Psychoanalytic action explanation

Abstract

Psychoanalysis is concerned with neurotic behaviour that counts as an action if one takes into account “repressed” mental states. Freud's paradigmatic examples are a challenge for philosophical theories of action explanation. The main problem is that such symptomatic behaviour is, in a characteristic way, irrational. In line with standard interpretations, I will recap that psychoanalytic action explanation is not in accordance with Davidson's classical reason-explanation model, and I will recall that Freud's unconsciousness is not a second mind with its own rationality but that it is non-propositional in character. However, I then will argue that this characterization is not discriminating enough to explain the dynamical unconscious and overlooks the crucial role of “counter-cathexis”. With counter-cathexis the relevant desire turns out to be a complex with two inseparable aspects (“double-aspect view”), so that the causing belief–desire pair is still part of the space of reasons, although it cannot rationalize the behaviour. Psychoanalytic action explanation is hence still Davidsonian, albeit in a modified way.

Keywords:

• psychoanalysis
• repression
• action theory
• Freud
• Davidson

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the participants of the workshop “Varieties of Action Explanation” held in Munich, March 2012, for stimulating discussion of an earlier version of this paper. Special thanks go to my respondent, Anna Schriefl (Bonn), for helpful comments on various versions of the paper.

Notes on contributor

Cord Friebe is currently Associate Professor (without tenure) at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany. Prior to that he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Freiburg University (Germany), in the Istituto Trentino di Cultura (Italy), at Bonn University (Germany), and in the Centre for Time, Sydney, Australia. His main research interests are in metaphysics (of physics), in the philosophy of psychoanalysis, and in Kant's theoretical philosophy.

Notes

1. “Unconscious” are mental states that are not present to conscious awareness, namely or (i) simply not present (“preconscious”) or (ii) unavailable for consciousness (“dynamically” unconscious; “repressed”). “Repression” will be clarified in detail in Section 3.

2. To recall the (common) crucial point: it is not sufficient to explain the behaviour by mere effective causes – however “mental” they might be (beliefs, desires, etc.) – but imperative to connect these causes with reasons or purposes.

3. The crucial technical term “counter-cathexis” will be explained in more detail below. For the rest of the psychoanalytic terminology, the reader should consult the glossary in Lear (2005).

4. The somewhat outdated story runs as follows: the threat was that the housemaid would have noticed the husband's impotence during the wedding night if she had not found any reliable blood-trace when making the bed. So, the newly married bride faked some trace but, most probably, did not succeed in deluding the housemaid. Then, years later, the obsessive action “intends” to finally convince the housemaid that the husband was not impotent.

5. Note that the could-have-done-otherwise should not be conceived of as merely casually indeterministic but as somehow reason-guided.

6. Note further that the post-hypnotic agent “acts” successfully and in the right way: post-hypnotic behaviour is surely not of the sort of typical counter-examples such as error-cases or deviant causal chains.

7. Freud claims are independent of any specific theory of free will and intentionality. In particular, it is not imperative to interpret the could-have-done-otherwise clause in a libertarian way. I suggest that Freud provides sufficient evidence that post-hypnotic behaviour should be conceived of as an action.

8. “The unconscious” is the third way in which Freud uses the term “unconscious”, denoting a mental locale that is the home of the repressed states (see Lear 2005, 258). It is a misguided use and should be avoided.

9. In Freud's work, some confusion arises because of his popular presentation of (Freudian) slips to be “mini-neurotic symptoms”: in my view, Freudian slips indeed occur (if at all) when two intentions clash. However, this is precisely not what is characteristic of neurotic behaviour.

10. To recall: the second-mind hypothesis is crucial for Davidson's own way of explaining neurotic behaviour; see Davidson in “Paradoxes of irrationality” (1982).

11. My impression is that, this way, the double-mind theory survives, but with the difference to Davidson's approach that the second mind is no longer conceived of as a holistic propositional system of its own rationality but as non-propositional in character, instead.

12. Of course: the spatial sense of “there” and “where” is not intended.

13. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify this crucial point.

14. The more developed cases will also involve several independent repressions or even other defence mechanisms. It is up to the therapist and his patient to analyse whether apparently different symptoms are really different or rather essentially the same – or by disguising different repressed contents or by being merely different appearances of the same repressed content.