ABSTRACT

This does not seem the right description of Mr S. If Mr S had decided the stick in the hedge was a danger, he would have had a reason to go back and remove it. But what reason could there be to replace it on the path? There seems to be a compulsion, not merely to remove the danger of the stick poking out of the hedge, but to restore it to its original position. Where is the reason in that? Freud describes Mr S as ‘suddenly seized with uneasiness,’ ‘obliged’ to jump off the tram, acting ‘under a compulsion,’ and unable to see ‘what anyone else would have seen.’ One gets the sense that Davidson is forced to see the act of replacing the stick as more rational than it is precisely because he conceives of the unconscious as a second mind.14 He sees the irrationality one level up – in how the two component-acts fit together – but in fact the second act seems nutty all on its own. How, then, might we otherwise conceive of the unconscious?