A century after Freud's emphasis on unconscious mental processes they have become largely accepted. In the last years we have come to recognize that the greatest mystery lies on the nature of consciousness. The distinction among wakefulness, moral conscience and consciousness in the sense of being experiencing something have found support on the latest neuroscientific findings. In this last sense of 'the feeling of what happens', as Antônio Damásio wrote, consciousness is present in dreaming and may be absent in certain fully awake states like absence seizures, and that's the phenomenon which has been receiving growing attention. Latest evidences point to the fact that the sensation of continuity as much as the impression that consciousness preceedes decision making are illusory. The old belief that consciousness were a global cortical function is also being questioned. Evolution of consciousness by differentiation of basic homeostatic mechanisms, as a sort of sophisticated feedback system for mental processes that allows for mistake detection on brain's predictions about self and environment, with the possibility of making corrections in parts of the mental process without having to discard it as a whole, are examples of modern comprehensions on this issue that bear implications to psychotherapeutic practice. In this article the authors review some of the main recent theories on consciousness, its nature, functions, evolutionary aspects, its relation to language, memory systems and to the 'binding problem' of reconciling various inputs and mnemic traits within a unified scene of the self interacting with the environment, emphasizing that, although there are already exciting developments, understanding of consciousness is still in its beginnings.
consciousness; evolution; neoteny; integration; memory; neuro-psychoanalysis
