Review of What you don't know you know: Our hidden motives in life, business, and everything else.

Reviews the book, What you don't know you know: Our hidden motives in life, business, and everything else by Ken Eisold (2010). This book sets out to refresh and renew our understanding of the unconscious. It seeks to build on new research and recent discoveries, and in the process, rescue our thinking about the unconscious from the dying hand of psychoanalysis, to make it more widely accessible and useful (p. 18). A rather large chunk of this book is devoted to a discussion of the “self,” a comparison with concepts like “personality,” “individual,” and “ego,” and ultimately the shortcomings of the very term. This book argues for the centrality of the unconscious to the psychoanalytic identity. As such, I believe it is a useful corrective to the recent emphasis on the defining nature of transference and countertransference processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)