Vesa Talvitie & Juhani Ihanus's “On the Nature of Repressed Contents”

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This commentary—kindly invited by the Editors of Neuro-Psychoanalysis—considers an article published therein by Vesa Talvitie and Juhani Ihanus, bearing the title “On the Nature of Repressed Contents—A Working-Through of John Searle's Critique.”1 I was probably asked to submit the present commentary mainly because, nearly a decade ago, a publication of mine on the same topic appeared. Published in Consciousness and Cognition, that article (Natsoulas, 1995) was critical of John R. Searle's (1992) account of Sigmund Freud's conception of consciousness and the relation of consciousness to those mental occurrences that Freud held to be unconscious. My critique of Searle's account was a sequel to an article, “A Rediscovery of Consciousness,” in which I treated of certain aspects of his mental philosophy (Natsoulas, 1994).

Another determinant of the decision to ask me to write this commentary may have been my unified series of articles on Freud's theory of consciousness that, for close to two decades, have been appearing in the journal Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought (e.g., Natsoulas, 1984a, 1985, 1991, 1993a, 2002a, 2002b, 2003). Add the fact that, between Talvitie and Ihanus and myself, there is much overlap in scientific interests—even if one judges only on the basis of their article for which the present response was sought. However, I do not want to imply that I agree with (a) all of Talvitie and Ihanus's statements about the theories of Freud and Searle, (b) their proposed “logic” of the repressed psychical processes, (c) their proposed computer metaphor for the psychical apparatus, or (d) their scientific philosophy of eliminativism—according to which scientific progress benefits from the restriction of theories and concepts to those acceptable to a favored scientific and philosophical contingent.

In all of my writings and lectures on Freud's understanding of consciousness, I have followed him and his editor/