Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

"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 psychoanalysts 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 dont 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 youre like Wilson advises pay attention to what you actually do and what other people think about you. Showing us an unconscious more powerful than Freuds and even more pervasive in our daily life Strangers to Ourselves marks a revolution in how we know ourselves.