PSYCHODYNAMICS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

The original New Look integrated the constructivist-psychodynamic traditions of Bartlett and Freud. The unconscious (Greenwald's "New Look 3") is a logically different idea, although in practice it is often intertwined with constructivist-psychodynamic approaches. The unconscious is a pretheoretic term with a variety of problems: It has multiple and unsettled meanings; null reports need not signify null awareness; the conscious-unconscious dichotomy implied by the limen may not exist; even "absolute subliminality" (chance-level accessibility) is relative to the lime interval of testing, as accessibility can increase to above-chance levels over time (hypermnesia). Yet, the phenomena that the unconscious sloppily subsumes are not simple or dumb. The capacity of subliminal perception should not be confused with the capacity of subliminal (unconscious) memory and cognition.