Training the Unconscious

For more than three centuries the idea of an unconscious mind was ignored or denied by the larger community of science. Indeed, as Joel Weinberger and Valentina Stoycheva point out in their wonderful new book, The Unconscious, “. . . for most of the history of Western thinking, unconscious processes were ignored, minimized, or flat-out denied.” And while this is undeniably true, researchers and philosophers alike nevertheless discovered evidence of unconscious processes but chose to relegate them to material matters. For example, Mesmer credited magnetic fluids and refused to acknowledge alternative theories that hypothesized an unconscious or subconscious mind, something ...