The Unconscious, The

This text distinguishes between the two uses of the Freudian term "unconscious": the descriptive, where Freud is seen as offering a non-causal description of psychological phenomena; and the explanatory, where he seems to be making correlations between crucial childhood events and adult behaviour. Noting that the concept of the unconscious is one that has captured the public mind, MacIntyre seeks to discover what it means to assert the existence of the unconscious rather than assess the empirical grounds for such an assertion. His exploration takes in the nature of psychological theory and the problems raised by our ordinary, pre-Freudian view of the mind. This text provides an illustration of how the techniques of linguistic analysis can be applied by modern philosophers.