The unconscious from the Storm and Stress to Weimar classicism: the dialectic of time and pleasure

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511712272.002

1 - The unconscious from the Storm and Stress to Weimar classicism: the dialectic of time and pleasure

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010

Paul Bishop

Edited by

Angus Nicholls and

Martin Liebscher

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Angus Nicholls: Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
Martin Liebscher: Affiliation:
University of London

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Summary

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her – powerless to leave her and powerless to enter her more deeply. Unasked and without warning she sweeps us away in the round of her dance and dances on until we fall exhausted from her arms. She brings forth ever new forms: what is there, never was; what was, never will return. All is new, and yet forever old. We live within her, and are strangers to her. She speaks perpetually with us, and does not betray her secret.

Thus begins, in what could be read as a vivid evocation of the intertwining of the twin forces of Eros and Thanatos, the fragmentary text “On Nature,” the text – allegedly written by Goethe – that made Freud, or so he later claimed, decide to study, not law, but medicine, after he had heard it read at a public lecture by Carl Brühl (1820–99).

At the opening of this volume, which takes us on a chronological journey – from Schelling, the late Goethe, and romanticism, via Schopenhauer, Carl Gustav Carus, Eduard von Hartmann, Gustav Theodor Fechner, to Nietzsche and Freud – through the concept of the unconscious in nineteenth-century German thought, where should one begin? The history of the concept of the unconscious reveals itself to be a complex and much-contested one, and the story of that complexity and contestation has been told by a variety of narrators.

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Type: Chapter
Information: Thinking the Unconscious
Nineteenth-Century German Thought
, pp. 26 - 56

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511712272.002 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2010

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