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“Feelings can be present without awareness of them” … “The absence of a conscious perception is no proof of the absence of mental activity.” These statements are attributed by the author, not to a present-day psychologist but to the third century philosopher, Plotinus. This essentially is the theme of The Unconscious Before Freud, namely, that the concept of the unconscious occupied the minds of philosophers, poets and scientists many centuries before the advent of Freud's theories. With clarity, insight, scholarship and purpose the author has presented an historical analysis dealing mainly with the discovery of the unconscious in post-Cartesian Europe. The author presents not only a survey of pre-Freudian thinkers (which in itself represents an important contribution) but also his own ideas on mental activity, the conscious-unconscious dualism, order and disorder in mental functioning and principles of mental organization, to name but a few. His intended audience is a varied one; it includes historian, philosopher and psychologist.
Mr. Whyte considers the idea of the unconscious as “the supreme revolutionary conception of the modern age.” He labels the Western ideal of self-aware man dealing with destiny through the utilization of his own will as a “moral mistake and an intellectual error, for it exaggerated the ethical, philosophical, and scientific importance of the awareness of the individual.” In one form or another this theme is repeated throughout the book and in so doing parallels the author's survey. It is as if he feels the need to stress the concept of the unconscious which, discovered centuries past, remains primarily obscure and unaccepted by many. It is a common observation that many psychotherapists discover in their personal psychoanalysis that the “unconscious”