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  • Freud and the Cognitive Unconscious
  • James Phillips (bio)
Keywords

unconscious, Freud, cognitive psychology, primary process, Freudian unconscious, cognitive unconscious

Professor Tauber’s paper participates in a broad discussion of the cognitive unconscious, some of which he reviews. Much of this discussion is carried out with little reference to the Freudian unconscious, but Tauber joins that subgroup that does bring Freud into the discussion. For this latter group, immediate questions arise about the relation of the respective cognitive unconscious to the Freudian unconscious. It is to those questions that I direct this commentary.

I begin by noting the multiple ways in which Freud describes the unconscious, some of them discussed by Tauber. At a general level. the unconscious refers descriptively to all mental activity that is not conscious. In his first, ‘topographical’ model, Freud reifies the unconscious into the system Ucs and develops the relations of this system to the other two systems, systems Pcs and Cs. In the second, ‘structural’ model, he is forced to abandon this black-hole system Ucs because he has become aware that all of the structures of the new model—id, ego, and superego—have an unconscious dimension. With the structural model the unconscious becomes again more descriptive that topographical.

There is another aspect of how Freud approaches the unconscious, distinguishing unconscious, primary process thinking, from conscious, secondary process thinking. He articulated the distinction primarily in the context of the topographical model, but the distinction remains applicable in the structural model. Secondary process refers to the discursive, logical thought, which we characterize as normal thought process, whereas primary process refers to the unique style of unconscious thought processes. Primary process thinking is characterized by atemporality and tolerance of contradictions, as well as the mechanisms of displacement and condensation. In his essay on the unconscious Freud (1915) also specifies that unconscious thought is not verbal, and that only conscious thought is verbal. It would be a mistake to treat the polarity of primary and secondary process as equivalent to Tauber’s polarity of rational conscious thought and irrational unconscious/id thought. Primary process thinking is only irrational when judged from a narrow perspective of secondary process thinking. As a different form of thinking, it is best associated with nondiscursive and mythic thought, as developed by Ernst Cassirer (1946) and Suzanne Langer (1953).

In approaching Freud’s unconscious, we need finally distinguish what I will call the clinical and the theoretical Freud. The first is Freud’s effort to develop a notion of the unconscious that will [End Page 247] assist in understanding clinical symptoms as well as related ‘normal’ phenomena, such as dreams and parapraxes. The second represents Freud’s irrepressible wish to develop an elaborate theory of the mind. George Kline, the first to identify this distinction, referred to the ‘clinical theory’ and the ‘metapsychology’ (Kline 1976; Phillips 1991). He understood that the clinical theory and the metapsychology greatly overlap, and also that Freud did not make the distinction himself. I invoke the distinction here because it is relevant to the discussion of Tauber’s analysis.

With Freud’s disparate notions of the unconscious in mind, let us look at Tauber’s analysis. He begins with a dramatic contrast between the Freudian conscious and unconscious—the former rational, the latter irrational; the former recognized as self, the latter experienced as other; the former moral and normative, the latter simply amoral. Tauber’s major thesis, as I understand it, is that this great divide between conscious and unconscious need not be the final story, that cognitive science has demonstrated a cognitive unconscious that works cooperatively with conscious experience and that can integrate the Freudian unconscious into a larger ‘cooperative’ unconscious. Tauber offers examples from Freud that demonstrate the latter’s own inchoate consideration of a cooperative unconscious. Tauber appropriately highlights the way in which the Freudian ego manages one’s life, often unconsciously. The ego is not just there to control the id. It performs countless managing and integrating functions, which we are aware of in varying degrees, but often not at all. As Tauber writes:

Indeed, if we regard Freudianism without Oedipus (i.e., a theory of unconscious intention absent repression or sexual neuroses) as...

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