Strangers to Ourselves
eBook - ePub

Strangers to Ourselves

Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Strangers to Ourselves

Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

About this book

"Know thyself," a precept as old as Socrates, is still good advice. But is introspection the best path to self-knowledge? What are we trying to discover, anyway? In an eye-opening tour of the unconscious, as contemporary psychological science has redefined it, Timothy D. Wilson introduces us to a hidden mental world of judgments, feelings, and motives that introspection may never show us.

This is not your psychoanalyst's unconscious. The adaptive unconscious that empirical psychology has revealed, and that Wilson describes, is much more than a repository of primitive drives and conflict-ridden memories. It is a set of pervasive, sophisticated mental processes that size up our worlds, set goals, and initiate action, all while we are consciously thinking about something else.

If we don't know ourselves—our potentials, feelings, or motives—it is most often, Wilson tells us, because we have developed a plausible story about ourselves that is out of touch with our adaptive unconscious. Citing evidence that too much introspection can actually do damage, Wilson makes the case for better ways of discovering our unconscious selves. If you want to know who you are or what you feel or what you're like, Wilson advises, pay attention to what you actually do and what other people think about you. Showing us an unconscious more powerful than Freud's, and even more pervasive in our daily life, Strangers to Ourselves marks a revolution in how we know ourselves.

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Yes, you can access Strangers to Ourselves by Timothy D. Wilson,Timothy D. Wilson in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Psychology & Cognitive Psychology & Cognition. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Preface
  6. 1 Freud’s Genius, Freud’s Myopia
  7. 2 The Adaptive Unconscious
  8. 3 Who’s in Charge?
  9. 4 Knowing Who We Are
  10. 5 Knowing Why
  11. 6 Knowing How We Feel
  12. 7 Knowing How We Will Feel
  13. 8 Introspection and Self-Narratives
  14. 9 Looking Outward to Know Ourselves
  15. 10 Observing and Changing Our Behavior
  16. Notes
  17. Bibliography
  18. Index