Jonah Bossewitch	October 12, 1995

PSY 365	Professor Sugarman

Beyond the Pleasure Principle (4-7))

In Chapter IV of Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud takes his theory of mind where it has never gone before - into the physical world. Whereas previously it was possible to understand Freud's explanations as pure abstractions, or at the very least metaphorical, in this piece Freud slams the door on any such attempt. For Freud, the Cs. and the Uncs. are not just abstractions, they correspond to an actual area of brain tissue somewhere inside the skull. Not only does Freud postulate this "organ" without the necessary biological evidence, but he then uses it as a way to prove his theories concerning instincts. In his book Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennet warns against the temptation to locate Cs. in the brain (he calls it the Cartesian Theater). What does it do to Freud's theory if Dennet's argument proved to be correct? Could Freud's theories stand independent of the biological claims that he is currently making?

On a related note, I thought that I understood what Freud meant by an instinct until he started attributing them to single celled creatures. Would Freud say that my refrigerator follows its instinct when it stays cold, or is he using two different senses of the word in different contexts?