As a scientist, Freud’s aim was to identify the causes of mental illness and, more broadly, the causal processes underlying all mental phenomena. The evidence he gathered came primarily from what his patients told him, but also from his own experiences and from myth and literature. This is not the sort of material from which causal theories are usually constructed. It relates much more obviously to our normal reasons-based explanations of human action. As Freud himself notes, his case studies often have a literary character. Like the writings of the great novelists, they seem to be exploring the intricacies and the contradictions of the human heart. In philosophical terms (and perhaps somewhat surprisingly), what seems to be at issue are the reasons for human action rather than its causes.
But aren’t reasons and causes the same? After all, when we speak about human action, we often switch between the two terminologies. We may ask for the reason John got angry or we may ask what caused him to get cross. The point, however, is that we do different things in developing a causal explanation and in trying to understand the reason for someone’s action. If we want to know what caused a lock to jam, we investigate the lock’s mechanism and see what might have blocked it. If we want to know why a gas tank exploded, we investigate the sequence of events leading up to the explosion and develop a hypothesis, which we can (if necessary) test by recreating the situation (or some element of it). This is not what we do when we want to understand why someone did something. If we want to know why John got cross, we ask him or we talk to people who know him well or we put ourselves in his situation and imagine what he might have felt. What John says will play a central role in our attempt to understand him – even if we do not accept everything he says. There is nothing similar in our investigations of causes. If the gas tank could talk and said it felt bored before the explosion and relieved after it, this would be irrelevant to our causal investigation. Furthermore, the explanations we arrive at after these different kinds of investigation have different values. When I understand the reasons why John got angry, this helps me make sense of his action and may make me feel closer (or less close) to him as a human being. When I understand what caused a gas tank to explode, this does not make sense of the explosion nor does it leave me reflecting on the similarities or dissimilarities between the way the gas tank behaves and how I behave. I am better able to predict what might happen with gas tanks, but I do not feel closer or less close to them.
In relation to human action, we often talk about people’s motives. But if we conclude that someone’s action was driven by greed (or by ambition or by envy), we are not identifying the dominant causal factor. We do not establish someone’s motives independently of their actions, for example, determining the level of someone’s greediness and then detecting a sudden increase in that level just before they grab the last slice of pizza. Rather in saying that their motive was greed, we provide a way of understanding their action. We understand (and respond to) the action of someone who took a slice of pizza because they were hungry very differently from the action of someone who took the slice because they imagined eating it would give them pleasure even though they were already full. Similarly, we would understand the action differently if we thought the person took the slice of pizza because they didn’t like the person sitting next to them and had noticed that they wanted to eat it. The account we offer characterises the action in a very specific way, attributing a meaning to it and relating it to other ways that the individual (and people in general) behave. Doesn’t this mean that this approach does not provide the real explanation of why something occurred? No, this is precisely what we treat as an explanation of human action because we treat people as agents, who act for reasons rather than as machines whose actions are to be explained in causal terms. After reading a biography of Clement Atlee, we may understand why he made the mistake of trying to appease Hitler, and this provides us with a perfectly good explanation of his actions. We do not have to say that the real explanation must lie in the neurological activity that took place in his brain or that we won’t really understand his actions until and unless we develop a set of psychological laws that enable us to predict every decision that people make.
But shouldn’t we accept that human beings are mechanisms even if highly complex ones and recognise that our different approach to understanding human action arises from the fact that we ourselves are those mechanisms and so can jump to the right explanations without having to do the work that we usually do when developing causal explanations? Aren’t reasons just causes “seen from the inside”? But the central feature of our use of the word “mechanism” is to distinguish mechanical things from living entities – human or otherwise – and there is no such thing as seeing causes from the inside. However, it is not that we never explain human behaviour in causal terms. Experimental psychology has established patterns in human behaviour that provide the basis for causal explanations (e.g. there is evidence that if you give someone a starting point when they are trying to make an estimate, then a high starting point will tend to cause them to produce higher estimates than a low starting point). There are also countless causal explanations linking changes in the body to changes in how people act (e.g. a urine tract infection may cause an older person to become confused or delirious). So, there certainly can be causal explanations of human action, but these causal explanations are established “from the outside” like all other causal explanations.
In fact, it is not just in our scientific endeavours that we take a causal approach to human activity. In everyday life, we often explain aspects of people’s behaviour in terms of causes rather than reasons. If my reserved colleague John becomes loud and aggressive at a social event, I may see his uncharacteristic behaviour as caused by the amount of alcohol he has drunk. Similarly, if Jill is being unusually snappy and impatient, I may urge myself to remember that she has worked without a break for six hours and that the failure of the office air conditioning system is having an impact on all of us. So, it is not that we never explain human behaviour in causal terms. We do, but we apply such explanations in specific circumstances. Our normal relationship to other people involves seeing them as agents and trying to understand the reasons for their actions. We do recognise limits to human agency, and in some contexts we look for the causes of human action rather than the reasons for it. It is up to us to decide how much of human action we treat as caused (and what types of causal explanations we use in relation to human action), but it is confused to suggest that causal explanations are the only form of real explanation, and it is crazy not to recognise that treating all human action as caused would involve a radical change in our relationship to each other and to ourselves (indeed, it is not clear what it would really be like to treat all human action as caused).
So, where does that leave Freud’s explanations? Psychoanalysis focuses on aspects of our thoughts, feelings and actions that we are not aware of and, since our normal approach gives a central role to the individual’s own account of these things, this suggests that we must be talking about causes rather than reasons. As we noted earlier, Freud certainly saw himself as a scientist investigating causes. He presented the mind as a self-regulating homeostatic process that maintains its equilibrium by ridding itself of excess excitations, and he wrote about the libido as if it were a measurable form of energy whose transformations we could measure and track. But the causal aspects of Freud’s work are relatively superficial – at best they act as metaphors to generate new ways of thinking about the mind. They are certainly not used to build causal theories based on objectively measurable forces and entities and generating specific testable hypotheses.
The fact that Freud did not develop genuine causal theories has led to repeated attacks on him as a pseudo-scientist with the implication that his ideas should be rejected as complete nonsense. This makes it hard to understand the massive (positive and negative) reception that his ideas received and ignores the fact that Freudian explanations permeate our lives and culture. Don’t most people nowadays accept that slips of the tongue and “accidental” actions often have meaning? Don’t we all accept that in our relationships with friends and loved ones there will sometimes be other emotions (envy, resentment, irritation etc) that we are not aware of (or try not to be aware of) but which bubble up to the surface and are reflected in what we say and do? Rather than dismissing Freud, we should recognise that his achievement was not about identifying new causes, but about enriching our language-game of reasons. In fact, his approach builds on the central aspects of our normal language-game, which involves paying careful attention to what the individual says, how they say it and the relationship between what they say and what they do. By doing this with a special focus on signs of potential conflicts within the individual, Freud was able to explore aspects of human agency that writers before him had talked about but which had previously not been given such a central role. The suggestion that we have unconscious as well as conscious reasons for action was a revolutionary one, but we misunderstand its significance if we accept Freud’s understanding of himself as a scientist investigating the causes of human action.
Wittgenstein and Freud 
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