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  • The Rational Unconscious:The Freudian Mind Reconsidered
  • Alfred I. Tauber (bio)
Keywords

Freud, unconscious, rationality, cognitive mind, normative

As Matthews (2013) correctly observes, Freud himself held two views of the unconscious, which may be characterized as ‘cognitive’ and the other as ‘dynamic.’ The central question each of the commentaries address is to what extent can we attribute a specifically Freudian contribution to our understanding of thinking if we accept the first constellation of his thought (a cognitive unconscious) and reject (or better, ignore) the second (psychoanalytic repression). I maintain that one may remain agnostic about the specific truth claims of psychoanalytic repression theory and still appreciate that Freud provided insights about unconsciousness, which remain germane to contemporary philosophies of mind. More specifically, new findings concerning unconscious deliberative thinking, which follows a normative strategy (Sio and Ormerod 2009), suggest new appreciation of Freud’s thought.

In response to the commentaries offered, I begin with a historical note and then conclude with a reiterated (and expanded) contextualization of Freud’s own contribution to understanding the structure of the mind as refracted by recent cognitive psychology studies.

Freud’s Cognitive Model of the Mind

In recent research, the role of ‘melding’ (the association through juxtaposition, analogy, and metaphor) has gained prominence in cognitive psychology, whose conceptual genealogy may be tracked back to Freud’s own notions of associative thinking, which in turn derives from early nineteenth-century associative theory.1 Freud conceived unconsciousness in the semantic tradition, by which he posited representations of unconscious drives as ways of thinking about them. Indeed, Freud recognized that the drives themselves are never represented as such but appear in the psyche as ideas to which the drives attach themselves. In “The unconscious” (1915), Freud explicitly addresses the relationship of language (representations) with the unconscious object, where he asserted that the ‘thing-presentation’ cannot become conscious until associated with words, and this step occurs in the preconscious (not the unconscious, which knows no language as such). At the interface of conscious and unconscious mental life, this associative locale, where [End Page 255] unconscious objects or drives become associated with language, provides the key link between the sectors of the psyche to offer the coherence required for normal mentation.

This ‘associative’ formulation dates to Freud’s 1891 pre-psychoanalytic writings on aphasia (Freud 1953). Framed by the neurological discourse of the time, he joined attempts to model the relationship of brain localization studies to speech, namely, how to balance the contributions made by areas with localized language competence (e.g., Broca’s area) and the complex processing that must occur as sensory data ascend to higher cortical regions. Very much in the same spirit of his later hypothesis presented in the Project for a Scientific Psychology, where he postulated that different types of neurons fulfill different neurological functions, Freud assumed that a nerve on its way to the cerebral cortex changed its functional significance (or meaning; 1895, p. 52).2 Making the case for a more global integration, Freud relied on some modality by which ‘a word sound image’ associates with an ‘impression of word innervation’ (ibid., p. 73), and he suggested that the word concept appears as a ‘closed’ complex of images of visual and auditory perceptions that processes the object through both specialized and more general anatomic locales.3 Then Freud makes the representational move: “In light of observations in speech disorders we have formed the view that the word concept (the idea of the word) is linked with its sensory part, in particular through its sound impressions, to the object concept” (ibid., pp. 77–78), which is then processed through the ascendant and integrative functions of various specialized anatomic centers.4

The striking element of this model is the associative thinking Freud posited and, from our perspective, that basic mechanism has a strong experimental basis not only for normal mental functions but also for creative insight and imaginative syntheses (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). This is not the place to review that literature, which ranges from the commonplace joke to revolutionary science (Koestler 1964), so suffice it to note that the inventive perception, whether inspired within an artistic or scientific context, is characteristically a resourceful combination...

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