The Unconscious without Freud

By (author) Rosemarie Sponner Sand

Not available to order

Publication date:

18 December 2013

Length of book:

184 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442231740

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.
This is a brilliant book. Sigmund Freud’s seminal discussions of the unconscious mind are well known to the general educated public. Less well known are the contributions to the subject made by Freud’s predecessors. What Rosemarie Sand has done is to show in detail using previously untranslated German sources that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were far more than hints, brief comments, and allusions to unconscious mentality. Beginning with Leibniz’s impressive contributions to psychology, there were well worked out theories and entire schools of thought devoted to the study of the unconscious culminating in the major works of the nineteenth century scholars Heinz Hartmann and Jonathan Herbart. In present day discussions of consciousness, most of the contributions of these pre-Freudian theorists of the unconscious tend to be ignored except by a few specialists. Psychologists, philosophers, and indeed anyone interested in the human mind can profit greatly from reading Sand’s The Unconscious without Freud.