Implicit or Unconscious?: Commentary on Paper by the Boston Change Process Study Group

Abstract

This commentary examines a very fundamental aspect of human psychology: the nature of unconscious knowledge and the process of self-reflection. However the term implicit is associated in cognitive science with unconscious procedural knowledge (of motor acts) rather than unconscious meaning, which is the business of psychoanalysis. Further, the Boston Change Process Study Group authors do not compare or contrast their ideas to analogous concepts within psychoanalytic theory such as Freud's concept of the preconscious, which was descriptive of a reflective verbal domain.