WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS

In the past few years scientists and scholars in a variety of discipli nes have been making concerted efforts to answer an ancient question, namely, How exactly do the physical processes in the brain cause consc iousness! What is distinctive about the way in which modern scientists and scholars are approaching this question is that they are treating it as a scientific problem rather than a metaphysical one. This transi tion reflects the air of expectation in contemporary cognitive science to the effect that an empirical solution is imminent to a philosophic al problem that previously was considered insoluble. Nevertheless, a r ecent authoritative review of the publications of such leading contemp orary workers in the field as Francis Crick, Daniel Dennett, Gerald Ed elman, Roger Penrose, and Israel Rosenfield has concluded that they ha ve all failed to provide a satisfactory answer to the question (Searle 1995a). The present paper makes a psychoanalytic contribution to this interdisciplinary effort and provides an alternative answer to the qu estion, based on Freud's conceptualization of the problem of conscious ness. The paper takes a concrete example from Searle's review, reanaly ses it within Freud's metapsychological frame of reference, and shows how this frame provides a radical solution to the problem. This implic ation of Freud's work has not hitherto been recognized and so has not received the attention it deserves.