[Paleopsych] why is the amygdala so sneaky?

[HowlBloom at aol.com]

Sounds like Freud intuited a lot of material that modern neurobiology would 
support.  

All thanks, David.  

Meanwhile, let's hope this message makes it out of my laptop and into the 
paleopsych listserv, which may be bouncing my emails because they come from aol.  
Howard

In a message dated 7/1/2004 12:33:14 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
dsmith06 at maine.rr.com writes:
Actually, Freud thought that repression is an unconscious act.   

Freud thought that conscious states must have sensory qualities in order to 
be conscious.  Counscious is a fabric of smells, tastes, sounds, sights etc.  
It follows that mental states devoid of these 'qualia' (as they are nowadays 
called) must be unconscious.  Thought, then, has to be unconscious.

How, then, do these nonsensory thoughts become conscious?  Freud thought that 
they have to become associated with language.  Language can serve as a 
go-between mediating the relationship between thought and consciousness because it 
shares the same abstract structure as thought but it is also a richly sensory 
symbol system.  

Freud thought that repression is a motiviated failure to translate 
unconscious thought into language, a failure to articulate our own thoughts to 
ourselves.  According to this thesis repression can't be conscious because it undercuts 
consciousness.

----------
Howard Bloom
Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of 
History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 
21st Century
Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Faculty 
Member, The Graduate Institute
www.howardbloom.net
www.bigbangtango.net
Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic 
of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The 
Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American 
Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy 
of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International 
Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive 
editor -- New Paradigm book series.
For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: 
www.paleopsych.org
for two chapters from 
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, 
see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang 
to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net
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