ABSTRACT
The resistance of the philosophers, Freud goes on to note in the same paper of 1925, is due to the fact that "the overwhelming majority of them call psychic only what is a phenomenon of consciousness." For them something that is unconscious but psychic is "an un-thing, a contradictio in adjecto." One might also translate Unding as something unthinkable. But the philosopher "does not want to note that this judgment merely repeats his own, perhaps too narrow, definition of what is psychic." I n the 1940s Professor C. I . Lewis at Harvard, one of the most outstanding American philosophers of his t ime, who taught generations of students Kant, epistemology, and ethics, st i l l argued like that, and so d i d Sartre. But as Freud goes on to say,
For the philosopher it is easy to be so certain, for he does not know the material whose study compelled the analyst to believe in unconscious acts of the soul. He has not paid attention to hypnosis nor exerted himself to interpret dreams.
