Response to commentaries

In our target article we aimed to transform philosophical—we think mainly useless—speculations concerning the mental nature of the unconscious into scientific or neurophysiological issues. When looking at the comments, it becomes evident that we have failed completely: philosophical issues have a prominent role in the comments of the reviewers. Moreover, none of the reviewers sees the basic line of thought of our article to be fruitful when the dilemma between the psychoanalytic and the cognitive unconscious is attempted to be resolved.

However, every reviewer thinks the topic to be important—this is not a surprise, because we are dealing with the “cornerstone” of psychoanalysis. Sharing this idea, and being glad to have an opportunity to study this topic together with the reviewers, we will still try to argue in favor of our view.

“Mental,” facts, and explanations

“Mental” is a tricky term. It is (together with “psychic”) probably the most common psychological term, but there is no standard definition for it. For us (and for Searle and many others, too), the term mental is inescapably tied to the unique characteristics of consciousness: emotions, affects, and the feeling of what it is like to possess a certain idea. However, it is often used in a very general sense to refer to processes that occur, or structures that exist, in the mind/brain (of humans). Only few researchers—in addition to psychoanalytic ones, or, for example, the HOT-theorists (see Gennaro, 1996, pp. 103-120)—have reasons to debate whether unconscious matters are mental or not.

When pondering if A has a property of B or not, we usually know what B is, and how it may appear to us. We know how to find out if a certain matter is, for example, wet or radioactive. In the present topic, however, the foundations are quite different. In the domain of psychoanalysis, we are accustomed to thinking that the unconscious is mental, but it has never been clear what this me