The Unconscious was Already Discovered and Already Well-Known by the time Freud and Psychoanalysis Came Along

The following is from pages 311-318 in Henri F. Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York, Basic Books, 1970).

“In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the philosophical concept of the unconscious, as taught by Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, was extremely popular, and most contemporary philosophers admitted the existence of an unconscious mental life…

“The assumption that a part of psychic life escapes man’s conscious knowledge had been held for centuries. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it attracted more attention; in the nineteenth [it was] one of the most highly debated problems…

“It was Leibniz [1704] who proposed the first theory of the unconscious mind supported by purely psychological arguments…

“A new experimental approach was devised by Chevreul [1833] who was able to show that the movements of the divining rod and the pendulum resulted from unconscious muscular movements of the subject caused by unconscious thoughts. Chevreul extended his research to the movements of the ‘turning tables’: it is not the ‘spirits,’ he said, who are moving the tables, but the unconscious muscular movements of the participants; the alleged messages of the ‘spirits’ are the expression of unconscious thoughts of the medium…

“The clinical approach to the exploration of the unconscious had largely been utilized during the entire nineteenth century, since a great part of the work of magnetizers and hypnotists was basically a clinical investigation of the unconscious…

“In France the interest in such research was renewed after Charles Richet’s publication of 1875. In the early 1880’s, when Charcot and Bernheim initiated the clinical study of hypnosis a continuous flow of research and publications began to emerge. The state of the problem of the unconscious…was sketched by Hericourt in a survey published in 1889, stating that the unconscious activity of the mind is a scientific truth established beyond any doubt…As everyday manifestations of the unconscious life, Hericourt mentions habits and instinct, forgotten memories, occurring spontaneously in the mind, problems being solved during sleep, unconscious movements that have psychological content and meaning, and unaccountable feelings of sympathy and antipathy…Other proofs of the activity of the unconscious are found in hysteria, mediumism, and automatic writing…a kind of estrangement may occur and the unconscious then organizes itself in the form of a ‘second personality’…

“…by the year 1900 four different aspects of the activity of the unconscious had been demonstrated: the conservative, dissolutive, creative, and mythopoetic.The conservative functions were recognized as being the recording of a great number of memories, even of unconscious perceptions, that have been stored away and of which the conscious individual knows nothing at all. There were case histories of patients who during a fever spoke a language that they had learned as young children and completely forgotten…The dissolutive functions of the unconscious [included] posthypnotic suggestion. There were also the facts investigated by Charcot, Binet, Janet, Delboeuf, and Myers. Around 1895, the assumption that disturbing tendencies were forced into the unconscious was a matter of course…The creative function of the unconscious had been emphasized by the Romantics…The mythopoetic function…In this conception the unconscious seems to be continually concerned with creating fictions and myths…”

In short, the unconscious was an old and well-known idea before psychoanalysis existed.