ABSTRACT
Of the concepts fashioned by recent and contemporary psychology none has so impressed itself upon the public mind as the concept of the unconscious. No doubt there are a variety of reasons for this, but one stands out. It is that this essentially simple notion seems able to relate a far wider range of disparate human phenomena and to subsume the wildly abnormal and the tediously normal activities of human beings under the same headings far more easily than any other explanatory concept advanced so far. Seems able, rather than is able, for here I am speaking of claims made and impressions received rather than of facts established. The importance of this can only be brought out by putting these claims in the context of the aspirations of psychologists. Psychology is today a field that presents a striking contrast. On the one hand there is an enormous quantity of solid experimental and clinical investigation going on in a piece-meal way. A tremendous variety of correlations between different aspects of human action and passion are being established. But most of this work goes on with only the sketchiest theoretical background to it. At the same time psychologists are extremely selfconscious about the need for developing comprehensive theories. They are apt to compare the present state of their science with that of physics immediately before Newton. The physicists had then established a great many low-level correlations between different physical phenomena, had observed an immense number of different regular sequences such as those incorporated in Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. But it needed the theoretical genius of a Newton to explain the whole range of phenomena
by means of a few simple concepts which could be given mathematical expression, such as the concept of gravitational attraction. Pre-Newtonian physicists had however the advantage over contemporary experimental psychologists that they did not know they were waiting for Newton. By contrast the hankering of psychologists after a comprehensive theory leads to their surrounding what is in fact a spectacle of industry and achievement that merits nothing but intellectual respect by a haze of aspiration which resembles nothing so much as waiting for a theoretical Godot.
