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Kant and Freud on ‘I’

B¦atrice Longuenesse

Preliminary Remarks

In this paper I will argue that Kant’s transcendental analysis of ‘I’ (‘Ich’) asused in the proposition ‘I think’ bears interesting relations to Freud’s con-cept ‘Ich’ (translated by James Strachey as ‘ego’) rather than to the post-Wittgensteinian analyses of self-reference it has often, in recent times,been compared to.1 The latter analyses focus on the question: is ‘I’ a re-ferring expression and if so, what does it refer to and how does it refer?Instead, Kant’s analysis of ‘I’ in ‘I think’ focuses on this other question:what is the role played in the ordering of our representations by thefact that we can ascribe those representations to ourselves in attachingto them the thought ‘I think’? In tracing our use of the concept ‘I’ in‘I think’ to what he calls the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’,Kant argues that in this context, our use of the concept ‘I’ expresses a spe-cific kind of (logical) unity of mental contents. The view I would like todefend here is that this role Kant assigns to ‘I’ can be interestingly com-pared to the way Freud characterizes his concept ‘ego’ (‘Ich’). For the lat-ter is supposed to capture a specific kind of ordering of mental processes,which Freud distinguishes from another kind he calls ‘the id’ (‘das Es’).The distinction rests on the fact that the intentional contents of the men-

1 See for instance Cassam, Quassim: Self and World. Oxford 1997. Strawson,Peter: The Bounds of Sense. London 1966. I discuss Cassam’s view in Longue-nesse, B¦atrice: “Self-Consciousness and Consciousness of One’s Own Body. Var-iations on a Kantian Theme” (henceforth SCB). In Philosophical Topics 34, 2006,283–309, esp. 304. On Freud’s concept ‘Ich’, cf. Freud, Sigmund: Das Ich unddas Es, in Gesammelte Werke, chronologisch geordnet. Hrsg. A. Freud, E. Bibring,V. Hoffer, E. Kris, O. Isakowa, unter Mitwirkung von M. Bonaparte. London1940–41, 13: 235–289. Engl. Transl. The Ego and the Id, in J. Strachey,A. Freud, C. L. Rothgeb, A. Richards (eds.): The Standard Edition of the CompletePsychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London 1958, 19: 1–66. Freud’s texts willbe cited in their English translation, with reference provided in the Standard Ed-ition (SE, volume and page number); followed by Gesammelte Werke (GW, vol-ume and page).

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tal processes he calls “ego” are logically connected and have objective im-port (they obey, in Freud’s terms, the “reality principle’). The goal of thepresent essay is to explore the comparison thus outlined.

Admittedly, such an enterprise flies in the face of glaring differencesbetween Kant’s enterprise and Freud’s. Let me list just a few. First, Kant’s‘I’ is the concept2 ‘I’ that occupies the place of logical subject in the prop-osition ‘I think’. In contrast, Freud’s concept ‘ego’ (‘Ich’) is a term of artcoined by Freud to refer to a specific kind of organization of mental proc-esses whose contents obey elementary logical rules. Second, the context ofKant’s investigation of the thought ‘I think’ is his attempt to answer thequestion: how are synthetic a priori cognitions possible? In contrast, thecontext in which Freud coins his concept ‘das Ich’ is that of a clinical in-vestigation into the workings of our minds, aiming at explaining our pro-pensity to various kinds of neurotic behavior. Third, Kant’s method is notempirical but transcendental, that of an a priori investigation into thenecessary conditions of synthetic a priori cognition. In contrast, Freud’smethod is empirical. The relevance of his concept ‘Ich’ is supposed tobe supported by empirical evidence gathered primarily – albeit not exclu-sively – in the context of the psychoanalytical therapy.

And yet, despite these obvious differences, I hope to show that com-paring Kant’s and Freud’s respective explanation of ‘Ich’ yields interestingresults. For I hope to show that Freud’s account of ‘Ich’ offers a compel-ling explanation of the complex ways in which empirically given, causally

2 It may seem strange to characterize ‘I’ in ‘I think’ as a concept, since for Kant,concepts are always general, and we are used to treating ‘I’ as what we call a sin-gular referring expression. In fact, Kant has difficulties placing ‘I’ in his classifi-cation of representations. When he introduces his argument in the Paralogisms ofPure Reasons, he writes : “Now we come to a concept that was not cataloguedabove in the general list of transcendental concepts (…). This is the concept –or rather, if one prefers, the judgment – I think.” ‘I’ is thus treated as an insep-arable element in the whole “concept, or judgment” ‘I think’. Clearly if ‘I think’ isa concept, it’s in a different sense than that of the standard “general and reflectedrepresentations” Kant calls concepts in his Logic (see ref. below, fn.4). Kant alsotalks of ‘I’ as a “wholly empty representation of which we cannot even say that itis a concept, but the mere consciousness that accompanies every concept” (KrV,A 346/B 404). He nevertheless occasionally talks of “the concept of the I” (KrV,A 401) or says that in the proposition “I think” “the concept of a subject is …taken merely logically” (KrV, B 419). While being aware of these difficulties,which I cannot address here, I have made the somewhat arbitrary choice tocall ‘I’ according to Kant a concept on the sole ground that it is an intellectualrepresentation, not a representation of sensibility.

For conventions used in citing Kant’s texts, see below, fn 3.

B¦atrice Longuenesse300


determined persons are able to develop just the capacity to think in thefirst person for which Kant claimed we could account, ultimately, onlyby appealing to the absolute spontaneity of a “transcendental subject =x which is cognized only through the thoughts that are its predicates.”3

I will proceed as follows.In the first part of this essay, I will consider four features of Kant’s

account of the use of the pronoun ‘I’ in the thought ‘I think’ that are,I believe, especially relevant to what Freud has to tell us about his concept‘Ich’.

In the second part, I will expound in its own terms Freud’s account of‘Ich’ in the text where he first offers a systematic account of this concept:Das Ich und das Es.

In the third part, I will offer a screening of Freud’s view in light of thefour points identified in Kant’s view. I will argue that this screening sup-ports my suggestion that there are striking parallels between Kant’s ‘tran-scendental unity of apperception’ grounding our use of ‘I’ in ‘I think’, andFreud’s ‘Ich’.

1 Kant on ‘I’ in ‘I think’

Let me start with the famous sentence from §16 of the B TranscendentalDeduction:

The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwisesomething would be represented in me that could not be thought at all,which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossibleor else at least, would be nothing to me. (KrV, B 131–132)

3 KrV, A 346/B 404. The Critique of Pure Reason is cited according to usual prac-tice, by pagination in the 1781 (‘A’) and 1787 (‘B’) edition. For the sake of con-sistency in the language of this essay, the text is cited in English translation. I haveused the translation by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood in The Cambridge Edition ofthe Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge 1998.

References to other works of Kant are given in Kant, Immanuel: GesammelteSchriften Hrsg.: Band 1–22 Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Bd. 23Preussische Akademie zu Berlin, ab Band 24 Deutsche Akademie der Wissen-schaften zu Gçttigen. Berlin 1900 ff. Cited by volume and page. For individualtexts I use the following abbreviations: KU: Critique of the Power of Judgment.Transl. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge 2000. Log: The J�scheLogic, in Logic Lectures. Transl. J. Michael Young. Cambridge 1992, 521–640.

Kant and Freud on ‘I’ 301


This sentence sums up in a compressed way two conditioning relations,which Kant will go on to develop and justify in the rest of §16. For clari-ty’s sake, let me divide this sentence into three parts:

[1] The I think must be able to accompany all my representations;[2] for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not

be thought at all,[3] which is as much as to say that the representation would either be

impossible or else at least, would be nothing to me.

The first conditioning relation is stated in [2] and [3]: [2] is a necessarycondition for [3]. A representation is something to me [3] only if it can bethought [2]. The second conditioning relation is stated in [1] and [2]: [1]is a necessary condition for [2]. A representation can be thought only ifthe ‘I think’ is able to accompany it. The four theses about ‘I’ I amnow going to expound rely on the explanations Kant gives of thesetwo conditioning relations in the rest of §16 as well as on further devel-opments of Kant’s view in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique ofPure Reason.

1.1 The concept ‘I’ is fundamentally related to discursive thinking

According to the first conditioning relation just outlined ([3] conditionedby [2]), representations’ being ‘something to me’ is possible only if thoserepresentations can be thought. Thinking, for Kant, is forming concepts,that is to say ‘general and reflected representations’, and binding them to-gether in judgments and inferences.4 Such thinking is what Kant calls‘discursive thinking’.5 Only insofar as they are susceptible to being thusconceptualized are any representations in the full sense ‘mine’. Otherwise,to borrow Kant’s striking formulation, although representations may be‘in me’, they nevertheless are nothing ‘to me’. So for instance, I mayhave present ‘in me’ various sensations that together are the materialfor the perception of a tree. Unless those sensations are combined andbound together in such a way that the resulting perception can be concep-tualized, recognized under the concept ‘tree’, they just pass through the

4 Log, AA 09: 91. See also KrV, A 68–69/B 92–94. On the relation between con-cept, judgment and inference, see Longuenesse, B¦atrice: Kant and the Capacityto Judge (henceforth KCJ). Princeton 1998, 90–92.

5 Log, AA 09: 36.



mental life of the individual I happen to be, but there is no representation‘I’ to which those sensations might be ascribed by me. This being so, thereis no concept or word ‘I’ unless the capacity for discursive thinking is ex-ercised.

But according to the second conditioning relation ([2] conditionedby [1]), a representation can be thought only if the ‘I think’ can accom-pany it. There is no discursive thinking unless one is able to ascribe theconceptualized representations thus obtained to oneself in forming thethought ‘I think’. In other words, discursive thinking and ascribingone’s thoughts to oneself in the first person are mutually conditioning.Why this is so appears more clearly if we consider the second importantpoint in Kant’s view of ‘I’ in ‘I think’.

1.2 Discursive thinking presupposes a pre-discursive activity of the mind

The discursive thinking to which the use of ‘I’ belongs presupposes a pre-discursive, pre-conceptual process of synthesizing representations, andjust as the concept ‘I’ belongs to discursive thinking both as conditioningit and as depending on it, there is a pre-discursive consciousness of one-self as the agent binding together the multiplicity of representations weeventually accompany with the thought ‘I think’.

So for instance, I see a bunch of flowers in bloom, and the next day Isee a bunch of flowers on what appears to be the same table in what ap-pears to be the same vase. But those flowers are faded, and I say: oh, theflowers that were so beautiful yesterday have now died. Someone mightsay: are you sure these are the same flowers? I reply: yeah, I think they arethe same flowers. Using, in this way, ‘I’ as the logical subject of the prop-osition ‘I think’ (or more completely: ‘I think they are the same flowers’)presupposes a pre-discursive consciousness of one and the same agent ofthe act of perceiving and binding yesterday’s and today’s perceptions, anagent whose identity through time is accessible in no other way thanthrough the continuity and unity of her own activity.6 Moreover, the con-

6 This representation is pre-discursive because I do not need to have a concept ofmyself as an agent for this representation to be available. All I need is experienc-ing myself as one by virtue of experiencing my activity as one binding activity. Thisis what Kant means, I submit, when he writes, for instance: “(…) It is only be-cause I can combine a manifold of representations in one consciousness that it ispossible for me to represent the identity of the consciousness in these representations



tinuity and unity of her own activity is accessible in no other way thanthrough its result : I do perceive these flowers as being one and thesame bunch as those I saw the day before, and if asked why, I can givemy reasons. Those reasons are available to me, ready to be accessed byme if needed, because they rest on an activity of binding and comparingthat is mine. The activity itself need not be conscious. This takes us to thenext point:

1.3 We are “seldom even conscious” of the pre-discursive (synthetic)activity of the mind

The binding or synthesizing activity is, in Kant’s words, “the work ofimagination, a blind though indispensable function of the soul, withoutwhich we would have no cognition at all, but of which we are seldom evenconscious” (KrV, A 78/B 103, italics mine).

What does Kant mean by “… of which we are seldom even con-scious?” Borrowing from the vocabulary of contemporary philosophersof mind, we might say that there is no “what it’s like” character of ouractivity of binding representations, thus no phenomenal consciousnessof that activity.7 As I said in 1–2, we are aware of the binding activitymostly through its results : our consciousness that the flowers are thesame, but faded ; our consciousness that this is a tree, and so on. Those re-

itself, i. e. the analytical unity of apperception is only possible under the presup-position of some synthetic one. (…) Only because I can comprehend their mani-fold in a consciousness do I call them altogether my representations; for otherwiseI would have as multicolored, diverse a self as I have representations of which Iam conscious.” (KrV, B 133–134; italics are Kant’s).

Note also that ‘I think’ can be said or thought, in the example cited (‘I thinkthey are the same flowers’) with different degrees of force, meaning either: ‘Itseems to me these are the same’ or ‘I’m sure they are the same’ or ‘I have no rea-son not to think they are the same’. This would correspond to what Kant calls the“value of the copula” (in this case, the copula ‘are’ in ‘they are the same flowers’)defining the modality of a judgment by its ‘relation to thinking in general’ name-ly to the concatenation of reasons I may be in a position to offer as support formy judgment. Cf. KrV, A 74/B 100 and KCJ, 157–161.

7 For consciousness as the “what it’s like” character of mental states, see Nagel,Tom: “What Is It Like to be a Bat?”, Philosophical Review 4, 1974, 435–450.For describing this aspect of consciousness as “phenomenal” consciousness, seeBlock, Ned: “Concepts of Consciousness”, in D. Chalmers (ed.): Philosophy ofMind. Classical and Contemporary Readings. Oxford 2002, 206–219.



sults are not necessarily judgments. They may be just intuitions (my in-tuition of a tree, my intuition of the currently faded flowers) or conceptsunder which we recognize those intuitions (I see the tree as a tree, I seethe flower as faded, and so on), or the representation of the temporalorder of the objects intuited and conceptualized (I see the flowers havechanged from being in bloom to being faded). Those results would notbe available to us unless we could assume that we, the perceivers, hadbeen present all along and thus in a position to compare the current per-ception (faded flowers) with the previous one (flowers in bloom), or totake into account the surrounding conditions for our interpreting ourperceptions as perceptions of a tree, and so on. The activity does nothave to be, itself, phenomenally present to us. But we do engage inand implicitly assume that we have engaged in such an activity wheneverwe confidently interpret our perception and perceive an object as fallingunder a concept or under a combination of concepts (‘the flowers havefaded’).

Note that Kant does not say, in the text cited above, that we are neverconscious of the activity of the imagination. He only says we are “seldomeven conscious” of it. And in fact, in § 25 of the B Deduction he seems tooffer an example in which we are conscious of our own synthesizing ac-tivity:

We also always perceive this in ourselves. We cannot think a line withoutdrawing it in thought, we cannot think a circle without describing it, we can-not represent the three dimensions of space at all without placing three linesperpendicular to each other from the same point, and we cannot even rep-resent time without, in drawing a straight line (which is to be the externalfigurative representation of time) attending merely to the action of the syn-thesis of the manifold through which we successively determine the innersense, and thereby attending to the succession of this determination ininner sense. Motion, as action of the subject (not as determination of an ob-ject) consequently the synthesis of the manifold in space, if we abstract fromthis manifold in space and attend solely to the action in accordance withwhich we determine the form of inner sense, first produces the concept ofsuccession at all. (KrV, B 154–155)

What Kant seems to be saying here is that in the cases he describes, at-tention is consciously directed at the acts of synthesis that conditionthe possibility of both intuitions and concepts. Nevertheless, even inthese cases, where Kant does point to what seems to be a direct conscious-ness of the act of synthesizing, what we are directly conscious of, accord-ing to his own description of the cases, is the successive generation of animage. Only thereby are we conscious of our own action of generating the



image, or of the action as our own. Moreover even under this guise (beingconscious of our own mental action by virtue of being conscious of theintuited image generated by that action), we were told in the text citedat the beginning of this section that we are only “seldom conscious” ofthe function of the imagination. In most cases, we do not catch ourselvesin the act, as it were, while processing it. The action remains somethingof which we are not conscious.8

In the text I cited at the beginning, Kant also described imagination a“blind” function of the mind. This is to be distinguished from his sayingthat it is a function of which we are “seldom even conscious”. After all, ofintuitions too Kant says that, without concepts, they are “blind” (KrV,A 51/B 75). And yet, in his general classification of representations, hecharacterizes intuitions as representations “with consciousness” (KrV,A 320/B 376). So we can assume that Kant means two different thingswhen he says of imagination that it is “blind” and when he says thatwe are “seldom even conscious” of it. Presumably the imagination is“blind” in the same sense in which intuitions are: imagination is blindwhen its syntheses are not explicitly subsumed under concepts.9 This isnot what makes it the case that we are “seldom even conscious” of its ac-tivity. For intuitions, although “blind” insofar as they are not conceptual-ized, are nevertheless representations “with consciousness”. I suggest thismeans they are phenomenally conscious in the sense outlined above:there is something it is like to have them. Similarly, we might imaginecombinations of representations in imagination which are blind (wedon’t know our way with them, what they are about) and neverthelesssomething we are conscious of (there is something it is like for us to en-gage in them – indeed the activity of the mind engaging in them may befelt and may be a source of pleasure or displeasure).10

Nevertheless, there is a connection between the blindness of imagina-tion and the fact that we are “seldom even conscious” of it. For clearlywhen it is not blind, when it is guided by concepts of which we are ex-

8 In a similar vein, Kant says that “The schematism of our understanding with re-gard to appearances and their mere form is a hidden art in the depth of thehuman soul, whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiledbefore our eyes only with difficulty” (KrV, A 141–142/B 180–181).

9 I specify “not explicitly” subsumed because syntheses of imaginations can occuraccording to concepts or be guided by concepts without the concepts being ex-plicitly thought as concepts, i. e. as universal and reflected representations. Onthis point, see KCJ, 196–197.

10 See KU, AA 05: 217–218.



plicitly aware, then the activity of the imagination is also something ofwhich we are conscious in the way described above: drawing a line, draw-ing a circle, or representing time by drawing a line. Conversely, there areactivities of the imagination of which we are and will remain unconsciouswhile they occur, but of which we may become conscious by being con-scious of their result : intuitions whose object we recognize under con-cepts, or combinations of concepts in judgments. As we shall seebelow, this is interestingly related to Freud’s idea that unconscious repre-sentations and activities of the mind become pre-conscious and finally ex-plicitly conscious when they come to be linked with words.

1.4 ‘I’ and one’s own body

When used in the proposition ‘I think’, ‘I’ represents a “transcendentalsubject of thoughts = x which is cognized only through the thoughtsthat are its predicates” (KrV, A 346/B 404). Nothing more needs to beknown about what ‘I’ represents for ‘I’ to play its role adequately inthis context. But there are other uses of ‘I’ in which it is used in sucha way that it picks out a particular person, indeed a particular living, sens-ing body. So for instance, in the Third Analogy of Experience, Kantclaims that our experience of the spatial position of material things inspace and our experience of our own spatial position with respect tothem are mutually conditioning. He writes:

From our experience it is easy to notice that only continuous influence in allplaces in space can lead our sense from one object to another, that the lightthat plays between our eyes and the heavenly bodies effects a mediate com-munity between us and the latter and thereby proves the simultaneity of thelatter; and that we cannot empirically alter our place (perceive this altera-tion) without matter everywhere making the perception of our position pos-sible. (KrV, A 213/B 260)

This ‘we’ is an ‘I’ in the plural: a first person plural. In using ‘I’ and itsplural ‘we’, here, Kant clearly means to refer to ourselves as empirical en-tities: either as living, sensing, thinking entities located in space and time:empirical persons; or at least as empirically determinate minds located atempirically determinate bodies.11 Here ‘I’ as it appears in the proposition‘I think’ is indexed, as it were, to a particular living, sensing, experiencingperson, namely an embodied entity.

11 On this point, see again SCB, esp. 302–303. Cf. KCJ, 392–393.



To sum up: Kant’s ‘I’ in ‘I think’ has the following four important fea-tures: i) The concept ‘I’ (or more precisely: being able to use the concept‘I’ in the proposition ‘I think’) is a condition for and is conditioned byany episode of discursive thinking. ii) Discursive thinking presupposesa pre-discursive binding activity, which in turn involves a pre-discursive(original synthetic) consciousness of oneself, and thus a pre-discursiverepresentation ‘I’. iii) We are “seldom even conscious” of the pre-discur-sive activity that grounds the discursive (conceptually organized) activityof the mind and the representation ‘I’. iv) In its use in ‘I think’, ‘I’ istaken to refer to a “transcendental subject = x” a point we might translateby saying that ‘I’ is taken to refer to whoever or whatever currently thinksor says ‘I think’, without any further determination of what kind of entitythis subject of thinking might be. But this use is inseparable from anoth-er, in which ‘I’ is thought to refer to a determinate entity: a person – aliving, sensing, thinking body, or at the very least, a thinking, intuitingand sensing mind located at a body.

2 Freud on “das Ich” (“the Ego”)

I will first briefly recount what I take to be the most important aspects ofFreud’s notion of ‘Ich’ as expounded in the first two sections of his 1923essay. This will be mainly expository. I will then compare Freud’s andKant’s ‘Ich’, following the guiding thread of the four core theses I haveidentified in Kant’s view.

2.1 Consciousness and what is unconscious

In section 1 of The Ego and the Id,12 Freud starts by recalling what hetakes to be the ground-breaking discovery of clinical psychoanalysis : con-sciousness is not the essence of the psyche, but only a passing quality of it,that can appear and disappear. In earlier phases of his work, he says, hehas progressed from a merely “descriptive” contrast between consciousand unconscious representations to a “dynamic” contrast : the representa-tions that are properly speaking unconscious are those that are repressed,prevented from access to consciousness by an active force that resiststhis access. Mental representations that are merely descriptively uncon-

12 SE 19: 13–18; GW 13: 239–245.



scious, namely that are temporarily unavailable to consciousness withoutbeing pushed out of consciousness by the force of repression, must becharacterized as “pre-conscious” rather than, properly speaking, uncon-scious. The dynamic notion of the unconscious has thus been substitutedfor the merely descriptive notion.

But, says Freud, the dynamic notion in turn has now proved insuffi-cient. Clinical experience calls for yet a new approach to the mind, wheredynamic concepts – repression, the unconscious as the domain of re-pressed mental activity and its contents – are complemented by structuralconcepts. Accordingly, conscious and unconscious systems of representa-tions are distinguished by their respective structure rather than by theirdivision through the force of repression. It remains true that every repre-sentation that is repressed is unconscious. But not every unconscious rep-resentation is unconscious by virtue of being repressed. Rather, what allunconscious representations have in common is the specific structureFreud describes as that of “primary processes”, in contrast with the “sec-ondary processes” of the pre-conscious/conscious system, obeying thelogical principles of discursive thought – in particular the law of non-con-tradiction – and functionally directed at a consistent representation of theoutside world.

The distinction of “ego” and “id” belongs to this new, structural ap-proach, and takes precedence over the old division between “conscious”and “unconscious”. Indeed, although the id (das Es) is unconscious, theego (das Ich) is part conscious and part unconscious, for reasons nowto be explained.

2.2 “Ego” and “Id”

In Freud’s view, the ego is the result of an internal differentiation within amore primitive system of representations, the id. Freud writes:

We shall now look upon an individual as a psychical id, unknown and un-conscious, upon whose surface rests the ego, developed from its nucleus, thePcpt system.13 (…) The ego is not sharply separated from the id, its lowerportion merges into it.

13 Freud uses the abbreviation “W” for “Wahrnehmung”, translated by Strachey by“Pcpt” for “perception” in the expression: “perception system” ( “W System” or“System W” in Freud’s German text). He sometimes also uses “W-Bw” (translated“Pcpt-Cs”) for “perception-consciousness” system. The “perception system” is thesystem of mental representations derived from sensory information.



But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it.(SE 19: 24; GW 13: 251)

Is the individual “the id”? One might think so, since Freud writes, at thebeginning of the text just cited: “We shall now look upon an individual asa psychical id.” This does not mean, however, that all there is to an in-dividual is her psyche, much less her psyche in the inchoate state thatis “the id” (“das Es”). What is true is that in the context of the psychoana-lytic therapy, what the analyst deals with is the unruly mass of emotionsthat is the core of the person’s psyche. But of course, in a more usualsense, an individual, for Freud, is the whole person.

A person is a biological entity. As such, she has drives (Triebe). Drivesare physiological forces, characterizing any living being. In human beingsas in other animals endowed with a central nervous system, physiologicaldrives have representatives, as it were, in psychical life, in the form ofemotions. The id, which is the core of any individual’s psyche, is theset of mental representations of drives. It also includes feelings of pleasureor displeasure: pleasure at having a drive satisfied and the correspondingemotion or sensation heeded (e. g. pleasure at having successfully avoidedthe object of fear, pleasure at obtaining the object of lust, pleasure at re-lieving one’s hunger, and so on), displeasure at having the drive hinderedand the emotion or sensation left unheeded.

The life of the mind as an id is subject to what Freud calls the pleas-ure principle: obtain pleasure and avoid un-pleasure.14 The principleleads the individual’s mental processes to select hallucinatory representa-tions over veridical ones if the former are pleasurable and the latter un-pleasurable. But this is a threat to the drive for self-preservation. The lat-ter is thus what determines the differentiation, within the id, of a partthat continues to obey the pleasure principle and it alone (this is the idproperly speaking); and a part that learns to seek information from exter-nal reality and adequate response to reality. This is how, as indicated inthe text cited above, the ego emerges from the id as the organization ofmental processes whose role it is to guide the individual in navigatingits own life-preserving activities in relation to the external world.

Freud writes:

We have formed the idea that in each individual there is a coherent organ-ization of mental processes ; and we call this his ego. (SE 19: 17; GW 13:243)

14 SE 19: 25; GW 13: 252. Cf. the 1911 essay: “Formulations on the Two Prin-ciples of Mental Functioning”, SE 12: 219; GW 8: 231–232.



And again:

(…) The ego is the part of the id [des Es] that has been modified by the di-rect influence of the external world through the medium of the Pcpt.-Cs(…). Moreover, the ego seeks to bring the influence of the external worldto bear upon the id and its intentions [Absichten] and endeavors to substitutethe reality principle for the pleasure principle that reigns unrestrictedly in theid. For the ego, perception plays the part which in id the falls to the drive.(SE 19: 25; GW 13: 252–253)15

The ego is an organization of mental processes unified by the specificfunction it is called upon to perform: it is that part of the id thatheeds the instructions of the external world, that is to say, it is thatpart of the psyche in which mental processes are organized in such away that what the world is like finds representation in the mind. In con-trast to the id, which functions according to the pleasure principle, theego thus functions according to what Freud calls the “reality principle”.16

Now, the information from the world comes via the body. The bodyis itself part of the world. So, the organization of mental processes thatconstitutes the ego includes processes that represent states and changesof states of the body. Here’s what Freud writes:

A person’s own body [der eigene Kçrper], and above all, its surface, is a placefrom which both external and internal perceptions may spring. It is seen likeany other object, but to the touch it yields two kinds of sensations, one ofwhich may be equivalent to an internal perception. Psycho-physiology hasfully discussed the manner in which a person’s own body attains its specialposition among other objects in the world of perception. Pain, too, seemsto play a part in the process, and the way in which we gain new knowledgeof our organs during painful illnesses is perhaps a model of the way by whichin general we arrive at the idea of our body.

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface en-tity, but it is itself the projection of a surface. (SE 19: 25–26; GW 13: 253)

Freud has said earlier that the ego is the “surface” of the psyche, that bywhich the psyche communicates with the external world. But it is also theprojection of a surface. That is to say, the representational contents of theperception/consciousness system are the projection of a “surface”, namelythe projection of the limit between the body and the world, literally its

15 For the abbreviation Pcpt.-Cs, see fn. 12. I differ from Strachey in translating“Absicht” as “intention” (Strachey says: “tendency”, probably because he is under-standably skeptical about attributing “intentions” to the id); and in translating“Trieb” as “drive” rather than Strachey’s “instinct”.

16 See again SE 19: 25; GW 13: 252. And SE 12: 219; GW 8: 232.



skin and eyes and ears. Because of this, “the ego is a bodily ego”, its per-ceptual contents are one and all representations of some point of contactbetween the body and the world around it.17

Freud assigns two complementary roles, one negative, the other pos-itive, to the selective organization of mental events he calls the ego (dasIch). The two roles are connected to one another. Negative: to hem theindividual’s striving for immediate satisfaction via hallucinatory represen-tation or immediate discharge of action. Positive: to promote an orderingof perceptions yielding objective representation and delayed life-preserv-ing action. In both roles, the ego develops out of the perception-con-sciousness system, namely the system of representations whose role is spe-cifically to allow the individual to successfully navigate her environment.

Freud adds, however, that in addition to this ego that develops out ofthe perception-consciousness system, there is also an unconscious compo-nent of the ego. This is the “ego-ideal” or “super-ego” expounded in thethird part of the Ego and the Id. This “unconscious” aspect of the ego isthe source of much of our social adaptation and internalization of moralimperatives. As such, it is also a major source of neurotic behavior. I amnot going to consider this aspect of Freud’s view here. Insofar as Freud’s“super-ego” bears an interesting relation to Kant’s “I”, it is to Kant’s moral“I”, the “I” of “I ought to”. In this essay I consider only the relation be-tween Freud’s “Ich” and Kant’s “Ich denke”, “I” in “I think”, which Kanttakes to be the expression of the unity of consciousness necessary for anyobjective representation. My claim is that Freud’s and Kant’s respectiveviews of cognition, of its dependence on a specific kind of ordering ofmental contents, and of the relation between that ordering and the con-cept “I”, turn out to be strikingly similar.

To show this, I will now review Freud’s conception of “ego” as I haveexpounded it so far, and scan it through the lens of the four features ofKant’s “I” I have identified in part 2 of this paper.

17 Of course the representations governed by the laws of secondary processes are notall perceptual representations. But perceptual representations are an important,perhaps the most important component: they are the core body of informationon which all other representations depend, especially word-representations (Wort-vorstellungen). More on this below.



3 Kant’s “Ich” in “Ich denke” and Freud’s “Ich”

First, a caveat again concerning the differences between what is meant by“Ich” in Freud, and in Kant. As we just saw, Freud’s concept “ego” (“Ich”)refers to a particular organization of mental processes about which Freudmakes statements in the third person. In contrast, Kant’s “I” is the firstperson pronoun used in the proposition “I think”, which does not referto an organization of mental processes but rather, to the “transcendentalsubject =x” of which, according to Kant, nothing more can be said thanthat it is “the thing that thinks” (A 346/B 404), whatever that thing maybe. Still, what makes it possible for us to use “I” in this way is that we areengaged in the activity of ordering our representations under the unity ofapperception, namely a logically structured unity of representationsgeared toward objective cognition. My claim is that this unity of represen-tations bears striking similarities to what Freud calls “Ich”. Indeed, I sub-mit that Freud’s developmental account of the organization of mentalprocesses he calls “Ich”, governed by the “reality principle” and as such,conquered over the inchoate mass of “Es” governed by the pleasure prin-ciple, gives us an interesting path into what a naturalized account ofKant’s transcendental unity of apperception might look like. Kant char-acterizes the latter as a “formal condition” (A 363) of objective represen-tation. He explains that the role of the concept “I”, in its position as thelogical subject in the thought “I think”, is both to express and to promotethe unity of the activity of thinking that sets its own norms directed atgenerating objective representation.18 I offered an example of this role

18 Admittedly, I am reformulating Kant’s view in my own terms here. In saying thatthe concept “I” both expresses and promotes the unity of apperception, I meanthat we have to be already engaged in unifying representations under the unity ofapperception in order to be able to attach to those representations the thought “Ithink”; but conversely, attaching to them the thought “I think” is endorsing andfurther promoting the unity under which these representations already stand.Compare KrV, B 135–136: “I am (…) conscious of the identical self in regardto the manifold of the representations that are given to me in an intuition be-cause I call them all together my representations, which constitute one. Butthat is as much as to say that I am conscious a priori of their necessary synthesis,which is called the original synthetic unity of apperception, under which all rep-resentations given to me stand, but under which they must also be brought bymeans of a synthesis.” When I add that the activity of thinking “sets its ownnorms directed at generating objective representations” I am echoing Kant’s state-ment that the logical forms of judgment are the forms of the objective unity ofapperception: see KrV, B 140–141. Cf KCJ, 82–85.



in the case of perceiving a bunch of flowers first in bloom, then faded:the successive perceptions have to be related to one and the same agentof mentally binding perceptual information in order for the recognitionof the bunch of flowers as one and the same in different states to occur.But one could say the same, at a more abstract level, of any process ofcounting or reasoning. I go through the units in my packet of cigarettes.I have to be conscious of going through one and the same act of counting– “don’t interrupt me!” – and for this, I need to be at least implicitly con-scious that there is throughout this process one and the same agent of theact of counting – myself. Or if I consider an activity of reasoning, of pro-ducing a proof, I have to keep in mind each step of the proof, keep inmind that they are steps of one proof, correspondingly keep track ofthe act of following up or indeed figuring out the proof, and be implicitlyconscious that there is, throughout, one and the same agent of the activityof producing the proof, myself. In all these cases, the consciousness ofunity culminates in “I think”: I think this is the same bunch of flowers,I think there are 17 cigarettes, I think the proof is valid. There is an ap-parent unity of the process of perceiving, counting, proving, which thecurrent perceiver, thinker and speaker has carried out and for whichshe can give justification – for which she takes responsibility. Relatingeach step to “I” not only expresses the unity, it also promotes it: becauseI relate the flowers to one and the same point of view and agent of thebinding of perceptions, I can think their objective temporal order. Be-cause I take myself to be accountable for the correctness of the enumer-ation or for the steps of the proof, I keep track of the units counted or thesteps of the proof in such a way that the enumeration or the proof goesthrough.19

19 One might object that in fact, “I” in “I think” often expresses not so much a unityof the process as a taking responsibility for the process. For when pressed, we mayrecognize that we in fact lost track of time, we lost count, we let go of the proof.So to the question: “Are you sure?” we might respond: “Well, perhaps I’m not sosure after all…”. We still use “I” to say: “I’m not so sure… I lost track.” “I” inthis case does not seem to express unity, but rather just the fact of taking respon-sibility. But I submit that taking responsibility and attempting to keep track(= promoting unity) are one and the same. It is on our doing that the keepingtrack depends, and if it is lost, we take responsibility for having lost track andmake it our commitment to retrieve it. This why I propose that for Kant, “I”in “I think” serves both to express and to promote the unity of a process onwhich justification depends. Thanks to Ned Block for pressing me on this point.



Now contrary to Kant, Freud does not have much to say (to myknowledge, he has nothing at all to say) about the role of the conceptand word “I” in ordering our thoughts. But if Kant is right in the rolehe assigns to our capacity to ascribe representations to ourselves inboth acquiring objective representations and conducting any kind of rea-son-giving process of thought, then Freud’s “ego” (“Ich”) designates,within our mental life, that particular organization of events or process-es20 that accounts for the use of “I” in Kant’s proposition “I think”. In-deed, this is the only explanation I can find for why Freud would givethe name “Ich” to this organization of mental events. While doing so,he gives an account in the third person, and a causal account, of a chainof events, physiological and mental/psychological, that result in our ac-quiring the capacity to think in the first person, which is according toKant the very capacity to provide or at least seek reasons for one’sthoughts and actions.

With this in mind, I will review the four points I highlighted inKant’s view of “I” and see what they become in Freud’s view of “Ich”.

3.1 “I” and discursive thought

Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, namely the activity of think-ing directed at objective representation and eventually expressed in Kant’s“I think”, has its counterpart in the organization of mental events Freudcalls “ego”, governed by the reality principle. Indeed Freud’s “reality prin-ciple” characterizes a mode of ordering mental events and their contentswhich, in Freud’s description of it, seems quite close to what Kant callsthe “logical use of the understanding” in which intuitions are broughtunder concepts combined in judgments and inferences according to log-ical laws – the laws of identity, of non-contradiction, and of excludedmiddle. In the 1911 essay already cited, “Formulations on the Two Prin-ciples of Mental Functioning”, Freud traces back to the reality principleour capacity to form judgments. After sketching out the process by whichthe reality principle gradually takes precedence over the pleasure principlein ordering the contents of our representations, Freud goes on:

20 Strachey says “processes”, I have adopted his translation. Freud’s term is Vorg�nge,which could also be translated as “events”. See SE 19: 17; GW 13: 243.



Instead of repression, which excluded from investment [Besetzung]21 some ofthe emerging representations as productive of unpleasure, there came forthan impartial passing of judgment, which had to decide whether a given rep-resentation was true or false, – that is, whether it was in agreement with re-ality or not – the decision being determined by making a comparison withthe memory-traces of reality. (SE 12: 221; GW 8: 233)

Kant’s and Freud’s approaches are thus complementary. Kant inquiresinto the logical forms of judgment and their role in generating, when ap-plied to sensible intuition, objective representations. Freud inquires intothe genesis of our very capacity to pass judgment on the conformity toreality of our representations, in the context of the conflicting demandsof our psychic life. For Kant, the concept “I” in “I think” expresses andpromotes the unity of the activity of ordering mental contents accordingto the logical forms of judgment. Freud’s “das Ich” is the organization ofmental events according to the reality principle, namely an organizationof mental events that plays a role, mutatis mutandis, very similar to that ofKant’s transcendental unity of apperception.

3.2 Discursive and pre-discursive mental activity

We saw that for Kant, the unity of consciousness that finds its discursiveexpression in concepts and judgments presupposes a pre-discursive activ-ity of combination or synthesis. The pre-discursive modes of combina-tion of representations depend on the very same acts of the mind thateventually lead to the reflection of representations under concepts, ac-cording to forms of judgments and inferences.22 Similarly for Freud,the ego, governed by the reality principle, includes not only discursive

21 Strachey translates Besetzung by cathexis. Besetzung is a common German term,which cathexis obviously is not in English. I am translating Besetzung by “invest-ment”, taking the term in its quasi military sense: psychic energy “invests” somerepresentations, settles in them, and rejects others as unsuitable (unpleasurable)places to settle in or to invest. Throughout this passage I have significantly alteredStrachey’s translation.

22 Cf. KrV, A 79/B 104–105: “The same function that gives unity to the differentrepresentations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of differentrepresentations in an intuition (…). The same understanding, therefore, and in-deed by means of the very same actions through which it brings the logical formsof a judgment into concepts by means of the analytical unity, also brings a tran-scendental content into its representations by means of the synthetic unity of themanifold in intuition in general (…)”. Cf. KCJ , 199–203.



representations – judgments according to logical rules, and thus presum-ably also concepts and inferences – but also perceptual images and repre-sentations of imagination which, unlike the representations belonging tothe id, are subject to rules of consistency and “impartial passing of judg-ment” according to the reality principle (SE 19: 21; GW 13: 248).

3.3 Conscious/discursive, pre-conscious/imaginative

We saw that the pre-discursive “binding” or “synthesizing” activity thatgoes on in the mind is, according to Kant, the work of imagination,that “blind though indispensable faculty of the soul” of which “we areseldom even conscious”. I noted that one should distinguish Kant’s state-ment that we are “seldom even conscious” of the workings of the imag-ination, and his statement that imagination is “blind”. I suggested thatthe first primarily means that we rarely have phenomenal consciousnessof the workings of our imagination, the second means that imaginationmay work without the guidance of concepts and be, in this sense, “blind”,just as intuitions, according to Kant, albeit representations “with con-sciousness”, are “blind” if they are not subsumed under concepts.23 Ialso noted that there is nevertheless a connection between the “blind”character of imagination or intuitions, and the lack of consciousness ofthem. Synthesizing according to a concept (as when we draw a line ora circle) may be one way we are conscious of the activity of synthesizing.And in general, it is true for Kant that we are conscious of the mentalactivities that have gone into our cognitive achievements by being con-scious of their results : these achievements themselves – imagining a line,knowing that this object is a tree, knowing that the proof is valid, andso on.

We find similar distinctions in Freud’s account of the representationalcontents of the ego. On the one hand, the conscious character of percep-tions, sensations, feelings or even some thought processes, is a qualitativefeature they may have or lose (SE 19: 13–14, 21–22; GW 13: 240,249). But on the other hand, thoughts that may be, in themselves, uncon-

23 The distinction between a representation’s being conscious by virtue of beingqualitatively or phenomenally present – there is something it is like to have it– and its being conscious by virtue of being conceptualized could be comparedto Ned Block’s distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness : seeBlock, “Concepts of Consciousness”, op. cit.



scious – either by virtue of being repressed (the unconscious properlyspeaking), or just by virtue of not having, by themselves, the “qualitative”feature of consciousness (what Freud calls the “pre-conscious”) – may be-come conscious by being associated with words. Words, literally, give aqualitative presence to the thought processes that without them wouldlack such access to consciousness (SE 19: 20–22; GW 248). Andthat’s how representations and thought processes also become taken upin the ego, governed by the reality principle and “impartial passing ofjudgment”. Admittedly, there is an important difference between Freud’stalk of representations’ access to consciousness via their association withwords and Kant’s talk of representations’ moving from “blind” to“clear” via their subsumtion under concepts. But access to words is pre-cisely, for Freud, the way a representation enters the realm of “reasonand level-headedness” (SE 19, 25), “Vernunft und Besonnenheit” (GW13, 253), namely reflective thinking, which appeals to concepts.

3.4 ‘I’ and the body

As we saw, Kant indexes the transcendental unity of apperception to one’sown body, represented as an object like any other in the world, albeit anobject with respect to which or in connection with which the location inspace and time of all other objects can alone be represented. This finds itscounterpart in the privileged role Freud assigns, in the organization ofmental processes that constitutes the ego, to the representation of one’sown body. Recall his formulation: “the ego is essentially a bodily ego”.So here again there is a direct parallel between Kant’s view and Freud’sview.

But in virtue of what has been said about the id, das Es, there is an-other aspect to the presence of the body in Freud’s view. As an entity ca-pable of representations, the individual is endowed not only with the sys-tem of representations Freud calls ego, but more primitively and funda-mentally, she is endowed with an id. Now insofar as the system of ourrepresentations is id (Es) rather than ego, we are – following a formula-tion of the German psychiatrist Groddeck which Freud was fond of citing– “… lived by unknown, uncontrollable forces” (SE 19: 23; GW 13:251). These forces, as belonging to the id, are the representational coun-terparts of physiological forces characteristic of the body. This is not abody we take to be “our own” in the sense of being that “projection ofa surface” which plays a prominent role in the system of representations



called the ego, das Ich. Rather, it is a body that owns us: a body that in-sofar as it is represented by the id rather than the ego, keeps us, namelykeeps the thin surface of the id that is the ego, under the spell of its con-flicting demands. Is there a counterpart, in Kant, for this overbearingpresence of the body? We may find something in the vicinity of it inthe conflicted nature of the moral “I”. But this too will have to be con-sidered in another essay. There is nothing like it in Kant’s account of “I”in “I think”.

Concluding Remarks

I submit, then, that Freud’s “Ich” offers resources for interpreting Kant’s“Ich” (“I” in “I think”) in terms of what McDowell has called a “natural-ism of second nature”.24 Kant claimed that “I” in the proposition “Ithink,” is used to express, endorse and promote the unity of a processof thinking geared toward objective representation. Freud’s explanatoryaccount of the emergence of the particular organization of mental eventshe calls “Ich”, governed by the reality principle, offers a causal-develop-mental story of how the capacity to think in the first person comes tobe, and against what odds it is constantly regained. Freud’s account is anaturalization of Kant’s transcendental unity of consciousness becauseFreud’s concept “Ich” refers to an organization of mental processes occur-ring in an empirically determinate person. There is no need to suppose anunknown and unknowable transcendental subject to account for that or-ganization. But Freud’s account is a naturalization where “nature” in-cludes “second nature” because the person’s ego is the result of a develop-mental process that occurs in a social context, in the course of which eachperson acquires her unique capacity for cognition and action: a normativecapacity that includes the capacity to acknowledge error and failure, totake responsibility for them and eventually to correct them.

A full account of this developmental process, especially in its socialaspect, calls for much more than what I have talked about here. It callsfor an account of that structure of mental life Freud calls sometimes“super-ego”, sometimes “ego-ideal”. If we follow Freud’s developmentalstory, just as our concept “I” in “I think” depends on the mental structureFreud calls “Ich”, so our concept “I” in “I ought to” depends on the men-

24 McDowell, John: Mind And World. With a New Introduction by the Author. Cam-bridge (Mass.) and London 1998.



tal structure Freud calls “ego-ideal” and “super-ego”. Here Freud’s devel-opmental account puts him in a more polemical relation to Kant’s moral“I ought to” than he is to Kant’s “I think”. The ego of morality, for Freud,namely the super-ego and ego-ideal, is identification driven, emotiondriven, and for that reason, in large part illusion driven. As such, it isprone to neurosis: the irrational repetition of early scenarios of loveand loss, and the retreat from reality. The remedy to the threat of neurosisis analytical therapy, whose success depends on progress in self-knowl-edge, including knowledge of oneself in the determination of one’sgoals driven by the reality principle – and thus the development of theego of cognition, as I have tried to sketch it out in this paper. In otherwords, in matters of morality, Freud’s ambition is to substitute forKant’s mix of Enlightenment ideals and pietism the empathetic and ob-jective attitude of the clinical psychologist’s mind. If we try to think ofthis contrast in light of the theme of the present Congress, we wouldhave to say: where Kant calls upon philosophy, in its “cosmic concept”,to determine “the relation of all human knowledge to the highest endsof human reason”, Freud asks us, rather, to reflect on the complex naturaland social process by which the very idea of “highest ends” is generated inour minds as both a conquest of “Ich” over “Es”, of rationality over com-pulsion; and as the threat of a neurotic obsession with an unreachableideal.



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