A plea for a more dialectical relationship between personal and subpersonal levels of analysis

Bermúdez (2005) problem” the question of clarifying how typical subpersonal explanations in cognitive sciences, whatever is their specific form, are related to folk psychology. In this opinion article we will approach the interface problem from a specific angle, i.e., the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious as it has taken shape within cognitive sciences. Our starting point is the contrast between the cognitive unconscious and the Freudian one. If examined from an orthodox cognitivist point of view, psychoanalysis turns out to be a brilliant but failed attempt to build a genuine subpersonal psychology. Freud aims to go beyond the psychology of his times, which is a psychology of consciousness; his theory of the unconscious is, therefore, programmatically against a “consciousness-centric” mentalistic framework. The problem is that, as a matter of fact, Freud failed to extricate himself from that framework. Like many psychoanalytic ideas, the Freudian unconscious is just an enlargement, or extension, of a psychology—folk psychology—hinged on the idea of a person who is able to have conscious mental experiences. According to a number of philosophers this extension of our ordinary psychological conception of mind is a strength of psychoanalytic theory. In this perspective, the grounds for psychoanalysis “lie in its offering a unified explanation for phenomena (dreaming, psychopathology, mental conflict, sexuality, and so on) that commonsense psychology is unable, or poorly equipped, to explain” (Gardner, 1999, p. 684). This approach has been taken as the basis of a defense of psychoanalysis against well-known epistemological objections: like folk-psychological explanations, psychoanalytic explanations should be exempt from the epistemological and methodological requirements of experimental science (Manson, 2003, p. 179). Donald Davidson is one the referents of this conception of psychoanalysis. On his view the personal level is autonomous and different from the subpersonal one, and is to be studied by means of different methods: you need hermeneutics, not the quest for natural laws. That is, the folk-psychological explaining is here viewed as an interpretive activity aimed to give sense to behavior—to “rationalize” it. Accordingly, when one runs across such a “pathology” of reason as selfdeception, the personal psychology framework is not to be given up in favor of the subpersonal one, but rather it must be enlarged or extended so that one can find somewhere else the rationality set out by the principle of charity. In this vein, the psychoanalytic partitioning the mind is seen as a metaphoric device to coherently describe within the personal-level explanatory framework a phenomenon (self-deception) that otherwise would be uninterpretable (Davidson, 1982). This attempt to abandon Freud’s positivistic naturalism and reconstruct psychoanalysis on hermeneutic grounds has a very long story. In the 1970s an influent version of this project was initiated by a number of psychoanalysts of Rapaport’s school; especially George Klein and, close to his ideas, Roy Schafer. According to these psychoanalysts the “biologistic” Freud is no longer defensible, and the whole Freudian metapsychology is to be declared waned owing to its association to the drive-discharge theory. By contrast, we have to reconsider the psychoanalytic clinical theory insofar as it rests on the intentionality of the interpretive process. This “clinical theory versus metapsychology” argument, however, tries to regenerate psychoanalysis by renouncing to its main legacy. For Freud’s hypothesis of a biological component that is constitutive of mental life is just what ensures for the psychoanalytic theory its typical content of systematic objection against the claim of self-legitimation made by rational consciousness: therefore, it is the ground of the very idea of a subpersonal-level unconscious. The Freudian hypothesis, to the extent that it views human subject as “tossed about” by its own biologicity, rules out that inner life can regain its own center in the free intentionality of consciousness. Vice versa, a psychoanalytic hermeneutics entirely aimed at insisting on the theme of meaning at the expense of the “blind” and “biological” theme of drive dynamics, runs the risk of surreptitiously reintroducing the pre-Freudian picture of the conscious subject as primary subject. In this perspective, the hermeneutical approach to psychoanalysis is to be contrasted with the project of replacing Freud’s positivistic naturalism with a neurocognitive naturalism (see, e.g.,