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UNCONSCIOUS The unconscious is used today in a variety of senses, ranging from informal, everyday uses to formally defined, elaborately theorized ones. But several meanings in particular need to be carefully distinguished, above all what Sigmund Freud identifies as the dynamic in contrast to the descriptive meaning of this term. In its dynamic sense (i.e. its strictly psychoanalytic meaning), the term continues to be the site of philosophical controversy, especially in Anglo-American philosophy (nowhere more so than among those who identify with Deweyan pragmatism, though Richard Rorty is a notable exception here). It refers to what in our own minds or psyches strenuously resists being brought to our awareness, indeed, what becomes accessible to us as conscious human actors only through an arduous process and in an indirect manner. Akin to the meanings given to the word by John Dewey in Experience and Nature (1925), consciousness designates for Freud the qualitatively immediate aspects of our mental lives and also the immediately accessible meanings so intimately associated with these aspects (Laplanche and Pontalis: 84-8; cf. LW 1.227), for example the feeling of hunger as both an immediate feeling and a somatic sign of the need for nutrition. But, for Dewey no less than Freud, there is more to mind than consciousness. Freud’s understanding of the workings of the unconscious is, however, derived from his clinical experience with mostly neurotic individuals whose psychological obsessions, fixations, and other maladies obstructed their efforts

to live meaningful, rewarding lives. In his most careful and precise formulations, then, the unconscious does not refer (as all too many of his critics allege) to a separate mental realm (see, e.g., Dewey MW 14.61) but to heterogeneous mental processes, that is, ones radically different from conscious thought (Lear 2005). The unconscious primary processes are condensation and displacement. They operate under the sway of the pleasure-principle, rather than the reality-principle. In addition, they are alogical and ahistoric in their functioning, undeterred in their course of operation by reality, reason, negation, and doubt. The ordinarily unacknowledged – indeed, typically disavowed – presence of such processes came to light in a clinical setting where resistance to certain ideas surfaced as a prominent and recurrent feature in the exchange between analyst and analysand.