Sublime

Shaun Gallagher

despite believing myself to be an integrated self, I talk to myself as if I am composed of several ‘people’.

Those who choose to continue to see a person as a single monolithic entity held to high standards of coherence will only ever be responding to a fraction of the World of a person.

We’re talking about what psychologists today would describe as the “adaptive unconscious.” Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has described this in his important book Strangers to Ourselves (a very Augustinian title!). Over the past twenty years psychology has come to appreciate the overwhelming influence of “nonconscious