ABSTRACT
The word "ambivalence" was popularized in connection with psychoanalytic theories of motivation involving unconscious states that cannot bear scrutiny if only because they conflict with the agent's conscious states. But here I want to discuss some cases of conscious emotional conflict in defense of the rationality of ambivalence. For the word does not imply irrationality-particularly if rationality in the sense captured by the notion of appropriateness is in question, though ambivalence may also be seen as adaptive in some cases, even if we consider only the promotion of rational self-interest. The word "ambivalence" covers various sorts of two-directional motivating factors, including many I shall not be dealing with here. We sometimes use it just as an expression for any kind of indecision: ''I'm ambivalent about so-and-so's worth as a writer," say. It may function, that is, as a substitute for "of two minds," without commitment as to whether or not the conflict is between states of mind of the same sort or active at the same time, though it is clear that both are taken as states of consciousness and as active at some time or other. I shall restrict attention here, though, to cases of conflict between two emotions, analyzed as comfort or discomfort directed towards evaluative propositions. These will be assumed to be occurrent emotions, even at times when their evaluative components are not actually present to consciousness. They need not therefore be "unconscious" in the sense that implies inaccessibility; but in any case, my treatment of unconscious emotions in Chapter 2 should allow for this possibility as well.
