"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 trying to discover in the end? In an eye-opening journey through 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 the "unconscious" of your psychoanalyst. 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's a set of pervasive and complex mental processes that assess our world, set goals, and take action—all while we're consciously thinking about something else.

If we don't know ourselves—our potential, feelings, or motives, Wilson tells us it's most often because we've 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 builds the case for how best to discover our unconscious selves. If you want to know who you are, what you feel or what you like, Wilson advises paying attention to what you really 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.