„"Know thyself" - this rule is as old as Socrates, but it's still good advice. But is introspection the best path to self-knowledge? What are we ultimately trying to discover? In an eye-opening journey into the unconscious, as defined by modern psychological science, Timothy D. Wilson It introduces us to the hidden psychic world of judgments, feelings, and motives that introspection may never be able to reveal to us.

This is not your psychoanalyst's "unconscious." The adaptive unconscious that empirical psychology has uncovered and that Wilson describes is much more than a storehouse of primitive drives and conflicted memories. It is a set of pervasive and complex mental processes that evaluate our world, set goals, and take action—all while we are consciously thinking about something else.

If we don't know ourselves—our potential, feelings, or motives—Wilson tells us that the reason is often because we have developed a plausible story about ourselves that has no connection to our adaptive unconscious. Citing evidence that too much introspection can actually be harmful, Wilson makes the case for how to better discover our unconscious self. If you want to know who you are, what you feel, or what you like, Wilson advises paying attention to what you actually do and what other people think of you. By showing us an unconscious that is more powerful than Freud's unconscious and even more pervasive in our daily lives, Strangers to Ourselves marks a revolution in the way we get to know ourselves.