Monday, August 22, 2022

The Epistemological Folly Of Psychoanalysis

The psyche is a word typically referring to a person's consciousness, their nonphysical seat of thought and perception, and the word analysis refers to a conceptual dissection of ideas and experiences with the light of deductive reasoning.  The word psychoanalysis is connected with something distinct, although the combination of other terms would on its own imply a strictly rationalistic (if done without assumptions) philosophical examination of the metaphysical and epistemological nature of consciousness, and perhaps one's own individual experiences, motivations, and perceptions as a conscious being.  Psychoanalysis in the sense associated with Freud is the process of supposedly exploring the interconnected conscious and unconscious (also called the subconscious) minds to better understand a person's psychological standing.  Particular methods like free association, where a person can write or speak whatever comes to their mind without constant prompting, might be used to supposedly tease out elements of the subconscious and see how they impact beliefs and behaviors.

The obvious epistemological problem with this, or at least the problem that is obvious to any unbiased person who understands the concept of the subconscious mind, is that something outside of one's ability to perceive could not be proven to exist with pure reason or with introspective experiences (which still hinge on reason, as all things inescapably do).  Having a conscious thought or experience--literally the only kind of thought or experience that one could know the existence of--could never prove the existence of a subconscious side of the mind.  Conscious experience does not even suggest a part of the mind inaccessible to actual perception, and pure reason, as opposed to logical truths specifically pertaining to the nature and knowability of consciousness, does not prove the existence of the subconscious because it does not exist by sheer logical necessity and is not epistemologically self-evident.

Here, there is a vial clarification that needs to be grasped.  Someone could "subconsciously" do something in the sense of performing an action while focusing so heavily on something else that there is little to no direct awareness of what they are doing.  On the level of belief, someone could passively and avoidably assume something, but they could never know an idea is true or be aware of their own belief without consciously dwelling on it.  Outward actions are different.  However, this kind of subconscious behavior is not something that cannot be directly experienced no matter what someone tries to do.  Someone with concentration difficulties could directly perceive their actions with intentional effort, yet a truly subconscious thought is not perceived at all or else it would not be subconscious, and there is nothing in the range of human experiences that is both experienced and subconscious.

Not everything in Freudian psychology is logically disprovable, epistemologically based in mere assumptions, or even at odds with Biblical doctrines.  The subconscious is not among them, as no one can believe in a subconscious part of the mind without making glaring assumptions.  Freudian psychoanalysis is irrational at the level of epistemology from the start even aside from the possible or impossible parts of his ideology.  Still, even if a subconscious part of the mind does exist, and it is possible, it would not causally dictate someone's beliefs, motivations, or actions, for it would only be like a room shut off from another room, without the light that the adjoined room has.  At most, it would be a collection of inaccessible memories or something similar, not the most foundational part of consciousness.  Consciousness is by necessity something that is or can be experienced, so a true subconscious side of the mind, while not logically incoherent when it comes to metaphysics by default, is by nature not just something voluntarily outside of one's focus for a time, but something that cannot be perceived at all.

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