Not too long ago, towards the end of the last century, the idea of the unconscious — a spooky idea if ever there was one — was a no-no, a throwaway concept in the field of psychology. And Sigmund Freud, who brought it to prominence, was dethroned from his god-like throne.

According to a survey published three years ago in the American magazine The Psychotherapy Networker, Freud doesn’t even rate among the top 10 most influential therapists of the 20th century. Instead, more down-to-earth types like Aaron Beck and Carl Rogers were in there – psychologists who believed our conscious mind was all we have to work with. The whole field seemed to banish the unconscious.

Well, that’s changing. Not because Herr Doctor Freud is back in favour — all sorts of people dislike him for his arch, paternal manner and his sex- and penis-obsessed theories. Still, I think that Freud, who always considered himself a scientist first and foremost, would be pleased. Freudian psychoanalysis has a phrase for this rear-your-head-up-from-the-muck phenomenon: the Return of the Repressed. In this case, the repressed is the unconscious.

Sometimes it seems more books on the brain are being written than we have neurons in our head.

But as the empirical critics of Freud like to say, where’s the evidence?

The evidence is the books that keep piling up on my desk. That’s not quite a scientific guide, but it tells you something about the zeitgeist.

For instance, staring at me is Shankar Vedantam’s The Hidden Brain — on the edition I have, the lettering of the word “brain” is stenciled in shadows, murky and mysterious. The book’s subtitle tells all: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives. As well, there’s The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement by New York Times columnist David Brooks and, on a lighter, self-help-type note, Idea Mapping: How to Access Your Hidden Brainpower by Jamie Nast.

So apparently the hidden, unconscious mind has not only returned for a visit, but it is busy electing presidents and prime ministers, trashing economies and intervening in countries around the world. As well, it can help you increase your earning power, among other benefits.

Now, there are a couple of reasons for the return of the unconscious as an idea. First, there’s something I will call the Gladwellizing of the publishing world.

Malcolm Gladwell, who grew up in Canada, is a New Yorker magazine writer and the brain behind a series of ingenious, best-selling books that turn the arcane world of social science research into smart and catchy magazine and book journalism.

From his first book, The Tipping Point (2000), to Blink (2005) and Outliers (2008), he has become our leading interpreter of the field of social psychology as applied to commercial areas like advertising (what makes a spaghetti sauce sell) and higher realms of public policy (what makes a city safe). He is a genuinely talented writer with a keen eye for the quotidian. The major message in all his essays is this: there’s something else going on beneath the humdrum. Just peel back the layers.

In Gladwell’s reading of the latest social science research, the world is both opaque and counterintuitive, a great puzzle for a writer. Want to make a city safer? Don’t start by solving murders, begin by painting over graffiti, creating an atmosphere of civic trust. The hidden — or, should I say, that which is just below the surface — is tantalizing, with its promise of both financial riches and cognitive insight.

Well, publishing is a herd activity and a gazillion writers have started writing their own versions of The Tipping Point, trying to find the hidden underneath a universe of jargon-filled findings.

Another reason for the return of the unconscious is the emergence of the new brain science, along with technologies of brain mapping and measurement via scanners, MRIs and the like.

A gazillion writers have started writing their own versions of The Tipping Point, trying to find the hidden underneath a universe of jargon-filled findings.

Sometimes it seems more books on the brain are being written than we have neurons in our head. There are books with titles like The Brain that Changes Itself (a bestseller by another Canadian, Norman Doidge) as well like Brain Rules, Train Your Brain, Your Life and This Is Your Brain on Music (another Canadian title, by McGill neuroscientist/musician Daniel Levitin).

So, we have a perfect publishing storm: a new emerging field and authors hot to tell us things hidden before our eyes. Who doesn’t love a real-life brainy mystery?

Now, of course, there are some distinctions that need to be made. For Freud, the unconscious was a great, murky swamp of repressed desires. It was a psychic purgatory where people banished their troubled feelings about sex and incest (and all else, but mainly sex). It was a nightmarish spot, very dour.

But what writers like Vedantam mean by the unconscious is actually not the repressed world of disreputable desires, but the banal stuff we don’t think about much. It’s what many might call the subconscious.

It’s that world we all inhabit on autopilot. It’s not just behaviors we perform without thinking — like eating, driving or locking our front door. The point of studying the “hidden brain” is that this invisible terrain is an enormous part of our psychic makeup. It governs us, even if we don’t pay much attention to the way our mind works.

These books tell us we fall in love with people who resemble us in character and even look like us, and that we vote for a political leaders on the basis of comfort or feeling (Would you have a beer with them? Do you trust them?) rather than policy. We love discovering things we already believe (the confirmation bias). The job of our political and commercial mind managers is to use advertising and these cognitive insights to manipulate our unconscious biases.

The good news is that we are more aware of these unconscious drives than we think — so in a sense, they’re not quite that hidden. They’re dozing, but quite accessible, if we wish. The bad news is that we can still be manipulated by biases even if we are aware of them. This must gladden the heart of every political operative.

A central point seems to be that we are emotional creatures who use reason to justify our choices. How the backroom boys (and girls) will manipulate us — in spite of our awareness of how we’re being manipulated — is the not-very-hidden drama of this federal election, to be played out in the coming weeks.