ETHOGENIC THEORY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS - THE UNCONSCIOUS AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION AND A FAILED EXPLANATORY CONCEPT

At the center of the Post Freudian situation today is the understandin g that the classical Freudian conception of the unconscious is the col lective fantasy of psychoanalysis. The remaining issue concerns the ca usal and explanatory status of the conception on the one hand, and its social constructional status on the other. In this paper a Harrean sc ientific realist analysis of the conception of the unconscious conclud es, contrary to Edelson's premature conviction, that the conception is a freakish version of causal powers and thus is shown, contrary to th e Frankel-Brunswick tradition, to be an implausible candidate for incl usion into the third realm of explanatory entities, processes, and eve nts. These conclusions lead to a Harrean social constructional account of the unconscious: as an instance of ontologizing the self, it is a mistaken construal of the social interactive use of personal pronouns and the consequent mislocation of agency and mind-a displacement from the person to a second Cartesian interior realm. Within the auspices o f one's personal agency, the unconscious is thus to be regarded as a d iscursive category and a rhetorical device for the construction and th e strategic utilization of human agency, rather than as an ontological category and an ideological device for the pursuit of deterministic e xplanation, the pessimistic celebration of the loss of personal agency in the name of deterministic science, and the consequent legitimation of hermeneutic fascism.