Psychoanalysis and the Logic of Thinking Without Language. How Can We Conceive of Neurotic Displacement, Denying, Inversion etc. as Rational Actions of the Mind?

Abstract

Freud’s psychoanalysis proposes the thesis of a powerful and lasting unconsciousness and it also calls our attention to the action of „neurotic displacement“ that affects our behavior and can be redone only with the help of a psychoanalytical hermeneutics. Thus, from a philosophical point of view, psychoanalysis incorporates the alarming insight that our consciousness is opaque. My starting point is a pheno­menological analysis of human non-linguistic thinking that is centered on the mode of scenic phantasma we commonly identify with daydreams. I will consider the idea that daydreams may be an old form of (non-linguistic) thinking about the present world, about our former experiences, or about our wishes and future plans. Daydreams turn out to be the medium to bind my former experiences with possible future actions and possible events. It reveals as a problem-solving activity even in the specific forms of neurotic displacement. From this point of view, some enigmas of our wakeful daydreams may be solved and turn out to be quite rational processes. ‘— End of Abstract’