Why Emotions Can't Be Unconscious: An Exploration of Freud's Essentialism

In “The Unconscious” (1915), Freud firmly denies that emotions can be unconscious, arguing that consciousness is part of the essence of emotion. The usual interpretation of Freud's denial is that Freud simply defines the word emotion so that it refers only to conscious states, but this makes the denial a trivial and arbitrary matter of semantics. I present a new analysis according to which Freud's essentialist argument is neither trivial nor semantic. Relying on recent philosophical accounts of scientific concepts, I argue that the essence of emotion is whatever explanatory theoretical property is common to all members of the category, and that this property must be scientifically discovered and is not part of the definition or meaning of the term emotion. Using this essentialist framework, I reconstruct Freud's arguments that the four types of states often labeled as “unconscious emotions” (i.e., displaced emotions, qualitatively transformed emotions, suppressed emotions, and unperceived bodily instinctual discharge) are not really and literally unconscious emotions either because they are not essentially emotions (as opposed to ideas or instinctual impulses) or because

they are not essentially mental (as opposed to physical). I also explain how Freud can deny unconscious emotions while accepting unconscious ideas. Finally, I argue that Freud's position is not arbitrary but has deep theoretical motivations. Freud must deny the existence of unconscious emotions to protect his sexual theory of the neuroses, because the existence of unconscious emotions would erode the plausibility of his claim that the causes of neuroses are always specifically sexual, and to protect his theory of unconscious mental states, because unconscious emotions would be counterexamples to the representational account of the mental on which the claim that ideas can be unconscious rests.