Unconscious

Introduction

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When Freud set out, in his A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis’ (1912), to expound ‘in a few words and as plainly as possible what the term ‘unconscious’ has come to mean in Psychoanalysis’, he was confident of being able to give an exact description of a very particular psychological element: a system, with its own definite place in mental functioning, with its particular laws of behaviour and forms of evidence. It is Freud’s description, made here, and in the Interpretation of Dreams (1900) as well as an assortment of theoretical papers, which has come to be popularly associated with the term ‘the unconscious’, and one could fairly argue that ‘the unconscious’ in Western culture over much of the last century has been a psychoanalytic one. However, Freud did not invent or discover the notion of an unconscious which had already had a long and varied development through the course of the nineteenth century. In fact, research such as Henri Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970) has revealed that notions of the unconscious were so diverse and pervasive in nineteenth-century culture, that it no longer seems adequate to think of the nineteenth-century unconscious as merely a fore-runner to the invention of psychoanalysis. Rather the Victorian and pre-Victorian concern with the role of the unconscious has its own complex set of determinants and meanings, which lead in a variety of different directions, and towards a variety of different issues, including memory, dreams, instinct, the nervous system, hysteria, criminology, creativity, Mesmerism and metaphysics. In order to appreciate the Victorian unconscious, then, we must look not only beyond the Freudian or Jungian unconscious towards different kinds of ideas such as the subconscious, the subliminal, the buried life and the reflex, but we must also extend our view beyond the boundaries of psychology into theories of nature, history, physiology, literature and the supernatural.

The Romantic Unconscious
An obvious starting point for a narrative of the development of nineteenth-century interest in the unconscious is with the poetical explorations of Romantic writers in the early part of the century. Thomas De Quincey’s speculations on the unconscious store of memories in Suspiria de Profundis (1845), a sequel to his notes on dream, hallucination and addiction gathered in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, famously anticipates Freud’s comparison of the unconscious to a late Victorian toy,  the ‘mystic writing pad’. Coleridge’s fascination with the creative sources of the imagination, and Wordsworth’s with childhood recollection, would equally bring their writing to bear on the obscure recesses of the soul. Such associations between creativity, dream, memory and unconsciousness continued throughout the century, inspiring later Victorian speculations, such as those from E.S. Dallas concerning an ‘absent mind which haunts us like a ghost or a dream’, or Frances Power Cobbe’s interest in dreams as indications of deeper layers of the self. However it was the German Romantic tradition that in many ways pioneered a more radical notion of the unconscious as a formative principle underlying life. In works written in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, formerly an extreme advocate of the powers of the conscious mind, began to rework his theory of knowledge, orienting it towards the hidden, the past, and the unconscious. The mind had two kinds of life, Schelling speculated: the one part, conscious, enquiring, rational; the other unconscious, buried, but intimately connected with the laws of nature. This hidden component of the soul contained secret kinds of knowledge and was capable of special acts of creation – for instance in works of art. By the 1830s, such Romantic philosophical interest in an unconscious mind had filtered through into writing on psychology. The landmark work here was Carl Gustav Carus's Psyche: On the Development of the Soul, published in 1846. Carus opened his introduction to the book with the resounding manifesto for a Romantic psychology: ‘The key to an understanding of the nature of the conscious life of the soul lies in the sphere of the unconscious’. Carus’s unconscious fused – often rather haphazardly – ideas about unconscious memory, with the question of unconscious biological and natural processes governing the development of life, and both of these in turn with an aura of mysticism: nature, on German Romantic lines, was portrayed as a god-like guiding principle within all life, whose tool was the unconscious. ‘Can the free activity of the conscious soul’, he asked, ever match the perfection and abundance of the creations of the unconscious soul? Carl Jung would later acknowledge the tradition of Schelling and Carus as a formative influence on his own theory of the subconscious, and as forerunners of psychoanalytic theory.

The Physiological Unconscious
Later in the century, and on quite a different front, developments in physiology began to generate their own arguments in favour of the unconscious at the level of unconscious reflexes, mental functions and neural processes.William Benjamin Carpenter, enquiring into the mechanisms of thought, felt increasingly justified in assuming that ‘not only an automatic, but an unconscious action enters largely into all its processes’ – an action that he explored in a section on  ‘Unconscious Cerebration’ in his Principles of Mental Physiology (1874). Samuel Butler likewise attempted to translate the more metaphysical theories of German writers, such as Hartmann and Ewald Hering, into an empirical framework. Taking the same kind of questions that had intrigued the Romantics – such as, ‘where do thoughts go when they are off-stage’- he attempted to supply answers by twinning the associationist account of memory (theorised by David Hartley, James Mill and J.S. Mill) with contemporary investigations of ‘nerve substance’. Thought processes were assumed to unfold in terms of chains of memories and associated ideas, but not all of these ideas would reach consciousness. There was reason to view thinking as at least partly an unconscious process which continued as an organic operation of the brain, whether or not such thoughts surfaced in the mind. Henry Maudsley also raised this possibility of ‘latent’ thoughts and unconscious action in the mind in his The Physiology of Mind (1876).

The Unconscious Will of Nature
There was a certain amount of cross-fertilisation later in the century between the romantic interest in unconscious sources of inspiration and the more physiological concern with the unconscious operation of nerves and fibres in the brain. Maudsley’s The Physiology of Mind, for instance, contains passages on the nature of unconscious imagination in the man of genius. But there were also sharp contrasts between these two kinds of approaches. One viewed the unconscious as a mysterious guiding force within the body or soul, the other, as a kind of automatism, a reflex action of the brain. Carpenter, for instance, though concerned throughout to retain a place for traditional concepts of will, also had to entertain the possibility that some humans some of the time were thinking automata. Both of these kinds of ideas intersected ambiguously on the terrain of theories of nature. Throughout the nineteenth-century the understanding of nature was being reformulated under the impact of new perceptions of life as historical and developmental, which, on a grand scale, raised the question of nature’s unconscious past. At the same time, Victorian naturalism developed a complex interest in the role of instinct in the animal and human sphere. Both of these attempts to revise or deepen an understanding of natural processes were liable to get caught up in metaphysical attempts to view nature itself as a vast organism with its own unconscious motives and principles. One of the most influential of such attempts was Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, written in 1818 and then republished in 1844 in an expanded form incorporating various kinds of empirical evidence drawn from Schopenhauer’s reading of contemporary naturalists. A chapter titled ‘On Instinct and Mechanical Tendency’correlated the behaviour of humans acting under unconscious impulses – such as sleepwalkers or those in Mesmeric trances – with the actions of insects, such as a spider spinning a web. Moreover, all of these details, from nature and psychology, were organised to support a central metaphysical message, a famously pessimistic one – that of human life and nature controlled by an all-pervasive, blind and chaotic will. Life ‘by no means presents itself as a gift to be enjoyed, but as a task, a drudgery to be worked through’, it is an ‘impulse wholly without ground or motive’. Humans are puppets, he argued, driven by an irrational and unconscious internal impulse to perpetuate themselves and their species. The 1844 edition added a lengthy chapter on the unconscious domination of humans by the sexual impulse.

The Unconscious Triumphant
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the notion of unconscious sources of human behaviour, which throve originally on the terrain of Romantic theories of genius and dreams, had become entwined with more general moral and sociological fears about the irrationality of life and the precariousness of human progress. The major impact of Schopenhauer’s work fell in the decades after the failed revolutions of 1848, when his vision of subservience to a blind irrational will combined with a climate of pessimism in politics. On the terrain of sociology, Gustav le Bon’s theories of crowd behaviour in The Psychology of Crowds (1895) reflect this exchange between romantic and Victorian theories of the unconscious, between guiding principles and moral panics: ‘Visible social phenomena appear to be the result of an immense, unconscious working’. Crowds act like regressions on the evolutionary scale, they display an ‘inferior mentality’; yet in some of their acts they appear to be guided by ‘mysterious forces’. One does not have to look far in later Victorian culture to find such negative imagery of the unconscious – threatening, mysterious, controlling, all-pervasive. One finds it in sociological descriptions of Victorian London, in investigations into Mesmerism, in theories of criminality, and in literary works such Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Trilby, and the sense of a brooding, impenetrable obscurity – outer and inner – evoked in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In their strongest formulations, such trends led to the perception that consciousness had rightly been unseated from the central position accorded to it by the Enlightenment, and that the unconscious was by far the superior or dominant principle in human life. On the terrain of aesthetic theory E.S.Dallas, could remark in his The Gay Science (1866) that we have within us a ‘hidden life’: ‘how vast is its extent, how potent and constant its influence’, while Eduard von Hartmann’s monumental Philosophy of the Unconscious (1868) combined the approaches of Carus and Schopenhauer along with contemporary zoology to fill three volumes with grandiose speculations on the various forms of mental, physical and metaphysical unconscious which were running life from behind the scenes.

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The Path to Psychoanalysis: Are there such things as unconscious ideas?
It is against this abundance of material that we should view the development of the modern, psychological theory of the unconscious, which emerged towards the beginning of the twentieth-century, and which we have come to associate with psychoanalysis. Since the middle of the nineteenth-century there had been a series of philosophical attempts to shore up the rational psychology of the conscious mind against this influx of mystery, chaos or automatism. J.S.Mill in his book-length rebuttal of the theories of Sir William Hamilton (1865), and Franz Brentano in his Psychology from an Empirical Point of View (1874) were careful to try and dismantle the grounds for supposing that there could be such a thing as truly unconscious motivations or perceptions. For both of these writers, the ‘uconscious’ still suggested a contradiction in terms. Freud attended Brentano’s seminar while studying at the University of Vienna in the mid-1870s. However, it was in the field of psychiatry and psychopathology rather than philosophy that the most influential theories of unconscious psychology began to emerge. These often painted a very different portrait of the individual mind which, far from upholding the traditional concepts of conscious will and intention, began to delineate a human subject that was potentially fragmented or layered between different conscious and unconscious strata – prone to nervous illness, disintegration, or threatened with the eruption of archaic forces or repressed impulses. One such route is exemplified in the early work of Freud and Breuer where associationist theories of memory were transformed by the study of hysteria and experimentation with hypnotism. In contrast to Brentano’s attempts to resist the hypothesis of unconscious ideas twenty years earlier, Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria published jointly with Freud in 1895 explores the premise that ‘the whole conduct of our life is constantly influenced by subconscious ideas’ and maintains that the objections raised against such ideas are simply juggling with words. The treatment of hysteria which they developed at this stage involved using hypnosis and other techniques to bring to light unconscious reminiscences which were split off from the normal consciousness of the individual, but continued to influence their behaviour in waking life.

The Double Mind, The Subliminal Mind, The Subconscious
Freud’s and Breuer’s was by no means the only such attempt to investigate splits in the mind and the operation of unconscious thoughts as an issue for personal psychology.  F.H.Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research (1882), published an article on ‘Multiplex Personality’ in 1886 which tried to link behavioural changes in hysterical patients – for instance from the ‘civilized’ to the violent and irrational - to dissociations between the functions of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. He sent a copy of the paper to Robert Louis Stevenson after reading his The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Such cases of ‘double consciousness’ had been widely documented throughout the century, at first within Romantic psychology and Mesmerism, and more recently in relation to hypnotism and hysteria. In a later article on ‘The Subliminal Consciousness’ (1892) Myers put forward the more radical idea, similar to that suggested by Dallas, that the ‘stream of consciousness in which we habitually live’ is not the only consciousness inhabiting the organism. The ordinary waking self was but one possibility amongst a multitude of thoughts, feelings and memories which clustered subliminally in the self, and might be actively conscious within the person, in a way that was detached and hidden from empirical consciousness. Such hidden personalities might be revealed under hypnotism or make their appearance in the case of mental illness. Myers was drawing in part on the work of French psychiatrists such as Pierre Janet who, in the 1880s and 90s was investigating the phenomenon of ‘subconscious’ acts in hysterical or hypnotised patients. In his The Mental State of Hystericals (1892) he described the phenomenon of post-hypnotic suggestion, in which patients would be given commands while in a hypnotic state, which they would then perform unconsciously in their waking state with no recollection of the original command: ‘All that relates to post-hypnotic suggestion, seems to be no longer a part of their consciousness’. Moreover, such unconscious actions differed from mere reflexes because they were ‘intelligent acts’ – they seemed to indicate that some portion of the person was thinking and responding, but in a way that was split off from their normal consciousness.

Part of the power of the unconscious in the nineteenth century stems from its diffuseness as a concept. It is a quality of mind, a portion of the personality, a principle of nature, a function of nerves, a force for good, or a danger of regression. It represents in many ways the borders of scientific thinking in the Victorian age, and the fears and speculative hopes which these borders attracted – criminality and madness on the one hand, but also speculations on telepathy, spiritual communication, and self-improvement. Its emergence in the twentieth-century as something more contained and scientific, less poetical, is an expression not only of the history of psychoanalysis, but of changing attitudes in the wider history of science itself.

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