Conscience et perception : contradictions de la théorie freudienne et perte d’un héritage philosophique

Abstract

This paper uses the notion of consciousness as a starting point and a guideline for a theoretical discussion aiming to demonstrate the contradictions and impossibilities of the successive representations of the psychic apparatus that are the two Freudian topics, and justifying a change in the theory: splitting the notions of perception and consciousness and, consequently abandoning the Perception-Conscious system (Pcpt-Cs), which was the central element of Freud's thinking when evolving from his first to his second topic. Freud was unknowingly referring to and rephrasing one of Descartes’ postulates, which is incompatible as such with the concept of unconsciousness. From an epistemological standpoint, it is ironical that the philosophical school of thought, which proposed, after Leibniz and before Freud, the hypothesis of an unconscious life, sustainably defended, as the very basis of this hypothesis, the principle of a separation between perception and consciousness. This is something, which Freud never realized.