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The aim of the author (identified as a psychoanalyst of twenty-five years' standing) of this well-written, if somewhat contentious, book is to reveal to the reader a “venerable” theory of the “unconscious” that preceded Freud, and that was “better than the one [with which he] replaced it” (p. xi). In pursuit of that objective, Sand has surveyed in considerable detail the work of those philosophers, beginning with Plato, who have concerned themselves with the nature of the mind (or the “soul”) and addressed themselves to the question of thought and impulse arising and operating outside the realm of consciousness.
It was the German master Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), the author contends, who first formulated a concept of the unconscious mind and developed a theory of psychodynamics. Unlike Descartes (“I think, therefore I am”) and Locke, who insisted that all mental activity occurred in the realm of consciousness, “Leibniz proposed that not only memories, but mental contents of all kinds—thoughts, emotions, and desires—could continue to exert power outside of consciousness” (p. 4). He and his followers conceived of levels of “insensible perception” and “apperception,” as well as a distinction between “light” and “dark” ideas.
Later on, Kant, the Romantic philosophers, and especially Schopenhauer offered reflections on the unconscious, often from a metaphysical point of view; it was Schopenhauer whose conception of the unconscious will came closest to Freud's theory of drives and later the id. Following him, Eduard von Hartmann published a Philosophy of the Unconscious that assigned to it extensive powers and that became a bestseller in multiple editions.1 “One cannot know,” Sand writes, “whether Freud actually quarried Hartmann or whether he and Hartmann simply drew from the same sources” (p. 128).
The author devotes three idealizing chapters to the contributions of Johann Friedrich Herbart, the first of which is entitled “The Ghost in the