Arguably the first appearance of the unconscious as we now understand the term came after the magnetisers noticed that when they induced magnetic sleep in someone, ‘a new life manifested itself of which the subject was unaware, and that a new and often more brilliant personality emerged’.9 These ‘two minds’ fascinated the nineteenth century, and there emerged the concept of the ‘double ego’ or ‘dipsychism’.10 People were divided as to whether the second mind was ‘closed’ or ‘opened’. The dipsychism theory was developed by Max Dessoir in The Double Ego, published to great acclaim in 1890, in which he divided the mind into the Oberbewussten and the Unterbewussten, ‘upper consciousness’ and ‘under consciousness’, the latter, he said, being revealed occasionally in dreams.
Among the general background factors giving rise to the unconscious, romanticism was intimately involved, says Ellenberger, because romantic philosophy embraced the notion of Urphänomene, ‘primordial phenomena’ and the metamorphoses deriving from them.11 Among the Urphänomene were the Urpflanze, the primordial plant, the All-Sinn, the universal sense, and the unconscious. Another primordial phenomenon, according to Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert (1780–1860), was Ich-Sucht (self-love). Von Schubert said man was a ‘double star’, endowed with a Selbstbewussten, a second centre.12 Johann Christian August Heinroth (1773–1843), described by Ellenberger as a ‘romantic doctor’, argued that the main cause of mental illness was sin. He theorised that conscience originated in another primordial phenomenon, the Über-Uns (over-us).13 Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887), a Swiss, promulgated the theory of matriarchy, publishing in 1861 The Law of Mothers.14 He believed, he said, that history had gone through three phases, ‘hetairism, matriarchy and patriarchy’. The first had been characterised by sexual promiscuity, when children did not know their fathers; the second was established only after thousands of years of struggle, but women had won out, founded the family and agriculture and wielded all the social and political power. The main virtue at this time was love for the mother, with the mothers together favouring a social system of general freedom, equality and peace. Matriarchal society praised education of the body (practical values) above education of the intellect. Patriarchal society emerged only after another long period of bitter struggle. It involved a complete reversal of matriarchal society, favouring individual independence and isolating men from one another. Paternal love is a more abstract principle than maternal love, says Bachofen, less down-to-earth and leading to high intellectual achievement. He believed that many myths contain evidence of matriarchal society, for example the myth of Oedipus.15
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
Pierre Janet may also be regarded as a ‘pre-Freudian’. Part of a great generation of French scholars which included Henri Bergson, Émile Durkheim, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Alfred Binet, Janet’s first important work was Psychological Automatism, which included the results of experiments he carried out at Le Havre between 1882 and 1888. There, he claimed to have refined a technique of hypnosis in which he induced his patients to undertake automatic writing. These writings, he said, explained why his patients would develop ‘terror’ fits without any apparent reason.23 Janet also noticed that, under hypnosis, patients sometimes developed a dual personality. One side was created to please the physician while the second, which would occur spontaneously, was best explained as a ‘return to childhood’. (Patients would refer to themselves, all of a sudden, by their childhood nicknames.) When Janet moved to Paris he developed his technique known as ‘Psychological Analysis’. This was a repeated use of hypnosis and automatic writing, during the course of which, he noticed, the crises that were induced were followed by the patient’s mind becoming clearer. However, the crises became progressively more severe and the ideas that emerged showed that they were reaching back in time, earlier and earlier in the patient’s life. Janet concluded that ‘in the human mind, nothing ever gets lost’ and that ‘subconscious fixed ideas are both the result of mental weakness and [a] source of further and worse mental weakness’.24