The motivational unconscious

Abstract

Motives may be said to be unconscious in a variety of ways.They may be automatically and unconsciously elicited by consciously perceptible situational cues; they may be instigated by cues that are themselves excluded from conscious awareness, as expressions of implicit perception or memory; or the person may be consciously unaware of his or her actual motivational state. The paper reviews the evidence pertaining to all three aspects of unconscious motivation, with emphasis on conceptual and methodological questions that arise in the study of motives which are not accessible to phenomenal awareness or voluntary control but nonetheless influence the individual's experience, thought, and action.

Consciousness, the unconscious, and the self.

“…Implicit motivation is commonly measured with the Picture-Story Exercise, a variant on the Thematic Apperception Test (Murray, 1943), in which subjects write stories in response to pictorial stimuli which are then coded for themes and imagery related to such social motives as achievement, affiliation or intimacy, and power (Schultheiss & Brunstein, 2010). As with implicit emotion, the evidence for implicit motivation is somewhat controversial (Kihlstrom, 2019). With few exceptions (e.g., Schultheiss et al, 2009), the means by which explicit and implicit motivation are assessed are so different that any dissociations between them may reflect little more than method variance.…”

Childhood Studies and child psychology: Disciplines in dialogue?

“…There remain multiple avenues of connection and exploration. For example, mainstream psychologies (particularly in English‐speaking traditions) are not very open to psychodynamic interpretations of children's internal and social development, but this need not necessarily be a barrier, as they do accept that the unconscious has a strong role to play in many domains of human behaviour such as cognition, motivation and attitudes, and that many human activities are dominated by unconscious processing triggered by stimuli in the environment and mediated by motivational structures (Kihlstrom, 1987, 2019). Bourdieusian analyses of how internalised frameworks form during childhoods and how these then play out through unconscious processing could be envisaged.…”