The Scientific Legacy of Sigmund Freud Toward a Psychodynamically Informed Psychological Science

Although commentators periodically declare that Freud is dead, his repeated burials lie on shaky grounds. Critics typically attack an archaic version of psychodynamic theory that most clinicians similarly consider obsolete. Central to contemporary psychodynamic theory is a series of propositions about (a) unconscious cognitive, affective, and motivational processes; (b) ambivalence and the tendency for affective and motivational dynamics to operate in parallel and produce compromise solutions; (c) the origins of many personality and social dispositions in childhood; (d) mental representations of the self, others, and relationships; and (e) developmental dynamics. An enormous body of research in cognitive, social, developmental, and personality psychology now supports many of these propositions. Freud's scientific legacy has implications for a wide range of domains in psychology, such as integration of affective and motivational constraints into connectionist models in cognitive science. Freud, like Elvis, has been dead for a number of years but continues to be cited with some regularity. Although the majority of clinicians report that they rely to some degree upon psychodynamic 1 principles in their work ( Pope, Tabachnick, & Keith-Spiegel, 1987 ), most researchers consider psychodynamic ideas to be at worst absurd and obsolete and at best irrelevant or of little scientific interest. In the lead article of a recent edition of Psychological Science, Crews (1996) arrived at a conclusion shared by many: "[T]here is literally nothing to be said, scientifically or therapeutically, to the advantage of the entire Freudian system or any of its component dogmas" (p. 63). Despite the explosion of empirical studies of unconscious cognitive processes (see, e.g., Greenwald, 1992 ; Kihlstrom, 1987 ; Schacter, 1992 ), few reference Freud; none cite any contemporary psychodynamic work; and in general, psychodynamic concepts are decreasingly represented in the major psychology journals ( Robins & Craik, 1994 ). The situation is similar in the popular media and in broader intellectual discourse. Publications ranging from Time to the New York Review of Books periodically publish Freud's intellectual obituary, with critics charging that Freud's ideas–such as his dual-instinct theory or his hypotheses about female personality development–are seriously out of date and without scientific merit (e.g., Crews, 1993 ). Many aspects of Freudian theory are indeed out of date, and they should be: Freud died in 1939, and he has been slow to undertake further revisions. His critics, however, are equally behind the times, attacking Freudian views of the 1920s as if they continue to have some currency in their original form. Psychodynamic theory and therapy have evolved considerably since 1939 when Freud's bearded file:///C|/Documents and Settings/Jordan Peterson/...n D Scientific Legacy of Freud Psych Bull 1998.htm (1 of 71) [9/12/2001 10:41:26 AM] countenance was last sighted in earnest. Contemporary psychoanalysts and psychodynamic therapists no longer write much about ids and egos, nor do they conceive of treatment for psychological disorders as an archaeological expedition in search of lost memories ( Aron, 1996 ; Gabbard, 1994 ; Horowitz, 1988 ; Kolb, Cooper, & Fishman, 1995 ; Mitchell, 1988 ; Wachtel, 1993 ). People do sometimes describe feelings or behaviors in therapy that conform remarkably to aspects of Freud's psychosexual theories (such as a patient of mine with erectile problems whose associations to a sexual encounter led to an image of having sex with his mother, followed by some unpleasant anal imagery). Nevertheless, psychotherapists who rely on theories derived from Freud do not typically spend their time lying in wait for phallic symbols. They pay attention to sexuality, because it is an important part of human life and intimate relationships and one that is often filled with conflict. Today, however, most psychodynamic theorists and therapists spend much of their time helping people with problematic interpersonal patterns, such as difficulty getting emotionally intimate or repeatedly getting intimate with the wrong kind of person (see Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983 ). In psychology, students' introduction to psychodynamic theory resembles the view found in the popular media and in scientific journals. I recently asked a research assistant with access to the latest editions of the major textbooks to conduct a brief study of the index entries of 10 leading upper-level introductory textbooks. Two of the 10 cited object relations theory, the major development in psychodynamic theory over the past 30 years. Of the 4 most prominent contemporary psychoanalytic theorists–Otto Kernberg, Heinz Kohut, Stephen Mitchell, and Charles Brenner–Kohut was cited in 3 books, Kernberg and Brenner were cited once each, and Mitchell was not cited in any. This is analogous to presenting trait psychology without referencing Costa and McCrae. My intention is not to lay blame here, which lies equally with psychoanalysts who have made too much of their work obscure to psychologists, but simply to demonstrate the widespread nature of the problem. 2 Psychodynamic thinking has, in fact, continued to flourish over the past decades and has been progressively converging with the concerns of personality, social, and developmental psychologists (see Barron, Eagle, & Wolitzky, 1992 ; Westen, 1990a ). This largely reflects three shifts. The first is the cognitive revolution, which brought mental processes, including unconscious processes, back into psychological discourse. Although this revolution began with cognition, the lifting of the taboo on mental processes imposed by behaviorism has inevitably led to a renewed focus on affect and motivation, the primary areas of psychodynamic interest. Indeed, as cognitive neuroscience progressively moves into these areas, it will probably have to be renamed. The second shift is that psychodynamic theory was not mummified and buried along with its founder 60 years ago. Psychoanalysis may have been "deconstructed," but it has not been decomposing. For example, Freud's dual-instinct theory (involving sex and aggression) is the primary, if not the only, psychodynamic model of motivation learned by most undergraduate psychology majors, because it is the primary one taught in textbooks. Yet most contemporary psychodynamic psychologists hold that humans have a number of motives, many of them rooted in biology but nearly all elaborated upon by culture and experience. Whereas Freud emphasized the pursuit of sensual and sexual pleasure, object relations theorists, self psychologists, and relational theorists have added a focus on needs for relationships and self-esteem (see Aron, 1996 ; Fairbairn, 1952 ; Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983 ; Kernberg, 1975 ; Kohut, 1977 ; Sullivan, 1953 ). To reject psychodynamic thinking because Freud's instinct theory or his view of women is dated is like rejecting modern physics because Newton did not understand relativity. file:///C|/Documents and Settings/Jordan Peterson/...n D Scientific Legacy of Freud Psych Bull 1998.htm (2 of 71) [9/12/2001 10:41:26 AM] The third shift is epistemological. For years, many in the psychoanalytic community have treated psychoanalysis as a religion and have been more interested in protecting than testing psychoanalytic dogma. This has clearly contributed to the widespread distaste for psychodynamic concepts in academic psychology. Far too many analysts continue to ignore or disparage efforts to test their theories as the folly of ignorant infidels and to dismiss alternative hypotheses, conceptualizations, and treatment techniques–and they do so at the peril of their patients. However, the infusion of psychologists into psychoanalysis over recent decades (and to some extent the increasing medicalization of psychiatry) has led to a greater appreciation for empirical work, an acknowledgment that psychoanalytic propositions do not rise and fall solely on the basis of their perceived clinical utility, and a recognition that "I had a patient once" is not the firmest of epistemological foundations. Conversely, many cognitive researchers have begun paying greater attention to the ecological validity of experimental work on thought and memory, which is leading to, among other things, a heightened focus on affect and motivation, the central domains of psychoanalysis (e.g., Ceci & Bronfenbrenner, 1991 ; Neisser, 1991 ; Stein, 1997 ). The aim of this article is to reconsider Freud's legacy, not by arguing about the validity of 1920s psychoanalysis but by considering the relevance of contemporary psychodynamic theory for psychological science in the 21st century. The article begins by presenting five core theoretical tenets that define current psychodynamic thinking and briefly considers the empirical evidence with respect to their validity. Although all of these propositions trace their lineage to Freud and were important to the way he understood the mind, Freud undoubtedly would have identified other propositions he considered central as well, such as his drive theory. These five tenets, however, are the psychodynamic propositions that have best stood the test of time, as reflected in their widespread acceptance among psychoanalysts and psychodynamically oriented clinicians and theorists a century after Freud began writing. The article concludes by illustrating the way psychological science might be enriched by incorporating some of the insights that have emerged from 100 years of psychoanalytic inquiry, using as examples research in social cognition and models of parallel distributed processing in cognitive science. Will the Real Psychoanalysis Please Stand Up? Five Postulates That Define Contemporary Psychodynamic Theory Psychoanalysis was once a single theory, identified with its founder and his particular ideas, so that summarizing its basic tenets was once less problematic. Today the situation is different, with no single theory dominating even the mainstream psychoanalytic journals let alone the thinking of those who consider themselves more broadly psychodynamic. Nevertheless, all psychodynamic theorists generally adhere to five propositions. First, and most central, much of mental life–including thoughts, feelings, and motives–is unconscious, which means that people can behave in ways or develop symptoms that are inexplicable to themselves. Second, mental processes, including affective and motivational processes, operate in parallel so that, toward the same person or situation, individuals can have conflicting feelings that motivate them in opposing ways and often lead to compromise solutions. Third, stable personality patterns begin to form in childhood, and childhood experiences play an important role in personality development, particularly in shaping the ways people form later social relationships. Fourth, mental representations of the self, others, and relationships guide people's interactions with others and influence the ways they become psychologically symptomatic. Finally, personality development involves not only learning to regulate sexual and aggressive feelings but also moving from an immature, socially dependent state to a mature, interdependent one. file:///C|/Documents and Settings/Jordan Peterson/...n D Scientific Legacy of Freud Psych Bull 1998.htm (3 of 71) [9/12/2001 10:41:26 AM] Before I review the empirical data for each of these propositions, two potential objections require consideration. The first is that these five propositions may not adequately represent contemporary psychodynamic thinking. Psychoanalytic theorists are not all of one mind, and distilling a common core to a wide range of often-competing theoretical formulations is no simple task. Isolation of these five tenets no doubt reflects the systematizing efforts of the author, who is an active researcher as well as a clinician and whose thinking is heavily influenced by research in a number of subdisciplines and not just by psychoanalytic theory and clinical observation. Nevertheless, these propositions were all once highly disputed in psychology and were exclusively associated with psychoanalysis. At the very least, they represent five important tenets of psychoanalytic theory even if not the five most central. Recent survey data suggest, however, that these propositions are indeed central to contemporary thinking among practicing psychodynamic psychologists and psychiatrists. 3 A second objection regards the extent to which the propositions outlined here, and the data that support them, are in fact distinctively psychodynamic. Many developmentalists, for example, would agree that childhood experiences play an important role in shaping personality, and most cognitive-experimentalists now accept the importance of implicit (unconscious) processes. Further, many of the studies that support these propositions have been conducted by researchers with little interest in or knowledge of psychodynamic ideas. Perhaps the propositions that have obtained empirical support are simply analogous to but not isomorphic with psychodynamic ideas, and little is to be gained by taking a second look at psychodynamic theory. To dismiss the approach to the mind that Freud inaugurated with the assertion that nothing about these propositions is or ever has been unique to psychoanalysis is, however, to engage in an impressive act of revisionist history. This can be readily seen with respect to the proposition that much of mental life is unconscious. Freud was not the first to notice unconscious processes; poets and philosophers beat him to it. He was, however, the first to build a systematic psychological theory on this proposition, which was attacked vociferously by psychologists of nearly every persuasion for almost a century. Until the mid-1980s, psychodynamic psychologists were alone among their colleagues in arguing for the importance of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and motives. They remain alone among clinicians in attempting to address these processes systematically in psychotherapy, a state of affairs that I believe will shift once the implications of the last decade of research in cognitive neuroscience become more apparent in the clinical literature. With respect to unconscious (implicit) processes, the historical record is quite clear. As the most comprehensive experimental alternative to psychoanalysis, behaviorism dominated academic psychology (particularly in the United States) through the 1950s and rejected the notion that unconscious processes (or even conscious processes) could play any causal role in human behavior. The successor to behaviorism in experimental psychology, cognitive science, held to a serial processing model of cognition, in which memories of past experiences only become significant once they enter short-term memory (a synonym for consciousness), until the late 1980s. This was fully a century after Freud's first attempts to describe the influence of unconscious processes on thought, emotion, and behavior. In 1987, Kihlstrom heralded the existence of the cognitive unconscious. However, as will be seen, less than 10 years passed before researchers began to discover that the same principles that apply to cognition operate with implicit (or unconscious) affective and motivational processes. So the cognitive unconscious became the psychological unconscious ( Kihlstrom, 1990 ) and is rapidly becoming the cognitive-affective-motivational unconscious. file:///C|/Documents and Settings/Jordan Peterson/...n D Scientific Legacy of Freud Psych Bull 1998.htm (4 of 71) [9/12/2001 10:41:26 AM] Is this new unconscious nothing but a 1900 Viennese wine in a 1990s bottle? Of course not–it comes from a different tradition and a different set of methods, and it emerged a century later. Does it bear a strong resemblance to the cognitive-affective-motivational unconscious of contemporary psychodynamic theorists and clinicians (e.g., Brenner, 1982 ; Sandler, 1987 ), who have continued bottling a distinctive blend of unconscious processes for decades while decreasing the content of drive theory and sexuality that characterized wine with a more Freudian bouquet? Those familiar with both literatures will recognize that it does, although both approaches to unconscious processes could be substantially enriched by attention to theory and data produced by the other. On the one hand, psychodynamic theory continues to contain problematic residues of Freud's model of the unconscious, which (a) linked unconscious processes inextricably to primitive, instinctual, and emotional processes; (b) failed to distinguish a variety of different kinds of unconscious processes (particularly cognitive ones); and (c) failed to recognize the extent to which some unconscious processes can be adaptive and learned ( Westen, in press-b ). On the other hand, the unconscious of cognitive experimentalists tends to be the comfortable unconscious: automatic, cold (though steadily warming up), cognitive, and unconscious only by virtue of mental architecture. As the data to be described below will make amply clear, this is only a subset of unconscious processes, and attention to the more affectively "hot" subset described for a century by psychodynamic theorists and clinicians would provide a more balanced, comprehensive, and ecologically valid portrayal of how the mind works. Psychoanalytic theorists have been operating from a theory of parallel processing for a century, and many aspects of the parallel architecture they have proposed–notably those relating to affect and motivation–have not yet been incorporated into contemporary connectionist models and will not likely be integrated without explicit attention to psychodynamic constructs and clinical data. The situation is no different with the other four propositions to be examined here, all of which have been central to psychodynamic thinking since at least 1914, were once vehemently contradicted by competing theories, and now have substantial empirical support. The Existence and Centrality of Unconscious Processes The most important proposition that has distinguished psychoanalysis from other theoretical systems since its inception is its postulation of unconscious mental processes. Freud (1926/1953c) considered this the cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory. The concept of "the unconscious" was not novel to Freud and was swirling around the intellectual air he breathed in the 19th century, particularly in Germany (see Ellenberger, 1970 ; J. Weinberger, in press ). The German idealist philosophers postulated a realm of the unconscious as early as the beginning of that century, infusing it with mystical elements that were later appropriated by Jung, such as the view that a single Will is immanent in all living things and is expressed in unconscious motives. Schopenhauer (1883/1958) identified this Will with reproduction of the species, whereas Nietzsche (1956) focused on power as the unconscious driving force behind human behavior. Freud divorced unconscious processes from their religious and philosophical underpinnings, schematized them, offered a theory of their dynamics, and linked this theory to data from the consulting room. Ironically, the linkage of a theory of unconscious processes to data was one of the main features that distinguished Freud's from earlier views of the unconscious; however, psychologists who embraced a positivist—empiricist philosophy of science were never enamored of the kind of data upon which Freud relied ( J. Weinberger, in press ). Until the 1980s, psychoanalysis was alone among psychological theories in its postulation of file:///C|/Documents and Settings/Jordan Peterson/...n D Scientific Legacy of Freud Psych Bull 1998.htm (5 of 71) [9/12/2001 10:41:26 AM] unconscious mental processes, although such processes had played some part in the history of psychology since Helmholtz's (1863/1971) concept of unconscious inference involved in perception. Freud (1900/1953b) initially emphasized unconscious wishes, but he later distinguished a variety of unconscious processes ( Freud, 1915/1957c ), and his followers expanded upon the notion that unconscious fantasies (by which they mean affect-laden beliefs) and unconscious mental representations play a central role in human behavior ( Arlow, 1991 ; Sandler & Rosenblatt, 1962 ; J. Weinberger, in press ). Today, the proposition that many cognitive processes are carried out unconsciously ( Kihlstrom, 1987 ) is as widely accepted by experimental psychologists as the opposite proposition (i.e., that such processes do not exist) was by their predecessors less than 2 decades ago. I suspect, however, that many cognitive scientists would be wary of extending the notion of unconscious processes to affect and motivation and would be particularly dubious of the hypothesis that affective considerations can bias the way thought is assembled outside of awareness (the concept of defense). In this section, I examine the data supporting the proposition that much of mental life, including thoughts, feelings, and motives, is unconscious. 4 Unconscious Thought and Memory I will be brief in describing the literature on unconscious cognitive processes, because it is no longer controversial and much of it has been reviewed elsewhere ( Holyoak & Spellman, 1993 ; Roediger, 1990 ; Schacter, 1992 ; Schacter & Buckner, 1998 ; Squire, 1987 ). For years, cognitive psychologists did not specify whether the processes they were describing were conscious or unconscious, although they assumed a serial architecture in which information entered sequential memory stores and was retrieved and manipulated in short-term memory (which was equated with consciousness). The role of consciousness has received much more attention since the discovery of implicit memory, which refers to memory that is observable in behavior but is not consciously (explicitly) brought to mind. One kind of memory that can be expressed implicitly is procedural memory, "how-to" knowledge of procedures or skills useful in various activities, such as tying a shoe or driving a car. Another kind of implicit memory emerges in priming experiments, in which prior exposure to the same or related information facilitates the processing of new information, whether or not the prime was originally even conscious. For example, presenting the word pair taxi/cab in the unattended channel using a dichotic listening paradigm renders individuals more likely to use the less preferred spelling of the auditorially presented homophone fare/fair, even though they have no recognition memory for the word pair (see Nisbett & Wilson, 1977 ; Schacter, 1992 ). Research in cognitive neuroscience has now documented that implicit memory and explicit memory (conscious recognition or recall) involve different neural mechanisms ( Schacter, 1995 ; Squire & Zola-Morgan, 1991 ). Various literatures on thinking have similarly come to distinguish implicit and explicit thought and learning processes ( Holyoak & Spellman, 1993 ; Jacoby & Kelly, 1992 ; Kihlstrom, 1990 ; Lewicki, 1986 ; Reber, 1992 ; Seger, 1994 ; Underwood, 1996 ). As with research on memory, until very recently psychologists paid little attention to the issue of consciousness when studying mechanisms involved in problem solving, decision making, and other cognitive tasks. In the last few years, this has begun to change as researchers have begun to recognize the extent to which thought is guided by implicit grammars that guide performance in tasks ranging from decoding or producing sentences to standing an appropriate distance from another person (as culturally defined) or producing appropriate notes in harmony with music playing on the radio. For example, Rubin, Wallace, and Houston (1993) found that file:///C|/Documents and Settings/Jordan Peterson/...n D Scientific Legacy of Freud Psych Bull 1998.htm (6 of 71) [9/12/2001 10:41:26 AM] participants asked to compose a ballad after hearing a series of ballads could follow twice as many rules used in their composition as they could consciously articulate. Unconscious Affective Processes The existence of unconscious cognitive processes, which were seen as the province of psychoanalysis just a decade ago, is now taken for granted by most cognitive scientists. What remains distinctive about the psychodynamic perspective is the view that affective and motivational processes can be unconscious as well. Logically, the assumption that cognition can be unconscious but affect and motivation must be conscious makes little sense. We have no reason to assume a parallel architecture for cognition but a serial architecture for emotion and motivation. Conscious emotions and motives do not "come out of the blue" any more than conscious thoughts do, and they often include or reflect cognitive components (such as attributions or interpretations) that presumably are assembled outside awareness, as are other cognitions. From an evolutionary perspective, an organism that had to reflect on every decision would be at a severe adaptive disadvantage relative to an animal that could rely on prior learning about the affective significance of various stimuli and produce a rapid response. In fact, several independent lines of research suggest that the cognitive unconscious includes only a subset of unconscious processes, notably those that are most automatic, least intentional, and most comfortable to discuss with one's mother. Neurological evidence for unconscious emotional responses. Some of the best documented early examples of unconscious affective processes came from the study of Milner's famous patient, H. M. ( Milner, Corkin, & Teuber, 1968 ). Because of hippocampal damage, H. M. lost the capacity to consolidate new explicit declarative memories. However, he continued to demonstrate the capacity for affective learning despite his deficits in explicit memory. For example, following a visit to his mother in the hospital, H. M. could remember nothing of the visit but "expressed a vague idea that something might have happened to his mother" ( Milner et al., 1968 , p. 216). Johnson, Kim, and Risse (1985) reported similar findings with patients suffering from Korsakoff's disorder, who showed a preference for melodies they had heard five minutes earlier (reflecting the mere exposure effect, the tendency to prefer familiar stimuli; Zajonc, 1968 ) despite their impaired recognition memory for the melodies. Patients with Korsakoff's also had difficulty recalling information presented to them about two fictional characters but preferred the one who had been associated a week earlier with positive attributes. This suggests that the neural circuitry for affective associative learning is distinct from that for conscious declarative memory. Other research with neurologically impaired patients points in the same direction. Patients with bilateral hippocampal lesions, who have difficulty with explicit memory, can develop conditioned emotional responses to aversive stimuli even though they cannot consciously learn the connection between the conditioned stimulus and an aversive unconditioned stimulus. In contrast, patients with an intact hippocampus but bilateral lesions to the amygdala show deficits in emotional conditioning even though they are conscious of the link between the conditioned and unconditioned stimulus ( Bechara et al., 1995 ). In other words, explicit memory in these patients is intact, but implicit affective learning is impaired. These data are consistent with LeDoux's (1989, 1995) finding of two neural pathways for emotion: one, implicated in conditioned emotional responses, in which primitive perceptual information is relayed via the thalamus to the amygdala (which attaches an affective valence to the information) without any involvement of consciousness, and the other, in which the thalamus relays information to the cortex, file:///C|/Documents and Settings/Jordan Peterson/...n D Scientific Legacy of Freud Psych Bull 1998.htm (7 of 71) [9/12/2001 10:41:26 AM] which processes the information more deeply before activating the amygdala. 5 Similarly, individuals with prosopagnosia, who lose the capacity to discriminate faces consciously (a form of explicit knowledge), may nevertheless show differential electrophysiological responses to familiar versus unfamiliar faces ( Bruyer, 1991 ). Analogous findings have been reported in patients with visual neglect, who ignore a region of the visual field. In one study, the investigators presented pictures of two houses to patients with visual neglect ( Halligan & Marshall, 1991 ). In one of the pictures, the left half of the house was on fire. The patients denied any difference between the two houses–consciously neglecting the image on the left–but chose the house without the fire when asked which one they would prefer to live in. Research similarly finds that split-brain patients presented with affectively evocative visual stimuli to the right hemisphere may show appropriate affective responses but be unable to offer any verbal explanation for them ( Gazzaniga, 1985 ). These neurological data are probably of relevance to the argument advanced by Zajonc (1980) that preferences can occur without inferences. For example, W. R. Wilson (1975) presented tone sequences to participants in the unattended channel in a dichotic listening experiment. Although participants showed no recognition memory for tone sequences they had heard as many as five times, they reported liking the tone sequences they had heard better than those they had not (the mere exposure effect). In other words, they were developing affective preferences outside of awareness toward stimuli they had never consciously registered. Murphy and Zajonc (1993) found that subliminal presentation of positive or negative faces similarly affected participants' liking or disliking of novel stimuli. Experiments with subliminal procedures have shown comparable effects on attitudes toward various stimuli, including the self (see Bargh, 1997 ; Eagle, 1959 ). More recently, Murphy, Monahan, and Zajonc (1995) have combined these lines of research (exposure and priming), demonstrating that subliminal mere exposure effects and subliminal priming effects are additive: Increasing exposure leads to increased ratings of liking for Chinese ideographs, and priming with a positive or negative stimulus (a happy or sad face) simply adds or subtracts a constant (that is, increases or decreases liking ratings the same amount at each level of exposure). Interestingly, explicit (1 s) priming does not have the same effect as implicit (4 ms) priming, because participants recognize the manipulation and appear to counteract it. Perhaps the most important contribution of this research is that it demonstrates unequivocally that affective evaluations can develop unconsciously and that multiple influences on affective associations can be combined outside of awareness. As we will see, this finding fits well with a psychodynamically informed connectionist model that integrates affective and motivational processes with the more familiar cognitive and perceptual ones. Conditioning and unconscious affect. A second, and related, source of data on unconscious affect comes, paradoxically, from research with conditioning paradigms. Lazarus and McCleary (1951) paired nonsense syllables with a mild electric shock and then presented the conditioned stimuli to participants subliminally. The conditioned stimuli reliably elicited a galvanic skin response (GSR) even when presented below the threshold of conscious recognition. Thus, a conditioned stimulus can elicit affect, as assessed electrophysiologically, even when presented outside of awareness. Numerous other studies have produced similar results (see Ohman, 1994 ; J. Weinberger, in press ; Wong, Shevrin, & Williams, 1994 ) with dependent variables ranging from skin conductance to facial electromyography (EMG, which measures facial muscle indicators of emotion) to evoked-related brain potentials (ERPs). file:///C|/Documents and Settings/Jordan Peterson/...n D Scientific Legacy of Freud Psych Bull 1998.htm (8 of 71) [9/12/2001 10:41:26 AM] Other studies show that classically conditioned emotional responses can be not only elicited but acquired without consciousness (e.g., Bunce, Bernat, Wong, & Shevrin, 1995 ; Esteves, Dimberg, & Ohman, 1994 ). For example, faces presented subliminally can become associated with an aversive stimulus (electric shock). The conditioned response is evidenced in facial EMG and evoked potentials even though the person reports no conscious awareness of the contingency between conditioned and unconditioned stimuli ( Bunce, Bernat, Wong, & Shevrin, 1995 ; Wong, Bernat, Bunce, & Shevrin, in press ). In another study, a conditioned auditory stimulus paired with electric shock while rats were unconscious (anesthetized) produced a conditioned response 10 days later ( Weinberg, Gold, & Sternberg, 1984 ; for similar research on nausea, see Garcia & Rusiniak, 1980 ). In yet another study, dental patients showed affective learning while anesthetized with nitrous oxide but not with Novocain (Hutchins & Reynold, as cited in Leventhal & Everhart, 1979 ). Whereas Novocain effectively blocked the experience and encoding of pain signals, nitrous oxide apparently blocked consciousness of pain but did not prevent implicit memory for the experience. Subsequent research has demonstrated other kinds of learning that can occur under general anesthesia (e.g., Cork, 1996 ). Behavior therapists in the 1970s who believed they had "cured" homosexuality in male patients subsequently discovered that their patients had suppressed the conscious response while remaining physiologically aroused by pictures of naked men, as demonstrated by genital plethysmography (which measures sexual arousal in males by measuring degree of erection; McConaghy, 1976 ). These findings echoed other research demonstrating that suppression of the subjective experience of emotion does not eliminate the psychophysiological component of the emotion ( Rachman, 1978 ). Presumably, this component could continue to exert an impact on behavior despite the absence of conscious affect. Unconscious affect and attitudes. Social psychologists studying attitudes and prejudice now recognize the importance of distinguishing conscious and unconscious attitudes (see Greenwald & Banaji, 1995 ). Social psychologists have traditionally defined attitudes as including not only a cognitive component but an affective—evaluative component (and often a set of behavioral tendencies as well, such as the tendency to vote for candidates with particular ideological agendas). Unconscious attitudes include unconscious affective dispositions, which may be activated automatically and without conscious awareness. Fazio (1990) has found that when people are consciously focusing on their attitudes, these attitudes heavily influence their behavior. When they are not focusing on their attitudes, only chronically activated, often automatic, and unconscious attitudes do so. This finding is directly parallel to a similar finding in the motivation literature, reviewed below, that conscious motives guide consciously chosen behavior, whereas implicit or unconscious motives guide behavior over the long run, when consciousness is not directly focused on goals ( McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1989 ). Petty and Cacioppo's (1986) work on attitude change distinguishes a central route to attitude change, which involves conscious attention to reasoned arguments, and a peripheral route, which is usually based on heuristics, automatic processes, affective appeals, and primitive evaluative processes that require minimal attention and effort 6 (see also Chaiken,