This article initially discusses reasons why Freud researchers turn to critical realism since this is what led me to compare causality in the two traditions in the first place. Three arguments on causality follow. First, it is argued that Freud's analyses of unconscious processes merit closer attention by critical realists, focusing on the relation between causal unconscious processes and rationality, and causal unconscious processes and social change. It may be objected that this does not concern the discussion of causality proper, (...) to which I would reply that what we consider to be causally efficacious ultimately is relevant to our conception of causality. The second argument, which is the centrepiece, outlines Freud's conception of causality, his idea of overdetermination and his treatment of motives and reasons as causes. His notions of causality are compared to those of critical realism. Freud's idea of retroactive causality is discussed in relation to delayed causality in critical realism and the idea of disembedded space-time components. Finally, Freud's concept of determinism and the related concepts of repetition and chance are discussed and compared to ubiquity determinism in critical realism and the distinctions between causal and non-causal correlations and necessary and accidental sequences of events. While the first argument concerns presuppositions for the discussion of causality in psychoanalysis and its relevance for critical realism, the third concerns implications and/or applications of the two views on causality. It is my contention that the second argument needs to be placed in context of the other two in order for the two conceptions of causality to be understood adequately and most revealingly compared. (shrink)

Freud (and later commentators) have failed to explain how the origins of psychoanalytical theory began with a positivist investment without recognizing a dual epistemological commitment: simply, Freud engaged positivism because he believed it generally equated with empiricism, which he valued, and he rejected ‘philosophy’, and, more specifically, Kantianism, because of the associated transcendental qualities of its epistemology. But this simple dismissal belies a deep investment in Kant’s formulation of human reason, in which rationality escapes natural cause and thereby bestows humans (...) with cognitive and moral autonomy. Freud also segregated human rationality: he divided the mind between (1) an unconscious grounded in the biological and thus subject to its own laws, and (2) a faculty of autonomous reason, lodged in consciousness and free of natural forces to become the repository of interpretation and free will. Psychoanalysis thus rests upon a basic Kantian construction, whereby reason, through the aid of analytic techniques, provides a detached scrutiny of the natural world, i.e. the unconscious mental domain. Further, sovereign reason becomes the instrument of self-knowing in the pursuit of human perfection. Herein lies the philosophical foundation of psychoanalytic theory, a beguiling paradox in which natural cause and autonomous reason — determinism and freedom — are conjoined despite their apparent logical exclusion. (shrink)

To illustrate one way in which philosophy may be helpful rather than merely critical in the present state of psychoanalytic theorizing, an attempt is made to disentangle issues in controversies about the unconscious. Eleven questions are distinguished and discussed. Logical, linguistic, methodological, metaphysical, empirical, and pragmatic components are set apart. It is found that there are no logical barriers to a construct of the unconscious, that it is linguistically feasible, need violate no methodological concepts, nor foreclose a metaphysical issue, nor (...) have deleterious pragmatic effect. Feasibility and desirability of the construct in all these respects will depend on the character and extent of the scientific findings. Some issues are also raised concerning desirable types of models in the explanation of conduct, and concerning the relevance of recent studies of consciousness. (shrink)

The paper focuses on Richard Moran's account (inAuthority and Estrangement) of the distinction between attitudes that meet, and alternatively fail to meet, his transparency criterion for what he calls rational health, and compare this with the psychoanalytic distinction between contained and uncontained states of mind. On the face of it, Moran's distinction appears to be a useful theoretical deepening of the psychoanalytic distinction. On closer examination, however, it appears that (a) rational health is a more demanding standard than containment, so (...) the rationally unhealthy contains much that is mentally (quite) healthy; and (b) more seriously, some states that meet the “transparency” condition are manifestly mentally unhealthy. So transparency needs to be supplemented by an independently understood notion of containment to approach a realistic norm of mental health/ill health. (shrink)