The Unconcious in medicine and psychology: Is it new, Enlightenment discovery or the struggle of modern man to come to terms with his life as an autonomous mind without a spirit?

I. Our Post-Enlightenment Landscape

Innumerable volumes have already been and yet still could be written on the impact of the Enlightenment on reframing the cultural, philosophical and religious history of the West. Rather than attempting an amateur synthesis of these multi-century movements, we will point you to physical chemist-turned philosopher of science, Michael Polanyi’s, McEnerney Lectures in 1962 at U.C. Berkley, in which he divides the “history of mankind” into “two sharply divided periods”: The first extends “from the beginnings of human society all through recorded history up to the French Revolution”; and the second, from the French Revolution to our current era.

Why this simplistic division?

Did the transformative forces that manifest themselves in France at the close of the 18th century really usher in a new era not only for the French elite but also for the entirety of the West?

Was “liberté, égalité, fraternité” more than just a platitudinous, political motto of the time? (We could probably answer “yes”, given the fact that it was none other than Robespierre who actually coined the phrase in a 1790 speech “"On the organization of the National Guard” as a means of radicalizing the masses [the “sans-culottes”] to overthrown the monarchial order…)

Is Polanyi’s analysis correct that the pre-revolutionary era “had accepted existing customs and law as the foundation of society”, whereas in the latter man began “deliberately contriving unlimited social improvement” as a “dominant principle”?

Further, did this “dominant principle” of unlimited personal and social improvement come to define the expectations of modern man in the West? Was this the “point at which modern culture emerged into full consciousness of itself”?

And did such a new “consciousness” begin the process of a radical redefinition of the human person from former eras?

Was modern man becoming a New Man?

One route to take in responding to these questions is to look at the development of the “unconscious” in the eras following the Revolution. As we trace it out from 18th onwards, we will see that the New Man, far from rising to new levels of triumphant self-understanding, became progressively aware that there was something fundamentally missing in the new construction of personhood.

II. The Unconscious Realm

Call it what you like—the unconscious, subconscious, preconscious, precognitive or even noncoconscious—there exists in the human person deep caverns that remain inaccessible, or at the best only partially accessible, to the conscious-level mind. Termed the “vast dark universe of the unconscious”, it contains not only the array of our own day-to-day, moment-to-moment experiences, but those of our parents and our ancestors who came before us.

And what is more, these personal and collective experiences, embedded in the caverns of our heart and sown into the DNA of our psyche, exert deep influences on us, shaping the way we think, feel and act (φρονέω is a NT term that may encapsulate this). In the Post-Enlightenment Landscape, it is assumed that mere education can reform and reshape these influences. In reality, however, behavioral change—the holy grail of medicine, politics and ministry—requires not merely an intellectual assent but, moreover, complete metanoia (μετάνοια) in the deepest levels of our being.

Far from understanding these realities, but realizing that their dimensions profoundly influence human behavior, we provide lectures and resources to explore these topics further.

One further introductory word, explored in another section of this site is that it may indeed be the case that the conceptual rise of the unconscious within psychology occurred to fill the void left by the evacuation of the spirit within the understanding of the human person. Victor White, a Catholic priest well-versed in these developments, put forward a synthesis in his book, God and the Unconscious, the forward of which was written by Jung himself. He makes clear that the unconscious had its antecedents in 18th-19th c. figures such as Gustav Carus (whom Jung claimed from his “scientific and medical experience…pointed to the unconscious as the essential basis of the psyche”), von Hartmann (who followed him in his 1100 page Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1869) and Herbart, whose writings actually dated back to Aristotle, Tertullian, Augustine and Aquinas. In this way, we might say, the “unconscious” was not an entirely novel discovery. Yet with this background he asserts that there is a difference between the 19th century milieu in which this concept was developing and our current environment that appears further and further adrift from the any religious or cultural moorings such that it comes to settle on the island of the self-life:

“I do not believe that I am going too far when I say that modern man, in contrast to his nineteenth-century brother, turns his attention to the psyche with very great expectations; and that he does so without reference to any traditional creed, but rather in the Gnostic sense of religious experience.

“We should be wrong in seeing mere caricature or masquerade when the movements already mentioned try to give themselves scientific airs; their doing so is rather an indication that they are actually pursuing 'science' or knowledge instead of the faith which is the essence of Western religions. The modern man abhors dogmatic postulates taken on faith and the religions based upon them. He holds them valid only in so far as their knowledge-content seems to accord with his own experience of the deeps of psychic life.

What is fascinating, however, and likely correct is his quite cogent argument that the modern obsession with the near salvific potential of the “psychic life” and the “unconscious” is actually an unconscious passage back to the foundational understandings of the Spirit. (More to come…)

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS WITHIN PSYCHOLOGY:

Below are a selection of lectures through the 20th c. developments within psychology. Absolutely fascinating, especially if you’re training was in biomedicine…alone.… Though we cannot affirm every aspect of these lectures, they are, nonetheless, very well-researched with heavy interaction with the primary sources and figures.

Complete List

Jean Piaget & Constructivism

Piaget, Segueing into Jung

Carl Jung (Part 1)

Depth Psychology: Carl Jung (Part 02)

Carl Jung and the Lion King (Part 1)

Carl Jung and the Lion King (Part 2)

Freud: An Overview

Depth Psychology: Sigmund Freud (Part 1)

Depth Psychology: Sigmund Freud (Part 02)

Humanism: Carl Rogers

Carl Rogers (Phenomenological Humanism)