Neurotic Action

Behaviour which is said to be motivated primarily or exclusively by unconscious desires and beliefs has created especially troublesome problems for action theorists. Those philosophers who have been captivated by the reason-cause, explanation description distinctions have tended to construe “neurotic” behaviour as something very much apart from “normal” behaviour, — something so different that neurotics, on such a theory, seem to be turned from actors or agents who do things into victims who are compelled by “causes” to “act” (to move?) in ways that are unconnected with their conscious mental lives. R. S. Peters argues, for example, that “Freud thought his explanations relevant only to phenomena which can hardly be called actions in that they seem either to have no point or conscious objective or to fall short of standards of correctness.” Peters takes the behaviour of a married man who suddenly makes an advance to a choir boy as illustrative: “It is because things seem to be happening to him that it is appropriate to ask what made, drove, or possessed him to do that. The appropriate answer in such cases is in terms of a causal theory.” So Freud, Peters has it, appeals to unconscious motivation only in cases where the purposive rule-following model breaks down. To behave neurotically, then, is not, on this interpretation, to act at all

Action (physics) · Epistemology · Happening · Interpretation (philosophy) · Neuroticism · Personality · Psychoanalysis · Unconscious mind · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · History · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Psychology · Social Psychology

• On Unconscious Emotions

  Michael D Fox, Michael Fox•Philosophy and Phenomenological…•1973

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