Talia Morag

This paper aims to clarify transference explanations in psychoanalysis and their empirical status. Transference explanations account for puzzling emotional behaviour of an analysand toward their analyst in terms of an enactment of an emotional and behavioural pattern of the analysand and the way they relate to other people in their lives. I argue that Jonathan Lear’s account of transference and the pattern that transference enacts provides a homuncular view of the unconscious – much like other psychoanalytic accounts going back to Freud’s hypothesis of the existence of an ID. I use Davidson’s work on the divided mind to show that homuncular accounts such as Lear’s are incoherent. I propose an alternative account in the context of a new view of the unconscious as (patterns of) inattention. My methodological commitments are to liberal naturalism and what Diamond calls ‘reflective empiricism’ which together make allowance for the possibility of empirical yet non-scientific support for my proposed account of transference. In that manner I sidestep the well-known criticism, from philosophers with scientific-naturalist commitments, that psychoanalysis fails to be a science.

In this chapter, I propose a new Freudian notion of the unconscious that differs from other notions one can find in Freud’s writings, in particular the one Sartre criticises, according to which the unconscious is conceived as a metaphorical secret room for conflictual mental states. At the heart of Sartre’s criticism is the notion of “the censor,” a little person within us, a homunculus, whose function is to either lock in forbidden emotions and desires in or let them out “disguised”, or symbolically distorted. The new notion I propose is still Freudian, and that is based on two interrelated psychological processes: one is what Freud calls “primary processes,” which are associative processes, and the other is Sartre’s notion of bad faith. Sartre’s notion of bad faith was meant to replace the Freudian unconscious, which he sought to demolish. And yet my aim is to show that bad faith is in fact an aspect of the Freudian unconscious. I use Sartre’s example of the date or the coquette, re-read as a case of #METOO, in order to demonstrate this new notion of the unconscious as associative patterns of inattention.

This book explores the relevance of Sartre's work for various areas in contemporary philosophy, including the imagination, philosophy of language, skepticism, social ontology, logic, film, practical rationality, emotions, and psychoanalysis. Unlike other collections focused on Sartre, this book is not intended as a book of Sartre scholarship or interpretation. The volume's contributors, trained in analytic philosophy, engage with Sartre's work in new refreshing ways, which does not require seeing him as primarily belonging to the continental philosophical traditions of phenomenology or existentialism. Instead, this book aims to make available and fruitfully explore the unheralded insights of Sartre, to creatively re-appropriate or rationally reconstruct certain fruitful ideas or approaches of Sartre and confront them with or make them available to contemporary philosophy in general. Sartre thereby emerges from this book as a versatile philosopher with a stake in a large variety of philosophical concerns. Sartre and Analytic Philosophy will appeal to Sartre scholars who are interested in his relevance to contemporary philosophical debates, as well as philosophers who are interested in exploring new ways of doing philosophy, which are neither stereotypically "analytic" nor "continental."

This paper examines the puzzling phenomenon of self-directed implicit bias in the form of gender “stereotype threat” (ST). Bringing to light the empirical undecidability of which account of this phenomenon is best, whether a rational or an associationist explanation, the paper aims to strengthen the associationist approach by appeal to a new account of seeing-as experiences. I critically examine “alief” accounts of reason-recalcitrant ST by bringing to bear arguments from the philosophy of emotion. The new account builds on the insights and overcomes the weaknesses of “aliefs” by (a) employing associations that are imaginative and unreliable; and (b) proposing non-conceptual seeing-as experiences.

How did the Great War affect psychoanalysis? The common approach to this question has to do with assessing the extent to which psychoanalysis has influenced the medical and military understanding of the soldiers diagnosed with shell shock after the war, as well as the extent to which that influence further contributed to the new interest in Freudian psychoanalysis in Britain. If we take a conceptual approach and ask about the impact of the Great War on the theory of psychoanalysis, we find ourselves investigating the more specific question: how did the Great War influence Freud’s psychoanalysis? For no matter how severely Freud has been and still is criticized, all psychoanalytic texts and schools lead back to his writings. When one examines Freud’s writings as a whole, comparing his pre-war work to his post-war writings, one can notice quite a few significant shifts. Perhaps most conspicuous is the shift in the theory of the mind as divided, a shift that is consolidated and articulated in The Ego and the Id. Prior to the war the main division was “topographical,” postulating more or less metaphorical “places” in the mind: consciousness, pre-consciousness, and the unconscious. After the war, the mind is divided “structurally” into three agencies, each with their own motivational functions: the Id, Ego and Super-Ego. The previous division, or rather the previous conception of the unconscious, was not abandoned. The Id, as well as parts of the Ego and the Super-Ego were said to be unconscious. But the main division of the mind was changed, especially since Freud came to understand that his conception of the unconscious did not lend itself to a unified definition.

The emotions pose many philosophical questions. We don't choose them; they come over us spontaneously. Sometimes emotions seem to get it wrong: we experience wrongdoing but do not feel anger, feel fear but recognise there is no danger. Yet often we expect emotions to be reasonable, intelligible and appropriate responses to certain situations. How do we explain these apparent contradictions? Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason presents a bold new picture of the emotions that challenges prevailing philosophical orthodoxy. Talia Morag argues that too much emphasis has been placed on the "reasonableness" of emotions and far too little on two neglected areas: the imagination and the unconscious. She uses these to propose a new philosophical and psychoanalytic conception of the emotions that challenges the perceived rationality of emotions; views the emotions as fundamental to determining one's self-image; and bases therapy on the ability to "listen" to one’s emotional episode as it occurs. Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason is one of the first books to connect philosophical research on the emotions to psychoanalysis. It will be essential reading for those studying ethics, the emotions, moral psychology and philosophy of psychology as well as those interested in psychoanalysis.