A Naturalized Conception of the Unconscious

Dr Talia Morag (University of Sydney)

The Freudian unconscious has been a topic of much criticism. Some skeptics (Adolf Grumbaum, Frederick Crews) rule out the unconscious on the ground that it is inevitably mysterious and in any case fails to explain scientifically psychological pathologies. Admittedly, Freud presents the unconscious in either metaphorically scientific terms (drives, forces) or mysterious conceptions such as hidden proto-people within us, or a storage room for mental states.  Some philosophers defend the unconscious by showing that the explanations that use it comprise an extension to common-sense psychology (Nagel, Hopkins, Gardner, Lear). But the literature lacks any positive account of what in the psychology of a person can make a mental state unconscious and how that process relates to the formation of symptoms. In this paper, I draw from the literature on self-deception and on certain Freudian insights about associative imagination and propose a new de-mystified but non-scientific account of the unconscious.

Dr. Talia Morag, Bsc (Tel-Aviv), MA (Paris 8), PhD (Sydney), is Sessional Lecturer of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at the University of Sydney and Adjunct Fellow at the University of Western Sydney.