Psychoanalytic Psychology, Vol 43(3), Jul 2026, 216-225; doi:10.1037/pap0000598
In this article, I present an analysis of the tactics used by Sigmund Freud in his momentous argument for the existence of unconscious mental states in the descriptive sense, distinct from his argument for the dynamic unconscious. The argument was essentially a philosophical argument on a topic that had been debated by philosophers for over two centuries. The tactics in his argument include the embrace of representationalism about the mind, turning psychophysical parallelism on its head, holding that all mental processes are essentially unconscious, postulating an unknown physical nature of the essence of the mental, and interpreting consciousness as perceptual awareness of one’s unconscious mental contents. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)