Oxford Handbooks Online: A Better Self: Freud and Nietzsche On The Nature and Value of Sublimation

A Better Self: Freud and Nietzsche on the Nature and Value of Sublimation

Oxford Handbooks Online

A Better Self: Freud and Nietzsche on the Nature and
Value of Sublimation
Ken Gemes
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
Edited by Richard G.T. Gipps and Michael Lacewing
Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, History of Western Philosophy (Post-Classical)

Online Publication Date: Nov 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198789703.013.5
Abstract and Keywords
The notion of sublimation is essential to Nietzsche and Freud. However, Freud’s writings
fail to provide a persuasive notion of sublimation. In particular, Freud’s writings are
confused on the distinction between pathological symptoms and sublimations, and on the
relation between sublimation and repression. After rehearsing these problems in some
detail it is proposed that a return to Nietzsche allows for a more coherent account of
sublimation, its difference from pathological symptoms and its relation to repression. In
summary, on Nietzsche’s account, while repression and pathological symptoms involve a
disintegration (of the self), sublimation involves integration. The chapter provides a brief
consideration of some post-Freudian accounts of sublimation that, arguably, represent a
return to a more Nietzschean approach. In closing, the chapter contrasts the different
bases of Nietzsche’s and Freud’s valorization of sublimation.
Keywords: sublimation, repression, pathological symptoms, integration, disintegration, master drive, Shreber,
Leonardo da Vinci
Introduction
Jacob Golomb writes that ‘(f)or Freud, sublimation is the only alternative to excessive
repression which may deteriorate into an acute neurotic conflict’.1 He quotes Freud:
It is precisely in neurotics that … the formation of an ideal heightens the demands

of the ego and is met with the most powerful factor favouring repression;
sublimation is a way out, by which those demands can be met without involving
repression
(Freud 1914: 95).
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He then adds: ‘This comment accurately reflects the ideas that Nietzsche had formulated
on sublimation years before Freud’ (Golomb 1989: 69–70). Golomb argues correctly that
sublimation is indeed a central notion for both Nietzsche and Freud, but as we shall see,
the question of what exactly is involved in sublimation raises profound difficulties. The
penultimate sentence in the entry on sublimation in Laplanche’s and Pontalis’s canonical
The Language of Psychoanalysis explicitly acknowledges the importance of giving a
coherent theory of sublimation:
In the psychoanalytic literature the concept of sublimation is frequently called

upon; the idea answers to a basic need of the Freudian doctrine and it is hard to
see how it could be dispensed with
(Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 433).
One reason that sublimation is a key notion in psychoanalysis is that from Freud’s
therapeutic point of view successful psychoanalytic treatment aims at sublimation, in as
much as sublimation is seen as a necessary condition for psychic health. By bringing to
conscious light hitherto repressed drives, desires, and wishes, energy which has
previously displayed itself in unpleasurable symptoms may be harnessed and directed to
more productive and felicitous ends. And indeed, at first glance, sublimation might seem
a clear enough concept. It involves the redirecting of a repressed sexual drive towards a
non-sexual aim.2 As Freud puts it in his paper On Narcissism:
Sublimation is a process that concerns object-libido and consists in the instinct

directing itself towards an aim other than, and remote from, that of sexual
satisfaction; in this process the accent falls upon deflection from sexuality3
(Freud 1914: 94).
Yet Laplanche’s and Pontalis’s entry on sublimation ends with a starkly negative
assessment of attempts to clarify the notion of sublimation: ‘The lack of a coherent theory
of sublimation remains one of the lacunae in psychoanalytic thought’ (Laplanche and
Pontalis 1973: 433).
The claim that sublimation is a vexed concept is repeatedly echoed in the ‘secondary’
literature. Indeed, this is true from the early days of that literature as evidenced in
Edward Glover’s (1931) assertion in his important paper ‘Sublimation, Substitution and
Social Anxiety’:
It is generally agreed that prior to 1923 a good deal of confusion existed

regarding the exact nature of sublimation. Since then it has increased rather than
diminished
(Glover 1931: 263),
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More recently Jacques Lacan notes ‘the virtually absurd difficulties that authors have
encountered every time they have tried to give a meaning to the term
“sublimation”’ (Lacan 1992: 142–3).
To get an entry to these difficulties let us begin by considering the simple definition given
here which emphasizes the redirecting of a drive from a sexual to a non-sexual aim.
Before demonstrating the major problem with this definition we shall briefly consider two
minor but important problems with this definition. First, there is the problem of
distinguishing aims that involve sexual satisfaction and those that do not. After all, it was
Freud who argued that many prima facie non-sexual activities (e.g. thumb-sucking) have
a sexual component. Perhaps this can be finessed by distinguishing overtly sexual aims
from aims that are not overtly sexual. Second, there is the problem that much sublimation
seems to involve a diversion of arguably non-sexual instincts. Thus aggressive drives,
drives associated with what Freud would later call the death drive, may find sublimated
discharge in non-aggressive behaviour.4
Substitute Formations, Symptoms, and

Sublimations
Now for the major problem: the definition in terms of the substitution of non-sexual for
sexual aims fails to distinguish sublimations from symptom formation. An obsessive who
compulsively aims to avoid treading on cracks in the pavement may have substituted a
non-sexual aim for a sexual aim but that would not normally count as a case of
sublimation (though see the following section). On Freud’s basic account various drives
are repressed and later these may manifest themselves in various behaviours. These
behaviours, often labelled by Freud as ‘substitute formations’, are related in complex
ways to the original drive. They are what Freud calls the ‘return of the repressed’ (Freud
1915: 154). Our key question then is how to separate those substitute formations, those
instances of the return of the repressed, which are symptoms, from those that are
sublimations?
Of all Freud’s writings perhaps the paper that most acutely demonstrates the need for a
clear means of separating symptoms from sublimations is his 1910 essay ‘Leonardo Da
Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’ (Freud 1910a). There Freud argues that Leonardo
is a model of that type of individual whose repressed sexual desires find sublimated
expression by becoming attached to a powerful drive for scientific and artistic research.
In his summarizing final section Freud shows implicit recognition of the difficulties of
separating symptoms from sublimations, and, relatedly, illness from health, when he
writes:
We must expressly insist that we have never reckoned Leonardo as a neurotic or a

‘nerve case’, as the awkward phrase goes. Anyone who protests at our so much as
daring to examine him in the light of discoveries gained in the field of pathology is
still clinging to prejudices which we have to-day rightly abandoned. We no longer
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think that health and illness, normal and neurotic people, are to be sharply
distinguished from each other, and that neurotic traits must necessarily be taken
as proofs of a general inferiority. To-day we know that neurotic symptoms are
structures which are substitutes for certain achievements of repression that we
have to carry out in the course of our development from a child to a civilized
human being. We know too that we all produce such substitutive structures, and
that it is only their number, intensity and distribution which justify us in using the
practical concept of illness and in inferring the presence of constitutional
inferiority. From the slight indications we have about Leonardo’s personality we
should be inclined to place him close to the type of neurotic that we describe as
‘obsessional’; and we may compare his researches to the ‘obsessive brooding’ of
neurotics, and his inhibitions to what are known as their ‘abulias’
(Freud 1910a: 131).
After holding up Leonardo as a model of sublimation throughout the essay, and then in
the first sentence of this quotation protesting that he has not reckoned Leonardo to be a
neurotic, Freud in the final sentence concludes that we must place Leonardo close to the
obsessional neurotic. The distance between sublimation and neurotic symptoms seems
vanishingly small. Here we have in microcosm our problem; how to separate sublimations
from the neurotic symptoms both of which count as substitutive formations?
The Social Factor in Sublimations

In many of Freud’s explications of sublimation there is an emphasis on the social value of
the activity resulting from sublimation. Thus in his New Introductory Lectures he says:
A certain kind of modification of the aim and a change of object, in which our
social valuation is taken into account, is described by us as ‘sublimation’
(Freud 1933: 97).
In one of his earliest published references to sublimation in the Dora case of 1905 he
talks of the ‘the undifferentiated sexual disposition of the child … being diverted to a
higher sexual aim’ and thereby providing ‘the energy for a greater number of our cultural
achievements’ (Freud 1905a: 50). In the Three Essays dating from the same period he
writes that sexual curiosity can be ‘diverted (sublimated) in the direction of art’ (Freud
1905a:156).
This emphasis on socially valued achievements would provide some means of separating
neurotic symptoms from sublimations but at the high cost of introducing a totally non-
psychoanalytic, indeed a non-psychological element to the definition; namely that of
social valuation. One, presumably uncomfortable, consequence of such an account would
be that as social values change, behaviour that was at one time pathological would
become a sublimation. For instance, suppose our compulsive crack avoider mentioned
earlier successfully presents his activities as a kind of performance art and receives much
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social acclaim for his continual performances. Does that move his activity from neurotic
symptom to sublimation?
The reference to social acclaim has led many authors to be suspicious of such
definitions.5 In his article ‘What is Sublimated in Sublimation’ Donald Kaplan begins:
The whole idea of sublimation has been a vagrant problem for psychoanalysis from
the very beginning. This is because sublimation, in one of its meanings, refers to
felicitous exercises of the mind, while psychoanalysis is suspicious of any such
simple creed
(Kaplan 1993: 549).
One gets a clear picture of the problem posed by the introduction of social valuation as a
defining characteristic of sublimation, and the related problem of distinguishing neurotic
symptoms from sublimations, by contrasting Freud’s essay on Schreber with his essay on
Leonardo. The latter is perhaps his most sustained surviving piece covering the topic of
sublimation.6 According to Freud, Schreber’s illness stems from his repression of
homosexual desires first overtly expressed in his quickly suppressed thought that ‘(a)fter
all it would be nice to be a woman submitting to the act of copulation’. This repression
later gave rise to the obsessive thought that God is trying to unman him and turn him into
a woman and led to various other obsessive thoughts and behaviour. This would not
normally count as a case of sublimation. Contrast this with Freud’s Leonardo case.
According to Freud, Leonardo, like Schreber, represses his homosexual desires and this
repression later leads to his scientific inquisitiveness and inventiveness and his artistic
activities including his obsession with capturing in drawings perfect representations of
the male body. This for Freud is a classical case of sublimation. Is the only pertinent
difference here that in the Schreber case the end activity that results from a repression of
erotic desires, namely, obsessive behaviour and thought centring on his relationship to
God, is not considered socially valuable, whereas in the Leonardo case the end activity
that results from a repression of erotic desires is considered socially valuable? Or, as
Kaplan might put it, is it simply that we regard Schreber’s exercises of the mind as non-
felicitous, but regard Leonardo’s as felicitous? Such distinctions as socially valuable/not
socially valuable, felicitous/non-felicitous, clearly involve value judgements. Moreover,
such distinctions do not seem to be analytical distinctions. Thus it seems a fundamental
notion in psychoanalysis is not to be explained in strictly psychoanalytical terms.
Furthermore, those terms seem irredeemably normative and this runs against Freud’s
general claim to be providing a merely scientific/descriptive account of psychological
phenomena.7 Also bringing in the normative results in a questionable form of relativism
as norms of what is socially acceptable vary from culture to culture and even between
subgroups in a given culture. It is presumably this kind of concern that lead Laplanche
and Pontalis to raise the question: ‘Should the fact that activities described as sublimated
in a given culture are accorded particularly high social esteem be taken as a defining
characteristic of sublimation?’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 33).
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If we do choose to abandon the social valuation factor in separating sublimation from

symptom formation any new account should, I suggest, be tested by how it handles the
Leonardo and Schreber cases. The respective behaviours of Leonardo and Schreber may
be taken as paradigms of sublimation and pathogenic symptoms. What we are looking for
then is a strictly psychoanalytic account which would class Leonardo’s behaviour as
sublimation and Schreber’s as pathogenic symptoms.
The Relation between Sublimation and

Repression
Another serious problem raised by Freud’s own writings on sublimation concerns the
relation between repression and sublimation. In one understanding of Freud’s telling of
the Leonardo case, Leonardo’s homosexual urges are continuously repressed, hence he
lives an asexual adult life, and it is this repression that gives rise to his adult scientific
and artistic drives:
the sexual repression which set in after this phase of his childhood (where he
experienced the ‘excessive tenderness of his mother’) caused him to sublimate his
libido into the urge to know and established his sexual inactivity for the whole of
his later life
(Freud 1910a: 135).
Here it seems out of place to talk of the repression of the original drives being lifted; for
if the repression were lifted there would be no account of the continuation of the
scientific and artistic drives and the continual asexuality.8 On this model, at its simplest,
Leonardo’s scientific and artistic drives, like his asexuality, are really kinds of symptoms
and, as per the usual Freudian model, working through the repressions behind the
symptoms should lead to elimination, or possibly the transformation, of the symptoms.
The notion that sublimation involves repression is re-enforced by one of Freud’s earliest
mentions of sublimation in his Three Essays on Sexuality.9 There he refers to ‘the
diversion of sexual forces from sexual aims and their direction to new ones—a process
that deserves the name of “sublimation”’ (Freud 1905a: 178). In the same place he goes
on to say ‘we would place its (sublimation’s) beginning in the period of sexual latency of
childhood’. Clearly such redirection on the part of the child involves non-conscious
repression of those sexual forces qua sexual forces, and such repression is exactly what
Freud describes as the progenitor of the period of sexual latency. It is not that the child
consciously faces his erotic desires and chooses not to act on them but pursue some other
activity as a substitute satisfaction. The sublimation of those desires first requires their
repression. Indeed, there is even some tendency in the psychoanalytic literature to at
least implicitly identify sublimation as a species of repression. For instance in
Sublimation: Inquiries into Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Hans Loewald writes
‘Traditionally sublimation is classified in psychoanalysis as a defence’ (Loewald 1988: 3),
and in fact Freud’s earliest reference to sublimation in his 1892 letter to Fliess refers to
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sublimations as ‘protective structures’ (Freud 1897: 247). A page later in a footnote

Loewald notes that:
It must be noted, however, that in the psychoanalytic literature, including works

by Freud himself, the very distinction between defence and repression has been
blurred, in as much as repression is used interchangeably with defense
(Loewald 1988: 4–5).
So if sublimations are defences and the notions of defences and repressions are
interchangeable it follows that sublimations are repressions. Fenichel indeed comments
that sometimes sublimation is called a ‘successful repression’ (Fenichel 1945: 148).
In fact while the Leonardo text and the extract from the Three Essays on Sexuality
suggest that repression is part of sublimation, often in other texts when Freud explicitly
considers repression and sublimation together he claims that sublimation is an
alternative to repression. Thus in a passage from Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis he
says: ‘Premature repression makes the sublimation of the repressed instinct impossible;
when the repression is lifted, the path to sublimation becomes free once more’ (Freud
1910b: 54). In a letter to Putnam, Freud even goes so far as to claim that the two are
mutually exclusive: ‘It (psychoanalytic theory) teaches that a drive cannot be sublimated
as long as it is repressed and that is true for every component of a drive’ (Hale 1971:
121).
To clarify the relation between sublimation and repression it helps to consider exactly
what gets repressed in repression. Here the best place to turn is Freud’s (1915) essay
‘Repression’ (Freud 1915: 141–58). A crucial point of that essay is Freud’s claim that a
drive has both an ‘ideational’ component and an energetic component, what Freud calls
‘a quota of affect’ (Freud 1915: 152). The ideational component is the intensional content
of the drive, including its aim. The energetic component is the force associated with that
aim, including the strength of the drive. In repression both the ideational component and
the force component are repressed. The repression of the ideational component involves
not letting the aim be consciously apprehended. The repression of the force involves not
letting the force be expressed in behaviour. While Freud refers to the repression of the
ideational component as ‘primal repression’ he emphasizes that ‘the vicissitude of the
quota of affect belonging to the representative is far more important than the vicissitude
of the idea’ (Freud 1915: 153). With this distinction in hand we can now see how
sublimation both does and does not involve repression. In sublimation the ideational
component may or may not be repressed. In the case of childhood sublimations, the aim
of the original drive, the drive’s ideational component, is typically held back from
conscious apprehension. In the case of sublimation reached through psychoanalytic
treatments typically the ideational component becomes available for conscious
apprehension. However, in all sublimations, therapeutically achieved or otherwise, the
force component is expressed in behaviour. All sublimations involve an expression of a
pent-up quota of affect. The picture suggested here is that all sublimations typically take
repressions as causal antecedents. In this sense sublimations are another manifestation
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of the phenomena that Freud calls ‘the return of the repressed’. What sublimations undo
is the repressing of the energetic component, they steer it to an outlet, an aim that
deviates from its original aim. Indeed in the passage quoted earlier from ‘Five Lectures
on Psychoanalysis’ Freud contrasts neurotics who owing to their repressions ‘have
sacrificed many sources of energy’ with cases of sublimation:
in which the energy of the infantile wishful impulses is not cut off but remains
ready for use—the unserviceable aim of the various impulses being replaced by
one that is higher, and perhaps no longer sexual
(Freud 1910b: 53–4).
Here Freud is explicitly claiming that in sublimation it is the repression of the energy that
is lifted.
This reading does not seem to square with the letter to Putnam where Freud says that
sublimation precludes the repression of any component of a drive. However, it is worth
noting that in that letter he is focused on the clinical practice of psychotherapy.
Presumably his idea is that the analyst is faced with a patient presenting various
symptoms which the patient experiences as distressing. These pathogenic symptoms are
the manifestation of various unconscious repressions. By bringing the repressed drives
into full consciousness—this of course involves more than just the patient’s intellectual
recognition of the drives—this allows for their expression in more acceptable forms. Note,
on this model it is not that the ideational component of the drive ceases to be suppressed
but that the suppression takes on a conscious form that somehow allows the energetic
component formerly associated with it to be redirected to new, more acceptable ends.
This model does not fit the non-therapeutic cases such as that of Leonardo since there is
no conscious recognition on Leonardo’s part of his underlying homoerotic drives. Nor
does it fit the text of Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality where the child in his latency
period has no conscious awareness of the desires being sublimated. Clearly the child
(unconsciously) represses rather than (consciously) suppresses his erotic desires. So the
conclusion to be drawn here is that the sublimation that is the result of successful
psychoanalytic intervention involves the lifting of unconscious repression of both the
ideational and energetic component; but the sublimation involved in typical cases of
scientific and artistic expression or that occurs in the latency period in childhood typically
only involve lifting of the repression of the energetic component and continued repression
of the ideational component. I suspect it is this model that leads to Fenichel’s idea of
sublimations as successful repressions; they are successful in that while the ideational
component is kept from consciousness the energy associated with it is allowed an outlet.
Freud’s claim in the Putnam letter that a drive cannot be sublimated as long as any
component is repressed would then have to be read as asserting that ‘in the practice of
psychotherapy a drive cannot be sublimated as long as it is unconsciously repressed’.
Nevertheless, this understanding of the relation of repression and sublimation still leaves
us hard-pressed to distinguish sublimation from other instances of the return of the
repressed, such as pathological symptoms.
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Nietzsche’s Solution
Nietzsche, like Freud10 and like their common predecessor Schopenhauer, takes
individual humans to be, at some fundamental level, collections of drives.11 However,
most modern humans, as members of what he denigratingly calls the herd, are simply
disorganized collections of competing drives, with different drives having relative
ascendancy at different times:
In the present age human beings have in their bodies the heritage of multiple
origins, that is opposite and not merely opposite drives and value standards that
fight each other and rarely permit each other any rest. Such human beings of late
cultures and refracted lights will on the average be weaker human beings (BGE
200).12
In many cases drives, particularly aggressive drives, are treated as per the Freudian
model by repression:
All instincts which are not discharged to the outside are turned back inside. This
is what I call the internalization of man. From this first grows in man what people
later call his ‘soul’. The entire inner world, originally as thin as if stretched
between two layers of skin, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, width,
and height to the extent that the discharge of human instinct out into the world
was obstructed (GM II 16).
Central to Nietzsche’s account is the notion of splitting off. Aggressive drives, which are
not viewed as acceptable, typically because acting on them would exact a painful
retribution, are suppressed to the point that one does not even acknowledge that one has
them; that is to the point where they are not simply suppressed but repressed.13 They
may nevertheless find their outlet often in disguised form. Indeed, often in a form that
contradicts their very nature. Thus Nietzsche claims that the Christian value of brotherly
love was originally, in fact, a transformed expression of hostile drives to dominate one’s
fellow men. By successfully preaching brotherly love the weak get their oppressors to
voluntarily disarm themselves and become subservient to the values of the weak. In doing
so they, both the weak and the strong who have been converted to the values of the weak,
split off their contrary aggressive drives from conscious apprehension, so that at the
same time they harbour both unacknowledged aggressive drives and acknowledged
beneficent drives. This repression and splitting-off of drives makes us sick creatures of
what Nietzsche calls ressentiment.14
For Nietzsche in certain rare cases drives, rather than being split off, are harnessed into
a centred, unified, whole. At one point Nietzsche took Wagner to be such a case:
The dramatic element in Wagner’s development is quite unmistakable from the

moment when his ruling passion became aware of itself and took his nature in its
charge: from that time on there was an end to fumbling, straying, to the
proliferation of secondary shoots, and within the most convoluted courses and
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often daring trajectories assumed by his artistic plans there rules a single inner
law, a will by which they can be explained (UM III 2).
The story of Wagner’s achievement of a higher unity borne from some master drive is of
course the story Nietzsche would repeat about himself in the dramatic section of Ecce
Homo where Nietzsche elaborates the subtitle of that work ‘How One Becomes What One
Is’:
To become what one is, one must not have the slightest notion of what one is …
The whole surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface—must be kept
clear of all great imperatives … Meanwhile the organizing ‘idea’ that is destined to
rule keeps growing deep down—it begins to command; slowly it leads us back
from side roads and wrong roads; it prepares single qualities and fitnesses that
will one day prove to be indispensable as a means towards the whole—one by one,
it trains all subservient capacities before giving any hint of the dominant task,
‘goal’, ‘aim’, or ‘meaning’ (EH, Why I am So Clever, 9).
This notion of the training of subservient drives is to be explicated in terms of the

redirection of those drives away from their initial, primary, goal towards a secondary goal
that is more in line with the master drive. This idea is partially expressed in the following
passage from Human, All too Human:
Microcosm and macrocosm of culture. Man makes the best discoveries about
culture within himself when he finds two heterogeneous powers governing there.
Given that a man loved the plastic arts or music as much as he was moved by the
spirit of science, and that he deemed it impossible to end this contradiction by
destroying the one and completely unleashing the other power; then, the only
thing remaining to him is to make such a large edifice of culture out of himself
that both powers can live there, even if at different ends of it; between them are
sheltered conciliatory central powers, with the dominating strength to settle, if
need be, any quarrels that break out. Such a cultural edifice in the single
individual will have the greatest similarity to the cultural architecture of whole
eras and, by analogy, provide continuous instruction about them. For wherever the
great architecture of culture developed, it was its task to force opposing forces
into harmony through an overwhelming aggregation of the remaining, less
incompatible powers, yet without suppressing or shackling them (HAH I, 276).
A point to be emphasized here is that on Nietzsche’s ideal weaker drives are not
suppressed or shackled. Rather they are to be harnessed to allow their expression in
service to a higher aim. Thus in his note books Nietzsche writes:
Overcoming of the affects? No, if that means their weakening and annihilation.
But instead employing them; which may mean a long tyrannizing of them … At last
they are confidently given freedom again: they love us as good servants and
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happily go wherever our best interests lie (KSA 12:39, see also HAH I, 224 and
276).
This gives us the material we need to affect a Nietzschean account of the distinction
between repression and sublimation. Sublimation is what happens when a drive’s primary
aim is substituted by a secondary aim that allows for expression of the drive in a manner
consonant with the master drive. As John Richardson succinctly puts it: ‘(D)rive A rules B
insofar as it has turned B towards A’s own end, so that B now participates in A’s
distinctive activity’ (1996: 33).15
Repression is what happens when a drive is denied its immediate aim and is then split off
from other drives in the sense that its aims are not integrated with the aims of other
drives and it must battle, often unsuccessfully, for any opportunity to achieve expression.
Consider again our cases of Leonardo and Schreber. Leonardo’s homosexual sexual drive
is redirected towards the secondary aims of scientific, as opposed to sexual, researches
and artistic creation, including idealized representations of the male body, as opposed to
actual sexual possession of male bodies. These ends fit in with his master drive of
scientific and artistic creativity. Schreber, on the other hand, by his own admission, splits
off his religious activity completely from his life as senate president. He claims that
neither activity in a way informs the other. Schreber does not integrate his sexual drive
with his wider life but strives to isolate it and separate its expressions from his other
activities.16
The Nietzschean solution to the problem of differentiating sublimation from pathological

symptoms may be summed up in the slogan sublimations involve integration or
unification, while pathological symptoms involve splittingoff or disintegration, as we
might call it. What is disintegrated is of course the (unified) self. For Nietzsche the
difference between repression and sublimation is that in sublimation the stronger drive
co-opts a weaker drive as an ally and this allows the weaker drive expression albeit to an
end that contains some degree of deflection from its original aim (for example Leonardo’s
homosexual drive is expressed in possession of idealized representations of male bodies
rather than literal possession of male bodies); whereas in repression the stronger drive
attempts to stifle any expression of the weaker drive so that its expression is either fully
stifled or can only be achieved in a heavily disguised form which often represents the
inverse of the original aim (the Christian’s hate and envy of, and desire to have power
over his fellow man, being expressed as professions of brotherly love and disinterest in
power). The relation between sublimation and repression is that often but not always
sublimations have repressions as antecedents. If a stronger drive does not at first have
sufficient strength to co-opt a weaker drive to it own ends it may simply act to stifle that
weaker drive.17 As the stronger drive gains in strength opportunities for co-option rather
than stifling may arise.18
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Sublimation and Ressentiment

For Nietzsche unified selves, what he takes to be genuine persons, are rare
achievements; hence he cautions ‘one should not at all assume that many humans are
“people”’(KSA 12: 491, translation mine), and ‘(m)ost men present pieces and fragments
of man: one has to add them up for a complete man to appear’ (KSA 12: 519).19 It is
Nietzsche’s aim to foster the development of such genuine persons. In the same vein his
Zarathustra says ‘it is my art and aim, to compose into one and bring together what is
fragment and riddle and dreadful chance’ (TSZ II, 21). Sublimation, for Nietzsche, is the
primary means to a unified self. Nietzsche, like Freud, takes sublimation as a mark of
health.
Nietzsche’s important and difficult normative ideas of amor fati, eternal recurrence, and
affirmation of life are all strongly related to his aim of overcoming ressentiment.20
Ressentiment is directly connected to repression in that where there is ressentiment there
is some drive that we have been forced to stifle. Nietzsche claims that in order to fully
love fate or to fully wish back everything eternally, both of which are exemplary ways of
affirming life, we would have to overcome all such ressentiment. To affirm all of one’s life,
to overcome ressentiment, would be to affirm all of one’s drives; life, for Nietzsche, being
nothing but a collection of drives.21 This does not mean to simply let all of one’s drives
have free expression. That would involve conflict, chaos and, inevitably, disintegration.22
It means harnessing one’s drives to allow them a form of concerted expression, as
Nietzsche himself nicely puts the point:
The multitude and disgregation of impulses and the lack of any systematic order
among them results in a ‘weak will’; their coordination under a single
predominant impulse results in a ‘strong’ will: in the first case it is the oscillation
and lack of gravity; in the later, the precision and clarity of direction (KSA 13:
394).
Sublimation is for Nietzsche the key means to such concerted expression and, hence, to
overcoming ressentiment.23
On Nietzsche’s picture of sublimation the questionable element of social valuation drops

out of the picture.24 Another important difference from the Freudian account is that the
notion of desexualization also drops out. Where in his account of sublimation Freud deals
primarily with a libidinal drive (Eros), Nietzsche allows for a multiplicity of drives.
Relatedly, for Nietzsche aggressive drives as well as sexual drives are prone to
sublimation. Given the problems of Freud’s notion of desexualization, and his concomitant
failure to revise his account of sublimation after his positing of a death drive separate
from the libidinal drive, these differences in Nietzsche’s account are a gain rather than a
loss. The price paid for this gain is that Nietzsche, much more than Freud, remains
unclear about the range of drives available for sublimation and repression.25
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On Nietzsche’s account the role of the ego in repressions and sublimations is dramatically
reduced. Rather than having a higher level agency, such as Freud’s ego or superego
censor lower level drives, Nietzsche simply posits an agonal struggle between the drives;
thus he says in Beyond Good and Evil: ‘The will to overcome an affect is, in the end, itself
only the will of another, or several other, affects’ (BGE 117). And even in those cases
where there is consciousness of the drive that is causing a disturbance, that
consciousness is not the engine of repression:
(T)hat one wants to combat the vehemence of a drive at all, however, does not
stand within our own power; nor does the choice of any particular method; nor
does the success or failure of this method. What is clearly the case is that in this
entire procedure our intellect is only the blind instrument of another drive, which
is a rival of the drive whose vehemence is tormenting us … While ‘we’ believe we
are complaining about the vehemence of a drive, at bottom it is one drive which is
complaining about the other; that is to say: for us to become aware that we are
suffering from the vehemence of a drive presupposes the existence of another
equally vehement or even more vehement drive, and that a struggle is in prospect
in which our intellect is going to have to take sides (D: 109).
While this passage allows that our conscious selves may be aware of the drive that is
causing us distress, it emphasizes another drive, not the conscious I, as the repressing
force. Other texts from Nietzsche make clear that he envisages such struggles between
drives often occurring with no conscious awareness, that is with no participation of the
conscious I, or ego, as Freud calls it (cf. for instance, the passages quoted earlier
describing Wagner and Nietzsche himself).
Klein, Segal, and Loewald: Towards a

Reconciliation of Freud and Nietzsche
While most of Freud’s texts on sublimation emphasize notions such as desexualization
and social valuations, there are occasional texts that emphasize the unifying element in
sublimations. In The Ego and the Id Freud tells us that sublimated energy may ‘retain the
main purpose of Eros—that of uniting and binding—as it helps towards establishing unity,
or a tendency to unity’ (Freud 1923: 45).26 While Freud fails to thematize this notion of
sublimation as unification, some post-Freudians, in particular those working in the
tradition of Melanie Klein, do attempt to thematize the important notions of
disintegration and integration in their discussions of sublimation.
In her essay ‘Infant Analysis’ Klein explicitly turns to consideration of Freud’s analysis of
Leonardo in order to ‘set forth more exactly the analogies and differences between
symptoms and sublimations’ (Klein 1926: 41). The key component she attributes to
Leonardo which allows him to achieve sublimations rather than hysterical conversions is
his capacity for ‘identification with the objects of the world around him’. It is this which
allows his fixations to ‘become consonant with the ego’ (Klein 1926: 43). According to
Page 13 of 27

Klein, having introjected various objects which are assigned both good and bad qualities
—this for Klein is a feature of what she calls the depressive position—sublimation is
achieved when hostility to introjected objects is overcome through phantasies that allow a
symbolic representation of the introjected object in a non-hostile form. It is through such
phantasies and symbolic representations that these introjected objects are integrated
with the ego. While we cannot hope to fully rehearse here Klein’s notion of depressive
position etc. what is clear is that for Klein sublimation involves integration and
overcoming of hostility to inner objects. Since these inner objects are for Klein
manifestations of drives (for instance bad objects are manifestations of aggressive
drives), Klein’s account of sublimation bears a striking resemblance to the Nietzschean
account offered earlier.27
The Kleinian account of sublimation as integration is a theme taken up by Hanna Segal in

her ‘A Psycho-Analytical Approach to Aesthetics’ which concludes that ‘a satisfactory
work of art is achieved by a realization and sublimation of the depressive position’ (Segal
1952: 206). For Segal this sublimation involves ‘the desire to unite’ (Segal 1952: 207).
Art, for Segal is a form of sublimatory activity, a working through of the depressive
position, that allows us through symbolic representations to take objects towards which
we have sadistic hostile impulses and reintegrate them into a world which is ‘whole,
complete and unified’ (Segal 1952: 204).
Another psychoanalyst, influenced by Klein, who identifies sublimation with a type of

integration, albeit under the name of ‘internalization’, is Hans Loewald. Internalization
according to Loewald involves ‘unconscious ego processes that undo the splitting off’ that
is characteristic of repression (Loewald 1973: 12). The splitting off that characterizes
repression, according to Loewald, ‘maintains psychic processes and structures on lower
organizational levels’ while sublimation, or internalization as he calls it, ‘leads to higher
organization and an enriched psychic life’ (1973: 14). In his later book Sublimation, in
reference to Freud’s Leonardo case, Loewald notes that ‘there are unitary experiences
which give way to experiences of differentiation, but that in sublimation the experience of
unity is restored’ (Loewald 1988: 45). Interestingly, Loewald (1973) cites Nietzsche, and
in particular Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, as a precursor for his own notion of
internalization. In fact Nietzsche’s term ‘internalization’ is closer to the notion of
repression than sublimation. For Nietzsche, as expressed in the passage from GM II 16
quoted earlier, internalization is the turning back of instincts that cannot be discharged
externally.
What is missing from these post-Freudian accounts of sublimation as integration or

unification, or a higher level of organization, is an account of what exactly is meant by
integration, unification, or higher organization. Nietzsche’s account of a master drive
with a determinate aim realigning the aims of weaker drives, to aims which augment
rather than conflict with the aim of the master drive, at least provides a start to such an
account. Whether Kleinians or other post-Freudians can utilize such a Nietzschean
conception of sublimation as unification without joining Nietzsche in putting such strong
conditions on what is necessary for unification, or without joining Nietzsche in his
Page 14 of 27

rejection of the notion of the role of the ego, is something that awaits further
investigation.
The Value of Sublimation

Above it was mentioned that both Nietzsche and Freud value health and took sublimation
to be a means toward health. Yet where Freud’s notion of health involves a fairly
moderate normative agenda, Nietzsche’s notion of health involves a much more radical
normative agenda. Freud, working more within a traditional medical model, took his
therapy to be primarily aimed at relieving psychic distress. In this vein he spoke of
‘transforming … hysterical misery into common unhappiness’ (Freud 1893–5: 305). For
Freud, repression leads to anxiety—in his quasi-energetic model this is expressed in
terms of the affective state caused by inhibition of discharge; pent up energy denied
realization causes a kind of system instability. Here it is clear why, given the aim of a
reduction of misery, sublimation, which allows for discharge of the drives, is to be
preferred to repression. Continuing in terms of the energetic model, repression leads to a
building up of pressure, sublimation allows for a release of pressure.
However on Nietzsche’s evaluative scheme the preference for sublimation over

repression is less clearly grounded. Nietzsche certainly did not place a high value on
contentment and often inveighed against it as a form of complacency; what he
disparagingly refers to as ‘green pasture happiness of the herd’ (BGE 44)—implying that
such a goal is worthy only of bovine animals. Where Nietzsche places the pursuit of
happiness as the aim of the last men and other lower types (Z Prologue 5), Freud, to some
extent echoing Schopenhauer, postulates it as the aim of humans in general:
They strive for happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This
endeavour has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand,
at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of
strong feelings of pleasure
(Civilization and Its Discontent, Freud 1930: 76).
Against this type of characterization Nietzsche, presumably having in mind various

utilitarian philosophers, quipped: ‘Man does not strive after happiness; only the
Englishman does that’ (TI, Maxims and Arrows, 12).
In Zarathustra Nietzsche refers contemptuously to ‘the last man’ as the ‘most

contemptible man’ who has ‘discovered happiness’ and who ‘makes everything small’;
such a man ‘will no more shoot the arrow of his longing out over mankind and the string
of his bow will have forgotten how to twang’ (Z, Prologue, 5). This metaphor of the
dissipation of tension contrasts vividly with his characterization of highly repressed
individuals who seethe with ressentiment. Indeed one of the most startling of his
characterizations of the generally negatively viewed psychic phenomena of ressentiment
is that it helped make man an ‘interesting animal’, that it gave him depth and that
Page 15 of 27

without it ‘(h)uman history would be much too stupid an affair’ (GM I 6–7). There is a
touch of both admiration and horror when Nietzsche writes of ‘the ressentiment of beings
denied the true reason, that of deed’, and of occasions where ‘ressentiment itself
becomes creative and gives birth to values’ (GM I 10).
One might think that perhaps Nietzsche’s objection to ressentiment and repression was
more on a quasi-moral ground: that one overtaken by ressentiment and repression
typically has a false view both of the object of ressentiment and of one’s own nature. For
instance, Nietzsche claims that repressed resentful slaves imagine, incorrectly, that their
masters are free to act other than in a masterly (i.e., slave oppressive) way and that they,
the slaves, have freely chosen to be meek, mild, turn the other cheek, etc., ‘weakness is to
be lied into a merit’ (GM I 14). Now for those who, working under the influence of
Christian morality, place a categorical value on truth, the objection that repression and
ressentiment typically lead their bearers to a false view of themselves and others, counts
as probative. In the Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche paints a story of repressed slaves
becoming creatures of resentment involved in massive self-deception knowing that his
readers, as inheritors of Christian morality, will naturally take the charge of self-
deception as a severe criticism. But what about those, allegedly such as Nietzsche
himself, who strive for an arche beyond Christian morality? The demand to be free of self-
deception, the demand for truth at any price, does not sit well with Nietzsche’s repeated
claims that lies and myths are a necessary part of life. Nietzsche repeatedly writes of the
need for self-deception (BGE 2, 4) and even claims that ignorance of one’s deeper drives
and motivations can often be healthy phenomenon (EH, Why I am So Clever 9). Christian
morality treats truth as a categorical and ultimate value, that is, as a final value that is
higher than all other values. For that reason it espouses a total rejection of all that is
opposed to truth, including falsity, myth, and self-deception. While Nietzsche does indeed
value truth, he sees it as one of many competing values. Health for Nietzsche involves a
certain balancing of these values; taking truth as a value to which everything must be
subordinated is for Nietzsche a form of pathology. Nietzsche recognizes that the health of
a certain individual or indeed of a certain culture is sometimes built upon certain lies,
myths, and self-deception. A Nietzsche who valorized truth above all else would be
subject to Nietzsche’s own trenchant critique of the ascetic ideal and its fetishization of
truth (GM III, passim).
It seems reasonable to conclude that Nietzsche does not prefer sublimation over
repression because the former facilitates a reduction of misery, and an easing of psychic
tension, or because repression leads to false beliefs or even self-deception.
One strand of Nietzsche’s arguments against repression is that it prevents a certain kind
of unity that he seems to value.28 It is in this deeper sense that through the effects of
repression we become ‘strangers to ourselves’ (GM, Prologue, 1); we do not simply lack
knowledge of ourselves but more importantly we have become estranged from parts of
ourselves. Through repression parts of our selves are split-off, not simply in the sense
that we have no conscious access to them, but in the sense that we contain within us
hidden affects and drives. These are separate movers that are not part of any integrated
Page 16 of 27

whole. Taken to the extreme, this notion of being strangers to ourselves actually
threatens the notion of a unified self. That is to say, we have strangers within ourselves,
so that, in fact, our self is no genuine self. We are nothing more than a jumble of different
voices/drives having no overall unity.29 But what is the basis for valorizing unity? Is it
merely an inheritance from the German romantics? Gemes (2006a) argues that Nietzsche
values unity because he thinks that it is a necessary condition for freedom and agency.
But then why value freedom and agency? Are these some of Nietzsche’s ultimate,
categorical values?30
Alternatively, or additionally, one might argue that Nietzsche, following the romantics,
believed that unity is the precondition for great creativity and high culture; these being
(some of) Nietzsche’s highest values. But Nietzsche himself, along with his story of the
repressed, resentful slaves/priests, and his story of Socrates, who create whole new
moral universes, seems to run counter to this claim. One suspects that Harold Bloom’s
thesis that strong poets, and, more generally, other creative types, have a sort of
resentment of their predecessors, a certain ‘anxiety of influence’, which spurs them to
their greatest creative deeds, would not at all be uncongenial to Nietzsche. One might
argue that in many such cases great creativity comes with the price of a certain
denigration of life—for Nietzsche the Christian and Socratic denigration of the non-
rational drives is simply a denigration of life. So even allowing that both repression and
ressentiment can be spurs to great creativity, Nietzsche would prefer a form of creativity
rooted in sublimation as it is more easily wedded to a genuinely life-affirming spirit.
Here is my final suggestion: One of Nietzsche’s fundamental grounds for preferring

sublimation to repression is ultimately aesthetic. According to Nietzsche repressed
persons have parts of themselves that they cannot accept; thus fundamentally
ressentiment is really directed at those very parts of themselves. What the repressed
person of ressentiment really hates is those parts of himself that his weakness, his
inability to act, has led him to repudiate and deny. This self hatred is ultimately
disfiguring and ugly. It is intriguing that Nietzsche suggests that his fundamental
objection to Socrates was that he was ugly. For Nietzsche, Socrates is a monster of reason
who has disfigured himself literally and metaphorically by suppressing all that is not
reason in himself:
In origin, Socrates belonged to the lowest class: Socrates was plebs. We know, we
can still see for ourselves, how ugly he was. But ugliness, in itself an objection, is
among the Greeks almost a refutation. Was Socrates a Greek at all? Ugliness is
often enough the expression of a development that has been crossed, thwarted by
crossing. Or it appears as declining development. The anthropologists among the
criminologists tell us that the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte,
monstrum in animo (A, ‘The Problem of Socrates’, 3).31
In the Gay Science (290) Nietzsche extols a certain kind of self-satisfaction as the ‘one
needful thing’. In doing so he raises a distinctly aesthetic objection to that human being
Page 17 of 27

who ‘is dissatisfied with himself and is constantly ready for revenge’, namely, that we, his
potential victims, have to ‘endure his ugly sight’.
It is doubtful that Nietzsche had some single ultimate categorical (i.e. end in itself) value.
More likely he had a variety of categorical values. Among other things, he valued, as ends
in themselves, great individuals, high culture, affirmation of life, expression of power, and
various aesthetic values (for instance, beauty). Indeed many of these he valued both
categorically and hypothetically (for the things they lead to). For instance, great
individuals are valued both as ends in themselves and as a means towards the
development of high culture. His strong preference for sublimation over repression is
perhaps best understood as embodying his belief that the former provides a more likely
path than the latter to realizing these values.32
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Notes:
(1) This chapter is a development of Gemes (2009).
(2) Freud often distinguishes between the aim and object of a drive. On one version of
Freud’s aim/object contrast the aim of a drive is simply satisfaction, or put another way,
its aim is to discharge its associated quanta of energy; and the object of a drive is that
characteristic activity or things towards which that energy is directed. However, Freud
often uses the aim/object contrast to differentiate the characteristic activity of a drive
(the aim) from the particular things that drive focuses on at different times (the objects).
In this chapter the term ‘aim’ is typically used in the sense of the active direction of a
drive. Thanks are due to Sebastian Gardner for bringing my attention to this point.
(3.) The term Freud invariably used is ‘Trieb’ which the translators of the Standard
Edition have unfortunately rendered as ‘instinct’ rather than ‘drive’.
Page 22 of 27

(4.) Bergler (1945: 77) similarly notes:
At the time Freud formulated his views on the subject (of sublimation), only the repressed
phallic and pre-genital wishes and their contributories were considered to be part of the
id. Later, Freud put at least equal stress on repressed aggressive trends. However, no
revision of the problem of sublimation was undertaken on the basis of this inclusion of
aggressive trends.
(5.) Cf., for instance, Glover (1931: 266–7); Hartmann (1955: 10); Arlow (1955: 515).
(6.) The editors of the Standard Edition hypothesize that among Freud’s lost
metapsychological papers from 1915–17 there was an essay dealing explicitly with
sublimation.
(7.) For instance, as late as his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis from 1933
Freud writes of psychoanalysis as a depth psychology that ‘is quite unfit to construct a
Weltanshauung of its own; it must accept the scientific one’, and later in the same work
writes ‘science is content to investigate and to establish facts’ (Freud 1933: 158, 162).
While it may be a fact that in society X walking only on the cracks in the pavement is
considered not socially valuable, the judgement that it not valuable and hence is a
neurotic symptom rather than a sublimation involves an endorsement of the norms of that
society and hence is beyond the purview of the mere establishing of facts. Alternatively
one is left with the difficult relativist position that all that one can say as a statement of
fact is that relative to the norms of society X it is sublimation and not a neurotic
symptom. There is no evidence the Freud endorsed this kind of relativism, even if many
post-Freudians would be happy to endorse it.
(8.) In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud gives perhaps his strongest formulation of the
claim that sublimations do not involve the removal of repressions: ‘The repressed instinct
never ceases to strive for complete satisfaction … No substitute or reaction formations
and no sublimations will suffice to remove the repressed instinct’s persisting
tension’ (Freud 1920: 42).
(9.) The first known references by Freud to sublimation occur in letters and drafts of
letters to Fliess dating from 1897 (Freud 1897: 247). The first reference to sublimation in
works published by Freud occurs in the Dora case (Freud 1905b: 50) and in the Three
Essays on Sexuality, both published in 1905.
(10.) There is a good deal of literature devoted to expounding the relationship between
Freud and Nietzsche. Unfortunately, much of it concerns the question of to what degree
Nietzsche anticipated Freud and to what degree Freud did or did not cover up influences
from Nietzsche. By and large, literature governed by these concerns tends to do little to
illuminate the work of either Freud or Nietzsche. Perhaps the best, or, at least, most
comprehensive, book of this questionable genre is Lehrer (1995). Less helpful is Assoun
(2000). A most succinct example of this genre is A. H. Chapman and Mirian Chapman-
Santana (1995).
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(11.) Schopenhauer was more prone to speak of wills (Willen) rather than drives (Triebe).
How much this is merely a terminological difference is a difficult question to answer. For
Schopenhauer, beyond individual time-located willings, there is, notoriously, the
transcendental notion of Wille, for which Nietzsche had no sympathy. However, Freud’s
notion of Eros may, arguably, be seen as a return to a more transcendental picture.
(12.) Note Nietzsche references are given not by page number, save for references to the
KSA, but rather by section or aphorism number. For instance ‘GM II 16’ refers to section
16 of the second essay of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality.
(13.) While Nietzsche never takes on anything approximating Freud’s topological model
of the id, ego, and superego (cf., for instance, The Ego and the Id, Freud 1923), Nietzsche
countenances different modes of suppression and repression that have echoes in Freud’s
topological model. For instance, in GM I Nietzsche tells the story of slaves who initially
suppress their drives principally because their reality principle tells them they are too
weak to act on those drives in the face of the masters’ oppression; later in GM Nietzsche
tells how that suppression takes on a more moralized form leading to full-blown
repression. Indeed, in sections 19–22 of GM II, Nietzsche tells how it is in reaction to our
debts to our fathers, forefathers, and God that we develop what he calls a guilty
conscience. The first kind of suppression is somewhat akin to suppression seated in the
ego and the second kind is akin to repression seated in the superego (itself formed,
according to Freud, through the internalization of god-like authoritarian father figures).
(14.) Reginster (1997) also argues that a kind of splitting of self is integral to
ressentiment, claiming that ‘ressentiment corrupts or dis-integrates the self’ (301).
(15.) More generally Richardson (e.g. 1996: 25) gives an account of Nietzsche on
sublimation that anticipates that given here. It is quite possible that this chapter’s
original inspiration comes from the excellent Richardson (1996) since, on reflection, that
seems to be true of so much of the current author’s work. Another source may have been
Simon May (1999) who persuasively argues that sublimation, power, and form creation
are Nietzsche’s key criteria for value. For an amusing, but much more important, case of
such ‘anxiety of influence’ I direct the reader to Bos (1992) which expounds the
convoluted relationship between Nietzsche and Freud on the concept of the ‘It’ or ‘Id’ as
mediated by the curious figure of George Groddeck, author of the somewhat notorious
Book of the It.
(16.) It’s worth noting that in section 205 from Beyond Good and Evil, quoted earlier,
after describing those ‘humans beings of late cultures’ who can contain a multitude of
drives fighting each other as ‘weaker human beings’, Nietzsche considers the case where:
a real mastery and subtlety in waging war against oneself, in other words, self control
self-outwitting, has been inherited or cultivated then those magical, incomprehensible,
and unfathomable ones arise … whose most beautiful expression is found … among artists
perhaps in Leonardo da Vinci.
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(17.) As Dina Emundts has pointed out to me, and as acknowledged earlier, such stifling,
which can be short of full stifling, does not mean the weaker drive need find no form of
expression. For instance, in Schreber’s case his repressed homosexual drive found outlet
in his paranoid fantasies and his transvestism. In the Christian slave, according to
Nietzsche, his repression of his desire to have what the masters have is expressed in his
proclaimed repudiation of the masters’ attainments. The point is that in repression, as
opposed to sublimation, those expressions typically take on the logic of opposites—
Schreber’s desire to be a female is expressed as his being forced by God to be a female
against his will, the Christian slave’s desire to have power over his masters is disguised
as an alleged love of his enemies and his renunciation of the desire for power. So where
repressed desires find expression they do so in a way that cannot be integrated into a
coherent whole, they represent disintegration not an integration of the subject.
(18.) Note, it is not being claimed here that Nietzsche uses the term ‘sublimation’ with
this exact meaning. While Nietzsche does occasionally use the term ‘Sublimieriung’ and
cognates in this writings (for instance, GM II 7) he never gives a thematized account of
sublimation. The account of sublimation as unification given here is described as a
Nietzschean account in that it is in line with many of his uses of that term and, more
importantly, it is based on one of Nietzsche’s central ideals of health. Even more
importantly, this account serves to underwrite the very distinctions between repression
and sublimation and between pathological symptoms and sublimations that Freud’s
account of sublimation fails to underwrite. This reading allows that in certain passages,
for instance KSA 12: 254, Nietzsche uses the term ‘Sublimieriung’ and cognates in ways
more akin to Freud’s actual usage and in ways that do not imply the notion of a united
self. Schacht (1983) claims that in fact Nietzsche tends to use the term ‘spiritualization
(Vergeistigung) in the sense of sublimation. He further contrasts this to Nietzsche’s term
‘internalization’ (Verinnerlichung). This accords with argument presented in the next
section that Nietzsche’s use of the term ‘internalization’ is better construed as repression
rather than sublimation.
(19.) Similarly, Nietzsche sees the achievement of free will as something open to a limited
few. For more on both these themes see Gemes (2006a).
(20.) The French term Ressentiment is expressly used by Nietzsche, most notably in GM,
essay I.
(21.) For more on this see Gemes (2008) where affirming drives is not explicated in terms
of taking a certain cognitive stance, endorsing some positive proposition about one’s
drives, but rather as fully expressing one’s drives.
(22.) One needs to be a little careful here in avoiding the suggestion that Nietzsche
favours some static permanent hierarchy among the drives. In fact, Nietzsche often
emphasizes the need for a kind of agonal struggle between the drives. Agonal struggle is
on the lines of a contest that develops, brings out, the best of the participants, rather
than a struggle that leads to their evisceration. While I do not believe there is genuine
conflict between the Nietzsche ideal of a unified self and the Nietzschean ideal of a self
Page 25 of 27

engaged in agonal struggle, limitations of space prevent me from developing this point
here. Suffice it for now to say that even a master drive, in order to fully develop itself,
needs the conflict of robust challenges.
(23.) Kaufmann (1980) similarly lays great stress on the importance of the notion of
sublimation for Nietzsche. In ch. 7, ‘Morality and Sublimation’, Kaufmann explicitly
contrasts repression and sublimation as two methods for dealing with the chaos of
impulses. Kaufmann places Nietzsche as a strong advocate of the second of these
methods. Indeed Kaufmann, while noting that other modern philosophers including
Goethe, Novalis, and Schopenhauer used the notion of sublimation, claims that is as
Nietzsche who gave the notion the connotation of the transformation of sexual energy
that it carries today (Cf. Kaufmann 1980: 219–20).
(24.) Since Nietzsche says little about the nature of master drives there is a certain
amount of vagueness about what counts as a unified self for Nietzsche. With the element
of social valuation absent there is the worry that, for instance, a reclusive obsessive
stamp collector may count as a unified self. For such a person we may envisage a stamp
collecting master drive. The answer here is that Nietzsche as a naturalist believes that as
humans we come with a rich panoply of inherited drives—this allows that we may also in
the course of acculturation acquire new drives. As a matter of empirical fact the reclusive
stamp collector will not be a being who is giving expression to all his drives (for instance,
drives to sociability, sexual drives, and aggressive drives).
(25.) In fact, some interpreters, including Heidegger (1979) and Adler (1928), insist that
for Nietzsche there is one basic drive or force, namely, will to power, and all more specific
drives are just modifications of this drive or force. But this is a difficult matter in
Nietzsche interpretation that I can’t here enter into.
(26.) Generally Freud emphasizes not unity but incompatibility between the demands of
various sub-personal agencies, such as the ego, superego, and the id. This is also true of
The Ego and the Id where he paints a picture of the ego being ever menaced by the
conflicting demands of the reality principle, the id, and the superego. It is in this voice
that he there labels Eros not as a uniter but as ‘a mischief maker’ (Freud 1923: 59).
(27.) I owe this observation about the relationship of internal objects to drives to a private
correspondence from Bernard Reginster.
(28.) While, as noted earlier, most of Freud’s texts on sublimation emphasize notions such
as desexualization and social valuations, there are occasional texts in which he, like
Nietzsche, emphasizes the unifying element in sublimations. In The Ego and the Id Freud
tells us that sublimated energy may ‘retain the main purpose of Eros—that of uniting and
binding—as it helps towards establishing unity, or a tendency to unity’ (Freud 1923: 45).
However, more typically Freud labels Eros not as a uniter but as ‘a mischief
maker’ (Freud 1923: 59). For more on this see Gemes (2009).
(29.) For more on this theme of self-estrangement see Gemes (2006b).
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(30.) Golomb (1989: 71) similarly argues that for Nietzsche sublimation is to be preferred
to repression because it allows for a certain kind of freedom, whereas repression tends to
transform its bearers into passive, defensive creatures. Indeed Golomb reasonably
concludes that while Nietzsche views the ordinary man as a creature of repression, he
takes the extraordinary Übermensh to be a product of successful sublimation.
(31.) Nietzsche’s relationship to Socrates is complex, involving elements of admiration

and repudiation. The admiration involves, among other things, recognition of his success
in framing a whole new moral universe and his courage in pursuing and facing death for
that vision. But even in passages such as GS 340, where we see some of that admiration,
Nietzsche characterizes Socrates as a ‘monster’ and as one who ‘suffered life’.
(32.) There is much in this last paragraph that reflects the enormous influence of my
colleague Andrew Huddleston on my thinking about Nietzsche. For more on this point see
Huddleston (2014). Thanks are also due to Gudrun von Tevenar, Sebastian Gardner,
Bernard Reginster, and to the participants of the St John’s College Research Centre’s
Interdisciplinary Seminars in Psychoanalysis for helpful feedback on this chapter, and to
Hanna Segal for discussions of her ideas about sublimation and how they differ from
Nietzsche’s. Initially I approached the topic of sublimation thinking that I could use Freud
to clarify Nietzsche on sublimation. It was Sebastian Gardner who, on hearing a paper in
which I gave my Nietzschean account of sublimation, helpfully suggested to me that
perhaps it would be more advisable to use Nietzsche to clarify Freud on sublimation.
Ken Gemes
Department of Philosophy, Birkbeck College, University of London
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Wish-Fulfilment

Wish-Fulfilment
Tamas Pataki
Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind Online Publication Date: Nov 2018

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198789703.013.15
The concept of wish-fulfilment as a substitutive mode of satisfying wish or desire was one
of Freud’s most important and singular psychoanalytic innovations. In his view dreams,
neurotic symptoms, conscious and unconscious phantasies, delusions, hallucinations,
jokes, much art, parapraxes, omnipotent thinking, illusions such as religion, the
institutions of morality and social organization are all wish-fulfilling phenomena or
attempts at wish-fulfilment. Although its remit is more circumscribed in contemporary
psychoanalysis, wish-fulfilment can be seen to underlie such important conceptions as
omnipotent phantasy, projective identification, actualization, and so on. This chapter
exposes in detail Freud’s singular innovation, relates it to some recent neuroscientific
work, and shows how Freud’s initial model of hallucinatory wish-fulfilment in dream and
infant phantasy gratification, together with his conception of symbolism, can be extended
to explain a range of symptoms as intentional behaviour, in line with Freud’s ambitious
claims for wish-fulfilment’s remit.
Keywords: Freud, wish-fulfilment, symbolism, intentional action, self-solicitude
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Subscriber: Tulane University; date: 16 December 2018

Wish-Fulfilment
Ordinary Wish-Fulfilment and Freudian Wish-

Fulfilment
When the seventeenth-century missionary Father Rageneau visited North America he
found the Huron people distinguishing three causes of disease: natural causes; sorcery;
unfulfilled wishes. Of the latter, some were known to the individual; others were not but
could be revealed to him in his dreams. These pathogenic wishes could be concealed and
then diviners were required to discover them. If the patient was mortally ill, the diviners
would declare the objects of his wishes were impossible to obtain. If there were chances
of recovery, a ‘festival of dreams’ was organized, a collection of valuables made among
the tribe and presented to the patient amidst banqueting and public rejoicing. Patients
not only recovered but sometimes emerged wealthy men.1 Here is a perspicacious—
almost ‘Freudian’—diagnosis of the malady of frustrated (or ineluctable) desire, and a
wonderful therapy. Here, pathogenic wishes, detected in dreams, are fulfilled in reality. It
is important to see at the outset precisely how the ordinary conception of wishes being
fulfilled instanced in this story differs from the topic of this chapter, Freudian wish-
fulfilment (henceforth FW). In the ordinary conception of wish-fulfilment a person wishes
for something; they get it; they know or believe that they get it and, as a result, cease
wishing.2 For their wishing to cease it is necessary that they at least believe that they get
it: our cycles of desire and action are governed by information, not, or not typically, by
exhaustion. And it is because they get it that they believe that they get it. Finally, it
doesn’t matter on this conception whether a wished-for object is attained by personal
effort or by gift. Simplifying a little: where ‘p’ denotes any state of affairs:
(A) In the ordinary sense of wish-fulfilment a wish that p is fulfilled only if:
(i) the wish is terminated: the agent ceases to wish that p;
(ii) the agent comes to believe that p;
(iii) p is actualized;
(iv) the wish is terminated because of the actualization of p.
The Freudian conception of wish-fulfilment is different. In the first edition of The

Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Freud introduced a theory according to which dreams,
neurotic symptoms, and conscious and unconscious phantasies, are wish-fulfilments.
Eventually he concluded that positive psychotic symptoms—delusions, hallucinations—
jokes and art, slips of the tongue, bungled actions, magical or omnipotent thinking,
illusions such as religion, the institutions of morality and social organization were also
wish-fulfilling or, recognizing that action can fall short of its object, attempts at wish-
fulfilment.3 The breadth of this array is striking: from the fictive representations of dream
and phantasy to involuntary neurotic tics to the purposeful action sequences of religious
observance, artistic creation, and character disorder. These phenomena, if indeed they
are wish-fulfilling, are so in a manner patently different from the ordinary conception: in
them, the objects of the wish are not attained, only a substitute or semblance is. FW is a
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Wish-Fulfilment
form of ‘substitutive satisfaction’. It is distinctive of the class that while conditions (i) and
(ii) are necessary, conditions (iii) and (iv) are not. Characteristically in FW either the
wished-for state of affairs is not actualized or, if it is, it has no causal role in the
termination of the wish. The terminative role must therefore rest entirely with (ii)
believing that p—or, perhaps, with experiential states functioning informationally and
terminatively in the manner of belief. Moreover, with the possible exception of aesthetic
appreciation, in all the cases described by Freud the agent initiates the wish-fulfilment.
FW is something an agent does, either intentionally, subintentionally or by some
expressive means.4 It cannot be a gift. Thus, Freud’s patient Dora sought by means of
hysterical symptoms to separate her father from his mistress. Even if the symptoms were
not manufactured intentionally by Dora, even if, say, they were dream-like expressions of
desire or phantasy, they could still have succeeded in separating the lovers, and thus be
wish-fulfilling in the Freudian sense. What would not count as FW is if, for example, a
brick fell on the mistress’s head.
On noting these features we may expect a spectrum of potential types of FW from simple
non-intentional cases, to cases where intention plays some subsidiary role, to ‘fully’
intentional cases where FW is itself intended. To accommodate this spectrum we
distinguish two conditions replacing conditions (iii) and (iv):
(B) For any wish that p, it is fulfilled in the manner of FW only if:
(i) the wish is terminated: the agent ceases to wish that p because:
(ii) the agent comes to believe (or, perhaps, experience) that p.
(v(a)) the agent initiates the wish-fulfilling process, in a sense that does not entail
but does not exclude intention; or
(v(b)) in self-solicitous types, fulfilment of the wish can be truly described in some
such way as ‘A intentionally fulfils A’s wish that p’ or ‘A intentionally gratifies
(consoles, appeases) A’.
So, possible examples of the simple cases may be infantile hallucinatory wish-fulfilment
and dreams, where representations caused by wishes in the primitive mental conditions
Freud describes as primary process functioning achieve FW. Further along,
representations of wished-for states of affairs may be generated intentionally, as in
recalling fond memories or daydream, though not yet with express purpose of wish-
fulfilment. In conditions of engrossment or reverie, however, vivid phantasy or
recollection may ephemerally be mistaken for reality. At the furthest end of the spectrum
are reflexive processes in which fictive representation, enactment, and manufactured or
tendentiously selected ‘evidence’, is used intentionally for the purpose of fulfilling wishes.
In the section on ‘Self-solicitude’ these reflexive, intentional forms of wish-fulfilment will
be recognized as members of a class of self-solicitous activities, expressions of internal
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Wish-Fulfilment
object relations, that include self-consolation and care but also pernicious acts of self-
appeasement and self-deception.
That is the conceptual outline of FW. It remains to show whether and how anything can
coherently fall under the concept.
Freud’s Basic Model

The concept of FW (though not of course articulated as stated earlier) is left undefined by
Freud in several respects. He doesn’t expressly distinguish FW from ordinary wish-
fulfilment and the various conceptions of precursors such as the ancient oneiromancers5;
and he often fails to distinguish between the representation of a wish being fulfilled, and
the fulfilment of a wish (either as process or end state), though this distinction has
significant consequences. Thus he writes of the famous Irma dream that its ‘content was
the fulfilment of a wish and its motive was a wish’ (Freud 1900: 119) and of a ‘delusion
having as content the fulfilment of the wish’ (Freud 1922: 226). But other passages go
further: ‘Dreams are … guardians of sleep which get rid of disturbances of sleep … a
dream does not simply give expression to a thought, but represents the wish-fulfilled as a
hallucinatory experience … the dream does not simply reproduce the stimulus [the wish],
but removes it, gets rid of it, deals with it, by means of a kind of experience’ (Freud 1916–
17: 129). Again: ‘Symptoms serve for the patient’s sexual satisfaction; they are a
substitute for satisfaction of this kind …’ (Freud 1916–17: 299). The idea that FW
terminates or ‘pacifies’ (Hopkins 1995) wishes and provides substitutive satisfaction is in
fact a theoretical necessity in Freud’s scheme. Mere representation of wishes fulfilled
fails to capture the specific functions assigned to dreams and symptoms: to preserve
sleep, resolve conflict, circumvent realistic action. FW involves less than full satisfaction
of a wish in the ordinary sense but more than mere representation: it involves, as well
(usually temporary) termination of the wish.
Freud describes the simplest form of FW, the hallucinatory wish-fulfilment of the infant,
in a famous passage:
A hungry baby screams or kicks helplessly … the excitation arising from the
internal need is not due to a force producing a momentary impact but to one
which is in continuous operation. A change can only come about if in some way or
other (in the case of the baby, through outside help) an ‘experience of satisfaction’
can be achieved which puts an end to the internal stimulus. An essential
component of this experience of satisfaction is a particular perception (that of
nourishment, in our example) the mnemic image of which remains associated
thence forward with the memory trace of the excitation produced by the need. As
a result of the link that has thus been established, next time this need arises a
psychical impulse will at once emerge which will seek to re-cathect the mnemic
image of the perception and to re-evoke the perception itself, that is to say, to re-
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Wish-Fulfilment
establish the situation of the original satisfaction. An impulse of this kind is what
we call a wish; the re-appearance of the perception is the fulfilment of the wish;
and the shortest path to the fulfilment of the wish is a path leading direct from the
excitation produced by the need to a complete cathexis of the perception. Nothing
prevents us from assuming that there was a primitive state of the psychical
apparatus in which this path was actually traversed, that is, in which wishing
ended in hallucinating. Thus, the aim of the first psychical activity was to produce
a ‘perceptual identity’—a repetition of the perception which was linked with the
satisfaction of the need (1900: 565–6; cf. 1950: 317–19, 332–3).
First, there is the perception of a real experience of satisfaction achieved through

‘outside help’. Subsequently when an internal need (or stimulus) gives rise to a wish (or
psychical impulse) and their—presumably it is both the need and wish—immediate
satisfaction is blocked, as it is in the helpless unattended infant and sleeper, a
topographical regression, a backward movement of psychic energy to the perceptual
system of the mental apparatus, ensues and a reactivation of a memory of satisfaction as
a hallucinatory experience provides a ‘perceptual identity’ with ‘an essential component’
of the original experience of satisfaction. A memory of a previously satisfying experience
is ‘mistaken’ for a perception of the original experience and it is for the infant as if its
wish has been satisfied: the wish is terminated. This outcome is characteristic of the
primary process mode of mental functioning whose key characteristics include mobility of
cathexis and ‘the replacement of external by psychical reality’ (Freud 1915b: 187). The
hallucinatory or fictive experience of satisfaction (henceforth EOS) that terminates the
wish does not terminate, but occludes, the endogenous stimuli that gives rise to the wish.
Hunger gives rise to a wish to be fed; the infant hallucinates being fed and this pacifies
the wish but not the hunger. Clearly pacification will be the more effective the more
remote a wish is from the needs which give rise to it.
We are to imagine a similar process occurring in the rest of the wish-fulfilling series:
dream, symptom, art, and so on. In essence, this is an informational conception of FW:
wishing is terminated when a belief or, perhaps, an information-laden experience,
registers that the wished-for state of affairs has been actualized. In the early Project
(1950), Freud exposed an underlying energic or mechanical model on which the
achievement of an EOS has several far-reaching neuronal consequences. One of them is a
‘lasting discharge’ which brings the ‘urgency which had produced unpleasure in w
[consciousness]’ to an end, thereby reducing the psychical excitation of free (unbound)
energy in accord with the overriding principle of inertia (or constancy) (Freud 1950: 318).
The reduction (or elimination) of psychical excitation as the governing principle of mind
remained a constant in Freud’s metapsychological formulations. It is notable, however,
even in this early work, that the energic conceptions ride on Intentional or common-
sense-psychological ones; and this is of a piece with Freud’s gradual realization that
these idioms were indispensible for describing mind (cf. Freud 1895: 160–1). He realized,
for example, that the regressive revival of a memory-percept in dream is by itself
insufficient for the efficacy of the EOS; for the EOS to be efficacious the memory percept
must, as well, ‘meet with belief’ (Freud 1950: 322–3, 339). Thus ‘we could well imagine
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Wish-Fulfilment
the dream-work penetrating to mnemic images of this [regressive] kind, making

conscious to us what was previously unconscious, and holding up to us a wishful phantasy
which rouses our longing, but which we should not regard as a real fulfilment of the wish.
Hallucination must therefore be something more than the regressive revival of mnemic
images that are themselves Ucs’ (Freud 1917: 231). So how do the mnemic images ‘meet
with’ belief? In the state of sleep, Freud says, attention cathexis are withdrawn from ‘the
system Cs. as well as the other systems, the Pcs. and the Ucs., in so far as the cathexis in
them obey the wish to sleep. With the system Cs. thus uncathected, the possibility of
reality testing is abandoned; and the excitations which, independently of the state of
sleep, have entered on the path of regression will find the path clear as far as the system
Cs. where they will count as undisputed reality’ (Freud 1917: 234). In the conditions
Freud describes ideas or representations of wished-for states of affairs brook no
contradiction and function as wish-fulfilling representations: psychical reality is mistaken
for external reality. One might say that from the perspective of the dreamer the fictive
EOS or hallucination functions as irrecusable evidence for wish-fulfilling beliefs. In such
conditions, we may say, a person is engrossed.6
That is the basic model. We have noted that FW compasses as well as dreams and
hallucination, neurotic and some psychotic symptoms, religious devotion, the making and
experience of art, and so forth, but with the exception of ‘symbolic wish fulfilment’,
understood in a wide sense, Freud provides little guidance on how the basic model can be
extended to accommodate these other putatively wish-fulfilling phenomena. The latter
generally involve intentional action, and it does appear to have been Freud’s view, and I
think it is the correct view, that some forms of FW are brought about intentionally, either
as adventitious consequences of intentional acts or as directly intended i.e. where FW is
itself intended in an act of self-solicitude. The basic model is evidently based on an
incipient neuroscience that is theoretically meagre even for explaining dreams and
hallucination, and especially so for the more complex cases of FW. The kernel of Freud’s
model can be extended, however, with considerable plausibility, as following sections
show.
Representation and Symbolism

Apart from the transparent dreams of young children, few dreams, let alone symptoms
and their kin, have conscious content that is manifestly wish-fulfilling. It is Freudian
doctrine that these phenomena are mostly disguised wish-fulfilments, partly as an effect
of unconscious primary processes and partly because of defensive activity to protect
consciousness from disruptive stimuli. Freud distinguishes latent from manifest content
in dream and symptom. In the case of dreams, the latent content or ‘dream thoughts’
consist of recent day residues interwoven with older aroused emotion-laden memories
and wishes, and this content is transformed into the manifest, consciously experienced
dream—the fictive experience of satisfaction or EOS (or cluster of EOSs)—by the
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Wish-Fulfilment
processes of the ‘dreamwork’: condensation, displacement, conditions of representability,

secondary revision, and symbolism. So, famously, dreams require interpretation, and that
ultimately involves uncovering the group of wish-fulfilments implicit in the dream:
‘Dreams frequently seem to have more than one meaning. Not only … may they include
several wishfulfilments one alongside the other; but a succession of meanings or
wishfufilments may be superimposed on one another, the bottom one being the fulfilment
of a wish dating from earliest childhood’ (Freud 1900: 219). Of his ‘specimen’ dream of
Irma’s injection Freud writes:
The dream fulfilled certain wishes which were started in me by the events of the
previous evening (the news given me by Otto [that Freud’s patient Irma was still
unwell] and my writing of the case history). The conclusion of the dream, that is to
say, was that I was not responsible for the persistence of Irma’s pain, but that Otto
was. Otto had in fact annoyed me by his remarks about Irma’s incomplete cure,
and the dream gave me my revenge by throwing the reproach back on to him … I
was not to blame for Irma’s pains, since she herself was to blame for them by
refusing to accept my solution. I was not concerned with Irma’s pains, since they
were of an organic nature … Irma’s pains had been caused by Otto giving her an
incautious injection of an unsuitable drug—a thing I should never have done
(Freud 1900: 118–19).
Freud’s detailed analysis is too ramified to present here (see Hopkins 2015: 71–85; also
Hopkins this volume) but the wish-fulfilments contained in the dream may be roughly
divided into relatively obvious ones such as Irma’s pains being organically caused, where
the dream text practically wears the EOS on its sleeve (‘Dr. M. … confirmed it … “There is
no doubt it is an infection”’); and those that are disguised by the dreamwork. The
‘incautious injection’ with which Otto is rebuked leads Freud to partially repressed
painful memories. Years earlier he had injected his patient Mathilde with a substance
then considered harmless, resulting in her death; and on his advice Freud’s friend Ernst
began using cocaine for the relief of intractable pain, and by misuse quickly succumbed
to it. So Otto with his thoughtless and probably dirty syringe is blamed not only for Irma’s
condition but also for the deaths of Mathilda and Ernst. If Otto is to blame then Freud is
not. If FW is to succeed then it must be for the dreaming Freud as if Otto was responsible
for the earlier deaths even though there is no conscious EOS to that effect. How does the
dream do it?
At first pass, FW is effected by elements of the manifest dream representing multiple

elements in the latent dream thoughts, utilizing condensation, displacement, and
symbolism. Condensation leads chiefly to the formation of ‘collective and composite
images’ of figures or actions. So we are told that Irma ‘stood for’ Freud’s eldest daughter,
his wife as well as Mathilda, and that she acquired a series of still ‘other meanings’ and
‘allusions’: ‘Irma became the representative of all these figures which had been sacrificed
to the work of condensation, since I passed over to her, point by point, everything that
reminded me of them’ (Freud 1900: 293). But how precisely does such representation by
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means of condensation facilitate FW? Freud’s unsatisfactory answer is that in

condensation ‘ideas are formed which are endowed with great intensity’ and ‘the
intensities of the individual ideas become capable of discharge en bloc and pass over from
one idea to another …’ (Freud 1900: 595). This is not helpful, of course, because we have
no idea how to relate meaning or representation to psychical intensity, or the facilitations
effected by relations of meaning to discharge. Moreover, it turns on the awkward
proposition that in condensation one element of a composite figure stands for other
elements of it. Whatever we come to make of these problems we can see why Freud also
considers displacement as a form of representation, for it too involves a transfer of
‘psychical intensity’ or ‘value’ (distinguished from ‘sensory intensity’), in which an
element of low value comes to stand for one with high value.
Condensation and displacement do not exhaust the relation of representation. Freud

eventually recognized an exclusive type of representation—symbolism—attended with
conditions distinguishing it from the other types. Symbols in this distinctively
psychoanalytic sense are semantically opaque to the subject because their meaning or
referent is either repressed or innately and unreflectively given, conditions not imposed
on the other processes (Freud 1901a: 683). This is the sense in which a snake can
symbolize a penis without condensation, or even displacement. Symbolism in this strict
sense need not depend on these processes of the dreamwork.7
Putting aside Freud’s unhelpful explanation in terms of energic discharge, can we explain
how representation, either as symbolism (strictly) or in the awkward manner Freud
attributes to condensation and displacement, facilitates and extends FW? Two considered
theses recommend themselves. In regard to symbolism, Petocz (1999: 233) argued that
the wish-fulfilling efficacy of the symbol rests on an unconscious belief in the identity of
symbol and symbolized. As a consequence ‘the symbol is mistaken for the symbolised and
treated as if it were the symbolised’ leading, ‘for reasons not properly understood’, to a
kind of ‘gratification which is not as complete as would be the gratification obtained from
the satisfaction, via primary objects and activities, of the unopposed instinctual
impulse’ (Petocz 1999: 233). Such a belief in identity cannot be excluded (see the section
on ‘Intention in Wish-Fulfilment’), but it does not seem to be an indispensible condition
for symbolic FW. It may be that an operation on the symbol is simply taken to be, is
apprehended as, an operation on its referent, without belief in their identity.8 The
sorcerer who sticks pins in an effigy need not believe the effigy is his enemy. The
supposed causal relations between effigy and referent are supported by an immense raft
of beliefs and practices; there appear to be many different ways in which symbolic
relations are established, and that may be true of unconscious symbolism also.
That reflection suggests the approach in Hopkins (2000; 2016) which bundles
condensatory and (strictly) symbolic forms of representation under the head of symbolic
cognition. It draws attention to the pervasiveness of symbolic and metaphoric
associations informing all thought and action, naturally established over the course of
life, so that ‘present significant figures and situations partly inherit their meanings from
past ones, to which they are unconsciously mapped’ (Hopkins 2000: 12). So, given
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Freud’s fixed association between Irma and Mathilda, in representing Otto as giving a
toxic injection to Irma, Freud at the same time pacifies his wish not to have been
responsible for the death of his earlier patient. The pacification of the contemporary
desire ‘went together’ with that of the deeper, more painful one (Hopkins 2000: 12). It
would seem that for FW to succeed on either of these views—or on related views of
unconscious representation—there must be some occurrence of unconscious
understanding or apprehension underwriting them. Whether, as on Petocz’s account, an
unconscious belief in the identity of Irma and Mathilda entails that an operation on the
one is experienced as if it were an operation on the other; or whether, as on Hopkins’s
account, representations of Irma and Mathilda become condensed and interchangeable
through association; the pacification of Freud’s wish that it was Otto (and not Freud) who
had killed Mathilda would require that it be for him as if Otto had killed Mathilda. That
would seem to entail the acquisition of a belief that Otto killed Mathilda—for there is no
EOS whose content is Otto killing Mathilda. The passage from the EOS—the tableau
which has Otto (almost) injecting Irma—to the content of Otto killing Mathilda requires a
process of thought arriving at an unconscious understanding or belief that it is so.9 So it
would appear from the common-sense-psychological perspective. The symbolic
associations between Irma and Mathilda may perhaps be best understood in sub-personal
terms, but the wish-fulfilling belief about Otto killing Mathilda cannot be.
A Neuroscientific Model
The neuroscience upon which Freud drew was in its infancy and his conception of
psychical energy was a placeholder waiting on the deliverance of more advanced science.
In a series of papers Hopkins (2012, 2015, 2016, and this volume) has integrated
fundamental aspects of Freudian theory with the recent ‘free energy’ neuroscience
developed by Karl Friston and his colleagues, one of several neuroscientific models
currently in contention. Friston’s information-theoretic conception of free energy (FE) is
not Freud’s but, as Hopkins points out, they both assign FE the same overall functional
role in the brain. In Freud’s work (1950; 1911) and under Friston’s (2010) FE principle
the brain seeks to minimize FE aroused by sensory and interoceptive impingements. I
summarize some relevant background to Hopkins’s synthesis before focusing on the role
the experience of satisfaction (EOS) plays in the account of wish-fulfilment that emerges
from this neuroscientific model.
In the terms of this account (which bears similarity to Freud’s notion of primary process
and Kleinian unconscious phantasy), the brain comes equipped with an innate model of
the world and a ‘virtual reality generator’ (Hobson, Hong, and Friston 2014), which
generates predictions about sensory and interoceptive impingements and, by testing
them in awake states, constructs increasingly veridical models of the world. A basic claim
of FE neuroscience is that ‘conscious perceptual experience is a form of explanatory
hypothesis, that at once unifies, predicts, and inhibits the impingements that cause it,
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thereby minimizing the FE associated with them’ (Hopkins 2016: 3). The FE of a model is
the difference between its complexity and its accuracy. Accuracy (roughly) is a measure of
how well the model is predicting the data. Complexity reflects the number of parameters
or potential trajectories for action composing the model and the extent to which they are
modified in coming to predict data. Increase in complexity (without increase in accuracy)
increases free energy. The imperative to minimize free energy therefore entails reduction
in complexity, rendering the models more efficient in making predictions. During the day,
it is argued, the huge influx of sensory input increases prediction error and, so,
complexity. During sleep, with abatement in sensory input, and accuracy irrelevant, the
brain or ‘generative model’ is freed to reduce complexity, enabling it to generate more
efficient predictions in waking. It does this by, amongst other things, manufacturing in
REM dream fictive or counterfactual virtual reality—various EOS—which inhibit realistic
movement trajectories or parameters, including those associated with emotional and
motivational conflict.
Hopkins makes the important suggestion that emotional and motivational conflict (too
many or conflicting trajectories of action) and trauma (required emotional adjustments
cannot be integrated) may plausibly be viewed on this model as sources generative of
neurocomputational complexity. So in sleep, for example, the most significant nocturnal
disruptions arise from recent emotion-laden memories of the sort Freud described as ‘day
residues’ and those remotely linked and often disturbing emotions and wishes which are
aroused and then condensed or consolidated with the more recent ones. Given the role of
the brain as conceived above we can see how dreams and symptoms generic to phantasy
or hallucinatory experience, which are viewed in psychoanalysis as ultimately products of
conflict and trauma, may in large measure be productions functioning to reduce
complexity. For if we now take the arousing materials of the dream as input, then, in
accord with the basic claim of FE neuroscience, ‘the fictive perceptual experiences of
dreaming [i.e. experiences of satisfaction] could serve to unify, predict, and inhibit these
arousals, thereby minimizing FE (as emotional conflict/complexity) in a way closely
analogous to the realistic perceptual experiences of waking’ (Hopkins 2016: 4). So on this
view, the brain calculates the optimal motor trajectory for reducing free energy (on
multiple interacting neurocomputational levels) by predicting sensory trajectories for
courses of action. The EOS is then the culminating part of the sensory trajectory
represented as conscious experience. But the EOS is not just the phenomenal end
product of a sub-personal process; it is posited as having a causal role. In dream and
symptom fictive experiences of satisfaction are figured as mitigating conflict, thereby
reducing complexity and, so, FE, by eliminating incipient or conflicting trajectories or
possibilities of action.
Precisely how does a fictive EOS reduce or eliminate conflicting parameters or potential
trajectories? In essence this is a reformulation of the question of how the EOS is
efficacious in FW. Recall the discussion of Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection. On
Hopkins’s view we have a sub-personal generative model acting in response to the dream
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arousals ‘inhibiting (pacifying) them by creating Freud’s fictive experience of innocence

and vindication, and so reducing the emotional complexity (adversity, conflict, and
potential to cause depressive trauma) of the whole family of memories under
reconsolidation’ (Hopkins 2016: 14; this volume). The dream, he says:
introduced an ideal alternative counterfactual model which perforce realized an

ideal fictive sensorimotor trajectory by which, and in accord with Freud’s priors of
the previous day, the adverse emotional situation precipitated in him by Otto’s
unwelcome remark could be restored to a personally satisfactory (and free-energy
minimal) equilibrium. Thus Freud could wake in the morning free from the self-
justificatory and depressive trend in which he had spent the day and evening after
Otto’s remark …’ (2016: 15).
Now these passages hint at a number of perplexities that arise, I think, from the
unresolved conjunction of sub-personal and personal perspectives. We can start with
contrasting the view of dreams being exposed here with Freud’s. According to Freud, the
dream produces a transient EOS that pacifies disruptive wishes in a hallucinatory manner
and guards sleep; it does not effect a lasting change in mind. It is perhaps in this vein
that Hopkins wrote of the dream ‘as a kind of perfect and all-encompassing miniature
hallucination, in which the deluded dreaming subject utterly obliterates both what is
happening in his mind and how things are in the world …’ (Hopkins 2012: 258). Here it is
clearly engrossment in the EOS—the all-encompassing hallucination—that represses or at
least pacifies parameters (conflicting trajectories, wishes etc.) inconsistent with the
brain’s dominant model. Wishes are pacified but they are not terminated. On the later
account (Hopkins 2016; this volume), incompatible parameters are terminated or
readjusted to achieve reduction in complexity. The dreamer receives not just a transient
substitutive satisfaction enabling him to continue sleeping: his mind is permanently
modified; thus, as Hopkins says, Freud awakes free from his depressive, self-accusatory
mood to pursue the day with enhanced creativity. Perhaps that is so, or partly so. But then
the generative model’s work of emotional consolidation, conflict elimination, and
inhibition as described by Hopkins at a sub-personal level seems to leave open the causal
role, if any, of the Intentional and phenomenal properties of the EOS in complexity
reduction. A situation where the generative model does indeed create an EOS, and the
EOS does its work of complexity reduction, but entirely by virtue of its neural properties,
not its Intentional and phenomenal properties, seems quite conceivable. In that case the
experience of that complex tableau of EOS dreamt by Freud would seem to be
epiphenomenal, causally inefficacious.10
If that is possible then there would appear to be ambiguity, if not incoherence, in this
neuroscientific account of wish-fulfilment. But even if that is not right and there is no
contradiction between what the sub-personal mechanism yields and the alleged
Intentional causality of the EOS, the account would still seem to be deficient. As I argued
in preceding sections, for a dream-wish to be fulfilled it must be for the dreamer as if the
wish’s object had been attained and that in most cases—given the absence of a
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corresponding EOS—requires the belief that the object has been attained. It does not
seem to me that the account of FW considered in this section satisfies that condition.
Whether or not that is the correct understanding of it, both the Freudian basic model and
this more sophisticated neuroscientific one appear limited in accounting for the full range
of FW as Freud envisaged it. Hopkins’s thesis is directed at explaining dream, phantasy,
neurotic and psychotic thought, and delusion. It is unclear (to this author, anyway) how it
is to be elaborated to explain wish-fulfilling action, the extended ordered sequences of
action constituting personality disorder, religious devotion, and aesthetic experience. The
next two sections make an attempt to explain some of these phenomena along Freudian
lines, retaining their presumptive wish-fulfilling character. But other, and perhaps more
attractive, alternatives may present themselves: (i) to abandon Freudian wish-fulfilment
as the fitting mode of explanation for these phenomena or (ii) to abandon altogether the
attempt to provide Intentional explanation for the pathological developments Freud (and
others) charted.11
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Intention in Wish-Fulfilment
We said that the Freudian account of wish-fulfilment is intended to compass a wide array
of activities including those that, on the face of it, are deliberate and intentional. The
therapeutic imperative to formulate aetiologies for his clinical cases led Freud to hold:
that neurotic symptoms, including enactments (obsessional routines, for example), are
caused by unconscious wishes, reasons, and intentions; that these motives are not
categorically different from corresponding conscious motives; and that they cause actions
in much the same ways as conscious motives do.12 That symptoms and their kin may have
unconscious causes is relatively uncontroversial; the stronger contention that they may
be produced intentionally, indeed as the end of practical reasoning, is problematic, and
few have followed Freud so far. The view is counter-intuitive: symptoms certainly appear
to be unintended, involuntary, and unpleasant. Again, intention, of all motivational
concepts, has the closest affinity with conscious deliberation: ‘unconscious intention’
looks like an oxymoron. Unconscious intentional agency entails unconscious practical
reasoning, acting, or resolving to act upon practical syllogisms—schemas whose main
premise is a desire, minor premise an instrumental belief, and conclusion an intention or
action. But as we shall soon see that is a taxing entailment. Moreover, given that in most
typical behavioural symptoms conscious intentional agency remains intact, the operation
of countervailing unconscious intentional agency would at least in some circumstances
entail an apparently untenable partition or dissociation of self into quasi-independent,
self-like centres of agency (Pataki 2003: 162–76).
Because of these difficulties most of the philosophers who reject partitive conceptions of
mind as incoherent pursue non-intentional analyses of dream, wish-fulfilling phantasy and
symptom; and largely ignore the role of FW in art, religion, and social action. My view,
however, is that the concept of unconscious intentional agency is coherent and indeed
essential for the explanation of the causal structure of many typical disorders and types
of activity. To convincingly establish that view requires a larger canvas than I have here,
but I can begin to sketch the main lines of its development.13
In Lecture 17 of the Introductory Lectures Freud discusses an obsessional symptom in a

nineteen-year-old girl:
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[T]he most important stipulation related to the bed itself. The pillow at the top end
of the bed must not touch the wooden back of the bedstead … The eiderdown had
to be shaken before being laid on the bed so that its bottom end became very
thick; afterwards, however she never failed to even out this accumulation of
feathers by pressing them apart … She found out the central meaning of the bed
ceremonial one day when she suddenly understood the meaning of the rule that
the pillow must not touch the back of the bedstead. The pillow, she said, had
always been a woman to her and the upright wooden back a man … If the pillow
was a woman, then the shaking of the eiderdown till all the feathers were at the
bottom and caused a swelling there had a sense as well. It meant making a woman
pregnant; but she never failed to smooth away the pregnancy again, for she had
for years been afraid that her parents’ intercourse would result in another child
and so present her with a competitor (1916–17: 265–8).
Freud understood this nightly ritual as the girl’s wish-fulfilling attempt to prevent her
parents’ sexual intercourse and to resist anxieties connected with the birth of a
competitor. The performance certainly presents as a sequence of intentional actions, but
initially the girl could provide no reasons for performing them and found her own actions
unintelligible. Before sleep anxious thoughts presumably assailed her: ‘if I want to get
some sleep then I had better separate the pillow from the bedstead etc.—I can’t help
doing that anyway’. But such thoughts do little to illuminate the causal structure of the
symptom. Her performance is involuntary: against her conscious will. She doesn’t know
why she does what she does; she seems a mere spectator of her own actions. In not
knowing her efficacious motives she doesn’t consciously know what she is doing, under
the descriptions that would be revelatory of why she behaves as she does. If we follow
Freud’s principal interpretation then as a preliminary attempt we can construct a
practical syllogism for her behaviour:
Girl wishes to separate mother and father.
Girl believes that by separating bedstead and pillow she will separate mother and
father.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Girl separates bedstead and pillow.
The desire expressed in the major premise and the belief expressed in the minor premise
are unconscious but if her performance accords with this syllogism it is plainly
intentional. Then given her belief and action she will have achieved the Oedipal wish
expressed in the major premise in the manner of FW: it will be for her as if she had
separated her parents: her wish is pacified, anxiety is allayed, she sleeps. The glaring
difficulty is that the minor premise expresses a ‘mad belief’: who could hold such
irrational or bizarre beliefs, or act on them?14
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We can in fact construct a number of practical syllogisms for the performance by

considering again the issue of representation and symbolism. On the face of it the girl
appears to unconsciously believe that if she separates the bedstead and the pillow she
will have separated her parents. Believing this proposition is not the same as, nor does it
presuppose, believing that her parents were identical with the furnishings (although the
latter is not a belief that can be ruled out tout court). The sorcerer who sticks pins into an
effigy doesn’t believe that the effigy is his enemy. The distinction here is between one
thing symbolizing another and that thing being believed to be identical with the other.
And both of these can be distinguished from a third, where one thing is equated with
another: where there is something like condensation or what Segal (1991) calls symbolic
equation in which the indiscernibility between symbol and thing symbolized is such that
an operation upon one is experienced as an operation on the other. So there are the
following possibilities: if the girl believes unconsciously that the bedstead is her father
and the pillow her mother then, from the fact that she separates bedstead from pillow she
could unconsciously infer that she has separated her parents. In the case of symbolism,
what the girl does effects—somehow—to separate her parents, as she apprehends it
unconsciously. In the case of symbolic equation she again does not infer, she simply
apprehends the performance as a separation of parents since operating on the
furnishings is experienced by her as emotionally the same as operating on parents.
The practical syllogism set out above is an example using the sorcery-like belief ‘if I
separate the furnishings I will separate parents’. The following syllogism incorporates a
symbolic equation:
Girl wishes to prevent the conception of a baby-competitor.
Girl believes that by keeping her father = bedstead and her mother = pillow apart
she could prevent that conception.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
In each case (and also in the case of symbolism strictly), the girl performs an act
rationalized and caused by her wish and the relevant belief, thereby intentionally fulfilling
her Oedipal wishes in the manner of FW. It seems that each of these practical syllogisms
articulates a possible instance of unconscious deliberation, and explains the ritual as an
instance of FW. (Possible, that is, given certain psychoanalytic and philosophical premises
undefended here.) But the case is underdescribed and we need not settle on a particular
explanation. Moreover, there are still other possible schemas that do not trade on mad
beliefs, symbolism, or symbolic equations, yet satisfy the requirements for FW as self-
solicitude expressed in the opening section of this chapter. But before turning to those we
are bound to examine the most cogent of the non-intentional alternatives.
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It is objected that the rational reconstructions of the girl’s behaviour considered here
over-intellectualize a simpler situation. One important and influential approach was early
advanced by Hopkins (1982, 1988). Hopkins placed FW at the centre of the common-
sense-psychological explanation in the psychoanalytic domain but explicitly contrasted
FW with intentional action. FW was conceived subintentionally, as supervening on
imaginative activity animated by desire. ‘In rational action’, he wrote, ‘motives produce
willed intentions and real actions aimed at satisfaction. Here [in dreams] they produce
wishes and mere representations of satisfaction, on the pattern of wishful
imagining’ (Hopkins 1988: 41). The subintentional mode of wishful imagining was also
enlisted to explain symptoms such as the Ratman’s obsessive thoughts of torture
(Hopkins 1982: xxi–xxvii).
We may concede that, at the common-sense-psychological level, subintentional causation

suffices for explaining the motivation of dreams, some phantasying, and symptoms such
as the Ratman’s obsessive thoughts. But it cannot fully explain more complex symptoms
such as the Ratman’s obsessive actions, the compulsive bedstead girl’s rituals, or
phenomena like wish-fulfilling religious practices. Suppose we try to explain the girl’s
performance as a product of wishing expressing itself directly, subintentionally, in action,
as if it were dream, imagination, or phantasy? In that case no element of her action can
be intentional: being caused subintentionally excludes a priori any action from having a
reason or intention among its causal conditions. So if the performance is the phantasy,
and the phantasy is the product of ‘an exercise of will of a kind prior to that in intentional
action’ (Hopkins 1982: xxiv), then it cannot be intentional. But the performance has the
hallmarks of being a sequence of intentional actions, features which this account is
unable to explain.
A better interpretation of the proposal is this: the girl, agitated and distrait, separates
bedstead and pillow and, given the (broadly, including condensatory) symbolic relations
between parents and furnishings, she comes to imagine or phantasize unconsciously that
she has separated her parents. Her actions are intentional, her wish-fulfilling imaginings
are not (Hopkins 1982: xxv). On this attractive account the imagining and the consequent
fulfilment of her wish supervene on an intentional performance that has acquired
contingent symbolic meaning. Well, how exactly does the performance fulfil the girl’s
unconscious wish to separate her parents? On the view that a symptom is wish-fulfilling
merely by virtue of being a representation of its originary wish-fulfilled the answer
appears straightforward. But that view of FW has been rejected (in the section on
‘Freud’s Basic Model’): for representation alone, we saw, does not suffice for pacification
and therefore for FW. The representation will pacify only if it is constitutive of the
circumstance that it is for her as if her parents have been separated—a mental state that
would seem to involve at least an unconscious belief or understanding that they had been
separated. Without supplementation by some notion of unconscious understanding it is
quite mysterious how the performance could acquire its pacific powers. With such
supplementation we do arrive at FW: the girl does something: the act is imagined or
understood unconsciously so as to generate a wish-fulfilling belief. But even so the
account remains deficient. The wish-fulfilment is adventitious: the girl does something
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which happens in the circumstances to pacify an unconscious wish. We do not yet have an
understanding of why she did what she did. We seem driven to suppose that she did
precisely what she did because she understood unconsciously that that very sequence of
actions would achieve her aim. If not that, then two counter-alternatives suggest
themselves: either she hit upon the wish-fulfilling performance by chance or her
performance is determined fixedly by the symbolic associations established in the course
of her life. Chance, I think we can exclude. On the other option we have it that given her
fixed associations it is natural that she should so act; just as it is natural for the old
bachelor to collect snuffboxes, given the unconscious meaning they have for him (cf.
Hopkins 2000: 12). So, how do unconscious symbolic associations determine her
performance? It is hard to say, but it seems that it cannot be merely through a fixed sub-
personal association: for that would deprive the performance of its intentional character.
On the other hand, if the symbolic associations do operate through the prism of
unconscious understanding that would concede the present argument that she knew what
the consequence of her performance could be.
However that uncertain issue is resolved, the subintentional approaches confront a

further difficulty: the fact that pathological behaviour of very much greater complexity
seems also to instance intentional FW. Some complex pathological enactments, for
example wish-fulfilling character disorders, unfold over a lifetime. In such cases a series
of otherwise unconnected acts, in diverse circumstances, strung out temporally, combine
to achieve the one (say, self-defeating) purpose. A thousand acts pointing in the same
direction. It seems inconceivable how an array of subintentional mechanisms, set of fixed
symbolic relations, or chance actions could be strung together in the service of the one
unified purpose: such behaviour seems to manifest resolution and plan. If such clinical
cases cannot be explained non-intentionally then self-solicitous FW may offer some
promise.
Self-Solicitude
In the first section of this chapter provision was made for cases of wish-fulfilment which
fall under the heading of self-solicitude, cases in which the self takes itself as an object—
mostly to be cared for, but allowing for the pathological permutations of such reflexive
relationships that psychoanalysis has uncovered. We must now consider whether there
are in fact psychological configurations that exemplify the self-solicitous forms of FW.
Granting a partitive conception of mind in which one part (B) is in solicitous relation to
another, ‘object’ part (A), we can generate valid practical syllogisms for B:
B wants to console (protect, deceive etc.) A
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B believes that by separating bedstead and pillow A will be consoled (protected,

deceived etc.)
B separates bedstead and pillow.
Here B’s belief is not mad; it is the kind of belief a concerned mother wanting to console
or pacify a child may have. Construing the self as a unity of parts (in the manner
indicated below) we recognize an expression of self-solicitude that was frequently
described by Freud and other pioneer object-relations theorists.15 Freud, for example,
writes of the ego’s protection and care-taking of the id (1940: 197–9) and of the
superego’s solicitude for the ego: ‘To the ego … living means the same as being loved—
being loved by the superego … The superego fulfils the same function of protecting and
saving that was fulfilled in earlier days by the father …’ (1923: 58); and ‘if the superego
does try to comfort the ego by humour and to protect it from suffering, this does not
conflict with its derivation from the parental function’ (1927: 166). That such self-
solicitous relations are possible is a consequence, in Freud’s view, of identification with
objects resulting in structural differentiation shaping several features of the self16: the
capacity to experience itself as divided; its capacity to divide, indeed for ‘a real split’ to
occur between the agencies (1926: 97); and the capacity of parts of the self to then take
other parts as objects. In this vein, Freud writes of the superego:
The ego can take itself as object, can treat itself like other objects, can observe
itself, criticize itself, and do Heaven knows what with itself. In this, one part of the
ego is setting itself over against the rest. So the ego can be split; it splits itself
during a number of its functions—temporarily at least. Its parts can come together
again afterwards (1933: 58).
Freud’s conception of the self is clearly partitive: the agencies are conceived as capable
of entering into a range of mutual ‘personal’ relations, for example sadomasochistic
relationships; they can function autonomously with their own perspectives, motives, and
capacity for intentional action; they have a degree of mutual opacity. Despite these
conditions Freud seems to have enjoined some kind of underlying unity in the self.17 How
might such extreme conditions of psychic stress be exemplified clinically? A patient:
would rave against girl children and in fantasy would describe how she would
crush a girl child if she had one, and would then fall to punching herself (which
perpetuated the beatings her mother gave her). One day I said to her, ‘You must
be terrified being hit like that.’ She stopped and stared and said, ‘I’m not being
hit. I'm the one that’s doing the hitting’
(Guntrip 1968: l9l).
This person certainly seems radically dissociated, a ‘real split’ having occurred (see
footnote 15). There appear to be at least two internal perspectives: in the part doing the
punching and in the part being punched. The parts appear to be mutually alienated: the
speaker says she’s not being punched, she’s doing the punching. Guntrip observes that
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his patient has identified with, and therefore adopted the perspective of, a punitive
mother, while retaining the aspect of the detested child she at bottom feels herself to be,
a ‘child within’ who maintains a masochistic relationship with an internalized mother. He
mentions several motives: identifying with the punitive mother provides relationship with
her; it represents the struggle to preserve an ego; it confers a sense of power, even if only
over her self. Guntrip uses Fairbairn’s conceptual framework which is more revealing of
this clinical case, but Freudian language will do, and we can describe the girl’s situation
without excessive distortion as her ego being maltreated by a punitive superego that
perceives its object as a wretched, hateful thing. On the other side, the ego perceives the
superego under the aspect of the punitive, though still consoling, mother. These ‘parts of
the self’ perceive and treat each other as if they were alien objects. The patient thus
appears to be divided in perspective, subjectivity, and agency, in the terms of partition
when a ‘real split’ has occurred.18
How is it possible for such an intrapsychic sadomasochistically configured enactment to

be wish-fulfilling? Briefly, one way is this: in its enactment the superego figure is
manufacturing an experience of satisfaction (EOS) for the ego—and at the ego’s behest,
or in response to its needs. We might say, paradoxically on the face of it, that the ego
activates the superego and the superego then enacts the consoling/punitive repertoires
written into it. The ego, not knowing fully the superego’s repertoire, may get more than it
bargains for. (Recall the quasi-independence and opacity of the agencies.) Principally the
ego seeks the companionship and security provided by the internalized figure, and
identification with it as aggressor, even if that comes with a familiar dose of punishment.
In re-establishing that relationship, of which we can observe only the punitive enactment,
the person, qua ego, has her wishes fulfilled, in the manner of FW. For we can see how
the ego figure may be engrossed or immersed in the EOS that is the superego’s
enactment. So here are circumstances analogous to Freud’s basic model of FW. There is,
as it were, a theatre of irrecusable evidence presented to the ego from which it cannot
but draw wish-fulfilling conclusions: ‘mother is present and I am her beating a child’. The
case of the bedstead girl may not be dissimilar. The ritualistic performance enacted as an
EOS by an obsessional part of herself is unconsciously understood by her child-self as the
wish-fulfilling achievement of separating her parents—while at the same time pacifying
and achieving an unstable identification with that obsessional (superego) part.
W(h)ither Wish-Fulfilment?
Although Freud was educated in the reductionist biophysics movement of the late
nineteeenth century even his earliest psychoanalytic work ran counter to the scientific
positivism and neurological psychiatry associated with that movement. In contrast to it
Freud insisted on the causality of subjective motives, on the desiring, wishful, and
affective aspects of mind, particularly of course on sexual motives and their development.
The idea that desire or unfulfilled wish causes mental conflict and disorder is older than
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Plato and proved over the centuries, but with Freud something entirely new appears:
mental disorder is not just caused by desires in conflict; symptoms (and their kin) are
compromise fulfilments of those desires—in the manner of FW. This is a strikingly novel
idea, fundamental to the explanation of human behaviour. Freudian wish-fulfilment, ‘the
doctrine of the wish’ (as it was early on and enthusiastically designated (Watson 1916)), is
a deep statement about the ineluctability of human desire and of the will to satisfy it.
When we cannot change the world we change ourselves: if the world will not
accommodate our desire then we dream, phantasize, manufacture delusions, modify our
bodies and perceptions as bogus evidence that desire has been satisfied.
Desire and this human way of dealing with it are in some neglect in contemporary human
sciences. Psychiatry, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology have attenuated their
conceptual resources, so that it is unclear whether questions about mental illness once
thought to be intricated with human longing and despair, or willed delusion, can even be
framed in them. They are now dominated by forms of reductive materialism and simplistic
conceptions of motivation. And were it possible to provide complete descriptions of
mental disorder, dream, phantasy (let alone artistic creation and religious devotion) in the
languages of the brain sciences then their exclusion of almost all traces of the Intentional,
common-sense-psychological, understanding of disorder, of which FW has been an
important component, would be entirely vindicated. But, of course, it is not.
In classical psychoanalytic theory most mental disorders were considered largely as

pathologies of desire and conflict, described in the Intentional idiom; but that has given
way in contemporary theory to a dominant concern with pathologies of developmental
deficits resulting from environmental, attachment, or interactional failure. Psychoanalysis
now appears less concerned with the pathology of desire than of belief—or the various
proposed non-Intentional but belief-like structures anteceding beliefs—internal working
models (Bowlby), representations of interactions generalized (D. N. Stern), and so on. The
attention to environmental deficiency and early impairment has, by and large, diminished
interest in the desiderative, conflictual, and wish-fulfilling aspects of mind. The
theoretical contrast is odd because trauma, privation, deprivation become mensurable
mostly against a backdrop of need and desire; and the language of object or interpersonal
relations is otiose without reference to mutual desiderative and affective relations. So of
course in reality motivational notions do not disappear and FW reappears, as omnipotent
phantasy, projective identification, manic defence, and so on. The scope Freud had given
it has been circumscribed but wish-fulfilment is still shifting in the background, wearing
different clothes, too much unremarked.19
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Notes:
(1.) Father Rageneau, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (1897–9), quoted in
Ellenberger (1970: 26).
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(2.) There is a sense of wish-fulfilment independent of belief and satisfaction, as when a

deceased person’s wishes are fulfilled after his Will passes probate. We can leave this
sense aside.
(3.) For a summary see Freud (1913: 186–7). The ‘actual neuroses’ were early exceptions
to the wish-fulfilment formula and later Freud made accommodations for traumatic
dreams and symptoms, but the general view held consistently despite major changes to
other aspects of theory.
(4.) The common-sense-psychological (CP) classification of motives and acts used in this
chapter is as follows. Intentional action is caused and rationalized by the conjunction of
desire and instrumental belief; it may also involve executive states such as intending,
deciding, and choosing; but the having of reasons is both causally and logically necessary.
Various non-intentional modes of causal explanation are available to CP. O’Shaughnessy
(1980) highlighted the notion of subintentional action. Such acts, including mental acts,
are caused by desire without facilitation by instrumental beliefs. There are forms of
expression that have archaeology but no teleology, as when one clenches fists in (out of)
anguish, or laughs. Explanation along these lines belongs in CP but is neither intentional
nor subintentional. As Richard Wollheim and Jim Hopkins first pointed out, much of
Freud’s work can be seen as an extension and deepening of this common-sense
psychological framework. Useful, if not unproblematic, classification of such extensions
may be found in Wollheim (1991: xixff; 1993).
(5.) The dreams interpreted in the temples of Asclepius in which a respected personage
or god, ‘reveals without symbolism what will or will not happen, or should or should not
be done’ (Dodds 1951: 107), or those like Alexander the Great’s Satyr dream (Freud 1900:
99), have a wishful tincture but they are obviously prognostic and instructive not wish-
fulfilments or substitutive satisfactions in the Freudian sense.
(6.) Freud’s implicit notion that an uncontradicted idea is ipso facto believed has pedigree
(W. James (1950: II, 288) cites Spinoza as the source) but it remains live in the
neuroscience of our day: ‘In the absence of sensory constraints, the vivid percepts,
delusional beliefs and cognitive defects cease to be delusional or defective—because
these attributes are only defined in relation to sensory evidence. However, in sleep, there
is no sensory evidence and the only imperative is to adjudicate and select among
unconstrained scenarios that can be entertained by the sleeping brain’ (Hobson, Hong,
and Friston 2014). See also Solms (2015: 138–9). For elaboration of the notion of
engrossment, introduced in Wollheim (1979), see Pataki (2014: 35–42).
(7.) Petocz (1999; this volume) distinguishes between Freud’s narrow theory of symbolism
(FN) of fixed archaic relations and a broader theory (FB). I accept that distinction. My
concern here is to distinguish both these sorts of symbolism from condensation and
displacement, vicissitudes that Freud also conceived as representational.
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(8.) Petocz (this volume) modifies her earlier view and no longer contends that a belief in
the identity of symbol and symbolized is essential to the motivated mistaken identity that
underlies the capacity to treat one thing as if it were another. I present the earlier view
because it still seems to me a live option, one of several that may facilitate symbolic FW,
as the discussion in the section ‘Intention in Wish-Fulfilment’ shows (see also Pataki
(2014): 88–94). Although she does not explicitly address the issue of symbolic wish-
fulfilment in this volume, the argument advanced for the compatibility of drive discharge
theory with ‘cognitive’ or ‘informational’ approaches to drive activity suggests than an
account of FW in terms of substitutional drive discharge, where the symbol is mistaken
for the drive’s primary object, and the drive is figured as a complex entity with cognitive
capacities, will suffice. My argument for the necessity in FW of the occurrence of a
suitable EOS or wish-fulfilling belief suggests that it will not. In any case, I cannot follow
Petocz (1999: 220–32; this volume; Maze 1983; Newberry 2011) in the constructions
placed on Freudian drive theory. Maze, and in earlier work Petocz, argued that drives are
programmed with innately, though highly modifiable, consummatory activities, that they
must have the capacity to seek out and perceive the conditions that terminate drive
activity, that these cognitive states are components of drives: in short, drives are
‘knowers’. In the present chapter the relevant psychological states (perceiving, believing,
remembering) are described as ‘crucial evolved components of drive-consummatory
activity’, not as components of the drive itself, but a somewhat ‘thick’ view of drives is
retained and it leads Petocz to favourably consider the implausible proposition that the
psyche or self is ‘composed’ (exhaustively constituted?) of instinctual drives. These views
seem to me neither accurate renderings of Freud’s account of drives—ambiguous as that
is—nor sustainable. The fact that drives causally interact with cognitive states—or that
perceptions and beliefs influence our desires and behaviour—does not entail either that
cognitive states are components, mereological parts of drives, or that drives can sense,
peer at, or know anything. It must be conceded however that the ‘thick’ view of drives
has the appeal of potentially resolving some of the many conundrums of mental plurality
to which Petocz draws attention. (See also Boag 2011). I propose a different approach to
some of these conundrums in the sections ‘Intention in Wish-Fulfilment’ and ‘Self-
Solicitude’.
(9.) This is discussed further in the section ‘Intention in Wish-Fulfilment’. For reasons
such as these Sandler (1976; Sandler and Sandler 1978) postulated an ‘understanding
work’ running parallel with but in opposite direction to the distortions of dream and
symptom. Thus the manifest or surface expressions are ‘decoded’ in the Pcs. of the
topographical theory. or unconscious ego of the structural theory, and the latent meaning
is then ‘understood’.
(10.) I am assuming (the contested view) that the explanation of the causal efficacy of
conscious Intentional and phenomenal properties qua mental properties remains
problematic for non-reductive physicalism, the metaphysical view implicit in the work
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under discussion. Conscious experience ‘fits’ in this enlargement of the Helmholtz-Friston

account, and is made to do work, but is not, as it seems to me, explained.
(11.) Those possibilities are explored in Pataki (2014, 2015).
(12.) I use ‘motive’ loosely to designate anything that can be a cause of action. ‘All the
categories’, Freud wrote, ‘which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as
ideas, purposes, resolutions and so on, can be applied to them [unconscious mental acts].
Indeed, we are obliged to say of some of these latent states that the only respect in which
they differ from conscious ones is precisely in the absence of consciousness.’ (Freud
1915b: 168). Freud invokes unconscious motives to explain the wish-fulfilling phenomena
of symptoms (e.g. 1916–17: ch. xix–xiii, esp. 298–9; 1909a: 231); parapraxes (1901b);
phantasies (1908a: 159, 164; 1909a); play (1908b: 146; 1911: 39); and art (1908b);
daydreams and masturbation phantasies (1912). His description of neurosis as consoling
flight into illness is certainly suggestive of intentional strategy, and it could hardly have
been plainer that this was his view of the secondary purpose in neurosis (1909a: 231–2).
(13.) On the counter-intuitiveness of intentional symptom formation see Eagle (2011: 70).
The intuition that ‘intention is the one concept that ought to be preserved free from any
taint of the less-than-conscious’ (Hampshire, 1974: 125) is widely shared but currently
much disputed (Mele 2009). Unconscious agency receives experimental support in Weiss
and Sampson (1986) and neuropsychoanalytic support in Kaplan-Solms and Solms (2000:
esp. 108, 111). For problems with partitive conceptions of mind see Gardner (1993).
Some notable non-intentional readings of FW within a broadly common-sense
psychological framework: Wollheim (1984, 1991, 1993), Hopkins (1982, 1995), Moore
(1984), Lear (1998, 2015), Gardner (1993), Cavell (1993, 2006), and Brakel (2009). The
larger canvas is in Pataki (2014, 2015).
(14.) [Eds: Cf. Leite (this volume) for further exploration of this theme.]
(15.) Spitz (1965: 179) noted that internalization of maternal functions is essential for the
infant’s capacity for self-regulation. Winnicott (1965: 48): ‘The infant develops means for
doing without actual care. This is accomplished through the accumulation of memories of
care, the projection of personal needs and the introjection of care details’. To my
knowledge the implications for mental structure of such normal internalization of caring
functions has not been much investigated, though see Bollas (1987); Kaplan-Solms and
Solms (2000: 234). More familiar are the pathological dissociations associated with the
internalization of frustrating or hated objects, or with false-self formation based on
compliance or denial. See Winnicott (1965); Rosenfeld (1987); Steiner (1993); Bowlby
(1980). It is possibly because the self-solicitous forms of FW are so frequently dominated
by pathological developments that they often issue, paradoxically, in self-deceit and
symptom.
(16.) I use ‘self’ and ‘parts of self’ promiscuously, counting on a measure of

disambiguation by context.
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(17.) Freud: ‘We were justified, I think, in dividing the ego from the id, for there are
certain considerations which necessitate the step. On the other hand the ego is identical
with the id, and is merely a specially differentiated part of it. If we think of this part by
itself in contradistinction to the whole, or if a real split has occurred between the two, the
weakness of the ego becomes evident … The same is true of the relation between ego and
superego. In many situations the two are merged; and as a rule we can only distinguish
the one from the other when there is a tension or conflict between them’. (1926: 97; my
italics). Amongst philosophers, to my knowledge only David Pears (1984), Rorty (1988),
and Pataki (2003, 2014) have argued for a conception of mind whose parts satisfy
conditions for independent agency. Within psychoanalysis, on the other hand, it is
commonplace to hold that the mind is constituted by independent agencies. Freud,
Fairbairn, M. Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Ogden, and S. Mitchell explicitly embrace partitive
conceptions of mind. A roll call doesn’t settle anything about the adequacy of partitive
conceptualization but it can suggest that the clinical phenomena press strongly in its
direction.
(18.) I am of course taking a highly Realistic line on the agencies. The defence with a
more accommodating conceptual framework is set out in Pataki (2014: ch. 5). Casting the
agencies involved as person-like has the happy consequence that the language of
personal relations, the Intentional or common-sense-psychological idiom, can be enlisted
in the description of intrapsychic relations.
(19.) This chapter has been greatly improved by the meticulous commentary of the
editors of this volume, and by discussions with Jim Hopkins and Agnes Petocz. I am much
indebted to them.
Tamas Pataki
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne
Page 29 of 29

Integrating Unconscious Belief

Adam Leite
Print Publication Date: Feb 2019 Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind

The very idea of psychic integration presents puzzles in the case of unconscious belief,
both for the analysand and for the theorist. In many cases, the unconsciously believed
proposition is one that the analysand knows perfectly well to be false. What could it be to
bring such a belief to consciousness? What could psychic integration come to in this sort
of case? Put bluntly, the task facing the analysand is to consciously hold the belief even
while placing it within a broader perspective in which it is recognized to be false.
Implications are drawn concerning a number of large issues in epistemology and
philosophy of mind: Moore’s Paradox, the role of rationality in psychic unity and self-
consciousness, the nature of the first-person standpoint in relation to one’s own attitudes,
transparency accounts of self-knowledge, and the role of endorsement in the constitution
of the self.
Keywords: unconscious belief, psychic integration, Moore’s Paradox, rationality, self-consciousness, first person,
self-knowledge, transparency, self-constitution
Adam Leite
‘we find that unconscious beliefs control our patients’ lives and they are therefore
important to discern’
Ronald Britton, as reported by Paul Williams (1996: 81)
Introduction
THERE are as many forms of psychic integration as there are forms of psychic
disorganization and fragmentation. It’s one thing to bring together feelings that have
been held apart, another to take back projections, and still another to be able to
represent previously unrepresented mental states or to bring psychosomatic phenomena
more fully into one’s mental life. My focus in this chapter is on just one form of
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Subscriber: UC - Los Angeles (UCLA); date: 17 March 2019

integration: the integration of psychodynamically unconscious belief. This issue looms

large in clinical practice (Britton 1998: 8). It also has rich and surprising philosophical
implications.
A step towards psychic integration is a step towards a more stable and more inclusive
psychic organization from a previous disorganized, fragmented, or incomplete state.
Stable organizations are possible that are wildly dysfunctional and out of touch with
reality (Steiner 1993). Insofar as increasing integration is understood as a move towards
psychic health, it must take place in a way that involves increasingly apt response to
reality. At the ideal, ‘integration’ is a success term. It requires both getting things right
enough about oneself and the world and also bringing these matters into contact with the
rest of one’s psychic functioning. In cases at issue here it involves insight, experientially
based self-understanding (Bell and Leite 2016), self-acceptance, and acceptance of reality.
A key question, then, forms the topic of this paper: What would all of this look like when it
comes to certain psychodynamically unconscious beliefs that are—as the analysand can
correctly see—plainly false?
My discussion will assume both a psychodynamic conception of the mind and a

(p. 306)
clinical picture on which integrating psychodynamically unconscious materials can be a

step towards psychic health. My goal is to show what can be learned philosophically from
taking this picture seriously. The discussion will be organized into the six following
sections: ‘Unconscious Belief’ introduces the key notion under discussion; ‘Integrating
Unconscious Belief: The Problem’ highlights a fundamental puzzle concerning the
integration of unconscious belief; and ‘Moore’s Paradox and the Integration of
Unconscious Belief’ offers an initial solution. ‘Is there a Superior Alternative
Description?’ considers and rejects various ways of redescribing the phenomena so as to
avoid the puzzle. ‘What Integration might Look Like’ aims to make such integration
intelligible, and, finally, ‘Philosophical Implications’ highlights important implications for
several large issues in philosophy: the role of rationality in psychic unity, the nature of the
first-person standpoint on one’s own attitudes, the role of transparency in self-knowledge,
and the place of endorsement in the constitution of the self. The upshot is a distinctive
orientation towards these issues, one that may be said to be ‘anti-rationalist’ from the
perspective of a common but overly narrow conception of what human rationality comes
to.
Unconscious Belief
I will take for granted that there are beliefs which are unconscious for dynamic reasons
relating to deep wishes, fears, and defences. For example, an analysand might
unconsciously believe that he is the most delightful and most beloved of the analyst’s
patients and that their relationship is special in a way that even the analyst’s marriage
can’t match. Another might unconsciously believe that her analyst has no interest in her
life and struggles. These unconscious beliefs play a hidden role in shaping the person’s
conscious thoughts, desires, emotional responses, and behaviour. Conscious reflection
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and deliberation generally will not modify them or otherwise affect the role they play. For
these reasons, among others, it can be important for the analysand’s positive
development that such beliefs become conscious, in a sense of that term (discussed later)
that is closely connected with self-awareness and the ability to self-ascribe the belief from
a first-person standpoint.
In describing these states as beliefs, we take it that they are content-bearing states of the
person that play a functional and explanatory role similar enough to that of ordinary
belief to warrant lumping the two together. In characterizing them as unconscious,
however, we highlight an important difference.
To bring the difference into view, it’s helpful to have the notion of the subjective
perspective of a belief. When somebody believes some proposition p, p’s being the case is
part of the subjective perspective through which and against the background of which the
person encounters the world. We might say that in her subjective world, p is the case.
Occupying this subjective perspective will involve patterns of emotional response and
expectation, dispositions towards reasoning and action, certain phenomenal dispositions,
(p. 307) and a tendency to seek corroborative evidence and to experience the world in
ways congruent with p’s being true.1
In ordinary conscious belief, the person is capable of occupying the subjective

perspective of the belief as conscious subject. The world will be presented to and in her
conscious occurrent thought as including that p is the case, and this presentation will
include a distinctive phenomenology, which we might term the force of reality. In
addition, ordinary conscious belief on the part of mature human beings involves self-
consciousness, in the sense that the person can simultaneously be the conscious subject
of the belief and also self-ascribe the belief from that very position. She can, we might
say, occupy the attitude as her own.
In qualifying a belief as unconscious, then, we are highlighting that though the person is
in a state which plays at least a good part of the functional and explanatory role of belief,
the person currently either lacks the ability to occupy the subjective perspective of the
belief as conscious subject or else lacks the ability to self-ascribe the belief from that
position.2
For example, imagine someone with the following complex pattern of responses. He finds
himself feeling guilty when kindnesses or favours are done for him, as though he has
taken something away from the other person. He feels that he is in danger of being
caught taking something he doesn’t deserve if he accepts positive offers from others, and
he experiences his legitimate and unproblematic requests for help as manipulative
manoeuvres robbing others of their riches. He fears that accolades that come his way are
nothing but the gains of trickery and deceit. He feels a vague terror that if others knew
the truth about him they would hate and cast him out, so that he must always hide the
truth about himself. It might be that what unifies all of these reactions is this: he believes
that he is nothing but a thief. But though he has all of these thoughts and feelings both in
particular situations and as part of the ongoing background of his life, he still might not
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consciously encounter the world as containing this truth: I am a thief. In such a case, he
cannot consciously occupy the subjective perspective of the belief, and he cannot self-
ascribe it from that position. His belief is functioning unconsciously.
In understanding him in this way we attribute to him a belief content that

(p. 308)
conflicts in his own thinking with thoughts to the effect that he has not stolen. This too is
supported by the detailed texture and particular pattern of his responses. For instance, a
range of very particular emotional reactions (such as specific forms of guilt connected in
various ways with the idea of theft) are forced upon him, while others (notably such
attitudes as pride and contentment) are systematically excluded or distorted. He likewise
interprets particular incidents in ways that fit with the thought that he has stolen, while
conflicting facts are explained away, reinterpreted, or ignored. When told that he did well
at something, he will react in a variety of ways that express, maintain, or even reinforce
feelings of guilt connected with thoughts about theft. He might disavow that he really did
the thing (insinuating that he stole credit for it) or deny that he did it well (insinuating
that he somehow stole in accomplishing what he did). He might find a way to treat the
compliment itself as stolen, e.g. by interpreting himself as having somehow ‘fished’ for it.
As a last resort he might respond by defending against feelings of guilt and then feel that
he is engaged in a cover-up. What he cannot do is sit comfortably with the thought, ‘I just
did well at such-and-such, and this person has, quite reasonably, voluntarily
complimented me for it’. What we see here is a standing orientation towards himself
involving feelings of guilt and thoughts about being undeserving, taking things from
others, and the like, all of which he routinely connects with ideas of theft.
We gain a measure of understanding if we attribute a mental state to him that dictates

these particular forms of response, an attitude that distorts his experience of himself and
the world in ways that fit—and indeed insist upon—the truth of this proposition. This
parallels theories of psychological attribution that emphasize interpretive fit with the
overall pattern exhibited in the person’s thought, feeling, and behaviour (cf. Child 1996;
Davidson 1970: 221–2; 1983; 1984; Freud 1917; Mölder 2010). The pay-off is a gain in
intelligibility, or as Freud terms it, ‘a gain in meaning’ (Freud 1915: 167).
Such psychological attributions are neither indefeasible nor unrevisable. In the

therapeutic setting the attribution is underwritten by the ongoing fine details of the
analys and’s associations, thoughts, feelings, and reactions in interaction with the
analyst. It might be refined retrospectively in light of later developments and the
patient’s settled understanding. In other cases, the state itself might change and develop
over time.3
Many unconscious beliefs are unconscious for motivational reasons: that is,
psychodynamic factors involving wishes, fears, and defences. The attribution of a
particular psychodynamic explanation in a particular clinical case is supported in part by
the way in which things unfold as the analytic process proceeds—for instance, defensive
processes and patterns of resistance, the way in which the belief comes into
consciousness (p. 309) when a particular defence or sense of unbearable conflict is
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gradually undone, and the context provided by the ongoing development of a broader
understanding of the patient’s mind.
There are various routes by which unconscious belief can be psychodynamically

generated. In some cases a recognized truth may be repressed because it is unbearably
painful. In this way, traumatic real-world experiences can give rise to unconscious beliefs.
In other cases, a false belief may be psychodynamically generated. For instance, a belief
may arise as a wish-fulfilment or as a defence against some other unbearable or
unacceptable experience or psychic content. Britton (1995) describes a psychotic patient
who believed that if she did not see her mother, she would go blind. This was a ‘defensive
counterbelief’ formed to head off fear about what might happen to her mother when
absent. (The protection comes from the childish thought, ‘She’s not absent; rather,
something is wrong with my eyes and so I cannot see her’.)
Defensive counterbeliefs—like wish-fulfilling beliefs—can be conscious or can be kept

unconscious because they are painful, threatening, conflict with central parts of one’s
conception of oneself or loved ones, and the like. In other cases, the belief is unconscious
not so much to ward it off as to maintain it: the belief functions unconsciously as a way of
safeguarding it in the face of acknowledged contradictory facts which are themselves felt
(perhaps unconsciously) to be threatening or unacceptable.4 Sometimes both factors are
in play.
Importantly, psychodynamically unconscious beliefs (such as unconscious defensive

counterbeliefs) need not be part of any larger rational structure. These beliefs exert
rationalizing pressure insofar as they lead the person both to interpret situations in ways
that conform with them and to fabricate justifications for convictions arising from them.
But such considerations are not what holds them in place. Rather, they are held in place
by motivational forces, mechanisms of defence, and other psychodynamic factors.
Two other important psychoanalytic notions—unconscious phantasy and implicit

procedural schemata—stand in complicated relations to the concept of unconscious
belief.
First, unconscious phantasy.5 Different psychoanalytic traditions diverge in their

interpretation of this protean concept (Bohleber et al. 2015). Frequently likened to
daydreaming, phantasy is widely understood as ‘an imagined scenario or storylike
narrative’ that represents the subject’s interactions with others in ways ‘shaped by
motivational states and defensive operations’ (Auchincloss and Samberg 2012a: 85). On
many views, unconscious phantasy can lead to or produce both conscious and
unconscious beliefs. There is disagreement, however, about several matters relevant to
unconscious phantasy’s relation to belief, including its origins, its relation to sources of
motivation, (p. 310) and the nature of its content (propositional, conceptual, imagistic, or
affective/bodily sensation).
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Many prominent conceptions sharply distinguish the two. In a canonical Kleinian

formulation, Susan Isaacs writes:
phantasies are the primary content of unconscious mental processes … this

‘mental expression’ of instinct is unconscious phantasy. Phantasy is (in the first
instance) the mental corollary, the psychic representative, of instinct. There is no
impulse, no instinctual urge or response which is not experienced as unconscious
phantasy.
(Isaacs 1948: 91)
For Isaacs, unconscious phantasy is the first, ‘low-level’, mental manifestation of a drive
or motivational urge (‘instinct’, in her terminology, following Strachey’s translation of
Freud’s ‘Trieb’ (drive, urge)). It likewise constitutes the mental content of defensive
processes countering these urges. It has a non-propositional, affectively laden
representational content (Gardner 1993: sect. 6.5). It thus differs from belief in several
respects, including the fact that (unlike wish-fulfilling belief) it is not a product of the
urge, but rather its mental expression.
Britton, too, sharply distinguishes unconscious belief from unconscious phantasy, holding
belief to be what bestows the status of reality upon the phantasy’s content for the subject
(1995: 19–20; 1998: 9).
Writers in other traditions bring the two closer together. Erreich, for instance, suggests
that unconscious phantasy should be ‘defined as a more or less unconscious belief
statement’ (2003: 569) that results from defensive processes of compromise formation
operating upon three components: wish, veridical perception, and naive cognition.
However, Erreich also characterizes unconscious phantasy as ‘a representational
structure for mental content with a motivational component’ (2003: 569) and views it as
‘a vehicle for the mental representation of … affects, wishes, defenses’ (2003: 545). So
understood, it is doubtful that an unconscious phantasy simply is a belief, despite
Erreich’s explicit definition; it might perhaps be understood as a complex structure
involving motivational elements along with unconscious beliefs as constituents,
components, or ‘concomitants’ (2003: 567), or it might be understood as some sort of
motivationally and affectively laden hybrid.
Some prominent views do not take a clear stand on the issue. In an influential
contribution to the American ego psychology tradition, Arlow (2008/1969) characterizes
unconscious phantasy as ‘unconscious daydreaming’ that is an ‘ever-present
accompaniment of conscious experience’ (2008/1969: 42). If we take the identification
with daydreaming literally, then unconscious phantasy is not a form of belief, even if it is
‘composed of elements with fixed verbal concepts’ (2008/1969: 23). Arlow also writes,
however, that ‘what is consciously apperceived and experienced is the result of the
interaction between the data of experience and unconscious fantasying’ (2008/1969: 42),
and he likens unconscious phantasy activity to a source of input analogous to that (p. 311)
provided by the senses (2008/1969: 43). He additionally characterizes unconscious
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daydreaming as a mental activity that ‘supplies the mental set in which the data of
perception are organized, judged, and interpreted’ (2008/1969: 43). These formulations
leave it unclear whether and to what extent unconscious phantasies are either belief-like
or involve a belief component.
A second explanatory construct can be more clearly distinguished from the concept of
unconscious belief. Some psychoanalytic theorists have recently emphasized nonlinguistic
procedural schemas, models, or routines for interpersonal relating—psychological
structures which are stored in an implicit (non-declarative) memory system and explain
patterns of behaviour, thought, and emotional response by generating particular
dispositions, motivations, and mental contents (including beliefs) in particular contexts
(for instance, Beebe and Lachmann 1994, Fonagy 1999, Lyons-Ruth 1999, Stern et al.
1998; for discussion, Eagle 2013). Such schemata may be thought to be underlying
psychological realizers of some unconscious beliefs. Whether that is so depends on larger
debates in the philosophy of mind.
In any case, however, the two concepts are distinct and are not extensionally equivalent.
First, many implicit procedural schemata—such as govern distance–standing as well as
more complex interpersonal behaviour—are not psychodynamically unconscious. Rather,
they remain difficult to articulate because stored in implicit (non-declarative) procedural
memory (Fonagy 1999: 216–17; Stern et al. 1998: 905–6). They consequently have
different behavioural manifestations. The patterns of resistance, defensive response, and
shifts over time that will lead an analyst to attribute a psychodynamically unconscious
belief are present only in certain cases. Moreover, as noted earlier, some unconscious
beliefs are generated by processes of psychic defence. Some of these can have a very
different sort of clinical manifestation and profile, and can play a different explanatory
role, from that of implicit procedural schemata. The two categories are thus disjoint.
However, none of this is to deny that procedural schemata for interpersonal relating can
participate in psychodynamic processes and structures: for instance, they can sometimes
generate psychodynamically unconscious phenomena, remain unacknowledged for
psychodynamic reasons, be shaped by psychodynamic processes, and even involve
characteristic interpersonally enacted defences (Lacewing, this volume).
Integrating Unconscious Belief: The Problem

Much clinical theorizing emphasizes that it can be crucially important for a patient’s
progress that unconscious beliefs become conscious. As Britton puts it, ‘until a patient
discovers that he really believes an idea its correspondence, or lack of it, with external
reality is irrelevant. His belief remains suspended, unconscious, unmodified, and
unverified, in parallel with a contrary belief’ (1995: 21).
What matters here is not simply awareness that one has a particular belief. An
(p. 312)
analysand might be said to ‘discover that he really believes an idea’ in the sense that he
learns to recognize the signs of his unconscious belief as they show up in his thought,
speech, and behaviour. On this basis he can say, ‘I believe that so and so’. However, such
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a person remains no closer to his belief as conscious subject than he was before (Moran
2001; Finkelstein, this volume). This might be a stage in a positive development
nonetheless, perhaps even a step towards bringing the belief into consciousness. The
person might benefit from learning to predict and manage the effects of the belief even if
it never becomes fully conscious. Still, this is fundamentally different from being able to
consciously occupy the subjective standpoint of the belief and self-attribute the belief
from precisely that position. It is only when one has attained that latter ability that one
can self-reflectively recognize the belief in operation ‘from the inside’ and bring it into
contact with one’s ongoing thinking about the matters with which it is concerned.
Bringing an unconscious belief into consciousness does not merely involve coming to
occupy this position in relation to that single belief. Rather, it involves bringing the
particular belief into the larger system of one’s conscious thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and
desires. It thus both requires and constitutes a process of psychic integration—a process
of bringing together into a single perspective what has been held apart or cut off, for
instance in a process of psychic defence. This necessarily involves an increase in the
range of positions—thoughts, feelings, and beliefs—that one can simultaneously self-
consciously occupy as a conscious subject.
To approach what might be involved here, it can be helpful to consider a parallel

schematic example. In the defence known as ‘splitting’, conflicting emotional responses—
along with correlative contradictory representations of self and other—are kept distinct
(Auchincloss and Samberg 2012b; Kernberg 1966: 238). The defence operates to evade
the anxiety introduced by the felt conflict between the emotions, and it can be
exacerbated by the analysand’s sense of threat arising from intense feelings of hatred
(Klein 1946). If an analysand has split her feelings of love and hatred, alternately
experiencing herself as in loving communion with an ideal object and in fierce battle with
a denigrated object, it will be crucial for her positive development that she come to
experience her hatred, understanding it as such, while also remaining in contact with her
loving feelings. That is the work of integration in this sort of case. The difficult task facing
the analysand is to hold in mind the feelings of both love and hate, understood precisely
as love and hate, and to experience their conflict as such, thereby uniting them into a
single self-conscious perspective. This amounts to bringing her loving self and her hating
self together into one.6
Integration in this sense does not necessarily entail rational control. Someone who
manages to integrate her love and hatred may not be able to get rid of either by
reflecting on the reasons for and against them. She may not be able to modulate the one
by ‘mingling’ (p. 313) it with the other (and that may not be appropriate in any case). Still,
her new ability to hold both in mind will enable new forms of thought, feeling, and
reaction, including the possibility of experiencing her behaviour and motivations in new
and emotionally richer ways, asking new questions about herself and others, and
considering paths of action that formerly were not live options. This requires the ability to
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recognize the conflict without becoming overwhelmed by anxiety, so that she can live
within and from that position of conflict as a self-conscious subject.
Turn now to the case of dynamically unconscious belief. In many cases the belief is one
that the analysand would perfectly well recognize as false.7 For instance, consider again
the belief I am a thief. Despite the reactions manifesting this unconscious belief, the
person might know perfectly well that he is no thief and has earned his salary and
received loving gifts and assistance from family and friends. Here, concretely, is what this
might look like. If we ask him, ‘Have you earned your salary?’, he replies, fully sincerely,
‘Yes, of course. I work very hard.’ And yet he might feel an inarticulate sense of guilt and
then begin telling a story about someone else who embezzled. If he is given a gift out of
love, he might recognize the gesture and genuinely feel grateful. And yet he might also
find himself feeling that he has gotten away with something. These feelings and thoughts
do not do away with his knowledge any more than everyday obsessive worries do away
with one’s knowledge that one turned off the stove. In his self-conscious thinking and
reasoning, he retains a firm grip on the truth.8
Such cases present a particular challenge within the lived experience of the analysand.
The analysand must attempt to take up, as a conscious belief, something he knows to be
plainly false. There is a difficulty here which is not merely a matter of defence against
anxiety or psychic pain. But these cases also present puzzles for us as theorists. What
would it be to integrate a plainly false belief? How can we make sense of the idea of such
a belief’s entering into the person’s self-conscious subjective perspective?
First, integration does not entail elimination. It would be lovely, perhaps, if as soon as the
troublesome belief began to come into consciousness it automatically ceased to exist.
However, because of the belief’s roots in wish, phantasy, and defence, this is not how
things usually go. These motivational forces require a different sort of treatment. For the
same reason, integration does not guarantee modifiability through deliberation. It is a
mistake to suppose that as the belief enters self-conscious mental life, it must become
directly and fully accessible to control, modification, or revision through conscious
reflection (contra Parrott 2015; cf. Moran 2001).
At the same time, however, integration can’t require radical loss of one’s grip on reality. It
can’t be that a belief comes into consciousness only insofar as the person now self-
consciously believes, without qualification, something that she previously consciously
(p. 314) regarded as false. Consider, again, Britton’s patient who believed that if she did
not see her mother, she would go blind (1995: 22). Such beliefs exert a rationalizing force
of their own, leading to the construction of a structure of delusional reasons and
evidence. To accept such a structure without qualification, and to feel and act
accordingly, wouldn’t be a route to integration, but to psychosis—a severe break from
reality (as in the case of Britton’s patient). Likewise, though confusion is sometimes an
important aspect of the process of working through, it would not be a positive
development in this sort of case if the person’s ongoing conscious state were to become
one of genuine uncertainty or confusion about what is true.
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For these reasons, to understand what it would be to integrate such a belief we need to
make room for an initially surprising idea: that a person could simultaneously self-
consciously believe something and recognize that the belief is false. That is, we have to
allow for the possibility of at least a period in which the person recognizes that she
believes that she has stolen everything good that has come her way—and occupies the
subjective position of that belief, viewing the world in that way—even while also perfectly
well recognizing that this belief is false because there are a great many good things in
her life that she did not steal: some were earned through hard work, some were freely
given, and sometimes she was simply lucky. This state may not be the ultimate goal—an
issue to which I will return—but we have to allow for it as a possible and sometimes
essential step along the way.
Moore’s Paradox and the Integration of

Unconscious Belief
What I have been describing is a psychological position that might be summarized in an
utterance or affirmative judgement of the so-called ‘commissive’ version of Moore’s
paradox: namely, ‘I believe that p, but p is false’ (Moore 1993). Many contemporary
philosophers take such an utterance or affirmative judgement to be paradoxical. While it
can be true that someone believes something that is false, it can seem incoherent to self-
ascribe a belief from the first-person standpoint even while judging or declaring that the
believed proposition is false. This incoherence has seemed to many philosophers to go
beyond mere irrationality; it is, we’re told, a fundamental and defining feature of the
concept of belief. As Wittgenstein writes, ‘One can mistrust one’s own senses, but not
one’s own belief’ (2001 [1953]: 190), and ‘If there were a verb meaning “to believe
falsely”, it would not have any significant first person, present indicative’ (2001 [1953]:
162). Many recent philosophers (e.g. Coliva 2015; Heal 1994; Moran 2001) have followed
Wittgenstein in holding that we can make no sense of the idea of someone’s consciously
occupying the subjective standpoint of a belief, self-attributing it from that position, and
also acknowledging its falsity. And yet this is precisely what integration of dynamically
(p. 315) unconscious beliefs often seems to require. The psychoanalytic case thus requires
us to accept as actual precisely what this tradition deems unintelligible.9
To make sense of this, it’s helpful to think more about what is involved in belief.
Consider the difference that is made when a belief functions in the way characteristic of
conscious belief. Conscious belief that p constitutively involves that p’s being the case is
person consciously encounters the world. As noted earlier, the world will be presented to
and in her occurrent thought as including that p is the case, and this presentation will
include a distinctive phenomenology: a sense or feeling of reality that might be captured
by saying that it is part of her subjective world that things are this way.10 Her experience
will likewise be shaped in various ways that fit with the truth of p, and she will be
disposed to have congruent emotional and motivational responses. Central here too are
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other differences in the person’s dispositions. If she consciously believes that p, she is
disposed to judge that p when she considers relevant questions. P will be presented in
her conscious directed thinking as a premise for her reasoning about what to do and what
is the case, and she will be disposed to so deploy it. She will be disposed to assert p when
appropriate and to act on the basis of p.
All of this can be true even if a person also recognizes that her belief is false. Crucially,
many of these dispositions are defeasible, and they can be defeated in various ways and
to varying extents in different cases. In particular, someone might consciously believe
that p, seeing the world in just the ways involved in consciously having this belief, and yet
not deploy p as a premise in conscious reasoning, act on its basis, or assert it flat out. She
might be disposed to judge p to be true and yet at the moment when she considers the
question, judge it to be false. She might strive not to act in ways that are predicated on
taking p to be true. Some of this may involve resisting these dispositions through an act
of will, as when one consciously resists the strong temptation to act as if p were true. In
other cases it may simply be a matter of what the person does in the course of her
directed conscious thinking: she might simply think, ‘But p is false’, and that might be
enough. These dispositions can also be defeated through changes in the person’s
underlying psychological functioning, so that the temptations and tendencies arising from
these dispositions do not even show up in her conscious thinking.
Suppose, then, that the analysand recognizes both that there is in fact no
(p. 316)
evidence in favour of the thought that she is a thief and that all sorts of considerations
support the contention that she isn’t one. Suppose that she also understands that her
belief I am a thief is itself a product of dynamic processes relating to deep wishes, fears,
and defences, and suppose that she has some experientially based understanding of these
wishes and fears and her defensive responses to them, so that all of this is functioning to
some extent consciously as well. In such a case, the belief will be intelligible to her, no
matter how wacky it is, in a way that goes beyond merely intellectual understanding,
insofar as the belief links with emotions and motivations she has experienced ‘from the
inside’. In light of all this, she might experience herself and her world in all of the ways
involved in believing that she is a thief, and yet she might attempt not to reason from I am
a thief in her conscious thinking about what to believe, think, and do. She might not
assert ‘I am a thief’, full stop. She might attempt to recognize when her emotional
responses are born of this false belief, and she might attempt to treat them accordingly;
likewise, with motivations that are given life by the belief. All of these further responses,
along with the subjective perspective involved in believing that p, thus form a total
complex perspective in which she self-consciously believes that she is a thief while not
endorsing that belief and indeed while judging it to be false. Even as she sees the world
through the lens of this belief, as it were, she also recognizes it as her lens, recognizes
the ways in which it is inapt, and resists, suppresses, or otherwise does not engage in
some of the patterns of response that would otherwise appropriately be involved.
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Different psychological positions might meet this description, as I discuss later. For now,
the point is this: we can in fact make sense of someone aptly capturing the reality of her
overall psychological situation by simultaneously self-attributing a belief from the subject
position and rejecting that belief as false. The key is to see that even as one occupies the
subjective perspective of the belief as conscious subject, one’s total self-conscious
perspective at that moment might include a wider purview. While this is a rationally
incoherent position, situations of this sort are familiar in ordinary life as well, particularly
in cases in which one unexpectedly discovers that a view to which one is deeply attached
is in error (Leite 2016).11
Any view of belief which emphasizes its connection with characteristic patterns of
activity, thought, motivation, and the like, would lead us to expect exactly the sort of
phenomena that I am pointing to. At least, it would do so unless one also holds the view
(identified most prominently with Donald Davidson) that belief ascription requires that
the person come out as rational, since I am proposing belief ascriptions that involve
(p. 317) contradictory beliefs within the same total view. However, if we think of belief
ascription as part of the attempt to make sense of the person or to render her intelligible
—where we separate that notion from specifically rational intelligibility—then often
precisely such a belief ascription will be the best fit. The distinctive form of intelligibility
provided by person-level folk-psychological explanation is not primarily and narrowly
rational intelligibility (Hursthouse 1991); a man’s rubbing his face in his wife’s sweater is
made intelligible when we note that he is dealing with her recent death, and this
intelligibility is not fully captured when we attempt to understand this case in terms of a
‘rationalizing explanation’ in the standard narrow sense. It rather has to do with
considerations of meaningfulness and significance for the person: with the emotional
resonances things have, the ideas with which they are associated, the motivations that
are in play, and the like. Once we allow that these richer forms of intelligibility play a role
in the attribution of attitudes such as belief, the possibility opens up of attributing much
more complex, conflicted belief states to the person.
To sum up: I have been arguing that the formerly dynamically unconscious belief is
integrated by being incorporated into a total conscious perspective that also contains its
contradictory. The total perspective is thus rationally fractured. But the fracture is
contained, in three senses. First, it is limited, in that it does not metastasize into a larger
split that would introduce a division into the person’s capacity for thought (as in
compartmentalization or dissociation). Second, the fracture is contained insofar as the
person is able to hold the whole situation in mind—both sides of the fracture, the fracture
itself, and their relations, and so can experience the whole situation as an object of
thought and as less threatening. Third, the various aspects of the person’s overall
perspective—including the formerly unconscious belief—are put in their places: they are
given a distinctive organization in relation to each other. As a result, the person now
functions differently. The person’s overall response—given the contradiction—is as
rational as it can be, insofar as the person aims not to act or reason on the basis of the
false belief and will attempt to ameliorate its effects on her emotions and motivations.
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This is the total complex situation that might be summed up and expressed by the
utterance or thought, ‘I believe that p, but p is false’.
It should be emphasized that this is not the mechanism that philosophers sometimes call
‘fragmentation’ (Lewis 1982). In fragmentation, two (or more) systems of belief are not
allowed to come into rational contact with each other. But here, the formerly unconscious
belief is brought into rational contact with the rest of the person’s conscious thought even
while being experienced as her belief, and it is rejected as false. That is precisely how it is
integrated into her total subjective perspective: as an aspect of that perspective that is
false. This integration is assisted by the way in which the belief is rendered intelligible
through an experientially based, emotionally rich understanding of the dynamic sources
of the belief—an understanding that arises through conscious experience of the fears and
wishes that hold it in place, so that they too, as well as their relation to the belief, all
become part of the single subjective perspective. To come to understand—on the basis of
a rich conscious experience of the relevant emotions—that one’s belief is, for instance, an
infantile defensive reaction to infantile fears is (p. 318) simultaneously to render it
intelligible, to accept it as what it is, and to put it in its place—even if it continues to be
an ineliminable part of one’s total perspective.
Is There a Superior Alternative Description?

I have been arguing that we have to allow for the possibility of self-consciously believing
something that one recognizes to be false, if we are to make sense of the very idea of
integrating the mind by bringing unconscious beliefs into consciousness. One possible
response is to feel that my argument just can’t be right: since (it is said) we can make no
sense of self-consciously believing something one knows to be false, we must have been
wrong to take this as a matter of belief to begin with.
In a well-known paper, the philosopher Tamar Gendler (2008) urges the explanatory
importance of what she calls ‘aliefs’: automatic, associative, arational clusters of
representational content, affect, and associated behavioural routines. It might be
suggested that what I have been talking about are really belief-discordant aliefs that are
brought into consciousness, not fully fledged beliefs that would generate a Moore-
paradoxical position of the sort I have been describing. It might similarly be said that in
many of these cases it would be more natural to express the attitude using affective
rather than cognitive language, saying something like ‘I feel like I’ve stolen everything
good in my life, but of course I know that’s not so’.12
In some cases, either of these forms of description might be apt. In particular, it might be
the case that many of what psychoanalysts call ‘unconscious beliefs’ consist in associative
clusters of affective and behavioural dispositions. From a clinical perspective, however,
the important point is this. Even if they were to begin life as ‘aliefs’, dynamically
unconscious beliefs can undergo a developmental trajectory in which they acquire
determinate propositional content and are brought into relation with the rest of the
person’s conscious view of the world in ways that are emotionally and motivationally
Page 13 of 30

transformative. It is precisely this work that is amongst the goals of the analytic therapy.
But the result might well be a conscious attitude that conflicts with the person’s other
conscious beliefs.
Likewise, casting these phenomena in broadly affective terms is fine, so long as one does
not lose track of the crucial fact that the attitudes in question conflict with one’s settled
view. So long as one keeps this point clearly in mind, the terminology does not matter.
Where the terminology can become important is in the clinical setting, since talk of what
one ‘feels’ can be used to distance oneself from acknowledging how one actually takes
things to be. Gardner’s characterization of defence is apt here: ‘an operation on mental
content that represents the cause of anxiety in such a way as to reduce or (p. 319)
eliminate anxiety’ (1993: 145). Talk of what one ‘feels’ can function defensively to avoid
the experience of psychic conflict by disguising unwanted or unacceptable aspects of
one’s view of what is the case.
It would likewise be a mistake to think that what I have been describing is best
understood as a situation in which it merely seems or appears to the person as if things
are a certain way. For her to deny that she holds the belief and to go straight to ‘it merely
seems or appears to me as if I have stolen everything good’, would be for her to deny
something crucial. When the belief was functioning unconsciously, this was how things
were for her, though she didn’t recognize it. And she is attached to this way of viewing
her world, insofar as doing so is fuelled by and satisfies particular motivations and
defensive responses to them. Believing that things are this way thus does important
psychic work for her. None of that necessarily changes as these matters come into
consciousness. Thus for her to say that this is not belief (but rather a mere ‘seeming’ or
‘appearance’) would be for her to evade these truths about herself in a way that enables
the processes that maintain the belief to continue unmodified and unexamined. For the
same reason, to characterize her state as mere ‘seeming’ or ‘appearance’ would miss—
and render unintelligible—the clinical fact, emphasized by Britton, that once a
dynamically unconscious belief becomes conscious, a process of mourning is often
required before the belief can be given up (1995: 22).
Similar points apply to the thoughts that the person merely has an ‘inclination’ to believe
—but doesn’t actually hold the belief—or that only ‘a part’ of her believes. To go straight
to such self-characterizations might very well be a motivated attempt to evade the
difficult conflicts presented by the states in question or to avoid approaching the
motivations that hold the belief in place. This would enable one to maintain the
conflicting view of things at a deeper level even while consciously avowing it in a
mischaracterized form. Such a self-characterization would short-circuit the difficulties
involved in integrating the false unconscious belief. Psychoanalytic-sounding ideas, too,
can be used for defensive ends.13
Moore-paradoxical belief attributions also cannot be avoided by emphasizing implicit,

non-propositional procedural schemata for interpersonal relating. All psychoanalytic
writers in this vein grant that there is a place clinically for the analysand’s conscious
Page 14 of 30

articulation of implicit models for relating.14 This cannot be accomplished except by the
analysand’s acknowledging from a first-person position how he takes things to be in his
interaction with the analyst (e.g. ‘I can’t reach out to you for comfort, because you
(p. 320) disapprove of comfort-seeking’).15 Since what is being articulated is how things
are from the patient’s subjective viewpoint, this amounts to the conscious expression of
belief. And there is no way for the patient to fully own—from the inside, as it were—the
full pattern of inhibition, motivation, emotional response, silence, etc. that is involved
here, unless he recognizes this as his perspective. But in some cases this will involve a
proposition which he regards as false.
An additional point is relevant here. Theorists who emphasize implicit procedural

schemata do not hold that this theoretical construct can entirely replace the clinical role
played by the concept of unconscious belief and its articulation in the process of working
through, since these schemata can generate distinct psychodynamically unconscious
beliefs. Fonagy, for instance, writes that ‘Consciousness of the beliefs generated by such
implicit memory models is crucial if the patient is to acquire the power to inhibit or
modify them through the creation of a second-order representation of their inner
experience . . .’ (Fonagy 1999: 219). Here again, a puzzle about the integration of false
unconscious belief will arise.16
Someone who thinks that the self-conscious self-attribution of false belief is just
impossible might instead suggest that as the belief comes into consciousness, the
analysand oscillates between incompatible, internally coherent viewpoints in order to find
a resting place in one and give up the other. But this picture is not adequate either. First,
there is often no larger viewpoint on the world available to the person within which the
formerly unconscious belief could be made to look rational. Because the belief is
sustained not by rational relations but rather by a tissue of phantasy, wish-fulfilment, and
defensive processes, to give it a place in a larger rationally coherent view would require
the wholescale creation of a massively delusive view of the world. Second, this picture is
overly optimistic about the extent to which it is possible to rid oneself of such beliefs.
Often they remain, and they need to be given a place within one’s larger subjective
perspective if one is to have hope of putting together a stable life. The picture of
‘oscillation’ cannot allow for this. Finally, to think that this is how things should always go
is to maintain a fantasy of being able to get rid of psychic materials one does not want. It
would be better in many cases to aspire to fully occupy one’s subjective perspective with
acceptance and understanding, where that very perspective includes a well-developed,
emotionally rich, and motivationally effective conception of its own weaknesses and
deficiencies.
I think that this conclusion is inevitable for any psychodynamic therapeutic approach that
takes the patient’s total first-person, subjective perspective seriously as a realm for
exploration, articulation, and productive elaboration through speech and avowal.
Page 15 of 30

(p. 321) What Integration Might Look Like

Various positive endpoints are possible. With work, the person may give up the belief and
correctly understand herself as subject to an unshakeable emotionally resonant
‘appearance’ or ‘seeming’ arising from understood psychodynamic forces. Through
underlying psychological shifts she might lose even this ‘seeming’ or ‘appearance’. In
other cases, the underlying motivations might remain but gain their satisfaction not in the
person’s cognitive life, not in the realm of seemings and belief, but rather in the realm of
treasured conscious fantasy and play. However, in many cases the endpoint is one in
which despite what the person might want, it would be untrue for her to deny that she
believes that she is a thief. In these cases the false belief is consciously maintained but
given its place within a broader perspective that acknowledges its falsehood, renders it
intelligible, and ameliorates its effects.
Even here there can be variation along multiple dimensions. One such dimension is the
precise way in which the person now occupies the subjective standpoint of the formerly
unconscious belief.
To see this, consider that the ability to use ‘I’ in expressive self-ascription of the attitude
doesn’t yet guarantee incorporation of this belief into the right sort of larger self-
conscious perspective. After all, someone could, at a given moment, consciously occupy
the subjective position of the belief that he is a thief and say, in a melancholic, chastened
tone, ‘I’m an awful person; I deceive people in order to get their love. I’m nothing but a
thief.’ He might continue, in response to a therapist’s comment, ‘You believe that you are
a thief’, ‘Yes, I do. I steal from everyone.’ This person has not yet integrated his formerly
unconscious false belief, because he is now in the grip of it. It isn’t yet properly
incorporated into the right sort of broader perspective. (This position might nonetheless
be an important stage in a developmental process, and someone engaged in ‘working
through’ may slip in and out of it.)
Someone might instead be able to self-attribute the belief from the subject position,
consciously having the thoughts, feelings, and motivations that go along with it, and yet
battle against it in light of its falsehood. He might fight and struggle to resist some of the
dispositions it involves, for instance by effortfully correcting false interpretations it
generates in particular interactions. He might be able to place all of this in the context of
a broader understanding of the psychodynamic forces at issue and an ability to recognize
them as they appear and function in situ. In these ways, he manages the false belief.
This situation is a step towards psychic integration, but precisely in its aspect of
intrapsychic struggle, it threatens to break apart. To put it metaphorically, the belief that
he is a thief is pressing to bust loose, and if it breaks free he might oscillate back towards
a position in which he is in the grip of the belief. The person’s overall mental state is thus
organized at the moment, but it lacks a measure of stability. Like a peace imposed by
armed garrison, it is subject to internal pressures that threaten to undo it.
Page 16 of 30

A notable feature of this last case is that there is a sense in which the person
(p. 322)
restrains himself from fully occupying the subjective position of the belief, precisely
because of the threat it is felt to pose. For instance, he might not be able to give voice to
this belief by saying ‘I am a thief’ without sliding back towards being in its grip. While he
can wholeheartedly self-ascribe the belief, he might feel enormous anxiety at thinking the
first-order thought, ‘I am a thief’. That belief’s subjective perspective thus hasn’t yet
been stably and fully incorporated into a larger, unified perspective in which he
simultaneously occupies the standpoint of the belief even while recognizing its falsity.
How could he give some form of first-order expression to the belief even while
maintaining his hold on its falsehood? Imagine that while he recognizes that his belief is
false, he is no longer engaged in intra-psychic struggle against it. Instead, he is able to
say, with warm, ironic good humour and a twinkle in his eye, ‘Of course I am a thief. After
all, I’m doing it right now! I’ve gotten you to pay undivided attention to me for a full hour,
and I’ve given you no love or attention in return.’ Here, tone is everything. We have to
imagine that the person is both giving voice to his belief that he is a thief and also in the
fact that he is speaking with ironic good humour giving voice to what he would otherwise
express by saying ‘Of course, I’m not a thief’. He thus gives voice to both sides of the
conflict while putting each in its proper place. And this single utterance doesn’t just
express the conflict; it expresses his total position regarding both the belief and the
conflict it is involved in. For instance, his utterance also expresses, with good-humoured
irony, the rationalizing pressure to seek confirming evidence for the belief that he is a
thief (‘See, I’m doing it right now!’), and the gentle, self-accepting, good humour with
which all of this is said expresses his recognition that this belief (with all that it involves)
is an immature solution to an immature problem. What we see here is thus an expression
of the full, stable incorporation of the false belief into a single, unified self-conscious
perspective.17
This person can give voice to both sides of the conflict without any oscillation in his total
position—that is, without any change in his total mental state, including its associated
dispositions and patterns of thought, feeling, and reaction. The utterance exhibits an apt,
settled pattern of relations between both sides of the conflict and also an apt, settled
orientation towards the conflict itself. The person thus has the ability to speak with one
voice—a voice that expresses the totality of his complex overall perspective all at once.
Indeed, it is this ability that is a key reason for describing this as one contemporaneous
complex subjective perspective comprising both the subjective position of the belief and
recognition of its falsehood. What underwrites such an ability are the functional relations
amongst the person’s beliefs, thoughts, feelings, motivational states, and ongoing
patterns of thought, feeling, motivation, and reaction, including the relatively stable
maintenance of an organization over time that includes an overall good grip on reality.
This, then, is one way things can look when a person has successfully integrated a false
unconscious belief. It is not the only way, and it may be but a stage in a larger process.
(p. 323) There is still the question of what motivations lie behind this belief. Moreover,
though this resolution is well attuned to reality and stable so far as the particular conflict
Page 17 of 30

is concerned, it may be threatened or undercut by other psychodynamic processes or co-

opted for other purposes. Moreover, certain defensive structures can look superficially
similar to this resolution; here the difference might be marked, for instance, by the
superficiality of the irony, the lack of warm self-acceptance, the casual flimsiness of the
patient’s claim to know that he is not a thief, or the panic-concealing giddiness of his
statement that he is one.
My use of the phrase ‘speaking with one voice’ emphasizes a connection with an
important theme in recent work by Jonathan Lear. Lear has articulated a broadly neo-
Aristotelian concept of integration involving excellent communication between the
rational and non-rational aspects of the psyche, communication that enables a person to
move forward freely to satisfy both the person’s conscious aims and unconscious
yearnings (Lear 2017). As he puts it:
If the voices of the non-rational soul are an occasion for a creative, in-tune and
thoughtful response from reason; and if, in turn, reason is able to enliven and free
up the voices of the non-rational soul, as it channels them into a life worth living,
we can give content to the thought that this is a rich form of speaking with the
same voice.
(Lear 2017: 49)
Here Lear calls attention to the way in which two systems or ‘parts’ of the psyche can
work in harmony despite their different modes of functioning: they are, at bottom, in a
certain kind of accord. This is an important form of integration. However, it differs from
the mode of integration which I have been highlighting: the integration of conflicting
mental states into a whole that neither evades nor elides the conflict but rather
incorporates it into a broader, well-functioning, self-conscious standpoint.
Lear’s own clinical examples do not thematize the relation between these two modes of
integration. One of his clinical examples—the case of Mr B—is described in such a way
that it appears that excellent communication is achieved without the patient’s consciously
integrating whatever conflict is holding him back (2017: 42). In the example of Ms A, by
contrast, the patient self-consciously experiences the conflict for what it is, and this
appears to play a role in enabling her to make a request that had been difficult for her
(2017: 22). This is a moment that is comparable to what I have described in the
integration of unconscious belief.
It is an open question for me to what extent and in what ways excellent communication
between the rational and non-rational aspects of the psyche involves consciously
experiencing and integrating conflicting mental states, just as it is an open question in
what way(s) the latter form of integration might depend upon the form of good
communication that Lear describes. The point that I want to mark for now is just this:
because these phenomena are conceptually distinguishable, these questions need to be
Page 18 of 30

considered. As Lear has helped us see, we shouldn’t assume in advance that we know
what integration is or should be.
Philosophical Implications: Psychic Unity,

(p. 324)
the First-Person Perspective, Transparency,

and Rational Self-Constitution
I have argued that if we are to make sense of the possibility that bringing unconscious
beliefs to consciousness could be a path to psychic health, we must make sense of the
idea of self-consciously occupying the standpoint of a belief that one knows to be false. I
have tried to show how to do so. In closing, I will briefly sketch some important
implications for several large issues in philosophy.
a. There is a strong tendency amongst philosophers to view both the unity of the subject
and psychic integration as matters of rational unity. For instance, in his defence of the
broadly Freudian idea that the mind can contain partitions between distinct psychic
systems, Donald Davidson comments, ‘I postulate such a boundary somewhere between
any (obviously) conflicting beliefs…. Such boundaries … are conceptual aids to the
coherent description of genuine irrationalities’ (Davidson 1986: 211; see also 1982). Such
aids are needed, Davidson tells us, because ‘two obviously opposed beliefs could coexist
only if they were somehow kept separate, not allowed to be contemplated in a single
glance’: these are ‘beliefs which, allowed into consciousness together, would destroy at
least one’ (Davidson 1997: 220). But the result of the partition, he says, is ‘a single mind
not fully integrated’ (1997: 221).
These formulations presuppose a picture of psychic integration as rational integration,

resulting in the rational abandonment of one or the other of the conflicting beliefs. The
integrated mind is thus free from obvious conflict, on this picture. However, we have seen
that self-conscious belief isn’t tied that closely to rationality, nor does psychic integration
necessarily involve the removal of rational conflict.18
Sydney Shoemaker deploys framing assumptions similar to Davidson’s in

(p. 325)
considering Moore’s paradox. He writes, of a person who affirms ‘I believe that p but p is
false’, that ‘the only way to save the coherence of this case is to suppose that it involves
there being a divided mind. One part of a person’s mind believes something, and another
does not, and the part that does not believe it ascribes the belief to the part that
does’ (Shoemaker 2012: 249). Here Shoemaker gets things exactly backwards. The
analysand’s ability to sincerely say or think such a thing is a manifestation precisely of
the overcoming of psychic division: it’s from one and the same perspective—that of the
conscious subject of the belief in question—that the analysand both self-ascribes the
belief and acknowledges its falsehood.
Page 19 of 30

At bottom, the lesson is this. There is a widespread view that it cannot possibly be correct
to ascribe an obviously irrational combination of contemporaneous conscious attitudes to
a person. Consideration of the clinical task of integrating false unconscious beliefs shows
that this view is simply incorrect. The unity of a single, self-conscious, subjective
perspective need not be a rational unity.19
b. I turn now to an issue prominent in recent philosophical discussions of knowledge of

one’s own beliefs and other attitudes. It is a familiar point in these discussions that there
is a crucial difference between ordinary first-personal awareness of our emotions, beliefs,
desires, and other attitudes, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, knowledge we
might gain about these matters in other ways. For instance, someone might learn of her
unconscious belief by accepting an interpretation offered by her analyst or by drawing an
inference from indications in her behaviour and conscious thought and feelings. She
doesn’t thereby gain the sort of knowledge that we ordinarily have of our own beliefs. The
difference is that her self-attribution is analogous to a third-personal psychological
attribution: she does not self-ascribe the belief from the standpoint of the conscious
subject of the very belief being self-ascribed. As it is put in the literature, she does not
stand in a genuinely first-personal relation to her belief (Moran 2001).
According to a long and prominent philosophical tradition, the genuinely first-personal

relation to one’s attitudes is inextricably linked to considerations of rationality and a
conception of the self as rational agent. Perhaps the most prominent proponent of such a
view is Kant, who writes that ‘it is only as intelligence that [a person] is his proper self’
and that if certain desires cannot be viewed by the individual as the products of reason,
‘He does not even hold himself responsible for these inclinations or impulses or attribute
them to his proper self’ (Kant Grundlegung 457–8; Beck’s translation p. 7). Themes along
these lines have shaped the thinking of a large number of contemporary philosophers, not
all of whom identify as specifically Kantian (Bilgrami 2006; Boyle 2009; Moran 2001; Rödl
2007). For instance, some hold that self-attribution of beliefs from the first-person stance
necessarily involves a stance of deliberative agency and rational endorsement. Others
hold that in first-personal attributions of belief, one sees the belief as the product of one’s
rational faculties.
The points I have been urging show such views to be mistaken. Self-attribution
(p. 326)
from a first-person stance requires consciously occupying the attitude’s subjective

perspective on the world. In the cases I have been discussing this does not require or
allow for rational endorsement of the belief or even seeing it as the product of the proper
functioning of one’s rational faculties. Nor in these cases does the first-person relation
involve taking a stance of deliberative agency towards the belief, since one might very
well recognize that one can’t get rid of the belief through rational deliberation. Rather, in
these cases a genuinely first-personal stance involves seeing the world from the
subjective standpoint of the belief even while regarding it as false and as the product of
non-rational belief-forming processes involving wish, phantasy, and defence. What is
required here is acknowledgement and acceptance of the reality of one’s psychic life,
building on a certain kind of emotional openness to that which one finds repugnant or
Page 20 of 30

unreasonable.20 This is not reducible to any sort of intellectual exercise, nor is it

compatible with identifying oneself (as subject) with one’s rational capacities in
particular.
Still, something is right in thinking that our reasoning capacities, and our understanding
of ourselves as possessing and aiming to exercise such capacities, are relevant to our
ability to take up a first-personal relation to our beliefs. Our ability to acknowledge and
accept our false beliefs depends fundamentally on our capacities for rational reflection
and response to reality. Without those capacities, we could not contain the conscious false
belief within a broader conscious perspective that puts it in its place, but would rather be
the helpless victims of unresolved conflict.
c. Problems also arise for the related accounts of first-personal self-knowledge which take
‘transparency’ to be central. Gareth Evans claimed that in self-ascribing a belief about
whether there will be a third world war ‘I must attend … to precisely the same outward
phenomena as I would attend to if I were answering the question’ whether there will be a
third world war (1982: 225): that is, to determine whether I believe that p, I ask whether
p and then if I find that p is true (or false), I append ‘I believe that . . .’ to that result. As
Moran puts it, ‘[T]he claim [of the Transparency Condition] … is that a 1st-person present
tense question about one’s belief is [to be] answered by reference to (or consideration of)
the same reasons that would justify an answer to the corresponding question about the
world’ (Moran 2001: 62). On this conception, present-tense self-attribution of belief from
the first-person standpoint is dictated by rational consideration of the relevant evidence
and facts concerning the matters the belief is about.
This view cannot make sense of the clinical phenomena. When an analysand integrates a
formerly unconscious belief that is plainly false, she cannot self-attribute the belief by
following the transparency procedure; after all, she recognizes that the belief is false, so
when she asks whether p her answer will point away from self-attribution of belief that p
—at least if she follows the transparency procedure. Still, she stands in a properly first-
personal relation to her belief that p nonetheless. Her relation to that belief is not merely
‘attributional’ or ‘theoretical’; she occupies the subjective perspective of the belief and
(p. 327) self-attributes the belief from that position. Properly first-personal self-attribution
thus need not conform to the transparency condition.
This point is of clinical importance. Precisely because the transparency procedure ties
self-attribution to one’s judgement about what is the case or what the relevant reasons
support, to take up the transparency approach in the clinical situation would be to refuse
to admit into one’s self-conscious view any belief that one can see fails to fit with the
relevant evidence or facts. The stance of Transparency would thus be a manifestation of
resistance to the analytic process or a defence against conscious psychic conflict in these
cases. In the clinical setting, the key question is, ‘How am I oriented towards myself and
my world?’ If one is tempted to answer that question by focusing on the question, ‘What
is there reason for here?’, one might well be led into a defensive, false self-conception
(Bell and Leite 2016; Lear 2011: 56).
Page 21 of 30

Some accounts of self-knowledge emphasize transparency without framing it in terms of

the Kantian themes highlighted earlier. Clinical cases raise a challenge for these views as
well.
For instance, according to Alex Byrne’s (2005, 2011) ‘inferentialist’ account, first-
personal awareness of our own beliefs is secured through an inference in accordance
with the ‘Doxastic Principle’, ‘If p, then conclude that you believe that p’. Byrne
emphasizes that this would be a distinctively first-personal way of acquiring such
knowledge; the inference’s reliability depends precisely on the fact that it concerns one’s
own beliefs. However, the patient who comes to see ‘from the inside’ that she believes—
quite incorrectly—that she has stolen everything good in life, has genuinely first-personal
knowledge of this belief, and yet we cannot reconstruct this knowledge in terms of the
reasoning Byrne proposes. First, the person would not reason in the way he suggests (‘I
have stolen everything good in my life, so I believe that I have stolen everything good in
my life’), because she regards the premise as false. Second, it is hard to see how an
inference from a premise a person correctly regards as false could give her knowledge of
the conclusion. Her first-personal awareness of this belief consequently cannot be
grounded in any such reasoning.
d. I turn to one last issue: the constitution of the self. A prominent strand of thought in
contemporary philosophy urges that my endorsement is what makes the difference
between that which belongs to ‘me’ as subject and that in my psychology to which I relate
only as an object of description, report, and possibly management (Frankfurt 1988;
Korsgaard 2009).21 On this view my unity as a subject is threatened to the extent that I
have not yet sorted conflicting elements into ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ through deliberation and
endorsement or rejection. Korsgaard gives characteristically sharp expression to the
point.
Because human beings are self-conscious, we are conscious of threats to our

psychic unity or integrity. Sometimes these threats spring from our own desires
and impulses … we deliberate in the face of threats to our integrity, and as against
them … we must repress them in order to be one, to be unified, to be whole (2009:
26).
Korsgaard does not merely mean that we give order to our psychologies by
(p. 328)
choosing to act on some motives and beliefs but not others. Rather, she thinks of
deliberation and choice as forging a distinction between what is genuinely ‘us’ and what
is not. ‘That’s what deliberation is: an attempt to reunite yourself behind some set of
movements that will count as your own’ (Korsgaard 2009: 213); through deliberation and
choice we engage in ‘the endorsement of our identities, our self-constitution’ (2009: 43).
So, for Korsgaard self-unity is achieved through extrusion: I cannot recognize from the
first-person point of view that something belongs to me as subject which I do not and
cannot endorse, but rather must regard it merely as ‘a product of some force that is at
work on me or in me’ (2009: 18–19).
Page 22 of 30

This gets things backwards from the clinical point of view. What is true, given a
psychodynamic framework, is rather that psychic health requires us to integrate these
threats ‘in order to be one, to be unified, to be whole.’ That doesn’t mean that we must
endorse them or choose to act upon them. It means that we must bring them within our
purview as self-conscious subjects, understanding them as us, as part of our identity, as
part of who we are.22
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Notes:
(1) Schwitzgebel (2002) offers a broadly dispositional approach to belief that fits well with
the perspective sketched here.
(2) There are two options here because someone could have patterns and dispositions of
conscious response—and be aware of the world in ways—that constitute occupying the
subjective perspective of the attitude, and yet be unable to self-ascribe it. For instance,
she might lack facility with relevant mental state concepts. More subtly, to consider just
one sort of alternative in which she possesses facility with the relevant concepts, she
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might consciously experience reactions of anger or envy but for defensive reasons be
unable to experience them as anger or as envy. Finkelstein (this volume) offers an
expressivist account of the conscious/unconscious distinction which attempts to cover all
of the relevant cases. However, it is doubtful that his account adequately handles clinical
examples in which a person directly expresses her attitude through self-attribution and
yet fails to understand in the requisite way what she is doing (Bell and Leite 2016; Leite
2018). More complicated versions of such examples cause trouble for Finkelstein’s
account even when it is supplemented with the requirement (Finkelstein, this volume)
that the person be able to ‘co-expressively gloss’ the expression of the attitude.
(3) Only a great deal of experience with the person will enable a belief attribution of this
specificity. For instance, some of the data I have described is compatible with an
attribution of the belief ‘I am an imposter’, but someone who thinks himself an imposter
rather than a thief will exhibit a different profile of thoughts and emotional responses.
However, some measure of indeterminacy may be an inevitable part of mental state
attributions as well. (Nothing I have said here addresses questions of clinical technique
such as how the analyst should regard her own conjectures about the patient or how she
should bring them into the clinical exchange.)
(4) This is a schematic characterization of the mechanism of ‘disavowal’ proposed by

Freud in his attempt to account for certain cases of fetishism (1927, 1940a: 201–4,
1940b).
(5) The Kleinian tradition uses the spelling ‘phantasy’ to mark off the specifically
psychoanalytic concept, as do many other analysts writing in Britain. However, many non-
Kleinian psychoanalysts, especially those in America, prefer the spelling ‘fantasy’. For
convenience, I will follow the Kleinian spelling. No tendentious theoretical assumptions
are thereby intended.
(6) This difficult task often isn’t helped by saying that a part of the patient hates the
object while another part loves the object. As Michael Feldman puts it, ‘while the patient
might be able to understand such interpretations intellectually, [she] may not be able to
use it in an insightful way, to promote psychic integration’ (2007: 383).
(7) Not all cases are of this sort; for instance, many repressed beliefs in relation to trauma
are not false.
(8) I don’t deny that sometimes we simply don’t know what to say about what the person
believes or knows. However, the case relevant here isn’t like that. It is one in which the
person has the dispositions (described earlier) involved in unconsciously believing that he
is a thief and also has the dispositions involved in believing—indeed, knowing—that he
isn’t one. The complex interplay between these dispositions explains the variegated
pattern of actual behaviour and reactions.
(9) The integration of unconscious belief thus poses a particularly sharp challenge for this
philosophical tradition. It has been noted in recent work on Moore’s paradox that in
Page 27 of 30

situations of irrational or superstitious belief, a person might recognize that she has a
belief even while acknowledging its falsity (Gertler 2011; discussion in Coliva 2015).
However, it hasn’t been clear in these examples whether the person occupies the
subjective position of the belief at the time of the self-attribution. If not, then such
examples are beside the point. Just as it is no surprise that a person could recognize on
the basis of her own behaviour that she has a false unconscious belief, it is no surprise
that self-attribution is straightforward when one is alienated from one’s belief and does
not at that moment occupy its subjective standpoint on the world. This is why the
integration of unconscious false belief is a key test case.
(10) This phenomenology is distinct from what is presented as being the case, but rather
concerns the manner in which it is so presented.
(11) It is sometimes asserted that understanding belief as involving ‘commitment’—say, a

‘commitment’ to the truth of the believed proposition—precludes intelligible self-
ascription of false belief (Coliva 2015). However, on any ordinary conception of
commitment you can perfectly well recognize that you have and are expressing a
commitment that you shouldn’t have: a commitment that is erroneous, mistaken, or
misguided. Admittedly, ‘commitment’ could be stipulatively defined in such a way that
‘commitment’ to the truth of p is incompatible with the self-attribution of false belief.
However, one had better not understand conscious belief in such terms. Such an account
has the consequence that self-conscious, deliberative change of mind is impossible—
which it surely isn’t (Leite 2016).
(12) Thanks here to Sarah Majid.
(13) Another sort of short circuit would arise if the analysand defensively rolled up his
sleeves and got to work on trying to change the belief before truly coming to occupy it
(Wollheim 2003).
(14) Fonagy, for instance, writes: ‘Therapeutic action lies in the conscious elaboration of
preconscious relationship representations’ (1999: 218). Stern et al. comment: ‘In the
course of an analysis some of the implicit relational knowledge will get slowly and
painstakingly transcribed into conscious explicit knowledge’ (1998: 918). Lyons-Ruth
writes: ‘If relational knowing is as much implicit and procedural as symbolic, the work of
elaborating new implicit procedures for being with others must occur at enactive as well
as symbolic levels … For an adult patient, more collaborative and inclusive dialogue may
involve partially translating previously implicit procedural knowing into words’ (1999:
608, 611, italics added).
(15) This example is suggested by a discussion in Lyons-Ruth (1999: 596).
(16) Even Stern et al. recognize the clinical importance—and difficulty—of bringing
dynamically unconscious beliefs to consciousness. They write: ‘The process of rendering
repressed knowledge conscious is quite different from that of rendering implicit knowing
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conscious. They require different conceptualisations. They may also require different
clinical procedures, which has important technical implications’ (1998: 918).
(17) There is a link here—which only became clear to me after writing this chapter—to
Lear’s important work on irony and therapeutic action (2003: esp. 118–33; see also Lear
2011).
(18) Psychoanalysts, too, are sometimes tempted by the conception of integration as an

absence of conflict. For instance, Morris Eagle writes, ‘In his later writings, [Freud]
writes that in health there is a “seamlessness” between the id and the ego, and also that
the overarching goal of psychoanalysis is unity of the personality. In taking this general
perspective, Freud aligns himself with those whose philosophical and spiritual ideal is
being at one with oneself, a man or woman of one piece. These figures include Confucius
… who reported that at the age of seventy … the dictates of his heart and his sense of
right and wrong were now one and the same, and Kierkegaard … who wrote that purity of
heart is to will one thing. The primary value underlying this idea is … the experience of
being at peace with oneself…. One way of putting it is to say that psychoanalysis moves a
bit out of what appeared to be the near-exclusive orbit of the Enlightenment vision and
closer to philosophical traditions characterized by a central concern with the
achievement of inner harmony’ (Eagle 2013: 908). Here we see a slide from
‘seamlessness’ (which is a functional/structural concept) to an ideal of integration as the
removal of conflict. However, seamlessness and the unity of the personality (understood
in functional/structural terms) do not in fact require the removal of conflict, but rather
acceptance of the conflict—of both sides of the conflict as ‘me’—and the discovery or
creation of a way to move forward given the fact of conflict. This alternative ideal—of
living with conflict gracefully and in full consciousness—gives us a different conception of
what ‘being at peace with oneself’ and ‘inner harmony’ (Eagle 2013: 908) might come to.
(19) I argue for this point on other grounds as well in Leite 2016.
(20) There is a parallel issue that can arise regarding psychoanalytic empathy—the
analyst’s capacity to empathically share in the patient’s perspective without endorsing it
and while maintaining her own.
(21) Of course, this characterization overlooks the vast differences between Frankfurt’s
and Korsgaard’s views in other respects.
(22) I am grateful to many people over many, many years for assistance related to this
chapter. I would especially like to thank Kate Abramson, David Bell, David Bleecker, Matt
Boyle, Louise Braddock, Jason Bridges, Ronald Britton, Fred Busch, Morris Eagle, Gary
Ebbs, Peter Fonagy, Richard Gipps, Louise Gyler, Edward Harcourt, Jim Hopkins, Leon
Kleimberg, Michael Lacewing, Jonathan Lear, Richard Moran, Caroline Polmear, and
Mary Target. I apologize to the many additional people who I am surely forgetting. I
would also like to thank the audiences at the 2013 Auburn University Conference on
Theoretical Rationality, the 2014 University of London/London Institute of Psychoanalysis
Joint Conference on Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, the 2015 American Philosophical
Page 29 of 30

Association Pacific Division Meeting, and the members of the Philosophy and
Psychoanalysis Study Group of the London Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Adam Leite
Department of Philosophy, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
Page 30 of 30

Making the Unconscious Conscious

David H. Finkelstein

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198789703.013.18
How should we understand the distinction between conscious states of mind and
unconscious ones? This chapter briefly reviews an answer to this question that the author
has set out and defended in earlier work; it then suggests a new answer—one that
supplements, rather than replaces, the old answer. In spelling out this new answer, the
chapter offers an account of a distinction that is related to, but not identical with, that
between conscious and unconscious states of mind, viz. the distinction between conscious
and unconscious expressions.
Keywords: expression, expressivism, conscious, consciousness, first-person authority, self-knowledge, unconscious
1. A Question
unconscious ones? This question, which I’ll refer to as ‘Q’ in what follows, could also be
put this way: by virtue of what is someone’s anger, fear, anxiety, or desire, for example,
rightly characterized as either conscious or unconscious? In what follows, I’ll introduce
some background to, and then briefly review, an answer to Q that I’ve set out and
defended in earlier work.1 I’ll raise a worry about how this answer could be correct, and
I’ll discuss an exchange between Jonathan Lear and Richard Moran that bears on how the
answer I’ve given to Q might help to elucidate what Lear calls ‘the psychoanalytic
meaning of making the unconscious conscious’ (Lear 2011: 52).2 Both the worry and the
exchange between Lear and Moran will lead me in the direction of a new answer to Q—
i.e. toward another way of understanding the difference between conscious and
unconscious states of mind—one that supplements, rather than replaces or corrects, the
old answer. Providing it will require that I present an account of a distinction that is
related to, but not identical with, that between conscious and unconscious states of mind,
viz. the distinction between (what I’ll call) conscious and unconscious expressions.
Page 1 of 17
Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 08 March 2019

A good point of departure for theorizing about what it means to characterize someone’s
state of mind as either ‘conscious’ or ‘unconscious’ is a simple, tempting, and ultimately
unsatisfactory answer to Q that can be put as follows: ‘A person’s mental state is
conscious if she is aware of it, i.e. if she knows that she is in it. It is unconscious if she
does not know that she is in it’. To see why this is not a satisfactory answer to Q, consider
the following story:
Max is a philosophy professor who lives and works in Chicago. Every few months,
his mother flies to Chicago from her home in New York to meet with business
associates and to visit her only child. Almost every time she does this, Max forgets
to pick her up at the airport. Now, as a rule, Max doesn’t tend toward this sort of
forgetfulness. He never forgets to retrieve his wife or his friends from the airport.
Moreover, on those occasions when he forgets to retrieve his mother, he also
manages to be away from his mobile phone or to be carrying a phone whose
battery has died—so, she is unable to reach him. One day, while talking with a
colleague about his mother, it occurs to Max that this behaviour of his might
constitute evidence that he is unconsciously angry at her. Indeed, on thinking
through some of his other recent behaviour involving his mother, Max becomes
convinced by this hypothesis—convinced on the basis of behavioural evidence that
he harbours unconscious anger toward her. He says to his colleague, ‘I must be
unconsciously angry. It’s the only way to explain the way I’ve been acting; I’m
angry at my mother’.
Imagine that Max is justified in drawing the conclusion that he does. In such a case, we
might describe him as ‘knowing that he is unconsciously angry at his mother’. I take it
that there is nothing incoherent in such a description. But if this is so, it means that being
consciously angry is not the same as knowing that one is angry. At the end of the story,
Max knows that he is angry at his mother; he is aware of his anger, but this anger is still
unconscious.
Why is it tempting to think that a conscious mental state is just one that its subject knows
about or is aware of? I suspect that part of the answer lies in the fact that we use the
expression ‘conscious of’ (nearly) interchangeably with ‘aware of’. Right now, as I write
these words, I’m aware of—i.e. conscious of—my dog’s left front paw, which is resting on
my right foot. Of course, no one imagines that it somehow follows from the fact that I’m
conscious of Kopi’s paw that her paw can itself be described as ‘conscious’. But the
difference between ‘conscious of x’ and ‘x’s being conscious’ is easier to get confused
about when x is one’s own state of mind. In order to get ourselves into a position from
which we can think clearly about question Q, we need to distinguish between two ways in
which the word ‘conscious’ is used. At the conclusion of Max’s story, he has become
aware of—we could say ‘conscious of’—his anger toward his mother. But his anger is not
conscious. He is conscious of his anger, but he is not consciously angry. (It is only when
someone is consciously angry—and not merely conscious of his own anger—that his anger
is said to be conscious). Q asks how we should understand the difference between
conscious states of mind and unconscious ones (i.e. the difference between someone’s
Page 2 of 17

being consciously, e.g. angry and his being unconsciously angry). We’ll fail to get this
difference into focus if we conflate it with a distinction between things that one is aware
of and things that one is unaware of.3
2. Wittgenstein’s Suggestion
The answer to Q that I’ve defended in the past may be understood as an attempt to
develop a suggestion that Ludwig Wittgenstein makes concerning how to think about
psychological self-ascriptions. In his late writings, Wittgenstein often suggests that we
should understand such ascriptions as, or as akin to, expressions. Thus he writes:
The statement “I am expecting a bang at any moment” is an expression of

expectation.
(Wittgenstein 1967: §53)
When someone says “I hope he'll come”—is this a report about his state of mind,
or an expression4 of his hope?—I can, for example, say it to myself. And surely I
am not giving myself a report.
For even when I myself say “I was a little irritated about him”—how do I know how
to apply these words so precisely? Is it really so clear? Well, they are simply an
expression.
(Wittgenstein 1992: 70)
Wittgenstein thinks that, at least when we’re doing philosophy, we are inclined to imagine
that saying, ‘I expect an explosion’, is more like saying, ‘He expects an explosion’, than in
fact it is. Thus, we assume that just as my ascribing an expectation of an explosion to
another person requires that I have some epistemic ground or justification for believing
that he expects an explosion, so, too, my ascribing an expectation of an explosion to
myself requires that I have some epistemic ground or justification for believing that I
expect an explosion. The likely result will be a view according to which, even under the
best of circumstances (even when there is no question of my being opaque to myself),
psychological self-ascriptions should be understood as reports of observations—a view
that Wittgenstein takes to be misguided.5 His suggestion—that we think of such
ascriptions as expressions—is meant to provide an alternative way of understanding their
grammar. When Wittgenstein calls, e.g. a self-ascription of expectation an ‘expression’,
part of what he means is that it is not the report of an observation. Thus, there is a
fundamental grammatical asymmetry between psychological self-ascriptions and
ascriptions of psychological states and goings-on to others.
In Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, this suggestion first appears in §244, in the

context of an exchange between Wittgenstein and his interlocutor concerning how it is
Page 3 of 17

that children manage to learn the names of sensations. During this exchange, we find
Wittgenstein saying:
Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, the natural,
expressions of the sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and
he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later,
sentences. They teach the child new pain-behaviour.
It’s no accident that it is in the context of a discussion of language learning that

Wittgenstein introduces the idea that some self-ascriptions might be understood in terms
of expression. Part of his point could be put as follows (and here I’m reading §244
through the lens of many other passages in which Wittgenstein likens self-ascriptions to
expressions). No one imagines that when an infant expresses a pain by crying, wincing, or
moaning, he is issuing a report concerning an item that he has discovered via some sort
of inwardly directed observation. We can think of a child’s gaining the ability to say,
‘Ouch!’ or, ‘That hurts!’ or, ‘I feel a pain in my foot’, as a matter of his learning new ways
to do something that, in some sense, he could already do before he could talk, viz.
express his pains. And while an expression that takes the form of a prelinguistic cry or
wince is different in significant ways from an expression that takes the form of a self-
ascription6—even so, Wittgenstein thinks, there is no good reason to hold that when a
child becomes able to produce the latter sort of expression, he suddenly needs to rely on
inner observation in order to manage it.
Immediately following the bit of Investigations §244 that I quoted in the preceding
paragraph, the text continues as follows:
“So you are saying that the word ‘pain’ really means crying?”—On the contrary:
the verbal expression [der Wortausdruck] of pain replaces crying and does not
describe it.
The question that Wittgenstein’s interlocutor asks in the first of these two sentences is
liable to seem oddly confused or unmotivated. After all, Wittgenstein has not suggested
(in §244 or elsewhere) that the word ‘pain’ means something different from what we
always took it to mean; he’s not suggested that it really refers to behaviour. What is
moving the interlocutor to ask what he asks here?
Wittgenstein’s interlocutor is in the grip of a false dilemma concerning sensations and

other mental items. He (the interlocutor) consistently thinks—not only in the
Investigations, but in other late writings as well—that one must choose between (1)
thinking of pains, etc. as things that can be known about only via a kind of inner
observation directed at a realm of objects that just one subject can, in principle, have
direct access to, and (2) embracing a kind of behaviourism that, in effect, eliminates
sensations and replaces them with behaviour. In the quoted passage from §244, the
interlocutor gathers that Wittgenstein means to be rejecting the idea that we ordinarily
Page 4 of 17

self-ascribe pains on the basis of inner observation, so he, in effect, accuses him of
embracing behaviourism. In this instance, the interlocutor’s way of accusing Wittgenstein
of embracing behaviourism is to suggest that Wittgenstein thinks the word ‘pain’ doesn’t
after all pick out anything genuinely inner, but instead just means crying.
This isn’t the only moment in the Investigations when Wittgenstein’s interlocutor accuses
him of behaviourism. But in §244, Wittgenstein replies to the accusation in a way that is
liable to sound off-key. He doesn’t say merely that an utterance such as ‘I’m in pain’
should be understood as a verbal expression of pain and not as a description of crying (or
of any other behaviour). He says that the verbal expression of pain replaces (‘ersetzt’)
crying. And perhaps this doesn’t seem quite right. After all, it’s not as if children stop
expressing pains by crying when they learn how to express them by talking about them.
Maybe Wittgenstein ought to have used a different word at the end of §244. Still, I think
it’s important that there is, after all, a kind of replacement that occurs when children
learn to express their pains by self-ascribing them. And I think Wittgenstein might have
had this in mind when he imagined the exchange in the way that he did. In any case, I
want to say that there is an important sense in which the kind of crying a child did as a
prelinguistic infant really is no longer a part of her life after she learns to talk about her
own sensations, emotions, and attitudes. The kind of crying she did as an infant is, at that
point, replaced by another kind of crying. After she learns to talk, even though her
expressions-of-pain-via-crying sometimes look and sound the same as they did before,
they now could be said to have a different form. I’m going to have to leave this suggestion
dark for a little while—until after I’ve discussed the possibility of an expression’s being
conscious. I’ll come back to it in §7.
3. An Answer to Q
In my own writing, I’ve tried to take what Wittgenstein says concerning the grammar of
our talk about our own mental states and use it to make sense of the distinction between
two kinds of mental state. The guiding idea could be put this way: once a human being
has acquired language, her mental states are such that she is, ordinarily, able to express
them via the sort of speech act that Wittgenstein talks about; she can express her
sadness, anger, or desire by ascribing it to herself. Insofar as she is able to do this, her
sadness, anger, or desire is said to be conscious. But sometimes, even after a human
being has acquired language (and with it, the capacity to say what she is thinking or
feeling), she is unable to express, e.g. some particular fear of hers by self-ascribing it. A
kind of expressive ability that is characteristic of normal psychological states and events
as they figure in the life of a linguistic animal is, in such a case, absent or blocked. The
word that we use to characterize this sort of absence is ‘unconscious’ or ‘unconsciously’;
we say that someone’s fear is unconscious or that she is unconsciously afraid.
What would it take for Max’s unconscious anger toward his mother to become conscious?
It would not be sufficient for Max to become aware on the basis of behavioural evidence
that he was angry. For Max’s anger to become conscious, he would need to acquire, or to
Page 5 of 17

regain, an ability to express it merely by self-ascribing it. This expressive ability is what
he still lacks at the conclusion of the story I told about him in §1. At the end of that story,
Max says to a colleague, ‘It’s the only way to explain the way I’ve been acting; I’m angry
at my mother’. In so saying, Max expresses a belief (or perhaps knowledge) that he has
about himself. But he does not express his anger at his mother. He may express that
anger by stranding his mother at the airport, but he is still unable to express it by self-
ascribing it. Hence, it is still unconscious.7 This is to say, I’ve answered Q by claiming that
what distinguishes conscious states of mind and unconscious ones is the presence or
absence of a particular expressive ability.
In my Expression and the Inner, I put the point as follows:
Someone’s mental state is conscious if he has an ability to express it merely by

self-ascribing it. If he lacks such an ability with respect to one of his mental states,
it is unconscious.
(Finkelstein 2003: 120)
What work is the word ‘merely’ doing in this encapsulation of an answer to Q? Why not
leave out ‘merely’ and say, more simply, that a person’s mental state is conscious if and
only if he can express it in a self-ascription? The trouble with the simpler formulation is
that it is open to counter-examples of the following sort. Imagine that Max occasionally
expresses his anger by speaking in a peculiar, clipped tone of voice. While speaking in
this tone of voice, he says: ‘The only way to explain my odd behaviour is to posit that I am
unconsciously angry at my mother. So, I’m angry at her’. Through his tone of voice, Max
expresses his anger in a self-ascription of it. Even so, his anger is unconscious. In
Expression and the Inner, I wrote:
When I say that someone’s state of mind is conscious if he has an ability to

express it merely by ascribing it to himself, I mean this: the sort of ability at issue
is one that enables a person to express his state of mind in a self-ascription of it,
where what matters [to the self-ascription’s expressing what it does] isn’t his tone
of voice (or whether he is tapping his foot, or what he is wearing, or to whom he
happens to be speaking), but simply the fact that he is giving voice to his sincere
judgment about his own state of mind.8 That I might manage to express my
unconscious anger in a self-ascription of it via a clipped tone of voice doesn’t show
that I have the relevant sort of expressive ability. When I am consciously angry, I
can say in a neutral tone of voice, “I’m angry,” and thereby express my anger.
Was that an adequate response to the tone-of-voice case? In one sense, I think it was. It
showed that the case constitutes a merely apparent, not a genuine, counter-example to
the view I was defending in the book (and that I still take to be correct). On the other
hand, it seems to me now that what I wrote there (and elsewhere) is liable to leave a
reader with a nagging question that might be put as follows: ‘Why should it matter if a
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person is able to express his anger merely by self-ascribing it—as opposed to being able
to express it in a self-ascription that comes in a clipped tone of voice? How could the
difference between conscious and unconscious anger come down to something so
apparently unimportant as that?’ I take the challenge posed by this question seriously.
Indeed, part of what has moved me to pursue a second answer to Q is the aim of coming
to better understand how, given this sort of challenge, my first answer could be correct.
How is it that gaining, or regaining, an ability to express some emotion or attitude merely
by self-ascribing it can make a significant difference in a person’s life? I’m not yet in a
position to address this question, but I’ll return to it after I’ve given a second answer to
Q, in the final section of this chapter.
4. Non-Linguistic Animals
Given the answer to Q that I’ve just been reviewing, we should not expect the distinction
between conscious and unconscious psychological states to, as it were, get a grip when
we are thinking about non-linguistic animals. After all, it is only when one is considering
the psychology of a linguistic creature that it makes sense to distinguish between states
that can be expressed in self-ascriptions and states that cannot. And, as a matter fact, we
don’t characterize the psychological states of non-linguistic creatures as either conscious
or unconscious. Even those of us who are prone to attribute complex thoughts and
feelings to our pets do not say things like: ‘My dog gets upset when I pack my suitcase
because she has an unconscious fear of being abandoned’, or, ‘Over time, my cat’s
distaste for the people who live next door has gone from being unconscious to being
conscious’. Nor do we say such things about prelinguistic children. To borrow a phrase
that Wittgenstein uses in a related context,9 when a child learns to attribute mental states
to herself, a ‘new joint’ is added to the language-game. We could say that when children
learn to self-ascribe their psychological states and events, the form of those states and
events changes. From then on, they are either conscious, unconscious, or somewhere in
between conscious and unconscious.10 To the extent that some desire of mine is such that
I am unable to express it by self-ascribing it, it could be said to suffer from a formal
defect or imperfection. But it is no imperfection in Kopi’s desire, e.g. for water that she is
unable to express it by self-ascribing it. Kopi’s desires are, unlike mine, neither conscious
nor unconscious.11 This is to say: it makes no sense to describe a desire of hers as either
‘conscious’ or ‘unconscious’. In the shift from brute to fully realized human desire, a new
joint is added to the language-game; the psychological is transformed.
5. ‘What is gained … by replacing some words

for some tears?’
One of the goals that Jonathan Lear sets for himself in his fascinating A Case for Irony is
to elucidate ‘the psychoanalytic meaning of making the unconscious conscious’ (Lear
2011: 52). In pursuing this end, he draws on the strand in my work that I’ve been
reviewing and discussing in this chapter. Lear contrasts a case in which someone
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concludes on the basis of self-observation that he must be angry, even though he isn’t
‘consciously feeling angry’, with a very different case that he describes as follows:
[I]n the midst of a boiling rage, I say “I’m furious with you!” In this case, the anger
itself is present in the verbal self-ascription of anger that is directed at you. In this
case, the self-ascription of anger is itself an angry expression. Unlike the former
case, I do not have to observe myself to know that I am angry. I just am angry; and
the form my anger at you takes on this occasion is the angry verbal self-ascription
directed at you. In this case, the utterance “I am furious with you!” may replace
other forms of angry expression. … This is a case, in Finkelstein’s terms, in which
I am not only conscious of my anger; I am consciously angry.
(Lear 2011: 52–3)
Lear goes on to consider the question of how it might be therapeutic, rather than merely
disruptive, to find some way of, as it were, taking unconscious anger—anger that has
been ‘held out of consciousness not simply because it is painful, but because it violates
one’s sense of who one is’ (Lear 2011: 54)—and making it conscious. In this context, he
says, ‘The question thus becomes whether there could be a process—not too disruptive—
by which the verbal expression of anger replaces (in the Wittgenstein-Finkelstein sense)
its unconscious manifestations’ (Lear 2011: 54).
A Case for Irony comprises a pair of lectures by Lear followed by responses by several
other philosophers. In one of these responses, Richard Moran writes:
The idea of “replacing” one mode of expression for another is not perfectly clear
to me, particularly in the therapeutic context into which Lear is importing the
idea. On a basic level, we might ask: If the two modes of expression are really
doing the same work, then what is the point of “replacing” one with the other? If
we take the notion of replacement literally, then what is gained, for instance, by
replacing some words for some tears? Does that mean that the tears are now
unnecessary, having been replaced by something else?
(Moran 2011: 113)
It might be tempting to try to answer Moran’s question by drawing a distinction between

the kind of expressive ‘work’ that gets done via a self-ascription of sadness and the kind
that gets done via crying. But I believe that this would be to draw a line in the wrong
place. At least insofar as we’re interested in psychoanalysis, there is an important line for
us to draw between expressions that are, in a very particular way, defective or imperfect
and ones that are not. But, as will become apparent, crying can lie on either side of this
line. Moran’s question is useful, I think, insofar as it helps us to see that we need to
distinguish cases in which someone’s (e.g.) crying constitutes (what can be called) a
conscious expression of sadness (or joy or whatever) from ones in which someone
unconsciously expresses her (e.g.) sadness via crying. Moran asks what the point is of
replacing some tears with some words—that is, of replacing an expression that takes the
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form of crying with one that takes the form of self-ascription. My own view is that there
need not be any point in replacing crying with self-ascription. Tears are just fine as long
as they constitute conscious expression. Psychoanalysis does not aim to replace tears with
words. It aims to replace unconscious expressions with conscious ones.
6. The Distinction between Conscious and

Unconscious Expressions
What does an unconscious expression look like? We already saw an example of one in §1,
but I’d like to consider a somewhat different example now:
One afternoon, Max and his wife, Sarah, have a quarrel while assembling hors
d’oeuvres for a dinner party that they’ll be hosting that evening. Sarah’s new boss
will be one of their guests, and partly for this reason, she is worried about the
party’s going well. Although the quarrel subsides after a few minutes, Max
continues to dwell on it. Just before guests are scheduled to arrive, he reminds
himself that Sarah has been anxious about the party’s going smoothly, and he tells
himself that it would be petty of him to express the anger that he’s still feeling
toward her in front of their guests. He resolves to be the perfect co-host, to be
cheerful, charming, and useful. In spite of—and perhaps partly because of—this
resolution, Max repeatedly expresses his anger during the party, but he remains
unaware of doing so. He responds to Sarah’s sharp, witty, and critical assessment
of a recent movie by suggesting that she simply failed to appreciate what was
innovative about it; he makes disparaging jokes about food that Sarah prepared;
he tells a story about her brother that she finds embarrassing; and so on. It does
not occur to Max that these remarks of his might be connected to that afternoon’s
quarrel, and if someone were to suggest that there was a connection, he would
deny it. Nonetheless, it is apparent to all but the drunkest of their friends that
Max is annoyed with Sarah. For all that, Max performs the bulk of the serving and
most of the straightening up. Indeed, at one point during the evening, he privately
congratulates himself on managing to ‘put on a good face’ for Sarah’s sake, in
spite of his angry, hurt feelings.
Here, Max unconsciously expresses his anger toward Sarah in passive-aggressive

remarks. A noteworthy feature of this particular example of unconscious expression—a
feature that is not present in every example—is that here, a person unconsciously
expresses a state of mind that is, itself, conscious. (As I’ve asked you to imagine him, Max
is consciously angry at Sarah). This example stands in contrast to one in which someone
unconsciously expresses an unconscious state of mind. The story that I told in §1—in
which Max expresses his unconscious anger by repeatedly stranding his mother at the
airport—constitutes one such example.
Thus far, I’ve recounted two stories in which Max unconsciously expresses anger. Here’s
one in which he consciously expresses pleasure:
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Early one evening, Max and Sarah are feeling both hungry and tired, so rather
than cooking dinner, they decide to go to a nearby restaurant. Five minutes after
they order, Sarah tells a joke, and after a brief pause, Max’s face lights up in a
smile. Sarah says, ‘Are you smiling at my joke?’ Max replies, ‘No. I thought your
joke was funny, but I’m smiling because I see the waiter with our food, and I’m
really pleased that it’s coming out so quickly’.
In this example, Max is able to speak to the question of what his smile expresses in, we
could say, a first-personal way. His smile is a conscious expression of his pleasure at the
imminent arrival of dinner.
How is conscious expression possible? How is it that Max is able to just say what his
smile expresses? How does he know that he’s not smiling at Sarah’s joke? I want to
approach these questions by first considering what seems to me an easier sort of case,
one in which someone speaks with a kind of first-person authority—not about what
psychological state a bit of his behaviour expresses, but rather—about what some of his
own words mean:
One afternoon, Max and Sarah attend a philosophy department social event. A
graduate student says to Max: ‘I just met Sarah. Is she a philosopher too?’ Max
replies: ‘She is a philosopher, by which I mean: she is moved by, and thinks hard
about, philosophical questions. But she’s not someone who makes her living by
doing philosophy’.
Here, Max first says, ‘Sarah is a philosopher’, and then he provides a gloss on what he
meant by these words. Imagine that someone were to ask: ‘How did Max find out what he
meant by the words, “Sarah is a philosopher”? Did he first hear himself utter these words
and then work out a plausible interpretation of them?’ That’s the wrong way to think
about what’s going on in the story. Indeed, the question, ‘How did Max find out what he
meant when he said, “Sarah is a philosopher”?’ is itself confused. Max didn’t find out what
the first half of his statement meant and then, in the second half of the statement, report
what he had learned. We might want to call the second part of Max’s statement an
interpretation of, or gloss on, the first part. But it’s not the sort of gloss or interpretation
that another person might provide. The second part of Max’s statement is as much a part
of his assessment of Sarah qua philosopher as the first part is. We should think of the two
parts of Max’s statement as constituting a kind of unity, a single act. I’ll describe them as
co-expressing his assessment of Sarah qua philosopher. If a listener wants to understand
this assessment, she needs to consider the two parts of Max’s statement (the part in
which he says, ‘Sarah is a philosopher’, and the part in which he glosses what he meant
by these words) as making sense together, as two pieces of a single, extended expression
of his thought.
Now consider again the story I told about Max and Sarah at the restaurant. Recall that
when Sarah asks Max whether he’s smiling at her joke, he replies, ‘I’m smiling because I
see the waiter with our food, and I’m really pleased that it’s coming out so quickly’. Max’s
smile, I said, is a conscious expression of his pleasure at the imminent arrival of dinner. I
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want to suggest that we understand Max’s gloss on what his smile expresses in the same
way that we understood Max’s gloss on what he meant by the words, ‘Sarah is a
philosopher’. When Max says what his smile expresses, he is not offering the sort of
interpretation of his behaviour that another person might offer. Rather, his smile and his
gloss on its significance are two parts of a unified expressive act; together, the smile and
the gloss co-express his pleasure at seeing dinner on its way. What I’ll call a ‘co-
expressive gloss’ on the psychological significance of, e.g. a smile is not an interpretation
of the smile based on observation. It is, rather, a kind of extension of the smile into a
linguistic register.
***
At this point, I can say what it is that distinguishes conscious expressions from
unconscious ones. Someone’s expression of a mental state is conscious if she is able to
gloss it—i.e. gloss its psychological significance—co-expressively. Someone’s expression
of a mental state is unconscious if she is unable to gloss it co-expressively. What it means
to say that Max’s passive-aggressive dinner-party remarks are unconscious expressions of
his anger at Sarah is this: they are expressions of anger at Sarah that Max is unable to
gloss co-expressively.
It’s not impossible that someone should unconsciously express her frustration by
slamming a door and, immediately thereafter, accurately interpret the significance of this
behaviour in the way that a psychologically astute external observer might. But in such a
case, the door-slam and the gloss on it would be separate acts. When someone
consciously expresses her frustration by slamming a door, she is able to provide a gloss
on the slam, where such a gloss would, itself, be a continuation—a kind of extension or
stretching out—of her expressive act.
7. Replacement
Earlier in this chapter (§2), I discussed §244 of Philosophical Investigations, in which
Wittgenstein introduces the idea that when a child learns to talk about his pains, he
thereby learns a new way to express them. I noted that §244 concludes in a way that’s
liable to sound off-key, with Wittgenstein saying to his interlocutor, ‘[T]he verbal
expression of pain replaces crying’. I went on to make a suggestion that I was not yet in a
position to spell out, viz. that even if ‘replaces’ (‘ersetzt’) seems the wrong word for
Wittgenstein to have used in this context, there is a sense in which the kind of crying that
children do as prelinguistic infants is—when they learn to talk—replaced by another kind
of crying. I want to return to that suggestion and try to explain it in light of what I just
said about the distinction between conscious and unconscious expressions along with
something I said a little while ago, in §4.
In §4, I noted that the distinction between, e.g. anger that can be expressed via self-
ascription and anger that cannot be so expressed does not, as it were, get a grip when
one is considering the mind of a non-linguistic or prelinguistic animal. I went on to say
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that when a child gains the ability to self-ascribe his attitudes and emotions, their form
changes. Until then, it doesn’t make sense to describe them as conscious or as
unconscious. From then on, they are either conscious or unconscious or in between
conscious and unconscious. Now, something similar happens when a child gains the
ability to co-expressively gloss the psychological significance of his expressions: the form
of his expression changes. Until then, it doesn’t make sense to describe his expressions
(of sadness, pleasure, love, desire, anger, etc.) as either conscious or as unconscious.
From then on, his expressions are either conscious or unconscious or in between. When
Kopi expresses a desire to play with me by dropping a Frisbee at my feet, it is no formal
imperfection in her expression that she is unable to extend it into a gloss on itself. But if
Sarah discovers Max curled up on their bed, sobbing, and if—when she asks him why he
is crying—he is completely unable to say, then his crying could be characterized as
imperfectly instantiating the form of human expression. Thus, when children learn to talk,
one kind of crying does, after all, replace another.
Perhaps this a good place to point out that in this chapter, I am discussing four distinct
kinds of replacement: (i) the replacement of prelinguistic desires, fears, etc. with the sort
of desires, fears, etc. that are characteristic of linguistic creatures, (ii) the replacement of
prelinguistic expressions of desire, fear, etc. with the sort of expressions of desire, fear,
etc. that are characteristic of linguistic creatures, (iii) the replacement of unconscious
desires, fears, etc. with conscious ones, and (iv) the replacement of unconscious
expressions of desire, fear, etc. with conscious ones. A case of type (i) or (ii) does not
constitute an example of ‘making the unconscious conscious’.12 Cases of types (iii) and
(iv) are examples of ‘making the unconscious conscious’. A central aim of this chapter is
to elucidate the logical relations between cases of types (iii) and (iv)—between, that is,
two different ways in which the unconscious may be made conscious.
8. Another Answer to Q
In the story that I told about Max and Sarah’s dinner party, Max expresses his anger at
Sarah via passive-aggressive remarks. As I noted in §6, that story illustrates that it is
possible for someone to unconsciously express his conscious anger. Indeed, there is
nothing particularly extraordinary about a person’s unconsciously expressing either an
unconscious emotion or a conscious one. By contrast, we don’t find cases that we’d be
inclined to describe as ones in which someone consciously expresses an unconscious state
of mind. This is what we should expect, given what I have claimed about the distinction
between conscious and unconscious expressions. In order for Max to consciously express,
e.g. his anger toward his mother, he would need to produce an expression of anger whose
psychological significance he could co-expressively gloss. But now: consider a case in
which Max expresses his anger toward his mother by not answering the phone when he
sees that she’s calling. If Max could co-expressively gloss this expression—if he could say,
‘I’m not answering the phone because I’m angry at my mother’, and, thereby, extend his
non-verbal expression into a gloss—his anger would be conscious.
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Summing up a bit: we’ve seen that conscious states of mind may be expressed either
consciously or unconsciously. But unconscious states of mind can be expressed only
unconsciously. There is, as it were, no grammatical or logical space for an unconscious
emotion or attitude to be consciously expressed. A bit of reflection on this point yields the
new answer to Q that I promised at the start of this chapter. In §3, I quoted the following
statement from Expression and the Inner:

it is unconscious.
Let’s call that first answer to Q ‘A1’. What follows is a second answer; call it ‘A2’.
Someone’s mental state is conscious if she has an ability to consciously express it.
If she lacks this ability with respect to one of her mental states, it is unconscious.
A2 might sound as if it involves an uncomfortably tight circle, so I should point out that
although I am here, as it were, defining a sort of ‘consciousness’ in terms of a sort of
‘consciousness’, the latter sort of consciousness has been further defined in terms of co-
expressive glossing.13
Although A1 and A2 may be thought of as providing two different criteria for a mental
state’s counting as conscious, if they both are true—as I believe they are—then any
mental state that meets either one of these criteria will meet the other one as well. This is
to say: (i) if someone is able to express his, e.g. anger merely by self-ascribing it, then he
will be able to consciously express it. And (ii) if someone is able to consciously express,
e.g. his anger, then he will be able to express it merely by self-ascribing it.14 In what
remains of this chapter, I’ll be particularly interested in a point that is implied by (ii), viz.
that if someone is unable to express his, e.g. anger merely by self-ascribing it, then he will
be unable to consciously express it.
***
Given the answer to Q that I summarized in §3 and that is encapsulated in A1, making an
unconscious emotion or attitude conscious is a matter of acquiring or regaining an ability
to express it merely by self-ascribing it. It is such an ability that, I said, Max still lacks
even after he’s concluded on the basis of behavioural evidence that he is angry at his
mother. At the end of §3, I introduced, and then left hanging, a question concerning how
this could be the right thing to say about what it takes for an unconscious state of mind to
become conscious. Someone might put this question to me as follows: ‘As you have
characterized him, Max is able to express his unconscious anger at his mother by
stranding her at the airport, by misplacing his phone when he knows that she is likely to
call, and, presumably, by doing a wide variety of other things that are liable to annoy her.
Given the long list of ways in which he can already express this anger, why should his
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becoming able to express it in one more way—by self-ascribing it—be significant? How
could the difference between unconscious and conscious anger come down to that?’
I am now in a better position than I was in §3 to address the challenge presented by this
question. A couple of paragraphs back, I noted that putting A1 and A2 together yields a
point that I put as follows: ‘if someone is unable to express his, e.g. anger merely by self-
ascribing it, then he will be unable to consciously express it’. I suggest that this point
ought to help us understand why it is that the ability to express one’s own state of mind in
a self-ascription of it should not be considered just one expressive ability on a long list of
such abilities. Until Max is able to express his anger at his mother merely by self-
ascribing it, there is no way for him to consciously express it at all—either by telling his
mother that he is angry at her or by refusing to let her stay with him and Sarah when she
visits or by choosing not to answer the phone when he sees that she is calling.15 If Max
were to gain the ability to express his anger at his mother merely by self-ascribing it, this
would, as it were, open up the possibility of his consciously expressing it in these and
myriad other ways. If only for this reason, such a shift would be significant; it would
matter to Max’s life.
For all that, acquiring an ability to express his anger toward his mother in a self-
ascription of it would not guarantee that Max’s subsequent expressions of this anger
would be conscious rather than unconscious. As we’ve seen, a conscious state of mind
may be expressed either consciously or unconsciously. At the end of §5, I said that
psychoanalysis aims—not to replace tears with words, but—to replace unconscious
expressions with conscious ones. It is perhaps disappointing that acquiring (or regaining)
an ability to express an emotion or attitude in a self-ascription of it does not ensure that it
won’t continue to be expressed unconsciously. Still, the acquisition of such an ability is a
necessary step toward replacing unconscious expressions with conscious ones.16
References
Finkelstein, D. (1999). ‘On the distinction between conscious and unconscious states of
mind’. American Philosophical Quarterly 36 (2) (April): 79–100.
Finkelstein, D. (2003). Expression and the Inner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Finkelstein, D. (2010). ‘Expression and avowal’. In Kelly Jolley (ed.), Wittgenstein: Key
Concepts (pp. 185–198). Durham: Acumen Press.
Kluger, J. (2017). The Animal Mind. New York: Time Inc. Books.
Moran, R. (2011). ‘Psychoanalysis and the limits of reflection’. In Jonathan Lear, A Case
for Irony (pp. 103–114). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford:

Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1967). Zettel, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and G.

H. von Wright. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1992). Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology Volume 2, trans. C.

G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue, eds. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman. Oxford: Blackwell.
Notes:
(1.) See, e.g. Finkelstein 1999 and Finkelstein 2003.
(2.) Although Lear is interested in how my answer to Q might bear on our understanding
of psychoanalysis, it’s worth mentioning that neither Q nor the answer to it that I’ve given
is about psychoanalysis as such. (Freud was not the first writer to recognize that we are
sometimes moved by unconscious emotions, preferences, and desires. I take it that the
title character in Jane Austen’s Emma, who realizes at the end of the novel that she’s
been in love with Mr. Knightly for quite a while, presents at least as good an example of
someone whose behaviour is motivated by unconscious states of mind as does, say,
Freud’s Rat Man).
(3.) I believe that many theorists of ‘consciousness’ fall into confusion by failing to
distinguish between ‘conscious of x’ and ‘x’s being conscious’. For a discussion of this
point, see Finkelstein 2003, ch. 1.
(4.) In her translation of Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe sometimes

renders ‘äußerung’ as ‘expression’ and sometimes as ‘manifestation’. Here, I’ve changed
her ‘manifestation’ to ‘expression’.
(5.) It would take me beyond the scope of what I aim to do in this chapter to explain why
Wittgenstein thinks this is misguided. Stepping back from Wittgenstein, I would suggest
that any such position will suffer from the conflation that I mentioned in n. 3.
(6.) One difference is that winces, moans, and cries (regardless of whether or not they are
produced by a human being who can already talk) are not truth-apt, while self-ascriptions
are. Wittgenstein has often been read as wanting to deny this difference and claim that
psychological self-ascriptions are neither true nor false. This reading is, I think, both
uncharitable and unsupported by the relevant texts. (For a discussion of this point, see
Finkelstein 2010).
(7.) ‘What if someone has a phobia that prevents him from ever speaking about being
angry? Couldn’t he nevertheless be consciously angry?’ As I understand the concept of
expression, not every expression must be a public manifestation. (It seems to me that on
more than one occasion, I have: (i) tried to tiptoe past a sleeping person, (ii) stubbed my
toe, and, finally, (iii) expressed the resultant pain in my toe by thinking, ‘Ow! That really,
really hurts!’) It’s consistent with my understanding of expression to allow that we
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sometimes express our states of mind by self-ascribing them in thought, rather than out
loud. So yes; someone who has a phobia about saying that he’s angry can, on my view,
nevertheless be consciously angry.
(8.) Imagine someone’s replying to what I said in this sentence as follows: ‘If a person
expresses his, e.g. anger by self-ascribing it, then what his self-ascription “gives voice to”
is just that anger and not, as you suggest here, a judgment about it’. In order to bracket
this concern, my former self might have rewritten this sentence so that it ended as
follows: ‘but simply the fact that he is sincerely addressing a question about his own state
of mind’.
(9.) Wittgenstein 1967: §§422–6.
(10.) I argue that we should think of conscious and unconscious states of mind as lying at
two ends of a continuum in Finkelstein 2003: §5.5.
(11.) This isn’t to deny that Kopi might be very conscious of, e.g. a piece of cheese that’s
sitting on a plate on a table just above her head. Nor is it to deny that she might bang her
head—perhaps in pursuit of that cheese—and momentarily lose consciousness. (In a
special edition of Time called The Animal Mind, Steven Pinker is quoted as saying, ‘It
would be perverse to deny consciousness to mammals’ (Kluger 2017). When I say that
Kopi’s states of mind are neither conscious nor unconscious, I don’t take myself to be
disagreeing with Pinker’s remark).
(12.) I’ve characterized cases of types (i) and (ii) as involving changes in form—from
states of mind and expressions that cannot be described as either conscious or
unconscious to states of mind and expressions that can be so described. Thus, cases of
these types are examples—not of ‘making the unconscious conscious’, but rather—of
‘making what is neither conscious nor unconscious either conscious or unconscious’.
(13.) I am not claiming that there won’t turn out to be some sort of circularity involved in
one or both of my characterizations of the distinction between conscious and unconscious
states of mind. My aim is not to provide a reductive account of consciousness. I don’t
mind circles, as long as they aren’t so small as to be uninteresting.
(14.) If it still seems unclear that (i) and (ii) both obtain, what follows might make it seem
less so. Let’s begin with (ii). Imagine that Max slams his office door and that this is (for
him, in this situation) a conscious expression of anger that he’s feeling toward a colleague
named Jeff. What it means for this to be a conscious expression of anger is that he can co-
expressively gloss its psychological significance; he can respond to a question like, ‘Why
did you slam the door?’ with an answer like, ‘I slammed it because I’m angry at Jeff’—and
he can do this in such a way that the gloss is a kind of extension of (rather than an
observation report about) the initial expressive act (the door-slam). Now, if Max can do
that, then he is (obviously, I want to say) able to express his anger merely by self-
ascribing it, i.e. merely by saying, ‘I’m angry at Jeff’. So, if Max’s anger counts as
conscious according to A2, it will also count as conscious according to A1. Thus, (ii) would
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seem to be true. Now let’s consider (i). Imagine that Max is able to express his anger at
Jeff merely by saying, ‘I’m angry at Jeff’. Such a self-ascription would itself be a conscious
expression. This is to say: Max would have the ability to co-expressively gloss its
psychological significance. Suppose that Max expresses his anger at Jeff by saying to
Sarah, ‘I’m angry at Jeff’. Sarah thinks (for reasons with which we needn’t concern
ourselves) that in so saying, Max might be trying to make some sort of joke. She replies,
‘Are you joking? I’m not getting what you mean’. Here, Max would be in a position to
reply with a co-expressive gloss on his initial expression, as follows: ‘When I said, “I’m
angry at Jeff”, I wasn’t making a joke; I was actually expressing anger that I’m feeling’.
So, if Max’s anger meets the criterion for consciousness in A1, it will also meet the
criterion in A2. Thus, (i) would also seem to be true.
(15.) While his anger toward his mother remains unconscious, Max might unconsciously
express it by not answering the phone when he sees that she is calling. But until he can
express that anger merely by self-ascribing it, there is no possibility of his consciously
expressing it by not answering the phone when he sees that she is calling.
(16.) Versions of this chapter were presented at the University of Murcia (Workshop on
Contemporary Rationalist and Expressivist Approaches to Self-knowledge, October 2016)
and at the University of Chicago (2016 Fall Colloquium, Department of Philosophy,
November 2016). I’m grateful to members of both audiences for their questions and
comments, especially Matthew Boyle, Jonathan Lear, Ángel García Rodríguez, Ryan
Simonelli, and Anubav Vasudevan. In addition, I’m indebted to Agnes Callard, Matthias
Haase, and Malte Willer for reading and commenting on drafts.
Department of Philosophy, The University of Chicago
Page 17 of 17

Phenomenology and Science: Introduction

Richard G.T. Gipps and Michael Lacewing
Print Publication Date: Feb 2019

Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Science
This introduction provides an overview of the five chapters in this section, which explores
some of the central issues in psychoanalysis as it relates to phenomenology and science.
One such issue concerns the scientific status of psychoanalysis (natural or social? bona
fide or tendentious?), and more specifically which between the methods of psychoanalysis
and its real-life practice may be considered scientific. One of the chapters examines
psychoanalysis as a scientific theory of mind, arguing that psychoanalysis fails to test its
theories. Another chapter suggests that many of the central tenets of psychoanalytic
theory are evidentially supported by recent developments in empirical neuropsychology.
Also discussed are the debate between those who view psychoanalysis as science and
those who insist that it rather offers a hermeneutic, how psychoanalysis provides a
phenomenology in its articulations of unconscious life, and alternative phenomenological
schemes for framing the dynamic unconscious.
Keywords: psychoanalysis, phenomenology, science, scientific theory of mind, empirical neuropsychology,

unconscious, psychoanalytic theory
Michael Lacewing and Richard G. T. Gipps
PHILOSOPHICAL disputation concerning psychoanalysis often begins—and unfortunately

sometimes ends—with the question of whether psychoanalysis counts as scientific
psychology. The claim that it does not is often taken to imply ‘too bad for psychoanalysis’,
rather than, say, ‘too bad for scientific psychology’, or ‘so what else is it then?’ But the
debate, if it is to be philosophically respectable, cannot simply take for granted some or
other unexamined conception of what being a science amounts to. And it will only
generate confusion, rather than pertinent critique, if it imports standards inappropriate
to its object. What it needs are explicit, workable, and apt conceptions of scientificity.
What we need to know when engaging with the debate is, for example, whether we are
here talking narrowly about natural science or much more permissively about
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Subscriber: Cambridge University Library; date: 17 March 2019

Wissenschaft—i.e. a systematic body of knowledge—or something in between? If by

‘science’ we mean Wissenschaft, then in that case anthropology, natural history, art
history, and psychoanalysis shall—as and when they accrue knowledge rather than
indulge speculation—all be counted as sciences. Freud certainly used the term
Wissenschaft to describe his endeavours, but he also tended to think that ‘the intellect
and the mind are objects for scientific research in exactly the same way as any non-
human things’ (1933: 159).
But what does the ‘same way’ mean in the quotation from Freud? Natural history differs
considerably from, say, chemistry in its use of merely observational rather than
experimental methods to accrue knowledge. Freud’s suggestion assimilates viable
understanding of matters psychological to the model of natural sciences; it leaves out of
consideration, for example, the possibility that psychoanalysis may better be considered a
social science—a science whose objects and methods are importantly unlike those
populating, and used to interrogate, non-human nature. We should also consider that
even parents with the best intentions and the most delightful offspring can sometimes
impose on their children in such a way as risks thwarting rather than nurturing their
flourishing. This, at least, is the force of Habermas’s (1987) contention that, in relation to
his own intellectual progeny, Freud laboured under ‘a scientistic self-misunderstanding’.
(p. 350) The question of the scientific status of psychoanalysis (natural or social? bona fide
or tendentious?) also requires specification as to the relevant aspect of its object. Are we
talking about the metapsychology (e.g. about putative underlying psychological
structures such as the id and superego), the aetiological theories (e.g. as concern the
developmental origins of various psychopathologies), the clinical theory (e.g. relating
particular difficulties to particular current defensive organizations), or the successfulness
of the clinical practice (e.g. as evaluated in outcome studies)? And are we talking about
whether the methods of psychoanalysis could, in theory, count as scientific or about
whether the real-life practice of psychoanalysts does so? And if we are interested in
testing the theory, then what kind of procedure is here to count as ‘testing’? And if we are
talking about the clinical theory, then which aspect of which one? Psychoanalysis has
after all developed a large number of theories of various phenomena from which a variety
of hypotheses may be drawn for testing, albeit all organized around centrally recurring
themes of dynamically unconscious motivation, defence mechanisms, symbolization, and
transference.
This last point raises a deeper question about how to understand psychoanalysis. When
we are talking about just such fundamentally organizing conceptions as unconscious
motivation, etc. are we describing the a posteriori hypotheses of a fallible science, or
rather the a priori organizing conceptualizations which belong to something we could call
the ‘philosophy’ of psychoanalysis? (Compare: do concepts such as ‘force’ and ‘space’
function to define physicists’ very field of enquiry, or do they function by referring,
hopefully successfully, to phenomena that show up within that field?) Perhaps that
distinction is itself rather too blunt to be helpful, and we should do better to consider the
a priori and the a posteriori as separated by degrees rather than by an immutable chasm.
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When we meet with an effective piece of clinical psychoanalytical theory, is its

effectiveness to be understood in terms of its ability to bring to life or make visible
something which beforehand too often went unnoticed—thus enriching the conceptual
frameworks with which we articulate human nature, or is it proposing a new causal
explanation for something which was perfectly visible all along? With regards to this issue
of visibility, a question not often enough asked, which parallels that of the scientific
prowess of psychoanalysis, concerns its phenomenological credentials: what wattage of
illumination of human nature has really been achieved by psychoanalysis compared with
other sciences and humanities?
In this part, the chapter by Eagle focuses on psychoanalysis as a scientific theory of mind.
Taking testability as a measure of scientific standing, he takes psychoanalysis to task for
its failure to test its theories. While Freudian theories can be used to generate testable
hypotheses, Kleinian and post-Kleinian theories are, he suggests, not so readily testable.
While they may play a variety of valuable functions inside and outside the clinic,
contributing to a scientific theory of the mind is not amongst them. Furthermore, setting
aside the theories, the practice of psychoanalysts does not encourage a scientific
approach—an objection pressed most frequently by Frank Cioffi (1999). Particular
difficulties noted by Eagle include a failure to address confirmation bias, a dearth of
decent published case studies, aetiological theories developed merely on the basis of
clinical (p. 351) data, concepts being tacitly redefined to preserve the otherwise
implausible theories they articulate, and a culture of hostility to research, guild mentality,
and gurus.
While Eagle looks at the extant scientific habits of psychoanalysts, Hopkins—a

philosopher—aims to demonstrate the scientific significance of psychoanalysis by newly
integrating it with attachment theory and neuroscience, arguing that many of the central
tenets of psychoanalytic theory are evidentially supported by recent developments in
empirical neuropsychology. Hopkins stresses the consiliences between psychoanalytic
understandings of the task of assimilating emotionally overwhelming experience (e.g. in
dreaming) to maintain reality contact, the development of symptoms when that breaks
down and primary process modes of cognition take over, the significance of our
attachment histories for developing the neurological structures required for such emotion
processing, Freud’s early neurological thought on minimizing ‘free energy’, and the
theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston’s more recent conception of the brain as tasked
with free energy minimization by producing such ‘predictive models’ of the perceptually
encountered world as minimizing complexity while maximizing accuracy. We note that
other such integrations are possible; those who prefer their theoretical neuroscience in
non-computational flavours may consult Allan Schore’s (2012) synthesis. The value of
Hopkins’s chapter for this book, though, is to indicate another way in which
psychoanalysis may seek to take its place amongst the sciences. As such it shows
philosophy in its synoptic mode (see Gipps and Lacewing, ‘Introduction: Know Thyself’,
this volume)—i.e. in its attempt to bring together disparate fields of knowledge with a
philosophical eye to the maximal coherence of the proposed integration. We may note too
the other scientific integrations now available and featuring in other sections of this
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handbook—with anthropology (Narvaez, this volume), with sociology (Jay, this volume); or
elsewhere—for example with cognitive and social psychology (Tesser 1991; Westen 2009).
Lacewing’s chapter steps back from the scientific details to review the debate between
those who would articulate psychoanalysis as science and those for whom it rather offers
a hermeneutic. In fact that very distinction is one which—in the course of a careful
unpicking of the assumptions at play in the debate of the last forty years between realist
and constructionist strands in American psychoanalysis—is deconstructed in the course
of his argument. That debate has, he contends, tended to confound its participants
because it too often runs together matters which are more fruitfully kept separate. While
it is possible to espouse all of realism (rather than constructionism), to respect (rather
than deprecate) metapsychology, to believe in mental determinacy (rather than hold to
the indeterminacy of the mental), and to portray psychoanalysis as aiming to provide
scientific (as opposed to a different kind) of knowledge, these need not stand or fall
together and should not in any case be assimilated. Although he is here not primarily
making a case for a particular combination of these themes, one possibility that becomes
particularly clear over the course of Lacewing’s chapter is that of a realist hermeneutic
science which respects mental indeterminacy while deprecating metapsychological
speculation.
Matters take a somewhat different tack in the chapters by Fuchs and Gipps. If we
understand what it is to be scientific in terms of testability, these chapters can be (p. 352)
understood as highlighting the importance of primarily non-scientific aspects of

psychoanalytic knowledge. That is, they are interested instead in our most basic
disclosure or characterization of unconscious life—psychoanalysis as phenomenology. We
do not test the aptness of a fundamental conceptual metaphor, picture, or vocabulary of
unconscious life against its object, since that procedure presupposes that we have what
here we do not have, namely some other conceptual scheme disclosing that object within
which the comparison could be framed. Instead we consider its fruitfulness both in
stimulating the development of further illuminations, and in warding off irremediably
speculative, esoteric, or otherwise fruitless conceptions of our unconscious life.
Gipps aims to draw out how psychoanalysis provides a phenomenology in its articulations
of unconscious life. The first half of his chapter makes a series of distinctions between
our acknowledgement of and accounting for phenomena, grammar versus fact, revelation
versus representation, and poiesis versus posits, and describes the central aspects of
psychoanalytic theory in terms of the former element within each pair. The second half
considers how a phenomenological understanding of psychoanalytic theory sheds light on
the divergence between the (typical) psychoanalyst’s and the (typical) psychologist’s
understanding of psychoanalytic theory and therapy.
Fuchs canvases several alternative phenomenological schemes for framing the dynamic
unconscious, and to replace or at least complement the ‘depth’ metaphors of traditional
psychoanalysis, he develops in detail a conception which puts to use Merleau-Ponty’s
notion of the lived body and Lewin’s notion of a life space. For Fuchs and Merleau-Ponty,
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the unconscious is sedimented in such bodily habits as we are blind to precisely because
they shape our very experience itself.
Between them, these five chapters offer the basis for future work on the philosophical
understanding of psychoanalysis. They analyse and deconstruct both psychoanalytic
‘theory’ and practice, and provide a range of approaches from which the question ‘what is
psychoanalysis?’ may be answered. They seek to identify and preserve what is most
valuable about psychoanalytic thought even while urging its development and integration
with other philosophical and empirical approaches to understanding human beings.
References
Cioffi, F. (1999). Freud and the Question of Pseudo-Science. Chicago, IL: Open Court.
Freud, S. (1933). ‘The question of a Weltanschauung’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The
Habermas, J. (1987). Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston, MA: Polity Press.
Schore, A. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. New York: W. W. Norton.
Tesser, A. (1991). ‘Social vs clinical approaches to self psychology: The self evaluation
maintenance model and Kohutian object relations theory’. In R. Curtis (ed.), The
Relational Self: Theoretical Convergences in Psychoanalysis and Social Psychology (pp.
257–281). New York: Guilford.
Westen, D. (2009). ‘The cognitive self and the psychoanalytic self: can we put our selves
together?’, Psychological Inquiry 3: 1–13.
Richard G.T. Gipps
Dr Richard Gipps is a clinical psychologist in private psychotherapy practice in

Oxford, UK, and an associate of the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Oxford.
He convenes the Philosophy Special Interest Group of the Institute of Psychoanalysis,
the Oxford Interdisciplinary Seminars in Psychoanalysis, and the Making the
Unconscious Conscious seminar series. His research interests lie in psychoanalysis,
psychosis, existential phenomenology, and Wittgenstein.
Michael Lacewing
Dr Michael Lacewing is a former Vice-Principal Academic and Reader in Philosophy

at Heythrop College, London, an Honorary Reader in Research Department of
Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology at University College, London, and a
teacher of philosophy and theology at Christ's Hospital School, Sussex. He has
published widely in philosophy of psychoanalysis, metaethics and moral psychology,
Page 5 of 6

alongside writing textbooks for A level philosophy and training in Philosophy for
Children (P4C).
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Complexities in the Evaluation of the Scientific Status of Psychoanalysis

Complexities in the Evaluation of the Scientific Status
of Psychoanalysis
Morris N. Eagle

This chapter is primarily concerned with the scientific status of psychoanalysis as a

theory of psychological functioning rather than as a form of treatment. It argues that
certain characteristics of psychoanalysis, including theoretical formulations that are often
obscure and untethered to observation, the proliferation of psychoanalytic ‘schools’, and
habits of mind inculcated in psychoanalytic training and education count against
according scientific status to psychoanalysis. The chapter also notes that psychoanalytic
formulations have generated a good deal of research on psychological functioning and
have yielded important insights into the nature of mind. It suggests that psychoanalytic
education and training needs to change in ways that succeed in attenuating loyalty to
particular psychoanalytic ‘schools’ and that encourage openness to empirical evidence
and research and the operation of other self-corrective processes.
Keywords: scientific status, psychoanalytic training, clinical data, empirical evidence, theory of mind.
Morris N. Eagle
Introduction
IN addressing the question of the scientific status of psychoanalysis one needs to keep in
mind: one, that psychoanalysis is a theory of psychological functioning and development
as well as a form of treatment, each aspect generating different issues and questions; and
two, that there is not a single psychoanalytic theory, but rather a collection of different
psychoanalytic theories and ‘schools’. The scientific status of Freudian theory has been
debated at great length over a period of many years (e.g. Grunbaum 1984; Hopkins 1988;
Lacewing 2018; Rosenblatt 1989; Sachs 1989). Far less discussed are the questions of:
one, the scientific status of post-Freudian psychoanalytic theories (however, see Eagle
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1986), formulations that have varying degrees of logical relationship to each other; and
two, the degree to which self-corrective processes relating evidence to theory are
embodied in the attitudes and practices of psychoanalytic practitioners (Cioffi 1970;
Eagle 2014).
Although I comment on psychoanalytic psychotherapy process and outcome research, my

main focus in this chapter will be on psychoanalysis as a theory of mind and psychological
functioning rather than as a form of treatment. I think Freud was right when he stated
that the claim of psychoanalysis on posterity will lie in its theory of mind rather than in its
form of therapeutic practice.
(p. 354) Psychotherapy and Outcome Research

Like any therapeutic approach, the practice of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic
psychotherapy may have little to do with science, but may be largely a matter of craft and
of individual talents and characteristics of the therapist, a conclusion supported by the
evidence that individual differences among therapists account for far more of the
variance in therapeutic outcome than specific techniques (Lambert and Barley 2001).
Scientific-empirical questions enter the picture when one directs systematic inquiry into
therapeutic outcome and the processes through which the outcomes occur.
There is a cadre of researchers (generally associated with university departments) who

have carried out process and outcome research on psychoanalytic and psychodynamic
treatment and have identified some of the factors that mediate therapeutic outcome. This
focus on accountability is a great advance over reporting outcomes in the form of clinical
anecdotes, self-selected clinical vignettes, testimonials, and ‘clinical experience’.1, 2 Thus,
if this chapter dealt with the question of whether psychoanalytically oriented researchers
are carrying out outcome and process studies on psychodynamic and psychoanalytic
psychotherapy, the answer would be a resoundingly positive one. That is not where the
problems related to the scientific status of psychoanalysis lie. The problems lie in the
facts that one, to the extent that there is any interest on the part of a large part of the
psychoanalytic community in such research, it is mainly limited to the demonstration that
psychoanalytic psychotherapy ‘works’; two, for the most part, there is little or no
feedback from the research findings to psychoanalytic training, education, and clinical
practice; and three, there is widespread hostility towards empirical research in the
psychoanalytic community. Indeed, the very idea of carrying out research on
psychoanalytic treatment has often met with indifference or hostility in the
psychoanalytic community.3 There are good reasons for scepticism regarding the direct
value of psychotherapy research for clinical work with individual patients. Insofar as
research studies often report group findings of a probabilistic nature, it would be
mistaken and foolish to think that one can directly and simply apply such findings to the
individual case. (p. 355) However, being aware of research findings can inform the
background of one’s clinical work and can lead one to question one’s cherished and
unquestioned assumptions.
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Let me provide an example. There is a significant body of psychoanalytic thought that

views transference interpretations as virtually the sole useful interventions in
psychoanalytic treatment (e.g. Gill 1982, 1994). However, there is evidence that
transference interpretations can have negative effects on therapeutic outcome (e.g. Ryum
et al. 2010; Schut et al. 2005) and that transference interpretations are relatively
ineffective with patients who are functioning at a relatively high level of interpersonal
relations and are effective mainly with patients who show relatively poor interpersonal
relations (Hoglend et al. 2006, 2011; Johansson et al. 2010). The latter finding, in
particular, contradicts the received wisdom that transference interpretations are likely to
be more effective with higher functioning patients. Surely, any responsible clinician
would want to be aware of such findings. Further, such findings are more likely to be
useful to therapists than general data on the effect of number of transference
interpretations on therapeutic outcome. Moreover, the further investigation of the factors
involved in accounting for why patients with relatively poor object relations find
transference interpretations more helpful, or which subset of patients within the poor
object-relations category find transference interpretations especially helpful, would be
even more likely to be useful in clinical practice. The more one includes individual
difference variables in one’s research, the less sharp the division between nomothetic and
ideographic approaches to knowledge, and the greater the direct usefulness of research
findings in clinical practice. The general point here is that rather than concluding that
research findings are of no relevance to the individual clinician, findings generated by
relatively sophisticated research designs can indeed be quite useful, even if their
usefulness is limited to leading one to reflect on one’s long-standing assumptions in
clinical work.
The fact is, however, that most psychoanalytic institutes, particularly free-standing ones,
neither require the carrying out of research nor, more noteworthily, prepare their
candidates to become critical research consumers. Neither of these activities plays any
significant role in psychoanalytic training and education in the majority of psychoanalytic
institutes. Furthermore, although not true of all psychoanalysts, as noted, there is a
pervasive atmosphere of hostility to research in most psychoanalytic institutes. As
described by Kernberg (2012), one of the site visitors’ criticisms of the Columbia
University Psychoanalytic Institute—an institute more supportive of research—was that
an emphasis on research would negatively affect a candidate’s clinical training and work.
Kernberg’s (2015) critique of the training and education practices of most psychoanalytic
institutes echoes Glover’s similar disaffection as far back as 1952. He writes:
It is scarcely to be expected that a student who has spent some years under the
artificial and sometimes hothouse conditions of a training analysis and whose
professional career depends on overcoming ‘resistance’ to the satisfaction of his
training analyst, can be in a favorable position to defend his scientific integrity
(p. 356) against his analyst’s theory and practice. And the longer he remains in
training analysis, the less likely he is to do so. For according to his analyst the
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candidate’s objections to interpretations rate as ‘resistances.’ In short there is a

tendency inherent in the training situation to perpetuate error.
(Glover 1952: 403)
Glover (1952) also describes the general state of affairs in the psychoanalytic community
as follows:
An analyst, let us say, of established prestige and seniority, produces a paper

advancing some new point of view or alleged discovery in the theoretical or
clinical field. Given sufficient enthusiasm and persuasiveness, or even just plain
dogmatism on the part of the author, the chances are that without any check, this
view or alleged discovery will gain currency, will be quoted and re-quoted until it
attains the status of an accepted conclusion. Some few observers who have been
stimulated by the new idea may test it in their clinical practice. If they can
corroborate it they will no doubt report the fact; but if they do not, or if they feel
disposed to reject it, this scientific ‘negative’ is much less likely to be expressed,
at any rate in public, and so, failing effective examination, the view is ultimately
canonized with the sanctioning phrase ‘so and so has shown’. In other words, an
ipse dixit acquires the validity of an attested conclusion on hearsay evidence only.
(Glover 1952: 403)
Quite disturbingly, there appears to be little or no change in the practices and attitudes of
the psychoanalytic community more than sixty years after Glover’s comments were made.
The psychoanalytic community’s interest in research appears to be directed mainly to

findings that suggest the effectiveness of a psychodynamic approach. During the time
that I was president of the Division of Psychoanalysis (Division 39) of the American
Psychological Association in 1995–6 there was little interest in research among most of
its members. A sudden interest in research arose in reaction to a spate of published
criticisms launched against the lack of evidence for the effectiveness of psychoanalytic
treatment. Some Division officers proposed the formation of a committee whose task it
was to amass all the evidence available demonstrating the effectiveness of
psychodynamic and psychoanalytic treatment. For the most part, the attitude towards
research of individuals making this proposal generally ranged from indifference to
hostility; they turned to it only for its demonstration and public relations value. They
appeared to want to have it both ways, namely, take the position that psychotherapy
research is irrelevant to psychoanalysis and, at the same time, turn to it for its public
relations value. This attitude towards research on the part of Division 39 members
continues to the present day: there is no longer a research section of the Division, partly
due to lack of interest in research papers among its members.
To sum up, as far as a psychoanalytic ethos is concerned, the set of attitudes and habits of
mind dominant among psychoanalysts and normative at psychoanalytic institutes is
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resistant to systematic inquiry into therapeutic process and outcome. Such inquiry, when
it does occur, is limited to a search for confirmation.
Psychoanalysis as Theory of Mind,

(p. 357)
Personality Development, and Psychopathology

Research on psychoanalytic theories and hypotheses has a long history going at least as
far back as a study by Pötzl (1917) on the influence of ‘indifferent impressions’ on dream
content and including, among other work, the Rosenzweig (1934) study on repression,
the Sears (1943, 1944) studies on Freudian concepts at Stanford; the anthropological
investigations of Malinowski (1927), and of Whiting (1960) and Whiting and Child (1953)
at Yale; studies on defence and ‘repressive style’ (e.g. Weinberger 1990; Weinberger et al.
1979); research on ability to delay gratification (e.g. Mischel 1961); the early work on
‘experimental neurosis’ (e.g. Masserman 1944, 1950), reflecting an attempt to integrate
Pavlovian and Freudian ideas (French 1933); research on Winnicott’s (1953) concept of
the transitional object (e.g. Cohen and Clark 1984); studies on the relationship between
the Freudian notion of orality and dependency (e.g. Bornstein, Poynton, and Masling
1985); the Fisher and Greenberg (1996) volume of empirical test of psychoanalytic
hypotheses; Masling and colleagues’ volumes on empirical test of psychoanalytic theories
(Bornstein and Masling 1998; Masling 1983, 1986, 1990; Masling and Bornstein 1993,
1994, 1996); and research on alexithymia (e.g. Taylor and Bagby 2013).
In short, psychoanalytic theory has been remarkably heuristic in generating a large body
of empirical research—mainly by non-psychoanalysts outside the context of
psychoanalytic training institutes. However: one, much of this research has had to do
with Freudian theory, largely due to the susceptibility to empirical testing of at least a
wide range of Freudian hypotheses; two, there appears to be a steady decrease outside
psychotherapy research in the number of research papers on psychoanalytic concepts
and formulations, largely due, I suggest later, to the unsusceptibility of many post-
Freudian theoretical formulations to empirical research; and three, the large body of
research findings have had little or no impact on psychoanalytic theorizing, perhaps
because of the widespread insistence that only clinical data from the psychoanalytic
treatment situation are relevant to psychoanalytic theorizing. I turn now to that
assumption.
Clinical Data
A virtually canonical assumption in the psychoanalytic literature, cutting across different
schools, is that evidence testing psychoanalytic formulations must be generated by the
clinical situation. Although in certain contexts, data derived from the clinical situation
can be useful in testing certain psychoanalytic hypotheses (see, for example, the research
(p. 358) of Luborsky on ‘momentary forgetting’ (1967, 1973) and the research of Weiss
and Sampson et al. (1986) on the relationship between therapist test-passing versus test-
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failing and the emergence of warded off contents), as Grunbaum (1984) cogently argued,
there are a number of problems with the uncritical use of such data. One problem is
illustrated in a paper by Masling and Cohen (1987) in which they follow the course of a
number of sessions of psychotherapy carried out by Carl Rogers, who defined his
approach as non-directive. In the early sessions the patient’s statements seem to be about
equally divided between concern with issues of sex and self. Undoubtedly unwittingly,
Rogers is silent when the patient talks about sex and tends to respond with a ‘Mmm’ or
tends to look up when the patient talks about issues of self. Over time, the patient’s
statements about sex decrease and his statements about self increase. This vignette
illustrates both the issue of suggestion in the clinical data as well as the problem of
confirmation bias, the latter insofar as the patient’s behaviour would tend to reinforce
Rogers’s belief that issues of self are more important than sexual issues for the patient.
Another problem with relying solely on clinical data to evaluate theoretical formulation is
that patients’ productions in the clinical situation are often ambiguous and subject to
different interpretations. Given the analyst’s theoretical commitment, he or she is likely
to interpret the patient’s free associations in accord with that commitment. For example,
if one believes that infantile sexual and aggressive wishes culminating in the Oedipus
complex are universal and at the core of psychopathology, one will likely find confirming
‘evidence’ for that belief in the patient’s productions (see Peterfreund 1983). And
similarly, if one believes, as Kohut (1984) does, that the need for empathic mirroring is
universal and that a traumatic lack of empathic mirroring is at the core of
psychopathology, one is likely to find confirming ‘evidence’ for that belief in the patient’s
productions. Confirmation bias is undoubtedly present in other disciplines. The important
question, however, is the degree to which the discipline allows and encourages self-
corrective practices (see Lacewing 2013).
An additional problem arises in the use of clinical data to defend etiological theories and
hypotheses (e.g. early lack of empathic mirroring leads to lack of self-cohesiveness in
adulthood). Such claims obviously require extra-clinical data. The shaky evidential base of
psychoanalytic etiological formulations becomes apparent when one considers that
virtually all such formulations are based on follow-back retrospective data rather than
follow-up prospective data (see Kohlberg et al. 1972). Employing follow-back data,
particularly follow-back clinical data, we develop our etiological theories of
psychopathology based solely on patients seen in the clinical situation. We do not get data
on individuals who may have been subject to the same vicissitudes as the patients we see,
but who function quite adequately. This inevitably leads to an overestimation of the
general pathogenic significance of the vicissitudes.
For example, in a follow-back study, Robins and McEvoy (1966) found that 59 per cent of
adult drug users were truants as juveniles. However, employing follow-up or longitudinal
data, they found that, for children who were truants before age fifteen, 26 per cent were
drug users as adults. Hence, an etiological theory linking juvenile truancy to adult drug
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use that is based solely on follow-back data would be seriously misleading regarding the
strength of the association between the two factors.
Or consider this purely hypothetical example: We have data on 1,000 individuals

(p. 359)
subjected to sexual abuse as children. Ten per cent of the children sexually abused as
children are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) as young adults. The
100 young BPD adults will be far more likely to be seen clinically than the 900 others.
Suppose further that all 100 of these young adults are seen at a particular clinic. The
clinicians treating them there may then form an aetiological theory that significantly
overestimates the impact of sexual abuse on the development of BPD. Researchers
considering the longitudinal data on all 1,000 sexually abused individuals, however, will
find that only 10 per cent of sexually abused children develop BPD, and so will conclude
that although sexual abuse is, indeed, a risk factor, it must interact with other factors in
determining the development of later BPD. Such research then encourages additional
research to identify the factors that jointly precipitate BPD. In short, formulations based
on clinical data on adult patients rely on follow-back or retrospective data rather than
follow-up prospective data and therefore cannot generate adequate developmental
theories. Recognizing this limitation and the importance of including methods and data
from other disciplines is necessary if one is to develop an adequate psychoanalytic theory
(or any other theory) of development, including the development of psychopathology.
Quite remarkably, for the most part, follow-back clinical data from adult patients
constitute the primary basis for central psychoanalytic developmental theories, for
example, Freud’s (1917 [1916–17], 1925 [1924]) positing of a universal Oedipus complex
that emerges at a particular age or, as another example, Kohut’s (1984) assertion that
lack of self-cohesiveness in adulthood is the consequence of early failures to have the
infant’s and child’s needs for empathic mirroring met.
With regard to the former, even if unconscious incestuous wishes were found in all
patients, this would hardly constitute adequate evidence for the positing of a universal
Oedipus complex characterized by specific wishes and regularly emerging in all children
at a particular age. Individuals seen in treatment, perhaps particularly in psychoanalytic
treatment, may constitute a selective group different in important respects from other
groups. Indeed, there is evidence that intergenerational conflicts (of which the Oedipus
complex is an instance) are more likely to be seen in troubled families (Ascherman and
Safier 1990; Erikson 1993; Flores, Mattos, and Salzano 1998). In short, an adequate
evaluation of the Oedipus complex hypothesis cannot legitimately rest on clinical data,
but rather requires longitudinal data with adequate sampling carried out outside the
clinical context. Furthermore, the insistence that only clinical data are relevant to testing
psychoanalytic hypotheses is but one instance of a stance that obstructs the possibility of
refutation.
Not infrequently, one finds the claim in the psychoanalytic literature that clinical data
from adult patients are not only an adequate, but the only legitimate, data for
psychoanalytic developmental formulations. For example, Green (2000), an influential
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spokesperson for this position, has distinguished between the ‘real child’ of empirical
observation and the ‘true child’ of psychoanalysis and written that ‘as far as
psychoanalysis is concerned, the “real child” is not our concern’ (2000: 61); only the ‘true
child’ is relevant to psychoanalysis. What Green means by the ‘true child’ is ‘the
reconstructed child of psychoanalysis’ (2000: 61). That is, Green seems to be saying that
one can infer the (p. 360) course of development and mental states of the child on the
basis of the productions of adult patients in psychoanalytic treatment.
If Green is saying that it is the patient’s subjective sense of his or her childhood, that is,
his or her psychic reality, rather than data from infant observation that are important in
clinical work, his argument is well taken. This point, I suspect, would be apparent to
anyone engaged in clinical work. Further, this claim does not require a sharp distinction
between the ‘true’ child and the ‘real’ child. Nor, and this is a critical point, does it
suggest that data from infant and child observation are irrelevant to psychoanalytic
theories of the nature of psychological development. After all, psychoanalysis is a theory
of mind as well as a clinical treatment.
Although Green’s view can be interpreted as applying to the context of the clinical
situation, the same cannot be said of Winnicott’s (1960) statement that ‘Indeed, it is not
from direct observation of infants so much as it is from the study of the transference in
the analytic setting that it is possible to gain a clear view of what takes place in infancy
itself’ (Winnicott 1960: 595, my emphasis). He goes on to say that ‘Freud was able to
discover infantile sexuality in a new way because he reconstructed it from his analytic
work with his psycho-neurotic patients. In extending his work to cover the treatment of
the borderline psychotic patient it is possible for us to reconstruct the dynamics of
infancy and of infantile dependence, and of the maternal care that meets this
dependence’ (Winnicott 1960: 595).
While one can perhaps understand the usefulness of this approach in the context of
treatment, it seems clear that one cannot legitimately base theories of infant and child
development on data derived from the productions of adult patients in treatment—even if
these data were not influenced by the therapist’s theoretical commitment. If one wants to
try to understand infant and child development, one observes infants and children in
systematic ways and over long periods of time. It is remarkable that this is even a
debated issue in the psychoanalytic community. That it is a debated issue, however, is
important information in addressing the role of the habits of mind and attitudes of
psychoanalytic theorists in the assessment of the scientific status of psychoanalysis. To
sum up, the three problems with the uncritical use of clinical data for general theoretical
formulations are: (1) suggestion; (2) confirmation bias; and (3) the inadequacy of follow-
back data for etiological formulations.
It is important to note that clinical data can be very useful in formulating and testing a
variety of clinical hypotheses and formulations. As noted earlier, this is illustrated in the
work of Luborsky (1967, 1973) on ‘momentary forgetting’ and the research of Weiss and
Sampson et al. (1986) on the relationship between therapist ‘test-passing’ and ‘test-
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failing’ and the emergence of warded off contents (see also Silberschatz 2005). In these
studies, the authors rely on a quasi-experimental design that is appropriate to the
phenomena being investigated. For example, Luborsky (1967, 1973) found that compared
to ‘control’ segments of clinical sessions in which momentary forgetting was not present,
those segments of clinical sessions that preceded momentary forgetting were
independently judged to be characterized by conflict and anxiety, suggesting that what
one might (p. 361) refer to as ‘mini-repressions’ occur when conflictual and anxiety-laden
material is being dealt with. With regard to the Weiss and Sampson researchers, based on
the clinical data, compared to independent judgements of therapist test-failing (i.e. the
independent judgement that therapist interventions tended to confirm the patient’s
unconscious pathogenic beliefs), therapist test-passing (i.e. the judgement that
pathogenic beliefs are disconfirmed by the interventions) was reliably associated with the
emergence in the clinical sessions of warded-off contents, broadened interests, and
reduced anxiety.
Case Studies
Another means by which clinical data can constitute a legitimate means of gaining
knowledge and a legitimate method of empirical research is the use of disciplined case
studies (Kazdin 1981, 2008). However, as noted by Portuges (1994),4 the American
Psychoanalytic Association Committee headed by Klumpner and Frank (1991) reviewed
the sixty most frequently referenced ‘psychoanalytic articles’ that had been published in
three prominent journals between 1869 and 1982 and scrutinized the top fifteen. They
reported:
[n]ot a single one of these 15 papers included any significant amount of ordinary
clinical data. Our sample contained no case studies. What evidence was given in
support of the conclusions could only be described as sketchy. We found no
verbatim examples of and only one dream fragment … Our most frequent
descriptions of the 15 papers were, ‘No clinical data’, ‘No evidence’,
‘Overgeneralized’ or ‘Assumptions not testable’. In short, it was as if
psychoanalytic data were considered so well documented that the reader would be
interested only in questions of interpretation.(as cited in Portuges 1994: 12)
There have been attempts to identify and recommend the standards for the case study
method that would enhance its reliability and validity as data (e.g. Eagle and Wolitzky
2011; Edelson 1984). However, as is the case with other empirical data, these attempts
have had little impact on papers published in psychoanalytic journals. Little has changed
since the Klumpner and Frank (1991) report. The clinical data reported in most
psychoanalytic papers tend to be limited to self-selected and sketchy clinical vignettes.
Page 9 of 27

(p. 362) Untestability of Formulations

Whatever the limitations of the above kind of theorizing, for the most part the reader can
generally understand what formulations are being proposed and perhaps imagine the
kind of evidence that might be relevant to assessing these formulations. Unfortunately
the psychoanalytic literature is replete with formulations that are so vague and/or so
obscure that it is difficult to conceive of any evidence that could play a role in their
evaluation. Especially unfortunate is the fact that the authors of these formulations are
not obscure figures, but include the most prominent and influential psychoanalytic
theorists in the world today.
Consider, for example, the following passage which is representative of Klein’s

formulations of infant fantasies. Klein (1930: 24–5) writes:
In my experience sadism reaches its zenith in this [early] phase, which is ushered
in by the oral-sadistic desire to devour the mother’s breast (or the mother herself)
… It is my experience that in the phantasied attack on the mother’s body a
considerable part is played by the urethral and anal sadism which is very soon
added to the oral and muscular sadism. In phantasy the excreta are transformed
into dangerous weapons: wetting is regarded as cutting, stabbing, burning,
drowning, while the faecal mass is equated with weapons and missiles.
(Klein 1930: 24–5)
Other than the comment ‘It is my experience’, Klein offers no evidential basis for the
attribution of such florid fantasies to the infant. Indeed, as I have noted, it is difficult to
even imagine what kind of clinical evidence could serve as a basis for such attributions.
Whereas one can think of evidence that could support Freud’s positing of a universal
Oedipal stage or Kohut’s claim regarding the need for empathic mirroring, it is very
difficult to even imagine the kind of evidence that would support Klein’s description of
the infant’s experience. This leaves one with the question of how Klein knows about the
experiences of the young infant. It also raises the question of why such theory should be
taken seriously, let alone taught at psychoanalytic institutes.
The writings, particularly the late work, of Bion, another highly influential psychoanalytic
theorist, fare no better with regard to the issue of testability. In his later writings, Bion
became increasingly mystical and preoccupied with the concept of ‘O’, which he variously
defined as the ‘Absolute Truth’, ‘Ultimate Reality’, ‘infinity’, ‘noumena or things in
themselves’, and ‘godhead’ (Bion 1965: 147–9; 1970: 52). Even those sympathetic to
Bion’s thought have commented on the problems with his later work. For example,
O’Shaughnessy (2005) writes in regard to this work:
Contradictions have their appeal; breaking the laws of thought and reason bring a
quantum of verbal fun. Yet, in scientific writings, such transgressions lead us to
anything and everything we fancy—because, as is readily logically demonstrable,
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from a contradiction any proposition follows. Texts with contradictions risk an

unending proliferation of meanings.
(O’Shaughnessy 2005: 1524–5)
The exegesis of Bion’s writings does not help much. For example, in a recent
(p. 363)
paper sympathetic to Bion’s ideas, Rosegrant (2012) refers to the notorious difficulty of
Bion’s writing style and comments that ‘a style that so dominates the message is better
taken seriously in itself, not as incidental, but as an integral part of Bion’s
message’ (Rosegrant 2012: 724). He then goes on to describe ‘the psychotic mechanisms
in Bion’s writing’ (724). These include ‘attacks on linking’ and ‘denudation of
meaning’ (725), a major ‘massive’ example of which is Bion’s notorious grid. Rosegrant
writes with regard to the grid: ‘he may or may not be describing psychologically and
clinically useful ideas, but displaying these ideas in a grid is an attack on the usually
linked ideas that a grid will simplify and help with understanding’ (727).
Rosengrant writes that ‘Bion’s writing, which on first glance appears to be about
psychosis, is on a more fundamental level an inducement to psychosis. Without providing
the grounding that would come from alerting the reader that this is about to happen, Bion
immerses the reader in the experience he is ostensibly describing: to read Bion is to be
psychotic’ (Rosegrant 2012: 727). He then goes on to state: ‘to recognize that Bion’s
writing is mad does not mean that it is without value or meaning, but clarifies that its
value and meaning are romantic’ (727–8). Rosegrant makes clear that what he means by
romantic in the present context is essentially a search for the ‘mystical one, god, the god
head’ (729) that Bion refers to as O. Further according to Rosegrant, for Bion, ‘the
experience of O is the proper goal of analysis’ (730).
As other examples of exegeses of Bion’s work, consider the following passages from a
prominent Kleinian and Bionian psychoanalyst’s account of Bion’s ideas:
1. ‘Bion took the final step in bringing psychoanalysis into alignment with virtually
all the fields of knowledge, including mathematics, physics, aesthetics, literature,
mythology, philosophy, poetry, religion, archeology, etc.—all for the purpose of
putting it on a veritable Internet of a universal epistemology’ (Grotstein 1997: 78).
2. ‘The major themes that express this profound paradigm shift include the concept
and the penumbra of ideas that cluster around “O”, the concept of the mystic, the
genius, and the “messiah”, the invocation of the “religious instinct”, the very idea of
God and the Godhead, and his explorations of fetal mental life’ (Grotstein 1997: 78).
3. ‘It is my impression upon reading Bion that this epistemological-ontological-
phenomenological cycle takes place as follows: the infantile portion of the
personality experiences O, Absolute Truth, as beta-elements, projects them into the
analyst who, in containing them, transforms them from O to K (from Truth to
Knowledge) and shares this knowledge with the analysand, who, upon this
acceptance of the knowable truth allows it to become transformed into wisdom,
personal O. I term this last act the achievement of the transcendent
position’ (Grotstein 2004: 1086).
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Klein’s and Bion’s concepts and formulations may be meaningful, evocative, and helpful
to many psychoanalytic clinicians. However, that is not the point here. Insofar as this
(p. 364) chapter is concerned with the scientific status of psychoanalytic theories, the
issues of evidence and empirical testability are, perforce, central. Further, insofar as
Klein and Bion are not marginal figures, but rather two of the most prominent and
influential theorists in the psychoanalytic world today, with a large group of followers, the
fact that many of their formulations are not susceptible to empirical test is a significant
factor in evaluating the status of psychoanalytic theory. This judgement, however, does
not preclude the value of their work in other contexts.
Progress and Theory Change

From the earliest period of its history to the present day, the emergence of ‘isms’ and
‘schools’, including Jungian, Adlerian, Horneyian, Sullivanian, Kleinian, Bionian,
Lacanian, ego psychology, modern Freudian, Fairbairnian, and relational psychoanalytic
theories, has characterized theoretical developments in psychoanalysis. Furthermore, the
emergence of each of these schools is not based on the presentation of evidence that
refutes earlier theories or compelling new evidence that supports the new theory. Rather,
theory change in psychoanalysis is characterized by the emergence of a charismatic
figure who attracts loyal adherents, often culminating in the establishment of
psychoanalytic institutes that provide training from a particular theoretical perspective
(Eagle 1987, 1995; Eagle and Wolitzky 1989).
Gedo (1984) has noted, accurately, I believe, that ‘experienced clinicians will refuse to
alter their convictions on the bases of [the researchers’] results. Instead, they would
continue to form their psychoanalytic views in direct response to their personal
experiences … the belief that psychoanalysis will make progress by validating the best
hypotheses through refined scientific methods is implausible. What we need are
innovative ideas powerful enough to compel acceptance by significant portions of the
analytic community’ (Gedo 1984: 514). However liberal one’s criteria for scientificity, it is
difficult to think of a discipline as scientific where theory changes take place as a function
not of systematic evidence but rather of the evocative power and appeal of its
formulations and the charisma of the originators of these formulations.
The historical trajectory of psychoanalytic theorizing is not encouraging to anyone who

looks for cumulative progress of a scientific sort. Indeed, although in certain areas one
may discern progress, many theoretical developments can be characterized as
retrogressive in one important sense. That is, whatever the problems and difficulties of
Freudian theory, many of its propositions are formulated with sufficient clarity that they
are susceptible to empirical test, as evidenced by the fact that much of the empirical
research on psychoanalytic propositions is linked to Freudian theory. Contrastingly, as we
have seen, Kleinian and neo-Kleinian theories, the most influential current psychoanalytic
theories, are formulated in such a way that the possibility of scientific testing does not
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arise. In so far as we are concerned with the development of a science of psychoanalysis,

this is not an encouraging trajectory.
(p. 365) Falsifiability of Psychoanalytic Propositions

It has been argued that the possibility of falsifiability speaks to the scientificity of a
theory, including psychoanalytic theory (Popper 2003/1965; See also Lakatos 1970). For
example, arguing against Cioffi’s (1970) position that the attitudes and practices of the
psychoanalytic community that protect these propositions from falsifiability compromise
its scientific status, Farrell (1961, 1984) has proposed that because certain specific
psychoanalytic generalizations can be refuted in principle, psychoanalytic theory should
be accorded scientific status. There are a number of problems with Farrell’s proposal.
One problem, already discussed, is that certain core psychoanalytic propositions do not
appear to be susceptible to empirical refutation. For example, how would one go about
devising procedures that would allow the possibility of refuting Freud’s and Klein’s claims
regarding an inborn death instinct, let alone its influence on psychological development
and functioning? The same question can be addressed to the florid fantasies attributed to
young infants by Klein or to Bion’s claims regarding beta and alpha elements and alpha
functioning.
A second problem with Farrell’s proposal is that, as Cioffi (1970) has pointed out,
‘refutability in principle is not an adequate criterion of the genuinely empirical character
of an enterprise’ (Cioffi 1970: 472). Were it an adequate criterion for scientific status,
astrology, for example, would have to be seen as scientific. For surely, astrological claims
are not only refutable, but, indeed, have been refuted. The issue is, as Cioffi (1970) has
noted, that astrological ‘theorists’ not only do not employ procedures that are able to test
their claims but, indeed, engage in practices that obstruct refutation. Thus, if being
refutable in principle is not accompanied by being refutable in practice, due to a parade
of obstructional procedures of the defenders of the claim, refutability in principle
becomes an empty criterion. The situation is somewhat analogous to the relationship
between the law and the carrying out of the law. Citing Orwell, Remnick (2016) observes
that the law itself affords no protection insofar as how laws are implemented depends on
the individuals carrying them out and on ‘the general temper of the country’ (Remnick
2016: 2). We all know of nations which have freedom-affirming constitutions, but
dictatorial practices.
Farrell’s (1961) specific example of a psychoanalytic proposition that is refutable in

principle is the theory of the Oedipus complex. Indeed, not only is there no convincing
evidence in support of a universal Oedipus complex, but a good deal of evidence against
that claim (see Eagle 2018). However, the refutation of the theory of the Oedipus complex
has not resulted in its relinquishment—just as refutations of astrological claims have not
resulted in their abandonment.
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Like Cioffi, Meehl (1993) also cites the practices and habits of mind of members of the
psychoanalytic community when he writes: ‘One need not conduct a literature search to
realize that the divergences in theory and technique among therapists in a broadly
(p. 366) “psychoanalytic” tradition are vast, increasing, and show little or no signs of the
sort of cumulative self-corrective development characteristic of post-Galilean

science’ (Meehl 1993: 324). That is, there is no ‘self-corrective’ feedback from the
evidence to the theory. The evidence contradicting the claim of a universal Oedipal stage
of development is largely ignored by many Freudian theorists who continue to refer to the
Oedipal complex both in their theoretical and clinical papers.
Another reaction to cogent critiques of the Oedipus complex hypothesis has been to
retain the concept, but radically alter its meaning so that it no longer bears much
resemblance to the original formulation and theoretical claims. Loewald (1979) writes:
‘the oedipal attachments, struggles, and conflicts must also be understood as new
versions of the basic union-individuation dilemma’ (775). In describing ‘oedipal
attachments’ this way, Loewald (1979) essentially redefines the Oedipus complex so that
it is understood as entailing conflict between remaining tied to early parental figures
versus separation and autonomy (in Mahler’s [1968] terms, between symbiosis versus
separation-individuation). The existence of unconscious incestuous and death wishes, the
defining features of the Oedipus complex, is no longer posited. Rather, reference to such
wishes is now understood not as pointing to actual incestuous and death wishes, but
rather as symbolic expressions of union and separation-autonomy. However, despite
gutting its essential features, which include the universality of unconscious incestuous
and death wishes, Loewald continues to refer to the Oedipus complex.
As another example of redefinitions of the Oedipus complex, Morehead (1999) writes that
although ‘human and animal evidence supports the Westermarck hypothesis’ (the
hypothesis that prolonged propinquity dampens sexual interest), such evidence does not
contradict ‘recent analytic theory on the Oedipus Complex [which] does not require the
existence of a central, powerful, incestuous sexual drive’ (347). Like Loewald, Morehead
removes a core aspect of the Oedipus complex—the existence of a central powerful sexual
drive—but nevertheless insists that it remains a viable theory. In short, both Loewald and
Morehead illustrate obstructional attempts to preserve a central psychoanalytic
hypothesis through nominal means despite the dearth of confirming evidence and the
accumulation of negative evidence.5
One could perhaps argue that the issue is largely a verbal one, i.e. that Loewald and
Morehead have merely retained the term ‘Oedipus complex’ to refer to certain dynamics.
However, this argument is not convincing. For one thing, Morehead makes clear that his
intention is to preserve the theory of the Oedipus complex. Perhaps most important,
Loewald’s and Morehead’s manoeuvres obscure the relationship between evidence and
theory through nominal means. That is, they obscure the conclusion that there is little or
no evidence in support of Freud’s positing of universal incestuous and death wishes. Nor
is there evidence that how one resolves Oedipal wishes has a decisive influence on
psychological development, including development of gender identity and the structure of
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the superego. Given this state of affairs, the warranted conclusion would point to the
relinquishment of the Freudian theory of the Oedipus complex. Further, (p. 367) there is
much evidence that issues of union versus separation-individuation and how they are
dealt with do exert a major influence on psychological development. However, union
versus separation-individuation is not a restatement or reconceptualization of the
Oedipus complex but, in an important sense, is a replacement of Oedipal theory.
Truth, Science, and a Heuristic Discipline

Despite the difficulties identified earlier, it is clear that psychoanalytic theory has had
much to offer to those interested in how the mind works. It has attracted the interest of
Nobel laureates such as Adrian (1946) and Kandel and gifted scientists such as Gallese,
the co-discoverer of mirror neurons. Indeed, both Kandel (2007) and Gallese (personal
communication) have reported that at one time in their life, they seriously thought of
becoming a psychoanalyst. It is important to add, however, that the inspiration for these
scientists was the corpus of Freud’s work on the nature of the mind rather than the post-
Freudian theorizing I have described.
Despite the problems I have discussed, there have been post-Freudian theoretical
developments that have contributed to an understanding of mental functioning. In my
view, these contributions include certain aspects of ego psychology (e.g. the importance
of certain ego functions such as reflective capacity, ability to delay gratification, and
capacity for affect regulation); the importance of what Mahler (1968) refers to as
separation-individuation in development; and Bowlby’s (1969, 1973, 1980) attachment
theory, particularly its account of the basis for the infant–mother bond and the
developmental consequences of the particular nature of that bond.
Although much of this work may have been stimulated by psychoanalytic ideas, for the
most part research in these areas takes place outside the psychoanalytic context (another
reason that psychoanalysts should familiarize themselves with research relevant to
psychoanalysis). For example, research and theory on ego functions (although it is not
referred to that way in the non-psychoanalytic literature) is primarily cognitive
psychology. Similarly, although Bowlby was trained as a psychoanalyst and viewed himself
as one throughout his life, virtually all the burgeoning research and theoretical
developments in attachment theory have taken place outside psychoanalysis, in domains
such as developmental psychology. These examples suggest that many psychoanalytic
ideas, including critical reactions to them, have been richly heuristic in stimulating
research. That is, to borrow Reichenbach’s (1938/1951) admittedly problematic
distinction, one can say that many psychoanalytic ideas have been useful in the context of
discovery; the problems lie in the context of testing them.
The value of a body of thought is not defined by its scientific status, nor is it the case that
only scientific method can generate important insights and truths. I believe that, at its
best, a psychoanalytic mode of thought is of great value in a number of ways, and in
particular, it may provide important insights into experience and behaviour that are not
Page 15 of 27

readily available through other means. As an example of this phenomenon, I am

(p. 368)
reminded of a description of an experience provided by Meehl (1984). He describes

observing a man and woman leaving a hospital, the woman carrying a Raggedy Ann doll.
Meehl becomes unbearably sad and begins sobbing, imagining that the man and woman
have just left their very ill child. Upon arriving at his analytic session, still sobbing, his
analyst asks Meehl whether he was mean to his daughter before coming to the session,
upon which Meehl becomes immediately aware of the reasons for his sadness and
sobbing, which then completely cease.
Let me provide another example from my own clinical experience. Many years ago, I was
working with a patient, A. G., whose presenting symptom was his obsessive fear that he
might be homosexual, which, if true, would represent for him an abominable sin. He was
tormented by these thoughts. The symptom appeared after his girlfriend pressed for them
to become engaged, with an eye towards marriage. During one session, he reported that
after dinner with his mother and father (at the time, he was still living at home), when his
mother asked him to put a baking dish back on a high shelf (he was quite tall), his
obsessive thoughts about whether he was homosexual got worse. When I asked him
whether he had any further thoughts about this incident, he said that putting the baking
dish away was something his father used to do. He then remembered that when his
mother had recently asked him to mow the lawn—remarking again that this was
something his father used to do—the same thing occurred. He then volunteered that after
he received a job promotion, his obsessive thoughts reached their peak in frequency and
intensity.
Although other interpretations are certainly possible, given other information about A.
G.’s experiences and difficulties, a plausible hypothesis close to the clinical evidence is
that a central symbolic meaning of all three events—putting the baking dish away,
mowing the lawn, and receiving a job promotion—that were associated with an
exacerbation of A. G.’s symptoms is that they all involved being placed in an adult role
and confronting the challenges and responsibilities that that entails—a role in which he
does things his father used to do.
And, indeed, A. G.’s severe anxiety about leaving home, both figuratively and literally, and
feeling panicky and engulfed at the thought of marriage, emerged as the central issues in
treatment. The point I want to make with this clinical anecdote, similar to Meehl’s point
about his own experience, is the following one: I know of no theory other than
psychoanalytic theory, particularly its formulation of primary process thinking that (in the
case of A. G.) enables one to identify the common symbolic meaning among activities as
disparate as placing a baking dish on a high shelf, mowing the lawn, and receiving a job
promotion. I also do not know of any other theory that provides as clear an insight into
the defensive function of a troubling symptom.6
Ironically, this very strength of psychoanalytic theory in finding hidden common

(p. 369)
motives and meanings in disparate activities is also a potential problem. This is so

because the meanings identified in the patient’s material are often arbitrary, far removed
Page 16 of 27

from the patient’s experience, and vary with the analyst’s theoretical orientation (see
Peterfreund 1983). Therefore, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between arbitrary
theoretical impositions on to the clinical material and interpretations warranted by the
clinical evidence. As Meehl (1995) puts it, ‘the clear message of history is that anecdotal
method delivers both wheat and chaff, but it does not enable us to tell which is
which’ (1019). Being better able to make this distinction would represent a significant
contribution. I think the earlier noted work of psychodynamically oriented researchers
such as Luborsky and Weiss and Sampson gives us some idea of how such distinctions
can be made. However, large sections of the psychoanalytic community need to overcome
their indifference or hostility towards these sorts of studies.
Conclusions
1) Although, as Freud and others believed, the development of psychoanalysis as a
separate discipline with its own free-standing training institutes and its relative
isolation from other disciplines may have made it possible for it to emerge as a
coherent body of thought, its status as a separate discipline with its own education
and training institutes has constituted a major barrier to theoretical (and perhaps
clinical) progress. For the most part, psychoanalytic associations and training
institutes have been more a force for the preservation of guild identity and orthodoxy
(including pluralistic orthodoxies) than a means for theoretical and clinical progress
(Kernberg 2012, 2015).
2) There appears to be a more recent acceptance of empirical research and greater
valuing of the importance of establishing links between psychoanalysis and other
disciplines in some quarters of the psychoanalytic community. However, this must be
broadened beyond a selective search for findings confirming psychoanalytic
hypotheses to reflect an equal interest in findings that might challenge
psychoanalytic formulations and serve as an impetus to theoretical change and
progress.
3) In contrast to central aspects of Freudian theory which, at least in principle, lend
themselves to empirical test, many post-Freudian theoretical developments, for
example those associated with Klein and Bion, are often so arbitrary, obscure, and
untethered to observation, that the question of testability becomes moot. Thus, the
historical trajectory of psychoanalytic theorizing does not provide a basis for
confidence in the prospect of steady and cumulative progress in psychoanalytic
theorizing.
4) Theory change in psychoanalysis comes about not by virtue of new findings, but
through the emergence of charismatic figures who attract loyal followers who
establish psychoanalytic training institutes that promulgate the ideas of new
‘schools’.
The general picture that emerges is that of two cultures, one, so to speak, within
(p. 370)
the psychoanalytic community of psychoanalytic institutes, and the other outside that
community, most often associated with university departments. The latter group,
Page 17 of 27

committed to a scientific ethos, carries out research on propositions directly generated or

inspired by psychoanalytic theory (e.g. Blatt 2008 on self-definition and relatedness;
Cramer 2008, 2012 on defence; Fonagy and Bateman 2006 on reflective capacity and
mentalization). The former group, made up of the great majority of psychoanalysts, tends
either to have no interest in or to be hostile to research on psychoanalytic formulations.
Further, many of the formulations that are most influential in the psychoanalytic
community are not susceptible to empirical test. And, perhaps most important, it is this
community that shapes the education, training, and therefore, habits of mind of most
psychoanalysts.
To sum up, it seems clear that, at its best, a psychoanalytic mode of thought can generate
important insights regarding the nature of mind that may not be readily available through
other means. However, at its worst, it has generated arbitrary and obfuscatory
formulations far removed from observation and unsusceptible to empirical test by any
means. Further, given the nature of psychoanalytic training and education, there appears
to be no reliable self-correcting mechanism that enables psychoanalysts to distinguish
between the plausible and testable, on the one hand, and the obscure and untestable, on
the other. Indeed, if one looks at the historical trajectory of psychoanalytic theorizing
from Freudian to dominant contemporary theories, it appears that at least as much
influential psychoanalytic theorizing is increasingly characterized by obtuse formulation
far removed from observation and evidence. Unhappily, this is a grim picture but, I think,
an accurate one. I agree with Kernberg (2012, 2015) that necessary modifications in
training and education may serve to brighten this picture. I believe that current practices
and habits of mind regarding such matters as attitudes towards evidence and testability
need to change. The challenge, in my view, is to be able to integrate the best of what a
psychoanalytic mode of thought has to offer with the attenuation of loyalties to particular
psychoanalytic ‘schools’ and an openness to empirical evidence and research in the
service of self-corrective practices and procedures.
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Journal of Psychoanalysis 41: 585–595. (p. 375) (p. 376)
Notes:
(1) As Meehl (1995) has observed, there probably is no presumed therapeutic intervention
in the history of humankind, including bloodletting, purging, and insulin coma therapy,
that has not been associated with personal testimony and anecdotes regarding its
beneficial effects.
(2) I would add that accountability is a moral as well as an empirical issue. That is, the
clinician has the moral responsibility to be open to the issue of accountability and to avail
him- or herself of whatever evidence is available regarding therapeutic outcome and the
processes linked to outcome. This is not to say that there cannot be open and informed
debates about such issues as criteria for outcome and quality of evidence, including its
ecological validity.
(3) Ironically, despite a widespread hostility towards research, meetings at the American
Psychoanalytic Association are labelled ‘scientific’ meetings.
(4) In addition to providing a poignant account of the doubts and struggles experienced in
psychoanalytic training by an open-minded psychoanalyst, Portuges also contributes an
excellent discussion of the scientific status of psychoanalysis as well as of the relationship
between research and clinical practice.
(5) [Eds: For a discussion of Lacan’s redefinition of the Oedipus complex, see Boothby
(this volume).]
(6) As one of the editors (RG) notes, one could hypothesize that an exacerbation of A. G.’s
symptoms in reaction to ‘doing things his father used to do’ may reflect an unconscious
anxiety-ridden desire and fantasy to replace father. That is a plausible clinical hypothesis
not necessarily contradicting, but perhaps complementing, my formulation. However, it is
a hypothesis that further clinical evidence would either support or fail to support.
Morris N. Eagle
California Lutheran University, USA
Page 26 of 27

Page 27 of 27

Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience

Jim Hopkins

Core concepts of psychoanalysis admit integration with recent work in neuroscience and
developmental psychology. Karl Friston’s free energy neuroscience embodies analogues
of Freud’s primary and secondary processes, and despite conceptual differences assigns
the same causal role as Freud to the minimization of free energy. This supports parallel
psychoanalytic and neuroscientific accounts of development, dreams, and symptoms, with
the latter expressible as a complexity theory of dreaming and mental disorder. Overall the
generative model that performs predictive processing discharges the functions—including
the regulation of waking and dreaming consciousness—that Freud assigned the ego,
while the prototype emotions systems delineated by Jaak Panksepp and other affective
neuroscientists discharge those of the drives or id. Together with the emerging role of
REM dreaming in memory consolidation, this provides neuroscientific underpinning for
psychoanalytic conceptions of the role of memory, emotion, and phantasy in dreams, as
illustrated by Freud’s dream of Irma’s Injection.
Keywords: predictive processing, free energy, ego, drives, complexity, conflict, dreaming, memory consolidation,
phantasy
Introduction: Integrating the Sciences of the

Mind
Recent developments have made it reasonable to think that some main claims of
psychoanalysis can be relatively directly integrated with the framework of contemporary
computational and affective neuroscience. Other approaches in psychology, including
attachment theory, are also seeking integration with neuroscience; and both neuroscience
Page 1 of 36
Subscriber: University of Otago; date: 17 December 2018

and the study of mental disorder are themselves undergoing integration with genetics
and Darwinian evolutionary biology. Here we will focus mainly on psychoanalysis and
attachment, leaving evolution for consideration elsewhere.1
Probabilistic Regulatory Modelling

The integration advanced here is based on the notion of probabilistic regulatory
modelling associated with the free energy principle recently espoused by Karl Friston and
his colleagues (see, e.g. Friston 2010).2 As accords with Conant and Ashby’s (1970) proof
that a good regulator of any system must model that system, we can understand
Darwinian adaptation as shaping phenotypic traits of organisms (and therewith the genes
that sustain them) to model aspects of the environment so as to interact with them in
ways that promote reproductive success. Taken overall these mappings constitute
organisms themselves as dynamic models of the environments with which they interact.
In the nineteenth century—and as a scientific version of Kant’s claim that consciousness

arose from a conceptual synthesis of the manifold of sensory intuition—Helmholtz
proposed that the brain naturally conducted such modelling. He argued that the brain
accomplished synthesis by embodying a generative model of the causes of the data at its
sensory receptors—that is, a model of the causes of these sensory data that could predict
the impingements and recreate their effects. (Hence, as Helmholtz remarked, objects
were ‘imagined in the field of vision’ as they would have to be ‘to produce the same
impression on the nervous mechanism’ (1865/1924: 2)).
The hypotheses of this model, as in Kant’s account of synthesis, included our concepts of
the causes and objects of everyday perceptual experience. In Helmholtz’s version our
conceptual apparatus unified and predicted the statistical patterns of the data impinging
at the receptors, and so explained these data for the subject, by re-representing the
patterns as conscious perceptual experiences of their causes.3 In this Helmholtz used
Kant’s philosophy to provide an outline account of the working of the brain in generating
consciousness, and one which entailed that the basic sensory data were not conscious
experiences themselves, but rather the contacts at the neural receptors whose patterns
the experiences serve to represent and predict.4
Freud’s Free Energy Neuroscience

Freud framed many of the basic claims of psychoanalysis in the autumn of 1895, shortly
after he discovered the use of free association in analysing his own and his patients’
dreams. After this both he and his patients sought self-understanding by following and
Page 2 of 36

describing the rapidly changing contents of their own conscious states, in as much detail
as possible and without omission or censorship.
This proved a uniquely informative mode of self-disclosure, which even now remains
without parallel in any other discipline. An individual’s associations made it possible to
consider a whole range of what would emerge as motivated behaviours (verbal
utterances, non-verbal actions, thoughts, dreams, and symptoms) together and in relation
to one another and to the motives that gave rise to them.5 Together with his own self-
analysis this enabled Freud to learn as much about his patients’ states of mind as they
were able to put into words, and to extend this by framing and testing hypotheses about
what their (and his own) associations indicated they could not put into words.
Accordingly he rapidly discovered that ‘the pathological mechanisms which are revealed
in the most careful analysis in the psychoneuroses bear the greatest similarity to dream-
processes’ (Freud 1895/1950: 336).6 He began to shift his investigative and therapeutic
focus away from what he and Breuer had taken to be veridical but repressed memory, and
towards the fundamental and memory-distorting role of imagination and phantasyy.
Freud’s first love in research had been the study of the nervous system, in which he had
shown unusual distinction.7 Hence as his new data prompted new hypotheses, he initially
tried to formulate them in neuroscientific terms. Within a few weeks he had framed a
prescient account of the brain as operating to minimize a form of free energy that was
specific to the nervous system.
Freud’s idea must have originated as a version of Helmholtz’s conception of free energy
as the energy in a system that was available for conversion into work. All physical engines
(animal, vegetable, or mineral) operate in accord with the laws of thermodynamics in
converting Helmholtz free energy into work. In organic metabolism this conversion is not
straightforward, since it involves concurrent processes that are bidirectional, that is, both
energy-storing and energy-releasing. But in applying Helmholtz’s notion to the brain and
mind, Freud adapted it in ways that we can now see to coincide with the distinct notion of
variational free energy, as this is used in contemporary neuroscience.8
Variational Free Energy (FE)

There is a fundamental conceptual problem in applying Helmholtz’s account of modelling
to the brain. Predicting sensory impingements and recognizing their causes requires
computing, for all relevant causes and impingements, the conditional probabilities of
impingements given causes that enable the prediction of impingements, and the (inverse)
probabilities of causes given impingements that enable the recognition of causes.
According to the Bayesian mathematics of probability, these calculations are intractable:
they have no finitary (closed-form) solution. Thus although Helmholtz had described a
Page 3 of 36

process of modelling that the brain seemed to be performing, the task seemed impossible
for the brain to perform.
Geoffrey Hinton and his colleagues solved this problem in a series of papers on the
Helmholtz machine (Dayan et al. 1995) that marked the transformation of connectionist
machine learning into the computational neuroscience of the Bayesian brain. Describing
the human sensory system as ‘a statistical inference engine whose function is to infer the
probable causes of sensory input’ (1995: 1), they produced a proof of principle as to how
the requisite inferences might be performed. This turned on the notion of variational free
energy (hereafter FE) that they used in computational modelling.
It could be proved that minimizing the FE of a Bayesian probabilistic model of the causes
of some data minimized the divergence in probabilities between those the model assigned
to the causes and those of the causes themselves: at zero free energy the probability
distributions would be the same. Also, however, the parameters (hypotheses) that
determined the FE of a model could be adjusted from within that model (as happens in
the brain in perceptual learning) in computationally tractable ways. As Hinton realized, it
followed that a brain that embodied such a model as Helmholtz had envisaged could
ensure that this model enjoyed maximal evidence-based conformity with the causes it
represented by continually adjusting its parameters to minimize FE.
The FE of a model is equal to its computational complexity minus its predictive accuracy.
Both are measured with respect to samples of the data the model adjusts itself to learn to
predict, which we can take as the sensory contacts that occur over a single waking
period. Accuracy is a measure of predictive success. If we imagine the data of waking
impingement as points on a graph, and the FE-minimizing hypotheses generated by the
model as curves through those points, accuracy would be maximized by a curve that
passed through every data point. Complexity, by contrast, reflects the changes imposed
on the model in working to increase accuracy, as measured by the number of parameters
the model is compelled to adjust and the extent of the adjustment required. The brain’s
model thus minimizes FE by maximizing accuracy and minimizing complexity, thereby
tending to make itself the simplest best predictor of the data at the receptors.
Friston extended this framework from the perceptual systems to the overall regulation of
bodily change and movement that perception subserves. Thus it appeared that the brain
so animated the body as to minimize the variational FE of its regulatory model not just by
improving prediction (as in perceptual learning), but also by framing and satisfying
predictive hypotheses as to how optimally to move and act.9 Such a minimization of FE
constitutes life-sustaining activity that is subserved by the processes that store and
release thermodynamic free energy (Seth and Friston 2017). In this sense the
minimization of FE takes the foreground in understanding the overall energic working of
brain and mind.10 In consequence, as Helmholtz had claimed, ‘every movement we make’
can rightly be regarded as an experiment testing the predictive success of brain and body
in modelling and navigating their environments.
Page 4 of 36

For both Freud and Friston the free energy to be minimized enters the nervous system
via sensory impingement, the main source being the inescapable flow of ‘endogenous
[interoceptive] stimuli’ that reflect ‘the peremptory demands of the internal needs’ (Freud
1895/1950: 297). For Friston these stimuli predict departure from the continuously
recalculated targets (including homeostatic set points and allostatic adjustments) for FE-
minimizing activity (Pellouzio et al. 2015). Hence as Freud speaks of such inputs as
creating a ‘demand for work’ to produce ‘specific actions’ that ‘bind’ (inhibit) this free
energy, so Friston speaks of ‘an imperative to minimize prediction error … through
action’ (2012: 248) that likewise inhibits the interoceptive sources. And on both accounts
such minimization requires the brain to embody a representation or model of the world,
including the agent’s body (in Freud the ‘bodily ego’, bounded both internally and
externally by the skin), via which the minimizing activities are conducted.
These similarities, as well as others described in what follows, give Freud’s conception of
free energy the same overall causal profile as Friston’s FE. On this basis Carhart-Harris
and Friston (2010) sought ‘to demonstrate and develop the construct validity of the
Freudian concepts’, including those of the primary and secondary processes. In what
follows, therefore, we will advance their argument by using ‘FE’ to designate both
conceptions of free energy.
FE and Waking and Dreaming Consciousness

Freud hypothesized that both dreams and symptoms functioned to protect the self (or
‘ego’) from trauma and conflict. They did so, moreover, in the same way: via the
fabrication of fictive experiences and beliefs, forms of imagination or phantasy that
created an ‘alienation from reality’ (Freud 1911b: 218ff) that temporarily masked and
pacified the conflict or trauma involved. Dreaming, moreover, seemed to present an
innate form of consciousness, which might perform a similar function in infancy.
Accordingly Freud hypothesized that the original form of consciousness was imaginary,
and produced by a primary process that was ‘in the apparatus from the first’ (1900: 603).
In infancy this process operated in accord with the pleasure principle, buffering the
potentially traumatic influx of FE at birth, and paved the way for the secondary
processes, which operated in accord with the reality principle. These enabled the infantile
ego to distinguish perceptual experience from wishful imagining, to establish experiential
memory, and to learn to perform the ‘specific actions’ required to inhibit the internal
sources of FE. Freud illustrated this by an example in which an infant used the ‘wishful
cathexis’ provided by imagining the breast, to ‘experiment’ by turning her head so as to
secure the nipple (1895: 328–9, 356). This required the infantile ego to moderate (inhibit)
the relief provided by phantasy, in order to focus on the indications of reality that enabled
movement leading to a veridical experience of satisfaction.
Page 5 of 36

Thus against the background of the regulation of pleasure and unpleasure by the primary
process, the secondary processes introduced the infant—cry by cry, feed by feed,
excretion by excretion—to the harsh realities of the world into which she had been born,
and also to her own real resources for coping with them. So as the infant gained a greater
apprehension of reality (and to the extent that she did so) the secondary processes
inhibited and overlaid the primary process in waking life, relegating it to the motor
paralysis and sensory attenuation of dreaming.
This benign development, however, remained under threat from frustration, trauma, or
conflict. These tended to activate the primary process in waking, and so could create a
continued reliance on wishful phantasy that would later show in the alienation from
reality (Freud 1911b) characteristic of mental disorder. Hence as Freud later described
matters, the phantasies produced by the primary process ‘possess psychical in contrast to
material reality; and we gradually learn to understand that in the world of the neuroses it
is psychical reality that is of the decisive kind’ (Freud 1915–7: 368).
The contemporary FE framework provides a remarkably full parallel to these claims.

Sleep is a key factor in neurological development, and infants cycle through phases
resembling slow wave (SWS) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep while still in the
womb (Kurth et al. 2015). In the last trimester they spend most time in REM, and as
Reissland et al. (2011, 2013) observe, their facial expressions indicate both positive
(laughter-related) and negative (cry-related) emotions. Accordingly Hobson, Hong, and
Friston (2014) take this as a formative period for the brain’s generative model. They
hypothesize that the brain is ‘genetically endowed with an innate virtual reality
generator’ whose working ‘is most clearly revealed in rapid eye movement sleep
dreaming’.
We are thus ‘born with a virtual reality model’ of what we will later discover to be the
worldly causes of sensory impingement; and with the onset of sensory activity this virtual
model is ‘entrained by sensory prediction errors’, to become ‘a generative or predictive
model of the world’. In Friston’s account this is accomplished by active inference, which
effects the perceptual learning, establishing of memory, and inception of FE-minimizing
action that Freud assigned to the secondary processes.
This account also parallels post-Freudian (e.g. Kleinian) descriptions of the primary
process as innate expectation-generating phantasy. Thus Segal (1964) describes the
infant as ‘approach[ing] reality armed, as it were, with expectations formed by his
unconscious phantasy’. These expectations are comparable to scientific hypotheses, in
the sense that ‘by testing them in reality [the infant] gradually learns which are
applicable and which modes of his own functioning enable him to deal with reality’.
(Among them are the ‘preconceptions’ of ideally good and malignantly bad breast/mother/
others that the Kleinian tradition regards as the innate basis for thinking about ourselves
and others.)
Page 6 of 36

In Friston’s terms these expectation-inducing would be the prior hypotheses that are
altered to accommodate prediction error as the virtual reality generator becomes a
‘predictive model of the world’. Alteration of these priors in the first phase of perceptual
learning would produce experientially informed posterior hypotheses that would then
serve as priors for the next phase.
In all this Helmholtz, Segal, Bion, and Friston construe thinking in a way that has become
familiar in philosophy—as involving tacit or explicit abduction, or inference to the best
explanation (Douven 2011). Helmholtz and Friston take perceptual consciousness to be
created by tacit abduction on the part of the brain or generative model; and as conscious
agents we continue abductive inference in everyday life and in science. This is the
continuity, as Popper remarked, that enables human beings to ‘let their theories die in
their stead’.11
These accounts clearly impose a common framework that links waking, dreaming,
development, and mental disorder. On both accounts waking consciousness is underlain
by an original imaginary (virtual reality/phantasy) process that later appears mainly in
dreaming, and whose operation in waking is constrained by a model or system of
representations of the causes of sensory impingement. On both, therefore, a central
aspect of development consists in constructing the worldly model whose adherence to
reality inhibits and overlays the imaginary process in waking. This, however, entails the
possibility originally envisaged by Freud, namely that the development of this realistic
orientation may be more or less unsuccessful, leaving the imaginary process to produce
the alienation from reality that appears as mental disorder.12
Friston’s account of FE casts further light on these matters. We noted earlier that the
brain’s model minimizes FE by maximizing accuracy and minimizing complexity, thereby
tending to make itself the simplest best predictor of the data at the receptors. In Friston’s
account these tasks are roughly divided between waking and sleeping. As a first
approximation (omitting the role of imaginative/primary process activity in waking) the
brain operates to increase the accuracy of the generative model in waking, and to reduce
its complexity in sleep and dreaming.
In this context the most accurate model would be the one best able to predict the
currently optimal course of motor response and put it into action. The contrasting
importance of complexity emerges if we consider that if an agent’s model is too complex
—for example if it is working to satisfy imperatives that conflict with one another—such
computation may be difficult or impossible. An agent who needs a drink, for example, will
maximize accuracy by wanting and getting a drink. But an agent who has numerous
conflicting needs may be unable to effect satisfying computation of this kind, and so
remain effectively immobile. Hence the requirement, advanced over the lifetime by
processing in sleep, of simplifying to predict a single best alternative. As we will see
further on, the reduction of complexity in dreaming apparently takes place via the
Page 7 of 36

imaginary attainment of accuracy that Freud described as wish fulfilment (see Pataki, this
volume).
We return to dreaming in ‘The Complexity Theory of Dreaming and Mental Disorder’.

First, however, we must take up the relation of complexity to emotion and conflict.
Emotion Systems
In regulating waking and dreaming consciousness in such a way that experience, thought,
and action harmonize to minimize FE, the generative model discharges the tasks that
Freud assigned to the ego. In this, however, it is important to see that the brain as
modeller or ego is not just a functional part of the personal conscious self, but is rather
the overall regulatory governor of the organisms we are. Among its activities are the
production of the conscious experiences in which we regard ourselves as persons who
think, feel, choose, and act, as well as the dreams in which we imagine ourselves doing
so.
The locus of this ego- or self-creating regulatory activity is the cerebral cortex; and the
subcortical prototype emotion systems13 that the cortex develops to regulate over the
first year of life play the role that Freud assigned to the drives or id. By contrast with the
cortex, the subcortical generators of emotion are fully functional at birth, and their basic
architecture in the brainstem is common to all mammals. Watt and Panksepp (2009: 92–3)
describe these systems as ‘sitting [in the brainstem] over homeostasis proper’, where
they give rise to attachment, which becomes ‘the massive regulatory-linchpin system of
the human brain’, exercising ‘primary influence’ over the prototype systems below.14
As described in Alcaro and Panksepp (2011) and Alcaro et al. (2017), these basic systems
divide into two overarching and conflicting groups:
1. Those characterized as ‘positive/appetitive’ or ‘Approach/Reward’. As indicated by

Panksepp’s capitalized functional descriptions, these include SEEKING, PLAY, LUST,
and CARE.
2. Those characterized as ‘negative/aversive’ or ‘Avoidance/Conflict’. These include
RAGE and FEAR, as well as the attachment-regulating system that Panksepp
describes in terms of PANIC, SEPARATION DISTRESS, and GRIEF (hereafter PSG).
This latter system generates the punishing internal experiences that ensure the
proximity of reproductive cooperators such as parents and offspring.
The systems in each group are co-activating (RAGE and FEAR activate one another, and
PSG activates both, and the objects of SEEKING include cooperators in CARE, PLAY, and
LUST). By contrast the groups inhibit one another, acting as parts of an overall structure
of emotional opponent-processing (Craig 2015); and they generate conflicting dispositions
in physiology and behaviour. They are thus sources both of the opposition between
Page 8 of 36

unpleasure and pleasure stressed by Freud, and of the emotional conflicts that he studied
and aimed to mitigate—and that we can now see as contribute to insecure (and
particularly disorganized) attachment.
These systems coordinate in reducing FE, but via a dialectic that renders them liable to
precipitate emotional conflict. This begins with birth, when the negative/aversive systems
are activated by the prediction errors that signal impending violations of basic
homeostatic expectations previously met from within the mother’s body. This challenge to
life-sustaining equilibrium is expressed in what Freud regarded as the infant’s ‘scream’.
This communicative action is often the infant’s first, and produces a resonating activation
in the aversive systems of the mother (Parsons et al. 2014), galvanizing her response.
Sensitive response (Howe 2011) coordinates mother and infant in replacing aversive
activations with appetitive and rewarding SEEKING, approach, and the consummatory
and life-sustaining activity of nursing. This promotes synchronization and bonding
between them (Atzila et al. 2017), paving the way for the other approach/reward systems
—LUST, CARE, and PLAY—to participate in deepening their emotional relationship.15
In this dialectic the infant’s and mother’s generative models operate in the same way.
Equilibrium-threatening increases in FE activate the avoidance/punishment systems, and
the model responds with motor activity (an optimal trajectory) that engages the
approach/reward systems to minimize it. In infancy this pattern coordinates mother and
infant, but the pattern itself is paradigmatic for the operation of the generative model,
whether operating realistically or in virtual reality. It develops together with attachment
over the first year, as the cortex extends its governance of the emotion systems through
phases of axonal growth, synaptic proliferation, and experience-dependent neural
pruning. By the beginning of the second year the brain has roughly doubled in size, and
reliable patterns in attachment relationships can be discerned in the ‘Strange Situation’
procedure, to be discussed in the section ‘Conflict and Complexity in Disorganized
Attachment’ further on (see also Howe 2011).
This marks the stabilizing ‘regulatory linchpin’ of the infant’s establishing of ‘internal
working models’ for emotionally significant relationships with the mother and/or other
carers. This modelling discharges what Freud described as ‘one of the earliest and most
important functions of the mental apparatus’ namely ‘to bind the instinctual impulses
which impinge on it, to replace the primary process prevailing in them by the secondary
process and convert their freely mobile cathectic energy into a mainly quiescent (tonic)
cathexis’’ And as Freud also remarks, and we will see later, ‘failure to effect this binding
would provoke a disturbance analogous to a traumatic neurosis …’ (Freud 1920: 33, 34).
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Trauma, Conflict, and Complexity

Infancy combines early neurological development with experiential learning, and is
therefore uniquely formative for the brain. For this reason early adverse or traumatic
experience can have a lifelong impact on mental and physical health (Anda et al. 2006)
that is mediated by changes in the working of the brain (McCrory et al. 2017). Early
activation of the aversive emotional systems seems a likely cause of what Freud described
as ‘the first great anxiety-state’ associated with the trauma of birth, and later ‘the
infantile anxiety of longing—the anxiety due to separation from the protecting
mother’ (Freud 1923: 58).
The early focus of the conflicting emotion systems on the mother accords with
psychoanalytic claims that experience in early infancy alternates between prototype-
forming representations of very bad and very good objects, whose originals are the parts
of the mother’s body with which the infant has significant interactions—her breast, her
holding presence, her face, eyes, etc. Recent research on memory suggests that the
infant’s episodic (autobiographical) memory system, centred in the hippocampus and
amygdala, is ‘highly engaged in the processing of infantile experience and the storing of
latent memories’ (Alberini and Travaglia 2017; see also Travaglia et al. 2016). These
latent memories, moreover, seem comparable to the early ‘memories in feeling’ described
by Melanie Klein (1952: 234). For although they do not admit explicit recall, the emotions
linked with them are nonetheless rearoused when similar experiences occur at later
times. Despite their latency, such memories can play an important role in experience-
driven maturation and development.
This is important for our purposes, for Friston’s conception of complexity is internally
connected with both trauma and conflict. Complexity measures the burden of adjustment
that experience places on the generative model; and since the primary task of the model
is to calculate an optimal motor trajectory, as driven by the potentially conflicting
prototype systems, this is effectively the burden of emotional adjustment (cf. the notion of
affective load in Levin and Nielsen 2009). Conflict naturally creates complexity, since it
involves the activation of inconsistent (conflicting) patterns in behaviour, one or both of
which perforce require complexity-reducing adjustment. And experiences are traumatic
when—as in post-traumatic stress disorder (Enlow et al. 2014) or borderline personality
disorder (Mosquera et al. 2014)—they impose requirements for emotional adjustment that
the ego/generative model cannot fully meet. The overarching role of the potentially
conflicting prototype systems in human motivation thus ensures that for our generative
models complexity is mainly emotional complexity, even when (as, say, in obsessive
compulsive disorder or OCD) it shows in ostensibly cognitive forms.
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Conflict and Development

We have seen that the early working of the emotion systems can engage mother and
infant in a conflictual relationship that predates the infant’s understanding. The
activation of conflicting emotions becomes emotional conflict for the infant as subject and
agent with the recognition of self and other as distinct enduring individuals. Experiments
suggest that this development—and with it our conception of ourselves as unique persons
bounded by physical bodies that move in space and last through time—starts to take hold
in the fourth month, as Melanie Klein suggested in her account of the depressive
position.16
In the prior, pre-objectual phase (Kumin 1996) infants seem to conceive the world as
containing a numerically indeterminate multitude of episodic proto-objects, comparable
to the ‘shifting and unsubstantial “tableau”’ in terms of which Piaget and Inhelder (1969)
described early experience.17 Since these proto-objects are derived from perception of
parts or aspects of the objects perceived, these are also ‘part objects’ which are
anatomically and psychologically incomplete;18 and since the infant’s conception does not
yet encompass their actual patterns of spatio-temporal behaviour, they are particularly
liable to imaginary transformation in phantasy.
During this phase the infant is also learning the boundaries of the bodily self via sight,
touch, and movement, as well as a range of feelings generated via interoception
(Fotoupoulou and Tsakaris 2017).19 So it is also indeterminate for the infant whether
these episodically encountered proto-objects are mental or physical, or inside or outside
the bodily container of the mind or self, as this is bounded by the skin. In consequence
the infant can imagine taking the early proto-objects into itself with milk or food; as good
or bad causes of feeling inside the self; as expelled from the self, or put into others, with
urine, gas, etc. and so on. (Such phantasies populate dreams, and often re-emerge in
mental disorder.)
As the generative model extends its spatio-temporal scope the infant increasingly
conceives persons as unique and persisting, and accordingly merges proto-objectual
representations to represent good and bad aspects of single complex individuals. This
requires reorienting the aversive systems from their original focus on the mother,
apparently effected by a coordination of identification, projection, and attachment. The
realization that others are unique and irreplaceable spurs identification with their valued
and caring aspects, and fosters the infant’s capacities for guilt and concern, ameliorating
the ingroup-facing aspects of the superego. At the same time aspects that cannot be
integrated in this way—particularly those derived from early parent–offspring and sibling
rivalry—are split off and projected outside the circle of familiar kith and kin.
These developments also establish the family as a basic ingroup, preparing the infant for
ingroup cooperation for outgroup conflict. Some early signs of this appear at seven to
eight months, when infants start to show both angry protest at separation from their
Page 11 of 36

mothers and also fear of strangers (Schaffer 1971). The separation protests show
appreciation of the mother as unique and irreplaceable, as well as the refocusing of the
emotion systems that this entails. RAGE at the mother now operates in harmony with PSG
and FEAR (of strangers) to maintain proximity and attachment within the family. And the
projections that originally created the indeterminately numerous bad proto-objects of
early infancy are relocated in the alien stranger, and so can now operate to arouse
derivatives of RAGE and FEAR in ingroup cooperation for outgroup conflict.20
Conflict and Complexity in Disorganized

Attachment
We have been taking the early binding (successful inhibition) of free energy hypothesized
by Freud to be accomplished by establishing the emotional bonds of attachment. But as
noted in the section ‘Emotion Systems’, Freud also claimed that ‘failure to
bind’ [successfully inhibit] the FE of the drives ‘would provoke a disturbance analogous to
a traumatic neurosis …’ (1920: 64). We can see such a failure, and learn something of its
causes, by considering disorganized attachment, as shown in the Strange Situation.
This is a roughly twenty-minute procedure involving eight episodes, numbered (1) to (8);
and we can regard the assignment of categories of attachment by this procedure as
measuring the functional integration of the rewarding and aversive prototype systems. In
(1) the mother (or other carer) and infant enter the room, and in (2) the infant has the
opportunity to explore and play with the toys which are there. In (3) a stranger enters the
room, and after a short interval attempts to play with the infant. In (4) the mother goes
out of the room, leaving the infant with the stranger, who tries, if play has begun, to
continue it. Then in (5), the first reunion, the mother returns and the stranger leaves
while the mother settles the infant, providing opportunity to return to exploration and
play. In (6) the mother again goes out, this time leaving the child entirely alone, and in (7)
the stranger enters and again attempts to play with the child. Finally, in (8), the second
reunion, the mother again returns to settle the child, who may (or may not) go back to
exploration and play.
Thus while episodes (2) and (5) and (8) are such as to activate the rewarding systems that
Panksepp identifies as SEEKING and PLAY in the context of maternal CARE, (3) and (4)
and (6) and (7) are such as to activate aversive FEAR, PSG, and RAGE, with the latter
directed at the caring mother for her part leaving the infant alone and/or at the mercy of
the stranger. These conflicting activations, moreover, are such as to produce regression,
since they repeat those that marked the infant’s appreciation of the mother as unique and
irreplaceable at seven to eight months. Roughly, infants who are classed as secure at
twelve months show less conflict between the rewarding and aversive systems, and
Page 12 of 36

resolve their conflicts more readily, than those who are classed as insecure, that is, as
avoidant, ambivalent-resistant, or disorganized.
Infants classed as disorganized show the most striking and apparently irresolvable
conflicts. Here are two examples, from a girl and a boy aged eighteen months, as
described in Solomon and George (1999: 131).
In the second reunion Kate approached her mother with her arms outstretched …
when she was about two feet away from making contact, she moved her arms to
the side and abruptly circled away from her mother like a banking airplane. As she
moved away she had a blank, dazed expression on her face.
In the first reunion, Sam approached his mother with his eyes cast down. When he
was about two feet away he looked up at her, rising suddenly and making gasping
noises with his breath as he did so. He quickly looked down again, bared his teeth
in a half-grimace/half-smile and turned away. Hunching his shoulders and holding
his arms and legs stiffly, he tiptoed to the other side of the room. He sat
motionless in the chair for 30s, grasping the armrests and staring straight ahead
with a dazed expression.
This is an example of the kind of complexity—and the overall trade-off between

complexity and accuracy—generated by emotional conflict. The successive stages of the
Strange Situation have aroused such disparate and conflicting images of these toddlers’
relationships with their mother that their egos/generative models are now unable to
determine whether the more accurate response would be to approach or avoid her. On
the present account this is because their online working memories are activating
disparate and conflicting pre-objectual representations of self and other—representations
that their egos/generative models have not yet integrated into single coherent
representations of themselves in relations to others as single enduring objects. Hence
these representations are overly complex in a literal sense. If we compare the generative
model to the guidance system of a self-driving vehicle, then these toddlers would be
attempting to compute a route on the basis of disparate and conflicting maps (internal
working models) of the territory they are seeking to navigate.
Disorganized infants characteristically achieve a particular form of coherence by three to

five years, when they settle into patterns of coercion and control in relation to their
objects. Thus here is Kate at forty-two months playing with a little boy named Trey:
Pretending to bake a cake in a toy oven, Kate said in a very loud, bossy tone, ‘You
can’t have cake now! Go away: you can’t have cake ’till I call you!’ She then
ordered Trey to get some dishes for her. She frowned when she saw what he
brought and scolded him, shaking her finger with her hand on her hips. Trey
pretended to eat … Kate yelled ‘No! It’s not done!’ … She ordered him to go away
… when he didn’t move she pushed him roughly, and he fell to the floor …
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(Solomon and George 1999: 150).
And here is Sam at the same age with a friendly little girl called Jenny, who tries to
interest him in playing with her doll.
At first he ignores her overtures but finally he takes the doll she offers … [and]
alternates between brushing its hair tenderly and smashing it against the floor.
Jenny tries to integrate Sam’s behavior into her pretend play … she pretends the
doll is saying in a squeaky voice ‘Ow, don’t do that!’ … Jenny tries again, making
her doll say ‘I’m going on the bus’. Sam grabbed the toy bus before Jenny could
put her doll in it, crammed his doll in, and drove the bus away. Jenny gave up
trying to play with Sam
Here the kind of conflict Sam showed towards his mother at eighteen months seems
echoed in his attitude towards Jenny’s doll, which he alternatively brushes tenderly and
smashes against the floor.
Finally we can see what seem to be pre-objective precursors of this kind of complexity in
the microanalyses of videotaped face-to-face interactions between mothers and infants
described in Beebe and Lachman (2014). These indicate that disorganization in the
Strange Situation at twelve-plus months can be predicted from the fourth month—that is,
near the inception of the shift to objectual representation the defines the depressive
position—by short (2.5 second) episodes in which the mothers involved fail to recognize
or coordinate empathically with their infants’ expressions of distress. Instead the mothers
involved respond to their infants’ distress with exaggerated surprise or smiling, or again,
as distress increases, with facial freezing and/or looking away. Meanwhile the infants
themselves—as in the later disorganized patterns discussed previously—respond with
rapidly conflicting expressions of emotion (e.g. whimpering and smiling within the same
second or so); and they grow more distraught as no response is forthcoming.
These are episodes in which the mothers concerned are not meeting activations of their
infants’ aversive systems in the paradigmatic way discussed previously, that is by
responses that generate FE-minimizing approach/reward. Rather they seem comparable
to what Bion (1962) and Segal (1975) describe as maternal failure to respond in a
containing way to infants’ projections of distress, leaving infants unable to incorporate a
capacity for conflict-modifying containment themselves. Emotional misrecognition of this
kind can occur in otherwise caring relationships, particularly, it seems, if the carers
experienced something comparable in infancy. Still it can prove traumatic, in the sense of
contributing to the kind of complexity found in disorganized attachment, and also, say, in
borderline personality disorder (BPD), in which histories of trauma and/or disorganized
attachment are common (Mosquera et al. 2014).
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The Complexity Theory of Dreaming and

Mental Disorder
In the Project Freud observed that the processes which produced the ‘alienation from
reality’ of mental disorder had ‘the greatest similarity’ to those that produce dreams.
Hobson, Hong, and Friston (2014) argue that the ‘virtual reality’ dream processes,
together with REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and SWS (slow wave sleep), serve to
minimize FE by reducing the complexity of the generative model. We have seen that this
complexity encompasses emotional conflict and trauma; so the virtual reality generator
would be doing the same thing—generating virtual reality to reduce the complexity
introduced by trauma and conflict—by producing the ‘alienation from reality’ (Freud
1911b: 218ff) that Freud and many others have found characteristic of mental disorder.
We can thus integrate Freud’s and Friston’s accounts of dreams and symptoms by
advancing a complexity theory of dreaming and mental disorder. This is the hypothesis
that the conflicts and traumas that Freud thought mitigated by recourse to yphantasy/
virtual reality in both dreaming and mental disorder can be seen as forms of the
neurocomputational complexity illustrated by disorganized attachment (Hopkins 2016).
The claim is thus that mental disorder is the product of such complexity, together with
the mechanisms (which apparently include synaptic pruning) which have evolved to
reduce it. As well as incorporating Freud’s original hypotheses, this account extends
them, by relating waking disorders to aberrant complexity reduction in SWS, REM, and
dreaming. As described in Hopkins (2016) this is borne out by research on dreaming in
depression as well as by work in schizophrenia and a number of other disorders.21
How do sleep and dreaming reduce the complexity of the model, and so prepare it to be a
more efficient (simpler) predictor of sensory impingement in the next waking period? We
can see this by considering the processes of consolidation and reconsolidation that
establish and update the cortically stored long-term memories that inform the model. The
‘engram complexes’ (Tonegawa et al. 2015a, 2015b) that realize memory are networks of
synaptically connected neurons. As Freud anticipated, experiential learning
systematically alters the patterns and strengths of synaptic connections (together with
other aspects of the neurons that regulate their activity), thus determining the nature and
contents of the memories they encode. Those that embody a particular memory are
distributed over a number of regions in the brain, which may be connected synaptically
and/or coordinated by oscillatory patterns (waves) of various kinds (Boccio et al. 2017).
The working of engram complexes involves two roughly dissociable components: the
contextual content of the memory (who, what, when, where, etc.), as contributed by
encoding activity in the hippocampus; and the emotional significance or valence of the
memory, contributed by encoding activity in the amygdala, as related to the
hypothalamus and other subcortical structures. The complexity of what is learned is
reflected at the synaptic level in individual neurons. Thus Tonegawa et al. (2015a: 94)
Page 15 of 36

report that conditioning, eliminating, and reconditioning fear memories creates opposing
patterns of growth and elimination of spines less than 2 millionths of a metre apart on the
same dendrites. This suggests that learning creates dynamic opposition, and hence
complexity, even at the level of individual synapses—of which there are trillions in the
brain.
Accordingly the creation of learning-embodying synaptic connections puts a physiological

load on the neurons involved, and one that increases with complexity. Hence what is
called synaptic homeostasis (Tononi and Cirelli 2014) requires that these connections be
renormalized (rescaled to levels optimal for the next waking period) in sleep. Friston
(2010) takes this as an important part of the reduction of complexity, and there is now
strong evidence that SWS (Tononi and Cirelli 2014) and REM (Li et al. 2017) reduce many
synaptic connections while maintaining and strengthen others during sleep. According to
recent ‘active systems’ accounts (Dudai et al. 2015; Feld and Born 2017; Rasch and Born
2013) renormalization is implemented in SWS and REM as part of the overall
consolidation and reconsolidation of memory in sleep.
In waking the hippocampus acts in concert with the amygdala as ‘the search engine of
the brain’ (Buzsaki 2011), continually constructing the online working memory that
enables ‘navigation in cognitive [as well as physical] space’. This includes ‘the
computation of relationships among perceived, conceived or imagined items’, which
depends on memory. In addition the hippocampus rapidly encodes the details of waking
experience, so that in SWS it can transfer memories from the day to cortical engram
complexes for consolidation as long-term memory. This transfer reactivates the
complexes, rendering them plastic for integration with the new memories being
transferred, and rearouses the associated emotions, so that SWS gives way to REM and
dreaming.
In dreaming as in waking, the generative model operates to minimize expected FE, and
via activation of the SEEKING system. In waking expected FE arises from sensory
impingement and the arousals of memory and emotion engaged in increasing accuracy
(e.g. by successful satisfaction of need and desire) to reduce it. In dreaming, by contrast,
sensory impingement is curtailed, so that the FE sources for complexity reduction are
those of memory and emotion in the process of consolidation dreaming.
For this reason dreaming characteristically involves a pattern in virtual reality that
mirrors that in waking, but in relation to the arousal of memory rather than sensory
experience. The reactivation of emotion-laden (conflictual or traumatic) memories
arouses negative/aversive emotions, prompting the imaginary prediction/execution of the
FE-minimizing appetitive/rewarding trajectories that Freud described as wish fulfilments.
Thus for example Freud’s dream of Irma’s Injection (1900: 106ff),22 as we will consider in
more detail, begins with Irma complaining to Freud of suffering that his psychotherapy
has failed to relieve, but ends with diagnostic triumph on his part.
Page 16 of 36

Accordingly REM dreaming is accompanied by the kind of burst-firing of dopamine

neurons that marks waking consummatory reward (Dahan et al. 2007). As this occurs in
the conditions of maximal neuroplasticity that enable the reactivated old memories to be
integrated with the new, the imaginary attainment of reward in dreaming can reshape the
emotional valences of the whole engram complex, rendering it less productive of conflict
or trauma, and so emotionally optimized to minimize FE by increasing accuracy during
the next waking period. Dreaming thus minimizes complexity by an imaginary
maximization of accuracy during sleep, which optimizes the brain for actual maximization
of accuracy in waking.
As would fit with this, Genzel et al. (2015) argue that REM and dreaming function to
modify aversive amygdala-related components of memory.23 This in turn fits with the
long-observed positive effects of the restoration of REM dreaming on depression
(Cartwright 2010) as well as with recent experiments on engram complexes (Boccio et al.
2017; Tonegawa et al. 2015a, 2015b) that produce dissociations between their amygdala-
related emotional valence and their hippocampus-related contextual contents—and
including those in which depression-like activity is reduced by manipulations that arouse
reward (Ramirez et al. 2015).
Dreaming thus seems the final phase of both the reduction of neurocomputational
complexity and the reconsolidation of memory that occur in sleep (and we would expect
these processes to be intertwined). On the present account this reduction/reconsolidation
yields a revised integration of emotion and memory, in which the role of emotionally
traumatic or conflictual memories has been mitigated by the imaginary experiences of the
dream.
Dreaming Consciousness and the Reduction of

Emotional Complexity
This account integrates the reduction of FE (as complexity) in sleep with observations
about the large-scale neurological phenomena of SWS, REM, and synaptic homeostasis,
downscaling, and pruning. The role it assigns to the generative model—as reducing the
aversive complexity of emotional memory via the imaginary accuracy of the fictive
experiences of dreaming—explicates the significance of dreams in a way that accords
with Freud’s as well as many other depth-psychological descriptions. For on this account
the significance we assign to dreams derives from their role in unifying the emotional
meaning of the past and the present in preparation for the future, a task they accomplish
by adjusting emotional significances over the fields of memory in which experiential
learning is embodied.
Page 17 of 36

We can readily trace this hypothesized adjustment of emotional significance in the

examples in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams as well as later psychoanalytic writings. For
in Freud’s work as well as that of other analysts, the analysis of a dream can be divided
into three parts, which are related by association, memory, and emotion. These are:
i. The manifest content of the dream, the series of fictive conscious experiences that
the dreamer reports as making up the dream. Elements of this are related by free
association (and memory and emotion) to
ii. Memories and feelings from the day before the dream, whose contents indicate
that they played a causal role in the formation of the dream. These in turn are
related by memory, emotion, and association, to
iii. Memories from the more remote past, together with deeper and more traumatic
and conflicted emotions. The contents of these indicate that they were unconsciously
activated together with (ii) the conscious memories and feelings from the day; and
these contents can be seen as transformed in (i), the manifest content. So Freud
describes these as the latent content of the dream.
Free association leads from elements of (i) to elements of (ii) and (iii). These connections,
and particularly the relations of transformation between (iii) and (i)—what Freud
describes as the transformation of latent into manifest content—enable us to gauge the
potential impact of the transformations of the manifest dream on the latent memories and
emotions that underlie it. We can illustrate this by taking a fragment from Freud’s dream
of Irma’s Injection , and focusing on a single manifest element (which we will follow with
the aid of bold type) together with the memories and emotions that Freud associated with
it.
(i). From the manifest content of the dream:
… I at once took [Irma] to one side … to reproach her for not having accepted my
‘solution’ yet … I took her to the window [to examine her] and looked down her
throat … I at once called in Dr. M., and he repeated the examination and
confirmed it … [saying] ‘There is no doubt it is an infection.’ … We were directly
aware, too, of the origin of her infection. Not long before, when she was feeling
unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection of …trimethylamin (and I saw
before me the formula for this printed in heavy type) … Injections of that sort
ought not to be made so thoughtlessly …And probably the syringe had not
been clean.
(Freud 1900, 107)
This element of the manifest content—Freud’s claim in the dream that Injections of that
sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly—is clearly associated with memories and
feelings, both from the dream day, and from the more remote past.
(ii). Memories and feelings from the day before the dream.
Page 18 of 36

As Freud reports, Irma was a family friend and patient he had been treating for hysteria.
As the treatment was ending he had ‘proposed a solution to [Irma]’ about the nature of
her illness ‘which she was unwilling to accept’, and her sessions were broken off at the
summer vacation.
On the day of the dream Freud was visited by Otto, the long-standing friend and
colleague whom the dream depicts as giving Irma a toxic injection. Otto had been staying
with Irma and her family at their country place, where he had been called away to give
someone an injection, which event evidently reappeared in the dream in an altered form.
… I asked him how he had found [Irma], and he answered ‘She’s better, but not
quite well’ … Otto’s words, or the tone in which he spoke them, annoyed me. I
fancied I detected a reproof in them … the same evening I wrote out Irma’s case
history, with the idea of giving it to Dr M … to justify myself … I had been engaged
in writing far into the night …
(Freud 1900: 106).
Here a number of connections between the memories and feelings from the day and the
content of the dream are clear. The dream depicts Freud as reproving Irma for not having
accepted his ‘solution’, and explains her continued illness as caused by Otto’s having
given her a toxic injection. Hence in the dream Freud had transformed his own
emotionally aversive daytime experience of feeling himself reproved by Otto on behalf of
Irma into one of reproving both Irma and Otto. The Injections of that sort ought not to
be made so thoughtlessly of Freud’s dream was the last and most serious of his self-
justificatory retaliations for what he had imagined as Otto’s reproof on the day of the
dream.
(iii). Memories from the more remote past, together with deeper and more traumatic and
conflicted emotions. To Injections of that sort ought not to be made so
thoughtlessly Freud associated as follows (emphasis again supplied):
… .this sentence in the dream reminded me once more of my dead friend who
had so hastily resorted to cocaine injections … I noticed too that in accusing
Otto of thoughtlessness in handling chemical substances I was once more
touching upon the story of the unfortunate Mathilde, which gave grounds
for the same accusation against myself …
(Freud 1900: 117).
These associations go directly to past memories freighted with guilt and shame. As Freud
says, they indicate that he felt himself guilty of the same kind of thoughtless handling/
injection of toxic substances of which he accused Otto in his dream, with the addition that
in his case injections had been lethal. Moreover, he linked this with his own advocacy of
Page 19 of 36

the medical use of cocaine, which (on the basis of his own experience) he had gone so far
as to claim was non-addictive. Thus as he says:
I had been the first to recommend the medical use of cocaine, in 1885, and this
recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me. The misuse of
that drug had hastened the death of a dear friend of mine
(Freud 1900: 111).
The ‘dear friend’ was Freud’s beloved mentor, the talented scientist Ernst Fleichel von
Marxow. He had become addicted to morphine, taken to relieve incurable nerve pain from
an amputation consequent on dissecting a cadaver. Freud had recommended that he use
cocaine as a non-addictive substitute, and his subsequent addiction, decline, and death
was a source of grief and guilt. The ‘unfortunate Mathilde’ whom Freud associated with
him was someone about whom Freud felt a comparable guilt. He had given her injections
of sulphanol, considered harmless at the time, and she, too, had died as result.
This death, moreover, was linked with a kind of unconscious emotional conflict on Freud’s
part that he was to explain much later in his career. Using the name ‘Mathilde’ as a
switch-word, he associated the Mathilde he had killed with his own daughter Mathilde,
who had also been seriously ill.
My patient—who succumbed to the poison—had the same name as my eldest

daughter. It had never occurred to me before, but it struck me now almost like an
act of retribution on the part of destiny. It was as though the replacement of
one person by another was to be continued in another sense: this Mathilde for
that Mathilde, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth
(Freud 1900: 111–12).
In considering how his associations had led to these topics, Freud remarked that it
seemed he ‘had been collecting all the occasions which I could bring up against myself as
evidence of lack of medical conscientiousness’. With hindsight we can see that this was
the activity of the agentive part of himself that he would later describe as the cruel and
moralistic superego, which not only accused him with his most painfully regrettable
medical derelictions, but also threatened him with retribution in the form of the death of
his own daughter.
This is an example of the turning of aggression against the self to curb aggression within
the family that Freud took as one of the main functions of the moralistic superego, and
that is particularly evident in the ferocious self-reproaches as well as the disposition to
suicide characteristic of introjective depression (Blatt 2004). These memories were thus
also a locus of emotional conflict—the conflict between the ego and the moralistic
superego in terms of which Freud was later to understand guilt, shame, and suicide.
Page 20 of 36

In psychoanalytic terms we can say that this part of Freud’s dream was produced by his
ego to relieve guilt and shame generated by his moralistic superego, whose cruelty is
shown in the way he feels it to threaten him with the death of his daughter. Similarly in
FE terms we can say that the dream was produced by Freud’s generative model acting as
complexity-reducing virtual reality generator. In this it was operating to reduce the
emotional complexity (conflict and trauma, guilt and shame) embodied in Freud’s long-
term memories, by reconsolidating them under the impact of the imaginary but
rewarding and emotionally simplifying experience of innocence and vindication provided
by the dream.
Thus in both accounts the mitigation of conflict or reduction of complexity is

accomplished by fictive experiences, as partly realized by activity of the approach/reward
systems, in what we can regard as instances of self-induced complexity-reducing
experiential learning in dreaming consciousness. And here the agencies involved in the
self-induced learning include ‘internal objects’, or again aspects of the ‘internal working
models’ of self and other, that subserve the working of the ego/generative model.
The FE account thus enables us to describe the role of Freud’s memories and associations
more fully, and to integrate them with the ‘active systems’ account of memory
consolidation described in the earlier section ‘The Complexity Theory of Dreaming and
Mental Disorder’. For as already indicated, the memories and feelings in (ii)—those from
the dream day—are evidently those undergoing consolidation in the dream, that is, those
being transferred from the hippocampus to emotionally related engram complexes in the
cortex for storage as part of long-term autobiographical memory.
Again, the memories and feelings in (iii) are those that were already resident in the
engram complex, whose unconscious activation during the day had set the stage both for
Freud’s sensitivity to Otto’s remark, and for his self-justifying response to it. These are
the memories with which the newcomers are undergoing integration, and which are
therefore rearoused and made plastic, so as to be reconsolidated in a new integration of
memory and feeling, emotionally simplified—rendered less conflictual and traumatic—by
the experience of the dream.
Thus we can construe Freud’s analysis as providing an example of the ‘active systems’
account of memory consolidation and reconsolidation. In this we see three stages:
1. First stage in the consolidation of memory: Freud’s memories from the day—the
penetration of Otto’s remark, Freud’s annoyance, his self-justificatory ruminations, and
work late into the night—are transferred in SWS from the hippocampus to the cortical
engram complexes that gave the events of the day their emotional significance, and with
which they are to be integrated as long-term memories.
Page 21 of 36

2. Second stage in the consolidation of memory: This transfer rearouses the target
complexes, so that they can be reconsolidated in integration with the memories of the
recent events they influenced. These older and deeper memories—Freud’s advocacy of
cocaine, his role in the deaths of his patient and friend, etc.—involve guilt, shame, and
internal threats of punishment for his role in respect of toxic injections. Under the impact
of this dual arousal of memory and (aversive/punishing) emotion, SWS gives way to REM
and dreaming.
3. The final stage in the consolidation of memory: Freud’s generative model responds to
this arousal of aversive memory and emotion by producing the series of imaginary
experiences of the dream, culminating in the wish fulfilling experience in which Freud
reproaches Otto with Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly.
This powerfully rewarding experience of innocence and vindication, intensified by the

embodiment of deep symbolic sexual significance,24 leaves the cortically stored ‘what,
when, and where’ aspects of Freud’s memory intact. But it simplifies the complex of
which these memories are part by altering their emotional registration in the amygdala.
The fictive experiences of the dream thus freed Freud from the depressive and self-
justificatory spiral into which he had fallen the day before, providing a kind of overnight
therapy (Walker and van der Helm 2009), now being elaborated in neuroscientific work
on dreaming and depression.25 As suggested both by traditional psychoanalytic work on
symbol formation (Spillius et al. 2011: Pt. 1, sec. 10) and recent work in cognitive
neuroscience (Lewis et al. 2018), this can be seen as part of a more pervasive impact of
the creative dreaming imagination on waking life and thought.
Freud’s dream thus enabled him to address the difficulties he had felt to be accumulating
in his practice in a way that was at once more realistic and more creative than his writing
out of Irma’s case history the evening before. On waking he turned from his sterile
preoccupation with trying to justify his past practice to the fruitful one of seeking to
understand his role in that practice at a deeper level. This began with his creative activity
in analysing his dream, and so engaging consciously with the memories, emotions, and
conflicts (particularly with his own superego) that had been roused by Otto’s remark. In
this he began the deep revisions in his theories and practice that showed weeks later in
the Project, and that would eventually enable him to address the difficulties of his
patients in a more thoughtful way than he had managed with Irma herself—and in
particular by taking into fuller account the inner world of their psychic reality, as well as
the outer world of their frustration and trauma.
Conclusion
Multiple pathways in contemporary scientific investigation of mind and brain lead to the
relations of dreaming, memory, and emotion, and to the transformations that memories
undergo in the processing of dreams. This consilience with psychoanalytic findings
Page 22 of 36

indicates the value of collaboration, particularly among psychoanalysis, attachment, and

neuroscience. The discoveries about engram complexes discussed in this chapter are
already being applied to psychotherapy (Elsey and Kindt 2017). Their application to
human dreaming requires further discovery and examination of the emotionally
significant memories that are reconsolidated in our dreams.
Freud’s method of analysing dreams by systematically comparing their manifest contents

with the results of free association makes such discovery and examination possible, and
there is no evidence that any other method can yet do so. So progress in this area, for
neuroscience as well as the fields of psychology with which it is undergoing integration,
may depend on the willingness of non-psychoanalytic researchers to explore the path
originally broken by Freud.26 If others do persevere in this—which is by no means certain,
however great the potential benefit—they may come to see that path as leading to a
greater understanding of the unconscious working of the FE-minimizing mind and brain.
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Notes:
(1.) Thus as briefly discussed later below the psychoanalytic mechanisms of identification
and projection seem clearly to play a role in the ingroup cooperation for outgroup conflict
that Darwin and contemporary theorists of culture gene co-evolution regard as formative
for our species, and both the Oedipus complex and the death drive also seem clearly
related to parent–offspring, sexual, and sibling conflict. These are discussed together in
Hopkins (2018a); and Hopkins (2015) discusses the relations of psychoanalysis, evolution,
attachment, and neuroscience more generally. The integration of Freudian and
contemporary free energy neuroscience in the complexity theory of mental disorder
sketched later on is treated at greater length in Hopkins (2016).
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(2.) The programme has a (technical) website at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Free_energy_principle.
(3.) On generative models in contemporary neuroscience, see Ch. 10 of Dayan and Abbot
(2001); for an exegesis of Friston’s use, see Ch. 10.3ff of Tappenberg (2010).
(4.) This account was ignored by the founders of twentieth-century analytical philosophy.
Succumbing to what Wittgenstein later described as ‘the picture that forces itself on us at
every turn’, Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein turned their backs on Helmholtz’s
conception of perceptual experience as synthesized by the brain. Instead they adopted a
Cartesian conception in which such experiences were the private ‘sense-data’ upon which
all knowledge, including the existence of bodies and brains, had somehow to be based.
See Hopkins (2014/2018c) for an account of the development of Helmholtz’s ideas
concerning modelling through Frege and the early Wittgenstein, which ideas prompted
Craik’s (1943) account of mental models, later taken up in cognitive science, e.g. in
Johnson-Laird (1983).
(5.) This holistic interpretive integration of the data of free association is discussed in
some detail in Hopkins (1999). Although other forms of investigation of the emotional
functions of dreaming increasingly acknowledge the evidential importance of the
dreamer’s associations and memories (see, e.g. Malinowski and Horton 2015), no mode of
study apart from psychoanalysis has taken them so thoroughly into account. If as argued
later dreaming functions as part of the emotional synthesis of long-term memory then
progress in understanding both dreaming and memory will partly depend upon other
disciplines following this lead.
(6.) In arriving at this account Freud started to provide detailed empirical support for a
tradition of thought about dreaming and disorder that went back to Plato, and was
summarized in Kant’s (1764/2007: 71) claim that ‘the deranged person’ was ‘a dreamer in
waking’.
(7.) While still a medical student Freud was invited by the celebrated physiologist Ernest
Bruke to conduct neurological research in his laboratory. Prior to practising as a
psychiatrist he published over a hundred papers, as well as monographs on disorders of
movement and childhood cerebral palsy that established him as an expert in these fields.
(8.) Helmholtz’s notion of thermodynamic free energy measures a physical quantity,

whereas the notion of variational free energy (FE) provides a measure of Bayesian model
evidence that is computable from parameters of a model. Similarities and differences
between the notions are discussed in some detail at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Free_energy_principle. The two are related mathematically, since the equations
describing variational FE derive from Helmholtz’s describing thermodynamic free energy;
and for this reason they share the terminology of statistical physics. Also the complexity
term of variational free energy shares the same fixed point as Helmholtz free energy for a
system that is thermodynamically closed but not isolated.
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(9.) ‘Optimally’: that is, by the criteria imposed by evolution, which would determine the
prior hypotheses and major modes of processing of the model, as well as by the
environment, including experiential learning over the lifespan. Hence only in some areas
(e.g. perception) does the brain appear as operating with Bayesian rationality. In others
(e.g. the assignment of properties to members of idealized ingroups as opposed to
derogated outgroups) it must be understood as operating in accord with priors imposed
by evolution (in this case those that sustain the process of ingroup cooperation for
outgroup conflict, ‘the competition of tribe with tribe’, that Darwin thought ‘sufficed to
raise man to his present high position in the organic scale’ (1871: 157)). In enabling us to
understand such oppositions between the imperatives of rationality and evolution the FE
programme encourages enquiry that parallels Quine’s conception of the naturalization of
epistemology.
(10.) Since the turn of the century Friston and others have directed this approach to the
rest of organic life (Friston 2013; Ramstead et al. 2017) and applied it to the brain in
rapidly increasing scope and detail. This has established the minimization of FE as a
paradigm for neuroscience, described variously as predictive coding, predictive
processing, the predictive brain, and the predictive mind. And since the probabilistic
regulatory generative models envisaged in this approach would encompass a host of
others—the mental models of cognitive science, the internal working models of
attachment theory, the internal objects of psychoanalysis, etc.—the programme naturally
extends through psychology as well.
Although Friston’s own presentations are often forbiddingly technical, the main ideas
have been given clear philosophical expositions in Hohwy (2013) and Clark (2016), as
well as a recent collection of essays edited by Metzinger and Weise (2017). Seth (2015) is
a good introductory starting point, and emphasizes the role of interoception in the
generation of emotion, which is discussed later in this chapter.
(11.) This continuity contradicts claims that human thought cannot be understood as
having arisen via natural selection. And although specifics of Friston’s account of the
brain’s model are controversial, the existence of some such model (map, etc.) is widely
accepted in neuroscience. The brain viewers at http://gallantlab.org/index.php/brain-
viewer/ display a striking range of information about the modelling of the external world
in the cortex (see also the video introduction at https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=u9nMfaWqkVE).
(12.) Friston’s collaborator Alan Hobson, for decades a zealous neuroscientific critic of
Freud, has now published two books (Hobson 2014, 2015) applying the virtual reality/
generative model conception to link dreaming with mental disorder, although via
neurotransmission rather than Freudian phantasy. While continuing to criticize Freud,
Hobson now stresses that his own work ‘takes up the Project for a Scientific Psychology
exactly where Freud left it in 1895’ (Hobson 2015: 5).
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(13.) These systems are described differently by different investigators. For example,
LeDoux (2015) describes them as ‘survival circuits’, and Volkow et al. (2017) describe the
SEEKING system as the Dopamine Motive System. The most detailed recent delineation
is Panksepp’s (1998), which has been updated for therapists and general readers in
Bivens and Panksepp (2011).
(14.) One important difference is that Freud did not anticipate the current claim that the
brainstem systems generate consciousness as well as emotion, both of which are
elaborated in the cortex. For this see Solms and Panksepp (2012). Again many authors,
such as Barrett (2017) and LeDouz and Brown (2017) argue that the contextual cortical
elaboration of emotion is inconsistent with the notion of basic emotions. But as Panksepp
argues, subcortical generation of the basics is consistent with any degree of cortical
elaboration of the final states, including that emphasized by Barrett; and as noted by
Saarimäki et al. (2016) the subcortical generators have ‘fingerprints’ in their complex
cortical derivatives.
(15.) This is the kind of dialectic that Bion (1962: 30) attempts to describe
phenomenologically as follows:
The infant suffers pangs of hunger and feels it’s dying; racked by guilt and anxiety
and impelled by greed, it messes itself and cries. The mother picks it up, feeds it
and comforts it and eventually the infant sleeps. In forming the model to represent
the feelings of the infant, we have the following version: the infant, filled with
painful lumps of faeces, guilt, fears of impending death, chunks of greed,
meanness and urine, evacuated these bad objects into the breast that is not there.
As it does so, the good object turns the no-breast (mouth) into a breast, the faeces
and urine into milk, the fears of impending death and anxiety into validity and
confidence, the greed and meanness into feelings of love and generosity; and the
infant sucks in its bad property, now translated into goodness, back again.
(16.) Some of main developments occur in and between the ‘what’ and ‘where’ object-
processing pathways (Wilcox and Bondi 2015), with an early representation of an
identified object as lasting while unobserved perhaps signalled at six months by gamma
wave activation in the right temporal cortex (Kaufman et al. 2005; see also Leung et al.
2017).
This is consistent with an experimental tradition that at first focused on the mother as
object of perception, but later on other (emotionally less significant) objects. Thus Bower
(1977) reported an experiment with mirrors (discussed in Hopkins 1987) that cohered
with Klein’s dating of the depressive position.
If one presents the infant with multiple images of its mother—say three
‘mothers’—the infant of less than five months is not disturbed at all but will in fact
interact with all three ‘mothers’ in turn. If the setup provides one mother and two
strangers, the infant will preferentially interact with its mother and still show no
Page 34 of 36

signs of disturbance. However, past the age of five months (after the coordination
of place and movement) the sight of three ‘mothers’ becomes very disturbing to
the infant. At this same age a setup of one mother and two strangers has no effect.
I would contend that this in fact shows that the young infant (less than five months
old) thinks it has a multiplicity of mothers, whereas the older infant knows it has
only one
(Bower 1977: 217).
Although this experiment has not been repeated in contemporary conditions, it was
consistent with experiments on occlusion (e.g. Baillargeon et al. 1985; Wilcox 1999) and
eye-tracking (Johnson et al. 2003) done afterwards. Later work (Baillargeon et al. 2012)
has clarified how the infant initially uses parameters of shape and then others as the
ability to individuate and track objects is refined.
(17.) See also Klein (1952/1972: 54). For comparison of Piaget and Klein on infantile
experience and the object concept see Hopkins 1987.
(18.) Thus as reported in (Campos et al. 1983), a three-month-old infant made angry by
someone using her hand to impede movement will express anger at the impeding hand.
By contrast a seven-month-old infant made angry in the same way expresses anger not at
the hand, but at the face. Apparently at three months the infant has not, whereas by
seven months it has, integrated episodic experiences with the mother into an image of an
anatomically whole and enduring person. Also by seven months, as reported in (Stenberg
et al. 1983) this infant’s anger is regulated by experience of the persons she knows. If the
infant is annoyed twice by mother, or again twice by a stranger, the infant is angry both
times. But an infant annoyed first by a stranger and then by mother is especially angry,
indicating that the infant’s expectation that mother will comfort her after intrusions by a
stranger has been betrayed.
(19.) The work reported in Ali et al. (2015) suggests that infants’ sense of bodily touch
becomes anchored to objects in the surrounding space at four to six months. And recently
Seth and Friston (2017) have suggested that failure in integrating interoceptive and
exteroceptive sensory information—in particular, failure properly to integrate
‘interoceptive signals associated with nurturance (e.g. breastfeeding) during affiliative
interactions with (m)others’ may render autistic infants incapable of learning ‘that the
nursing and prosocial mother were the same hidden cause or external object’ (Seth and
Friston 2017: 7, and Fig. 4). If this is correct it would place autism among the disorders
that result from failure to negotiate this depressive-position integration.
(20.) For a fuller discussion of these developments, which also include the regulation of
parent–offspring conflict and sibling rivalry as part of the Oedipus complex, see Hopkins
(2018b).
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(21.) For further discussion and citations see the section on ‘Waking Disorder and
Complexity Reduction in Sleep’ in Hopkins (2016) as well as the work on dreaming and
depression cited later in this section.
(22.) For a fuller discussion of this dream which bears out claims made in passing here
see Hopkins (2015), and for further methodological discussion see Hopkins (1999).
(23.) See also Walker and van der Helm (2009) and Cartwright (2010).
(24.) On symbolism see Petocz, this volume. For the symbolism in this dream see the
discussions in Hopkins (2015), and Hopkins (2002) on psychoanalysis and conceptual
metaphor, which is also discussed in the work by Malinowski and Horton cited here.
(25.) See the discussion in Cartwright (2010: ch. 4), following up the work Vogel et al.
(1977); and the continuation of Cartwright’s work in the neuropsychoanalytic research
project on dreaming and depression described in Fischmann et al. (2013).
(26.) Thus for example the main arguments and claims of a recent series of non-
psychoanalytic papers by Malinowski and Horton (e.g. 2014a, 2014b, 2015; see also
Horton and Malinowski 2015) are consilient both with Freud and with the argument of
the present paper. They discuss role of memory, the dreamer’s associations, and
symbolism, and see dreams as performing ‘emotion assimilation’ via symbolic embodied
cognition that ameliorates the ‘emotional intensity’ of memories transformed in them.
Jim Hopkins
Department of Philosophy, King's College London
Page 36 of 36

Psychoanalysis and Religion

John Cottingham
Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Religion

Acknowledging the layers of the mind below the level of overt consciousness can lead to
very divergent accounts of religious belief. One response—taken by Freud himself—
argues that religious belief should be abandoned as unavoidably contaminated by
unconscious motivations (e.g. an infantile longing for security) that distort our rational
judgement. By contrast, Jung maintains that religious thinking is shaped by unconscious
structures (the ‘archetypes’), which can play a vital role in the development of an
integrated human personality. This chapter examines these contrasting psychoanalytic
interpretations of religion, and then explores more recent accounts of the workings of the
human psyche and how they affect the status of religious belief. A concluding section
discusses some general implications of all this for the epistemology of religious belief and
the way in which philosophy of religion should be conducted.
Keywords: Freud, Jung, unconscious, illusion, archetypes, Graham Ward, Iain McGilchrist, brain hemispheres,
receptivity, detachment
Page 1 of 20
Subscriber: Gothenburg University Library; date: 17 December 2018

Introduction
A large part of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, from Sigmund Freud onwards,
has been concerned with the treatment of disturbed and troubled patients seeking help
with their symptoms, but the philosophical importance of the Freudian revolution is very
far from confined to the domain of the pathological or the neurotic. In effect what Freud
challenged was a simplistic but widely held model of the mind as a kind of transparent
goldfish bowl inside which straightforwardly identifiable beliefs and desires float around,
ready to inform our actions and choices. In the wake of Freud, it has become much
harder to be confident about the image of ourselves as self-sufficient and autonomous
rational agents whose decisions are based solely on what is straightforwardly accessible
to the reflective mind. This does not mean that the Freudian revolution in our conception
of ourselves undermines the very possibility of rational thought—if that were the case,
psychoanalytic thought would be self-refuting, since it would undermine the possibility of
its coherent articulation. What is entailed is that we should give up the naïve conception
of our mental powers and capacities as transparent tools of reason, and start working
towards a more nuanced conception, according to which uncovering the truth about
ourselves and our relation to the world must be approached in a spirit of humility and
receptivity that acknowledges the intensely complex and problematic nature of the
instrument which we must use to undertake that task—the human mind.
These general lessons of the Freudian revolution evidently have application to the domain
of religious belief, along with many other areas of human thought. But acknowledging the
layers of the mind that operate below the level of overt consciousness can lead to very
divergent accounts of the status and validity of religious beliefs and attitudes. One way to
go—the route that Freud himself took—is to argue that religious belief should be
abandoned, insofar as it is unavoidably contaminated by unconscious drives and
motivations (an infantile longing for security, for example) that distort our rational
judgement. A quite opposite approach, exemplified by that of Freud’s onetime disciple
Carl Jung, is to maintain that religious thinking is typically shaped by unconscious forms
and structures (what Jung called the ‘archetypes’) which, so far from being generators of
neurosis, can play a vital role in the development of a healthy and integrated human
personality. We shall look in more detail at these two influential but strongly contrasting
psychoanalytic interpretations of religion in the next two sections, before going on, in the
fourth section, to explore more recent accounts of the workings of the human psyche and
how they may affect the status of religious belief. The fifth and final section will aim to
tease out some general conclusions about the relationship between psychoanalysis and
religion, and the implications of this for the epistemic status of religious belief, and the
way in which the philosophy of religion should be conducted.
Page 2 of 20

Freud’s Critique of Religion

Freud’s attack on religion begins by drawing attention to our human helplessness before
the ‘majestic, cruel and inexorable powers of nature’ (Freud 1927: 195). These powers
include both external forces (earthquakes, floods, hurricanes) and the equally threatening
internal forces (lust, anger, brutality) arising from our own nature. Freud sees religion as
an attempt to mitigate our defencelessness by endeavouring to ‘adjure, appease, bribe’ or
otherwise influence a celestial father figure, who will protect us from suffering, and
impose justice on a seemingly chaotic and terrifying universe (1927: 196).
The vulnerability of the human condition, and the fact that since time immemorial
humans beings in extremis have resorted to a variety of supposed divine powers and
forces to rescue them when all else fails, are familiar enough themes which have been
commented on by many writers, including Jean-Paul Sartre:
When the paths traced out become too difficult, or when we see no path, we can
no longer live in so urgent and difficult a world. All the ways are barred. However,
we must act. So we try to change the world, that is, to live as if the connection
between things and their potentialities were not ruled by deterministic
procedures, but by magic
(Sartre 1975: 58–9).1
The same general line had been taken much earlier by another stern critic of religion,
David Hume. What prompts us to suppose there is a God, according to Hume, are ‘the
ordinary affections of human life’ such as the ‘dread of future misery’ and the ‘terror of
death’ (Hume 1757: section 2).
But to explain the religious impulse simply in terms of human vulnerability and
helplessness leaves something out: no doubt people earnestly desire to be rescued when
in trouble, but that in itself does not seem to account for the strength and pervasiveness
of the human belief in the divine. When in grave distress we might like to deceive
ourselves into thinking the world is determined not by natural forces but by magic (as
Sartre phrases it), but this does not in itself explain how widespread and successful such
self-deception (if it is indeed that) has become. Here Freud contributes something
crucially important by addressing himself to the psychological question of how the belief
becomes so powerfully entrenched in the minds of so many religious adherents. The
human psyche, he argues in The Future of an Illusion, is already predisposed, as a result
of the traces left by our forgotten experience as infants, to conjure up the image of a
powerful protector to rescue us from our helplessness.2 For when we encounter threats
and dangers:
Page 3 of 20

… this situation is nothing new. It has an infantile prototype of which this is in fact
only the continuation. For once before one has found oneself in a similar state of
helplessness: as a small child, in relation to one’s parent. One had reason to fear
them, and especially one’s father; and yet one was sure of his protection against
the dangers one knew. Thus it was natural to assimilate the two situations. Here,
too, wishing plays its part, as it does in dream-life …
(Freud 1927: 196).
So just as with the strange deliverances of dreams, what is planted in our consciousness
has a resonance, a power that takes hold of us quite independently of the normal criteria
of reasonable evidence and rational judgement. The mind is in the grip of an illusion, but
this is not just a mistake, or a piece of deliberate self-deception. Rather, layers of
mentation working beneath the level of explicit awareness or rational reflection have
been activated by our helplessness in the face of the perils we face as adults, and we
revert, without being consciously aware of what is going on, to the infantile state of fear
and dependency which is ineradicably linked to the yearning for security and the hope of
parental protection. Only as a result of delving into the deeper workings of the mind right
back from early childhood does the full explanation of the process come to light. This is
the background that enables Freud to declare with such confidence ‘the derivation of
religious needs from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it
seems to me incontrovertible’ (Freud 1929: 260). So we arrive at the famous Freudian
diagnosis: religion is an illusion born of helplessness and fear.
Freud makes it clear, however, that he does not intend his psychoanalytic diagnosis of our
longing for protection to be a logical demonstration of the falsity of the religious world
view. That would be to commit the ‘genetic fallacy’ (the logical fallacy of confusing the
causal origins of a belief with its justification or lack thereof). Illusions, as Freud
concedes, are not necessarily erroneous: ‘A middle-class girl may have an illusion that a
prince will come and marry her … and a few such cases have actually occurred’ (Freud
1927: 213). But Freud argues that it is characteristic of illusions in his sense that they are
held on to without regard for rational justification; further, they characteristically stem
from (indeed are generated by) the wishes or needs of the believer. So it is a short step
from this to the conclusion that Freud is aiming at: religion is an infantile piece of wishful
thinking that we need to grow out of.
Yet on further reflection the implications of Freud’s critique are by no means as damaging
as might at first appear. The believer might well concede to Freud that our infantile
helplessness leaves a lasting stamp on the psyche, but go on to insist that this can
scarcely be the whole story. For beyond any mere desire for protection (Freud’s ‘longing’
for the father figure), it seems hard to deny that the religious impulse is in large part
connected with the powerful yearning human beings have for meaning and purpose in
their lives. Now it could be proposed, as is done by many secularists, that meaning and
purpose must be found in the chosen activities and pursuits—intellectual, artistic, social,
familial, and so on—which are the components of a worthwhile human life. But, without
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denying the value and meaningfulness of such activities and pursuits, it may be argued
that they cannot in themselves bear all the weight of satisfying our human hunger for
meaningfulness. One way of putting this is to say that to be human is to have a
characteristic restless, a sense of incompleteness, such that even were all our specific
needs and goals to be satisfied (for food, for shelter, for company, for recreation, for
satisfying relationships, for creative activities, and so on), there would always remain a
longing for something more—something that will provide an ‘ultimate grounding’ for our
lives, or give us a sense of ‘ontological rootedness’ (May 2011: 7).
God, for the religious believer, is the ultimate source of being and value towards which
we yearn, and which alone can satisfy the existential longing which is part of the nature
of dependent and contingent beings such as us.3 Pointing this out does not of course
vindicate belief in God, nor does it of itself refute deflationary Freudian-style explanations
of it, but it may at least open up the possibility that religious belief connects with
something in our human nature of deeper significance than a mere neurotic or infantile
impulse. Certainly there are many places in Scripture where the strange open-ended
longing of the human spirit is underlined (‘Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks, so
longeth my soul after Thee, O God’ (Psalm 42 [41]: 1)); and the theme is reiterated in
seminal Christian writers such as St Augustine (‘You have made us for Yourself, and our
heart is restless until it finds repose in You’, and Dante (‘In his will is our peace’)).4 The
thought in such passages is not merely that religious devotion provides peacefulness of
mind, in the sense of securing some kind of tranquillizing or calming effect; rather, the
idea is that God is the source of genuine value, and that orienting ourselves towards that
source bestows ultimate meaning on our human existence and enables us to find true
fulfilment even in the face of danger and turmoil. Augustine and Dante acknowledge our
vulnerability, but manage to construe it as a corollary of our creatureliness, so they can
end up celebrating it as a cause for joyful affirmation of our creator. Freud by contrast
sees our vulnerability as a condition which scares us so much that we desperately
fantasize that we have found a way of assuaging it—even though in fact the power we
appeal to has no reality outside the human psyche. But as to which of the two accounts
reflects the way things actually are, this remains to be determined; so however
disconcerting Freud’s analysis may initially be for the religious believer, it seems clear
that it cannot finally settle the matter.
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Carl Jung and the Importance of Symbolic

Thought
While Freud’s view of religious belief places it under the same general heading as the
neurotic, the infantile, and the disturbed, or at any rate as falling short of the standards
of balanced judgement to which we aspire as reasonable adults, Carl Jung, though
concurring with Freud that such belief has roots buried deep in the human psyche, took a
very different view of the resources of the unconscious mind, regarding them in a
potentially much more benign light.5 For Jung, Freud’s dismissal of the religious impulse
as infantile fails to recognize the imaginative and symbolic role of religious modes of
thought and expression, and their possible role in the healthy development of the human
personality. Crucial here is the idea of ‘individuation’ as Jung terms it, the ‘process by
which a person becomes a psychological “in-dividual”, that is, a separate, indivisible unity
or whole’ (Jung 1939: 275). Jung sees human psychological development in terms of a
struggle to achieve internal balance and psychic integration, where integrating the
conscious and unconscious elements of the self is a precondition for psychic health or
wholeness;6 and religious imagery and symbolism, according to Jung, perform a vital
function here (Jung 1952). The process of individuation requires modes of thought and
expression that operate not just on the surface level of explicit assertion, but which carry
deep imaginative resonances that are vital for our psychological balance and harmony. To
give but one example of this, the figure of Christ functions for Jung as an ‘archetype of
the self’, a deeply resonant image of the perfectly unified and integrated human being
(Jung 1938; Jung 1951: 183). From this perspective, as Michael Palmer aptly puts it in his
account of the Jungian position:
Religion, far from being neurotic, is revealed as a constant and evolving process in
the development of the psychic personality … Religious symbols … open up a
psychic level … that is primordial and … of supreme value for the present and
future development of the human psyche
(Palmer 1997: 110–11).
Jung’s ideas have encountered considerable philosophical opposition (as indeed have
those of Freud). Many contemporary analytic philosophers are supporters of what Brian
Leiter has called the ‘naturalistic revolution in philosophy’, according to which philosophy
should ‘adopt and emulate the methods of the successful sciences’ (Leiter 2004: 2–3).
Such philosophers often tend to be sceptical about the very idea of the unconscious mind,
and a fortiori the Jungian idea of the archetypes, on the grounds that the theories that
invoke such ideas lack the kind of hard scientific warrant demanded by today’s dominant
naturalistic paradigm. In response to this kind of critique, defenders of the Jungian
approach have two possible lines of defence. One is to argue that there is in fact hard
empirical evidence, for example from cognitive science and developmental psychology,
that can be used to support the Jungian hypothesis of the role of symbols and archetypes
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in psychic integration (Knox 2003). Another response would be to take issue with the
doctrine that the methods of science are the only valid way of uncovering the truth. Thus
Thomas Nagel has argued, in the case of Freud, that irrespective of what we think about
the authority of analysts or the clinical evidence for their theories, there is an ‘evident
usefulness of a rudimentary Freudian outlook in understanding ourselves and other
people, particularly in erotic life, family dramas, and what Freud called the
psychopathology of everyday life’ (Freud 1901; Nagel 1994). And similarly one could
argue that Jung’s ideas, like those of Freud, are best assessed not as contributions to
science, but in a more ‘hermeneutic’ way—that is, as ways of enriching our
understanding of the human predicament, and the deeper significance of our thoughts
and feelings and beliefs.7, 8
To suggest that Jung’s ideas may enrich our understanding without qualifying as
contributions to science is not at all to dismiss or downgrade the value and importance of
scientific inquiry or scientific methods. One can be a genuine and wholehearted admirer
of the achievements of science while at the same time resisting the false allure of
scientism—the dogma that scientific methods give us everything we need to understand
all aspects of reality. To be sure, we live in, and are an integral part of, the physical world
constituted by the particles and forces studied by science—that is undeniable. But when it
comes to understanding aspects of human life such as religious experience (and the same
goes for poetic or artistic or moral experience, or even our ordinary human interactions
with each other) we patently need other categories than those of the physical sciences;
for even the fullest and most detailed print-out of the relevant particle collisions and
biochemical processes will tell us nothing about the human significance of these
processes and events.9
In addition to the physical sciences there are of course the social sciences (including for
example economics, sociology, and psychology), and there are continuing debates as to
how far such disciplines meet the standards of the ‘hard’ physical sciences (in matters
such as experimental repeatability, verifiable prediction, mathematical modelling, and so
on). There is probably no simple answer to this question, since the term ‘social science’
covers a large array of divergent disciplines and inquiries, whose methods manifest
varying degrees of precision and rigour. A particular issue as regards psychology is the
inevitable reliance on reports by individual human subjects of their thoughts, feelings,
sensations, beliefs, and desires, thus making reference to what is, according to some
philosophers, an irreducible domain of qualitative subjective experience that resists
subsumption or explanation in objective scientific terms (Nagel 1974). But however that
may be, psychoanalytic approaches to psychology present special additional problems,
insofar as the ‘data’ being studied come to light in the context of special relationship with
the analyst—an issue which led even Freud, despite his attraction to the scientific model,
to remark on how far psychoanalysis diverges from normal scientific procedures. We shall
return to this issue in ‘Philosophizing about Religion and the Layers of the Human
Psyche’.
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At all events, when we come to religious feelings, beliefs, attitudes, and experiences, it is
apparent that these have a characteristic depth and complexity that can seldom if ever be
conveyed in a set of straightforward factual propositions laid out for our assessment and
awaiting verification. For religious thoughts and ideas operate within a rich and complex
web of associations, carrying manifold metaphorical and symbolic echoes which may
often have powerful effects on us in ways that are not fully transparent to consciousness.
This, as Jung sees it, is the key to the peculiar resonance and power of the images and
icons that inform the thoughts and ideas of religious believers, and what explains their
role in the search for integration and healing within the troubled human psyche. None of
this of course means that we should uncritically accept all or any of Jung’s ideas about
the role of religious concepts; but at least it reminds us of the context in which his
theories are meant to operate, and within which they need to be evaluated.
Whatever conclusions one finally reaches about the Jungian theory of archetypes,
important questions remain about Jung’s general approach to religion. The foremost
among these is the objection that the Jungian approach leads to a kind of psychologizing
or subjectivizing of religion, where the question of the truth or validity of any given
religious outlook (Christian theism, for instance) boils down to no more than the question
of whether certain archetypal images (such as that of God the Father, or Christ the Son,
for example) have a transformative power within the human psyche (Palmer 1997: 187,
196). Jung’s own response to this type of criticism was that his role as a psychologist was
not to make pronouncements about the existence or non-existence of transcendent
realities, but simply to describe the role of certain fundamental and universal images and
symbols in human development:
We know that God-images play a great role in psychology, but we cannot prove the
[actual] existence of God. As a responsible scientist, I am not going to preach my
personal and subjective convictions which I cannot prove … To me, personally
speaking, the question whether God exists at all or not is futile. I am sufficiently
convinced of the effects man has always attributed to a divine being. If I should
express a belief beyond that … it would show that I am not basing my opinion on
facts … I am well satisfied with the fact that I know experiences which I cannot
avoid calling numinous or divine
(Jung 1956).
This makes quite clear the restricted scope of Jung’s position: it insists that religious
concepts and images play a crucial role in the development of the human personality and
its search for integration, but leaves completely open the question of whether there is
some objective reality—something ‘external’ or independent of the subjective structure of
the human psyche—to which those concepts and images refer.
To sum up our necessarily compressed and selective account of the contrasting attitudes
of Freud and Jung to religion—the former’s highly negative, the latter’s much more
positive—what emerges is that in neither case do their suggested findings about the
workings of the human psyche in themselves either establish or refute the truth of the
Page 8 of 20

religious outlook. The partly hidden motivation for religious belief may, if Freud is right,
be an infantile one; but as we have seen, that in itself does not logically entail the falsity
of such a belief. And the symbols and images drawn from the unconscious mind may, if
Jung is right, exert a powerful psychological influence on the human quest for
integration; but that, as just noted, still leaves open the real existence or otherwise of the
God that is the object of religious belief.
In the wake of these two seminal thinkers, however, one thing at any rate should be clear:
that any philosophical attempt to address the fundamental questions of religious belief
will find it hard to carry conviction unless it takes some account of the complexity that
lies beneath the seemingly transparent surface of propositional assent to religious claims
and doctrines. No account of religious belief and experience is going to look plausible
unless it acknowledges the complexity of the human mind—the strata of hidden longings
and needs and the manifold symbolic forms and images resonating deep within the
human psyche. To some of the more recent attempts to address that complexity we shall
now turn.
Page 9 of 20

The Complexity of Belief

The contemporary debate over the validity of religious belief tends to play out in a
curiously abstract and rationalistic way. The implicit assumption is that the participants
are detached evaluators, judiciously examining the ‘God hypothesis’ (as Richard Dawkins
calls it (Dawkins 2006: ch. 2)), scrutinizing the supposed evidence, and weighing up the
arguments for and against. Particularly among anglophone philosophers in the analytic
tradition, where psychoanalytic ideas have tended to be resisted or ignored by many
practitioners, the claims of religion are implicitly construed as rather like scientific
claims, suitable subjects for purely intellectual disputation, the province, as it were, of
scholarly discussion in the seminar room. But a number of recent writers have started to
challenge this austere and bloodless picture of religious belief.
Philosophers have argued endlessly about the epistemic status of religious and other
kinds of belief, and what entitles some beliefs to the accolade ‘knowledge’, but
comparatively few have paid attention to ‘what lies beneath’—to the ‘archaeology of
belief’, as the British theologian Graham Ward has called it. Ward argues that believing or
disbelieving something involves far more complex processes than the scrutiny and
evaluation of factual evidence. There are much ‘deeper layers of embodied engagement
and reaction’, where we are touched ‘imaginatively, affectively and existentially’ (Ward
2014: 7, 10, 31). Drawing on empirical research into the behavioural and neurological
underpinnings of belief, and its evolutionary and prehistoric roots, Ward delves into the
domain of what the Berkeley psychologist John Kihlstrom has termed the ‘cognitive
unconscious’ (Kihlstrom 1987; see also Kahneman 2011). A rich array of non-conscious
mental activity, including learned responses that have become automatic, subliminal
perceptions that impact on our conscious judgements, and implicit but not consciously
recalled memories—all these profoundly affect how we perceive and interpret the world
(Ward 2014: 11, 68). And as we saw in the case of Freud (whose general influence is
clearly discernible here), the implications of the resulting conception of human belief and
understanding extend far more widely than the domain of the pathological. Not just in
neurotic desires and perceptions, but whenever we believe anything at all, there is, as
Ward puts it, a ‘mode of liminal processing, related to embodiment and affectivity, which
“thinks” more quickly and reacts more instinctively than our conscious rational
deliberation’ (Ward 2014: 12).
A further dimension of complexity in our beliefs is explored in the neuroscientist Iain

McGilchrist’s groundbreaking work The Master and His Emissary, according to which
there are two different modes of relating to the world, broadly correlated with the
activities of the left and right hemispheres of the brain respectively, one mode being
detached, fragmented, abstract, and analytical, the other being more direct, holistic,
intuitive, and empathetic. McGilchrist speaks of:
Page 10 of 20

… two ways of being in the world, both of which are essential. One is to allow
things to be present to us in all their embodied particularity, with all their
changeability and impermanence and their interconnectedness, as part of a whole
which is forever in flux … The other is to step outside the flow of experience and
‘experience’ our experience in a special way: to re-present the world in a form that
is … is abstracted, compartmentalised, fragmented, static … From this world we
feel detached, but in relation to it we are powerful (2009: 93).
Acknowledging McGilchrist’s influence, Graham Ward urges us to question the ‘left-brain

hegemony’ that has increasingly dominated our culture since the Enlightenment, and to
reconfigure our understanding of belief. Doing justice to the full range of our embodied
human engagement with the world could allow for a ‘rebalancing’ of left-brain and right-
brain modes of awareness. This, he argues, might enable us to overcome the sterile
opposition between scientific and religious modes of thinking, and to understand what
lies ‘at the very core of poetic and religious faith’ (Ward 2014: 110).
Before proceeding, it needs to be noted that many critics have questioned the distinction
that is invoked here between ‘left-brain’ and ‘right brain’ activity, objecting that the
available scientific research on the neurophysiology and functioning of the brain does not
support a strong dichotomy between the functions performed by the two hemispheres
(Nielsen et al. 2013). There may be evidence to suggest that in most subjects one can
distinguish between ‘logical–conceptual’ and more ‘intuitive’ mental activity, each broadly
correlating with neural activity in the relevant halves of the brain; but the critics point
out that in normal subjects both halves play some role in both, and in any case there is
constant interaction between the two hemispheres. All this, however, is readily conceded
by McGilchrist, who fully acknowledges the massive degree of interconnectivity in the
wiring of the brain, while nevertheless insisting that the two hemispheres have been
shown to function in ways that are to some degree independent, and that this can tell us
something important about the different ways in which we experience the world
(McGilchrist 2018).10
However that may be, the position taken by McGilchrist, Ward, and others11 about the
need to challenge what they term ‘left-brain hegemony’ does not seem ultimately to hinge
on the precise details as to how the brain is configured. For the crucial point at issue is
not a neurological one, but what might be called a psycho-ethical or spiritual one: that
our ultimate flourishing as human beings depends on our being able to integrate our
detached and analytic modes of relating to the world with our more direct and intuitive
modes of awareness. This is not to say, however, that the scientific study of the brain has
no relevance to the psychological-cum-moral task of striving for an integrated vision of
the world. For the wiring of the brain, shaped by the long history of its evolution, is an
integral part of our nature as biological creatures, and our human ways of perceiving and
understanding the world must inevitably be conditioned and mediated by that history. The
point was in fact explicitly anticipated by Jung in a paper written early in his career:
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Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, with a long
evolutionary history behind them, so we should expect the mind to be organized in
a similar way … We receive along with our body a highly differentiated brain
which brings with it its entire history, and when it becomes creative it creates out
of this history—out of the history of mankind … that age-old natural history which
has been transmitted in living form since the remotest times, namely the history of
the brain structure
(Jung 1918: 12).12
In short, whatever scientific consensus is eventually reached with regard to the precise
workings of the brain and the functioning of its parts, the resulting picture seems likely
only to reinforce the idea that our grasp of reality depends at the physiological level on an
intricate nexus of mechanisms and processing systems evolved over many millennia and
working beneath the threshold of conscious awareness and control. And alongside this
neurological complexity there also has to be taken into account the complex array of
socially and culturally inherited associations and resonances that condition our cognitive
and emotional responses to the world, again working largely below the level of our
explicit conscious awareness. So the more we learn about all this, the more pressure is
put on the idea of the detached autonomous agent, somehow operating above the fray of
evolution and history, and forming beliefs based solely on dispassionate scrutiny of the
evidence like some pure disembodied intelligence.
So what are the implications of the growing interest in the ‘archaeology of belief’ for our
understanding of religion and its place in the modern scientific age? Ward, as already
noted, maintains that a greater understanding of what lies beneath the surface of
conscious belief-formation will help us to overcome what he sees as the ‘sterile’
opposition between scientific and religious thought and to give up the idea that primitive
mythological ways of thinking about the world will progressively be replaced by modern
scientific methods. For placing the belief-forming faculties of our species within the
context of their biological and social development over many millennia reveals the
ineradicable role of the mythic and the symbolic in all human cognition, and thus radically
undermines the idea of the inevitable triumph of a science-based, demythologized and
secularized belief system. Just as Jung had argued that mythical and symbolic forms
powerfully and inescapably impinge on our human beliefs and attitudes, so Ward argues
that all human belief systems involve myth-making. And this includes not just archetypal
stories of our origins (such as the Genesis narrative), but a whole range of human activity
—the ‘symbolic realms we hominids have been cultivating for 2.2 million years’, including
art, poetry, rite, and dance. In ways we cannot fully explain, these interlocking modes of
human culture tap the powers of what (for a want of a better term) we call the
imagination, which operates at many more levels than are accessed by our conscious
reflective awareness. Such works of the imagination ‘intimate that our experience … of
being in the world is freighted with a significance that only an appeal to the mythic can
index’ (Ward 2014: 186).
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Many important issues are raised by this stress on the psychological depth and
complexity of human cognition, and its mythical and the imaginative aspects. But for
present purposes two key questions present themselves: first, what are the implications
of all this for the epistemic status of religious belief; and second, what lessons emerge for
the way in which the philosophy of religion should be conducted? To these questions we
shall briefly turn in the fifth and final section of our discussion.
Philosophizing About Religion and the Layers

of the Human Psyche
The line of argument canvassed in the previous section—emphasizing the creative,
imaginative, and mythical elements in all human belief systems—might seem to offer a
kind of protective armour for religious ways of thinking against the advances of modern
scientific rationalism. But there may be grounds for concern that such a defence of
religion is bought at too steep a cost—the cost of eroding the very distinction between
mythos and logos, between imagination and reason. For even if science is necessarily the
creation of our evolved human capacities, conditioned by our long human history, it has
nevertheless developed tried and trusted methods (empirical investigation, mathematical
modelling) for understanding and predicting the workings of nature. And the secularist
charge against religious ways of thinking is that they completely fail to pass these tests
for reliable belief formation, and thus do not deserve a place in our modern world view.
There is no space here to delve further into the extensive and continuing contemporary
debate about the future of religion in the modern world. What needs to be addressed in
the present context are the implications for philosophy, and in particular the philosophy
of religion, of the issues raised in the previous section about the complex ‘archaeology of
belief’. In this connection, one does not have to sign up to a questionable assimilation of
science and myth in order to wonder if contemporary analytic philosophy of religion has
become too dry and austere, too closely modelled on the pared-down unambiguous
language of the sciences, to do justice to the complexities of religious belief and the ways
in which it might contribute to our understanding of ourselves and the nature of the
reality of which we are a part. It is here that the contribution of psychoanalytic thought
seems particularly relevant. For if there is any truth in what the psychoanalytic
movement has tried to uncover about the hidden layers of the human mind, then it seems
plausible to suppose that being more open to ‘what lies beneath’ might lead to a more
nuanced epistemology, less modelled on the austere language and methods of the
physical sciences, but arguably better equipped for the task of philosophizing insightfully
about religion.13 It is striking in this connection to find even a committed analytic
philosopher of religion such as Eleonore Stump arguing recently that in order to do its
job philosophy of religion may require deeper and richer resources than those afforded by
the tools of logical analysis and technically expert argument (Stump 2010: 26–7).
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Stump does not explicitly mention or invoke the resources of psychoanalytic theory, but
significantly she does argue that philosophers of religion need to make use of our
manifold responses to the multiple resonances of literary, and scriptural, narrative. This
chimes in with earlier calls for a certain kind of narrative or literary turn in philosophy, as
advocated for example in the work of Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum argues that in
learning to appreciate a great literary text we have to allow ourselves to be receptive and
‘porous’, knowing when to yield instead of maintaining constant critical detachment
(1990: 281–2). Some philosophers may suppose that any departure from complete
analytical detachment would involve a loss of philosophical integrity; and certainly there
is need for philosophical caution whenever our imaginative and emotional resources are
made use of. But equally, if we insist on maintaining a detached analytical stance at all
times, this may be less a sign of intellectual integrity than what Nussbaum calls ‘a
stratagem of flight’ (Nussbaum 1990: 268)—a refusal of the openness and receptivity that
is prepared to acknowledge all the dimensions of our humanity.
If this is right, then one lesson to emerge is that we may need a new epistemology for
thinking about religious belief and its basis. In contemporary analytic philosophy of
religion, both the advocates of religious belief and its critics tend to operate with an
epistemology of control. We stand back, scrutinize the evidence, retaining our power and
autonomy, and pronounce on the existence or otherwise of God. But such methods
implicitly presuppose that the divine presence ought to be detectable via intellectual
analysis of formal arguments or observational data. Yet the ancient Judaeo-Christian idea
of the Deus absconditus (the ‘hidden God’)14 suggests a deity who is less interested in
proving his existence or demonstrating his power than in the moral conversion and freely
given love of his creatures, and in guiding the steps of those who ‘seek him with all their
heart’, in Pascal’s phrase (1670: no. 427). And when we start to think about the means of
such conversion, it becomes clear that it could never operate through detached
intellectual argument alone, or through the dispassionate evaluation of ‘spectator
evidence’ (Moser 2008: 47).
Any suggestion that religious claims cannot fully and properly be evaluated from a
detached and dispassionate standpoint may at first seem to be special pleading on behalf
of religion; but further reflection makes it clear that there are all sorts of other areas of
life—appreciation of poetry, of music, entering into any kind of personal relationship—
where we need to be (to use Nussbaum’s term) ‘porous’. Otherwise, while we pride
ourselves on being in control and judiciously evaluating the evidence, we may actually be
closing ourselves off from allowing the evidence to become manifest to us. In short, there
may be many areas of human life where a proper understanding of what is going on
requires us to relinquish the epistemology of control and substitute an epistemology of
receptivity.15
Perhaps surprisingly, this plea for the adoption of an epistemology of receptivity when
assessing the claims of religion can draw some support from the writings of the founding
father of psychoanalysis. Although as we have seen, Freud himself was a stern critic of
religion, and although he tended to present himself very much in the garb of the austere
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scientific rationalist, he also acknowledged, perhaps most explicitly in his Introductory

Lectures on Psychoanalysis, that his methods of treatment diverged very significantly
from those which are typical of standard scientific procedure. He points to two important
differences. First, conventional scientific medicine looks to ‘establish the functions and
disturbances of the organism on an anatomical basis, to explain them in terms of
chemistry and physics, and to regard them from a biological point of view’, whereas
Freud concedes that his own approach focuses on a much more elusive aspect, namely
the ‘psychological attitude of mind’. And second, Freud acknowledges the oddity of the
fact that the processes involved are not susceptible of public investigation under normal
observer conditions, because the psychotherapeutic process takes place in a private
consulting room and ‘only under the conditions of a special affective relationship to the
physician’ (1916–17: 22).
Thus, so far from there being an objective scientific template to which all valid discourse
and all legitimate human inquiry must conform, Freud in the Introductory Lectures
appears ready to allow that there are phenomena whose nature is such that quite
different modes of understanding are appropriate. Indeed, he goes further and
acknowledges that psychoanalysis is learnt first of all ‘on oneself, by studying one’s own
personality’ (1916–17: 23). These concessions are most significant, since (whether Freud
himself drew such an inference or not) they implicitly cut the ground from underneath
those critics of religion who would dismiss the validity of religious experiences on the
grounds that they resist external verification by detached or non-involved observers.
The important lesson to emerge here is that despite the prevalence of scientistic modes of
thinking in our contemporary culture (and in some parts of Freud’s own thinking), we
need to take seriously the idea that there may be phenomena that do not manifest
themselves ‘cold’, as it were, but require involvement and commitment on the part of the
subject in order to be apprehended. It has been an assumption of modern scientific
inquiry that the truth is simply available for discovery, given sufficient ingenuity and the
careful application of the appropriate techniques, and that the dispositions and moral
character of the inquirer are entirely irrelevant. But while this assumption may be correct
enough when inquiring into truths within meteorology, say, or chemical engineering, it
seems quite out of place when we are dealing with certain central truths of our human
experience—for example truths about how a poem or symphony may be appreciated, or
how a loving relationship may be achieved and fostered. In these latter areas, the
impartial application of a mechanical technique is precisely the wrong approach: the
truth yields itself only to those who are already to some extent in a state of receptivity
and trust.16, 17 The upshot is that there may be phenomena, or parts of reality, whose
detection or apprehension is subject to what might be called accessibility conditions: the
requirements for getting in touch with them include certain requirements as to the
subjective attitude and psychological (and perhaps moral) state of the subject
(Cottingham 2005: ch. 1, §§ 3 and 4; ch. 7, §4). And as we have seen, Freud himself seems
clearly to acknowledge this when he speaks of the insights arising from the
psychotherapeutic process making themselves available ‘only under the conditions of a
special affective relationship to the physician’ (1916–17: 23). Yet once it is granted that
Page 15 of 20

there are psychological truths that may come to light only given certain affective and
other transformations within the experiencing subject, then it may become possible to see
how the same principle might be applied to religious truths, so that certain
transformations in the subject may be crucially necessary preconditions for the
manifestation of the divine reality that is the object of the religious quest (Cottingham
2009: ch. 5).
What thus emerges, as we bring to a close our discussion of the relation between
psychoanalysis and religion, is the remarkable degree of convergence that obtains
between these two very different ways of thinking about the human condition. Not only
do both outlooks search for deeper layers of significance beneath of the surface world of
factual assertion and plain ‘common sense’, but also, as we have just seen, both hold that
this deeper world may disclose itself only to those who are in a suitable state of
receptivity—a point that carries important epistemological implications perhaps not yet
fully assimilated in our contemporary philosophical culture. To be sure, none of this is
sufficient on its own to constitute a vindication of the claims either of psychoanalytic
theory or of traditional religion, nor is it intended to be; but at least it may give some
indication of the way in which those claims might have to be assessed.18
References
Augustine of Hippo (c. 398 CE [1912]). Confessions (Confessiones), trans. W. Watts.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cottingham, J. (1998). Philosophy and the Good Life: Reason and the Passions in Greek,
Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cottingham, J. (2005). The Spiritual Dimension. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cottingham, J. (2009). Why Believe? London: Continuum.
Cottingham, J. (2014). Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach.

Cottingham, J. (2015). How to Believe. London: Bloomsbury.
Dante Alighieri (c. 1310 [1981]). The Divine Comedy: Paradise (La Divina Comedia:
Paradiso), ed. and trans. G. Bickersteth. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dawkins, R. (2006). The God Delusion. London: Transworld Publishers.
Foucault, M. (2005). The Hermeneutics of the Subject. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Freud, S. (1901). The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.),
The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 5. London: Penguin.
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Freud, S. (1916–17 [1952]). Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Vorlesungen zur

Einführung in die Psychoanalyse,), trans. J. Riviere as A General Introduction to
Psychoanalysis. New York: Washington Square Press.
Freud, S. (1927). ‘The Future of an Illusion’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Penguin
Freud Library, Vol. 12 (pp. 182–241). London: Penguin.
Freud, S. (1929). ‘Civilization and its Discontents’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The
Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 12 (pp. 251–340). London: Penguin.
Howard-Snyder, D. and Moser, P. (eds) (2002). Divine Hiddenness. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.
Hume, D. (1757). ‘The Natural History of Religion’. In Four Dissertations. London: Millar.
Jung, C. (1918). ‘The Role of the Unconscious’ (‘Über das Unbewußte’). In C. G. Jung,
Collected Works, rev. edn (l967–77), Vol. 10. London: Routledge.
Jung, C. (1938). Psychology and Religion. In C. G. Jung, Collected Works, rev. edn (l967–
77), Vol. 11 (pp. 89–95). London: Routledge.
Jung, C. (1939). ‘Conscious, Unconscious and Individuation’. In C. G. Jung, Collected

Works, rev. edn (l967–77), Vol. 9 (1) (pp. 275–289). London: Routledge.
Jung, C. (1951). Aion. In C. G. Jung, Collected Works, rev. edn (l967–77), Vol. 9 (2).
London: Routledge.
Jung, C. (1952). ‘Symbols of Transformation’. In C. G. Jung, Collected Works, rev. edn

(l967–77), Vol. 5. London: Routledge.
Jung, C. (1956). ‘Correspondence with H. L. Philp’. In C. G. Jung, Collected Works, rev.

edn (l967–77), Vol. 18 (pp. 706–707). London: Routledge.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking Fast and Slow. London: Penguin.
Kihlstrom, J. (1987). ‘The cognitive unconscious’. Science 237: 1445–1452.
Knox, J. (2003). Archetype, Attachment, Analysis. Hove: Brunner-Routledge.
Leiter, B. (2004). The Future for Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Martin, T. (2002). Oppression and the Human Condition. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield.
May, S. (2011). Love: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and His Emissary. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
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Moser, P. (2008). The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology. Cambridge:

Nagel, T. (1974 [1979]). ‘What is it like to be a bat?’. In Mortal Questions (ch. 12).
Nagel, T (1994). ‘Freud’s Permanent Revolution’. New York Review of Books 41(9): 34–38.
Nielsen, J. et al. (2013). ‘An Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain

Hypothesis’. Plos One 8(8): e71275.
Nussbaum, N. (1990). Love’s Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Palmer, M. (1997). Freud and Jung on Religion. London: Routledge.
Pascal, B. (1670 [1962]). Pensées, ed. L. Lafuma. Paris: Seuil.
Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and Philosophy: an essay on interpretation, trans. D. Savage.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (Originally published as De l’interprétation: Essai
sur Sigmund Freud, 1965).
Sartre, J.-P. (1975). The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, trans. B. Frechtmann. Secaucus,
NJ: Citadel Press (Originally published as Esquisse d’une théorie des emotions, 1939).
Stump, E. (2010). Wandering in Darkness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ward, G. (2014). Unbelievable: Why We Believe and Why We Don’t. London: I. B. Tauris.
Notes:
(1.) Quoted in Martin 2002: 67. It should be noted that Sartre himself was critical of the
Freudian concept of the unconscious mind.
(2.) [Eds: See Blass, this volume, § ‘The Dialogue Between Freud and the Believer on the
Nature of Truth’, for an account of Freud’s later explanation, in Moses and Monotheism,
of the force of religious belief in terms of ‘historical truth’.]
(3.) [Eds: Cottingham’s argument may be fruitfully juxtaposed with Blass, this volume, §
‘Contemporary Positive Perspectives’ and Boothby, this volume.]
(4.) ‘Fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te’ (Augustine (c.
398), Bk. I, Ch. 1; ‘E’n la sua volontade è nostra pace’ (Dante Alighieri (c. 1310), Canto iii,
line 85.
(5.) [Eds. See also Blass, this volume, § ‘Contemporary Positive Perspectives’.]
(6.) For more on the psychodynamics of this transformational process, see Cottingham
(1998), ch. 4.
Page 18 of 20

(7.) ‘Hermeneutics’ in the most general sense may be thought of as an approach to

philosophy which gives a central place to the (culturally mediated) search for self-
understanding. See Ricoeur 1970.
(8.) [Eds. Blass, this volume, § ‘The Change in the Attitude to Truth’ explores Freud’s
antipathy to this turn in relation to questions of religion.]
(9.) [Eds. See Gipps, this volume, for a development of this line of thought.]
(10.) See McGilchrist, ‘Exchange of Views’ at http://iainmcgilchrist.com/exchange-of-

views/.
(11.) See for instance Eleonore Stump on ‘cognitive hemianopia’ (2010: 26–7).
(12.) Compare McGilchrist 2009: 8.
(13.) [Eds. A similar conclusion is reached via a very different route by Blass, this
volume.]
(14.) See Isaiah 45:15. For more on the ‘hiddenness’ of God, see Howard-Snyder and
Moser (2002).
(15.) The argument of the last three paragraphs draws on material from Cottingham
2014: ch. 1. See also Cottingham 2015, esp. ch. 3.
(16.) For more on this theme, see Michel Foucault, Seminar at the Collège de France of 6
January 1982, trans. in Foucault (2005: 1–19). See also Cottingham 2005: ch. 5 and ch. 7.
(17.) [Eds. For development of this line of thought in relation to psychoanalysis, see
Gipps, this volume.]
(18.) I am grateful to Richard Gipps and Michael Lacewing for their most thoughtful
comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
John Cottingham
John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading,

UK.
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The No-Thing of God: Psychoanalysis of Religion After Lacan

The No-Thing of God: Psychoanalysis of Religion After
Lacan
Richard Boothby

This chapter traces some main lines of Jacques Lacan’s interpretation of religion and
divinity, which differs significantly from Freud’s critique. Orienting ourselves with respect
to what Lacan calls das Ding, the enigmatic desire of the Other, it is possible to sketch a
Lacanian analysis of religion parallel to that offered by Kant in Religion Within the Limits
of Reason Alone. The difference is that where Kant looked to find in religious
representations, especially those of Christianity, the underlying dynamics of pure
rationality and of a morality founded upon it, Lacan discerns the very structure of
subjectivity and its relation to the unknown Other. New perspectives are thereby opened
up on a whole series of problems, including the unconscious dynamics of enjoyment,
practices of sacrifice, the structural differences between various religions, and Christian
doctrines of incarnation, love, and mystical unknowing.
Keywords: Lacan, Real, Imaginary, Symbolic, the Other, das Ding, paternal metaphor, sacrifice, sexuation,
mysticism
Page 1 of 23

Introduction
On the topic of religion, it is clear that the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, doesn’t
merely repeat the critique mounted by Freud. Not so clear is the meaning of what Lacan
says on his own.1 At different points in his teaching, Lacan associates the ancient gods
with the unthinkable Real (2017: 44), he identifies the ‘I am that I am’ of the burning
bush with the pure subject of speech (1968: Session of 11 December), he asserts that ‘the
true formula for atheism is that God is unconscious’ (1981: 59), and he intimates that his
Écrits should be compared with the writings of the great mystics (1998: 76). That last
provocation is sounded in Lacan’s twentieth seminar, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, The
Limits of Love and Knowledge. It is there, too, that Lacan associates an excessive
enjoyment beyond knowing, what he calls the ‘jouissance of the Other’, with the essential
incompleteness of woman, her characteristic of being pas tout, or ‘non-all’. He then
brings such feminine jouissance suggestively but enigmatically into conjunction with God,
asking at one point: ‘Why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as based on
feminine jouissance?’ (1998: 82).
How to make sense of these obscure passages? How are we to grasp the intersection they
imply between jouissance, language, lack, love, and God? And how are these terms
knotted in relation to knowing and what is beyond knowing? While such questions cannot
be adequately answered in a brief paper, we might hope to provide a basic orientation to
them.
Freud’s Critique
Freud’s critique of religious belief is familiar and need only be tersely summarized to
orient our discussion.2 In The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud’s attack is directed less
towards the object of belief, the dubiousness of an invisible, supernatural power who
oversees human life from a cosmic distance, than towards the subject who believes. The
problem is the motive of the believer. The ‘illusion’ at stake is thus a matter of the
believer’s investment in wish-fulfilling fantasies.
To this bottom-line assessment, Freud added two more properly psychoanalytic angles of
interpretation. The first, developed in Totem and Taboo (1911) and revisited in Freud’s
last major work, Moses and Monotheism (1939), predicates the solidarity of the human
group upon the fantasy of the father’s murder. The bond of brotherly love is cemented by
the blood of the patriarch. It is a theory that casts a light on the origins of religious ritual
in practices of blood sacrifice and suggests that what Catholics call the mystical body of
the Church is founded upon a collective guilt over the murder of the Saviour.
Page 2 of 23

Freud based a second strategy on the resemblance of religious ritual to the compulsions
of the obsessive neurosis. Not only are they both marked by a conspicuous
conscientiousness, they also display the compromise structure of the symptom, which
functions to repress some impulse at the same time that it symbolically discharges it. The
case of the Ratman illustrates the dynamic perfectly (Freud: 1909: 153–320). His
obsessional thinking becomes unmanageable upon hearing a fellow soldier describe an
oriental torture in which a cage of starving rats is affixed to the buttocks of the victim so
that the rats chew their way into the anus. The Ratman becomes preoccupied with the
recurring dread that such horrifying treatment might be applied to the two most
important figures in his life: his father and his fiancée. In the frightful shudder that
accompanies each compulsive reimagining, Freud recognizes both a struggle to defend
against a sexually charged desire and a means of satisfying that very desire. Key religious
phenomena might be interpreted in parallel fashion. Contemplation of the crucifixion, for
example, invites the worshipper to rise above all hatred in a final victory of love while
also offering an occasion to gratify an unconscious sadism.
Page 3 of 23

Lacanian Heresy
In a simple but elegant pun, the title of Lacan’s twenty-second seminar, ‘R.S.I.,’ ––which
pronounced in French sounds like ‘heresy’––suggests both a measured departure from
Freudian orthodoxy and, more subtly but palpably, a promise of a new angle of
interpretation on the problem of religion. The three letters stand for the three
fundamental registers––Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary–– with which Lacan rewrites the
essentials of psychoanalytic theory. The case of the Ratman offers a useful frame in which
to introduce them.
The fantasy of bodily violation in the rat torture recalls the dynamics of the ‘imaginary’,
which for Lacan inform the structure and function of the ego. During the period of late
infancy that Lacan calls ‘the mirror stage’, the unifying gestalt of the other’s body is
thought to coordinate the impulse chaos of the child. This reliance on an external image
alienates the human subject from itself. It inevitably invites aggression towards the other
because it introduces an internal split. On this point, Lacan rests a central postulate of
his entire outlook: the opposition between the moi and the je, between the ego as the seat
of one’s conscious sense of self, and the subject of unconscious desire.
That subject emerges in pulsations of the ‘symbolic’, Lacan’s general term for the
resources of language, informed by the theories of Saussure and Jakobson, on which he
draws in order to retrieve and radicalize Freud’s many analyses of word play in dreams,
slips, bungled actions, and symptomatic complexes. In the Ratman, for example, the
obsessive idea clearly crystallizes around the morpheme ‘Rat’, which functions like a kind
of switch-point in a constellation of emotionally loaded issues: the starving, gnawing
rodents (Ratten), monetary debts (Raten), gambling (Spielratte), and marriage
(Heiraten). The key thing that Lacan adds to Freud’s own elaborate analyses (and what
he adds to the linguistic theories of Saussure as well) is a more general theory of the
signifier centred on its unconscious dimension. The signifier always passes into the
speech stream an indeterminate excess, what Lacan calls the ‘objet petit a’. In the margin
of this excess there is a ‘slippage of the signified beneath the signifier’ (Lacan, 2006: 419)
The consequence, put in simplest terms, is that we always say more than we intend. It is
in the space of the unsaid and unintended that unconscious effects unfold.
By locating the roots of unconscious desire in the play of the signifier, Lacan reconceives
the Oedipus complex as a function of the acquisition of language.3 What Freud had tied to
paternal threats of castration becomes a matter of tensions internal to the child’s
submission to the symbolic law. Lacan’s third category of the ‘real’ arises at the limit of
the law, or better, at the point where the symbolic function remains incomplete,
interrupted, or inconsistent. In the gaps and failures of the symbolic, the subject may be
confronted with a traumatic excess, the subjective impact of the real that Lacan calls
jouissance. The real in this sense, far from being reducible to everyday ‘reality’, indicates
the subject’s encounter with something fundamentally unthinkable. If it is an encounter
with something incomprehensible in the outside world, it is also an engagement with the
Page 4 of 23

incomprehensible in the subject itself. Here, too, the Ratman provides us with a
suggestive example. In talking about the dread rat torture, Freud tells us, the patient’s
face ‘took on a very strange, composite expression. I could only interpret it as one of
horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware’ (Freud 1909: 166–7).
Where, then, are we to locate the religious in the architecture of Lacanian theory? For
many commentators, the answer is to identify God with an aspect of the unthinkable real.
Divinity is to be situated in a domain beyond human experience, a zone that forever
outstrips all capacities to image or name it.4 Such an approach offers the satisfaction of
locating the divine in a dimension of radical transcendence, but it also runs the risks
attendant upon the conception first put forward by Kant, who famously claimed to limit
human reason in order to make room for God. For such a view, the divine is vouchsafed
by being located in a noumenal Beyond, but only at the price of our being barred from
saying anything whatever about its nature.
A second angle of interpretation takes its point of departure from Lacan’s conception of
the symbolic ‘big Other’. Part of what is distinctive about Lacan’s conception of language
is that he characterizes the network of the symbolic code as susceptible of being
construed as something akin to, or in some way inhabited by, another subject. This so-
called ‘big Other’ is the nameless and faceless regulator who oversees the written and
unwritten rules that direct our lives. At stake is not just the properly linguistic rules
governing grammar, syntax, and semantics. The big Other also monitors our polite
behaviour, inspects our adherence to fashion, defines for us what is funny (sometimes
actually laughing for us in the ‘laugh track’ of TV sitcoms), insists on our silent decorum
at one moment and calls for our deep-throated patriotic fervour at another. The power of
this symbolic big Other resides in part precisely in the fact that it exists everywhere and
nowhere, that it is both ‘all and none’.5
In this supposition of something subject-like in the symbolic code we rightly discern a

shadow of Freud’s primal father. Yet we also get a hint that, unlike Freud, who posed
faith as a means of coping with human helplessness by means of pleasing illusions, for
Lacan the disposition to belief in God is more emphatically unconscious and more
definitely structural. Far from being an illusory add-on to a rationality that could and
should do without it, an implicit ‘faith’ in the underlying coherence of sense-making is a
kind of structural requirement of our relation to language. The Lacanian view thus
suggests that something like faith, the baseline credulity that undergirds reliance on all
symbolic conventions, is a virtual necessity for human beings. It is this function that
underlies the promotion of what Lacan calls ‘master signifiers’, the legitimacy of which
are warranted by the big Other in the role of a ‘subject supposed to know’. And what is
God but the ultimate form of such supposition? If we mortals fail to grasp the meaning of
our lives, the same is not true of the divine agency whose plan for Creation is complete in
every detail.6 ‘The subject supposed to know’, says Lacan, ‘is God, full stop, nothing
else’ (1968: Session of 30 April).
Page 5 of 23

God in the real or in the symbolic. Must we make a choice? A prime purpose of the
remainder of this chapter is to show how the two perspectives are in fact inseparable.
The key for making their connection lies in Lacan’s concept of das Ding, the Thing.
Page 6 of 23

In the Shadow of the Thing

While mentioned only infrequently after the central role it plays in the Lacan’s seventh
Seminar on ‘The Ethics of Psychoanalysis’, the concept of the Thing is clearly
fundamental.7 As Lacan says of it, ‘Das Ding is a primordial function which is located at
the level of the initial establishment of the gravitation of the unconscious Vorstellungen’ (1992:
62). How, then, to interpret it? Much of the commentary on Lacan’s notion has followed a
Kantian clue. On this account, the Lacanian Thing is akin to the Kantian Ding-an-sich, the
unthinkable kernel of external things, not merely as they appear to us, but as they are in
themselves. It is along this line of thinking that Lacan’s Thing is associated with the
original lost object that sets in motion the ceaseless roving of human desire. Das Ding
also names the dimension of what is fundamentally excessive (and thus is connected in
Lacan’s thought to the object petit a). As such, it animates the experience of the sublime,
which Lacan famously characterizes as emerging when ‘the object is elevated to the
dignity of the Thing’ (1992: 112).
This quasi-Kantian posing of the Thing in the locus of the Ding-as-sich is by no means
without some value, but it needs to be resisted at least long enough to recognize that the
crucial dimension of the das Ding concerns not objects but other people. The original
unthinkable object is the fellow human being. This conclusion is obvious when we return
to the text of Freud from which Lacan takes his clue. In a brief flight of theorizing in his
unpublished ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, Freud notes how the child divides the
figure of the Nebenmensch, the ‘neighbour’ or fellow human being, between what it can
recognize on the basis of similarities to its own body––precisely the sort of mirror
recognition that Lacan associates with the imaginary—and a locus of something that is
‘new and non-comparable’, a zone of something unknown. This unrepresentable excess
Freud calls das Ding. It is this division of the human other, a division that reserves in the
heart of the familiar a locus for something excessive and as yet unknown, that will serve
as the template for all of the child’s future attempts to interrogate the nature of objects.
‘For this reason’, says Freud, ‘it is in relation to the fellow human-being that a human-
being learns to cognize’ (1886–99: 331) The key point is not merely that there remains a
inaccessible, noumenal core of all objects but that the original schema that locates such
an unknown is taken from the example of what is unknown in the human Other.8
What is new and crucially important in Lacan’s treatment of the Thing is the way in which
the enigmatic locus of something uncognized in the Other becomes the root source of
anxiety. ‘Not only is [anxiety] not without object’, he says, ‘but it very likely designates
the most, as it were, profound object, the ultimate object, the Thing’ (Lacan 2014: 331).
The challenge of the neighbour-Thing consists not simply in the discovery of an
inaccessible kernel at the heart of the Other but in the way it raises the unsettling
question of what object I am for that unknown desire. The question presses with
particular force in the drama of toilet training when the demand of the Other for the
regulation of the infant’s bowels re-energizes anxiety about the unanswered question of
Page 7 of 23

what the Other wants. The Lacanian thesis thus goes beyond merely locating the source
of anxiety in the fellow human being. It asserts, contrary to our fondest myth about
childhood, that the hidden source of deepest and most uncanny anxiety is the mother
herself.9
We might remark in passing how this Lacanian understanding of the dynamics of the
mother/child relation at least partly resembles that offered by Simone de Beauvoir. At a
key point of her argument in The Second Sex, de Beauvoir reasserts the value of the
Freudian Oedipus complex for understanding the deep roots of ambivalence towards the
feminine, though with the crucial proviso that we invert Freud’s conception (de Beauvoir
1989: 195–6). The core of the Oedipus complex is not, as Freud thought, that the child
must be separated from the mother by a threat of castration, but rather that the child is
motivated to navigate its own separation, seeking to achieve an autonomy that can be
won only by a certain rejection of the maternal embrace. Lacan echoes this key point. He
could well be paraphrasing de Beauvoir when he insists that ‘it’s not true that the child is
weaned. He weans himself. He detaches himself from the breast’ (Lacan 2014: 313).
Does Lacan then follow de Beauvoir here? By no means completely. Their point of
convergence only makes it more essential to clarify Lacan’s distance from de Beauvoir,
who departs from Freud merely in claiming that the child’s desire for the mother is
abrogated not by the threat of paternal castration but rather by the child’s own rejection.
For Lacan, by contrast, the problem isn’t the desire of the child at all, but rather that of
the mother, in as much as her desire is encountered as a threatening unknown. It is in the
light of this perspective that we can make sense of Lacan’s comparison of the mother to
the daunting spectre of a giant praying mantis (Lacan 2014: 22). In the same stroke, we
can interpret his characterization of the objet petit a as un objet cessible, a cedable or
yieldable object (see Lacan 2014: 312–15, 324–7). In the various incarnations of the objet
a, most of them parts of the body, the subject’s ‘pound of flesh’, is exchanged or
‘sacrificed’ in order to create a margin of safe separation from the Other.10 Lacan calls to
mind a similar function when he likens the mother to a crocodile and the phallic signifier
to a stick with which to keep its jaws from snapping shut.
The notion of the objet cessible recapitulates in Lacan’s own theoretical frame something
akin to Heidegger’s notion of an escape from anxiety made possible by means of focusing
on an object (Heidegger 1962: 234). What Lacan calls objet a ultimately derives from a
pure void, a pure function of lack and absence. Yet this lack is successively given definite
shape in a series of objects, in the first instance parts of the body (breast, faeces, penis
etc.).11 In this way, the yawning lack discovered in the unfathomable opacity of the Other
our topic, the result is a new angle of view on the meaning of sacrifice. In its ultimate
function, ‘sacrifice is not at all intended to be an offering, nor a gift, both of which are
propagated in a quite different dimension, but the capture of the Other in the web of
desire’ (2014: 277).
Page 8 of 23

This discussion of the materialization of the objet a and its deployment in an economy of
exchange provides a ready segue to the child’s entry into language, the most basic and
highly elaborated economy of exchange. In the originary drama with the maternal Other,
the inarticulate cry of the infant becomes in itself a ceded object, indeed the very first
such object, yielded into the space between subject and Other. As Lacan says, ‘this
manifestation of anxiety coincides with the very emergence in the world of he who is
going to be the subject. This manifestation is his cry … this first effect of cession … the
nursling can’t do anything about the cry that slips out of him. He has yielded something
and nothing will ever conjoin him to it again’ (2014: 326).
If the first inchoate eruptions of the voice are in this way inflected with anxiety, and
inevitably so, in as much as they enter and begin to shape the emerging interval between
the subject and the Other, they are also destined to become the means by which the
question of the Other, the enigma of das Ding, will be ceaselessly reposed. ‘Here we’re
touching’, says Lacan, ‘on the very thing that makes the relation to the Other possible,
that is, on that whence emerges the fact that there is such a thing as a signifier. This site
whence emerges the fact that there is such a thing as the signifier is, in one sense, the
site that cannot be signified. It is what I call the site of the lack-of-signifier’ (2014: 134).
What is at stake is the most elemental implication of Lacan’s theory of the signifier,
perhaps precisely what he had in mind by claiming that he had defined the signifier as no
one else had dared. In every entry into language, in every iteration of signifying material,
there resounds some echo of the unanswered and unanswerable question of the Other.
This perspective on das Ding, in which the primordial question of the Other resonates––
waveringly, uncertainly––every signifier, illuminates the point that Lacan never tires of
emphasizing: that it is always possible to ask about anything spoken, ‘yes, I hear what
you’re telling me, but what are you really saying (what do you really want)?’. What most
distinguishes Lacan’s view of language and its function is that meaning can never be fully
stabilized, that a question not only can but always implicitly is posed by every entry into
language. Yet if every play of the signifier implicitly resumes an interrogation of the
unknown in the Other, what is ultimately at stake is the subject’s own coming-to-be, the
subject’s own question. This even more elusive stake of the game is rooted in the real of
the subject’s mute jouissance. It is a locus that can be approached only mythically,
conceivable only as a primordial, indeterminate X. The key point for Lacan, however, is
that the question of the Other always comes first, that the question of the subject’s desire
can be posed only in the locus of the Other.12 ‘What anxiety targets in the real’. Lacan
says, ‘includes the x of a primordial subject moving towards his advent as subject, […]
since the subject has to realize himself on the path to the Other. […] [this subject] is the
subject of jouissance […] it can in no way be isolated as a subject, unless
mythically’ (2014: 173).
Page 9 of 23

Hell is Other People

The upshot of the foregoing discussion, as shockingly violent to common sense as it is to
mainstream linguistics, is to assert that the most archaic function of language, far from
connecting the subject to the fellow human being, is to achieve an indispensable degree
of separation from the Other, to establish a margin of detachment and independence that
puts the neighbour-Thing at a distance.13 The primordial accomplishment of the signifier
is to provide a stand-in for the unknown dimension of the Other, putting that threatening
unknown at a remove and thereby forestalling the outbreak of anxiety.
With this process in view, we can say with fresh literalness that ‘the word is the murder of
the Thing’. The phrase refers to the philosophy of Hegel.14 Yet if the Hegelian formula
now becomes meaningful in a new way, another Hegelian concept becomes even more
relevant, insofar as the function of the signifier becomes an exemplary instance, indeed
the exemplary instance of Hegel’s cardinal concept of Aufhebung, which forms the inner
pivot of his famous dialectic.15 In accord with the two-fold meaning of the German word,
something that undergoes Aufhebung is simultaneously cancelled and preserved. In
exactly such a dialectical movement, the signifier both cancels das Ding, distancing the
subject from it, offering an arbitrary sound in the place of the unknown Thing, yet also
preserves precisely what is cancelled, marking it for further coginizing sometime in the
future. The signifier establishes a locus suspended between the subject and the Other, at
once putting what remains unknown and potentially threatening about the Other at a safe
distance, yet thereby repositioning it and maintaining it as a question.
This perspective integrates the most basic points of Lacan’s theoretical framework. To
identify the elementary function of the signifier with an Aufhebung of the enigmatic Thing
in the Other is nothing other than to repose the basic terms of Lacan’s ‘paternal
metaphor’, his way of reconceptualizing the Oedipus complex, in which a signifier, what
Lacan calls the ‘Name of the Father’, is substituted for the unknown Desire of the Mother.
In the same stroke, it explains how and why the inauguration of the signifier is already
and in itself the most primitive inscription of the law against incest. There can be no
subject without opening a certain distance from the maternal Thing.
To summarize the view we’re adopting here, the very being of the subject is predicated
upon a suspension of the unknown reality of the Other, the continued management of
which becomes the charge of the symbolic law. This perspective is audible in a question
put forward by Slavoj Žižek, apropos Lacan’s distance from Levinas: ‘What if the ultimate
function of the Law’, Žižek asks, ‘is not to enable us not to forget the neighbor, to retain
our proximity to the neighbor, but, on the contrary, to keep the neighbor at a proper
distance, to serve as a kind of protective wall against the monstrosity of the neighbor?
(2005: 163). From this perspective, the lack in the Other, the enigma of the Other’s
Page 10 of 23

jouissance, becomes the undetectable ‘dark matter’, by definition invisible to ordinary

consciousness, that underlies the entire edifice of the social world.
We can now return to the question of religion and God with new resources. I’ll limit
myself to sketching four brief points, by necessity more suggestive and programmatic
than comprehensive.
Economies of Jouissance
The analysis we have pursued allows us to trace the basic outline of a Lacanian
interpretation of the religious in a manner reminiscent of Kant’s (1793) effort in Religion
Within the Limits of Reason Alone, highlighting those features of religious practice and
belief that dovetail with features of human life discernible by wholly secular analysis. The
difference is that where Kant’s approach was oriented towards the human capacity for
reason, for Lacan the crucial problem is the very structure of subjectivity, a structure, as
we have seen, fundamentally oriented towards the desire of the Other. Where Kant
remains in the orbit of cogito, Lacan is attuned to desidero. The crucial dimension is not
thought but desire, not rationality but jouissance.
In Seminar 16––the seminar entitled ‘D’un Autre à l’autre’ (‘From an Other to the other’)
—Lacan offers a particularly pithy note about how the big and little Others are to be
distinguished, a note that reminds us that the problem of the unknown in the Other is
always a question of an unknown enjoyment. The little Other, the fellow human being or
neighbour, is the locus of an incipient jouissance, the big Other is a second locus that has
been somehow cleared, or evacuated, of enjoyment.
This neighbor, is it what I have called the [big] Other, what I make use of to make
function the presence of the signifying articulation in the unconscious? Certainly
not. The neighbor is the intolerable imminence of enjoyment. The [big] Other is
only its cleared out terreplein. […] It is precisely that, it is a terrain cleared of
enjoyment
(1968: Session of 12 March).
This passage points to an elemental shift in which an oppressive and intrusive presence of
enjoyment in the little Other is traded for some kind of ‘clearing’, or leveling of enjoyment
in the big Other. The implication is that the move towards a reliance on a big Other of the
symbolic code answers to the challenge of the neighbour-Thing by means of ‘taming’ the
desire of the Other. We’re invited to see the so-called ‘clearing’ of enjoyment as a
structural moment, a kind of necessary base camp or staging, on the way to the
establishment of a regulated economy of enjoyment. What sort of regulation is this and
how does it work?
Page 11 of 23

The key to moving forward from this point and making new sense of the question of
religion and God is to recognize that Lacan’s reference to a ‘clearing’ or evacuating of
enjoyment in the big Other doesn’t mean that the locus of the big Other remains forever
empty of jouissance. On the contrary, Lacan refers repeatedly to the big Other as a
special site of projected enjoyment. The big Other comes to be another locus, another
scene, of enjoyment but one that bears a special relation to the structure of the Law.
From this vantage point, religious belief presents us with the spectacle of a congregation
of human beings, gathered in the common cause of controlling too raw an exposure to
one another’s enjoyment in favour of devotion to another, imagined subjectivity in the
form of a deity who controls access to enjoyment in accordance with sacred dictates.16
Such an economy of jouissance is shown with particular clarity, and with particular
relevance to questions of the religious, in Lacan’s conception of masochism and sadism.
His primary point is to correct the vulgar conception of the masochist as someone who
simply enjoys pain and the sadist as one who enjoys inflicting it. What is crucial, Lacan
insists, is the way in which both masochism and sadism are triangulated by reference to
the locus of the big Other. The masochist submits to pain in service of the larger purpose
of inciting the anxiety of the big Other. The sadist, for his part, seeks to make himself the
instrument of the big Other’s enjoyment.
This rereading clarifies a great deal, not least the theatricality of masochism and sadism,
the tendency to elaborately stage torments. The ultimate spectator of perversion is the
gaze of the big Other. Among other things, this means that the results of the perverse
game for the little Others—the perverse couple who enact it—are typically not only
different but virtually the opposite of what they are for the big Other. In the case of the
masochist, far from inciting the anxiety of the torturer, the masochist’s submission offers
to the sadistic partner a thrill of power, a complete escape from anxiety (the beating
scenes from Lars Von Triers’ film Nymphomaniac illustrate the dynamic perfectly). The
anxiety is produced not in the human Other, but wholly on the level of the big Other. It is
the big Other whose rules are violated, who is scandalized by pain, injury, and death.
Likewise, in sadism, the crucial enjoyment is not that of the torturer (who, as we see in
Sade’s endless scenarios of torment, is virtually mechanical, unfeeling) but the big Other,
who enjoys in his place. In the tenth Seminar, Lacan explicitly makes the link to the
religious question: masochism and sadism are devoted respectively to the anxiety and the
jouissance of God (Lacan 2014: 163). The conclusion to be drawn would have been
familiar to St Augustine. Insofar as perversion is always played out under the gaze of the
big Other, the perverse is coincident with the dimension of the religious.
From Mortals to Divinities … and Back Again
For Lacan, the initial separation of the child from the mother is achieved not under
pressure of a paternal threat of castration, but by means of the emerging agency of
language. The relevance of this point for a new psychoanalytic interpretation of religion is
compactly signalled by the opening line of John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word’.
Page 12 of 23

It is now possible to expand upon that mapping of the primal origin of the subject by
emphasizing the role of the signifier as an objet cessible, a ‘ceded object’ injected into the
space between the subject and the Other. This mediating object can be related to what is
arguably the most elemental gesture of all religious life: the act of sacrifice. The signifier
is itself the primal instance of something given up by the subject in order to found an
economy of exchange with the Other. The sacrificial offerings of religion are essentially
signifiers whose function is to establish the field of mediation between subject and Other.
17
As we have seen, that process of signification inevitably tends towards unfolding of a

third locus, that of the symbolic big Other, that grounds the consistency of the code,
thereby stabilizing the subject’s relation with the little Other of the fellow human being. It
is with reference to this triangular structure of the subject, the little Other, and the big
Other that Lacan is able to explain the source and strength of the disposition to belief in
gods. Where Freud starkly opposed the blindness of faith to all rationality, Lacan roots
the motive sources of belief in the elemental architecture of subjectivity. At the most
fundamental level, the appeal to deities is grounded in the necessity for stabilizing the
referential valence of linguistic signifiers.18
Reference to the elementary triangle of subject, little Other, and big Other also promises
a means of explaining the logic of a certain evolution of religions, a sort of phylogenesis
of religious life, moving across the trajectory from polytheism to monotheism and
displaying a marked tendency towards collapsing the hypotenuse of the triangle that
separates the little and big Others.
At one extreme, we have something like Aztec sacrifice, centred on an absolutely

inhuman Other (the sun) that requires unending human sacrifice. The divine being is a
sort of fearsome cosmic parasite that feeds ceaselessly on spurting human blood.
In ancient polytheistic paganism, the gods still require copious sacrifice though a new,
much more advantageous arrangement is arrived at in which, as Hesiod tells us, humans
get to eat the slaughtered victims and the gods content themselves with the smell of
roasting meat wafting towards the heavens. In pagan sacrifice, specific objects are
exchanged between mortals and divinities, stabilizing a link between them but also
maintaining an unbridgeable distance.
In Judaism, the deity becomes a single individual and the dynamic of sacrifice alters
radically. To seal the covenant with Abraham, Yahweh wants only the foreskin, thus
reducing the stakes of sacrifice to an almost purely symbolic exchange. The focus on such
a relatively trivial object, a conspicuously expendable part of the body, albeit one
attached to the privileged organ of vitality, indicates that the value of sacrifice is no
longer to be measured by the number or value of victims offered but entirely by the
willingness of the sacrificer to give it up. The upshot is to signal an interest less in the
Page 13 of 23

object of sacrifice than in the inward intention, the allegiance and obeisance, of the one
who sacrifices.
To this basic view, the commentary of Slavoj Žižek adds an interesting sidelight. Žižek
argues that the Hebrew prohibition of idolatry should be interpreted as a response to the
fact that the deity has become so close to being human that there arises a kind of anxiety
of coincidence, a fear, in effect, that the god is too close for comfort. In the terms we’ve
been forging, this proximity threatens to collapse of the distance between the little and
big Others, in turn undermining the economy of enjoyment that is predicated upon it. The
problem with graven images and idols is not that they fail to do justice to the
transcendent majesty of God but rather, as Žižek puts it that they ‘would render [the
Jewish God] too faithfully, as the ultimate Neighbor-Thing’ (2001: 130–1).
Yet it is precisely such an identification of the god with the neighbour-Thing that is
proposed by Christianity. The Christian ‘fulfilment of the law’ is achieved through a
radical reversal of the order of sacrifice, a reversal that is, as Paul says, folly for the
Greeks and scandal for the Jews: God sacrifices to save man. Even more radically, God
becomes man. The Christian incarnation thus completely collapses the distance
separating the big Other and the little Other. The new God can now say to his disciples:
‘As you do to the least among you, you do unto me’. ‘I am there wherever two or more of
you are gathered’.
Sexuation and the Sacred
If the function of the religious centrally involves establishing an economy of jouissance

that is triangulated between the little and big Others, then we can expect the essential
structures and internal tensions of religious life to reflect Lacan’s theory of sexuation, by
which he sought to distinguish masculine and feminine forms of jouissance.19 To see how
they do, we need a little more background.
Among the most important and influential features of Lacan’s late teaching are his so-
called ‘formulae of sexuation’, his gloss on Freud’s famous question about ‘what does a
woman want?’. His scheme derives from a deliberate torsion––many will say simply
‘distortion’–– of classical logic, resulting in two different modes of relating to the
universal. The first, characteristic of the masculine position, defines the universal by
reference to the exception. As Freud’s formulation had it, all men are subject to
castration only because one man, the primal father, wasn’t. For the masculine subject, the
law is founded upon the point of its transgression. The masculine organization thus tends
to be oriented towards prohibition and the fantasy of its exceptional violation. The
feminine position, by contrast, asserts the totality of the universal without reference to
the exception, but with the crucial proviso that the whole is internally incomplete, or non-
all. Lacan relies on these two options, what might be called external exception versus
internal excess, to posit two forms of enjoyment, so-called ‘phallic jouissance’ versus the
‘jouissance of the Other’. Put in crude terms, and those only narrowly relevant to sex
Page 14 of 23

itself, Lacan’s view here helps explain why masculine desire so typically shows a
fetishistic focus on the part object, a tendency to immerse itself in the brute details of the
sex act, while the feminine subject remains attuned to the larger context and situation,
sensitive to a whole milieu of seduction. On the basis of this structural difference, Lacan
posits an irresolvable antagonism between the sexes, tersely expressed in his dictum: il
n’y a pas de rapport sexuel, ‘there is no sexual relation’.
The relevance of Lacan’s theory of sexuation to the problem of religion can be sensed in a
provisional way when we remember that ancient religions conspicuously and almost
universally identify the origin and order of the universe with sexual difference and sexed
reproduction. The religious mind, it seems, cannot resist conflating cosmos with coitus.
But the relevance becomes more interesting when sexuation is related to Christianity.
Once again, we hear an echo of Kant’s approach to religion in so far as Christianity turns
out to be especially, perhaps even uniquely, reflective of the structures of subjectivity. The
dichotomy between phallic and feminine jouissance as Lacan defines them can be said to
centrally inhabit Christianity, not because Christianity is to be linked to one side or the
other but rather precisely because of the way that it straddles the two.
The reason is that the figure of Christ is deeply ambiguous. From one point of view, Christ
can be taken to stand for the ultimate exception, the perfected human subject by whose
measure all others are to be judged. The Christ-exception stabilizes the law––not, to be
sure, by the negative measure of transgression but rather by offering a positive exemplar
of perfection. This difference, according to which the role of exception in the grounding
of the law is inverted from its more familiar form of a violation or transgression of the
law’s moral demand, is anything but trivial. In fact, it is by means of this inversion that
Christianity achieves a universalization of moral failure, establishing a perfect democracy
of sin. Compared with the Messiah, we are all sinners. It is also by this means, as
Nietzsche recognized, that Christianity can be thought to bring to completion the Judaic
invention of bad conscience (Nietzsche 1887/1992: 493–532). Nevertheless, the logical
form of the relation between the universal and the exception remains the same as that
described by the masculine formula of sexuation. The universal is founded by the
exception.
According to this first reading, Christianity repeats a completely traditional assertion of

God as furnishing a master signifier. The organization of the Church as a hierarchy of
authority that defends doctrinal orthodoxy would seem to follow with perfect consistency.
And yet, a second point of view leads us to an opposite conclusion, as Christ can also be
taken to instantiate the ultimate denial of all exception. The figure of Jesus inaugurates a
new and unprecedented universalism that is based on his identifying himself with the
human. What makes this second view distinct from the first is the way it extends the full
implications of the revolutionary Christian notion of incarnation by asserting a kind of
infinity inhabiting every human being, a radical equality of all persons in the eyes of God
that is born of the fact that every human incarnates something of the divine. This new
assertion of the universal, hinting as it does at the sort of sublime unity of the divine and
the human alluded to by the mystics, is to be aligned with Lacan’s feminine logic of the
Page 15 of 23

non-all. Christ becomes what is ‘in me more than me’, a tincture of the divine.
Paradoxically, a kind of essential, constitutive excess is precisely what makes me
human.20
It is in the context of this discussion that we can make some sense of Lacan’s evocation of
a God who doesn’t know. On the side of Christian doctrine that links Christ with the
masculine logic of exception, God remains omniscient, God is fully sujet supposé savoir.
‘God only knows’, as the familiar saying has it. But according to the more radical
potential of incarnation in which Christ-the-suffering-God is identified with all who suffer,
Christianity is opened to the feminine logic of excess, an Other jouissance that is not
knowable. The big Other becomes no longer identifiable with a subject supposed to know,
but is, on the contrary, found to be internally incomplete, inconsistent, inhabited by an
irradicable vacuity or gap. From this point of view, the Christian divinity ceases to be
immutable or impassible. It is for this reason that Lacan’s twentieth seminar continually
flirts with the notion of an unknowing God, a suffering and kenotic being whose majesty
consists precisely in a sublime form of weakness. Lacan thus probes a radical
reassessment of divinity arrived at on the basis of psychoanalytic premises, provoking us
with the conclusion that ‘one can no longer hate God if he himself knows nothing’ (1998:
98). As Slavoj Žižek has argued, this assertion of a God who does not know can be seen as
a necessary correlate of identifying God with love.
Only an imperfect, lacking being loves: we love because we do not know

everything. On the other hand, even if we were to know everything, love would
still be higher than complete knowledge. Perhaps the true achievement of
Christianity is to elevate a loving (imperfect) Being to the place of God
(Žižek 2002: 61).
The Abyssal Ground of Belief
Early in our discussion of the Lacanian Thing we noted the inadequacy of interpreting it
in too Kantian a fashion. It now remains to complete the necessary distancing from Kant
and draw out the consequences for our topic. Doing so means asking again about the
fuller meaning of the notion of das Ding. What order of reality are we dealing with here?
It is immediately tempting to understand the Thing as a substantial entity of some sort.

Given Lacan’s framing of it in terms of the jouissance of the Other, for example, we might
pose the Thing in more familiar Freudian terms, taking it as a kind of vortex of excessive
libido, a volatile reservoir of surplus energy in the Other that threatens to wash over the
subject and overwhelm it.21 But any such interpretation would miss an absolutely key
point. The Thing is in no way a substance, nor even an indeterminate quantum of energy.
Nor is it an object. The Thing is the site of a fundamental blind spot, the subject’s
primitive acknowledgement of a zone of something unknown. The spectre of the Thing
results from a kind of primitive projection which essentially says ‘there is something here,
Page 16 of 23

I know not what’. The Thing is thus a reality for the subject alone. It marks the space of
an open question. As Freud said of it, the establishment of such a space of the question is
what allows the human being to learn to cognize. As such, it performs an absolutely
fundamental function, something that might be fruitfully compared to what Heidegger
called the disclosive opening of human Dasein. It is not itself a being but is rather the
lighted clearing in which beings come to presence.
The act by which this site of something unknown is posited cannot easily be named.
Indeed, to call it ‘posited’ already implies too conscious and deliberate an exertion of the
part of the subject. But even more difficult is to determine what exactly is posited. The
Thing is less an object than a locus, a topos. Das Ding is not an object, nor is it a fantasy.
It is rather the very frame of fantasy, the point of departure or even the cause of fantasy.
The Thing is the open question to which fantasy attempts to pose an answer. As such, the
Thing is the decentred void that forms the nucleus of the unconscious. One thinks of the
‘other scene’ that Freud attributed to the dream. In Lacanian terms, the locus of the
Thing is ‘extimate’, something of the most intimate concern to the subject, but located
outside, in the Other.
It also remains to clarify the chronology of the Thing. If it is not an object neither is it any
sort of prehistorical givenness, some primal point of departure that kicks everything else
into motion. Its ‘being’ is rather an effect of the signifier. The Thing arises with the
signifier and is nothing but its excessive dimension. All of which is to say that the Thing is
a kernel of the real in the Lacanian sense. And if the real and the symbolic can never be
coincident, neither are they separable. They arise together. The symbolic, the real, the
subject and the Other constitute an irreducibly four-fold structure. It is Lacan’s answer to
Heidegger’s four-fold of earth and sky, mortals and divinities, and it bears the same
consequence of asserting the inescapability of time.22 This irreducible quadratic
dimensionality of the four terms implies that all four are ineluctably caught up in
contingent and historical specificity. Their conjunction is historicity itself.
To grasp the full implications of this precision of our discussion is to appreciate the
degree to which Lacan’s notion is finally less Kantian than Hegelian. Just as Hegel
rejected Kant’s appeal to a noumenal realm wholly beyond phenomena, Lacan insists that
the real is not some impenetrable substance wholly beyond the symbolic but rather arises
only from gaps, inconsistencies, and failures internal to the symbolic itself.23 And we can
now make clear how Lacan’s assessment of religion parallels that of Hegel, who sharply
divides the Christian legacy. On the one hand is the way that Christian incarnation, the
Pauline ‘scandal for the Jews and folly for the Greeks’, opens up an abyssal short-
circuiting of the mortal and the divine, the finite and the infinite, even to the point of
evoking the death of God. On this side, Christianity marks the truly revolutionary moment
in the history of human freedom. On the other is the ‘positive’, dogmatic aspect of
Christianity, its elaboration of doctrinal and theological orthodoxies, which occasioned
Hegel’s critique in some of his early writings, a critique that resonates with the Pauline
dictum that ‘the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life’ (Hegel 1795/1979).
Page 17 of 23

A Lacanian perspective shows with special clarity why this division is virtually inevitable.
It is rooted in the bifold function of the signifier, divided as it is between meaning
(corresponding to the linkage of the signifier to a particular signified) and an
indeterminate potentiality-for-meaning (the open space of a yet-to-be-determined
reference, the space of the Thing). At many points, Lacan emphasizes the first theme, as
when, in his interview on ‘Triumph of Religion’, he characterizes religion as endless
spewing out of meaning. The frenzied production of meaning is both what makes religion
most seductively attractive and also what makes it so inimical to psychoanalysis.
‘Humanity will be cured of psychoanalysis’, he says, ‘by drowning the symptom in
meaning, in religious meaning naturally, people will manage to repress it’ (Lacan 2013:
67). But at other times, Lacan appreciates the way in which the religious impulse touches
upon the real, a feature that he associates, as we have done here, with the psychic reality
of the Thing. As Lacan said of it, ‘Freud left us with the problem of a gap once again at
the level of das Ding, which is that of religious men and mystics’ (1992: 100).
In this way, Lacan reveals Christianity as the religion most spectacularly divided between
positivity and mystery, dogma and deinos.24 The Christian Church ferociously enforces
doctrinal fidelity and fanatically persecutes heresy precisely because the Christian
message so radically opens towards something abyssal.25 The Christian God at once
embodies the monstrosity of the Thing, the primary locus of the real, and also the
symbolic big Other that seeks to defend against it. Yet the final twist consists in Lacan’s
refusal to allow any simple opposition between the spirit and the letter. Indeed, the
keynote of his entire outlook is to insist on the primacy of the letter, along with all of the
Sturm und Drang it brings in its train. Without the agency of the signifier, there is no
spirit. As he puts it in one of his Écrits: ‘Of course, as it is said, the letter kills while the
spirit gives life. I don’t disagree […] but I also ask how the spirit could live without the
letter’ (Lacan 2006: 423).
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Stories Press.
Žižek, S. and Milbank, J. (2009). The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?

Notes:
(1.) The past decade has seen a flurry of commentary on the implications of Lacanian
theory for rethinking religion. Among the more notable are Pierre Daviot (2006), Jacques
Lacan et le sentiment religieux; François Balmes (2007), Dieu, le sexe et la verité; Marcus
Pound (2007), Theology, Psychoanalysis, and Trauma; and Lorenzo Chiesa (2016), The
Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. But no one has done more to demonstrate how Lacan
reopens the field of the religious from a psychoanalytic point of view than Slavoj Žižek.
Žižek treats questions of religion and God in many of his books, perhaps most directly in
The Fragile Absolute—or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (2000), On
Belief (2001), The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003), The
Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (with John Milbank 2009), and God in Pain:
Inversions of Apocalypse (with Boris Gunjevic 2012).
(2.) [Eds. See Cottingham, this volume, and Blass, this volume, for more detailed
discussions.]
(3.) [Eds. See Eagle, this volume, §‘Falsifiability of psychoanalytic propositions’, for a
discussion of interpretations of the Oedipus complex in relation to empirical testing.]
Page 20 of 23

(4.) ‘God is real’ states the title of the final chapter of Leupin (2004). For other treatments
of God as an embodiment of the real, see Depoortere (2007: 497–523) and Richardson
(1997: 1–15).
(5.) For a clear, freewheeling, and highly suggestive introduction to the Lacanian concept
of the big Other, see Žižek (2006).
(6.) [Eds. For a very different account of the need for meaningfulness in relation to God,
see Cottingham, this volume, §‘Freud’s critique of religion’.]
(7.) My thesis, which cannot be developed adequately in this chapter, is that while explicit
references to the Thing tend to disappear after the seventh seminar, the underlying
notion is not abandoned but rather replaced by its representative, the so-called objet petit
a. When, late in his career, Lacan referred to the objet a as his greatest single
contribution to psychoanalysis, we should also discern an implicit reference to the
concept of the Thing.
(8.) I capitalize ‘Other’ here and will continue to do so throughout this chapter, but the
choice is an awkward one in so far as ‘Other’ must do double duty between the concepts
of the little and big Others. In fact, Lacan himself alternates in his capitalization of Autre
throughout his work without any apparent consistency. The most logical thing would
seem to be using the lower case for the little Other and the upper case for the big Other.
But then again, even the little Other of the fellow human being sometimes deserves the
emphasis lent by the capitalization, precisely because, when its Thingly dimension is
taken into account, the fellow human being becomes something totally different than the
impression of ordinary experience leads us to conclude. It is to recognize this point that I
will retain the capitalization even of the ‘little Other’.
(9.) Linking the primal root of anxiety with the mother herself makes new sense of
Freud’s observation that the German word ‘heimlich’, which by virtue of its reference to
‘home’ (Heim) indicates what is safest and most familiar, but may also, according to its
secondary meaning as what remains ‘concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get
to know of or about it’ function as an equivalent for what is ‘unheimlich, or ‘uncanny’. Cf.
Freud, (1955: 224).
(10.) ‘In the body there is always, by virtue of this engagement in the signifying dialectic,
something that is separated off, something that is sacrificed, something inert, and this
something is the pound of flesh.’ (Lacan 2014: 219).
(11.) ‘The most decisive moment in the anxiety at issue, the anxiety of weaning, is not so
much when the breast falls short of the subject’s need, it’s rather that the infant yields
the breast to which he is appended as a portion of himself.’ (Lacan 2014: 313).
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(12.) ‘Here the a stands in for the subject––it’s a stand-in in the position of precedent. The
primordial, mythical subject, posited at the outset as having to be constituted in the
signifying confrontation, can never be grasped by us, and for good reason, because the a
preceded it and it has to re-emerge secondarily, beyond its vanishing, marked by this
initial substitution. The function of the yieldable object as a piece that can be primordially
separated off conveys something of the body’s identity, antecedent to the body itself with
respect to the constitution of the subject’ (Lacan 2014: 314).
(13.) The quotation ‘hell is other people’ famously belongs to Jean-Paul Sartre. By citing it
here I don’t mean to conflate Lacan’s outlook with that of Sartre. The two are importantly
different in ways we cannot expound upon here. Nevertheless, there is a significant, if
only partial, overlap with Sartre when it comes to Lacan’s treatment of the neighbour-
Thing of the fellow human being.
(14.) The precise phrasing of ‘the word as the murder of the thing’, indeed most of
Lacan’s acquaintance with Hegel, was made known to him via the highly influential
lectures of Alexandre Kojève.
(15.) [Eds. See also Macdonald, this volume.]
(16.) Cf. Lacan’s remark: ‘That is clearly the essence of law––to divide up, distribute, or
reattribute everything that counts as jouissance’ (1998: 3).
(17.) I have elsewhere put forward an account of sacrifice from a Lacanian point of view.
See Boothby (2001: 175–89).
(18.) [Eds. For alternative accounts of the roots of religion in subjectivity, see Cottingham,
this volume, and Blass, this volume.]
(19.) Lacan elaborates the formulae of sexuation most extensively in Seminar XX: Encore.
For especially useful explications of his theory on this point, see Copjec (2015: 201–36),
and also Žižek (2002: 57–75).
(20.) Cf. the final chapter of Lacan (1981): ‘In You More Than You’.
(21.) We might note in passing that posing the Thing as a mass of energy makes it
comparable to the Freudian id, and also invites a link with Lacan’s 1955 essay on ‘The
Freudian Thing’ (2006: 334–63) in which the id, le ça, is said to speak: ça parle.
(22.) Cf. Lacan’s remark: ‘I have already asked the question here as to what the critical
conceivable minimum is for a signifying scale, if the register of the signifier is to begin to
organize itself. There cannot be a two without a three, and that, I think, must certainly
include a four, the quadripartite, the Geviert, to which Heidegger refers
somewhere’ (2002: 65–6).
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(23.) Linking Lacan with Hegel is a tricky business iinsofar as Lacan himself retained a
persistently critical view of Hegel as a philosopher of metaphysical closure. Here again,
credit needs to be given to Slavoj Žižek, whose clarification of Hegel’s thought,
convincingly offering an almost complete inversion of the dominant interpretation, has
made it possible to recognize the deep conjunction between Hegel’s philosophy and
Lacan’s retheorization of psychoanalysis.
(24.) One wonders whether it is not for reason of Lacan’s recognition of the particularly
intensity of this double function in the case of Christianity that he claims that ‘There is
one true religion and that is the Christian religion’ (Lacan 2013: 66).
(25.) This abyssal dimension is what Žižek and Milbank (2009) has called ‘the monstrosity
of Christ’.
Richard Boothby
Department of Phlosophy, Loyola University Maryland
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Introduction: Know Thyself


DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198789703.013.1
This Handbook examines the contributions of philosophy to psychoanalysis and vice

versa. It explores the most central concept of psychoanalysis—the unconscious—in
relation to its defences, transference, conflict, free association, wish fulfilment, and
symbolism. It also considers psychoanalysis in relation to its philosophical prehistory, the
recognition and misrecognition afforded it within twentieth-century philosophy, its
scientific strengths and weaknesses, its applications in aesthetics and politics, and its
value and limitations with respect to ethics, religion, and social life. The book explains
how psychoanalysis draws our attention to the reality of central aspects of the inner life
and how philosophy assists psychoanalysis in knowing itself. This introduction elaborates
on the phrase ‘know thyself’, the words inscribed at the Temple of Delphi, and illustrates
the connection between matters philosophical and psychoanalytic in relation to the
Delphic command by highlighting their mutual concern with truth and truthfulness.
Keywords: philosophy, psychoanalysis, unconscious, ethics, inner life, knowing oneself, truth, truthfulness
Page 1 of 23
Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

A Delphic Command
The words inscribed at the Temple of Delphi—‘know thyself’—have been a guiding light
for both philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Thus it is often said that an important aim of psychoanalysis is self-knowledge.1 An

explicit connection to Delphi, however, was made by Freud himself just once, in The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life, where he says ‘The road whose goal it is to observe
the precept γνω̃θι σεαυτόν [gnothi seauton: know thyself] runs via the study of one’s own
apparently accidental actions and omissions’ (Freud 1901: 210). The claim that this was
not only an aim of psychoanalysis, but the guiding principle of Freud’s life and work, was
left to Ernest Jones to make in his obituary of Freud (in the kind of hagiographic language
which could only be justified, if at all, in such a context): ‘Future generations of
psychologists will assuredly wish to know what manner of man it was who, after two
thousand years of vain endeavour had gone by, succeeded in fulfilling the Delphic
injunction: know thyself’ (Jones 1940: 4). Jones rehearsed the claim again in his
influential biography of Freud (Jones 1955: 470), and the connection between
psychoanalysis and the inscription at Delphi became widespread, endorsed by such
luminaries as Sterba (1969: 439), Eissler (1963: 461), Menninger (1956: 623), Kohut
(1973: 25), and Bettelheim (1982: ch. 4), who elaborates the aim by connecting it with
practical effects: ‘The guiding principle of psychoanalysis is that knowing oneself requires
knowing also one’s unconscious and dealing with it, so that its unrecognized pressures
will not lead one to act in a way detrimental to oneself and others’ (1982: 24).
While the Delphic command is mentioned in several of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates, like
Freud, takes it up in discussion just once, in the Phaedrus, where he claims that it is
‘ridiculous’ to pursue knowledge of other things before one knows oneself, a claim which
places self-knowledge at the heart of the human epistemological endeavour. What
Socrates himself meant by inviting us to pursue self-knowledge is something about which
scholars disagree (Hadot 1995: 90), yet there are at least four senses in which the
endeavour has been considered central to philosophy.
First we have the practical endeavour of the individual philosopher, through her
philosophical reflection on her predicaments in their particularity, better to come to know
herself. This goal, clearly apparent in the approach of Socrates, the Stoics, and
Epicureans, has been suggested as the intelligibility-conferring setting against which
various ancient philosophical texts must be read (Hadot 2002). An explicit personal,
therapeutic, existential engagement in doing philosophy is only occasionally to be found
in more recent philosophers (e.g. Nehamas 1998), yet may play an implicit motivating
role for philosophers more widely.
Next we have that project which could be called ‘knowing ourselves’—namely the
philosophical project of clearly articulating the human condition in its generality. This is
the Socratic task taken up in theoretical mode. This project of philosophical anthropology
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may appear merely descriptive yet, to the extent that humanity is to be understood by
reference to ideals, aspirations, and excellences (such as truth and truthfulness, love and
goodness, reason and rationality), it is not intelligibly separable from fundamental
evaluative questions of how to live (i.e. from what we here call ‘ethics’, which we
understand more broadly than questions of ‘morality’ traditionally conceived).
Thirdly we meet with the philosophical valuation of knowing ourselves as an intrinsically

valuable way of life. This was most famously encapsulated in Socrates’ famous retort
when invited at his trial to abandon reflection on the Delphic oracle’s pronouncements
(i.e. to abandon his search for wisdom): ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. Here
philosophical reflection becomes not merely a reflective means to a non-reflective end but
an end in itself, one which constitutes a significant form of the good life.
Finally we may bring these together, as when my philosophical reflection on how I am to

live is informed by my best understanding of how one may live best given what it is to be
human, or when my understanding of how one may live best is informed by deep
reflection on my own (or others’) personal experience. While different philosophers have
understood the connection between self-knowledge and the ethical life in various ways, it
is notable that living an examined life, one enabled by philosophical enquiry, has been
seen as the crowning purpose and achievement of philosophy by many, from Plato and
Aristotle, through Descartes, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and Dewey to
Martha Nussbaum and Bernard Williams. And here we meet with values that find
expression not only in philosophy but also in the goals and methods of psychoanalysis. In
what follows we explore the character and congruence of such endeavours at self-
knowledge.
As Bernard Williams expresses our second, theoretical, version of the Delphic command,
philosophy can be understood as ‘part of a more general attempt to make the best sense
of our life, and so of our intellectual activities, in the situation in which we find
ourselves’ (2000: 479). As such, he argues, philosophy is a ‘humanistic discipline’. It is
humanistic not only in the sense that the central object of study is ourselves, but also that
its understanding develops within and expresses a ‘human perspective’. Definitive of such
a perspective is that it is irreducible to that of the natural sciences in its style, method,
and aims. The scientific ambition that particularly concerns Williams is that of working
towards a description of the world ‘as it is in itself, independent of perspective’ (2000:
481). The contrastive aim of philosophy, as he understands it, is to do proper justice to
matters of meaning, intelligibility, and significance—matters which, he argues, involve
reason reflecting on itself from within, drawing inescapably on such perspectival modes
of understanding as are inevitably historically and culturally situated and conditioned.
Williams’s thought may here helpfully be brought into relation with that of Charles Taylor
(1985) who takes us closer to matters psychoanalytic with his focus on that project of self-
understanding which involves our articulating—both in the sense of ‘giving voice to’ and
in the sense of ‘developing and refining’—our emotional experience. Thus according to
Taylor we are essentially ‘self-interpreting animals’ whose ‘interpretation of ourselves
Page 3 of 23

and our experience is constitutive of what we are, and therefore cannot be considered as
merely a view on reality, separable from reality, nor as an epiphenomenon, which can be
by-passed’ (1985: 47). What Taylor means here by ‘self-interpretation’ is not an
essentially intellectual or reflective act, but nevertheless pertains to a kind of self-
understanding not met with in animal life. We highlight two aspects of Taylor’s
discussion.
First, Taylor argues that ‘experiencing a given emotion involves experiencing our
situation as bearing a certain import’ (1985: 49). An import is a way in which a situation
or object can be relevant and important to us, given our desires and purposes. Taylor’s
claim is now very widely accepted in the philosophy and psychology of emotion as the
claim that emotions constitutively involve our making appraisals of situations, which
appraisals form ‘the grounds or basis for the feeling’ (49). Thus, we can define emotions
‘by the imports they relate to: fear is the affective response to the menacing, anger to the
provoking, indignation to the flagrantly wrongful, and so on’ (49). As a consequence, our
emotions are not intelligible for what they are merely in objective—i.e. experience-
independent, physiological, or physical-causal—terms since they essentially ‘characterize
things in their relevance to our desires and purposes’ (51).
Second, Taylor highlights the relationship between our self-understanding, our social and
moral emotions, and what it is to lead a human life. Shame, for example, is only
intelligibly experienced by those who understand, experience, and value their lives as
having a certain kind of import—i.e. only intelligibly experienced by subjects with an
aspiration to dignity (1985: 53). The subject who feels shame cares about how she
handles herself and how she is seen by others. She is someone who understands herself,
in her shame, to be failing to meet standards that matter to her. In such ways are self-
conscious social subjects partly constituted, in their emotional lives, by their self-
interpretations.
None of this is to say that there is no space for our self-interpretations to go awry, nor to
suggest that we may not fail to interpret ourselves in apt ways (see Moran 2001: ch. 2;
Carman 2003). What it suggests, however, is that: from the point of view of philosophical
anthropology, aspirations to grasp what it is to lead a human life in merely objective
terms (i.e. in terms not referring to a subject’s self-understanding) will be doomed to
failure; from the point of view of psychopathology, that the relationship between self-
interpretation and selfhood must be taken into account in understanding the distinctive
sufferings of human selves; and from the point of view of therapy, that we can begin to
understand how a merely talking cure could be thought curative of such disturbances as
reach down into our selfhood—since reinterpreting the meaning of one’s behaviour will
be at the same time a refashioning of oneself.
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Recovering the Inner Life

Williams and Taylor pursue philosophy as, in part, a project of retrieving, sustaining, and
exploring a conception of what it is to live a human life. The living of a distinctly human
life involves, at its paradigmatic best, the experience of a rich inner subjectivity which
informs our relationships, work, and creative projects. Aspects of this inner life may, and
frequently do, remain stunted or atrophy through lack of nurture, become covered over
by emotional defences against the pains of living, be inhibited by ideological narrowness,
or be degraded through corrupt forms of relationship. Against such natural tendencies,
many of the arts and humanities, including literature, poetry, history, and philosophy,
engage in a continuing project of developing and retrieving our subjectivity. The project
may be valuable for individuals yet also, more broadly, for cultures.
What makes this ongoing endeavour intelligible to its participants is the possible
disjunction of our implicit, lived understanding of what it is to live a distinctly human life
and those more explicit self-understandings which may do better or worse justice to what
is implicitly grasped and lived. What makes it necessary is the way in which our implicit,
lived understandings may have been muted or thwarted by various factors including our
explicit self-conception that may tacitly or explicitly trash much of what makes for our
humanity. (Imagine how impoverishing it would be to actually live as if that philosophy or
psychology of mind you consider most implausibly reductive, or which simply leaves out
of account or sees as merely epiphenomenal that which in your inner and existential life
most matters to you, were true.) And what makes it valuable is the recovery of that within
us which has become muted, our emancipation from such falsifying self-understandings
as impoverish our self-becoming, and the intrinsic dignity of the examined life.
Nothing in such a humanistic approach is opposed to the natural scientific study of

human life, but it challenges the scientistic thought that such a life may itself be
adequately articulated in the terms offered by the natural sciences. The humanity that
Williams and Taylor retrieve for us is one run through with a constitutive normativity,
subjectivity, affectivity, rationality, and agency, and the methods they retrieve for us are
ineliminably hermeneutic and aspire to no interpretation-transcending objectivity. What
matters for them is not that the humanities and social sciences demonstrate the validity
and reliability of their methods by adopting natural scientific methods ill-fitted to self-
interpreting animals, but rather that they self-critically deploy such meaning-
apprehending methods as are apt to the study of human life.
Such a focus is also central to the vision of psychoanalysis which pursues its own
exploration and development of our humanity on two fronts.
First, at the level of theory, and by contrast with behaviourist, cognitivist, and
physiological psychology, it emphasizes the inner subjective life. This is the life of our
preoccupations—with erotic desire and social recognition, with our shame, guilt, and
contrition, power and humiliation, with our hopes and our histories, lovableness and
Page 5 of 23

loneliness, lovesickness and consuming hatreds, shyness and courage, envy, resentment,
and gratitude, intense secret passions, idealizing delights, the peculiarly vaunted or
denigrated status for us of our significant attachment figures, our sexual adequacy and
inadequacy, fateful repetitions, with our expressions and deeds which threaten to betray
us, and all of our inner conflicts, moodiness, anxieties, excitements, self-punishments,
self-defeating behaviours, irrational impulses, and bodge-job forms of self-management.
This caboodle is what we may call our ‘subjective life’ or ‘internal world’, and many a
student of psychology has been disappointed to find that what they naturally hoped would
be centre stage on their syllabus—namely why our emotional life is so often baffling and
tumultuous—barely gets a look-in besides the studies of cognition, behaviour, perception,
and neuropsychology. It is, of course, the life of the neurotic subject—but also of all of us,
since ‘psychoanalytic research finds no fundamental, but only quantitative, distinctions
between normal and neurotic life’ and ‘the psychical mechanism employed by neuroses is
not created by the impact of a pathological disturbance upon the mind but is already
present in the normal structure of the mental apparatus’ (Freud 1900: 373, 607).
Second, at the level of practice, psychoanalysis aims to attain or recover for us the very
subjective sense of what otherwise appears not as meaningful, humanly intelligible
moments of emotionally charged behaviour, but instead merely as behavioural signs and
symptoms of an unknown condition. It aims, that is, to restore or develop in us our
subjectivity, to help us recover or grow our agency or self-possession, to retrieve or
awaken our inner lives, to ‘make the unconscious conscious’ and thereby to ‘know
ourselves’.
It is safe to say that, compared to any other psychological school, psychoanalysis has in
both its theory and practice most keenly kept its pulse on the distinctive qualities of the
inner life. That philosophy may borrow from it to considerably enrich its own sense of
what it really means to live a distinctly human life should not be surprising (e.g. Wollheim
1984; 1993). One of the most valuable contributions made by psychoanalysis to the
project of making sense of ourselves is its drawing our attention to both the clinical data
and the everyday observations upon which it constructs its theories. It offers up, if not an
entirely new, then a considerably under-examined, set of human experiences. Such
experiences are relevant not only for psychoanalysis’ own explanatory and therapeutic
projects, they also deserve a place in the understanding of what it is to be human at play
in many other disciplines—including, of course, philosophy. Many chapters in this
Handbook consider the significance of psychoanalysis as a contribution to the meaning
and meaningfulness of human activity, to the nature of human experience, to a
philosophical anthropology and the phenomenology of human consciousness and relating,
and thus to questions in ethics, religion, aesthetics, and, of course, self-knowledge.
Thus, psychoanalysis draws our attention to the reality of central aspects of the inner life
which we know implicitly to be essential to human life as lived yet which for various
reasons often escape our reflective grasp. As Nietzsche remarked, philosophy is littered
with claims and ideas, e.g. about human psychology and ethics, that are insufficiently tied
to human reality. For example, the important Aristotelian conception of man as a ‘rational
Page 6 of 23

animal’ might, if we’re not careful, illegitimately displace from our self-understanding the
essential contribution made by our emotional sensibilities, sensibilities which make
possible not only irrationality and human impoverishment but which put us in contact
with reality and enable our flourishing. Or an equation of mentality with consciousness
may squeeze out of view the essential contribution to our psychological lives of
dynamically and descriptively unconscious mental processes. At the time of writing, many
areas of philosophy are undergoing transformation in response to developments in the
social, cognitive, and neuropsychological understanding of unconscious processes and the
possible challenges these provide to the autonomy and integrity of conscious rational
deliberation. The issue is at the heart of philosophy’s project, as the place and nature of
reason and conscious deliberation have been of central concern to philosophy since its
inception.
A second reason why philosophy should attend to the understandings of human life
offered by psychoanalysis, and may be enhanced by psychoanalytic reflection, is that the
unconscious may be understood to consist of optional and idiosyncratic aspects of our
lives which go unexamined and constrain our sense of what is possible (see Fuchs, this
volume, and Lear, this volume). This point can be better understood in light of a more
familiar argument concerning why philosophy should attend to history, deriving from the
self-interpreting nature of human life. If what it is to live a human life or have a human
mind were immutable facts, they could be interrogated by means of a familiarity with any
human culture at any point in history (one’s own culture and times, for example). Since,
however, what it is to be a human being itself changes (within limits) over time and place,
philosophers attempting to grasp what it is to live a human life or to be minded in human
ways will do well to attend to more than their present time. This will be important not
only for the understanding of other modes of human life but, perhaps even more
importantly, for the understanding of our own. For it is only when set against the
backdrop of other ways of being human that we can understand the distinctive shape, and
acknowledge the contingency, of our own life. This lesson from history, we say, has a
psychoanalytic analogue given above. Thus, a historical, sociological, and psychoanalytic
method may help philosophy come to know itself, to make its unconscious conscious, by
unearthing the contingent character of the forms of life which it takes for granted,
including the form of its own enquiries.
Psychoanalysis: Know Thyself

But in what ways may philosophy return the favour? Various chapters of this Handbook
provide their own diverse answers. But, following here the theme of ‘know thyself’, we
propose that one of philosophy’s distinctive contributions is to assist psychoanalysis in
knowing itself. Psychoanalysis as a discipline involves an ongoing dialectic of
psychological theory and therapeutic practice informing each other, over time generating
diverse self-understandings that are in tension with one another. Perhaps the debate over
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natural science and hermeneutics provides the most striking example of this. Philosophy
can make more explicit conceptual implications, uncover misunderstandings, unearth
problematic structuring assumptions, and enable new and productive self-
understandings.
As an illustration: it is today fairly well understood that the kind of self-knowledge sought
both by psychoanalysis and by anyone hoping to do genuine emotional work on herself, is
not simply reflective. It may be interesting for us to develop beliefs about our minds’
functioning, and such beliefs may even be true, but, from a therapeutic point of view, the
risk is significant that such an intellectual self-acquaintance may defensively stand in the
way of, and disguise the ongoing need for, an emotionally deeper and mutative form of
self-knowledge. Relatedly, Jonathan Lear (2005: section 4) notes that even ‘raising “the
question of how to live” can be a way of avoiding the question of how to live’. Getting
clear on what is and isn’t involved in that deeper and intrinsically transformative project
of knowing thyself is something with which philosophy has been concerned for centuries
before psychoanalysis, and without philosophical aid it is inevitable that psychoanalysis
will sometimes embed those self-misunderstandings about what it is to know thyself with
which philosophy has had to grapple.2
Consider for example Hadot’s (1995: 90) explication of that first sense of ‘know thyself’
offered in Section 1:
[In] the Socratic dialogue … the interlocutors are invited to participate in such
inner spiritual exercises as examination of conscience and attention to oneself; in
other words, they are urged to comply with the famous dictum, ‘Know thyself’.
Although it is difficult to be sure of the original meaning of this formula, this much
is clear: it invites us to establish a relationship of the self to the self, which
constitutes the foundation of every spiritual exercise.
But is ‘this much’ clear? Sometimes this is the relationship taken in knowing oneself, but
others have taken the Delphic command otherwise. Augustine, for example, (c.417/2002:
10.8.11) urged that when the mind ‘is ordered to know itself, let it not seek itself as
though withdrawn from itself, but let it withdraw what it has added to itself’. That is to
say that some central forms of knowing oneself involve not the gleaning of new
information about oneself—not an addition but a subtraction, not so much the
establishment of a helpful self-relation but the undoing of an unhelpful self-relation. In
addition we also meet with those other forms which take us closer to self-becoming, i.e. to
growing into one’s own character, to articulating and making more determinate what is
as yet undeveloped, than to any increased store of knowledge about oneself.
Philosophical reflection on the way that the term ‘self’ works in a variety of locutions—
including ‘know thyself’—bears this out and helps us guard against assuming that it
inevitably signifies the object of a reflexive relationship, and instead helps us see how it
functions to signal the absence of relationship. Consider, for example, ‘self-respect’, ‘self-
possession’, ‘self-motivation’, ‘self-consciousness’, ‘to thine own self be true’,
‘selfishness’. Someone who ‘selfishly’ ‘keeps something for himself’ is not well
Page 8 of 23

understood as keeping something for someone who happens to be himself, but rather as
simply keeping something without thought of later giving it to anyone. The same may be
said of someone who ‘keeps something to himself’: he just doesn’t share it with others.
Someone who is ‘self-possessed’ doesn’t stand in a positive relation of possession to
himself (whatever that would mean), but is rather free from the psychological influence of
others past and present. He now acts in a straightforward and decisive manner that is
free from responsibility-avoiding dither. Someone who becomes ‘self-conscious’ is, to be
sure, thrown into an anxious state of wondering how she is coming across to others, and
in this sense it is she and they, these flesh and blood people (but not some additional ‘self’
that she has), who are the objects of her attention. Yet what is also essential to our self-
conscious subject is that she has been thrown out of relationship with these others, at
least in any trusting connected form. Someone who is ‘true to herself’ is not so much
simply representing herself accurately or simply happening to act on the basis of
whatever she desires. Rather, she is not in the business of dissimulation but now chooses
and acts according to her own values. The ‘self-motivated’ person is simply a person
whose motivation to achieve her goals is not dependent on external influences. And, we
suggest, one important understanding of the person who follows the Delphic command
focuses not on the subject enjoying a reflexive relationship with his own mind but on his
enjoying the absence of unhelpful defence mechanisms. For just as ‘being true to oneself’
is not perspicuously taken to cover, say, unremarkable cases of wanting to go for a walk
and then, by gosh, going for a walk, so too ‘knowing thyself’ is not perspicuously taken to
cover, say, ordinary cases of being able to verbally express one’s thoughts and feelings
about, say, going for that walk. Instead ‘knowing thyself’ is, in such cases, not a matter of
having, but rather of emancipating oneself from, a certain relation with oneself—a
relation of self-deception or the inability to tolerate and own one’s thoughts and feelings.
In such contexts, at least, the injunction to ‘know thyself’ refers not to the cultivation of a
truthful reflexive presentation of the mind to itself but to a non-dissimulative, non-
reflexive engagement with one’s life.3
Or—by way of understanding the value of philosophical reflection on ‘knowing thyself’ to

psychoanalysis—consider the idea that such self-knowledge is by itself but a morally
neutral affair. Here we are offered the notion of a psychopathic patient who, despite her
depravity, and perhaps even because of a successful psychoanalysis, knows herself
perfectly well—not just in the sense of having a factually correct understanding of her
own psychology, but also in the sense of having dismantled her defences. Without
philosophical reflection such an idea can seem rather too clearly intelligible, as if there
were no meaningful alternative. Yet, while the claim remains controversial, it certainly
has been doubted whether what we understand by the Delphic command, or for that
matter by the work of psychoanalysis, can quite so readily meet with an amoral
interpretation. For, the suggestion goes, just as it is only in and through our joy, anger,
and sadness that we really understand what it is to know reward, be wronged, and lose
what matters to us, so too it is only really in and through relationships conditioned by
love that we can comprehend others’ true reality, and only in and through our honest
commitment, integrity, and humility that we can know what it is to lead a truly human
Page 9 of 23

life. On this view we do not grasp what it is to be a human living a distinctly human life by
becoming knowledgeable about the behavioural habits of Homo sapiens. Rather we grasp
it by engaging in forms of relationship with others which are essentially characterized in
moral terms—in terms of what is humane, in terms of what is revealing of our and their
humanity.4 Truly understanding what it is to wrong someone, for example, may be
thought to consist not simply in being able to track a range of abstract propositional
entailments, but instead in feeling guilt and wanting to put it right. There are certainly
senses in which a clever and uninhibited psychopath may ‘know herself’, but if she can’t
feel the guilt she has nevertheless accrued by her evil acts then, the suggestion goes,
there is yet an important form of self-knowledge which she lacks.
This excursus into two important, psychoanalytically pertinent meanings of ‘knowing

thyself’ is of course but one of the ways in which philosophy may repay psychoanalysis for
its enriched reflective conception of our inner life. Stepping back to survey the
interdisciplinary field we may distinguish advocative, critical, and synoptic applications of
philosophy to psychoanalytic theory.
On the advocative side we find philosophy helping to defend and clarify psychoanalytic
theory from misunderstandings. Here we might think, for example, of how best to
understand the physicalistic and energetic metaphors within psychoanalysis, how best to
understand the notions of psychological ‘structures’ and defence ‘mechanisms’, and
which methods of investigation, epistemic standards, and forms of understanding and
explanation are best suited to knowledge of inner life.
On the critical side we find philosophy helping to sort out the wheat from the chaff within
psychoanalytic theory. What has mattered here is not so much the scientific evidence for
the truth or falsity of psychoanalytic theories, which is not a direct matter for philosophy.
Instead what matters here is the cogency of the forms of reasoning used within
psychoanalysis to support its claims, and the critical unearthing of optional, perhaps even
worrisome, moral and political values tacitly embedded in the theory and practice. Here,
connecting the critical with the advocative application, the question of whether
psychoanalysis can qualify as a science, and if so, what kind of science, has been of
considerable importance. In such ways psychoanalysis comes to better know itself—to
know and work through its habitual irrationalities in the service of achieving a more
honest, perhaps a more modest, less hubristic, and more integrated enterprise.
The synoptic contribution of philosophical reason to psychoanalysis takes us into a

broader discussion of interdisciplinarity in psychoanalytic thought.
Page 10 of 23

Psychoanalysis Situated
The earlier discussion of the Delphic command stressed the importance of not
misunderstanding ‘knowing thyself’ as always and inevitably involving the cultivation of a
positively informative relation of the self to itself. Instead it urged the significance of a
form of ‘knowing’ marked principally, not by the presence of a particular epistemic
attitude but rather, by the absence of self-deception. Another way to misunderstand
‘knowing thyself’ merely as a self-relation would be to assume that it did not essentially
implicate others—i.e. to overlook the essentially interpersonal nature of self-knowledge.
This idea that we come to know ourselves in and through one another forms the heart of
Hegel’s (1807/1977) conception of identity as ‘negation’: we become who we are in so far
as we distinguish ourselves from others and in so far as we achieve mutual recognition
with them.5 Such negation determines not only our sensorimotor selfhood—as we
differentiate from, while at the same moment we perceptually and motorically relate to,
our proximate environments—but also our personalities—as we come to relinquish our
childhood egocentricity. In that process we come to appreciate both that we and others
have genuinely different tastes, desires, and values and that, all being well, for all that we
may still offer one another humane recognition. Or, at least, that we may—if we so wish—
work to achieve that mutual recognition and mutual accountability, work to manage our
relationships, and overcome our and others’ misrecognitions, such unending work being
—in the ‘tragic vision’ of psychoanalysis—an aspect of any worthwhile relating at all.
That self-knowledge may be won through essentially relational means marks a significant
theme of recent psychoanalysis which has come to place our object relations and our
intersubjectivity at the heart of both its clinical theory and its clinical practice. Yet
negation and relation also provide another means for philosophy to repay its debt for the
richer picture of the inner world offered to it by psychoanalysis: by helping
psychoanalysis ‘know itself’ through grasping its relations to, identities with, distinctions
from, debts to, and dependencies on other disciplines. Here philosophy plays its long-
established role of coordinating and synthesizing synoptician.
Psychoanalysis itself originated in interdisciplinary reflection. It is both well known and

frequently forgotten within psychoanalysis that Freud drew upon extensive non-clinical
sources in constructing psychoanalytic theory. Patricia Kitcher (1992) lays out the full
extent of Freud’s borrowings from theories and discoveries of his time in neurophysiology
(neurons, psychic energy, the reflex model of the mind), psychology (associationism,
functional analysis), psychiatry (unconscious ideas, the sexual origin of neurosis, the
separation of ideas and language), sexology (infantile sexuality, stages of sexual
development, component instincts), anthropology and evolutionary biology
(recapitulationism), with further ideas taken from philology and sociology. To the extent
to which psychoanalysis draws on non-clinical findings and models directly it will need to
revisit such ideas as have been superseded within their source disciplines. The same may
be said of the use by more recent incarnations of psychoanalysis of theories and concepts
Page 11 of 23

from structural linguistics, attachment theory, existential phenomenology, Marxism and

critical theory, anthropology, postmodernism, developmental psychology, and
neurobiology. Philosophy in synoptic, grand-theoretic, mode may take up the task of
urging and facilitating such updatings, and of drawing critical attention to failures to do
so.
Philosophy’s job here, however, is not only the uncomfortable one of interdisciplinary
police officer, but also that of diplomat. For sometimes, when psychoanalysis borrows
from other disciplines, it does not so much directly import their concepts, as tacitly
reappropriate or metaphorically extrapolate them for its own ends. While this may, in
many cases, relieve psychoanalysis of the obligation to keep track of changes in scientific
knowledge and understanding within the source domains, it may result in unclarity about
the imported concepts, e.g. whether they are best understood as carrying literal or
metaphorical senses (an example here may be Freud’s use of energetic and biological
concepts). Here the task of philosophy is to clarify this indeterminacy and to assess
whether inferences are being made within the psychoanalytic theory which illegitimately
switch the senses of terms mid-argument.
Perhaps the most significant diplomatic role for philosophy concerns the questions of
whether and how the findings and the methods of non-psychoanalytic disciplines are to be
brought to bear on psychoanalytic theory and vice versa. Looking back a few decades one
thinks especially of attempts to use the quantitative methods of experimental psychology
to test hypotheses derived from psychoanalytic theory, or to test the adequacy of
psychoanalytic therapy. The distinctly philosophical questions here were whether and
when and how such hypotheses are pertinent to the theory, whether the theory is
genuinely testable, whether it’s too bad for the theory or too bad for the experimental
methods if it isn’t, and whether and when such methods truly are apt to investigation of
the internal world.6 In the background of such debates lies the central question of
whether psychoanalysis is a science. If so, of what sort, and are our existing conceptions
of science adequate when it comes to the idea of a ‘science of subjectivity’? If not, is this
because psychoanalysis is unscientific (i.e. a failed science) or non-scientific (e.g. a
Weltanschauung)? More recently one thinks of the theory and findings of experimental
psychology concerning the non-dynamic unconscious and their significance for
psychoanalytic theory. In defending the claim that apparently meaningless human
phenomena may have a sense, Freud (1916: 251) argued that merely physical (e.g.
genetic or neurological) explanations frequently fail to tell us all we want to know, and
that psychological explanation remains called for—but he failed to adequately consider
the different psychological ways in which we may make sense of such phenomena (e.g.
via such heuristics and biases in information processing as form part of an ‘adaptive’
unconscious). Recent work on both sides explores the complementarity of such
explanations, and offers us the understanding that cognitive processing is motivated in
psychodynamic ways and that the psychodynamic unconscious may be comprised of
structures first delineated outside psychoanalytic theory (Eagle 2013; Chen and Chaiken
Page 12 of 23

1999). Here the philosopher’s role is both synoptic (surveying the points of overlap and
contact in the objects and the theories) and diplomatic (working to ensure that different
schools, with their different approaches to the life of the mind, do not talk past one
another).
A certain kind of good psychoanalysis might go something like this (but without the linear
form): build enough trust between a vulnerable patient and a respectful analyst; examine
and carefully deconstruct the patient’s defensive character formations; try to tolerate,
truthfully acknowledge, and integrate such latent unintegrated and undeveloped feelings
and expectations that induce shame and distrust in the patient; facilitate thereby the
development of these feelings and the patient’s increased realistic self-confidence. Along
the way such grandiose ambitions and self-deceiving illusions as serve defensive ends
may be dismantled in the pursuit of: a more workable inner life, an increased ability to
remain inwardly and outwardly truthful, and the forming of deeper relationships. A good
philosophical analysis of psychoanalysis may proceed along parallel lines. Having one’s
precious psychoanalytic understandings subjected to philosophical critique may be
galling, parts of what was cherished may have to be foregone, ambitions may sometimes
need to be scaled back, collaborations more willingly entered into—with the rewards
being greater clarity and the opportunity for what is truly valuable within the theory to
shine and grow. The result is a discipline with its finger even more keenly on the pulse of
our baffling inner lives and yet more serviceable to those seeking to follow the Delphic
command.
Truth and Truthfulness

We close with an illustration of the closeness of matters philosophical and psychoanalytic
in relation to the Delphic command by an examination of their mutual concern with truth
and truthfulness.
Freud commented that ‘Psychoanalytic treatment is founded on truthfulness’ (1915: 164)

and—perhaps less truthfully!—that, regarding his own development of psychoanalysis,
‘My single motive was the love of truth’ (quoted in Sterba 1982: 115). It is a motivation he
urges on the patient too, in the ‘fundamental rule’ of psychoanalysis (Thompson 2004).
‘The only exception’ to the rule that the patient be encouraged to speak of whatever he or
she wants is ‘in regard to the fundamental rule of psycho-analytic technique which the
patient has to observe’. What is the rule? Freud (1913: 134–5) tells his patient that:
You will notice that as you relate things various thoughts will occur to you which
you would like to put aside on the ground of certain criticisms and objections. You
will be tempted to say to yourself that this or that is irrelevant here or that it’s
quite unimportant or nonsensical so that there’s no need to say it. You must never
give in to these criticisms, but must say it in spite of them—indeed, you must say it
precisely because you feel an aversion to doing so. Later on you will find out and
Page 13 of 23

learn to understand the reason for this injunction, which is really the only one you
have to follow. So say whatever goes through your mind … [N]ever forget that you
have promised to be absolutely honest and never leave anything out because for
some reason or other it is unpleasant to tell it.
This valuation of truth-telling is also central to that most psychoanalytical of pre-Freudian

philosophers, Friederich Nietzsche, who, in his last work The Antichrist, wrote: ‘Truth has
had to be fought for every step of the way, almost everything else dear to our hearts …
has had to be sacrificed for it. Greatness of soul is needed for it, the service of truth is the
hardest service’ (Nietzsche 1895/1968: 50). In The Gay Science, he explains that the ‘“will
to truth” does not mean “I do not want to let myself be deceived” but—there is no
alternative—“I will not deceive, not even myself”; and with that we stand on moral
ground’ (Nietzsche 1882/2001: 344).
Earlier we considered the notion of knowing thyself, and tried to do more justice to the
idea of such a gain in knowledge than could be done by reading it in terms of increasing
one’s stock of information about oneself. In particular we stressed self-knowledge as
overcoming self-deception and self-alienation and as relating realistically with others.
Later we will also go on to discuss ‘knowing one’s own mind’ in the sense of arriving at
non-vacillating resolve and determinacy of thought and will. So too, in considering truth,
we do well to attend to uses of the concept which take us beyond notions of mere
correctness. Thus not only a judgement expressed in a proposition, but also plumb lines,
hearts, desires, and lovers, may all be true. And if we are true to someone (including
ourselves—recall ‘to thine own self be true’), then correct judgement also does not seem
to come into it. We may here recall Martin Heidegger’s (1927/1962: §44) recovery of truth
as alethia from otherwise hegemonic conceptions of truth as adequatio—the former to do
with something’s self-revelation or unimpeded unconcealment, the latter to do with one
thing’s correct representation of something else (see Gipps, this volume). We may think,
too, of Ryle’s (1949: 183–4) discussion of what he called ‘avowals’—utterances such as:
‘I want’, ‘I hope’, ‘I intend’, ‘I dislike’, ‘I am depressed’, ‘I wonder’ etc— and of

how we may be tempted by their form to misconstrue all the sentences in which
they occur as self-descriptions. But in its primary employment ‘I want …’ is not
used to convey information, but to make a request or demand. It is no more meant
as a contribution to general knowledge than ‘please’. … Nor, in their primary
employment, are ‘I hate …’ and ‘I intend …’ used for the purpose of telling the
hearer facts about the speaker … They are things said in detestation and
resolution and not things said to advance biographical knowledge about
detestations and resolutions.
The truth of such avowals is not a function of their expressing correct judgements that
one hates or intends, but rather of their being expressions of the hate and intention in
question. When we express ourselves truly, or again truthfully, we typically speak ‘from’,
not ‘about’, our thoughts and feelings, and do so without perverting their articulation.
Page 14 of 23

What none of these philosophers considers, in their talk of truth as the auto-revelation of
Being to us (Heidegger) or as the auto-revelation of the human heart and mind to itself
and others (Nietzsche, Ryle), is the significance, including the ethical significance, of an
interpersonal commitment to truthfulness for the very constitution of what is there to be
revealed. To put it otherwise: we do well to avoid considering the value of truthfulness
only in relation to the expression of what already has determinate psychological shape,
and instead to acknowledge its even more fundamental role in our minds becoming made
up, in various senses of that idiom. Such a focus is provided by Williams’s (2002)
discussion of the virtues of truth and truthfulness, the psychoanalytic resonances of
which should shortly become clear.
Williams begins with the observation that many of our thoughts do not already clearly
take the form of a belief as opposed to a desire or, say, a wish (2002: 82). For sure,
sometimes we do have:
very determinate dispositions to assert certain things. But in many other cases, it
is not merely the case that we do not know what we believe (though this is of
course often true), but that a given content has not come to be a belief at all. What
makes it into a belief may be that we are asked about the matter or about the
belief and then have to decide whether we are prepared to assert it or not. How
can that be, if assertions are expressions of belief? The answer is that assertions
… often give others a reason to rely on what we say, either as a statement of how
things are, or as an expression of how they seem to us. So … I have to consider
what I am prepared, sincerely and responsibly, to assert. I ask myself what I
believe, and that is, in such a context, the same question. The question should not
be understood, however, as simply one of what I already believe; in trying to
answer it I do not simply review my dispositions but consider my reasons for
taking a given content to be true, and this is a question of what I am to believe.
A subject may be sincere in that he may come out with what is on his mind at any
moment, but unless there is some consistency between what he says from occasion to
occasion it will be hard to treat what he says as expressive of anything that dignifies the
description of ‘belief’ (Williams suggests the phrase ‘propositional mood’ as a more fitting
alternative). He may at first be ‘awash with many images, many excitements, merging
fears and fantasies that dissolve into one another’ (2002: 195).
What will help a subject firm up his thoughts into distinct beliefs, desires, and wishes that
no longer bleed into one another, will be in part the conversations he has with others. In
conversation you may ask me what I think or feel about something, and if I am to respect
the relationship we have, to be of use to you, and to be someone whose word counts for
something, it will be important that I give thought to the matter at hand and actually form
determinate thoughts or feelings. At a level more basic than the enjoyment of any
transparent self-understanding of determinate beliefs and desires ‘we are all together in
Page 15 of 23

our social activity of mutually stabilizing our declarations and moods and impulses into
becoming such things as beliefs and relatively steady attitudes’ (Williams 2002: 193).
Williams identifies a second way in which conversations clarify what we believe. Some of
our thoughts are wishes, and through wishful thinking, turn into beliefs. Or again, some
of our indeterminate thoughts may become either wishes or beliefs, and which they
become may depend on other wishes and desires we have. Wishful thinking, says Williams
‘is very basic and not a great mystery: the steps from its being pleasant to think of P, to its
being pleasant to think that P, to thinking that P, cover no great psychological
distance’ (2002: 83). As a result, ‘there is no mystery about the fact that … an agent may
easily find himself committed to [the] content [of his wishes and beliefs] in the wrong
mode’ (2002: 198). However, this does not happen transparently. When beliefs arise in
these ways, when they ‘become hostage to desires and wishes, they do so only as the
result of hidden and indirect processes, against which the disciplines of the virtues of
truth are directed’ (2002: 83). And this is something that conversations with others can
help prevent.
This applies not only to questions of what to believe, but also when thinking about what
to do. Since:
individual deliberation … is inherently open to wishful thinking … it needs the

virtues of truth as much as purely factual inquiries need them. [So] thinking about
what one individual should do can usefully involve more than one person: we can
think about what I should do. This is not just because you may have experience
and knowledge which I lack, but because your wishes are not mine—possibly not
in their content, certainly not in their effects. [We] help to sustain each other’s
sense of reality, both in stopping wishes’ becoming beliefs when they should not,
and also in helping some wishes rather than others to become desires
(Williams 2002: 198).7
The same may also be said of a third question, self-interpretation: we may equally
helpfully think together about who I am.
The implications of Williams’s philosophical argument for both psychoanalytic theory and
practice are clear. Yet, arguably, they are equally relevant to philosophical practice itself.
Nietzsche and Wittgenstein both identify a similar role for the will and its influence on
philosophical thought as Williams identifies for the wish here, and with it the significance
of an ethic of truthfulness in philosophy. Wittgenstein’s remarks return us to the very first
sense of ‘know thyself’ we identified in relation to philosophy, the practical endeavour of
the philosopher to come to know herself:
What makes a subject difficult to understand—if it is significant, important—is not

that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it.
Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most
Page 16 of 23

people want to see. … What has to be overcome is not a difficulty of the intellect,
but of the will. … Work on philosophy is … actually more of a kind of work on
oneself
(Wittgenstein 2005: 86).
The edifice of your pride has to be dismantled. And that means frightful work. …
One cannot speak the truth, if one has not yet conquered oneself. One cannot
speak it – but not because one is still not clever enough
(Wittgenstein 1980: 30–5).
A Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

Wittgenstein’s reflections on philosophical practice carry both explicit and implicit
psychoanalytic overtones (Baker 2003), but he famously had an ambivalent relationship to
psychoanalysis itself (Levy, this volume), while Freud in turn famously had an ambivalent
relationship with philosophy. In 1886 Freud avowed to Fliess that he secretly nourished
‘the hope of arriving … at my initial goal of philosophy’ after ‘the detour of medical
practice’ (Freud 1985: 159). Furthermore he supplemented his medical lectures by
enrolling in six of the philosopher Brentano’s lecture courses, and also met with him
outside the class (Tauber 2010: 29). He conceived of psychoanalysis as standing in a
‘middle position between medicine and philosophy’; he also added that he had ‘never
really been a doctor in the proper sense’ (cited by Rieff 1959: 301). Later though he
confessed to a ‘constitutional incapacity’ for philosophy (Freud 1925: 60) and became
famously dismissive of ‘the philosophers’—whom he equated with those who dogmatically
insisted that ‘“consciousness” and “mental” were identical’ and so would not accept what
he variously described as the ‘postulate’ or ‘hypothesis’ of unconscious mental life (1925:
31).
By happy contrast with Freud’s ‘philosophers’, those contributing to this Handbook show
a sympathetic interest in psychoanalysis’ most central concept, the unconscious, in
relation to its closest conceptual allies: defences, transference, conflict, free association,
wish-fulfilment, and symbolism. Several of their chapters work to help psychoanalysis
know itself by elucidating, retheorizing, and rescuing ‘the unconscious’ from objections
and misrepresentations—including its self-misrepresentations. Other contributions
explore psychoanalysis in relation to: its philosophical prehistory, the recognition and
misrecognition afforded it within twentieth-century philosophers, its scientific strengths
and weaknesses, its applications in aesthetics and politics, and its value and limitations
when brought to bear on ethics, religion, and social life.
Page 17 of 23

Further introduction we save for the openings of each of the sections which follow. Within
each section, we have endeavoured to provide an evaluative overview of current thinking
at the interface between philosophy and psychoanalysis through original contributions
that will shape the future of the debate. Some chapters lean more towards the overview,
others towards developing a line of argument that defends a particular position, but
taken as a whole, each section forms the ground for future research.
We close by acknowledging three points. First, we have not sought to provide an

introduction to psychoanalytic theory, for which we refer the reader to Bateman and
Holmes (1995), Rusbridger and Budd (2005), Eagle (2011), Lear (2011), or Milton,
Polmear, and Fabricius (2011). Second, there are some limitations in coverage. The
reader will notice, for example, that Jungian, Lacanian, and feminist traditions feature far
less prominently than Freudian and object-relations approaches. Sometimes this wasn’t
for lack of trying to solicit contributions but, especially in relation to the paucity of
coverage of post-Lacanian developments, we must also own a lack of editorial expertise in
assessing their cogency. The third relates to this being a Handbook of philosophy and, not
philosophy of, psychoanalysis. It may be remarked that we have included some, but not
extensive, coverage of the ‘Freud Wars’ which constituted a once-prominent strand within
the philosophy of psychoanalysis of the last forty years. Some of the important issues that
arose in those debates, in particular the scientific evidence for and conceptual validity of
psychoanalytic theory, have naturally found their place in this Handbook, but on the
whole, we have encouraged different modes of engagement of the kind discussed and
illustrated in this introductory chapter.8
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Smith, David Livingstone (2003). Psychoanalysis in Focus. London: Sage Publications.
Sterba, R. F. (1969). ‘The Psychoanalyst in a world of change’. Psychoanalytic Quarterly

38: 432–454.
Sterba, R. F. (1982). Reminiscences of a Viennese Psychoanalyst. Detroit, IL: Wayne State

University Press.
Tauber, A. I. (2010). Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Taylor, C. (1985). ‘Self-interpreting animals’. In C. Taylor, Human Agency and Language:

Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (pp. 45–76). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (2004). The Ethic of Honesty. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi.
Williams, B. (1995a). ‘Saint-Just’s Illusion’. In Making Sense of Humanity (pp. 135–150).

Williams, B. (1995b). ‘Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology’. In Making Sense of

Humanity (pp. 65–78). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, B. (2000). ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’. Philosophy 75(4): 477–496.
Williams, B. (2002). Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton, NJ:

Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Culture and Value, trans. P. Winch. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (2005). Big Transcript. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wollheim, R. (1984). The Thread of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wollheim, R. (1993). The Mind and Its Depths. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Page 21 of 23

Notes:
(1.) Other important aims include self-becoming (i.e. developing what is as yet but latent
within) and improved self-other relating. As will be evident from our discussion we take
these to be interdependent with self-knowing. For elaborations see Eagle (2011) and
Lacewing (2014).
(2.) The fantasy that one could avoid such philosophical troubles through avoiding
philosophizing—and the correlative defensive equation of intellectual activity with
intellectualizing defence—is akin to the fantasy that one may better go through life by
simply avoiding troublesome emotional experience. The psychoanalyst, one might say, no
more has the option of opting out of intellectual self-understanding than the philosopher
has the option of opting out of the self-(mis)understandings that constitute our emotional
lives. For self-(mis)understanding, in both emotional and intellectual registers, is an
inexorable part of the human condition. One might say that one cannot not philosophize—
only do so worse or better, i.e. only be less or more aware of the assumptions embedded
in one’s thinking.
(3.) In this way we can grasp why, say, a Woody Allen character who is preoccupied by
psychoanalytically understanding himself is still neurotic: he is caught up in endless self-
relationship rather than being emancipated from self-preoccupation.
It is important to note that more comes under the general concept of knowing thyself
than the absence of unhelpful self-relations. Thus another important aspect of the concept
refers to the cultivation of a straightforward determinacy of action. Such an agent takes
responsibility for himself (he ‘owns’ his thought and his actions) and does not vacillate; he
‘knows his own mind’. We return to this in the final section of this introduction.
(4.) A perspective most forcefully developed by Raimond Gaita (2004), and iterated by
Backström (this volume).
(5.) This is but one of several ways in which Hegel prefigures psychoanalytic theory
(McDonald 2014). We may think here too of Wittgenstein’s plan to use either the Earl of
Kent’s ‘I will teach you differences’, or Joseph Butler’s ‘everything is what it is and not
another thing’, as the motto for his Philosophical Investigations. The thought is also
familiar to us through Saussure’s (1915: 120) consideration that ‘in language there are
only differences without positive terms’: our concepts enjoy their determinacy in virtue of
their exclusionary relations with other concepts, and we reflectively grasp what
phenomena are by appreciating how they differ from other phenomena.
(6.) For summaries see Smith (2003) and Gomez (2005).
(7.) As Williams (2002: 198) notes, however, there can yet ‘be a negative side to this same
process: in helping you to decide, I may reinforce your fantasy, and we may conspire in
projecting wishes into a deceptive social hologram’.
Page 22 of 23

(8.) We are very grateful to Katy Abramson and Adam Leite for their comments on an
earlier draft of this introduction.
Richard G.T. Gipps
Richard G.T. Gipps, Oxford University, Disability Advisory Service, Oxford, UK
Michael Lacewing
Michael Lacewing, Department of Philosophy, Heythrop College, University of

London, London, UK
Page 23 of 23

Intellectual Prehistory: Introduction

Michael Lacewing and Richard G.T. Gipps

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198789703.013.2
This section of the Handbook consists of five chapters that focus on how psychoanalysis
intersects with the history of philosophy. Three themes are examined: philosophical
anticipations of psychoanalytic ideas; the clarification of psychoanalytic ideas by situating
them in their intellectual context; and alternative approaches to psychoanalytic material
provided by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Baruch Spinoza. Also
considered in this section is how Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer anticipated aspects
of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. The first chapter explores Schopenhauer’s
conception of mankind’s motivations and his writings on madness, the second deals with
Freud’s thinking on sexuality and the sexual drive, and the third describes an implicit
concept of an unconscious first made explicit by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
and later deployed to explicate human motivation by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The
last two chapters discuss sublimation and the solipsistic aspect of Freud’s
systematization.
Keywords: philosophy, psychoanalysis, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Sigmund Freud, madness,
sexual drive, unconscious, human motivation, sublimation
Page 1 of 7

As a distinctive therapeutic practice deploying free association as its key method,

psychoanalysis may rightly be said to have originated with Freud. The same is not true of
a variety of its core concepts such as the unconscious, repression, sublimation,
projection, the significance of the sexual drives, and wish-fulfilling fantasy. The
psychological and medical prehistory of psychoanalytic notions clustered around the idea
of a dynamic unconscious has been masterfully traced by Ellenberger (1970). The
chapters of this section consider instead the philosophical prehistory of psychoanalysis.
They trace a history of ideas from Spinoza through to Nietzsche, and investigate three
forms of connection between the two disciplines: 1) philosophical anticipations of
psychoanalytic ideas; 2) the clarification of psychoanalytic ideas through situating them
in their intellectual context; and 3) alternative—perhaps even superior—approaches to
psychoanalytic material provided by the philosophers in question. While we have
arranged this section’s chapters in the chronological order of the philosophers they
consider, in this introduction we instead discuss them in terms of the above three themes.
Page 2 of 7

Philosophical Anticipations of Psychoanalytic

Ideas
The two central philosophers who clearly anticipated aspects of Freud’s (1856–1939)
psychoanalytic theory are his precursor Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and his
contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). As described by Ellenberger (1970) and
Chapman and Chapman-Santana (1995) amongst others, Nietzsche developed various
concepts similar to those of Freud, for example: the transposition into psychology of the
principles of the conservation and transformation of energy; sublimation; repression
(Hemmung); ‘ressentiment’; conscience theorized along the lines of the superego;
unconscious guilt; and the id. In their chapter, Brook and Young provide a comprehensive
elaboration of the ways in which Schopenhauer anticipated Freud. Central to
Schopenhauer’s conception of mankind’s motivations in The World as Will and
Representation (1819) is that of an inscrutable transcendental will, manifesting itself in
sexual and self-preservative drives, with its own intentions that are yet disguised by the
rationalizations of the ego. Brook and Young also draw our attention to Schopenhauer’s
striking writings on madness, comparing his consideration that, faced with unbearable
sorrow, the mind ‘seizes upon madness as the last means of saving life’, with Freud’s
contention that delusions are ‘applied like a patch over the place where originally a rent
had appeared in the ego’s relation to the external world’.
Comparison of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory with that of Schopenhauer not only throws
up interesting parallels but also, according to Sandford, helps reveal some of what is
distinctively original about Freud’s formulations. Sandford pursues this thought with
especial reference to Freud’s thinking on sexuality as found in the 1905 edition of his
Three Essays on Sexuality. As Sandford describes it, Freud’s predecessors, including
Kant and Schopenhauer but also the sexologists Krafft-Ebing and Moll, held to a
conception of the sexual instinct (Geschlechtstrieb) as geared towards copulation and
reproduction. By contrast with this, Freud’s conception of the sexual drive (Sexualtrieb)
had it essentially aimed at the experience of pleasurable sensations, and only
contingently connected to reproductive ends. As such, it provides us with a new
philosophical anthropology and radicalizes our understanding of what can be meant by
the concepts of the natural and the perverse in relation to human sexual life.
Psychoanalysis Situated in Its Intellectual

Context
While Freud was critical of ‘the philosophers’, he appears to have had in mind the likes of
his one-time teacher Brentano for the latter’s exclusive focus on the conscious mind. Yet
by contrast with Brentano, the German Romantics and idealists offered a conception of
Page 3 of 7

the driving forces of the human subject as part of a will extending much further back into
nature than is reached by consciousness (ffytche 2012). In his chapter, Gardner traces an
implicit concept of an unconscious transcendental self underpinning consciousness,
informing mental structure and creating mental content, back to Kant (1724–1804)1 and
Fichte (1762–1814). He tells how the concept was first made explicit by Schelling (1775–
1854), and posited as generative of individual character by the physicians Schubert
(1780–1860) and Carus (1789–1869), before being deployed to explicate human
motivation by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Yet he also discusses how Freud’s
psychoanalysis makes use of another version of the self, one which Gardner exemplifies—
without meaning thereby to attest to an informing influence—with the pre-Romantic
Spinoza (1632–77). The aspect of Spinoza’s philosophy to which Gardner attends are his
naturalistic conception of affects as causally determining actions independently of the
agent’s rational endorsement. As explored throughout this Handbook, psychoanalysis is
replete with fruitful yet challenging tensions between meaning, artistry, and
understanding on the one hand, and causation, science, and explanation on the other.
Gardner clarifies these tensions by describing how psychoanalysis contains within itself,
in an imperfectly fitting manner, two different conceptions of mind: the experience-
synthesizing transcendental mind of the post-Kantians, and the naturalistically conceived
mind with causal powers and animal instincts of Spinoza.
Page 4 of 7

Retheorizing the Unconscious

The third reason for considering psychoanalysis in relation to the history of philosophy is
the resource the latter provides for providing alternative theorizations of psychoanalytic
phenomena. This is most evidently undertaken by the twentieth-century philosophers
considered in the next section, but also here by Gemes in his chapter on Nietzsche and
sublimation, and by Macdonald in her chapter on Hegel and recognition.2
As Gemes describes, the concept of sublimation plays an essential role in psychoanalysis,

yet was never given a fully satisfactory treatment by Freud. In particular, Freud failed to
provide a convincing criterion to help us distinguish between symptoms caused by
repression and culturally valuable activities resulting from sublimation. Nietzsche,
however, now comes to the rescue on precisely this point by suggesting that, whereas
neurotic symptoms involve disintegration of the psyche, sublimation involves the
integration of sublimated drives within the master plan of a dominant drive. This
dominant drive provides the lynchpin for our self-becoming, a notion which is essentially
evaluative insofar as, by contrast with the ugly disintegrative and self-hating nature of
repression, it involves power, greatness, beauty, and life affirmation.
As Gemes also makes clear, sublimation (by contrast with repression) involves a desire to
unite, and in this way connects Nietzsche’s thought with a conception of sublimation
more prominent in post-Freudians such as Klein and Loewald than in Freud. Such a
connection with post-Freudian themes is also made by Macdonald who draws on the
dialectical conception of selfhood found in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) to help
transcend what Ricoeur described as the solipsistic aspect of Freud’s systematization (i.e.
the structural, topological, and energy-balancing models of the individual mind) which
clashes with the relational character of his therapy. Scholars influenced by Kojève’s
reading of Hegel have stressed the resources of the earlier Master–Slave moment of his
dialectic (the struggle for recognition between, and the mutual dependency of, Slave and
Master) for overcoming the merely intrapsychic character of Freud’s structural and
topological models of the psyche. This, however, inscribes a rather paranoid moment into
the heart of human intersubjectivity, whereas Macdonald follows Hyppolite in suggesting
a happier resolution. This interpretation focuses on later moments of the dialectic, in
particular that of the Unhappy Consciousness and his relationship with the figure of the
Counsellor. The resolution it brings helps the Unhappy Consciousness overcome his sense
of meaninglessness and lack of self-sufficiency by grasping the intrinsically relational
nature of any mature independence. This correlativity of mature independence and
relational dependency has been placed centre stage by relational schools of
psychoanalysis, yet receives a more rigorous dialectical formulation in Hegel’s
phenomenology.3
Page 5 of 7

Clinical psychoanalysis is sometimes taken to task for its alleged aim of explaining to the
patient his present pain in terms of what is uncovered by way of his history. Given the
focus on the here-and-now transference relationship by many of today’s psychoanalysts,
the accusation can already be seen as baseless,4 but the accusation also risks
misunderstanding the value of such understanding of personal history as develops within
an effective psychoanalytic treatment. One of the values of such historical work is the
way it helps the patient grasp the non-inexorable contingency of her current moods and
modes of relating (Lear, this volume). It may be clinically pointless to explain the present
by relation to the putative past, but what is not pointless is a patient and analyst using
reference to the past to help the patient get such a vantage on the present as reveals it to
be optional, as one possibility amongst others, as something that can be conceived and
rendered otherwise. Being able to step back and relate the present to the past is a
restoration or new development of personal agency. We believe that the chapters offered
in this section allow something of a similar shift to be made in relation to psychoanalytic
theory. As psychoanalysis comes to know itself through narrating its own conceptual
history, it is afforded the possibility of stepping back from and grasping its latent
assumptions as contingent theories: as options that may both reveal and constrain, as
developments that may be disputed and which could have been otherwise, as possibilities
that now may indeed become otherwise in the hands of a reinvigorated theory-generating
agency.5
References
Chapman, A. H. and Chapman-Santana, M. (1995). ‘The influence of Nietzsche on Freud’s
ideas’. British Journal of Psychiatry 166: 251–253.
ffytche, M. (2012). The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of
the Modern Psyche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Longuenesse, B. (2012). ‘Kant’s “I” in “I Ought To” and Freud’s Superego’. Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, 86: 19–39.
Sandford, S. (2017). ‘Freud, Bion and Kant: Epistemology and anthropology in The
Interpretation of Dreams’. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 98: 91–110.
Notes:
(1.) See Longuenesse (2012) and Sandford (2017) for further investigation of the parallels
between Kant, Freud, and Bion.
(2.) As Bernstein (this volume) also notes, Ricoeur also draws on Hegel in his reading of
Freud.
Page 6 of 7

(3.) See Lacewing (this volume) for further philosophical treatment of such issues in
relational psychoanalysis as it often leaves these under-theorized.
(4.) See the section on ‘Recognition versus Cognition’ in Gipps (this volume) for
elaboration.
(5.) We explore the various significances of self-knowledge for psychoanalysis in Gipps

and Lacewing (this volume).
Michael Lacewing

London, London, UK
Richard G.T. Gipps
Page 7 of 7

Psychoanalytic Theory: A Historical Reconstruction

Sebastian Gardner

This chapter sketches a reconstruction of the basic psychoanalytic conception of the mind
in terms of two historical resources: the conception of the subject developed in post-
Kantian idealism, and Spinoza’s laws of the affects in Part Three of the Ethics. The former
supplies the conceptual basis for the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious, while the
latter defines the type of psychological causality of psychoanalytic explanations. The
imperfect fit between these two elements, it is argued, is reflected in familiar conceptual
difficulties surrounding psychoanalytic theory and explanation.
Keywords: subject, causality, affect, unconscious, post-Kantian idealism, Spinoza
Sebastian Gardner
(p. 29) Introduction

INQUIRY in the history of philosophy may serve a variety of purposes and assume a
variety of forms. In addition to tracking the actual historical story of the formation of
ideas, we may seek to illuminate the thought of historical figures by drawing systematic
comparisons in the absence of any relation of historical influence. Longuenesse’s account
(2012) of the relation between Kant’s ‘I ought’ and Freud’s superego fits this description,
and I am in full agreement that there is insight to be had by drawing out systematic
affinities between concepts, even when these are historically remote in the sense of
belonging to quite different schools or traditions, or of participating in quite different
intellectual projects, as is evidently the case with Kant and Freud.
Another thing which we may legitimately do, with the same end of philosophical
illumination rather than strict historical explanation in view, is to offer systematic
reconstructions of concepts and theories in terms of resources supplied by the history of
philosophy. In this vein, I am going to use the space available to suggest a reconstruction
Page 1 of 17
Subscriber: University of Colorado at Boulder; date: 16 March 2019

of psychoanalytic theory—more specifically, of the basic conception of the mind evidenced

in Freud’s metapsychology—in terms of historical materials. The reconstruction falls into
two parts. The first proposes a source for the psychoanalytic conception of the
unconscious in post-Kantian idealism. The second attempts to locate a point of affinity of
psychoanalytic explanation with Spinoza. Although I regard the first as a defensible
historical claim—I think it is plausible to maintain on historical grounds that the legacy of
idealism transmits itself into Freud’s model of the mind, and I will formulate my account
in such terms—for present purposes it can be taken in a purely systematic spirit, which is
in any case how my second claim, concerning Spinoza, is intended. What follows (p. 30)
may be regarded, therefore, as a purely analytical exercise cast in the form of a Just-So
story: in a nutshell, I am suggesting that psychoanalytic theory may be viewed as the
product of combining a conception of the subject developed in post-Kantian thought with
a Spinozist view of the mechanics of human motivation; as if Freud had come up with the
metapsychology as a facilitating framework for developing empirical psychological
hypotheses through a reading of classical German philosophy and the Ethics. In the final
section of the paper I will suggest that the idealist and Spinozist dimensions of
psychoanalytic theory do not cohere fully, and that the tension between them is
responsible for and reflected in certain familiar conceptual difficulties that have been
held to confront Freudian theory. The ultimate point of the reconstruction is thus to shed
some light on the famously puzzling character of psychoanalytic theory and explanation,
in a way which bears on Longuenesse’s alignment of Kant with Freud.
The Unconscious in Post-Kantian Idealism

One component of psychoanalytic theory which is both fundamental to it and, as it seems
to me, not likely to be well accounted for by locating Freud’s metapsychology in a line of
descent solely from developments in nineteenth-century scientific psychology, is the
opposition which lies at its core between consciousness and the unconscious. This
distinction is not simply equivalent to, even if it at some point involves, a distinction
between mental contents characterized in terms of different degrees of accessibility to
introspection or conscious reflection, or of different (for instance, personal versus sub-
personal) modes of processing (different types of) information. Rather it invokes as its
starting point the ordinary idea of the person as a self-conscious self-determining subject,
to which it then counterposes the notion of an enduring mental structure, capable of
changing its contents over time, causally disposed to maintain itself in existence,
systemically distinct from the network of mental states manifest in the stream of
consciousness, and governed by a heterogeneous set of laws: a structure which is
nonetheless posited within the orbit of the subject and held to stand in an intimate,
immediately determining relation to conscious and self-conscious mental life.
This idea is, as Freud appreciated, highly puzzling: common-sense psychology

accommodates mental states which are in various ways obscure, subliminal, latent,
implicit, and so on, but nothing in it prepares for the notion that, as it has been put, I am
(also) my Other. Freud, of course, spells out several justifications for the concept of the
Page 2 of 17

unconscious, but these are best regarded as essentially warrants for employing an
implicitly pregiven concept, not ab initio explications of a novel theoretical construction.
So we have the question: how, through what sequence of reflections, can it come to be
thought that persons as ordinarily conceived harbour counterselves, abiding
configurations organized independently from their self-conscious subjectivity, their
relation to which (p. 31) naturally draws comparison with a relation to another person, yet
with which they are required to identify themselves?1
At least the rudiments of this idea can be arrived at through epistemological reflection of
the type pursued by Kant’s immediate successors.2 The usual suspects cited when
nineteenth-century antecedents of psychoanalysis are sought include Schelling, Romantic
Naturphilosophen such as Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler, and
Gustav Carus, Eduard von Hartmann, and, famously, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. In all
of these thinkers an identification is made of the unconscious portion of the subject with
Nature and the forces holding sway in it, which is also, of course, a foundational tenet of
psychoanalysis; but in order for that identification to make sense, the concept of the
former had to be available initially, and in order to locate that original notion, we need to
look further back, to the first generation of thinkers occupied with the post-Kantian
transcendental project.
The ground for the development of a transcendental unconscious was, in effect, prepared
by Kant himself: in the first place, through his notion (as the first Critique allows itself to
be and has been read, whether or not correctly) that mental contents are not conscious
per se, in and of themselves, but need to be made conscious, and that cognitive
awareness of both self and objects involves conceptually motivated operations,
comprising synthetic acts not given in inner sense; and second, through his thesis of the
necessary limit of self-knowledge which is due, not to the impossibility of theoretically
cognizing noumena, but to the consideration that any attempt to cognize the self qua
subject of thought ‘can only revolve in a perpetual circle’ (Kant 1781/1999: A346/B404), it
being ‘very evident that I cannot know as an object that which I must presuppose in order
to know any object’ (Kant 1781/1999: A402).
The notion that self-consciousness contains an aporia—that the ‘I or he or it (the thing)

which thinks’ must represent itself as and only as ‘=X’, a something ‘known only through
the thoughts which are its predicates’ (Kant 1781/1999: A346/B404)—undergoes a radical
modification in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre. The complex theory of mental acts which
Fichte provides in its Theoretical Part shares with Kant’s theory of synthesis the aim of
establishing the preconditions of empirical consciousness, but has a very different
character. Kant’s agencies and acts of synthesis, though non-conscious, can still be said
to manifest themselves directly in conscious mental life, insofar as Kantian syntheses are
necessarily discernible in—can be read off from—the conceptually shaped (p. 32) sensible
given. By contrast, Fichte’s multilayered account of the absolute I’s positing and counter-
positing, in which elements are cross-related in oppositional structures, identified without
reference to recognizable types of mental representation, and form genetic series in
which successive forms displace their predecessors, are set at a vastly greater distance
Page 3 of 17

from the conscious surface of mental life. Fichte’s speculative structures do not merely
shadow what is present in natural consciousness but seek to bring to light its complete
sufficient ground, hence their greater depth and remoteness.
What in particular screens Fichtean transcendental grounds from ordinary consciousness

is the operation of the faculty which he calls productive imagination. The transition to
empirical consciousness involves, on his account, an abrupt discontinuity, which has no
conceptual representation and so must be effected by imagination, which converts purely
intelligible structure into the kind of (ultimately, spatio-temporal) mental content that an
empirical subject can recognize as its own (Fichte 1794/1982: 187–8, 193–4, 200–1).
Experience depends upon an interplay and ‘clash’ of opposed components, but this is
possible, Fichte argues, only if the ‘boundary’ between them is positively represented,
which is something that no purely intellectual function can do: the role of productive
imagination is accordingly to give phenomenologically concrete, intuitable form to a
structure which pure thought can grasp only as a relation of irreconcilable mutual
exclusion. Fichte draws an analogy with the way in which instants of light and darkness
can be given in experience as alternating only if the boundary between them is extended
into a temporal instant (Fichte 1794/1982: 187–208): in similar fashion, the I can grasp
itself as distinct from its objects, and figure as an object for itself, only by relating to itself
through the medium of imagination.
The upshot of Fichte’s account, as regards the theme that we are tracking, is complex. In
one sense, the Wissenschaftslehre eliminates the aporia that Kant locates in self-
consciousness: though the I qua subject cannot be given objectually within empirical self-
consciousness, it is not unknowable, since philosophical insight into the self-positing I
provides knowledge of the thing that for Kant remains a mere ‘=X’. In another regard,
however, Fichte reaffirms and underlines the aporia: the genesis of empirical self-
consciousness from absolute I-hood covers its tracks, and the standpoints of life and
philosophy are distinct and exclusive, the way things appear from the one being an
inversion of how they appear from the other (Fichte 1794/1982: 207–8).
Although, for Fichte, the transcendental grounds of ordinary mental life are invisible to
the pre-philosophical subject, the relation between them is open to full philosophical
comprehension. Such epistemological optimism is open to challenge, however. Two
figures are of particular importance in the present context. Kant’s early critic Salomon
Maimon (1790/2010) argued that Kant’s theory of empirical knowledge fails to close the
gap between the a priori conditions which issue from his transcendental proofs and the a
posteriori contents of empirical judgement, to the advantage of Hume. In order to
address scepticism, it is necessary, Maimon argued, to embrace a more rationalistic form
of idealism than Kant’s. Maimon proposes, accordingly, a Leibnizian recasting of the
Kantian divisions between spontaneity and receptivity, and apriority and aposteriority, in
which what he calls ‘infinitesimals of sensation’, akin to petites perceptions and (p. 33)
belonging to the subject qua passive, are postulated as the elements of synthesis, which
proceeds without consciousness and in accordance with rules not given to our
understanding. This gives rise to the appearance of an a posteriori sensible given. In a
Page 4 of 17

cognitively perfected consciousness, Maimon supposes, Kant’s divisions would be

overcome, and such a subject would grasp itself and its power of cognition as parts of an
infinite mind or reason. On Maimon’s account, the ground of sensation is located
therefore within the subject, and derives ultimately from the deficiency of self-
understanding which is constitutive of ordinary consciousness.
The same broad type of development—this time in reaction to Fichte—is found in Novalis,
who provides a clear exposition of the shared view of Romantic post-Kantians that the
ground of consciousness is necessarily inaccessible to discursive reflection and so must
be grasped by other, non-discursive means. Novalis rejects Fichte’s claim that the
concept of positing can lead us to the absolute ground of self-consciousness and empirical
cognition, on the basis that the structures of opposition and non-identity which positing
involves are themselves products of, and valid only within, our limited cognitive structure
(Novalis 1796/2003: 167–8). The consequent problem of elucidating being prior to our
representation of it in predicative and identity statements is then provided with an
affective-aesthetic solution: if being qua ground of consciousness must be considered in
abstraction from any objectual character, then its proximate manifestation within us must
be similarly non-objectual, that is, it must comprise a mode of consciousness which is not
intentionally directed, which is as much as to say that it must have the character of
feeling. Feeling must, however, stand in some relation to our judgementally articulated
consciousness in order for it to function as a transcendental ground. This relation,
Novalis argues, is one of content to form, but it follows what Novalis calls the principle of
‘ordo inversus’: reflection reverses the true relations obtaining within the subject, on the
analogy with a mirror image, so that when reflection takes up feeling, being’s affective
self-manifestation is lost from view, and the status of being something is attributed
instead to what has been formed conceptually.
This provides a rough indication of how the post-Kantian model of the subject can evolve,
under the momentum of transcendental reflection, in a psychoanalytic direction. The
transcendental project, as Dieter Henrich has argued (2003: ch. 2), aims to construct a
theory of the subject in which the subject can recognize itself: it specifies the conception
under which the mind operates and which is deployed implicitly in making those
operations possible. This subjective fit provides one measure of validation for the theory.
The transcendental image of the mind should thus be or correspond to—in a phrase of
Richard Wollheim’s (1972)—the mind’s own image of itself. This conception of the end
and method of transcendental inquiry does not, however, as we have seen, bind it to
representing the subject as fully self-transparent: for a variety of reasons, gaps may be
affirmed in the transcendental theory of the mind, and where these exist they will imply
regions of opacity in the subject’s apprehension of its own grounds.
The next historical and logical step consists, as indicated earlier, in the insertion of
Nature into the place opened up by post-Kantian transcendental reflection. The
conception of the empirical subject as constituted by an aporetic self-relation—the mind
as a (p. 34) dynamically self-concealing structure, which can open up to itself and the
world only on the condition that the facilitating ground of its doing so is excluded from
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consciousness—is annexed to the philosophy of nature by Schelling (1800/1978), who first

formulates explicitly the concept of the Unconscious, identifying it with the infinite
activity of natura naturans. Schelling’s unconscious has no specific role in psychological
explanation, but Schubert, Carus, and others in his wake ascribe an unconscious to the
human subject in an individualized form: the development of human personality is
regarded as the effect of a subsisting unconscious core, which expresses in microcosmic
form the principles, forces, and order of Nature at large. The final chapters in the story of
progressive approximation to the psychoanalytic unconscious are familiar: Schopenhauer
and then Nietzsche advance speculative hypotheses concerning the foundations of human
motivation which repudiate the original transcendentalist association of the unconscious
with rationality.
Spinoza on Human Motivation

In Part Three of the Ethics, ‘Concerning the Origin and Nature of the Emotions’, Spinoza
devotes many pages to a systematic catalogue of the psychological laws governing the
affects. On the basis of three ‘primary’ emotions of pleasure, pain, and desire, and their
immediate derivatives, love and hatred (E3 P11, E3 P13 S; 2002: 285, 286), Spinoza
defines in Propositions 13–59 (2002: 286–311) the complex kinds of emotion which may
be formed, and the conditions under which they increase or decrease in intensity, and
yield to, or are transformed into, one another.
Spinoza’s purpose in giving this account is, at a minimum, to bring home to us the ways
in which, and the degree to which, our passions determine our action dispositions
independently of anything that could be called reflective endorsement. The account
thereby serves the end of increasing our freedom: correct insight into the causation of
our passions—above all, appreciation that they cannot be expected to respond to reason
in the way that we naively suppose—can spur us to adopt the less direct but truly
effective measures for their regulation described by Spinoza in the opening pages of Part
Five.
As commentators have observed, there is much in the Ethics that can be regarded as
proto-psychoanalytic. Spinoza envisages explanation of mental states and changes in a
way that parallels and tracks bodily conditions and changes. Spinoza’s strict
psychological determinism echoes Freud’s equally categorical statements on the topic.
The picture of the mind as moving from one condition to another according to laws of
efficient causality—registered by changes of hedonic state but not explained by invoking
pleasure as an end—recalls the model that Freud draws up in his pre-psychoanalytic
Project for a Scientific Psychology and which survives recognizably in the ‘economic’
component of the psychoanalytic metapsychology. The concept of imagination, given very
broad scope in the Ethics and introduced primarily in order to account for the limitations
of human cognition, is employed by Spinoza in the context of the affects in ways that
show (p. 35) it doing duty for the panoply of concepts (pleasure as opposed to reality
principle, primary as opposed to secondary process, phantasy, screen memory, etc.)
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employed by Freud to explain the mind’s capacity for operating with indifference to
reality. Spinoza, like Freud, regards wish-fulfilment as having its basis in the fundamental
structure of the mind.3 Spinoza’s assertion of the affective impotence of cognitions, their
inability to check emotions directly by virtue of their truth alone,4 is mirrored in Freud’s
account of the insufficiency of intellectual assent to interpretations and of the necessity of
working-through. Spinoza anticipates Freud’s devaluation of the property of
consciousness, if not in fact to have taken it a good deal further, insofar as consciousness
barely figures in the Ethics, which nowhere treats it as a topic in its own right. Conatus
corresponds to Freud’s conception of libido. And so on.
What I want to focus on, with a view to getting a unified perspective on these doctrinal
points of contact of Spinoza with Freud, is the nature of Spinoza’s claims in E3 P13–59.
Some of the propositions advanced in E3 P13–59 are indisputably true, perhaps even, as
we would put it, conceptual truths, while others are far from obvious and require
decoding. Spinoza gives no explicit account of their epistemological basis, and their
status is not immediately clear. Insofar as they deal with observable patterns in the
phenomena of psychological life, it would be natural to suppose that those which are not
candidates for conceptual truth must be a posteriori, but it is barely conceivable in light
of the method and ambition of the work as a whole, and the specific role of Part Three,
that Spinoza should intend a mere inventory of psychological tendencies drawn from
common observation, amounting to the inferior kind of knowledge that he calls ‘casual
experience’ (E2 P40 S2; 2002: 267). Spinoza’s aim must be, rather, to nail down the
essential ‘logic’ of affect—in the context of the Ethics, nothing less would do.
This raises the expectation of being able to regard Spinoza’s propositions as a priori, and
Spinoza does indeed spell out, in the proofs of the propositions, deductive connections
with the foundational metaphysical claims about human beings that he has made in Part
Two and the earlier portion of Part Three. In these proofs Spinoza’s constant reference
point is his thesis of the mind’s necessary endeavour ‘to think of those things that
increase or assist the body’s power of activity’ or (what is the same) ‘the power of
thought of our mind’ (E3 P11–13; 2002: 284–6).
What deserves attention is the nature of the necessity whereby conatus expresses itself in
the causation of affect. One type of necessity that we can make good sense of in the
analysis of psychological explanation is the normative necessity associated with rational
choice theory and the ordinary practical syllogism,5 and some of Spinoza’s propositions
may look as if they can be expressed in such familiar terms: that he ‘who hates someone
will endeavour to injure him unless he fears that he will suffer a greater injury in return’
(p. 36) (E3 P39; 2002: 298), for instance, might be considered a prudential norm. But this
cannot be what Spinoza has in mind, since such rational necessity is manifestly absent
from his claims, for example, that we shall love or hate an object which we imagine to be
similar to an object that is wont to affect us with pleasure or pain (E3 P16; 2002: 287);
that we will share the emotion of whatever we imagine to be like ourselves (E3 P27;
2002: 292); that we love, desire, or hate a thing the more steadfastly when we think it
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loved, desired, or hated by somebody else (E3 P31; 2002: 294); that we will seek to
deprive someone of anything they enjoy that only one person can possess (E3 P32; 2002:
295); that our love for someone will turn to hatred if they form a more intimate bond of
friendship (E3 P35; 2002: 296); that we will desire to possess a thing that gave us
pleasure in the same circumstances as when we first took pleasure in it (E3 P36; 2002:
297); that we will hate someone whom we imagine to hate us without cause (E3 P40;
2002: 299) or someone imagined to be similar to ourselves who hates something that we
love and imagine to be similar to ourselves (E3 P45; 2002: 301); that someone’s hatred of
an object that he has previously loved will be proportionate to the strength of his former
love, and vice versa (E3 P38, E3 P44; 2002: 298, 301); that we will have higher regard for
an object that we have not seen in conjunction with other objects or that has nothing in
common with them (E3 P52; 2002: 304). The vectors and tendencies of emotional life to
which Spinoza is pointing are familiar and, as we would put it, thoroughly natural, but if
we choose to honour them on that count with some sort of claim to some kind of
rationality, it is simply because of their familiarity, prevalence, and embeddedness in
human nature, not because we suppose any articulable principle of reasoning or
judgement of ‘rightness’ to underlie them.6
On a weak reading, of the sort that I offered earlier as a minimal characterization of his
intentions, Spinoza would be taken to have shown only how the affects comport
themselves when left to their own devices, information which we could regard as giving
helpful forewarning of the ways in which our rational self-determination is prone to being
subverted. This, however, would be to picture the affects as situated on the outside, and
ourselves—as centres of rational self-determination—on the inside, in the situation of a
swimmer calculating the forces of tide and current. A compelling reason for thinking that
this view of our situation cannot be Spinoza’s is that it corresponds to that of Descartes,
as Spinoza construes—and explicitly rejects—it; it is to ‘conceive man in Nature as a
kingdom within a kingdom’ (E3 Preface; 2002: 277).7 That a much stronger reading is in
order becomes clear when Spinoza says that ‘mental decisions are nothing more than the
appetites themselves’, ‘that mental decision on the one hand, and the appetite and
physical state of the body on the other hand, are … one and the same thing’ (E3 P2 S;
2002: 281),8 a claim which coheres with his declaration of intent to ‘consider human
actions and appetites just as if it were an investigation into lines, planes, or bodies’
(p. 37) (E3 Preface; 2002: 278). Spinoza envisages, therefore, the affects and their
causation as occupying the full space of psychological explanation: they are not what we
qua rational beings are set over and against, rather they are what we are, whence their
metaphysical necessity;9 the question of why we find ourselves subject to immediate
affective determination receives its answer alongside the question of why we conceive
physical bodies as divisible and numerable. Spinoza’s logic of affect is designed to show
that psychological life proceeds in ways that are not driven by any power of practical
reason: explanations with the form of practical syllogisms do not express falsehoods—
human action is not ‘blind’ in that sense—but they do not display the causal reality of the
mind, since what makes them true, insofar as they are true, is not a grasping of
normative relations. Recognition of the true, non-normative character of psychological
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reality is the first step in escaping from human bondage: only when we have grasped that
our ‘ought’ thoughts are nothing but further expressions of conatus, without sui generis
reality, are we in a position to steer ourselves in the appropriate therapeutic direction.10
There is therefore a good sense in which the ordinary concept of a reason for action does
not survive the Ethics.11 Spinoza’s interchangeable use of ‘reason’ and ‘cause’ gives
notice of this.12
What should accordingly strike us when we consider E3 P13–59 with Freud in mind is the
remarkable parallel of Spinoza’s explanations by and of emotion with psychoanalytic
explanations, which similarly appear—from the standpoint of common-sense psychology—
to be poised awkwardly on the border separating reasons from mere causes. Just as it
would make no sense to cite the inherent tendency of love to convert itself into hatred in
the circumstances detailed in E3 P35 as a reason for regarding a person with hatred, so
similarly unconscious determinants as such cannot be incorporated into our self-
reflection as justifications for our actions or propositional attitudes. And yet, nor are
these forms of causation correctly described as merely mechanical: the relations between
cause and effect are internal, and the effects are intelligible in light of their postulated
causes.13 There is no space here to go into detail, but I think it would not be hard to show,
with reference to Freud’s own texts and to typical psychoanalytic case histories, that the
explanatory baseline in psychoanalytic explanation consists in the interaction of elements
in psychic reality in ways which fuse (in a way that at once illuminates and puzzles)
activity of thought with forms of activity conceptualized in terms of movements of organic
and even inorganic bodies.
(p. 38) The shared nature of Spinozistic and psychoanalytic explanation—their fusion of
thought and mechanism into a single form of efficient causality—is reflected in the points
of doctrinal covergence listed earlier. Other revisionary claims concerning the human
subject defended in the Ethics with conspicuous psychoanalytic resonance include
Spinoza’s reductive conception of the self, his rejection of free will, his use of the concept
of expression as a linchpin of psychological explanation, his overhauling of the common-
sense taxonomy of mental states, and his argument that the very fact of failures of reason
suffices to falsify the kingdom-within-a-kingdom conception of the subject.14
The Tension in Psychoanalytic Theory

My answer to the question posed earlier—whence the psychoanalytic concept of the
unconscious?—is therefore that Spinoza’s logic of affect can be thought to mesh with the
idealist conception of self-concealing subjectivity, yielding a model of the mind which
approximates to that of psychoanalysis: in rough outline, the psychoanalytic conception of
the unconscious is the product of substituting for the synthetic acts of transcendental
subjectivity, postulated by the idealist/transcendentalist with a view to solving problems
of epistemology and metaphysics, the sorts of contents and operations which Spinoza
postulates with a view to explaining human action and affect. Freud has accordingly a
foot in two distinct camps: the humanistic tradition of classical German philosophy, in
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which cognitive and ethical tasks are conceived and pursued from the internal standpoint
of the subject, and the alternative naturalistic programme of modern philosophy.
This seems to me a fair representation of the intellectual forces which come together in
Freud’s notion of the unconscious, and it accords well with the salient facts of
psychoanalysis’ historical reception—to wit, the huge appeal which psychoanalytic ideas
have had across the board in the humanities for over a century, alongside the determined
attempt, to the fore in the North American psychoanalytic tradition, to hold
psychoanalysis fast (for better or worse) to the agenda of the natural sciences.15 It is
difficult to see that any more economical hypothesis could account for the extraordinary
depth of disagreement separating different schools of psychoanalytic thought, ranging as
it does from deconstructionist and neo-Nietzschean appropriations of Freud to the
interpretation of psychoanalysis as proto-neurophysiology.
Representing psychoanalysis as an attempt to unite in a single concept two major and

distinct trajectories in modern philosophy throws light on the theory and accounts for
(p. 39) the double character of Freud’s notion of the unconscious, but by the same token
makes clear the difficulty which it faces. On the one hand, the legacy of idealism showing
itself, Freud asks that we avow the unconscious, that we regard it as our own, while on
the other he insists, in line with Spinoza, that the real forms of motivational causation are
incongruent with the image of action as proceeding from a centre of self-conscious self-
determination. This combination of claims is what forces out the characterization of the
unconscious as the ‘Other’ of consciousness. The extended debate in the philosophy of
psychoanalysis concerning whether psychoanalysis is a form of causal explanation or of
reason explanation, reflects this duality.16 So too does the puzzle, which has also given
rise to an inconclusive literature, concerning the coherence of supposing that bona fide
mental states, of the sort attributed in psychoanalytic explanation, can subsist without
consciousness.
The problem can be put in sharper focus if we contrast the relation to common-sense
psychology required for psychoanalytic explanation with the situation of Spinoza. As my
earlier discussion emphasized, Spinoza’s intentions are uncompromisingly revisionary. If
Spinoza is not an eliminativist regarding common-sense psychology, he comes within a
hair’s breadth of being one. Psychoanalytic theory cannot, however, mean to follow
Spinoza’s hard line, because its own distinctive forms of explanation are interwoven with
those of common-sense psychology, and its own concept of the unconscious is formulated
with reference to and as the counterpart of the ordinary conception of the subject.
The consequences of this conceptual compromise—psychoanalysis’ adoption of

Spinozistic explanation, without acceptance of its revisionary implications—are reflected
in Sartre’s critique of Freud, the nub of which is contained in the following passage:
By rejecting the conscious unity of the psyche, Freud is obliged to imply

everywhere a magic unity linking distant phenomena across obstacles, just as
sympathetic magic unites the spellbound person and the wax image fashioned in
his like. The unconscious drive (Trieb) through magic is endowed with the
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character ‘repressed’ or ‘condemned’, which completely pervades it, colours it,

and magically provokes its symbolism. Similarly the conscious phenomenon is
entirely coloured by its symbolic meaning although it can not apprehend this
meaning by itself in clear consciousness.
(Sartre 1943/1958: 53–4)
This claim is explained more fully in Sartre’s essay on the emotions:
The psychoanalytic interpretation [of an emotion] conceives the conscious

phenomenon as the symbolic realization of a desire repressed by the censor. Note
that, for consciousness, the desire is not involved in its symbolic realisation. In so
far as it (p. 40) exists by and in our consciousness it is only what it gives itself out
to be: emotion, desire for sleep, theft, laurel-phobia, etc. If it were otherwise, if we
had any consciousness, even only implicit, of the real desire, we should be in bad
faith, and that is not what the psychoanalyst means.
(Sartre 1939/2004: 30)
So the relation between an emotion and the signification conferred on it under a

psychoanalytic interpretation must, to some degree, resemble the relation of the ashes of
a fire extinct upon a mountain to those who lit it. And yet, Sartre points out, it cannot be
merely external. For the psychoanalyst ‘there is always an internal analogy between the
conscious fact and the desire it expresses, since the conscious fact is symbolical of the
expressed complex’: the symbolic character of the conscious fact ‘is constitutive of it’.
This, however, leads us back in a circle, to the identification of unconscious motivation
with mere bad faith: ‘if symbolization is constitutive it is legitimate to see an immanent
bond of comprehension between the symbolization and the symbol’—‘the relation
between symbol, symbolized and symbolization is an intra-structural bond of
consciousness’ (Sartre 1939/2004: 32).
The problem that Sartre describes, expressed in terms of my historical reconstruction, is

therefore that psychoanalytic explanation invokes the conception of the unity of the mind
and of the nature of relations between mental elements contained in our commonsense
self-conception, elaborated in the Kantian tradition, and also models the mind in terms of
Spinoza’s patterns of causation, from which the same degree and type of reflexive unity is
absent. The psychoanalytic concept of symbolization is a bridge, not just from
unconscious to conscious facts, but also from the one philosophical model of the subject
to the other, and the strain which it is under reflects the way in which psychoanalytic
theory merely superimposes—grafts onto one another, without integrating—the two
different models of the mind.17
There are, to be sure, ways of softening the impact of Sartre’s criticism. We may, for
instance, postulate some species of mental connection midway between immanent bonds
of comprehension and merely external causal linkages of the fire and ashes sort. And it is
clear furthermore that in doing so we may claim a degree of support from common-sense
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psychology (which does not, after all, assimilate all ‘bonds of comprehension’ to the clear-
cut case of knowing the meaning of a sign, as Sartre perhaps tends to imply). Moves of
this sort can be given plausibility through being interrelated with one another in a
systematic way. Psychoanalysis can thus be presented as an extension of common-sense
psychology. What I think nonetheless needs to be recognized as the substantial truth in
Sartre’s criticism—and which in no way depends upon his professed Cartesianism—is his
insight that, to the extent that we extend common-sense psychology by proposing a new
species of mental state or relation, even though each individual theoretical move in the
construction of the extension may have an adequate local justification, there is a sense in
which the cumulative effect of the incremental changes is a philosophical loss of (p. 41)
bearings; in historical shorthand, we wonder how, starting with Kant, we could have
ended up with Spinoza. This is quite compatible with the resulting theory’s working
perfectly well as an explanatory system in accordance with criteria appropriate to
empirical theories; what it means is only that we cannot render the theory philosophically
perspicuous.18
One way in which the problem might be resolved decisively is through an expansion of
the boundaries of the self, in a way that permits reconception of the unconscious in terms
that make full metaphysical sense of the identification with it demanded by
psychoanalysis. If the Nature that feeds into my unconscious is in reality more of myself,
if it is a whole with which I am in some sense identical, then it is false that, as Sartre puts
it, ‘I am ego but I am not id’ (1943/1958: 50): rather, the unconscious is a continuation of
me. This view of the metaphysics of human personality is, in fact, the picture proposed
(for epistemological and metaphysical reasons) by Schelling. It amounts, of course, to a
revision of the common-sense view of the borders of the self, but it conserves, unlike
Spinoza’s metaphysics, the notion of self-conscious self-determination. However, it also,
plainly, requires attributing to Nature properties that disenchanted modern natural
science denies it, and though a hint of a preparedness to retrieve nineteenth-century
Romantic idealism can be found in a very few psychoanalytic thinkers19—and arguably
receives encouragement from Freud’s late remarks on Eros and Thanatos—it is in flat
contradiction with Freud’s official account of the psychoanalytic Weltanschauung and not
likely to be regarded as an acceptable condition for securing the conceptual integrity of
psychoanalysis.
Where does all this leave psychoanalysis, as regards its systematic evaluation? The larger
issues which arise concerning the long-running debate concerning psychoanalysis’ claim
to truth obviously cannot be pursued here, but I have a limited suggestion, arising from
the preceding discussion.
One reaction to my account—which will recommend itself to those unimpressed by

psychoanalysis’ claim to psychological insight—is to take the diagnosis implied by the
historical reconstruction as the basis for a quick conviction. The empirical defensibility of
psychoanalytic claims is a matter for another occasion, but if the roots of (p. 42)
psychoanalysis’ conceptual difficulties lie as deep as I have suggested, namely in a
collision of transcendentalist with naturalist commitments, then it may reasonably be
Page 12 of 17

held that the re-emergence of this overarching philosophical antinomy in the

psychoanalytic context—albeit in an especially overt, acute, aggravated form—cannot be
a reason for impugning the theory’s claim to offer genuine psychological explanation.
Psychoanalysis ought not to be made a casualty of our inability to resolve what is at the
end of the day a wholly general philosophical problem. Acknowledging the ambiguity
concerning the personal versus Spinozistic status of the unconscious, and accepting that
the theory does not explicate itself in a fully coherent manner, is an acceptable price to
pay for a picture of human beings that makes sense of stretches of human experience
which will otherwise be left completely opaque.
In so far as Longuenesse and I differ, our difference lies in our respective attitudes to the
proposed unification of Kant’s ‘I ought’ and Freud’s superego. This Longuenesse regards
as an unproblematic theoretical unification, which promises to help out Kant’s ethical
theory, by transposing a questionable transcendentalist conception into a secure
naturalistic context. In my view, waiving all questions about the capacity of Kant’s
conception of morality to survive the move intact, the proposal draws attention to an
underlying bifurcation in psychoanalytic thought, which I have modelled in terms of its
derivation from incongruent historical sources. One of these, the Spinozistic, is
antithetical to Kantian ways of thinking. This alone does not exclude Longuenesse’s
proposal, since, I have argued, psychoanalysis is not consistently Spinozistic. It may be
true, therefore, that there are aspects of Freud’s metapsychology which accord with
Kant’s concepts. The problem, however, is that psychoanalysis is not consistently Kantian
either, and its ambiguity cannot be resolved in either the one direction or the other. This
should not, I have urged, be made an objection to psychoanalysis. But if correct, it means
that psychoanalysis does not offer a philosophically safe home for Kant’s ‘I ought’ to the
extent that Longuenesse supposes.20
References
Alexander, F. (1935). ‘The logic of emotions and its dynamic background’. International
Assoun, P.-L. (1976). Freud: la philosophie et les philosophes. Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France.
Augustine (400/2002). Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Carriero, J. (2005). ‘Spinoza on Final Causality’. In D. Garber and S. Nadler (eds), Oxford
Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, Vol. 2 (pp. 105–148). New York: Clarendon Press.
Davidson, D. (2005). ‘Spinoza’s Causal Theory of the Affects’. In Truth, Language, and
History: Philosophical Essays, Vol. 5 (pp. 295–314). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fichte, J. G. (1794/1982). The Science of Knowledge, with the First and Second
(p. 43)
Introductions, eds and trans. P. Heath and J. Lachs. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
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Henrich, D. (2003). Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism, ed. D. S.
Pacini. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kant, I. (1781/1999). Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and eds P. Guyer and A. W. Wood.
Kitcher, P. (1992). Freud’s Dream: A Complete Interdisciplinary Science of Mind.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Koistinen, O. (2009). ‘Spinoza on Action’. In O. Koistinen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion

to Spinoza’s Ethics (pp. 167–187). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lear, J. (1990). Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Reconstruction of

Psychoanalysis. London: Faber.

Longuenesse, B. (2012). ‘Kant’s “I” in “I Ought To” and Freud’s Superego’. Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 86: 19–39.
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N. Midgley, H. Somers-Hall, A. Welchman, and M. Reglitz. London: Continuum.
Marquard, O. (1987). Transzendentaler Idealismus, romantische Naturphilosophie,

Psychoanalyse. Cologne: Dinter.
Nicholls, A. and Liebscher, M. (eds) (2010). Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-

Century German Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Pearson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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University Press.
Redding, P. (1999). The Logic of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (1939/2004). Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, trans. P. Mairet. London:
Routledge.
Sartre, J.-P. (1943/1958). Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological

Ontology, trans. H. E. Barnes. London: Methuen.
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Spinoza, B. (2002). Complete Works, trans. S. Shirley, ed. M. L. Morgan. Indianapolis, IN:
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Essays and Lectures (pp. 31–53). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (p. 44)
Notes:
(1) For a clear statement of the point, see Tugendhat (1986: 131–2). The puzzle here may
be regarded as a heightened, theoretically elaborated form of the perplexity Saint
Augustine reports in contemplating the vastness of memory: ‘Although it is part of my
nature, I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow
to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain? Is it
somewhere outside itself and not within it? How, then, can it be part of it, if it is not
contained in it? I am lost in wonder when I consider this problem. It bewilders
me’ (Augustine 400/2002: 216; Book X, 8).
(2) In what follows I am heavily indebted to Marquard’s ground-breaking study (1987),

though my reconstruction does not follow his account in all details. Other illuminating
studies of the field include Assoun (1976), Redding (1999), and Völmicke (2005). Detailed
discussion of major figures in the development of the concept of the unconscious can be
found in Nicholls and Liebscher (2010).
(3) See E3 P13 (Spinoza 2002: 286) and E3 P28 (293).
(4) See E4 P1 (Spinoza 2002: 323–4), E4 P7 (325–6), and E4 P14 (328–9).
(5) Thus Davidson (2005) seems to identify causal explanation within the attribute of
Thought with rationalization. My construal accords with the interpretation of Spinoza in
Carriero (2005: see especially 136–41).
(6) See E3 P9 S (Spinoza 2002: 284).
(7) Key points in Spinoza’s extended argument against this conception are E2 P48–9
(2002: 272–7), E4 P1–7 (2002: 323–6), and E5 Preface (2002: 363–5).
(8) A mental decision, Spinoza continues, ‘is not distinct from imagination and memory,
and is nothing but the affirmation which an idea, in so far as it is an idea, necessarily
involves’ (E3 P2 S; 2002: 282).
(9) Which is why achieving freedom is associated with the metaphysical modification of
our identity—identification with the immortal part of the mind—described in Part Five.
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(10) Whence Nietzsche’s praise of Spinoza for restoring the world’s

‘innocence’ (1887/1994: 50; Essay II, §15). Spinoza describes himself as seeking to
‘understand’ the emotions and actions of men rather than ‘abuse or deride’ them (E3
Preface; 2002: 277).
(11) This is of course very far from a complete analysis, which leaves aside the special
case where reason has become determining; my intention is simply to highlight points of
relevance to psychoanalysis. On Spinoza’s complex theory of agency, see Koistinen
(2009).
(12) See E1 P11, Second Proof (Spinoza 2002: 222). Also relevant is the famous
comparison of a person’s consciousness of their agency with the thinking of a stone in
motion (Letter 58; 2002: 908–10).
(13) Of interest here is the sketch of a psychoanalytic logic of affect in Alexander (1935),
which attempts to coordinate talk of ‘emotional syllogisms’ with the modelling of mental
processes on bodily functions.
(14) ‘But my argument is this: in Nature nothing happens which can be attributed to its
defectiveness, for Nature is always the same, and its force and power of acting is
everywhere one and the same; that is, the laws and rules of Nature according to which all
things happen and change from one form to another are everywhere and always the
same’ (E3 Preface; Spinoza 2002: 278). Also relevant are E3 P2 S (2002: 281–2), on the
cognitive illusion of the distinctness of mental decision, and the deflationary remarks on
perfection in the Preface to Part Four (2002: 102–3).
(15) Kitcher (1992) provides a sophisticated version of this approach.
(16) As Ricœur puts it, the ‘aporia’ of psychoanalysis, ‘the whole problem of the Freudian
epistemology’, may be ‘centralized in a single question’ concerning the integration of
‘interpretation that necessarily moves among meanings’ with explanation by forces, and
‘Freudianism exists only on the basis of its refusal of that disjunction’ (Ricœur 1977: 66–
7).
(17) Sartre does not, however, reject symbolic interpretation as such, and towards the end
of Being and Nothingness he proposes what he considers a superior conceptualization
(1943/1958: 602–15).
(18) Deconstructionist and neo-Nietzschean readings of Freud and applications of

psychoanalytic ideas, referred to earlier, construe psychoanalytic theory as engaged in
(negative) metaphysical assertion. This removes the problem under discussion, since if at
the heart of Freud’s theory of the mind stands the claim that the concept of the person or
subject is incoherent and/or that the reality in which persons and subjects consist does
not permit coherent conceptualization, then the theory is freed from the tension I have
been exploring and the inconsistency alleged by Sartre: the tension and inconsistency are
relocated in the concept which is the theory’s object. What this approach may be right
about is that psychoanalysis counts among its data the difficulty which subjects
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encounter in conceiving themselves in the terms that psychoanalysis recommends, in

other words, in relating themselves to their unconscious states, but it is not plausible to
construe Freudian theory, as a whole, as a consistently sceptical metatheory.
(19) Loewald concludes, after consideration of the ‘reconciliation of the subject–object

dichotomy’ involved in sublimation (1988: 20), that psychoanalysis refers us to a natura
naturans characterized by a subjectivity vaster than ‘human individual mentation’ (1988:
79–80). Also of high interest is the discussion in Lear (1990: ch. 5).
(20) Reprinted from Sebastian Gardner (2015), ‘Psychoanalytic Theory: A Historical

Reconstruction’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 86(1): 41–60, Copyright ©
2015, Oxford University Press, by permission of Oxford University Press.
Sebastian Gardner
Department of Philosophy, UCL, UK
Page 17 of 17

From Recognition to Intersubjectivity: Hegel and Psychoanalysis

From Recognition to Intersubjectivity: Hegel and
Psychoanalysis
Molly Macdonald

This chapter engages in a conversation between two seemingly disparate discourses of

Hegelian philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. In the work of Jean Hyppolite, the
chapter locates the first use of the term intersubjectivity in relation to Hegel’s theory of
recognition as found in Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) and argues that Hyppolite
pioneered a mode of thinking about Hegel and psychoanalysis. The chapter traces the
transmutation initiated by Hyppolite through the work of Paul Ricouer, Jacques Lacan,
Judith Butler, Jessica Benjamin, and others to locate the influence of Hegel’s philosophy
on a particular line of psychoanalytic thinking. The author’s reading of Hegel
incorporated here argues that the majority of attention paid to the concept of recognition,
and its translation into terms of intersubjective relating, has confined it to the episode of
the Lord and Bondsman and that further attention should be paid to the drama of the
Unhappy Consciousness which follows.
Keywords: Hegel, psychoanalysis, recognition, intersubjectivity, Phenomenology of Spirit, unhappy consciousness,

Jean Hyppolite, Paul Ricoeur, Jessica Benjamin
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Introduction
I would like to illuminate a particular conversation, initiated in the first part of the
twentieth century and still alive today, which takes place between the two seemingly
disparate discourses of Hegelian philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. This conversation
can take a number of different forms, the most recognizable of which involves a focus on
the work of Jacques Lacan or on concepts such as negation, as in the work of Slavoj
Žižek, following Lacan.1 My own focus, however, is on exploring the concept of
intersubjectivity as it rises out of the Hegelian concept of recognition, which is arguably
one of the richest and most significant concepts found in the Phenomenology of Spirit.
The theory of intersubjectivity was introduced by Jean Hyppolite to describe this process
of recognition, to name the relationship between two consciousnesses.2 Intersubjectivity
comes to describe what takes place in the movement from consciousness into self-
consciousness, dramatized by Hegel in the Lordship and Bondage episode, as a
movement that relies on the interaction, the interrelating of two subjects, each
responsible not only for themselves, but also for the other with whom they are bound. The
notion of the ‘subject’, freighted as it is with its own particular history in philosophical
and theoretical discourse, asks on the most basic level that, rather than see our existence
as anchored in a stable and concrete self, we reconceive of ourselves as subjects,
constantly in the process of being made, a product of both our internal lives and our
interactions with the world of others and objects. For the purposes of the work I’m doing
here to think of Hegel together with psychoanalysis, I would like to consider the Hegelian
subject along the lines suggested by Judith Butler (1999: xv). She sees this subject as ‘ek-
static’—as a ‘subject who constantly finds itself outside itself, and whose periodic
expropriations do not lead to a return to a former self’. This is a self deeply involved in
constant (re)formation. In this process, it is misrecognition as much as recognition that
constitutes the subject, and which continuously causes the loss of the self, a ‘perpetual
displacement’ complementing a perpetual desiring and bound subject. In other words,
this state of being outside itself is the very thing that drives the Hegelian subject’s
existence and is never a permanent state, but only part of the dialectical movement. A
fundamental part of the dialectical movement of consciousness is that the subject is
returned to itself through its interactions with another self-consciousness.
To find a concept of intersubjectivity in Hegel, then, as Hyppolite does and as I do in

following him, is not to distort Hegel’s original intention, but serves only to recast what is
already there: we are, for Hegel, a process of becoming, and this process entails being
bound, and unbound, and rebound to another consciousness, as much as we are to the
world of objects. Indeed, it is this idea of process and emergence of the self through its
relations with the world of objects and others that will serve as one of the key links
between Hegel’s thought and psychoanalytic theory and practice. As psychoanalyst André
Green (1999: 41) writes: ‘something is continuing which started with Hegel: the idea of
consciousness as a process which is self-revelatory through its discourse, the path from
latency to actuality’. One of the very basic tenets, both practical and theoretical, of
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psychoanalysis is the communication (discourse) of the analysand’s unconscious, to

themselves and to the analyst. This is a process through which the patient brings to self-
consciousness (self-reveals) that which has remained hidden, repressed, as yet
unthought, but deeply felt and therefore known in some affective form. The crucial aspect
of what takes place in an analytic encounter is that this process is initiated, witnessed,
interpreted by and with the analyst. We can take this witnessing as a form of recognition
and thus contend that the encounter in the analytic setting is a unique form of
intersubjective relating that leads to the elaboration of consciousness. Through the lens
of Hegel, I read Green here to mean that to move from latency to actuality is to move
from simply being a perceiving, sense-certain consciousness, to a dynamic, truly alive,
intersubjectively formed self-consciousness. Out of the analytic encounter is where, in the
language of Hegel’s Phenomenology, new shapes of knowing can come to life, manifesting
in new moments of self-consciousness.
What follows in this chapter is first a location of the concept of recognition in Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit. I work at extending its reach beyond the Lordship and Bondage
episode,3 through the shapes of consciousness which Hegel dramatizes in the figures of
the Stoic and the Sceptic and into a consideration of the Unhappy Consciousness. I offer
a reading of the Unhappy Consciousness as a way of remedying what I see as the
limitations and blind spots of distilling a concept of recognition, and the notion of
intersubjectivity that comes to correspond to it, down to the master/slave dialectic. The
figure of the Unhappy Consciousness, too, has its own genealogy in twentieth-century
philosophy, starting with the pioneering work of Jean Wahl. Following Wahl, I will argue it
is a crucial figure, the ‘motor of the dialectic’, necessary to break theories of self-
consciousness out of the deadlock of master/slave dialectic.4 I will then turn to the
transmutation of the concept of recognition into that of intersubjectivity, touching upon
examples of what I see as the most significant interventions in this move. In so doing I
cement a positioning of the idea of intersubjectivity as one of the most powerful links to
be made between Hegel’s philosophical work and contemporary psychoanalytic theory.
Recognition in the Phenomenology of Spirit
The Process of Being Bound to the Other: Lordship and Bondage
In the translation of the concept of recognition into that of intersubjectivity performed

earlier by Jean Hyppolite we see his equation of the ‘need of desire for recognition in
another desire’ and the term ‘intersubjectivity’.5 I now locate this material in Hegel’s
Phenomenology itself. In Chapter B ‘Self-Consciousness’, in the section titled
‘Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage’ Hegel
(1977: 111) writes:
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Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists
for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged. The Notion of this its
unity in its duplication embraces many and varied meanings. […] The detailed
exposition of the Notion of this spiritual unity in its duplication will present us
with the process of Recognition.
The elaboration of this process of recognition involves both the loss of the self in an other
and then the return to the self via this other. Here, when self-consciousness ‘is faced’ by
another self-consciousness, it not only finds itself ‘as an other being’ (and we can recall
here Butler’s formulation of the Hegelian subject as constituted by being outside of itself)
but also negates the other independent being to see only itself in this other. This is a
process of loss of the self and return to the self, of negation of the other and affirmation
of the self in this negation. Importantly, both self-conscious independent beings are
experiencing this process simultaneously: ‘Each is for the other the middle term through
which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; each is for itself, and for the
other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only
through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one
another’ (PS: 112).
As the section progresses, the drama of the scene heightens and it is in this dramatic
tension that most readings of the Phenomenology revel, for what transpires is that this
mutual recognition cannot sustain itself in the abstract. In order for self-consciousness to
truly come to life there must be more at stake, and what is at stake is life itself:
In so far as it is the action of the other, each seeks the death of the other. But in
doing so, the second kind of action, action on its own part, is also involved; for the
former involves the staking of its own life. Thus, the relation of the two self-
conscious individuals is such that they prove themselves and each other through a
life-and-death struggle. They must engage in this struggle, for they must raise
their certainty of being for themselves to truth, both in the case of the other and in
their own case. And it is only through the staking of one’s life that freedom is won.
[…] The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person,
but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-
consciousness (PS: 113–14).
To truly be alive, not just a body, a person who exists, one must stake one’s life in relating
to an other. Freedom only comes about through this life-and-death struggle. This is not, at
least not yet, an actual staking of life, but a staking of psychic life. But again, Hegel
increases the tension. He posits that this is a one-sided and unequal relationship.
Reciprocity collapses in an inevitable splitting into the lord (the independent
consciousness who lives for itself) and the bondsman (the dependent consciousness who
lives for another). We are introduced to the idea that the two consciousnesses then
become mediated by an object that is the product of the work of the bondsman, an object
that the lord relies on for his existence. This is an ‘object of desire’ (PS: 115) and it
belongs to the bondsman. It becomes, therefore, the medium through which he is both
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bound to the lord and potentially free. Importantly, the lord is also completely bound to
the bondsman through this object and achieves his recognition through this other
consciousness. There are many further moves that Hegel makes in this section, most
crucially to do with the nature of desire and of the work of the bondsman, through which
he becomes ‘conscious of what he truly is’ (PS: 118). It is through this work, through
feeling the absolute fear of death and transforming it with its work that the bondsman
thus ‘acquires a mind of its own’ and thus a kind of freedom that is more free than the
Lord’s. Yet this is a freedom that is ‘still enmeshed in servitude’ and Hegel needs to bring
us through the subsequent shapes of consciousness in order to elucidate the process of
recognition in its various permutations.
There is a certain limitation to the readings of intersubjectivity that stay within the
Hegelian confines of the ‘struggle for recognition’ as based in this moment of the
dialectic, even though there are compelling reasons for most interpretations of Hegel’s
thinking to entrench themselves here and, indeed, the confluence of his thought with
psychoanalytic theory is given grounding in this dramatic passage. Part of the
responsibility for the lasting impact of this section of Hegel’s Phenomenology is down to
the way in which it was read by Alexandre Kojève whose Marx-inflected lectures on Hegel
were to prove remarkably influential on a cohort of French students, who would
themselves go on to be leading intellectuals (amongst others George Bataille, Maurice
Blanchot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Andre Breton, and Lacan). From Kojève on there was a
particular flavour of Hegel that was accepted, the Hegel of desire and the ‘struggle to the
death’. Judith Butler (1997: 11) argues that, because it was perfectly suited to a
‘liberationist narrative for various progressive political visions[,] most readers have
neglected to pay attention to the resolution of freedom into self-enslavement at the end of
the chapter’.6 I will now briefly move through the stages of the Stoic and the Sceptic
before landing at the unhappy consciousness, the site of this self-enslavement. I believe
that Butler does not go far enough to see that there is a resolution to this self-
enslavement embedded in the episode of the unhappy consciousness, a resolution that
brings us back to a scene of intersubjective relating.
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Stoicism and Scepticism
The state of externalization and freedom reached at the end of the Lordship and Bondage
section quickly transforms into the internalized state of thought of the Stoic as self-
consciousness attempts to understand its freedom. Consciousness begins to lose sight of
the necessity of the other and the ‘I’ becomes a seemingly self-sufficient being: ‘In
thinking, I am free, because I am not in an other, but remain simply and solely in
communion with myself, and the object, which is for me the essential being, is in
undivided unity being-for-myself; and my activity in conceptual thinking is a movement
within myself’ (PS: 120). The process of recognition here is solipsistic, self-consciousness
involved only in recognizing itself. This recognition then changes further into the shape of
Scepticism as thought is actualized. From the externalization of consciousness which
results in a bounded state, both to its own object and to the external world, what looks
like a move towards freedom is a consciousness edging slowly towards the unbounded
state. In scepticism the freedom of stoicism ‘becomes a reality’, ‘duplicates itself, and
now knows itself to be a duality’. We have here a remarkable splitting of the self into
‘dual natured, merely contradictory being’ (PS: 126). This splitting causes deep suffering
for self-consciousness and this deeply suffering state is the unhappy consciousness.
The Unhappy Consciousness
Building on the work of Wahl, Hyppolite (1974: 190) proposed that ‘Unhappy
consciousness is the fundamental theme of the Phenomenology. Consciousness, as such,
is in principle always unhappy consciousness, for it has not yet reached the concrete
identity of certainty and truth, and therefore it aims at something beyond itself’. Such a
reading does not follow the traditional ‘end of history’ readings of the Phenomenology but
instead argues that even when one gets to the ‘end’, one is always still aiming at
‘something beyond’. This is the movement of consciousness, of the dialectic itself.
The birth of the unhappy consciousness is, in many ways, the manifestation, the
actualization, of the potential for the pain and suffering that are the potential for all who
possess self-consciousness. It is a product of the movements of the stoic and the sceptic
that have come before. It is the culmination of the fear and the terror of the ‘life-and-
death struggle’ that took place with the lord and bondsman. It is, in some senses, the
affective response of consciousness articulated and made apparent since we have now
turned to the idea of the activity of consciousness as it occurs in one individual rather
than between two. Here we encounter consciousness that is experiencing a crisis of
existence. Unlike the sceptic that set about freeing itself, with a miscalculated coldness,
from itself and from the world in which it existed, the attitude of the unhappy
consciousness is not one of indifference. If anything, it could be accused of feeling too
intensely its own existence.
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What the unhappy consciousness is bound to at this stage is the feeling of its own
meaninglessness. Hegel writes: ‘Consciousness of life, of its existence and activity, is only
an agonizing over this existence and activity, for therein it is conscious that its essence is
only its opposite, is conscious only of its own nothingness’ (PS: 127). The essence of its
activity is the desire for its own self as this essential being. What it finds is that what it
seeks, the essential, the ‘other’ in an individual form, will necessarily always be out of its
reach. Ultimately, the lack it feels, the desire to fill this lack, is its activity. We can return
to Butler’s formulation of the Hegelian subject as that which is always somehow outside
itself, a kind of becoming subject spurred on by its loss of self. Hegel writes of this
despair in order, I think, to alert us to the danger of unbinding ourselves from the world
of others, to show us the deep vulnerability that is the price of believing that freedom
means complete and utter independence. But he also asks us to think about the
vulnerability of our desires.
In a remarkable move in this section, Hegel introduces the figure of a ‘counsellor’, the
third, to save the Unhappy Consciousness from itself, reinforcing the necessity of an
‘other’ in order to ground the self, to ground the movement of self-consciousness and to
save this newly liberated consciousness from self-despair (PS: 136–8). Intersubjectivity,
then, is cemented as a mode of being that is fundamental to the survival of self-
consciousness, and its realization does not sit with the struggle between master and
slave, but in the acknowledgement of this necessity as it rises from a moment of
existential crisis. I suggest that when interpreting the Phenomenology in this way, if we
perform a secular reading of this section, we can see the figure of a proto-analyst
(counsellor) emerge, which can bolster a reading of Hegel as anticipating the
psychoanalytic project in an unexpected way. In its moment of crisis, consciousness gives
itself over to this mediating figure and in so doing returns to itself by relinquishing what
it thought was its freedom, but what was really just its frenzy of self-conceit. Once this
figure of ‘the third’ as counsellor is introduced, self-consciousness is saved from itself and
returns to Reason. It is not difficult to read an analytic scene into this episode. The
crucial move is not that the counsellor has more power than the despairing self-
consciousness, but that it is equipped to help the unhappy consciousness see itself in a
new light, to form a new mode of knowing, to help relieve the misery and suffering, and
to help it continue on in this process of becoming.
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From Recognition to Intersubjectivity—On the

Way to the Analytic Setting
In order to begin a transition into the analytic setting, I now turn to Paul Ricoeur’s
masterful work, Freud and Philosophy (1970). Ricoeur is not only useful in helping to
further nuance the translation performed by Hyppolite of Hegel’s process of recognition
into the language of intersubjectivity, but he also explicitly locates the analytic encounter
as an intersubjective relation. Celebrated, amongst other things, for its coining of the
phrase ‘the masters of suspicion’, Ricoeur’s text is one of the most exhilarating works of
philosophy written about psychoanalysis, ranging into and beyond an interrogation of the
potential resonance between Freudian psychoanalytic theory, hermeneutics, and
phenomenology. His reading of Hegel and intersubjectivity which sits embedded in its
vast and ranging arguments calls for a reconsideration.7 While it is not on the surface
devoted entirely to Hegel’s philosophy, Ricoeur’s engagement with Hegel’s
Phenomenology configures it as essential to a productive illumination of Freud’s
thought.8 Ricoeur (1970: 468) wishes ‘to show in each discipline of thought, considered in
and for itself, the presence of its other’. One of his major criticisms of Freud’s
topographical model (as tied in various ways to the realm of the drives/instincts), which
he accuses of unhelpful abstraction, is that it ‘does not account for the intersubjective
nature of the dramas forming its main theme’. He goes on to argue that:
Whether it be the drama of the parental relation or the drama of the therapeutic
relation itself, in which the other situations achieve speech, what nourishes
analysis is always a debate between consciousnesses. […] Stated bluntly, the
Freudian systematization is solipsistic, whereas the situations and relations
analysis speaks of and which speak in analysis are intersubjective
(Ricoeur 1970: 61).
Ricoeur is here positioning the therapeutic relation as one through which all other
‘dramas’, the ‘situations’ (e.g. of family relations, the life of the drives, the desires and
wishes etc. of the patient) can finally find articulation and interpretation, finding life in
language, in the speech of the patient. This speech is received, contained, and translated
back to them by the analyst, hopefully effecting the relief from suffering that brought
them into analysis in the first place. This is the potential power of the intersubjective
relating which takes place in an analysis.
Ricoeur is clearly indebted here to the Lacanian location of speech as the foundational
act of intersubjectivity, and the move beyond the solipsism of the drive is necessary in
order to privilege speech as the centre of the analytic encounter. In his early seminars,
the concept of intersubjectivity seems central to Lacan’s work and his indebtedness to
Hegel is acknowledged, particularly in his first Seminar (1953).9 Lacan argues that
‘Speech is the founding medium of the intersubjective relation’, and locates hate as one
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pole (as the opposite of love) of the ‘very structure of the intersubjective relation’. He
remarks that this is ‘what Hegel recognises as the impasse for the coexistence of two
consciousnesses, from whence he deduces his myth of the struggle for pure
prestige’ (Lacan 1991: 274–7). Language, then, specifically speech, is that which
mediates intersubjective relating, both within and outside of the analytic setting.
Lacan’s contribution to thinking about intersubjectivity here centres on questions of

language and his contribution is to translate the Hegelian process of recognition into a
process more fitting for the analytic setting, in that it becomes a form of recognizing the
speech of the other. Here we can return to the scene of the Lord and Bondsman to
suggest that what Lacan is picking up on is the idea that for Hegel the relationship
between two self-consciousnesses is mediated by the ‘object of desire’, the ‘thing’ that
then holds them both in bondage, bound to one another and to the thing itself. It is worth
noting that in the early chapters of the Phenomenology Hegel puzzles through the role of
language in the experience of consciousness and most importantly the failure of language
to adequately express one’s encounters with the world (the experience of a sensing and
perceiving consciousness), yet he does not really engage with the question of language
when he comes to think through the movement of self-consciousness.10 As we’ve seen, he
is concerned with desire, its motivation and manifestation, with the fashioning of an
object out of the self, of the activity of thought (recall the Stoic). This brings us to
acknowledge the crucial idea that it is largely left up to Hegel’s reader to render the
drama of recognition into terms that draw it out of abstraction and into the material
world. So, for example, there is plenty of opening for Marx to recast the scenes of the
lord and bondsman as the drama of the worker and the owner of capital. The mediating
object becomes then the product of the worker’s labour. For Lacan, we can see his
investment in structuralist linguistics and in language translate the mediating objects to
that of Speech.
Yet, here we might want to pause just for a moment and consider the manner in which the
nature of non-verbal recognition, the fact that the analytic encounter begins with two
bodies in a room (one potentially prone on a couch and the other sitting behind them, a
strange and vulnerable physical asymmetry) is also a basis for intersubjective relating.
Simultaneously, where, we might want to wonder, are the bodies in Hegel’s
Phenomenology?11 It takes some time to think through the body with Hegel, but it is
there in the idea of work and desire, and also in an admission of the ‘animal
functions’ (PS: 135). We should not lose sight of the body, even as we encounter a surfeit
of affect (despair, fear, ‘the struggle of the heart and emotions’, the ‘feeling of
wretchedness’ (PS: 135)). How bodies are the site of recognition is worth considering.
To return to Ricoeur then with the idea of transference: as could be expected, this
becomes the locus of intersubjective relating in the analytic setting, whose possibility
‘resides in the intersubjective texture of desire and of the desires deciphered within that
situation’ (Ricoeur 1970: 372). It is important to note Ricoeur’s contribution here, as it is,
as far as I can tell, completely neglected by those ‘schools’ of relational and
intersubjective psychoanalysis which have come to define a strand of the contemporary
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American scene (to whom I will turn my attention shortly), even though the corrective
they offer to the Freudian corpus is the very same Ricoeur offered in 1970. His reading of
intersubjectivity comes as part of the inheritance of Hyppolite’s Hegelian line of thinking,
and he discusses this at some length, with particular reference to Hyppolite’s paper
‘Phenomenologie de Hegel et Psychanalyse’ mentioned earlier, moving through the
‘texture’ of desire, and the formation of subjectivity out of the intersubjective, the analytic
relationship (Ricoeur 1970: 386–9). In fact, Ricoeur goes so far as to say that there is a
structural homology between Hegel’s dialectic and the process of consciousness as it
arises in the analytic setting: ‘The entire analytic relation can be reinterpreted as a
dialectic of consciousness, rising from life to self-consciousness, from the satisfaction of
desire to the recognition of the other consciousness’ (Ricoeur 1970: 474) Ricoeur does
not, however, explicitly move away from using the master/slave episode of the dialectic.
In a slightly troubling manner, he at first traps the analytic situation in the unequal
relationship of this dynamic, positioning the patient in the role of the slave, whose truth
lies in the other, ‘before becoming the master through a work comparable to the work of
a slave, the work of the analysis’. Yet, he also offers that the way out of this impasse is
that the patient/slave becomes the master through the difficult and demanding labour of
analysis. The analyst as master is simply a stage in the dialectic of analysis. The logical
outcome of this work for Ricoeur is that the analysis will end when there is equality
between the two consciousnesses when ‘the truth of the analyst has become the truth of
the sick consciousness’ and is no longer alienated, and has become a self, himself.
(Ricoeur 1970: 474) The implication of this reading is not only to securely position the
analytic encounter as intersubjective, but also to suggest that the analyst, although
seemingly in the position of mastery, is just as vulnerable as the patient. We can see how
Ricoeur is recasting the Hegelian drama as an analysis. As we saw with Hegel, the lord
(master) is as bound to the bondsman (slave) for their existence as the latter to the
former. We also might want to see in Ricoeur’s interpretation an analysis which
culminates, without explicitly being stated here, in the move from the self-divided
alienation of the unhappy unconsciousness, to the form of Reason.
There is one final element of Ricoeur’s deeply nuanced reading to attend to and that is
the strong note of caution he offers. He acknowledges that although it is through the
concept of intersubjectivity that we can see the closest identification between
phenomenology and psychoanalysis, it is also the site of their most radical distinction.
The fundamental difference is that psychoanalysis treats the ‘intersubjective relationship
as technique’ (Ricoeur 1970: 406, italics his). On a basic level (and he does spend some
time working through what technique means for psychoanalysis—from the technique of
treatment, methods of investigation, and the body of theories at play) Ricoeur breaks the
word ‘technique’ down into thinking about the ‘work’ of an analysis as having three parts:
the analyst’s work, the work of the analysand ,and then, the most slippery of all, the
mechanisms of the neurosis. The intersubjective relation of a psychoanalysis—the analytic
dialogue—because it is a technique that relies on the technique of transference
interpretation, is unlike any other form of intersubjectivity. To forget this, or gloss over
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this, is to do a disservice to both psychoanalysis and intersubjectivity in their fullest

potentials and different registers.
Hegel and Intersubjectivity in Contemporary

Psychoanalysis
Arnold H. Modell (1993) doubts ‘whether our present psychology of intersubjectivity
could have developed without Hegel. For Hegel appeared to have intuitively grasped the
fundamental aspects of the psychology of self and other’. Indeed, Modell continues,
‘Hegel can justifiably be termed the first intersubjective or relational
psychologist’ (Modell 1993: 98–9). In the last decades of the twentieth century there was
a movement towards intersubjective theory on the side of psychoanalytic theory written
from a more clinical perspective. Given the scope of this chapter, I cannot fully address
the complexities of the contested nature of such developments in psychoanalytic theory
or trace the nuances of the way in which the American strands of the psychoanalytic
institutional sphere differ from those of the UK, France etc.12 I wish here only to pick up
some of the threads of my discussion of the translation of Hegel’s process of recognition
into the theory of intersubjectivity and to see where this translation might find resonance
in the field of contemporary psychoanalysis.
Henry Schwartz (2012) has argued that the introduction of intersubjective theory has
been seen as a declaration of war by the more traditional American school of ego
psychology, yet that what the various modes of theorizing and practice that could come
under the umbrella term of intersubjectivity (relational, interpersonal, intersubjective
systems theory), are trying to effect is a corrective to the Freudian legacy of the focus on
the drive and intrapsychic life.13 I have already noted earlier that Ricoeur set this
corrective in motion in his own work, but clearly Ricoeur was not a practising
psychoanalyst, and it is not entirely surprising that the American branches of the
psychoanalytic project would not engage with his thinking. Following André Green’s lead,
Schwarz notes that psychoanalysis has always been intersubjective but that the
contemporary movements are doing the work of elaborating upon that which has existed
from the start without yet being properly theorized. That is to say, the corrective in post-
Freudian thinking has been to bring together theories of the drive with theories of the
object, to think about intersubjective relating, and not just intrapsychic life, and to
crucially consider the dialectic at play between the drive and the object.14
Although it is not the aim of this chapter to explore fully the nuances of the battles taking
place in intersubjective theory, it is important for an understanding of where Hegel is still
at play to note the basic distinctions. The predominately American ‘intersubjective’ and
‘relational’ modes of analysis had their origins in 1970s American psychoanalytic
movements. Yet, it is only the relational school that could be considered as having
institutional boundaries (with, as Schwarz notes, a doctoral training programme at New
Page 11 of 21

York University started in 1988, and a professional journal) whereas we can consider the
intersubjective to be a mode of theorizing that finds itself in many strands of
psychoanalytic practice. The relational school is mainly associated with the work of
Stephen Mitchell and Jay Greenberg and of the two schools is of less interest to my
survey because it is not invested in a Hegelian model of intersubjectivity. It had its origins
in Mitchell and Greenberg’s work Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983). The
best-known representatives of one development of the intersubjective school are Robert
Stolorow, George Atwood, and Donna Orange. Atwood and Stolorow claim their first use
of the term ‘intersubjectivity’ was in an article in 1978, but develop theories of
intersubjectivity throughout their works such as Atwood and Stolorow’s Structures of
Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology (1984), Working
Intersubjectively: Contextualism in Psychoanalytic Practice (1997), written with Orange,
and Worlds of Experience: Interweaving Philosophical and Clinical Dimensions in
Psychoanalysis (2002).
These authors define intersubjectivity as a ‘sensibility that continually takes into account
the inescapable interplay of the two subjects in any psychoanalysis. It radically rejects the
notion that psychoanalysis is something one isolated mind does to another, or that
development is something one person does or does not do’ (Orange, Atwood, and
Stolorow 2002: 18). Although they take Hegel’s master/slave model as the starting point
for any kind of thinking about ‘dominance relations’ and for any thinking about the
relation of self and wider historical and intellectual contexts, they do not use the master/
slave paradigm to represent a developmental stage of subjectivity, as does Jessica
Benjamin, a psychoanalyst who explicitly pays her debt to Hegel’s model, but claims to
draw her use of the term ‘intersubjectivity’ out of Habermas’s work, rather than, as I
have, Hyppolite’s.15
Benjamin’s work marks a second important strain of intersubjectivity theory that uses
Hegel and the master/slave paradigm as a model for recognition and intersubjective
relations and for what is seen as grounding an understanding of the dialectical nature of
the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Three of her works are key here: The Bonds of
Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination (1990), Shadow of the
Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (1998) and, ‘Beyond Doer and Done
To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness’ (2004). Benjamin shows a consistent allegiance
to Hegel, but seems to confine herself to his most famous chapter of the Phenomenology.
As a way of situating an element of Benjamin’s thinking around intersubjectivity let me

turn to the idea noted earlier of mutual recognition as part of a developmental process.
We are here witnessing the translation of Hegel’s process of recognition into terms about
human psychic development. Benjamin is interested in the notion of the infant’s
development of intersubjectivity as it derives from the recognition of its carers (e.g. the
mother). She is fully aware of that critique of her work which posits that she ‘conflates
the normative ideal of mutual recognition with the empirical possibility and necessity of
development’.16 Yet, she argues it is not that the baby begins with a normative ideal, but
Page 12 of 21

‘with a material possibility’, a view which has been excluded from the Freudian view of
the baby and thus of all human development as seen in strictly Freudian theory. She
writes:
Thus, mutual recognition derives from material possibility, but whether it will be
realized and in what way are in no sense predetermined. The idea is not to bolster
the ideal by proving that we are ‘born with the ability’; it is to recognize that when
we postulate a psychological need (not a social need or a normative ideal) for
recognition, we mean that failure to satisfy the need will inevitably result in
difficulties or even damage to the psyche
(Benjamin 1995: 20).17
We can understand Benjamin here in light of our earlier consideration of Hegel’s

Phenomenology if we think about Hegel’s argument that one can be in existence, but that
without recognition, one is not truly living. In Benjamin’s terms this comes to be about a
healthy and thriving psyche being reliant upon the process of being recognized. Benjamin
is equally aware, however, of the critique of a collapsing of the tension between the
dialogue between the psychoanalytic and the philosophical register when talking
recognition and (inter)subjectivity. In Like Subjects, Love Objects she rehearses an
argument made in her earlier work The Bonds of Love:
On the one hand, I stated that we need mutual recognition in order to develop our
faculties, a statement that postulates a kind of essential, development position
that is typical of psychoanalysis; on the other hand, I argued from the standpoint
of social and political theory that we need mutual recognition in order to live in
some degree free of domination and non-violently. I linked these two positions by
arguing that the upshot of failures of recognition is domination, that the
constitution of subjectivity and the self-other relationship is a necessary material
basis for noncoercive intersubjectivity
(Benjamin 1995: 21).
Importantly, for Benjamin, the idea of mutual recognition includes autonomy, which is a
point that I think Donna Orange seems to miss in her critique of Benjamin’s work noted
earlier. Indeed, I think Orange misreads both Hegel and Benjamin. On the one hand,
when she gets stuck on the notion of mastery in the process of intersubjective
recognition, Orange completely misses the idea of the freedom of the bondsman through
work and the creation of the object and the resolution of the drama of master and slave
into the later stages of self-consciousness. So, this fundamental misreading of Hegel also
leads Orange to misread Benjamin’s intentions in thinking with Hegel about domination,
mastery, recognition, and the ‘mastery’ of the analyst.18 Benjamin is thoroughly Hegelian
in her vision of mutual recognition in which there is a necessary tension between
dependence and independence for the subject and in the requirement for the inclusion of
the possibility for breakdown, of a failure to sustain the tension as well as to account for
the possibility of repair after this failure. Benjamin does not do so, but we could read this
Page 13 of 21

as an engagement with the movement of self-consciousness out of the scene of the master
and slave and into the other stages I rehearsed above of the stoic, sceptic, and the
unhappy consciousness.
The final point I want to make regarding Benjamin’s work is to emphasize not just the
theoretical aspect of the concept of (mutual) recognition, but also the practical, where
she draws it into the analytic scene. For Benjamin (1995: 24), it is productive to think
about intersubjective theory not just as a supplement or corrective to intrapsychic theory,
but to acknowledge it as a ‘concrete site of discovery and exploration’, a site that ‘has
become central to thinking about the analytic endeavour’, especially around the notion of
counter-transference and the particular subjectivity of the analyst as it comes to meet
with the mind of the patient. Here are echoes of the argument I traced through Ricoeur
and of my own suggestions about how we can form a dialogue between Hegel’s
philosophy as it is found in the Phenomenology and psychoanalytic theory. It is, at its
heart, a dialogue that offers an understanding of what it means to be a subject involved in
the continuous process of becoming, as bound to another subject as part of this process—
whether inside or outside the unique intersubjective encounter that is an analysis. To be
recognized and to recognize in return is one of most difficult but necessary elements of
being human.
References
Agamben, G. (1991). Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. K. E. Pinkus
and M. Hardt. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Atwood, G. E. and Stolorow, R. D. (1984). Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in

Psychoanalytic Phenomenology. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Benjamin, J. (1990). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of
Domination. London: Virago.
Benjamin, J. (1995). Like Subjects, Love Objects. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Benjamin, J. (1998). Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis.

London: Routledge.
Benjamin, J. (2004). ‘Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness’.
Benjamin, J. (2010). ‘Can we Recognize each other? Response to Donna Orange’.

International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology 5(3): 244–256.
Butler, C. (1976). ‘Hegel and Freud: A Comparison’. Philosophy and Phenomenological

Research 36(4): 506–522.
Butler, J. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Page 14 of 21

Butler, J. (1999). Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France,

New York: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1987.)
Christensen, D. (1968). ‘Hegel’s Phenomenological Analysis and Freud’s Psychoanalysis’.

International Philosophical Quarterly 8(3): 356–378.
Derrida , J. (1978). Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass. Chicago, IL: Chicago University
Press.
Derrida, J. (1982). Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass. Brighton: Harvester Press.
Dews, P. (2007). Logics of Disintegration. London: Verso.
Green, A. (1999). The Work of the Negative. London: Free Association Books.
Green A. (2000). ‘The intrapsychic and intersubjective in psychoanalysis’. Psychoanalytic

Habermas, J. (1993). ‘Labour and interaction: Remarks on Hegel’s Jena Philosophy of

Mind’. In G. W. F. Hegel: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. London: Routledge. (Original work
published 1967.)
Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford

University Press. (Original work published 1807.)
Hyppolite, J. (1969). ‘The Human Situation in the Hegelian Phenomenology’. In Studies in

Marx and Hegel, trans. J. O’Neill. London: Heinemann. (Original work published in 1955.)
Hyppolite, J. (1971). ‘Hegel’s Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis’. In W. Steinkraus (ed.),

New Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy, trans. A. Richer. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
(Original work published in 1957.)
Hyppolite, J. (1974). Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Chicago, IL:

Northwestern University Press. (Original work published in 1946.)
Hyppolite, J. (1997). Logic and Existence, trans. L. Lawlor and A. Sen. Albany, NY: SUNY
Press. (Original work published in 1952.)
Kojève, A. (1980). Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, assembled by R. Queneau, ed. A.

Bloom, trans. J. Nichols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Lacan, J. (1988). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique
1953–1954, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. J. Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Lacan, J. (1991). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in
the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. S. Tomaselli. New
York: Norton.
Page 15 of 21

Macdonald, M. (2014). Hegel and Psychoanalysis: A New Interpretation of the

Phenomenology of Spirit. London: Routledge.
McCumber, J. (1993). The Company of Words: Hegel, Language and Systematic

Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Mead, G. H. (1962). Mind, Self and Society, ed. C. Morris. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press. (Original work published 1934.)
Mitchell, S. A. and Greenberg, J. R. (1984). Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory.

Modell, A. (1993). The Private Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Pres.
Ogden, T. (1994). Subjects of Analysis. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
O’Neill, J. (ed.) (1996). Hegel’s Dialectic of Desire and Recognition. Albany, NY: SUNY
Press.
Orange, D. (2010). ‘Recognition as: Intersubjective Vulnerability in the Psychoanalytic

Dialogue’. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology 5(3): 227–243.
Orange, D. M., Atwood G. E., and Stolorow, R. D. (1997). Working Intersubjectively:

Contextualism in Psychoanalytic Practice. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Orange, D. M., Atwood G. E., and Stolorow, R. D. (2002). Worlds of Experience:

Interweaving Philosophical and Clinical Dimensions in Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic
Books.
Reid, J. (2007) Real Words: Language and System in Hegel. Toronto/London: University of
Toronto Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. D. Savage.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Original work published in 1965.)
Roudinesco, E. (1990). Jacques Lacan & Co. A History of Psychoanalysis in France 1925–
1985, trans. J. Melman. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Roudinesco, E. (1999). Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and a History of a System of

Thought, trans. B. Bray. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Russon, J. (1997). The Self and its Body in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Schwartz, Henry P. (2012). ‘Intersubjectivity and dialecticism’. International Journal of

Surber, J. O. (ed.) (2006). Hegel and Language. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Page 16 of 21

Veron, J. (2007). Hegel’s Philosophy of Language. London: Continuum.
Wahl, J. (1993). ‘The Unhappy Consciousness in the Philosophy of Hegel’. In Hegel:

Critical Assessments, trans. R. Northey (pp. 284–310). London: Routledge. (Original work
published in 1951.)
Williams, R. (1992). Recognition: Fichte, Hegel and the Other. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Williams, R. (1997). Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition. Berkeley, CA: University of California

Press.
Žižek, S. (1993). Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel And The Critique Of Ideology.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Žižek, S. (1996). The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matter.
London: Verso.
Žižek, S. (2005). Interrogating the Real, eds R. Butler and S. Stephens. London:
Continuum.
Žižek, S. (2012). Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism.
London: Verso.
Notes:
(1.) I will not engage with Žižek’s work here, but see Žižek (1993), (1996), and a
collection of his essays (2005) (where he posits the ‘negation of negation’, as the
‘Hegelian version’ of ‘death drive’ (34)) has offered, in no systematic fashion, a set of
readings that mobilizes Hegel in order to understand Lacan and vice versa. He
consistently argues that Lacan himself was thoroughly Hegelian, even after he renounced
his philosophy, and even, as Žižek argues, if he didn’t know it himself. His work, Less
Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012) offers many
brilliant readings of Hegel. See Part III, Section 8 ‘Lacan as a Reader of Hegel’ (pp. 507–
51); section 11 ‘Negation of the negation: Lacan Versus Hegel?’ (pp. 787–94). Although
Lacan’s relationship with Hegel’s philosophy is mentioned in many texts, for the most
succinct account from the point of view of an intellectual biography see Elisabeth
Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co. A History of Psychoanalysis in France 1925–1985
(1990) and Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and a History of a
System of Thought (1999), pp. 61–107.
(2.) Hyppolite is perhaps best known in his role as translator of the Phenomenology of
Spirit into French (1939–41) and for his highly influential Genesis and Structure of
Hegel’s Phenomenology (1946, 1979), and Logic and Existence (1952, 1997). However,
Hyppolite contributed two ground-breaking pieces on the subject of Hegel,
psychoanalysis and the concept of intersubjectivity. The first is a lecture given in 1955 to
the French Society for Psychoanalysis titled ‘Hegel’s Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis’,
Page 17 of 21

which was transcribed by Jean Laplanche and first published in French as

‘Phenomenologie de Hegel et Psychanalyse’ in La Psychanalyse, Vol III (1957). English
language readers were given access to it in a collection on Hegel titled New Studies in
Hegel’s Philosophy, edited by Warren E. Steinkraus (1971). The version of the paper
included in the Steinkraus volume was given reconsideration by Hyppolite himself,
including the addition of illuminating footnotes as to his discussions with Lacan following
the delivery of the original lecture on the relationship between Freud and Hegel, and the
implications for the crossover of the disciplines of psychoanalysis and philosophy. The
second is ‘The Human Situation in the Hegelian Phenomenology’ in Studies in Marx and
Hegel (1955, 1969).
(3.) The Lordship and Bondage episode is often referred to as the dialectic of master and
slave by the majority of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophical texts, as a result
of following Alexandre Kojève’s influential reading, which I discuss later. See Introduction
to the Reading of Hegel (1980). When reading the Hegel, I will refer to it in his language
of Lordship and Bondage, but when engaging with other readers of Hegel, I will refer to it
as they do.
(4.) Wahl’s seminal text has yet to be published in English, bar a short excerpt from The
Unhappy Consciousness in the Philosophy of Hegel (1993) which has curtailed his
influence.
(5.) Nearly all of the scholarly texts on the Phenomenology discuss the concept of
recognition. It is important to note, however, that, as I’ve suggested, very few translate it
into terms of intersubjectivity. Although he does not acknowledge Hyppolite’s original use
of the term intersubjectivity in regards to Hegel, Robert Williams’s Recognition: Fichte,
Hegel and the Other (1992) also claims that recognition (Annerkennung) is the ground of
intersubjectivity, but that the concept of intersubjectivity ‘in German idealism is all but
unnoticed’ (1992: 1). Williams credits Fichte and Hegel with having brought the concept
to philosophy and spends his work detailing the inception and progression of the concept
of intersubjectivity. His aim is to recover this original ground for what he locates as a
burgeoning interest in the philosophy of intersubjectivity and the ‘problem of the Other’
taking place in twentieth-century intellectual thought. See also his work Hegel’s Ethics of
Recognition (1997) which is a continuation of this earlier work. For a collection of articles
that discuss Hegel along similar lines, see John O’Neill (ed.), Hegel’s Dialectic of Desire
and Recognition (1996).
(6.) The influence Kojève’s lectures on Hegel of 1933–39 had on thinkers like Lacan and
his contemporaries has been well documented. See Roudinesco, Lacan & Co., pp. 134–47;
Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration (2007), pp. 64–6; p. 304, n26. Robert Williams
argues in Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (1997) that Kojève’s narrow focus, which equates
recognition with the struggle between master and slave, ‘distorted’ Hegel’s original
concept of intersubjectivity.
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(7.) In addition to Ricoeur’s work, there are two articles of note that were published in
roughly the same era as Ricoeur’s 1970 publication, and are important for understanding
the way in which the confluence of Hegel and psychoanalytic theory started to elaborate
itself. Neither deal directly with the concept of intersubjectivity so will not be addressed
here. See Darrell Christensen’s, ‘Hegel’s Phenomenological Analysis and Freud’s
Psychoanalysis’, in the International Philosophical Quarterly (1968) and Clark Butler’s
‘Hegel and Freud: A Comparison’ in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (1976).
One can see in Butler’s article an indication of just how undeveloped the line of inquiry
into the Hegel/psychoanalysis connection is at that point of the twentieth century with a
glance at the bibliography. There are six titles, one being Christensen’s article, four of
which had yet to be translated into English, including the article by Hyppolite,
‘Phenomenologie de Hegel et la Psychanalyse’. When Butler writes in the first line of his
article that, ‘Exploration has recently begun into the relation between Freud and Hegel’
he is sitting at a particular juncture of history where this kind of thinking would have
started to be acceptable outside of Lacanian circles.
(8.) [Eds: See also Bernstein, this volume].
(9.) The majority of Lacan’s commentary on Hegel can be found in Seminar I, particularly
Chapter XVII ‘The object relation and the intersubjective relation’. Of additional interest
is Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of
Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, Chapter XV, ‘Odd or even? Beyond intersubjectivity’.
(10.) For interesting engagements with the question of Hegel and language see Jacques
Derrida, ‘The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology’, in Margins of
Philosophy (1982), pp. 69–108, and ‘Force and Signification’ in Writing and Difference
(1978) pp. 3–30. Georgio Agamben offers an interesting meditation in Language and
Death: The Place of Negativity (1991). Also see Jeffrey Reid, Real Words: Language and
System in Hegel (2007); Jim Veron, Hegel’s Philosophy of Language (2007); Hegel and
Language (2006); John McCumber, The Company of (1993).
(11.) For an important study of this question see John Russon, The Self and its Body in
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1997). Russon also follows Hyppolite in locating the
Unhappy Consciousness as the heart of the Phenomenology.
(12.) This is as distinct from what might be considered object-relations theory, deriving
from the work of Donald Winnicott and geographically located more on the UK side of the
Atlantic. There is great potential to read Hegel alongside other branches of
psychoanalytic thinking that come after Winnicott, and I do so in the portion of my book
Hegel and Psychoanalysis: A New Interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit (2014)
concerning the work of Christopher Bollas.
(13.) [Eds: For further discussion of the debate between traditional and intersubjective
schools on psychoanalysis, see also Lacewing this volume.]
(14.) See also Green (2000).
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(15.) Habermas’s ‘Labour and interaction: Remarks on Hegel’s Jena Philosophy of Mind’ (1967)
draws a major distinction between Fichte and Hegel regarding the foundation of the ‘I’.
For Fichte, Habermas argues, the foundation of the ‘I’ comes in the idea of the
‘subjectivity of self-knowing’ and this creates the dialectic between the ‘I’ and the ‘other,
whereas for Hegel, the framework is that of ‘intersubjectivity of spirit, in which the “I”
communicates not with itself as its “other” but instead with another “I” as its
“other”’ (Habermas 1993: 560). This is a key moment in the trajectory of the concept of
intersubjectivity, because from this point on Habermas is often credited with bringing it
into twentieth-century theory, both via G. H. Mead’s (1934) reading of mutual recognition
and directly from his own interpretation of Hegel, whereas Hyppolite is somewhat
overlooked as a point of origin. Interestingly, however, Habermas does not simply fix his
reading of mutual recognition and thus of intersubjectivity in the master/slave dialectic in
the 1807 Phenomenology as most versions of the theory do, but instead finds the roots in
Hegel’s Jena lectures of 1803–4 and 1805–6.
(16.) See International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, Vol 5, Number 3, 2010
for an in-depth and discussion and engagement between Donna Orange, Jessica
Benjamin, and others around the issue of intersubjectivity as drawn from theories of
(Hegelian) recognition in the clinical setting. This special issue is dedicated to an attempt
to find common ground between the self psychologists, ‘intersubjective system
theorists’ (noted as Stolorow, Atwood, Orange) and interpersonal and relational analysts.
It notes the historical dissonance about the concept of recognition within the schools of
psychoanalytic theory and practice listed here and stems from a critique launched by
Orange in her 2008 article ‘Recognition as: Intersubjective Vulnerability in the
Psychoanalytic Dialogue’ (reprinted in this issue) that Benjamin’s Hegelian model of
recognition puts the analyst in the position of mastery and does not allow for a necessary
vulnerability on their part.
(17.) Thomas Ogden’s work (1994) is similarly representative of this line, and owes and
acknowledges a great debt both to Hegel’s Phenomenology and to André Green’s work.
The majority of the theory found in Ogden’s Subjects of Analysis is shot through with the
model of dialectical tension (subject and object, analyst and analysand) that he sees as
inherent in subjectivity.
(18.) Benjamin (2010) herself responds to Orange’s (2010) misreadings in a collegial yet
forceful rejoinder in her article ‘Can we Recognize each other? Response to Donna
Orange’.
Molly Macdonald
School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London
Page 20 of 21

Page 21 of 21

Schopenhauer and Freud

Andrew Brook and Chris Young

This chapter engages in a conversation between two seemingly disparate discourses of

Hegelian philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. In the work of Jean Hyppolite, the
chapter locates the first use of the term intersubjectivity in relation to Hegel’s theory of
recognition as found in Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) and argues that Hyppolite
pioneered a mode of thinking about Hegel and psychoanalysis. The chapter traces the
transmutation initiated by Hyppolite through the work of Paul Ricouer, Jacques Lacan,
Judith Butler, Jessica Benjamin, and others to locate the influence of Hegel’s philosophy
on a particular line of psychoanalytic thinking. The author’s reading of Hegel
incorporated here argues that the majority of attention paid to the concept of recognition,
and its translation into terms of intersubjective relating, has confined it to the episode of
the Lord and Bondsman and that further attention should be paid to the drama of the
Unhappy Consciousness which follows.
Keywords: Hegel, psychoanalysis, recognition, intersubjectivity, Phenomenology of Spirit, unhappy consciousness,

Jean Hyppolite, Paul Ricoeur, Jessica Benjamin
Andrew Brook and Christopher Young
Introduction
THE will and the unconscious were among the most important subjects in the German-
speaking intellectual world in the nineteenth century. This line of inquiry may well have
reached its highest development later in Freud but many of the doctrines developed by
Freud did not begin with him, or even with Nietzsche. To find their first clear expression
we must go back at least as far as Arthur Schopenhauer. In Schopenhauer, we find not
only ideas similar to some of Freud’s most characteristic ideas but a surprisingly
complete articulation of them. It is generally known that some of Freud’s views are
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similar to some of Schopenhauer’s.1 Indeed, later in life Freud himself acknowledged this,
though with an ambivalence to which we will return. However, the correspondences are
far more extensive and detailed than have been previously recognized, at least in English.
We will explore these correspondences2 and examine Freud’s attitude to Schopenhauer.
Will and Sexuality

We turn first to Schopenhauer’s concept of the will. Though primarily a metaphysical
concept, it is also at the root of Schopenhauer’s explicitly psychological doctrines, (p. 64)
especially his view that sexuality is pervasive in all human motivation and that intellect is
secondary to the will. For Schopenhauer, the will is fundamental. It underlies and
animates everything that we can observe. According to Schopenhauer, individual volition
is a limited (also indirect and distorted) manifestation of the same will from which the
entire observable world arises. We can know something of will’s manifestation in us but
we cannot be conscious of it directly. In Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view, the will’s
endless strivings are forever incapable of satisfaction. Setting aside the broader
metaphysical functions that Schopenhauer assigns to the will, let us examine how he saw
its manifestations in the volition of individual human beings.
Schopenhauer thought that the will itself is a blind unconscious striving which is not
directly accessible to our own consciousness. However, we enjoy a partial awareness of it
in our own volition, and it further manifests itself in sexual desire and in our ‘love of life’.
These are all manifestations of an underlying will to live. Freud’s first theory of instinct, a
picture in which dual instincts are rooted in a single will to live, is very similar and it
remained his view until his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), i.e. for the first two
decades of his psychoanalytic writings. For both thinkers, the sex drive was by far the
stronger of the two, ‘the most perfect manifestation of the will to live’ (Schopenhauer
1844 (2): 514).3 Indeed, Schopenhauer went so far as to claim that:
man is concrete sexual drive; for his origin is an act of copulation, and his desire
of desires is an act of copulation, and this impulse alone perpetuates and holds
together the whole of his phenomenal existence. (1844 (2): 514)
The sexual impulse is the most vehement of all craving, the desire of desires, the
concentration of all our willing.4 (1844 (2): 514)
To all this corresponds the important role which the sex-relation plays in the world
of mankind, where it is really the invisible central point of all action and conduct,
and peeps up everywhere in spite of all the veils thrown over it. It is the cause of
war and the aim and object of peace, the basis of the serious and the aim of the
joke, the inexhaustible source of wit, the key to all allusions, and the meaning of
all mysterious hints, of all unspoken offers and all stolen glances; it is the daily
meditation of the young and often the old as well, the hourly thought of the
unchaste, and even against their will the constantly recurring imagination of the
Page 2 of 22

chaste, the ever ready material for a joke, just because the profoundest
seriousness lies at its root. (1844 (2): 513, translation slightly modified)
On how people respond to the dominating force of sexual desire, Schopenhauer

(p. 65)
again sounds like Freud. His account of how far human beings will go to deny the power
of sexuality is every bit as acerbic as Freud’s:
This … is the piquant element and the jest of the world, that the chief concern of
all men is pursued secretly and ostensibly ignored as much as possible. But, in
fact, at every moment we see it seat itself as the real and hereditary lord of the
world, out of the fullness of its own strength, on the ancestral throne, and looking
down from thence with scornful glances, laugh at the preparations which have
been made to subdue it, to imprison it, or at least to limit it and if possible to keep
it concealed, or indeed so to master it that it shall only appear as a subordinate,
secondary concern of life.
(Schopenhauer 1844 (2): 513)
The passages just quoted are so completely in line with psychoanalysis that it is easy to
forget that their author was dead by the time Freud entered school as a young boy. Even
Freud did not give sexual desire any stronger a role in human motivation than
Schopenhauer did.
The parallels go deeper. They both greatly expand the range of things to which the
concept of sexuality applies, and in much the same way. Both stretched sexuality far
beyond procreation and many of Schopenhauer’s illustrations of the disguised
manifestations of sexual desire could have been written by Freud. They both come close
to using the term to describe virtually all bodily pleasure-seeking of any sort, though
Freud went further than Schopenhauer in this regard.
Although Schopenhauer drastically broadened the range of motive and activity called
‘sexual’, to the point where not much sexual in the ordinary sense could be found, unlike
Freud he always kept some link to the orgasmic, the genital—to sexuality in its ordinary
sense. If the will is the ground of everything, including all instincts and therefore
something much broader than normal sexuality, at least for him its manifestations are
sexual in the ordinary sense. Freud went further: he not only expanded the range of the
sexual, he expanded the concept itself, calling many things sexual that have no obvious
link to the orgasmic or genitalia at all.5
Finally, both Schopenhauer and Freud treated sexuality from two very different
perspectives: the individual and the species (but see Sandford, this volume). As
Schopenhauer wrote, ‘It is true that the will-to-live manifests itself primarily as an effort
to maintain the individual; yet this is only a stage towards the effort to maintain the
species’ (1844 (2): 514). Here is the same dual perspective in Freud: ‘On the one view,
the individual is the principal thing, sexuality is one of its activities and sexual
satisfaction is one of its needs; while on the other view, the individual is a temporary and
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transient appendage to the quasi-immortal germ-plasm, which is entrusted to him by the

process of generation’ (1915a: 125).
Freud did depart most notably from Schopenhauer in his views about infantile
(p. 66)
sexuality. Contrary to what Freud later held, Schopenhauer attributes the happiness of
youth to the fact that the sexual impulse, so ‘pregnant with evil, is lacking in the child … ;
from this arises the character of innocence, intelligence, and reasonableness’ which we
find in children (1844 (2): 395).6 This may be because Schopenhauer linked sexual desire
to reproduction more closely than Freud did (Sandford, this volume).
In light of this disagreement about infantile sexuality, it is interesting that the two of them
did agree on the central importance of childhood to adult life. As Freud put the point, ‘the
child is psychologically father to the adult and … the events of his first years are of
paramount importance for his whole later life’ (1940a: 187). There are few ideas for
which Freud is better known. It is not well known that Schopenhauer may have held the
same view:
the experiences and acquaintances of childhood and early youth become

thereafter the types and rubrics of all later knowledge and experience … Thus the
firm foundation of our world view is formed even in the years of childhood,
together with its shallowness or depth: it is later carried out and completed; yet
not essentially altered.
(quoted in McGill 1971: 55)
Returning to the will and instincts, Freud parallels Schopenhauer on some more
theoretical issues. They were both unsettled as to whether there is one fundamental kind
of motivator or two, an unease that came to a head for Freud in 1920. Schopenhauer
often distinguished the sexual drive from ‘the love of life’ as two drives (‘Next to the love
of life’, he once said, sexual love is ‘the strongest and most active of all motives … ’ (1844
(2): 533, our emphasis)). But he also often ran them together in an undifferentiated
notion of the will. That he saw them, even when separated, as both manifestations of will
also has a parallel in Freud: Freud saw both libido and the self-preservative drive as
discharge of endogenous stimuli or avoidance of excessive exogenous stimuli.
Will or Drives and Intellect

We turn now to the relation of the will to the intellect. According to Schopenhauer, the
will must objectify itself in the world to satisfy its strivings. To do so, it creates for itself
an intellect appropriate to its needs. Even memory relies on the unifying force of the
will’s stable and unceasing urges: (p. 67)
if we reflect deeply on the matter, we shall reach the conclusion that memory …
requires the foundation of a will as … a thread on which the recollections range
themselves, and which holds them firmly together, or that the will is, so to speak,
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the ground on which the individual recollections stick, and without which they
could not be fixed.
(Schopenhauer 1844 (2): 222)
We will have more to say about the thread of memory in the sections on
‘Psychopathology’ and ‘Psychic Defences’. Here the important point is that even this
element of the intellect is secondary to the will and subordinate to its demands. Being the
basis of the intellect, the will ‘rules it, guides it, incites it to further effort, in short
imparts to it the activity that is not originally inherent in it’ (Schopenhauer 1844 (2): 213,
224). The will creates the intellect, which ‘is designed merely to prescribe to the
individual will its motivations, i.e. to indicate to it the objectives of its desires together
with the means of taking possession of them’ (Schopenhauer 1970: 59). This led
Schopenhauer to the idea that the intellect was not as rational as had been previously
supposed; the will dictates, unseen, what the mind desires, believes, and thinks. Our
states of consciousness and our decisions had previously been thought to be the outcome
of processes of reasoning. Schopenhauer argues that these states have their origin in the
will.
Schopenhauer was not the first to part company with the Enlightenment view that reason
dominates, but he gave the will far greater prominence than any previous thinker,
building his whole model of the psyche upon it. Freud, of course, shared Schopenhauer’s
view that the ‘intellect is entirely secondary’ to the functioning of the mind: ‘the ego is
not master in its own house’ (Freud 1917: 143, italics in original). Further, they both saw
that the intellect promptly takes the demands of the will as its own: ‘the ego is in the
habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if it were its own’ (Freud 1923: 25). There
are even shadows of the concept of rationalization in Schopenhauer. He did not explicitly
formulate the concept but, like Freud, he held the view that the intellect takes what are
really the will’s motives as its own and justifies them as though it were the author of them
(Schopenhauer 1970: 59). Here is Freud’s version of roughly the same view:
We are bound to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist … from
the start; the ego has to be developed. (1914b: 76)
We may well … conclude that instincts and not external stimuli are the true motive
forces behind the advances that have led the nervous system, with its unlimited
capacities, to its present high level of development. (1915a: 120)
For Freud, activities of what he called the ego are in the service of an (un)pleasure
principle (1895), in service of discharging energy that is causing unpleasure, and he
eventually developed a sophisticated account in which discharges are not outwards but at
the self, an activity he called auto-eroticism and needed in order to make room for the
concept of narcissism (1914b: 88). So his account goes beyond Schopenhauer’s.
Nevertheless, the two views start from the same picture.
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Freud adhered to this picture in one form or another throughout his life, from the Project
for a Scientific Psychology (1895) and Chapter 7 of the Interpretation of Dreams (1900:
565ff., 598ff.) at least to Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920: 10ff.) and even later,
(p. 68) with appropriate modifications to accommodate the introduction of the death
instinct. As we have seen, the parallels with Schopenhauer are close. They even agree
that the ‘afflux of stimulation’ that gets mental life going is ‘incessant and
unavoidable’ (Freud 1915a: 120) and that the only way to stop it is to find some object
that quiets its source, something that creates an ‘experience of satisfaction’, for example
food or sexual discharge. Schopenhauer’s characterizations of how the will operates even
anticipate the notion of primary process.
For what the bridle and the bit are to an unmanageable horse, the intellect is to
the will in man; it must be led by this bridle by means of instruction, exhortation,
training, and so on; for in itself the will is as wild and impetuous an impulse as is
the force appearing in the plunging waterfall; in fact it is, as we know, ultimately
identical therewith. (1844 (2): 213)
Parallels even extend to their respective views of pleasure and the way the will operates.
Both saw pleasure as merely negative, a removal of an irritant. Pleasure is, for
Schopenhauer the momentary cessation of the will’s striving, for Freud the discharge or
at the very least the achievement of constancy in the flow of stimuli from the drives.
‘Every unpleasure’ ought ‘to coincide with a heightening, and every pleasure with a
lowering, of mental tension due to stimulus’ (Freud 1924a: 159–60). Only in 1924 did
Freud even partially modify this view. Thus, for the first twenty-five years of his work on
psychology, he adhered to the view of Schopenhauer, whether or not he was aware of it.
Since obviously much pleasure is not like this, it is interesting that both argue (or
assume) that it is, though others have, too.
Schopenhauer may have carried through the implications of the primacy of the will or the
id for rationality more consistently than Freud. If Freud was a child of the German
Romanticism to which Schopenhauer so richly contributed, he was also a child of
nineteenth-century scientific empiricism. In line with the latter, he believed that the
human mind could operate rationally and discover truths about the world. If rationality
was threatened by the unconscious, it was a threat that could be overcome, at least in
science. From this point of view, when Schopenhauer said that ‘[e]very passion, in fact
every inclination or disinclination, tinges the objects of knowledge with its colour … most
common of occurrence is the falsification of knowledge brought about by desire or
hope’ (1844 (2): 141), he was perhaps more in tune with this implication of the power of
the will or id than Freud was. As some psychoanalysts in France and elsewhere
demonstrate, Freud’s model of the mind can easily be taken in this direction, too.
Page 6 of 22

Unconsciousness
Let us dwell for a moment on the specific idea that we are conscious only of expressions
of the will in individual volition, not the will itself. The parallels with Freud on this issue
are particularly close. Says Schopenhauer, the intellect ‘does not penetrate into the
secret workshop of the will’s decisions’. Indeed: (p. 69)
the intellect remains so much excluded from the real resolutions and secret
decisions of its own will that sometimes it can only get to know them, like those of
a stranger, by spying out and taking unawares; and it must surprise the will in the
act of expressing itself, in order merely to discover its real intentions.
(Schopenhauer 1844 (2): 209–10)
Compare Freud:
Unconsciousness is a regular and inevitable phase in the processes constituting

our psychical activity; every psychical act begins as an unconscious one, and it
may either remain so or go on developing into consciousness, according as it
meets with resistance or not.
(Freud 1912: 264)
These parallels in the two doctrines of the unconscious may not seem especially
surprising to us now, standing as we do on the other side of Freud. A further parallel is
striking even now: Schopenhauer’s main argument for the existence of unconscious
mental states is also the argument that Freud used most frequently. The argument begins
by noting that much thought, feeling, and behaviour cannot be explained on the basis of
conscious mental states alone. ‘It is evident’, wrote Schopenhauer, ‘that human
consciousness and thinking are by their nature necessarily fragmentary’ (1844 (2): 138).
By this he means that conscious psychological states often seem disjointed, do not add up
to any coherent picture of what the beliefs, feelings, and motives behind a belief or action
were like. Freud makes exactly the same point:
[C]onscious acts remain disconnected and unintelligible if we insist upon claiming

that every mental act that occurs in us must also necessarily be experienced by us
through consciousness. (1915c: 167)
Yet both took for granted that there is a unity, a coherence, to mental life. What produces
it? Schopenhauer: ‘What gives unity … to consciousness is … the will. The will … holds all
its ideas and representations together … ’ (1844 (2): 139–40). Compare Freud:
We have found—that is, we have been obliged to assume—that very powerful

mental processes or ideas exist … which can produce all the effects in mental life
that ordinary ideas do … though they themselves do not become conscious. (1923:
14)
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Freud used this argument repeatedly throughout his career (1909: 175–6; 1915c: 166ff.;
1923: 14–18; 1940: 196–7). It is very similar to Schopenhauer’s argument.
Relation to Consciousness
The two thinkers also agree on important aspects of the relationship of the unconscious
to consciousness. Schopenhauer believed just as strongly as Freud that vastly more of the
psyche is unconscious than conscious. ‘Consciousness is the mere surface of our (p. 70)
mind, and of this, as of the globe, we do not know the interior, but only the crust’ (1844
(2): 136). Again:
Let us compare our consciousness to a sheet of water of some depth. Then the
distinctly conscious ideas are merely the surface; on the other hand, the mass of
the water is the disposition of our … will that is the kernel of our inner nature.
(1844 (2): 135)
Or, as he put it in a work that Freud cites three times in the Interpretation of Dreams,
‘the intellect is a mere superficial force, essentially and everywhere touching only the
outer shell, never the inner core of things’ (1851: 301). The same image of consciousness
as an outer crust or cap runs through the whole of Freud’s work, from the Project to the
famous diagram of the mind in Lecture 31 of the New Introductory Lectures (1933: 78).
The parallel is made more striking by the fact that they both held that only this outer
layer of the psyche is in contact with or affected by the external world. The intellect,
‘enlightened by experience … draws up and modifies its precepts’, says Schopenhauer
(1844 (2): 224), but the will is unaffected by external reality. In Freud, the ‘processes in
the id are entirely unconscious, while consciousness is the function of the ego’s
outermost layer, which is concerned with the perception of the external world’ (1925b:
266).
Freud even shared Schopenhauer’s notion that consciousness is not the natural state of
psychological contents, that bringing these contents to consciousness is an extra step.
Schopenhauer: ‘It is no more possible for an idea to enter consciousness without an
occasion than it is for a body to be set in motion without a cause’ (1844 (2): 133). Freud:
every psychical act begins as an unconscious one, and it may either remain so or
go on developing into consciousness, according as it meets with resistance or not
(1912: 264, a passage also cited earlier).7
For Schopenhauer, what makes it possible to follow these paths of association is that
ideas, i.e. psychological states, are arranged in an ordered sequence, along temporal,
causal, and narrative lines, tied together in virtue of being successive stages in the
unfolding of the unchanging projects of the will. This continuity is also what makes
possible the thread of memory introduced in the section on ‘Will or Drive and Intellect’.
What associations do, to simplify a bit, is to allow us to trace these sequences in various
ways.
Page 8 of 22

Schopenhauer’s views on association are also similar to the associative mechanisms that
Freud identified as central to dream work and psychic defence, namely, condensation and
displacement (Freud 1900: Ch. 4A to 4D). Schopenhauer even uses the example of
remembering a forgotten dream to illustrate his theory.
The search for the thread of recollection shows itself in a peculiar way, when it is a
dream that we have forgotten on waking up. Here we look in vain for that which a
(p. 71) few minutes previously occupied us with the force of the clearest and
brightest present, but has now entirely vanished. We then try to seize any
impression that has been left behind, and on which a slender thread hangs. By
virtue of association, this thread might draw the dream back into our
consciousness. (1844 (2): 134)
This passage expresses the core of Freud’s later notion of free association. Freud of
course broadened both the theoretical formulation and the applications of the idea, but
the basic notion is already there in Schopenhauer.
To be sure, their views of consciousness and the unconscious may seem to differ in some
respects. Schopenhauer emphasizes his view that the will is ‘the true and ultimate point
of unity of consciousness, and the bond of all its functions and acts’ (1844 (2): 140). By
unity, he seems to have meant the continuity and stability of our basic drives and
interests. Freud would have denied that what Schopenhauer called the will has even that
much unity, being governed as it is by the primary process. However, the disagreement
here may be more apparent than real. In Schopenhauer, when the will is manifested in
individual persons, its unity is lost. In this state, Schopenhauer, too, sees it as pursuing
conflicting aims without regard to mutual contradiction—a cardinal feature of the
primary process.
A real difference is that Schopenhauer always viewed consciousness, the intellect, as a

separate psychic system. Freud went both ways on the question. He could say that
consciousness is ‘only a quality or attribute of what is psychical, and moreover an
inconsistent one’ (1940b: 285–6). He could also tie it to the preconscious and treat the
two together as a separate psychic structure, the structure that with further development
evolves into the ego.
To summarize, there are striking parallels between Schopenhauer and Freud both in their
doctrines of the will or id and in its relationship to consciousness. For both, the will or the
id is unconscious and consists of non-rational processes, seeks satisfaction endlessly and
insatiably, provides the most powerful motives in human life, mostly unknown, causes
rationality and the conscious mind to come to be, and is needed to explain thought,
feeling, and action. For both, these views force a fundamental re-evaluation of
consciousness.
Page 9 of 22

Psychopathology
We turn now to a quite different topic—Schopenhauer and psychopathology.
Schopenhauer thought that madness is caused by the repression of painful memories or
traumata, though he did not use the word ‘repression’ (see the next section entitled
‘Psychic Defences’). By ‘madness’, he seems to have meant what we would now call
psychosis or severe affective disorder. As an account of psychosis, his theory is not very
plausible. However, as an account of neurosis, it is very similar to Freud’s first theory of
neurosis: ‘hysterics [neurotics of one kind] suffer mainly from reminiscences’ (1893–5: 7).
(p. 72) Schopenhauer introduces his observations with the penetrating remark that
madness does not affect the entire range of mental capabilities:
Neither the faculty of reason nor understanding can be denied to the mad, for
they talk and understand, and often draw very accurate conclusions. They also, as
a rule, perceive quite correctly what is present, and see the connection between
cause and effect.
(1819 (1): 192)
Thus, these disorders lie in something other than a simple inability to connect with
reality. In fact, they originate in problems of memory:
For the most part, mad people do not generally err in knowledge of what is
immediately present; but their mad talk relates always to what is absent and past,
and only through these to its connection with what is present. Therefore, it seems
to me that their malady specifically concerns the memory (1819 (1): 192).
We are reminded of Freud’s first theory. But there is more. For Schopenhauer, the failure
of memory that causes the trouble is something very specific. In some cases memory is
preserved, but in others:
it is a case of the thread of memory being broken, its continuous connection being
abolished, and of the impossibility of a uniformly coherent recollection of the past.
Individual scenes of the past stand out correctly, just like the individual present;
but there are gaps in their recollections that they fill up with fictions … In his
memory the true is forever mixed up with the false. Although the immediate
present is correctly known, it is falsified through a fictitious connection with an
imaginary past.
(1819 (1): 192)
As we recall, Schopenhauer used the metaphor of the thread of memory to describe the
ordering of consciousness by the will (see the sections entitled ‘Will or Drives and
Intellect’ and ‘Psychic Defences’, in this chapter); when the thread is broken, there are
periods in the will’s activities that are no longer represented in memory, the continuity of
aim in these activities notwithstanding. Given what Schopenhauer said about repression,
he probably held, as did Freud later, that while they are lost to consciousness, they are
Page 10 of 22

not lost altogether. What could break the thread? According to Schopenhauer in a
remarkable passage, traumata are the villains.
The fact that violent mental suffering or unexpected and terrible events are
frequently the cause of madness, I explain as follows. Every such suffering is as an
actual event always confined to the present; hence it is only transitory, and to that
extent is never excessively heavy. It becomes insufferably great only in so far as it
is a lasting pain, but as such it is again only a thought, and therefore resides in
memory. Now if such a sorrow, such a painful knowledge of reflection, is so
harrowing that it becomes positively unbearable, and the individual would
succumb to it, then (p. 73) nature, alarmed in this way, seizes upon madness as the
last means of saving life. The mind, tormented so greatly, destroys, as it were, the
thread of memory, fills up the gaps with fictions, and thus seeks refuge in madness
from the mental suffering that exceeds its strength. (1819 (1): 193)
This is all very similar to Freud’s first theory noted earlier and to one of Freud’s accounts
of (at least some kinds) of psychosis: delusions, Freud once said, are ‘applied like a patch
over the place where originally a rent had appeared in the ego’s relation to the external
world’ (1924b: 151). To be sure, Schopenhauer and Freud were hardly the only ones to
believe that hysteria is linked to memory; in the passage in which Freud’s famous
aphorism occurs, he immediately goes on in a long footnote to discuss others ‘who have
held similar views on hysteria to ours’ (1893–5: 7n). He mentions Moebius, Strümpell,
and Benedikt—but not Schopenhauer. Yet Schopenhauer could well have been, directly or
indirectly, the source of the idea for all of them.
Schopenhauer was also well aware of the ‘psychopathology of everyday life’ (Freud 1901)
and the connection between mental illness and ‘normal’ psychological processes. One of
Freud’s greatest achievements was to make credible the idea that neurotic symptoms are
purposive, that there are reasons for them. They are not expressions of arbitrary
neurological failure. Once again, we find Schopenhauer arriving at an idea first. Nature,
we saw him say, ‘seizes upon madness as a means of saving life’. Both Schopenhauer’s
and Freud’s contemporaries mostly saw mental illness as a symptom of neurological
breakdown, of constitutional weakness. In sharp contrast, they both saw it as
psychologically functional: madness is a way of coping, a motivated reaction. The idea
first entered Freud’s work about 1890 and he (rightly) never gave it up.
Psychic Defences
In connection with ‘madness’, Schopenhauer articulated large parts of what became the
Freudian doctrine of how the psyche defends itself against painful memories and the like.
In particular, though he did not use the word, his insights into the nature of what Freud
called repression run very deep. The will always:
Page 11 of 22

makes its supremacy felt in the last resort. This it does by prohibiting the intellect
from having certain representations, by absolutely preventing certain trains of
thought from arising … it then curbs and restrains the intellect, and forces it to
turn to other things. (1844 (2): 208)
Even as late as 1919, Freud ascribed to the same motive for repression as Schopenhauer
had: ‘we have a perfect right to describe repression, which lies at the basis of every
neurosis, as a reaction to a trauma—as an elementary traumatic neurosis’ (1919: 210).
Schopenhauer also described what is translated in both thinkers as ‘resistance’.8

(p. 74)
We can understand the memory gaps of the mad better, he tells us, when:
we remember how reluctant we are to think things that powerfully prejudice our
interests, wound our pride, or interfere with our wishes; with what difficulty we
decide to lay such things before our own intellect for accurate and serious
investigation; how, on the contrary, pleasant affairs come into our minds entirely
of their own accord, and, if driven away, always creep on us once more, so that we
dwell on them for hours. In this resistance on the part of the will to allow what is
contrary to it to come under the examination of the intellect is to be found the
place where madness can break in on the mind. (1844 (2): 400, our italics)
Schopenhauer even articulated a thought that is on the road to the clinical insight that it
is therapeutic to bring the unconscious to consciousness:
Every new adverse event must be assimilated by the intellect, in other words,
must receive a place in the system of truths connected with our will and its
interests … As soon as this is done, it pains us much less; but this operation itself
is often very painful, and in most cases takes place only slowly and with
reluctance. But soundness of mind can continue only in so far as this operation
has been correctly carried out each time. (1844 (2): 400)
It is a short step indeed from this claim to the idea of making the repressed unconscious
conscious, and from there to the clinical insight that recovering unconscious memories,
fantasies, etc. will deprive them of their power by assimilating them into consciousness.
In Freud’s words, ‘The therapeutic influence of psycho-analysis depends on the
replacement of unconscious mental acts by conscious ones and is effective within the
limits of that factor’ (1925b: 265).
As the passages quoted in this and the previous sections show, Schopenhauer had the
essentials of the whole traumatic theory of neurosis. He specified the role played by
traumatically induced repression of memories, identified the phenomena of substitute
fantasies and symptoms, and described resistance fifty years before Freud did.
Page 12 of 22

Other Parallels in Psychological Doctrine

There are other parallels between Schopenhauer’s work and Freud’s which we do not
have the space to explore. Briefly, Schopenhauer had a detailed theory of dreams, a
theory that occupies a substantial portion of his hundred-page Essay on Spirit Seeing and
(p. 75) Everything Connected Therewith (1851). Freud cites this essay three times in the
Interpretation of Dreams. In addition, this essay and some of Schopenhauer’s other works
display a knowledge of neurophysiology quite remarkable for someone of Schopenhauer’s
time and discipline. The same was true of Freud, of course, but Schopenhauer’s theory of
the systems that make up the brain and of how experiences could consist of
communication of impulses in and among these systems is actually similar to Freud’s
view in The Project of the psy/phi/omega systems and the Qn said by Freud to circulate
among them. Schopenhauer also described what Freud called parapraxes and
sublimation.
Freud on Schopenhauer
The substantial parallels between Schopenhauer and Freud raise a number of questions.
The most obvious is the extent to which Freud is indebted to Schopenhauer for key
insights, whether directly, by having read him, or indirectly, by being exposed to his
insights in other ways. For intellectual history is filled with coincidences and not every
correlation is the result of a causal connection. We argue that Freud almost certainly was
indebted to Schopenhauer. Both Freud’s remarks and his silences are of interest here.
There is also a further question as to whether Schopenhauer’s high standing at the time
helped to ease the reception of psychoanalysis, and we suggest that indeed it did.
Freud’s remarks on Schopenhauer fall into two periods. Before 1915, Freud made few
references to Schopenhauer: five in the Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900) including
the three just mentioned, one to a comment about Schopenhauer (Freud 1901: 119), a
passage which also contains a reference to von Hartmann, to whom we will return, a
footnote on two kinds of knowledge which uses Schopenhauer as an example but could
have used anyone (Freud 1909: 196n), and a strange passage in Freud (1914a: 15). Only
two of these references are to The World as Will and Representation, a general reference
to Schopenhauer on time in the Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900: 503), and the
reference in 1914a, which is a passage that Freud knew about at all, he tells us, only
because Rank showed it to him. He is arguing in the passage that he discovered
repression by himself.
The theory of repression quite certainly came to me independently of any other

source; I know of no outside impression which might have suggested it to me and
for a long time I imagined it to be entirely original, until Otto Rank … showed us a
passage in Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation in which the
philosopher seeks to give an explanation of insanity. [He is probably referring to
the passage from 1844 (2): 192–208, quoted earlier.] What he says there about the
Page 13 of 22

struggle against accepting a distressing piece of reality coincides with my concept

of repression so completely that once again I owe the chance of making a
discovery to my not being well read. (1914a: 15)
Of course, an idea that someone else has already hit upon is not a discovery. And
(p. 76)
Freud had already read some Schopenhauer, as the references in Interpretation of

Dreams show. Moreover, the Essay on Spirit Seeing (1851) that Freud cites repeats
Schopenhauer’s memory theory of madness, and his views on dreams, the will, and
sexuality, asserts that the intellect is just the shell of the mind, and so on. However, prior
to 1915, Freud said little to indicate that he had read any other works by Schopenhauer.
Beginning in 1915, the pattern changes markedly. The Introductory Lectures explicitly
acknowledge Schopenhauer as a forerunner of psychoanalysis:
Probably very few people can have realized the momentous significance for
science and life of the recognition of unconscious mental processes. It was not
psycho-analysis, however, let us hasten to add, which took this first step. There
are famous philosophers who may be cited as forerunners—above all the great
thinker Schopenhauer, whose unconscious ‘will’ is equivalent to the mental
instincts of psycho-analysis. It was this same thinker, moreover, who in words of
unforgettable impressiveness admonished mankind of the importance, still so
greatly-underestimated by it, of its sexual craving.
(Freud 1916–17: 143) [Strachey thinks that Freud had in mind the passage that
we cited earlier from 1844 (2): 513–14.]
Then in the 1920 preface to Three Essays, we find:
it has been some time since Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher, showed
mankind the extent to which their activities are determined by sexual impulses—in
the ordinary sense of the word. (1905: 134, 1920 edn)
Freud acknowledged parallels between his thought and Schopenhauer’s very fully after
1915.
Yet what he credited Schopenhauer for is a little strange. He credited Schopenhauer for
anticipating not his pre-1920 theory of libido and self-preservation as separate drives but
his post-1920 theory which merged the two under the concept of Eros and contrasted
both with the newly introduced death drive. Indeed, Freud links both parts of his new
picture to Schopenhauer. He now treats sexual drives as fundamental to Eros (‘ … the
true life instincts’ (1920: 40)), and then links this expanded concept to Schopenhauer
(1920: Preface). Similarly, when he introduces his controversial death drive later in 1920,
Freud tells us that:
We have unwittingly steered our course into the harbour of Schopenhauer’s

philosophy. For him death is the ‘true result and to that extent the purpose of life’,
while the sexual instinct is the embodiment of the will to live. (1920: 49–50)
Page 14 of 22

This is doubly curious. Schopenhauer never married sexuality and the urge to self-
preservation in the way that Freud is now doing. And he never postulated a positive drive
to die. It was bad enough for him that death was the inevitable result of living. In short,
(p. 77) Freud first acknowledged the parallels between his drive theory and
Schopenhauer’s only at the point at which they had largely ceased to exist!
While he now credited Schopenhauer, he continued to assert his originality:
The large extent to which psycho-analysis coincides with the philosophy of

Schopenhauer—not only did he assert the dominance of the emotions and the
supreme importance of sexuality but he was even aware of the mechanism of
repression—is not to be traced to my acquaintance with his teaching. I read
Schopenhauer very late in life. (1925a: 59)
Even if Freud is right, the remark is an evasion. He ignores all the other ways in which he
could have learned about Schopenhauer, as many commentators have noted. For
example, Herzog noted that ‘Freud was fully aware of a philosophical tradition, centred in
Germany, that placed great emphasis on the concept of a psychical unconscious . . .
[d]espite his insistence that he had read neither Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche until after
making his own discoveries’ (Herzog 1988: 169). And McGrath (1986: 148) argues
convincingly that even if Freud read Schopenhauer only late in life, the parallels on
repression might still not be a coincidence. One of Freud’s most influential teachers,
Meynert, described repression fully and he explicitly credited the idea to Schopenhauer
(1851). Freud knew this. Yet as little as a year after Freud wrote the impressive 1914
acknowledgement quoted earlier, he could go so far as to claim that repression was a
‘concept which could not have been formulated before the time of psycho-analytic
studies’ (1915b: 146).
One of the most significant indirect routes by which Freud encountered Schopenhauer’s
thought is in the works of Eduard von Hartmann, whom we know Freud read early in his
career (Brandell 1979: 93). Von Hartmann was a popularizer of Schopenhauer and his The
Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) and numerous works of the 1870s were immensely
popular. Schopenhauer’s psychology is central to von Hartmann’s view, a view that also
contains ideas similar to Freud’s ideas. Moreover, Brentano discussed von Hartmann at
length and on precisely the question of unconscious mental states in his 1874 book.
There is more. First, the period of Freud’s secondary schooling and university, roughly
from 1865 to 1875, was the period of Schopenhauer’s greatest fame. Indeed, he was
virtually the official philosopher of the German-speaking world in those years. Most
university students in Freud’s time who had any interest in philosophy or psychology
would have read at least The World as Will and Representation. Secondly, as a student,
Sulloway (1979) tells us, Freud belonged to Leseverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens
(Reading Society of the German Students of Vienna). Along with Wagner and Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer was a prime topic of conversation. Thirdly, Brentano refers to
Schopenhauer several times in his 1874 book.
Page 15 of 22

For all the reasons that we have laid out, we are of the view that the deep similarities in
the views of Schopenhauer and Freud were not a coincidence; when Freud said, ‘Why
should not a bold thinker have guessed something that is afterwards confirmed by sober
and painstaking detailed research?’ (1933: 107), we suspect that he should have said
‘that (p. 78) is afterwards taken up and confirmed by sober and painstaking detailed
research’.9 Freud’s claim that he made his discoveries without being influenced by
Schopenhauer would be like someone today claiming that she or he discovered dynamic
psychology without being influenced by Freud!
Freud’s ambivalence about Schopenhauer goes with peculiarities in his attitude to

philosophers in general. An example. In 1923 and many times in other works, he said that
philosophers reject the idea of unconscious psychical states: ‘To most people who have
been educated in philosophy the idea of anything psychical which is not also conscious is
so inconceivable that it seems to them absurd and refutable simply by logic … ’ (1923:
13). This is a remarkable statement, considering that Freud was steeped in German
Romanticism from his youth. Schopenhauer denied the unconscious? Von Hartmann?
Nietzsche? And there were many others. As Ellenberger notes, in the latter part of the
nineteenth century, the unconscious was extremely popular (1970: 311).
Not only did this tradition not deny unconscious mental life, it held it to be the most
important part of the human person. Freud had to have been aware of all this. So, what is
going on? Perhaps something like the following. One philosopher who influenced Freud
did deny the very possibility of unconscious psychic states: Franz Brentano. (Brentano
was not the only nineteenth-century philosopher who equated the psychical with the
conscious but the others are not known to have influenced Freud.) Freud attended
Brentano’s lectures for three years, at just the time Brentano published his famous 1874
book in which the equation of the psychical with the conscious appears most prominently.
And Brentano was the only philosopher under whom Freud studied. At the time, as
Freud’s letter to his friend Silberstein shows, Freud idealized Brentano, describing him at
one point as a ‘remarkable man and in many respects ideal human being’ (1990: 95). Yet
Freud mentioned Brentano only once in all his writings. It is possible that when Freud
thought of philosophers, he thought of philosophers such as Brentano and when he
worked on his own views, he did not think of philosophers such as Schopenhauer and von
Hartmann who had held similar views.
We will close by noting that Schopenhauer’s contribution likely goes beyond any direct or
indirect influence that he had on Freud. Intellectual historians must also consider
Schopenhauer’s influence on those Freud sought to persuade. In addition to influencing
Freud on the many doctrines that we have detailed, it is reasonable to believe that
Schopenhauer helped to shape the reception of psychoanalysis. Obviously, many of
Freud’s ideas were shocking to his contemporaries and he struggled against fierce
resistance to gain acceptance for them. However, Freud promulgated his theories in an
intellectual climate thoroughly shaped by Schopenhauer and other philosophers and
psychologists of the unconscious will, Nietzsche for example. Freud himself probably
Page 16 of 22

came to recognize, maybe after 1915, that invoking Schopenhauer helped his cause. If so,
Schopenhauer paved the way for Freud in more ways than one.10
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Brandell, G. (1979). Freud: A Man of His Century. New Jersey: Humanities Press.
Brentano, F. (1874/1973). Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. A. C.

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Freud, S. (1990). The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, 1871–1881, ed.
Walter Boehlich, trans. A. Pomerans. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press.
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Gardiner, P. (1963). Schopenhauer. London: Penguin Books.
Gardner, S. (1999). ‘Schopenhauer, Will, and the Unconscious’. In C. Janaway (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (pp. 375–421). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gardner, S. (2013). ‘The unconscious: Transcendental origins, Idealist metaphysics and

psychoanalytic metapsychology’. In N. Boyle and L. Disley, and K. Ameriks (eds), The
Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought (pp. 134–165).
Gödde, G. (2010). ‘Freud and 19th-century philosophical sources on the unconscious’. In

A. Nicholis and M. Leibscher (eds), Thinking the Unconscious: 19th-Century German
Thought (pp. 261–286). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gupta, R. (1980). ‘Freud and Schopenhauer’. In M. Fox (ed.), Schopenhauer: His

Philosophical Achievement. New Jersey: Barnes & Noble Books.
Hartmann, E. von (1869/1931). Philosophy of the Unconscious: Speculative Results

According to the Inductive Method of Physical Science. New York: Harcourt, Brace &
Company.
Herzog, P. (1988). ‘The myth of Freud as anti-philosopher’. In Freud: Appraisals and

Reappraisals, Vol. 2 (pp. 163–190). New Jersey: The Analytic Press.
Jacquette, D. (2015). Schopenhauer and the Metaphysics of the Unconscious. Basel:

Schwage AG, Verlag.
Janaway, C. (2010). ‘The real essence of human beings: Schopenhauer and the
unconscious will’. In A. Nicholis and M. Leibscher (eds), Thinking the Unconscious: 19th-
Century German Thought (pp. 140–155). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jung, C. (1973). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage Books.
Magee, B. (1989). The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mann, T. (1968). Essays of Three Decades. Toronto: Random House of Canada Ltd.
McGill, V. J. (1971). Schopenhauer: Pessimist and Pagan. New York: Haskell.
McGrath, W. (1986). The Politics of Hysteria: Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis. Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press.
Proctor-Greg, N. (1956). ‘Schopenhauer and Freud’. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 25: 197–

214.
Schopenhauer, A. (1819/1969). The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, trans. E. F. J.

Payne. New York: Dover Publications.
Page 20 of 22

Schopenhauer, A. (1844/1966). The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2, trans. E. F. J.

Payne. New York: Dover Publications.
Schopenhauer, A. (1851/1974). ‘Essay on spirit seeing and everything connected

therewith’. In Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Schopenhauer, A. (1970). Essays and Aphorisms (selection and translation of Parerga and
Paralipomena, 1851). London: Penguin Books.
Sulloway, F. (1979). Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. New
York: Basic Books.
Young, C. and Brook, A. (1994). ‘Schopenhauer and Freud’. The International Journal of
Psychoanalysis 75: 101–118. (p. 82)
Notes:
(1) In Young and Brook (1994), we explore earlier studies: Cassirer (1946); Ellenberger
(1970); Gupta (1980); Gardiner (1963); Magee (1989); and Mann (1968). More recent
studies include: Gardner (1999, 2013); Askey and Farquhar (2006); Janaway (2010); and
Jacquette (2015). Gödde (2010) provides an excellent synopsis of the whole period.
Sandford (this volume) paints a picture of Schopenhauer and Freud on reproduction and
sexuality that is different from ours. None of these authors goes into anything like the
detail that we do.
(2) We will limit ourselves to correspondences in psychological doctrine between the two
thinkers, though there are other similarities in their views, too, for example in their ethics
and aesthetics.
(3) Though The World as Will and Representation was published in 1819, we date Vol. 2 to
1844 because it did not appear until the second edition, which was published in 1844. A
third edition was also published in Schopenhauer’s lifetime and he expanded the work
still further. As he tells us in the Preface, ‘though in the same type’, it has ‘136 pages
more than its predecessor’.
(4) Sandford (this volume) argues that Schopenhauer was concerned with a desire to
reproduce, whereas Freud was concerned with sexual desire. Statements such as the
ones just quoted suggest that she pushes her argument too far, and that while
Schopenhauer certainly linked sexual desire to the will to live and reproduce (sexual
desire ‘is the most complete manifestation of the will to live’ (1844 (2): 514)), by sexual
desire he often had plain old lust in mind.
(5) Freud’s expansion of the concept of sexuality is altogether more complicated than
Schopenhauer’s. We explore some of the complications in Young and Brook (1994).
Page 21 of 22

(6) In response, we might try to say that the sensual zones and pleasures of Freud’s
theory of infantile sexuality are sexual only in the extended sense of the term we
delineated earlier. Freud no more believed that infantile sexuality is aimed at orgasmic
release or that it is genital than anyone else—indeed, his stages of psychosexual
development were specifically built on a denial of the latter point. If so, it may sometimes
appear as if his infantile ‘sexuality’ comes down to little more than ‘organ-pleasure’,
bodily sensuality in general (see in this regard the argumentative discussion at 1916–17:
323–5). Such a minimalist reading would seriously understate the originality of his theory,
however; for Freud, the infantile part-instincts and erogenous zones are sexual in a much
stronger sense than that—they are the origins of genital sexuality in the human organism.
(7) Kant held much the same view too (Gardner 2013: 136).
(8) Freud uses the word Widerstand for resistance, Schopenhauer here uses
Widerstreben.
(9) Moreover, Schopenhauer may have been less a mere speculator than Freud alleges. As
Magee notes, he ‘was a frequent visitor to insane asylums, where he would hold long
conversations with the inmates, and go back again and again to talk to those who
particularly interested him’ (1988: 266).
(10) An earlier version of this paper appeared as Brook & Young (1994).
Andrew Brook
Department of Philosophy, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Chris Young
Independent scholar
Page 22 of 22


A Better Self: Freud and Nietzsche on the Nature and
Value of Sublimation
Ken Gemes

The notion of sublimation is essential to Nietzsche and Freud. However, Freud’s writings
fail to provide a persuasive notion of sublimation. In particular, Freud’s writings are
confused on the distinction between pathological symptoms and sublimations, and on the
relation between sublimation and repression. After rehearsing these problems in some
detail it is proposed that a return to Nietzsche allows for a more coherent account of
sublimation, its difference from pathological symptoms and its relation to repression. In
summary, on Nietzsche’s account, while repression and pathological symptoms involve a
disintegration (of the self), sublimation involves integration. The chapter provides a brief
consideration of some post-Freudian accounts of sublimation that, arguably, represent a
return to a more Nietzschean approach. In closing, the chapter contrasts the different
bases of Nietzsche’s and Freud’s valorization of sublimation.
Keywords: sublimation, repression, pathological symptoms, integration, disintegration, master drive, Shreber,
Leonardo da Vinci
Introduction
Jacob Golomb writes that ‘(f)or Freud, sublimation is the only alternative to excessive
repression which may deteriorate into an acute neurotic conflict’.1 He quotes Freud:
It is precisely in neurotics that … the formation of an ideal heightens the demands

of the ego and is met with the most powerful factor favouring repression;
sublimation is a way out, by which those demands can be met without involving
repression
(Freud 1914: 95).
Page 1 of 27

He then adds: ‘This comment accurately reflects the ideas that Nietzsche had formulated
on sublimation years before Freud’ (Golomb 1989: 69–70). Golomb argues correctly that
sublimation is indeed a central notion for both Nietzsche and Freud, but as we shall see,
the question of what exactly is involved in sublimation raises profound difficulties. The
penultimate sentence in the entry on sublimation in Laplanche’s and Pontalis’s canonical
The Language of Psychoanalysis explicitly acknowledges the importance of giving a
coherent theory of sublimation:
In the psychoanalytic literature the concept of sublimation is frequently called

upon; the idea answers to a basic need of the Freudian doctrine and it is hard to
see how it could be dispensed with
(Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 433).
One reason that sublimation is a key notion in psychoanalysis is that from Freud’s
therapeutic point of view successful psychoanalytic treatment aims at sublimation, in as
much as sublimation is seen as a necessary condition for psychic health. By bringing to
conscious light hitherto repressed drives, desires, and wishes, energy which has
previously displayed itself in unpleasurable symptoms may be harnessed and directed to
more productive and felicitous ends. And indeed, at first glance, sublimation might seem
a clear enough concept. It involves the redirecting of a repressed sexual drive towards a
non-sexual aim.2 As Freud puts it in his paper On Narcissism:
Sublimation is a process that concerns object-libido and consists in the instinct

directing itself towards an aim other than, and remote from, that of sexual
satisfaction; in this process the accent falls upon deflection from sexuality3
(Freud 1914: 94).
Yet Laplanche’s and Pontalis’s entry on sublimation ends with a starkly negative
assessment of attempts to clarify the notion of sublimation: ‘The lack of a coherent theory
of sublimation remains one of the lacunae in psychoanalytic thought’ (Laplanche and
Pontalis 1973: 433).
The claim that sublimation is a vexed concept is repeatedly echoed in the ‘secondary’
literature. Indeed, this is true from the early days of that literature as evidenced in
Edward Glover’s (1931) assertion in his important paper ‘Sublimation, Substitution and
Social Anxiety’:
It is generally agreed that prior to 1923 a good deal of confusion existed

regarding the exact nature of sublimation. Since then it has increased rather than
diminished
(Glover 1931: 263),
Page 2 of 27

More recently Jacques Lacan notes ‘the virtually absurd difficulties that authors have
encountered every time they have tried to give a meaning to the term
“sublimation”’ (Lacan 1992: 142–3).
To get an entry to these difficulties let us begin by considering the simple definition given
here which emphasizes the redirecting of a drive from a sexual to a non-sexual aim.
Before demonstrating the major problem with this definition we shall briefly consider two
minor but important problems with this definition. First, there is the problem of
distinguishing aims that involve sexual satisfaction and those that do not. After all, it was
Freud who argued that many prima facie non-sexual activities (e.g. thumb-sucking) have
a sexual component. Perhaps this can be finessed by distinguishing overtly sexual aims
from aims that are not overtly sexual. Second, there is the problem that much sublimation
seems to involve a diversion of arguably non-sexual instincts. Thus aggressive drives,
drives associated with what Freud would later call the death drive, may find sublimated
discharge in non-aggressive behaviour.4
Substitute Formations, Symptoms, and

Sublimations
Now for the major problem: the definition in terms of the substitution of non-sexual for
sexual aims fails to distinguish sublimations from symptom formation. An obsessive who
compulsively aims to avoid treading on cracks in the pavement may have substituted a
non-sexual aim for a sexual aim but that would not normally count as a case of
sublimation (though see the following section). On Freud’s basic account various drives
are repressed and later these may manifest themselves in various behaviours. These
behaviours, often labelled by Freud as ‘substitute formations’, are related in complex
ways to the original drive. They are what Freud calls the ‘return of the repressed’ (Freud
1915: 154). Our key question then is how to separate those substitute formations, those
instances of the return of the repressed, which are symptoms, from those that are
sublimations?
Of all Freud’s writings perhaps the paper that most acutely demonstrates the need for a
clear means of separating symptoms from sublimations is his 1910 essay ‘Leonardo Da
Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’ (Freud 1910a). There Freud argues that Leonardo
is a model of that type of individual whose repressed sexual desires find sublimated
expression by becoming attached to a powerful drive for scientific and artistic research.
In his summarizing final section Freud shows implicit recognition of the difficulties of
separating symptoms from sublimations, and, relatedly, illness from health, when he
writes:
We must expressly insist that we have never reckoned Leonardo as a neurotic or a

‘nerve case’, as the awkward phrase goes. Anyone who protests at our so much as
daring to examine him in the light of discoveries gained in the field of pathology is
still clinging to prejudices which we have to-day rightly abandoned. We no longer
Page 3 of 27

think that health and illness, normal and neurotic people, are to be sharply
distinguished from each other, and that neurotic traits must necessarily be taken
as proofs of a general inferiority. To-day we know that neurotic symptoms are
structures which are substitutes for certain achievements of repression that we
have to carry out in the course of our development from a child to a civilized
human being. We know too that we all produce such substitutive structures, and
that it is only their number, intensity and distribution which justify us in using the
practical concept of illness and in inferring the presence of constitutional
inferiority. From the slight indications we have about Leonardo’s personality we
should be inclined to place him close to the type of neurotic that we describe as
‘obsessional’; and we may compare his researches to the ‘obsessive brooding’ of
neurotics, and his inhibitions to what are known as their ‘abulias’
(Freud 1910a: 131).
After holding up Leonardo as a model of sublimation throughout the essay, and then in
the first sentence of this quotation protesting that he has not reckoned Leonardo to be a
neurotic, Freud in the final sentence concludes that we must place Leonardo close to the
obsessional neurotic. The distance between sublimation and neurotic symptoms seems
vanishingly small. Here we have in microcosm our problem; how to separate sublimations
from the neurotic symptoms both of which count as substitutive formations?
The Social Factor in Sublimations

In many of Freud’s explications of sublimation there is an emphasis on the social value of
the activity resulting from sublimation. Thus in his New Introductory Lectures he says:
A certain kind of modification of the aim and a change of object, in which our
social valuation is taken into account, is described by us as ‘sublimation’
(Freud 1933: 97).
In one of his earliest published references to sublimation in the Dora case of 1905 he
talks of the ‘the undifferentiated sexual disposition of the child … being diverted to a
higher sexual aim’ and thereby providing ‘the energy for a greater number of our cultural
achievements’ (Freud 1905a: 50). In the Three Essays dating from the same period he
writes that sexual curiosity can be ‘diverted (sublimated) in the direction of art’ (Freud
1905a:156).
This emphasis on socially valued achievements would provide some means of separating
neurotic symptoms from sublimations but at the high cost of introducing a totally non-
psychoanalytic, indeed a non-psychological element to the definition; namely that of
social valuation. One, presumably uncomfortable, consequence of such an account would
be that as social values change, behaviour that was at one time pathological would
become a sublimation. For instance, suppose our compulsive crack avoider mentioned
earlier successfully presents his activities as a kind of performance art and receives much
Page 4 of 27

social acclaim for his continual performances. Does that move his activity from neurotic
symptom to sublimation?
The reference to social acclaim has led many authors to be suspicious of such
definitions.5 In his article ‘What is Sublimated in Sublimation’ Donald Kaplan begins:
The whole idea of sublimation has been a vagrant problem for psychoanalysis from
the very beginning. This is because sublimation, in one of its meanings, refers to
felicitous exercises of the mind, while psychoanalysis is suspicious of any such
simple creed
(Kaplan 1993: 549).
One gets a clear picture of the problem posed by the introduction of social valuation as a
defining characteristic of sublimation, and the related problem of distinguishing neurotic
symptoms from sublimations, by contrasting Freud’s essay on Schreber with his essay on
Leonardo. The latter is perhaps his most sustained surviving piece covering the topic of
sublimation.6 According to Freud, Schreber’s illness stems from his repression of
homosexual desires first overtly expressed in his quickly suppressed thought that ‘(a)fter
all it would be nice to be a woman submitting to the act of copulation’. This repression
later gave rise to the obsessive thought that God is trying to unman him and turn him into
a woman and led to various other obsessive thoughts and behaviour. This would not
normally count as a case of sublimation. Contrast this with Freud’s Leonardo case.
According to Freud, Leonardo, like Schreber, represses his homosexual desires and this
repression later leads to his scientific inquisitiveness and inventiveness and his artistic
activities including his obsession with capturing in drawings perfect representations of
the male body. This for Freud is a classical case of sublimation. Is the only pertinent
difference here that in the Schreber case the end activity that results from a repression of
erotic desires, namely, obsessive behaviour and thought centring on his relationship to
God, is not considered socially valuable, whereas in the Leonardo case the end activity
that results from a repression of erotic desires is considered socially valuable? Or, as
Kaplan might put it, is it simply that we regard Schreber’s exercises of the mind as non-
felicitous, but regard Leonardo’s as felicitous? Such distinctions as socially valuable/not
socially valuable, felicitous/non-felicitous, clearly involve value judgements. Moreover,
such distinctions do not seem to be analytical distinctions. Thus it seems a fundamental
notion in psychoanalysis is not to be explained in strictly psychoanalytical terms.
Furthermore, those terms seem irredeemably normative and this runs against Freud’s
general claim to be providing a merely scientific/descriptive account of psychological
phenomena.7 Also bringing in the normative results in a questionable form of relativism
as norms of what is socially acceptable vary from culture to culture and even between
subgroups in a given culture. It is presumably this kind of concern that lead Laplanche
and Pontalis to raise the question: ‘Should the fact that activities described as sublimated
in a given culture are accorded particularly high social esteem be taken as a defining
characteristic of sublimation?’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 33).
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If we do choose to abandon the social valuation factor in separating sublimation from

symptom formation any new account should, I suggest, be tested by how it handles the
Leonardo and Schreber cases. The respective behaviours of Leonardo and Schreber may
be taken as paradigms of sublimation and pathogenic symptoms. What we are looking for
then is a strictly psychoanalytic account which would class Leonardo’s behaviour as
sublimation and Schreber’s as pathogenic symptoms.
The Relation between Sublimation and

Repression
Another serious problem raised by Freud’s own writings on sublimation concerns the
relation between repression and sublimation. In one understanding of Freud’s telling of
the Leonardo case, Leonardo’s homosexual urges are continuously repressed, hence he
lives an asexual adult life, and it is this repression that gives rise to his adult scientific
and artistic drives:
the sexual repression which set in after this phase of his childhood (where he
experienced the ‘excessive tenderness of his mother’) caused him to sublimate his
libido into the urge to know and established his sexual inactivity for the whole of
his later life
(Freud 1910a: 135).
Here it seems out of place to talk of the repression of the original drives being lifted; for
if the repression were lifted there would be no account of the continuation of the
scientific and artistic drives and the continual asexuality.8 On this model, at its simplest,
Leonardo’s scientific and artistic drives, like his asexuality, are really kinds of symptoms
and, as per the usual Freudian model, working through the repressions behind the
symptoms should lead to elimination, or possibly the transformation, of the symptoms.
The notion that sublimation involves repression is re-enforced by one of Freud’s earliest
mentions of sublimation in his Three Essays on Sexuality.9 There he refers to ‘the
diversion of sexual forces from sexual aims and their direction to new ones—a process
that deserves the name of “sublimation”’ (Freud 1905a: 178). In the same place he goes
on to say ‘we would place its (sublimation’s) beginning in the period of sexual latency of
childhood’. Clearly such redirection on the part of the child involves non-conscious
repression of those sexual forces qua sexual forces, and such repression is exactly what
Freud describes as the progenitor of the period of sexual latency. It is not that the child
consciously faces his erotic desires and chooses not to act on them but pursue some other
activity as a substitute satisfaction. The sublimation of those desires first requires their
repression. Indeed, there is even some tendency in the psychoanalytic literature to at
least implicitly identify sublimation as a species of repression. For instance in
Sublimation: Inquiries into Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Hans Loewald writes
‘Traditionally sublimation is classified in psychoanalysis as a defence’ (Loewald 1988: 3),
and in fact Freud’s earliest reference to sublimation in his 1892 letter to Fliess refers to
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sublimations as ‘protective structures’ (Freud 1897: 247). A page later in a footnote

Loewald notes that:
It must be noted, however, that in the psychoanalytic literature, including works

by Freud himself, the very distinction between defence and repression has been
blurred, in as much as repression is used interchangeably with defense
(Loewald 1988: 4–5).
So if sublimations are defences and the notions of defences and repressions are
interchangeable it follows that sublimations are repressions. Fenichel indeed comments
that sometimes sublimation is called a ‘successful repression’ (Fenichel 1945: 148).
In fact while the Leonardo text and the extract from the Three Essays on Sexuality
suggest that repression is part of sublimation, often in other texts when Freud explicitly
considers repression and sublimation together he claims that sublimation is an
alternative to repression. Thus in a passage from Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis he
says: ‘Premature repression makes the sublimation of the repressed instinct impossible;
when the repression is lifted, the path to sublimation becomes free once more’ (Freud
1910b: 54). In a letter to Putnam, Freud even goes so far as to claim that the two are
mutually exclusive: ‘It (psychoanalytic theory) teaches that a drive cannot be sublimated
as long as it is repressed and that is true for every component of a drive’ (Hale 1971:
121).
To clarify the relation between sublimation and repression it helps to consider exactly
what gets repressed in repression. Here the best place to turn is Freud’s (1915) essay
‘Repression’ (Freud 1915: 141–58). A crucial point of that essay is Freud’s claim that a
drive has both an ‘ideational’ component and an energetic component, what Freud calls
‘a quota of affect’ (Freud 1915: 152). The ideational component is the intensional content
of the drive, including its aim. The energetic component is the force associated with that
aim, including the strength of the drive. In repression both the ideational component and
the force component are repressed. The repression of the ideational component involves
not letting the aim be consciously apprehended. The repression of the force involves not
letting the force be expressed in behaviour. While Freud refers to the repression of the
ideational component as ‘primal repression’ he emphasizes that ‘the vicissitude of the
quota of affect belonging to the representative is far more important than the vicissitude
of the idea’ (Freud 1915: 153). With this distinction in hand we can now see how
sublimation both does and does not involve repression. In sublimation the ideational
component may or may not be repressed. In the case of childhood sublimations, the aim
of the original drive, the drive’s ideational component, is typically held back from
conscious apprehension. In the case of sublimation reached through psychoanalytic
treatments typically the ideational component becomes available for conscious
apprehension. However, in all sublimations, therapeutically achieved or otherwise, the
force component is expressed in behaviour. All sublimations involve an expression of a
pent-up quota of affect. The picture suggested here is that all sublimations typically take
repressions as causal antecedents. In this sense sublimations are another manifestation
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of the phenomena that Freud calls ‘the return of the repressed’. What sublimations undo
is the repressing of the energetic component, they steer it to an outlet, an aim that
deviates from its original aim. Indeed in the passage quoted earlier from ‘Five Lectures
on Psychoanalysis’ Freud contrasts neurotics who owing to their repressions ‘have
sacrificed many sources of energy’ with cases of sublimation:
in which the energy of the infantile wishful impulses is not cut off but remains
ready for use—the unserviceable aim of the various impulses being replaced by
one that is higher, and perhaps no longer sexual
(Freud 1910b: 53–4).
Here Freud is explicitly claiming that in sublimation it is the repression of the energy that
is lifted.
This reading does not seem to square with the letter to Putnam where Freud says that
sublimation precludes the repression of any component of a drive. However, it is worth
noting that in that letter he is focused on the clinical practice of psychotherapy.
Presumably his idea is that the analyst is faced with a patient presenting various
symptoms which the patient experiences as distressing. These pathogenic symptoms are
the manifestation of various unconscious repressions. By bringing the repressed drives
into full consciousness—this of course involves more than just the patient’s intellectual
recognition of the drives—this allows for their expression in more acceptable forms. Note,
on this model it is not that the ideational component of the drive ceases to be suppressed
but that the suppression takes on a conscious form that somehow allows the energetic
component formerly associated with it to be redirected to new, more acceptable ends.
This model does not fit the non-therapeutic cases such as that of Leonardo since there is
no conscious recognition on Leonardo’s part of his underlying homoerotic drives. Nor
does it fit the text of Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality where the child in his latency
period has no conscious awareness of the desires being sublimated. Clearly the child
(unconsciously) represses rather than (consciously) suppresses his erotic desires. So the
conclusion to be drawn here is that the sublimation that is the result of successful
psychoanalytic intervention involves the lifting of unconscious repression of both the
ideational and energetic component; but the sublimation involved in typical cases of
scientific and artistic expression or that occurs in the latency period in childhood typically
only involve lifting of the repression of the energetic component and continued repression
of the ideational component. I suspect it is this model that leads to Fenichel’s idea of
sublimations as successful repressions; they are successful in that while the ideational
component is kept from consciousness the energy associated with it is allowed an outlet.
Freud’s claim in the Putnam letter that a drive cannot be sublimated as long as any
component is repressed would then have to be read as asserting that ‘in the practice of
psychotherapy a drive cannot be sublimated as long as it is unconsciously repressed’.
Nevertheless, this understanding of the relation of repression and sublimation still leaves
us hard-pressed to distinguish sublimation from other instances of the return of the
repressed, such as pathological symptoms.
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Nietzsche’s Solution
Nietzsche, like Freud10 and like their common predecessor Schopenhauer, takes
individual humans to be, at some fundamental level, collections of drives.11 However,
most modern humans, as members of what he denigratingly calls the herd, are simply
disorganized collections of competing drives, with different drives having relative
ascendancy at different times:
In the present age human beings have in their bodies the heritage of multiple
origins, that is opposite and not merely opposite drives and value standards that
fight each other and rarely permit each other any rest. Such human beings of late
cultures and refracted lights will on the average be weaker human beings (BGE
200).12
In many cases drives, particularly aggressive drives, are treated as per the Freudian
model by repression:
All instincts which are not discharged to the outside are turned back inside. This
is what I call the internalization of man. From this first grows in man what people
later call his ‘soul’. The entire inner world, originally as thin as if stretched
between two layers of skin, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, width,
and height to the extent that the discharge of human instinct out into the world
was obstructed (GM II 16).
Central to Nietzsche’s account is the notion of splitting off. Aggressive drives, which are
not viewed as acceptable, typically because acting on them would exact a painful
retribution, are suppressed to the point that one does not even acknowledge that one has
them; that is to the point where they are not simply suppressed but repressed.13 They
may nevertheless find their outlet often in disguised form. Indeed, often in a form that
contradicts their very nature. Thus Nietzsche claims that the Christian value of brotherly
love was originally, in fact, a transformed expression of hostile drives to dominate one’s
fellow men. By successfully preaching brotherly love the weak get their oppressors to
voluntarily disarm themselves and become subservient to the values of the weak. In doing
so they, both the weak and the strong who have been converted to the values of the weak,
split off their contrary aggressive drives from conscious apprehension, so that at the
same time they harbour both unacknowledged aggressive drives and acknowledged
beneficent drives. This repression and splitting-off of drives makes us sick creatures of
what Nietzsche calls ressentiment.14
For Nietzsche in certain rare cases drives, rather than being split off, are harnessed into
a centred, unified, whole. At one point Nietzsche took Wagner to be such a case:
The dramatic element in Wagner’s development is quite unmistakable from the

moment when his ruling passion became aware of itself and took his nature in its
charge: from that time on there was an end to fumbling, straying, to the
proliferation of secondary shoots, and within the most convoluted courses and
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often daring trajectories assumed by his artistic plans there rules a single inner
law, a will by which they can be explained (UM III 2).
The story of Wagner’s achievement of a higher unity borne from some master drive is of
course the story Nietzsche would repeat about himself in the dramatic section of Ecce
Homo where Nietzsche elaborates the subtitle of that work ‘How One Becomes What One
Is’:
To become what one is, one must not have the slightest notion of what one is …
The whole surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface—must be kept
clear of all great imperatives … Meanwhile the organizing ‘idea’ that is destined to
rule keeps growing deep down—it begins to command; slowly it leads us back
from side roads and wrong roads; it prepares single qualities and fitnesses that
will one day prove to be indispensable as a means towards the whole—one by one,
it trains all subservient capacities before giving any hint of the dominant task,
‘goal’, ‘aim’, or ‘meaning’ (EH, Why I am So Clever, 9).
This notion of the training of subservient drives is to be explicated in terms of the

redirection of those drives away from their initial, primary, goal towards a secondary goal
that is more in line with the master drive. This idea is partially expressed in the following
passage from Human, All too Human:
Microcosm and macrocosm of culture. Man makes the best discoveries about
culture within himself when he finds two heterogeneous powers governing there.
Given that a man loved the plastic arts or music as much as he was moved by the
spirit of science, and that he deemed it impossible to end this contradiction by
destroying the one and completely unleashing the other power; then, the only
thing remaining to him is to make such a large edifice of culture out of himself
that both powers can live there, even if at different ends of it; between them are
sheltered conciliatory central powers, with the dominating strength to settle, if
need be, any quarrels that break out. Such a cultural edifice in the single
individual will have the greatest similarity to the cultural architecture of whole
eras and, by analogy, provide continuous instruction about them. For wherever the
great architecture of culture developed, it was its task to force opposing forces
into harmony through an overwhelming aggregation of the remaining, less
incompatible powers, yet without suppressing or shackling them (HAH I, 276).
A point to be emphasized here is that on Nietzsche’s ideal weaker drives are not
suppressed or shackled. Rather they are to be harnessed to allow their expression in
service to a higher aim. Thus in his note books Nietzsche writes:
Overcoming of the affects? No, if that means their weakening and annihilation.
But instead employing them; which may mean a long tyrannizing of them … At last
they are confidently given freedom again: they love us as good servants and
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happily go wherever our best interests lie (KSA 12:39, see also HAH I, 224 and
276).
This gives us the material we need to affect a Nietzschean account of the distinction
between repression and sublimation. Sublimation is what happens when a drive’s primary
aim is substituted by a secondary aim that allows for expression of the drive in a manner
consonant with the master drive. As John Richardson succinctly puts it: ‘(D)rive A rules B
insofar as it has turned B towards A’s own end, so that B now participates in A’s
distinctive activity’ (1996: 33).15
Repression is what happens when a drive is denied its immediate aim and is then split off
from other drives in the sense that its aims are not integrated with the aims of other
drives and it must battle, often unsuccessfully, for any opportunity to achieve expression.
Consider again our cases of Leonardo and Schreber. Leonardo’s homosexual sexual drive
is redirected towards the secondary aims of scientific, as opposed to sexual, researches
and artistic creation, including idealized representations of the male body, as opposed to
actual sexual possession of male bodies. These ends fit in with his master drive of
scientific and artistic creativity. Schreber, on the other hand, by his own admission, splits
off his religious activity completely from his life as senate president. He claims that
neither activity in a way informs the other. Schreber does not integrate his sexual drive
with his wider life but strives to isolate it and separate its expressions from his other
activities.16
The Nietzschean solution to the problem of differentiating sublimation from pathological

symptoms may be summed up in the slogan sublimations involve integration or
unification, while pathological symptoms involve splittingoff or disintegration, as we
might call it. What is disintegrated is of course the (unified) self. For Nietzsche the
difference between repression and sublimation is that in sublimation the stronger drive
co-opts a weaker drive as an ally and this allows the weaker drive expression albeit to an
end that contains some degree of deflection from its original aim (for example Leonardo’s
homosexual drive is expressed in possession of idealized representations of male bodies
rather than literal possession of male bodies); whereas in repression the stronger drive
attempts to stifle any expression of the weaker drive so that its expression is either fully
stifled or can only be achieved in a heavily disguised form which often represents the
inverse of the original aim (the Christian’s hate and envy of, and desire to have power
over his fellow man, being expressed as professions of brotherly love and disinterest in
power). The relation between sublimation and repression is that often but not always
sublimations have repressions as antecedents. If a stronger drive does not at first have
sufficient strength to co-opt a weaker drive to it own ends it may simply act to stifle that
weaker drive.17 As the stronger drive gains in strength opportunities for co-option rather
than stifling may arise.18
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Sublimation and Ressentiment

For Nietzsche unified selves, what he takes to be genuine persons, are rare
achievements; hence he cautions ‘one should not at all assume that many humans are
“people”’(KSA 12: 491, translation mine), and ‘(m)ost men present pieces and fragments
of man: one has to add them up for a complete man to appear’ (KSA 12: 519).19 It is
Nietzsche’s aim to foster the development of such genuine persons. In the same vein his
Zarathustra says ‘it is my art and aim, to compose into one and bring together what is
fragment and riddle and dreadful chance’ (TSZ II, 21). Sublimation, for Nietzsche, is the
primary means to a unified self. Nietzsche, like Freud, takes sublimation as a mark of
health.
Nietzsche’s important and difficult normative ideas of amor fati, eternal recurrence, and
affirmation of life are all strongly related to his aim of overcoming ressentiment.20
Ressentiment is directly connected to repression in that where there is ressentiment there
is some drive that we have been forced to stifle. Nietzsche claims that in order to fully
love fate or to fully wish back everything eternally, both of which are exemplary ways of
affirming life, we would have to overcome all such ressentiment. To affirm all of one’s life,
to overcome ressentiment, would be to affirm all of one’s drives; life, for Nietzsche, being
nothing but a collection of drives.21 This does not mean to simply let all of one’s drives
have free expression. That would involve conflict, chaos and, inevitably, disintegration.22
It means harnessing one’s drives to allow them a form of concerted expression, as
Nietzsche himself nicely puts the point:
The multitude and disgregation of impulses and the lack of any systematic order
among them results in a ‘weak will’; their coordination under a single
predominant impulse results in a ‘strong’ will: in the first case it is the oscillation
and lack of gravity; in the later, the precision and clarity of direction (KSA 13:
394).
Sublimation is for Nietzsche the key means to such concerted expression and, hence, to
overcoming ressentiment.23
On Nietzsche’s picture of sublimation the questionable element of social valuation drops

out of the picture.24 Another important difference from the Freudian account is that the
notion of desexualization also drops out. Where in his account of sublimation Freud deals
primarily with a libidinal drive (Eros), Nietzsche allows for a multiplicity of drives.
Relatedly, for Nietzsche aggressive drives as well as sexual drives are prone to
sublimation. Given the problems of Freud’s notion of desexualization, and his concomitant
failure to revise his account of sublimation after his positing of a death drive separate
from the libidinal drive, these differences in Nietzsche’s account are a gain rather than a
loss. The price paid for this gain is that Nietzsche, much more than Freud, remains
unclear about the range of drives available for sublimation and repression.25
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On Nietzsche’s account the role of the ego in repressions and sublimations is dramatically
reduced. Rather than having a higher level agency, such as Freud’s ego or superego
censor lower level drives, Nietzsche simply posits an agonal struggle between the drives;
thus he says in Beyond Good and Evil: ‘The will to overcome an affect is, in the end, itself
only the will of another, or several other, affects’ (BGE 117). And even in those cases
where there is consciousness of the drive that is causing a disturbance, that
consciousness is not the engine of repression:
(T)hat one wants to combat the vehemence of a drive at all, however, does not
stand within our own power; nor does the choice of any particular method; nor
does the success or failure of this method. What is clearly the case is that in this
entire procedure our intellect is only the blind instrument of another drive, which
is a rival of the drive whose vehemence is tormenting us … While ‘we’ believe we
are complaining about the vehemence of a drive, at bottom it is one drive which is
complaining about the other; that is to say: for us to become aware that we are
suffering from the vehemence of a drive presupposes the existence of another
equally vehement or even more vehement drive, and that a struggle is in prospect
in which our intellect is going to have to take sides (D: 109).
While this passage allows that our conscious selves may be aware of the drive that is
causing us distress, it emphasizes another drive, not the conscious I, as the repressing
force. Other texts from Nietzsche make clear that he envisages such struggles between
drives often occurring with no conscious awareness, that is with no participation of the
conscious I, or ego, as Freud calls it (cf. for instance, the passages quoted earlier
describing Wagner and Nietzsche himself).
Klein, Segal, and Loewald: Towards a

Reconciliation of Freud and Nietzsche
While most of Freud’s texts on sublimation emphasize notions such as desexualization
and social valuations, there are occasional texts that emphasize the unifying element in
sublimations. In The Ego and the Id Freud tells us that sublimated energy may ‘retain the
main purpose of Eros—that of uniting and binding—as it helps towards establishing unity,
or a tendency to unity’ (Freud 1923: 45).26 While Freud fails to thematize this notion of
sublimation as unification, some post-Freudians, in particular those working in the
tradition of Melanie Klein, do attempt to thematize the important notions of
disintegration and integration in their discussions of sublimation.
In her essay ‘Infant Analysis’ Klein explicitly turns to consideration of Freud’s analysis of
Leonardo in order to ‘set forth more exactly the analogies and differences between
symptoms and sublimations’ (Klein 1926: 41). The key component she attributes to
Leonardo which allows him to achieve sublimations rather than hysterical conversions is
his capacity for ‘identification with the objects of the world around him’. It is this which
allows his fixations to ‘become consonant with the ego’ (Klein 1926: 43). According to
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Klein, having introjected various objects which are assigned both good and bad qualities
—this for Klein is a feature of what she calls the depressive position—sublimation is
achieved when hostility to introjected objects is overcome through phantasies that allow a
symbolic representation of the introjected object in a non-hostile form. It is through such
phantasies and symbolic representations that these introjected objects are integrated
with the ego. While we cannot hope to fully rehearse here Klein’s notion of depressive
position etc. what is clear is that for Klein sublimation involves integration and
overcoming of hostility to inner objects. Since these inner objects are for Klein
manifestations of drives (for instance bad objects are manifestations of aggressive
drives), Klein’s account of sublimation bears a striking resemblance to the Nietzschean
account offered earlier.27
The Kleinian account of sublimation as integration is a theme taken up by Hanna Segal in

her ‘A Psycho-Analytical Approach to Aesthetics’ which concludes that ‘a satisfactory
work of art is achieved by a realization and sublimation of the depressive position’ (Segal
1952: 206). For Segal this sublimation involves ‘the desire to unite’ (Segal 1952: 207).
Art, for Segal is a form of sublimatory activity, a working through of the depressive
position, that allows us through symbolic representations to take objects towards which
we have sadistic hostile impulses and reintegrate them into a world which is ‘whole,
complete and unified’ (Segal 1952: 204).
Another psychoanalyst, influenced by Klein, who identifies sublimation with a type of

integration, albeit under the name of ‘internalization’, is Hans Loewald. Internalization
according to Loewald involves ‘unconscious ego processes that undo the splitting off’ that
is characteristic of repression (Loewald 1973: 12). The splitting off that characterizes
repression, according to Loewald, ‘maintains psychic processes and structures on lower
organizational levels’ while sublimation, or internalization as he calls it, ‘leads to higher
organization and an enriched psychic life’ (1973: 14). In his later book Sublimation, in
reference to Freud’s Leonardo case, Loewald notes that ‘there are unitary experiences
which give way to experiences of differentiation, but that in sublimation the experience of
unity is restored’ (Loewald 1988: 45). Interestingly, Loewald (1973) cites Nietzsche, and
in particular Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, as a precursor for his own notion of
internalization. In fact Nietzsche’s term ‘internalization’ is closer to the notion of
repression than sublimation. For Nietzsche, as expressed in the passage from GM II 16
quoted earlier, internalization is the turning back of instincts that cannot be discharged
externally.
What is missing from these post-Freudian accounts of sublimation as integration or

unification, or a higher level of organization, is an account of what exactly is meant by
integration, unification, or higher organization. Nietzsche’s account of a master drive
with a determinate aim realigning the aims of weaker drives, to aims which augment
rather than conflict with the aim of the master drive, at least provides a start to such an
account. Whether Kleinians or other post-Freudians can utilize such a Nietzschean
conception of sublimation as unification without joining Nietzsche in putting such strong
conditions on what is necessary for unification, or without joining Nietzsche in his
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rejection of the notion of the role of the ego, is something that awaits further
investigation.
The Value of Sublimation

Above it was mentioned that both Nietzsche and Freud value health and took sublimation
to be a means toward health. Yet where Freud’s notion of health involves a fairly
moderate normative agenda, Nietzsche’s notion of health involves a much more radical
normative agenda. Freud, working more within a traditional medical model, took his
therapy to be primarily aimed at relieving psychic distress. In this vein he spoke of
‘transforming … hysterical misery into common unhappiness’ (Freud 1893–5: 305). For
Freud, repression leads to anxiety—in his quasi-energetic model this is expressed in
terms of the affective state caused by inhibition of discharge; pent up energy denied
realization causes a kind of system instability. Here it is clear why, given the aim of a
reduction of misery, sublimation, which allows for discharge of the drives, is to be
preferred to repression. Continuing in terms of the energetic model, repression leads to a
building up of pressure, sublimation allows for a release of pressure.
However on Nietzsche’s evaluative scheme the preference for sublimation over

repression is less clearly grounded. Nietzsche certainly did not place a high value on
contentment and often inveighed against it as a form of complacency; what he
disparagingly refers to as ‘green pasture happiness of the herd’ (BGE 44)—implying that
such a goal is worthy only of bovine animals. Where Nietzsche places the pursuit of
happiness as the aim of the last men and other lower types (Z Prologue 5), Freud, to some
extent echoing Schopenhauer, postulates it as the aim of humans in general:
They strive for happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This
endeavour has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand,
at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of
strong feelings of pleasure
(Civilization and Its Discontent, Freud 1930: 76).
Against this type of characterization Nietzsche, presumably having in mind various

utilitarian philosophers, quipped: ‘Man does not strive after happiness; only the
Englishman does that’ (TI, Maxims and Arrows, 12).
In Zarathustra Nietzsche refers contemptuously to ‘the last man’ as the ‘most

contemptible man’ who has ‘discovered happiness’ and who ‘makes everything small’;
such a man ‘will no more shoot the arrow of his longing out over mankind and the string
of his bow will have forgotten how to twang’ (Z, Prologue, 5). This metaphor of the
dissipation of tension contrasts vividly with his characterization of highly repressed
individuals who seethe with ressentiment. Indeed one of the most startling of his
characterizations of the generally negatively viewed psychic phenomena of ressentiment
is that it helped make man an ‘interesting animal’, that it gave him depth and that
Page 15 of 27

without it ‘(h)uman history would be much too stupid an affair’ (GM I 6–7). There is a
touch of both admiration and horror when Nietzsche writes of ‘the ressentiment of beings
denied the true reason, that of deed’, and of occasions where ‘ressentiment itself
becomes creative and gives birth to values’ (GM I 10).
One might think that perhaps Nietzsche’s objection to ressentiment and repression was
more on a quasi-moral ground: that one overtaken by ressentiment and repression
typically has a false view both of the object of ressentiment and of one’s own nature. For
instance, Nietzsche claims that repressed resentful slaves imagine, incorrectly, that their
masters are free to act other than in a masterly (i.e., slave oppressive) way and that they,
the slaves, have freely chosen to be meek, mild, turn the other cheek, etc., ‘weakness is to
be lied into a merit’ (GM I 14). Now for those who, working under the influence of
Christian morality, place a categorical value on truth, the objection that repression and
ressentiment typically lead their bearers to a false view of themselves and others, counts
as probative. In the Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche paints a story of repressed slaves
becoming creatures of resentment involved in massive self-deception knowing that his
readers, as inheritors of Christian morality, will naturally take the charge of self-
deception as a severe criticism. But what about those, allegedly such as Nietzsche
himself, who strive for an arche beyond Christian morality? The demand to be free of self-
deception, the demand for truth at any price, does not sit well with Nietzsche’s repeated
claims that lies and myths are a necessary part of life. Nietzsche repeatedly writes of the
need for self-deception (BGE 2, 4) and even claims that ignorance of one’s deeper drives
and motivations can often be healthy phenomenon (EH, Why I am So Clever 9). Christian
morality treats truth as a categorical and ultimate value, that is, as a final value that is
higher than all other values. For that reason it espouses a total rejection of all that is
opposed to truth, including falsity, myth, and self-deception. While Nietzsche does indeed
value truth, he sees it as one of many competing values. Health for Nietzsche involves a
certain balancing of these values; taking truth as a value to which everything must be
subordinated is for Nietzsche a form of pathology. Nietzsche recognizes that the health of
a certain individual or indeed of a certain culture is sometimes built upon certain lies,
myths, and self-deception. A Nietzsche who valorized truth above all else would be
subject to Nietzsche’s own trenchant critique of the ascetic ideal and its fetishization of
truth (GM III, passim).
It seems reasonable to conclude that Nietzsche does not prefer sublimation over
repression because the former facilitates a reduction of misery, and an easing of psychic
tension, or because repression leads to false beliefs or even self-deception.
One strand of Nietzsche’s arguments against repression is that it prevents a certain kind
of unity that he seems to value.28 It is in this deeper sense that through the effects of
repression we become ‘strangers to ourselves’ (GM, Prologue, 1); we do not simply lack
knowledge of ourselves but more importantly we have become estranged from parts of
ourselves. Through repression parts of our selves are split-off, not simply in the sense
that we have no conscious access to them, but in the sense that we contain within us
hidden affects and drives. These are separate movers that are not part of any integrated
Page 16 of 27

whole. Taken to the extreme, this notion of being strangers to ourselves actually
threatens the notion of a unified self. That is to say, we have strangers within ourselves,
so that, in fact, our self is no genuine self. We are nothing more than a jumble of different
voices/drives having no overall unity.29 But what is the basis for valorizing unity? Is it
merely an inheritance from the German romantics? Gemes (2006a) argues that Nietzsche
values unity because he thinks that it is a necessary condition for freedom and agency.
But then why value freedom and agency? Are these some of Nietzsche’s ultimate,
categorical values?30
Alternatively, or additionally, one might argue that Nietzsche, following the romantics,
believed that unity is the precondition for great creativity and high culture; these being
(some of) Nietzsche’s highest values. But Nietzsche himself, along with his story of the
repressed, resentful slaves/priests, and his story of Socrates, who create whole new
moral universes, seems to run counter to this claim. One suspects that Harold Bloom’s
thesis that strong poets, and, more generally, other creative types, have a sort of
resentment of their predecessors, a certain ‘anxiety of influence’, which spurs them to
their greatest creative deeds, would not at all be uncongenial to Nietzsche. One might
argue that in many such cases great creativity comes with the price of a certain
denigration of life—for Nietzsche the Christian and Socratic denigration of the non-
rational drives is simply a denigration of life. So even allowing that both repression and
ressentiment can be spurs to great creativity, Nietzsche would prefer a form of creativity
rooted in sublimation as it is more easily wedded to a genuinely life-affirming spirit.
Here is my final suggestion: One of Nietzsche’s fundamental grounds for preferring

sublimation to repression is ultimately aesthetic. According to Nietzsche repressed
persons have parts of themselves that they cannot accept; thus fundamentally
ressentiment is really directed at those very parts of themselves. What the repressed
person of ressentiment really hates is those parts of himself that his weakness, his
inability to act, has led him to repudiate and deny. This self hatred is ultimately
disfiguring and ugly. It is intriguing that Nietzsche suggests that his fundamental
objection to Socrates was that he was ugly. For Nietzsche, Socrates is a monster of reason
who has disfigured himself literally and metaphorically by suppressing all that is not
reason in himself:
In origin, Socrates belonged to the lowest class: Socrates was plebs. We know, we
can still see for ourselves, how ugly he was. But ugliness, in itself an objection, is
among the Greeks almost a refutation. Was Socrates a Greek at all? Ugliness is
often enough the expression of a development that has been crossed, thwarted by
crossing. Or it appears as declining development. The anthropologists among the
criminologists tell us that the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte,
monstrum in animo (A, ‘The Problem of Socrates’, 3).31
In the Gay Science (290) Nietzsche extols a certain kind of self-satisfaction as the ‘one
needful thing’. In doing so he raises a distinctly aesthetic objection to that human being
Page 17 of 27

who ‘is dissatisfied with himself and is constantly ready for revenge’, namely, that we, his
potential victims, have to ‘endure his ugly sight’.
It is doubtful that Nietzsche had some single ultimate categorical (i.e. end in itself) value.
More likely he had a variety of categorical values. Among other things, he valued, as ends
in themselves, great individuals, high culture, affirmation of life, expression of power, and
various aesthetic values (for instance, beauty). Indeed many of these he valued both
categorically and hypothetically (for the things they lead to). For instance, great
individuals are valued both as ends in themselves and as a means towards the
development of high culture. His strong preference for sublimation over repression is
perhaps best understood as embodying his belief that the former provides a more likely
path than the latter to realizing these values.32
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of New York Press.
Notes:
(1) This chapter is a development of Gemes (2009).
(2) Freud often distinguishes between the aim and object of a drive. On one version of
Freud’s aim/object contrast the aim of a drive is simply satisfaction, or put another way,
its aim is to discharge its associated quanta of energy; and the object of a drive is that
characteristic activity or things towards which that energy is directed. However, Freud
often uses the aim/object contrast to differentiate the characteristic activity of a drive
(the aim) from the particular things that drive focuses on at different times (the objects).
In this chapter the term ‘aim’ is typically used in the sense of the active direction of a
drive. Thanks are due to Sebastian Gardner for bringing my attention to this point.
(3.) The term Freud invariably used is ‘Trieb’ which the translators of the Standard
Edition have unfortunately rendered as ‘instinct’ rather than ‘drive’.
Page 22 of 27

(4.) Bergler (1945: 77) similarly notes:
At the time Freud formulated his views on the subject (of sublimation), only the repressed
phallic and pre-genital wishes and their contributories were considered to be part of the
id. Later, Freud put at least equal stress on repressed aggressive trends. However, no
revision of the problem of sublimation was undertaken on the basis of this inclusion of
aggressive trends.
(5.) Cf., for instance, Glover (1931: 266–7); Hartmann (1955: 10); Arlow (1955: 515).
(6.) The editors of the Standard Edition hypothesize that among Freud’s lost
metapsychological papers from 1915–17 there was an essay dealing explicitly with
sublimation.
(7.) For instance, as late as his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis from 1933
Freud writes of psychoanalysis as a depth psychology that ‘is quite unfit to construct a
Weltanshauung of its own; it must accept the scientific one’, and later in the same work
writes ‘science is content to investigate and to establish facts’ (Freud 1933: 158, 162).
While it may be a fact that in society X walking only on the cracks in the pavement is
considered not socially valuable, the judgement that it not valuable and hence is a
neurotic symptom rather than a sublimation involves an endorsement of the norms of that
society and hence is beyond the purview of the mere establishing of facts. Alternatively
one is left with the difficult relativist position that all that one can say as a statement of
fact is that relative to the norms of society X it is sublimation and not a neurotic
symptom. There is no evidence the Freud endorsed this kind of relativism, even if many
post-Freudians would be happy to endorse it.
(8.) In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud gives perhaps his strongest formulation of the
claim that sublimations do not involve the removal of repressions: ‘The repressed instinct
never ceases to strive for complete satisfaction … No substitute or reaction formations
and no sublimations will suffice to remove the repressed instinct’s persisting
tension’ (Freud 1920: 42).
(9.) The first known references by Freud to sublimation occur in letters and drafts of
letters to Fliess dating from 1897 (Freud 1897: 247). The first reference to sublimation in
works published by Freud occurs in the Dora case (Freud 1905b: 50) and in the Three
Essays on Sexuality, both published in 1905.
(10.) There is a good deal of literature devoted to expounding the relationship between
Freud and Nietzsche. Unfortunately, much of it concerns the question of to what degree
Nietzsche anticipated Freud and to what degree Freud did or did not cover up influences
from Nietzsche. By and large, literature governed by these concerns tends to do little to
illuminate the work of either Freud or Nietzsche. Perhaps the best, or, at least, most
comprehensive, book of this questionable genre is Lehrer (1995). Less helpful is Assoun
(2000). A most succinct example of this genre is A. H. Chapman and Mirian Chapman-
Santana (1995).
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(11.) Schopenhauer was more prone to speak of wills (Willen) rather than drives (Triebe).
How much this is merely a terminological difference is a difficult question to answer. For
Schopenhauer, beyond individual time-located willings, there is, notoriously, the
transcendental notion of Wille, for which Nietzsche had no sympathy. However, Freud’s
notion of Eros may, arguably, be seen as a return to a more transcendental picture.
(12.) Note Nietzsche references are given not by page number, save for references to the
KSA, but rather by section or aphorism number. For instance ‘GM II 16’ refers to section
16 of the second essay of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality.
(13.) While Nietzsche never takes on anything approximating Freud’s topological model
of the id, ego, and superego (cf., for instance, The Ego and the Id, Freud 1923), Nietzsche
countenances different modes of suppression and repression that have echoes in Freud’s
topological model. For instance, in GM I Nietzsche tells the story of slaves who initially
suppress their drives principally because their reality principle tells them they are too
weak to act on those drives in the face of the masters’ oppression; later in GM Nietzsche
tells how that suppression takes on a more moralized form leading to full-blown
repression. Indeed, in sections 19–22 of GM II, Nietzsche tells how it is in reaction to our
debts to our fathers, forefathers, and God that we develop what he calls a guilty
conscience. The first kind of suppression is somewhat akin to suppression seated in the
ego and the second kind is akin to repression seated in the superego (itself formed,
according to Freud, through the internalization of god-like authoritarian father figures).
(14.) Reginster (1997) also argues that a kind of splitting of self is integral to
ressentiment, claiming that ‘ressentiment corrupts or dis-integrates the self’ (301).
(15.) More generally Richardson (e.g. 1996: 25) gives an account of Nietzsche on
sublimation that anticipates that given here. It is quite possible that this chapter’s
original inspiration comes from the excellent Richardson (1996) since, on reflection, that
seems to be true of so much of the current author’s work. Another source may have been
Simon May (1999) who persuasively argues that sublimation, power, and form creation
are Nietzsche’s key criteria for value. For an amusing, but much more important, case of
such ‘anxiety of influence’ I direct the reader to Bos (1992) which expounds the
convoluted relationship between Nietzsche and Freud on the concept of the ‘It’ or ‘Id’ as
mediated by the curious figure of George Groddeck, author of the somewhat notorious
Book of the It.
(16.) It’s worth noting that in section 205 from Beyond Good and Evil, quoted earlier,
after describing those ‘humans beings of late cultures’ who can contain a multitude of
drives fighting each other as ‘weaker human beings’, Nietzsche considers the case where:
a real mastery and subtlety in waging war against oneself, in other words, self control
self-outwitting, has been inherited or cultivated then those magical, incomprehensible,
and unfathomable ones arise … whose most beautiful expression is found … among artists
perhaps in Leonardo da Vinci.
Page 24 of 27

(17.) As Dina Emundts has pointed out to me, and as acknowledged earlier, such stifling,
which can be short of full stifling, does not mean the weaker drive need find no form of
expression. For instance, in Schreber’s case his repressed homosexual drive found outlet
in his paranoid fantasies and his transvestism. In the Christian slave, according to
Nietzsche, his repression of his desire to have what the masters have is expressed in his
proclaimed repudiation of the masters’ attainments. The point is that in repression, as
opposed to sublimation, those expressions typically take on the logic of opposites—
Schreber’s desire to be a female is expressed as his being forced by God to be a female
against his will, the Christian slave’s desire to have power over his masters is disguised
as an alleged love of his enemies and his renunciation of the desire for power. So where
repressed desires find expression they do so in a way that cannot be integrated into a
coherent whole, they represent disintegration not an integration of the subject.
(18.) Note, it is not being claimed here that Nietzsche uses the term ‘sublimation’ with
this exact meaning. While Nietzsche does occasionally use the term ‘Sublimieriung’ and
cognates in this writings (for instance, GM II 7) he never gives a thematized account of
sublimation. The account of sublimation as unification given here is described as a
Nietzschean account in that it is in line with many of his uses of that term and, more
importantly, it is based on one of Nietzsche’s central ideals of health. Even more
importantly, this account serves to underwrite the very distinctions between repression
and sublimation and between pathological symptoms and sublimations that Freud’s
account of sublimation fails to underwrite. This reading allows that in certain passages,
for instance KSA 12: 254, Nietzsche uses the term ‘Sublimieriung’ and cognates in ways
more akin to Freud’s actual usage and in ways that do not imply the notion of a united
self. Schacht (1983) claims that in fact Nietzsche tends to use the term ‘spiritualization
(Vergeistigung) in the sense of sublimation. He further contrasts this to Nietzsche’s term
‘internalization’ (Verinnerlichung). This accords with argument presented in the next
section that Nietzsche’s use of the term ‘internalization’ is better construed as repression
rather than sublimation.
(19.) Similarly, Nietzsche sees the achievement of free will as something open to a limited
few. For more on both these themes see Gemes (2006a).
(20.) The French term Ressentiment is expressly used by Nietzsche, most notably in GM,
essay I.
(21.) For more on this see Gemes (2008) where affirming drives is not explicated in terms
of taking a certain cognitive stance, endorsing some positive proposition about one’s
drives, but rather as fully expressing one’s drives.
(22.) One needs to be a little careful here in avoiding the suggestion that Nietzsche
favours some static permanent hierarchy among the drives. In fact, Nietzsche often
emphasizes the need for a kind of agonal struggle between the drives. Agonal struggle is
on the lines of a contest that develops, brings out, the best of the participants, rather
than a struggle that leads to their evisceration. While I do not believe there is genuine
conflict between the Nietzsche ideal of a unified self and the Nietzschean ideal of a self
Page 25 of 27

engaged in agonal struggle, limitations of space prevent me from developing this point
here. Suffice it for now to say that even a master drive, in order to fully develop itself,
needs the conflict of robust challenges.
(23.) Kaufmann (1980) similarly lays great stress on the importance of the notion of
sublimation for Nietzsche. In ch. 7, ‘Morality and Sublimation’, Kaufmann explicitly
contrasts repression and sublimation as two methods for dealing with the chaos of
impulses. Kaufmann places Nietzsche as a strong advocate of the second of these
methods. Indeed Kaufmann, while noting that other modern philosophers including
Goethe, Novalis, and Schopenhauer used the notion of sublimation, claims that is as
Nietzsche who gave the notion the connotation of the transformation of sexual energy
that it carries today (Cf. Kaufmann 1980: 219–20).
(24.) Since Nietzsche says little about the nature of master drives there is a certain
amount of vagueness about what counts as a unified self for Nietzsche. With the element
of social valuation absent there is the worry that, for instance, a reclusive obsessive
stamp collector may count as a unified self. For such a person we may envisage a stamp
collecting master drive. The answer here is that Nietzsche as a naturalist believes that as
humans we come with a rich panoply of inherited drives—this allows that we may also in
the course of acculturation acquire new drives. As a matter of empirical fact the reclusive
stamp collector will not be a being who is giving expression to all his drives (for instance,
drives to sociability, sexual drives, and aggressive drives).
(25.) In fact, some interpreters, including Heidegger (1979) and Adler (1928), insist that
for Nietzsche there is one basic drive or force, namely, will to power, and all more specific
drives are just modifications of this drive or force. But this is a difficult matter in
Nietzsche interpretation that I can’t here enter into.
(26.) Generally Freud emphasizes not unity but incompatibility between the demands of
various sub-personal agencies, such as the ego, superego, and the id. This is also true of
The Ego and the Id where he paints a picture of the ego being ever menaced by the
conflicting demands of the reality principle, the id, and the superego. It is in this voice
that he there labels Eros not as a uniter but as ‘a mischief maker’ (Freud 1923: 59).
(27.) I owe this observation about the relationship of internal objects to drives to a private
correspondence from Bernard Reginster.
(28.) While, as noted earlier, most of Freud’s texts on sublimation emphasize notions such
as desexualization and social valuations, there are occasional texts in which he, like
Nietzsche, emphasizes the unifying element in sublimations. In The Ego and the Id Freud
tells us that sublimated energy may ‘retain the main purpose of Eros—that of uniting and
binding—as it helps towards establishing unity, or a tendency to unity’ (Freud 1923: 45).
However, more typically Freud labels Eros not as a uniter but as ‘a mischief
maker’ (Freud 1923: 59). For more on this see Gemes (2009).
(29.) For more on this theme of self-estrangement see Gemes (2006b).
Page 26 of 27

(30.) Golomb (1989: 71) similarly argues that for Nietzsche sublimation is to be preferred
to repression because it allows for a certain kind of freedom, whereas repression tends to
transform its bearers into passive, defensive creatures. Indeed Golomb reasonably
concludes that while Nietzsche views the ordinary man as a creature of repression, he
takes the extraordinary Übermensh to be a product of successful sublimation.
(31.) Nietzsche’s relationship to Socrates is complex, involving elements of admiration

and repudiation. The admiration involves, among other things, recognition of his success
in framing a whole new moral universe and his courage in pursuing and facing death for
that vision. But even in passages such as GS 340, where we see some of that admiration,
Nietzsche characterizes Socrates as a ‘monster’ and as one who ‘suffered life’.
(32.) There is much in this last paragraph that reflects the enormous influence of my
colleague Andrew Huddleston on my thinking about Nietzsche. For more on this point see
Huddleston (2014). Thanks are also due to Gudrun von Tevenar, Sebastian Gardner,
Bernard Reginster, and to the participants of the St John’s College Research Centre’s
Interdisciplinary Seminars in Psychoanalysis for helpful feedback on this chapter, and to
Hanna Segal for discussions of her ideas about sublimation and how they differ from
Nietzsche’s. Initially I approached the topic of sublimation thinking that I could use Freud
to clarify Nietzsche on sublimation. It was Sebastian Gardner who, on hearing a paper in
which I gave my Nietzschean account of sublimation, helpfully suggested to me that
perhaps it would be more advisable to use Nietzsche to clarify Freud on sublimation.
Ken Gemes
Department of Philosophy, Birkbeck College, University of London
Page 27 of 27

Twentieth-Century Engagements: Introduction


This section of the Handbook consists of four chapters that focus on the different ways in
which twentieth-century philosophers engaged with psychoanalysis. The first chapter
examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential-phenomenological reformulation of the
psychoanalytic unconscious, with emphasis on his argument that the unconscious is an
all-pervasive invisible ‘atmosphere’ (atmosphère) inexorably surrounding the lived-body
and shaping all our emotional experience. The second chapter considers Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s philosophical critique of psychoanalysis and how he drew on Sigmund
Freud’s writings to test his new linguistic methods in philosophy. The third chapter
describes how the Frankfurt School used Freudian psychoanalysis to bolster its Marxist
critique of modern society, citing as an example Theodor W. Adorno, who offered an
explanation of how fascist mass movements occurred by drawing on Freud’s theory of
narcissism. The last chapter discusses the key hermeneutic themes found in Paul
Ricoeur’s engagement with Freud in his book Freud and Philosophy.
Keywords: psychoanalysis, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, unconscious, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud,

philosophy, Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno, narcissism, Paul Ricoeur
Richard G. T. Gipps and Michael Lacewing
WHILE philosophical interest in the unconscious long predated him, the extent of Freud’s
influence on the twentieth century was such that further philosophical thinking about the
nature and significance of unconscious mental life was by way of engagement with or
reaction against his thought. This philosophical engagement with psychoanalysis proved
a love–hate relationship, and some of the strongest opposing reactions to psychoanalysis,
and especially to its father figure, were held within the same individuals or schools.
Philosophers related in various ways to psychoanalysis: i) by reformulating or critiquing
the theory of the unconscious; ii) by applauding the resource it offers for social critique,
or deploring it for reactionary obstructions to emancipation; iii) by vaunting it as a
secular spirituality, or decrying its psychological straitjacketing; iv) by emulating its
Page 1 of 7

methods and aims transposed into the philosophical context; v) by criticizing its failings
to measure up to extant paradigms of knowledge, or by drawing on its distinctive insights
into human nature to further philosophical projects; vi) by finding within it either a
unifying understanding, or a misleading conflation, of matters biological and matters
meaningful. The following compressed overview provides a sense of some major lines of
development.
i) Classic examples of twentieth-century philosophical reformulations of the

unconscious include Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1970) phenomenological
understanding of it as an all-pervasive invisible ‘atmosphere’ (atmosphère)
inexorably surrounding the lived body and shaping all our emotional experience;
Martin Heidegger’s (2001) ontological refashioning of it in terms of the distinctive
form of human existence (Dasein) and the ‘clearing’ (die Lichtung) within which
anything shows up for us in experience; Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1943/2003) replacing it
with bad faith (mauvaise fois); and Jacques Lacan’s (1966/2002) articulation of it in
terms provided by structuralist linguistics.
ii) Philosophers vaunted and decried psychoanalysis as a model for both social and
individual emancipation. At the social level the major impetus came from the Marxist
philosophy of the Frankfurt School. For example Marcuse (1955) found Freud’s focus
on the liberation of libidinal life a valuable resource to challenge what is stultifying
in the social order, while Fromm (1980) saw Freud’s focus on libidinal drives as
distracting from the social determinants of psychological illness.
iii) A psychoanalytic ethic of knowing thyself is a famously secular one (see Gipps
and Lacewing, ‘Introduction: Know Thyself’, this volume). Yet twentieth-century
philosophers have differed in their assessments of the viability of psychoanalysis as a
philosophy for life. Herbart Fingarette (1963), for example, saw in it a profound
means of spiritual self-transformation. By contrast Philip Rieff (1966) doubted the
moral depths of the ‘psychological man’ who lives in an ‘era of the therapeutic’, an
era which replaces an ethics of passionate commitment to ideals and social purposes
with one of inner, individual, rational, compromise-making self-consciousness. Michel
Foucault (1965) similarly considered psychoanalysis as contributing to the creation
of its own object of study—a pathologically self-preoccupied subject whose natural
outer-directed intentionality is subverted by the inward focus of the psychoanalytic
gaze.
iv) Psychoanalysis as a therapy aims not to teach general truths about human life,
but to make conscious what an individual has repressed and thereby transcend the
obstacles to growth. As a model for philosophical practice this has been most
strongly developed in France. Thus Gaston Bachelard (1936/1964) drew on a
psychoanalytic model to interrogate and unearth such ‘epistemic obstacles’, and
‘blindly accepted, unquestioned convictions’ with an affective rather than rational
nature, as inform and constrain scientific theorizing. Jacques Derrida (1998), who
often engaged directly with Freud and Lacan in his writing, also developed a
‘deconstructive’ approach to reading texts which aims to unearth what is repressed
yet quietly crucial within an author’s system of thought. Luce Irigaray (1985) deploys
Page 2 of 7

a similar method; she pays particular attention to the elision of woman within the
dominant forms of thought offered by both psychoanalysis and philosophy. Michel Foucault
(1965) analysed reason’s duplicitous disavowal of the resources of madness, and
sometimes saw psychoanalysis as perpetrator, and sometimes as sensitive recoverer
of unreason. In a different spirit, both Ludwig Wittgenstein (2005) and Friederich
Waismann (1968) analogized between philosophical practice and psychoanalysis.
According to Gordon Baker’s (2006) reading, the salient points of comparison involve
the non-generalizable, patient-specific nature of a philosophical therapy which is
designed not to undo false beliefs but rather to relieve mental cramps which have
their roots not in the intellect but in the will.
(p. 135) v) The philosophical critique of psychoanalytic science takes various forms.
On the one hand we find those—Alasdair MacIntyre (1958) and Adolf Grunbaum
(1984), for example—who find psychoanalysis wanting according to standards (e.g.
nomological conceptions of causal explanation) invoked, at least for a while, by
twentieth-century philosophy of science. On the other we meet with critics—Deleuze
and Guattari (1987), for example—who take Freud’s psychoanalysis to task for so
persistently reading the data through the theory they are supposed to evidence that
other ways of reading them become unavailable. And then there are those—Karl
Popper (1963), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1966), and Frank Cioffi (1998), for example—
who find psychoanalysis variously insightful yet also severally tendentious, especially
as it tacitly but effectively renders its own pronouncements immune from meaningful
challenge. Contrasting with these critical projects are the uses of psychoanalytic
ideas by philosophers to further their philosophical anthropologies. Leaving aside
those who themselves appear in the Handbook, the most prominent of these friends
of psychoanalysis is perhaps Richard Wollheim (1984) whose writings on personal
identity draw deeply on the Freudian and Kleinian theory of identification, the
superego, internal objects, and projective identification. Also worthy of mention here
is Ilham Dilman’s trilogy (1983, 1984, 1988) on Freud and the mind, human nature,
insight, and therapeutic change.
vi) Twentieth-century philosophy was preoccupied by the question of naturalism—i.e.
with the place of meaning in a natural world. Some philosophers—Susanne Langer
(1942) and Paul Ricœur (1970), for example—found in psychoanalysis a happy or
unhappy union of man’s symbolic and animal natures. Others—such as Ludwig
Wittgenstein (1966) and Jurgen Habermas (1972)—complained that psychoanalysis
‘conflated reasons and causes’ or suffered a ‘scientistic self-misunderstanding’ when
it saw its methods as scientific rather than interpretive, and its insights as belonging
to natural science rather than to the humanities.
In this section of the Handbook we offer four exemplary critical and exegetical chapters
considering particular twentieth-century philosophical engagements. James Phillips
considers Merleau-Ponty’s existential-phenomenological retheorization of the
psychoanalytic unconscious. Merleau-Ponty’s thought is particularly important as it is
located at the intersection of two of the most important strands of twentieth-century
thinking about human nature—namely Heidegger’s existential phenomenology and
Page 3 of 7

Freud’s psychoanalysis—and its significance for understanding unconscious life is only

now being appreciated (see also Fuchs, this volume). Donald Levy critically examines
Wittgenstein’s philosophical critique of psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein offered us no
sustained treatment of psychoanalysis, but was, like Freud, a product of early twentieth-
century Vienna, with a sister treated by Freud; he styled himself a ‘disciple of Freud’, and
kept on returning to Freudian themes throughout his life’s work. Freud’s writings—
especially the Interpretation of Dreams—provided him with opportunities to test his
(p. 136) new linguistic methods in philosophy. Such methods were designed to reveal
latent confusions about (for example) the mind, confusions caused by making simplifying
assumptions about how the language of the mind works, assumptions which may be
overcome by attending to the rich diversity of its essential forms. Martin Jay surveys the
Frankfurt School’s sundry uses of Freudian psychoanalysis to bolster its Marxist critique
of modern society. An important question for philosophy in integrative mode is how to
understand the relations between the trans-individual nature of society and social change
and the intrapsychic forces at work in individuals. To give here just one example from
Jay’s discussion, Adorno drew on Freud’s theory of narcissism to explain how fascist mass
movements occurred—the authoritarian-type personality both impotently submitting to
authority while also magically identifying with it and finding an out-group to serve as the
locus for all that is denigrated and abjected. Finally, Richard Bernstein provides an
explication of the key hermeneutic themes to be found in Ricœur’s engagement with
Freud in his Freud and Philosophy. Ricœur’s book remains one of the most substantial
single-volume treatments of Freud’s thought available in English, and Bernstein provides
an introduction to the significant contours of Ricœur’s early study of Freud.
This is a small selection from among the many strands of twentieth-century philosophers’
engagement with Freud and psychoanalysis. For readers interested in Heidegger’s and
Sartre’s approaches to psychoanalysis, and in the Daseinanalytic approaches of Medard
Boss and Ludwig Binswanger, see Askay and Farquhar (2006) and Holzhey-Kunz (2014).
For a clinical introduction to Lacan, see Bailly (2009) and for a philosophical exploration,
Grigg (2009). Many of the themes canvased here are still live concerns in the engagement
between philosophy and psychoanalysis and as such naturally take up their place in the
majority of the chapters comprising the rest of this Handbook. Yet whereas twentieth-
century engagements between philosophy and psychoanalysis could sometimes be
marked by ‘either/or’s (either reasons or causes, either a science or a humanity, etc.), a
salient feature of many of the twenty-first-century engagements represented here is the
work they put in to transcend—or at least contend with, without inappropriately resolving
—such dichotomies.
References
Askay, R. and Farquhar, J. (2006). Apprehending the Inaccessible: Freudian
Psychoanalysis and Existential Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press.
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Bachelard, G. (1936/1964). The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. A. C. M. Ross. London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Bailly, L. (2009). Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: Oneworld.
Baker, G. (2006). Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Cioffi, F. (1998). Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience. Chicago, IL: Open Court.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis,

Derrida, J. (1998). Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. P. Kamuf, P.-A. Brault, and M.

Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
(p. 137) Dilman, I. (1983). Freud and Human Nature. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dilman, I. (1984). Freud and the Mind. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dilman, I. (1988). Freud, Insight and Change. Oxford: Blackwell.
Fingarette, H. (1963). The Self in Transformation. New York: Harper & Row.
Foucault, M. (1965). Madness & Civilization, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon.
Fromm, E. (1980). Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx & Freud.
London: Sphere Books.
Grigg, R. (2009). Lacan, Language and Philosophy. New York: SUNY Press.

Habermas, J. (1972). Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. London:
Heinemann.
Heidegger, M. (2001). Zollikon Seminars, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press.
Holzhey-Kunz, A. (2014). Daseinsanalysis. London: Free Publishing Ltd.
Irigaray, L. (1985). Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Lacan, J. (1966/2002). Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
Langer, S. (1942). Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite,
and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
MacIntyre, A. (1958). The Unconscious. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Page 5 of 7

Marcuse, H. (1955). Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston,
MA: Beacon Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1970). Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952–
1960, trans. J. O’Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Popper, K. (1963). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge.

London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Ricœur, P. (1970). Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Rieff, P. (1966). The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (1943/2003). Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological

Ontology, 2nd edn, trans. H. E. Barnes. London: Routledge.
Waismann, F. (1968). How I See Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wittgenstein, L. (1966). Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology &

Religious Belief. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (2005). Big Typescript. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wollheim, R. (1984). The Thread of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
(p. 138)
Richard G.T. Gipps

Michael Lacewing

Children (P4C).
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Page 7 of 7

Merleau-Ponty and Psychoanalysis

James Phillips

This chapter traces the trajectory of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s views on psychoanalysis

and the Freudian unconscious. It begins with a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s first
reading of Sigmund Freud by way of The Structure of Behavior, his development of a full
description of perceptual consciousness in the Phenomenology of Perception, and his
interpretation of the Freudian unconscious as the ambiguity of operative intentionality or
perceptual consciousness. The chapter goes on to consider Merleau-Ponty’s lectures as
Professor of Psychology at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952, the criticisms hurled against
his early work, and his relationship with Jacques Lacan. It also examines themes from
Merleau-Ponty’s lectures at the Collège de France between 1951 until his death, along
with two of his posthumous writings: The Visible and the Invisible, and a Preface to
L’Oeuvre de Freud et son Importance pour la Monde, a book on Freud by psychoanalyst
Angelo Hesnard.
Keywords: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, psychoanalysis, Freudian unconscious, perceptual consciousness, Jacques

Lacan, phenomenology
Page 1 of 24

Introduction
In this chapter on Merleau-Ponty and psychoanalysis our focus is on Merleau-Ponty’s
treatment of psychoanalysis and the Freudian unconscious.1 The ‘unconscious’ deserves
attention because, on the one hand it is, as Laplance and Pontalis point out (1973: 474),
the single word that more than any other sums up Freud’s discovery; and on the other
hand, phenomenology, in its intense study of consciousness, was traditionally sceptical of
the notion of an unconscious. Merleau-Ponty, who studied psychoanalysis more intensely
than any other phenomenologist, took issue with his colleagues and argued for the
introduction of psychoanalysis and the unconscious into phenomenological thought. He
did not mean the reified unconscious of Freud, which he also rejected, but a
philosophically reformulated unconscious. He regarded the unconscious as a profound
insight that Freud was unable to express in philosophically suitable language. Caught up
as he was in the language of representational thought, Freud could only think of the
unconscious in terms of unconscious representations, ‘a tribute’, as Merleau-Ponty put it
in Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France (hereafter TLF), ‘paid by Freud to
the psychology of his day’ (Merleau-Ponty 1970: 130).
Just as psychoanalysis needs phenomenology to reformulate the unconscious, so also does

phenomenology need the psychoanalytic unconscious to reach a depth not achieved in
phenomenology. Speaking of this mutual need in an interview with Madeleine Chapsal in
his later years, Merleau-Ponty asked:
Does psychoanalysis render man intelligible? Does it allow us to dispense with

philosophy? On the contrary, it poses more vigorously than ever a question that
cannot be resolved without philosophy: how can man be at once, completely spirit
and completely body? The technique of psychoanalysis contributes to resolving
this question along with many other inquiries, and philosophy is again at the
crossroads
(Merleau-Ponty 1992: 6).
Page 2 of 24

The Early Period
The Structure of Behavior
The Structure of Behavior (1963/1942, hereafter cited as SB) represents Merleau-Ponty’s

first reading of Freud. The first sentence of the book strikes a theme that will remain
constant throughout Merleau-Ponty’s life: ‘Our goal is to understand the relations of
consciousness and nature: organic, psychological, or even social’ (SB: 3). The terms of
this discussion will change, but Merleau-Ponty will always remain focused on this central
theme: that of understanding the mysterious bond of consciousness and world, of the
interior and the exterior, the subjective and the objective. The goal of The Structure of
Behavior is to examine this theme from the point of view of the observer. Merleau-Ponty
argues that behaviour at any level can only be understood in terms of forms, and that
these forms belong neither to nature nor to constituting consciousness, but rather to the
spontaneous bond of consciousness and nature that he will eventually call perceptual
consciousness. He maintains that the human order of perceptual consciousness is
radically distinct from the vital order, that of animal behaviour and its milieu, and that in
human behaviour the vital is surpassed and integrated into fully human activity.
Freud is introduced into this discussion as an example of an attempt to reduce the human
to the vital—to explain human psychopathology by means of causal, biological forces. To
account for psychopathology within the structures of the human order, Merleau-Ponty
makes a critical distinction between normally and abnormally structured behaviour. He
distinguishes between normal behaviour, in which infantile attitudes are surpassed and
integrated into adult behaviour, and pathological behaviour, in which the infantile
attitudes have been transcended only in appearance. A ‘complex’ is a segment of such
unintegrated behaviour. In this case the adult lives a life of fragmented consciousness.
The phenomena which Freud describes in the categories of conflict, repression, and the
unconscious may thus be understood as the life of a fragmented consciousness whose
split off segments are present and operative at different times.
This analysis generates a first reformulation of the Freudian unconscious. As Merleau-

Ponty puts it: ‘… the pretended unconsciousness of the complex is reduced to the
ambivalence of immediate consciousness’ (SB: 179)—ambivalence in that conduct may at
one moment reflect an integrated, adult organization and at another moment regression
to the more primitive, infantile organization of a complex. Merleau-Ponty concludes The
Structure of Behavior by invoking the notion of perceptual consciousness, in which the
polarity of structured and unstructured, fragmented consciousness is replaced by the
ambiguity of perceptual consciousness itself. Merleau-Ponty takes up perceptual
consciousness in his second and major work, Phenomenology of Perception.
Page 3 of 24

Phenomenology of Perception
Merleau-Ponty does not devote a lot of direct attention to psychoanalysis as such in the
Phenomenology of Perception (1962/1945, hereafter cited as PP). What he does rather is
develop a full description of perceptual consciousness, which will serve as the
background for the examination of psychoanalysis and the unconscious both in this work
and in that of the following several years. Perceptual consciousness will provide a way of
reading Freud, and Freud will offer a confirmation of perceptual consciousness.
For Merleau-Ponty, the method of analysis of perceptual consciousness is phenomenology,

but not a phenomenology which posits a transcendental consciousness that constitutes
the world in a transparent manner, but rather a phenomenology that emphasizes
perception as the lived, embodied experience of a human subject that is inextricably
bound up with the world. It is important to note that the subject matter of the
Phenomenology of Perception is not simply perception, as this is usually understood. It is
rather the totality of experience accessible at the level of perception. As Spiegelberg
writes: ‘Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception is primarily an attempt to explore
the basic stratum in our experience of the world as it is given prior to all scientific
interpretation’ (1982: 561–2). Spiegelberg might also have written ‘prior to reflection’,
inasmuch as perceptual consciousness is first and foremost spontaneous and pre-
reflective. The pre-reflective relationship of man and world is described in a variety of
ways, such as lived body, being-in-the-world, pre-reflective life, operative intentionality,
and existence. Assuming a Heideggerian manner in describing the pre-reflective unity of
the subject and world, Merleau-Ponty writes:
This world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject that is nothing but a
projection of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a
world which it projects itself. The subject is a being-in-the-world, and the world
remains subjective since its texture and articulations are indicated by the
subject’s movement of transcendence (PP: 430).
In describing perceptual consciousness Merleau-Ponty emphasizes its pre-reflective or

unreflective quality, its ambiguity. Consciousness is always opaque, ambiguous, always
embedded in uncertainty. In describing this obscurity of one’s sense of self, he writes: ‘…
the lived is never entirely comprehensible, what I understand never quite tallies with my
living experience, in short, I am never quite at one with myself’ (PP: 347).
This analysis of ambiguous consciousness is the basis for Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of

Freud’s understanding of the unconscious as a split off, reified system or, as it were, a
second, out-of-awareness ‘consciousness’. Merleau-Ponty argues that everything Freud
assigns to the unconscious can be understood as pre-reflective consciousness. He writes:
Page 4 of 24

The lived is certainly lived by me, nor am I ignorant of the feelings which I
repress, and in this sense there is no unconscious. But I can experience more
things than I represent to myself, and my being is not reducible to what expressly
appears to me concerning myself. That which is lived is merely ambivalent (PP:
179).
To capture Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the unconscious as pre-reflective consciousness

rather than as a split off second system, a long quote from a later lecture, ‘Man and
Adversity’, is in order.
In order to account for that osmosis between the body’s anonymous life and the
person’s official life which is Freud’s great discovery, it was necessary to
introduce something between the organism and ourselves considered as a
sequence of deliberate acts and express understandings. This was Freud’s
unconscious. We have only to follow the transformations of this Protean idea in
Freud’s work, the diverse ways in which it is used, and the contradictions it
involves to be convinced that it is not a fully developed idea, and that, as Freud
himself implies in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, we still have to
find the right formulation for what he intended by this provisional designation. At
first glance ‘the unconscious’ evokes the realm of a dynamics of impulses whose
results alone would presumably be given to us. And yet the unconscious cannot be
a process ‘in the third person’; since it is the unconscious which chooses what
aspect of us will be admitted to official existence, which avoids the thoughts or
situation we are resisting, and which is therefore not un-knowing but rather an un-
recognized and unformulated knowing that we do not want to assume. In an
approximative language, Freud is on the point of discovering what other thinkers
have more appropriately named ambiguous perception. It is by working in this
direction that we shall find a civil status for this consciousness which brushes its
objects (eluding them at the moment it is going to designate them, and taking
account of them as the blind man takes account of obstacles rather than
recognizing them), and knows about them to the extent that it does not know
about them, and which subtends our express acts and understandings
(Merleau-Ponty 1964: 229–30).
To illustrate this experience of spontaneous, ambiguous experience that is only later

brought to reflection, Merleau-Ponty offers the example of falling in love. In this
experience the subject does not start with an awareness that he will later describe as, ‘I
was falling in love’. Such an awareness only comes later, when reflecting back on the first
steps of the relationship. ‘The love which worked out its dialectic through me, and of
which I have just become aware, was not, from the start, a thing hidden in my
unconscious, nor was it an object before my consciousness, but the impulse carrying me
toward someone, the transmutation of my thoughts and behaviour’ (PP: 381).
Page 5 of 24

Throughout the discussion of perceptual consciousness Merleau-Ponty develops an

interpretation of the Freudian unconscious as effectively the ambiguity of operative
intentionality or perceptual consciousness. We just noted in his example of falling in love
that the early experience was a pre-reflective impulse towards the other. There was no
unconscious idea present at the first moments of falling in love. Merleau-Ponty treats all
psychoanalytic examples of the unconscious in the same manner. This interpretation of
the unconscious is clearly a further development of his interpretation of the unconscious
in The Structure of Behavior, where he wrote: ‘… the pretended unconscious of the
complex is reduced to the ambivalence of immediate consciousness’ (SB: 179).
Moving this analysis to the area of psychopathology, Merleau-Ponty takes up the

condition of hysteria. Freud interprets hysteria as an unacceptable impulse or traumatic
memory that is repressed into the unconscious and then forces itself into consciousness
as a hysterical symptom, the treatment for which is an uncovering of the repressed idea
or impulse. Merleau-Ponty rejects this analysis at every level: for its attempt at an
empirical, causal analysis of the hysterical symptom, for its dissociation of the mental and
the physical in a way that ignores the unity of the lived body, and for its analysis of
behaviour in terms of representational thought, as in Freud’s treatment as the recovery
of the repressed idea or representation. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty treats hysteria as a
form of self-deception in which the hysteric is not fully aware of herself as a lived body
and takes distance from her bodily states, not quite treating them as herself. That is why,
despite the reported pain or paralysis, the hysteric can appear indifferent to her
symptoms. With regard to treatment, Merleau-Ponty again disagrees with Freud’s
treatment by insight (recovering the repressed memory) and proposes that successful
treatment will be below the cognitive, insight-oriented level, and will involve a change in
the patient’s existence through the relationship with the therapist. Merleau-Ponty
recognizes that Freud would dismiss this approach as mere suggestion—or quasi-
hypnosis.
Merleau-Ponty carries his analysis one step further in addressing the topic of sexuality,
the heartland of Freud’s treatment of neurosis. As before, the Freudian unconscious,
considered as a region of formed mental representations, is rejected in favour of the
ambiguous intentionalities of the lived body. Merleau-Ponty begins his analysis by
broadening the discussion of sexuality to that of the entire affective life. Affective
experience makes dramatically clear the relations of embodied subject and world. In
affective experiences with others, we see that relations with others always involve the
self as affective and embodied. That said, sexual relations stand out as the most intense
form of affective, embodied experience.
In discussing sexuality Merleau-Ponty first rejects the empirical account that sexuality
involves sexual arousal plus a stimulating object. He argues that sexual experience,
rather than arising from an autonomous arousal, involves perceiving the other as sexually
desirable. He argues further that sexual feeling follows the general trend of the
individual’s existence. Sexuality reflects one’s existence, and one’s existence is
experienced in one’s sexuality; e.g. if one is aggressive in everyday life, one will be
Page 6 of 24

aggressive in one’s sexual relations. Merleau-Ponty regards this reciprocity between

sexuality and existence as the true discovery of psychoanalysis. While he rejects any
reduction of human relations to sexuality, he agrees with Freud that sexuality bears a
special relation to neurosis. Whatever conflicts one is experiencing in one’s life will be
acted out with great intensity in one’s sexual relations.
Merleau-Ponty concludes his discussion of sexuality by describing sexuality as an

‘ambiguous atmosphere’ (PP: 169) that always accompanies existence. What this means is
that in sexualized conflicts it is never possible to determine how much the motivation is
sexual and how much non-sexual. This point follows Merleau-Ponty’s theme that human
existence is inherently ambiguous.
The Sorbonne Lectures
A few years after the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception in 1945, Merleau-
Ponty was appointed Professor of Psychology at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952.2 He
lectured extensively on child psychology, and this included a study of post-Freudian
psychoanalysis. In this context he examined childhood sexuality, emphasizing the way in
which sexuality pervades childhood, but without the child identifying it as such. Of these
lectures psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche pointed out ‘how much we can learn from
Merleau-Ponty. A philosopher interested in clinical observation, in the very concrete
experiences involving children, and in the observations of an anthropologist! He could
teach a lesson to more than one psychoanalyst’ (Laplanche 1989: 92).
In the context of this chapter what we can take from these lectures is another way of
understanding the unconscious—in the figure/ground terminology of Gestalt psychology.
The point is that the boundary between figure and ground is always blurred. Thus, for
both the child and the adult (in different ways), any spontaneous act is surrounded by
unfocused-upon intentions, some of which, when brought into awareness (turned from
ground to figure), may be found to be influencing the person’s actions. Ultimately, of
course, the unseen ground represents the ambiguity of pre-reflective life. Merleau-Ponty
emphasizes finally, and here he is in full accord with psychoanalysis, that bringing the
ground into awareness as figure may require the intervention of another person.
In order to know (ourselves), we need a certain distance that we are not able to take by
ourselves. It is not a matter of an unconscious that would play tricks on us; the problem
of mystification (of a deceptive consciousness) stems from the fact that all consciousness
is the privileged consciousness of a ‘figure’ and tends to forget the ground without which
it has no meaning. We do not know the ground although it is lived by us. We are ourselves
our own ground. For knowledge to progress, for there to be scientific knowledge of that
‘other’ (the ground), it is necessary for what was ground to become figure (Merleau-Ponty
1988: 113).
Page 7 of 24

Critique of Early Work
The presentation of sexuality in the Phenomenology of Perception—and along with it the

interpretation of the unconscious as unreflective life—was subjected to much criticism.
Concerning the issue of sexuality, Merleau-Ponty’s effort in the Phenomenology of
Perception not to ‘allow sexuality to become lost in existence’ (PP: 159) did not prevent
the criticism that he had done exactly that. Psychoanalyst André Green, for instance,
wrote: ‘The Phenomenology of Perception reflected an existential position, and the
unconscious as well as sexuality were stripped of the specificity Freud had given them to
be dissolved in all too general significations, especially close to those of existential
analysis’ (Green 1964: 1035). Psychoanalyst and philosopher Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
wrote similarly of Merleau-Ponty’s analyses that ‘the meaning of the symptom dissolves
itself in a global existential attitude’ (Pontalis 1982: 85).
Arguing in the same critical manner, Paul Ricoeur wrote that the discovery and
rediscovery of the unconscious takes place in the treatment situation, that the very notion
of an unconscious is intimately associated with the phenomena of conflict, repression,
and resistance, and can’t be understood out of that context. And further that if the
unconscious emerges through analytic work on resistance and repression, it presents
itself not as pre-reflectively conscious but rather as separate, autonomous, and
heterogeneous—as another system, in Freud’s terms. Ricoeur summarizes his argument:
‘The justification for the topographic differentiation into systems is to be found in praxis;
the “remoteness” between the systems and their separation by the “barrier” of repression
are the exact pictorial transcriptions of the “work” that provides access to the area of the
repressed’ (1970: 413).
The conclusion to this line of critique is that the only way to view the ‘unconscious’ of the
Phenomenology of Perception is as Freud’s preconscious, as a region of experience that is
not in consciousness but that is eminently recoverable through reflection. As Ricoeur put
it: ‘The unconscious of phenomenology is the preconscious of psychoanalysis, that is to
say, an unconscious that is descriptive and not yet topographic’ (Ricoeur 1970: 392). And
in this vein Pontalis pointed to the distinction between the Freudian unconscious and
Merleau-Ponty’s pre-reflective life as that of ‘the other scene’ versus ‘the other
side’ (Pontalis 1971: 62), and he made it clear that the Husserlian, phenomenological
‘other side’ is the psychoanalytic preconscious.
Was this matter thus settled with the conclusion that Merleau-Ponty’s pre-reflective
consciousness only reaches Freud’s preconscious? Not quite. To the Freudian position
that while the repressed unconscious is accessible only through the agency of another,
the preconscious is accessible to self-reflection, Merleau-Ponty responded, as noted
earlier, that dimensions of pre-reflective consciousness (the ‘ground’ in the terminology of
the Sorbonne Lectures) may not be accessible to self-reflection and may require the
distance of another to see them. It is arguable that most of the features of the dynamic
unconscious could be found in Merleau-Ponty’s approach to pre-reflective life. In fact,
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Belgian philosopher/psychoanalyst Alphonse de Waelhens and French psychoanalyst

Georges Lanteri-Laura both argued in that direction—that the phenomena described in
terms of the Freudian unconscious require not so much a second system as an opacity in
pre-reflective consciousness. De Waelhens (1966) pointed out that the intentional
relations between man and world are so greatly varied that no simple distinction between
conscious and unconscious experience is possible, and Lanteri-Laura described the
unconscious as that dimension of experience not recovered through reflection:
The unconscious, we can say, is the entire part of non-thetic [undirected]

consciousness that man is not able to recover through reflection alone and that he
apprehends only through singular noematic [specific] qualities of objects. If man is
essentially a movement of transcendence toward that which he is not, he
apprehends himself in totality through the noematic qualities of objects and of
others, without moreover knowing it specifically, and it is this hiatus that, in
Phenomenology of Perception, renders possible the very notion of an unconscious
(Lanteri-Laura 1966: 399).
Thus far in this section we have reviewed the critique—and defence—of Merleau-Ponty’s
view of the unconscious by a number of his contemporaries in psychoanalysis and
philosophy. However, the main challenge—and confrontation—came from Jacques Lacan.
Merleau-Ponty and Lacan
The relationship of Merleau-Ponty and Lacan dates back to Alexandre Kojeve’s 1933
lectures on Hegel in Paris (Roudinesco 1990: 350), which both attended and which were a
significant influence on both of them.3 Given that Lacan had a serious interest in
philosophy and Merleau-Ponty an equal interest in psychoanalysis, it’s hardly surprising
that they remained in contact over the ensuing years. They clashed, however, over their
respective views on the unconscious. While Lacan regarded Merleau-Ponty’s
interpretation of the unconscious as hopelessly embedded in a philosophy of
consciousness, Merleau-Ponty regarded Lacan’s view as an idealist deviation in
psychoanalysis.
There were three direct encounters during the 1950s, and then implicit encounters
following Merleau-Ponty’s death in 1961. In the first encounter in January 1955, Merleau-
Ponty gave a lecture to the Société française de Psychanalyse entitled ‘Philosophy and
Psychoanalysis’. We don’t have the text of Merleau-Ponty’s presentation, but we do have
Lacan’s discussion of the lecture in his seminar the next day. Lacan challenged Merleau-
Ponty’s interpretation of the unconscious as a dimension of a unified consciousness. ‘…
for Merleau-Ponty, it’s all there, in consciousness’ (Lacan 1988/1954–5: 77–8).
The second episode occurred in 1957, when Lacan presented a paper to the Société
française de Philosophie entitled ‘Psychoanalysis and its Teaching’. Merleau-Ponty
attended the lecture and engaged Lacan in a lively discussion following the lecture.
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Lacan challenged the philosophers regarding the unconscious: ‘In the unconscious, which
is less profound than inaccessible to the depths of consciousness, it (Id) speaks: a subject
in the subject, transcendent to the subject, poses its question to the philosopher since The
Interpretation of Dreams’ (Lacan 1957: 65). The debate that followed the lecture centred
on how to understand a parapraxis, taking as an example one from Freud’s own personal
history, as related by Lacan. While Merleau-Ponty argued that a parapraxis is a failure of
language use, Lacan countered that it is a successful use of language in that it allows the
unconscious to speak.
A final encounter between Merleau-Ponty and Lacan took place in 1960, some months
prior to Merleau-Ponty’s death, at psychiatrist Henri Ey’s annual colloquium at Bonneval,
that year devoted to the unconscious (Ey 1966). The colloquium has been described at
length by Elisabeth Roudinesco in her Jacques Lacan & Co. (1990). Prominent
philosophers, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts gathered to discuss the status of the
Freudian unconscious.
For Lacan, what was at stake at Bonneval was considerable. It was a question of
demonstrating in France, in the teeth of the IPA [International Psychoanalytic
Association], that Freudianism as revised and corrected by linguistics had the full
status of a science. If philosophy wanted to escape its rut, it would have to
interrogate psychoanalysis and admit that the Freudian unconscious placed the
certitudes of consciousness in jeopardy
(Roudinesco 1990: 308).
For Lacan the conference was mostly a success. For the philosophers in attendance,
however, the result was mixed. Although there was some agreement on the importance of
the Freudian unconscious, not all agreed with Lacan’s formulation of it. Primary among
the detractors was Merleau-Ponty, the most prominent philosopher in attendance.
Because of Merleau-Ponty’s unexpected death months after the meeting, he wasn’t able
to write his own summary of his remarks. That task fell to Pontalis (with the concurrence
of Merleau-Ponty’s wife, herself a Lacanian psychoanayst), who reported that Merleau-
Ponty began with an interpretation of the unconscious as a ‘primordial symbolism’, and
then continued:
Only, this primordial symbolism, must we not seek it, rather than in language as
such—‘it makes me uneasy to see the category of language occupy the entire
field’— in a certain perceptual articulation, in a relation between the visible and
the invisible that M. Merleau-Ponty designates by the name of latency, in the sense
that Heidegger gives to this word [Verborgenheit], and not in order to specify a
being that would conceal itself behind the appearances. Perception, on condition
of not conceiving it as an operation, as a mode of representation, but as the
double of non-perception, can serve as a model, and even the simple fact of
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seeing: ‘to see, this is to have no need to form a thought’. M. Merleau-Ponty

recalls that in his view, the opening to being is not linguistic: it is in perception
that he sees the birthplace of the word
Roudinesco relates Lacan’s unhappiness with Merleau-Ponty’s comments. He took the

occasion of the publication of the proceedings in 1966 to falsely accuse Pontalis of
transcribing Merleau-Ponty’s words incorrectly (Roudinesco 1990: 314).4
The Late Period
Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France
In 1951 Merleau-Ponty assumed a professorship at the Collège de France, a position he

would hold until his death. In two of his courses he introduced his further views on the
unconscious. Indeed, as Green remarked, his changing view of psychoanalysis and the
unconscious was not simply a reflection of his changing philosophy, but may have been
one of the fermenting elements in that change (Green 1964: 1030).
In the course on ‘Passivity’, in a discussion of Sartre’s discussion of the dream as pure

imagination in which the world is negated, he argues, contra Sartre, for an ambiguous
relationship in which a dream is itself a form of consciousness, and waking consciousness
itself has an oneiric character. ‘Others are present to us in the way that dreams are, the
way myths are, and that is enough to question the cleavage between the real and the
imaginary’ (TLF: 48). Merleau-Ponty is now introducing something new. Instead of
describing the unconscious as ambiguous consciousness, he is now talking about oneiric
consciousness. Elaborating on this, he writes rather dramatically that Freud’s ‘most
interesting insight’ is the notion of a ‘primordial symbolism … the idea of a “non-
conventional thought” … which is the source of dreams and more generally of the
elaboration of our life’ (TLF: 49).
In this discussion Merleau-Ponty apparently doesn’t recognize that he is now talking

about what for Freud is one of the principle features of the unconscious, namely its
character of primary process thinking (nor does Merleau-Ponty use that phrase). For
Freud there was, in fact, a conflict as to how to think of unconscious thinking: whether as
fully developed unconscious thoughts, or as more primitive, primary process thoughts. In
Merleau-Ponty’s early writings he focused on the first meaning of the unconscious—as
split off unconscious thoughts—and his critique of Freud was directed at that Freudian
unconscious, replacing it with his notion of ambiguous consciousness. In the course on
Passivity, he now shifts to the other meaning of the unconscious—as primary process. The
difference with Freud, now, is that Merleau-Ponty doesn’t locate oneiric consciousness
Page 11 of 24

solely in the unconscious; he intermingles it with clear, waking consciousness. This means
that so-called waking consciousness can be infused with fantasy, imagination, dream-like
material—or, in other words, that waking consciousness is also in part oneiric
consciousness.
Merleau-Ponty takes the next step in this train of thought in his last Collège de France
course, ‘Nature and Logos’. He begins with a focus on the body. Now, however, he takes a
radical step that will drive all his late thought: namely, he replaces the ‘lived body’ of the
Phenomenology of Perception with a new category of flesh. Merleau-Ponty’s description of
flesh is certainly difficult to understand, and it may help to appreciate in advance that
with this concept he is embarking on a new, monistic ontology. Although Merleau-Ponty
always thought of consciousness and world as thoroughly entwined, he now brings them
totally together as two aspects of the same flesh.5
We see this shift both in the course on ‘Nature and Logos’ and in a number of Merleau-
Ponty’s late and posthumous writings. Writing about corporeal consciousness in ‘The
Philosopher and his Shadow’, Merleau-Ponty writes typically:
Thus I touch myself touching, my body accomplishes ‘a sort of reflection’. In it,

through it, there is not just the unidirectional relationship of the one who
perceives to what he perceives. The relationship is reversed, the touched hand
becomes the touching hand, and I am obliged to say that the sense of touch here
is diffused in the body—that the body is a ‘perceiving thing’, a ‘subject–object’
(Merleau-Ponty 1964b/1960: 166).
The other person appears through an extension of that copresence [of the two
hands], he and I are like organs of one single intercorporeality
(Merleau-Ponty 1964b/1960: 168).
Flesh is the body as reflexive, as seeing–seen, as touching–touched, as the ‘idea of

corporeality as an entity with two faces or two sides’ (TLF: 129). As he describes this new
vision of the body in a very late essay, ‘Eye and Mind’:
There is a human body when, between the seeing and the seen, between touching
and the touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand, a
blending of some sort takes place—when the spark is lit between sensing and
sensible, lighting the fire that will not stop burning until some accident of the
body will undo what no accident would have sufficed to do
(Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 163–4).
The opposition of consciousness and nature has thus collapsed into a phenomenology of
flesh.
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In ‘Nature and Logos’ Merleau-Ponty now addresses an obvious question. In a philosophy

of the flesh, what becomes of the unconscious? It was originally ambiguous
consciousness, then in the course on ‘Passivity’, oneiric consciousness. Now Merleau-
Ponty reformulates it again. He says in this course that the idea of ‘unconscious
representations’ has no place in a philosophy of the flesh and that ‘the unconscious is
sensing itself, since sensing is not the intellectual possession of “what” is felt but a
dispossession of ourselves in favor of it, an opening toward that which we do not have to
think in order that we may recognize it’ (TLF: 130). In the context of a monistic
philosophy of the flesh, sensing becomes Merleau-Ponty’s word for the deep and
‘unconscious’ phenomenon of touching–touched or seeing–seen.
In this context, at the end of the course Merleau-Ponty discusses the psychoanalyst,
Melanie Klein, for whom phenomena such as introjection and projection are in the early
child bodily experiences—experiences he refers to as ‘primordial symbolism’. He now
distinguishes the unconscious of repressed phenomena as a ‘secondary formation’, to be
distinguished from a ‘primordial unconscious’ that ‘would be a permissive being, the
initial yes, the undividedness of sensing’ (TLF: 131). He is making contact with what Klein
understood as an initial unity of mother and infant in which the infant doesn’t grasp their
difference. Oneiric or sensing consciousness thus points to an enduring bond and unity
with the other in adult life. To quote from the posthumous Preface: ‘Consciousness is now
the “soul” of Heraclitus, and Being, which is around it rather than in front of it, is an
oneiric Being, by definition hidden’ (Merleau-Ponty 1982: 70, hereafter cited as Pref.).
Referring to this persistence of primitive or primordial level in adult life, Pontalis remarks
of Merleau-Ponty’s final philosophy, ‘nothing is ever “possessed”, but nothing is ever
“lost”’ (Pontalis 1971: 63), and Green contrasts the role of loss in Freud with the
undividedness of Being in Merleau-Ponty (Green 1964: 1032).
Posthumous Writings: The Visible and the Invisible
In The Visible and the Invisible (1968/1964, hereafter cited as VI), Merleau-Ponty invokes
psychoanalysis frequently in the further radicalizing of his thought. In reflecting on this
volume, especially the Working Notes that are included at the end of the written text, we
must bear in mind that the Working Notes are indeed experimental notes; they are mostly
incomplete phrases whose meaning can be very obscure and uncertain. They are also
written in a random manner, and it is the reader’s challenge to order them in a
comprehensible way.
In pursuing his vision of a monistic philosophy of the flesh, Merleau-Ponty corrects his
own earlier philosophy, telling us that he is not only abandoning ambiguous
consciousness for an ontology of the flesh, but also abandoning consciousness itself. He
writes that the problems of the Phenomenology of Perception are ‘due to the fact that I
retained the philosophy of “consciousness”’ (VI: 183). The results of Phenomenology of
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Perception need to be brought to ‘ontological explication’ (VI: 182). They will then be
deepened and rectified (VI: 168).
He describes the new ontology as one in which the Being of flesh splits (‘dehisces’) into
self and world, both participating in the same flesh. Merleau-Ponty develops a special
language for this phenomenon, speaking of dehiscence, dimensions, hinges, pivots,
reversibility, and chiasms. These terms are all efforts to describe the monistic world in
which self and other, self and world, become reversible, and in which our conventional
language no longer applies. He writes, for example:
[P]erhaps the self and the non-self are like the obverse and the reverse and …
perhaps our own experience is this turning around that installs us far indeed from
‘ourselves’. In the other, in the things. Like the natural man, we situate ourselves
in ourselves and in the things, in ourselves and in the other, at the point where, by
a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become world (VI: 160).
Writing of oneself and the other he writes further that ‘our intentional life involves the
Ineinander of the others in us and of us in them’ (VI: 180). The self and other are no
longer two separate individuals facing one another. Rather, the relationship of self and
other involves a kind of reversibility, likened to the finger of the glove that is turned
inside out.
In reality there is neither me nor the other as positive, positive subjectivities.

There are two caverns, two opennesses, two stages where something will take
place—and which both belong to the same world, to the stage of being … There is
not the For Itself and the For the Other. They are each the other side of the other.
This is why they incorporate one another: projection-introjection—There is that
line, that frontier surface at some distance before me, where occurs the veering I-
Other Other-I (VI: 263).
What now is the role of psychoanalysis and the unconscious in this discussion? Merleau-
Ponty writes that there is a mutual encroachment of philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Philosophy will correct psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis will correct philosophy. On the
one hand, psychoanalytic terminology has infiltrated Merleau-Ponty’s new ontology.
Polymorphism and promiscuity are no longer attributes of infantile sexuality but of Being
itself. We hear of ‘the vertical or carnal universe and its polymorphic matrix’ (VI: 221), of
‘the fact that the world, Being, are polymorphism, mystery and nowise a layer of flat
entities of the in itself’ (VI: 252), and that ‘the in itself-for itself integration takes place
not in the absolute consciousness, but in the Being in promiscuity’ (VI: 253). In another
note Merleau-Ponty charges himself, ‘Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the
mother’ (VI: 267).
On the other hand, if psychoanalysis has encroached on philosophy, it is also the case that
philosophy encroaches on psychoanalysis. Thus he writes that ‘a philosophy of the flesh is
the condition without which psychoanalysis remains anthropology’ (VI: 267), and finally
Page 14 of 24

he enjoins himself, ‘Make not an existential psychoanalysis but an ontological

psychoanalysis’ (VI: 270).
We can only guess at the meaning of some of these obscure phrases. In speaking of the
polymorphism and promiscuity of being/flesh, Merleau-Ponty is certainly using
psychoanalytic concepts to reflect the complicated state of a flesh that is both man and
other, and man and world. When he directs us to do a psychoanalysis of nature, he is
presumably telling us again that the psychoanalytic terms can refer to the world as flesh.
On the other hand, when he directs us to make psychoanalysis ontological, it is not at all
clear what he means—except that he does not mean existential analysis.
What then of the unconscious? The abundance of references to the unconscious in the
working notes indicates that Merleau-Ponty’s new ontology of the flesh will involve the
unconscious more than ever before in his thought, albeit in a very different manner.
Recall the trajectory of the unconscious in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. From the beginning
he rejected the reified Freudian unconscious. He understood the unconscious as a
fragmented consciousness in The Structure of Behavior, as ambiguous perceptual
consciousness in the Phenomenology of Perception, as unseen ground in the Sorbonne
Lectures, and as oneiric consciousness and sensing in the Collège de France courses. In
the working notes the unconscious takes on a new role as the structure that makes
relationships possible. He writes:
One always talks of the problem of the ‘other’, of ‘intersubjectivity’ etc. … In fact
what has to be understood is, beyond the ‘persons’, the existentials according to
which we comprehend them, and which are the sedimented meaning of all our
voluntary and involuntary experience. This unconscious is to be sought not at the
bottom of ourselves, behind the back of our ‘consciousness’, but in front of us, as
articulations of our field. It is ‘unconscious’ by the fact that it is not an object, but
it is that through which objects are possible, it is the constellation wherein our
future is read—It is between them as the interval of the trees between the trees,
or at their common level (VI: 180).6
We follow Renaud Barbaras here as he emphasizes the displacement of the unconscious

away from the subject as well as its structuring of all worldly phenomena. ‘The
unconscious is rather on the side of the world rather than at the center of the psyche;
between things as the pivot or structure around which their phenomenality is constituted,
it is a synonym for dimension’ (Barbaras 1991: 315). As Merleau-Ponty indicated in the
preceding quote, he also refers to the unconscious as an ‘existential’, with obvious
reference to Heidegger’s use of this term to describe essential features of Being-in-the-
World.
Merleau-Ponty develops this train of thought further in the language of visibility and the
invisible, the visible world held together by an invisible structure—by ‘an invisible inner
framework, and the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible, it appears only
within it, it is the Nichturpräsentierbar which is presented to me as such within the world
…’ (VI: 215). The invisible framework and the existentials are all but indistinguishable.
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The language of reversibility, chiasm, dimensions, levels, pivots, and hinges applies to
both of them. Merleau-Ponty describes the existentials as ‘the armature of that “invisible
world” which, with speech, begins to impregnate all the things we see’ (VI: 180). And of
course, it is difficult to distinguish either of these concepts from the newly formulated
unconscious.
At the end of this discussion of The Visible and the Invisible, it is important to point out
what appears to be a persistent ambivalence in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. In his late
writings he has consistently moved in the direction of a monistic ontology. The Working
Notes are the most radical expression of that effort. There remains, however, an
ambivalence as to how far he wishes to push the monism. Regarding, for instance, the
relations with others, does he really want to argue that I and the other person are simply
one person, as opposed to two persons who are intertwined in ways we have not
recognized before in philosophy? In a statement quoted earlier, he writes that ‘In reality
there is neither me nor the other as positive, positive subjectivities. There are two
caverns, two opennesses, two stages where something will take place—and which both
belong to the same world, to the stage of being …’ (VI: 265). He is saying both that there
are not two positive subjectivities, but that there are two opennesses or two caverns. We
are left to wonder how he would have worked out this ambivalence over monism and
otherness. He was certainly using the Working Notes to experiment with the monist
extreme. It is in the Preface that we can see the ambivalence on full display.
Posthumous Writings: Preface to Hesnard
In 1960 Merleau-Ponty accepted an invitation to write a Preface to a book on Freud by

psychoanalyst Angelo Hesnard, L’Oeuvre de Freud et son Importance pour la Monde
(Merleau-Ponty 1982–3). His agreement to write the Preface speaks to his persistent
interest in the psychoanalytic enterprise and provides a valuable summary of his thought,
as he calls on his early writings about psychoanalysis and attempts to integrate them into
his later thought.
What is at first surprising about the Preface is the degree to which Merleau-Ponty clings
to his original point of view on psychoanalysis. Much of the Preface might have been
written at the time of the Phenomenology of Perception.
He begins the Preface by attributing to the reader what was probably his own history of
reading Freud:
Every reader of Freud, I imagine, remembers his first impression: an incredible

bias in favor of the least probable interpretations; a maniacal penchant for the
sexual; and above all a distortion, through the use of archaic forms, of
significations, language, and action in the interest of derisive puns. Then, to the
extent that one read, that one related oneself to oneself, and that the years
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passed, a sort of evidence for psychoanalysis was inexplicably established and one
came to live in peace with the pitiless hermeneutic (Pref: 68–9).
That said, Merleau-Ponty hastens to add that the psychoanalysis one once refused is not
the psychoanalysis one now accepts. What is now accepted is psychoanalysis delivered of
Freud’s empiricism, biologism, and psychologism. Merleau-Ponty agrees with the author
of the book that the theory and practice of psychoanalysis lead to a new philosophy
different from that espoused by Freud, and which tends to converge with phenomenology.
In their converging efforts, he continues, each may offer the other something valuable.
Phenomenology brings to psychoanalysis a new set of categories, allowing it to see ‘the
Freudian unconscious as an archaic or primordial consciousness, the repressed as a zone
of experience that we have not integrated, the body as a sort of natural or innate
complex, and communication as a relation between incarnate beings of the sort who are
well or badly integrated’ (Pref: 67). Psychoanalysis for its part will bring to
phenomenology a depth of experience not reached in a philosophy of consciousness.
Merleau-Ponty adds further that we owe to Freud the discovery of the remarkable
exchange of roles that is part and parcel of human development—that one can at once be
father and son, in becoming a father identifying with both his son and his own father. As
Merleau-Ponty puts it: ‘This prodigious intuition of exchanges—exchange of roles,
exchange of the soul and the body, of the imaginary and the real—this universal
promiscuity’ (Pref: 68).
He concludes the Preface by questioning whether phenomenology and psychoanalysis

converge completely, and whether they do this through a phenomenological translation of
psychoanalysis. He answers ‘no’ to both questions:
The accord of phenomenology and of psychoanalysis should not be understood to

consist in phenomenology’s saying clearly what psychoanalysis had said obscurely.
On the contrary, it is by what phenomenology implies or unveils at its limits—by its
latent content or its unconscious—that it is in consonance with psychoanalysis.
Thus the cross validation between the two doctrines is not exactly on the subject
man; their agreement is precisely in describing man as a work site (chantier), in
discovering, beyond the truth of immanence, that of the Ego and its acts, that of
consciousness and its objects, of relations which a consciousness cannot sustain:
man’s relations to his origins and his relations to his models. Freud points his
finger at the Id and the Superego … Phenomenology and psychoanalysis are not
parallel; much better, they are both aiming toward the same latency (Pref: 71).7
Much of what we have just read from the Preface would seem to apply to Merleau-Ponty’s
early work, as if he were still dealing with perceptual consciousness and the reified
Freudian unconscious, rather than with an ontology of the flesh. To the extent that
Merleau-Ponty moves beyond that in the Preface, we may find it in his concept of latency.
(The other words he uses for latency in the Preface are the ‘hidden’ (reflecting
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Heidegger’s Verborgenheit) and Husserl’s Tiefenleben). In Merleau-Ponty’s reading, both

psychoanalysis and phenomenology have changed in how they understand what is latent
or hidden.
Regarding psychoanalysis, in the Preface Merleau-Ponty reviews his critique of Freud’s

mechanistic language and his concept of a reified unconscious. He rejects Freud’s
scientistic talk of mnemic traces, projections, unconscious representations, etc., and
argues that Freud’s genius was in discovering in the clinical encounter a ‘treasure of
experience’—‘in his contact with things, his polymorphous perception of work, of acts, of
dreams, of their flux and their reflux, of counter-coups, of echoes, of substitutions, of
metamorphoses’ (Pref: 68). He rejects any talk of a biological phallus and argues that
Freud reveals in work ‘an imaginary phallus, a symbolic phallus, oneiric and poetic’ (Pref:
69).
Regarding phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty argues that with the publication of Husserl’s

later work phenomenology has moved beyond the ‘transparent correlations between acts
of thought and objects’ that might be taken from the early work. Phenomenology ceases
to be a straightforward relation of consciousness to its objects:
All consciousness is consciousness of something or of the world, but this

something, this world, is no longer, as ‘phenomenological positivism’ appeared to
teach, an object that is what it is, exactly adjusted to acts of consciousness.
Consciousness is now the ‘soul of Heraclites’, and Being, which is around it than
in front of it, is a Being of dreams, by definition hidden: Husserl sometimes uses
the term ‘pre-being’ (Pref: 70).
What does Merleau-Ponty mean with these enigmatic statements? These citations suggest
that he is using the term ‘latency’ to understand further, and beyond the understanding of
the Phenomenology of Perception, what phenomenology and psychoanalysis, each in its
own way, tries to reach beyond consciousness.
Recall now that the final position of Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy is that of a
dehiscence of Being into subject and object in which the two are both reversible and
united in the notion of flesh—a flesh that is both the flesh of the human subject and the
flesh of the world. For Merleau-Ponty, philosophy and psychoanalysis will each get to this
core realization of an underlying unity in its own way: philosophy/phenomenology
through its analysis of perception, and psychoanalysis through its analysis of
interpersonal relations.
In the philosophic investigation of perception, latency emerges in the analysis of the

perceptual relation of man and world. As Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘It is not we who
perceive, it is the thing that perceives itself yonder … The world is a field, and as such is
always open’ (VI: 185). The usual perceptual relation that proceeds from man to world is
now transcended. Rather than saying, I perceive, we now say, there is perception—or
something like, Being perceives itself through me. Such perception is now articulated in
terms of hinges, dimensions, encroachment, and levels of being—and also as the invisible
Page 18 of 24

of the visible, the interior of the exterior. What is latent is the ground of Being or flesh
that founds the perceptual relation. If the perceptual relation is thought of as
consciousness, then Being or flesh is the latent ‘unconscious’. The unseen ground is no
longer pre-reflective life but Being (or flesh) itself.
Psychoanalysis finds its own unconscious (or latency) not in the investigation of
perception, but rather in the interpersonal relationship, in what earlier was called erotic
intentionality and later the libidinal body. In the context of a philosophy of Being in
dehiscence, however, we no longer hear psychoanalytically of affective, intentional bonds
but rather of a ‘prodigious intuition of exchanges’, a ‘universal promiscuity’ (Pref: 68).
Thus the psychoanalytic unconscious now refers not to an affective attachment to the
other but to a unity with the other through a ‘fundamental polymorphism’ in which the ‘I-
other relation [is] to be conceived (like the intersexual relations, with its indefinite
substitutions) … as complementary roles one of which cannot be occupied without the
other being also: masculinity implies femininity, etc’ (VI: 220–1). As indicated earlier, this
undividedness of self and other is expressed through a primordial symbolism of the body
—what Merleau-Ponty also describes as ‘symbolic matrices, a language of self to self,
systems of equivalences built up by the past, effecting groupings, abbreviations, and
distortions in a simple act and which analysis reconstitutes more and more closely’ (Pref:
69). What Merleau-Ponty studied in the Sorbonne Lectures as the primitive unity of
mother and infant now persists into adult life. The primordial symbolism of this bond is
now the psychoanalytic unconscious (or latency).
Page 19 of 24

Conclusion
In tracing the trajectory of Merleau-Ponty’s thought we have witnessed a striking
transformation of his view of psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic unconscious, leading
to two possible, and somewhat opposing, conclusions. First, while it is clear that he
wanted to turn psychoanalysis in the direction of an ontology of the flesh, it is not clear
that this transformation will serve psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic therapy well. As a
praxis, as a basis for any psychoanalytically oriented treatment, it may be that Merleau-
Ponty’s early reading of psychoanalysis will prove more useful than the ontological
reading of the later works. In the ongoing confrontation of phenomenology and
psychoanalysis, the question will remain whether Merleau-Ponty’s early vision of ongoing,
perceptual consciousness—pre-reflective, uncertain, ambiguous, never at one with itself—
will do the work that Freud assigned to the unconscious and thus provide a clinically
useful phenomenological revision of Freud’s central idea.
But second, it may also be the case that Merleau-Ponty’s later reading of psychoanalysis
may add something—a further depth—to psychoanalytic practice. This would involve the
discovery of a deeper self—other unity beneath surface relations and conflicts—a unity
designated as latency and grounded in an ontology of flesh. Such a proposal is consistent
with what in fact has been the post-Freudian history of psychoanalysis, with both its
changing focus from Oedipal to pre-Oedipal relationships, and its corresponding
emphasis on the therapeutic relation as less asymmetric than Freud viewed it—and
perhaps, more than less asymmetric, as also subject to the reversibility of self and other
described by Merleau-Ponty (see, e.g. Aron 1996; Loewald 1980; Mitchell 1988).
References
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Press.
Barbaras, R. (1991). De l’être du Phénomène: Sur l’Ontolgie de Merleau-Ponty. Paris:

Jérôme Millon.
De Waelhens, A. (1966). ‘Sur l’Inconscient et la pensée philosophique’. In H. Ey (ed.),

L’Inconscient, VIe Colloque de Bonneval (pp. 371–385). Paris: Desclée de Brower.
Ey, H. (ed.) (1966). L’Inconscient, VIe Colloque de Bonneval. Paris: Desclée de Brower.
Green, A. (1964). ‘Du comportment a la chair: Itineraire de Merleau-Ponty’. Critique 211:

1017–1046.
Lacan, J. (1957). ‘La psychanalyse et son enseignement’. Bulletin de la Socièté francaise

de Philosophie 2: 65–101.
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Lacan, J. (1978). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans.
A. Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (1982–3/1961). ‘Merleau-Ponty in Memoriam’. Review of Existential Psychology

and Psychiatry 18(1, 2, 3): 73–82.
Lacan, J. (1988/1954–5). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II. The Ego in Freud’s
Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. S. Tomaselli. New
York: W. W. Norton.
Lanteri-Laura, G. (1966). ‘Les problèmes de l’inconscient et la pensée

phénoménologique’. In H. Ey (ed.), L’Inconscient, VIe Colloque de Bonneval (pp. 387–408).
Paris: Descle de Brower.
Laplanche, J. (1989). New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Macey. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1973). The Language of Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W.
Norton.
Loewald, H. (1980). Papers on Psychoanalysis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1963/1942). The Structure of Behavior, trans. A. Fisher. Boston, MA:

Beacon Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962/1945). Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith. London:

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964a/1960). ‘Man and Adversity’. In Signs, trans. R. McCleary (pp.

224–246). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964b/1960). ‘The Philosopoher and his Shadow’. In Signs, trans. R.

McCleary (pp. 159–182). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1970). Themes from the lectures at the Collège de France, 1952–1960,
trans. J. O’Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1966). ‘Remarks’. In H. Ey (ed.), L’Inconscient, VIe Colloque de

Bonneval (p. 143). Paris: Desclée de Brower.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1982–3/1960). ‘Phenomenology and psychoanalysis: Preface to

Hesnard’s L’oeuvre de Freud’. Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 18(1, 2, 3):
67–72.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1988/1949–52). Merleau-Ponty á la Sorbonne: Résumé de cours. Paris:

Cynara.
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Merleau-Ponty, M. (1992/1960). ‘Merleau-Ponty in person: (An interview with Madeleine

Chapal, 1960)’. In H. Silverman and J. Barry (eds), Texts and Dialogues, trans. M. Smith
(pp. 2–13). Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964b/1961). ‘Eye and Mind’. In J. Edie (ed.), Maurice Merleau-Ponty,

The Primacy of Perception (pp. 159–92). Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univesity Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968/1964). The Visible and the Invisible. C. Lefort (ed.), trans. A.
Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northweatern University Press.
Mitchell, S. (1988). Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press.
Phillips, J. (1988). ‘Latency and the Unconscious’. In E. Murphy (ed.), Phenomenology and
the Unconscious: The Sixth Annual Symposium of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology
Center (pp. 31–64). Pittsburgh, PA: The Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center,
Duquesne University.
Phillips, J. (1996). ‘Lacan and Merleau-Ponty: The Confrontation of Psychoanalysis and

Phenomenology.’ In D. Pettigrew and F. Raffoul (eds), Disseminating Lacan (pp. 69–108).
Albany, NY: State University of New York.
Phillips, J. (1999). ‘From the Unseen to the Invisible: Merleau-Ponty’s Sorbonne Lectures
as Preparation for his Later Thought. In D. Olkowski and J. Morley (eds), Merleau-Ponty,
Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World (pp. 69–88). Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press.
Pontalis, J.-B. (1971). ‘Presence, entre les signes, absence’. L’Arc 46: 56–66.
Pontalis, J.-B. (1982–3/1961). ‘The problem of the unconscious in Merleau-Ponty’s

thought’. Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 18(1, 2, 3, 4): 67–72.
Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and Philosophy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Roudinesco, E. (1990). Jacques Lacan & Co., trans. J. Mehlman. Chicago, IL: Chicago
University Press.
Spiegelberg, H. (1982). The Phenomenological Movement. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Notes:
(1.) This and other sections draw on material that appeared in James Phillips (1988).
(2.) Discussed at greater length in James Phillips (1999).
(3.) Discussed at greater length in James Phillips (1996).
Page 22 of 24

(4.) On two occasions after Merleau-Ponty’s death Lacan continued his critique. In his
tribute to Merleau-Ponty in Les Temps Modernes, argued once more that with his concept
of the perceptual consciousness, Merleau-Ponty perpetuated a unity of the subject that is
not there. ‘It is this very presupposition—that there be a place of unity somewhere—that
makes us delay our assent’ (Lacan 1982–3: 77–8). Lacan summarized his disagreement
with Merleau-Ponty with a sharp contrast between two versions of the subject: as
constituted primarily through the signifier (Lacan), and as constituted primarily through
the body (Merleau-Ponty).
The second occasion was the publication of The Visible and the Invisible in 1964. Shortly
after the publication, in his seminars of February and March, 1964, Lacan again
contrasted Merleau-Ponty’s starting point—the perceived world of sensory experience—
with his own—human desire and its vicissitudes (1978). At the end of the final discussion
of Merleau-Ponty, in the seminar of 11 March 1964, Jacques Miller remarked to Lacan
that he had talked of a convergence between Merleau-Ponty and himself regarding the
unconscious. Lacan responded: ‘I did not say that. I suggested that the few whiffs of the
unconscious to be detected in his notes might lead him to pass, let us say, into my field.
I’m not at all sure’ (1978: 119). Miller finally asked: ‘This leads me to ask you if The
Visible and the Invisible has led you to change anything in the article that you published
on Merleau-Ponty in a number of Les Temps Modernes?’ To which Lacan responded:
‘Absolutely nothing’ (Lacan 1978: 119).
(5.) See Pietersma (1988) for Merleau-Ponty’s relation to Spinoza.
(6.) See Thomas Fuchs (this volume) for a related, but different approach to the
unconscious based in large part on Merleau-Ponty. Citing the same quote, he interprets
the notion of an unconscious ‘not at the bottom of ourselves … but in front of us …’ as
indicative of the unconscious as bodily memory, as opposed to the monistic view
expressed in this chapter of the unconscious as the unseen structure holding the world of
flesh together.
(7.) Translation altered. See Merleau-Ponty, M. (1982–3/1960).
James Phillips
Yale Global Mental Health Program, Yales School of Medicine
Page 23 of 24

Page 24 of 24

Wittgenstein and Psychoanalysis

Donald Levy

Wittgenstein proposes an Aesthetic Model for psychoanalytic interpretation to replace

Freud’s Causal Model. When we assent to such interpretations of our dreams, for
example, he claimed that we are not making inferences based on evidence about the
causes of our dreams; instead, our assent is comparable to more dreaming, or
‘redreaming’ our dreams, as Wittgenstein called it. That assent is part of Freud’s criterion
of interpretive correctness, which would not be possible if recognizing causal laws were
involved, Wittgenstein claims. For causal inferences need to be based on inductive
evidence, which, with dreams, is non-existent or unavailable. Since for Freud,
interpreting dreams shows how neurotic symptoms, jokes, slips, and much else can be
interpreted, i.e. by free association, this non-causal character distinguishes
Wittgenstein’s Aesthetic Model for psychoanalytic interpretation quite generally—in
which dreams and symptoms cannot be assumed to cause the associations we ascribe to
them—from Freud’s Causal Model.
Keywords: Aesthetic Model, assent, Causal Model, criterion, free association, inductive evidence, interpretive
correctness, non-causal, psychoanalytic interpretation, redreaming
Page 1 of 23

Introduction
Wittgenstein wrote nothing on psychoanalysis for publication, but commented on it
repeatedly, in written notes made for his own use, as well as in publicly and privately
spoken remarks, often of considerable length, reported by others. This heterogeneous
body of notes and reports produced over many years has generated considerable interest,
since his whole philosophical enterprise from the start bears the signs of Freud’s
influence, as he freely acknowledged. Like Freud exploring the unconscious, Wittgenstein
approached philosophy as a kind of therapy, investigating philosophical problems by
uncovering the hidden misconceptions about language enshrined in them, thereby
subverting their power to bewitch our minds. This novel approach combined Freud’s
psychology with a concern for the verification of statements and the dependence of their
meaning on the activities in which they are used, which enabled Wittgenstein to examine
long-familiar questions in new ways. But in combining that philosophy, according to which
“Nothing is hidden” (Wittgenstein 1945–9: §435), with Freud’s psychology, for which
much of importance in the mind is hidden, Wittgenstein’s programme was bound to
generate tension, which is one of the main subjects of this chapter.
Wittgenstein’s attitude to traditional thought could be called reserved, given his greatly
reduced dependence on earlier influences or even on the ideas of contemporaries; thus,
his response to psychoanalysis was personal and specific in a way that is probably
unmatched among philosophers. As a result of that reserve, it is difficult to say where
Wittgenstein’s take on Freud’s work belongs in the conventional dichotomy between
hermeneutic and scientific views of psychoanalysis, since unlike most of those who have
confronted this dichotomy, Wittgenstein did not stay put on one side of it or the other,
sometimes praising Freud’s contribution to science but also attacking his explanations of
psychological phenomena as unscientific. Such apparent inconsistencies may be merely
the result of his uniquely personal ‘zig-zag’ style of philosophical inquiry, in which wildly
different ‘thought-experiments’ are tried; but the result is that in assessing Wittgenstein’s
view of psychoanalysis, perfect agreement cannot be expected concerning what these
notes and recorded comments and discussions add up to. We cannot even say for sure
whether a single, stable view underlies these materials—perhaps one that evolved over
time—or whether instead Wittgenstein was content with allowing his observations on
psychoanalysis to remain as they now, superficially, appear—isolated insights, surrounded
inconclusively by mistakes and changes of mind. In the following account, signs of
development in Wittgenstein’s views have been emphasized, although this requires
ignoring to some degree indications of repeated changes of direction, which are not
easily distinguished from that personal style of philosophizing. Obviously, any account
based on these notes and reports, and produced under such conditions, must be a
tentative and speculative affair.
Page 2 of 23

Although perfect consensus among commentators is absent, on one point something like
agreement can be found; it is that whatever his initially favourable opinion of
psychoanalysis may have been, Wittgenstein came to be dissatisfied with what he is said
to have seen as a “pseudoscience” (Bouveresse 1991: 52; Cioffi 1996: 286) and ended up
critical of everything about it. Although the evidence for this very negative view deserves
to be reviewed here, a more nuanced conclusion can be supported, according to which,
although Wittgenstein often saw Freud as seriously mistaken about the nature of
psychoanalysis, his estimation of it did not waver as much as may at first appear.
A Pseudoscience?
The term ‘pseudoscience’ signifies non-adherence to the norms of scientific research, and
is always pejorative, but what more can be said about its meaning is unclear. Speaking of
‘pseudoscience’ here is troublesome because Wittgenstein seems never to have used the
term in reference to psychoanalysis or to anything else, although he certainly expressed
disparaging views about the excesses he thought he saw in many of Freud’s claims.
Nevertheless, we don’t generally apply the epithet ‘pseudoscience’ to a theory merely
because some part of it (even a large part) deviates from modern scientific standards.
After all, it would be absurd to call the Ptolemaic cosmology pseudoscience simply
because of its geocentrism and reliance on epicycles, or to dismiss Kepler’s astronomy
because of its admixture of astrology and numerology. The circular planetary orbits of
Copernicus and the luminiferous aether assumed by the Michelson-Morley experiments
are further examples; none of these are pseudoscientific at all. What, then, distinguishes
genuine science, however riddled with error or imperfectly executed, from its
counterfeit?
Attempts to transform ‘pseudoscience’ from a mere epithet into a determinate term of

philosophical critique, and thereby enable objective determination of whether
psychoanalysis is scientific or not, begin with Karl Popper, for whom the defining
characteristic of a pseudoscience is that its formulations are essentially impossible to
falsify and, therefore, immune from empirical testing. Thus, for Popper, given any
possible behaviour, e.g. whether someone tries to drown a child or seeks to rescue it from
drowning, a psychoanalytic interpretation is available to ‘explain’ whatever is observed
(Popper 1963: 35–7). In this, Popper claims, psychoanalysis differs from the real thing,
the claims of which are always open to refutation by observed facts.
Frank Cioffi revised Popper’s theory of pseudoscience while also adopting psychoanalysis
as a paradigm case of it. Thus, like Popper, Cioffi agrees that psychoanalysis is
unfalsifiable; however, for Cioffi, unlike Popper, its unfalsifiability is not what makes it
pseudoscientific (Cioffi 1985: 210). For a theory might lead to the discovery of new,
empirically testable truths, ones that can be independently verified; but if its proponents
Page 3 of 23

habitually and willfully (even self-deceptively) avoid using methods that aim at such
falsification, then the theory would still be pseudoscientific (Cioffi 1970: 116).
The affinities or lack of them between the conceptions of psychoanalysis as a

pseudoscience in Popper and Cioffi, on the one hand, and Wittgenstein’s criticisms of
Freud, on the other, can be left to emerge as we survey Wittgenstein’s views; however,
two points are constant amidst the shifts in those views. First of all, for Wittgenstein,
whatever defects he found in the procedures and assumptions of psychoanalysis, that it
might be entirely without cognitive value never seems to have occurred to him. Second,
unlike Popper and Cioffi, Wittgenstein never attempted to develop a theory of
pseudoscience by which to judge psychoanalysis, so it should not surprise us that he
never used the term ‘pseudoscience’ with regard to psychoanalysis or anything else, as
far as we know.
Nevertheless, as Cioffi remarks, Wittgenstein thought psychoanalysis had scientific

pretensions that should be abandoned, unlike its scientific critics, who pressed for it to
live up to those pretensions (Cioffi 1996: 286). Yet in The Blue Book, Wittgenstein also
credited Freud with ‘newly discovered psychological reactions’ (Wittgenstein 1933–4: 57),
and referred to Freud’s ‘extraordinary scientific achievement’ in a letter to Norman
Malcolm written in 1945 (Malcolm 1958: 39).
That passage in The Blue Book does not give examples or specify which psychological
reactions Wittgenstein meant. The unwary reader might assume that Wittgenstein was
thinking of repression, projection, and transference, for example, but that assumption
should give us pause, since all of these, as Freud understood them, involve unconscious
mental causality, about which Wittgenstein was extremely doubtful when he dictated
these words, and about which he remained suspicious long after. Instead, it is possible
that the reactions Wittgenstein was thinking of here were ones that appear to be
observable and describable without reference to unconscious mental causality—
specifically, our reactions when we intuitively grasp the symbolism, especially sexual
symbolism, which Freud thought we find in dreams. For dreams can seem to have
meaning, even before we think we know what they mean; in this respect, dreams are
unlike other phenomena that are interpreted psychoanalytically, which may appear
initially to be meaningless. Such symbols in dreams that we do come to accept are often
not imposed upon us; they seem instead to arise spontaneously, so we do not need to be
persuaded to accept them, as Wittgenstein came to recognize (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 43,
45), although he had earlier thought they were ‘impositions’ (Wittgenstein 1938: 27). By
contrast, Freud’s Primal Scene theory, which Wittgenstein called a ‘new
myth’ (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 51) is, Wittgenstein maintained, ‘imposed’ even when
assented to. But whether assented to or not, what, exactly, made the very idea of
unconscious mental causality so very troublesome for him?
Page 4 of 23

Reasons and Causes

According to Wittgenstein around the time of The Blue Book, Freud was wrong to believe
that he was the discoverer of the unconscious causes of dreams, jokes, slips, and neurotic
symptoms. Wittgenstein comments:
I see a muddle here between a cause and a reason. Being clear why you laugh is
not being clear about a cause. If it were, then agreement to the analysis given of
the joke as explaining why you laugh would not be a means of detecting it. The
success of the analysis is supposed to be shown by the person’s agreement. There
is nothing corresponding to this in physics. Of course, we can give causes for our
laughter, but whether those are in fact the causes is not shown by the person’s
agreeing that they are. A cause is found experimentally. The psychoanalytic way of
finding why a person laughs is analogous to an aesthetic investigation. For the
correctness of an aesthetic analysis must be agreement of the person to whom the
analysis is given. The difference between a reason and a cause is brought out as
follows: the investigation of a reason entails as an essential part one’s agreement
with it, whereas the investigation of a cause is carried out experimentally … Of
course the person who agrees to the reason was not conscious at the time of its
being his reason
(Wittgenstein (1932–5: 39–40).
So it is not the unobservability of unconscious mental activity by itself that leads

Wittgenstein to regard any reference to unconscious mental causality as suspect; indeed,
that supposed unobservability may prove to be less of an impediment than appears. Here,
although his criticism still derives from concerns about the verifiability of such causal
claims, its focus falls on Freud’s claims to have discovered the unconscious mental causes
of dreams, jokes, slips, and symptoms. According to Wittgenstein, if the criterion of
correctness for an interpretation is the assent of the individual subject, then causality
cannot be involved. For as he understood matters at this time, legitimate causal claims
are the product of repeated experiments (Wittgenstein 1932–5: 39–40), issuing in the
formulation of causal laws. By contrast, Freud’s supposed unconscious causes are one-
time occurrences, and it is only the individual dreamer’s or joker’s assent, e.g. to the
specific interpretation, which is decisive; repeated experiments on other subjects would
not be to the point. Thus, for Wittgenstein, what Freud presented as causal explanations
were actually reasons.
Wittgenstein would probably find little to criticize in contemporary cognitive science’s

ascription of unconscious mental causes, which is based overwhelmingly on experimental
observations of many subjects, yielding law-like generalizations, where assent of the
subjects plays hardly any evidentiary role. Wittgenstein’s considerations do not merely
subvert the claim of psychoanalysis to uncover unconscious mental causes; his view also
undermines the necessity of ever invoking ‘the Unconscious’ at all, even if unconscious
Page 5 of 23

ideas and wishes are allowed (Bouveresse 1991: ch. 2). Thus, when we laugh at a joke, for
example, psychoanalysis does not give us the unconscious cause of our laughing, as
Freud supposed; instead:
… it is a way of speaking to say the reason was subconscious. It may be expedient

to speak in this way, but the subconscious is a hypothetical entity which gets its
meaning from the verification these propositions have. What Freud says about the
subconscious sounds like science, but in fact it is just a means of representation.
New regions of the soul have not been discovered, as his writings suggest
(Wittgenstein 1932–5: 40).
The ‘means of representation’ Wittgenstein speaks of here is capable of becoming what

he elsewhere calls a ‘mythology’ when it is erroneously viewed as something represented,
or as “persuasion” when others, under pressure, accept the conflation. For Wittgenstein,
quite generally, when you assent to a psychological explanation involving unconscious
reasons, ‘… you could have been persuaded of something different’, if other means had
been employed (Wittgenstein 1938: 27). However, there is no need to assume the
existence of ‘the Unconscious’—doing so is merely one ‘means of representation’ among
many, where none is the single, uniquely correct way to represent the observable facts.
Wittgenstein does not pause here to consider how he knows that Freud had not
discovered ‘new regions of the soul’—as if he knew what conditions for such a discovery
Freud’s evidence had failed to satisfy, and what evidence would have satisfied them. How
does he know when something is merely a ‘means of representation’ and nothing more?
Perhaps a means of representation might become something else—as atoms and
molecules, which, until Einstein, were thought to be merely hypothetical entities, later
came to be understood to be real. And if unconscious reasons are unproblematic, why is
‘the Unconscious’ different? For if poor people or baroque buildings exist, references to
‘the poor’ or to ‘the baroque’ should pose no challenge. These questions are not as
peripheral as might appear, since they bear upon our earlier tentative rejection of
repression, projection, and transference, as instances of what Wittgenstein could have
meant when he spoke of Freud’s ‘newly discovered psychological reactions’. That earlier
rejection seems to be undermined by the following passage from The Blue Book, dictated
at about the same time as the lectures quoted above, which shows him accommodating
‘unconscious thoughts, acts of volition, etc.’, although in a very mitigated way:
It might be found practical to call a certain state of decay in a tooth, not

accompanied by what we commonly call toothache, ‘unconscious toothache’ and to
use in such a case the expression we have a toothache, but don’t know it. It is in
just this sense that psychoanalysis talks of unconscious thoughts, acts of volition,
etc. Now is it wrong in this sense to say that I have a toothache but don’t know it?
There is nothing wrong about it, as it is just a new terminology and can at any
time be retranslated into ordinary language
(Wittgenstein 1933–4: 22–3).
Page 6 of 23

The suggestion here is that for Wittgenstein, against our earlier hesitation, there could be
observable reactions that would allow ascribing unconscious thoughts and acts of
volition, even if there would be no necessity in doing so. Repression, for example, might
be conceived, roughly, as trying to forget an untoward thought or wish, by habitually
switching attention to something else whenever it comes to mind, while preventing other
thoughts or wishes from bringing it to mind by habitually shunting them aside whenever
they verge on doing so. Being habitual, the ‘switching’ and ‘shunting’ of attention might
escape notice by the subject, resulting in a motivated inability to attend to the untoward
thought. Even if the specific unconscious thought or wish being repressed by an
individual cannot be identified by observers, that some idea or wish is being repressed
might be, based on such evidence. Thus, at least some psychoanalytic references to
repression, so long as they can be ‘retranslated into ordinary language’ in this way, might
be unobjectionable, for Wittgenstein.
It is strange for Wittgenstein to claim that ‘unconscious toothache’ illustrates something

about psychoanalysis, since unlike in psychoanalysis, the assent of the tooth’s bearer is
not the criterion for ascribing unconscious toothache; if there is tooth decay in a subject’s
tooth but no felt pain, there is what may be called ‘unconscious toothache’, period.
Indeed, if and when the tooth’s bearer knows of the decay and feels no pain, they would
then be fully conscious of experiencing unconscious toothache. Whether such a thing
could be true of the sort of unconscious mental states Freud discussed, that is, whether
the subject of a particular unconscious thought or act of volition could at the same time
be conscious of being such a subject remains to be seen. Perhaps we are tripping here
over the limitations imposed by relying exclusively on questions of verifiability, very
narrowly conceived, with which to investigate the meaning of psychoanalytic claims. For
his comments on those claims seem to gravitate toward saying either that psychoanalytic
interpretations are unverifiable, period (inasmuch as they are not based on repeatable
experiments, and so cannot ascribe causes), or that the sole verification of their
correctness is the assent of the individual subject.
Aesthetics as the Model

An alternative conceptualization of Freud’s observations, one closer to the truth,
according to Wittgenstein, was available in Aesthetics, which he regarded as a branch of
Ethics (Wittgenstein 1929: 38), wherein observable similarities and differences are to be
found, without experiments, inductive inferences, or inferences of any kind (Wittgenstein
1938: 18), and without having to refer to unobservable activities in an Unconscious Mind.
Absent the need to prove causality, the assent criterion for interpretations could now be
taken as sufficient. Then a dream image, say, of a flowering tree branch could be a sexual
symbol—without concern about what, if anything, really caused the dream in the first
place. Such an understanding of dream symbolism would solve the puzzle concerning
what Wittgenstein was thinking of when he praised Freud for his newly discovered
Page 7 of 23

psychological reactions while at the same time emphasizing the absence of any need to
resort to unconscious mental causality to describe or explain dream reports and our
intuitive understanding of their meanings. As Wittgenstein remarked to Rush Rhees in
1942:
Freud in his analysis provides explanations which many people are inclined to
accept. He emphasizes that people are dis-inclined to accept them. But if the
explanation is one which people are disinclined to accept, it is highly probable
that it is also one which they are inclined to accept. And this is what Freud had
actually brought out. Take Freud’s view that anxiety is always a repetition in some
way of the anxiety we felt at birth. He does not establish this by reference to
evidence—for he could not do so. But it is an idea which has a marked attraction.
It has the attraction which mythological explanations have, explanations which say
that this is all a repetition of something that has happened before
This is evidence that what Wittgenstein meant when he referred to Freud’s ‘newly
discovered psychological reactions’ were the observable inclinations to accept accounts of
a sort that are not susceptible to ordinary or scientific inquiry, i.e. ideas which have a
marked attraction but whose attraction resist explanation. Such inclinations and
attractions might be ‘what Freud had actually brought out’. These observable reactions,
without unconscious mental activity as causes, favour the Aesthetic approach.
But Wittgenstein was forced to question his Aesthetic assumptions when Bertrand
Russell’s essay, ‘The Limits of Empiricism’, with its new ideas about causality appeared
(Russell 1935–6); for his notes on causality (Wittgenstein 1937), were apparently written
with Russell’s essay in mind.
Causality
In that essay, Russell argued that it must be possible to perceive causal relations, that is,
e.g. to see, hear, or feel one thing producing another. Such awareness of one thing
causing another is necessary before we can discover causality through repeated
experience, according to Russell. As an example he offered the fact that:
When I am hurt and cry out, I can perceive not only the hurt and the cry, but the
fact that the one ‘produces’ the other
(Russell 1935–6: 149).
This claim is a direct rejection of Wittgenstein’s assumption that knowledge of causality

always arises inductively, that is, by observing regularities in repeated experiments
leading to the formulation of causal laws. Instead, for Russell, we can perceive causes at
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work in individual cases; so Russell says: ‘“Cause” accordingly, must mean something
other than “invariable antecedent …”’ (Russell 1935–6: 137). For Russell, as Wittgenstein
paraphrases him:
… we don’t always arrive at the proposition ‘this is the cause of that’ by observing
regular sequences. One has first to recognize certain causes intuitively—I am
immediately aware that this is the cause
So our ability to engage in inductive inferences rests on our prior ability to ‘intuitively’
perceive some causes ‘immediately’. However, the notion of immediate awareness here is
suspicious, for Wittgenstein, since it might be taken to imply that there is a kind of
infallibility attached to that immediate awareness. Wittgenstein asks:
Don’t we recognize immediately that the pain is produced by the blow we have
received? Isn’t this the cause, and can there be any doubt about it?—But isn’t it
quite possible to suppose that in certain cases we are deceived about this? And
later recognize the deception?
To which he replies:
Certainly there is in such cases a genuine experience which can be called

‘experience of the cause’. But not because it infallibly shows us the cause; rather
because one root of the cause-effect language-game is to be found here, in our
looking out for a cause
(Wittgenstein 1937: 373).1
After reading Russell on causality, Wittgenstein could no longer simply deny the
coherence of someone claiming to be aware of their ideas and wishes causing their
individual dreams. Nor could a dreamer experiencing their free associations to a dream
as what focusing attention on the dream ‘made them think of’ be so easily dismissed. The
dichotomy between reasons and causes, treated by many as a truism before Russell,
became a subject for philosophical debate thereafter, quite apart from its relevance to
psychoanalytic interpretation, and it remains so today. Elizabeth Anscombe’s distinction
between reasons and causes (Anscombe 1957: §§9–11, §14), is less absolute than
Wittgenstein’s dichotomy; building on her work, and aided by her separation of causality
from its deterministic distortions (Anscombe 1971), Donald Davidson’s view of reasons as
essentially causal gained widespread acceptance (Davidson 1963).
It might at first appear that once Wittgenstein had recognized the reality of perceptions
of causality, the dichotomy between his own Aesthetic Model and Freud’s scientific
approach would have to be reconsidered, since his model had assumed the impossibility
of such non-inductive, individual perceptions, whereas Freud had raised no problem
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about them. Yet despite his new recognition of their existence, Wittgenstein seemed not
to realize their subversive implications for the dichotomy. After all, acknowledging the
reality of individual perceptions of causality and recognizing free association as an
instance of it, may seem too disparate to immediately connect. The ‘freedom’ we
experience when we free associate to a dream means that then the mind has been
temporarily freed of distractions from the dream as fully as possible, and this requires not
only the voluntary suspension of action, and of the critical faculty needed for action, but
also of thinking about anything to do with action. Then, when one focuses attention on a
dream or any of its elements, the thoughts and feelings which follow upon this ‘emptying’
of the mind are commonly experienced as having been evoked by the dream. Those
potentially new thoughts and feelings answer the question, ‘What does this dream (or
dream element) make you think of?’, which cannot be assumed if the question is asked
when the freedom that free association provides is absent.
Perhaps he saw that even if free associations to a dream, experienced as the dream’s
causal efficacy when the dreamer’s attention is focused on it, were not really exceptions
to our basic beliefs about causality, it did not follow that they were completely
unobjectionable. All that Russell had shown is that such causal experiences are not, prima
facie, incoherent, as Wittgenstein had believed. After all, he did not yet know whether
free associations were similar enough to uncontroversial experiences of causality for
them to be entirely problem-free, nor did he know what kinds of evidence would support
unconscious ideas and wishes as causes, for example, of dreams or symptoms. For
whatever reasons, Wittgenstein’s initial response to Russell was not an attempt at
integrating Freud’s Causal Model with his own Aesthetic, i.e. non-causal, non-inferential
approach. On the contrary, in his lectures on Aesthetics, in the summer of 1938
(Wittgenstein 1938: 1–36), Wittgenstein’s starting point was the assumed contrast
between the two, although glimmers of interest in reconciling them appear.
When he returned to discussing psychoanalysis (Wittgenstein 1942–6), in conversations

alone with Rush Rhees (among the most knowledgeable of his students about Freud’s
writings, to judge from the notes to the lectures on Aesthetics), Wittgenstein at last
abandoned the stance he had maintained up to then, of using psychoanalysis merely to
illustrate one or another philosophical point, as in the exploration of the assent criterion
in those 1938 lectures. Now, for the first time, he approaches psychoanalysis as a new
and independent philosophical subject in its own right. As such, these conversations are
among the earliest investigations—if they are not the very first—by anyone that have
come down to us.
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Dreams and Their Associations

The first conversation focuses on free association and how it can be thought to lead to
‘the right analysis’ of a dream, given that ‘Freud never shows how we know where to
stop’, and that ‘it does not seem to be a matter of evidence’ (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 42).
This implies that interpretations are not inferences, so gleaning clues from many
associations is not involved, in Wittgenstein’s view. Wittgenstein does not question his
own assumption that the right analysis of a dream is to be found in some one thought that
occurs, without inference, in the course of the dreamer’s free associating, and so that is
where the associating should stop, if we only knew where that was. However, the
assumption is troubling for two reasons; it seems to tilt, in a question-begging way, in
favour of the Aesthetic Model and against the Causal Model since, even if not inferred,
causality is arguably multiconditional (Anscombe 1971), and it seems arbitrary to assume
that all of the conditions producing the dream will be found in any one association to it.
Admittedly, among the associations to a dream Freud is prepared to single out a thought
‘which is represented in [the dream’s] content and is indispensible for its
interpretation’ (Freud 1900: 281); but this does not imply that such a thought by itself
provides the interpretation. Besides, Wittgenstein’s apparent conflating of such an
association with the dream’s correct interpretation, implies that for Wittgenstein—and
contrary to Freud—the process of free association, all by itself, generates interpretations
the way dreams generate associations, that is, without the use of the dreamer’s ‘critical
faculty’ (Freud 1900: 102–3), which is to say, non-inferentially.
Wittgenstein acknowledges that for Freud, independent evidence supporting a dream

interpretation could be found in ‘memories brought to light in analysis’, i.e. memories not
previously recalled (Freud 1937: 262); these might support the interpretations that
appear to have prompted them. But that idea is rejected here, although the reason given,
i.e. concern about the analyst’s role in producing those recollections, seems less than
conclusive (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 43). Here, Wittgenstein sweeps aside the possibility that
some of those recollections are verifiably true; however, this idea reappears in the next
year’s conversations (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 46) with a different response. The remainder
of the conversation in the summer of 1942 is devoted to the idea of a dream language, for
which there is evidence, as Wittgenstein initially agrees, although doubts about it
immediately arise:
Consider the difficulty that if a symbol in a dream is not understood, it does not
seem to be a symbol at all. So why call it one? But suppose I have a dream and
accept a certain interpretation of it. Then—when I superimpose the interpretation
on the dream—I can say ‘Oh yes, the table obviously corresponds to the woman,
this to that etc’
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Here, the dream initially seems to be devoid of symbolic significance, and its contents
appear to become symbolic only after the interpretation is accepted and ‘superimposed’
onto it. However, by the following year, 1943, Wittgenstein seems to reconsider his ideas
about psychoanalytic interpretations as ’impositions’:
It is characteristic of dreams that often they seem to the dreamer to call for an
interpretation. One is hardly ever inclined to write down a day dream, or recount
it to someone else, or to ask ‘What does it mean?’ But dreams do seem to have
something puzzling and in a special way interesting about them—so that we want
an interpretation of them. (They were often regarded as messages)
Here, Wittgenstein recognizes that the dreamer wants an interpretation of the dream
before one is offered. But he does not completely abandon all aspects of the ‘imposition’
model; for once a dream is interpreted: ‘… we might say that it is fitted into a context in
which it ceases to be puzzling. In a sense the dreamer re-dreams his dream in
surroundings such that its aspect changes’ (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 45), a formulation that
he does not abandon even when the interpretation prompts recollections, sometimes
truthful ones, from early childhood: ‘(All this is connected with what was said about
dreaming the dream over again. It still belongs to the dream, in a way)’ (Wittgenstein
1942–6: 46).
Those new recollections do not necessarily count as evidence for the correctness of the
interpretation that prompted them; but neither is there any impediment to adopting an
explicitly causal framework for incorporating the occurrence of such recollections into an
explanatory account of the dream; for immediately following the last quoted remarks, he
goes on:
On the other hand, one might form an hypothesis. On reading the report of the
dream, one might predict that the dreamer can be brought to recall such and such
memories. And this hypothesis might or might not be verified. This might be called
a scientific treatment of the dream
Here, not for the first time (compare Wittgenstein 1938: 18, n3), Wittgenstein recognizes
the faint possibility of integrating the Aesthetic and Scientific approaches to
psychoanalytic interpretation, instead of contrasting them dichotomously, as he usually
does.
But why treat a dream interpretation as ‘dreaming the dream over again’ merely because,
when interpreted, the dream’s aspect changes? Wittgenstein’s reason seems to be that
not only has the dream’s aspect changed when it is interpreted, but it has done so with no
Page 12 of 23

provable cognitive gain—as a result of which the interpreted dream has the cognitive
status of a new dream, and nothing more.
Yet there is nothing unusual about aspect change in interpreting dreams, compared to
other kinds of interpretation; quite generally, in any inquiry, say, a criminal investigation,
individual pieces of evidence change aspect as they are connected to different theories of
the crime. But even if we treat each new interpretation of a dream, literally, as
redreaming the dream, there is no reason why a second dream cannot be evidence
affecting the interpretation of the original dream. Besides, given repeated memories of a
dream (perhaps separately recorded), a dream might be expected to change over time,
regardless of whether it has been interpreted or reflected upon. That is, the dream’s
changes in aspect might result, not only from its having been interpreted or reflected
upon, but also from an instability in dreams quite generally, a tendency to drift, like other
remembered mental states on which we do not act (Levy 2004: 183–5).
Thus far, Wittgenstein has merely questioned reliance on free association in interpreting
dreams given our limited knowledge of the connections between free associations and
dreams, since free association ‘is likely to be conditioned by everything that is going on
about you and within you’ (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 47)—which of course could also be said
about the dream itself. However, the categorical denial of free association as yielding
evidence of the causes of dreams is not yet the issue; thus far, it is only the degree of
reliability of our perceptions of causality linking dreams and free associations that is in
question, i.e. the low probability of that linkage really being as we perceive it, and the
small possibility of correcting our misperceptions of it. But Wittgenstein’s implicit point
here seems to be the absence of criteria for distinguishing associations that are genuinely
caused by focusing attention on dreams from those that are not—for all such associations
are, or can be, experienced as dream-induced, but it is doubtful that all really are.
Free association receives no direct attention for the remainder of the conversations in
1943 (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 47–50), but when Rhees’s notes resume, in 1946, it is again
discussed. Now, more radical doubts enter concerning whether free associations to a
dream can be presumed to provide reliable evidence concerning the dream’s cause. The
dreamer’s free associations to the dream were supposed to imply unconscious ideas and
wishes from which the dream’s cause could be inferred. But that inference breaks down if
something other than the dreamer’s attending to the dream actually caused the free
associations, unbeknownst to the dreamer; for then, even if the dreamer’s free
associations do support ascribing certain unconscious ideas and wishes to the dreamer,
when those free associations turn out not to have been caused by the dreamer’s attention
to the dream, the inference collapses, and nothing about the cause of the dream can be
inferred from the free associations the dreamer produced. Even when experienced as
perceptions of causality, free associations are still fallible, which subverts the project of
psychoanalytic interpretation based on free association, for Wittgenstein.
Page 13 of 23

In each of the three arguments that follow, the apparent causal links between focusing on
dreams and the dreamer’s subsequent free associations are illusory, even though free
associations are (fallible) experiences of such causal links. As a result, a dream’s cause,
supposed to be inferable from the unconscious ideas and wishes implied by the
associations the attention to the dream apparently produced, proves not to be inferable
from the dream after all. Since, by hypothesis, in all three arguments, the dream activity
plays no part in producing those associations, the dreamer’s associations provides no real
evidence concerning the cause of the dream. Three arguments for this are presented:
[I] You could take my dream report, and by free association, ‘arrive at the same
results’ (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 50) as those I reach—although it was not your dream.
Here, my dream activity, as Wittgenstein calls it, plays no causal role in generating your
free associations; it was the report of my dream that did. The argument here is supposed
to show the lack of connection between my dream activity and your associative process,
which proceeds as if my dream activity caused the associations you produced, when it did
not. The point is that with or without my actual dream activity, the separate associations
and interpretations produced by us are alike; so my dream activity is not the cause of
either.
The argument resembles a defender of free association as revealer of causes of dreams

might make to justify belief in a shared dream symbolism. Wittgenstein wavered back and
forth about dream symbolism, but ultimately rejected it, partly because such a symbolism
could not rise to the level of a dream language (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 48), i.e. one that
would enable translations into and out of waking language, and partly because even if
such a symbolism could account for some dream elements, it cannot be assumed to be
capable of explaining everything in a dream (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 49).
Objection: 1. Your associations to my dream report, which are all experiences of

causality, are related, indirectly, by way of that report, to my dream activity; but even my
own associations are not directly related, causally, to my dream activity. My associations
are related to that activity, i.e. to the dream itself, only indirectly, by way of my memory of
it. So both sets of associations, yours and mine, are indirectly related to the dream
activity itself, although in different ways. 2. That a symbolism is not a language is not
necessarily a defect, nor is incompleteness in an explanation a defect either, unless it
purports to be complete, which a dream interpretation does not do.
[II] A thing you are preoccupied with, sex, for instance, will lead your associations ‘finally
and inevitably’ back to itself (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 51), no matter where you began. Your
starting point, e.g. focusing attention on a dream, might play no actual role in causing
your associations to go where they do; possibly, they were caused by the preoccupation
(here, sex), and not by your attention to your dream. Earlier (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 46–7),
Wittgenstein had argued that a ‘whole host of circumstances’ could hijack your free
associations. Here, in [II], just one such constant distraction, e.g. sex, will lead ‘back to
that same theme’ (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 51), and away from wherever your associations
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might otherwise have gone. So there is no warrant for ascribing the cause of the
associations to the attention paid to the dream, Wittgenstein claims, since a credible
alternative cause, i.e. the preoccupation, exists.
Objection: If the dream is assumed to be subject to the same kinds of causes as is

everything else you experience, then the dream as well as the dreamer’s associations
would be vulnerable to influence by the preoccupation, in which case the preoccupation
would not be a distraction from the dream. Unless the dream is assumed to be impervious
to causal influences—a question-begging assumption—then either the preoccupation
influenced both the dream and the associations separately, or it influenced the
associations indirectly, by way of the dream. For the preoccupation to be a distraction,
either the dream or the preoccupation are causally linked to the associations but not both
—a false dichotomy.
[III] After associating to one of your dreams and interpreting it, if you then turn to the
objects you find on a table and associate to them, the same pattern might appear in both
sets of associations, which seems—absurdly—to speak in favour of interpreting the
objects in the same manner as the dream, even though your dream activity did not place
those objects on the table. So the objects did not really cause your pattern-bearing
associations; but why then assume that your dream activity produced the pattern-bearing
associations when you free-associated to the dream? The mere presence of the pattern-
bearing associations alone tells us nothing about the cause of the objects’ presence or of
the dream.
In this account of the argument, [III] is a continuation of [II], since it depends upon the
dreamer’s unnoticed persistence of mind when being led back to the same theme on
which the dreamer had been dwelling shortly before, i.e. to the hypothesized dream
interpretation. That is why Wittgenstein says of the objects on the table that ‘you could
find that they all could be connected in a pattern like that’ (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 51), i.e.
like the pattern in the associations supporting the dream interpretation. On this reading,
all three arguments challenge the assumption that attending to a dream actually causes
one’s associations to it; and then those associations do not lead to the dream’s cause,
since the unconscious ideas and wishes those associations imply do not reveal the
dream’s cause if those associations were not caused by focusing attention on the dream.
Objection: Wittgenstein seeks to reveal an absurdity in employing free association to

determine a dream’s cause. But the argument rests on the supposed psychoanalytic
assumption that the cause is revealed in a single free association (compare Wittgenstein
1942–6: 42), whose pattern here reappears when you associate to objects on a table.
Supposedly, psychoanalysis involves interpreting the same pattern in the same way,
regardless of where it appears, as the sexual symbolism in dreams seems to warrant,
which would lead to the absurdity of interpreting your associations to the objects on the
table as if you had dreamt them. But requiring that a single pattern-bearing association
identifies the correct interpretation is questionable, and ignores the role of convergence
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among many associations in arriving at an interpretation. With convergence in play, and

without that questionable requirement, Wittgenstein’s (desired) absurd implication fails.2
On this reading, Wittgenstein’s purpose in all three sub-arguments is merely to show that
free association yields no good evidence from which the causes of dreams can be
inferred; that is, estimating the cognitive value of free association in all its aspects is not
under discussion. So just because free association to a dream ‘does not explain why the
dream occurred’, this does not imply that free association has no cognitive value at all,
since one ‘may be able to discover certain things about oneself’ by its means
(Wittgenstein 1942–6: 51), and such discoveries might be momentous. Thus, in a private
notebook entry dated 1939, he writes:
In a way having oneself psychoanalyzed is like eating from the tree of knowledge.
The knowledge acquired sets us (new) ethical problems; but contributes nothing
to their solution
which shows that he thought psychoanalysis, and therefore, free association, enables
genuine discoveries about oneself.
Wittgenstein’s arguments in [I], [II], and [III] then, challenge the psychoanalytic view that
free associations provide evidence of dreamers’ unconscious ideas and wishes, and that
from those unconscious ideas and wishes their dreams’ causes can be inferred. For him,
relying on free association in this way assumes either that the perceptions of causality
comprising associations to dreams are infallible, or else that we have criteria—or can
discover them—for distinguishing veridical perceptions of causality among those
associations from the rest. For without one or the other of these assumptions, the
reliance on free association for evidence of causality would be unjustified, in his view. His
arguments are meant to show that neither assumption is justified, for no perceptions of
causality are infallible, and criteria for perceptions of causality among these associations
are not forthcoming.
Blocking our search for those criteria are two seemingly unavoidable conditions; one is
the instability of dreams, i.e. their aspect changes and their lack of any firm identity—and
the fact that we only know about our own dreams by way of our unverifiable memories of
the ‘original’ dream activity. This instability sets dreams apart from causes in ordinary
perceptions of causality. The second condition is the opacity of associations to dreams, i.e.
we cannot distinguish associations whose sources are truly the dreamer’s focusing on
their dreams, from those that originate elsewhere; for both kinds of associations are
experienced alike as effects of dreamers focusing attention on their dreams. The upshot
is that however much it may seem to us that focusing on our dreams causes our
associations to them, there seems to be no empirical means of determining when, if ever,
this really is so.
Page 16 of 23

So even granting Russell’s claim concerning the existence of individual causal

perceptions, Wittgenstein still has reasons to resist treating free associations to dreams
as similar enough to other kinds of causal perceptions, i.e. ones whose veracity is
unquestioned. But would comparable resistance be warranted against treating
individuals’ associations to their neurotic symptoms, jokes, or slips as veridical causal
perceptions? In those cases, isolation from action and total reliance on memory, which
seem to be implicated in the instability of dreams and the opacity of their associations,
are not obvious impediments. Still, Wittgenstein seems to be holding evidence of causality
in dream associations to a stricter standard, beyond anything assumed in other,
unquestioned perceptions of causality; for him, searching psychoanalytically for the
causes of associations to dreams imposes upon the analyst the burden of proof in a
practically impossible task, i.e. proving of each and every possible cause of an association
aside from the dream, that none had been operative in the association’s production, a
demand that could not be justified merely by referring to isolation from action and total
reliance on memory alone (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 46–7). But if this unreasonable burden of
proof is not to be shouldered, how else can psychoanalysis claim plausibility, let alone
credibility, in treating some associations to dreams as veridical causal perceptions?
Convergence, Ambiguity, and ‘Seeing-As’

Up to this point, Wittgenstein has assumed that for psychoanalysis, the correct
explanation of a dream, i.e. its cause, is to be found, non-inferentially, in some one ‘tell-
all’ association (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 42, 47, 51). That is, unlike Freud, he had ignored
the possibility that even if no one association to a dream by itself reveals the cause of the
dream’s content, the dreamer’s associations, taken together, might converge, thereby
providing evidence of the dreamer’s unconscious ideas and wishes, from which the cause
of the dream’s content could be inferred; and that might remain true even if each
separate association is a fallible, even uncertain, perception of causality. For fallibility
and uncertainty differ in that the latter admits of degrees, unlike the former; whereas
many gradations in certainty and uncertainty exist, a perception or belief is either fallible
or infallible, with nothing between; and even very certain beliefs remain fallible. Thus, a
set of fallible perceptions, by themselves, no matter how numerous, do not generally
warrant an infallible judgement (but might warrant a very certain one), whereas a large
number of individually less-than-certain converging perceptions, especially ones from
independent sources, could, together, justify a very certain judgement.
Introducing convergence among associations as evidence, whether for the meaning of a

dream or for its cause, suggests that even if the dreamer’s assent to an interpretation is
taken to be a criterion of its correctness, as the Aesthetic Model assumes, that assent
need not be regarded as indefeasible. In practice, that apparent infallibility can be
replaced by the (not unconditional) deference that dreamers’ greater familiarity with
Page 17 of 23

their own lives normally warrants, and then causal explanations of dreams would more
easily be seen as based on converging evidence from multiple sources, including
converging associations, in which case none needs to be infallible (Levy 1996: 19–23).
Recognizing convergence among associations as evidence also suggests that in judging

the reliability of free association as a method of inquiry, the general fallibility of
dreamers’ beliefs about the causes of individual associations could be less important than
Wittgenstein assumed. A dreamer’s assent to an offered interpretation, or inclination to
assent to one, or support for one that they themselves produced, might be evidence
relevant to an interpretation, even if the associations on which it rests are of doubtful
origin—indeed, regardless of whether those perceptions of causality are veridical. For the
relevance of those associations as evidence in interpreting the dream might depend
simply on their being seen as veridical perceptions of causality by the dreamer. So
interpreting a dream, by focusing exclusively on the veridicality (or lack of it) of the
perceptions of causality comprising our free associations to it, while ignoring the
dreamer’s belief that those perceptions of causality are veridical, could mean throwing
out potentially valuable evidence.
However, convergence in practice brings with it the possibility of ambiguity in the

outcome, since a set of associations that converge to a point could converge to one or
more other points as well—which cannot occur in psychoanalytic dream interpretation on
the Aesthetic Model’s assumption about what Freud claims (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 42, 47,
51). For Wittgenstein, psychoanalysis assumes that the correct interpretation of a dream
is to be found in one association to it—an assumption that would be hard to justify unless
Wittgenstein also assumed that Freud partly shared his own earlier picture theory of
meaning as expounded in the Tractatus (Wittgenstein 1921). According to that theory,
abandoned by him by the time of these discussions of psychoanalysis, if a dream is to be
meaningful at all, it must share the same ‘logical multiplicity’ (Wittgenstein 1921: §4.04)
with its meaning, i.e. with the state of affairs it depicts—and with the single association
which, according to Wittgenstein, psychoanalysis assumes to be its correct interpretation.
For without that background assumption, the expectation that one association must
always simply be the dream’s meaning would be very hard to explain. So the Aesthetic
Model rules out consideration of convergence, a priori, and ignores the sort of ambiguity
needing interpretation that convergent associations can produce (Wittgenstein 1921: 3).
Now such ambiguous perceptions, produced by convergence, are instances of seeing-as

phenomena, a much-discussed topic in Wittgenstein’s later writing (Wittgenstein 1945–9;
1946–9). For instance, we perceive our associations to a dream as caused by it, although
we can also perceive them as not so caused—comparable to the way the ambiguous duck–
rabbit drawing can be seen in two different ways. However, in many of the other cases of
ambiguity that Wittgenstein considers, the ambiguity is eliminated (or can be) even if we
often do not know how we do it; by contrast, in perceiving a dream as the cause—or not—
of our associations to it, we seem to be unable to eliminate the ambiguity with any
Page 18 of 23

finality, just as we cannot eliminate the ambiguity in a duck–rabbit drawing if its creator
intended to draw something ambiguous.
Indeed, some ambiguous associations continue to be perceived by their dreamers as

induced by focusing attentively on the dream, yet perhaps because of its unwelcome
implications, those dreamers doubt the causal link while still feeling its force
(Wittgenstein 1942–6: 50–1). This immunity or resistance to final refutation marks off our
inclination to believe that certain associations were caused by focusing attention on the
dream. For in some cases, and at certain times, even when particular associations are not
believed by the dreamer to be caused by their attending to the dream, those associations
continue to seem to them to be caused by the dream, comparable to the way a spoon in a
clear glass of water ‘looks bent’, even though the viewer does not believe it really is.
Such dream associations, which remain causally ambiguous to the dreamer, seem to
provide a new kind of evidence beyond the shared, relatively unambiguous dream-
symbols recognized by the Aesthetics Model. Like them, these ambiguous causal
perceptions also result in spontaneous verbal reactions to dreams that are apparently
inexplicable by rational or common sense considerations; the dreamer does not
understand why those associations continue to seem to be caused by attending to the
dream, even while doubting or denying that they are. (Such a dreamer resembles the one
in [III], who, after associating to objects on a table, is tempted to interpret them as if they
were a dream).
Those dream associations can plausibly be seen as evidence of an individual (i.e. not
necessarily shared) dream symbolism, but one without solipsistic (Private Language)
implications, since the test for immunity from correction in the bent-spoon kind of case is
not private. So the version of free association that results from weighing the dreamer’s
perceptions of causality, including ambiguous ones, in investigating a dream’s causes
resembles the Aesthetic Model’s version of free association. In both models, uncovering
what the dream means to the individual dreamer is the point of the endeavour, where the
individual dream symbolism provides objective evidence of such meaning, apart from the
dreamer’s acceptance.
Conclusion
Wittgenstein’s view of psychoanalysis is very far from being the total condemnation that
Cioffi supposed, and as it still appears to many readers. Unlike Wittgenstein, Cioffi found
little or nothing in psychoanalysis worth salvaging—hence it is no surprise that he viewed
it simply as a pseudoscience. Yet when we, today, get past the dichotomies in which much
of Wittgenstein’s thinking about psychoanalysis was embedded, we can see why Rush
Rhees was convinced that their conversations on it show Wittgenstein ‘trying to separate
what is valuable in Freud from that “way of thinking” which he wanted to
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combat’ (Wittgenstein 1942–6: 41). But whether he ever fully achieved that separation,
and what it might have consisted in, we do not know.3
References
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957). Intention. Oxford: Blackwell.
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1971). ‘Causality and Determination’. In Collected Papers, Vol. 2,

Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (pp. 133–147). Oxford: Blackwell.
Bouveresse, J. (1991). Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious, trans. C.
Cosman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cioffi, F. (1969). ‘Wittgenstein’s Freud’. In Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience.

Chicago, IL: Open Court.
Cioffi, F. (1970). ‘Freud and the Idea of a Pseudoscience’. In Freud and the Question of
Pseudoscience. Chicago, IL: Open Court.
Cioffi, F. (1985). ‘Psychoanalysis, Pseudoscience, and Testability’. In Freud and the

Question of Pseudoscience. Chicago, IL: Open Court.
Cioffi, F. (1996). ‘Through the Psychoanalytoscope’. In Freud and the Question of

Pseudoscience. Chicago, IL: Open Court.
Davidson, D. (1963). ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’. In Essays on Actions and Events.
Drury, M. O’C. (1984). ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’ (ed. R. Rhees). In F. A. Flowers

III and Ian Ground (eds), Portraits of Wittgenstein, Vol. 2 (pp. 828–829). London:
Bloomsbury Academic.
Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1937). ‘Constructions in Analysis’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard
Press.
Harcourt, E. (2017). ‘Wittgenstein and Psychoanalysis’. In Hans-Johann Glock and John

Hyman (eds), A Companion to Wittgenstein. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Holmes, J. (2010). ‘Charles Rycroft’s Contribution to Contemporary Psychoanalytic

Psychotherapy’, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis 70: 180–192.
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Levy, D. (1996). ‘Wittgenstein’s Critique of Psychoanalysis’. In Freud Among the

Philosophers: the Psychoanalytic Unconscious and Its Philosophical Critics. New Haven,
Levy, D. (2004). ‘Incompleteness and Experimental Untestability in Psychoanalysis’. In Jon

Mills (ed.), Psychoanalysis At The Limit; Epistemology, Mind, and the Question of Science.
Malcolm, N. (1958). Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 2nd edn 2001. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Moore, G. E. (1954). ‘Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930–33’. In Ludwig Wittgenstein:

Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, eds J. Klagge and A. Norman (pp. 45–114).
Indianapolis, IN/Cambridge: Hackett.
Popper, K. (1963). Conjectures and Refutations. Oxford: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Prum, R. O. (2017). The Evolution of Beauty. New York: Doubleday.
Russell, B. (1935–36). ‘The Limits of Empiricism’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,

New Series 36: 131–150.
Rycroft, C. (1979). The Innocence of Dreams. New York: Pantheon.
Wittgenstein, L. (1921). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. Pears and B.

McGuinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Wittgenstein, L. (1929). ‘A Lecture on Ethics’. In Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical

Occasions, 1912–1951, eds J. Klagge and A. Norman. Indianapolis, IN/Cambridge:
Hackett.
Wittgenstein, L. (1932–5). Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1932–1935, from the

notes of Alice Ambrose and Margaret Macdonald, ed. Alice Ambrose. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1933–4). The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1937). ‘Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness’. In Ludwig Wittgenstein:

Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, trans. R. Rhees, J. Klagge, and A. Norman (pp. 368–
426. Indianapolis, IN/Cambridge: Hackett.
Wittgenstein, L. (1938). ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’. In Lectures and Conversations on

Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (pp. 1–36). Berkeley/Los
Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1942–6). ‘Conversations on Freud’. In Lectures and Conversations on

Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, 1938–1946, compiled from notes taken by
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Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees, and James Taylor, ed. Cyril Barrett (pp. 41–52). Berkeley/
Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1945–9). Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S.

Hacker, and J. Schulte. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1946–9). Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, 2 Vols: Vol. 1, eds G.

E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright; Vol. 2, eds G. H. von Wright and G. Lyman. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1977). Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch of
Vermischte Bemerkungen. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Notes:
(1.) It is puzzling for Wittgenstein to raise the issue of infallibility at all, since nothing in
Russell’s argument in support of the view that we sometimes experience causality rather
than inferring it inductively requires a discussion of infallibility. For like ‘intuitive
recognition’, which does not appear to be Russell’s term, ‘immediate awareness’ is
ambiguous. If we are going to paraphrase Russell’s claim in terms of ‘immediate
awareness’, it’s clear that what Russell meant was simply that when we experience an
individual instance of causality, that experience is not mediated by any inference; in this
respect, the experience of causality differs from inductive inferences, by which causal
claims can also be derived.
(2.) The argument in [III] receives a very different critical treatment in Frank Cioffi’s
essay, ‘Wittgenstein’s Freud’ (Cioffi 1969: 108–9); for a response to Cioffi, see Levy
(1996): 45–56.
(3.) A glimpse of what Wittgenstein sought can be found in Charles Rycroft’s The
Innocence of Dreams (1979), wherein several ideas also to be found in Wittgenstein’s
Aesthetic Model are employed to support an alternative conception of psychoanalysis, as
Jeremy Holmes and Edward Harcourt have noted (Holmes 2010: 183; Harcourt 2017:
661). For Wittgenstein, the Aesthetic Model was not only vital to his thinking about
psychoanalysis; besides much else in his philosophy, some version of it probably also
explains his low regard for Darwin’s theory of evolution, which he thought lacked ‘the
necessary multiplicity’, and so could not account for life’s observable variety (Drury 1984:
160–1). In saying this, Wittgenstein need not be assumed to have been expressing
hostility to the very idea of evolution itself. For until recently, biologists, unlike Darwin
himself, very widely regarded the sexual selection that Darwin expounded (which rests on
an aesthetic model), as reducible to natural selection (‘survival of the fittest’). So
Wittgenstein’s dissatisfaction with Darwin can be seen as prophetic of the return to non-
reductive, aesthetic evolution, alongside natural selection. Aesthetic evolution is argued
for by Richard O. Prum (2017).
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Donald Levy
The Levy Group, Inc
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Ricœur’s Freud

Ricœur’s Freud
Richard J. Bernstein

Ricœur’s reading of Freud is one of the most comprehensive, perceptive, and judicious
explications of Freudianism—one that begins with his early ‘Project’ of 1895 and
culminates with the last book that Freud published, Moses and Monotheism. Ricœur is
successful in exposing some of the weaknesses in Freud, and even more importantly, in
showing why there is a need to move beyond Freud. He also develops the significant idea
of a dialectical relationship between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a restorative
hermeneutics of meaning—and that they are integral to each other. Ricœur is successful
in showing how, if one relentlessly pursues the logic of Freud’s thinking, it leads beyond
Freud. But, even though he gives some indications of how such dialectic is to be
developed, this remains a task (an Aufgabe) that lies ahead.
Keywords: dialectic, Freud, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, meaning
Introduction
I want to begin with a few personal remarks about my encounters with Paul Ricœur—for
they are relevant to the topic that I will be exploring. I first met Paul in the late 1970s.
One of our first meetings was at a conference on Hannah Arendt in Paris—one of the
earliest conferences on her work in France. At the time, there was barely any philosophic
interest in Arendt but Ricœur and I shared an enthusiasm for her work. And we were
both interested in her conception of action. Paul sometimes used my book Praxis and
Action (Bernstein 1971) in the courses that he taught at the University of Chicago. But
what really united us was his growing interest in and contribution to hermeneutics. In the
1970s and early 1980s there was a new interest in hermeneutics in America, in part due
to the English translation of Gadamer’s (1975) Truth and Method. But there were other
contributing factors such as Habermas’s (1971) appreciation of the role of hermeneutics
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Ricœur’s Freud
as a form of practical knowledge that he explores in Knowledge and Human Interests.

And on the Anglo-American scene there was the appearance of Charles Taylor’s (1971)
classic essay ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’. Even Thomas Kuhn came to
appreciate that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1962) had a deep affinity
with hermeneutics. In 1977 in The Essential Tension, Kuhn writes:
What I as a physicist had to discover for myself, most historians learn by example
in the course of professional training. Consciously or not, they are all practitioners
of the hermeneutic method. In my case, however the discovery of hermeneutics
did more than make history seem consequential. Its most immediate and decisive
effect was instead on my view of science.
And he adds:
In my own case, for example, even the term ‘hermeneutics,’ to which I resorted
briefly above, was no part of my vocabulary as recently as five years ago.
Increasingly, (p. 204) I suspect that anyone who believes that history may have
deep philosophical import will have to learn to bridge the longstanding divide
between the Continental and English language philosophical traditions.
(Kuhn 1977: xiii)
I don’t think it is an exaggeration to suggest that during these decades there was a sea
change taking place—that in the humanities, the social sciences, and even the natural
sciences there was a new appreciation for hermeneutics—for the significance of
understanding and interpretation of meaning and its importance for understanding our
being in the world. And clearly one of the leaders in this new sensitivity to hermeneutics
was Paul Ricœur.
Ricœur’s Freud
By 1970, Ricœur had already published his monumental Freud and Philosophy, which he
subtitled ‘An Essay in Interpretation’ based on the Terry lectures that he gave at Yale. The
full title of these lectures is ‘The Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation Lectures in
Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy’. The statement of the purpose of these
lectures says that ‘it is desired that a series of lectures be given by men eminent in their
respective departments … to the end that the Christian spirit may be nurtured in the
fullest light of the world’s knowledge and that mankind may be helped to attain its
highest possible welfare and happiness upon this earth’ (Ricœur 1970: vi). Although
Ricœur was known for his work on the philosophy of religion, it must have taken an act of
intellectual courage to give a series of lectures on Freud—who was one of the most
outspoken and vigorous atheistic thinkers of the twentieth century. Freud and Philosophy
is a remarkable book. Written more than forty years ago, it stands as one of the most
judicious, thorough, and comprehensive explications of Freud’s work and development.
Ricœur displays an intellectual virtue that is all too rare. In Book II, the main part of his
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Ricœur’s Freud
study, entitled ‘Analytic: Reading of Freud’, Ricœur not only shows his subtle
understanding of Freud’s entire corpus but he brackets his own philosophic views to
explicate the complex stages of Freud’s development. It is a model of interpretation that
stays close to Freud’s texts and is always illuminating. Freud presents a deep challenge
to Ricœur’s own philosophical convictions. I have always admired those thinkers who
have the imagination and the hermeneutical generosity to ‘take on’ what is alien and
antithetical to their own way of thinking. Ricœur exemplifies this. In one of his essays he
writes:
For someone trained in phenomenology, existential philosophy, linguistic or

semiological methods, and the revival of Hegel studies, the encounter with
psychoanalysis constitutes a considerable shock, for this discipline affects and
questions anew not simply some particular theme within philosophical reflection
but the philosophical project as a whole. The contemporary philosopher meets
Freud on the same ground as Nietzsche and Marx. All three rise up before him as
protagonists of suspicion who rip away masks and pose the novel problem of the
lie of consciousness and (p. 205) consciousness as a lie. This problem cannot
remain just one among many, for what all three generally and radically put into
question is something that appears to any good phenomenologist as the field,
foundation, and the very origin of any meaning at all: consciousness itself. What in
one sense is a foundation must appear to us in a different sense as a prejudice, the
prejudice of consciousness.
(Ricœur 1974: 99)
Ricœur is alluding to his famous idea of a hermeneutics of suspicion. I will have more to
say about this, but here I want to emphasize Ricœur’s awareness that psychoanalysis
poses a deep challenge to the foundation and starting point of any phenomenology when
he speaks of the ‘lie of consciousness and consciousness as a lie’. Consciousness turns out
to be just as obscure as the unconscious. Consciousness is not a given, not a starting
point, not a presupposition that cannot be questioned; it will turn out to be a task and an
achievement. The questions that Ricœur poses are: ‘What is the meaning of the
unconscious for a being whose task is consciousness?’; ‘What is consciousness as a task
for a being who is somehow bound to those factors such as repetition and even
regression, which the unconscious represents for the most part?’ (Ricœur 1974: 108–9).
Energetics and Hermeneutics

To appreciate what is at stake in these questions and to appreciate what is involved in
Ricœur’s encounter with Freud, we must turn to the outlines of his ‘reading’ of Freud.
Ricœur distinguishes two aspects or dimensions of Freud’s approach—what he calls
‘energetics’ and ‘hermeneutics’. To a great extent ‘energetics’ refers to Freud’s earliest
scientific and positivist leanings where he attempted to present an understanding of
psychic life that was completely dependent on a ‘quantitative apparatus’—one that Freud
originally associated with the operation of the brain. Energetics is based on an ‘economic’
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Ricœur’s Freud
interpretation of psychical life which is initially represented in Freud’s ‘Project’ of 1895.

Ricœur tells us that the ‘ “Project” of 1895 represents what could be called a non-
hermeneutic state of the system. Indeed, the notion of the ‘psychical apparatus’ that
dominates this essay appears to have no correlation with a work of deciphering and ‘is
based on a principle borrowed from physics—the constancy principle—and tends to be a
quantitative treatment of energy’.1 As Ricœur notes ‘this recourse to the principle of
constancy and the quantitative hypothesis is the aspect of Freudianism that most resists
the reading I propose based on the correlation between energetics and hermeneutics,
between connections of forces and relations of meanings’.2 What Ricœur brilliantly shows
is that a close reading of the ‘Project’ (Freud 1895) already indicates the tension in
Freud’s thinking—the need for interpretation even to make sense of the psychical
apparatus. Consequently, even when Freud (before The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900)
was most deeply influenced by the quantitative natural science of his time and (p. 206)
hoped to provide a psychology limited to physical principles, we can already detect the
hermeneutic tensions in the ‘Project’—the beginning of Freud’s sense of the need for
interpretation of meaning. Ricœur sees the development of Freudian theory in terms of
‘the gradual reduction of the notion of psychical apparatus—in the sense of “a machine
which in a moment would run of itself”—to a topography in which space is no longer a
place within the world of action but a scene of action where roles and masks enter into
debate’ (Ricœur 1970: 70). But even this characterization does not quite indicate what is
distinctive about Ricœur’s reading of Freud. Freud never gives up the model of energetics
or economics—although it gets transformed in the course of his development of the
topological models of the psyche—first, in terms of the unconscious, preconscious, and
conscious, and later in terms of the id, ego, and superego. Even though the problem of
deciphering and interpreting becomes more prominent, what Freud elaborates is a
distinctive ‘mixed discourse’ of energetics and hermeneutics. Both dimensions are
essential for psychoanalytic discourse—and they do not stand opposed to each other.
Energetics (force) implies a hermeneutics (meaning) and a hermeneutics discloses
energetics. So what initially presents itself as an aporia—the contradiction of energetics
and hermeneutics—turns out ultimately to be Freud’s great accomplishment. Ricœur
declares that the whole problem of a Freudian epistemology may be centralized in a
single question: ‘How can the economic explanation be involved in an interpretation
dealing with meanings; and conversely, how can interpretation be an aspect of the
economic interpretation?’ This is the question that Ricœur seeks to answer—and he does
so by carefully pursuing three cycles in Freud’s development. What emerges in the
course of Ricœur’s reading is an elaboration of what he calls Freud’s ‘semantics of
desire’.
The Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Let me remind you of the structure of Freud and Philosophy. It consists of three parts or
books: ‘Problematic: The Placing of Freud’, ‘Analytic: Reading of Freud’, and finally
‘Dialectic: A Philosophic Interpretation of Freud’. The use of the terms ‘Analytic’ and
‘Dialectic’ might suggest that Ricœur is using Kant as a template for his reading and
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Ricœur’s Freud
interpretation of Freud, but we will see that it is really Hegel’s (1807/2018)

Phenomenology of Spirit that inspires Ricœur. In the first part, the placing of Freud,
Ricœur reviews his own understanding of language and symbol. In this opening part he
introduces a distinction between two different types of hermeneutics: interpretation as
recollection of meaning and interpretation as exercise of suspicion. And the three great
practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion are Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—each, in a
different way, seeks to expose the hidden or latent meaning of what is manifest; each
challenges interpretations that fail to acknowledge what symbols conceal. This discussion
of the conflicting types of interpretation sets the stage for Ricœur’s reading of Freud. And
this reading contains its own inner complexity because Ricœur shows how in the course
of Freud’s development the understanding of energetics and hermeneutics is
transformed. (p. 207) Against the prevailing view that Freud began his psychoanalytic
investigations with a focus exclusively on the analytic situation of curing individual
patients and only turned to problems of culture in his later writings, Ricœur argues that
the interpretation of culture was always evident in Freud’s writings. He also argues that
when Freud introduces the Death Instinct and pursues its consequences in the great
struggle of Eros and Thanatos, there is a radical transformation in the psychoanalytic
understanding of culture.
In the culminating section of Freud and Philosophy, ‘Dialectic’, Ricœur offers ‘a’—not
‘the’—philosophical interpretation of Freud. Although Ricœur makes it clear that his
study is oriented to this final section, I actually think it is the least satisfactory. I want to
explore some of the tensions and unresolved issues in his philosophical interpretation.
But first consider Ricœur’s description of his journey:
In my introductory presentation of Freud I regarded him, along with Marx and

Nietzsche, as one of the representatives of reductive and demystifying
hermeneutics. In this view I was guided by a taste for extremes: I saw Freud as
having a precise place in the hermeneutic debate, opposed to a nonreductive and
restorative hermeneutics, and in league with other thinkers who wage a combat
comparable to his. The whole movement of this book consists in a gradual
readjusting of that initial position and of the panoramic view of the battlefield
governing it. In the end it may seem that in this indecisive combat Freud is
nowhere because he is everywhere. That impression is correct: The limits of
psychoanalysis will finally have to be conceived not so much as a frontier beyond
which exist other points of view, but rather as the imaginary line of a front of
investigation which constantly advances, while the other points of view filter
through the dividing line. In the beginning, Freud is one combatant among many;
in the end, he shall have become the privileged witness of the total combat, for all
the opposition will be carried over to him.
(Ricœur 1970: 59–60)
Now there is something unsettling about this passage. It already indicates a certain
hesitancy in how Ricœur understands Freud as a privileged witness to the total combat.
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Ricœur’s Freud
One might think that after the careful explication of Freud as an exemplar of the
hermeneutics of suspicion, then one can (or should be able to) demarcate clearly the
boundaries and limits of this hermeneutics of suspicion—and confront it with other more
restorative hermeneutic interpretations. And there are many passages in Ricœur that
suggest that this is his project. But things are not quite this straightforward. Indeed, the
above passage suggests that there isn’t a sharp boundary that delimits psychoanalysis
but rather that there is an imaginary line of investigation which constantly advances.
Phrased in a different way, Ricœur’s reading of Freud is so powerful and comprehensive
that it becomes increasingly difficult to ‘contain’ it, to assimilate and reconcile it with
other types of restorative hermeneutics. There is a disparity and tension between what
Ricœur claims to show and what he actually shows.
Let me illustrate this with an example that is fundamental for Ricœur’s project. In his
initial discussion of symbol, Ricœur reiterates a theme that had been prominent in his
earlier reflections on language, the double meaning of symbol—the way in which symbols
reveal and conceal—‘the showing hiding of double meaning’ (Ricœur 1970: 7). (p. 208)
Ricœur emphasizes this double meaning in his phenomenology of religion and he notes a
parallel between the role of symbols in religion and psychoanalysis:
The problem of double meaning is not peculiar to psychoanalysis. It is known in

the philosophy of religion in its constant encounter with those great cosmic
symbols of earth, heaven, water, life, trees, and stones, and with strange
narratives about the origin and end of things which are myths … What
psychoanalysis encounters primarily as the distortion of elementary meanings
connected with wishes and desires, the phenomenology of religion encounters
primarily as a manifestation of a depth or, to use the word immediately, leaving for
later a discussion of its content and validity, the revelation of the sacred.3
Ricœur, in his Analytic, his explication of psychoanalysis, rigorously excludes any

reference to the phenomenology of religion—any reference to the revelation of the
sacred. But he does return to this theme in his Dialectic—in his philosophic interpretation
of Freud. And here he wants to acknowledge the contribution and challenge of Freud—as
well as the limitations of his hermeneutics of suspicion. He acknowledges the force of
Freud’s psychoanalytic critique of religion. The psychoanalytic analysis of illusion, the
comparison of religion with neurosis, the genetic account (in both the individual and
culture) of the origin of religion in Totem and Taboo (Freud 1913) presents a powerful
challenge to any believer. Ricœur tells us that Freud’s critique is effective against
superstition and naive conceptions of religion.4 He notes that Freud draws an analogy
between the three basic stages of the childhood condition—‘neurotic phase, latency
period, return of the repressed’—and religion, but Ricœur goes on to say that the
meaning of the analogy remains and must remain indefinite:
All that can be said is that man is capable of neurosis as he is capable of religion,
and vice versa. The same causes—life’s hardship, the triple suffering dealt the
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Ricœur’s Freud
individual by nature, his body, and other men—give rise to similar responses—
neurotic ceremonials and religious ceremonials … 5
This may well be true, but it doesn’t strike me as a forceful response to Freud—to the
Freud that Ricœur has so effectively explicated. The point of naming the final section of
his study ‘Dialectic’ is to indicate that there is a genuine dialectic between the ‘merciless
exercise of reductive hermeneutics’ and a restorative hermeneutics that acknowledges
what Ricœur calls the signs of ‘the Wholly Other’. But although this is announced as his
project, I don’t see that he really shows this in any detail. Ricœur laments the cultural
movement that seeks to objectify and reify the Wholly Other. He writes:
It seems to me, however, that this cultural movement cannot and must not remain
external to the restoration of the signs of the Wholly Other in their authentic
function (p. 209) as sentinels of the horizon. Today we can no longer hear and read
the signs of the approach of the Wholly Other except through the merciless
exercise of reductive hermeneutics; such is our helplessness and perhaps our
good fortune and joy. Faith in that region of the symbolic where the horizon
function is constantly being reduced to the object function: thus arise idols, the
religious figures of that same illusion which in metaphysics engenders the
concepts of a supreme being, first as substance, absolute thought. An idol is the
reification of the horizon into a thing, the fall of the sign into a supernatural and
supracultural object.
Thus there is a never ending task of distinguishing between the faith in religion—
faith in the Wholly Other which draws near—and belief in the religious object,
which becomes another object of our culture and thus a part of our own sphere.6
And he concludes this section with a dramatic claim: ‘Thus the idols must die—so that
symbols may live.’
What precisely is Ricœur telling us, and how does it bear on psychoanalysis as a
hermeneutics of suspicion and the restorative hermeneutics of the sign of the Wholly
Other? Ricœur believes that there is a pernicious cultural tendency to reify the Wholly
Other—to make the sacred into some sort of divine object. Freudian psychoanalysis plays
a crucial role of exposing and critiquing this tendency to idolatry. The hermeneutics of
suspicion cannot be bracketed or put aside. It is the fire that purifies faith and keeps us
from idolatry. In the final analysis, there are not two types of hermeneutics that can be
neatly separated from each other; rather they are dialectically related. The hermeneutics
of suspicion exemplified in Freud’s multifaceted critique of religion informs a restorative
hermeneutics of the signs of the Wholly Other. And a genuine hermeneutics of restorative
meaning must pass through the fire of merciless suspicion. This is what Ricœur wants to
show. And in many ways it is an attractive resolution of the conflict of interpretations.
But, as I have already indicated, although this is what he says, I do not see that he has
actually shown how this dialectic works. Ricœur wants to limit Freud’s critique to a
critique of idolatry—a cultural tendency that is always a seductive temptation, but he says
that this critique does not touch the heart of a genuine faith in the signs of the Wholly
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Ricœur’s Freud
Other. I don’t want to deny that this may be true, and I certainly don’t want to affirm that
psychoanalysis can or will ever ‘refute’ a true faith. But the hermeneutics of suspicion is
not simply limited to a critique of idolatry. It also raises suspicions about a faith directed
to the sacred symbols of the Wholly Other. If there is or can be a genuine dialectical
reconciliation between ‘the merciless exercise of reductive hermeneutics’ and the
restorative hermeneutics of ‘the symbols of the Wholly Other’, then this must be shown
and not simply affirmed. I think it is to Ricœur’s credit that in many places he indicates
his awareness that he has outlined a task and not a completed project. He speaks of the
‘never ending task’ of distinguishing the faith of religion from belief in a religious object.
More generally, he admits that the project of showing ‘how other types of hermeneutics
which are foreign to psychoanalysis, is waiting to be constructed’. (p. 210) This is
‘currently the most urgent task of a philosophical anthropology’. He limits himself to
pointing out ‘certain border zones within that vast field’.7
Hegelian Dialectics
I find a similar tension in the way in which Ricœur seeks to reconcile what he calls the
dialectic of archaeology and teleology. It is this dialectic that presumably is the key to his
philosophical interpretation of Freud. ‘Archaeology’ is the term that Ricœur adopts to
indicate Freud’s analysis of the Subject—as it is understood from the perspective of
reflective philosophy. Ricœur understands ‘the Freudian metapsychology as an adventure
of reflection; the dispossession of consciousness in its path, because the act of becoming
conscious is its task’. And the result of this adventure is a ‘wounded Cogito—a Cogito that
posits itself but does not possess itself; a Cogito that sees its original truth only in and
through the avowal of the inadequacy, illusion, and lying of actual consciousness’.8 In the
movement from force to language, from energetics to hermeneutics we discover the very
emergence of the semantics of desire. But from a philosophical perspective, the problem
is how can we reconcile the economic model that is so fundamental and persistent in
Freud with reflection. Ricœur wants to show that there is a way of reconciling Freud’s
economic model with reflection—with the task of becoming conscious: ‘Can we
understand this archaeology within the framework of a philosophy of reflection?’9 This is
the fundamental question that Ricœur seeks to answer in his philosophic interpretation.
An affirmative answer depends on showing the dialectic of archaeology and teleology.
And the way that Ricœur sets about answering this question is at once bold and
imaginative. In what might seem like a detour, he explores this development in Hegel’s
(1807/2018) Phenomenology of Spirit, focusing especially on the crucial stage when
Hegel introduces the concepts of desire and life at the beginning of the section on self-
consciousness. Ricœur makes it clear that he is not interested in a facile and absurd
eclecticism of Freud and Hegel:
Hegel and Freud each stand in a separate continent, and between one totality and
another there can only be relations of homology. I will try to express one of these
homologous relations by discovering in Freudianism a certain dialectic of
archeology and teleology that is clearly evident in Hegel. The same connection is
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Ricœur’s Freud
in Freud, but in reverse order and proportion. Whereas Hegel links an explicit
teleology of mind or spirit to an implicit archeology of life and desire, Freud links
a thematized archeology of the unconscious to an unthematized teleology of the
process of becoming conscious … I seek to find in Freud an inverted image of
Hegel, in order to discern, with the help of this schema certain dialectical features
which, though (p. 211) obviously operative in analytic practice, have not found in
the theory a complete systematic elaboration.10
Let me elucidate what Ricœur is claiming.11 Hegel’s great achievement in the

Phenomenology is to trace and make concrete the complex enriching dialectical unfolding
of spirit—spirit that initially is rooted in consciousness. And when the ‘truth’ of
consciousness is revealed, we discover that it leads us to self-consciousness that
presupposes desire and life. Hegel’s dialectic of negativity gradually leads us to an ever-
enriching concrete understanding of intersubjective recognition. Nothing like this is
thematized in Freud. But Ricœur employs his rich discussion of Hegel to highlight those
aspects of Freudianism where such a dialectic of the development of consciousness is
implicit and unthematized. There is an implicit teleology (in this Hegelian sense) in
Freudianism. Ricœur finds three indications of this in Freud. The first is in the ‘operative
concepts’ that Freud employs (but does not thematize). In the analytic encounter between
therapist and patient there is a structural homology with Hegel’s depiction of the struggle
for recognition. This is evident in the dynamics of transference where (ideally) analysis is
completed ‘with the attainment of the two consciousnesses, when the truth in the analyst
has become the truth of sick consciousness. Then the patient is no longer alienated, no
longer another: he has become a self, he has become himself.’12 The second way in which
we can discern the implicit teleology of Freudianism is in the Freudian concept of
identification. Ricœur claims that the notion of identification is problematic for Freud.
And here again Ricœur appeals to Hegel to illuminate a lacuna in Freud. Freud’s texts
suggest the ‘beginning of a dialectic of desire, in which negation is placed at the very
center of desire’:
The possibility is thus opened of rereading Freud’s writings from the standpoint of
the reduplication of consciousness. The rule of this rereading would be the
oscillation between a dialectic and an economics, between a dialectic oriented
toward the gradual emergence of self consciousness and an economics that
explains the ‘placements’ and ‘displacements’ of desire through which this
difficult emergence is effected.13
The final indication of the implicit teleology of Freudianism is the question of sublimation.
Freud’s comments about sublimation are suggestive, problematic, and sketchy.14 Freud
never really explicitly explains this ‘instinctual vicissitude’. Ricœur reviews the various
texts that discuss sublimation in order to show the incompleteness and inadequacies of
Freud’s reflections. But the topic of sublimation opens up the possibility of developing the
teleology that is implicit in Freudian archaeology. ‘Ultimately, (p. 212) through the more
highly elaborated concepts of identification and idealization, the empty concept of
sublimation refers us back to the operative unthematized concepts of the Freudian
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Ricœur’s Freud
economics.’15 All of this can be summed up in ‘the task of becoming conscious, which
defines the finality of analysis’. For Ricœur this is what is at once implicit and entailed in
the famous claim that ‘Where id was, there ego shall be’.
What are we to make of this philosophical interpretation—this attempt by Ricœur to show

a dialectic of archaeology and teleology in Freudianism? As always, Ricœur’s reflections
are illuminating and thought-provoking. In the spirit of immanent critique Ricœur
exposes weaknesses in Freud. And he presents a powerful case for showing why
Freudianism needs to be supplemented with a type of teleology that would be
homologous with the dialectical story of the development of spirit that we find in Hegel’s
Phenomenology. But at best, what we have are notes and suggestions towards such a
dialectic—not the dialectic itself. We may fully agree with Ricœur’s critique: ‘Ultimately,
the task of becoming I, of becoming the ego, a task set within the economics of desire, is
in principle irreducible to the economics.’16 But this negative point only sets the task for
showing in detail how starting with the Freudian semantics of desire we can progress to
the development of self-consciousness—a self-consciousness that achieves its satisfaction
in another self-consciousness. And although at times Ricœur’s rhetoric suggests that he
has actually concretely developed this dialectic, I am not sure he would disagree with me
that he sketches a project and a task that is yet to be fulfilled.
I want to try to show this vividly by considering a concrete instance of two different types
of interpretation that Ricœur develops. Ricœur frequently returns to Sophocles’ Oedipus
Rex for obvious reasons. This is the text that initially served as the basis for Freud’s
introduction of the Oedipus complex. Quoting The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900),
Ricœur tells us:
Freud writes ‘His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours—
because the oracle laid the same curse on all of us before our birth as upon him’;
and, later on, ‘King Oedipus … merely shows us the fulfillment of our childhood
wishes’ (ibid). Our pity and terror, the famous tragic phobos is merely an
expression of the violence of our own repression before this manifestation of our
impulses.17
Ricœur tells us that this reading is ‘possible, illuminating and necessary, but there is a
second possible reading which is not so much concerned with the drama of incest and
patricide which actually took place as with the tragedy of truth’.18 Ricœur then develops a
subtle reading of the Oedipus story that points to ‘Oedipus at Colonus’. The tragedy of
Oedipus is that the king’s pride must be broken through suffering. The tragedy is about
the hubris of adult guilt, about a man who considers himself unaffected by the truth.
Oedipus’ zeal is the zeal of ignorance and is revealed in his outburst against Tiresias.
(p. 213) ‘Thus Tiresias and not Oedipus is the center from which the truth proceeds.’ ‘The
connection between Oedipus’ anger and the power of truth is the core of the real Oedipus
tragedy.’19 In pursuing this illuminating interpretation Ricœur brings out further
revealing details of the tragedy of Oedipus Rex. Ricœur illustrates the two types of
hermeneutics, ‘one oriented toward the resurgence of archaic symbols and the other
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Ricœur’s Freud
toward the emergence of new symbols and ascending figures, all absorbed into the final
stage, which, as in the Phenomenology of Spirit, is no longer a figure but knowledge’.20
Now Ricœur himself raises the very question we (his readers) want to raise: how are
these two different interpretations related to each other? ‘As long as we remain within
the perspective of an opposition between the two, consciousness and unconsciousness
will answer to two inverse interpretations progressive and regressive.’21 Ricœur wants to
avoid the Scylla of simply stating a stark abstract opposition and the Charybdis of a facile
eclecticism. ‘We cannot simply add Hegel and Freud and give to each a half of man.’22
Once again, the problem is to show in detail that there really is a genuine dialectic
between these two modes of interpretation. But just as we arrive at the denouement, at
the point where Ricœur will show us the dialectical relation between these two different
types of hermeneutic, he leaves us in suspense. And he concedes that he has not yet
answered the question we want him to answer—and which he claims is the heart of the
matter. He concludes his essay ‘Consciousness and Unconsciousness’ with the admission:
‘Finally, we have left unanswered the question of the fundamental identity of these two
hermeneutics—an identity which leads us to say that a phenomenology of spirit and an
archeology of the unconscious speak not of two halves of man but each one of the whole
of man.’23
Conclusion
In conclusion, I want to make it clear precisely what I am arguing. I think that Ricœur’s
‘Analytic’, his reading of Freud is one of the most comprehensive, perceptive, and
judicious explications of Freudianism, one that begins with his early ‘Project’ of 1895 and
culminates with the last book that Freud published, Moses and Monotheism (Freud 1939).
I also think that Ricœur is successful in exposing some of the weaknesses in Freud, and
even more importantly, why we need to move beyond Freud. I am deeply sympathetic
with his claim that there is a dialectical relationship between a hermeneutics of suspicion
and a restorative hermeneutics of meaning—and that they are integral to each other. And
I also think he is successful in showing how, if we relentlessly pursue the logic of Freud’s
thinking, we are led beyond Freud—we are led to a set of concerns about (p. 214)
consciousness, self-consciousness, and intersubjectivity that Freudianism does not
adequately illuminate. But although he gives us many indications of how such dialectic is
to be developed, I do not think he has actually achieved this. This is still a task (an
Aufgabe) that lies before us.24
References
Bernstein, R. (1971). Praxis and Action. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Freud, S. (1895). Collected Papers. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 1. London: Hogarth Press.
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Ricœur’s Freud
Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1913). Totem and Taboo. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of
Freud, S. (1939). Moses and Monotheism. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard
Press.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1975). Truth and Method. London: Sheed & Ward Ltd.
Habermas, J. (1971). Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. Shapiro. Boston, MA:
Beacon Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1807/2018). The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. T. Pinkard. Cambridge:

Kuhn, T. (1962). Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press.
Kuhn, T. (1977). The Essential Tension. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Ricœur, P. (1970). Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Ricœur, P. (1974). The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, trans. W.

Domingo et al., ed. D. Idhe. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Taylor, C. (1971). ‘Interpretation and the sciences of man’. Review of Metaphysics 25(1):
3–51.
Notes:
(1) Ricœur (1970: 69). [Eds: See also Hopkins, this volume.]
(2) Ricœur (1970:69–70).
(3) Ricœur (1970:7).
(4) [Eds: See Blass and Cottingham, this volume.]
(5) Ricœur (1970:533).
(6) Ricœur (1970:530–1).
(7) Ricœur (1974:143).
(8) Ricœur (1970:439).
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Ricœur’s Freud
(9) Ricœur (1970: 453).
(10) Ricœur (1970: 461–2).
(11) [Eds: See also Macdonald, this volume.]
(12) Ricœur (1970:474).
(13) Ricœur (1970:483).
(14) [Eds: See also Gemes, this volume.]
(15) Ricœur (1970:492).
(16) Ricœur (1970).
(17) Ricœur (1974:115).
(18) Ricœur (1974).
(19) Ricœur (1974:116).
(20) Ricœur (1974:117).
(21) Ricœur (1974:118).
(22) Ricœur (1974).
(23) Ricœur (1974: 120; emphasis added).
(24) This chapter was originally printed in Ricœur Studies 4(1): 130–9 by the University
Library System, University of Pittsburgh. Copyright © 2013 Richard J. Bernstein. It is
reprinted here with permission.
The New School for Social Research, New York, USA
Page 13 of 13

Imagination and Reason, Method and Mourning in Freudian Psychoanalysis

Imagination and Reason, Method and Mourning in
Freudian Psychoanalysis
Jonathan Lear

This chapter begins with a consideration of transience and mourning as a way of thinking
about what a failure of imagination might be. It then considers why the ‘fundamental
rule’ of psychoanalysis is truly fundamental: not only for psychoanalytic method, but also
for understanding why Freudian psychoanalysis is of philosophical significance. The
fundamental rule opens up a new meaning of speaking one’s mind. The chapter argues
that the psychoanalytic method is a deployment of reason, properly understood. For it is
that activity of mind through which reason comes to an understanding of the mental
activities—the thinkings—of non-rational and unconscious parts of the human psyche. It
thus illuminates Socrates’ claim in the Republic that reason ought to take the lead in
organizing human life because it has insight into the whole psyche. The chapter examines
what it is for the unconscious to function as a fate.
Keywords: imagination, reason, method, mourning, psychoanalysis, fate, melancholia, fundamental rule
Jonathan Lear
On Transience
IN November 1915, Sigmund Freud published an article on the fleeting nature of all
things—ourselves included. The paper, ‘On Transience’, records ‘a summer walk through
a smiling countryside in the company of a taciturn friend and of a young but already
famous poet’. The countryside was smiling, but neither poet nor friend smiled back.
The poet admired the beauty of the scene around us but felt no joy in it. He was
disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would
vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour
that men have created or may create. All that he would otherwise have loved and
Page 1 of 21

admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its
doom.
(Freud 1915b: 305, my emphasis)
Freud thought the poet was right about the transience of the world. He rejected as
wishful the idea that there must be some eternal ground lying behind the beautiful
appearances. He nevertheless thought that something was going importantly wrong in
the poet’s reflective evaluation of the situation. The sense of transience, Freud thought,
ought to increase the value and joy in our experience. But, what really impressed Freud
about this conversation was that his arguments with his companions seemed to go
nowhere. Reason did not really seem to engage. (p. 222)
My failure [to convince them] led me to infer that some powerful emotional factor
was at work which was disturbing to judgement, and I believed later that I had
discovered what it was. What spoilt their enjoyment of beauty must have been a
revolt in their minds against mourning. The idea that all this beauty was transient
was giving these two sensitive minds a foretaste of mourning over its decease;
and, since the mind instinctively recoils from anything that is painful, they felt
their enjoyment of beauty interfered with by thoughts of its transience.
(Freud 1915b: 306, my emphasis)
In Freud’s view, his companions’ imaginations leapt forward to an imagined future in

which everything that mattered was destroyed; and then that image was used to attack
the capacity to take joy in present beauty.
But what is wrong with that? Usually we use the phrase ‘failure of imagination’ to mean
the person is not being imaginative enough; but in this case Freud seems to think his
companions were being too imaginative, and imaginative in the wrong sort of way. But
what about this imagining makes it the wrong sort of way? It cannot simply be leaping
ahead to the future in order to inform the present. A similar imaginative leap could be
used to enhance the sense of joy in the light of beauty’s transience—and, in Freud’s view,
this would be an altogether healthy imaginative move. Nor can their problem be simply
that their imaginings brought them a wistful lack of joy in the world’s beauty. The failure
does not consist simply in a failure to produce pleasure—though pleasure and pain may
be involved in explaining the psychodynamics. What makes this revolt a failure, in
Freud’s opinion, rather than just a movement of imagination is that it disturbed his
companions’ judgement. Basically, the movement of imagination is disturbing the proper
function of reason in two related ways. First, his companions are thoughtfully and
reflectively drawing the wrong conclusion about the meaning of transience. Second, they
are unresponsive to the salient conditions that ought to be the basis for changing their
minds.
Freud says that what is going wrong is ‘a revolt in their minds against mourning’. It is not
clear what this means. He is no doubt drawing on our familiar experiences of mourning,
Page 2 of 21

and perhaps ideas are percolating that will emerge a couple years later in his essay
‘Mourning and Melancholia’; but Freud could not simply have meant a passing
psychological state. For, he is trying to account for an organized way of life. The young
poet and the taciturn friend were not fleeing mourning a particular dead loved one.
Rather, the ‘revolt’ showed up in a stable way of life: a resolute refusal to take joy in the
world’s beauty (ostensibly due to its transience). Freud suggests a dynamic psychological
account of how this works: a ‘foretaste’ of mourning triggers a ‘recoil’ from painful
feelings. Still, what he is trying to explain is not an isolated psychological response, but a
stable, character-like formation: this is how the poet lives with the beauty of the world.
From Freud’s perspective, it is actually a character-deformation: the poet and his friend
are not living well with respect to the world’s beauty.
But then what would living well with transient beauty consist in? Freud says that our
sense of the transience of the world’s beauty ought to increase the joy we take in it
(Freud 1915b: 305-306). Now if what is getting in the way of this response is a revolt
(p. 223) against mourning, this would suggest that a healthy response—joy in transient
beauty—would be an unfettered exercise of a healthy and developed capacity to mourn.

This may at first seem like a strange conclusion. After all, don’t we think of mourning as
the response to the death of a loved one? To be sure, this is the paradigm; but Freud
seems to be suggesting that we take this paradigm and think outwards from it. By way of
analogy, consider Aristotle’s virtue of courage. The paradigm is on the battlefield, risking
one’s own life to protect the polis, Athens. But then as we reflect on the myriad occasions
in life that require us to take a stand, to take some personal risks for a higher cause, we
see that this condition of the psyche, courage, may be deployed at almost any moment in
life. Although Freud’s line of reasoning is not explicit here, it seems to take a similar turn.
If we consider the broad structure of human life it seems to be marked by vulnerability to
loss and separation. Not only do our loved ones die, it can happen that we outgrow our
friends or they outgrow us. When things are going well we leave our own childhoods
behind, at least, up to a point. Our relations to teddy do not remain the same. At the heart
of human development is a capacity to bid adieu. It is in the spirit of Freud’s writing to
treat this capacity as a capacity to mourn broadly construed.
We do not yet know the marks and features of mourning when it is used in this broad
sense. We have thus far isolated it via paradigm cases and an invitation to expand our
conception of it in certain directions. But it is clear that for Freud the capacity to mourn
is an important aspect of living well with the transience of things. And since we ourselves
are transient beings living in a world of transient beings, it would seem that the capacity
to mourn (broadly understood) is a virtue or a human excellence in Aristotle’s sense. For
what it is for creatures like us to live well is to live well with transience, separation, and
loss—and Freud is isolating a psychic capacity whose function is to do just that.
So if mourning broadly understood is a form of living well it seems as though we might

have a standard by which we can judge imaginative life in terms of better and worse. Are
there distinctive forms of imagining that characterize failures to mourn? Are there forms
of imagining that distort one’s view of the world and thus get in the way of one’s attempt
Page 3 of 21

to live a meaningful life? Does failure to mourn disfigure reason in its proper activities? It
would seem so if it is the task of reason to distinguish appearance from reality about the
most fundamental matters. And if so, is there anything to be done about this? In my
opinion, one needs psychoanalytic insight to be able to address these questions. And one
needs a philosophical outlook to grasp their deeper significance.
The Fundamental Rule

When I talk about the need for psychoanalytic insight I do not mean to refer to any
particular dogma or theoretical claim. Rather, I am interested in insights that come to
light from psychoanalytic activity according to its characteristic method. That method is
structured by what Freud called the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis. The rule is
simple (p. 224) to state: say whatever it is that comes to mind without inhibition or
censorship.1 Freud was right that the fundamental rule is fundamental to psychoanalysis.
But it is fundamental to psychoanalysis because it establishes a special arena for reason
and imagination to meet and interact.
The injunction to say whatever comes to mind without inhibition or censorship gives us
one sense of what we might mean by the free flow of self-conscious thinking. But it is an
unusual sense. The analytic situation as structured by the fundamental rule both
facilitates and enjoins a certain spontaneity of mind. A person is encouraged to let her
mind wander wherever it will go and simply to say out loud whatever comes next. This is
obviously not the ‘freedom’ of rational thinking in the familiar sense, of thinking
according to the constraints of logos. Indeed, with the fundamental rule, the normal
constraints of logos are ruled out as a reason for not speaking. But the situation is more
complex than just the encouragement of this form of spontaneity. It is not merely that the
analysand is saying out loud what is coming to mind, but analysand and analyst are also
listening together to what is being said and not said. The analysand in particular is
apperceptively attending to the movements of her thought, but it is a special mode of
apperception.2 On the one hand, the attention being paid is informed by logos in the
familiar sense that the person is attuned to what makes more or less sense; but, on the
other hand, the person is freed of the normal responsibilities that usually attend
apperceptive consciousness. There is no burden to explain or defend what ‘I think’—
certainly, not in a reasonable account. As a result, the analysand is freed to develop a
capacity to attend to the workings of her own mind; a capacity that tends to be
underdeveloped when one focuses on the flow of rational thought. The analytic situation
then is not a moment in which irrationality is promoted for its own sake. It is more like a
Sabbath moment in which the familiar constraints of rationality—the inhibition and
censorship of ‘silly’ or ‘bad’ thoughts, the giving of reasons and so on—are encouraged to
take a rest (Lear 2016). The overall aim is the development of one’s rational capacity—in
the sense of one’s capacity to distinguish appearance from reality, both about the world
and about oneself. In this sense the fundamental rule encourages a teleological
suspension of the rational for the sake of the rational.
Page 4 of 21

In effect, the analytic situation as structured by the fundamental rule sets up an intimate
space for reason and the workings of the imagination to meet and interact in fine-grained
detail. As the analysand lies down and attempts to ‘free associate’, the associations tend
of their own accord to become looser, at least by the standards of ordinary conscious
thought. It is not an accident that in such an environment, analysands tend to remember
their dreams. Dream memories come to mind because the analytic situation becomes
dreamy.
It is a surprising and remarkable empirical discovery that no one can follow the
fundamental rule. As Freud said, ‘there comes a time in every analysis when the patient
(p. 225) disregards it’ (Freud 1913: 135n). In my experience that time comes almost
immediately and recurs throughout the analysis. This means that the fundamental rule
gives occasion for analyst and analysand to attend together both to the mind’s
spontaneous wanderings and to the internal resistance to any such opportunity. Attending
to both makes possible a very rich and textured understanding of a person’s imaginative
life (including fantasy) and of how that imaginative life intersects with her self-conscious
understanding.
And so, while the fundamental rule does encourage the free flow of self-conscious
understanding in the sense of a self-conscious sense of the mind’s spontaneous
wanderings, it also facilitates the freedom of self-consciousness in the deeper sense of the
development of a capacity of mind. That is, psychoanalysis is the development of a
psychic capacity to attend to the imaginative workings of one’s own mind as well as to
internal efforts to disrupt them, and then to thoughtfully and effectively intervene simply
through the self-conscious thinking one is doing. One develops a capacity of mind to
change the structure of one’s mind, immediately and directly, through the very
understanding that brings about the change. In the remainder of this chapter, I shall try
to make this claim clear.
Unconscious Fate
We are in a position to formulate a thought that is not explicitly in Freud, though there
are suggestions of it throughout his work. The thought is this: even at the level of the
unconscious our being is an issue for us. Unbeknownst to us for the most part, our
imaginations are actively thinking through what kind of creature we are and what kind of
world we inhabit. Issues of transience and omnipotence, power and vulnerability have
long been on our minds, but in a manner that we do not easily recognize. Freud showed
that this imaginative thinking has a peculiar form: a form that justifies us in
conceptualizing it as a form of thinking, albeit one not constrained by the normal
demands of rationality. If we are to come to grips with how our imagination works, we
need to understand how ontological debate is possible at the level of the unconscious.
Freud saw that repetition was a hallmark of neurotic modern life—and he took that to be
a hallmark of modern life. People were caught up in unhappy-making routines, often
stretching far back in life, with myriad variations. And modern society did not have any
Page 5 of 21

particular interest in undoing such structures. He tried to think through what this could
mean.
Let me give a clinical vignette. Ms M—a professional in a large corporation—came into

analysis because of persistent feelings of anger, irritation, and frustration. She and her
partner would fight regularly, and she would also feel frustrated and angry at work, with
friends and family. Outwardly she was successful at her job, though she did get into
unspoken feuds with colleagues. She would, as she put it, make ‘passive-aggressive
moves’ in which she would struggle with people while pretending just to be doing her job.
Similarly, with her partner: she was managing to stay in the relationship, but it was
(p. 226) regularly threatened by struggles, unacknowledged and acknowledged. Typically,
some imagined third party was involved. So, for example, Ms M’s partner has an old
girlfriend with whom he remained friends. This was an occasion for Ms M to form angry
fantasies about that relationship. She would express her fury in small gestures—like
leaving dirty dishes in the sink—that could be denied if challenged. And if a fight did
break out, Ms M would assume the posture of the pure voice of objective reason,
wondering out loud why her partner was getting so angry. This would enrage him further,
and Ms M would secretly enjoy his frustration. There is much to be said about this case,
but I want to consider the broad structure. Freud focused on repetition—and that is how
it appears when one looks consciously at the phenomena—but he also had the genius to
recognize that the unconscious is a mode of imaginative life that has its own form.3
One of the hallmarks of unconscious mental functioning is timelessness. It is important to

understand what this means. There are of course remarks in Freud that suggest that
memories of events from long ago persist in the unconscious and continue to have a
causal effect. But there is a deeper meaning, a claim about the temporality of
unconscious thinking. From the timeless perspective of the unconscious, there is no such
thing as repetition. There is no same again. From an unconscious perspective there is just
timeless perdurance: a tenseless the same. In this way, the unconscious functions like a
fate.4
The idea that we experience our unconscious as fate is sometimes not that far from
conscious awareness. People may enter analysis with an inchoate worry that they are
somehow destined never to have an intimate relationship, for example; or, that they will
never quite express the creativity of which they are capable. Freud showed that in an
important sense they are right.
In the case of Ms M, the fate was that life shall be frustrating. This fate hung timelessly
over her life—and uncannily informed the daily events of which Ms M was consciously,
temporally aware. (In Aristotelian terms, it functioned like a formal and final cause.) Ms
M was painfully, angrily aware of life’s frustrations; yet unaware of how active she was in
shaping her life to fit this fate. She would focus on real-life slights; but she also would
construe ambiguous moments so as to trigger her sense of frustration. Occasionally she
would surreptitiously provoke colleagues to stand in her way. In her imagination she
would set up triangles: one person purportedly favouring another over Ms M. So on those
Page 6 of 21

occasions when she was blocked in some way, she would feel defeated in a competition.
She did not realize she was doing this. But having succeeded in arousing opposition, she
would then be filled with rage and fantasies of revenge. It was as though Ms M lived
inside a geodesic dome of frustration and anger that she mistook for the world.5 (p. 227)
The dome was made up of petite triangles—shaped around two others—made up of
rivalry, frustration, anger, and revenge. They each looked like discrete problems, but they
had a similar shape and together they made up a world. That is, although there was no
conscious overall act of will, Ms M’s mode of living otherwise took the form of a resolute
refusal to take joy in the beauty of the world.
Freud also said of the unconscious that it was indifferent to contradiction.6 The point is
not that the unconscious allows us to believe contradictions because the beliefs reside in
different parts of our mind.7 Rather, our unconscious imaginings are basically not
troubled by contradictory evidence. Ms M was adept at passing over things that were
seemingly ‘going right’ in her life. And she was creative in interpreting these apparently
good events as mere appearance. That is, she was adept at creating and maintaining a
false appearance–reality distinction. To put it in philosophical terms, her imagination
distorted her capacity for reason. Sometimes she would subvert an event that was going
her way. For example, she would on occasion instigate a fight—all the while thinking it
was her partner who spoiled things. The fight would excite her, though it left her feeling
angry, frustrated, and alienated from her partner.
Now, the point about these unconscious fates is that they are akin to a philosophical claim
about our finite condition. That life shall be frustrating: We are creatures who consciously
recognize that we are not omnipotent, that we inhabit a world that to a significant extent
exists independently of us, that we have desires and longings that we are unable to
satisfy. From this perspective, fate seems like a claim about who we are and what is
possible for us. It is as though the unconscious is working in a philosophical direction—
what is it like to be the finite creatures we are?—only it lacks reason.
The irrationality consists not just in the unconscious’ imperviousness to contradictory

evidence, but in its unrelenting insistence. These two features of unconscious mental
functioning—timelessness and indifference to contradiction—help establish an
imaginative a priori. Ms M’s imagination sustained a teleological structure that
interpreted all of life’s unfolding events in its terms: namely, that life shall be frustrating.
This imaginative a priori is further facilitated by forms of unconscious imaginative

thinking Freud discovered and called primary process; in particular, displacement and
condensation. In primary process almost any association can be made, based on
similarities in sound, smell, touch, contiguity in time or space, or the merest contingency.
This means that virtually anything can be drawn in to symbolize life’s teleological
structure as destined for frustration. If she dreams of a door, for example, it quickly
becomes a door she cannot go through—‘shut, shut out, shut in, alone’—the imaginary
meaning of a life summed up in a seemingly benign image.
Page 7 of 21

(p. 228) Melancholia

It might at first be surprising that this unconscious fate-like structure—that life shall be
frustrating—is basically an ego strategy. It is a mode of living through which Ms M
expressed her understanding of herself as a finite creature. Certainly, it came as a
surprise to Freud—and it came relatively late in his career—that the unconscious could
not be equated with the repressed. The ego regularly works in ways of which we are
unaware—and to which we are deeply resistant to finding out. But we are not here
dealing with repression and the repressed.
. . . we find ourselves in an unforeseen situation. We have come upon something in

the ego itself which is also unconscious, which behaves exactly like the repressed
—that is, which produces powerful effects without itself being conscious and
which requires special work before it can be made conscious … we must admit
that the characteristic of being unconscious begins to lose significance for us. It
becomes a quality which can have many meanings …
(Freud 1923: 15–18)
What I think Freud means by this last statement is that the characteristic of being
repressed may no longer be the primary concern of those aspects of unconscious mental
functioning that emerge for us in psychoanalysis. We need to grasp how these fate-like
ego strategies work. For Ms M, the insistence on life’s frustration had almost the opposite
of its official meaning. It was a way of taking control. The world could not inflict
frustration on her because, in fantasy, she would get there first, and inflict it on herself.
By insisting upon frustration, Ms M protected a hidden sense of invulnerability. This came
out in dreams and daydreams of being all-powerful: able, for instance, to rip out the heart
of an opponent and devour it or shred her enemy with sabre-like fingernails. The
frustration and anger that Ms M consciously felt covered over omnipotent fantasies of
revenge. She also felt omnipotent when, in a fight, she took up the position of
unemotional reason looking down objectively on her opponent: wondering out loud in an
‘unemotional voice’ why his problem would get him so upset.
Rather than focus on the content of Ms M’s fantasies, consider their structure: one level
of unconscious ego inflicts a fate that life shall be frustrating, and a level of unconscious
fantasy wishfully expresses omnipotence. This broad-scale structure has many variants
and I suspect it is not unusual in contemporary urban bourgeois life. It is an unhappy-
making solution, but one compatible with managing the social and work demands of
readers of the New York Times (or the Guardian). Within the psyche of the high-
functioning neurotic there is in some sense an ongoing ontological conflict: one side
insisting on the person’s finite nature, the other claiming omnipotence. In Ms M’s case,
the conflict culminates in a standoff in which Ms M expresses both her sense of finiteness
and her sense of omnipotence in an unhappy but triumphant compromise of frustration.
Page 8 of 21

I want to characterize this overall psychic structure—unconscious claims of omnipotence

set over against unconscious insistence on the fated disappointment of a (p. 229) finite
creature—as melancholic. Not melancholic in the familiar sense of a particular
psychological state, mood, or emotion, such as depression, though, of course, such
emotions might be part of this melancholic structure. This ‘melancholia’ should be
understood broadly as the unhealthy counterpart to the ‘mourning’ (see Freud 1917) I
mentioned at the beginning. It is a psychic configuration that makes mourning
impossible. I want to say that it is a stuck insistence that the world be, in this case, a
frustrating place. But what does it mean to be stuck? It cannot mean simply that a person
insistently brings everything back, again and again, to the same idea. Think of creative
hedgehogs, like Plato, Dostoyevsky, or Proust.8 Think of those joyous saintly figures who
are able to bring each human experience back to the idea that humans are created in
God’s image; or of Kierkegaard’s claim that purity of the heart is to will one thing; or of
Bob Dylan’s claim that all his songs end by wishing his listeners good luck.9 Just because
of repeated insistence, we do not thereby think of them as stuck. For the same reason, it
is not sufficient for being stuck that one is living with an imaginative a priori that tends
one to experience things in certain ways, tends one’s reason down certain paths. Such
imaginative direction may be internal to one’s creative flourishing.
Ms M is stuck because she is stuck in falsity—and in two related ways. First, in Ms M’s
case reason has not merely been influenced by imagination, it has been subverted by it.
Her capacity thoughtfully to distinguish appearance from reality has been distorted, so
that she has become adept at interpreting any purported successes as mere appearance.
She similarly interprets apparent failures immediately as a real-life basis for frustration.
She is stuck in a false conception of reality. And any attempts at further reflection only
feed through this short-circuited loop. Second, she is stuck in a false understanding of
self and world because she is unknowingly entangled in a poor solution to psychic
conflict. She repeatedly experiences the world as frustrating because, almost
unbeknownst to her, her imagination is taken up with childish fantasies of omnipotence.
These fantasies of course present significant challenges in adult life. If they are not
worked through and modified through further imaginative work, they threaten to break
through in demands and claims that disrupt one’s position in the social world. They can
drive one crazy. The ‘solution’ that Ms M hit upon—probably early in life—is to cover over
those fantasies with an omnipotent insistence on life’s frustrations. So the falsity here is a
false understanding of oneself, and a false sense of where one’s frustration is coming
from.
This is, I think, what Freud means when he says that the neurotic is withdrawn from
reality. Ms M cannot experience the variety of life’s events—and thus their liveliness—
because she has already interpreted them in the frame of frustration. All other beings are
and must be frustrating beings. In this way, a largely unconscious ontological stance is
held in place by a conflicted, but fairly stable psychological formation. And although Ms
M may exercise imaginative creativity in enforcing this world view, it is wearying (p. 230)
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always to be brought back to the telos of frustration. In this sense, melancholia,

understood as an ontological stance, is a failure of imagination.
Transference
Freud came to see that these forms of imagining attempt to structure the entire analytic
situation. He called this phenomenon transference, and said of it:
. . . transference is itself only a piece of repetition, and the repetition is a

transference of the forgotten past not only on to the doctor but also on to all the
other aspects of the current situation.
(Freud 1914: 151, my emphasis)
As is well known, Freud had an interest in the repetition of forgotten scenes from the
past. But there is also in his work a strain of thinking that the significant repetition is not
so much of a past scene, but the re-enactment of a past form of imaginative life. The
purported past scene—whether or not it actually happened—functions as symbolic
representation of this imaginative form of life. The best way to understand this, I think, is
not in terms of repetition or reproduction, but as the self-maintaining imaginative activity
of an unconscious teleological structure.
In his first serious reflection on transference—in the aftermath of his painful failed
treatment with the patient known as Dora—Freud said that dealing with transference was
‘by far the hardest part of the whole task’:
It is easy to learn how to interpret dreams, to extract from the patient’s

associations his unconscious thoughts and memories and to practice similar
explanatory arts: for this the patient himself will always provide the text.
Transference is the one thing the presence of which has to be detected almost
without assistance and with only the slightest clues to go upon . . .
(Freud 1905: 116–17)
There are, I think, two reasons Freud found dealing with transference so difficult. First,
in transference there is a weird undertow in which the analyst is pulled by the currents of
another person’s imagination. One finds oneself in the midst of an intermingling of
subjectivities that still needs to be better understood. And it is especially difficult to grasp
what is happening if, as with Freud, one’s self-image is of a doctor taking an objective
stance towards a patient whose subjectivity is over there, firmly inside the patient.
Second, it is emotionally demanding to be drawn into a melancholic imaginative
structure. One is assigned a rigid role, and one can come to feel that if it were up to the
analysand, one would be stuck there forever.
It is Freud’s genius to recognize that the way to get unstuck is to learn how to play with
the transference. Freud put it this way:
Page 10 of 21

The main instrument … for curbing the patient’s compulsion to repeat and for
turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of the transference.
We (p. 231) render the compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the
right to assert itself in a definite field. We admit it into the transference as a
playground in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and in
which it is expected to display to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts
that is hidden in the patient’s mind. Provided only that the patient shows
compliance enough to respect the necessary conditions of the analysis, we
regularly succeed in giving all the symptoms of the illness a new transference
meaning and in replacing his ordinary neurosis by a ‘transference-neurosis’ for
which he can be cured by the therapeutic work. The transference thus creates an
intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition
from one to the other is made.
(Freud 1914: 154, my emphasis)
I would like to take seriously the idea that working with the transference consists in
analyst and analysand learning to play together. I will give a brief clinical vignette that
illustrates what I mean by this, and then discuss why it matters. I hope to show how play
is an imaginative activity of special philosophical and psychological significance.
After a few years of analysis, Ms M became more aware of her tendency to feel frustrated
and angry with colleagues and friends, and with her partner. She was weary of it, but she
also felt despondent about ever breaking out of the cycle. She still had angry feelings, she
still had vengeful fantasies, but she was now able to notice them consciously in the
moment, and keep them to herself rather than just act them out. In that way, Ms M felt
her life was much less self-destructive than it had been: she was still in her relationship,
for example, rather than having one more explosive break-up. But she continued to feel
frustrated and angry.
In the transference, Ms M was regularly angry with me: for my silences, for what she
experienced as my spare analytic comments (which I experienced as a friendly but
definite analytic stance). She experienced me, at least at times, as withholding from her,
and accused me of being a ‘silent, passive-aggressive type, just like my mother’. This was
not all she felt towards me, but these angry feelings of frustration would recur. It also
made her angry when I pointed out that she was using our analytic relation to set up a
situation of frustration. She would then turn her anger on herself: she must not know at
all how to do analysis. She said she felt helpless and confused. In the transference I
became a parent who would not come to her aid, and left her ‘in the crib with dirty
diapers’. And yet, there was also something unreal about all this for her. It was as though
she was starting to wake up to the dream-like status of her waking life. This was a sign
we were in the ‘intermediate region’ Freud talked about.
Ms M became ever more frustrated with me in my other roles as a professor and as a

public speaker. She felt blocked from my classes and imagined I had a very good time
with my students. She had read my books and was frustrated she couldn’t learn from me
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what I was thinking now. One day she mentioned that she had seen a notice that I would
be giving a lecture in Chicago. She moved quickly on, to talking about a frustration in her
work situation. It was as though bare mention was enough. I drew her attention to the
brevity of her mention—and asked her if she might have felt the need to move away from
it. She became angry with me for bringing it up. But she did say that if I hadn’t said
anything, she would have interpreted that as me tacitly giving her permission to go. Now
(p. 232) that I had brought it up, that must mean I did not want to her to go. Either way I
was giving her a hint about what to do.
This led to a wealth of associations from childhood. She had spent much of her youth
sneaking around looking for clues, afraid to state her desire openly. In her pre-teens her
mother had become worried about Ms M gaining weight and had put her on a diet. Ms M
would sneak around for food. My not speaking much reminded her of not being fed. If she
got caught—or if she refused to eat the ‘disgusting’ food her mother did give her—she
would be sent to the basement as punishment. It is there that she remembers having her
first violent fantasies of revenge. So, in the moment I was the fantasy mother—in the
playground of the analytic situation. In asking her about her brief mention of my
upcoming talk I had caught her sneaking around. And, by supposedly giving her hints that
she shouldn’t go I was forcing her on a diet, keeping her ravenously hungry, preventing
her from being fed by me outside the confines of the analytic situation.
But though the feelings were strong, we could both feel we were in an intermediate zone,
an arena in which the reality or unreality of events is held in a weird kind of abeyance.
Ms M circled through many associations but came back to her experience of me getting
in the way of her coming to my lecture. A voice welled up from deep inside her, a plaint: ‘I
have never heard you speak!’
I said, ‘Can you hear me now?’ (My comment was earnest but as I hope you can see, also
playful. My mind had associated to a well-known mobile phone ad in which the person
repeatedly tests whether there is still a communicative link.) I do not want to exaggerate
the efficacy of any single moment and I cannot say with absolute confidence what
happened. But this seemed to me a significant moment. Ms M was at first taken aback,
slightly shaken. She laughed, she sighed, she fell silent, her body relaxed. After a moment
she said, ‘Yes, I can hear you now’.
Ms M began to draw links between various meanings of I have never heard you speak!
The official voice of the ego was the voice of frustration and complaint: because she was
in analysis with me, she was prevented from going to hear me in a lecture or a classroom.
But Ms M had been in analysis long enough that when she paid attention, she could hear
another voice just below the surface: a voice of omnipotent, victorious triumph. I have
never heard you speak! That is, ‘I have absolute, unassailable right to go whether you like
it or not!’ But then there was also a voice of dawning recognition. I have never heard you
speak! That is, ‘I have spent this time hearing you in a false role, speaking indirectly to
me passively denying me permission’. It was also a voice of mourning: ‘I have spent these
years in analysis so busy listening for clues whether you endorse what I am saying or
Page 12 of 21

whether you deny me permission that I have only dimly heard your analytic voice—which
you have been speaking all along’.
It would take a paper of its own to explain what happened in the analysis to make it
possible at this later stage for Ms M to hear my comment ‘Can you hear me now?’ as
something other than just another frustrating remark. That is all it would have been or
could have been in the opening phase of the analysis. We should have to describe how
working together Ms M and I created a ‘playground’ in which Ms M felt safe enough to
play. In particular, she felt safe enough to ‘play’ with me as being someone other than a
frustrating figure in her life.
This is crucial: playing is playing with ontology. It is a different way of being with
(p. 233)
the being of things. In his discussion of child’s play, the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott
famously introduced the terms ‘transitional object’ and ‘transitional phenomena’ to
describe a child’s play with, say, a teddy bear. Play, according to Winnicott, provides a
resting place from the standard tasks of distinguishing subjective from objective, inside
from outside, me from not-me. In play the issue of whether teddy is part of me or not—
whether, for instance, teddy simply knows what I am thinking or I simply know what he is
thinking—is left in abeyance. It is the ontological status of the teddy that is played with.
This kind of play is precious to our living; and Winnicott suggests that, with children,
‘good enough’ parents have an intuitive sense to protect the play space.
Of the transitional object [that is, teddy] it can be said that it is a matter of
agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question: ‘Did you
conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?’ The important point is
that no decision on this point is expected. The question is not to be formulated.
(Winnicott 1982: 12)
In a ‘good-enough’ environment children have freedom to play with the issues of their
being and the being of things around them; for example: Is teddy part of me? Or: Is teddy
up to me? But they are able to do so because, with the help of a parental, supporting
environment, certain defining questions are left unasked. To ask them is to dissolve the
play space.
The analytic situation is a recreation in adult life of a play space. Analysts are sometimes
caricatured as not saying very much; but one benign way to understand this is in terms of
a reluctance to ask the questions that would inevitably bring play to an end. As we have
seen, Ms M was able to start playing with me as a figure in her life. In particular, were
there other ways of hearing me say ‘Can you hear me now?’ It was the play that put her
in a position where she could then effectively ask a question about the frustrating figure
who would not let her go to the lecture. Was that figure really located over there, in me?
Or was it a figment of her imagination? It was play in the analytic space that enabled her
to raise imaginative possibilities—and then gingerly try them out: questions about the
manner of her being and the manner of mine.
Page 13 of 21

In learning to play, Ms M was building up a significant psychological capacity. For as she

linked these different meanings together, she was doing more than playing with words.
These meanings were voices inside Ms M’s psyche expressing different outlooks, each of
which was hers. By going back and forth between them she was in effect linking these
voices together, bringing them into a different form of communication. This was an
exercise in Ms M’s developing capacity to integrate her psyche, precisely through her
self-understanding that this was what she was doing. Ms M’s playfulness was itself an
integrating act.
This immediate and direct efficacy of psychoanalysis has not been sufficiently
appreciated. To put it in psychoanalytic and philosophical terms: the ego can develop
itself by developing a practical capacity with respect to its own functioning. This is a
startling accomplishment: not just the capacity to change how one’s mind functions, or
even to change it on the basis of conscious understanding of how it functions, but to be
able to (p. 234) change it immediately and directly through the efficacy of self-conscious
thinking itself. On this occasion, when Ms M says, ‘I can hear you now’, she is actually
creating the condition of hearing me. This is a remarkable power: the capacity for self-
consciousness to take up and practically influence the workings of the whole psyche via
its understanding of those workings. We need to understand much better than we do how
this all works. In particular, what does influencing the workings of the whole psyche
consist in? We typically see in such moments a move in the direction of wholeheartedness
—as though the person’s emotional life and will are coming together. But how does this
work? It seems to me that we still lack an adequate answer.
Psychoanalysis as Human Reason

I believe we have reason to think of this psychic activity as a development and
manifestation of human reason. It is practical reason applied to the mind’s own workings.
My inspiration for this thought is due to Socrates. In the Republic, he argues that it is
appropriate for reason to rule the psyche because it is truly wise and exercises foresight
on behalf of the whole soul.10 Of course, we should be attentive to historical context, and
not simply assume that Socrates is somehow speaking timeless, transcendent truths.
However, there is a choice of historical contexts in which one might locate Socrates’
dictum. I would like to suggest that we locate his remark not only in the local context of
the ancient Athenian polis, but also in the broader historical context of human logos-
making.
Socrates says it is appropriate for reason to rule. The Greek is to logistikon, which
literally refers to our capacity to exercise and deploy logos. Our capacity for logos is a
shared human capacity in which we attempt to react to reality by giving an account of it
in language, an account we try to make adequate, one to which we hold ourselves and
each other answerable, one which requires us to take responsibility even for the norms of
adequacy. It is in terms of this logos-making capacity that we try to formulate a
distinction between truth and appearance, both about the world and about ourselves. The
Page 14 of 21

development of a capacity for logos-making is an historical development, but it has come

to be internally linked with what it means to be human. That is, the capacity of logos-
making has ontological implications. We can imagine circumstances in which our capacity
for logos atrophied but sexual reproduction continued. I suppose one would say that the
biological species survived, but there would be a crucial sense in which we human beings
would go out of existence.
Now Socrates says it is appropriate for reason to rule, but we should not be
(p. 235)
constrained by a caricature of ruling. It is easy to have an image of reason as a benign,

reasonable but firm monarch sitting in the throne room deciding which desires pounding
at the gates shall be let across the drawbridge into the castle. But the Greek verb archein
suggests more generally taking the lead, functioning as a principle or starting point,
lending form. Socrates’ claim, understood in its broadest context, is that our capacity for
logos ought somehow to take the lead when it comes to the workings of the whole human
psyche. In particular, our capacity for logos-making ought to take the lead with respect to
the workings of the non-rational part of the soul. It ought to be able to lend creative
direction to the imaginative workings of our soul. The appropriateness of to logistikon
taking the lead depends on the claim that it is wise (sophia) and that it has foresight
(promethêian) on behalf of the whole soul. That is, our capacity for logos-making has
legitimacy only when it is actually moving in the direction of getting things right with
respect to the whole soul.
I want to read Socrates and Plato as speaking beyond themselves. I see them as laying
down constraints on what an adequate account of reason will turn out to be. To
understand what reason is we need to figure out what the appropriate relations are
between our logos-informed capacity to understand and the (non-logos-constrained)
imaginative workings in our soul. What would it be for our capacity for logos to be wise
and exercise foresight with respect to our imaginations? It seems to me that
psychoanalysis is the attempt to work out what those appropriate relations are, in the
therapeutic context of actually encouraging the development of those relations (not
simply understanding theoretically what they should be). So understood, psychoanalysis
is itself an exercise of human reason.11 It is the activity of listening to the imaginative
voices, the promptings and workings of the non-rational soul, and engaging them
effectively with logos-informed understanding.
For Socrates in the Republic and Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics one of the central
questions, if not the central question, was how reason, to logistikon, could exercise
appropriate influence over the non-rational part of the soul. This is a question for which
they could only provide a partial answer. I believe psychoanalysis ought to be understood
as taking up that heritage and opening new paths for providing an answer.
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Mourning the Loss of Omnipotence

It is, I think, an unusual insight, not one we could have anticipated in advance, that this
power of self-consciousness to transform the mind requires the development of the
capacity to mourn, in the sense that Freud used in his essay ‘On Transience’. I said
earlier that when Ms M entered analysis her overall psychic structure was melancholic in
the (p. 236) sense that it was stuck, rigid, and life-flattening. It showed itself in a stuck
form of living. Melancholic psychic structures are unhappy-making, but at the same time
it is difficult to let go of them. The process that Freud called working-through is a
mournful process. As we saw with Ms M, the moment of saying ‘Yes, I can hear you’ had
something wistful about it, as though gaining the capacity to hear in less rigid ways was
at the same time letting go of a familiar way of life.
Mourning is essentially an imaginative activity. In effect, we learn to play with death. In

the paradigmatic case at the graveside, the death of a loved one is a time of grief. But in
mourning our imaginations get busy. We are full of memories of the loved one, full of
thoughts like, ‘what would he say if he were here?’, full of daydreams of how we will go
on under the benign aura of his lasting influence. And we are full of playful fantasies—
some conscious, some unconscious—in which he lives on inside us, in which we can hear
him speak or he can hear us. For Freud, a healthy way of saying goodbye is learning how
to play with our lost loved one. Mourning, broadly understood, is the playful way of
leaving in abeyance the lostness of the lost one. It is in such play that we work out how to
be as a transient being in the company of other transient beings.
In ‘On Transience’, Freud suggests we expand our conception of mourning—take it

beyond the paradigm case of loss of a loved one and apply it more broadly to the
structure of human life in general. One way of viewing Ms M’s analysis is that in it she
learned how to mourn her own omnipotence. That is, she learned how to play with its
demise. And, because in this case we are dealing with structuring fantasies, learning how
to play with the death of one’s own sense of omnipotence is the same activity as allowing
omnipotence to die. And as Ms M no longer has to deal with the threats of omnipotent
fantasies breaking through, she can ease up on her need to cover them over with an
unrelenting insistence on frustration. Mourning is the way we bid adieu to a melancholic
psychic structure that has hitherto held us captive. In this way we again open ourselves
up to life. For example, instead of forever facing false structures of frustration we open
ourselves up to the genuine risks and corresponding joys of transient life. The question of
how we are to be with our own unconscious is thus revealed as a question of how we are
to be.
An Unusual Meal
Let me conclude with a clinical example that illustrates this point. About four months
before the end of her analysis Ms M came in and reported a dream she had the night
before.
Page 16 of 21

I had to give a presentation. It has music in it. I wanted to make Thai food—that’s
somehow connected to the music. I’m excited about it. I have a recipe. I am going
to go shopping for the ingredients. It will be spicy. Then later in the dream I’m
anxious that I’m not prepared.
She comments that she is excited by the idea of making music and Thai food. She
(p. 237)
is not an expert, but is really interested in it. But she is anxious that as she goes shopping
for ingredients she might not be able to find her way back. Then she asks:
Why Thai food? The word ‘Thai’ could be significant, it has to do with a connection
to music, but that is not clear.
She continues, ‘I can’t believe in the dream how much I’m enjoying my life’.
Then she says something that surprises me: ‘I can see the Thai dish in front of me. But it
is one someone else made. I have to get the things to make my own.’ This is the first time
I have heard about another person, so I ask her, ‘There is someone else who has already
done it?’ She says yes, and then after a pause says ‘I wonder whether you think that is
you, and all I am going to do is copy you’. I say, ‘What do you think?’ She said, ‘It feels
like my idea. I can bring the Thai food into my presentation and connect it to the music. It
feels right.’
This was the second time she said that she could connect Thai food to the music. So I
said: ‘You seem to think that Thai food would tie things to the music’. She responded, ‘The
Thai food is a tie—it could tie everything together—though I don’t know how it will work
out exactly. I have to go far away for the ingredients, but the food will be interesting,
spicy, taste good, be unfamiliar to me.’ She also wondered whether this would make a tie
between the two of us, after the analysis ended. She would have to go off on her own to
find her own ingredients and put them together.
I do not think it is too much of a stretch of the imagination to hear this as a dream-like
comment on the end of the analysis. In her youth, she had been kept on a strict food
regimen by her mother and this had led, in her own mind, to terrible feelings of
frustration and anger; to sneaking and peeking; to hidden gluttony and purging; to
getting caught and punished and having violent fantasies of revenge. In the dream, this
structure is opened up. She is going to be able to make, eat, and present an exotic new
dish—Thai food. It is not something with which she is familiar, but she is excited by the
prospect. It feels fresh and new; a challenge. She has some anxiety that she might get
lost as she looks for the spicy ingredients, but that does not dampen her sense of
excitement.
And then through the loose associations of primary processes of the unconscious, Thai
food is linked to tie-food. A heap of meanings are condensed into that image. In the
dream, Ms M ties Thai food together with making music. She ties that together with her
capacity to make a new kind of public presentation. The dream seems to be summing up
Page 17 of 21

the meaning of the analysis for her in dream-like terms. The analysis has fed her. But it
has fed her with a capacity to make her own tie-food. She can now make music for others.
We can see the truth of the dream demonstrated in the analytic session. As Ms M
associates, she is able to tie her dream to her conscious thoughts about her dream. She is
able to put her dream into logos-filled conscious thoughts that tie together in unusual
ways the rational and non-rational parts of her soul. All of this—the dream and the later
analysis of it—are playful and mournful anticipations of the end of the analysis. Ms M is
(p. 238) anticipating the end, trying to sum it up as a way of getting ready to say goodbye.
She is dealing with the transience of the analysis itself. Notice how lacking her goodbye is
in the familiar structure of frustration and anger. This means that Ms M is not just
mourning the end of the analysis, she is saying goodbye to a way of life that had for so
long been her way of life. It is by thinking through her life in a psychoanalytic manner,
interweaving reason and the imaginative workings of the non-rational parts of her soul,
that she has been able to undo its false structure. This is the activity of reason taking
appropriate lead of the whole soul. And note the imaginative hopefulness here for a
future that cannot yet be comprehended. This open-ended hopefulness is integral to the
willingness to give up hitherto imprisoning structures, however comfortable they once
were. And it is a joy Ms M can now experience in the transience of life.12
References
Berlin, I. (2013). The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History.
Davidson, D. (1982). ‘Paradoxes of irrationality’. In R. Wollheim and J. Hopkins (eds),

Philosophical Essays on Freud (pp. 289–305). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Engstrom, S. (2009). The Form of Practical Knowledge: A Study of the Categorical

Imperative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vols 4–5.
Freud, S. (1905). ‘Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria’. In J. Strachey (ed. and

Freud, S. (1910a). ‘Five lectures on psycho-analysis’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The
Freud, S. (1910b). ‘The future prospects of psycho-analytic therapy’. In J. Strachey (ed.

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Freud, S. (1912). ‘Recommendations to physicians practicing psycho-analysis’. In J.

Freud, S. (1913). ‘On the beginning of treatment’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The
Freud, S. (1914). ‘Remembering, repeating and working-through’. In J. Strachey (ed. and

Freud, S. (1915a). ‘The unconscious’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard
(p. 239)
Freud, S. (1915b). ‘On transience’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of
Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1917). ‘Mourning and melancholia’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The
Freud, S. (1923). ‘The ego and the id’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard
Freud, S. (1925). ‘An autobiographical study’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard
Freud, S. (1969). ‘Das Unbewußte’. In M. Bonaparte, A. Freud, E. Bibring, W. Hoffer, E.

Kris, O. Isakower (eds), Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 10. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag.
Lear, J. (2016). ‘The Freudian sabbath’. In J. Kreines and R. Zuckert (eds), Hegel on
Philosophy in History (pp. 230–247). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lear, J. (2017). Wisdom Won From Illness: Essays in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy.
Mann, T. (1937). ‘Freud and the future’. In Essays of Three Decades. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf.
Pippin, R. (2014). Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology

of Spirit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Page 19 of 21

Plato (2003). Platonis: Rempublicam, ed. S. R. Slings. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Plato (2004). Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Winnicott, D. W. (1982). ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena’. In Playing and

Reality (pp. 1–25). New York: Routledge. (p. 240)
Notes:
(1) See Freud 1913: 134–5; Freud 1900: 101–2; Freud 1910a: 31–2; Freud 1925: 40–1;
Freud 1910b: 144; Freud 1912: 115. I discuss the importance of the fundamental rule in
Lear 2017: 1–49.
(2) I discuss this mode of apperception in Lear 2016. See also Pippin 2014.
(3) ‘To sum up: exemption from mutual contradiction, primary process (mobility of
cathexes), timelessness, and replacement of external by psychical reality—these are the
characteristics which we may expect to find in processes belonging to the system Ucs.’
Freud 1915a: 187.
(4) For a thought-provoking discussion of fate in psychoanalysis, see Mann 1937: 3–45.
(5) See also the case of Ms A, in Lear 2017: 11–29. The broad-scale difference was that
Ms A’s world was one of disappointment and resignation; Ms M’s was one of frustration
and rage, passive aggression, and emotional explosions.
(6) The German is Widerspruchlosigkeit. See Freud 1969: 286.
(7) This is the route Davidson (1982) took and the problem he set out to solve. The
solution is ingenious but I have argued (Lear 2015: 29–60) that it is not adequate to the
psychological phenomena that show up in psychoanalysis.
(8) See Berlin (2013) for an account of the use of this phrase.
(9) ‘Is there anything in addition to your songs that you want to say to people?
—Good luck.
—You don’t say that in your songs.
—Oh, yes I do, every song tails off with ‘Good Luck,—I hope you make it.’
(‘Bob Dylan Gives Press Conference in San Francisco, Part II’, Rolling Stone, 20 January
1968).
(10) Plato (2003, 2004), Republic 441e. I use the English words ‘soul’ and ‘psyche’
interchangeably as translations of the Greek word ‘psyche’. And thus by ‘soul’ I mean
basically what Aristotle meant: that the soul is the principle of life in a living being.
Page 20 of 21

(11) See Engstrom 2009; Rödl 2007.
(12) I would like to thank Matthew Boyle, Gabriel Lear, Anselm Mueller, Edna
O’Shaughnessy, and the editors of this volume for comments on a previous draft; and
Isabela Ferreira for copy-editing and comments.
Jonathan Lear
Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago, USA
Page 21 of 21

Symbolism, the Primary Process, and Dreams: Freud’s Contribution

Symbolism, the Primary Process, and Dreams: Freud’s
Contribution
Agnes Petocz

This chapter surveys new developments in the theory of symbolism, primary process
thinking, and dreams, and then revisits some of Freud’s own material to suggest how his
contribution has been variously neglected or misconstrued. Freud’s broader treatment of
symbolism, and his theory of drive as a motivation–cognition–affect matrix, suitably
clarified, offer a rich and coherent context for understanding symbolization and symbolic
activity across primary and secondary processes and along a pathological-normal
continuum—from psychosis, dream, defence, and phantasy to healthy ego functioning,
creativity, and waking rational thought. This material helps to bridge the supposed gap
between Freud’s metapsychology and his clinical theory.
Keywords: dreaming, drive theory, metapsychology, primary process, symbolism, symbolization
Agnes Petocz
PSYCHO-analysis began as a method of treatment; but I did not want to commend

it to you as a method of treatment, but on account of the truths it contains, on
account of the information it gives us about what concerns human beings most of
all—their own nature—and on account of the connections it discloses between the
most different of their activities.
Freud 1933: 156–7
It is tempting to regard the heterogeneity of the rapidly expanding contemporary

psychoanalytic field as a sign of healthy progress. According to Christian (2017), the
monolithic view of psychoanalysis as offering a unified theory of the mind ‘no longer
exists, and more recent authors have had to contend with a growing theoretical pluralism
in psychoanalysis, as well as with findings from neuropsychology, cognitive science,
empirical psychoanalytic research, and psychotherapy process and outcome
studies’ (2017: 127). Consequently, there is disagreement about the nature and extent of
Page 1 of 30
Subscriber: McMaster University; date: 17 March 2019

Freud’s contribution—where and how we are confirming his ideas, where and how we
have disconfirmed them and successfully moved on, and where and how we are hampered
by misguided allegiance to the classical Freudian past.
In my view the main problem for psychoanalytic theory today is to divorce fruitful
development from fruitless fragmentation and the illusion of progress, and the main task
is to show how Freud’s unifying account of mind and behaviour, far from being
challenged by empirical findings in other disciplines, is actually being confirmed as the
only coherent theory that can properly accommodate them. My aim in this chapter is to
address this theme in relation to three central interrelated topics: symbolism, the (p. 256)
primary process, and dreams. In the first half of the chapter I provide a brief and perforce
selective survey of contemporary work in these areas, with a view to identifying some of
the major issues that occupy the attention of theorists and clinicians. In the second half I
indicate what of Freud’s material I think deserves revisiting in order to appreciate that
his contribution to these issues has been neglected, and then offer some further thoughts
towards clarification and synthesis.
Contemporary Developments: A Brief Survey

Freud (e.g. 1913, 1933) located his contribution within the domain of science and
scientific psychology. Yet mainstream academic psychology—especially the Anglo-
American tradition—has long dismissed his theory precisely on the grounds of its being
an archaic relic of little scientific worth (but see Petocz 2004, 2015). This rejection
continues even as psychology begins to embrace silently1 many of Freud’s ideas—in ‘hot’
and ‘embodied’ cognition, conceptual metaphor, attachment theory, evolutionary
approaches to motivation and emotion, and various key factors in the dynamics of
successful psychotherapeutic interventions.
In contrast, those within psychoanalysis concerned with promoting its scientific status
have explicitly embraced developments in mainstream psychology’s putatively scientific
heartland, namely, cognitive science and neuroscience.2 Both the information-processing
model of the mind from cognitive science and the ‘neuromania’ (Tallis 2011) that has
gripped psychology and extended to psychoanalysis in the new disciplines
neuropsychoanalysis (Solms and Turnbull 2011) and psychodynamic neuroscience
(Fotopoulou 2012; Fotopoulou, Pfaff, and Conway 2012) have clearly influenced
psychoanalytic treatments of symbolism, the primary process, and dreaming.
Symbolism: Contemporary Developments and Questions
Freud singled out symbolism as a field ‘in which we have new things to learn and do in
fact discover new things every day’ (1910: 142), as being ‘perhaps the most remarkable
(p. 257) chapter of the theory of dreams’ (1916/17: 151), and as raising ‘the most
interesting and hitherto unsolved problems’ (1923a: 242).
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The received view is that throughout the history of psychoanalysis there have been
significant changes in how the field has dealt with symbols, with one of the most fruitful
being the evolving conception of symbolization (Levy 2012; Roussillon 2015). We have
advanced beyond the narrow Freudian symbol as defensive substitute dominated by
primary process thought and based on the unconscious as a container of repressed
thoughts (see Deri 1984; Jones 1916). We have shifted from symbolism to symbolization,
the latter encompassing two additional notions that are regarded as human
developmental achievements especially important in clinical considerations.
The first is the idea—earlier promoted in the work of Klein, Sharpe, and Segal—that the
capacity for symbolization is not merely a defensive and pathological process, as Freud
maintained, but is also adaptive and progressive, allowing for healthy accommodation to
the privations of life, as in the use of symbols in play, imagination, and creativity. Here,
symbolization involves representing an absent object (rather than only a repressed one)
(Rayner 1991), and can become the basis for later forms of ‘adaptive regression’ (Holt
2002; Kris 1952).
The second new notion—emerging from the work of British analysts such as Rycroft,
Winnicott, and Bion—is that the capacity for symbolization is equivalent to, or the basis
of, the capacity for thinking.3 This is important to contemporary psychoanalysis since
‘symbols are essential for thinking and for storing emotional experiences’ (da Rocha
Barros and da Rocha Barros 2011: 879, my emphasis; see also Bucci 1997a, 1997b, 2008).
In sum: ‘Symbolization is a broader concept than symbolism … it includes secondary
process as well as primary process thought, and is considered a process of linking and
meaning-making’ (Aragno 1997; Freedman 1998). ‘This process corresponds closely with
Bion’s (1962) concept of “alpha function”, which he considered a kind of mental
digestion’ (Taylor 2010: 184, my emphasis).
Clinical applications have expanded accordingly onto the various ways in which symbolic
processes can be prevented, damaged, or destroyed in trauma and psychosis (Levy 2012).
Breakdowns in symbolization amount to breakdowns in the ability to engage in cognitive
and emotional information processing. The aim now becomes one of the analyst using his
or her containing function to restore and enhance the patient’s damaged capacity for
symbolization (Deri 1984; Green 1975). Taylor (2010) discusses several case studies, all of
which turn on the analyst assisting the traumatized patient to slowly acquire ‘the capacity
to contain and modulate intense affects, and to use the symbolic system of language to
think and talk about emotionally painful childhood experiences’ (Taylor 2010: 195).
These developments prompt a number of questions. Is Freud’s notion of

(p. 258)
symbolism indeed restricted to an archaic, primitive, regressive, defensive, pathological

process, where the symbolized is invariably repressed? And is that notion to be
distinguished from that of the use of symbolism as a progressive, healthy, creative, and
functional ego process? If yes, what is the relationship between these two? Further, is
Freudian symbolism to be distinguished from the later concept of symbolization as the
basis of the capacity for thought and for the processing of emotional experience? If yes,
Page 3 of 30

how does this new foundational notion of symbolization relate to the other? Did Freud
overlook this last type of symbolization?
The Primary Process: Contemporary Developments and Questions
Freud pronounced the existence of primary process laws in the id to be ‘one new fact,
whose discovery we owe to psycho-analytic research’ (1940: 164). He introduced the
concept of the primary process as a type of mental functioning (unconscious and
irrational) differing from secondary process (conscious and rational) thinking and
occurring in phenomena (dreams, jokes, symptoms, etc.) that are not amenable to
explanation in terms of the latter (Freud 1895, 1900, 1915a, 1940). He described the
primary process both in terms of free-flowing (as opposed to bound) psychic energy
involving mobility of drive cathexes, and producing, for example, the primitive, infantile
hallucinatory attempts at gratification in dreaming (Freud 1895: 326–7) and in terms of
the mental mechanisms of condensation and displacement that contribute to the special
characteristics of the unconscious (Freud 1900, 1905: 88–9; see also Holt 1967, 2009;
Rapaport 1951). The primary process operates in accordance with the pleasure principle
(the seeking of immediate and direct gratification), but then becomes modified and
constrained by the reality principle to produce the secondary processes that allow for the
realistic pursuit of gratification (Freud 1911).
This contribution, pronounced revolutionary and original (Jones 1953; Robbins 2004), was
initially faced with the same treatment as was the theory of symbolism. Gammelgaard
(2006) remarks that early theorists were:
working in a tradition of classical metapsychology trying to rescue the concept of

primary process from its connotation of a primitive, chaotic form of thinking,
making it useful for understanding sophisticated and creative thinking, [whereas]
today there is a radically different approach to the concept of primary process and
the whole of Freudian metapsychology.
(Gammelgaard 2006: 94)4
This radically different approach saw the concept of the primary process become
(p. 259)
absorbed into cognitive science (e.g. Bucci 1997a, 1997b). Gammelgaard (2006) discusses
Bucci’s echoing of Schafer’s (1976) ‘two languages’ view, where the primary process is
presented in terms either of biology (specifically nervous system energy) or of
psychological systems in the mental apparatus. Bucci’s preferred solution is to reject the
concepts of energy and instinct and other central concepts of the metapsychology.5
According to Gammelgaard, this rejection, arising from a failure to see how the
physiological drive ‘level’ fits with that of the psychological and clinical, is the central
problem of the fate of the primary process when it has been absorbed into cognitive
science.
Page 4 of 30

Nevertheless, more recent accounts have kept up with the gradual shift to second-
generation (embodied) cognitive science (Kövecses 2005) and then to cognitive
neuroscience. For example, Brakel and her colleagues (2002) originally provided an
exclusively perceptual-cognitive view of the primary process as involving automatic,
unconscious, typically associative, relatively fast, processing. This primary process,
shared with other animals, is developmentally and evolutionarily adaptive, and its formal
aspect can be indexed in humans via categorization of similarity based on attributes (e.g.
shared individual features) as opposed to relations (e.g. shared global configurations), as
assessed by the Geometric Categorisation Task (GeoCat) (Brakel et al. 2000). Brakel and
colleagues initially claimed that the primary process is not per se emotional and
pathological, but that—as demonstrated in their empirical research—people will naturally
engage in it under certain emotional or pathological conditions (Brakel 2004; Brakel and
Shevrin 2005). More recently, in keeping with the shift towards embodiment in cognitive
science, they have conceded that the primary process is emotion-based (Cutler and
Brakel 2014), and also that their account fits well with recent neuroscientific accounts
(Bazan et al. 2013). They conclude that the primary process is not restricted to
impulsivity, regression, and symptom formation, but is also healthy and adaptive.
Hopkins (2012, 2015, 2016, and this volume), in demonstrating the consilience of
psychoanalysis and neuroscience, gives equal attention to biological and psychological
aspects of the primary process. He argues that the concepts of variational free energy
(FE) and the Bayesian brain developed by Karl Friston and colleagues (Carhart-Harris
and Friston 2010; Friston 2010; Hobson et al. 2014) can be mapped onto Freud’s early
formulations in his Project for a Scientific Psychology. One suggestion of contemporary
neuroscience is that the brain is a Helmholtzian inference-making machine, innately
supplied with a ‘virtual reality generator’ that ‘produces the fictive prior beliefs that
Freud described as the primary process’ (Hopkins 2016: 1). These prior beliefs undergo a
process of Bayesian updating via inference. The brain has evolved to minimize FE via
increasing accuracy and decreasing complexity. In waking both accuracy and complexity
(p. 260) are increased, but in dreaming (and in symptoms) complexity, which is
‘conceptually linked with emotional conflict and trauma’ (2016: 8), is reduced. Mental
disorder ‘is thus caused by computational complexity’ (2016: 1). This complexity theory
‘integrates the full range of psychoanalytic hypotheses about dreaming, development, and
disorder with the perspective of FE neuroscience, where they might receive additional
testing’ (2016: 10).6
With this line in mind, Modell (2014) claims that Freud’s distinction between primary and
secondary processes is fundamentally biological and one of the few scientifically
confirmed psychoanalytic ideas, because neuroscientists have ‘found the neural
correlates of Freud’s primary and secondary process’ (2014: 813). He argues that Freud
failed to see that there were two types of primary process: dreaming, which is wish-
fulfilling; and waking, which functions instead as an inference-making tool useful for
survival. Therefore, Freud was wrong to assign anticipation of danger to the secondary
process and to claim that the primary process ignores reality.7
Page 5 of 30

Here, again, questions arise. Is the primary process a biological process, a psychological
process, or both? Is it restricted to what is archaic, primitive, and infantile, or is it also
involved in creative and healthy functioning? Is it restricted to unconscious thinking in
general? Was Freud wrong to claim that the primary process is ‘cut off from relations
with the external world’ when in fact it is ‘immediately and directly involved with
perception and with an individual’s affective communication’ (Dorpat 2001: 449)? Is the
primary process the initial condition of mind, preceding the secondary process in both
evolutionary and developmental terms, or do both emerge together during development
(Holt 2002, 2009)? Is the primary process evolutionarily maladaptive or adaptive? Is
dreaming primary process different from waking primary process? Did Freud mistakenly
restrict the primary process to the dreaming model?
Dreams: Contemporary Developments and Questions
According to Freud, dreams are the productions of the primary-process dream-work

mechanisms that ‘make use of any symbolizations that are already present in unconscious
thinking’ (1900: 349). They are the mental phenomena whose interpretation is both ‘the
royal road to knowledge of the unconscious mind’ (1900: 608) and ‘the most complete
piece of work the young science has done up to the present’ (1912: 265).
Contemporary developments have focused on three closely interrelated themes: dreaming

as regressive, disguised wish-fulfilment versus dreaming as progressive snap (p. 261) shot
of the mind; dreaming as basic thinking involving fruitful psychological work, a process
that continues during the waking state; and dreaming as neurophysiologically based
complexity reduction.
The first theme continues Jung’s original objection to Freud’s seeing the dream as vehicle
of disguised repressed wish-fulfilment. In his revisiting of Freudian dream theory,
Robbins (2004) points to a number of post-Freudian theorists—among them Fairbairn,
Kohut, and Hartmann—who ‘elaborated the idea that the dream is a snapshot
dramatization or depiction, a kind of map of what is on the mind of the dreamer at a
particular moment during the night, as contrasted to an unconscious disguise’ (Robbins
2004: 357, my emphasis). This is related to the debate about whether dream bizarreness
is the natural form of dreaming content or whether it is produced by the Freudian
‘censor’s’ distorting activity (Boag 2006, 2012; Maze and Henry 1996; Petocz 2006).
Robbins argues that Freud’s material leads to two radically different and incompatible
theories of dreaming—a primary process theory and a secondary process theory—and
that the latter is favoured by Freud, by virtue of his references to representation and
symbolism. Robbins complains that Freud neglected his own more revolutionary
hypothesis that dreaming represents a ‘qualitatively distinct protolinguistic expression of
mind’ (Robbins 2004: 380) involving hallucinatory actualization. In support of this he
alludes to the Solms-Hobson dream debate, and to Braun’s (1999) PET scan brain studies
that indicate relative neural quiescence during dreaming of those parts of the brain that
are involved in secondary process activity.
Page 6 of 30

The second theme—arising from Bion’s work—is that of dreaming as the basic form of
unconscious emotional thinking. We are constantly dreaming, even when awake, and this
is exactly what is prevented or damaged in psychosis. Schneider (2010) sees this as a
great paradigm shift in psychoanalytic history:
Freud does not believe that, by dreaming, the dreamer does psychological work
that helps deal with unsettling emotional experience; rather, he believes that
dreaming dissipates the threat of overwhelming anxiety caused by the tension of
repressed impulses originating in childhood … Dreamwork accomplishes
censorship, editing and compromising … There is no psychological work (yielding
motivational advance) inherent in the disguising and smuggling function of dream-
work.
(Schneider 2010: 524)
According to the new view dreams are a manifestation of the symbolic function, a first
step in the process of thought. This also challenges Freud’s (1940) claim that psychosis
and dreams are parallel because of the prevalence in both of the primary process.
Freudian dream theory is not directly applicable to psychosis, because the psychotic
dreamer’s lack of associations and the concreteness of the hallucination preclude the
usual psychoanalytic approach to their interpretation; they are not genuine dreams
because they are not the result of dream-work mechanisms (Capozzi and De Masi 2001).
Vinocur Fischbein and Miramón (2015) see Bion’s work less as a paradigm shift and more
as a special extension of Freud’s which, based on clinical work with psychotics, (p. 262)
draws out the implications for dreaming of the new notion of symbolization. Instead of
symbolization being an expression of repressed material, Bion ‘inverts the Freudian
assertion … in his opinion it is symbolization and the dream-work-alpha which makes
remembering possible’ (Vinocur Fischbein and Miramón 2015: 987).
The third theme concerns the neuroscience of dreaming. This topic has been
controversial largely by virtue of the long-standing Solms-Hobson dispute.8 Hobson
initially proposed an ‘activation-synthesis’ model of dreaming (Hobson and McCarley
1977) which rejected the Freudian wish-fulfilment theory, until Solms showed (Solms and
Turnbull 2002) that dreaming involves activation of the same (i.e. dopaminergic) neural
system as is involved in waking goal-seeking and reward-consummatory behaviour.
Hobson insists that Freud’s seminal dream book ‘still exerts an antiscientific force on our
understanding of dreaming’ (Hobson 2014: 4). Yet, as Solms (2013) points out, Hobson’s
views (most recently with his shift to a ‘protoconsciousness theory’ (Hobson 2009)) are
getting ever closer to Freud’s. Indeed, his recent collaborative paper ‘Virtual reality and
consciousness inference in dreaming’ (Hobson et al. 2014) has been drawn upon in
Hopkins’s (2016) complexity theory of dreaming and mental disorder (see also Hopkins,
this volume).
Once more, questions arise. Is the contrast between dreams as disguised wishes and
dreams as meaningful expressions or snapshots of the dreamer’s mind a genuine
contrast? Did Freud offer two radically different and conceptually incompatible theories
Page 7 of 30

of dreaming, a primary-process theory of dreams as hallucinatory wish-fulfilments and a

secondary-process theory of dreams as employing dream-work mechanisms that require
symbolization? Are dreams equivalent to unconscious processing of experience, such that
we can be said to be dreaming all the time? Or are they a particular type of unconscious
processing that requires the sensory attenuation of the sleeping state, as in the
complexity-reduction thesis? Is dreaming in psychosis different from normal dreaming,
and, if so, how?
Obviously, these and the earlier questions are a mere subset of possible questions that
emerge from the contemporary scene. There is insufficient space here to address them in
the systematic or thorough way that is needed. So what I propose to do in the space that
remains is first to indicate where and how revisiting some of Freud’s material might help
to clarify the issues and lead us to reassess his contribution, and then to offer some
further thoughts towards clarification and synthesis.
Revisiting Freud’s Material

The first step is to revisit Freud’s theory of symbolism, showing how much broader it is
than is usually claimed. This involves also addressing two problems in his treatment (the
‘system unconscious’ and the role of language) whose resolution has direct implications
for thinking about symbolism, the primary process, and dreaming. From this the
(p. 263)
focus shifts away from the distinction between primary and secondary processes onto the
distinction between what is motivationally primary and what is motivationally derivative,
and this takes us to Freud’s much-disputed drive theory of motivation.
The Freudian Broad (FB) Theory of Symbolism
Within Freud’s thought may be discerned a general, unified theory of symbolism and
symbolic activity—the Freudian Broad (FB) theory—which is both more encompassing
and more sound than what has typically been identified, even by Freud, as his theory—the
Freudian Narrow (FN) theory (Petocz 1999, 2011a, 2011b).
The FB theory understands something’s being a symbol as involving not just individual
objects (a church spire symbolizes the phallus), but also more complex actions and events
(playing sport symbolizes—among many other things—Oedipal competition), in a process
that can be located anywhere along dimensions of normal–pathological, conscious–
unconscious, and conventional–nonconventional, although it is the controversial
nonconventional symbolism that is the focus of Freud’s attention. This theory supports
the continuity of the symbolic function through so-called primary and secondary
processes. However, the theory requires for its conceptual coherence and consolidation
the rejection of two problematic propositions advanced by Freud, namely, that symbolism
is the natural mode of expression of the ‘system unconscious’ (Freud 1912: 260; 1915c)
and that symbolism is a language (1916–17: 166). Failure to appreciate these problems
Page 8 of 30

has meant that the propositions have become absorbed uncritically into post-Freudian
developments and influenced assessments of Freud’s contribution.
However, Freud also offered an ‘epistemic’ conception of the unconscious (Freud 1912,
1915a, 1923b, 1933); what makes a mental state unconscious is simply that the subject is
unaware of it. This coheres with Freud’s preferred ‘dynamic’ conception of repression—
that what is repressed is rendered unconscious by a competing motivational force (Freud
1915b)—as opposed to the ‘structural’ conception of repression—that the qualitatively
distinct characteristics of the unconscious preclude entry into consciousness. Combining
the epistemic unconscious with dynamic repression clarifies the distinction between
primary and secondary processes as they apply to thinking in general and to symbolism in
particular. First, the primary process as irrational and involving mechanisms of
condensation and displacement is not restricted to unconscious processes, so this attempt
—as also various later attempts—to characterize unconscious processes as differing
qualitatively from conscious processes runs into difficulties (see Petocz 1999: 154–61).9
Second, the primary process conceived as primitive infantile hallucinatory gratification is
primary neither logically nor temporally, for the infant must first experience the reality
that is subsequently wishfully hallucinated. This challenges (p. 264) the forced gulf
between the primary-process id and the secondary-process ego. Thus, the worry about
whether symbolism is a strictly primary process phenomenon, a characteristic of archaic
thinking, or whether it is a secondary process, adopted by the ego either for purposes of
disguise or as part of healthy ego development and necessary for sublimation, is
misguided—symbolism occurs across the board, beginning with the infant’s interested
perceiving of similarities, resulting in associations (e.g. breast associations to round, soft
objects) that can be revived at any later stage.
Further, Freud’s failure to adhere consistently to the distinction between the conventional
symbolism of language and nonconventional symbolism encouraged psychoanalytic
theorizing not only to conflate the two, but also to go further, into conflating language
and thought.10 Nonconventional symbolism in Freud’s sense is not a communicative
system of arbitrarily or freely chosen signifiers lacking any similarities to their referents.
It is a special case of nonverbal motivated mistaken identity, typically based on perceived
similarities of form or function, when one thing (which an ‘interpreter’ subsequently
identifies as the ‘symbol’) is treated as if it were or is acted towards as if it were another
thing (which an ‘interpreter’ subsequently identifies as the ‘symbolized’). It includes the
person’s having two simultaneous beliefs, whose contents (where, say, X is the symbol
and Y is the symbolized) are ‘Here is Y’ alongside ‘Here is X’. Moreover, in this process of
compromise formation neither repression nor active searching for a substitute is
necessary. The drive takes the substitute when the primary object is unavailable, which
may involve mere physical absence. This process can be understood as an extension of
the straightforward satisfaction of an unopposed drive impulse, but now involving two or
more impulses/wishes satisfied within existing constraints.11 Nevertheless, that
symbolism is a type of compromise formation means that it involves some kind of mental
division,12 one part mistaking the symbol for the symbolized, while another part treats
Page 9 of 30

the symbol non-symbolically—though there is variability in the extent to which conscious

and unconscious processes are balanced.
In sum, the basis of (nonconventional) symbolism lies in four empirical facts: (i) the initial
primary objects and consummatory activities of the innate instinctual drives; (ii) the long
period of infantile dependence; (iii) the connection between the drives and cognitive
structures, which leads to the ‘interested’ perceiving of similarities between (p. 265) the
primary objects and other, non-primary, objects; and (iv) the unavailability (to some part
of the mind), mainly through repression, of those primary objects, and the inhibition,
mainly through repression, of the expression of the consummatory activities with respect
to particular primary objects. The crucial point is (iii), for attention now moves from the
distinction between primary and secondary processes onto the more salient distinction
between what is motivationally primary and what is motivationally derivative or
secondary. But further elucidation is required. Freud’s approach alone respects the
logical constraints and meets the psychological requirements that any theory of
symbolism must follow (see Petocz 1999: 239–65, summarized in Figure 3, 241). One of
those logical constraints is that a theory of symbolism, by virtue of symbolism’s being a
three-term relation in which one of the terms is a cognizing organism, must be a
psychological theory.13 There follows a set of psychological requirements, amongst which
the most important is that the theory offer a motivational account to explain the
ontogenesis of symbolism, the selection of the symbolized, and the unidirectional nature
of the symbolic equation. The account must also explain mental plurality and the notion of
‘interested’ perceiving, and it must address a theme that, as shown in the first half of this
chapter, crops up regularly in contemporary developments—the question of the relation
between the biological and the psychological. For that, we need to revisit Freudian drive
theory.
Freudian Drive Theory: A Motivation-Cognition-Affect Matrix
Freudian drive theory has long been controversial.14 Even within Freud-friendly
neuropsychoanalysis and psychodynamic neuroscience, there is the view (e.g. Watt 2012)
that Freud’s theory is outdated and clumsily mechanistic, ignores the Darwinian insight
that homeostatic needs must have access to the perceptual and cognitive machinery of
consciousness, cannot accommodate the primacy of attachment and other social needs,
and has been superseded by the idea of multiple motivational/affective systems (e.g.
Panksepp 1998). These criticisms could legitimately be applied to traditional drive
theories—McDougallian, Hullian, Skinnerian—which are indeed inadequate. But Freud’s
conception of drives is very different; it goes far beyond any traditional conception,
offering a motivational model that stands out amongst drive theories in providing the
required complexity and sophistication. If, then, we come to Freud’s material with our
traditional conception of drive, it is difficult to appreciate Freud’s originality, easy to see
why ‘the drives have proven to be a huge problem in psychoanalytic theorizing’ (Solms
and Zellner 2012: 51), and easy to reject prematurely (not via straw-manning but via
ignoratio elenchi) Freud’s formulations.
Page 10 of 30

Freudian drive theory offers a realist and determinist motivational approach whose
sophistication as a motivation-cognition-affect15 matrix that is needed to explain all
behaviour has not been fully appreciated. The seminal exposition of this argument
appears in John Maze’s (1983) book The Meaning of Behaviour (see also Boag 2005, 2012,
2017a, 2017b; Mackay and Petocz 2011b; Maze 1952, 1987/2009, 1993; Newbery 2011;
Petocz 1999: 220ff.). This work challenges the standard view of Freudian drive as
somehow divorced from cognitive and other psychological processes, and the related
view that Freud struggled to integrate two competing theories of motivation—a drive-
discharge model on the one hand and a psychological model on the other.
Freud’s innovation centres on the intimate connection between the biological and the
psychological, and is given its clearest account in what has come to be regarded as the
locus classicus of his model of motivation—the famous passage in the Interpretation of
Dreams (Freud 1900: 565–6) describing the hungry baby. This passage is variously cited
as evidence for Freud’s drive-discharge view, involving ‘quasi-neurological or
metapsychological details and speculations’ (Pataki 2014: 33); as evidence for Freud’s
cognitive/psychological view, ‘The basis for a cognitive, as opposed to an instinctual
model of motivation’ (Dahl 1983: 41, my emphasis); or as evidence for both, that is, for
Freud’s proposing ‘side by side two quite different basic conceptions of motivation’ (Dahl
1983: 40). But if we consider not only the details within the passage itself but also the
material that immediately precedes and follows what is usually quoted, then Freud is
identifying psychological states (e.g. perceiving, believing, remembering) as crucial
evolved components of drive-consummatory activity, which ‘makes use of movement for
purposes remembered in advance. But all the complicated thought-activity which is spun
out from the mnemic image to the moment at which the perceptual identity is established
by the external world—all this activity of thought merely constitutes a roundabout path to
wish-fulfilment which has been made necessary by experience’ (Freud 1900: 566–7, my
emphasis). Thus, the homeostatic needs of Freudian drives clearly do have access to the
perceptual and cognitive machinery of consciousness, which has evolved to allow the
drives to ‘find’ their objects in the external world; there is no disjunct between a cognitive
and an instinctual motivational theory. Freud reinforces this position in his description of
instincts and their vicissitudes (Freud 1915c), where he refers to an instinct’s appearing
to us as ‘a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical
representative of the stimuli originating within the organism and reaching the
mind’ (1915c: 121–2), regarding which Strachey offers the editorial suggestion that ‘the
contradiction is more apparent than real’ (1915c: 113).16 Moreover, Freud sees the
(p. 267) evolved cognitive and perceptual apparatus as sustaining an elaborated drawn-
out process of consummatory behaviour. He contrasts the reflex arc response to a mere
stimulus with the far more complicated and developed response to instincts, in that they
‘make far higher demands on the nervous system and cause it to undertake involved and
interconnected activities by which the external world is so changed as to afford
satisfaction to the internal source of stimulation’ (1915c: 118–20, my emphasis). These
‘involved and interconnected’ activities include the various attachment and social
behaviours. Freud’s description here, when combined with his insistence on the
Page 11 of 30

deterministic definition of instinctual drives, in which the ‘desire’ component of the

standard desire-plus-belief model of action is transformed from the teleological desire for
into the deterministic driven by, is reflected in Maze’s paraphrase: the motivational
structure’s innately provided consummatory response is caused to run off and ‘extended
spatiotemporally to a tremendous degree by the fact of cognition’ (Maze 1952: 38).
Moreover, Freud’s commitment to the ‘bodily ego’ (Wollheim 1982) shows that it is not
merely cognition that is accommodated in this more sophisticated drive theory but also
cognition’s agent, the ego or self, the executive that is widely supposed (e.g. in ego
psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive motivation theory) to stand above the drives.
Maze (1987/2009) identifies two strains in Freud’s thinking—both appearing strikingly
within a single paragraph of The Ego and the Id (Freud 1923b: 25): the ego-instincts view
where the ego is ‘that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of
the external world’, suggesting that the ego, being comprised of modified id drives, is
instinctually based; and the ego as just a set of control functions, in which perception
‘plays the part which in the id falls to instinct’. Yet, notes Maze, perception alone,
furnishing policy-neutral factual information, cannot initiate action without that
information being perceived as relevant by some existing motivation, and so both drive
and perception acting together are necessary for the production of any action. Moreover,
the self or psyche, being rooted in instinctual drives, is not ‘passive’. As Maze, following
Freud’s (1923b: 23) reference to Groddeck, puts it, we ‘are lived by our instincts’ (1983:
176). In sum, disconnecting the ego or self from instinctual drives is not consistent with
Freud’s overall treatment of the ego, nor with other material in which he includes a
Darwinian evolutionary acknowledgement of attachment theory:
We have no reason to dispute the existence and importance of original, innate,

distinguishing characteristics of the ego … we shall not overlook the fact that the
id and ego are originally one; nor does it imply any mystical overvaluation of
heredity if we think it credible that, even before the ego has come into existence,
the lines of development, trends and reactions which it will later exhibit are
already laid down for it.
(Freud 1937: 240)
Thus, Freud’s motivational model sees the primary drives as foundational

(p. 268)
perceptually and cognitively based structures, together providing the mental plurality
required to explain internal conflict.17 They have evolved in the service of basic biological
needs and in that same service have become extended into innate psychological social
and attachment systems. The result is that everything we do, no matter how sophisticated
and apparently removed from biological sources, is some form—either direct or
elaborated—of drive-consummatory action (Gardner 1993; Maze 1983; Newbery 2011;
Petocz 1999).18
With respect to the ‘affect’ component of the matrix, the emotional systems are, like
cognition itself, evolved drive-ancillary structures via which the drives respond, using
what James (1890: 471) called ‘the bodily sounding board’, to events pertaining to their
Page 12 of 30

gratification/frustration. Just as there are no such things as non-cognition-connected

drives, so there are no such things as non-affect-connected drives, and no such things as
non-drive-based affects (e.g. if the hunger drive is frustrated, the organism may be
thrown into an angry emotional state and behave accordingly). The only difference is that
emotion is not an inevitable accompaniment or reaction. This is consistent with
Wollheim’s (1999) remarks that ‘emotion is posterior to both belief and desire’ (1999: 12)
and that ‘emotion rides into our lives on the back of desire’ (1999: 15).
In the light of this, we can see contemporary affective neuroscience as contributing to

fleshing out and implicitly confirming Freudian drive theory, albeit not without some
muddying of the waters. Hopkins (2004) suggests that Panksepp’s emotional command
systems are ‘roughly equivalent to what Freud meant by drives’ (2004: 237). It seems to
me that these systems confirm the motivation-cognition-affect matrix of Freudian drive
theory while remaining uncertain on the role of drive, the question of primary drives, and
the relations between drive, cognition, and affect. With respect to these systems
Panksepp (1998) appears to acknowledge implicitly that drives are primary and that
emotions are drive-ancillary. He says: ‘emotional abilities initially emerge from
“instinctual” operating systems of the brain, which allow animals to begin gathering food,
information, and other resources needed to sustain life’ (Panksepp 1998: 25). The drive-
ancillary nature of emotional reactions is reinforced in the later Panksepp and Biven
(2012) book, which begins: ‘All of us get angry at times, especially when our interests
(p. 269) are ignored or thwarted’ (2012: ix, my emphasis), and ends with reference to the
‘vastly interacting neural circuits that work in and for living bodies and that respond to
the challenges of the world by creating desired circumstances and avoiding those that are
harmful … emotional feelings are the experienced affective manifestations of such
interactions’ (Panksepp and Biven 2012: 500). Yet, when Panksepp discusses the origins
of the emotional command systems and how they differ from drives, he clearly has in
mind a Hullian-style theory of drives as abstract (and redundant) intervening variables
(1998: 168), which is one of those traditional conceptions of drives that, as noted earlier,
are inadequate and inferior to Freud’s. This may explain why Panksepp says ‘The most
primal affective-cognitive interaction in humans … is encapsulated in the phrases “I
want” and “I don’t want” ’ (1998: 27, my emphasis), adding examples such as dislike of
bitter foods, or desire for food. These examples suggest that reference to drive-cognitive
or motivational-cognitive interaction would be more appropriate. Thus, Panksepp’s list of
emotional command systems is, from the Freudian drive theory perspective, a
heterogeneous mix of: general aspects of all drives (SEEKING); specific drives
(SEXUALITY, CARE); behaviours (PLAY); and emotions (FEAR, RAGE, GRIEF). As
Newbery (2011) points out, finding evidence of neural underpinnings of various
behaviours is not sufficient for distinguishing an independent drive from its drive-
ancillary structures and pathways or from other drives; an evolutionary criterion for
identifying the primary drives is needed, and that is in any case implict in much of
contemporary affective neuroscience, as also in Freud.
Page 13 of 30

Given the standard perceptions of Freudian drive theory, it is not surprising that, as is
evident from my earlier brief survey, most theorists who discuss symbolism, the primary
process, and dreaming call for either abandoning or revising the Freudian
metapsychology. There is a perceived gulf between Freud’s (drive-based) metapsychology
and his clinical theory, leading theorists to ask whether we should abandon the instinctual
‘physiological level’ of the metapsychology of classical Freudian drive theory in favour of
the cognitive ‘psychological level’ of clinical theory. But Freud’s metapsychology—
keeping faith with his theory of the drive as a motivation-cognition-affect matrix—is more
comprehensive than is typically claimed. While the unifying role of this metapsychology
has been promoted by some authors (e.g. Aragno 1997, 2010; Kitcher and Wilkes 1988),
there is dispute about its characteristics, and little acknowledgement of the crucial role of
Freud’s broader drive theory (but see Boag 2017b).
Further Thoughts Towards Clarification and

Synthesis
Some of the questions listed in the first part of this chapter have been addressed
indirectly during the revisiting of Freud’s material, but we can now show more clearly the
implications and how they might apply in clinical examples.
One major question concerns the contrast between regressive, defensive disguise
(p. 270)
versus progressive, transparent, healthy accommodation to reality. Freud’s material

suggests an integration that argues against too forced a contrast. His drive theory,
underpinning the FB theory of symbolism, presents the mind as a society of competing
impulses involving multiple often-conflicting drives seeking gratification via elaborated
versions of their consummatory activities on their objects, and, where unavailable,
substitute activities and substitute objects. Compromise formations are ipso facto
motivation-cognition-affect accommodations to reality that also will typically include
defensive elements; evasion of and accommodation to reality operate simultaneously
within the complex situation. For example, in Freud’s eighteen-month-old grandson
Ernst’s famous ‘fort-da’ game (Freud 1920: 14–16), there is no awareness of what the
ritual symbolizes, but there are clearly both defensive and accommodative aspects to the
‘game’. Similarly, that ‘the dream is a slice of emotive-sentience, an expressive product of
a feeling/thinking brain’ (Aragno 2010: 11) is not incompatible with the fact that some of
the material in that expression requires ‘deciphering’ by virtue of its distortions
(‘disguise’). Since the dream is neither a deliberate communication nor subject to
deliberate disguise, the motivated mistaken identity that underlies dream symbolism
arises from the same set of motivational structures that are also responsible for the
dream’s being a snapshot of the mind’s emotional work, albeit while ‘reality testing’ is
typically and inadvertently ‘off-line’. This is consistent with the neuropsychological
complexity-reduction account, in which the fictive or counterfactual active inferences in
dreaming are simultaneously hallucinatory attempts at wish-fulfilment and involve
psychological work and emotional processing, thus challenging Schneider’s (2010) view
Page 14 of 30

that Freudian dream theory does not allow for ‘psychological work (yielding motivational
advance)’ (2010: 524). And, as Freud reminded us, not all dreams have a latent content.
They can range from repression-free hallucinated satisfaction of earlier conscious but
frustrated desire, as in little Anna Freud’s dream about eating the strawberries that she
had been earlier forbidden to eat (Freud 1900: 130), or existing desire, such as the
pressing need to empty a full bladder, all the way to the dream fragment of the psychotic
patient in which ‘two halves join together’ (a symbolic representation of desired reunion
with the temporarily absent analyst) (Roussillon 2015: 587). By contrast, daydreaming
and fantasy are hallucinatory experiences in which reality testing is deliberately or
knowingly suspended. This is the sense in which (day)dreaming as emotional work goes
on during waking. This is not to deny the significant difference between positions at
either end of the continuum—between, on the one hand, the psychotic who is locked into
the Segalian ‘symbolic equation’ (Segal 1958) and so is unable to play his violin in public
and, on the other hand, the virtuoso who can exercise supreme control in sublimating
sexuality and aggression into a public violin performance. It is, rather, to identify the
common factors that are in play in both cases: motivational multiplicity and competition
operating via the reality principle in the service of the pleasure principle with varying
levels of conscious awareness and with evasion of reality and accommodation to reality
operating simultaneously but applying to different aspects of the single complex
situation. Symbolic play can involve the conscious and deliberate adoption of a substitute
or (p. 271) ‘pretend’ object/situation with the suspension of disbelief that allows for
unconscious treatment of the symbol as if it were the symbolized; it is a kind of motivated
mistaken identity that involves a sliding scale of conscious awareness and unconscious
absorption (as in Pataki’s (2014, 2015) notion of engrossment). Adulthood sees the
extension of symbolic play into the variety of healthy ego-syntonic accommodative adult
forms (e.g. sport), forms of ‘controlled regression’, lucid dreaming, and so on. In sum,
defensive conflict resolution is not incompatible with accommodation to loss and change,
and in neither can all reality be avoided.19
Another major question concerns the relation of symbolism to psychosemiotics in general

and to language in particular. To begin with, separating nonconventional symbolism from
language allows us to see that all the references to interpretation, translation,
communication, and so on pertain to the person who is attempting to understand
(‘interpret’) what is going on—typically, to identify the symbolized. According to the FB
theory, the presence of symbolism in dreams is nothing to do with language, so claims
that there are two radically different theories of dreaming, as distinguished in the section
on ‘Dreams: contemporary developments and questions’, conflate the dream’s content
with the tools used by the dream interpreter. Further, to present the ‘mental digestion’ of
understanding and emotional processing as being an extension of narrow Freudian
symbolism into the new ‘symbolization’ in which symbols are needed for basic thinking is
misleading in two ways: it neglects prelinguistic mentality;20 and it repackages what is
already in Freud, that is, his clinical recognition of the emotional processing involved in
successfully ‘making the unconscious conscious’; since the sense of symptoms lies in
some connection with the patient’s experience, thinking that involves making links of
Page 15 of 30

personal significance (Mackay 2003) is needed in order to ‘make the unconscious

conscious’; merely being informed by the analyst about the unconscious content produces
no change ‘until the conscious idea, after the resistances have been overcome, has
entered into connection with the unconscious memory-trace’ (Freud 1915a: 175–6).
We can see the combination of both of these points illustrated in clinical phenomena. For
example, Heller (2013) refers to the famous wedding-night ritual of Freud’s patient in his
(1916/17) lecture on ‘The sense of symptoms’:
This case is rich in its symbolic content, but also shows how the meaning of the
ritual came to life once the woman could make the link between the obsessive
ritual and what it stood for in her actual experience. Her inability to symbolise
meant that the experience was repeated without any meaning for her. Once she
linked it to her wedding night, she was able to create room in her mind for the
symbolic meaning of her action.
(Heller 2013: 238, my emphasis)
(p. 272) Here, ‘inability to symbolise’ does not mean that there is no symbolism of the FB
motivated mistaken identity kind; she is of course symbolizing in just that way; instead, it
is being used to mean ‘inability to understand’, via making the personally significant
links, the actions that she feels compelled to execute repeatedly, and, a fortiori, inability
to engage in the type of symbolization that is comprised of articulation of that situation.
Another example is seen in Taylor’s (2010) discussion of the case of Parens’s (2004)
autobiographical Renewal of Life: Healing from the Holocaust. At the age of seventy-
three, on the sixtieth anniversary of the murder of his mother at Auschwitz, Parens began
to write the memories from his childhood, including his escape at age twelve from a camp
in Vichy France. The writing was an excruciatingly painful process that led to the
irruption of intense somatic reactions, including an eczema rash. Parens engaged in self-
analysis, leading to his ‘symbolization’ of the symptom, in this case meaning that he came
to discover its association with the lost memory of a coarse blanket. Notably, however,
Parens is aware that this insight will not clear the rash away immediately because it
needs to be emotionally processed: ‘skin reactions of this nasty kind … have to be, we
might say, detoxified and metabolized by the psyche and the body’ (in Taylor 2010: 188).
Taylor says: ‘As he was able gradually to tolerate and contain the dreaded affects, and
link them with verbal representations as he continued thinking and writing, Parens
presumably reduced the painful activation, which then allowed healing of his skin’ (2010:
189). Here, Parens’s ability to articulate and write about the ‘meaning’ of his symptom is
dependent on his prior nonlinguistic ability to perceive the salient connection.
The last example comes in the famous autobiographical case study, written after her
recovery, by a schizophrenic teenage girl (Sechehaye 1951), and with the analyst’s
technique of ‘symbolic realization’. Hospitalized teenage ‘Renee’ had an obsession with
(and accompanying psychotic fantasies about) apples, but would not eat those that were
bought for her by her therapist/analyst Sechehaye (whom she called ‘Mama’). Renee
Page 16 of 30

reports: ‘my eyes fell to her bosom, and when she insisted, “But why don’t you want the
apples I buy you?” I knew what I was yearning for so desperately, and I was able to bring
out, “Because the apples you buy are food for grownups and I want real apples, Mama’s
apples, like those”, and I pointed to Mama’s breasts’ (Sechehaye 1951: 70). Sechehaye
understood, cut a piece from one of the apples she had bought and said ‘Mama is going to
feed her little Renee. It is time to drink the good milk from Mama’s apples’. Renee
continues: ‘She put the piece in my mouth, and with my eyes closed, my head against her
breast, I ate, or rather drank, my milk. A nameless felicity flowed into my heart’ (1951:
70). Here, the analyst has provided the patient with the containment that allows her to
suddenly identify the symbolic meaning of apples, and the analyst then engages in a safe
and controlled way with that symbolic meaning, communicating it to her patient in a way
that makes it emotionally digestible, by understanding the symbolism and explicitly
engaging with it, in an action that is equivalent to symbolic play. Here, again, articulation
and dialogue ride on the coat-tails of the FB theory’s mix of nonconventional symbolism’s
motivated mistaken identity and its understanding and use by the therapist in symbolic
play.
(p. 273) My final thought concerns the special nature of the Freudian contribution. The
psychoanalytic field, like mainstream psychology, is characterized by what Rayner (1991)
calls ‘the empiricist suspicion of system-building’ that ‘can bring about neglect of
coherent theory’ (1991: 10). Yet that suspicion targets the type of system-building that
was also rejected by Freud. His understanding of science and the kind of system that can
be built via science was quite different. When addressing the question whether
psychoanalysis offers its own Weltanschauung, he insisted that the scientific world view,
of which psychoanalysis is a part, is to be contrasted with the kind of grand system
offered by religion or Marxism, namely, ‘an intellectual construction which solves all the
problems of our existence on the basis of one overriding hypothesis’ (Freud 1933: 158).
That Freud could offer a genuinely integrative system from within the scientific
perspective was made possible by his rejection of the dichotomy of Natur- and
Geisteswissenschaften, and along with it dualism in its various guises (matter–spirit, free–
determined, universal–particular) and various resulting pseudo-dichotomies
(hermeneutic–causal, nomothetic–idiographic, individual–social, biological–psychological).
While there is no doubt that the contemporary psychoanalytic scene involves a wide
range of clinical practices, observational methods, general theories, and cross-
pollinations with other disciplines, nevertheless, the view that we have ‘moved on’ from
Freud closes the door prematurely. The insights and context-derived clarifications in his
material can prevent unnecessary fragmentation. The special nature of his synthesizing
contribution lies in the fact that it unifies and integrates without loss of due attention to
complexity and diversity. In this, it leads the way for psychology more generally, and one
of the main challenges for contemporary psychoanalysis is to show how that is the case.21
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Notes:
(1) That is, with careful terminological revision (e.g. ‘implicit processing’, ‘affective
schemas’) and with no mention of Freud or psychoanalysis, thereby occluding important
theoretical connections, such as those between Freud, Darwin, and the supposedly new
attachment theory (see Hopkins 2004).
(2) There are strong grounds (which I cannot go into here) for arguing that psychology
itself is misguided in how it pursues these directions (see e.g. Bickhard 1996; Heil 1981;
Hibberd 2005, 2014; Malcolm 1977; Maze 1991; McMullen 2011; Michell 1988; Skinner
1987; Bennett and Hacker 2003; Mackay and Petocz 2011a, 2011b; Petocz and Mackay
2013). And, since Freud led the way in not neglecting mentality, body, emotion,
motivation, and evolution, there is no conceptual (as opposed to sociopolitical) need for
psychoanalysis to detour through these mainstream ‘corrective’ movements.
(3) This echoes the Cassirer–Langer post-Kantian view of the symbol as form of thinking
(Cassirer 1923/1953, 1925/1955, 1929/1957; Langer 1942), but it also converges with the
cognitive science acceptance of Fodor’s (1975, 1985, 2008) ‘language of thought’ thesis, a
thesis that, according to Heil (1981), ‘rests on a mistake’ (321).
(4) Consistent with my earlier remarks, Vanheule et al. (2011) claim that the primary and
secondary processes are both clinically useful and important for aligning psychoanalytic
concepts with cognitive science and the neurosciences, and Ridenour (2016) commends
Robbins’s (2012) updating of Freud’s primary process into the notion of the ‘primordial
mind’ on the grounds that it integrates modern neuroscience findings and attachment
research with Freud’s basic formulation.
(5) Hence, when Bucci later extends her cognitive approach to absorb the focus on
emotion and motivation from second-generation cognitive science, she talks of ‘emotional
schemas’ (Bucci 2008: 57) rather than drives. So also in Westen’s (1998, 1999)
championing of the psychoanalytic approach by assimilating it to the dominant
connectionism in cognitive psychology: ‘Was Freud wrong in some of his fundamental
Page 27 of 30

ideas about human nature? Without doubt. His theory of drives was highly
problematic’ (1998: 362).
(6) Hopkins’s references to parallels, isomorphism, and consilience, and his glossing of
‘integrate’ as ‘maps onto’ is consistent with his caveat that the specific content of any
particular theory (including Freudian) is not needed. Nevertheless, the point is that there
is nothing in the neuroscience that disconfirms psychoanalysis.
(7) This may explain Yigael’s (2005) charge that Freud failed to explain ‘why evolution
would create such a “blind” information-processing system that is not as “smart” as the
secondary process’ (2005: 79).
(8) The prominence of this dispute in the literature (see Boag 2017a for a recent
discussion) confirms my earlier remark about the psychoanalytic embracing of
contemporary neuroscience.
(9) [Eds: For alternative, non-epistemic ways of distinguishing qualitatively between

conscious and unconscious see the contributions to this Handbook by Fuchs, Phillips, and
Finkelstein.]
(10) According to this view, a naked thought must be symbolized in order for it to be a
thought. This, as I mentioned earlier, became enshrined as the received view in cognitive
information-processing theory of mind, where thinking is a symbol-using process. It is still
the dominant view today, despite several cogent arguments against it, the most simple
being that learning the first object-word-user relation requires prior perceiving/cognizing
of those three terms (see references in footnote 2).
(11) This is a clarification (prompted by Pataki, pers. comm.; see also Pataki 2015: 24–6) of
my earlier somewhat misleading claim that ‘it is an outcome of a mistaken belief in the
identity of symbol and symbolized, a belief whose juxtaposition with a true belief in the
non-identity of symbol and symbolized allows (via a process which is not properly
understood) for the satisfaction of the repression-driven search for substitutes via
compromise formations’ (Petocz 1999: 195).
(12) The issue of mental plurality is controversial, but it seems to me unavoidable given
the facts of conflict and contradictory beliefs. One way of conceiving this is to link it to
motivational plurality (see ‘Freudian Drive Theory: A Motivation-Cognition-Affect Matrix’
and footnote 15; also Boag 2005).
(13) There is a big difference between identifying the third term of the triadic symbolic
relation as a cognizing organism (as I do) and identifying it as an interpreter, because the
latter implies linguistic or semiotic functions. There need be no interpreter or
interpretation or communication; the organism simply acts towards X as if it were Y. It is
for this reason that Freudian symbolism is not part of the Peircean theory of signs.
(14) [Ed: For different appraisals of Freudian drive theory see contributions from
Backstrom, Sandford, and Brook and Young, this volume.]
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(15) I am following standard psychological practice here in using ‘affect’ as an umbrella

term covering emotion, feelings, and moods—as in Panksepp’s (1998) ‘affective’
neuroscience that identifies ‘emotional’ command systems. Nevertheless, there is a vast
literature involving considerable debate about these terms.
(16) Freud claims that in mental life we know the instincts only by their aim; we are not
perceptually connected to the biochemical processes of hunger (though we may feel the
gnawing of the empty stomach), but we certainly immediately and urgently feel that we
‘want food’. Desire, as Wollheim (1999) comments, is ‘from the beginning of life, object-
directed’ (1999: 14; see also Maze 1993). Freud clearly did not share the view, espoused
by many in cognitive neuroscience, and claimed by some to be an error in Freud’s own
drive theory, that consciousness is unrelated to homeostatic needs.
(17) I earlier referred to the drives as the ‘knowers’, in that they have the ‘ability to
cognise, and thus be the subject term in psychological processes’ (Petocz 1999: 222). But
this lends itself to misunderstanding and to charges of postulating homunculi and falling
into the mereological fallacy (Bennett and Hacker 2003); for it is, surely, the organism
that perceives, knows, believes, etc. True. But when the organism is engaged in self-
knowing, or when it is motivationally conflicted and epistemologically split—when, as in
symbolism, the person simultaneously believes of the single object ‘Here is X’ and ‘Here
is Y’, when in repression the person both wishes that p and remains unaware of the wish,
when one part of the mind believes something while another part does not, then fine-
tuning the single knower towards some kind of mental plurality appears unavoidable. In
that fine-tuning, we can say that, while there is only one body, and only one set of
perceptual apparatus, there are (ex hypothesi) several drives, and, accordingly, several
organism-cum-particular-drive states, differentiated within the single bodily contour and
the single shared perceptual apparatus.
(18) In this sense the wide reach of the Freudian theory of symbolic substitutive activity
via compromise formations overlaps considerably with the terrain identified by Pataki
(2014, 2015) as Freudian wish-fulfilment (FWT).
(19) The schizophrenic who refuses to play his violin in public is accurately perceiving the
social sanctions against public masturbation, and so is accommodating to social reality.
Moreover, he is acting rationally given his false premise about the nature of the violin.
(20) See footnote 10.
(21) I am grateful to Joel Michell, Marko Milic, Glenn Newbery, Tamas Pataki, and
members of the Sydney Theory Group for helpful discussions on aspects of this material.
My sincere thanks also to my research assistants, Ryan McMullan and Catherine
O’Gorman. Finally, thanks to the editors, Richard Gipps and Michael Lacewing, for their
thorough editorial work, including valuable insights and suggestions for improvement.
Agnes Petocz
Page 29 of 30

School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University, Australia
Page 30 of 30

Wish-Fulfilment

Wish-Fulfilment
Tamas Pataki

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198789703.013.15
The concept of wish-fulfilment as a substitutive mode of satisfying wish or desire was one
of Freud’s most important and singular psychoanalytic innovations. In his view dreams,
neurotic symptoms, conscious and unconscious phantasies, delusions, hallucinations,
jokes, much art, parapraxes, omnipotent thinking, illusions such as religion, the
institutions of morality and social organization are all wish-fulfilling phenomena or
attempts at wish-fulfilment. Although its remit is more circumscribed in contemporary
psychoanalysis, wish-fulfilment can be seen to underlie such important conceptions as
omnipotent phantasy, projective identification, actualization, and so on. This chapter
exposes in detail Freud’s singular innovation, relates it to some recent neuroscientific
work, and shows how Freud’s initial model of hallucinatory wish-fulfilment in dream and
infant phantasy gratification, together with his conception of symbolism, can be extended
to explain a range of symptoms as intentional behaviour, in line with Freud’s ambitious
claims for wish-fulfilment’s remit.
Keywords: Freud, wish-fulfilment, symbolism, intentional action, self-solicitude
Page 1 of 29

Wish-Fulfilment
Ordinary Wish-Fulfilment and Freudian Wish-

Fulfilment
When the seventeenth-century missionary Father Rageneau visited North America he
found the Huron people distinguishing three causes of disease: natural causes; sorcery;
unfulfilled wishes. Of the latter, some were known to the individual; others were not but
could be revealed to him in his dreams. These pathogenic wishes could be concealed and
then diviners were required to discover them. If the patient was mortally ill, the diviners
would declare the objects of his wishes were impossible to obtain. If there were chances
of recovery, a ‘festival of dreams’ was organized, a collection of valuables made among
the tribe and presented to the patient amidst banqueting and public rejoicing. Patients
not only recovered but sometimes emerged wealthy men.1 Here is a perspicacious—
almost ‘Freudian’—diagnosis of the malady of frustrated (or ineluctable) desire, and a
wonderful therapy. Here, pathogenic wishes, detected in dreams, are fulfilled in reality. It
is important to see at the outset precisely how the ordinary conception of wishes being
fulfilled instanced in this story differs from the topic of this chapter, Freudian wish-
fulfilment (henceforth FW). In the ordinary conception of wish-fulfilment a person wishes
for something; they get it; they know or believe that they get it and, as a result, cease
wishing.2 For their wishing to cease it is necessary that they at least believe that they get
it: our cycles of desire and action are governed by information, not, or not typically, by
exhaustion. And it is because they get it that they believe that they get it. Finally, it
doesn’t matter on this conception whether a wished-for object is attained by personal
effort or by gift. Simplifying a little: where ‘p’ denotes any state of affairs:
(A) In the ordinary sense of wish-fulfilment a wish that p is fulfilled only if:
(i) the wish is terminated: the agent ceases to wish that p;
(ii) the agent comes to believe that p;
(iii) p is actualized;
(iv) the wish is terminated because of the actualization of p.
The Freudian conception of wish-fulfilment is different. In the first edition of The

Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Freud introduced a theory according to which dreams,
neurotic symptoms, and conscious and unconscious phantasies, are wish-fulfilments.
Eventually he concluded that positive psychotic symptoms—delusions, hallucinations—
jokes and art, slips of the tongue, bungled actions, magical or omnipotent thinking,
illusions such as religion, the institutions of morality and social organization were also
wish-fulfilling or, recognizing that action can fall short of its object, attempts at wish-
fulfilment.3 The breadth of this array is striking: from the fictive representations of dream
and phantasy to involuntary neurotic tics to the purposeful action sequences of religious
observance, artistic creation, and character disorder. These phenomena, if indeed they
are wish-fulfilling, are so in a manner patently different from the ordinary conception: in
them, the objects of the wish are not attained, only a substitute or semblance is. FW is a
Page 2 of 29

Wish-Fulfilment
form of ‘substitutive satisfaction’. It is distinctive of the class that while conditions (i) and
(ii) are necessary, conditions (iii) and (iv) are not. Characteristically in FW either the
wished-for state of affairs is not actualized or, if it is, it has no causal role in the
termination of the wish. The terminative role must therefore rest entirely with (ii)
believing that p—or, perhaps, with experiential states functioning informationally and
terminatively in the manner of belief. Moreover, with the possible exception of aesthetic
appreciation, in all the cases described by Freud the agent initiates the wish-fulfilment.
FW is something an agent does, either intentionally, subintentionally or by some
expressive means.4 It cannot be a gift. Thus, Freud’s patient Dora sought by means of
hysterical symptoms to separate her father from his mistress. Even if the symptoms were
not manufactured intentionally by Dora, even if, say, they were dream-like expressions of
desire or phantasy, they could still have succeeded in separating the lovers, and thus be
wish-fulfilling in the Freudian sense. What would not count as FW is if, for example, a
brick fell on the mistress’s head.
On noting these features we may expect a spectrum of potential types of FW from simple
non-intentional cases, to cases where intention plays some subsidiary role, to ‘fully’
intentional cases where FW is itself intended. To accommodate this spectrum we
distinguish two conditions replacing conditions (iii) and (iv):
(B) For any wish that p, it is fulfilled in the manner of FW only if:
(i) the wish is terminated: the agent ceases to wish that p because:
(ii) the agent comes to believe (or, perhaps, experience) that p.
(v(a)) the agent initiates the wish-fulfilling process, in a sense that does not entail
but does not exclude intention; or
(v(b)) in self-solicitous types, fulfilment of the wish can be truly described in some
such way as ‘A intentionally fulfils A’s wish that p’ or ‘A intentionally gratifies
(consoles, appeases) A’.
So, possible examples of the simple cases may be infantile hallucinatory wish-fulfilment
and dreams, where representations caused by wishes in the primitive mental conditions
Freud describes as primary process functioning achieve FW. Further along,
representations of wished-for states of affairs may be generated intentionally, as in
recalling fond memories or daydream, though not yet with express purpose of wish-
fulfilment. In conditions of engrossment or reverie, however, vivid phantasy or
recollection may ephemerally be mistaken for reality. At the furthest end of the spectrum
are reflexive processes in which fictive representation, enactment, and manufactured or
tendentiously selected ‘evidence’, is used intentionally for the purpose of fulfilling wishes.
In the section on ‘Self-solicitude’ these reflexive, intentional forms of wish-fulfilment will
be recognized as members of a class of self-solicitous activities, expressions of internal
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object relations, that include self-consolation and care but also pernicious acts of self-
appeasement and self-deception.
That is the conceptual outline of FW. It remains to show whether and how anything can
coherently fall under the concept.
Freud’s Basic Model

The concept of FW (though not of course articulated as stated earlier) is left undefined by
Freud in several respects. He doesn’t expressly distinguish FW from ordinary wish-
fulfilment and the various conceptions of precursors such as the ancient oneiromancers5;
and he often fails to distinguish between the representation of a wish being fulfilled, and
the fulfilment of a wish (either as process or end state), though this distinction has
significant consequences. Thus he writes of the famous Irma dream that its ‘content was
the fulfilment of a wish and its motive was a wish’ (Freud 1900: 119) and of a ‘delusion
having as content the fulfilment of the wish’ (Freud 1922: 226). But other passages go
further: ‘Dreams are … guardians of sleep which get rid of disturbances of sleep … a
dream does not simply give expression to a thought, but represents the wish-fulfilled as a
hallucinatory experience … the dream does not simply reproduce the stimulus [the wish],
but removes it, gets rid of it, deals with it, by means of a kind of experience’ (Freud 1916–
17: 129). Again: ‘Symptoms serve for the patient’s sexual satisfaction; they are a
substitute for satisfaction of this kind …’ (Freud 1916–17: 299). The idea that FW
terminates or ‘pacifies’ (Hopkins 1995) wishes and provides substitutive satisfaction is in
fact a theoretical necessity in Freud’s scheme. Mere representation of wishes fulfilled
fails to capture the specific functions assigned to dreams and symptoms: to preserve
sleep, resolve conflict, circumvent realistic action. FW involves less than full satisfaction
of a wish in the ordinary sense but more than mere representation: it involves, as well
(usually temporary) termination of the wish.
Freud describes the simplest form of FW, the hallucinatory wish-fulfilment of the infant,
in a famous passage:
A hungry baby screams or kicks helplessly … the excitation arising from the
internal need is not due to a force producing a momentary impact but to one
which is in continuous operation. A change can only come about if in some way or
other (in the case of the baby, through outside help) an ‘experience of satisfaction’
can be achieved which puts an end to the internal stimulus. An essential
component of this experience of satisfaction is a particular perception (that of
nourishment, in our example) the mnemic image of which remains associated
thence forward with the memory trace of the excitation produced by the need. As
a result of the link that has thus been established, next time this need arises a
psychical impulse will at once emerge which will seek to re-cathect the mnemic
image of the perception and to re-evoke the perception itself, that is to say, to re-
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establish the situation of the original satisfaction. An impulse of this kind is what
we call a wish; the re-appearance of the perception is the fulfilment of the wish;
and the shortest path to the fulfilment of the wish is a path leading direct from the
excitation produced by the need to a complete cathexis of the perception. Nothing
prevents us from assuming that there was a primitive state of the psychical
apparatus in which this path was actually traversed, that is, in which wishing
ended in hallucinating. Thus, the aim of the first psychical activity was to produce
a ‘perceptual identity’—a repetition of the perception which was linked with the
satisfaction of the need (1900: 565–6; cf. 1950: 317–19, 332–3).
First, there is the perception of a real experience of satisfaction achieved through

‘outside help’. Subsequently when an internal need (or stimulus) gives rise to a wish (or
psychical impulse) and their—presumably it is both the need and wish—immediate
satisfaction is blocked, as it is in the helpless unattended infant and sleeper, a
topographical regression, a backward movement of psychic energy to the perceptual
system of the mental apparatus, ensues and a reactivation of a memory of satisfaction as
a hallucinatory experience provides a ‘perceptual identity’ with ‘an essential component’
of the original experience of satisfaction. A memory of a previously satisfying experience
is ‘mistaken’ for a perception of the original experience and it is for the infant as if its
wish has been satisfied: the wish is terminated. This outcome is characteristic of the
primary process mode of mental functioning whose key characteristics include mobility of
cathexis and ‘the replacement of external by psychical reality’ (Freud 1915b: 187). The
hallucinatory or fictive experience of satisfaction (henceforth EOS) that terminates the
wish does not terminate, but occludes, the endogenous stimuli that gives rise to the wish.
Hunger gives rise to a wish to be fed; the infant hallucinates being fed and this pacifies
the wish but not the hunger. Clearly pacification will be the more effective the more
remote a wish is from the needs which give rise to it.
We are to imagine a similar process occurring in the rest of the wish-fulfilling series:
dream, symptom, art, and so on. In essence, this is an informational conception of FW:
wishing is terminated when a belief or, perhaps, an information-laden experience,
registers that the wished-for state of affairs has been actualized. In the early Project
(1950), Freud exposed an underlying energic or mechanical model on which the
achievement of an EOS has several far-reaching neuronal consequences. One of them is a
‘lasting discharge’ which brings the ‘urgency which had produced unpleasure in w
[consciousness]’ to an end, thereby reducing the psychical excitation of free (unbound)
energy in accord with the overriding principle of inertia (or constancy) (Freud 1950: 318).
The reduction (or elimination) of psychical excitation as the governing principle of mind
remained a constant in Freud’s metapsychological formulations. It is notable, however,
even in this early work, that the energic conceptions ride on Intentional or common-
sense-psychological ones; and this is of a piece with Freud’s gradual realization that
these idioms were indispensible for describing mind (cf. Freud 1895: 160–1). He realized,
for example, that the regressive revival of a memory-percept in dream is by itself
insufficient for the efficacy of the EOS; for the EOS to be efficacious the memory percept
must, as well, ‘meet with belief’ (Freud 1950: 322–3, 339). Thus ‘we could well imagine
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the dream-work penetrating to mnemic images of this [regressive] kind, making

conscious to us what was previously unconscious, and holding up to us a wishful phantasy
which rouses our longing, but which we should not regard as a real fulfilment of the wish.
Hallucination must therefore be something more than the regressive revival of mnemic
images that are themselves Ucs’ (Freud 1917: 231). So how do the mnemic images ‘meet
with’ belief? In the state of sleep, Freud says, attention cathexis are withdrawn from ‘the
system Cs. as well as the other systems, the Pcs. and the Ucs., in so far as the cathexis in
them obey the wish to sleep. With the system Cs. thus uncathected, the possibility of
reality testing is abandoned; and the excitations which, independently of the state of
sleep, have entered on the path of regression will find the path clear as far as the system
Cs. where they will count as undisputed reality’ (Freud 1917: 234). In the conditions
Freud describes ideas or representations of wished-for states of affairs brook no
contradiction and function as wish-fulfilling representations: psychical reality is mistaken
for external reality. One might say that from the perspective of the dreamer the fictive
EOS or hallucination functions as irrecusable evidence for wish-fulfilling beliefs. In such
conditions, we may say, a person is engrossed.6
That is the basic model. We have noted that FW compasses as well as dreams and
hallucination, neurotic and some psychotic symptoms, religious devotion, the making and
experience of art, and so forth, but with the exception of ‘symbolic wish fulfilment’,
understood in a wide sense, Freud provides little guidance on how the basic model can be
extended to accommodate these other putatively wish-fulfilling phenomena. The latter
generally involve intentional action, and it does appear to have been Freud’s view, and I
think it is the correct view, that some forms of FW are brought about intentionally, either
as adventitious consequences of intentional acts or as directly intended i.e. where FW is
itself intended in an act of self-solicitude. The basic model is evidently based on an
incipient neuroscience that is theoretically meagre even for explaining dreams and
hallucination, and especially so for the more complex cases of FW. The kernel of Freud’s
model can be extended, however, with considerable plausibility, as following sections
show.
Representation and Symbolism

Apart from the transparent dreams of young children, few dreams, let alone symptoms
and their kin, have conscious content that is manifestly wish-fulfilling. It is Freudian
doctrine that these phenomena are mostly disguised wish-fulfilments, partly as an effect
of unconscious primary processes and partly because of defensive activity to protect
consciousness from disruptive stimuli. Freud distinguishes latent from manifest content
in dream and symptom. In the case of dreams, the latent content or ‘dream thoughts’
consist of recent day residues interwoven with older aroused emotion-laden memories
and wishes, and this content is transformed into the manifest, consciously experienced
dream—the fictive experience of satisfaction or EOS (or cluster of EOSs)—by the
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processes of the ‘dreamwork’: condensation, displacement, conditions of representability,

secondary revision, and symbolism. So, famously, dreams require interpretation, and that
ultimately involves uncovering the group of wish-fulfilments implicit in the dream:
‘Dreams frequently seem to have more than one meaning. Not only … may they include
several wishfulfilments one alongside the other; but a succession of meanings or
wishfufilments may be superimposed on one another, the bottom one being the fulfilment
of a wish dating from earliest childhood’ (Freud 1900: 219). Of his ‘specimen’ dream of
Irma’s injection Freud writes:
The dream fulfilled certain wishes which were started in me by the events of the
previous evening (the news given me by Otto [that Freud’s patient Irma was still
unwell] and my writing of the case history). The conclusion of the dream, that is to
say, was that I was not responsible for the persistence of Irma’s pain, but that Otto
was. Otto had in fact annoyed me by his remarks about Irma’s incomplete cure,
and the dream gave me my revenge by throwing the reproach back on to him … I
was not to blame for Irma’s pains, since she herself was to blame for them by
refusing to accept my solution. I was not concerned with Irma’s pains, since they
were of an organic nature … Irma’s pains had been caused by Otto giving her an
incautious injection of an unsuitable drug—a thing I should never have done
(Freud 1900: 118–19).
Freud’s detailed analysis is too ramified to present here (see Hopkins 2015: 71–85; also
Hopkins this volume) but the wish-fulfilments contained in the dream may be roughly
divided into relatively obvious ones such as Irma’s pains being organically caused, where
the dream text practically wears the EOS on its sleeve (‘Dr. M. … confirmed it … “There is
no doubt it is an infection”’); and those that are disguised by the dreamwork. The
‘incautious injection’ with which Otto is rebuked leads Freud to partially repressed
painful memories. Years earlier he had injected his patient Mathilde with a substance
then considered harmless, resulting in her death; and on his advice Freud’s friend Ernst
began using cocaine for the relief of intractable pain, and by misuse quickly succumbed
to it. So Otto with his thoughtless and probably dirty syringe is blamed not only for Irma’s
condition but also for the deaths of Mathilda and Ernst. If Otto is to blame then Freud is
not. If FW is to succeed then it must be for the dreaming Freud as if Otto was responsible
for the earlier deaths even though there is no conscious EOS to that effect. How does the
dream do it?
At first pass, FW is effected by elements of the manifest dream representing multiple

elements in the latent dream thoughts, utilizing condensation, displacement, and
symbolism. Condensation leads chiefly to the formation of ‘collective and composite
images’ of figures or actions. So we are told that Irma ‘stood for’ Freud’s eldest daughter,
his wife as well as Mathilda, and that she acquired a series of still ‘other meanings’ and
‘allusions’: ‘Irma became the representative of all these figures which had been sacrificed
to the work of condensation, since I passed over to her, point by point, everything that
reminded me of them’ (Freud 1900: 293). But how precisely does such representation by
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means of condensation facilitate FW? Freud’s unsatisfactory answer is that in

condensation ‘ideas are formed which are endowed with great intensity’ and ‘the
intensities of the individual ideas become capable of discharge en bloc and pass over from
one idea to another …’ (Freud 1900: 595). This is not helpful, of course, because we have
no idea how to relate meaning or representation to psychical intensity, or the facilitations
effected by relations of meaning to discharge. Moreover, it turns on the awkward
proposition that in condensation one element of a composite figure stands for other
elements of it. Whatever we come to make of these problems we can see why Freud also
considers displacement as a form of representation, for it too involves a transfer of
‘psychical intensity’ or ‘value’ (distinguished from ‘sensory intensity’), in which an
element of low value comes to stand for one with high value.
Condensation and displacement do not exhaust the relation of representation. Freud

eventually recognized an exclusive type of representation—symbolism—attended with
conditions distinguishing it from the other types. Symbols in this distinctively
psychoanalytic sense are semantically opaque to the subject because their meaning or
referent is either repressed or innately and unreflectively given, conditions not imposed
on the other processes (Freud 1901a: 683). This is the sense in which a snake can
symbolize a penis without condensation, or even displacement. Symbolism in this strict
sense need not depend on these processes of the dreamwork.7
Putting aside Freud’s unhelpful explanation in terms of energic discharge, can we explain
how representation, either as symbolism (strictly) or in the awkward manner Freud
attributes to condensation and displacement, facilitates and extends FW? Two considered
theses recommend themselves. In regard to symbolism, Petocz (1999: 233) argued that
the wish-fulfilling efficacy of the symbol rests on an unconscious belief in the identity of
symbol and symbolized. As a consequence ‘the symbol is mistaken for the symbolised and
treated as if it were the symbolised’ leading, ‘for reasons not properly understood’, to a
kind of ‘gratification which is not as complete as would be the gratification obtained from
the satisfaction, via primary objects and activities, of the unopposed instinctual
impulse’ (Petocz 1999: 233). Such a belief in identity cannot be excluded (see the section
on ‘Intention in Wish-Fulfilment’), but it does not seem to be an indispensible condition
for symbolic FW. It may be that an operation on the symbol is simply taken to be, is
apprehended as, an operation on its referent, without belief in their identity.8 The
sorcerer who sticks pins in an effigy need not believe the effigy is his enemy. The
supposed causal relations between effigy and referent are supported by an immense raft
of beliefs and practices; there appear to be many different ways in which symbolic
relations are established, and that may be true of unconscious symbolism also.
That reflection suggests the approach in Hopkins (2000; 2016) which bundles
condensatory and (strictly) symbolic forms of representation under the head of symbolic
cognition. It draws attention to the pervasiveness of symbolic and metaphoric
associations informing all thought and action, naturally established over the course of
life, so that ‘present significant figures and situations partly inherit their meanings from
past ones, to which they are unconsciously mapped’ (Hopkins 2000: 12). So, given
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Freud’s fixed association between Irma and Mathilda, in representing Otto as giving a
toxic injection to Irma, Freud at the same time pacifies his wish not to have been
responsible for the death of his earlier patient. The pacification of the contemporary
desire ‘went together’ with that of the deeper, more painful one (Hopkins 2000: 12). It
would seem that for FW to succeed on either of these views—or on related views of
unconscious representation—there must be some occurrence of unconscious
understanding or apprehension underwriting them. Whether, as on Petocz’s account, an
unconscious belief in the identity of Irma and Mathilda entails that an operation on the
one is experienced as if it were an operation on the other; or whether, as on Hopkins’s
account, representations of Irma and Mathilda become condensed and interchangeable
through association; the pacification of Freud’s wish that it was Otto (and not Freud) who
had killed Mathilda would require that it be for him as if Otto had killed Mathilda. That
would seem to entail the acquisition of a belief that Otto killed Mathilda—for there is no
EOS whose content is Otto killing Mathilda. The passage from the EOS—the tableau
which has Otto (almost) injecting Irma—to the content of Otto killing Mathilda requires a
process of thought arriving at an unconscious understanding or belief that it is so.9 So it
would appear from the common-sense-psychological perspective. The symbolic
associations between Irma and Mathilda may perhaps be best understood in sub-personal
terms, but the wish-fulfilling belief about Otto killing Mathilda cannot be.
A Neuroscientific Model
The neuroscience upon which Freud drew was in its infancy and his conception of
psychical energy was a placeholder waiting on the deliverance of more advanced science.
In a series of papers Hopkins (2012, 2015, 2016, and this volume) has integrated
fundamental aspects of Freudian theory with the recent ‘free energy’ neuroscience
developed by Karl Friston and his colleagues, one of several neuroscientific models
currently in contention. Friston’s information-theoretic conception of free energy (FE) is
not Freud’s but, as Hopkins points out, they both assign FE the same overall functional
role in the brain. In Freud’s work (1950; 1911) and under Friston’s (2010) FE principle
the brain seeks to minimize FE aroused by sensory and interoceptive impingements. I
summarize some relevant background to Hopkins’s synthesis before focusing on the role
the experience of satisfaction (EOS) plays in the account of wish-fulfilment that emerges
from this neuroscientific model.
In the terms of this account (which bears similarity to Freud’s notion of primary process
and Kleinian unconscious phantasy), the brain comes equipped with an innate model of
the world and a ‘virtual reality generator’ (Hobson, Hong, and Friston 2014), which
generates predictions about sensory and interoceptive impingements and, by testing
them in awake states, constructs increasingly veridical models of the world. A basic claim
of FE neuroscience is that ‘conscious perceptual experience is a form of explanatory
hypothesis, that at once unifies, predicts, and inhibits the impingements that cause it,
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thereby minimizing the FE associated with them’ (Hopkins 2016: 3). The FE of a model is
the difference between its complexity and its accuracy. Accuracy (roughly) is a measure of
how well the model is predicting the data. Complexity reflects the number of parameters
or potential trajectories for action composing the model and the extent to which they are
modified in coming to predict data. Increase in complexity (without increase in accuracy)
increases free energy. The imperative to minimize free energy therefore entails reduction
in complexity, rendering the models more efficient in making predictions. During the day,
it is argued, the huge influx of sensory input increases prediction error and, so,
complexity. During sleep, with abatement in sensory input, and accuracy irrelevant, the
brain or ‘generative model’ is freed to reduce complexity, enabling it to generate more
efficient predictions in waking. It does this by, amongst other things, manufacturing in
REM dream fictive or counterfactual virtual reality—various EOS—which inhibit realistic
movement trajectories or parameters, including those associated with emotional and
motivational conflict.
Hopkins makes the important suggestion that emotional and motivational conflict (too
many or conflicting trajectories of action) and trauma (required emotional adjustments
cannot be integrated) may plausibly be viewed on this model as sources generative of
neurocomputational complexity. So in sleep, for example, the most significant nocturnal
disruptions arise from recent emotion-laden memories of the sort Freud described as ‘day
residues’ and those remotely linked and often disturbing emotions and wishes which are
aroused and then condensed or consolidated with the more recent ones. Given the role of
the brain as conceived above we can see how dreams and symptoms generic to phantasy
or hallucinatory experience, which are viewed in psychoanalysis as ultimately products of
conflict and trauma, may in large measure be productions functioning to reduce
complexity. For if we now take the arousing materials of the dream as input, then, in
accord with the basic claim of FE neuroscience, ‘the fictive perceptual experiences of
dreaming [i.e. experiences of satisfaction] could serve to unify, predict, and inhibit these
arousals, thereby minimizing FE (as emotional conflict/complexity) in a way closely
analogous to the realistic perceptual experiences of waking’ (Hopkins 2016: 4). So on this
view, the brain calculates the optimal motor trajectory for reducing free energy (on
multiple interacting neurocomputational levels) by predicting sensory trajectories for
courses of action. The EOS is then the culminating part of the sensory trajectory
represented as conscious experience. But the EOS is not just the phenomenal end
product of a sub-personal process; it is posited as having a causal role. In dream and
symptom fictive experiences of satisfaction are figured as mitigating conflict, thereby
reducing complexity and, so, FE, by eliminating incipient or conflicting trajectories or
possibilities of action.
Precisely how does a fictive EOS reduce or eliminate conflicting parameters or potential
trajectories? In essence this is a reformulation of the question of how the EOS is
efficacious in FW. Recall the discussion of Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection. On
Hopkins’s view we have a sub-personal generative model acting in response to the dream
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arousals ‘inhibiting (pacifying) them by creating Freud’s fictive experience of innocence

and vindication, and so reducing the emotional complexity (adversity, conflict, and
potential to cause depressive trauma) of the whole family of memories under
reconsolidation’ (Hopkins 2016: 14; this volume). The dream, he says:
introduced an ideal alternative counterfactual model which perforce realized an

ideal fictive sensorimotor trajectory by which, and in accord with Freud’s priors of
the previous day, the adverse emotional situation precipitated in him by Otto’s
unwelcome remark could be restored to a personally satisfactory (and free-energy
minimal) equilibrium. Thus Freud could wake in the morning free from the self-
justificatory and depressive trend in which he had spent the day and evening after
Otto’s remark …’ (2016: 15).
Now these passages hint at a number of perplexities that arise, I think, from the
unresolved conjunction of sub-personal and personal perspectives. We can start with
contrasting the view of dreams being exposed here with Freud’s. According to Freud, the
dream produces a transient EOS that pacifies disruptive wishes in a hallucinatory manner
and guards sleep; it does not effect a lasting change in mind. It is perhaps in this vein
that Hopkins wrote of the dream ‘as a kind of perfect and all-encompassing miniature
hallucination, in which the deluded dreaming subject utterly obliterates both what is
happening in his mind and how things are in the world …’ (Hopkins 2012: 258). Here it is
clearly engrossment in the EOS—the all-encompassing hallucination—that represses or at
least pacifies parameters (conflicting trajectories, wishes etc.) inconsistent with the
brain’s dominant model. Wishes are pacified but they are not terminated. On the later
account (Hopkins 2016; this volume), incompatible parameters are terminated or
readjusted to achieve reduction in complexity. The dreamer receives not just a transient
substitutive satisfaction enabling him to continue sleeping: his mind is permanently
modified; thus, as Hopkins says, Freud awakes free from his depressive, self-accusatory
mood to pursue the day with enhanced creativity. Perhaps that is so, or partly so. But then
the generative model’s work of emotional consolidation, conflict elimination, and
inhibition as described by Hopkins at a sub-personal level seems to leave open the causal
role, if any, of the Intentional and phenomenal properties of the EOS in complexity
reduction. A situation where the generative model does indeed create an EOS, and the
EOS does its work of complexity reduction, but entirely by virtue of its neural properties,
not its Intentional and phenomenal properties, seems quite conceivable. In that case the
experience of that complex tableau of EOS dreamt by Freud would seem to be
epiphenomenal, causally inefficacious.10
If that is possible then there would appear to be ambiguity, if not incoherence, in this
neuroscientific account of wish-fulfilment. But even if that is not right and there is no
contradiction between what the sub-personal mechanism yields and the alleged
Intentional causality of the EOS, the account would still seem to be deficient. As I argued
in preceding sections, for a dream-wish to be fulfilled it must be for the dreamer as if the
wish’s object had been attained and that in most cases—given the absence of a
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corresponding EOS—requires the belief that the object has been attained. It does not
seem to me that the account of FW considered in this section satisfies that condition.
Whether or not that is the correct understanding of it, both the Freudian basic model and
this more sophisticated neuroscientific one appear limited in accounting for the full range
of FW as Freud envisaged it. Hopkins’s thesis is directed at explaining dream, phantasy,
neurotic and psychotic thought, and delusion. It is unclear (to this author, anyway) how it
is to be elaborated to explain wish-fulfilling action, the extended ordered sequences of
action constituting personality disorder, religious devotion, and aesthetic experience. The
next two sections make an attempt to explain some of these phenomena along Freudian
lines, retaining their presumptive wish-fulfilling character. But other, and perhaps more
attractive, alternatives may present themselves: (i) to abandon Freudian wish-fulfilment
as the fitting mode of explanation for these phenomena or (ii) to abandon altogether the
attempt to provide Intentional explanation for the pathological developments Freud (and
others) charted.11
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Intention in Wish-Fulfilment
We said that the Freudian account of wish-fulfilment is intended to compass a wide array
of activities including those that, on the face of it, are deliberate and intentional. The
therapeutic imperative to formulate aetiologies for his clinical cases led Freud to hold:
that neurotic symptoms, including enactments (obsessional routines, for example), are
caused by unconscious wishes, reasons, and intentions; that these motives are not
categorically different from corresponding conscious motives; and that they cause actions
in much the same ways as conscious motives do.12 That symptoms and their kin may have
unconscious causes is relatively uncontroversial; the stronger contention that they may
be produced intentionally, indeed as the end of practical reasoning, is problematic, and
few have followed Freud so far. The view is counter-intuitive: symptoms certainly appear
to be unintended, involuntary, and unpleasant. Again, intention, of all motivational
concepts, has the closest affinity with conscious deliberation: ‘unconscious intention’
looks like an oxymoron. Unconscious intentional agency entails unconscious practical
reasoning, acting, or resolving to act upon practical syllogisms—schemas whose main
premise is a desire, minor premise an instrumental belief, and conclusion an intention or
action. But as we shall soon see that is a taxing entailment. Moreover, given that in most
typical behavioural symptoms conscious intentional agency remains intact, the operation
of countervailing unconscious intentional agency would at least in some circumstances
entail an apparently untenable partition or dissociation of self into quasi-independent,
self-like centres of agency (Pataki 2003: 162–76).
Because of these difficulties most of the philosophers who reject partitive conceptions of
mind as incoherent pursue non-intentional analyses of dream, wish-fulfilling phantasy and
symptom; and largely ignore the role of FW in art, religion, and social action. My view,
however, is that the concept of unconscious intentional agency is coherent and indeed
essential for the explanation of the causal structure of many typical disorders and types
of activity. To convincingly establish that view requires a larger canvas than I have here,
but I can begin to sketch the main lines of its development.13
In Lecture 17 of the Introductory Lectures Freud discusses an obsessional symptom in a

nineteen-year-old girl:
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[T]he most important stipulation related to the bed itself. The pillow at the top end
of the bed must not touch the wooden back of the bedstead … The eiderdown had
to be shaken before being laid on the bed so that its bottom end became very
thick; afterwards, however she never failed to even out this accumulation of
feathers by pressing them apart … She found out the central meaning of the bed
ceremonial one day when she suddenly understood the meaning of the rule that
the pillow must not touch the back of the bedstead. The pillow, she said, had
always been a woman to her and the upright wooden back a man … If the pillow
was a woman, then the shaking of the eiderdown till all the feathers were at the
bottom and caused a swelling there had a sense as well. It meant making a woman
pregnant; but she never failed to smooth away the pregnancy again, for she had
for years been afraid that her parents’ intercourse would result in another child
and so present her with a competitor (1916–17: 265–8).
Freud understood this nightly ritual as the girl’s wish-fulfilling attempt to prevent her
parents’ sexual intercourse and to resist anxieties connected with the birth of a
competitor. The performance certainly presents as a sequence of intentional actions, but
initially the girl could provide no reasons for performing them and found her own actions
unintelligible. Before sleep anxious thoughts presumably assailed her: ‘if I want to get
some sleep then I had better separate the pillow from the bedstead etc.—I can’t help
doing that anyway’. But such thoughts do little to illuminate the causal structure of the
symptom. Her performance is involuntary: against her conscious will. She doesn’t know
why she does what she does; she seems a mere spectator of her own actions. In not
knowing her efficacious motives she doesn’t consciously know what she is doing, under
the descriptions that would be revelatory of why she behaves as she does. If we follow
Freud’s principal interpretation then as a preliminary attempt we can construct a
practical syllogism for her behaviour:
Girl wishes to separate mother and father.
Girl believes that by separating bedstead and pillow she will separate mother and
father.
---------------------------------------------------------------
The desire expressed in the major premise and the belief expressed in the minor premise
are unconscious but if her performance accords with this syllogism it is plainly
intentional. Then given her belief and action she will have achieved the Oedipal wish
expressed in the major premise in the manner of FW: it will be for her as if she had
separated her parents: her wish is pacified, anxiety is allayed, she sleeps. The glaring
difficulty is that the minor premise expresses a ‘mad belief’: who could hold such
irrational or bizarre beliefs, or act on them?14
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We can in fact construct a number of practical syllogisms for the performance by

considering again the issue of representation and symbolism. On the face of it the girl
appears to unconsciously believe that if she separates the bedstead and the pillow she
will have separated her parents. Believing this proposition is not the same as, nor does it
presuppose, believing that her parents were identical with the furnishings (although the
latter is not a belief that can be ruled out tout court). The sorcerer who sticks pins into an
effigy doesn’t believe that the effigy is his enemy. The distinction here is between one
thing symbolizing another and that thing being believed to be identical with the other.
And both of these can be distinguished from a third, where one thing is equated with
another: where there is something like condensation or what Segal (1991) calls symbolic
equation in which the indiscernibility between symbol and thing symbolized is such that
an operation upon one is experienced as an operation on the other. So there are the
following possibilities: if the girl believes unconsciously that the bedstead is her father
and the pillow her mother then, from the fact that she separates bedstead from pillow she
could unconsciously infer that she has separated her parents. In the case of symbolism,
what the girl does effects—somehow—to separate her parents, as she apprehends it
unconsciously. In the case of symbolic equation she again does not infer, she simply
apprehends the performance as a separation of parents since operating on the
furnishings is experienced by her as emotionally the same as operating on parents.
The practical syllogism set out above is an example using the sorcery-like belief ‘if I
separate the furnishings I will separate parents’. The following syllogism incorporates a
symbolic equation:
Girl wishes to prevent the conception of a baby-competitor.
Girl believes that by keeping her father = bedstead and her mother = pillow apart
she could prevent that conception.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
In each case (and also in the case of symbolism strictly), the girl performs an act
rationalized and caused by her wish and the relevant belief, thereby intentionally fulfilling
her Oedipal wishes in the manner of FW. It seems that each of these practical syllogisms
articulates a possible instance of unconscious deliberation, and explains the ritual as an
instance of FW. (Possible, that is, given certain psychoanalytic and philosophical premises
undefended here.) But the case is underdescribed and we need not settle on a particular
explanation. Moreover, there are still other possible schemas that do not trade on mad
beliefs, symbolism, or symbolic equations, yet satisfy the requirements for FW as self-
solicitude expressed in the opening section of this chapter. But before turning to those we
are bound to examine the most cogent of the non-intentional alternatives.
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It is objected that the rational reconstructions of the girl’s behaviour considered here
over-intellectualize a simpler situation. One important and influential approach was early
advanced by Hopkins (1982, 1988). Hopkins placed FW at the centre of the common-
sense-psychological explanation in the psychoanalytic domain but explicitly contrasted
FW with intentional action. FW was conceived subintentionally, as supervening on
imaginative activity animated by desire. ‘In rational action’, he wrote, ‘motives produce
willed intentions and real actions aimed at satisfaction. Here [in dreams] they produce
wishes and mere representations of satisfaction, on the pattern of wishful
imagining’ (Hopkins 1988: 41). The subintentional mode of wishful imagining was also
enlisted to explain symptoms such as the Ratman’s obsessive thoughts of torture
(Hopkins 1982: xxi–xxvii).
We may concede that, at the common-sense-psychological level, subintentional causation

suffices for explaining the motivation of dreams, some phantasying, and symptoms such
as the Ratman’s obsessive thoughts. But it cannot fully explain more complex symptoms
such as the Ratman’s obsessive actions, the compulsive bedstead girl’s rituals, or
phenomena like wish-fulfilling religious practices. Suppose we try to explain the girl’s
performance as a product of wishing expressing itself directly, subintentionally, in action,
as if it were dream, imagination, or phantasy? In that case no element of her action can
be intentional: being caused subintentionally excludes a priori any action from having a
reason or intention among its causal conditions. So if the performance is the phantasy,
and the phantasy is the product of ‘an exercise of will of a kind prior to that in intentional
action’ (Hopkins 1982: xxiv), then it cannot be intentional. But the performance has the
hallmarks of being a sequence of intentional actions, features which this account is
unable to explain.
A better interpretation of the proposal is this: the girl, agitated and distrait, separates
bedstead and pillow and, given the (broadly, including condensatory) symbolic relations
between parents and furnishings, she comes to imagine or phantasize unconsciously that
she has separated her parents. Her actions are intentional, her wish-fulfilling imaginings
are not (Hopkins 1982: xxv). On this attractive account the imagining and the consequent
fulfilment of her wish supervene on an intentional performance that has acquired
contingent symbolic meaning. Well, how exactly does the performance fulfil the girl’s
unconscious wish to separate her parents? On the view that a symptom is wish-fulfilling
merely by virtue of being a representation of its originary wish-fulfilled the answer
appears straightforward. But that view of FW has been rejected (in the section on
‘Freud’s Basic Model’): for representation alone, we saw, does not suffice for pacification
and therefore for FW. The representation will pacify only if it is constitutive of the
circumstance that it is for her as if her parents have been separated—a mental state that
would seem to involve at least an unconscious belief or understanding that they had been
separated. Without supplementation by some notion of unconscious understanding it is
quite mysterious how the performance could acquire its pacific powers. With such
supplementation we do arrive at FW: the girl does something: the act is imagined or
understood unconsciously so as to generate a wish-fulfilling belief. But even so the
account remains deficient. The wish-fulfilment is adventitious: the girl does something
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which happens in the circumstances to pacify an unconscious wish. We do not yet have an
understanding of why she did what she did. We seem driven to suppose that she did
precisely what she did because she understood unconsciously that that very sequence of
actions would achieve her aim. If not that, then two counter-alternatives suggest
themselves: either she hit upon the wish-fulfilling performance by chance or her
performance is determined fixedly by the symbolic associations established in the course
of her life. Chance, I think we can exclude. On the other option we have it that given her
fixed associations it is natural that she should so act; just as it is natural for the old
bachelor to collect snuffboxes, given the unconscious meaning they have for him (cf.
Hopkins 2000: 12). So, how do unconscious symbolic associations determine her
performance? It is hard to say, but it seems that it cannot be merely through a fixed sub-
personal association: for that would deprive the performance of its intentional character.
On the other hand, if the symbolic associations do operate through the prism of
unconscious understanding that would concede the present argument that she knew what
the consequence of her performance could be.
However that uncertain issue is resolved, the subintentional approaches confront a

further difficulty: the fact that pathological behaviour of very much greater complexity
seems also to instance intentional FW. Some complex pathological enactments, for
example wish-fulfilling character disorders, unfold over a lifetime. In such cases a series
of otherwise unconnected acts, in diverse circumstances, strung out temporally, combine
to achieve the one (say, self-defeating) purpose. A thousand acts pointing in the same
direction. It seems inconceivable how an array of subintentional mechanisms, set of fixed
symbolic relations, or chance actions could be strung together in the service of the one
unified purpose: such behaviour seems to manifest resolution and plan. If such clinical
cases cannot be explained non-intentionally then self-solicitous FW may offer some
promise.
Self-Solicitude
In the first section of this chapter provision was made for cases of wish-fulfilment which
fall under the heading of self-solicitude, cases in which the self takes itself as an object—
mostly to be cared for, but allowing for the pathological permutations of such reflexive
relationships that psychoanalysis has uncovered. We must now consider whether there
are in fact psychological configurations that exemplify the self-solicitous forms of FW.
Granting a partitive conception of mind in which one part (B) is in solicitous relation to
another, ‘object’ part (A), we can generate valid practical syllogisms for B:
B wants to console (protect, deceive etc.) A
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B believes that by separating bedstead and pillow A will be consoled (protected,

deceived etc.)
B separates bedstead and pillow.
Here B’s belief is not mad; it is the kind of belief a concerned mother wanting to console
or pacify a child may have. Construing the self as a unity of parts (in the manner
indicated below) we recognize an expression of self-solicitude that was frequently
described by Freud and other pioneer object-relations theorists.15 Freud, for example,
writes of the ego’s protection and care-taking of the id (1940: 197–9) and of the
superego’s solicitude for the ego: ‘To the ego … living means the same as being loved—
being loved by the superego … The superego fulfils the same function of protecting and
saving that was fulfilled in earlier days by the father …’ (1923: 58); and ‘if the superego
does try to comfort the ego by humour and to protect it from suffering, this does not
conflict with its derivation from the parental function’ (1927: 166). That such self-
solicitous relations are possible is a consequence, in Freud’s view, of identification with
objects resulting in structural differentiation shaping several features of the self16: the
capacity to experience itself as divided; its capacity to divide, indeed for ‘a real split’ to
occur between the agencies (1926: 97); and the capacity of parts of the self to then take
other parts as objects. In this vein, Freud writes of the superego:
The ego can take itself as object, can treat itself like other objects, can observe
itself, criticize itself, and do Heaven knows what with itself. In this, one part of the
ego is setting itself over against the rest. So the ego can be split; it splits itself
during a number of its functions—temporarily at least. Its parts can come together
again afterwards (1933: 58).
Freud’s conception of the self is clearly partitive: the agencies are conceived as capable
of entering into a range of mutual ‘personal’ relations, for example sadomasochistic
relationships; they can function autonomously with their own perspectives, motives, and
capacity for intentional action; they have a degree of mutual opacity. Despite these
conditions Freud seems to have enjoined some kind of underlying unity in the self.17 How
might such extreme conditions of psychic stress be exemplified clinically? A patient:
would rave against girl children and in fantasy would describe how she would
crush a girl child if she had one, and would then fall to punching herself (which
perpetuated the beatings her mother gave her). One day I said to her, ‘You must
be terrified being hit like that.’ She stopped and stared and said, ‘I’m not being
hit. I'm the one that’s doing the hitting’
(Guntrip 1968: l9l).
This person certainly seems radically dissociated, a ‘real split’ having occurred (see
footnote 15). There appear to be at least two internal perspectives: in the part doing the
punching and in the part being punched. The parts appear to be mutually alienated: the
speaker says she’s not being punched, she’s doing the punching. Guntrip observes that
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his patient has identified with, and therefore adopted the perspective of, a punitive
mother, while retaining the aspect of the detested child she at bottom feels herself to be,
a ‘child within’ who maintains a masochistic relationship with an internalized mother. He
mentions several motives: identifying with the punitive mother provides relationship with
her; it represents the struggle to preserve an ego; it confers a sense of power, even if only
over her self. Guntrip uses Fairbairn’s conceptual framework which is more revealing of
this clinical case, but Freudian language will do, and we can describe the girl’s situation
without excessive distortion as her ego being maltreated by a punitive superego that
perceives its object as a wretched, hateful thing. On the other side, the ego perceives the
superego under the aspect of the punitive, though still consoling, mother. These ‘parts of
the self’ perceive and treat each other as if they were alien objects. The patient thus
appears to be divided in perspective, subjectivity, and agency, in the terms of partition
when a ‘real split’ has occurred.18
How is it possible for such an intrapsychic sadomasochistically configured enactment to

be wish-fulfilling? Briefly, one way is this: in its enactment the superego figure is
manufacturing an experience of satisfaction (EOS) for the ego—and at the ego’s behest,
or in response to its needs. We might say, paradoxically on the face of it, that the ego
activates the superego and the superego then enacts the consoling/punitive repertoires
written into it. The ego, not knowing fully the superego’s repertoire, may get more than it
bargains for. (Recall the quasi-independence and opacity of the agencies.) Principally the
ego seeks the companionship and security provided by the internalized figure, and
identification with it as aggressor, even if that comes with a familiar dose of punishment.
In re-establishing that relationship, of which we can observe only the punitive enactment,
the person, qua ego, has her wishes fulfilled, in the manner of FW. For we can see how
the ego figure may be engrossed or immersed in the EOS that is the superego’s
enactment. So here are circumstances analogous to Freud’s basic model of FW. There is,
as it were, a theatre of irrecusable evidence presented to the ego from which it cannot
but draw wish-fulfilling conclusions: ‘mother is present and I am her beating a child’. The
case of the bedstead girl may not be dissimilar. The ritualistic performance enacted as an
EOS by an obsessional part of herself is unconsciously understood by her child-self as the
wish-fulfilling achievement of separating her parents—while at the same time pacifying
and achieving an unstable identification with that obsessional (superego) part.
W(h)ither Wish-Fulfilment?
Although Freud was educated in the reductionist biophysics movement of the late
nineteeenth century even his earliest psychoanalytic work ran counter to the scientific
positivism and neurological psychiatry associated with that movement. In contrast to it
Freud insisted on the causality of subjective motives, on the desiring, wishful, and
affective aspects of mind, particularly of course on sexual motives and their development.
The idea that desire or unfulfilled wish causes mental conflict and disorder is older than
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Plato and proved over the centuries, but with Freud something entirely new appears:
mental disorder is not just caused by desires in conflict; symptoms (and their kin) are
compromise fulfilments of those desires—in the manner of FW. This is a strikingly novel
idea, fundamental to the explanation of human behaviour. Freudian wish-fulfilment, ‘the
doctrine of the wish’ (as it was early on and enthusiastically designated (Watson 1916)), is
a deep statement about the ineluctability of human desire and of the will to satisfy it.
When we cannot change the world we change ourselves: if the world will not
accommodate our desire then we dream, phantasize, manufacture delusions, modify our
bodies and perceptions as bogus evidence that desire has been satisfied.
Desire and this human way of dealing with it are in some neglect in contemporary human
sciences. Psychiatry, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology have attenuated their
conceptual resources, so that it is unclear whether questions about mental illness once
thought to be intricated with human longing and despair, or willed delusion, can even be
framed in them. They are now dominated by forms of reductive materialism and simplistic
conceptions of motivation. And were it possible to provide complete descriptions of
mental disorder, dream, phantasy (let alone artistic creation and religious devotion) in the
languages of the brain sciences then their exclusion of almost all traces of the Intentional,
common-sense-psychological, understanding of disorder, of which FW has been an
important component, would be entirely vindicated. But, of course, it is not.
In classical psychoanalytic theory most mental disorders were considered largely as

pathologies of desire and conflict, described in the Intentional idiom; but that has given
way in contemporary theory to a dominant concern with pathologies of developmental
deficits resulting from environmental, attachment, or interactional failure. Psychoanalysis
now appears less concerned with the pathology of desire than of belief—or the various
proposed non-Intentional but belief-like structures anteceding beliefs—internal working
models (Bowlby), representations of interactions generalized (D. N. Stern), and so on. The
attention to environmental deficiency and early impairment has, by and large, diminished
interest in the desiderative, conflictual, and wish-fulfilling aspects of mind. The
theoretical contrast is odd because trauma, privation, deprivation become mensurable
mostly against a backdrop of need and desire; and the language of object or interpersonal
relations is otiose without reference to mutual desiderative and affective relations. So of
course in reality motivational notions do not disappear and FW reappears, as omnipotent
phantasy, projective identification, manic defence, and so on. The scope Freud had given
it has been circumscribed but wish-fulfilment is still shifting in the background, wearing
different clothes, too much unremarked.19
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Notes:
(1.) Father Rageneau, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (1897–9), quoted in
Ellenberger (1970: 26).
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(2.) There is a sense of wish-fulfilment independent of belief and satisfaction, as when a

deceased person’s wishes are fulfilled after his Will passes probate. We can leave this
sense aside.
(3.) For a summary see Freud (1913: 186–7). The ‘actual neuroses’ were early exceptions
to the wish-fulfilment formula and later Freud made accommodations for traumatic
dreams and symptoms, but the general view held consistently despite major changes to
other aspects of theory.
(4.) The common-sense-psychological (CP) classification of motives and acts used in this
chapter is as follows. Intentional action is caused and rationalized by the conjunction of
desire and instrumental belief; it may also involve executive states such as intending,
deciding, and choosing; but the having of reasons is both causally and logically necessary.
Various non-intentional modes of causal explanation are available to CP. O’Shaughnessy
(1980) highlighted the notion of subintentional action. Such acts, including mental acts,
are caused by desire without facilitation by instrumental beliefs. There are forms of
expression that have archaeology but no teleology, as when one clenches fists in (out of)
anguish, or laughs. Explanation along these lines belongs in CP but is neither intentional
nor subintentional. As Richard Wollheim and Jim Hopkins first pointed out, much of
Freud’s work can be seen as an extension and deepening of this common-sense
psychological framework. Useful, if not unproblematic, classification of such extensions
may be found in Wollheim (1991: xixff; 1993).
(5.) The dreams interpreted in the temples of Asclepius in which a respected personage
or god, ‘reveals without symbolism what will or will not happen, or should or should not
be done’ (Dodds 1951: 107), or those like Alexander the Great’s Satyr dream (Freud 1900:
99), have a wishful tincture but they are obviously prognostic and instructive not wish-
fulfilments or substitutive satisfactions in the Freudian sense.
(6.) Freud’s implicit notion that an uncontradicted idea is ipso facto believed has pedigree
(W. James (1950: II, 288) cites Spinoza as the source) but it remains live in the
neuroscience of our day: ‘In the absence of sensory constraints, the vivid percepts,
delusional beliefs and cognitive defects cease to be delusional or defective—because
these attributes are only defined in relation to sensory evidence. However, in sleep, there
is no sensory evidence and the only imperative is to adjudicate and select among
unconstrained scenarios that can be entertained by the sleeping brain’ (Hobson, Hong,
and Friston 2014). See also Solms (2015: 138–9). For elaboration of the notion of
engrossment, introduced in Wollheim (1979), see Pataki (2014: 35–42).
(7.) Petocz (1999; this volume) distinguishes between Freud’s narrow theory of symbolism
(FN) of fixed archaic relations and a broader theory (FB). I accept that distinction. My
concern here is to distinguish both these sorts of symbolism from condensation and
displacement, vicissitudes that Freud also conceived as representational.
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(8.) Petocz (this volume) modifies her earlier view and no longer contends that a belief in
the identity of symbol and symbolized is essential to the motivated mistaken identity that
underlies the capacity to treat one thing as if it were another. I present the earlier view
because it still seems to me a live option, one of several that may facilitate symbolic FW,
as the discussion in the section ‘Intention in Wish-Fulfilment’ shows (see also Pataki
(2014): 88–94). Although she does not explicitly address the issue of symbolic wish-
fulfilment in this volume, the argument advanced for the compatibility of drive discharge
theory with ‘cognitive’ or ‘informational’ approaches to drive activity suggests than an
account of FW in terms of substitutional drive discharge, where the symbol is mistaken
for the drive’s primary object, and the drive is figured as a complex entity with cognitive
capacities, will suffice. My argument for the necessity in FW of the occurrence of a
suitable EOS or wish-fulfilling belief suggests that it will not. In any case, I cannot follow
Petocz (1999: 220–32; this volume; Maze 1983; Newberry 2011) in the constructions
placed on Freudian drive theory. Maze, and in earlier work Petocz, argued that drives are
programmed with innately, though highly modifiable, consummatory activities, that they
must have the capacity to seek out and perceive the conditions that terminate drive
activity, that these cognitive states are components of drives: in short, drives are
‘knowers’. In the present chapter the relevant psychological states (perceiving, believing,
remembering) are described as ‘crucial evolved components of drive-consummatory
activity’, not as components of the drive itself, but a somewhat ‘thick’ view of drives is
retained and it leads Petocz to favourably consider the implausible proposition that the
psyche or self is ‘composed’ (exhaustively constituted?) of instinctual drives. These views
seem to me neither accurate renderings of Freud’s account of drives—ambiguous as that
is—nor sustainable. The fact that drives causally interact with cognitive states—or that
perceptions and beliefs influence our desires and behaviour—does not entail either that
cognitive states are components, mereological parts of drives, or that drives can sense,
peer at, or know anything. It must be conceded however that the ‘thick’ view of drives
has the appeal of potentially resolving some of the many conundrums of mental plurality
to which Petocz draws attention. (See also Boag 2011). I propose a different approach to
some of these conundrums in the sections ‘Intention in Wish-Fulfilment’ and ‘Self-
Solicitude’.
(9.) This is discussed further in the section ‘Intention in Wish-Fulfilment’. For reasons
such as these Sandler (1976; Sandler and Sandler 1978) postulated an ‘understanding
work’ running parallel with but in opposite direction to the distortions of dream and
symptom. Thus the manifest or surface expressions are ‘decoded’ in the Pcs. of the
topographical theory. or unconscious ego of the structural theory, and the latent meaning
is then ‘understood’.
(10.) I am assuming (the contested view) that the explanation of the causal efficacy of
conscious Intentional and phenomenal properties qua mental properties remains
problematic for non-reductive physicalism, the metaphysical view implicit in the work
Page 27 of 29

Wish-Fulfilment
under discussion. Conscious experience ‘fits’ in this enlargement of the Helmholtz-Friston

account, and is made to do work, but is not, as it seems to me, explained.
(11.) Those possibilities are explored in Pataki (2014, 2015).
(12.) I use ‘motive’ loosely to designate anything that can be a cause of action. ‘All the
categories’, Freud wrote, ‘which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as
ideas, purposes, resolutions and so on, can be applied to them [unconscious mental acts].
Indeed, we are obliged to say of some of these latent states that the only respect in which
they differ from conscious ones is precisely in the absence of consciousness.’ (Freud
1915b: 168). Freud invokes unconscious motives to explain the wish-fulfilling phenomena
of symptoms (e.g. 1916–17: ch. xix–xiii, esp. 298–9; 1909a: 231); parapraxes (1901b);
phantasies (1908a: 159, 164; 1909a); play (1908b: 146; 1911: 39); and art (1908b);
daydreams and masturbation phantasies (1912). His description of neurosis as consoling
flight into illness is certainly suggestive of intentional strategy, and it could hardly have
been plainer that this was his view of the secondary purpose in neurosis (1909a: 231–2).
(13.) On the counter-intuitiveness of intentional symptom formation see Eagle (2011: 70).
The intuition that ‘intention is the one concept that ought to be preserved free from any
taint of the less-than-conscious’ (Hampshire, 1974: 125) is widely shared but currently
much disputed (Mele 2009). Unconscious agency receives experimental support in Weiss
and Sampson (1986) and neuropsychoanalytic support in Kaplan-Solms and Solms (2000:
esp. 108, 111). For problems with partitive conceptions of mind see Gardner (1993).
Some notable non-intentional readings of FW within a broadly common-sense
psychological framework: Wollheim (1984, 1991, 1993), Hopkins (1982, 1995), Moore
(1984), Lear (1998, 2015), Gardner (1993), Cavell (1993, 2006), and Brakel (2009). The
larger canvas is in Pataki (2014, 2015).
(14.) [Eds: Cf. Leite (this volume) for further exploration of this theme.]
(15.) Spitz (1965: 179) noted that internalization of maternal functions is essential for the
infant’s capacity for self-regulation. Winnicott (1965: 48): ‘The infant develops means for
doing without actual care. This is accomplished through the accumulation of memories of
care, the projection of personal needs and the introjection of care details’. To my
knowledge the implications for mental structure of such normal internalization of caring
functions has not been much investigated, though see Bollas (1987); Kaplan-Solms and
Solms (2000: 234). More familiar are the pathological dissociations associated with the
internalization of frustrating or hated objects, or with false-self formation based on
compliance or denial. See Winnicott (1965); Rosenfeld (1987); Steiner (1993); Bowlby
(1980). It is possibly because the self-solicitous forms of FW are so frequently dominated
by pathological developments that they often issue, paradoxically, in self-deceit and
symptom.
(16.) I use ‘self’ and ‘parts of self’ promiscuously, counting on a measure of

disambiguation by context.
Page 28 of 29

Wish-Fulfilment
(17.) Freud: ‘We were justified, I think, in dividing the ego from the id, for there are
certain considerations which necessitate the step. On the other hand the ego is identical
with the id, and is merely a specially differentiated part of it. If we think of this part by
itself in contradistinction to the whole, or if a real split has occurred between the two, the
weakness of the ego becomes evident … The same is true of the relation between ego and
superego. In many situations the two are merged; and as a rule we can only distinguish
the one from the other when there is a tension or conflict between them’. (1926: 97; my
italics). Amongst philosophers, to my knowledge only David Pears (1984), Rorty (1988),
and Pataki (2003, 2014) have argued for a conception of mind whose parts satisfy
conditions for independent agency. Within psychoanalysis, on the other hand, it is
commonplace to hold that the mind is constituted by independent agencies. Freud,
Fairbairn, M. Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Ogden, and S. Mitchell explicitly embrace partitive
conceptions of mind. A roll call doesn’t settle anything about the adequacy of partitive
conceptualization but it can suggest that the clinical phenomena press strongly in its
direction.
(18.) I am of course taking a highly Realistic line on the agencies. The defence with a
more accommodating conceptual framework is set out in Pataki (2014: ch. 5). Casting the
agencies involved as person-like has the happy consequence that the language of
personal relations, the Intentional or common-sense-psychological idiom, can be enlisted
in the description of intrapsychic relations.
(19.) This chapter has been greatly improved by the meticulous commentary of the
editors of this volume, and by discussions with Jim Hopkins and Agnes Petocz. I am much
indebted to them.
Tamas Pataki
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne
Page 29 of 29


Adam Leite

The very idea of psychic integration presents puzzles in the case of unconscious belief,
both for the analysand and for the theorist. In many cases, the unconsciously believed
proposition is one that the analysand knows perfectly well to be false. What could it be to
bring such a belief to consciousness? What could psychic integration come to in this sort
of case? Put bluntly, the task facing the analysand is to consciously hold the belief even
while placing it within a broader perspective in which it is recognized to be false.
Implications are drawn concerning a number of large issues in epistemology and
philosophy of mind: Moore’s Paradox, the role of rationality in psychic unity and self-
consciousness, the nature of the first-person standpoint in relation to one’s own attitudes,
transparency accounts of self-knowledge, and the role of endorsement in the constitution
of the self.
Keywords: unconscious belief, psychic integration, Moore’s Paradox, rationality, self-consciousness, first person,
self-knowledge, transparency, self-constitution
Adam Leite
‘we find that unconscious beliefs control our patients’ lives and they are therefore
important to discern’
Ronald Britton, as reported by Paul Williams (1996: 81)
Introduction
THERE are as many forms of psychic integration as there are forms of psychic
disorganization and fragmentation. It’s one thing to bring together feelings that have
been held apart, another to take back projections, and still another to be able to
represent previously unrepresented mental states or to bring psychosomatic phenomena
more fully into one’s mental life. My focus in this chapter is on just one form of
Page 1 of 30

integration: the integration of psychodynamically unconscious belief. This issue looms

large in clinical practice (Britton 1998: 8). It also has rich and surprising philosophical
implications.
A step towards psychic integration is a step towards a more stable and more inclusive
psychic organization from a previous disorganized, fragmented, or incomplete state.
Stable organizations are possible that are wildly dysfunctional and out of touch with
reality (Steiner 1993). Insofar as increasing integration is understood as a move towards
psychic health, it must take place in a way that involves increasingly apt response to
reality. At the ideal, ‘integration’ is a success term. It requires both getting things right
enough about oneself and the world and also bringing these matters into contact with the
rest of one’s psychic functioning. In cases at issue here it involves insight, experientially
based self-understanding (Bell and Leite 2016), self-acceptance, and acceptance of reality.
A key question, then, forms the topic of this paper: What would all of this look like when it
comes to certain psychodynamically unconscious beliefs that are—as the analysand can
correctly see—plainly false?
My discussion will assume both a psychodynamic conception of the mind and a

(p. 306)
clinical picture on which integrating psychodynamically unconscious materials can be a

step towards psychic health. My goal is to show what can be learned philosophically from
taking this picture seriously. The discussion will be organized into the six following
sections: ‘Unconscious Belief’ introduces the key notion under discussion; ‘Integrating
Unconscious Belief: The Problem’ highlights a fundamental puzzle concerning the
integration of unconscious belief; and ‘Moore’s Paradox and the Integration of
Unconscious Belief’ offers an initial solution. ‘Is there a Superior Alternative
Description?’ considers and rejects various ways of redescribing the phenomena so as to
avoid the puzzle. ‘What Integration might Look Like’ aims to make such integration
intelligible, and, finally, ‘Philosophical Implications’ highlights important implications for
several large issues in philosophy: the role of rationality in psychic unity, the nature of the
first-person standpoint on one’s own attitudes, the role of transparency in self-knowledge,
and the place of endorsement in the constitution of the self. The upshot is a distinctive
orientation towards these issues, one that may be said to be ‘anti-rationalist’ from the
perspective of a common but overly narrow conception of what human rationality comes
to.
Unconscious Belief
I will take for granted that there are beliefs which are unconscious for dynamic reasons
relating to deep wishes, fears, and defences. For example, an analysand might
unconsciously believe that he is the most delightful and most beloved of the analyst’s
patients and that their relationship is special in a way that even the analyst’s marriage
can’t match. Another might unconsciously believe that her analyst has no interest in her
life and struggles. These unconscious beliefs play a hidden role in shaping the person’s
conscious thoughts, desires, emotional responses, and behaviour. Conscious reflection
Page 2 of 30

and deliberation generally will not modify them or otherwise affect the role they play. For
these reasons, among others, it can be important for the analysand’s positive
development that such beliefs become conscious, in a sense of that term (discussed later)
that is closely connected with self-awareness and the ability to self-ascribe the belief from
a first-person standpoint.
In describing these states as beliefs, we take it that they are content-bearing states of the
person that play a functional and explanatory role similar enough to that of ordinary
belief to warrant lumping the two together. In characterizing them as unconscious,
however, we highlight an important difference.
To bring the difference into view, it’s helpful to have the notion of the subjective
perspective of a belief. When somebody believes some proposition p, p’s being the case is
person encounters the world. We might say that in her subjective world, p is the case.
Occupying this subjective perspective will involve patterns of emotional response and
expectation, dispositions towards reasoning and action, certain phenomenal dispositions,
(p. 307) and a tendency to seek corroborative evidence and to experience the world in
ways congruent with p’s being true.1
In ordinary conscious belief, the person is capable of occupying the subjective

perspective of the belief as conscious subject. The world will be presented to and in her
conscious occurrent thought as including that p is the case, and this presentation will
include a distinctive phenomenology, which we might term the force of reality. In
addition, ordinary conscious belief on the part of mature human beings involves self-
consciousness, in the sense that the person can simultaneously be the conscious subject
of the belief and also self-ascribe the belief from that very position. She can, we might
say, occupy the attitude as her own.
In qualifying a belief as unconscious, then, we are highlighting that though the person is
in a state which plays at least a good part of the functional and explanatory role of belief,
the person currently either lacks the ability to occupy the subjective perspective of the
belief as conscious subject or else lacks the ability to self-ascribe the belief from that
position.2
For example, imagine someone with the following complex pattern of responses. He finds
himself feeling guilty when kindnesses or favours are done for him, as though he has
taken something away from the other person. He feels that he is in danger of being
caught taking something he doesn’t deserve if he accepts positive offers from others, and
he experiences his legitimate and unproblematic requests for help as manipulative
manoeuvres robbing others of their riches. He fears that accolades that come his way are
nothing but the gains of trickery and deceit. He feels a vague terror that if others knew
the truth about him they would hate and cast him out, so that he must always hide the
truth about himself. It might be that what unifies all of these reactions is this: he believes
that he is nothing but a thief. But though he has all of these thoughts and feelings both in
particular situations and as part of the ongoing background of his life, he still might not
Page 3 of 30

consciously encounter the world as containing this truth: I am a thief. In such a case, he
cannot consciously occupy the subjective perspective of the belief, and he cannot self-
ascribe it from that position. His belief is functioning unconsciously.
In understanding him in this way we attribute to him a belief content that

(p. 308)
conflicts in his own thinking with thoughts to the effect that he has not stolen. This too is
supported by the detailed texture and particular pattern of his responses. For instance, a
range of very particular emotional reactions (such as specific forms of guilt connected in
various ways with the idea of theft) are forced upon him, while others (notably such
attitudes as pride and contentment) are systematically excluded or distorted. He likewise
interprets particular incidents in ways that fit with the thought that he has stolen, while
conflicting facts are explained away, reinterpreted, or ignored. When told that he did well
at something, he will react in a variety of ways that express, maintain, or even reinforce
feelings of guilt connected with thoughts about theft. He might disavow that he really did
the thing (insinuating that he stole credit for it) or deny that he did it well (insinuating
that he somehow stole in accomplishing what he did). He might find a way to treat the
compliment itself as stolen, e.g. by interpreting himself as having somehow ‘fished’ for it.
As a last resort he might respond by defending against feelings of guilt and then feel that
he is engaged in a cover-up. What he cannot do is sit comfortably with the thought, ‘I just
did well at such-and-such, and this person has, quite reasonably, voluntarily
complimented me for it’. What we see here is a standing orientation towards himself
involving feelings of guilt and thoughts about being undeserving, taking things from
others, and the like, all of which he routinely connects with ideas of theft.
We gain a measure of understanding if we attribute a mental state to him that dictates

these particular forms of response, an attitude that distorts his experience of himself and
the world in ways that fit—and indeed insist upon—the truth of this proposition. This
parallels theories of psychological attribution that emphasize interpretive fit with the
overall pattern exhibited in the person’s thought, feeling, and behaviour (cf. Child 1996;
Davidson 1970: 221–2; 1983; 1984; Freud 1917; Mölder 2010). The pay-off is a gain in
intelligibility, or as Freud terms it, ‘a gain in meaning’ (Freud 1915: 167).
Such psychological attributions are neither indefeasible nor unrevisable. In the

therapeutic setting the attribution is underwritten by the ongoing fine details of the
analys and’s associations, thoughts, feelings, and reactions in interaction with the
analyst. It might be refined retrospectively in light of later developments and the
patient’s settled understanding. In other cases, the state itself might change and develop
over time.3
Many unconscious beliefs are unconscious for motivational reasons: that is,
psychodynamic factors involving wishes, fears, and defences. The attribution of a
particular psychodynamic explanation in a particular clinical case is supported in part by
the way in which things unfold as the analytic process proceeds—for instance, defensive
processes and patterns of resistance, the way in which the belief comes into
consciousness (p. 309) when a particular defence or sense of unbearable conflict is
Page 4 of 30

gradually undone, and the context provided by the ongoing development of a broader
understanding of the patient’s mind.
There are various routes by which unconscious belief can be psychodynamically

generated. In some cases a recognized truth may be repressed because it is unbearably
painful. In this way, traumatic real-world experiences can give rise to unconscious beliefs.
In other cases, a false belief may be psychodynamically generated. For instance, a belief
may arise as a wish-fulfilment or as a defence against some other unbearable or
unacceptable experience or psychic content. Britton (1995) describes a psychotic patient
who believed that if she did not see her mother, she would go blind. This was a ‘defensive
counterbelief’ formed to head off fear about what might happen to her mother when
absent. (The protection comes from the childish thought, ‘She’s not absent; rather,
something is wrong with my eyes and so I cannot see her’.)
Defensive counterbeliefs—like wish-fulfilling beliefs—can be conscious or can be kept

unconscious because they are painful, threatening, conflict with central parts of one’s
conception of oneself or loved ones, and the like. In other cases, the belief is unconscious
not so much to ward it off as to maintain it: the belief functions unconsciously as a way of
safeguarding it in the face of acknowledged contradictory facts which are themselves felt
(perhaps unconsciously) to be threatening or unacceptable.4 Sometimes both factors are
in play.
Importantly, psychodynamically unconscious beliefs (such as unconscious defensive

counterbeliefs) need not be part of any larger rational structure. These beliefs exert
rationalizing pressure insofar as they lead the person both to interpret situations in ways
that conform with them and to fabricate justifications for convictions arising from them.
But such considerations are not what holds them in place. Rather, they are held in place
by motivational forces, mechanisms of defence, and other psychodynamic factors.
Two other important psychoanalytic notions—unconscious phantasy and implicit

procedural schemata—stand in complicated relations to the concept of unconscious
belief.
First, unconscious phantasy.5 Different psychoanalytic traditions diverge in their

interpretation of this protean concept (Bohleber et al. 2015). Frequently likened to
daydreaming, phantasy is widely understood as ‘an imagined scenario or storylike
narrative’ that represents the subject’s interactions with others in ways ‘shaped by
motivational states and defensive operations’ (Auchincloss and Samberg 2012a: 85). On
many views, unconscious phantasy can lead to or produce both conscious and
unconscious beliefs. There is disagreement, however, about several matters relevant to
unconscious phantasy’s relation to belief, including its origins, its relation to sources of
motivation, (p. 310) and the nature of its content (propositional, conceptual, imagistic, or
affective/bodily sensation).
Page 5 of 30

Many prominent conceptions sharply distinguish the two. In a canonical Kleinian

formulation, Susan Isaacs writes:
phantasies are the primary content of unconscious mental processes … this

‘mental expression’ of instinct is unconscious phantasy. Phantasy is (in the first
instance) the mental corollary, the psychic representative, of instinct. There is no
impulse, no instinctual urge or response which is not experienced as unconscious
phantasy.
(Isaacs 1948: 91)
For Isaacs, unconscious phantasy is the first, ‘low-level’, mental manifestation of a drive
or motivational urge (‘instinct’, in her terminology, following Strachey’s translation of
Freud’s ‘Trieb’ (drive, urge)). It likewise constitutes the mental content of defensive
processes countering these urges. It has a non-propositional, affectively laden
representational content (Gardner 1993: sect. 6.5). It thus differs from belief in several
respects, including the fact that (unlike wish-fulfilling belief) it is not a product of the
urge, but rather its mental expression.
Britton, too, sharply distinguishes unconscious belief from unconscious phantasy, holding
belief to be what bestows the status of reality upon the phantasy’s content for the subject
(1995: 19–20; 1998: 9).
Writers in other traditions bring the two closer together. Erreich, for instance, suggests
that unconscious phantasy should be ‘defined as a more or less unconscious belief
statement’ (2003: 569) that results from defensive processes of compromise formation
operating upon three components: wish, veridical perception, and naive cognition.
However, Erreich also characterizes unconscious phantasy as ‘a representational
structure for mental content with a motivational component’ (2003: 569) and views it as
‘a vehicle for the mental representation of … affects, wishes, defenses’ (2003: 545). So
understood, it is doubtful that an unconscious phantasy simply is a belief, despite
Erreich’s explicit definition; it might perhaps be understood as a complex structure
involving motivational elements along with unconscious beliefs as constituents,
components, or ‘concomitants’ (2003: 567), or it might be understood as some sort of
motivationally and affectively laden hybrid.
Some prominent views do not take a clear stand on the issue. In an influential
contribution to the American ego psychology tradition, Arlow (2008/1969) characterizes
unconscious phantasy as ‘unconscious daydreaming’ that is an ‘ever-present
accompaniment of conscious experience’ (2008/1969: 42). If we take the identification
with daydreaming literally, then unconscious phantasy is not a form of belief, even if it is
‘composed of elements with fixed verbal concepts’ (2008/1969: 23). Arlow also writes,
however, that ‘what is consciously apperceived and experienced is the result of the
interaction between the data of experience and unconscious fantasying’ (2008/1969: 42),
and he likens unconscious phantasy activity to a source of input analogous to that (p. 311)
provided by the senses (2008/1969: 43). He additionally characterizes unconscious
Page 6 of 30

daydreaming as a mental activity that ‘supplies the mental set in which the data of
perception are organized, judged, and interpreted’ (2008/1969: 43). These formulations
leave it unclear whether and to what extent unconscious phantasies are either belief-like
or involve a belief component.
A second explanatory construct can be more clearly distinguished from the concept of
unconscious belief. Some psychoanalytic theorists have recently emphasized nonlinguistic
procedural schemas, models, or routines for interpersonal relating—psychological
structures which are stored in an implicit (non-declarative) memory system and explain
patterns of behaviour, thought, and emotional response by generating particular
dispositions, motivations, and mental contents (including beliefs) in particular contexts
(for instance, Beebe and Lachmann 1994, Fonagy 1999, Lyons-Ruth 1999, Stern et al.
1998; for discussion, Eagle 2013). Such schemata may be thought to be underlying
psychological realizers of some unconscious beliefs. Whether that is so depends on larger
debates in the philosophy of mind.
In any case, however, the two concepts are distinct and are not extensionally equivalent.
First, many implicit procedural schemata—such as govern distance–standing as well as
more complex interpersonal behaviour—are not psychodynamically unconscious. Rather,
they remain difficult to articulate because stored in implicit (non-declarative) procedural
memory (Fonagy 1999: 216–17; Stern et al. 1998: 905–6). They consequently have
different behavioural manifestations. The patterns of resistance, defensive response, and
shifts over time that will lead an analyst to attribute a psychodynamically unconscious
belief are present only in certain cases. Moreover, as noted earlier, some unconscious
beliefs are generated by processes of psychic defence. Some of these can have a very
different sort of clinical manifestation and profile, and can play a different explanatory
role, from that of implicit procedural schemata. The two categories are thus disjoint.
However, none of this is to deny that procedural schemata for interpersonal relating can
participate in psychodynamic processes and structures: for instance, they can sometimes
generate psychodynamically unconscious phenomena, remain unacknowledged for
psychodynamic reasons, be shaped by psychodynamic processes, and even involve
characteristic interpersonally enacted defences (Lacewing, this volume).
Integrating Unconscious Belief: The Problem

Much clinical theorizing emphasizes that it can be crucially important for a patient’s
progress that unconscious beliefs become conscious. As Britton puts it, ‘until a patient
discovers that he really believes an idea its correspondence, or lack of it, with external
reality is irrelevant. His belief remains suspended, unconscious, unmodified, and
unverified, in parallel with a contrary belief’ (1995: 21).
What matters here is not simply awareness that one has a particular belief. An
(p. 312)
analysand might be said to ‘discover that he really believes an idea’ in the sense that he
learns to recognize the signs of his unconscious belief as they show up in his thought,
speech, and behaviour. On this basis he can say, ‘I believe that so and so’. However, such
Page 7 of 30

a person remains no closer to his belief as conscious subject than he was before (Moran
2001; Finkelstein, this volume). This might be a stage in a positive development
nonetheless, perhaps even a step towards bringing the belief into consciousness. The
person might benefit from learning to predict and manage the effects of the belief even if
it never becomes fully conscious. Still, this is fundamentally different from being able to
consciously occupy the subjective standpoint of the belief and self-attribute the belief
from precisely that position. It is only when one has attained that latter ability that one
can self-reflectively recognize the belief in operation ‘from the inside’ and bring it into
contact with one’s ongoing thinking about the matters with which it is concerned.
Bringing an unconscious belief into consciousness does not merely involve coming to
occupy this position in relation to that single belief. Rather, it involves bringing the
particular belief into the larger system of one’s conscious thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and
desires. It thus both requires and constitutes a process of psychic integration—a process
of bringing together into a single perspective what has been held apart or cut off, for
instance in a process of psychic defence. This necessarily involves an increase in the
range of positions—thoughts, feelings, and beliefs—that one can simultaneously self-
consciously occupy as a conscious subject.
To approach what might be involved here, it can be helpful to consider a parallel

schematic example. In the defence known as ‘splitting’, conflicting emotional responses—
along with correlative contradictory representations of self and other—are kept distinct
(Auchincloss and Samberg 2012b; Kernberg 1966: 238). The defence operates to evade
the anxiety introduced by the felt conflict between the emotions, and it can be
exacerbated by the analysand’s sense of threat arising from intense feelings of hatred
(Klein 1946). If an analysand has split her feelings of love and hatred, alternately
experiencing herself as in loving communion with an ideal object and in fierce battle with
a denigrated object, it will be crucial for her positive development that she come to
experience her hatred, understanding it as such, while also remaining in contact with her
loving feelings. That is the work of integration in this sort of case. The difficult task facing
the analysand is to hold in mind the feelings of both love and hate, understood precisely
as love and hate, and to experience their conflict as such, thereby uniting them into a
single self-conscious perspective. This amounts to bringing her loving self and her hating
self together into one.6
Integration in this sense does not necessarily entail rational control. Someone who
manages to integrate her love and hatred may not be able to get rid of either by
reflecting on the reasons for and against them. She may not be able to modulate the one
by ‘mingling’ (p. 313) it with the other (and that may not be appropriate in any case). Still,
her new ability to hold both in mind will enable new forms of thought, feeling, and
reaction, including the possibility of experiencing her behaviour and motivations in new
and emotionally richer ways, asking new questions about herself and others, and
considering paths of action that formerly were not live options. This requires the ability to
Page 8 of 30

recognize the conflict without becoming overwhelmed by anxiety, so that she can live
within and from that position of conflict as a self-conscious subject.
Turn now to the case of dynamically unconscious belief. In many cases the belief is one
that the analysand would perfectly well recognize as false.7 For instance, consider again
the belief I am a thief. Despite the reactions manifesting this unconscious belief, the
person might know perfectly well that he is no thief and has earned his salary and
received loving gifts and assistance from family and friends. Here, concretely, is what this
might look like. If we ask him, ‘Have you earned your salary?’, he replies, fully sincerely,
‘Yes, of course. I work very hard.’ And yet he might feel an inarticulate sense of guilt and
then begin telling a story about someone else who embezzled. If he is given a gift out of
love, he might recognize the gesture and genuinely feel grateful. And yet he might also
find himself feeling that he has gotten away with something. These feelings and thoughts
do not do away with his knowledge any more than everyday obsessive worries do away
with one’s knowledge that one turned off the stove. In his self-conscious thinking and
reasoning, he retains a firm grip on the truth.8
Such cases present a particular challenge within the lived experience of the analysand.
The analysand must attempt to take up, as a conscious belief, something he knows to be
plainly false. There is a difficulty here which is not merely a matter of defence against
anxiety or psychic pain. But these cases also present puzzles for us as theorists. What
would it be to integrate a plainly false belief? How can we make sense of the idea of such
a belief’s entering into the person’s self-conscious subjective perspective?
First, integration does not entail elimination. It would be lovely, perhaps, if as soon as the
troublesome belief began to come into consciousness it automatically ceased to exist.
However, because of the belief’s roots in wish, phantasy, and defence, this is not how
things usually go. These motivational forces require a different sort of treatment. For the
same reason, integration does not guarantee modifiability through deliberation. It is a
mistake to suppose that as the belief enters self-conscious mental life, it must become
directly and fully accessible to control, modification, or revision through conscious
reflection (contra Parrott 2015; cf. Moran 2001).
At the same time, however, integration can’t require radical loss of one’s grip on reality. It
can’t be that a belief comes into consciousness only insofar as the person now self-
consciously believes, without qualification, something that she previously consciously
(p. 314) regarded as false. Consider, again, Britton’s patient who believed that if she did
not see her mother, she would go blind (1995: 22). Such beliefs exert a rationalizing force
of their own, leading to the construction of a structure of delusional reasons and
evidence. To accept such a structure without qualification, and to feel and act
accordingly, wouldn’t be a route to integration, but to psychosis—a severe break from
reality (as in the case of Britton’s patient). Likewise, though confusion is sometimes an
important aspect of the process of working through, it would not be a positive
development in this sort of case if the person’s ongoing conscious state were to become
one of genuine uncertainty or confusion about what is true.
Page 9 of 30

For these reasons, to understand what it would be to integrate such a belief we need to
make room for an initially surprising idea: that a person could simultaneously self-
consciously believe something and recognize that the belief is false. That is, we have to
allow for the possibility of at least a period in which the person recognizes that she
believes that she has stolen everything good that has come her way—and occupies the
subjective position of that belief, viewing the world in that way—even while also perfectly
well recognizing that this belief is false because there are a great many good things in
her life that she did not steal: some were earned through hard work, some were freely
given, and sometimes she was simply lucky. This state may not be the ultimate goal—an
issue to which I will return—but we have to allow for it as a possible and sometimes
essential step along the way.
Moore’s Paradox and the Integration of

Unconscious Belief
What I have been describing is a psychological position that might be summarized in an
utterance or affirmative judgement of the so-called ‘commissive’ version of Moore’s
paradox: namely, ‘I believe that p, but p is false’ (Moore 1993). Many contemporary
philosophers take such an utterance or affirmative judgement to be paradoxical. While it
can be true that someone believes something that is false, it can seem incoherent to self-
ascribe a belief from the first-person standpoint even while judging or declaring that the
believed proposition is false. This incoherence has seemed to many philosophers to go
beyond mere irrationality; it is, we’re told, a fundamental and defining feature of the
concept of belief. As Wittgenstein writes, ‘One can mistrust one’s own senses, but not
one’s own belief’ (2001 [1953]: 190), and ‘If there were a verb meaning “to believe
falsely”, it would not have any significant first person, present indicative’ (2001 [1953]:
162). Many recent philosophers (e.g. Coliva 2015; Heal 1994; Moran 2001) have followed
Wittgenstein in holding that we can make no sense of the idea of someone’s consciously
occupying the subjective standpoint of a belief, self-attributing it from that position, and
also acknowledging its falsity. And yet this is precisely what integration of dynamically
(p. 315) unconscious beliefs often seems to require. The psychoanalytic case thus requires
us to accept as actual precisely what this tradition deems unintelligible.9
To make sense of this, it’s helpful to think more about what is involved in belief.
Consider the difference that is made when a belief functions in the way characteristic of
conscious belief. Conscious belief that p constitutively involves that p’s being the case is
person consciously encounters the world. As noted earlier, the world will be presented to
and in her occurrent thought as including that p is the case, and this presentation will
include a distinctive phenomenology: a sense or feeling of reality that might be captured
by saying that it is part of her subjective world that things are this way.10 Her experience
will likewise be shaped in various ways that fit with the truth of p, and she will be
disposed to have congruent emotional and motivational responses. Central here too are
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other differences in the person’s dispositions. If she consciously believes that p, she is
disposed to judge that p when she considers relevant questions. P will be presented in
her conscious directed thinking as a premise for her reasoning about what to do and what
is the case, and she will be disposed to so deploy it. She will be disposed to assert p when
appropriate and to act on the basis of p.
All of this can be true even if a person also recognizes that her belief is false. Crucially,
many of these dispositions are defeasible, and they can be defeated in various ways and
to varying extents in different cases. In particular, someone might consciously believe
that p, seeing the world in just the ways involved in consciously having this belief, and yet
not deploy p as a premise in conscious reasoning, act on its basis, or assert it flat out. She
might be disposed to judge p to be true and yet at the moment when she considers the
question, judge it to be false. She might strive not to act in ways that are predicated on
taking p to be true. Some of this may involve resisting these dispositions through an act
of will, as when one consciously resists the strong temptation to act as if p were true. In
other cases it may simply be a matter of what the person does in the course of her
directed conscious thinking: she might simply think, ‘But p is false’, and that might be
enough. These dispositions can also be defeated through changes in the person’s
underlying psychological functioning, so that the temptations and tendencies arising from
these dispositions do not even show up in her conscious thinking.
Suppose, then, that the analysand recognizes both that there is in fact no
(p. 316)
evidence in favour of the thought that she is a thief and that all sorts of considerations
support the contention that she isn’t one. Suppose that she also understands that her
belief I am a thief is itself a product of dynamic processes relating to deep wishes, fears,
and defences, and suppose that she has some experientially based understanding of these
wishes and fears and her defensive responses to them, so that all of this is functioning to
some extent consciously as well. In such a case, the belief will be intelligible to her, no
matter how wacky it is, in a way that goes beyond merely intellectual understanding,
insofar as the belief links with emotions and motivations she has experienced ‘from the
inside’. In light of all this, she might experience herself and her world in all of the ways
involved in believing that she is a thief, and yet she might attempt not to reason from I am
a thief in her conscious thinking about what to believe, think, and do. She might not
assert ‘I am a thief’, full stop. She might attempt to recognize when her emotional
responses are born of this false belief, and she might attempt to treat them accordingly;
likewise, with motivations that are given life by the belief. All of these further responses,
along with the subjective perspective involved in believing that p, thus form a total
complex perspective in which she self-consciously believes that she is a thief while not
endorsing that belief and indeed while judging it to be false. Even as she sees the world
through the lens of this belief, as it were, she also recognizes it as her lens, recognizes
the ways in which it is inapt, and resists, suppresses, or otherwise does not engage in
some of the patterns of response that would otherwise appropriately be involved.
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Different psychological positions might meet this description, as I discuss later. For now,
the point is this: we can in fact make sense of someone aptly capturing the reality of her
overall psychological situation by simultaneously self-attributing a belief from the subject
position and rejecting that belief as false. The key is to see that even as one occupies the
subjective perspective of the belief as conscious subject, one’s total self-conscious
perspective at that moment might include a wider purview. While this is a rationally
incoherent position, situations of this sort are familiar in ordinary life as well, particularly
in cases in which one unexpectedly discovers that a view to which one is deeply attached
is in error (Leite 2016).11
Any view of belief which emphasizes its connection with characteristic patterns of
activity, thought, motivation, and the like, would lead us to expect exactly the sort of
phenomena that I am pointing to. At least, it would do so unless one also holds the view
(identified most prominently with Donald Davidson) that belief ascription requires that
the person come out as rational, since I am proposing belief ascriptions that involve
(p. 317) contradictory beliefs within the same total view. However, if we think of belief
ascription as part of the attempt to make sense of the person or to render her intelligible
—where we separate that notion from specifically rational intelligibility—then often
precisely such a belief ascription will be the best fit. The distinctive form of intelligibility
provided by person-level folk-psychological explanation is not primarily and narrowly
rational intelligibility (Hursthouse 1991); a man’s rubbing his face in his wife’s sweater is
made intelligible when we note that he is dealing with her recent death, and this
intelligibility is not fully captured when we attempt to understand this case in terms of a
‘rationalizing explanation’ in the standard narrow sense. It rather has to do with
considerations of meaningfulness and significance for the person: with the emotional
resonances things have, the ideas with which they are associated, the motivations that
are in play, and the like. Once we allow that these richer forms of intelligibility play a role
in the attribution of attitudes such as belief, the possibility opens up of attributing much
more complex, conflicted belief states to the person.
To sum up: I have been arguing that the formerly dynamically unconscious belief is
integrated by being incorporated into a total conscious perspective that also contains its
contradictory. The total perspective is thus rationally fractured. But the fracture is
contained, in three senses. First, it is limited, in that it does not metastasize into a larger
split that would introduce a division into the person’s capacity for thought (as in
compartmentalization or dissociation). Second, the fracture is contained insofar as the
person is able to hold the whole situation in mind—both sides of the fracture, the fracture
itself, and their relations, and so can experience the whole situation as an object of
thought and as less threatening. Third, the various aspects of the person’s overall
perspective—including the formerly unconscious belief—are put in their places: they are
given a distinctive organization in relation to each other. As a result, the person now
functions differently. The person’s overall response—given the contradiction—is as
rational as it can be, insofar as the person aims not to act or reason on the basis of the
false belief and will attempt to ameliorate its effects on her emotions and motivations.
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This is the total complex situation that might be summed up and expressed by the
utterance or thought, ‘I believe that p, but p is false’.
It should be emphasized that this is not the mechanism that philosophers sometimes call
‘fragmentation’ (Lewis 1982). In fragmentation, two (or more) systems of belief are not
allowed to come into rational contact with each other. But here, the formerly unconscious
belief is brought into rational contact with the rest of the person’s conscious thought even
while being experienced as her belief, and it is rejected as false. That is precisely how it is
integrated into her total subjective perspective: as an aspect of that perspective that is
false. This integration is assisted by the way in which the belief is rendered intelligible
through an experientially based, emotionally rich understanding of the dynamic sources
of the belief—an understanding that arises through conscious experience of the fears and
wishes that hold it in place, so that they too, as well as their relation to the belief, all
become part of the single subjective perspective. To come to understand—on the basis of
a rich conscious experience of the relevant emotions—that one’s belief is, for instance, an
infantile defensive reaction to infantile fears is (p. 318) simultaneously to render it
intelligible, to accept it as what it is, and to put it in its place—even if it continues to be
an ineliminable part of one’s total perspective.
Is There a Superior Alternative Description?

I have been arguing that we have to allow for the possibility of self-consciously believing
something that one recognizes to be false, if we are to make sense of the very idea of
integrating the mind by bringing unconscious beliefs into consciousness. One possible
response is to feel that my argument just can’t be right: since (it is said) we can make no
sense of self-consciously believing something one knows to be false, we must have been
wrong to take this as a matter of belief to begin with.
In a well-known paper, the philosopher Tamar Gendler (2008) urges the explanatory
importance of what she calls ‘aliefs’: automatic, associative, arational clusters of
representational content, affect, and associated behavioural routines. It might be
suggested that what I have been talking about are really belief-discordant aliefs that are
brought into consciousness, not fully fledged beliefs that would generate a Moore-
paradoxical position of the sort I have been describing. It might similarly be said that in
many of these cases it would be more natural to express the attitude using affective
rather than cognitive language, saying something like ‘I feel like I’ve stolen everything
good in my life, but of course I know that’s not so’.12
In some cases, either of these forms of description might be apt. In particular, it might be
the case that many of what psychoanalysts call ‘unconscious beliefs’ consist in associative
clusters of affective and behavioural dispositions. From a clinical perspective, however,
the important point is this. Even if they were to begin life as ‘aliefs’, dynamically
unconscious beliefs can undergo a developmental trajectory in which they acquire
determinate propositional content and are brought into relation with the rest of the
person’s conscious view of the world in ways that are emotionally and motivationally
Page 13 of 30

transformative. It is precisely this work that is amongst the goals of the analytic therapy.
But the result might well be a conscious attitude that conflicts with the person’s other
conscious beliefs.
Likewise, casting these phenomena in broadly affective terms is fine, so long as one does
not lose track of the crucial fact that the attitudes in question conflict with one’s settled
view. So long as one keeps this point clearly in mind, the terminology does not matter.
Where the terminology can become important is in the clinical setting, since talk of what
one ‘feels’ can be used to distance oneself from acknowledging how one actually takes
things to be. Gardner’s characterization of defence is apt here: ‘an operation on mental
content that represents the cause of anxiety in such a way as to reduce or (p. 319)
eliminate anxiety’ (1993: 145). Talk of what one ‘feels’ can function defensively to avoid
the experience of psychic conflict by disguising unwanted or unacceptable aspects of
one’s view of what is the case.
It would likewise be a mistake to think that what I have been describing is best
understood as a situation in which it merely seems or appears to the person as if things
are a certain way. For her to deny that she holds the belief and to go straight to ‘it merely
seems or appears to me as if I have stolen everything good’, would be for her to deny
something crucial. When the belief was functioning unconsciously, this was how things
were for her, though she didn’t recognize it. And she is attached to this way of viewing
her world, insofar as doing so is fuelled by and satisfies particular motivations and
defensive responses to them. Believing that things are this way thus does important
psychic work for her. None of that necessarily changes as these matters come into
consciousness. Thus for her to say that this is not belief (but rather a mere ‘seeming’ or
‘appearance’) would be for her to evade these truths about herself in a way that enables
the processes that maintain the belief to continue unmodified and unexamined. For the
same reason, to characterize her state as mere ‘seeming’ or ‘appearance’ would miss—
and render unintelligible—the clinical fact, emphasized by Britton, that once a
dynamically unconscious belief becomes conscious, a process of mourning is often
required before the belief can be given up (1995: 22).
Similar points apply to the thoughts that the person merely has an ‘inclination’ to believe
—but doesn’t actually hold the belief—or that only ‘a part’ of her believes. To go straight
to such self-characterizations might very well be a motivated attempt to evade the
difficult conflicts presented by the states in question or to avoid approaching the
motivations that hold the belief in place. This would enable one to maintain the
conflicting view of things at a deeper level even while consciously avowing it in a
mischaracterized form. Such a self-characterization would short-circuit the difficulties
involved in integrating the false unconscious belief. Psychoanalytic-sounding ideas, too,
can be used for defensive ends.13
Moore-paradoxical belief attributions also cannot be avoided by emphasizing implicit,

non-propositional procedural schemata for interpersonal relating. All psychoanalytic
writers in this vein grant that there is a place clinically for the analysand’s conscious
Page 14 of 30

articulation of implicit models for relating.14 This cannot be accomplished except by the
analysand’s acknowledging from a first-person position how he takes things to be in his
interaction with the analyst (e.g. ‘I can’t reach out to you for comfort, because you
(p. 320) disapprove of comfort-seeking’).15 Since what is being articulated is how things
are from the patient’s subjective viewpoint, this amounts to the conscious expression of
belief. And there is no way for the patient to fully own—from the inside, as it were—the
full pattern of inhibition, motivation, emotional response, silence, etc. that is involved
here, unless he recognizes this as his perspective. But in some cases this will involve a
proposition which he regards as false.
An additional point is relevant here. Theorists who emphasize implicit procedural

schemata do not hold that this theoretical construct can entirely replace the clinical role
played by the concept of unconscious belief and its articulation in the process of working
through, since these schemata can generate distinct psychodynamically unconscious
beliefs. Fonagy, for instance, writes that ‘Consciousness of the beliefs generated by such
implicit memory models is crucial if the patient is to acquire the power to inhibit or
modify them through the creation of a second-order representation of their inner
experience . . .’ (Fonagy 1999: 219). Here again, a puzzle about the integration of false
unconscious belief will arise.16
Someone who thinks that the self-conscious self-attribution of false belief is just
impossible might instead suggest that as the belief comes into consciousness, the
analysand oscillates between incompatible, internally coherent viewpoints in order to find
a resting place in one and give up the other. But this picture is not adequate either. First,
there is often no larger viewpoint on the world available to the person within which the
formerly unconscious belief could be made to look rational. Because the belief is
sustained not by rational relations but rather by a tissue of phantasy, wish-fulfilment, and
defensive processes, to give it a place in a larger rationally coherent view would require
the wholescale creation of a massively delusive view of the world. Second, this picture is
overly optimistic about the extent to which it is possible to rid oneself of such beliefs.
Often they remain, and they need to be given a place within one’s larger subjective
perspective if one is to have hope of putting together a stable life. The picture of
‘oscillation’ cannot allow for this. Finally, to think that this is how things should always go
is to maintain a fantasy of being able to get rid of psychic materials one does not want. It
would be better in many cases to aspire to fully occupy one’s subjective perspective with
acceptance and understanding, where that very perspective includes a well-developed,
emotionally rich, and motivationally effective conception of its own weaknesses and
deficiencies.
I think that this conclusion is inevitable for any psychodynamic therapeutic approach that
takes the patient’s total first-person, subjective perspective seriously as a realm for
exploration, articulation, and productive elaboration through speech and avowal.
Page 15 of 30

(p. 321) What Integration Might Look Like

Various positive endpoints are possible. With work, the person may give up the belief and
correctly understand herself as subject to an unshakeable emotionally resonant
‘appearance’ or ‘seeming’ arising from understood psychodynamic forces. Through
underlying psychological shifts she might lose even this ‘seeming’ or ‘appearance’. In
other cases, the underlying motivations might remain but gain their satisfaction not in the
person’s cognitive life, not in the realm of seemings and belief, but rather in the realm of
treasured conscious fantasy and play. However, in many cases the endpoint is one in
which despite what the person might want, it would be untrue for her to deny that she
believes that she is a thief. In these cases the false belief is consciously maintained but
given its place within a broader perspective that acknowledges its falsehood, renders it
intelligible, and ameliorates its effects.
Even here there can be variation along multiple dimensions. One such dimension is the
precise way in which the person now occupies the subjective standpoint of the formerly
unconscious belief.
To see this, consider that the ability to use ‘I’ in expressive self-ascription of the attitude
doesn’t yet guarantee incorporation of this belief into the right sort of larger self-
conscious perspective. After all, someone could, at a given moment, consciously occupy
the subjective position of the belief that he is a thief and say, in a melancholic, chastened
tone, ‘I’m an awful person; I deceive people in order to get their love. I’m nothing but a
thief.’ He might continue, in response to a therapist’s comment, ‘You believe that you are
a thief’, ‘Yes, I do. I steal from everyone.’ This person has not yet integrated his formerly
unconscious false belief, because he is now in the grip of it. It isn’t yet properly
incorporated into the right sort of broader perspective. (This position might nonetheless
be an important stage in a developmental process, and someone engaged in ‘working
through’ may slip in and out of it.)
Someone might instead be able to self-attribute the belief from the subject position,
consciously having the thoughts, feelings, and motivations that go along with it, and yet
battle against it in light of its falsehood. He might fight and struggle to resist some of the
dispositions it involves, for instance by effortfully correcting false interpretations it
generates in particular interactions. He might be able to place all of this in the context of
a broader understanding of the psychodynamic forces at issue and an ability to recognize
them as they appear and function in situ. In these ways, he manages the false belief.
This situation is a step towards psychic integration, but precisely in its aspect of
intrapsychic struggle, it threatens to break apart. To put it metaphorically, the belief that
he is a thief is pressing to bust loose, and if it breaks free he might oscillate back towards
a position in which he is in the grip of the belief. The person’s overall mental state is thus
organized at the moment, but it lacks a measure of stability. Like a peace imposed by
armed garrison, it is subject to internal pressures that threaten to undo it.
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A notable feature of this last case is that there is a sense in which the person
(p. 322)
restrains himself from fully occupying the subjective position of the belief, precisely
because of the threat it is felt to pose. For instance, he might not be able to give voice to
this belief by saying ‘I am a thief’ without sliding back towards being in its grip. While he
can wholeheartedly self-ascribe the belief, he might feel enormous anxiety at thinking the
first-order thought, ‘I am a thief’. That belief’s subjective perspective thus hasn’t yet
been stably and fully incorporated into a larger, unified perspective in which he
simultaneously occupies the standpoint of the belief even while recognizing its falsity.
How could he give some form of first-order expression to the belief even while
maintaining his hold on its falsehood? Imagine that while he recognizes that his belief is
false, he is no longer engaged in intra-psychic struggle against it. Instead, he is able to
say, with warm, ironic good humour and a twinkle in his eye, ‘Of course I am a thief. After
all, I’m doing it right now! I’ve gotten you to pay undivided attention to me for a full hour,
and I’ve given you no love or attention in return.’ Here, tone is everything. We have to
imagine that the person is both giving voice to his belief that he is a thief and also in the
fact that he is speaking with ironic good humour giving voice to what he would otherwise
express by saying ‘Of course, I’m not a thief’. He thus gives voice to both sides of the
conflict while putting each in its proper place. And this single utterance doesn’t just
express the conflict; it expresses his total position regarding both the belief and the
conflict it is involved in. For instance, his utterance also expresses, with good-humoured
irony, the rationalizing pressure to seek confirming evidence for the belief that he is a
thief (‘See, I’m doing it right now!’), and the gentle, self-accepting, good humour with
which all of this is said expresses his recognition that this belief (with all that it involves)
is an immature solution to an immature problem. What we see here is thus an expression
of the full, stable incorporation of the false belief into a single, unified self-conscious
perspective.17
This person can give voice to both sides of the conflict without any oscillation in his total
position—that is, without any change in his total mental state, including its associated
dispositions and patterns of thought, feeling, and reaction. The utterance exhibits an apt,
settled pattern of relations between both sides of the conflict and also an apt, settled
orientation towards the conflict itself. The person thus has the ability to speak with one
voice—a voice that expresses the totality of his complex overall perspective all at once.
Indeed, it is this ability that is a key reason for describing this as one contemporaneous
complex subjective perspective comprising both the subjective position of the belief and
recognition of its falsehood. What underwrites such an ability are the functional relations
amongst the person’s beliefs, thoughts, feelings, motivational states, and ongoing
patterns of thought, feeling, motivation, and reaction, including the relatively stable
maintenance of an organization over time that includes an overall good grip on reality.
This, then, is one way things can look when a person has successfully integrated a false
unconscious belief. It is not the only way, and it may be but a stage in a larger process.
(p. 323) There is still the question of what motivations lie behind this belief. Moreover,
though this resolution is well attuned to reality and stable so far as the particular conflict
Page 17 of 30

is concerned, it may be threatened or undercut by other psychodynamic processes or co-

opted for other purposes. Moreover, certain defensive structures can look superficially
similar to this resolution; here the difference might be marked, for instance, by the
superficiality of the irony, the lack of warm self-acceptance, the casual flimsiness of the
patient’s claim to know that he is not a thief, or the panic-concealing giddiness of his
statement that he is one.
My use of the phrase ‘speaking with one voice’ emphasizes a connection with an
important theme in recent work by Jonathan Lear. Lear has articulated a broadly neo-
Aristotelian concept of integration involving excellent communication between the
rational and non-rational aspects of the psyche, communication that enables a person to
move forward freely to satisfy both the person’s conscious aims and unconscious
yearnings (Lear 2017). As he puts it:
If the voices of the non-rational soul are an occasion for a creative, in-tune and
thoughtful response from reason; and if, in turn, reason is able to enliven and free
up the voices of the non-rational soul, as it channels them into a life worth living,
we can give content to the thought that this is a rich form of speaking with the
same voice.
(Lear 2017: 49)
Here Lear calls attention to the way in which two systems or ‘parts’ of the psyche can
work in harmony despite their different modes of functioning: they are, at bottom, in a
certain kind of accord. This is an important form of integration. However, it differs from
the mode of integration which I have been highlighting: the integration of conflicting
mental states into a whole that neither evades nor elides the conflict but rather
incorporates it into a broader, well-functioning, self-conscious standpoint.
Lear’s own clinical examples do not thematize the relation between these two modes of
integration. One of his clinical examples—the case of Mr B—is described in such a way
that it appears that excellent communication is achieved without the patient’s consciously
integrating whatever conflict is holding him back (2017: 42). In the example of Ms A, by
contrast, the patient self-consciously experiences the conflict for what it is, and this
appears to play a role in enabling her to make a request that had been difficult for her
(2017: 22). This is a moment that is comparable to what I have described in the
integration of unconscious belief.
It is an open question for me to what extent and in what ways excellent communication
between the rational and non-rational aspects of the psyche involves consciously
experiencing and integrating conflicting mental states, just as it is an open question in
what way(s) the latter form of integration might depend upon the form of good
communication that Lear describes. The point that I want to mark for now is just this:
because these phenomena are conceptually distinguishable, these questions need to be
Page 18 of 30

considered. As Lear has helped us see, we shouldn’t assume in advance that we know
what integration is or should be.
Philosophical Implications: Psychic Unity,

(p. 324)
the First-Person Perspective, Transparency,

and Rational Self-Constitution
I have argued that if we are to make sense of the possibility that bringing unconscious
beliefs to consciousness could be a path to psychic health, we must make sense of the
idea of self-consciously occupying the standpoint of a belief that one knows to be false. I
have tried to show how to do so. In closing, I will briefly sketch some important
implications for several large issues in philosophy.
a. There is a strong tendency amongst philosophers to view both the unity of the subject
and psychic integration as matters of rational unity. For instance, in his defence of the
broadly Freudian idea that the mind can contain partitions between distinct psychic
systems, Donald Davidson comments, ‘I postulate such a boundary somewhere between
any (obviously) conflicting beliefs…. Such boundaries … are conceptual aids to the
coherent description of genuine irrationalities’ (Davidson 1986: 211; see also 1982). Such
aids are needed, Davidson tells us, because ‘two obviously opposed beliefs could coexist
only if they were somehow kept separate, not allowed to be contemplated in a single
glance’: these are ‘beliefs which, allowed into consciousness together, would destroy at
least one’ (Davidson 1997: 220). But the result of the partition, he says, is ‘a single mind
not fully integrated’ (1997: 221).
These formulations presuppose a picture of psychic integration as rational integration,

resulting in the rational abandonment of one or the other of the conflicting beliefs. The
integrated mind is thus free from obvious conflict, on this picture. However, we have seen
that self-conscious belief isn’t tied that closely to rationality, nor does psychic integration
necessarily involve the removal of rational conflict.18
Sydney Shoemaker deploys framing assumptions similar to Davidson’s in

(p. 325)
considering Moore’s paradox. He writes, of a person who affirms ‘I believe that p but p is
false’, that ‘the only way to save the coherence of this case is to suppose that it involves
there being a divided mind. One part of a person’s mind believes something, and another
does not, and the part that does not believe it ascribes the belief to the part that
does’ (Shoemaker 2012: 249). Here Shoemaker gets things exactly backwards. The
analysand’s ability to sincerely say or think such a thing is a manifestation precisely of
the overcoming of psychic division: it’s from one and the same perspective—that of the
conscious subject of the belief in question—that the analysand both self-ascribes the
belief and acknowledges its falsehood.
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At bottom, the lesson is this. There is a widespread view that it cannot possibly be correct
to ascribe an obviously irrational combination of contemporaneous conscious attitudes to
a person. Consideration of the clinical task of integrating false unconscious beliefs shows
that this view is simply incorrect. The unity of a single, self-conscious, subjective
perspective need not be a rational unity.19
b. I turn now to an issue prominent in recent philosophical discussions of knowledge of

one’s own beliefs and other attitudes. It is a familiar point in these discussions that there
is a crucial difference between ordinary first-personal awareness of our emotions, beliefs,
desires, and other attitudes, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, knowledge we
might gain about these matters in other ways. For instance, someone might learn of her
unconscious belief by accepting an interpretation offered by her analyst or by drawing an
inference from indications in her behaviour and conscious thought and feelings. She
doesn’t thereby gain the sort of knowledge that we ordinarily have of our own beliefs. The
difference is that her self-attribution is analogous to a third-personal psychological
attribution: she does not self-ascribe the belief from the standpoint of the conscious
subject of the very belief being self-ascribed. As it is put in the literature, she does not
stand in a genuinely first-personal relation to her belief (Moran 2001).
According to a long and prominent philosophical tradition, the genuinely first-personal

relation to one’s attitudes is inextricably linked to considerations of rationality and a
conception of the self as rational agent. Perhaps the most prominent proponent of such a
view is Kant, who writes that ‘it is only as intelligence that [a person] is his proper self’
and that if certain desires cannot be viewed by the individual as the products of reason,
‘He does not even hold himself responsible for these inclinations or impulses or attribute
them to his proper self’ (Kant Grundlegung 457–8; Beck’s translation p. 7). Themes along
these lines have shaped the thinking of a large number of contemporary philosophers, not
all of whom identify as specifically Kantian (Bilgrami 2006; Boyle 2009; Moran 2001; Rödl
2007). For instance, some hold that self-attribution of beliefs from the first-person stance
necessarily involves a stance of deliberative agency and rational endorsement. Others
hold that in first-personal attributions of belief, one sees the belief as the product of one’s
rational faculties.
The points I have been urging show such views to be mistaken. Self-attribution
(p. 326)
from a first-person stance requires consciously occupying the attitude’s subjective

perspective on the world. In the cases I have been discussing this does not require or
allow for rational endorsement of the belief or even seeing it as the product of the proper
functioning of one’s rational faculties. Nor in these cases does the first-person relation
involve taking a stance of deliberative agency towards the belief, since one might very
well recognize that one can’t get rid of the belief through rational deliberation. Rather, in
these cases a genuinely first-personal stance involves seeing the world from the
subjective standpoint of the belief even while regarding it as false and as the product of
non-rational belief-forming processes involving wish, phantasy, and defence. What is
required here is acknowledgement and acceptance of the reality of one’s psychic life,
building on a certain kind of emotional openness to that which one finds repugnant or
Page 20 of 30

unreasonable.20 This is not reducible to any sort of intellectual exercise, nor is it

compatible with identifying oneself (as subject) with one’s rational capacities in
particular.
Still, something is right in thinking that our reasoning capacities, and our understanding
of ourselves as possessing and aiming to exercise such capacities, are relevant to our
ability to take up a first-personal relation to our beliefs. Our ability to acknowledge and
accept our false beliefs depends fundamentally on our capacities for rational reflection
and response to reality. Without those capacities, we could not contain the conscious false
belief within a broader conscious perspective that puts it in its place, but would rather be
the helpless victims of unresolved conflict.
c. Problems also arise for the related accounts of first-personal self-knowledge which take
‘transparency’ to be central. Gareth Evans claimed that in self-ascribing a belief about
whether there will be a third world war ‘I must attend … to precisely the same outward
phenomena as I would attend to if I were answering the question’ whether there will be a
third world war (1982: 225): that is, to determine whether I believe that p, I ask whether
p and then if I find that p is true (or false), I append ‘I believe that . . .’ to that result. As
Moran puts it, ‘[T]he claim [of the Transparency Condition] … is that a 1st-person present
tense question about one’s belief is [to be] answered by reference to (or consideration of)
the same reasons that would justify an answer to the corresponding question about the
world’ (Moran 2001: 62). On this conception, present-tense self-attribution of belief from
the first-person standpoint is dictated by rational consideration of the relevant evidence
and facts concerning the matters the belief is about.
This view cannot make sense of the clinical phenomena. When an analysand integrates a
formerly unconscious belief that is plainly false, she cannot self-attribute the belief by
following the transparency procedure; after all, she recognizes that the belief is false, so
when she asks whether p her answer will point away from self-attribution of belief that p
—at least if she follows the transparency procedure. Still, she stands in a properly first-
personal relation to her belief that p nonetheless. Her relation to that belief is not merely
‘attributional’ or ‘theoretical’; she occupies the subjective perspective of the belief and
(p. 327) self-attributes the belief from that position. Properly first-personal self-attribution
thus need not conform to the transparency condition.
This point is of clinical importance. Precisely because the transparency procedure ties
self-attribution to one’s judgement about what is the case or what the relevant reasons
support, to take up the transparency approach in the clinical situation would be to refuse
to admit into one’s self-conscious view any belief that one can see fails to fit with the
relevant evidence or facts. The stance of Transparency would thus be a manifestation of
resistance to the analytic process or a defence against conscious psychic conflict in these
cases. In the clinical setting, the key question is, ‘How am I oriented towards myself and
my world?’ If one is tempted to answer that question by focusing on the question, ‘What
is there reason for here?’, one might well be led into a defensive, false self-conception
(Bell and Leite 2016; Lear 2011: 56).
Page 21 of 30

Some accounts of self-knowledge emphasize transparency without framing it in terms of

the Kantian themes highlighted earlier. Clinical cases raise a challenge for these views as
well.
For instance, according to Alex Byrne’s (2005, 2011) ‘inferentialist’ account, first-
personal awareness of our own beliefs is secured through an inference in accordance
with the ‘Doxastic Principle’, ‘If p, then conclude that you believe that p’. Byrne
emphasizes that this would be a distinctively first-personal way of acquiring such
knowledge; the inference’s reliability depends precisely on the fact that it concerns one’s
own beliefs. However, the patient who comes to see ‘from the inside’ that she believes—
quite incorrectly—that she has stolen everything good in life, has genuinely first-personal
knowledge of this belief, and yet we cannot reconstruct this knowledge in terms of the
reasoning Byrne proposes. First, the person would not reason in the way he suggests (‘I
have stolen everything good in my life, so I believe that I have stolen everything good in
my life’), because she regards the premise as false. Second, it is hard to see how an
inference from a premise a person correctly regards as false could give her knowledge of
the conclusion. Her first-personal awareness of this belief consequently cannot be
grounded in any such reasoning.
d. I turn to one last issue: the constitution of the self. A prominent strand of thought in
contemporary philosophy urges that my endorsement is what makes the difference
between that which belongs to ‘me’ as subject and that in my psychology to which I relate
only as an object of description, report, and possibly management (Frankfurt 1988;
Korsgaard 2009).21 On this view my unity as a subject is threatened to the extent that I
have not yet sorted conflicting elements into ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ through deliberation and
endorsement or rejection. Korsgaard gives characteristically sharp expression to the
point.
Because human beings are self-conscious, we are conscious of threats to our

psychic unity or integrity. Sometimes these threats spring from our own desires
and impulses … we deliberate in the face of threats to our integrity, and as against
them … we must repress them in order to be one, to be unified, to be whole (2009:
26).
Korsgaard does not merely mean that we give order to our psychologies by
(p. 328)
choosing to act on some motives and beliefs but not others. Rather, she thinks of
deliberation and choice as forging a distinction between what is genuinely ‘us’ and what
is not. ‘That’s what deliberation is: an attempt to reunite yourself behind some set of
movements that will count as your own’ (Korsgaard 2009: 213); through deliberation and
choice we engage in ‘the endorsement of our identities, our self-constitution’ (2009: 43).
So, for Korsgaard self-unity is achieved through extrusion: I cannot recognize from the
first-person point of view that something belongs to me as subject which I do not and
cannot endorse, but rather must regard it merely as ‘a product of some force that is at
work on me or in me’ (2009: 18–19).
Page 22 of 30

This gets things backwards from the clinical point of view. What is true, given a
psychodynamic framework, is rather that psychic health requires us to integrate these
threats ‘in order to be one, to be unified, to be whole.’ That doesn’t mean that we must
endorse them or choose to act upon them. It means that we must bring them within our
purview as self-conscious subjects, understanding them as us, as part of our identity, as
part of who we are.22
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Notes:
(1) Schwitzgebel (2002) offers a broadly dispositional approach to belief that fits well with
the perspective sketched here.
(2) There are two options here because someone could have patterns and dispositions of
conscious response—and be aware of the world in ways—that constitute occupying the
subjective perspective of the attitude, and yet be unable to self-ascribe it. For instance,
she might lack facility with relevant mental state concepts. More subtly, to consider just
one sort of alternative in which she possesses facility with the relevant concepts, she
Page 26 of 30

might consciously experience reactions of anger or envy but for defensive reasons be
unable to experience them as anger or as envy. Finkelstein (this volume) offers an
expressivist account of the conscious/unconscious distinction which attempts to cover all
of the relevant cases. However, it is doubtful that his account adequately handles clinical
examples in which a person directly expresses her attitude through self-attribution and
yet fails to understand in the requisite way what she is doing (Bell and Leite 2016; Leite
2018). More complicated versions of such examples cause trouble for Finkelstein’s
account even when it is supplemented with the requirement (Finkelstein, this volume)
that the person be able to ‘co-expressively gloss’ the expression of the attitude.
(3) Only a great deal of experience with the person will enable a belief attribution of this
specificity. For instance, some of the data I have described is compatible with an
attribution of the belief ‘I am an imposter’, but someone who thinks himself an imposter
rather than a thief will exhibit a different profile of thoughts and emotional responses.
However, some measure of indeterminacy may be an inevitable part of mental state
attributions as well. (Nothing I have said here addresses questions of clinical technique
such as how the analyst should regard her own conjectures about the patient or how she
should bring them into the clinical exchange.)
(4) This is a schematic characterization of the mechanism of ‘disavowal’ proposed by

Freud in his attempt to account for certain cases of fetishism (1927, 1940a: 201–4,
1940b).
(5) The Kleinian tradition uses the spelling ‘phantasy’ to mark off the specifically
psychoanalytic concept, as do many other analysts writing in Britain. However, many non-
Kleinian psychoanalysts, especially those in America, prefer the spelling ‘fantasy’. For
convenience, I will follow the Kleinian spelling. No tendentious theoretical assumptions
are thereby intended.
(6) This difficult task often isn’t helped by saying that a part of the patient hates the
object while another part loves the object. As Michael Feldman puts it, ‘while the patient
might be able to understand such interpretations intellectually, [she] may not be able to
use it in an insightful way, to promote psychic integration’ (2007: 383).
(7) Not all cases are of this sort; for instance, many repressed beliefs in relation to trauma
are not false.
(8) I don’t deny that sometimes we simply don’t know what to say about what the person
believes or knows. However, the case relevant here isn’t like that. It is one in which the
person has the dispositions (described earlier) involved in unconsciously believing that he
is a thief and also has the dispositions involved in believing—indeed, knowing—that he
isn’t one. The complex interplay between these dispositions explains the variegated
pattern of actual behaviour and reactions.
(9) The integration of unconscious belief thus poses a particularly sharp challenge for this
philosophical tradition. It has been noted in recent work on Moore’s paradox that in
Page 27 of 30

situations of irrational or superstitious belief, a person might recognize that she has a
belief even while acknowledging its falsity (Gertler 2011; discussion in Coliva 2015).
However, it hasn’t been clear in these examples whether the person occupies the
subjective position of the belief at the time of the self-attribution. If not, then such
examples are beside the point. Just as it is no surprise that a person could recognize on
the basis of her own behaviour that she has a false unconscious belief, it is no surprise
that self-attribution is straightforward when one is alienated from one’s belief and does
not at that moment occupy its subjective standpoint on the world. This is why the
integration of unconscious false belief is a key test case.
(10) This phenomenology is distinct from what is presented as being the case, but rather
concerns the manner in which it is so presented.
(11) It is sometimes asserted that understanding belief as involving ‘commitment’—say, a

‘commitment’ to the truth of the believed proposition—precludes intelligible self-
ascription of false belief (Coliva 2015). However, on any ordinary conception of
commitment you can perfectly well recognize that you have and are expressing a
commitment that you shouldn’t have: a commitment that is erroneous, mistaken, or
misguided. Admittedly, ‘commitment’ could be stipulatively defined in such a way that
‘commitment’ to the truth of p is incompatible with the self-attribution of false belief.
However, one had better not understand conscious belief in such terms. Such an account
has the consequence that self-conscious, deliberative change of mind is impossible—
which it surely isn’t (Leite 2016).
(12) Thanks here to Sarah Majid.
(13) Another sort of short circuit would arise if the analysand defensively rolled up his
sleeves and got to work on trying to change the belief before truly coming to occupy it
(Wollheim 2003).
(14) Fonagy, for instance, writes: ‘Therapeutic action lies in the conscious elaboration of
preconscious relationship representations’ (1999: 218). Stern et al. comment: ‘In the
course of an analysis some of the implicit relational knowledge will get slowly and
painstakingly transcribed into conscious explicit knowledge’ (1998: 918). Lyons-Ruth
writes: ‘If relational knowing is as much implicit and procedural as symbolic, the work of
elaborating new implicit procedures for being with others must occur at enactive as well
as symbolic levels … For an adult patient, more collaborative and inclusive dialogue may
involve partially translating previously implicit procedural knowing into words’ (1999:
608, 611, italics added).
(15) This example is suggested by a discussion in Lyons-Ruth (1999: 596).
(16) Even Stern et al. recognize the clinical importance—and difficulty—of bringing
dynamically unconscious beliefs to consciousness. They write: ‘The process of rendering
repressed knowledge conscious is quite different from that of rendering implicit knowing
Page 28 of 30

conscious. They require different conceptualisations. They may also require different
clinical procedures, which has important technical implications’ (1998: 918).
(17) There is a link here—which only became clear to me after writing this chapter—to
Lear’s important work on irony and therapeutic action (2003: esp. 118–33; see also Lear
2011).
(18) Psychoanalysts, too, are sometimes tempted by the conception of integration as an

absence of conflict. For instance, Morris Eagle writes, ‘In his later writings, [Freud]
writes that in health there is a “seamlessness” between the id and the ego, and also that
the overarching goal of psychoanalysis is unity of the personality. In taking this general
perspective, Freud aligns himself with those whose philosophical and spiritual ideal is
being at one with oneself, a man or woman of one piece. These figures include Confucius
… who reported that at the age of seventy … the dictates of his heart and his sense of
right and wrong were now one and the same, and Kierkegaard … who wrote that purity of
heart is to will one thing. The primary value underlying this idea is … the experience of
being at peace with oneself…. One way of putting it is to say that psychoanalysis moves a
bit out of what appeared to be the near-exclusive orbit of the Enlightenment vision and
closer to philosophical traditions characterized by a central concern with the
achievement of inner harmony’ (Eagle 2013: 908). Here we see a slide from
‘seamlessness’ (which is a functional/structural concept) to an ideal of integration as the
removal of conflict. However, seamlessness and the unity of the personality (understood
in functional/structural terms) do not in fact require the removal of conflict, but rather
acceptance of the conflict—of both sides of the conflict as ‘me’—and the discovery or
creation of a way to move forward given the fact of conflict. This alternative ideal—of
living with conflict gracefully and in full consciousness—gives us a different conception of
what ‘being at peace with oneself’ and ‘inner harmony’ (Eagle 2013: 908) might come to.
(19) I argue for this point on other grounds as well in Leite 2016.
(20) There is a parallel issue that can arise regarding psychoanalytic empathy—the
analyst’s capacity to empathically share in the patient’s perspective without endorsing it
and while maintaining her own.
(21) Of course, this characterization overlooks the vast differences between Frankfurt’s
and Korsgaard’s views in other respects.
(22) I am grateful to many people over many, many years for assistance related to this
chapter. I would especially like to thank Kate Abramson, David Bell, David Bleecker, Matt
Boyle, Louise Braddock, Jason Bridges, Ronald Britton, Fred Busch, Morris Eagle, Gary
Ebbs, Peter Fonagy, Richard Gipps, Louise Gyler, Edward Harcourt, Jim Hopkins, Leon
Kleimberg, Michael Lacewing, Jonathan Lear, Richard Moran, Caroline Polmear, and
Mary Target. I apologize to the many additional people who I am surely forgetting. I
would also like to thank the audiences at the 2013 Auburn University Conference on
Theoretical Rationality, the 2014 University of London/London Institute of Psychoanalysis
Joint Conference on Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, the 2015 American Philosophical
Page 29 of 30

Association Pacific Division Meeting, and the members of the Philosophy and
Psychoanalysis Study Group of the London Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Adam Leite
Department of Philosophy, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
Page 30 of 30



DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198789703.013.18
unconscious ones? This chapter briefly reviews an answer to this question that the author
has set out and defended in earlier work; it then suggests a new answer—one that
supplements, rather than replaces, the old answer. In spelling out this new answer, the
chapter offers an account of a distinction that is related to, but not identical with, that
between conscious and unconscious states of mind, viz. the distinction between conscious
and unconscious expressions.
Keywords: expression, expressivism, conscious, consciousness, first-person authority, self-knowledge, unconscious
1. A Question
unconscious ones? This question, which I’ll refer to as ‘Q’ in what follows, could also be
put this way: by virtue of what is someone’s anger, fear, anxiety, or desire, for example,
rightly characterized as either conscious or unconscious? In what follows, I’ll introduce
some background to, and then briefly review, an answer to Q that I’ve set out and
defended in earlier work.1 I’ll raise a worry about how this answer could be correct, and
I’ll discuss an exchange between Jonathan Lear and Richard Moran that bears on how the
answer I’ve given to Q might help to elucidate what Lear calls ‘the psychoanalytic
meaning of making the unconscious conscious’ (Lear 2011: 52).2 Both the worry and the
exchange between Lear and Moran will lead me in the direction of a new answer to Q—
i.e. toward another way of understanding the difference between conscious and
unconscious states of mind—one that supplements, rather than replaces or corrects, the
old answer. Providing it will require that I present an account of a distinction that is
related to, but not identical with, that between conscious and unconscious states of mind,
viz. the distinction between (what I’ll call) conscious and unconscious expressions.
Page 1 of 17

A good point of departure for theorizing about what it means to characterize someone’s
state of mind as either ‘conscious’ or ‘unconscious’ is a simple, tempting, and ultimately
unsatisfactory answer to Q that can be put as follows: ‘A person’s mental state is
conscious if she is aware of it, i.e. if she knows that she is in it. It is unconscious if she
does not know that she is in it’. To see why this is not a satisfactory answer to Q, consider
the following story:
Max is a philosophy professor who lives and works in Chicago. Every few months,
his mother flies to Chicago from her home in New York to meet with business
associates and to visit her only child. Almost every time she does this, Max forgets
to pick her up at the airport. Now, as a rule, Max doesn’t tend toward this sort of
forgetfulness. He never forgets to retrieve his wife or his friends from the airport.
Moreover, on those occasions when he forgets to retrieve his mother, he also
manages to be away from his mobile phone or to be carrying a phone whose
battery has died—so, she is unable to reach him. One day, while talking with a
colleague about his mother, it occurs to Max that this behaviour of his might
constitute evidence that he is unconsciously angry at her. Indeed, on thinking
through some of his other recent behaviour involving his mother, Max becomes
convinced by this hypothesis—convinced on the basis of behavioural evidence that
he harbours unconscious anger toward her. He says to his colleague, ‘I must be
unconsciously angry. It’s the only way to explain the way I’ve been acting; I’m
angry at my mother’.
Imagine that Max is justified in drawing the conclusion that he does. In such a case, we
might describe him as ‘knowing that he is unconsciously angry at his mother’. I take it
that there is nothing incoherent in such a description. But if this is so, it means that being
consciously angry is not the same as knowing that one is angry. At the end of the story,
Max knows that he is angry at his mother; he is aware of his anger, but this anger is still
unconscious.
Why is it tempting to think that a conscious mental state is just one that its subject knows
about or is aware of? I suspect that part of the answer lies in the fact that we use the
expression ‘conscious of’ (nearly) interchangeably with ‘aware of’. Right now, as I write
these words, I’m aware of—i.e. conscious of—my dog’s left front paw, which is resting on
my right foot. Of course, no one imagines that it somehow follows from the fact that I’m
conscious of Kopi’s paw that her paw can itself be described as ‘conscious’. But the
difference between ‘conscious of x’ and ‘x’s being conscious’ is easier to get confused
about when x is one’s own state of mind. In order to get ourselves into a position from
which we can think clearly about question Q, we need to distinguish between two ways in
which the word ‘conscious’ is used. At the conclusion of Max’s story, he has become
aware of—we could say ‘conscious of’—his anger toward his mother. But his anger is not
conscious. He is conscious of his anger, but he is not consciously angry. (It is only when
someone is consciously angry—and not merely conscious of his own anger—that his anger
is said to be conscious). Q asks how we should understand the difference between
conscious states of mind and unconscious ones (i.e. the difference between someone’s
Page 2 of 17

being consciously, e.g. angry and his being unconsciously angry). We’ll fail to get this
difference into focus if we conflate it with a distinction between things that one is aware
of and things that one is unaware of.3
2. Wittgenstein’s Suggestion
The answer to Q that I’ve defended in the past may be understood as an attempt to
develop a suggestion that Ludwig Wittgenstein makes concerning how to think about
psychological self-ascriptions. In his late writings, Wittgenstein often suggests that we
should understand such ascriptions as, or as akin to, expressions. Thus he writes:
The statement “I am expecting a bang at any moment” is an expression of

expectation.
When someone says “I hope he'll come”—is this a report about his state of mind,
or an expression4 of his hope?—I can, for example, say it to myself. And surely I
am not giving myself a report.
For even when I myself say “I was a little irritated about him”—how do I know how
to apply these words so precisely? Is it really so clear? Well, they are simply an
expression.
(Wittgenstein 1992: 70)
Wittgenstein thinks that, at least when we’re doing philosophy, we are inclined to imagine
that saying, ‘I expect an explosion’, is more like saying, ‘He expects an explosion’, than in
fact it is. Thus, we assume that just as my ascribing an expectation of an explosion to
another person requires that I have some epistemic ground or justification for believing
that he expects an explosion, so, too, my ascribing an expectation of an explosion to
myself requires that I have some epistemic ground or justification for believing that I
expect an explosion. The likely result will be a view according to which, even under the
best of circumstances (even when there is no question of my being opaque to myself),
psychological self-ascriptions should be understood as reports of observations—a view
that Wittgenstein takes to be misguided.5 His suggestion—that we think of such
ascriptions as expressions—is meant to provide an alternative way of understanding their
grammar. When Wittgenstein calls, e.g. a self-ascription of expectation an ‘expression’,
part of what he means is that it is not the report of an observation. Thus, there is a
fundamental grammatical asymmetry between psychological self-ascriptions and
ascriptions of psychological states and goings-on to others.
In Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, this suggestion first appears in §244, in the

context of an exchange between Wittgenstein and his interlocutor concerning how it is
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that children manage to learn the names of sensations. During this exchange, we find
Wittgenstein saying:
Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, the natural,
expressions of the sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and
he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later,
sentences. They teach the child new pain-behaviour.
It’s no accident that it is in the context of a discussion of language learning that

Wittgenstein introduces the idea that some self-ascriptions might be understood in terms
of expression. Part of his point could be put as follows (and here I’m reading §244
through the lens of many other passages in which Wittgenstein likens self-ascriptions to
expressions). No one imagines that when an infant expresses a pain by crying, wincing, or
moaning, he is issuing a report concerning an item that he has discovered via some sort
of inwardly directed observation. We can think of a child’s gaining the ability to say,
‘Ouch!’ or, ‘That hurts!’ or, ‘I feel a pain in my foot’, as a matter of his learning new ways
to do something that, in some sense, he could already do before he could talk, viz.
express his pains. And while an expression that takes the form of a prelinguistic cry or
wince is different in significant ways from an expression that takes the form of a self-
ascription6—even so, Wittgenstein thinks, there is no good reason to hold that when a
child becomes able to produce the latter sort of expression, he suddenly needs to rely on
inner observation in order to manage it.
Immediately following the bit of Investigations §244 that I quoted in the preceding
paragraph, the text continues as follows:
“So you are saying that the word ‘pain’ really means crying?”—On the contrary:
the verbal expression [der Wortausdruck] of pain replaces crying and does not
describe it.
The question that Wittgenstein’s interlocutor asks in the first of these two sentences is
liable to seem oddly confused or unmotivated. After all, Wittgenstein has not suggested
(in §244 or elsewhere) that the word ‘pain’ means something different from what we
always took it to mean; he’s not suggested that it really refers to behaviour. What is
moving the interlocutor to ask what he asks here?
Wittgenstein’s interlocutor is in the grip of a false dilemma concerning sensations and

other mental items. He (the interlocutor) consistently thinks—not only in the
Investigations, but in other late writings as well—that one must choose between (1)
thinking of pains, etc. as things that can be known about only via a kind of inner
observation directed at a realm of objects that just one subject can, in principle, have
direct access to, and (2) embracing a kind of behaviourism that, in effect, eliminates
sensations and replaces them with behaviour. In the quoted passage from §244, the
interlocutor gathers that Wittgenstein means to be rejecting the idea that we ordinarily
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self-ascribe pains on the basis of inner observation, so he, in effect, accuses him of
embracing behaviourism. In this instance, the interlocutor’s way of accusing Wittgenstein
of embracing behaviourism is to suggest that Wittgenstein thinks the word ‘pain’ doesn’t
after all pick out anything genuinely inner, but instead just means crying.
This isn’t the only moment in the Investigations when Wittgenstein’s interlocutor accuses
him of behaviourism. But in §244, Wittgenstein replies to the accusation in a way that is
liable to sound off-key. He doesn’t say merely that an utterance such as ‘I’m in pain’
should be understood as a verbal expression of pain and not as a description of crying (or
of any other behaviour). He says that the verbal expression of pain replaces (‘ersetzt’)
crying. And perhaps this doesn’t seem quite right. After all, it’s not as if children stop
expressing pains by crying when they learn how to express them by talking about them.
Maybe Wittgenstein ought to have used a different word at the end of §244. Still, I think
it’s important that there is, after all, a kind of replacement that occurs when children
learn to express their pains by self-ascribing them. And I think Wittgenstein might have
had this in mind when he imagined the exchange in the way that he did. In any case, I
want to say that there is an important sense in which the kind of crying a child did as a
prelinguistic infant really is no longer a part of her life after she learns to talk about her
own sensations, emotions, and attitudes. The kind of crying she did as an infant is, at that
point, replaced by another kind of crying. After she learns to talk, even though her
expressions-of-pain-via-crying sometimes look and sound the same as they did before,
they now could be said to have a different form. I’m going to have to leave this suggestion
dark for a little while—until after I’ve discussed the possibility of an expression’s being
conscious. I’ll come back to it in §7.
3. An Answer to Q
In my own writing, I’ve tried to take what Wittgenstein says concerning the grammar of
our talk about our own mental states and use it to make sense of the distinction between
two kinds of mental state. The guiding idea could be put this way: once a human being
has acquired language, her mental states are such that she is, ordinarily, able to express
them via the sort of speech act that Wittgenstein talks about; she can express her
sadness, anger, or desire by ascribing it to herself. Insofar as she is able to do this, her
sadness, anger, or desire is said to be conscious. But sometimes, even after a human
being has acquired language (and with it, the capacity to say what she is thinking or
feeling), she is unable to express, e.g. some particular fear of hers by self-ascribing it. A
kind of expressive ability that is characteristic of normal psychological states and events
as they figure in the life of a linguistic animal is, in such a case, absent or blocked. The
word that we use to characterize this sort of absence is ‘unconscious’ or ‘unconsciously’;
we say that someone’s fear is unconscious or that she is unconsciously afraid.
What would it take for Max’s unconscious anger toward his mother to become conscious?
It would not be sufficient for Max to become aware on the basis of behavioural evidence
that he was angry. For Max’s anger to become conscious, he would need to acquire, or to
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regain, an ability to express it merely by self-ascribing it. This expressive ability is what
he still lacks at the conclusion of the story I told about him in §1. At the end of that story,
Max says to a colleague, ‘It’s the only way to explain the way I’ve been acting; I’m angry
at my mother’. In so saying, Max expresses a belief (or perhaps knowledge) that he has
about himself. But he does not express his anger at his mother. He may express that
anger by stranding his mother at the airport, but he is still unable to express it by self-
ascribing it. Hence, it is still unconscious.7 This is to say, I’ve answered Q by claiming that
what distinguishes conscious states of mind and unconscious ones is the presence or
absence of a particular expressive ability.
In my Expression and the Inner, I put the point as follows:

it is unconscious.
What work is the word ‘merely’ doing in this encapsulation of an answer to Q? Why not
leave out ‘merely’ and say, more simply, that a person’s mental state is conscious if and
only if he can express it in a self-ascription? The trouble with the simpler formulation is
that it is open to counter-examples of the following sort. Imagine that Max occasionally
expresses his anger by speaking in a peculiar, clipped tone of voice. While speaking in
this tone of voice, he says: ‘The only way to explain my odd behaviour is to posit that I am
unconsciously angry at my mother. So, I’m angry at her’. Through his tone of voice, Max
expresses his anger in a self-ascription of it. Even so, his anger is unconscious. In
Expression and the Inner, I wrote:
When I say that someone’s state of mind is conscious if he has an ability to

express it merely by ascribing it to himself, I mean this: the sort of ability at issue
is one that enables a person to express his state of mind in a self-ascription of it,
where what matters [to the self-ascription’s expressing what it does] isn’t his tone
of voice (or whether he is tapping his foot, or what he is wearing, or to whom he
happens to be speaking), but simply the fact that he is giving voice to his sincere
judgment about his own state of mind.8 That I might manage to express my
unconscious anger in a self-ascription of it via a clipped tone of voice doesn’t show
that I have the relevant sort of expressive ability. When I am consciously angry, I
can say in a neutral tone of voice, “I’m angry,” and thereby express my anger.
Was that an adequate response to the tone-of-voice case? In one sense, I think it was. It
showed that the case constitutes a merely apparent, not a genuine, counter-example to
the view I was defending in the book (and that I still take to be correct). On the other
hand, it seems to me now that what I wrote there (and elsewhere) is liable to leave a
reader with a nagging question that might be put as follows: ‘Why should it matter if a
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person is able to express his anger merely by self-ascribing it—as opposed to being able
to express it in a self-ascription that comes in a clipped tone of voice? How could the
difference between conscious and unconscious anger come down to something so
apparently unimportant as that?’ I take the challenge posed by this question seriously.
Indeed, part of what has moved me to pursue a second answer to Q is the aim of coming
to better understand how, given this sort of challenge, my first answer could be correct.
How is it that gaining, or regaining, an ability to express some emotion or attitude merely
by self-ascribing it can make a significant difference in a person’s life? I’m not yet in a
position to address this question, but I’ll return to it after I’ve given a second answer to
Q, in the final section of this chapter.
4. Non-Linguistic Animals
Given the answer to Q that I’ve just been reviewing, we should not expect the distinction
between conscious and unconscious psychological states to, as it were, get a grip when
we are thinking about non-linguistic animals. After all, it is only when one is considering
the psychology of a linguistic creature that it makes sense to distinguish between states
that can be expressed in self-ascriptions and states that cannot. And, as a matter fact, we
don’t characterize the psychological states of non-linguistic creatures as either conscious
or unconscious. Even those of us who are prone to attribute complex thoughts and
feelings to our pets do not say things like: ‘My dog gets upset when I pack my suitcase
because she has an unconscious fear of being abandoned’, or, ‘Over time, my cat’s
distaste for the people who live next door has gone from being unconscious to being
conscious’. Nor do we say such things about prelinguistic children. To borrow a phrase
that Wittgenstein uses in a related context,9 when a child learns to attribute mental states
to herself, a ‘new joint’ is added to the language-game. We could say that when children
learn to self-ascribe their psychological states and events, the form of those states and
events changes. From then on, they are either conscious, unconscious, or somewhere in
between conscious and unconscious.10 To the extent that some desire of mine is such that
I am unable to express it by self-ascribing it, it could be said to suffer from a formal
defect or imperfection. But it is no imperfection in Kopi’s desire, e.g. for water that she is
unable to express it by self-ascribing it. Kopi’s desires are, unlike mine, neither conscious
nor unconscious.11 This is to say: it makes no sense to describe a desire of hers as either
‘conscious’ or ‘unconscious’. In the shift from brute to fully realized human desire, a new
joint is added to the language-game; the psychological is transformed.
5. ‘What is gained … by replacing some words

for some tears?’
One of the goals that Jonathan Lear sets for himself in his fascinating A Case for Irony is
to elucidate ‘the psychoanalytic meaning of making the unconscious conscious’ (Lear
2011: 52). In pursuing this end, he draws on the strand in my work that I’ve been
reviewing and discussing in this chapter. Lear contrasts a case in which someone
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concludes on the basis of self-observation that he must be angry, even though he isn’t
‘consciously feeling angry’, with a very different case that he describes as follows:
[I]n the midst of a boiling rage, I say “I’m furious with you!” In this case, the anger
itself is present in the verbal self-ascription of anger that is directed at you. In this
case, the self-ascription of anger is itself an angry expression. Unlike the former
case, I do not have to observe myself to know that I am angry. I just am angry; and
the form my anger at you takes on this occasion is the angry verbal self-ascription
directed at you. In this case, the utterance “I am furious with you!” may replace
other forms of angry expression. … This is a case, in Finkelstein’s terms, in which
I am not only conscious of my anger; I am consciously angry.
(Lear 2011: 52–3)
Lear goes on to consider the question of how it might be therapeutic, rather than merely
disruptive, to find some way of, as it were, taking unconscious anger—anger that has
been ‘held out of consciousness not simply because it is painful, but because it violates
one’s sense of who one is’ (Lear 2011: 54)—and making it conscious. In this context, he
says, ‘The question thus becomes whether there could be a process—not too disruptive—
by which the verbal expression of anger replaces (in the Wittgenstein-Finkelstein sense)
its unconscious manifestations’ (Lear 2011: 54).
A Case for Irony comprises a pair of lectures by Lear followed by responses by several
other philosophers. In one of these responses, Richard Moran writes:
The idea of “replacing” one mode of expression for another is not perfectly clear
to me, particularly in the therapeutic context into which Lear is importing the
idea. On a basic level, we might ask: If the two modes of expression are really
doing the same work, then what is the point of “replacing” one with the other? If
we take the notion of replacement literally, then what is gained, for instance, by
replacing some words for some tears? Does that mean that the tears are now
unnecessary, having been replaced by something else?
(Moran 2011: 113)
It might be tempting to try to answer Moran’s question by drawing a distinction between

the kind of expressive ‘work’ that gets done via a self-ascription of sadness and the kind
that gets done via crying. But I believe that this would be to draw a line in the wrong
place. At least insofar as we’re interested in psychoanalysis, there is an important line for
us to draw between expressions that are, in a very particular way, defective or imperfect
and ones that are not. But, as will become apparent, crying can lie on either side of this
line. Moran’s question is useful, I think, insofar as it helps us to see that we need to
distinguish cases in which someone’s (e.g.) crying constitutes (what can be called) a
conscious expression of sadness (or joy or whatever) from ones in which someone
unconsciously expresses her (e.g.) sadness via crying. Moran asks what the point is of
replacing some tears with some words—that is, of replacing an expression that takes the
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form of crying with one that takes the form of self-ascription. My own view is that there
need not be any point in replacing crying with self-ascription. Tears are just fine as long
as they constitute conscious expression. Psychoanalysis does not aim to replace tears with
words. It aims to replace unconscious expressions with conscious ones.
6. The Distinction between Conscious and

Unconscious Expressions
What does an unconscious expression look like? We already saw an example of one in §1,
but I’d like to consider a somewhat different example now:
One afternoon, Max and his wife, Sarah, have a quarrel while assembling hors
d’oeuvres for a dinner party that they’ll be hosting that evening. Sarah’s new boss
will be one of their guests, and partly for this reason, she is worried about the
party’s going well. Although the quarrel subsides after a few minutes, Max
continues to dwell on it. Just before guests are scheduled to arrive, he reminds
himself that Sarah has been anxious about the party’s going smoothly, and he tells
himself that it would be petty of him to express the anger that he’s still feeling
toward her in front of their guests. He resolves to be the perfect co-host, to be
cheerful, charming, and useful. In spite of—and perhaps partly because of—this
resolution, Max repeatedly expresses his anger during the party, but he remains
unaware of doing so. He responds to Sarah’s sharp, witty, and critical assessment
of a recent movie by suggesting that she simply failed to appreciate what was
innovative about it; he makes disparaging jokes about food that Sarah prepared;
he tells a story about her brother that she finds embarrassing; and so on. It does
not occur to Max that these remarks of his might be connected to that afternoon’s
quarrel, and if someone were to suggest that there was a connection, he would
deny it. Nonetheless, it is apparent to all but the drunkest of their friends that
Max is annoyed with Sarah. For all that, Max performs the bulk of the serving and
most of the straightening up. Indeed, at one point during the evening, he privately
congratulates himself on managing to ‘put on a good face’ for Sarah’s sake, in
spite of his angry, hurt feelings.
Here, Max unconsciously expresses his anger toward Sarah in passive-aggressive

remarks. A noteworthy feature of this particular example of unconscious expression—a
feature that is not present in every example—is that here, a person unconsciously
expresses a state of mind that is, itself, conscious. (As I’ve asked you to imagine him, Max
is consciously angry at Sarah). This example stands in contrast to one in which someone
unconsciously expresses an unconscious state of mind. The story that I told in §1—in
which Max expresses his unconscious anger by repeatedly stranding his mother at the
airport—constitutes one such example.
Thus far, I’ve recounted two stories in which Max unconsciously expresses anger. Here’s
one in which he consciously expresses pleasure:
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Early one evening, Max and Sarah are feeling both hungry and tired, so rather
than cooking dinner, they decide to go to a nearby restaurant. Five minutes after
they order, Sarah tells a joke, and after a brief pause, Max’s face lights up in a
smile. Sarah says, ‘Are you smiling at my joke?’ Max replies, ‘No. I thought your
joke was funny, but I’m smiling because I see the waiter with our food, and I’m
really pleased that it’s coming out so quickly’.
In this example, Max is able to speak to the question of what his smile expresses in, we
could say, a first-personal way. His smile is a conscious expression of his pleasure at the
imminent arrival of dinner.
How is conscious expression possible? How is it that Max is able to just say what his
smile expresses? How does he know that he’s not smiling at Sarah’s joke? I want to
approach these questions by first considering what seems to me an easier sort of case,
one in which someone speaks with a kind of first-person authority—not about what
psychological state a bit of his behaviour expresses, but rather—about what some of his
own words mean:
One afternoon, Max and Sarah attend a philosophy department social event. A
graduate student says to Max: ‘I just met Sarah. Is she a philosopher too?’ Max
replies: ‘She is a philosopher, by which I mean: she is moved by, and thinks hard
about, philosophical questions. But she’s not someone who makes her living by
doing philosophy’.
Here, Max first says, ‘Sarah is a philosopher’, and then he provides a gloss on what he
meant by these words. Imagine that someone were to ask: ‘How did Max find out what he
meant by the words, “Sarah is a philosopher”? Did he first hear himself utter these words
and then work out a plausible interpretation of them?’ That’s the wrong way to think
about what’s going on in the story. Indeed, the question, ‘How did Max find out what he
meant when he said, “Sarah is a philosopher”?’ is itself confused. Max didn’t find out what
the first half of his statement meant and then, in the second half of the statement, report
what he had learned. We might want to call the second part of Max’s statement an
interpretation of, or gloss on, the first part. But it’s not the sort of gloss or interpretation
that another person might provide. The second part of Max’s statement is as much a part
of his assessment of Sarah qua philosopher as the first part is. We should think of the two
parts of Max’s statement as constituting a kind of unity, a single act. I’ll describe them as
co-expressing his assessment of Sarah qua philosopher. If a listener wants to understand
this assessment, she needs to consider the two parts of Max’s statement (the part in
which he says, ‘Sarah is a philosopher’, and the part in which he glosses what he meant
by these words) as making sense together, as two pieces of a single, extended expression
of his thought.
Now consider again the story I told about Max and Sarah at the restaurant. Recall that
when Sarah asks Max whether he’s smiling at her joke, he replies, ‘I’m smiling because I
see the waiter with our food, and I’m really pleased that it’s coming out so quickly’. Max’s
smile, I said, is a conscious expression of his pleasure at the imminent arrival of dinner. I
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want to suggest that we understand Max’s gloss on what his smile expresses in the same
way that we understood Max’s gloss on what he meant by the words, ‘Sarah is a
philosopher’. When Max says what his smile expresses, he is not offering the sort of
interpretation of his behaviour that another person might offer. Rather, his smile and his
gloss on its significance are two parts of a unified expressive act; together, the smile and
the gloss co-express his pleasure at seeing dinner on its way. What I’ll call a ‘co-
expressive gloss’ on the psychological significance of, e.g. a smile is not an interpretation
of the smile based on observation. It is, rather, a kind of extension of the smile into a
linguistic register.
***
At this point, I can say what it is that distinguishes conscious expressions from
unconscious ones. Someone’s expression of a mental state is conscious if she is able to
gloss it—i.e. gloss its psychological significance—co-expressively. Someone’s expression
of a mental state is unconscious if she is unable to gloss it co-expressively. What it means
to say that Max’s passive-aggressive dinner-party remarks are unconscious expressions of
his anger at Sarah is this: they are expressions of anger at Sarah that Max is unable to
gloss co-expressively.
It’s not impossible that someone should unconsciously express her frustration by
slamming a door and, immediately thereafter, accurately interpret the significance of this
behaviour in the way that a psychologically astute external observer might. But in such a
case, the door-slam and the gloss on it would be separate acts. When someone
consciously expresses her frustration by slamming a door, she is able to provide a gloss
on the slam, where such a gloss would, itself, be a continuation—a kind of extension or
stretching out—of her expressive act.
7. Replacement
Earlier in this chapter (§2), I discussed §244 of Philosophical Investigations, in which
Wittgenstein introduces the idea that when a child learns to talk about his pains, he
thereby learns a new way to express them. I noted that §244 concludes in a way that’s
liable to sound off-key, with Wittgenstein saying to his interlocutor, ‘[T]he verbal
expression of pain replaces crying’. I went on to make a suggestion that I was not yet in a
position to spell out, viz. that even if ‘replaces’ (‘ersetzt’) seems the wrong word for
Wittgenstein to have used in this context, there is a sense in which the kind of crying that
children do as prelinguistic infants is—when they learn to talk—replaced by another kind
of crying. I want to return to that suggestion and try to explain it in light of what I just
said about the distinction between conscious and unconscious expressions along with
something I said a little while ago, in §4.
In §4, I noted that the distinction between, e.g. anger that can be expressed via self-
ascription and anger that cannot be so expressed does not, as it were, get a grip when
one is considering the mind of a non-linguistic or prelinguistic animal. I went on to say
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that when a child gains the ability to self-ascribe his attitudes and emotions, their form
changes. Until then, it doesn’t make sense to describe them as conscious or as
unconscious. From then on, they are either conscious or unconscious or in between
conscious and unconscious. Now, something similar happens when a child gains the
ability to co-expressively gloss the psychological significance of his expressions: the form
of his expression changes. Until then, it doesn’t make sense to describe his expressions
(of sadness, pleasure, love, desire, anger, etc.) as either conscious or as unconscious.
From then on, his expressions are either conscious or unconscious or in between. When
Kopi expresses a desire to play with me by dropping a Frisbee at my feet, it is no formal
imperfection in her expression that she is unable to extend it into a gloss on itself. But if
Sarah discovers Max curled up on their bed, sobbing, and if—when she asks him why he
is crying—he is completely unable to say, then his crying could be characterized as
imperfectly instantiating the form of human expression. Thus, when children learn to talk,
one kind of crying does, after all, replace another.
Perhaps this a good place to point out that in this chapter, I am discussing four distinct
kinds of replacement: (i) the replacement of prelinguistic desires, fears, etc. with the sort
of desires, fears, etc. that are characteristic of linguistic creatures, (ii) the replacement of
prelinguistic expressions of desire, fear, etc. with the sort of expressions of desire, fear,
etc. that are characteristic of linguistic creatures, (iii) the replacement of unconscious
desires, fears, etc. with conscious ones, and (iv) the replacement of unconscious
expressions of desire, fear, etc. with conscious ones. A case of type (i) or (ii) does not
constitute an example of ‘making the unconscious conscious’.12 Cases of types (iii) and
(iv) are examples of ‘making the unconscious conscious’. A central aim of this chapter is
to elucidate the logical relations between cases of types (iii) and (iv)—between, that is,
two different ways in which the unconscious may be made conscious.
8. Another Answer to Q
In the story that I told about Max and Sarah’s dinner party, Max expresses his anger at
Sarah via passive-aggressive remarks. As I noted in §6, that story illustrates that it is
possible for someone to unconsciously express his conscious anger. Indeed, there is
nothing particularly extraordinary about a person’s unconsciously expressing either an
unconscious emotion or a conscious one. By contrast, we don’t find cases that we’d be
inclined to describe as ones in which someone consciously expresses an unconscious state
of mind. This is what we should expect, given what I have claimed about the distinction
between conscious and unconscious expressions. In order for Max to consciously express,
e.g. his anger toward his mother, he would need to produce an expression of anger whose
psychological significance he could co-expressively gloss. But now: consider a case in
which Max expresses his anger toward his mother by not answering the phone when he
sees that she’s calling. If Max could co-expressively gloss this expression—if he could say,
‘I’m not answering the phone because I’m angry at my mother’, and, thereby, extend his
non-verbal expression into a gloss—his anger would be conscious.
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Summing up a bit: we’ve seen that conscious states of mind may be expressed either
consciously or unconsciously. But unconscious states of mind can be expressed only
unconsciously. There is, as it were, no grammatical or logical space for an unconscious
emotion or attitude to be consciously expressed. A bit of reflection on this point yields the
new answer to Q that I promised at the start of this chapter. In §3, I quoted the following
statement from Expression and the Inner:

it is unconscious.
Let’s call that first answer to Q ‘A1’. What follows is a second answer; call it ‘A2’.
Someone’s mental state is conscious if she has an ability to consciously express it.
If she lacks this ability with respect to one of her mental states, it is unconscious.
A2 might sound as if it involves an uncomfortably tight circle, so I should point out that
although I am here, as it were, defining a sort of ‘consciousness’ in terms of a sort of
‘consciousness’, the latter sort of consciousness has been further defined in terms of co-
expressive glossing.13
Although A1 and A2 may be thought of as providing two different criteria for a mental
state’s counting as conscious, if they both are true—as I believe they are—then any
mental state that meets either one of these criteria will meet the other one as well. This is
to say: (i) if someone is able to express his, e.g. anger merely by self-ascribing it, then he
will be able to consciously express it. And (ii) if someone is able to consciously express,
e.g. his anger, then he will be able to express it merely by self-ascribing it.14 In what
remains of this chapter, I’ll be particularly interested in a point that is implied by (ii), viz.
that if someone is unable to express his, e.g. anger merely by self-ascribing it, then he will
be unable to consciously express it.
***
Given the answer to Q that I summarized in §3 and that is encapsulated in A1, making an
unconscious emotion or attitude conscious is a matter of acquiring or regaining an ability
to express it merely by self-ascribing it. It is such an ability that, I said, Max still lacks
even after he’s concluded on the basis of behavioural evidence that he is angry at his
mother. At the end of §3, I introduced, and then left hanging, a question concerning how
this could be the right thing to say about what it takes for an unconscious state of mind to
become conscious. Someone might put this question to me as follows: ‘As you have
characterized him, Max is able to express his unconscious anger at his mother by
stranding her at the airport, by misplacing his phone when he knows that she is likely to
call, and, presumably, by doing a wide variety of other things that are liable to annoy her.
Given the long list of ways in which he can already express this anger, why should his
Page 13 of 17

becoming able to express it in one more way—by self-ascribing it—be significant? How
could the difference between unconscious and conscious anger come down to that?’
I am now in a better position than I was in §3 to address the challenge presented by this
question. A couple of paragraphs back, I noted that putting A1 and A2 together yields a
point that I put as follows: ‘if someone is unable to express his, e.g. anger merely by self-
ascribing it, then he will be unable to consciously express it’. I suggest that this point
ought to help us understand why it is that the ability to express one’s own state of mind in
a self-ascription of it should not be considered just one expressive ability on a long list of
such abilities. Until Max is able to express his anger at his mother merely by self-
ascribing it, there is no way for him to consciously express it at all—either by telling his
mother that he is angry at her or by refusing to let her stay with him and Sarah when she
visits or by choosing not to answer the phone when he sees that she is calling.15 If Max
were to gain the ability to express his anger at his mother merely by self-ascribing it, this
would, as it were, open up the possibility of his consciously expressing it in these and
myriad other ways. If only for this reason, such a shift would be significant; it would
matter to Max’s life.
For all that, acquiring an ability to express his anger toward his mother in a self-
ascription of it would not guarantee that Max’s subsequent expressions of this anger
would be conscious rather than unconscious. As we’ve seen, a conscious state of mind
may be expressed either consciously or unconsciously. At the end of §5, I said that
psychoanalysis aims—not to replace tears with words, but—to replace unconscious
expressions with conscious ones. It is perhaps disappointing that acquiring (or regaining)
an ability to express an emotion or attitude in a self-ascription of it does not ensure that it
won’t continue to be expressed unconsciously. Still, the acquisition of such an ability is a
necessary step toward replacing unconscious expressions with conscious ones.16
References
Finkelstein, D. (1999). ‘On the distinction between conscious and unconscious states of
mind’. American Philosophical Quarterly 36 (2) (April): 79–100.
Finkelstein, D. (2003). Expression and the Inner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Finkelstein, D. (2010). ‘Expression and avowal’. In Kelly Jolley (ed.), Wittgenstein: Key
Concepts (pp. 185–198). Durham: Acumen Press.
Kluger, J. (2017). The Animal Mind. New York: Time Inc. Books.
Moran, R. (2011). ‘Psychoanalysis and the limits of reflection’. In Jonathan Lear, A Case
for Irony (pp. 103–114). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Page 14 of 17

Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford:

Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1967). Zettel, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and G.

H. von Wright. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1992). Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology Volume 2, trans. C.

G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue, eds. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman. Oxford: Blackwell.
Notes:
(1.) See, e.g. Finkelstein 1999 and Finkelstein 2003.
(2.) Although Lear is interested in how my answer to Q might bear on our understanding
of psychoanalysis, it’s worth mentioning that neither Q nor the answer to it that I’ve given
is about psychoanalysis as such. (Freud was not the first writer to recognize that we are
sometimes moved by unconscious emotions, preferences, and desires. I take it that the
title character in Jane Austen’s Emma, who realizes at the end of the novel that she’s
been in love with Mr. Knightly for quite a while, presents at least as good an example of
someone whose behaviour is motivated by unconscious states of mind as does, say,
Freud’s Rat Man).
(3.) I believe that many theorists of ‘consciousness’ fall into confusion by failing to
distinguish between ‘conscious of x’ and ‘x’s being conscious’. For a discussion of this
point, see Finkelstein 2003, ch. 1.
(4.) In her translation of Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe sometimes

renders ‘äußerung’ as ‘expression’ and sometimes as ‘manifestation’. Here, I’ve changed
her ‘manifestation’ to ‘expression’.
(5.) It would take me beyond the scope of what I aim to do in this chapter to explain why
Wittgenstein thinks this is misguided. Stepping back from Wittgenstein, I would suggest
that any such position will suffer from the conflation that I mentioned in n. 3.
(6.) One difference is that winces, moans, and cries (regardless of whether or not they are
produced by a human being who can already talk) are not truth-apt, while self-ascriptions
are. Wittgenstein has often been read as wanting to deny this difference and claim that
psychological self-ascriptions are neither true nor false. This reading is, I think, both
uncharitable and unsupported by the relevant texts. (For a discussion of this point, see
Finkelstein 2010).
(7.) ‘What if someone has a phobia that prevents him from ever speaking about being
angry? Couldn’t he nevertheless be consciously angry?’ As I understand the concept of
expression, not every expression must be a public manifestation. (It seems to me that on
more than one occasion, I have: (i) tried to tiptoe past a sleeping person, (ii) stubbed my
toe, and, finally, (iii) expressed the resultant pain in my toe by thinking, ‘Ow! That really,
really hurts!’) It’s consistent with my understanding of expression to allow that we
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sometimes express our states of mind by self-ascribing them in thought, rather than out
loud. So yes; someone who has a phobia about saying that he’s angry can, on my view,
nevertheless be consciously angry.
(8.) Imagine someone’s replying to what I said in this sentence as follows: ‘If a person
expresses his, e.g. anger by self-ascribing it, then what his self-ascription “gives voice to”
is just that anger and not, as you suggest here, a judgment about it’. In order to bracket
this concern, my former self might have rewritten this sentence so that it ended as
follows: ‘but simply the fact that he is sincerely addressing a question about his own state
of mind’.
(9.) Wittgenstein 1967: §§422–6.
(10.) I argue that we should think of conscious and unconscious states of mind as lying at
two ends of a continuum in Finkelstein 2003: §5.5.
(11.) This isn’t to deny that Kopi might be very conscious of, e.g. a piece of cheese that’s
sitting on a plate on a table just above her head. Nor is it to deny that she might bang her
head—perhaps in pursuit of that cheese—and momentarily lose consciousness. (In a
special edition of Time called The Animal Mind, Steven Pinker is quoted as saying, ‘It
would be perverse to deny consciousness to mammals’ (Kluger 2017). When I say that
Kopi’s states of mind are neither conscious nor unconscious, I don’t take myself to be
disagreeing with Pinker’s remark).
(12.) I’ve characterized cases of types (i) and (ii) as involving changes in form—from
states of mind and expressions that cannot be described as either conscious or
unconscious to states of mind and expressions that can be so described. Thus, cases of
these types are examples—not of ‘making the unconscious conscious’, but rather—of
‘making what is neither conscious nor unconscious either conscious or unconscious’.
(13.) I am not claiming that there won’t turn out to be some sort of circularity involved in
one or both of my characterizations of the distinction between conscious and unconscious
states of mind. My aim is not to provide a reductive account of consciousness. I don’t
mind circles, as long as they aren’t so small as to be uninteresting.
(14.) If it still seems unclear that (i) and (ii) both obtain, what follows might make it seem
less so. Let’s begin with (ii). Imagine that Max slams his office door and that this is (for
him, in this situation) a conscious expression of anger that he’s feeling toward a colleague
named Jeff. What it means for this to be a conscious expression of anger is that he can co-
expressively gloss its psychological significance; he can respond to a question like, ‘Why
did you slam the door?’ with an answer like, ‘I slammed it because I’m angry at Jeff’—and
he can do this in such a way that the gloss is a kind of extension of (rather than an
observation report about) the initial expressive act (the door-slam). Now, if Max can do
that, then he is (obviously, I want to say) able to express his anger merely by self-
ascribing it, i.e. merely by saying, ‘I’m angry at Jeff’. So, if Max’s anger counts as
conscious according to A2, it will also count as conscious according to A1. Thus, (ii) would
Page 16 of 17

seem to be true. Now let’s consider (i). Imagine that Max is able to express his anger at
Jeff merely by saying, ‘I’m angry at Jeff’. Such a self-ascription would itself be a conscious
expression. This is to say: Max would have the ability to co-expressively gloss its
psychological significance. Suppose that Max expresses his anger at Jeff by saying to
Sarah, ‘I’m angry at Jeff’. Sarah thinks (for reasons with which we needn’t concern
ourselves) that in so saying, Max might be trying to make some sort of joke. She replies,
‘Are you joking? I’m not getting what you mean’. Here, Max would be in a position to
reply with a co-expressive gloss on his initial expression, as follows: ‘When I said, “I’m
angry at Jeff”, I wasn’t making a joke; I was actually expressing anger that I’m feeling’.
So, if Max’s anger meets the criterion for consciousness in A1, it will also meet the
criterion in A2. Thus, (i) would also seem to be true.
(15.) While his anger toward his mother remains unconscious, Max might unconsciously
express it by not answering the phone when he sees that she is calling. But until he can
express that anger merely by self-ascribing it, there is no possibility of his consciously
expressing it by not answering the phone when he sees that she is calling.
(16.) Versions of this chapter were presented at the University of Murcia (Workshop on
Contemporary Rationalist and Expressivist Approaches to Self-knowledge, October 2016)
and at the University of Chicago (2016 Fall Colloquium, Department of Philosophy,
November 2016). I’m grateful to members of both audiences for their questions and
comments, especially Matthew Boyle, Jonathan Lear, Ángel García Rodríguez, Ryan
Simonelli, and Anubav Vasudevan. In addition, I’m indebted to Agnes Callard, Matthias
Haase, and Malte Willer for reading and commenting on drafts.
Department of Philosophy, The University of Chicago
Page 17 of 17



This introduction provides an overview of the five chapters in this section, which explores
some of the central issues in psychoanalysis as it relates to phenomenology and science.
One such issue concerns the scientific status of psychoanalysis (natural or social? bona
fide or tendentious?), and more specifically which between the methods of psychoanalysis
and its real-life practice may be considered scientific. One of the chapters examines
psychoanalysis as a scientific theory of mind, arguing that psychoanalysis fails to test its
theories. Another chapter suggests that many of the central tenets of psychoanalytic
theory are evidentially supported by recent developments in empirical neuropsychology.
Also discussed are the debate between those who view psychoanalysis as science and
those who insist that it rather offers a hermeneutic, how psychoanalysis provides a
phenomenology in its articulations of unconscious life, and alternative phenomenological
schemes for framing the dynamic unconscious.
Keywords: psychoanalysis, phenomenology, science, scientific theory of mind, empirical neuropsychology,

unconscious, psychoanalytic theory
PHILOSOPHICAL disputation concerning psychoanalysis often begins—and unfortunately

sometimes ends—with the question of whether psychoanalysis counts as scientific
psychology. The claim that it does not is often taken to imply ‘too bad for psychoanalysis’,
rather than, say, ‘too bad for scientific psychology’, or ‘so what else is it then?’ But the
debate, if it is to be philosophically respectable, cannot simply take for granted some or
other unexamined conception of what being a science amounts to. And it will only
generate confusion, rather than pertinent critique, if it imports standards inappropriate
to its object. What it needs are explicit, workable, and apt conceptions of scientificity.
What we need to know when engaging with the debate is, for example, whether we are
here talking narrowly about natural science or much more permissively about
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Wissenschaft—i.e. a systematic body of knowledge—or something in between? If by

‘science’ we mean Wissenschaft, then in that case anthropology, natural history, art
history, and psychoanalysis shall—as and when they accrue knowledge rather than
indulge speculation—all be counted as sciences. Freud certainly used the term
Wissenschaft to describe his endeavours, but he also tended to think that ‘the intellect
and the mind are objects for scientific research in exactly the same way as any non-
human things’ (1933: 159).
But what does the ‘same way’ mean in the quotation from Freud? Natural history differs
considerably from, say, chemistry in its use of merely observational rather than
experimental methods to accrue knowledge. Freud’s suggestion assimilates viable
understanding of matters psychological to the model of natural sciences; it leaves out of
consideration, for example, the possibility that psychoanalysis may better be considered a
social science—a science whose objects and methods are importantly unlike those
populating, and used to interrogate, non-human nature. We should also consider that
even parents with the best intentions and the most delightful offspring can sometimes
impose on their children in such a way as risks thwarting rather than nurturing their
flourishing. This, at least, is the force of Habermas’s (1987) contention that, in relation to
his own intellectual progeny, Freud laboured under ‘a scientistic self-misunderstanding’.
(p. 350) The question of the scientific status of psychoanalysis (natural or social? bona fide
or tendentious?) also requires specification as to the relevant aspect of its object. Are we
talking about the metapsychology (e.g. about putative underlying psychological
structures such as the id and superego), the aetiological theories (e.g. as concern the
developmental origins of various psychopathologies), the clinical theory (e.g. relating
particular difficulties to particular current defensive organizations), or the successfulness
of the clinical practice (e.g. as evaluated in outcome studies)? And are we talking about
whether the methods of psychoanalysis could, in theory, count as scientific or about
whether the real-life practice of psychoanalysts does so? And if we are interested in
testing the theory, then what kind of procedure is here to count as ‘testing’? And if we are
talking about the clinical theory, then which aspect of which one? Psychoanalysis has
after all developed a large number of theories of various phenomena from which a variety
of hypotheses may be drawn for testing, albeit all organized around centrally recurring
themes of dynamically unconscious motivation, defence mechanisms, symbolization, and
transference.
This last point raises a deeper question about how to understand psychoanalysis. When
we are talking about just such fundamentally organizing conceptions as unconscious
motivation, etc. are we describing the a posteriori hypotheses of a fallible science, or
rather the a priori organizing conceptualizations which belong to something we could call
the ‘philosophy’ of psychoanalysis? (Compare: do concepts such as ‘force’ and ‘space’
function to define physicists’ very field of enquiry, or do they function by referring,
hopefully successfully, to phenomena that show up within that field?) Perhaps that
distinction is itself rather too blunt to be helpful, and we should do better to consider the
a priori and the a posteriori as separated by degrees rather than by an immutable chasm.
Page 2 of 6

When we meet with an effective piece of clinical psychoanalytical theory, is its

effectiveness to be understood in terms of its ability to bring to life or make visible
something which beforehand too often went unnoticed—thus enriching the conceptual
frameworks with which we articulate human nature, or is it proposing a new causal
explanation for something which was perfectly visible all along? With regards to this issue
of visibility, a question not often enough asked, which parallels that of the scientific
prowess of psychoanalysis, concerns its phenomenological credentials: what wattage of
illumination of human nature has really been achieved by psychoanalysis compared with
other sciences and humanities?
In this part, the chapter by Eagle focuses on psychoanalysis as a scientific theory of mind.
Taking testability as a measure of scientific standing, he takes psychoanalysis to task for
its failure to test its theories. While Freudian theories can be used to generate testable
hypotheses, Kleinian and post-Kleinian theories are, he suggests, not so readily testable.
While they may play a variety of valuable functions inside and outside the clinic,
contributing to a scientific theory of the mind is not amongst them. Furthermore, setting
aside the theories, the practice of psychoanalysts does not encourage a scientific
approach—an objection pressed most frequently by Frank Cioffi (1999). Particular
difficulties noted by Eagle include a failure to address confirmation bias, a dearth of
decent published case studies, aetiological theories developed merely on the basis of
clinical (p. 351) data, concepts being tacitly redefined to preserve the otherwise
implausible theories they articulate, and a culture of hostility to research, guild mentality,
and gurus.
While Eagle looks at the extant scientific habits of psychoanalysts, Hopkins—a

philosopher—aims to demonstrate the scientific significance of psychoanalysis by newly
integrating it with attachment theory and neuroscience, arguing that many of the central
tenets of psychoanalytic theory are evidentially supported by recent developments in
empirical neuropsychology. Hopkins stresses the consiliences between psychoanalytic
understandings of the task of assimilating emotionally overwhelming experience (e.g. in
dreaming) to maintain reality contact, the development of symptoms when that breaks
down and primary process modes of cognition take over, the significance of our
attachment histories for developing the neurological structures required for such emotion
processing, Freud’s early neurological thought on minimizing ‘free energy’, and the
theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston’s more recent conception of the brain as tasked
with free energy minimization by producing such ‘predictive models’ of the perceptually
encountered world as minimizing complexity while maximizing accuracy. We note that
other such integrations are possible; those who prefer their theoretical neuroscience in
non-computational flavours may consult Allan Schore’s (2012) synthesis. The value of
Hopkins’s chapter for this book, though, is to indicate another way in which
psychoanalysis may seek to take its place amongst the sciences. As such it shows
philosophy in its synoptic mode (see Gipps and Lacewing, ‘Introduction: Know Thyself’,
this volume)—i.e. in its attempt to bring together disparate fields of knowledge with a
philosophical eye to the maximal coherence of the proposed integration. We may note too
the other scientific integrations now available and featuring in other sections of this
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handbook—with anthropology (Narvaez, this volume), with sociology (Jay, this volume); or
elsewhere—for example with cognitive and social psychology (Tesser 1991; Westen 2009).
Lacewing’s chapter steps back from the scientific details to review the debate between
those who would articulate psychoanalysis as science and those for whom it rather offers
a hermeneutic. In fact that very distinction is one which—in the course of a careful
unpicking of the assumptions at play in the debate of the last forty years between realist
and constructionist strands in American psychoanalysis—is deconstructed in the course
of his argument. That debate has, he contends, tended to confound its participants
because it too often runs together matters which are more fruitfully kept separate. While
it is possible to espouse all of realism (rather than constructionism), to respect (rather
than deprecate) metapsychology, to believe in mental determinacy (rather than hold to
the indeterminacy of the mental), and to portray psychoanalysis as aiming to provide
scientific (as opposed to a different kind) of knowledge, these need not stand or fall
together and should not in any case be assimilated. Although he is here not primarily
making a case for a particular combination of these themes, one possibility that becomes
particularly clear over the course of Lacewing’s chapter is that of a realist hermeneutic
science which respects mental indeterminacy while deprecating metapsychological
speculation.
Matters take a somewhat different tack in the chapters by Fuchs and Gipps. If we
understand what it is to be scientific in terms of testability, these chapters can be (p. 352)
understood as highlighting the importance of primarily non-scientific aspects of

psychoanalytic knowledge. That is, they are interested instead in our most basic
disclosure or characterization of unconscious life—psychoanalysis as phenomenology. We
do not test the aptness of a fundamental conceptual metaphor, picture, or vocabulary of
unconscious life against its object, since that procedure presupposes that we have what
here we do not have, namely some other conceptual scheme disclosing that object within
which the comparison could be framed. Instead we consider its fruitfulness both in
stimulating the development of further illuminations, and in warding off irremediably
speculative, esoteric, or otherwise fruitless conceptions of our unconscious life.
Gipps aims to draw out how psychoanalysis provides a phenomenology in its articulations
of unconscious life. The first half of his chapter makes a series of distinctions between
our acknowledgement of and accounting for phenomena, grammar versus fact, revelation
versus representation, and poiesis versus posits, and describes the central aspects of
psychoanalytic theory in terms of the former element within each pair. The second half
considers how a phenomenological understanding of psychoanalytic theory sheds light on
the divergence between the (typical) psychoanalyst’s and the (typical) psychologist’s
understanding of psychoanalytic theory and therapy.
Fuchs canvases several alternative phenomenological schemes for framing the dynamic
unconscious, and to replace or at least complement the ‘depth’ metaphors of traditional
psychoanalysis, he develops in detail a conception which puts to use Merleau-Ponty’s
notion of the lived body and Lewin’s notion of a life space. For Fuchs and Merleau-Ponty,
Page 4 of 6

the unconscious is sedimented in such bodily habits as we are blind to precisely because
they shape our very experience itself.
Between them, these five chapters offer the basis for future work on the philosophical
understanding of psychoanalysis. They analyse and deconstruct both psychoanalytic
‘theory’ and practice, and provide a range of approaches from which the question ‘what is
psychoanalysis?’ may be answered. They seek to identify and preserve what is most
valuable about psychoanalytic thought even while urging its development and integration
with other philosophical and empirical approaches to understanding human beings.
References
Cioffi, F. (1999). Freud and the Question of Pseudo-Science. Chicago, IL: Open Court.
Habermas, J. (1987). Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston, MA: Polity Press.
Schore, A. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. New York: W. W. Norton.
Tesser, A. (1991). ‘Social vs clinical approaches to self psychology: The self evaluation
maintenance model and Kohutian object relations theory’. In R. Curtis (ed.), The
Relational Self: Theoretical Convergences in Psychoanalysis and Social Psychology (pp.
257–281). New York: Guilford.
Westen, D. (2009). ‘The cognitive self and the psychoanalytic self: can we put our selves
together?’, Psychological Inquiry 3: 1–13.
Richard G.T. Gipps

Michael Lacewing

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Children (P4C).
Page 6 of 6


Complexities in the Evaluation of the Scientific Status
of Psychoanalysis
Morris N. Eagle

This chapter is primarily concerned with the scientific status of psychoanalysis as a

theory of psychological functioning rather than as a form of treatment. It argues that
certain characteristics of psychoanalysis, including theoretical formulations that are often
obscure and untethered to observation, the proliferation of psychoanalytic ‘schools’, and
habits of mind inculcated in psychoanalytic training and education count against
according scientific status to psychoanalysis. The chapter also notes that psychoanalytic
formulations have generated a good deal of research on psychological functioning and
have yielded important insights into the nature of mind. It suggests that psychoanalytic
education and training needs to change in ways that succeed in attenuating loyalty to
particular psychoanalytic ‘schools’ and that encourage openness to empirical evidence
and research and the operation of other self-corrective processes.
Keywords: scientific status, psychoanalytic training, clinical data, empirical evidence, theory of mind.
Morris N. Eagle
Introduction
IN addressing the question of the scientific status of psychoanalysis one needs to keep in
mind: one, that psychoanalysis is a theory of psychological functioning and development
as well as a form of treatment, each aspect generating different issues and questions; and
two, that there is not a single psychoanalytic theory, but rather a collection of different
psychoanalytic theories and ‘schools’. The scientific status of Freudian theory has been
debated at great length over a period of many years (e.g. Grunbaum 1984; Hopkins 1988;
Lacewing 2018; Rosenblatt 1989; Sachs 1989). Far less discussed are the questions of:
one, the scientific status of post-Freudian psychoanalytic theories (however, see Eagle
Page 1 of 27

1986), formulations that have varying degrees of logical relationship to each other; and
two, the degree to which self-corrective processes relating evidence to theory are
embodied in the attitudes and practices of psychoanalytic practitioners (Cioffi 1970;
Eagle 2014).
Although I comment on psychoanalytic psychotherapy process and outcome research, my

main focus in this chapter will be on psychoanalysis as a theory of mind and psychological
functioning rather than as a form of treatment. I think Freud was right when he stated
that the claim of psychoanalysis on posterity will lie in its theory of mind rather than in its
form of therapeutic practice.
(p. 354) Psychotherapy and Outcome Research

Like any therapeutic approach, the practice of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic
psychotherapy may have little to do with science, but may be largely a matter of craft and
of individual talents and characteristics of the therapist, a conclusion supported by the
evidence that individual differences among therapists account for far more of the
variance in therapeutic outcome than specific techniques (Lambert and Barley 2001).
Scientific-empirical questions enter the picture when one directs systematic inquiry into
therapeutic outcome and the processes through which the outcomes occur.
There is a cadre of researchers (generally associated with university departments) who

have carried out process and outcome research on psychoanalytic and psychodynamic
treatment and have identified some of the factors that mediate therapeutic outcome. This
focus on accountability is a great advance over reporting outcomes in the form of clinical
anecdotes, self-selected clinical vignettes, testimonials, and ‘clinical experience’.1, 2 Thus,
if this chapter dealt with the question of whether psychoanalytically oriented researchers
are carrying out outcome and process studies on psychodynamic and psychoanalytic
psychotherapy, the answer would be a resoundingly positive one. That is not where the
problems related to the scientific status of psychoanalysis lie. The problems lie in the
facts that one, to the extent that there is any interest on the part of a large part of the
psychoanalytic community in such research, it is mainly limited to the demonstration that
psychoanalytic psychotherapy ‘works’; two, for the most part, there is little or no
feedback from the research findings to psychoanalytic training, education, and clinical
practice; and three, there is widespread hostility towards empirical research in the
psychoanalytic community. Indeed, the very idea of carrying out research on
psychoanalytic treatment has often met with indifference or hostility in the
psychoanalytic community.3 There are good reasons for scepticism regarding the direct
value of psychotherapy research for clinical work with individual patients. Insofar as
research studies often report group findings of a probabilistic nature, it would be
mistaken and foolish to think that one can directly and simply apply such findings to the
individual case. (p. 355) However, being aware of research findings can inform the
background of one’s clinical work and can lead one to question one’s cherished and
unquestioned assumptions.
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Let me provide an example. There is a significant body of psychoanalytic thought that

views transference interpretations as virtually the sole useful interventions in
psychoanalytic treatment (e.g. Gill 1982, 1994). However, there is evidence that
transference interpretations can have negative effects on therapeutic outcome (e.g. Ryum
et al. 2010; Schut et al. 2005) and that transference interpretations are relatively
ineffective with patients who are functioning at a relatively high level of interpersonal
relations and are effective mainly with patients who show relatively poor interpersonal
relations (Hoglend et al. 2006, 2011; Johansson et al. 2010). The latter finding, in
particular, contradicts the received wisdom that transference interpretations are likely to
be more effective with higher functioning patients. Surely, any responsible clinician
would want to be aware of such findings. Further, such findings are more likely to be
useful to therapists than general data on the effect of number of transference
interpretations on therapeutic outcome. Moreover, the further investigation of the factors
involved in accounting for why patients with relatively poor object relations find
transference interpretations more helpful, or which subset of patients within the poor
object-relations category find transference interpretations especially helpful, would be
even more likely to be useful in clinical practice. The more one includes individual
difference variables in one’s research, the less sharp the division between nomothetic and
ideographic approaches to knowledge, and the greater the direct usefulness of research
findings in clinical practice. The general point here is that rather than concluding that
research findings are of no relevance to the individual clinician, findings generated by
relatively sophisticated research designs can indeed be quite useful, even if their
usefulness is limited to leading one to reflect on one’s long-standing assumptions in
clinical work.
The fact is, however, that most psychoanalytic institutes, particularly free-standing ones,
neither require the carrying out of research nor, more noteworthily, prepare their
candidates to become critical research consumers. Neither of these activities plays any
significant role in psychoanalytic training and education in the majority of psychoanalytic
institutes. Furthermore, although not true of all psychoanalysts, as noted, there is a
pervasive atmosphere of hostility to research in most psychoanalytic institutes. As
described by Kernberg (2012), one of the site visitors’ criticisms of the Columbia
University Psychoanalytic Institute—an institute more supportive of research—was that
an emphasis on research would negatively affect a candidate’s clinical training and work.
Kernberg’s (2015) critique of the training and education practices of most psychoanalytic
institutes echoes Glover’s similar disaffection as far back as 1952. He writes:
It is scarcely to be expected that a student who has spent some years under the
artificial and sometimes hothouse conditions of a training analysis and whose
professional career depends on overcoming ‘resistance’ to the satisfaction of his
training analyst, can be in a favorable position to defend his scientific integrity
(p. 356) against his analyst’s theory and practice. And the longer he remains in
training analysis, the less likely he is to do so. For according to his analyst the
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candidate’s objections to interpretations rate as ‘resistances.’ In short there is a

tendency inherent in the training situation to perpetuate error.
(Glover 1952: 403)
Glover (1952) also describes the general state of affairs in the psychoanalytic community
as follows:
An analyst, let us say, of established prestige and seniority, produces a paper

advancing some new point of view or alleged discovery in the theoretical or
clinical field. Given sufficient enthusiasm and persuasiveness, or even just plain
dogmatism on the part of the author, the chances are that without any check, this
view or alleged discovery will gain currency, will be quoted and re-quoted until it
attains the status of an accepted conclusion. Some few observers who have been
stimulated by the new idea may test it in their clinical practice. If they can
corroborate it they will no doubt report the fact; but if they do not, or if they feel
disposed to reject it, this scientific ‘negative’ is much less likely to be expressed,
at any rate in public, and so, failing effective examination, the view is ultimately
canonized with the sanctioning phrase ‘so and so has shown’. In other words, an
ipse dixit acquires the validity of an attested conclusion on hearsay evidence only.
(Glover 1952: 403)
Quite disturbingly, there appears to be little or no change in the practices and attitudes of
the psychoanalytic community more than sixty years after Glover’s comments were made.
The psychoanalytic community’s interest in research appears to be directed mainly to

findings that suggest the effectiveness of a psychodynamic approach. During the time
that I was president of the Division of Psychoanalysis (Division 39) of the American
Psychological Association in 1995–6 there was little interest in research among most of
its members. A sudden interest in research arose in reaction to a spate of published
criticisms launched against the lack of evidence for the effectiveness of psychoanalytic
treatment. Some Division officers proposed the formation of a committee whose task it
was to amass all the evidence available demonstrating the effectiveness of
psychodynamic and psychoanalytic treatment. For the most part, the attitude towards
research of individuals making this proposal generally ranged from indifference to
hostility; they turned to it only for its demonstration and public relations value. They
appeared to want to have it both ways, namely, take the position that psychotherapy
research is irrelevant to psychoanalysis and, at the same time, turn to it for its public
relations value. This attitude towards research on the part of Division 39 members
continues to the present day: there is no longer a research section of the Division, partly
due to lack of interest in research papers among its members.
To sum up, as far as a psychoanalytic ethos is concerned, the set of attitudes and habits of
mind dominant among psychoanalysts and normative at psychoanalytic institutes is
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resistant to systematic inquiry into therapeutic process and outcome. Such inquiry, when
it does occur, is limited to a search for confirmation.
Psychoanalysis as Theory of Mind,

(p. 357)
Personality Development, and Psychopathology

Research on psychoanalytic theories and hypotheses has a long history going at least as
far back as a study by Pötzl (1917) on the influence of ‘indifferent impressions’ on dream
content and including, among other work, the Rosenzweig (1934) study on repression,
the Sears (1943, 1944) studies on Freudian concepts at Stanford; the anthropological
investigations of Malinowski (1927), and of Whiting (1960) and Whiting and Child (1953)
at Yale; studies on defence and ‘repressive style’ (e.g. Weinberger 1990; Weinberger et al.
1979); research on ability to delay gratification (e.g. Mischel 1961); the early work on
‘experimental neurosis’ (e.g. Masserman 1944, 1950), reflecting an attempt to integrate
Pavlovian and Freudian ideas (French 1933); research on Winnicott’s (1953) concept of
the transitional object (e.g. Cohen and Clark 1984); studies on the relationship between
the Freudian notion of orality and dependency (e.g. Bornstein, Poynton, and Masling
1985); the Fisher and Greenberg (1996) volume of empirical test of psychoanalytic
hypotheses; Masling and colleagues’ volumes on empirical test of psychoanalytic theories
(Bornstein and Masling 1998; Masling 1983, 1986, 1990; Masling and Bornstein 1993,
1994, 1996); and research on alexithymia (e.g. Taylor and Bagby 2013).
In short, psychoanalytic theory has been remarkably heuristic in generating a large body
of empirical research—mainly by non-psychoanalysts outside the context of
psychoanalytic training institutes. However: one, much of this research has had to do
with Freudian theory, largely due to the susceptibility to empirical testing of at least a
wide range of Freudian hypotheses; two, there appears to be a steady decrease outside
psychotherapy research in the number of research papers on psychoanalytic concepts
and formulations, largely due, I suggest later, to the unsusceptibility of many post-
Freudian theoretical formulations to empirical research; and three, the large body of
research findings have had little or no impact on psychoanalytic theorizing, perhaps
because of the widespread insistence that only clinical data from the psychoanalytic
treatment situation are relevant to psychoanalytic theorizing. I turn now to that
assumption.
Clinical Data
A virtually canonical assumption in the psychoanalytic literature, cutting across different
schools, is that evidence testing psychoanalytic formulations must be generated by the
clinical situation. Although in certain contexts, data derived from the clinical situation
can be useful in testing certain psychoanalytic hypotheses (see, for example, the research
(p. 358) of Luborsky on ‘momentary forgetting’ (1967, 1973) and the research of Weiss
and Sampson et al. (1986) on the relationship between therapist test-passing versus test-
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failing and the emergence of warded off contents), as Grunbaum (1984) cogently argued,
there are a number of problems with the uncritical use of such data. One problem is
illustrated in a paper by Masling and Cohen (1987) in which they follow the course of a
number of sessions of psychotherapy carried out by Carl Rogers, who defined his
approach as non-directive. In the early sessions the patient’s statements seem to be about
equally divided between concern with issues of sex and self. Undoubtedly unwittingly,
Rogers is silent when the patient talks about sex and tends to respond with a ‘Mmm’ or
tends to look up when the patient talks about issues of self. Over time, the patient’s
statements about sex decrease and his statements about self increase. This vignette
illustrates both the issue of suggestion in the clinical data as well as the problem of
confirmation bias, the latter insofar as the patient’s behaviour would tend to reinforce
Rogers’s belief that issues of self are more important than sexual issues for the patient.
Another problem with relying solely on clinical data to evaluate theoretical formulation is
that patients’ productions in the clinical situation are often ambiguous and subject to
different interpretations. Given the analyst’s theoretical commitment, he or she is likely
to interpret the patient’s free associations in accord with that commitment. For example,
if one believes that infantile sexual and aggressive wishes culminating in the Oedipus
complex are universal and at the core of psychopathology, one will likely find confirming
‘evidence’ for that belief in the patient’s productions (see Peterfreund 1983). And
similarly, if one believes, as Kohut (1984) does, that the need for empathic mirroring is
universal and that a traumatic lack of empathic mirroring is at the core of
psychopathology, one is likely to find confirming ‘evidence’ for that belief in the patient’s
productions. Confirmation bias is undoubtedly present in other disciplines. The important
question, however, is the degree to which the discipline allows and encourages self-
corrective practices (see Lacewing 2013).
An additional problem arises in the use of clinical data to defend etiological theories and
hypotheses (e.g. early lack of empathic mirroring leads to lack of self-cohesiveness in
adulthood). Such claims obviously require extra-clinical data. The shaky evidential base of
psychoanalytic etiological formulations becomes apparent when one considers that
virtually all such formulations are based on follow-back retrospective data rather than
follow-up prospective data (see Kohlberg et al. 1972). Employing follow-back data,
particularly follow-back clinical data, we develop our etiological theories of
psychopathology based solely on patients seen in the clinical situation. We do not get data
on individuals who may have been subject to the same vicissitudes as the patients we see,
but who function quite adequately. This inevitably leads to an overestimation of the
general pathogenic significance of the vicissitudes.
For example, in a follow-back study, Robins and McEvoy (1966) found that 59 per cent of
adult drug users were truants as juveniles. However, employing follow-up or longitudinal
data, they found that, for children who were truants before age fifteen, 26 per cent were
drug users as adults. Hence, an etiological theory linking juvenile truancy to adult drug
Page 6 of 27

use that is based solely on follow-back data would be seriously misleading regarding the
strength of the association between the two factors.
Or consider this purely hypothetical example: We have data on 1,000 individuals

(p. 359)
subjected to sexual abuse as children. Ten per cent of the children sexually abused as
children are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) as young adults. The
100 young BPD adults will be far more likely to be seen clinically than the 900 others.
Suppose further that all 100 of these young adults are seen at a particular clinic. The
clinicians treating them there may then form an aetiological theory that significantly
overestimates the impact of sexual abuse on the development of BPD. Researchers
considering the longitudinal data on all 1,000 sexually abused individuals, however, will
find that only 10 per cent of sexually abused children develop BPD, and so will conclude
that although sexual abuse is, indeed, a risk factor, it must interact with other factors in
determining the development of later BPD. Such research then encourages additional
research to identify the factors that jointly precipitate BPD. In short, formulations based
on clinical data on adult patients rely on follow-back or retrospective data rather than
follow-up prospective data and therefore cannot generate adequate developmental
theories. Recognizing this limitation and the importance of including methods and data
from other disciplines is necessary if one is to develop an adequate psychoanalytic theory
(or any other theory) of development, including the development of psychopathology.
Quite remarkably, for the most part, follow-back clinical data from adult patients
constitute the primary basis for central psychoanalytic developmental theories, for
example, Freud’s (1917 [1916–17], 1925 [1924]) positing of a universal Oedipus complex
that emerges at a particular age or, as another example, Kohut’s (1984) assertion that
lack of self-cohesiveness in adulthood is the consequence of early failures to have the
infant’s and child’s needs for empathic mirroring met.
With regard to the former, even if unconscious incestuous wishes were found in all
patients, this would hardly constitute adequate evidence for the positing of a universal
Oedipus complex characterized by specific wishes and regularly emerging in all children
at a particular age. Individuals seen in treatment, perhaps particularly in psychoanalytic
treatment, may constitute a selective group different in important respects from other
groups. Indeed, there is evidence that intergenerational conflicts (of which the Oedipus
complex is an instance) are more likely to be seen in troubled families (Ascherman and
Safier 1990; Erikson 1993; Flores, Mattos, and Salzano 1998). In short, an adequate
evaluation of the Oedipus complex hypothesis cannot legitimately rest on clinical data,
but rather requires longitudinal data with adequate sampling carried out outside the
clinical context. Furthermore, the insistence that only clinical data are relevant to testing
psychoanalytic hypotheses is but one instance of a stance that obstructs the possibility of
refutation.
Not infrequently, one finds the claim in the psychoanalytic literature that clinical data
from adult patients are not only an adequate, but the only legitimate, data for
psychoanalytic developmental formulations. For example, Green (2000), an influential
Page 7 of 27

spokesperson for this position, has distinguished between the ‘real child’ of empirical
observation and the ‘true child’ of psychoanalysis and written that ‘as far as
psychoanalysis is concerned, the “real child” is not our concern’ (2000: 61); only the ‘true
child’ is relevant to psychoanalysis. What Green means by the ‘true child’ is ‘the
reconstructed child of psychoanalysis’ (2000: 61). That is, Green seems to be saying that
one can infer the (p. 360) course of development and mental states of the child on the
basis of the productions of adult patients in psychoanalytic treatment.
If Green is saying that it is the patient’s subjective sense of his or her childhood, that is,
his or her psychic reality, rather than data from infant observation that are important in
clinical work, his argument is well taken. This point, I suspect, would be apparent to
anyone engaged in clinical work. Further, this claim does not require a sharp distinction
between the ‘true’ child and the ‘real’ child. Nor, and this is a critical point, does it
suggest that data from infant and child observation are irrelevant to psychoanalytic
theories of the nature of psychological development. After all, psychoanalysis is a theory
of mind as well as a clinical treatment.
Although Green’s view can be interpreted as applying to the context of the clinical
situation, the same cannot be said of Winnicott’s (1960) statement that ‘Indeed, it is not
from direct observation of infants so much as it is from the study of the transference in
the analytic setting that it is possible to gain a clear view of what takes place in infancy
itself’ (Winnicott 1960: 595, my emphasis). He goes on to say that ‘Freud was able to
discover infantile sexuality in a new way because he reconstructed it from his analytic
work with his psycho-neurotic patients. In extending his work to cover the treatment of
the borderline psychotic patient it is possible for us to reconstruct the dynamics of
infancy and of infantile dependence, and of the maternal care that meets this
dependence’ (Winnicott 1960: 595).
While one can perhaps understand the usefulness of this approach in the context of
treatment, it seems clear that one cannot legitimately base theories of infant and child
development on data derived from the productions of adult patients in treatment—even if
these data were not influenced by the therapist’s theoretical commitment. If one wants to
try to understand infant and child development, one observes infants and children in
systematic ways and over long periods of time. It is remarkable that this is even a
debated issue in the psychoanalytic community. That it is a debated issue, however, is
important information in addressing the role of the habits of mind and attitudes of
psychoanalytic theorists in the assessment of the scientific status of psychoanalysis. To
sum up, the three problems with the uncritical use of clinical data for general theoretical
formulations are: (1) suggestion; (2) confirmation bias; and (3) the inadequacy of follow-
back data for etiological formulations.
It is important to note that clinical data can be very useful in formulating and testing a
variety of clinical hypotheses and formulations. As noted earlier, this is illustrated in the
work of Luborsky (1967, 1973) on ‘momentary forgetting’ and the research of Weiss and
Sampson et al. (1986) on the relationship between therapist ‘test-passing’ and ‘test-
Page 8 of 27

failing’ and the emergence of warded off contents (see also Silberschatz 2005). In these
studies, the authors rely on a quasi-experimental design that is appropriate to the
phenomena being investigated. For example, Luborsky (1967, 1973) found that compared
to ‘control’ segments of clinical sessions in which momentary forgetting was not present,
those segments of clinical sessions that preceded momentary forgetting were
independently judged to be characterized by conflict and anxiety, suggesting that what
one might (p. 361) refer to as ‘mini-repressions’ occur when conflictual and anxiety-laden
material is being dealt with. With regard to the Weiss and Sampson researchers, based on
the clinical data, compared to independent judgements of therapist test-failing (i.e. the
independent judgement that therapist interventions tended to confirm the patient’s
unconscious pathogenic beliefs), therapist test-passing (i.e. the judgement that
pathogenic beliefs are disconfirmed by the interventions) was reliably associated with the
emergence in the clinical sessions of warded-off contents, broadened interests, and
reduced anxiety.
Case Studies
Another means by which clinical data can constitute a legitimate means of gaining
knowledge and a legitimate method of empirical research is the use of disciplined case
studies (Kazdin 1981, 2008). However, as noted by Portuges (1994),4 the American
Psychoanalytic Association Committee headed by Klumpner and Frank (1991) reviewed
the sixty most frequently referenced ‘psychoanalytic articles’ that had been published in
three prominent journals between 1869 and 1982 and scrutinized the top fifteen. They
reported:
[n]ot a single one of these 15 papers included any significant amount of ordinary
clinical data. Our sample contained no case studies. What evidence was given in
support of the conclusions could only be described as sketchy. We found no
verbatim examples of and only one dream fragment … Our most frequent
descriptions of the 15 papers were, ‘No clinical data’, ‘No evidence’,
‘Overgeneralized’ or ‘Assumptions not testable’. In short, it was as if
psychoanalytic data were considered so well documented that the reader would be
interested only in questions of interpretation.(as cited in Portuges 1994: 12)
There have been attempts to identify and recommend the standards for the case study
method that would enhance its reliability and validity as data (e.g. Eagle and Wolitzky
2011; Edelson 1984). However, as is the case with other empirical data, these attempts
have had little impact on papers published in psychoanalytic journals. Little has changed
since the Klumpner and Frank (1991) report. The clinical data reported in most
psychoanalytic papers tend to be limited to self-selected and sketchy clinical vignettes.
Page 9 of 27

(p. 362) Untestability of Formulations

Whatever the limitations of the above kind of theorizing, for the most part the reader can
generally understand what formulations are being proposed and perhaps imagine the
kind of evidence that might be relevant to assessing these formulations. Unfortunately
the psychoanalytic literature is replete with formulations that are so vague and/or so
obscure that it is difficult to conceive of any evidence that could play a role in their
evaluation. Especially unfortunate is the fact that the authors of these formulations are
not obscure figures, but include the most prominent and influential psychoanalytic
theorists in the world today.
Consider, for example, the following passage which is representative of Klein’s

formulations of infant fantasies. Klein (1930: 24–5) writes:
In my experience sadism reaches its zenith in this [early] phase, which is ushered
in by the oral-sadistic desire to devour the mother’s breast (or the mother herself)
… It is my experience that in the phantasied attack on the mother’s body a
considerable part is played by the urethral and anal sadism which is very soon
added to the oral and muscular sadism. In phantasy the excreta are transformed
into dangerous weapons: wetting is regarded as cutting, stabbing, burning,
drowning, while the faecal mass is equated with weapons and missiles.
(Klein 1930: 24–5)
Other than the comment ‘It is my experience’, Klein offers no evidential basis for the
attribution of such florid fantasies to the infant. Indeed, as I have noted, it is difficult to
even imagine what kind of clinical evidence could serve as a basis for such attributions.
Whereas one can think of evidence that could support Freud’s positing of a universal
Oedipal stage or Kohut’s claim regarding the need for empathic mirroring, it is very
difficult to even imagine the kind of evidence that would support Klein’s description of
the infant’s experience. This leaves one with the question of how Klein knows about the
experiences of the young infant. It also raises the question of why such theory should be
taken seriously, let alone taught at psychoanalytic institutes.
The writings, particularly the late work, of Bion, another highly influential psychoanalytic
theorist, fare no better with regard to the issue of testability. In his later writings, Bion
became increasingly mystical and preoccupied with the concept of ‘O’, which he variously
defined as the ‘Absolute Truth’, ‘Ultimate Reality’, ‘infinity’, ‘noumena or things in
themselves’, and ‘godhead’ (Bion 1965: 147–9; 1970: 52). Even those sympathetic to
Bion’s thought have commented on the problems with his later work. For example,
O’Shaughnessy (2005) writes in regard to this work:
Contradictions have their appeal; breaking the laws of thought and reason bring a
quantum of verbal fun. Yet, in scientific writings, such transgressions lead us to
anything and everything we fancy—because, as is readily logically demonstrable,
Page 10 of 27

from a contradiction any proposition follows. Texts with contradictions risk an

unending proliferation of meanings.
(O’Shaughnessy 2005: 1524–5)
The exegesis of Bion’s writings does not help much. For example, in a recent
(p. 363)
paper sympathetic to Bion’s ideas, Rosegrant (2012) refers to the notorious difficulty of
Bion’s writing style and comments that ‘a style that so dominates the message is better
taken seriously in itself, not as incidental, but as an integral part of Bion’s
message’ (Rosegrant 2012: 724). He then goes on to describe ‘the psychotic mechanisms
in Bion’s writing’ (724). These include ‘attacks on linking’ and ‘denudation of
meaning’ (725), a major ‘massive’ example of which is Bion’s notorious grid. Rosegrant
writes with regard to the grid: ‘he may or may not be describing psychologically and
clinically useful ideas, but displaying these ideas in a grid is an attack on the usually
linked ideas that a grid will simplify and help with understanding’ (727).
Rosengrant writes that ‘Bion’s writing, which on first glance appears to be about
psychosis, is on a more fundamental level an inducement to psychosis. Without providing
the grounding that would come from alerting the reader that this is about to happen, Bion
immerses the reader in the experience he is ostensibly describing: to read Bion is to be
psychotic’ (Rosegrant 2012: 727). He then goes on to state: ‘to recognize that Bion’s
writing is mad does not mean that it is without value or meaning, but clarifies that its
value and meaning are romantic’ (727–8). Rosegrant makes clear that what he means by
romantic in the present context is essentially a search for the ‘mystical one, god, the god
head’ (729) that Bion refers to as O. Further according to Rosegrant, for Bion, ‘the
experience of O is the proper goal of analysis’ (730).
As other examples of exegeses of Bion’s work, consider the following passages from a
prominent Kleinian and Bionian psychoanalyst’s account of Bion’s ideas:
1. ‘Bion took the final step in bringing psychoanalysis into alignment with virtually
all the fields of knowledge, including mathematics, physics, aesthetics, literature,
mythology, philosophy, poetry, religion, archeology, etc.—all for the purpose of
putting it on a veritable Internet of a universal epistemology’ (Grotstein 1997: 78).
2. ‘The major themes that express this profound paradigm shift include the concept
and the penumbra of ideas that cluster around “O”, the concept of the mystic, the
genius, and the “messiah”, the invocation of the “religious instinct”, the very idea of
God and the Godhead, and his explorations of fetal mental life’ (Grotstein 1997: 78).
3. ‘It is my impression upon reading Bion that this epistemological-ontological-
phenomenological cycle takes place as follows: the infantile portion of the
personality experiences O, Absolute Truth, as beta-elements, projects them into the
analyst who, in containing them, transforms them from O to K (from Truth to
Knowledge) and shares this knowledge with the analysand, who, upon this
acceptance of the knowable truth allows it to become transformed into wisdom,
personal O. I term this last act the achievement of the transcendent
position’ (Grotstein 2004: 1086).
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Klein’s and Bion’s concepts and formulations may be meaningful, evocative, and helpful
to many psychoanalytic clinicians. However, that is not the point here. Insofar as this
(p. 364) chapter is concerned with the scientific status of psychoanalytic theories, the
issues of evidence and empirical testability are, perforce, central. Further, insofar as
Klein and Bion are not marginal figures, but rather two of the most prominent and
influential theorists in the psychoanalytic world today, with a large group of followers, the
fact that many of their formulations are not susceptible to empirical test is a significant
factor in evaluating the status of psychoanalytic theory. This judgement, however, does
not preclude the value of their work in other contexts.
Progress and Theory Change

From the earliest period of its history to the present day, the emergence of ‘isms’ and
‘schools’, including Jungian, Adlerian, Horneyian, Sullivanian, Kleinian, Bionian,
Lacanian, ego psychology, modern Freudian, Fairbairnian, and relational psychoanalytic
theories, has characterized theoretical developments in psychoanalysis. Furthermore, the
emergence of each of these schools is not based on the presentation of evidence that
refutes earlier theories or compelling new evidence that supports the new theory. Rather,
theory change in psychoanalysis is characterized by the emergence of a charismatic
figure who attracts loyal adherents, often culminating in the establishment of
psychoanalytic institutes that provide training from a particular theoretical perspective
(Eagle 1987, 1995; Eagle and Wolitzky 1989).
Gedo (1984) has noted, accurately, I believe, that ‘experienced clinicians will refuse to
alter their convictions on the bases of [the researchers’] results. Instead, they would
continue to form their psychoanalytic views in direct response to their personal
experiences … the belief that psychoanalysis will make progress by validating the best
hypotheses through refined scientific methods is implausible. What we need are
innovative ideas powerful enough to compel acceptance by significant portions of the
analytic community’ (Gedo 1984: 514). However liberal one’s criteria for scientificity, it is
difficult to think of a discipline as scientific where theory changes take place as a function
not of systematic evidence but rather of the evocative power and appeal of its
formulations and the charisma of the originators of these formulations.
The historical trajectory of psychoanalytic theorizing is not encouraging to anyone who

looks for cumulative progress of a scientific sort. Indeed, although in certain areas one
may discern progress, many theoretical developments can be characterized as
retrogressive in one important sense. That is, whatever the problems and difficulties of
Freudian theory, many of its propositions are formulated with sufficient clarity that they
are susceptible to empirical test, as evidenced by the fact that much of the empirical
research on psychoanalytic propositions is linked to Freudian theory. Contrastingly, as we
have seen, Kleinian and neo-Kleinian theories, the most influential current psychoanalytic
theories, are formulated in such a way that the possibility of scientific testing does not
Page 12 of 27

arise. In so far as we are concerned with the development of a science of psychoanalysis,

this is not an encouraging trajectory.
(p. 365) Falsifiability of Psychoanalytic Propositions

It has been argued that the possibility of falsifiability speaks to the scientificity of a
theory, including psychoanalytic theory (Popper 2003/1965; See also Lakatos 1970). For
example, arguing against Cioffi’s (1970) position that the attitudes and practices of the
psychoanalytic community that protect these propositions from falsifiability compromise
its scientific status, Farrell (1961, 1984) has proposed that because certain specific
psychoanalytic generalizations can be refuted in principle, psychoanalytic theory should
be accorded scientific status. There are a number of problems with Farrell’s proposal.
One problem, already discussed, is that certain core psychoanalytic propositions do not
appear to be susceptible to empirical refutation. For example, how would one go about
devising procedures that would allow the possibility of refuting Freud’s and Klein’s claims
regarding an inborn death instinct, let alone its influence on psychological development
and functioning? The same question can be addressed to the florid fantasies attributed to
young infants by Klein or to Bion’s claims regarding beta and alpha elements and alpha
functioning.
A second problem with Farrell’s proposal is that, as Cioffi (1970) has pointed out,
‘refutability in principle is not an adequate criterion of the genuinely empirical character
of an enterprise’ (Cioffi 1970: 472). Were it an adequate criterion for scientific status,
astrology, for example, would have to be seen as scientific. For surely, astrological claims
are not only refutable, but, indeed, have been refuted. The issue is, as Cioffi (1970) has
noted, that astrological ‘theorists’ not only do not employ procedures that are able to test
their claims but, indeed, engage in practices that obstruct refutation. Thus, if being
refutable in principle is not accompanied by being refutable in practice, due to a parade
of obstructional procedures of the defenders of the claim, refutability in principle
becomes an empty criterion. The situation is somewhat analogous to the relationship
between the law and the carrying out of the law. Citing Orwell, Remnick (2016) observes
that the law itself affords no protection insofar as how laws are implemented depends on
the individuals carrying them out and on ‘the general temper of the country’ (Remnick
2016: 2). We all know of nations which have freedom-affirming constitutions, but
dictatorial practices.
Farrell’s (1961) specific example of a psychoanalytic proposition that is refutable in

principle is the theory of the Oedipus complex. Indeed, not only is there no convincing
evidence in support of a universal Oedipus complex, but a good deal of evidence against
that claim (see Eagle 2018). However, the refutation of the theory of the Oedipus complex
has not resulted in its relinquishment—just as refutations of astrological claims have not
resulted in their abandonment.
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Like Cioffi, Meehl (1993) also cites the practices and habits of mind of members of the
psychoanalytic community when he writes: ‘One need not conduct a literature search to
realize that the divergences in theory and technique among therapists in a broadly
(p. 366) “psychoanalytic” tradition are vast, increasing, and show little or no signs of the
sort of cumulative self-corrective development characteristic of post-Galilean

science’ (Meehl 1993: 324). That is, there is no ‘self-corrective’ feedback from the
evidence to the theory. The evidence contradicting the claim of a universal Oedipal stage
of development is largely ignored by many Freudian theorists who continue to refer to the
Oedipal complex both in their theoretical and clinical papers.
Another reaction to cogent critiques of the Oedipus complex hypothesis has been to
retain the concept, but radically alter its meaning so that it no longer bears much
resemblance to the original formulation and theoretical claims. Loewald (1979) writes:
‘the oedipal attachments, struggles, and conflicts must also be understood as new
versions of the basic union-individuation dilemma’ (775). In describing ‘oedipal
attachments’ this way, Loewald (1979) essentially redefines the Oedipus complex so that
it is understood as entailing conflict between remaining tied to early parental figures
versus separation and autonomy (in Mahler’s [1968] terms, between symbiosis versus
separation-individuation). The existence of unconscious incestuous and death wishes, the
defining features of the Oedipus complex, is no longer posited. Rather, reference to such
wishes is now understood not as pointing to actual incestuous and death wishes, but
rather as symbolic expressions of union and separation-autonomy. However, despite
gutting its essential features, which include the universality of unconscious incestuous
and death wishes, Loewald continues to refer to the Oedipus complex.
As another example of redefinitions of the Oedipus complex, Morehead (1999) writes that
although ‘human and animal evidence supports the Westermarck hypothesis’ (the
hypothesis that prolonged propinquity dampens sexual interest), such evidence does not
contradict ‘recent analytic theory on the Oedipus Complex [which] does not require the
existence of a central, powerful, incestuous sexual drive’ (347). Like Loewald, Morehead
removes a core aspect of the Oedipus complex—the existence of a central powerful sexual
drive—but nevertheless insists that it remains a viable theory. In short, both Loewald and
Morehead illustrate obstructional attempts to preserve a central psychoanalytic
hypothesis through nominal means despite the dearth of confirming evidence and the
accumulation of negative evidence.5
One could perhaps argue that the issue is largely a verbal one, i.e. that Loewald and
Morehead have merely retained the term ‘Oedipus complex’ to refer to certain dynamics.
However, this argument is not convincing. For one thing, Morehead makes clear that his
intention is to preserve the theory of the Oedipus complex. Perhaps most important,
Loewald’s and Morehead’s manoeuvres obscure the relationship between evidence and
theory through nominal means. That is, they obscure the conclusion that there is little or
no evidence in support of Freud’s positing of universal incestuous and death wishes. Nor
is there evidence that how one resolves Oedipal wishes has a decisive influence on
psychological development, including development of gender identity and the structure of
Page 14 of 27

the superego. Given this state of affairs, the warranted conclusion would point to the
relinquishment of the Freudian theory of the Oedipus complex. Further, (p. 367) there is
much evidence that issues of union versus separation-individuation and how they are
dealt with do exert a major influence on psychological development. However, union
versus separation-individuation is not a restatement or reconceptualization of the
Oedipus complex but, in an important sense, is a replacement of Oedipal theory.
Truth, Science, and a Heuristic Discipline

Despite the difficulties identified earlier, it is clear that psychoanalytic theory has had
much to offer to those interested in how the mind works. It has attracted the interest of
Nobel laureates such as Adrian (1946) and Kandel and gifted scientists such as Gallese,
the co-discoverer of mirror neurons. Indeed, both Kandel (2007) and Gallese (personal
communication) have reported that at one time in their life, they seriously thought of
becoming a psychoanalyst. It is important to add, however, that the inspiration for these
scientists was the corpus of Freud’s work on the nature of the mind rather than the post-
Freudian theorizing I have described.
Despite the problems I have discussed, there have been post-Freudian theoretical
developments that have contributed to an understanding of mental functioning. In my
view, these contributions include certain aspects of ego psychology (e.g. the importance
of certain ego functions such as reflective capacity, ability to delay gratification, and
capacity for affect regulation); the importance of what Mahler (1968) refers to as
separation-individuation in development; and Bowlby’s (1969, 1973, 1980) attachment
theory, particularly its account of the basis for the infant–mother bond and the
developmental consequences of the particular nature of that bond.
Although much of this work may have been stimulated by psychoanalytic ideas, for the
most part research in these areas takes place outside the psychoanalytic context (another
reason that psychoanalysts should familiarize themselves with research relevant to
psychoanalysis). For example, research and theory on ego functions (although it is not
referred to that way in the non-psychoanalytic literature) is primarily cognitive
psychology. Similarly, although Bowlby was trained as a psychoanalyst and viewed himself
as one throughout his life, virtually all the burgeoning research and theoretical
developments in attachment theory have taken place outside psychoanalysis, in domains
such as developmental psychology. These examples suggest that many psychoanalytic
ideas, including critical reactions to them, have been richly heuristic in stimulating
research. That is, to borrow Reichenbach’s (1938/1951) admittedly problematic
distinction, one can say that many psychoanalytic ideas have been useful in the context of
discovery; the problems lie in the context of testing them.
The value of a body of thought is not defined by its scientific status, nor is it the case that
only scientific method can generate important insights and truths. I believe that, at its
best, a psychoanalytic mode of thought is of great value in a number of ways, and in
particular, it may provide important insights into experience and behaviour that are not
Page 15 of 27

readily available through other means. As an example of this phenomenon, I am

(p. 368)
reminded of a description of an experience provided by Meehl (1984). He describes

observing a man and woman leaving a hospital, the woman carrying a Raggedy Ann doll.
Meehl becomes unbearably sad and begins sobbing, imagining that the man and woman
have just left their very ill child. Upon arriving at his analytic session, still sobbing, his
analyst asks Meehl whether he was mean to his daughter before coming to the session,
upon which Meehl becomes immediately aware of the reasons for his sadness and
sobbing, which then completely cease.
Let me provide another example from my own clinical experience. Many years ago, I was
working with a patient, A. G., whose presenting symptom was his obsessive fear that he
might be homosexual, which, if true, would represent for him an abominable sin. He was
tormented by these thoughts. The symptom appeared after his girlfriend pressed for them
to become engaged, with an eye towards marriage. During one session, he reported that
after dinner with his mother and father (at the time, he was still living at home), when his
mother asked him to put a baking dish back on a high shelf (he was quite tall), his
obsessive thoughts about whether he was homosexual got worse. When I asked him
whether he had any further thoughts about this incident, he said that putting the baking
dish away was something his father used to do. He then remembered that when his
mother had recently asked him to mow the lawn—remarking again that this was
something his father used to do—the same thing occurred. He then volunteered that after
he received a job promotion, his obsessive thoughts reached their peak in frequency and
intensity.
Although other interpretations are certainly possible, given other information about A.
G.’s experiences and difficulties, a plausible hypothesis close to the clinical evidence is
that a central symbolic meaning of all three events—putting the baking dish away,
mowing the lawn, and receiving a job promotion—that were associated with an
exacerbation of A. G.’s symptoms is that they all involved being placed in an adult role
and confronting the challenges and responsibilities that that entails—a role in which he
does things his father used to do.
And, indeed, A. G.’s severe anxiety about leaving home, both figuratively and literally, and
feeling panicky and engulfed at the thought of marriage, emerged as the central issues in
treatment. The point I want to make with this clinical anecdote, similar to Meehl’s point
about his own experience, is the following one: I know of no theory other than
psychoanalytic theory, particularly its formulation of primary process thinking that (in the
case of A. G.) enables one to identify the common symbolic meaning among activities as
disparate as placing a baking dish on a high shelf, mowing the lawn, and receiving a job
promotion. I also do not know of any other theory that provides as clear an insight into
the defensive function of a troubling symptom.6
Ironically, this very strength of psychoanalytic theory in finding hidden common

(p. 369)
motives and meanings in disparate activities is also a potential problem. This is so

because the meanings identified in the patient’s material are often arbitrary, far removed
Page 16 of 27

from the patient’s experience, and vary with the analyst’s theoretical orientation (see
Peterfreund 1983). Therefore, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between arbitrary
theoretical impositions on to the clinical material and interpretations warranted by the
clinical evidence. As Meehl (1995) puts it, ‘the clear message of history is that anecdotal
method delivers both wheat and chaff, but it does not enable us to tell which is
which’ (1019). Being better able to make this distinction would represent a significant
contribution. I think the earlier noted work of psychodynamically oriented researchers
such as Luborsky and Weiss and Sampson gives us some idea of how such distinctions
can be made. However, large sections of the psychoanalytic community need to overcome
their indifference or hostility towards these sorts of studies.
Conclusions
1) Although, as Freud and others believed, the development of psychoanalysis as a
separate discipline with its own free-standing training institutes and its relative
isolation from other disciplines may have made it possible for it to emerge as a
coherent body of thought, its status as a separate discipline with its own education
and training institutes has constituted a major barrier to theoretical (and perhaps
clinical) progress. For the most part, psychoanalytic associations and training
institutes have been more a force for the preservation of guild identity and orthodoxy
(including pluralistic orthodoxies) than a means for theoretical and clinical progress
(Kernberg 2012, 2015).
2) There appears to be a more recent acceptance of empirical research and greater
valuing of the importance of establishing links between psychoanalysis and other
disciplines in some quarters of the psychoanalytic community. However, this must be
broadened beyond a selective search for findings confirming psychoanalytic
hypotheses to reflect an equal interest in findings that might challenge
psychoanalytic formulations and serve as an impetus to theoretical change and
progress.
3) In contrast to central aspects of Freudian theory which, at least in principle, lend
themselves to empirical test, many post-Freudian theoretical developments, for
example those associated with Klein and Bion, are often so arbitrary, obscure, and
untethered to observation, that the question of testability becomes moot. Thus, the
historical trajectory of psychoanalytic theorizing does not provide a basis for
confidence in the prospect of steady and cumulative progress in psychoanalytic
theorizing.
4) Theory change in psychoanalysis comes about not by virtue of new findings, but
through the emergence of charismatic figures who attract loyal followers who
establish psychoanalytic training institutes that promulgate the ideas of new
‘schools’.
The general picture that emerges is that of two cultures, one, so to speak, within
(p. 370)
the psychoanalytic community of psychoanalytic institutes, and the other outside that
community, most often associated with university departments. The latter group,
Page 17 of 27

committed to a scientific ethos, carries out research on propositions directly generated or

inspired by psychoanalytic theory (e.g. Blatt 2008 on self-definition and relatedness;
Cramer 2008, 2012 on defence; Fonagy and Bateman 2006 on reflective capacity and
mentalization). The former group, made up of the great majority of psychoanalysts, tends
either to have no interest in or to be hostile to research on psychoanalytic formulations.
Further, many of the formulations that are most influential in the psychoanalytic
community are not susceptible to empirical test. And, perhaps most important, it is this
community that shapes the education, training, and therefore, habits of mind of most
psychoanalysts.
To sum up, it seems clear that, at its best, a psychoanalytic mode of thought can generate
important insights regarding the nature of mind that may not be readily available through
other means. However, at its worst, it has generated arbitrary and obfuscatory
formulations far removed from observation and unsusceptible to empirical test by any
means. Further, given the nature of psychoanalytic training and education, there appears
to be no reliable self-correcting mechanism that enables psychoanalysts to distinguish
between the plausible and testable, on the one hand, and the obscure and untestable, on
the other. Indeed, if one looks at the historical trajectory of psychoanalytic theorizing
from Freudian to dominant contemporary theories, it appears that at least as much
influential psychoanalytic theorizing is increasingly characterized by obtuse formulation
far removed from observation and evidence. Unhappily, this is a grim picture but, I think,
an accurate one. I agree with Kernberg (2012, 2015) that necessary modifications in
training and education may serve to brighten this picture. I believe that current practices
and habits of mind regarding such matters as attitudes towards evidence and testability
need to change. The challenge, in my view, is to be able to integrate the best of what a
psychoanalytic mode of thought has to offer with the attenuation of loyalties to particular
psychoanalytic ‘schools’ and an openness to empirical evidence and research in the
service of self-corrective practices and procedures.
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Journal of Psychoanalysis 41: 585–595. (p. 375) (p. 376)
Notes:
(1) As Meehl (1995) has observed, there probably is no presumed therapeutic intervention
in the history of humankind, including bloodletting, purging, and insulin coma therapy,
that has not been associated with personal testimony and anecdotes regarding its
beneficial effects.
(2) I would add that accountability is a moral as well as an empirical issue. That is, the
clinician has the moral responsibility to be open to the issue of accountability and to avail
him- or herself of whatever evidence is available regarding therapeutic outcome and the
processes linked to outcome. This is not to say that there cannot be open and informed
debates about such issues as criteria for outcome and quality of evidence, including its
ecological validity.
(3) Ironically, despite a widespread hostility towards research, meetings at the American
Psychoanalytic Association are labelled ‘scientific’ meetings.
(4) In addition to providing a poignant account of the doubts and struggles experienced in
psychoanalytic training by an open-minded psychoanalyst, Portuges also contributes an
excellent discussion of the scientific status of psychoanalysis as well as of the relationship
between research and clinical practice.
(5) [Eds: For a discussion of Lacan’s redefinition of the Oedipus complex, see Boothby
(this volume).]
(6) As one of the editors (RG) notes, one could hypothesize that an exacerbation of A. G.’s
symptoms in reaction to ‘doing things his father used to do’ may reflect an unconscious
anxiety-ridden desire and fantasy to replace father. That is a plausible clinical hypothesis
not necessarily contradicting, but perhaps complementing, my formulation. However, it is
a hypothesis that further clinical evidence would either support or fail to support.
Morris N. Eagle
California Lutheran University, USA
Page 26 of 27

Page 27 of 27


Jim Hopkins

Core concepts of psychoanalysis admit integration with recent work in neuroscience and
developmental psychology. Karl Friston’s free energy neuroscience embodies analogues
of Freud’s primary and secondary processes, and despite conceptual differences assigns
the same causal role as Freud to the minimization of free energy. This supports parallel
psychoanalytic and neuroscientific accounts of development, dreams, and symptoms, with
the latter expressible as a complexity theory of dreaming and mental disorder. Overall the
generative model that performs predictive processing discharges the functions—including
the regulation of waking and dreaming consciousness—that Freud assigned the ego,
while the prototype emotions systems delineated by Jaak Panksepp and other affective
neuroscientists discharge those of the drives or id. Together with the emerging role of
REM dreaming in memory consolidation, this provides neuroscientific underpinning for
psychoanalytic conceptions of the role of memory, emotion, and phantasy in dreams, as
illustrated by Freud’s dream of Irma’s Injection.
Keywords: predictive processing, free energy, ego, drives, complexity, conflict, dreaming, memory consolidation,
phantasy
Introduction: Integrating the Sciences of the

Mind
Recent developments have made it reasonable to think that some main claims of
psychoanalysis can be relatively directly integrated with the framework of contemporary
computational and affective neuroscience. Other approaches in psychology, including
attachment theory, are also seeking integration with neuroscience; and both neuroscience
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and the study of mental disorder are themselves undergoing integration with genetics
and Darwinian evolutionary biology. Here we will focus mainly on psychoanalysis and
attachment, leaving evolution for consideration elsewhere.1
Probabilistic Regulatory Modelling

The integration advanced here is based on the notion of probabilistic regulatory
modelling associated with the free energy principle recently espoused by Karl Friston and
his colleagues (see, e.g. Friston 2010).2 As accords with Conant and Ashby’s (1970) proof
that a good regulator of any system must model that system, we can understand
Darwinian adaptation as shaping phenotypic traits of organisms (and therewith the genes
that sustain them) to model aspects of the environment so as to interact with them in
ways that promote reproductive success. Taken overall these mappings constitute
organisms themselves as dynamic models of the environments with which they interact.
In the nineteenth century—and as a scientific version of Kant’s claim that consciousness

arose from a conceptual synthesis of the manifold of sensory intuition—Helmholtz
proposed that the brain naturally conducted such modelling. He argued that the brain
accomplished synthesis by embodying a generative model of the causes of the data at its
sensory receptors—that is, a model of the causes of these sensory data that could predict
the impingements and recreate their effects. (Hence, as Helmholtz remarked, objects
were ‘imagined in the field of vision’ as they would have to be ‘to produce the same
impression on the nervous mechanism’ (1865/1924: 2)).
The hypotheses of this model, as in Kant’s account of synthesis, included our concepts of
the causes and objects of everyday perceptual experience. In Helmholtz’s version our
conceptual apparatus unified and predicted the statistical patterns of the data impinging
at the receptors, and so explained these data for the subject, by re-representing the
patterns as conscious perceptual experiences of their causes.3 In this Helmholtz used
Kant’s philosophy to provide an outline account of the working of the brain in generating
consciousness, and one which entailed that the basic sensory data were not conscious
experiences themselves, but rather the contacts at the neural receptors whose patterns
the experiences serve to represent and predict.4
Freud’s Free Energy Neuroscience

Freud framed many of the basic claims of psychoanalysis in the autumn of 1895, shortly
after he discovered the use of free association in analysing his own and his patients’
dreams. After this both he and his patients sought self-understanding by following and
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describing the rapidly changing contents of their own conscious states, in as much detail
as possible and without omission or censorship.
This proved a uniquely informative mode of self-disclosure, which even now remains
without parallel in any other discipline. An individual’s associations made it possible to
consider a whole range of what would emerge as motivated behaviours (verbal
utterances, non-verbal actions, thoughts, dreams, and symptoms) together and in relation
to one another and to the motives that gave rise to them.5 Together with his own self-
analysis this enabled Freud to learn as much about his patients’ states of mind as they
were able to put into words, and to extend this by framing and testing hypotheses about
what their (and his own) associations indicated they could not put into words.
Accordingly he rapidly discovered that ‘the pathological mechanisms which are revealed
in the most careful analysis in the psychoneuroses bear the greatest similarity to dream-
processes’ (Freud 1895/1950: 336).6 He began to shift his investigative and therapeutic
focus away from what he and Breuer had taken to be veridical but repressed memory, and
towards the fundamental and memory-distorting role of imagination and phantasyy.
Freud’s first love in research had been the study of the nervous system, in which he had
shown unusual distinction.7 Hence as his new data prompted new hypotheses, he initially
tried to formulate them in neuroscientific terms. Within a few weeks he had framed a
prescient account of the brain as operating to minimize a form of free energy that was
specific to the nervous system.
Freud’s idea must have originated as a version of Helmholtz’s conception of free energy
as the energy in a system that was available for conversion into work. All physical engines
(animal, vegetable, or mineral) operate in accord with the laws of thermodynamics in
converting Helmholtz free energy into work. In organic metabolism this conversion is not
straightforward, since it involves concurrent processes that are bidirectional, that is, both
energy-storing and energy-releasing. But in applying Helmholtz’s notion to the brain and
mind, Freud adapted it in ways that we can now see to coincide with the distinct notion of
variational free energy, as this is used in contemporary neuroscience.8
Variational Free Energy (FE)

There is a fundamental conceptual problem in applying Helmholtz’s account of modelling
to the brain. Predicting sensory impingements and recognizing their causes requires
computing, for all relevant causes and impingements, the conditional probabilities of
impingements given causes that enable the prediction of impingements, and the (inverse)
probabilities of causes given impingements that enable the recognition of causes.
According to the Bayesian mathematics of probability, these calculations are intractable:
they have no finitary (closed-form) solution. Thus although Helmholtz had described a
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process of modelling that the brain seemed to be performing, the task seemed impossible
for the brain to perform.
Geoffrey Hinton and his colleagues solved this problem in a series of papers on the
Helmholtz machine (Dayan et al. 1995) that marked the transformation of connectionist
machine learning into the computational neuroscience of the Bayesian brain. Describing
the human sensory system as ‘a statistical inference engine whose function is to infer the
probable causes of sensory input’ (1995: 1), they produced a proof of principle as to how
the requisite inferences might be performed. This turned on the notion of variational free
energy (hereafter FE) that they used in computational modelling.
It could be proved that minimizing the FE of a Bayesian probabilistic model of the causes
of some data minimized the divergence in probabilities between those the model assigned
to the causes and those of the causes themselves: at zero free energy the probability
distributions would be the same. Also, however, the parameters (hypotheses) that
determined the FE of a model could be adjusted from within that model (as happens in
the brain in perceptual learning) in computationally tractable ways. As Hinton realized, it
followed that a brain that embodied such a model as Helmholtz had envisaged could
ensure that this model enjoyed maximal evidence-based conformity with the causes it
represented by continually adjusting its parameters to minimize FE.
The FE of a model is equal to its computational complexity minus its predictive accuracy.
Both are measured with respect to samples of the data the model adjusts itself to learn to
predict, which we can take as the sensory contacts that occur over a single waking
period. Accuracy is a measure of predictive success. If we imagine the data of waking
impingement as points on a graph, and the FE-minimizing hypotheses generated by the
model as curves through those points, accuracy would be maximized by a curve that
passed through every data point. Complexity, by contrast, reflects the changes imposed
on the model in working to increase accuracy, as measured by the number of parameters
the model is compelled to adjust and the extent of the adjustment required. The brain’s
model thus minimizes FE by maximizing accuracy and minimizing complexity, thereby
tending to make itself the simplest best predictor of the data at the receptors.
Friston extended this framework from the perceptual systems to the overall regulation of
bodily change and movement that perception subserves. Thus it appeared that the brain
so animated the body as to minimize the variational FE of its regulatory model not just by
improving prediction (as in perceptual learning), but also by framing and satisfying
predictive hypotheses as to how optimally to move and act.9 Such a minimization of FE
constitutes life-sustaining activity that is subserved by the processes that store and
release thermodynamic free energy (Seth and Friston 2017). In this sense the
minimization of FE takes the foreground in understanding the overall energic working of
brain and mind.10 In consequence, as Helmholtz had claimed, ‘every movement we make’
can rightly be regarded as an experiment testing the predictive success of brain and body
in modelling and navigating their environments.
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For both Freud and Friston the free energy to be minimized enters the nervous system
via sensory impingement, the main source being the inescapable flow of ‘endogenous
[interoceptive] stimuli’ that reflect ‘the peremptory demands of the internal needs’ (Freud
1895/1950: 297). For Friston these stimuli predict departure from the continuously
recalculated targets (including homeostatic set points and allostatic adjustments) for FE-
minimizing activity (Pellouzio et al. 2015). Hence as Freud speaks of such inputs as
creating a ‘demand for work’ to produce ‘specific actions’ that ‘bind’ (inhibit) this free
energy, so Friston speaks of ‘an imperative to minimize prediction error … through
action’ (2012: 248) that likewise inhibits the interoceptive sources. And on both accounts
such minimization requires the brain to embody a representation or model of the world,
including the agent’s body (in Freud the ‘bodily ego’, bounded both internally and
externally by the skin), via which the minimizing activities are conducted.
These similarities, as well as others described in what follows, give Freud’s conception of
free energy the same overall causal profile as Friston’s FE. On this basis Carhart-Harris
and Friston (2010) sought ‘to demonstrate and develop the construct validity of the
Freudian concepts’, including those of the primary and secondary processes. In what
follows, therefore, we will advance their argument by using ‘FE’ to designate both
conceptions of free energy.
FE and Waking and Dreaming Consciousness

Freud hypothesized that both dreams and symptoms functioned to protect the self (or
‘ego’) from trauma and conflict. They did so, moreover, in the same way: via the
fabrication of fictive experiences and beliefs, forms of imagination or phantasy that
created an ‘alienation from reality’ (Freud 1911b: 218ff) that temporarily masked and
pacified the conflict or trauma involved. Dreaming, moreover, seemed to present an
innate form of consciousness, which might perform a similar function in infancy.
Accordingly Freud hypothesized that the original form of consciousness was imaginary,
and produced by a primary process that was ‘in the apparatus from the first’ (1900: 603).
In infancy this process operated in accord with the pleasure principle, buffering the
potentially traumatic influx of FE at birth, and paved the way for the secondary
processes, which operated in accord with the reality principle. These enabled the infantile
ego to distinguish perceptual experience from wishful imagining, to establish experiential
memory, and to learn to perform the ‘specific actions’ required to inhibit the internal
sources of FE. Freud illustrated this by an example in which an infant used the ‘wishful
cathexis’ provided by imagining the breast, to ‘experiment’ by turning her head so as to
secure the nipple (1895: 328–9, 356). This required the infantile ego to moderate (inhibit)
the relief provided by phantasy, in order to focus on the indications of reality that enabled
movement leading to a veridical experience of satisfaction.
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Thus against the background of the regulation of pleasure and unpleasure by the primary
process, the secondary processes introduced the infant—cry by cry, feed by feed,
excretion by excretion—to the harsh realities of the world into which she had been born,
and also to her own real resources for coping with them. So as the infant gained a greater
apprehension of reality (and to the extent that she did so) the secondary processes
inhibited and overlaid the primary process in waking life, relegating it to the motor
paralysis and sensory attenuation of dreaming.
This benign development, however, remained under threat from frustration, trauma, or
conflict. These tended to activate the primary process in waking, and so could create a
continued reliance on wishful phantasy that would later show in the alienation from
reality (Freud 1911b) characteristic of mental disorder. Hence as Freud later described
matters, the phantasies produced by the primary process ‘possess psychical in contrast to
material reality; and we gradually learn to understand that in the world of the neuroses it
is psychical reality that is of the decisive kind’ (Freud 1915–7: 368).
The contemporary FE framework provides a remarkably full parallel to these claims.

Sleep is a key factor in neurological development, and infants cycle through phases
resembling slow wave (SWS) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep while still in the
womb (Kurth et al. 2015). In the last trimester they spend most time in REM, and as
Reissland et al. (2011, 2013) observe, their facial expressions indicate both positive
(laughter-related) and negative (cry-related) emotions. Accordingly Hobson, Hong, and
Friston (2014) take this as a formative period for the brain’s generative model. They
hypothesize that the brain is ‘genetically endowed with an innate virtual reality
generator’ whose working ‘is most clearly revealed in rapid eye movement sleep
dreaming’.
We are thus ‘born with a virtual reality model’ of what we will later discover to be the
worldly causes of sensory impingement; and with the onset of sensory activity this virtual
model is ‘entrained by sensory prediction errors’, to become ‘a generative or predictive
model of the world’. In Friston’s account this is accomplished by active inference, which
effects the perceptual learning, establishing of memory, and inception of FE-minimizing
action that Freud assigned to the secondary processes.
This account also parallels post-Freudian (e.g. Kleinian) descriptions of the primary
process as innate expectation-generating phantasy. Thus Segal (1964) describes the
infant as ‘approach[ing] reality armed, as it were, with expectations formed by his
unconscious phantasy’. These expectations are comparable to scientific hypotheses, in
the sense that ‘by testing them in reality [the infant] gradually learns which are
applicable and which modes of his own functioning enable him to deal with reality’.
(Among them are the ‘preconceptions’ of ideally good and malignantly bad breast/mother/
others that the Kleinian tradition regards as the innate basis for thinking about ourselves
and others.)
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In Friston’s terms these expectation-inducing would be the prior hypotheses that are
altered to accommodate prediction error as the virtual reality generator becomes a
‘predictive model of the world’. Alteration of these priors in the first phase of perceptual
learning would produce experientially informed posterior hypotheses that would then
serve as priors for the next phase.
In all this Helmholtz, Segal, Bion, and Friston construe thinking in a way that has become
familiar in philosophy—as involving tacit or explicit abduction, or inference to the best
explanation (Douven 2011). Helmholtz and Friston take perceptual consciousness to be
created by tacit abduction on the part of the brain or generative model; and as conscious
agents we continue abductive inference in everyday life and in science. This is the
continuity, as Popper remarked, that enables human beings to ‘let their theories die in
their stead’.11
These accounts clearly impose a common framework that links waking, dreaming,
development, and mental disorder. On both accounts waking consciousness is underlain
by an original imaginary (virtual reality/phantasy) process that later appears mainly in
dreaming, and whose operation in waking is constrained by a model or system of
representations of the causes of sensory impingement. On both, therefore, a central
aspect of development consists in constructing the worldly model whose adherence to
reality inhibits and overlays the imaginary process in waking. This, however, entails the
possibility originally envisaged by Freud, namely that the development of this realistic
orientation may be more or less unsuccessful, leaving the imaginary process to produce
the alienation from reality that appears as mental disorder.12
Friston’s account of FE casts further light on these matters. We noted earlier that the
brain’s model minimizes FE by maximizing accuracy and minimizing complexity, thereby
tending to make itself the simplest best predictor of the data at the receptors. In Friston’s
account these tasks are roughly divided between waking and sleeping. As a first
approximation (omitting the role of imaginative/primary process activity in waking) the
brain operates to increase the accuracy of the generative model in waking, and to reduce
its complexity in sleep and dreaming.
In this context the most accurate model would be the one best able to predict the
currently optimal course of motor response and put it into action. The contrasting
importance of complexity emerges if we consider that if an agent’s model is too complex
—for example if it is working to satisfy imperatives that conflict with one another—such
computation may be difficult or impossible. An agent who needs a drink, for example, will
maximize accuracy by wanting and getting a drink. But an agent who has numerous
conflicting needs may be unable to effect satisfying computation of this kind, and so
remain effectively immobile. Hence the requirement, advanced over the lifetime by
processing in sleep, of simplifying to predict a single best alternative. As we will see
further on, the reduction of complexity in dreaming apparently takes place via the
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imaginary attainment of accuracy that Freud described as wish fulfilment (see Pataki, this
volume).
We return to dreaming in ‘The Complexity Theory of Dreaming and Mental Disorder’.

First, however, we must take up the relation of complexity to emotion and conflict.
Emotion Systems
In regulating waking and dreaming consciousness in such a way that experience, thought,
and action harmonize to minimize FE, the generative model discharges the tasks that
Freud assigned to the ego. In this, however, it is important to see that the brain as
modeller or ego is not just a functional part of the personal conscious self, but is rather
the overall regulatory governor of the organisms we are. Among its activities are the
production of the conscious experiences in which we regard ourselves as persons who
think, feel, choose, and act, as well as the dreams in which we imagine ourselves doing
so.
The locus of this ego- or self-creating regulatory activity is the cerebral cortex; and the
subcortical prototype emotion systems13 that the cortex develops to regulate over the
first year of life play the role that Freud assigned to the drives or id. By contrast with the
cortex, the subcortical generators of emotion are fully functional at birth, and their basic
architecture in the brainstem is common to all mammals. Watt and Panksepp (2009: 92–3)
describe these systems as ‘sitting [in the brainstem] over homeostasis proper’, where
they give rise to attachment, which becomes ‘the massive regulatory-linchpin system of
the human brain’, exercising ‘primary influence’ over the prototype systems below.14
As described in Alcaro and Panksepp (2011) and Alcaro et al. (2017), these basic systems
divide into two overarching and conflicting groups:
1. Those characterized as ‘positive/appetitive’ or ‘Approach/Reward’. As indicated by

Panksepp’s capitalized functional descriptions, these include SEEKING, PLAY, LUST,
and CARE.
2. Those characterized as ‘negative/aversive’ or ‘Avoidance/Conflict’. These include
RAGE and FEAR, as well as the attachment-regulating system that Panksepp
describes in terms of PANIC, SEPARATION DISTRESS, and GRIEF (hereafter PSG).
This latter system generates the punishing internal experiences that ensure the
proximity of reproductive cooperators such as parents and offspring.
The systems in each group are co-activating (RAGE and FEAR activate one another, and
PSG activates both, and the objects of SEEKING include cooperators in CARE, PLAY, and
LUST). By contrast the groups inhibit one another, acting as parts of an overall structure
of emotional opponent-processing (Craig 2015); and they generate conflicting dispositions
in physiology and behaviour. They are thus sources both of the opposition between
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unpleasure and pleasure stressed by Freud, and of the emotional conflicts that he studied
and aimed to mitigate—and that we can now see as contribute to insecure (and
particularly disorganized) attachment.
These systems coordinate in reducing FE, but via a dialectic that renders them liable to
precipitate emotional conflict. This begins with birth, when the negative/aversive systems
are activated by the prediction errors that signal impending violations of basic
homeostatic expectations previously met from within the mother’s body. This challenge to
life-sustaining equilibrium is expressed in what Freud regarded as the infant’s ‘scream’.
This communicative action is often the infant’s first, and produces a resonating activation
in the aversive systems of the mother (Parsons et al. 2014), galvanizing her response.
Sensitive response (Howe 2011) coordinates mother and infant in replacing aversive
activations with appetitive and rewarding SEEKING, approach, and the consummatory
and life-sustaining activity of nursing. This promotes synchronization and bonding
between them (Atzila et al. 2017), paving the way for the other approach/reward systems
—LUST, CARE, and PLAY—to participate in deepening their emotional relationship.15
In this dialectic the infant’s and mother’s generative models operate in the same way.
Equilibrium-threatening increases in FE activate the avoidance/punishment systems, and
the model responds with motor activity (an optimal trajectory) that engages the
approach/reward systems to minimize it. In infancy this pattern coordinates mother and
infant, but the pattern itself is paradigmatic for the operation of the generative model,
whether operating realistically or in virtual reality. It develops together with attachment
over the first year, as the cortex extends its governance of the emotion systems through
phases of axonal growth, synaptic proliferation, and experience-dependent neural
pruning. By the beginning of the second year the brain has roughly doubled in size, and
reliable patterns in attachment relationships can be discerned in the ‘Strange Situation’
procedure, to be discussed in the section ‘Conflict and Complexity in Disorganized
Attachment’ further on (see also Howe 2011).
This marks the stabilizing ‘regulatory linchpin’ of the infant’s establishing of ‘internal
working models’ for emotionally significant relationships with the mother and/or other
carers. This modelling discharges what Freud described as ‘one of the earliest and most
important functions of the mental apparatus’ namely ‘to bind the instinctual impulses
which impinge on it, to replace the primary process prevailing in them by the secondary
process and convert their freely mobile cathectic energy into a mainly quiescent (tonic)
cathexis’’ And as Freud also remarks, and we will see later, ‘failure to effect this binding
would provoke a disturbance analogous to a traumatic neurosis …’ (Freud 1920: 33, 34).
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Trauma, Conflict, and Complexity

Infancy combines early neurological development with experiential learning, and is
therefore uniquely formative for the brain. For this reason early adverse or traumatic
experience can have a lifelong impact on mental and physical health (Anda et al. 2006)
that is mediated by changes in the working of the brain (McCrory et al. 2017). Early
activation of the aversive emotional systems seems a likely cause of what Freud described
as ‘the first great anxiety-state’ associated with the trauma of birth, and later ‘the
infantile anxiety of longing—the anxiety due to separation from the protecting
mother’ (Freud 1923: 58).
The early focus of the conflicting emotion systems on the mother accords with
psychoanalytic claims that experience in early infancy alternates between prototype-
forming representations of very bad and very good objects, whose originals are the parts
of the mother’s body with which the infant has significant interactions—her breast, her
holding presence, her face, eyes, etc. Recent research on memory suggests that the
infant’s episodic (autobiographical) memory system, centred in the hippocampus and
amygdala, is ‘highly engaged in the processing of infantile experience and the storing of
latent memories’ (Alberini and Travaglia 2017; see also Travaglia et al. 2016). These
latent memories, moreover, seem comparable to the early ‘memories in feeling’ described
by Melanie Klein (1952: 234). For although they do not admit explicit recall, the emotions
linked with them are nonetheless rearoused when similar experiences occur at later
times. Despite their latency, such memories can play an important role in experience-
driven maturation and development.
This is important for our purposes, for Friston’s conception of complexity is internally
connected with both trauma and conflict. Complexity measures the burden of adjustment
that experience places on the generative model; and since the primary task of the model
is to calculate an optimal motor trajectory, as driven by the potentially conflicting
prototype systems, this is effectively the burden of emotional adjustment (cf. the notion of
affective load in Levin and Nielsen 2009). Conflict naturally creates complexity, since it
involves the activation of inconsistent (conflicting) patterns in behaviour, one or both of
which perforce require complexity-reducing adjustment. And experiences are traumatic
when—as in post-traumatic stress disorder (Enlow et al. 2014) or borderline personality
disorder (Mosquera et al. 2014)—they impose requirements for emotional adjustment that
the ego/generative model cannot fully meet. The overarching role of the potentially
conflicting prototype systems in human motivation thus ensures that for our generative
models complexity is mainly emotional complexity, even when (as, say, in obsessive
compulsive disorder or OCD) it shows in ostensibly cognitive forms.
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Conflict and Development

We have seen that the early working of the emotion systems can engage mother and
infant in a conflictual relationship that predates the infant’s understanding. The
activation of conflicting emotions becomes emotional conflict for the infant as subject and
agent with the recognition of self and other as distinct enduring individuals. Experiments
suggest that this development—and with it our conception of ourselves as unique persons
bounded by physical bodies that move in space and last through time—starts to take hold
in the fourth month, as Melanie Klein suggested in her account of the depressive
position.16
In the prior, pre-objectual phase (Kumin 1996) infants seem to conceive the world as
containing a numerically indeterminate multitude of episodic proto-objects, comparable
to the ‘shifting and unsubstantial “tableau”’ in terms of which Piaget and Inhelder (1969)
described early experience.17 Since these proto-objects are derived from perception of
parts or aspects of the objects perceived, these are also ‘part objects’ which are
anatomically and psychologically incomplete;18 and since the infant’s conception does not
yet encompass their actual patterns of spatio-temporal behaviour, they are particularly
liable to imaginary transformation in phantasy.
During this phase the infant is also learning the boundaries of the bodily self via sight,
touch, and movement, as well as a range of feelings generated via interoception
(Fotoupoulou and Tsakaris 2017).19 So it is also indeterminate for the infant whether
these episodically encountered proto-objects are mental or physical, or inside or outside
the bodily container of the mind or self, as this is bounded by the skin. In consequence
the infant can imagine taking the early proto-objects into itself with milk or food; as good
or bad causes of feeling inside the self; as expelled from the self, or put into others, with
urine, gas, etc. and so on. (Such phantasies populate dreams, and often re-emerge in
mental disorder.)
As the generative model extends its spatio-temporal scope the infant increasingly
conceives persons as unique and persisting, and accordingly merges proto-objectual
representations to represent good and bad aspects of single complex individuals. This
requires reorienting the aversive systems from their original focus on the mother,
apparently effected by a coordination of identification, projection, and attachment. The
realization that others are unique and irreplaceable spurs identification with their valued
and caring aspects, and fosters the infant’s capacities for guilt and concern, ameliorating
the ingroup-facing aspects of the superego. At the same time aspects that cannot be
integrated in this way—particularly those derived from early parent–offspring and sibling
rivalry—are split off and projected outside the circle of familiar kith and kin.
These developments also establish the family as a basic ingroup, preparing the infant for
ingroup cooperation for outgroup conflict. Some early signs of this appear at seven to
eight months, when infants start to show both angry protest at separation from their
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mothers and also fear of strangers (Schaffer 1971). The separation protests show
appreciation of the mother as unique and irreplaceable, as well as the refocusing of the
emotion systems that this entails. RAGE at the mother now operates in harmony with PSG
and FEAR (of strangers) to maintain proximity and attachment within the family. And the
projections that originally created the indeterminately numerous bad proto-objects of
early infancy are relocated in the alien stranger, and so can now operate to arouse
derivatives of RAGE and FEAR in ingroup cooperation for outgroup conflict.20
Conflict and Complexity in Disorganized

Attachment
We have been taking the early binding (successful inhibition) of free energy hypothesized
by Freud to be accomplished by establishing the emotional bonds of attachment. But as
noted in the section ‘Emotion Systems’, Freud also claimed that ‘failure to
bind’ [successfully inhibit] the FE of the drives ‘would provoke a disturbance analogous to
a traumatic neurosis …’ (1920: 64). We can see such a failure, and learn something of its
causes, by considering disorganized attachment, as shown in the Strange Situation.
This is a roughly twenty-minute procedure involving eight episodes, numbered (1) to (8);
and we can regard the assignment of categories of attachment by this procedure as
measuring the functional integration of the rewarding and aversive prototype systems. In
(1) the mother (or other carer) and infant enter the room, and in (2) the infant has the
opportunity to explore and play with the toys which are there. In (3) a stranger enters the
room, and after a short interval attempts to play with the infant. In (4) the mother goes
out of the room, leaving the infant with the stranger, who tries, if play has begun, to
continue it. Then in (5), the first reunion, the mother returns and the stranger leaves
while the mother settles the infant, providing opportunity to return to exploration and
play. In (6) the mother again goes out, this time leaving the child entirely alone, and in (7)
the stranger enters and again attempts to play with the child. Finally, in (8), the second
reunion, the mother again returns to settle the child, who may (or may not) go back to
exploration and play.
Thus while episodes (2) and (5) and (8) are such as to activate the rewarding systems that
Panksepp identifies as SEEKING and PLAY in the context of maternal CARE, (3) and (4)
and (6) and (7) are such as to activate aversive FEAR, PSG, and RAGE, with the latter
directed at the caring mother for her part leaving the infant alone and/or at the mercy of
the stranger. These conflicting activations, moreover, are such as to produce regression,
since they repeat those that marked the infant’s appreciation of the mother as unique and
irreplaceable at seven to eight months. Roughly, infants who are classed as secure at
twelve months show less conflict between the rewarding and aversive systems, and
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resolve their conflicts more readily, than those who are classed as insecure, that is, as
avoidant, ambivalent-resistant, or disorganized.
Infants classed as disorganized show the most striking and apparently irresolvable
conflicts. Here are two examples, from a girl and a boy aged eighteen months, as
described in Solomon and George (1999: 131).
In the second reunion Kate approached her mother with her arms outstretched …
when she was about two feet away from making contact, she moved her arms to
the side and abruptly circled away from her mother like a banking airplane. As she
moved away she had a blank, dazed expression on her face.
In the first reunion, Sam approached his mother with his eyes cast down. When he
was about two feet away he looked up at her, rising suddenly and making gasping
noises with his breath as he did so. He quickly looked down again, bared his teeth
in a half-grimace/half-smile and turned away. Hunching his shoulders and holding
his arms and legs stiffly, he tiptoed to the other side of the room. He sat
motionless in the chair for 30s, grasping the armrests and staring straight ahead
with a dazed expression.
This is an example of the kind of complexity—and the overall trade-off between

complexity and accuracy—generated by emotional conflict. The successive stages of the
Strange Situation have aroused such disparate and conflicting images of these toddlers’
relationships with their mother that their egos/generative models are now unable to
determine whether the more accurate response would be to approach or avoid her. On
the present account this is because their online working memories are activating
disparate and conflicting pre-objectual representations of self and other—representations
that their egos/generative models have not yet integrated into single coherent
representations of themselves in relations to others as single enduring objects. Hence
these representations are overly complex in a literal sense. If we compare the generative
model to the guidance system of a self-driving vehicle, then these toddlers would be
attempting to compute a route on the basis of disparate and conflicting maps (internal
working models) of the territory they are seeking to navigate.
Disorganized infants characteristically achieve a particular form of coherence by three to

five years, when they settle into patterns of coercion and control in relation to their
objects. Thus here is Kate at forty-two months playing with a little boy named Trey:
Pretending to bake a cake in a toy oven, Kate said in a very loud, bossy tone, ‘You
can’t have cake now! Go away: you can’t have cake ’till I call you!’ She then
ordered Trey to get some dishes for her. She frowned when she saw what he
brought and scolded him, shaking her finger with her hand on her hips. Trey
pretended to eat … Kate yelled ‘No! It’s not done!’ … She ordered him to go away
… when he didn’t move she pushed him roughly, and he fell to the floor …
Page 13 of 36

And here is Sam at the same age with a friendly little girl called Jenny, who tries to
interest him in playing with her doll.
At first he ignores her overtures but finally he takes the doll she offers … [and]
alternates between brushing its hair tenderly and smashing it against the floor.
Jenny tries to integrate Sam’s behavior into her pretend play … she pretends the
doll is saying in a squeaky voice ‘Ow, don’t do that!’ … Jenny tries again, making
her doll say ‘I’m going on the bus’. Sam grabbed the toy bus before Jenny could
put her doll in it, crammed his doll in, and drove the bus away. Jenny gave up
trying to play with Sam
Here the kind of conflict Sam showed towards his mother at eighteen months seems
echoed in his attitude towards Jenny’s doll, which he alternatively brushes tenderly and
smashes against the floor.
Finally we can see what seem to be pre-objective precursors of this kind of complexity in
the microanalyses of videotaped face-to-face interactions between mothers and infants
described in Beebe and Lachman (2014). These indicate that disorganization in the
Strange Situation at twelve-plus months can be predicted from the fourth month—that is,
near the inception of the shift to objectual representation the defines the depressive
position—by short (2.5 second) episodes in which the mothers involved fail to recognize
or coordinate empathically with their infants’ expressions of distress. Instead the mothers
involved respond to their infants’ distress with exaggerated surprise or smiling, or again,
as distress increases, with facial freezing and/or looking away. Meanwhile the infants
themselves—as in the later disorganized patterns discussed previously—respond with
rapidly conflicting expressions of emotion (e.g. whimpering and smiling within the same
second or so); and they grow more distraught as no response is forthcoming.
These are episodes in which the mothers concerned are not meeting activations of their
infants’ aversive systems in the paradigmatic way discussed previously, that is by
responses that generate FE-minimizing approach/reward. Rather they seem comparable
to what Bion (1962) and Segal (1975) describe as maternal failure to respond in a
containing way to infants’ projections of distress, leaving infants unable to incorporate a
capacity for conflict-modifying containment themselves. Emotional misrecognition of this
kind can occur in otherwise caring relationships, particularly, it seems, if the carers
experienced something comparable in infancy. Still it can prove traumatic, in the sense of
contributing to the kind of complexity found in disorganized attachment, and also, say, in
borderline personality disorder (BPD), in which histories of trauma and/or disorganized
attachment are common (Mosquera et al. 2014).
Page 14 of 36

The Complexity Theory of Dreaming and

Mental Disorder
In the Project Freud observed that the processes which produced the ‘alienation from
reality’ of mental disorder had ‘the greatest similarity’ to those that produce dreams.
Hobson, Hong, and Friston (2014) argue that the ‘virtual reality’ dream processes,
together with REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and SWS (slow wave sleep), serve to
minimize FE by reducing the complexity of the generative model. We have seen that this
complexity encompasses emotional conflict and trauma; so the virtual reality generator
would be doing the same thing—generating virtual reality to reduce the complexity
introduced by trauma and conflict—by producing the ‘alienation from reality’ (Freud
1911b: 218ff) that Freud and many others have found characteristic of mental disorder.
We can thus integrate Freud’s and Friston’s accounts of dreams and symptoms by
advancing a complexity theory of dreaming and mental disorder. This is the hypothesis
that the conflicts and traumas that Freud thought mitigated by recourse to yphantasy/
virtual reality in both dreaming and mental disorder can be seen as forms of the
neurocomputational complexity illustrated by disorganized attachment (Hopkins 2016).
The claim is thus that mental disorder is the product of such complexity, together with
the mechanisms (which apparently include synaptic pruning) which have evolved to
reduce it. As well as incorporating Freud’s original hypotheses, this account extends
them, by relating waking disorders to aberrant complexity reduction in SWS, REM, and
dreaming. As described in Hopkins (2016) this is borne out by research on dreaming in
depression as well as by work in schizophrenia and a number of other disorders.21
How do sleep and dreaming reduce the complexity of the model, and so prepare it to be a
more efficient (simpler) predictor of sensory impingement in the next waking period? We
can see this by considering the processes of consolidation and reconsolidation that
establish and update the cortically stored long-term memories that inform the model. The
‘engram complexes’ (Tonegawa et al. 2015a, 2015b) that realize memory are networks of
synaptically connected neurons. As Freud anticipated, experiential learning
systematically alters the patterns and strengths of synaptic connections (together with
other aspects of the neurons that regulate their activity), thus determining the nature and
contents of the memories they encode. Those that embody a particular memory are
distributed over a number of regions in the brain, which may be connected synaptically
and/or coordinated by oscillatory patterns (waves) of various kinds (Boccio et al. 2017).
The working of engram complexes involves two roughly dissociable components: the
contextual content of the memory (who, what, when, where, etc.), as contributed by
encoding activity in the hippocampus; and the emotional significance or valence of the
memory, contributed by encoding activity in the amygdala, as related to the
hypothalamus and other subcortical structures. The complexity of what is learned is
reflected at the synaptic level in individual neurons. Thus Tonegawa et al. (2015a: 94)
Page 15 of 36

report that conditioning, eliminating, and reconditioning fear memories creates opposing
patterns of growth and elimination of spines less than 2 millionths of a metre apart on the
same dendrites. This suggests that learning creates dynamic opposition, and hence
complexity, even at the level of individual synapses—of which there are trillions in the
brain.
Accordingly the creation of learning-embodying synaptic connections puts a physiological

load on the neurons involved, and one that increases with complexity. Hence what is
called synaptic homeostasis (Tononi and Cirelli 2014) requires that these connections be
renormalized (rescaled to levels optimal for the next waking period) in sleep. Friston
(2010) takes this as an important part of the reduction of complexity, and there is now
strong evidence that SWS (Tononi and Cirelli 2014) and REM (Li et al. 2017) reduce many
synaptic connections while maintaining and strengthen others during sleep. According to
recent ‘active systems’ accounts (Dudai et al. 2015; Feld and Born 2017; Rasch and Born
2013) renormalization is implemented in SWS and REM as part of the overall
consolidation and reconsolidation of memory in sleep.
In waking the hippocampus acts in concert with the amygdala as ‘the search engine of
the brain’ (Buzsaki 2011), continually constructing the online working memory that
enables ‘navigation in cognitive [as well as physical] space’. This includes ‘the
computation of relationships among perceived, conceived or imagined items’, which
depends on memory. In addition the hippocampus rapidly encodes the details of waking
experience, so that in SWS it can transfer memories from the day to cortical engram
complexes for consolidation as long-term memory. This transfer reactivates the
complexes, rendering them plastic for integration with the new memories being
transferred, and rearouses the associated emotions, so that SWS gives way to REM and
dreaming.
In dreaming as in waking, the generative model operates to minimize expected FE, and
via activation of the SEEKING system. In waking expected FE arises from sensory
impingement and the arousals of memory and emotion engaged in increasing accuracy
(e.g. by successful satisfaction of need and desire) to reduce it. In dreaming, by contrast,
sensory impingement is curtailed, so that the FE sources for complexity reduction are
those of memory and emotion in the process of consolidation dreaming.
For this reason dreaming characteristically involves a pattern in virtual reality that
mirrors that in waking, but in relation to the arousal of memory rather than sensory
experience. The reactivation of emotion-laden (conflictual or traumatic) memories
arouses negative/aversive emotions, prompting the imaginary prediction/execution of the
FE-minimizing appetitive/rewarding trajectories that Freud described as wish fulfilments.
Thus for example Freud’s dream of Irma’s Injection (1900: 106ff),22 as we will consider in
more detail, begins with Irma complaining to Freud of suffering that his psychotherapy
has failed to relieve, but ends with diagnostic triumph on his part.
Page 16 of 36

Accordingly REM dreaming is accompanied by the kind of burst-firing of dopamine

neurons that marks waking consummatory reward (Dahan et al. 2007). As this occurs in
the conditions of maximal neuroplasticity that enable the reactivated old memories to be
integrated with the new, the imaginary attainment of reward in dreaming can reshape the
emotional valences of the whole engram complex, rendering it less productive of conflict
or trauma, and so emotionally optimized to minimize FE by increasing accuracy during
the next waking period. Dreaming thus minimizes complexity by an imaginary
maximization of accuracy during sleep, which optimizes the brain for actual maximization
of accuracy in waking.
As would fit with this, Genzel et al. (2015) argue that REM and dreaming function to
modify aversive amygdala-related components of memory.23 This in turn fits with the
long-observed positive effects of the restoration of REM dreaming on depression
(Cartwright 2010) as well as with recent experiments on engram complexes (Boccio et al.
2017; Tonegawa et al. 2015a, 2015b) that produce dissociations between their amygdala-
related emotional valence and their hippocampus-related contextual contents—and
including those in which depression-like activity is reduced by manipulations that arouse
reward (Ramirez et al. 2015).
Dreaming thus seems the final phase of both the reduction of neurocomputational
complexity and the reconsolidation of memory that occur in sleep (and we would expect
these processes to be intertwined). On the present account this reduction/reconsolidation
yields a revised integration of emotion and memory, in which the role of emotionally
traumatic or conflictual memories has been mitigated by the imaginary experiences of the
dream.
Dreaming Consciousness and the Reduction of

Emotional Complexity
This account integrates the reduction of FE (as complexity) in sleep with observations
about the large-scale neurological phenomena of SWS, REM, and synaptic homeostasis,
downscaling, and pruning. The role it assigns to the generative model—as reducing the
aversive complexity of emotional memory via the imaginary accuracy of the fictive
experiences of dreaming—explicates the significance of dreams in a way that accords
with Freud’s as well as many other depth-psychological descriptions. For on this account
the significance we assign to dreams derives from their role in unifying the emotional
meaning of the past and the present in preparation for the future, a task they accomplish
by adjusting emotional significances over the fields of memory in which experiential
learning is embodied.
Page 17 of 36

We can readily trace this hypothesized adjustment of emotional significance in the

examples in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams as well as later psychoanalytic writings. For
in Freud’s work as well as that of other analysts, the analysis of a dream can be divided
into three parts, which are related by association, memory, and emotion. These are:
i. The manifest content of the dream, the series of fictive conscious experiences that
the dreamer reports as making up the dream. Elements of this are related by free
association (and memory and emotion) to
ii. Memories and feelings from the day before the dream, whose contents indicate
that they played a causal role in the formation of the dream. These in turn are
related by memory, emotion, and association, to
iii. Memories from the more remote past, together with deeper and more traumatic
and conflicted emotions. The contents of these indicate that they were unconsciously
activated together with (ii) the conscious memories and feelings from the day; and
these contents can be seen as transformed in (i), the manifest content. So Freud
describes these as the latent content of the dream.
Free association leads from elements of (i) to elements of (ii) and (iii). These connections,
and particularly the relations of transformation between (iii) and (i)—what Freud
describes as the transformation of latent into manifest content—enable us to gauge the
potential impact of the transformations of the manifest dream on the latent memories and
emotions that underlie it. We can illustrate this by taking a fragment from Freud’s dream
of Irma’s Injection , and focusing on a single manifest element (which we will follow with
the aid of bold type) together with the memories and emotions that Freud associated with
it.
(i). From the manifest content of the dream:
… I at once took [Irma] to one side … to reproach her for not having accepted my
‘solution’ yet … I took her to the window [to examine her] and looked down her
throat … I at once called in Dr. M., and he repeated the examination and
confirmed it … [saying] ‘There is no doubt it is an infection.’ … We were directly
aware, too, of the origin of her infection. Not long before, when she was feeling
unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection of …trimethylamin (and I saw
before me the formula for this printed in heavy type) … Injections of that sort
ought not to be made so thoughtlessly …And probably the syringe had not
been clean.
(Freud 1900, 107)
This element of the manifest content—Freud’s claim in the dream that Injections of that
sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly—is clearly associated with memories and
feelings, both from the dream day, and from the more remote past.
(ii). Memories and feelings from the day before the dream.
Page 18 of 36

As Freud reports, Irma was a family friend and patient he had been treating for hysteria.
As the treatment was ending he had ‘proposed a solution to [Irma]’ about the nature of
her illness ‘which she was unwilling to accept’, and her sessions were broken off at the
summer vacation.
On the day of the dream Freud was visited by Otto, the long-standing friend and
colleague whom the dream depicts as giving Irma a toxic injection. Otto had been staying
with Irma and her family at their country place, where he had been called away to give
someone an injection, which event evidently reappeared in the dream in an altered form.
… I asked him how he had found [Irma], and he answered ‘She’s better, but not
quite well’ … Otto’s words, or the tone in which he spoke them, annoyed me. I
fancied I detected a reproof in them … the same evening I wrote out Irma’s case
history, with the idea of giving it to Dr M … to justify myself … I had been engaged
in writing far into the night …
(Freud 1900: 106).
Here a number of connections between the memories and feelings from the day and the
content of the dream are clear. The dream depicts Freud as reproving Irma for not having
accepted his ‘solution’, and explains her continued illness as caused by Otto’s having
given her a toxic injection. Hence in the dream Freud had transformed his own
emotionally aversive daytime experience of feeling himself reproved by Otto on behalf of
Irma into one of reproving both Irma and Otto. The Injections of that sort ought not to
be made so thoughtlessly of Freud’s dream was the last and most serious of his self-
justificatory retaliations for what he had imagined as Otto’s reproof on the day of the
dream.
(iii). Memories from the more remote past, together with deeper and more traumatic and
conflicted emotions. To Injections of that sort ought not to be made so
thoughtlessly Freud associated as follows (emphasis again supplied):
… .this sentence in the dream reminded me once more of my dead friend who
had so hastily resorted to cocaine injections … I noticed too that in accusing
Otto of thoughtlessness in handling chemical substances I was once more
touching upon the story of the unfortunate Mathilde, which gave grounds
for the same accusation against myself …
(Freud 1900: 117).
These associations go directly to past memories freighted with guilt and shame. As Freud
says, they indicate that he felt himself guilty of the same kind of thoughtless handling/
injection of toxic substances of which he accused Otto in his dream, with the addition that
in his case injections had been lethal. Moreover, he linked this with his own advocacy of
Page 19 of 36

the medical use of cocaine, which (on the basis of his own experience) he had gone so far
as to claim was non-addictive. Thus as he says:
I had been the first to recommend the medical use of cocaine, in 1885, and this
recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me. The misuse of
that drug had hastened the death of a dear friend of mine
(Freud 1900: 111).
The ‘dear friend’ was Freud’s beloved mentor, the talented scientist Ernst Fleichel von
Marxow. He had become addicted to morphine, taken to relieve incurable nerve pain from
an amputation consequent on dissecting a cadaver. Freud had recommended that he use
cocaine as a non-addictive substitute, and his subsequent addiction, decline, and death
was a source of grief and guilt. The ‘unfortunate Mathilde’ whom Freud associated with
him was someone about whom Freud felt a comparable guilt. He had given her injections
of sulphanol, considered harmless at the time, and she, too, had died as result.
This death, moreover, was linked with a kind of unconscious emotional conflict on Freud’s
part that he was to explain much later in his career. Using the name ‘Mathilde’ as a
switch-word, he associated the Mathilde he had killed with his own daughter Mathilde,
who had also been seriously ill.
My patient—who succumbed to the poison—had the same name as my eldest

daughter. It had never occurred to me before, but it struck me now almost like an
act of retribution on the part of destiny. It was as though the replacement of
one person by another was to be continued in another sense: this Mathilde for
that Mathilde, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth
(Freud 1900: 111–12).
In considering how his associations had led to these topics, Freud remarked that it
seemed he ‘had been collecting all the occasions which I could bring up against myself as
evidence of lack of medical conscientiousness’. With hindsight we can see that this was
the activity of the agentive part of himself that he would later describe as the cruel and
moralistic superego, which not only accused him with his most painfully regrettable
medical derelictions, but also threatened him with retribution in the form of the death of
his own daughter.
This is an example of the turning of aggression against the self to curb aggression within
the family that Freud took as one of the main functions of the moralistic superego, and
that is particularly evident in the ferocious self-reproaches as well as the disposition to
suicide characteristic of introjective depression (Blatt 2004). These memories were thus
also a locus of emotional conflict—the conflict between the ego and the moralistic
superego in terms of which Freud was later to understand guilt, shame, and suicide.
Page 20 of 36

In psychoanalytic terms we can say that this part of Freud’s dream was produced by his
ego to relieve guilt and shame generated by his moralistic superego, whose cruelty is
shown in the way he feels it to threaten him with the death of his daughter. Similarly in
FE terms we can say that the dream was produced by Freud’s generative model acting as
complexity-reducing virtual reality generator. In this it was operating to reduce the
emotional complexity (conflict and trauma, guilt and shame) embodied in Freud’s long-
term memories, by reconsolidating them under the impact of the imaginary but
rewarding and emotionally simplifying experience of innocence and vindication provided
by the dream.
Thus in both accounts the mitigation of conflict or reduction of complexity is

accomplished by fictive experiences, as partly realized by activity of the approach/reward
systems, in what we can regard as instances of self-induced complexity-reducing
experiential learning in dreaming consciousness. And here the agencies involved in the
self-induced learning include ‘internal objects’, or again aspects of the ‘internal working
models’ of self and other, that subserve the working of the ego/generative model.
The FE account thus enables us to describe the role of Freud’s memories and associations
more fully, and to integrate them with the ‘active systems’ account of memory
consolidation described in the earlier section ‘The Complexity Theory of Dreaming and
Mental Disorder’. For as already indicated, the memories and feelings in (ii)—those from
the dream day—are evidently those undergoing consolidation in the dream, that is, those
being transferred from the hippocampus to emotionally related engram complexes in the
cortex for storage as part of long-term autobiographical memory.
Again, the memories and feelings in (iii) are those that were already resident in the
engram complex, whose unconscious activation during the day had set the stage both for
Freud’s sensitivity to Otto’s remark, and for his self-justifying response to it. These are
the memories with which the newcomers are undergoing integration, and which are
therefore rearoused and made plastic, so as to be reconsolidated in a new integration of
memory and feeling, emotionally simplified—rendered less conflictual and traumatic—by
the experience of the dream.
Thus we can construe Freud’s analysis as providing an example of the ‘active systems’
account of memory consolidation and reconsolidation. In this we see three stages:
1. First stage in the consolidation of memory: Freud’s memories from the day—the
penetration of Otto’s remark, Freud’s annoyance, his self-justificatory ruminations, and
work late into the night—are transferred in SWS from the hippocampus to the cortical
engram complexes that gave the events of the day their emotional significance, and with
which they are to be integrated as long-term memories.
Page 21 of 36

2. Second stage in the consolidation of memory: This transfer rearouses the target
complexes, so that they can be reconsolidated in integration with the memories of the
recent events they influenced. These older and deeper memories—Freud’s advocacy of
cocaine, his role in the deaths of his patient and friend, etc.—involve guilt, shame, and
internal threats of punishment for his role in respect of toxic injections. Under the impact
of this dual arousal of memory and (aversive/punishing) emotion, SWS gives way to REM
and dreaming.
3. The final stage in the consolidation of memory: Freud’s generative model responds to
this arousal of aversive memory and emotion by producing the series of imaginary
experiences of the dream, culminating in the wish fulfilling experience in which Freud
reproaches Otto with Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly.
This powerfully rewarding experience of innocence and vindication, intensified by the

embodiment of deep symbolic sexual significance,24 leaves the cortically stored ‘what,
when, and where’ aspects of Freud’s memory intact. But it simplifies the complex of
which these memories are part by altering their emotional registration in the amygdala.
The fictive experiences of the dream thus freed Freud from the depressive and self-
justificatory spiral into which he had fallen the day before, providing a kind of overnight
therapy (Walker and van der Helm 2009), now being elaborated in neuroscientific work
on dreaming and depression.25 As suggested both by traditional psychoanalytic work on
symbol formation (Spillius et al. 2011: Pt. 1, sec. 10) and recent work in cognitive
neuroscience (Lewis et al. 2018), this can be seen as part of a more pervasive impact of
the creative dreaming imagination on waking life and thought.
Freud’s dream thus enabled him to address the difficulties he had felt to be accumulating
in his practice in a way that was at once more realistic and more creative than his writing
out of Irma’s case history the evening before. On waking he turned from his sterile
preoccupation with trying to justify his past practice to the fruitful one of seeking to
understand his role in that practice at a deeper level. This began with his creative activity
in analysing his dream, and so engaging consciously with the memories, emotions, and
conflicts (particularly with his own superego) that had been roused by Otto’s remark. In
this he began the deep revisions in his theories and practice that showed weeks later in
the Project, and that would eventually enable him to address the difficulties of his
patients in a more thoughtful way than he had managed with Irma herself—and in
particular by taking into fuller account the inner world of their psychic reality, as well as
the outer world of their frustration and trauma.
Conclusion
Multiple pathways in contemporary scientific investigation of mind and brain lead to the
relations of dreaming, memory, and emotion, and to the transformations that memories
undergo in the processing of dreams. This consilience with psychoanalytic findings
Page 22 of 36

indicates the value of collaboration, particularly among psychoanalysis, attachment, and

neuroscience. The discoveries about engram complexes discussed in this chapter are
already being applied to psychotherapy (Elsey and Kindt 2017). Their application to
human dreaming requires further discovery and examination of the emotionally
significant memories that are reconsolidated in our dreams.
Freud’s method of analysing dreams by systematically comparing their manifest contents

with the results of free association makes such discovery and examination possible, and
there is no evidence that any other method can yet do so. So progress in this area, for
neuroscience as well as the fields of psychology with which it is undergoing integration,
may depend on the willingness of non-psychoanalytic researchers to explore the path
originally broken by Freud.26 If others do persevere in this—which is by no means certain,
however great the potential benefit—they may come to see that path as leading to a
greater understanding of the unconscious working of the FE-minimizing mind and brain.
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Notes:
(1.) Thus as briefly discussed later below the psychoanalytic mechanisms of identification
and projection seem clearly to play a role in the ingroup cooperation for outgroup conflict
that Darwin and contemporary theorists of culture gene co-evolution regard as formative
for our species, and both the Oedipus complex and the death drive also seem clearly
related to parent–offspring, sexual, and sibling conflict. These are discussed together in
Hopkins (2018a); and Hopkins (2015) discusses the relations of psychoanalysis, evolution,
attachment, and neuroscience more generally. The integration of Freudian and
contemporary free energy neuroscience in the complexity theory of mental disorder
sketched later on is treated at greater length in Hopkins (2016).
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(2.) The programme has a (technical) website at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Free_energy_principle.
(3.) On generative models in contemporary neuroscience, see Ch. 10 of Dayan and Abbot
(2001); for an exegesis of Friston’s use, see Ch. 10.3ff of Tappenberg (2010).
(4.) This account was ignored by the founders of twentieth-century analytical philosophy.
Succumbing to what Wittgenstein later described as ‘the picture that forces itself on us at
every turn’, Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein turned their backs on Helmholtz’s
conception of perceptual experience as synthesized by the brain. Instead they adopted a
Cartesian conception in which such experiences were the private ‘sense-data’ upon which
all knowledge, including the existence of bodies and brains, had somehow to be based.
See Hopkins (2014/2018c) for an account of the development of Helmholtz’s ideas
concerning modelling through Frege and the early Wittgenstein, which ideas prompted
Craik’s (1943) account of mental models, later taken up in cognitive science, e.g. in
Johnson-Laird (1983).
(5.) This holistic interpretive integration of the data of free association is discussed in
some detail in Hopkins (1999). Although other forms of investigation of the emotional
functions of dreaming increasingly acknowledge the evidential importance of the
dreamer’s associations and memories (see, e.g. Malinowski and Horton 2015), no mode of
study apart from psychoanalysis has taken them so thoroughly into account. If as argued
later dreaming functions as part of the emotional synthesis of long-term memory then
progress in understanding both dreaming and memory will partly depend upon other
disciplines following this lead.
(6.) In arriving at this account Freud started to provide detailed empirical support for a
tradition of thought about dreaming and disorder that went back to Plato, and was
summarized in Kant’s (1764/2007: 71) claim that ‘the deranged person’ was ‘a dreamer in
waking’.
(7.) While still a medical student Freud was invited by the celebrated physiologist Ernest
Bruke to conduct neurological research in his laboratory. Prior to practising as a
psychiatrist he published over a hundred papers, as well as monographs on disorders of
movement and childhood cerebral palsy that established him as an expert in these fields.
(8.) Helmholtz’s notion of thermodynamic free energy measures a physical quantity,

whereas the notion of variational free energy (FE) provides a measure of Bayesian model
evidence that is computable from parameters of a model. Similarities and differences
between the notions are discussed in some detail at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Free_energy_principle. The two are related mathematically, since the equations
describing variational FE derive from Helmholtz’s describing thermodynamic free energy;
and for this reason they share the terminology of statistical physics. Also the complexity
term of variational free energy shares the same fixed point as Helmholtz free energy for a
system that is thermodynamically closed but not isolated.
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(9.) ‘Optimally’: that is, by the criteria imposed by evolution, which would determine the
prior hypotheses and major modes of processing of the model, as well as by the
environment, including experiential learning over the lifespan. Hence only in some areas
(e.g. perception) does the brain appear as operating with Bayesian rationality. In others
(e.g. the assignment of properties to members of idealized ingroups as opposed to
derogated outgroups) it must be understood as operating in accord with priors imposed
by evolution (in this case those that sustain the process of ingroup cooperation for
outgroup conflict, ‘the competition of tribe with tribe’, that Darwin thought ‘sufficed to
raise man to his present high position in the organic scale’ (1871: 157)). In enabling us to
understand such oppositions between the imperatives of rationality and evolution the FE
programme encourages enquiry that parallels Quine’s conception of the naturalization of
epistemology.
(10.) Since the turn of the century Friston and others have directed this approach to the
rest of organic life (Friston 2013; Ramstead et al. 2017) and applied it to the brain in
rapidly increasing scope and detail. This has established the minimization of FE as a
paradigm for neuroscience, described variously as predictive coding, predictive
processing, the predictive brain, and the predictive mind. And since the probabilistic
regulatory generative models envisaged in this approach would encompass a host of
others—the mental models of cognitive science, the internal working models of
attachment theory, the internal objects of psychoanalysis, etc.—the programme naturally
extends through psychology as well.
Although Friston’s own presentations are often forbiddingly technical, the main ideas
have been given clear philosophical expositions in Hohwy (2013) and Clark (2016), as
well as a recent collection of essays edited by Metzinger and Weise (2017). Seth (2015) is
a good introductory starting point, and emphasizes the role of interoception in the
generation of emotion, which is discussed later in this chapter.
(11.) This continuity contradicts claims that human thought cannot be understood as
having arisen via natural selection. And although specifics of Friston’s account of the
brain’s model are controversial, the existence of some such model (map, etc.) is widely
accepted in neuroscience. The brain viewers at http://gallantlab.org/index.php/brain-
viewer/ display a striking range of information about the modelling of the external world
in the cortex (see also the video introduction at https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=u9nMfaWqkVE).
(12.) Friston’s collaborator Alan Hobson, for decades a zealous neuroscientific critic of
Freud, has now published two books (Hobson 2014, 2015) applying the virtual reality/
generative model conception to link dreaming with mental disorder, although via
neurotransmission rather than Freudian phantasy. While continuing to criticize Freud,
Hobson now stresses that his own work ‘takes up the Project for a Scientific Psychology
exactly where Freud left it in 1895’ (Hobson 2015: 5).
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(13.) These systems are described differently by different investigators. For example,
LeDoux (2015) describes them as ‘survival circuits’, and Volkow et al. (2017) describe the
SEEKING system as the Dopamine Motive System. The most detailed recent delineation
is Panksepp’s (1998), which has been updated for therapists and general readers in
Bivens and Panksepp (2011).
(14.) One important difference is that Freud did not anticipate the current claim that the
brainstem systems generate consciousness as well as emotion, both of which are
elaborated in the cortex. For this see Solms and Panksepp (2012). Again many authors,
such as Barrett (2017) and LeDouz and Brown (2017) argue that the contextual cortical
elaboration of emotion is inconsistent with the notion of basic emotions. But as Panksepp
argues, subcortical generation of the basics is consistent with any degree of cortical
elaboration of the final states, including that emphasized by Barrett; and as noted by
Saarimäki et al. (2016) the subcortical generators have ‘fingerprints’ in their complex
cortical derivatives.
(15.) This is the kind of dialectic that Bion (1962: 30) attempts to describe
phenomenologically as follows:
The infant suffers pangs of hunger and feels it’s dying; racked by guilt and anxiety
and impelled by greed, it messes itself and cries. The mother picks it up, feeds it
and comforts it and eventually the infant sleeps. In forming the model to represent
the feelings of the infant, we have the following version: the infant, filled with
painful lumps of faeces, guilt, fears of impending death, chunks of greed,
meanness and urine, evacuated these bad objects into the breast that is not there.
As it does so, the good object turns the no-breast (mouth) into a breast, the faeces
and urine into milk, the fears of impending death and anxiety into validity and
confidence, the greed and meanness into feelings of love and generosity; and the
infant sucks in its bad property, now translated into goodness, back again.
(16.) Some of main developments occur in and between the ‘what’ and ‘where’ object-
processing pathways (Wilcox and Bondi 2015), with an early representation of an
identified object as lasting while unobserved perhaps signalled at six months by gamma
wave activation in the right temporal cortex (Kaufman et al. 2005; see also Leung et al.
2017).
This is consistent with an experimental tradition that at first focused on the mother as
object of perception, but later on other (emotionally less significant) objects. Thus Bower
(1977) reported an experiment with mirrors (discussed in Hopkins 1987) that cohered
with Klein’s dating of the depressive position.
If one presents the infant with multiple images of its mother—say three
‘mothers’—the infant of less than five months is not disturbed at all but will in fact
interact with all three ‘mothers’ in turn. If the setup provides one mother and two
strangers, the infant will preferentially interact with its mother and still show no
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signs of disturbance. However, past the age of five months (after the coordination
of place and movement) the sight of three ‘mothers’ becomes very disturbing to
the infant. At this same age a setup of one mother and two strangers has no effect.
I would contend that this in fact shows that the young infant (less than five months
old) thinks it has a multiplicity of mothers, whereas the older infant knows it has
only one
(Bower 1977: 217).
Although this experiment has not been repeated in contemporary conditions, it was
consistent with experiments on occlusion (e.g. Baillargeon et al. 1985; Wilcox 1999) and
eye-tracking (Johnson et al. 2003) done afterwards. Later work (Baillargeon et al. 2012)
has clarified how the infant initially uses parameters of shape and then others as the
ability to individuate and track objects is refined.
(17.) See also Klein (1952/1972: 54). For comparison of Piaget and Klein on infantile
experience and the object concept see Hopkins 1987.
(18.) Thus as reported in (Campos et al. 1983), a three-month-old infant made angry by
someone using her hand to impede movement will express anger at the impeding hand.
By contrast a seven-month-old infant made angry in the same way expresses anger not at
the hand, but at the face. Apparently at three months the infant has not, whereas by
seven months it has, integrated episodic experiences with the mother into an image of an
anatomically whole and enduring person. Also by seven months, as reported in (Stenberg
et al. 1983) this infant’s anger is regulated by experience of the persons she knows. If the
infant is annoyed twice by mother, or again twice by a stranger, the infant is angry both
times. But an infant annoyed first by a stranger and then by mother is especially angry,
indicating that the infant’s expectation that mother will comfort her after intrusions by a
stranger has been betrayed.
(19.) The work reported in Ali et al. (2015) suggests that infants’ sense of bodily touch
becomes anchored to objects in the surrounding space at four to six months. And recently
Seth and Friston (2017) have suggested that failure in integrating interoceptive and
exteroceptive sensory information—in particular, failure properly to integrate
‘interoceptive signals associated with nurturance (e.g. breastfeeding) during affiliative
interactions with (m)others’ may render autistic infants incapable of learning ‘that the
nursing and prosocial mother were the same hidden cause or external object’ (Seth and
Friston 2017: 7, and Fig. 4). If this is correct it would place autism among the disorders
that result from failure to negotiate this depressive-position integration.
(20.) For a fuller discussion of these developments, which also include the regulation of
parent–offspring conflict and sibling rivalry as part of the Oedipus complex, see Hopkins
(2018b).
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(21.) For further discussion and citations see the section on ‘Waking Disorder and
Complexity Reduction in Sleep’ in Hopkins (2016) as well as the work on dreaming and
depression cited later in this section.
(22.) For a fuller discussion of this dream which bears out claims made in passing here
see Hopkins (2015), and for further methodological discussion see Hopkins (1999).
(23.) See also Walker and van der Helm (2009) and Cartwright (2010).
(24.) On symbolism see Petocz, this volume. For the symbolism in this dream see the
discussions in Hopkins (2015), and Hopkins (2002) on psychoanalysis and conceptual
metaphor, which is also discussed in the work by Malinowski and Horton cited here.
(25.) See the discussion in Cartwright (2010: ch. 4), following up the work Vogel et al.
(1977); and the continuation of Cartwright’s work in the neuropsychoanalytic research
project on dreaming and depression described in Fischmann et al. (2013).
(26.) Thus for example the main arguments and claims of a recent series of non-
psychoanalytic papers by Malinowski and Horton (e.g. 2014a, 2014b, 2015; see also
Horton and Malinowski 2015) are consilient both with Freud and with the argument of
the present paper. They discuss role of memory, the dreamer’s associations, and
symbolism, and see dreams as performing ‘emotion assimilation’ via symbolic embodied
cognition that ameliorates the ‘emotional intensity’ of memories transformed in them.
Jim Hopkins
Department of Philosophy, King's College London
Page 36 of 36

How Should We Understand the Psychoanalytic Unconscious?

How Should We Understand the Psychoanalytic
Unconscious?
Michael Lacewing

This chapter reviews the debate between ‘realist’ and ‘constructivist’ understandings of
the psychoanalytic unconscious. To oversimplify, realists hold that unconscious mental
states exist in the analysand’s mind fully formed and with determinate intentional
content, independent of consciousness, and these are discovered in analysis.
Constructivists (including relationalists and intersubjectivists) hold that the unconscious
meaning of clinical material does not exist ‘preorganized’ in the analysand’s mind, but is
constructed, not discovered, through the analytic relationship. The chapter argues that
the debate is multiply confused. For example, different meanings of ‘psychoanalysis’ and
‘constructivism’ are at play, and a number of central arguments rest on
misunderstandings of complex philosophical positions concerning the status of science
and the nature of human knowledge. Once these confusions are removed, an
understanding of the psychoanalytic unconscious that retains the strengths of both
realism and constructivism presents itself.
Keywords: unconscious, realism, constructivism, relationalism, science, hermeneutics, Stephen Mitchell
Michael Lacewing
Introduction: Psychoanalysis and Theory

PSYCHOANALYTIC theories of the unconscious have changed greatly since Freud.1 I shall
review a debate that has taken place over the last forty years, predominantly in the USA,
between two families of theories I shall term ‘realist’ and ‘constructivist’. An oversimple
first characterization of the two positions is this: realists hold that unconscious mental
states exist fully formed and with determinate intentional content, independent of
consciousness, and are part of the analysand’s mind, playing a determinate role in their
thoughts, feelings, and behaviour, and this is what is discovered in analysis. By contrast,
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constructivists—by which I mean to include not only those who self-identify as

‘constructivists’, but also many relationalists and intersubjectivists—claim that the
unconscious meaning of clinical material is constructed, not discovered, and this is of
central importance to understanding psychoanalytic knowledge and the nature of the
unconscious. They hold that not only are psychological structures built from patterns of
interpersonal interaction (ontology), individuals can only be understood within an
‘interactional field’ (epistemology). It is only through interacting that people can come to
understand one another (in analysis as elsewhere), and to this interaction, both bring
(p. 408) their individual subjectivity. And so, says Stephen Mitchell (1998: 18), one of the
originators of relationalism, we must reject the claims of classical Freudian practice ‘that
the central dynamics relevant to the analytic process are pre-organised in the patient’s
mind and that the analyst is in a privileged position to gain access to them’.
I shall argue that the debate is multiply confused, with detractors on both sides
misunderstanding not only the claims and arguments of their opponents, but their own
positions and commitments as well. Once we untangle the many threads of thought that
have fed into the debate, this becomes less surprising. Part of my purpose is to explore
the extent to which constructivism and realism may be compatible once the debate is
made clearer.
One element of the debate—more often implicit than explicit—has concerned just what is
meant by ‘psychoanalysis’. As most commonly understood, psychoanalysis is a form of
psychotherapy, the relationship between analyst and analysand in the clinical setting. We
should grant that the heart of psychoanalysis is the clinical practice, including the
observations, interpretations, and inferences about one individual’s psychological
experience within the unique relationship between this analysand and this analyst. But it
is a mistake to restrict the meaning of ‘psychoanalysis’ to this practice. Psychoanalysis is
equally a theory about the nature, development, and functioning of the human mind,
especially in relation to motives (see also Eagle, this volume). There are a number of
features of this theory, particularly concerning the role and nature of unconscious mental
states and processes, that make it recognizably distinct and a competitor with other
psychological theories deriving, for instance, from cognitive psychology or neuroscience.
As we shall see, some of the confusion in the debate has derived from not clarifying
whether claims being advanced concern the therapeutic practice, the psychological
theory, or both.
To complicate matters further, the theoretical functioning of psychoanalysis takes place at

many levels, or again in many contexts, and these are also not always clearly
differentiated in the debate:
1. At the clinical level, we may observe that psychoanalysts generalize over

individual cases to make more general claims about the nature and function of
particular psychological processes or structures manifest in clinical interaction, such
as the meaningfulness of dreams, the occurrence of psychological defence, or the
phenomenon of transference. We can call this ‘low-level’ or ‘experience-near’
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theorizing. Such claims are so central to psychoanalysis they are very often not
recognized as forming part of an explanatory psychological theory, yet they are taken
to characterize human psychology universally (or at least widely within a culture),
and so should be distinguished from claims made about individual experience and
functioning.
2. Psychoanalysts frequently state or argue for claims about more abstract processes
or structures, often without (apparently) inferring them from clinical data, although
clinical data are frequently presented as supporting or illustrating such claims. Call
this ‘high-level’ or ‘abstract’ theorizing. One example would be Freud’s (1923)
(p. 409) theory of the superego or again general theories of the origin, structure, and
influence of object relations, such as we find in Fairbairn (1952) or Kohut (1971).

3. They also range into more speculative discussion about human psychology, and in
some cases, take up or begin from philosophical arguments and theories, e.g. Fromm
(1979), Stern (1997), or Stolorow and Atwood (2016). Call this ‘applied
philosophizing’. We will see that a good part of the debate over how to understand
the unconscious has been informed by such theorizing.
4. On other occasions, for any of 1 to 3 above, psychoanalysts appeal to theories or
empirical findings in other disciplines, from other branches of psychology to
anthropology and linguistics to biology, from Freud’s (1895) ‘economic’ theory to
Mitchell’s (1988) account of object relations. Call this ‘interdisciplinary’ theorizing at
the relevant level.
5. Finally, psychoanalysts apply psychoanalytic theory to wider issues, e.g. the nature
of social and cultural practices, religion, group psychology, etc. Call this ‘social’
theorizing.
In what follows, I shall occasionally refer back to these distinctions to diagnose a

confusion or line of thought. But let us get on. What is the debate about, and how did it
begin?
The Critique of Freud

In the debate, Freud is presented as holding a strongly realist position on the
unconscious. Whether Freud was a realist in the sense described earlier is not my
concern here. But we can note that, at different points in his career, Freud claims that
hypnosis recovers memories; that the meaning(s) of a dream lie(s) in specific,
determinate latent thoughts and wishes; that psychoanalytic interpretation identifies
specific defences that have distorted intentional content in specific ways (e.g. through
reversal, projection, etc.); that interpretation uncovers repressed wishes, which exist as
such prior to lifting the repression; and so on. Importantly, these mental states are
representations with determinate intentional content, to be understood in their nature
and ontology along the lines of conscious mental states, though allowing for the
differences imposed by primary process in the system Ucs. Of course, Freud also holds
that there is great complexity in the unconscious, and so discovering exactly which
unconscious mental states are expressed in a dream or operating in a defence can be very
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challenging, but this is a result of myriad associations and primary process substitutions,
rather than the result of any indeterminacy in the unconscious mental states themselves.
Freud is understood, then, as thinking of the unconscious as ‘a storehouse of fully formed

mental contents that, when uncovered, appear in consciousness, unchanged in their
original form’ (Eagle 2011: 112). But this model, Eagle continues, ‘has been rejected in
much of the contemporary psychoanalytic, cognitive psychology, and philosophical
literature’. This rejection—at least within psychoanalysis—went hand in hand with a
(p. 410) broader critique of Freud’s metapsychology, and this broader critique was itself
part of a reconsideration of whether psychoanalysis could properly be considered a

science, and this question was in turn situated within yet broader philosophical concerns
about the nature of human knowledge as such.
One result of this breadth and complexity in the debate has been that, in a great many of
the most influential contributions over how to think of the unconscious, these issues have
not been adequately separated. And a result of this, I believe, has been the imposition of
an unhelpful dualistic, either-or framework—one either thinks:
1) that psychoanalysis is and aspires to be a science (which is the paradigm of

human epistemic achievement), and
2) that metapsychology (of some kind) is central to this, and
3) that realism about unconscious mental states is correct
or one thinks
1′) that psychoanalysis is not a science (which, in any case, is at best one form of
knowing among others), and
2′) that metapsychology has little place, and
3′) that realism about the unconscious is false.
But why accept the alignment of these theoretical commitments? Very few writers have
recognized even the possibility of holding, say, that psychoanalysis is some kind of
science (which is one form of knowledge among others) but realism about the
unconscious is false, or again that realism is true, but Freud’s metapsychological and
scientific aspirations were misplaced, or any of a number of other possible combinations.
One purpose of this chapter is to free us from the straitjacket of thought that has been
voluntarily but unwittingly donned by many contributors to the debate.
The rejection of Freud’s model of the unconscious gained force and momentum in the
1960s, through critiques both internal and external to psychoanalysis. Such critique had
always been around, but additional impetus—certainly in the USA—was sparked by a
symposium arranged by Sydney Hook in 1958 in New York, at which Hook and Ernest
Nagel, among others, presented forceful criticisms of psychoanalysis as science which
Heinz Hartmann’s reply did little to quash (see Hook 1959). Critics outside
psychoanalysis engaged with issues of the truth of its claims in general and the reliability
of its method, both in generating and in drawing inferences from the clinical data. At the
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same time, the internal critique questioned both the validity and the usefulness of Freud’s
metapsychology and his drive theory in particular.
It was, in part, the theory of drives that supported Freud’s claims of realism. Freud had
argued that biologically based drives provide the most fundamental sources of
psychological motivation. Each drive introduces energy into the psychological system that
presses for action. It generates motivation that aims at the satisfaction of the drive,
attaching to an object that can supply this, which helps determine the intentional (p. 411)
content of the corresponding mental state. The development of the drives in childhood, in
particular of the multifaceted libido, he argued, contributes materially to the
development of the subject’s mind and mental health or psychopathology.
This theory, together with a number of implications that Freud drew concerning clinical
practice and the interpretation of clinical material, had drawn fire ever since its
formulation and development around the turn of the twentieth century. It was hotly
disputed not only by the scientific community, but also by a number of Freud’s early
collaborators and supporters, including Adler, Jung, Stekel, Forel, and Bleuler (see Borch-
Jacobsen and Shamdasani 2012: ch. 1). It was disputed by Fairbairn and a number of later
‘Independents’ in the UK and by neo-Freudians (Sullivan, Horney, Fromm) in the USA in
the 1930s and 1940s. However, these internal critics had offered rival accounts of the
structure and development of the mind. One novel response to the Hook symposium, not
only by psychoanalysts but also by sympathetically minded philosophers, such as Ricœur
(1970) and Habermas (1972), was to question the truth and usefulness of any such theory
within psychology.
Under pressure from these criticisms, by 1976, the first steps towards restricting
psychoanalysis to clinical phenomena had been taken (Holt 1976; Klein 1976; Rubinstein
1976; Schafer 1976). It was argued that the metapsychology and associated etiological
claims, e.g. the theory of libido and its development or of the superego and its origin in
Oedipal conflict, should be jettisoned, as these parts of psychoanalytic theory are most
difficult to derive from the clinical data and are tangential to the therapeutic relationship.
From this point onwards, the scope of the term ‘psychoanalysis’ within the debate
became unclear—was the writer concerning themselves with just the clinical relationship
and the understanding of unique individuals, or a general theory of psychological
functioning, and if the latter, was that theory experience-near or abstract?
Rejecting metapsychological and etiological claims was widely thought to have

implications for thinking that psychoanalysis is a science. If psychoanalysis were to be a
natural science, it would be so in virtue of something like Freud’s economic and drive
theories, for it is here that psychoanalytic theory touches most closely upon the
established natural sciences of biology and neurology (see also Hopkins, this volume).
Hence, a rejection of the metapsychology was also widely understood as a rejection of the
idea of psychoanalysis as a science in favour of an alternative model of psychoanalytic
knowledge. Making this move, it was thought, means that the critique of psychoanalysis
as unscientific now misses its mark (Ricœur 1970). For psychoanalysis to fail to meet the
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evidential standards of (natural) science is no failing at all if psychoanalysis is not, and

does not aspire to be, a science.
The alternative that was taken up came, in the first instance, from ‘hermeneutics’—the
interpretative understanding of meaning. For instance, according to Habermas (1972),
psychoanalytic psychotherapy is a process of (assisted) self-reflection, self-interpretation,
and self-formation. This process can be transformative by opening up new ways of
understanding ourselves and the meanings of our behaviour, providing insights into
previously unrecognized motives. The theoretical framework of psychoanalysis—insofar
as it is retained at all—must therefore be an interpretation of this process in (p. 412)
general terms. Many in the debate assimilated ‘science’ to ‘natural science’, and assumed
that science deals in objective causal processes. Hence psychoanalysis is not science, as
it deals in meanings, not causes, and these meanings are subjective, not objective.
By the 1980s, this line of thought raised questions about the ‘truth’ of interpretations and
the corresponding ontology of the mind (Mitchell 1988; Spence 1982). Arguments
appeared claiming that the study of subjectivity—which psychoanalysis undoubtedly is—
could only be a subjective study. But it is unfortunate that such associations were made so
quickly and widely, as claiming that psychoanalysis is a hermeneutic discipline does not
require one to accept that it is not a science. To arrive at this conclusion, one must first
argue that meanings cannot be studied using a scientific method, and to defend that
claim, one must have some idea both of the nature of meanings and the range of methods
that count as ‘scientific’.2
The Analytic Relationship

Central to the development of the debate in the 1980s and 1990s was a revised
understanding of the relationship between analyst and analysand. Freud’s scientific
understanding of psychoanalysis was mirrored, it was claimed, in the tenets and practices
of classical Freudian analysis (e.g. Mitchell 1998). The analyst is akin to the scientific
psychologist, in that psychoanalysis seeks to discover ‘the truth’ about the analysand’s
unconscious mind, and the same truth—being part of the individual analysand’s mind—
ought to emerge irrespective of the particular identity of the analyst. The analyst retains
‘neutrality’, in part so as not to influence the clinical data produced by the analysand in
ways that are tantamount to suggestion. The discovery of the analysand’s unconscious
states, in the right conditions—‘insight’—will materially contribute to the therapeutic
action of psychoanalysis.
All this came under close scrutiny, and a new recognition arose of the importance and
contribution of the individual subjectivity of the analyst to the analytic relationship (Gill
1983, 1984; Hoffman 1983). It became widely accepted that the analyst is not a ‘blank
screen’ onto which the analysand projects in the transference, as Freud thought. But Gill
and Hoffman went further to argue for a new understanding of transference, a ‘social
conception’ of transference. First, transference is, in part, a response by the analysand to
the actual analyst, not only the projected one. Second, ‘interpersonal reality’ has different
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interpretations that may be valid—it can no longer be assumed that the analysand’s
(p. 413) perspective on the analytic relationship is distorted by transference while the
successfully analysed analyst’s perspective is not (in theory at least). There can be no
simple division of interpersonal experience into veridical (how things really are) and
distorted. The analyst has biases and a subjective history that influence his or her
experience of the analytic relationship and the resulting interpretations are unavoidably
‘subjective’, in the sense of being a reflection of the subjectivity of the analyst. And so,
third, objective neutrality is impossible and, it was argued, clinically unhelpful.
This new conceptualization of the analytic relationship led simultaneously in two

directions—towards both a new epistemology and a new ontology of the unconscious.
Unfortunately, as we will see, the issues of epistemology and ontology weren’t always
kept clear. Nor was the scope of ‘the unconscious’ that was being reconceptualized—e.g.
was the debate about unconscious experience in the clinical setting, or did it extend to
include particular historically formed behavioural dispositions and other psychological
‘structures’ of particular analysands identified in the clinical setting, or did it extend still
further to include such dispositions and structures as discussed in general and abstract
theorizing?
We will turn to these developments since the 1990s in just a moment, but to make sense
of them, we must first note that the developments were mediated by another theoretical
‘innovation’. Having rediscovered countertransference, American analysts rediscovered
object relations (from the perspective of many British psychoanalysts, for whom such
claims were already entrenched by the 1950s, this was all at least thirty years behind, but
better late than never). One of the leading thinkers in this development, whose work shall
form the primary focus of our discussion, was Stephen Mitchell, who stated (1988: 17):
‘Mind has been redefined from a set of predetermined structures emerging from inside
an individual organism to transactional patterns and internal structures derived from an
interactive, interpersonal field’. Rather than mental states—or at least unconscious
mental states—being expressions of endogenous forces (drives), they are essentially
interpersonal. ‘[T]he interpersonal and intrapsychic realms create, interpenetrate, and
transform each other’ (Mitchell 1988: 9). The psychoanalytic school of ‘relationalism’
began.
On its own, this adoption of object-relations theory is independent of Gill and Hoffman’s
claims concerning transference and the analyst’s knowledge, let alone the developments
that followed—as evidenced by the history of object-relations theory and transference in
Britain (Hughes, this volume). It is perfectly possible for an object-relations theorist (e.g.
Rustin 1997; Eagle 2011) to hold that there are facts about an analysand’s object
relations and that one task of the analyst is to discover, with the analysand, what these
are (a second, intertwined task being to transform them). Given that the analysand
formed these object relations via their experience prior to beginning the analytic
relationship, it is even possible that the same discoveries would be made independent of
who the analyst is: ‘that it may be impossible to develop any mental states … without
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social interaction, does not alter the fact that, once formed, they do exist independently of
us and of our “interpretive construction” ’(Eagle, Wolitzky, and Wakefield 2001: 469).
But with this last phrase—‘interpretive construction’—we are getting ahead of

(p. 414)
ourselves. Suffice to say that the development of object-relations theory from the 1980s in
the USA was informed by the revisionary understanding of the analytic relationship
presented by Gill and Hoffman, and further developed by Mitchell (1988), Renik (1993),
Stolorow and Atwood (1992), Orange (1995), Aron (1996), Ogden (1997), Hoffman (1998),
and others. These authors developed and defended the ontological and epistemological
claims of constructivism described in the opening paragraph of this chapter, that
psychological structures are built from patterns of interpersonal interaction and that
individuals can only be understood within an ‘interactional field’.
The Confusion Over ‘Constructivism’

A first obvious epistemological implication of these developments, rightly drawn and
widely granted, is fallibilism. In classical Freudian practice, it was said, analysts had been
too confident in their declarations and authoritarian in their relations with patients.
Greater caution and modesty were called for.
But debate was sparked by the defence of ‘constructivist’ readings of psychoanalytic

knowledge. In the first instance, what is ‘constructed’, on these readings, is the
understanding of the analysand’s material that is reached by analyst and analysand
together through their interpretations of their experiences of the interpersonal
relationship. Reaching this understanding is not simply a matter of inferring, from the
evidence, the analysand’s unconscious mental states as they are already and in any case.
Rather, that this understanding is constructed should be understood to mean that the
meaning of this material is not ‘there’ in the mind of the analysand in the form of
unconscious mental states with determinate intentional content waiting to be discovered.
Compare: the realist holds that there is some definite truth about someone’s mental
states, some ‘real’ meaning to what they do, think, and feel, but to discover this, we will
often need to infer those mental states from the behavioural data. The fallibilist realist
accepts, further, that the evidence often supports more than one inference, and that
different interpretations of others’ behaviour may legitimately emphasize different mental
states. But these concessions on the indeterminacy of evidence are compatible with the
thought that the meaning of one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviour is given prior to and
independently of the interactive relationship with another person, and thus can be said to
be discovered. The constructivist rejects this model.
Beyond this, the further commitments of constructivism, its exact meaning and scope,
became a matter of considerable confusion, and early, more radical statements of the
position were later modified and moderated. (As noted at the outset of this chapter, I use
the term ‘constructivism’ not to identify just the views of those who self-identify as
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constructivists (e.g. Hoffman, Stern), but much more broadly, including other
relationalists and intersubjectivists.)
One cause of confusion was the failure to distinguish different strengths of the
(p. 415)
epistemological claim, while a second was disagreement over the ontological implications
of this claim. The starting point was, as above, that:
(1) There can be no singular, canonical interpretation of the analysand’s material, as what
emerges in the analytic relationship is inevitably equally a product of the analyst’s
subjectivity.
This claim was thought to support the further claim that:
(2) There can be no objective interpretation of the analysand’s material (e.g. Renik 1993).
However, whether this is so depends on one’s understanding of objectivity and its

requirements (Cavell 1998). If objective knowledge requires the knower to have no
subjectivity—to occupy a ‘view from nowhere’—then there is no such thing as objectivity
for human beings. But in that case, there is no contrast to be drawn between, say,
psychoanalysis and physics. Clearly, though, claims concerning the involvement of the
analyst’s subjectivity are intended to draw a contrast with how a physicist’s subjectivity
impacts on physics. We will return to this in ‘Beyond Objectivism and Subjectivism?’
(1) and (2) were taken together to support the stronger claims that:
(3) Analysts cannot approach the ‘real’ meaning of the patient’s experiences (Mitchell
1998), nor should they seek to do so, as
(4) The very idea of an ‘objective psychological reality’ that is independent of a particular
perspective on it threatens a return to the ‘epistemological authoritarianism’ that
characterized classical Freudianism (Hoffman 1999).
From such claims concerning epistemology and clinical methodology, many authors drew
a further conclusion (while some did not, and many others were simply silent on the
issue):
(5) There is no correspondence in the patient’s material to a single interpretation.
It is not simply that no one interpretation is better justified than others; there is no ‘real’
meaning, in that neither the patient’s material nor their mental states are structured in a
way that could correspond to one interpretation. Interpretations cannot be ‘true’ or ‘false’
in the sense of corresponding to something that exists independently of the interpretation
(Mitchell 1998).
In accounting for why this is so, constructivists crossed from epistemology to ontology.
On Freud’s realist view, interpretation describes—accurately or not—the unconscious
mental states of the analysand, which exist and have their determinate intentional
content independent of the interpretation. The function of language here is descriptive.
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By contrast, on constructivist views, what is unconscious does not pre-exist interpretation

in a determinate way. The function of language in interpretation is creative—it brings into
being determinate mental states where none existed. Thus Stern (1997: 5) talks of the
analysand’s experience itself being constructed through interpretation, and not merely
the understanding of that experience. At least in part, the psychological reality of (p. 416)
the analysand is constituted in and through the interaction with the analyst and the
language they both use.
I say ‘at least in part’ as the debate quickly focused on the scope of the claim. There were
disagreements, as well as changes of mind, among those who self-consciously rejected
the ‘realism’ label, as well as misunderstandings by those who adopted it. Is all of human
psychology, or just that which is relevant to psychoanalysis, to be understood thus—as a
construction out of interaction? And is it a construction of present interaction or past
interaction, or an interaction of present and past interaction? Is the claim restricted to
manifest clinical phenomena or does it cover the objects of psychoanalytic theory as well?
In developing and defending the five constructivist claims and their ontological
implications, psychoanalysts appealed to innovations in philosophy and culture
concerning the status of science and the nature of human knowledge. Thus the question
of realism versus constructivism concerning the unconscious developed into a debate
about objectivism in human knowledge, the influence of Kuhn and Feyerabend in the
philosophy of science, whether constructivism ‘descends’ into postmodernist relativism,
and the proper interpretation of Gadamer, among other matters. This did nothing to
clarify the debate (Mills 2005), which by the late 1990s became marked by repeated
accusations of oversimplifications, misinterpretations (wilful as well as unwitting),
obfuscation, and increasing ill humour.3
Narrowing the Gap

I have detailed the development of constructivism. But I also noted Eagle’s comment that
Freud’s realism has largely been left behind; just as constructivists have modified their
views over time, so too have realists. As object relations are central to the family of
constructivist theories discussed so far, it is worth briefly outlining an understanding of
object-relations theory in contemporary realist terms that eschew Freud’s
metapsychology.
We can understand ‘object relations’ as ‘the cognitive, affective and motivational

processes mediating interpersonal functioning, and … the enduring patterns of
interpersonal behavior that draw upon these intrapsychic structures and
processes’ (Westen 1990: 686). Internalized ‘objects’, in this sense, include ‘schemas’ or
‘models’ of oneself, other persons, particular relationships, and relationship structures.
These schemas are set up in childhood, derived from repeated experiences of
interpersonal relating. (p. 417) Current interpersonal relationships are impacted upon by
these enduring patterns, assimilating our present to our past: when some element of the
schema is ‘activated’, e.g. experiencing a particular interpersonal situation in a certain
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way, other elements of the schema come into play to interpret experience further in
accordance with the schema and to influence behaviour. Hence, unconscious models of
ourselves and significant others, deriving from the past, affect our perception, cognition,
motivation, and affective states in myriad, patterned ways. For example, psychological
defences are, to some significant extent, the result of patterns of experiencing or relating
to others that derive from one’s individual history of psychological development. As the
result of both developmental factors (the deficit model of psychopathology) and the
motivation to avoid psychological pain (the defence model), these models may
inaccurately reflect social and intrapsychic reality. Or again, this process underpins the
processes involved in transference. A minimal resemblance of the analyst to an
analysand’s ‘significant object’ leads to a set of responses, attitudes, and behaviours
deriving from the patient’s object relation (Andersen and Thorpe 2009).
On a realist reading, object relations are understood as psychological structures that,

through interaction with real-time interpersonal situations, causally explain a subject’s
occurrent conscious and unconscious psychological processes and states. Object relations
are understood as mediating the causal effects of past experience in which they originate
on both present dispositions and, through these, on present experience. In this sense, it is
indeed true to say that the intersubjective psychological reality of the consulting room is
a construction from the subjectivity of both analysand and analyst.4
How do constructivists respond to this picture? Some critics of constructivism (e.g.

Meissner 1998: 422) have understood constructivists to claim that all mental states of an
analysand are ‘constructed’ in the interpersonal relationship with the analyst, such that
the analysand does not bring with him or her any dispositions—most importantly, object
relations—that existed prior to encountering the analytic situation. But this is a
misunderstanding. Stolorow and Atwood (1992: 24) clarify:
Some may see a contradiction between the concept of developmentally

preestablished principles that organize subsequent experiences and our repeated
contention that experience is always embedded in a constitutive intersubjective
context. This contradiction is more apparent than real. A person enters any
situation with an established set of ordering principles (the subject’s contribution
to the intersubjective system), but it is the context that determines which among
the array of these (p. 418) principles will be called on to organize the experience.
Experience becomes organized by a particular invariant principle only when there
is a situation that lends itself to being so organized. The organization of
experience can therefore be seen as codetermined both by preexisting principles
and by an ongoing context that favors one or another of them over the others.
Similarly, Stern (1997: 42) acknowledges ‘character, schemata, transference … internal

object representations … unconscious fantasies … the plethora of processes in any one
person’s psychic life that keep reproducing experience in meaningfully similar shapes’,
and says that childhood experiences ‘structure … the possibility of knowing—the potential
for what we can say and think and what we cannot’ (Stern 1997: 31). And Mitchell
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(2000a: 155) comments that ‘There is no place in any of my writings in which I argue
against the idea that the patient has a mind with preexisting properties before ever
encountering the analyst or that there are no continuities among the versions of
ourselves that emerge with different people. This would, of course, be preposterous.’5
Finally, Benjamin (1999: 886) notes the shift that has occurred in Hoffman’s
constructivism. While in the 1980s Hoffman spoke of ‘social’ constructivism to emphasize
the interpersonal nature of the process, by the late 1990s, he talks of ‘dialectical’
constructivism, in which the constructive process is in dialectical exchange with what is
already ‘given’ for the individual. Like Mitchell, Hoffman gives explicit recognition to the
history that the individual brings to any interpersonal relationship.
What, then, is the disagreement between revised realism and revised constructivism?
Benjamin (1999: 887) suggests that:
the issue that divides us is not the existence of individual history but the question
of how we come to know and interact with the patient’s history, fantasies, and
conflicts—via our own subjective experience or through objective knowledge—and
whether these are seen as ambiguous but not absolutely malleable or amorphous.
Here again we see both the epistemological claim and the ontological claim concerning
determinacy. A kind of realism has been granted, in the form of psychological structures—
of whatever kind—that carry an individual’s psychological history into the present. But
because constructivists’ primary target has been Freud’s realism, with its claim that
analysis discovers the analysand’s unconscious mental states as they exist independently
of interaction with the analyst, constructivists have often felt that properly recognizing
the influence of the situation, especially the analyst’s subjectivity, on the (p. 419)
experience of the analysand and its interpretation is inconsistent with realism. Thus
Mitchell (2000a: 155) continues, ‘a problem with preconstructivist thinking is the
assumption that there is a static organization to mind that manifests itself whole cloth
across experiences’. He goes on to approve of Ogden’s (1997: 190) description of the
interaction between object relations and situations:
The internal object relationship … is not a fixed entity; it is a fluid set of thoughts,
feelings, and sensations that is continually in movement and is always susceptible
to being shaped and restructured as it is newly experienced in the context of each
new unconscious intersubjective relationship. In every instance it will be a
different facet of the complex movement of feeling constituting an internal object
relationship that will be most alive in the new unconscious intersubjective context.
This last sentence repeats Stolorow’ and Atwood’s claim that which element of an object
relation—which ‘principle’, which ‘facet’—is activated in a given situation, and the
consequent effects on experience and behaviour, are importantly a function of the
situation.
Page 12 of 28

But while this interactive understanding may conflict with some, especially early, object-
relations theories, it is perfectly compatible with more recent theories as they are
outlined earlier. To some extent, so too is Ogden’s claim that an object relation is ‘always
susceptible to being shaped and restructured as it is newly experienced in the context of
each new unconscious intersubjective relationship’. While realist object-relations theories
typically understand object relations as stable, enduring structures, this is compatible
with the thought that they are susceptible to change through new experiences. Realists in
the debate, then, have quickly conceded that Freud’s realism, with its thought that what
emerges in analysis are the unconscious states as they pre-existed in the analysand’s
mind, is untenable. They accept that a much more dynamic, interactive understanding of
the unconscious is necessary. But, they argue, this needn’t lead us to abandon realism per
se (Eagle, Wolitzky, and Wakefield 2001: 477).
The Remaining Debate

Is that it, then? Is the debate now resolved? Unfortunately not. Questions remain
concerning how determinate object relations are and whether there is any meaningful
sense in which a psychoanalyst’s knowledge may be said to be ‘objective’. I suggest,
oversimplifying somewhat, that the debates over both questions are fed by the two sides
focusing on different aspects of ‘psychoanalysis’, identified in the Introduction. The
constructivists are primarily concerned with individual analysts’ knowledge of individual
analysands, and tend to reject or remain silent on the possibility of a general empirical
theory of the mind. The realists, while also concerned with the clinical encounter, are
equally concerned with the development of more abstract theoretical knowledge. Let me
explain.
In ‘The Critique of Freud’, I noted that constructivism has its origins in a rejection
(p. 420)
of Freudian metapsychology and the restriction of psychoanalysis to clinical phenomena.

The clinical encounter provides the experience that defines the object of psychoanalytic
investigation. Thus, the primary concern of constructivists, and the primary term in which
to think about the ontology of mind, is experience. And experience is what is said to be
constructed within an interpersonal interaction. Experience, of course, is occurrent, not
dispositional, and the construction of experience is a complex process—hence ‘mind’ is
conceptualized as unfolding in the present. But experience is not determinate.
Psychoanalysis makes sense of experience through identifying some patterns among
others that may justly be found in the occurrent psychological phenomena, past and
present.
The unconscious in psychoanalysis, on this approach, is to be defined in terms of the

experience of the clinical encounter—it is what is unconscious in this unique experience
of relationship. Thus, the unconscious is first and foremost defined in terms of what is
outside the awareness of the subject yet informs and shapes their intersubjective
experience. In formulations that are reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty (see Phillips, this
volume, and Fuchs, this volume), Stern (1997) conceives of this as part of the subject’s
Page 13 of 28

experience, but left ‘unformulated’ rather than brought to consciousness, while Stolorow
(2001: xii) conceives of it as falling ‘outside the horizons of a person’s experiential world’.
Insofar as there can be a general account of the mind, it is hermeneutic and
phenomenological rather than taking the form of a ‘scientific theory’. Furthermore, what
is unconscious for a subject is a function not of the individual subject, as realist object-
relations theory is sometimes still prone to theorizing it, but of the unique relationship
between two subjects, the analysand and analyst. Thus, we arrive at the claim that the
concept of the ‘intersubjective system’ (Orange, Atwood, and Stolorow 1997: 76), the
‘analytic third’ (Ogden 1994), or the ‘interpersonal field’ (variously conceptualized) is
primary in clinical work.6
From the constructivist perspective, the way realists are prone to understand object
relations, even after acknowledging their indeterminacy, is a misleading theoretical
hypostatization. Psychoanalysis, constructivists claim, is not seeking to identify what
realists think of as existing mental states as they are already (as though ‘fixed’ or ‘static’).
Hence the claim that there is no one ‘correct’ interpretation of experience, no ‘given’
meaning.7 Rather, what is known is indeterminate and how it is known is through (p. 421)
co-construction. ‘Psychoanalysis’ refers to the clinical encounter and ‘psychoanalytic
knowledge’ is the knowledge individual analysts have of individual analysands.
Realists are happy to grant that psychoanalytic knowledge begins in the clinical
encounter, but do not limit it to this. We have seen that realists insist on the importance
of object relations as ways in which the mind of an analysand is ‘preorganized’ in advance
of the clinical relationship. They appeal to clinical experiences of ‘discovery’ and of how
an interpretation can seem to ‘fit’ what is ‘already’ part of the analysand’s unconscious.
But constructivism will claim to explain such experiences equally well. First, such
experiences take place within the co-constructed clinical encounter. And within this
unique clinical relationship, discoveries may be made and interpretations may well ‘fit’.
But this does not demonstrate realism, since the phenomenology is (partly) a product of
the relationship. Second, with revised constructivism, the claim is not that there is no
psychic reality to be encountered, but that such reality is indeterminate and that
knowledge of it cannot be objective for the reasons rehearsed earlier.
However, realists hold that psychoanalysis is not only about understanding individuals
within a unique relationship. It is also the construction of a general psychological theory,
based on information about the generic processes and obstacles present in such
interpersonal experiences. Claims about transference, the many patterns of psychic
defence, resistance, conflict and compromise, the understanding of dreams, unconscious
emotions, the symbolic content of motives, and the influence of the past are part of this
psychological theory. This theoretical apparatus, and the concepts it employs, enables us
to understand, explain, and in some cases predict human behaviour. This conceptual and
theoretical structuring and organization of our ever-changing conscious and unconscious
experience is what gives realism its motivation and grip in seeking to understand and
explain why experience takes the structure it does.
Page 14 of 28

Clinical practice, says the realist, requires such a more general theoretical backdrop, and
so any psychoanalytic approach to understanding ourselves, including constructivism,
must take some stance on these theoretical claims. Indeed, these general claims
concerning the clinical process are inescapable. Their general and theoretical status is
hidden in constructivism either because they are silently assumed or because they are
thought to be a matter of phenomenological hermeneutics and thus not ‘theoretical’. But
they nevertheless inform the process of making sense of experience. Constructivists
continue to approach the task of interpreting the individual within the framework of a
psychoanalytic model of the mind. But, realists point out, this model has been disputed by
other psychological theories, and can therefore legitimately be understood to comprise an
alternative theory which can, in an important sense, be thought to be true or false.8
These differences in what is meant by ‘psychoanalytic knowledge’ feed the debate

(p. 422)
over its possible objectivity. And thus we see the influence of restricting the meaning of
‘psychoanalysis’ to the clinical encounter or extending it to include a psychological
theory, creating a tendency for those on each side of the debate to misunderstand the
scope and approach of the opposition.9
Continuing the realist line of thought a moment longer, it may seem that if it is true that
our experience is inflected by transference, defence, and the like, then what makes this
true are determinate mental operations on determinate mental contents. If there really
are such processes, and there really are such contents, then this secures a particular
description of a person as, say, projecting their fear, as objectively true. But does this
follow? It is claims like these that constructivists want to challenge most strongly. Is talk
of ‘objectivity’ or even ‘truth’ appropriate here? Would some other telos, such as
understanding, usefulness, or praxis, provide a better model? These are concerns that
constructivism presses, appealing to the reconsideration of objectivity and truth in
philosophical debates concerning the status of science, within both ‘analytic’ philosophy
of science following Kuhn (1970) and hermeneutic theories, perhaps most especially that
of Gadamer (1975).
Beyond Objectivism and Subjectivism?

At this point, we must leave the general debate to continue with a single point of focus. I
shall consider the issue through the lens of Mitchell (2000a). He says that ‘the major
point’ of his substantial (1998) article was to show that the oppositional categories of
‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ are no longer helpful. Instead, he claims, recent debates in
psychoanalysis and philosophy point to a third category that is neither objective nor
subjective, as exemplified in Bernstein’s (1983) Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. I am
fundamentally in agreement with Bernstein, but I shall argue that Mitchell has
misunderstood him.
Bernstein (1983: 74) argues that the upshot of debates in philosophy of science is ‘an
appreciation of the practical character of rationality in science’. This practical character
includes ‘the role of choice, deliberation, conflicting variable opinions, and the
Page 15 of 28

judgmental quality of rationality’. As a result, we can no longer think of ‘the’ scientific

method (is there just one?) as ‘a set of permanent, unambiguous rules’ nor can we
assimilate scientific argument to ‘models of deductive proof or inductive generalization’.
Instead, to understand ‘the rationality of scientific inquiry we must focus on the conflict
of theories, paradigms, research programs, and research traditions in their historical
(p. 423) development’ (see Lakatos 1978) and ‘the nature, function, and dynamics of
communities of inquirers’ (Bernstein 1983: 77).
This phrase—community of enquiry—comes from American pragmatist Charles Peirce. He

argues that ‘the conception of reality … essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY,
without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge’ (1931–5: Vol. 5,
para. 311, 186–7). While Bernstein and Peirce are primarily concerned with science, we
can extend the point to all rational enquiry. Our account of the nature, function, and
dynamics of such communities of enquiry must include the recognition of the practical
norms which they take as constitutive of their enquiry and intersubjective
communication, i.e. the norms that govern what counts as giving a reason, when evidence
is sufficient, how claims are to be defended or critiqued, and so on.
Thus, says Bernstein, we must give up ‘objectivism’ understood as the claim that ‘there is
or must be some permanent, ahistorical matrix or framework to which we can ultimately
appeal in determining the nature of rationality, knowledge, truth, reality, goodness, or
rightness’ (1983: 8). Instead, rationality is dialogic, intersubjective, and historically
situated—these are all ways in which reasoning, even scientific reasoning, is practical.
However, this does not yield relativism or subjectivism. Giving up objectivism as
understood, Bernstein argues, is perfectly compatible with recognizing that ‘in the course
of scientific development the cumulative weight of evidence, data, reasons and arguments
can be rationally decisive for scientific communities’ (1983: 74). Kuhn, Lakatos, and
Peirce all acknowledge that science progresses and that this is an achievement of
rationality. Recognizing the practical grounding of rationality and the failure of
objectivism is no attack on objectivity understood thus (Bernstein 1983: 92).
Bernstein (1983: 154) goes on to argue that Gadamer similarly understands truth as
‘what can be argumentatively validated by the community of interpreters who open
themselves to what tradition “says to us” ’. Fundamental to Gadamer’s epistemology is
the concept of ‘dialogue’, ‘a process of two people understanding each other’ (Gadamer
1975: 347). This requires an openness to the other and to new experience (1975: 319),
which can never be completed. While this makes claims to truth fallible and open to
criticism, Bernstein argues, it doesn’t remove the need for ‘validation that can be realized
only through offering the best reasons and arguments that can be given in support of
them—reasons and arguments that are themselves embedded in the practices that have
been developed in the course of history’ (1983: 168). Bernstein furthermore points out
that Gadamer fails to recognize the general application of these ideas, frequently—but
misleadingly—speaking of hermeneutical understanding as ‘an “entirely different type of
knowledge and truth” from that which is yielded by … science’ (1983: 168). We should
correct this in light of the earlier conclusions concerning science and rationality. Within
Page 16 of 28

science, the scientific method provides a recognized form of validation, a manifestation of

the demand for intersubjective criteria of truth within a community of enquirers.10
How is this revised understanding of science, rationality, and truth supposed to be

(p. 424)
helpful to the constructivist defence of psychoanalytic knowledge? Silverman (2000: 148)

suggests that Mitchell (1998) should be understood as defending ‘relative objectivity’. In
light of the outline of Bernstein’s argument, and Mitchell’s apparent endorsement of it,
this looks like a reasonable suggestion. However, Mitchell (2000a) explicitly rejects this,
arguing that not only are the old dichotomies of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ unhelpful, but
that combining them as Silverman suggests is ‘obfuscating’. To justify his rejection of
Silverman’s suggestion, Mitchell says:
psychoanalytic knowledge is not usefully considered objective in any traditional

sense of that word. The analyst can never be confident that he or she can, through
self-reflection, filter out his or her own subjectivity, through which he or she has
brought to life and come to understand the patient. But it is also not helpful to
consider psychoanalytic knowledge relativistic. Good analysts do not simply make
things up. Good analysis is highly disciplined, careful, thoughtful, continually self-
reflective, and responsive to subsequent experience … [B]ecause neither
objectivism nor relativism seems an adequate description of psychoanalytic
knowledge, combining them oxymoronically just compounds the problem … It
does not help to imply that we can come close, or sort of, or almost, to separating
out the analyst’s involvement. (2000: 157–8)
However, these grounds for rejecting ‘objectivity’ have almost nothing at all to do with
Bernstein’s understanding of knowledge, truth, and reason in terms of a third category
‘beyond objectivism and relativism’. Mitchell’s appeal to Bernstein misses its mark for
two reasons.
First, Mitchell confuses objectivism and objectivity. Bernstein’s arguments apply equally
to physics, chemistry, and biology, to palaeontology, economics, and history. Thus, his
arguments against objectivism leave completely open whether psychoanalytic knowledge
has the same structure and grounding as the natural sciences. If Bernstein’s reading of
the debate in the philosophy of science is correct (and I think that, on the whole, it is),
other appeals to post-Kuhnian conceptions of science and rationality in support of attacks
on objectivity in psychoanalytic knowledge are equally misguided. (p. 425) Awareness of
general developments in epistemology and the philosophy of science are helpful to ward
off ‘objectivism’ as Bernstein uses the term and any resulting simplistic scientism. As long
as one rejects objectivism—the idea of a permanent ahistorical set of principles for
determining rationality and truth—as do the realists Cavell (1998) and Silverman (2000),
there is no conflict between Bernstein’s position and practice-specific conceptions of
realism and objectivity.
Second, as the earlier quotation from Mitchell indicates, his primary concern is with the
individual analyst’s knowledge of the individual analysand. By contrast, Bernstein’s
arguments are not primarily concerned with the individual subjectivity or involvement of
Page 17 of 28

the enquirer, but operate at the level of communities with accepted norms of reasoning
and evidence. He is primarily concerned with the general or theoretical knowledge held
by a discipline. The concern is with the norms around method and communication, rather
than the construction of the interpersonal field within each unique analyst–analysand
dyad. Once again, there has been confusion concerning what is at issue in talk of
‘psychoanalytic knowledge’. It is perfectly reasonable—and I think, correct—to hold that
an individual analyst’s knowledge of an individual analysand cannot be ‘objective’ in the
same sense as psychoanalytic knowledge at the level of general theory. Specific
interpretations concerning the meaning of an individual’s thoughts, feelings, and
behaviour may not have the same epistemological status as widely accepted general
claims about psychological functioning, as they are closely tied to—and influenced by—
individual situations and individual enquirers. This is true not just in psychoanalysis, but
in psychology as a whole (Wilson and Brekke 1994: 121). This understanding of the
relationship between individual and general knowledge supports the realist reading of
psychoanalytic knowledge. Once corroboration by the community of enquirers has
established a general claim, e.g. concerning the occurrence of transference or a typical
pattern of defence, then it can be made use of when seeking to understand meanings on
any given occasion (see Lacewing 2013). It is a realist defence of objective knowledge,
rather than a constructivist attack on it, that coheres best with Bernstein’s analysis of the
philosophy of science.
Unconscious Meaning
We are left with the remaining question of the ontology of the unconscious, and in
particular, the determinacy of object relations: those unconscious structures, states, or
processes that are acknowledged by both sides of the debate to be an individual’s
contribution to an interpersonal situation.
I begin by acknowledging again the constructivist point, made in ‘The Remaining Debate’,
that what is unconscious for an individual is not best understood in terms of their mind
taken on its own. First, what they are unconscious of in themselves is itself a product of
interpersonal situations. Second, what is unconscious at any one time is a function of the
intersubjective situation they are in, and thus may alter from one (p. 426) situation to
another. Third, there will be features of the other and the situation, as well as of
themselves, of which they will be unconscious.
Yet even if we grant that the unconscious in psychoanalysis is more about patterns of
interpersonal experience than the Freudian conception of ‘hidden depths’ in the
individual mind, are there nevertheless determinate truths about a subject’s object
relations—about what they do and do not, or can and cannot, experience in their
relationships with others? In particular, can unconscious psychological phenomena have
determinate intentional content and meaning while unconscious, or do they only acquire
it upon being brought to consciousness through interpretation? My focus for this last,
brief discussion will be Stern (1997).
Page 18 of 28

In ‘The Critique of Freud’ we saw that Freud’s realism holds that unconscious mental
states and their intentional content exist prior to and independent of their interpretation
in consciousness. According to constructivism, this is not so. Starting from this thought,
Stern understands the unconscious as ‘unformulated experience’:
if language is not merely a set of tags or labels for experience, but actually plays a
role in constituting it, we are challenged to change our conception of what it
means for experience to be unconscious. Unconscious experience … is no longer
merely hidden, awaiting only language to bring it out of the shadows. Instead, the
form it will eventually take in words is not predetermined by its own structure …
unconscious experience exists; but it does not exist in forms in which we can
grasp it in words. It remains to be interpreted. Unconscious experience and
meaning is what I call unformulated experience. (1998: xi)
Although Stern talks here of unconscious experience, it is clear from later discussions in
the book that he intends these claims to apply to unconscious phenomena generally,
including, for example, object relations—which he himself identifies as dispositional
structures rather than experiences. Thus, he holds that unconscious contents are
indeterminate and non-verbal (‘unformulated’), and indeed, that they are indeterminate in
some sense because they are non-verbal. They only acquire greater determinacy as their
meaning is ‘formulated’, i.e. interpreted in consciousness.
But these remarks, even if true, are not sufficient to account for the contents being
unconscious. There is no easy equation between what is unconscious and unformulated
experience as described. There are conscious but indeterminate or unformulated
experiences and states. And there are semantic unconscious experiences and states.
1. The indeterminate conscious: Much, if not all, intentional content is indeterminate

to some extent (Mackie 1975). Suppose I want a cup of tea, and I take my tea with
milk and sugar. If someone makes me black tea, I didn’t want that. My desire is more
determinate than wanting just anything that can be described as ‘a cup of tea’. But it
is not so determinate that I can be said to want it with 17 per cent milk and 78 grains
of sugar. Yet any particular cup of tea will have a determinate percentage of milk and
number of grains of sugar. Many cups of tea that satisfy my desire differ in these
determinate respects. So the content of my desire is indeterminate, yet perfectly
conscious.
(p. 427) 2. The unformulated conscious: Non-verbal, and more generally non-
conceptual, experience is unformulated but can be conscious. I look at an abstract

work of art. I see the shapes and the colours. I do not (and probably cannot) put into
words much about those shapes and colours. But there is nothing unconscious about
my visual experience of seeing them.
3. The semantic unconscious: While controversial, there is evidence of semantic
priming, i.e. subliminal processing of the meanings of words, presented either
visually or aurally (e.g. Naccache and Dehaene 2001). Given that Stern understands
putting something into words as making it (more) determinate, I take the occurrence
Page 19 of 28

of unconscious states and processes with semantic content to demonstrate that some
unconscious psychological phenomena are (at least somewhat) determinate.
A first step towards a more complete account of the relation between what is unconscious
and what is unformulated involves recognizing that the psychoanalytic unconscious does
not exhaust the psychological unconscious. The psychoanalytic unconscious as
unformulated experience concerns particular forms of experience—experience of the self,
others, and interpersonal relations. So how are we to account for both the unconscious
and the indeterminate status of these?11
Stern assimilates unformulated experience to implicit know-how. The ‘felt meaning’ that
is unformulated cannot be verbal or semantic meaning, nor even a condensation of these.
The difficulty of finding the right words is not the result of a complexity of unconscious
associations and primary processes that are in themselves each determinate (1997: 49).
Rather, the meaning derives from a ‘semiotics’ of practice: ‘Reflect on the difficulty of
describing in words the details of how you ride a bicycle … The difficulty is due to the fact
that these activities are not represented in words at all, but in the semiotic of practice.
The same is true for the difficulty of describing how one deals with one’s mother …
’ (1997: 18).
But again, this is not quite sufficient. Stern’s model here is missing a psychodynamic
element. The way in which—or again, the reasons why—implicit know-how is unconscious
can be entirely distinct from anything that psychoanalysis is interested in, entirely a
matter of non-verbal procedural knowledge. And even when one turns from how to ride a
bicycle to interpersonal relations, the same can hold, e.g. my unconscious knowledge of
how to engage in conversation with others is implicit but not for psychodynamic reasons.
And as Leite (this volume) points out, even the ‘implicit relational (p. 428)
knowing’ (Lyons-Ruth et al. 1998) involved in intimate relationships does not yet provide
a full account of the unconscious that is of interest to psychoanalysis.
However, we may provide the beginnings of an integrative model using the ‘schema’-
based understanding of object relations delineated above in ‘Narrowing the Gap’. On this
view, the form that what is interpreted takes while unconscious may well be
indeterminate, requiring or inviting a ‘completion’ or specification in meaning as it is
brought into consciousness. What is unconscious, at root, is a psychodynamically charged
and incompletely specified procedural model—a model that may be one among others—
for how to relate self and others, including within that how to be oneself and how to
understand significant others, which model is in constant interaction with one’s current
situation. What one is unconscious of may become more determinate through the process
of formulation, as new associations, conceptualizations, or precise feelings are formed
and other possibilities are or are not taken up. But equally, as Stern (1997: 28–9) notes,
this process is ‘constrained by’ or answerable to what is unconscious before the process
of its interpretation and specification as it becomes conscious.
Page 20 of 28

This proposal, I believe, is coherent with Stern’s constructivism, and yet it is a

development of a contemporary realist understanding of object relations. Should we say
‘unconscious contents (meanings) are not fully determinate, and only become so through
interaction with an intersubjective situation, and so constructivism is true’? Or should we
say ‘unconscious contents are partially (though not linguistically) determinate, and
contribute to intersubjective situations, and so realism is true’? Mightn’t we say both?
Perhaps some may struggle with the notion that what is indeterminate can be ‘real’. Of
course, if our touchstone for what is real is our everyday experience of physical objects,
this can seem puzzling. But this just shows that we shouldn’t expect psychological reality
to resemble physical reality in this respect. As already noted, there is a sense in which all
intentional content is indeterminate, while non-conceptual content and procedural
knowledge is linguistically indeterminate. Everyone in the debate grants that the
historical inheritance of an individual shapes their present experience—that this, at least,
is not itself constructed through conscious interpretation alone. Everyone also grants that
such an inheritance may—and in the course of a successful analysis, will—be changed for
the future by precisely such conscious interpretations (though not only these). Whether
we wish to emphasize, with Ogden, the fluidity and responsiveness of object relations to
new relationships or, with Eagle, the stability of object relations and the difficulty of
achieving lasting change, is now a matter less for the theorist than for the practitioner.
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Notes:
(1) Thanks to Richard Gipps, Adam Leite, and Katy Abramson for their helpful and
insightful comments. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the conference
‘Modes of the Unconscious’ in Heidelberg in October 2016. Thanks to the organizers,
Stefan Kristensen and Thomas Fuchs, and to participants for their questions and
suggestions.
(2) That psychiatry could be both hermeneutic and a science was, of course (though rarely
noted), Jaspers’s (1913/1963) view, which he further articulated in terms of
phenomenological investigation, and some contemporary phenomenological engagements
with psychoanalysis continue to defend this scientific understanding (Fuchs, this volume).
Also frequently overlooked was the possibility that psychoanalysis is a social science, and
social sciences are genuine forms of science, though with appropriately different
methodologies and concerns from natural sciences, given their hermeneutic nature (see
Lacewing 2013).
(3) For example, see Stolorow’s (1998) response to Frank’s (1998) review; Renik’s (1999)
response to Cavell’s (1998) review; Mitchell’s (2000a) response to Silverman’s (2000)
review; Stern’s (2003) response to Richards’s (2003) review; Altman and Davies’s (2003)
response to Eagle, Wakefield, and Wolitzky’s (2001) review and Eagle, Wakefield, and
Wolitzky’s (2003) reply in turn; Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange’s (2006) response to Mills’s
(2005) review.
(4) As discussed further in ‘The Remaining Debate’, it is typically important to realists

that this account is consilient with other theories in psychology. Psychology and
psychoanalysis have the same object of study, and therefore should aim at coherence,
even if they have legitimately distinct methodologies and emphases. And so we may note
that this model of interpersonal mental functioning has received considerable empirical
support. See, for example, the ‘internal working model’ of attachment theory (Cassidy
and Shaver 1999), Stern’s (1985) concept, in developmental psychology, of RIGs
(Representations of Interactions that have been Generalized), and Andersen and
colleagues’ theory of the relational self in personality psychology (Andersen and Chen
2002; Andersen and Thorpe 2009). See also Narvaez, this volume.
(5) Mitchell and Aron (1999: xv) state that ‘relational analysts, in speaking of a two-
person psychology, have never intended to deny that there are two distinct individuals
with their own minds, histories and inner worlds, but rather have meant simply to
emphasize the emergence of what Ogden calls the intersubjective analytic third’. Mitchell
(2000b: 57) expresses the emergence the other way around: ‘individual minds do arise
out of and through the internalisation of interpersonal fields, and … having emerged in
that fashion, individual minds develop what systems theorists call emergent properties
and motives of their own’. The two are compatible, as he then explains: ‘Interpersonal
relational processes generate intrapsychic relational processes which reshape
interpersonal relational processes … ’.
Page 26 of 28

(6) Eagle, Wolitsky, and Wakefield (2001: 477) compare the debate about the priority of
object relations as structures and experience to that in personality psychology between
trait theorists and situationists. That debate is largely resolved in favour of
interactionism, in which behaviour is a product of both trait and situation (see, e.g.,
Fleeson and Noftle 2009). But constructivists can complain that this analysis, in terms of
how the individual interacts with the situation, is the wrong way around, at least in
psychoanalysis, given that the interpersonal situation is primary.
(7) A connected thought here may be that psychoanalysis provides not so much a causal
explanation of occurrent psychological phenomena as a descriptive identification of a
pattern that may be found in them. On this view, talk of object relations is best
understood not as describing ‘real structures’ but as an abstraction. On the importance of
the distinction between description and explanation in psychiatry and psychology, see
Jaspers (1913), Murphy (2007: ch. 5), Gipps (this volume), and Gipps (2018). It is notable
that a considerable portion of the strength of the original argument for the hermeneutic
interpretation rested on a distinction between motives and causes (e.g. Ricœur 1970:
358–63; Taylor 1964): If motives are not causes, then explanations in terms of motives,
such as those given in psychoanalysis, are not causal explanations. Not only is the
explanatory form different, to think of motives as causes is to reify them, and so to
postulate metaphysically dubious entities. I briefly discuss the success of this argument in
Lacewing (2013, 2018).
(8) For a dissenting view, see Gipps (this volume).
(9) A different reading of the debate may take the disagreement as primarily about
clinical technique, dressed up as a debate about knowledge and objectivity. Given the
origins of the debate as discussed in the sections ‘The Analytic Relationship’ and ‘The
Confusion over “Constructivism” ’, this interpretation has considerable justification, but it
requires one not to take the later arguments of the proponents at face value.
(10) Bernstein does not seek to replace truth as the telos of enquiry with something more
‘practical’, but argues that we must understand truth in terms of the practical character
of all reason. Following Peirce, one pragmatist conception of truth is asymptotic. A claim
is true if it would survive critical reflection under future improvements in our knowledge,
or again if it remains a coherent part of our epistemic practices (Chang 2017; Putnam
1981; Wright 1991).
Such a conception of truth is compatible with many of the central claims of

constructivism, as illustrated by the fact that it is held by the intersubjectivists Stolorow
et al. (2006: 387), who say that there are ‘no God’s-eye views of anything or anyone. But
it does not mean that we abandon the search for truth, for lived experience, for subjective
reality. We hold that closer and closer approximations of such truth are gradually
achieved through an analytic dialogue in which the domain of reflective self-awareness is
enlarged for both participants.’
Page 27 of 28

However, in light of the revised conception of rationality, we needn’t suppose that we will
or could ever reach such an asymptotic point—the point is ‘ideal’, something that
regulates our language and practices. Nor need we conceive convergence of all true
claims on a single point. We can recognize that we have multiple practices and so there is
no single true description of reality (Putnam 1992).
(11) Stern sometimes situates his constructivist claims about experience, language, and
unformulated experience in psychoanalysis within the broader claim that all experience is
constructed by language. This suffers the same drawbacks as Mitchell’s reference to
Bernstein’s third category. If all experience is constructed by language, realism versus
constructivism about the unconscious is on a par with realism versus constructivism
about plants. The important point for constructivism in psychoanalysis is that language is
not only the medium of knowledge (as it is universally), but constitutes the object of
investigation. The role of language in interpersonally making sense of one’s self in
interpersonal experience is importantly constitutive in a way over and above the way it is
constitutive (if it is) of all experience. Reasons of space prevent further exploration of this
claim, but see Taylor (1985).
Michael Lacewing

Children (P4C).
Page 28 of 28

A New Kind of Song: Psychoanalysis as Revelation

Richard G.T. Gipps

Conceptions of psychoanalysis as science typically construe its key formulations as

providing posits to be referenced in inferences to the best explanation of the clinical
phenomena. Such was Freud’s own vision of the discipline he created, and it is reflected
in his ambition to prove his fundamental formulations warranted. The first half of this
chapter argues that this approach and this ambition significantly underestimate the
significance of the psychoanalytic project. The suggestion is that it misconstrues
foundational—and therefore unaccountable—forms of revelation, apprehension, poiesis,
and grammar as merely factual claims, accounts, representations, and posits which, as
such, now falsely appear to require scientific accounting. The second half of this chapter
explores the significance of this for attempts to capture psychoanalytic theory and
therapy within the ‘reflective scientist practitioner’ model of contemporary clinical
psychology.
Keywords: psychoanalysis, psychology, revelation, representation, science, grammar, posit, poiesis
Richard G. T. Gipps
(p. 433)
You have a new conception and interpret it as seeing a new object. You interpret a
grammatical movement made by yourself as a quasi-physical phenomenon which
you are observing …
But there is an objection to my saying that you have made a ‘grammatical’

movement. What you have primarily discovered is a new way of looking at things.
As if you had invented a new way of painting; or, again, a new metre, or a new
kind of song.
Page 1 of 26

Introduction
Dialectics versus Dogmatics
IN an unfinished work comparing and contrasting psychoanalysis with physics, Freud

comments ‘Psychology, too, is a natural science. What else can it be?’ (Freud 1938). To
which one is tempted to respond ‘Well, might it not best be considered a social science?’
Such a temptation would be doubly misplaced. Tempting it is because there are important
contexts of scientific enquiry that give sense to a distinction between the natural and
social, and in such contexts psychoanalytic psychology is, despite what Freud the
theoretician often suggests, far more naturally characterized as social science (see
Lacewing 2013a, 2018a). Misplaced, though, because a contrast between the natural and
the social is, as it happens, simply not here the one giving sense to his discussion. For
although he soon goes on to mislead himself about what he is saying, at this point in his
essay Freud’s talk of a ‘natural science’ refers to enquiry into the nature or being (p. 434)
of something—an investigation which is equally pursued by those social sciences whose
methods have little in common with the methods of physics, chemistry, and biology.1 And
misplaced too because, in other contexts, we may wish for what I will make a case for
later on: the characterization of the fundamentals of psychoanalysis as less (what could
be called) science and more (what could be called) art.
I mention this here by way of introducing both my methodological and my substantive

concerns. In what follows I’ll be finding ways to give some determinate content to the
otherwise rather vague question of how and when and whether psychoanalysis is or is not
science, each time deploying a contrasting pair of terms—accounting versus
acknowledging; explanation versus understanding; representation versus revelation;
posits versus poiesis; cognition versus recognition—and locating fundamental aspects of
psychoanalysis on the latter (let’s call it ‘non-scientific’) side of the contrasting pair. But
my purpose in doing so would be mistaken if the reader were bluntly to ask ‘so are you
saying that there are no respects in which psychoanalysis may be called a science?’ For
might we not also offer measures of scientific prowess—such as the use of clear methods,
in a controlled environment, with careful observations, generating a body of knowledge,
capable of inspiring testable hypotheses, consilient with extra-clinical psychological
knowledge etc.—and find that psychoanalytic theory thus measured at least sometimes
comes out as scientific in character? That this is so has been carefully argued by my co-
editor (Lacewing 2013a). And since I’m largely persuaded I shall instead focus here only
on the question of how and where psychoanalysis is less science, more art.
The substantive thrust of what I have to say is as follows. Every discipline—scientific or

not—has what we might describe as its founding revelations and its revelation-
presupposing representations.2 When the revelatory character of its foundations goes
unacknowledged, a standing temptation of apologists is to urge the alleged veracity and
validity of what are now cast not as revelations but merely as foundational suppositions—
while critics focus on the alleged lack of warrant for these supposed suppositions. This
Page 2 of 26

has, from Freud onwards, happened frequently in relation to psychoanalysis. Yet in so

doing both sides downplay the originary, sui generis significance and artistry of its
revelations, ignoring this while recruiting extra-psychoanalytic data to frame an otiose
defence or besides-the-point criticism. Regarding such manoeuvres the critic may—will,
by me—be accused of having a tin ear, and the apologist of a failure of self-possession.
The central tenets of psychoanalysis—that people are motivated by unconscious wishes,
that dreams and parapraxes may be interpreted, that we labour under diverse defence
mechanisms that preserve us from anxiety yet restrict our engagements, that our
significant relations are so often replete with vexing and unwitting transferences, etc.—
are (contra (p. 435) the pundits and critics) neither properly scientific nor regrettably
unscientific but, I claim, non-scientific, belonging instead to the empirically unassailable
artistry of its founding revelation. Indeed the claim here is that the distinctive
psychoanalytic branches of representational science only have a psychoanalytic tree to
hang on because of that tree’s rootedness in its ownmost non-representational revelation.
There is another—methodological—reason why this chapter does not take itself to answer
‘the’ question of whether psychoanalysis is art or science. This is because the time is
surely long since past when one can honestly say it makes good sense for philosophers to
debate, say, ‘whether psychoanalytic understanding treats of meanings or of causes’. This
as I see it is neither because nuanced philosophical argument has finally revealed that, in
fact, psychoanalytic understanding treats of one to the exclusion of the other, nor because
modern philosophy of mind has cleverly shown that the two are not in truth disjunctive. It
is rather because a philosopher—typically an analytic metaphysician—raising that
question in that bald a manner potentially betrays a lack of dialectical sophistication
which threatens to vitiate her philosophical project ab initio. For in a truly critical context
it remains to be demonstrated, rather than simply presupposed, that there already is a
determinate if yet unexplicated meaning to the terms (‘causation’, ‘science’, ‘meanings’,
and, especially, ‘the mind’) of such questions in the context of their current deployment—
which meaning may then be taken for granted so that something called ‘working on’ an
‘account’ that allegedly answers for us ‘the problem’ or ‘the question’ of ‘the’ unconscious
may be undertaken.
The problem is particularly acute when it proceeds upon a foundation of careless

substantialization and hypostasization—as when one prescinds from enquiry into the
witting and unwitting, life-historically and socially situated, acts and habits and
dispositions (call them ‘comportments’) of human beings, and from reflective enquiry into
the ascription conditions for the various concepts for these comportments, instead
focusing on what in a typical jargon may be construed as the ‘states and processes’ ‘going
on in’ something called ‘the mind’ or ‘consciousness’ or ‘the unconscious’. Let’s
distinguish such comportments—the concepts of which may be generated by the
nominalization of various verbs for human activities and actions such as ‘think’, ‘wish’,
‘understand’, ‘feel’ etc.—from those call-them-‘phenomena’ as are originally identified
(referentially, for example) by nouns (like, say, ‘kidney’, ‘corpus callosum’, ‘retina’). While
there’s surely nothing intrinsically wrong with nominalization, this conceptual manoeuvre
by itself can hardly create a phenomenon, and a fortiori not thereby establish that the
Page 3 of 26

said comportments enjoy a nature sufficient to sustain and reward the same kinds of
inquiry as may be directed at genuine phenomena.
In truth, we philosophical psychologists by now know far too well where such
undialectical efforts typically leave us: with increasingly complex ‘explanations’ of alleged
phenomena that have us everywhere hanging in the air, vainly hoping our feet might one
day rest back on the psychoanalytic ground if somehow we can now also find it in
ourselves to commit to an ever-proliferating host of accounts issuing from sundry
interdigitated inquiries in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, cognitive
science, metaphysics, epistemology, etc. Given the difficulty of keeping so many balls in
the air at (p. 436) once—without building a castle there to keep them in—the more
cautious of our analytical metaphysicians will offer that they are not themselves so much
making commitments as merely sketching with greater finesse where at circumscribed
points such philosophical theories do and do not cohere. Yet neither commitment nor
want of finesse were our original need or concern, which was rather to make more of an
actual reflective acquaintance with this charming yet baffling creature—psychoanalysis—
and with those forms of unconsciousness of which she provides such intriguing report. To
be proffered a merely conjectural schematic of her nature is to suffer the cold shoulder.
No, what we require is not, say, a guiding philosophical presumption that terms like
‘cause’, ‘meaning’, ‘art’, ‘science’, ‘real’, carry a univocal and always anticipatable
meaning with them into just whichever context of enquiry they happen to be deployed, so
that a question like ‘is psychoanalysis art or science?’ may supposedly be clearly raised
even if not cleanly answered. A preferable approach would be for the meanings of our
core distinctions (poiesis versus posits, meanings versus causes, etc.) to be not
presupposed by, but rather grasped as a function of, the discriminating work they’re put
to, in particular contexts of clinically grounded enquiry, as we draw distinctions to
elucidate the character of psychoanalytic knowledge and its objects. That, at least, will be
the angle offered here, in which explanatory theories will not be provided, for the method
will instead be dialectical: distinctions will be made, antitheses will be devised not
borrowed.
Acknowledging versus Accounting
A frequent Freudian refrain offers us the unconscious as a hypothesis, a hypothesis

allowing us to explain phenomena which, it is claimed, otherwise must but mystify.
Freud’s own favourite examples are parapraxes and post-hypnotic suggestions.
Imagine: the year is 1889, the place Nancy in France, and Bernheim the physician is,
assisted by Freud, conducting some experiments on hypnosis:
. . . it is possible in the case of persons in a state of hypnosis to prove

experimentally that there are such things as unconscious psychical acts and that
consciousness is not an indispensable condition of activity. Anyone who has
witnessed such an experiment will receive an unforgettable impression and a
conviction that can never be shaken. Here is more or less what happens. The
Page 4 of 26

doctor enters the hospital ward, puts his umbrella in the corner, hypnotizes one of
the patients and says to him: ‘I’m going out now. When I come in again, you will
come to meet me with my umbrella open and hold it over my head.’ The doctor
and his assistants then leave the ward. As soon as they come back, the patient,
who is no longer under hypnosis, carries out exactly the instructions that were
given him while he was hypnotized. The doctor questions him: ‘What’s this you’re
doing? What’s the meaning of all this?’ The patient is clearly embarrassed. He
makes some lame remark such as ‘I only thought, doctor, as it’s raining outside
you’d open your umbrella in the room before you went out.’ The explanation is
obviously quite inadequate and made up on the spur of the moment to offer some
sort of motive for his senseless behaviour. It is clear to us (p. 437) spectators that
he is in ignorance of his real motive. We, however, know what it is, for we were
present when the suggestion was made to him which he is now carrying out, while
he himself knows nothing of the fact that it is at work in him.
(Freud 1938: 285)
For those unfamiliar with our unconscious life such experiments are particularly
remarkable. They prove the possibility of radical dissociation between the disposition to
act on and the capacity to report the fact of a suggestion. When the dissociation is such
that we have action in the absence of report, we meet with what we call ‘unconscious
intention’. The offering of that label could be said to amount to what I am here calling an
acknowledgement of the fact of unconscious mental life. Yet despite his frequent
challenge to ‘anyone in the world to give a more correct scientific account of this state of
affairs [which, if they succeed, will cause Freud to] gladly renounce our hypothesis of
unconscious mental processes’ (Freud 1916–17: 277), nothing in what Freud reports
would appear to condone a description of the unconscious intention to open the umbrella
as an explanatory hypothesis as to why the patient opened the umbrella.3
Or at least … call it ‘explanation’ if you will. But what I’m here inviting you to do is follow
me in drawing up a—not tracing a supposedly pre-existing—distinction between
acknowledgement and explanation of the psychological facts. Where by ‘explanation’ I
intend here precisely something which goes beyond acknowledgement of what happens—
thereby fashioning new hypotheses regarding, for example, its extrinsic causes. For in the
absence of some such distinction (between phenomenologically surveying and giving
voice to the character of human behaviour, and offering hypotheses to explain this
behaviour’s occurrence), talk of explanation is apt to appear either vapid or hyperbolic,
while in its presence such talk here is, I suggest, misplaced.
Freud did more than anyone to acquaint us with the (painful, embarrassing, regressive,
violent, lustful) facts of our unconscious lives. He laid them out before us, midwife to our
eager and reluctant acquaintance. At some of these we marvel, especially at first,
astonished or appalled at this mysterious unavowable intentionality within even (what we
had imagined to be) the more innocent dimensions of our lives. Talk of ‘unconscious
wishes/emotions/intentions’, however, does not solve the mystery of such phenomena, but
Page 5 of 26

rather dignifies them with their own place in the order of things. And as we learn to offer
them such acknowledgement we also learn to stop mystifying ourselves with our
continued failed attempts to assimilate them to the place occupied by other matters we
already understand in other terms. We may come, too, to appreciate that our difficulty in
accepting unconscious intentions was partly dependent on an unwarranted assumption:
that a dissociation between what even post-dissociation we may yet be drawn to call
‘action’ and ‘avowal’ was somehow simply impossible, that this defining unity of our
(conscious) intention was everywhere and always indissoluble. But, well, why should it
be? The possibility may frighten us; the unity thereby disturbed (p. 438) may even run
deep in our very concepts of agency and intentionality. Yet none of that makes of it a
natural necessity.4
Reflections
Grammar versus Fact
It is to Wittgenstein that we owe both the grammatical/empirical distinction and an

approach to the core propositions of psychoanalytic theory as belonging to grammar. The
‘proposition “There is an unconscious” is’—writes Charles Elder (1994: 46), the author of
the most sustained Wittgensteinian treatment of the grammar of psychoanalysis
—‘internal to the logic of psychoanalysis’—much as ‘there is length’ is internal to the logic
of geometry, ‘momentum is a function of mass and velocity’ to physics, ‘there is narrative
structure’ to literary theory, ‘plants have leaves’ to botany—rather than a psychological
hypothesis to be evidenced by scientifically collated and interpreted data. ‘Consider this
case’, says Wittgenstein:
[We] have a general undirected feeling of fear. Later on we have an experience

which makes us say, ‘Now I know what I was afraid of. I was afraid of so-and-so
happening’. Is it correct to describe my first feeling by an intransitive verb, or
should I say that my fear had an object although I did not know that it had one?
Both these forms of description can be used. (Wittgenstein 1964: 22)
To help us appreciate such a latitude’s legitimacy he invites us to ‘examine the following

example’:
It might be found practical to call a certain state of decay in a tooth, not

accompanied by what we commonly call toothache, ‘unconscious toothache’ and to
use in such a case the expression that we have toothache, but don’t know it. It is
in just this sense that psychoanalysis talks of unconscious thoughts, acts of
volition, etc.
Now is it wrong in this sense to say that I have toothache but don’t know it? There
is nothing wrong about it, as it is just a new terminology and can at any time be
retranslated into ordinary language…. But the new expression misleads us by
Page 6 of 26

calling up pictures and analogies which make it difficult for us to go through with
our convention . . .
(Wittgenstein 1964: 22–3)
And why should this be a problem for us? Because—and here Wittgenstein tacitly
references Freud’s philosophical reception:
… by the expression ‘unconscious toothache’ you may either be misled into

thinking that a stupendous discovery has been made, a discovery which in a sense
(p. 439) altogether bewilders our understanding; or else you may be extremely
puzzled by the expression (the puzzlement of philosophy) and perhaps ask such a
question as ‘How is unconscious toothache possible?’
You may then be tempted to deny the possibility of unconscious toothache; but the
scientist will tell you that it is a proved fact that there is such a thing, and he will
say it like a man who is destroying a common prejudice. He will say: ‘Surely it’s
quite simple; there are other things which you don’t know of, and there can also
be toothache which you don’t know of. It is just a new discovery’.
So, Wittgenstein offers us a deflationary answer to the question ‘Are we right to talk of
“unconscious fears and desires”?’ We feel an undirected sensation of fear (we might also
call this ‘anxiety’). If you ask us ‘of what?’ we may either reply i) ‘of nothing’, or say ii) ‘I
don’t know’. Wittgenstein invites us to see these as equivalent: we can here say what we
like, although of course it’s best if we don’t then go on to mislead ourselves about what
we mean by what we say.
And how might we mislead ourselves about that? Well, we might think that i) and ii)
contrast in that the fear in i) supposedly has no object, while ii) supposedly has an
unknown object. When we consider the toothache analogy, however, we’re not drawn to
think there’s any difference between what we’re here calling ‘unconscious toothache’ and
‘tooth decay but thankfully no toothache’. This understanding can then be usefully
extended to cover our grasp of the sense of the present use of ‘not knowing what we fear’
and ‘coming to know what we feared’. We can say either that an objectless fear gained an
object, or that later experience shows that the fear was only apparently objectless.
Analogies are unhelpful when overextended. Thus a clear conceptual contrast between
toothache without tooth decay and intransitive fear is that there is no transitive form of
toothache; toothaches are not about anything—not even about tooth decay! Furthermore,
the psychoanalytic concept of ‘unconscious emotion’ is most often used to denote cases in
which not merely the object but also the emotion itself is unacknowledged by its subject.
(Or to put it with more conceptual rigour: cases in which we are invited to yet talk of
‘emotion’, on the basis of the characteristic shape of the subject’s expressive behaviour,
despite that subject’s non-acknowledgement of said emotion.) Finally, we may usefully
distinguish two forms of undirected fear. In the first I later discover that I had, say,
unwittingly ingested a large quantity of caffeine. In the second I later ‘have an experience
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which makes [me] say, “Now I know what I was afraid of. I was afraid of so-and-so
happening” ’. The first provides a cause but no object for the undirected fear; the latter
may make us want to revise our description of it as directionless. The revision would,
however, still be non-compulsory; we could still equally say that an undirected feeling of
fear which yet had a certain cause but no object has turned into a directed feeling of fear
with both object and cause.5
Yet, while we could say this, we don’t. And this is because the grammar of the
psychoanalytic unconscious has a further distinctive aspect missed by Wittgenstein’s
suggestion that it is ‘in just the sense’ in which toothache may be called ‘unconscious’
(p. 440) that fear may also be so called. Consider the difference between Tony’s organic
agnosia and Heather’s psychodynamic repression.
Tony experiences a neurologically rooted dissociation between what we may well enough
call his experience of fear and his ability to avow reasons for the fear. There he is,
quivering yet paralysed in front of the pacing tiger, but when you ask him ‘why are you
quaking?’ he may, despite yet being able to talk, not here have an answer. In this case we
may say either that ‘Tony is afraid of the tiger but doesn’t know it’ or that ‘Tony’s fears no
longer have objects even though they still have causes’. Tony’s unfortunate condition
abrogates that unity of potential avowal and affect presupposed by our ordinary
ascriptions of intentional attitudes (e.g. fear of tigers). But, so long as we’re mindful of
this, we shan’t get stuck with the hope that science or philosophy will, eventually at least,
tell us which ascription is here the right one.
Heather, however, experiences a defensively motivated block regarding the object of her
anger. She depends on her husband and the marriage is deeply important to her but,
frankly, it was obvious to everyone from day one what a bastard he could be. Obvious to
all but her that is: Heather makes every excuse for his behaviour. Yet her parents start to
notice: how she’s getting more and more angry with her children (‘she’s deflecting her
anger onto them’ they say), how she’s now broken a surprising number of his precious
china figurines when cleaning (‘oh, another “accident” ’, they say), how she keeps on
coming down with a headache when he wants her with him (‘but I’m not angry with him!’
she keeps telling them).
Later on Heather comes to acknowledge her anger at her husband. Such

acknowledgement is what Wittgenstein tends to treat as the most salient criterion for her
previously unconscious anger (‘For only if he acknowledges it as such, is it the correct
expression. (Psychoanalysis.)’ (Wittgenstein 2005: 410)). But what this misses is the
conceptual significance of the defence mechanisms—that they’re not extrinsic causes, but
constitutive, of the unconsciousness with which we here meet. That is to say: it was the
positive presence of her defences, and not merely the absence of her acknowledgement …
it was the situated inflection of her earlier disavowal, and not merely the fact of her
belated avowal … which was criterial for our judgement that Heather was (not globally
dyspeptic but rather) unconsciously angry with her husband.6 These defences show
themselves not simply as absences or blindspots, but rather as the positive presence of,
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for example, defensiveness. Or, to move from denial to projective identification: imagine
that we’re called on to justify our judgement that her husband projects his guilt into
Heather. What we should appeal to would not simply be his earlier perception of her as
guilty plus his post-therapy tolerating and acknowledging the guilt as his own along with
his ceasing to see her as blameworthy. We should, more importantly, also include his
earlier tendency to act in a subtly wounded manner towards her, tacitly (p. 441) and
unfairly insinuating that he has been traduced, and insinuating this in such a way as is
likely to covertly induce guilty feelings within her.7
It’s time to regroup. Wittgenstein offers us an important thought—that the existence of

the dynamic unconscious belongs to the ‘logic’ or ‘grammar’ of psychoanalytic theory. The
implication of this is that we don’t do well to think of the existence of the dynamic
unconscious as something to be justified by appeal to scientifically collected observation.
It is, to use the term which in this chapter I’m borrowing from Thomas Mann’s (1947)
‘Freud and the Future’, rather an intrinsic and unassailable part of the psychoanalytic
revelation. Yet sometimes when Wittgenstein aims to characterize the grammatical
character of core psychoanalytic tenets he does so by reducing them to phrases that may
supposedly be translated out without loss into non-psychoanalytic idioms (as we might
translate ‘bachelor’ into ‘unmarried man’), rather than offering them to us as a sui
generis revelation of aspects of human reality not otherwise visible. As he says in the
Philosophical Investigations:
But there is an objection to my saying that you have made a ‘grammatical’

movement. What you have primarily discovered is a new way of looking at things.
As if you had invented a new way of painting; or, again, a new metre, or a new
kind of song.
Learning to hear and sing this song depends not on learning to substitute handy
psychoanalytic epithets for cumbersome non-psychoanalytic phrases. It involves the
development of new sensibilities, the development of a new attunement to the distinctive
shape of that affective and conative domain we call the ‘dynamic unconscious’, an
attunement required for bringing into view the facts of unconscious motivation and
emotion. In justifying an interpretation a psychoanalyst may appeal to certain of her
patient’s expressions and behaviours, but how it is that these are to be related to their
context, and what aspects of them are here the pertinent ones, is not to be understood
through a reflective grasp of a general rule. It depends, rather, on the gist-getting
afforded by a hard-won analytic sensibility. In this way the unconscious aspect of the
situation may be appreciated in its particularity.
Revelation versus Representation
One way to draw, and thereby give sense to, a distinction between what I shall call
phenomenological revelation and scientific representation is to focus on the latter’s
method, sometimes called the scientific method, of asking a question of nature in such a
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way that, while we have set the terms of the question, she at least gets to answer without
our further interference. So, I ask: ‘Does X obtain or not?’ If—and here I stipulate—my
(p. 442) question is to be taken as scientific, my grasp of the meaning of ‘X’ must be
largely independent of my understanding whether X actually here obtains. In particular it

cannot be, on this stipulative understanding of a condition necessary for an enquiry to
count as ‘scientific’, that the shape of my understanding of the meaning of ‘X’ simply be a
function of my past and present practical engagements with Xs in the course of my life. If
that were so, what role would there be for empirical enquiry? If my understanding of
what it is to be an ‘X’ is constituted by my practical ability to engage with Xs in the
course of my life, rather than by that kind of theoretical knowledge as does not bottom
out thus in praxis, we should not yet have cleared the space for nature to answer in her
own way those existential questions we put to her. (‘I know what “humans” means, but
are there any?’ is nonsense; ‘I know what “yeti”, “photographic memory”, “muon”, and
“human pheromone” mean but, in point of fact, do they obtain?’ is not.)
I said in the Introduction that my co-editor had largely convinced me that, in the context
of debates as to what kind of science psychoanalysis is, we typically do better to consider
it social than natural. Here, however, is something over which we’ve fruitfully disagreed:
‘Suppose’, he writes, that:
someone understands, theoretically, the concept of resistance. However they

doubt that resistance ever occurs. What they doubt is that there is any such
pattern in human behaviour…. Compare: a palaeontologist claims to have
discovered a new dinosaur from the re-examination of existing finds. Evidence can
be laid out, not by presenting new material, but by reorganizing existing material
and drawing attention to what has been overlooked…. Where we argue for
patterns in what we can observe, we want to know if the patterns are ‘really
there’, in the bones or the behaviour. We are aware that we can be mistaken about
this (as popular but false accounts in human behaviour and character, I suggest
astrology or the four ‘humours’). We need to defend the sensibility that purports to
identify the pattern against the charge of confirmation bias … This is one reason
for saying that we ‘posit’ the pattern …
(Lacewing 2018b: 120–1)
Here, where Lacewing compares, I contrast. We may imagine that the posited patterns,
which patterns partly constitute the meaning of the terms for the mooted species, did or
did not once actually obtain. One palaeontologist may arrange the material in one way,
another in another, and only one (or neither) of these scientists be positing a possibility
that was also an actuality. It is natural, too, to take a similar line for the claims of
astrology and humoralist medicine: their posits counting as true or false hypotheses of
celestial or physiological events designed to explain the occurrence of the patient’s
manifest life events and symptoms.8 Yet this, I maintain, is precisely what should be
questioned in relation to the central concepts of psychoanalysis.
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Let’s stay with the concept of resistance. What might a purely ‘theoretical’
(p. 443)
understanding of it look like? Well, Freud wrote:
The discovery of the unconscious and the introduction of it into consciousness is

performed in the face of a continuous resistance on the part of the patient. The
process of bringing this unconscious material to light is associated with pain, and
because of this pain the patient again and again rejects it.
(Freud 1904/1959)
Neither Lacewing nor I would disagree that it’s possible to learn to parrot such phrases,
perhaps even write academic papers which in some sense are about psychoanalysis,
without having a real grasp of their meaning. And we could even both agree that a merely
‘theoretical’ understanding of the term ‘resistance’ was possible—if by this was meant
one that was sketchy, schematic, unfleshed out. (We may know ‘theoretically’ that
‘resistance = voltage/current’ is an equation of physics without really knowing what this
equation is on about.) My claim, however, is that to actually know what psychoanalysis
means by ‘resistance’, we have to learn how to use the term in practice—to become
actually and imaginatively acquainted with the distinctive shape that resistance takes in
our own and others’ lives. (Resistance, one might say, looks like something, and it is this
look we must learn.) And that, before we’ve done this, we don’t really know what it means
and also that, once we’ve done that, there’s no intelligible further question for us as to
whether it actually exists or not. Contrast the newly posited dinosaur which may only
have been stomping about in our palaeontologist’s mind and not also in the swamps of
prehistory.
To rehearse, the purpose of this discussion is not to draw up an artificially hard-and-fast

distinction between phenomenological elucidations and scientific posits, point out the
ways in which the essentials of psychoanalytic theory are phenomenologically bent, and
use this to force a conclusion that psychoanalysis at its heart is, as it turns out, not a
science. Instead, I proceed in the manner I described as ‘dialectical’: i.e. to give content
to a distinction between science and non-science by drawing up a living distinction, then
applying this to psychoanalytical theory. The claims so far have been that ‘people have an
unconscious/manifest resistance/engage in projection/etc.’ belongs to grammar and not
science (i.e. we couldn’t understand it without already grasping its truth, thereby
guaranteeing its empirical unassailability and also the meaninglessness of attempting its
empirical confirmation); that learning this grammar involves not learning abstract rules
but becoming phenomenologically familiar with the manifestations of the unconscious;
and that such learning involves the deepening of a distinctive sensibility and sui generis
attunement to the subtle and complex, always situated and inevitably particularistic,
otherwise invisible resonances of our affective and conative lives.
Now, it occurs to me that a reader not yet catching my drift may think that Mann’s and
my talk of ‘psychoanalytic revelation’ smacks of mystery-mongering. As if we were
claiming that the unassailability of the core propositions of psychoanalysis were a matter
of gnosis: a matter of an intuitive experiential revelation of the truth of the claims as
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propounded by the doctrine. To answer I should like to emphasize a distinction between

grammar and gnosis.
My contrast, recall, was between revelation and representation. A claim to gnosis

(p. 444)
is—let’s say—a claim to an intuitive, and hence unassailable, personal access to those
facts which determine the truth or falsity of our representations of them. Yet what instead
I’ve been maintaining is that claims such as ‘people sometimes repress their emotions’
don’t articulate what I’m here calling representational knowledge at all. For whereas the
stipulated hallmark of such knowledge is a disjunction of matters of meaning and truth,
our coming to understand the truth of such fundamental psychoanalytic propositions is of
a piece with our coming to understand their meaning. Or to put it otherwise: to say
‘people sometimes repress their emotions’ is of the order of ‘sometimes it rains’, or
‘human life is permeated by power relations’, or ‘people typically prefer requited to
unrequited love’, or ‘we tend to try to get or achieve what we desire’. On the one hand:
empirical facts. On the other: not something anyone understanding how to use these
words aright could meaningfully doubt. If you want to learn what is meant by ‘weather’:
come outside! By ‘power relations’: get yourself sensitized through a sociology class and
micropolitical discussion. By ‘unconscious affectivity’: get analysed, search your heart,
keep a journal, do an analytic training, read literature. In all such cases our theory is
necessarily data-laden from the get-go, yet the data are themselves what are disclosed by
the same world-opening revelation as is articulated in the theory.
In truth it is not the revelatory, but the representational, vision which here makes for the
greater mysteries. For, according to the view of psychoanalytic concepts as referencing
posits intelligible independently of that relational behaviour which they are to explain, we
are to grasp their meaning—not through gradually getting our psychodynamic eyes in, in
the midst of our relational lives, but rather—by pulling it out of our disengaged noggins in
mysterious acts of pure intellectual intuition. The motivation for the representational view
may be the wish to scientifically demonstrate and justify the truth of psychoanalytic
claims to one’s own and doubters’ satisfaction. But what we lose by abandoning it, by way
of a hope of provability, we gain by way of an appreciation of the psychoanalytic
revelation’s originary significance.
Poiesis versus Posit
The philosopher best known for his determination to recover the disclosive revelations
latently underpinning the representational edifices built on top of and, as the metaphors
die, disguising these foundations is Heidegger. To briefly rehearse his idiom:
‘adequatio’—representational truth—presupposes ‘alethia’—a primordial uncovering or
expressive disclosure of aspects of reality within the ‘lichtung’ (‘clearing’) of our worldly
engagements (Heidegger 1927/1962: section 44). Such primordial disclosure is, in the
philosophical context, the task of an ‘inceptual’ or founding phenomenology, and the
‘logos’ of this phenomenology is not descriptive accuracy but evocative potency or
‘poiesis’ (Heidegger 1989/2012: sections 20–31). As the name suggests, poetry provides
its best model, since it alone finds the words with which phenomena may sing to us with
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their ownmost voice, rather than that voice getting drowned out by our attempts to sing
(p. 445) of them in a voice not their own. Poiesis, on this understanding, is no mere
colourful gloss overlaying the factive but rather its condition of possibility, and if matters
appear otherwise that is a function of the deadening of the metaphors constituting the
poietic disclosure.
I mention this by way of introduction not to Heidegger but to the philosophical

significance of psychoanalytic style. Much has been written by psychoanalysts about their
practice as an art which nourishes a process of self-becoming in the subject itself best
articulated in aesthetic terms (Hobson 1989; Ogden 2005; Summers 2013), and much too
by literary critics on psychoanalytic theory as itself an art (Harris Williams 2010; Jacobus
2005; Meisel 1981). What I wish to draw out here are those aspects of this aesthetic
valuation which speak to its ontological revelation of unconscious life.
Many have acknowledged the power of Freud’s (e.g. Gay 1978) and Winnicott’s (e.g.
Ogden 2001) style, and it is easy to contrast it with, say, the written inelegance of Pierre
Janet, Carl Jung, and many an ego psychologist. Those who have read such post-Kleinians
as have deepened our access to the psychotic mind (Bion, especially) will also have been
struck by their confounding style’s disturbing evocation of mental pain (Ogden 2005;
Rosegrant 2012). The angle being developed here offers the significance of such ‘style’ as
best grasped not by a dialectical contrast with ‘substance’, of which it is (in the sense
offered here) in any case not the garb but the formal condition, but by constitutive
contrast with the efforts of one of human nature’s less successful suitors. Freud’s status
as a central pioneer of the territory of the dynamic unconscious has itself, on this
understanding, to do with his capacity to offer it linguistic emancipation and voice,
something for which flatfooted scientific forerunners of the ‘unconscious idea’ had little
aptitude, by contrast with its prefigurement by the expressive writings of the poets and
philosophers to whom Freud himself offered acknowledgement. This thought, I should
acknowledge, has already been developed by Lacan (1977: 144): ‘Freud … derived his
inspiration, his way of thinking, and his technical weapons’ from a study of the
resonances and significations of art, and also by literary critic Lionel Trilling (1950: 52–
3): ‘the Freudian psychology … makes poetry indigenous to the very constitution of the
mind … [by contrast with the view] that poetry is a kind of beneficent aberration of the
mind’s right course’. The thought is not one simply of, but also one reflexively about,
psychoanalysis, for ‘Freud has not merely naturalized poetry; he has discovered its status
as a pioneer settler, and he sees it as a method of thought’.
Yet for all this talk of psychoanalytic poiesis, what surely often takes us aback is how
unpoetic it is with its proliferation of organismic and mechanistic tropes. To be sure we
do meet from time to time with, say, ‘holding’, with ‘dreaming undreamt dreams’, with
‘unthought knowns’. But the mainstay metaphors are of ‘objects’ (internal, transitional,
part, whole, good, bad) and their ‘uses’, and of the properties of an internal ‘container’
called a ‘psyche/mind’ with (inter alia) its ego capacity, libidinal energy, links, libidinal
cathexes, contact barrier, ego, superego, id, preconscious, conscious, unconscious,
implosion, petrification, engulfment, projections, and transferences. Perhaps this should
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be no surprise when we contemplate how the conceptual metaphors for our mindedness
which psychoanalysis extends are themselves largely based on the body—attitudes,
(p. 446) under-standing, attraction and repulsion, feeling up or down, high or low, crushed
or shattered or going to pieces—or bodily contents—with feelings that bubble or are

bottled up, pride swallowed, emotions spilling out, being under pressure, steam let off,
cooling off, blood running cold, blowing our top (Hopkins 2000). Perhaps we should
acknowledge, too, that the blatantly physicalistic bent of psychoanalytic discourse too
often feeds a sterile, arcane, and pseudoexplanatory ‘metapsychology’ when the
metaphoric music dies. Yet I here wish to make the plea that its constructive ends be kept
in view too. Methodologically, what to anyone not lost in metapsychological self-
satisfaction appears its flagrantly metaphoric character keeps inceptual thought alive,
since the terms’ blank corporeality forces their deployer to continually call up his analytic
sensibility to animate them afresh. Experientially, it keeps us close to the life of the
individual human being. And ontologically it keeps close the character of unconscious life,
with its as-yet unsymbolized, unowned, and unsubjective bent. Psychoanalysis, after all, is
not itself primarily tasked with the voicing of our better selves, but with rescuing for us
our precipitately disowned feet of clay.
Having now pulled into view something of what is meant by the psychoanalytic revelation,
I turn to some applications, asking of the significance of this reflective understanding of
psychoanalysis for psychological practice.
Applications
Understanding versus Explaining
Philosophical psychology was once conducted through elaborating contrasts—between

reasons (or meanings) and causes, between explanation and understanding. This
provided a nice opportunity, with varyingly successful results, for later philosophers to try
their deconstructive hands—by showing for example that some reasons are, after all, a
species of cause. I mention this here by way of reminder that, while I shall now talk of
explanation versus understanding, I will have failed myself if I trade on prior and
independent understandings of explanation and of understanding. Instead I shall proceed
in that manner I have described as ‘dialectical’—i.e. by not tracing but illustratively
drawing a living distinction and using ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding’ to index it.
So, consider the kinds of psychoanalytic claims which self-styled scientific psychologists
tend to find perversely unevidenced. The psychoanalyst David Bell presents us with the
psychoanalytic understanding of paranoia, and tells of how a:
… threatening mental content is transported from its internal position and

relocated in the external world … [N]ow objects in the external world appear to
the individual to be increasingly menacing … It is this psychological mechanism
that underlies all paranoid mental states.
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A psychiatrist on an acute admission ward brushed past a male patient. The

patient turned to him, his face a mixture of anger and anxiety and exclaimed, ‘I am
not (p. 447) homosexual.’ How is one to understand this event? … The man …
might have perceived within himself a homosexual impulse that was pressing
forward for awareness. But, for whatever reason, this was intolerable and so could
not be admitted into consciousness. He defended himself through projecting the
impulse, and the awareness of it, into … the psychiatrist. Instead of feeling that a
disturbing idea was forcing itself upon his own mind, he believed that the idea
belonged to an external figure, the psychiatrist, who was trying to force it upon
him.
(Bell 2003: 3–5)
Throughout his book Bell provides further Freudian theory concerning the relation
between paranoia and sexual and aggressive inner conflict; details the relief to the
patient resulting both from their projective disowning (‘these are his thoughts not mine!’)
and also from the illusory clarity provided by paranoid delusions (‘now I know what’s
going on!’); and further details the Kleinian understanding of the relation between the
intolerance of ambivalence, splitting and projecting, paranoid fear, reintrojection, further
projection etc. What I should like to stress here is that Bell provides evidence for these
claims only in the sense in which a case study provides evidence for a theory: the study
helps us understand what is meant by the theory by exemplifying and enlivening its terms;
yet in its singular nature it naturally does nothing to let us know how often what is being
articulated obtains. We could call this method ‘phenomenological’ in the way it unpacks
for us a form of understanding, using the singular to give sense to—but not to evidence—
the general.
Contrast the cognitive model of paranoia offered by the psychological theorist Richard
Bentall which has it that:
. . . the paranoid world view arises from the tendency to make extreme self-
protective attributions, together with the failure (for whatever reason) to take into
account situational causes of events.
(Bentall 2003: 343)
By contrast with Bell’s phenomenological approach, Bentall’s empirical method aims not
to elucidate for us forms of understanding, but to scientifically demonstrate that what we
already understand is in fact instantiated in the mind of the paranoiac. Thus his theory
identifies the possible external triggers, internal states, and internal traits which may
conceivably give rise to the paranoia (the explanandum). The latter two—the inner states
and traits—are that which our psychological explanation appeals to (the explanantia).
Measures are taken of paranoia and of these inner states (degree of implicit low self-
esteem—how the person deep down feels about or represents herself to herself; degree of
explicit self-esteem—how the paranoid person consciously and explicitly represents
himself to himself), and inner traits (habits of information processing such as having a
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bias towards making external and personal attributions over the causes of the triggers).
The measures are then correlated. A positive relation between the measures of the
explanantia (the degree of implicit low self-esteem, the attribution bias) and the measures
of the explanandum (the paranoia) is found, and this is taken to constitute evidence for
the truth of the psychological model. The character of the theory might be summed up
like this: paranoid people are also people like this: … perhaps it is in part (p. 448) because
they are like this that they are now paranoid; the data collected provide empirical
evidence for the truth of the theory.
Now, Bentall’s method runs into various self-confessed difficulties around testability
(Bentall 2003: 339)—perhaps because it is (I suggest) impossible to meaningfully
operationalize, or because it is (he suggests) hard to accurately test for, underlying as
opposed to explicitly expressed low self-esteem. It also leaves an impossible-to-close gap
between matters correlational and causal: all the evidence in the world that people with
attribution bias and low self-esteem tend to form paranoid delusions could not establish
that the latter is an effect of the former. But what I should like to focus on here is what
may rather appear to be the superiority of what I’m calling Bentall’s ‘empirical’ method
over Bell’s ‘phenomenological’ approach. For whereas Bell makes claims about paranoia
but offers no evidence of their actual truth—beyond a few case studies which for all we
know may not be representative—Bentall takes the time to take many careful
independent measures of paranoia and of the low self-esteem and externalizing bias
which, he proposes, cause it. Does this not make for the greater respectability of Bentall’s
method?
If it were the case that psychoanalytic claims about paranoia—concerning the anxiolytic
reshaping of the person–world encounter by the projection of unthinkable internal horror
into the thinkable world beyond—were intelligible independently of the kind of evidence
which might be provided for them, then we can readily see how an empiricist approach
would here have the upper hand. For then we should go about devising separate
measures of projection, of thinkability, of paranoia, and trouble ourselves to assess their
correlations. We could, as I have been putting it, offer a determinate question to nature
and then await her answer. Yet we have no reason to think that these phenomena are
separable, and so no way here of questioning nature, as opposed to simply listening to the
sound of her voice. In fact the understanding I here offer as to what the psychoanalytic
theory proposes is precisely that the phenomena are not separable: the claim being not
that the distress of paranoid people is as some mere matter of fact typically metabolized
by projection, but instead that projection here characterizes the paranoid reaction (i.e. it
is its formal, rather than efficient, cause). Or, as we also might gesture towards the
conceptual distinction at issue, here we do not have to do with an explanation of one
phenomenon (paranoia) as precipitated by some quite other phenomenon (projection),
but rather with the possibility of understanding paranoia as itself an instance of
projection-in-action.9 The understanding tracks paranoia’s motivations rather than its
precursor precipitants—its pulls rather than its pushes, if you like—and thereby gives us
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the means to see more deeply into it. To see more deeply not into how else paranoid
people happen to be, but into what it means to be paranoid.
Our central thesis, to recall, was that psychoanalysis’ pronouncement regarding

(p. 449)
the desire-instantiating character of psychiatric symptomatology arises from

phenomenological rather than any empirical investigation and is expressed in the
revelatory rather than the representational moment of psychoanalytic theory. To say that
human behaviour is motivated is, then, not to state a contingent fact about it but to grasp
it for what it is. You withdraw your hand from a hot stove. I don’t understand this by
separately identifying your action, your pain, and your desire to relieve pain, then bring
them together with a ‘because’ to give ‘she withdrew her hand because the stove was
burning it painfully’. We may, of course, imagine strange cases (someone wants to burn
his hand to win a perverse dare, but reflexively withdraws it from the hotplate to shoo a
vexatious wasp) but the fact that we must trouble to imagine special cases itself
reinforces our appreciation of the fact of the default presumption that a hand withdrawn
from the stove is a hand withdrawn in avoidance of pain and burning. Motivation is what
we may call the intelligible form of human action as such, and not merely its contingently
obtaining precipitant.
Psychoanalysis extends this vision of orectically intelligible form into the psychiatric
domain of what otherwise show up merely as symptoms. To help the novitiate horse see
what it is getting at, it gives it evocative case studies, and thereby leads it to that water
which yet no amount of empirical data can force it to drink. That this is so we can see
even in Bentall’s psychological researches: we could imagine an empirical demonstration
of a perfect correlation of paranoia with low implicit self-esteem and an externalizing
personalizing attribution bias. Yet to know that these are in fact its causes we require
something more—not an apprehension of some further correlated fact providing evidence
that paranoia is an effect of low self-esteem, but rather a formal grasp of what it is for
paranoia to be an expression of low self-esteem. What this grasp amounts to may be
discerned from the fact that no further empirical datum—nothing from the brain and
behavioural sciences for example—could conceivably provide it, for any such further
psychological or neurological discovery would simply hang alongside what we already
have as yet another correlated finding. Instead the phenomena of paranoia and the
mental pain of low self-esteem are brought together under the motivational concept of
projection. It is motivation’s ‘in order to’ which structures even Bentall’s account, for that
account’s intelligibility itself relies on our grasping that the patient, say, attributes
externally rather than internally because of being motivated so to do—thus: ‘projection’.
If we understand explanation as a requirement of scientificity then we may say that
Bentall’s and not Bell’s account is the scientific one, yet from this we may conclude not
that Bell’s account is unscientific but only that, in the particular sense delineated here, it
is non-scientific.10
In a second application I turn now from psychopathological to psychotherapeutic theory.
Page 17 of 26

(p. 450) Recognition versus Cognition
Psychoanalytic psychotherapists are sometimes criticized for offering patients nothing

but new Just So stories in the guise of applied psychological science. These supposedly
explain the origins of troubles in a manner which is either relieving because spuriously
absolving (‘it wasn’t you, it was your unconscious/your mum and dad/your past traumas …
’ etc.) or because spuriously hope-engendering (the irrational hope being that mere
reflection on your unconscious motivation will somehow help it change). The criticism
continues that such a practice is: deluded since the causal stories we learn to tell about
our symptoms are nothing but post-hoc fabrications; dependency-promoting; and largely
ineffectual since it is concerned with introspection rather than change (Watters and
Ofshe 1999). Psychotherapists’ responses to such critiques vary from bite-the-bullet it’s-
all-just-a-story-anyway postmodernism, to that of the reflective scientist practitioner who
draws as far as possible on objective psychological knowledge while modestly refraining
from offering anything other than flexible revisable hypotheses in a pragmatic fashion in
his clinic.
A shared assumption of both the critic and the pundit is that the psychotherapeutic work
of ‘making the unconscious conscious’ essentially involves helping a patient arrive at new
beliefs about the history and current operations of his psyche to further his self-
understanding and self-management. In what follows I suggest that this ‘applied science’
conception locates the therapeutic endeavour in largely the wrong conceptual context. In
short it locates it within what we could call an empirical psychology that offers cognition,
rather than a moral psychology that offers recognition. (In line with this chapter’s tack
the claim is that the latter and not the former context is the more fundamental one, since
it alone enables the encounter within which minded human beings show up as such.)
What follows provides the substance to my contrast. I start with considering the
therapist’s role in making her patient’s unconscious conscious before considering the
patient’s task of knowing his own mind.
By way of an example of an empirical psychological treatment offering what I’m calling

cognition consider the following from a proponent and a critic of what both authors call
‘psychodynamic psychotherapy’. First the proponent (Cabaniss et al.):
A psychodynamic formulation … is an hypothesis about the way a person thinks,

feels, and behaves, which considers the impact and development of … thoughts
and feelings that are out of awareness—that is, that are unconscious…. Thus, a
psychodynamic formulation is an hypothesis about the way a person’s unconscious
thoughts and feelings may be causing the difficulties that have led him/her to
treatment…. [H]elping people to become aware of their unconscious thoughts and
feelings is an important psychodynamic technique…. Once we have a good sense
of the problems and patterns, the next step in creating a psychodynamic
formulation is to review the developmental history…. Having described and
reviewed the patient’s problems and history the third step is to ‘link’ them
together. [This provides the psychological ‘hypotheses’ which help the therapist
Page 18 of 26

to] construct meaningful (p. 451) interventions…. These might include: … creating
a life narrative … offering explanation and perspective throughout the therapy …
consolidating insights …
(Cabaniss et al. 2013: 3–238)
Now the critic (Watters and Ofshe):
Psychodynamic therapists claim the ability to help clients connect current

behaviors to long-past traumas in childhood, for instance, or to repressed
fantasies decades in the patients’ past…. But … if [as we have shown] we can’t
trace the influence of simple actions and decisions to their correct sources, can we
be expected to do better making etiological connections between complex current
life and events or fantasies from our childhood? … [T]he vast number of
psychodynamic schools of talk therapy appears as nothing more than a testing and
breeding ground for these shared cultural narratives. Psychodynamic therapy
offers a new and interesting world of possible narratives by which patients can
come to believe they understand the origin of their thoughts and behaviors. These
narratives become plausible in the patient’s eyes through the process of influence
embedded in therapy.
(Watters and Ofshe 1999: 204)
Now, in what follows I don’t so much argue against a version of psychotherapy which
formulates then offers interventions, explanations, and advice to the patient, as aim to
recover, in line with this chapter’s ambition, the therapeutic significance of the
psychoanalytic revelation itself before any such representational knowledge comes on the
therapeutic scene.11
Consider: Geraldine comes to therapy with mental and physical suffering she does not
want. She may or may not have a theory as to its causes. What however she cannot see is
how it already embodies the intelligible form of an emotional response to her situation.
Perhaps she hopes that her therapist will somehow help her remove what she herself
experiences merely as symptoms. Or, failing that, perhaps the therapist can at least offer
her an explanation as to where these symptoms come from and what maintains them so
she can learn to manage them better. This gives us one possible meaning of what it could
be to engage in the therapeutic task of ‘making the unconscious conscious’: i.e. to
become more conscious of what has been going on in the unconscious mind.
Luckily for Geraldine she encounters a psychoanalytic psychotherapist who can offer a
different, deeper kind of relief. For rather than set about trying to understand and share
his understanding of her unconscious mind, he instead offers her understanding. That is
to say, he doesn’t so much offer her causal explanations of her symptoms, but instead
refuses to see them as symptoms in the first place. His analytic eyes recover what she
experiences as symptoms as instead living (if undeveloped) moments of her (p. 452)
subjectivity—as part of a humanly intelligible response to a world. Where she experienced
Page 19 of 26

baffling anxiety, he sees her ambivalent love and hate; where she suffered from fatigue
and demotivation, he sees her actively shutting herself down to avoid distressing
confrontation. In his eyes his patient becomes an agent, and her symptoms dissolve into
actions, reactions, and ordinary emotions. The result of her internalizing such recognition
is not that she now understands her present symptoms better, but that such symptoms
themselves transmute into live intelligible emotional registrations of her situation.
Geraldine may have come in looking for a therapist’s cognitive insight into her own
symptoms, but she comes out having experienced his recognition—not of her symptoms
but of her in her suffering.
It’s worth noting that during the course of therapy Geraldine finds that receiving her
therapist’s recognition is not always a comfortable matter. For although in his acceptance
of her he shows a kindness she has hitherto been unable to offer herself, his seeing her
symptoms as instead actions and expressions also uncomfortably highlights her own
disowned responsibility. In short, there are times when, rather than being the victim of a
depressive symptom, and so unable to rise to the responsibilities of everyday life, the
symptom itself is seen as her culpable refusal to engage with her predicaments. The
therapist offers her conjoint acceptance and accountability. This is his ‘tough love’, and
this is his contribution to ‘making the unconscious conscious’. Through this process
Geraldine doesn’t become conscious of her previous or current unconscious mental
states. Instead they themselves become conscious as they are restored and owned as
living moments of her subjectivity, will, and accountability.12 The critic who, at the
beginning of this section, suspected psychoanalytical therapy of creating exculpatory
psychologizing stories for what is in fact culpably bad behaviour would, in this situation,
seem to have matters quite back to front.
In this way the correlate of her therapist’s humane recognition is Geraldine’s

appropriation of her symptoms. She is no longer possessed by them, for instead she is
now self-possessed. She ‘becomes herself’, as we say: she now inhabits (‘integrates’) and
develops that which previously in her was but a latent possibility. She comes to ‘know her
own mind’, not in the sense of knowing facts about what she thinks—for that would still
leave in her a merely external ‘managing’ relation to herself—but in the sense of
consciously developing clear opinions which guide her thought and action. Her feelings
become conscious—their form (Lear, this volume) changes so that they now manifest an
avowable (Finkelstein, this volume), integrated (Leite, this volume) perspective, and she
may now also question the understanding of the meaning of her situations which they
provide, take responsibility for them, appreciate their partiality etc. Far from possessing
more psychological knowledge about, or to be in some greater kind of (p. 453)
comprehending relation to, her own psychological functioning, she in fact needs rather
less of these. For now, when we encounter her, what we meet with is rather less by way of
her psychology and more by way of her personhood. To borrow Buber’s well-known
terminology, neither Geraldine nor we need now engage with her mind in I–It relations.
Instead we relate to her as to a You, and it is as a more fully integrated You that she
responds to us.
Page 20 of 26

It is not uncommon to hear psychodynamic transference interpretations described as

‘hypotheses’ (see the earlier quote from Cabaniss et al. 2013). The concept alludes both
to an empirical scientific attitude and also to the difference between the dogmatic and
the respectful therapeutic word. In this section I’ve argued that what the patient needs is
not primarily empirical hypotheses about his symptoms but rather his therapist’s ethical
recognition. To conclude it I should like to suggest that the notion of a tentative
hypothesis also fails to aptly characterize the difference between dogmatic and respectful
therapeutic interaction. For while it’s true that the therapist may not impose her will if
she’s to do anything that could even count as offering the patient recognition, we can also
readily think of occasions in which she must, in order to be truly respectful, take a strong
stand against her patient’s defences and be firm and frank about the conscious and
unconscious intention, affect, and defence clearly manifest by him. Occasions, that is, in
which to do anything other than offer the mot juste in forceful terms—to honestly call the
patient on his irresponsibility within the therapeutic relationship, for example—would be
to fail to respect him as a human subject. What this call requires by way of tempering is
not hypothetical tentativeness but instead, when sincerely requested, true forgiveness.
Conclusions
This chapter began with a distinction between dialectical and dogmatic thought.
Dialectical thought, as I have developed the idea, is thought which does not trace pre-
existing distinctions, so does not make assailable truth claims about what independently
of it is the case, but rather draws distinctions afresh within its contrastive terms of art.
Its artistry may be impugned or vaunted; its veridicality may not—since it neither enjoys
nor wants for it. Distinctions made along the way, within a master distinction of revelation
and representation, have been that between: grammar and fact, poiesis and posit,
disclosure and description, acknowledgement and accounting, understanding and
explanation, phenomenology and empirical science, and recognition and cognition. In
each case the claim is that, as the terms are here intended, psychoanalysis suffers a
failure of nerve, and its critics a tin ear, to the extent that they take the latter, rather than
the former, to provide the model for the central tenets of its theory. The intent of my
enquiry has not been to suggest that the representations—i.e. the facts, posits,
descriptions, accounts, explanations, hypotheses—do not have their place within what
may comfortably be called the social science of psychoanalysis. It has instead been
(p. 454) to caution against the fantasy that such valuable representational attic rooms
could ever usurp the role of the revelatory foundations of the psychoanalytic edifice.
To close I should like to comment on the relationship between this dialectical approach to
the philosophy of psychoanalysis and the ethic of psychoanalysis itself. A key theme of
contemporary clinical psychoanalysis has been the significance of keeping inner
experience and thought alive. Think, for example, of Bion on the value of ‘suffering’
rather than defensively ‘constructing’ our experience, Winnicott on the emotional
significance of ‘play’, Bollas on the importance of ‘cracking up’ in unconscious
experience, Ogden on ‘dreaming undreamt dreams and interrupted cries’, Meltzer on the
Page 21 of 26

developmental significance of ‘beauty’, Stern on the therapeutic significance of ‘vitality

affects’. Such (romantically inspired) clinical approaches take an increasingly
particularistic approach to psychoanalytic theorizing: we are encouraged not simply to
understand the particular by bringing to bear upon it a general metapsychological
concept, but to work at reversing the trajectory and keep the meaning of our theoretical
terms alive by anchoring them in evocatively articulated and empathically grasped case
material. Accountability, in the most fundamental junctures of both clinical and
theoretical contexts, amounts here not to a demonstrable fidelity to rules or evidence;
that would be the derivative, representational accountability met with in the less
foundational tiers of psychoanalytic science. Instead it amounts to taking responsibility
for undertaking one’s own authentic poietic disclosure of the inner life. The ‘new kind of
song’ which is psychoanalysis is not one to be learned and then formulaically repeated,
but rather one to be sung afresh in the diverse changing contexts of our developing lives.
Clinically this amounts to coming alive again as a human subject; philosophically it
amounts to the phenomenon we call ‘having something to say’.
References
Bell, D. (2003). Paranoia. Cambridge: Icon Books.
Bentall, R. (2003). Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature. London: Penguin
Press.
Cabaniss, D., Cherry, S., Douglas, C., Graver, R., and Schwartz, A. (2013). Psychodynamic
Formulation. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Elder, C. (1994). The Grammar of the Unconscious. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press.
Freud, S. (1904/1959). ‘Freud’s psycho-analytic procedure”. In J. Strachey (ed. and

Freud, S. (1913/1955). ‘The claims of psycho-analysis to scientific interest’. In J. Strachey

Freud, S. (1916–17). Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. In J. Strachey (ed. and

Freud, S. (1938). ‘Some elementary lessons in psycho-analysis’. In J. Strachey (ed. and

23 (pp. 281–286). London: Hogarth Press. (p. 455)
Gay, P. (1978). Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Master and Victims in Modernist Culture.
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Hacker, P. (2002). ‘Is there anything it is like to be a bat?’ Philosophy 77: 157–174.
Hai, H. (2014). The Theory of Chinese Medicine: A Modern Interpretation. London:

Imperial College Press.
Harris Williams, M. (2010). The Aesthetic Development: The Poetic Spirit of

Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac.
Heidegger, M. (1927/1962). Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson.

Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Heidegger, M. (1989/2012). Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). Bloomington, IN:

Indiana University Press.
Hobson, R. (1989). Forms of Feeling: The Heart of Psychotherapy. London: Tavistock/

Routledge.
Hopkins, J. (2000). ‘Psychoanalysis, metaphor, and the concept of mind’. In M. Levine

Jacobus, M. (2005). The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: A Selection. New York: Norton.
Lacewing, M. (2013a). ‘Could psychoanalysis be a science?’ In K. W. M. Fulford, M.

Davies, R. G. T. Gipps, G. Graham, J. Sadler, G. Stanghellini, and T. Thornton (eds), The
Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry (pp. 1103–1127). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Lacewing, M. (2013b). ‘The problem of suggestion in psychoanalysis: An analysis and

solution’. Philosophical Psychology 26: 718–743.
Lacewing, M. (2018a). ‘The science of psychoanalysis’ Philosophy, Psychiatry, and

Lacewing, M. (2018b). ‘Evidence, inference and causal explanation: a reply to Gipps’.

Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 25(2): 119–122.
Mann, T. (1947). ‘Freud and the future’. In Essays of Three Decades, trans. H. T. Lowe-
Porter (pp. 411–428). New York: Alfred A Knopf.
Meisel, P. (ed.) (1981). Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall.
Ogden, T. (2001). ‘Reading Winnicott’. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 60(2): 299–323.
Ogden, T. (2005). This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and

Interrupted Cries. Hove: Routledge.
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Rosegrant, J. (2012). ‘Why Bion? Why Jung? For that matter, why Freud?’ Journal of the
Summers, F. (2013). The Psychoanalytic Vision: The Experiencing Subject,

Transcendence, and the Therapeutic Process. London: Routledge.
Trilling, L. (1950). ‘Freud and literature’. In The Liberal Imagination (pp. 34–57). New
York: Viking Press.
Watters, E. and Ofshe, R. (1999). Therapy’s Delusions: The Myth of the Unconscious and
the Exploitation of Today’s Worried Well. New York: Scribner.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1964). The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (2005). Big Typescript (TS 213), trans. C. G. Luckhardt and M. E. Aue.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. (p. 456)
Notes:
(1) It is worth noting that Freud (e.g. Freud 1913/1955) also includes philosophy among
‘the sciences’. While Wissenschaften is the general term for knowledge construction (an
archaic sense of ‘science’), and while Freud does sometimes use Naturwissenschaften
which implies a contrast with Geisteswissenschaften, at this point in this essay in English
his talk of a ‘natural science’ does not invoke a contrast with the social sciences.
(2) I give specific content to ‘revelation’ and ‘representation’, and distinguish my use of
these terms from other possible uses, in the section on ‘Revelation versus
Representation’.
(3) This theme is developed in detail by Elder (1994: section 1.17 et passim).
(4) As opposed to a conceptual necessity in the normal (i.e. ‘conscious’) cases of

intentional action; see the following section on ‘Grammar versus Fact’.
(5) See the final section of Lacewing (this volume) for discussion of indeterminacy and the
unconscious.
(6) Freud (1916–17), by contrast, provides a range of criteria for an unconscious motive—
from the sincere subject’s acknowledgement, to his suspiciously energetic denials, to the
entire psychological and interpersonal situation of the symptom or slip.
(7) For a contrastive account which does not bring the positive presence of defences into
our understanding of the very unconsciousness of such emotions and motivations see
Finkelstein (this volume).
Page 24 of 26

(8) Yet other understandings of humoral and related systems are available—for example
Hong Hai’s (2014) construal of ‘qi’ and ‘phlegm’ and ‘vital organs’ not as hypothesized
underlying entities but as heuristics and constructs to guide therapy.
(9) Bentall’s difficulties in empirically confirming his thesis of a connection between

implicit low self-esteem and paranoia can, I propose, be understood along similar lines.
Once related through the concept of projection, paranoia becomes intelligible as one of
the forms that low self-esteem takes, and the specification that this low-self esteem is
unconscious or ‘implicit’ is a way of articulating the nature of this form. The recognition
of this form is not however something which can be secured through the provision of any
number of further, isolable, data.
(10) In his chapter Eagle (this volume) bemoans the untestability of much post-Freudian
theory. My suggestion is that this may be because it’s concerned more with articulating
intelligible forms than with offering hypotheses about efficient causes.
(11) For an alternative rebuttal of this version of the psychodynamic model which
distinguishes between what is helpful in clinical theory and what is unhelpful by way of
metapsychological and aetiological speculation see Lacewing (2013b).
(12) Finkelstein (this volume) outlines in his own terms the contrast between what may be
described as transitive (consciousness of something) and intransitive (conscious
simpliciter) senses of ‘consciousness’. To describe someone as conscious (awake) or
unconscious (e.g. asleep), or a mental state as conscious or unconscious, is to talk of
forms of ‘intransitive consciousness’; see Hacker (2002). Lear (this volume) outlines what
I here offer as a broadly ethical reading of what it is for id to become ego or for the
unconscious to be made conscious.
Richard G.T. Gipps

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Page 26 of 26

Body Memory and the Unconscious

Thomas Fuchs

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198789703.013.22
In traditional psychoanalysis the unconscious was conceived as a separate intra-psychic

reality, hidden ‘below consciousness’ and only accessible to a ‘depth psychology’ based on
metapsychological premises and concepts. In contrast to this vertical conception, this
chapter presents a phenomenological approach to the unconscious as a horizontal
dimension of the lived body, lived space, and intercorporeality. This approach is based (a)
on a phenomenology of body memory, defined as the totality of implicit dispositions of
perception and behaviour mediated by the body and sedimented in the course of earlier
experiences. It is also based on (b) a phenomenology of the life space as a spatial mode of
existence which is centred in the lived body and in which unconscious conflicts are played
out as field forces.
Keywords: unconscious, phenomenology, body memory, life space, field forces, intercorporeality
… il n’y a pas d’homme intérieur, l’homme est au monde, c’est dans le monde qu’il
se connaît.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Page 1 of 17

Introduction: Psychoanalysis and

Phenomenology
Psychoanalysis and phenomenology, two theories that arose at more or less the same
time,1 both considering themselves basic sciences of subjectivity, have nevertheless
remained foreign to one another. The grounds for this are probably to be found primarily
in their conflicting views of the role played by consciousness. To psychoanalysis,
consciousness appeared only as a shimmering varnish concealing psychological forces
and processes in unfathomable depths which are what is actually effective. For
phenomenology, on the other hand, consciousness rather was the medium or the light
through which all phenomena come to be seen in the first place, and appear as such.
Consciousness as the sphere of mere semblance (Schein) or of manifestation (Erscheinung
)—is a pointed distinction that could be made between the two. Accordingly, they held
contrasting views also of the unconscious: either it was considered the actual source of
the psyche’s life, the hidden meaningful structure and driving force, which made its way
by various but coded means, even in opposition to the conscious intentions of the subject.
Or the unconscious had to be viewed as restricted to an implicit awareness that remained
potentially accessible to consciousness or reflection, and, in any case, could not basically
be foreign to the subject. In Husserl’s words:
What I do not ‘know’, what in my experience, my imagining, thinking, doing, is not

present to me as perceived, remembered, thought, etc., will not ‘influence’ my
mind. And what is not in my experience, be it ignored or implicitly-intentionally
decided, does not motivate me even unconsciously
(Husserl 1952: 231).
These two views seem hardly reconcilable. Antagonistic as they may seem, however, on
closer analysis, psychoanalysis and phenomenology do in fact have a common starting
point: it is in the Cartesian view of consciousness as ‘clear and distinct perception’, the
assumption that consciousness is transparent to itself insofar as its own contents are
concerned. For Husserl, the ‘cogito’ is the present evidence, the necessary
‘appresentation’ of all contents in the observing consciousness, without which they would
melt or escape into the unreality of past or future. All memories, all ideas, all the
possibilities of consciousness, must cling, as it were, to this evident present so as not to
vanish. But Freud’s view of consciousness is not much different: what is conscious is only
‘… the idea that is present in our consciousness and which we perceive’ in each case
(Freud 1943: 29). Consciousness, therefore, as in classical thought, is considered the
space for current ideas or representations. The unconscious is then the space which is
conceived as containing all the other ideas which are not present at a particular moment.
Freud rejects an ambiguous knowing-unknowing consciousness for ‘… a consciousness of
which one knows nothing seems to me many times more absurd than a psychic
Page 2 of 17

unconscious’ (Freud 1940b: 243). Consciousness must be transparent to itself or it is not

consciousness at all.
Psychoanalysis thus rebelled against the classical philosophy of consciousness, and not
only failed to overcome it but, without being aware of it, even adopted its premises. The
situation is similar to that in today’s conflict between neurobiology and classical
philosophy: the sovereign, autonomous conscious subject that neurobiology believes it
must dethrone is itself merely a dualistic construct. Separated from its body and its life,
restricted to present ‘mental states’, the bodiless, and to this extent powerless, ‘ego’
becomes easy prey to neurobiological reductionism, and the role of the unconscious as
the actually powerful substrate is now taken over by the material brain. With this, of
course, there is the threat of naturalizing subjectivity in a way that could have a much
more reifying effect than Freud’s interpretation of man as ‘homo natura’, criticized by
Binswanger (1957).
Now, the dimension of embodiment of the subject which was increasingly brought to the
fore by phenomenology as time went on, could just as easily have become the core of
psychoanalysis. Freud, as is well known, did not only see the origin of the ego in the
body.2 The body also played a decisive role in psychoanalytical drive theory, since this
theory assumed a step-by-step development of partial drives, which are dominated by
certain regions of the body, and whose ‘destinies’ permanently affect the development of
the individual. Nevertheless, despite this concept, the dualism of body and mind made an
impact on psychoanalytic theory. For Freud, in the final analysis, drives are not
phenomena of the lived body, but objective-somatic quantities; and their representations
do not belong to a libidinous body of the subject but are already part of the psyche as an
inner, hidden apparatus where drive derivatives and drive energies are converted into
one another and distributed to various levels of the psyche—an apparatus which can only
be decoded on the basis of external signs such as body-language or by way of speech. In
the end, the body thus remained interesting only as the seat of symbolic or imagined
meanings, as a primary projection field for the psyche, so to speak, which always had to
be scrutinized for its hidden meanings. That mental phenomena could at the same time
be bodily as well was not imaginable in the dualistic paradigm.
With the idea of the ‘psychic apparatus’, which doubtlessly goes back to Freud’s own
early brain theory, an entity had also been created that served as a sort of inner container
for images and memories of external reality. Introjected as ‘object-representations’,
‘imagos’ etc. they populated the various compartments of the psyche and there developed
a life of their own with the help of the drive energies. In this way, the ego remained
separated from important parts of these compartments through radical ignorance: the
topologically structured, dynamic unconscious, according to Freud, is basically different
from the pre-conscious as the latent and implicitly ‘previously known’ (Freud 1940c: 77f.).
Between the preconscious and the unconscious stands the economical mechanism of
repression, and both what is repressed and the repressing mechanism—i.e. the
motivation for repression—elude consciousness. As evidence for this concept, Freud could
point to physical symptoms or to Freudian slips, which appeared alien or meaningless to
Page 3 of 17

the ego, furthermore to the difference between manifest and latent dream content which
is attributable to an unconscious censor, and, last but not least, to the resistance shown
by the patient during analysis to becoming aware of what has been repressed.
This radical separation of the unconscious, however, took place at the cost of its having to
take a problematic ambiguous position between subjective experiencing and objective
processes (Waldenfels 2002: 294). In fact, in the final analysis, it had to be assigned to the
objectivity of the psychological apparatus. Freud solves the paradox he discovered,
namely that one ‘knows something that one simultaneously does not know’ and that ‘one
is struck with blindness while the eyes see’ (Freud 1957: 175n) by the splitting of the
psyche into two parts. As a consequence, the unconscious turns into an ‘internal foreign
country’ (Freud 1940c: 62), in other words to something external within oneself, whose
meaning and effect are alien to the subject. At this point, however, one should not only
bear in mind Husserl’s objection to a motivation which is entirely alien to the subject.
How, over and above this, should the subject be in the position to reappropriate such an
alien meaning unless, both in origin and in its latency, it was always his own meaning?
Psychoanalytical therapy could then do no more than convey rational insights into the
mechanisms of one’s own inner life, and could not contribute to a genuine integration of
the personality. The aim of therapy: ‘where id was, ego shall be’, would then remain only
a matter of explicit knowledge, not of actual self-appropriation.
The phenomenological critique of this concept now moved along various paths:
• Sartre saw the unconscious not as a circumstance imposing restrictions on the

subject from outside, but as a basic modality of the subject’s constitutive relationship
to himself, namely, that of bad faith, ‘mauvaise foi’ (Sartre 1958: 47ff). The subject
assumes an ambivalent relationship to himself, he allows himself, so to speak, to slide
into an ‘intentional inattention’: one doesn’t know something and doesn’t want to know
it; one doesn’t see something and doesn’t want to see it, and in this way becomes the
deceived and the deceiver in one.
• A comparable form of double consciousness may be found, as Bernet (1997) has
undertaken to show, in Husserl’s analyses of the perception of images, of the
reproductive consciousness, of memory, and above all, of imagination: these forms of
consciousness in each case entail a duplicity of presence and absence so that the ego
lives in two worlds at the same time. In this way, they can also serve as paradigms for
the relationship between conscious and unconscious.
• Another way of overcoming the dualism of conscious and unconscious consists of
expanding the space of subjectivity vertically so to speak, so that it can include the
phenomena of drive and urge as a basic stratum. This method of reinterpretation of
Freud’s metapsychological terms into an elementary activity of life which always
precedes the conscious experience of oneself, was an approach partly adopted by Max
Scheler (1928), and then, primarily, by Michel Henry (1992).
Page 4 of 17

• Finally, there is the possibility of taking the ambiguity of the body, as understood by
Merleau-Ponty, as the starting point, to extend subjectivity in the horizontal dimension
and to encounter the unconscious in bodily behaviour, in day-to-day living, and in the
structures of the person’s lived space. Body memory plays a special part here, insofar
as it changes a person’s bodily and inter-bodily experiences into implicitly effective
dispositions, which provide the mostly unconscious basis for day-to-day living (Fuchs
2000, 2012, 2016).
The latter is the course which I will take in what follows (without rejecting the other
possibilities mentioned). So the question will be: can the unconscious be localized in the
lived relationships and conduct of a person—in other words in the horizontal dimension of
the lived body and intercorporeality? How far can such a concept reflect elements of
Freud’s unconscious? In what follows, I first want to develop the concept of body memory
and the relational field that it constitutes, and then ask about the structures of this field
where the unconscious can, as it were, take up its abode.
Page 5 of 17

Body Memory
If, following Merleau-Ponty, we view the body not as the visible, touchable, and sentient
physical body but first and foremost as our capacity to see, touch, and sense, then body
memory designates the totality of these bodily predispositions as they have formed in the
course of our development—in other words, in their historical dimension. In body
memory, the situations and actions experienced in the past are, as it were, all fused
together without any of them standing out individually. Through the repetition and
superimposition of experiences, a habit structure has been formed: well-practiced motion
sequences, repeatedly perceived Gestalten, forms of actions and interactions have
become an implicit bodily knowledge and skill. Body memory does not take one back to
the past, but conveys an implicit effectiveness of the past in the present. This approach
converges with the results of recent memory research on the central significance of
implicit memory which is just as much at the basis of our customary behaviour as of our
unconscious avoidance of actions (Fuchs 2012; Schacter 1996).
The body is thus the ensemble of organically developed predispositions and capacities to
perceive, to act, but also to desire and to communicate. Its experiences, anchored in body
memory, blanket the environment like an invisible network which relates us to things and
to people. It is, as Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘our permanent means of “taking up attitudes”
and thus constructing virtual presents’, in other words to actualize our past and, with
this, to make ourselves feel at home in situations (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 181). Even more:
in the bodily experience structures, the other is always already included, he is understood
in expression and intended in desire. Before I can reflect on what I am communicating
through my gestures or speech, my body always already creates the feeling of being-with;
it expresses itself through attitude and gestures, and at the same time reacts to the
impressions of others. This ‘intercorporeality’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 168) forms an
overriding, intersubjective system in which, from childhood on, forms of bodily
interaction are established and constantly reactualized. It comprises the self and the
others, the conscious and the unconscious: ‘I do not have to search very far for others: I
find them in my experience, lodged in the hollows that show what they see and what I fail
to see (…) We are in no way locked inside ourselves’ (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 138f).
Body Memory and Life Space

Body memory—like the body schema—thus forms not only an interior system restricted to
the physical body. It also constitutes a sensorimotor, emotional, and interactive field in
which we, as embodied beings, constantly move and conduct ourselves. The terminology
of Kurt Lewin’s field psychology (1936) offers itself here, particularly the concept of the
life space. In order to link it with the structures of body memory, I want to give a brief
outline of this in what follows.
Page 6 of 17

The life space is centred around the person and the person’s body. According to Lewin, it
is characterized by experienced characteristics such as closeness or distance, narrowness
or breadth, connectedness or separateness, attainability or elusiveness, and it is
structured by physical or symbolic boundaries which offer resistance to movement. This
produces more or less clearly bounded sectors such as the peripersonal space around
one’s own body, claimed territories (property, home), the sphere of influence which
emanates from someone, but also prohibited or taboo zones. The lived space is further
permeated by tangible ‘field forces’ or ‘vectors’, in the first place those which attract and
repel. Competing attractive or repulsive forces in the life space lead to typical conflicts
such as attraction versus aversion, attraction versus attraction etc. They can be
considered as conflicting directions of movement or possibilities which are offered to a
person in a given situation.
A good example of conflicting field forces is offered by the situation of a small child who
is torn back and forth between his bond to his mother and curiosity (cf. Stern 1991: 101).
The mother is first of all the ‘safe haven’, the centre of gravity, so to speak, which curves
the child’s experienced space in such a way that he remains in her vicinity. The space
thus acquires a gradient: the further the child moves away from the mother, the more
empty, more lonely the space becomes. While it condenses again around other, i.e.
strange, people, the child rather makes a detour around them: the space curvature near
them is ‘negative’. Little by little, the child’s exploratory drive and the attractive charms
of the environment loosen his tie to his mother, so that it becomes possible to increase
the distance against the gradient—only until the bond is stretched too much, and the
child runs back to his mother in the end. This example is also a good illustration of the
fact that the respective field structures are based on body memory, in this case, the
history of the experiences the child has had in closeness and ties to his mother. Another
proverbial example lies in the saying, ‘Once bitten, twice shy’, which illustrates the
aversive effect of body memory. A third example, finally, is given by the zones of
prohibition which restrict the directions in which a child can move so that his
spontaneous impulses interfere with parental imperatives, namely, inasmuch these have
left a negative mark on his very life space.
Consequently, the life space—depending on the respective experiences, capabilities, and

motives of a person—can bear varying significances, relevances, or valences. In analogy
to a physical field, ‘gravitational effects’, invisible ‘curvatures’ of space, or barriers can
appear which restrict or prevent spontaneous movements. Particularly in
psychopathology, we encounter various deformations of the lived space (Fuchs 2007), as,
for instance, the taboo zones of obsessive patients and the avoidance zones of phobic
patients, which are based on certain past experiences sedimented in body memory.
Page 7 of 17

On the Phenomenology of the Unconscious

With this, I have made a brief sketch of an approach and a terminology which permit the
question of the unconscious to be put and answered in a different way.
If we reject a topologically structured unconscious beyond consciousness—a separate

intra-psychic process which impacts on the experiencing subject from outside, so to speak
—then we may ask whether the unconscious might not be considered another mode of
experiencing that manifests itself in the horizontal dimension of the lived body and the
lived space. The paradigm for this would be the ambiguity of the body itself which, while
seeing, always remains unseen, and of whose dispositions I often remain unaware, which
in fact come to meet me from outside, namely in the form of the attractive or repelling
objects, the affordances and field structures of my environment. Such an unconscious
would then, as Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘… be sought not at the bottom of ourselves, behind
the back of our “consciousness”, but in front of us, as articulation of our field’ (Merleau-
Ponty 1968: 180). It would be the unrecognized reverse side of our experience and
conduct, or its other, hidden meaning.
As our starting point, let us first consider the field structure of a repressed wish. In his
short story ‘Der Branntweinsäufer und die Berliner Glocken’ (‘The brandy drinker and
Berlin’s bells’), Heinrich von Kleist recounts the story of an alcoholic soldier who, after
insistent preaching and punishment, has resolved to become abstinent but was found
drunk after only three days. Asked how this relapse could have happened after all his
good resolutions, the soldier justified himself by saying that the devil must have had his
hand in it because while walking through the town he suddenly heard the names of
various brandies in the tolling of the bells—for example ‘Kümmel! Kümmel!’ in the ringing
of the town hall bell, ‘Pommeranzen, Pommeranzen’ in the ringing cathedral bell, and so
on. In the end, he could not help being defeated by these insidious sounds.3 While this
humorous example relates only to a wish that was not repressed but merely suppressed
by an act of will, it gives a fine illustration of the indirect way in which contrary bodily
impulses or drives can get their way, namely from outside. The experiential field is, so to
speak, interspersed with suppressed desire which becomes crystallized finally around
certain perceptions—namely those which are sufficiently vague while offering a certain
similarity for the purpose: in this case the various chimes. The uncertain or ambiguous is
the place where a latent or hidden significance can take shape. The drive or the wish that
was not satisfied breaks through circuitously and from outside so that, in principle, we
can already recognize the mechanism of displacement. What is actually desired is fulfilled
through something similar.
A comparable interference of thematic and non-thematic (only bodily expressed)

directions of meaning is also found in the various types of ‘Freudian slips’. Freud himself
says that ‘… slips are the result of two different intentions which interfere with one
another, of which one can be called the disturbed and the other the disturbing
intention’ (Freud 1940a: 56). Mishearing is most like the example of Kleist’s soldier: a
Page 8 of 17

latently desired meaning is ‘interpreted’ from a similar sequence of sounds. With

mistakes in speaking, writing, and in (mis)placing things another intention interferes with
the explicitly intended action, so that ‘the right hand—literally—does not know what the
left hand is doing’. Finally, with forgetting, an originally made but unpleasant intention is
blanked out and replaced by others, for example, routine processes. Thus, in spontaneous
bodily perceptions or actions which take place ‘of their own accord’, the relevant latent
intention breaks through—in a reversal or interlacing which is linguistically expressed by
the prefix ‘mis-’.
The producer of the slip can now either immediately or after some brief thought
recognize its significance and ascribe it to himself, or he finds it ‘senseless’, in other
words, alien to himself. For example, Freud writes the following concerning
‘misspeaking’:
If later we present it [the intention on which the misspeaking was based] to the
speaker, he may either acknowledge it as something familiar, so that it was only
temporarily unconscious, or he may deny it as alien to himself, which means that it
was permanently unconscious
(Freud 1940c: 77).
It is on this difference, amongst other things, that Freud bases his categorical distinction
between the preconscious and the true dynamic unconscious which is excluded or
repressed from consciousness ‘by living forces’ (Freud 1943: 436). The defence
mechanism and the corresponding resistance to the latent meaning obviously have as
their prerequisite that the inhibitive trends and their motives are themselves excluded
from consciousness. However, the question is whether this justifies establishing a special
intrapsychic space for the dynamic unconscious. Against this, there is the merely gradual
difference between a temporary and a permanent unconscious in the Freud quotation just
cited. In both cases, after all, we are dealing mainly with a duplicity of intentions, to
which only an additional repressive tendency is added in the second case. But if we do
not assign the ‘living forces’ of repression of which Freud speaks to an intrapsychic
mechanism beyond consciousness, but see them rather as field forces, we will easily find
models for them in the bodily or life space.
The first thing that comes to mind would be the relieving posture adopted after sustaining
an injury: spontaneously one avoids putting the injured limb at risk from dangerous
objects and holds it back without having still to think of the event. Avoidance behaviour is
thus incorporated into the implicit body memory. Moreover, I have already mentioned the
zones of prohibition which face the child and operate against its approach through
negative field forces until the child respects them automatically. We come one step closer
to the dynamic unconscious with zones or objects which are taboo. For, unlike prohibition,
the taboo has a special structure and effect in that it is not expressly formulated but is
generated by the avoidance behaviour of others, like a negative curvature of the shared
Page 9 of 17

life space around what is prohibited. Taboos are most effective when the members of the
community are not aware of them. The infringement of taboos is not necessarily punished
with open penalties, but automatically generates feelings of shame, guilt, or abhorrence
in the offender, reinforced by the contempt and the ostracizing silence of the others.
In all these cases, experience and conduct are determined by negative—i.e. ‘repulsive’—
field forces exercising their effect unconsciously since the subject, like the ‘bitten’
person, has gradually extricated herself from the possible conflict. Avoidance has become
an implicit, bodily pattern of behaviour so that what is potentially threatening in the
environment is no longer consciously experienced. Nevertheless, repelling forces do not
appear to consciousness as coming from outside but, in Hegel’s terms, as its own
otherness. They remain coextensive with the experiential field but as its negative. The
manifest feelings of fear, guilt, or shame which arise on stepping beyond the barriers in
the life space were already latently present before, endowing these barriers with their
affective loading.
In the same way, in the case of a ‘slip’, the dynamic unconscious puts up resistance to its
becoming conscious. This resistance is itself not conscious, nor is it implicitly or
preconscious, and yet on this account it is still not altogether outside consciousness. It is
rather an ambiguity or duplicity of consciousness itself; in such a way that the subject, if
she hits on the manifestation of the hidden meaning, at least has an inkling that it is
asking her a question, namely about her own otherness. The unconscious, writes
Merleau-Ponty:
… cannot be a process ‘in third person’, since it is the unconscious which chooses
what aspect of us will be admitted to official existence, which avoids the thoughts
or situation we are resisting, and which is therefore not an un-knowledge but
rather a non-recognized and unformulated knowledge that we do not want to take
up. In an approximative language, Freud is on the point of discovering what other
thinkers have more appropriately named ambiguous perception
We can understand this ambiguity of consciousness with the example of another defence
mechanism, namely projection. Here the beam in one’s own eye becomes the splinter in
another’s eye; in other words, one perceives in others the impulses and motives against
which one has built defences in oneself. Naturally, this perception is also ambiguous,
since the excessive zeal with which the impulses in others are disapproved derives its
energy precisely from the efforts one has to make to neutralize one’s own impulses. The
blind spot in self-awareness—and here Freud is doubtlessly right—does not result from a
mere ‘overlooking’, but from active and emotionally charged repression. Nevertheless,
this repression remains the work and the effort of the subject herself, not of a mechanism
outside her.
Page 10 of 17

Trauma and Reiteration

Let us now turn to another phenomenon, namely, the unconscious effect of an emotional
trauma which Merleau-Ponty sets out to interpret in his ‘Phenomenology of Perception’.
What is repressed, he writes, is like a phantom limb for an amputee inasmuch as a bodily
capacity continues in the latter which is no longer congruent with the present. Habitual
and current body come into conflict with one another. Similarly, repression also creates
an empty space in current subjectivity (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 87), as if the ‘negative’ left
by an experience which has not been dealt with interposes itself unnoticed before every
new situation and thus imprisons the traumatised person in a past which is still present.
… (T)his fixation does not merge into memory; it even excludes memory in so far
as the latter spreads out in front of us, like a picture, a former experience,
whereas this past which remains our true present [the trauma, T.F.] does not leave
us but remains constantly hidden behind our gaze instead being displayed before
it. The traumatic experience does not survive as a representation in the mode of
objective consciousness and as a ‘dated’ moment; it is of its essence to survive
only as a manner of being and with a certain degree of generality
This description assigns the repressed trauma not to explicit but to body memory, which
holds what is hidden ‘from sight’ and goes on living in a general manner or ‘style’ of
existence.4 The injury has penetrated the body of the subject and has left behind a
permanent responsiveness, a readiness to defend itself. The traumatized person becomes
hypersensitive to threatening, shaming situations similar to the trauma in some manner,
even if this similarity is not consciously known, and tries to circumvent them. ‘The
resistance is directed to a certain area of experience, a certain category, a certain type of
memory’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 194). All the same, at every step, the victim may
encounter something that reawakens the trauma in her. Often it happens that a
permanent predisposition develops to react with fear and nervousness, to become
alarmed every time the doorbell rings, a feeling of being followed or observed by
unknown people.
An impressive description is to be found in the memoirs of the Jewish writer Aharon

Appelfeld, who from his seventh to his thirteenth year of age experienced the Second
World War hiding in the woods of the Ukraine:
More than fifty years have passed since the end of the war. I have forgotten much,
even things that were very close to me—places in particular, dates, and the names
of people—and yet I can still sense those days in every part of my body. Whenever
it rains, it’s cold, or a fierce wind is blowing, I am taken back to the ghetto, to the
camp, or to the forests where I spent many days. Memory, it seems, has deep roots
in the body. (…) The cells of my body apparently remember more than my mind
Page 11 of 17

which is supposed to remember. For years after the war, I would walk neither in
the middle of the sidewalk nor in the middle of the road. I always clung to the
walls, always staying in the shade, and always walking rapidly, as if I were slipping
away. (…). Sometimes, just the aroma of a certain dish, or the dampness of shoes
or a sudden noise is enough to take me back in the middle of the war (…). The war
has infiltrated my bones. (…) the palms of one’s hands, the soles of one’s feet,
one’s back, and one’s knees remember more than memory. Had I drawn from
them, I would have been overwhelmed with what I have seen
(Appelfeld 2009: 50, 90, vii).
Here it is not a particular episode, but an entire segment of his life that has left its mark
on the body, more deeply and permanently, of course, than the autobiographic memory
could have done: proprioception, touch, smell, hearing, even certain kinds of weather can
suddenly allow the past to come to life again, and even bodily pattern of movement, such
as the hunted walk close to the wall, still imitates the behaviour of the fugitive.
The effect of the trauma on the person can thus be viewed, first, as a specific deformation
of her lived space corresponding to an unconscious avoidance behaviour which she
adopts towards the anxiety-provoking or ‘repelling zones’. The lived space around these
zones is to a certain extent negatively curved and prevents the free development of the
life movement. Second, the life space is permeated with similarities in which the trauma
approaches the traumatized person from outside, so that it is impossible to avoid it. For in
one’s attitude, one’s stance, and in one’s perceptive predispositions, one carries the
trauma into one’s world over and over again.
It is to this that the psychoanalytic concept of repetition compulsion relates. This is based
on the clinical experience that patients continue to be drawn into the same, mostly
damaging behaviour or relationship patterns even if they try to prevent this at the
conscious level. Their lived space is so to speak ‘positively curved’ around these regions—
in other words, these exercise an unnoticed attraction. If, for example, a person’s early
experiences were characterized by abusive and violent relationships, this issue will
determine also that person’s later relationship patterns. The types of abuse may vary, but
the implicit behaviour patterns deposited in body memory will have the effect of fulfilling
her expectations and bring about the familiar type of relationship. These unconscious
enactments, as they are called today, were, of course, seen by Freud as a form of
transference. As he writes, we must:
… say in analysis that the analysand remembers nothing at all of what has been
forgotten and repressed, but he acts it out. He does not reproduce it as a memory
but as action, he repeats it, naturally without realizing that he is repeating it. For
example, the analysand does not say that he remembers being defiant and
incredulous towards the authority of his parents, but he behaves in this manner
towards the doctor
Page 12 of 17

(Freud 1946: 129).
The unconscious prehistory of intersubjective relations is re-enacted through the

intercorporeal memory. However, this means that the unconscious is not a hidden
chamber of the psyche any more, but is interwoven in the lifestyle, in the bodily conduct
of a person, as a substructure which remains hidden from her personally, but becomes
visible to others because, in the final analysis, it is always implicitly directed to those
others themselves. The ‘blind spot’ in the centre of consciousness can also be viewed as
the other side of the intersubjective relationship, in which our own being-with-others
must necessarily remain hidden from us, so that this dark side of ourselves can only be
illuminated in our communication with others. For in my world they dwell ‘… in the
hollows that show what they see and what I fail to see ’ (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 138f).
Conclusion
From the point of view of a phenomenology of the lived body, the unconscious is not an
intrapsychic reality residing in the depths ‘below consciousness’. Rather, it surrounds and
permeates conscious life, just as in picture puzzles the figure hidden in the background
surrounds the foreground, and just as the lived body conceals itself while functioning. It
is an unconscious which is not located in the vertical dimension of the psyche but rather
in the horizontal dimension of lived space, most of all lodging in the intercorporeality of
dealings with others, as the hidden reverse side of day-to-day living. It is an unconscious
which is not to be found inside the individual but in his relationships to others.5
Unconscious fixations are like certain restrictions in a person’s space of potentialities

produced by an implicit but ever-present past which declines to take part in the
continuing progress of life. Their traces, however, are not hidden in an inner psychic
world but manifest themselves rather as ‘blind spots’, ‘empty spaces’, or curvatures in the
lived space: in the ‘slips’ in speech and action; in the relationship patterns into which a
person repeatedly blunders, in the actions which are avoided without being aware of it; in
the spaces which are not entered, the opportunities offered by life which one does not
take, and even does not dare to see. Such traces may be recognized as ‘negatives’ so to
speak, in the form of inhibitions or omissions which are characteristic of a person. They
can also become symbolically or physically present in neurotic or psychosomatic
symptoms. The symptom is to this extent neither meaningless nor a defective habit—as
learning theory assumed6—nor is its meaning to be found beyond itself, in the
unconscious interior. Rather, it lies in the intercorporeal expression, in the interactive
field, even if this meaning is not evident, but must be understood and interpreted.
The unconscious is thus absence in presence, the unperceived in the perceived (Merleau-
Ponty 1968: 245f). Like a figure blanks out the ground from which it stands out, thus
consciousness, perception, and language conceal their reverse side, namely the
unconscious, the unperceived, and the silence, which are always bound up with them.
Page 13 of 17

This reverse side, however, does not remain fully concealed but expresses itself in
reversals, chiasmatic entanglements, in an ambiguity of consciousness: one does not
know something and does not want to know it; one does not see something and does not
want to see it—in other words, one looks past it intentionally–unintentionally.
Consciousness is not fully transparent to itself because it hides itself from itself.
This duplicity of consciousness corresponds to the ambiguity of the body whose modes of
appearing fluctuate between the thematic and the unthematic, between the physical
(Körper) and the lived body (Leib). But it also corresponds to the ambivalent, conflict-
prone nature of our existence itself where we, precisely as natural, embodied beings, can
always confront our own instinctive and natural side as well. This is what constitutes the
contradictoriness or, to speak with Plessner (1975), the ‘eccentricity’ of the way we relate
to ourselves, the constant conflict between spontaneity and reflectivity, body and soul,
nature and nurture, conscious and unconscious. One could then accuse Freud that even
he, for all his scepticism, was too generous to humankind in that he tried to relieve our
consciousness of this inherent conflict by placing our opposing will in a separate space
belonging to the unconscious—thus withdrawing this will from our responsibility.7
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Philosophie. II. Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Den Haag: Nijhoff.
Kleist, H. v. (1984). Sämtliche Erzählungen and andere Prosa. Stuttgart: Reclam.
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Notes:
(1.) As is well known, both Husserl’s ‘Logische Untersuchungen’ and Freud’s

‘Traumdeutung’ appeared in 1900.
(2.) Cf. Freud 1940b: 253.
(3.) Kleist 1984. The story is also cited by Graumann (1960: 151) as an illustration of the
motivational basis of perspectivity.
(4.) ‘comme un style d’être’, in the French original (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 98).
(5.) ‘(…) the latency of psychoanalysis is an unconscious that is beneath conscious life and
within the individual, an intrapsychic reality that leads to a psychology of depth in the
vertical dimension. (…) the latency of phenomenology is an unconscious which surrounds
conscious life, an unconsciousness in the world, between us, an ontological theme that
leads to a psychology of depth in the lateral dimension’ (Romanyshyn 1977).
(6.) ‘Learning theory assumes no “unconscious” causes whatsoever but views neurotic
symptoms simply as learned habits. There is no neurosis at the bottom of the symptom,
only the symptom itself ’ (Eysenck and Rachmann 1972: 20).
(7.) Acknowledgement: Originally published as Fuchs, Thomas (2012), ‘Body Memory and
the Unconscious’, in Dieter Lohmar and Jagna Brudzinska (eds), Founding Psychoanalysis
Phenomenologically: Phenomenological Theory of Subjectivity and the Psychoanalytical
Experience (pp. 69–82). © Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
Thomas Fuchs
Karl Jaspers Professor of Philosophy and Psychiatry Psychiatric Department,

University of Heidelberg
Page 16 of 17

Page 17 of 17

Aesthetics: Introduction

Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

This introduction provides an overview of the chapters in this section, which explores the
role of psychoanalysis in aesthetics. More specifically, the chapters examine some
psychoanalytic concepts with which to think more deeply about human creativity and
aesthetic sensibility, such as wish and wish fulfilment, the depressive position, projection,
containment, and mentalization. The focus is on what Sigmund Freud thinks about art,
how we should understand it (the question of criticism), what makes an experience
distinctively aesthetic, and how we should understand artistic creativity. One of the
chapters deals with film theory, arguing against the cognitive turn in favour of the view
that ‘the creation and experience of film is driven by desire and wish fulfilment and
functions so as to satisfy certain psychological, protective, expressive needs of both
artists and audiences’. Another chapter considers the developmental, transformative
nature of art, and the particular importance of its form in this respect.
Keywords: psychoanalysis, aesthetics, wish-fulfilment, projection, containment, mentalization, Sigmund Freud, art,
artistic creativity, film theory
In our ‘Introduction: Know Thyself’, we commented that one important use that
philosophers have made of psychoanalysis is to deepen our understanding of the meaning
and meaningfulness of human activity and experience. Among the defining characteristics
of human beings are our creativity and aesthetic sensibility. Experiences of creativity and
aesthetic appreciation, which can be unusually intense, are essential to human life, and
yet very difficult to articulate and understand reflectively. As Freeman notes in his
chapter on the work of Richard Wollheim, arguably the most significant philosopher of
psychoanalysis of the twentieth century, philosophical aesthetics seeks to think and write
about these experiences in a rigorous and analytic way, and psychoanalysis can assist in
that.
Page 1 of 5

We may take the following as core questions that the philosophy of art seeks to answer:
What is art? How should we understand it (the question of criticism)? What makes an
experience distinctively aesthetic? And how should we understand artistic creativity? On
each of these, Freud has little to say directly, and although he attempts to address the
second and fourth (see Freud 1924 and 1908 respectively), Wollheim (1970) argues that
he does not display a deep understanding of art. But his initial thoughts point us in
particular directions that may be fruitfully developed.
Freud (1908) famously claims that art, like dreaming, involves the creation of a fantasy in
which unconscious wishes are fulfilled. As in dreaming, we enjoy these wish-fulfilling
fantasies in many cases because the wish is at least partly disguised. Unlike dreaming,
however, to engage the spectator, not merely the artist, the fantasy must touch on
something universal in the human condition. The formalist Roger Fry (1924) rightly
objected that art cannot be understood simply as wish-fulfilment, but many of his
objections rest on misunderstanding Freud’s claims or can be met by a more
sophisticated account of the place of wish-fulfilment in artistic creativity. For example,
Fry overlooks Freud’s equal emphasis of the importance in art of both taking account of
reality (e.g. the manipulation of real materials) and connecting the wish to something
universally true in human experience. Or again, many emotions and wishes may be at
play, and the wish that is fulfilled is to find an expression that represents a resolution of
the conflict between them.
Building on this idea of conflict resolution, Hanna Segal (1985, 1991) famously develops a
detailed account of artistic creativity through the lens of Kleinian theory. Leaving aside
for now Klein’s backstory of distinct developmental stages, the centrepiece of the theory
as it has been taken up in post-Kleinian work is that of discrete psychological positions.
The depressive position is that mode in which we are able to experience both love and
hate towards the same object, giving rise to anxiety, feelings of loss and guilt, and the
desire to ‘repair’ symbolically what we destroy in feeling. The impulse to create arises
from such feelings, to resolve the (usually unconscious) conflict of the depressive
position. Segal famously provides an analysis of classical tragedy in these terms, in which
she drew on Bion’s notion of the container–contained to articulate the disturbing content
of the play as contained—made bearable and thus able to be thought about—by the
beautiful, unifying form it takes. A related Kleinian account is provided by the art critic
Adrian Stokes (2014) who understood the total form of a painting or sculpture as the
container for that turmoil projected into it by the artist who can there work it through
into more manageable and harmonious forms.
Thus, psychoanalytic theory, as Freeman notes, provides the grounds for defending the
‘psychologization’—or given the anti-psychologization of the last seventy years following
Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s (1946) famous attack on ‘the intentional fallacy’, a
‘repsychologization’—of the meaning of an artwork, one which connects it closely to why
we produce art at all and why we seek it out. Wollheim’s response to Wimsatt’s and
Beardsley’s charge is carefully laid out in ‘Criticism as Retrieval’ (1980), but each chapter
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included here provides additional reasons to revisit psychoanalytic approaches in

aesthetics.
It is worth noting that the rejection of psychoanalytic contributions to understanding art

has been fuelled by two misunderstandings that mark discussions from Fry onwards.1 The
first, already noted, is a misunderstanding of psychoanalytic theory itself, typically
substituting its rich resources for an implausible oversimplification. The second is the
thought that psychoanalytic accounts of criticism or creativity aim to be complete in
themselves; because they are not, psychoanalytic approaches are to be rejected. But
while it is true that psychoanalytic resources must be supplemented by others, this does
not make them irrelevant. As Cox and Levine note in their chapter, the light that
psychoanalysis casts on our experience of art can be necessary without being sufficient.
And Wollheim (1980) would agree, arguing that there is much else that we need to know
as well, from artistic conventions to available materials to the social purposes of
artworks.
The importance of desire in aesthetics forms the main theme of Cox’s and Levine’s
chapter on film theory. Arguing against the cognitive turn, perhaps most forcefully
championed by Noel Carroll, they defend the view that ‘the creation and experience of
film is driven by desire and wish-fulfilment and functions so as to satisfy certain
psychological, protective, expressive needs of both artists and audiences’. Without this
perspective, we cannot adequately explain the power of film and its effects on viewers,
nor some characteristics of specific genres, such as horror.
It is notable that Wollheim himself goes well beyond wish-fulfilment in tapping the
resources psychoanalysis provides. In criticism, says Wollheim, we should seek to
reconstruct the creative process, but this includes not just conscious and unconscious
intentions, but many things—psychological, historical, social, cultural, and chance—that
can impact on these. While Freud himself does not make the connection, Wollheim takes
projection to be central to the processes of creation and appreciation. Our imagination
redeploys what has its psychological origins as a defence. Freeman provides an admirably
clear guide to Wollheim’s complex and challenging theory of how projection underpins
our ability to perceive artworks and nature as expressive of psychological—especially
emotional—properties. The role and nature of expressive perception forms the basis of
Wollheim’s account of what is both distinctive and valuable about art.
Galgut’s discussion of literary form returns us to Segal’s ideas of another value in art,
namely its developmental, transformative nature, and the particular importance of its
form in this respect. Many have noted that art resembles psychoanalysis in enabling
emotions to be worked through, mostly notably in the case of literary art which uses
language to give form to what we feel unconsciously. As we engage with reading, our
minds relate to other minds, and this provides an opportunity for development, especially
in emotional insight. The development of such insight—the ability to understand the
emotional experience of others and oneself—is of course central to psychoanalysis but,
Galgut argues, it can also be facilitated by literature. In philosophical and psychological
Page 3 of 5

discussions of understanding other people, subsumed in debates over ‘theory of mind’,

this attention to emotion—including the impact of emotional self-regulation on
interpretation—is typically missing. By contrast, it plays a central role in the theory of
‘mentalization’, a modern development of a psychoanalytic account of how we understand
ourselves and others (Fonagy et al. 2002). Galgut argues that certain kinds of literature,
especially in respect of their form, can develop mentalization, not least through the
complex provision of a multiplicity of perspectives.
As noted at the outset, then, psychoanalysis offers us a number of concepts—we have

considered here wish and wish-fulfilment, the depressive position, projection,
containment, and mentalization—with which to think more deeply about an aspect of
human experience that is important, intensely felt, but otherwise enormously difficult to
articulate and understand.
References
Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., and Target, M. (2002). Affect Regulation, Mentalization,
and the Development of the Self. New York: Other Press.
Freud, S. (1908). ‘Creative writers and day-dreaming’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The
153). London: Hogarth Press/Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Freud, S. (1924). ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The
211–238). London: Hogarth Press/Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Fry, R. (1924). The artist and psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press.
Segal, H. (1985). ‘A Psycho-Analytical Approach to Aesthetics’. In P. Heimann and R.

Money-Kyrle (eds), New Directions in Psycho-Analysis (pp. 384–406). London: Karnac.
Segal, H. (1991). Dream, Phantasy and Art. Hove/New York: Brunner-Routledge.
Stokes, A. (2014). Art and Analysis: An Adrian Stokes Reader, ed. M. Harris Williams.
London: Karnac Books.
Wimsatt, W. and Beardsley, M (1946). ‘The intentional fallacy’. The Sewanee Review 54:
468–488.
Wollheim, R. (1970). ‘Freud and the Understanding of Art’. British Journal of Aesthetics
10: 211–224.
Wollheim, R. (1980). ‘Criticism as Retrieval’. In Art and its Objects: With Six
Supplementary Essays (pp. 185–204). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Page 4 of 5

Notes:
(1) Of course, in addition, if psychoanalysis provides a false theory of the human mind, it
cannot correctly illuminate human aesthetic experience. We cannot here address the
question of the truth of psychoanalysis, though we note in passing that the question is not
simple—many psychoanalytic claims about mental functioning are most likely false while
others are very well supported and most likely true—and it is unfortunate when
psychoanalysis as a whole is rejected as a result of its misrepresentation.
Michael Lacewing

London, London, UK
Richard G.T. Gipps
Page 5 of 5

On Richard Wollheim’s Psychoanalytically Informed Philosophy of Art

On Richard Wollheim’s Psychoanalytically Informed
Philosophy of Art
Damien Freeman

This chapter discusses the way in which Wollheim recruits the insights of psychoanalysis
to develop a distinctive approach to philosophy of art in particular, and other branches of
philosophy more generally, such as philosophy of mind and ethics. Wollheim develops an
original approach to artistic expression and expressive perception of emotion by drawing
on psychoanalysts’ treatment of projection. He also develops an original approach to art
criticism which he dubs criticism as retrieval, and which involves what he dubs the
‘repsychologization’ of pictorial meaning.
Keywords: art and emotion, expression, art criticism, Richard Wollheim, philosophy of art, repsychologization
Damien Freeman
On an Analytical Philosopher of a
(p. 477)
Psychoanalytical Bent
WRITING in the Guardian on 5 November 2003, Arthur Danto began his obituary for
Richard Wollheim thus:
The philosopher Richard Wollheim, who has died aged 80, belonged in the top
echelon of thinkers who redefined the practice of his subject in Britain and the
United States after the second world war. In terms both of the clarity of his
writing and the acuity and ingenuity of his arguments, he embodied the
intellectual virtues of analytical philosophy. But in terms of what engaged him as a
philosopher, he stood far closer than any of his peers to continental thought.
Page 1 of 21

This is the riddle of Wollheim’s philosophy: he exemplified the virtues of analytical

philosophy, but he was drawn to the preoccupations of the continental philosophers.
Danto continues his obituary by explaining:
Wollheim had little interest in donnish preoccupations with linguistic usage, or

with the endlessly agonising issues of how language relates to reality. But he
freely adapted some of the strategies worked out in addressing these issues to the
problems that did engross him, which typically derived less from what other
philosophers said than from what was central in his life.
What was central to his life might broadly be described as the ‘irrational’ aspects
(p. 478)
of human experience. He was captivated by the intensity of certain experiences and the
grip that they have on the way we live our lives in virtue of their intensity. Chief among
these were the experiences offered by art, in particular, painting as an art. Where modern
philosophy in the Western tradition has been preoccupied with rationality, Wollheim
applied the techniques of philosophy to speculate about the heart and the particular
thought processes that govern it. Indeed, at the end of his obituary, Danto remarks:
The heart was really the focus of his thought, in life and in philosophy, and it was
the heart, above all, that he sought in the painting about which he was so
passionate. The heart has not been the favoured organ of philosophical interest
since perhaps Pascal, and it is this that set Wollheim apart from his peers in a
discipline to which he brought originality and distinction.
Central to Wollheim’s philosophical achievement was the idiosyncratic way in which he

recruited the hypotheses of psychoanalysis as an aid to philosophical speculation.
Wollheim was an expert on psychoanalytical theory, and he published numerous works
discussing the philosophical issues surrounding psychoanalytical theory. However, he also
did something more than that. His command of psychoanalytical theory and philosophy
was such that he was able to use psychoanalysis to extend the way that philosophy
speculates about human experience. It was this unique application of psychoanalysis that
enabled Wollheim to apply the approach of analytical philosophers so effectively to the
subject matter of continental philosophy. In this way, he might be said to develop a
psychoanalytically informed philosophy rather than a philosophy of psychoanalysis.
This chapter seeks to introduce Wollheim’s use of psychoanalysis in addressing the

problems of philosophical aesthetics, and the rewards of his approach, by considering his
relationship with art as practitioner, critic, and theorist, before saying something about
his interest in psychoanalysis, and then investigating how art and psychoanalysis come
together in his philosophy.
As discussed later, one feature that stands out here is Wollheim’s treatment of projection.
Projection has a venerable history both in philosophy and psychoanalysis. But Wollheim
offers a unique—if, at times, controversial—approach to projection. In his philosophy of
art, projection is central to his account of expressive properties that works of art possess,
or, more specifically, to his account of our capacity for expressive perception of art and
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nature. He offers a psychoanalytically informed account of projection, and this enables

him to provide a new solution to an old problem of aesthetics. His account is not without
its problems. What is fascinating, however, is the way it resonates with the intensity of his
experience of works of art, and the astonishing readings of masterpieces that this
permits.
His psychoanalytically informed approach to art also allows him to revisit the classic
problem of the nature of art criticism. Where it had once been conventional to think
about the critic’s role as identifying the artist’s intention in creating the work, (p. 479)
Wollheim argues that we do better to think of it as retrieving the artistic process, and this
project of criticism pursued as retrieval turns out to bear a strong resemblance to
psychoanalysis, although he distances himself from claiming that it amounts to
psychoanalysis.
In assessing Wollheim’s legacy, we do well to consider what he exemplifies for the

budding philosopher, as much as his place in the canon. For, while it is true that he has
largely been marginalized, if not neglected, by mainstream analytical philosophy, he
remains a truly inspiring figure for those who, like him, are consumed by the depths of
human experience, and the need to provide some form of speculative account of these; an
account worthy of their place in our lives.1
On Art and the Life of the Man

Art was central to Wollheim’s life. In order to understand his philosophy of art, one has to
see it in the context of his life.
It would not be in order to say that Wollheim was first and foremost an artist, but he did
try his hand at it. In 1969, he published a novel, A Family Romance (Wollheim 1969). The
semi-autobigraphical novel takes Freud’s ‘family romance’—a phantasy in which a child
imagines that he is able to overcome parental authority—as the basis for a story about a
man who executes a plan to poison his wife. Wollheim’s novel is significant for the way it
brings together his personal life, his interest in art, and his knowledge of psychoanalysis.
Towards the end of his life, he completed Germs (Wollheim 2004), a memoir of childhood,
which was published posthumously. Again, the memoir is significant for the way in which
it draws together Wollheim’s Proustian literary style, his reflections on his early life, and
the self-analysis that his knowledge of psychoanalysis brings to these.2
Wollheim attracted considerably more acclaim for his writing as an art critic. He was a
regular contributor to the contemporary art magazine, Modern Painters, and an
acknowledged expert on the Western tradition of painting. That he was a connoisseur in
the traditional sense is attested by invitations to address institutions devoted to such an
approach, including the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge,
where he presented ‘Giovanni Morelli and the Origins of Scientific Connoisseurship’,
reproduced in On Art and the Mind (Wollheim 1974). Wollheim had a singular capacity for
giving sustained attention to a painting, and apparently could sit in front of a single
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painting for hours. Such sustained attention enabled him to attend to the details of the
work, and, through these details, to gain a deep understanding of what they reveal about
the meaning of the work of art. In this sense, he was a true connoisseur. But it is also
(p. 480) interesting to consider the similarity between the connoisseur’s attention to
details and what they reveal on the one hand, and the psychoanalyst’s attention to what
seemingly trivial details reveal on the other. His art criticism blends together with his
philosophy of art (and his application of the hypotheses of psychoanalysis) in the most
celebrated achievement of his mature philosophy: the Mellon Lectures that he gave at the
National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1984, subsequently published as Painting as an
Art (Wollheim 1987).
Adrian Stokes (1902–72) was an artist and writer who exerted a profound personal and
intellectual influence on Wollheim, a debt repaid in the form of a collection of Stokes’s
essays that Wollheim edited (Stokes 1972). Stokes was psychoanalysed by Melanie Klein
in the 1930s, and this experience deeply informed his art criticism. In his introduction
(Wollheim 1972) to The Image in Form: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes, Wollheim
discusses the influence of Kleinian psychoanalytic theory on Stokes’s criticism, notably
Stokes’s treatment of the distinction between carving and modelling in sculpture in terms
of Klein’s paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. Wollheim’s introduction and
Stokes’s essays are of interest both for the intrinsic value of Stokes’s psychoanalytically
informed criticism and for the influence that this has on Wollheim’s psychoanalytically
informed philosophy. Wollheim explains of Stokes (1972: 29):
by the time we reach the later writings, it becomes for the reader the most natural
thing in the world—in the world of art, at any rate—to assimilate a shape to a
feeling, or to equate the use of a specific material with a fantasy. In these works
we catch the unmistakable voice of psychoanalytic culture.
This voice is likewise a feature of Wollheim’s late writings, where he develops similar
assimilations.
However, Wollheim was first and foremost a philosopher of art. Whereas ‘epistemology’
and ‘theory of knowledge’ are interchangeable, ‘aesthetics’ and ‘philosophy of art’ are not
necessarily so. Aesthetics in modern philosophy is traditionally dated to Baumgarten’s
(1750) Aesthetica, where it means knowledge obtained through the senses, and then to
Kant’s (1790/1987) treatment of aesthetics as the study of the pleasure we derive from
sensory experience of natural objects and artefacts. Under the influence of Hegel
(1835/1975), however, there was a shift away from thinking about the faculty of taste and
the ability to appreciate natural beauty, towards thinking about works of art as
manifestations of the spirit of the age. This resulted in a preoccupation with art as a
cultural practice that leads Hepburn (1966) to lament philosophy’s neglect of natural
beauty. This fixation with art as a distinctive cultural tradition gave rise to Duchamp’s
Fountain and Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, and to the institutional theories of art, formulated and
popularized by Danto (1964), and embellished with greater detail by Dickie (1974),
according to which any object could count as a work of art, irrespective of whether it had
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any inherently valuable properties, just so long as it was accorded the status of a work of
art by a representative of the art world.
Wollheim was a staunch critic of the institutional theory of art, and published an
(p. 481)
influential essay refuting it, ‘The institutional theory of art’ (Wollheim 1980). He was,
however, much more attuned to the philosophy of art that gave rise to this theory than he
was to the older idea of aesthetics. That he privileges the artistic over the aesthetic is
seen most strikingly in his account of the aesthetic attitude. Despite a long tradition
identifying the aesthetic attitude with disinterested pleasure (Shaftsbury 1900) or an
experience involving ‘psychical distance’ (Bullough 1912), Wollheim’s solution is to assert
that the aesthetic attitude is nothing more than the mode in which one attends to an
object as a work of art (whether or not the object is, in fact, a work of art).
Art and Its Objects has received much critical acclaim as a systematic statement of the
problems of the philosophy of art. It poses the question ‘What is art?’ at the outset, and
introduces a working hypothesis that, in all art forms, a work of art is a physical object.
The investigation of this problem forms the basis for a wide-ranging essay. While there
are some indications of the influence of Freud, these tend to be passing references
scattered throughout.
It is in Painting as an Art that Freud’s influence is most keenly seen. The book is a study
of the philosophy of painting, discussing what the artist does and what the spectator sees
when looking at a painting executed by a genuine artist. In developing his arguments,
however, Wollheim embarks on indepth discussions of specific paintings. These are much
more than mere examples to illustrate philosophical points. They are highly sophisticated
readings of paintings, in which all Wollheim’s prowess as art historian and critic is on
display. Psychoanalysis informs his theoretical account of the capacities that spectators
draw on when looking at paintings, and the use artists make of these, as well as his
reading of specific paintings, to extraordinary effect.3
On Wollheim’s Philosophy and his

Psychoanalysis
In an endorsement printed on the back cover of The Thread of Life (Wollheim 1984),
Bernard Williams is quoted as summing up Wollheim’s philosophy in the following terms:
Wollheim’s is a very original and extremely interesting approach to the philosophy

of the mind, bringing together three areas of reflection not often combined: the
philosophy of mind, psychoanalysis, and ethics.
That is a good statement both of what is original about his approach, and what is valuable
about it. Wollheim’s subject matter is difficult to pin down in the conventional (p. 482)
terms of analytical philosophy. He was interested in practical life and the psychology that
informs how we live our lives. More particularly, he was interested in the phenomenology
of mental states—a peculiar combination of the intentionality and the feeling of the
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various mental states—and the way in which the intensity of the feeling of certain mental
states affects the way we live our lives. This may be found in two volumes of collected
essays—On Art and the Mind and The Mind and its Depths (Wollheim 1993)—as well as
two monographs—The Thread of Life and On the Emotions (Wollheim 1999).
The Thread of Life is a revised version of the William James Lectures that Wollheim gave
at Harvard University in 1982. The purported subject of the lectures is the question:
‘What is it to live the life of a person?’ In providing an answer to this question, Wollheim
touches on a range of issues including personal identity, the nature of the mind, and
meta-ethics. To each of these, he brings a psychoanalytical perspective, and, although he
demonstrates an understanding of the contemporary literature on these topics, his aim is
not to address them head-on, but to develop his own account of what it is to live the life of
the person, while showing, along the way, how his theory addresses contemporary issues.
Drawing on psychoanalysis, Wollheim sketches out an account in which living the life of a
person is a process in which a person’s past manifests itself (in a disguised way) in the
person’s psychology such that it affects the person’s mental states, dispositions, and
behaviour by colouring the person’s present orientation to the future through a distorting
lens of the past.4
On the Emotions is a revised version of the Ernst Cassirer Lectures that Wollheim gave at
Yale University in 1991. It provides a philosophy of emotion that is addressed only in
passing in The Thread of Life. Wollheim does not give a conceptual analysis of emotion,
but instead argues that the emotions must be understood in terms of their characteristic
history, through which a past experience of satisfaction or frustration of desire comes to
colour the way we perceive the object that we believe precipitates this satisfaction or
frustration. The emotion is the attitude that we develop towards the precipitating factor,
when our attention shifts from the earlier experience of satisfaction or frustration and
settles on the object that precipitated it. We then experience this as the object of an
attitude (or emotion) that colours our perception of the object in light of the past
experience.
With this spotty précis of Wollheim’s philosophy, our attention turns to his approach to
psychoanalysis. It is necessary to say something about his experience and understanding
of psychoanalysis, before considering how this fits into the general approach of his
mature philosophy. Wollheim was not a psychoanalyst. He did undergo a lengthy analysis
with the Kleinian psychoanalyst Dr Leslie Sohn. His analysis very clearly is an implicit
influence on much of his writing, and is sometimes discussed explicitly.5
Wollheim’s most sustained treatment of psychoanalysis is to be found in his Freud

(p. 483)
(1991). As an intellectual biography of Sigmund Freud it strives to afford an exposition of

Freud’s thought and its development. It stands in contrast to Wollheim’s later (and more
original) work, in which he develops ideas that he finds in Freud (and Melanie Klein),
rather than providing a faithful exposition of them.6 Given Wollheim’s interests, two
observations about Freud are particularly pertinent: the first concerns Wollheim’s
Page 6 of 21

conviction that Freud should be understood as a scientist and psychoanalysis as a

science; the second, that Freud does not offer much insight into art.
In Freud, Wollheim is adamant that Freud’s theory of mind and psychology needs to be
seen as a science that is continuous with neurology, and, to this end, devotes the second
chapter to the aborted Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud 1895). Wollheim
subsequently defends Freud’s empirical method in ‘Desire, Belief, and Professor
Grünbaum’s Freud’ (in Wollheim 1993). In the last chapter of Freud, he deals with
fragments of Freud’s social thought, but acknowledges that there is nothing approaching
a systematic social theory or social ethic. He says nothing about Freud’s comments on
art, although he does deal with Freud’s remarks about Leonardo, Michaelangelo’s Moses,
etc. in ‘Freud and the Understanding of Art’ (in Wollheim 1974).
These points are worth emphasizing because they might seem to be at odds with
Wollheim’s project. He is interested in art, culture, psychology, and reflecting on the
human condition. He believes that psychoanalysis has much to offer our understanding of
these things. Yet he is also convinced that psychoanalysis is properly to be understood as
a science, and that Freud, despite his personal interest in art, does not demonstrate a
profound understanding of it in his writing. Of course one might take exception to these
claims. What is interesting, however, is the way he is able to recruit the insights of Freud
and psychoanalysis notwithstanding his convictions about them.7
Wollheim believes that psychoanalytic theory provides an accurate account of human

psychology. And he is quite clear that the most accurate psychoanalytical theory is the
one that descends from Freud to Melanie Klein and thence the Kleinian school (which
included his own analyst, Leslie Sohn), following the British Psychoanalytical Society’s
‘controversial discussions’ of 1942–4. It is not possible to investigate comprehensively
(p. 484) his treatment of psychoanalysis in this chapter. Instead, attention shall focus on a
single idea that is central to classical psychoanalytical theory and the psychoanalytically
informed philosophy that Wollheim develops by drawing on it: projection.8
On Projection and the Human Condition

Although projection is one of the most celebrated concepts of the psychoanalytic corpus,
it also has a history in philosophy that stretches back well before Freud. Freud
introduced projection into psychoanalysis as a defence mechanism (e.g. Freud 1911). It is
a means of coping with anxiety or a painful emotion: the mind projects its own mental
state onto another mind, and, in doing so, gains a measure of relief. In philosophy, it can
be traced back at least as far as Hume (1739–40/2000). For Hume, projection is important
for understanding the metaphysics of fact and value. Simon Blackburn (1985) argues that
projection is important for understanding the way we use language when we talk about
value.9 Both are doing something quite different from Freud, for whom projection is
important for understanding the psychology of coping with anxiety and painful emotions.
Page 7 of 21

Wollheim is interested in Freud’s sense of projection as a defence mechanism, but we can

also see in his work a concern with the philosophical categories of belief, evaluation, and
perception. So he connects up the psychological and philosophical investigations. When
Wollheim discusses ‘projection’, he is talking about a capacity of the mind to extend
something mental into the world outside the mind. The mind, he suggests, owes this
capacity to the Freudian defence mechanism. Wollheim’s concept of projection is best
understood as a redeployment of a capacity that belongs to a Freudian defence
mechanism: it is only because the mind has this defence mechanism that projection is
possible. The imagination is able to recruit the capacity to project and redeploy it in other
contexts; contexts that are not necessarily ones in which a psychological defence
mechanism has any obvious role.10
Wollheim acknowledges that projection’s function as a defence mechanism is

(p. 485)
lifted from classical psychoanalytical theory. Wollheim (1987) calls this simple projection.
Simple projection involves the mind projecting a mental state or disposition onto another
mind. The consequence of my act of simple projection is that my beliefs about the world
have changed (more specifically, my belief about the content of another mind has
changed), as have my beliefs about my own mind. For example, in order to alleviate my
own feeling of anxiety, I project hostility onto you, and so by imagining it is you rather
than I who feels this way, I alleviate my own unpleasant feelings.
Wollheim also develops a concept of complex projection, which is central to his account of
expressive perception (considered in the following section). He begins with simple
projection, and supposes that complex projection occurs when simple projection is not
possible; that is, when one seeks to project onto an object that one does not conceive of
as possessing a mind of its own. In this case, the mind cannot project a mental state or
mental disposition, because it knows that only other minds can possess mental states and
mental dispositions. So, instead, it projects a projective property which is not a mental
state or disposition, but which is of a piece with the mental state or disposition that the
mind would otherwise project. The projection of a projective property onto something
that does not possess a mind, Wollheim calls complex projection. The essential upshot of
complex projection is that the projective property changes how we perceive the object
onto which we have projected it, i.e. how the object appears to us is changed. This
involves an affective property fusing with a perceptual property, so that sense perception
and affect are experienced together. The consequence of my act of complex projection is
that the world as it appears to me changes (more specifically, my perception of a portion
of nature or a work of art changes by becoming fused with an emotional quality). For
example, I am walking along the bank of an estuary and I feel melancholy. I seek to
alleviate this feeling through projection, and, as there is no one else to project it onto, I
seek to project it onto the estuary itself. I know that the estuary does not possess its own
mind, and so I cannot project the melancholy onto the estuary through simple projection.
So, instead, I project a projective property that is of a piece with melancholy onto the
estuary. My beliefs about the estuary have not changed, but how I perceive it has
changed. My perception of the appearance of the estuary, with its slow-moving current
Page 8 of 21

and the weeping branches of the willow trees, fuses with my feeling of melancholy, so
that the estuary’s appearance seems to have a melancholy quality.
Projection also has a role in Wollheim’s understanding of value and morality. Wollheim
(1984) distinguishes value from morality, and believes that both can be explained
psychologically. He conceives of morality in terms of obligation, and maintains that it has
its origin in the introjection of a frightening voice that tells us that we may not act
according to our natural impulses—a prospect he finds wholly baneful (Wollheim 1999).
Value, on the other hand, has its origin in projection: in order to preserve a state of
archaic bliss or love satisfied, the mind projects this state onto some object (usually a
person) in the world. The sense of ‘projection’ here is given by considering the response
to a person upon whom archaic bliss has been projected which involves neither the belief
that the person is in a state of bliss, nor the fusing of blissfulness with the perception of
the person. (p. 486) Rather, our evaluation of the person changes: we judge the person to
possess value on account of the archaic bliss that we have projected onto them.11
So Wollheim conceives of different forms or senses of projection: mental states and

dispositions can be projected (simple projection); projective properties can be projected
(complex projection); and archaic bliss can be projected (love). These different forms of
projection have different consequences: our beliefs about other minds change through
simple projection; our perception of the appearance of the world changes through
complex projection; and our evaluation of other people’s value changes through the
projection of archaic bliss.
This approach to projection is notable for at least three reasons. First, although Wollheim
begins with the Freudian defence mechanism of projection, he develops it in novel ways
that exceed anything found in the Freudian or Kleinian corpus. Secondly, it is arguable
that Wollheim conceives of projection operating in several different ways: it appears that
there is a variety of different forms of projective experience in his philosophy. Finally,
projection is recruited in a range of different contexts in a way that draws together his
thinking on topics in different branches of philosophy. In doing so, it seems to be central
to his very understanding of the human condition.
For Wollheim, human beings are fundamentally creatures who project their inner life onto
the world in a range of different ways. No creature that lives in the real world is going to
flourish unless the relationship between the creature’s mental life and the real world is
adequately mediated. Wollheim offers us an insight into the range of ways in which
projection mediates our beliefs, evaluations, and perceptions. In doing so, he helps us to
get clearer about human flourishing.
Page 9 of 21

On Projection as the Foundation for Expressive

Perception
Artistic expression has long been a concern of philosophers who seek to account for what
it is that is both distinctive and valuable about art. What makes something count as a
work of art has variously been identified with an object’s representational properties
(Plato 1974), its formal properties (Bell 1913), and its expressive properties (Tolstoy
1898/1995). When it comes to providing an account of the expressive properties of works
of art, attempts have been made to link these to the emotion experienced by the artist
when creating the work (Tolstoy); or the sense in which a work of art might resemble
physiological expression of emotion—just as a Saint Bernard dog’s face resembles the
look of a sad human face (Kivy 1989); or it might be linked to the work’s capacity to
arouse an emotion in its audience (Matravers 1998) or to the work’s capacity to engage
the audience’s (p. 487) imagination in a way that produces some kind of emotional
response (Walton 1988); or, finally, it might be linked to the idea that artist and audience
alike are able to comprehend otherwise incomprehensible emotions through engaging
with the work of art (Collingwood 1938).
Such theories of artistic expression are not the only reason that one might seek an
account of expressive properties and our capacity for expressive projection. Our ability to
perceive emotion in human physiognomy also invites an account of these properties and
capacities in the context of self-expression (e.g. Green 2007) and our possible knowledge
of other minds (e.g. Hampshire 1971). The other context in which we might encounter
expressive properties is in our experience of nature, some portions of which can, from
time to time, seem expressive of emotional states—e.g. the estuary that is expressive of
melancholy. Whatever it might mean for us to identify a portion of nature with a certain
emotion, there is one sense in which this is distinctly different from identifying the quality
of a person’s countenance, gait, or tone of voice with such an emotion. In the
physiognomic case, we are aware that the person possesses a psychology, and that the
emotional quality that we perceive in the person’s appearance might sensibly be thought
to have its genesis in the person’s psychology. In the case of nature, such a line of
thought is not possible (absent anthropomorphism), because we know that the portion of
nature does not possess a psychology to which the emotional quality might be genetically
related. This requires us to distinguish between expression and expressiveness (Budd
2002). An artefact might be an expression of emotion, and this might account for why we
perceive it as being expressive of that emotion. But an object might well seem to be
expressive of emotion without its being an expression of emotion.
Works of art constitute a special category when it comes to expression and

expressiveness. Like physiognomy, artistic creativity gives rise to something that might
be an act of self-expression or a ‘pressing out’ of the artist’s inner condition. As with
nature, we can engage with a work of art as an object that has properties that affect us
independently of anything to do with creative intentions. In §§17–18 of Art and its
Objects, Wollheim indicates that he is aware of these different possibilities, and
Page 10 of 21

distinguishes between art as an expression and the expressiveness of art. He seems to

acknowledge that the emotional qualities can be a pressing out of the inner condition of
the artist, but he does not think that this is all that is involved. He maintains that the
expressiveness of a work of art has much to do with the audience’s capacity to project its
own emotions onto the work of art. It is at this point that we find the beginnings of his
attempt to use projection to explain our capacity for expressive perception of works of
art.12
Complex projection provides the basis for his theory of expressive perception. Wollheim
believes that we perceive melancholy in the appearance of the estuary because we have
projected a projective property that is of a piece with melancholy onto the estuary.
(p. 488) He then moves from the expressive perception of nature to the expressive
perception of art. Wollheim maintains that we can project projective properties onto any
object, and he further maintains that the archaic mind does this when simple projection is
not possible. In some cases, the effect of complex projection is short-lived. In other cases,
the effect is longer lived, because there is a match between the appearance of the object
and the affect that the mind seeks to project. This is because sometimes there is a
relationship of matching between what is being projected and that onto which it is
projected; which relationship Wollheim calls correspondence, drawing on the idea of
correspondance in Baudelaire’s poetry and the visionary Swedenborg’s writing.13
As a defence mechanism, it does not matter whether the projective property is projected
onto an object whose appearance corresponds to it. Relief will be obtained irrespective of
this. But correspondence is a requirement for expressive perception. When a work of
art’s appearance corresponds to the projective property that is projected onto it, the
appearance sustains the projective property, such that the appearance of the object
invites projection, and will be perceived as being expressive of the affect that was earlier
projected onto it. In this way, our perception of the object is changed for as long as the
projection is sustained.
It is not enough, however, for Wollheim to explain why we perceive emotional qualities in
nature when we have projected our own emotions onto it. The interesting situation is not
one in which I feel melancholy, and then perceive the world around me to be melancholy
because I have projected my current melancholy onto it. Rather, the interesting case is
the one in which I do not currently feel melancholy, but when I encounter a work of art, I
become aware that it seems to have a melancholy quality, and this somehow puts me in
mind of melancholy. Wollheim (1993) is adamant that correspondence grounded in
complex projection can account for this. As a contribution to our understanding of artistic
expression, there is something very satisfying about Wollheim’s solution. Claims that
Constable’s Hadleigh Castle, the Mouth of the Thames—Morning After a Stormy Night is
expressive of harrowing sadness no longer boil down to claims about the audience’s
knowledge of Constable’s harrowing sadness when he painted it, or claims that it
somehow resembles the natural expression of a person in the grip of harrowing sadness,
or that it simply causes the audience to feel sad in the ordinary sense. Rather, these give
way to the claim that the painting’s expressiveness is to be explained in terms of a
Page 11 of 21

distinctive mode of perceiving it; such that the sensory perception of the painted surface
and the harrowing affect to which it corresponds are fused together in a single
experience with a distinctive phenomenology that fuses the sensory and the emotional.
Yet, for all its appeal, we cannot let it escape from the host of criticisms that it meets.
First, there are the problems that it presents for classical psychoanalysis. Complex
projection is not to be found in the psychoanalytical canon. It appears to be a case of
Wollheim extending ideas found in Freudian psychoanalysis in a new and original way.
This is an admirable enough project, but it raises worries about whether he has provided
(p. 489) enough evidence to justify this extension. (If it were a case of applying standard
ideas, it might be sufficient for him to appeal to authority, but this is not so
straightforward when he extends those ideas.) So, even if one accepts the legitimacy of
psychoanalytical theory, it might be argued that psychoanalysis does not provide
philosophical authority for Wollheim’s innovation.
Secondly, there are the philosophical objections. Budd (2001) provides a close analysis of
Wollheim’s theory and its weaknesses. He argues that Wollheim’s argument fails to prove
that expressive perception has its origin in complex projection; fails to give an adequate
account of correspondence; and fails to demonstrate that correspondence is anchored in
complex projection. Budd claims that Wollheim relies too much on stipulation, and that he
cannot provide an account of complex projection that has the precision required for a
philosophical analysis. Wollheim (2001) concedes to Budd that aspects of his theory are
imprecise, indefinite, and merely programmatic, but suggests that these are inherent in
any theory of expressive perception, at least given the limits of our current understanding
of it.
Thirdly, the whole approach might be misguided. Budd, whatever his criticisms, seems to
appreciate the appeal of such an account of expressive perception, were Wollheim able to
deliver it. It might be objected, however, that it is a mistake to look for such an account.
Wollheim maintains that there is something melancholy about the estuary in the sense
that something about its appearance actually corresponds to melancholy. This is
something more than an imagined relationship between the appearance and the affect.
The Pathetic Fallacy espoused by Ruskin (1856), however, denies that there is anything
other than an imaginary connection between melancholy and the estuary, and so a theory,
such as Wollheim’s, that attempts to capture how it can be that we experience the
appearance of nature as imbued with some emotional property is misguided.
Finally, there is another line of objection that perhaps trivializes the extent of Wollheim’s
achievement. The account of expressive perception is supposed to demonstrate that
perception and affect can be fused together, and the expressiveness of art is a special
case in which this occurs. Arguing that such a fusion is possible, and that it is a special
feature of the experience of art seems to be innovative. Collingwood (1938: 162)
observes, however, that, at least in the case of colour, the fusing of perception and
emotion is quite natural, and so it only seems remarkable to ‘adult and “educated” people
Page 12 of 21

in what is called modern European civilization’, who are taught to sterilize their colour
perception of any emotional charge.
On Psychoanalysis as an Aid to Understanding

Art
Aside from questions about the nature of art and the kinds of properties that works of art
have, a central problem of the philosophy of art concerns our understanding of the
meaning of a work of art. This is the problem of art criticism. We can ask questions about
(p. 490) what artists do when they create works of art, and what audiences do when they
engage with works of art. There is also a special category of spectator that is the critic.
The critic professes to have a special appreciation of the meaning of works of art, and the
ability to communicate this to others, so that they, too, might come to appreciate the
value that the critic finds in the work of art.
The traditional position maintains that art criticism is a matter of understanding the
meaning of a work of art. Every work of art has a meaning, and this is so because every
work of art is an intentional object: it was created by an artist who had some specific
intention as to the meaning that the object would have. So there are right and wrong
interpretations of the meaning of a work of art. There is a standard of correctness that
determines whether an interpretation is correct or not, and that standard is the artist’s
intention: only interpretations that are consistent with the artist’s intention are correct.
So the challenge for the critic is to reveal the artist’s intention in creating a specific work
of art.
This understanding of criticism was challenged in the twentieth century by the idea that
the true meaning of the work of art is the meaning that it in fact has for any given
audience; not the meaning that the artist intended it to have (Richards 1925). On this
understanding of criticism, the critic’s role is not to retrieve the artist’s intention, but to
articulate the meaning that the work has for the critic. Different people will experience a
work differently, and that is fine. It is only the properties of the work of art that determine
whether interpretations are acceptable, and the critic’s task is to link the subjective
interpretation to the objective properties of the work of art. The imperative to retrieve
the artist’s intention in order to determine the correct interpretation of the work is now
gone.
Wollheim rejects this innovation. He believes that there is a standard of correctness for
understanding the meaning of a work of art, and it lies with the artist. He does not
maintain, however, that it is a matter of retrieving the artist’s intention. In ‘Criticism as
Retrieval’, Wollheim (1980) explains that the critic’s role is to retrieve the creative
process that terminates on the work of art—not the artistic intention behind the work of
art. This, he maintains, determines the correct meaning of a work of art. The creative
process is more expansive than the artist’s intentions, because it includes the vicissitudes
to which the artist’s intentions are subject. Such vicissitudes may be intentional (such as
Page 13 of 21

changes of intention), but others involve chance or elements that are beyond the artist’s
control. The creative process is also said to include background beliefs, conventions, and
modes of production against which the artistic intention is formed. Wollheim maintains
that theory and hindsight may be used to reconstruct the creative process, and finds
archaeology to be a useful metaphor for criticism as retrieval.
Wollheim engages in criticism as retrieval in Painting as an Art. When he engages with

works by the masters, he takes it for granted that psychological factors deep within the
artist’s psyche are often at work in a painting, and that it is possible to retrieve these
when attending carefully to paintings. Wollheim believes that any painter who is
genuinely an artist paints with the intention of imbuing his canvas with pictorial meaning.
For Wollheim, pictorial meaning is concerned with the artist’s attempt to explore the
(p. 491) depths of his emotional life, and, in doing so, he argues for the
‘repsychologization’ of pictorial meaning. He provides compelling readings of the

Antichus and Stratonice paintings, to make the case that Ingre paints out of an
unconscious wish to reorganize his family drama; that Poussin explores morality in
paintings such as Rinaldo and Armida and Armida Carrying off Rinaldo; and that De
Kooning is concerned with infantile experiences of pleasure that shape subsequent
knowledge and desire in such paintings as Untitled III, 1977, Untitled II, 1979, and
Woman I.
All of this clearly draws on psychoanalysis. Yet Wollheim is insistent that he does not
engage in psychoanalysis in the book (1987: 8–9):
To the experience, to the hard-won experience, of painting, I then recruited the

findings of psychology, and in particular the hypotheses of psychoanalysis, in
order to grasp the intention of the artist as the picture revealed it. In these
lectures I have not attempted to ‘psychoanalyze’ individual painters, but, if I am
right in thinking that art presupposes a common human nature, and that pictorial
meaning works through it, then it must be absurd to bring to the understanding of
art a conception of human nature less rich than what is required elsewhere. Many
art-historians, in their scholarly work, make do with a psychology that, if they
tried to live their lives by it, would leave them at the end of an ordinary day
without lovers, friends, or any insight into how this had come about.
Wollheim may not actually psychoanalyse artists, however he comes fairly close to doing
so. He certainly believes that the meaning of great art lies in the attempts of great artists
to engage with the struggles at the deepest parts of their psyche. Whether or not he
succeeds in showing that an artist can explore such concerns through the painted
surface, it is far from certain that these are the only legitimate concerns that an artist
might seek to explore: a great artist might, for instance, be interested in social
commentary or experimenting with the artistic medium without having an interest in self-
analysis.14
Page 14 of 21

On Wollheim as a Guide to Art, Philosophy,

Psychoanalysis, and Life
Why does Wollheim matter for understanding the relationship between philosophy,
psychoanalysis, and art?
First, he demonstrates the dynamic nature of this relationship. For Wollheim, art is not
merely an object of aesthetic appreciation, and certainly not merely an object of scholarly
rumination. It was integral to the way he lived his life. One cannot neatly separate
Wollheim’s creative writing, his criticism, or his theoretical writing from one (p. 492)
another or from his life. That, in itself, is telling for how philosophers of art might
approach their subject more fruitfully. Psychoanalysis was central to his life, writing, and
appreciation of art, and to the way he made sense of these. Indeed, one cannot separate
out Wollheim’s analysis with Dr Sohn from his theoretical writing about psychoanalysis,
or from the way he philosophized, or lived his life. Psychoanalysts will not find this
remarkable, because it is a feature of their training that they must undergo an analysis in
order to analyse others, and on account of the fluidity of the relationship between therapy
and theory in psychoanalysis. It is a more remarkable thought, however, for the analytical
philosopher, and one worth dwelling on.
Secondly, Wollheim exemplifies the riches of pursuing a psychoanalytically informed

philosophy, as opposed to philosophy of psychoanalysis. One of the unifying themes that
we can see running throughout his psychoanalytically informed philosophy is projection
as an activity that is central to being human. This comes out of his engagement with
psychoanalysis, but it moves beyond classical psychoanalysis, and is seen in his treatment
of artistic expression, which turns out to depend upon our capacity for expressive
perception, which is anchored in a modification of the classical psychoanalytical defence
mechanism of projection.
Finally, he restores the primacy of the artist to the meaning of a work of art, but, in doing
so, he adds a psychoanalytical twist: meaning is no longer the artist’s intention, but the
process that he undergoes in creating the work of art. At least in the case of painting, the
pictorial meaning that is retrieved in this process is psychological, and Wollheim
demonstrates how the hypotheses of psychoanalysis may be used to understand the deep
psychosexual issues being explored by the artists through their manipulation of the
painted surface.
In each of these respects, Wollheim provides thoughtful contributions that challenge

established approaches to the subject. That is not to say that he has had a decisive impact
on current thinking. The history of twentieth-century philosophy may well treat him as
little more than a curiosity, a footnote in the development of the major lines of thought.
His writing offers a most valuable inspiration, however, for readers who are captured by
the intensity of certain experiences, and the significance that these experiences have for
us in virtue of their intensity. It demonstrates how one might think and write about such
experiences in a rigorous and analytical way—a challenge that is notoriously difficult
Page 15 of 21

when it comes to discussing the phenomenology of experience. Wollheim did this, in part,
through his training as an analytical philosopher. In major part, it was also because of his
ability to recruit the insights of psychoanalysis in a liberal way that created a
psychoanalytically informed philosophy.15
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Notes:
(1) For an analytical aesthetician’s perspective on Wollheim’s life and work, see Budd
(2005); for a psychoanalyst’s perspective, see Lear (2005); and for an art historian’s, see
Podro (2004).
(2) For further discussion, see Marcus (2015).
(3) For a survey of responses to Wollheim’s philosophy of painting, see the various
contributions to Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting (Gerwen 2001).
(4) For further discussion, see Freeman (2016).
(5) His knowledge of psychoanalysis was recognized by the British Psychoanalytical

Society (which made him an honorary affiliate in 1982), the San Francisco
Psychoanalytical Institute (which made him an honorary member in 1994), and the
International Society for Psychoanalysis (which awarded him for his distinguished
services to psychoanalysis in 1991)—rare honours for those who have not undergone
formal psychoanalytical training.
(6) It is in keeping with his earlier F. H. Bradley (1957), in which he provides an exposition
of the British idealist’s metaphysical system and subsequent misunderstandings of it. For
a comparison between aspects of British idealism and psychoanalysis, see Wollheim’s
Dawes Hicks Lecture on Philosophy at the British Academy, ‘The Good Self and the Bad
Self: The Moral Psychology of British Idealism and the English School of Psychoanalysis
Compared’ in The Mind and Its Depths. For a discussion of F. H. Bradley and T. S. Eliot,
see Wollheim’s ‘Eliot and F. H. Bradley’ in Martin, G. (ed.), Eliot in Perspective (London,
1972); reproduced in On Art and the Mind.
(7) Wollheim’s most significant contribution to political philosophy was ‘A Paradox in the
Theory of Democracy’ (Wollheim 1964). In the realm of social and political thought, he
produced Socialism and Culture (Wollheim 1961), a pamphlet for the Fabian Society. In
terms of the relationship between politics, art, and psychoanalysis, his most fascinating
line of thought is the enigmatic last paragraph of Painting as an Art (1987: 357), when he
concludes his argument for the psychological meaning of painting thus: ‘the societies
across which painting has survived as an art are human societies: that is, societies in
which a common human nature manifests itself … Our belief then in the value of painting
… happily locks together two of the commitments by which I steer: the love of painting,
and loyalty to socialism’.
(8) For a range of perspectives on Wollheim’s philosophy, see the various contributions to
Hopkins and Saville (1992).
(9) Projection comes into philosophy in an important way as a means of understanding the
distinction between fact and value. For Hume, the good and the beautiful are not part of
how the world actually is. They are not properties of objects, but rather are projected
onto objects by subjects. For a subject to claim that an object is beautiful is not to assert
Page 19 of 21

that it possesses some objective property, but that the subject feels a certain way about
the object. Hume speaks of the way that we stain the world with value. So claims about
value are not claims about facts. In the twentieth century, philosophy famously took the
‘linguistic turn’, and its focus became linguistic analysis. A. J. Ayer (1962) established a
way of analysing how we use language when we make value claims, and this classical
statement of logical positivism is subsequently developed by Simon Blackburn (1985). In
some sense, this is simply a development of Hume’s insight. But now the focus has shifted
from understanding the relationship between fact and value (a metaphysical problem), to
understanding the linguistic structure of value claims.
(10) For a comparative discussion of projection in the philosophy of Blackburn, J. L.

Mackie, and Wollheim, see Price (1992).
(11) For a discussion of morality, obligation, and love, see Backstrom (this volume), who
presents an alternative to Wollheim’s understanding here.
(12) The following is a sketch of how Wollheim grounds artistic expression in a

psychoanalytical notion of projection, but for a detailed discussion of Wollheim’s
approach to the expression of emotion in art, see Freeman (2012). Wollheim’s earliest
essay on the topic is ‘Expression’ (in Wollheim 1974) and the mature position is found in
Wollheim (1987) and ‘Correspondence, Projective Properties, and Expression in the
Arts’ (in Wollheim 1993).
(13) A discussion of correspondence is crucial to understanding Wollheim’s theory of

expressive perception, but is beyond the scope of the present chapter. See Wollheim
(1999: 78–80, 1987: 81–4, and 1993: 154–5), as well as Freeman (2012: 59–61) for a
discussion of this concept.
(14) For a critical evaluation, see Herwitz (1991).
(15) Beyond aesthetics, his legacy might be seen in the inspiration that he gave a
subsequent generation of American philosophers who have adopted a psychoanalytically
informed approach to philosophy, such as may be witnessed in the treatment of
philosophical anthropology and ethics, in Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope (Lear 2006), and
the philosophy of mind and psychology in some of the essays in J. David Velleman’s Self to
Self (Velleman 2005).
Damien Freeman
PM Glynn Institute, Australian Catholic University, Australia
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Page 21 of 21

Literary Form and Mentalization

Elisa Galgut

Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language
This chapter argues that literature—or at least certain kinds of literature—facilitates

mentalization. Book reading shares some of the same features as mind reading.
Psychoanalysis, via the work of Hanna Segal and others, has been interested in the
differences between escapist literature and literature that encourages genuine
psychological engagement. This chapter engages that issue via the lens of mentalization.
It focuses specifically on literary form rather than on content, and examines the ways in
which some kinds of literary form facilitate mentalizing capacities. More narrowly, it
shows how different kinds of literary techniques—the free indirect discourse employed by
Jane Austen, the tight structure of the sonnet form—enable different mentalizing abilities
and develop our capacity for self-reflection.
Keywords: psychoanalysis, mentalization, self-reflection, literature, literary form, free indirect discourse, sonnet,
Jane Austen
Elisa Galgut

SINCE its beginnings, psychoanalysis has been used to explore our engagement with art
in general and literature in particular; indeed, the explorations have gone both ways, with
literature used as a resource for psychoanalytic insight. Early psychoanalytic literary
analysis tended to focus on the content of literary narratives—the fate of Oedipus, the
indecision of Hamlet, the typical plots of romance tales where ‘all the women in the novel
invariably fall in love with the hero’ (Freud 1908: 150). Freud does nod towards ‘the
purely formal—that is, aesthetic—yield of pleasure’ (1908: 153) but he provides little
analysis of these formal elements. Hanna Segal, in her seminal 1952 paper, takes a
significant step in shifting the discussion away from the emphasis on content by exploring
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Subscriber: UC Santa Barbara Library; date: 17 March 2019

its relationship with literary form. Segal develops an account of the reparative function
that aesthetic formal elements can play in tragedy in particular, and art more broadly.
The orientation of this chapter follows Segal in falling broadly within the British object-
relations tradition, which I largely take for granted.1 But I take the conversation between
psychoanalysis and literature in a slightly different direction. Much psychoanalytically
informed art criticism focuses primarily on the relationship between artworks and
unconscious mental processes—the ways in which art gives expression to unconscious
fantasy, for example, or its relation to dreaming2 or daydreaming. I do not dispute the
importance of the unconscious in both the production and appreciation of art. However,
my focus in this chapter explores more closely the ways in which formal elements of
literature can facilitate higher-order mental functioning.
The philosopher Jenefer Robinson has argued that ‘formal or structural devices in
(p. 496)
literature play the role of coping mechanisms’ by directing ‘the sequence of appraisals
and reappraisals that we engage in as we read, and in particular, they act as coping
strategies … which enable us to manage or deal with the explosive fantasies’ (Robinson
2005: 196) found in the content of the work. In this chapter, I too focus on the importance
of literary form by showing some of the ways in which formal properties enable our
capacities for mentalization. Although it is likely the case that even basic engagement
with narrative stories facilitates the capacity for mentalization,3 I shall argue that
particular forms of literary techniques are better suited for the facilitation of mentalizing
capacities, particularly the capacity for meta-cognitive functions. This is so because
literature provides us with the opportunities for insight and focused attention not often
afforded to us in ordinary life. Here I focus on two forms of literary technique: the
stylistic feature known commonly as ‘free indirect discourse’ and the poetic form of the
sonnet. This discussion is not intended to be exhaustive of the ways in which literary form
may facilitate mentalization, but rather to gesture in the direction in which new insights
from psychoanalytic thought shed light on how reading literature—and especially good
literature—enables the development of cognitive and emotional capacities. There has
been a surge in the analysis of readers’ responses to fiction using the insights of cognitive
science, with particular reference to simulation theory to explain how we engage with the
minds of (fictional) others.4 I would like to make a case for expanding our accounts of
engaging with literary texts via insights gleaned from psychoanalysis. By doing so I am
also making a claim for a humanistic view of literature, which holds that literature can
tell us important things about ourselves as thinking and reflective subjects.
A Word about Mentalization

Mentalization—and its related verb mentalizing—was reintroduced into the contemporary
psychoanalytic literature by Fonagy, Target et al. in their groundbreaking book on
mentalization and its relation to development. ‘Mentalization’ refers to our ability to
understand those around us and to predict their behaviour, as well as the ability to reflect
upon our own minds and actions. There is some discussion in the literature about whether
the term adds something new to psychology—and particularly to psychoanalysis—or
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whether it’s just old wine in new bottles. Cognitive psychologists, for instance, have been
using terms such as ‘theory of mind’ and ‘simulation’ to describe similar skills. I argue
that the terms mentalization and mentalizing add a dimension to our theoretical
understanding of how we understand minds by focusing on certain meta-cognitive
abilities which are both amenable to and enriched by the incorporation of psychoanalytic
theory. (p. 497) Mentalization as a theory of mind also grounds mentalizing capacities
firmly within affective capacities, which cognitive science approaches tend not to do.
The psychoanalyst Jeremy Holmes has usefully delineated four interrelated aspects of
mentalization:
1. Mentalizing is a ‘meta-cognitive’ phenomenon—thinking about thinking—and thus

requires higher-order beliefs.
2. ‘Mentalizing is concerned with the meanings which we attribute to our own and
others’ actions—that is, to the implicit or explicit hypotheses we use to understand
why we, or another, might have thought or done such and such a thing.’
3. Mentalization is a key aspect of persons—one might say that it is both central to
how we respond to another as a person, as well as an important constituent of
personhood.
4. ‘Mentalizing is not a fixed property of mind, but is a process, a capacity, or skill,
which may be present or absent to a greater or lesser degree’ (Holmes 2005: 180).
There has been some discussion about whether the notion of mentalization is sufficiently
psychoanalytic: does it differ from—say—appealing to a theory of mind in order to explain
how we engage with and understand others? Mary Target (2008) addresses this issue,
and argues that mentalization is part of psychoanalysis ‘understood in a broad sense’.
Mentalization as a process means thinking about what someone does, and what
happens between people … in terms of psychological meaning and motivation.
Psychoanalysis clearly contributes unique understanding of particular kinds of
motivation … The theory of stages of mentalization underlying the development of
personality and relatedness … is psychoanalytic in that it concerns the
unconscious foundations of mental functioning, which may be dynamically as well
as descriptively unconscious.
(Target 2008: 262)
I am in sympathy with Target’s understanding of mentalization as falling within a

psychoanalytic understanding of the mind; indeed, part of the motivation for its adoption
is to distinguish it from other kinds of terms (such as ‘theory of mind’) regarding how we
understand the minds of others. Mentalization, in both its theoretical origins and its
clinical use—its relationship with attachment theory, its use in the treatment of patients
diagnosed with borderline personality disorder—is steeped in ways of understanding the
mind that are psychoanalytic at heart. This indicates a fundamental difference between
the concept of mentalization and that of theory of mind as used within cognitive science.
The two concepts are clearly compatible, but discussions about theory of mind in
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cognitive science tend to refer mainly to mental states involving propositional attitudes—
beliefs and desires—without locating this discussion in a particular psychological theory.
Theory of mind ‘fails to encapsulate the relational and affect regulative aspects of
interpreting behaviour in mental state terms’ (Fonagy 2008: 3). As noted earlier,
mentalization is not only a meta-cognitive phenomenon, but it is also a meta-emotional
(p. 498) one—it refers to an ability not only to think about emotion, but to use emotion to
think about thinking.5 Mentalization thus points to the ways in which emotion and
cognition are interdependent—‘comprehension of intentional mental states encompasses
the understanding of feelings, and the representations which underlie them’ (Diamond
and Kernberg 2008: 236). Elliot Jurist claims that affectivity—the capacity to reflect on
affective and emotional states—is ‘a specific aspect of mentalization’ (Jurist 2005: 428);
Jurist stresses the importance to mentalization of such factors as the attachment bond
between infant and caregiver, and the relationship between the development of affect and
the development of a sense of self. Jurist concludes that mentalization ‘has an intrinsic
relation to affects’ and ‘fosters a new, more differentiated kind of affect and self-
regulation’ (2005: 428). In the discussion that follows, I hope to show how certain kinds
of literary form foster mentalization by requiring the reader to develop not only meta-
cognitive capacities, but meta-emotional ones as well.
Another way in which the concept of mentalization differs from a cognitive psychology
picture of the mind is that both theory of mind and its rival, offline simulation theory,
rarely refer to unconscious mental phenomena, and offline simulation theory often makes
use of sub-personal explanations to explain our ability to understand and predict the
behaviour of others. Mentalization, on the other hand, is a personal level ability—as
Holmes notes, the term is used to refer to the ways in which we attribute meaning to
ourselves and to others. The implication that follows from this is that mentalization flows
from a view of the self as a moral and emotional subject.6 This personal level view of the
mind is consistent with the claim that cognitive and emotional capacities are interrelated
—mentalization may refer to different aspects of the mind, such as thinking or imagining,
for example, but a personal level approach sees these different aspects as interrelated
aspects of a whole self. This is consistent with a psychoanalytic understanding of the
mind—as Target says, broadly understood.
By understanding the concept of mentalization psychoanalytically, as opposed to through

the lens of cognitive science, we understand in more nuanced ways what may impede or
foster it. For instance, a psychoanalytically informed concept of mentalization can explore
the ways in which overly rigid defence mechanisms may hinder mentalization. Or an
appeal to Freud’s distinction between primary and secondary processing can explain how
primary modes of thinking dominated by unconscious phantasy and irrational defensive
strategies may overwhelm our capacities to mentalize, while secondary processing
governed by rationality and responsiveness to reality may enhance them. Mentalization
requires not just an unconscious response to another’s state of mind but an ability to
think about such responses. Mentalization is indicative of one’s ability to think about
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one’s own inner life as well as the inner lives of others; it indicates a capacity for
flexibility in judgement and an ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.
Mentalization and Literature: Narrative

(p. 499)
Voice
Mentalization provides a useful lens through which to examine the ways in which
literature affects us cognitively and emotionally. Although she does not use the term
‘mentalization’, the philosopher Susan Feagin, in her account of the pleasure we take in
tragedies, argues for the importance of meta-cognitive responses. Feagin’s explanation of
our experience of tragic pleasure is to argue that our enjoyment of the aesthetic
representation of events involves a meta-response that is—and should be—absent from
our engagement with such events were they to happen in real life. Tragic pleasure is
thus:
a meta-response, arising from our awareness of, and in response to, the fact that
we do have unpleasant direct responses to unpleasant events as they occur in the
performing and literary arts. We find ourselves to be the kind of people who
respond negatively to villainy, treachery, and injustice. This discovery, or reminder,
is something which, quite justly, yields satisfaction.
(Feagin 1983: 98)
Although Feagin proposes that this meta-response is partly constitutive of our pleasure in
tragedy, it is my contention that literature more generally can enable the development of
these kinds of meta-responses, which constitute an important aspect of mentalization. I
hope to show how literature—via a close examination of literary form and technique—can
enable better mentalization by heightening our awareness of the development of our
thought processes. Different literary forms or techniques may enable these capacities in
different ways. In the following discussion, I explore two of the ways in which this might
occur.
There are a variety of means by which novelists can make a reader aware of the mental
states of characters: she can, inter alia, adopt the position of omniscient narrator; she can
present the thoughts of a character in the first person, or she can quote what a character
says. All of these techniques require some kind of mentalizing capacities on the part of
the reader. But some, I argue, are better than others. Compare these three passages:
A: He was unspeakably happy with her; she governed his household so cleverly
and economically that they seemed to live in luxury. She was full of attentions for
her husband, spoiling and coaxing him, and the charm of her person was so great
that six years after their marriage M. Lantin discovered that he loved his wife
even more than during the first days when he knew her.
(Guy de Maupassant, ‘The Jewels’ (1956): 370)
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B: Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep
this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and
sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest
childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and
transfix the moment (p. 500) upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James
Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of
the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother
spoke, with heavenly bliss.
(Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1996): 9)
C: As Mr Shepherd perceived that this connexion of the Crofts did them no service
with Sir Walter, he mentioned it no more; returning, with all his zeal, to dwell on
the circumstances more indisputably in their favour; their age, and number, and
fortune; the high idea they had formed of Kellynch Hall, and extreme solicitude for
the advantage of renting it … It succeeded, however; and though Sir Walter must
ever look with an evil eye on anyone intending to inhabit that house, and think
them infinitely too well off in being permitted to rent it on the highest terms, he
was talked into allowing Mr Shepherd to proceed in the treaty, and authorising
him to wait on Admiral Croft … Sir Walter was not very wise; but still he had
experience enough of the world to feel, that a more unobjectionable tenant, in all
essentials, than Admiral Croft bid fair to be, could hardly offer.
(Jane Austen, Persuasion (1997): 17)
The de Maupassant short story (passage A) is told from the perspective of the omniscient
narrator; we are privy to the thoughts and feelings of M. Lantin from this external
perspective (and later in the story via dialogue). We are also given the reasons for M.
Lantin’s happiness—his wife’s cleverness, attention, spoiling, and coaxing—but we rely on
the viewpoint of the narrator for our understanding of M. Lantin. De Maupassant,
according to the literary critic Wayne Booth, ‘prided himself on writing
“objectively” ’ (Booth 1983: 184), and this objectivity is apparent in the extract above.
Understanding M. Lantin’s happiness does require some mentalizing capacities, but not
very sophisticated ones—the reader is told what he is feeling, and why he is feeling it.
Comparing the de Maupassant extract with that from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (passage
B) reveals a difference in the mentalizing capacities that are required. In the Woolf
passage, the reader is asked to reflect more carefully on the mental states of six-year-old
James Ramsay. This is done via the lens of the omniscient narrator, whose voice presents
a subtlety and complexity to what, in the hands of a more prosaic writer, would have been
a simple description of a child’s excitement about an anticipated outing. The reader is
provided with insight into the complex ways in which mental states may influence one
another, but this insight is the author’s, not the child’s. We are removed, momentarily,
from the scene as we inhabit the author’s bird’s eye view, and then are returned to it. The
reader’s understanding of young James is seen through the lens of the author’s views
about human psychology, as evidenced by phrases such as: ‘Since he belonged … to that
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great clan’ and ‘since to such people even in earliest childhood’. In this passage Woolf is
presenting the psychology of the young James Ramsay through a theoretical lens of folk
psychology; we are made privy to his mental states, but at a distance—we don’t really see
the world through his eyes. The extract from Woolf’s novel is illustrative of writing that
requires a more advanced form of mentalizing than required by the de Maupassant
extract, but it does so from the point of view of an omniscient narrator whose perspective
remains outside that of her character’s.
The Austen piece (passage C) provides examples of what’s known as ‘free indirect
(p. 501)
discourse’ or ‘narrated monologue’; this is the literary technique whereby the first-person
thoughts of a character are written in the grammatical third person. Through free
indirect discourse, ‘the immediacy of the inner voice’ of a character is relayed to us by
the narrator who is not also a character in the novel (Cohn 1966: 104). Free indirect
discourse, especially in the hands of a great writer, allows for the presentation of a
multiplicity of perspectives. It works most powerfully when invisible and provides the
author with stylistic flexibility. As the literary critic James Wood notes: ‘Thanks to free
indirect style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through
the author’s eyes and language, too. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once’ (Wood
2008: 11). In the Jane Austen passage, we see how this habitation of both omniscience
and partiality provides the reader with a multiplicity of perspectives on the minds of the
characters and by doing so facilitates mentalization.
Jane Austen’s Persuasion narrates the reunion of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth.
Years earlier, before the novel begins, Anne was persuaded by a friend of the family, Lady
Russell, to reject Wentworth’s early proposal of marriage on the grounds that the match
was not worthy of her. Lady Russell acts as a mother figure to Anne, whose own mother
died when Anne was a teenager. Despite being in love with Wentworth, Anne agrees, and
Wentworth departs for the navy, angry and heartbroken. Eight years later Wentworth
returns, and Persuasion narrates their reunion as they chart their way to a second chance
of happiness. The context for Passage C is as follows: Anne’s father, Sir Walter, part of the
landed gentry but fallen on hard times, is considering renting his family home, Kellynch
Hall, to Admiral Croft. Admiral Croft, a naval officer and thus held in low esteem by Sir
Walter, is married to Wentworth’s sister. Mr Shepherd, Sir Walter’s lawyer, is trying to
persuade Sir Walter to go through with the lease arrangement.
Passage C is written in the third person, but the views are not only the narrator’s—they
include those of other characters in the novel. Mr Shepherd, aware that Sir Walter is
unhappy about renting out his family home, especially to a naval officer related to the
rejected Captain Wentworth, is eager to list the Crofts’ merits as tenants. It is he—and
not the narrator—who considers the Crofts’ ‘age, and number, and fortune’ to be
‘indisputably in their favour’, and it is he who claims that they had formed a ‘high idea’ of
Kellynch Hall. Through the author’s voice we hear the shrewd sales pitch of the lawyer.
This provides us not only with Mr Shepherd’s own views, but also with the narrator’s
assessment of him as a wily lawyer. The narrative then shifts to the voice of the narrator
(‘It succeeded, however’), and then presents Sir Walter’s perspective (‘Sir Walter must
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ever look with an evil eye’). The narrator’s omniscient perspective returns with the words
‘Sir Walter was not very wise’, which is quickly followed by a qualification (‘but still he
had experience enough of the world’), which again shows Sir Walter’s own perspective—
we see how Sir Walter is looking for reasons to accept the Crofts as tenants because he
needs the income, despite his reservations about their station. This is also reflected in the
convoluted language of the final sentence of passage C, which shows Sir Walter’s internal
wrestle between pride and need. In this short passage we are presented (p. 502) with
several viewpoints: Mr Shepherd’s views of Sir Walter and Admiral Croft; Sir Walter’s
views about himself and Admiral Croft; and the narrator’s views. We are made privy to Sir
Walter’s anxieties about social status, which the narrator mocks, although it is a mockery
tempered with sympathy. What is even more remarkable about this particular passage is
that these are minor characters, and yet the narrative voice subtly shifts perspectives and
encourages reflection on all their points of view,7 even those with whom we don’t
sympathize.
Austen’s use of free indirect discourse or narrated monologue is subtle, and the reader
must pay careful attention to the changes in tone and voice. The reader is asked not only
to think about the respective viewpoints as they are presented to us, but is also asked to
draw implicit conclusions regarding how the narrator—who, in Austen’s world, functions
as a moral ballast—views her characters. Austen’s use of free indirect discourse allows
the narrative flow to remain uninterrupted as it directs the reader’s gaze without drawing
attention to itself. ‘In Persuasion, the narrative perspective shifts more often and more
quickly than in Emma, and the multiple perspectives serve to obscure the origin of
judgement. Multiple perspectives are presented, so in one scene the perspectives of all
characters involved are simultaneously presented’ (Chen 2014: 37).
In another passage, Jane Austen uses free indirect discourse at a significant point in the
novel when Anne realizes that Wentworth may still have feelings for her. Wentworth,
noting that Anne is tired, assists her into a carriage:
Yes,—he had done it. She was in the carriage, and felt that he had placed her
there, that his will and his hands had done it, that she owed it to his perception of
her fatigue, and his resolution to give her rest. She was very much affected by the
view of his disposition towards her which all these things made apparent. This
little circumstance seemed the completion of all that had gone before. She
understood him. He could not forgive her,—but he could not be unfeeling.
(Austen, Persuasion (1997): 67)
In this passage, the voice of the narrator and the voice of Anne are unified—the narrator
is telling us what Anne feels by presenting her point of view. Even more remarkable is
that this point of view is one that presents Wentworth’s perspective about Anne—it is a
moment of insight that is central in the development of their reunion. Had this passage
been presented from a purely third-person perspective the effect on the reader would
have been very different: we would have been made privy to Anne’s thoughts from the
outside, and then we would have decided, based on the reliability of the narrative voice,
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whether or not to accept the description. But here we are presented simultaneously with
the narrator’s perspective and with Anne’s, which in this passage speak together. This
dual and harmonious perspective strengthens the reader’s sympathy for Anne; it also
(p. 503) strengthens our belief in Wentworth’s feelings for Anne. The reader is thus invited
to think about Anne’s thoughts from both an external and internal perspective—her views
about Wentworth and the effects this has on her. We are also asked to consider
Wentworth’s thoughts and feelings, as well as our own assessment, as readers, of these
views. This multiplicity of perspective lies at the heart of mentalization, as we seek to
understand others, our views of others, their views of us, and their views of each other as
well.
Ordinary life does not often present us with such opportunities for insight; via
engagement with the writings of a skilled author such as Jane Austen, the reader can
sharpen her mentalizing skills and develop capacities for thinking about others through a
variety of perspectives, including her own. Literature thus not only requires mentalizing
skills, but helps to develop and sharpen them. Persuasion, like many of Austen’s novels, is
concerned with the ways in which individuals learn to understand themselves in relation
to others, and to tease out their real motivations from ones that are imposed by social
convention. One of Austen’s gifts is to place the reader in the centre of this journey of
discovery in so subtle a way that the reader must constantly reflect on her own position
within a matrix of views.
Literary style, then, in addition to content and narrative structure, is extremely important
for engaging readers’ sympathies, and formal stylistic techniques employed by a writer
are able to limit or expand the ways in which readers are asked to reflect on the minds of
literary characters. The more perspective-sharing we are asked to do, and the more
subtly our imaginations are engaged, the greater the mentalizing capacities that are
required. This is partly the case because one of the hallmarks of cognitive development is
the understanding that beliefs don’t merely reflect the world, but rather provide one of
many perspectives on the world. When the capacity to adopt multiple perspectives is
interwoven with an understanding of how perspectives interrelate and alter our
understanding, both cognitive and emotional, of a character’s motivations, our
mentalizing capacities are strengthened. This, I am arguing, is what certain kinds of
narrative styles can accomplish, especially in the hands of a gifted writer with a highly
developed skill for nuance and observation.
Mentalization and Poetic Form: the Sonnet

From an examination of a narrative style, I now turn to the tightly structured form of the
sonnet, and offer a close reading of one of the finest exemplars of the sonnet form—
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30. Poetic form is another way in which the formal elements of
literature enable mentalization, albeit in a way different from that of free indirect
discourse. Similarities between poetry and the development of mentalization are noted by
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the psychoanalyst Jeremy Holmes, but for Holmes, the focus is on psychoanalysis, not
poetry. Holmes writes:
(p. 504)
Poetry and psychotherapy are strange, yet compatible, bedfellows. Both regularly
arouse suspicion and incomprehension, yet people often turn to them when in
states of heightened emotion—love, elation, despair, confusion, loss and
bereavement. As I have suggested, both could be seen as means with which to
enhance the capacity for mentalising: the capacity to ‘think about feelings’ or to
be ‘mind-minded’ … Finding the right words in the right order (Coleridge’s famous
definition of poetry) is a crucial skill for therapists (and their patients) as well as
poets, since the appropriate image or metaphor can mirror or evoke feelings in
the listener in a way that facilitates empathic attunement.
(Holmes 2016: 43)
In exploring the connections between poetry and psychoanalytic therapy, Holmes claims
that both enable ‘reverie’, and the ‘constant interplay between feelings and language’.
Both poetry and psychoanalysis enable the working-through of emotions by using
language to give form to unconscious thought and feeling. Much has been said of the
reparative nature of literature by Hanna Segal; of aesthetic form, she writes:
formal modes of speech … the strictness and rigidity of the rules are all, I believe,
an unconscious demonstration of the fact that order can emerge out of chaos.
Without this formal harmony the depression of the audience would be aroused but
not resolved. There can be no aesthetic pleasure without perfect form.
(Segal 1952: 204)
Aesthetic form can function to order thought and emotion, and also to arouse it; for
example, the limerick shares with the sonnet the feature of being highly structured.
Spiller notes that the last line of the limerick combines ‘conclusion with
repetition’ (Spiller 1992: 4) or it functions as ‘the completion of the narrative, adding an
extra item of information but sacrificing the echo, or reprise, of the opening line’ (Spiller
1992: 5). The form of the limerick creates an expectation in the reader, who ‘expects the
returning rhythm of the last line to bring with it, like the fifth act of a play, a solution of
previous incompleteness’ (1992: 5). The brevity of the limerick, together with its use of
repetition and other stylistic features, arouses in the audience amusement rather than,
say, pity or fear. Another example where aesthetic form dictates a reader’s (or listener’s)
cognitive and emotional responses is the joke: the philosopher Noël Carroll attempts to
provide a theory of jokes by examining their ‘underlying structural principles’ (Carroll
2003: 322). He posits that the structure of the joke is strict: ‘a joke is an integral unit of
discourse with a marked beginning and an end’ (2003: 322), and its distinguishing
feature is the punch line, which ‘concludes the joke with an unexpected puzzle whose
solution is left to the listener to resolve’ (2003: 323). Carroll draws an analogy with
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Aristotle’s account of tragedy: just as the formal features of a tragedy are necessary for
the arousal of tragic katharsis, so too are the formal features of jokes in part responsible
for the emotional response (laughter) to which they give rise.
The importance of form in structuring a reader’s emotional and cognitive responses is

evident too in the sonnet: ‘compact, shapely, highly finished, and able to contain, in
concentrated form, almost all that is human’ (Spiller 1992: 1). The sonnet is ‘probably the
(p. 505) longest-lived of all poetic forms, and certainly the longest-lived of all prescribed
forms. A prescribed form, or closed form … is one whose duration and shape are
determined before the poet begins to write’ (1992: 2, italics in original). Strictness of
form primes the reader’s expectations, and enables complex and often difficult emotions
to be contained8 in ways that bring insight and enable mentalization. The figurative
elements of poetry—metaphor, allusion, imagery, rhyme, rhythm, and so on—contribute to
the meaning of the poem via the vehicle of poetic form, which unites both form and
content. The tight structure of the sonnet is able to convey the development of thought,
and its brevity allows the reader to follow and keep in mind at a single reading changes in
ideas and emotional affect. The sonnet form is thus in a unique position for both depicting
and exemplifying the thinking process.
The sonnet form is tightly structured: in the Petrarchan sonnet, which is divided into two
quatrains and a sestet, the first eight lines often act as the development of an argument,
and the sestet as its conclusion. In the Elizabethan or Shakespearean sonnet, where the
structure is three quatrains and a rhyming couplet, the couplet often takes on the role of
presenting a ‘summing up’ (Spiller 1992: 4) statement. The sonnet is also well suited as a
vehicle for address: ‘The sonnet … always gives an impression of immediacy, as if it
proceeded directly and confessionally or conversationally from the speaker’ (Spiller 1992:
5) and is an ideal vehicle for introspective thought. The literary critic Helen Vendler notes
that Shakespeare’s sonnets are ‘inward, meditative, and lyrical’ (Vendler 1997: 5) rather
than ‘outward, expository, and narrative’. The lyric form in the sonnet ‘gives us the mind
alone with itself’ (Vendler 1997: 19). Vendler argues that the significance of the sonnet—
and of Shakespeare’s sonnets in particular—does not necessarily lie in mining the
meaning of the poem—sometimes a sonnet can be paraphrased as making such banal
claims as ‘I have insomnia because I am far away from you’ (Vendler 1997: 13). Vendler
argues rather that the ‘appeal of lyric lies elsewhere than in its paraphrasable
statement’ (1997: 14). What, then, does lie at the heart of the Shakespearean sonnet?
Wherein lies its value? Vendler argues that great poets use in their sonnets a variety of
techniques—temporal, emotional, semantic, dramatic—to allow the development of
thought within the tightly knit fourteen lines. She argues that one of the ways poetry is
able to elicit emotions is by capturing the thinking process that underlies literary
creation: ‘Shakespeare learned to find strategies to enact feeling in form, feelings in
forms, multiplying both to a superlative degree’ (Vendler 1997: 17). Poetry—and the
sonnet form in particular—reveals the evolution of thought in symbolic form; in poetry,
thinking is ‘made visible’ (1997: 9). Poems may develop arguments, but unlike pure
philosophical arguments, poetry appeals to emotions as well as to thoughts and ideas.
Indeed, I hope to show that, in the best poems, the distinction between a thought and an
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emotion is an unstable one—mentalization develops precisely when our cognitive and

affective abilities work in harmony.
(p. 506) Sonnet 30
Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 30 illustrates the lyric thoughtfulness of which the sonnet
form is capable.
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye (unused to flow)
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee (dear friend)
All losses are restored and sorrows end.
The poem represents within its brief length ‘a multi-layered self, receding through panels
of time’ (Vendler 1997: 165). ‘We might give such temporal panels the names “now”,
“recently”, “before that”, “yet farther back”, “in the remote past” ’ (1997: 165). The time
periods are associated with particular emotional experiences that tell of the experience of
loss and mourning:
In receding order, before the weeping ‘now’ (T5, where T = Time), there was the
‘recent’ dry-eyed stoicism (T4); ‘before that’ the frequent be-moanèd moan (T3) of
repeated grief; ‘further back in the past,’ the original loss (T2) so often mourned;
and ‘in the remote past’ (T1), a time of achieved happiness, or at least neutrality,
before the loss. These panels of time are laid out with respect to various lacks,
grievances, and costs, as we track the emotional history of the speaker’s
responses to losses and sorrows (the two summarizing categories of line 14).
(Vendler 1997: 165; italics in original)
Like all Shakespeare’s sonnets, Sonnet 30 is divided into three quatrains and a rhyming
couplet; each quatrain focuses on a particular idea or image, and they are then woven
together to form a coherent unity. Thought and thinking form a central theme of this
poem. In line 2, the present act of remembering is likened to the summoning of memories
before a judge—the critic Stephen Booth notes that ‘sessions’ refers to ‘the periodic
sittings of judges, a court of law’ (Booth 2000: 181). Seymour Smith ‘notes that the legal
metaphor “adds the notion of guilt and punishment to that of nostalgia” ’ (quoted in
Booth: 181). The repetition of the ‘s’ sound brings to mind the sweep of judges’ (p. 507)
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robes; it also serves to connect the act of memory (‘summon up remembrance’) with the
vocal (‘sighing’) and the visual (‘seeing’)—since ‘sigh’ and ‘sight’ were often confused in
Renaissance English.
It’s interesting to note that the poet does not ‘remember’, but rather ‘summon[s] up
remembrances’—as though the memories are mental states distinct from the subject who
remembers. This brings to mind Bion’s distinction between ‘thoughts’ and ‘thinking’—the
former refers to unconscious mental states that are not subject to secondary processing
and are unavailable for mentalization. It is only when we are able to think our thoughts
that we start to develop mentalizing capacities. It is important to remember that
mentalizing capacities are both inward and outward looking—the ability to mentalize
refers both to our capacity to understand our own minds as well as the minds of others.
When thoughts merely occur to the mind, the mind is experienced as passive rather than
active. To reference Richard Wollheim, ‘When the mind is passive, thoughts are conceived
of as effecting an entry into it, from the outside’ (Wollheim 1974: 35), in contrast with an
active mind that regards itself as both the source and the location of thoughts.9 As argued
earlier, mentalization is a ‘meta-cognitive’ phenomenon, and involves thinking about
thinking; a passive mind in which thoughts passively occur is unlikely to exhibit well-
developed mentalizing capacities. As the narrative of the poem develops, so too does the
speaker’s ability to connect different aspects of his past in a way that brings forth a new
understanding of his emotional life, as well as a renewed ability to mourn.
As noted in the previous section on free indirect discourse, one of the characteristics of
mentalization is the ability to adopt multiple perspectives simultaneously. This ability
would also include the ability to adopt hypothetical perspectives regarding one’s own life.
In Sonnet 30, the narrator is able to step out of the narrated time and to comment,
explain, or evaluate the actions of his past self. The layered perspectives in Sonnet 30
capture well this aspect of meta-cognition. The reader of the sonnet, by being required to
adopt imaginatively these various perspectives on the speaker’s past selves, acquires new
emotional insights in a way that real life does not often provide. A failure to engage in
this imaginative work of perspective-taking will result in an aesthetic failure to appreciate
the poem: the sonnet asks us to flex our mentalizing muscles via our imaginations.
Another feature of mentalization is the ability to integrate felt experiences with

intellectual and emotional ones. Dimaggio et al., in a paper that examines the
autobiographical memories of psychiatric patients, found that typically those patients
who suffered from ‘significant forms of psychopathology’ (Dimaggio et al. 2012: 1)
exhibited disturbances in memory: among other features, their memories lacked ‘a
pictorial quality which might enable a listener to imagine what happened’ and memories
often lack detail ‘which would lend an opportunity to understand the memory as a unique
experience’ (2012: 2). Sonnet 30 is characterized by bringing into focus the very situated
experiences—both emotional and somatic—of the speaker; past losses are expressed
through sighing, weeping, moaning, and an eye drowning in tears. These images evoke in
the reader a visceral response to the speaker’s grief, which can then be processed. The
thoughts about old losses bring (p. 508) forth new tears—‘with old woes new wail’. The
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alliteration is onomatopoeic—as is the word ‘sigh’ in line 3—and conjures up the physical
sensations of weeping. This also emphasizes the connection between past and current
expressions of grief. By engaging imaginatively with the work of mourning, the reader too
embarks on an emotional journey with the speaker of the poem.
At the start of the poem, we are presented with a speaker at odds with himself and who,
via the act of remembering and the activity of writing, is attempting to achieve emotional
resolution. The imagery in the first two stanzas centres on the eye and the mouth, which
do the work of mourning. Perhaps the visual similarity of the open mouth/eye—the ‘o’—
assists with the resemblance. In stanza one, the speaker does not speak but ‘wail’—an
infantile, preverbal expression of sadness. Stanza two is also dominated by oral and visual
images: the speaker ‘drown[s] an eye’ for ‘precious friends hid in death’s dateless night’.
This is a strange image of the eye drowning itself with its tears, as though enacting a kind
of suicide. This suggests a strong identification by the speaker with the dead friends—
since the dead friends are hidden and can no longer be seen, the eye (‘I’) will refuse to
see. Midway through stanza two, though, the speaker ‘weep[s] afresh’, which suggests a
move back into the present with the capacity to mourn still intact. Wailing has progressed
to ‘moaning’, which seems a more articulate form of grieving. In stanza three, the
relationship between past and present grief is again emphasized via a repetition in the
language—the speaker ‘grieves at grievances foregone’, he moves ‘from woe to woe’ to
‘tell o’er/The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan’, which he ‘new pays’ as if not ‘paid
before’. The repetition illustrates how emotions that were experienced in the past are
being re-experienced in the present in a way that strengthens and intensifies them. It’s
not the case that the speaker is simply remembering past grief, but he is re-experiencing
and reworking it in the present. This suggests an integration between past and present
selves. Note how the emotional movement of the poem is facilitated by its structure—
later quatrains are built upon the images and emotional tonality of previous ones and
draw the reader forward towards the concluding couplet. Note also the change in
imagery—the emphasis on bodily expression via the mouth (sighing, wailing, moaning)
and the eyes (seeing, weeping) is transformed to more ego-syntonic activities—grieving
and speaking (‘tell o’er’). The sonnet which began with ‘thoughts’ ends with ‘thinking’—
lost emotions that were once buried and disavowed have become revived, re-experienced,
and worked through so that they can be ‘thought’ about.
Sonnet 30 investigates the nature of grief and mourning—its vicissitudes over time, the
ways in which it may transform the self and be transformed in turn. By the end of the
sonnet, we note how the emotions have also transmuted into meta-emotions—their object
is not only lost loves and deceased friends, but also the past emotions of grief and loss.
The speaker in Sonnet 30 does not simply give expression to painful emotions, but
reflects on these emotions, and in reflecting changes them. In a short fourteen lines, the
sonnet expresses and re-enacts the process of mourning—from an identification with the
departed loved ones in fantasy to a more mature kind of grief that has moved from an
initial denial to acceptance.
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Indeed, I would argue that the brevity of the poem intensifies the emotional experiences,
and also requires that the reader interweaves the various time-slices of the speaker’s
(p. 509) multilayered self. The closed form of the sonnet asks the reader to keep in mind a
range of emotional experiences and perspectives in a way that a longer poem could not
do as effectively. We are induced to identify emotionally with the speaker via
imaginatively identifying with his actions. We too are familiar with weeping for dead
friends, and feel bereft when we relive old sorrows. The descriptions of grief in the
sonnet, immersed in bodily images, have the effect of creating a visceral identification
with the speaker. It is via this identification that we can engage in the working through of
these emotions. This account of the reparative aspect of creativity by Hanna Segal
captures this idea well:
The reader identifies with the author through the medium of his work of art. In
that way he re-experiences his own early depressive anxieties, and through
identifying with the artist he experiences a successful mourning, re-establishes his
own internal objects and his own internal world, and feels, therefore, re-
integrated and enriched.
(Segal 1952: 205)
Although Segal focused on the reparative aspects of creativity, I think her general
insights also help explain how literary and creative artworks facilitate mentalization.
Sonnet 30 both describes and enacts an experience of mentalization, in part via
encouraging the emotional identification with the dramatic speaker to which Segal refers.
This ability to see from the perspective of another forms a central aspect of mentalizing
capacities; the ability to then reflect further upon these various perspectives and subject
them to re-examination contributes to the development of higher-order cognitive and
emotional capacities.
Some Final Comments

The examples discussed in this chapter of the ways in which formal features of literature,
such as narrative style and sonnet form, may facilitate mentalizing capacities are clearly
not exhaustive. This chapter takes a small but hopefully important step in making the
case for the importance of stylistic features of artworks, as opposed to focusing only on
their narrative content. An implication of this claim is that different genres will facilitate
different kinds of emotional and cognitive responses and meta-responses. I have focused
to a large extent on the ways in which formal literary features that encourage perspective
taking facilitate mentalization. Although I think that the ability to adopt multiple
perspectives is an important feature of mentalization, I do not want to suggest that it is
the only one. For example, other stylistic features of poetry, such as rhyme, rhythm, and
imagery, may evoke emotional responses in particular ways: these will then contribute to
the overall experience of the literary work, sometimes by working harmoniously together,
sometimes by creating tensions that require resolution. The ways in which stylistic,
formal, and narrative elements work together or pull apart forms part of the complexity
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of literary works and our engagement with them. In ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’,
Freud drew parallels between the work of the creative writer and (p. 510) the child at play
—both create ‘a world of phantasy’ which they invest with ‘large amounts of emotion—
while separating it sharply from reality’ (Freud 1908: 144). On this view, the purpose of
creative writing is the expression of desire—often unfulfilled—via the imagination. There
is no doubt much truth to this comparison; but where the creative writer of good literary
fiction differs from the mere teller of tales is by tying this expression of fantasy to the
deeper psychological work of attaining insight. The literary writer crafts the expression of
unconscious fantasy in a way that transforms it so that it can be understood. In the
abstract to this chapter I wrote that book reading shares some of the same features as
mind reading: reading (good) literature enables us to develop—if partially—the same
kinds of mentalizing capacities as we acquire in therapy or analysis. When we read, we
engage in a kind of conversation, which shares some features of the ‘peculiar
conversation’10 that is psychoanalysis. This view of both literature and psychoanalysis
places them at the heart of a humanistic endeavour—reading the great writers makes us
more human because we share in their insightful humanity. Reading—like analysis—is at
heart relational; our minds develop in consort with others.
References
Austen, J. (1997). Persuasion. New York: Dover Publications (Original work published
1817).
Booth, W. (1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Booth, S. (2000). Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press.
Bray, J. (2007). ‘The “dual voice” of free indirect discourse: a reading experiment’.
Language and Literature 16(1): 37–52.
Carroll, N. (2003). ‘On jokes’. In Beyond Aesthetics (pp. 317–335). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Chen, S. (2014). ‘Austen’s narrative perspective and the problem of interpretation in

Emma and Persuasion’. Tulane Undergraduate Research Journal 1: 32–39.
Cohn, D. (1966). ‘Narrated monologue: definition of a fictional style’. Comparative

Literature 18(2): 97–112.
Currie, G. and Ravenscroft, I. (2002). Recreative Minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Maupassant, G. (1956). ‘The jewels’. In 88 Short Stories (pp. 370–377). London:

Cassell & Co Ltd.
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Diamond, D. and Kernberg, O. (2008). ‘Discussion’. In F. N. Busch (ed.), Mentalization:

Theoretical Considerations, Research Findings, and Clinical Implications (pp. 235–260).
New York/Sussex: Analytic Press.
Dimaggio, G., Salvatore, G., Popolo, R., and Lysaker, P. H. (2012). ‘Autobiographical
memory and mentalizing impairment in personality disorders and schizophrenia: clinical
and research implications’. Frontiers in Psychology 3: 1–4.
Feagin, S. (1983). ‘The pleasures of tragedy’. American Philosophical Quarterly 20(1): 95–
104.
Fonagy, P. (2008). ‘The mentalization-focused approach to social development’. In F. N.

Busch (ed.), Mentalization: Theoretical Considerations, Research Findings, and Clinical
Implications (pp. 3–56). New York/Sussex: Analytic Press. (p. 511)
Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., and Target, M. (2002). Affect Regulation, Mentalization,
and the Development of the Self. New York: Other Press.
Freud, S. (1908). ‘Creative writers and day-dreaming’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The
Hjort, M. and Laver, S. (1997). Emotion and the Arts. New York: Oxford University Press.
Holmes, J. (2005). ‘Notes on mentalizing—old hat, or new wine?’ British Journal of

Psychotherapy 22: 179–197.
Holmes, J. (2016). The Therapeutic Imagination: Using Literature to Deepen

Psychodynamic Understanding and Enhance Empathy. Oxford: Routledge.
Jurist, E. L. (2005). ‘Mentalized affectivity’. Psychoanalytic Psychology 22(3): 426–444.
Kidd, D. C. and Castano, E. (2013). ‘Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind’.
Science 342: 377–380.
Lear, J. (2005). Freud. Oxford/New York: Routledge.
Mar, R., Oatley, K., and Peterson, J. (2009). ‘Exploring the link between reading fiction
and empathy: ruling out individual differences and examining outcomes’.
Communications 34(4): 407–428.
Nichols, S. (2004). ‘Imagining and believing: the promise of a single code’. Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62(2): 129–139.
Robinson, J. (2005). Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and
Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Segal, H. (1952). ‘A psycho-analytical approach to aesthetics’. The International Journal of

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Segal, H. (2000). Dream, Phantasy and Art. Hove/New York: Brunner-Routledge.
Spiller, M. R. G. (1992). The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction. London:

Routledge.
Target, M. (2008). ‘Commentary’. In F. N. Busch (ed.), Mentalization: Theoretical

Considerations, Research Findings, and Clinical Implications (pp. 261–279). New York/
Sussex: Analytic Press.
Vendler, H. (1997). The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.
Wollheim, R. (1974). On Art and the Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wood, J. (2008). How Fiction Works. London: Jonathan Cape.
Woolf, V. (1996). To the Lighthouse. London: Penguin Books (Original work published
1927). (p. 512)
Notes:
(1) A great deal of contemporary literary criticism that explores the themes of novels,
plays, and poetry via the insights provided by psychoanalysis owes much to the French
psychoanalytic school, which is not my focus.
(2) For a fuller discussion on film and dreams, see Cox and Levine (this volume).
(3) See, for example, Kidd and Castano (2013), and Mar, Oatley, and Peterson (2009).
(4) See, for example, Currie and Ravenscroft (2002); Nichols (2004); and Hjort and Laver
(1997).
(5) I am grateful to Michael Lacewing for this observation.
(6) I would like to thank Richard Gipps for this observation.
(7) This seems borne out by empirical research: in an experiment designed to test
whether free indirect discourse requires that readers shift their points of view while
reading, the researchers conclude that in some uses of free indirect discourse, ‘the
ambiguity may never be resolved and both points of view may remain in play’ (Bray 2007:
48).
(8) Hanna Segal speaks of the importance of form in the containment of feeling with
regard to tragedy. Tragic form ‘contains feelings which otherwise might be
uncontainable’ (Segal 2000: 90).
(9) See Freeman (this volume) for a fuller discussion on Wollheim.
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(10) I borrow this phrase from Jonathan Lear, which he uses as a title to the Introduction
to his book Freud (2005).
Elisa Galgut
Department of Philosophy, University of Cape Town, South Africa
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Psychoanalysis and Film

Damian Cox and Michael Levine

Those who believe that the psychoanalytic understanding of human nature is broadly
correct will also likely believe that there are essential aspects of film that cannot be
adequately understood without it. Among these are film’s power; the nature of film
spectatorship; and the characteristics of specific films and genres. Why are we attracted
to certain kinds of films—horror films and those depicting violence we abhor? The most
basic claim underlying psychoanalytic approaches to film is that the creation and
experience of film is driven by desire and wish-fulfilment and functions to satisfy certain
psychological, protective, expressive needs of artists and audiences. Psychoanalytic
explorations of film tend to draw together aspects of artistic creation and spectatorship,
as well as accounts of film’s power to move audiences and the nature of film
spectatorship in general—the affective and cognitive significance of the nature of film
experience itself.
Keywords: spectatorship, power, horror, wish-fulfilment, desire, violence, affective and cognitive significance,
protective and expressive needs, human nature, experience
Damian Cox and Michael Levine

PSYCHOANALYSIS is both a set of theories of the structure and workings of the mind and
the psychotherapeutic method based on Freud’s theory of the mind. Those who believe
that the psychoanalytic understanding of human nature and the mind are broadly correct
will also likely believe that there are essential aspects of film that cannot be adequately
understood without it.1 Prominent among these are (i) film’s power; (ii) the nature of film
spectatorship; and (iii) the characteristics of specific films and genres. Why are we
attracted to certain kinds of films, for example horror films and those depicting violence
Page 1 of 21

we abhor?2 Psychoanalytic approaches to film tend to be more unified than piecemeal

approaches that see issues of spectatorship and narrative construction and genre as
discrete questions. However, the fact that psychoanalysis approaches film with a unified
theory of mind, though there is considerable dispute as to its details, should not be
confused with the claim that psychoanalytic approaches are exhaustive and complete.
(p. 514) Richard Allen (2009: 446) says:
Orthodox psychoanalytic theories of art have focused on [1] the relationship

between the creation of art, sexuality, and unconscious mental life, and a great
deal of both film and literary criticism has used psychoanalytic theory to interpret
texts or genres of texts, but the distinctive contribution of film theory to
psychoanalytic theories of art lies in [2] its focus upon the nature and character of
film spectatorship.
From a psychoanalytic perspective [1] and [2 ]are closely related. Freud sought to explain
not just the meaning of texts and their relation to the artist—what the artist is doing and
how art functions both for artists and audiences. He also sought to explain why audiences
took an interest in such works, and how and why art is able to convey phantasies, wishes,
and desires in ways palatable to audiences.3 The most basic claim underlying
psychoanalytic approaches to film is that the creation and experience of film is driven by
desire and wish-fulfilment and functions so as to satisfy certain psychological, protective,
expressive needs of both artists and audiences.
Psychoanalytic explorations of film tend to draw together aspects of artistic creation and
spectatorship. The conditions of a work’s creation and the ways in which it is viewed are
connected, though not identical. Psychoanalytic explorations of film also tend to draw
together accounts of film’s power to move audiences and the nature of film spectatorship
in general (the affective and cognitive significance of the nature of film experience itself).
They also tend to draw together accounts of film’s power to move audiences and the
characteristics of particular genres of films—such as horror films or revenge films.
When it comes to film theory, psychoanalytic influence has been profound. Christian
Metz’s Lacanian account of film spectatorship and Laura Mulvey’s account of the
structure of cinema as grounded in male voyeurism are two very prominent and
influential psychoanalytic interventions in film theory, but the interactions between the
two fields has been long-standing, extensive, varied, and deep.4 In the late 1980s,
however, a group of film theorists overtly hostile to psychoanalytic ways of approaching
film came to prominence. Film studies undertook a cognitivist turn, and one of the
foundational cruxes of cognitivism was a rejection of the psychoanalytic modes of
explanation.5 Cognitivists in film theory attempt to explain basic features of film
experience: audience comprehension, emotional elicitation, character identification, and
aesthetic preference.6 They do so using the resources of contemporary cognitive science
and analytic philosophy, (p. 515) self-consciously eschewing the work of psychoanalytic
theorists. They represent the most trenchant critics of psychoanalytic approaches to the
study of film. In our view, the rejection was premature and exaggerated. We discuss
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cognitivism and its rejection of psychoanalytic approaches to film later in the chapter, but
first we offer a clarification of applications of psychoanalysis. We then explore the
positive side of the story. What relevance might psychoanalysis have to the creation and
experience of film art?
Applying Psychoanalysis to Film

Psychoanalytic aesthetics has drawn from and contributed to psychoanalytic theory.
Freud and psychoanalytic theorists generally have seen art as supporting and enlarging
such theory. For those who accept the basic tenets of psychoanalysis, its engagement with
aesthetics has advanced theory by enhancing the psychoanalytic understandings of mind
and human nature.7 Basic tenets of psychoanalysis that are especially relevant in this
context include such things as the reality of dynamic unconsciousness, the reality of
‘primitive’ (primary process) mental function focused on immediate gratification of
instincts and drives, the centrality of defence mechanisms for managing anxiety, the
emotional meaningfulness of dreams and phantasy. Some features of film spectatorship
are best explained by our tendency to repress and disavow uncomfortable or perverse
desires, and to gain a special kind of gratification from the vicarious satisfaction of these
desires in dreams and phantasies. In dreams and phantasies, representations beset us
and our ordinary modes of self-critical judgement are suspended. Much the same thing
seems to happen, at least sometimes, in film spectatorship.
Much as Freud used what he termed ‘the psychopathology of everyday life’, film and
other arts are used to support the validity of psychoanalysis and theoretically to enhance
it.8 An understanding of art on the one hand and psychoanalysis on the other is mutually
supportive. An understanding of both art and psychoanalysis is furthered by explaining
fundamental features of aesthetics: its significance in virtue of the roles that it plays in
our lives; the relation between artists and their work, as well as between artists and
audiences; and even why there is any art at all.
It is a common misconception of psychoanalytic approaches to film and art generally to

think that if there are exceptions to Freud’s claim that art is driven by desire and wish-
fulfilment, and functions to satisfy certain psychological, protective, expressive (or
whatever) needs of artists and audiences, then one will have shown Freud’s views (p. 516)
about art to be mistaken.9 Clearly, exceptions undermine claims of universal and
necessary truth, but psychoanalytic approaches to film need not make such claims. Wood
(2004: xv) expresses the point this way.
Part of the problem lies in that distressingly common tendency either to totally
accept or totally reject, as opposed to the principle of examining critically. Few
today appear to read Freud or Marx with a view to sorting out what is still valid,
what can be cast off, and what needs to be rethought. Freudian theory is
vulnerable to attack on many points, but not, in my opinion, on the one that
formed The American Nightmare’s psychoanalytic basis: the theory of repression
and the ‘return of the repressed.’ We can all trace the workings of this, surely, in
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our own personal histories and daily lives; it continues to have great resonance in
relation to the horror film . . .
Wood may overemphasize the extent to which the mere unburdening of repression and
the ‘return of the repressed’ is at work in film spectatorship. Repression is just one form
of defence explored in psychoanalytic theory. Nonetheless, Wood makes clear the idea
that psychoanalytic insights into film are not an all-or-nothing, take-it-or-leave-it
phenomenon. Getting clear about the way psychoanalysis may, on the one hand, share the
stage with other interpretative methods and tools and, on the other, characterize some
fairly general aspects of the spectatorship of genres (such as horror films) will be a task
for our discussion of psychoanalysis and genre later. For now, it is worth pointing out the
basic fallacy of rejecting any psychoanalytic theorizing about film or interpreting films
and film genres by problematizing its blanket, universal application. For example, certain
films—say a documentary on an economic crisis such as Craig Ferguson’s Inside Job
(2010)—seem neither to invite nor reward psychoanalytic treatment (as opposed to the
people depicted in the film, who surely do invite such treatment).
Prominent uses of psychoanalysis in film theory throughout the 1960s and 1970s tended
to offer universal and fundamental analyses of the experience of film. Christian Metz
(1982), for example, emphasized the ‘gaze’ and its psychoanalytic significance. The idea
is that the appeal of watching meaningful, moving images on a screen is based on an
identification with the camera and corresponding fetishistic scopophilia. This is an
essentializing move: a way of explaining the key features of all cinematic experience
within a single theoretical perspective. This essentializing approach reached its
apotheosis with ‘apparatus theory’ in the 1970s. Apparatus theory combined
psychoanalytic, semiotic, and Marxist theoretical perspectives in one theory—one that
made the psychoanalytic and ideological character of film spectatorship an inevitable
product of the physical and institutional apparatus of film production (see Baudry 1986).
The attempt to construct an essentialist theory of cinematic spectatorship, one that

characterizes spectatorship of the moving image as such within one overarching theory,
has largely been abandoned. This leaves open the possibility that psychoanalytic insights
are an important and ineliminable framework to explain particular aspects of film (p. 517)
spectatorship. Some writers, however, remain unconvinced of even this.10 For example,
Richard Allen is largely critical of psychoanalytic approaches to film. He describes
‘[p]sychoanalytic theory [as] a theory of the relationship between sexuality and
unconscious mental states … ’ (2009: 446). Part of the reason Allen is critical of
psychoanalytic approaches to film is that he mischaracterizes and oversimplifies
psychoanalytic theory. It is true that psychoanalysis is concerned with sexuality and
unconscious mental states, but it is also misleading as a characterization generally, and
especially as one that can adequately ground the relevance of psychoanalytic theory to
film. It mirrors the untutored idea, along with objections based on that idea, that
psychoanalysis is all about sex. Not only does sexuality have to be interpreted broadly
with reference to bodily and mental pleasures (not sex as ordinarily understood); but
connections between sexuality and unconscious mental states have to be understood in
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relation to the orectic (i.e. to desire and appetite). If this is not done, then it is difficult to
envision psychoanalytic film theory as even getting started.
Gabbard (2001: 5–12), the first film review editor for the International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, gives an exhaustive overview of psychoanalytic approaches to film,
including the explication of underlying cultural mythology, the film as reflective of the
film-maker’s subjectivity, the film as reflective of a universal developmental moment or
crisis, the application of Freud’s dreamwork to film, the analysis of spectatorship, the
appropriation of psychoanalytic constructs by the film-maker, and the analysis of
character in the narrative. These overlap and are by no means mutually exclusive.
Analysis of some films may require several approaches, and it should go without saying
that psychoanalytic interpreters of film do not see themselves, and should not be seen, as
employing the only useful approach to understanding character, narrative, or
spectatorship—not even when such an approach is thought of as necessary. As Gabbard
(2001: 12–14) says:
Some psychoanalytic film critics deliberately mix methodologies for a more

comprehensive reading of a particular text … [When] A multiplicity of theoretical
perspectives is brought to bear … the result is a psychoanalytic film criticism that
understands a particular movie as having multi-layered meanings that are not
immediately apparent to the average viewer.
Nor is it plausible to suppose that the perspectives are all psychoanalytic.
Much of the controversy in applied analysis has revolved around whether the appropriate
subject for analysis is the art object itself or, rather, the biographical features of the artist
that may contribute to our understanding of the forces shaping the artistic creation. Both
may be fruitful subjects for exploration, and psychoanalytic film scholars have (p. 518)
made productive use of both approaches. Obviously, when one applies a psychoanalytic
lens to the text of a film, one cannot hope for a definitive reading. A more modest goal is
to emphasize how psychoanalytic theory can often illuminate what appears to be
happening on the screen and the manner in which the audience experiences it.
To sum up this discussion: psychoanalytic accounts of the nature and function of art and
film should not be taken, as they often are by their critics, as reductive. Psychoanalytic
accounts do not rule out other purposes, functions, and explanations of art. These include
the rational exploration of ideas and feelings as entertaining, as providing cognitive
insights of various kinds, as morally examining the social, political, and personal status
quo.
The Orectic Self: Psychoanalysis, Dreams, Film

Psychoanalysis claims that psychic life is dominated by our orectic nature—that is, driven
by desire and wish-fulfilment. We are not the rational, transparent, self-knowing
creatures we generally take ourselves to be. Art too is orectic. It functions, though not
Page 5 of 21

exclusively, to satisfy psychological needs of artists and audiences, and relates artists to
the audiences in virtue of common desires and satisfying phantasies. Gabbard (2001: 5–6)
for example says:
Just as dreams function as wish-fulfilments (at least in many cases), so do films

provide wish-fulfilling solutions to human dilemmas. In the 1946 classic, Frank
Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, for example, the post-World War II audience
vicariously experienced the magical resolution of three pervasive internal
conflicts: adventure/domesticity, individual/community and worldly success/
ordinary life … the film does not so much resolve these anxieties as push them to
one side … Audiences loved Capra’s film, however, because its ending so
completely disposed of what had briefly returned from the repressed.
Psychoanalysis sees these needs, desires, and phantasies, along with the artist’s often
unconscious intentions, as necessary for interpreting film and for understanding
spectatorship (e.g. spectator satisfaction). Such a view also provides grounds for
psychoanalysis to see art as integral and necessary to living well.
Films function psychoanalytically in various other and related ways as well. Gabbard
(2001: 7) describes some films as ‘reflective of the film-maker’s subjectivity … [as] a
canvas in which the director attempts to work through and repair problematic childhood
experience and conflicts’. And again drawing on the likeness between dreams and film,
he says (2001: 8) that ‘Certain films defy conventional analysis and understanding unless
they are viewed as dreams subject to condensation, displacement and other elements of
Freud’s dreamwork’. Many of the films of Alfred Hitchcock are best understood in this
way. For example, Vertigo (1958) casts its protagonist into a dream-like following of a
phantasy (p. 519) object: its loss, its replacement, and final loss—at which exact point the
protagonist’s vertigo is cured. It is difficult to see how the film can be understood at all
without deploying psychoanalytic categories of explanation.
The alleged connections and likenesses between dreams and film is often emphasized by
psychoanalytic approaches and many are summed up in Allen’s (2009: 448–9) account of
McGinn (2005).
McGinn has explored the film–dream analogy … plausibly noting the way that our
familiarity with dreams tutors our experience of film … Films, like dreams, are
characterized by sensory/ affective fusion … like dreams, they are characterized
by spatial discontinuity and by temporal fixation …. are attention dependent … are
often characterized by a heightened sensation of movement that is linked to the
solicitation of strong emotion … are characterized by the ‘salience’ of every
element, at once compressing information and amplifying emotional impact …
[M]ost contentiously … McGinn claims that in films, like dreams, the minds of
others seem peculiarly transparent to the spectator. The body or face in a dream is
designed to express a given mind, in this sense it is a transparent portal to the
mind in a way that the face of the other usually fails to be. Likewise in films, the
Page 6 of 21

human mind is not merely inferred from bodily criteria, but appears something we
have transparent access to.
Allen (2009: 450) also cites ‘ … many disanalogies between dreams and watching a movie
… the most important of which is that the spectator is wide awake and the images are
real (Metz 1982). The analogy … at best provides a partial understanding of the film
experience and an understanding that is probably not best cashed out in psychoanalytic
terms’.
The analogies between dreams and film spectatorship are nonetheless salient to
understanding film spectatorship. Moreover, psychoanalytic comparison between dreams
and film spectatorship is not pointing to a mere analogy between them, but to a common
explanation of them in terms of psychic functioning. Most obvious here is the psychic
defence against anxiety and corresponding wish-fulfilment of both dreams and film
spectatorship.
A Case Study: Science Fiction Disaster Films

Let us consider an example of this: science fiction disaster films. In her seminal essay
‘The Imagination of Disaster’, Susan Sontag (1965) argues that science fiction films from
the 1950s and 1960s (significantly, during the height of the Cold War), and viewers’
attraction to them, should be seen as reflecting a widely held fear of catastrophe as well
as ambivalence towards science, scientists, technology, and politicians. The films display
anxiety and worry about disaster, nuclear annihilation, and the like, while at (p. 520) the
same time providing easy wish-fulfilling answers to such anxieties.11 A basic claim of
psychoanalytic theory is that dreams function in part to protect sleep. If this is right,
there is a further analogy to be drawn between dreaming and film. The kinds of science
fiction films Sontag discusses function so as to enable people to avoid confronting and
consciously examining their anxiety, as well as consciously considering strategies for
dealing with real problems.12 They function, as it were, to keep us asleep.
It is no surprise that movies (some movies) have long been seen as forms of escapism—
including ones that do not, on the surface, appear as escapist. The films Sontag discusses,
on her own account, really do aid and abet moral and existential escapism. Lest this
sounds overly negative, it should be remembered that psychoanalytically speaking
escapism of this kind is at times as necessary as it is desirable. Such escapism is
generally desirable only temporarily as the real world will not indefinitely be put off.
However, it is a mistake to think that one should or could permanently escape escapism,
just as it is a mistake to think that, psychoanalytically speaking, complete self-
transparency, or a life completely free of neuroses, is possible.
A good deal of what Sontag discusses has to do with catastrophe on a global scale; where
what is being considered is the obliteration of earth or life as we know it on earth. One
thing that Sontag’s essay overlooks—perhaps because the films themselves do not deal
with it, and given the way they function, could not deal with it—is the aftermath of
Page 7 of 21

catastrophe. That is, the rebuilding following extraterrestrial invasion and devastation.
What happens when the monsters are gone? The reason for such oversight is clear. Such
films function, after all, to relieve rather than enhance anxiety and questions about what
is to be done in the aftermath are surely anxiety producing.
Sontag says (1965: 224) ‘From a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster
does not greatly differ from one period in history to another. But from a political and
moral point of view, it does.’ On this view, the imagination of disaster does not change
because psychologically speaking, neither the precipitating concerns and fears (death,
loss of love, meaninglessness), nor the ways in which people’s minds endeavour to
assuage them, substantively differ from disaster to disaster.13
Although science fiction films are ‘strongly moralistic’ (1965: 216), Sontag notes
(p. 521)
that they contain ‘absolutely no social criticism of even the most implicit kind … No
criticism … of the conditions … which create the impersonality and dehumanization
which science fiction fantasies displace onto the influence of an alien It’ (1965: 223). Why
the lack of critical concern? Sontag’s account of the function of these films carries an
implied explanation. Serious social criticism is not merely beside the point, but would also
prevent the films from providing the satisfactions audiences seek. Though the
satisfactions are largely psychological, they may serve to emotionally ground specific
beliefs and, more broadly, one’s cognitive outlook—one’s understanding of reality—on the
social, political, and personal status quo. By their very nature, the science fiction films
Sontag discusses cannot concern themselves with serious social or political criticism,
even though they may express it. Any serious questioning of the moral and political status
quo—conditions that are responsible for the disasters befalling people—would hamper
the operation of phantasy and its production of temporarily satisfying ‘solutions’ to
whatever catastrophe is being depicted.14 Of course, it is possible that science fiction
films offer serious social and philosophical reflection. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) is
a philosophically rich post-disaster film. It follows three men—a scientist, a writer, and
their guide, the stalker of the title—as they plot their way through a forbidden zone, the
site of a mysterious disaster. However, films such as this are not typical of the science
fiction genre and do not generally capture the attention of science fiction fans.
Tarkovsky’s film is first and foremost an art film, not a science fiction film.
Cognitivist Rejection of Psychoanalytic Film

Theory
As noted in the introduction, cognitivists attempt to explain basic features of film
experience using the resources of contemporary cognitive science and analytic
philosophy, self-consciously eschewing the work of psychoanalytic theorists. Without
recourse to psychoanalytic concepts and ideas, they attempt to explain such things as the
identification audiences succeed in making with film protagonists; how audiences are
Page 8 of 21

able to follow the plot of films, given the gaps in narrative and shifting perspectives
characteristic of most films; and whether the moving image is an illusion or not.
The cognitivist film theorist Noël Carroll offers one of the most sustained and trenchant
criticisms of psychoanalytic approaches to film (1988, 1990, 1996, 2004b). His
championing of a cognitivist turn in film studies has been so successful that such
approaches have come to be seen as incompatible with psychoanalytic approaches.
(p. 522) However, this is only the view from the cognitivist side. The key questions of
cognitivist film theory differ from, but do not replace, the key questions of psychoanalytic
approaches to film. In this section, we set out what is at issue in the debate between
cognitivist film theorists and psychoanalytically informed film theorists.
There are two key psychoanalytic claims that cognitivists by and large take issue with.
First, things such as narrative curiosity are not primarily, let alone exclusively, capable of
explaining the pleasures of spectatorship. Second, these pleasures require psychoanalytic
interpretation. If the psychoanalytic account of the mind and psychic life is broadly
correct, then its interpretation of the pleasures of cinematic spectatorship is broadly
correct too. On a psychoanalytic account it is, for example, no more possible to explain
prejudices as cognitive mistakes (e.g. ‘people of colour are lazy; Jews are lascivious’),
rather than in terms of ego defence, than it is to explain the attraction to horror film in
cognitive terms while ignoring our orectic natures.
Cognitivist criticism of psychoanalytic approaches to film is based partly on scepticism

about the credentials of psychoanalysis as a theory of mind and partly on a mistaken
essentialism. We discuss this scepticism later, but first let us consider the essentialist
presupposition of the cognitivists. We mentioned earlier certain essentializing forms
psychoanalytic film theory has taken in the past. We claimed that this tendency to
produce an essentializing theory of the cinema reached its most extreme form in
‘apparatus theory’, the theory prominently advanced by Jean-Louis Baudry and based on
the claim that the apparatus of cinema—the means of the production of cinematic
experience—is essentially a psychoanalytically explicable process. Interpreted as a
totalizing account of the possibility of cinematic experience, apparatus theory suffers
from theoretical overreach. However, it seems plausible to say that the cognitivists’
mistake is to over-react to this and substitute an overreach of their own. Psychoanalytical
insights into cinematic experience are not limited to grand theories such as apparatus
theory; and if psychoanalytic accounts of the orectic nature of our psychic lives, in the
cinema and out of it, have any merit, then we should expect highly context-laden and
partial explanations of cinematic experience to emerge from it. Cinematic experience, its
pleasures, and its dreads, will necessarily depend upon the peculiarities of the subject
and the subject’s psychological history and character. One-size-fits-all theories of
cinematic experience run counter to the fundamental claims of psychoanalytic theory.
However, this does not rule out the possibility of quite general claims being made about
genre and the nature of the filmic experiences elicited by a genre. Genres are
characterized by a commonality of experience as well as structure and narrative.
Page 9 of 21

Typically, we go to a musical film (whether La La Land (2016) or Meet Me in St Louis

(1944)) for a certain kind of experience: musical pleasure, escapist entertainment, the
aesthetic joy of watching people who can dance, dance. The goal, therefore, of
psychoanalytic explorations of genre is to understand the typical experiences of typical
audience members in typical films of the genre. There is a lot of room in this for
exceptions of all kinds; and it is compatible with a realization that there may be not one
kind of typical audience member or not one kind of typical filmic experience of genre.
Proffered psychoanalytic explanations are not essentializing about genre, but are fairly
general in their explanatory ambitions nonetheless.
For several reasons, the best genre for contrasting psychoanalytic and cognitivist
(p. 523)
approaches to cinema is the horror genre. On the one hand, it presents an apparent
paradox—the so-called paradox of horror—which is fertile ground for psychoanalytic
insight. (The paradox of horror is simply the question of why horror films generate
audience pleasure from negative emotions of fear and disgust.) The horror genre appears
highly suited to psychoanalytical explanation as, for a psychoanalytically orientated film
theorist, the horror genre presents a striking insight into the nature of cinematic
phantasy. On the other hand, the genre has been the site of robust cognitivist attempts to
do away with psychoanalytic explanation and replace it with narrative-based
explanations. (Very roughly: audiences enjoy watching horror films because they want to
know what happens when a monster is let loose. Why? Because they find the idea of it
interesting; their curiosity has been piqued.) If the cognitivist rejection of psychoanalytic
approaches to film is to gain real purchase, it will be in virtue of the fact that the
cognitivists can show psychoanalytic explanations of the experience of horror films to be
either wrong-headed or entirely superfluous.15
Cognitivist and Psychoanalytic Accounts of

Horror
Noël Carroll is the chief architect of this cognitivist take on horror film experience.16
Carroll’s account of the (ir)relevance of psychoanalysis to horror films contrasts very
nicely with Schneider’s (2000) account. Carroll (2004b: 263) says:
Schneider points out that in Freud’s [1919] characterization of the uncanny, which
he finds useful for modeling horror, Freud indicates that not only repressed
wishes, but also [the reconfirmation of] surmounted beliefs, can function to
trigger the sense of uncanniness ([Schneider] 2000: 172). These surmounted
beliefs include things like infantile beliefs in the omnipotence of the will and the
belief that the dead can return to life.
The ‘return of the repressed’ temporarily satisfies certain wishes and desires and,
according to Schneider, partly explains our attraction to horror.17
Page 10 of 21

Schneider also discusses an aspect of the uncanny in relation to horror—a favourite of

Alfred Hitchcock’s—known as ‘doubling’.18 Perhaps the most striking example of doubling
in Hitchcock’s oeuvre occurs in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). In that film, Hitchcock tells
(p. 524) the story of two Charlies: a killer, played by Joseph Cotton, and his favourite
niece, Charlotte (Charlie), played by Teresa Wright. The two play off each other, with
parallel and opposing narrative paths. The effect lends a sense of the uncanny to a story
that would otherwise be fairly routine.
Carroll concedes the fact that psychoanalysis might be interpretatively relevant because
it influences the way in which artists and audiences frame their self-understanding. He
calls this a hermeneutical defence of psychoanalytic interpretation.19 However, this
hermeneutical defence does not go very far. He writes (2004b: 259; cf. Carroll 1990):
This defense of the relevance of psychoanalysis to the horror film, however, does
not entail that psychoanalysis is relevant to the interpretation of all horror films.
For, pervasive though psychoanalytic thought may be, it is not the case that in
every horror film one will find evidence of psychoanalytic concepts, scenarios,
and/or imagery.
And again Carroll (2004b: 260–1) says ‘I agree that many horror films deserve a
psychoanalytic interpretation (at least in part), [but] they [psychoanalytic critics] believe
that all horror films should be interpreted psychoanalytically’. But there is no reason to
insist that psychoanalysis is relevant to all horror films. As we have emphasized
previously, it is enough if psychoanalysis is relevant to typical films of the genre and
typical genre-audiences.
The reason those in favour of a psychoanalytic approach would reject Carroll’s

‘hermeneutical defence’ is not because they think all horror films require psychoanalytic
interpretation.20 They reject it because as characterized by Carroll it is beside the point
for the kind of psychological explanations of spectatorship and interpretation of films that
psychoanalytically informed theorists and interpreters seek. Perhaps Carroll would agree.
He says (2004b: 260–1):
One reason why many psychoanalytic critics are apt to reject what I’ve called the
hermeneutical defense of their practice is that they believe that psychoanalysis is
true, (p. 525) whereas the preceding hermeneutical defense does not require that
psychoanalysis be any less wacky than scientology to be apposite in a given
case.21
This gets closer to why psychoanalytically orientated critics reject Carroll’s hermeneutic
defence. Carroll’s disdain is palpable and it is clear that the rejection of psychoanalytic
approaches to film frequently rests on a wholesale rejection of psychoanalysis itself.22
Carroll (2004b: 261) says:
Page 11 of 21

. . . the case for explicating all horror films psychoanalytically will depend on
showing that there is something in the very nature of the horror film that is
peculiarly suited for psychoanalysis. That is, the psychoanalyst needs to establish
that there is something in the essence of horror—something without which a film
would not be a horror film—that is only explicable or that is best explained
psychoanalytically.
Yet one can easily drop the claim that horror film ‘is only [and exclusively] explicable’ in
psychoanalytic terms, and still claim that horror films are largely ‘best explained
psychoanalytically’.
Tudor (1997: 449) challenges just this claim. The psychoanalytic explanation of the
pleasures associated with horror in terms of the return of the repressed, e.g. as offered
by Schneider, is inadequate. He says that ‘it is necessary to pose supplementary
mechanisms to bridge the gap between a general account of repression and the specific
explanation of pleasure, and these supplementary mechanisms lead away from the pure
form of the repression model’. But such supplements will be part of any more complete
explanation of the attraction of horror in terms of the return of the repressed.
Unsurprisingly, there are various and often conflicting accounts of what additional
elements are needed to explain the attraction of horror. Thus, Kristeva’s notion of
‘abjection’, taken up by Barbara Creed in her (1993) theorization of the ‘monstrous-
feminine’ in terms of a Lacanian account of the ‘Real’ and the construction of the
feminine as ‘Other’, seeks to give a more complete explanation of the attraction of
horror.23 The extent to which these notions, and Lacanian psychoanalysis generally, are
compatible with what Freud says about horror and Freudian theory in general, is
controversial. But psychoanalytically informed (p. 526) elaborations on the return of the
repressed, if evidentially defensible, support rather than subvert this model.
Although Tudor regards recourse to additional explanation in terms of psychoanalytic

theory as ad hoc, it need not be. In psychoanalysis as elsewhere, more complete
explanations require additional detail. The return of the repressed may be pleasurable for
a variety of reasons depending on the repressed element and depending also on the
particular spectator. The pleasures of horror, dependent as they are upon the effects of
the repressed, may involve substitutive satisfactions—much like neurotic activity which
provides replacement satisfaction for something that did not occur.24
Carroll (2004b: 264) appears to back away from his claim that psychoanalysis is not
important to interpreting some films and aspects of spectatorship beyond the false friend
of his hermeneutical defence. He says:
that psychoanalysis might not be applicable to all horror films does not entail that
it cannot clarify some. Psychoanalysis is a vast and complex body of ideas,
including not only meta-psychological theories but also observations of
hithertofore scarcely noticed patterns of human behavior. Some of these ideas, if
Page 12 of 21

they are well founded and if they track the phenomena on the screen, may
illuminate otherwise perplexing aspects of particular horror films.
Carroll’s rejection of psychoanalytic approaches dwindles here to the question of just how
illuminating, relevant, and sometimes necessary psychoanalytic approaches are—rather
than whether they are relevant at all. He appears willing to accept some psychoanalytic
observations and insights, but not the theory that explains or supports them. In any case,
the concession is short-lived. He continues (Carroll 2004b: 266):
My own suspicion … is that where most psychoanalytic interpretations of horror

films succeed, it is on historicist grounds, but that may only reflect my skepticism
about how many well-founded, uniquely psychoanalytic observations there are to
be had about recurring patterns of human behavior . . .
In other words, where psychoanalysis is relevant and succeeds with regard to explaining
horror (or anything else), its successes are likely to be rare. Where psychoanalysis does
appear to explain features of the experience of art horror, it is unlikely to be uniquely
insightful. That is, it is likely to be based on observations available from other
psychological perspectives. Psychoanalysis is largely otiose.
A problem with Carroll’s discussion here is his reduction of psychoanalytic explanation to

the observation of recurring patterns of behaviour. As we have argued earlier,
psychoanalysis is also an orectic mode of explanation. Its explanatory power rests, in
part, on the idea that our pleasures are often based on desires that are hidden from us or
disguised for us. Carroll’s attempt to direct the attention of film scholars away from
engaging with psychoanalysis is, in the end, based on a general theoretical hostility to
psychoanalysis. (p. 527) It is not based on any well-developed insights into the nature of
film, the moving image, cinematic spectatorship, and the like.
Conclusion
Psychoanalytic approaches to film have focused on genres such as horror, along with
feminist critiques of aspects of spectatorship such as voyeurism and misogyny that seem
to cry out for psychological explanation. Psychoanalysis also played an important role in
the emergence of grand theories of film in the 1970s, theories such as ‘apparatus theory’.
We have argued that the most significant contribution of psychoanalysis to the
understanding of film is not made through such grand theories of film, but through the
explanation of certain pervasive and striking features of film spectatorship, including the
spectatorship of individual films and typical examples of genre films.
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Gabbard, G. (ed.) (2001). ‘Introduction’. Psychoanalysis & Film, International Journal of

Psychoanalysis (pp. 1–16). Key Papers Series, series ed. Paul Williams. London/New York:
Karnac.
Gabbard, G. and Gabbard, K. (1987). Psychiatry and the Cinema. Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.
Gabbard, G. and Gabbard, K. (1999). Psychiatry and the Cinema, 2nd edn. Washington,
DC: American Psychiatric Press.

Hopkins (eds), Philosophical Essays on Freud (pp. vii–xlv). Cambridge: Cambridge
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Hopkins, J. (1988). ‘Epistemology and depth psychology: critical notes on The Foundations
of Psychoanalysis’. In C. Wright and P. Clark (eds), Mind, Psychoanalysis and Science (pp.
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Humbert, D. (2013). ‘Re-visiting the double: A Girardian reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s

Rope and Strangers on a Train’. Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture
20(1): 253–262.
Kemp, G. and Mras, G. (eds) (2016). Wollheim, Wittgenstein, and Pictorial Representation:
Seeing-as and Seeing-in. London/New York: Routledge.
Lacan, J. (1977). ‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in
psychoanalytic experience’. Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (pp. 1–23). London:
Tavistock.
Levine, M. (2004a). ‘A fun night out: horror and other pleasures of the cinema’. In S.
Schneider (ed.), The Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmares (pp. 35–
54). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (p. 529)
Levine, M. (2004). Racism in Mind, eds M. Levine and Tamas Pataki. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Levine, M. (2015). ‘Freud’s aesthetics: artists, art and psychoanalysis’. In S. Boag (ed.),
Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Mind (pp. 137–162). London: Karnac.
Levine, M. (2016). ‘Wollheim’s ekphrastic aesthetics: emotion and its relation to art’. In G.
Kemp and G. Mras (eds), Wollheim, Wittgenstein, and Pictorial Representation: Seeing-as
and Seeing-in (pp. 241–267). London/New York: Routledge.
Levine, M. and Taylor, W. (2012). ‘War as catastrophe: Jacques Callot’s “Miseries of War”
as moral meditation’. Journal of Art Theory and Practice 13(2): 157–184.
Levine, M. and Taylor, W. (2013). ‘The upside of down: disaster and the imagination 50
years on’. M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture 16:1 Catastrophe issue, http://
journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/author/submission/586.
McGinn, C. (2005). The Power of Movies. New York: Pantheon.
Metz, C. (1982). The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema, trans. C. Britton, A.
Williams, B. Brewster, and A. Guzetti. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Mulvey, L. (1989). Visual and Other Pleasures, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Pataki, Tamas (2014). Wish-Fulfilment in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: The Tyranny of

Desire. London/New York: Routledge.
Plantinga, C. (2009). Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience.
Prince, S. (1996). ‘Psychoanalytic film theory and the problem of the missing spectator’.
In D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (eds), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (pp. 71–86).
Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
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Radford, C. (1977). ‘Tears and fiction’. Philosophy 52: 208–213.
Ray, R. B. (1985). A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980. Princeton,

Rodowick, D. N. (1991). The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference

and Film Theory. New York: Routledge.
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Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 3(3/4): 417–428.
Schneider, S. J. (2000). ‘ “Monsters as (uncanny) metaphors”: Freud, Lakoff, and the

representation on monstrosity in cinematic horror’. In A. Silver and J. Ursini (eds), Horror
Film Reader (pp. 167–191). New York: Limelight Editions.
Schneider, S. J. (ed.) (2004a). The Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst
Nightmares. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Schneider (ed.), The Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmares (pp. 1–
15). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Pyschoanalytic Association 47: 1239–1247.
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University Press.
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other Essays (pp. 209–225). New York: Dell.
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256–268.
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(ed.), Movies and Methods, vol. 2. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (p. 530)
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Masochistic Aesthetic. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Tudor, A. (1997). ‘Why horror? The peculiar pleasures of a popular genre’. Cultural
Studies 11: 443–463.
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Press.
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Žižek, S. (1992). Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in and out of Hollywood. New York:
Routledge.
Notes:
(1) Freud, however, was not an enthusiast. Gabbard (2001: 1–2) claims that ‘The cinema
and psychoanalysis have a natural affinity.’ But he goes on to say that ‘The marriage
between movies and psychoanalysis occurred in spite of Sigmund Freud. As far as we
know, Freud had little regard for the cinema as an art form and appeared almost oblivious
to the development of movies during his lifetime (Sklarew 1999). His attitude was
perhaps best illustrated when Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn offered him a
$100,000 fee to consult on a film he was planning to shoot in 1925. Freud rejected the
offer without a second thought. The New York Times of 24 January 1925 displayed the
following headline: Freud Rebuffs Goldwin: Viennese Psychoanalyst Is Not Interested in
Motion Picture Offer (Sklarew 1999: 1244).’
(2) Tudor (1997: 444) distinguishes between the following two questions. ‘ “What is it
about people who like horror?” and “what is it about horror that people like?” ’
Psychoanalytically speaking, however, these are just two sides of the same coin.
(3) Levine (2015).
(4) Metz (1982); Mulvey (1989). Other examples include: Baudry (1986), Clover (1992),
Copjec (1989), Creed (1993), Rodowick (1991), Schneider (2000), Studlar (1988), and
Žižek (1992).
(5) The publication of David Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film (1985) is the
founding moment of the cognitivist turn in film theory. The pervasiveness of cognitivist
criticism of psychoanalytic approaches to film is on display in such places as the
Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (2009). The entry on psychoanalysis in this
work, by Richard Allen, is robustly critical and sometimes dismissive. We discuss Allen’s
views later.
(6) Prominent cognitivists in film studies include Bordwell (1985), Carroll (1996), Currie
(1995), Plantinga (2009), and Smith (1995).
(7) See Damien Freeman and Elisa Galgut, both in this volume. Also see Kemp and Mras
(2016) and Levine (2016).
(8) See Sterba (1940: 257): ‘The … complemental relationship between the two sources of
information consists then in the theoretical enlightenment about art and the artist to be
found in papers devoted to the psychoanalytic theory of neurosis, while in those papers
devoted to an examination of specific objects of art and artists we are given insight into
more general analytic theories and methods.’
(9) See Pataki’s (2014) account of wish-fulfilment and desire in philosophy and
psychoanalysis, and chapter 17, this volume.
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(10) See Buscombe et al. (1975: 119, 125–6) for criticism of psychoanalytic approaches to
film published in Screen, the leading academic journal for the study of film and television.
‘Our reservations are in three main areas: the unproblematic acceptance of
psychoanalysis implicit in the way it has been presented in Screen; the intelligibility of
the various expositions and applications of it; and the validity of the attempts made to
apply it directly to the cinema’ (119). The objections appear to amount to rejection of the
validity of psychoanalysis in its entirety.
(11) Gabbard (2001: 8) says ‘Part of the appeal of the horror and science fiction genres is
related to the audience’s vicarious mastery of infantile anxieties associated with earlier
developmental crises. The audience can re-encounter terrifying moments involving early
anxieties while keeping a safe distance from them and knowing that they can survive
them.’
(12) Sontag discusses many films. They include War of the Worlds (1953), Conquest of
Space (1955), This Island Earth (1955), The Mysterians (1957), The Day the Earth Caught
Fire (1962).
(13) It is a common mistake to think this ahistoricity excludes a sensitivity to context.

Schneider (2004: 11–12) takes up this issue of historicity in discussing Crane (1994) and
Tudor (1997). He writes: ‘Jonathan Lake Crane … charges those theorists who offer
depth-psychological explanations of canonical horror film monsters and narratives … with
ahistoricity: “In irrevocably linking horror to the unconscious we dismiss, all too hastily,
the possibility that horror films have something to say about popular epistemology, about
the status of contemporary community, or about the fearsome power of modern
technology” (Crane 1994: 29).’ But the psychoanalytic linking of horror to the
unconscious entails no such dismissal. On the contrary, psychoanalysis supports all of
Crane’s claims with a variety of explanatory theses. Similarly, Schneider (2004a: 12)
notes that ‘Tudor finds fault with those “universalizing” explanations of the pleasure
viewers get from watching horror films on the grounds that “it is only possible to speak of
the appeal of a genre in a particular sociotemporal context … [P]sychoanalytic models,
arguably already reductive, will be particularly misleading, conceptually inclined to
neglect the variability of audience responses in the name of a spurious generality”(1997:
456).’ This misunderstanding was addressed earlier.
(14) See Levine and Taylor (2012, 2013).
(15) See Levine (2004a) for a response to criticisms of psychoanalytic film theory’s
approach to horror.
(16) Carroll (1990).
(17) See Schneider (1997, 2000) for an explanation of how (i) the ‘return of the repressed’,
and (ii) the reconfirmation of previously surmounted infantile beliefs addresses the
question of the attraction of horror. Schneider also explains—again in terms of the above
Page 19 of 21

—why certain kinds of monsters and horror films lose their appeal and fail to frighten by
failing to evoke the ‘uncanny’.
(18) A doppelganger (‘double walker’) is a double or second self. In literature and film it is
often portrayed as a kind of copy or mirror image of the protagonist and may symbolically
represent an archetype. See David Humbert (2013) for development of the idea of the
significance of doubling in Hitchcock’s work.
(19) It should be noted that what Carroll calls the ‘hermeneutical approach’ is not what is
generally meant by a hermeneutical approach (e.g. compare it with Paul Ricœur’s
account), but is instead a simple form of contextualism. Psychoanalysis can be and is used
hermeneutically, but not generally in the ways that Carroll claims it can be appropriately
used. The ways Carroll thinks appropriate are indifferent to the truths of psychoanalysis.
They are based only on explicit and implicit authorial intent, but not intent as
psychoanalytically interpreted.
(20) Schneider (2004: 11) puts the point in this way: ‘Just as “one should not assume,
prima facie, that either Freudian psychology or one singular version of psychoanalytic
theory is the key to understanding a text” (Allen 1999: 142), one should not assume that
any version of psychoanalysis, not even any combination of versions, is the key to
understanding every horror text. Most critics object to what they perceive as
psychoanalytic horror film theory’s unsupportable claims of explanatory sufficiency. This
objection appears in a number of forms and cuts across the distinction I have been
drawing between a minimal, epistemically neutral use of psychoanalytic theory and a use
of such theory which depends on the truth of at least some of the particular version’s
substantive theses’.
(21) See Hopkins (1988) and Levine (2004a: 35–40) for a critique of the claim that
psychoanalysis is unfalsifiable.
(22) Stephen Prince (1996: 72–3) states that ‘the primary and to my mind insurmountable
problem with basing general theories of spectatorship on psychoanalysis is that such
theories must remain unsupported because psychoanalysis is a discipline without reliable
data’. Prince endorses Colby and Stroller (1988: 3, 29), who claim that ‘psychoanalytic
evidence is hearsay, first when the patient reports his or her version of an experience and
second when the analyst reports it to an audience … Reports on clinical findings are
mixtures of facts, fabulations, and fictives so intermingled that one cannot tell where one
begins and the other leaves off’. See Levine (2004a) for a critique of these claims.
(23) Tudor (1997: 450) cites The Exorcist, Carrie, Alien, The Brood, and The Hunger as
examples of films in which the monstrous-feminine ‘does play an important role’. It is
unclear why he makes this claim given his apparent rejection of feminist film theory that
employs ‘structural psychoanalysis’.
(24) See Hopkins’s (1982: xxi) discussion of the table cloth lady.
Page 20 of 21

Damian Cox
Faculty of Society and Design, Bond University, Australia
Michael Levine
The University of Western Australia, Australia
Page 21 of 21

Religion: Introduction


This introduction provides an overview of the chapters in this section, which explores
some of the important contributions of psychoanalysis to our understanding of religion,
with particular emphasis on Sigmund Freud’s views. In The Future of an Illusion (1927),
Freud argues that religion—or more specifically, beliefs in the Judaeo-Christian tradition
and its prehistory—is an ‘illusion’, an idea that is not necessarily false, but one that is
produced by the wish for it to be true. Each of the chapters agrees with the notion that
there is a close connection between religious belief and desire, and addresses Freud’s
account of the origin of religion in structures of subjectivity. Topics include Jacques
Lacan’s theory of religion, the implications of psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity for
philosophy of religion, the epistemology of religious belief in relation to the epistemology
of psychoanalysis itself, and Freud’s supposed view that religion expresses a ‘historical
truth’.
Keywords: psychoanalysis, religion, Sigmund Freud, religious belief, desire, subjectivity, Jacques Lacan, wish,
philosophy of religion
THE standard interpretation of Freud’s account of religion goes something like this. In
The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud compares religion—or more specifically, beliefs in
the Judeo-Christian tradition and its prehistory—to an ‘illusion’, an idea that is not
necessarily false, but one that is produced by the wish for it to be true. Let us think about
the human situation independent of the claims of religion. What would human beings
wish the universe to be like, given our situation? The answer, Freud argues, is just how
religion describes the world as being. In other words, religion presents an understanding
of the universe that we can understand as a wish fulfilled.
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The origins of the wish fulfilled by religious belief are two-fold. First, in the history of
humanity, we find ourselves part of an overpowering, uncaring nature. Thus, we need
ways to propitiate the uncontrollable forces we face. And so we seek to be able to control
the forces, e.g. through influencing a god that can do this—the god of the sea or wind or a
God who is God of all things. Or, we can seek to align ourselves with God, to live a good
life that will protect us from the worst effects of these forces. Our security rests in God’s
love for us—if it does not save us physically, it does so in a deeper sense. Second, in our
individual history, as children, we each experience our dependency, our inability to take
care of ourselves. Our wishes are met by our parents, but we soon realize their fallibility
and limitations. Hence, we arrive at the idea of a much more powerful and perfect parent
in God. Thus, argues Freud, we have a naturalistic, psychological explanation of religion
—we can explain the origin of its claims in our wishes and the origin of our wishes in our
experience of reality.
However, we can turn Freud’s approach on its head. Suppose God does exist and created
us. What would human beings wish for—or better—what would human beings desire
deeply? God—the fulfilment of our nature would be to stand in good relationship with
God. Here, however, the desire is realistic, just as the child’s desire to be looked after by
its parents is realistic, necessary for its life and flourishing. Even if Freud (p. 534) shows
that religious belief originates, at least in part, in our wishes, he does not show that those
wishes, and so religious belief, originate simply in response to our helplessness in a
difficult and dangerous world.
If we accept this much—that religious belief is closely connected to desire—as each of the
chapters included here does, there are at least these three paths of thought leading on
from here. First, we may seek to develop or challenge Freud’s account of the origin of
religion in structures of subjectivity. Each of the three chapters included here takes us
down different branches of this path that reclaims religion from Freud’s negative
evaluation of it (see also Black 2006; Hinshelwood 1999). Both Cottingham and Blass, in
different ways, review and deepen the standard interpretation of Freud before going on
to discuss, respectively, Jung and the resources of modern cognitive psychology and
neuroscience, and recent psychoanalytic theories in the British and American traditions
that regard religious belief positively, while Boothby provides us with an overview of
Lacan’s theory of religion.
Second, we can develop the question of whether these accounts of religious belief
undermine, support, or simply bracket as unimportant the truth of religious belief, or
again whether they have some effect on our understanding of what it could be for
religious belief to be ‘true’. This is the main focus of Blass’s discussion.
Third, we may ask what further implications—beyond adding possible reasons for or
against belief in the existence of God—psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity have for
philosophy of religion. There are, of course, different philosophies of religion, drawing on
different traditions in philosophy. Boothby notes the development of ideas from Kant and
Hegel on religion and subjectivity in the thought of Lacan and the modern Lacanian
Page 2 of 5

Žižek. An important project in Cottingham’s previous work (2003, 2014), of which he

provides a clear synopsis here, has been to consider the implications for philosophy of
religion in the analytic tradition (see also Clack 2008). In particular, he criticizes the
dominant ‘epistemology of control’ that reflects only the conscious, detached, analytic
way that we may respond to questions about God. Our best psychological theories
indicate that this needs integrating with an ‘epistemology of receptivity’ that reflects the
direct, intuitive, imaginative, and typically unconscious ways in which we constantly
engage with the world through all our cognition, and may be of yet greater importance in
acquiring the relevant evidence for thinking meaningfully about religion. Here, notes
Cottingham, the epistemology of religious belief (and its necessary reflection in
philosophy of religion) mirrors the epistemology of psychoanalysis itself.
This is a conclusion that Blass shares. After carefully demonstrating that Freud’s later
views on religion changed from those expressed in The Future of an Illusion, she
criticizes recent theories for failing to take the truth of religious claims seriously, yet it
was exactly this point that vexed Freud, and his search for truth is not something we
should lightly set aside (see Gipps and Lacewing, ‘Introduction: Know Thyself’ in this
volume). Blass shows that by Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud arrives at the view
that religion expresses an ‘historical truth’, an impression made on the mind by past
reality, but which does not accurately reflect that reality, because the mind cannot do so
at (p. 535) that time as the events are too primal. The origin of religion in the history of
humanity rests in such events, Freud thinks, but this new account of mental functioning
has implications for primal events in each individual’s life as well. A sense of conviction in
the ‘rightness’—or truth—of an idea cannot be dismissed as wishful, but may reflect some
fundamental aspect of human nature and experience—and this is something that the
psychoanalysis must be attentive to more generally. It is a surprise to find this thought in
Freud’s late work, as it is more often presented by Freud’s critics as an objection to the
‘standard story’.
Lacan’s thought on religion is no less full of surprises, as richly brought out by Boothby.
Lacan understands the mind and its operations along three axes or registers. To
oversimplify hugely, ‘the imaginary’ structures the ego, its initial division as ‘me’ (moi)
from the true ‘subject’ (je) of desire, and its operations of defence and transference. ‘The
symbolic’ concerns the sphere of language and rules/laws more generally, generated
through and regulating our encounter with ‘Others’. ‘The real’ involves our encounter
with what is incomprehensible, both outside and inside us. Where does God (as thought
by us) fit in? Is God part of the incomprehensible real, as Kant argued? Or is God the
ultimate ‘Other’, providing regulation for our lives? Boothby argues that both answers are
correct, unified and coordinated by Lacan’s concept of ‘the Thing’, that which is both
beyond representation and yet can only be thought—symbolized—at all as precisely being
beyond representation. In other words, it is symbolized as a question mark or an ‘X’. The
real and the symbolic thus arise together in human subjectivity, with the first
incomprehensible real being the desire of the Other. Our relation to the real and the
Other is ultimately one of desire, not—as Kant held—of thought. Along the way, Lacan
Page 3 of 5

argues that this account not only explains religion but specific practices, such as
sacrifice, and Christian doctrines, such as the Incarnation.
The important contributions of psychoanalysis to our understanding of religion are not

only, then, Freud’s negative critique, but bringing to our attention the deeper roots of
religious belief in human subjectivity. Philosophy of religion can no longer rest content
with examining religion in relation to rationality but must come to grips with unconscious
imagination, emotional response, and desire. It is interesting to note the steps already
being taken in this direction (e.g. Coakley 2013; Ellis 2018).
References
Black, D. M. (ed.) (2006). Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century: Competitors or
Collaborators? London: Routledge.
Clack, B. (2008). ‘After Freud: phantasy and imagination in the philosophy of religion’.
Philosophy Compass 3: 203–221.
Coakley, S. (2013). God, Sexuality and the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (p. 536)
Ellis, F. (2018). ‘Philosophy of religion and desire’. In L. Hickman and R. Manning (eds),
Philosophy of Religion: Whence and Whither? London: Bloomsbury.
Freud, S. (1927). ‘The future of an illusion’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard
Freud, S. (1939). ‘Moses and monotheism: Three essays’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.),
Hinshelwood, R. (1999). ‘Introduction’. In S. M. Stein (ed.), Beyond Belief: Psychotherapy

and Religion. London: Karnac Books.
Michael Lacewing

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Children (P4C).
Richard G.T. Gipps

Page 5 of 5


John Cottingham

Acknowledging the layers of the mind below the level of overt consciousness can lead to
very divergent accounts of religious belief. One response—taken by Freud himself—
argues that religious belief should be abandoned as unavoidably contaminated by
unconscious motivations (e.g. an infantile longing for security) that distort our rational
judgement. By contrast, Jung maintains that religious thinking is shaped by unconscious
structures (the ‘archetypes’), which can play a vital role in the development of an
integrated human personality. This chapter examines these contrasting psychoanalytic
interpretations of religion, and then explores more recent accounts of the workings of the
human psyche and how they affect the status of religious belief. A concluding section
discusses some general implications of all this for the epistemology of religious belief and
the way in which philosophy of religion should be conducted.
Keywords: Freud, Jung, unconscious, illusion, archetypes, Graham Ward, Iain McGilchrist, brain hemispheres,
receptivity, detachment
Page 1 of 20

Introduction
A large part of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, from Sigmund Freud onwards,
has been concerned with the treatment of disturbed and troubled patients seeking help
with their symptoms, but the philosophical importance of the Freudian revolution is very
far from confined to the domain of the pathological or the neurotic. In effect what Freud
challenged was a simplistic but widely held model of the mind as a kind of transparent
goldfish bowl inside which straightforwardly identifiable beliefs and desires float around,
ready to inform our actions and choices. In the wake of Freud, it has become much
harder to be confident about the image of ourselves as self-sufficient and autonomous
rational agents whose decisions are based solely on what is straightforwardly accessible
to the reflective mind. This does not mean that the Freudian revolution in our conception
of ourselves undermines the very possibility of rational thought—if that were the case,
psychoanalytic thought would be self-refuting, since it would undermine the possibility of
its coherent articulation. What is entailed is that we should give up the naïve conception
of our mental powers and capacities as transparent tools of reason, and start working
towards a more nuanced conception, according to which uncovering the truth about
ourselves and our relation to the world must be approached in a spirit of humility and
receptivity that acknowledges the intensely complex and problematic nature of the
instrument which we must use to undertake that task—the human mind.
These general lessons of the Freudian revolution evidently have application to the domain
of religious belief, along with many other areas of human thought. But acknowledging the
layers of the mind that operate below the level of overt consciousness can lead to very
divergent accounts of the status and validity of religious beliefs and attitudes. One way to
go—the route that Freud himself took—is to argue that religious belief should be
abandoned, insofar as it is unavoidably contaminated by unconscious drives and
motivations (an infantile longing for security, for example) that distort our rational
judgement. A quite opposite approach, exemplified by that of Freud’s onetime disciple
Carl Jung, is to maintain that religious thinking is typically shaped by unconscious forms
and structures (what Jung called the ‘archetypes’) which, so far from being generators of
neurosis, can play a vital role in the development of a healthy and integrated human
personality. We shall look in more detail at these two influential but strongly contrasting
psychoanalytic interpretations of religion in the next two sections, before going on, in the
fourth section, to explore more recent accounts of the workings of the human psyche and
how they may affect the status of religious belief. The fifth and final section will aim to
tease out some general conclusions about the relationship between psychoanalysis and
religion, and the implications of this for the epistemic status of religious belief, and the
way in which the philosophy of religion should be conducted.
Page 2 of 20

Freud’s Critique of Religion

Freud’s attack on religion begins by drawing attention to our human helplessness before
the ‘majestic, cruel and inexorable powers of nature’ (Freud 1927: 195). These powers
include both external forces (earthquakes, floods, hurricanes) and the equally threatening
internal forces (lust, anger, brutality) arising from our own nature. Freud sees religion as
an attempt to mitigate our defencelessness by endeavouring to ‘adjure, appease, bribe’ or
otherwise influence a celestial father figure, who will protect us from suffering, and
impose justice on a seemingly chaotic and terrifying universe (1927: 196).
The vulnerability of the human condition, and the fact that since time immemorial
humans beings in extremis have resorted to a variety of supposed divine powers and
forces to rescue them when all else fails, are familiar enough themes which have been
commented on by many writers, including Jean-Paul Sartre:
When the paths traced out become too difficult, or when we see no path, we can
no longer live in so urgent and difficult a world. All the ways are barred. However,
we must act. So we try to change the world, that is, to live as if the connection
between things and their potentialities were not ruled by deterministic
procedures, but by magic
(Sartre 1975: 58–9).1
The same general line had been taken much earlier by another stern critic of religion,
David Hume. What prompts us to suppose there is a God, according to Hume, are ‘the
ordinary affections of human life’ such as the ‘dread of future misery’ and the ‘terror of
death’ (Hume 1757: section 2).
But to explain the religious impulse simply in terms of human vulnerability and
helplessness leaves something out: no doubt people earnestly desire to be rescued when
in trouble, but that in itself does not seem to account for the strength and pervasiveness
of the human belief in the divine. When in grave distress we might like to deceive
ourselves into thinking the world is determined not by natural forces but by magic (as
Sartre phrases it), but this does not in itself explain how widespread and successful such
self-deception (if it is indeed that) has become. Here Freud contributes something
crucially important by addressing himself to the psychological question of how the belief
becomes so powerfully entrenched in the minds of so many religious adherents. The
human psyche, he argues in The Future of an Illusion, is already predisposed, as a result
of the traces left by our forgotten experience as infants, to conjure up the image of a
powerful protector to rescue us from our helplessness.2 For when we encounter threats
and dangers:
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… this situation is nothing new. It has an infantile prototype of which this is in fact
only the continuation. For once before one has found oneself in a similar state of
helplessness: as a small child, in relation to one’s parent. One had reason to fear
them, and especially one’s father; and yet one was sure of his protection against
the dangers one knew. Thus it was natural to assimilate the two situations. Here,
too, wishing plays its part, as it does in dream-life …
(Freud 1927: 196).
So just as with the strange deliverances of dreams, what is planted in our consciousness
has a resonance, a power that takes hold of us quite independently of the normal criteria
of reasonable evidence and rational judgement. The mind is in the grip of an illusion, but
this is not just a mistake, or a piece of deliberate self-deception. Rather, layers of
mentation working beneath the level of explicit awareness or rational reflection have
been activated by our helplessness in the face of the perils we face as adults, and we
revert, without being consciously aware of what is going on, to the infantile state of fear
and dependency which is ineradicably linked to the yearning for security and the hope of
parental protection. Only as a result of delving into the deeper workings of the mind right
back from early childhood does the full explanation of the process come to light. This is
the background that enables Freud to declare with such confidence ‘the derivation of
religious needs from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it
seems to me incontrovertible’ (Freud 1929: 260). So we arrive at the famous Freudian
diagnosis: religion is an illusion born of helplessness and fear.
Freud makes it clear, however, that he does not intend his psychoanalytic diagnosis of our
longing for protection to be a logical demonstration of the falsity of the religious world
view. That would be to commit the ‘genetic fallacy’ (the logical fallacy of confusing the
causal origins of a belief with its justification or lack thereof). Illusions, as Freud
concedes, are not necessarily erroneous: ‘A middle-class girl may have an illusion that a
prince will come and marry her … and a few such cases have actually occurred’ (Freud
1927: 213). But Freud argues that it is characteristic of illusions in his sense that they are
held on to without regard for rational justification; further, they characteristically stem
from (indeed are generated by) the wishes or needs of the believer. So it is a short step
from this to the conclusion that Freud is aiming at: religion is an infantile piece of wishful
thinking that we need to grow out of.
Yet on further reflection the implications of Freud’s critique are by no means as damaging
as might at first appear. The believer might well concede to Freud that our infantile
helplessness leaves a lasting stamp on the psyche, but go on to insist that this can
scarcely be the whole story. For beyond any mere desire for protection (Freud’s ‘longing’
for the father figure), it seems hard to deny that the religious impulse is in large part
connected with the powerful yearning human beings have for meaning and purpose in
their lives. Now it could be proposed, as is done by many secularists, that meaning and
purpose must be found in the chosen activities and pursuits—intellectual, artistic, social,
familial, and so on—which are the components of a worthwhile human life. But, without
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denying the value and meaningfulness of such activities and pursuits, it may be argued
that they cannot in themselves bear all the weight of satisfying our human hunger for
meaningfulness. One way of putting this is to say that to be human is to have a
characteristic restless, a sense of incompleteness, such that even were all our specific
needs and goals to be satisfied (for food, for shelter, for company, for recreation, for
satisfying relationships, for creative activities, and so on), there would always remain a
longing for something more—something that will provide an ‘ultimate grounding’ for our
lives, or give us a sense of ‘ontological rootedness’ (May 2011: 7).
God, for the religious believer, is the ultimate source of being and value towards which
we yearn, and which alone can satisfy the existential longing which is part of the nature
of dependent and contingent beings such as us.3 Pointing this out does not of course
vindicate belief in God, nor does it of itself refute deflationary Freudian-style explanations
of it, but it may at least open up the possibility that religious belief connects with
something in our human nature of deeper significance than a mere neurotic or infantile
impulse. Certainly there are many places in Scripture where the strange open-ended
longing of the human spirit is underlined (‘Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks, so
longeth my soul after Thee, O God’ (Psalm 42 [41]: 1)); and the theme is reiterated in
seminal Christian writers such as St Augustine (‘You have made us for Yourself, and our
heart is restless until it finds repose in You’, and Dante (‘In his will is our peace’)).4 The
thought in such passages is not merely that religious devotion provides peacefulness of
mind, in the sense of securing some kind of tranquillizing or calming effect; rather, the
idea is that God is the source of genuine value, and that orienting ourselves towards that
source bestows ultimate meaning on our human existence and enables us to find true
fulfilment even in the face of danger and turmoil. Augustine and Dante acknowledge our
vulnerability, but manage to construe it as a corollary of our creatureliness, so they can
end up celebrating it as a cause for joyful affirmation of our creator. Freud by contrast
sees our vulnerability as a condition which scares us so much that we desperately
fantasize that we have found a way of assuaging it—even though in fact the power we
appeal to has no reality outside the human psyche. But as to which of the two accounts
reflects the way things actually are, this remains to be determined; so however
disconcerting Freud’s analysis may initially be for the religious believer, it seems clear
that it cannot finally settle the matter.
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Carl Jung and the Importance of Symbolic

Thought
While Freud’s view of religious belief places it under the same general heading as the
neurotic, the infantile, and the disturbed, or at any rate as falling short of the standards
of balanced judgement to which we aspire as reasonable adults, Carl Jung, though
concurring with Freud that such belief has roots buried deep in the human psyche, took a
very different view of the resources of the unconscious mind, regarding them in a
potentially much more benign light.5 For Jung, Freud’s dismissal of the religious impulse
as infantile fails to recognize the imaginative and symbolic role of religious modes of
thought and expression, and their possible role in the healthy development of the human
personality. Crucial here is the idea of ‘individuation’ as Jung terms it, the ‘process by
which a person becomes a psychological “in-dividual”, that is, a separate, indivisible unity
or whole’ (Jung 1939: 275). Jung sees human psychological development in terms of a
struggle to achieve internal balance and psychic integration, where integrating the
conscious and unconscious elements of the self is a precondition for psychic health or
wholeness;6 and religious imagery and symbolism, according to Jung, perform a vital
function here (Jung 1952). The process of individuation requires modes of thought and
expression that operate not just on the surface level of explicit assertion, but which carry
deep imaginative resonances that are vital for our psychological balance and harmony. To
give but one example of this, the figure of Christ functions for Jung as an ‘archetype of
the self’, a deeply resonant image of the perfectly unified and integrated human being
(Jung 1938; Jung 1951: 183). From this perspective, as Michael Palmer aptly puts it in his
account of the Jungian position:
Religion, far from being neurotic, is revealed as a constant and evolving process in
the development of the psychic personality … Religious symbols … open up a
psychic level … that is primordial and … of supreme value for the present and
future development of the human psyche
(Palmer 1997: 110–11).
Jung’s ideas have encountered considerable philosophical opposition (as indeed have
those of Freud). Many contemporary analytic philosophers are supporters of what Brian
Leiter has called the ‘naturalistic revolution in philosophy’, according to which philosophy
should ‘adopt and emulate the methods of the successful sciences’ (Leiter 2004: 2–3).
Such philosophers often tend to be sceptical about the very idea of the unconscious mind,
and a fortiori the Jungian idea of the archetypes, on the grounds that the theories that
invoke such ideas lack the kind of hard scientific warrant demanded by today’s dominant
naturalistic paradigm. In response to this kind of critique, defenders of the Jungian
approach have two possible lines of defence. One is to argue that there is in fact hard
empirical evidence, for example from cognitive science and developmental psychology,
that can be used to support the Jungian hypothesis of the role of symbols and archetypes
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in psychic integration (Knox 2003). Another response would be to take issue with the
doctrine that the methods of science are the only valid way of uncovering the truth. Thus
Thomas Nagel has argued, in the case of Freud, that irrespective of what we think about
the authority of analysts or the clinical evidence for their theories, there is an ‘evident
usefulness of a rudimentary Freudian outlook in understanding ourselves and other
people, particularly in erotic life, family dramas, and what Freud called the
psychopathology of everyday life’ (Freud 1901; Nagel 1994). And similarly one could
argue that Jung’s ideas, like those of Freud, are best assessed not as contributions to
science, but in a more ‘hermeneutic’ way—that is, as ways of enriching our
understanding of the human predicament, and the deeper significance of our thoughts
and feelings and beliefs.7, 8
To suggest that Jung’s ideas may enrich our understanding without qualifying as
contributions to science is not at all to dismiss or downgrade the value and importance of
scientific inquiry or scientific methods. One can be a genuine and wholehearted admirer
of the achievements of science while at the same time resisting the false allure of
scientism—the dogma that scientific methods give us everything we need to understand
all aspects of reality. To be sure, we live in, and are an integral part of, the physical world
constituted by the particles and forces studied by science—that is undeniable. But when it
comes to understanding aspects of human life such as religious experience (and the same
goes for poetic or artistic or moral experience, or even our ordinary human interactions
with each other) we patently need other categories than those of the physical sciences;
for even the fullest and most detailed print-out of the relevant particle collisions and
biochemical processes will tell us nothing about the human significance of these
processes and events.9
In addition to the physical sciences there are of course the social sciences (including for
example economics, sociology, and psychology), and there are continuing debates as to
how far such disciplines meet the standards of the ‘hard’ physical sciences (in matters
such as experimental repeatability, verifiable prediction, mathematical modelling, and so
on). There is probably no simple answer to this question, since the term ‘social science’
covers a large array of divergent disciplines and inquiries, whose methods manifest
varying degrees of precision and rigour. A particular issue as regards psychology is the
inevitable reliance on reports by individual human subjects of their thoughts, feelings,
sensations, beliefs, and desires, thus making reference to what is, according to some
philosophers, an irreducible domain of qualitative subjective experience that resists
subsumption or explanation in objective scientific terms (Nagel 1974). But however that
may be, psychoanalytic approaches to psychology present special additional problems,
insofar as the ‘data’ being studied come to light in the context of special relationship with
the analyst—an issue which led even Freud, despite his attraction to the scientific model,
to remark on how far psychoanalysis diverges from normal scientific procedures. We shall
return to this issue in ‘Philosophizing about Religion and the Layers of the Human
Psyche’.
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At all events, when we come to religious feelings, beliefs, attitudes, and experiences, it is
apparent that these have a characteristic depth and complexity that can seldom if ever be
conveyed in a set of straightforward factual propositions laid out for our assessment and
awaiting verification. For religious thoughts and ideas operate within a rich and complex
web of associations, carrying manifold metaphorical and symbolic echoes which may
often have powerful effects on us in ways that are not fully transparent to consciousness.
This, as Jung sees it, is the key to the peculiar resonance and power of the images and
icons that inform the thoughts and ideas of religious believers, and what explains their
role in the search for integration and healing within the troubled human psyche. None of
this of course means that we should uncritically accept all or any of Jung’s ideas about
the role of religious concepts; but at least it reminds us of the context in which his
theories are meant to operate, and within which they need to be evaluated.
Whatever conclusions one finally reaches about the Jungian theory of archetypes,
important questions remain about Jung’s general approach to religion. The foremost
among these is the objection that the Jungian approach leads to a kind of psychologizing
or subjectivizing of religion, where the question of the truth or validity of any given
religious outlook (Christian theism, for instance) boils down to no more than the question
of whether certain archetypal images (such as that of God the Father, or Christ the Son,
for example) have a transformative power within the human psyche (Palmer 1997: 187,
196). Jung’s own response to this type of criticism was that his role as a psychologist was
not to make pronouncements about the existence or non-existence of transcendent
realities, but simply to describe the role of certain fundamental and universal images and
symbols in human development:
We know that God-images play a great role in psychology, but we cannot prove the
[actual] existence of God. As a responsible scientist, I am not going to preach my
personal and subjective convictions which I cannot prove … To me, personally
speaking, the question whether God exists at all or not is futile. I am sufficiently
convinced of the effects man has always attributed to a divine being. If I should
express a belief beyond that … it would show that I am not basing my opinion on
facts … I am well satisfied with the fact that I know experiences which I cannot
avoid calling numinous or divine
(Jung 1956).
This makes quite clear the restricted scope of Jung’s position: it insists that religious
concepts and images play a crucial role in the development of the human personality and
its search for integration, but leaves completely open the question of whether there is
some objective reality—something ‘external’ or independent of the subjective structure of
the human psyche—to which those concepts and images refer.
To sum up our necessarily compressed and selective account of the contrasting attitudes
of Freud and Jung to religion—the former’s highly negative, the latter’s much more
positive—what emerges is that in neither case do their suggested findings about the
workings of the human psyche in themselves either establish or refute the truth of the
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religious outlook. The partly hidden motivation for religious belief may, if Freud is right,
be an infantile one; but as we have seen, that in itself does not logically entail the falsity
of such a belief. And the symbols and images drawn from the unconscious mind may, if
Jung is right, exert a powerful psychological influence on the human quest for
integration; but that, as just noted, still leaves open the real existence or otherwise of the
God that is the object of religious belief.
In the wake of these two seminal thinkers, however, one thing at any rate should be clear:
that any philosophical attempt to address the fundamental questions of religious belief
will find it hard to carry conviction unless it takes some account of the complexity that
lies beneath the seemingly transparent surface of propositional assent to religious claims
and doctrines. No account of religious belief and experience is going to look plausible
unless it acknowledges the complexity of the human mind—the strata of hidden longings
and needs and the manifold symbolic forms and images resonating deep within the
human psyche. To some of the more recent attempts to address that complexity we shall
now turn.
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The Complexity of Belief

The contemporary debate over the validity of religious belief tends to play out in a
curiously abstract and rationalistic way. The implicit assumption is that the participants
are detached evaluators, judiciously examining the ‘God hypothesis’ (as Richard Dawkins
calls it (Dawkins 2006: ch. 2)), scrutinizing the supposed evidence, and weighing up the
arguments for and against. Particularly among anglophone philosophers in the analytic
tradition, where psychoanalytic ideas have tended to be resisted or ignored by many
practitioners, the claims of religion are implicitly construed as rather like scientific
claims, suitable subjects for purely intellectual disputation, the province, as it were, of
scholarly discussion in the seminar room. But a number of recent writers have started to
challenge this austere and bloodless picture of religious belief.
Philosophers have argued endlessly about the epistemic status of religious and other
kinds of belief, and what entitles some beliefs to the accolade ‘knowledge’, but
comparatively few have paid attention to ‘what lies beneath’—to the ‘archaeology of
belief’, as the British theologian Graham Ward has called it. Ward argues that believing or
disbelieving something involves far more complex processes than the scrutiny and
evaluation of factual evidence. There are much ‘deeper layers of embodied engagement
and reaction’, where we are touched ‘imaginatively, affectively and existentially’ (Ward
2014: 7, 10, 31). Drawing on empirical research into the behavioural and neurological
underpinnings of belief, and its evolutionary and prehistoric roots, Ward delves into the
domain of what the Berkeley psychologist John Kihlstrom has termed the ‘cognitive
unconscious’ (Kihlstrom 1987; see also Kahneman 2011). A rich array of non-conscious
mental activity, including learned responses that have become automatic, subliminal
perceptions that impact on our conscious judgements, and implicit but not consciously
recalled memories—all these profoundly affect how we perceive and interpret the world
(Ward 2014: 11, 68). And as we saw in the case of Freud (whose general influence is
clearly discernible here), the implications of the resulting conception of human belief and
understanding extend far more widely than the domain of the pathological. Not just in
neurotic desires and perceptions, but whenever we believe anything at all, there is, as
Ward puts it, a ‘mode of liminal processing, related to embodiment and affectivity, which
“thinks” more quickly and reacts more instinctively than our conscious rational
deliberation’ (Ward 2014: 12).
A further dimension of complexity in our beliefs is explored in the neuroscientist Iain

McGilchrist’s groundbreaking work The Master and His Emissary, according to which
there are two different modes of relating to the world, broadly correlated with the
activities of the left and right hemispheres of the brain respectively, one mode being
detached, fragmented, abstract, and analytical, the other being more direct, holistic,
intuitive, and empathetic. McGilchrist speaks of:
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… two ways of being in the world, both of which are essential. One is to allow
things to be present to us in all their embodied particularity, with all their
changeability and impermanence and their interconnectedness, as part of a whole
which is forever in flux … The other is to step outside the flow of experience and
‘experience’ our experience in a special way: to re-present the world in a form that
is … is abstracted, compartmentalised, fragmented, static … From this world we
feel detached, but in relation to it we are powerful (2009: 93).
Acknowledging McGilchrist’s influence, Graham Ward urges us to question the ‘left-brain

hegemony’ that has increasingly dominated our culture since the Enlightenment, and to
reconfigure our understanding of belief. Doing justice to the full range of our embodied
human engagement with the world could allow for a ‘rebalancing’ of left-brain and right-
brain modes of awareness. This, he argues, might enable us to overcome the sterile
opposition between scientific and religious modes of thinking, and to understand what
lies ‘at the very core of poetic and religious faith’ (Ward 2014: 110).
Before proceeding, it needs to be noted that many critics have questioned the distinction
that is invoked here between ‘left-brain’ and ‘right brain’ activity, objecting that the
available scientific research on the neurophysiology and functioning of the brain does not
support a strong dichotomy between the functions performed by the two hemispheres
(Nielsen et al. 2013). There may be evidence to suggest that in most subjects one can
distinguish between ‘logical–conceptual’ and more ‘intuitive’ mental activity, each broadly
correlating with neural activity in the relevant halves of the brain; but the critics point
out that in normal subjects both halves play some role in both, and in any case there is
constant interaction between the two hemispheres. All this, however, is readily conceded
by McGilchrist, who fully acknowledges the massive degree of interconnectivity in the
wiring of the brain, while nevertheless insisting that the two hemispheres have been
shown to function in ways that are to some degree independent, and that this can tell us
something important about the different ways in which we experience the world
(McGilchrist 2018).10
However that may be, the position taken by McGilchrist, Ward, and others11 about the
need to challenge what they term ‘left-brain hegemony’ does not seem ultimately to hinge
on the precise details as to how the brain is configured. For the crucial point at issue is
not a neurological one, but what might be called a psycho-ethical or spiritual one: that
our ultimate flourishing as human beings depends on our being able to integrate our
detached and analytic modes of relating to the world with our more direct and intuitive
modes of awareness. This is not to say, however, that the scientific study of the brain has
no relevance to the psychological-cum-moral task of striving for an integrated vision of
the world. For the wiring of the brain, shaped by the long history of its evolution, is an
integral part of our nature as biological creatures, and our human ways of perceiving and
understanding the world must inevitably be conditioned and mediated by that history. The
point was in fact explicitly anticipated by Jung in a paper written early in his career:
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Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, with a long
evolutionary history behind them, so we should expect the mind to be organized in
a similar way … We receive along with our body a highly differentiated brain
which brings with it its entire history, and when it becomes creative it creates out
of this history—out of the history of mankind … that age-old natural history which
has been transmitted in living form since the remotest times, namely the history of
the brain structure
(Jung 1918: 12).12
In short, whatever scientific consensus is eventually reached with regard to the precise
workings of the brain and the functioning of its parts, the resulting picture seems likely
only to reinforce the idea that our grasp of reality depends at the physiological level on an
intricate nexus of mechanisms and processing systems evolved over many millennia and
working beneath the threshold of conscious awareness and control. And alongside this
neurological complexity there also has to be taken into account the complex array of
socially and culturally inherited associations and resonances that condition our cognitive
and emotional responses to the world, again working largely below the level of our
explicit conscious awareness. So the more we learn about all this, the more pressure is
put on the idea of the detached autonomous agent, somehow operating above the fray of
evolution and history, and forming beliefs based solely on dispassionate scrutiny of the
evidence like some pure disembodied intelligence.
So what are the implications of the growing interest in the ‘archaeology of belief’ for our
understanding of religion and its place in the modern scientific age? Ward, as already
noted, maintains that a greater understanding of what lies beneath the surface of
conscious belief-formation will help us to overcome what he sees as the ‘sterile’
opposition between scientific and religious thought and to give up the idea that primitive
mythological ways of thinking about the world will progressively be replaced by modern
scientific methods. For placing the belief-forming faculties of our species within the
context of their biological and social development over many millennia reveals the
ineradicable role of the mythic and the symbolic in all human cognition, and thus radically
undermines the idea of the inevitable triumph of a science-based, demythologized and
secularized belief system. Just as Jung had argued that mythical and symbolic forms
powerfully and inescapably impinge on our human beliefs and attitudes, so Ward argues
that all human belief systems involve myth-making. And this includes not just archetypal
stories of our origins (such as the Genesis narrative), but a whole range of human activity
—the ‘symbolic realms we hominids have been cultivating for 2.2 million years’, including
art, poetry, rite, and dance. In ways we cannot fully explain, these interlocking modes of
human culture tap the powers of what (for a want of a better term) we call the
imagination, which operates at many more levels than are accessed by our conscious
reflective awareness. Such works of the imagination ‘intimate that our experience … of
being in the world is freighted with a significance that only an appeal to the mythic can
index’ (Ward 2014: 186).
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Many important issues are raised by this stress on the psychological depth and
complexity of human cognition, and its mythical and the imaginative aspects. But for
present purposes two key questions present themselves: first, what are the implications
of all this for the epistemic status of religious belief; and second, what lessons emerge for
the way in which the philosophy of religion should be conducted? To these questions we
shall briefly turn in the fifth and final section of our discussion.
Philosophizing About Religion and the Layers

of the Human Psyche
The line of argument canvassed in the previous section—emphasizing the creative,
imaginative, and mythical elements in all human belief systems—might seem to offer a
kind of protective armour for religious ways of thinking against the advances of modern
scientific rationalism. But there may be grounds for concern that such a defence of
religion is bought at too steep a cost—the cost of eroding the very distinction between
mythos and logos, between imagination and reason. For even if science is necessarily the
creation of our evolved human capacities, conditioned by our long human history, it has
nevertheless developed tried and trusted methods (empirical investigation, mathematical
modelling) for understanding and predicting the workings of nature. And the secularist
charge against religious ways of thinking is that they completely fail to pass these tests
for reliable belief formation, and thus do not deserve a place in our modern world view.
There is no space here to delve further into the extensive and continuing contemporary
debate about the future of religion in the modern world. What needs to be addressed in
the present context are the implications for philosophy, and in particular the philosophy
of religion, of the issues raised in the previous section about the complex ‘archaeology of
belief’. In this connection, one does not have to sign up to a questionable assimilation of
science and myth in order to wonder if contemporary analytic philosophy of religion has
become too dry and austere, too closely modelled on the pared-down unambiguous
language of the sciences, to do justice to the complexities of religious belief and the ways
in which it might contribute to our understanding of ourselves and the nature of the
reality of which we are a part. It is here that the contribution of psychoanalytic thought
seems particularly relevant. For if there is any truth in what the psychoanalytic
movement has tried to uncover about the hidden layers of the human mind, then it seems
plausible to suppose that being more open to ‘what lies beneath’ might lead to a more
nuanced epistemology, less modelled on the austere language and methods of the
physical sciences, but arguably better equipped for the task of philosophizing insightfully
about religion.13 It is striking in this connection to find even a committed analytic
philosopher of religion such as Eleonore Stump arguing recently that in order to do its
job philosophy of religion may require deeper and richer resources than those afforded by
the tools of logical analysis and technically expert argument (Stump 2010: 26–7).
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Stump does not explicitly mention or invoke the resources of psychoanalytic theory, but
significantly she does argue that philosophers of religion need to make use of our
manifold responses to the multiple resonances of literary, and scriptural, narrative. This
chimes in with earlier calls for a certain kind of narrative or literary turn in philosophy, as
advocated for example in the work of Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum argues that in
learning to appreciate a great literary text we have to allow ourselves to be receptive and
‘porous’, knowing when to yield instead of maintaining constant critical detachment
(1990: 281–2). Some philosophers may suppose that any departure from complete
analytical detachment would involve a loss of philosophical integrity; and certainly there
is need for philosophical caution whenever our imaginative and emotional resources are
made use of. But equally, if we insist on maintaining a detached analytical stance at all
times, this may be less a sign of intellectual integrity than what Nussbaum calls ‘a
stratagem of flight’ (Nussbaum 1990: 268)—a refusal of the openness and receptivity that
is prepared to acknowledge all the dimensions of our humanity.
If this is right, then one lesson to emerge is that we may need a new epistemology for
thinking about religious belief and its basis. In contemporary analytic philosophy of
religion, both the advocates of religious belief and its critics tend to operate with an
epistemology of control. We stand back, scrutinize the evidence, retaining our power and
autonomy, and pronounce on the existence or otherwise of God. But such methods
implicitly presuppose that the divine presence ought to be detectable via intellectual
analysis of formal arguments or observational data. Yet the ancient Judaeo-Christian idea
of the Deus absconditus (the ‘hidden God’)14 suggests a deity who is less interested in
proving his existence or demonstrating his power than in the moral conversion and freely
given love of his creatures, and in guiding the steps of those who ‘seek him with all their
heart’, in Pascal’s phrase (1670: no. 427). And when we start to think about the means of
such conversion, it becomes clear that it could never operate through detached
intellectual argument alone, or through the dispassionate evaluation of ‘spectator
evidence’ (Moser 2008: 47).
Any suggestion that religious claims cannot fully and properly be evaluated from a
detached and dispassionate standpoint may at first seem to be special pleading on behalf
of religion; but further reflection makes it clear that there are all sorts of other areas of
life—appreciation of poetry, of music, entering into any kind of personal relationship—
where we need to be (to use Nussbaum’s term) ‘porous’. Otherwise, while we pride
ourselves on being in control and judiciously evaluating the evidence, we may actually be
closing ourselves off from allowing the evidence to become manifest to us. In short, there
may be many areas of human life where a proper understanding of what is going on
requires us to relinquish the epistemology of control and substitute an epistemology of
receptivity.15
Perhaps surprisingly, this plea for the adoption of an epistemology of receptivity when
assessing the claims of religion can draw some support from the writings of the founding
father of psychoanalysis. Although as we have seen, Freud himself was a stern critic of
religion, and although he tended to present himself very much in the garb of the austere
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scientific rationalist, he also acknowledged, perhaps most explicitly in his Introductory

Lectures on Psychoanalysis, that his methods of treatment diverged very significantly
from those which are typical of standard scientific procedure. He points to two important
differences. First, conventional scientific medicine looks to ‘establish the functions and
disturbances of the organism on an anatomical basis, to explain them in terms of
chemistry and physics, and to regard them from a biological point of view’, whereas
Freud concedes that his own approach focuses on a much more elusive aspect, namely
the ‘psychological attitude of mind’. And second, Freud acknowledges the oddity of the
fact that the processes involved are not susceptible of public investigation under normal
observer conditions, because the psychotherapeutic process takes place in a private
consulting room and ‘only under the conditions of a special affective relationship to the
physician’ (1916–17: 22).
Thus, so far from there being an objective scientific template to which all valid discourse
and all legitimate human inquiry must conform, Freud in the Introductory Lectures
appears ready to allow that there are phenomena whose nature is such that quite
different modes of understanding are appropriate. Indeed, he goes further and
acknowledges that psychoanalysis is learnt first of all ‘on oneself, by studying one’s own
personality’ (1916–17: 23). These concessions are most significant, since (whether Freud
himself drew such an inference or not) they implicitly cut the ground from underneath
those critics of religion who would dismiss the validity of religious experiences on the
grounds that they resist external verification by detached or non-involved observers.
The important lesson to emerge here is that despite the prevalence of scientistic modes of
thinking in our contemporary culture (and in some parts of Freud’s own thinking), we
need to take seriously the idea that there may be phenomena that do not manifest
themselves ‘cold’, as it were, but require involvement and commitment on the part of the
subject in order to be apprehended. It has been an assumption of modern scientific
inquiry that the truth is simply available for discovery, given sufficient ingenuity and the
careful application of the appropriate techniques, and that the dispositions and moral
character of the inquirer are entirely irrelevant. But while this assumption may be correct
enough when inquiring into truths within meteorology, say, or chemical engineering, it
seems quite out of place when we are dealing with certain central truths of our human
experience—for example truths about how a poem or symphony may be appreciated, or
how a loving relationship may be achieved and fostered. In these latter areas, the
impartial application of a mechanical technique is precisely the wrong approach: the
truth yields itself only to those who are already to some extent in a state of receptivity
and trust.16, 17 The upshot is that there may be phenomena, or parts of reality, whose
detection or apprehension is subject to what might be called accessibility conditions: the
requirements for getting in touch with them include certain requirements as to the
subjective attitude and psychological (and perhaps moral) state of the subject
(Cottingham 2005: ch. 1, §§ 3 and 4; ch. 7, §4). And as we have seen, Freud himself seems
clearly to acknowledge this when he speaks of the insights arising from the
psychotherapeutic process making themselves available ‘only under the conditions of a
special affective relationship to the physician’ (1916–17: 23). Yet once it is granted that
Page 15 of 20

there are psychological truths that may come to light only given certain affective and
other transformations within the experiencing subject, then it may become possible to see
how the same principle might be applied to religious truths, so that certain
transformations in the subject may be crucially necessary preconditions for the
manifestation of the divine reality that is the object of the religious quest (Cottingham
2009: ch. 5).
What thus emerges, as we bring to a close our discussion of the relation between
psychoanalysis and religion, is the remarkable degree of convergence that obtains
between these two very different ways of thinking about the human condition. Not only
do both outlooks search for deeper layers of significance beneath of the surface world of
factual assertion and plain ‘common sense’, but also, as we have just seen, both hold that
this deeper world may disclose itself only to those who are in a suitable state of
receptivity—a point that carries important epistemological implications perhaps not yet
fully assimilated in our contemporary philosophical culture. To be sure, none of this is
sufficient on its own to constitute a vindication of the claims either of psychoanalytic
theory or of traditional religion, nor is it intended to be; but at least it may give some
indication of the way in which those claims might have to be assessed.18
References
Augustine of Hippo (c. 398 CE [1912]). Confessions (Confessiones), trans. W. Watts.
Cottingham, J. (1998). Philosophy and the Good Life: Reason and the Passions in Greek,
Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cottingham, J. (2009). Why Believe? London: Continuum.

Cottingham, J. (2015). How to Believe. London: Bloomsbury.
Dante Alighieri (c. 1310 [1981]). The Divine Comedy: Paradise (La Divina Comedia:
Paradiso), ed. and trans. G. Bickersteth. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dawkins, R. (2006). The God Delusion. London: Transworld Publishers.
Foucault, M. (2005). The Hermeneutics of the Subject. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 5. London: Penguin.
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Freud, S. (1916–17 [1952]). Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Vorlesungen zur

Einführung in die Psychoanalyse,), trans. J. Riviere as A General Introduction to
Psychoanalysis. New York: Washington Square Press.
Freud, S. (1927). ‘The Future of an Illusion’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Penguin
Freud Library, Vol. 12 (pp. 182–241). London: Penguin.
Freud, S. (1929). ‘Civilization and its Discontents’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The
Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 12 (pp. 251–340). London: Penguin.
Howard-Snyder, D. and Moser, P. (eds) (2002). Divine Hiddenness. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.
Hume, D. (1757). ‘The Natural History of Religion’. In Four Dissertations. London: Millar.
Jung, C. (1918). ‘The Role of the Unconscious’ (‘Über das Unbewußte’). In C. G. Jung,
Collected Works, rev. edn (l967–77), Vol. 10. London: Routledge.
Jung, C. (1938). Psychology and Religion. In C. G. Jung, Collected Works, rev. edn (l967–
77), Vol. 11 (pp. 89–95). London: Routledge.
Jung, C. (1939). ‘Conscious, Unconscious and Individuation’. In C. G. Jung, Collected

Works, rev. edn (l967–77), Vol. 9 (1) (pp. 275–289). London: Routledge.
Jung, C. (1951). Aion. In C. G. Jung, Collected Works, rev. edn (l967–77), Vol. 9 (2).
London: Routledge.
Jung, C. (1952). ‘Symbols of Transformation’. In C. G. Jung, Collected Works, rev. edn

(l967–77), Vol. 5. London: Routledge.
Jung, C. (1956). ‘Correspondence with H. L. Philp’. In C. G. Jung, Collected Works, rev.

edn (l967–77), Vol. 18 (pp. 706–707). London: Routledge.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking Fast and Slow. London: Penguin.
Kihlstrom, J. (1987). ‘The cognitive unconscious’. Science 237: 1445–1452.
Knox, J. (2003). Archetype, Attachment, Analysis. Hove: Brunner-Routledge.
Leiter, B. (2004). The Future for Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Martin, T. (2002). Oppression and the Human Condition. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield.
May, S. (2011). Love: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and His Emissary. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
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Moser, P. (2008). The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology. Cambridge:

Nagel, T. (1974 [1979]). ‘What is it like to be a bat?’. In Mortal Questions (ch. 12).
Nagel, T (1994). ‘Freud’s Permanent Revolution’. New York Review of Books 41(9): 34–38.
Nielsen, J. et al. (2013). ‘An Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain

Hypothesis’. Plos One 8(8): e71275.
Nussbaum, N. (1990). Love’s Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Palmer, M. (1997). Freud and Jung on Religion. London: Routledge.
Pascal, B. (1670 [1962]). Pensées, ed. L. Lafuma. Paris: Seuil.
Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and Philosophy: an essay on interpretation, trans. D. Savage.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (Originally published as De l’interprétation: Essai
sur Sigmund Freud, 1965).
Sartre, J.-P. (1975). The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, trans. B. Frechtmann. Secaucus,
NJ: Citadel Press (Originally published as Esquisse d’une théorie des emotions, 1939).
Stump, E. (2010). Wandering in Darkness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ward, G. (2014). Unbelievable: Why We Believe and Why We Don’t. London: I. B. Tauris.
Notes:
(1.) Quoted in Martin 2002: 67. It should be noted that Sartre himself was critical of the
Freudian concept of the unconscious mind.
(2.) [Eds: See Blass, this volume, § ‘The Dialogue Between Freud and the Believer on the
Nature of Truth’, for an account of Freud’s later explanation, in Moses and Monotheism,
of the force of religious belief in terms of ‘historical truth’.]
(3.) [Eds: Cottingham’s argument may be fruitfully juxtaposed with Blass, this volume, §
‘Contemporary Positive Perspectives’ and Boothby, this volume.]
(4.) ‘Fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te’ (Augustine (c.
398), Bk. I, Ch. 1; ‘E’n la sua volontade è nostra pace’ (Dante Alighieri (c. 1310), Canto iii,
line 85.
(5.) [Eds. See also Blass, this volume, § ‘Contemporary Positive Perspectives’.]
(6.) For more on the psychodynamics of this transformational process, see Cottingham
(1998), ch. 4.
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(7.) ‘Hermeneutics’ in the most general sense may be thought of as an approach to

philosophy which gives a central place to the (culturally mediated) search for self-
understanding. See Ricoeur 1970.
(8.) [Eds. Blass, this volume, § ‘The Change in the Attitude to Truth’ explores Freud’s
antipathy to this turn in relation to questions of religion.]
(9.) [Eds. See Gipps, this volume, for a development of this line of thought.]
(10.) See McGilchrist, ‘Exchange of Views’ at http://iainmcgilchrist.com/exchange-of-

views/.
(11.) See for instance Eleonore Stump on ‘cognitive hemianopia’ (2010: 26–7).
(12.) Compare McGilchrist 2009: 8.
(13.) [Eds. A similar conclusion is reached via a very different route by Blass, this
volume.]
(14.) See Isaiah 45:15. For more on the ‘hiddenness’ of God, see Howard-Snyder and
Moser (2002).
(15.) The argument of the last three paragraphs draws on material from Cottingham
2014: ch. 1. See also Cottingham 2015, esp. ch. 3.
(16.) For more on this theme, see Michel Foucault, Seminar at the Collège de France of 6
January 1982, trans. in Foucault (2005: 1–19). See also Cottingham 2005: ch. 5 and ch. 7.
(17.) [Eds. For development of this line of thought in relation to psychoanalysis, see
Gipps, this volume.]
(18.) I am grateful to Richard Gipps and Michael Lacewing for their most thoughtful
comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
John Cottingham
John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading,

UK.
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Psychoanalytic Thinking on Religious Truth and Conviction

Psychoanalytic Thinking on Religious Truth and
Conviction
Rachel B. Blass

While Freudian psychoanalysis is famous for its negative evaluation of religion, many
contemporary analytic schools reject this view, regarding religion positively. Interestingly,
both critical and positive psychoanalytic approaches to religion are based on the idea that
religious belief is an illusion. This chapter explores these approaches, their development,
and the thinking that underlies them especially in relation to the notion of truth and the
personal quest for it. It sheds light on the complexity of Freud’s thinking on truth and
conviction and draws attention to a neglected dimension that is crucial to his
understanding of religion. The chapter points to the fact that despite fundamental
differences, the Freudian world view has more affinity with that of the religious believer
than commonly thought. In turn, the world views of the psychoanalytic schools which
have regarded religion positively are actually opposed to those of most believers.
Keywords: Freud, religion, conviction, doubt, truth, psychoanalysis, illusion, spiritual experience, Winnicott, Moses
and Monotheism
Rachel B. Blass
(p. 553) Freud’s Negative View of Religion

FOR Freud the understanding of any phenomenon is primarily the understanding of the
personal motives, or needs and wishes, the phantasies that come into play through it or in
relation to it.1 When it comes to religion Freud’s concern is with the individual’s motives
for belief in God, for faith. And while these would naturally differ from person to person,
Freud concluded that across individuals it was possible to discern features common to the
state or act of belief in God. These common features determined Freud’s evaluation of
religion, which was, famously, very negative.
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Freud’s best-known ideas regarding faith centre on the individual’s wish to have a
protective father figure with whom he can feel identified. He discussed this idea
extensively in his 1927 The Future of an Illusion and further elaborated it in his ‘The
question of a Weltanschauung’ (1933). In this latter text he summarizes what religion
undertakes to do for people as follows:
It gives them information about the origin and coming into existence of the
universe, it assures them of its protection and of ultimate happiness in the ups and
downs of life and it directs their thoughts and actions by precepts which it lays
down with its whole authority. Thus it fulfils three functions …. [I]t satisfies the
human thirst for knowledge; it soothes the fear that men feel of the dangers and
vicissitudes of life, when it assures them of a happy ending and offers them
comfort in unhappiness … [and] it issues precepts and lays down prohibitions and
restrictions.
(Freud 1933: 161)
(p. 554) Freud goes on to explain that what unites these three seemingly disparate aspects
of religion (instruction, consolation, and ethical demands) is the fact that they are all tied
to the child’s view of his father. The God-creator whom believers call father, Freud writes,
‘really is the father, with all the magnificence in which he once appeared to the small
child’ (Freud 1933: 163). He created us, he protected us, and he taught us to restrict our
desires. Freud explains that when one grows up one still remains helpless in many ways
in face of the dangers one encounters in life, but one recognizes that father cannot really
be a source of protection from them. Thus, Freud explains, the believer:
harks back to the mnemic image of the father whom in his childhood he so greatly
overvalued. He exalts the image into a deity and makes it into something
contemporary and real. The effective strength of this mnemic image and the
persistence of his need for protection jointly sustain his belief in God.
(Freud 1933: 163)
These needs and wishes for the protective father explain not only the idea of the
existence of a personal god who created us and loves us, but also our sense of guilt in
relation to him. Our feelings of guilt are expressions of our conscience, which we form
from critical inner voices of our parents in an effort to be assured of their love. These
voices are now perceived as coming from God. Freud concludes:
The amount of protection and happy satisfaction assigned to an individual

depends on his fulfilment of the ethical demands; his love of God and his
consciousness of being loved by God are the foundations of the security with
which he is armed against the dangers of the external world and of his human
environment. Finally, in prayer he has assured himself a direct influence on the
divine will and with it a share in the divine omnipotence.
(Freud 1933: 164)

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The notion of sharing in divine omnipotence points to our desire not only for security, but
for control; indeed God is great, but God is also in a close relationship with us, He is in
us, and like us. This may be a great boost to our ego. In this context, belief in Jesus (the
Son) is often regarded as an expression of our desire to be both exonerated of our ‘sins’
in relation to the father (in sharing the experience on the cross) and a desire to become
God ourselves (Freud 1927).
In other words, in the depths of the mind God becomes an idea, a construct, associated
with different parts of ourselves and our internal parental figures. He serves us in our
desire for protection, for love, for punishment, for restriction of our desires, for
exoneration, for perfection and power (while in each person these specific factors may
play out somewhat differently). In addition, our need to submit to authority, to follow
clear rules, to not think on our own, may come into play in the act of faith, both in our
relationship to God and in our relationship to those who transmit faith to us. In a sense,
Freud here claims that we are naturally inclined to blindly accept traditional claims of
belief.
Freud is clear on the fact that having wishes and needs for the world to be a
(p. 555)
certain way does not mean that the world is not that way. And in this context he puts forth
his much-cited distinction between ‘illusion’ and ‘delusion’. He writes:
What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes … In
the case of delusions, we emphasize as essential their being in contradiction with
reality. Illusions need not necessarily be false—that is to say, unrealizable or in
contradiction to reality. For instance, a middle-class girl may have the illusion that
a prince will come and marry her. This is possible; and a few such cases have
occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less likely.
Whether one classifies this belief as an illusion or as something analogous to a
delusion will depend on one’s personal attitude. Examples of illusions which have
proved true are not easy to find, but the illusion of the alchemists that all metals
can be turned into gold might be one of them. The wish to have a great deal of
gold, as much gold as possible, has, it is true, been a good deal damped by our
present-day knowledge of the determinants of wealth, but chemistry no longer
regards the transmutation of metals into gold as impossible. Thus we call a belief
an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in
doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store
by verification.2
(Freud 1927: 31)
While on the basis of this distinction Freud may have concluded that beliefs about God
are illusions, he goes on to assert that they are, in fact, delusions; they have no source
but the psychological one. He describes the rationale behind this assertion as follows:
‘scientific work is the only road which can lead us to a knowledge of reality outside
ourselves’ (1927: 31), and religious ideas are not only closed to scientific investigation
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but also are ‘so improbable, so incompatible with everything we have laboriously
discovered about the reality of the world’ (1927: 31).
The fact that religious beliefs are held by many does not alter the situation. In his
Civilization and its Discontents (1930) Freud speaks of the situation in which large groups
‘attempt to procure a certainty of happiness and protection against suffering through a
delusional remoulding of reality’ and adds that ‘The religions of mankind must be classed
among the mass delusions of this kind’ (1930: 81).
The negative attitude of Freud, of Freudian psychoanalysis, and in fact of a good part of
psychology at large as well, to religious faith has to do with the combination of the kind of
psychological motives that maintain it and its delusional nature. At bottom, it is regarded
as a distortion of reality, of truth, due to self-serving, infantile needs. Thus faith is
regarded not only as mistake, but as a kind of moral failure, childishness at best, and,
accordingly, inclinations towards it should be overcome. Freud (p. 556) affirms that, when
‘a psychologist who does not deceive himself’ assesses the process of human
development:
the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis,
and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic
phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis. (1927: 53)
Contemporary Positive Perspectives

Ever since the time these critical views were initially put forth there have been voices
coming from within psychoanalysis (in addition to the numerous ones coming from
without it) that have taken issue with them. Carl Jung is often presented as Freud’s
earliest and most stringent opponent in this regard.3 In contrast to Freud’s rejection of
religion he went as far as to state that religion is curative. He wrote:
Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—
there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a
religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he
had lost what the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and
none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.
(Jung 1933/2001: 234)
What Jung meant by adopting a religious outlook has been the subject of much
discussion. And while it is commonly understood as an expression of Jung’s belief in God
and his appreciation of such belief by others, some have argued that Jung’s use of
religious language is misleading; that his reference to God is, actually, to certain aspects
of the human psyche and that his call is not for an encounter with the divine, but with the
self. As Martin Buber states in his critique of Jung’s portrayal of modern man: ‘Man does
not deny a transcendent God; he simply dispenses with Him…. In his place he knows the
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soul, or rather the self’ (Buber 1952/1988: 86). This explains how Jung, in his book
Answer to Job, could speak of man helping God attain wholeness, in part through God
coming to a better integration of his evil sides.
In 1913 the ties between Freud and Jung were severed and Jung went on to develop his
own school of psychological thought and practice, Analytical Psychology, which differed
with the Freudian school in many ways. Focusing on development within the latter, the
first critical voice of Freud’s views on religion is that of Oskar Pfister, the Swiss
psychoanalyst and Lutheran minister. Pfister’s objections were made public with Freud’s
blessing in his paper ‘The Illusion of a Future’, published in German in Imago in 1928
(and republished in English in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1993). It is
(p. 557) possible to follow a continuous, albeit rather thin, stream of critical writings that
ensued in the following fifty years. Zilboorg, Erikson, Fromm, and Loewald are the most
prominent of the writers who explicitly rejected what was considered to be Freud’s
central view of religion as illusionary, delusionary, infantile, and neurotic. The more
dominant trend, however, was the acceptance of this Freudian view (Kakar 1991: 56).
From the 1980s, a change in this trend began to take place and a wave of religion-
friendly writings emerged. Among some of the more provocative book titles directly
addressing the issue of psychoanalysis and religion that have appeared since then are The
Birth of the Living God (Rizzuto 1979), The Psychoanalytic Mystic (Eigen 1988), The
Analyst and the Mystic (Kakar 1991), Soul on the Couch (Spezzano and Gargiulo 1997),
Emotion and Spirit (Symington [1994] 1998), Ecstasy (Eigen 2001), Terror and
Transformation (Jones 2002), accompanied by some more low-key titles such as
Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience (Meissner 1984) and Psychoanalysis and
Religion (Smith and Handelman 1990). In these books, and in the numerous articles that
have appeared during these years, religion is understood in the light of psychoanalytic
theory (and especially through some of its recent developments) as a normal, healthy,
positive phenomenon. The understanding expressed in this literature reflects a broader
sentiment within the psychoanalytic field in general of tolerance and acceptance of
religious belief and believers (as may be seen in David Black’s (2006) collected essays
Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century: Competitors or Collaborators?).
Under the influence of Freud’s thinking on religion, analysts could describe a patient’s
loss of religious belief as a measure of success (Fenichel 1938: 316) and continued
religious faith and practice as a sign of failure (1951: 189, cited in Leavy 1990: 50). Today,
while analysts are as atheistic as they were in Freud’s day, they would not express such
views (even if they privately held them). A dramatic change has taken place.
One may point to four main lines of thinking that characterize the new views on religion
and to some extent explain their emergence:
1) Freud failed to appreciate the value of illusion.
According to the newer literature on religion, when the meaning of illusion is fully
grasped the question of the validity of religious belief that seemed to trouble Freud
becomes irrelevant. Not only is there no possible move from illusion to delusion, in the
Page 5 of 20

sense that the fact that religious belief is founded on a wish does not allow one to
conclude that the belief is false, but also the fact that a belief is an illusion implies the
irrelevance of the question of falsity. Here the thinking of the British psychoanalyst D. W.
Winnicott on the early development of the child, published primarily in the 1950s and
1960s, plays a crucial role. For example, Winnicott describes the importance of the infant
believing that he created the breast that feeds him, and the importance of allowing him to
maintain this illusion. This is clearly false in a simple factual sense, but in another sense
one may say that the breast arrives because of the infant’s scream. He also describes how
the infant becomes invested in objects (his thumb, his blanket) as though they were the
breast, and in a certain sense they take on its meaning. This situation is, according to
(p. 558) Winnicott, neither real nor imaginary nor delusional, but rather involves some
transitional area of reality, one of illusion. It’s an area in which the question: ‘ “Did you
conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?” … is not to be
formulated’ (1953: 14).
Winnicott goes on to suggest that this understanding of the nature of illusion and its role
in infant development has broader cultural implications as well, including for religion. In
his paper ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’ (1953) he describes how the
mother allows:
the infant the illusion that what the infant creates really exists. This intermediate
area of experience, unchallenged in respect of its belonging to inner or external
(shared) reality, constitutes the greater part of the infant’s experience, and
throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and
to religion. (1971: 16)
This perspective has been very much taken up by newer analytic approaches to religion
and allows them to ground their positive view of religion as something that exists in a
kind of transitional space. Indeed, as Freud says, religion is an illusion, but illusions are
necessary and valuable and cannot be dismissed by questioning whether they tell us
something true about objective reality.
It should be noted here that the irrelevance of the question of objective reality refers only
to the content of the illusion. The capacity to form illusion and the relational conditions
that enable this are considered to be objective realities of great relevance and an
important focus of analytic concern.4 This leads to the next characteristic of the new
analytic models of religion.
2) Religion satisfies basic self and relational needs.
The contemporary positive perspective on religion maintains that there is a connection

between religion in some senses of the term and psychic well-being. They introduce
criteria of well-being, which were not of direct concern to Freud and his followers, to
support this. Religion, they argue, may allow for the expression, and even reinforcement,
of various desirable human capacities for relationship, such as trust, intimacy, care, and
community (Wallwork and Wallwork 1990: 161), and provide an important means for
Page 6 of 20

articulating basic aspects of self-experience. As James Jones, the very prolific American
writer on psychoanalysis and religion, states:
religious moments … allow us to enter again and again into that timeless and
transforming psychological space from which renewal and creativity emerge …
[there,] we gain access again to the formative (and reformative) experience at the
heart of selfhood. (1991: 134)
In presenting such capacities and experiences as relevant factors in determining

(p. 559)
the value of religion these authors rely on a post-Freudian psychoanalytic approach which
is thought to better appreciate the value of regressive forms of relatedness and
experience. For example, undifferentiated relatedness to a maternal object is considered
necessary for early developmental processes and in order to overcome painful feelings of
loss later in life. Thus religious experience which supposedly gives expression to
undifferentiated forms of relatedness to a maternal object are thought to be helpful to the
individual’s well-being (Kakar 1991).
3) Religion is defined in terms of broad spiritual experience.
In the contemporary positive analytic perspective on religion, the ideal religion becomes
more of a personal, self-determined mysticism, devoid of history, ritual, authority,
obligation, and mediation, a kind of Westernized Buddhism. This religious ideal often does
away with the notion of the existence of a transcendent object to the point that the self
becomes the object of religious experience. For example, Symington, in his 1994 book on
psychoanalysis and religion, defines religion and spirituality so that, in their mature
forms, they are compatible ‘with the denial of God’s existence’ (1994: 88) and equated
with willing the good, disciplining one’s intentions, and upholding a morality based on
freedom and responsibility for the other. Coming from a very different angle and referring
to the writings of Lacan, Bion, and Winnicott, Michael Eigen speaks of holiness,
mysticism, sacredness, and prayer, apparently referring by these terms to a general and
vague kind of openness to experiencing (Eigen 1988, 2001). Responding to the question
of what he means by ‘God’ he states:
God could be anything … to blank oneself out and be totally open to whatever
currents pulse this way or that … whether you’re into body, or emotion … Taoist or
Buddhist, whatever, it feels good. (1988: 193; the last two ellipses appear in the
original)
At the same time, a critical stance is often maintained in regard to more traditional forms
of religion, which are regarded as dogmatic and fundamentalist. Hinshelwood explains in
his foreword to an edited book entitled Beyond Belief, which presents contemporary
views on the nature of the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion, that he feels
a kind of aversion towards religion in its institutionalized form. He adds that he thinks he
shares the viewpoint of all the contributors to the volume (twelve in number), who ‘more
or less all repudiate “organised religion”. They reject dogma and (mostly) rituals. They
Page 7 of 20

revert simply to “natural religion”, the deeply personal religious experience of a mystical
kind’ (Hinshelwood 1999: xvi–xvii).
4) Psychoanalysis is regarded as a spiritual experience.
The contemporary positive analytic perspective on religion tends to regard not only
religion in terms of a more general spiritual experience, but psychoanalysis too.
Symington, for example, considers the aim of psychoanalysis to be ‘the transformation of
bad actions into good’ and consequently maintains that it is a spiritual endeavour (1994:
181). (p. 560) He concludes that both theology and psychoanalysis have yet to recognize
that ‘the greatest spiritual encounters’ (1994: 130) occur between patient and analyst.
Moreover, also being, according to Symington, a practice geared towards the
transformation of narcissism into concern for others, psychoanalysis is the pinnacle of
mature religiosity and a much-needed substitute for the failed primitive religions of
revelation (1994: 75).
Along similar lines Eigen speaks of the ‘holiness’ of therapy (1988: 42), and the ‘mystical’
and ‘sacred’ (2001: 37) nature of psychoanalysis and the self-experiencing that these
allow for. He tells us that psychoanalysis is, for him, at times ‘a form of prayer’ (1988:
11).5
The Change in the Attitude to Truth

These four features that characterize the positive view of religion in psychoanalysis point
to the fact that those who have rejected Freud’s stance on religion do so primarily on the
basis of a change of attitude in relation to the role and value of truth. Freud rejected
religion because he considered it to involve a distortion of truth. He maintained that it is
founded on belief in claims that are false and this in and of itself is not only wrong, but
also can never be considered conducive to the person’s development and well-being.
What psychoanalysis can offer is only cure through truth and aimed at seeing reality as it
is (Freud 1917). The positive analytic view of religion argues, in contrast, that through
changing the value of illusion, by expanding the scope of its relevance, the question of
truth can be bracketed. Moreover, neither psychoanalysis nor religion should be
measured in terms of its claims to truth. In place of these we should focus on the
personal, interpersonal, and spiritual benefits that each allows for.
In other words, the shift towards a positive view of religion, for the most part, comes with
a transformation of both the nature of psychoanalysis and the nature of religion. They
begin to resemble each other. Notably, the question most central to the traditional
Judaeo-Christian believer, the question of God’s existence, is not only bracketed, but is no
longer considered relevant or meaningful. Religion is regarded not as an expression of
knowledge or truth pertaining to the nature of reality, a transcendent reality of God, but
more as a kind of self- or relational experiencing within a realm of illusion. And it is self-
Page 8 of 20

and relational experiencing of this kind which is considered to be what psychoanalysis

offers and aims for.6
Freud clearly would have rejected such developments in psychoanalysis. Already in his
time the view was gaining force that religious beliefs are merely a kind of fiction accepted
as true for their great practical significance, both culturally and in terms of the needs of
mankind that cannot be fulfilled by ‘cold science’ (1927: 35). However, such a (p. 561)
view, Freud states with clear disdain, could be proposed only by a philosopher. No serious
believer would accept this. Nor could he. In a letter to Oskar Pfister in 1930 Freud writes,
‘The question is not what belief is more pleasing or more advantageous to life, but of
what may approximate more closely to the puzzling reality that lies outside us’ (Meng and
E. L. Freud, 1963: 132–3). Freud’s concern and efforts were directed towards coming to
know this reality.
As I’ve noted, Freud’s argument against religion did not rest solely on its being based on
false claims. He was also concerned with its infantile origins—a point much emphasized
by Freud’s critics. But it may be seen that these infantile origins only complement,
support, and contribute to Freud’s position that religious beliefs are not actually true. In
effect, by pointing to religion’s infantile roots Freud explains how it is that people believe
such beliefs, given that it cannot be because of the actual existence of the realities that
these beliefs purport to be about. However, it is the truth and not the infantilism that is
the crucial point here for Freud. Clearly other activities that are infantile in origin are not
intolerable to Freud. Adult sexual activity also has infantile roots but, as long as it does
not make false claims regarding reality, Freud did not feel that it should be overcome.
Similarly, art, although expressing phantasy life and turning away from reality, could be
viewed as valuable because it made no claims to universal truth.7 ‘Art’, Freud writes,
‘does not seek to be anything but an illusion … it makes no attempt at invading the realm
of reality’ (1933: 160). It was only the invasion of reality, of truth, that was intolerable to
Freud, and which he thought to be taking place in the case of religious belief.
Prophetically, perhaps, Freud knew that his position on the truth of religion would not be
welcomed by modern defenders of the faith. He remarked that, as a consequence of his
stance, he would now ‘have to listen to the most disagreeable reproaches for my
shallowness, narrow-mindedness and lack of idealism or of understanding for the highest
interests of mankind’ (1927: 36). He ‘consoled’ himself with the thought that at least in
our day and age such reproach would not bring with it ‘a sure curtailment of one’s earthly
existence and an effective speeding-up of the opportunity for gaining a personal
experience of the after-life’ (1927: 36).
While Freud has indeed been scorned by believers, it would seem that Freud’s view that
believers are making claims to truth would be better received by traditional believers
than the more religion-friendly analytic views that have emerged in recent years. While
all believers would be happy to hear that being a believer does not necessarily entail
involvement in infantile, regressive, neurotic processes and practices, and on the
contrary could reflect and contribute to one’s psychic well-being and adaptive living
Page 9 of 20

within society, for many the essence of religion lies in acknowledging the actual reality of
a supernatural or divine being (Leavy 1990: 47, 50; Vergote 1990: 76). These believers
maintain that there is no meaning or value to religion if its assertions are not true, not
real. ‘Real’ here does not mean real in the sense of being expressive of real inner
experience, (p. 562) a psychic reality that lies behind the religious stories and practices,
but rather real in the sense that the assertions made about the nature of God, his
existence and transcendence, his actions and his promise, his message and his demands,
refer to something actual. The Judaeo-Christian tradition in this context speaks of the
existence of a unique being who actually intervenes in the course of human history. As the
theologian Hans Kung summarizes:
The man who believes … is primarily interested … in the reality itself … He wants
to know whether and to what extent his faith is based on illusion or on historical
reality. Any faith based on illusion is not really faith but superstition. (1984: 418)
Cardinal John Henry Newman expressed similar sentiments. He writes that ‘religion, as a
mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery. As well can there be filial love without
the fact of a father, as devotion without the fact of a Supreme Being’ (Apologia pro vita
sua, chapter II [1864] 1995: 39). What is affirmed here is not belief in the literal truth of
all biblical stories (e.g. that Jonah spent three days in the belly of a fish), but in the truth
of a God whose existence and nature finds expression through these stories.
In sum, Freud rejected the truth of religious belief and thus the value of religion and, in
so doing, took a stance diametrically opposed to that of traditional believers. However, it
may be argued that in that very opposition he was closer to the concerns of the
traditional believer than those who adopt the much more positive attitude characteristic
of the new psychoanalytic thinking on religion. This is because Freud’s opposition, his
rejection of religion, is ultimately founded on a love of truth. As Freud rejected religion in
the name of truth, he not only maintained that religion consisted of assertions that made
truth claims, but he also shared in the passionate desire for truth with which the
traditional believer, in his faith in an ultimate reality, would readily identify.
Oskar Pfister, who wrote against Freud’s views on religion, thought that this love of truth
pointed not only to an affinity with the believer, but was, in fact, a religious stance.
Shortly after the publication of Freud’s most critical text on religion, The Future of an
Illusion, Pfister wrote in a reply to Freud that ‘Anyone who has struggled so powerfully
for the truth and fought so courageously for the redemption of love as you have is,
whether he admits it or not, a true servant of God according to scripture’ (Pfister 1928:
149–50; in Meissner’s translation, 1984: 75).
Page 10 of 20

The Dialogue between Freud and the Believer

on the Nature of Truth
Recognizing that Freud and traditional believers share the common ground of a concern
with and love of truth, further exploration of that ground is possible.
1) Freud’s recognition of his inability to make assertions regarding religious truth

and yet his insistence on doing so.
Freud openly acknowledged that psychoanalysis can determine what is real or not
(p. 563)
only in relation to psychic reality—its area of expertise. It can tell us about wishes and
other kinds of personal motivations that come into play in relation to other areas or
aspects of reality, but it cannot make pronouncements regarding the actual nature or
existence of that reality. As noted earlier, understanding that we wish for reality to be a
certain way doesn’t tell us about the actual nature of reality. To use Freud’s terminology,
the fact that we have illusions doesn’t tell us that they are delusions (that they contradict
reality) (Freud 1927: 31). For example, while psychoanalysis may tell us of the
motivations involved in the acceptance of the law of gravity or the theory of relativity, it
does not inform us of the truth or falsity of such laws and theories, nor does it add new
physical laws of its own. Freud’s critics emphasize his failure to apply this understanding
to the reality of God’s existence as well.
This criticism is legitimate. While Freud held that the determination that a belief is
delusional could not be made on the basis of psychoanalytic thinking or findings, in
regard to religious belief Freud moves quite quickly from illusion to delusion, offering but
a few extra-analytic considerations as to why he thinks such belief contradicts reality.
Freud’s personal and cultural reasons for his digression from his own position when it
comes to religious belief have been the subject of much discussion (e.g. the role and
sources of his own atheism). It may, however, be seen that there is an intrinsic analytic
one as well. This has to do with the supernatural status of religious truth, which renders
its claims about the basic nature of reality beyond objective demonstration. Indeed
psychoanalysis’ concern is only with coming to know psychic reality, but it may be argued
that the possibility of doing so relies on having a conception of the basic nature of
external reality. For example, how we would understand the psychic reality of a patient
who denies the law of gravity is strongly influenced by what we know or assume
regarding the existence and acceptance of this law and what we expect of the patient in
this regard. Similarly, how we understand the psychic reality of a patient who affirms the
existence of God will be shaped by basic conceptions regarding the reality of God’s
existence (see Leavy 1990: 59). Since there is no consensus or objectively demonstrated
position on this basic conception of reality, when patient and analyst differ in regard to
this conception, that is, when they differ in their views of religious truth, the search for
psychic truth may be constricted. For Freud such constriction of the analytic project was
unacceptable and this may be seen to underlie his firm stance that religious truth was not
only an illusion, but that it directly contradicted what is known about reality (1933: 160).8
Page 11 of 20

2) Historical truth: Some similarities between the form and content of

psychoanalytic and religious truth.
Moses and Monotheism, which was ultimately published in full as a book in 1939, is often
viewed as yet another of Freud’s anti-religious texts (for example, Gay 1987: 44; Meissner
1984: 106). In that book, Freud explains the origins of Judaism and monotheism through
a very complex analysis of religious and historical writings. Freud’s explanation (p. 564)
centres on a story regarding the relationship between Moses, an Egyptian prince and
follower of the monotheistic beliefs of Akhenaten, and the problematic Jewish people
whom Moses chose in order to carry on his religion. This relationship was ultimately a
fatal and painful one, as the Jews for various reasons and needs were to rise up and kill
Moses, only to feel afterwards remorse and guilt. These feelings are reminiscent of the
experiences of the sons in Freud’s account of the early development of mankind (which
he describes in his Totem and Taboo 1913), after they rise up and kill the revered and
beloved primal father. Freud’s story of this relationship and the historical events
surrounding it is presented as a product of careful scrutiny of relevant texts, and as a
valid explanation of the source of many of the particular characteristics of the Jewish
people, their beliefs, and the attitudes that they have aroused and continue to arouse in
others.
In the course of this exposition, Freud presents his notion of ‘historical truth’. He does so
in the context of his concern, and I have argued that this is the major concern of the book
(Blass 2003, 2004), to understand the source of the believer’s conviction, the power of
certain ideas to compel us to believe in them even though they are not only unverified by
reality, but are incompatible with it. Freud wonders, for example, why such ideas are not
‘listened to, judged, and perhaps dismissed, like any other piece of information from
outside’ (1939: 101). In dealing with this question in Moses and Monotheism, Freud more
seriously than ever before is willing to examine the pious religious suggestion that these
ideas, though strange and unverified, are accepted because they are simply true (1939:
128–9). That is, the believer is convinced because he meets in these ideas what he
somehow knows to be true; much in the same way that we believe there is a blue chair in
front of us for the simple reason that it so happens that this is the case. For example (and
this is Freud’s main example), the believer accepts the idea of there being a single God,
although it is a strange and unverifiable proposition, because as a matter of fact there is a
single God. The believer accepts the idea because, upon hearing it, the believer’s mind
recognizes its truth. Freud acknowledges that such an explanation does have explanatory
power but, of course, it would require us to also accept that the human mind has a
‘special inclination for recognising the truth’ (1939: 129). Freud concludes that, knowing
that our intellect is very easily led astray by our wishes—that is, we tend to take as true
that which we wish for—the claim that we have such a special inclination for truth is
obviously mistaken and consequently the pious explanation must be rejected.
Nevertheless, very interestingly at this point, Freud does not suggest (as he has at
others) that what the believer recognizes as true is, therefore, merely illusion and in turn
delusion. Instead, here the notion of historical truth is introduced. He writes, ‘We too
believe that the pious solution contains the truth—but the historical truth and not the
Page 12 of 20

material truth’ (1939: 129). This historical truth, as Freud goes on to describe and define
it, does not refer to the historical facts; it is not the objective reality of the past (as it is
often wrongly taken to mean). But it is not merely an internal, psychical reality either.
Rather, it is a special kind of impression in the mind of a past reality. Its origin is in the
real world; real events left the impression. But the impression is not identical to the real
world, to the actual events. The source of the relevant distortion in this context is not our
wishful tendencies, but rather the primal nature of the impression.
Something from the outside was registered in our minds at a time when it was
(p. 565)
impossible for us to create an accurate image of it, or to understand it in a way that is

accurate in terms of our present understanding of reality. It is this historical truth, buried
in the depths of our minds, according to Freud, that explains the believer’s acceptance of
religious ideas. These ideas are false propositions regarding objective reality, but they are
in a sense true to the internal impression of what was once external reality. As such, they
are what Freud refers to as ‘justified memor[ies]’ that demand to be believed (1939: 130).
In other words, the believer is compelled to accept religious ideas because upon hearing
them his mind recognizes their truth, but what takes place here is not a simple
correspondence between mind and reality as such (as when my mind recognizes the
existence of a chair that is there), but rather between mind and the vestiges of a past
primal reality. To the extent that religious ideas are shaped by the limitations of our mind
to have accurately perceived and registered this reality, and, to the extent that they are
further influenced by our wishes, these ideas are false. However, to the extent that they
convey the great truths of ‘the earliest experiences of the whole of humanity’ that return
and find revived expression in our minds and in our lives, they are also true—true to a
past external reality (1939: 130).
Here there is a radical shift in Freud’s position regarding the truth of religious ideas and
their relationship to his own. Indeed, Freud had always maintained that there exist some
real events at the foundations of religious belief, whether it be a primeval patricide or a
loving relationship that did, in fact, exist in the past with one’s own father. But now there
is a difference. I mention here just two points. First, Freud’s focus is now on the truth and
the justification of these ideas, not on their distortive nature. There are good and real
reasons to believe. As he notes in the postscript to An Autobiographical Study (written
while he was preparing his Moses and Monotheism): ‘In The Future of an Illusion I
expressed an essentially negative valuation of religion. Later, I found a formula which did
better justice to it … granting that its power lies in the truth which it contains’ (1935: 72).
Second, while religious ideas are distortive of the objective material reality, Freud now, in
effect, contends that all ideas that attempt to grasp the common primal realities of
mankind will inevitably be so. It is in the very nature of that early reality that we
encounter it only through the traces that it leaves in our mind. We can then
retrospectively form propositions regarding the material reality that engendered these
traces, but these propositions are always only conjecture. Our minds have never really
fully met that early reality, nor, being prehistorical and external in origin, could we ever
meet it now. And while these propositions are only conjecture they are still the best we
Page 13 of 20

have in the way of truth, since it is through these conjectures, these convictions, that the
traces of an earlier reality can now find some expression (Blass 2003: 676).
It is important to recognize that in Moses and Monotheism Freud not only expresses ideas
on the origins of religion and its value, but also offers a psychoanalytic perspective on the
person and on knowledge, which in important ways corresponds to those of religious
approaches. To explain: (a) Freud’s position in Moses and Monotheism that belief in God
is not merely a projection of various aspects of the father of childhood, (p. 566) but
reflects true and valuable aspects of early human reality, highlights an aspect of Freud’s
basic perspective on the person that is often overlooked and is downplayed by Freud
himself.
According to this perspective the person’s foundational psychic reality has an inherent
ethical texture to it (see Blass 2006, 2012). That is, Freud’s description of this reality is
not a neutral portrayal of psychological facts, of what happens to exist in our mind; rather
his description of the facts contains an inbuilt prescription on how the person should be.
It tells us not only that people develop Oedipal conflicts and tend to feel guilty, but rather
that in experiencing certain forms of guilt we are actually fulfilling our human nature,
giving expression to ‘historical truth’—and it is right that we do so. And here we may see
that the nature of historical truth that Freud thinks the person should give expression to,
should come to know and live, corresponds in important ways to what is foundational to
the traditional believer’s view of the person. The foundational reality that Freud thinks
the person must contend with centres on a battle between love and hate, between
conflicted desires, which results in destruction and specifically in the killing of the
beloved father, which arouses remorse and which accounts for a basic sense of guilt that
guides us throughout life. Of course, despite this kind of correspondence, Freud rejects
the believer’s view that this nature is the result of the intervention of an actual
transcendent God, and here lies a fundamental and very important difference.
A similar approach to the foundational reality of the person may be seen in basic ideas
later put forth by the British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and her followers. According to
the Kleinian view psychic reality is composed of early relationships between objects that
are ‘good’ and/or ‘bad’. But this designation of good and bad does not merely refer to
qualities of feelings. For example, the mother’s breast is not only experienced as good; it
is good not only as a source of pleasure and nutrition. Rather the breast is regarded as an
actual and direct source of goodness. It reflects goodness that exists in the world as well
as in the person’s internalized psychic reality. Accordingly, the ability to recognize this
goodness rather than deny it (e.g. out of envy) is what it means to see truth and to
properly live one’s psychic truth: (b) Freud’s recognition of the value of historical truth
puts in question the criteria for accepting a claim as true or delusional that, as we have
seen, he argues for elsewhere (Freud 1927, 1933).
On the basis of this recognition he accepts claims as true even where there is no way of
objectively demonstrating their truth. Moreover, he suggests that a sense of conviction in
the truth of the claims, like the believer’s belief, can serve as an indication—at least in
Page 14 of 20

part—of their truth. The conviction, while possibly delusional, a distortion of truth based
on wishful thinking, may also be evidence that we have encountered foundational truths
regarding our very nature, truths so primary, so integral to human nature, that they
cannot be corroborated by material evidence. Their truth, rather, is lived and is made
apparent through the very sense of conviction itself.
But with this new approach to conviction based on the notion of historical truth, there
comes the danger that there would be no room for doubting convictions, as the sense of
conviction itself might be taken as a sign of truth. Freud’s solution is to maintain (p. 567) a
balance between accepting conviction and questioning one’s wishful motives for
accepting it, a balance between belief and doubt. Interestingly, one can see this tension
even in the very writing of Moses. Throughout that text Freud struggled with his doubts
as he continued to seek material truth and proof, but ultimately he allowed himself to go
with his convictions (Blass 2003). Noting the lack of sufficient evidence for his
conclusions, he confides to Andreas-Salomé that ‘It suffices me that I myself can believe
in the solution of the problem’ (letter of 6 January 1935, cited in Pfeiffer 1966: 205).
It may be seen that this more complex notion of truth and how we come to know it, with
its focus on lived convictions and an ongoing process of doubting them, better captures
the clinical stance that Freud recommends than Freud’s more familiar objective approach
(Blass 2016). The psychoanalytic process is not about proving to the patient facts about
what’s going on in his mind, but of encountering, and coming to know and question and
better integrate, one’s inner reality. It’s a fluid process in which the sense of conviction
regarding what one comes to understand plays an important part.9
Dialogue and Tension

As I have described, contemporary positive psychoanalytic views of religion bridge
psychoanalysis and religion by affirming the existence of a common ground of illusion, by
putting aside distinctions between truth and fiction, religious ideas and those of
psychoanalysis, experience of the sacred and experience of the self.
Freud, in contrast, opposed religion; he did not accept the traditional belief in God’s
actual existence or in anything supernatural. Only human reality lies at the foundation of
his explanation of our experiences and tendencies. But his opposition was grounded in a
concern to encounter truth. The person, he maintained, should strive to see reality as it is
rather than distort it in order to make ourselves more loved, protected, forgiven, and
ideal than we are. Freud’s concern for truth is shared by traditional believers. Moreover,
in his later writing additional areas of commonality become apparent as his notion of
truth becomes increasingly complex. According to his more complex notion foundational
truths of our mind are not regarded as something to be simply objectively demonstrated
or proven. Rather, conviction and doubt play an important part in their discernment. And
the view of the person and his basic predicament that finds expression in these truths—
Page 15 of 20

his ethical struggle with love, destruction, and guilt towards a paternal figure—
significantly resembles aspects of certain religious views of the person.
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Notes:
(1) [Eds: See also Cottingham, this volume, § ‘Freud’s Critique of Religion’.]
(2) In this chapter I will describe psychoanalytic positions on concepts of illusion,

delusion, truth, reality, and objectivity as presented by their authors. Within this single
text it would not be possible to subject them to philosophical critique and this task is left
to the readers.
(3) [Eds: See also Cottingham, this volume, § ‘Carl Jung and the Importance of Symbolic
Thought’.]
(4) It should also be noted that not all writers who have promoted the notion of illusion
and transitional space for the understanding of religion have dismissed the objectivity of
the content of the illusion. Notable exceptions are William Meissner and Ana-Maria
Rizzuto. However, others have made use of their writings to support the general trend.
These ideas regarding the necessity of illusion are, at times, accompanied by the idea of
the necessity and value of the irrational (for example, Ostow 1988: 209).
(5) This may be seen to be part of a broader cultural trend, which has allowed for a new
respect for the sacred by changing the meaning of the term (see Bloom 1987: 216).
Page 19 of 20

(6) [Eds: See Cottingham, this volume, for the development of a view that seeks to avoid
both poles of this disagreement.]
(7) This understanding stands in contrast to some of the newer analytic interpretations,
which maintain that Freud held a generally antagonistic attitude towards illusion, except
in the realm of art, and that, were this attitude to change for the better, so would Freud’s
attitude towards religion (Kakar 1991: 59; Meissner 1984: 162).
(8) For another way of thinking about Freud’s approach to dealing with claims regarding
religion’s truth within the analytic situation see Blass 2018.
(9) [Eds: See also Cottingham, this volume, § ‘Philosophizing about Religion and the
Layers of the Human Psyche’ on similarities between religion and psychoanalysis.]
Rachel B. Blass
Blass Heythrop College, University of London, UK
Page 20 of 20


The No-Thing of God: Psychoanalysis of Religion After
Lacan
Richard Boothby

This chapter traces some main lines of Jacques Lacan’s interpretation of religion and
divinity, which differs significantly from Freud’s critique. Orienting ourselves with respect
to what Lacan calls das Ding, the enigmatic desire of the Other, it is possible to sketch a
Lacanian analysis of religion parallel to that offered by Kant in Religion Within the Limits
of Reason Alone. The difference is that where Kant looked to find in religious
representations, especially those of Christianity, the underlying dynamics of pure
rationality and of a morality founded upon it, Lacan discerns the very structure of
subjectivity and its relation to the unknown Other. New perspectives are thereby opened
up on a whole series of problems, including the unconscious dynamics of enjoyment,
practices of sacrifice, the structural differences between various religions, and Christian
doctrines of incarnation, love, and mystical unknowing.
Keywords: Lacan, Real, Imaginary, Symbolic, the Other, das Ding, paternal metaphor, sacrifice, sexuation,
mysticism
Page 1 of 23

Introduction
On the topic of religion, it is clear that the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, doesn’t
merely repeat the critique mounted by Freud. Not so clear is the meaning of what Lacan
says on his own.1 At different points in his teaching, Lacan associates the ancient gods
with the unthinkable Real (2017: 44), he identifies the ‘I am that I am’ of the burning
bush with the pure subject of speech (1968: Session of 11 December), he asserts that ‘the
true formula for atheism is that God is unconscious’ (1981: 59), and he intimates that his
Écrits should be compared with the writings of the great mystics (1998: 76). That last
provocation is sounded in Lacan’s twentieth seminar, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, The
Limits of Love and Knowledge. It is there, too, that Lacan associates an excessive
enjoyment beyond knowing, what he calls the ‘jouissance of the Other’, with the essential
incompleteness of woman, her characteristic of being pas tout, or ‘non-all’. He then
brings such feminine jouissance suggestively but enigmatically into conjunction with God,
asking at one point: ‘Why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as based on
feminine jouissance?’ (1998: 82).
How to make sense of these obscure passages? How are we to grasp the intersection they
imply between jouissance, language, lack, love, and God? And how are these terms
knotted in relation to knowing and what is beyond knowing? While such questions cannot
be adequately answered in a brief paper, we might hope to provide a basic orientation to
them.
Freud’s Critique
Freud’s critique of religious belief is familiar and need only be tersely summarized to
orient our discussion.2 In The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud’s attack is directed less
towards the object of belief, the dubiousness of an invisible, supernatural power who
oversees human life from a cosmic distance, than towards the subject who believes. The
problem is the motive of the believer. The ‘illusion’ at stake is thus a matter of the
believer’s investment in wish-fulfilling fantasies.
To this bottom-line assessment, Freud added two more properly psychoanalytic angles of
interpretation. The first, developed in Totem and Taboo (1911) and revisited in Freud’s
last major work, Moses and Monotheism (1939), predicates the solidarity of the human
group upon the fantasy of the father’s murder. The bond of brotherly love is cemented by
the blood of the patriarch. It is a theory that casts a light on the origins of religious ritual
in practices of blood sacrifice and suggests that what Catholics call the mystical body of
the Church is founded upon a collective guilt over the murder of the Saviour.
Page 2 of 23

Freud based a second strategy on the resemblance of religious ritual to the compulsions
of the obsessive neurosis. Not only are they both marked by a conspicuous
conscientiousness, they also display the compromise structure of the symptom, which
functions to repress some impulse at the same time that it symbolically discharges it. The
case of the Ratman illustrates the dynamic perfectly (Freud: 1909: 153–320). His
obsessional thinking becomes unmanageable upon hearing a fellow soldier describe an
oriental torture in which a cage of starving rats is affixed to the buttocks of the victim so
that the rats chew their way into the anus. The Ratman becomes preoccupied with the
recurring dread that such horrifying treatment might be applied to the two most
important figures in his life: his father and his fiancée. In the frightful shudder that
accompanies each compulsive reimagining, Freud recognizes both a struggle to defend
against a sexually charged desire and a means of satisfying that very desire. Key religious
phenomena might be interpreted in parallel fashion. Contemplation of the crucifixion, for
example, invites the worshipper to rise above all hatred in a final victory of love while
also offering an occasion to gratify an unconscious sadism.
Page 3 of 23

Lacanian Heresy
In a simple but elegant pun, the title of Lacan’s twenty-second seminar, ‘R.S.I.,’ ––which
pronounced in French sounds like ‘heresy’––suggests both a measured departure from
Freudian orthodoxy and, more subtly but palpably, a promise of a new angle of
interpretation on the problem of religion. The three letters stand for the three
fundamental registers––Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary–– with which Lacan rewrites the
essentials of psychoanalytic theory. The case of the Ratman offers a useful frame in which
to introduce them.
The fantasy of bodily violation in the rat torture recalls the dynamics of the ‘imaginary’,
which for Lacan inform the structure and function of the ego. During the period of late
infancy that Lacan calls ‘the mirror stage’, the unifying gestalt of the other’s body is
thought to coordinate the impulse chaos of the child. This reliance on an external image
alienates the human subject from itself. It inevitably invites aggression towards the other
because it introduces an internal split. On this point, Lacan rests a central postulate of
his entire outlook: the opposition between the moi and the je, between the ego as the seat
of one’s conscious sense of self, and the subject of unconscious desire.
That subject emerges in pulsations of the ‘symbolic’, Lacan’s general term for the
resources of language, informed by the theories of Saussure and Jakobson, on which he
draws in order to retrieve and radicalize Freud’s many analyses of word play in dreams,
slips, bungled actions, and symptomatic complexes. In the Ratman, for example, the
obsessive idea clearly crystallizes around the morpheme ‘Rat’, which functions like a kind
of switch-point in a constellation of emotionally loaded issues: the starving, gnawing
rodents (Ratten), monetary debts (Raten), gambling (Spielratte), and marriage
(Heiraten). The key thing that Lacan adds to Freud’s own elaborate analyses (and what
he adds to the linguistic theories of Saussure as well) is a more general theory of the
signifier centred on its unconscious dimension. The signifier always passes into the
speech stream an indeterminate excess, what Lacan calls the ‘objet petit a’. In the margin
of this excess there is a ‘slippage of the signified beneath the signifier’ (Lacan, 2006: 419)
The consequence, put in simplest terms, is that we always say more than we intend. It is
in the space of the unsaid and unintended that unconscious effects unfold.
By locating the roots of unconscious desire in the play of the signifier, Lacan reconceives
the Oedipus complex as a function of the acquisition of language.3 What Freud had tied to
paternal threats of castration becomes a matter of tensions internal to the child’s
submission to the symbolic law. Lacan’s third category of the ‘real’ arises at the limit of
the law, or better, at the point where the symbolic function remains incomplete,
interrupted, or inconsistent. In the gaps and failures of the symbolic, the subject may be
confronted with a traumatic excess, the subjective impact of the real that Lacan calls
jouissance. The real in this sense, far from being reducible to everyday ‘reality’, indicates
the subject’s encounter with something fundamentally unthinkable. If it is an encounter
with something incomprehensible in the outside world, it is also an engagement with the
Page 4 of 23

incomprehensible in the subject itself. Here, too, the Ratman provides us with a
suggestive example. In talking about the dread rat torture, Freud tells us, the patient’s
face ‘took on a very strange, composite expression. I could only interpret it as one of
horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware’ (Freud 1909: 166–7).
Where, then, are we to locate the religious in the architecture of Lacanian theory? For
many commentators, the answer is to identify God with an aspect of the unthinkable real.
Divinity is to be situated in a domain beyond human experience, a zone that forever
outstrips all capacities to image or name it.4 Such an approach offers the satisfaction of
locating the divine in a dimension of radical transcendence, but it also runs the risks
attendant upon the conception first put forward by Kant, who famously claimed to limit
human reason in order to make room for God. For such a view, the divine is vouchsafed
by being located in a noumenal Beyond, but only at the price of our being barred from
saying anything whatever about its nature.
A second angle of interpretation takes its point of departure from Lacan’s conception of
the symbolic ‘big Other’. Part of what is distinctive about Lacan’s conception of language
is that he characterizes the network of the symbolic code as susceptible of being
construed as something akin to, or in some way inhabited by, another subject. This so-
called ‘big Other’ is the nameless and faceless regulator who oversees the written and
unwritten rules that direct our lives. At stake is not just the properly linguistic rules
governing grammar, syntax, and semantics. The big Other also monitors our polite
behaviour, inspects our adherence to fashion, defines for us what is funny (sometimes
actually laughing for us in the ‘laugh track’ of TV sitcoms), insists on our silent decorum
at one moment and calls for our deep-throated patriotic fervour at another. The power of
this symbolic big Other resides in part precisely in the fact that it exists everywhere and
nowhere, that it is both ‘all and none’.5
In this supposition of something subject-like in the symbolic code we rightly discern a

shadow of Freud’s primal father. Yet we also get a hint that, unlike Freud, who posed
faith as a means of coping with human helplessness by means of pleasing illusions, for
Lacan the disposition to belief in God is more emphatically unconscious and more
definitely structural. Far from being an illusory add-on to a rationality that could and
should do without it, an implicit ‘faith’ in the underlying coherence of sense-making is a
kind of structural requirement of our relation to language. The Lacanian view thus
suggests that something like faith, the baseline credulity that undergirds reliance on all
symbolic conventions, is a virtual necessity for human beings. It is this function that
underlies the promotion of what Lacan calls ‘master signifiers’, the legitimacy of which
are warranted by the big Other in the role of a ‘subject supposed to know’. And what is
God but the ultimate form of such supposition? If we mortals fail to grasp the meaning of
our lives, the same is not true of the divine agency whose plan for Creation is complete in
every detail.6 ‘The subject supposed to know’, says Lacan, ‘is God, full stop, nothing
else’ (1968: Session of 30 April).
Page 5 of 23

God in the real or in the symbolic. Must we make a choice? A prime purpose of the
remainder of this chapter is to show how the two perspectives are in fact inseparable.
The key for making their connection lies in Lacan’s concept of das Ding, the Thing.
Page 6 of 23

In the Shadow of the Thing

While mentioned only infrequently after the central role it plays in the Lacan’s seventh
Seminar on ‘The Ethics of Psychoanalysis’, the concept of the Thing is clearly
fundamental.7 As Lacan says of it, ‘Das Ding is a primordial function which is located at
the level of the initial establishment of the gravitation of the unconscious Vorstellungen’ (1992:
62). How, then, to interpret it? Much of the commentary on Lacan’s notion has followed a
Kantian clue. On this account, the Lacanian Thing is akin to the Kantian Ding-an-sich, the
unthinkable kernel of external things, not merely as they appear to us, but as they are in
themselves. It is along this line of thinking that Lacan’s Thing is associated with the
original lost object that sets in motion the ceaseless roving of human desire. Das Ding
also names the dimension of what is fundamentally excessive (and thus is connected in
Lacan’s thought to the object petit a). As such, it animates the experience of the sublime,
which Lacan famously characterizes as emerging when ‘the object is elevated to the
dignity of the Thing’ (1992: 112).
This quasi-Kantian posing of the Thing in the locus of the Ding-as-sich is by no means
without some value, but it needs to be resisted at least long enough to recognize that the
crucial dimension of the das Ding concerns not objects but other people. The original
unthinkable object is the fellow human being. This conclusion is obvious when we return
to the text of Freud from which Lacan takes his clue. In a brief flight of theorizing in his
unpublished ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, Freud notes how the child divides the
figure of the Nebenmensch, the ‘neighbour’ or fellow human being, between what it can
recognize on the basis of similarities to its own body––precisely the sort of mirror
recognition that Lacan associates with the imaginary—and a locus of something that is
‘new and non-comparable’, a zone of something unknown. This unrepresentable excess
Freud calls das Ding. It is this division of the human other, a division that reserves in the
heart of the familiar a locus for something excessive and as yet unknown, that will serve
as the template for all of the child’s future attempts to interrogate the nature of objects.
‘For this reason’, says Freud, ‘it is in relation to the fellow human-being that a human-
being learns to cognize’ (1886–99: 331) The key point is not merely that there remains a
inaccessible, noumenal core of all objects but that the original schema that locates such
an unknown is taken from the example of what is unknown in the human Other.8
What is new and crucially important in Lacan’s treatment of the Thing is the way in which
the enigmatic locus of something uncognized in the Other becomes the root source of
anxiety. ‘Not only is [anxiety] not without object’, he says, ‘but it very likely designates
the most, as it were, profound object, the ultimate object, the Thing’ (Lacan 2014: 331).
The challenge of the neighbour-Thing consists not simply in the discovery of an
inaccessible kernel at the heart of the Other but in the way it raises the unsettling
question of what object I am for that unknown desire. The question presses with
particular force in the drama of toilet training when the demand of the Other for the
regulation of the infant’s bowels re-energizes anxiety about the unanswered question of
Page 7 of 23

what the Other wants. The Lacanian thesis thus goes beyond merely locating the source
of anxiety in the fellow human being. It asserts, contrary to our fondest myth about
childhood, that the hidden source of deepest and most uncanny anxiety is the mother
herself.9
We might remark in passing how this Lacanian understanding of the dynamics of the
mother/child relation at least partly resembles that offered by Simone de Beauvoir. At a
key point of her argument in The Second Sex, de Beauvoir reasserts the value of the
Freudian Oedipus complex for understanding the deep roots of ambivalence towards the
feminine, though with the crucial proviso that we invert Freud’s conception (de Beauvoir
1989: 195–6). The core of the Oedipus complex is not, as Freud thought, that the child
must be separated from the mother by a threat of castration, but rather that the child is
motivated to navigate its own separation, seeking to achieve an autonomy that can be
won only by a certain rejection of the maternal embrace. Lacan echoes this key point. He
could well be paraphrasing de Beauvoir when he insists that ‘it’s not true that the child is
weaned. He weans himself. He detaches himself from the breast’ (Lacan 2014: 313).
Does Lacan then follow de Beauvoir here? By no means completely. Their point of
convergence only makes it more essential to clarify Lacan’s distance from de Beauvoir,
who departs from Freud merely in claiming that the child’s desire for the mother is
abrogated not by the threat of paternal castration but rather by the child’s own rejection.
For Lacan, by contrast, the problem isn’t the desire of the child at all, but rather that of
the mother, in as much as her desire is encountered as a threatening unknown. It is in the
light of this perspective that we can make sense of Lacan’s comparison of the mother to
the daunting spectre of a giant praying mantis (Lacan 2014: 22). In the same stroke, we
can interpret his characterization of the objet petit a as un objet cessible, a cedable or
yieldable object (see Lacan 2014: 312–15, 324–7). In the various incarnations of the objet
a, most of them parts of the body, the subject’s ‘pound of flesh’, is exchanged or
‘sacrificed’ in order to create a margin of safe separation from the Other.10 Lacan calls to
mind a similar function when he likens the mother to a crocodile and the phallic signifier
to a stick with which to keep its jaws from snapping shut.
The notion of the objet cessible recapitulates in Lacan’s own theoretical frame something
akin to Heidegger’s notion of an escape from anxiety made possible by means of focusing
on an object (Heidegger 1962: 234). What Lacan calls objet a ultimately derives from a
pure void, a pure function of lack and absence. Yet this lack is successively given definite
shape in a series of objects, in the first instance parts of the body (breast, faeces, penis
etc.).11 In this way, the yawning lack discovered in the unfathomable opacity of the Other
our topic, the result is a new angle of view on the meaning of sacrifice. In its ultimate
function, ‘sacrifice is not at all intended to be an offering, nor a gift, both of which are
propagated in a quite different dimension, but the capture of the Other in the web of
desire’ (2014: 277).
Page 8 of 23

This discussion of the materialization of the objet a and its deployment in an economy of
exchange provides a ready segue to the child’s entry into language, the most basic and
highly elaborated economy of exchange. In the originary drama with the maternal Other,
the inarticulate cry of the infant becomes in itself a ceded object, indeed the very first
such object, yielded into the space between subject and Other. As Lacan says, ‘this
manifestation of anxiety coincides with the very emergence in the world of he who is
going to be the subject. This manifestation is his cry … this first effect of cession … the
nursling can’t do anything about the cry that slips out of him. He has yielded something
and nothing will ever conjoin him to it again’ (2014: 326).
If the first inchoate eruptions of the voice are in this way inflected with anxiety, and
inevitably so, in as much as they enter and begin to shape the emerging interval between
the subject and the Other, they are also destined to become the means by which the
question of the Other, the enigma of das Ding, will be ceaselessly reposed. ‘Here we’re
touching’, says Lacan, ‘on the very thing that makes the relation to the Other possible,
that is, on that whence emerges the fact that there is such a thing as a signifier. This site
whence emerges the fact that there is such a thing as the signifier is, in one sense, the
site that cannot be signified. It is what I call the site of the lack-of-signifier’ (2014: 134).
What is at stake is the most elemental implication of Lacan’s theory of the signifier,
perhaps precisely what he had in mind by claiming that he had defined the signifier as no
one else had dared. In every entry into language, in every iteration of signifying material,
there resounds some echo of the unanswered and unanswerable question of the Other.
This perspective on das Ding, in which the primordial question of the Other resonates––
waveringly, uncertainly––every signifier, illuminates the point that Lacan never tires of
emphasizing: that it is always possible to ask about anything spoken, ‘yes, I hear what
you’re telling me, but what are you really saying (what do you really want)?’. What most
distinguishes Lacan’s view of language and its function is that meaning can never be fully
stabilized, that a question not only can but always implicitly is posed by every entry into
language. Yet if every play of the signifier implicitly resumes an interrogation of the
unknown in the Other, what is ultimately at stake is the subject’s own coming-to-be, the
subject’s own question. This even more elusive stake of the game is rooted in the real of
the subject’s mute jouissance. It is a locus that can be approached only mythically,
conceivable only as a primordial, indeterminate X. The key point for Lacan, however, is
that the question of the Other always comes first, that the question of the subject’s desire
can be posed only in the locus of the Other.12 ‘What anxiety targets in the real’. Lacan
says, ‘includes the x of a primordial subject moving towards his advent as subject, […]
since the subject has to realize himself on the path to the Other. […] [this subject] is the
subject of jouissance […] it can in no way be isolated as a subject, unless
mythically’ (2014: 173).
Page 9 of 23

Hell is Other People

The upshot of the foregoing discussion, as shockingly violent to common sense as it is to
mainstream linguistics, is to assert that the most archaic function of language, far from
connecting the subject to the fellow human being, is to achieve an indispensable degree
of separation from the Other, to establish a margin of detachment and independence that
puts the neighbour-Thing at a distance.13 The primordial accomplishment of the signifier
is to provide a stand-in for the unknown dimension of the Other, putting that threatening
unknown at a remove and thereby forestalling the outbreak of anxiety.
With this process in view, we can say with fresh literalness that ‘the word is the murder of
the Thing’. The phrase refers to the philosophy of Hegel.14 Yet if the Hegelian formula
now becomes meaningful in a new way, another Hegelian concept becomes even more
relevant, insofar as the function of the signifier becomes an exemplary instance, indeed
the exemplary instance of Hegel’s cardinal concept of Aufhebung, which forms the inner
pivot of his famous dialectic.15 In accord with the two-fold meaning of the German word,
something that undergoes Aufhebung is simultaneously cancelled and preserved. In
exactly such a dialectical movement, the signifier both cancels das Ding, distancing the
subject from it, offering an arbitrary sound in the place of the unknown Thing, yet also
preserves precisely what is cancelled, marking it for further coginizing sometime in the
future. The signifier establishes a locus suspended between the subject and the Other, at
once putting what remains unknown and potentially threatening about the Other at a safe
distance, yet thereby repositioning it and maintaining it as a question.
This perspective integrates the most basic points of Lacan’s theoretical framework. To
identify the elementary function of the signifier with an Aufhebung of the enigmatic Thing
in the Other is nothing other than to repose the basic terms of Lacan’s ‘paternal
metaphor’, his way of reconceptualizing the Oedipus complex, in which a signifier, what
Lacan calls the ‘Name of the Father’, is substituted for the unknown Desire of the Mother.
In the same stroke, it explains how and why the inauguration of the signifier is already
and in itself the most primitive inscription of the law against incest. There can be no
subject without opening a certain distance from the maternal Thing.
To summarize the view we’re adopting here, the very being of the subject is predicated
upon a suspension of the unknown reality of the Other, the continued management of
which becomes the charge of the symbolic law. This perspective is audible in a question
put forward by Slavoj Žižek, apropos Lacan’s distance from Levinas: ‘What if the ultimate
function of the Law’, Žižek asks, ‘is not to enable us not to forget the neighbor, to retain
our proximity to the neighbor, but, on the contrary, to keep the neighbor at a proper
distance, to serve as a kind of protective wall against the monstrosity of the neighbor?
(2005: 163). From this perspective, the lack in the Other, the enigma of the Other’s
Page 10 of 23

jouissance, becomes the undetectable ‘dark matter’, by definition invisible to ordinary

consciousness, that underlies the entire edifice of the social world.
We can now return to the question of religion and God with new resources. I’ll limit
myself to sketching four brief points, by necessity more suggestive and programmatic
than comprehensive.
Economies of Jouissance
The analysis we have pursued allows us to trace the basic outline of a Lacanian
interpretation of the religious in a manner reminiscent of Kant’s (1793) effort in Religion
Within the Limits of Reason Alone, highlighting those features of religious practice and
belief that dovetail with features of human life discernible by wholly secular analysis. The
difference is that where Kant’s approach was oriented towards the human capacity for
reason, for Lacan the crucial problem is the very structure of subjectivity, a structure, as
we have seen, fundamentally oriented towards the desire of the Other. Where Kant
remains in the orbit of cogito, Lacan is attuned to desidero. The crucial dimension is not
thought but desire, not rationality but jouissance.
In Seminar 16––the seminar entitled ‘D’un Autre à l’autre’ (‘From an Other to the other’)
—Lacan offers a particularly pithy note about how the big and little Others are to be
distinguished, a note that reminds us that the problem of the unknown in the Other is
always a question of an unknown enjoyment. The little Other, the fellow human being or
neighbour, is the locus of an incipient jouissance, the big Other is a second locus that has
been somehow cleared, or evacuated, of enjoyment.
This neighbor, is it what I have called the [big] Other, what I make use of to make
function the presence of the signifying articulation in the unconscious? Certainly
not. The neighbor is the intolerable imminence of enjoyment. The [big] Other is
only its cleared out terreplein. […] It is precisely that, it is a terrain cleared of
enjoyment
(1968: Session of 12 March).
This passage points to an elemental shift in which an oppressive and intrusive presence of
enjoyment in the little Other is traded for some kind of ‘clearing’, or leveling of enjoyment
in the big Other. The implication is that the move towards a reliance on a big Other of the
symbolic code answers to the challenge of the neighbour-Thing by means of ‘taming’ the
desire of the Other. We’re invited to see the so-called ‘clearing’ of enjoyment as a
structural moment, a kind of necessary base camp or staging, on the way to the
establishment of a regulated economy of enjoyment. What sort of regulation is this and
how does it work?
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The key to moving forward from this point and making new sense of the question of
religion and God is to recognize that Lacan’s reference to a ‘clearing’ or evacuating of
enjoyment in the big Other doesn’t mean that the locus of the big Other remains forever
empty of jouissance. On the contrary, Lacan refers repeatedly to the big Other as a
special site of projected enjoyment. The big Other comes to be another locus, another
scene, of enjoyment but one that bears a special relation to the structure of the Law.
From this vantage point, religious belief presents us with the spectacle of a congregation
of human beings, gathered in the common cause of controlling too raw an exposure to
one another’s enjoyment in favour of devotion to another, imagined subjectivity in the
form of a deity who controls access to enjoyment in accordance with sacred dictates.16
Such an economy of jouissance is shown with particular clarity, and with particular
relevance to questions of the religious, in Lacan’s conception of masochism and sadism.
His primary point is to correct the vulgar conception of the masochist as someone who
simply enjoys pain and the sadist as one who enjoys inflicting it. What is crucial, Lacan
insists, is the way in which both masochism and sadism are triangulated by reference to
the locus of the big Other. The masochist submits to pain in service of the larger purpose
of inciting the anxiety of the big Other. The sadist, for his part, seeks to make himself the
instrument of the big Other’s enjoyment.
This rereading clarifies a great deal, not least the theatricality of masochism and sadism,
the tendency to elaborately stage torments. The ultimate spectator of perversion is the
gaze of the big Other. Among other things, this means that the results of the perverse
game for the little Others—the perverse couple who enact it—are typically not only
different but virtually the opposite of what they are for the big Other. In the case of the
masochist, far from inciting the anxiety of the torturer, the masochist’s submission offers
to the sadistic partner a thrill of power, a complete escape from anxiety (the beating
scenes from Lars Von Triers’ film Nymphomaniac illustrate the dynamic perfectly). The
anxiety is produced not in the human Other, but wholly on the level of the big Other. It is
the big Other whose rules are violated, who is scandalized by pain, injury, and death.
Likewise, in sadism, the crucial enjoyment is not that of the torturer (who, as we see in
Sade’s endless scenarios of torment, is virtually mechanical, unfeeling) but the big Other,
who enjoys in his place. In the tenth Seminar, Lacan explicitly makes the link to the
religious question: masochism and sadism are devoted respectively to the anxiety and the
jouissance of God (Lacan 2014: 163). The conclusion to be drawn would have been
familiar to St Augustine. Insofar as perversion is always played out under the gaze of the
big Other, the perverse is coincident with the dimension of the religious.
From Mortals to Divinities … and Back Again
For Lacan, the initial separation of the child from the mother is achieved not under
pressure of a paternal threat of castration, but by means of the emerging agency of
language. The relevance of this point for a new psychoanalytic interpretation of religion is
compactly signalled by the opening line of John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word’.
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It is now possible to expand upon that mapping of the primal origin of the subject by
emphasizing the role of the signifier as an objet cessible, a ‘ceded object’ injected into the
space between the subject and the Other. This mediating object can be related to what is
arguably the most elemental gesture of all religious life: the act of sacrifice. The signifier
is itself the primal instance of something given up by the subject in order to found an
economy of exchange with the Other. The sacrificial offerings of religion are essentially
signifiers whose function is to establish the field of mediation between subject and Other.
17
As we have seen, that process of signification inevitably tends towards unfolding of a

third locus, that of the symbolic big Other, that grounds the consistency of the code,
thereby stabilizing the subject’s relation with the little Other of the fellow human being. It
is with reference to this triangular structure of the subject, the little Other, and the big
Other that Lacan is able to explain the source and strength of the disposition to belief in
gods. Where Freud starkly opposed the blindness of faith to all rationality, Lacan roots
the motive sources of belief in the elemental architecture of subjectivity. At the most
fundamental level, the appeal to deities is grounded in the necessity for stabilizing the
referential valence of linguistic signifiers.18
Reference to the elementary triangle of subject, little Other, and big Other also promises
a means of explaining the logic of a certain evolution of religions, a sort of phylogenesis
of religious life, moving across the trajectory from polytheism to monotheism and
displaying a marked tendency towards collapsing the hypotenuse of the triangle that
separates the little and big Others.
At one extreme, we have something like Aztec sacrifice, centred on an absolutely

inhuman Other (the sun) that requires unending human sacrifice. The divine being is a
sort of fearsome cosmic parasite that feeds ceaselessly on spurting human blood.
In ancient polytheistic paganism, the gods still require copious sacrifice though a new,
much more advantageous arrangement is arrived at in which, as Hesiod tells us, humans
get to eat the slaughtered victims and the gods content themselves with the smell of
roasting meat wafting towards the heavens. In pagan sacrifice, specific objects are
exchanged between mortals and divinities, stabilizing a link between them but also
maintaining an unbridgeable distance.
In Judaism, the deity becomes a single individual and the dynamic of sacrifice alters
radically. To seal the covenant with Abraham, Yahweh wants only the foreskin, thus
reducing the stakes of sacrifice to an almost purely symbolic exchange. The focus on such
a relatively trivial object, a conspicuously expendable part of the body, albeit one
attached to the privileged organ of vitality, indicates that the value of sacrifice is no
longer to be measured by the number or value of victims offered but entirely by the
willingness of the sacrificer to give it up. The upshot is to signal an interest less in the
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object of sacrifice than in the inward intention, the allegiance and obeisance, of the one
who sacrifices.
To this basic view, the commentary of Slavoj Žižek adds an interesting sidelight. Žižek
argues that the Hebrew prohibition of idolatry should be interpreted as a response to the
fact that the deity has become so close to being human that there arises a kind of anxiety
of coincidence, a fear, in effect, that the god is too close for comfort. In the terms we’ve
been forging, this proximity threatens to collapse of the distance between the little and
big Others, in turn undermining the economy of enjoyment that is predicated upon it. The
problem with graven images and idols is not that they fail to do justice to the
transcendent majesty of God but rather, as Žižek puts it that they ‘would render [the
Jewish God] too faithfully, as the ultimate Neighbor-Thing’ (2001: 130–1).
Yet it is precisely such an identification of the god with the neighbour-Thing that is
proposed by Christianity. The Christian ‘fulfilment of the law’ is achieved through a
radical reversal of the order of sacrifice, a reversal that is, as Paul says, folly for the
Greeks and scandal for the Jews: God sacrifices to save man. Even more radically, God
becomes man. The Christian incarnation thus completely collapses the distance
separating the big Other and the little Other. The new God can now say to his disciples:
‘As you do to the least among you, you do unto me’. ‘I am there wherever two or more of
you are gathered’.
Sexuation and the Sacred
If the function of the religious centrally involves establishing an economy of jouissance

that is triangulated between the little and big Others, then we can expect the essential
structures and internal tensions of religious life to reflect Lacan’s theory of sexuation, by
which he sought to distinguish masculine and feminine forms of jouissance.19 To see how
they do, we need a little more background.
Among the most important and influential features of Lacan’s late teaching are his so-
called ‘formulae of sexuation’, his gloss on Freud’s famous question about ‘what does a
woman want?’. His scheme derives from a deliberate torsion––many will say simply
‘distortion’–– of classical logic, resulting in two different modes of relating to the
universal. The first, characteristic of the masculine position, defines the universal by
reference to the exception. As Freud’s formulation had it, all men are subject to
castration only because one man, the primal father, wasn’t. For the masculine subject, the
law is founded upon the point of its transgression. The masculine organization thus tends
to be oriented towards prohibition and the fantasy of its exceptional violation. The
feminine position, by contrast, asserts the totality of the universal without reference to
the exception, but with the crucial proviso that the whole is internally incomplete, or non-
all. Lacan relies on these two options, what might be called external exception versus
internal excess, to posit two forms of enjoyment, so-called ‘phallic jouissance’ versus the
‘jouissance of the Other’. Put in crude terms, and those only narrowly relevant to sex
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itself, Lacan’s view here helps explain why masculine desire so typically shows a
fetishistic focus on the part object, a tendency to immerse itself in the brute details of the
sex act, while the feminine subject remains attuned to the larger context and situation,
sensitive to a whole milieu of seduction. On the basis of this structural difference, Lacan
posits an irresolvable antagonism between the sexes, tersely expressed in his dictum: il
n’y a pas de rapport sexuel, ‘there is no sexual relation’.
The relevance of Lacan’s theory of sexuation to the problem of religion can be sensed in a
provisional way when we remember that ancient religions conspicuously and almost
universally identify the origin and order of the universe with sexual difference and sexed
reproduction. The religious mind, it seems, cannot resist conflating cosmos with coitus.
But the relevance becomes more interesting when sexuation is related to Christianity.
Once again, we hear an echo of Kant’s approach to religion in so far as Christianity turns
out to be especially, perhaps even uniquely, reflective of the structures of subjectivity. The
dichotomy between phallic and feminine jouissance as Lacan defines them can be said to
centrally inhabit Christianity, not because Christianity is to be linked to one side or the
other but rather precisely because of the way that it straddles the two.
The reason is that the figure of Christ is deeply ambiguous. From one point of view, Christ
can be taken to stand for the ultimate exception, the perfected human subject by whose
measure all others are to be judged. The Christ-exception stabilizes the law––not, to be
sure, by the negative measure of transgression but rather by offering a positive exemplar
of perfection. This difference, according to which the role of exception in the grounding
of the law is inverted from its more familiar form of a violation or transgression of the
law’s moral demand, is anything but trivial. In fact, it is by means of this inversion that
Christianity achieves a universalization of moral failure, establishing a perfect democracy
of sin. Compared with the Messiah, we are all sinners. It is also by this means, as
Nietzsche recognized, that Christianity can be thought to bring to completion the Judaic
invention of bad conscience (Nietzsche 1887/1992: 493–532). Nevertheless, the logical
form of the relation between the universal and the exception remains the same as that
described by the masculine formula of sexuation. The universal is founded by the
exception.
According to this first reading, Christianity repeats a completely traditional assertion of

God as furnishing a master signifier. The organization of the Church as a hierarchy of
authority that defends doctrinal orthodoxy would seem to follow with perfect consistency.
And yet, a second point of view leads us to an opposite conclusion, as Christ can also be
taken to instantiate the ultimate denial of all exception. The figure of Jesus inaugurates a
new and unprecedented universalism that is based on his identifying himself with the
human. What makes this second view distinct from the first is the way it extends the full
implications of the revolutionary Christian notion of incarnation by asserting a kind of
infinity inhabiting every human being, a radical equality of all persons in the eyes of God
that is born of the fact that every human incarnates something of the divine. This new
assertion of the universal, hinting as it does at the sort of sublime unity of the divine and
the human alluded to by the mystics, is to be aligned with Lacan’s feminine logic of the
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non-all. Christ becomes what is ‘in me more than me’, a tincture of the divine.
Paradoxically, a kind of essential, constitutive excess is precisely what makes me
human.20
It is in the context of this discussion that we can make some sense of Lacan’s evocation of
a God who doesn’t know. On the side of Christian doctrine that links Christ with the
masculine logic of exception, God remains omniscient, God is fully sujet supposé savoir.
‘God only knows’, as the familiar saying has it. But according to the more radical
potential of incarnation in which Christ-the-suffering-God is identified with all who suffer,
Christianity is opened to the feminine logic of excess, an Other jouissance that is not
knowable. The big Other becomes no longer identifiable with a subject supposed to know,
but is, on the contrary, found to be internally incomplete, inconsistent, inhabited by an
irradicable vacuity or gap. From this point of view, the Christian divinity ceases to be
immutable or impassible. It is for this reason that Lacan’s twentieth seminar continually
flirts with the notion of an unknowing God, a suffering and kenotic being whose majesty
consists precisely in a sublime form of weakness. Lacan thus probes a radical
reassessment of divinity arrived at on the basis of psychoanalytic premises, provoking us
with the conclusion that ‘one can no longer hate God if he himself knows nothing’ (1998:
98). As Slavoj Žižek has argued, this assertion of a God who does not know can be seen as
a necessary correlate of identifying God with love.
Only an imperfect, lacking being loves: we love because we do not know

everything. On the other hand, even if we were to know everything, love would
still be higher than complete knowledge. Perhaps the true achievement of
Christianity is to elevate a loving (imperfect) Being to the place of God
(Žižek 2002: 61).
The Abyssal Ground of Belief
Early in our discussion of the Lacanian Thing we noted the inadequacy of interpreting it
in too Kantian a fashion. It now remains to complete the necessary distancing from Kant
and draw out the consequences for our topic. Doing so means asking again about the
fuller meaning of the notion of das Ding. What order of reality are we dealing with here?
It is immediately tempting to understand the Thing as a substantial entity of some sort.

Given Lacan’s framing of it in terms of the jouissance of the Other, for example, we might
pose the Thing in more familiar Freudian terms, taking it as a kind of vortex of excessive
libido, a volatile reservoir of surplus energy in the Other that threatens to wash over the
subject and overwhelm it.21 But any such interpretation would miss an absolutely key
point. The Thing is in no way a substance, nor even an indeterminate quantum of energy.
Nor is it an object. The Thing is the site of a fundamental blind spot, the subject’s
primitive acknowledgement of a zone of something unknown. The spectre of the Thing
results from a kind of primitive projection which essentially says ‘there is something here,
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I know not what’. The Thing is thus a reality for the subject alone. It marks the space of
an open question. As Freud said of it, the establishment of such a space of the question is
what allows the human being to learn to cognize. As such, it performs an absolutely
fundamental function, something that might be fruitfully compared to what Heidegger
called the disclosive opening of human Dasein. It is not itself a being but is rather the
lighted clearing in which beings come to presence.
The act by which this site of something unknown is posited cannot easily be named.
Indeed, to call it ‘posited’ already implies too conscious and deliberate an exertion of the
part of the subject. But even more difficult is to determine what exactly is posited. The
Thing is less an object than a locus, a topos. Das Ding is not an object, nor is it a fantasy.
It is rather the very frame of fantasy, the point of departure or even the cause of fantasy.
The Thing is the open question to which fantasy attempts to pose an answer. As such, the
Thing is the decentred void that forms the nucleus of the unconscious. One thinks of the
‘other scene’ that Freud attributed to the dream. In Lacanian terms, the locus of the
Thing is ‘extimate’, something of the most intimate concern to the subject, but located
outside, in the Other.
It also remains to clarify the chronology of the Thing. If it is not an object neither is it any
sort of prehistorical givenness, some primal point of departure that kicks everything else
into motion. Its ‘being’ is rather an effect of the signifier. The Thing arises with the
signifier and is nothing but its excessive dimension. All of which is to say that the Thing is
a kernel of the real in the Lacanian sense. And if the real and the symbolic can never be
coincident, neither are they separable. They arise together. The symbolic, the real, the
subject and the Other constitute an irreducibly four-fold structure. It is Lacan’s answer to
Heidegger’s four-fold of earth and sky, mortals and divinities, and it bears the same
consequence of asserting the inescapability of time.22 This irreducible quadratic
dimensionality of the four terms implies that all four are ineluctably caught up in
contingent and historical specificity. Their conjunction is historicity itself.
To grasp the full implications of this precision of our discussion is to appreciate the
degree to which Lacan’s notion is finally less Kantian than Hegelian. Just as Hegel
rejected Kant’s appeal to a noumenal realm wholly beyond phenomena, Lacan insists that
the real is not some impenetrable substance wholly beyond the symbolic but rather arises
only from gaps, inconsistencies, and failures internal to the symbolic itself.23 And we can
now make clear how Lacan’s assessment of religion parallels that of Hegel, who sharply
divides the Christian legacy. On the one hand is the way that Christian incarnation, the
Pauline ‘scandal for the Jews and folly for the Greeks’, opens up an abyssal short-
circuiting of the mortal and the divine, the finite and the infinite, even to the point of
evoking the death of God. On this side, Christianity marks the truly revolutionary moment
in the history of human freedom. On the other is the ‘positive’, dogmatic aspect of
Christianity, its elaboration of doctrinal and theological orthodoxies, which occasioned
Hegel’s critique in some of his early writings, a critique that resonates with the Pauline
dictum that ‘the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life’ (Hegel 1795/1979).
Page 17 of 23

A Lacanian perspective shows with special clarity why this division is virtually inevitable.
It is rooted in the bifold function of the signifier, divided as it is between meaning
(corresponding to the linkage of the signifier to a particular signified) and an
indeterminate potentiality-for-meaning (the open space of a yet-to-be-determined
reference, the space of the Thing). At many points, Lacan emphasizes the first theme, as
when, in his interview on ‘Triumph of Religion’, he characterizes religion as endless
spewing out of meaning. The frenzied production of meaning is both what makes religion
most seductively attractive and also what makes it so inimical to psychoanalysis.
‘Humanity will be cured of psychoanalysis’, he says, ‘by drowning the symptom in
meaning, in religious meaning naturally, people will manage to repress it’ (Lacan 2013:
67). But at other times, Lacan appreciates the way in which the religious impulse touches
upon the real, a feature that he associates, as we have done here, with the psychic reality
of the Thing. As Lacan said of it, ‘Freud left us with the problem of a gap once again at
the level of das Ding, which is that of religious men and mystics’ (1992: 100).
In this way, Lacan reveals Christianity as the religion most spectacularly divided between
positivity and mystery, dogma and deinos.24 The Christian Church ferociously enforces
doctrinal fidelity and fanatically persecutes heresy precisely because the Christian
message so radically opens towards something abyssal.25 The Christian God at once
embodies the monstrosity of the Thing, the primary locus of the real, and also the
symbolic big Other that seeks to defend against it. Yet the final twist consists in Lacan’s
refusal to allow any simple opposition between the spirit and the letter. Indeed, the
keynote of his entire outlook is to insist on the primacy of the letter, along with all of the
Sturm und Drang it brings in its train. Without the agency of the signifier, there is no
spirit. As he puts it in one of his Écrits: ‘Of course, as it is said, the letter kills while the
spirit gives life. I don’t disagree […] but I also ask how the spirit could live without the
letter’ (Lacan 2006: 423).
References
Balmés, F. (2007). Dieu, le sexe et la verité. Paris: Erès.
De Beauvoir, S. (1989). The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books.
Boothby, R. (2001). Freud As Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan. New York:

Routledge.
Chiesa, L. (2016). The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT
Press.
Copjec, J. (2015). ‘Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason’. In Read My Desire: Lacan Against
the Historicists (pp. 201–236). London/Brooklyn, NY: Verso.
Daviot, P. (2006). Jacques Lacan et le sentiment religieux. Paris: Erès.
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Depoortere, F. (2007). ‘The End of God’s Transcendence? On Incarnation in the work of

Slavoj Žižek’. Modern Theology 23(4) October: 497–523.
Freud, S. (1886–99). Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts. In J.

Sigmund Freud, Vol. 1. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1909). Two Case Studies. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition
Hegel, G. W. F. (1795/1979). Early Theological Writings. Philadelphia, PA: University of

Pennsylvania Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row.
Lacan, J. (1968). ‘Seminar XVI: From an Other to the other’, translated for private use
from the unpublished French transcript of the seminar by Cormac Gallagher.
Lacan, J. (1981). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. New York: W. W.

Norton.
Lacan, J. (1992). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.
New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality,
The Limits of Love and Knowledge. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits. New York/London: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2013). The Triumph of Religion. Cambridge/Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Lacan, J. (2014). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety. Cambridg/Malden, MA:
Polity Press.
Lacan, J. (2017). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII, Transference. Cambridge/
Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Leupin, A. (2004). Lacan Today: Psychoanalysis, Science, Religion. New York: Other
Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1887/1992). ‘The Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay “Bad Conscience”’. In

Basic Writings of Nietzsche (pp. 493–532). New York: Modern Library.
Pound, M. (2007). Theology, Psychoanalysis, and Trauma. London: SCM Press.
Richardson, W. (1997). ‘“Like Straw”: Religion and Psychoanalysis’. The Letter: Lacanian
Perspectives on Psychoanalysis 11: 1–15.
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Žižek, S. (2000). The Fragile Absolute—or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting
For? London/New York: Verso.
Žižek, S. (2001). On Belief. London/New York: Routledge.
Žižek, S. (2002). ‘The Real of Sexual Difference’. In S. Barnard and B. Fink (eds), Reading
Seminar XXL Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality (pp. 57–
75). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Žižek, S. (2003). The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity.
Žižek, S. (2005). ‘Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence’. In S. Žižek,
E. Santner, and K. Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (pp. 134–
190). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Žižek, S. (2006). How to Read Lacan. New York: W. W. Norton.
Žižek, S. and Gunjevic, B. (2012). God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse. New York: Seven
Stories Press.
Žižek, S. and Milbank, J. (2009). The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?

Notes:
(1.) The past decade has seen a flurry of commentary on the implications of Lacanian
theory for rethinking religion. Among the more notable are Pierre Daviot (2006), Jacques
Lacan et le sentiment religieux; François Balmes (2007), Dieu, le sexe et la verité; Marcus
Pound (2007), Theology, Psychoanalysis, and Trauma; and Lorenzo Chiesa (2016), The
Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. But no one has done more to demonstrate how Lacan
reopens the field of the religious from a psychoanalytic point of view than Slavoj Žižek.
Žižek treats questions of religion and God in many of his books, perhaps most directly in
The Fragile Absolute—or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (2000), On
Belief (2001), The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003), The
Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (with John Milbank 2009), and God in Pain:
Inversions of Apocalypse (with Boris Gunjevic 2012).
(2.) [Eds. See Cottingham, this volume, and Blass, this volume, for more detailed
discussions.]
(3.) [Eds. See Eagle, this volume, §‘Falsifiability of psychoanalytic propositions’, for a
discussion of interpretations of the Oedipus complex in relation to empirical testing.]
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(4.) ‘God is real’ states the title of the final chapter of Leupin (2004). For other treatments
of God as an embodiment of the real, see Depoortere (2007: 497–523) and Richardson
(1997: 1–15).
(5.) For a clear, freewheeling, and highly suggestive introduction to the Lacanian concept
of the big Other, see Žižek (2006).
(6.) [Eds. For a very different account of the need for meaningfulness in relation to God,
see Cottingham, this volume, §‘Freud’s critique of religion’.]
(7.) My thesis, which cannot be developed adequately in this chapter, is that while explicit
references to the Thing tend to disappear after the seventh seminar, the underlying
notion is not abandoned but rather replaced by its representative, the so-called objet petit
a. When, late in his career, Lacan referred to the objet a as his greatest single
contribution to psychoanalysis, we should also discern an implicit reference to the
concept of the Thing.
(8.) I capitalize ‘Other’ here and will continue to do so throughout this chapter, but the
choice is an awkward one in so far as ‘Other’ must do double duty between the concepts
of the little and big Others. In fact, Lacan himself alternates in his capitalization of Autre
throughout his work without any apparent consistency. The most logical thing would
seem to be using the lower case for the little Other and the upper case for the big Other.
But then again, even the little Other of the fellow human being sometimes deserves the
emphasis lent by the capitalization, precisely because, when its Thingly dimension is
taken into account, the fellow human being becomes something totally different than the
impression of ordinary experience leads us to conclude. It is to recognize this point that I
will retain the capitalization even of the ‘little Other’.
(9.) Linking the primal root of anxiety with the mother herself makes new sense of
Freud’s observation that the German word ‘heimlich’, which by virtue of its reference to
‘home’ (Heim) indicates what is safest and most familiar, but may also, according to its
secondary meaning as what remains ‘concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get
to know of or about it’ function as an equivalent for what is ‘unheimlich, or ‘uncanny’. Cf.
Freud, (1955: 224).
(10.) ‘In the body there is always, by virtue of this engagement in the signifying dialectic,
something that is separated off, something that is sacrificed, something inert, and this
something is the pound of flesh.’ (Lacan 2014: 219).
(11.) ‘The most decisive moment in the anxiety at issue, the anxiety of weaning, is not so
much when the breast falls short of the subject’s need, it’s rather that the infant yields
the breast to which he is appended as a portion of himself.’ (Lacan 2014: 313).
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(12.) ‘Here the a stands in for the subject––it’s a stand-in in the position of precedent. The
primordial, mythical subject, posited at the outset as having to be constituted in the
signifying confrontation, can never be grasped by us, and for good reason, because the a
preceded it and it has to re-emerge secondarily, beyond its vanishing, marked by this
initial substitution. The function of the yieldable object as a piece that can be primordially
separated off conveys something of the body’s identity, antecedent to the body itself with
respect to the constitution of the subject’ (Lacan 2014: 314).
(13.) The quotation ‘hell is other people’ famously belongs to Jean-Paul Sartre. By citing it
here I don’t mean to conflate Lacan’s outlook with that of Sartre. The two are importantly
different in ways we cannot expound upon here. Nevertheless, there is a significant, if
only partial, overlap with Sartre when it comes to Lacan’s treatment of the neighbour-
Thing of the fellow human being.
(14.) The precise phrasing of ‘the word as the murder of the thing’, indeed most of
Lacan’s acquaintance with Hegel, was made known to him via the highly influential
lectures of Alexandre Kojève.
(15.) [Eds. See also Macdonald, this volume.]
(16.) Cf. Lacan’s remark: ‘That is clearly the essence of law––to divide up, distribute, or
reattribute everything that counts as jouissance’ (1998: 3).
(17.) I have elsewhere put forward an account of sacrifice from a Lacanian point of view.
See Boothby (2001: 175–89).
(18.) [Eds. For alternative accounts of the roots of religion in subjectivity, see Cottingham,
this volume, and Blass, this volume.]
(19.) Lacan elaborates the formulae of sexuation most extensively in Seminar XX: Encore.
For especially useful explications of his theory on this point, see Copjec (2015: 201–36),
and also Žižek (2002: 57–75).
(20.) Cf. the final chapter of Lacan (1981): ‘In You More Than You’.
(21.) We might note in passing that posing the Thing as a mass of energy makes it
comparable to the Freudian id, and also invites a link with Lacan’s 1955 essay on ‘The
Freudian Thing’ (2006: 334–63) in which the id, le ça, is said to speak: ça parle.
(22.) Cf. Lacan’s remark: ‘I have already asked the question here as to what the critical
conceivable minimum is for a signifying scale, if the register of the signifier is to begin to
organize itself. There cannot be a two without a three, and that, I think, must certainly
include a four, the quadripartite, the Geviert, to which Heidegger refers
somewhere’ (2002: 65–6).
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(23.) Linking Lacan with Hegel is a tricky business iinsofar as Lacan himself retained a
persistently critical view of Hegel as a philosopher of metaphysical closure. Here again,
credit needs to be given to Slavoj Žižek, whose clarification of Hegel’s thought,
convincingly offering an almost complete inversion of the dominant interpretation, has
made it possible to recognize the deep conjunction between Hegel’s philosophy and
Lacan’s retheorization of psychoanalysis.
(24.) One wonders whether it is not for reason of Lacan’s recognition of the particularly
intensity of this double function in the case of Christianity that he claims that ‘There is
one true religion and that is the Christian religion’ (Lacan 2013: 66).
(25.) This abyssal dimension is what Žižek and Milbank (2009) has called ‘the monstrosity
of Christ’.
Richard Boothby
Department of Phlosophy, Loyola University Maryland
Page 23 of 23

Ethics: Introduction

Print Publication Date: Feb 2019 Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Moral Philosophy
This introduction provides an overview of the three chapters in this section, which
explores central issues in ethics in the context of psychoanalysis, including the nature of
virtue, the ground of normativity, moral development, the relation between reason and
passion, naturalism and moral motivation. One such issue concerns Sigmund Freud’s
theory of the superego, which is said to undermine the ‘authority’ of morality. The first
chapter argues that the superego represses conscience, and that our ‘moral-psychological
difficulties’ can be understood only in light of repressed love. The second chapter
examines the place of psychoanalysis in the relationship between virtue and mental
health, and between vice and mental dysfunction. The third chapter discusses the idea of
an ‘evolved development niche’ to address object relations and their role in moral
development.
Keywords: ethics, psychoanalysis, virtue, reason, Sigmund Freud, superego, morality, conscience, mental health,
evolved development niche
UNDOUBTEDLY the best-known contribution of psychoanalysis to ethics is Freud’s theory

of the superego. Many—including Freud at times—have understood his theory to
undermine the ‘authority’ of morality. On this understanding, far from being the voice of
pure reason, as Kant would have it, or a God-given sense of what is right and wrong, our
conscience as superego is the distillation of the views and values of those around us when
we were very young children, distortingly filtered through our own infantile concerns,
instincts, and emotions. Furthermore, morality, in the form of the superego, can give rise
to various forms of mental distress—narcissism, moral masochism, obsessiveness,
ascetism, and a split between ‘reason’ and ‘passion’. Consequently, a reduction in the
strength of the superego is a frequent aim of psychoanalysis.
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There are a variety of responses to this picture. The first is to follow the line of thought
rather uncritically, and adopt some form of moral scepticism or nihilism. But this tends to
be motivated by an oversimple understanding both of morality and of Freud’s theory, and
so while it has been taken up in popular culture, it is rarely developed by psychoanalysts
and philosophers. A second response is to reject Freud’s theory of the superego
wholesale. But while many of the details have come under attack, e.g. the claim that the
superego is the result of resolving the Oedipus complex, those attracted by Freud’s
naturalism still need some account of our acquisition of moral values. A third response,
then, is to develop Freud’s theory to find in the resources of psychodynamic psychology a
rational alternative (Deigh 1996; Scheffler 1992; Velleman 2006). A fourth approach is to
distinguish ‘bad superego morality’, based on fear and aggression, from ‘good ego ideal
morality’, based on love (Dilman 1984; Erikson 1964; Wollheim 1984). As a variant of this,
one might set aside superego theory and use other resources in psychodynamic
psychology to remodel our account of the development of our moral sense (Cottingham
1998: ch. 4; Nussbaum 2004: ch. 4).
In his chapter, Backström rejects all of these in favour of a new approach again. He
argues that it is a serious mistake to equate conscience and the superego, arguing
instead that the superego represses conscience. The foundation of morality is love,
understood as an openness to the other, and conscience is the call of love. Backström’s
approach is to (p. 592) offer a phenomenological analysis of the meanings inherent in our
emotional lives to show that our ‘moral-psychological difficulties’ can be understood only
in light of repressed love. We struggle to remain open in love towards others, and the
many ways we deny, refuse, and distort this openness not only provide the material for
the drama of human relationships, including ‘essentially misrecognized’ emotions such as
envy and jealousy, but also cause many theoretical misunderstandings, from Freud’s
structural model of id–ego–superego to various accounts of the nature of love to the
attempt to ground morality in reason rather than openness. While Backström’s account is
Freudian in understanding moral psychology in terms of love and repression, it is highly
critical of Freud’s inability to understand these terms and their relationship adequately.
As argued in our ‘Introduction’ to this Handbook, questions at the intersection of

psychoanalysis and ethics go to the very heart of both disciplines, raising issues about the
purpose of each, their self-understanding, and the status of their theoretical models. As
Harcourt (2015: 599–600) has commented, there is a ‘long tradition’ in moral psychology
stretching back to Socrates that enquires into ‘the relationship between human nature,
the good life for man, and human goodness’. Not only has psychoanalysis much to
contribute to this enquiry; the enquiry in turn raises challenging issues for how
psychoanalysis should understand itself (as a science, as a humanism, as an ethical
relationship?) and its aim (psychic health, self-knowledge, goodness?). In his chapter,
Harcourt surveys the place of psychoanalysis in this three-way discussion ‘between the
kinds of creatures we are, what it is to be good or excellent of our human kind, and what
constitutes a good life for us’. There are those who argue that psychoanalysis does not
aim at nor concern itself with human excellences or the good life, but, by contrast, with
psychic health. However, there are others who reject the contrast, because psychic health
Page 2 of 6

should be understood—as Plato and Aristotle thought—in terms of human excellences.

Harcourt argues that psychoanalysts who take the former route unknowingly tend to
smuggle in human excellences in their characterization of psychic health (Freud 1924;
Hartmann 1960). If, then, psychoanalysis addresses the question of human excellences, or
again, the question of how to live a good human life, the further question arises whether,
on the psychoanalytic account, this is something that is necessarily or recognizably
‘morally good’. We are here in the territory of the relationship between virtue and mental
health, and its converse, the relationship between vice and mental dysfunction. If there
are strong connections here, then psychoanalysis may lend support to the tradition of
‘virtue ethics’ in philosophy (Erikson 1964; Fromm 1947; Lacewing 2014; Swanton 2011).
Harcourt concedes that some virtues—those of courage, truthfulness, and the capacity to
relate to others as separate beings—may be supported by psychoanalytic accounts of
mental health, but argues that otherwise this claim is over-optimistic. What follows? One
possibility, which Harcourt is sceptical about but leaves open, is that psychic health,
though not a sufficient condition for virtues, is a necessary condition for them.
In the background of Harcourt’s discussion is the question of what a naturalistic moral

psychology might look like (Lear 2004, 2014). A great deal of empirical psychological
work has been done recently on the first of Harcourt’s three relata, viz. what kind of
beings are we, and its implications for moral psychology. In her chapter, Narvaez begins
by arguing that, in studying ourselves as we are now, we have frequently failed to
(p. 593)
fix an appropriate ‘baseline’ of comparison by which to understand the results. Seeking to

provide a wider empirical context for understanding object relations and their role in
moral development, she develops and defends the idea of an ‘evolved development niche’,
the characteristic environment for human babies over the vast expanse of time between
our evolution as a species and the changes of the last 10,000 years. Drawing on studies in
neuroscience, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and anthropology,
Narvaez argues that our ‘species-typical’ upbringing is significantly different from today’s
culturally typical—but species atypical—parenting practices. Our current practices
frequently result in a disordered emotional foundation to the self giving rise to moral
psychological problems, a focus on protecting the self against threats rather than an open
engagement with others. Her arguments offer the possibility of an empirical framework
that supports Backström’s phenomenological analysis and takes up Harcourt’s question of
the connection between virtue and mental health.
Our three chapters thus survey central issues in ethics, including the nature of virtue, the
ground of normativity, moral development, the relation between reason and passion,
naturalism, moral motivation, and much more. Many other topics in ethics, not covered in
any depth in this section, have received rich contributions from psychoanalytic theory.
Examples include analysis of moral emotions, such as guilt and shame (Carveth 2013;
Harcourt 2007; Wollheim 1999: ch. 3); responsibility (Orange 2014); the aim of human
action (Lear 2000); moral epistemology (Lacewing 2005, 2015); the nature of empathy
(Richmond 2004); the difference between real virtues and their simulacra (A. Freud 1936:
Page 3 of 6

ch. 10; Fromm 1947); and a great many topics in practical ethics, including, of course, the
ethics of confidential relationships.
References
Carveth, D. (2013). The Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and
Conscience. London: Karnac.
Cottingham, J. (1998). Philosophy and the Good Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Deigh, J. (1996). The Sources of Moral Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dilman, I. (1984). Freud and the Mind. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Erikson, E. (1964). Insight and Responsibility. London: Faber.
Freud, A. (1936). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1924). ‘The loss of reality in neurosis and psychosis’. In J. Strachey (ed. and
19 (pp. 183–190). London: Hogarth Press/Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Fromm, E. (1947). Man for Himself. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett.
Harcourt, E. (2007). ‘Guilt, shame, and the “psychology of love” ’. In L. Braddock and M.
Lacewing (eds), The Academic Face of Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Harcourt, E. (2015). ‘The place of psychoanalysis in the history of ethics’. Journal of

Moral Philosophy 12(5): 598–618.
Hartmann, H. (1960). Psychoanalysis and Moral Values. New York: International

Universities Press. (p. 594)
Lacewing, M. (2005). ‘Emotional self-awareness and ethical deliberation’. Ratio 18: 65–
81.
Lacewing, M. (2014). ‘Emotions and the virtues of self-understanding’. In S. Roeser and

C. Todd (eds), Emotion and Value (pp. 199–211). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lacewing, M. (2015). ‘Emotion, perception and the self in moral epistemology’. dialectica
69(3): 335–355.
Lear, J. (2000). Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Lear, J. (2004). ‘Psychoanalysis and the idea of a moral psychology: Memorial to Bernard
Williams’ philosophy’. Inquiry 47: 515–522.
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Lear, J. (2014). ‘Mourning and moral psychology’. Psychoanalytic Psychology 31(4): 470–
481.
Nussbaum, M. (2004). Upheavals of Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Orange, D. M. (2014). ‘What kind of ethics?: Loewald on responsibility and atonement’.

Psychoanalytic Psychology 31(4): 560–569.
Richmond, S. (2004). ‘Being in others: Empathy from a psychoanalytical perspective’.

European Journal of Philosophy 12(2): 244–264.
Scheffler, S. (1992). ‘Naturalism, psychoanalysis, and moral motivation’. In J. Hopkins and

A. Savile (eds), Psychoanalysis, Mind and Art (pp. 86–109). Oxford: Blackwell.
Swanton, C. (2011). ‘Nietzsche and the virtues of mature egoism’. In S. May (ed.),
Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide (pp. 285–308). Cambridge:
Velleman, D. (2006). ‘A rational superego’. In Self to Self (pp. 129–155). Cambridge:

Wollheim, R. (1984). The Thread of Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Wollheim, R. (1999). On the Emotions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Michael Lacewing

Children (P4C).
Richard G.T. Gipps

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Page 6 of 6

Hiding From Love: The Repressed Insight in Freud’s Account of Morality

Hiding From Love: The Repressed Insight in Freud’s
Account of Morality
Joel Backström
Freud’s account of morality is distinctive, and right, in focusing on unconscious,

emotionalized conflict, and specifically on the repression of love as the centre of moral
life. However, Freud misunderstands love in drive terms and confuses conscience with
the superego. Conscience is actually an immediate moral understanding, an interpersonal
openness that the moral normativity of collectivity (values, ideals, etc.) represses. Thus,
conscience is the repressed unconscious of the superego, and ‘morality’ not one thing,
but a living contradiction. This chapter details how bad conscience differs from superego
guilt, how destructive emotions (e.g. jealousy) are in themselves moralized repressions of
love, and how Freud’s officially amoral, drive-based accounts of the Oedipus complex and
the installation of the superego break down, but can be understood if reconceptualized in
the terms proposed here. The chapter elucidates the concrete sense in which openness
and love can be conceived as the very heart of moral understanding.
Keywords: morality, love, openness, repression, conscience, superego, guilt, emotions, Oedipus complex,
collectivity
Joel Backström
(p. 595) The Superego and its Other

FREUD accepts the traditional view of morality as a set of norms/ideals that constrain or
redirect our supposedly natural egocentric inclinations. Freud’s version, where norms are
enforced by the ‘superego’ against sexual and aggressive ‘drives’ housed in ‘the id’ poses
a sceptical, naturalizing challenge to the idealizing–intellectualizing tendency of
traditional ethics, which sees moral norms not as mere social impositions, but as
authored by Reason and/or God. Against this, Freud presents conscience as ‘an
embodiment, first of parental criticism, and subsequently of that of society’, its ‘voice’ the
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inner echo of parental voices and the clamour of ‘public opinion’ (Freud 1914b: 96).
Naturalistic views of morality are standard today. Freud is distinctive in focusing on how
moral norms come to concern the child at all, and consequently on the intimate dynamics
of family life, seen in terms of destructive inner conflicts which morality both regulates
and perpetuates. Morality is a socially necessary but cruel system of internalized
repression rather than, even ideally, a satisfying development of capacities for moral
reasoning and virtuous character. Its core workings are unconscious, its rigid demands
not the product of reason but a primitive way of managing libidinal deadlocks, and its
‘reward’: madness for some and for the majority, general discontent and widely ramified
cultural pathologies born of an obscure, mostly unconscious sense of guilt.1
A bleak picture! A common response is to think that Freud exaggerated; at best,

(p. 596)
his description might be accurate for individual pathology and particularly vicious
versions of collective morality—after all, he lived in repressive Victorian times (cp. Lear
2015: 190–7). For many psychoanalysts, making ‘rigid’, ‘punitive’, ‘archaic’ superegos
more ‘realistic’, ‘humane’, and ‘mature’ is a central goal of therapy,2 and philosophers
revise Freud’s theory to allow for a ‘rational superego’, i.e. for moral reasoning rather
than mere blind obedience in our response to socially sanctioned norms.3 Theorists make
the picture of moral development friendlier and (they believe) more realistic by stressing
our natural inclination to sociability (‘attachment’) against Freud’s idea of the amorally
egocentric child, the pre-Oedipal relationship to the nurturing caregiver(s) over the
hostile Oedipal rivalry that transfixed Freud, and the role in moral education of positive
ideals and encouragements to identification (the aspirational ‘ego ideal’, even a ‘loving
superego’) over threats and prohibitions.4
I propose something different. A broadly ‘Freudian’ focus on unconscious, emotionalized

conflict is urgently needed, lest philosophical ethics remain stuck in the back-and-forth
between equally naive rationalisms and sentimentalisms. Freud’s account of ethics is
seriously confused, however, his notion of childish amorality being a case in point (more
on that later). But making it more ‘reasonable’ or otherwise ‘positive’ obscures the crucial
insight he points to concerning the destructiveness of everyday collective morality, where
we pressure others and ourselves into submitting to depersonalizing decrees about how
one ‘must’ think and behave. This isn’t merely irrational or too harsh, but a deeply
destructive falsification of life. This comes into full view, however, only in contrast to the
wholly other, interpersonal moral understanding that I will call conscience, which
collective moralism, i.e. the superego, attempts to repress. Morality is a thing much more
fundamental and more terrible than either idealists or cynics ever suspect, because it
isn’t really one thing at all, but a living contradiction, comprised of our impossible
attempts to deny and destroy the openness between us which conscience calls us to
welcome. Freud never says anything like this. Paradoxically, he sees the destructiveness
of collective moralism, but not what it is ultimately destructive of. The basic defect of his
account is that he replaces conscience with its false double, the superego, and this is
intimately connected with his confused view of love. His core idea that human life is a
drama centred on love and its repression is right, but he misunderstands its meaning.
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Others, too, have criticized Freud for not distinguishing ‘conscience’ from ‘superego’,5
and many have insisted, using different terms, that there are ‘two quite distinct types of
(p. 597) morality’ (Reddish 2014: 1).6 Indeed, something like that idea motivates the
pervasive wish to ‘improve’ the superego, moving towards ‘mature’ morality. But the
decisive question is how one conceives this contrast. Is the superego a primitive form of
conscience, say, or a repressive reaction-formation against it, as I propose? Once the
basic structure of motivations constituting the superego is clearly seen, I think
‘improving’ it will seem as appealing as a bigger cell in prison when compared to
freedom. Hopefully, my account also indicates why morality has, basically, nothing to do
with being reasonable, and why there’s no need for an ‘independent faculty of normative
judgement, located in the ego’ that would ‘subject conscience to judgement’.7
In my view, ‘conscience’ refers to one’s personal moral understanding of one’s relation to

the other person, as it appears when one is tempted to go against it by somehow closing
oneself to the other. If, seeing your need, I simply help, without reservations or ulterior
motives, we wouldn’t speak of ‘conscience’, yet the bad conscience that pricks me if I let
you down expresses the same responsive openness that in the other case made me simply
help. This openness is, very concretely, our ‘moral sense’; the sense one person makes of
another and of their encounter because she senses how it is with the other, responds to
him in an immediate way that precedes inferences and reasoning. Thus, your sadness
moves me in compassion; your gentleness warms me and makes me glad; your
indifference chills me. These aren’t mere passive reactions, but active forms of
understanding and being with the other; in openness I enter your gentleness and sadness,
but I’m closed out by your indifference. This openness is always already and inescapably
there, insofar as any sense we make of what transpires between us presupposes and
expresses it—if only, often, in the form of our destructively repressing it. This is simply
how we relate to and understand each other.8 This interpersonal understanding is itself
moral, rather than merely psychological, insofar as feelings and judgements which are
‘moral’ in a narrower, often moralistic, sense (e.g. shame and guilt) remain dependent on
it for their moral significance. If someone claimed to understand he’d done wrong in
brutally beating someone, yet in his response to his victim showed no compassionate
understanding of her, felt no chill as he thought of what he’d done, his supposed
‘understanding’ would be morally empty.9
However, this inseparability of conscience and interpersonal understanding is obscured

precisely insofar as conscience is confused with the guilt- and shame-inducing superego,
which happens in everyday life before being echoed by theorists like Freud. The
slaveholder’s sense that he’s duty-bound to keep slaves in their place, the guilt and
shame (p. 598) he might feel for being ‘too soft’ on them, certainly don’t express the same
understanding as his compassion with the grief of the slave mother whose child he just
sold down the river. On the contrary, these destructive moralistic feelings, and the values,
ideals, and ‘moral reasons’ that correspond to them on the ‘intellectual’ side, function to
repress the slaveholder’s interpersonal moral understanding, hardening him against the
slave and against his own heartfelt understanding of her. Thus, in identifying with his
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collective belonging, he identifies with his superego and represses his conscience.
Conscience is the repressed unconscious of the superego.10
This doesn’t mean that human beings are naturally good, and only get ruined by an evil
society. Society exists only through/as the way individuals relate to each other and
themselves, and the evil I do is indeed mine; I make it mine in identifying with ‘my
station’ and its evil duties. That is: I close myself to those I make my victims, but because
it’s impossible to simply ignore others (to simply stop one’s compassion, etc.), closing
oneself necessitates, as its other side, a constellation of collectively enabled, destructive
identifications and projections. Thus, I see my victim by turns as dangerous and
contemptible, disgusting and attractive, pitiable and having himself to blame, and my
view of myself and the collective I identify with is correspondingly ambivalent; e.g. I see
‘us’ as superior to ‘them’ and as defenceless against their aggression. A fruitful ethics
needs to understand precisely the intra- and interpersonal emotional dynamics at stake in
such conflicting, self-obfuscating identifications/projections. And this means
understanding how, starting in the nursery, love is repressed and relationships are
depersonalized.
Jealous Oedipus: Repressing Love through

Moralized Emotion
The focus on life as structured and deformed by repression—i.e. by the unconscious
created by our desperate need to keep ourselves unaware of what troubles us—is, Freud
says, ‘the corner-stone on which the whole structure of psycho-analysis rests’ (Freud
1914a: 16).11 And Freud always relates repression to love; repression is the manifestation
of an ‘incapacity for loving’ (Freud 1904: 267), and ‘every psycho-analytic treatment is an
attempt at liberating repressed love’ (Freud 1907: 90). In other words, what we suffer
from is love trouble. Alas, this trouble infects Freud’s various statements about (p. 599)
the matter, too, turning ‘love’ (Liebe) into a symptom and agent of confusion in his text, a
sign whose meaning is perpetually changing and slipping away. Unsurprisingly,
theorizations of love are (de)formed by one’s personal wishful and fearful fantasies about
love: cynical, romantic, sentimental, etc. You may wear the theorist’s hat, but the head
and heart under it are your own.
In Freud’s earlier texts, ‘love’ is supposed to mean ‘libido’, that is, sexuality understood
as a ‘drive’ composed of ‘component drives’, originating in somatic ‘erotogenic zones’ and
variously sublimated and displaced (Freud 1905). Then, in rehauling his drive theory and
introducing the controversial ‘death drive’, Freud also gives ‘love’ a new, broader
signification (Freud 1920; cp. Lear 2003: 157ff.). Instead of reducing love to sexuality,
sexuality now becomes an aspect of love understood as a general life force, Eros, striving
‘to establish ever greater unities … to bind together’, while the death drive aims ‘to undo
connections and so to destroy things’ (Freud 1930: 122; 1940: 148). Freud’s later drive
conception is notoriously speculative and obscure; we’ll return to its problems. His earlier
reduction of love to libido was just as problematic, however; in fact, mere theoretical
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fantasy. Had Freud actually thought about love as reductively as he pretended to, he
couldn’t have made any sense of his clinical material.
The best illustration is Freud’s depiction of the Oedipus complex. The breakdown of his
libidinal account of it reveals the general impossibility of conceiving morality as, most
basically, the imposition of norms on amoral ‘nature’. Freud officially holds that morality
enters the inner world of the previously amoral child only through the installation of the
superego, which ends the Oedipal phase, making the superego ‘the direct heir of the
Oedipus complex’ (Freud 1924a: 167; cp. Freud 1923: 28–39; 1924b). The Oedipal
constellation itself is supposedly a purely libidinal, amorally sexual-emotional affair
(including its aggressive aspects). But Freud’s actual descriptions reveal something
altogether different; a drama of terrible tensions and difficulties between family
members, driven by jealous rivalry which arises because those involved both love and
mistrust each other. The Oedipal child, Freud says, proceeds as though the parents,
primarily the parent of the opposite sex, should by rights be devoted to it exclusively, and
regards anything contradicting this as proof of ‘unfaithfulness’ (Freud 1910: 171; cp.
Freud 1917: 332–4; 1924b; 1933a: 118–135, etc.). Pleasure, which Freud claims sexuality,
and so the whole libidinal drama, is ultimately about, isn’t at stake, but love; love
repressively misrepresented as preference and possession, where the value of pleasures
given is inextricable from their being perceived as tokens of privileged status. The
Oedipal drama, then, isn’t about sexuality but about love trouble—or, as one might also
say: human sexuality, that trouble-ridden thing, is created by the presence of love and
love trouble (Backström 2014a).
The critical point isn’t limited to sexuality, but concerns any attempt to understand
interpersonal dynamics in drive terms, that is, taking the individual’s private/anonymous
urges and needs as primary, with the other person entering only derivatively, as a
contingent provider of satisfactions. Drives, Freud says, become attached to people
—‘objects’—‘only in consequence of [the object] being peculiarly suited to make
satisfaction possible’ (Freud 1915: 122; cp. Freud 1905: 147–9). But his own descriptions
show that the (p. 600) Oedipal drama turns precisely around one’s troubled relation to the
other person; that relationship determines what one finds satisfying or frustrating (cp.
Freud 1924b: 176). Unlike Fairbairn (1994), I’m not asserting the primacy of the ‘object’
over the ‘drive’; those are strictly correlative concepts, the ‘object’ being what the ‘drive’
focuses on. The primary thing is the actual relationship to the other person. Drive objects
are formed as repressive responses to love trouble in that relationship and function, like
the values, ideals, etc. to which they’re typically tied, to repress conscience (which calls
one to love). Love trouble means closing oneself to the other, reducing her, in fantasy, to a
certain kind of person. In one’s irritation or excitement, say, one feels ‘driven’ towards, or
away from, this irritating or exciting ‘object’ to which one’s own difficulty in being open
with the other reduces her. By contrast, there’s nothing driven (compulsive) or
objectifying in love.12
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Love trouble is moral trouble because it concerns the relation to the other person.
Jealousy, envy, hatred, and the related emotions and fantasies that constitute the Oedipal
drama are in themselves morally defined responses. They aren’t morally good, but they
manifest, however confusedly and wilfully, an accusing sense of entitlement, of one’s
rightful position vis-à-vis others; Freud speaks of ‘romances of revenge and
exoneration’ (Masson 1985: 318). Prior to any external superego judgement, this
accusatory moralism is constitutive of what the jealous (etc.) child feels. Jealousy and the
other Oedipal attitudes are morally charged because they are demands raised in the
name of love (not out of love).
The Oedipal boy doesn’t just want the presence of mother and isn’t resentful towards
father simply for being the cause of her absence. He is jealous because he sees that
mother cares about father, loves him. In his jealous eyes, that is the betrayal. His demand
for devotion is essentially triangular and comparative; he demands that mother exclude
father in favour of him. He might be indifferent or irritated with mother as long as they’re
alone, but once father enters, he suddenly cannot be without her. Thus, the rival’s
presence, self-deceptively presented and felt in jealousy as simply a hateful threat, is
actually what makes the supposedly loved person ‘lovable’ to the jealous. The jealous
demand for devotion doesn’t indicate strength of love, and even where there’s a strong
wish to be with the other also in the rival’s absence, jealousy reveals a distrust of the love
between oneself and the other. If two people love wholeheartedly, with no secret
reservations and anxieties between them, a third person cannot become a ‘rival’ any
more than buyers can exist in the absence of sellers.
However, while the jealous demand for devotion isn’t an expression of wholehearted love,
it is related to love. A child who felt no love, but was simply the biological discharge-
seeking machine Freud claims children originally are (Freud 1933a: 62), would simply
use people for his own ends. He wouldn’t feel jealous, for he wouldn’t care what
happened between his parents, unless it directly impinged on his private interests. He
(p. 601) couldn’t feel excluded from their love because he wouldn’t perceive it as love but
only as, say, ‘an opportunity to snatch a cookie while they’re occupied with each other’.
Actual children aren’t like that; like adults, they love, but also find it difficult to love, i.e.
are susceptible to jealousy and myriad other emotional responses in which love is played
on and perverted by fearful, destructive egocentricity. Egocentricity isn’t amorality, but a
repression of love in which one indulges, as no amoral creature could, feelings of rage
and self-pity over fantasized betrayals by others whom one claims to love, but
destructively attacks in one’s self-pitying rage, thereby repressing the love one does also
feel.13
The jealous boy presents himself, both to mother and to himself, as having been
abandoned by her and accuses her, as Freud says, of ‘lack of love’ (Freud 1933a: 122).
The accusation is fraudulent; even if mother really acted lovelessly, the jealous child’s
accusing attitude is itself loveless. Compare the forlorn, heartbreaking expression of a
child who genuinely feels abandoned by a parent, with the simultaneously self-pitying and
tyrannical demeanour of a jealous child, furiously protesting if the parent shows interest
Page 6 of 26

in others. No difference could be greater! With a heartfelt sense of abandonment comes

anguish, but no demand. The abandoned child’s look is heartbreaking precisely because it
doesn’t try to force the parent to stay; it simply longs for the parent, suffers defencelessly
from her callousness. The jealous child appeals to this very defencelessness, makes a
show of it, and parents often play along; ‘Those sad, innocent puppy eyes, I just couldn’t
say no!’ Alas, that isn’t love speaking, and there’s nothing innocent about this game of
mutual moralistic sentimental manipulation. The jealous demand makes it clear that
unless you yield, you’ll be sorry, but the threat is moralized. It doesn’t say: ‘If you leave,
I’ll break your favourite vase’, but rather: ‘Look how hurt I would be by your leaving;
think of how sorry, how guilty that would make you feel!’
The jealous child doesn’t only accuse the parent, trying to make her feel guilty; he also
feels guilty himself. Because of the repressed love in jealousy and other responses, they
have a self-accusing aspect; they are essentially guilty feelings. The Oedipal boy doesn’t
only want, egocentrically, to have mother’s total devotion; he also loves her, and so wants
to see her happy. And he loves and cares for his father, too, however intensely he may also
hate him as a rival. Indeed, hatred is itself a repressed form of love; its perversely
insatiable concern with the hated other, with whom one claims to want nothing to do,
arises as one’s loving concern for the other, which cannot be simply abolished, is
repressively turned into a destructive persecuting and being persecuted by him.14 The
presence of love means that, if the jealous boy gets mother to neglect father in
preference to him, his triumph will be mixed with guilt for having made both father and
mother sad by forcing himself between them and ruining the moment of love between
them (to repeat: if he didn’t perceive this love, he wouldn’t feel jealous). The destruction
he wrought makes the boy sad, gives him bad conscience. If he allowed (p. 602) himself to
simply perceive what his bad conscience shows him, to feel it without repressing it, he
would feel no guilt-ridden jealousy or triumph, but wholehearted love in the form of a
longing for forgiveness and reunion with both his parents, where no one would be
excluded. If this sounds like a naively idyllic notion, consider a situation where a jealous
boy’s ‘death-wish’ is seemingly ‘granted’, and father actually goes away for good; this will
certainly not make the boy happy, but deeply unhappy and guilt-ridden, and he will wish
for nothing more than to have father back.
Jealousy, like other responses, is attended by bad conscience, but one can persist in
jealousy only by repressing this bad conscience, this longing for lovingly reuniting with
those one jealously turned against. The repression leaves one feeling guilty, but not,
consciously, for the jealousy, which one presents, in feeling it, as a justified response to
the other’s treason. Instead, one feels guilty for other things, proxies, and one may not
feel overtly guilty at all, but rather one’s guilt comes out in self-punishing behaviour, etc.
Thus, the ‘unconscious sense of guilt’ with its symptomatic displacements, which Freud
always emphasized (cp. Johnston 2013: 88–101), is itself a repression of love, that is, of
conscience.
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The crucial point is that this ‘primal repression’ of love’s bad conscience is inherent in
jealousy and other responses; it is part of having/feeling them at all. This is why triumph
over a rival and other ‘good’ feelings engendered by destructive, self-centred schemes
and fantasies never feel simply good, but always also terrible, intense and even euphoric
as they may be. The repression of love, the self-obfuscation or splitting-of-oneself, is part
of the feeling itself. Here, then, repression doesn’t work according to Freud’s schema,
where ‘–instinctual impulses’ undergo repression ‘following the commands of [the] super-
ego’ (Freud 1924c: 150) because they ‘come into conflict with the subject’s cultural and
ethical ideas’—which makes ‘the formation of an ideal … the conditioning factor of
repression’ (Freud 1914b: 93–4; 1925: 29; 1895: 268–9). While one may indeed repress
awareness of one’s jealousy because one has internalized a moral prohibition against
jealousy (an ideal of being a non-jealous person), the primary repression happens already
in the jealous response itself: to feel jealous is to repress the very love in the name of
which one raises one’s jealous demands. Hence, jealousy and other reactions can be
characterized as essentially misfelt/misrecognized responses. One cannot be clear about
them in having them; having them means misrepresenting to oneself the character of the
relation to the other person they manifest.15 Thus, jealousy involves misrepresenting
oneself as loving the person one blackmails with one’s jealous demands and confusing
love, which is between ‘you’ and ‘me’, with preference, i.e. rejection of a third party
(without this confusion, there’d be no jealousy). Egocentric/destructive responses repress
both the actual lovelessness of one’s own response and the love that nonetheless also
underlies it. Thus, in one’s hatred one feels not loveless, but justified by the other’s
supposed lovelessness (‘After what she did to me … ’), and one refuses to acknowledge
the love one still also feels for her.
(p. 603) In my view, our moral difficulties generally are structured by responses; they
involve a repression of love and conscience and are constitutively self-misrepresentations.
This also means that love and destructiveness aren’t two equiprimordial ‘drives’, as Freud
imagines (Freud 1930: 122). Rather, the myriad forms of our destructiveness are
repressive responses to love, parasitic on the very relation to the other they desperately,
impossibly, want to destroy. Reik’s claim that ‘Love is in its essential nature an emotional
reaction-formation to envy, possessiveness, and hostility’ (2002: 66), gets it exactly the
wrong way round.
The Superego’s Empty Threat

Jealousy is not a one man show. Like our ‘inner’ life generally, it’s a response within an
evolving relationship to others, and their responses to us change the field, the sense, of
our further responses. If others didn’t confuse the jealous child’s manipulations with love
but clearly saw them for what they are, they’d lose their effectiveness, appearing merely
sad. The confusion is self-deceptive; manipulation, unlike simple deception, plays on the
manipulated person’s wish to go along with the manipulation.16 Parents are taken in by
their manipulative children not because they’re stupid, but because they themselves are
playing the same manipulative game. Freud tends to depict the Oedipal constellation
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from the child’s point of view, but parents who feel rejected by a child in favour of the
other parent are as prone as the child to jealousy, and if the jealous boy feels ‘special’ in
having mother privilege him, mother feels ‘special’ in seeing the boy insistently
demanding her for himself. Neither of them wants to give up the narcissistic satisfactions
of their self-deceptive game. And similar games are everywhere; think of how easily
telling someone something trivial gains an aura of importance if presented as a secret;
lowering my voice, I say ‘I’ve told no one else’, and you feel flattered to be let in on this,
in contrast to all those excluded. The Mother–Child–Father triangle doesn’t exist in a
vacuum, and siblings, relatives, friends, and others are drawn into and actively play along
in the games of mutual jealousy, envy, preferences, sympathies, and other forms of
egocentrically, distrustfully comparing attitudes, where one is judged by others and
lowered or raised in their affection and esteem relative to others, just as one in turn
judges them.
Let’s now consider how the ‘superego’—the culturally variable constellations of more
narrowly moral values and norms with their corresponding patterns of guilt and shame
that children internalize—fits into this web of deformed relationships. Freud claims that
‘the destruction of the Oedipus complex is brought about by the threat of castration’;
faced with threatened punishment, the child eventually gives up its parent(s) as object(s)
of jealous sexual fantasies of possessing mother/father and instead identifies with them
in their role as authorities prohibiting this very possession; ‘The authority of …
(p. 604)
the parents is introjected into the ego, and there … forms the nucleus of the super-
ego’ (Freud 1924b: 176–7; cp. Freud 1923: 28–39). But fear of threatened punishment
(Freud understands castration literally; we needn’t) cannot create moral understanding,
and ‘introjection’ changes nothing here. Introjecting a frightening, punitive adult creates
a frightening, punitive ‘internal object’ that appears in the child’s anxieties and
nightmares, but it doesn’t make it feel the least guilty (cp. Harcourt 2007; Jones 1966).
Guilt feelings arise only where punishment is administered in the name of love, or, rather,
only then can aggressive reprisal be experienced as punishment. Insofar as adults could
simply mistreat children, with nothing like affection between them, children would fight
for their survival without moral scruples, as though confronted by some terrible machine.
Freud himself finally admits this when, after trying unsuccessfully to explain the origin of
the superego only in terms of aggression turned back on the child’s self (1930: 123–30),
he acknowledges the ineliminable part ‘played by love in the origin of conscience [i.e. the
superego]’ (Freud 1930: 132). As he says, only ‘the experience of being loved’ can turn
aggression into guilt (Freud 1930: 130 fn).17
The superego’s basic motive force is, Freud says, fear of ‘loss of the parents’ love’ (Freud
1930: 124–5). Its ‘pangs of conscience’ are really stabs of this internalized fear, while in
heeding superego demands one ‘expects to be rewarded by receiving more love from it’,
and ‘consciousness of deserving this love is felt … as pride’ (Freud 1939: 117). This
description is simultaneously both accurate and confused, because it characterizes the
destructive dynamics at issue in the same repressively confused terms used by those who
submit others and themselves to it.18 The question we should ask is how love could be
withdrawn, as opposed to repressed? Certainly, favoured status can be withdrawn, out of
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some motive or capriciously. But love isn’t favouritism or conditionality. Anyone who says
‘I’ll love you if you do xyz’ isn’t speaking the language of love. In turning my supposed
‘love’ into a weapon of extortion, I only show that I don’t love you. In other words, Freud
hangs everything on an empty threat; the threat of taking away what the threat itself
reveals isn’t there, or is only there in repressed form, as refused.
Alas, Freud’s conception seems plausible because we constantly threaten each other in
this way, to terrible effect. This essentially empty threat is more powerful than all ‘real’
threats combined. Hurt looks and other manipulative strategies of moralized,
emotionalized blackmail imply that if you want to be ‘loved’, you have to make yourself
‘lovable’; change yourself to fit my preferences, wishes, needs. However, insofar as the
situation is moralized, I don’t present these as simply mine, but as about you meeting
shared expectations and values; ‘No one accepts a person who acts like you!’ In this
moralistic depersonalization one enlists the support of others against the person one
threatens, making her feel isolated and powerless. But depersonalization isn’t primarily
driven by (p. 605) strategic concerns; the basic point is that in making egocentric
demands one refuses to be open, to address the other simply as oneself, ‘I’ to ‘you’, and
this means that one starts speaking in general terms, about what ‘one’—perhaps as ‘a
person in my position, after the kind of thing you did’—can and cannot do, think,
understand, etc. This depersonalized mode of address doesn’t change one’s basically
egocentric, manipulative orientation, but manifests it. To repeat: in rejecting you because
you don’t meet my expectations, whether shared with ‘everybody’ or with no one, I show
that I refuse to love you, not that you’re ‘unlovable’.
Does loving someone then mean uncritically accepting abuse and evil from them? No.
Love rejects evil unconditionally, but it doesn’t reject the other even when she does evil.
Rather, evil prevents love’s realization insofar as, in doing evil, the evil-doer refuses to
give or receive love. In speaking to someone’s conscience in love’s sense, one calls her
back to herself and to the one(s) she deserted. By contrast with superego voices, there’s
no moralistic demand or threat, and no argument, just a simple appeal: ‘Don’t you see
what you’re doing?’ It’s an appeal without power, but precisely this freedom from—not
mere lack of—power makes it in a way stronger than any power. Think, again, of the
appeal in the forlorn child’s face; in not attempting to manipulate and force the other, but
leaving them free, it opens them to the question of their own freedom and responsibility.
This breaks their heart open—or drives them mad, if they refuse the opening.
In succumbing to parental threats of ‘loss of love’, the child feels ashamed or guilty; the
empty threat becomes ‘real’, effective, through those emotional responses. They contrast
with two other possibilities. A child might react amorally, obeying without shame or guilt,
simply to avoid the external consequences of parental disapproval, or it might be ‘unable’
to repress its love and so reacts to parental shaming/guilt-loading with sadness and
anguish, perhaps anger. The child who, instead, represses its love in succumbing to
shame/guilt, turns on its own spontaneous expressions, anxiously trying to remake itself
in the image of ‘the lovable child’ projected by the parents’ disapproval of the real one;
thus arises the ego ideal. The tragedy is that while the child longs for love, by falsifying
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itself it gets only approval. Adam Smith thought we have an ‘original desire to please, and
… original aversion to offend our brethren’ (1976: 116), and that this is the foundation of
morality, but the desire to please isn’t original; it’s what our longing for love gets
perverted into insofar as we turn it down. ‘Society’ doesn’t do this to us; rather, society in
its destructive aspects is constituted and perpetuated by our collectively doing it to
ourselves. The jealous child, too, with its hurt looks and angry protests, threatens the
parent with ‘withdrawing its love’, claiming the right to punish the faithless parent for
‘withdrawing her love first’. Indeed, every move in our collective threatening game is
presented as justified by the lovelessness of the other. Thus, the punitive mother presents
herself as punishing her child for his naughtiness; that is, for acting selfishly, not caring
about her or others.
The paradigmatic superego responses shame and guilt suffuse the threatening game.
These responses are in some ways quite different. Most obviously, shame focuses on one’s
weakness/ineptness in not measuring up to some ideal, i.e. to the expectations of those
whose rejection one fears, guilt on the harm one has supposedly done them; not (p. 606)
one’s impotence but the destructive use made of one’s power makes one feel guilty (thus,
if A made B cry, A feels guilty for her meanness, her power to hurt, while B feels ashamed
for his weakness). But the differences between shame and guilt arise from a deeper
similarity. In both cases one fears social rejection and (so) loss of self-esteem; one feels an
intolerably bad person. This is obvious in shame, and it means that, even where my shame
results from my mistreating you in what I regard as a shameful way, my thoughts aren’t
primarily with you in your suffering; rather, I’m preoccupied with the misfortune I’ve
brought on myself (I have lost face). This narcissism in the form of one’s moral concern
makes shame morality a terrible thing even where the particular values (‘contents’) it
honours are in some ways desirable. A murderer who feels ashamed of his deed only
perpetuates the blindness to his victim, and to himself, it revealed.19
It might seem, though, that a murderer should definitely feel guilty. We shouldn’t confuse
guilt feelings with bad conscience, however; the former are actually a repression of the
latter, and share shame’s self-loathing self-centredness. Obviously, a repentant wrongdoer
knows he’s guilty in the plain sense of having done someone wrong. But the more he
opens up to the person he wronged, i.e. the more he allows himself to feel love for her—
that love is what he feels in his bad conscience, what it calls him to—the less will he be
tormented by guilt feelings, which are feelings focusing, like shame, on one’s own
(supposed) badness. The primary expression of bad conscience is the longing to find
those one wronged, ask their forgiveness, and be reconciled with them. Here, one isn’t
dominated by the egocentric worry over others withdrawing their ‘love’, i.e. their favour.
Instead, there’s a pained realization that, by hurting, ignoring, or manipulating the other,
one has oneself failed in love for them. This realization isn’t intellectual, but manifests
one’s desire to open up to the other in love again. The sense of having closed oneself to
the other and being still estranged from them is painful; the more one loves, the clearer
and deeper is the pain. But since one now wholeheartedly seeks reconciliation and sees
the other and oneself in one’s relation to them in the light of love, one’s consciousness of
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estrangement—unlike guilt and shame, but like grief or longing for an absent friend—
doesn’t feel simply bad (cp. Nykänen 2014).20
The guilt- and shame-inducing superego’s function is, as Freud says, hostile surveillance;
one feels watched and condemned by others (Freud 1930: 136; cp. Freud 1933a: 59). The
repression and displacement of conscience by the superego consists precisely, as
Nykänen (2014) demonstrates, in this reversal whereby, instead of actively opening
oneself in love to the person one wronged, one assumes the passive position of ‘one
judged by others’. These others needn’t be real people, although at first they were that
for the child; they may be imagined, idealized others, representatives of impersonal moral
values. (p. 607) Philosophers debate whether the moral judgement one feels subject to is
‘autonomous’ (impersonal) or ‘heteronomous’ (tied to an audience of specific others), but
from love’s perspective that difference is irrelevant; however the judging ‘one’ is further
specified, the self-objectifying, judgemental perspective contrasts with the bad
conscience of love, where one doesn’t feel observed and condemned, but opened to and
united with the other in love. Furthermore, even in its most instinctive and infantile
forms, comparing oneself with more or less ‘lovable’ (favoured) others involves a
depersonalizing self-objectification; the Oedipal boy already implicitly wonders ‘What
does he (the rival) have that I lack, that makes mother prefer him?’ Apparently, some
‘thing’, some quality or ingredient, makes one ‘lovable’ (valuable); the ego ideal is built
around the core fantasy of acquiring this ‘thing’, this value, thereby forcing others to
‘love’ (value) one. ‘Autonomy’ is the fantasy of making oneself valuable by fashioning
oneself into an object that others ‘must’ value by a kind of impersonal, ideal necessity.
Some may find linking bad conscience to forgiveness cheap; saying ‘I’m sorry’ might
make one feel good, but what counts is making reparations and bettering one’s ways. The
objection is misguided. Asking for forgiveness isn’t just saying ‘I’m sorry’ and perhaps
shedding some guilty tears. When spoken from the heart, ‘Please forgive me’ is the
unadorned expression of the longing to undo the distance and alienation between oneself
and the other caused by oneself. One makes no claims, doesn’t pressure the other to
forgive or pretend that they are obliged to; one simply expresses the same longing of love
expressed in the forlorn child’s ‘Please don’t go’. And that longing will also be expressed
in endeavours to change entrenched ways of acting, to repair what was broken, etc.
Where the longing is absent, or rather repressed, as when guilt feelings dominate and
there’s no forgiveness sought, reparation, too, will acquire a different, morally
problematic character. Then, one will try to appease the guilt one feels for having avoided
seeking forgiveness, compensating for it by ‘doing good’. Think, e.g., of a woman forever
‘paying’ in the coin of kindness and self-abnegation to her husband for an affair she never
dared confess and ask forgiveness for, because truthful confrontation with him frightens
her.
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Love: All Freedom, No Licence

The main point I’ve been labouring is that our moral psychological difficulties, in
pathological and everyday forms, can be understood only in the light of the good
possibility they repress, namely the wholeheartedness of love to which conscience calls
us. That possibility is what we have difficulties with. Thus, both the pressure we often feel
to lie and the terribleness of lying relate to the truthful, wholehearted contact the lie
evades and represses. Love is the good that the various forms of human destructiveness,
moralized or not, are destructive of.
But, it will be objected, can’t people do terrible, as well as wonderful, things out of love?
And isn’t the ‘first desideratum’ in any account of love therefore ‘to recognize that love
comes in good and bad varieties’, and to decide ‘which ideal sorts love into good and
(p. 608) bad’ (Harcourt 2017: 39)? Freud certainly thought so, and until we see the
misconception underlying this view, it remains unclear how conscience in the sense of
love could provide genuine moral understanding. The crucial point is that so-called bad
‘forms of love’ aren’t really forms of love, but attitudes that masquerade as love while
actually repressing it. As I’ve stressed, terrible things are done in the name of love. No
word is as abused as ‘love’. To tell the real thing from the counterfeits one doesn’t need
an ‘ideal’, however, but the real thing itself. Someone who loves wholeheartedly won’t be
taken in by false protestations of ‘love’, while one who doesn’t will use even the best
ideals to rationalize the distrust, defensiveness, and destructiveness which manifest their
own lovelessness. ‘If someone has no ideals’, Frankfurt says, ‘there is nothing that he
cannot bring himself to do’ (1999: 114). But it’s precisely in the name of ideals, often
loveless ideals of ‘love’, that the worst atrocities are committed.
It isn’t merely that some ideal representations of love—those tied up with oppressive
gender roles, say—misrepresent love, but that any representation of love is itself a
repression of love. Any ideal of love comes between the lovers, obstructing and perverting
the openness between them. Loving someone means approaching them without
preconceptions and demands, conscious or unconscious, regarding how one ‘should’ treat
them or be treated by them, or what ‘kind’ of person oneself and they are, whereas ideals
are precisely pieces of ‘legislation’ about these things. To love is to listen and speak, to
touch and move, freely, unrestrictedly, guided only, and fully, by love’s wholehearted
desire to know and be known by the other, in every sense of word, and this includes the
endless work of undoing the clogs of distrust and misunderstanding that always threaten
to build up between us. Here, even the best ideals and the most positive expectations and
‘narratives’ are, ultimately, only hindrances.21
Certainly, without moral ideals, norms, and prohibitions, social life, including intimate
relationships, would descend into barbarism. But that’s because there’s so much
lovelessness (jealousy, envy, etc.) between people, not because love must be regulated.
Moral regulation by norms/ideals is like the police: necessary, given how heartless and
irresponsible we often are, but also a symptom of the love trouble they only precariously
control. Clearly, insofar as things are good between people, no police surveillance is
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needed, and if it’s still insisted on, that itself becomes a problem. The idea that, if left
free, love itself might lead to abuse, is confused; abuse is excluded by the very dynamics
of love’s desire. If you love someone you also desire sexually, for instance, there’s no need
for you also to (say) ‘respect’ them to ensure your desire doesn’t lead to violations, for
when sexual arousal is lived in love, what you desire—that the other turn to you in the
openness, the unguarded desire and joy, in which you turn to them—excludes every
violation. What you’re aroused by is the prospect of sexual communion, and if the other
doesn’t want that, it kills your arousal. Or rather, your arousal ceases where it would
become, through the other’s withdrawal, merely your own, your private thing. Thus,
insofar as my desire to caress you expresses love, I won’t go on if you don’t want me to,
because (p. 609) there will now be no place for me to go. You were the ‘place’, and you’ve
withdrawn. By contrast, if my caress is loveless, i.e. if love is only present in repressed
form, my response to your unwillingness may vary. If I wish to ingratiate myself with you,
I’ll anxiously stop and apologize, perhaps; if I feel sentimental and cuddly, or just horny, I
might go on because I want to so much; indeed, in my egocentric arousal I may not even
notice that you don’t like what I’m doing. The more I give myself over to my sentimental
or horny fantasizing, the more I ignore you, on whose person I stage my fantasy
(Backström 2014a).
Wholehearted love thus subverts the standard conception of the relation between desire
and morality, which sees a person’s desires, needs, etc. as essentially egocentric and
therefore amoral. On that conception, what I desire and experience as ‘good for me’ is
compatible with the other’s good only contingently, and so concern for the other must be
expressed through external moral regulation (through taboos, reasoning, or in some other
way). Even apparently ‘positive’ desires like the desire to relieve distress rooted in
empathic identification, need moral regulating because they’re still essentially egocentric
and capricious. I might feel empathic towards A and B, but not C; my empathy for A
might disregard his actual predicament (perhaps I wrongly see him as like myself), etc.
This privatizing conception of desire, shared by rationalists and sentimentalists, doesn’t
fit love’s desire, however, which is itself the welcoming opening of oneself to the other.
That’s why, far from needing external moral regulation, it is the very movement of
morality, of conscience. Conscience can reveal the moral destructiveness of both my
private inclinations and the shared moral norms of my society not because it’s some
‘higher’ form of subjectivity, whatever that would mean, but because it is my openness to
the other person, the one my private or collectively sanctioned aims tempted me to
violate—as I now clearly see, in the light of love that makes her presence real to me.22
That light excludes all licentiousness/irresponsibility. Moral regulations, by contrast,
always leave some room for it, within the limits they establish; thus, my obligation to
respect your wealth is matched by your right to use it as you please, e.g. keeping it all
while your neighbours starve.
Love is the longing for the other to be herself and oneself to be oneself, together. Thus,
love is a longing for reality, ‘a spirit of truth … which will not … have anything to do with
… falsehood’ (Weil 1978: 242); the very opposite of the blindly idealizing credulity Freud
and many others present it as (Freud 1905: 150, 295–6; 1921: 111–16). That view leads
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Freud to suggest that love itself can drive repression, as when a husband blinds himself
to hateful aspects of his wife’s person; in Freud’s view, ‘precisely the intensity of his love
… would not allow his hatred … to remain conscious’ (Freud 1909: 180–1). But it isn’t out
of love that the husband is hostile and represses his hostility; it’s because he isn’t
prepared to love his wife wholeheartedly. He cannot bear to see her and his feelings for
her truthfully, because that would mean opening things up between them; he’d have to
change, to forgive, and ask for forgiveness. Instead, he represses the problem, which
(p. 610) means, correlatively, that he fabricates a false, idealized picture or narrative
about their relationship. He may admit they have problems, but he’ll misrepresent what
they’re about. Refusal of love is compatible with brutal frankness in acknowledging
shortcomings in oneself and the other; one can admit to any kind of ‘truth’ except the
truth that one refuses to love (not cannot, but refuses to). And it isn’t this truth as such
that frightens one, but the prospect of love itself, of opening up to the other in
forgiveness.
Love, then, is what is repressed, never what represses. When you find something amiss in
the other’s way of relating to you, or to someone else, the question of conscience in love
is whether your own reaction expresses love—in which case what you react to is the
other’s closing herself to love—or is rather a way in which you close yourself to her, while
projecting your guilt over this onto her, presenting her as ‘harassing’ or ‘judging’ you,
say.23 And you know what’s what only by opening yourself in love, as conscience calls you
to, for opening up means letting go of your fearful hostility with its repressive/projective
games, thus fully and lucidly feeling what is going on between you. There is then no
‘moral question’ left, only the longing to be and stay open. This is what the dissolution of
moral difficulties looks like from the perspective of love (cp. Nykänen 2015). This
dissolution doesn’t tell you what to do in the situation, for instance how best to help
someone in need. But the moral aspect of the difficulty consisted in your not really
wanting to help. Perhaps the other disgusted you or provoked your envy, and so you
instinctively made up justifications for not helping; ‘He doesn’t deserve help’, ‘He’ll
manage’, etc. Opening up to the other dissolves the disgust/envy, and along with it the
falsely moralized pseudo-problem of whether he ‘deserves’/needs help, and you’re finally
able to look at the problem as a genuinely practical one of how best to help him.
A common objection to equating conscience with love is that two people loving each other
isn’t enough and that lovers may treat ‘outsiders’ indifferently—even viciously, if they feel
their love threatened, so that ‘in the blindness of love, remorselessness is carried to the
pitch of crime’, as Freud says (1921: 113). But this, too, is misconceived. Unlike
favouritism or devotion which indeed tend towards remorselessness against ‘outsiders’—
as do collective us/them identifications generally, however wide in scope—love is non-
excluding, even if, or, rather, precisely because, it’s strictly personal. No extra moral
demand to ‘extend’ the love one feels for one person to others is needed, because the
very form of love’s desire excludes all destructiveness, not just against one particular
person (‘the beloved’). Loving even one person wholeheartedly means opening oneself,
i.e. shedding one’s fearfully insistent egocentric demands, and this changes the spirit in
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which one approaches each person one meets; one now sees each other as other
(Backström 2007: 229–316).
And, turning things around: whence derives the objector’s certainty that everyone should
be treated well and equally? How does one know, say, that the slaveholder’s attitude to
his slaves is evil? Isn’t that because love shows one this in conscience, as one considers
what it would mean to treat a loved human being as the slaveholder treats his (p. 611)
slave? Repressing this understanding means repressing one’s sense of the slaveholder’s
callousness, and this allows his attitude to appear justified, even perfectly reasonable—as
it did to Aristotle, whose blindness to the evil of ‘natural slavery’ (cp. Cambiano 1987)
wasn’t due to any weakness in his rational powers, but to identification with his
slaveholding culture. Aristotle’s superego forbade him to see its evil. The social pressure
internalized in the superego determines the limits allowed to reasoning rather than the
reverse; it is ‘rational’ only in the sense that, speaking in the superego’s depersonalizing
voice, we enlist reasoning as readily as emotional reactions for our repressive purposes.
Reasoning doesn’t tell ideologizing rationalization from moral understanding if one
doesn’t want it to. And if one wants to see the difference, no reasoning is needed. One
doesn’t perceive callousness as a result of arguments, and if one starts arguing the
wrongness of slavery, one has already conceded too much, insofar as one admits, in
principle, that the slaveholder might be right (if one doesn’t admit that, one isn’t really
reasoning, merely rationalizing).
The ‘Impossibility’ of Ethics

I have been radically critical of Freud’s account of morality. However, my critique is itself
Freudian in inspiration insofar as I understand moral difficulties in terms of love trouble
and repression. My criticism is that Freud doesn’t see how love and repression are
actually related, and how both can be properly understood only as essentially moral
phenomena—just as, conversely, moral life itself can only be understood in terms of love
and its repression.
Let me finally illustrate a crucial ‘methodological’ point about the study of ethics by
briefly commenting on Freud’s structural model of the psyche. That model doesn’t model
the structure of our minds, as Freud thinks, but is rather itself a symptom of real-life
difficulties; a theoretical formulation of the self-misrepresentation belonging to
destructive moral-existential orientations. The model reifies ‘ego’, ‘id’, and ‘superego’ as
independent psychical ‘agencies’, but they’re really only different stances (or ‘voices’) we
assume as we address ourselves and others. It is I who speak in an impatiently horny
voice (‘id’), or in a prurient voice condemning horny desires as ‘immoral’ (‘superego’).
However, I thereby become a different kind of ‘I’ than I would be if I dared to confront the
other openly; an ‘I’ for which the term ‘ego’ is quite apposite. The egocentric attitude I
assume is marked by irresponsible passivity, self-pity, and hostility. Picturing myself as an
innocent bystander caught in the middle of a conflict between the ‘natural urges’ I
‘simply find welling up in myself’ and the arduous moral demands for renunciation that
Page 16 of 26

‘society’ imposes, I refuse to take responsibility for either my desire or my moral

understanding. Freud’s structural model doesn’t account for this depersonalization and
flight from responsibility, from openly addressing the other in one’s longing, sorrow, or
anger; it merely echoes it. The model is the self-obfuscating self-apology of the ‘poor ego’
who often ‘cannot suppress a cry: “Life is not easy!” ’ (Freud 1933a: 78).
What this brief discussion illustrates was implicit in all the discussions here; that
(p. 612)
the difficulty of doing ethics isn’t primarily intellectual. The pictures we make of morality,
including at the most abstract theoretical levels, are themselves implicated in our love
trouble, defended and rejected depending on what wishful and fearful fantasies we’ve
unconsciously invested in them. This means that accounting for morality truthfully ‘in
theory’ implies a kind of ‘working-through’ of one’s own moral-existential difficulties and
temptations; a sustained engagement precisely with what one most wants to avoid
thinking about. If psychoanalysis is an ‘impossible’ profession, so is ethics, and essentially
for the same reason.
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Notes:
(1) Three central Freud texts here are (1923, 1930, 1933a: 57–80); see also his (1913,
1914b, 1921, 1924a) etc. Barnett (2007), Church (1991), and Roth (2001) are recent
sympathetic readings of Freud on morality. On individual/cultural symptoms of superego
guilt, see Bergler (1952), Carroll (1985), Wurmser (2000), and Žižek (2005).
(2) For example, Grotstein (2004), Jacobsen (1964), Kernberg (1976), Strachey (1934),
and Sedlak (2016).
(3) Velleman (2006), cp. Deigh (1996) and Scheffler (1992a, 1992b).
(4) For example, Bieber (1972), Brickman (1983), Cottingham (1998), Dilman (2005),
Gillman (1982), Harcourt (2015), Holder (1982), Holmes (2011), Lacewing (2008, 2014),
Lear (2000, 2015: 211–4), Schafer (1960), and Schecter (1979).
(5) For example, Carveth (2013), Reiner (2009), Sagan (1988), and Symington (2004).
Lacanians don’t speak of conscience, but they too project an ethics ‘not subject to the
logic of the superego’ (cp. Kesel 2009; Neill 2011; Žižek 2005; Zupančič 2000: 160).
(6) Novick and Novick (2004) distinguish ‘closed-system’ from ‘open-system’ superegos;
Kleinians ‘paranoid-schizoid, persecutory’ from ‘depressive, reparative’ guilt (cp. Alford
2006; Grinberg 1964; Segal 2002), etc.
(7) Velleman (2006: 149) and Britton (2003: 101). Cp. Alexander (1925), Gray (2005), and
Milrod (2002).
(8) This isn’t an empirical claim but a philosophical remark concerning the space of
human intelligibility as such, within which any meaningful empirical testing must move
(cp. Backström 2017).
(9) Gaita (2004: 43–63) underlines this point. Levinas (1969) and Løgstrup (1997) also
make the concrete relation to the other person basic, whereas most ethics proceeds as
though others gained moral significance only in relation to my values (cp. Backström
2015; Nykänen 2005).
(10) This general perspective on ethics, focusing on our difficulties with openness to the
other and our destructive responses to it, is developed at length in Backström (2007),
following Nykänen (2002). Cp. Backström and Nykänen (2016a, 2016b).
(11) By ‘repression’ (Verdrängung), Freud sometimes means a specific defence in contrast

to others, but he mostly uses the word generically, as I do, covering an open-ended range
of defensive strategies (cp. Boag 2012; Freud 1926: 163–4). Freud’s discussions of
Page 24 of 26

repression are inadequate precisely because he overlooks that what is ultimately

repressed is conscience. As Symington says, ‘We cannot do evil … and know it. We fashion
the unconscious so as not to know it’ (2004: 70; cp. Backström 2014b; Nykänen 2009).
(12) Freud’s later drive conception might seem to mark ‘the movement from a closed to an
open psyche’ (Lear 2003: 166), with Eros conceptualized as a non-egocentric/reductive/
destructive drive, but conceiving love in drive terms still focuses on the singular subject;
Eros becomes ‘the quasi-instinctual force by which … the psyche grabs hold of meaning
to organize itself [ … in] ever more diverse communications with itself and with the world
at large’ (2003: 177–8). Here, the psyche is open to itself and ‘its’ world, not to the other
person—which is what love is all about, and why it’s the very heart of moral
understanding.
(13) I’m not making empirical claims here (or, I hope, anywhere else in my argument), but
clarifying the immanent connections of meaning between various motives and attitudes;
connections we typically deny in indulging these very attitudes.
(14) Cp. Cordner (2002: 147–9), Løgstrup (1997: 32–5), and Sartre (1965).
(15) Cp. Johnston (2013), Nykänen (2009), and Warner (1986, 1982).
(16) Selling sugar pills as painkillers is simple deception; taking the pills and feeling the
pain subside ‘as a result’ is self-deceptive self-manipulation; pill merchants who count on
this response are engaged in manipulation.
(17) Cp. Freud 1930: 124–33. Many commentators overlook the centrality of love in
Freud’s account of superego formation (e.g. Church 1991; Symington 2004), and Freud
himself sometimes appears to deny it (e.g. Freud 1933b: 211).
(18) Even writers critical of Freud’s reductive view of love accept the loss-of-love idea; e.g.
Suttie (1963: 102) and Harcourt (2007: 143).
(19) Clearly, people can feel ashamed even for murder; confusion is confused, but one can
be confused. Similarly, philosophers regularly overlook or explicitly deny the narcissism
of shame, even praising it as ‘the prime moral sentiment of evolved morality, of morality
beyond the superego’ (Wollheim 1986: 220).
(20) Some may feel that the ‘bad conscience’ I contrast with self-centred guiltiness is
actually guilt in the proper sense of the word. Since I’m not legislating about the use of
words, but trying to characterize two different moral orientations, I wouldn’t object to
this—if my description of the contrast is otherwise accepted.
(21) Hence, the ubiquitous psychoanalytic talk of ‘good objects’ and ‘good narratives’
should be treated with caution.
(22) Huckleberry Finn is an exemplary case (Backström 2007: 240–8, 338–343). Many
philosophers rightly criticize subjectivistic misconceptions of conscience, mistakenly
thinking they’re criticizing conscience itself (cp. Feldman 2006).
Page 25 of 26

(23) In actual cases, love and loveless motives will typically be mixed on both sides; I don’t
wish to deny this ambivalence but to understand what creates it, what is mixed.
Joel Backström
Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, Finland
Page 26 of 26

Human Excellence and Psychic Health in Psychoanalysis

Human Excellence and Psychic Health in
Psychoanalysis
Edward Harcourt
This chapter begins with a seeming rivalry between two answers to the question ‘what
are the aims of psychoanalysis?’, which seem to situate psychoanalysis differently in
relation to ideals of human excellence: ‘we are trying to make people good’; and
‘goodness is none of our business—we are just trying to make people healthy’. But are
these alternatives? If, as Aristotle said, human excellence is psychic health, one aim
cannot be achieved without the other. That still leaves a space between human excellence
and ‘the moral virtues’, until it is shown that one cannot be excellent of our human kind
without possessing the moral virtues—as modern philosophers assume, though as
Nietzsche denied. Attempting to resist these various assimilations, this chapter aims to
untangle the complex relations between psychic health as it is conceived in
psychoanalysis, the possession of the ‘moral virtues’, and excellence of our human kind.
Keywords: Freud, psychoanalysis, Aristotle, virtue ethics, psychic health, morality, Hartmann, teleology, character,
human development
Edward Harcourt

PLATO and Aristotle initiated an investigation into the triangular relations between
human nature, distinctively human excellence, and the human good: between the kinds of
creatures we are, what it is to be good or excellent of our human kind, and what
constitutes a good life for us. In recent philosophy, at least in the Anglophone world, the
burden of this investigation has been carried by what is often known for better or worse
as ‘virtue ethics’.1 Its central exhibit—with which labourers in the ‘virtue ethics’ vineyard
may agree or disagree—is the ambitious thesis that the life both in which we are
distinctively excellent of our kind and that is best for us is the life in which we possess
Page 1 of 22

certain presumptively valuable dispositions of character. Though there’s room for

controversy about exactly which ones make it on to the list (modesty?) and why those that
make it on to the list do make it (because these dispositions enable us to meet our
impartial moral obligations? because they are necessary for us to lead our characteristic
species lives?), if a core consisting of at least justice, fidelity to promises, honesty,
courage, and generosity didn’t make it on to the list, many practitioners of ‘virtue ethics’
would agree that the ambitious thesis wasn’t worth arguing about.
From within the trenches of recent Anglophone philosophy, it can look as if ‘virtue ethics’
is the only place nowadays in which the Platonic–Aristotelian investigation is carried on.
But more than one psychoanalyst (Lomas 1999: 3; Lear 2005: 514) has claimed (p. 618)
that the question with which patients come to analysis is Socrates’ ‘how to live’ (Plato
1961: 352d)—that is, surely, the ‘good life for us’ corner of the Platonic–Aristotelian
triangle. Again, according to Hans Loewald (1978: 5–6), ‘psychoanalytic findings and
theory, are … [about] becoming what may properly be called a self, a person’.2 That
sounds like a claim about the proper development of our distinctively human natures, and
so—assuming, plausibly, a connection between excellence and proper development (Wall
2013: 342)—a claim about excellence of our human kind. Psychoanalysis3 has thus been
seen, by some at least, as another continuator of the Platonic–Aristotelian investigation.
Indeed, it has a fair claim to be a continuator that’s more visible to all but the
professional philosopher than ‘virtue ethics’ itself.
To set against this claim, however, others—beginning with Freud—have maintained that
psychoanalysis is animated not by an ideal of human excellence, nor of the proper
development of our distinctively human natures—however exactly that is to be
understood—but by an ideal of psychic health. On this view, psychoanalysis is interested
not in people becoming better as people, but only in their becoming less ill. In Freud’s
words, it is ‘a procedure for the medical treatment of neurotic patients’ (1963a: 15; cp.
1958: 115).
Moreover, even between those psychoanalytic thinkers most readily associated with the
Platonic–Aristotelian investigation and their ‘virtue ethics’ counterparts, there seems to
be a striking difference in respect of which real or apparent human excellences matter.
To avoid confusion, we need to pause here on a point of terminology. To the ear attuned to
the ‘virtue ethics’ literature, there may be no audible difference between ‘the virtues’ or
indeed ‘the moral virtues’ on the one hand and, on the other, ‘human excellences’ or
‘excellences of character’. Thus the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains a virtue
as ‘an excellent trait of character’ and continues—seemingly as if no new idea is being
introduced—that ‘a virtuous person is a morally good, excellent or admirable
person’ (Hursthouse and Pettigrove 2016). However, this assimilation of virtues or
excellences to moral virtues or moral excellences leaves us without a ready label for those
traits of character—such as the ability to enjoy oneself, adventurousness, Aristotle’s
‘proper ambition’, or (a contemporary favourite) ‘resilience’, i.e. the ability to recover
from setbacks—which are presumptively good, but which don’t seem like a fit for ‘morally
Page 2 of 22

good’, however exactly the qualification is to be understood. But we badly need such a
label if the difference I have in mind between psychoanalytic contributions to the
Platonic–Aristotelian investigation and their ‘virtue ethics’ counterparts is to be made
visible. So, when I say ‘human excellences’ I do not mean that as a synonym for ‘human
moral excellences’, but rather as a more inclusive label for human excellences,
understood so as to include both (for example) justice and fidelity to promises (assuming
(p. 619) that’s where the word ‘moral’ takes us, if it takes us anywhere) and (for example)
resilience and proper ambition.
With our terminology thus fixed, we can observe that for ‘virtue ethics’, the excellences
that matter are the core of justice, fidelity to promises, and so on. Psychoanalysis, on the
other hand, has often explicitly resisted the idea that it’s concerned with these or indeed
with any moral virtues, with the possible exceptions of courage and truthfulness. In their
place, it’s common to find an emphasis in psychoanalysis on excellences (real or
apparent) which, though seemingly excellences of character, bear a problematic relation
to moral virtue, such as integration, or authenticity, and (in addition, or alternatively) on
what might be called ‘relational excellences’: the capacity for other-relatedness, or good
object relations, or the capacity to love. Even if a number of psychoanalytic thinkers have
been as interested as was Aristotle in the proper development of our distinctively human
natures, what they think that consists in is ostensibly quite different. The following
remark of Loewald’s exemplifies both the overlap and the divergence: ‘a human being’s
becoming a person’—that’s the overlap—is a matter not, indeed, of developing moral
virtues but ‘of the development of our love-life’ (1978: 32). Again, D. W. Winnicott thought
psychoanalysis has ‘limited moral import’ (Blass 2001: 207), but he didn’t think that
meant it was merely about health: ‘the absence of psychoneurotic illness may be health
but it is not life’, and what psychoanalysis should offer is ‘life’ (Winnicott 1967: 360, cited
by Blass 2003: 931).
In attempting to map the relations between psychoanalysis and ‘virtue ethics’, then, we
have arrived so far at a three-way distinction, between those (if any) who see
psychoanalysis as about human excellence or the proper development of our distinctively
human natures and who see human excellence as consisting in the moral virtues
(whatever exactly the list of those includes); those who see psychoanalysis as about
human excellence or the proper development of our distinctively human natures but who
see human excellence as consisting in some other set of characteristics; and those who
see psychoanalysis not as about human excellence at all, but as about something much
more modest—psychic health.
The picture is further complicated, however, by the fact that the phrase ‘psychic health’
itself stands for something different in different psychoanalytic writers. Two comparisons
may serve to explain the difficulty. First of all Plato and Aristotle again: these
philosophers might have been puzzled at the idea that if psychoanalysis is about psychic
health, it cannot also be about human excellence, even human excellence interpreted as
moral virtue. For Plato said that ‘virtue is the health and beauty and well-being of the
soul, and vice is the disease and weakness and deformity of the soul’ (1961: 444 d–e), and
Page 3 of 22

Aristotle something similar (1984: 1166a30–1166b1, 1166b25–1166b29). That is, in their

theories, psychic health is either identical with human excellence or, perhaps, with some
excellent distinctively human condition which underlies and explains it. The second
comparison is with the notion of physical health. That notion is hardly straightforward.
But for all that physical health is in some sense a condition we are meant to be in, and for
all that it seems to resist reduction to a value-free notion of statistical normality (Boorse
1977; Kingma 2007), it is surely—and not just because non-human creatures (p. 620) too
are meant to be physically healthy—implausible as an occupant of the exalted role Plato
and Aristotle assigned to the health of the soul. For some psychoanalytic writers, then,
psychic health is more like health of the soul in Plato and Aristotle—the developmental
ideal for our distinctively human natures—whereas for others, it is more like physical
health, a good, but a subordinate one (and which may relate only obliquely to ideals of
character). Unfortunately, psychoanalytic writers may sometimes say it is more like the
one, and treat it as more like the other. What is more, which one it is more like cannot
always be inferred from the set of characteristics in which psychic health is said to
consist.
Be that as it may, the more psychoanalysis treats psychic health like health of the soul for
Plato and Aristotle, the more it looks as if psychoanalysis and ‘virtue ethics’ constitute
attempts on the same Platonic–Aristotelian set of questions. Indeed, where
psychoanalysis treats psychic health like health of the soul for Plato and Aristotle and
where its focus is on (real or apparent) excellences distinct from the moral virtues—from
justice, fidelity to promises, and so on—there is the possibility not only that they are
attempts on the same set of questions, but rival attempts. Where by contrast
psychoanalysis treats psychic health as more like physical health, this possibility tends to
fade from view.
In this chapter I am going to do little more than fill out this sketch of the various
theoretical options in a complex field.
Hartmann, Plato, and ‘Psychic Health’

It has often been difficult for psychoanalysis to pin down a notion of psychic health that is
not bound up with human excellences of one kind or another. A psychoanalyst who
ostensibly tried to do so was Heinz Hartmann. Writing in the 1960s, Hartmann argued
that:
analysis is primarily a therapeutic and not a moral instrument … [W]e try to

relieve a patient of his neurotic suffering, even if there is no chance that in the
process he will become a morally better person. (1960: 69–70, 87)
In his therapeutic work [the analyst] will keep other values in abeyance and
concentrate on the realization of one category of values only: health values. (1960:
55)
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And Hartmann opposed what he called ‘health ethics’, which makes:
an equation of moral badness with mental dysfunction … [hoping that] in

attacking neurosis individual therapy can also do away with everything that is
considered ‘bad’ in human nature. (1960: 70)
Hartmann is thus ostensibly defending a conception of psychic health which is

independent of any human excellences (moral or otherwise), because we can state what it
is (p. 621) to be psychically healthy without reference to ‘social, moral and other
values’ (1960: 55), or indeed to any value beyond health itself.
Notice, however, that in the last passage quoted, Hartmann has ‘bad’ in scare-quotes—as
if he might mean not what’s really bad, but what society (in its drearily conventional way)
merely calls ‘bad’. If that is so, then to be sure we could be free of neurosis (and so
presumably at least minimally psychically healthy) while remaining ‘bad’, that is, while
straying from conventional moral norms. Such a line of thought is also present in Freud:
some neurotic illness, Freud said, could be prevented if society took thought as to what
was really worth proscribing in the way of sexual behaviour, the clear implication being
that in this area at least, much of what we call ‘wrong’ isn’t really wrong (1962: 278; cp.
1963b: 434). ‘Psychoneuroses spring from the sexual needs of people who are
unsatisfied’, Freud said (1959: 186), while at the same time favourably contrasting
‘strong natures who openly oppose the demands of civilization’ with ‘well-behaved
weaklings’ (1959: 192). However, the fact that psychic health is compatible with (scare-
quoted) ‘badness’—that is, with the absence of merely conventional excellences like
sexual abstinence outside marriage—doesn’t show it is compatible with (real not scare-
quoted) badness. But if psychic health is not compatible with real badness, that is as
much as to say that it implies real rather than merely conventional human excellence,
whatever exactly that turns out to be.
Moreover, notwithstanding Hartmann’s claim that psychoanalysis aims simply at freedom

from neurosis, it also in his view promotes ‘more successful integration’ and improved
‘communication between the superego and the ego’ (1960: 86); though it does not seek to
promote particular moral values, it is interested in these values ‘in regard to their
authenticity in expressing the complex and more or less integrated dynamics of … moral
personality’ (1960: 51). So explained, integration and authenticity are conceptions of the
proper relations between different parts of the psyche. Anyone familiar with
psychoanalysis will recognize these as extremely common ways in which psychoanalysis
glosses the notion of psychic health. And remember Aristotle’s claim that the virtuous
man’s ‘opinions are harmonious, and he desires the same things with all his soul’ (1984:
1166a30–1166b1). If integration is not actually one of the virtues in Plato’s and Aristotle’s
catalogues, it is surely the good state of the soul which may be said to underlie virtue. So
we should beware of taking Hartmann’s claim to have described a notion of psychic
health that’s independent of ‘social, moral and other values’ too much at face value.
Page 5 of 22

Psychic Health, Character Disorders, and

Neurosis
At this point, perhaps unexpectedly, the history of psychoanalysis comes to play a part in
the investigation. Since at least the 1950s, it has often been remarked that analysands
tend to present not with hysteria or obsessional neurosis—seemingly the staples of
(p. 622) Freud’s own practice, and certainly the stuff of many of his most famous case
histories—but something more diffuse: ‘narcissism’, or an inability to achieve depth in

relationships, or ‘a general sense of not being able to get along’ (Giovacchini 1975: 31).4
As Allen Wheelis put it in 1958:
[a] change in the patterns of neuroses [fell] within the personal experience of
older psychoanalysts, [while younger ones] became aware of it from the
discrepancy between the older descriptions of neuroses and the problems
presented by the patients who come daily to their offices. The change is from
symptom neuroses to character disorders. (Lasch 1980: 42, my italics)
Why this shift occurred is not clear. Perhaps large-scale cultural changes meant that
society simply ceased to produce neurotics, and produced something else instead (Lasch
1980). Perhaps on the other hand what changed is not the epidemiology of these
conditions themselves but the client base of psychoanalysis, thanks for example to its
increasing cultural acceptance, or to the extent to which analysts were employed outside
psychiatric institutions (Horwitz 2002).
Whatever the truth of the matter, the mere fact of the historical shift bears on the account
we are to give of psychic health as the notion is deployed in psychoanalysis. An attractive
(though not uncontroversial) way of explaining the notion of psychic health on analogy
with that of physical health is in terms of the absence of symptoms. Since Freud defined
the neuroses in terms of their symptoms, absence of symptoms at least makes sense as a
formulation of psychic health, as early psychoanalysis took itself to be pursuing it. But it
is useless as a conception against which to interrogate psychoanalysis since the 1950s—
or whenever exactly the relevant shift took place. For it is built into the characterization
of post-1950s analysands that what they brought to analysis were not symptoms.
Presumably they came to analysis for a reason, though, and yet, relative to the ‘symptom-
freedom’ definition of psychic health, when they began analysis they were already
perfectly well. What’s more, if we find mid-century psychoanalytic writers such as
Hartmann claiming that psychic health is merely freedom from ‘neurotic disease’, and yet
—when one scratches the surface—tacitly thinking of psychic health in terms of human
excellence, or of the proper arrangement of parts of the psyche—one explanation for this
is that psychoanalysis in Hartmann’s time had not caught up with itself, and was affixing
labels that fitted the pre-1950s scene to theories suited to the new generation of
analysands.
Page 6 of 22

However, the very fact that it is historical reasons that underlie the possibility of thus
reading Hartmann’s notion of psychic health against itself suggests it would be a mistake
(p. 623) to conclude that wherever psychic health, characterized negatively as symptom-
freedom, appears to be the animating ideal of psychoanalysis what is really in play is

some characterological notion. If the notion of psychic health deployed in the neurotics’
heyday is no more merely a health conception—no more free of ‘social and moral’ notions
—than Hartmann’s, that needs to be separately argued for. The obvious place to look in
order to put that suggestion to the test is, of course, the work of Freud himself, as I do in
the next section.
Neurosis, Psychosis, and Freud’s ‘Work Ethic’

The following passage, from ‘The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis’ (Freud 1961:
183–7), can stand as well as any as a summary of Freud’s view of psychic health as poised
between neurosis and psychosis:
Both neurosis and psychosis are … the expression of a rebellion on the part of the
id against the external world, of its unwillingness … to adapt itself to the
exigencies of reality … In neurosis a piece of reality is avoided by a sort of flight,
whereas in psychosis it is remodelled …. We call behaviour ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ if
it combines certain features of both, … [i.e.] if it disavows reality as little as does a
neurosis, but if it then exerts itself, as does a psychosis, to effect an alteration in
it…. [T]his expedient, normal behaviour leads to work being carried out on the
external world; it does not stop, as in psychosis, at effecting internal changes…. [It
is] alloplastic.
Neurosis and psychosis, that is, have—according to Freud—something in common, in that

each involves a denial of reality (in the case of neurosis, of an aspect of inner reality, in
psychosis of an aspect of the external world). So in the second we find delusion, and in
the first, symptom-formation. Psychic health, meanwhile, has something in common with
both. It has something in common with neurosis in that external reality is not denied in
either case. It has something in common with psychosis in that in each case the subject
goes to work on and transforms something—in psychosis, the subject’s inner world; in
health, external reality itself. The thought is echoed in many other remarks, spread
widely across the corpus of Freud’s writings.
Two features of this conception deserve comment here. First, what underpins psychic
health—that is, what explains why a given person turns neither to neurosis nor to
psychosis, when they don’t—is, though Freud doesn’t use this word, a human excellence:
roughly, the excellence of being able to look reality in the eye, disagreeable though it may
be. In the passage quoted above, admittedly, it is the id’s unwillingness to adapt itself to
the exigencies of reality, but in other related passages Freud uses more familiar moral
(p. 624) language: ‘Today neurosis takes the place of monasteries which used to be the
refuge of all whom life had disappointed or who felt too weak to face it’ (1957: 50, my
italics); neurotics ‘turn away from reality because they [not just their ids] find it
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unbearable’ (1958: 218). Nor should it be a surprise to find Freud holding such a view.
‘The great ethical element in psychoanalytic work’, as he acknowledged, ‘is truth and
again truth … Courage and truth are of what [sic] … [people] are mostly deficient’ (Hale
1971: 170). Courage and truthfulness—which I take it is what he meant, writing in
English, by ‘truth’—are unarguably human excellences (and indeed excellences in
Aristotle’s catalogue), and these seem to be just the characteristics people ‘too weak to
face reality’ don’t have.6, 7
Beyond this, Freud’s characterization of psychic health draws heavily upon a second
characteristic, namely the determination to work or to effect change in the world (to be
‘alloplastic’). Freud sees the ‘healthy’ person as one who seeks to shape reality, giving
form to his (and it always is his) wishes. (Here Freud is surely influenced by Nietzsche:
see Nietzsche 1882/2001: 163–4; Ridley 1998: 136.) ‘The energetic and successful man’,
Freud says, ‘is one who succeeds by his efforts in turning his wishful fantasies into
reality’ (1957: 50). ‘Scientific work’ enables one to ‘gain some knowledge about the
reality of the world, by means of which we can increase our power and in accordance
with which we can arrange our life’ (1964a: 55). ‘The man of action will never give up the
external world on which he can try his strength’ (1964b: 84). By joining with others, and
‘guided by science’, we can ‘go over to the attack against nature and subject her to the
human will’ (1964b: 72).8
What we might call Freud’s ‘work ethic’ is also to the fore in some of his remarks on
sexuality. He claims that the child ‘is meant to grow up into a strong and capable person
with vigorous sexual needs and to accomplish during his life all the things that human
beings are urged to do by their instincts’ (1953: 223). One might think, on Freudian
principles, that what one is ‘urged to do by instinct’ is simply to satisfy the instinct (1953:
168). However, Freud condemns masturbation—arguably the equal of non-masturbatory
sexual activity as far as satisfying instinct is concerned—on the grounds that ‘it teaches
people to achieve important aims without taking trouble and by easy paths instead of
through an energetic exertion of force’ (1959: 199). Sexual intercourse is better than
(p. 625) masturbation, in other words, not because it is better at satisfying instinct but
because it is a form of ‘work’.
Though Freud connects the value of work with the virtue of being able to look reality in
the eye—as when he says of ‘the ordinary and professional work that [because it requires
no extraordinary talents] is open to everyone’ that ‘no other technique for the conduct of
life attaches the individual so firmly to reality’ (1964b: 80 n.1)—the value Freud places on
‘work’ is clearly additional to the value he places on facing reality, or on courage and
truthfulness. For one could face reality simply by passively suffering whatever reality
throws in one’s way, paying without murmur the price in frustration. ‘Going over to the
attack against nature’, on the other hand, is something extra. Moreover, insofar as
neurosis, in Freud’s view, is a ‘flight from reality’, ‘work’ is more than is required for
psychic health as long as that means freedom from neurosis, since the courageous
passive sufferer (or indeed the seeker of autoerotic sexual satisfaction) would no more be
flying from reality than would the person who ‘goes over to the attack’. It would seem,
Page 8 of 22

then, that in Freud we have a minimal conception of psychic health (as freedom from
symptoms), and a further conception which, though Freud also calls it
‘health’—‘remaining in lasting possession of health and efficiency’ (1959: 181), for
example—is a more substantive ideal of ‘living life to the full’ (compare Winnicott’s ‘life’).
But both are bound up with notions of human excellence: the more substantive ideal
obviously so, because it relies on Freud’s ‘work ethic’, but the minimal conception too,
since even it requires the excellences of courage and truthfulness.
Object Relations and the ‘Relational

Excellences’
Notwithstanding their sometimes medical self-presentation, both Hartmann’s and Freud’s
conceptions of psychic health therefore build in human excellences, albeit in different
ways. Something very similar is true of a final leading strand in psychoanalysis I will now
consider.
A great many versions of post-Freudian psychoanalysis are organized by a master

distinction—the distinction between ‘immature’ and ‘mature dependence’ in Winnicott,
for example, or ‘mergedness’ and ‘separateness’ (Mahler 1986; Winnicott 1985, 1990),
‘undifferentiation’ and ‘differentiation’ (Loewald 1978), ‘fusion’ and ‘autonomy’ (Mitchell
1988), and the ‘paranoid–schizoid’ and ‘depressive’ positions (Klein 1988).
Notwithstanding the variations in terminology, all these distinctions are designed to
function as the measure of psychic health or, alternatively, of psychopathology. (They are
also designed to function as the measure of psychological maturity, but that is another
story: see Harcourt 2018a.) As Margaret Mahler puts it (1986: 222), ‘the object-
relationship’—meaning the degree of ‘separation-individuation’—‘is the most reliable
single factor by which we are able to determine the level of mental health’. Again, the
central ‘pathology’ (p. 626) which so much post-Freudian psychoanalysis sets out to
address—‘narcissism’—is frequently explained as a way of relating to others that is
‘pathological’ precisely insofar as it is ‘merged’ or ‘undifferentiated’ or
‘dependent’ (Eagle 1984; Fonagy 1999: 602; Lear 1998: 134; Loewald 1978).
Undifferentiation, ‘narcissism’ and so on are often described as ‘boundary issues’:

according to Kohut, for example, the ‘intimacy of [pathologically] immature …
relationships’ involves the ‘blurring of boundaries between selves’ (Chazan 1998: 74). But
what does talk of boundaries between people really amount to? Plausibly, blurring of
boundaries refers to that state of affairs when we become over-identified with another
person so that we cannot think accurately about what they think or want: when we ask
ourselves about them, what we come up with is just an echo of our own thoughts and
wants. Or, alternatively, it refers to that state of affairs when we can’t think accurately
about ourselves: we have been so taken over by another person that when we try to
consult our own thoughts or wants, all we come up with is what they think or want. The
terminology of undifferentiated/differentiated (and so on), that is, marks a contrast
between on the one hand something like egotism, incapacity for other-concern, failure to
Page 9 of 22

be alive to others as independent centres of thought, feeling, and initiative—‘narcissism’

being at least an example of and perhaps a catch-all term for all of these defects; and (on
the other), in Betty Joseph’s words, ‘real relating, in which the other’—and oneself—are
‘thought of as separate’ (2004: 161). But surely the capacity for ‘real relating, in which
the other is thought of as separate’ is a human excellence, whether or not it is a moral
one (Harcourt 2018a). (It might even be an Aristotelian virtue—philia, usually rendered
‘friendship’—even if that virtue is not conceived as Aristotle conceived it.)
Psychoanalysis and Ideals of Character

The literature of psychoanalysis is vast and I cannot aspire in one chapter to cover all of
it. But at least three readily recognizable psychoanalytic conceptualizations of psychic
health—which may of course also overlap, in ways I have not explored—turn out,
sometimes reading the psychoanalysts against themselves, sometimes simply taking them
at their word, to involve ideas of human excellence, or excellence of character, whether
or not these are also moral: courage, truthfulness, and ‘work’ in Freud; authenticity and,
especially, integration in Hartmann (and many others); and the relational excellences
summarized by ‘real relating in which the other is thought of as separate’ in Joseph
herself, and in Mahler, Winnicott, and a great many others.
This might not seem like a very exciting result. Relative to the aspiration of some analysts
to be ‘doing medicine’, and therefore to be doing something ‘value-free’—if indeed
somatic medicine is that—of course the result is worthwhile, but that aspiration seems to
be driven, as much as anything, by an institutional need from within psychoanalysis
to seem professionally respectable plus a typical twentieth-century anxiety that
(p. 627)
being mixed up with ‘values’ is not respectable. Certainly the thought that mental health
—of which the psychoanalysts’ ‘psychic’ health is presumably an aspect—is inextricably
tied to evaluative notions is familiar, even if not universally accepted (Horwitz 2002;
Horwitz and Wakefield 2007).
A more interesting question is what this involvement of characterological notions in

psychoanalytic conceptions of psychic health really means.
Here the history of psychoanalysis is relevant once again. If the typical post-1950s
psychoanalytic presentation is not with symptoms but with a ‘character disorder’, then it
shouldn’t come as a surprise that—typically—psychoanalysts’ accounts of what
psychoanalysis is about should have moved away from absence of symptoms towards
something more like a good state of character. Thus R. D. Hinshelwood writes that though
psychoanalysis initially aimed ‘simply at the relief of symptoms through interpreting
dream symbols’, it then ‘became the analysis of character, [and so] changed from a mere
medical technique to a moral practice’ (1997: 3, my italics). However, we should be as
careful about taking at face value Hinshelwood’s claim that psychoanalysis is a ‘moral
practice’ as we should about taking at face value Freud’s that it is a ‘medical procedure’,
or Hartmann’s that it ‘concentrate[s] on the realization of one category of values only:
health values’. For the question is surely not only whether the psychoanalytic conception
Page 10 of 22

of psychic health is about freedom from symptoms or rather about some condition of
character, be it ‘integration’ or courage and truthfulness or ‘good object relations’: if that
were the only question, it would be very easy to answer.
I suggest that the interesting question in this area breaks down into two. One is whether,
insofar as psychoanalytic conceptions of psychic health build in characterological notions,
psychic health plays the ambitious role in psychoanalysis that ‘health of the soul’ plays in
Plato and Aristotle (that is, as a conception of the proper development of our distinctively
human natures), or some more modest role (compare again physical health). The other
question, which is orthogonal to the first, concerns the relationship between the
characterological notions implicated in the conceptions of psychic health under review,
and the notions of virtue or human excellence we find in Plato and Aristotle and, more
especially perhaps, among their contemporary followers in ‘virtue ethics’. To see why this
question is orthogonal to the first, remember that in Plato and Aristotle, psychic health is
both an ambitious notion—the end of a distinctively human developmental trajectory—
and consists in a set of virtues containing at least the core of fidelity to promises, justice,
and so on. There is room therefore for psychoanalytic conceptions of psychic health, for
all that they seem inescapably to build in characterological notions, to relate to this
Platonic–Aristotelian template in more than one way. In particular, psychic health as
conceived by psychoanalysis could thus be the end of a distinctively human
developmental trajectory and be realized in moral virtue, i.e. human excellence
understood so as to include the core of fidelity to promises etc. itself: on this view,
psychoanalysis would track Plato and Aristotle quite closely, and some contemporary
‘virtue ethics’ still more so. Or it could be the end of a distinctively human developmental
trajectory but consist in excellences distinct from those moral ones (though perhaps
overlapping them). Or again, psychic health might not be the end of (p. 628) a distinctively
human developmental trajectory at all, but represent, like physical health, a more modest
good.
In the two final sections, I make a start on a reasoned comparison between these three
views.
Psychic Health, Proper Human Development,

and the Virtues
The first of the above views—psychic health as the end of a distinctively human
developmental trajectory and realized in moral virtue—features in a worked-out form at
least in psychoanalysts Erich Fromm (1947), Karen Horney (1950/1991), and Erik Erikson
(1964); cp. also Narvaez, this volume. Citing Aristotle, Fromm says not only that ‘in order
to know what is good for man we have to know man’s nature’ but also that ‘virtue is …
identical with the realization of man’s nature’ (1947/2003: 12, 19). He then appeals to the
notion of human nature’s proper or, alternatively, improper development to explain the
difference between the real excellences of being ‘accepting’, ‘devoted’, ‘self-confident’, or
‘economical’, and the superficially similar but non-excellent traits of being ‘passive’,
Page 11 of 22

‘submissive’, ‘arrogant’, or ‘stingy’ (1947/2003: 82). Moreover the difference between

them is not just that between real excellences and counterfeits, but that the real ones
flow, as the impostors do not, from a ‘total character
organization’—‘productiveness’ (1947/2003: 42, 60)—in which psychic health consists.
This ‘organization’ is modelled on—and here the Aristotelian teleology meets the
Freudian—Freud’s (early) conception of proper development as the achievement of ‘full
genitality’, though Fromm’s notion, he says, is not one of merely sexual (re)production,
but of a total ‘mode of relatedness’ to the world (1947/2003: 61).
Unsurprisingly, then, a contemporary neo-Aristotelian might be drawn to this first view,

the neatest possible coincidence between psychoanalysis (in some versions) and ‘virtue
ethics’.9 On that view, would psychoanalysis have anything to add to ‘virtue ethics’,
beyond endorsement from afar? Potentially yes. Plato’s and Aristotle’s accounts of virtue
and vice look as if they have two levels, the level of the virtues and vices themselves and
an underlying moral psychology, with the underlying moral psychology—the interrelation,
healthy or otherwise, of the different parts of the soul—supposedly explaining the
presence or absence of virtue (Irwin 2007: 154). A plausible complaint against at least
Plato, however (Lear 2003; Williams 2000), is that what it is for the parts of the soul to be
healthily related is fixed in advance by the dominance of reason in his conception of
virtue, so the claim that virtue is the health of the soul is no more than an (p. 629)
honorific relabelling. Whether this complaint is fair or not isn’t my business here—and I
do not have the space to ask whether (for example) Fromm’s ‘productiveness’ itself can
do better. The point is that if there is something for psychoanalysis to add to ‘virtue
ethics’ just here, it is surely this: to give a genuinely independent characterization of the
underlying level which leaves conceptual room for nasty surprises (so the concepts of
psychic health and of moral excellence, conceived so as to include the core of justice and
so on, are distinct), but at the same time shows there aren’t any.10
Is this first view over-optimistic? If there can be people who are psychically healthy—
relative to the conception of psychic health under discussion—who do not also possess
the virtues of justice, fidelity to promises and so on, then the first view is over-optimistic
since it precisely denies that possibility. So assessing whether it is over-optimistic breaks
down into as many distinct tasks as there are conceptions of psychic health (I reviewed
three).
Let’s begin with Freud. If we take seriously the teleological language of claims such as
‘[the child] is meant to grow up into a strong and capable person . . .’ (1953: 223, italics
mine), Freud seems to be saying of being ‘strong and capable’ (etc.) what Plato and
Aristotle say of possession of the virtues, including justice and so on, namely that it
constitutes the proper development of our natures, given the kinds of creatures we are.
But the relationship between being strong and capable (etc.) and the moral virtues is—
pace Fromm, who of course borrowed his ideal of ‘productiveness’ from this bit of Freud
—not straightforward. Since ‘work’ is arguably a virtue, and if we assume that Freud’s
minimal psychic health is a condition for ‘being strong and capable’ (etc.) and minimal
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psychic health implies courage and truthfulness, then ‘being strong and capable’ (etc.)
guarantees three virtues. The tricky question is whether it guarantees all the others.
It may look as if Freud thought it guaranteed many others: ‘Anyone who has succeeded in
educating himself to the truth about himself’, he said, ‘is permanently defended against
the danger of immorality’ (1963b: 434). However, the context suggests that what he
means is that anyone who chooses to violate merely conventional norms of sexual
behaviour in pursuit of instinctual satisfaction won’t count as immoral as far as that is
concerned (whether ‘after the completion of their treatment’ they opt for ‘living a full
life’, ‘absolute asceticism’, or something in between). He just doesn’t seem to have been
thinking about justice or fidelity to promises. But now couldn’t someone strong and
capable—a politician or (favourite example of Freud’s) an artist—be deficient in these
virtues? Surely the human record suggests that they could.
Now let’s turn to psychic health as ‘real relating’, or ‘good object relations’. Some
psychoanalytic writers—and of course not only they—have been extremely optimistic
about what ‘real relating’ can accomplish: to assume that if we get it right in our ‘love
lives’ (in Loewald’s sense) all other forms of human goodness will flow from that (Sagan
1988: 194). But it does not seem probable that love is identical with the dispositions in
which justice, fidelity to promises, or kindness—to name a few—consist. For at least
(p. 630) these virtues are such that we owe them indifferently to everybody, whereas the
relational excellences are such that we owe their exercise only to those to whom we
already stand in a particular kind of relationship. So these virtues seem to have different
psychological sources, which would explain why a person can plausibly be very good in
respect of the one and highly indifferent in respect of the others (such as the exemplary
good neighbour who steers clear of intimate relationships ‘because he is not very good at
them’). Indeed Freud himself said as much: love does well at explaining good behaviour
between people who stand in special relations to one another. But if ‘real relating’ is to
underwrite justice, fidelity to promises and so on, we need it to do the same explanatory
work for all persons. But we don’t love everybody, so why should it? (Eros ‘binds in love
among a loving pair’, but ‘civilization depends on relations between a considerable
number of individuals’, 1964b: 108.) At best, if ‘real relating, in which the other is
thought of as separate’ is a kind of master-virtue which implies all the others, that case
has yet to be made out.
Finally, how about integration? Here social context is important since integration, though
possibly not a wholly ‘individualistic’ notion, seems less context-dependent than some of
the core moral virtues. As Roger Money-Kyrle (1952) argues, psychoanalysis may be able
to show that there is a functional difference between the ‘authoritarian’ and the
‘humanistic’ conscience, and that one is psychically healthier than the other. (The
inferiority of the authoritarian conscience in respect of psychic health consists in the fact
that in that formation ego and superego are less well integrated with each other.) But,
importantly, he adds that ‘the humanistic consciences of different individuals are by no
means necessarily identical. They have a common form or pattern which distinguishes
them sharply from the authoritarian type … but the content … may be widely
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different’ (1952: 233). One reason for this may simply be differences in individual
judgement: not everybody with (say) a humanistic conscience will have identical moral
attitudes, so—on reasonable assumptions about the possibility of moral error—at least
some of these moral attitudes will be mistaken. But from the perspective of psychic
health, the correct ones and the mistaken ones are on all fours, so there can be moral
differences which differences in psychic health do not explain. Another reason is the
difference in cultural resources available to different individuals. One cause of the fact
that two well-integrated individuals may differ with respect to their moral attitudes lies in
the difference in resources which their respective social contexts make available to them
—if one lives in an apartheid system and the other in a liberal democracy, for example. It
would be consoling to think that everyone who lives under the former system must be
psychically unhealthy, but even if this is true of the system’s architects it is very unlikely
to be true of everyone favoured by the system and living comfortably under it, and all the
more so the more the system beds down and comes (to them) to seem normal. And yet
some of the normal attitudes under the system are bad, so the person with the
‘humanistic’ conscience under the apartheid system and his or her counterpart under the
liberal democracy are surely not indistinguishable in point of moral virtue: under the
former system at least some virtues—most obviously justice—are (p. 631) impossible for
the privileged conformist. But to say that such a person cannot be psychically healthy
because they are not virtuous is question-begging; to say they must be virtuous because
they are psychically healthy is manifestly wrong.
In sum, it looks as if on all three psychoanalytic conceptions of psychic health we have

considered, it is possible to be psychically healthy but not to possess the virtues of
justice, fidelity to promises, and so on. So the view that psychic health is the end of a
distinctively human developmental trajectory and is realized in moral virtue is indeed
over-optimistic.
Psychic Health With and Without Teleology

If that view is over-optimistic, to what extent do the conceptions of psychic health under
review constitute a challenge to those conceptions of the proper development of our
natures which tend to dominate ‘virtue ethics’, and which emphasize the centrality to
proper human development of justice, fidelity to promises, and other core moral virtues?
This depends on at least two further questions: first, as already noted, it depends on
whether psychic health is itself seen as the end of a distinctively human developmental
trajectory or in a more modest light. And secondly, if psychic health is seen ambitiously
rather than modestly, it depends further on whether psychic health (and the non-moral
presumptive excellences it involves) is seen as the only end of proper human development
—call this the exclusive view—or as one such end (the inclusive view). I deal with the
second of these issues first.
The exclusive view comes at a cost. Philosophers who think there is such a thing as the
proper development of our natures will presumably also hold that a test of whether a
Page 14 of 22

characteristic really is a human excellence is whether it features on the list of

characteristics a human being would possess if their natures were properly developed,
however exactly that notion is to be explained in its turn. So an adherent of the exclusive
view, believing that the core moral virtues are not what the proper development of our
natures consists in, faces a choice. Either they have to hold that some or all of these
virtues are indeed good characteristics, but explain their goodness otherwise than by
appeal to the notion of proper development—surely an uncomfortable position given that
this is how they explain the goodness of psychic health; or else, if that’s the only way
goodness is to be explained, they must conclude that the core moral virtues aren’t really
good characteristics, but only conventionally regarded as such. On the latter alternative,
the exclusive view potentially underwrites a scepticism about the value of the moral
virtues—compare of course Nietzsche—which will be familiar to readers of (some)
psychoanalysis. That may be a successful line of critique against, for example, an old-
fashioned conventional sexual morality. But I take it that it is not an attractive option to
treat justice, or (p. 632) fidelity to promises, or generosity, as making unreal demands on
us, or as merely conventional virtues—even if we may sometimes behave in accordance
with them for the wrong reasons (such as timidity or conformism). Lacan seems to have
thought otherwise (‘a form of ethical judgment is possible which gives this question the
force of a Last Judgment: Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?’,
1992: 314). But I suspect that the number of psychoanalysts clear-sightedly to have
embraced the exclusive view are few. Those psychoanalysts who have seen psychic health
as the end of a distinctively human developmental trajectory, but with an at least
ambiguous relation to the moral virtues—Winnicott, or Loewald (1978: 5–6); Anna Freud
(1998) with her notion of ‘developmental lines’ would be another example—have rather
tended either to overestimate what flows from personal love (cp. Backström, this volume),
or not to have been very interested (at any rate professionally) in virtues such as justice
and fidelity to promises, and so to have left the potentially anti-moral implications of their
alternative non-moral teleology unexplored. (I would also say that a great many of the
popular moralists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, where a ‘therapeutic
teleology’ has been almost a default, are, for one or other of these reasons, in the same
unwitting predicament.) Since psychoanalysts are presumably no less eager not to be let
down, lied to, exploited, or insulted than the next person, it is a question well worth
further investigation why the advocates of ‘life’ (Winnicott 1967: 360) should sometimes
have been so dismissive of ‘morals’ (Winnicott 1990b).
However that may be, the notion of ‘proper development’ doesn’t require that we think of
the core moral virtues or, alternatively, a set of non-moral excellences as exclusive
claimants to the title of the proper development of our natures: human beings may by
nature be such that more than one set of excellences constitute a proper development of
their natures. So, supposing that psychic health didn’t imply enough moral virtues, it
would not follow that the moral virtues aren’t aspects of the proper development of our
natures, or were merely apparently good: it might rather be that not all genuine
excellences can be instantiated in the life of a single albeit properly developed human
being (Williams 1985: 153). Still, given the possibilities for value-conflict on this picture,
Page 15 of 22

and the emphasis on freedom from conflict both in (neo-)Aristotelian ethics (in the shape
of the thesis that any virtue implies every virtue (Cooper 1998)) and in many strains
within psychoanalysis,11 it is perhaps easy to see why those interested in reconciling
psychoanalysis with those conceptions of the proper development of our natures which
tend to dominate ‘virtue ethics’ may have tended to prefer the over-optimistic view I have
ascribed to Fromm and Horney.
On an alternative conception, psychic health would not be identified with the proper
development of our natures at all, whether that consists in the moral virtues, in some
alternative set of excellences, or in both. The goals of psychoanalysis, on this view, would
thus be more modest, notwithstanding the fact that psychic health builds in (p. 633)
characterological components on several different psychoanalytic conceptions of it. Still,
because nothing in psychic health (as modestly conceived) is inconsistent with virtue,
psychic health would still be pictured not indeed as the proper development of our
natures, or as a sufficient condition of that (as on the over-optimistic view), but as a
necessary condition. As Freud says in a letter to J. J. Putnam, ‘I quite agree … that
psychoanalytic treatment should find its place among the methods whose aim is to bring
about the highest ethical and intellectual development of the individual. Our difference …
is confined to the fact that I do not wish to entrust this further development to the
psychoanalyst’ (Hale 1971: 170–1). Or as R. D. Hinshelwood puts it in a different idiom,
psychoanalysis aims at ‘greater integration’ because that is a precondition of autonomy,
rationality, and ‘holding together intrapsychically … various choices’. But though
integration is a ‘route on which a person must travel to become a moral being’, it is not
identical to becoming one (1997: 154–5; cp. Hursthouse 1999: 207). Psychoanalysis would
thus play a part in a person’s moral education, but because how much further we take
that is up to us, psychoanalysis might complete its work while still leaving ‘a person of
but moderate worth’ (Freud 1961: 119).
But is psychic health even a necessary condition for moral virtue, or indeed for a range of
non-moral human excellences? If the absence of psychic health can accompany moral
virtue, the answer is no. Were the topic mental health as understood in psychiatry, rather
than psychic health as understood in psychoanalysis, it would surely be clear that its
absence can accompany moral virtue: the severely mentally ill can be as kind, honest, or
fair as the next person even if their illnesses sometimes prevent these dispositions from
being actualized. To stick with psychic health in psychoanalysis, however, the absence of
psychic health can of course accompany moral virtue if its absence is itself needed for
moral virtue. But now, might not caring for or healing others for the right reasons be an
imaginative way of dealing with one’s own need to be cared for or healed? Because it is
done for the right reasons the caring really is virtue, not some behaviourally similar but
otherwise motivated counterfeit (contrast Fromm 1947/2003); but because it’s an
imaginative negotiation of a psychic problem, in that virtuous person at least, virtue
requires the presence of the problem. The question is whether what I am blandly calling
‘the problem’ is an instance of psychic ill-health. Psychoanalysis—for better or worse—
often points to the same mechanisms as underlying the normal and the pathological, as in
Klein’s deployment of the notion of projective identification, or Anna Freud’s of
Page 16 of 22

projection, all the work of distinguishing between normal and pathological being left to
terms like ‘normal’ and ‘excessive’ (e.g. A. Freud 1998: 25; Klein 1988). Still, if the very
presence of knots in the psyche is a mark of psychic ill-health—as some psychoanalytic
talk of the ‘fully analysed personality’ might lead one to imagine—then psychic health is
not even necessary for virtue, since these knots belong to the material out of which the
human psyche manufactures virtue (or for that matter humour, or art). On the other hand,
perhaps the fact that it’s virtue rather than (say) symptoms that is manufactured shows
that there is no pathology. So the claim that virtue is possible without psychic health,
modestly conceived, has yet to be made out.
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Notes:
(1) Largely for worse. Once upon a time, to work ‘in virtue ethics’ was simply to have an
interest in the virtues—even though nobody who was interested in them called it that.
Now the phrase can also mark adherence to an ethical theory in which the concept of
virtue plays the same fundamental role as the concept of a good state of affairs in a
consequentialist theory.
(2) See also Waddell (1998: 3), for whom it’s about ‘the moral and emotional growth of the
self, the character’; Lomas (1999), Harcourt (2015, 2018b), and Sherman (1995).
(3) By ‘psychoanalysis’ I do not mean the practice of psychoanalysis but the theory or
theories associated with it. Moreover I don’t just mean the theory or theories associated
with psychoanalysis as practised in the world’s Institutes of Psychoanalysis, but also the
cognate theories at large in the ‘psychoanalytic diaspora’ of broadly Freud-inspired
psychodynamic psychotherapies.
(4) Of course there has been another shift too, namely a tendency to not think of
psychoanalysis as appropriate to the explanation or treatment of psychotic illness
(Bateman and Holmes 1995: 213). But this point is neutral with respect to what I am
arguing here: if you subtract psychosis throughout the history of psychoanalysis, what is
left over now is seemingly very different from what was left over in Freud’s day.
(6) There is an odd gap, at this point, in Freud’s theory of therapeutic efficacy: if what
explains symptom-formation is the absence of a virtue, one would expect part of the
theory of therapeutic efficacy to be a story about how the missing virtue is acquired, but
Freud’s therapeutic repertoire of free association, interpretation etc. does not seem to
contain one.
Page 21 of 22

(7) [Eds: For further discussion of these ideas, see Gipps and Lacewing, ‘Introduction:
Know Thyself’, this volume.]
(8) A special case of work in Freud’s thought, which it would take too long to go into fully
here, is of course art. For Freud, the artist ‘in a certain fashion actually becomes the
hero, the king, the creator … without following the long roundabout path of making real
alterations in the world’ (1958: 224). This characterization of the difference between the
artist and the psychotic depends on Freud’s theory of sublimation (‘shifting the
instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the
external world’, 1964b: 79). It is strange, though, that Freud didn’t seem to see how
much real—in addition to symbolic—change the artist needs to effect in the world, by way
of transforming his or her various media, or therefore how many opportunities for
frustration he or she encounters.
(9) A striking example of this view in the contemporary ‘virtue ethics’ literature is
Christine Swanton, for whom the difference between the virtues of ‘mature egoism’ and
their defective cousins which superficially resemble them—‘immature egoism’ and ‘self-
sacrificing altruism’—consists in the presence or absence of certain ‘depth-psychological
traits’ (2003: 10; 2011: 288).
(10) I do not mean to imply that this is the only respect in which psychoanalysis might
contribute to ‘virtue ethics’.
(11) ‘With complete temporal balance and harmony between the various [developmental]
lines, the result could not fail to be a completely harmonious, well-balanced
personality’ (A. Freud 1998: 139).
Edward Harcourt
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, UK
Page 22 of 22

Evolution, Childhood, and the Moral Self

Darcia F. Narvaez
What has gone wrong with humanity that it is the only species that is destroying its
habitat and justifying it as good or inevitable? The quality of a child’s early nest, including
experience with mother and others, co-construct the nature of the child, shaping a highly
intertwined biology and sociality. The species-typical nest that humans inherited for their
young facilitates the development of a self that is relationally attuned and communal and
receptively intelligent. Neurobiological studies today support the general insight from
psychoanalytic theory that early experiences with caregivers initialize the formation of
the self. But civilization typically does not provide the evolved nest, promoting a species-
atypical pathway for social and moral development, one of self-focused protectionism.
Cultures that adults build and perpetuate are founded on the human dispositions brought
about by early experience.
Keywords: evolution, evolved nest, evolved nest, small-band hunter-gatherer, moral sense, self, neurobiology,
social schemas, toxic stress, chronic stress
Darcia Narvaez
Introduction: The ‘Evolved Development

(p. 637)
Niche’ as a Baseline for Human Well-being

WHAT has gone wrong with humanity?1 How can it be that a particular human culture2
has come to dominate most of the earth, acting in effect to destroy the planet (e.g.
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005; Ceballos, Erlich, and Dirzo 2017) and at the
same time creating a cultural narrative that justifies such destruction (Ferguson 2012;
Korten 2015)?
Page 1 of 27

Freud (1929/2002), too, wondered about the state and behaviour of humanity and drew
generalizations from his patients. His work led him to hypothesize an inborn id as a
primary source of difficulty. Contrasting with Freud’s nativism, Hillman and Ventura
(1992) fingered a century of psychotherapy for inventing narratives for their patients on
which to blame what they viewed as socially caused illnesses. In interviews by Ventura
transcribed in the book, Hillman points out that other societies had less egocentric and
isolating forms of dealing with life’s troubles; they would never blame childhood
experience for them, as psychotherapy can tend to do.
However, Hillman assumed that childhoods were similar across cultures (as, more
recently, does anthropologist David Lancy 2015). This is untrue. This chapter will argue,
against Freud, that his conception of the id represents a misshapen human nature that
(p. 638) emerges from the denial of evolved needs through an abandonment of the
‘evolved nest’, common in ‘civilized’ societies. And it will argue, against Hillman, that the
dominant culture (industrialized capitalism) has shifted away from providing children
with what they evolved to need, perhaps especially in the USA whose overall health
continues to worsen (e.g. National Research Council 2013) and which exports its child-
raising ways to other nations.
One of the problems with many assessments of human well-being is a lack of a baseline
against which accounts of normal and deviant development may be judged. Scholars
often assume their own experience of contemporary life as a baseline (Pauly 1995),
leading to mistaken assumptions and interpretations. For example, in a widely cited study
used to support parental detachment, Robert LeVine and colleagues (LeVine et al. 2008)
compared the infant caregiving of Boston mothers with that of the Gusii in East Africa.
They used as a baseline for normal human behaviour the Boston mothers’ high verbal
interaction with their infants, assuming it was necessary for successful child outcomes.
They were surprised that Gusii adolescents showed no signs of deprivation despite the
fact their mothers were not verbally ‘attentive’ when they were young. Actually, the
researchers were using the wrong baseline for normal human infant care. The Gusii
infants and children were cared for in the manner that characterized 99 per cent of
humanity’s genus history (Konner 2005), with non-verbal responsiveness and extensive
affectionate touch that kept the infants calm and growing well—as social mammalian
young evolved to need, and which are known now to play a large role in the development
of neurobiological structures and socioemotional intelligence (Narvaez 2014; Narvaez,
Panksepp, Schore, and Gleason 2013; Narvaez, Wang et al. 2013). Unfortunately, it is
common for research to be based on faulty assumptions, leading to faulty conclusions
(Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010). Establishing baselines from the outset is a way
to avoid the creeping biases that otherwise enter into conceptualizations of research and
its interpretation.
A first baseline that should be mentioned is the highly cooperative nature of the natural
world. The biosystems of the planet are all cooperative, operating in a gift economy of
give and take and give (Bronstein 2015; Margulis 1998; Paracer and Ahmadjian 2000).
Competition is a thin icing on the thick cake of cooperation. In fact, each human being is
Page 2 of 27

a community of cooperation with trillions of microorganisms that keep alive the

individual, who carries 90–99 per cent non-human genetic material (Dunn 2011). Only
recently in human genus history has a dominator culture emphasized a competitor model
that undermines the cycle of give and take in the natural world and represents a shifted
baseline about how the world works (Worster 1994). Even within the family, cooperation
is fundamental where costs and benefits balance among members over time.
Second, we need a baseline for human development against which comparisons are
made. The baseline I use is humanity’s species-typical ‘nest’, niche, or developmental
system (Gottlieb 2002). What is species-typical for a human being? Time-tested over
millions of years by our ancestors, the human ‘evolved developmental niche’ or EDN
(Narvaez 2016) represents the inherited characteristics of early life experience provided
for 99 per cent of human genus existence (until agriculture came into existence, after
(p. 639) which many societies decreased the provision of the EDN). Most characteristics of
the human EDN emerged with social mammals over thirty million years ago and
intensified with human evolution—(a.k.a. ‘hunter-gatherer childhood model’; Konner
2005). The EDN for young children includes: soothing birth experience (no separation of
mother and baby, no inducement of pain, e.g. smacking, suction, or skin pricks, which is
routine today); responsiveness to needs (preventing distress); infant-initiated
breastfeeding for several years; extensive positive touch (nearly constant in first year)
and no negative touch; multiple, responsive adult caregivers and maternal support; social
climate that promotes positive emotions; free play in nature with multiple-aged playmates
(throughout childhood and beyond) (Hewlett and Lamb 2005). All these components
optimize normal development both neurobiologically and psychologically (for reviews, see
Narvaez, Panksepp, Schore, and Gleason 2013; Narvaez, Valentino Fuentes, McKenna,
Gray 2014). Why is the EDN important for optimizing normal development? Because the
human neonate is born at least eighteen months early compared to other primates, with
only 25 per cent of the adult-sized brain at full-term birth, so most brain and body
systems develop and form postnatally (Trevathan 2011).
The quality of the early nest, including experience with mother and others, co-constructs
the nature of the child, shaping a highly intertwined biology and sociality. In fact, humans
are biosocial creatures through and through. That is, the functioning of a child’s
neurobiology is highly influenced by social experience and the biology that develops from
that experience guides the nature of the child’s sociality. Significant foundations are
established during sensitive periods in the early years across brain and body systems, and
other capacities are layered upon these. Life is an ongoing biosocial experience wherein
gene expression shifts from experience to experience, continuing to build physiologically
based habits of getting along in life.
Neurobiological studies today support the general insight from psychoanalytic theory that
early experiences with caregivers initialize the formation of the self (Panksepp and Biven
2011).3 The self’s emotionally dynamic structure, with elements that importantly are non-
conscious, derives from biosocial learning in childhood. In what follows, I examine how
the self relies on the development of particular embodied knowledge structures or
Page 3 of 27

schemas through interaction with caregivers, which psychoanalysts have theorized as

object relations. But it is important to realize that early co-construction of the self can go
in a species-typical or a species-atypical manner. Too many selves in existence today have
been initialized in a species-atypical nest, leading to disordered emotional foundations
that build ethical orientations of self-protectionism instead of communalism.4
In what follows, I explore and explain the importance of the EDN for our
(p. 640)
understanding of the social and moral self, providing a wider empirical context for
psychoanalytic ideas concerning the centrality of object relations in child development. I
begin with the idea of social schemas.
Social and Self Relational Schemas

The species-typical nest that humans inherited for their young facilitates the development
of a self that is relationally attuned and communal. For a compassionate ethical self to be
fostered and maintained throughout childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood,
particular learning experiences are needed. Even in adulthood, attention to the nature of
our environments and experiences is required. In our small-band hunter-gatherer past
(our 99 per cent), this took place as a matter of course (Narvaez 2013, 2015).5 The focus
here will be on early childhood experience.
Starting perinatally, the sense of self is an emergent property, an outcome of biosocial

experience, based in the development of implicit socioemotional intelligence that includes
a deep attunement to the social world.6 The moral self is formed through relational
experience. In early life, reciprocal communication and companionship care convey to the
infant that s/he matters, that the feelings the infant communicates matter, that relational
communion is the normal way to be in the world. From beginnings in the womb and
under good care after birth, for the child the world of experience is centred around
Mother, gradually expanding to include a community of other ‘mothers’. The gradual
distinction of the internal and external environments occurs through experience with
multiple caregivers who sensitively bring to life the child’s self within a social world.7
Experiences in early life establish how and how well the brain develops, not only for
health and intelligence but sociality and morality.8 It is not surprising that early
experience has long-term effects on all biological systems, as humans are complex
dynamic systems. Interacting with the maturation and growing history of the child, early
experience co-constructs the cognition–emotion–action patterns that form the implicit
world view the child takes along throughout life. One might say that early life furnishes
apprenticeship for social, cognitive, and moral development.
From a cognitive science perspective, general understandings of how the world works
form from the accumulation and transformation of specific experiences. In cognitive
(p. 641) information processing theory, these general understandings are often called
schemas (Piaget and Inhelder 1969; Taylor and Crocker 1981). As generalized knowledge
structures residing in long-term memory, schemas organize an individual’s operational
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activities (Piaget 1970; Rummelhart 1980; Taylor and Crocker 1981). Schemas develop
from repeated experience, drawing generalizations from recurrent patterns. Their form is
tightly organized but flexible in accessibility and adaptation—each instantiation of a
schema alters the schema. More than ‘in the mind’, they connect emotion, cognition, and
behaviour, subsuming procedural knowledge (knowing how), declarative knowledge
(knowing that), as well as embodied cognition formed from situated (context-specific)
experience, corresponding to ways of being. Schemas arise from repeated opportunities
to solve a particular problem; since humans face similar problems, many schemas are
similar across individuals (Marshall 1995). Some basic schemas developed in early life
are related to the physical world (e.g. gravity’s effects on objects we drop; Piaget 1954).
Other early-forming schemas concern the social world, are more dynamic, and fluctuate
with each situation. These dynamic forms are part of a set of schemas we develop for the
self and the social life.
Social schemas reflect patterns of generalized experience applied within or across social
situations or in ways of being for particular relationships. Some schemas are chronically
employed by an individual (e.g. assessing others based on weight) and become
‘chronically accessible’—easily and quickly deployed because of frequent use (Mischel
and Shoda 1995). These can be anchored to particular situations (e.g. moments with
mother) or generalized across them (relations with women). Chronically accessible
schemas influence how an individual processes life events, directing attention, filtering
and organizing stimuli; these schemas influence the selection of life tasks and goals and
translate into behavioural routines that become highly practised and automatic (Cantor
1990). Thus, chronically accessible schemas contribute to the form of a personality,
varying by particular situation. These activated schemas guide expectations, winnowing
and chunking experience, and shape habitual reactions. They include as a subset the
schemas that psychoanalysts have termed ‘object relations’ (rather unfortunately, given
that such schemas concern relations between people/subjects).9
Schemas and Object Relations

On Westen’s (1990: 686) definition, object relations are ‘the cognitive, affective and
motivational processes mediating interpersonal functioning, and … the enduring patterns
of interpersonal behaviour that draw upon these intrapsychic structures and processes’.
Object-relations theory argues that the need for relationships with others is primary,
rather than dependent—as Freud thought—on the satisfaction of other desires (p. 642)
(for nourishment or bodily pleasure). Interpersonal relations are the framework within
which child development, especially emotional and social development, takes place.
Central to this is the thought that the self is built up from representations of significant
others and of relationships to them. These include not only identifications the child makes
with others, but also experiences of the self in relation with others. Thus, in her self-
formation, the child constructs psychological (‘internal’) models of herself, of others, of
particular relationships with others, and of relationship structures more generally. Not
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only are relations to actual others of central importance to the child’s developing social
and moral self, so are the child’s experiences of such relations and interpretations of
those experiences. Thus, while actual events in childhood impact on the formation of a
child’s object relations, this impact is mediated by the child’s developmental level, prior
experience, and an already-emerging personality structure.
The similarity between object relations and the concept of social and self schemas is clear
from the descriptions provided, and Westen makes the link explicit (1990: 687). He
argues that object relations are best understood as organized networks of associations
and encoded in many different modes of representation (including linguistic, imagistic,
bodily, and procedural knowledge; here I add neurobiological). One finds similar
connections drawn in the conceptual frameworks of other theories that seek to straddle
the empirical and psychoanalytic models, including the ‘internal working model’ of
attachment theory (Cassidy and Shaver 1999), Stern’s (1985) concept of
‘RIGs’ (Representations of Interactions that have been Generalized), and Beebe and
Lachmann’s (2002) ‘interactional structures’. As Eagle (2013: 887) comments, although
there are differences between these theories of unconscious self–other representations,
they have much in common, in particular that such representations are acquired early in
childhood as a result of repeated patterns of interaction with others, that they involve
implicit and procedural knowledge, and that they strongly influence one’s relations with
significant others later in life. Understanding object relations as schemas does not
detract from nor overlook the significance of the specifically psychodynamic elements of
object relations, such as their role in psychic conflict and transference (see e.g. Andersen
and Thorpe 2009; Westen and Gabbard 2002a, 2002b). Rather, the theory of self and
social schemas can be enriched by attention to their psychodynamic operations.
Early Social Schemas and ‘Vitality Dynamics’

Thus, according to object relations and social schema theories, understandings of the
social world are shaped by early experience, specifically by the mothering (nurturing
responsive care) received from mothers, fathers, and others. A vibrant, true self develops
within relationships of mutuality that ‘affirm, validate, acknowledge, know, accept,
understand, empathize, take in, tolerate, appreciate, see, identify with, find (p. 643)
familiar … love … ’—what Jessica Benjamin calls practices of mutual recognition,
experiences commonly noted in research on mother–infant interaction: ‘emotional
attunement, mutual influence, affective mutuality, sharing state of mind’ (Benjamin 1988:
15–16). Simultaneously moulding neurobiological and psychological structures, these
experiences ground expectations for the social relationships to come.
Humans naturally experience others in terms of vitality or energy dynamics (Stern 2010).
They evaluate others in terms of their emotions and mental states, what they might be
thinking and what they really mean, their authenticity in self-expression, anticipating
what they are likely to do next, as well as the status of their health, on the basis of the
fluctuating vitality expressed in their nearly constant movement. At least five dynamic
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properties are linked together as a gestalt in our (and babies’) experience of vitality: time,
movement, intention/directionality, force, and space. These are apprehended together
without conscious awareness (though may be studied in isolation).
Vitality dynamics become chronically accessible schemas for ongoing social behaviour.
The early social life of the baby shapes capacities for recognizing and performing holistic
dynamic movement in the social world through experiences in everyday life: the practice
of micro-communicative movements with caregivers. From two and a half months to
about six months of age, the baby’s behaviour is highly responsive to parental behaviour
through touch, facial expressions, and vocalizations. In the Western world, ‘face-to-face
play becomes the main “game” ’ (Stern 2010: 106). Generally, some culturally appreciated
combination of communications take centre stage: eye gaze, facial expression,
vocalizations, gestures, body tonus. Subsequently, as babies become better able to control
movements, they easily mirror social partners and initiate social events. Interactions
become rich and mutual.
Daniel Stern asks why nature ‘planned’ for babies not to speak or understand words for
the first year or so of life. His answer is that they ‘have too much to learn about the basic
processes and structures of interpersonal exchange’, such as ‘the forms of dynamic flow
that carry social behaviour’ which they must learn ‘before language arrives to mess it all
up’ (Stern 2010: 110). The basic structures of interpersonal exchange ‘are all non-verbal,
analogic, dynamic Gestalts that are not compatible with the discontinuous, digital,
categorical nature of words’ (Stern 2010: 110). What kinds of things is a baby prepared to
learn socially in the first eighteen months?
• Mutual eye gaze practices (how, how long, with whom)

• How to read postures
• How to solicit others for needs such as food or play
• ‘Rules’ of games
• Turn taking
• Greetings
• Joking
• Expressing affection
• Making friends
• And much more
This implicit, relational, and non-verbal knowing that is predominately processed

(p. 644)
in the right hemisphere of the brain rapidly develops, under conditions of good care, in
the first years of life. Parent ‘matching/mismatch of vitality forms can shape what the
infant does and how he feels about doing it. It is like sculpting his mind from the inside
out’ (Stern 2010: 115). The interpersonal dynamics of synchronizing motives, intentional
states, and behaviours with another—the forming of a duet of ‘being with’ the other
person by participating in the dynamic flow—can be described as a communicative
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musicality (Trevarthen 1999). Each relationship is a way to implicitly learn an alternative

pattern of social being: ‘Dad and I relate this way; Mum and I relate that way’. The child
learns to be alive together with each caregiver, an aliveness missing in many who suffer
early trauma (Clancier and Kalmanovitch 1984). Generalizations about relationships are
made from these early experiences.
Human infants, like other apes, develop strong attachments to caregivers in the first year
of life. In fact, the neurobiology of attachment appears to ground lifetime brain function
as well as social and moral behaviour (Gross 2007). Emotions that guide ‘attachment for
companionship’ are innate and test possibilities and values of shared experience
(Trevarthen 2005). Loving care is conveyed by the caregiver’s enjoyment of bathing,
clothing, and feeding the child—‘it’s like the sun coming out, for the baby’ (Winnicott
1957: 14–15).
Psychologically, the ongoing (emotional and physical) support that caregivers provide
communicates to the young child the trustworthiness of his body signals and the safety
and supportiveness of the world in getting needs met. Consistent responsiveness leads to
a self highly secure and deeply rooted in the social landscape, a self who skilfully derives
pleasure from and prosocially contributes to the community. When caregivers are not
ongoingly supportive (e.g. isolating the baby from touch and calming comfort), the child’s
foundational neurobiology and sense of living can form instead around a sense of danger
(Sandler 1960), along with a sense of rejection or negation (Litowitz 1998).
Sandler (1960) suggested that the early sense of danger grows into cynicism or anxiety,
minimally into an adult with little trust or confidence in the self and the world, and
maximally into an adult with personality disorders. The insecure self harbours a sense of
abandonment and badness, apparent in insecure attachment, which unconsciously
flavours interpretation of life experience and propels behaviours to avoid those feelings,
demonstrated in neurobiological inflexibility (‘stiffness’ of the mind or ‘heart’). Using the
terms of the early object-relations theorists, such as Klein and Fairbairn, we may seek to
understand this as involving the internalization of a ‘bad object’, although such phrasing
is heavy with various controversial theoretical commitments, especially if internalization
is understood as a defensive process motivated by anxiety, rather than the implicit
development of a schema through habituation.
But however one further theorizes the process, we may agree that early dynamic
experiences undergird our expectations and sensibilities for social life, rooted in
neurobiologically grounded ‘narratives’ or schemas for the self: ‘I am good and
competent and the world is to be trusted’ versus ‘My urges are bad and the world is to be
(p. 645) distrusted’ (Narvaez 2011). ‘Dynamic forms of vitality are part of episodic
memories and give life to the narratives we create about our lives’ (Stern 2010: 11).
When a young child’s evolved needs are met through companionship care, including
experiences of ongoing intersubjectivity with familiar, loving others, cooperation with self
and others becomes an intuitive baseline for life (Narvaez 2014; Trevarthen 2005). Are
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there other early caregiving practices that are critical to the formation of a social and
thence a moral self?
Species-Typical Child-Raising and the Evolved

Developmental Niche
A key oversight of Freud that still continues within most branches of the social sciences is
the failure to understand the importance of attending to the particular types of early care
a child experiences for shaping specific individual capacities, which Stern (2010), for
example, tried to explicate. (Researchers who are starting to focus on species-expectant
care include Greenough, Black, and Wallace (1987) and McLaughlin, Sheridan, and
Nelson (2017).) Winnicott (1957) emphasized the ‘good enough’ holding and handling
environment that allows a baby to feel omnipotent until ready to face the reality principle.
But we can go further and be more specific if we consider typical and atypical child-
raising from an evolutionary perspective. Species-typical child-raising involves the
evolved developmental niche (EDN) described in the Introduction (soothing perinatal
experience, extensive breastfeeding and affectionate touch, quick and warm
responsiveness to needs, multiple responsive adult allomothers, positive social support
and climate, self-directed free play). These components provide the environment for
optimal development, matching up with and constantly interacting with the maturational
development of the child with epigenetic and plasticity effects. Atypical child-raising
occurs outside the nest, much like Harry Harlow’s (1958) monkeys, raised without
maternal love, touch, responsiveness, and breastfeeding. The results are disturbed
development.
Most people, including scholars and practitioners, still lack awareness of the type of
child-raising that is typical for our species and how strange and atypical civilized child-
raising is for the human species (although I think that perhaps many psychotherapists
suspect that something went wrong with the childhoods of their patients, that
mistreatment or trauma occurred at some point from babyhood to early adulthood). Early
life experience may be the most critical factor in shaping the type of human being that is
raised. Schemas for self in relation to other, representative of the quality of one’s
neurobiological self-regulation and social growth, can go awry in a variety of ways
depending on the nature of undercare.
As noted by Winnicott, the ecology of the child is a system: ‘The unit is not the individual,
the unit is an environment-individual set-up. The centre of gravity of the being (p. 646)
does not start off in the individual. It is in the total set-up’ (Winnicott 1975: 99). Along
similar lines, Urie Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory identifies several
levels of interactive influence in the child’s life (e.g. family and peer relations, relations of
the family with the community, job pressures on parents, cultural and historic events).
Bronfenbrenner’s theory provides a vertical view of a child’s life which is complemented
by the horizontal view of development across generations provided by evolutionary
systems theory (Oyama 1985). This focuses on a host of evolutionary inheritances (genes
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are only one of many inheritances) such as the developmental system or nest, maternal
ecology (health, nutrition), and the cultural and environmental ecologies left by prior
generations, among other extra-genetic features. Relational developmental systems meta-
theory (Overton 2013, 2015) focuses on the ongoing interactions of individual and context
as the individual self-organizes through developmental processes. Each theory points to
the constant dynamic interplay of many elements in the developmental life course.
Ethogenetic theory (Narvaez 2018) integrates these theories to describe the nature and
pathways of humanity’s moral development, focusing on inheritances and neurobiological
foundations that are epigenetically and plastically integrated in early childhood as the
child functionally adapts to the social and physical environment.10
The child has a built-in maturational schedule, in which layers of foundation are laid for
more complex, later-developing systems, all self-organizing during sensitive periods
(Knudsen 2004). Caregiver interaction with a child is not a moulding of clay but the
layering of a rapidly growing agent. Physiologically, multiple systems are setting
parameters and thresholds based on maturational schedule and the nature of early care.
Of course, proper environmental ‘holding’ ideally is provided by adults who themselves
were well cared for, who are willing to adapt to the needs of the baby in the critical first
months and years.
One complex and fundamental set of capacities highly influenced by early experience is
basic self-regulation, involving regulatory systems that are all too often considered innate
and involuntary (e.g. the stress response).11 We know now that most self-regulatory
systems (e.g. the stress response) are shaped by experience during sensitive periods
inside and outside the womb (Lupien, McEwen, Gunner, and Heim 2009). Multiple
neurobiological systems and layers of systems (e.g. those underpinning other systems
such as vagal tone, Porges 2011) which become increasingly self-organized are nurtured
into being by postnatal care. Neocortical self-control of arousal (through the later-
developing cortex) is not in place till the end of the first year, so maintaining proper
arousal is largely up to the caregiver, who keeps baby from over- or under-arousal.
(p. 647) Of course, the baby has limited capacities for self-calming (although can do
simple things like turn away or close eyes), but otherwise relies on caregivers to guide
the development of self-regulatory capacities.
Babies are optimally aroused to play and be happy in a particular zone of arousal. Too
little or too much parental stimulation shifts the baby out of the optimal zone. Caregivers
help baby stay calm with skin-to-skin carrying (a remarkably calming tool), rocking and
patting, and other touch-plus-movement behaviours. Representatively, the orbitofrontal
system connects directly to the autonomic system and, when properly functioning,
regulates its two subsystems (sympathetic and parasympathetic). The sympathetic system
mobilizes the body for action (flight–fight) whereas the parasympathetic system
conserves energy (freeze–faint) to preserve life. When the orbitofrontal system is
immature or underdeveloped from lack of comforting touch and responsive care, both the
sympathetic and parasympathetic systems can mis-perform. The child will have difficulty
adapting appropriately to situations and will show a deficit of empathy (Schore 2003a).
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Instead of automatic self-soothing and self-regulation after a stressor, the individual will
respond cacostatically—i.e. too strongly or too weakly, taking extra time to return to
homeostasis.
Much of the social self is grounded in the early months and years when foundations for
multiple systems are laid down, interactively shaped among themselves, and tuned up by
experience. The same, I argue later, can be said for the moral self. Morality too emerges
from neurobiologically wired capacities significantly shaped during this period. Before
turning to that argument, it is worth briefly noting the species-typical context for human
development provided by small-band hunter-gatherer communities.
Small-Band Hunter-Gatherers: Humanity’s 99

Per Cent
Archaeological studies have indicated that the human genus has been around for over
two million years.12 And prior to the emergence of agricultural settled societies in the last
12,000 years or so (humanity’s 1 per cent), all human beings spent their lives in small-
band hunter-gatherer communities, hundreds of which still exist today. Anthropologists
note the similarities of these communities which developed independently all over the
world.
Small-band hunter-gatherers (SBHG, aka nomadic foragers) are groups of about five to
twenty-five individuals whose membership shifts from day to day. They have no
possessions, forming ‘immediate-return’ societies—consuming food resources as they are
encountered and not hoarding resources, including cultivation of plants or domestication
(p. 648) of animals. Despite living in vastly different landscapes around the world, they
share similar cultural and personality characteristics. They live within a set of landscapes
over which they migrate regularly. They live in highly cooperative but fluid groupings
with deep values of egalitarianism and sharing. There is no coercion, even between adults
and children, but high autonomy (Boehm 1999). All over the world SBHG provide the
evolved developmental niche (EDN), which converging evidence suggests leads to the
adult personalities that are also similar around the world: generous, calm, content,
humble, kind, highly autonomous, and highly communal. Unlike the characters in the
mythologies about them promoted by some scholars, SBHG are not warlike (they have no
possessions to fight about), though jealous male rages are recorded.13
The ‘Moral Sense’

For the remainder of this chapter, we turn to the question of the implications of this
broader view of the human situation in terms of the EDN for our understanding of
morality and the place of social and self-schemas/object relations in moral development.
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First, what do species-typical experiences bring about in terms of morality? Species-

typical upbringing leads to the moral capacities noted among the adults of indigenous
peoples around the world by first-contact explorers and later by anthropologists, but
perhaps most clearly by Charles Darwin.
In response to Herbert Spencer’s early arguments that selfishness and aggression were
part of human nature, Darwin (1871) brought forth the idea of an evolved ‘moral sense’.
He identified its characteristics—social pleasure, empathy, concern for the opinion of
others, and habit development for the sake of the community—and how they were
apparent in other animals that had evolved prior to human beings, making the moral
sense part of human nature, not the other way around. He assumed these were inherited
characteristics. But recent evidence suggests otherwise—that they develop after birth
and may require the early nest (Kochanska 2002).
Ethnogenetic theory describes the early-life neurobiological foundations of an individual’s

preferred moral orientations (Narvaez 2016). For example, normal, species-typical,
human development, with EDN provided and secure attachment established, fosters a
relationally attuned, emotionally present, heart-centred orientation. How do we know
this? We can see what is species-typical among small-band hunter-gatherer communities
who provide the evolved developmental niche for children throughout their lives and end
up with the type of personalities described above (for reviews, see (p. 649) Ingold 2005;
Narvaez 2013). (The alternative, self-centred orientations that develop with species-
atypical care are described later in the section on self-protectionism.)
The key to human development, and especially social and moral development, is
relationship, beginning with conception, gestational experience, and early life. Many
babies died when it was assumed that physical care (food, warmth, nourishment) was
enough (Spitz 1945). As emphasized previously, early relationships provide the soil for the
growth of neurobiological systems (e.g. neurotransmitter function and proliferation,
stress response system function, vagus nerve myelination). During this time much more
than internal working models or object relations are set up: the multiple neurobiological
systems set thresholds and parameters for life. Our psyches rely on these psychobiosocial
foundations.
Firm foundations for a good life include the proper shaping of the visceral-emotional
nervous system on the hypothalamic-limbic axis (Panksepp 1998), which includes multiple
limbic and subcortical structures and multiple types of neurotransmitters. Evolved
emotion systems of care and play (the italics denote physiologically mapped emotion
systems), which guide sociality and learning (Konner 2002), are the primary systems for
the social self, self-identity, and sense of what is true (MacLean 1990). ‘Knowledge of the
world is gained by moving about in it, exploring it, attending to it, ever alert to the signs
by which it is revealed’ (Ingold 2011: 55). So too, the social world. From our embodied
experience, we learn to see and to be. Our knowledge is situated in the direct
engagement with the world. Existing in a dynamic flow of being is enlivening.
‘ “Forgetting” ourselves is how we lose our sense of separation and realize that we are
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not other than the world’ (Loy 2002: 7). This communal flow is learned in the early nest
which engraves expectations for relations with others, i.e. sets up the child’s social
schemas. (When this goes well then, as object-relations theory has it, the child has
‘internalized a good object’.)
Human brains are designed to be reward-seeking, primarily from social relationships

(Panksepp and Biven 2011). However, these inclinations are shaped postnatally. With
immersion in supportive and socially stimulating family and community, the individual will
grow the capacities for sociality—micro-skills for getting along well, along with pleasure
in being with others because it is so much fun. Empathic and sympathic capabilities will
grow as a matter of course. If the individual is minimally supported socially and spends
most time alone or away from intimate relationships (as most USA children do today),
these capacities will not grow properly. The child will have fewer social and emotional
capacities and find social relations less pleasurable as a result. Deficiencies will be
mappable in endocrine and neuronal structures (e.g. Pollak and Perry 2005; Weaver, Szyf,
and Meaney 2002). Social engagement and compassionate functioning will be impaired.
The individual likely will have greater hostility and distrust towards others (Kruesi, Hibbs,
Zahn, Keysor, Hamburger, Bartko, and Rapoport 1992).
With companionship care, capabilities for emotional presence and secure attachment
develop that allow for an engagement ethic, an orientation of egalitarian relational
attunement.14 Shaped initially by early learning of an intuitive dance in
(p. 650)
relationships with caregivers (as described earlier), and then from envelopment in a
broad ‘circle of attachments’, the child simultaneously practises and grows capacities for
reverence, intersubjectivity, play, and egalitarian respect (Narvaez 2014). The formation
of a positive sense of self and relationships was well described by R. D. Laing who
observed that ontologically secure persons:
have a sense of … presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and in a temporal
sense, a continuous person. As such [they] can live out in the world and meet
others: a world and others experienced as equally real, alive, whole, and
continuous.(1959/1990: 39)
Regular experiences of mutual recognition lead to a sense of deep relatedness and being
known.
A species-typical nest promotes the development of losing the self initially in caregivers’
arms and then in social pleasure, in communal trance or dance. Because of the early
formation of secure attachment through companionship care, deep trust of the social
world is foundational; socially attuned relating to others forms the framework for a good
life. The deep, routine experiences of empathy, resonance, intersubjectivity with
caregivers ‘tunes up’ the child’s neurobiological self (e.g. vagus nerve, internal working
models of how the world works) to at first dynamically mimic and then become what is
experienced. What the young child practices is what she becomes. Routine experiences of
empathy, social attunement, and social pleasure lead to values of compassion, social
harmony, and togetherness as a matter of course. I–Thou, rather than I–It, relations
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become the baseline for social functioning. The life course and personality are set to be
other-regarding rather than self-centred (Narvaez 2014).
Although an engagement ethic orientation is sufficient for many situations, humanity’s

fullest moral flowering occurs with the full development of the neocortex and related
thalamic structures, a somatic-cognitive nervous system on the thalamic-neocortical axis
(MacLean 1990; Panksepp 1998). These systems take several decades to complete
themselves with ongoing supportive experience (three decades for executive functions;
four or five decades for synthesizing broadly). Higher capacities for executive functions
(e.g. foresight, goal-coordination) and reasoning continue to develop into adulthood;
moral reasoning too develops more sophistication with maturation and experience (Rest,
Narvaez, Bebeau, and Thoma 1999). These capacities can be rooted in the sensorimotor
social experiences of early life and develop gradually. Within a species-typical
developmental system, executive functions are grounded in communality, curtailing their
use in a manner contrary to well-being of the community. (In a species-atypical
developmental system, executive functions may develop in a more self-centred direction
from missing (p. 651) the companionship care that is provided in a species-typical system.
Moral reasoning can then involve only intellect and operate in an emotionally detached
manner.)
Communal imagination is rooted in the engagement ethic, but adds abstraction and
metacognitive capabilities (Narvaez 2014). Communal imagination coordinates instincts,
intuitions, and deliberation, as well as internal and external information, for intentional
compassionate action that attends to steps, obstacles, and consequences. Imagination is
integrated with empathy and attachment. That is, it is far-seeing but not far-hearted. It is
grounded in concern for one’s particular community but also for communal welfare in
distant times and places, for those not present in time or place. Societies where children
are raised within a species-typical development system also support the development of
wise elders. Wise elders display communal imagination capacities to the greatest extent,
and some societies also build it into their planning across generations (e.g. Japan; Native
American peoples with concern for the seventh generation).
Self-Protectionism
Civilization presents an alternative pathway for social and moral development, one of self-
protectionism. What does the self-protective pathway look like? Let’s suppose a child who
experienced some degree of a species-atypical early life: traumatized by painful
procedures at birth, left largely alone in carriers, playpens through the day, and cots at
night, who is left to cry alone because parents are told this is best or even want their own
independence. These are examples of a violated evolved nest, what I call ‘undercare’.
Undercare shifts energies away from growing the emotion systems of sociality (care,
play), scheduled to develop after birth, and instead enhances the survival systems with
which we are born—emotion systems of fear, anger, panic/grief, seeking (anticipatory
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euphoria that guides exploratory and acquisitive behaviour) and primitive lust (Panksepp
1998).
An early life of inadequate or under-care results in layers of deficiencies, from brain

structures to hormonal regulation to structures underlying the psyche and integral to
overall system integration. Such an individual has not been able to develop expectations
and internalization of good-enough others who relate to the individual in supportive,
positive ways. Of course, the problems go ‘all the way down’ to endocrine and
neurotransmitter function, neural synapses and networks, paralleling impaired emotional
self-regulation from the lack of early physiological shaping by responsive care during
sensitive periods. These multilayered, somatosensory ‘knowings’ lead to the unique
combination of experiential traces and fantasy, distorting the individual’s view of the
social world.
Set on the wrong trajectory, the child will not properly develop the neurobiological
structures that are scheduled to develop during early life and that undergird species-
typical (p. 652) sociality. When adults leave a child to cry in rage or panic, they are
lubricating a dispositional orientation towards anxiety. In a dissociated state (detachment
from the immediate situation), the individual is cut off from external and internal stimuli
and fantasy takes over (Schore 2003a). A false, grasping self takes over, signalling a shift
to the primitive survival systems of rage or ritual, false selves or false narratives that
keep the self calm enough.15 Instead of agile relational capacities, the individual stands
apart. What becomes enlivening in species-atypical nests is often destructive of self or
other.
When the stress response kicks in, self-protectionism predominates. As studies following
terror-management theory demonstrate, activating a fear response lessens empathy and
concern for others and increases distrust of outgroup members (Nisbett and Cohen 1996;
Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Lyon 1989). Self-protectionism is
characterized by an emphasis on survival mechanisms such as following precedent and
maintaining territoriality (MacLean 1990). In this mindset, ruthless use of shaming,
threat, and deception to control others seems like the right thing to do (Shaver and
Mikulincer 2007; Staub 1992). When threat seems pervasive, strong-armed and
strongman tactics seem reasonable.
Toxic stress in early life promotes a generalized threat reactivity, shifting one to
conditioned responses (what worked for self-calming in the past), thwarting free will in
the moment. Capacities for other-regarding ethics evaporate. The social world is
persecutory. The individual sets up a sense of security around a harsh social world, of one
kind or another, so as not to expect too much and thereby not be devastated again.
Devastation can occur through such things as engulfment or petrification by the other or
by personal implosion (Laing 1959/1990). Without a witness or advocate to process the
lack of a proper early nest and childhood the individual becomes stuck in denial. A baby
abandoned and unloved develops bad object relationships and, in a consequent negative
transference towards people generally, projects her bad objects into others, thus isolating
Page 15 of 27

herself from creative social attunement. Brain-behavioural disorders (e.g. personality

disorders) are a natural outcome. Deep ontological insecurity (Laing 1959/1990) leads to
social self-protectionism. The individual may favour one or another or bounce among
social self-protectionisms: externalizing—hostility and aggression towards others, seeking
control and dominance; or, internalizing—social withdrawal, depression, and anxiety
(Perry 2000; Schore 2003a, 2003b). Each dissolves prosociality. Avoidance of a sense of
non-being, of shame, and of annihilation shapes actions and reactions, with negative
transferences to others predominating. Thus, self-protectionist ethics reflect an
enhancement of the survival systems through early conditioning while right-hemisphere
lateralized self-regulatory and relational capacities are underdeveloped or shut down.
Unable to stand negative feelings towards the self (e.g. guilt), the individual slides into
bullying or being victimized as comfortable psychic locations. What becomes normalized
is a role in a dominance hierarchy, either through aggressive action or through
appeasement or withdrawal. The self-protective individual is not relaxed and open but
braced against others.
(p. 653) The Impact on Moral Imagination

In species-atypical developmental systems, the moral imagination develops awry. When
the child’s needs are not met:
there will be a prematuration of the system; his sense will awaken precociously
and the child will use understanding as a defence system against traumatism …
intellectual activity, may be a bad thing that leads at first to a false system, in the
wrong direction, without belonging to the body. A certain type of mental
functioning—such as memorizing or cataloguing impingements with a view to
assimilation at later stages of development—may be a burden for the psyche-
soma, or for the continuity of existence that constitutes the self. This type of
mental functioning acts as a foreign body if it is associated with inadequate
adaptation to the environment.
(Clancier and Kalmanovitch 1987: 60)
In the species-atypical nest, experiences of physical and emotional isolation build in a

lasting detachment and distrust rather than a deep sense of empathy and relational
responsibility (detached imagination, Narvaez 2014, 2016). Morality becomes only an
intellectual exercise about hypotheticals or logic problems where intellect can be used to
rationalize anything (see also Backström, this volume). Relational embeddedness and
responsibility are alien. When one has learned to be detached from emotions (without
awareness or intention), imagination too becomes detached from a relational grounding,
making it possible to dream up and justify activities, actions, and products that harm
others.
Page 16 of 27

With significant undercare, trauma, or abuse, executive functions and reasoning may root
themselves in vicious imagination, based on a splitting of the self that leads to rejection
and the scapegoating or ruthless control of others. Missing are the early foundations of
sociality that otherwise guide imagination and abstraction. In a threat-filled world,
abstracting capabilities also become misguided, building on self-protective mechanisms.
When one has learned to be socially oppositional, violence and aggression seem morally
logical.
Conclusion
What has gone wrong with humanity? My contention is that species-atypical child-raising
seeds underdeveloped and even skewed human nature and morality. The resulting
misdeveloped adults create societies that perpetuate the undercare of children, fostering
communities of people with neurobiologically framed paranoiac perceptions of the
relational world.
Prior scholars have pointed out the inadequacy of modern child-raising arrangements.
Many commentators on USA culture have pointed to the adolescent nature of adult
culture today. For example, Paul Shepard (1998) pointed to adolescence as a key
(p. 654)
time when traditional societies provided initiation ceremonies into adulthood. As noted
earlier, I think the misdevelopment begins much earlier.
Although psychoanalysts from Freud onwards have long intuited the importance of early
experience and developed theories of object relations, they have had neither the data nor
the tools to provide empirical support and context for these insightful intuitions. This has
changed. We have extensive animal studies showing causal neurobiological effects of
experience. We can see similar findings in human brains through retrospective studies of
maltreated children. Clinical studies show the damaging effects of trauma and
maltreatment in early life, while empirical approaches in child development have
produced extensive evidence favouring schema theory.
However, both psychoanalytic and empirical descriptions of normal development have

lacked an appropriate baseline against which accounts of normal and deviant
development may be judged. The baseline of the early nest suggests that undercaring for
children impairs human cognitive, social, and moral capacities. In fact, perhaps
psychiatric (including psychoanalytic) descriptions of pathologies might be considered an
atlas of deficits resulting from a degraded evolved nest. I contend then that psychic and
moral health go hand in hand (see Harcourt, this volume). Thus, we might also compile an
atlas of moral deficits from a degraded evolved nest
Moreover, the deformities that result appear to be linked to the destructiveness not only
towards self and others but toward the other-than-human—the rest of the planet’s living
entities. In fact, Western scholars for centuries and the field of psychology from the
beginning turned away from partnering with the natural world (Kidner 2001; Merchant
2003), with Freud (1929/2002) even suggesting that for civilization to move forward,
Page 17 of 27

humans needed to take up the attack on nature to force it under human will, guided by
science. Clearly this combination of child undercare, disregard for the natural world, and
narratives to justify those behaviours have contributed to the ecological catastrophe we
face today.
Human beings are complex creatures whose capacities are developed mostly after birth,
unlike virtually every other animal. To grow well, each baby needs a set of responsive
caregivers to provide the nurturing care, the mothering, that babies need to grow well
(Hrdy 2009). Early experiences powerfully influence neurobiology and personality and
ought to match up with what children evolved to need. The biosocially constructed self
relies on the evolved nest. And so does our morality. We can build receptive intelligence
and communal imagination or shrink the circles of moral awareness and concern to the
self by not providing what babies and young children evolved to need. Which shall it be?
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Notes:
(1) Many thanks to the editors for their suggestions and assistance in finalizing the
chapter.
(2) The particular culture to which I refer is Western capitalism, which considers the
other-than-human resources to be exploitable for human ends. Korten (2015) pointed out
how the dominant culture is guided by the Sacred Money and Markets story, which
contrasts with the long sustainable Sacred Life and Living Earth story that guided most
societies previously and sustainable societies currently.
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(3) And accumulating evidence shows that boys are much more affected by early
experience—more vulnerable over a longer period to stressors in the social environment
—because of their slower maturation and less innate resilience in comparison to girls (see
Schore 2017).
(4) I discuss elsewhere how the assumptions of a selfish, aggressive human nature
emerge from both species-atypical early nests, which influence world view, and the
cultural narratives that have emerged to justify that misdevelopment (Narvaez 2013,
2014, 2015, 2016).
(5) Among small-band hunter-gatherers (nomadic, immediate-return societies with few

possessions), broader social practices include radical individual autonomy and radical
connection to and understanding of the natural environs (e.g. Ingold 2005).
(6) Prehistorically, and among small-band hunter-gatherers and earth-centred

communities, this includes other-than-humans.
(7) In our ancestral environments, mothering was a pleasurable experience, with mutual
benefits, that necessarily was supported by the community (Hrdy 2009).
(8) Note that womb experiences also influence brain development (e.g. Davis, Glynn,
Schetter, Hobel, Chicz-Demet, and Sandman 2007) and we can inherit some traits due to
the experiences our parents and grandparents had, such as anxiety (Bowers and Yehuda
2016).
(9) I understand ‘object relations’ here in a broad sense, as identified by Greenberg and
Mitchell (1983) and Westen (1990), without commitment to the specific claims of Klein,
Fairbairn, and other original object-relations theorists.
(10) Functional adaptation refers to the accommodation made by an individual within her
lifetime. This is to be distinguished from adaptation in the evolutionary sense. The latter
requires outcompeting one’s rivals over multiple generations, which can only be assessed
retrospectively.
(11) There are many forms of self-regulation, such as continent self-control (avoiding the
chocolate cake while still desiring it), versus virtuous self-control (not desiring the
chocolate cake at all because it is not a healthy person’s choice), compliant self-control in
the face of another’s aggression, and so on. Here, I focus on some basic neurobiological
self-regulatory systems shaped in early life.
(12) For reviews, see Fry 2006; Ingold 2005; Lee and Daly 2005; Narvaez 2013; Woodburn
1982.
(13) Pinker (2011) lumps them together with more complex societies that emerged in the
last 1 per cent of human genus history and calls them all more violent than present-day
peoples! (Only physical violence is gauged, not institutional, emotional, or psychological
Page 26 of 27

violence which are rampant in the modern world.) See data-intensive refutations of this
warrior-history view in Fry 2013.
(14) [Eds: A link may be drawn here with Backström’s conception of love as openness
(Backström, this volume).]
(15) Of course, downshifting to the primitive survival systems can occur for most anyone
when the stress response overwhelms other capacities.
Darcia F. Narvaez
Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, USA
Page 27 of 27

Politics and Society: Introduction


Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Social and Political Philosophy
This introduction provides an overview of the four chapters in this section, which
explores the link between psychoanalysis and social and political theory. Each chapter
examines or advocates radical change; the first appeals to psychoanalytic ideas to
support radicalism concerning the basis of war and pacifism; the second deals with the
organization of education; the third argues for change in psychoanalytic theory and
practice by emphasizing socially radical ideas on gender; and the fourth traces the
origins of radical thinking in psychoanalysis to ‘Jewish modernity’. Also discussed are
Sigmund Freud’s Civilization, which addresses the nature of social oppression and its
internalization in the superego; how society imposes normative social categories in the
formation of human individuals; the role of anxiety and of defences against anxiety;
contemporary populism in relation to the role of a leader and changing social expressions
of inegalitarianism; and how best to contain human destructiveness.
Keywords: psychoanalysis, radicalism, education, gender, social oppression, super-ego, anxiety, populism,
inegalitarianism, human destructiveness
Michael Lacewing and Richard g. t. Gipps
RADICALISM, in the context of social and political theory and practice, is the view
(p. 663)
that something at the very ‘root’ of our social and political order and institutions is wrong
and needs to change. Either the understanding of human beings, their needs and
possibilities, that is implicitly or explicitly assumed by social structures is mistaken or the
structures fail to contribute to human flourishing or, in most cases of radical thought,
both. While psychoanalysis has primarily been concerned with the individual and their
mental health, a radicalism of this kind finds a clear expression in the late works of
Freud, mostly famously in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).1 It is from this
radicalism that discussions of the relation between psychoanalysis and social and political
theory tend to begin. The four chapters included here are no exception, each exploring or
Page 1 of 5

advocating radical change, either by appealing to psychoanalytic ideas to support

radicalism concerning the basis of war and pacifism (Butler) and the organization of
education (Rustin), or appealing to socially radical ideas on gender (themselves fed by
psychoanalysis) to argue for change in psychoanalytic theory and practice (Gyler).
In his review of radical thinking in psychoanalysis, Frosh identifies its origins in ‘Jewish
modernity’, ‘a mixture of universal striving, alertness to social injustice, self-reliance, and
a capacity for resilient truth-seeking that was relatively free from any impulse towards
justification of existing social norms’. After Freud, the radical potential of psychoanalysis
was most developed within the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society and the Frankfurt School
(see Jay, this volume), the leading thinkers of which were—almost without exception—
Jewish. The mid-nineteenth-century breakdown of traditional Jewish society together with
the rise of anti-Semitism enabled Jewish thinkers to develop a more critical mode of
thought, and Freud counted himself amongst them.
Psychoanalysis offers an understanding of human subjectivity that places

(p. 664)
emotions and unconscious drives centre stage, an understanding that is typically missing,
or at least under-theorized, in social and political thought. For example, Butler notes that
political philosophy presumes that we are disposed to live together in society, submitting
to common government whether through social ties or prudential self-interest. But
Freud’s reflections on the death drive call this universal assumption into question. If we
are also unconsciously motivated to destroy the bonds that make society possible,
motivations that are acted upon most fully in war, then our understanding of how
societies sustain themselves and why they break down will need reconsideration. A
central recognition of psychoanalytically informed social thought is that there are
contradictions in the idea of ‘civilization’. What is necessary for society to be possible,
e.g. sexual repression or the redirection of our destructiveness, also sets up psychological
and social conditions that endanger society itself, or at least its aim of enabling positive
human development. But these conditions can be neither understood nor averted by
conscious rational reflection alone—hence the space for a psychoanalytic contribution to
social and political theory.
Psychoanalytic ideas thus provide a lens for reading contemporary social and political
trends and events in terms of the presence and force of such unconscious emotions and
drives, enabling us to better know ourselves. A brief selection of these ideas from the four
chapters is collected here:
1. The primary focus of Freud’s Civilization was the nature of social oppression and
its internalization in the superego. With the resulting sexual repression no longer
quite what it used to be, the vicissitudes of the relation of society to pleasure, and in
particular the idea of the ‘management’ of pleasure, were explored by the Frankfurt
School and are revisited here by Frosh. The question remains, how should we
understand and respond to society’s encouragement of (demand for?) the search for
pleasure?
Page 2 of 5

2. In the formation of human individuals, society may be said to impose normative

social categories. Perhaps none is more deep-rooted than that of gender. Gyler
argues that, despite the social transformations of the last fifty years, we continue to
understand and elaborate our subjective experience in terms of normative gender
categories. What response does this require from us at this stage? While her focus is
on the response of psychoanalysts themselves, the question generalizes.
3. Central to the psychodynamic understanding of the mind is the role of anxiety and
of defences against anxiety. These defences can be social as well as individual in
form. Rustin argues that in addition to anxieties and defences concerning love and
hate, deriving from the life and death drives, psychoanalytic theory needs to find a
central place for anxieties and defences deriving from a distinct epistemophilic drive.
The concept of epistemic anxiety has important implications for the organization of
education, as evidenced by recent social events, including the 2016 debates over
Brexit in the UK and the election campaign of Donald Trump, in which social
antagonisms around educational advantage played an important role.
(p. 665) 4. We may relate aspects of contemporary populism to a question raised by
Butler (Chapter 42) concerning the role of a leader and changing social expressions
of inegalitarianism: ‘If we say that an elected official has licensed a new wave of
misogyny, or that he has made widespread racism permissible, what sort of agency
do we attribute to him? Was it there all along, or has he brought it into being? Or
was it there in certain forms and now his speech and action give it new forms?’
5. Among the defences against anxiety and our natural tendency to envy (Klein) are
various phantasies and projections concerning our relation to authority and to the
social ‘other’ (race, class, immigrant . . .). What kinds of social arrangements and
institutions could ameliorate anxiety and envy, to provide some form of containment
(Bion) for them? Might such institutions be opposed because they remind us of the
vulnerability that gives rise to anxiety in the first place?
6. Finally, how should we understand human destructiveness and how best to contain
it?
While psychoanalysis raises these questions, a further theme of these chapters is whether
psychoanalysis has sufficient resources to answer them. Does its radicalism run out at
this point? While the critical resources of psychoanalysis are apparent, its potential to
contribute positively to radical social and political theory is less obvious. First, in its own
clinical practice and theory, it has often been conservative. Gyler makes the case
forcefully concerning gender identity and inequality. While contemporary psychoanalytic
thought has turned away from a focus on gender, it nevertheless retains a traditional
association of masculinity with reason and culture and femininity with emotion and
nature, or again, the feminine continues to be conceived as ‘lack’ or ‘absence’. There is
little positive contribution to a transformation of this patriarchal symbolic order,
demonstrated for example by how little psychoanalysis has had to say about transgender.
Frosh (Chapter 39), drawing on previous work by Rustin, observes that psychoanalysis
can enable us to think how ‘specific modes of social organization can moderate or
produce states of increased vulnerability or greater security, exaggerated violence or
Page 3 of 5

more resilient possibilities of nonviolent, reparative practice’. Butler (Chapter 42)

similarly comments that ‘for societies that wish to organize themselves on the basis of a
principled opposition to cruelty, that is, to war or to the death penalty, there first has to
be a mindfulness of the destructive potential that inheres in all group formations’. But,
and this is a second reservation concerning the radical contribution of psychoanalysis,
these responses contribute towards social improvement, rather than pointing us towards
anything more revolutionary.
Third, one clear line of thought in Freud about how to respond to the antisocial
tendencies of human beings—our anxiety, envy, and destructiveness—is to harness and
strengthen the bonds of life and love, the forces of Eros, that hold us together. But even
Freud was doubtful whether this can suffice. For example, in his exchange with Einstein,
‘Why War?’, discussed by Frosh and Butler, he agrees with Einstein’s emphasis on the
need for an international agency that can limit state sovereignty to prevent the outbreak
of war. But for such an agency to work and contain aggression, it would need to rest on
(p. 666) widespread sentiments favouring internationalism over nationalism. For this, a
‘cultural evolution’ is needed—but is it possible?
Butler concludes her chapter by identifying the importance of critical thought, which
among other things is ‘a form of judgement, that knows how and when to check that
destructiveness and that has the power to do so’. Critical thought comes under attack in
certain forms of ‘mass psychology’, but she argues, ‘[s]uch judgement is crucial to the
operation of politics, and one task of political theory is to establish the conditions of its
possible exercise’. If our aggression is inescapable, then perhaps it can be rallied to the
cause of life through its expression in critical thought—we rally our hatred against war
and destruction to adopt an aggressive form of pacifism. With these last thoughts, a
radical political response finds some place in psychoanalytic thought.
Reference
Notes:
(1) Radicalism, in addition, has frequently advocated revolutionary activity to bring about
the necessary change. This is perhaps less prominent in psychoanalytic thought, though it
finds expression in some of the works of the Frankfurt School and of Žižek.
Michael Lacewing

Page 4 of 5


Children (P4C).
Richard G.T. Gipps

Page 5 of 5

Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Society: What Remains Radical in
Psychoanalysis?

Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Society: What Remains
Radical in Psychoanalysis?
Stephen Frosh

This chapter is concerned with the contribution that psychoanalysis has made to
progressive political thought. It argues that despite, alongside, or in tension with the
more conservative, psychologically ‘reductive’ side of psychoanalytic politics, there is a
very challenging radical strand. On the whole, once the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis
was destroyed by Nazism, it found its strongholds outside the main psychoanalytic
movement, for example in the works of philosophers and social theorists from Herbert
Marcuse to Judith Butler; and this is one of the issues that needs to be addressed as part
of the question of whether this radicalism is truly ‘psychoanalytic’. Starting with Freud,
and taking seriously the contribution of social theorists influenced by Klein and Lacan,
the chapter suggests that psychoanalysis offers a vocabulary for, and orientation towards,
subjectivity that is not otherwise highly developed in political thought.
Keywords: conservatism, radical politics, social theory, subjectivity, Freud, Klein, Lacan
Introduction
It can be claimed that psychoanalysis has always operated in a political domain. From his
earliest formulations onwards, Freud was interested in how individuals might find
themselves at odds with their society, specifically through the opposition between sexual
drives and social repression. The question of human freedom in relation to a
fundamentally constraining social world (the world of the ‘reality principle’) has recurred
throughout the history of psychoanalysis. The political engagement implicit in this
ostensibly libertarian query—how much latitude can the individual be allowed in a
Page 1 of 22

Psychoanalysis?
regulated society?—is augmented by a number of other strands, ranging from the
conservatism visible in the privatization of clinical practice, through social welfarism and
radical, socialist, or Marxist activism and their contemporary post-Marxist forms.
Although most of these tendencies have competed with one another throughout the
history of psychoanalysis, a loosely chronological tracing of these different political
directions is possible. Freud’s ‘social awareness’ and his commitment to social
democratic practice was manifested in his speech to the 1918 International
Psychoanalytic Congress in Budapest advocating free treatment for ‘the wider social
strata’ (Freud 1919: 166), which led to the founding of free psychoanalytic clinics in
Berlin, Vienna, and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s (Danto 2005). The promise and
limitations of the psychoanalytic radicalism of the time, which was wrecked by the onset
of Nazism and the collapse of German psychoanalysis (Frosh 2005), gave way after the
Second World War to the more normative practices of ego-psychological and object-
relations work in the USA and Britain. From the 1960s onwards, however, there has been
a return to various politically active strands in psychoanalytic thought, such as in certain
uses of Lacan (Stavrakakis 2007); in the profound challenge to psychoanalysis that came
from feminism (Goldner 2003); and in more recent engagements with psychoanalysis by
queer and postcolonial theorists (Giffney and Watson 2017; Khanna 2004). On the other
hand, psychoanalysis as a practice remains quite conservative and at times (for instance
in Latin America during the dictatorships of the late twentieth century) there has been
collusion between psychoanalytic institutions and oppressive social regimes, oriented
around a cult of ‘neutrality’ and a familial ideology that was easily appropriated by
authoritarian rulers (Rubin et al. 2016).
The conservative elements in psychoanalysis are genuine and would benefit from
extended treatment on their own. They have roots in a variety of sources, including
Freud’s personal attitudes (especially towards women and Bolshevism—e.g. Roudinesco
2016; Makari 2008); the strong, yet relatively unacknowledged implication of much early
psychoanalytic thinking in colonial assumptions and racializations, as reflected in Freud’s
Totem and Taboo but also in general psychoanalytic notions of ‘primitivity’ (Brickman
2003; Freud 1913; Frosh 2017); the medicalization of psychoanalysis under the influence
of Ernest Jones and American psychoanalysis (itself driven by the search for professional
respectability and fear of ‘quackery’—see Makari 2008; Zaretsky 2015); the increasingly
bourgeois nature of psychoanalysis as it settled down, especially post-Second World War,
into a middle-class profession never fully integrated into the National Health Service in
Britain or public health provision elsewhere (Ryan 2017); and a conceptual affiliation to
psychology or psychologism, with its characteristic ‘reduction’ of complex social
experiences to ‘internal’ psychological events (Frosh 1989). In this regard, the emergence
of psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth century at the same time as psychology and
sociology meant that it participated in the epistemological divisions between what was
legitimately the arena of the sociological—the operation of social forces at a structural
level—and what was the domain of the psychological—individual behaviour and the
‘inner’ attributes that lie behind it. Psychoanalysis generally affiliated itself to the
psychological domain (this is indicated even by its name, which has never been, as some
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Psychoanalysis?
might have liked, ‘socioanalysis’) and contested the grounds of theory and practice with
academic psychology and clinical psychology as well as with psychiatry, with their
associated individual-centred treatments such as behaviour and cognitive behaviour
therapy and, of course, psychopharmacology. For psychology, the medium of engagement
with the social and political was largely ‘social psychology’, understood primarily as the
investigation of how social context affects individual psychology (attitudes, group
processes, etc.). Similarly, ‘official’ psychoanalysis largely limited its forays into the
sociopolitical world to accounts of the requirements for ‘adaptation’ (Jacoby 1975) and
investigations of the impact of trauma, especially post-Holocaust and then in relation to
sexual abuse once it emerged as a major issue in the 1980s. Despite paying homage to
Freud’s great late social texts (The Future of an Illusion (1927), Civilization and its
Discontents (1930), Moses and Monotheism (1939)), psychoanalysis has largely focused
on the struggles of individuals to survive their tumultuous inner world and often difficult
early circumstances. This is not unwarranted given the therapeutic focus of its practice,
and has produced a rich array of concepts relating to what might be required of a caring
society in order for people to develop the internal resources and capacities allowing them
to manage themselves (Winnicott’s (1965) notions of what a baby might need from the
maternal ‘environment’ are particularly expressive and influential here); but it has had
relatively little to offer in relation to political thought.
If the tendency towards a more ‘conforming’ or at least individualizing understanding of

the relationship between people and their society has been characteristic of mainstream
psychoanalytic thinking in the post-war period, there was plenty of radicalism in its early
years, expressed most influentially in the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute of the 1920s and
very early 1930s (Frosh 2005; Goggin and Goggin 2001; Jacoby 1983). The Berlin
Institute was a remarkable hotbed of psychoanalytic creativity that also housed a large
group of socialist intellectuals; and its famous ‘Children’s Seminar’, run mainly by Otto
Fenichel, was an explicit attempt to reconcile the ‘dialectical’ psychological theory of
Freud (the dialectic being produced by the conflicting psychic forces either of sexuality
and ‘ego preservative’ drives, as in Freud’s first theory, or life drives and death drives, as
in his post-First World War reformulation of drive theory) and Marxist social-revolutionary
dialectics. This left a strong legacy, despite the corruption and destruction of the Berlin
Institute by Nazism and the exile of its adherents. It has been a place to look back to and
locate a genealogy of psychoanalytic radicalism that depends less on Freud (though his
social texts still form the basis of most psychoanalytic radical thought), and more on the
mix of theory and social practice that the Berliners advocated. It is with this ‘tradition’, if
that is not too strong a word, that this chapter is primarily concerned. That is, despite,
alongside, or in tension with the more conservative, psychologically ‘reductive’ side of
psychoanalytic political thought, there is a very challenging radical strand. On the whole,
once the Berlin Institute went under, it found its strongholds outside the main
psychoanalytic movement, for example in the works of philosophers and social theorists
from Herbert Marcuse to Judith Butler; and this is one of the issues that needs to be
addressed as part of the question of whether this radicalism is truly ‘psychoanalytic’. Or
perhaps more usefully, the question should be: what is psychoanalytic about this
Page 3 of 22

Psychoanalysis?
philosophical strand of radicalism, and what can it draw from psychoanalysis that can
contribute to the radical political endeavour? To jump forwards quite a lot, the simple
answer to this is that psychoanalysis offers a vocabulary for, and orientation towards,
subjectivity that is not otherwise highly developed in political thought; but what this
means, and what its promise and limitations might be, still needs to be unravelled.
Sexual Emancipation
One way of reading Freud is as a representative of what might be called ‘Jewish
modernity’ characterized by the explosive release of Jewish intellectuals from the
constraints of traditional societies, alongside the continued enforcement of their
marginality by ever-evolving anti-Semitism. Enzo Traverso (2016: 9) describes how
access to citizenship—‘emancipation’, which occurred in Austria only in 1867, when
Freud was eleven years old—began a process of dissolution of Jewish community life that
was nevertheless highly constrained: ‘From this turn on, the marginality of Jews was
more a question of the attitude of the world around them than of their own desire to
preserve a separate life’. Modern European anti-Semitism imposed from the outside what
Jewish community self-regulation, albeit aided by Christian anti-Semitism, had previously
preserved from the inside. Traverso comments (2016: 9), ‘This is the source of the
mixture of particularism and cosmopolitanism that characterizes Jewish modernity’. It
also characterizes Freud, who as a highly educated professional of the late nineteenth
century might have expected to be entitled to full acceptance within society, yet who as a
Jew experienced exclusion on a regular and thorough basis. The consequence, according
to Freud himself as well as in line with the broad thrust of Jewish modernity, was a
mixture of universal striving, alertness to social injustice, self-reliance, and a capacity for
resilient truth-seeking that was relatively free from any impulse towards justification of
existing social norms. That is to say, Jewish modernity bred a critical impulse. Looking
back to the 1890s on his seventieth birthday in 1926, Freud (1961: 368) famously wrote,
‘Because I was a Jew, I found myself free of many prejudices which restrict others in the
use of the intellect; as a Jew I was prepared to be in the opposition and to renounce
agreement with the “compact majority”’. The impulse here is towards independence of
mind fuelled by a position of marginality that is uncomfortable, for sure, but also has the
advantage of leaving open the space for critical thought.
Freud’s (1908) paper, ‘“Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’, with its
argument that neurosis is in large part caused by the hypocritical relations governing
sexuality in the Europe of the early twentieth century, can be understood as just such a
critical intervention in the social and political mores of his time. His argument here is
potentially quite seditious: sexual repression might be necessary for the maintenance of
the social order (‘civilization’), but the ‘sacrifices’ it imposes on people are such as to
cause them suffering and thereby endanger society, or at least its ‘cultural aim’ (1908:
180). The various restrictions of sexuality, for instance in sexual abstinence and
Page 4 of 22

Psychoanalysis?
monogamy, which supposedly moderate the passions that could undermine social
relations, are themselves damaging of society because they cause neurosis. Freud
acknowledges the possibility that the ‘damage done’ in this way might be necessary for
the well-being of society as a whole, but he is not convinced: ‘I must confess that I am
unable to balance gain against loss correctly on this point, but I could advance a great
many more considerations on the side of the loss’ (1908: 195). This means not only that
suffering is imposed on individuals, but society as a whole is damaged by the repression
of sexuality, with the implication that radical social change might be required in order to
achieve a reduction in neurosis and also the creation of a healthy social environment.
If ‘“Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’ marks one beginning of
‘Political Freud’ (Zaretsky 2015), Civilization and its Discontents (Freud 1930) is the high
point of his explicit engagement with social and sociological issues. In this book, written
as Europe was beginning to smell the gathering vapours of destruction again, Freud
returns to the issue of whether the suffering of individuals is a necessary consequence of
their position as social subjects. This time, he was armed with his new concept of the
death drive, which Butler (this volume) has examined closely and shown to have
constructive as well as destructive prospects. As in the earlier piece on sexual morality,
‘civilization’ is presented as a necessary evil. Without it, people would be subjected to
various uncontrollable forces, not least those that come from their own impulses—
impulses that from prehistoric times have always been constituted as much by violence as
by love. With civilization, however, comes privation and constraints on freedom that are
felt to be unjust: ‘The liberty of the individual’, writes Freud (1930: 94), ‘is no gift of
civilization’. The political consequence of this is that there is always the potential for
revolt against society. Sometimes this is because of the actual injustice of the social order,
so the push for freedom may ‘prove favourable to a further development of civilization’—
an indication that Freud was not in principle averse to the possibility of political rebellion.
But sometimes what is being expressed in this way is a general ‘hostility to civilization’, a
reaction against the very idea that there should be any control of the drives at all. In this
cautiously expressed formula, Freud attests to a kind of liberal concern for moderation.
On one side, revolt might be atavistic and wish-fulfilling, producing the irrationalities of
destructiveness that negate all cultural gains. On the other side, there are times when it
is all too much and it is understandable and even socially constructive that people might
seek to throw off some of their chains.
Balancing optimistic and pessimistic prospects for political resistance is characteristic of

Freud’s thought, and is enunciated in the final lines of Civilization and its Discontents as a
never-ending battle between the death drive and Eros. It can be seen working its way
right through that text, particularly in relation to the formation of the superego as an
internalization of violence, strikingly imagined by Freud as ‘like a garrison in a conquered
city’ (1930: 124). Here the superego is presented along a specifically political, or rather
military model, with the ‘garrison’ being the mechanism of colonization that maintains
order on behalf of a hostile external entity. The ‘pessimistic’ side of this is that the
internalization of the external order in this way means that the ‘law’ that is the abstract
version of the father in the Oedipus complex (Laplanche and Pontalis (1967: 286) give as
Page 5 of 22

Psychoanalysis?
one rendering of the Oedipus complex ‘the triangular structure constituted by the child,
the child’s natural object and the bearer of the law’) comes to regulate the subject from
the ‘inside’, thus freeing society from the requirement to become so authoritarian that it
exhausts itself in repressive activities. Although he did not use this language, Freud’s
account here prefigures the idea of the ‘administered society’ that emerges in later
critical theory (Adorno 1967): resistance to social oppression is made all the harder when
social norms are experienced as natural because they are thoroughly internalized, and
the subject becomes self-regulating rather than simply subjugated to social norms. With
the formation of the superego, the subject always feels guilty and at fault: as Freud notes
(1930: 128): ‘A threatened external unhappiness—loss of love and punishment on the part
of the external authority—has been exchanged for a permanent internal unhappiness, for
the tension of the sense of guilt’. If there is a more ‘optimistic’ element that can be read
into this material, it is in the way that the internalization of social norms can also
humanize them, meaning both that collective identifications are possible and that the
violence of the social is intimately connected to its loving elements. One consequence of
this, as Butler (this volume) has been exploring in her recent work (see also Butler 2015),
is the possibility of solidarity amongst those who have much to lose, or indeed have
already had to deal with the losses imposed by social regulation. One might add to this
the psychoanalytic claim that emancipation is produced by a form of knowledge. Insight
into the internalized norms of the social order can activate resistance to them when the
life drives become aware of just how damaging these norms can be. This might even be
understood to be a justification for Freud’s sociological writings as a mode of ‘applied’
psychoanalysis: understanding of the psychoanalytic kind is a step towards becoming
free.
Wriggling out of the pessimistic position and articulating a more viable emancipatory one
has been one of the ambitions of much psychoanalytic radicalism, epitomized especially
in the ‘libertarian’ stance taken early on by Wilhelm Reich and then by Herbert Marcuse.
There is quite a lot that can be rescued from Reich’s troubled, even tragic, trajectory
through psychoanalysis to oblivion, one that has been written about from many
perspectives, including through the scathing irony of Philip Rieff (1966). Rieff saw Reich
as a misbegotten mystic, an advocate of the ‘ecstatic’ attitude that could lead only to the
decline of the true psychoanalytic contribution, which for Rieff was the maintenance of a
capacity to ‘live with one’s ailments’. In retrospect, this is accurate and yet also too
harsh, and Rieff himself clearly recognized this because at the end of his portrait of Reich
he reinstates him as a kind of priest of love.
Reich yearned for a revolution of mood. When both Freudianism and Marxism
failed to make that revolution, he invented his own, although it came to have an
almost entirely private use … Nevertheless, though publicly labelled an eccentric,
Reich was anything but a fool. On the contrary, he was wise enough to know that
love is the supreme form of energy … pathetic as Reich’s method was, it is well to
be reminded that love is the ultimate power
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Psychoanalysis?
(Rieff 1966: 160–1).
It is perhaps this utopian element in Reich’s thought that has continued to catch people’s
imagination. Reich’s ideas, especially from his early years, have been provocative and
often influential on those who are impatient with the often formulaic pessimism of
psychoanalysis about therapeutic and social change. Reich’s eventually eschatological
view of life and death (orgone energy as the erotic stuff of the universe) had its
underpinnings in an understanding of psychic resistance in which the sexual energy of
the free subject is constrained by the internalization of family structures in the form of
‘character’. This means that what are structured into the social world as authoritarian,
especially fascist, living conditions are also experienced in the individual’s psychic life as
a personality or character structure that inhibits and suppresses liveliness, becoming, in
both political and psychoanalytic senses, repressive (Reich 1946). This not only makes the
supposedly ‘inner’, psychological world just as important as the outer one in relation to
continued oppression and resistance to it, it additionally shows up the bonds between
them, their inextricability. Sexual revolution is as necessary as political revolution if
anything is to change, because the one without the other leaves the authoritarian social
structures unaltered. There is thus a profound stirring of the psychoanalytic pot going on
in Reich’s early work, in which the ideological conditions of domination become
structured into sexual life.
Traces of this libertarian perspective can be seen in Marcuse’s (1955) Eros and
Civilization, despite Marcuse’s more systematic and thoroughgoing exploration of both
Freudian and Marxist theory (see Jay, this volume). Once again there is the idea that the
drives are fundamental, and that—as in Freud—they are met by a certain degree of social
resistance. However, whereas Freud emphasized the necessity of this social resistance for
maintenance of an ordered society, the radical critics argued that such ‘repressive’ forces
are in fact, under capitalism, structures of domination and the idea that they are anything
else is part of the ideological process whereby subjects are regulated and ‘administered’
or controlled. In late modernity (Marcuse was writing in the mid-1950s) this system of
administration is brought to the boil by the possibility of technological alleviation of the
supposedly real conditions of nature; that is, there is an increased potential for libidinal
release produced by technological advances. However, to counteract this the
‘administered society’ turns to the management of pleasure itself; which is to say, the
contemporary mode of domination is less by active and overt force, and more by the
subtle seduction of the subject into its processes of consumption. Advertising replaces
armies (though one has to question the global accuracy of this assertion); as Slavoj Žižek
(2006) never tires of reiterating, ‘enjoyment’ ceases to be a way of resisting social
constraints and instead becomes a social injunction. We are required to enjoy, to take
possession of the commodities available under capitalism and to use them as substitutes
for freedom.
It is in this way—through the management of pleasure—that society is perpetuated in the

interests of capital. This resonates strongly with later work on how, for example,
capitalism provokes and frustrates desire at one and the same time, so that each failed
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attempt at satisfaction drives the subject to consume more. What no one can bear, neither
subject nor society as a whole, is the possibility of coming face to face with desire and the
necessary impossibility of its fulfilment—otherwise it would putatively cease to be desire,
a point discussed later. Instead, this process of administration reassures the subject that
while it may be dissatisfied now, salvation is just around the corner. Žižek, as it happens,
has an important and characteristically provocative response to the revelation of the
administered society and the place of psychoanalysis within it. ‘Traditionally’, he writes
(2006: 304):
psychoanalysis was expected to allow the patient to overcome the obstacles which
denied him or her access to ‘normal’ sexual enjoyment; today, however, when we
are bombarded from all sides by different versions of the superego injunction
‘Enjoy!’, from direct enjoyment of sexual performance to enjoyment of
professional achievement or spiritual awakening, we should move to a more
radical level: today, psychoanalysis is the only discourse in which you are allowed
not to enjoy (as opposed to ‘not allowed to enjoy’).
This is a new version of the old idea that psychoanalysis can help remove illusions,
including ideological ones. One question, in addition to the obvious one about efficacy
(does psychoanalysis really succeed in this?—a different question from the one about
therapeutic utility, but entertainingly parallel to it), is what we might be left with if this
were to occur. Freed of ideological mystification, what does one then see? Moreover, is it
the injunction to enjoy that characterizes contemporary western society (and one needs to
note the very particular cultural location of this claim, which seems to be presented by
Žižek as if it applies to all societies, and to cross over categories of gender, ethnicity, and
desire) or are there other competing injunctions? To give one example, Isin (2004)
portrays the generalized contemporary subject as a subject of anxiety, always dissatisfied
and living in fear of catastrophe. This ‘neurotic citizen’ is produced as such by governing
practices that treat the subject ‘as someone who is anxious, under stress and increasingly
insecure and is asked to manage its neurosis’ (2004: 225). The neurotic subject, Isin
claims (2004: 225), ‘is one whose anxieties and insecurities are objects of government not
in order to cure or eliminate such states but to manage them’. Citizenship becomes a
space for the appeasing of anxieties that have themselves been created as part of the
process of governing; this promotes paranoia and a hunt for security as well as a constant
process of self-monitoring that is deliberately induced to block political action (Frosh
2017). While this has moved quite a way from Marcuse’s original analysis, there is a
recognizable genealogy in which identification of how desires are ‘administered’ develops
into a fuller account of the management of anxiety and pleasure in a surveillance society,
with its attendant implications for control and—ultimately, if we are lucky and persistent
—resistance.
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War, Barbarism, and Rationality

The exchange between Freud and Albert Einstein published as Why War? in 1933—an
ironic year, given the election of Hitler to power in Germany—is a strange piece that as
Butler (this volume) also notes, compresses some productive reflections on war and peace
into a compelling, dialogic space. Why War? presents the spectacle of these two great
Jewish intellectuals speculating about human destructiveness and the reasons why
rational solutions to violence do not take hold. They seem to be in agreement that there
must be something equivalent to a death drive, an inbuilt tendency in the human subject
to choose to move against peace. For Einstein, this takes the form of ‘a lust for hatred and
destruction’. He opines that, ‘In normal times, this passion exists in a latent state, it
emerges only in unusual circumstances; but it is a comparatively easy task to call it into
play and raise it to the power of a collective psychosis’ (Einstein and Freud 1933: 201).
Freud seems disconcerted by this (‘You have taken the wind out of my sails’ (Einstein and
Freud 1933: 203)) as if surprised that this man who claims to know little about
psychology could so easily come up intuitively with an idea that Freud himself has
struggled towards over decades: that inside each person there is an urge for destruction,
upon which warmongers and aggressive nation states can build. Freud uses the space of
the exchange to produce an account of the death drive that emphasizes its biological
basis and also its protective function: the death drive is to be understood as a compulsion
to return to rest (like all drives in the Freudian scheme, one might argue) that becomes
externally violent as a way of protecting the organism against its tendency to self-
destruct. Perhaps this overly complicated account, which belies the supposed aim of the
exchange to make Freud’s thinking on war widely accessible, reflects how Einstein cuts
the ground from under Freud’s feet while apparently setting up the discussion in such a
way that Freud can lead it. Not knowing anything about psychology, or so he claims, and
enthralled by the great perspicacity of the discoverer of the unconscious, Einstein
nevertheless, naively, comes up with precisely the same theory that Freud has laboured
his whole life to produce. Anyone can do it is the unconscious message here: Einstein is as
good a psychologist as Freud. The problem for Freud then is that he can only ‘confirm all
you have said’, and in so doing make his own additional contribution either excessively
complex for this public and non-technical interchange, or trivial, no better than the
amateur can produce without trying. The famous Jewish joke about the response to an
attempt to describe Einstein’s theory—‘from this he makes a living?’—is turned by
Einstein onto Freud.
It may be that what is going on here is that Freud is rebelling against the reduction of the
death drive to the observation that people tend to be destructive, or even to widely held
religious and biological notions about the animalistic elements in ‘human nature’. For
Freud, the central point about the death drive is not that there is a source of evil within
each person, or even that each one of us is fundamentally antisocial (or at least asocial),
even though there are traces of these views in his account. It is rather that there is a
universal wish for the solace of dissolution, what he refers to as the ‘nirvana’ principle
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(Freud 1920: 56), characterized by the pull of the subject towards inactivity and complete
rest. Most of all, there is the structure of repetition, in which things keep coming into
view and then disappearing again, like the child’s cotton reel in the famous fort-da game
of Freud’s grandson Ernst (1920: 15). The death drive becomes violent and destructive
though its projection outwards into the world, and Civilization and its Discontents is in
large part a meditation on the consequences of this and on what might be done to protect
humanity against these consequences. But the death drive is also a way of thinking about
those things that cannot easily be wished away, but keep returning to plague us until we
can find ways of dealing with them—sadness and loss, failure and trauma, war and
unbearable suffering. We know through how we deal with these things that something
stirs inside us to wreck everything we depend on; the big question is what can be done
with this destructive urge, how can it be contested or managed? None of this is easy to
theorize, nor can it be reduced to the commonsense notion of a ‘lust for destruction and
hate’ even if this might capture some of its force.
For Freud, it is the life drive that embodies hope, ‘eternal Eros’ as he calls it, drawing on
the vocabulary of love that sustained him over the years. The radical possibility here
would be that the force of love, or more broadly the libidinal energy that elaborates life
and fuels the capacity of humans to come together to create and procreate, can be
harnessed in opposition to destructiveness, one force against another, the two ‘immortal
adversaries’ locked in combat. Others, however, have focused differently on the way in
which destructiveness can be thwarted, while still taking the death drive seriously. The
keenest example is that of Kleinian psychoanalysis, where the inborn deathliness of the
subject is taken as a given, and the trajectory of thought is towards what can be done to
live with this. For Klein, the death drive is manifested psychologically in the state of envy,
which ‘is an oral-sadistic and anal-sadistic expression of destructive impulses, operative
from the beginning of life, and … has a constitutional basis’ (Klein 1957: 176). Envy is
unavoidable and it makes no difference if the object of envy is generous or persecutory. If
the former (as with the breast that the infant experiences as full and giving), it can be
hated for the fact that it possesses such riches; and if the latter (the mean and grudging
breast), it is hated because it refuses to give what it should: the infant, Klein writes
(1957: 180), ‘feels that the gratification of which he was deprived has been kept for itself
by the breast that frustrated him’. When envy is intense, the perception of a good object
can be as painful as that of a bad one, for the better it is the more it gives rise to envious
wishes. Envy therefore destroys hope, and good things are poisoned by it; its regular
appearance in psychotherapy is both a necessary focus for work and a profound threat to
progress.
This description of envy seems to offer little possibility for radical resistance or for
reconstruction of a broken world. It is also a reason why Kleinianism is seen as
biologistic: everything comes from within, and whatever the nature of the external
environment, it is the force of these constitutional drives that determine the structure
and phenomenology of psychic life. This characterization of Kleinian theory as strongly
focused on the ‘inner world’ has a lot of truth, and is a compelling description of much
Kleinian clinical practice (Hinshelwood 1994). Nevertheless, in recognizing the ubiquity
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of human destructiveness, Kleinian psychoanalysis opens out to something else—the issue
of what kind of society might be constructed in order to ameliorate this, or at least to
make it possible for people to live together peacefully. Indeed, it might be argued that it
reflects one of two possible routes into the question of dealing with violence, one of them
the ameliorative route and the other based on an acknowledgement of needs and of the
conditions of sociality that promote the possible meeting of those needs. This
differentiation, which perhaps does not have to be an absolute one, produces some
slightly unexpected genealogies. On the Kleinian side, for example, there is
acknowledgement of the role of the environment in mitigating envy and easing
destructive impulses, even though these impulses can never be fully removed or
restrained. As Klein herself notes in relation to early infancy, certain kinds of ‘good’
experience can begin an integrative process that allows envious urges to be offset by
loving ones.
If the undisturbed enjoyment in being fed is frequently experienced, the

introjection of the good breast comes about with relative security. A full
gratification at the breast means that the infant feels he has received from his
loved object a unique gift which he wants to keep. This is the basis of gratitude
(1957: 188).
More powerfully, the Kleinian idea of ‘reparation’ has been picked up to express a way of
coming to terms with destructiveness that has resonance both in psychoanalysis and in
social relations. Applied to individuals, reparation refers to the way in which the ego
‘feels impelled (and I can now add, impelled by its identification with the good object) to
make restitution for all the sadistic attacks that it has launched on that object’ (Klein
1935: 149). The issue here is of how to repair what has been damaged, and specifically
what each of us feels we have done violence to. It is when we attack what we also need
and love that depression follows, and it is under such circumstances that reparation is
called for. Reparation rebuilds the world after destruction and as such, as Michael Rustin
(1995) points out in relation to Kleinian theory as a whole, it is a ‘positive’, integrative
mechanism: it starts from fragmentation and paranoid splitting (evil versus good; envy
versus gratitude) and brings together the damage done with the moral responsibility of
the one who has done that damage, so constructing an impulse towards rebuilding and
repair. On the other hand, there is something symptomatic in the use of the terminology
of reparation, invented at a historical moment in which it had by no means a solely
integrative and healing set of associations. Lyndsey Stonebridge (1998) has demonstrated
that ‘reparations’ in its original, post-First World War context, not only meant repairing
damage, but also had connotations of being unfair and punitive, and these ‘violent’
connotations left some trace in psychoanalysis itself. Reparation is one of those complex
psychoanalytic concepts that contains many ambiguities, including a tinge, at least, of
hostility alongside its dominant ameliorative connotations. As Stonebridge argues, some
of this can be seen in Kleinian analyses of creative artwork (understood as produced
largely through reparative processes—Segal 1990), which contain their own dynamic of
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destruction and reparation, although it is perhaps more arguable whether the hostile
component of ‘reparations’ is maintained within contemporary Kleinian clinical thinking.
The idea of reparation has had creative resonances for writers seeking to find a way of
expressing the possibility of a social world constructed around conditions of care without
idealization. For Rustin (1991), for example, working sociologically in the Kleinian
tradition, the issue has long been how to create a model of social reform that will
seriously address the fragility of the social order in the face of potential destructiveness,
and will maximize the conditions for responding to the need for care. Faced with
undeniable tendencies towards splitting and destructiveness, what are the requirements
for social conditions that will contain these tendencies sufficiently for them to become
less fearsome, less potent, and for the equally important yet often subjugated impulses
towards gratitude and love to come to the fore? Perhaps the most obvious, and probably
most successful, instance of this working out well is in the construction of the welfare
state in Britain after the Second World War. Destruction had certainly made itself felt in
acts of barbarism and uncontrolled brutality that overwhelmed much of the world—
especially the supposedly ‘civilized’ world of Freud’s imagination—to a degree perhaps
never seen before. In response, rebuilding the shattered economy of the country in a
context of austerity and continuing rationing, the Labour government of 1945–50
introduced profound and lasting reforms in education, welfare, and perhaps most of all in
healthcare. Psychoanalytically and possibly politically too, though this is not really the
language of politics, one can understand this as a way of making reparation to the
citizens of the country for what they had gone through. The force of destruction had been
felt as vividly as it could imaginably be; the possibility of further devastation through
nuclear war seemed very real; and while this demanded political reaction at the level of
confrontation of this destruction, it also needed acts that would model and mould a
society built around care rather than further suffering. This is exactly what happened in
the formation of the UK’s National Health Service, and is also perhaps one reason
amongst many that social welfare is so virulently attacked by neo-liberals and other right-
wing forces: it reminds us of our dependency and vulnerability, of how much we need
protection and exactly why that should be so.
The legacy of this thinking in cultures of care is important (Hollway 2006), but it is also
worth noting how it resonates with other work on violence. Here as in many other places,
Judith Butler’s influence is significant. Butler regards violence as ubiquitous and endemic
to the formation of the human subject, experienced in infancy not only through acts of
commission or omission (abuse, neglect) but in a ‘routine’ way through the forceful
imposition of social categories on the subject.
We are all at least partially formed through violence. We are given genders or
social categories, against our will, and these categories confer intelligibility or
recognizability, which means that they also communicate what the social risks of
unintelligibility or partial intelligibility might be
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(Butler 2009: 167).
Butler is stressing here both that we are all impinged on in a more or less violent way, all
submitted to a regime of dependency that makes us vulnerable, and that the
incorporation of a human subject into sociality is a ‘violent’ process in which certain
pregiven, ‘iterable’ structures (in the quotation above those of gender) have to be
accepted. This significantly extends the usual psychoanalytic notion of what violence
might be, and it draws out the political implications of the social regime of violence,
linking Butler’s thinking with that of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School. It also allows
Butler to articulate the responsibility that falls on each human subject to resist
reproducing the violence that we are so fully ‘mired’ in. ‘It may be’, she writes (2009:
167), ‘that precisely because one is formed through violence, the responsibility not to
repeat the violence of one’s formation is all the more pressing and important’. We know
about violence in our very formation, in the fundamental depths of our lives, just as we
know about vulnerability and dependency through the earliest and most deeply rooted
neediness of infantile experience. In response, we can either ‘moralize’ our situation and
inflict violence on others, or we can ‘struggle with the idea of non-violence in the midst of
an encounter with social violence as well as with [our] own aggression’ (Butler 2009:
167). Each of these possible routes to action starts with the same state of being ‘injured
and rageful’. What distinguishes them is the act that follows, whether it is using one’s
own hurt to justify one’s hurtfulness, or whether it is struggling towards ‘non-violence’ as
a consequence of knowing, deeply, from one’s own experience, how damaging violence
can be. Given that Butler has spoken about what she calls ‘pre-emptive reparation’ and
that she has engaged explicitly with Klein in her work on violence (Butler 2009), this
analysis can be taken to have a Kleinian set of resonances. The radical move here,
politically as well as psychosocially, is to use the insight that there could be a
fundamental impulse towards care arising from what Butler names as ‘a more general
conception of the human … in which we are, from the start, given over to the
other’ (Butler 2004: 31) to generate an impulse towards reparative and generous
reaching out towards others, what elsewhere might be called relationships of trust.
As noted earlier, while the articulation of a culture of care can start with destructiveness
and move towards reparation, it can also be expressed differently, as a consequence of a
different strand of thinking, also psychoanalytic in formation, about what is needed for a
benign sociality. I have discussed this previously under the heading of ‘relational
ethics’ (Frosh 2011) that stem in large part from the object relational perspective in
psychoanalysis, or more generally, the ‘relational’ one that de-emphasizes drives and
instead focuses on the intersubjective conditions under which people develop and then go
on to live their lives. The varying versions of this, particularly associated with Donald
Winnicott but latterly with a large group of significant American psychoanalysts
(including Stephen Mitchell, Jessica Benjamin, and Thomas Ogden), concern how the
‘inner worlds’ of human subjects are formed as a process of internalization and
identification with loved ‘objects’; and the conditions under which this happens are given
as products of social structures. That is, the social conditions under which people live
profoundly influence their object relationships and their inner structures of security and
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selfhood. Briefly, we can take as an example the sociologist Axel Honneth (1996), for
whom ‘affective recognition’ grounded in childhood experiences in the family is the
source of the kind of emotional stability and security of selfhood that is necessary for
social life. It is also a term employed by psychoanalytic theorists who wish for equality
and benevolence to operate between analysts and patients. Much of what is discussed
under this heading concerns the questions of what constitutes recognition and whether it
can ever be enough to sustain an ethical relationship. In social theory, recognition is one
focus of a debate about equality that addresses identity politics, including those
surrounding gender, race, and sexuality. Without recognition, identity cannot be
manifested in an emancipatory way; groups are disowned, sidelined, stigmatized.
Recognition politics demands that a space is made for these stigmatized groups and that
they are acknowledged as a site of existence and value. But it also emphasizes the
importance of being recognized by the other: it is this that creates the conditions for the
development of a secure self that can act in the world, that can be an agent as well as a
‘subject’, much in line with the theory of self-formation put forward by Winnicott (1975),
on which several of these thinkers explicitly draw. As Benjamin (2000: 294) comments,
‘The problem of whether or not we are able to recognize the other person as outside, not
the sum of, our projections or the mere object of need and still feel recognized by her or
him, is defining for intersubjectivity’.
There are many criticisms that can be made of this general relational approach (Frosh
2010), but what I want to emphasize here is not so much the strengths or weaknesses of
the various theories, but rather that from the nuanced and sophisticated account of
subject formation developed by different strands of psychoanalysis (here, Kleinian and
object relational), different but not incompatible ideas about social democracy can arise.
These focus on the conditions under which what Butler (2004) calls ‘precarious lives’ can
be made more secure. That is, from their somewhat distinct vantage points, these
psychoanalytic ideas move from a sensitive awareness of the vulnerability of human
subjects to considerations of how specific modes of social organization can moderate or
produce states of increased vulnerability or greater security, exaggerated violence or
more resilient possibilities of non-violent, reparative practice. None of this is
revolutionary in the standard sense; but it is part of the struggle for social conditions that
will be better attuned to the preservation and furtherance of less precarious lives.
Political Dimensions of Desire

The terms of this discussion to date have left some very obvious gaps. One is the absence
of Lacanian theory in what has been outlined earlier, yet it is in relation to the ‘Lacanian
left’ (Stavrakakis 2007) that some of the strongest contemporary appeals to radical
thinking can be found.1 There are many ways into this, but one issue of concern is that
while Lacanianism seems to have a strong political analysis born out of its interest in the
functioning of the Symbolic order of language and culture, its actual engagement with
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politics is at a level of such abstraction that its effect can be conservative rather than
truly progressive. To unpack this a little, the division Lacanianism makes between
different registers of experience—Imaginary, Symbolic, Real—has proved very fertile for
thinking about the way in which the human subject is ‘subjected to’ the operations of a
social order that regulates it and makes demands of it, yet also retains enough difference
(agency, perhaps, in terms that do not quite belong to the Lacanian domain) to resist that
order. The problem is that this ‘resistance’ is not in itself a politically active stance.
Instead, it is built out of an acknowledgement of ‘lack’, understood in the Lacanian
scheme as linked inextricably to desire. This is a complex notion that need not delay us
too much here. The key point is that desire is fuelled by the lack of the object that will
satisfy that desire (the breast, for instance, which can meet the infant’s ‘need’ but never
fully sate the ‘demand’ for love) and also by the lack in the ‘Big Other’, which might be
approximated to by the Symbolic order or by the fantasy relation between the subject and
‘society’ as a whole (i.e. the Big Other is not the same as ‘society’, but refers to the
subject-social relationship, mediated as that is by fantasy). The outcome of this is that the
subject experiences a lack in itself, and in the social world. Lacan’s clearest description of
this situation in a way that has political relevance comes from his Seminar XI:
A lack is encountered by the subject in the Other, in the very intimation that the
Other makes to him by his discourse. In the intervals of the discourse of the Other,
there emerges in the experience of the child something … namely, He is saying
this to me, but what does he want? The desire of the Other is apprehended by the
subject … in the lacks of the discourse of the Other, and all the child’s whys reveal
not so much an avidity for the reason of things, as a testing of the adult, a Why are
you telling me this? ever-resuscitated from its base, which is the enigma of the
adult’s desire
(Lacan 1973: 214).
This seems to be a commentary on how the subject comes to be called into being by a
social order that ‘desires’ it. The subject is lacking because it is placed in a symbolic web
that cuts it off from the source of its desire; that is, the subject is always constructed
from ‘outside’ in the light of the desire of the Other—the mass of unconscious
expectations and wishes that are directed towards it and position it as one subject
amongst others. But the Other is also lacking, because it makes demands on the subject,
because it clearly desires that the subject plays a particular role or occupies a specified
position (for instance, as a consumer or loyal citizen). This faces the subject with the
question, ‘What does the Other want?’
The interesting point here is that the Other is conceptualized as having a lack within
itself that produces a desire of its own, which the subject is immersed in. This suggests
that any society is propped up by the flow of fantasies that come from its subjects; that is,
a social order requires a kind of investment from its subjects that can maintain it. Derek
Hook (2008) offers as an example of this how the perpetuation of apartheid in South
Africa depended both on a set of fantasy investments by its proponents, fuelled by
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envious longings and anxieties as well as greed, and on the existence of a social order
that produced absence and exclusion as a means of sustaining itself, and hence inevitably
generated a field of desire. Apartheid, which was clearly a structural (economic and
political) organization of society along highly racialized, colonial lines, survived not only
on violence, but also because of the intense emotional dependence on it by a White
population that dealt with its own lack through anxious investments in privilege and
projective fantasies of black ‘primitivity’ and hatred, and through (as Hook documents)
revulsion towards mixing. Hook (2008) provides an example here, derived from J. M.
Coetzee’s (1991) analysis of the writings of an ‘apartheid ideologue, Geoffrey Cronjé’:
any given fantasy is divided between its beatific, stabilizing aspect (the promise,
say, of absolute white racial purity/superiority) and its vexing, radically
destabilizing aspect that forms the basis of a variety of exaggerated threats (for
Cronjé, the contaminant of blackness, or, metonymically, the danger of infection by
black blood). The dynamic interplay of these aspects should not be lost on us: the
beatific dimension of fantasy functions to mask a structural impossibility (a pure,
independent Afrikaner community existing in a state of self-contained harmony),
whereas the second dimension provides the reason—and typically also a scapegoat
—for why such an inherent impossibility could not be realized
(Hook 2008: 293).
More generally, the racist imaginary is clearly located at a social level—racism is a social
phenomenon, in other words—yet it is deeply invested in by individuals and is often
sustained by its immense affective load. Indeed, whereas Kleinian theory has offered at
times vivid accounts of how racism might operate through processes of projection of split-
off ‘bad’ material into socially nominated denigrated others, Lacanian psychoanalysis’
contribution to understanding and contesting racism lies mainly in unpicking the way
racism functions to cover over certain kinds of lack at the level of the individual, for
instance through fantasies of the racialized other’s ‘theft’ of the possibility of the
subject’s full ‘enjoyment’ (sexuality, wholeness, integrity, success, etc.), as well as at the
level of society (migrants as scapegoats for economic failure, etc.) (Frosh 2013; Hook
2012).
There are some contradictory political implications of the social order’s need for
recognition by the subject. On the one hand, this account shows how the subject is caught
in a web of desire that means it is always left empty of something, because the Big Other
is not capable of delivering on its promises. In fact, capitalism relies on this non-delivery:
continuing consumption depends on raising the hope of fulfilment and then always failing
to meet this hope, while holding open the possibility that further consumption will finally
make one fully satisfied. On the other hand, the incompleteness of the Big Other, its
constitutive lack, allows for the possibility of some resistance as the subject discovers its
own unmet desire. Stavrakakis (2007) frames it like this:
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Psychoanalysis?
In fact it is this constitutive and unbridgeable gap between the symbolic/
imaginary nexus (the field of social construction and institution) and the always
escaping real which also makes history possible: if it was feasible for a particular
social construction to symbolise fully the real, then history would come to an end,
together with the permanent play between human creativity (desire) and social
dislocation (lack) (2007: 40).
Stavrakakis presses this point to argue that the Real—the dimension of experience that
can never be properly symbolized—acts as a kind of pressure for change. That which is
left out of symbolization always seeks to return, creating new possibilities and perhaps
opportunities for the oppressed to have their ‘voices’ heard.
Stavrakakis (2007), however, also notes another feature of the typical Lacanian political
scene, characterized in his account by the work of Slavoj Žižek. This relates to the
argument that the subject can never cease to be split, because once the subject achieves
desire (i.e. ceases to be lacking) it comes face to face with the horror of its true
dimension of need. It is unclear at times whether this is simply a logical statement (desire
is defined in relation to what is lacking—the object a, as Lacanians name it—hence, if the
object is achieved and is no longer lacking, it cannot be desired) or whether it is a
description of a psychoanalytic observation (we never seem to desire what we have). In
either case, it is not clear that the ‘no lack = no desire’ formula necessarily holds, even if
it is often true: is it always the case that marriage kills desire? Are there no desires left
once one has been fulfilled? This suggests that the assumption made by some Lacanians
that the achievement of desire would be terrifying because it would result in the collapse
of the subject as a subject of desire, may also be driven more by the semantic logic of the
‘no lack = no desire’ formula (perfect achievement of desire is impossible) than by a
study of what actually happens. Jason Glynos (2001), for instance, claims that:
what is most traumatic is not that I am subject to the rule of the big Other, to the
Master. All our complaints and appeals to justice conceal their true function,
namely to maintain the big Other and the jouissance it makes possible for us. Far
more traumatic is the possibility that the big Other does not exist. This is
ultimately what we cannot accept as subjects of desire and this is ultimately the
reason for our ready recourse to fantasies of the ‘Other of the Other’ who ‘steal’
our enjoyment (2001: 97).
In some ways this is a persuasive idea, articulating how an ‘administered’ society might
promote anxiety in its subjects (‘where is the Big Other who will ensure my needs are
met?’) which then is dealt with through projection into others who can be elected as the
derogated sources of psychic suffering, a role that has been filled particularly by
‘migrants’ in recent times. It also constitutes a kind of political theory claiming that
authority functions to channel resistance (‘the existence of the Big Other frustrates my
desires, maintaining them and giving sense to my life’) and so sustains the security of the
subject who never has to face the problem of what to do with a desire that has been
fulfilled. What it also makes problematic, however, is the possibility of political resistance
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or revolution: if a masterful Big Other is always needed in order to preserve the
subjecthood of the desiring subject, how can change ever occur? We can be left here with
nihilism or ungrounded messianism, in which the only way to produce political change is
to smash the social system completely, under the guise of a breakthrough of the Real; and
as this is intolerable, because it would also mean the demise of the subject, it means that
we are caught politically between a rock and a hard place.
For Lacanians, the return of the Real is always a disruptive, almost revolutionary
event which shatters the entire social totality constructed around its exclusion.
Every social order, therefore, has a single touchy ‘nodal point’ which it must
maintain, or else it will collapse. Since the exclusion of a Real element is supposed
to be necessary, Lacanians urge that one reconcile oneself to the inevitability of
lack. Lacanian politics is therefore about coming to terms with violence, exclusion
and antagonism, not about resolving or removing these
(Robinson 2004: 260).
While this might be an overly critical statement, it reflects a difficult problem that Žižek
has also referenced directly, for example when discussing Lacan’s idea that the position
of the psychoanalyst (the ‘discourse of the Analyst’) is one that, ideally, disrupts the lure
of absolute authority (the ‘discourse of the Master’) and returns power to the subject.
‘Lacan’s claim’, Žižek writes (2006), is:
that the discourse of the Analyst prepares the way for a new Master … The
question, however, remains: how, structurally, does this new Master differ from
the previous, overthrown one …? If there is no structural difference, then we are
back with the resigned conservative wisdom about (a political) revolution as a
revolution in the astronomic sense of the circular movement which brings us back
to the starting point (2006: 307).
One response to this is to see the overthrowing of the Master as only the first step
towards building a new set of structures, but the nature of these structures remains hazy,
in contrast to the relatively modest proposals of some of the other theorists described in
this chapter, who seem to think that it might be possible to use psychoanalytic ideas to
promote a more progressive, more caring, and relationally fulfilling society. Still, there is
something alluring about the Lacanian emphasis on lack and on constant critique:
amongst other things, it describes a restlessness that is at the heart of psychoanalysis
when it comes to confronting the rigid structures of power and the assumed norms of
what Freud, scathingly, called ‘civilization’.
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Notes:
(1.) For an accessible general introduction to Lacanian theory, see Bailly (2009).
Stephen Frosh
Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London
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Epistemic Anxiety

Epistemic Anxiety
Michael Rustin
Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology Online Publication Date: Nov 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198789703.013.42
This chapter develops a concept of epistemic anxiety and explores its particular relevance
to educational settings and to wider contexts in contemporary society. The idea brings
into conjunction two significant psychoanalytical ideas. The first is that of the
epistemophilic instinct proposed, following Freud’s reflections on anxiety, by Melanie
Klein and developed by Wilfred Bion into a theory of thinking and its relations to love and
hate. The second is the theory of unconscious social defences against anxiety which first
evolved within the Tavistock tradition of psychoanalytic social research in the 1950s and
has recently been subject to reappraisal and new applications. Its argument is that
epistemic anxiety frequently arises in learning situations, and that learning and thinking
can be facilitated if this is understood.
Keywords: epistemophilic instinct, unconscious anxiety, social defences, learning difficulties, Melanie Klein,
Wilfred Bion
Introduction
This chapter proposes that a specific kind of anxiety, identified as epistemic anxiety, can
arise from the desire or impulse to know. It suggests that this form of anxiety is
particularly significant in those spheres of social life which are concerned with learning
and knowledge, for example in educational settings, and that it may also have a wider
presence in contemporary society. The concept may also have relevance to the clinical
context of psychoanalysis, but this is not the main subject of this chapter.
This formulation has come about through bringing into relation with one another two
fields of psychoanalytic theory—the first concerned with unconscious anxiety, and the
second with the ‘epistemophilic instinct’—in the specific context of the ‘British school’
and especially its filiation through the writings of Freud, Klein, and Bion. It is from this
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Epistemic Anxiety
conjunction that it became possible to identify anxiety about learning and knowing as a
specific kind of anxiety.
The concept of unconscious anxiety and its origins and objects originates in Sigmund
Freud’s work and was further developed in the writings of Melanie Klein. The
investigation and elaboration of the forms and functions of anxiety have been of great
importance in the development of psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice since the
beginnings of psychoanalysis, and have continued to evolve. The idea of defences against
anxiety has also found significant applications to social institutions and wider social
contexts.
The second field concerns the idea of an epistemophilic instinct, or an innate desire for
knowledge. This also has its source in Freud’s work, was then developed by Klein, and
became more fully established as a central postulate of psychoanalytic theory in the
writings of Wilfred Bion, through his argument that the impulse to know is as important
to the mind and its development as the impulses to love and to hate. This gave rise to
Bion’s formulation of L, H, and K (a kind of algebraic triad) as the central constituents or
dispositions of the mind. In recent years, this focus on the vicissitudes of the disposition
to know (in Bion’s terms, ‘K’, ‘no K’, and ‘minus K’) has become a major theme in the
development of psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Anxieties and Their Objects

Freud wrote about anxiety most extensively in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926).
The principal anxiety with which he was concerned was the anxiety associated with the
Oedipus complex, which he formulated as castration anxiety. This was aroused by fears of
paternal retribution fantasized to be the consequence of the infant’s sexual desire for the
mother. Freud believed that this found expression in obsessional neurosis, including
obsessional phobias, whose objects functioned unconsciously as condensations or
displacements of Oedipal anxieties. Freud interpreted Little Hans’s phobia of horses in
terms of his anxieties about his father (Freud 1909a), and the Rat Man’s phobias about
torture by rats also within the context of Oedipal anxieties about being punished for his
sexual feelings by his father, and by concern about what might happen to his father and
his fiancée (Freud 1909b). Freud also referred to anxieties about object loss, but this had
a subordinate place in his reflections on anxiety in the 1926 paper. The theme of
responses to object loss was given its fullest development in Mourning and Melancholia
(1917).
Klein’s theories of anxiety reflect the significant differences that emerged between her
ideas and Freud’s. She proposed that there were two primary kinds of anxiety, those
associated with the depressive and paranoid schizoid positions, respectively (Klein 1940,
1946). The central issue in the generation of anxiety arose from the self’s relation to its
objects, and the place of love and hate in that relation. In the paranoid–schizoid position,
love and hatred were deeply split from one another, both within the self and in its relation
to its objects. Love was directed towards the self and those objects with whom it
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Epistemic Anxiety
identified, hatred towards others who were defined in negative terms. Feelings of hatred
directed towards split-off objects gave rise to anxieties about the damage which those
objects might inflict in reprisal for the aggressive feelings directed towards them.
Paranoid–schizoid states are associated with a harsh superego, and a belief that ‘badness’
must be punished wherever it lies, inside or outside the self. Here the talion principle—an
eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—rules in the sphere of justice.
The second kind of anxiety arises from the capacity for concern for the state of the object,
as the recipient of the states of mind and feelings of the self towards it. Anxiety is thus
aroused not only by threats to, and fears for, the state of the self, but also by fears for the
state of the other. Depressive anxiety is thus closely linked to guilt, and gives rise to
feelings of remorse.
Klein believed that both the dispositions to hate and to love were innate. She thought
feelings of hate arose in infants in response to the frustrations inevitable in early life, and
from emotions of envy and rage which could be provoked by dependence on a mother
who did not and could not always provide what the baby desired. She believed that
Oedipal issues—anxieties about mother’s relationship with father and about rival siblings
—arose much earlier than in Freud’s account of early life. It depended both on the actual
environment of parental love and care, and on the infant’s innate vulnerability and
disposition, what balance between love and hating impulses would be the outcome of
internal conflicts in the infant’s mind. Klein gave particular emphasis to the infant’s inner
world, rather than to deficits in its external environment, which she felt were more widely
recognized at that time. Both paranoid–schizoid and depressive anxieties (about the
damage inflicted by the infant in phantasy on its loved objects) were potent sources of
anxiety in her view. This emphasis in her work on the internal world, and on destructive
feelings, gave rise to differences between the Kleinian school and perspectives such as
that of attachment theory, and the Independent tradition of psychoanalysis which
attributed a larger role to environmental deficits in causing developmental difficulties.
Bion’s theory of the functions of ‘containment’ and the relations of ‘container and
contained’, although located within the Kleinian tradition, has rebalanced this debate by
focusing on the unconscious dimensions of the mother’s contribution to the infant’s
emotional development.
Klein believed that hatred is often in any case the outcome of disappointment or
disillusionment with loved objects. The infantile origin of a criminal state of mind could in
her view lie in the hatred and feelings of persecution aroused by loved objects which
were felt unconsciously to have betrayed the self or to have been damaged by it. Because
she thought that such hatred was originally directed towards loved objects, it followed
that its interpretation and understanding, for example through psychoanalysis, could
reveal an underlying capacity for love. In fact, idealization makes some element of
disappointment inevitable for everyone. This led Klein to be hopeful about the
psychoanalytic treatment of children with ‘criminal tendencies’ (Klein 1927). Because in
depressive states, the good and bad, the loved and the hated, are not so deeply split off
from one another, these states may make possible, she thought, some interest in and
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Epistemic Anxiety
concern for the perpetrators of bad deeds, as well as for their victims. Forms of justice
which involve recognition and reparation, as well as vilification and punishment, become
conceivable. The idea that the self might be assailed by feelings of concern for the harms
it has caused to others, rather than only by anxiety about threats to itself, was a crucial
contribution by Klein to the understanding of anxiety.
Although Klein believed that the onset of the Oedipus complex occurred in the first year
of life, earlier than Freud thought, a good deal of the discussion of the paranoid–schizoid
and depressive positions has referred to dyadic rather than triadic relationships. The
focus has tended to be on relations between the self and its primary object, whether these
take the form of paranoid–schizoid splitting or evolve into depressive concern. This
emphasis reflected a ‘maternal’ emphasis in one phase of development of object-relations
psychoanalysis, in its Winnicottian as well as Kleinian variants. But there has been a
renewal of interest in Oedipal issues in recent years (a return to psychoanalysis of the
repressed father figure, one might say) and this has made it easier to relate both
paranoid–schizoid and depressive anxieties to the early Oedipal situation. In Klein’s view,
this is a central locus of both paranoid–schizoid feelings (liable to violently split the
parental couple in phantasy), and depressive ones, where it is possible for love to
dominate in the relations with both parental objects, outweighing feelings of jealousy or
envy towards them. In such a state, the separation of parental objects from the infantile
self, and their closeness to each other, can be tolerated and even enjoyed, if there is, as it
were, enough love to go round. This renewal of interest in the Oedipal situation has had
considerable importance in the growth of understanding of the epistemic issues which
will be considered later in the chapter.
Psychoanalytic investigations of autistic and psychotic states in children, by analysts who

include Frances Tustin (1972), Donald Meltzer et al. (1975), and Thomas Ogden (1992),
have given rise to the postulation of a stage of personality development which precedes
the emergence of splitting and the paranoid–schizoid position. Ogden named this earliest
state of mind the autistic–contiguous position, which he suggests is one in which a
distinction between self and object has yet to be made. The refusal of object relations in
autistic states, or their explosive or implosive disintegration in psychotic states, are the
pathologies which correspond to this state. A particular kind of anxiety—annihilation
anxiety—may be held to correspond to this state of mind or ‘non-mind’. Such anxiety
expresses the terror of complete disintegration and non-existence. It is not clear whether
this is best understood as a normal first stage of infant development, or whether it rather
corresponds to a state of mental collapse which can occur when relations with objects are
felt to have entirely failed. The state of bodily and mental ‘falling to pieces’, which Esther
Bick (1968) has described in certain infants, and the experience of ‘catastrophic change’
described by Bion (1970) (which may have the creative outcome of reintegration as well
as giving rise to the psychotic collapse of the mind) seem close to the state which Ogden
describes. W. Fred Alford (1997) has suggested that the kinds of evil of which mass
exterminations are an example may be understood as projective responses to anxieties
about annihilation.
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Epistemic Anxiety
Psychoanalytic theories of anxiety have found a fairly extensive application to the spheres
of group and institutional life. It is the experience of anxiety which is held in Bion’s
(1961) work on group processes to stimulate the oscillation found in groups between
‘basic assumption’ behaviour and ‘work group’ behaviour. In the former, the group’s
relations to its objects take the form of unconscious phantasies which relieve anxiety
states. In the latter, the reality principle is in the ascendancy, and the real objects of
work-related tasks and functions are present in the minds of the group. Bion identified
three varieties of ‘basic assumptions’. These are ‘fight–flight’, in which the group unites
against a phantasied enemy; ‘pairing’, in which the group evolves the phantasy that a pair
will together produce something extraordinary which can resolve its anxieties and
sufferings: and ‘dependency’, in which the group is passive while expecting its leader to
resolve these. Bion developed these ideas through his pioneering form of group therapy,
and they have become widely influential in that field and in the larger educational
practice of group relations. David Armstrong (2007: 139–50) holds that Bion maintained
that the rational functioning of the ‘work group’ most of the time prevailed over irrational
phantasy, although this positive view is not usually ascribed to Bion.
In Elliott Jaques’s (1951, 1955) and Isobel Menzies’s (1960) (later Menzies Lyth 1988)
writings about social defences against anxiety, the topics for investigation were anxieties
generated within contexts of work. In Jaques’s case, anxieties were focused in the
relations between managers, workers, and their trade union representatives, and were of
both paranoid–schizoid and depressive kinds. In Menzies’s work, the primary source of
anxiety was the mental pain evoked by the actual tasks of nursing, arising from the
proximity to suffering bodies, and the emotional distress which these evoked in trainees.
She was less specific about whether these anxieties were paranoid–schizoid or depressive
in character. However, it seems they were of both kinds, with depressive anxieties
aroused by contact with the patients, and paranoid–schizoid or persecutory ones aroused
by the authoritarian approach of the hospital. (William Halton (2015) has suggested that
the obsessional nature of the nursing system reflected an element of unconscious hatred
of the patients).
Each of these socio-psychoanalytic researchers described characteristic modes of

unconscious defence which had been constructed by institutions and their cultures to
manage anxiety states. This field of investigation has recently been extended (Armstrong
and Rustin 2015) in reflections on changed theoretical understandings of anxiety,
changing conditions in society, and by exploration of anxieties and defences which arise
in different occupational settings. The Kleinian psychoanalytic concepts of anxiety which
informs this work had as its primary locus, as we have seen, states of mind characteristic
of early infant development—the infantile parts of the self—which become visible and
accessible in the transference relationships of the clinical consulting room, and which are
manifested, as Freud also believed, in the symptoms of mental illnesses. In adult life,
these anxieties can arise within institutional and social contexts, in relations between the
self and the persons and situations which it encounters. The question of whether
psychoanalytical ideas like these can be useful in the explanation of what happens in
ordinary social settings is one which will be relevant to the main topic of this chapter,
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Epistemic Anxiety
epistemic anxiety, which it will be suggested can be aroused by the demands placed on
the self to learn.
What virtually all of these discussions of anxiety share is the view that anxiety is
essentially a response to perceived danger to the self, or to its loved objects, whether this
be at a conscious or unconscious level. Anxiety can in favourable circumstances mobilize
the ‘reality principle’, as Freud named it, i.e. the capacity to respond rationally to
perceived risks to the self or its objects. But in unfavourable circumstances, responses to
anxiety can be unconscious and irrational, and can take the mind further away from an
engagement with reality, rather than closer to it. Both Freud (1926) and Klein (1930)
were at pains to point out that anxiety was a necessary stimulus to growth and
development, as well as a source of danger to the self and its psychic equilibrium. Klein’s
argument was that anxiety is provoked by the infant’s sadism towards its maternal object,
and that this anxiety stimulated the developments of phantasy and symbol formation
which could then enable it to be overcome. She described this process in relation to her
analysis of a child patient, Dick. There can be differing views, perhaps specific to national
cultures at a given time, of how much and what kinds of anxiety are excessive and
damaging rather than healthy and motivating.
One can relate these views to the ‘basic assumptions’ (or structures of phantasy) first
described by Bion in his Experiences in Groups (1961). Some have argued that
‘dependency cultures’, such as that of the British welfare state and some of its component
institutions, enact an aversion to the anxieties which follow from competition and
individual self-reliance, and constitute defences against these (Khaleelee and Miller 1985;
Khaleelee 2003). ‘Fight–flight’ cultures, such as that found in a highly competitive market
society such as the United States, are by contrast hostile to dependency, and intolerant to
those perceived to have failed. In such societies, systems of social protection are much
weaker. Social systems can ascribe different value to security and freedom.
The Epistemophilic Instinct

The origins of the idea of an epistemophilic instinct lie in Freud’s writings about infantile
sexual curiosity which are a central theme of his case studies of ‘Little Hans’ (1909a) and
the ‘Rat Man’ (1909b). Freud describes Little Hans’s keen interest both in the anatomical
differences between little boys and little girls, and in the question of how babies are
made. The Oedipal situation and its attendant anxieties (not least castration anxiety) are
Freud’s central topic in these two case studies, and indeed in his theory of infantile
development. The term ‘epistemophilic instinct’ as such appears for the first time in the
case study of the ‘Rat Man’. Freud there argued that:
the epistemophilic instinct is a preponderant feature in the constitution of an

obsessional patient … The thought process becomes sexualized, for the sexual
pleasure which is normally attached to the content of thought becomes shifted on
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Epistemic Anxiety
to the act of thinking itself, and the satisfaction derived from reaching the
conclusion of a line of thought is experienced as a sexual satisfaction (1909b).
The epistemophilic instinct first contributes to the substitution of action by thought, and
then ‘procrastination in action is replaced by lingering over thoughts’ (1909b: 245). Freud
uses the term again in his ‘Introductory Lectures’ (Freud 1917b: 327–8).
The concept of an epistemophilic instinct becomes more fully elaborated in three of

Melanie Klein’s papers (Klein 1928, 1930, 1931). Her development of this idea follows
Freud’s focus on the Oedipal preoccupations of children but, because she locates these at
an earlier stage of development than Freud, these states of mind are described as taking
a more primitive form. The epistemophilic instinct in its earliest manifestations in Klein’s
work is conjoined with powerful oral and anal impulses directed aggressively towards
mother’s body, as well as with Oedipal anxieties about the presence of father’s penis and
other babies inside it. The epistemophilic instinct, or the desire for knowledge, may be
inhibited or disrupted, Klein believed, if these phantasies are too destructive in their
content. In one of her cases, she prefigured the later psychoanalytic idea that such
phantasies of damage and destruction may be a cause of the severe inhibition of thought
found in autistic states. Klein wrote of her patient Dick:
his defences against his destructive impulses proved to be a fundamental

impediment to his development. He was absolutely incapable of any act of
aggression, and the basis of this incapacity was clearly indicated at a very early
period in his refusal to bite up food. At four years old he could not hold scissors,
knives or tools, and was remarkably clumsy in all his movements. The defence
against the sadistic impulses directed against the mother’s body and its contents
… impulses connected with phantasies of coitus—had resulted in the cessation of
his phantasies and the standstill of symbol–formation (1930: 224).
The fullest development of the idea of a primary desire to know or learn takes place,
however, in the writings of Wilfred Bion (Bion 1962, 1970; Bléandonu 1994). He
considered the construction of a mind or ‘mental apparatus’ in an infant to be a
developmental achievement. This depends on nurture, on a maternal function of
‘containment’ through which the intense emotions of love and hate, and also the
emotionally invested bodily sensations of the infant, are mentally processed by a mother
or mother-figure, to a degree which maintains them at a tolerable level for the infant.
Bion’s more developed understanding of the maternal (in a functional sense) role in this
process was influenced by Klein’s idea of projective identification. This was her
conception of the process whereby a baby projected unbearable aspects of its mental
state into its mother for her to process on the infant’s behalf. This had both an evacuative
function (getting rid of what cannot be borne, as in an infant’s screaming fit) but also one
of communication. In normal circumstances a hungry baby will have an expectation,
which is both innate and reinforced by experience, that crying is likely to bring a
response from its mother.
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Epistemic Anxiety
Bion proposed that the impulses or dispositions to love, hate, and know were of equal
significance in the functioning of the mind, in a theoretical development which has
become very influential in psychoanalysis. His argument was that where the container–
contained relationship could not cope with the intensities of projections of love and hate,
damage could be caused to the mind. Much of his most important clinical work was with
patients suffering from psychosis, and he interpreted psychotic states of mind by analogy
with those of infants whose containing object was insufficient or absent. (Understanding
of a psychotic state according to this conceptual model is distinct from a causal assertion
that psychotic states in adults have this infantile origin, even though they may well often
do so). The crucial developmental path for Bion was one where it becomes possible for
primitive feelings to be transformed into thoughts, in a process which he named ‘alpha
function’. This might be thought of as a psychoanalytic formulation of the transformation
of ‘impressions’ (sensory experiences) into ideas in the philosophy of the British
empiricists. For Bion, however, the success of such transformations could by no means be
taken for granted, and depended on favourable conditions of what he called
‘containment’.
Hanna Segal (1957) argued, following Klein, that the capacity for symbol formation, or
the function of ‘K’ in Bion’s terms, depended on the attainment of the ‘depressive
position’. That is, on the lessening of paranoid–schizoid splitting to the extent that it was
recognized that the apparently different objects of intense love and hatred were in reality
the same objects, and that furthermore the love and hatred which were felt for these
belonged to the same self. Thus the capacity for thought was one which depended on the
understanding and integration of different emotions. Because for Bion the original objects
of thought were the highly emotionally charged parental figures of the infant’s mind,
thinking itself was an experience from which emotions could not be excluded. ‘Thinking’
for Bion means something a little different from its ordinary meaning, in that he believes
it to be an intrinsically emotional process. This is because it often involves the recognition
or acceptance of something which cannot easily be recognized or acknowledged by the
self beforehand. In other words, it involves a change in oneself, and not just a change in
one’s understanding of something, or in the contents of one’s mind. This helps to explain
later, as we shall see, why learning often involves anxiety. ‘Learning from experience’,
which is an important concept in Bion’s work, means learning from emotional experience.
This modern psychoanalytic interest in the nature and functions of ‘knowing’ has
distanced itself from a dominant tendency in Western science and philosophy of sharply
counterposing the domains of thought and feeling, cognition and the emotions. Indeed, it
is commonly believed that they must be kept apart if knowledge is to be advanced, and
the functions of the rational mind protected. Freud in his chosen role as a scientist for the
most part worked within the framework of this distinction. Psychoanalysis in his view had
discovered a new object for scientific investigation, the unconscious mind, but he
believed that this could be understood by means of empirical evidence and logical
arguments similar to those deployed by the major fields of science in which he intended
psychoanalysis to find its place. Freud’s purpose was to gain understanding of the
unconscious by methods which would eliminate emotional biases or preconceptions, even
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though one of his primary discoveries was to show how human beliefs and
understandings of their experience were influenced by unconscious states of mind and
feeling. The misperceptions and distortions of the symptom-dominated structures of the
mind which he investigated—hysteria, obsessional neurosis, phobias, etc.—were states of
mind driven by powerful emotions which functioned in an unrealistic or irrational relation
to their objects. This did not call into question the nature of knowledge and
understanding for Freud himself. His belief was that psychoanalysis could help both
individuals and society more broadly to resist the unconscious and thus emotionally
driven misrepresentations of experience, by understanding their origins at a deep level of
the mind. But it nevertheless made emotions, conscious and unconscious, central to the
understanding of how the mind actually worked, and challenges cognitivist approaches to
psychology and the philosophy of mind.
Once psychoanalysts, from Klein onwards, began to investigate the earliest experiences
of learning and understanding in infancy, emotions came even more to the fore in the
understanding of mental function. This is because the initial object of curiosity—the
desire for knowledge—is held to be the emotionally highly charged relationship of the
infant with its mother. If the primary object of knowledge is, as Klein thought, the nature
of mother’s body and its inside, and the possible harm which the baby’s hatred and bodily
discharges may be doing to it, how can we explain the emergence of a cognitive function
which is free from the influence of emotions?
The psychoanalytic argument in the work of Klein and Bion and their associates came to
be that the functions of reason require a configuration of the mind within which
aggression and anxiety are contained and limited. Where this does not happen, the
capacities of the mind are liable to be fragmented or inhibited. Bion (1962) describes
states of mental near-disintegration in his psychotic patients. The formation of the mind is
held to depend on an experience of nurture in emotionally rich relationships in infancy
and childhood. Segal (1957) described this as leading to the growth of the capacity for
symbol formation. In this model of the development of the mind, the capacity for thinking
itself depends on the integration of emotional states.
Bion’s interest in the functions and processes of thought lead him to find some affinity
between his work and Kant’s philosophy of mind. In particular he draws a comparison
between his own conception of an unknowable infinite to which the mind aspires, and
Kant’s distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal domains, only the latter being
within the reach of our perceptual apparatus (Bion 1962: 67). But the distinctive
assertion of psychoanalytic writers, particularly in the tradition of Klein and Bion, is that
the development of the faculty of reason—Bion’s domain of K—requires the recognition
and integration of conflicting emotions, and is always at risk of disturbance from the
resurgence of unconscious feelings. These include those intense forms of love and hatred
which dominate paranoid–schizoid states of mind, and the anxiety, guilt, and remorse
which are the emotions characteristic of Klein’s depressive position.
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Epistemic Anxiety
The two areas of psychoanalytic theory which have been outlined in the first parts of this
chapter—that concerning anxiety and its varieties, and that concerning the different
instincts characterized as those of love, hate, and curiosity, or the desire for knowledge
(L, H, and K in Bion’s formulation)—have seldom been brought into a direct relation to
one another in the psychoanalytic literature. Theories of anxiety in Freud and Klein have
assumed that the predominant drives which the personality needs to organize and
reconcile in its encounters with internal and external reality are those of love and hatred,
the libidinal and the aggressive impulses. The Oedipal anxieties described by Freud arise
from the fears that the infant and child’s libidinal desires will give rise to aggressive
retribution which will threaten its survival, or at least the boy’s or girl’s sexual identities.
The paranoid–schizoid and depressive anxieties conceptualized by Klein also arise from
how the self organizes its dispositions to love and hate. In the paranoid–schizoid position,
these are split off from one another, and the self feels assailed by persecutory anxiety. In
the depressive position, the self becomes aware of its own aggressive impulses, and
through its love for its object becomes aware of the harm that they can do to it. Neither
Klein’s nor Bion’s addition of a third major instinct or impulse, curiosity, the
epistemophilic instinct, or K, to the primary dispositions of love and hate, was
accompanied by the identification or naming of a specific kind of anxiety, although one
could see the states of mind of Bion’s psychotic patients, with their massive projections
and evacuations, as enactments of extreme anxiety about psychic survival and the
fragmentation of the mind itself.
Bion writes about the experience of the ‘rudimentary consciousness’ of the infant when
its projections of intense feelings cannot be received and processed by a maternal
container, describing its feelings as ‘nameless dread’. This is analogous to his description
of the psychotic states of mind in his Second Thoughts (1962).
There seem grounds for proposing, however, that just as specific kinds of anxiety are
linked closely to the instincts or dispositions of love and hate, so there may be a specific
anxiety associated with the epistemophilic instinct, the desire to learn. It is this kind of
anxiety that I term ‘epistemic anxiety’. I suggest that this kind of anxiety is of common
occurrence, parallel in this respect to paranoid–schizoid and depressive anxieties, and
also needs to be differentiated from catastrophic forms of psychotic anxiety. Although in
psychotic states the disintegration of the mind itself is a source of terror, it seems that in
such states the impulses to love, hate, and to know are scarcely distinguishable from one
another. The concept of ‘epistemic anxiety’ is here being used to denote a condition in
which the mind and its disposition is certainly recognized to exist, but in which its
capacities for thinking are felt to be inadequate to the demands of its internal and
external environment.
The clinical consulting room and the transference–countertransference relationship

between analyst and patient has been the primary locus of discovery of concepts and
theories within psychoanalysis since Freud (Rustin 2009). The idea advanced by Bion and
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Epistemic Anxiety
by Edna O’Shaughnessy (1981) that the dimension of ‘knowledge’ or K can be specifically

identified as an aspect of patients’ communications, and their wish to discriminate this
from preoccupations with love and hate, indeed suggests that we might identify a form of
anxiety, and defences against anxiety, specific to this epistemic function within the
transference situation of psychoanalysis itself. However, it proves challenging to separate
epistemic anxiety about learning itself from other anxieties raised by the objects of
thought and experience.
Descriptions of work with narcissistic or borderline patients by, for example, Herbert
Rosenfeld (1987), Ronald Britton (1998, 2015), and John Steiner (1993) have certainly
placed resistances to the understanding offered by analysts as a central clinical and
theoretical issue. Rosenfeld wrote about resistance as the ‘negative therapeutic reaction’,
and suggested that ‘destructive narcissism’ could have a large role in this. Destructive
narcissism is the form of pathological personality organization which is dominated not by
self-love, as in the usual concept of narcissism, but rather by unconscious identification
with a superior, destructive, and envious part of the self. This part of the self resists
interpretation and understanding, because of what this might reveal about the damage
the self is inflicting on its loved objects. If the destructive forces which dominate the self
can be recognized and understood, some relief may obtained, but the experience of being
understood is felt to be a dangerous one, and flight from it often follows from phases of
insight and improvement. Epistemic anxiety in this context arises from the extreme
depressive and paranoid–schizoid anxieties to which an understanding of the self as
dominated by hatred might lead.
Steiner took a central characteristic of borderline states to be the disavowal of

knowledge, and the defence against knowing that he termed ‘turning a blind eye’. He
developed this idea in the context of an illuminating interpretation of Sophocles’ play,
Oedipus the King, revising Freud’s interpretation of this play in the light of Bion’s
understanding of the mental function of K. Whereas Freud’s emphasis was on the
forbidden Oedipal desires which the play’s tragic hero had unwittingly enacted, Steiner
argued that decisive in the action of the play was the unwillingness of Oedipus and
Jocasta to recognize what was hidden in plain sight, namely that Oedipus had actually
fulfilled the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother. In the situation
represented in the play, the instincts of love and hate (the libidinal and aggressive
impulses) and that of curiosity and its potential to be diverted by unconscious disavowal
are deeply entangled with one another. The particular kind of knowledge which arouses
intense resistance here is knowledge of particular objects, namely the Oedipal
relationships between father, mother, and son, and the different ways in which these are
enacted. (The infant Oedipus is, as his parents intended, sent to his death before he
grows up to enact his part in what Freud saw as a primordial pattern of unconscious
impulses).
Britton’s (1998) analysis of different kinds of narcissistic personality organizations also

gives a central place to the disposition to know or to refuse to know. His important
contribution to the understanding of Bion’s faculty of knowledge is the connection he
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Epistemic Anxiety
makes with the Oedipal situation. Britton’s argument is that the emergence of the infant’s
capacity to learn and understand depends on its toleration of a ‘third position’ which
makes possible the differentiation between reality and phantasy. Indeed, we commonly
talk of ‘triangulation’ (deploying a metaphor whose origin lies in surveying) to describe
reference to a third point of view as resolving differences which cannot be settled from
two positions alone. Britton describes different ways in which the reality of the Oedipal
situation, faced in phantasy by patients in relation to their analyst, can be denied. In an
identification in phantasy with a maternal figure, emotional intimacy and oneness can be
preserved, at the expense of the paternal function of thought. In an identification in
phantasy with a paternal figure, a certain kind of thought becomes possible, but only if it
is entirely cut off from emotion and intimacy.
Britton (1993) has given his argument a wider social dimension, in describing alternative
modes of holding on to beliefs in defiance of reality. One of these involves an indissoluble
attachment to words (‘fundamentalism’) and the other an equally intense attachment to
images (‘idolatry’), each involving an exclusive identification with a phantasy of a male or
female parental function. The presumption of all these accounts is that some kind of
meaningful ordering of experience, and belief in its true relation to reality, is essential to
the self’s sense of security and well-being. ‘Epistemic disruption’ is a painful and
potentially catastrophic experience, both for individuals and groups.
In these accounts, and indeed in Freud’s (1905, 1926) original discussions of the crucial
role of patients’ resistance in psychoanalysis, the refusal or disavowal of knowledge and
understanding, and the inhibition of curiosity, has a large place, sometimes described as
the ‘negative therapeutic reaction’ (Freud 1923). This was so before the distinctive
function of K was identified and theorized by Bion. The difficulty in these clinical
descriptions of identifying a distinct kind of ‘epistemic anxiety’ is that the massive
anxieties which are shown to be present seemed to be provoked by their particular
disavowed objects, not by the experiences of curiosity or learning in themselves. Perhaps
the problem is that in these situations, the dimensions of L and H and K are so deeply
entwined with one another that it becomes difficult to separate K from its intentional
objects, thought from what it is about. It is possible that psychoanalysts may be able to
further clarify these differences by reference to their clinical experience.
But even where disturbances in the K function have been the explicit object of attention
in Bion’s writing, for example in his paper ‘Attacks on Linking’ (1959), some of these
same difficulties, of differentiating between modes of thought and their objects, still
arise. The specific ‘links’ which he saw as being under attack, in the experience of
psychotic patients, were the primitive links of the maternal and Oedipal relationships—
between breast and mouth, penis and vagina. The disruptions to the capacity for thought
which Bion investigated were held to have taken place in the earliest phantasies of the
infant, and were then being re-enacted in a primitive kind of transference relationship
with the analyst. This came to be understood by him through his close observation of his
patients, and through interpretation of the meaning of their fragmented projections.
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‘Bion’, wrote Edna O’Shaughnessy (1981: 60), ‘placed the capacity to know (K) at the very
centre of mental life. His work puts the pleasure principle and the reality principle on a
par with the life instinct and the death instinct as the fundamental governors of mental
life’. He believed that L, H, and K could each be the key to the understanding of what is
taking place in a psychoanalytic session. Just as the emotions of love and hate take
different forms (in the latter case for example, resentment, envy, jealousy, rage, and the
refusal to consciously acknowledge them) so there are in Bion’s view different kinds of
relation to K, or the experience of knowing. He described these as positive, non-existent,
or negative: K, no-K, and minus K in his notation. O’Shaughnessy argues, with Bion, that
discriminations can and should be made in clinical psychoanalytic sessions, which require
deciding how far the central focus of communication lies with the varieties of L, H, or K.
Making these distinctions can enable analysts to recognize the central unconscious
preoccupations of a patient at that moment, and to be in contact with these. She refers to
the anxieties which are evoked by K, which seems to be the equivalent of the idea of
epistemic anxiety.
O’Shaughnessy thus long ago described the potential relevance of the idea of K, and thus
of anxieties aroused by K, to clinical practice. The idea of ‘linking’ (Bion 1959) drew
attention to attacks on the functioning of the mind, which has particular relevance to the
understanding of developmental inhibitions, such as autism and other conditions on the
autistic spectrum (Rhode and Klauber 2004), and also to learning difficulties more widely,
where these have an emotional or relational dimension. Nevertheless, it seems in practice
difficult to discriminate between anxieties about the processes of thought, and those
evoked by objects of thought which arouse powerful unconscious feelings. It may not be
straightforward to differentiate paranoid–schizoid and depressive anxieties, such as those
evoked by Oedipal phantasies, from the anxieties aroused by exposure to knowledge of
them. The most primitive mental structures of all may be those in which anxieties about
the experiences of knowing, of reality itself, are felt at their most extreme. These include
the autistic states explored in Tustin’s work, theorized as the ‘autistic–contiguous
position’ in Ogden’s (1992), and relating to the psychotic states of mind which Bion
(1962) describes. However, individuals who do not suffer from such extreme and chronic
conditions may yet have some experience of them during their lives.
Psychoanalytic child psychotherapists have found Bion’s work on ‘linking’ highly

illuminating. But again, since they have been seeking to understand states of mind and
phantasy being enacted in the consulting room, it is the specific meaning in phantasy of
what is being linked, or cannot be linked, which has been given most attention. Thus, a
patient who can tolerate the connections of neither words nor numbers, because of the
parental coupling which they may unconsciously signify for him, is attacking his K
function (his intellectual capability) in a radical way, but this is because of his intolerance
of the Oedipal situation. These ideas have been valuable for the understanding of severe
disabilities in learning (Simpson and Miller 2004; Sinason 1992) and of the severe
aversion to awareness of emotionally significant objects which one finds in autistic states
of mind (Tustin 1972). In each of these cases it seems that the unmanageability of the
dispositions to love and hate, in the context of the Oedipal situation, is responsible for
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Epistemic Anxiety
disrupting and inhibiting the impulse to learn. Hanna Segal (1957) made the important
distinction between the use of symbolism, and symbolic equations, in ‘concrete thinking’.
An example of a symbolic equation being transformed into symbolic thinking, not from a
clinical setting, is the following:
A young woman working with a small group of emotionally deprived children in an

inner city primary school was presenting an account of her work … One very
excitable and provocative little boy of six, Patrick, wanted help with his sums. He
was one of the children making reasonable progress in reading and was keen to
impress his teacher, but one of his difficulties in doing math was that he could
never manage to write the figure 8 to his satisfaction. One day, as he struggled to
do this in the context of simple addition sums, he began a flow of talk in which he
spoke about his teacher’s sexual relationship with her husband. In an
astonishingly uninhibited monologue, he put into words his excited fantasies about
their intercourse. To his teacher’s amazement, as his intense preoccupation with
intertwining bodies was communicated to her, he suddenly and delightedly drew
her attention to the now perfect 8s he could produce. Clearly, the symbolic
equation (Segal 1957) in which the joined circles had been equated with joined-up
bodies and thus experienced as a source of anxiety had been unpacked, so that
separate realms of thinking could exist without confusion
(Rustin 1999: 128).
As this review demonstrates, the idea which evolved in Klein and Bion’s work—that the
drive to know and understand is as fundamental an attribute of the mind as the
disposition to love and hate—has become influential in contemporary psychoanalysis. Its
importance derives in part from developments in the psychoanalysis of children, where
experiences of early development and of later severe disturbance through its disruptions
of early care have become of pressing clinical interest. And also because of an increased
attention, related to relationships both in early life and in psychotic states of mind, in
which disturbances of primary mental function are central issues. Clinical phenomena of
resistance, denial, splitting, projective identification as a form of evacuation and
communication of unbearable emotions and feelings, and dissociation between thought
and emotion have needed to be understood. Sometimes this is needed if patients are to be
even containable in the clinical setting, and certainly if therapeutic progress is to be
made with them. The recognition of the vicissitudes of mental function, somewhat distinct
from the emotions of love and hate directed towards their objects in reality and phantasy,
has become a valuable theoretical resource for psychanalysts and psychoanalytic
psychotherapists. Indeed the ideas of ‘containment’, ‘reflective space’, and
‘mentalization’ (which seeks to enable Bion’s ideas about the capacity for thinking of K to
become, in a simplified form, a reliably attainable therapeutic goal) have become common
terms in psychoanalytic therapeutic practice.1 The idea of epistemic anxiety—anxiety
concerning the felt inadequacy of the mind to situations it faces—arising from the
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epistemophilic instinct and Bion’s K function, is already implicitly present in clinical

thinking and may be capable of further clarification in that context.
Epistemic Anxiety in Society

In the second part of this chapter I shall give attention to the relevance of the concept of
epistemic anxiety to wider spheres than that of clinical practice. This rests on the idea
that different unconscious anxieties, and social defences against them, are evoked in
different institutional settings, and arise from their principal occupational tasks. The idea
will be proposed that epistemic anxiety—anxiety about learning—is a kind of anxiety
especially liable to be experienced in certain social contexts and situations.
In an edited collection of papers, Social Defences against Anxiety: Explorations in a

Paradigm (2015), Armstrong and Rustin proposed that just as the anxieties and defences
which Menzies had identified in the experience of trainee nurses arose from the
distressing nature of their work with patients, so other kinds of work might be expected
to give rise to specific kinds of anxiety, and defences constructed to manage these.
Several examples of such correlations between work tasks and associated anxieties are
developed in that volume, for example in regard to the situations of risk-taking involved
in financial trading, and of day nurseries where the distresses of small children have to
be contained. Groups whose work involves hard and dangerous physical labour
sometimes respond to the anxieties of this situation through creating defensive cultures
of endurance and solidarity. There is a parallel to be drawn between the concept of
anxieties arising from the tasks of work, and Bion’s idea that different basic assumptions
are dominant in specific institutions. He referred to the centrality of the basic assumption
of ‘fight–flight’ to military organizations, and the need to manage this in order to enable a
rational ‘work-group’ mentality to prevail among soldiers, and to the role of the basic
assumption of dependency in the context of the church. Bion’s ‘basic assumptions’ can be
understood as collective defences against anxiety.
The contexts in which ‘epistemic anxiety’ is most likely to arise and to give rise to
defences against it, are educational settings. The idea that curiosity or epistemophilia is
itself a natural instinct implies that satisfactions may be gained from its exercise.
Epistemophilia means love of knowledge and its concomitant and opposite is hatred of
knowledge, what might be termed epistemophobia. These terms correspond to Bion’s
formulations of K and minus K. Teachers have continuously to enable their students to
acquire knowledge and skills, and in doing so to overcome the anxieties associated with
learning. Since curiosity and understanding in themselves give pleasure, as well as being
potential sources of anxiety, a problem for those involved in educational work is how to
ensure that the pleasurable elements of the process prevail over the painful ones. How
can it be brought about that epistemic enjoyment outweighs epistemic anxiety?
Freud was aware that the relationship between the ‘pleasure principle’ and the ‘reality
principle’ is a complicated one. Although the experience of reality itself is often that it
frustrates or denies pleasure, the function of the ‘reality principle’ is a positive one. For
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one thing, a grasp of reality may make desires more, not less, capable of satisfaction. And
for another, as Klein and Bion understood, the apprehension of meaning can often itself
be a source of pleasure. Indeed, lack of opportunity to learn and to satisfy the desires
associated with curiosity may itself be a source of pain and distress, giving rise to the
state of mind we call boredom, and in its extreme form, depression. Studies of the
behavioural systems of mammals, cited for example by Panksepp (1998), have described
the significance of the play of young animals in their necessary attempts at learning, for
example to hunt. We know from captive and pet animals how lack of stimulus can cause
what seems like depression in them. So far as human learners are concerned, there are
risks at both ends of this spectrum. If too little is offered to arouse curiosity and interest,
there is a stultification of the desire to learn. If what is demanded in terms of learning, or
new knowledge, is too much, the learner may be overwhelmed by his task, and turn away
from it.
Although curiosity and the desire to learn is an innate human attribute, it functions in
definite relations to Bion’s other primary dispositions to love and to hate. Knowledge can
be pursued in the service of both love and hate. On the one hand, there is the desire to
learn about and appreciate the good qualities of ‘objects’, and on the other, the intrusive
and destructive forms of curiosity whose emotional purpose is to diminish and damage
them. The epistemophilic instinct which Klein attributed to infants, and its focus on its
primary parental objects, was liable to be influenced by loving or hating impulses, at
different moments. Curiosity propelled by jealousy involves both a recognition of the
admired qualities which the self feels in danger of losing to the possession of others, and
antipathy to rivals for the loved one and perhaps to the betraying object itself. The kind of
interest in an object which we call envy is specifically dominated by hatred of it.
Epistemic anxieties will be shaped to a degree by these interconnections. Destructive
curiosity will be liable to arouse unconscious anxieties about retribution and perhaps, if
not only hatred is in play, reparative concerns about damage to the object. A form of
curiosity or apprehension which is excessively dominated by love for the object may lead
to its excessive idealization, and the need to deny aspects of reality which call this in
question. The problem in this case is how to avoid a condition of individual or collective
narcissism, in which unconscious anxiety that the object may not be perfect may lead to
the defence of its further idealization, and the splitting which accompanies this.
Learning or not-learning has a large bearing on everyone’s sense of self-worth, from

infancy onwards. What children learn and know is an element of their capability and
agency in their world. Children’s intense awareness of their place in the natural ranking
of age, the significance of birthdays, and what ‘year’ they are in at school, relates to what
they believe they are able to do and understand at what stage. Furthermore, their
attainments and achievements—from being able to walk and talk onwards—are reflected
back in the gaze and behaviour towards them of their objects, be they parents or
teachers, which deeply influences how they see themselves. Learning is usually rewarded
with approval, or love, and failures to learn risk the withdrawal of approval or love. It is
because of the availability of such recognition, approval, and love, as well as from the
intrinsic pleasures of learning itself, the satisfactions of the epistemophilic instinct, that
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children are persuaded to continually put themselves at risk in new situations of learning,
and are prepared to renounce the security of total dependency. Practices of teaching and
learning require delicate balances to be maintained between the enhanced satisfactions
which arise from learning, and the elements of disapproval and unpleasure which are also
deployed to motivate learning. Too much disapproval and dissatisfaction, and learners
will withdraw from the field. Undiscriminating approval undermines the reality sense
needed for learning to take place. Theories of learning and pedagogy have sought to
understand this process. Vygotsky’s (1978) ‘zone of proximal development’—the idea that
learning needs to proceed in comprehensible, sequential stages, so that the next step
follows coherently from the last—is one valuable idea. James Strachey’s (1934) seminal
account of interpretation in psychoanalysis took a related view. He argued that the role of
unconscious phantasy in analysands’ perceptions can only be revealed to them, and their
resistance can only be overcome, through the demonstration of small discrepancies
between their perception of the analyst and the manifest reality. He describes here the
way in which an analyst can take account of epistemic anxiety as it arises when
interpretations are offered. In this instance the resistance is relinquishing a false kind of
knowledge—a phantasy—on which at that moment his sense of himself may have
depended. Unconscious anxieties involving both love and hate may be involved in such a
situation, but it seems that the experience of recognition gives rise to anxiety in itself.
The role of formal education has grown to a large degree in modern industrial and post-
industrial societies. Formal education may begin as early as three or four years of age,
where governments (as in England) decide that pre-school provision should have qualified
teachers among its providers. In many nations, around half of the relevant age group are
enrolled in tertiary education, in universities, or other institutions. Occupational
opportunities are highly correlated with educational achievements. This situation gives
rise to immense social and psychological pressures within educational systems, since the
rewards for success and the penalties for failure have become so large.
Michael Young (1958) described, in The Rise of the Meritocracy, a dystopian future in
which domination would be exercised by those who had proved their merits through their
educational success, while those in lower positions were left to blame themselves for
their failures in a system which claimed to provide opportunities for all. His suggestion
was that in some ways inequalities which arise from competitive systems based on
competitive achievement could be more psychologically painful to the unsuccessful than
those which seem to have occurred merely through accidents of birth. A meritocratic
apportionment of success and failure seems similar in some respects to a Calvinistic
distinction between the elect and the damned, the elected in meritocracies being held to
have demonstrated their ‘chosen’ status through the educational certificates they
acquire. (Of course, we know that ostensibly meritocratic social systems are often deeply
compromised by the advantages which the offspring of some social groups, independent
of their individual talents, are able to bring to educational competition).
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Different strategies are adopted by societies and institutions in response to the ‘epistemic
anxieties’ inseparable from contexts of learning. Highly competitive systems may divide
not only the rewards of learning, but also the penalties and anxieties arising from failure
to learn, between one group and another. Systems of ranking and grading have this
divisive effect, since those at the top gain assurance of their capability and position of
honour, while those placed lower down are left to bear the anxiety and shame of being
unable to learn to the required standard. In the English educational system, schools and
universities as well as pupils are subjected to systems of grading and ranking (through
inspections, ‘league tables’, and the like), which has the effect that competitive pressures
and their anxieties are projected by institutions into their students. We know from
research into educational selection and streaming (Jackson 1964) that the mere
designation or ‘labelling’ of children as less capable itself causes a lessening of their
capability. More inclusive approaches, more influential in the primary than the secondary
sector of British education, seek to support all children’s ability to learn. Critics of such
systems, especially in secondary education where ‘comprehensive’ schools at one time
embodied such a conception, argue that unless discriminations are made between
capacities to learn, and priority accorded to the most capable, high levels of achievement
by the most capable students will be diminished. According to this view, ‘standards’ will
then suffer, although whether these are the standards of the most capable, or of the
majority, or even of the least capable, is rarely specified. Much public debate about
educational policy and practice reflects these different priorities.
A distinction can be made between the anxiety and shame that can be evoked by the
experiences and difficulties of learning itself, and that which can be evoked by encounters
with specific areas of knowledge, for example where these are fields of contention. For
example, attempts to reflect on issues of race, sexuality, and gender in educational
settings, and elsewhere, may give rise to specific epistemic anxieties, as individuals and
groups may fear being shamed for holding unacceptable views or for their supposed
ignorance.
While epistemic anxiety has its most visible presence in educational settings, it seems
that in some contemporary societies it has become a phenomenon of political
significance. Whereas social antagonisms in an early period were mainly structured by
differences of income and wealth, it appears that today these have been reordered to
reflect differences of educational advantage. The most significant demographic difference
between those who voted for Trump and those who voted for Clinton in the 2017 United
States presidential election lay in the proportions of those with and without college
education (Edsall 2017). In part, this reflects the fact that power in modern societies is
largely exercised by those with high levels of formal education. It may be that those
perceived to be privileged and neglectful of the interests of the middle or working class
were resented and opposed because of their relative power and wealth, not because of
their educational achievement. But this seems not to be entirely the case. What happened
does seem in part to have been a revolt of the less against the more educated. Trump’s
election campaign involved deliberate attacks on the idea that political debate should be
conducted according to the ‘codes’ which attribute value to consistency and the proficient
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Epistemic Anxiety
deployment of evidence in arguments. These codes are subscribed to by ‘quality’ media,

the law, the scientific establishment, and have been established conventions of political
debate. This entire way of thinking, Trump in effect asserted, is a source of oppression for
the ‘ordinary’ (less educated) American. Attacks on the autonomy of the courts, on
climate science, and on leading newspapers and television networks for their alleged
biases and disregard for popular opinion, have been elements of this assault. Trump’s
choice of 140-character ‘tweets’ as his preferred mode of communication with publics
surely reflects his disdain for more ‘difficult’ and elaborated forms of thought and
expression. In Bion’s terms, one could say that they have the function more of the
evacuation of angry feelings than communication. Similar phenomena were observed in
the European Referendum campaign in Britain in 2016, in assertions that too much
attention had been customarily paid to ‘experts’ and ‘evidence’, with the implication that
collectively shared feelings might be a more reliable guide to the truth and to proper
action. They seem to be part of the rise of populism and nationalism more widely.
These campaigns surely gave voice to a feeling of injury and insult on the part of
populations who felt that their own less sophisticated and ‘authorized’ forms of thought
and expression had disqualified them from being listened to by conventional politicians
and authorities. We can understand what is happening as a vehement reaction to the
perceived rise of a privileged meritocracy. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb (1972)
once described the ‘Hidden Injuries of Class’; we are now able to observe the effects of
the hidden injuries of education, to those who are excluded by it.
There is a long tradition of thought which has regarded ‘mass society’, and indeed the
emergence of democracy, with its media of mass communication, with suspicion and
foreboding. Theodor Adorno’s (1951) essay on fascist propaganda was a classic
demonstration of how popular sentiments could be manipulated through the mass media
of the press and broadcasting. Media of communication consistently offer to their
audiences opportunities both to satisfy impulses to learn, and to deflect, displace, and
resist these, as much through offered varieties of trivia and repetition as in the deliberate
negation and subversion of rational forms of understanding. In so far as learning is
usually accompanied by anxiety, it is to be expected that some of the time nearly all
individuals will seek refuge from its stresses in kinds of mental function which demand
little of them. These two contrasting forms of communication—those committed to
learning, those averse to it—are in a constant alternation with one another in the outputs
of the broadcasters, the press, and the entertainments industry. It remains unclear
whether the greater opportunities for communication between individuals and groups
which are provided by the proliferation of its electronic resources—social media, search
engines, ‘platforms’, and ‘apps’ of innumerable kinds—will make possible an inclusive
educated democracy of a kind which has been hitherto unachievable (Wikipedia is an
example of where widely felt desires for greater knowledge and understanding are being
met), or will give rise instead to varieties of ‘soft totalitarianism’, in which most
communication is covertly controlled by elites.
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Epistemic Anxiety
Conclusion
The aim of this chapter has been to bring together the psychoanalytic theories of anxiety
and of epistemophilia, to see if their conjugation would identify a distinctive variety of
anxiety associated with learning. Insofar as this is constituted by the concept of
‘epistemic anxiety’ an additional question arises. Can these conjoined theories enable us
to understand how epistemic anxiety can most effectively be managed, in order to enable
learning to be facilitated rather than undermined and resisted? The answer to this
question, at every level of the learning experience, from infancy to adult political life, may
lie in Bion and his successors’ theory of containment, or container–contained relations.
Crucial to the experience of learning, in all its phases and locations, is the recognition of
the anxieties which accompany it, of which one specific kind is the capacity to learn itself.
It is where this anxiety is recognized and understood that learning will best take place.
Epistemic anxiety is one of several forms of anxiety which have relevance to the spheres
of social and political philosophy. One can differentiate and choose between societies and
social institutions in regard to the way in which they ‘organize’ anxieties and their
productive and destructive functions. On the positive side lie the motivating role of
anxieties in various spheres of competition and enterprise. On the negative side, there
are the states of affairs where anxieties become excessive and give rise to the defences of
social phobias and paranoias. Such an approach to anxieties brings emotions, both
collective and individual, into the centre of social and political thinking, and thereby
identifies a key space for psychoanalysis as a way of understanding their unconscious
presence and force.
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(1.) [Eds: For further discussion of mentalization and the development of thought, though
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Michael Rustin
School of Law and Social Sciences, University of East London
Page 24 of 24

Psychoanalysis in the Twenty-First Century: Does Gender Matter?

Psychoanalysis in the Twenty-First Century: Does
Gender Matter?
Louise Gyler

Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Feminist Philosophy
This chapter is concerned with exploring the relevance of gender as a critical category
for clinical psychoanalysis. It recognizes two developments in the late twentieth century
that may appear to present gender as either not a pressing issue in self-development or
as sufficiently troubled and undone to have lost its regulatory grip. The first concerns the
domination of the psychoanalytic imagination with preoccupations other than sexuality,
sexual difference, and gender; and the second is linked to the deconstruction and
reconstruction of hetero-normative gendered frameworks initiated by cultural gender
theorists. It is argued that the gendered binary of Western thought with its socially
normative values and assumptions shapes the unconscious minds of every person.
Notwithstanding critical appreciation of the gendered discourses of psychoanalysis as
well as expanded thinking about the possible repertoire of individual gender variations,
gender continues to carry evaluative burdens.
Keywords: gender, sexual difference, gendered discourses, clinical psychoanalysis, power
Louise Gyler
Introduction: Psychoanalysis, Gender, and

(p. 709)
Power
GENDER issues impact individuals in profound, indefinable, and contradictory ways, both
in public and private life, especially as power dynamics are so intimately involved in the
production of gendered meanings. Historically, psychoanalysis has been prone to getting
it wrong when it comes to gender matters—for example, women, same-sex desire, and
trans experience—by overlooking the workings of power in the production of knowledge
and gender inequalities as they find expression in psychic life, clinical practice, and
Page 1 of 20

theorizing. Social and cultural norms have been conflated with psychoanalytic theory;
description with prescription. The question that I am asking with ‘Does gender matter?’ is
whether psychoanalysis is now suitably cognizant of the workings of gender binary logic
of Western thought so that the consequences of the more controversial aspects of our
past can be grappled with psychoanalytically; are we (psychoanalysts) able to submit our
theoretical and personal explicit and implicit biases to analysis so that enough of any non-
reflexive tendencies are ameliorated? Have we arrived somewhere approximating the
‘third attitude’ advocated by Julia Kristeva (1979/1986) in ‘Women’s Time’ all those years
ago? For Kristeva, the first phase is associated with sociopolitical demands of women for
equality and the second with ‘the specificity of female psychology and its symbolic
realisation’ (1986: 194). Kristeva wrote:
In the third attitude, which I strongly advocate—which I imagine?—the very

dichotomy man/woman as an opposition between two rival entities may be (p. 710)
understood as belonging to metaphysics. What can ‘identity’, even ‘sexual
identity’, mean in a new theoretical and scientific space where the very notion of
identity is challenged? (1986: 209)
Kristeva goes on to argue that she is not proposing a hypothetical bisexuality as that
would only serve to erase difference but rather suggesting ‘the demassification of the
problematic of difference’ (1986: 209). Virginia Goldner seems to think that the
theoretical grip of sexual/gender difference has weakened: ‘Nearly four decades of
feminist and queer theory have disabled the sex/gender binary, undermining the
assumption that something called “gender” imposes its cultural will on a pre-existing,
universalized “sexed body” ’ (2011: 160). The above propositions lead to questions about
where we are now: are we in Kristeva’s imaginative place where the distinction between
women and men no longer carries the normative evaluative freight that it historically has;
have we arrived at a place, at least theoretically, where gender and the biological body
are no longer naturalized as in unison as Goldner claims?
Recently when discussing with psychoanalyst colleagues questions concerning gender

biases in our theory and their implications for practice, I was met with puzzlement as my
colleagues appeared to feel that these issues were no longer of relevance for
contemporary practice, believing we had worked through the problems and prejudices of
previous decades. This led me to ask: has gender been sufficiently ‘troubled’ and ‘undone’
to no longer have purchase in (some) psychoanalysts’ consulting rooms? Has gender been
sufficiently disambiguated from the effects of the workings of power relationships? Has
the regulatory gaze with its attendant anxieties for both psychoanalyst and analysand
been sufficiently relaxed? On one level, I am not unsympathetic to my colleagues’ position
because not only have our attitudes to gender and sexuality been reworked but there
have been paradigm shifts in psychoanalytic thinking (and here I refer primarily to Anglo-
American trajectories). These paradigm shifts, in one sense, potentially leave sexuality
and gender behind, as André Green lamented in his provocatively entitled paper ‘Does
sexuality have anything to do with psychoanalysis?’ (1995), and position other clinical
preoccupations as more central and urgent. I shall suggest that, with these
Page 2 of 20

developments, although the meaning of gender and gender discourses in the consulting
room is both hard to pin down and writ large, gender theory continues as critically
relevant for psychoanalytic practice.
Questions of gender function on various interrelated levels in clinical psychoanalysis—

these include the level of individual psychology; the theoretical level; and the way
individual psyches, theoretical ideas, and differing styles of participation in the consulting
room interweave to produce gendered psychoanalytic discourses (Gyler 2010; Mitchell
1996). To explore the significance of gender and gender theory for contemporary
practice, I briefly touch upon issues such as: where have we been on questions on
gender? where are we now? and where might we be going? These questions involve the
complicated intersections between psychoanalysis and cultural gender theory. Before
discussing these issues, I propose to sketch briefly the contemporary landscape of clinical
psychoanalysis to give some context for my colleagues’ perplexed attitudes.
(p. 711) Contemporary Clinical Concerns

Psychoanalytic developments since the second half of the twentieth century have been
marked by preoccupations other than sexuality and gender; notably object relations,
attachment and loss, and the development of thought have dominated the
psychoanalytical imagination. I suggest that contemporary clinical psychoanalysis, no
longer deploying an ‘archaeological’ model or even particularly concerned with
reconstruction (of the primal scene), aims at the work of representation—as met with, for
example, in Bion’s theory of thinking (1959, 1962a, 1962b), Botella and Botella on the
work of psychic figurability (2005), and Roussillon (2011) amongst others. Bion’s theory
of thinking is based on four overlapping and interconnected principles of mental
functioning. They are: a person’s need to know the ‘truth’; that two minds are required to
think a person’s disturbing thoughts (this principle implicates the mechanism of
projective identification as communicative); a capacity for thinking as necessary to
manage constructively the thoughts and feelings generated from disturbing experiences
(this principle relates to the model of container/contained); and, ‘dreaming’ conceived as
a psychoanalytic function of the personality that occurs in wake and sleep and is
necessary to work through emotional issues. More recently there is a developing
literature based on Bion’s later work (1970, 1992) on the unrepresented and unknowable
(called O) that represents the limits of knowledge as acquired through the senses and can
only be experienced in the becoming at-one (Eshel 2017). Put simply, psychoanalysis is
concerned with the problem of how to think and with experiencing deeper levels of
psychic reality rather than with the question of what to think (that is, making the
unconscious conscious which assumes the existence of formed but defended thought). Of
course, all levels of psychic life fold together in an analysis but I am suggesting that
contemporary attention rests with the problems of representation and psychic states of
being-in-oneness. Clinically, this means that there is increased attention in the literature
to presymbolic manifestations, for example children who are unable to play (Tustin 1988),
autistic transformations (Korbivcher 2014), and enactments of unverbalized/
Page 3 of 20

unrepresented experience. Careful consideration is given to meaning-making in the ‘here’

and ‘now’ intersubjective encounter (Joseph 2013; O’Shaughnessy 2013). These modified
clinical aims appear to position gender and sexuality as no longer ‘bedrock’ in the
currency of the consulting room.
Along with the interest in archaic states of mind and with analytic engagement with
patients who function in the presymbolic and non-verbal realm of experience, there has
been a shift in the analyst’s mode of participation in the analytic encounter. As a
generalization, it is less authoritative, relying less on universalizing forms of knowledge.
In practice, careful consideration is given to how explicit and implicit theoretical
commitments and personal responses, attitudes, and biases all form part of how we
emotionally receive and make sense of our analysand’s communications—and the
capacity for emotional resonance is needed when it comes to shaping responses to
unrepresented experience. In addition, there has been a changed attitude to theorizing
(p. 712) itself marked by a tendency to shift away from universalizing accounts especially
of gender and sexual development to constructing knowledge on more particular and

individualized bases as Nancy Chodorow promotes:
We need to move beyond those theories that base their psychologies of gender on
a search for gender differences and a comparison of men and women or that
reduce gender psychology to one element (whether genital, relational, or anything
else). We need a theory that can point us toward and help us understand the
clinical individuality of gender.
(Chodorow 2012: 43)
The Intersubjective Space: Clinical Examples

The following clinical vignettes are illustrations of how the issue of gender and sexuality
may not appear pressing in the lives of some children or in the foreground of the analytic
working through in the consulting room.
Mandy, aged ten years, began her analytic sessions by creating with the play materials an
imaginative island world inhabited with various ‘creatures’ who would cook up exotic
meals, sleep, play, fight, work, travel, and so on. For several months at the beginning of
her analysis, Mandy rarely spoke. Whenever I spoke to explore and/or link the meaning of
her play with emotional states and/or what might be happening in the room between us,
she appeared to ignore any of my overtures, remaining silent. After a period, her play and
our interaction began to feel repetitive and the emotional atmosphere in the consulting
room began to alter. I sensed her increasing anger, which appeared to resonate with my
own experience of frustration, confusion, and sense of failure at being unable to make any
emotional contact with Mandy. I guess we both suffered for a time before I could
interpret (with emotional conviction) that she heard my words as confusing and foreign,
leaving her feeling angry with me for intruding into her world with my bewildering words
Page 4 of 20

and ideas. This interpretation about the ‘here’ and ‘now’ of our interaction did connect
with Mandy who was able to acknowledge her agreement and, from this juncture, in her
analysis, she began to talk freely to me. Much later, she could confide that this moment in
her analysis marked an important milestone for her; she could have a conversation with
another person and that was a great relief to her.
What stops conversations or dialogue—an all too common feature of contemporary

analyses? Why didn’t Mandy tell me that my words, or my presence for that matter, were
confusing to her so we could have explored this together—a coming together rather than
a turning away? On a manifest level, we might consider that she simply did not trust me
to listen to her experience—and, yet, she steadfastly attended her sessions, even when
occasionally they clashed with apparently more appealing activities. In the transference, I
embodied a confusing and confused object/figure that anxiously needed to intrude into
her, disturbing her equilibrium, and frightening her. Mandy defended (p. 713) against this
intrusive object by shutting down, with this dynamic externalized and enacted in the
intersubjective encounter. As this non-verbal communication came to be understood and
contained, verbal representation and speech became possible. In Mandy’s analysis, the
transference/countertransference experience needed to be lived in the consulting room
and experienced as emotionally ‘real’, before the analyst could speak cogently about the
experience to her.
To give another example: I have described elsewhere the experience of seeing a small
boy, James, aged two years, who had been exposed to serious violence in his primary
caregiving relationship, which he then enacted with a series of multiple caregivers (Gyler
2010). Not unexpectedly, in his sessions he related to me with fear and actual aggression.
In one session, after I had registered both in my mind and in my physical reaction (I pull
back my hand to protect it) my alarm about being physically hurt (scratched by toy
scissors), I was able to speak to him about his terror at being with me. He then
responded: ‘Who are you?’ This locution allowed a space for clarification and
interpretation after which the small boy could reveal playfully his fear of his falling apart
‘world’. The question, ‘who are you?’ is a question about identity, about in this instance
the identity of the other—is she who I think she is? Is she a dangerous murderous
(m)other? Is she different from my own ‘fixed’ phantasmal ideas of others? Who then is
‘she’ and who am ‘I’? These are questions of identity that this small child needed to
explore. The issue of whether there are or can be satisfactory and satisfying answers, or
whether the ‘answers’ are provisional and shift over time and place, is another matter.
Nonetheless, exploring these questions may involve anger, disappointment, and mourning
and a confrontation with the limits and constraints of human freedom.
In these clinical vignettes, the children begin to think and articulate their wishes and
fears rather than enact them in unproductive and/or destructive forms of relatedness: the
wish to speak in a silent child and the wish to be curious about the other in a child who
attacked others. These wishes are relational but not gender related in any direct sense.
These children require the recognition of the other so that they can develop their
capacity for thought. With the capacity for symbolic thought comes the painful
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confrontation of needing to tolerate and mourn the inner reality of their damaged internal
object. I have argued elsewhere (Gyler 2010) that, when difficulties associated with the
primary caregiving relationship are in relation to women as mothers, this can result in
negative and frightening internal representations of the maternal object if these types of
representations are not mourned and balanced with positive ones. This internal psychic
situation can lead, via the symbolic associative chain of maternal/mother/women, to
deprecating attitudes towards women. In this sense, these problematics implicate a
gendered discourse. For the individual, gendered meanings are produced by and
productive of experience where the psyche and the social interact ‘enigmatically’ to fix,
resist, and refuse the normative gender binary.1 (p. 714) Psychoanalysis as a critical self-
reflexive endeavour holds the potential to analyse such ongoing effects produced by
gendered discourses.
Gender Discourses: Past into Present

Until the mid-twentieth century, gender was mostly used to refer to grammatical
categories. The genesis of gender as analytical concept, perhaps, begins with Simone de
Beauvoir’s enquiry: why is Woman Other? (1949/1972). This incisive question cuts to the
heart of the problem of women’s otherness and their disadvantaged location in the binary
system of Western thought. The term ‘gender’ was introduced into the medical field by
John Money (1973) when he made the distinction between sex (biologically given) and
gender (socially constructed) in the 1950s while investigating sex roles and gender-
related behaviour of individuals with intersex conditions. Robert Stoller (1968)
introduced the term into psychoanalysis through his work on sexual/gender identities.
The widespread uptake of the term, however, is associated with second-wave feminism
where in the UK, Ann Oakley (1972) and in the USA, Gayle Rubin (1975) and Rhoda
Unger (1979) initiated the use of the sex/gender distinction for feminism.
Freud can be read as not interested in gender identity as we would understand it today
because for him, gender and sexuality were not bifurcated as they mostly are today.
Nevertheless, psychoanalytic usages of the term ‘gender’ are closely associated with the
contested space of sexual difference. Freud’s account of sexual difference, the question of
how desire and identifications are structured so lives are lived as sexually differentiated,
clearly has implications for our contemporary gender thinking. Freud (1905) offered a
finely textured but unstable account of sexuality with the biological body and sexual
desire being motivationally fundamental to the development of mind.2 His writings hold
contradictory claims so that subsequent authors can read off various passages to support
both socially conventional and more radical positions in relation to gendered functioning.
For example, his radical insights include that there are no simple corresponding relations
between libidinal instincts and their aim and objects and that ‘pure masculinity and
femininity remain theoretical constructions of uncertain content’ (Freud 1925: 258). As
we know, there are also normative claims of what it means to be a man or woman (Freud
Page 6 of 20

1925, 1931, 1933). For Freud, sexual differentiation with its binary logic is central for the
construction of subjectivity and entry into the symbolic order.
In the nineteenth century with the advent of the modern medical interventions and the
shift from theological moral views of mental distress to medicalized pathological views,
‘bad’ women were reframed ‘mad’ women (Appignanesi and Forrester 1993; Showalter
1985). These developments meant that, for example, women who resisted and (p. 715)
refused normative gender roles could be ‘medicalized’ and, for example, have their
reproductive and sexual organs removed as cure for their apparent derangements. In this
context, ‘the talking cure’ introduced a fundamentally different approach, permitting a
space for women to voice their sexual desire. Nevertheless, Freud’s account of the
possible outcomes for women’s development was negatively freighted—for example, they
are more masochistic, narcissistic, jealous, envious, with weaker and less independent
superegos than men, and their ‘nature is determined by their sexual function’ (Freud
1933: 135). In her landmark text, Juliet Mitchell (1974) introduced the argument that
Freud was describing the limiting conditions for women under patriarchy rather than
prescribing how women should be. The description/prescription debate continues
(Mitchell 2015). From the outset, Freud’s accounts of the psychology of women was
contested and analysts such as Jones (1927), Klein (1928), and Horney (1925) shed light
on the ‘dark continent’ (Freud 1926: 212) in Freud’s lifetime. Subsequently, other writers
have theorized a representational space for women’s ambition, aggression, and agency
(Elise 2008; Harris 1997), to include representations of the female body (Balsam 2012)
and the significance of the representation of prediscursive phenomena for subjectivity,
especially inner spaces to hold the possibility of (pro)creativity being called into attention
(Gyler 2017).
Over the past century or so, termed the ‘sexual century’ by Ethel Person (1999) and
perhaps book-ended between The Three Essays (Freud 1905) and Gender Trouble (Butler
1990), classical psychoanalytic insights concerned with sexuality and gender have been
challenged, deconstructed, and reconstructed to render them more available for the
representation of human freedom. We have seen psychoanalytical critical interventions
into the woman ‘question’ (described earlier), theorizing same-sex desire, gender binary
discourses, and ways of conceiving queer and trans experience. Accounts of same-sex
desire aimed at depathologizing homosexuality have been productive along with the
theoretical move to problematize all sexualities (Chodorow 1994). Ideas such as ‘gender
as destiny’ as the bedrock of psychoanalytical discourse (Young-Bruehl 1996) and notions
of a binary construction of gender have been challenged with gender being reconceived
as relational, provisional, in-process, contingent, assembled, fluid, and indeterminate
(Benjamin 1996; Harris 2005). The need for a representational space for trans and queer
experience and the delinking of any naturalized connection between gender identity and
the anatomical or natal body have been thoughtfully discussed (Goldner 2011). The role
and status of the body remains uncertain and contentious in psychoanalytical discourse
but interventions that, for example, conceive bodies as ‘hybrids of natures-cultures’ (Flax
2006: 1134) and present a symbiological approach where nature/nurture and biology/
culture inextricably determine one and another (Gagnier 2017) are well established. In
Page 7 of 20

these shifts, not only is the universal heteronormative male subject of Western thought
more precariously seated in his occupation of the privileged epistemological and
conceptual position, but also conceptions of ‘gender as destiny’ and sexual difference are
in contention; for example, we can now ask if we need to be a sexually differentiated
subject to be able to function symbolically.
In contemporary psychoanalysis and cultural discourses, sexual difference is

(p. 716)
understood within two broad frameworks as Scott (2011) proposes. In the first, sexual
difference is seen as a given, that is, a natural bodily based phenomenon, on which the
gender system is culturally constructed (for example, Chodorow 1978). In the second,
sexual difference is viewed as the effect of historically variable discursive practices of
gender which produce the body as sexual. This position has been most notably advocated
by Butler (1990). Following Freud and Lacanian readings of Freud, sexual difference is
given meaning through fantasy and identification to produce either masculine or feminine
psychic identities. Anatomical bodies are seen as not necessarily corresponding with the
feminine and masculine psychic positions, that is, these positions are not viewed as
directly expressing any natural biological distinction. The categories of feminine/
masculine and in association female/male are, however, asymmetric in their relationship
to the signifying processes of subjectivity. They have a different relationship to the
phallus, with the feminine position standing as the negative term—absence/castrated, and
the masculine for the positive term—presence/phallic; that is they accrue and restate
meaning from the gendered binary of Western thought. For example, one of the effects of
this discourse can be seen in the literature on ‘the paternal function’, a function
conceptualized to intervene to promote psychic separation in the primary maternal
dyadic relationship. The paternal function becomes associated for example with
knowledge (Perelberg 2013) and time (Aisenstein 2015), perpetuating a gendered
theoretical discourse whereby the fantasy of the masculine/male’s association with
culture and reason and the feminine/female’s association with nature and emotion is
sustained. While not disputing the role and function of the third-party function and the
need for difference, other writers have questioned the use of such gender-specific
language as it risks conflating phenomenological experience and fantasy with theoretical
abstraction (Glocer Fiorini 2010, 2017; Gyler 2010). I suggest that this gender-specific
linguistic style is problematic as it appears to claim that the patriarchal version of the
symbolic order is immutable and not open to contestation rather than one more
contingent and entwined with social practice as Judith Butler argues (2004).
Along with developments in rethinking gender and sexual difference also comes
uncertainty. We start to believe that we understand our terms, categories, and references,
only to find the definitions and understandings have been modified and we are in a
constant state of anxiety that we will never capture with sufficient acuity, subtlety, and
sensitivity the multitude of nuances we need to communicate about gender, sex, the body,
sexuality, and sexual difference. ‘Gender’ now is an out-of-focus term situated in a web of
other terms such as woman, man, femininity, masculinity, sex, sexuality, body,
embodiment, sexual difference, the social, and culture. It refers to an analytical, political,
sociological, and psychological concept. Although contemporary gender theory has
Page 8 of 20

displaced or even replaced the category of woman as central, I argue that the problem of
women and gender continues as a substantive issue—notwithstanding the conceptual
expositions of gender from feminist, queer, and trans theorists in recent decades (see
Corbett 2008 for an overview of these developments) and attempts to generate ‘new’
languages for our ever-expanding ways of living and ‘doing’ gender.
Gendered Desires and Dis-ease: A Clinical

(p. 717)
Example
I now turn to clinical material in which desires and anxieties in relation to gender and the
body are in the foreground of the clinical presentation and the work in the consulting
room. Sarah, in her twenties, sought analysis because she was troubled by separation
anxieties and her worries about the meaning of her subjectively experienced bodily
reaction (she equated her vagina and its secretions with a penis because she believed in
an out-of-awareness way that vaginal secretions were active, and activity was associated
with masculinity and men and passivity with femininity and women). She held split
contradictory self-representations: on the one hand, successful, competent, and superior
—‘cocky’ to use her term; and on the other, chronically anxious and vulnerable and with
life-long separation anxieties. Not unexpectedly, from early in her analysis, she responded
to interpretations that reflected on the analyst’s difference and the asymmetry of the
analytic relationship, as the analyst being more interested in analytic technique than in
her. She made clear her wish for a seamless relationship where everything could be
arranged on her terms (e.g. fees, appointment times, and the ending of sessions). For
example, she believed that the analyst had a difficult job because the analyst was
required to end the session without patients feeling cut off. When no seamless options
were available, it signalled her own or her object’s failure, leaving her feeling defeated
and depressed. She believed that it was impossible to manage two things at once (work/
analysis, etc.). Her wish, however, for an enclosed state with her object endlessly broke
down because it was also a terrifying state of mind where she feared losing herself.
Sarah dreamed recurrently that her body possessed the anatomical characteristics of
both genders which meant for her that she could psychically position herself as
‘complete’. For example, she introduced a dream fragment in which women not only have
vaginas but also little penises. She elaborated that the penises are baby ones that do not
work properly. Her association was to a dummy (mannequin) in a shop display. In the
working through of the dream material she became aware of her wish to have everything
but also that her belief of having everything was pretence. In another dream, she
reported that she has a penis coming out of her neck and that there is something wrong
about it. In another dream, she goes to the toilet and does not need to squat as there is a
direct flow, which is exciting because it is like a direct flow from a penis. Her associations
to the dream included her belief that men have a sensitive and responsive penis that
affords a clear pleasure. She did also note that this was her phantasy3 and she did not
know whether it was necessarily like this for men. She continued that she did believe that
Page 9 of 20

‘their sexual response is not wishy-washy like women’s … sometimes there, sometimes
not’. (p. 718) In Sarah’s psychic landscape, she attributed the penis with the power to
desire and without it she was left passively waiting to be desired. We also see that she
was burdened with holding rigidly normative views of the meaning of masculinity and
femininity and maleness and femaleness.
For Sarah, her dream work revealed her wish to have everything, including the male
sexual organ which stood in her psychic economy for the possibility of completeness and
certitude. At the same time, on another level, in her dreams, the male organ never was
quite right, never quite worked as it should, exposing her anxiety that her appropriation
was feeble. Sarah appeared to equate in her imagination maleness with potency,
adequacy, and agency. She wanted to embody these qualities, but they were elusive to
her. Without these qualities, she felt that she was left with nothing to counter her
inescapable belief that she was odd, weird, and damaged both in body and mind. Sarah
used her anxieties about her body to communicate her central conundrum, that is, her
anxiety in relation to her primary internal object. She believed the other/the analyst did
not freely recognize her as a person of worth and value; a person worthy of love. She
believed that she could only receive attention and a conditional form of love if she used
coercive means to bind the other to her. In her phantasy world she believed that if she
were perfect the other would recognize and love her. Sarah’s unconscious solution to this
dilemma was to use both her body (for example, her vaginal reactions) and genital
imagery in dreams as an attempt to position herself as omnipotently ‘complete’. The
eroticization of the phallus represented a defence against her sense of inadequacy and
damage as well as an attempt to mark her difference/to deidentify from her maternal
object. She appeared to employ a binary set of gendered assumptions whereby male
genitalia (and, by association, men) are given privileged status in her (unconscious) mind;
thereby here we see how a normatively gendered set of power relationships is reflected
and perpetuated in the unconscious mind.
Discussion: Phantasies, Metaphors, and

Conceptual Language
Sarah’s anxieties regarding identity and self-esteem are played out on a backdrop of
gendered evaluative commitments with the body recruited into giving voice to this
internal scenario. Her phantasies reflect an unequal given distinction between the sexes
that safeguards a patriarchal approach to symbolization. Yet, the body also functions/is
constructed not merely as a passive receptacle but as a corporeal force that carries the
possibility of arousal and excitement. In Sarah’s phantasy world, her body was employed
to sign her incompleteness (her sense of lack) and her belief that, if she had everything,
she would be complete (and desirable and able to desire). Sarah’s confusion and anxiety
about her body, her graphic bodily imagery employed to communicate her anxieties, and
her idea of a naturalized body used to code socially normative gender and sexual (p. 719)
representations, invite interpretative accounts of penis envy and symbolic femininity as
Page 10 of 20

lack. If we stopped at this point, however, we would be as blind as Oedipus, enacting a

transference/countertransference to confirm her anxieties that there was no way out of
her encapsulated world. I suggest everyone, like Sarah, uses consciously and
unconsciously socially normative gender and sexual representations to elaborate our
subjective experience.
Laplanche (1997) offers one of the more compelling accounts of how the other is
incorporated into the development of mind. His general theory of seduction reverses the
Freudian sources of desire by arguing that the child’s unconscious and sexuality are
formed by the unconscious desire of the other (primary relationship). While caring and
attending to her infant’s needs (feeding, soothing, bathing, and so on), the mother/
primary carer transmits unconsciously enigmatic messages which engender desire, bodily
phantasies, and identifications in the infant. This process inevitably generates an ‘excess’
of meaning; meaning that goes unrepresented and is repressed.4 This primal seduction by
the (m)other that forms the unconscious is not primarily a fantasy (as in the Freudian
Oedipus complex) but represents a real experiential situation although not an event-
based encounter (as in Freud’s seduction theory). It is not only Sarah’s but everyone’s
experience that unconscious messages from the other/culture shape our psychic life and
our way of being in the world.
For me, a problem arises when, at times, psychoanalytic theorizing can sit too
experientially close to our enigmatically influenced gendered unconscious minds. As
stated, Sarah appeared to hold no positive conception of femininity; any sense of agency
in her mind was located in the symbolic masculine. Similarly, Marilla Aisenstein (2012),
for example, when describing an identification that instils an agency of learning in
women, relies on negating but also endorsing language normatively associated with men
and the masculine; she termed this identification as virile but non-phallic (see Gyler 2017
for further discussion of this problematic). So, I suggest that this is not only a problem
with which Sarah struggles but also it captures a problem for psychoanalysts and
psychoanalytic theorizing. I want to emphasize that these issues affect, often in out-of-
awareness ways, how we think, especially how we listen, think, and speak in the
consulting room; that is, our personal meanings and preferred theories potentially impact
the transference/countertransference encounter (Hansell 2011; Kulish 2010).
Psychoanalysts are required to hold their explicit and implicit theories and their
subjective clinical encounters in a creative tension that values both the feminine and
masculine positions in order to construct a third position from which to interpret. Glocer
Fiorini (2010) argues that metatheories of the universalization of the feminine as other,
the place of lack in the riddle of sexual difference, carry risks. Depending on the implicit
theory being employed by a psychoanalyst, the gendered unconscious of the analysand
can be understood at the wrong level or misunderstood, for example in relation to
women’s jealousy and rivalry (p. 720) with men. Emilce Dio Bleichmar asks: ‘Is it literally
envy of the penis as a male genital organ, or is it symbolic materiality of the social
difference between the genders?’ (2010: 197). Putting this problematic another way: on
the one hand, hyperfeminized states (hysterical and histrionic states) can go
Page 11 of 20

unquestioned in women, and on the other, women’s ambitions can be interpreted solely in
relation to penis envy rather than a wish to expand possibilities for themselves.
Gender Variance
Trans and queer gender theory represents a site of complex intersections between
psychoanalysis and cultural theory and moves away from challenging binary
constructions in terms of the power relations between female/male, feminine/masculine
oppositions. It deconstructs binary thinking from a different trajectory—it challenges the
naturalized relationship between the anatomical body and gender identity and in doing so
questions any universalizing conceptions of woman/man. It produces a discourse that
Goldner described as gender in ‘free fall’ (2011: 159). The trans cultural gender literature
is diverse, multilayered, and bursting with contested interpretations and it is beyond the
scope of this chapter to review this literature. I shall, however, call attention briefly to
one debate that has resonance for clinical practice. The wrong-body theory5 versus the
beyond-the-binary model (that is, no recognition given to one or other categories) debate
goes to the heart of theorizing identity issues—for example is gender identity innate? Are
sex and gender socially constructed?6 Talia Bettcher argues that the beyond-the-binary
model and the wrong-body theory are both embedded in the conventionally understood
gender categories:
In the beyond-the-binary model, to say that trans people are marginal with respect
to the binary is to locate them in terms of the categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as
dominantly understood. If trans bodies can have different resistant meanings, the
decision to say of those bodies that they are ‘mixed’ or ‘in between’ is precisely to
assume a dominant interpretation. So, the problem is not the rigidity of the binary
categories but rather the starting assumption that there is only one interpretation
in the first place (the dominant one). Similarly, in the wrong-body model, to
become (p. 721) a woman or a man requires genital reconstruction surgery as a
correction of wrongness. But this is to accept a dominant understanding of what a
man or a woman is. (2014: 390)
For Bettcher, both accounts are underpinned by normative assumptions that leave the
logic of the gender binary intact.
In contrast to the cultural theory literature, the psychoanalytical contribution is relatively

limited on the question of transgender. Following Stoller (1968) and our history of
theoretical and clinical errors regarding same-sex desire, this literature does not usually
equate gender variance with psychopathology. Expressions of gender and sexuality are no
longer viewed as giving a privileged view of psychic functioning, but in some
circumstances may be recruited to communicate mental distress and disorder
(Saketopoulou 2011). To give an example from the recent psychoanalytic literature: Avgi
Saketopoulou (2014) describes the clinical case of Jenny, a five-year-old trans girl. Unlike
Sarah, described above, who experienced her form of subjectivity as wrong, Jenny
experienced her gender/body misalignment as wrong and unmirrored and misrecognized
Page 12 of 20

by those in her environment. Jenny presented herself as female from a very early age
(two years old) and became dysregulated and angry if referred to by her birth name,
Johnny. According to Saketopoulou, by age five Jenny was experiencing a seriously
depressed mood necessitating psychiatric intervention and bodily dysphoria with a near
delusional belief about her anatomical body. For Jenny, her gender identity and natal body
did not align according to her perception of family and societal expectations and norms,
producing a sense of excruciating shame, sadness, and guilt. Saketopoulou reported that
Jenny said: ‘Dad thinks I’m a boy … sometimes I wear boy clothes, so his heart doesn’t
keep breaking’ (2014: 774). The reader is left to ponder the nature of the enigmatic
messages unconsciously transmitted to Jenny in her early life that now animate her
psychic reality—but I agree that Saketopoulou is right to ‘deliberately eschew the much-
debated quest for etiological factors’ (2014: 775). While psychoanalytical methodology
may assist in (co-)creating a personal reconstructive narrative, this is not in the same
category as causal discourses. In this case study, the realness of Jenny’s anguish exposes
the psychic burden when inner reality and the normative gendered binary system collide.
For Jenny, a naturalized alignment should exist between gender identity and the natal
body.
Conceptually, this case complicates how we theorize the body (contentious because the
body has always been a fraught place for feminism). As referred to earlier, it is now usual
to see the body as both made and given; both mediated and immediate; both a corporeal
force and an idea; both never prediscursive and a bodily force that exceeds symbolization
(Dimen 2014). Saketopoulou appears to take a different step which is not uncommon in
the psychoanalytic literature theorizing trans experience, in conceptualizing the body as
naturalized body (see Dimen 2014). First, there appears an acceptance of a naturalized
link between the body and gender, that is, one’s subjective sense of gender identity
should align with one’s anatomical/natal body. Second, this link is denaturalized so that,
as Saketopoulou writes, there is an ‘undoing of the notion (p. 722) that her (Jenny’s) body
delivered gender’s verdict’ (2014: 788). The body as naturalized, denaturalized, and often
renaturalized, nevertheless remains conceived in relation to the binary modality of
thought. As Bettcher put it, greater freedom of gender representation and expression
requires the ‘starting assumptions’ of the gender binary to be reframed to allow for the
meaning of the categories of women and men to be decentred, along with the relation
between gender identity and the anatomical body.
In future accounts of decentred and deconstructed subjectivity, the task continues to be

the development of frameworks that permit a representational space for the body, and the
meaning of procreative body in psychic life, mediated through phantasy, desire, and affect
without essentializing and universalizing it. Rosemary Balsam (2012) has called attention
to the elision of the pregnant body in psychoanalytic discourse which has resulted in
diminished accounts of the representation of women. While psychoanalytic theory and
practice do not map together in any one-to-one correspondence, I suggest that this
representational gap will influence how an analysand’s associative speech is registered,
organized, and interpreted by the analyst. I have argued elsewhere (Gyler 2010) that if
Freud had recognized the vagina and its meaning, his Oedipal theory and especially his
Page 13 of 20

notion of the female Oedipal complex would have been overturned. Representations of
female genitalia and of procreativity challenge formulations of the feminine position as
only conceived as castrated/lack/absence and lead to the need to include a different
version of femininity with bodily based meanings (see Birksted-Breen 1999).
Concluding Thoughts
Cultural gender theories opened the way for critical appreciation of the gendered
discourses of psychoanalysis as well as expanded our thinking about the possible
repertoire of individual gender variations. My starting point for this chapter asked: does
the concept of gender continue as a critical category for contemporary clinical
psychoanalysis? I suggested that in exploring this question there are two contemporary
developments that might lead psychoanalysts to consider that gender as a critical
category is no longer as cogent as it once was. The first hinges on the belief that the
deconstructive and reconstructive endeavours of past decades have sufficiently troubled
and undone the heterosexist and patriarchal assumptions and values embedded in earlier
theories. The other direction relates to the increasing attention given to working with
analysands where archaic states of mind predominate their ways of being in the world.
On the other hand, I suggest that gender enters clinical practice through the individual
gendered subjectivity of the analyst and the analysand and through gendered discourses.
The analysts bring conscious and unconscious assumptions, biases, and theoretical
commitments that influence their receptivity and countertransference responses and
inform their style of participation. For analysands, questions of gender identity may or
may not be the site of maximal anxiety, but gender anxieties may be expressed, for
(p. 723) example, through the inevitable anxiety and loss associated with gendered
subjectivity, the social suffering of individuals with variant and resistant gender identities,
and the recruitment of gender expressions and gendered phantasies to communicate
unmourned mental states and distress. Nevertheless, the question of gender is no longer
a self-evident arbiter of psychopathology for contemporary practice.
As we grapple with these questions we, as individuals, can think in terms of gender
categories or resist notions of categorization, especially normative versions. Problems
can arise when ideas about gender carry rigid and fixed meanings which dispense
negative and destructive burdens. I suggest that (leaving aside the debate as to whether
he was describing or/and prescribing) Freud’s ambivalently held conventional equation of
male equals strong and female equals weak continues to reverberate in the psyches of
men and women, either as conformity or resistance or in mostly combined and
contradictory ways. Perhaps it is inevitable that, regardless of our conscious intentions,
the orthodoxy of this equation unavoidably echoes in the consulting room both in the
conscious and unconscious minds of patients and analysts alike because we all frequently
employ socially normative gender and sexual representations to organize and elaborate
our subjective experience. This constrains the ways we see, listen, think, and talk (that is,
we construct meaning through frameworks; there is no view from ‘nowhere’). Everyone is
Page 14 of 20

challenged to remain in an open-ended and uncharted space which, at times, feels

unbearably unmoored. Chodorow puts it this way: ‘In our [psychoanalysts’] thinking
about gender, as in our thinking about other aspects of psychological functioning, it is
always so much easier to have set theories to bring to bear on what we hear, rather than
stay with uncertainty’ (1995: 298). Our knowledge of individuals is not exemplary. While
the challenge is to remain open to not knowing, we also need to remember that the
gendered binary of Western thought inevitably exerts its pull and problematizes the
representational space for the feminine, same-sex desire, and the body.
Psychoanalysis offers rich descriptive and experience-near accounts of the workings of

the mind and meaning-making. The Western gendered binary structure of thought shapes
the phantasies, metaphors, and ideas used to make meaning. In theorizing, it can be a
complicated task to disentangle the different levels of understandings; phenomenological
accounts and conceptual abstraction can be conflated. Analysands’ unconscious
phantasies which might employ normative social values and family arrangements can be
transcribed literally into conceptual and theoretical language. I suggest that the effect of
these discourses is to both produce and be productive of heteronormative frameworks. To
probe these discourses is not to elide the question of difference but to acknowledge, as
Scott (1999) argues, the need for systematic criticism of the operations of categorical
difference with its hierarchical inclusions and exclusions and to refuse any ‘truth’ implied
in these constructions not in the name of equality based on sameness but rather an
equality that recognizes differences.
In this chapter, I started with the question as to whether gender had been sufficiently
deconstructed in our discourses to allow the contemporary clinician to be less ‘troubled’
by questions of gender. I have attempted to indicate that the question of gender needs to
be contextualized in the broader preoccupations for psychoanalysis. I suggest the (p. 724)
question of gender remains of crucial concern for representing human possibilities and
all three of Kristeva’s attitudes continue to require our ongoing attention. To borrow from
Donna Haraway a phrase used in a different context, we need to ‘stay with the
trouble’ (2016) to recognize with pleasure rather than fear the otherness of difference.
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London: Karnac.
Glocer Fiorini, L. (2017). Sexual Difference in Debate. London: Karnac.
Goldner, V. (2011). ‘Trans: Gender in free fall’. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 21(2): 159–171.
Green, A. (1995). ‘Has sexuality anything to do with psychoanalysis?’ The International

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Hansell, J. (2011). ‘Where sex was. There shall gender be? The dialectics of
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Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in Chthulucene. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Harris, A. (1997). ‘Aggression, envy and ambition: Circulating tensions in women’s

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Harris, A. (2005). Gender as Soft Assembly. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Horney, K. (1925/1999). ‘The flight from womanhood: The masculinity complex in women,
as viewed by men and women’. In R. Grigg, D. Hecq, and C. Smith (eds), Female
Sexuality: The Early Psychoanalytical Controversies (pp. 107–121). London: Rebus.
Isaacs, S. (1948). ‘The nature and function of phantasy’. The International Journal of
Jones, E. (1927). ‘The early development of female sexuality’. In R. Grigg, D. Hecq, and C.
Smith (eds), Female Sexuality: The Early Psychoanalytical Controversies. London: Rebus
Press.
Joseph, B. (2013). ‘Here and now: my perspective’. The International Journal of

Psychoanalysis 94(1): 1–5. (p. 726)
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Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945. London: Karnac.
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Laplanche, J. (1997). ‘The theory of seduction and the problem of the other’. The
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Mitchell and the Lateral Axis: Twenty-First-Century Psychoanalysis and Feminism. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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plight of the perplexed clinician’. Gender and Psychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal
1(1): 45–74.
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of terms’. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 1(4): 397–402.
Oakley, A. (1972). Sex, Gender and Society. London: Temple Smith.
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Has the future been foretold’. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 82(3): 557–585.
Person, E. S. (1999). The Sexual Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Roussillon, R. (2011). Primitive Agony and Symbolization. London: Karnac.
Rubin, G. (1975). ‘The traffic in women: Notes of the “political economy” of sex’. In R.
Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press.
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in work with gender variant children’. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 21(2): 192–209.
Saketopoulou, A. (2014). ‘Mourning the body as bedrock: Developmental considerations

in treating transsexual patients analytically’. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association 62(5): 773–806.
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Notes:
(1) [Eds: ‘Enigmatic signifier’ is a term (taken by Jean Laplanche from Jacques Lacan) to
mean language which transmits meaning unconsciously, such meaning being largely
composed of sexual desire that has been repressed.]
(2) [Eds: For an extended discussion of Freud’s conception of sexuality, see Sandford (this
volume).]
(3) The ‘ph’ spelling of phantasy is used to denote the Kleinian concept which refers to the
‘primary content of unconscious mental processes’ (Isaacs 1948: 81). This definition
extends the notion of fantasy as wish-fulfilment.
(4) [Eds: For a critical expository account of Laplanche’s theory of enigmatic signifiers,
see Fletcher, J. (2007). ‘Gender, sexuality and the theory of seduction’. In L. Braddock and
M. Lacewing, The Academic Face of Psychoanalysis (pp. 224–40). London: Routledge.]
(5) According to Bettcher (2014), the wrong-body theory can be schematically conceived
by a weaker version proposing proper alignment with an innate gender identity and a
stronger version suggesting ‘real’ sex determined by gender identity. Nevertheless, the
implications drawn from this theory for a lived life are mixed: for example, some cultural
theorists argue that body reassignment surgery is medicalizing the body, with all the
associated dangers of historical interventions into the body/sexuality to ‘naturalize’ and
constrain difference and otherness; while others see the ‘wrong-body theory’ as a
possible route to recognition that bypasses experience of doubt and blame and accepts
and supports medical and surgical interventions.
(6) Bettcher (2014) makes the critical point that social constructions are no less ‘real’
than apparent ‘givens’.
Louise Gyler
The Australian Psychoanalytical Society, Australia
Page 20 of 20

Political Philosophy in Freud: War, Destruction, and the Critical Faculty

Political Philosophy in Freud: War, Destruction, and the
Critical Faculty
Judith Butler

Freud’s reflections on death and the death drive form a proper part of political
philosophy. If the idea of a self-governing polis requires that citizens maintain a set of
social bonds, then the threat to social bonds also threatens the possibility of self-rule.
Freud identifies a destructive impulse or drive as part of the human psyche, clarifying
that it has the specific capacity to destroy social bonds. This chapter considers the
importance of ambivalence as a permanent feature of love relations and those social
relations that form the basis of political life. It argues that a political effort to counter
destruction must call upon the resources of melancholia, including the manic refusal of
tyranny and a normalizing reality principle. Defending the idea of militant pacifism, the
argument here suggests that aggression can be—and must be—part of the strategy
against violence and the sustainable future of political life.
Keywords: death, death drive, love, Eros, politics, political philosophy, melancholia, mania, pacifism, war
I fear I may be abusing your interest, which is after all concerned with the
prevention of war and not with our theories. Nevertheless I should like to linger
for a moment over our destructive drive, whose popularity is by no means equal to
its importance.
Freud to Einstein, 1932
Page 1 of 26
Subscriber: Tulane University; date: 15 January 2019

Introduction
In general, Freud is not considered to be a political philosopher although some of his
insights have been brought into philosophical positions that seek to address political
issues. Sometimes political metaphors turn out to have special importance to certain
views he has enunciated. So, for instance, his work on repression makes use of the
language of censorship, though, strictly speaking, there is no state or institution that
directs censorship when ideas or wishes are censored. The ego is occasionally described
as an ‘institution’, giving it a social status and potential political significance. On several
occasions, he remarks on the dangers of nationalism, the phantasmatic character of
citizenship, the problem of authority, the origins of violence and war, and the prospects
for peace. At work here is an operative metaphor of the psyche as a legal system unto
itself, passing judgement, asserting authority, banishing foreign elements, and dealing out
forms of punishment. In his ‘Thoughts for the times on war and death’, written in 1915
and in the midst of the First World War, Freud reflected on the bonds that hold a
community together as well as the destructive powers that break those bonds (Freud
1915b). By the time he develops the death drive, first in 1920 and then more fully in the
following decade, he becomes increasingly concerned with the destructive capacities of
human beings. What he calls sadism, aggression, and destructiveness come to be primary
representatives of the death drive, which receives its most mature formulation in
Civilization and its Discontents in 1930. The ‘unconquerable’ drive takes on a new form as
Freud develops a dualistic metaphysics, counter-posing Eros, the force that creates ever
more complex human bonds, to Thanatos, the force that breaks them down (1930: 86). A
durable political form presumes that social bonds can remain relatively in place, but how,
then, do polities deal with the destructive force that Freud describes?
Political philosophy traditionally seeks to understand concepts such as justice, freedom,

and equality, but usually only in the context of a broader question: what is the best way
for humans to govern themselves in common? It presumes that polities are established
and maintained, and that laws and norms exist to regulate these forms of shared
existence or common life. So when we ask about that best way for human beings to
govern themselves, and we look for state structures or forms of governance that will
answer that question, we make several key assumptions. First, we presume that humans
are in some sense disposed to govern themselves in common, or that they can become so
disposed. Either they have a concern for others, are part of a general will, have a concern
with what is best for all, or have a social and political sense of having to find a way of
being one single self among many, or they can be educated or compelled to develop an
orientation of this kind. We tend to presume as well that the particular relations
established within any given polity are oriented towards the continuation of the polity
except in those cases where the polity proves to be so thoroughly unworkable or unjust
that it has to be dissolved in favour of another regime. If Aristotle is right that human
beings are political animals, that they only properly know and express themselves as
human in the context of political life, then it follows that the particular form that human
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relations assume within a polity directly bears on the question of whether what is human
about them can know and express itself within that polity. For humans to govern
themselves and to do that together seems to presuppose that they are already related to
one another enough for that prospect to be realized, or that they can become related to
one another in the course of governing. The possibility of realizing political life not only
assumes a shared life, but a set of social bonds that reflects a commitment to
perpetuating that shared life, finding a mode of governance, and participating in the
process of governing themselves.
The effort to understand how a social bond is forged and maintained leads us to Freud’s
view that it is Eros that compels us to create and sustain human bonds, even to elaborate
increasingly complex human bonds. Thus, according to that view, polities that depend on
the possibility of continuing and expanding increasingly complex human ties may be said
to rely upon Eros in some way. If they presume that people will be oriented towards
maintaining and cultivating such ties, then those polities—and the political philosophies
by which they are conceptually grasped—presume the workability of those bonds and
must, as a result, anticipate their breakability as well. In his reflections on war, for
instance, the breakability of those bonds becomes for Freud a pressing matter for
reflection.
Freud on War
Freud’s reflections on the First World War led to successive insights on destructiveness.
In 1915, Freud has not yet introduced the notion of the death drive—which will have as
one of its primary aims the deterioration of social bonds—but he does register an
impression of overwhelming and unprecedented human destructiveness in his time:
… the war in which we had refused to believe broke out and brought—
disillusionment. Not only is it more bloody and more destructive than any war of
other days, because of the enormously increased perfection of weapons of attack
and defence; it is at least as cruel, as embittered, as implacable as any that has
preceded it. It disregards all the restrictions known as International Law, which in
peace-time the states had bound themselves to observe; it ignores the
prerogatives of the wounded and the medical service, the distinction between civil
and military sections of the population, the claims of private property. It tramples
in blind fury on all that comes in its way, as though there were to be no future and
no peace among men after it is over. It cuts all the common bonds between the
contending peoples, and threatens to leave a legacy of embitterment that will
make any renewal of those bonds impossible for a long time to come
(Freud 1915b: 278–9).
Page 3 of 26

Freud’s remarks are noteworthy for many reasons, chief among them the sense of shift in
the history of destructiveness: destructiveness has not been known quite like this before.
Although the development of new weapons made the destruction greater than in other
wars, the level of cruelty strikes Freud as the same, suggesting that the problem is not
that humans have become more cruel, but that technology has allowed that cruelty to
produce greater destruction than before. A war without those weapons would cause less
destruction but would engage no lesser amounts of cruelty. So if we are tempted to say
that cruelty is itself augmented by technology, Freud appears to resist that view:
destruction takes on new and historically variable forms, but cruelty remains the same.
Thus, human cruelty alone does not account for all destructiveness—technology exercises
its agency as well. But the distinctly human capacity for destructiveness in human beings
follows from the ambivalent psychic constitution of the human subject. The question of
what can be done to check destructiveness thus engages ambivalence and technology,
especially in the context of war.
Although it is commonly supposed that war-making is the specific activity of nations, the
blind rage that motivates war destroys the very social bonds that make nations possible.
Of course, it can fortify the nationalism of a nation, producing a provisional coherence
bolstered by war and enmity, but it also erodes the very bonds that make politics possible.
Not every polity is a nation state, and the nation cannot be reduced to the polity. What
Freud’s analysis allows us to understand is that if a polity depends on accords with other
polities, or if it depends on laws, including those laws that govern military action, then
war imperils those accords and those laws. In fact, war tends to be oblivious to key
dimensions of governance such as international law and human rights, the rights of
nations, the obligation to protect the lives of civilians against harm, and rights to private
property—to place them in suspension, or to calculate on what forms of criminality will be
tolerated by the international community. The power of destruction unleashed by war
breaks social bonds and produces anger, revenge, and distrust (‘embitterment’) such that
it becomes unclear whether reparation is possible, undermining not only those relations
that may have been built in the past, but also the future possibility of peaceful
coexistence. Although Freud is clearly reflecting on the First World War in his remarks
here, he is also making claims about war in general: war ‘tramples … on all that comes its
way’. Here he is suggesting that breaking down the barriers that keep inhibitions in place
is, in fact, one aim of war—military personnel have to be given licence to kill. Whatever
the explicit strategic or political aims of a war may be, they prove to be weak in
comparison with the aims of destruction; what is destroyed first in war are the very
restrictions imposed on destructive licence. If we can rightly speak about the unstated
‘aim’ of war, it is neither primarily to alter the political landscape nor to establish a new
political order but, rather, to destroy the social basis of politics itself. Of course, such a
claim may seem overstated if we believe, for instance, in just wars, wars waged against
fascist or genocidal regimes in the name of democracy. But even then, the explicitly
stated goal of war-waging and the destructiveness unleashed by war are never quite the
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same. Even the so-called ‘just war’ runs the risk of a destructiveness that exceeds its
stated aims, its deliberate purpose.
This last claim might at first appear perplexing since governments do give reasons for
going to war: the expansion or recovery of territory and natural resources, the defences
of people or land, the restoration of honour, patriotism, and the like. And yet, Freud
makes two claims that call this account into question. First, whatever the public and
stated aims of war may be, another aim is always also at work, one that Freud refers to
here as ‘a blind fury’. Second, this fury, motivating and even unifying a people or a nation
at war, also tears the people and the nation apart, working against whatever intentional,
self-preserving, or self-enhancing aims they may have. The aims of this sort of rage
include first and foremost overcoming existing inhibitions and restrictions imposed on
destruction itself, breaking social bonds—understood in part as blocks against
destruction—in favour of increased destructiveness, reproducing destruction into the
foreseeable future, which may turn out to be either a future of destruction or a way of
destroying the future itself. It is from within the stated, local, and provisional aims for
war-making that another aim or indeed ‘a drive’ can take hold, a destructiveness without
limit. Even as a group or a nation may achieve temporary cohesion in war, rallying behind
its explicit aims to defend the country or to destroy the enemy, something can form—or
take hold—within that rallying that exceeds any of those explicitly acknowledged aims,
not only breaking the social bonds of the groups waging war but those targeted by war as
well. The idea of ‘blind fury’ that Freud takes from Greek tragedy prefigures what he will
come to call the death drive just five years later. Already in 1915, what concerns him is
the power that the death drive assumes once it is amplified with destructive technology to
wreak destruction across the world, and to destroy the very social bonds that have the
power to keep destructiveness in check. By 1930, Freud will become more explicitly
concerned with the possibility of genocide, as evidenced in Civilization and its
Discontents. There he writes:
The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what
extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of
their communal life by the human instinct (Trieb) of aggression and self-
destruction [Agressions und Selbstvernichtungstrieb]. It may be that in this
respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained
control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would
have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man
(Freud 1930: 145).
He appends a line to that paragraph in 1931 that calls upon ‘eternal Eros … to assert
himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary’, noting that no one can
foresee how successful that effort will be (Freud 1930: 145). Freud is clearly looking to
find a possibility in the life of the drives to counter the horrific destructiveness that he
saw in the First World War and that he senses is returning to Europe in greater
proportions in the 1930s. Freud does not turn to history or to empirical examples in his
Page 5 of 26

effort to understand destructiveness, but to what he calls the ‘drives’—a move that seems
speculative at best. So why look to the life of the drive? For Freud, the conscious reasons
for acting that groups give to themselves are not the same as the underlying motivations
that guide their action. As a result, reflection on how best to avert destruction must do
something other than provide an argument acceptable to rational thought—it must
somehow appeal to the drive, or find a way of working with—and against—that propulsive
destructiveness that can lead to war.1
One sceptical position towards drive theory results from a mistaken translation of
‘instinct’ for ‘Trieb’ in Freud’s writing. Although Instinkt and Trieb are both used in
Freud’s work, the latter appears more often, and the death drive (Todestrieb) is never
‘the death instinct’. The Strachey translation of the Complete Works has consistently
translated both terms as ‘instinct’, giving rise to a biologistic understanding of the term
in English-language literature and, in some cases, a view that drives, in Freud, follow a
form of biological determinism. Freud makes clear in an essay entitled ‘Instincts and their
Vicissitudes’ (Triebe und Triebschicksale) but that should be called ‘Drives and their
Destinies’ that the drive (Trieb, meaning ‘push’) belongs neither exclusively to the realm
of biology nor to a fully autonomous psychic domain; rather, it functions as a threshold
concept (ein Grenzbegriff) between the somatic and ideational spheres (1915a).2 Over
and against a biologistic reduction of the drive, he argues at one point that ‘drives’
belong to the poetic dimension of his own work.3 In fact, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
he affirms that figurative language is peculiar to psychology and to scientific language
itself, suggesting that efforts to provide biological explanations might not be altogether
successful in purging figurative language from their operation. Freud’s point, however, is
to call into question the idea that drives are biological sources of action that act in
unknown and deterministic ways. It seems much more plausible to conclude that drives
function as powerful motivations that become manifest in feeling and actions that cannot
be fully understood through conscious reflection alone.
Page 6 of 26

The Death Drive
Until 1920, Freud maintained that psychic life was governed by pleasure, sexuality, or
libido, and it was only when he encountered forms of war neurosis that he began to
consider that there were symptoms characterized by compulsive repetition that could not
be explained by wish-fulfilment or a drive towards gratification. So it was in the wake of
war that Freud began to formulate the death drive, prompted as well by his consideration
of forms of destructiveness with a repetitive quality that seemed distinct from all erotic
satisfaction (what he will later refer to as ‘non-erotic aggressivity’ in Civilization and its
Discontents (1930: 120)). In the first formulation of the death drive in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, Freud sought to find an explanation for forms of repetitive behaviour
that did not appear to be guided by satisfaction. He had encountered patients suffering
from war neurosis who relived traumatic scenes of violence and loss in ways that bore no
clear resemblance to forms of repetition linked with libido and wish-fulfilment. There
appeared to be no satisfaction linked to this kind of uncontrollable repetition of suffering,
progressively deteriorating the condition of the patient. At this stage, Freud developed
the first version of the death drive according to which the organism seeks a return to its
primary inorganic state, a state relieved of all excitation. Indeed, every human organism
seeks to return to this origin such that the trajectory of a life turns out to be no more than
a ‘circuitous route toward death’ (1920: 38). 4 As much as there is something in humans
that seeks to fulfil wishes and to preserve its own organic life, there is also something
that operates to the side of wish-fulfilment, seeking to negate the organic conditions of
life, whether that life belongs to another or to oneself.
At this point Freud effectively calls into question one of the key tenets of classical liberal
political philosophy, namely, that the primacy of self-preservation functions as a
presupposition in the formation of social groups and forms of government. If one were to
argue in a Hobbesian vein that self-interest or self-preservation leads humans into war,
one would be neglecting the very dimension of destructiveness that Freud seeks to
foreground, one that potentially works against both self-interest and self-preservation.
Freud’s point is important since it would seem that political forms depend upon the
preservation of social bonds, so if something works to destroy those bonds, it works to
undermine the basis of political community as well. The preservation of social bonds
presumes that beings seek to preserve themselves not only as individuals, but as social
creatures for whom preservation depends upon ongoing social relations. The workability
of this claim presumes, however, that self-preservation is bound up with social relations,
that is, that the ‘self’ who is preserved is defined in fundamental ways by its social
relations and not only or primarily as an individual.
If a being whose primary aim is self-preservation has to live with others who have the
same primary aim, then how do they seek (a) to secure the preservation of each other’s
lives, and (b) develop forms of concern for society as a whole? One answer to that
dilemma has been to show that society itself secures self-preservation, and so fulfils that
primary aim of human life. What difference does it make that Freud now posits another
Page 7 of 26

tendency within the human psyche that seeks to return it to a time before the
individuated life of the human organism? If self-destruction is as equally powerful as self-
preservation, what implications does that have for the political forms in which people
live? His reflections on destruction focus on the possibility of the destruction of other
lives, especially under conditions of war, in which the technology of weaponry amplifies
the powers of human destructiveness. Those who suffered war neurosis were living out
the psychic consequences of war, but they also became the occasion for Freud to consider
how destruction works not only against others, but against oneself. War neurosis
continues the suffering of war in the form of traumatic symptoms characterized by
repetition. This form of repetition serves no wish-fulfilment, progressively deteriorating
the condition of the patient with no end in sight. Freud identifies this as the repetitive
character of destruction. In the patient, it eventuates in social isolation; more broadly
considered, it not only serves to weaken the social bonds that hold societies together, but
also to deteriorate the human organism, taking form as a self-destruction that can
culminate in suicide. Libido or sexuality has a reduced or vanishing role in this form of
destruction, and the social bonds without which political life proves impossible are
shredded in its midst. Of course, there are communities and bonds of solidarity that are
formed under conditions of war, apparently vitalized by shared—transitively
communicated—aims of destruction. We see this across the political spectrum, social
bonds formed in resistance or in opposition, taking up arms to achieve their goals. The
more general point, however, is that certain conditions of destruction erode and
potentially destroy even those forms of social relations, since trauma disconnects a
subject from itself and from the other. When this happens on a large scale, the social
basis of political life is imperilled; repair and renewal are indefinitely suspended.
Towards the end of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud asserts that every human
organism in some sense seeks its own death, and that this tendency cannot be derived
from the sexual drives. The evidence for the death drive, he argues, can additionally be
found within sexual sadism and, more generally, within the phenomenon of
sadomasochism.5 Although the sexualization of the death drive can subordinate its
destructiveness to what Freud regards as the non-destructive aims of sexuality, the death
drive can come to predominate—a situation that would be illustrated clearly with sexual
violence. Both self-destruction and the destruction of the other are potentially at work
within sadomasochism, suggesting for Freud that a drive separate from the sexual drive
can nevertheless operate through it. Fugitive and opportunistic, the death drive seizes
upon sexual desire without properly or explicitly making itself known. A sexual relation
that begins with the desire to join together is interrupted by myriad forms of self-
destruction that seem manifestly counter to the stated aims of the lovers. The
disconcerting quality of acts that are clearly self-destructive or that destroy the bonds
that one wants most to keep is but one ordinary form of wreckage by which the death
drive makes itself known in sexual life.
Page 8 of 26

In Civilization and its Discontents (1930), another text concerned with the potentially
destructive effects of war, sadism is once again introduced as the ‘representative’ of the
death drive, but in this late work the death drive is more explicitly linked with the
concepts of aggression and destructiveness. These latter are no longer understood as
operating exclusively in the context of sexual sadomasochism for, as Freud remarks, ‘we
can no longer overlook the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness’ (1930:
120). Freud is registering the escalation of bellicosity and nationalism across Europe as
well as the strengthening of anti-Semitism. These forms of aggression are not linked with
pleasure or with the satisfactions that belong to pleasure: ‘This aggressive instinct [drive]
is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct [drive] which we have
found alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion with it’ (Freud 1930: 122).
Even though what he now calls ‘Eros’ and ‘Thanatos’ do not usually occur separately, they
nevertheless have contrary aims: Eros seeks to combine or synthesize separate units
within society, bringing individuals together into groups, but also bringing groups
together in the service of larger social and political forms. Thanatos drives those same
units apart, and even drives each unit apart from itself. So in the very action that seeks to
establish and build a social bond a counter-tendency exists that just as readily seeks to
take it apart, i.e. I love you; I hate you; I cannot live without you; I will die if I continue to
live with you.
Freud has two different ways of approaching this problem in relation to love. On the one
hand, Freud insists throughout his work on the constitutive ambivalence in all love
relations. This becomes clear in his chapter on ‘emotional ambivalence’ in Totem and
Taboo (1913), but also in ‘Mourning and melancholia’, where the loss of the loved one is
coupled with aggression (Freud 1917: 248–52). On that model, love is itself ambivalent
(Freud 1917: 250). On the other hand, ‘love’ is another name for ‘Eros’ and names only
one pole in the polarity of emotional ambivalence. There is love and there is hate. So
either love names the ambivalent constellation of love and hate, or it is but one pole of
that bipolar structure. Freud’s own position seems itself to be ambivalent, perhaps
rhetorically yielding further proof of his claim. Indeed, the paradoxical formulation is
never fully resolved in his writings, remaining fecund throughout. It surfaces
symptomatically in the late work: love is that which binds one person to another, but love,
by virtue of its inherent ambivalence, contains the potential to destroy social bonds. Or, at
least, if it is not love that destroys those bonds, there is a destructive force that is in love
or attaches itself to love, that moves human creatures towards destruction and self-
destruction, including the destruction of that which they most love.6
The fact that Freud’s mind remains unsettled on the question of whether love contains or
opposes this destructiveness is a sign of a problem that continues as he attempts to think
not only about intimate relations of love but the psychology of the mass and its
destructive potential. Is the destructive capacity to be found within the bonds that hold
such groups together—a sort of destructive tie, or is it rather a power that ‘cuts all the
common bonds’ (Freud 1915b: 279)—an antisocial impetus that tears at social relations?
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What happens in groups, large crowds, or what Freud calls ‘masses’, such that
destructive aims can take hold as they do? Although Freud does not lead with this
question in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), it surfaces insistently
throughout the course of that text, more aptly translated as Mass Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego.7 Freud notes in that text the tendency for individuals to yield their
judgement or ‘critical faculty’ in the midst of groups, especially those compelled by a
leader, and engaged in forms of mutual excitation by the prospect of violence.
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The Critical Faculty and the Mass
In his discussion of Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Freud
seeks to take account of what Le Bon calls ‘the invincible power which allows [the
individual] to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept
under restraint’ (Le Bon 2002: 15). The individual is ‘less disposed to check himself’ in an
anonymous crowd (2002: 15). Freud is sceptical about whether individuals suddenly
acquire new attributes in the midst of a crowd or whether, as seems more likely, what
emerges are unconscious impulses that are suddenly less restrained by conscience or a
sense of responsibility in the context of the group. In 1921 at least, his view is that
conscience is a matter of ‘social anxiety’—wondering what others think and feeling
constrained by their judgements (Freud 1921: 75). A crowd that encourages its members
not to worry about what others think will be relieved of inhibition and social anxiety alike.
Freud finds two interconnected descriptive terms in Le Bon quite useful for
understanding what crowds do under conditions of disinhibition. The first is contagion,
where the suggestion is made that contagious affect within crowds belong to an ‘hypnotic
order’ in which the individual sacrifices his own interests for those of the collective
(Freud 1921: 75). The second point is related, and it has to do with suggestibility,
understood as the subjective condition of yielding to an external impression. Whereas Le
Bon relies on terms like ‘magnetic attraction’ to explain this phenomenon, Freud remarks
that those who are under the influence of suggestion—and so still within an extended
region of hypnosis—undertake actions with what Le Bon calls an ‘irresistible impetuosity’
that is increased in the midst of crowds (Freud 1921: 76). So contagion is the central
phenomenon, and suggestibility takes a more heightened form when coupled with
contagion. But perhaps most importantly, the crowd is governed by unconscious motives,
and those are brought forth by grand gestures: powerful images, exaggerations, and
repetitions—‘saying the same thing again and again’ (Freud 1921: 78). The crowd expects
a tendency towards violence. In Freud’s words, ‘it wants to be ruled and oppressed’.
Precisely because Le Bon does not acknowledge any repressed content breaking out in
violence, it becomes Freud’s task to rethink how and why disinhibition is related to the
unconscious. Freud disputes the notion that there might be hereditary grounds for the
desire for an authority to which a crowd might submit. In this way, herds of animals and
groups of people behave the same way: ‘a group is an obedient herd’ (1921: 81). Yet
Freud makes clear that the mass can find a leader only if the leader himself is ‘held in
fascination by a strong faith (in an idea)’—only by exhibiting and communicating his own
powerful belief can the leader compel the powerful belief of the mass (1921: 81). Freud
writes of the leader, ‘he must possess a strong and imposing will, which, the group, which
has no will of its own, can accept from him’ (1921: 81). In effect, his will becomes their
ether—the pure essence that the gods breathe. What Freud does not immediately say, but
adds later, is that as much as the mass accepts his will, the leader’s will is strengthened
by their belief.8 The result of attributing such powers to a leader is the effect of ‘prestige’
and what Freud describes as the paralysis of ‘the critical faculty’ (1921: 81). Later, he
remarks that within a crowd, perceiving someone else with heightened affect evokes a
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sympathetic response—a form of primitive sympathy—that induces in the perceived

person the same affect. This compulsion becomes stronger the more heightened the
affect, and the affect heightens precisely through the sorts of contagious communications
that take place in crowds. Relying on the work of William McDougall on the group mind
(2015), Freud remarks that ‘the most remarkable and also the most important result of
the formation of a group is the “exaltation or intensification of emotion produced in every
member of it”’—the result of a ‘direct induction’ of heightened affect (1921: 84). As a
consequence, ‘the individual loses his power of criticism’ (Freud 1921: 84). Then again,
Freud reiterates McDougall: ‘the collective lowering of intellectual ability is avoided by
withdrawing the performance of intellectual tasks from the group and reserving them for
individual members of it’. And then Freud refines the formulation: qualities are conferred
upon the mass ‘which were characteristic of the individual’, and those qualities are the
very ones that have been effaced by the formation of the mass.
So Freud tells us that to some degree the formation of a mass makes us stupid or, rather,
people congregating lose their critical faculty in concert because they have relegated the
task of thought to someone else, or perhaps to no one, letting the mass replace the
individual, savouring self-loss over the travails of individuation (1921: 78). Further, the
heightening of affect correlates with the ‘collective inhibition of intellectual
functioning’ (Freud 1921: 82). So though we think of mass formation as providing the
condition for letting inhibitions go, the mass actually strengthens one sort of inhibition,
the inhibition of critical thought. Where the inhibition of antisocial impulse once reigned,
the inhibition of thought now prevails, loosening the inhibition on antisocial impulse. We
have not, it seems, overcome inhibition—as seemed to be the promise—but only shifted
its locus and, as it takes form as disinhibition, its operation is inverted.
Freud’s view is that critical thought has the power to inhibit forms of affective excitation
and inversely, heightened affect can inhibit the critical faculty. So the task that emerges
for Freud is less to strengthen the powers of inhibition in general than to strengthen the
inhibiting power of the critical faculty. When that heightened affect becomes a form of
group cruelty, is the obligatory task to strengthen the social bonds apparently supported
by love (strengthening Eros against its adversary Thanatos) or to strengthen and sharpen
the critical agency that will in The Ego and the Id (1923) come to be identified with the
superego? Here Freud is interested not only in diagnosing forms of crowd conduct that
portend destruction, but also finding and strengthening whatever capacities humans have
to counter such formations. Whereas love is sometimes identified as the counter-force to
destruction, other times it seems it is this ‘critical faculty’ that is most important. In
Group Psychology the ‘critical faculty’ describes various forms of deliberation and
reflection, but the next year it takes on a new meaning and is associated with the
superego, a form of cruelty unleashed upon the ego. Eventually, the superego will become
identified as ‘a pure culture of the death drive’, at which point the way to counter
destruction is through deliberate forms of self-restraint, i.e. directing destructiveness
against one’s own destructive impulse (i.e. self-restraint is a deliberate and reflexive form
of destructiveness directed against the externalization of destructive aims) (Freud 1923:
53).9 In other words, the check against unleashing destructive impulses which earlier
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could be described as an inhibition is set up as a psychic mechanism once Freud

introduces the superego. The task of the superego is to direct its destructive power
against its destructive impulses. The problem with this solution, of course, is that an
unbridled operation of the superego can lead to suicide, converting the destruction of the
other into the destruction of the self. On the one hand, the ‘critical faculty’ seems
attentive to the consequences of action, monitoring forms of expression and action to
prevent injurious consequences. On the other hand, as an expression of the death drive,
its aim is potentially destructive of the ego itself. A moderate form of self-checking can
explode into unrestrained suicidal self-beratement, but only if the death drive itself
remains unchecked. Paradoxically, this means that the critical agency upon which one
relies to check destructive impulses can become the instrument of a destructive impulse,
imperilling the life of the ego itself. Thus, the self-preserving tendencies of Eros have to
be applied to the death drive as a check on its destructive operation. If the superego
works destruction against the ego to inhibit its destructive expression, it still traffics in
destruction, but the imperilled object is no longer the other or the world, but the ego
itself. Thus, the critical faculty is of limited use in checking destruction, since it cannot
check the destruction that operates through its superegoic form. For that, a
countervailing force is needed, one that pursues self-preservation and, more generally,
the preservation of life. Is that force to be called love, or is it mania? Does it involve
disidentification, or the adoption of a neurotic position that establishes a critical distance
from the sadistic exhilarations that run through society?
Of course, the task of checking uninhibited forms of destructiveness is not an easy one,
mired as it is in certain constitutive paradoxes. If the superego were sufficient, we would
have no problem, but once the superego is understood as potentially destructive as well,
there seems to be no way out of the circle of destructiveness. What difference does it
make if we return to the mass psychology to pose this question? For the problem is not
how the superego is related to impulse (id) or the ego (reality principle), but what
happens within groups: what are the perils and the promises? How does a return to this
focus resituate our discussion of destructiveness?
Freud probes these questions in earnest in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
a year or so before the development of the theory of the superego: What is the
mechanism by which the disinhibition of cruelty takes place? How do we account for its
workings? And what, for instance, does disinhibition have to do with identification, the
process by which group identities are formed? When we say that a wave of feeling passes
through a crowd, what do we mean? Or when certain kinds of passions are unleashed in a
crowd that would otherwise remain unexpressed, how do we account for that expression?
Does ‘unleashing’ mean that a desire was always there, but simply held in check? Or is
‘unleashing’ always structured, and so giving form to the desire or rage as it emerges? If
we say that an elected official has licenced a new wave of misogyny, or that he has made
widespread racism permissible, what sort of agency do we attribute to him? Was it there
all along, or has he brought it into being? Or was it there in certain forms and now his
speech and action give it new forms? In either case, impulse is structured either by the
power by which it is repressed that designates and shapes it in some way or by that
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power by which it is ‘liberated’ which endows it with specific meaning in relation to the
prior repression. If we were simply to accept a hydraulic model or one that holds that a
quantity of ‘energy’ is released when inhibition is lifted, then the impulse is the same
whether it is inhibited or expressed. But if it matters through what means the inhibition
has been enforced, and that means crafts the content of the repressed, then the
emergence of the formerly inhibited impulse does not simply push aside the inhibiting
force; rather, it wages an orchestrated attack on that form of power, debunking its
reasons, its legitimacy, it claims. The impulse that emerges is thus worked over with
interpretations and no raw energy, defined in relation to prohibition and licence. It has
actively contested the moral and political claims that have informed and supported the
inhibition; it has worked assiduously against the critical faculty—not just moral
judgements and political evaluations, but the general character of reflective thought that
make both possible. The impulse seeks to disperse and nullify moral self-restrictions, the
basis for what Freud comes to call the superego itself. It may seem that against such a
challenge to the superego, the task is to shore up moral restrictions, especially those that
the self imposes on itself. But once it becomes clear that the superego is itself a potential
force of destruction, the matter becomes more complex.
Freud’s reflections can tell us something about what a common or shared use of the
critical faculty looks like, or what it entails, what its fault lines are, and why groups and
political formations can persist only when a moderating version of the critical faculty
stays alive, one that can check both the external expression of destructive aims and its
self-destructive internalization. The point is not to model society on the ego, but to ask
about the specific social forms that destruction can take, and what implications they have
for shared political life. On the one hand, Freud gives us a psychological explanation of
the conditions under which groups can survive without destroying others or themselves.
On the other hand, a political principle is developed that shows the importance of mass
psychology for political philosophy, namely, that for societies that wish to organize
themselves on the basis of a principled opposition to cruelty, that is, to war or to the
death penalty, there first has to be a mindfulness of the destructive potential that inheres
in all group formations, and then a shared sense of the form and power of a critical
faculty, a form of judgement, that knows how and when to check that destructiveness and
that has the power to do so. Such judgement is crucial to the operation of politics, and
one task of political theory is to establish the conditions of its possible exercise (Zerilli
2016).
Identification, Inhibition, and the Superego

On several occasions, Freud seeks to explain that ‘esprit de corps’ emerges both from
envy and also from shared mourning (1921: 120). Members of a group seek to have their
relations with one another mediated by an idealized leader, one they alternately admire
and hate. They do not like being subordinated to the ideal they require. And even if the
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idealized figure is removed, none of them can embody that ideal themselves—but they do
settle on a form of equality in the wake of that loss. This is the lesson that Freud gleans
from the myth of the primal horde, according to which a band of brothers murder the
father only then to establish his symbolic status as a totem.10 They bond together in a
social solidarity marked by shared failure: ‘No one must want to put himself forward,
everyone must be the same and have the same. Social justice means that we deny
ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well, or, what is the
same thing, may not be able to ask for them. This demand for equality is the root of social
conscience and the sense of duty’ (Freud 1921: 121). In fact, what Freud calls ‘the social
feeling’ depends upon ‘the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively
toned tie in the nature of an identification’ (1921: 121). Earlier in this same text, he
wrote, ‘a democratic strain runs through the church—for the very reason that before
Christ everyone is equal, and … everyone has an equal share of his love’ (Freud 1921:
94). This potential of equality in a bond of lateral affection develops into an attachment to
a shared leader or ideal of some kind, a third term that mediates potential hostility. As
much as identification can occasion the suppression of hostility (and become a substitute
for a libidinal attachment), it can also suppress both neurosis and the higher operations
of intellectual thought. It is, of course, the latter that are required for the exercise of
critical judgement—perhaps some measure of neurosis as well to the extent that it marks
a withdrawal from social consensus.
Identification that depends upon an ideal—a leader, an ideal of the nation, an ‘ego-ideal’
of some kind—can provisionally resolve a murderous hostility, but it can also lead to the
externalization of the enemy and a form of group affection that under certain conditions
becomes indistinguishable from nationalism. The ideal is apparently not fully bearable—it
is always superior, and envy interrupts the equality of the subjects subordinated to the
one who embodies the ideal—which leads to violence against it. Indeed, when the ideal is
exposed as faulty, or when it vanishes as a result of murder, the group falls asunder, and
hostility also re-emerges—as does the need to establish a new ideal.
The hostility can take the form of faulting another or oneself. The excessive force of self-
reprimand came within a year to be called by Freud the ‘superego’, at which point it
became necessary to consider how best to check its operation. The ‘duty’ that he
understood in Mass Psychology to be the result of a shared affection, a self-restraint
imposed by individuals on themselves in the name of a greater good, is redescribed in The
Ego and the Id as the superego (Freud 1923). And, as already noted in the ‘The critical
faculty and the mass’, it is at this point that the critical faculty takes on a new and
dangerous character. It is no longer simply the faculty of a reason that checks impulse,
but the instrument of a destructive power and unbridled sadism. The superego has within
it a ‘destructive component’ that turns against the ego, finds it faulty, even threatens it
with lethal punishment (Freud 1923: 43). The ‘critical agency’ now identified with the
superego imposes restraint and restriction just like a strong inhibition would do, except
that it also runs the risk of a fuller destruction of the ego. Freud puts the matter this way:
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… the excessively strong super-ego which has obtained a hold on consciousness

rages against the ego with merciless violence, as if it had taken possession of the
whole of the sadism available in the person … What is now holding sway in the
super-ego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death drive, and in fact it often
enough succeeds in driving the ego into death (1923: 53).
What, if anything, checks the merciless violence of one part of the self unleashed against
another? Freud finishes that sentence by claiming that what can thwart the success of
self-destruction is for the ego to ‘fend off its tyrant in time by the change round into
mania’ (1923: 53).
Freud here references his 1917 work on ‘Mourning and melancholia’ where he seeks to
distinguish between mourning, which implies a wakeful acknowledgement of the reality
of a lost person or ideal, and melancholia, which is a failure to acknowledge the reality of
loss. In melancholia the lost other is internalized (in the sense of incorporated) as a
feature of the ego, and a form of heightened self-beratement re-enacts—and inverts—at a
psychic level the relation of the ego to the lost other. The recrimination against the lost
person or ideal is ‘turned round’ against the ego itself, and in this way the relation is
preserved as an animated intrapsychic relation (Freud 1917: 251). Even in that essay,
Freud makes clear that the hostility unleashed against the ego is potentially fatal. The
scene of melancholic self-beratement thus becomes the model for the later topography of
superego and ego. Melancholia, however, is composed of two opposing trends: the first is
self-beratement which becomes the signature action of ‘conscience’; the second is ‘mania’
which seeks to break the bond to the lost object, actively renouncing the object that is
gone (Freud 1917: 253–5). The ‘manic’ and energetic denunciations of the object, the
ego’s heightened efforts to break the bond to the lost object or ideal, imply the desire to
survive the loss and not to have one’s own life claimed by the loss itself. Mania is, as it
were, the protest of the living organism against the prospect of its destruction by an
unchecked superego.
As we have seen, forms of heightened self-beratement (and, by extension, self-

destruction) can be provisionally ameliorated through the social solidarity of failure in
which none of us lives up to the ideal, and this shared failure grounds our solidarity and
sense of equality. That amelioration of superegoic violence proves to be provisional when
a group formation fails to organize and contain that hostility, and it can assume a fatal
form. Moreover, there are group formations that mobilize that destructive hostility
towards an external enemy, at which point the destruction of life, even the mass
destruction of life, becomes possible. Significantly, then, when Freud identifies ‘mania’ as
the force by which the internal tyrant might be overthrown, he is referring to that power
of the organism to break the bonds of identification itself. Indeed, active disidentification
becomes one way of the organism to ameliorate its self-destructive powers in order
precisely to survive. Mania serves the purposes of disidentification, but it also presumes a
‘criticism’ of the tyrant, offering one way to think about the exercise of a critical faculty
that is directed against the superego and so not already identified in its terms.
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In brief, the superego relied upon to check destructive impulse is always potentially an
instrument of destruction, which is not only why violence can be moralized, deemed as
righteous, but also why those with particularly severe consciences can take their own life.
Similarly, it may seem that identifications are important for empathy and the perpetuation
of social bonds, but they also imply destructive potential. The internalization of the lost
other or ideal is one form of identification, one that preserves and animates a form of
hostility that has the power to destroy the living organism itself. So, even as the superego
checks the externalization of destructiveness, it remains a potentially destructive
instrument that can come to serve the very murderous purposes it is meant to check—but
mainly through self-murder. We return again to the question: Is there a way to oppose
destructiveness that does not escalate destructiveness? It would seem that the superego
is a weak instrument to enforce a check on violence, unless we opt for the violence of the
superego, however fatal that may prove, over its alternative, externalized expression. But
is that the only path available?
Freud and Einstein: Solidarity in Life

This very problem emerges in the correspondence between Freud and Einstein in 1931–
32, the years directly preceding Hitler’s rise to power and their subsequent exile from
Germany and Austria respectively.11 Einstein writes to Freud to ask him how humankind
can become delivered from ‘the menace of war’ (Freud 1933b: 199). Lamenting that the
fate of humankind is in the hands of ‘a governing class’ that is ‘craving for power’, and
‘hostile to any limitation of national sovereignty’, Einstein appeals to Freud as someone
whose ‘critical judgement’ is most important at this time in which world war once again
threatens Europe. He asks whether there is a basis in the drives that constitute human
psychic life for a political arrangement that could serve as an effective check on war. In
particular, he asks whether it might be possible to establish an association or a tribunal
that could check the destructive power of those drives. Einstein first identifies the
problem as destructive drives, but he is also interrogating the issue at the level of
political institutions, calling for nations to cede their sovereignty to an international body
that would demand a commitment to preventing war and guaranteeing international
security. This political goal can only be achieved if human beings are the kind of creatures
capable of constituting, and submitting to, international authorities that have the power
to prevent war. If there is a tendency or drive that undercuts that capacity, then averting
war may well be impossible. Clearly having read Freud, Einstein asks whether human
beings have within them ‘a lust for hatred and destruction’ and whether this can be
‘raise(d) … to the power of a collective psychosis’ (Freud 1933b: 201). So though he
wonders whether the destructive drives can be contained, he is also wondering whether
human practices of institutions can be cultivated that would increase the possibility of
preventing war. He notes that violence can take the form of wars between nations but
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also civil wars motivated by religious zealotry, as well as ‘the persecution of racial
minorities’ (Freud 1933b: 201).
Freud’s response is complex, beginning with a report on his initial response to Einstein’s
letter: he is not a ‘statesman’ and daunted by practical matters (1933b: 203). He then
retracts his initial claim not because he believes he is a political thinker but because, with
Einstein, he shares a political desire for peace and for the alleviation of suffering, and so
must be engaged in political reflections as a ‘psychological observer’. Freud warns that
he has no practical proposals, but his remarks do elaborate a political position with both
theoretical and practical implications. His first proposal is to replace a distinction
Einstein makes between right and power with one between right and violence (‘right’
translates ‘Recht’ which, in German, means ‘legal order’ and even ‘justice’). In Freud’s
account, conflicts between persons and groups have been traditionally resolved through
recourse to violence, but this happens less regularly as group formations change. In
particular, he notes that ‘a path was traced that led away from violence to law’ when ‘an
alliance of many weaklings’ overcomes the strength of the single man or leader. In this
way, he writes, ‘brute force is overcome through union’ or what he also calls ‘the power of
a community’. In his view, ‘the superior strength of a single individual could be rivalled by
the union of several weak ones’ and later he elaborates: ‘… in order that the transition
from violence to this new right or justice may be effected … [t]he union of the majority
must be a stable and lasting one’. To do this, a psychological condition has to be met: ‘the
growth of … communal feelings which are the true source of its strength’.
Writing to Einstein a full decade after Mass Psychology, Freud now conjectures that the
community is held together not by their common subordination to an ideal leader, but
precisely through their explicit power to overthrow a tyrant or authoritarian ruler and to
establish common and enforceable laws and institutions in the wake of that overthrow.
Can the ‘communal feelings’ and ‘emotional ties’ actually persist to achieve such a goal?
To answer this political question, the turn to psychological conditions once again becomes
obligatory. The answer seems to depend on how we interpret the ‘community of
interests’ (Freud 1933b: 205). Freud’s wager is that as power (not violence) is transferred
to ever larger combinations, group members are increasingly enfranchised and more
inclined to act from sentiments of solidarity. Einstein talked about the obligation of each
nation state to surrender its sovereignty to a larger international body. Freud also
imagines the distribution of power beyond the model of sovereignty. As the community
and its powers of self-governance expand and become increasingly distinct from, even
opposed to, the individual ruler, the sentiment of solidarity, expressed in a set of laws
both self-legislated and self-restraining, is relied upon to check destructiveness. The
ongoing problem, however, is that violence can erupt within the community when, for
instance, one faction pits itself against another or the right of rebellion is exercised
against the state or the international body that limits the sovereignty of states.
The limitation on violence seems to coincide, for both Freud and Einstein, with the
limitation of state sovereignty within a broader internationalist frame. In the 1930s, both
Freud and Einstein understood nationalist fervour to lead to outbreaks of violence,
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though neither could fully see the forms of state violence in fascism and Nazism that
would materialize in the next few years. The international body or ‘tribunal’ they both
imagined was to some degree represented by the League of Nations in the early 1930s,
but that institution hardly constituted an ultimate power since state sovereignty was not
effectively checked by membership. Ideally, an international institution for developing
and maintaining international law with the power to enforce its judgements would
provide a check on war, but only, of course, if international sentiments of solidarity could
be maintained to support its existence and function. Without the power of enforcement,
such a body lacks the sovereign power it requires to prevent war. The internationalist
wager that both Freud and Einstein considered was that international institutions could
be based on modes of self-governance across national borders that delocalize and limit
sovereign power. Einstein, who called himself ‘immune from nationalist bias’, thought
that the risk was worth taking: ‘the quest for international security involves the
unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of action, its
sovereignty that is to say, and it is clear beyond all doubt that no other road can lead to
such security’. He then continues to remark upon the failure of this effort, which ‘leaves
us no room for doubt that strong psychological factors are at work’ (Freud 1933b: 200).
Freud is, of course, aware that law can work in several ways, and that it makes no sense
to have a naïve faith in the power of law. It can encode and reproduce social inequalities,
and more often than not ‘laws are made by and for the rulers’. The only way for law not to
become an instrument that fortifies the power of the rulers over the people is for the
masses to undergo what he calls ‘a cultural evolution’ such that the ideals embodied in
international self-governance become increasingly desirable and widespread (Freud
1933b: 214). If the ideals of the community become nationalistic, then violence returns in
the form of war among competing nation states. Thus, internationalist ideals support the
sentiment of solidarity for Freud. If, however, the idea of internationalism still imagined
communities and groups primarily as nations, it may be that ‘transnational’ solidarity
proves to be the better name for sentiments of solidarity no longer structured by the
nation state and its corresponding nationalism. But such a notion postdates Freud.
The problem, however, remains whether such sentiments can fully and effectively contain
or redirect aggression. Freud has offered some paths for providing an answer, but he
does not follow through on all of the possibilities that his work has opened up for
consideration. In conclusion, I would like to consider Freud’s final case for ways of
preventing war as it takes him on a train of thought unpursued in his reflections on group
psychology; the first requires resisting the exhilarations of nationalism; the second,
heeding the organic basis of our nature as human beings. Although the drive is not the
same as the instinct, it does not follow that the drive is relieved of all organic dimensions.
Indeed, persistence always takes some form or another, and yet it is not reducible to any
of its possible forms. That paradox informs one important argument Freud makes for an
internationalist resistance to war.
Page 19 of 26

As we have seen, for Freud, there is no possibility of finally ‘conquering’ the death drive
and its forms of aggression and destructiveness. Towards the end of his letter to Einstein,
he makes a strong case that there are only two ways to counter the propensity for war:
the mobilization of its ‘Eros, its antagonist’, and the forming of communal forms of
identification (Freud 1933b: 212). A third possibility was suggested by Einstein, namely,
that an elite class of intellectuals should form an association that could provide proper
guidance for the masses. Freud does not readily accept this suggestion, maintaining
instead that an evolution of the masses is possible through education and the cultivation
of solidaristic sentiments of a non-nationalist sort.12 The ideal condition would be one in
which every member of a community exercises self-restraint, and does so precisely by
recognizing that the preservation of life is itself a good to be valued in common. Freud
realizes that this is utopian, but it provides a subtle counterpoint to Einstein’s more frank
embrace of elitism.
Although Freud does not pursue the political alternative to elitism, his ideal of a
community whose members are equally bound to impose self-restraint in the name of the
preservation of life opens the possibility of the democratization of critical judgement and
critical thought that does not rush unimpeded to the extreme of superegoic self-
flagellation. Does he in the end offer a strong enough response to the sceptical position
that the destructive powers of humans are so profoundly inscribed in the life of the drives
that no political arrangement can effectively check them? On the one hand, Freud argues
that we must ally behind love, which builds and preserves social bonds, and
identification, which builds and preserves sentiments of solidarity, over and against hate,
or Thanatos, which tears at social bonds in wild and mindless ways. On the other hand, he
has time and again underscored the fact that love and hate are equally constitutive
dimensions of the drives, and that it is not possible to eliminate destructiveness through
amplifying Eros. It is not only that we must sometimes aggressively defend our lives in
order to preserve life (the aim of Eros); we also have to commit to living with those
towards whom we maintain intense feelings of hostility. In his discussion of identification
and melancholia, it is clear that all love relations contain ambivalence, which suggests
that love and hate are both equally constitutive of love. So love names one pole in the
oppositional relation of love and hate. But it also names the opposition itself, lived out as
emotional ambivalence. One can say that I love you and so do not hate you, but one can
also say that love and hate are bound together, and this paradox is what we name by
‘love’. In the former formulation, love is unequivocal; in the latter formulation, love does
not escape ambivalence. Is there something about the rhythm, however jarring,
established between these two formulations that constitutes a broader concept of love for
Freud?
There seem to be two consequences then to Freud’s views on destructiveness and war
that that are opened up but not precisely pursued; both pertain directly to the political
philosophy embedded in his reflections on group (or mass) psychology. The first is that a
corrective to forms of accelerated nationalist sentiment is precisely ambivalence, the
‘tearing’ at the social bond that follows from a mindful self-distancing from its
exhilarations and hostilities—and from the restrictively nationalist framework. One might
Page 20 of 26

at the same time love a country and dissent from its nationalist fervour—that would
activate ambivalence in the service of a critical reflection on the possibility of war and a
refusal to partake in its excitations. The second would be to rally hatred against war
itself. Freud offers this indirectly in his letter to Einstein in his own rhetoric. For instance,
he writes, ‘the basis for our common hatred of war … is that we cannot do otherwise than
to hate it. Pacifists we are because our organic nature wills us thus to be’ (Freud 1933b:
214). Significantly, it is as a result of the ‘growth of culture’ or what he earlier called its
‘evolution’ that we come to resent war and find it intolerable. War sensations, he claims,
no longer thrill us, only because we have come to see—and to imagine—the destruction of
organic life that war implies, something which is unbearable for humans to accept in light
of their own organic life. On the one hand, it is organic life that makes us pacifists, since
we do not will our own destruction (when we are not under the sway of the death drive).
On the other hand, we only come to understand the consequences of the destruction of
organic life through a cultural process that allows us to see and consider this destruction
and so to develop a revulsion against destruction itself. In the end, Freud hopes that
organic life will have the final say against the death drive whose aim is the destruction of
that very life, and that various forms of organic life will be understood as connected
through relations of dependency that extend throughout the living world. His is a politics
of and for the living organism, even if sometimes the organism is swayed by the
circuitous or destructive path. Hatred is never fully absent, but its negative power can
become focused as an aggressive stance against war, one form of destruction pitted
against another, a view that would be compatible, for instance, with an aggressive form of
pacifism, what Einstein himself called ‘militant pacifism’.13
So if the superego was established by Freud as that internal mechanism fuelled by the
death drive, constituting a pure culture of the death drive, and its limit point was the
destruction of the ego and the living organism itself (suicide or murder), then the form of
aggression that Freud imagines at the end of his correspondence with Einstein is of a
different order. When he remarked that the only hope for prevailing against the
murderous aim of the unbridled superego which would, as it were, judge the ego unto
death, was the ‘manic’ possibility of breaking with the tyrant (levelling plaint after plaint),
he offered us a glimpse into those forms of insurrectionary solidarity that turn against
authoritarian and tyrannical rule, exceed the national frame, and seek binding
international agreement. The hatred directed against war is perhaps like the mania that
alone has the strength to free the subject from the tyrant; both break with nationalist and
militarist forms of social belonging through turning one sense of the critical faculty
against another. The critical faculty that becomes animated in the name of a
democratization of dissent is one that opposes war and resists the intoxications of
nationalism, turns against the leader who insists that obedience to a warmongering
authority is obligatory. In this way Freud offers us the possibility of imagining the
democratization of critical judgement based on sentiments of solidarity, one that turns
against that life-threatening form of aggression, including its critical manifestation.
Aggression and hatred both remain, for sure, but directed now against all that which
undermines the prospect of expanding equality and imperils the organic persistence of
Page 21 of 26

our interconnected lives. But nothing remains guaranteed, for the death drive appears as
well to be part of organic life, so if the organic turns out to be driven by the duality of life
and death, that should hardly come as a total surprise. The struggle that constitutes us as
political creatures is the one we continue in the practices of life and death without a
perfect conscious understanding despite our occasionally admirable and decisive efforts
at vigilance.
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Towards a critical theory of political myth’. Critical Horizons 13(1): 94–112.
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Freud, S. (1933b). ‘Why war?’. In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the
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Freud, S. (2004). Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the ‘I’. In J. A. Underwood (trans.),
Mass Psychology and Other Writings. New York: Penguin. (Original work published in
1921.)
Frosh, S. (1999). The Politics of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to Freudian and Post-

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Lear, J. (1998) Open-Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
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Luxon, N. (2013). Crisis of Authority: Politics, Trust, and Truth-Telling in Freud and
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Pitkin, H. F. (1999). Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo
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Notes:
(1) [Eds: For a discussion of developments in psychoanalytic thought on the death drive
and its containment, see Frosh (this volume), § ‘War, barbarism, rationality’.]
(2) Freud writes in ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’: ‘… an “instinct” appears to us as a

concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic…’ […so erscheint uns der
‘Trieb’ als ein Grenzbegriff zwischen Seelischem und Somatischem…”(1915: 121–22).
Freud, Psychologie des Unbewussten, Fischer Verlag, 85.]
(3) In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud reassures his reader that there is no reason to
worry about the speculative character of his discussion of the drives, since ‘we are
obliged to operate with the scientific terms, that is to say with the figurative language,
proper to psychology …’ (1920: 60). In the New Introductory Lectures, he goes further:
‘The drives are so to say our mythology. Drives are mythical entities, magnificent in their
indefiniteness’ (1933a: 95).
(4) In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes the ‘circuitous route to death’ that a
life takes, governed in fugitive fashion by a drive that seeks to return to an inorganic
condition (1920: 38).
(5) Freud’s theorization of sadomasochism seeks to explain the phenomenon through

recourse to the theory of libido in ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (1915a) but is revised
in light of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and ‘The Economic
Problem of Masochism’ (1924).
(6) [Eds: see Backström (this volume) for a critical discussion of Freud’s conception of
love that argues that ambivalent forms of love are failures in love.]
(7) In German, it is not group psychology, but ‘mass psychology’ [Massenpsychologie],

which carries a sense of much larger crowds, drawing on Le Bon’s analysis of the crowd.
In the Penguin edition published in 2004 and translated by J. A. Underwood, the text is
appropriately entitled Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the ‘I’.
(8) See for instance Franz Kafka’s ‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk’ for an
account of how the leader—a singer—is inflated by the people, idealized in impossible
terms, because they depend on her for a sense of their national unity and belonging. In
the end, she is weak and barely speaks or sings, but the mechanism of their idealization
stays intact, and it appears that the people (the mouse folk) are the ones with the
idealizing power to sustain their leader. Finally, however, transience takes over, and the
entire history is ushered into oblivion.
(9) Translation modified.
Page 25 of 26

(10) Freud considers the myth of the ‘primal horde’ in the postscript to Mass Psychology,
an origin story in which the original Father is killed and dismembered by the sons who
idealize him. Idealization and murderous impulse work together—a primary form of
ambivalence that is linked to Freud’s views on the idealizing and murderous dimensions
of love. The totemic brotherhood that comes about after the kill mourns the loss, but
reaps its benefits in a form of political equality among the brothers. But equality is
apparently hard to bear, and the ideal of the father re-emerges now within the family,
where the husband’s power breaks the line of matriarchal rule. Their collective act of
murder left them fatherless, but with the institution of familial patriarchy through the
categories of ‘husband’ and ‘father’ they each become the substitute for the father-ideal
they have lost (Freud 1921: 135; Freud 2004: 91).
(11) Einstein departed Germany in 1933 and Freud left Vienna in 1938. Their
correspondence can be found as ‘Why War?’ (Freud 1933b). In 1931, the Institute for
Intellectual Cooperation invited Einstein to engage in a dialogue with a thinker of his
choice on the topics of politics and peace, and he chose Freud, whom he had met briefly a
few years before.
(12) For Freud’s resistance to nationalism and Zionism, see Jacqueline Rose, The Last
Resistance (2007: 17–38).
(13) See Albert Einstein’s interview with George Sylvester Viereck in January, 1931 where
he claims, ‘I am not only a pacifist, but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace.
Nothing will end war unless the peoples themselves refuse to go to war. Every great
cause is first championed by an aggressive minority’ (quoted in Holton and Elkana 1982:
377).
Judith Butler
Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley
Page 26 of 26

Oxford Handbooks Online: A Better Self: Freud and Nietzsche On The Nature and Value of Sublimation

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A Better Self: Freud and Nietzsche on the Nature and Value of Sublimation

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Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, History of Western Philosophy (Post-Classical)

Abstract and Keywords

It is precisely in neurotics that … the formation of an ideal heightens the demands

(Freud 1914: 95).

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

In the psychoanalytic literature the concept of sublimation is frequently called

(Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 433).

Sublimation is a process that concerns object-libido and consists in the instinct

(Freud 1914: 94).

It is generally agreed that prior to 1923 a good deal of confusion existed

(Glover 1931: 263),

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

Substitute Formations, Symptoms, and

We must expressly insist that we have never reckoned Leonardo as a neurotic or a

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

(Freud 1910a: 131).

The Social Factor in Sublimations

(Freud 1933: 97).

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

(Kaplan 1993: 549).

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

If we do choose to abandon the social valuation factor in separating sublimation from

The Relation between Sublimation and

(Freud 1910a: 135).

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

sublimations as ‘protective structures’ (Freud 1897: 247). A page later in a footnote

It must be noted, however, that in the psychoanalytic literature, including works

(Loewald 1988: 4–5).

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

(Freud 1910b: 53–4).

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

The dramatic element in Wagner’s development is quite unmistakable from the

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

This notion of the training of subservient drives is to be explicated in terms of the

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

The Nietzschean solution to the problem of differentiating sublimation from pathological

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

Sublimation and Ressentiment

On Nietzsche’s picture of sublimation the questionable element of social valuation drops

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

Klein, Segal, and Loewald: Towards a

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

The Kleinian account of sublimation as integration is a theme taken up by Hanna Segal in

Another psychoanalyst, influenced by Klein, who identifies sublimation with a type of

What is missing from these post-Freudian accounts of sublimation as integration or

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

The Value of Sublimation

However on Nietzsche’s evaluative scheme the preference for sublimation over

(Civilization and Its Discontent, Freud 1930: 76).

Against this type of characterization Nietzsche, presumably having in mind various

In Zarathustra Nietzsche refers contemptuously to ‘the last man’ as the ‘most

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

Here is my final suggestion: One of Nietzsche’s fundamental grounds for preferring

Subscriber: Goldsmiths College, University of London; date: 28 February 2019

Adler, N. (1986). ‘Sublimation and Addiction’, Psychoanalytic Psychology 3: 187–191.

Arlow, J. (1955). ‘Sublimation’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 3: 515–