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  • Revisiting Freud
  • Eric Matthews (bio)

Opposition to Freudianism is likely to be at least as much a product of ideological antipathy as of disinterested intellectual disagreement. Freud represents his theories as contributions to science—but those who nowadays reject them do so, for the most part, not so much by citing contrary empirical evidence, as by describing them, in the terminology of one of their bitterest critics, Karl Popper, as pseudo-science. But, as Popper himself admits, “the criterion of demarcation [between science and pseudoscience] cannot be an absolutely sharp one but will itself have degrees” (Popper 1963, 252). The demarcation line is bound to be uncertain, because both the concept of ‘science’ and that of ‘pseudoscience,’ as Popper and others operate with them, are terms, respectively, of approval and disapproval, rather than neutrally defined philosophical concepts. Most of the hostility to Freudianism results from a view that the only rational (‘genuinely scientific’) way to think of mental disorder is as essentially brain dysfunction, analogous to liver dysfunction, and to be appropriately treated primarily by drugs and other ‘physical’ therapies. Freud himself seems, in his earlier writings at least, to have held the view that, ultimately, mental disorder would come to be seen in that way: he wanted to be ‘scientific’ in just the same sense as his recent critics. If he were right, then experimental results achieved by cognitive psychologists might well be relevant, as Professor Tauber says, to supporting Freud’s insights into the normal and disordered functioning of the human mind. But I argue that the most valuable insights emerge from those passages in Freud’s writings in which he was not trying to be ‘scientific’ in that sense, but working his way toward a different philosophical view of the human mind, and of the way in which its disorders could be treated.

Freud and the Unconscious

The key concept to look at, as Professor Tauber rightly suggests, is that of the ‘unconscious.’ Freud often talks of the unconscious as an empirical discovery emerging from his clinical work. It is necessary to postulate an unconscious part of the mind, he says, because “in healthy and sick people alike, psychic acts frequently take place that we can explain only by presupposing other acts that are not registered by consciousness” (Freud 2005, 50). As he also puts it, “As with the physical world, psychic life need not be as it appears to us” (Freud 2005, 54). He claims that in this way psychoanalysis “paves the way to a decisive new orientation in the world and in science” (Freud 1991, 47).

Professor Tauber’s account, however, makes it clear why Freud could not quite make the breakthrough to that ‘decisive new orientation.’ To do so would have been to take seriously the consequences of Freud’s own claim that the mental cannot be identified with the conscious (see Freud 1991, 46). The logical consequence of that claim is that the unconscious is not an object to be mechanistically explained like material objects, but is as much a part of a person’s ‘self,’ or subjectivity, as consciousness. Instead, as Tauber says, he followed the well-established philosophical [End Page 243] tradition initiated by Descartes. For Descartes, the operations of the conscious subject were explicable in terms of rational purposes, known to the subject him- or herself; but the operations of material objects could not be explained in such purposive or rational terms, but only in terms of the purposeless, nonrational, movements of matter through space. Under the influence of this tradition, Freud, especially in his earlier writings, explains the workings of the unconscious in terms of primitive, biological, ‘drives’—ego-drives, aiming at individual self-preservation, and sexual drives, aiming, through reproduction, at the survival of the species. The process of socialization, in this view, is an attempt to train these drives to operate in accordance with social norms. But the sexual drives in particular remain in most people “self-willed and inaccessible to influence (what we describe as being ‘unreasonable’) in most people in some respect all through their lives” (Freud 1991, 401). The unconscious is then the residue in adults of the mental life of childhood (see Freud...

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