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Sigmund Freud is best known as the creator of psychoanalysis. It is less widely appreciated that Freud's creation of psychoanalysis arose from his work in what is now called ‘cognitive science’ (Erdelyi 1985). Kitcher (1992) describes Freud as ‘the first’ interdisciplinary cognitive scientist (p. 5). Glymour (1991) states that ‘a big part of cognitive science is pretty much what you would expect to get if Sigmund Freud had had a computer’ (p. 44) and goes on to say that:
…Freud's writings contain a philosophy of mind, and indeed a philosophy of mind that addresses many of the issues about the mental that nowadays concern philosophers and ought to concern psychologists. Freud's thinking about the issues in the philosophy of mind is better than much of what goes on in contemporary philosophy, and it is sometimes as good as the best… Even when Freud had the wrong answer to a question, or refused to give an answer, he knew what the question was and what was at stake in it. And when he was deeply wrong it was often for reasons that still make parts of cognitive psychology wrong. (p. 46)
Freud is more widely regarded as a theorist of the unconscious than as a theorist of consciousness. In fact, Freud believed that any theory of unconscious mental states must address the problem of consciousness. Freud did just that, and his subtle and complex theorizing about consciousness is all too often neglected both inside and outside psychoanalysis. In particular, the new and rapidly growing academic discipline of ‘consciousness studies’ has neglected Freud's seminal contributions, many of which anticipate or even go beyond contemporary theorizing.1
In the present paper I will trace out some of the fundamental features of Freud's cognitive science of consciousness, with special emphasis on those aspects of it that dovetail with contemporary concerns in cognitive science, consciousness studies and the philosophy of mind. In order to do this I will contextualize Freud's theory of conscio