Freud’s Philosophy of the Unconscious by David Livingstone Smith

Author:David Livingstone Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer-Verlag Wien 2012
Published: 2014-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

This is Freud’s justification for what I will call his ‘methodological homunculism’. If, in our rationality-maximizing interpretations of our own mental processes, certain events do not fit the pattern, we have license to apply principles of charity to these ‘leftovers’ and thereby posit and attribute propositional attitudes to intrapsychic homunculi. My choice of the term ‘methodological homunculism’ turns on Freud’s cautious wording. It is clear that he understands all of this as an interpretive activity: the number of ‘minds’ at work in oneself at any given moment is partially a function of one’s skill at discovering rational patterns. The idea that such sub-personalities only exist relative to some interpretive strategy, and that two interpreters with different interpretive competencies or priorities might cut the pie in different ways, is therefore consistent with Freud’s anti-realism with respect to folk-psychology118.

Let us pause to contrast the homuncular functionalism that informed Freud’s model making with his methodological homunculism. Freud views homuncular functionalism as a legitimate explanatory strategy for scientific psychology. The conjectured homunculi are hypothetical entities supervening upon neurophysiological processes, realistically interpreted and in principle open to falsification. The homunculi generated by methodological homunculism are folk-psychological artifacts of a particular interpretive strategy. As such they are not hypothetical entities and must be interpreted anti-realistically. Although these methodological homunculi do not corespond one-to-one to neural kinds, they are nonetheless token-identical to neurophysiological states and are informative with respect to psychology: they provide a guide to the functional structure of the mind.

If the anti-realist interpretation of Freud seems strange and strained, it will perhaps seem less so if we examine other examples from Freud’s writings where he considers the ontological status of folk-psychological entities. The earliest hints of intentional instrumentalism in Freud’s writings are embedded in the dualist metaphysics that Freud embraced during the early years of his career. If epiphenominalism is true, and neurophysiological events provide only the causal basis for mental events, then those neurophysiological events which fail to cause their corresponding (by definition, conscious) mental events, can be described figuratively as unconscious mental events ‘as if what is expressed by the terms “separation of the idea from its affect” and “false connection” of the latter had really taken place’ (1894:53).119

In ‘Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defence’, the first paper written after his shift to the identity theory, Freud (1896) wrote that In order to describe clearly and with probable accuracy the processes of repression, the return of the repressed and the formation of pathological compromise-ideas, one would have to make up one’s mind to some quite definite assumptions about the substratum of psychical events and of consciousness. So long as one seeks to avoid this, one must be content with...remarks which are intended more or less figuratively (170).

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