Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

We can understand the concept of the unconscious as a representation of all that is unknown in human beings, and of what is valuable about us: our eternal soul. For most of Western history, traditional religion was the guardian of the soul. After the rupture of science in the Enlightenment, the soul was housed, incognito, and transformed through philosophy into the unconscious: the element of the unknown in consciousness. In particular, German Idealism protected the concept of the unconscious from radical empiricists. At the turn of the twentieth century, as psychological science emerged, so, too, did psychoanalysis as the new repository of the unconscious in psychology. This paper traces and contrasts the concept and images of the unconscious from the religious soul, to the philosophical mystery of human consciousness, to depth psychology’s unconscious as the place of the repressed, shadow, and numinous. A discussion of why the concept of the unconscious is important in a modern context, and thoughts about its current transformations will be offered.