Cognitive vs. psychoanalytic unconscious

Here, I share a project proposal I wrote for the philosophy of mind seminar "Conceptions of Mind", lead by Prof. Hong Yu Wong at the University of Tübingen. It is only but a rough and short sketch of a hopefully one day longer, finished work.

In essence, I. point out that both cognitive neuroscience and psychodynamic models in psychology acknowledge conscious and unconscious mental activity. There is, however, no unifying framework for the two approaches. To my surprise, there turns out to be an entire niche subfield of research called "neuropsychoanalysis" which strives to unify these disciplines, but has been criticized for lacking a consistent metaphysical framework. Much of the discussion deals around finding the "biological substrate" for psychoanalytic constructs as are the it, ego, superego, and so on. Although not much discussed, this problem has been seriously addressed by leading scholars such as neuroscientist Karl Friston (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2850580/). There is much more to say about this but here I leave my first sketch.

Cognitive_vs_psychoanalytic unconscious.pdf

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