Seeing is only Perceiving: The Undeniable Limitations of Conscious Perception in Psychotherapeutic Treatment and Training

The contemporary clinical relationship to unconscious determinism remains attenuated in the context of more popular modalities emphasizing behavioral modification, e.g. CBT, DBT and ACT. Although there have been great strides in the neuroscientific and philosophical fields substantiating unperceived, automated processes, neither discipline has been meaningfully integrated to combat the current trending away from the significance of subjectivity and consciousness itself. In this paper, a developing psychoanalytic percept is illuminated, bridging these adjacent schools in harmony with their therapeutic properties. This is presented through binding psychoanalytic heuristics, integrated information theory and complex systems theory to allow for an unconscious ‘renaissance’, highlighting the iatrogenic considerations to modern-day treatment which so often disavow the mind outside of awareness.