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As Morris Eagle states at the very beginning of his important new book, “what is most valuable and precious about being alive is consciousness, that is, being able to feel, think, and experience the world and oneself and others in it.” Yet as he also states, “consciousness and subjective experience have had a checkered career in the history of intellectual thought” (p. 1). The book takes on the challenge of exploring this odd contradiction as it is evident in psychology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy of mind.
This is an audacious book, in the very best sense of that word. Eagle is one of the very few writers who have the scholarly breadth, understanding of clinical phenomena, and familiarity with rigorous psychological research to dare to take this topic on, and a close reading of the book is richly rewarded. Much of the intellectual world today is post-Cartesian, rejecting some of the foundational premises of Descartes's dualistic philosophy. But on one thing Descartes's cogito was surely correct. There is no phenomenon more certain and trustworthy than that we do think—and, one should add, do feel and experience. That is the one thing we can be most sure of. Our thoughts and perceptions may be faulty—much of psychoanalysis and of psychology in general is addressed to this phenomenon—but the experience of thinking or perceiving per se cannot be denied. Except, Eagle notes, if you are a certain kind of philosopher, so enamored with the logic with which you have painted yourself into a corner that it erases the very bedrock of being a person living in the world.
Interestingly, as Eagle discusses, it is not just philosophers who have had trouble coming to terms with consciousness. In exploring the view of consciousness and subjective experience in psychoanalysis, Eagle illuminates complexities and tensions that have characterized the psychoanalytic view almost from its inception. On one hand, psychoanalysis aims to
make the unconscious conscious.1 In this, it seems