Det ubevidstes mange ansigter - en historisk oversigt

Abstract

This article gives a historical overview over what, according to the authors, are the most important conceptualizations of the unconscious. While the interest in the unconscious during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was at first philosophical and literary and thereafter scientific and psychological, during our own century it has had practical and therapeutic motives, and it has first og foremost shown itself in psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. Freud represents a point of intersection in this development. In the period up to 1915 he worked at purifying and narrowing the concept trying to get rid of its romantic and speculative heritage, but after 1915 he reintroduced many of the elements he had himself removed. Jung differentiated himself from Freud in several ways, but especially he regarded the unconscious as a creative potential in each individual rather than as a source of psychopathological phenomena. Inside both schools today we find a rather broad spectrum of views and at the same time the theoretical confrontations have been less sharp.