If Psychoanalysts Care So Much About the Truth of the Unconscious, Why Aren’t They Obsessed with Behavioral Economics?

Psychoanalysts have long styled themselves as truth-seekers: explorers of the hidden motives, infantile fantasies, and disavowed desires that govern human behavior beneath the surface of conscious awareness. Their vocabulary, “interpretation,” “insight,” “the return of the repressed,” rests on an epistemic claim: that psychoanalysis is a method for discovering truths obscured by defenses, not merely a form of storytelling or consolation.

It is a field preoccupied with the question of why people do what they do. Psychoanalysis’ central premise is that human action is not transparent to itself; that confession, intention, and rationalization conceal deeper forces": drives, identifications, archaic object relations.

From Freud’s dream interpretations to Lacan’s insistence that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” the analytic tradition treats the mind as a theater of concealed motives. A patient says one thing but means another. A slip of the tongue reveals the hidden wish. The analyst listens for the latent beneath the manifest.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis in its December 2023 issue it clear: “the pursuit of truth is a central aim of psychoanalysis.”

Meanwhile, in the last half century, another field has quietly conducted thousands of experiments designed to measure unconscious motivation rather than merely infer it through interpretation. Behavioral economics, emerging from the work of Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Richard Thaler, and later popularized by writers like Dan Ariely and Robin Hanson, has empirically mapped the predictable irrationalities that shape decision-making.

Hanson and Kevin Simler’s The Elephant in the Brain is an extended argument that from charity to religion to politic, much of human behavior is driven by self-interest and signaling; motives we prefer not to acknowledge. In other words, it’s a modern, data-driven account of the unconscious; one that replaces free association with controlled experiments, and transference with incentive structures.

Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow describes conflicts within the brain between different systems. “System 1” is fast, intuitive, unconscious cognition which routinely subverts “System 2” which does planning and deliberative reasoning. Behavioral economists have cataloged dozens of biases (confirmation bias, loss aversion, hyperbolic discounting) that distort self-perception and decision-making in ways individuals are completely unaware of.

This is, in essence, a rigorous empirical study of the unconscious, precisely the domain psychoanalysis claims as its own.

And yet, psychoanalysts rarely engage with this literature. The analytic journals that once obsessed over unconscious motivation now largely ignore the vast empirical body that demonstrates in measurable, replicable ways that unconscious processes shape judgment and choice.

Where are the psychoanalytic commentaries on Kahneman’s biases? On Ariely’s deception studies? On the signaling models that reveal how altruism, mate selection, and moral outrage serve hidden functions? The overlap is enormous. The shared object of study, the mind’s tendency to conceal its own motives, is unmistakable.

If Freud were alive today, it’s hard to imagine him not being fascinated by the experimental proof that humans routinely deceive themselves. But the analytic establishment seems oddly uninterested… as though empirical confirmation of their deepest premise would somehow cheapen it.

The disconnect is glaring. Behavioral economics has, in many ways, realized the psychoanalytic dream: a systematic, reproducible exploration of the unseen forces that govern human behavior. Yet psychoanalysis, still proclaiming itself the science of the unconscious, barely looks up from its own canon.

If psychoanalysts truly care about truth, about exposing the motives that govern us outside awareness, they should be thrilled by the rise of behavioral economics. Here, finally, is a field that operationalizes the unconscious, measures its effects, and invites cross-disciplinary synthesis.

Instead, psychoanalysis risks repeating its own historical pattern: defending its methods rather than expanding its reach. A field that once prided itself on radical insight now risks being left behind by the very inquiry it inspired.

As seekers of the truth, we should be integrating psychoanalysis with behavioral economics. We shouldn’t lay dormant, accepting Popper’s claim that Psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience. We should be testing our models, updating them in light of current information, and using that knowledge to help our clients uncover truths about their own lives.