Explorers of implicit motivation part 2Investigating the unconscious

At the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, there was great interest in the role of the unconscious in the development of psychological dysfunction, although the construct motive, or specific motives, was not widely acknowledged. This, the second article in a series on motivation, traces the route to the emergence of such a construct in the 1930s and early 1940s. Our starting point is a compilation, Birney and Teevan, (1962), consisting of reprinted sequential landmark contributions, entitled ‘Measuring human motivation: An enduring problem in psychology’.