A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action: Freud, the Kantian-Hylomorphic Psychologist(Part One)

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There are many reasons why we view Freud as a hylomorphic Psychologist. The first is that his later work is best interpreted through what I call the hylomorphic matrix(Three domains of science, 4 kinds of change, 3 principles, and 4 “causes” of change). Secondly, it has a view of the principle of life (psuche, or “soul”) that best meets the demands of the kind of aporetic question which typically arises in the Philosophy of Mind or Philosophical Psychology. Thirdly Freud’s later Work also answers aporetic questions arising in the arenas of Cultural and Political Philosophy. Fourthly Freud’s view of consciousness as a surface phenomenon accords well with Aristotelian and Kantian positions.

Freud, we should remember claimed that his Later theorising in Psychology was Kantian. This is an acceptable claim if one bears in mind that some aspects of Freud, e.g. the division of the mind into “parts” does not quite fit with the Kantian division of the mind into “faculties”(sensibility, understanding, and reason). It should also be recalled that Freud’s theorising falls into the domain of all three hylomorphic sciences. His theorising, that is, has universal theoretical intent, but also falls into the domain of the Practical Sciences and finally, and perhaps most importantly his medical intent to help his patients use the principles of the productive sciences. Of course, this “productive” help was both morally and theoretically motivated. Freud, we should remember decided to talk to his patients rather than institutionalise them in “mental” institutions and his therapy thereby deserves the title “moral treatment”.

Freud was not a university figure but his work enlightened his time and his culture with ideas and with a new kind of mental health worker, the psychoanalyst. Paradoxically his time at University in Vienna did not provide him with the tools necessary to treat patients suffering from neuroses and psychoses and after a period of limited success and a “stillborn” piece of writing called the “Project”(which was later burned), Freud turned, like Socrates and Wittgenstein, away from theoretical science and more toward hylomorphic and Transcendental Philosophy. This “Freudian turn” is perhaps not sufficiently appreciated by the Freud bashers who take delight in claiming that his work is not scientific.

Freud’s work has been appreciated by Philosophers with a more philosophical view of Science and also by Philosophers, in particular, the Phenomenologists who share with Schopenhauer the view that we must awaken some basic experience of the world. This “awakening” in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology amounts to describing how consciousness, in perception, forms the world around me and gives it existence. Freud, is praised by Merleau-Ponty because he recognises that sexuality is a general dimension of human being that cannot be reduced to the activity of the genital organs. For Merleau-Ponty, however, it is rather the case that the phenomenological subject “projects” sexuality onto the world, time, and other men. Our history is sexual because of the kind of being that we are. Psychoanalysis, Merleau-Ponty, argues speaks to us about a biological sexual substructure insofar as it is integrated into the multi-dimensional being of man, or what Husserl called his “lebenswelt” or life world. Sexuality for Merleau-Ponty cannot be described or explained by Science because Science resolves wholes into causal “parts” or “facts” that disconnect us from the holistic structure of consciousness and our life-worlds. The Phenomenological attitude thus seeks to describe the essences that are revealed in our “perception” of the world, time, and other people, This attitude seeks the psychic meaning in everything physical. Freud used the term “Primary process” to describe a primitive kind of (impulsive?)thinking that had the potential to generate a more reflective secondary process. The Primary process basically obeyed the hylomorphic principles of energy regulation and pleasure-pain, whereas the secondary process obeyed what Freud called the “Reality Principle” which rationally produces the flourishing life for any individual. Merleau Ponty embraces this position of Freud’s in the following :

“..biological existence is synchronised with human existence and is never indifferent to its distinctive rhythm. Nevertheless, we shall now add, “living”(leben) is a primary process, from which as a starting point, it becomes possible to “live”(erleben) this or that world, and we must eat and breathe before perceiving and awakening to relational living, belonging to colours and lights through sight, to sounds through hearing, to the body of another through sexuality, before arriving at the life of human relations”(Phenomenology of perception P.185)

What is being presented here is nothing other than the hylomorphic structure of a being that is functioning in accordance with biological, psychological, and rational principles. For Freud this occurs in accordance with the energy regulation principle(whose telos is homeostasis), the pleasure-pain principle(the impulsive aspect of being human in which we seek hedonistically to experience pleasure rather than pain) and the reality principle(where for Freud the normative “ought” plays an extensive role in both theoretical and practical reasoning processes).

For Merleau-Ponty, it is the life of the body and the life of consciousness which he claims reciprocally “express” each other in a realm of “meaning. Freud’s theory, however, is more complex and suggests a relation of reciprocal expression between three levels of body, consciousness, and rationality, thus placing him closer to Aristotle than Merleau-Ponty. Freud integrates here both the thesis of somatogenesis (mental illness has its origin in the body) and psychogenesis(mental illness has its origin in the mind) in a way that was problematic for the psychiatry of his time, especially those psychiatrists who believed that the mind was an epi-phenomenon like the sound of musical notes from the vibrating strings of the harp. In relation to whether the mind has the power to move the body, Merleau Ponty considers Binswwangers reported case study in his “Uber Psychotherapie”, in which a patient who recalls a traumatic memory in the therapeutic process relaxes his sphincter as a consequence. It is case studies such as this that bring home to us the importance of Spinoza’s reflection that the mind is first of all the idea of the body, a reflection moreover that Aristotle would have approved of. Those who would take this as an argument for the primacy of psychogenesis should consider whether the musical sounds of the vibrating strings could exist without those strings. We should not, however, necessarily include Merleau-Ponty amongst those psychologists that seek to deny the role of the biological in the constitution of consciousness. The hylomorphic priority of the “form” of the body or the principle of the body is necessary to produce the music of the mind, its ideas, judgments, and reasonings.

Primary processes “manifest” themselves in dream interpretation. Merleau Ponty’s account in his work “The Structure of Behaviour, (trans. by Fisher, A.,L., Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 2011) characterises the relation between the manifest content of the dream and the latent content in Phenomenological language which basically accepts the primary process-secondary process relation:

“Freud….protested against the physiological theories of dreams which, according to him, furnish only their most general conditions and since he sought their explanation in the individual life of the dreamer and in its immanent logic. But the proper meaning of the dream is never its manifest meaning. It has been clearly shown how, faced with the contrast between the subject’s first recital of the dream and the second recital which analysis reveals, Freud believed it necessary to actualise the latter in the form of latent content within an ensemble of unconscious forces and mental entities which enter into conflict with the counter forces of the censor: the manifest content of the dream would result from this sort of energic action.”(P.177)

Merleau Ponty calls into question the language of “force” and “energy” on phenomenological grounds, asserting that the language of causality does not suffice to capture the phenomenon we wish to describe. Much depends on what is meant in this context by causality. If the appeal to causality requires a resolution of a whole into physical observable parts or events, there can be no objection to Merleau-Ponty’s criticism. if, however, as was the case in Freud’s later thought the category of causation is a category of judgment that is related to principle, for example, in the above case, the energy regulation principle and the pleasure-pain principle, then on the Kantian account this form of conceptualised “causality” is well equipped to make judgments about “phenomena”.

Merleau-Ponty, however, is very critical of Kant’s approach to phenomena. He criticises, for example, Kant’s Copernican revolution on the grounds that it is no longer true to our experience(Phenomenology of perception, P. x) but the grounds of his objection are unfortunately Hegelian, claiming that Kant is detaching the subject of experience from the experience and thereby denying its “lived” quality. This in a sense is true: judgment is an objectifying moment and the judging subject for Kant does, in a sense transcend the experience. The concepts that are constituents of the judgment are categorical and causality is one of these categories (as is Community in which agents and patients are logically related) and concepts are representations that are not in immediate contact with what they are representations of. Conceptualisation, and the categories that control this function, are a key element of the Kantian Copernican revolution. Freud’s theory does not merely use causal judgments it also uses the judgments of community. His use of the term “force” or “energy” is therefore usually more complex than we give him credit for. The energy regulation principle for Freud operates very primitively in infancy until it is incorporated in the later egotistical pleasure-pain principle which in its turn becomes incorporated into a very much more complex reality principle as the “agent” actualises more and more complex cognitive powers. When actualised these principles are in a reciprocal relation, each affecting the other in complex ways.

In fact, Freud would not have objected to the following account of the development of “agency” that Merleau-Ponty provides us with, in his work “The Structure of Behaviour”:

“Development should be considered not as the fixation of a given force on outside objects which are also given, but as a progressive and discontinuous structuration of behaviour. Normal structuration is one which reorganises conduct in depth in such a way that infantile attitudes no longer have a place or meaning in the new attitude: it would result in perfectly integrated behaviour, each moment of which would be internally linked with the whole. One will say that there is repression when integration has been achieved only in appearance and leaves certain relatively isolated systems subsisting in behaviour which the subject refuses both to transform and to assume.”(P.177)

Merleau Pony continues to acknowledge that what he calls “Freudian mechanisms” can explain pathological behaviour but not what he calls “structured” behaviour in which the subject or agent relates normally to reality. Merleau-Ponty, however, fails to acknowledge that these mechanisms are regulated by the three hylomorphic principles of energy regulation, pleasure-pain, and reality, where the latter would be characterised at the level of the rational power(Aristotle) an agent has to exercise sound judgment(Kant).

Another Phenomenologist, Paul Ricoeur, (Freud and Philosophy: an essay in interpretation, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1970, P65) sees no epistemological problem in Freud’s use of what he calls the language of energetics in spite of its anti-phenomenological characteristics. Ricoeur suggests that the solution to the problem of integrating the two perspectives of firstly, an energetics that functions at the level of events and secondly, a hermeneutics which functions at the level of interpreting representations, may lie in the mixed nature of desires which have both impulsive force and meaning. Desire, if we include in its scope the desire to understand, appears, then, to function at all levels from the biological level through the level of consciousness and to the level of rationality. Excessive desire for example in a life form that is not “structured” to use Merleau-Ponty’s terminology, can give rise to pathological perception or hallucination(Macbeth). This structuring function is for Freud constituted by the ego and the reality principle whose task it is to regulate our relation to the id(the home of the primary process) and the external world. Desire, in a structured life form, will give rise to thought or speech which are the highest forms of cognition. Thought obviously uses less energy than a hallucination at the neuronal level, Freud claims. But this is not reductionist because by the time we get to the publication of the work the “Interpretation of Dreams”, we are informed that the psychical “apparatus” has no anatomical location. The “mechanisms” of perception and memory must be purely psychic phenomena. A dream is, of course, also a purely psychical phenomenon and it is related to desire at the level of consciousness and at an unconscious level. This accounts for the fact that we can have two different accounts of the dream without the risk of falling foul of the principle of non-contradiction. The different forms of the accounts then correspond to the relation of the primary and secondary processes and the integrated workings of the pleasure-pain principle and the reality principle.

Consciousness is clearly an important structuring agency in the process of actualising the potential powers at our disposal and Freud’s account is, in our opinion, far more interesting than his account of the unconscious. Firstly it is important to point to the outline Freud gave of the psychic apparatus in his “interpretation of Dreams. There are two “ends” to the apparatus, Firstly, the perceptual end that is juxtaposed both to the stimuli of the external world that stimulate it into activity and memory systems(short term and long term) which preserve and record the activity but also associates memories with each other(different principles of association will be stored in different memory systems). Secondly, the motor end of the psychic apparatus re-engages with the external world. The natural direction of the flow of energy in the apparatus is from the perceptual end to the motor end. Juxtaposed to the motor end is the preconscious system that possesses what Ricoeur calls a critical function and immediately behind the preconscious system (that contains our knowledge which includes the knowledge of the meanings of our words) lies the unconscious system.

Consciousness is characterised by Freud in his work “The Interpretation of dreams” in the following terms:

“It is the Pcpt(perceptual) system, which is without the capacity to retain modifications and is thus without memory, that provides our consciousness with the whole multiplicity of sensory qualities. On the other hand, our memories–not excepting those which are most deeply stamped on our minds are in themselves unconscious. They can be made conscious: but there can be no doubt that they can produce all their effects while in an unconscious condition. What we describe as our ” character” is based on the memory traces of our impressions and moreover the impressions which have had the greatest effect on us–those of our earliest youth–are precisely the ones which scarcely ever become conscious.” P 688-9)

Now during sleep and dreaming the motor end of the apparatus is resting and energy then flows in a regressive direction back to memory images. Any wish that arises in this state of affairs is the “cause” that seeks for fulfilment regressively in the realm of memory images. Given the low energy level of a sleeping brain, it is possible that this phenomenon then imitates the brain of a 5-year-old which functioned largely in the realm of imagery whilst the ego was in the process of developing and whilst the power of language and reality cathected thought was also developing. This developmental process guided by deception, failure, and the pain of frustration teaches us this roundabout process of thinking which Freud characterises as the secondary process. Hallucinatory wish-fulfilment is then substituted by thought, a more reflective and quiescent process. Consciousness on this account, then, is related to the peripheral excitations that produce sensory qualities but also to the feelings of pleasure and pain which are necessarily conscious. In the process of the actualisation or development of cognitive powers, language and verbal images play a decisive role in the generation of self-consciousness. In this process, there is a shift from pleasure-pain regulation to regulation via linguistic symbols(representations) and consciousness becomes determined by preconscious thought processes. thus introducing critically the relation of consciousness to two different kinds of reality testing,( perception and thought). Here we see a shift from an observationally oriented consciousness to a more reflective cogitative process as well as a shift from the conscious pain of deception and failure. In this shift is involved a hyper-cathexis in favour of the secondary process, but in spite of this, thought never succeeds in freeing itself of regulation by unpleasure which if it arouses high levels of anxiety can give rise to various defense mechanisms including repression(–when for example the preconscious turns away from thoughts cathected with high anxiety). Consciousness is not substantival and is perhaps best characterised as a system of constituting powers. It is a sensory phenomenon for Freud but not unconnected to the motor end of the psychic apparatus which requires conscious attention to begin and end a project and to correct any errors. Yet it is still a “surface” phenomenon” because it is Desire and the primary process that fundamentally organises our practical and theoretical projects in accordance with its “aims”. Being a surface phenomenon means that on the Freudian account it is probably closely related to the underlying phenomenon of preconscious thought. Consciousness is itself a form of thought which according to William James in his essay “Does Consciousness Exist?” (Essays in radical empiricism, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press,1996)carries out the function of reporting and knowing its objects and events. Reporting one’s dream obviously requires consciousness. This descriptive function is important for the process of interpretation that will lead to the knowledge of what the dream means(at least by the analyst). To some extent the knowing aspect of consciousness can know the dream, and that means understanding the principles involved in its interpretation which also includes understanding the “mechanisms” involved in producing the dream. This activity of understanding will involve an integration of the faculties of the mind and the powers of the mind that include language and its power to bring these principles and powers into the field of consciousness(including its memories). This latter activity of “knowing” will also involve the integration of the preconscious system with consciousness. The function of the preconscious is partly dynamic, that is to say, the preconscious performance of actions in, habit, for example, reduces the energy levels required.(Consciousness is, as Freud maintains hyper-cathected).

This takes us to what Freud calls his “mythology” namely the instincts and their vicissitudes. The instincts have aims that originate in the biology of the individual but these aims can change. Two of the most important vicissitudes are connected to the aims of becoming conscious and exclusion from consciousness. These vicissitudes will be regulated by the three Freudian principles. That is to say that the instincts or Desire are defined teleologically in terms of their aims which will paradoxically in the case of the death instinct include the ending of all conscious, preconscious and unconscious activity. The objects of instinct are obviously variable, they are the means the instinct uses to achieve its aim. The Freudian notion of instinct is clearly not a biological concept obeying only the energy regulation principle. Instinct is rather the basic building block of Freud’s Psychology. Freud referred to his theory of the instincts as his mythology but we are claiming that the basis has a claim to be called “Philosophical”. The ego itself is a product of instinctive activity or Desire and its choice of objects relates directly to the instincts and their vicissitudes. The ego can also be determined by the preconscious system and its “knowledge”(memories etc). Insofar as the ego functions in accordance with the energy regulation principle and the pleasure-pain principle, it is narcissistic(what Freud would describe as a weak ego) and all object choice in this state will be narcissistic. Instincts, therefore, underlie these subject-object exchanges. The strong ego judges in accordance with the reality principle(in accordance with the Kantian categories). Judgment of this kind is a displacement of narcissism but not necessarily a displacement of the instinct of becoming conscious. The displacement of narcissism will obviously be part of the setting up of the agency of the superego. Here the “principles” involved will be first, the pleasure-pain principle regulating the narcissism of the agent and secondly, the reality principle regulating the economics of pain as a consequence of the loss of a loved object(the narcissistic “I”). The “mechanisms” involved are the work of mourning or the masochistic work of melancholia depending upon whether the reality principle successfully “structures” the ego. In the work of mourning, it is the object that is the focus, or rather the memories of the object must be contextualised in the light of the “knowledge” that the object no longer exists (whatever the imaginatively based wish fulfilment process desires). In melancholia, the work occurs against the background of a lack of structure(characteristic of narcissism) and the death instinct enters the equation of the work via the masochistic feelings directed toward the agent. Here there is no measurement of the wished-for object against the tribunal of reality that has judged the object not to exist. One of the vicissitudes of the death instinct is aggression and it is this which is unleashed by the narcissist upon his environment if he is frustrated. If he desires an object and then loses that object, the memory system is not sufficiently structured for the work of mourning to occur, and the work of melancholia occurs. Here we can see the limited role of consciousness and the importance of the metapsychology of the Instincts and their vicissitudes. Consciousness, of course, is to some extent involved because it is only in virtue of what is not conscious becoming conscious that we come to know what is in the preconscious and unconscious systems. It is the work of becoming conscious which turns what are presentations of the body into psychic presentations. Here Spinoza emerges in Freud’s reflections, namely the claim that the first idea of the mind is the idea of the body. Freud embellishes this by claiming that the instincts re-present the body to the mind. The system of the unconscious contains these instincts which are basically wishful impulses that coexist together with no logical relation to each other, i.e. one wishful impulse cannot negate another or be related to any of the other categories of judgment or indeed have any relation to Time, both of which are constituents of the preconscious and conscious systems. We only know of these unconscious desires through their psychic representatives, insofar, that is, as they become conscious. When these desires appear in consciousness they are symbols of latent processes. It is this fact that demands of psychoanalysts that they do not reflect scientifically and merely search for a cause, but rather with their Delphic self-knowledge in the context of Freudian explanations and justifications “interpret” these “symbols” of consciousness. Freudian explanations and justifications are regulated by Aristotelian “principles” and conform to Kantian judgments of the understanding. The psychoanalyst, that is, works in a philosophical context of meaning and only incidentally in the realm of observation and causality.

Freud has been accused of dualism. He is certainly an instinct pluralist having postulated the life and death instinct and other instincts that have yet to be discovered. The distinction that he draws between Consciousness and the unconscious is not, however, dualistic, because Consciousness is clearly for him a hylomorphic phenomenon, actualising in accordance with principles. The preconscious is a third system and may be subconscious but is easily accessible via simple questioning. Knowledge of all kinds is lodged in the preconscious system: from knowledge or memory of simple particulars such as my telephone number to the most complex forms of knowledge that might require an essay, a lecture, or a dialogue to actualize. This may not be merely a question of accessing material in the memory, or using the association-mechanisms of our memory systems but also require the conscious use of reasoning. Unconscious material cannot, of course, be accessed via simple questioning techniques and requires the special techniques of Freudian psychoanalysis(free association, dream interpretation, transference techniques etc) before it can “become conscious”. The body is, however, a holistic phenomenon as can be seen in Merleau-Ponty and requires perhaps a pluralistic theoretical approach of the kind we encounter in Kant where judgments of inherence and subsistence, causal judgments, judgments of “Community”, judgments of agency(substances reciprocally determining one another) can coexist without contradiction in the same theory. The first two categories of Kant’s table of categories are concerned with what Kant referred to as “objects of intuition” which probably relate to the consciousness that is required for such objects. Here we find the category of Totality which relates to the unity of the plurality of a manifold of representations. Groups three and four of the categories are structured for the purpose of explaining or justifying the existence of the objects of intuition. Science is concerned with reasoning and rationality and, as an activity, is concerned with accumulating the totality of conditions for the phenomena we seek to explain and justify in any particular scientific domain. At the root of Science is the desire to understand which is a condition of the consciousness of awe and wonder we find in both Aristotle and Kant. Space, Time, Memory, and imagination are involved in precisely determined ways in the consciousness that seeks understanding. Kant invokes a principle of the unity of Consciousness which he calls “transcendental apperception” in relation to the more intuitively inclined categories. Transcendental apperception invokes the conceptualisation activity of the “I think” and at the same time establishes that the identity of the self is related to the consciousness one must-have of the act of unifying ones representations under concepts. The concept of Causality, for example:

“..is nothing but a synthesis(of that which follows in the time series, with other appearances) according to concepts…and without such unity which has its a priori rule, and which subjects the appearances to itself, no thoroughgoing, universal, and therefore necessary, unity of consciousness would be met with, in the manifold of perceptions”(Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans Kemp Smith, N.,London, Macmillan, 1929)

In the above quote we can see a Kantian commitment to a priori knowledge of the conceptual kind in which consciousness plays an incidental but necessary role.

Here we can also see the Aristotelian hylomorphic actualising theory in operation: a theory in which powers build upon powers. Kant, with one eye on Aristotle, claimed that the work of constructing the table of categories was the most difficult and time-consuming of the work involved in the First Critique. Freud probably had one eye on Kant’s table of categories when he claimed that his Psychology was Kantian. In the Kantian account “Consciousness” plays a limited role in the representation process(sensory qualities) and in a critical (non-observational?)monitoring process when the agent is involved in action of any kind. There are many pure, so-called a priori concepts involved in the table of categories and these are, as Kant claims, independent of experience. These play the role in Kant’s system that instincts and their vicissitudes have in Freud’s system. There is a further complication in Kantian theory that justifies the claim that consciousness is merely a “surface” phenomenon and that revolves around the Kantian claim that the self can be conceptualised as a phenomenal object but also as something noumenal which cannot be directly grasped by the concepts, categories, rules(laws) and judgments from the faculty of understanding using the power of thought . The noumenal self, that is, is not theoretically characterisable by the tribunal of the understanding with its “laws”. Kant poetically characterises this tribunal via a metaphor of an island:

“We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place. This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth–enchanting name!–surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion.”(A235.236)

Kant goes on interestingly to claim that :

“we are not satisfied with the exposition merely of that which is true, but likewise demand that account be taken of that which we desire to know.”(A237)

The island of truth appears almost as an aesthetic phenomenon and is created by our empirical and conceptual relation to our representations. If, however, we view our representations transcendentally we realize according to Kant that the reasoning he resorted to in his Transcendental Aesthetic (where Space and Time were discussed) already as Kant puts it

“establishes the objective reality of noumena and justifies the division of objects into phenomena and noumena, and so of the world into a world of the senses and a world of the understanding”(A249)

This concept of the noumenon is the consequence of an intellectual intuition but cannot be known through any of the categories, and Kant claims that we can theoretically know nothing of noumena. But Kant also claims that there is another island that is not an aesthetic phenomenon but rather an ethical reality that can be established by practical reason using the practical law of freedom which thinks not about what is the case but rather about what ought to be the case. This island is an ideal reality, and it is what Plato was aiming at with his “idea of the good” which he claimed was a more important idea than that of the truth. Freud undoubtedly also had his eye on this aspect of Plato when he suborned the Platonic concepts of Eros, Thanatos, and Ananke. It was the life and the death instincts that formed the unconscious aspect of the superego that was formed in the phallic psychosexual stage. This transcendental object of reason emerges from the transcendental employment of reason. The ethical/ practical use of reason is not based on experience, on prudence or pragmatism:

“By the term “practical” I mean everything that is possible through freedom. When, however, the conditions of the exercise of our free will are empirical, reason can have no other than a regulative employment in regard to it, and can serve only to effect unity in its empirical laws. thus, for instance, in the precepts of prudence, the whole business of reason consists in uniting all the ends which are prescribed to us by our desires in the one single end, happiness, and in coordinating the means for attaining it. In this field therefore, reason can supply none but pragmatic laws of free action, for the attainment of those ends which are communicated to us by the senses: it cannot yield us laws that are pure and determined completely a priori.Laws of this latter type, pure practical laws, whose end is given through reason completely a priori, and which are prescribed to us not in an empirically conditioned but in an absolute manner, would be products of pure reason. Such are the moral laws: and these alone therefore belong to the practical employment of reason..”(B828)

Rationality in hylomorphic theory is both the essence of man and something, like consciousness, which is actualized, something which both comes to be and ought to come to be in accordance with Aristotle’s definition of man as a rational animal capable of discourse. For Aristotle, man uses his rationality theoretically, practically, and productively. Freud, in his theorizing, is more of a Kantian than he is an Aristotelian because he believes the practical use of reason to be more important for the fate of man than his use of theoretical reason. But Freud as a therapist is perhaps more Aristotelian in his use of the techniques of productive science in order to bring about change in his patients. The Freudian view of civilization contains no vision of a struggle between the dwarfs of truth and falsity in the name of “knowledge” but rather a struggle between the giants of Eros and Thanatos in the name of Ananke. In this last mythopoetic image, he places psychoanalysis as a movement with its origins in Greek Philosophy and Kantian hylomorphism. Aristotle, we know believed that theoretical contemplation was divine and not merely potentially rational, but actually rational and connected to his ideal of a philosophical God(that does not need to act in order to be rational). Aristotle, consequently believed that ethical reasoning would contain less certainty than theoretical contemplation which for him was the divine standard by which to measure our finite form of human existence. Freud probably is on the side of Kant in this debate but he was one of the new men and believed that the idea of God was not an idea of reason but more a fictional creation of an unstructured imagination ruled by fear and the pleasure-pain principle.

The above aspect of the self as noumenon is also present in Freud’s account and it adds a dimension of complexity to an already complex theory that falls clearly in the domain of Philosophical Psychology.