Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought, edited by Angus Nicholls and Martin Liebscher,  Cambridge University Press, New York, 2010,  329 pp.

This is a significant book on a subject of major importance. At least since publication of Lancelot Law Whyte's The Unconscious Before Freud (, 2d ed., ), most students of psychoanalysis have been aware that the concept of the unconscious had been a major topic in European intellectual history long before publication of The Interpretation of Dreams. The subsequent work of Henri Ellenberger , David Edwards and Michael Jacobs , and in German of Elke Völmicke further demonstrated not only the concept's long pre-psychoanalytic history, but also the particularly important role it has played in German literature, science, and philosophy. The three-volume history published in German by Günter Gödde and Michael Buchholz persuaded anyone left who still doubted the concept's longevity or ubiquity. So the question this book raises immediately is its own right to life—do we need yet another book on the history of pre-Freudian conceptions of the unconscious?

The answer, in this case, is a resounding yes. Angus Nicholls (Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature in Queen Mary College, University of London) and his co-editor, Martin Liebscher (Lecturer in Germanic