Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

A number of philosophers also anticipated Freudian concepts. The following list of books is instructive but far from exhaustive (Unbewussten means ‘unconscious’ in German): August Winkelmann, Introduction into Dynamic Psychology (1802); Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious

(1868); W. B. Carpenter, Unconscious Action of the Brain (1872); J. C. Fischer, Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten (1872); J. Vokelt, Das Unbewusste und der Pessimismus (1873); C. F. Flemming, Zur Klärung des Vegriffs der unbewussten Seelen-Thätigkeit (1877); A. Schmidt, Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Philosophie des Unbewussten

(1877); E. Colsenet, La Vie Inconsciente de l’Esprit (1880).¹⁶

In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer conceived the will as a ‘blind, driving force’. Man, he said, was an irrational being guided by internal forces, ‘which are unknown to him and of which he is scarcely aware’.¹⁷

The metaphor Schopenhauer used was that of the earth’s surface, the inside of which is unknown to us. He said that the irrational forces which dominated man were of two kinds – the instinct of conservation and the sexual instinct. Of the two, the sexual instinct was by far the more powerful, and in fact, said Schopenhauer, nothing else can compete with it. ‘Man is deluded if he thinks he can deny the sex instinct. He may think that he can, but in reality the intellect is suborned by sexual urges and it is in this sense that the will is “the secret antagonist of the intellect”.’ Schopenhauer even had a concept of what later came to be called repression which was itself unconscious: ‘The Will’s opposition to let what is repellent to it come to the knowledge of the intellect is the spot through which insanity can break through into the spirit.’¹⁸ ‘Consciousness is the mere surface of our mind, and of this, as of the globe, we do not know the interior but only the crust.’¹⁹

Von Hartmann went further, however, arguing that there were three layers of the unconscious. These were (1) the absolute unconscious, ‘which constitutes the substance of the universe and is the source of the other forms’; (2) the physiological unconscious, which is part of man’s evolutionary development; and (3) the psychological unconscious, which governs our conscious mental life. More than Schopenhauer, von Hartmann collected copious evidence – clinical evidence, in a way – to support his arguments. For example, he discussed the association of ideas, wit, language, religion, history and social life – significantly, all areas which Freud himself would explore.

Many of Freud’s thoughts about the unconscious were also anticipated by Nietzsche (whose other philosophical views are considered later). Nietzsche had a concept of the unconscious as a ‘cunning, covert, instinctual’ entity, often scarred by trauma, camouflaged in a surreal way but leading to pathology.²⁰ The same is true of Johann Herbart and G. T. Fechner. Ernest Jones, Freud’s first (and official) biographer, drew attention to a Polish psychologist, Luise von Karpinska, who originally spotted the resemblance between some of Freud’s fundamental ideas and Herbart’s (who wrote seventy years before). Herbart pictured the mind as dualistic, in constant conflict between conscious and unconscious processes. An idea is described as being verdrängt (repressed) ‘when it is unable to reach consciousness because of some opposing idea’.²¹ Fechner built on Herbart, specifically likening the mind to an iceberg ‘which is nine-tenths under water and whose course is determined not only by the wind that plays over the surface but also by the currents of the deep’.²²