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Failing to recognize the assumptions of his inves-tigations, Freud segregated psychoanalysis from philosophy on the charge that philosophers equated mind with consciousness, putatively propounded unfounded speculations, and assumed false conclusions about comprehensiveness.
The most important evidence concerning Freud's attitude towards philosophy comes from his own philosophical efforts. In spite of his self-diagnosis as 'lacking talent for philosophy by nature' (cited in Gay, 1988:46n), Freud's writings show him to be a philosopher of consider
Freud as Philosopher The image of Freud as a pure 19th century scientist— never quite fitting for a psychologist who focused his theory on the unconscious—has undergone considerable alterations in recent years. David Bakan1 discovered the significance of Jewish mysticism as a background of psychoanalyisis; others,
Freud’s enduring interests in what might be termed social or anthropo-logical philosophy, and beneath these disciplines a supportive humanism, offer important clues towards understanding Freud’s thinking and the intellectual framework in which to place his work. In building his theory, Freud adopted, at least implicitly, a philosophy
- —Denis Forest, Professor of Philosophy of Science, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University
- —Tim Crane, Professor of Philosophy, Central European University, Author of Elements of Mind and The Objects of Thought
- cAveAts
- terminologicAl And textuAl conventions
- intentionAlity And the nAturAlness of the consciousness criterion for the mentAl
- unconscious mentAl stAtes And the essence of the mentAl
- rePresentAtionAlity And intentionAlity
- contents versus modes of intentionAl stAtes
- Psychology’s trAnsformAtion from A science of consciousness to A science of brAin rePresentAtionAlity
- freud And the trAnsformAtion of Psychology
- the PhilosoPhicAl chAllenge of the new focus on brAin rePresentAtionAlity
- finessing duAlism
- freud on the descriPtive versus dynAmic unconscious
- the stAndArd view thAt freud’s PhilosoPhy-of-mind Argument cAnnot be sePArAted from his rePression theory
- is the theory of rePression bAsic to freud’s PhilosoPhy-of-mind Argument?
- why the PercePtuAl metAPhor for consciousness mAkes the descriPtive unconscious A useful focus of freud’s Argument
- An AnomAly: unconscious defenses As inAccessible And Active but not rePressed
- freud AgAinst the PhilosoPhers on the “vivAcity” Argument
- freud As PhilosoPher of cognitive science
- why the semAntic objection cAnnot be dismissed out of hAnd
- conclusion
- scientific concePts And observAble ProPerties
- the theoreticAl-definition APProAch to scientific concePts
- the meAning of “mentAl”: freud As A blAck-box essentiAlist
- rejection of the semAntic objection
- imPlicAtions for cognitive science
- conclusions
- clArificAtion of brentAno’s terminology
- brentAno’s Argument thAt intentionAlity is the essence of the mentAl
- brentAno’s rejection of unconscious mentAl stAtes
- the self-reference of consciousness
- brentAno’s fAiled AttemPt to exPlAin why All intentionAlity must be conscious
- the brentAniAn-cArtesiAn Position thAt confronted freud
- why freud cAn’t be A disPositionAlist About unconscious mentAl stAtes
- freud’s fundAmentAl ProPosition
- brAin rePresentAtionAlity: freud’s bridge from brentAno to unconscious mentAl stAtes
- freud’s elegAnt trAnsformAtion of the cArtesiAn trAdition
- intentionAlity in the reconstruction of freud’s Argument
- freud’s semAntic objection AgAinst the consciousness criterion
- does rejecting the consciousness criterion helP resolve the mind–body Problem?
- the inflAted Pretensions of consciousness
- how to Argue AgAinst the consciousness criterion
- whAt is the relevAnt essence of consciousness for defining the mentAl?: the multiPle-essences Problem
- mentAlity, rAtionAlity, And the chAllenge of PrimAry Process
- the Argument for PhenomenAl rePresentAtionAlity As the essence of the mentAl
- the overAll Argument
- freud’s PercePtuAl model of consciousness
- brAin rePresentAtionAlity As the essence of the mentAl
- the uniformity thesis
- the existence of unconscious mentAl stAtes
- 15. Therefore, unconscious mental states can exist. QED.
- reconsidering freud’s Arguments AgAinst the consciousness criterion
- concluding remArks
- Conclusion: The Freudian Century in Philosophy of Mind
“This is a brilliant and bold book. It provides the deepest analysis of the concept of unconscious mental states I have read. The main claim of the book, presented with a level of lucidity characteristic of Wakefield’s writ-ing, is that Freud is a prescient and major contributor to a coherent phi-losophy of mind and a major influence on the emergen...
“Jerome Wakefield has produced a fascinating, original and masterful work that brings together history of philosophy and psychology, philos-ophy of mind and Freudian scholarship to illuminate the origins of con-tinuing debates around our current understanding of mind and Freud’s prescient contribution to them. Crystal clear and richly informed by p...
First, my aim here is to understand Freud’s philosophical argument by optimally and charitably reconstructing the argument that I believe is implicit in scattered comments in his work, and to reconstruct his argu-ment from a rigorous contemporary philosophical perspective. This task is helped along because Freud turns out to have been remarkably so...
Throughout this book, many of the writers I quote, including Freud, tend to use italics liberally for emphasis. Rather than stating each time that italics appear that they are in the original text or that they are added by me, I adopt the convention that any italics appearing in quoted pas-sages are in the original, unless otherwise stated. Additio...
The theory of consciousness as the essence of the mental reached its peak in the work of the nineteenth-century philosopher/psychologist Franz Brentano, who pushed the consciousness account of the essence of the mental yet deeper. He theorized that the essence of consciousness itself is a unique kind of directedness, manifested in the fact that con...
What do unconscious mental states have to do with the theoretical and philosophical question of the nature of the essence of the mental? Many writers had suggested the occurrence of unconscious mental states without attempting to revise the consciousness criterion or address the implications for the nature of the mental. They wrote as if consciousn...
How is it possible for a state of one’s mind to refer to, be about, or be directed at some object outside itself? Although there are many theories— including some championed by phenomenologists that are based on Gestalt formation or on direct relationships to the environment (e.g., Wakefield & Dreyfus, 1991)—the longest standing and currently clear...
Intentional states must have characteristics other than their sheer rep-resentational content to make them fully functioning mental states. Searle (1983), elaborating Brentano, distinguishes the content of an intentional state, which is realized in a mental representation, from the mode of the intentional state, which is the type of mental “attitud...
We no longer identify the mental with consciousness. What, then, has replaced consciousness as psychology’s foundational topic? The subject matter of psychology is now widely agreed to consist of mental representations that can be conscious or unconscious, but that are largely unconscious, where the medium for the realization of uncon-scious mental...
The most direct and plausible way to change the domain of a science is by an argument showing that the standard definition of the science’s domain by implication in fact covers the new domain as well. For psy-chology, such a change might be justified by deep new theoretical insights into the nature of “the mental”—an abstract subject-matter cat-ego...
Once the argument for the existence of unconscious mental states won the day and the existence of unconscious mental states as representa-tions somehow encoded in brain tissue independent of any relationship to consciousness was broadly accepted, not only the focus of psycholo-gists but also the corresponding preoccupations of philosophers of mind ...
The consciousness criterion for the mental should not be confused with, and will be considered here largely independently of, the well-known Cartesian metaphysical doctrine of substance dualism, which asserts that consciousness must be a substance different from physical matter. The arguments for and against holding that consciousness is the essenc...
Freud’s writing, I claim, contains a strand of argument that constitutes an important philosophy-of-mind argument for the existence of uncon-scious mental states that has not been adequately appreciated or prop-erly reconstructed. This philosophical argument is more general than and entirely independent of his better-known argument for the exist-en...
Although there are exceptions, most commentators on the development of Freud’s view of unconscious mental states maintain that they must be considered in the context of his signature theories of repression and the dynamic (i.e., repressed) unconscious. The argument for unconscious mental states, these commentators suggest, goes hand in glove with h...
There is of course no question that Freud’s clinical experiences convinced him of the reality of unconscious mental states and provided the motivation for formulating an account of unconscious mental states in order to theorize successfully about psychopathological processes. Examples from the domain of the dynamic unconscious provided Freud with v...
A further, more conceptual reason that makes sense of Freud’s inde-pendent focus on the existence of descriptively unconscious mental states has to do with the relative difficulty of establishing the existence of descriptive versus dynamic states and the rhetorical strategy necessary to make Freud’s argument effective to his audience. Given the wid...
will be saying almost nothing further about Theses 2 and 4—inacces-sible and repressed mental contents—in the remainder of this book, so will offer here a brief account of the fate of their relationship within Freud’s theory. These theses are distinct in principle, because men-tal contents might be inaccessible for reasons other than repression, as...
Freud is a consummate theoretician, and he fully understands that there is no way to establish the dynamic unconscious without first conquering the challenge of the descriptive unconscious. The only route to a theory of repression is via a path through an initial argument that mental states can be unconscious in the descriptive sense. Leaving aside...
A further, more pragmatic, problem with focusing on repression in understanding Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states is that this divorces Freud’s account from its potential relevance to contempo-rary cognitive science. The cognitive science view is that much psycho-logical processing routinely goes on outside of awareness without the inf...
I am going to expend a lot of energy in the next chapter trying to under-stand precisely how Freud evades the semantic objection. So, it seems worth asking: should the semantic objection be taken so seriously? One might argue that the objection is trivial because it is “merely semantic.” The view that I will put forward later will help to explain w...
The semantic objection to Freud’s thesis—that is, the objection that in claiming that there are unconscious mental states Freud is simply mis-using the term “mental”—cannot be easily dismissed. Given that Freud is specifically attempting to overthrow the Cartesian tradition, and that the semantic objection is one of the most common Cartesian-inspir...
The observational properties approach to natural kind concepts, at least in one classical version, holds that a concept is defined by a set of observ-able properties that people use to identify the things that fall under the concept and that provide necessary and sufficient conditions for applica-tion of the concept. The observational properties ap...
The above considerations suggest that, at their core, many scientific con-cepts have little to do with observational properties or overall similar-ity relations. An alternative is to adopt a view in which, in one way or another, the meaning of a natural kind term refers to theoretical entities or processes that explain the observable phenomena. I w...
Having formulated what appears to be a reasonably adequate theory of scientific concepts, it is time to return to Freud’s thesis and his troubles with the semantic objection. The black-box essentialist approach allows for the legitimate application of a term to surprising new instances with-out a change in the term’s meaning, if the new instances c...
We are now in a position to understand how Freud can correctly reject the semantic objection. Freud approaches the question of unconscious mental states via an essentialist conception of scientific concepts. The semantic objection is based on the misconception that the word “men-tal” is defined by the property of consciousness. But, scientific conc...
I noted earlier that any choice by Freud of a base set for “mental” other than consciousness would be question-begging in his dispute with the Cartesians and would open Freud to the semantic objection. This point still applies to us today, for we are inheritors of the same tradition and the same term and its baptism, at least to the degree that we ...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
have sympathetically reconstructed Freud’s argument for unconscious mental states, placing the argument to the extent possible within the ter-minology and intellectual context of contemporary philosophy of mind. My analysis has been neither sheer history nor sheer philosophy, but an explicative/reconstructive amalgam of the two. Going against ortho...
The significance of Freud for modern philosophy of mind. The aspects of Freud's thought that have generated the greatest amount of recent philosophical discussion, and have provoked significant critical commentary from various psychoanalysts, are those concerning the nature of the unconscious and its connec tion with conscious thought and conduct.
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In his 1923 essay, The Ego and the Id , Freud offers what he calls a 'struc- tural' view of the mind according to which mental processes are structured according to two fundamental principles, the 'reality principle' and the 'pleasure principle'.
