![]() ![]() ![]() Indeed, Freud recognized that the drives themselves are never represented as such but appear in the psyche as ideas to which the drives attach themselves. Freud conceived unconsciousness in the semantic tradition, by which he posited representations of unconscious drives as ways of thinking about them. In recent research, the role of ‘melding’ (the association through juxtaposition, analogy, and metaphor) has gained prominence in cognitive psychology, whose conceptual genealogy may be tracked back to Freud’s own notions of associative thinking, which in turn derives from early nineteenth-century associative theory. ![]() In response to the commentaries offered, I begin with a historical note and then conclude with a reiterated (and expanded) contextualization of Freud’s own contribution to understanding the structure of the mind as refracted by recent cognitive psychology studies. More specifically, new findings concerning unconscious deliberative thinking, which follows a normative strategy (Sio and Ormerod 2009), suggest new appreciation of Freud’s thought. I maintain that one may remain agnostic about the specific truth claims of psychoanalytic repression theory and still appreciate that Freud provided insights about unconsciousness, which remain germane to contemporary philosophies of mind. As Matthews (2013) correctly observes, Freud himself held two views of the unconscious, which may be characterized as ‘cognitive’ and the other as ‘dynamic.’ The central question each of the commentaries address is to what extent can we attribute a specifically Freudian contribution to our understanding of thinking if we accept the first constellation of his thought (a cognitive unconscious) and reject (or better, ignore) the second (psychoanalytic repression). ![]()
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