Table Of ContentUnconscious Thought in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
Also by John Shannon Hendrix
AESTHETICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT: From Plotinus to Schelling
and Hegel
ARCHITECTURAL FORMS AND PHILOSOPHICAL STRUCTURES
ARCHITECTURE AS COSMOLOGY: Lincoln Cathedral and English Gothic
Architecture
ARCHITECTURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: Peter Eisenman and Jacques Lacan
BISHOP ROBERT GROSSETESTE AND LINCOLN CATHEDRAL: Tracing
Relationships between Medieval Concepts of Order and Built Form (c o-edited
with Christian Frost and Nicholas Temple )
THE CONTRADICTION BETWEEN FORM AND FUNCTION IN ARCHITECTURE
THE CULTURAL ROLE OF ARCHITECTURE: Contemporary and Historical
Perspectives (c o-edited with Paul Emmons and Jane Lomholt )
HISTORY AND CULTURE IN ITALY
NEOPLATONIC AESTHETICS: Music, Literature, and the Visual Arts (c o-edited
with Liana Cheney )
NEOPLATONISM AND THE ARTS (c o-edited with Liana Cheney )
PLATONIC ARCHITECTONICS: Platonic Philosophies and the Visual Arts
THE RELATION BETWEEN ARCHITECTURAL FORMS AND PHILOSOPHICAL
STRUCTURES IN THE WORK OF FRANCESCO BORROMINI IN SEVENTEENTH-
CENTURY ROME
RENAISSANCE THEORIES OF VISION ( co-edited with Charles H. Carman )
ROBERT GROSSETESTE: Philosophy of Intellect and Vision
Unconscious Thought
in Philosophy and
Psychoanalysis
John Shannon Hendrix
University of Lincoln, UK and Roger Williams University, US
© John Shannon Hendrix 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-53812-3
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First published 2015 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-57968-6 ISBN 978-1-137-53813-0 (eBook)
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hendrix, John Shannon.
Unconscious thought in philosophy and psychoanalysis / John Shannon
Hendrix, University of Lincoln, UK and Roger Williams University, US.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Consciousness – Philosophy. 2. Subconsciousness – Philosophy.
3. Psychoanalysis – Philosophy. I. Title.
B105.C477.H46 2015
127—dc23 2015012998
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Plotinus: The First Philosopher of the Unconscious 29
Imagination and unconscious thought 4 4
Art and unconscious thought 58
2 The Peripatetics and Unconscious Thought 6 3
Alexander of Aphrodisias 63
Themistius 80
Alfarabi 89
Avicenna 94
3 The Active Intellect of Averroes 105
Averroes and Plotinus 117
Averroes and Grosseteste 121
4 Robert Grosseteste: Imagination and
Unconscious Thought 126
5 Unconscious Thought in the Philosophy of
Immanuel Kant 148
The Kantian imagination 157
Critique of Pure Reason 160
Critique of Judgment 173
6 Unconscious Thought in Eighteenth- and
Nineteenth-Century Philosophies 1 79
Wolff, Baumgarten, Sulzer, Platner 1 79
Schelling 182
H egel 195
Herbart 206
Carus and Fechner 208
Hartmann and Lipps 214
v
vi Contents
7 Unconscious Thought in Freud 230
8 Unconscious Thought in Lacan 261
Lacan and Plotinus 289
Bibliography 2 97
Index 3 05
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy
and the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies for providing
forums and discussions over many years. Many individuals provided
inspiration and contributed to the development of ideas, especially
Liana Cheney, Aphrodite Alexandrakis, Panayiota Vassilopoulou, Jean-
Marc Narbonne, Michael Wagner, Stephen Gersh, Jay Bregman, Bruce
MacLennan, Marilynn Lawrence, Emilie Kutash, Robert Wallace, and
Eric Perl. Current collaborators on the subject of unconscious thought
include Lorens Holm, Thomas Mical, Gordana Korolija Fontana-
Giusti, Christina Malathouni, Alla Vronskaya, Francesco Proto, Hugh
Campbell, Jane Rendell, Spyros Papapetros, Nikos Sideris, Stephen Kite,
Andrew Ballantyne, Kati Blom, Emma Cheatle, and Tim Martin. The
research and writing have been possible with the support of Lincoln
University, UK, and Roger Williams University, US. Valuable colleagues
at Lincoln have included Nicholas Temple, Nader El-Bizri, Renée Tobe,
Jane Lomholt, Francesco Proto, Kathleen Watt, Behzad Sodagar, and
Amira Elnokaly. Valuable colleagues at Roger Williams have included
Dean Stephen White, Andrew Thurlow, Edgar Adams, Andrea Adams,
Hasan-Uddin Khan, Mete Turan, Sara Butler, Nermin Kura, and Philip
Marshall. I would like to express my gratitude and admiration for my
editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Brendan George and Esme Chapman.
I had the opportunity to meet with them in London, which made an
otherwise anonymous process much more enjoyable.
vii
Introduction
What is unconscious thought? Does it exist? How does it work? What is
its relation to conscious thought? How does it contribute to human iden-
tity? This book attempts to answer these questions, in philosophical and
psychoanalytic terms. There are many books with “the unconscious” in
the title, but no other book attempts to answer these questions, focusing
on the mechanisms of unconscious thought, or thought of which we
are not aware. In order to answer these questions, this book undertakes
a thorough analysis of works throughout the history of philosophy and
psychoanalysis that lay a groundwork for understanding the concept,
organization, structure, mechanisms, contradictions, effects and conse-
quences of unconscious thought. The analysis is undertaken in chrono-
logical order from the classical to the present in order to understand
how the concept of unconscious thought has evolved and developed
in relation to changing philosophical and epistemological frameworks.
Classical, medieval, and modern conceptions of unconscious thought
laid the groundwork for concepts of unconscious thought in psychoana-
lytic theory. It is necessary to explore and understand the philosophical
concepts in order to understand modern concepts of the unconscious.
How is conscious thought influenced by unconscious thought? What
role does unconscious thought play in sense experience, perception,
vision, intellection, the formation of ideas, abstract thought, language,
creativity, judgment, imagination, dreams, artistic production, and rela-
tionships with other people? It becomes clear that unconscious thought
plays an important role in all of these intellective activities; it is there-
fore important to understand how unconscious thought works. There
is currently much interest in unconscious thought in cognitive science.
For example, Unconscious Thought Theory examines the role that
unconscious thought plays in everyday thought activities and events.
1
2 Unconscious Thought in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
It is necessary to look to philosophy and psychoanalysis to understand
the possible roles that unconscious thought plays in more advanced
intellective activities. How is unconscious thought known, conceived,
and apprehended by conscious thought? Is conscious thought possible
without unconscious thought? In order to answer these questions, it
is necessary to consider, not just pathologies, as introduced by Freud,
but the history of philosophy, and the ways in which an unconscious
element of thought has been conceived, prior to the coining of the term
“unconscious,” and after.
In relation to books that might be seen as complementary works, the
goal of this book is to explore concepts throughout the history of philos-
ophy, in the Classical, Scholastic, Idealist and Romantic traditions, and
to illustrate the extent to which philosophical concepts of unconscious
thought, as part of the workings of conscious thought in philosophy of
intellect, which plays a role in psychoanalytic theory, are rooted in the
philosophical tradition. This book focuses on a unique philosophical
tradition: the classical tradition, from Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus, the
Peripatetics, and Robert Grosseteste, and the modern tradition from
Leibniz and Kant to Schelling, and Hegel, as philosophical forerun-
ners to the understanding of the workings of unconscious thought in
psychoanalytic theory. Rather than focus on the empirical phenomenon
of the unconscious as established by Freud, this book focuses specifi-
cally on the functions of unconscious thought in relation to conscious
thought in philosophical and metaphysical terms. This is the reason
for the focus on these particular philosophers. There is no book that
investigates the development of theories of unconscious thought from
Plotinus to contemporary psychoanalytic theory. The interest of this
book is in the psychological mechanisms of thought in philosophy and
psychoanalysis, rather than defining the unconscious as an empirical
phenomenon. This is a book about the philosophy of intellect, how
thoughts are formed, the relation between thinking and perceiving,
how self-consciousness and self-identity are manifested.
The book contributes to the project of exploring the roots of contem-
porary theory in the history of philosophy, bridging the gap between
ancient and modern understanding, and establishing a continuity
through the different traditions. The book should be of interest to
academics, and undergraduate and graduate students in philosophy,
intellectual history, history of psychology and psychoanalysis, and the
medical humanities. The subject is of increasing interest in academic
discourses in Western intellectual history, especially in Europe and the
United States. The book should also be of interest to people working
