Freud Among the Philosophers. The Psychoanalytic Unconscious and Its Philosophical Critics. By Donald Levy.: New Haven/London:  Yale University Press, 1996. 189 pp.

Some investigators, … who are unwilling to accept the unconscious, find a way out of the difficulty in the fact … that in consciousness … it is possible to distinguish a great variety of gradations in intensity or clarity …. The reference to gradations of clarity in consciousness is in no way conclusive and has no more evidential value than such analogous statements as: ‘There are so very many gradations in illumination—from the most glaring and dazzling light to the dimmest glimmer—therefore there is no such thing as darkness at all’; or, ‘There are varying degrees of vitality, therefore there is no such thing as death.’ Such statements may in a certain way have a meaning, but for practical purposes they are worthless. This will be seen if one tries to draw particular conclusions from them such as, ‘there is therefore no need to strike a light’, or, ‘therefore all organisms are immortal’. Further to include ‘what is unnoticeable’ under the concept of ‘what is conscious’ is simply to play havoc with the one and only piece of direct and certain knowledge that we have about the mind. And after all, a consciousness of which one knows nothing seems to me a good deal more absurd than something mental that is unconscious.

How can one think the unthought? This is precisely the question Freud attempts to explain by positing the existence of an unconscious ontology. Philosophy has traditionally assumed an ambivalent attitude toward the psychoanalytic unconscious, from questioning its epistemic verity, to denoucing its existence altogether. In Freud Among the Philosophers, Donald Levy undertakes a comprehensive philosophical defense of the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious against four major critics of Freud. Scrutinizing the claims that psychoanalysis is mythology, incoherent, self-contradictory, and scientifically unverifiable, Levy levels such arguments with cogent precision, exposing selective philosophical biases and misunderstandings that have d