The philosophical knot If you study clinically the sorts of behaviour Freud dealt with, you may justifiably feel tempted to say that they manifest conflict of the individual with himself or herself. You might regard this self-conflict as a clash between forces within the person. And you might wonder, as Freud did: what items contend inside of us? What forms do their struggles take? With great originality and boldness, Freud put forth quite heterogenous theories of the mind's components, and of how their operations result in various types of normal as well as disturbed behaviour. I find many of his speculations altogether spellbinding. Yet despite my unqualified enthusiasm, I fear that none of these ingenious and suggestive partitioning explanations will turn out to be both illuminating and coherent. I plan to illustrate why it was nevertheless reasonable for him to propose such ‘dynamic’ accounts of human activity and affliction. I hope it will be instructive to see which features of behaviour threw Freud into conceptual confusion. These few deep muddles cannot possibly discredit Freud's innovative work. Our appreciation of the difficulties he seems to have encountered should advance our understanding, in philosophy of mind and action, of the person and his reflexive acts.

I realize that the doctrinal thickets I want to rummage in have been staked out by a legion of Freud experts. But I think most of the sceptical commentators have not argued their case in detail.

Notes by Rush Rhees after a conversation: summer 1942

When we are studying psychology we may feel there is something unsatisfactory, some difficulty about the whole subject or study – because we are taking physics as our ideal science. We think of formulating laws as in physics. And then we find we cannot use the same sort of ‘metric’, the same ideas of measurement as in physics. This is especially clear when we try to describe appearances: the least noticeable differences of colours; the least noticeable differences of length, and so on. Here it seems that we cannot say: ‘If A = B, and B = C, then A = C’, for instance. And this sort of trouble goes all through the subject.

Or suppose you want to speak of causality in the operation of feelings. ‘Determinism applies to the mind as truly as to physical things.’ This is obscure because when we think of causal laws in physical things we think of experiments. We have nothing like this in connexion with feelings and motivation. And yet psychologists want to say: ‘There must be some law’ – although no law has been found. (Freud: ‘Do you want to say, gentlemen, that changes in mental phenomena are guided by chance?’) Whereas to me the fact that there aren't actually any such laws seems important.

Freud's theory of dreams. He wants to say that whatever happens in a dream will be found to be connected with some wish which analysis can bring to light.

It is beyond any reasonable doubt that there are unconscious mental phenomena of decisive importance for understanding people's lives. But it is not quite so clear in what the unconsciousness of a mental phenomenon consists nor by what processes such a phenomenon is rendered unconscious. In this essay, I wish to direct my attention to these two problems. In particular, I shall focus on three models of unconscious states and repression, a process by which psychic conditions are rendered unconscious. It is important to treat the unconscious and repression simultaneously. For there is a crucial distinction between unconscious and pre-conscious mental states. The essential mark of an unconscious mental state is that one has powerful motives for excluding it from consciousness. After Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d, XX), it is clear that Freud thought that in some cases of intrapsychic conflict, an unbearable anxiety arises which provides a motive for repression. Repression is thereby represented as an intentional, though nonetheless typically unconscious, mental action (which is not to deny that it might also be a causal process). In modelling repression, then, it is necessary to allow for a psychic phenomenon rendered unconscious, a motive arising from conflict for so rendering it, and means whereby a person can accomplish this aim. This requires characterizing both the state of a mental phenomenon rendered unconscious and means by which a person can render that phenomenon into precisely that state.

The idea of an irrational action, belief, intention, inference or emotion is paradoxical. For the irrational is not merely the nonrational, which lies outside the ambit of the rational; irrationality is a failure within the house of reason. When Hobbes says only man has ‘the privilege of absurdity’ he suggests that only a rational creature can be irrational. Irrationality is a mental process or state – a rational process or state – gone wrong. How can this be?

The paradox of irrationality is not as simple as the seeming paradox in the concept of an unsuccessful joke, or of a bad piece of art. The paradox of irrationality springs from what is involved in our most basic ways of describing, understanding, and explaining psychological states and events. Sophia is pleased that she can tie a bowline. Then her pleasure must be due to her belief that she can tie a bowline and her positive assessment of that accomplishment. Further, and doubtless more searching, explanations may be available, but they cannot displace this one, since this one flows from what it is to be pleased that something is the case. Or take Roger, who intends to pass an examination by memorizing the Koran. This intention must be explained by his desire to pass the examination and his belief that by memorizing the Koran he will enhance his chances of passing the examination.

1. ‘The ego’ Freud writes in The ego and the id ‘is first and foremost a bodily ego’ (1923b, XIX, 26). ‘The Bodily Ego’, a striking phrase, does not recur in Freud's writings. Nevertheless I believe there to be a thesis of the bodily ego which plays an important part, certainly in Freud's later, but probably also in his earlier, thinking. In this essay I want to consider the nature of this thesis, and to say something about its place within Freudian theory.

2. The thesis of the bodily ego contributes to the question how mind and body are related, or the mind–body problem. Currently, it is true, the problem is interpreted very narrowly, only one relation – that of identity – is taken into account, and only the question whether mind is identical with body is raised. To this question the thesis of the bodily ego has nothing to say, and the contribution that the thesis makes to the mind–body problem becomes apparent only when the full range of theoretically interesting relations between mind and body is taken account of. Let us see how those relations are reached.

To the question whether mind is identical with body or whether for every mental particular – a thought, a feeling, an access of desire – there is some physical particular with which it is identical, the answer may be yes or no. Those who answer yes subscribe to the identity thesis and are, on ordinary metaphysical assumptions, materialists.

Freud was a materialist, and at an early stage of his psychological inquiries attempted to construct an explicitly physiological psychology based on the interaction of neurons. This attempt, by now well known under the title ‘Project for a scientific psychology’, was abandoned shortly after Freud sent the draft to Fliess in October 1895. And when he learned in 1937 that Marie Bonaparte had unearthed the manuscript, he sought to have it destroyed.

His subsequent theories were of an entirely different character, for they contained only psychological terminology and did not refer explicitly to neuron interaction. Nevertheless, there is a good deal of structural continuity between the earlier and later views, and Freud continued to be convinced that the psychic apparatus which he was investigating and describing in mentalistic terms was in its true nature a physical system – though too little was known about neurophysiology to permit anyone to think about psychology in physical terms. That is why Freud felt it necessary to abandon the line of investigation represented by the Project.

The question therefore arises in what sense it is possible to think about a physical system in mentalistic terms, taken from the vocabulary of experience, perception, desire, etc., without having any idea of the physical significance of those descriptions.

The work to be presented here is an attempt to work out the rudimentary principles of a theory of the defence mechanisms. More specifically, we will attempt to lay out a framework within which the defence mechanisms may be systematically defined, generated and classified. The recent literature, both psychological and psychoanalytic, is full of comments concerning the need for systematic treatment of psychoanalytic theory. A good summary of the situation may be found in Rapaport's monograph (1960).

The approach we have used in this paper falls generally within the framework of the use of mathematical models in psychology, although the developments are elementary and, we believe, totally self-contained within the framework of our discussion of the defence mechanisms. The problems in developing specific mathematical models for given parts of psychoanalytic theory are formidable, and we do not pretend to be clear as to how all these problems are to be solved. Nevertheless, the kinds of success that have been achieved by using mathematics in other areas of science, including other areas of psychology, suggest that a piecemeal approach may be useful at the present stage. We think that the elementary mathematical models we have used in the present paper to provide a definite scheme for generating and classifying the defence mechanisms provide an example of such a piecemeal approach.

By using elementary formal methods we have been able to bring a viewpoint to the classification of the defence mechanisms that seems not to have been previously presented in the literature.

The essays in this volume are about philosophical issues arising from the work of Freud. They differ in approach and opinion, although most are written in the tradition of analytical philosophy. Readers who lack familiarity with psychoanalysis or philosophical discussion of it may find it useful to be given some perspective on the issues involved, and some indication as to how they are connected with one another. This introduction, therefore, consists of two parts. The first describes one of the most widely discussed topics from the encounter between analytical philosophy and psychoanalysis, and considers its bearing upon the exegesis and verification of Freudian theory. The second comments briefly on the essays, relating them to the issues described.

Philosophy aims, among other things, at clarity of understanding and the demarcation of knowledge. These aims are linked in the philosophical consideration of theories used in explanation; for a correct understanding of the nature of a theory may be required for judging how far explanations using that theory contribute to knowledge. Clarity of this sort about psychoanalytic theory has, it seems, been difficult to attain. In particular, the relation of Freud's explanations to those in physical or experimental science has long been a matter of dispute. Recently this dispute has taken a particular form.

Within the last decade philosophy of science has developed greatly as a special discipline. Perhaps inevitably, the internal controversies which this expansion has engendered have been difficult to relate to the more general philosophical field. The difficult relationship between philosophy in general and philosophy of science in particular, is an aspect of the difficult relationship between philosophy and scientific theory. The back numbers of reputable journals are littered with articles which either utilize some illusory science as a raw material for practising philosophy on, or which hew so closely to a few minor scientific maxims that their philosophy is deformed. Both these approaches tend towards a sort of eclectic and abstract legislation about the nature of science and the conduct of scientific activity.

In the course of this paper we shall have occasion inter alia to deal with the following one-sided perspectives. One is the resort to ‘common sense’ as a court of appeal; often involved with an essentialist view of causation, in particular a reduction to ‘constant conjunction’. A second common source of confusion stems from rigid application of criteria based on falsificationist principles. We shall be finding this of particular interest since falsificationism depends upon certain assumptions, a metaphysical theory of truth and a particular view of the relations between facts and theories: assumptions which actually deflect that particular tendency within philosophy of science from dealing with those very methodological problems of scientific discovery and explanation which it formally sets itself.

Whether or not we should think psychoanalysis a reasonable theory, or even a theory at all in the usual sense, depends on what we think to be the evidence for and against it, and that, in turn, depends on how we think theory and evidence go together generally. On one very influential view of scientific testing what is required in order to obtain evidence for or against psychoanalysis, as with any other theory, is that we deduce from it some claim regarding the correlation of two or more properties – which are of a kind that can be identified without using any psychoanalytic hypotheses – and then subject this claim to the rigors of statistical hypothesis testing. This strategy has been used to test psychoanalysis with very mixed and unpromising results. For several reasons, analysts tend to oppose evaluating their theory solely on the basis of such evidence. In the first place, they claim that the experimentalists' bias for easily manipulated and easily controlled factors results in an undue emphasis on testing psychoanalytic hypotheses that are peripheral to the main tenets of the theory; even worse, the hypotheses tested by experimentalists are often no more than surrogates for the genuine article, and inferences from the falsity of such ersatz hypotheses to the falsity of psychoanalysis are not legitimate.

Freud denied that psychoanalysis has ‘moral’ implications beyond those of the scientific attitude in general (1933a, XXII, 158ff.). Yet any comprehensive vision of human nature such as he provides must have implications for the nature of happiness, and for the relation of man's natural capacities to his normal or ideal state. Classical theories of man might be forced into a dichotomy between what we might tag the ‘biological’ and the ‘theological’. The former derive normative conclusions from the innate and specific endowments of man, the latter start from an ideal model somehow revealed. (In this sense Aristotle's vision is biological, Plato's theological.) Freud's view contrasts with both: the normal man in maturity is not ‘natural’, he is the outcome of a complex development the course of which is not determined by innate capacities alone. Yet no source exists, outside that development itself, for an ideal of maturity. This third way blurs the venerable distinction between Fact and Value: in the developmental vision of the normal human, we should find both a source of therapeutic values – whether or not these coincide with conventional morals – and a relative measure of the worth, in relation to happiness, of different levels of experience and activity. My central object in these pages is to give a qualified defence of this approach, and to show how Freud's version of it fares in the face of criticism.

Who can doubt that we do deceive ourselves? Yet who can explain coherently and explicitly how we do so?

Recent philosophical attempts at such explanation have centred around the assumption that, in essence, the self-deceiver is one who has got himself to believe what he (still) does not believe. So soon as the matter is put thus starkly we are faced with deep paradox, and a good deal of the recent philosophical discussion has been directed toward trying to save the concept while dissolving the paradox.

In the following, I propose a quite different approach to the analysis of self-deception, one which does not centre on the coexistence of inconsistent beliefs, and indeed does not centre on the understanding of self-deception in terms of belief at all. In consequence, the paradox inherent in the ‘two-belief’ approach does not arise, nor does any other paradox.

The analysis of self-deception which I present here is set beside certain of Freud's doctrines. Setting my own account alongside Freud's work is appropriate inasmuch as his doctrine on defence and the unconscious constitutes the most elaborately worked out, the most extensively applied contemporary doctrine touching self-deception. The juxtaposition of these ways of talking about self-deception results, as I see it, in helping to identify and resolve a central incompleteness in Freud's doctrine, an incompleteness whose centrality Freud himself had just come to appreciate at the very end of his life.

Talk of a summary kind about Freud has for its byword the claim that unconscious items and processes dominate psychic life. Such talk is of course likely to go farther: due to the unconscious we are creatures curiously heedless of time, creatures fixed in our early if not earliest ways. The unconscious, to put it dramatically, first maddens us and then keeps us mad. Among its achievements are these: we try to gratify wishes that are opposed to each other, indeed wishes whose descriptions may be paradoxical; we mistake as meaningless what is intelligible, and as trivial the important and even portentous; we confuse the scope and character of our acts and intentions; our denials can often be better understood as affirmations, and often too, the converse obtains; again more or less unbeknownst to us, our lives are largely spent in the quest and avoidance of persons and experiences past, in pursuit of and flight from an array of surrogates for those persons and experiences, including even antithetical surrogates. Then, too, prominent if not paramount in any résumé of Freud's thought will be statements about his extensions of commonplace notions of sexuality; that among unconscious entities those which enjoy pride of place and power are dispositions to affects or emotions that derive from early erotic experiences and fantasies. Any adequate abstract of Freud's work will also observe that, according to him, everyone is either neurotic or troubled by neurotic tendencies for some appreciable phase or phases of his life.

Thus far we have discussed the various kinds and meanings of special objects, but we have not looked at the process by which meaning is attributed to things in any detail. Yet cherished possessions attain their significance through psychic activities or transactions. Objects are not static entities whose meaning is projected on to them from cognitive functions of the brain or from abstract conceptual systems of culture. They themselves are signs, objectified forms of psychic energy. Whether through action or contemplation, objects in the domestic environment are meaningful only as part of a communicative sign process and are active ingredients of that process.

How a person interacts with objects makes considerable difference. In Chapter 1 we defined the person and the thing as two elements, and in this chapter we will explore the third term, the transaction or relationship between the person and thing. The mode of this transaction determines the goals around which one can shape a life course. The most inclusive term to describe the modes of meaning that mediate people with objects is perhaps cultivation (see Rochberg-Halton, 1979a,b.; 1980a).

Cultivation involves both senses of the verb “to tend”: to take care of or watch over (“she tends her plants regularly”), in other words, “to attend to”; and also to proceed or be directed on some course or inclination (“he tends to find the right way”), that is, “to intend” some aim.

In preceding chapters we have tried to unravel the ways in which the self develops through transaction with the symbolic environment of the home. The objects that constitute this environment help to channel their owners' psychic energy toward goals that give meaning to life. Some of these goals appear to be limited to satisfying a person's needs; some include the well-being of others, some aim toward wider patterns of harmony. It is now time to view this process of cultivation more closely, in order to attempt to provide a context for individual development within the history of the human species. Only from this broader perspective can we evaluate the significance of symbolization and assess the various goals that men and women create to direct their lives.

Throughout the millions of years of the evolution of life on our planet, the various species of bacteria, plants, and animals have struggled to create their form and to maintain it through time. To do so they had to capture energy from the environment – sunlight, chemicals, the fibers and flesh of other living things – and to use it to shape matter according to the blueprint contained in their genes. Thus the basic sources of energy were transformed into tens of thousands of differentiated life forms, each attempting to impose and retain its own form of order.

One of the reasons that the Earth has supported such a variety of life forms has been the fact that none of them have been able to gain an advantage over others in this process of transformation.