You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author, who is Lecturer in Philosophy at Leeds University, has in this essay attempted a logical analysis of the concept of the unconscious. He finds Freud 'not over-careful about terminology'. He refers to Freud's spurious attempt to present a psychology based on neurophysiology. Like others before him, he notes that Freud borrowed from neurology a number of terms by which he described psychological mechanisms.
The concept of the unconscious, according to the author, stands and falls with that of repression, which he regards as unproven. Freud used the term 'the unconscious' in a new meaning which in the author's view derived from neurophysiology. It is, in his opinion, no more than an explanatory concept, like the notions of the ether or the electron. In treating unconscious motives both as purposes and causes, Freud was guilty of confusion. His great achievement lay not in the explanation of abnormal behaviour but in its redescription. It is not quite easy to follow the author in these arguments. He is at a disadvantage in not being a biologist, for whom cause and purpose of behaviour are more intimately related than they are to the logician. His use of the term 'description' is different from that of the scientist. It appears that he is referring to what Jaspers called the difference between 'verstehen', i.e. to discern understandable relationships between phenomena, and 'erklären', i.e. to answer the question why a certain event happened. If this distinction was as clear and clean as it seems to the philosopher, Freud's achievement would be largely in the area of 'verstehen'. Freud is criticized for not having distinguished motives and causes. This confusion the author believes to be rooted in the therapeutic situation. Wittgenstein is reported as having expressed the view that Freud's genius was notable in his 'descriptive' work rather than in his explanatory concepts. Wittgenstein apparently included interpretation in his concept of descrip