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Everything seemed to fall into place, the cogs meshed, I had the impression that the thing now really was a machine that shortly would function on its own. (Freud 1895, p. 146)
In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most of the time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine. (Winnicott 1971, p. 65)
The early nineteenth-century history of the unconscious is thoroughly interwoven with attempts to construct theories of personal autonomy, radical individuality, or creative freedom. In German Romanticism it was characteristically used to rework accounts of individuality that were formulated too stringently in terms of rationally determined systems, mechanistic structures of connection, or logical concepts. The unconscious, in effect, becomes implicated in the representation of the autonomous self by thinking outside the discursive codes of rationalism. It was invoked by F.W.J. Schelling, for instance, as a way of defending the ‘reality’ of the individual against its dissolution into more generalized concepts of subjectivity. It was used to counter reductive models of determinism in mental life that were felt to extinguish the representation of personal freedom—the philosopher J.G. Fichte, contemplating his implication in a chain of strict necessity, was repelled by an explanation that conflicted ‘so decisively with the innermost root of my existence’ (Fichte 1800, p. 20). Most radically of all, the unconscious provided grounds for quasi-spiritual evocations of other more inscrutable laws operating in the depths of inner life, connecting the psyche to the creative ‘soul’ of nature. Versions of all of these kinds of associations