Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought

by Edited by Angus Nicholls , Martin Liebscher

• ISBN13: 9780521897532
• ISBN10: 052189753X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-16
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Since Freud's earliest psychoanalytic theorization around the beginning of the twentieth century, the concept of the unconscious has exerted an enormous influence upon psychoanalysis and psychology, and literary, critical and social theory. Yet, prior to Freud, the concept of the unconscious already possessed a complex genealogy in nineteenth-century German philosophy and literature, beginning with the aftermath of Kant's critical philosophy and the origins of German idealism, and extending into the discourses of romanticism and beyond. Despite the many key thinkers who contributed to the Germanic discourses on the unconscious, the English-speaking world remains comparatively unaware of this heritage and its influence upon the origins of psychoanalysis. Bringing together a collection of experts in the fields of German Studies, Continental Philosophy, the History and Philosophy of Science, and the History of Psychoanalysis, this volume examines the various theorizations, representations, and transformations undergone by the concept of the unconscious in nineteenth-century German thought.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	p. vii
Introduction: thinking the unconscious	p. 1
The unconscious from the Storm and Stress to Weimar classicism: the dialectic of time and pleasure	p. 26
The philosophical significance of Schelling's conception of the unconscious	p. 57
The scientific unconscious: Goethe's post-Kantian epistemology	p. 87
The hidden agent of the self: towards an aesthetic theory of the non-conscious in German romanticism	p. 121
The real essence of human beings: Schopenhauer and the unconscious will	p. 140
Carl Gustav Carus and the science of the unconscious	p. 156
Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious	p. 173
Gustav Theodor Fechner and the unconscious	p. 200
Friedrich Nietzsche's perspectives on the unconscious	p. 241
Freud and nineteenth-century philosophical sources on the unconscious	p. 261
Epilogue: the "optional" unconscious	p. 287
Works cited	p. 297
Index	p. 324
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