The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis
Language: English
Pages: 128
ISBN: 0415333040
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This edition includes a substantial new preface by the author, in which he discusses repression, determinism, transference, and practical rationality, and offers a comparison of Aristotle and Lacan on the concept of desire. MacIntyre takes the opportunity to reflect both on the reviews and criticisms of the first edition and also on his own philosophical stance.
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it he constructed an explanatory system in which all mental phenomena are understood as resulting from the operation of certain material elements according to certain basic laws. It is a delightful and ingenious tour de force in which the contemporary discoveries of neurophysiology are skilfully blended with the preconceptions of that nineteenthcentury materialism which took the schematism of Newtonian mechanics as the archetype of all authentically scientific explanation. On the one hand, Freud
a motive, therefore, is to say something about behaviour, about tendencies to behave in a particular manner. Mr. D. J. McCracken, among others, has argued that motives are, at least on occasion, occurrences rather than (or as well as) dispositions. Macbeth’s ambition was what went on in Macbeth’s mind which led him to act as he did. Here in the case of ‘motive’ all the moves that we have made in the case of ‘intention’ could be made over again. To say that ‘motive’, ‘intention’, ‘wish’ and so on
thesis, that Freud’s genius is notable in his descriptive work is not of course original. G. E. Moore has told us how Wittgenstein advanced it in his lectures in 1931–3. But it is important to understand how much of Freud’s work it affects. Before pursuing this, 97 Describing and explaining however, it is worth noting a possible explanation, not perhaps of why Freud attempted to use ‘the unconscious’ in the way that he does, but of why so many have taken it for a possible concept. Freud picks
time, and the deception is discovered by the analyst. But is the theoretical structure secure enough to guarantee that the psychoanalyst will not be deceived? Our doubts about this trust in the theoretical structure and its keystone, the conception of ‘the unconscious’, may well be heightened by another consideration. It is a commonplace that psychotherapists are divided into what it is still regrettably no exaggeration to call warring factions, of which the Freudian school is only one. It might
what she or he has been characteristically has had to recognize that the unified ego was one of the fictions used to conceal the multiplicity and fragmentation of the self in its conflicts. And this genuine awareness is possible only when the analysand is no longer deceived by a counterfeit awareness that is a defence against genuine self-knowledge. The analysand, like the analyst, has to learn ‘that the drive itself may be led to consciousness in order to prevent the subject from recognizing it’
