The Explicit and Implicit Domains in Psychoanalytic Change

New research findings of the development and organization of the mind, brain, and behavior bolster the ongoing relational- or intersubjective-field paradigmatic revision of psychoanalytic theory. A multisystems view of learning, memory, and knowledge provide us with a more complex picture of information processing that has fundamental implications for a psychoanalytic theory of therapeutic action.

If the implicit and explicit learning/memory systems are viewed as parallel processes, not easily translatable from one to the other, then new implicit relational experience carries considerably more power as compared to explicit/declarative processing in changing and establishing new implicit mental models. When these cognitive processing systems are viewed as more closely interconnected with a developmental emphasis on connecting them through language, then exploratory/interpretive work becomes more central. REM, dream, infant, and cognitive research evidence suggests that imagistic symbolic capacity exists at birth. Learning and remembering using imagistic symbolic processing could suggest a more easily translatable connection with later developed verbal symbolic processing and a closer, although varied, interconnection between implicit and explicit (symbolic) memory systems.

Explicit attitudes are more directly modifiable through an explicit/declarative focus. Implicit mental models, it is proposed, are variably modifiable through two different change processes: (1) accommodation or transformation of expectancies through new implicit procedural experience (not requiring explicit focus) and (2) diminished activation and increased capacity to deactivate implicit mental models through explicit/declarative processing and the establishment of contrasting implicit models through new implicit procedural experience.