ABSTRACT
Consciousness (or at least certain aspects of it) is a fundamental, perhaps the fundamental, aspect of the Being of Human Beings. Completion is intense between the three disciplines—Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Neuroscience—to understand this “hard Problem.” All three are discussed in the present chapter. Psychoanalysts, I would posit, have been remiss in devoting the bulk of their attention to Unconsciousness and the putative “System Unconscious”: It has been argued over the course of several volumes now over the dubiousness of the existence of such a system. It has been argued here, in opposition to previous positions I have taken in the past that, although fascinating and seductive, the neuroscience of Consciousness does not help very much with the issues about it that we, as Psychoanalysts, should be most concerned with.
Consciousness is a Primitive; it is a term that is incapable of being further defined. Phenomenology (particularly, but not limited to the work of Husserl) has, perhaps, the most to tell us about it. Existentialism leads to a discussion of the position that Consciousness is Absurd (Camus and Sartre) Evo-Devo leads to the Paleoanthropology of Consciousness (of sentience really) and Consciousness benefits from being discussed as a complex system. Discussions lead to the phenomenal basis of the new Integrated Theory of Conscious (ITC).
