Freud and Consciousness: I. Intrinsic Consciousness

Although the end to academic psychology's systematic suppression of the scientific study of consciousness seems to have arrived (Natsoulas, 1978, 1981, 1983b), it will take considerable time to recover the costs of that suppression to psychology and human knowledge. At the present point in the history of the science there exists, inevitably, a scarcity of psychological theory about consciousness—whereby psychologists can get their conceptual bearings as they again turn their scientific attention to the “new” subject matter. In order to help make more available such a conceptual framework, to which psychologists can refer, the present article intensively addresses the thinking about consciousness of the greatest theorist that the scientific field of psychology has had. Therefore, Freud's widely familiar and highly influential conception of the mind is approached here from an unusual angle. Namely, it is approached as though Freud had been primarily, of all things, a theorist of consciousness. This hopefully responsible liberty that I take here with Freud's thought can be justified by: (a) the benefits to be derived