Commentary on “On the Nature of Repressed Contents”

This is a topic well worth exploring. Searle is one of the preeminent philosophers wrestling with the problem of consciousness in the world today. Searle clearly believes in the power of unconscious processes (see Chapter 7 of The Rediscovery of the Mind, 1992): “The explanatory power of the notion of the unconscious is so great that we cannot do without it …” (p. 151). He believes however that the “Freudian conception of the relation between consciousness and the unconscious … is incoherent” (p. 151). As Freud is the preeminent theorist of the unconscious, this dispute is well worth exploring. If it could be resolved, this would be a major contribution to the study of the mind. Talvitie and Ihanus's notion that the conflict is more apparent than real—a consequence of choice of metaphors— is an intriguing one. Their solution involving the creation of a third set of terms to solve the dilemma (e.g., unconscious meaning preservation for repressed meanings) is worth exploring.

Before I go further, however, there seems to be confusion in their article that makes it very difficult for me to judge its points. The authors seem to equate repression with unconscious. Thus they assert that: “The basic logic behind the term repression is that to be conscious of a content is distinct from its efficacy—a content does not have to be conscious to affect behavior.” And again: “According to the terminology introduced above, repressed contents involve representations that have no direct consequences for the contents of consciousness.” This definition can hold for any unconscious process or content. It does not capture the unique properties of a repressed content. A cognitive scientist and/or a social psychologist would be perfectly comfortable with it as a description of what they would term implicit processes. It could describe an automatic process, perceptual fluency, implicit memory, or a multitude of other processes studied by cognitive theorists and researchers. For a content to