Jared Edward Reser, Ph.D. With GPT 5.6. 

Abstract

Psychodynamic theory’s most durable claim is that motives, conflicts, memories, expectations, and defensive patterns can influence thought and behavior without becoming fully accessible to introspection. Cognitive psychology and neuroscience have established the pervasive influence of nonconscious processing, but they generally describe it as distributed among specialized perceptual, mnemonic, affective, and action-generating systems rather than organized within a cohesive hidden agent. The present article proposes Iterative Psychodynamics, a theoretical framework that integrates the dynamic unconscious with State-Spanning Workspace Theory. Consciousness is modeled as a temporally extended causal trajectory composed of partially overlapping global coalitions. Distributed nonconscious systems generate perceptions, associations, valuations, predictions, memories, and action proposals. Selected outputs become conscious when they participate reciprocally in a functionally global coalition, remain causally active across successive updates, and jointly contribute to the construction of successor states. Slower unconscious dispositions, encoded in associative weights, valuation functions, attentional priorities, habitual policies, self-model commitments, and defensive tendencies, shape the probability distribution over these successors without necessarily appearing as explicit contents within them. On this account, unconscious motives are recurrent transition biases, ambivalence is competition among trajectory attractors, denial is defensive non-integration, repression involves reduced admission or reinstatement of threatening content, rationalization is retrospective narrative construction, and repetitive psychological patterns are compiled transition policies. Conscious trajectories reciprocally modify the unconscious through implicitization or trajectory compilation, whereby repeatedly traversed sequences become increasingly automatic. Insight involves trajectory reconstruction, in which previously distributed determinants become jointly represented, connected to the self-model, and available for revision. Iterative Psychodynamics preserves the scientifically useful core of psychodynamic theory without positing a second unified subject beneath consciousness. It also generates testable predictions concerning successor-state bias, self-relevant integration, motivational conflict, defensive gating, insight, and enduring psychological change.

Keywords: unconscious processing, psychodynamics, consciousness, state-spanning coactivity, global workspace, motivation, implicitization, denial, ambivalence, insight

---

1. Introduction

People do not have complete access to the processes that produce their perceptions, emotions, motives, decisions, and actions. Contemporary research on the cognitive unconscious has documented automatic perception, implicit memory, procedural learning, affective influence, and behavior generated without awareness of the causal operations involved. Psychodynamic theory made a broader claim: unconscious influences are not limited to neutral perceptual or motor routines. They also include motives, emotional conflicts, defensive reactions, relational expectations, and recurring patterns of interpretation. Kihlstrom’s account of the cognitive unconscious placed nonconscious mental structures and processes within information-processing psychology, while Westen argued that unconscious mental life, parallel motivational conflict, stable personality patterns, developmental history, and representations of self and others remain central and empirically relevant psychodynamic propositions. 

The scientific problem is to retain these observations without treating the unconscious as a second person inside the person. A hidden agent appears to require its own perceptions, beliefs, deliberations, intentions, and executive system. Once those capacities are attributed to it, the original explanatory problem has merely been displaced. One conscious thinker has been explained by proposing another thinker whose organization remains unspecified.

An early formulation of the present approach appeared in On the Unconscious. That essay argued that unconscious processing is biologically distributed, that apparently intelligent unconscious outcomes can arise from systems shaped by evolution, learning, and earlier conscious activity, and that consciousness may be constructed when selected unconscious perceptions and associations remain active through successive cycles of cortical processing. It also introduced implicitization, the process through which a previously explicit A-B-C sequence becomes a more automatic A-C association after repetition. 

The temporal mechanism was developed more formally in the theory of state-spanning coactivity. State-spanning coactivity, or SSC, describes representational content shared across successive brain states, while incremental change in state-spanning coactivity, or icSSC, describes the gradual turnover through which some contents persist as others are removed or added. The resulting sequence allows previous computational results to remain available as parameters for subsequent processing. Incremental change in state spanning cortical.pdf The original formulation proposed that coactive representations pool their spreading activity, recruit new representations, and recursively embed each state in its predecessor. 

Incremental change in state spanning cortical.pdf

State-Spanning Workspace Theory, or SSWT, extends these constructs into a transition-level theory of stream consciousness. A capacity-limited global coalition is broadcast to specialized systems. Those systems nonconsciously evaluate and transform the coalition, after which selected contents are retained and newly generated candidates are incorporated into a successor coalition. The conscious episode is identified with the causally connected trajectory formed by these partially overlapping, globally consequential states. 

Iterative Psychodynamics adds a motivational, developmental, and personality-level layer to this architecture. It proposes that:

1. Distributed unconscious processes supply the elements from which conscious states are composed.
2. Slower unconscious dispositions bias which elements are recruited, retained, transformed, or displaced.
3. Psychodynamic conflict arises when incompatible dispositions favor competing conscious and behavioral trajectories.
4. Defenses operate by altering admission, persistence, interpretation, self-attribution, and successor construction.
5. Repeated conscious trajectories become compiled into increasingly automatic unconscious structure.
6. Insight and psychological change occur when implicit transition structure becomes explicitly represented and is revised through further experience.

The central claim can be summarized as follows:

Distributed unconscious processes compose the conscious stream; unconscious dispositions shape the direction of that stream; and repeated conscious trajectories are compiled into the unconscious structures that will organize future experience.

---

2. From a Hidden Agent to a Distributed Dynamic Unconscious

2.1 The psychodynamic core

Contemporary psychodynamic theory is broader than Freud’s particular drive theory, developmental stages, or metapsychological divisions. Westen identified five propositions that remained widely shared among psychodynamic theorists: much mental life is unconscious; affective and motivational processes operate in parallel and can conflict; stable personality patterns develop over time; representations of the self, others, and relationships guide social behavior; and psychological development involves increasingly mature forms of affect regulation and relatedness. 

Iterative Psychodynamics retains the first four propositions in mechanistic form. Unconscious mental life is understood as activity and dispositional structure outside the state-spanning conscious coalition. Motivational conflict is understood as competition among distributed valuation and action systems. Stable personality patterns are understood as learned transition policies that recur across partially similar situations. Representations of self and others are treated as high-level constraints that influence perception, memory retrieval, affect, and successor-state selection.

The word dynamic is important. The unconscious is not merely a storage location containing dormant thoughts. It includes active interactions among motives, affective associations, memories, expectations, action tendencies, and inhibitory processes. These elements can cooperate, compete, reinforce one another, or interfere with one another. Their interactions determine which psychological tendencies become behaviorally effective and which become explicit.

2.2 Organized influence without unified agency

A process can exhibit stable directionality without being a conscious agent. A fear network may repeatedly increase vigilance and avoidance. An attachment expectation may increase the salience of ambiguous signs of rejection. A status motive may preferentially recruit social comparisons, memories of recognition, and opportunities for influence. The recurrence and coordination of these effects can make the underlying system appear purposeful.

Purpose-like regularity can arise because multiple systems have been shaped by common selection pressures, developmental experiences, reinforcement histories, and previous conscious decisions. Their outputs converge on similar interpretations and actions because their associative organization points in the same direction. The apparent unity lies in the consistency of the resulting bias, not in the existence of a hidden narrator who privately formulates a plan.

This distinction allows the unconscious to be psychologically substantial. It can encode sophisticated relational expectations, emotional predictions, action policies, and conditional strategies. It can also produce conflict and compromise. None of these capacities requires the unconscious as a whole to possess one perspective, one continuously maintained model of the world, or one private stream of consciousness.

The term distributed dynamic unconscious will be used for this ecology of active and latent processes. Its organization is distributed across perceptual systems, affective and valuation networks, memory systems, motor and action-selection systems, linguistic processes, self-models, and learned connections among them. Its dynamics become visible through regularities in what a person notices, feels, remembers, imagines, avoids, says, and does.

2.3 Functional levels of processing

The following categories are proposed as functional distinctions. They should not be interpreted as sharply bounded anatomical systems.

Level

Proposed definition

Nonconscious operation

A local transformation, computation, physiological regulation, or motor process that is not itself experienced.

Unconscious representation or disposition

Information or learned organization that influences cognition or behavior without currently becoming an explicit constituent of the conscious trajectory.

Preconscious content

Information that is presently unattended but can be recruited into consciousness relatively readily when cued or selected.

Subconscious formation

A partially integrated affective, mnemonic, perceptual, or motivational coalition that exerts coherent influence while remaining incompletely conceptualized, self-attributed, or globally inherited.

Conscious coalition

A capacity-limited set of representations participating in reciprocal, functionally global processing at a particular interval.

Conscious trajectory

A causally connected sequence of partially overlapping conscious coalitions whose inherited contents jointly constrain subsequent states.

The term subconscious is introduced here as an intermediate functional category rather than as a separate brain compartment. It identifies formations that are more coordinated than isolated unconscious operations but less fully integrated than explicit conscious interpretations. A person may experience anxiety without identifying its object, anger without recognizing the hurt that organizes it, or avoidance without representing the anticipated outcome being avoided. The conscious effect is available, while the causal formation producing it remains only partially integrated.

---

3. The Iterative Composition of Consciousness

3.1 State-spanning coactivity

An instantaneous neural state is insufficient to explain the experienced continuity of thought. Conscious experience includes retention and transformation. A perceived object remains identifiable as its orientation changes. A question remains active while possible answers are evaluated. An emotional concern persists while memories and future scenarios are introduced. These processes require information from earlier states to remain causally effective in later states.

SSC occurs when multiple representational contents remain jointly active, or remain functionally continuous, across successive states. icSSC occurs when group membership changes incrementally. Some representations remain, while others are removed, transformed, or added. The retained subset provides contextual continuity; the changing subset permits updating and differentiation. 

Incremental change in state spanning cortical.pdf

SSWT distinguishes three forms of composition. Synchronic composition occurs when several specialized systems contribute to the same integrated coalition. Diachronic composition occurs when selected contents preserve their identity or causal role across successive coalitions. Recursive composition occurs when the current coalition helps determine its successor by altering processing within the systems to which it is broadcast. 

These three forms are mutually dependent. Synchronic composition supplies a jointly organized present. Diachronic composition preserves enough of that organization to create continuity. Recursive composition uses the inherited organization as a set of constraints on what will be perceived, retrieved, valued, imagined, or prepared next.

3.2 Polyassociativity and cospreading

The construction of a successor state does not require a central executive to inspect every possible association. In the original SSC model, coactive assemblies were proposed to pool their spreading activity and converge on representations associated with their combination. This process was termed polyassociativity. 

Incremental change in state spanning cortical.pdf

SSWT uses the related term cospreading. Several active representations jointly alter the accessibility of candidate additions. A candidate may have only a weak relationship to each current representation considered separately, yet be strongly associated with their conjunction. The coalition therefore functions as a distributed query. Every retained item helps specify what would constitute an appropriate continuation. 

The process is automatic at the level of local operations. The active combination spreads through a network whose weights embody prior experience. Candidate memories, inferences, images, words, and actions emerge from this interaction. Subjectively, the next thought often appears rather than being consciously selected. Mechanistically, it has been conditioned by the present coalition, recent context, learned associations, bodily state, motivational value, and environmental input. The 2016 paper explicitly described polyassociativity as an unconscious form of pattern completion capable of producing automatic associations, deliberate-seeming thought, and sudden insight. 

Incremental change in state spanning cortical.pdf

3.3 Persistence alone is insufficient

The early formulation associated unconscious processing primarily with brief activity and conscious thought with prolonged cortical persistence. That contrast now requires refinement. Unconscious visual information can be integrated over several hundred milliseconds before a unified percept and report-related representation emerge. Menétrey, Herzog, and Pascucci distinguished an earlier occipital pattern associated with unconscious processing from a later centroparietal pattern associated with the integrated percept. 

Information from subjectively unseen stimuli can also influence delayed performance. Studies of nonconscious working memory have reported above-chance use of masked information after delays, sometimes without the sustained activity associated with conscious maintenance. Activity-silent working-memory research further demonstrates that temporarily relevant information can remain encoded in altered synaptic or network states and later be reactivated. 

Duration therefore cannot be the sole distinction between conscious and unconscious representation. Iterative Psychodynamics distinguishes local persistence from global iterative inheritance. A representation may remain active or latent within a specialized system while exerting only limited influence. It becomes part of the conscious trajectory when it participates reciprocally in a functionally global coalition, contributes to structured differentiation, and helps determine several successor states. SSWT similarly distinguishes a focal coalition from a slower fringe whose contents can bias later updates without presently belonging to the conscious field. 

3.4 System 2 as iterated System 1

Dual-process accounts commonly distinguish rapid, automatic, relatively effortless processing from slow, capacity-limited, controlled reasoning. The SSC model proposed that the second mode may arise when operations characteristic of the first mode become sequentially coordinated through state-spanning retention. Automatic associations continue to occur, but intermediate results remain available and support one another across successive processing cycles. 

Incremental change in state spanning cortical.pdf

A multistep calculation illustrates the proposal. Each elementary operation may be automatic once learned. Higher-order reasoning arises because the output of one operation is retained, combined with the task goal, and used to recruit the next operation. No individual step contains the entire solution. The solution emerges from the cumulative organization of the sequence. The original paper therefore raised the possibility that conscious and metacognitive processing can be constructed from preattentive operations whose products exhibit SSC across successive episodes of imagery generation. 

Incremental change in state spanning cortical.pdf

This proposal does not imply that every System 1 process becomes conscious when extended. Conscious composition additionally requires functional globality, reciprocal processing, structured differentiation, and causal contribution to successor states. The broader claim is that conscious deliberation need not depend on an elementary operation unique to consciousness. It may depend on the temporal organization of operations that remain individually nonconscious.

3.5 Three forms of accumulation

The claim that consciousness is accumulated from unconscious processing has three meanings.

Simultaneous accumulation occurs when perception, memory, affect, interoception, language, valuation, and action preparation contribute to the same coalition. The conscious situation contains the jointly organized products of many processors whose individual operations are unavailable to introspection.

Temporal accumulation occurs when partial products remain active and become parameters for later processing. Each retained result changes the context in which new information is interpreted. The stream grows through context-sensitive revision rather than through the simple addition of independent outputs.

Developmental accumulation occurs because the representations and transition rules participating in present consciousness were constructed across a lifetime. Concepts, habits, emotional expectations, skilled routines, and self-representations embody the history of earlier learning. Some were acquired without awareness. Others originated in conscious sequences and later became implicitized.

Consciousness is therefore accumulated both within the current episode and across developmental time.

---

4. The Dynamic Unconscious as Transition Structure

4.1 Beyond hidden contents

The unconscious is often imagined as a repository containing hidden thoughts, wishes, and memories. Some unconscious influences can be described as latent contents. A memory may exist without currently being retrieved, and a perceptual representation may be processed without being consciously identified. A large part of unconscious organization, however, is better characterized as transition structure.

Transition structure includes:

• associative weights connecting representations;
• learned valuations that increase attraction or aversion;
• attentional priorities that regulate salience;
• retrieval biases that make some memories more accessible;
• action policies linking situations to responses;
• emotional predictions about likely outcomes;
• self-model commitments that favor compatible interpretations;
• defensive tendencies that inhibit, transform, or displace threatening implications;
• attachment and relational expectations that organize social perception.

These structures do not have to appear as contents in consciousness. They shape which contents become conscious and what those contents are likely to become next.

A person’s fear of abandonment, for example, may not ordinarily exist as a continuously active sentence. It may be distributed across enhanced detection of distancing cues, preferential retrieval of rejection memories, autonomic arousal, hostile or anxious interpretations of ambiguity, reassurance seeking, and avoidance of vulnerability. The motive or fear is real as a stable causal organization even when no complete proposition representing it is present.

4.2 Unconscious motives as successor-state biases

An unconscious motive can be defined as:

A relatively stable valuation and action disposition that systematically changes the probability distribution over conscious and behavioral successor states without being explicitly represented as the source of those states.

A motive for recognition may increase the likelihood that ambiguous events are interpreted in status-relevant terms. It may prolong thoughts involving achievement, make praise more memorable, intensify reactions to being ignored, and increase the accessibility of competitive action. Each effect is partial. Their recurrence across situations reveals a common motivational attractor.

This definition avoids the assumption that every unacknowledged desire exists as a complete hidden statement. A desire may be realized as a distributed tendency whose components become jointly visible only through repeated observation or insight. Its depth can be operationalized through stability, cross-context recurrence, causal influence, resistance to competing goals, and its capacity to organize extended trajectories.

The phrase true desire should therefore be used cautiously. People can possess several genuine motives whose implications conflict. One motive may be more stable, developmentally entrenched, or behaviorally influential than another without invalidating the second. Iterative Psychodynamics replaces the search for one hidden authentic sentence with the analysis of interacting motivational attractors.

4.3 Subconscious formations

A subconscious formation is proposed as an intermediate organization between a local unconscious process and an explicit conscious interpretation. It consists of several mutually supporting processes whose combined influence has acquired coherence.

An unresolved interpersonal formation might include:

• a partially activated memory of an earlier rejection;
• a bodily state of tension;
• a prediction that disclosure will lead to humiliation;
• an impulse to withdraw;
• selective attention to signs of disinterest;
• an alternative desire for closeness.

The person may consciously experience only unease or irritation. The wider formation has enough organization to guide interpretation and behavior, but its components have not yet become jointly stabilized, conceptualized, and integrated with the self-model.

The fringe described in SSWT provides one mechanism for subconscious influence. Recently active or primed information can alter later candidate generation without being part of the current focal coalition. Deeper subconscious formations can also depend on long-term associative structure, emotional learning, and recurrent relational models. The 2016 SSC paper similarly distinguished short-term continuity based on sustained firing and short-term plasticity, intermediate continuity based on priming and emotion, and longer continuity based on learning and episodic memory. 

Incremental change in state spanning cortical.pdf

4.4 The self-model as a recurring constraint

The self is not an executive standing outside the cognitive stream. Self-representations are contents and dispositions within the same architecture. They include autobiographical memories, body representations, social identities, values, expectations about personal behavior, and models of how others perceive the person.

When self-representations remain active across successive states, they can organize perception, memory retrieval, emotional interpretation, and action. The 2016 paper proposed that active self-awareness may depend on autobiographical representations remaining in SSC and guiding the progression of imagery and impulses. 

Incremental change in state spanning cortical.pdf

A psychological implication can therefore be processed without becoming self-integrated. A person may understand a proposition semantically while failing to connect it to autobiographical identity, responsibility, future planning, or emotional meaning. This separation is central to the iterative account of denial.

---

5. Psychodynamic Phenomena as Trajectory Dynamics

The principal psychodynamic constructs can be translated into relations among distributed processors, slower dispositions, the conscious coalition, and the evolving trajectory.

Psychodynamic construct

Proposed iterative mechanism

Impulse

An affective or action proposal gains influence before its causal organization becomes explicit.

Unacknowledged desire

A stable valuation pattern repeatedly favors desire-congruent perceptions, memories, images, and actions without entering the self-model as an explicit motive.

Ambivalence

Incompatible motivational coalitions favor different successor trajectories and alternately or jointly influence the stream.

Compromise formation

A state or action partially satisfies constraints imposed by competing motives.

Denial

Information is processed, but its self-relevant implications fail to achieve stable iterative integration.

Repression

Admission, retrieval, reinstatement, or persistence of threatening representations is repeatedly reduced.

Rationalization

Narrative systems construct a coherent reason after behavior or judgment has already been shaped by unavailable causes.

Projection

Affective or motivational structure influences social interpretation while remaining weakly attributed to the self.

Transference

Compiled relational expectations organize interpretations of a present person through partial similarity to earlier relationships.

Repetition

A learned transition policy repeatedly reconstructs a familiar emotional and behavioral trajectory.

Insight

Previously distributed determinants become jointly explicit, self-relevant, and state-spanning.

Working through

Repeated activation of a new interpretation gradually modifies the disposition that produced the old trajectory.

These mappings are theoretical proposals. Existing findings support the component capacities, such as nonconscious influence, competing motives, memory suppression, limited introspective access, and post hoc explanation. They do not independently establish every classical psychodynamic construct in the form proposed here.

5.1 Impulse and unacknowledged desire

An impulse is an action-oriented output that acquires causal force before the system explicitly represents why the action is attractive. Perceptual, affective, interoceptive, and motor systems can converge on an approach or avoidance tendency. The person may become conscious of wanting to act while lacking access to the learning history, valuation processes, or anticipated outcomes that produced the urge.

An unacknowledged desire is more enduring. It repeatedly changes what the person attends to, imagines, remembers, and prepares to do. Explicit acknowledgment may be absent because the desire has never been linguistically conceptualized, because its components remain distributed, because it conflicts with another goal, or because incorporating it into the self-model would threaten an established identity.

Research distinguishing implicit and self-attributed motives provides partial support for the possibility of motivational dissociation. Measures of implicit and explicit motives can relate to different behavioral tendencies, and discrepancies between them have been associated with volitional strain and reduced well-being. These findings depend on contested measurement traditions and should not be treated as a direct assay of hidden desires. They nevertheless support the broader proposition that motivational organization and explicit self-description can diverge. 

5.2 Ambivalence and competing trajectory attractors

Ambivalence occurs when different motivational systems assign incompatible values to the same object, action, or relationship. A person may desire closeness and fear dependence, seek recognition and fear scrutiny, or want immediate relief while also wanting to preserve a long-term identity. Each tendency can recruit its own memories, predictions, bodily states, and possible actions.

Because conscious access is capacity-limited, one coalition may temporarily dominate. The person can sincerely experience one position and later sincerely experience its opposite. The apparent inconsistency does not require deception. It can arise because different parts of a parallel motivational architecture acquire state-spanning influence at different moments.

A trajectory attractor is a region of cognitive state space toward which processing repeatedly tends to move. Two competing attractors can produce oscillation. A cue favoring attachment may pull the stream toward affectionate memories and approach behavior. A cue favoring self-protection may recruit threat predictions and withdrawal. Intermediate behavior may constitute a compromise formation, satisfying each tendency partially while fully satisfying neither.

Psychodynamic conflict is therefore a conflict over successor construction. The competing systems differ in the conscious states, interpretations, and actions they make more probable.

5.3 Denial as defensive non-integration

Denial is frequently described as an absence of knowledge, but many instances appear to involve a more complex distribution of knowledge. A person may perceive relevant evidence, understand its literal meaning, experience emotional or physiological effects, and alter behavior while continuing to reject its personal implication.

Iterative Psychodynamics describes this condition as defensive non-integration. Information is represented at some levels, but it fails to remain jointly active with the self-model, autobiographical memory, emotional interpretation, and future planning. The literal proposition may enter consciousness briefly. Its self-relevant meaning is then displaced, weakened, compartmentalized, or replaced before it can organize an extended trajectory.

Several mechanisms could contribute:

• attention may shift away from elaborating the implication;
• counterinterpretations may be preferentially recruited;
• autobiographical memories supporting the implication may fail to reactivate;
• emotional responses may be attributed to another cause;
• the proposition may remain abstract rather than self-referential;
• reassuring narratives may rapidly replace threatening successors;
• action may be organized around the information even while explicit endorsement is withheld.

This account explains how a person can simultaneously know and not know. Different components of the information have different access, persistence, and self-integration profiles. Denial is identified by the structure of the transition from recognition to personal integration, not simply by whether the initial information was encoded.

A strong test of this proposal would distinguish early perceptual or semantic failure from later defensive non-integration. If denial begins after intact recognition, one should observe early registration of the information followed by reduced multicycle coupling with self-referential, autobiographical, affective, and prospective representations.

5.4 Repression as reduced admission and reinstatement

Classical repression proposes that threatening material is kept outside awareness. Contemporary evidence demonstrates that people can intentionally suppress retrieval of unwanted memories. In the think/no-think paradigm, repeated attempts to prevent retrieval can reduce later recall. Neuroimaging studies have associated memory suppression with increased prefrontal control, reduced hippocampal activity, and impaired retention. Emotional memory suppression has also been associated with temporally differentiated control over sensory and mnemonic-affective components. 

Voluntary laboratory suppression is not equivalent to classical repression. Participants know the material, know that they are suppressing it, and act under explicit instructions. The findings establish relevant component mechanisms, including retrieval inhibition, reduced reinstatement, and control over memory-related activity. They do not prove that threatening autobiographical material is automatically repressed in the Freudian sense.

Iterative Psychodynamics proposes a possible bridge. Repeatedly practiced avoidance may become implicitized. A person may initially redirect attention deliberately, reject certain interpretations, or prevent memories from developing. Over time, the sequence can become a compiled policy that rapidly attenuates threatening candidates before conscious deliberation is required.

Repression would then involve one or more of the following:

1. reduced generation of a threatening candidate;
2. reduced admission of the candidate into the focal coalition;
3. accelerated displacement after admission;
4. reduced retrieval of supporting memories;
5. weakened linkage to the self-model;
6. transformation into a less threatening substitute;
7. reduced later reinstatement.

These mechanisms should be studied separately. Treating repression as one indivisible process would conceal potentially distinct forms of defensive regulation.

5.5 Rationalization and retrospective construction

People often lack direct access to the higher-order operations that generated their judgments. Nisbett and Wilson reviewed evidence that people can be unaware of influential stimuli and cognitive processes, then generate explanations based on plausible causal theories. Choice-blindness experiments later showed that participants can fail to detect a mismatch between a choice and the outcome presented to them, yet provide reasons for the manipulated outcome. 

These findings do not imply that all introspective explanation is false. People can accurately report reasons that were explicitly represented and causally involved in a decision. They do demonstrate that coherence and confidence are insufficient to establish causal access.

Within Iterative Psychodynamics, rationalization is a successor-state construction. Once an action, judgment, or emotional stance has occurred, the current coalition contains the outcome, the self-model, conversational demands, and available cultural explanations. Cospreading among these representations generates a plausible narrative. The narrative may preserve identity, social acceptability, and local coherence even when it does not reconstruct the actual causal trajectory.

A rationalization can later become causally effective in its own right. Once repeated, the explanation may alter autobiographical memory, strengthen a self-concept, and guide future behavior. A post hoc account can therefore become part of the disposition that shapes subsequent decisions.

5.6 Projection and transference

Projection can be interpreted as asymmetric attribution. An affective or motivational formation influences social perception, but the formation is not adequately represented as belonging to the self. Its structure therefore enters the conscious trajectory primarily through interpretations of another person.

For example, unacknowledged hostility may increase the accessibility of hostile interpretations of ambiguous behavior. The person consciously experiences the other as antagonistic while remaining unaware that internally generated affect helped construct the perception. Projection need not involve transferring a complete hidden thought. It may arise from a failure to bind the source of an affective bias to the self-model.

Transference can be interpreted as relational trajectory compilation. Repeated early interactions build expectations linking interpersonal cues to predicted outcomes, emotional responses, and protective actions. A present relationship that shares only part of the earlier pattern can reactivate the compiled policy. The current person is then interpreted through a transition structure originally acquired elsewhere.

This does not imply that every repeated relationship pattern originated in childhood or that present interpretations are necessarily mistaken. The hypothesis is that some relational responses display more continuity with an established transition policy than with the evidence available in the present interaction.

5.7 Repetition, personality, and symptoms

Repeated coactivation strengthens associative structure. The SSC model proposed that recurring cortical associations can persist as semantic knowledge and underlie beliefs and habitual behavior. It also proposed that a subset of previously coactive representations may eventually become sufficient to recruit an outcome that once required the whole set, leaving omitted elements implicit in the transition. 

Incremental change in state spanning cortical.pdf

Personality can therefore be conceptualized partly as a stable distribution of transition tendencies. Faced with similar configurations, the person repeatedly notices related features, retrieves related memories, adopts related emotional stances, and prepares related actions. The exact contents vary, but the path through cognitive and affective state space remains statistically recognizable.

A repetitive symptom may sometimes represent the output of a stable conflict-defense configuration. Anxiety, avoidance, self-criticism, anger, reassurance seeking, or emotional detachment may recur because each is embedded in a learned trajectory that is easily reconstructed. The symptom can be locally regulatory even when it is globally costly. Avoidance, for example, may reduce immediate distress while preserving the predictions that make future avoidance likely.

Iterative Psychodynamics does not assume that every symptom is symbolic, defensive, or psychologically meaningful. Symptoms can arise from neurological, physiological, pharmacological, environmental, and other causes. The psychodynamic interpretation becomes appropriate only when a recurrent output can be linked prospectively and causally to an identifiable configuration of motives, predictions, and defensive transitions.

---

6. Implicitization and Trajectory Compilation

6.1 From explicit sequence to automatic transition

The early concept of implicitization described a transition from an explicit sequence to an automatic association. Initially, the system may have to move consciously from A through B to C. After repetition, A becomes sufficient to recruit C. B may remain recoverable, but it no longer has to be reconstructed during routine performance. 

This principle applies to motor skills, conceptual judgments, emotional reactions, social expectations, and defensive behavior. A child may initially notice a sequence in which disclosure leads to ridicule, ridicule leads to shame, and withdrawal reduces immediate distress. After repeated episodes, cues associated with disclosure may directly produce withdrawal. The intermediate memories and predictions no longer have to enter consciousness.

The term trajectory compilation describes this process at the level of state transitions:

Trajectory compilation is the conversion of a repeatedly traversed conscious or partially conscious sequence into a faster, compressed, and increasingly automatic transition policy.

Compilation preserves the result of previous processing while reducing the need to reconstruct its intermediate steps. It conserves time and cognitive resources, but it also makes the basis of a response less accessible to introspection.

6.2 Consciousness as a trainer of the unconscious

The causal relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness is circular. Distributed unconscious processes supply the candidates that compose consciousness. Conscious processing then permits sustained comparison, simulation, inhibition, recontextualization, and multistep reasoning. Repeated trajectories modify associative weights and action policies. Those modified structures subsequently generate and select the contents of future consciousness.

The cycle can be represented as:

\text{unconscious organization}
\rightarrow
\text{candidate generation}
\rightarrow
\text{state-spanning conscious composition}
\rightarrow
\text{action and outcome}
\rightarrow
\text{implicitization}
\rightarrow
\text{modified unconscious organization}

Consciousness is therefore both a product and a teacher of unconscious processing. It receives compressed results from previous learning and returns newly organized structure to the systems that will act automatically in the future.

6.3 Biography as disposition

Trajectory compilation provides a mechanism through which biography becomes personality. Recurring experiences establish associations among cues, emotional states, self-representations, expectations, and actions. Conscious interpretations may participate during acquisition, but the resulting policy can outlast explicit memory for the events that formed it.

A person may eventually experience only the conclusion:

• “I should not trust this person.”
• “I am about to be rejected.”
• “I have to prove myself.”
• “Expressing need is dangerous.”
• “Conflict must be avoided.”
• “I must act before I lose control.”

The conscious proposition may itself be a late derivative of a larger implicit organization. The transition policy includes attentional, affective, mnemonic, bodily, and behavioral components that cannot be exhausted by one sentence.

---

7. Insight, Trajectory Reconstruction, and Working Through

7.1 Insight as a novel convergence event

The 2016 SSC paper introduced the concept of a novel convergence event. Several representations may each have contributed separately to the activation of another representation in the past. When they become active together for the first time, their combined influence can converge on a new association or interpretation. 

Incremental change in state spanning cortical.pdf

Psychodynamic insight can be understood in this way. A person may previously have experienced:

• a recurring bodily reaction;
• a particular interpersonal fear;
• a memory from an earlier relationship;
• a pattern of avoidance;
• an explicit belief about the self.

Each element may have entered consciousness separately. Insight occurs when enough of them become jointly active to recruit a representation of their common organization.

The new interpretation was not necessarily stored intact in the unconscious. It may be constructed for the first time when previously distributed information converges. Insight is therefore often an act of composition rather than excavation.

7.2 Trajectory reconstruction

Trajectory reconstruction is the process through which previously omitted causal steps become explicitly represented:

A \rightarrow C
\quad \longrightarrow \quad
A \rightarrow B_1 \rightarrow B_2 \rightarrow C

The person who previously experienced only cue A and reaction C begins to represent the predictions, memories, emotions, and self-relevant meanings that connect them. This reconstruction makes the transition available for evaluation.

An interpretation becomes a substantial insight when it:

1. enters the conscious coalition;
2. remains active through several updates;
3. recruits relevant affect and autobiographical memory;
4. connects to the self-model;
5. explains multiple previous episodes;
6. changes predictions about future situations;
7. creates alternative action possibilities.

A verbal statement that does not alter successor construction remains informationally shallow. The person may repeat the explanation without integrating it into perception, emotion, or action.

7.3 Working through as policy revision

A single insight may be insufficient to change a well-compiled transition policy. The old policy has been reinforced across many episodes and may be supported by bodily reactions, relational expectations, attentional habits, and environmental contingencies. The new interpretation initially competes with this established organization.

Working through can be defined as repeated state-spanning activation of the new interpretation across relevant contexts. Each activation permits the system to compare the old prediction with new evidence, enact an alternative response, and observe its outcome. When this process is repeated, the transition weights underlying the old pattern can gradually change.

Psychological change therefore requires more than conscious disclosure. The new representation must acquire causal influence over perception, valuation, memory retrieval, and action. It must become capable of constructing successors that the old policy would not have produced.

The long-term sequence is:

\text{implicit pattern}
\rightarrow
\text{explicit reconstruction}
\rightarrow
\text{alternative trajectory}
\rightarrow
\text{new outcome}
\rightarrow
\text{repeated updating}
\rightarrow
\text{recompiled disposition}

The endpoint is not permanent self-analysis. Successful change eventually produces a new form of automaticity. What initially required deliberate regulation becomes an increasingly natural response.

---

8. A Formal Model of Iterative Psychodynamics

8.1 Extending the State-Spanning Workspace

SSWT represents the complete system state at time t as:

S_t =
(G_t, H_t, X_t^1,\ldots,X_t^M,A_t)

Here, G_t is the active global coalition, H_t is a slower fringe, X_t^m is the state of specialized system m, and A_t represents enabling physiological conditions. Specialized systems process the current coalition and new input, return candidate contributions, and help form a capacity-limited successor state. 

Iterative Psychodynamics adds a set of slower dispositions:

S_t =
(G_t,H_t,X_t^1,\ldots,X_t^M,\Theta_t,A_t)

\Theta_t includes relatively enduring psychological organization:

• associative weights;
• learned valuations;
• attentional priorities;
• retrieval tendencies;
• habitual action policies;
• relational expectations;
• self-model commitments;
• defensive gating functions;
• motivational sensitivities.

These dispositions change more slowly than the contents of the focal coalition, although they remain plastic over developmental time.

8.2 Candidate generation and selection

Let specialized system m generate an output:

Z_{t+1}^{m}
=
f_m(X_t^m,E_{t+1}^{m},B_mG_t,H_t;\Theta_t)

E_{t+1}^{m} is new external or internal input, and B_mG_t is the projection of the current global coalition available to that system. \Theta_t biases how the input and broadcast are evaluated.

The candidate set for the next coalition is:

Q_{t+1}
=
M(G_t,H_t,Z_{t+1}^{1:M};\Theta_t)

M is the multiassociative or cospreading function. It captures the joint influence of the current coalition, fringe, specialized outputs, and slower dispositions.

The successor coalition is:

G_{t+1}
=
\operatorname{Cap}_K
\left[
P(G_t;\Theta_t)
\cup
Q_{t+1}
\right]

P determines which current contents persist, while \operatorname{Cap}_K represents the system’s capacity limitation. \Theta_t can influence both persistence and admission. A concern may prolong one representation, a motive may enhance a candidate, and a defense may accelerate displacement or weaken self-relevant binding.

8.3 The conscious trajectory

A conscious episode is represented as:

\Gamma_t =
(G_{t-n},\ldots,G_t)

The trajectory contains inherited and transformed information. Its organization cannot be reduced to any one member state because the relevant properties include predecessor-to-successor dependence, recurrent elaboration, and accumulated context.

An unconscious motive \theta_j is present when variation in that disposition changes the probability of future coalitions or actions:

P(G_{t+1},a_{t+1}\mid G_t,H_t,E_{t+1},\Theta_t)

while no adequate explicit representation of the motive’s causal role is present within the current conscious trajectory.

Ambivalence occurs when different subsets of \Theta_t favor incompatible successor distributions. Defense occurs when \Theta_t selectively lowers the probability that specified contents will be admitted, sustained, self-attributed, or reinstated.

8.4 Learning and implicitization

The dispositions are updated through experience:

\Theta_{t+1}
=
\Theta_t
+
\eta F(\Gamma_t,a_t,o_t)

Here, a_t is action, o_t is outcome, \eta is the learning rate, and F represents the learning process through which trajectories and consequences modify future transition structure.

Trajectory compilation occurs when repeated sequences make some intermediate representations unnecessary for producing a later state. Trajectory reconstruction occurs when omitted representations become explicit again and participate in updating \Theta.

This model is a computational sketch, not a claim that one neural variable corresponds to the entirety of \Theta. Different dispositions are expected to be distributed across different learning, valuation, memory, and control systems.

---

9. Empirical Predictions

The empirical program of SSWT emphasizes measuring transitions rather than isolated states. Representational inheritance can be investigated through cross-temporal decoding, representational similarity, latent-state alignment, and causal perturbation. Cospreading predicts that a joint coalition should explain successor recruitment beyond the additive predictive power of its individual contents. 

Iterative Psychodynamics extends this program to motive, conflict, defense, and psychological change.

Table 2. Discriminating predictions

Hypothesis

Predicted observation

Finding that would weaken the account

Unconscious motives bias successors

Motive-relevant dispositions predict the content and direction of later states after current content, input, and explicit goals are controlled.

Disposition measures add no predictive or causal information beyond current conscious content and task structure.

Ambivalence reflects competing attractors

Conflict produces alternating or mixed neural, experiential, and behavioral trajectories corresponding to incompatible valuation structures.

Ambivalent reports arise without detectable competing patterns or differential successor predictions.

Denial is defensive non-integration

Threatening information shows intact early processing but reduced persistence or coupling with self-relevant, autobiographical, and prospective representations.

Denial is fully explained by initial perceptual or semantic failure.

Repression alters admission or reinstatement

Threatening candidates are less likely to enter, persist in, or return to the active trajectory, with effects predictable from inhibitory control and learning history.

Threatening and neutral contents exhibit identical admission, persistence, and reinstatement under matched conditions.

Rationalization is retrospective construction

Commitment or action occurs before the reported reason is generated, and the reason reflects outcome and self-model constraints more than the original causal variables.

Explicitly reported reasons consistently precede decisions and mediate their causal effects.

Insight increases integration

Insight is accompanied by increased cross-domain coactivation and state-spanning influence among affective, autobiographical, conceptual, and self-related representations.

Insight reports occur without increased integration, persistence, or changes in later prediction and behavior.

Working through modifies transition policies

Repeated use of an insight predicts reduced recurrence of the original trajectory and greater accessibility of alternative successors.

Repetition of a genuinely integrated insight leaves transition structure and behavior unchanged.

Personality includes stable transition signatures

Within-person transition patterns remain more stable across contexts than individual surface contents and predict recurring interpersonal behavior.

Static self-report and situational variables explain recurrence fully, with no added value from transition-level measures.

9.1 Measuring unconscious successor bias

Participants could be exposed to ambiguous situations while neural activity, eye movements, autonomic responses, language, and reported thought sequences are recorded. A state-space model could estimate which representations are active and which successors follow them. Motive-related variables would be tested for their ability to predict transitions after current stimuli and explicit goals are controlled.

The critical evidence would not be the activation of a motive-related region or concept alone. It would be a recurrent alteration in what becomes conscious next. A status disposition, for example, should increase transitions toward social comparison, evaluation, recognition, and dominance-related representations across otherwise different contexts.

Causal designs could manipulate motivational relevance or temporarily perturb candidate representations. If the proposed disposition genuinely shapes the trajectory, changing its inputs should alter the distribution of later states rather than merely changing one immediate response.

9.2 Testing defensive non-integration

Denial can be studied using personally relevant information whose literal meaning and self-relevance can be separated. The design should measure:

• early perceptual and semantic registration;
• affective and autonomic response;
• persistence across later windows;
• retrieval of supporting autobiographical material;
• coupling to self-representation;
• influence on prospective planning;
• later explicit endorsement.

Defensive non-integration predicts dissociation among these stages. A participant may show early registration and affective response but reduced propagation into self-relevant and future-oriented successors.

The strongest evidence would come from within-person contrasts and prospective predictions. An interpretation classified as defensively excluded should predict later avoidance, selective memory, or behavior even when explicit endorsement remains low.

9.3 Detecting competing trajectories

Ambivalence can be modeled using tasks in which two personally meaningful goals favor incompatible decisions. Neural and behavioral state-space analyses should identify whether the system alternates between distinct coalitions or settles into compromise states containing elements of both.

The trajectory-attractor account predicts more than slower reaction time or generalized conflict activation. Each attractor should possess identifiable content, valuation, and successor tendencies. Perturbing a representation supporting one motive should temporarily shift the trajectory toward the other.

9.4 Distinguishing insight from verbal agreement

A participant can verbally endorse an interpretation without integrating it. Genuine trajectory reconstruction should produce measurable changes in cross-domain coupling, memory organization, future simulation, and behavioral choice.

Longitudinal research could distinguish three conditions:

1. an interpretation is heard but rejected;
2. an interpretation is verbally accepted without broader integration;
3. an interpretation becomes affectively, autobiographically, and behaviorally integrated.

Only the third condition should strongly predict changes in later successor states. This distinction would help explain why intellectual insight frequently fails to produce durable change.

---

10. Relations to Existing Frameworks

10.1 Cognitive unconscious

The cognitive unconscious established that perception, memory, skill, and judgment can be influenced by processes unavailable to awareness. Iterative Psychodynamics accepts this foundation and extends it toward motives, affective conflict, self-representation, relational expectations, and defense. It also distinguishes between unconscious contents and unconscious transition structure.

The extension should remain empirically constrained. Unconscious processing can be sophisticated without possessing all the capacities of conscious reasoning. Recent evidence for extended unconscious integration demonstrates that complex temporal processing can precede awareness, but it does not establish an autonomous unconscious deliberator. 

10.2 Global workspace theories

Global workspace and global neuronal workspace theories emphasize the broad availability of selected information to specialized systems. Contemporary GNW accounts describe recurrent amplification and broadcasting as central to conscious access. 

Iterative Psychodynamics adopts functional globality while emphasizing the relationship among successive broadcasts. Psychodynamic influence appears in what specialized systems return to the workspace, which representations survive, and how slower dispositions alter the successor distribution. The distinctive unit is therefore not a single global broadcast, but a trajectory whose direction is continually biased by unconscious organization.

10.3 Recurrent and dynamical theories

Recurrent processing theories emphasize feedback and sustained interaction. Dynamical approaches emphasize metastability, integration, differentiation, and evolving patterns of neural coordination. SSWT incorporates these ideas but assigns a specific role to partial representational inheritance and shared successor construction.

Iterative Psychodynamics adds that the evolving trajectory is constrained by learned motivational and defensive landscapes. The same sensory input can therefore initiate different trajectories in different people, or in the same person under different emotional conditions, because \Theta changes the effective state space.

10.4 Dual-process theories

The proposal that System 2 may be temporally organized System 1 offers a continuity-based reinterpretation of dual-process theory. Automatic operations become components of deliberate reasoning when their outputs are retained, arranged, and permitted to build on one another. The distinction between intuitive and deliberative cognition remains useful at the behavioral level, but it need not imply two wholly separate computational substances.

Psychodynamic conflict can occur within and between these modes. An automatic motive may bias the candidates entering deliberation, while deliberation can inhibit, elaborate, or rationalize the resulting impulse. Repeated deliberation can then compile a new automatic policy.

10.5 Predictive and active-inference approaches

Predictive approaches describe cognition as recurrent inference constrained by prior expectations, uncertainty, goals, and sensory evidence. Iterative Psychodynamics is compatible with this orientation. Unconscious dispositions can be understood partly as learned priors, precision assignments, value functions, and policies.

Its distinctive emphasis concerns state-spanning composition and psychological accessibility. A prior can influence perception without being represented as a belief about the self. A policy can control action without becoming an explicit intention. A prediction can produce anxiety without its anticipated event being conceptualized. The framework therefore asks how implicit predictions enter, shape, or fail to enter the conscious trajectory.

10.6 Contemporary psychodynamic theory

Iterative Psychodynamics preserves unconscious motive, conflict, defense, relational patterning, compromise, and limited self-knowledge. It revises their architecture. The unconscious is treated as a distributed ecology rather than a singular agency, and defenses are translated into operations on admission, persistence, attribution, retrieval, and successor construction.

This translation also narrows psychodynamic explanation. A proposed defense must specify what information was processed, where the transition changed, what alternative successor became favored, and how the bias predicts later behavior. Interpretations that explain every possible outcome would not satisfy this requirement.

---

11. Scope, Limitations, and Conditions for Falsification

Iterative Psychodynamics is a theoretical synthesis. The component literatures demonstrate nonconscious processing, implicit memory, motivational dissociation, limited introspective access, retrieval suppression, recurrent neural dynamics, and state-dependent working memory. No existing dataset simultaneously measures the full sequence from unconscious disposition through candidate generation, global admission, state-spanning inheritance, self-integration, action, and long-term policy updating.

The 2016 SSC model explicitly characterized itself as qualitative and exploratory, containing unverified assumptions and untested claims. It also cautioned that icSSC may resemble consciousness without being identical to it. Incremental change in state spanning cortical.pdf SSWT likewise remains a synthesis whose proposed conjunction of globality, inheritance, differentiation, cospreading, and causal efficacy has not yet been measured in a single experiment. 

Several conceptual limitations require emphasis.

First, persistence is not consciousness. Local sustained activity, priming, latent memory, or recurrence can occur without conscious participation. Conscious membership is proposed to require reciprocal global causal involvement and successor-state influence.

Second, unconscious influence is not necessarily psychodynamic. Most nonconscious processing may be perceptual, motoric, regulatory, or computationally routine. The psychodynamic designation is most appropriate when motive, affect, conflict, self-representation, relationship models, or defensive regulation organize the transition.

Third, voluntary suppression is not classical repression. Suppression studies establish mechanisms capable of limiting retrieval and reinstatement. Whether and how these become automatically recruited in real autobiographical conflict remains an empirical question.

Fourth, ambivalence does not imply a single hidden truth. Multiple motives can be authentic. The framework should not automatically privilege one merely because it is less explicitly acknowledged.

Fifth, rationalization does not invalidate introspection as a whole. Conscious reports can accurately describe contents and reasons that participated in the trajectory. The theory predicts variable access to causes, not universal confabulation.

Sixth, not every symptom is a compromise formation. A psychodynamic explanation requires prospective evidence that the symptom follows from an identifiable motivational and defensive configuration.

Seventh, the construct \Theta is deliberately broad. It will have to be decomposed into independently measurable forms of valuation, attention, memory accessibility, self-modeling, relational expectation, and control. Treating it as an unrestricted hidden variable would make the theory difficult to falsify.

The theory would be weakened if transition-level measurements add no explanatory value beyond current conscious content, environmental input, and static trait measures. It would also be weakened if denial consistently reflects only failed initial encoding, if purported unconscious motives do not prospectively predict successor states, or if integrated insight does not produce measurable changes in future trajectories.

---

12. Conclusion

The unconscious is real in the sense that perception, memory, affect, valuation, motivation, and action are continually shaped by processes whose organization is only partially available to introspection. Its reality does not require a second cohesive person beneath awareness. Organized unconscious influence can emerge from distributed systems that have been jointly shaped by evolution, development, learning, and prior conscious activity.

Consciousness arises when selected products of these systems enter a recurrent, functionally global coalition and participate in a state-spanning trajectory. The conscious stream is composed synchronically from multiple specialized contributions, diachronically through partial inheritance, and recursively because each coalition helps construct its successor. Local operations can remain nonconscious while their temporally organized products collectively constitute conscious thought.

Psychodynamics enters at the level of transition. Motives alter what is likely to become conscious next. Conflict creates competition among possible trajectories. Defenses change admission, persistence, retrieval, attribution, and self-relevant integration. Rationalization supplies retrospective coherence. Repetition reflects compiled transition policies. Insight reconstructs previously implicit causal organization, and working through gradually recompiles it.

The resulting architecture is circular:

\text{distributed unconscious processing}
\rightarrow
\text{conscious composition}
\rightarrow
\text{state-spanning deliberation}
\rightarrow
\text{action and learning}
\rightarrow
\text{implicitization}
\rightarrow
\text{modified unconscious processing}

Iterative Psychodynamics can therefore be defined as:

The study of how distributed unconscious dispositions compose, steer, and are reciprocally modified by the state-spanning conscious stream.

This formulation preserves the strongest psychodynamic insight: people are guided by mental organization they do not fully observe. It also supplies that insight with a mechanistic framework grounded in distributed processing, recurrent interaction, selective inheritance, successor-state construction, and learning across time.

---

References

Anderson, M. C., & Green, C. (2001). Suppressing unwanted memories by executive control. Nature, 410, 366-369.

Anderson, M. C., Ochsner, K. N., Kuhl, B., Cooper, J., Robertson, E., Gabrieli, S. W., Glover, G. H., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2004). Neural systems underlying the suppression of unwanted memories. Science, 303, 232-235.

Baars, B. J. (1997). In the Theater of Consciousness. Oxford University Press.

Baumann, N., Kaschel, R., & Kuhl, J. (2005). Striving for unwanted goals: Stress-dependent discrepancies between explicit and implicit achievement motives reduce subjective well-being and increase psychosomatic symptoms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 781-799.

Block, N. (1995). On a confusion about a function of consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18, 227-247.

Casali, A. G., Gosseries, O., Rosanova, M., Boly, M., Sarasso, S., Casali, K. R., Casarotto, S., Bruno, M. A., Laureys, S., Tononi, G., & Massimini, M. (2013). A theoretically based index of consciousness independent of sensory processing and behavior. Science Translational Medicine, 5, 198ra105.

Collins, A. M., & Loftus, E. F. (1975). A spreading-activation theory of semantic processing. Psychological Review, 82, 407-428.

Dehaene, S., & Naccache, L. (2001). Towards a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness: Basic evidence and a workspace framework. Cognition, 79, 1-37.

Del Cul, A., Baillet, S., & Dehaene, S. (2007). Brain dynamics underlying the nonlinear threshold for access to consciousness. PLOS Biology, 5, e260.

Depue, B. E., Curran, T., & Banich, M. T. (2007). Prefrontal regions orchestrate suppression of emotional memories via a two-phase process. Science, 317, 215-219.

Evans, J. St. B. T. (2003). In two minds: Dual-process accounts of reasoning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 454-459.

Freud, S. (1915/1957). The unconscious. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 159-215). Hogarth Press.

James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. Henry Holt.

Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., & Olsson, A. (2005). Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310, 116-119.

Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., Tärning, B., & Lind, A. (2006). How something can be said about telling more than we can know: On choice blindness and introspection. Consciousness and Cognition, 15, 673-692.

Kehr, H. M. (2004). Implicit/explicit motive discrepancies and volitional depletion among managers. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 315-327.

Kihlstrom, J. F. (1987). The cognitive unconscious. Science, 237, 1445-1452.

Mashour, G. A., Roelfsema, P., Changeux, J. P., & Dehaene, S. (2020). Conscious processing and the global neuronal workspace hypothesis. Neuron, 105, 776-798.

McClelland, D. C., Koestner, R., & Weinberger, J. (1989). How do self-attributed and implicit motives differ? Psychological Review, 96, 690-702.

Menétrey, M. Q., Herzog, M. H., & Pascucci, D. (2026). Sequential neural dynamics underlie unconscious integration and conscious perception of visual stimuli. PLOS Biology, 24, e3003894.

Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231-259.

Reser, J. E. (n.d.). On the unconscious. Cognitive Mechanics.

Reser, J. E. (2016). Incremental change in the set of coactive cortical assemblies enables mental continuity. Physiology & Behavior, 167, 222-237.

Reser, J. E. (2026). Consciousness from nonconscious processes: State-Spanning Workspace Theory and the iterative composition of the conscious stream. Iterated Insights.

Rose, N. S., LaRocque, J. J., Riggall, A. C., Gosseries, O., Starrett, M. J., Meyering, E. E., & Postle, B. R. (2016). Reactivation of latent working memories with transcranial magnetic stimulation. Science, 354, 1136-1139.

Soto, D., Mäntylä, T., & Silvanto, J. (2011). Working memory without consciousness. Current Biology, 21, R912-R913.

Stokes, M. G. (2015). Activity-silent working memory in prefrontal cortex: A dynamic coding framework. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19, 394-405.

Trübutschek, D., Marti, S., Ojeda, A., King, J. R., Mi, Y., Tsodyks, M., & Dehaene, S. (2017). A theory of working memory without consciousness or sustained activity. eLife, 6, e23871.

Varela, F. J., Lachaux, J. P., Rodriguez, E., & Martinerie, J. (2001). The brainweb: Phase synchronization and large-scale integration. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2, 229-239.

Westen, D. (1998). The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 333-371.

Wilson, T. D. (2002). Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. Harvard University Press.

Wolff, M. J., Jochim, J., Akyürek, E. G., & Stokes, M. G. (2017). Dynamic hidden states underlying working-memory-guided behavior. Nature Neuroscience, 20, 864-871.