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This book consists of three themes, the unconscious, identity and femininity. Each subject is considered by two different authors.
Esa Roos questions whether the duality between the conscious and the unconscious has been formulated correctly. The idea of consciousness expressed by Descartes in the sixteenth century facilitated the conception of the unconscious. Spinoza formulated the theory of unconscious memories, desires and feelings. According to Leibniz a conscious structure differs from an unconscious one. He differentiated between a phenomenon and a representation, just as the philosophers of the romantic era had done. German Herbart in the eighteenth century had a theory of the unconscious that included dynamic dependencies, repression, censorship and dreams. One of the progenitors of psychoanalysis is Schopenhauer. His point of view is close to Freud's ideas on the power of sexuality, repression, free association and primary process. Roos moves on to Matte-Blanco, pointing out that our unconscious includes more dimensions than our conscious does.
Mikael Enckell considers the topic of mysticism in psychoanalysis. The object of our interest in psychoanalysis is the invisible unconscious. We only have representations of the unconscious. So the unconscious has analogies with the Jewish conception of God. Man interprets God's message as he inteprets the unconscious messages. Man has many interpretations and idioms, as in the disorder of languages in Babel. Judaism is a religion centred on memory and the Jewish tradition of interpretation is analogical with the method of interpretation developed by Freud. Enckell has studied Proust, Kafka and Freud and he has found many parallels between Judaism and psychoanalysis.
Turo Reenkola demonstrates clearly that Freud's theories were neither mechanistic nor reductionistic. In metapsychology the ego is conceived as a striving towards identity. Consciousness emerges when identity has not been reached. The eg