Phantasy and wish: A proper function account for human a-rational primary process mediated mentation

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 80, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 1-16

  Brakel, Linda A W ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN HOSPITALS   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 12344256340     PISSN: 00048402     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/713659346     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. Sigmund Freud, 'The Interpretation of Dreams', The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freu, Vols. 4 & 5 (1900) 1-626, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1975). As surprising as the fourth feature might seem, it can be seen to follow from any one of the other three primary process characteristics mentioned (and of course any combination thereof). If one lacks the capacity to grasp one's own experiences as having continuity, for example, there is no unitary agent holding both X and a contradiction of X to be true. Likewise, and even more basically, before attempts to regulate representations for considerations of truth, any proposition that is considered merely 'is'. While an external view would regard this as a default consideration-as-true, from the internal viewpoint there is no attempt or even capacity to get the truth conditions right. This being the case, take some X that 'is' (i.e., is considered-as-true); but if a contradiction of this X is also consiered in this manner, prior to considerations of truth and falsity, this ̃X 'is' (i.e., is considered-as-true) no less. Finally tenselessness too can yield tolerance for contradiction. If every moment is an unexamined timeless present, a 'now' with no history and no future, X held at moment t will not be negated by ̃X being held at t+ 1, nor will the ̃X of moment t+1 be negated when at t+2 X is held. I thank Jennifer Church (personal communication) for this final point.
2. Content should be understood in the usual way. I am not holding for any special, new 'primary process' type content.
3. See Donald Davidson, Actions and Events, Chapters 11 (1970), 12 (1974), 13 (1973) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Truth and Interpretation, Chapter 11 (1975) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); and 'Paradoxes of Irrationality' in Philosophical Essays on Freud, eds. R. Wolheim and J. Hopkins, 289-305, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1978); and The Intentional Stance (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1987). See Richard Cherniak, 'Minimal Rationality', Mind vol. 90 (1981), 161-83. See Stephen Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1983).
4. I will use a-rational rather than irrational. Irrational implies the rational gone wrong. A-rational refers instead to states not-yet rational and not-yet irrational.
5. See also Brakel, 'Phantasies, neurotic-beliefs, and beliefs-proper'. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis (2002), in press. It is conceded that the a-rational primary processes cannot be subject to belief/desire interpretations. However, it is not conceded that contentful states are constituted only in virtue of satisfying explanations predicated on belief/desire interpretations. As will be argued below, contentful states can also be constituted in propositional attitudes of the form phantasy/wish.
6. The views of Davidson to be presented in this paper are representative of what is basic to attributionism. Other attributionists change certain features of the attributionist program without really changing what is at the core. Chemiak (1981), for example, relaxes the criteria for what counts as rational. Dennett (1987, p. 98) agrees with Chemiak. Stich (1983), a projectivist, suggests that projecting one's own beliefs and mental contents will provide less stringent rationality requirements than assuming rational contents in others. And yet these relaxed-criteria versions of rationality all amount to rationality-attributing nonetheless. Hence they pose the same difficulties for the a-rational primary process. Davidson is however the most extreme attributionist with respect to other of his views not to be taken up in the body of this paper. Perhaps most striking are his claims on what it takes 'to have a belief. He (1975, p. 170) says, 'Can a creature have a belief if it does not have the concept of belief?... it cannot... Someone cannot have belief unless he understands the possibility of being mistaken, and this requires grasping the contrast between truth and error-true belief and false belief.' Clearly these requirements limit those to whom Davidson will ascribe beliefs to humans, and rather mature humans at that. Dennett (1978, p. 271), at the other pole, counts as a believer any '. .. system whose behavior can be ... explained and predicted by relying on ascriptions to the system of beliefs and desires ...''
7. Regarding these three points see especially Davidson (1974a, pp. 231 and 237) and Davidson (1973, p. 259).
8. See Davidson (1982, pp. 290-304). Also, as long as intra-structural causal relations between states (belief/desire or belief/belief) are most often rational, Davidson does allow that non-rational causal connections occasionally take place intra-structurally between states. However as Jennifer Church (in 'Reasonable Irrationality', Mind vol. 96 (1987), 354-66) points out, this strategy cannot help Davidson account for the systematic, consistent, even predictable nature of much irrationality.
9. Davidson's principle of charity argument appears in many places in addition to those that I've cited. See, for example, 'Thought and Talk' (1975, particularly p. 159) in Truth and Interpretation. And see, 'Mental Events' (1970, particularly pp. 221-3), and 'The Material Mind' (1973, particularly pp. 257-9), both in Action and Events.
10. See Ruth Millikan, White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice, Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 9, pages 51-121 and 172-92 (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993).
11. Dennett's phrase is from Dennett (1978, p. 19).
12. The 'divorce' between representations and rationality may not look like a divorce at all, particularly with higher level representations like beliefs, since for Millikan beliefs clearly do participate in rational inference processes. But although Normal condition properly functioning beliefs are rational, that they are rational is purely contingent in the Millikan program. Rational true beliefs just happen to be the sorts of beliefs that have contributed to the selective fitness of their holders. Since these are the conditions that happen to be the fitness conferring/Normal conditions, these conditions are those that constitute the truth conditions for representations in beliefs. (For beliefs then, rather than a married or divorced couple, representation and rationality are more like two people who just happen to be next-door neighbours and find that they actually like one another.) It is the case for Millikan that other, lower level representations (like bugs represented by frogs) are not even contingently related to rationality; and I will claim below that there are also even fully propositional contentful states which are unrelated to rationality.
13. William Lycan (in a review of an earlier version of this paper) suggested that Dennett, unlike Davidson, can obtain this sort of divorce too as Dennett's 'subpersonal agencies have states with real (nonattributive) intentional content'. Something more like a legal separation might be more apt, for Dennett's view affords him only perceptual contents, not contentful propositional states.
14. It is presumed that Millikan's biological success criterion for beliefs being true '... not on the average, but just enough' is a far less stringent requirement than the attributionist's interpretation of success criterion, which demands that most beliefs be true.
15. Indeed, success in interpreting the rational, vital to the attributionist's program, does not play a role for Millikan. However there is a very different sense in which 'interpretation' is involved in the Millikan program, namely in what is seen as constitutive of Normal explanations for biological success. With the typical standards of the philosopher of biology she holds, for example, that Normal explanations are the most simple and proximal explanations. These are indeed rational and interpretative constraints upon what can be considered a Normal explanation; but clearly this is a very different level from attributionist interpretation of what must be presumed to be holistically rational in every mentating subject.
16. 'How Belief Aims at the Truth', unpublished manuscript (1998).
17. The 'true' part of phantasising-true and imagining-true pertains only to the proposition's truth-value as regarded externally, objectively. It does not pertain to the phantasiser's subjective, internal evaluation of truth, as there is none.
18. See footnote 18.
19. Strong arguments against this assumption that true belief believing enhances selective fitness are offered by Stephen Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1990). See especially pp. 55-70.
20. The fitness-enhancing condition of a phantasy p at time t, requiring that p will obtain later, say at t+1, is a Normal condition different from any Normal condition for belief. For whether or not a particular phantasy p is properly functioning under this Normal condition cannot be determined at the time of the phantasy, time t. Such determination cannot take place until some time in the future, time t+1.
21. This definition of play activity is from Robert Fagen, Animal Play Behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
22. This is demonstrated convincingly for rhesus monkeys in R. Symon, Play and Aggression: A Study of Rhesus Monkeys (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).
23. This analysis, analogous to that regarding beliefs, secures content for those primary process phantasies that are not properly functioning and/or not operating under Normal conditions, much as faulty and false beliefs are not without content. Note that this analysis also allows for the very real possibility that most primary process phantasies are not both properly functioning and Normal.
24. I will close by addressing an important objection raised by an anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of this paper. He/she states that, 'This account seems to be along the right lines and therefore quite promising... [but] the author does not link the account with any of the actual contents characteristically ascribed to Freudian phantasy or primary process thought. It is unclear how well, say, any of Freud's primal phantasies can be understood in these terms;.. . even Oedipal phantasies ...' I have two responses, related to one another. First, I am proposing here only one way for a certain category of wishes and phantasies to plausibly have a proper function in the Millikanian sense. For other categories of wishes and phantasies, even if the play-as-practice explanation will not serve, there is no reason to rule out the plausibility of a different sort of Millikanian proper function account. (For example, a plausible proper function account might be advanced for certain types of primary process phantasies and wishes in terms of their contents providing material for creative thought.) Second, I have attempted in this paper only to refute the claim that the very notion of primary process content is incoherent. I have used some Freudian primary process contents (and indeed not the most familiar) in refuting this claim. To attempt to provide proper function accounts for other Freudian primary process contents, including those that are most characteristic, seems a worthy task-but one requiring a follow up paper.