Topics Mind

Question What is the philosophical take on the subconscious and who came up with the idea? It seems highly problematic to me in that its existence can never be established because of its very nature. It is rather like positing Pluto to account for wobbles in other known planets' orbits except that Pluto can be demonstrably found! This is different from the unconscious mind which keeps you breathing, etc. which works rather like the programmes running in the background on your PC. No mystery here. And where do dreams enter into this debate? I can't ever recall having had a 'symbolic' dream, just ones dramatising traits and memories I am well aware of. A statement like 'I hated her but I now realise I subconsciously loved her' is surely just hindsight. Knowing and not knowing something at the same time has to be impossible?

Accepted:
April 8, 2006

Comments

I'm not sure why it seems to you that the existence of the sub-conscious could never be established. The idea is simply that our behavior is in part caused by mental states of which we are not consciously aware. Perhaps a better example would be anger: I might come to realize at some point that I have long been angry with X for something he did, and that this anger, of which I'd not previously been consciously aware as such, has been causing me to behave badly towards X. That seems pretty unproblematic to me.

It also isn't obvious there is any real difference with the case of Pluto. Suppose you think that mental states are, ultimately, physical states, states of the brain. Then if we knew more about the brain, perhaps we could verify the existence of sub-conscious states like that one.

I concur with Richard.

The idea of positing the subconscious was first taken seriously by Freud. It was a theoretical posit, posited to explain a large number of phenomena, including slips of the tongue, dreams and a whole variety of psychological conditions such as obsessional neurosis. Freud actually got the idea from hypnosis. Under hypnosis people perform actions without knowing their own reasons for so acting (the reasons having been put into their minds by the hypnotist).

Freud's 'New Introductory Lectures' provide a very good introduction to his ideas on the topic.

According to Freud, all dreams are symbolic. You just don't know how to interpret the symbolism.

Freud's theories, and those of later psychoanalysts, are extremely sophisticated and address a very wide range of data. Their status, however, is very controversial amongst philosophers and psychologists.