The Unconscious without Freud
By (author) Rosemarie Sponner Sand
Publication date:
18 December 2013Length of book:
188 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersDimensions:
242x159mm6x10"
ISBN-13: 9781442231733
During the first ten years of his career in psychological medicine, Sigmund Freud espoused a theory of unconsciousness which predated his own. As Rosemarie Sand describes in The Unconscious without Freud, he would evolve this theory over the course of his career and eventually apply it to his own psychological practice. Once Freud's hypothesis of unconscious mental functioning was published, the same professionals who had valued the traditional concept turned against what they considered to be a catastrophic, logically indefensible revision. The scientific investigation of unconscious influences was retarded for decades as a war zone opened between implacable opponents and intransigent defenders of the Freudian concept of unconscious mind. In the din of this battle, the traditional theory, free of the features which Freud's foes could not accept, was forgotten. Sand argues that a return to this original theory, which psychotherapists and experimenters might both espouse, could contribute to a cessation of hostilities and lead to the peaceful development of a theory of the unconscious—one that is free from the stigma that is currently attached to Freudian theory.
Rosemarie Sand has resurrected the splendid theory of unconscious mental functioning proposed by G.W. Leibniz at the beginning of the eighteenth century, together with the contributions of Christian Wolff and other disciples during the following decades. The teaching of this Leibniz-Wolffian psychology was highly regarded and widely accepted during the nineteenth century. Freud himself relied on its conceptualization of unconscious mind during the decade before he created his own first theory. Its immediate, potential importance today is attributable to its being unencumbered by the controversial ‘Freudian’ features to which critics have objected, the grounds for the interminable ‘Freud wars.’ Devoid of these obstacles, the Leibnizian vision could easily serve as the common denominator for diverse Freudian schools; it could also render service as a common ground where psychoanalytic theoreticians and the experimenters of cognitive psychology could meet.