Resumen de Freud Returns.
The article focuses on discoveries in neuroscience and theories of Sigmund Freud. When Freud introduced the central notion that most mental processes that determine our everyday thoughts, feelings and volitions occur unconsciously, his contemporaries rejected it as impossible. But today's findings are confirming the existence and pivotal role of unconscious mental processing. For example, the behavior of patients who are unable to consciously remember events that occurred after damage to certain memory-encoding structures of their brains is clearly influenced by the "forgotten" events. Cognitive neuroscientists make sense of such cases by delineating different memory systems that process information "explicitly" (consciously) and "implicitly" (unconsciously). Freud split memory along just these lines. He said that not only is much of our mental life unconscious and withheld but that the repressed part of the unconscious mind operates according to a different principle than the "reality principle" that governs the conscious ego. This type of unconscious thinking is "wishful"--and it blithely disregards the rules of logic and the arrow of time. If Freud was right, then damage to the inhibitory structures of the brain (the seat of the "repressing" ego) should release wishful, irrational modes of mental functioning. This is precisely what has been observed in patients with damage to the frontal limbic region, which controls critical aspects of self-awareness. Freud argued that the pleasure principle gave expression to primitive, animal drives. Neuroscientists such as Donald W. Pfaff of the Rockefeller University and Jaak Panksepp of Bowling Green State University believe that the instinctual mechanisms that govern human motivation are even more primitive than Freud imagined.
