Conscious and Unconscious Programs in the Brain

For almost a century now, since Freud described the basic motivations and Pavlov the basic mechanisms of human behavior, we have had a reasonable concept of the forces that drive us. Only recently have we gained any real insight into how the brain really works to produce such behavior. The new developments in cognitive psychology and neuroscience have taught us things about the function of the brain that would have been inconceivable even ten years ago. Yet, there still remains a tremendous gap between the two studies-human behavior and brain function-a gap which often seems irrec oncilable in view of the basic differences in the methodologies and approaches of the two fields. Students of behavior are frequently disinterested in the underlying neu rophysiology while neurophysiologists tend to consider the concepts of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists too vague and theoretical to be applicable to their own more limited schemata. Several valiant attempts have been made by experimentalists to develop a theoretical context in which behavior is described, not separately from brain function but rather as its direct outgrowth. This present work is still another attempt to develop a theoretical system which, given the limitations of our present knowledge, as completely as possible, the underlying brain mechanisms that influ will describe ence and determine human behavior. The main emphasis of this work, however, will be not on normal behavior but rather on more neurotic manifestations.

Contenu
I. Fundamentals of Psychobiology.- 1.Anatomical and Functional Organization of the Central Nervous System.- 2.The Biological Origins of Motivated Behavior.- 3.Adaptive and Affective Roles of the Emotions.- 4.Perception, Learning, and Engram Formation.- 5.Language and the Higher Cognitive Processes.- II. Mechanisms of Conscious and Unconscious Thought Processing.- 6.Functional Organization of the Consciousness System.- 7.Self-Awareness and the Anatomy of the Subjective Self.- 8.Attention as Directed Consciousness.- 9. Recognition, Memory Retrieval, Mental Set, and Other Decisional Operations of the Neocortex.- 10.The Alert Conscious State: Controlled Processing of Episodic and Affective Data.- 11.The Procedural Unconscious: Automatic Processing of Mechanical, Structural, and Semantic Data.- 12.The Episodic Unconscious: Semicontrolled Unconscious Processing of Episodic and Affective Material.- III. Hierarchial and Hemispheric Origins of Repression and Other Defense Mechanisms.- 13.The Effects of Emotionality on Conscious and Unconscious Information Processing.- 14.Differential Cognitive and Emotional Functions of the Cerebral Hemispheres.- 15.The Disparate Levels of Consciousness in the Two Hemispheres.- 16.Psychological Defense Mechanisms as Interactions between Hierarchical and Hemispheric Functions.- IV. Psychobiology and the Pathogenesis of Neurosis.- 17.A Psychobiological Model of Conscious and Unconscious Brain Activity.- 18.The Role of Childhood and Adult Stress in the Genesis of the Decathected Unconscious.- 19.Psychobiological Mechanisms in Personality Development.- 20.Psychobiological Mechanisms in the Pathogenesis of the Neuroses.- 21.Hypnagogic States and Transcendent Experience.- 22.Psychobiology and Psychoanalytic Methodology.- References.- Author Index.