Abstract

Unconscious emotions are of central importance to psychoanalysis. They do, however, raise conceptual problems. The most pertinent concerns the intuition, shared by Freud, that consciousness is essential to emotion, which makes the idea of unconscious emotion seem paradoxical. In this paper, I address this paradox from the perspective of the philosopher R. C. Roberts’ account of emotions as concern-based construals. I provide an interpretation of this account in the context of affective neuroscience and explore the form of Freudian repression that emotions may be subject to under such an interpretation. This exploration draws on evidence from research on alexithymia and utilises ideas from free-energy neuroscience. The free-energy framework, moreover, facilitates an account of repression that avoids the homunculus objection and coheres with recent work on hysteria.

Highlights

  • A primary aim of this paper is to address this puzzle and provide an account that makes sense of both the reality of unconscious emotion and the intuition that consciousness is essential to emotion

  • Any future occurrences of that emotion could come to generate the defensive response of lowering the precision on the second-order construal. Stimuli, such as a particular quality of affective feeling, that would previously have contributed to the generation of the second-order construal as an attempt to explain the feeling, triggers a learned policy within the superordinate level of organisation for decreasing the precision of priors related to the consciousness of the emotion

  • The purpose of this paper has been to explore unconscious emotion in light of Freud’s seemingly paradoxical remarks, in which, on the one hand, he claimed that consciousness was essential to emotion, and on the other, he frequently invoked unconscious emotion

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

Without the availability of the correct explanation for these feelings, the brain attempts to construct a plausible alternative explanation, which in the right circumstances would be a symptom “belief.” This, in turn, can lead to the generation of symptoms of hysteria If this account is correct, it demonstrates the important role that unconscious emotion plays in the emergence of the kind of phenomena that psychoanalysis was first designed to address. I use this cumbersome phrase to hone in on the form of repression at stake Freud, despite his aforementioned comments, did speak about the repression of emotions, except that what he spoke about in this context was () the suppression of affect. Our focus will be on the second level, since it is this which most relates to hysteria, and is the key to understanding Freud’s seemingly paradoxical comments on unconscious emotion

A CONSTRUAL ACCOUNT OF EMOTIONS
A NEUROSCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION
Findings
DISCUSSION
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