In this chapter, we argue that differences in problem-solving experiences can be traced to differences in the activation of brain structures involved in the unconscious processing of information (what we refer to as “the backstage”). Scientists commonly distinguish between two major types of problem-solving experiences: via insight and via analysis. Three properties are often mentioned when describing how insight solutions differ from analytic solutions: (1) Solvers are unable to report much of the processing that leads to the solution which comes to mind in an off–on manner; (2) Solvers experience their solutions together with a feeling of pleasure and reward; (3) Solutions via insight feel correct and they actually are. This is captured by a distinctive response: the Aha! This chapter focuses on these three properties and argues that unconscious processes are important for problem-solving in general, but especially important for insight experiences because most of the processing that leads to the solution happens below awareness. It also argues that the positive affect associated with insight serves an adaptive function.

How to theorise the pleasure of thinking? Psychoanalysis is the rare discipline of psychology that has accounted for the pleasure of thinking. Chapter 3 follows a historical presentation of psychoanalysis; it first presents how, when founding psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud theorised thinking and its pleasure, an experience he obviously himself had. The chapter then explores the two next generations of psychoanalysts. It thus focuses on two post-war authors, Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott, who, in very contrasting ways, give us elements to further understand psychic activity and its pleasures. Finally, it examines the work of contemporary theoreticians who, building on Freud, Bion, and Winnicott, turn their interests to the modalities of thinking and, with it, allude also to pleasure (André Green), whether in sublimation (Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor), daydreaming (Thomas Ogden), or the pleasure of insights.

7. In daily life, common sense refers to established uniformities of a physical, biological, and social nature, and it is usually assumed to be self-evident. Humans sense such uniformities as constancies passed on over generations, and common sense is an implicit and normative guidance for daily acting.

In this chapter, I have shown that the relations between common sense and social representations are complex and manifold, and one cannot substitute one phenomenon for the other. I insisted that relations between common sense and social representations are different in the broad and narrow perspectives of social representations.

In the broad perspective, Moscovici distinguished between two forms of common-sense knowledge: historically, first-hand common-sense knowledge generates scientific knowledge. It is based on traditions and consensus, comprising daily thinking and language, images, and metaphors. Second-hand common-sense knowledge results from the transformation of scientific knowledge into daily knowledge.

In the narrow perspective, I suggest that Moscovici was not primarily concerned with rationality of common sense but with reversals of unconscious into conscious beliefs and knowledge, and vice versa, in the formation and transformation of social representations of specific phenomena. I identify two sources of such reversals: the unconscious (and non-conscious) and themata.

Innovative conceptions of the soul flourished in the past century. Worcester and McComb discussed the subconscious as the soul, that unknown aspect of ourselves. The subconscious was the source of religious experience. Myers’ “subliminal self” produced automata that upsurged across the threshold of consciousness; while automata could be pathological, they could also be indicative of the future evolution of the personality. James speculated about souls beyond the individual, even of the earth itself. Jung articulated an understanding of the soul and of psychical reality. Holt recognized soul in the form of consciousness as the “cross-section.” Holt recognized form in “the wish,” as organizing consciousness and behavior. These innovations represented a shift in emphasis from the figural of mental life—consciousness—to its ground. They shifted the conversation about the soul from it being an efficient cause of mental life to it being the formal cause of mental life.

The intellectual excitement of nineteenth-century Germany was reflected by the Romantic and Existential movements, although both had international aspects as well. Both movements were to some extent reactions against the dominant idealism of rationalism, coming primarily from Kant’s views on the active mind, constructing reality. Fichte, von Schelling, and Hegel explored the implication of Kant’s philosophy, with Hegel coming to dominate the age. Romanticism found its roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and exerted tremendous influence in art, literature as well as philosophy, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century. Recognizing the complexities of human experience, particularly in the dimensions of emotions, passions and desires, romanticism explored those aspects not readily explained by rational, intellectual processes. Existentialism was a direct reaction against rationalism and found initial expression in the nineteenth century by Kierkegaard, in Theology, and Dilthey, in psychology. Further, the Kantian notions of the strivings of the will and the unconscious were explored more fully by Schopenhauer and von Hartmann.

This chapter considers Romantic surgery from the patient’s perspective. It uses Astley Cooper’s rich archive of personal correspondence to explore the complex emotions associated with the experience of surgical illness and its treatment, as well as the ways in which emotional expression functioned as a form of agency within the private surgical relationship. In addition to considering private patients, this chapter also examines how emotions expressed and mediated agency within what, following Michel Foucault, we might consider the ‘disciplinary’ space of the hospital. The pre-anaesthetic surgical patient was a deeply unstable and ‘messy’ ontological entity whose pre-operative health and post-operative recovery were determined by a complex melding of constitutional, nervous, and emotional factors. Thus, as this chapter demonstrates, the patient’s own body could exert an unconscious material agency, often frustrating both surgical intervention and the patient’s own will, something that was most evident in the associations between irritability and obstreperousness that characterised contemporary discourses on amputation and its discontents.

We live in a multiplicity of personal worlds, all connected through the power of our unconscious mind and its capacity for trance. This vast unconscious, far larger than conscious awareness, appears to initiate all our movements. The cognitive unconscious, with its perceptual-cognitive abilities, automated motor skills, and implicit memory, facilitates creative expression while clinically, our unconscious emotions, internal conflicts, and repressed desires drive the inspiration and passion of a creative trance. Relinquishing conscious control in the creative process can be a type of artistic projective identification. As the visual artist Joan Mitchell says, “the painting tells me what to do.” Unlike the slow sequential thinking of the conscious mind, the unconscious is a parallel processor quickly integrating multiple variables to bring depth and complexity into the creative process. It carries out multipart repeated behaviors that become automatic fluid expertise, as in the violinist no longer concentrating on finger positions and the archer instinctually positioning a bow.

This chapter examines Freudian psychoanalysis as a source of inspiration and ambivalence for Surrealism. Freudian postulates such as the centrality of subconscious activity in human behavior and its manifestation through automatic processes helped determine surrealist methods of art-making and poetical practice in the movement’s early years. Yet surrealists would gradually reappraise their reliance on automatism and other key psychoanalytical concepts which had been appropriated into the movement’s theoretical body, mainly by André Breton. Breton and his coterie developed forms of creative activity based on a looser interpretation of the inner life; in doing so, they helped provide inspiration for new psychoanalytic concepts – the most notable example was Jacques Lacan and Salvador Dalí’s iterative notion of paranoia. This novel understanding of the disorder illustrated how the same idée fixe could appear to manifest itself in different external phenomena by virtue of the subject’s delirious projections. The chapter demonstrates that, while Surrealism was influenced by psychoanalysis at its inception, in its later years it was Surrealism that influenced psychoanalysis.

This chapter examines the process of introspection and examining our own minds. It looks at different types of introspection. it examines the philosophical process and discipline of phenomenology, particularly the work of Husserl. We look at psychological methods of examining the contents of our thoughts, particularly using experience sampling. We then look at the reliability of our own beliefs, and how we can be misled by illusions and delusions. The chapter looks at examples such as schizophrenia, mass hysteria, confabulation and the neurological disorder denial, all of which make us question the reliability of our beliefs. We ask to what extent we could be wrong about the nature of our experience. The chapter moves on to consider what is outside consciousness, and the Freudian concept of the unconscious, and the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious and its contents. The chapter concludes by examining subliminal processing.

A detailed phenomenological analysis of the various manifestations of corporeality can help to grasp and make sense of how the body is apprehended in different psychopathological conditions. I will argue that once distinguished the body-object (the representational, explicit and ultimately visible manifestation of one's corporeality) from the lived body (the proto-reflexive semi-experiential/semi-representational manifestation of one's corporeality), the latter should be distinguished from the living body. What I will call here the ‘living body’ is the immediately felt, pathic, purely impressive, pre-reflective, non-representational, experiential and invisible manifestation of one's corporeality. I will also propose that the living body possess two distinct profiles: self-affection or the primordial bodily chiasm enforcing one's feeling of belonging to oneself and to the world, and the sheer flesh or chaotic plurality of invisible bodily forces immediately felt without the intercession of a representation. A further manifestation of corporeality is the body-for-others; that is the experience of feeling one's corporeality when it is looked at by another person. I will match these different profiles of corporeality to specific anomalous psychopathological conditions, namely the appearance of the sheer, chaotic flesh to the borderline person's form of existence; the body as a corporealized, restricted, inhibited and rigid body to melancholia; the mechanic, robotic functioning object “out there” to schizophrenia; and finally the body apprehended through the gaze of the other to the existence of persons with eating disorders

The relations between embodiment and temporality reach from the micro-temporality of conscious experience to the enactment of human existence. First, the basic internal time consciousness is marked by the rhythmicity of vital processes (heartbeat, respiratory rhythm, daily periods, etc.). Moreover, the bodily drives, urges, and needs, which may be subsumed under the term conation, crucially determine the future-directed temporality of primary experience. On the other hand, the body forms an extract of sensorimotor and affective experience which are sedimented in implicit or body memory, thus shaping an individual's capacities and dispositions. Finally, existential temporality is essentially characterized by the vital processes of birth, growth, aging, and dying.

Body, time, and intersubjectivity are equally interconnected. First, interbodily resonance establishes the primary experience of the shared present, beginning in the child's early development. Thus, a basic contemporality emerges, which later continues in social synchronizations and temporal orders as the basis of social life. However, this temporal alignment is also subject to desynchronizations, for example, in backlogs of tasks, in guilt, remorse, or grief – situations that require processes of psychosocial resynchronization.

All these interconnections are subject to various kinds of disturbances which are also found in psychopathology and thus crucially determine the emergence and course of mental disorders.