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 verdrangt (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, Emile Durkheim, Lucien Levy-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 The nineteenth century was also facing up to the issue of child sexuality. Physicians had traditionally considered it a rare abnormality but, as early as 1846, Father P. J. C. Debreyne, a moral theologian who was also a physician, published a tract where he insisted on the high frequency of infantile masturbation, of sexual play between young children, and of the seduction of very young children by wet nurses and servants. Bishop Dupanloup of Orleans was another churchman who repeatedly emphasised the frequency of sexual play among children, arguing that most of them acquired 'bad habits' between the ages of one
and two years. Most famously, Jules Michelet, in Our Sons (1869), warned parents about the reality of child sexuality and in particular what today would be called the Oedipus complex.25 Two things of some importance emerge from even this brief survey of nineteenth-century (mainly German and French) thought. The first is to dispense thoroughly with any idea that Freud 'discovered' the unconscious. Whether or not the unconscious exists as an entity (an issue we shall return to later), the idea of the unconscious pre-dates Freud by several decades and was common currency in European thought throughout most of the 1800s. Second, many of the other psychological concepts inextricably linked with Freud in the minds of so many-such ideas as childhood sexuality, the Oedipus complex, repression, regression, transference, the libido, the id and the superego-were also not original to Freud. They were as much 'in the air' as the unconscious was, as much as 'evolution' was at the time Darwin conceived the mechanism of natural selection. Freud had nowhere near as original a mind as he is generally given credit for. Surprising as all this is, for many people, it is still not the main charge against him, not the main sin so far as Freud's critics contend. These critics, such figures as Frederick Crews, Frank Cioffi, Allen Esterson, Malcolm Macmillan and Frank Sulloway (the list is long and growing), further argue that Freud is-not to beat about the bush-a charlatan, a 'scientist' only in quotation marks, who fudged and faked his data and deceived both himself and others. And this, the critics charge, completely vitiates his theories and the conclusions based on them. The best format to convey the new view of Freud is first to give the orthodox view of the ways in which he conceived his theories, and their reception, and then to give the main charges against him, showing how the orthodox view now has to be altered (this alteration, it should be said one more time, is drastic- we are talking here about critical scholarship over the last forty years but, in the main, the last fifteen years). Here, to begin with, is the orthodox version. Sigmund Freud's views were first set out in Studies in Hysteria , published in 1895 with Joseph Breuer, and then more fully in his work entitled The Interpretation of Dreams , published in the last weeks of 1899. (The book was technically released in November 1899, in Leipzig as well as Vienna, but it bore the date 1900 and it was first reviewed in early January 1900). Freud, a Jewish doctor from Freiberg in Moravia, was already forty-four. The eldest of eight children, he was outwardly a conventional man. He believed passionately in punctuality and wore suits made of English cloth, cut from material chosen by his wife. He was also an athletic man, a keen amateur mountaineer, who never drank alcohol. He was, on the other hand, a 'relentless' cigar-smoker.26 Though Freud might be a conventional man in his personal habits, The Interpretation of Dreams was a deeply controversial and-for many people in Vienna-an utterly shocking book. It is in this work that the four fundamental building blocks of Freud's theory about human nature first come together: the unconscious, repression, infantile sexuality (leading to the Oedipus complex), and the tripartite division of the mind into ego, the sense of self, superego, broadly speaking the conscience, and id, the primal biological expression of the unconscious. Freud had developed his ideas-and refined his technique-over a decade and a half since the mid-1880s. He saw himself very much in the biological tradition initiated by Darwin. After qualifying as a doctor, Freud obtained a scholarship to study under Charcot, who at the time ran an asylum for women afflicted with incurable nervous disorders. In his research, Charcot had shown that, under hypnosis, hysterical symptoms could be induced. Freud returned to Vienna from Paris after several months and, following a number of neurological writings (on cerebral palsy, for example, and on aphasia), he began a collaboration with another brilliant Viennese doctor, Josef Breuer (1842- 1925). Breuer, also Jewish, had made two major discoveries, on the role of the vagus nerve in regulating breathing, and on the semicircular canals of the inner ear which, he found, controlled the body's equilibrium. But Breuer's importance for Freud, and for psychoanalysis, was his discovery in 1881 of the so-called talking cure.27