ABSTRACT
Psychology is different from medicine. Such a psychological idea as “the unconscious” is not a timeless anthropological fact, part of the inventory of the personality. People of the Middle Ages or of Antiquity did not have an unconscious. “The unconscious” is an idea and as such a product and expression of the time that developed this idea. “The unconscious” as a concept of depth psychology, however, means something completely different, be it a layer of the psyche, a part of the personality, or a reservoir of images, ideas, instinctual wishes, repressed memories, or an organ, possibly even an agent with a certain subjectivity and intentionality of its own, so that in some quarters one can, e.g., say, “the unconscious has sent me this dream” or ask, “what did the unconscious want to tell me with this dream?” To put it in slightly exaggerated terms, “the unconscious” was not discovered, but invented.
