Freud’s Secret Cognitive Theories

Abstract

Professor Rychlak regrets that I do not spell out “a bit more clearly what it was that Freud actually wanted to introduce into our characterization of the human being.” I did not do so because that was not my topic: I was concerned only with his cognitive theories, implicit and explicit. I agree, of course, that Freud must have experienced the tension between the mechanistic assumptions of the science in which he was trained, and which he adopted, and the purposive nature of human beings. Koffka remarks (1938, p. 226): “I believe that the mechanist has no better friend than the vitalist. “ If Freud had been able to give up the mechanistic assumptions of his time, he need not have seen purpose as dangerously close to vitalism. In any case, he was a teleologist, if by that term (I would prefer another—and so, I believe, would Freud)¹ Rychlak means that he gave a central place in his psychology to human motivation. I did not know there was any secret about that.