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To cite this article: Vesa Talvitie Lic. Psych. & Juhani Ihanus Ph.D. (2003) On the Nature of Repressed ContentsA
Working-Through of John Searles Critique, Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the
Neurosciences, 5:2, 133-142, DOI: 10.1080/15294145.2003.10773417
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15294145.2003.10773417
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The philosopher John Searle has called Freuds idea about repressed contents incoherent, factually empty, and
implying dualism. Thus he has been seen as a critic of psychoanalysis. This view is questioned in the present article.
Searle shares the central ideas of psychoanalysis, and the differences between him and Freud are conceptual. Problems
with unconscious meanings and mental contents of the repressed are treated here as philosophical, and the debate on this
issue is suggested to have minor relevance for clinical data and psychoanalytic practice. The authors of this article prefer
the terms unconscious meaning preservation and meaning manipulation instead of repressed contents. It is
problematic to show how repressed contents would exist other than as neurophysiological structures. However, talk about
repressed desires and memories is assessed as unavoidable and reasonable for psychoanalytic practice.
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tween perception and consciousness: In psychoanalysis there is no choice for us but to assert that
mental processes are in themselves unconscious,
and to liken the perception of them by means of
consciousness to the perception of the external
world by means of sense-organs (Freud, 1915, p.
171; for a review of the perception metaphor, see
Solms, 1997, pp. 683687). Opinions diverge on the
role of this metaphorlater referred as the perception metaphorin psychoanalysis: for example,
Solms (1997) leans on it heavily, whereas Natsoulas
(1995, p. 307) criticizes Searle and psychoanalytic
authors for taking a misleading metaphor of
Freuds literally.
Talk about repressed contents does not belong
only to the history of psychoanalysis. Edelson
(1990, pp. 3739), for example, considers repressed
fantasies to be mental dispositions, but he also mentions the latent content of fantasy (see also
Shevrin, Bond, Brakel, Hertel, & Williams, 1996,
pp. 264266). Slap and Saykin (1994) state that the
contents of the repressed include theories and fantasies, and the latter could be thought of as film
clips. According to this kind of thinking, the repressed is something between the brain and consciousness, and it (1) has content (it contains ideas,
desires, fantasies, and memories), (2) cannot be
described in terms of neurophysiology, and (3) is
intentional (psychic, mental). Searles critique is
directed against the second thesis: When you make
a claim about unconscious intentionality, there are
no facts that bear on the case except neurophysical
facts. There is nothing else there except neurophysiological states and processes describable in neurophysical terms (Searle, 1992, p. 161). To put it in
other words, when unconscious contents are not
perceived (in terms of the perception metaphor) or
translated into something conscious, they are
nothing but neurophysiology. This view may seem
to question the cornerstone of psychoanalysis.
Within psychoanalysis, critique can be found
concerning the idea of repressed contents which is
relative to that of Searle: Beres and Joseph (1970),
Schimek (1975), and Olds (1992), for example, hold
that there cannot be repressed contents, although
this expression is useful in psychoanalytic practice.
135
136
memory rather as a mechanism for generating current performance, including conscious thoughts and
actions . . . (p. 187). Similarly, he (e.g., pp. 227
248) criticizes the idea that the mind/brain contains
rules and representations, and he supports the connectionist approach.
If we went into more detail here, we would lose
sight of the main point of this article. Therefore, let
us make some minimalist definitions. Searle is one
of the main critics of the computational approach,
but our example of Thesaurus happens to be of help
in understanding his view. We could think of it
either in terms of having a representation of correct
English, or as containing mechanisms capable of
generating language-correcting performance. In
the case of human memory performance, we should
think in terms of a certain event having somehow
changed the brain, regardless of whether we call the
change a neural representation (see Hadley, 1983)
(be it distributed, explicit, or implicit), a mechanism, or a trace. Central to the issue treated here is
the point thataccording to Searlebehind consciousness are just physical matters.
According to Searles biological naturalism,
consciousness and (intrinsic) intentionality is
a phenomenon that humans and certain other animals have as part of their biological nature
(Searle, 1992, p. 79) or property of the brain.
Various researchers (Chalmers, 1996, pp. 213246;
Damasio, 1994, pp. 225229; Dennett, 1991, p. 16;
Edelman, 1992, pp. 149150; Olds, 1992; Searle,
1992) have recently supported this kind of thinking.
From this point of view, the question about the
existence of contents outside consciousness canto
borrow an idea from Woolridge (1968, in Peterfreund, 1971, p. 228)be equated to a childs
question, Where does the light go when it goes
out?
The brain also has the capability or power to
cause (or give rise to) conscious states. This could,
in principle, be likened to the hardware of a computer, which is capable of giving rise to what appears
on the screen (and, as every user of a PC knows, this
capability is easily disturbed). In the case of a
computer, the physical entity responsible for the
capability is a set of silicon chips or 01 formations.
In humans, the physical entity is a set of nerve cells
or neurophysical structures.
Searles view does not solve the mindbody
problem because he does not give us an explanation
of how and why brains have this capability. Therefore, his idea that consciousness is a property of the
brain could be considered equal to Freuds analogy
between consciousness and perception: the aim is to
conceptualize the phenomenon in a way that is
fruitful for research. Thus, toward the end of this
article, Searles critique is considered in terms of
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138
thoughts) intentional, too: The concept of unconscious intentionality is thus that of latency relative
to its manifestation in consciousness (Searle, 1992,
p. 161). Although repressed contents are just neurophysiological facts, they are intentional (and this
way mental) too, because they are possible candidates of consciousness.
Searle formulates his critique against Freud quite
cautiously, in fact: One, we dont have a clear
notion of how the ontology of the unconscious is
supposed to match the ontology of neurophysiology.
Two, we dont have a clear notion of how to apply
the perceptual analogy to the relation between consciousness and unconsciousness . . . (Searle, 1992,
p. 172).
The first point means that intentionality cannot be
found from unconscious states otherwise than
through their capacity to produce conscious intentionality. If repressed contents exist somewhere,
they are in the brain. However, according to presentday views of neuroscience, we cannot even conceive
of what these contents are like, or of the kind of
equipment that would reveal their existence. Although the expression has been traditionally used in
a different context, repressed fantasies (beliefs, etc.)
could be said to appear from the cognitive viewpoint
as ghosts in the machineit is even hard to
conceive of where and how such entities might exist.
Searles (1992, pp. 170171) critique against
Freuds perception metaphor relates closely to the
first issue. According to the metaphor, mental contents exist independently of the perceiver, just as do
physical objects. For Searle, there is nothing but
neurophysiological facts to be perceived.
139
140
Discussion
All in all, Searles views are mainly compatible with
psychoanalytic thinking. If we think that repressed
fantasies and beliefs are matters that cannot be
described in terms of neurophysiology, there is, of
course, a major disagreement with Searle: for him,
facts about the unconscious are just neurophysiological facts. For Searle, however, this disagreement only concerns terminology.
In our discussions of the ontology of the unconscious, we need to be reminded that it is not only in
psychoanalytic treatment, but also in science, that
there is a need to speak about matters that are known
not to exist in a strict physical sense. In his article
What Is a Theory of Mental Representation?
Stich (1992) notes that even for materialists, materialistic explanations cannot be the whole story. According to him, the materialistic explanation of the
difference between the phonemes /p/ and /b/, for
example, is hardly satisfactory. On the other hand,
many objects of studygrooming behavior studied
by ethologists being onecannot be defined in
terms of natural sciences. Let us also mention that
cognitive science conventionally refers to the computational level between the brain and consciousness, without anybody believing that there are
tokens in the brain.
According to certain cognitive views (e.g.,
Dennett, 1987, pp. 117202), even when we talk
about conscious beliefs and desires we are dealing
with undeniably useful abstractions that do not exist
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