The Iceberg Theory in Psychology: What it is and How it Describes the Mind

You’re halfway through a work meeting when your face goes hot. A colleague has said something mild, nothing really, and yet your jaw has set, your pen has stopped, and a reply you’d never say out loud is already composed. Later, on the commute home, you can’t quite explain why it landed so hard. You only know that something below the visible part of the conversation moved first.

That gap between what we do and what we can explain is the territory of the iceberg theory in psychology. The picture is simple and a little eerie: a small tip of conscious awareness above the waterline, and a much larger mass of unconscious mental processes below, quietly steering emotions, habits, preferences and reactions. It shows up in introductory lectures, therapy offices, leadership workshops and a thousand slide decks. Some of what it claims is well supported, and that matters, because a model this popular shapes how people think about their own motives, their relationships and even their therapy. Some is fiction wearing a lab coat, including the popular line that “ninety percent of your mind is unconscious.”

So which parts hold up?

This article explains what the iceberg model of the mind actually says, where it came from, what modern research confirms or contradicts, and how therapists use the idea in practice.

One quick note: this is the psychological iceberg, tied to Freud. The literary technique that shares the name is a different thing, and we cover it separately in our guide to the iceberg principle in writing.

What is the iceberg theory in psychology, and where did the image come from?

The iceberg theory (or iceberg model of the mind) is a metaphor for the idea that most mental activity happens outside awareness. The visible tip is what you notice and can report right now; the submerged bulk holds memories, motives, feelings and automatic processes that still shape what you do.

The ideas behind it come from Sigmund Freud, the Viennese physician who founded psychoanalysis. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) he laid out what’s now called the topographical model, a map of the mind with regions defined by how accessible their contents are. Two decades later, in The Ego and the Id (1923), he reworked that map into the structural model of id, ego and superego.

Here’s the part most slides skip. As far as scholars can tell, Freud never published an iceberg. The floating-ice picture appears to be a teaching device added later, by textbook authors and lecturers who needed one image to carry a dense theory. It worked. Almost every student who meets Freud meets him via ice.

Why did the image stick? Probably because ice does something minds do: most of its mass is hidden, yet the hidden part decides how the visible part moves. A ship’s captain who respects only what shows above the water ends up in trouble.

It’s also worth being clear about scope. The iceberg is a conceptual model, not a measured quantity. Nobody has weighed the unconscious and found it to be some fraction of the mind. The popular figure of 90 percent is a slogan; no study supports a number like that, because there’s no agreed way to divide mental activity into “conscious” and “unconscious” portions in the first place.

What the model does offer is a vocabulary for something we all experience. You’ve driven home and not remembered the route. You’ve felt dread before knowing its cause. You’ve said “I don’t know why I did that” and meant it.

A clean definition for quick reference: the unconscious, in the psychoanalytic tradition, is the part of mental life that influences thought and behavior without being available to awareness. Modern cognitive science uses the word “unconscious” more loosely, to mean any mental process you can’t introspect on, which isn’t the same claim, and we’ll come back to that difference.

Another iceberg worth naming, since the label gets reused: family therapist Virginia Satir built her own, very different iceberg for making sense of personal experience. We’ll meet it later.

Is the iceberg model scientifically valid?

Partly. The broad claim that much mental processing happens outside awareness is well supported. Freud’s specific theories about what the unconscious contains and why are far shakier, and many can’t be tested at all.

Psychologist Drew Westen tackled this question head-on in a 1998 review in Psychological Bulletin, titled “The Scientific Legacy of Sigmund Freud.” He argued that, stripped of the Victorian trappings, several core propositions have decent empirical backing: that much of mental life is unconscious, that the mind can hold conflicting feelings at once, that personality patterns often begin in childhood, and that mental images of self and others shape relationships. He was equally clear that other Freudian ideas (libido theory, the details of psychosexual stages) have not held up.

That split verdict is the honest one. Freud was often right that the mind was less transparent than it feels. He was frequently wrong about the mechanism.

There’s a method problem too. Freud built his theory from case studies of a small group of patients, many of them from a narrow social background, and he rarely tested alternatives. His claims were hard to falsify: if a patient agreed with an interpretation, it was confirmed; if the patient denied it, that was called resistance. Philosophers of science have criticized this circularity for decades, and it’s a fair criticism.

So where does that leave a curious reader? It leaves you with a useful distinction between the psychoanalytic unconscious and the cognitive unconscious. The first is Freud’s: a dynamic reservoir of wishes and conflicts pushed out of awareness. The second comes from experimental psychology: fast, efficient, automatic processing that never needed to be conscious in the first place. The second has far more laboratory support, yet the first is closer to what people describe in therapy.

Think of Mira, 24, an illustrative student in a shared apartment who notices she goes quiet and cold whenever her flatmate raises her voice. She has no memory of a specific event. Her therapist later wonders whether a childhood household with frequent shouting taught her to shut down, which is a hypothesis, not a verdict. Cognitive science would say the learned response became automatic. Psychoanalysis would add that the feeling itself may have been pushed away. Both can be partly right.

A fair test for any claim you read about the iceberg: is it describing something measurable, or telling a compelling story? Compelling stories can still be useful. They just shouldn’t be mistaken for lab results.

What do the three layers of the iceberg actually contain?

The model divides the mind into conscious, preconscious and unconscious layers, depending on how readily their contents reach awareness. The table shows how each differs.

The middle layer gets the least attention and deserves more. The preconscious is just ordinary memory: facts and experiences sitting quietly until something calls them up. The smell of a certain cleaning product brings back a school corridor you hadn’t thought about in twenty years. Nothing mysterious has happened. The memory was always there, within reach, waiting for a cue.

The true unconscious is different in kind, according to Freud’s theory. Its contents aren’t simply forgotten; they’re kept out of awareness because they would cause anxiety, shame or conflict if they surfaced. The mind, in this view, actively works to keep them down, a process called repression.

Repression is where the evidence is weakest. Laboratory studies have found it hard to show that people bury painful experiences wholesale, and the idea that recovered memories are reliable has caused serious harm in clinical history. What’s much better documented is that people often don’t think about unpleasant things, avoid reminders of them, or remember emotional events imperfectly, which is a gentler, more ordinary story.

Notice also that the boundaries aren’t walls. Material can move up and down between layers. A name you couldn’t recall rises into awareness an hour after you stopped trying. A feeling you ignored for months suddenly surfaces at a funeral.

The levels also differ in how you can work with them. The conscious layer responds to deliberate effort. The preconscious responds to cues, which is why journaling prompts, photographs and conversations with old friends work as well as they do. The unconscious, if you accept the theory, responds only to indirect routes: dreams, slips, free association, patterns in relationships.

Where do you spend most of your day on this map? For most of us, the honest answer is the preconscious, rolling along on memory and habit, popping up to the tip only when something goes wrong.

Where do the id, ego and superego sit on the iceberg?

People often think the id is the unconscious, the ego is the conscious, and the superego floats above both. That’s tidy and wrong. Freud’s structural model cuts across the iceberg instead of matching it layer by layer.

In The Ego and the Id, Sigmund Freud described three agencies. The id holds basic drives and demands immediate satisfaction; it’s entirely unconscious. The ego mediates between those drives, the demands of reality and the conscience, and it operates partly in awareness and partly outside it. The superego holds internalized rules and ideals absorbed from parents and society, and a large part of it also works unconsciously, which is why guilt can arrive without a clear reason.

The ego’s position matters most. Freud explicitly said that parts of the ego are unconscious, including the defensive operations that keep unwelcome material out of sight. In other words, you can be defending yourself without knowing it. That single point separates his model from the simpler “conscious on top, unconscious below” slide.

Here’s how the three might look in an ordinary scene. Hassan, 47, an illustrative manager, gets a message late on a Friday asking him to cover for a colleague. His id wants to ignore it and go home. His superego tells him a good team member never says no. His ego negotiates: it replies “Sure, I’ll check” and then spends the evening resenting the request without ever naming the resentment. The compromise is the ego’s work; the resentment, drifting beneath the surface, is what the theory says later leaks out.

You don’t have to accept the vocabulary to see why clinicians find it useful. Many people really do experience an inner tug-of-war between impulse and conscience, with a mediator trying to keep life workable. The model gives names to the parties.

The criticisms are familiar. The three agencies can start to sound like little people living inside your head, and psychologists point out that the model explains everything after the fact and predicts almost nothing in advance. Modern neuroscience hasn’t found an “id region” or “superego region” either. Treat these as descriptive labels for kinds of mental conflict, not as brain parts.

Still, it’s hard to beat for a plain explanation of why someone can sincerely want to change and still keep doing the same thing.

How do slips, dreams and defenses show what’s below the surface?

According to Freud, hidden material leaks out through slips of the tongue, dreams and defense mechanisms, which are the mind’s ways of handling anxiety without facing its source. Some of this has research support. Some is speculation.

In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Sigmund Freud collected examples of forgotten names, misplaced objects and verbal slips and argued that they weren’t random. The so-called Freudian slip (a parapraxis, in technical language) was, to him, a small window onto a suppressed wish. Experimental psychologists have found that some slips do reflect what’s on your mind, though the more mundane explanation, that similar-sounding words compete during speech planning, accounts for most of them. Not every slip means something. Sometimes a slip is only a slip.

Defense mechanisms have fared better, and they carry more clinical weight. Developed further by later analysts and researchers, they describe how people manage threatening feelings without being aware that they’re doing it. Common ones include:

• Denial: refusing to accept a painful fact, such as a worrying test result nobody wants to discuss.
• Projection: attributing your own unwelcome feeling to someone else, as when a person who feels hostile insists everyone around them is angry.
• Displacement: redirecting an emotion toward a safer target, like snapping at a partner after a humiliating day with a boss.
• Rationalization: building a reasonable-sounding excuse for a choice made for other reasons.
• Intellectualization: discussing a painful event in abstract terms to keep the feeling at arm’s length.

Joan, 66, an illustrative caregiver for her aging mother, insists she’s “fine” and “just tired” while declining every offer of help from her siblings. She talks about the care schedule like a logistics project. Whether you call that intellectualization, denial or plain exhaustion, the pattern is familiar: feelings that don’t get named still find a way out, often through the body or through irritability.

What about dreams? Freud called them the “royal road” to the unconscious and distinguished the manifest content (the dream as remembered) from the latent content (the supposed hidden meaning). Modern sleep research doesn’t support the view that dreams are disguised wish fulfillment, though dreams do seem to be linked to emotional processing and memory. Dream interpretation in therapy is better treated as a conversation starter than a decoder ring.

A fair summary: the specific decoding rules are weak, while the general observation that avoided feelings leak out sideways is close to everyday common sense.

What does cognitive science say about the automatic mind?

Experimental psychology supports a different unconscious: automatic processing, in which perception, judgment and behavior unfold without deliberate attention. It’s less dramatic than Freud’s version and far better tested.

The standard reference is a 1999 review by John A. Bargh and Tanya Chartrand called “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being.” They argued that much of everyday life, from how we interpret others to how we act in familiar situations, is driven by automatic processes triggered by the environment, not by conscious choice. Think about how you walk, how you read a face, how you reach for the coffee cup. None of it is deliberated step by step.

Some of the findings associated with this research were exciting enough to reach the popular press. The most famous suggested that brief exposure to words about old age might make people walk more slowly afterward. Here the caution flag goes up. Several well-known social priming results have failed to replicate in later attempts, which has led many psychologists to treat dramatic priming claims with real skepticism. The broader point, that much of cognition is fast and automatic, is not in doubt. The idea that subtle cues can easily steer complex behavior is on far shakier ground.

To keep the distinction clear, think of two systems. Fast, automatic processing handles pattern recognition, habits and snap judgments with little effort. Slow, deliberate processing handles reasoning, planning and self-control, and it tires quickly. Most of the time, the fast system runs the show and the slow one signs off afterward.

Consider Kofi, 31, an illustrative commuter who takes the same route to a new job and, three weeks in, arrives at the office with no recollection of the train ride. Nothing sinister has occurred. His brain has automated a repetitive sequence, freeing attention for other things, which is how habits are meant to work.

This is a very different picture from Freud’s. The cognitive unconscious isn’t dark, repressed or full of wishes. It’s efficient, practical and mostly dull. Yet it still supports one claim in the iceberg metaphor: much of what we do is not under moment-to-moment conscious control.

Habits matter here because they explain why knowing something isn’t the same as changing it. A person can believe, sincerely, that they should stop checking their phone at night, and still reach for it half asleep. Insight lives in the slow system; the habit lives in the fast one.

That’s useful for anyone trying to change behavior. Plans that rely entirely on willpower tend to lose to automatic routines, while plans that change the environment (phone charging in another room, say) often win.

Why can’t we explain our own behavior?

We frequently can’t. People often have little direct access to the real causes of their choices, and they fill the gap with plausible stories. That’s one of the best-supported findings in this whole area.

The classic paper is a 1977 article by Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy D. Wilson titled “Telling More Than We Can Know.” In one famous demonstration, shoppers were asked to choose among identical pairs of stockings laid out in a row. They showed a strong tendency to pick the item on the right, yet when asked why, they cited quality, texture or color, and denied that position had anything to do with it. They weren’t lying. They honestly didn’t know.

The authors’ conclusion was cautious but pointed: when people explain their behavior, they often draw on commonsense theories about why people act as they do, not on a direct view of their own mental processes. A reasonable-sounding explanation feels like insight, whether or not it’s accurate.

Wilson developed this line of thought in his 2002 book Strangers to Ourselves, where he proposed the adaptive unconscious: a set of fast, powerful nonconscious processes that help us make sense of the world and guide behavior. Unlike Freud’s reservoir of repressed conflict, Wilson’s unconscious is a kind of efficient background processor. He also argued that we often misread our own feelings and attitudes, and that it’s possible to learn more about ourselves by observing our behavior as a stranger might.

Notice what this means practically. If you ask yourself “why am I so irritated?” and an answer comes instantly, treat it as a hypothesis. It may be right. It may be a story you tell yourself because stories feel better than not knowing.

The risk of overconfident self-explanation turns up everywhere: the person who says they left a job for “growth opportunities” when the real reason was a conflict with a manager; the shopper who insists a purchase was rational; the partner who says an argument was “about the dishes.”

That doesn’t mean introspection is worthless. It means introspection is better at finding patterns over time than at explaining a single moment. Keeping a short log of when you feel irritable, tired or anxious often tells you more than any individual reflection.

What would your friends say is the real reason you do the thing you keep doing?

Does pushing thoughts out of mind actually work?

No, at least not reliably. Trying hard not to think about something often makes it come back more often. That’s the best-documented real-world cousin of Freud’s repression, and it works by a different route.

The research comes from Daniel M. Wegner, a Harvard social psychologist. In his best-known experiment, participants were told not to think of a white bear for five minutes, and to ring a bell whenever it came to mind. They rang often. When later told to think of the bear, they thought about it even more than people who’d never been told to suppress it, a pattern called the rebound effect.

Wegner’s explanation, laid out in his 1994 paper on ironic process theory, goes like this. Suppression involves two processes. One searches for alternative thoughts (the operating process). The other scans the mind for signs that the forbidden thought is present (the monitoring process). When you’re stressed, tired or distracted, the effortful operating process falters, while the monitor keeps running, and the very thing you’re avoiding keeps getting flagged. Under strain, suppression backfires.

Later research has been more mixed than the original headlines suggested. Some studies find clear rebound; others find small or inconsistent effects, and individual differences matter. The more solid takeaway is narrower: chronic thought suppression tends to be associated with distress, especially in conditions involving intrusive thoughts, and it isn’t a good long-term plan.

Why does this matter for the iceberg? It offers a testable, modern version of one of Freud’s ideas: that material pushed out of awareness doesn’t vanish. Where Freud described repression as a defense that works silently and keeps content buried, Wegner shows that deliberate suppression is effortful, imperfect and often counterproductive. These aren’t the same mechanism, though they point in a similar direction.

Take Tomas, 52, an illustrative night-shift worker who keeps trying not to think about a conflict with his brother. Every quiet moment on his break brings it back. The more firmly he orders himself to stop, the more often the argument replays.

What tends to help more than suppression:

1. Name the thought without arguing with it (“there’s that argument again”).
2. Schedule a short worry slot of ten to fifteen minutes, then return to other tasks.
3. Redirect attention to a concrete task instead of a vague “don’t think about it.”
4. Talk or write about it with someone you trust.

If intrusive thoughts are frequent, disturbing or interfere with daily life, speak with a licensed therapist or your primary care doctor. Such thoughts are common and treatable, and they aren’t a character flaw.

Can a test measure the hidden part of the mind?

Not very well. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was designed to measure associations people might not admit or even know they hold, but its reliability for individuals is modest and its link to real-world behavior is weaker than many assume.

The IAT was introduced in 1998 by Anthony G. Greenwald and colleagues. It asks you to sort words and images into categories as quickly as possible, and measures tiny differences in reaction time. If you sort faster when “flower” and “pleasant” share a key than when “insect” and “pleasant” do, the test infers a stronger association between the first pair. Applied to social groups, the same logic is used to estimate implicit bias.

It became hugely popular, partly because it seemed to give the iceberg a measuring stick at last. A quiz that tells you something about yourself you didn’t know, and that you might even dislike, is a powerful hook.

The science has proved more complicated. Critics have pointed out that scores from the same person can shift noticeably from one session to the next, that the link between IAT scores and actual discriminatory behavior tends to be small, and that it’s unclear whether the test captures a hidden attitude, cultural familiarity with stereotypes, or something in between. Researchers differ over how far its results should be trusted for individuals, and most agree it’s more informative about group patterns than about any single person.

So what should you make of a result, if you take one? Treat it like a mood ring: it might point toward something, yet it isn’t a diagnosis. A single score doesn’t tell you what you believe, and it certainly doesn’t show how you’ll behave.

Imagine Priya, 38, an illustrative HR professional, who takes an online IAT and feels shaken by the result. A better response than panic or dismissal is curiosity: what in my environment might have shaped these associations, and which concrete behaviors, such as structured interviews or written hiring criteria, reduce the room for snap judgments?

That last point deserves emphasis. Even if implicit associations are hard to measure, structured decision procedures have decent evidence of reducing the influence of snap judgments across many settings.

The iceberg metaphor tempts us toward a tidy story: hidden attitudes below, behavior above, and one test to reveal them. Real minds are messier than that.

How do therapists work with what’s below the surface?

Different therapies treat the hidden part of the mind in very different ways. Psychodynamic therapy aims to bring unconscious patterns into awareness, while cognitive behavioral therapy works with thoughts that are hidden but accessible, and Satir’s model maps layers of experience from behavior down to the self.

Start with psychodynamic therapy, the direct descendant of Freud’s work. Its premise is that recurring patterns in relationships, feelings that don’t fit the situation, and emotions that never get named often trace back to earlier experiences the person hasn’t fully put into words. Psychologist Jonathan Shedler reviewed the evidence in a 2010 article in American Psychologist and reported large effect sizes (around 0.97 on overall symptom measures) for psychodynamic therapy, along with signs that benefits can continue to grow after treatment ends. The caveats matter: the quality of studies varies, many compare treatment with waiting lists and not with active alternatives, and other therapies show comparable results in head-to-head trials.

Now contrast that with cognitive behavioral therapy. Aaron T. Beck, who founded it, began as a trained psychoanalyst and broke away after finding that his depressed patients’ thoughts were more accessible and more directly tied to their mood than the theory predicted. In Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders (1976), he described automatic thoughts (quick, unexamined interpretations, like “I always mess up”) and deeper core beliefs (broad assumptions about the self, others and the world). In CBT terms the iceberg is shallower: the material beneath awareness is not repressed, just unnoticed, and it can be brought up with careful questioning, a technique often called the downward arrow.

A third iceberg belongs to Virginia Satir, a pioneer of family therapy. Her model, described in a 1991 book written with three colleagues, treats a person’s visible behavior as the tip and works down through layers of experience. It looks quite different from Freud’s.

• Behavior: what others can see and hear, including coping styles.
• Feelings: the emotions beneath the behavior.
• Feelings about feelings: shame about being angry, guilt about being sad.
• Perceptions: beliefs, assumptions and stories about the situation.
• Expectations: what a person expects from themselves and from others.
• Yearnings: universal needs such as acceptance, connection and being valued.

Beneath all of these sits the person’s sense of self. Satir’s model is a practical map for conversation, not a scientific theory, and its evidence base is thinner than for CBT or psychodynamic therapy. Many counselors still find it helpful as a way to slow down a conflict.

Which approach is right depends on the problem. Someone with a specific phobia may do well with a structured behavioral approach; someone stuck in repeating relationship patterns may value the depth of psychodynamic work. A licensed psychologist or therapist can help you work out a good fit, and many practitioners blend approaches.

FAQs about the Iceberg Theory in Psychology and the Mind

What is the iceberg theory in psychology in simple terms?

It’s a metaphor for the idea that most of what drives your thoughts, feelings and behavior happens outside your awareness. The small visible tip stands for what you’re consciously aware of right now. Below the waterline sits the preconscious, which holds memories you can recall with a little effort, and the unconscious, which holds motives, feelings and automatic processes you can’t directly access. The image comes from popular teaching of Sigmund Freud’s ideas. It’s a simplification, though a useful one for explaining why people sometimes act in ways they can’t easily explain.

Did Freud actually create the iceberg model?

Not in the form usually shown. Freud developed the topographical model in 1900 and the structural model of id, ego and superego in 1923, but as far as scholars can tell he never published an iceberg diagram. The picture seems to have been added later by teachers and textbook authors as a memorable summary. Many people therefore describe it as Freud’s iceberg, which is understandable, though slightly misleading. When you cite it, say the iceberg is a popular illustration of Freud’s theory and not his own drawing.

Is it true that 90 percent of the mind is unconscious?

No. That figure circulates widely, but no study has measured a fixed proportion. There’s no agreed way to divide mental activity into conscious and unconscious parts, and the answer would depend on how you define the terms. What research does show is that a large share of perception, memory retrieval, habit and judgment occurs automatically, outside awareness. So the spirit of the claim is reasonable, while the number is invented. If you see it in a slide deck or an article, treat it as a slogan and not a finding.

Is the iceberg theory still used in therapy today?

Yes, in different forms. Psychodynamic therapists work directly with unconscious patterns, feelings and relationship themes, drawing on Freud’s descendants. Cognitive behavioral therapists use a shallower version, in which hidden automatic thoughts and core beliefs can be identified and tested. Family and systemic therapists sometimes use Virginia Satir’s iceberg as a conversational tool. Not every therapist uses the image itself, but the underlying idea that people aren’t fully aware of why they feel and act as they do is common across approaches. Which method suits you depends on your goals and the problem you’re facing.

What’s the difference between the conscious, preconscious and unconscious?

The difference is how easily the content reaches awareness. The conscious holds whatever you’re aware of this second. The preconscious holds things you aren’t thinking about but can bring to mind easily, such as your address or yesterday’s lunch. The unconscious, in Freud’s theory, holds material that is kept out of awareness, often because it would cause anxiety or conflict. Content isn’t locked in place; it can move between layers when cues, effort or emotion change what’s accessible. Modern researchers use the term unconscious more broadly for any mental process you can’t directly observe.

Can you make the unconscious conscious?

Partly. You can’t directly observe unconscious processes, but you can infer them from patterns. Therapy, journaling, honest feedback from people who know you, and paying attention to recurring reactions all help you notice themes you hadn’t put into words. Dreams, slips and strong emotional reactions can offer clues, though they’re ambiguous and shouldn’t be treated as certain answers. Beware of anyone offering to decode your hidden mind with total confidence, whether a book, an app or a person. Self-knowledge tends to come slowly, through repeated observation, and rarely through a single moment of revelation.

How is Hemingway’s iceberg different from Freud’s?

They share a metaphor and little else. Hemingway’s version is a writing technique: show only a small part of what you know, and let readers infer the rest. Freud’s, in its popular form, is a picture of how the mind works. One is a craft choice; the other is a psychological theory. People mix them up because both use the same image and both involve hidden meaning. If you’re looking for the literary technique, it’s covered separately under the iceberg principle in writing.

Does the iceberg model explain why I react so strongly to small things?

It offers one way of thinking about it. A strong reaction to a minor event can mean the event touched something older, such as a past humiliation, a fear of rejection or a learned expectation, and the feeling arrived before you could explain it. That’s consistent with both psychodynamic and cognitive views. But other causes are just as likely: stress, poor sleep, hunger, hormonal shifts or health problems can all lower your threshold. If reactions are frequent, intense, or damaging relationships or work, a conversation with a therapist or your primary care doctor can help sort out what’s behind them.

Bibliography

• Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54(7), 462-479.
• Beck, A. T. (1976). Cognitive therapy and the emotional disorders. International Universities Press.
• Freud, S. (1960). The psychopathology of everyday life. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 6). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1901)
• Freud, S. (1961). The ego and the id. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19, pp. 1-66). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1923)
• Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The Implicit Association Test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1464-1480.
• Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231-259.
• Satir, V., Banmen, J., Gerber, J., & Gomori, M. (1991). The Satir model: Family therapy and beyond. Science and Behavior Books.
• Shedler, J. (2010). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 65(2), 98-109.
• Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101(1), 34-52.
• Westen, D. (1998). The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 333-371.