The Foundation of the Unconscious: Freud, Schelling and the Birth of the Modern Psyche by Matt ffytche (review)

Matt ffytche’s thoughtful and intricate historiography of the unconscious puts textual and biographical detail alongside a compelling sense of broader questions of political subjectivity in the post-Enlightenment period. The premise of The Foundation of the Unconscious is, on the surface, straightforward: a genealogy of the idea of the unconscious from its germination in Friedrich Schelling’s idealist philosophy to the expression of its early nineteenth-century origins in Freud and a number of other twentieth-century analysts, and the political baggage that comes with it. In this way, ffytche’s study makes an interesting companion to historiographical accounts of other psychoanalytic ideas, like Nicholas Royle’s 2003 study The Uncanny (Manchester University Press). The result is a psychoanalysis that is recognizably Romantic rather than archetypically modernist: ffytche makes a powerful case for a Freud rooted in the Naturphilosophie of Schelling and the poets and anthropologists who constituted his context.

The first two parts of ffytche’s book make heavy going for readers unfamiliar with the terminologically dense and obdurately abstract writing of Fichte and Schelling, though the meticulous readings of their work on offer pays dividends. The ‘I’ in Fichte and the unconscious in Shelling offer a rebuttal, in ffytche’s reading, to eighteenth-century notions of mechanistic and deterministic structures underlying the natural world and thus circumscribing the possibilities for human autonomy and freedom. Schelling, conversely, begins to attribute the dimension of unconsciousness to ‘all points of ontological reference’, consigning ‘the whole city of life to the abyss’ (p135). This manoeuvre, however, is not a punishment or fall but rather the foundation and imperative for human freedom. ffytche goes on to read the connected interests of natural philosophy, ontology and psychology through particularly illuminating examinations of the work of relatively little known figures like polymath C.G. Carus and naturalist G.H. Schubert.

The final third of the book and conclusion draw out the implications of the earlier discussions of Fichte and Schelling as regards the implications of their Romanticism in psychoanalytic writing proper. ffytche offers more than merely an account of Romantic influence on Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, exploring instead the ways in which psychoanalysis can be set in a wider frame of the problems of post-idealist political philosophy in the 1800s. It is, in this regard, inevitably political, with the Freudian conception of the psyche offering, on the one hand, a more ‘unbounded and natural instinct against which civilized independence must be defended’ (p258) and, on the other, a determining law completing the rational account of human behavior and thus buttressing a rationalistic image of the ego. ffytche displays, in other words, the ways in which debates about the concept of an unconscious are both foundational in and critical of the liberal subject of European modernity.

In stressing this ambivalence, ffytche problematizes attitudes in critical theory that treat the concept of the unconscious as the mysterious harbinger of revolutionary forces and resistant to the norms of bourgeois society. If only in a muted way, ffytche’s meticulous historicization of the political and philosophical forces shaping Schelling’s conception of the unconscious offers a counterpoint to, and critique of, Slavoj Žižek’s vision of Schelling’s unconscious in which it emerges ‘in a brief flash’; a view that ffytche feels necessarily ‘forecloses any attempt to give the unconscious itself a history’ (p4). For this reason, ffytche’s study will be useful to researchers and postgraduates engaged in contemporary theoretical speculations about the relationship between concepts of subjectivity, political life and the legacy of the Enlightenment. It should also be of great value to writers interested in the relationship of psychoanalysis and aesthetics in both modernist studies and Romanticism, opening the door to a vision of modernism inflected by not just psychoanalysis but its Romantic precursors, as well as perhaps promising new engagements of Romantic twentieth-century psychoanalysts (C.G. Jung; Donald Winnicott) with the philosophical...