ABSTRACT
Freud held complex and fascinating views on the question of mental causation. In this chapter, the author proposes an interpretation of Freud’s views on this question, bringing together ideas from psychoanalysis, philosophy of psychoanalysis, and philosophy of mind. Faced with the impasse of the problem of how the mind interacts with the body, Freud created a two-dimensional picture of mental causation, with one dimension involving mechanistic causes and the other involving intentional causes. The author argues that Freud’s best-developed picture of mental causation describes mental causes as intentional causes arising from psychological processes. She analyzes three moments in Freud’s work with a focus on causality. In the first topography, Freud uses a hybrid vocabulary, describing the mind in terms of both mechanistic and intentional causes. In his second topography, the mind increasingly assumes an intentional description. The third moment is Freud’s theory of anxiety, in which the arational cause of unconscious drives, initially presented as a motor of the mind, gives rise to anxiety as an affective state that forces the self to find a solution for its mental conflicts. In the last part, she argues that Freud’s theory gradually moves from a reductionist approach to the mind-body problem on which mental causation is understood in terms of physical mechanisms, to a non-reductionist view where the mental becomes causally efficacious in its own right.
