Ørsted And The Rational Unconscious

Abstract

From his earliest lectures on psychoanalysis in 1915–1917 to his very last works on the subject in 1938, Sigmund Freud remarked upon the vehement opposition provoked by the very idea of the unconscious, especially in scientific circles: “The concept of the unconscious has long been knocking at the gates of psychology and asking to be let in. Philosophy and literature have often toyed with it, but science could find no use for it.” From the outset, he insisted that the existence of the unconscious had been empirically proven, challenging “anyone in the world to give a more correct scientific account of this state of affairs, and if he does we will gladly renounce our hypothesis of unconscious mental processes. Till that happens, however, we will hold fast to the hypothesis; and if someone objects that here the unconscious is nothing real in a scientific sense, is a makeshift, une façon de parler, we can only shrug our shoulders resignedly and dismiss what he says as unintelligible.”