ABSTRACT
Fascination with the ‘obscure recesses of the mind’ did not begin in 1800. It was central to eighteenth-century associationist philosophy and played a crucial part in the development of Romantic thought in Britain and in nineteenth-century Germany, where, in Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious, it became the ultimate representative of the transcendent historical will. Debates around mesmerism thus encapsulated, in a particularly intense form, a range of issues about what constituted the unconscious in the mid-nineteenth century, and a similar set of arguments could be used both to promote and to refute its use. In The Principles of Mental Physiology William Carpenter drew on S. T. Coleridge’s and Hamilton’s cases of unconscious memory, modifying them to argue that latent traces are inscribed within the structures of the brain. Throughout the nineteenth century writers dramatized the ‘Victorian’ unconscious, adapting and transforming theories as ways of telling stories, just as psychologists often used stories as ways of elaborating their theories.
