“Let us compare our consciousness to a sheet of water of some depth. Then the distinctly conscious ideas are merely the surface; on the other hand, the mass of the water is the indistinct, the feelings, the after-sensation of perceptions and intuitions and what is experienced in general, mingled with the disposition of our own will that is the kernel of our inner nature.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
For many of us today, it is commonplace to talk about the “unconscious”. We might use it to explain our own behaviour, or that of others, or try to uncover its secrets in therapy. We convince ourselves that a friend who finds a new partner soon after a breakup is “on the rebound” – we know their motivations better than they do, we think. Perhaps we ourselves struggle with relationships, and believe this is due to something that happened in our childhood, rather than that we have not yet met someone who makes us want to commit. Our moods, our hopes, our actions, are ascribed again and again to hidden impulses.
The unconscious is not a new idea. It was of course given huge impetus by the work of Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century, but the waning of his influence has had little effect on what we might call his cultural – we might even say “pop-cultural” – influence. From Freudian slips to the search for secret motivations, his ideas are now embedded in the way we talk and live. But there is no hard evidence for the existence of something called “the unconscious”. Is the idea just a way of removing blame from ourselves, and placing it elsewhere?
A brief history of the 'unconscious'
In the late 18th century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant produced his masterwork, The Critique of Pure Reason. In it, he put forward a theory of mind which, for the most part, claims that all cognition is conceptual – that is, conscious. According to Kant, we are – or can be, if we take the time to reflect – fully self-aware, and can proceed by reason. As a founding text of modern philosophy, Kant’s theory has remained incredibly influential. But in the eyes of many philosophers, he left something crucial out of his picture of the human mind – what his contemporary Friedrich Schelling named “the unconscious”.
We might think the idea is uncontroversial. There are, of course, many things of which our brain is unconscious, even when they are being processed. If we were conscious of every sound around us, or everything within our field of vision, we would be overwhelmed – our brain is constantly filtering these things for us. But this is not what Schelling meant by the unconscious – the above examples are better described as nonconscious. For Schelling, the unconscious was not simply the passive activities of a brain (while thinking about other things), but an active and dynamic component of mind – it influences consciousness.
Arthur Schopenhauer took the idea further. In his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, not only is consciousness not the whole story of mind, it is merely the surface. For Schopenhauer, the active force of the universe was what he termed “Will”. The whole of the phenomenal world – that which we can see, touch, smell, which we can apprehend rationally and so on – is actually the manifestation of a huge irrational and impersonal drive. This is also the condition of each individual. While we believe our thoughts and motivations are explicable through rational thought, we are deluded. Rather: “The intellect remains so much excluded from the real resolutions and secret decisions of its own will that sometimes it can only get to know them, like those of a stranger, by spying out and taking unawares; and it must surprise the will in the act of expressing itself, in order merely to discover its real intentions.”
In fact, Schopenhauer was sceptical that we can ever get to know our secret decisions. We can only get at the representations of the truth of the universe, and the truths of ourselves. In this he was heavily influenced by Indian philosophy.
In works such as the sacred canonical text of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, dating from at least 3,000 years ago, Schopenhauer’s theory of the world and the mind finds an early parallel, which he was quick to acknowledge. The phenomenal world is, in the Veda, an illusion, with true reality lying behind it – whether we can pull back the veil remains a matter for debate. Similarly, our human self is, in some key sense, ultimately unknowable to itself.
The three 'Master's of Suspicion'
One of Schopenhauer’s great followers – and, later, great critics – Friedrich Nietzsche, is often credited as Freud’s most immediate precursor. As with so much of Nietzsche, his position regarding the unconscious is difficult to pin down. But it remains fascinating. He wanted to question Kant’s idea that we were in control of our chain of thoughts: that when a person goes from thought A to B to C, that is because A led logically to B, which led logically to C. This, to Nietzsche, is to use a current term, “retrofitting” what is actually occurring – finding logical links where none exist. Rather, he argued that “the events which are actually linked play out beneath our consciousness: the emerging sequence and one-after-the-other of feelings, thoughts, etc., are symptoms of the actual event!” The “actual event” is what has happened beneath our thinking, in our unconscious.
In fact, the later French thinker Paul Ricoeur identified Nietzsche as one of what he famously called “the Masters of Suspicion”, each of whom called into question human confidence in our own self-knowledge. The second for Ricoeur was Karl Marx, who saw our minds as created not from within, but out of the social fabric which surrounds us. The third of the three Masters was Sigmund Freud.
Born in 1856, Freud, while being an avid reader of philosophy, trained in medicine before branching off into the field of psychology, establishing his own practice in 1886. While “psychology” as the study of the workings of the mind has been around since the Greeks, the late 19th century saw a great flowering of the discipline, and the Freudian unconscious grew out of a number of similar ideas that were being debated at the time.
Two immediate predecessors were the French psychologists Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet. Charcot was making groundbreaking discoveries in understanding and treating hysteria, which included the use of hypnosis, while Janet was among the first thinkers to directly link patients’ present conditions to past traumas – in particular traumas which the sufferer had forgotten, or where they were not themselves conscious of a link.
Janet termed this breaking of the link between the trauma and the later symptoms “dissociation”, and placed responsibility in what he called the “subconscious”. Failing to integrate these traumatic experiences with normal selfhood led, he believed, to neurosis. Like Charcot, he used hypnosis, seeing what he called a “magnetic rapport” between the hypnotist and their patient, which allowed for a cure to be performed. This is close to the Freudian model, with hypnosis replaced by “the talking cure”, and the magic rapport being termed “transference”.
Freud's 'internal censor'
But Freud did not just draw on philosophy and psychology as he moved towards his own version of the unconscious. An acute reader of literature, he credited writers such as Shakespeare and Dostoevsky with leading him to theories of unconscious motivation, while of course, his famous – or infamous – concept of the Oedipus Complex is drawn from Greek drama.
There was also his religion. As the French writer Clémence Boulouque analyses in her excellent new book, On the Edge of the Abyss: The Jewish Unconscious Before Freud, the Jewish tradition, both religious and secular, has a strong tradition of engagement with the unconscious – from early works of mysticism and Kabbalism (with their beliefs in an underlying reality generally inaccessible to human understanding) through to the work of Schelling himself, who drew on these traditions. While Freud grew more and more to argue that religion is something to be overcome – in his The Future of an Illusion, religion is the illusion – his work remains peppered with religious symbolism.
For all that, Freud’s version of the unconscious is a more unequivocal one than anything that had preceded it. The unconscious is not, as in Schelling’s understanding, just a place where we store various random parts of our memory and experiences, nor just where we store things we believe we have forgotten.
The unconscious that Freud engages with is one where nothing is random, where nothing psychologically unimportant is stored. It is, specifically, a place formed of our repressed traumas. We have, according to Freud, an “internal censor” that is, in some sense, protecting us from harmful thoughts, by forcing them into the unconscious.
What is crucial here is that, for Freud as for Janet, the unconscious is formed by what happens to us. While Schopenhauer’s version of the unconscious can be criticised for being so impersonal that our individual lives become meaningless (to which criticism Schopenhauer, the great pessimist, might have simply said, “Yup”), for Freud the unconscious is perhaps more personal to us than the selves our conscious thoughts make us believe we are. While some of the behaviours caused by the unconscious of person A might give us clues as to the case of person B, our traumas are deeply individual.
Where, who and what is the 'unconscious'?
Fast forward to the 21st century and, despite criticism of his work, Freud’s ideas on the unconscious have, as we have seen, proved influential on popular beliefs around the workings of the mind, not forgetting the fields of psychotherapy and therapeutic practice. However, the very concept of the unconscious remains a problematic one. Many question whether there is such a thing, and if the idea is even comprehensible.
There is of course the question of location – where is the unconscious exactly? – but this mirrors the question of where consciousness is. Others have raised the question of what it means for Freud (and any psychoanalyst) to “know” about something that is, by its own definition, unknowable.
Further, what sort of game is our internal censor playing that it would hide information from us, and then not only leave clues for us as to its existence (such as, in Freud’s case, slips of the tongue or dream symbols), but also allow us enough access to un-censor the material in some way? And in a way that is good for us – why bother to censor it in the first place? What even is an “internal censor”? Is it part of the mind, too? How? Or we might even ask, “Who?”
This is a version of the homunculus fallacy, where there is a person inside a person inside a person. One thinker to raise it was Jean-Paul Sartre. If “we” are censoring material to keep it away from consciousness, how is that happening? Do we have another consciousness inside us – a little person or homunculus – which knows what is or isn’t acceptable, then makes a decision? But wouldn’t they need another one inside them, like a Russian doll? Finally, how is what is to be censored decided?
A bid to evade responsibility?
Sartre, for whom personal responsibility is paramount, thought the idea of the unconscious was the product of the human desire to evade responsibility. Rather than blaming ourselves for any wrongdoing, we are able to pass on the blame to our unconscious, and then, through psychoanalysis, on to those who have shaped it – our parents, for example.
This is Sartre joining the dots between the gods of the Greeks, the primal Will of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, and the unconscious of Freud – they are all of them, in his belief, mythical beasts which allow us to evade culpability. As the first humans invented gods to hold responsible for the great mysteries, so have we, but placed them inside us.
This is not to say that Sartre dismissed Freud’s work entirely. In fact he attempted to create a psychoanalysis aligned to Freud’s – just without the unconscious. This he termed existentialist psychoanalysis. He too believed we were shaped by external forces, but there was no extra layer of repression and censoring which needed to be accounted for.
While he admitted, with Nietzsche, that our motivations and indeed our consciousness might be opaque, opacity does not mean something inside us is performing an act of mysticism. Chinese mathematics is opaque, but it can be learnt. As a contemporary of Sartre’s, Eric Fromm, put it:
“The term ‘the unconscious’ is actually a mystification … There is no such thing as the unconscious; there are only experiences of which we are aware, and others of which we are not aware, that is, of which we are unconscious. If I hate a man because I am afraid of him, and if I am aware of my hate but not of my fear, we may say that my hate is conscious and that my fear is unconscious; still my fear does not lie in that mysterious place: ‘the’ unconscious.”
Sartre’s argument is also one against determinism. Given facts A, B and C, Freud seems to suggest in this account, we will have outcome D. Freud believes he can argue, for instance, that a person behaves in a certain way because of this or that childhood trauma. Determinism was anathema to Sartre – we must, in his philosophy, have the ability to shape our own ends.
So, where does this lead us, when we reflect on the workings of our own minds, and the minds of others? We might like to think, as Kant did, that we are entirely rationalist thinkers, or as Sartre did, that we have absolute responsibility. But many of us still speak of, and believe in, the existence of the unconscious. It’s a belief that predates Freud and will undoubtedly continue in different forms for as long as humans try to pin down the self. Much of our burgeoning therapeutic industry relies on the idea, so it’s easy to forget that it is contested.
As Shakespeare has Hamlet say, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” The sheer amount of “life” to which we are all exposed makes consciousness seem a thin tool for apprehending it. Perhaps science is not the place to seek the unconscious. Perhaps, like god, the unconscious may simply be a powerful metaphor – one that helps us understand and deal with our experience – rather than a thing?
This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.
