Unconscious motivation.
When Freud introduced the central notion that most mental processes that determine our everyday thoughts, feelings and volitions occur unconsciously, his contemporaroes 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 encoding structures of their brains is clearly influenced by the "forgotten" events. Cognitive neuroscienctists make sense of such cases by dilineating different memory systems that process information "explicitly" (consciously) and "implicitly" (unconsciously). Freud split memory along just these lines.
Neurpscientists have also identified unconsciousmemory systems that mediate emotional learning. In 1996 at New York University, LeDoux demonstrated the existence under the conscious cortex of a neuronal pathway that connects perceptual information with the primitive brain structures responsible for generating fear responses. Because this pathway bypasses the hippocampus-- which generates conscious memories--current events routinely trigger unconscious rememberances of emotionally important past events, causing conscious feelings of that seem irrational, such as "Men with beards make me uneasy."
"Neuroscience has shown that the major brain structures essential for forming conscious (explicit) memories are not functional during the first two years of life, providing and elegant explanation of what Freud called infantile amnesia. As Freud surmised, it is not that we forget our earliest memories; we simply cannot recall them to consciousness. But this inability does not preclude them from affecting adult feelings and behavior. One would be hard pressed to find a developmental neurobiologist who ...it is becoming increasingly clear that a good deal of our mental activity is unconsciously motivated.
