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Mr. Field is unable to accept the idea of the Unconscious, as he 'cannot attach any meaning to it and cannot see any necessity for it'. He complains that the Unconscious is useless as an explanatory principle, since we can form no notion at all as to its nature.
If the Unconscious is merely a negative idea something of which all that we can say is that it is not physical and not conscious, then it ceases to be anything which could be given as a real explanation. It is simply an x, an unknown cause. And to ascribe anything to it is simply a confession of ignorance.
What actually happens when the Unconscious is evoked is that
writers slip into a way of talking, … and at times of thinking, of the Unconscious as of another conscious person of exactly the same kind as the conscious personality that we know, which exists alongside it and every now and then affects it in some way or other, so that to explain an event by referring it to the Unconscious becomes just the same kind of explanation as to say that something was done by John Jones instead of by Tom Smith.
We may perhaps note in passing that it is here probably that there exists the most fundamental difference between Mr. Field and the supporters of the Unconscious, who would say that this very process of drawing an analogy between our own Unconscious and the consciousness of another person to which we have no direct access is, within limits (the Conscious and the Unconscious are not of course 'of exactly the