ABSTRACT
Soon after the discovery of consciousness, a dark reservoir beyond awareness emerged: the inner transcendence of the unconscious. The Enlightenment considered the mind as a transparent terrain. Leibniz, however, doubted that all perceptions were permanently conscious to us. Ever more philosophers such as Hume, Wolff, and Platner shared his reservations. Baumgarten was the first to assign the unconscious a specific place in the psyche. He called it the “bottom of the soul.” His idea quickly caught on. At first, leading theorists such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel considered the unconscious to be only an intermediate stage on the way to conscious reflection. Finally, Schopenhauer realized that it was a genuine dimension. Thus he created the first theory of the unconscious. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the unconscious was a popular idea, disseminated by Maine de Biran, Eduard von Hartmann, and Nietzsche in particular. Sigmund Freud, however, was the first to go from theory to method. His method is well known as psychoanalysis. Carl Gustav Jung expanded the field by adding the archetypes and the collective unconscious. Political implementations emerged as mass psychology, advertising, propaganda, and public relations. These, in turn, have stimulated new theoretical approaches developed in particular by Pareto, Lasswell, Schumpeter, and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School.
