Underlying consciousness, the self, and free will is a notion that seems the dark flip-
side of them all: the unconscious. The history of the unconscious has been a stormy
one. The idea that much of what goes on in the nervous system is unconscious
and that our conscious experiences depend upon unconscious processing seems
quite natural to us today. Yet it was deeply disturbing to many nineteenth-century
scientists, who assumed that inference and thinking, as well as ethics and moral-
ity, require consciousness. To them, the idea that thinking could happen without
consciousness seemed to undermine the moral or spiritual superiority of ‘Man’. This
meant that the notion of the unconscious which was derived from physiological
studies of the time, such as Helmholtz’s idea that perceptions are ‘unconscious infer-
ences’ and James’s (1902) talk of ‘unconscious cerebration’, was genuinely shocking.
The notion of the unconscious developed by Sigmund Freud was a crucial part of his
‘psychodynamic’ theory of how conscious and unconscious forces interact to pro-
duce personality and motivation. In Freud’s theory the unconscious (in his early work
also called the subconscious) consists of the impulses of the ‘id’, including biological
desires and needs; the defence mechanisms and neurotic processes of the ‘ego’; and
all the mass of unwanted or unacceptable material that is repressed by the ‘super-
ego’ – a part of the mind acquired through education in childhood, and the source of
conscience and guilt. All these unconscious feelings, images, and forbidden wishes
or instincts might then appear in dreams or cause neurotic symptoms (e.g. Freud,
1915, 1923/1927). Although Freud was trained as a neurologist, and frequently
referred to his work as a ‘new science’, his theories were derived almost entirely from
case studies of psychiatric patients and from his own self-analysis, and were largely
unfalsifiable. The theories of psychoanalysis have not stood the test of time, and the
ethics of Freud’s interactions with his patients were dubious, especially when it came
to ‘recovering’ their ‘memories’ of childhood sexual abuse. Nonetheless, his work did
manage to lastingly influence everyday notions of what the unconscious is and does.
That night he had a terrible dream [...]. Fear was the beginning,
fear and desire and a horrified curiosity at what was to come. It was
night, and his senses were alert, because from far away a turmoil,
a roar, a blend of noise approached [...]. But he knew a phrase,
dark, yet denoting what was coming: ‘The foreign god!’ [...] And in
the splintered light, from woody hills, between trunks and mossy
boulders it rolled and crashed earthward like a vortex: men, animals,
a swarm, a raging mob, and flooded the slopes with bodies, flames,
tumult, and a delirious dance. [...] Great was his abhorrence, great
his fear, honourable his will, to protect to the last what was his
from the foreign, from the enemy of the sober and dignified mind.
But the din, the howling, multiplied by the echoing cliff face, grew,
gained the upper hand, swelled to a ravishing madness. [...] His
heart thudded with the drumbeats, his brain gyrated, anger gripped
him, blindness, deadening lust, and his soul craved to join the god’s
dance. The obscene symbol, enormous, wooden, was uncovered and
raised: then more riotously they howled the watchword.
(Thomas Mann, Death in Venice [Der Tod in Venedig], 1912, our translation)
