ABSTRACT
To the layman’s ears, the word ‘unconscious’ has an undertone of something metaphysical and rather mysterious. This peculiarity, attaching to the whole concept of the unconscious, is primarily due to the fact that the term found its way into ordinary speech as a designation for a metaphysical entity. Eduard von Hartmann, for instance, called the unconscious the ‘Universal Ground.’ Again, the word was taken up by occultism, because people with these leanings are extremely fond of borrowing scientific terms in order to dress their speculations in a ‘scientific’ guise. In contradiction to this, the experimental psychologists, who for a long time regarded themselves – not unjustly – as the representatives of the only truly scientific psychology, adopted a negative attitude towards the concept of the unconscious, on the ground that everything psychic is conscious and that consciousness alone deserves the name ‘psyche.’ They admitted that conscious psychic contents showed varying degrees of clarity, some being ‘brighter’ or ‘darker’ than others, but the existence of unconscious contents was denied as being a contradiction in terms.
