ABSTRACT
This objection has often been pressed in even more general terms. It has been argued not only that wishes, motives and the like cannot be unconscious, but that nothing can be. For that of which we are unconscious is that of which ex hypothesi we are and must be unaware. But of that of which we cannot be aware nothing can be known or said: it cannot therefore be known or
said to exist. The philosophers who advanced this type of argument against Freud only displayed their own naïvete in assuming that linguistic objections of so obvious a kind could have been ignored by Freud. But they make it plain that what is crucial is to exhibit the sense that the term ‘unconscious’ has in psychoanalytic theory and to exhibit what sort of evidence it is on the basis of which the occurrence of unconscious mental activity is asserted. Yet to accept the demand that this should be done is not necessarily to accept the assumptions of those who raise this type of objection. Indeed a first step should be precisely to examine their assumptions as to how ordinary mental words are used. Freud is accused of innovating in his use of ‘unconscious’. But on what is he innovating?
