Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by Timothy Wilson

I love the subject but mostly dislike this book. Wilson does not believe one can uncover the unconscious thought processes by introspection. His "proof" of this is experiments/studies that only confirm that the average person is stupid. And/or he's not doing so well himself.

I was annoyed by his misinterpretation of some experiments. For example asking the girl out on a date you met on a rope bridge. Wilson thinks having fear because you're on a rope bridge leads to an adrenal rush that goes over into sexual arousal and tiddah! You're suddenly attracted to a woman you otherwise wouldn't be. He sees this as an example of not being aware of our unconscious thought processes. My explanation would just be that if we're sharing some fearful experience we're more likely to reach out socially, to bond with whomever we share such an experience with. Such, by the way, does not remotely make the feeling of a bond invalid. If a person was better able to realize that's what happening on the rope bridge that wouldn't mean they should resist the urge to ask out the woman. Yet Wilson thinks asking the woman out is proof we can't reach our unconscious.

Wilson actually in the beginning of the books mentions that the idea of "personality" is totally dependent on whatever situation your in, we don't have one single personality. Yet, Wilson then gives as proof of the futility of introspection, multiple studies that he claims are examples of people not really knowing their preferences (or their personality). When in fact, these are just examples of people not being able to construct situations in their head well enough. And/or imperfect memory. The fact, for example, that we don't really know for certain what kind of sexual mate will be best for us, is not remotely proof of any barrier to our unconscious. Every type of person isn't just sitting there in our unconscious perfectly formed and waiting for us to explore. Argggh! Really I ultimately found this book highly annoying for the degree of misinterpretation.

Wilson is an improvement from Freud, for what little that's worth.

Wilson never mentions religion, existential nihilism or such things. Nothing philosophical here. He only thinks of application in terms of the most crude. Job interviews, sexual partners, subliminal experiments to discover unconscious racism.

The idea of performing experiments to try to discover our unconscious is interesting. I never thought of such because I can actually know my unconscious by introspection.

Wilson talks about trying to get the unconscious in line with the conscious. I've thought concerning existential nihilism that it might be worth recognizing that we actually need to do the opposite to an extent.

A related book is Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell.
I only read the Kindle sample and I find this one so annoying I don't think I'll be able to read further. Although maybe eventually as there doesn't seem to be much out there on this subject. Gladwell starts with the example of the Getty Kouros. He goes to great lengths about it, in attempting to say that our unconscious initial reaction is often more reliable than our conscious thought. But he really only proves that archaelogists, etc are also stupid.

And so then, since we're stupid, we should often just go with our unconscious first impression. Probably good advice for the idiocracy.

I shall seek other books on the unconscious (not Freud) but I highly doubt I'll find much of use.