Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: philosophy and psychoanalysis
- 1 Conversations on Freud; excerpt from 1932–3 lectures
- 2 Freud, Kepler, and the clinical evidence
- 3 Critical empiricism criticized: the case of Freud
- 4 Freudian commonsense
- 5 Disposition and memory
- 6 On Freud's doctrine of emotions
- 7 The id and the thinking process
- 8 The bodily ego
- 9 Norms and the normal
- 10 On the generation and classification of defence mechanisms
- 11 Models of repression
- 12 Mauvaise foi and the unconscious
- 13 Self-deception and the ‘splitting of the ego’
- 14 Freud's anthropomorphism
- 15 Freud's anatomies of the self
- 16 Motivated irrationality, Freudian theory and cognitive dissonance
- 17 Paradoxes of irrationality
- Works of Freud cited
- Select bibliography
5 - Disposition and memory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: philosophy and psychoanalysis
- 1 Conversations on Freud; excerpt from 1932–3 lectures
- 2 Freud, Kepler, and the clinical evidence
- 3 Critical empiricism criticized: the case of Freud
- 4 Freudian commonsense
- 5 Disposition and memory
- 6 On Freud's doctrine of emotions
- 7 The id and the thinking process
- 8 The bodily ego
- 9 Norms and the normal
- 10 On the generation and classification of defence mechanisms
- 11 Models of repression
- 12 Mauvaise foi and the unconscious
- 13 Self-deception and the ‘splitting of the ego’
- 14 Freud's anthropomorphism
- 15 Freud's anatomies of the self
- 16 Motivated irrationality, Freudian theory and cognitive dissonance
- 17 Paradoxes of irrationality
- Works of Freud cited
- Select bibliography
Summary
Preface (1973)
This lecture can be attached to a specific text within Freud's works. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety and New Introductory Lectures were two works to which I had been paying special attention while I was writing the Ernest Jones lecture. The lecture purposely avoids any mention of repression; the word nowhere occurs in it. Yet Freud's theory of repression was its starting point. The account that I at that time planned to give of mental dispositions, quite independently of Freud, required a theory of inhibition and of repression. At the same time I found an uncertainty, an apparent hesitation between two distinct views, in Freud's theory of repression. On one view repression of libidinal energies is the universal condition of learning and of conscious, rational planning, and even of the power of normal human thought. On another view repression is represented as the necessary cost of that renunciation of instinctual drives which our civilization demands; the implication is that much of the cost in neurosis may be controllable, and that repression need not be so severe and harmful as it has been. Also, there seemed to be in Freud more than one theory of the relation of anxiety to repression. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety Freud wrote: ‘It was anxiety which produced repression and not, as I formerly believed, repression which produced anxiety.’ I was puzzled by these changes, which have consequences for the philosophy of mind.
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- Philosophical Essays on Freud , pp. 75 - 91Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1982
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