The New Unconscious

<br>In the past several decades a revolution has occurred in how psychologists view the unconscious. The Freudian view of an infantile, primitive, unconscious has proved to be far too limited; it turns out that a great deal of our mental lives, much of it highly sophisticated and adaptive, occurs behind the curtain of consciousness. Indeed, as illustrated in this fine book, the boundary separating nonconscious from conscious processing is constantly being expanded, to the point where some are questioning whether consciousness serves much of a function at all. The New Unconscious is a must read for anyone interested in these intriguing developments. Most of the key players have contributed to this volume, and their chapters are fascinating reports from the front lines of a true revolution. --Timothy D. Wilson, Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia, and author of Strangers to Ourselves<p><br>Our understanding of the mind is changing fast. The study of cognitive, introspectable processes, which dominated psychology when I was a student, explored the tip of an iceberg of mental activity. Research in social cognition now uses subtle but rigorous behavioral indices of involuntary, unconscious, automatic processes to infer a new view of the mind in which emotions and goals are as important as thinking and knowledge. But this is not the Freudian unconscious. The methods are those of scientific psychology. This book is a rich compendium of recent findings exploring the structure of implicit mental activity, and incidentally challenging conventional views of free will, the self, and the control of actions. --Anne Treisman, James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, Princeton University<p><br>The title of this book is surprising, but fully justified. This is the book you should read if you want to understand the remarkable progress recently achieved in the empirical study of unconscious mental processes--cognitive, emotiona