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The essay on The Unconscious, written by Freud in 1915, has continued to exert a vital influence upon psychological thinking. The apparent reason for the impact of this material was not that Freud discovered the unconscious, but rather that he strongly advocated a different view of psychological phenomena than that which had been traditional since the time of Descartes. Despite some mention of behavior that could be construed as involving an unconscious, the traditionally-held image equated psychic life with consciousness. The emphasis of psychoanalysis on unconscious activity forced a modification of the traditional approach.
The catholicity of the psychoanalytic view is now apparent as it frequently appears in the ideas of people who have only a superficial familiarity with the blue-prints for the unconscious. The use of the unconscious is equally widespread in psychological literature and has stimulated a continuing controversy both as to the existence and the nature of the unconscious. This is precisely illustrated in Miller's86 work on the various senses of the term, “unconscious.”
The attempted demonstration of the existence of an entity known as the unconscious can be found to have preceded psychoanalysis. At first there were merely descriptive references to such a concept, as in Plato's Republic: “a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.”102 Other early philosophers implied the existence of an unconscious. For example, while Aristotle3 basically conceived of memory as a static concept he indicated that the process of recollection postulates laws of association which operate unconsciously to produce a conscious product.
The foundation for the unconscious as a philosophical theory seems to appear with Descartes'20 emphasis on the necessity of thought