Turnbull and Solms (2007, this issue) call attention in their target article to several ways in which neuropsychological and psychoanalytic concepts throw light on each other. They conclude that emotion and motivation so central to psychoanalysis have been underinvestigated in neuroscience. We agree with this position, but believe there is more to psychoanalytic theory and its implications for neuroscience than the authors have discussed. AWARENESS After a brief review, the authors conclude that “The principle distinction is that the findings… confirm the existence of cognitive processing outside of conscious awareness, whereas Freud claimed specifically that motivational and emotional factors shape conscious mental life” (p. 5). Fortunately, there have been quite a few studies of unconscious processes dealing with emotional and motivational factors. Employing a time- frequency analysis of ERPs, Shevrin et al. (1992) have identified neurophysiological markers for unconscious conflict in social phobics which correlate with personality measures related to repression. Unconscious conflict is a central concept in Freud’s theory of psychopathology, and involves powerful emotional and motivational factors. Shevrin et al. (2002) have shown that the same measure of repression correlates significantly with Libet’s measure of time-to-consciousness of a stimulus, repressive subjects having a greater time to consciousness. In a series of two subliminal aversive conditioning studies, Wong et al. (1994, 1997) have demonstrated that, 1) a frowning face conditioned to a shock consciously when presented subliminally subsequently will elicit a greater P300 than a pleasant face, 2) the same frowning face can be aversively conditioned unconsciously with the same difference in P300 present in subsequent supraliminal presentations. Bernat et al. (2001) have shown that negative valence words presented subliminally will elicit greater event-related potential amplitudes for components across the brain (N100, P200, P300, LP1, LP2) than positive valence words. The investigation of unconscious emotional and motivational factors is alive and well in neuroscience and speaks to a greater convergence of interests between neuroscience and psychoanalysis in the study of unconscious processes than identified by Turnbull and Solms. EMOTIONS AND MOTIVATIONS The authors appear to be of two minds about the role of emotional and motivational factors in false beliefs. At one point they appear to consider them to be independent factors: “…the central psychoanalytic claim is that emotion systems (and the drives that govern them (italics ours) might distort cognitive representations of reality…” (p. 8). Elsewhere the authors confound the two: “…there is powerful support for the claim that basic instinctual emotion systems (italics ours) represent an important component…” (p. 8). Furthermore, while they emphasize how emotions generate false beliefs in anasognosia, they also describe how patients need to maintain a state of positive feeling through denial while dealing with loss, thus implicating motivation. Following their own formulation these motivations would presumably constitute one set of causes governing the emotional dysregulation, along with the presumed direct effect of right hemisphere lesions on emotional systems. Finally, the authors are clear in identifying an independent motivational system when they refer to findings that “…dreaming stops completely when fibers in the ventromedial frontal lobes are severed; a symptom that coincides with a general reduction in motivated behavior (italics ours)” (p. 15), which they then relate to similar effects produced by pre- frontal leucotomy involving destruction of the same pathways. However, almost immediately after Cortex, (2007) 43, 1104-1105 FORUM: COMMENTARY MOTIVATIONS AND EMOTIONS CONTRIBUTE TO A-RATIONALUNCONSCIOUS DYNAMICS: EVIDENCE AND CONCEPTUAL CLARIFICATION Ariane Bazan 1 , Howard Shevrin 2 , Linda A.W. Brakel 2 and Michael Snodgrass 2 ( 1 Faculty of Psychological and Education Sciences, University Libre of Bruxelles; 2 Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, MI, USA)