Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought (review)

This commendable anthology of essays focuses on nineteenth-century German philosophical concepts of the unconscious. More specifically, the study’s declared goal is to provide “an in-depth account” of the conceptual history of the unconscious from its Cartesian origins to Freud (2). The editors deliberately chose the title, Thinking the Unconscious, to distinguish their approach from “Henri F. Ellenberger’s magisterial The Discovery of the Unconscious” (3). In contrast to Ellenberger, the editors do not want to suggest that the unconscious is a universal phenomenon like the brain. By presenting the object of their study in the context of nineteenth-century German philosophical tradition, Nicholls and Liebscher view the unconscious as a product of human activity rather than as an object that could be detected or found.

The volume’s approach, with its emphasis on key figures of German idealism such as Kant, Goethe, Schelling, and Carus, as well as their nineteenth-century successors Schopenhauer, Helmholtz, Hartmann, Fechner, Nietzsche, and Freud, effectively demonstrates how basic assumptions of Freudian psychoanalysis can be attributed to a dialectic between competing idealist philosophy and empiricist science. Yet the editors are aware of the pitfalls of construing the teleology from German idealism to psychoanalysis that can be found in some older studies, such as Ellenberger’s Detecting the Unconscious, Whyte’s The Unconscious Before Freud, and Hemecker’s Before Freud (Vor Freud). Rather than projecting such a predisposed view onto pre-Freudian concepts of the unconscious, it is the editors’ intention to present these sources “in their own independent historical and philosophical contexts” without neglecting to point out significant similarities to the Freudian model (22). The anthology possesses a high degree of coherence, which results from the authors’ engagement with each others’ contributions. At the same time the volume benefits from the inclusion of differing, even deviating viewpoints. For instance, “some [contributors] see deep-seated affinity between Goethe and Freud on the unconscious; while others . . . see this purported affinity as being part of the historical mythology of psychoanalysis, which is based upon [the] fallacious teleology” mentioned above (23).

It would take up too much space to elaborate on the different arguments of all eleven contributions here. Suffice it to say that the essays reveal remarkable erudition and that the volume benefits from a variety of perspectives. I will mainly refer to the editors’ superb introduction, which includes references to the pertinent and up-to-date research on the topic, and Günter Gödde’s chapter 10, which summarizes many of the arguments made in the preceding chapters. Nicholls and Liebscher point out that the division between conscious and subconscious thought already emerged during the Enlightenment. Leibniz’s “petites perceptions,” that is, perceptions that are “too minute and too numerous” to enter reflexive consciousness or thought, can be viewed as a prototype of the subconscious (7). This model, which also bears similarities to the Freudian concept of repression, is still of relevance for today’s psychology of cognition (Gödde 262). Examples of this model are discussed in chapter 8 of the volume, with regard to the psychophysics of Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), and Theodor Lipps (1851–1914).

Although for Kant, the unconscious “never became an explicit question for consideration,” the editors refer to specific examples from his work to show that the idea is a latent part of Kantian thought (18). Kant’s identification of “unconscious,” “dark,” or “obscure” representations in his anthropology, his contempt for the instinctual desires in his ethics, and his assumption of the unconscious nature of human creativity in his aesthetics testify to his acute awareness of the power of “sensuous intuitions and sensations” in the economy of the human psyche (9–18). Although Kant’s system did not give much room to considerations of the unconscious, his successors—the representatives of post-Kantian German idealism (chapters 2 and 3), especially the Romantic tradition that emerged from Herder’s and...