You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
About Forty Years ago, Lancelot Law Whyte (1960), in his book The Unconscious Before Freud, wrote:
There is no one Zeitgeist, no single state of awareness in any community, even in a small professional group, at any one time. There may be traditional elements in decline, a variety of dominant elements, and new ones emerging…. Moreover, ideas may undergo cycles of influence, and may be temporarily inhibited, and consciously or unconsciously, transformed…. [O]nly the greatest ideas or men can continue to be fertile in the new context which they have themselves helped to create. [p. 12]
Whyte's contention was that the “unconscious mind” is such an idea, and that Sigmund Freud was such a man, but that “the antithesis conscious/unconscious may have exhausted its utility” (p. 174). “The trouble,” he says, “is not that they are ambiguous; that might be overcome by providing better definitions. It is that we do not yet know the right definitions to use, the meanings which would throw most light on the structure of mental processes. What we need is not merely words with definitions using other words, but insight into the changing structure of mental processes” (p. 15).
To underscore his argument about there being no single zeitgeist at any point in intellectual history, Whyte quotes H. A. Taine, a French historian who, as far back as 1871, questioned the idea of separating conscious and unconscious into different realms. In imagery that I find breathtakingly comparable to current thinking about the structure of the