Abstract
Virtually all those who are not either ignorant of Freud or totally sceptical of his findings believe that he altered, radically altered, our conception of the mind. He effected a change in what we think we are like, and it was a big change. Astonishingly enough, it is philosophers who have been of all people the slowest to recognize this fact. They have been slowest to recognize that this fact has anything to do with them.
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References
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), pp. 22–23 and 57, and Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Beliefs, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, and Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 23–27 and 41–52.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ).
For this account of the explanation of action, see Donald Davidson, Essays in Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980 ), passim, especially Essays 1 and 5. That Freudian theory offers an extension of commonsense psychology is cogently argued for in an essay I saw only after writing this piece: James Hopkins, “Epistemology and Depth Psychology: Critical Notes on the Foundations of Psychoanalysis ”, in Psychoanalysis, Mind and Science, ed. Peter Clark and Crispin Wright ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988 ).
Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–1974), vol. VI, 1901b, pp. 227–228.
Ibid., vol. VI, 1901b, for example, pp.4, 39–40, 151–162, and 167–190. See also vol. XXIII, 1940 [1938], pp. 284–285.
Adolf Grünbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984 ).
See, for example, Donald Levy, “Grünbaum’s Freud”, Inquiry, 31 (June 1988), pp. 193–215, and David Sachs, “In Fairness to Freud”, Philosophical Review, 97 (July 1989), pp. 349–378, reprinted in The Cambridge Companion to Freud, ed. Jerome Neu ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ).
See Freud, Works,for example, vols. IV and V, 1900a, pp. 280–281, 311, and n. 532; and vol. XV, pp. 109–112, 170–171.
Grünbaum, Foundations,pp. 185–189 (Grünbaum’s italics). For the argument see pp. 177–189; cf. pp. 221–225.
Grünbaum cites what he aptly calls the “causal microstructure of paranoia” in two separate contexts. One (Grünbaum, Foundations,pp. 76–77 and 79–81) is in the course of his onslaught upon the hermeneutic tradition and, in particular, upon an assumption he attributes to this tradition: that all Freudian explanations of action regard action as the output of a practical syllogism. The other (ibid., pp. 110–111) is to be found in his defence of Freud against Popper’s claim that Freud was indifferent to the issue of falsifiability. In neither context does Grünbaum appreciate the fundamental place that the “causal microstructure” occupies in Freud’s thought, or that it is this microstructure that assures the distinctively psychoanalytic nature of Freud’s hypotheses. Even the reference to repression in the correlation of repressed homosexuality and paranoia fails to alert Grünbaum to the indispensability of infilling to the hypothesis.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 9 (June 1986), pp. 217–228.
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Wollheim, R. (1995). Desire, Belief, and Professor Grünbaum’s Freud. In: Kaiser, E. (eds) Psychoanalytisches Wissen. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-11198-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-11198-6_3
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