Toward a Grounded Depth Psychology

"A naturalized depth psychology starts with a simple recognition: Much of our mental life operates outside conscious awareness. This isn't mystical; it's how brains work. Neural systems learn patterns and then run them automatically, freeing conscious attention for novel challenges. Think about driving a car. When you first learned, every action required conscious attention. Now, if you're an experienced driver, you can navigate complex traffic while carrying on a conversation. The driving has become automated- unconscious in the functional sense."

"The same process applies to psychological patterns. We learn how to relate to others, how to manage emotions, and how to think about ourselves. These learned patterns become automated. They feel like who we are rather than what we learned. And crucially, much of this learning happens in early childhood, before we have the cognitive capacity to evaluate what we're absorbing."

Much of mental life operates unconsciously because neural systems learn patterns and run them automatically, freeing conscious attention for novel challenges. Many behavioral and emotional patterns are learned in early childhood before critical evaluation is available, producing automatic responses that can be maladaptive. Brain organization maps onto older functional models—appetite, spirit, reason—with an executive governance layer that integrates and regulates these parts. Psychological health depends on cooperative functioning among subsystems rather than suppression. Grounded depth psychology treats the unconscious as automated learning and anchors intervention in the mechanisms of learning and memory.

Read at Psychology Today