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What was so remarkable in Freud's concept of the Unconscious? Freud, after all, was not the first to tell us that our conscious minds were influenced by an unconscious mental structure. Plato may have used a different word for it, but even he thought in terms of unconscious influences (cf. Arvanitakis, 1980). Still, there was something remarkable about Freud's version, something revolutionary. And we might ask: What was it?
From a postmodern point of view, what was remarkable about Freud's concept was that it sometimes escaped the seductive philosophy of Plato, a philosophy that has controlled Western thought for the past twenty-five hundred years (Derrida, 1978; Zuckert, 1985). The idea is that Plato's concept of the mind, or rather some watered-down version of it, has held us captive in a “closure.” A closure can be thought of as a kind of mental prison without visible doors, a space where our thoughts can only echo prior thoughts. In this closure, everyone repeats a version of Platonic ideas. Of course, Plato had his critics, but typically even his critics have had philosophical systems that are similar in critical ways. That is, even Plato's critics have not escaped his closure.
And the fact that we are in a philosophical closure means that the Western world is “logocentric.” Our logocentrism lives not only in philosophical dialogues but in psychoanalysis and psychology generally, in our therapies and even in our everyday dialogues about psychological matters.
And our particular logocentrism is largely Platonic. There is no need for someone to actually read Plato to be influenced by his philosophy. As we will see, the simple figures of speech initiated by Plato's parables have woven themselves into the way we talk and think. They have been echoed in the words of key thinkers through the centuries even when those thinkers have been critical of Plato. The dominance of the Platonic vocabulary simply acts to limit our ability to conceptualize mental matters in