Freud and Consciousness: XIII. Seeing in the Unconscious!?

At one point Freud stated that the hysterically blind see in their unconscious. This statement is not consistent with Freud's theory of consciousness, which holds that all experiences take place in the perception—consciousness system, whose psychical processes, without exception, instantiate the full property of consciousness. This article considers Freud's proffered account for hysterical blindness, with the aim of showing that the account, omitting the one statement, does not require the introduction of perceptual experiences that take place elsewhere in the psychical apparatus. His account is understood to imply that the hysterically blind's denied visual perceptual experiences are conscious psychical processes that are not hypercathected owing to repression, with the consequence that their effects on the psychical apparatus are weak and diffuse. Some attention is given to what, consistently with Freud's theory of consciousness, unhypercathected visual perceptual experiences could be like. Although they possess Freud's full consciousness property, at the same time, such experiences may be minimally conscious in a different yet compatible sense.