Freud Neither Discovered Nor Understood The Unconscious: The Implications for Our Understanding of People and Literary Theory

The unconscious was discovered—and was a well-known, popular idea—before Freud was born. If you want to know the history, see Henri F. Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York, Basic Books, 1970).

In any case, “the unconscious” is a misnomer. I can explain why with an example from Freud’s book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which he thinks that he is illustrating and proving the existence of the unconscious, but he is not.

Freud describes an incident in his office in which he accidentally knocked over an item on his desk. The remarkable thing, Freud emphasizes, is that he “accidentally” knocked over something of little value, when his desk was crowded with things of much greater value. Thus, it was actually a feat requiring considerable attention and dexterity to have knocked over only that trivial item, proving that it was really no accident, and that his “unconscious” must have guided his hand.

But if his “unconscious” was paying attention and guiding his hand, what sense does it make to call it unconscious? It was only unconscious from the point of view of the part of Freud’s mind that was doing the writing. It was not unconscious. It was dissociated consciousness. That is, it was conscious, but was compartmentalized and split off from Freud’s regular consciousness.

Let’s use common sense. Something is not unconscious just because I’m not conscious of it. I’m not conscious of your thoughts, but that doesn’t make your thoughts unconscious. It’s just that your conscious thoughts are inaccessible to me. Just like the part of Freud’s mind that guided his hand in the "accident" was inaccessible to the part of Freud’s mind doing the writing.

In short, Freud’s example illustrates that he had dual consciousness, and that one of them didn’t know what the other was thinking, but did see what the other had done.

So everyone who thinks and talks about the unconscious should stop doing so, and instead think and talk about dissociated consciousness, which means multiple personality (dissociative identity).