Ryle's concept of mind compared to Descartes and Freud

Ryle (in Chapter One of the Concept of Mind) considers what he calls the Official Doctrine concerning the relation of the mind to the body. Explain the main components of this doctrine as conceived by Ryle. How, according to Ryle, was Descartes driven to propound such a doctrine in the face of the new mathematical physics of his day?

Ryle calls people's common belief in separation of mind and body a 'category error'. People are apt to talk about feelings 'inside me' or pointing to inside as self, or the way I look outside' etc. There are even various psychological theories ( prominently psychotherapeutic modes) that articulate the same sentiments. Most common of all of these is Freud's psychoanalysis that initiated psycho-dynamics, that talks about abstract 'inner' mechanisms such as the ego that, begin disturbed, cause symptoms to occur to the external' part. This is popularly known as the 'unconscious' and this concept of 'unconscious has spread to other areas too where people believe that humans act in ways that they are not always aware of and that reasons for these actions are 'buried inside them'.

Ryle compares such demarcation of body into body and mind to someone visiting a university, seeing all the different buildings and departments and querying where the university is, unable to realize that the 'university' refers to the while. Similarly, too, a child who sees a division move past him split into their separate squadrons, batteries, battalions etc., and then asks when the 'division' will appear fails to realize that the spectacle that she has been seeing is the division.

Ryle dubs this belief of self within a body "the ghost in the machine." According to him, all is reducible to physical components, namely the soul and/or mind is the brain and all can be conceptualized via neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, and so forth.

The fact that Descartes committed a 'dualism error was due to the times that he lived in. True that Descartes was a scientist, and as such could not fail but be influenced by Galileo's demonstration of the world working on mechanist motions. The only thing was that Descartes being religious too, theorized that people worker either on a supra-machinist frame and/or that part of them worked according to machinist variables (namely the bodily / physical parts) and others functioned according to spiritual elements.

Descartes' belief was actually common in his time and had roots in the Christian religion that epitomized the history of the West.

n his chapter on Symbolism, Freud in ILP makes a number of bold claims about how various items in dreams may be interpreted. For instance, Freud tells us that a king and queen represents one's parents; that small animals and vermin represent one's brothers and sisters; that female genitals are represented by receptacles of various kinds including jewel-boxes, and that gliding, sliding and pulling off a branch all represent masturbation. Strikingly, Freud gives us no evidence for such claims. Might it be possible to support these claims with evidence? If so, please offer a conjecture as to what sort of evidence might be sought in support of these claims. If not, please explain how we should respond to Freud's interpretive claims if they cannot be supported with evidence.

It seems to me extremely difficult if not impossible to support these claims with evidence. One way to do so may be by taking nay number of these claims e.g that jewel boxes resemble female genitals and by studying a certain population -- large enough so that it be reliable -- using fMRI. The implicit association test could be used where the subjects are shown jewelery boxes and then shown a range of pictures, one of which is female genitals. Hooked up to fMRI imaging, neural imagery could indicate whether the same neural response is configured between that image and the other, and whether this response differs to response generated when seeing other images. Nonetheless, there are various problems with this study, not least being that we can never be sure that association if it occurs indicates linkage or whether brain reaction may actually be unrelated and whether response to both images are interdependent.