Abstract
Amongst the marginalisers of consciousness, amongst those thinkers who have advocated that consciousness should be, in Nietzsche’s words, ‘more modest’, Freud is the most ambitious and influential. The reach of his (conscious, superficially rational) thoughts about the limitations of thinking, rational consciousness is enormous, encompassing sanity and madness, sexual and non-sexual love, war and peace, art and politics, life and death. Indeed, his example is so obvious, his ideas so well known, his œuvre so vast and his commentators so numerous, that it is tempting to bypass him altogether. He is, however, unignorable, and his case for the marginalisation of the conscious mind must be answered, or at least assigned its correct place.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes and References
Adolf Grunbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis. A Philosophical Critique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Jeffrey Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Viking-Penguin, 1985).
See also Janet Malcolm In the Freud Archives (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), for further documentation. The most damning evidence comes from Freud’s own correspondence which had been suppressed by the ‘keepers of the flame’ in the Freudian archives. Freud’s brutally inquisitorial methods are also documented in the published works:
Allen Esterson, Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Books, 1993).
E.M. Thornton, Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy (London: Blond and Briggs, 1983).
Richard Webster, Why Freud was Wrong: Sex, Sin and Psychoanalysis (London: HarperCollins 1995).
My essay on Webster’s book (‘Burying Freud’, Lancet 1996, 347: 669–71) is a brief summary of the case against Freud as a clinician and scientist.
Robert Wilcocks, Maelzel’s Chess Player: Sigmund Freud & the Rhetoric of Deceit (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994). Wilcocks’ witty and subtle book draws attention to, amongst other things, Freud’s use of the middle mode of discourse in which ‘apparent referentiality’ is combined with ‘the absence of assessable reference‘. The consequent ‘semantic slippage’ is harnessed to promote rhetorical persuasion of the validity of his inventions within which context the metaphor does duty of a whole network of thought patterns, each of which subverts the primary referential trope.
Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (London: Paladin, 1985). Gellner compellingly accounts for the attractiveness of Freud to the contemporary mind. Freud’s theory, by seeming to be constructed from the elements upon which clinical medicine is based, was acceptable to modern sensibility. At the same time, however, ‘Freud’s system also provided pastoral services comparable to those previously offered by religion, but in a manner suited to the ethos and customs of the new age‘. Moreover, the ideas were ‘manned by a well-groomed clerisy who promised a new kind of salvation’ and who were incorporated into closely regulated guild.
Frank J. Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, Esquisse d’une vie, histoire d’un système de pensée (Paris: Fayard, 1993). The baselessness of Lacan’s ideas is discussed in ‘Jacques Lacan: A Critical Reflection’, in Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure (London: Macmillan, 2nd edition, 1995)
and Raymond Tallis ‘The Strange Case of Jacques Lacan’, PN Review 14(4) (1987), 60: 23–6.
Quoted in Richard Wollheim, Freud (London: Fontana, 1971), p. 174. In writing this section about the Freudian unconscious, I have been greatly assisted by Wollheim’s exemplary guide, although he would not share my evaluation of Freud.
A.H. Chapman and M. Chapman-Santana, ‘Is it possible to have an unconscious thought?’ Lancet 344 (1994): 1752–3. The examples the authors give in this paper also show how, when Freudians talk about the Unconscious, they are often simply talking about things we are conscious of but are not yet conscious of reflectively. In accordance with their own theories, they shouldn’t, of course: the Unconscious is supposed to be composed of psychic things that have been actively repressed rather than simply not yet brought into full consciousness (or, as discussed in note 13, simply forgotten).
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, New Left Books, 1979), p. 192.
W.H. Auden ‘Vespers’, from Horae Canonicae, Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), p. 114.
Copyright information
© 1997 Raymond Tallis
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tallis, R. (1997). Freud and the Instinctual Unconscious. In: Enemies of Hope. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371569_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371569_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-76318-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37156-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)