XML 052159104Xc08.

xml CU979-Baldwin March 17, 2003 20:54

THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND

se bast i an gardne r

I N T RO D U C T I O N

The concept of the unconscious is now so firmly associated with Sigmund Freud
that an alternative conception of the unconscious, one which is not in some
way dependent on or derived from that of psychoanalysis, is hard to imagine
at present. Yet, as studies of the prehistory of psychoanalysis emphasise, by no
means did Freud introduce the concept from scratch: already by 1900, when
Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) appeared, the unconscious was a
well-established intellectual topic (the classic studies of psychoanalysis’s ancestry
are Ellenberger 1970 and Whyte 1979; see also Brandell 1979: ch. 8, Decker
1977: ch. 9, and Ellenberger 1993: chs. 1–2; Freud’s debts are acknowledged
in Jones 1953: I, 435–6). Throughout the period 1870 to 1914 the concept of
the unconscious was, however, in comparison with its psychoanalytic version,
indeterminate in several respects. This reflects its deep involvement with two
broader issues in later nineteenth-century philosophy, namely the disentangling
of psychology as an autonomous discipline from philosophy, and the opposition
between ascendant materialistic naturalism and the contrary impulse to preserve
something of the metaphysical systems which had dominated the first three
decades of the century (for a different suggestion as to why the unconscious
appeared in Western thought, see Foucault 1966 [1974: 326–7]).

THE CONCEPT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

The concept of the unconscious entered the scene in the latter half of the
nineteenth century from two directions. First, unconscious mental entities and
processes were explicitly postulated many times over in the context of nascent
empirical psychology. Unconscious ideas were affirmed in Johann Friedrich
Herbart’s dynamic conception of ideas as inhibited but not destroyed by mental
conflict, and as reaching consciousness on the condition of adequate strength
and clarity (Herbart 1816 and 1824, esp. §§41–3; on Herbart, see Boring 1929
107
XML 052159104Xc08.xml CU979-Baldwin March 17, 2003 20:54

108 Sebastian Gardner

[1950: 245–61]; another early and influential source is Stewart 1792: ch. 2).
Subsequently they appeared in Gustav Theodor Fechner’s elaboration of the
notion of a threshold of awareness and theory of its relation to the intensity
of sensation (Fechner 1860: I, esp. ch. 10; on Fechner, see Boring 1929 [1950:
ch. 14]). Decisively, the concept of unconscious inference, which goes a step
beyond the postulation of mere unconscious ideas, was introduced by Hermann
von Helmholtz in his analysis of perceptual knowledge, where it is made the
key to spatial awareness, and it played a central role in the early writings of
Wilhelm Wundt.1 And in many other contexts theorists saw the need to refer
to mental states and processes that exceed the immediate given data of intro-
spective consciousness. As the discipline of psychology defined and consolidated
itself, the references became more frequent.2 In most of these writings, how-
ever, unconscious mental states are thought of as states which are not objects
of consciousness, rather than, as in Freud, states which cannot become such.
A distinctive school of psychological theory formed around Janet’s notion of
désagrégation (dissociation), although it was unclear what relation the concept
of dissociation bears to that of the unconscious, Janet preferring the term sub-
conscious (sous-conscience) (see Janet 1889, esp. pp. 190ff. and pt. II, ch. 1, and
1907–8; and Münsterberg et al. 1911; on Janet, see Ellenberger 1970: ch. 6). It
is safe to assume that most if not all of these authors would have been known to
Freud, whether directly or indirectly. For example, Freud says in letters of 1898
that he is reading Lipps (Freud 1954: Letters 94, 95, 97), whom he discusses in
The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1800 [1960: V, 611–15).
Notions of the unconscious were also introduced in metaphysical contexts,
the chief and most spectacular instance being Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophie
der Unbewußten (Philosophy of the Unconscious) – a work no longer read, but which,
measured in terms of its reception by the broader public, must be counted as
one of the most successful in the history of nineteenth-century philosophy. Here
the unconscious was associated with a very different cultural tendency, namely
the surge of interest in Schopenhauer and the recrudescence of romanticism (in
a novel, pessimistic form) in the late nineteenth century (on Schopenhauer’s
growing fame in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Henry 1988 and

1 Helmholtz 1855, 1856–67, vol. III, and 1894, and Wundt 1862, p. 65 and ch. 6; on Helmholtz, see
Boring 1950: ch. 15, and Mandelbaum 1971: 292–8: on Wundt, Boring 1929 [1950: ch. 16]; the
idea of unconscious inference goes back to J. S. Mill: see Mill 1843: II, bk. 6, ch. 4, discussed in
Reed 1997: ch. 7.
2 See Baldwin 1891: 93ff.; Butler 1880; Clifford 1878; Galton 1883: 203ff.; Lewes 1875: 126–7, 139ff.,
and 1874: I, 134–46 and II, problem 3, ch. 2; Lipps 1883 and 1897; Lotze 1854–64: I, bk. II, ch.
3, §§12–14 and bk. III, ch. 3, §5 [1885: I, 196–214 and 324–32] and 1884: pt. I, ch. 3, pt. II, ch. 6;
Maudsley 1867: ch. 1; Prince 1906, 1907–8, and 1914 (esp. Lecture 8); Ribot 1881: ch. 1 and 107ff.
1889 [1890: 112–17] and 1914; Taine 1870 (e.g. I, 165ff. and 332ff.), and Ward 1893.
XML 052159104Xc08.xml CU979-Baldwin March 17, 2003 20:54

The unconscious mind 109

Wallace 1890: pp. 189ff.; public interest in Schopenhauer in Britain began with
a review of his œuvre in the Westminster Review 1853: 388–407).
With qualification, these two sources can be thought of as giving rise re-
spectively to psychological and philosophical conceptions of the unconscious.
Qualifications are needed, first because psychologists, particularly in Germany,
conceived their theories as integral to the philosophical task of analysing the
conditions of human knowledge (Helmholtz for example was a Neo-Kantian,
psychological enquiry being on his account the correct means of effecting the
Copernican Revolution); and second because the conception of metaphysics in
Hartmann, inherited from Arthur Schopenhauer (most clearly exemplified in
Schopenhauer 1836), allowed metaphysical results to be based upon those of the
natural sciences, which meant that a metaphysical concept of the unconscious
could be supported by psychological research. The distinction between psycho-
logical and philosophical grounds for postulating the unconscious had no firm
place in the self-conceptions of the time.
The use made by Helmholtz and others of the concepts of unconscious ideas
and inferences belongs, strictly, to the history of psychology (see Boring 1929
[1950: chs. 13–18]; Littman 1979; Murray 1983: chs. 5–8; Reed 1997: chs. 4–7,
10; Robinson 1981: ch. 11). Essentially its theoretical motivation is the same as
that of contemporary sub-personal cognitive science. Once it had been resolved
that the mind should be made an object of scientific study on the model supplied
by the material natural sciences, it was inevitable that psychological concepts
defined with indifference to consciousness, in some cases by explicit analogy
with the theoretical entities of physics, would be introduced. The immedi-
ate background to nineteenth-century psychology was supplied chiefly by the
legacy of Locke, and the limitations of what could be achieved within the em-
piricist framework of associationism were well known; they had been exposed,
albeit in highly abstract terms, by Immanuel Kant (even though Kant’s warn-
ings against confusing epistemology with empirical investigation were ignored
by Helmholtz, as they had been by Herbart). Hence, given the undeveloped
state of physiology until late in the nineteenth century, which ruled out direct
explanation of conscious events by neurological causes, some investment in psy-
chological entities outside consciousness would be needed if psychology were
to make headway and not to remain a merely descriptive discipline.
Hartmann’s philosophy of the unconscious, by contrast, requires considerable
historical reconstruction in order to become intelligible from a late twentieth-
century perspective. The sub-title of his main work – Versuch einer Weltanschauung
(Attempt at a World-View) (1869) – signals his distance from the relatively circum-
scribed project of empirical psychology. Hartmann’s overarching intention is to
allow the opposing systems of G. W. F. Hegel and Schopenhauer, each of which
XML 052159104Xc08.xml CU979-Baldwin March 17, 2003 20:54

110 Sebastian Gardner

he regards as expressing a partial truth, to be rendered consistent and fruitfully

integrated.3 Accordingly, the world is envisaged by Hartmann as a teleological
whole with two interdependent but mutually irreducible aspects. On the one
hand, the world is, as in Schopenhauer, will, a process of striving which mani-
fests itself in the kinds and particulars of organic nature. Hartmann argues (1869
[1931: I, 30, 117ff.]), however, that will presupposes, an end, which is supplied
by the Hegelian Idea, the unity of will and idea comprising in Hartmann’s lan-
guage, borrowed from F. W. J. von Schelling, the Unconscious (1869 [1931: I,
4–5, 28–9, II, 55–61]; see Schelling 1800 [1993: 58–9, 75–9, 203–36]).
Hartmann’s construction of his picture follows what he calls an ‘inductive’
method (1869 [1931: I, 6–15]), whereby the existence of the unconscious is
established initially through a wide-ranging survey of natural phenomena, in-
cluding instinctual behaviour in animals and physical pathology, extending to
an analysis of human sexual and moral behaviour, language, aesthetic experi-
ence, and so on (1869 [1931: I]). In each case Hartmann argues that mechanical
causality fails to provide a complete explanation, which requires reference to
ends which must be represented and yet are not conscious (1869 [1931: I, 98,
113]). On the basis of this empirical warrant, Hartmann differentiates the hy-
pothesised unconscious into several kinds (physiological, psychic, metaphysical),
culminating in the absolute unconscious, which shares in the attributes of God
(1869 [1931: II, 245ff.]).
At one level, Hartmann’s system appears to have advantages over those of
Hegel and Schopenhauer. The (frequently supposed) difficulty of understanding
Hegel’s conception of a development of thought which is at the same time the
development of reality – of understanding in what sense concepts can ‘move’ –
does not arise for Hartmann, because of his interpretation of this process on the
model of agency (Hegel’s Idea is assimilated to a subject with practical reason).
Similarly, a question which arises for Schopenhauer, as to why the world-will
should objectify itself in individuated nature, is answered by the Hegelian com-
ponent of Hartmann’s system, the dependence of will on representation. To that
extent, Hartmann uses Hegel and Schopenhauer to solve one another’s prob-
lems. At another level, however, Hartmann’s own system faces a problem, since
it provides no answer to the question why the absolute Unconscious should give
rise to a world (see 1869 [1931: II, 271–5]: the Unconscious has no attributes
apart from that of the individuals in which it manifests itself ). Hartmann cannot,
like Schopenhauer, appeal to the a-rational character of will to bring explana-
tion to an end, nor can he take over Hegel’s claim that this end is supplied by

3 See the preface to the eighth edition, 1869 [1931: xxx; see also III, 147]; Hartmann offers detailed
accounts of his relations to his predecessors, 1869 [1931: I, 16–42, and III, 147–59].
XML 052159104Xc08.xml CU979-Baldwin March 17, 2003 20:54

The unconscious mind 111

the self-explaining concept. Instead, Hartmann effectively seeks to translate the

metaphysical problem of explaining the existence of the represented world into
the ethical problem of explaining the existence of evil, to which he responds
with a doctrine of philosophical pessimism, more thoroughgoing than Schopen-
hauer’s in so far as it teaches that the Unconscious is pure suffering and that the
world’s telos – for which consciousness evolved – is its own self-abolition (1869
[1931: II, 256–9, III, 123ff.]).

S C H O P E N H AU E R A N D B E R G S O N

The use which Hartmann intends for the concept of the unconscious is high-
lighted by comparison with, first, Schopenhauer, and, second, another philoso-
pher of a slightly later period who also had affinities with Schopenhauer and
made explicit use of the concept of unconscious mental states, Henri Bergson.
Schopenhauer is widely noted as a precursor of Freud. In volume II of Die
Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation) Schopenhauer
sketches many of the key elements of Freud’s metapsychology, including the
limited scope of consciousness, the subservience of consciousness and cognition
to the will, the fallibility of self-knowledge, the existence of repression, the
aetiology of madness, and the importance of sexuality (Schopenhauer 1844:
chs. 14–15, 19, 22, 32, 42, 44; see Assoun 1976: pt. II, and Gardner 1999).
Yet, the concept of the unconscious itself does not appear in Schopenhauer:
there is nothing in his philosophy comparable to the explicit discussion of the
Unconscious found in Schelling. The explanation for this lies in the fact that his
concept of will, together with his conception of the world as a ‘cryptograph’ in
which natural phenomena, human psychology included, could be interpreted
as manifesting the constitution of an underlying reality (Schopenhauer 1844: II
[1966: II, 182–5]), allowed Schopenhauer to arrive at a disenchanted view of the
human psyche similar to that of Freud. The same programme – of interpreting
human beings in terms that stand on the border of metaphysics and naturalistic
explanation – is pursued in Friedrich Nietzsche, again with results that famously
approximate to those of psychoanalysis and which became increasingly well
known towards the turn of the century (Nietzsche’s most sustained attempt in
this direction is Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887; on his relation to Freud, see
Assoun 1980 and Lehrer 1995, esp. ch. 14).
Bergson, though well acquainted with empirical psychology and prepared
to appropriate its results for philosophical ends, arrived at a conception of the
unconscious on the basis of uniquely metaphysical considerations, and the claim
that there are unconscious mental states has for him a quite distinctive meaning
(Bergson 1896 [1991: 140–9; see also 67, 171, 176]). Consciousness, according
XML 052159104Xc08.xml CU979-Baldwin March 17, 2003 20:54

112 Sebastian Gardner

to Bergson, is the mark of the present, and so, on his analysis of the struc-
ture of time and the nature of mind, essentially an action-directed function.
Hence it is an illusion (though an intelligible one, in so far as it reflects a more
general illusion of the autonomy and priority of theoretical cognition) to sup-
pose that consciousness is necessary to psychological states: in fact, for Bergson,
consciousness is merely a condition enjoyed by states that engage with our prac-
tical interests. Representations, he holds, exist outside awareness in a manner
precisely analogous to objects in space. Memory has this status.
Redolent though this may be of the atemporal Freudian unconscious – a
comparison drawn by Bergson himself (1934 [1946: 75]: ‘my idea of integral
conservation of the past has more and more found its empirical verification
in the vast collection of experiments instituted by the disciples of Freud’) –
the distance between the two conceptions is in fact enormous: not only does
Bergson’s account imply that unconscious states are ineffective, he also holds
(due to his idealism) that the reality of the unconscious is equivalent to that of
the material world at large. Bergson’s conception of the unconscious evidently
stands or falls with his philosophical system as a whole, and is disengaged from
the problems of psychological explanation addressed by Freud (the ‘ontological’,
non-psychological character of Bergson’s unconscious is stressed in Deleuze 1966
[1991: 55–6, 71–2]).
The comparison with Schopenhauer and Bergson puts in focus the reason
why Hartmann’s vast system is not a living survivor in the history of philoso-
phy. Hartmann’s aim of synthesising the philosophies of the Idea and the Will
requires them to be brought under a single principle which possesses an inde-
pendent content and justification. There is, however, nothing in Hartmann’s
system comparable to Schopenhauer’s account of will or Bergson’s account of
time which might give philosophical substance to his notion of the Unconscious.
It remains the wholly indefinite concept of whatever it is that would provide a
unitary ground for Hegelian and Schopenhauerian metaphysics, and his philo-
sophical system reduces to an eclectic compendium (criticism of Hartmann by
his contemporaries may be found in Brentano 1874 [1973: 103–9], and Lange
1873 [1925: bk. 2, 71–80]; on Hartmann, see Darnoi 1967 and Windelband
1892: §§44, 46).

CRITICS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

It would be a mistake to suppose that the concept of the unconscious met no

resistance in the pre-Freudian era. Examples of systematic critical discussions of
the unconscious are found in Franz Brentano and William James. Each argues
at length, with reference to writings of their contemporaries, that a broadly
XML 052159104Xc08.xml CU979-Baldwin March 17, 2003 20:54

The unconscious mind 113

empirical approach to psychological questions fails to uncover good reasons for

hypothesising unconscious mental states. Brentano’s discussion of unconscious
mental phenomena (Brentano 1874: bk 2, ch. 2 [see also 1973: 56–9]) considers
four possible lines of defence, the most familiar and promising being inference
to unconscious mental phenomena as causes of conscious mental phenomena.
Speculations of this form – Brentano cites instances from Sir William Hamilton,
G. H. Lewes, Henry Maudsley, Hartmann, and Helmholtz – fail to fulfil the
conditions of a successful inference, Brentano argues, in most cases because of
the failure to rule out alternative explanations, in terms of dispositions to con-
scious mental states or the activation of pre-established associative connections
(Brentano 1874 [1973: 105–16]; see e.g. Hartmann 1869 [1931: I, 98]). Brentano
also stresses (here anticipating a standard criticism of psychoanalysis) the tension
between the homogeneity of conscious and unconscious states which arguments
of this form must presuppose, and the heterogeneity of conscious and uncon-
scious mental processes which is characteristically asserted by theorists such as
Hartmann who appeal to the unconscious for explanation of what cannot be ex-
plained by consciousness alone (Brentano adds a further, independent criticism
of Hartmann’s metaphysics as wholly lacking in rigour, 1874 [1973: 108–9]).
Another, less familiar attempted justification of the unconscious considered by
Brentano is an a priori argument turning on the claim that if all mental phenom-
ena are conscious, i.e. objects of other mental phenomena, then an infinite (and
vicious) regress of mental acts is generated (Brentano 1874 [1973: 121–37]). To
this Brentano opposes his doctrine that each mental act is its own (secondary)
object (1874 [1973: 127–8]), a reflexive conception of the mental which persists
in the phenomenological tradition and underpins the criticism of Freudian ideas
in phenomenology and existentialism (in addition to the well-known discus-
sion in Sartre 1943 [1958: 50–4, 568ff.], see Merleau-Ponty 1945 [1962: 157–8],
Scheler 1923 [1954: 196–209], and Henry 1985: ch. 9).
James covers similar territory to Brentano. The classic argument of G. W.
Leibniz, that conscious perception of a whole presupposes unconscious percep-
tion of its perceptible parts (Leibniz 1765 [1981: 53–6 and 164–7]), is rejected by
James as exemplifying the ‘fallacy of division’, and cases of habitual, automated
intelligent behaviour are accounted for by him in terms of either conscious
states which are instantly forgotten, or split-off consciousness (James 1890: I,
ch. 6 [1950: 162–76]; James’s discussion is very similar to that in Mill 1878:
ch. 15). James regards Janet’s conception of split consciousness as providing also
the explanation of somnambulism and of the purported unconsciousness of
hysterics (James 1890: I, ch. 6 [1950: 202–13]; see also ch. 10 [1950: 373ff.]).
Where these forms of explanation come under pressure or give out, as in se-
quences of thought where links are absent from consciousness, James (here
XML 052159104Xc08.xml CU979-Baldwin March 17, 2003 20:54

114 Sebastian Gardner

departing from Brentano) refers to brain traces and the operations of the ner-
vous system in place of unconscious ideation – ‘there are all kinds of short-cuts
in the brain’ (James 1890: I [1950: 167]). Quasi-Freudian cases, where we seem
to retrospectively self-ascribe motives and emotions previously unrecognised by
us, are on James’s analysis simply ones in which our mind has changed: the mo-
tive or emotion which we are now aware of did not in fact exist earlier (though
some conscious fact closely related to it may have done so), and so need not be
assumed to have previously taken an unconscious form. (James, however, later
takes a different view of the unconscious in the context of religious experience:
see James 1902 [1982: 233ff., 483ff., 511ff.].)

FREUD

Freud is sometimes said to have rendered the concept of the unconscious

‘scientific’ (e.g. Robinson 1981: 380), or at any rate to have made an attempt
in the direction of genuine science, but this is not an especially helpful way of
characterising the difference between psychoanalysis and earlier theories which
gave application to the notion of unconscious mentality. The latter were no less
guided by considerations of systematicity and empirical proof (Hartmann in-
cluded, within his own terms). Rather, what Freud did was to take the idea that
unconscious mental states and activities can legitimately be postulated in accor-
dance with the demands of psychological explanation, and give it a novel, very
much broader sphere of application, one that took in not only psychopathology
but also the normal functions of dreams, sexuality, child development, adult mo-
tivation and so on – all of this material being subjected to a highly original form
of holistic, interpretative scrutiny, anchored in the new clinical practice of the
psychoanalytic session. Freud’s primary innovation thus lay in the development
of a new plane of psychological explanation, one that goes beyond common-
sense psychology, not by appeal to experimental methods modelled on those of
natural science, but by radically innovating selected elements taken from within
everyday psychological knowledge and practice (see Wollheim 1991: Preface).
The image of Freud as having discovered the unconscious has a justification,
therefore, in so far as he gave the concept a stability and empirical determi-
nacy which it lacked previously. To the extent that any narrowly philosophical
development may be associated with Freud, it lies in his having developed a
conception of the unconscious mind as something more substantial than a mere
aggregate of unconscious ideas or representations, but which does not amount
to a second mind as such, and so does not (like Pierre Janet’s theory of disso-
ciation) take us full circle to a theory of split-off (subliminal, secondary, etc.)
consciousness. (Freud’s own philosophical defence of the concept of unconscious
XML 052159104Xc08.xml CU979-Baldwin March 17, 2003 20:54

The unconscious mind 115

mentality recapitulates what had been said before by Herbart, Hartmann, and
others: see Freud 1912, 1915, and 1940: pt IV.)
The objections to talk of unconscious mentality levelled by Brentano and
James could certainly, in principle, continue to be pressed against Freud, but not
nearly as straightforwardly: the explanatory detail and integration of psychoana-
lytic theory, together with its reliance on a hermeneutical method which is only
obliquely related to familiar instances of inductive reasoning, made it harder
to refute the claim that postulation of the Freudian unconscious satisfies the
conditions of inference to the best explanation. In fact, the bulk of the criticism
directed at psychoanalysis in Freud’s lifetime (when it did not revert, rather disin-
genuously, to a flat repudiation of the notion of the unconscious as absurd) took
issue with his account of the content of human motivation, especially regarding
the role of sexuality (see Decker 1977: chs. 3–4, esp. 95ff. and 123ff.); Freud’s
contemporary opponents did not in general seek to directly counter psychoan-
alytic claims by advancing explanations of the same phenomena in competing
(neurophysiological or other psychological) terms.
Though Freud discarded all pretensions to metaphysical truth, and aligned
himself unequivocally with the endeavour to make the human mind a topic
of objective knowledge, he may be regarded as having persevered, in contrast
with the other major schools of empirical psychology in this century, with the
philosophical, Schopenhauerian, or Hartmannian, task of providing an inter-
pretation of human existence (Decker 1977: 322ff., suggests that this aspect of
psychoanalysis played a role in its negative reception). To the extent that psycho-
analysis supports a Weltanschauung (see Freud 1933: Lecture 35), it may be said
that the philosophical and psychological conceptions of the unconscious were
brought together in Freud. That the traditional philosophical task of providing
a synoptic account of man’s situation should have been taken over by what is
essentially an empirical theory of the individual mind is a measure of the de-
gree to which, by the end of the nineteenth century, speculative ambition had
faded from philosophy, and, lying immediately behind this development, natural
science had achieved a cultural authority which allowed it to influence signifi-
cantly the terms of intellectual enquiry – such that it now seems inevitable that
a fully naturalistic conception of the unconscious such as Freud’s would eclipse
the compromised, scientific-cum-metaphysical sort advanced by Hartmann (for
a contrasting view of the significance of the Freudian unconscious, see Henry
1985).
XML 052159104Xc08.xml CU979-Baldwin March 17, 2003 20:54

116