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Old Jan 22, 2008, 08:33 PM
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Though it is complicated by neuropsychologists also specialising in the physical causes of mental illness (clinical cognitive neuropsychology, in particular). Cognitive and social psychologists would also maintain that cognition and society are physical causes...

Cognitive psychologists also talk about unconscious processes. For example, we don't have access to the (arguably mental) processes that allow us to transform present tense verbs into past tense verbs. We don't have access to early visual processes either (such as the contents of line and edge and motion detectors).

Clinically, cognitive psychologists talk about 'deep activation' or 'schema / schemata' or 'modular' processes - whose workings are inaccessible to conscious experience and whose operation is fast, automatic, informationally encapsulated etc.

I found an interesting article from a psychiatrist and philosopher of mind working in Adelaide about how (despite what some psychiatrists / psychoanalysts claim) the cognitive psychological unconscious has NOT vindicated the dynamic (Freudian) unconscious. They may have been looking in the wrong place, though (e.g., looking at language and perceptual processing) rather than looking at the work that has been done on clinical contexts / social psychological contexts on categorization and schemata and the role of pairing neutral stimuli with punishers for emotional responses etc etc...