ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three interwoven parts of Freud’s thinking: first, his views on the mental unconscious, second, the relation between the unconscious and the brain, and third, the Freudian view of the nature of introspection. It is also appropriate to focus on the above three issues since psychoanalytic folks not accepting the Freudian metapsychology, nevertheless use an approach to the unconscious and introspection in a Freudian way. The unconscious is supposed to contain desires, and thus one has to consider it intentional. However intentionality is the hallmark of consciousness in particular. This problem carries an advocate of psychoanalytic metaphysics even deeper into frustrating conceptual acrobatics. Excluding some philosophers, it is evident for everybody that humans possess pains and pleasures, and that each of us has a stream of consciousness containing feelings and mental images of different kinds. The psychoanalytic mentalism creates additional problems as well as experiencing those encountered in ordinary mentalism.
