58 Part II Psychodynamic Theories
At about the same time, certain groups of cognitive psychologists began doing research
on the importance of nonconscious processing of information and memory, or what
they called “implicit” cognition. John Bargh, one of the leaders in the field of social-
cognitive psychology, reviewed the literature on the “automaticity of being” and con-
cluded that roughly 95% of our behaviors are unconsciously determined (Bargh &
Chartrand, 1999). This conclusion is completely consistent with Freud’s metaphor that
consciousness is merely the “tip of the iceberg.”
By the late 1990s, the findings from neuroscience and cognitive psychology
began to converge on many cognitive and affective processes that were very con-
sistent with basic Freudian theory. These commonalities have become the founda-
tion for a movement started by some cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, and
psychiatrists who are convinced that Freud’s theory is one of the more compelling
integrative theories—one that could explain many of these findings. In 1999, a
group of scientists began a society called Neuro-Psychoanalysis and a scientific
journal by the same name. For the first time, some eminent cognitive and neurosci-
ence psychologists such as Nobel laureate for physiology, Eric Kandel, along with
Joseph LeDoux, Antonio Damasio, Daniel Schacter, and Vilayanur Ramachandran,
were publicly declaring the value of Freud’s theory and contending that “psycho-
analysis is still the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind”
(as cited in Solms, 2004, p. 84). Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio wrote: “I believe
we can say that Freud’s insights on the nature of consciousness are consonant with
the most advanced contemporary neuroscience views” (as cited in Solms & Turnbull,
2002, p. 93). Twenty years ago, such pronouncements from neuroscientists would
have been nearly unthinkable.
Mark Solms is probably the most active person involved in integrating psycho-
analytic theory and neuroscientific research (Solms, 2000, 2004; Solms & Panksepp,
2012; Solms & Turnbull, 2002). He argued, for instance, that the following Freudian
concepts have support from modern neuroscience: unconscious motivation, repres-
sion, the pleasure principle, primitive drives, and dreams (Solms, 2004). Similarly,
Kandel (1999) argued that psychoanalysis and neuroscience together could make use-
ful contributions in these eight domains: the nature of unconscious mental processes;
the nature of psychological causality; psychological causality and psychopathology;
early experience and the predisposition to mental illness; the preconscious, the uncon-
scious, and the prefrontal cortex; sexual orientation; psychotherapy and structural
changes in the brain; and psychopharmacology as an adjunct to psychoanalysis.
Although there are some gaps in the evidence (Hobson, 2004), and in fact some
psychoanalysts reject neuroscience as irrelevant and harmful to psychoanalysis (Blass
& Carmeli, 2007), the overlap between Freud’s theory and neuroscience is sufficient
to make at least a suggestive, if not compelling, case for their integration (Yovell,
Solms, & Fotopoulou, 2015). We have reviewed some of the empirical evidence for
unconscious mental processing, the id and the pleasure principle and the ego and the
reality principle, repression and defense mechanisms, and dreams.Unconscious Mental Processing
Many scientists and philosophers have recognized two different forms of con-
sciousness. First is the state of not being aware or awake, and second is the state