The Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century France

What is it about?

This chapter investigates the introduction of the term ‘unconscious’ into French philosophical debate. It focuses in particular on the theoretical and strategic role with which it was endowed. In the first two sections, alongside presenting a novel hypothesis about the coining of the term inconscient, it will attempt to highlight its provenance. In the third section, the emphasis will be instead on Claude-Joseph Tissot’s idea of the unconscious, conceived as allegedly the first French philosophical theorization of this concept. In the final part of the chapter, it will show how this conception – and its ambivalent status, somewhere between physiology and psychology – penetrated the era’s philosophical debate, in order to shed light on the process that gradually led to later (and more renowned) theories of the unconscious.

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Photo by Donny Jiang on Unsplash

Photo by Donny Jiang on Unsplash

Why is it important?

In an attempt to reconstruct the genesis of the term inconscient within francophone areas, scholars have tended to focus on a specific source and a precise intellectual context. According to some interpreters, the term was coined by the Swiss poet, philosopher, and critic Henri-Frédéric Amiel around the 1860s. This hypothesis, vigorously propounded not long ago by two psychoanalyst-historians, Elisabeth Roudinesco and Michel Plon, has garnered a widespread consensus, so much so that it is not uncommon to find references to the stance in the most recent writings on the history of the French unconscious. Yet, even though Amiel’s journal played a clear role in constituting a French understanding of the unconscious life of the mind, there is room for an alternative theory about the genesis of the French term for the unconscious. This chapters aims to unveil such an alternative history.