ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a neuropsychoanalytic approach to the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. The starting point is Sigmund Freud’s assertion that, although cognition is mostly unconscious, affect is intrinsically conscious. A feeling wouldn’t be a feeling if you didn’t feel it. This crucial difference between cognition and affect casts new light on David Chalmers’s claim that consciousness cannot be explained mechanistically. If affect (unlike cognition) is indeed intrinsically conscious, then surely its mechanism must account for how and why it feels like something?
