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In the introduction to his new book, Jon Mills links the ancient quest for the resurrection of the soul with man's earliest known attempt to come to terms with the unconscious. The afterlife was regarded as a “treacherous journey through the underworld” (p. 1) rife with danger and insurmountable challenges. From the Papyrus of Ani and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Mills discerns four remarkably modern correlates of unconscious dynamics: a self or consciousness conditioned by unknown and unformulated processes; suffering and conflict that cannot be subordinated entirely to personal agency; conflicting forces mediated by affect and rationality; and moral self-evaluation. He develops these themes in a scholarly exegesis of six influential systems of modern thought. It is an ambitious project, but one that Mills executes brilliantly. Predictably, one finds treatments of Freud, Jung, and Lacan, whose perspectives continue to enjoy widespread interdisciplinary interest. His inclusion of Heidegger and Sartre invites interest if for no other reason than that these philosophers famously opposed the idea of the unconscious, especially unconscious agency. Sartre explicitly rejected unconscious defense as an instance of bad faith. For those unfamiliar with Mills's writings, one may be surprised to find detailed treatments of Hegel and Whitehead, two towering figures in the history of philosophy whose work too rarely finds expression within psychoanalytic circles or in discussions of the unconscious.
To make sense of Mills's selection of subjects requires one to recognize his central thesis: each system of thought represents a stage in the dialectic of the human spirit. Each offers a provisional formulation of human subjectivity that, viewed at a higher level of abstraction, represents a development and reconfiguration of the self with the larger project of becoming or self-actualization. He defends this bold conclusion by distilling each system's foundational claims, weaving the