The mental causation problem in the constitution of Freudian theory

• Grant number: 11/19321-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: April 01, 2012
• End date: March 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Fundamentals and Assessments in Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Jonas Gonçalves Coelho
• Grantee: Beatriz Gomes Marinotti
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências (FC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Bauru. Bauru , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Our objective in this research is, from the debates on contemporaneous Philosophy of Mind, to discuss the issue of psychic or mental causation in the period of the constitution of the Freudian theory, that is, the moment that precedes the book "The interpretation of dreams". By understanding that the mental causation issue appears only from the distinction between mental processes and brain/body processes, we will initially investigate the reasons presented by Freud to justify this distinction and, from that, to defend the causal power of the mind in the case of some pathologies considered either fantasy of imagination or neurophysiologic processes, by the academic and professional community in which the thinker was graduated. We will also try to show how the attribution of a mental cause to these pathologies, regardless of whether their dominant symptoms are physics or psychics, is directly linked to mental ways of treatment, the hypnoses, and free association methods, both used by Freud in the studied period. In the proposed study, we will show that the mental in Freud refers in special, although not exclusively, to the unconscious mind. From the proposed study we will return to the mental causation problem as treated by the Philosophy of Mind, not only to put the Freudian theory in this context but also, considering the critics of the dualist conception, to analyze if Freud's ideas provide consistent tools to the distinction between mind and body processes and to the mental causation thesis.(AU)