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Response to commentaries
Vesa Talvitie & Juhani Ihanus
Published online: 09 Jan 2014.
To cite this article: Vesa Talvitie & Juhani Ihanus (2003) Response to commentaries, Neuropsychoanalysis: An
Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 5:2, 153-158, DOI: 10.1080/15294145.2003.10773421
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15294145.2003.10773421
for more care in laying out the ideas and scholarship makes this a difficult article to evaluate.
Nonetheless, I think this is an area worth pursuing
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Response to commentaries
Vesa Talvitie & Juhani Ihanus
WHAT IS IT LIKE
TO BE UNCONSCIOUSLY MENTAL?
154
toward critically examining psychoanalytic explanations in the light of up-to-date knowledge. When
there are such serious difficulties in determining the
nature of the Freudian (mental) unconscious, we
should turn to more recent points of view.
We have recently presented a model (Talvitie
& Ihanus, 2002) that aims to explain making
the repressed conscious in terms of implicit and
explicit knowledge. According to our model, unconscious matters are not made conscious in psychoanalysis, and thus the new contents of consciousness
that emerge in the cure do not preexist in the brain
or in the unconscious either. Thus, our model does
not lean on the idea of the mental nature of the
unconscious, but is based on empirical research
derived from cognitive views. Our model may turn
out to be erroneous, but we strongly favor the strategy of creating better models based on empirical
research and psychoanalytic clinical data instead of
concentrating on speculations about the meanings
that might be given to the term mental.
We are happy that Dr. Brakel stressed the clinical
point of view: theories should not exist in a fictive
reality without connections to clinical practice.
However, we still think that even if a psychoanalyst
could accept the view we presented in our target
article (though, judging by the comments, this may
seem unlikely), it should not alter (a lot) the way he/
she works. Despite what we have presented above,
we see that psychoanalysts should feel free to think
of the patients mind in terms of hidden ideas,
desires, etc. This permissive attitude may seem to be
opportunistic, or postmodern, but we think it
has good foundations. Theoretical hypotheses made
by an analystwhether they are metapsychological, neurophysiological, applied from cognitivists
models, or whateverhave to be presented to analysands in everyday language (in terms of folk psychology). It is hard to believe that, for example,
neurophysiological speculations with patients
would be especially curative. One of us (Talvitie,
2003) has suggested that just as parents should think
of an infant in terms of ideas and desires that he/she
will possess when older (Fonagy, 2001, p. 27), so in
the clinical situation an analyst should think of a
patients unconscious matters from the point of
view of what they would be like if they were conscious. This might be called a psychoanalysts
stance.
Thus, we deem it possible and appropriate to get
it both ways: Theoretically, we maintain that one
should holdas Searle and most cognitivists do
that the unconscious contains only neurophysiological matters. In a clinical situation, there is no reason
to avoid thinking in terms of repressed contents
when it gives support in reaching the aims of the
cure.
155
are nowadays not characterized in terms of a definable structure of the brain that would possess a
certain content.
We made a supposition above that the psychoanalytic view concerning the mental unconscious is
closely related to the idea of bringing unconscious
contents to consciousness. If so, the problems with
telling what it is like to be unconsciously mental
are closely related to the present trend to give emphasis to processes over structures.
Weinberger continues this way:
Searle has no problem with repression defined in
this way. And no doubt there are many [mental
states] that could not be brought to consciousness
for one reason or anotherthey may be too painful
and hence too deeply repressed for us to think about
them, for example (p. 154). So what are the authors
interested in reconciling?
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