Online research in philosophy

Freud's principal contribution to clarifying persons' relations to themselves lies in his exploration of the dynamic relations between conscious and unconscious processes. This paper addresses another aspect of Freud's ideas, one to which he himself and his followers accorded insufficient attention, namely, unconscious knowledge, in particular, unconscious knowledge of one's own mind and hence of one's own unconscious. First I show that Freud's idea of unconscious knowledge of one's own mind is epistemologically coherent and that it can be understood in different ways within the framework of his basic concepts. I then discuss select examples of such knowledge from his clinical and theoretical writings. In conclusion, I pose the question of the scope of these ideas for depth psychology.

Machine generated contents note: Introduction: the historiography of the unconscious; Part I. The Subject Before the Unconscious: 1. A general science of the I: Fichte and the crisis of self-identification; 2. Natural autonomy: Schelling and the divisions of freedom; Part II. The Romantic Unconscious: 3. Divining the individual: towards a metaphysics of the unconscious; 4. The historical unconscious; 5. Post-idealism and the Romantic psyche; Part III. The Psychoanalytic Unconscious: 6. Freud: the Geist in the machine; 7. The liberal unconscious; Conclusion.

In this paper I investigate the notion of an unconscious intention as it is discussed and defended in Freud's A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. I am concerned with two issues: first, whether the evidence that Freud adduces supports his conclusion that there are unconscious intentions, and, second, whether the notion of an unconscious intention is coherent. I call into question some of Freud's arguments to support the notion, and I present a case for the incoherence of the notion. Finally, I suggest how one might begin to reconcile my argument for its incoherence with an argument for the existence of unconscious intentions.