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  • The Trouble With Consciousness
  • Melvin Woody (bio)
Keywords

Freud, conscious, unconscious

Consciousness means too much. It has different meanings for different people—and it overflows with meanings that refer beyond itself. And because it has no clearly defined boundaries, the definition of mental processes that fall outside consciousness remains correspondingly vague. Professor Tauber finds an adroit resolution of that difficulty by proposing a continuum that includes Freud’s conscious, preconscious, and unconscious domains. I find his solution very attractive. But is Freud without Oedipus or repression still recognizable as Freud?

Freud distinguished between descriptive and dynamic senses of ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious.’ In the descriptive sense, the unconscious ‘designates whatever falls outside the field of consciousness and in that sense it includes what Freud calls the preconscious,’ whereas the dynamic sense refers to ideas that are prevented from reaching consciousness by repression. This is the sense of ‘unconscious’ central to psychoanalysis. In dismissing repression from his account of the relation between conscious and unconscious mental processes, Tauber dispenses with the dynamic consciousness and ‘the’ unconscious.

I arrived at the same point in an earlier issue of this journal, in comments on O’Brien and Jureidini’s essay, “Dispensing with the Dynamic Unconscious” (2003). O’Brien and Jureidini argued that appeals to the cognitive unconscious to shore up Freud’s theory of the dynamic unconscious fail because the two are incompatible. Therefore, like Tauber, but more explicitly, they propose to dispense with the dynamic unconscious. My comments concurred, but focused on a critique of Freud’s account of consciousness (Woody 2003a).

Freud described the difference between the two domains in his 1915 metapsychological essay, “The Unconscious:”

It strikes us all at once that now we know what is the difference between a conscious and an unconscious idea. The conscious idea comprises the concrete idea plus the verbal idea corresponding to it, whilst the unconscious idea is that of the thing alone. … The idea which is not put into words or the mental act which has not received hyper-cathexis then remains in the unconscious in a state of repression.

(1915, 201–2)

By this standard, human beings are the only conscious animals, because all others lack language and therefore cannot transmute their experiences into words. Moreover, as O’Brien and Jureidini stress, large portions of human experience also fail to satisfy this logocentric conception of consciousness. Although language certainly mediates much of my experience, I do not keep a running verbal inventory of every nuance and momentary change in my stream of experience—and words scarcely begin to capture my enjoyment of music or ballet or most of my emotional life. Nor can the wordless part of experience be allocated to Freud’s ‘preconscious,’ because that is also a domain of [End Page 251] words and discursive, secondary process thinking in contrast with the images and primary process thought characteristic of the dynamic unconscious as illustrated by Freud’s accounts of dreams, hysterical symptoms and other ‘derivatives.’ Yet the dreams and other derivatives cannot themselves be unconscious, because they are available for analytic interpretation. Granted, Freud only has access to dreams through the analysand’s verbal narrative, but they were not dreamt as verbal narrative—and other wordless derivatives were consciously accessible to both Freud and his patients. But If we do admit that all of this ‘manifest content’ is conscious, what is left for the dynamic unconscious? All that seems to remain is the ‘latent content’ disclosed by the analyst’s interpretation—the repressed thoughts that find expression in the dreams, symptoms, and so on, thanks to the dream work, which translates “correctly formed and expressed” latent thoughts into the images and primary process thinking consciously experienced as dreams, symptoms, derivatives, and so on (Freud 1960, 181).

But that inverts Freud’s contrast between an unconscious domain of wordless ideas and the wordiness of consciousness. The easiest way to account for this inversion is that Freud means that the dreamer or hysterically paralyzed analysand is unconscious of the meaning of the conscious dreams and derivatives, a meaning only disclosed by the analytic interpretation. Yet we all express ourselves in nondiscursive ways—in music and painting and tantrums and smiles or frowns...

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