ABSTRACT
A fundamental element of any account of mind is addressing the nature of consciousness and the possibility of unconscious mental processes. This is particularly so for psychoanalysis since, as Fonagy and Target (2000) write, “[t]he hallmark of psychoanalytic theory is the attention to unconscious mental processes and unconscious motivation in the explanation of complex and often paradoxical human behaviour” (p. 414) and, as discussed earlier, the very nature of Freud’s metapsychology can be described as the psychology of the unconscious (Brenner, 1980). However, there is clearly something dicult in conceptualising unconscious mentality. Searle (2004), for example, writes that “[t]he notion of the unconscious is one of the most confused and ill-thought-out conceptions of modern intellectual life. Yet it seems we cannot get on without it” (p. 256). Furthermore, Freud’s theory is considered particularly problematic (e.g. Greenwald, 1992; Uleman, 2005), and complicated by his dissection of unconscious mentality into descriptive, dynamic, and systematic senses (Freud, 1912g, 1915d, 1915e). The diculties with conceptualising unconscious mentality are compounded by the proliferation of apparent synonyms for the term ‘unconscious’, including nonconscious, aconscious, or implicit processes, as well as varieties of ‘the unconscious’, including the ‘past’ and ‘present’ unconscious (Sandler & Sandler, 1983, 1994), or the ‘cognitive’, ‘emotional’, ‘behavioural’, ‘procedural’, ‘principle’ unconscious systems, etc. (see, for instance, Northo, 2012).
