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 BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Archimedes, or the Future of Physics (1927)

Critique of Physics (1931)
The Next Development in Man (1944)
Everyman Looks Forward (1946)
The Unitary Principle in Physics and Biology (1949)
Aspects of Form (edited) (1951)
Accent on Form (1954)
The Unconscious before Freud (1960)
The Atomic Problem (1961)
R. J. Boscovich (1711-1787): Studies of His Life and Work (edited) (1961)
Essay on Atomism: Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Focus and Diversions (1963)
Internal Factors in Evolution (1965)
Kepler’s Six-Cornered Snowflake (edited) (1966)
Hierarchical Structures (edited Whyte, Wilson, Wilson) (1969)
The Universe of Experience (1974)
Vistas (forthcoming)
The Next Development in Man (third revised edition forthcoming)
The Unconscious
before Freud

Lancelot Law Whyte

Introduced by Arthur Koestler

Julian Friedmann Publishers London

This edition of The Unconscious Before Freud first published in 1979

Julian Friedmann Publishers Ltd, 4 Perrins Lane, London, NW3 1QY

Text © E. Whyte 1978

Introduction © A. Koestler 1978

All rights reserved

ISBN 0-904014-48-7 paperback

0-904014-41-x casebound

Introduction typeset by T & R Filmsetters Ltd.

Printed and Bound by A. Wheaton & Co, Ltd, Exeter, England
Introduction
by Arthur Koestler

‘I do not know of any more important book by a living writer,’

wrote Dame Edith Sitwell in her Foreword to the first edition of
The Unconscious Before Freud: ‘It is enthralling for a poet...’ Ina
more restrained voice the British Journal of Psychology joined in the
praise: “His [Whyte’s] book should serve to wake at least some
psychologists from their dogmatic slumbering, and give them a
larger view of the subject matter of psychology.’ It does not
happen often that a book receives such joint accolades, from a
poet of fastidious tastes and from a learned scientific journal.
One of the lasting merits of Whyte’s book is its thorough
refutation of the popular belief that the concept of the
unconscious mind was, like Relativity or Quantum Physics, an
invention of the twentieth century. The ‘Freudian Unconscious’,
as it came to be eponymously known, acquired a clinical odour to
which, later on, Jung added a mystical halo. The ‘Id’ could be
regarded as a kind of Pandora’s box, inhabited by demons of
 THE UNCONSCIOUS BEFORE FREUD

various breeds, while the sceptical behaviourists asserted that it

was empty.
However, the concept of the unconscious mind was no more
invented by Freud than evolution was invented by Darwin, and it
has an equally distinguished ancestry which can be traced back to
antiquity. Whyte — very wisely, I think — refrains from burdening
his readers with obscure quotations from the Upanishads or
ancient Egypt, and starts his history of the unconscious with the
dawn of Christian Europe, when the dominant influence on
philosophy were the Neoplatonists, foremost among them
Plotinus, who apparently took it for granted that ‘feelings can be
present without our being aware of them’, and that ‘the absence
of conscious perception is no proof of the absence of “mental
activity”.’ He also produced a striking metaphor: there is a
‘mirror’ in the mind which, when correctly aimed, reflects the
processes going on inside that mind, and when displaced or
broken fails to do so — yet the processes continue all the same,
and ‘thus thought is present without an inner image of itself’.
St Augustine, too, marvelled at man’s immense store of
unconscious memories and its ‘limitless depth’. In fact, the
knowledge of unconscious mentation had always been there — as
Whyte shows with an abundance of quotations from theologians
like St Thomas Aquinas, mystics like Jacob Boehme or St John of
the Cross, physicians like Paracelsus, astronomers like Kepler,
writers and poets as far apart as Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare
and Montaigne. Yet this shared, fundamental insight into the
working of the human mind was lost under the impact of the
scientific revolution, and more particularly of its most influential
philosopher, René Descartes.
As modern cosmology started with the Newtonian revolution,
so modern philosophy starts with what one might call the
Cartesian catastrophe. The catastrophe consisted not so much in
the splitting up of the world into the realms of matter and mind
(more sophisticated versions of dualism are still arguable today),
INTRODUCTION

but in the identification of ‘mind’ with conscious thinking. The result of

this fallacious identification was the shallow rationalism of l’esprit
.Cartesten, and an impoverishment of psychology which it took
three centuries to remedy even in part. But the Cartesian
catastrophe had a further unexpected consequence, which
Whyte describes in a key passage of this book (italics in the
original):

‘Prior to Descartes and his sharp definition of the dualism

there was no cause to contemplate the possible existence of
unconscious mentality as part of a separate realm of mind.
Many religious and speculative thinkers had taken for granted
factors lying outside but influencing immediate awareness... .
Until an attempt had been made (with apparent success) to
choose awareness as the defining characteristic of an indepen-
dent mode of being called mind, there was no occasion to
invent the idea of unconscious mind as a provisional correction
of that choice. It is only after Descartes that we find, first the
idea and then the term, “unconscious mind” entering
European thought.’

From the end of the seventeenth century onward, the idea

gradually spread among the pioneers who came to realise that ‘if
there are two realms, physical and mental, awareness cannot be
taken as the criterion of mentality (because) the springs of human
nature lie in the unconscious, as the realm which links the
moments of human awareness with the background of organic
processes within which they emerge.’
In other words, since Cartesian philosophy had no room for it,
the concept of the unconscious had to be re-invented. Before
Descartes it had been taken for granted; after its resurrection it
became an object of intensive study. The leading figures in this
new field were mostly to be found in England and Germany. As
early as 1678 the English Platonist John Norris declared boldly:
 THE UNCONSCIOUS BEFORE FREUD

‘We may have ideas of which we are not conscious’, and two
centuries later, at the end of a chain of eminent scholars, Henry
Maudsley wrote in his classic Phystology and Pathology of the Mind:
‘The most important part of mental action, the essential process
on which thinking depends, is unconscious mental activity.’ In
Germany there was an equally distinguished line of writers, from
Goethe to Nietzsche, and of scholars, from Leibnitz to Fechner, a
pioneer of experimental psychology, who coined the famous
metaphor of the mind as an iceberg, with only a fraction of it
above the surface of consciousness, moved by the winds of
awareness, but mostly by hidden under-water currents. At about
the same time (1868) Erich von Hartmann published his
Philosophy of the Unconscious which became a bestseller. Whyte
lists six philosophical works published within ten years after von
Hartmann’s, which carry the word ‘unconscious’ in their titles.
He concludes (italics in the original):

‘The general conception of unconscious mental process was

conceivable (in post-Cartesian Europe) around 1700, topical
around 1800, and fashionable around 1870-1880... It cannot
be disputed that by 1870-1880 the general conception of the
unconscious mind was a European commonplace and that
many special applications of this general idea had been
vigorously discussed for several decades.’ .

Whyte’s intent was not to belittle the greatness and originality

of Freud — that would have been as silly as trying to run down
Newton because he had ‘stood on the shoulders of giants’. But
while Newton was aware ofthis —the metaphor is his own— Freud,
curiously, was not. He never realised how ancient and respectable
the idea was on which he built his edifice.
* * *

The Unconscious Before Freud is a remarkable contribution to that

much neglected branch ofhistoriography, the History of Ideas. It
INTRODUCTION
is a short book, but I believe that it will take its place among such
classics as Herbert Butterfield’s The Origins of Modern Science and
Lovejoy’s The Great Chain ofBeing.
Lance Whyte started his career — or intellectual Odyssey — as a
physicist working under Rutherford in Cambridge. His two
earliest books — Archimedes, or the Future of Physics and Critique of
Physics — created a stir because they attacked the philosophical
assumptions underlying modern science. From physics he turned
to biology and published a series of unorthodox but scholarly and
well-documented books which turned him into a minor cult-
figure among scientists discontented with the prevailing reduc-
tionist Zeitgeist. In spite of his heretical views, he was elected
Chairman of the Philosophy of Science group of the British
Society for the History of Science and held office from 1953 to
1955; he also lectured at various American universities and was a
Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study at Stanford and other
“Think Tanks’. He possessed great charm, equalled only by his
insatiable intellectual appetite. I cannot think of a more fitting
epitaph than Professor Whitrow’s concuding lines in his obituary
notice for Whyte in the British Journal for the Philosophy ofScience:
‘Although it is too soon to say which of Lancelot Whyte’s many
ideas will bear fruit, the catholicity of his interests and the
unorthodoxy of his views, coupled with his infectious enthusiasm,
acted as an intellectual stimulus. He was a fascinating talker and
had an unrivalled gift for bringing together people with similar
interests who, but for him, would probably never have met. Many
of us owe him a great debt for encouraging us to look at old
problems in a new way.’

London, June 1978

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Foreword
In this “‘siécle 4 mains” there are yet adventurers
who seek to conquer the universe, though the growth of the
spirit from darkness is sometimes forgotten.
To read any work by Mr. Whyte, one of the most important
thinkers and writers of our time, is an adventure comparable
to those of Christopher Columbus and of Major Gagarin. These
works seek to conquer the universe—are voyages of discovery
but they deal also with the growth of the spirit.
e a *

The book of which I write is so vitalizing that after the

long period of spiritual and mental darkness which comes to
the artist after the completion of a work, I felt like a dying
person when placed in an oxygen tent.
It is enthralling for a poet-—(Mr. Whyte’s works are amongst
the most potent influences in this poet’s life as an artist)—
enthralling because it takes us through “the twilight realms
of consciousness’”’ which are the antecedents of ‘‘the morning
redness’ —the beginning of inspiration:
Vv
vi FoREWORD
“When the flash is caught in the fountain of the heart”
wrote Jacob Boehme, “then the Holy Ghost riseth up in the
seven qualifying or fountain spirits into the brain, like the day-
break, dawning of the day, or morning redness.”
But a fruitful darkness comes before this experience. That
fruitful night, and that morning redness we find in this book.
I do not know of any more important book by a living writer.
It is indeed a history of the development of Man.
EpitH SITWELL
Preface

The origins of this work lie back in the years

after the first World War, when psychoanalysis was a novelty
and I innocently imagined that Freud had just discovered the
unconscious mind. None of my teachers had explained to me
that major achievements are usually the culmination of a
cultural process extending over centuries.
So when I found that Nietzsche had expressed several of
the insights of Freud’s doctrine twenty or more years before
him, I was greatly excited and could not understand why
neither Freud nor his interpreters had mentioned this signifi-
cant fact. For such anticipations showed that the unconscious
mind was not just an invention of Freud’s, but a step in the
discovery of objective truth, a necessary way of interpreting
the facts found independently by very different minds: an
intuitive philosopher and a clinical scientist.
This excitement has survived more than thirty years and
another World War, though my notes on those whom I then
regarded as Freud’s predecessors have frequently been lost.
Vil
Vili PREFACE

But my perspective has changed. It is now the state of Euro-

pean thought during the two hundred years before Freud that
interests me. Moreover the early thinkers are not “predeces-
sors” who “anticipated” Freud. They, and Freud, and count-
less others are participants in a tradition which is being slowly
enriched. They did not ‘lead to Freud,” for some of them
knew much that Freud, rightly for his own purposes, preferred
not to emphasize. Hence one way of improving current ideas
is to recall what was thought and said in earlier times. The
aim is not to project our ideas into the past, or to dazzle our-
selves with the prescience of early thinkers as wise as we are,
but to recognize where they knew more.
Thus what began as an interest in the “history of the idea
of the unconscious before Freud” has become a study in the
development of human awareness and of ideas: how the Euro-
pean individual first became intensely aware of his own faculty
of consciousness, and then balanced this by also becoming
aware by inference of much in his own mental processes of
which he is not directly conscious. Freud is not final; he is
the most influential figure in a succession of thinkers, all
recognizing aspects of the truth. And Freud himself may be
the anticipator of a more balanced doctrine that still lies
out of sight.
The continuity of the tradition of human thought and the
productive imagination of individuals are inseparable features
of a single story. The individuals and the tradition mold each
other. Thus Freud’s greatness implies that he can only be
adequately interpreted against several centuries of European
thought.
When Volume I of Ernest Jones’s biography of Freud ap-
peared in 1953, and I found that he explained Freud’s theory
of the mind, not in the context of the development of Euro-
pean thought but in terms of academic and clinical psychology
over the preceding fifty years, I was shocked into action. As
PREFACE ix
a start I gave a brief survey of “the unconscious before
Freud” on the Third Programme of the B.B.C., calling atten-
tion to the ideas of Schelling, Carus, Schopenhauer, von Hart-
mann, and others.
At first I hesitated to attempt a more extensive study, re-
garding this as a task for a professional psychologist, philos-
opher, or historian. Then gradually, as the result of the re-
sponse of audiences in Great Britain and the United States, I
came to realize that my interest in the matter was partly due
to a conviction, until then barely conscious, that historical
understanding can throw light on current problems. Thus a
study of the idea of the unconscious over the two hundred
years before Freud can, I believe, throw some light on the
limitations of contemporary ideas. This may be called thera-
peutic history: history revealing where current ideas are par-
tial, the expression of transitory preoccupations and inhibi-
tions. One can be fascinated by the past for its own sake, and
at the same time allow history to enlighten one. For past
thinkers, in their different contexts, knew much that we have
either forgotten or have not yet learned to express in mid-
twentieth-century language. Thus I came to feel that here
was a task appropriate to my situation and interests.
This book may perhaps be regarded as a contribution
toward the general education of the second half century, with
the twofold aim of using the historical approach to clarify and
unify foundations, and of warning the young from accepting
any one doctrine as absolute. The specialization of contem-
porary thought can be remedied by remembering our roots.
The hurried reader may welcome a summary of my main
assumptions and conclusions:
1. Ideas often come suddenly to individuals, but they usu-
ally have a long history.
2. There is seldom a monopoly in great ideas. The general
conception of unconscious mental processes, in a different
x PREFACE

context, is implicit in many ancient traditions. The develop-

ment of the idea in Europe—prior to the relatively precise
theories of our time—occupied some two centuries, say 1680-—
1880, and was the work of many countries and schools of
thought. The idea was forced on them as a response to facts;
it was necessary to correct an overemphasis, c. 1600-1700, on
the consciousness of the individual.
3. Criticism is the due of genius. Freud’s greatness and
lasting influence are here taken for granted. But his originality
was in some respects less than he and others have imagined.
Every generation exaggerates the achievements of the heroes
it has created. The worthy followers of great men are those
who seek to lessen any damage they may have done by show-
ing where their ideas were inadequate or mistaken. In the
case of Freud this task may take another half century.
4. For Freud to achieve what he did between 1895 and
1920 two conditions were necessary: that a long preparation
should already have taken place and that he should himself
be largely unaware of it, so that while unconsciously influ-
enced by it he was free to make his own inferences from clin-
ical observations.
5. The antithesis conscious /unconscious probably does not
hold the clue to the further advance of psychological theory.
It requires modification or reinterpretation in terms of more
comprehensive and precise ideas. Some suggestions are made
regarding these.
6. Reason has not yet learned what its precise limitations
are, and none of the various sciences understands its own
foundations. The application of supposedly scientific ideas
and methods to the interpretation (let alone the control!) of
human situations calls for the greatest caution. For example,
this entire book should be set in giant quotation marks im-
plying: “These concepts and assertions are all partial, being
PREFACE Xi

borrowed from a tradition known to be inadequate, but they

are the best I can do now.”
I wish to thank the countless friends, too numerous to cite,
who have helped with suggestions, making Chapters V-VIII
a collective product. Also my wife, Eve, for her invaluable
aid. Finally, the work would have been more difficult with-
out the facilities of the Widener Library at Harvard, which
I enjoyed while holding a Graham Foundation Fellowship
(1958/59).
London, March 1960 i. LW.

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Contents

Introduction by Arthur Koestler

Foreword by Edith Sitwell v
Preface vii

I. The History of Ideas 3

II. Conscious and Unconscious 17

III. The Rise of European Self-Awareness 31

qv: The Discovery of the Unconscious 59

V. The Discoverers: Before 1730 77

VI The Discoverers: 1730-1800 107

VII. The Discoverers: 1800-1850 131

VIII. The Discoverers: 1850-1880 153

1X: Lhe Prospect) .177

Three Historical Charts 191

Notes 199
References 201
Bibliography 205
Name Index 209
Subject Index 215
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 No one can take from us the joy of
the first becoming aware of something, the
so-called discovery. But if we also demand
the honor, it can be utterly spoiled for us,
for we are usually not the first.

-What does discovery mean, and who

can say that he has discovered this or that?
After all it’s pure idiocy to brag about
priority; for tt’s simply unconscious conceit,
not to admit frankly that one is a plagtarist.

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The History
of Ideas

HUMAN UNDERSTANDING is new. Until recent

times in the history of this planet, say a hundred thousand
years ago or less, there was no talking, no writing, and no
thinking, in a human sense. Elaborate methods of communi-
cation, perhaps a human version of the dance language of the
bees, must already have existed, but there was no articulated
speech, no recording of experience in art or script, no stabili-
zation of thought in unit ideas. Man was not yet aware of
anything but transitory sensations, presumably not even of
himself. His unconscious brain-mind did all the work. Every-
thing man did was without understanding. Yet a process had
begun that was to lead to Plato, Newton, Beethoven, and
Freud—guided by unconscious factors of whose existence man
was ignorant until recently, and which he still does not under-
stand.
4 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
We may call this the incomparable adventure. For dra-
matic, emotional, and intellectual interest it is unique, once™
it has seized the mind. Nothing that man can ever conceive
can transcend it, for everything that man does and thinks
arises from this challenging phenomenon: the unconscious
genesis of mental processes, the appearance of thoughts where
there were none similar a moment, and none at all a million
years, before.
We all partake in this adventure, unconsciously, every
minute of our lives. For in everything that we do, in the kitch-
en, the office, the factory, the study, or anywhere else, the
same basic factors, “physical” or “mental,” are at work that
guided the developing minds of our earliest ancestors. What
molds your thoughts and mine at this very moment likewise
molded the earliest thoughts of Homo sapiens. For there is
no reason to assume any basic genetic difference in consti-
tution or general mode of operation (affecting the capacity
for a social tradition) between your thinking organ or mine
or even Newton’s, and that of our ancestors as they developed
the art of articulated speech. As Montaigne believed, and
biology confirms: “Chaque homme porte en lui la forme
entiére de l’humatne condition.” One species, one set of
basic structures and potentialities. The incomparable adven-
ture is the story, continuing in each of us now, of the realiza-
tion step by step of some of those potentialities, through the
interaction of imaginative individuals molding new thoughts
and a conservative tradition preserving what appears valuable.
If we try for a brief moment to hold in our restricted
minds, in our “narrow consciousness,” the amplitude of this
tremendous adventure of a once unthinking species, aware
only of intense transitory sensations, becoming what we are
today and knowing what we do, we may be inclined to con-
sider it miraculous or incredible. How can the experience of
truth, or beauty, or goodness, arise in a universe that had
Tue History oF IpEAs 5
not contained it before? How can rational understanding
come into existence and learn to develop itself into logic,
philosophy, and science? How can an unconscious soil produce
the delights and agonies of human life as we know it?
Yet these things may not remain incredible, if we approach
them rightly. The strangeness of this story is partly the result
of emotional prejudice and intellectual error, and of the lan-
guage we use. Thus we still tend to assume that great achieve-
ments are possible only by conscious selection of an aim and
conscious attention to the means of accomplishing it. Cer-
tainly that assumption makes the human achievement in-
credible. But in mid-twentieth century that mistake is
unnecessary; many knew better all the time, as we shall see.
Crystals, plants, and animals grow without any conscious
fuss, and the strangeness of our own history disappears once
we assume that the same kind of natural ordering process that
guides their growth also guided the development of man and
of his mind, and does so still. Man can order, and even com-
municate, before he understands. The history of ideas is
only in small degree a matter of the conscious choice of aims
and methods. If it had to be that, it could not have begun at
all. Ideas are not conscious inferences from experience, but
orderings of experience, achieved largely unconsciously. Con-
sciousness is of great importance, but we do not yet know
where or why.
However, we are not here concerned with the precise status
of “conscious” and “unconscious” factors in the story—which
is not understood—but with a single process: the development
of the human brain-mind as an organ for ordering the records
of the past into symbols and using them to anticipate the
future in a manner serving the development either of the
individual or of the species. And in certain respects the most
powerful symbols are ideas representing particular separable
aspects of experience, often expressible as spoken and written
6 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
words. Thus the history of ideas, properly understood, is not
merely intellectual history, but is an aspect of the complete
story of man: biological, developmental, emotional, and so-
cial. Ideas and events are inseparable. Indeed the great in-
terest of ideas springs from the fact that they are restricted
units of limitless scope: at once clearly separable elements
representable in words which can be articulated in chains to
provide assertions, and at the same time aspects of experience
which spread out into the open realms of emotion and action.
“This is no paradox, for ideas are nothing more or less than
representations of the separable aspects of what is itself un-
bounded and multiply interrelated. An idea is a focus of
unrestricted relationships, just as a point defines an infinity
of lines radiating in all directions.
Unfortunately there is as yet no adequate philosophy or
science of human history, or even of the development of the
human mind. Therefore all that can be done in describing
any aspect of the history of ideas is to state the facts as known,
and to interpret them as best one can, making one’s assump-
tions explicit as far as possible. Moreover, for the sake of
definiteness in a difficult field, we shall here consider only
ideas made verbally explicit in literature, though the story
might equally be traced in the visual arts.
But ideas about the history of ideas—what sort of inbreed-
ing is that? The history of ideas, in the wider sense used here,
should be one of the most fundamental and influential
branches of scholarship and teaching, yet to what dangers it is
subject! On the one hand, overintellectualism, the undue
separation of verbal records and rational ideas from the total
history of man. On the other hand, subjectivism, the neglect
of detail and the painting of grand dramas in the colors of
one mind. Even if the balance is found between these, the
subtler difficulty remains that the historian of ideas must
watch the false as well as the true consciousness of each period,
Tue Hisrory oF IDEAS 7
the dishonest ideologies and rationalizations as well as the
unmistakable thread of truth: the molding into words of the
organic insights without which there would be no movement
toward understanding.
No realm of scholarship demands a greater sense of respon-
sibility and sensitivity to truth, relatively to the lack of agreed
criteria to guide the judgment. To be a good historian of
ideas it would seem necessary for a writer to be a good man
as well as a good thinker; he should not only be clear, pre-
cise, and logical, but generous, open, and free: himself an
adequate channel for the factors that have brought about the
development of the human mind, for they must repeat that
process in him.
Yet if the pitfalls are myriad in the history of ideas, so are
the signposts when we learn to read them. For given a genu-
ine desire for truth, for the valid order pervading complexity
which, being valid, permits advance, the study of the history
of ideas generates its own insights and teaches the necessary
precautions. This may be seen in the principle, most easily
learned from the history of ideas, and stressed by Dilthey, that
all philosophical and scientific doctrines have to be regarded
as partial visions of the truth, which we must expect to be
replaced one day by more comprehensive ones. Most concep-
tions emphasize one aspect only of the truth; conflicting
theories are often complementary; the successful doctrine
may therefore eventually have to go back to its defeated rivals
and learn from them.
This central principle of the history of ideas—that all ideas
are partial—is perhaps the most important single fact that
the human intellect has yet discovered. It requires interpre-
tation with a modicum of elasticity, for it does not deny that
some ideas may fully cover a limited realm—though even here
the main principle holds good, since no idea can be used to
define its own limitations. Thus the principle remains as the
8 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
foundation of wisdom: the mind must be modest. Even if it
does not, and probably cannot, know its own limitations, it
can be aware that they exist. No thinker need accept the onus
of perfection.
Does this principle seem obvious? Alas, it is not. One of
the dangers of our age, more damaging than ever before, is
total obsession with partial ideas. The world of pure intellect
should be more sensible, but is not. No scholar should present
his own ideas, or those of anyone else, as final. This matters
today more than ever before, because community and family
habits, which used to hold human life relatively stable
through the centuries, can no longer be relied on to do so.
The present moral vacuum will not long remain empty; no
traditional religion can claim universality; classical commu-
nism is in decline; some new quasi-religious rationalization of
the space age will take over tomorrow, unless those who be-
lieve themselves wiser start now by mocking at any total sur-
render to partial ideas, whether they be those of Marx, or
Freud, or anyone else. Let the study of human history help
to keep the way clear for the continuing advance of the intel-
lect, by making it unmistakably obvious that every intel-
lectual instrument must sooner or later prove inadequate.
The European and Western ideal of the self-aware indi-
vidual confronting destiny with his own indomitable will and
skeptical reason as the only factors on which he can rely is
perhaps the noblest aim which has yet been accepted by any
community. This conception of the self-conscious person gave
ancient ideals a new characteristically European élan and,
through its myriad expressions, has been the greatest single
influence molding thought and behavior during the last three
hundred years. Exact science is one of its many expressions.
But it has become evident that this ideal was a moral
mistake and an intellectual error, for it exaggerated the
ethical, philosophical, and scientific importance of the aware-
Tue History oF IpEAs 9
ness of the individual. And one of the main factors exposing
this inadequate ideal was the discovery of the unconscious
mind, That is why the idea of the unconscious is the supreme
revolutionary conception of the modern age: it undermines
the traditional foundations of Europe and the West, as was
recognized by Windelband? as early as 1914 when he ex-
pressed concern lest “the hypothesis of the unconscious might
destroy certain basic features of our conception of the
world.” For, in a historical sense, the idea is anti-Classical,
anti-European and anti-Enlightenment.
At least this is my interpretation. Indeed I regard the de-
velopment of contrasted conceptions of unconscious mental
processes as an important phase in the emotional and intel-
lectual history of the species. Here the West, through its
thinkers, is still leading mankind. Moreover I consider that
the time is ripe for an attempt to trace the main features of
this phase and to interpret it as a neobiological development,
a step toward the fuller exploitation of the innate hereditary
faculties of the species. During the last ten years several sur-
veys have been published of the historical background of
Freud’s ideas, from the Orient and ancient Greece through
the medieval mystics to European systematic thinkers. But
a review based on assumptions broad enough to permit an
interpretation of the whole story has not yet been attempted.
However inadequate the present study, the attempt is nec-
essary. For if my general interpretation is valid, no other
single factor is today so fraught with good or evil, with po-
tential benefit or disaster, for mankind. If the human uncon-
scious is one thing, the race is doomed anyway, even without
the bombs; if it is another, mankind may conceivably sur-
vive present threats and create for itself an unexpected ren-
aissance, not “moral” but biological and human. Further-
more without a balanced conception of the unconscious it is
hard to see how human dignity can be restored. For today
10 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
faith, if it bears any relation to the natural world, implies
faith in the unconscious. If there is a God, he must speak
there; if there is a healing power, it must operate there; if
there is a principle of ordering in the organic realm, its
most powerful manifestation must be found there. The un-
conscious mind is the expression of the organic in the in-
dividual. But Freud’s conception of it is not adequately
organic, and the conscious mind will enjoy no peace until
it can rejoice in a fuller understanding of its own unconscious
sources.
Freud’s greatness lies not in any of his particular ideas but
in the fact that he compelled the race to face the problem of
finding an adequate concept of the unconscious mind. He
showed, once and for all, that the unconscious is so powerful
that this task cannot be neglected.
If this view is correct another half century should see some
headway made. This essay is a contribution from the side of
therapeutic history, a suggestion that all conceptions of the
unconscious have so far been partial, and that the main need
is to develop more comprehensive principles covering both
the healthy and the pathological, the usual and the unusual,
aspects. But, as we shall see later, the antithesis conscious/
unconscious may not hold the clue to further advance.
This book is not a study in the history of psychology, trac-
ing how a particular psychological idea was developed as the
result of experience or observation and of the influence of
one writer upon another, with evidence and references sup-
porting each link in a chain of formulations. No definitive
study of the history of the idea of the unconscious from this
point of view is yet available.
Nor is it concerned with the detailed technical analysis and
comparison of the various philosophical attitudes which have
influenced the development of the idea. This is also a pro-
fessional task of high complexity, and essays of this kind are
THE Hisrory oF IDEAS 11
already available. It is scarcely surprising that none of these
appears satisfactory, since a comprehensive analytical treat-
ment requires an unprejudiced mastery of all relevant philo-
sophical schools.
However, both these tasks lie within established realms of
scholarship, and it would be surprising if further endeavors
were not made in both directions, or possibly combining the
two in a single survey of the development of philosophical
and psychological theories during the last three hundred
years, in relation to the concept of the unconscious mind,
say, from Cudworth to Jung.
But such legitimate specialist studies, in order to achieve
the maximum of scientific objectivity and intellectual and
historical precision, must exclude those matters which are
the main concern of this work: the treatment af this feature
of the development of the European mind, evidenced in the
written word, as a significant phase in the history of man: self-
conscious European man discovering his unconscious. Here
I do not seek to weigh the relative importance of different
contributions, to trace direct or indirect influences, or even
to analyze in any detail the distinctions between one concept
and another, though a preliminary statement of my preferred
ideas will be given in Chapter II. The aim is to outline a
changing state of awareness as evidenced in European writ-
ings, and to provide detailed, but necessarily incomplete, evi-
dence in support of the general picture, in the form of quo-
tations. I am concerned with the developing awareness, as
shown in writings of any kind, of the need to infer from
the facts of immediate conscious experience the existence of
unconscious mental processes, and this study is restricted to
the particular culture—Europe c. 1680 to 1880—that first gave
this inference clear conceptual formulation within a largely
dualistic tradition.
Since we cannot reverse the process of history and watch
12 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
parents, magic men, priests, or physicians at their daily tasks
a thousand or ten thousand years ago so as to judge from their
words and actions how far they, consciously or unconsciously,
made a similar inference in their treatment of their children,
followers, or patients, it is reasonable to start by accepting
only the written word as evidence. Moreover, to be ade-
quately sure of the explicit or implicit meaning of words, it
is best to rely mainly on words used in senses that one can
be sure of understanding. One may think one knows what
a mystic or poet writing before A.D. 1000 meant by his words,
but can one be certain of appreciating the social and emo-
tional context within which they found their meaning? Even
if one believes this possible, an elaborate apparatus of scholar-
ship is necessary to convince others. We shall therefore rely
on the written word after A.D. 1600.
In attempting a broad approach to the subject it is useful
thus to restrict the historical scope. This does not imply an un-
dervaluation of other cultures and other modes of expression,
such as those of ancient Greece, China, or India. My limita-
tion of the field means only that in taking a European story
as universally significant the assumption is made that, in its
struggle with the systematization of ideas, the European mind
during some two hundred years experienced with peculiar in-
tensity and recorded with unique clarity a change of aware-
ness and of emphasis which other cultures probably shared in |
lesser degree. During two centuries Europe started on a task
with which no other culture has ever come seriously to grips.
In passing from scholarly detailed analysis to broad inter-
pretation certain advantages are lost, for precision, objectivity,
and reliability become more difficult. But something is also
gained.
All human comprehension, whether it be intuitive under-
standing or scientific explanation, or any blend of these, rests
on knowledge with two complementary aspects:
accuracy of detailed facts (precision);
THE History oF IDEAS 13
correct arrangement of these into comprehensive generali-
zations (order).
Neither aspect has any meaning, or relevance to experience,
without some element of the other. Facts only become defi-
nite in a frame of reference, and an assertion of the existence
of some kind of abstract order must be expressed in terms of
particular facts to make it meaningful.
Unfortunately, the instability of the human temperament
enters here and fogs the issue. European thinkers have tended
to split into two camps representing contrasted tendencies in
human nature: the one seeking order, similarities, and unity
(often called “mystical” or ‘“‘religious”) and the other differ-
ences between particulars (the “tough” thinkers or scientists).
The first seek comfort in feeling a unifying order, the second
in the defining of particulars. Sometimes members of these
Opposed camps can scarcely speak to one another, because
each stands for what the other has inhibited but uses un-
consciously. Yet they represent complementary differentia-
tions of one underlying tendency present in all human
thought: the search for order in particular facts. Here the
term “‘order’’ stands for some form of unity, similarity, regu-
larity, or equivalence, and any such order is subject to definite
restrictions. For no form of order is universal, and a state-
ment of any “truth” is only acceptable when it explicitly de-
fines the conditions under which it is true, to the satisfaction
of contemporary critics.
No scientific assertion is legitimate unless it makes clear
the general ordering principles on which it is based, and this
is often neglected. On the other hand, a broad interpretation
of some nonscientific realm usually cannot avoid making its
prior assumptions clear to the reader. Thus a personal inter-
pretation may be less treacherous than a supposedly scientific
one which conceals the problematic character of its hidden
assumptions. .
But can a personal interpretation of historical facts ever
BEG
14 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
possess any degree of validity? I believe it can, because the
sense of truth, the critical judgment, can be improved by
training. Moreover, if by “truth” we mean an ordering of
particular facts which permits further advance, then the sense
of truth prevails more often than not. Given undeformed
organic vigor, the senses and the ordering mind operate
reasonably well, on the average and in the long run. The
organ of thought tends to improve its own operations, on a
long personal or historical view. If this had not been the case,
there could have been no community life, no language, no
rational thought, no science. Moreover it is precisely this
élan toward clarity and validity that leads us to criticize its
manifold failures and pathologies. The conception of error
proves a standard implicit in the working of the mind, and
the achievements of the Western intellect and of exact science
show that a collective tradition and discipline can strengthen
the mind’s faculty of self-criticism. This implies that a per-
sonal interpretation of a particular aspect of history, such
as that set out in Chart A,* though it may be in some degree a
projection of personal experience, can also be more than that,
for if each man carries in him the entire human condition
one man’s story may reflect history. (When aware of intro-
ducing a personal assumption I write “I”; when opening a
dialogue with the reader I use ‘‘we.”)
The story told here presupposes certain principles regard-
ing the history of ideas:
There is no one Zeitgeist, no single state of awareness in
any community, even in a small professional group, at any
one time. There may be traditional elements in decline, a
variety of dominant elements, and new ones emerging. More-
over the awareness of any single individual varies according
to what he has in hand at the moment.
* This refers to the first of three charts (A, B, and C) to be found at the back
of the book.
Tue History oF IpEAs 15
In the life history of ideas a similar variety is present.
There is often one period when a new idea is conceivable, as
evidenced by the printed word; another when it becomes
topical, as shown by multiple discussions; and sometimes an-
other when it becomes manifestly effective. Moreover ideas
may undergo cycles of influence, and may be temporarily in-
hibited, and consciously, or unconsciously, transformed.
One phase in the life history of an idea is of special rele-
vance to our topic. This may be called its climax, when it is
widely acclaimed and is accepted by nearly everyone, but its
value is already declining, though this is only known to a few.
The prestige of an idea may be as misleading as the reputa-
tion of a man. When young men or ideas are most fertile they
are usually unrecognized by their community. Once prestige
or reputation is established the main task is often over; only
the greatest ideas or men can continue to be fertile in the
new context which they have themselves helped to create.
If an idea is of universal relevance many kinds of thinkers,
and different groups, will respond to the need for it in their
own ways. The school of thought which is apparently most
directly opposed to it may be the first to give it explicit con-
sideration, just because the need for what their thinking en-
tirely lacks is strongly felt, at least by some of its members.
Les extrémes se touchent.
Ideas are not discovered once and for all and passed on
like museum objects. They are part of the life of thought and
must come to life, be kept alive, and be made productive in
the processes of human minds and the activities of indi-
viduals. The same ideas, or similar ones, may have to be
independently rediscovered over and over again by isolated
thinkers, some of whom may never communicate their
thoughts, while others may have spoken but not been under-
stood or produced any recorded response, and finally by still
others who bring the idea to full life, not only in their own
16 THE UNconscious BEFORE FREUD
minds but in a professional or social community. The world
as a whole, ignorant of this long story in some particular case,
may stand amazed at the “power of genius.” For his words or
creations throb with the excitement of his own discovery,
and his heat sets them on fire. His discovery appears magical
to him, and so to his audience. He could not possibly have
withstood the burden of his task had he known that countless
others had already thought in similar ways. He must make the
discovery for himself and not find it in a book, if the idea is
to live in him and in his work, and through him in others.
The interpretation offered here of one aspect of the recent
history of the Western mind does not involve “historical de-
terminism” in any sense implying either that prediction is
trivial or that the experience of free will is illusory. Nonethe-
less, the anticipation of future possibilities on the basis of
largely unconscious assumptions is one of the main biological
functions of the ordering processes in the human brain, and
veridical historical prophecy is frequently possible.
This book offers an interpretation based on facts. The in-
terpretation is given in Chapters I-IV. In the present chap-
ter I have outlined some principles which I consider should
guide the study of the history of ideas. Chapter II describes
my preferred interpretation of the terms “conscious” and
“unconscious,” and of the factors producing awareness.
Chapter III describes how, in my view, such factors made
individuals in Europe intensely aware of themselves before
and after 1600, and Chapter IV how they later became aware
of the need to infer the existence of unconscious mental
processes. The next four chapters cite some of the thinkers
who made this inference. Chapter IX summarizes the present
position and poses some questions.
 II

Conscious
and Unconscwus

As A. B. JOHNSON? wrote in 1836: “Nature is

no party to our phraseology.” Certainly the terms “conscious,”
“unconscious,” “subconscious,” and “preconscious,” though
valuable, are not entirely satisfactory. The trouble is not that
they are ambiguous; that might be overcome by providing
better definitions. It is that we do not yet know the right
definitions to use, the meanings which would throw most light
on the structure of mental processes. What we need is not
merely words with definitions using other words, but insight
into the changing structure of mental processes. Until we can
identify a law covering all mental processes, definitions can-
not do more than flatter us into imagining we are thinking
properly, when we are not.
It may, for example, be wrong to think of two realms
which interact, called the conscious and the unconscious, or

17
18 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD

even of two contrasted kinds of mental process, conscious and

unconscious, each causally self-contained until it hands over
to the other. There may exist, as I believe, a single realm of
mental processes, continuous and mainly unconscious, of
which only certain transitory aspects or phases are accessible
to immediate conscious attention. On this view there are few,
if any, causally separable “conscious processes’; only par-
ticular features or transitory phases of mental processes enter
direct awareness.
The main purpose of this study is to outline the develop-
ment of human self-awareness; to emphasize its special quality
and intensity around 1600 in Europe; and to trace in more
detail the progressive recognition, in the systematic thought
which developed after Galileo, Kepler, and Descartes, that it
is necessary to infer that mental factors which are not directly
available to our awareness influence both our behavior and
the conscious aspects of our thought.
In telling such a story, unless one is satisfied with a bare
listing of historical facts, some assumptions are unavoidable
regarding the genesis and nature of conscious and uncon-
scious factors, and the best meanings of these terms. Why did
men gradually become aware of themselves as experiencing
individuals? Why did they later feel the need to infer the
existence of unconscious mental factors? We do not know the
answers, but each can use the facts to form his own opinion.
Since this survey is an expression of my view I feel bound
to make it explicit.
That alone might not justify some pages of speculative
theory. But I cannot criticize the Cartesian dualism without
suggesting a path that may lead toward a better way of think-
ing, throwing light on the “interactions” which dualistic
thinking leaves obscure. So I ask the reader either to be
patient with the next few pages or to pass at once to the later
part of this chapter. Those who do not share the logical
Conscious AND UNCONSCIOUS 19
thinker’s anxiety for precision may find these pages tedious,
though they underlie much that follows.

I have thus far used the terms ‘‘conscious” and “uncon-

scious” in a vague sense. I shall now indicate what I consider
to be the best usages, the meanings that may form part of a
future mental science, insofar as this antithesis remains use-
ful. For the succeeding chapters interpret the history of the
discovery of the unconscious in the way in which I believe it
should be done by a future science of mind.
We shall move step by step from general principles to spe-
cial features of unconscious mental processes and their con-
scious aspects. The analysis here is logical and theoretical; the
historical treatment of the development of European man
from overemphasis of self-consciousness to recognition of the
unconscious is the subject of the later chapters. Each of the
following numbered paragraphs treats a theme which is
summarized in italics. The formulations are tentative; their
brevity and apparent precision do not imply dogmatism.
But they appear to be useful working assumptions.
1. We require a single method of approach which avoids
the partly verbal problem of the relations of “matter’’ and
“mind,” and deals with the changing structure of experienced
and observed relationships. It will therefore be assumed
that a unified theory is possible, and lies ahead, in which
“material” and “mental,’ “conscious” and “unconscious,” as-
pects will be derivable as related components of one primary
system of ideas. We need not consider here in what respects
this single system of thought may be “neutral” as between the
physical and the subjective languages.
2. It will further be assumed that this future theory of
mental processes will constitute a special application of a more
general theory of organism, and this in turn of a still more
general theory of the transformations of partly ordered com-
20 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD

plex systems, based on a universal postulate that in isolable

systems disorder tends to decrease. (““Disorder’”’ may be de-
fined as the number of theoretically independent parameters
necessary to describe the system at any moment, and this
“ordering principle” defines the class of systems which can
be treated as isolable for purposes of causal description under
this principle.)
This postulate alone gives significance to our definitions.
Any process illustrating it will be called ordering or forma-
tive. Here the Platonic “forms” are generalized to become
actual tendencies in the world of process, as recognized by
Aristotle but still to be clarified by science.
3. On this view most organisms may be described as hier-
archical systems of ordering processes, their self-replicating
activity being the extension of their characteristic type of
ordering by the transformation of structures absorbed from
their environment. Similarly, “mental” processes are the ex-
pression of an ordering tendency evident both in a complete
physiological description of the processes of the central nerv-
ous system and the brain, and in a subjective description of
directly experienced states. These preliminaries enable us to
pass to the definitions we require.
4. “Mental process” will be used to mean the dominant
ordering process (in an animal with a brain) in which the
traces of past or present individual experience are themselves
ordered, and tend to order current or anticipated behavior
under the dominant vital drives. The traces of experience are
often records of distinctions or contrasts. Such mental order-
ing processes tend to involve some degree of modification
both of the established mental orderings and of the new
traces. The mental ordering process is a plastic activity which
may deform or simplify the records in the course of organ-
izing them.
Conscious will be used to mean directly present in aware-
Conscious AND UNCONSCIOUS 21
ness (or “immediately known to awareness’). This adjective
will be applied only to discrete aspects or brief phases of
mental processes. No distinction will be made between ‘‘con-
scious” and “aware.” Except for a few doubtful extreme
cases (€.g., processes of logical or mathematical deduction)
there appear to be no causally self-contained processes of
which all aspects directly enter awareness. ‘Conscious’ is a
subjective term without, as yet, (i) interpretation in terms of
physiological structure, or (ii) explanation of its function.
Unconscious,* in the term ‘“‘unconscious mental processes”
will be used to mean all mental processes except those dis-
crete aspects or brief phases which enter awareness as they
occur. Thus “unconscious mental processes” (or the “uncon-
scious,” for short) is here used as a comprehensive term in-
cluding not only the ‘‘subconscious” and “‘preconscious,” but
all mental factors and processes of which we are not immedi-
ately aware, whatever they be: organic or personal tendencies
or needs, memories, processes of mimicry, emotions, motives,
intentions, policies, beliefs, assumptions, thoughts, or dis-
honesties.
Where precision is desirable ‘“‘conscious” and “uncon-
scious” will not be used as nouns. The continuous un-
conscious sections and the discrete conscious aspects of mental
processes are intimately interconnected, as components of the
total realm of mental processes. A single integrated trans-
formation proceeds in a single organ: the mind-brain. This
mental process follows its own laws and is frequently an
ordering process; discrete features of this process may “be-
come conscious” or “be the subject.of conscious attention.”
‘Awareness,’ when present, may be awareness of an ex-
ternal sense perception or of an internal sensation or other
experience. It is not necessary here to consider various special
or pathological types of awareness, as in dreams, hallucina-
tions, etc.
22 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
5. The structure of mental processes. Mental processes
are complex; hierarchically organized; finalistic, i.e., tending
toward some terminus (though certain mental operations are
reversible); involve memory, selection, and the formative or
ordering imagination; and usually serve biological, social, or
individual ends. Since the operation of memory, selection,
and the ordering imagination characterize all mental proc-
esses, poetic fantasy may be taken as a representative example,
while logical deduction (including mathematical calculation)
is a special case, lacking the selective and formative aspects.
If we neglect their hierarchical organization, which is not
yet understood, the characteristic structure of mental proc-
esses is that of an ordering process, in which traces are so
organized as to guide present or future thought and behavior.
As the result of special conditions (excessive strain, etc.)
the hierarchical organized unity of the system of mental proc-
esses may be disrupted, dissociated, or otherwise disorganized.
But if favorable conditions are restored, the ordering tend-
ency may have the power to re-establish the unified state.
6. Factors promoting awareness. The following sugges-
tions summarize the results of recent research. But all con-
clusions are tentative until more is known of the distinction
between the differentiated or focused awareness, e.g., of one
external sense perception like the sight of a point, and the
awareness of a complex situation involving an extensive field
and several senses, like the awareness of all the sights, sounds,
and smells perceived from a window.
It seems that differentiated awareness often accompanies
the operation of distance perceptors (vision, hearing, smell)
and of the highest integrating processes of the neural hier-
archy absorbing information from these senses, so as to an-
ticipate the. effect of possible responses. But this condition is
not necessary. One can be aware of pleasant memories which
Conscious AND UNCONSCIOUS 23
neither involve the external senses nor evoke any response.
It seems that any trace, new or old, which enters the dominant
nervous processes can evoke awareness. However the meaning
of “dominance” is obscure.
It is evident that sharpness, novelty, surprise, challenge,
pain (below a threshold), and pleasure may all promote aware-
ness. But none of these factors is a necessary condition of
awareness. Since most, if not all, awareness involves discrimi-
nation, or consciousness of a contrast or distinction, we shall
provisionally assume that conscious aspects of mental proc-
esses are distinctions affecting the momentarily dominant
ordering processes; the content of awareness is the tension of
a contrast. This defines a program of research: to discover
the meaning of “dominant” in terms of structure and func-
tion. We are definitely conscious at any one moment only of
a few relatively stable contrasts, and unconscious of the vast
changing complexity of which they form part. The senses
discriminate; the (unconscious) mind orders.
One basic problem is, how can contrasts be ordered? The
logician has to consider how dissimilars can be correlated, the
biologist how differentiated structures and processes are co-
ordinated within the organism, and the brain physiologist
and psychologist how the mind discovers an order in the con-
trasts which it observes.
4. The role of awareness. Awareness wanders, is transi-
tory and often interrupted, and ranges from a differentiated
consciousness of isolated factors to a vague sense of the rhythm
of being alive. The biological function of awareness is still
uncertain, but appears to be narrower than has often been
thought.
The function of awareness is linked with that of the domi-
nant integrating processes of the nervous system and its site
(if any), or sites, may wander from one part of the brain to
24 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
another. “Dominance,” ,
it seems, is often associated with a
wandering distinction, without permanent location, temporal
continuity, or even one unchanging character, since it can be
either sharp or diffused.
But it is clear that conscious attention often heightens the
clarity of discrimination and quickens the achievement of an
adequate delayed response. The stronger the awareness of
some factor, the more definite its separation as something re-
quiring its own response. Only awareness can, in principle,
call directly on all the reserves of experience; it is a signal
echoing through all the available associations of memory. Yet
it need not await an external stimulus, for awareness can play
on internal factors.
Since we do not yet understand biological organization in
general, or its particular case, neural integration, it is not sur-
prising that we cannot define either the precise role of aware-
ness or the objective physiological] situation to which it cor-
responds (though electrical studies of the brain have come
close to this problem). But it is clear that intensity of aware-
ness 1s heightened by the degree of novelty, and of challenge
to the person, of some perceived contrast. It may be lessened
again when an adequate response, oftenan ordering of the
new contrast into a modified personal or social order, has
been achieved. Thus awareness of this contrast self /environ-
ment is normally self-eliminating, in the sense that in pro-
ducing an adequate response it eliminates the factor which
evoked it. The role of the characteristically human self-con-
sciousness may be to facilitate those responses which require
considerable time because they involve a substantial adjust-
ment of the established order.
The significance of these provisional conclusions for the
theme of this book is that one may expect individuals to have
their conscious attention drawn particularly to any novel
contrasts which challenge the established ordering of their
Conscious AND UNCONSCIOUS 25,
lives or of their thought. We shall use this principle to de-
scribe and interpret the historical development of two par-
ticular forms of awareness:
Self-awareness of the person, in which the attention of the
individual is drawn to his own faculty of experiencing. This
process is too vast to be treated other than in outline here. We
are concerned only with one expression of it: European man’s
use of words to describe his own self-reflective awareness.
The discovery of the unconscious, in the sense of the self-
aware European becoming aware of the need to infer from
his direct experiences the existence of mental processes in
himself of which he is not immediately aware, and to employ
a special term for these unconscious processes.

I have here outlined some of the ideas which, adequately

clarified, should, in my view, underlie a unified theory of
mental processes. But psychology has not yet established any
such unified doctrine and this historical study is concerned
only with one step already taken toward that aim: the partial
correction, through the “discovery of the unconscious,” of the
error of treating the individual self-consciousness as primary.
This is part of a larger story: the slow development of self-
awareness in the human species, and its accompaniment by a
dim sense, gradually growing more definite, of divine or
natural agencies guiding and controlling the actions and
thoughts of the individual. In that story biology and an-
thropology must set the background, and the parts played by
the earliest civilizations, in particular those of ancient Egypt,
Greece, China, and India, be given their place. It may be
that Europe has not developed any ideas of which the germ
is not to be found elsewhere in earlier times. More than that,
both this “European” error and its correction may be latent
in the history of Greek, Indian, or Chinese thought. It would
be surprising if that were not the case.
26 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD

Our theme is universal, but here we are only concerned

with its expression in European minds with the bias, dis-
played mainly after 1600, toward the systematic and later the
scientific, exploitation of words. In fact our story begins after
Descartes (1596-1650) and the publication of his Discourse
(1637). That work marks a crucial moment in the history of
ideas, for it initiated the writings in which Descartes sought
to stabilize with final clarity an ancient dualism: the split of
subject from object. Archeological remains dating some
10,000 years back suggest that men had then begun to discrim-
inate an ideal eternal soul from the frail and perishable body.
Moreover many religious and early philosophers, Plato for
example, assumed a similar separation of soul or mind from
the material universe. But Descartes was the first thinker to
assert a sharp division of mind from matter as the basis of a
systematic philosophy claiming scientific clarity and certainty.
To postulate the existence of two separate realms of being,
one of which is characterized by awareness, as Descartes did,
may prove one of the fundamental blunders made by the
human mind. However admirable his genius, and however
fertile the dualistic approach has been, Descartes’ claim to
clarity renders him the exemplar of this treacherous dualism.
Our theme is the development of the conception of “‘uncon-
scious mental ‘processes’ as a first correction of that Cartesian
blunder, the denial of the existence of an independent realm
discriminated by awareness. All the writers whom I shall
quote (after 1650) say, in effect, either: “If there are two
realms, physical and mental, awareness cannot be taken as the
criterion of mentality,” or, going further: “The assumption
of two separate realms is untenable, for the unity displayed in
their interactions is more important than their separation.”
Descartes recognized that the “union of soul with body” is
intuitively known, and that their pervasive connections are a
Conscious AND UNCONSCIOUS 277
matter of everyday experience. However, in his doctrine these
connections are not ones of true causation, but an illusion re-
sulting from some kind of parallelism between the two modes
of being. It is therefore, in Descartes’ view, abortive to study
these connections in detail.
He has widely been regarded, and with justice, as the su-
preme representative of the dualistic view. Yet his own think-
ing did not in fact possess the clarity that he claimed. His ideas
seemed clear to him only because he inhibited, or postponed
for later consideration, inconvenient facts.
One part of his mind, impatient for logical clarity, thought:
“the soul is of a nature wholly independent of the body”
(Discourse), and “it is certain that I am really distinct from
‘my body and can exist without it” (Meditations). But he was
also a careful observer, and another part of his mind thought:
“The mind is so intimately dependent on the condition and
relations of the organs of the body that if any means can ever
be found to render men wiser and more ingenious than
hitherto, I believe it is in Medicine they must be sought for’
(Discourse).
Descartes the Cartesian was a product of intellectual im-
patience; Descartes the observer recognized that the pervasive
interactions remained a challenge to understanding and of-
fered an opportunity for therapy. But he left it to others to
explain why clear fundamental ideas leave so much obscure.
Prior to Descartes and his sharp definition of the dualism
there was no cause to contemplate the possible existence of
unconscious mentality as part of a separate realm of mind.
Many religious and speculative thinkers had taken for granted
factors lying outside but influencing immediate awareness;
Augustine’s remarks on memory are a famous example.
Until an attempt had been made (with apparent success) to
choose awareness as the defining characteristic of an inde-
28 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD

pendent mode of being called mind, there was no occasion to

invent the idea of unconscious mind as a provisional correc-
tion of that choice. It is only after Descartes that we find, first
the idea and then the term, “unconscious mind’ entering
European thought.
There was nothing remarkable in the ancient view that
both divine and physical agencies could influence the mind;
that only seemed philosophically disturbing after Descartes
had converted many to his view that conscious mentality
should be separated from everything else. It may be that part
of the appeal of Freud’s ideas was due to the fact that he did
more than anyone before him toward repairing the dualism
into which the thought of most educated Europeans had
fallen since the seventeenth century. For Freud’s influence
has been greatest in the Protestant English-speaking world,
and it was here that the dualism penetrated furthest.
Thus the most profound aspect of Freud’s hold over many
minds may have little to do with his scientific discoveries,
with sex, or libido, or any special aspect of the unconscious,
except as an opportunity for the conscious subject to escape
his isolation, for the individual to relax his lonely self-aware-
Ness in a surrender to what is organic and universal. This
deep appeal can be expressed in philosophical terms: by call-
ing attention to the unconscious mental processes Freud gave
the Western world an opportunity to improve the relations
of the individual as subject to nature as object, in the daily
life of ordinary people as well as in the thinking of the clinics
and the academies. I know no better way in which to under-
stand the fascination which Freud’s name, ideas, and writings
hold for so many in the English-speaking world. He has
helped us to recognize the need and the possibility of escap-
ing from a disastrous intellectual and moral split that has
caused trouble for all individuals and cultures that have
flirted with this facile disordering of experience.
Conscious AND UNCONSCIOUS 29
Quintillian wrote: “Scientia difficultatem facit” (the theory
creates the difficulties). No difficulties have been so profound
or so persistent as those which reason has made for itself by
its hasty separation of the conscious self from everything else.
The impatience to order has here led to disorder.

LB ety
 9 Neath Ri +
eet ;
>i -j PE if hie:

rnb ss)
a i same
ery a
; iusigiis chro ;
 I]

The Rose of European

Self-Awareness

OuR STORY TAKES PLACE in Europe after A.D.

1600 and expresses in condensed form universal human po-
tentialities. Certain persisting hereditary characteristics of
the species made possible the development of mind, the
genesis of self-awareness, and the recent discovery that the pri-
mary mental processes are unconscious. We do not yet under-
stand these basic organic characteristics. But in the previous
chapter I have offered a way of viewing mental processes and
their origin, because without this the story would lose its
continuity and fall apart into an arbitrary sequence of
miracles.
Though we can have no direct knowledge of the growth
of consciousness in past times it is reasonable to assume that
such moments of awareness that gregarious animals enjoy, or
that the earliest members of Homo sapiens experienced, are
31
32 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
relatively transitory and undifferentiated aspects of continu-
ous social activities, associated in general with a lesser range
of conscious memory and anticipation than that of which we
are capable today. Through a process occupying many thou-
sands of generations, the later stages of which were probably
linked with the development of articulated speech, men
gradually became more often and more definitely self-con-
scious, dimly aware of a persisting experiencing self, with its
own continuity of memory, distinguishable from objects per-
ceived around them. What is here inadequately described in
elaborate terms was a spontaneous intuitive discrimination,
unconsciously inferred from the structure of awareness, an
attempt made without deliberation to find an order in im-
mediate experience, stimulated at those moments when ex-
perience seemed to display this dual structure. At least that
seems a reasonable inference from known facts.
This splitting of experience into two aspects: my aware-
ness and the world, which eventually led to dualistic ways of
thinking, presumably emerged very slowly and tended to
occur chiefly at moments of danger or surprise when some
prior unified and less conscious ordering of experience proved
inadequate. The individual probably only performed this
mental act of separating himself from everything else when
the facts tended to force this on him. The intuitive sense of
a persisting experiencing self constitutes a treacherous basis
for an ordering of experience, because the direct awareness
of the human individual does not justify the attribution to
the self either of permanence, or of unchanging identity, or
of continuous awareness. Indeed the facts of growth, aging,
and death, and the transitory wandering character of aware-
ness render this assumption of a permanent identical con-
scious subject most peculiar. Why did the human mind ever
make such a strange, apparently perverse, “‘inference’’?
The hypostatization of a permanent self cannot have been
Tue RisE OF EuROPEAN SELF-AWARENESS 33
due either to the conscious vanity of the individual or to his
fear of death, for these are its consequences and cannot be its
causes. It is probable that the basic factor, in all the leading
Western communities whose languages reveal an exaggerated
isolation of the self from change, was the widespread but not
universal tendency of the mind to treat its own mental traces
as representations of permanent entities. This tendency is not
surprising, since most separate stable traces are precisely the
rendering permanent, in the form of a record, of some aspect
of a persisting or recurrent experience. As Bergson noted:
“Our concepts have been formed on the model of solids.” We
shall return again to this point, for it dominates our story.
It is all the more interesting, therefore, that certain African
and American Indian communities, the Hopi and others, ap-
pear to put the cognitive emphasis, not on separable traces
representing isolable entities, but on the actual process of
personal experiencing. Whorf® has suggested that their lan-
guages are molded to represent the transformation of the
subject in the course of his experienced activities and of his
participation in the processes of his world. The Hopi, for
example, view reality as “events,” rather than as “matter.”
These languages, far from being vague or undifferentiated,
make finer discriminations in regard to the action of think-
ing than do the European. They are highly developed systems
of communication, stressing a different aspect of experience.
None the less these languages of process and participation do
not help to promote the awareness by the individual of his
characteristic personality and its capacities and needs. Stable
contrasts are less clearly focused, a vague unity of process
tending to dominate mental activities. Thus it seems that the
first step toward a precise structural understanding of the
variety of phenomena must be through the exploitation of
permanent separable contrasted aspects, which is what the
individual traces normally represent. On this view the sharp
34 THE Unconscious BEForRE FREUD
separation of subject from object, first intuitively and later in
European rational analysis, was not perverse, but a necessary
stage toward a fuller realization of the potentialities of the
human intellect.
However that may be, as the vital surplus in man led to
the gradual development of his mental faculties, the separa-
tion of a conscious self from an objective universe became
inevitable in vigorous communities once the resistance of the
world around to the needs of the human individual and group
forced this contrast and challenge on his attention. The bio-
logical “function,” in a generalized sense, of this awareness
was to assist man in eliminating the clash by modifying either
the environment or the activities of the person, and thus to
remove the conditions which evoked the moment of self-
awareness. The clear awareness of a distinction self/environ-
ment tended to facilitate adequate delayed responses which
would lessen the clash and hence to relax the self-awareness.
Thus self-awareness is basically self-eliminating; its biologi-
cal function is apparently to catalyze processes which tend to
remove its cause, in each situation. Consciousness is like a
fever which, if not excessive, hastens curative processes and
so eliminates its source. Hence its transitory, wandering, and
often strangely unreasonable character. Contrasted with the
growth of a plant or an animal, persisting self-awareness is
like an illness which continually provokes its own cure, and
in the long run usually does so. (Only aesthetic awareness, in
which there is no consciousness of the self contrasted with the
environment, is not self-eliminating.)
We may conveniently define an extreme representative
type, self-conscious man, as the individual who is excessively
self-aware, does not understand the etiology or limitations of
this condition, and treats self-awareness not as a sequence of
self-eliminating moments of fever, but as primary in theory,
in value, or in action. ‘‘Self-conscious man” is a useful abstrac-
THE RisE OF EUROPEAN SELF-AWARENESS 35
tion, and also an idea which, as we shall see, proved attrac-
tive to many Europeans from around 1600 onward. One can
think of several representative figures of the last three cen-
turies in whom the natural moments of fever became a per-
sisting pathological condition. For example, Goethe suffered
from an exceptionally intense and continuous self-awareness,
but it was relieved by his wide range of interests and dis-
ciplined by equally continuous work.
The condition of self-conscious man is efficient in pro-
moting thought and action, particularly in new explorations
of all kinds, and it produced among other things a vigorous
transitional development of the rational intellect. But it has
also led to two serious embarrassments, for a valid ordering of
experience cannot be based on the uncritical acceptance of
the responses of an organ, or organic condition, which directs
its main attention to contrasts and is self-eliminating.
1. It leads to a biased estimate of human life. In attend-
ing to contrasts, consciousness stresses the disorders, conflicts,
clashes, and inadequacies, and tends to neglect the harmonies.
Pain and conflict provoke our concentrated attention and diff-
culties are magnified, while the free play of spontaneous
vitality—as in the transitory rhythms of eating, drinking, walk-
ing, loving, making things, working well, thinking, and
dreaming—evokes no persistent differentiated awareness. We
feel right while it is going on, and then forget it, as a rule.
It is a tough fact of the human constitution that it displays
a tendency to neglect, or take for granted as unworthy of
attention, perfectly ordered processes, and to concentrate on
contrasts, differences, lacks, and forms of disorder. This is
evident, for example, in the absence of any general concept
or word (outside the language of mysticism) for perfection in
process, in spite of the fact that perfectly coordinated com-
plex processes have been going on for a thousand million
years in all living cells, and are occurring by myriads at this
36 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
very moment in your body and mine. Perfection of ordered
transformations is more than a biological commonplace, it is
an almost universal fact. In technical terms, the probability of
this perfection within living cells is nearly unity, the chance
of some transformation going wrong being incredibly minute,
say one in countless billions for young organisms in a favor-
able environment. This alone has made possible the con-
tinuity of life over a thousand million years and given living
systems the chance of doing more than merely continue to be
what they already were. Life can develop, mutate, evolve, and
in man create without visible limits, only because it rests on
a perfect foundation, for practical purposes in terms of the
species and race.
It is strange that the West does not yet possess a simple
term for ‘‘order or harmony in process’; perhaps if it had felt
the need to invent one, self-conscious man would have been
a little less liable to live and die in a state of frustration and
disappointment. But as it is, in treating his own self-awareness
as primary and not as a secondary condition whose role is
to eliminate what caused the awareness by some adaptive
modification either of the environment or of himself, he is
often doomed to misery. Many of the most productive per-
sonalities have been cursed with a haunting sense of failure,
their intense activities being unduly forced by preoccupation
with their ego.
For self-conscious man, as here conceived, cannot be whole-
natured. This has been known to philosophers, mystics, psy-
chologists, and ordinary men and women of all times: learn
to know yourself by all means, when you feel it necessary,
but then turn to something in which you can forget your-
self. We see ancient wisdom laboriously becoming modern
science in a recognition of the human function of awareness:
the elimination of its causes. It is not merely civilization
which “advances by extending the number of important
THE RIsE OF EUROPEAN SELF-AWARENESS 37
operations which we can perform without thinking about
them,” as Whitehead said, but the individual also. The main
purpose of conscious thought, its neobiological function, may
be first to identify, and then to eliminate, the factors which
evoke it.
2. This private embarrassment, the individual’s conscious
overemphasis on disorder, might matter less if it were not
linked to a second which is its social and intellectual counter-
part: valid rational understanding of man and nature cannot
be reached by treating as primary what is self-eliminating
and therefore normally transient. It is philosophically incon-
ceivable that so slippery a feature as consciousness could
hold the clue to an ordering of anything. This assumption
had to be challenged at once if self-conscious man was not to
lead Western thought into further abstract confusion. And
precisely that happened. We shall see that within fifty years
of the publication of Descartes’ first essay, at the very moment
when the Cartesian doctrine emphasizing man’s consciousness
attained its greatest influence, the process of correction was
already at work.
Thus a problem arose in the seventeenth century which I
shall call the dilemma of self-conscious man: being self-aware
he required a far-reaching conscious understanding in order
to live appropriately to his own nature, but his mind was in
a transitional condition for he did not yet recognize the sec-
ondary self-eliminating function of his awareness and he at-
tempted to treat its signals as primary for thought and action.
However, the direct messages of consciousness are not func-
tionally self-sufficient, and man’s self-awareness is not itself
an independent controlling organ. It is one differentiated as-
pect only of the total organ of mind, important for the identi-
fication and ordering of contrasts, yet never the ultimate
determinant of any ordering process, in thought or behavior.
The decisive factors, the primary decisions, are unconscious.
38 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
The appearance of this type of individual in increasing
numbers or the increasing influence of this ideal at any time
is evidence that the human tradition—a varying blend of
habit, myth, ritual, religion, philosophy, and science—is no
longer adequate in relation to man’s developing activities.
The momentary self- and object-awareness of an earlier period
expressible as ‘J am looking at some strange object; what is
it?’ becomes a sustained social condition: ‘‘J am experiencing
this strange affair of human life; what does it signify, since
no doctrine can tell me?” evident in germ in Boehme,
Montaigne, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, and today a common-
place.
Why this happened at particular periods is a difficult ques-
tion, outside our present theme. It is enough to recognize
that the new modes of acting and thinking which provoke
such searching questions are the expression of a vital surplus
which goes beyond adaptation to the immediate demands of
current situations. The root source of everything that has
contributed to the development of human potentialities is
this biological surplus energy, vital discontent, exploratory
future-oriented urge, expressed in the anticipatory character
of all thought.
The dog that enjoys playing and the monkey that finds
pleasure in tackling soluble problems suggest that a biology
of behavior relying on narrowly adaptive or utilitarian prin-
ciples, based merely on rewards or the release of tension, may
be too narrow. Organisms promote their own complete
rhythms, the increase as well as the decrease of tensions. Man
himself displays the absurdity of such narrow theories for he
enjoys difficulties, seeks trouble, and is challenged by the
apparently impossible. He will go to any length to escape his
hated self-awareness. Sometimes he will even surrender him-
self, or his conscious pride, in the discovery of whole-natured
activities. And if thought is his line, and the pathology of
THE RisE oF EuROPEAN SELF-AWARENESS 39
self-consciousness has not gone too far, he will even recog-
nize the primacy of his unconscious mind.
It is not known how this condition of human self-aware-
ness was first developed as a reorientation of man’s percep-
tive functions, the proprioceptive senses turning inward
toward the organ of thought. Little is to be gained by study-
ing the genesis of self-awareness in the, growing child, for
that is a secondary process, its parents teaching it to think
of itself as they do of themselves. The first sources of the
condition lie hidden not in childhood today, but far in the
historical past.
We can obtain some light on this by considering
contemporary “primitive” peoples whose customs or lan-
guages emphasize the role of the individual less than ours.
The anthropologist Radin® suggested that “every human
group . . . has, from time immemorial, contained individ-
uals who were constrained by their individual temperaments
and interests to occupy themselves with the basic problems
. . . of philosophy.” In Radin’s view every community, since
the birth of human languages, contained a small proportion
of original thinkers, men who thought for themselves about
their own experience and sensed the inadequacy of tradi-
tional ways. Such men must surely at moments have medi-
tated on the difference between themselves and others, and
possessed in a greater degree than their fellows the self-reflec-
tive consciousness. But the experience of competition for food
or for a mate, of painful illness, or of approaching death, must
often have stimulated a similar self-awareness.
It would be misleading to select any early historical per-
sonality and to suggest that he was the earliest individual
who is known to have experienced an intense sustained self-
awareness similar to our own. For the earlier the choice, the
less surely is this known.
Nonetheless it is useful to consider an early case, as an
40 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
illustration of the conditions which may have provoked an
exceptional degree of self-awareness, and I know of none bet-
ter than Akhenaton (Amenhotep IV, 1388-1358 B.c., Pharaoh
of the Egyptian Empire from 1375-1358; dates probably cor-
rect within five years). Breasted called him the “world’s first
individual,” and this has a useful meaning. Even when allow-
ance is made for the continuity in Akhenaton’s social en-
vironment, family origins, and historical setting, the art and
scripts of his reign suggest that he was so original, so unlike
any predecessor known to have been similarly situated, that
he must have experienced an intense and sustained sense of
his own uniqueness, of his unusual mission, and probably of
his historical “failure.” One can hardly avoid conceiving him
as a highly self-conscious person, vividly aware that his own
nature compelled him to follow strange paths, for he sought
to uproot one religion and to establish another, he built a
new capital at Amarna to symbolize this change and, though
supremely powerful, he refused to make war to save his Em-
pire. He may have been a neurotic epileptic and politically
weak; he certainly displayed originality of an order for which
there is no precedent in the known records. The inference
that he was also for periods intensely self-conscious is no less
reliable than many which we draw every day. For he must
surely have been vividly aware of the conflict between his
own nature and his environment.
Though we cannot trace the origins or development of
self-consciousness with any certainty, with the improvement of
the records from 5000 B.c. onward we find more and more
individuals making their mark on the human story as we
know it. This is a fascinating theme, still, I believe, awaiting
comprehensive treatment, but it is not ours here. We must
step across some thirty centuries tollowing Akhenaton to con-
sider in outline the remarkable transformation of human ways
which began in Europe, for reasons which are partly obscure,
THE RisE OF EuROPEAN SELF-AWARENESS 41
around A.D. 1100-1200, and reached a crucial stage in the
decades before and after a.p. 1600. During this period many
habits and traditions began to collapse, the Christian tendency
to accept the status quo lost its prestige, and self-conscious
man (as we have defined him) began to take over the leader-
ship. Ancient ways only survived insofar as they were modi-
fied and reinterpreted by imaginative individuals. The per-
son thinking for himself ceased to be a social freak inhibited
by his difference from others, and began to claim the op-
portunity to realize himself and to guide the community. This
change is shown in the upper part of Chart A.
The selection of A.p. 1600 requires no justification here.
But a few dates may serve to illustrate the outburst of in-
dividual vitality which challenged traditional ways around
that time. In the background there was the renewed atten-
tion to classical scripts from the twelfth century onward and
the consequences of the European discovery of printing
in the fifteenth century. Hamlet was written in 1598/9,
Kepler met Tycho de Brahe in 1600, Descartes started think-
ing afresh in 1619, and the “Mayflower” set out in 1620. The
individual was becoming more interested in the facts of
human nature, particularly those accessible to his or her own
introspection: Santa Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), Montaigne
(1533-1592), Kepler (1571-1630), Boehme (1575-1624), Pas-
cal (1632-1662), Rousseau (1712-1778). Religious thinkers
felt the need to develop their personal experience of God,
philosophers to express their own vision of the facts. This
break with orthodoxy was by 1700 becoming widely accepted
in the incipient movements of individualism, liberalism, de-
mocracy, rationalism, and scientific skepticism. As Brennan
has said, “pride was the vice of the seventeenth century,” and
beneath all these special manifestations lay the intensified
self-awareness of the individual.
In that century we can recognize the germ of a new experi-
42 Tue Unconscious BerorE FREUD
ence and a new way of living which in our own time has
become a social commonplace: the existentialist complaint
that there is no tradition which makes life bearable. Already
then the sensitive individual knew himself to be deserted;
parent, teacher, and adolescent, first unconsciously and later
with a deep guilt or resentment, recognized that there existed
no single manifestly adequate tradition. The ugly fact was
in the open: the old had failed the young. From then onward
every sensitive and vital young person had to make his own
choice. Once he became aware of this freedom and necessity,
the alternatives before him were many. To mention only a
few: he could go to the East and become a Buddhist; decide
that skeptical reason and scientific method held all the clues;
take any other available path; believe in nothing. Or, like
Shakespeare, he could accept the music and the tempest, and
hold the mirror to man. This date with destiny had been ex-
perienced before, but never with such necessity and freedom
as from 1600. The challenge was unavoidable, and the ab-
sence of effective precedents and rules intensified the lonely
self-awareness of the new kind of man.
The seventeenth century was the first period when the
individual’s experience of ‘‘consciousness”’ and ‘‘self-conscious-
ness’’ was isolated and treated as a primary concept or value,
the first principle of universal philosophies and the essential
attribute of divinity, though, in a different context, this atti-
tude had been implicit in Socrates and Plato. With a naiveté
which has its charm in restrospect, a few thinkers, such as
Fichte somewhat later, went so far as to enthrone awareness,
this moody and promiscuous visitor, as the sole basis of reality.
Thought and language mold each other, and the height-
ened attention to the awareness of the individual is evidenced
in the fact that words expressing awareness and self-aware-
ness first emerge in the English and German languages dur-
ing the seventeenth century. In English “conscious” as mean-
THE RISE OF EUROPEAN SELF-AWARENESS 43
ing “inwardly sensible or aware’ appears first in 1620,
“consciousness” or ‘‘the state of being conscious” in 1678, and
“self-consciousness” or “consciousness of one’s own thoughts,
etc.” in 1690. In German the equivalent terms are found in
the same period, though it is more difficult to place them
exactly; in French the corresponding terms appeared rather
later. It is interesting that “‘con-scious’” whose Latin source
had meant “to know with” (to share knowledge with another),
now came to mean “to know in oneself, alone.” In seven-
teenth-century Europe Homo sapiens (the individual) had
become so vividly aware of himself as a feeling, perceiving,
and thinking person that in Germany and England, at least,
he could no longer do without a term for it, a single word
expressly referring to this experience.
This moment in the history of European languages marks
a decisive phase in the social development of man. From this
time onward the highest organic ordering processes in man
tended increasingly to take the form either of the individual
seeking to impose his personally preferred form of order on
the disorder around him, or of the individual seeking to dis-
cover a form of order in himself which could survive in isola-
tion from the environment.
The mystics represented, in extreme form, this second path
of renunciation, the aim of which was to find a divine har-
mony in the soul by withdrawal and denial of the impatient
demands of the self-conscious ego. The embarrassments of
self-consciousness were to be cured by forgetting the self and
developing an awareness of the divine. This path had a great
appeal for some, in the West as in the East, but generally
adopted it would lead to race suicide, and even for individ-
uals it involves a shirking of the primary task: the maturing
of the mind so that self-awareness is not denied, but used
appropriately.
The rationalists, sustained by a mystical belief in con-
44 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD

scious logic, adopted a response at the other extreme, seek-

ing to impose their own order on experience and impatiently
assuming that the necessary principles or ideas were already
available. But they were not. The rationalists’ conception
of the skeptical consciousness or intellectual reason as the
primary agent of the advancing human mind was wrong, as
is now amply evident.
The remainder, constituting the majority of ordinary
Europeans, perhaps less sensitive and less shocked by the con-
trast of the desire for order and the disorder of human life,
took things more calmly and went about their business with-
out assuming, as did both the mystics and the rationalists,
that the answer was in principle already available, either as
divine harmony or as conscious reason.
Of these three groups it was the rationalists who repre-
sented the spearhead of social advance. Their mistakes were
the inevitable products of a transition toward a more mature
and balanced view of man. The confusions of philosophy and
the misuses of science are trivial beside this fact: the devel-
opment of exact science is the sole unquestionably cumula-
tive achievement of the human mind. But the rational intel-
lect which claimed to be creating science was not the active
principle behind its development.
Confronted by a universe in which neither order nor dis-
order prevails to the exclusion of the other, those whose facul-
ties lay in the realm of speculative reason unconsciously
sought to compensate the pain of their awareness of disorder
by the search for general ideas which might reveal an under-
lying order and bring comfort. Here Plato had already
marked out the way. This search for intellectual harmony is
not, at root, a deliberate attempt to impose a fictitious order
on a mainly disordered universe but a valid organic response:
a movement to adjust the otherwise unbalanced judgment of
human self-consciousness. Our attention and our faculty for
THE RisE OF EuroPEAN SELF-AWARENESS 45
direct experience is primarily drawn to contrast, clash, pain,
disaster; the ordering tendency of the mind compensates this
by leading us to recognize by inference the astonishingly
powerful rules of ordering that prevail over great regions:
for example, Newtonian gravitation, atomic theory, and the
still unidentified principle of coordination which governs
biological transformations. The impulse of intellectual reason
to order the universe is a biologically authentic process, philo-
sophically justified by its self-correcting character. “Reason,”
understood as the servant of deeper impulses, is the most re-
liable instrument yet available. As Hume’? said, “Reason is,
and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never
pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them,” and
beneath the “passions” must lie a biological principle of
coordination.
But the self-correcting character of reason is only reliable
tomorrow, never today—in the long run, never now. In any
individual mind at any particular moment, or in any recorded
analysis, reason is always somewhere at fault (though this
fact may not matter for the point at issue). Reason can never
know the hidden assumptions which restrict its momentary
reasoning; no rational system—logical, mathematical, or sci-
entific—can ever be used to define its own boundaries. For
that the implicit assumptions must be made explicit in terms
of a wider vision of possibilities. This will remain true until
reason can create for itself a closed system which reveals
limits inherent in the character of reason itself, for example,
as an organic and historical theory of reason might make clear
its necessary restrictions in man. This would imply that
reason has to be regarded, not as primary, but as one expres-
sion of the ordering transformations of organic nature. How-
ever this possibility need not trouble anyone now, for any
such closed theory lies far ahead.
The awkward fact—that reason, as we know it, is never
46 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
aware of its own hidden assumptions—has been too much for
some philosophers, and even for many scientists to admit.
Few have stated explicitly that their ideas were not correct,
but merely the best available; that the greatest possible
achievement of a single human mind, including their own,
is to eliminate a few errors, while remaining blind to others.
This masculine kind of dogmatic abstract reasoning usually
overreaches itself, thinks itself mature, and falls into the trap.
Self-conscious man cannot use conscious reason to overcome
his own impatience; for that he must surrender his conviction
of the supreme importance of his own awareness and of the
maturity of his reasoning; only if he can do that is he saved
from humiliation. He must take his self-awareness with a
little irony.
This is not easy. The pathology of the overemphasis of
self-consciousness has increasingly affected the entire Western
community over three centuries, and lies deep in social and
individual habits. Hence the appeal of an equally patholog-
ical collectivism, and the emphasis on doctrines and groups.
The frail awareness seeks comfort in conformity.
Many of the distresses of our age are due to the impatience
of self-conscious man in treating his own personally preferred
ideas, or conception of order, as final and universal. The
psychological pressure to discover a compensating order leaves
him no peace. “If the valid order is one I cannot yet recog-
nize, what use is that to me? I cannot live by faith in an un-
known order; I prefer my own. It at least expresses my con-
victions, serves my will, and solaces my pain, here and now.”
Moreover, this habit of self-conscious man, to treat his own
basic conceptions as final, was rendered the more intractable
by their static character. As we have seen, the first ideas of
the human mind, which were clear enough to permit any
degree of systematization of contrasts, were representations of
invariant aspects of experience. The mental traces of mem-
Tue RisE oF EuROPEAN SELF-AWARENESS 47
ory render permanent isolable aspects of experience; that
which can be repeatedly isolated must in some sense be re-
current or persistent; the simplest kind of persistence is static
invariance; hence the clearest unit ideas express such invari-
ance; the mind has to develop far before it can master proc-
esses in which transformation plays as important a role as any
invariant aspects. The temptation to treat static ideas as abso-
lute, rather than partial and provisional, proved irresistible
for many Western thinkers; the apparent clarity of such ideas
seduces the mind into dismissing change or transformation
as a trivial secondary effect of interactions between the “real’’
entities. Static concepts proved to be very effective intellectual
tranquilizers; they enabled many thinkers for several cen-
turies to continue at work, because they drugged the mind,
inhibiting excessive awareness of the uncomfortably perva-
sive fact of change by drawing the attention elsewhere.
However intellectually convenient for contemporary spe-
cialist purposes—such as logical analysis, physical theory, and
parts of biological theory (isolated unit genes, etc.)—this
drugging is philosophically shocking, for it has temporarily
blinded the human mind to one of the deepest intellectual
problems: the interplay of constancy and change, wherever
change is more than mere movement. Exact thinkers took up
the study of constancy, and the study of change was left to
those who accepted the immediacy of change, and these usu-
ally lacked even the desire for rational precision.
Heraclitus, with his followers in many fields, maintained
the obvious but intellectually embarrassing principle of the
primacy of change in the given world. But most systematic
thinkers did not care to admit that, drugged by tranquilizers,
they had been led into a philosophical ravine that must,
sooner or later, prove to be a dead end.
Some recognized this situation early, though they could
not estimate the importance which it possesses for us. Des-
48 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
cartes’ daring claim of clarity and simplicity made the danger
evident to a few thinkers in the eighteenth century. One of
the first was Diderot § who, in 1759, wrote of the ‘‘sophism of
the ephemeral,” ‘‘the sophism of a transient being who be-
lieves in the immortality of things.”
Thus it came about that during the period after 1600, when
the basis of rationalism was being laid, all the most powerful
ideas were static. They did not involve any element of funda-
mental transformation and could be defined without using
the conception of one-way temporal succession. The relation
of later than played no part in ideas such as an eternal God,
persisting atoms or other material entities, and the soul of
the subject.
Yet in all personal experience and most observations of
the world there is continual transformation from earlier to
characteristically distinct later states. Static concepts are ab-
stract, in the sense of neglecting a widespread, if not uni-
versal, feature of the given. Thus all the basic ideas of self-
conscious man around 1600-1700 were abstractions achieved
by emphasizing permanent entities and neglecting their
changing relationships. In this manner transformation was
apparently reduced to permanence.
This overemphasis on temporal invariance was inevitable
at that time and would have been less harmful had it not
been widely assumed that contemporary ideas and ideals were
final. Minor discoveries of course remained to be made, but
the main principles were correct—so it was assumed. And one
of the deepest unquestioned assumptions, all the more power-
ful because deeply rooted in the unconscious habits of the
Western mind, was this preference for static concepts. It was
only because men gradually became aware of this preference
and began to question it in many fields that the overemphasis
on the self-consciousness of the permanent subject was, as we
THE RiszE oF EuROPEAN SELF-AWARENESS 49
shall see, so swiftly corrected by the discovery of unconscious
processes.
We here reach one of the most important developments in
the history of the human mind, shown in the lower part of
Chart A and in Chart B. In Europe from around 1750 on-
ward a shift of emphasis is evident in philosophical and scien-
tific thought from static toward process concepts which is still
in progress today. Since this continuing movement is render-
ing the human intellect more powerful and extending its
scope into new realms I shall call it the great transformation.
Until now this change is one of emphasis only, for though it
has affected thought in nearly all realms no one has yet
shown how to construct a fundamental concept of “‘transfor-
mation” in which new entities or arrangements come into
being and disappear.
The transformation from 1750 onward found its best
known expression in the development of evolutionary ideas,
but it coincided closely with the progressive recognition of
unconscious mental processes. Darwin and Freud are at once
products and promoters of the transformation. By showing
that organic species and individual minds are fundamentally
modified by the processes in which they partake, these two
thinkers carried on the transformation of thought which had
already begun. Yet their historical roles are sharply con-
trasted: Darwin presumably knew he was extending the scope
of reason by helping to make it less static; it seems that Freud
did not realize that he was destroying rationalism by showing
that reason, though essential to understanding, did not con-
trol thought or behavior. But that is anticipating. Their main
explicit influence on the structure of our thinking was as
unconscious instruments of an intellectual transformation of
whose historical extent and philosophical significance neither
had an adequate conception. However, such awareness can-
50 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
not be expected of minds formed in the nineteenth century,
which lacked our own intense self-reflective thinking about
thinking, that is, about the historical sources and the logical
assumptions on which our thought is based.
As yet no general survey of the great transformation is
available and a brief summary must therefore be given here
to enable our story, which is one of its expressions, to be
understood. For convenience in presentation I shall separate
the inseparable and consider in turn four realms of scholar-
ship: history; philosophy and psychology; biology; and finally
physics, though so far it hardly merits mention here, except
as an absentee. The transformation in three of these realms
is shown in Chart B.
1. The prevalent interpretation of human history as a con-
tinuing sequence of changes set within the history of the
evolution of species, of the solar system, and of the earth,
rather than as the expression of a divine purpose which de-
termines its significance and may at moments override its his-
torical character, is first clearly evident in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. This historical outlook was strength-
ened during the seventeenth century by the recognition of
the cumulative character of the new scientific discoveries and
their irreversible effect on human society, by Descartes’ cos-
mogony, and in the last decades of the century by geological
discoveries. Between 1650 and 1750 scientists were becoming
interested in the development of the physical universe, and
there was a dim sense of the need for a valid concept of ‘“‘de-
velopment.” One of the first historians to be influenced by
this new attitude and to apply it in a philosophy of human
history was Vico, who gave in his New Science (1723, 1742) a
speculative picture of the earliest history of primitive man-
kind, though he introduced the idea of recurrence into the
subsequent history of civilized man. During the second half
of the century this historical attitude was matured by many
 Tue RisE oF EuROPEAN SELF-AWARENESS 51
thinkers: Voltaire, Lessing, Kant, Herder, Schiller, Gibbon,
and others, to become by the opening decades of the nine-
- teenth century the dominant assumption of most historians.
(The alternative interpretation, based on recurrent cycles
within an eternal divine dispensation, has still been used, for
example by Toynbee.)
2. In philosophy and psychology a parallel tendency is evi-
dent in the same period. The basically static outlook of Des-
cartes (1596—1650)—except in his cosmogony— and of Spinoza
(1632-1677) was modified to take more account of change
and development by Leibniz (1646-1716) and Kant (1724-
1804). It was finally discarded by Herder (1744-1803) and
later by Goethe, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and
many others, in favor of a primary developmental principle:
creativity, productive reason, organic growth, or will, either
unconscious or conscious. By the early nineteenth century
this developmental approach had become dominant both in
German systematic philosophy and in the general background
of English writing. A similar movement is particularly clear
in one branch of psychology: the increasing attention paid
after 1750 to the productive or imaginative aspects of human
thinking, e.g., from Herder (c. 1778) to Wertheimer (1945).
3. A major factor behind this almost general tendency was
the growing interest in biology, particularly in the growth
of organisms and their history. The relatively static ideas of
earlier biologists, for example that of persisting forms that
undergo cycles, which culminated in Linnaeus’ classification
of species (c. 1736), were gradually modified between 1740
and 1760 by the writings of Buffon, Maupertuis, Diderot, and
Wolff, in which evolutionary ideas appear clearly for the first
time. These were later extended by Herder, Monboddo, La-
marck, Erasmus Darwin, Welles, and Matthew, and finally
established by Charles Darwin and Wallace in the theory of
natural selection as the cause of the evolution of species.
52 Tue Unconscious BerorE FREUD
The history of the idea of organic evolution between 1740
and the Origin of Species (1859) has been treated by many
writers. But it has not, I believe, been adequately stressed that
this movement is one component, or expression, of a more
general change: a shift toward greater power and generality
in the structure of the basic concepts of the Western intellect,
potentially affecting all realms of thought. Basically this
change is from symmetrical relations (like equal to; if A is
equal to B, then it follows that B is equal to A), toward
asymmetrical relations (like greater than; if B is greater than
A, then A cannot be greater than B). Change, in the fuller
sense of transformation, implies that something apparently
changes into a later something else, and involves the asym-
metrical relation later than. The historical transformation of
thought is thus from ideas based primarily on symmetrical to
others based on asymmetrical relations. This is the key to many
of the intellectual problems which have concerned the West-
ern intellect from 1750 to 1950, and there still remains one
door which it must open.
For the search for adequate conceptions of one-way change
still continues, and its successful culmination would mark an
important step in the realization of the rational potentiali-
ties of the human brain-mind. This does not imply a change
in the rules of logic, but the application of logic to more
powerful classes of relations exploited in more extensive con-
cepts and principles. For the asymmetrical relations in ques-
tion include as a special degenerate case, and can be used -to
define, the corresponding symmetrical ones. Nearly static
systems can be treated as those in which the element of trans-
formation is negligible, but transformation is not, and cannot
be represented as a special case of static invariance. Thus the
great transformation is toward enlarged intellectual scope.
The simultaneity and close connections between these three
movements in history, philosophy, and biology might suggest
THE RIsE OF EuROPEAN SELF-AWARENESS 53
that they were aspects of a single trend producing a simul-
taneous effect in all realms of thought. But this is not the case,
at least so far. The branch of thought which has been more
influential in molding thought than any other since Coper-
nicus, Kepler, and Galileo—mathematical physics—has here
been strangely stubborn. In physics, where the quantitative
correlation of thought and fact has been taken as the over-
riding criterion, it seems that the Zeitgeist is not omnipotent.
One must welcome this resistance to uniformity, even if it
raises interesting unsolved problems, indeed because it does.
4. Fundamental physical theory is a laggard in respect to
the two-hundred-year-old transformation in other fields. For
what are still held to be good reasons physical theory has
(until very recently) preferred to regard time invariants, such
as mass, energy, or mass-energy, and stable particles, as “‘obvi-
ously” primary, and to admit one-way processes only in the
realm, presumably secondary, of statistical aggregates moving
toward equilibrium. (Einstein, in his two theories of rela-
tivity, sought to treat temporal relations as similar to spatial.)
But the discovery of increasing numbers of unstable entities
which behave as if they were “elementary particles” is forc-
ing a reconsideration of the adequacy of certain principles of
invariance and symmetry, and this may lead to a more general
physics of one-way processes. It is conceivable that the great
transformation of thought will find its conclusion and justifi-
cation in a physical theory of one-way transformations.
A consideration of these four realms reinforces the obser-
vation already made: that no clear fundamental idea of the
essential character of transformation.has yet been formulated
in any branch of knowledge. No general rule is known which
tells us when and how new entities or arrangements appear
or disappear. In this respect the world of transformation, after
three and a half centuries of exact science, still lies beyond
our rational understanding.
54 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
Striking facts may remain almost unnoticed for generation
after generation, if only the mind has unconsciously become
accustomed to them. This strange antithesis cries for atten-
tion: static ideas in a world of process! Yet no fundamental
thinker has yet thought fit to tackle the problem of transfor-
mation; few have even seen the problem clearly. But at a less
fundamental level it was, as we have seen, precisely this an-
tithesis that initiated the transformation around 1750: the
contrast of observed processes to the static abstractions of the
mathematics and physics of the period. At that time renewed
attention to personal experience, to direct observations in
many fields, and to the unchallengeable geological, archeo-
logical, and other records of the human and biological past,
led many thinkers to the conclusion that change is a primary
and pervasive feature of the world, and that the current
mathematical and physical conceptions were idealized sim-
plifying abstractions, powerful within their proper realms,
but nonetheless partial and damaging since they drew atten-
tion away from the immediate and almost universal fact of
change. This recognition is evident in many writers around
1750: Buffon, Diderot, Rousseau, and Hamann illustrate it
in different contexts. Certainly no one school can claim a
monopoly of this potentially universal appreciation, which
was the prime source of the transformation.
A reasonably balanced and many-sided recognition of the
inescapable immediacy of change, in contrast to the imposing
static abstractions of exact reason, was first expressed by
Herder (c. 1780). Nearly two centuries have passed, yet his
brilliant though vague and emotional intuitions have not yet
been replaced by an objective developmental doctrine ap-
plicable in all realms. Both Marx and Freud seemed to be
aiming at this, each in his own sphere, but neither possessed
an adequate understanding of the fundamental processes with
which he was concerned, and each had to employ static ab-
TuE RIsE OF EuROPEAN SELF-AWARENESS 55
stractions which appear unsatisfactory today: separate, sup-
posedly unchanging, economic classes; and persisting entities
or regions (Superego, Ego, and Id) into which the mind is
assumed to be divisible.
The transformation which I have here outlined was prob-
ably the most important factor leading European thinkers
after 1800 to correct the overemphasis on consciousness. For
the split of experience into subject and object had only suited
the mind because both are relatively permanent, and both can
be directly perceived as objects of perception or introspection,
while the actual process of experiencing and of acquiring
knowledge is transitory, obscure, and intangible. This might
not have been so if man had possessed an organ which gave
him direct perceptive awareness of the “body-mind”’ rela-
tions, that is, of the actual processes, and not merely the re-
sults, of perception, cognition, selection, judgment, and so on.
But as things are, in the human brain’s search for stable aspects
of experience, the split into experiencing subject and external
object was appropriate and in some sense unavoidable as a
first step.
Any advance from this dualism was difficult until the trans-
formation had begun to prepare the way. If change is nearly
universal, and subject and object are not really permanent
but merely changing components of a wider system itself
undergoing continual transformations, if all cognition rests
on interactions between subject and object—which change
them—then it is clear that the next step should not be to
isolate more powerful invariants, but to come to grips with
the interactions viewed as a changing pattern of relations in
the complete system: changing subject plus changing object,
for while interacting both are subject to change.
The Cartesian split is inescapable while the demand ts made
for static concepts, unconsciously or consciously. On that
basis static thought cannot improve on Descartes, the “body-
56 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
mind relation” having remained almost as obscure in 1959
as it was in 1659, for lack of a clear concept of transformation.
But once change is accepted as pervasive the problem can be
restated, and new vistas may be opened to empirical and
theoretical investigation. The subject of study becomes a
one-way sequence of transformations, with some continuity
of pattern but no invariant material identity (since even
atoms come and go) and no invariant subjective identity
(since growth, experience, and decline affect awareness irre-
versibly). When science has identified, perhaps many decades
hence, the structural changes in the experiencing subject
and the perceived object which correspond to the processes
of experiencing, observing, and thinking, it is likely that the
old problems of the body-mind relation will appear in a new
light.
That culmination may lie far ahead. Certainly the first
tentative efforts to correct the Cartesian assumptions began
far in the past, even before the general transformation began
around 1750. This was possible because some monistic re-
ligious thinkers did not take the static scientific concepts of
the seventeenth century as seriously as others. For example,
Christian theologians were among the first—after Descartes—
to make explicit suggestions regarding the existence of what
we now call unconscious mental processes.
But these early speculations, made within a religious con-
text, had little influence. It is not the first expression or the
earliest discovery of an idea within a particular community
that counts, but the person who does it in a special historical
context. ‘Ten, perhaps a hundred, discoveries are made for
every one which the community is ready to recognize. Orig-
inality is not uncommon and the community, as expressed
through its corporate instruments, is always blind to the color
of what is new. The array of early speculators, taken one by
one, fascinating as they are, are only important for our story
THE RisE OF EuROPEAN SELF-AWARENESS 57
because very slowly, after two centuries, their cumulative
efforts convinced the post-Cartesian dualists that their dichot-
omy of res cogitans and res extensa was of no further use
in promoting clarity, the interactions which this dualism
neglected having become more important than their apparent
separation.
Indeed, looking back on the story, the most striking fea-
tures of the historical correction of the Cartesian error are
the. swiftness with which it began in a few minds, and the
slowness with which it reached the schools and the profes-
sions. Insights may be impulsive, but teaching must be con-
servative.
Saal Z
aa ee
co
ss ba
 IV

The Discovery
of the Unconscious

SELF-CONSCIOUS MAN thinks he thinks. This has

long been recognized to be an error, for the conscious sub-
ject who thinks he thinks is not the same as the organ which
does the thinking. The conscious person is one component
only, a series of transitory aspects, of the thinking person.
This misinterpretation led to extraordinary achievements
and strange embarrassments. To the first because it gave the
individual a sense of his independence, power, and responsi-
bility; nothing was beyond him to learn; his conscious mind
was primary and free, though perhaps lent to him by God. To
the second because, as we have seen, this power and freedom
of the conscious mind is partly illusory, the person being
more than his immediate awareness.
There have probably been individuals in every culture who
knew that factors of which we are not directly aware influ-
59
60 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD

ence thought and behavior. As I have suggested, this recog-

nition must have been widespread, for example in China
where a more balanced and unified view of mind than that
of Cartesian Europe was prevalent in some periods. And cer-
tainly in ancient Greece, in Rome, and through the centuries
of the Middle Ages many thinkers, some of great influence,
avoided the self-centered mistake of treating the awareness
of the individual as primary in the realm either of value or of
philosophical thought. For them the direct experiences of the
person were subordinate to other principles, divine or ma-
terial, that in some degree controlled the fate of the individ-
ual and influenced his awareness. This was indeed the almost
universal assumption, explicit or concealed, until self-con-
scious Europeans began to treat mind as an autonomous
realm of being, a thing following its own laws.
No thinker ever imagined that “body” and ‘“‘mind’’—inso-
far as the terms are valid—are without apparent interactions.
We must leave it to the Cartesian scholars, as Descartes did,
to explain what it meant to postulate, as one of the first prod-
ucts of clear thinking, two independent realms which are
none the less so intimately interdependent. The lesson is that
the more brilliant the light cast on two neighboring realms,
the more profound the obscurity into which their inter-
actions are thrown.
I use the term “discovery of the unconscious” not in the
sense of a scientific discovery supported by systematic tests,
but of a new inference, the bringing to light of what was
previously unknown in a particular culture. The discovery
of the unconscious was the spreading out of the intellectual
illumination that Descartes had focused too sharply. This
discovery was unnecessary before him; it was the prestige of
Cartesian ideas that created the “problem of the uncon-
scious.”
During the late seventeenth century three main attitudes
THE Discovery OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 61

dominated European philosophical thought, corresponding

to three interpretations of the nature of existence. Material-
ism treated physical bodies and their motions as the primary
reality; idealism took it to be spirit or mind; while Cartesian
dualism postulated two independent realms: the mental res
cogitans and the material res extensa. For the first two schools
there was no difficulty in recognizing unconscious mentality,
though under other names. To the materialists all mentality
was physiological, and the existence of unconscious physio-
logical processes, similar to and influencing thought, was an
immediate consequence of the fact that our direct awareness
of the processes in our bodies is restricted. And to the ideal-
ists all natural processes were the expression of a universal
mind or world spirit of which the human individual has no
direct knowledge, though it shares, in some degree, the char-
acteristics of human mentality. Thus for the idealists also
there was no problem; the unconscious mind of the individual
was not in any way surprising; it was merely a part of the
universal mind to which the individual awareness enjoyed
no direct access. But to the third, Cartesian, school the ad-
mission of the existence of unconscious mental processes pre-
sented an acute philosophical challenge, for it demanded the
discarding of the original conception of the dualism, as one
of two independent realms, matter in motion and mind neces-
sarily aware. For those who were loyal to Descartes, all that
was not conscious in man was material and physiological, and
therefore not mental.
If the three schools had enjoyed equal authority there
would have been no intellectual difficulty or historical drama
in the recognition of the unconscious, for the monists would
have achieved it without any disturbance, as indeed several
did. But no monism, whether mystical, religious, or scientific,
has yet provided a sufficiently lucid and stable basis for the
progressive clarification of thought covering both realms. As
62 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
we have seen, the cerebral preference for static concepts made
dualism or pluralism necessary as a first step, if the complexity
of experience is to be reflected. Thus the Cartesian dualism
corresponded to a deep tendency in the human mind; what
it did was to express that tendency for the first time in
systematic form. Neither the Christian idealistic nor the scien-
tific physiological monists could offer a satisfying alternative
to the dualism, and from that time onward behind the dis-
putes of the academies Europeans did most of their thinking
in terms of the split. We still use the dualistic terms, though
the separation has long been exposed as misleading.
Thus the situation displayed an unfortunate paradox: most
thinking was based on error which ultimately would impede
advance, but the two schools which were readiest to recognize
the unconscious mind, and did in fact do so, could not con-
tribute greatly to the advance, because their monisms were
both relatively impotent: the idealists could not link their uni-
versal mind with physical phenomena, and physiologists were
too ignorant (as they still are today) to know how to build the
bridge from the other side by showing how their electrically
pulsating cerebral tissues simulate mentality. The two schools
for which there was in principle no difficulty could contribute
nothing to the solution of a problem which thus became the
embarrassing responsibility of the third: to break down the
separation of the two realms, starting with a broader inter-
pretation of mentality.
The issue can be interpreted as one of definition: no school
knew how to define “mentality” so that understanding could
best advance. The idealists postulated mind as primary, but
did not understand it; the materialists had a reasonably good
definition of matter, but could not use it to define mind; and
the dualists, while claiming mind as one basic concept in a
dualistic theory, continually shifted their ground in trying to
explain what was meant by it. “Unconscious mental proc-
THE DiscovERY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 63
esses’’ sounds impressive, particularly if a clear meaning is
given to the term “‘unconscious,” which may not be too diffi-
cult. But what does “mental’’ mean? It is here that the prob-
lem lies. No one yet knows how properly to define “mental,”
perhaps because this can only be done within a valid monism.
All that we know is that there are other processes or factors,
in some respects so similar to conscious mentality that they
can with justification also be called mental, which must be
taken into account in understanding our minds and our be-
havior. The term “unconscious mental processes” is the
enunciation of a program of research: to discover the true
structure and function of mentality in terms of a single doc-
trine replacing the dualism which has broken down.
The discovery of the unconscious by self-conscious man
occupied some two centuries, roughly from 1700 to 1900. As
we Shall see in the next chapters, the idea of unconscious
mental processes was, in many of its aspects, conceivable
around 1700, topical around 1800, and became effective
around rgoo, thanks to the imaginative efforts of a large
number of individuals of varied interests in many lands.
Opinions may differ regarding the relative importance of
their thought and the extent to which they influenced each
other. But research proves that more than fifty individuals
in Germany, England, and France alone, whose works are
easily accessible, contributed during the two hundred years
from 1680 to 1880 to the creation of a steadily developing
climate of thought regarding the unconscious mind, and that
many of them made systematic introspective studies, labora-
tory experiments, and even clinical applications of the new
idea. During these two centuries the existence of the uncon-
scious mind was being established; the discovery of its struc-
ture only began in the twentieth century.
Several factors forced this development in thought and
practice, but the most important, underlying all the others,
64 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
was the recognition—which even Descartes could not avoid—
that the facts do not support the assumption of the autonomy
of consciousness. In varying degrees representatives of nearly
all fields—religious, literary, philosophical, and scientific—
contributed to the growth of the idea of the unconscious
because it is an unavoidable inference from experience. No
one tradition enjoys a monopoly of fertile ideas; even the
exact sciences continually receive important suggestions from
the varied background of the cultural tradition. It was the
broad tradition of thought, as much as newly discovered facts,
that gradually forced the scientific specialists to be more re-
ceptive to the idea of the unconscious mind.
This pervasive pressure of old and new facts was strength-
ened by the general transformation of thought from 1750
onward, but it was expressed through certain channels which
directly encouraged speculations regarding the unconscious
mind:
1. The steady development of interest in the experiences
of the individual, evident from the eleventh century onward,
leading to two contrasted approaches: (a) the romantic and
transcendental philosophies toward the end of the eighteenth
century, and the German Naturphilosophie of 1800-1830;
and (b) the establishment of a science of the psychology of
the individual using scientific methods, from about 1800
onward.
2. The encouragement given by biological (genetic, de-
velopmental, and evolutionary) ideas to greater emphasis on
vitality, organic tendencies, and will, as a background to the
reasoning intellect.
3. Ihe impact of ideas from other, mainly Eastern, tradi-
tions which placed greater emphasis on feeling and emotion
and had never attempted to separate the conscious mind
from other phenomena in the radical manner of the Carte-
sians. Ideas from India and China, in particular, began
THE DiscOvERY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 65
noticeably to influence European thinking during the eight-
eenth century.
These related influences together created an irresistible
pressure: the romantics needed the unconscious as a link with
universal powers, the psychologists as a continuity behind the
transient moments of awareness, the biologists provided the
vital background of organic will and unconscious motive, and
Eastern thought the sense of a pervasive unity of which the
individual was a part.
Post-Cartesian speculations regarding unconscious men-
tality had begun before 1700, but from 1750 onward these
combined influences began to produce a fresh orientation
of thought. We are here mainly concerned with systematic
verbal formulations, and in this respect the German lan-
guage contribution was the most important. Those who trust
national generalizations may consider that this was due to the
fact that many German thinkers at that time were par excel-
lence theorizers, concerned with the universal application of
a very few ideas. Or possibly to a German Protestant tendency
toward personal culture and an Jnnerlichkett involving an
introspective isolation of the individual. This was in contrast
to the French complementary emphasis on a civilized society
and to the English more empirical, practical, and political
tradition. Whether valid or not these interpretations are not
fundamental, for no philosophy of history tells us either when
and why such national characteristics developed, or how per-
manent they are.
However that may be, the history of the rise of self-con-
scious man and of the discovery of the unconscious after
Descartes shows a dominant German contribution in the
realm of systematic ideas, English support on the empirical
side, and French verbal caution combined with intuitive
subtlety. The German language tradition certainly displays
most evidence both of an occasional intellectual obsession
66 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD

with the self-awareness of the individual, and later of a need

to correct this by substituting, not a more balanced personal
attitude, but a better theory of the mind. The most repre-
sentative and influential figures in the expression of the dis-
covery of the unconscious in explicit formulations were
German-speaking. But we must not forget the immeasurable
influence of Shakespeare and Rousseau; the fertile interactions
of varied traditions, within and outside Europe; and the part
played by thinkers in smaller communities.
One generalization is safe: the French, under the combined
influence of Catholicism and of Descartes, played a relatively
smal] role in the explicit development of the idea of the un-
conscious mind, compared with either the German or the
English. The English contribution is less known, except to
specialists, but it was early and of great importance. On the
other hand, in spite of one or two notable names and the great
influence of French psychiatry, with its interest in hypnotism
and hysteria from Mesmer to Charcot, French minds contrib-
uted relatively little to theoretical understanding of the proc-
esses involved.
In language the true units of meaning may be phrases
rather than single words, and some communities may have a
weakness, and others a dislike, for inventing new words. None-
theless the first usage of a word in any language marks a sig-
nificant moment in the development of religious, philosoph-
ical, or scientific ideas. The available surveys suggest that
Unbewusstsein and bewusstlos (in meanings close to those
now current) were first used by E. Platner in 1776, and these
or similar terms were made popular by Goethe, Schiller, and
Schelling between 1780 and 1820. The word “unconscious”
as an adjective (with the same meaning) appears in English
in 1751, and more frequently after 1800, for example, in the
writings of Wordsworth and Coleridge. By 1850 both adjec-
tive and noun were extensively used in Germany, and were
moderately common in England.
THE DiscovERY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 67
But in France inconscient, as adjective or noun, was prob-
ably not used until the 1850's, and then mainly in translating
the German terms. Amiel, who read German extensively,
speaks of la vie inconsciente (in relation to man) around
1860, and earlier usages must have been few. A French dic-
tionary published in 1862 includes inconscient as ‘‘very rarely
used,” and the conservative Dictionnaire de l’ Académie Fran-
¢aise only admitted the word in 1878. French was in this
respect half a century behind both German and English.
If we turn to consider the main sequence of European
thought as represented in its leading thinkers we find that in
the post-Cartesian period increasing attention was paid to
different aspects of unconscious mental processes, roughly in
the following sequence:
memory;
perception;
ideas;
instinct, vitality, will, imagination;
dreams, pathology;
therapeutic applications.
Unconscious memory, perception, and ideas were con-
sidered very early, and the speculation regarding therapeutic
applications came rather late. But there are exceptions to
this general sequence. All that it is safe to conclude is that
between 1680 and 1880 a large number of thinkers, some of
them with little apparent influence, considered one or more
of the following aspects of unconscious mental processes:
memory, and its pathology;
perception, images, ideas;
reasoning, inference;
selection, judgment, diagnosis;
imagination, invention, creation, inspiration;
ecstasies, premonitions, visions;
vital impulses, volition, motive, interest, sympathy, aver-
sion, falling in love;
68 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD

conflict, inhibition, dissociation, hysteria, obsession, per-

versions;
mental therapeutics for physical and mental pathology;
dreams, hallucinations, somnambulism, suggestion, hypno-
tism;
alcohol, drugs. diseases;
collective myths, religions;
personal and social rationalizations.
No one considered all known aspects in a scientific and
comprehensive manner, Freud neglected one of the most im-
portant, had nothing fresh to say about it, and seems only
to have occasionally mentioned it in passing: the general
character of the unconscious mental processes which underlie
the appearance of novelty in all creation, imagination, and
invention. On this primary characteristic of unconscious proc-
esses he remained almost silent.
As we shall see, each of these aspects was considered by
several writers before 1850, a number of them before 1750. If
an idea of this depth and revolutionary significance was to
become socially effective by, say, 1920, it is not surprising to
find that many aspects of it were conceivable around 1700
and topical by 1800. Allowing for human conservatism in re-
lation to everything that lies deep, twenty decades or eight
generations is not long for the idea of the unconscious to
have attained partial maturity and produced social changes.
It has been argued by Lovejoy ® that the Western ‘‘revolt
from psychophysical dualism” and the “dethronement of
Descartes” took place mainly during the present century, be-
tween 1900 and 1930. This may be true of academic thought
in a narrow context, but it implies too restricted a view of
the history and interactions of ideas. We have seen that the
revolt began at once, in the same century as Descartes, but
that it has developed slowly for lack of any clear monistic
ideas fit to be substituted. As I have said, within this varied
THE DiscovERY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 69
movement and underlying all its special expressions lay one
primary factor: the facts. But this must be seen in a broad
context. It was the facts, not merely as observed, but also as
experienced, and the basis of the human response to them
was not merely the intellectual impulse to recognize a ra-
tional order in phenomena, but this impulse serving as an
instrument to assist man, first in recognizing the’ potentiali-
ties of his own nature, and secondly in realizing them. Thus
the fundamental agent, the ultimate driving force, behind
the discovery of the unconscious was that element of surplus
vitality, or refusal to be content with life as it is, which had
the power to force self-conscious man to transcend his image
of himself, to become richer as a person by recognizing the
limitations of his current idea of himself. The movement
was more than a phase in intellectual history, it was a step
toward a more mature human life; not a return to a primi-
tive unity, but a movement aiming at a differentiated order-
ing of life sustained by a more complete and objective knowl-
edge of nature and human nature. Historically, as these three
centuries moved through their course, what was developing
seemed to be Rousseau plus Newton, emotional unreason
plus quantitative science. We may hope that it can be better
understood as a transition through the disharmonies of Rous-
seau, Newton, and Freud, toward a better adapted mode of
thinking and of spontaneity which lacks, as yet, a representa-
tive name—possibly a Goethe less self-oriented and supported
by more comprehensive and cautious sciences of nature and
man, an enriched humanism.
The core of the discovery certainly lay where the transi-
tional disease of rationalistic
self-consciousness accompanied
by reverence for human creativity was most intense: in Ger-
many. It is in the Romantic movement there, influenced by
Shakespeare and Rousseau, that we find the earliest focus of
the new idea, from which all its special expressions flow: the
70 Tue Unconscious BEForE FREUD
valid principle that in the unconscious mind lies the contact
of the individual with the universal powers of nature. The
springs of human nature lie in the unconscious, for it links
the individual with the universal, or at least the organic. This
is true, whether it is expressed as the union of the soul with
the divine, or as the realm which links the moments of
human awareness with the background of organic processes
within which they emerge. But the fascination of the idea arises
because it is felt to be the source of power, the home of the
élan which moves us, the active principle which leads us to
feel, to imagine, to judge, to think, and to act. This is more
than mechanics, or dynamics, or chance; it is a principle of
biological surplus vigor, of potential order or organization
continually coming into being as far as clash permits.
It is therefore not surprising that we find a complementary
tendency in Europeans during the period of self-conscious
man, indeed at the very moment when self-awareness was
being widely acclaimed as primary in theory and value, lead-
ing them to pay increased attention to what appear to ordi-
nary waking consciousness as less normal or pathological
states. From the eighteenth century onward growing interest
was shown not only in the normal rhythms of consciousness
(sleep, dreams, reveries, etc.), but also in unusual or patho-
logical states (fainting, ecstasy, hypnosis, hallucinations, dis-
sociation, drugged conditions, epilepsy, forgetfulness, etc.)
and in processes underlying ordinary thought (imagination,
judgment, selection, diagnosis, interest, sympathy, etc.).
It seemed to self-conscious man that many of these phe-
nomena lay in a realm of the “irrational” challenging that of
the “rational” where he believed himself to be at home. This
was a mistake, based on his misunderstanding and exaggera-
tion of the role of “reason,” as can be seen at many levels of
analysis. First, there are no separable realms: all sustained
mental processes, including those into which awareness enters
THE Discovery OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 71
temporarily, are primarily unconscious, and are largely guided
by unconscious factors. Second, there is no reason to regard
unconscious processes as intrinsically irrational (in the sense
of contrary or antagonistic to rational analysis or behavior),
merely because we do not yet understand the organization
and operation of the mind, or because they may acquire a
pathological disorder. This sense of an antagonism between
conscious reason and unconscious mental processes arises only
in the dissociated mind. It is certainly obvious enough, thanks
to Freud, that unconscious factors can (e.g., where there is
repression, dissociation, and deformation) lead to behavior
contrary to reason, but that is no ground for misrepresenting
the operations of the unconscious imagination and judgment
as always unreasonable, for they provide the basis for rational
thought. It is reason which must grow more comprehensive
so that it can understand, assist, and fuse with—though it
will never replace—the ordering processes of the unconscious.
The discovery of the unconscious is the recognition of a
Goethean order, as much as of a Freudian disorder, in the
depths of the mind.
But for two centuries, say from 1750 to 1950, many ra-
tionalists tended to regard the unconscious as the realm of
irrational forces threatening the social and intellectual order
which the rational consciousness, they imagined, had built up
over generations. Day was challenged by Night, the enlight-
enment of reason by the tempests and conflicts of intuition
and instinct, the soul of man by a dark and frightening, but
desperately attractive, inner spirit of teniptation and sur-
render, ready to take over and bring the peace of self-
forgetfulness. Night, dream, self-annihilation in the abysses of
sensuality, escape from the pretenses of the social and intel-
lectual life to a sincere and spontaneous acceptance of the
depths. But this attraction of the dark was merely the reverse
side of the pretense that man had already discovered the
72 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
light: the ideals and ideas, Platonic or Christian, religious
or rational, appropriate to his nature. For others who saw
deeper the unconscious was not a realm merely of chaos, con-
flict, and destructive passions, but the source also of all the
forms of order created by the human imagination since man’s
first and most extraordinary formative achievement: the de-
velopment of language. Thus we can, to some extent at least,
see in each of the contrasted concepts of the unconscious the
expression of a corresponding type of human temperament:

The Unconscious Mind Was Interpreted

By: As:
Mystics The link with God
Christian Platonists A divine, universal, plastic
principle
Romantics The link between the in-
dividual and_ universal
powers
Early Rationalists A factor operating mainly in
memory, perception, and
ideas
Post-Romantic Thinkers Organic vitality, expressed in
will, imagination, and crea-
tion
Dissociated “‘Self-Conscious Night: the realm of violence
Man”
Physical Scientists The consequence of physio-
logical factors not yet un-
derstood
Monistic Thinkers The prime mover and source
of all order and novelty in
thought and action
THE DiIscovVERY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 72
Freud (‘‘Subconscious’’) Mainly inhibited memories
ruled by the pleasure prin-
ciple, in a state of deforma-
tion and conflict, accessible
only through special tech-
niques; also forgotten
memories and inaccessible
levels
Jung The prerational realm of col-
lective myth and religious
symbolisms

Yet to separate too sharply these contrasted conceptions is

to misunderstand them. The mystic believes in an unknown
God, the thinker and scientist in an unknown order; it is
hard to say which surpasses the other in nonrational devo-
tion. But while the mystic retreats, the scientist goes out to
explore. To interpret the unconscious mind as the link with
God is to invite a surrender to ignorance, unless it is coupied
with curiosity about things as they are. And we shall see that
the first European (known to me) who, after Descartes, gave
an interesting sketch of some of the activities of the uncon-
scious mind in health was, most appropriately, a Christian
monist interested in science.
The advance from the naive overemphasis of conscious-
ness toward a balanced scientific understanding of the un-
conscious, perhaps still some generations ahead, has been
so far mainly the result, first of speculative philosophical
thought, and later of the clinical and laboratory study of
personality and behavior, the study of the physiology of the
central nervous system and brain having as yet contributed
relatively little. Our detailed understanding of the over-all
organization of the processes of the central nervous system and
14, Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
of the mode of operation of the (animal or human) brain as
a selecting, recording, ordering, and controlling organ has
not advanced greatly in the last few decades, relative to its
importance. Thus unless a further physiological clarification
is achieved soon, the twenty-first century may be opening
before the neurophysiology of the brain and the psychology
of the mind are replaced by a single doctrine of the coordi-
nated structure and processes of the human organ of thought.
However, the application of the growing understanding of
unconscious mental processes to human therapy began many
decades ago and has achieved much, though hindered by the
still partial character of theoretical knowledge. The ancients
used drugs and rituals to cure mental disease, but the idea of
applying the developing objective knowledge of unconscious
processes to provide techniques for treating pathological men-
tal conditions first appeared around the end of the eighteenth
century, and the first systematic professional efforts to base
curative procedures on theories of the structure of unconscious
mental processes were made a hundred years later, in the last
decades of the nineteenth century. Measured against the im-
portance of such knowledge and techniques, the fifty years and
more which have passed since these attempts began, and the
high hopes placed on them, it is unfortunate that no self-im-
proving psychological methods of permanently curing grave
mental conditions have yet been established. Freud did not re-
gard the benefits of psychoanalysis to the neurotic individual
or even to the analyzed analyst as normally complete or perma-
nent, and his own techniques have not yet led to important
discoveries improving and extending them. His contribution,
as far as one can judge twenty years after his death, has been
more to social, professional, and parental understanding than
to wholly satisfactory techniques for therapy. Certainly theo-
retical insight was his chief personal concern. He was as
optimistic regarding the possibility of discovering the laws of
THE DISCOVERY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 75
the psyche as he was pessimistic regarding the prospect of
that moral improvement which he regarded as the desidera-
tum in the individual and in society. Here the contrast pro-
vided by the physical approach is striking. Since 1920
important cumulative advances have been made in the phys-
ical treatment of certain psychoses, though they have not been
based on any theoretical understanding, physiological or
psychological, of the reasons for their success.
Thus the century has so far achieved partial understand-
ing of the mind, in the form mainly of a dramatized allegory
—the Freudian doctrine with its recent variants—and has
made widely available a miscellaneous array of methods of
treatment, from confessional and analysis to drugs and shock.
If the whole field of the understanding and treatment of the
human thinking organ is taken into account there have been
minor but definite advances in nearly every decade since
1900. Yet the situation remains confused. There is no uniting
humane philosophy, no comprehensive scientific theory, no
satisfying orderin what is known. And a great deal is still
unknown.
This situation might be an unavoidable consequence of the
fact that here science confronts the secrets of the subject—a
part of the human mind seeking to understand the whole—
and this task might conceivably lie beyond the scope of the
self-checking interplay of theory and observation which we
call science. But there is no compelling reason yet to assume
this, though it may be necessary for science to change its
concepts and to broaden its methods.
Having regard to the achievements of the various scientific
methods, it is more probable that the present theoretical con-
fusion and therapeutic uncertainty (in some realms) is transi-
tory, the existence of the unconscious mind having become
clear, but its basic structure and mode of operation being still
obscure. This distinction is sometimes forgotten. The physi-
76 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
cists discovered the nucleus of the atom fifty years ago and
they have recently learned how to exploit its internal energy.
But they do not yet understand the laws of its structure. The
recognition of the existence of a class of phenomena is dif-
ferent from the identification of the laws they obey. Yet to
name a thing is an important step, for it suggests the task of
finding an appropriate definition, and that leads in turn to
the attempt to discover its characteristic form of order, its
way of working.
The Discoverers:
Before 1730

As MarGETTs © HAS SAID, “Almost since the

dawn of civilization man has had an inkling of understanding
that mind activity outside of our waking consciousness does
exist.” This could be proved by citations from the Indian
Upanishads, from ancient Egypt and Greece, and, I believe,
from many other civilizations. All the greatest human docu-
ments, such as the Old and New Testaments and the writings
of Plato, Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, reveal this under-
standing.
In the present and subsequent chapters we salute some of
the more accessible writers in our own culture who have
shown this awareness. But we should not forget that there
must have been a vastly greater number who shared this real-
ization without recording their thoughts. Moreover we are
not concerned with “‘first’’ expressions of any idea—that often
ch
78 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
has no clear meaning and cannot be determined—but only
with early examples, mainly in post-Cartesian Europe.
One of the attractions of this survey is that it is necessary
to neglect most of the distinctions between one thinker and
another which are indispensable for other scholarly purposes,
and to pass freely from mystic to scientist, from poet to philos-
opher, and even from dualist to monist, in tracing a nearly
universal developing awareness. We are here following a com-
plex idea in course of growth through decades and centuries.
The quotations * are designed to illustrate this, and must not
be taken to represent adequately their author’s point of view.
They are torn from context and should, as far as possible, be
given the meanings which they had for their author.
The chief lesson of this study lies in the fact that it can
never be complete. A few hours of additional search and an-
other forgotten figure comes to light who had his own inkling
of an understanding of our idea. In other peoples and lan-
guages there are certainly many further examples bearing on
our theme. For there are as many different approaches to it as
there are kinds of human temperament.
Every rule must be broken and though our story begins
after 1637 it cannot be understood without a few reminders
of what had already been thought in earlier times.
Those who are in earnest in the search for reliable knowl-
edge even if the race has to wait long for it, will appreciate why
I choose the first experimental physiologist to open the se-
quence of discoverers:
Galen (c. A.D. 130-200), Greek physician and founder of
experimental physiology, is credited with the recognition that
we make unconscious inferences from perceptions. This initi-
ates the story appropriately, since the conception of un-
conscious mental processes was itself born as an unconscious
inference from external or internal perceptions, and experi-
* For sources of quotations in Chapters V-VIII see References at end of book.
Tue Discoverers: BEFORE 1730 79
mental physiology has still to make a decisive contribution to
our theme.
It is equally fitting to pass at once to a Neoplatonic thinker:
Plotinus (c. 204-270), a philosopher who spent the last
thirty years of his life in Rome. He suggested that we only
become aware of the processes of thought when we pay atten-
tion to them:

[Just as a mirror correctly placed provides an image, but when

displaced fails to reflect the continuing process] so when the
analogous feature [mirror] is present in the soul, wherein the
images of reflection and of the mind are mirrored, these latter
are seen and the higher recognition is present that the mind
and soul are active. But when this [the mirror in us] is broken, on
account of the disturbed harmony of the organism, then the mind
and soul think without the mirror image, and then thought is
present without an inner image of itself.

Feelings can be present without awareness of them.

The absence of a conscious perception is no proof of the absence

of mental activity.

St. Augustine (354-430), the great Christian philosopher,

was deeply impressed, as Plato had been, by the power of
memory.

Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great. O my God, a

spreading limitless room within me. Who can reach its uttermost
depth? Yet it is a faculty of soul and belongs to my nature. In fact
I cannot totally grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large
enough to contain itself: but where can that part of it be which it
does not contain? Is it outside itself and not within? How can it not
contain itself? As this question struck me, I was overcome with
wonder and almost stupor. Here are men going afar to marvel at
the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long
80 THe Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the movements of
the stars, yet leaving themselves unnoticed . . .

St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) developed a systematic

theory of the mind, stressing in particular the body-mind
unity, and the importance of unconscious features:

I do not observe my soul apart from its acts. There are thus proc-
esses in the soul of which we are not immediately aware.

It was an essential feature of the mystical tradition that

the most important insights are not gained by the deliberate
pursuit of knowledge, but by what Keats called the “negative
capability,” or ability to make oneself empty and to receive.
Hence a saying attributed to Dionysius Areopagiticus (? c.
A.D. 50):

The most godly knowledge of God is that which is known by

unknowing.

This feature of mystical thought runs through the centuries

to Jakob Boehme, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche,
and contributed much to the background of our story. Thus
Meister Eckhart (?-1327), the German mystical philosopher,
says:

A really perfect person will be so dead to self, so lost in God, so

given over to the will of God, that his whole happiness consists
in being unconscious of self and its concerns, and being conscious
instead of God.

Writing of the thirteenth century Vyvyan " has suggested,

with Le Roman de la Rose in mind, that “‘a psychoanalytical
technique was then being used [in medieval poetry] for
THE DiIscovERERS: BEFORE 1730 81
artistic creation as consciously as the psychiatrist uses one
today for the healing of a neurosis.”” Here Vyvyan is referring
to the dual role of figures in a story: as persons in their own
right and as projections of largely unconscious aspects of a
central figure.
This early awareness was not restricted to general aspects
of the unconscious; it extended even to the psychopathology
of everyday life, as, for example, in the tricks of memory.
Dante (1265-1321) knew that shameful memories are often
forgotten. In the Purgatorio Dante and Beatrice are in con-
versation:

Therefore I answered: “I remember not

That ever I estranged myself from thee
Nor there-in does my conscience bring remorse.”
“If now thou hast no memory thereof,”
Smiling she answered me, ‘Recall to mind
How thou of Lethe e’en this day didst drink.
As from the smoke the fire may be inferred,
So thy forgetfulness doth clearly prove,
Fault in thy will, that otherwhere was bent.”

Paracelsus (1493-1541), Swiss physician, represents a

transition between the mystical and the scientific attitudes.
Many of his ideas imply that there are influences, at once
biological and spiritual, guiding man of which he is seldom
aware. C. G. Jung says, “Of all Paracelsus’ intuitions the
Aquaster comes nearest to the modern conception of the
Unconscious.” For Paracelsus the imagination is creative
power and takes precedence over all other faculties. In this
he was followed by Boehme, and later by many poets and
philosophers. Paracelsus also recognized the part played by
mind in disease.
It is fitting, perhaps, that one of the most penetrating de-
82 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD

scriptions of the mystical path was written just before modern

science was born, and yet contains passages which read like
a moralist’s defense of psychoanalysis:

Of these the first benefit is the knowledge of the self and its own
vileness. . . . Hereby the soul learns the reality of its own misery,
which before it knew not. . . . Other benefits . . . flow as from
their proper source and fount, that of self-knowledge.

This is from St. John of the Cross (1542-1591), Spanish

mystic, in The Dark Night of the Soul. It leads us to Jakob
Boehme (1575-1642), German shoemaker and one of the
greatest mystics, for whom an unconscious will was the source
of everything, divine and natural:

Before God I do not know how the thing arises in me, without
the participation of my will. I do not know that which I must
write.

For Boehme “the hidden man is God’s own being,” and

as for many after him, including Jung, God is found “‘under-
neath” rather than ‘‘above.”’ God is the spring, the root, the
“abyss.”’ Nature rises out of God, and we sink into Him. God
is nature.
Boehme’s importance cannot be measured. Hegel called
him ‘the father of German philosophy,” and Schopenhauer,
who owed much to him, said that Schelling took the ideas of
one of his works straight from Boehme. If he “‘lived and
moved and had his being in God”’ it might equally be said
that when he was not making shoes, he was exploring, by
introspection, a unity hidden in his own nature beneath all
conflict.
However none of these minds displays the confident spirit
of inquiry, the combination of reverent inquisitiveness and
scientific concentration, that marks a later period. In the
THE DISCOVERERS: BEFORE 1730 83
ultimate analysis science is born of myth and religion, all
three being expressions of the ordering spirit of the human
mind. But it is only when the individual mind accepts its own
authority as superior to the inherited tradition that this spirit
becomes aware of itself and confident of its powers.
Montaigne (1532-1592) was one of the earliest to achieve
this emancipation from medieval tradition. Here we are only
concerned with the intimations in this skeptical mind of the
limited role of awareness.

. . . So it happens to us in the yawning of sleep, before it has

fully possessed us, to perceive, as in a dream, what is done about
us, and to follow the last things that are said with a perplexed
and uncertain hearing which seems but to touch the borders of
the soul; and to make answers to the last words that have been
spoken to us, which have more in them of chance than sense. Now
seeing I have in effect tried it, I have no doubt but I have hitherto
made a right judgment . . . for we have many motions in us that
do not proceed from our direction; . . . so falling people extend
their arms before them by a natural impulse, which prompts
our limbs to offices and motions without any commission from
our reason...

Now, those passions which only touch the outward bark of us,
cannot be said to be ours: to make them so, there must be con-
currence of the whole man; and the pains which are felt by the
hand or the foot while we are sleeping, are none of ours . . .

In the following passage Montaigne describes his condition

after an accident:

This consideration should seem to proceed from a soul that re-

tained its functions: but it was nothing so with me. I knew not
what I said or did, and they were nothing but idle thoughts in the
clouds, that were stirred up by the senses of the eyes and ears, and
84 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
proceeded not from me. I knew not for all that, whence I came
or whither I went, neither was I capable to weigh and consider
what was said to me: these were light effects, that the senses pro-
duced of themselves as of custom; what the soul contributed was
in a dream, lightly touched, licked and bedewed by the soft
impression of the senses . . .

The name of Cervantes (1547-1616) is included here as a

reminder that there have been many writers with understand-
ing of “depth psychology” who are not quoted in this survey
for lack of space or of scholarship, or because their insights
are left implicit and cannot be extracted in bits. Don Quixote
is a study of the growth, defense, wearing down, and collapse
of a delusion of consciousness. An undercurrent of doubt, of
repressed knowledge that it was all self-delusion, runs through
the story.
This is perhaps the place to apologize to the quoted authors
for tearing these pieces from their original context. But I
have placed them in a grander context of which any man may
be proud.
Shakespeare (1564-1616) reflects and strengthens the grow-
ing awareness of the depths of the mind. I have left these
quotations unarranged since to order them by any arbitrary
classification would be disloyal to their source.

. the thought whereof

Doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my inwards.
(Othello, I, i, 305.)

My affection hath an unknown bottom, like the

bay of Portugal.
(As You Like It, IV, i, 212.)

When we should submit ourselves to an unknown

fear.
(All’s Well, II, iii, 6.)
THE DiscOVERERS: BEFORE 1730 85
. . 1t shall be called Bottom’s Dream, for it hath
no bottom.
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, IV, i, 221.)

. . . Jugglers that deceive the eye,

Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind.
(The Comedy of Errors, I, ii, 98.)

My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirr’d;

And I myself see not the bottom of it.
(Trotlus and Cressida, III, iii, 311.)

Macbeth: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased;

Pluck from the memory of a rooted sorrow;
Raze out the written troubles of the brain;
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
Doctor: Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.
(Macbeth, V, iii, 44.)

Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,

The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.
(Macbeth, Il, ii, 35.)

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind;

The thief doth fear each bush an officer.
(King Henry VI, Part III, V, vi, 11.)

Prince: I never thought to hear you speak again.

King: Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought.
(King Henry IV, Part II, IV, v, 92.)

. . . Inever may believe

These antique fables nor these fairy toys.
 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
86
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to
heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V, i, 2.)

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:

It wearies me; you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn;
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself.
(The Merchant of Venice, I, i,1.)

Descartes (1596-1650), by his definition of mind as aware-

ness, may be said to have provoked, as reaction, the European
discovery of the unconscious mind. I shall therefore mark this
decisive moment by a change of technique. Descartes, as a
thinker, had no clear conception of the unconscious mind,
THE DIsCcOVERERS: BEFORE 1730 87
for to him all that is unconscious is physiological, and his
physiology (like ours) could not explain how the brain works.
But Descartes, the person, had at one time a very lively, effi-
cient, and far-sighted unconscious mind which inhibited con-
fusing emotions and gave birth to the dream of rationalism
(that would occupy the West for centuries) in a triple dream
in course of sleep (that occupied Descartes during a brief
conversion from chaos to clarity on the night of November
10, 1619).
It is not necessary to guess what ideas actually came to
Descartes for the first time during that dream sequence. What
is significant is that the dreams came within a day or two of
his first conceiving his plan of a unified mathematical science,
and that Descartes himself believed and stated that this triple
dream had determined the entire subsequent course of. his
life and thought. From the violent personal experience of
that dream and of those few days Descartes extracted in the
course of a lifetime the objective universal truth—or so he
believed.
As a thinker Descartes considered that the dreams expressed
a movement of the organs of the sleeper, that they constituted
a language translating a desire. But to Descartes as a person
the dreams were, as he said, a divine command to devote his
inner life to the search for truth.
Freud considered that they were mainly dreams “from
above” that could have been formed in awareness, and came
only in small part from the deeper layers of the mind; that for
this reason Descartes’ own interpretation might be accepted,
as far as it goes; and that the dreams show that Descartes was
passing through a crisis of conscience associated with sexu-
ality (perhaps his friendship with Beekman).
To these interpretations I would only add this: the dreams
express the transformation of intolerable emotional conflict
and confusion into a supreme (apparent) clarity in intel-
88 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
lectual awareness, achieved by a radical inhibition of all po-
tentially confusing emotions and problems. The new start in
Descartes’ life and in philosophy was made by separating con-
scious intellectual clarity from complex emotions which were
driven, as far as possible, into the unconscious, and from com-
plex problems which were neglected or postponed. This
dream of rationalism betrayed human nature, but it shaped
the temperament of rationalists from Descartes to Freud.
The dreams of November 10, 1619, represented a conversion
in an extraordinarily intense personality, and hence also in
Western human nature. It is not too much to say that a new
man was born in Descartes, a new type of man in Europe, and
a new tradition in philosophy. But the new Descartes was not
whole-natured, and the new philosophy was superficial. Both
were born of impatience with painful complexity; neither
were what they claimed.
Descartes had been struggling for some time (1614-1619)
to clear his mind of prejudice and to make the pursuit of
truth his life occupation. But this aim must have provoked
deep emotional conflicts, for by the evening of November 10
he had reached the point where this endeavor (as he informs
us, writing in the third person): ‘‘threw his mind into violent
agitations that grew greater and greater. [The endeavor] so
exhausted him that the fire went to his brain and he fell into
a kind of enthusiasm which so mastered his already cast down
mind that it prepared it to receive the impressions of dreams
and visions. He [Descartes] tells us that on the 10th Novem-
ber, 1619, having gone to bed wholly filled with this enthusi-
asm and wholly occupied with the thought that he had
discovered that day the foundations of the admirable science
he had three consecutive dreams in a single night, that he
could only imagine had come to him from above.” (Descartes’
italics.)
The first two dreams, recounted at great length, were
THE DIscoverers: BEFORE 1730 89
frightening: malign winds blowing Descartes from a college
to a church, but not affecting other people he encounters;
then a thunderstorm. Descartes explained these two dreams
as representing his shortcomings and sins. The third dream
had nothing frightening about it. Two books which are pre-
sented to Descartes play a central role: one a “Dictionnaire,”
the other a book of poetry, Corpus Poetarum (which existed
in reality, published 1603), and in particular a poem, “Est &
Non.” While still asleep, so Descartes recounts, he asked him-
self whether he was dreaming or had had a vision. He not
only decided that he was dreaming, but began, while still
dreaming, to interpret the earlier part of the dream. The
“Dictionnaire,” he decided, stood for all the sciences, while
the book of poetry stood for philosophy and wisdom.
“For he did not think that one should be so greatly aston-
ished to see that the Poets . . . were full of sentences more
serious, more felt, and better expressed than those which are
found in the writings of Philosophers. He attributed this
marvel to the divine nature of Enthusiasm and to the power
of the Imagination, which brings out the seeds of wisdom
(that are to be found in the minds of all men, like sparks of
fire among the pebbles) as Reason cannot in the Philoso-
phers.”
Still asleep, Descartes continued interpreting his dream.
“Est & Non” he interpreted as truth and falsehood in human
knowledge and science, and he boldly persuaded himself that
“it was the Spirit of Truth which had wanted to open to him
the treasures of all the sciences by this dream.” This last
dream, Descartes says, marked out the path for the rest of his
life.
After a few days Descartes regained his normal composure
and began to write.
Descartes tells us that the triple dream was associated with
the supreme question, “What way of life shall I follow?” and
go Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
that the dream brought him the answer as a compelling com-
mand from Heaven or Olympus: Search for the truth, by
applying the mathematical method (analytical geometry, in
the main) to all other studies. This twin experience, the
dream and the discovery of his method, did in fact put an
end to his emotional and intellectual confusions and gave a
decisive direction to his subsequent life. Olympus had spoken
through his unconscious, and Descartes had been lifted out
of his past self to acquire a new vision of truth. But his life
story proves that there remained an intense nervousness, a
disquieting sense of insecurity, producing often an impression
of insincerity, as we may easily understand. Descartes’ con-
scious clarity was partial, and rested on a treacherous dissoci-
ation. One may suspect that all static concepts, just as they
neglect process, may produce in those who surrender their
minds to them an uncomfortable lesion. Certainly Descartes’
dogmatism regarding a split in the nature of things provoked
other thinkers, who lacked his personal dissociation, to re-
pudiate his way of thinking. Descartes’ dream deserves a place
in this chapter because its consequences drew the attention
of others to the partial character of ideas so clearly expressed.
There are times when great minds seem to spring into
existence to seize great opportunities. No sooner had Des-
cartes chosen'his path than another mind, of comparable
mathematical genius, refused to accept intellectual clarity as
ultimate, since this would mean denying prior validity to the
deepest truth he knew: the complexity of the human heart.
Pascal (1623-1662), mathematician, mystic and sage, com-
bined a deep religious need with great introspective honesty.
He was a highly original mathematician and experienced the
attraction of mathematical clarity, but the richness and com-
plexity of his own nature did not allow him to accept reason
as ultimate. Pascal felt that there could be no short cut to
truth. He knew Descartes personally, but rejected his phi-
THE DiscOVERERS: BEFORE 1730 gl
losophy, and came to renounce mathematics in favor of
devotion to the religious life. His revolt from nonhuman
abstractions and recognition of the miserable aspects of the
individual life have echoes three centuries later.
Though some texts of Pascal’s Pensées are unreliable, and
his terms, being penetrating, are difficult to translate, there
can be no doubt of his insight into much that lies behind con-
scious reason. He uses the term “heart” (coeur) for his sense
of the inner depths of human nature, the seat of true knowl-
edge and of will.

The heart has its reasons, which reason knows not.

For we must not mistake ourselves, we have as much that is

automatic in us as intellectual, and hence it comes that the instru-
ment by which persuasion is brought about is not demonstration
alone. How few things are demonstrated! Proofs can only convince
the mind; custom makes our strongest proofs and those which hold
most firmly, it sways the automaton, which draws the unthinking
mind after it (qui entraine l’esprit sans qu’il pense).

Those who are accustomed to judge by the heart do not under-

stand the process of reasoning, for they wish to understand at a
glance, and are not accustomed to seek for principles. And others,
on the contrary, who are accustomed to reason by principles, do
not at all understand the things of the heart, seeking principles
and not being able to see at a glance.

It is as useless and absurd for reason to demand from the heart

proofs of first principles before it will admit them, as it would
be for the heart to ask from reason a feeling of all the proposi-
tions demonstrated before accepting them.

This inability should serve then only to make reason more humble,
which would fain judge of all things, but not to shake our cer-
tainty, as if only reason were able to instruct us. Would to God,
g2 Tue Unconscious BEForRE FREUD
on the contrary, that we never needed reason, and that we knew
everything by instinct and feeling! But nature has denied us this
advantage, and has on the contrary given us but little knowledge
of this kind, all the rest can be acquired by reason only.

. never does reason override the imagination, whereas the

imagination often unseats reason.

Self is hateful.

May it not be better for man’s happiness that he should not know
himself?

B. Spinoza (1632-1677) had a vivid sense of the person as

part of nature and laid stress on unconscious memory and
motives as making up an unconscious personality, and hence
also on the need for an objective self-knowledge reaching be-
neath resentment and conflict:

Men regard themselves as free, since they are aware of their will
and their desires, and do not even in dream think of the causes
which determine their desiring and willing, as they do not know
them.

We now turn to Britain, to a remarkable group of think-

ers, mainly of the English Platonist school: Sir Thomas
Browne, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, John Norris, Shaftes-
bury, and with them John Milton, John Dryden, and Isaac
Newton.
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), physician, philosopher,
and theologian, sets the background with his neoclassical con-
ception of the Idea, or plastic life, pervading everything,
physical, organic, and mental.
Henry More (1614-1687) wrote:
THE DiscovERERS: BEFORE 1730 93
The Spirit of Nature therefore . . . is a substance incorporeal,
but without Sense or Animadversion, pervading the whole Matter
of the Universe, and exercising a Plastical Power.

John Milton (1608-1674) in Paradise Lost (1667) echoes

Shakespeare’s view of the imagination, calling it Fancy, and
distinguishing it from “mimic Fancy”:
(Adam is consoling Eve for a dream she has had in which
Satan tempted her)

But know that in the soul

Are many lesser faculties, that serve
Reason as chief. Among these Fancy next
Her office holds; of all external things,
Which the fine watchful senses represent,
She forms imaginations, aery shapes,
Which Reason, joining or disjoining, frames
All what we affirm or what deny, and call
Our knowledge or opinion; then retires
Into her private cell when Nature rests.
Oft, in her absence, mimic Fancy wakes
To imitate her; but, misjoining shapes.
Wild work produces oft, and most in dreams,
Il] matching words and deeds long past or late.
Some such resemblances, methinks, I find
Of our last evening’s talk in this thy dream.
But with addition strange. Yet be not sad:
Evil into the mind of God or Man
May come and go, so unapproved, and leave
No spot or-blame behind; which gives me hope
That what in sleep thou didst abhor to dream
Waking thou never wilt consent to do.

The same awareness is shown by John Dryden (163 1-1700):

Long before it was a Play; when it only was a confused mass of

thoughts, trembling over one another in the dark; when the fancy

U.B.F.—H
94 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
was yet in its first work, moving the sleeping images of things
towards the light, these to be distinguished, and then either chosen
or rejected by the judgment.

And at the same period Isaac Newton (1642-1727), not

wishing to be troubled to give a mathematical proof of an
assertion, thought it sufficient to say:

It is plain to me by the fountain I draw it from.

I have no doubt that Newton’s fountain was to him divine.

His genius is shown in his restriction of his science to the
mathematics of an unchanging or stationary universe; the
realm of creation, formation, and history was for him another
matter: the direct expression of divine powers.
There are few sharp lines in the history of thought, but
for convenience we shall now draw one.
Around 1680 the influence of Descartes and of the new sci-
ences became so evident that they could not be neglected. The
writers cited before Spinoza employed a primarily mystical or
poetic approach, and in addition may be said either to have
neglected the developing scientific attitude, or, like Pascal, to
have rejected it when meditating on primary matters. We now
come to a thinker who, though he shared in the classical and
religious tradition and sought to maintain it, went out of his
way to study science, to read the Greek atomists, and sought
to disprove current scientific materialism by beating the
atheistic scientists at their own game: the representation of
detailed facts. It is not suggested that he was the earliest
writer to attempt this after Descartes, but he is one of the
most striking.
This is Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), Cambridge divine,
philosopher, and student of science, whose conception of a
plastic power pervading nature and providing the basis for
conscious thought brought him to a conception of the uncon-
THE DiscOvERERS: BEFORE 1730 95
scious mind similar in many respects to our own (as has been
recognized in the article on him in the Dictionary of National
Biography). Here is Cudworth writing in 1678:

However, that there may be some vital energy without clear con-
sciousness and express attention and animadversion, or self-per-
ception, seems reasonable upon several accounts. For, first, those
philosophers themselves, who made the essence of the soul to con-
sist in cogitation, and again, the essence of cogitation in clear and
express Consciousness, cannot render it in any way probable, that
the souls of men in all profound sleeps, lethargies, and apoplexies,
as also of embryos in the womb, from their very first arrival thither,
are never so much as one moment without expressly conscious
cogitations; which, if they were, according to the principles of
their philosophy, they must, ipso facto, cease to have any being.
. . . It is certain, that our human souls themselves are not always
conscious of whatever they have in them; for even the sleeping
geometrician hath, at that time, all his geometrical theorems some
way in him; as also the sleeping musician, all his musical skills and
songs; and, therefore, why may it not be possible for the soul to
have likewise some actual energy in it, which it is not expressly
conscious of? We have all experience of our doing many animal
actions non-attendingly, which we reflect upon afterwards; as, also,
that we often continue a long series of bodily motions, by a mere
virtual intention of our minds, and as it were by half a cogitation.
That vital sympathy, by which our soul is united and tied fast, as
it were with a knot, to the body, is a thing that we have no direct
consciousness of, but only in its effects. . . . There is also a more
interior kind of plastic power in the soul (if we may so call it),
whereby it is formative of its own cogitations, which itself is not
always conscious of; as when, in sleep or dreams, it frames inter-
locutory discourses betwixt itself and other persons, in a long
series, with coherent sense and apt connections, in which often-
times it seems to be surprised with unexpected wiseness and rep-
artees, though itself were all the while the poet and inventor of
the whole fable.
96 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
Elsewhere Cudworth speaks of “a drowsy unawakened
cogitation,” and his outlook is based on a “‘plastic nature,”
vitalized by “‘plastic energy.”
This is the idealistic monist approach, which finds no difh-
culty in identifying a background to the passing moments of
awareness. The book in which this quotation occurs was
called The Intellectual System of the Universe, and its main
aim was to attack Democritean materialism in the interests of
the Christian religion. That controversy is not our concern
here. But it is instructive that so ancient a tradition as Chris-
tian Platonism, invigorated by Cudworth’s interest in con-
temporary physics and biology, could lead him toward ideas
that we, paralyzed in our dualism, have still not got straight.
If experimental physiology had been ready in 1678, or 1778,
or even 1878, to support Cudworth’s outlook with a scientific
identification of the plastic processes of objective nature, in
particular of the coordinating and formative principles in
organisms and brains, the history of science and of man would
have been different. If the Christian churches had seen that
their best policy was to reveal the divine marvels of the
human brain by encouraging physiological research, a Chris-
tian post-Cudworth school of scientific thought might have
enjoyed the world prestige of Marx and Freud together, and
more. But they preferred the status quo.
Cudworth was not alone. When John Locke, following
Descartes, wrote in 1690 that “It is impossible to perceive
without perceiving that he does perceive,”
John Norris (1632-1704), another English Platonist, could
not let this pass and published a correction in the same year:

We may have ideas of which we are not conscious.

There are infinitely more ideas impressed on our minds than we

can possibly attend to or perceive.
THE DIscOVERERS: BEFORE 1730 97
There may be an impression of ideas without any actual percep-
tion of them.

This was written twenty years before Leibniz expressed the

same conclusions.
Norris was a disciple of Malebranche (1638-1715), one of
the most influential French philosophers to contribute to this
story, whose priority in this respect over Leibniz, with whom
he corresponded, merits recognition. The following passages
are from his De la Recherche de la Vérité, 1675.

We only know [the soul] by our consciousness, and that is why the
knowledge which we have of it is imperfect; we only know of the
soul what we feel taking place in us. . . . Therefore it does not
suffice to know the soul completely to know what we know by our
interior feeling, since the awareness we have of ourselves does not
perhaps reveal ‘to us more than the smaller part of our being.

We believe . . . that there is in the mind a capacity to receive in

succession an infinity of diverse modifications which the mind it-
self does not know.

Shaftesbury (A. A. Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury,

1671-1713) was one of the earliest English writers to give
vivid expression to the sense of a dark mystery hidden in
the sources of the mind, which a century later became one
of the characteristic features of German romantic thought.

Know but this self. . . . O Cimmerian darkness . . . not to see

which sees, which judges, which pronounces, and which only 1s!
. . . Self-simple or a system? . . . What am I? A particular mind,
an acting principle? . . . Or how are you yourself? . . . by a prin-
ciple uniting certain parts, and that thinks and acts for these parts.
. . . For my own share, I have a mind, which serves, such as it is,
to keep my body and the affections of it, my appetites, imagina-
tions, fancies, and the rest in tolerable order. . . . And the par-
ticular mind, what? . . . Part of a general mind.
98 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
Idea! Wait a while till I have examined thee, whence thou art,
and to whom thou returnest.

One would think, there was nothing easier for us, than to know
our own minds. .. . But our thoughts have generally such an
obscure implicit language, that it is the hardest thing in the world
to make them speak out distinctly.

Shaftesbury was deeply moved by this mystery, the inability

of the mind to see its own sources, and he gave eloquent
expression to a possible clue: the interpretation of the divine
spirit of the world as a plastic force, or as he called it a form-
ing power pervading everything: matter, life, and mind. The
real mystery lies perhaps in the fact that Plato and his fol-
lowers could guess so much, and exact science achieve so
much while still failing to identify this shaping agency.
Writing at the same time, the English clergyman George
Keith (1639-1716), after renouncing the emotional excesses
of Quakerism, displayed insight into the unconscious psy-
chology of “true” and “false” religion.

. the Spirit of every Heresie is no other than an exalted Imagi-

nation, joined with a perversion of Will.

[It is a necessary Christian Duty] clearly to distinguish between

God’s inward gracious operations and Inspirations, and all coun-
terfeit resemblances of them.

And for the ecstasies that some of the Profets were sometimes in,
it was not their own proper act, but the effect of a Divine Power
and operation in them, that is far differing from what Men may
seek wilfully to cast themselves into, as some have done to their
great hurt.

And this is a plain demonstration of what the Quakers by a great

mistake and deception call the Life and call it the Life of God
THE DISCOVERERS: BEFORE 1730 99
. . . when in very deed it is nothing other but the vigor and
vivacity of the Animal Life and Spirits.

Also that there are Antipathies among Animals, as well as Sym-

pathies, arising not from occult qualities, but from certain cor-
poreal Causes, to wit, certain effluvia from one Body to another,
which if agreeable, cause Sympathy, and if disagreeable, cause
Antipathy; the which agreeableness or disagreeableness of those
effluvia proceed not from occult qualities which the learned have
generally exploded if physically understood, but from their dif-
ferent Texture, Figures, Motion, and Configurations.

Leibniz (1646-1716) has often been regarded as the first

European thinker to give clear expression to the idea of
unconscious mental activity. This may be valid if attention is
restricted to writers within the scientific tradition of mathe-
matical and logical precision—though here Pascal must not
be forgotten—and it was Leibniz’s careful and quasi-quanti-
tative approach to the problem that made his conclusions so
influential. He held that ordinary perceptions are the sum-
mation of countless smaller perceptions each of which we can-
not be aware of, since they lie below a quantitative threshold.
Leibniz also considered that these small perceptions, of which
we are not directly aware, make up a wider field than those
of which we are conscious.

Our clear concepts are like islands which arise above the ocean
of obscure ones.

[Yet] it is not easy to conceive that a thing can think and not be
conscious that it thinks.

The importance and influence of Leibniz’s work is beyond

question. But Malebranche and Norris had already stressed
the existence of an immense background of unconscious per-
100 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD

ceptions in terms even clearer than those of Leibniz, whose

originality lay mainly in the speculative idea of a quantitative
threshold. This gave prestige to Leibniz’s doctrine, though
this threshold has never been measured. But prestige for the
wrong reasons has often been a powerful influence in the
history of ideas.
Stahl PRES GED) the German chemist and physician, he
gave the name “animism” to his doctrine of a world soul, held
that the passions have a great influence on the state of the
body, and that

disease [is] a disturbance of the vital functions caused by mis-

directed activities of the soul.

Vico (1668-1744), Italian lawyer, philosopher, and _his-

torian, interpreted all human thought and action as the ex-
pression of underlying laws. He is possibly the earliest writer
who sought to identify a law of historical process underlying
everything, including the human imagination. Though he be-
lieved that an eternal law of recurrence was displayed in the
rise, maturity, and decline of all civilizations, his thinking
was genetic or developmental in character and his specula-
tive description of the earliest emergence of human society
from a wild quasi-animal origin illustrates the operation of
natural and divine laws in prehuman behavior, before man
became humanly aware. Many passages in his works are in
effect the description of unconscious mentality, of “human”
judgments and actions undertaken before man became as we
know him in civilized societies. The following passages are
taken from his New Science (1725).

Our new Science must therefore be a demonstration, so to speak,

of the historical fact of providence, for it must be a history of the
forms of order which, without human discernment or intent, and
often against the designs of men, providence has given to this
great city of the human race.
THE DIscOVERERS: BEFORE 1730 101
. . men were for a long time incapable of truth and reason.

. . Its start when the first men began to think humanly.

This world of nations has certainly been made by man, and its
guise must therefore be found within the modification of our
own human mind.

. the world of civil society has certainly been made by man,

and its principles are therefore to be found within the modifica-
tions of the human mind.

Vico is much concerned with the origin of myths common

to a whole community, which he traces to a process of selec-
tion without reflection, the operation of a sense shared by
all, called by him “common sense.” This is the collective
unconscious at work in the genesis of myths.

Common sense is judgment without reflection.

An alternative translation of this passage is:

This meaning which is common to all is a judgment without any

reflection.

He is also interested in the origin of languages, and in the

peculiar status of nouns, suggesting the idea taken up two
centuries later by Bergson and others, that:

nouns awaken ideas which leave firm traces.

At the same time C. v. Wolff (1679-1752) was engaged in

clarifying and extending Leibniz’s conception of unconscious
mental processes. He may have been the first influential Ger-
man writer to give the word Bewusstsein its present meaning
of awareness, and his analysis of unconscious factors is clearer
102 Tue Unconscious BrroreE FREUD

than that of any predecessor. For example, he asserted that

less conscious ideas may be the cause of more conscious ones,
and he was possibly the first to state explicitly that noncon-
scious factors must be inferred from those of which we are
conscious.

Let no one imagine that I would join the Cartesians in asserting

that nothing can be in the mind of which it is not aware... .
That is a prejudice, which impedes the understanding of the mind,
as we can see in the case of the Cartesians.

We conclude that we only then become conscious of objects when

we distinguish them from one another; when we do not notice the
difference of things which are presented to us, then we are not
aware of what enters our senses.

This passage, writen in 1725, expresses the view of a lead-

ing school of psychology in 1960.

Insofar as something further exists in us than we are conscious of,

we must bring it to light by inferences from that of which we are
conscious, since otherwise we should have no ground to do so.
[Wolff's italics.]

Similar thoughts are expressed by Wolff's contemporary,

Lord Kames (Henry Home, 1696-1782), Scottish judge and
philosopher. In his Essays on the Principles of Morality and
Natural Religion (1751) Kames wrote:

The whole operation of vision far surpasses human knowledge.

When we attend to the operation of the external sense, the impres-

sions made upon us by external objects are discovered to have
very different effects. In some cases we feel the impression, and
are conscious of it, as an impression. In others, being quite un-
conscious of the impression, we perceive only the external object.
THE DIscOVERERS: BEFORE 1730 103
This is a remarkable passage to find written in 1751. Sir
Richard Blackmore, physician and poet, in his poem Creation
(1712) had used the word “unconscious” several times, in the
more general sense of “unheeding.’’ But Kames uses the terms
“conscious” and “unconscious” in two successive sentences to
characterize awareness and nonawareness in relation to par-
ticular mental functions: conscious attention to the process of
receiving an impression, and perception of an object without
awareness of receiving an impression. This usage overlaps
with the twentieth-century meaning of unconscious mental
processes. It is hard to imagine that Kames or his Edinburgh
printer knew in 1751 what they were doing: sending out into
the English-speaking world a new verbal symbol that would
eventually mark one of the greatest revolutions in human
thought. This was twenty-five years before Platner began to
use bewusstlos in relation to mental activities.
In order again to stress the incompleteness of this survey,
or rather the irrelevance of the criterion of completeness to
the history of ideas, I leave to others the question how far
E. Swedenborg (1688-1722), Swedish scientist, philosopher,
and mystic, explicitly indicated his awareness of the impor-
tance of the unconscious mind. He certainly stressed that
thought depended on the combined activity of the various
parts of the brain, and it is just this correlation of separated
factors which the unconscious processes prepare for the atten-
tion of the conscious mind.
If we survey the period 1670-1730 we find that during this
time (after Pascal and Spinoza) not less than eight writers in
the English, German, French, and Italian languages are known
to have published ideas overlapping in some degree with our
contemporary conception of unconscious mental processes:
(in order of birth) Cudworth, Malebranche, Leibniz, Norris,
Vico, Shaftesbury, Wolff, and Kames. Of these four were
British, two German, one French, and one Italian. Effort has
104 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
been made to eliminate national bias, but further research
would probably bring to light more names in other countries.
The four British thinkers who hold such a privileged posi-
tion in our story enjoyed certain advantages. First, they were
not held back in their speculations by dogmatic doctrines such
as Roman Catholicism or Cartesianism. Second, they were all
Christian monists interested in the contemporary advances in
science, who would naturally seek to identify unifying ideas
linking consciousness with its background. Finally, their think-
ing was not inhibited by adherence to any particular scientific
doctrine. These factors may all be summarized in saying that
they were freely speculating monists. Indeed the same may be
said of the other four: Leibniz, Wolff, Malebranche, and
Vico, all of whom either inherited or sought for a monistic
doctrine.
In relation to the history of the idea, Leibniz alone enjoyed
an immediate and unmistakable influence, for only he worked
within the new mathematical and scientific tradition of which
Descartes was one of the creators. All eight were pure specu-
lators; none of them put their ideas to any systematic observa-
tional tests. But Leibniz clothed his ideas in the borrowed
uniform of quantitative science; hence his prestige and in-
fluence.
If we collect the various aspects of unconscious mental
processes considered by these eight writers around 1700:
memory, perception, ideas, sleep, dreams, the formative back-
ground of thought, insight, the threshold, the greater range of
unconscious activities, the birth of myth, the need to infer un-
conscious factors, habitual activities—we find that a consider-
able proportion of the general features of our present concept
was already conceivable, though in a speculative or tentative ©
form. The main elements still missing were the link with. in-
stinct, will, and the emotions; the frequency of dissociation,
conflict, and distortion; the connection with pathology, tech-
THE DiIscOvERERS: BEFORE 1730 105
niques for investigation, and the application to therapy; and
the fusion of all these factors in a single quasi-scientific con-
cept of the unconscious mind.
As is shown in Chart CG, the cognitive aspects of the uncon-
scious mind were conceivable by many isolated thinkers
around 1700, while the vital, emotional, and pathological
aspects remained to be discovered, though a mystic like
Boehme, and possibly many others, had a vivid sense of the
vital background which was later to become a matter of
objective knowledge.
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 VI

The Discoverers:
1730-1800

A LITTLE KNOWN FIGURE, C. A. Crusius (1715-

1773), German philosopher and theologian, provides a bridge
from earlier thinkers who stressed the cognitive aspects to
those whose main interest was in the unconscious mind as the
seat of the passions. Crusius divided the faculties of the soul
into two classes: those of thinking and those of willing. For
him consciousness is an inner faculty of feeling, and external
perception can proceed without this inner awareness being
evoked. Only when it is, do we know that we are imagining,
thinking, or desiring. This inner function must operate if
mere thinking is to become conscious thinking, and it is
absent ‘‘in deep sleep, in rage, and in many other circum-
stances.” It is a necessary condition for this inner feeling that
the external perception should pass “‘a certain level of live-
liness.” There are many degrees of awareness.
107
108 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
Though Crusius has been dismissed as a negligible figure,
he appears to have been one of the earliest eighteenth-century
philosophers to look beneath the cognitive aspects of the un-
conscious mind and to assert the existence of a Grundkraft, a
primary force or activity, of which we have no direct aware-
ness or knowledge though it underlies all physical and mental
phenomena. Kant took several ideas from Crusius, and ac-
knowledged his importance. For us his interest lies in his early
recognition, within the German philosophical tradition, that
willing and thinking are twin functions of the soul of which
we only become aware under special circumstances. This,
however, was merely the intellectual counterpart of an emo-
tional storm taking place at that very moment in another
European.
What Crusius recognized in theory J. J. Rousseau (1712-
1778) was experiencing with passionate intensity: the turmoil
of will and emotion lying below, and often breaking through,
the threshold of awareness. His almost continuous preoccu-
pation with his own emotions led Rousseau to conceive of
passive reverie as the only true happiness:

The sound of the waves and the agitation of the water holding my
senses and driving every other agitation from my soul, plunged it
into a delicious reverie . . . without any active cooperation of
my soul.

Toward the end of his life Rousseau’s chief endeavor was

to achieve by continual introspection a full understanding of
his own emotional nature. He did not succeed, any more than
Freud did a century and a half later. Much that is obvious to
us was hidden to him. But he has been called the first modern
man as we know him: intensely preoccupied with his own
“psychology,” and lacking any reliable guide for thinking and
living. Viewed biologically or historically this is the de-
THE DIscOvERERS: 1730-1800 109
generacy of individualism, the loss of natural relations with
family, profession, or community, in a pathological obsession
with one’s own frustrated emotions.
But since the West had apparently to pursue this morbid
path, Rousseau must be recognized as the first to go to the
limit, that is, as far as his capacities could take him. In an
important sense he is the visible source of the movement
which led to the discovery of the role of will and emotion in
the processes that lie below the threshold. If Rousseau had
not existed the movement would surely have developed, but
it might have taken a different path.
Here is Rousseau reflecting on his own actions and emo-
tions in the course of a persistent self-analysis:

It is thus certain that neither my judgment nor my will dictated

my answer, and that it was the automatic consequence of my em-
barrassment.

There is no automatic movement of ours of which we cannot find

the cause in our hearts, if we know well how to look for it there.

The true and primary motives of the greater part of my actions

are not so clear to me as I have for a long time imagined.

These experiences have procured for me, by reflection, new light

on my self-knowledge, and on the true motives of my conduct in
a thousand circumstances on which I have so often deceived myself.

The feeling of existence alone does not imply awareness.

He did not even feel his own existence.

Beside Rousseau there appears almost at the same time a

strange and influential figure, J. G. Hamann (1730-1788),
a German philosopher of religion, who was too honest and
110 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
whole-natured to accept any abstract system of thought. His
power lay in his personality rather than his writings, and
both Herder and Goethe derived much from him. Hamann’s
interest in his own experience of religious conversion, in the
unconscious working of the imagination, and in contemporary
biological researches, led him to recognize the temporal char-
acter of all immediate experience, and its contrast to the static
abstractions of contemporary mathematical science. For him,
as for Rousseau, the immediacy of experience was primary,
but Hamann rejected the notion of personal isolation, and
put the stress on personal relations as the basis of the indi-
vidual life.
Hamann enters our story, not only because, like the phil-
osophes in Paris (Diderot, Buffon, Holbach, Maupertuis,
etc.), he stressed process, growth, and transformation, but also
for his rejection of the autonomy of the individual conscious-
ness, which he felt to be an instrument of superpersonal
forces. Reason must patiently learn to make itself the instru-
ment of nature, that is, of God.

But our skeleton remains hidden from us, because we were formed
in secret, as though under the earth.

-How much more the formation of our own ideas remains secret!

Poetry is the mother language of the human race.

Our reason must wait and hope—seek to be the servant and not
the master of nature.

To be a servant of nature and to wait for the fulfillment of other

births than our own.

Only patience and time are necessary.

The divine secrets of time and its development constitute nature

as it is [die reine Natur].
THE DISCOVERERS: 1730-1800 111
Goethe valued Hamann highly, comparing him with Vico,
and saying, “The main principle to which all Hamann’s
statements may be referred is the following: All that a man
undertakes to perform, whether by deed or word or otherwise,
must proceed from all his powers united: everything isolated
is worthless.”” To which I imagine Hamann would have re-
plied: “Yes, and to achieve this union of powers let mind
_be the patient servant of nature.”
In England the poet Edward Young (1683-1765) outlined
in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1758) a theory
of the literary imagination which was deeply to influence the
German romantic writers through its stress on the twin
mysteries of poetic creation and of plant growth, as though
some common secret underlay both.

Nor are we only ignorant of the dimensions of the human mind

in general, but even of our own. . . . Therefore dive deep into
thy bosom; learn the depth, extent, bias and full fort of thy mind;
contrast full intimacy with the stranger within thee; excite and
cherish every spark of intellectual light and heat.

An Original grows, it is not made.

We must now turn to see what minds of a very different

kind were thinking during the same period.
David Hartley (1705-1757), philosopher and psychologist,
who held that sensations are the result of vibrations of the
particles in the central tissue of the nerves, wrote in 1748:

The white medullary substance of the Brain is also the immediate

Instrument by which Ideas are presented to the Mind; or, in other
words, whatever Changes are made in this Substance, correspond-
ing Changes are made in our Ideas; and vice versa.

But how he did not know, nor do we. Hartley ? in the

same year defined the new science of “Psychology” as “the
112 THE UNCONSCIOUS BEFORE FREUD
theory of the human Mind, with that of the intellectual prin-
ciples of animals.” Long before his day, in sixteenth-century
Germany, the term “Psychologia” had begun to be used, and
in 1693 the science of “Anthropologia” had been divided into
“Somatologia” or anatomy, and “Psycology.” So, in name at
least, the science is nearly three hundred years old. And the
“psychosomatic,” or dual, approach is nearly as old, for in
1716 Davies had written of the ‘“‘Psycandrick as well as So-
mandrick Secret.”
Meantime, the main contribution of Malebranche, Norris,
Leibniz, and Wolff was not forgotten, for we find J. H. Lam-
bert (1728-1777), a German mathematician and physicist,
noting that “‘in every perception there are always unnoticed
parts,” while E. B. de Condillac (1714-1780) in his Essai sur
VOrigine des Connaissances Humaines (1746) gives a lucid
analysis of the opposing views currently held with regard to
unconscious perception.
Another fascinating figure is A. Tucker (1705-1774), Eng-
lish philosopher and humanist, who was intrigued by the
work of the unconscious mind in tidying up what deliberate
effort had left in disorder, and by the tricks of unconscious
dishonesty.

. . our [mental] organs do not stand idle the moment we cease

to employ them, but continue the motions we put into them after
they have gone out of our sight, thereby working themselves to a
glibness and smoothness and falling into a more regular and or-
derly posture than we could have placed them with all our skill
and industry.

Some there are who will not allow the mind to act upon motives
at all, or at least assign her a limited power, which she exercises
sometimes, of acting against or without them or of giving them a
weight which does not naturally belong to them: they say she
plays tricks with her balance, like a juggling shopkeeper who
THE DISCOVERERS: 1730-1800 113
slides his little finger slily along one side of the beam, and by
pressing upon it makes twelve ounces of plumbs draw up a pound
of lead. It must be owned to our shame that we too frequently
practice these scurvy tricks to cheat those who have dealing with
us, and what is more fatal, to cheat ourselves into error and mis-
chief; but I hope to make it appear in due time that this is done,
not by a freewill of indifference overpowering the force of our
motives, but by privately slipping in or stealing out the weights
in either scale, which we often get a habit of doing so covertly
that we are not aware of the fraud ourselves.

D. Hume (1711-1776), in his Enquiry concerning Human

Understanding (1776) argued that all human behavior is ulti-
mately due to instinctive or physical agencies acting in us
without our knowledge:

. . . the experimental reasoning itself, which we possess in com-

mon with beasts, and on which the whole conduct of life depends,
is nothing but a species of instinct or mechanical power, that acts
in us unknown to ourselves; and in its chief operations, is not
directed by any such relations or comparisons of ideas, as are the
proper objects of our intellectual faculties.

G. C. Lichtenberg (1742-1799), German mathematician

and physicist, was deeply occupied with the significance of
his own dreams. He is one of the earliest examples of a pro-
fessional physicist interested in the unconscious aspects of his
own mental processes:

It thinks, one ought to say.

I believe that instinct takes priority over settled judgment.

One must marvel at the manifest stages of learning involved in

our organization, from the most obscure contrivances to the clear-
est insights of reason.
114 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
We become aware of certain representations, which do not depend
on us; others depend on us, or at least so we believe; where is the
boundary? One should say, it thinks, just as one says, it rains. To
say cogito is already too much, as soon as one translates it by “I
think.” To assume, or postulate the “I” isa practical requirement.

Unplanned wandering around, unplanned strokes of feeling, often

catch the wild animal which carefully planned philosophy can use
in its careful husbandry.

Lichtenberg was fascinated by his own dreams, and he had

the idea, which recurs in Moritz, Schubert, Carus, Schopen-
hauer, and Jung, that dreams may be reminiscences of states
prior to the development of individual awareness. But he was
mainly concerned with the contribution which particular
dreams could make to one’s understanding of oneself:

I know from experience that dreams lead to self-knowledge.

I recommend dreams again. We live and feel just as much in

dreams, as in waking, and the one is as much a part of our exist-
ence as the other. . . . One has hardly yet made the right use of
[our knowledge of dreams].

The fact that we see ourselves in dreams is the result of the fact
that we see ourselves often in a mirror, without thinking that it is
in a mirror. But in dreams the image is livelier and the conscious-
ness and thought less.

These dreams developed all kinds of ideas that were sleeping in

my soul.

Dreams can serve to represent the spontaneous expression of our

entire nature, without the strain of the most elaborate considera-
tion.
THE DISCOVERERS: 1730-1800 115
Though he did not know it, Lichtenberg was not alone at
that time in his concern with dreams. In 1791 D. Simpson,
an English clergyman, published his Discourse on Dreams and
Night Visions in which he wrote:

Dreams of great consequence in the government of the world. Of

equal authority with the Bible.

And has not the experience that many men have of significant
dreams and night visions a more powerful effect on their minds
than the most pure and refined concepts?

We now come to an important sequence of German

thinkers, from Kant, who was still mainly concerned with the
cognitive aspects, to Platner, Herder, Moritz, Fichte (J. G.),
Novalis, Schelling, Schlegel, and Goethe, who show a steadily
deepening sense of the emotional and volitional. The sources
of this new emphasis lie, if anywhere, in Shakespeare, Rous-
seau, and Hamann. But whatever had gone before them, in
some sense the time was ripe for an outburst of emotions
from the unconscious forcing men to realize that the source
of feeling and willing lay in unconscious regions of the mind.
I. Kant (1724-1804) enters our story because of his great
influence, rather than for any special originality.

Only we can be indirectly aware that we have a perception, though

at the same time we are not directly aware of it. Such perceptions
are called dark; the others clear.

The field of our sense perceptions and sensations, of which we are

not conscious, though we undoubtedly can infer that we possess
them, that is, the dark ideas in Man [and so also in animals], is
immeasurable. The clear ones in contrast cover infinitely few
points which lie open to consciousness; that in fact on the great
map of our spirit only a few points are illuminated: this can lead
us to marvel regarding our own nature.
116 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD

Kant suggested that the creative activities of genius are

guided by an “‘unconscious purpose.”
E. Platner (1744-1818), physician and philosopher, is a
figure of great importance. For he was apparently the first to
use the German terms bewusstlos (unconscious) and Unbe-
wusstsein (unconsciousness), and to assert that conscious and
unconscious states follow one another in a ceaseless alterna-
tion. His Philosophische Aphorismen (1776) is a landmark
in the history of our theme.

Consciousness is no essential part of an idea.

The soul is not always conscious of its ideas. Experience teaches

this. So not always of their consequences. Thus ideas without con-
sciousness must be possible.

Ideas with consciousness I provisionally call apperceptions, fol-

lowing Leibnitz; ideas without consciousness perceptions, or dark
images.

The life of the mind is an unbroken series of actions, a continuous

series of ideas of both kinds. For apperceptions alternate with per-
ceptions throughout life—wakefulness and sleep, consciousness and
unconsciousness.

Ideas with consciousness are often the psychological results of

ideas without consciousness.

In J. G. v. Herder (1744-1803), a student of surgery who

turned to theology and philosophy, we find, fused into a
single religious and emotional vision of experience as tem-
poral process, most of the factors which led the transforma-
tion from static to process thought: a vivid inner sense of the
immediacy of change (derived partly from Rousseau, Ha-
mann, and Eastern thought), a keen interest in archeology and
THE DISCOVERERS: 1730-1800 117
history (Lessing, Winckelmann), and in the sciences (Kant,
the French Encyclopedists, biology). Herder was perhaps
more receptive than original. Nietzsche said that Herder
“possessed in the highest degree the sense for the weather, he
saw and collected the flowers of the season earlier than all the
rest.” ‘Thus it is not surprising that, being inspired by a desire
to bring everything into his vision, he anticipated many
features of subsequent thought and was one of the earliest
to give vivid expression to certain aspects of the unconscious
mind. Here Herder stands halfway between the mystics and
the genuine science of the unconscious that is still ahead,
for he viewed the unconscious mind as the source of all power
within man: the fount both of evil and of good, at once noble
and terrifying.
The validity of Herder’s outlook is remarkable, as far as we
can judge it today. As will be seen in the following extracts
he hints at many important aspects of unconscious mental
processes: their demonic and frightening power; their im-
portance as the source of human nobility, of the unifying
imagination, of poetry, and of dreams; their roots in childhood
experience; their role in cognition; their greater accessibility
in dreams, in passion, and in illness; and the opportunity they
offer for therapy and the elimination of what we see as “the
great demon of evil.”

Also how excellent, that it is so, and that the deepest depths of
our soul are hidden in the night! Our poor thinking organ would
certainly not be able to seize every stimulus, the seed of every
sensation, in its ultimate elements, or to hear aloud such a soar-
ing ocean of dark waves, without shuddering with anxiety and
in fear and cowardice letting the rudder go from its hands. So
mother nature took away from it whatever could not be faced by
its clear consciousness, weighed every impression that it might
receive, and carefully organized every channel leading to it. Now
it does not analyze the roots, but enjoys the blossoms; scents float
118 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
to it from the dark bushes that it neither planned nor nourished;
it stands on an abyss of infinity, and knows not that it is there;
thus, through this happy ignorance, it stands firm and steady.

. varied as the contributions of the different senses are to think-

ing and feeling, in our inner man everything flows together and
becomes one. We usually call the depths of this confluence the
imagination...

And here too often illusions and visions, illnesses and dreams,
betray in the most peculiar fashion, what is sleeping within us.

So our faculty of cognition, though it is certainly the deepest self

in us, is not so powerful, voluntary, or free, as one believes.

. . . for long, and often throughout our life, we lean on the sup-
ports given to us in earliest childhood; we think ourselves, but
only in the same forms as others thought; we understand where
the finger of the methods we learnt points, . . . the rest is as if
it did not exist.

The ancient Germans reached decisions in drunkenness and car-

ried them out when sober; others will reach them soberly and
carry them out when drunk. Indeed it’s true that our planet moves
always round these two foci of our ellipse [knowing and feeling]
and is seldom equally near both. Perhaps it cannot and should
not; only let it be on guard against each extreme, from which it
can’t return. It becomes exhausted in pure reason, and sinks down
into burning passion.

Every noble human characteristic sleeps, like every good seed, in

motionless germ—it is there and does not know itself. . . . How
can the poor germ know, and how should it know, what stimuli,
forces and vapors of life flowed into it at the moment of its genesis?

If a man could sketch the deepest, most personal roots of his ab-
stractions and feelings, of his dreams and of the paths taken by
his thoughts, what a novel that would make! As it is this comes
THE DIscOvERERS: 1730-1800 119
about only in illnesses and moments of passion; and what a fright-
ful sight and what sheer marvel is often disclosed!

Mankind must one day get to the point where, sure of itself, it
can learn to recognize that even the frustrations of our fate are
caused by no one but the great and bountiful mother of all things
in accordance with her eternal laws, and that the mistakes we
make, and the maliciousness of others toward us, are aberrations
of the human understanding and diseases of the human heart,
which await our healing care. Seen in this light, the great demon
of evil disappears from nature, its realm is destroyed. And the
little demons in our own and in others’ hearts, must never, not
even in fairy tales, become co-rulers of the universe but, exposed
as mistakes and phantoms, they must be stifled and reduced to
silence.

A marvellous faculty in man, this involuntary and yet self-con-

sistent poetic creation of fairy tales and dreams! A realm unknown
to us and yet arising from out of us, in which for years, often for
our entire life, we continue to live, to dream, and to wander. And
precisely there we are our most severe judges. The world of dreams
gives us the most serious hints about ourselves. Thus every fairy
tale has the magic, but also the moral power of the dream.

Herder reacted violently against the rationalism of many

scientific thinkers of his time, feeling that their intellectual
abstractions distracted attention from more important aspects
of experience. Now that science no longer has to struggle for
prestige, scientists need not be slow to recognize that in cer-
tain respects Herder was right.
We have already considered several factors which, around
1740-1760, were preparing the ground. Certainly in each
decade from 1760 onward we find minds of various kinds:
religious, philosophical, scientific, and clinical, paying in-
creasing attention to the unconscious.
C. P. Moritz (1757-1793) founded a journal for obser-
120 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
vational psychology (Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde)
which ran for ten years. The first two issues, in 1783, contain
articles with the following titles: ‘‘Strength of Self-Conscious-
ness,” ‘““Waking Dream,” “Strange Behaviour without Con-
sciousness,” all contributed by physicians. This journal paid
considerable attention to the pathology of consciousness. One
article recounts how a Gottingen professor composed Greek
verses in a dream, and found them next morning without any
memory of the dream or even of the act of recording it. “Does
not this story prove that dim ideas, that is those whose origin
and relations we do not know, often determine our actions?”
J. G. Fichte (1762-1814) opens a sequence of German
philosophers: Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche,
who developed the conception of the unconscious mind as a
dynamic principle underlying conscious reason. For Fichte
the light of consciousness emerges out of the dark of the
unconscious. The unconscious processes of the mind had
previously been considered by professional philosophers to be
mainly concerned with memory and perception; now they
became unmistakably the seat of instinct and will.
Fichte starts, with Kant, by stressing the role of the un-
conscious in perception and thought:

It is this almost always neglected activity [the synthetic activity

of the mind] which constructs a unity from steady contrasts, which
enters between moments which must separate from each other and
preserves a unity linking both; it is this alone which makes pos-
sible life and consciousness, and above all consciousness as a con-
tinuous temporal sequence.

The apperceptive faculty of the mind is an activity which contains

the ultimate basis of all consciousness, but never itself comes to
consciousness.

This Fichte called “the Unconscious.”

THE DIscOVERERS: 1730-1800 12%
But he goes on to link this Unconscious with the natural
springs of action:

The highest in me, independently of consciousness and the im-

mediate object of consciousness, is the impulse. The impulse is
the highest representation of the intelligence in nature.

Such thoughts were certainly in the air.

Novalis (Friederich von Hardenburg, 1772-1801), the
German poet, conceived man as the harmony of conscious
and unconscious.

We do not know the depth of our mind. The secret path leads
inward. Inside us, or nowhere, are the realms of eternity, the past
and the future.

Equation and analogy between the theory of body and of mind.

Then psychology and physiology would seem to me to be com-

pletely identical, and the mind nothing but the principle of the
system.

The person is a harmony . . . not a mixture, nor a movement.

. . . Spirit and person are one.

One is necessarily terrified when one casts a glance into the depths
of the mind. The depths of meaning and the will know no limits.
. .. The imagination is exhausted and ceases to operate, only
its momentary constitution is perceived. Here we encounter the
possibility of mental illnesses . . . and the moral law appears as
the one true, great elevating principle of the universe, as the basic
law of all harmonious development.

Strange that the inside of man has thus far been so scantily ob-
served and unintelligently discussed. . . . How little one has ap-
plied physics to the human spirit, and the spirit to the external
122 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
world. Reason, imagination, intelligence—these are the bare frame-
work of the universe operating in us. No word of their wonderful
blendings, new forms, and transitions. No one has thought of seek-
ing out a new unknown force, to follow out their cooperative
relationships. Who knows, what wonderful new unities, what won-
derful new developments, still lie ahead of us within ourselves.

Between 1775 and 1800 the study of human personality by

physicians was breaking fresh ground and a movement was
initiated which laid the basis for the medical psychology of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Only a few realized
this at the time.
In retrospect we can see that one of the most influential
was F, A. Mesmer (1733-1815), who claimed to achieve per-
manent cures of mental illnesses by overcoming conscious-
ness through the use of “animal magnetism.” The importance
of what is now called suggestion both in inducing and in
curing hysterical conditions was known to the ancient Greeks.
Mesmer provided a transition from the ancient mysteries to
true medical research. He did not himself employ controllable
methods and he gave no acceptable explanation of his partial
success. But the results which he achieved by hypnotism pro-
voked the interest of the French psychiatrists whose work
gave Freud his opportunity.
Another important influence was J. G. Cabanis (1757-
1808), a French physician who emphasized the physiological
background of mind, and held that a physical understanding
of man must provide the true basis for philosophy and ethics.
Cabanis’ philosophy may be called a physiologically differ-
entiated animism. His studies of the effect of physiological
states on the mind led him to the idea which had occurred to
Descartes: in order to influence character, modify the organ-
ism. Cabanis’ combination of a highly scientific approach
with a firm conviction that his science held great promise for
man played a considerable part in stimulating several of the
THE DIScOVERERS: 1730-1800 123
leading nineteenth-century figures in our story, such as
Schopenhauer, Maine de Biran, and von Hartmann, though
for Cabanis physiology was all-important, and the activities
of the mind were particularly influenced by those of the re-
productive system.

Often the energy or weakness of the mind, the elevation of genius,

the abundance and élan of its ideas, or their almost complete
absence and the impotence of the intellectual organs, depend en-
tirely and directly on the states of excessive activity, languor, or
disorder in which the organs of generation find themselves. [My
italics.]

The source of morality lies in the human organization, on which

depend both our faculties and our manner of feeling.

J. C. Reil (1759-1813), a German physician, was con-

cerned with questions which he was one of the earliest to
pose clearly: “Which illnesses are psychic in origin? Which
of these should be treated by psychic and which by physical
methods?” Here is a sample from a work published after his
death, but written around 1790:

The passions act powerfully on the organism, can make it sick, and
kill it. But by the same powers they have also the capacity under
certain circumstances to cure it.

For Reil the clue to the nature of man lay beneath what
is directly visible of body and mind in principles of centrality
and tension.
During this period interest in the interactions of body
and mind was growing rapidly among physicians. Though
Cabanis’ view that physiology was primary was the most
popular, the reverse position, that the mind influenced bodily
states, was also being expressed. For example, in Germany
124 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
J. G. Langermann (1768-1832) published a work, “On a
Method of Diagnosing and Curing Morbid States of Mind,”
(in Latin) in 1797, where he developed the view that many
physical diseases were of psychological origin and stressed
the need to treat them by psychotherapy.
J. G. E. Maass (1766-1823), German philosopher, was
interested in the expression of desire in sleep and in dreams.

Passion is also an activity of the mental faculty, more precisely of

the faculty of desire. But sleep may often be too deep for us to
be conscious of the passion which disturbs it and of the associated
images but not less often it happens that a dream is born. For if
an idea reaches our consciousness during sleep, then a dream is
present.

F. W. J. v. Schelling (1775-1854), a close friend of Goethe,

and representative of the German School of Naturphilo-
sophie, though often unclear and overabstract, is of consider-
able importance as a link in the chain of thinkers leading
from the mysticism of Boehme to the protoscience of Freud.
For Schelling unconscious nature is potential mind, intelli-
gence in course of development. Unconscious nature becomes
conscious in the Ego. Consciousness is a secondary phe-
nomenon due to the conflict of subject and object. A single
unconscious formative energy underlies everything and dis-
plays a movement toward consciousness.

Aesthetic activity is an interplay of conscious and unconscious

mind beyond the reach of rational analysis.

In all, even the commonest and most everyday [human] produc-

tion, there cooperates with the conscious an unconscious activity.

Man’s noblest activity is that which knows not itself.

The identity of conscious and unconscious in the self.

THE DIscOVERERS: 1730-1800 125,
The eternal unconscious, that is also the eternal sun in the realm
of the mind, conceals itself by its own undulled light, and though
it never becomes an object, nonetheless impresses all spontaneous
activities with its identity, and is at the same time for all intelli-
gence the invisible root of which intelligence itself is only an ex-
pression.

You demand that you must be conscious of this freedom? But do

you realize that only because of it is all your consciousness pos-
sible? Do you realize that the “I,” as far as it arises in consciousness,
is no more the unmixed absolute “I” . . . ? Self-consciousness im-
plies a danger of losing the “I.”

Schelling gave the earliest formulation known to me of

the following argument, which for minds affected by the
Cartesian dualism is of crucial importance: that one organiz-
ing principle must pervade both the physical world and con-
sctousness, but that outside our own awareness this principle
is not itself conscious. This unifying principle of organization
and productivity operates without awareness in the de-
terminism of nature, and with awareness in our sense of free-
dom. We have to use our awareness to infer this principle
where we are not directly aware of it, both in the rest of
nature and in the unconscious formative processes of our
own minds.

It is impossible to understand how the objective world adjusts

to our ideas, and simultaneously how our ideas adjust to the ob-
jective world, if a pre-established harmony does not exist between
the two worlds: the ideal and the real. But this pre-established
harmony is inconceivable unless the activity which produces the
objective world is originally identical with the activity which
expresses itself in the will, and vice versa.

The same activity, which in free actions is productive with con-

U.B.F.——-K
126 THe Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
sciousness, must in producing the world be productive without
consciousness.

But this separation [of self from object] is only a means, not an
end. For the nature of man is action. But the less he thinks about
himself the more active he is. His noblest activity is that which
is not aware of itself. Once he makes himself an object, the whole
man no longer acts, for he has stopped a part of his activity in
order to reflect about the remainder.

As without language not only no philosophy, but no human con-

sciousness at all is conceivable, the foundations of language could
not have been consciously laid; and yet the deeper we penetrate
into it, the more clearly does it appear that its invention far sur-
passes in profundity those of the highest conscious product. It is
with language as with human beings; we think we behold them
come blindly into existence, and at the same time cannot doubt
their unfathomable significance even in the smallest particular.

It has been suggested that Schelling’s ‘““Unconscious”’ lies

purely in the cognitive realm, like Kant’s unconscious apper-
ceptive activity. This may be true of Schelling’s temperament
as a thinker, but not of the actual content of certain of his
writings, as will be seen from these quotations, which stress
the primary role of will and action. ‘‘For the nature of man is
active.” Here, with unmistakable clarity, is the primary ele-
ment in all those views of man which have displaced naive
rationalism: the Romantic, the neobiological, and recent
psychological theories.
J. W. v. Goethe (1749-1832) had the advantage of being
primarily a poet (but one with an intense interest both in
visual and in emotional experience) and he distrusted those
static analytical abstractions which for him patently neglected
the organized form that constitutes the characteristic feature
THE DISCOVERERS: 1730-1800 127
of everything in nature and man. It is significant that for a
few years after 1784 Goethe collaborated with Herder in mak-
ing a study of the natural sciences, both of them believing
that Kant’s analytical approach to science was inadequate.
With Goethe’s fascination in immediate phenomena, includ-
ing his own imagination and emotions, and his sensitivity to
the thoughts germinating in his contemporaries, it is not sur-
prising that, read in retrospect, he appears vividly aware,
with the Romantic poets and the others already quoted, of
the role of unconscious mental activities. The shift of
emphasis from the cognitive toward the instinctive and vital
aspects goes a step further in Goethe. Though less analyti-
cally philosophical and objectively scientific than many others
before and after, his outlook is more balanced. His intuition
is single, and for him as for Novalis, consciousness and un-
consciousness, properly interpreted, are inseparable, mere
names for complementary aspects of one phenomenon.
For Goethe, as for Spinoza whom he greatly admired, every-
thing human is part of nature. The poetic imagination is one
with the deepest secret of nature, for the primary process in
everything is the coming into existence of form (Gestaltung).
The working of his own poetic fantasy is a natural process.
His imagination is a gift, “pure nature.” It operates “in-
voluntarily, even against my will.’’ He wrote Werther “prac-
tically unconsciously.”” The same theme echoes through all his
writings; it is the most powerful clue to his outlook, since
the imagination, for him, underlies all loving, willing, and
thinking. It is this concern with the background of the
human mind and imagination that led Jung to interpret the
second part of Faust as “a preoccupation with the uncon-
scious.”
Here are a few samples of Goethe’s apergus, taken at
random from an immense number.
128 THe Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
Was von Menschen nicht gewusst,
Oder nicht gedacht,
Durch das Labyrinth der Brust,
Wandelt in der Nacht.

Man cannot persist long in a conscious state, he must throw him-

self back into the Unconscious, for his root lives there.

Men are to be viewed as the organs of their century, which operate

mainly unconsciously.

Everything that we call invention or discovery, in the higher sense,

is the significant practising, exercising of primitive feeling for
truth, which, after a long and quiet development, leads unex-
pectedly and with lightning speed to a fertile recognition. It is
a revelation developing from the internal toward the external,
which gives man a glimpse of his likeness to God. It is a syn-
thesis of world and spirit, which gives a blissful assurance of the
eternal harmony of existence.

Goethe had a firm conviction that conscious and uncon-

scious are inextricably interwoven in the working of the mind
and that cooperation of the two aspects was essential to all
the greatest achievements of the creative imagination in any
realm. He gave the clearest expression to this in a letter to
W. v. Humboldt, written in 1832, five days before his death
at the age of eighty-three.

Every action, and so every talent, needs some inborn element

which acts of itself, and unconsciously carries with it the neces-
sary aptitudes, and which, therefore, works spontaneously in such
a way that, though its law is implicit in it, its course in the end
may be aimless and purposeless. The earlier man becomes aware
that there exists a craft, an art that can help him toward a con-
trolled heightening of his natural abilities, the happier he is . . .
Here begin the manifold relations between the conscious and
THE DISCOVERERS: 1730-1800 129
the unconscious. Take for instance a talented musician, compos-
ing an. important score: consciousness and unconsciousness will
be like warp and weft, a simile I am fond of using. Through prac-
tice, teaching, reflection, success, failure, furtherance and resist-
ance, and again and again reflection, man’s organs unconsciously
and in a free activity link what he has acquired with his innate
gifts, so that a unity results which leaves the world amazed . . .

F, Schiller (1759-1805) poet and dramatist, and also friend

of Goethe, shows a similar awareness: ‘‘Poetry sets out from
the unconscious.” He advised a friend to release his imagina-
tion from the restraint of critical reason by employing a flow
of free associations.

Although by the dim light of everyday emotions the secret work-

ing of the forces of desire remain hidden away from light, it
becomes all the more conspicuous and stupendous when passion
is strongly aroused. . . . If for the other realms of nature there
should arise a Linnaeus to classify impulses and inclinations he
would greatly astonish mankind.

It will be noted that in the eighteenth century the uncon-

scious mind had already been linked with a primary organiz-
ing activity or formative principle, with the organs of genera-
tion and the élan of desire, and with illness. The nineteenth
century developed these early speculations in various direc-
tions, but added little that was new to the general conception.
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The Discoverers:
1800-1850

THE DEVELOPMENT of the idea of the uncon-

scious mind during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
followed two main paths which can be considered separately,
though a few thinkers combined both.
The first was to continue the scientific examination of de-
tailed facts, approaching the unconscious mental processes
in the individual cautiously from the clearly known facts of
the conscious life, from above as it were. This is the path of
Leibniz, Kant, Herbart, Benecke, Wundt, Hamilton, Mauds-
ley, Fechner, Lipps, and countless others who contributed to
the new science of psychology. This ‘inductive’ school is
fully treated in the histories of psychology, and will there-
fore here be given a smaller place than is its due.
Those who took the other path sought to identify at one
stroke the general character of all unconscious processes,
131
132 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
either in nature as a whole or in the human mind, either
individual or collective. The most important examples within
philosophy are Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
and perhaps von Hartmann (though he claimed to hold a
balance between his central idea and its particular expres-
sions). They dived straight into the unknown, deserting step-
by-step reasoning for a plunge into the depths. These four,
and their followers, were in an important sense anti-Classical,
anti-European, and anti-Enlightenment, for they rejected the
progressive advance of knowledge by careful discrimination
and instead postulated universal “dynamic” principles with
which the conscious person could identify himself and his
emotions, and from which everything else could be “de-
duced.” They preferred a dynamic of feeling to the apparent
clarity of analytical thought.
The disputes between the two schools were riddled with
misconceptions, for both points of view were indispensable.
The intellect must hold to individual facts, yet without intui-
tive raids into new realms the analytical, step-by-step ap-
proach would lack constructive hypotheses and a direction of
advance. Enthusiastic vision and detailed precision are both
necessary, though they are seldom found together, as they
were, for example, in Kepler.
The Romantic raid into the dark realms of the soul is well
illustrated by J. P. F. Richter (Jean Paul, 1763-1825), Ger-
man novelist, who gave lively expression in the first years of
the nineteenth century to the sense of the unconscious as the
seat of the passions, emotions, and the creative spirit of man.
Jean Paul had studied under Platner, from whom he had
learned of the Leibniz-Wolff conception of the unconscious.
But in Jean Paul the cognitive aspect falls into the back-
ground, the unconscious is now (1804) the source of vitality,
the unknown “inner Africa.”
THE DISCOVERERS: 1800-1850 133
The unconscious is really the largest realm in our minds, and
just on account of this unconsciousness the inner Africa, whose
unknown boundaries may extend far away. Why should every-
thing come to consciousness that lies in the mind since, for ex-
ample, that of which it has already been aware, the whole great
realm of memory, only appears to it illuminated in small areas
while the entire remaining world stays invisible in the shadows?
And may there not be a second half world of our mental moon
which never turns toward consciousness?

The most powerful thing in the poet, which blows the good and
the evil spirit into his works, is precisely the unconscious. So a
great one, like Shakespeare, will enfold and present jewels which
he could no more see than he could his own heart in his body,
since the divine wisdom always expresses its fullness in the sleep-
ing plant, in the animal instinct and in the movements of the
soul. . . . If one dares to say anything about the unconscious and
unfathomable, then one can only seek to determine its existence,
not its depths.

Visual artists and poets are among the most sensitive ba-
rometers of the intellectual weather, and it would be of
interest to examine how in Germany and Britain they re-
sponded in their different ways, and at different times in their
lives, to the emerging idea of the unconscious, say between
1770 and 1830, the period of Goethe’s adult life. To take
four poets: Goethe, Schiller, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
were all aware of the new realm being explored, though in
accordance with their contrasted temperaments they showed
this in different ways.
W. Wordsworth (1770-1850) in ‘The Prelude’ (1805)
reveals his preoccupation with the hidden sources of his own
thoughts:

I held unconscious intercourse with beauty.

134 Tue Unconscious BEForRE FREUD
Caverns there were in my mind which sun could
never penetrate.

With meditations passionate from deep recesses

in my heart.

Just as we are, the immortal spirit grows

Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements.

. .. my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion.

S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834), as poet, philosopher, and wide

reader, is as much aware of the new outlook as anyone of
his generation, but he retains a unique place for “reason,”
by which he means rational awareness in the service of the
whole man. Like Goethe and Schiller he recognizes the subtle
interplay of conscious and unconscious in artistic creation:

In every work of art there is a reconcilement of the external with

the internal; the consciousness is so impressed on the unconscious
as to appear in it.

that state of nascent existence in the twilight of imagination and

just on the vestibule of consciousness.

the twilight realms of consciousness.

The interest in dreams was carried further by G. H. v.

Schubert (1780-1860) who, in 1840, published a book on the
“Symbolism of Dreams.” The following quotations are taken
from earlier works (1808, 1838):
THE DIscoveRers: 1800-1850 135
And just as our body in a healthy condition knows and notices
nothing of what happens inside it to the food and air which has
been taken in, so also is the internal psychological process of
assimilation under ordinary conditions unnoticed, unconscious,
and only recognizable through its results.

Nonetheless there have been in the past and still occur states of
the human being in which his spirit attains a direct knowledge of
the spiritual and divine, and his mind knowledge of the internal,
hidden psychological world.

Also in the life of the mind a continual rhythm of inner events

can be observed which the comparing reason, without prejudicing
the truth, might compare with the sleeping and waking of the
body . . . for just as sleep strengthens the limbs for the tasks of
the day . . . so this retreat of our mind from the active direction
to the passive, which we can compare with sleep, strengthens all the
powers and capacities of the human mind and prepares in them
the beginnings of a new, fresh movement along the road of active
operation.

Maine de Biran (1766-1824), French philosopher, is an-

other important figure. De Biran was a self-taught introspec-
tive thinker mainly concerned with problems of perception
and epistemology, but he went beyond most of the earlier
systematic thinkers in giving a primary role to vitality, will,
and effort. For him awareness is a consequence of some chal-
lenge to the inner, often unconscious, will.
De Biran was particularly influenced by Leibniz, Condil-
lac, and Cabanis. There is much in common between De
Biran’s doctrine and that of Schopenhauer, who was writing
at the same period, and he may also have been interested in
Mesmer’s work. De Biran studied Pascal closely and critically.
Like Schopenhauer, he contrasts the conscious ego with the
unconscious background which ultimately controls it, pre-
determining character and intelligence. Janet goes so far as
136 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
to give De Biran credit for the “first clear recognition of the
unconscious.” I have already quoted enough to show that
this is misleading, but these passages, written between 1808
and 1812, speak for themselves:

Between the full consciousness and the Cartesian mechanism there

is room for beings with sensation without awareness, without a
me capable of perceiving it.

“Affection” is defined by De Biran as ‘‘what remains of a

complete sensation when one removes the personal individu-
ality or me.”’ This constitutes the mode “of a multitude of
living beings whose condition we approach whenever our
intellectual thinking is weakened or degraded, when thought
falls asleep, when the will is absent, when the me is as though
absorbed into the impressions, when the moral personality
no longer exists.”

Our illustrious Montaigne says with his directness and usual pro-
fundity: “There is not a single organ which does not often operate
against our will; each organ has its own passion which awakes it
and puts it to sleep without our leave.”

How many facts, and direct impressions, combine to demon-

strate these passions, which one might call partial, indicated with
such truth and force by the author of the Essays: is it not thus
that even during the silence of the sense and the imagination an
internal organ, such as that of hunger or of the sexual appetite,
spontaneously awakes all of a sudden, draws to itself all the facul-
ties of sensibility, masters the will, absorbs the intelligence, changes
the direction of the ideas, the order of all the movements and im-
presses a sequence of determinations and actions correctly de-
scribed as animal, so much so that the me does not take a truly
active part in it and that they equally take place without its co-
operation, as in the instincts or in somnambulism . .
These secret motive powers of a crowd of actions and of de-
THE DISCOVERERS: 1800-1850 137
terminations remain none the less profoundly unknown to the
sensible being who obeys them, and are hidden to reflection owing
to their very intimacy .. .
It is such dispositions, whether variable or constant, which,
unperceived by the sense, combine their products, impregnating
—one may say—the objects and images with certain colorings, cer-
tain affective modifications which appear truly to belong to them
and to adhere to them. Hence that refraction of the sensibility
which shows us external nature now as smiling and gracious, now
as covered by a funeral veil, which makes us see in the same things,
the same beings, now objects of hope and love, now matters for
distrust or fear; thus there is “hidden” in these obscure impres-
sions, which we cannot reverse, the source of practically all the
good and evil linked to the various moments of our life, we carry
there within us the truest sources of all good and evil . . . and
we accuse chance, we build altars to blind and variable fortune!
In fact what does it matter whether this secret power is inside or
outside us! For is not this the fate which pursues us, directs us,
and draws us often without our knowing .. . let us have the
courage to say it, and who better than you, Gentlemen [De Biran
was speaking to an audience of physicians], have the right to
appreciate this assertion which others, perhaps, will judge as too
daring? It is not at all in the power of philosophers, of reason, or
even of virtue, all-powerful as it is in relation to the volition and
actions of the man of goodwill, by itself to create any of these
happy affections which can make the immediate experience of
life so sweet, nor to change those sinister dispositions which can
make it so insupportable? If there existed some methods for pro-
ducing such results, it would be in your art above all, it would be
in physical medicine as much as moral medicine that one should
look for them; and whoever discovers such a precious secret, acting
on the very source of the internal sensibility, should be regarded
as the first benefactor of the species, the dispenser of the supreme
good, of wisdom, and even of virtue—if one can call virtuous who-
ever is always good without effort, being always calm and
happy... -
138 Tue Unconscious BEFrorE FREUD
In order to recognize the proper and specific characteristics of
those immediate impressions, whose source is in the internal life
and which exercise such a far-reaching and powerful influence on
all faculties of man, one must catch these characteristics when
they are isolated or dominant in cases where the functions of the
active life are still quiet or awaiting activity, or in a momentary
state of suspension, sluggishness or transformation. . . . The phe-
nomena of the life of the fetus during the period of gestation,
those of sleep and delirium, and those finally of various affective
sympathies can provide here interesting data and curious examples.

Hence those remarkable dreams through which a suffering nature

has sometimes revealed the cause and basis of his ill, explained his
needs, and indicated the appropriate remedies.

Observe, in fact, that even in the state of waking certain general

laws of association direct the sequence of the spontaneous images
of our mind, or determine the combinations or aggregates that
these form in our head; aggregates all the more resistant to the
methods of analysis, and all the more inaccessible to reflection,
because they are formed of their own accord, following the arbi-
trary dispositions in the brain, without any intervention of the
active faculties or of the power of the will.

A perception or an image that enters the mind without making any

trace in the memory, can nonetheless serve to introduce other
ideas which are linked to them by the laws of association.

[A consideration of dreams shows:]

1. The contrast between two principles of action which unite to
_ constitute the nature of man with his diverse faculties: the one
subordinated to the vitality of the organs and to the animal
sensibility; the other which is liberated from them up to a cer-
tain point and obeys hyperorganic laws;
2. The suspension of this latter principle in the phenomena of
sleep and dreams: a fact which is general and common, sup-
ported by the most varied phenomena of this class.
THE DISCOVERERS: 1800-1850 139
Maine de Biran was in regular correspondence around
1810 with A. M. Ampére (1778-1836), the physicist, and
Ampére’s letters to De Biran have been published. Ampére
discusses the nature of sensation, the origin of the sense of
“Me,” and suggests that without this self-awareness sensation
is an animal function lacking the characteristics of true ex-
perience, as we know it. This correspondence does not lend
itself to quotation, as the two friends took for granted what
they knew they shared: certain convictions about the uncon-
scious aspects of mental activities.
The next quotation is one of my favorites.
I. P. V. Troxler (1780-1866) was a German-Swiss physician,
teacher, and philosopher, who had studied under Schelling.
This is taken from his Glimpses into the Nature of Man
(1812):

Voluptuousness is a kind of wisdom of the unconscious, and beauty

a kind of freedom of the involuntary, but life has married the un-
conscious and involuntary to the reasonable and spontaneous—
and so man should not separate what heaven has joined.

G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), though an important figure

in the history of ideas, and one of the first to attempt to
systematize a universal doctrine of process, made scarcely any
novel contribution to the conception of unconscious mental
activities. Yet his thought is pervaded with the sense of an
unconscious historical movement often becoming in man an
unconscious will, as in these passages:

The patterns of habit affect all types and levels of activity of the
mind; the external, spatial determination of the individual, that
he stands upright, made by his will into a habit, is a direct, uncon-
scious attitude which none the less remains a matter of his per-
sisting will.
140 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
The History of the World begins with its general aim—the realiza-
tion of the Idea of Spirit—only in an implicit form, that is as
Nature; a hidden, most profoundly hidden, unconscious instinct;
and the whole process of History is directed to rendering this
unconscious impulse a conscious one.

Manifestations of vitality on the part of individuals and peoples,

in which they seek and satisfy their own purposes, are, at the same
time, the means and instructions of a higher and broader purpose
of which they know nothing—which they realize unconsciously.

[Of Caesar] it was not, then, his private gain merely, but an un-
conscious impulse that occasioned the accomplishment of that for
which the time was ripe. Such individuals [the World Historical
Heroes] had no consciousness of the general idea they were un-
folding.

A. Schopenhauer (1788-1860) made the idea of an uncon-

scious will in nature and man the center of his thought and
developed this idea with great vigor and psychological in-
sight, chiefly in his main work: The World as Will and Idea.
He touched on most aspects of the unconscious as we think of
it today and, as we have seen, the ground had been prepared
for a century and a half. I have chosen the following as an
example, not of the power and breadth of his vision, but of
his early understanding of a special problem: the origins of
mental illness.

The exposition of the origin of madness . . . will become more

comprehensible if it is remembered how unwillingly we think of
things which powerfully injure our interests, wound our pride,
or interfere with our wishes; how easily . . . we unconsciously
break away or sneak off from them again. . . . In that resistance
of the will to allowing what is contrary to it to come under the
examination of our intellect lies the place at which madness can
break in upon the mind . .
‘THE DISCOVERERS: 1800-1850 141
If . . . certain circumstances become for the intellect completely
suppressed . . . the gaps which arise are filled up at pleasure;
thus madness appears. For the intellect has given up its nature to
please the will; the man now imagines what does not exist. Yet
the madness which has thus arisen is now the lethe of unendur-
able suffering; it was the last remedy of harassed nature, i.e. of
the will.

The psychoanalyst Otto Rank suggested that Schopenhauer

includes under madness what is now called neurosis.
In England at this time Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859),
“the prince of dreamers”, declared in his ‘‘Palimpsest of the
Human Brain” that unconscious principles in the mind
sustain its unity during its last moments, as death is approach-
ing, and at times of crisis:

The fleeting accidents of a man’s life, and its external shows, may
indeed be irrelate and incongruous; but the organising principles
which fuse into harmony, and gather about fixed predeterminate
centres, whatever heterogeneous life may have accumulated from
without, will not permit the grandeur of the human unit greatly
to be violated, or its ultimate repose to be troubled, in the retro-
spect from dying moments, or from other great convulsions.

The idea that the unconscious mind might be a crucial

factor in the cure of mental or physical disorders, which—
except in mesmerism—had previously been mainly specula-
tive, became a practical issue for a few physicians around
1820-1830.
A. J. F. Bertrand (1801-1831), a French doctor, was partly
occupied with the task of turning Mesmer’s experiences into
a genuine therapeutic science. He defined “‘ecstasy”’ as “‘a par-
ticular state, which is neither wakefulness, nor sleeping, nor
dreaming, nor a sickness, but a state natural to man,” and
discusses this in saints, prophets, miracle-workers, the pos-
142 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
sessed, and those in convulsions. Bertrand explains how
unerringly “instinct” can sometimes speak through the words
of a somnambulist:

But when the somnambulist says things which can be the direct
result of judgments which their intelligence makes with regard to
impressions they have received, one can accord the greatest con-
fidence to wnat they say. Such notions fall into the class of instinc-
tive notions.
So their anticipations, the sense for remedies, understanding of
illnesses, etc., yield results of which one can be proud, provided
always that one can assure oneself that the somnambule, in speak-
ing, is listening only to the inspiration of his instinct.

In the same decade J. F. Herbart (1776-1841), German phi-

losopher, psychologist, and educationist, made an important
step forward toward a theory of the structure and mode of
operation of the unconscious mind. In a general sense the
unconscious mind had already been discovered, for the neces-
sity for inferring unconscious mental activities had been
well established. Moreover, in a tentative and speculative
manner many thinkers in different cultures had already
divided the mind into two or three higher and lower parts;
the Egyptians, the Hebrews, the Hindus, and the medieval
Christians, had all done this. But within Europe after 1600
few thinkers, if any, had attempted to reformulate these
ancient structural doctrines and to render them fertile by
introducing further principles of functional operation. Her-
bart’s ideas, published from 1824 onward, therefore mark
an important step.
As we have seen, the context of thought had been pre.
pared for this. Not only had the general conception of un-
conscious mental activities become widely acceptable, and
even commonplace, to an influential school of advanced
poetic, philosophical, and scientific thinkers, but the idea of
THE DiscovERERS: 1800-1850 143
maturing this conception so that it could be applied to achieve
deeper understanding and possibly even therapy had begun to
grip enterprising minds.
Countless physicians had been saying from 1780-1820:
“Don’t exaggerate the importance of consciousness.” The
terms “‘psychosomatic”’ and ‘“‘somatopsychic” had been used by
German physicians in 1818 and 1822. The treatment of patho-
logical mental conditions was already a legitimate field of
specialization for those with medical training. The ‘‘dynamic”
or developmental way of thinking had been maturing for
over fifty years. It is indeed difficult to imagine that hypoth-
eses regarding the precise structure of the formative and
destructive processes within the psyche could have been long
postponed.
Herbart’s contribution was to suggest that all mental phe-
nomena result from the actions and interactions of “ideas”
(presentations); that ideas are of different kinds, stronger
and weaker; that arrested (inhibited) ideas are obscured and
disappear from consciousness, leaving the field to others; that
such inhibited, unconscious ideas constitute a mass and con-
tinue to exert their pressure against those in consciousness;
and that there is thus a continual conflict between conscious
and unconscious ideas at the threshold of consciousness. This
is a positive theory regarding the mode of operation of the
mind, and Herbart carried it further: in his view the strong
ideas may not be old ones, new ideas may be capable of de-
feating and inhibiting long-established conceptions. Herbart’s
“ideas” are evidently active agents expressing vital tendencies,
and their struggles reflect the progressive adaptation of the
mind to personal and social situations.

One of the older ideas can in this situation be completely driven

out of consciousness by a new much weaker idea. On the other
hand its pressure there is not to be regarded as without effect;
144 Tue Unconscious BrForE FREUD
rather it works with full power against the ideas which are present
in consciousness. It thus causes a particular state of consciousness,
though its object is in no sense really imagined.

The importance of Herbart’s ideas, and their influence on

much subsequent thought, including Freud’s, has been widely
discussed. We are now entering the period when the history
of the idea of the unconscious in clinical and theoretical
psychopathology is covered by the standard histories of
medical psychology.
It is clear that the prestige of Herbart’s ideas, like those
of Leibniz, lay in the fact that he presented them in
quantitative form, as a speculative mechanics of the mind.
But in 1960 this has still not been justified. Indeed, it is
doubtful if it can have any objective meaning to assert that
“at a particular moment in A’s mind an abstract representa-
tion of a Platonic Moral Ideal had half of the strength of a
concrete representation (say) of Venus.” (An ordering rela-
tion may exist, but a quantitative measure is probably
irrelevant.)
Herbart’s ideas did not evoke any immediate response, for
few thinkers of the time were ready to recognize that uncon-
scious ideas might be, and frequently are, active agents in a
conflict on the threshold.
For example, F. E. Benecke (1798-1854), writing in 1825,
recognized a tendency to pass from unconscious to conscious
states, and a principle of alternation in the mind as a whole,
but the idea of conflict is missing.

[The newly born child’s] sensations and apprehensions are all of

them as yet unconscious.

These unconscious powers possess from the very first an inherent

capacity of becoming conscious. . . . Consciousness, therefore,
THE DIsCOVERERS: 1800-1850 145
does not exist from the first in any soul; it must come into existence
gradually.

. . . in the developed soul there is a perpetual alternation of con-

sciousness and unconsciousness.

. . . tnvoluntary suggestions, not to be confused with involuntary

impressions, which often arise suddenly in the soul . . .

Similar ideas were also being expressed in France.

Thus J. J. S. de Cardaillac, in a philosophical work pub-
lished in 1830, wrote:

One must note also that, amidst this immense crowd of ideas
always presented to the mind, it is only a small number that are
distinctly perceived and felt; and, among this small number, one
must include those which, being expressed by the vocal or mental
speech, are actually the object of attention; those which are most
closely related to circumstances which particularly strike us of
their own accord, or which acquire dominance by the attention
we give to them. As for the others, even though they are neither
perceived nor experienced, they are no less present to the mind,
playing there a most important role, as motives determining action;
and the influence they exert in this manner becomes the more
important the better they are disguised by habit.

At the same time, in 1832, C. Nodier (1780-1844), novelist

and poet, a much traveled thinker and friend of many Ro-
mantic writers, was publishing his ideas on sleep, dreams, and
the depths of the mind:

It may seem extraordinary, but it is certain that sleep is not only

the most powerful condition, but even the most lucid condition
for thought, if not in the transitory illusions in which it envelops
its thought, at least in the perceptions which derive.from it.
146 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
Folk wisdom has expressed this truth in the liveliest manner in
the significant usages of all languages: I’ll sleep on it . . . the
night will bring counsel.

Great God! Who will ever sound the impenetrable mysteries of

the spirit, whose depth makes dizzy the most confident reason?

Since there are two powers in man, or if one may so express it,
two spirits which rule him [the imaginative principles of sleep,
and the positive materialistic principle of waking] . . . which is
the better of the two states? If I dare to state my opinion, since
man cannot escape, along some unknown tangent, the obligation
of accepting and fulfilling the conditions of his double nature,
both are impossible in an exclusive application. . . . In a coun-
try where the positive principle claims to reign over all opinions,
there is nothing left to do but to renounce the name of man and
to retire to the woods . . . for such a society doesn’t deserve any
other farewell.

While Nodier was dreaming of an escape from man’s dual

nature by a retreat into the woods (perhaps taking Shake-
speare and Goethe with him), S. A. Kierkegaard (1813-1855),
the Danish philosopher, was seeking to pass beyond despair by
deep introspection, penetrating through the layers of uncon-
scious distortions to reach, with Boehme, a redeeming vision
of the Christian message of spiritual harmony.

Despair, viewed so that one does not consider whether it is con-

scious or unconscious. . . . If the Self is not true to itself, then
it is in despair, whether it knows it or not.

The degree of consciousness is as it were the exponent of the

power of the despair: the more consciousness the more intense the
despair. . . . The minimum of despair is a state which . . . in
a kind of innocence does not even know that it is despair, and
this coincides with the minimum of consciousness. It can then even
THE DIscOVERERS: 1800-1850 147
seem questionable to the observer whether he is at all right to
call such a state despair.

The despair that does not know it is despair.

Sir W. Hamilton (1788-1856), student of medicine, law,

and metaphysics, was one of the earliest English-speaking
scientific philosophers to accept and develop, in lectures given
from 1836 onward, the ideas being promoted in Germany:

Are there, in ordinary, Mental modifications, i.e. Mental activities

and passivities—of which we are unconscious, but which manifest
their existence by effects of which we are conscious?

I do not hesitate to affirm that what we are conscious of is con-

structed out of what we are not conscious of. . . . The Mental
modifications in question . . . are not in themselves revealed to
consciousness; but as certain facts of consciousness necessarily sup-
pose them to exist, and to exert an influence on the [conscious]
Mental processes, we are thus constrained to admit, as Modifica-
tions of Mind, what are not phenomena of Consciousness.

The sphere of our conscious modifications is only a small circle

in the centre of a far wider sphere of action and passion, of which
we are only conscious through its effects.

Hamilton’s systematic and comprehensive approach to the

problem, and his emphasis on action and passion, contributed
to the development of an English school, whose most influ-
ential members were Carpenter, Morell, and Maudsley. This
school directly influenced Freud’s teachers in Vienna.
K. F. Burdach (1776-1847), German Professor of Medicine,
looked beneath mental activity to a general property of all
living things, a plastic organizing principle like that of the
Christian Platonists. In 1829 he used the term “unconscious
148 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD

formative life,” and later wrote that “one should assume that
the principle of life and of the mind are not different in
essence, but only in their form of expression and stage of de-
velopment.”
Meantime the complement to this attempt to sweep every-
thing tidily under one principle was expressed by E. A. Poe
(1809-1848) in his Imp of the Perverse:

[On Perverseness]: In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a mobile

without motive, a motive not motiviert. Through its promptings
we act without comprehensible object; or, if this be understood
as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition
as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that
we should not. In theory no reason can be more unreasonable; but,
in fact, there is none more strong.

Any objective ‘“‘science of man” must curb itself so as to

leave room for Poe’s imp, and all the other paradoxical
streaks in human nature.
C. G. Carus (1789-1869), German physician and another
friend of Goethe, on whom he wrote a valuable interpreta-
tive study, is one of the most significant figures in our chain.
He was a doctor and observer of men, with an attitude at
once biological and religious. His strength and weakness are
those of Goethe: he distrusts and perhaps does not appre-
ciate the importance of the fine analysis of contrasts, and seeks
to derive all phenomena, as it were deductively, from a cen-
tral principle of life, dimly conceived as the growth of forms.
Carus’ root principle is unconscious and holistic. “Alle
Schopfung ist Werk der Natur.” Though as a physician he
cannot fail to recognize conflict and pathology, his emphasis
is idealistic and optimistic, and he does not identify the
peculiar frustrations of self-conscious man.
Carus’ great work: Psyche: Zur Entwickelungsgeschichte
der Seele (1846), is a landmark. Speaking as a physician, Carus
THE Discoverers: 1800-1850 149
claims that he is in possession of an important message for
mankind: the recognition of the true nature of the uncon-
scious mind. The opening sentence of this volume, which
runs as a leitmotiv through its pages, reads: “The key to the
understanding of the character of the conscious life lies in
the region of the unconscious.” (It is interesting that Freud’s
library, at his death, contained other works by Carus.) While
the conflicts which were Freud’s main concern were rela-
tively neglected by Carus, these quotations show that Carus
had a vivid sense of the importance of the sexual functions,
unconscious as instinct and conscious as voluptuousness, in
relation to the mind as a whole. His conception of the
“subtle oscillations between unconscious and conscious”
maintained through sexual relationships, describes something
known to every sensitive observer.

Let us therefore above all assist ourselves by observing how many

of the conscious states of our mind only develop and reach com-
pletion in an unconscious form.

From which it is clear that in willing, just as in knowing, the

passage from the conscious to the unconscious is truly part of the
highest human fulfillment.

Thus the possibility of the highest intensification of inner pleas-

ure or delight lies in this region—for which language has a special
word: voluptuousness—which is nothing other than the communi-
cation of the most intense and vital stimulation of the unconscious
sphere of the sexual system to the highest conscious sphere of the
nerves .

To emphasize that not merely in one case, but in many realms, the
unconscious is the active principle of our mental life.

. . . [so we conclude that] one and the same kind of intelligence

150 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
is effective in all these cases, and operates as a truly “unconscious
thinking.”

So gradually many other important distinctions between the con-

scious and the unconscious will become clear to us, for example,
one becomes convinced that necessity rules throughout the realm
of the unconscious, while freedom is based on the appearance of
consciousness.

In the entire realm of unconscious mental life the conception of

exhaustion does not apply.

This [sexual] desire, which in origin is necessarily an unconscious

one, has the significance that, in all its excitations, it penetrates
conscious and unconscious with equal force.

. so that the same subtle oscillation between unconscious and

conscious, on which every truly human existence must rest, is also
maintained right through this [sexual] relationship.

[Instinct, the prior form of human conscious life, is no special

force, but] nothing other than an activity, like the simpler organic
functions [breathing, digesting, etc.], but more complex and in-
volving the entire organism, which is determined in the uncon-
scious and is directed towards the requirements of the whole.

The unconscious is contrasted to the conscious, as the general is

to the special. But the main difference is that the first flows con-
tinuously, while the second appears periodically.

The unconscious is itself the subjective term for what we ob-

jectively recognize as nature.

As I have said, Carus’ penetrating interpretation of the

unconscious mind was prejudiced by a somewhat sentimental
idealistic and religious optimism, resulting in a neglect of
THE DIsCOVERERS: 1800-1850 151
conflict. A complementary and equally prejudiced view of
the unconscious factors in history was expressed in the same
year as Carus’ book appeared (1846) by K. Marx (1818-1883)
and F. Engels (1820-1895) in their materialistic and pessimistic
doctrine of social conflict. Though they did not at that date em-
ploy the term “unconscious,” they were keenly concerned with
the material factors producing consciousness, the limited valid-
ity of conscious motives, the real interests concealed beneath
ruling ideas, and so on. Their doctrine was, in fact, based on a
philosophy of the collective unconscious of the social classes.
(The index to the Deutsche Ideologie contains over 100
references under Bewusstsein.)

Since according to [the Young Hegelians’] fantasy, the relation-

ships of men, all their doings, their chains, and their limitations
are products of their consciousness, . . .

Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their

corresponding form of consciousness, thus no longer retain the
semblance of independence. . . . Life is not determined by con-
sciousness, but consciousness by life.

Division of labor only becomes truly such from the moment when
a division of material and mental labor appears. From this mo-
ment on consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something
other than consciousness of existing practice ... [and can]
emancipate itself from the world and proceed to the formation of
“pure” theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.

It is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to do on its own.

The class which has the means of material production at its dis-
posal, has control at the same time of the means of mental pro-
duction. . . . The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal
expression of the dominant material relationships.
152 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
During the nineteenth century there were many exact
scientists who did not recognize the utility of the conception
of “unconscious mental processes’ and were inclined to as-
sume that it was necessarily misleading.
For example, O. Domrich, German physiologist, wrote in
1848:

To postulate a special, mental, unconscious, lower central entity

for these involuntary associative feelings and movements can only
appeal to a philosopher who is not informed about the natural
physiological relations of the organism.

But even in 1960 no one is yet so well informed as to be

able to give a physiological description of mental processes.
 Vil

The Discoverers:
1850—1880

IN THE LIMITED PERSPECTIVE of the mid-twen-

tieth century the history of our idea appears to start moving
with a rush as it enters the 1850’s. It would be possible to
name some ten or twenty thinkers in each decade from 1850
to 1880 as having made minor contributions. Viewed more
objectively it may be that in the hundred years from 1850 to
1950 only a very few, perhaps five, basic theoretical advances
were made, mainly round 1900. Though the tempo seems to
change after 1850, this is partly a matter of more professional
workers in the field, and more thinkers either taking their
own ideas too seriously or neglecting what had already been
expressed. It was a time of increasing philosophical, bio-
logical, medical, and psychological specialization, and special-
ists—and above all teachers—cannot be expected to be con-
tinuously aware that their fundamental ideas may be old. In
153
154 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
retrospect it is both shocking and entertaining to observe
with what high seriousness each generation took its own
achievements, and how swiftly they were modified by the next.
What counts in the world of intellectual fashion is not novelty
or validity, but dramatic condensation, scholarly elaboration,
vivid presentation, and above all topical illustration and prac-
tical application. If one chose to look only for genuine intel-
lectual originality, in the sense of historical priority of valid
formulations, much of the history of ideas would vanish from
sight.
Thus Carpenter’s useful phrase ‘‘unconscious cerebration”
(1853)—to which we shall come in a moment—is either a cloak
for ignorance or a program for research; von Hartmann’s stu-
pendous Philosophy of the Unconscious (1868) added little,
except comprehensiveness, to Fichte, Schelling, Schopen-
hauer, Carus, and the others; Nietzsche’s doctrine of vitality
and his clairvoyant poetry of the depths can be viewed today
as natural inferences from what had already been thought
and said for a hundred years.
Even those who enjoy flashes of intuition and are repelled
by laborious detailed research must recognize that sub specie
aeternitatis all this ancient wisdom began to acquire a new
power when workers such as Liébault, Charcot, and Bern-
heim took up’ the scientific study of hypnotism and hysteria.
That is why this study of the background ideas ends approxi-
mately at the time when their work began.
The work of the years 1850 to 1880 was mainly exploratory
and educative, a further move from the general speculative
and philosophical context of the earlier period toward the
subsequent quasi-scientific specialized methods of thought
and inquiry.
The birth of a relatively trivial term may mark a new
orientation in thought, and W. B. Carpenter (1813-1885),
English physician and naturalist, is now remembered for his
THE DIscOvERERS: 1850-1880 155
creation in 1853 of the term “unconscious cerebration.” This
had a strong appeal to physical scientists and physiologists,
for it put the emphasis on an activity of the brain, and offered
the promise of a monist interpretation, still to be discovered.
It also appealed to many others, including philosophers such
as J. S. Mill, and it entered common usage around 1870;
Henry James wrote of the ‘‘unconscious cerebration of sleep”
in his Aspern Papers (1888).
For Carpenter it was ‘‘a matter of no practical consequence,
whether the doctrine be stated in terms of Metaphysics or of
Physiology, in terms of mind, or in terms of brain, provided
it be recognised as having a positive scientific basis.”

That act of ‘unconscious cerebration,” for so I call it, this un-

conscious operation of the brain in balancing for itself all these
considerations, in putting all in order, so to speak, in working out
the result—I believe that that process is far more likely to lead us
to good and true results than any continual discussion and argu-
mentation.

The mind has obviously worked more clearly and successfully in

this automatic condition, when left entirely to itself, than when
we have been cudgelling our brains, so to speak, to get the solu-
tion.

That action of the brain which, through unconscious cerebra-

tion, produces results which might never have been produced by
thought.

A considerable part of Carpenter’s Principles of Mental

Physiology (1874) is devoted to a discussion of the evidence
for unconscious cerebration, “an unconscious reflex action ot
the brain,” or ‘‘process of Modification” of the brain, only the
terminal results of which enter awareness. Chapter XIII of
that book, entitled ““Of Unconscious Cerebration,” is in many
156 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
respects so up to date, so topical in its quotations on the work-
ing of the unconscious background of the imagination, and
so little known, that it might be taken as it is and offered to
a popular magazine in 1960.
In spite of the work of Maine de Biran, thinkers in France
paid little attention until c. 1870 to the conceptions of the
unconscious that were developing so rapidly elsewhere. It is
significant that the first known usage of inconscient, either
as adjective or noun, is in 1860 by a French-speaking Swiss, a
student of German literature and philosophy:
H. F. Amiel (1821-1888), in his famous Journal:

The dream is the reflection of the waves of the unconscious life

in the floor of the imagination.

g August, 1862—Life, which seeks its own continuance, tends to

repair itself without our help. It mends its spiders’ webs when
they have been torn; it re-establishes in us the conditions of
health, and itself heals the injuries inflicted upon it: it binds the
bandage again upon our eyes, brings back hope into our hearts,
breathes health once more into our organs, and regilds the dream
of our imagination. But for this, experience would have hopelessly
withered and faded long before the time, and youth would be
older than the centenarian. The wise part of us, then, is that
which is unconscious of itself; and what is most reasonable in
man are those elements in him which do not reason. Instinct,
nature, a divine and impersonal activity, heal in us the wounds
made by our own follies; the invisible genius of our life is never
tired of providing material for the prodigalities of the self. The
essential, maternal basis of our conscious life is therefore that
unconscious life which we perceive no more than the outer hemi-
sphere of the moon perceives the earth, while all the time indis-
solubly and eternally bound to it.

28 April, 1861—In the same way as a dream transforms, according to

its nature, the incidents of sleep, so the soul converts into psychi-
THE DIscOVERERS: 1850-1880 157
cal phenomena the ill-defined impressions of the organism. An un-
comfortable attitude becomes nightmare; an atmosphere charged
with storm becomes moral torment. Not mechanically and by
direct causality; but imagination and conscience engender, accord-
ing to their own nature, analogous effects; they translate into their
own language, and cast in their own mold, whatever reaches them
from outside. Thus dreams may be helpful to medicine and to
divination, and states of weather may stir up and set free within
the soul vague and hidden evils. The suggestions and solicitations
which act upon life come from outside, but life produces nothing
but itself after all. Originality consists in rapid and clear reaction
against these outside influences, in giving to them our individual
stamp. To think is to withdraw, as it were, into one’s impression
—to make it clear to oneself, and then to put it forth in the shape
of a personal judgment. In this also consists self-deliverance, self-
enfranchisement, self-conquest. All that comes from outside as a
question to which we owe an answer—a pressure to be met by
counter-pressure, if we are to remain free and living agents. The
development of our unconscious nature follows the astronomical
laws of Ptolemy; everything in it is change—cycle, epicycle, and
metamorphosis.

Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think our-

selves to be.

Finally, here is Amiel’s warning (very relevant today) to

those who would cast the impatient searchlight of conscious
attention on every seed of thought:

And if you feel something new, whether thought or sentiment,

awake in the root of your being, do not at all bring light or atten-
tion to bear on it quickly; protect the birth of the germ by for-
getting it, surround it with peace, do not rob it of its darkness,
allow it to shape itself and to grow, and do not noise your fortune
abroad. Sacred work of nature, every conception should be en-
veloped in a triple veil of modesty, of silence, and of shadow.

U.B.F.—M
158 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
Meantime in Germany the sequence of thinkers on the
unconscious becomes so dense that selection is difficult, and
well-known names must be neglected in order to leave room
for a few of the forgotten.
I shall not, for example, quote from H. Helmholtz (1821-
1894), though he is important for his emphasis on uncon-
scious inference.
K. Fortlage (1806-1881), German philosopher and follower
of Benecke, in his System der Psychologie (1855) stressed the
basic importance of impulse and the association of uncon-
scious processes with instinct, suggesting that only when they
are repressed are special differentiated forms of instinct actu-
ally experienced, and that even then the primary undiffer-
entiated instinct remains unconscious. Instinct itself, accord-
ing to Fortlage, cannot make mistakes.
Consciousness is “a repressed instinct, or one arrested in its
external effectiveness.”

The act of perception perceives the rememberable content of an

image, and this is itself unconscious.

Instinct is the most important part of the unconscious content of

these images. It is the basis of consciousness. For consciousness
is an arrested instinct.

It is not instinct as such which displays the characteristic of an

imponderable, but only instinct in the uninhibited or unconscious
condition. [“‘Imponderable” here means “like an imponderable or
intangible physical fluid.’’]

These quotations show that Fortlage is concerned with a

fundamental issue which was relatively neglected by Freud:
the general conditions which evoke awareness. Freudian
theory is mainly concerned with a less general problem: the
THE DISCOVERERS: 1850-1880 159
conditions generating a pathological loss of awareness, after
it has developed.
I. H. Fichte (1796-1879), psychologist, son of the philos-
opher, is also concerned with the development of awareness
as a mode of response.

Beneath active consciousness there must lie consciousness in a

merely potential state, that is a middle condition of the mind,
which though not yet conscious, nonetheless positively carries
the specific character of Intelligence; from those conditions of
preconscious existence the true consciousness must be explained
and developed step by step.

One must therefore first distinguish an unconscious and a con-

scious region in the life of the mind, which are nonetheless inti-
mately interconnected in such a manner that what enters con-
scious presentations only develops itself from the flowing depths
of dark feelings and activities and sinks back into them again. This
unconscious, but rich and indeed inexhaustible background always
accompanies our clearly conscious mental life, which in compari-
son is relatively meager. But we can learn of the depth of its
range, and what hidden treasures it contains, when we turn our
attention to these phenomena of dreams, of insight, and so on.

Thus the first genesis of consciousness can only be the product of

a reaction, the response of our still unconscious mental life to an
external stimulus. Left to itself, innerly closed against relations
with anything other, even for the nature of the mind there would
be no cause for change, and it would thus be incapable of reach-
ing the condition of awareness.

Consciousness as such is not productive, brings forth nothing new.

In 1858 G. H. Lindner’s important Lehrbuch der em-

pirischen Psychologie nach genetischer Methode appeared,
160 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
in which Herbart’s psychology, including his theory of the
conflict of ideas on the threshold of awareness, was treated as
the most reliable approach to the understanding of the mind
from an empirical and developmental point of view.
G. T. Fechner (1801-1887), German psychologist, exerted
great influence (he was much admired and closely followed
by Freud) through his contributions to psychophysics, his
work on the threshold of consciousness—he compared the
mind to an iceberg mainly below the surface and moved by
hidden currents as well as by the winds of awareness—and by
his conceptions of mental energy, of a topography of the
mind, his pleasure-unpleasure principle, and his principle of
constancy (universal tendency toward a stable regular form).
W. M. Wundt (1832-1920), German physiologist, devel-
oped Fechner’s ideas between 1860 and 1880, and held that
we become conscious of our activities mainly through resist-
ance and conflict, that is, through their frustration. Our
proper activity is unconscious. He was keenly interested in
unconscious creative synthesis:

Our mind is so fortunately equipped, that it brings us the most

important bases for our thoughts without our having the least
knowledge of this work of elaboration. Only the results of it be-
come conscious. This unconscious mind is for us like an unknown
being who creates and produces for us, and finally throws the ripe
fruits in our lap.

As further evidence of German professional attention to

unconscious mental activities in the 1860’s, here is the influ-
ential physician-psychologist W. Griesinger (1817-1868), in
his book Mental Pathology and Therapeutics (taken from the
English translation, 1867):

There is in intelligence an actual, though to us an unconscious,

life and movement; we recognise it however by its results, which
THE DIscovERERS: 1850-1880 161
often suddenly make their appearance from some unexpected
source. A constant activity reigns over this almost, if not wholly,
darkened sphere, which is much greater and more characteristic
for the individuality than the relatively small number of impres-
sions which pass into the state of consciousness.

This appreciation of the unconscious formative imagina-

tion from German experimental physiology (not from physi-
ological theory, which is silent on such matters) makes a
convenient transition to a Scottish critic of art, E. S. Dallas
(1828-1879). These quotations are taken from his Gay Science
(1866), a study in the theory of art criticism.

The “imagination” is a name given to the automatic function of

the mind or any of its faculties—to what may not unfitly be called
the Hidden Soul.

Outside consciousness there rolls a vast tide of life which is per-

haps more important to us than the little isle of our thoughts
which lies within our ken. . . . Each is necessary to the other.
. . . Between our unconscious and our conscious existence, there
is a free and a constant, but unobserved traffic for ever carried on.

The mind is an organic whole, and lives in every part, even though
we know it not.

The spectator brings to the art object a total experience far deeper
than he could consciously fathom.

[The Hidden Soul never reasoned, abstracted, or dissected;] it

worked through metaphor, comparing wholes with wholes, seek-
ing from art parallels to its own latent intuitions.

Meantime in Britain a school of physicians had been quietly

developing a doctrine of unconscious mental activities as
part of their professional task of trying to understand the
162 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
patient as a body-mind unity. To these pragmatic monists
there was nothing strange or challenging in the idea of un-
conscious factors; whether one chose to call them physio-
logical or mental, they were indubitably at work. We have
already seen that Sir William Hamilton had taken up the
German ideas, and that W. B. Carpenter had followed him.
They were succeeded by many, of whom the most important
are perhaps J. D. Morell, J. C. Brodie, H. Maudsley, T. Lay-
cock, and D. H. Tuke.
Morell suggested in his Elements of Physiology that a line
cannot be drawn between the organic and the psychical forces,
and that it is only by a mental fiction that we distinguish the
conscious processes so sharply from the unconscious. In 1860
Laycock wrote:

No general fact is so well established by the experience of man-

kind or so universally accepted as a guide in the affairs of life, as
that of unconscious life and action.

Vital successional states and conscious successional states are due

to a common law, a law of design which includes both.

Maudsley summarized the ideas of this English school of

thought in his Physiology and Pathology of the Mind (1867),
where he wrote:

The most important part of mental action, the essential process

on which thinking depends, is unconscious mental activity.

This leads on, after 1880, to William James, and to

F. H. W. Myers’ “subliminal self.”
It is interesting to note that in 1874, the year Freud entered
the University, Brentano published in Vienna a detailed ex-
amination of Maudsley’s views, and that Freud attended
Brentano’s lectures for two years.
THE Discoverers: 1850-1880 163
It is not surprising that a German metaphysician (this is
not a pejorative term, for “an unconscious metaphysic moulds
every life”) considered that the time had come to make the
Unconscious the central principle of a philosophical system.
E. v. Hartmann (1842-1906) presented in his massive Phi-
losophy of the Unconscious (1868) a comprehensive survey
of German philosophy and of Western science, interpreted
in the light of one principle, partly “transcendental’’ and
partly “empirical,” of unconscious mental process. Von Hart-
mann’s work and its influence throughout Europe has some-
times been underestimated.
By 1882 this book had gone into nine editions in Germany;
it was translated into French in 1877 and into English in
1884, and was extensively reviewed in all three countries.
For example, the French reviews around 1870 display aware-
ness of the fact that unconscious mental activities had been
widely discussed throughout Europe, but most of all in Ger-
many, during the previous decades. Von Hartmann had struck
at a favorable moment; the unconscious was in the air; and
alarm was even being expressed in some quarters at the
threat it presented to established ideals and principles, for
that was already clear to some.
It is true that the power of the new idea to disturb and
transform Western ways was then only evident to a few. Our
quotations represent the advanced intuitions of searching
minds and the vast bulk of the science and literature of the
schools did not recognize the long-term significance of the
movement. .
Yet this must not be misunderstood. Around 1870 the
“unconscious” was not merely topical for professionals, it was
already fashionable talk for those who wished to display their
culture. The German writer, von Spielhagen, in a period
novel written about 1890, describes the atmosphere in a salon
in Berlin in the 1870’s, when two topics dominated the con-
164 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
versation: Wagner and von Hartmann, the music and the
philosophy of the unconscious, Tristan and instinct.
As often happens in the history of thought, an idea may be
fashionable and even transform society before it is properly
understood. The atomic nucleus was discovered in 1911; it is
now transforming human life; but it is not yet understood in
the sense that gravity, crystal structure, and chemical actions
already are. The unconscious mind, in the post-Cartesian
sense, was discovered around 1700; it is now transforming
Western thought; who would dare to claim that its basic laws
are yet understood? Freud did not.
Von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious is a vast
enterprise—the English 1931 translation fills 1100 pages—
covering in its fashion nearly all conceivable aspects. The
chapter headings refer to twenty-six topics, from neural physi-
ology, movements, reflexes, will, instinct, idea, curative proc-
esses, plastic energy, sexual love, feeling, morality, language,
mysticism, history, metaphysics, ultimate principles, and even
the use of probability theory to justify the inference of mental
causes from material events. Von Hartmann surveys his pred-
ecessors, giving a discussion of the ideas of the Vedas, Leibniz,
Hume, Kant, Fichte, Hamann, Herder, Schelling, Schubert,
Richter, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Herbart, Fechner, Carus,
Wundt, and several others. He does not, however, indicate
what several have noticed, that his work is an expansion of
the ideas of Carus’ Psyche into a comprehensive metaphysical
and quasi-scientific system. Carus had already digested much
earlier thought, and had transformed it into an intuitive pic-
ture of the nature of man; von Hartmann broke it up again,
went back to all the sources and claimed to be re-presenting
it as a systematic philosophy. His work is an extraordinary
achievement in 1868, and it proves that when Freud was
twelve years of age, twenty-six aspects of unconscious mental
activity in man had already been considered in detail in a
THE DIscOVERERS: 1850-1880 165,
famous work. But it is neither good philosophy nor good
science. It does not state what is known and what is not
known; what are the real problems; how they should be
solved; or what effect their solution might have on man.
How can one quote from 1100 pages, which are partly
echoes of earlier writers, partly a Hegelian whirl of words,
and partly descriptions of scientific facts? Here are a few
passages, chosen at random, to show that von Hartmann could
see far in 1868:

The principle of practical philosophy is to MAKE THE ENDS

OF THE UNCONSCIOUS ENDS OF OUR OWN CONSCIOUS-
NESS. [His capitals.]

Female chastity alone protects social relations from complete dis-

order.

The bee . . . without ever having seen the life, carries in itself
the unconscious representation of the hexagonal cell, accurate to
half an angular minute.

The vis medicatrix [unconscious reparative power of nature].

. . we must recognize a clairvoyance of the unconscious in the

purposiveness of the creative impulse as in that of instinct . .

Such quotations could be endless. Everything seems to be

there, but without the clear discriminations of science and
the concentration on important unknowns that marks genius.
There could not be a greater contrast between von Hart-
mann, the verbalizing philosopher digesting everything, and
Freud, the seeker after special truths to be used for a clear
purpose. Yet for the student of the history of ideas von Hart-
mann’s book, and the response it received in many countries,
is proof that by 1870 Europe was ready to discard the Car-
166 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
tesian view of mind as awareness, but not prepared to wait
any longer for physiology to take over the problem. Nor was
Freud himself: around 1890, confronted by neurotic patients,
he began to drop his neurophysiology and sought to develop
a psychological interpretation of neurosis. Fortunately he had
not read von Hartmann. He may have been unconsciously
influenced in his general attitude by Schopenhauer, Nie-
tzsche, and Dostoevsky—for even if he personally read little of
these writers in his early years, they were being widely read
in Vienna in the last two decades of the century. Yet in their
recognition of the unconscious depths of the mind, these three
great writers were in no sense original, they were merely pre-
senting once again, in new images and in a new context, what
had long been known to a few. They are original in their
own dimension, but not in the history of the human mind.
In one sense no writer ever was more without precedent in
his material or method than Dostoevsky, and his penetrating
insight into unusual states of mind has never been surpassed.
Yet the immense response to his novels shows that the orien-
tation of his thought must correspond closely to a widespread
experience in our time. And on analysis we find that many
of the aspects of deep psychology with which he was concerned
were those that were being actively explored by philosophers,
physicians, and psychologists throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury. One may call these aspects the pathology of conscious-
ness, first explicitly studied in the previous century, and
taken up in the nineteenth for professional investigation in
particular realms: hysteria, epilepsy, the paralysis of spon-
taneity through unconscious conflict of motives, the antici-
patory and curative significance of dreams, and so on. Dosto-
evsky was, like every other fertile genius, a man of his time,
bringing an old tradition of ideas to new life by reliving it in
his own passionate experience. Here the personal and the
universal are fused. Dostoevsky seems to be describing freak
THE Discoverers: 1850-1880 167
pathology; but he is illustrating at the same time less-recog-
nized levels of the normal. Some of his most striking char-
acters are so riddled with contradictions that we can scarcely
accept them—but what about ourselves? ‘To take an extreme
example: Dostoevsky seems to be excessively concerned with
the quality of a man’s consciousness when he believes that
death is near—but is this so irrelevant as we may consciously
suppose?
Just because Dostoevsky is so deeply aware of contradiction
and complexity, and not an impatient theorizer, his vivid
sense of the harmonies and cacophonies of the unconscious
cannot properly be illustrated by quotations. I will content
myself with one passage from The Idiot (1868), referring to
a dream:

These obvious absurdities and impossibilities with which your

dream was overflowing . . . you accepted all at once, almost with-
out the slightest surprise, at the very time when, on another side,
your reason was at its highest tension and showed extraordinary
power, cunning, sagacity and logic. And why, too, on waking and
fully returning to reality, do you feel almost every time, and some-
times with extraordinary intensity, that you have left something
unexplained behind with the dream, and at the same time you
feel that interwoven with these absurdities some thought lies
hidden, and a thought that is real, something belonging to your
actual life, something that exists and always has existed in your
heart. It’s as though something new, prophetic, that you were
awaiting, has been told you in your dream.

This survey of leading opinion from 1850 to 1880 makes it

all the more striking that Freud’s work was treated with
angry professional scorn from 1905—1915, as stupid as the same
profession’s blind adulation which followed swiftly, from
1935-1945. Why were Freud’s doctrine and methods found so
despicable—a matter for official taboos and police action—if
168 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
the background had been so long prepared and he was to be
recognized as a major figure a generation later?
The answer is perhaps that Freud’s explicit and narrow
emphasis on sexuality-as the source of neurosis disturbed
many who were not ready—as Freud was—to admit into theory
and clinical practice what they had inhibited—as Freud also
had—in their own lives. Freud mercilessly exposed their
lesions; more than that he claimed to be doing it in the name
of science and enlightenment, though sexuality is only one
aspect of the vital ¢lan in man. To be exposed is bad enough;
to have that done to one in the name of a harmonizing prin-
ciple would perhaps have made it tolerable. But to be told
that sexual conflict was the cause of all neuroses and that
the fear of incest lay at the bottom of everything, this was
hateful and Freud was duly hated—until he himself (from
1920 onward) and later many of his followers, uncorsciously
took “Freud” cum grano salis, knowing well that sexuality is
only one expression, inseparable from all the others, of the
organic tendencies in man. But there was no assurance of
that when Freud began his incisive analysis and self-analysis
from 1890 to 1900, nor indeed up to 1920.
Around 1870-1880 the story passes out of our scope. This
means that such names as Charcot, Bernheim, Delboeuf,
Lotze, Bertrand, Lipps, Janet, Breuer, Galton, Tuke, Morton
Prince, James, Myers, Hudson, Lombroso—all of whom made
contributions before 1899 when Freud’s Interpretation of
Dreams was published—can only be mentioned. Nor can we
consider the work of those who since 1900 have, either in-
dependently or in some degree following Freud, developed
these ideas further (Weininger, Havelock Ellis, Jung, Adler,
Rank, and many others) or applied them in philosophy (Berg-
son) or literature (Proust, and many writers of this century).
I have given sufficient evidence to show that the general
conception of unconscious mental processes was conceivable
THE DiIscovERERS: 1850-1880 169
(in post-Cartesian Europe) around 1700, topical around 1800,
and fashionable around 1870-1880. Also that many special
applications of the idea had been systematically developed
from 1800 onward. My object in doing this is in no degree
to belittle Freud’s achievement, which would be absurd, but
to show that an immense background of sustained thought
by a large number of individuals in many countries uncon-
sciously or semiconsciously influences and supports even the
most original of minds. As is well known, Freud explained
that he avoided reading Schopenhauer and Nietzsche until
late in life, “I was less concerned with priority than with
preserving my impartiality,” just as Boyle, the chemist, said
that he had avoided the Democritean and Cartesian doctrines
for fear of prejudicing his inferences from experiment. In a
letter to Fliess, written on August 31, 1898, Freud shows some
disappointment at discovering that Theodor Lipps had ex-
pressed some of his own basic assumptions in a work published
in 1883. This shows that when Freud was forty-two he was
unaware that at least fifty writers (probably many more)
had been developing similar assumptions for over two hun-
dred years.
Finally in 1925, at the age of sixty-nine, Freud wrote: “The
overwhelming majority of philosophers regard as mental
only the phenomena of consciousness. For them the world of
consciousness coincides with the sphere of what is mental.”
This curious mistake shows how narrow his reading had
been, and how wrong a conception he must then have had of
his own originality. The inference is that not only Freud but
most of us are largely unaware of what has made us what we
are and led us to think as we do, and it is sometimes as well
that we should be ignorant.
In any case it cannot be disputed that by 1870-1880 the
general conception of the unconscious mind was a European
commonplace, and that many special applications of this gen-
170 Tue Unconscious BeForE FREUD
eral idea had been vigorously discussed for several decades.
Nor was this interest restricted to narrow circles, for:
1. The circulation of works such as von Hartmann’s sug-
gests that at least fifty thousand Europeans paid some atten-
tion to these ideas during this decade.
2. During the same decade at least six other books were
published with the word “unconscious” (or its equivalent in
German or French) in the title, showing that publishers were
ready to seize the opportunity resulting from this widespread
interest:
1872, W. B. Carpenter, Unconscious Action of the Brain;
1872, J. C. Fischer, Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewuss-
ten. Ein Schmerzenschrei des gesunden Menschen-
verstandes;
1873, J. Volkelt, Das Unbewusste und der Pessimismus;
1877, C. F. Flemming, Zur Klarung des Begriffs der unbe-
wussten Seelen-Thatigkeit;
1877; A. Schmidt, Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen
der Philosophie des Unbewussten;
1880, E. Colsenet, La Vie Inconsciente de l’Esprit.
3. Even in France where the idea seems to have met more
resistance than in Germany or England, it became topical at
this time. For example, during the six years, 1872-1877, three
lengthy surveys * of contemporary thought on the uncon-
scious mind were published by Renouvier, Janet, and Du-.
mond—the last citing fourteen German authors from Kant
onward.
4. In the 1870’s three writers independently developed
theories of unconscious organic memory: Eduard Hering,
Thomas Laycock, and Samuel Butler.
I shall close this historical survey by referring to five
writers, each remarkable in her or his own way, whose names
might not be found in the index of any narrower professional
survey, but who showed around 1870 a keen awareness of the
THE Discoverers: 1850-1880 171
importance of the unconscious levels of the mind: an English-
woman of wide interests, an American poet and essayist, a
French poet, a French historian, and finally one of the most
penetrating minds ever to have used the German language.
None of these, I believe, had anything new to say, but they
expressed old truths in a new context, and to a new audience.
I have found no woman writer since Descartes (that ex-
cludes Santa Teresa) who put on record her interest in the
unconscious mind earlier than the intelligent Miss Frances
Power Cobbe, who contributed regularly to English monthlies
between 1860 and 1880. She was certainly a wide reader, and
she reflects advanced opinion in England fourteen years be-
fore the first translation of von Hartmann appeared in
London. Macmillan’s Magazine for November, 1870, contains
an excellent review article by her on ‘Unconscious Cerebra-
tion” mentioning Leibniz, Hamilton, and Carpenter, among
others, and giving a lucid summary of the mental faculties
which, on the basis of her reading and personal experience,
she credited to the “Unconscious Brain.” In this she found
nothing alien to her Christian faith.
Four months earlier the American anatomist, essayist, and
poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes, had been reading a paper to
the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard on ‘Mechanism in
Thought and Morals,” which included the following wonder-
ful passage:

The more we examine the mechanism of thought, the more we

shall see that the automatic, unconscious action of the mind enters
largely into all its processes. Our definite ideas are stepping-
stones: how we get from one to the other, we do not know: some-
thing carries us; we do not take the step. A creating and informing
spirit which is with us, and not of us, is recognized everywhere in
real and in storied life. It is the Zeus that kindled the rage of
Achilles: it is the Muse of Homer; it is the Daimon of Socrates;
it is the inspiration of the seer; it is the mocking devil that whispers
172 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
to Margaret as she kneels at the altar; and the hobgoblin that cried,
“Sell him, sell him!” in the ear of John Bunyan; it shaped the
forms that filled the soul of Michael Angelo when he saw the
figure of the great Lawgiver in the yet unhewn marble, and the
dome of the world’s yet unbuilt basilica against the blank horizon;
it comes to the least of us, as a voice that will be heard; it tells us
what we must believe; it frames our sentences; it lends a sudden
gleam of sense or eloquence to the dullest of us all, so that, like
Katterfelto with his hair on end, we wonder at ourselves, or rather
not at ourselves, but at this divine visitor, who chooses our brain
as his dwelling-place, and invests our naked thought with the
purple of the kings of speech or song.

After all, the mystery of unconscious mental action is exempli-

fied, as I have said, in every act of mental association. What hap-
pens when one idea brings up another? Some internal movement,
of which we are wholly unconscious, and which we only know by
its effect. What is this action, which in Dame Quickly agglutinates
contiguous circumstances by their surfaces; in men of wit and fancy,
connects remote ideas by partial resemblances; in men of imagina-
tion, by the vital identity which underlies phenomenal diversity;
in the man of science, groups the objects of thought in sequences
of maximal resemblance? Not one of them can answer. There is
Delphi and a Pythoness in every human breast.

[Katterfelto was a German quack and conjurer who was the rage
in London from 1782 to 1784.]

On May 15, 1871, the poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)

wrote in Lettre du Voyant:

For J is someone else. If the upper vessel awakes as a clarion, it’s

not in the least its fault. This is quite clear to me: I assist at the
unfolding of my thought: I watch it. I listen to it: I make a stroke
of the bow: the symphony stirs in the depths, or comes on the
scene at a leap.
THE DIscovERERS: 1850-1880 173
If the old imbeciles hadn’t only discovered the wrong meaning of
ME, we wouldn’t have had to clear away the millions of skeletons
who, for infinite ages, have been piling up the products of their
intelligences fit only for a one-eyed old woman, while crying out
that they are authors.

In Greece, as I said, poetry and the lyre provide the rhythm of

action. Later, music and rhyme become games, relaxations. The
study of the past charms the inquisitive; several pleased them-
selves by renewing antiquity—that’s for them. The universal in-
telligence has always sent forth its ideas naturally; men collect a
part of these fruits of the brain; then act on them, and use them to
write books; that’s how the advance went on, man not working,
indeed not yet being awake, or not yet as fully awake as he was
lost in the great sleep. Officials, writers. The Author, the creator,
the poet: this man has never existed! The first study for the man
who wants to be a poet is to know himself; he looks for his mind,
inspects it, tries it, learns it. When he knows it, he must cultivate
it! That seems simple: in each brain a natural development works
itself out; so many egoists claim to be authors: many others take
credit themselves for their intellectual progress! . . . I say that
one must be a seer (voyant), make oneself a seer.

The following passages from H. A. Taine (1828-1893)

French historian and critic, show that many of the ideas we
have been considering were by 1870 circulating there almost
as freely as in Germany. They are taken from his essay Sur
V’Intelligence:

We get a glance here at the obscure and infinite world extending

beneath our distinct sensations. These are compounds and wholes.
For their elements to be perceptible to consciousness, it is neces-
sary for them to be added together, and so to acquire a certain
bulk, and to occupy a certain time; if their group does not attain
this bulk and does not last this time, we observe no change in our
state. Nevertheless, though it escapes us, there is one; our internal

U.B.F.—N
174 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
sight has limits; outside these limits, internal events, though real,
are for us as though they did not exist. They gain accession, they
undergo diminutions, they combine, they are decomposed, with-
out our being conscious of it. They may even, as we have just seen
in the case of sensations of sound, have different degrees of recoil,
beyond the grasp of consciousness. The elementary sensations
directly making up our ordinary sensations are themselves com-
pounded of sensations of less intensity and duration, and so on.
Thus, there is going on within us a subterranean process of infi-
nite extent, its products alone are known to us, and are only
known to us in the mass. As to elements and their elements, con-
sciousness does not attain to them, reasoning concludes that they
exist; they are to sensations what secondary molecules and primi-
tive atoms are to bodies; we have but an abstract conception of
them, and what represents them to us is not an image, but a
notation.

But, besides the mental events perceptible to consciousness, the

molecular movements of the nervous centers also arouse mental
events imperceptible to consciousness. These are far more numer-
ous than the others, and of the world which makes up our being,
we only perceive the highest points, the lighted-up peaks of a
continent whose lower levels remain in the shade. Beneath ordi-
nary sensations are their components, that is to say the elementary
sensations which must be combined into groups to reach our con-
sciousness. By the side of ordinary images and ideas are their
collaterals, I mean the latent images and ideas, which must take
their turn of preponderance and ascendancy in order to reach
consciousness.

Having settled this, we see the moral world extending far beyond
the limits assigned to it. We are accustomed to limit it to events
of which we have consciousness; but it is now plain that the ca-
pacity of appearing to consciousness belongs only to certain of
these events; the majority of them do not possess it. Outside a little
luminous circle lies a large ring of twilight, and beyond this an
THE DISCOVERERS: 1850-1886 175
indefinite night; but the events of this twilight and this night
are as real as those within the luminous circle . . .

One can therefore compare the mind of a man to a theater of

indefinite depth whose apron is very narrow but whose stage
becomes larger away from the apron. On this lighted apron there
is room for one actor only. He enters, gestures for a moment, and
leaves; another arrives, then another, and so on. . . . Among the
scenery and on the far-off backstage there are multitudes of ob-
scure forms whom a summons can bring onto the stage or even
before the lights of the apron, and unknown evolutions take
place incessantly among this crowd of actors of every kind to
furnish the stars who pass before our eyes one by one, as in a
magic lantern.

Finally here are some passages from an intuitive who ex-

pressed old insights with extreme clarity: F. Nietzsche (1844-
1900). It was not surprising that he saw so much, for his
passionate temperament sought to replace Christianity by a
doctrine of vital energy as the source of everything, natural,
human, and divine. Nietzsche never had any doubt that the
conscious mind is the instrument of unconscious vitality, and
he invented the term “Id” (for the impersonal elements in
the psyche subject to natural law), which Freud took over at
Groddeck’s suggestion. The following are taken, almost at
random, from works written between 1876 and 1888:

Where are the new doctors of the soul?

Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic,

and is consequently the most unfinished and least powerful of
these developments.

The absurd overvaluation of consciousness.

The awakening consciousness is a danger; and whoever lives

among conscious Europeans knows in fact that it is an illness.
176 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
Every extension of knowledge arises from making conscious the
unconscious.

Our consciousness limps along afterward.

Consciousness only touches the surface.

The great basic activity is unconscious.

For it is narrow, this room of human consciousness.

Every sequence in consciousness is completely atomistic.

The real continuous process takes place below our consciousness:

the series and sequence of feelings, thoughts, and so on, are symp-
toms of this underlying process.

The conjecture that consciousness in general developed itself only

under the pressure of the need to communicate.

We flatter ourselves that the controlling or highest principle is

in our consciousness.

“I did that,” says my memory. “I could not have done that,” says
my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually the memory yields.

All our conscious motives are superficial phenomena: behind

them stands the conflict of our instincts and conditions.
 IX

The Prospect

IT WOULD BE SUPEREROGATION for me to attempt

a summary of Freud’s ideas; that has already been done from
many points of view. But I wish to say something of the sig-
nificance of his work, as a link between this survey of pre-
Freudian ideas and the present chapter which seeks to look
ahead.
As we have seen, Freud’s supreme achievement was to force
the attention of the Western world to the fact that the un-
conscious mind is of importance in every one of us, by giving
dramatic illustrations of the way in which it works, particu-
larly when its spontaneous formative processes are deformed
by inhibition. He was the first systematically to connect the
. general idea with a wide range of particular distortions of
behavior in a way that is manifestly valid to unprejudiced
minds. Freud changed, perhaps irrevocably, man’s image of
himself. Beside this it is of secondary import that some of
his valid ideas were not new, his special conceptions ques-
tionable, and his therapeutic méthods uncertain. One side

177
178 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
of his nature sometimes doubted the apparent conviction of
another side: that understanding by an individual of the
genesis of his neurosis must of itself ensure a cure.
Freud’s extraordinary influence on the English-speaking
world is probably due—as already suggested—to two factors:
his own profound sense of a mission, and the fact that his
doctrine, by making man fully aware (by inference) of his
unconscious, offered the conscious person a chance of recover-
ing—some day—a more natural relation to the universal. For
Freud no such true recovery was conceivable; man was cursed
forever with the separation, even if only partial, of Superego,
Ego, and Id—for “‘the character of being foreign to the Ego”
defines the Id. Inhibition, for him, necessarily led to essential
deformation, frustration, and pathology. Civilization and psy-
chopathology were one. However, his vast audience, who ac-
cepted the unconscious but not the structure he imposed on
it, dimly perceived in his lifework the promise of something
better: the overcoming of pathology in a genuine relation of
the individual to the organic. The Western world has ac-
claimed Freud as a great emancipator, because it sensed that
he opened the path through and beyond Freudian ideas to a
more natural, more organic, and more humane condition.
Freud was not the first person to identify himself with the
mission of enlightening man by revealing to him his own
unconscious mind. In a pale manner Carus experienced this
task as a mission of redemption. But for Freud the mission
gained in intensity from its tragic limitation. Man was
doomed to frustration; let him at least know the truth about
himself. ‘“‘Where Id is, there Ego shall be.” He did not say:
where conflict is, there unconscious organic coordination
shall be.
This message of doom dignified by scientific clarity met
two great needs of the early twentieth century: apparent scien-
tific reliability, and a myth of human experience as we know
THE PRosPECT 179
it, which means for many conflict, fission, and disorder. Freud
is here an exemplar of our time, though his puritanical
moralism and narrow conception of scientific method mark
him personally as pre-Freudian, what we sometimes call
“Victorian.” He was the last pre-Freudian rationalist, pas-
sionately upholding a rationalism of the conscious intellect
which his doctrines would rapidly undermine. As was once
said to me, ‘‘Freud didn’t really believe in the unconscious”;
he did not actually like it, or libido, or the free imagination.
For, as his biographer has told us, he spent most of his life
afraid of his own free fancy, and sought security in a stern
moralism, a naive rationalism, an exact materialistic physi-
ology, and a psychology based on the attempt to eliminate
complexity. In this a true Cartesian, his spirit sought rest
and assurance in experimental physiology and exact science.
Though Freud had read Goethe extensively, his revolt from
him and from Naturphilosophie to exact science expressed
his overpowering need for the kind of mental security that
analytical thinking seems to promise.
Freud’s strength in his early period lay in his self-limitation
to the analytical study of conflict in its extreme pathological
expressions. He was not seriously interested in the universal,
the historical, and the normal. He neglected not only phi-
losophy, but also the historical approach to the present condi-
tion of man, and behind these lay an even more surprising
and enlightening limitation: the lack of an adequate recogni-
tion of the primary fact of the organic and human realms:
the pervasive order and coordination in all organisms, though
in his later years he paid it lip service. Sexuality, which he
enjoyed little in his own experience though it is the source
of beauty in most human lives, took its revenge by obsessing
his thinking to the exclusion of the biological order which
sexuality serves, and to which it is normally subordinate.
This is intended to be understood sub specie aeternitatis;
180 THE Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
it is no criticism of a specialist genius born in 1856 that he
failed to recognize an issue which is only coming to the fore-
front in the late twentieth century. For I assert the following:
Freudian and Neo-Freudian psychological conceptions will
only be replaced by a more reliable and comprehensive theory
of the human mind after exact science has established a valid
theory of biological organization. The “unity of the mind”
resides in a biological coordination of its differentiated as-
pects. Whether the future scientific understanding of this
biological unity comes from a physical biology, a biological
physics, or from a neutral structural theory of complex sys-
tems, does not concern us here. But it is unlikely that the
human mind can comprehend its own states of coordination
merely by attention to its awareness, or even by inferences
therefrom, without the aid of guiding principles of organic
order gained from the objective study of organisms. Freud
was the genius of conflict in the psyche; he should be fol-
lowed by the genius of order in the organism illustrated in
the human mind. Freud asked, “What is the origin and nature
of psychic conflict?” The next question is: ‘““What is not-
conflict? What is the source and character of organic coordi-
nation?”
Ernest Jones wrote '* that ‘‘a good deal of [Freud’s] more
theoretical expositions were, as he would certainly have
agreed, responses to his own intellectual needs, rather than
assertions of general validity. As he said himself, they were
scaffoldings he found useful, but which could be replaced
at any time if better ones were found.” (My italics.) If Freud
and his followers had maintained this wise caution all the
time, the movement would have been less subject to criticism,
and the world would have been spared vain polemics. For the
detailed study of psychic conflict may be one of the best routes
toward a general theory of psychic order and disorder.
Freud’s limitations, as person or thinker, were perhaps in-
evitable; they were certainly fertile. But the limitations of
THE ProsPeEcr 181
the profession are less excusable. I repeat: the uncritical
adulation of Freud by one school from 1935 to 1945 was as
stupid as the scorn of an earlier one from 1905, to 1915.
In 1913, when opposition to Freud was at its height, Henri
Bergson © recognized the importance of the new science of
depth psychology:

To explore the most sacred depths of the unconscious, to labor

on what I have just called the subsoil of consciousness, that will
be the principal task of psychology in the century which is open-
ing. I do not doubt that wonderful discoveries await it there, as
important perhaps as have been in the preceding centuries the
discoveries of the physical and natural sciences.

Knowledge advances in waves, and the forty years which

have passed since Freud’s most fertile period have added little
that is both new and objectively valid to the science. The
“depths” still remain obscure.
This judgment implies no failure to recognize Jung’s work
as an intuitive reinterpreter of ancient knowledge, or the con-
tributions of Adler, Rank, and others at work in this field
during the last three decades. Freud’s pseudo-scientific sharp-
ness was his strength and weakness; the complementing
breadth of later workers is necessary, but remains vague. Some
may even doubt whether a valid psychological theory can be
analytically sharp, since the biological, and even more, the
human realm is distinguished by its complexity and variety.
The issue is still open: What operations of the human brain-
mind admit exact analysis? Many techniques are converging
toward an answer.
But this answer may not imply “a scientific theory of the
human mind” applicable to any individual situation as a
classical physical theory was to a classical physical system. It
is likely that the relation of theory to particular facts must
change as knowledge moves into realms where the pervasive
182 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
interactions cannot be neglected. The isolated object is al-
ready losing its autonomy in current physics, for its frame of
reference is nothing less than the entire universe, and this
tendency may go further. It is the task of any new theory in
the psychic realm to achieve both sharpness and balance, if
necessary by a new limitation of its scope.
This study leads to the following conclusions regarding the
contributions of two past periods to the understanding of
the human mind:
1680-1880: Widespread discovery of the existence of the un-
conscious mind, in the context of post-Cartesian
thought.
1880-1960: Partially successful attempts to uncover the struc-
ture of unconscious mental processes, at first
mainly in pathology.
To this I add a guess as to what lies ahead:
From 1960: More attention to undeformed mental processes
and their monistic interpretation, with less em-
phasis on the antithesis Conscious/unconscious,
within the context of a developing theory of bio-
logical organization.
There are indications that the antithesis conscious /uncon-
scious may have exhausted its utility. The “unconscious” may
already have passed its climax. From 1920 onward Freud saw
the most important classification elsewhere, in the contrast
between uninhibited thought flowing to fantasy fulfillment
and thought deformed by inhibitions finding expression in
the real world. Hence his pessimism: all ‘‘real’”’ life, in his
experience and his theory, is deformed.
But there are other signs, not dependent on Freudian con-
ceptions:
Conscious and unconscious aspects are now recognized not
to be on a par: the first being transitory, discontinuous, and
self-eliminating; the second continuous, and self-developing.
THE PROSPECT 183
It is not the separation of two realms but their unification
as aspects of one complex continuous activity which is now
held to be primary.
It is unsatisfactory to define the more general by a nega-
tive: unconscious. The next task is to identify the general
characteristics of those mental processes which are now desig-
nated as “not directly given in awareness.”
The irrelevance of these two concepts to fundamental prin-
ciples is also suggested by the fact that the basic biological
function and structural meaning of both terms are still ob-
scure, after many generations of quasi-scientific usage.

That the self cannot doubt that it is aware appeared lucid

and self-evident to Descartes. But what is the “self” and what
is “awareness”? Several of the philosophical schools that
sprang from Descartes have ended in what appears to be an
impasse.
When Wittgenstein wrote in 1922: “The world is every-
thing that is the case,’ he evoked the whole problematic of
human existence, and that may be too much for the intellect
to digest along the path of logical analysis of the meaning of
the meaning of words. An alternative is to pay attention at
the start to the fact that knowledge arises within a complex
human context: the largely unconscious mental processes of
the imaginative social organism Homo saptens. This is cer-
tainly a difficult path to follow, but there may be no other
way. Since the early seventeenth century the situation of
the Western intellect has changed. Then, as Descartes said,
the prime need was to make a fresh start by choosing simple
clear ideas for what seemed to beself-evident facts. This suc-
ceeded so well, that as then understood it may now be ex-
hausted. In mid-twentieth century nothing is simple or self-
evident, for we have become aware of the web of complexity
of which all existence is part. Our need today is not for sim-
184 Tue Unconscious BEForE FREUD
plicity, clarity, or certainty here and now; we have learned
that that is too much to ask. Things are complex, and what
the mind needs to find is some order in the complexity, the
mind itself being an ordering organ which even imposes a
spurious order when necessary as a short cut or a first step.
Instead of immediate clarity and certainty we need some-
thing both less and more: a provisional working hypothesis
concerning the kind of order in each complexity. Less, be-
cause tentative; more, because admitting complexity at the
start.
The conception of “order” is highly general, but none-
theless it can be made fertile. In certain fields it has already
been given clear meanings and this challenges us to discover
its appropriate meaning in others. The kind of order in most
chemical molecules, in crystals, and in the solar system is
known; that in atomic nuclei, in living systems, and in brain-
minds is not. Temporal succession illustrates one type of
order; regular spatial patterns another. Moreover, any one
kind of order may be combined with aspects of disorder in
ways we do not understand. Finally, the two great tendencies
apparent in the universe: toward order and toward disorder,
seem to be locked in a cosmic opposition, perhaps because we
view them wrongly. We do not yet know (outside certain
special fields) when or how order subdues disorder. And
within this universal warfare there are here and there human
brain-minds impatiently reducing everything to order.
But what is the brain-mind ordering all the time? The
best answer available today is: contrasts. We perceive internal
or external contrasts, differences, and distinctions, and we
infer that they are contrasts between “one thing’ and “an-
other”; the logicians class these contrasts as “relations.”” The
attention of an animal with a brain is always directed (when
the animal is attentive) to some contrast, and human aware-
ness is the “impressing” of a “‘trace” representing some con-
THE PROSPECT 185
trast on the “dominant processes” of the central nervous
system in man. However, these assertions clarify little; they
are merely the enunciation of a program of research: to make
evident what it means to say that thought is the dominant
ordering process in an animal with a brain-mind. If physi-
ology is to contribute a solution, it will probably not be
based on classical atomic mechanics, or relativistic mechanics,
or quantum mechanics, but on a science which will not be
mechanics in a traditional sense: a general theory of order
and disorder in complex systems. Here we enter the realm
of unknowns which we are slowly learning to formulate as
questions.
But even the posing of questions presupposes some lan-
guage. How to avoid a false start? A. B. Johnston }* gave a
hint when he wrote (1836), “We make language the expositor
of nature, instead of making nature the expositor of lan-
guage.” I have sought to allow the facts to clarify words, and
the least prejudicial starting point that I have discovered is
the following:

This is a
UNIVERSE OF CONTRASTS
grouped into
COMPLEXES OF RELATIONS
with aspects of
ORDER AND DISORDER
including
CHANGE AND TENDENCY

We begin with some group of contrasts separable from the

totality. This appears to have the logical character of a com-
plex system of relations (between things, if you will). Such
groups may reveal a temporal order, interpreted as the
changes of a system of things, and in certain cases as a tend-
186 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD

ency toward some apparent terminus. The stress is on com-

plex systems of changing relations displaying tendencies
toward order or disorder, not on simple unchanging entities.
For intellectual convenience or for other reasons, it may be
necessary to infer an invisible world of immutables: of gods
never directly known, or of one or more classes of persisting
atomic particles, to account for the stability of the world of
appearances. These issues are not prejudiced by the present
argument.
In this context of a universe of contrasts displaying the
temporal and logical character of changing complexes of rela-
tions with tendencies toward order or disorder, the crucial
issue in any particular situation is:
What forms of order and disorder and what tendencies can
be identified in any given complex of relations?
This is the general question characteristic of our time,
which allows us to pass to its applications to special questions
now confronting any theory of the human mind:

1. The problem of life: What contrasted forms of order dis-

tinguish animate and inanimate phenomena? What is the
nature of biological organization and its relation to phys-
ical laws, either known or still to be discovered? How
sharp is the boundary?
It would seem that until a general theory of (or method .
of approach to) order and disorder in complex systems
of various kinds has been established, theoretical sci-
ence cannot come to grips with the “problem of life,”
since this appears to involve ordered transformations in
complex systems. Current theories of protein and nucleic ©
acid structure, etc., provide no suggestions of how dif-
ferentiated processes are coordinated spatially and
temporally within living systems.
THE PRosPECT 187
2. The general problem of “mind’’: What is the structure
characteristic of “mental processes’? What aspects of these
enter direct awareness? How should types of awareness be
classified?
It may be possible to identify, within the wider class
of organic processes, a category of mental processes
which can either be observed externally as physiological
phenomena, or known subjectively. ‘““Mental” may be
defined (as in Chapter II) as referring to those “domi-
nant ordering processes in which traces of individual
experience are ordered and tend to order thought and
behavior.” But this is ambiguous, since the mean-
ing and uniqueness of “dominance”’ has still to be de-
termined.
If “finality” (the property of proceeding toward a
terminus) is accepted as a characteristic of mental proc-
esses, and if mind is taken to be part of nature, then
the general laws which determine the processes of the
mind must themselves be finalistic.

3. The problem of man: Wherein is man unique? In what

respects, if at all, does he escape the restrictive conditions
of all other organisms? Are any universally valid bio-
logical principles irrelevant to man? How far do the con-
trasted methods of the various sciences apply to man?
Most centuries have had their own answers to these or
similar questions. Certainly biology is not in a position
to claim finality for any current answers. Homo may be
distinguished by his use of tools, mastery of fire, or size
of brain; Homo sapiens perhaps by his ability to draw,
to speak, to write, to read, or to think step-by-step about
one thing at a time. For our own species seems to be
marked by the cerebral faculty to form new commu-
188 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD

nicable unitsof thought. But here we are still ignorant,

and surprises are likely.

4. The problem of human consciousness: What is the role

of human “awareness” and “‘self-awareness’” and which
mental processes are necessarily unconscious?
These questions have been considered in Chapter II.

5. The problem of “reason”: Has the term “reason” a useful

meaning today? If so, what is its relation to other mental
faculties?
It is not easy to give this term a single, acceptable
meaning. To call reason ‘‘the guiding principle of the
human mind” merely conceals our ignorance as to what
this principle is. ‘Logical reasoning” would restrict it to
the highly specialized operations of deductive logic and
calculation. ‘“The ordering process of the human brain-
mind” might be a useful interpretation, but this process
is largely unconscious.

6. The problem of disorder in the human mind: If man is

an organic species, and the brain-mind a differentiated
organ, why have human thought and behavior lost the
perfect coordination of structures and functions which
prevails in organisms that survive?
The easy answer is: he lost it through the Original
Sin (or some genetic misfortune), and he will not
survive.
Another is: man passed through a historical discon-
tinuity and thus acquired freedom of choice; he has
thereby moved outside the biological realm of organic
order. But this cannot be the correct answer since ani-
mals continually select between alternatives without
frustrating hesitation, damaging conflict, or permanent
disorder.
THE PRosPECT 189
Another possible answer is that man’s fifty thousand
years or more as a stabilized species have not been
enough; that he is a not-yet-adapted species: that he still
has to complete the exploitation of his hereditary species
potentialities in an adequate social tradition ordering
both thought within the individual, and individuals
within the race; and that a mature characteristically
human organic-social order lies ahead, if he can survive
the transitional lack of adaptation.
This is a dreamy hypothesis of an ultimate stationary
adaptation. But it has been suggested that the most
rapid known evolution of a new adapted animal species
has required about half a million years, certainly much
more than Homo sapiens has yet had. And if our species
can already explore cosmic time and space with its
instruments why worry if it possibly needs a mere thou-
sand generations or so more to realize its organic po-
tentialities, mentally and socially? For this is the only
human ideal that can be universally accepted forever:
the full realization of the biological potentialities char-
acteristic of the species, subject to any minor eugenic
modifications.

7. The problem of the “depths” of the human mind: What

is the meaning of “depth” psychology? How far is the
human psyche an autonomous part of the human system,
with obscure ‘‘abysses” of its own?
The term ‘‘depth” psychology confuses the issue by
combining two contrasted meanings: hidden far from
direct awareness, and therefore accessible only by difh-
cult procedures; and concerned with highly general
tendencies underlying all differentiated and all con-
scious activities. The second meaning can be combined
with a physiological conception of highly general traces
involved in all the dominant processes of the brain, and
190 Tue Unconscious BEFORE FREUD
affecting all special activities. Subjectively ‘‘deeper”’
tendencies might then correspond to “higher” tend-
encies in the nervous hierarchy.
Topographical theories of the mind, assuming its ap-
proximate division into higher, middle, and lower re-
gions, may have exhausted their value. At one point it
seemed as if Freud and Jung were approaching the
“depths” of the mind by complementary paths, Freud
from personal experience toward biological instinct,
and Jung toward historical-social forms. But each influ-
enced the other; the topographical scheme is ambiguous
and ultimately misleading; and behind both approaches
lies an aim recognized by both Freud and Jung in their
later work: to identify an objective organic founda-
tion at the root of the mind.
Many alternative views are possible. No one has yet
clarified and coordinated all that is implicit in the
original work of this century in the realm of depth
psychology.?7 We are not slaves who are compelled to
choose between Freud and Jung; we can take what is
valid from both if we can create a true fusion. But
this may require new principles.

8. The problem of personal coordination: In spite of the

prevalence of clash, and of the still inescapable disorder
in the human mind and tradition, can each person at
times experience in himself the harmonious cooperation
of the differentiated functions and faculties? Can each
person directly experience the fact and the operation of
“organic coordination’?
I believe that this experience is not merely possible,
but frequent: in joy in living, when self-awareness is
replaced by aesthetic participation. Without this posi-
tive core life would be unbearable.
Three Historical Charts

A. Changes in Intellectual Awareness in Post-

Medieval Western Europe (c. 1300 onward)

B. The Transition from Static toward Process

Concepts (1750 onward)

C. The Successive Discovery of Three Aspects

of the Unconscious Mind

N.B. These charts simplify highly complex historical facts.

191
 CHART A

CHANGES IN THE DOMINANT INTELLECTUAL

AWARENESS IN POST-MEDIEVAL EUROPE
(c. 1300 ONWARD) BETWEEN

FocusEp SELF-AWARENESS, ANALYTICAL

METHODs, AND STATIC CONCEPTS

1500

1600 A developing self-awareness expressed in a new

term: ‘“‘self-conscious.” Analytical methods,
quantities, and relatively static concepts are
treated as primary.

1700 STATIC ABSTRACT RATIONALISM

The partial and abstract character of this out-
look provokes a

ee
eeeee ene
1800

1900 Prestige of rational analytical intellect is prej-

udiced by the absence of any clear fundamental
concept or principle of transformation.
No theory available of conditions under which
static concepts are valid, or of true function of
awareness, or self-awareness.
 A BROADER, POTENTIALLY UNIFYING, SENSE
OF PROCESS AS PRIMARY

The underlying sense of process is not yet expressed

in nonreligious language. As medieval thought loses its
authority (c. 1300 onward) the individual acquires

i a = le. 5» me

Historical outlook gradually develops. Unconscious

mind conceivable (c. 1700).
New emphasis on the immediacy and primacy of
change. Transition toward process concepts begins
(c. 1750).

REVOLT FROM STATIC REASON.

Nature viewed as process.
Unconscious mind toprcal (c. 1800).
Unconscious mind fashionable (c. 1870).

No monistic philosophy or science of transformation

yet in sight.
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Notes

J . L. L. Whyte, Listener (London: British Broadcasting Com-

pany), Vol. 52, July 15, 1954, 91.
. W. Windelband, Die Hypothese des Unbewussten (Heidel-
berg: Akad. d. Wissenschaften, 1914).
. A.B. Johnson, Treatise on Language (1836), Univ. California
Press, 1947 (Lecture 24, ¥ 8).
For 16 distinct usages of “unconscious” see: J. G. Miller, Un-
consciousness (London: Chapman & Hall, 1942). Mine
corresponds to Miller’s usage 16: 1 “Unaware of dis-
criminating; unavailable to awareness.”
B. L. Whorf, “Time, Space, and Language” in L. Thompson,
Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 1954). Also B. L.
Whorf and J. B. Carroll, Language, Thought, and Reality
(London: Chapman & Hall, 1956), p. 80.
. P. Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher (New York: Dover;
London: Mayflower & Vision Press, 1957), p. xxi.
D. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature. Of Morals, Part 3,
Section 3.
D. Diderot, D’Alembert’s Dream, tr. Birrell (London: Rout-
ledge, 1927).
199
200 NOTES
g. A. O. Lovejoy, The Revolt against Dualism (London: Allen
& Unwin, 1930).
10. E. L. Margetts, “Concept of the Unconscious in the History
of Medical Psychology,” Psychiatric Quarterly, 27
(1953), 1.
11. J. Vyvyan, The Shakespearean Ethic (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1959), p. 161.
12. On the content of this paragraph see E. L. Margetts, ‘“His-
torical Notes on Psycho-somatic Medicine,” in Recent De-
velopments in Psycho-somatic Medicine, Wittkower and
Cleghorn, eds. (London: Pitman, 1954).
13. L. Dumont, Revue Scientifique (December 28, 1872); C. B.
Renouvier, La Critique Philosophique, I (1874), 19,
231, 293, 386; P. Janet, Revue des Deux Mondes (June 1,
1877).
14. E. Jones, Prefatory Note to Issue on Freud, British Journal
for the Philosophy of Science, VII (1956), 1.
15. H. Bergson, The Independent (New York, October 30, 1913).
16. A. B. Johnson, Treatise on Language (1836), Univ. of Cali-
fornia Press, 1947,Pp. 59-
17. An attempt in this direction has been made by I. Progoff in
Death and Rebirth of Psychology (New York: Julian,
1956).
References

To most quotations in Chapters V-VIIJ, in same sequence as

in text.

(Except where indicated, the translations are those of the author,

L. L. Whyte.)

CHAPTER V

GALEN, in Siebeck, Geschichte der Psychologie, 1880-1884 (p. 195).

PLOTINUS, in Siebeck, Geschichte der Psychologie (p. 338).
AucusTINE, Confessions. Tr. Sheed (London: Sheed and Ward,
1943) (Book 10, { 8).
Aguinas, Philosoph. Texts. Tr. Gilbey (London: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1951) No. 292.
Eckuart, Tr. Blakney. 1941 (p. 50).
Dante, Purgatorio. Tr. Money (Canto 33).
Parace.sus, Paracelsica by C. G. Jung (p. 94).
JouN oF THE Cross, Dark Night of the Soul (Ch. XII).
MonrTAIGNE, Essays. Tr. Reeves, Turner. 1902 (Vol. II, Ch. 6).
DescarTEs, Oeuvres. 1908 (Vol. 10, pp. 180/188). Also Adam’s
Vie in Vol. 12. See also M. Leroy, Descartes, le Philosophe en

201
202 ' REFERENCES
Masque, 1927. J. CHEVALIER, Descartes (p. 41). J. Maritain, Le
Réve de Descartes.
PascaL, Thoughts. 1888 (pp. 77, 103, 307/8).
H. More, Immortality of the Soul (III. Ch. 12).
J. Mixton, Paradise Lost (Book V. ll. 100-121).
J. Drypven, Works. Ed. Scott-Sainsbury. II (pp. 129-130).
R. Cupwortn, True Intellectual System of the Universe. 1678
(I. p. $46).
J. Norris, Practical Discourses (Cursory Reflections).
N. MALEBRANCHE, De la Recherche de la Vérité. 1675 (I. p. 419).
SHAFTESBURY (A. A. Cooper, Third Earl), Exercises (Philosoph.
Regimen, On the Natural Self).
G. KeitH, The Magick of Quakerism. 1707.
G. B. Vico, The New Science. Tr. Bergin, Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1948).
C. v. WotFr, See Grau, loc. cit. (Bibliography) (pp. 182-196).
KaMEs (Henry Home, Lorn K.), Essays on the Principles of Mo-
rality. . . . 1751 (p. 260).

CHAPTER VI

C. A. Crusius, see Grau, loc. cit. (Bibliography).

J. J. RoussEau, Réveries d’un Promeneur (4th, 6th). Confessions.
1947 (pp. 419-20).
J. G. Hamann, Schriften.
E. Youn, Conjectures on Original Composition. 1759.
D. HartLey, Observations on Man.
A. Tucker, Light of Nature Pursued. 1768 (Vol. I, Pt. I, Chs. 5, 10).
D. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (Book 2, Part 3, Section 3).
G. C. LicHTenserc, Deutsche National Literatur (Vol. 141, pp.
47-89).
D. Stmpson, Discourse on Dreams and Night Visions. 1791.
I. Kant, Anthropology (I. § 5).
E. PLatner, Philosophische Aphorismen. 1776.
H. G. v. Herper, Vom Erkennen und Empfinden. Werke. 1876
(Vol. 17, pp. 178-211).
REFERENCES 203
C. P. Moritz, Ed. Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (1783-
1793).
J. G. Ficus, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre. 1794
(P- 374). 1802 (p. 161). Science of Rights. 1889 (p. 497).
Novatis (F. v. HARDENBURG), Schriften, Kluckhohn, ed. (Vols. II,
III).
J. G. Casanis, Rapports. 1799 (pp. 312-313).
J. C. Ret, Entwickelung einer allgemeinen Pathologie. 1815,
Vol. III. p. 220).
J. G. E. Maas, Versuch ueber die Einbildungskraft. 1792.
F. J. W. v. ScHELLING, Werke (I. Vol. 3, p. 612). Sémtl. Werke. 1858
(I. p. 348).
J. W. v. Gortue, Last quotation is from Letters (transl. Herzfeld,
Sym. 1957). See also Gesprache 2 (234); Schr. d. Goethegesell. 27.
(122, 203) 1827.
J. C. F. v. Scnitier, Briefwechsel mit Kérner. 184% (I, p. 381).

CHAPTER VII

J. P. F. RicHTER (JEAN PauL), Sdmtl. Werke. 1841 (Vol. 18, p. 60).

Selina (p. 165).
W. WorpswortH, Prelude.
S. T. CoLEripcE, Statesman’s Manual (App. B). Letters I (377).
Biographica Literarta II (120).
- G. H. v. ScHuBeErt, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissen-
schaften. 1805 (pp. 197/8). Lehrbuch der Menschen- und Seelen-
kunde. 1883 (p. 145).
M. DE BiRAN, Oeuvres inédits. 1859. Essai sur les Fondements de
la Psychologie. II. (pp. 12, 19). Des impressions affectives in-
ternes. V. (pp. 42, 46, 51, 203).
I. P. V. TRoxter, Blicke in das Wesen des Menschen. 1812 (p. 115).
G. W. F. HEGEL, Enc. d. Phil. Wiss. im Grundr. 1827 (p. 394).
A. SCHOPENHAUER, Welt als Wille (Vol. II, Ch. 32).
T. De Quincey, Palimpsest of the Human Brain (p. 18).
A. J. F. Bertrand, Du Magnétisme Animale. 1826 (p. 3). Tratté du
Somnambulisme. 1823 (p. 452).
204 REFERENCES
J. F. Herparr, Saémtl. Werke (V. p. 19).
F. E. BenecxE, Elements of Psychology. 1871.
J. J. S. bE CaRpAILLac, Etudes élém. de Philosophie (2 vols. 1830).
C. Nopier, Oeuvres. V. (pp. 160, 161, 173, 188).
S. A. KreRKEGAARD, Sickness unto Death. (Pt. 1).
Sir W. Hamitton, Lectures on Metaphysics. 1859/60 (Vol. I.
pp: 348/9).
K. F. Burpacn, Anthropologie. 1847 (p. 130).
E. A. Por, Imp of the Perverse.
C. G. Carus, Psyche. 1846. Vergl. Psychologie. 1866 (p. 77).
K. Marx ano F. Encers, Die Deutsche Ideologie. 1845/6
(I: Feuerbach).
O. Domaricu, Die psychischen Zustande. 1849 (p. 62).

Cuapter VIII

W. CarPENTER, Principles of Mental Physiology. 1874.

H. F. Amiet, Journal. 1889.
K. ForTLaGE, System der Psychologie. 1855.
I. H. Ficute, Zur Seelenfrage. 1859 (pp. 20, 258). Psychologie. 1864
(pp. 8, 82).
W. M. Wunnt, Beitr. z. Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung. 1862.
W. GrigsincER, Mental Pathology and Therapeutics. 1867 (p. 27).
E. S. DALLAs, Gay Science. 1866 (I. pp. 194-207).
T. Laycock, Mind and Brain. 1860.
H. Maupstey, Physiology and Pathology of the Mind. 1867.
E. v. HARTMANN, Philosophy of the Unconscious. 1869. Trans. 1931.
F. Dostorvsky, The Idiot. Tr. 1912 (p. 455).
F. P. Copse, Essay on Unconscious Cerebration in Darwinism and
Morals. 1872.
O. W. Hotmes, Mechanism tn Thought and Morals. 1877.
A. Rimsaup, Lettre du Voyant.
H. A. Taine, On Intelligence. 1871 (pp. 115, 180, 278).
F. NiETZscHE, For references see under Bewusst and Bewusstsein in
Nietzsche-Register (Vol. XIX of Werke). See also Bewusstsein
und Organismus (Werke, Vol. XIII, p. 239).
Brbliography

As stated in the text, no such survey can ever be complete. For

example, E. T. W. Hoffman (1766-1822) and H.von Kleist (1777-
1811) might have been included, but it was considered that
German Romanticism was already sufficiently represented, as its
interest in the unconscious is well known.
A. GENERAL
M. H. AsramMs, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and
the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford, 1953).
A. Bécuin, l’Ame romantique et le Réve. 2 vols (Marseille, 1937).
E. G. Borne, History of Experimental Psychology (2nd ed.; New
York: Appleton, 1950).
F. M. Cornrorp, “The Unconscious Element in Literature and
Philosophy,” in F, M. Cornford, The Unwritten Philosophy
(Cambridge University Press, 1950).
E. R. Dopps, The Greeks and the Irrational (Cambridge Uni.
versity Press, 1951).
K. J. Grau, Die Entwickelung des Bewusstseinsbegriffes tm XVII
und XVIII. Jahrhundert, Erdmann. Abhandlungen zur Philos-
ophie, Halle, Heft 39, 1916.
G. Murpuy, Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951).
H. Sieseck, Geschichte der Psychologie (Gotha, 1880-1884).
tarp 205,
206 BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Z1tBoorc AND G. W. Henry, History of Medical Psychology

(London: Allen & Unwin, 1941).

B. SurvEYs OF THE HisToRY OF THE IDEA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

AND RELATED TOPICS

M. D. ALTscHULE, Roots of Modern Psychiatry, including essay

on “Growth of the Concept of Unconscious Cerebration,” (New
York: Grune, 1957).
D. BRINKMANN, Probleme des Unbewussten (Zurich: 1948).
M. Dorrr, Historische Grundlagen der Psychoanalyse (Leipzig:
1932).
H. ELLENBERGER, ‘““The Unconscious before Freud,” Bulletin of
the Menninger Clinic, :2r (1957), 3-
E. v. HARTMANN, Philosophy of the Unconscious (London: Kegan
Paul, 1931).
F. KUH.er, Beitrége zum Problem des Unbewussten 1936.
E. L. Marcetts, “Concept of the Unconscious in the History of
Medical Psychology,” Psychiatric Quarterly, 27 (1953), 115; “His-
torical Notes on Psycho-somatic Medicine,” in Recent Develop-
ments in Psycho-somatic Medicine, Wittkower and Cleghorn,
eds. (London: Pitman, 1954).
A. W. Watts, “Asian Psychology and Modern Psychiatry,” Amer-
ican Journal of Psychoanalysis, 13 [25] (1953)-

The essays by Margetts (1953) and Ellenberger (1957) are the

best recent surveys by psychiatrists of the history of the idea of the
unconscious. Margetts is more comprehensive, covering ancient
India, Greece, and the Middle Ages, as well as recent Europe,
whereas Ellenberger gives a careful interpretation, mainly since
Leibniz. Their papers support and supplement my own studies,
largely made before I found them. I wish to thank these authors
for their assistance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 207

C. Srupies or FreupIAN DoctrRiINE, THE CONCEPT OF THE

Unconscious, Etc.

E. we Sigmund Freud’s Mission (London: Allen & Unwin,

1959).
S. Hook, ed., Psychoanalysis and Scientific Method (28 essays)
(New York: N. Y. U., 1959).
E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols.
(London: Hogarth, 1953-1957).
I. Levine, The Unconscious (1923).
A. C. McIntyre, The Unconscious (London: Routledge, 1953).
J. G. Miver, Unconsciousness (London: Chapman & Hall,
1942).
I. Procorr, Death and Rebirth of Psychology (New York: Julian,
1956). :
P. ante Freud: the Mind of the Moralist (London: Gollancz,
1960).

Additional bibliography, 1978 edition:

C.G. Jung The Relations between the Ego and The Unconscious (Collected Works, Vol.
VIL. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953)

D. Recent books and Essays

L. FREY-ROHR From Freud to Jung: A Comparative Study of the Psychology of the

Unconscious (New York: Putnam, 1974)
A. KOESTLER The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964)
R. B. ONIANS The Origins of European Thought (Cambridge University Press,
1968)
R. E. ORNSTEIN The Psychology of Consciousness (New York, Viking Press, 1972)
J. PIAGET The Affective Unconscious and the Cognitive Unconscious. Journal of
the American Psychoanlytical Association, 21 (2) (1973)
A. STORR The Dynamics of Creation (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972)
P. E. VERNON (Editor) Creativity, (London: Penguin, 1970)
K. WILBER The Spectrum ofConsciousness (Quest Book, 1977)
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Name Index

A Berkeley, George, 193

Bernheim, 154, 168, 196
Adler, Alfred, 168, 181 Bertrand, A. J. F., 141, 168, 196
Akhenaton, 40 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 103
Amiel, Henri Frédéric, 67, 156, Boehme, Jacob, 38, 41, 80-82,
157, 196 105, 124, 146
Ampére, André Marie, 139 Boyle, Robert, 169
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 80 Brahe, Tycho, 41
Augustine, St., 79 Breasted, James Henry, 40
Brennan, 41
Brentano, Franz, 162, 196
B Breuer, Josef, 168, 196
Brodie, J. C., 162
Bacon, Francis, 193 Browne, Sir Thomas, g2
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 3 Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc,
Benecke, Friedrich Eduard, 131, 51, 54, 110, 194
144, 145, 196 Burdach, Karl Friedrich, 147
Bergson, Henri, 33, 168, 181, 194 Butler, Samuel, 170
209
210 NAME INDEX

C Descartes, René, 18, 26, 37, 41,

50, 51, 55, 56, 60, 61, 64,
66, 68, 86—go, 94, 96, 104,
Cabanis, Jean Georges, 122-123,
122, 171, 183, 193
135
Cardaillac, J. J. S. de, 145 Diderot, Denis, 48, 51, 54, 110,
Carpenter, William B., 147, 154, 194
155, 162, 170, 171, 196
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 7
Carus, Carl Gustavus, ix, 114,
Dionysius, 80
148-150, 154, 164, 178, Domrich, O., 152
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 166, 167,
196
Cervantes, Miguel de, 77, 84 196
Charcot, Jean Martin, 66, 154, Dryden, John, 92, 93
168, 196 Dumond, 170
Clausius, Rudolf, 194
Cobbe, Frances Powers, 171 E
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 66,
Eckhart, Johannes, 80
133, 134
Colsenet, E., 170 Einstein, Albert, 53, 194
Condillac, Etienne Bonnet de, Ellis, Havelock, 168
112, 135, 196 Engels, Friedrich, 151, 196
Condorcet, Marquis de, 194
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 52 F
Crusius, Christian August, 107,
108, 196 Fechner, Gustav Theodore, 131,
Cudworth, Ralph, 11, 92, 94, 160, 164
Fichte, Immanuel Hermann
103, 195
von, 159
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 42, 51,
D
115, 120, 154, 164, 196
Fischer, J. C., 170
Dallas, E. S., 161 Flemming, C. F., 170
Dante, Alighieri, 77, 81 Fliess, Wilhelm, 169
Darwin, Charles, 49, 51, 194 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier
Darwin, Erasmus, 51, 194 de, 193
Davies, 112 Fortlage, Karl, 158, 196
De Quincey, Thomas, 141 Freud, Sigmund, passim. Main
Delboeuf, Joseph, 168 passages: Preface, 10, 28,
NAME INDEX 211

49, 54, 71-75, 158, 166— Hering, Eduard, 70

169, 177-181 Holbach, Paul Henri d’, 110
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 171-
G 172
Hudson, 168
Galen, 78
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 128
Galilei, Galileo, 18, 52, 193 Hume, David, 45, 113, 164, 194
Galton, Francis, 168, 196
Gibbon, Edward, 51, 194
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, J
1, 34, 51, 66, 69, 71, 110,
111, 115, 124, 126-129, James, Henry, 155
133, 146, 148, 179, 194, James, William, 162, 168
196 Janet, Pierre, 135, 168, 170, 196
Griesinger, W., 160, 196 Jean Paul (see Richter)
John of the Cross, St., 82
H Johnson, A. B., 17, 185
Jones, Ernest, viii, 180
Hamann, Johann Georg, 54, Jung, Carl Gustav, 11, 73, 81,
109, 110, 111, 115, 116, 82, 114, 168, 181, 190,
164, 194 194, 196
Hamilton, Sir William, 131,
147, 162, 171, 196 K
Hartley, David, 111
Hartmann, Eduard von, ix, 123,
Kames, Henry Home, Lord,
132, 154, 163-166, 170,
102, 103, 195
171, 196
Kant, Immanuel, 51, 108, 115,
Harvey, William, 193
Hegel, George Wilhelm Fried- 1L7, 3120, -120,) 1937 264,
rich, 51, 82, 120, 132, 139, 194, 196
Keats, John, 80
164, 194
Helmholtz, Hermann, 158 Keith, George, 98
Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 131, Kelvin, William Thomson,
142-144,
164, 196 Lord, 194
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, Kepler, Johannes, 18, 41, 52,
51, 54, 110, 115, 116-119, ITD hefe
164, 194, 196 Kierkegaard, Séren, 38, 146
212 NAME INDEX
L Marx, Karl, 8, 54, 96, 151, 194,
196
Lamarck, Jean Baptiste de Mo- Matthew, 51
net, 51, 194 Maudsley, Henry, 131, 147, 162,
Lambert, Johann Heinrich, 112 196
La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de, Maupertuis, Pierre Louis de,
194 51, 110, 194
Langermann, J. G., 124, 196 Maxwell, Clerk, 194
Laycock, T., 162, 170, 196 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 66, 122,
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 135, 141, 196
von, 51, 96, 98, 100, 101, Mill, John Stuart, 155
103, 104, 112, 131, 132, Milton, John, 92, 93
135, 144, 164, 171, 193, Monboddo, James Burnett,
195 Lord, 51
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 51, Montaigne, Michel de, 4, 38, 41,
117, 194 83, 136, 19%
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, Montesquieu, Charles de Secon-
113, 114, 196 dat, Baron de, 193
Liébault, 154 More, Thomas, 92
Lindner, G. H., 159 Morell, J. D., 147, 162, 196
Linnaeus, Carolus, 193 Moritz, Carl Philipp, 114, 115,
Lipps, Theodor, 131, 168, 169, 119, 196
196 Myers, F. H. W., 162, 168
Locke, John, 96
Lombroso, Cesare, 168 N
Lotze, Rudolf Hermann, 168
Lovejoy, A. O., 68 Newton, Isaac, 3, 4, 69, 92, 94,
403
M Nietzsche, Friedrich, vii, 80,
117, 120, 132, 154, 166,
Maas, J. G. E., 124 169, 175-176, 194
Maine de Biran, 123, 135-139, Nodier, Charles, 145, 146
156, 196 Norris, John, g2, 96, 98, 103,
Malebranche, Nicolas de, 97, 112, 195
98, 103, 104, 112, 195 Novalis (Friedrich von Harden-
Margetts, E. L., 77 berg), 115, 120
NAME INDEX 213
Pp Schlegel, Wilhelm von, 155,
Schmidt, A., 170
Paracelsus, 81, 195 Schopenhauer, Arthur, ix, 51,
Pascal, Blaise, 38, 41, 90, 94, 80, 82, 114, 120, 122, 132,
103, 135, 195 135, 140, 141, 154, 164,
Platner, Ernst, 66, 103, 115, 116, 166, 169, 194, 196
132 Schubert, Franz, 114, 134, 164
Plato,
3, 42, 44,77 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley
Plotinus, 79 Cooper, Lord, 92, 97, 98,
Poe, Edgar Allan, 148 103, 195
Prince, Morton, 168 Shakespeare, William, 42, 66,
Proust, Marcel, 168
69, 77, 84, 115, 146, 195
Simpson, D., 115
Q Socrates, 42 ;
Spielhagen, Friedrich von, 163
Quintillian, 29
Spinoza, Baruch, 51, 92, 94, 103,
R 193, 195
Stahl, Georg Ernst, 100
Radin, P., 39 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 103
Rank, Otto, 168, 181
Rerl; J. GC, 123, 196 ah
Renouvier, Charles, 170
Richter, Jean Paul, 132, 133, Taine, Hippolyte, 173-175
164 Teresa of Avilla, Saint, 41, 171
Rimbaud, Arthur, 172-173 Toynbee, Arnold, 51, 194
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 41, 54, Troxler, I. P. V., 139, 196
66, 69, 108, 115, 116, 194 Tucker, Abraham, 112, 196
Russell, Bertrand, 194 Tuke, D. H., 162, 168

S Vv

Schelling, F. W. J. von, ix, 51, Vico, Giovanni Battista, 50, 100,

66, 80, 82, 115, 120, 124- 103, 104, 193, 195
126, 132, 154, 164, 194, Volkelt, Johannes, 170
196 Voltaire (Francois Marie Arou-
Schiller, Friedrich, 51, 66, 129, et), 51, 193
Vyvyan, J., 80, 81
133
214 NAME INDEX
W Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 183
Wolff, Christian von, 101, 103,
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 51, 194 104, 112, 132, 195
Weininger, 168 Wolff, Kaspar Friedrich, 51, 194
Welles, 51 Wordsworth, William, 66, 133
Wertheimer, Max, 51 Wundt, Wilhelm, 131, 160, 164
Whitehead, Alfred North, 37
Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 33 yy;
Winckelmann, J. J., 117
Windelband, Wilhelm, 9 Young, Edward, 111
Subject Index

A B

adventure, the incomparable, 4 biology, passim, 9, 51, 64, 194-

aesthetic awareness (see con- 195
sciousness) British contribution, 65, 103,
alternation of conscious and un- 147, 161 f.
conscious, 116, 124, 128
f., 144 C
in sexual activity, 149
anticipations, vii, vili Cartesian dualism, 18, 26 f., 55
anxiety for precision, 19 ff., 60 (see also Descartes)
assumptions and conclusions, ix Catholicism, 66, 104
atomism, 94, 96 caution, x, 157, 180
authors (egotistic), 173 chastity, 165
awareness (see consciousness) China, 12, 25, 60, 64
215
216 SuByecT INDEX
conclusions (see assumptions dualism (see Cartesian dualism)
and conclusions)
conflict, 143, 160, 176, 180 E
consciousness (awareness), pas-
sim Eastern thought, 9, 42, 64
aesthetic awareness, 34, 190 Egypt, 25,77
changes in awareness, 192 evolution, 49, 51, 64
conscious /unconscious not
the clue, x, 182 f. F
definitions, 20 f.
factors promoting, 22 f., 158 faith, 9
narrow, 4, 178 formative process (see ordering
not the aim, 8, 34 f., 42 process)
pathology of, 120, 166 France, 63, 65 f., 170
physiological basis, 22 ff., 62 Freudian ideas and methods
role of, 23, 188 (see Freud)
self-eliminating character of,
24, 34 f. G
words for, 42 f.
contrasts (distinctions, discrim- genius, x, 16, 116, 128 f.
inations), 20, 23 f., 102, Germany, 63 ff., 69, 170
185 Greece, 9, 12, 25, 60, 77
coordination (biological, organ-
ization), 35, 103, 180, 190 H
creative imagination, passim,
68, 93 f., 116, 127, 134, harmony (see coordination)
161 (see also under Ro- history: of ideas, ix, 3-16
mantics) philosophy of, 6
therapeutic, ix
D Homo sapiens, 4, 31, 183, 187,
189
death, 141, 167
definitions, 13, 17, 19 ff. I
determinism, 16
discovery, v; 25, 60 ideas: all partial, 7, 8
dreams, 87 ff., 112 ff., 138, 167 conceivable, topical, effec-
(see also unconscious) tive, 15, 63
SuByEcT INDEX 217
long history, vii, ix ordering (formative) process,
prestige of, 15 20 ff., 98, 185
(see also history of ideas) organisms, 19 f., 186
impatience, 27, 29, 46, 88
impulse (see vitality) P
India, 12, 25, 64, 77, 164
individualism, 41
paradoxes, 148
inference, viii, 11 f., 60, 64, 102, philosophy, 10
158 of history, 6
instinct (see vitality) physics, 50, 53, 72, 160
interpretations of existence, 61 physiology, 22 ff., 62, 74, 78, 87,
122 f., 152, 166
L plastic principle, 92, 94
language, 33, 42, 66 f. Platonists, English, 72, 92
precision, 12
M primitive man, 3, 39, 100
process concepts (see static and
man (see Homo sapiens) process concepts)
Marxism (see Marx) Protestantism, 65
memory, 79, 81, 92, 170 psychiatry, present state of, 74
mental processes, 20 ff., 62 f., 187 ff
structure of, 22 psychoanalysis, vii, 80
Middle Ages, 41 psychology, passim, 10, 74, 114,
misery (despair), 91, 146 120
mission, 149, 178 depth, 84, 189 f.
Monism, 61, 72, 104 psychosomatic, 143
mysticism, 13, 43, 61, 72 £., 78,
80, 82
myth, 101 Q
quantity, 99 f., 144
N
Naturphilosophie, 64, 179 R

O rationalism, 43 f., 72, 88

order and disorder, 13, 29, 180, rationalization, 7, 151
184 f., 188 reason, ix, 45, 110, 134, 188
218 SuBJEcT INDEX
recovery, 178 sion, 67 f., 104, 116, 196—
relations, 52, 184 197
revolt from dualism, 68 conceivable 700, topical 1800,
romantics, 72, 97, 111, 132 effective 1900, 63
Rome, 60 definition, 21
early association with (for
S more complete refer-
ences see Chapters V-—
science of man (limits to), x, 69, VII):
187 childhood experience, 117
self-awareness, 25, 32 delusions, 84
c. 1600 in Europe, 41 despair, 84
(see also consciousness) dreams, 95, 113-119,: 124,
self-conscious man, 34 f., 59 ee
sexuality, 28, 87, 123, 136, 149 f., ideas, 96, 99
164, 168, 179 (see also illness, 123, 140
voluptuousness) imagination, 93, 111, 117,
specialisms, 10, 11, 153 127-129
static and process concepts, 33, inferences, 78
47-57, 90, 116 £., 192-193, “inner Africa,” 132
194-195 memory, 79, 81
surrender to sensuality, 71 myths, 101
perceptions, 79, 97, 99, 117
T personality, 92
sexuality, 123, 129, 139, 149
tradition, failure of, 38, 42 thinking, 95
transformation: concept of, 53 interpretations of, 72 f.
the great, 49-57 in the salons of the 1870's, 163
two paths (to idea of uncon- terms (in German, English,
scious), 131 French), 66 f., 103, 116 |
two paths, 131
U understanding, 3, 5
unified theory, 19
unconscious (mind, mental United States of America, ix,
processes, etc.), passim 141, 171
anti-classical, etc., 9, 132 unity of process, 33 (see also co-
aspects discovered in succes- ordination)
SuBJECT INDEX 219
Vv WwW

vitality, passim, 38, 69, 72, 107, will (see vitality)

115, 154, 175 Z
volition (see vitality)
voluptuousness, 139 Zeitgeist, 14, 53
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_ Whyte traces the evolution of the concept of the lunconeti )
what Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Roussea
Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche (amongst others) wrote about it.He do
belittle Freud’s greatness, but to establish the intellectual he
Freud established his theories.

problem of consciousness into a new perspective.’ Observer

... very stimulating. Every teacher and writer who is co
history of ideas . . . should have it on his shelves.’ New Society

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