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Freud and Philosophy of Mind, Volume 1 pp 285–347Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Freud’s Argument, Part 2: Brain Representationality as the Essence of the Mental

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Abstract

In this chapter, I complete my reconstruction of Freud’s positive argument for the existence of unconscious mental states by providing a step-by-step account of Freud’s philosophical argument that the mental-relevant essence of consciousness is brain representationality. I consider Freud’s understanding of the mind–body problem in historical context, drawing on figures such as Fechner, Hughlings Jackson, and Titchener; Freud’s perceptual model of consciousness and how it differs from Brentano’s “inner perception” model; Freud’s strategy of turning traditional psychophysical parallelism on its head to separate consciousness from the mental; and Freud’s prescient hypothesis that brain representationality—representationality realized unconsciously in the brain—is the essence of the mental.

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  1. Silver School of Social Work and Department of Psychiatry, New York University, New York, USA

    Jerome C. Wakefield

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Wakefield, J.C. (2018). Freud’s Argument, Part 2: Brain Representationality as the Essence of the Mental. In: Freud and Philosophy of Mind, Volume 1. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96343-3_10

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