Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> Last bit of a nyt article from 1999 about a debate between Solms, who
> wrote the Freud essay from Scientific American that shag posted a
> week or so ago and I just reposted, and Hobson, emeritus psychiatry
> professor at Harvard:
>
> [clip]
> He is not opposed to the idea of unconscious mental process, but
> questions whether ''there are parts of my unconscious mind that are
> inaccessible to me and that are critically important in understanding
> my behavior.''
(1) No one of course has _evere_ "opposed the idea of unconscious mental process." On this list both Miles and I have stressed the importance of such functioning.
(2) For the rest, this eliminates nearly the whole of what humanist and political freudians want to get from freud. It eliminates "the unconscious" from both literature and politics.
Carrol
P.S. Sometimes, in fact not infrequently, writers who claim to be deriving their insights from Freud or Lacan are deceiving themselves: they have arrived at sound conclusions that in fact depend not at all on freudian notions. Hence while dismissing their freudian or lacanian maunderings we should still in some cases attend to what they have to say about a poem or a political issue.