The Unconscious before Freud

The Unconscious before Freud: A history of the evolution of human awareness is a 1960 book AbOUT the history of IDeaS about the unconscious mind by Lancelot Law Whyte. The work, which has been compared to Henri Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970), is sometimes considered a classic.

Summary

Whyte describes the thinking about the unconscious that preceded the work of Sigmund Freud, emphasizing that those who discussed the subject before Freud were important thinkers in their own right rather than simply figures who anticipated Freud. According to Whyte, his inspiration for writing The Unconscious before Freud was his excitement as discovering that the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had expressed several of Freud's insights years before Freud, showing that it was not Freud who discovered the unconscious. Whyte's immediate reason for beginning the book was his shock at finding that the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, in the first volume of The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1953), "explained Freud's theory of the mind, not in the context of the development of European thought but in terms of academic and clinical psychology over the preceding fifty years".

Reception

Scientific and academic journals

The Unconscious before Freud received a negative review from Sidney Axelrad in the American Sociological Review, and a positive review from G. Stewart Prince in the Journal of Analytical Psychology.

Axelrad described Whyte's book as "loosely organized" and denied that it constituted "an essay on the history of ideas". He wrote that Whyte did not have a "particularly good grasp of what Freud wrote" and repeated the "vulgar errors" that "Freud attributed neurosis only to some [...] malfunctioning and that Freud thought that if the genesis of the neurosis was explained to the patient this would result in a cure." He criticized Whyte for failing to discuss the influence that earlier thinkers had on Freud, for presenting statements from authors who wrote about the unconscious before Freud out of context, and for failing to relate those statements "to the interior development of the concept of the unconscious" or to "those forces within Western European culture which engendered the idea." He maintained that Whyte concealed or was unaware of the fact that Freud, unlike previous thinkers, tried to create "a general and systematic framework for psychology, based upon a physical model although phrased in psychological language." He also wrote of Whyte's book that "in its insistence upon a monistic view of the mind, it comes close to mysticism." Prince wrote that the material was "well selected and arranged", that Whyte's thesis was "closely argued", and that those interested in the history of ideas would find his work fascinating. However, he expressed the wish that Whyte had devoted more space to Carl Gustav Jung.

Evaluations in books

The psychologist Hans Eysenck, writing in Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (1985), called The Unconscious before Freud a classic, comparing it to Henri Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970). Eysenck credited Whyte with showing in great detail how Freud's predecessors "established the importance of the unconscious and delineated its vagaries." The historian Peter Gay, writing in Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), called Whyte's book helpful, though he noted that it was brief and less comprehensive than Ellenberger's work. The philosopher Adolf Grünbaum, writing in Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis (1993), found Whyte's book useful for documenting the influence of Johann Friedrich Herbart's philosophy of the unconscious on Freud.

Footnotes

Bibliography

Books

Journals