Hidden Minds: A History of the Unconscious

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The concept of the unconscious has staged a comeback. New research, employing brain scans and other techniques, has shown that the unconscious is not only real but indispensable. Hidden Minds traces our enduring fascination with the unconscious and our attempts to tame it through hypnosis, psychoanalysis, subliminal manipulation, lucid dreams, and even the principles of the "quantum mind." Drawing widely on scientific research, art, literature, and philosophy, Frank Tallis shows that an understanding of this ...
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Overview

The concept of the unconscious has staged a comeback. New research, employing brain scans and other techniques, has shown that the unconscious is not only real but indispensable. Hidden Minds traces our enduring fascination with the unconscious and our attempts to tame it through hypnosis, psychoanalysis, subliminal manipulation, lucid dreams, and even the principles of the "quantum mind." Drawing widely on scientific research, art, literature, and philosophy, Frank Tallis shows that an understanding of this "hidden mind" is essential to understanding our true selves.

About the Author:

Frank Tallis, a clinical psychologist and the author of six books on psychology, obsession, and the mind, as well as two novels, has worked at the Institute of Psychiatry and King's College, London. He won the New London Writers' Award in 2000.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
As British clinical psychiatrist and novelist Tallis (How to Stop Worrying) notes, Freud famously claimed to have delivered the "third and most wounding blow" to humanity's "naive self-love" by exposing the power of unconscious processes-the first two blows having been dealt by Copernicus and Darwin. Though Freud's reputation has been waning for the last 30 years, Tallis sifts current reports and argues that science has vindicated Freud's sweeping claim. Most of the history here, however, is of the idea of the unconscious, from Augustine and Leibniz through 19th-century opium dreams and hypnotic therapies to Freud's psychoanalytic theory and its aftermath. The book is strongest when reporting the post-Freudian research that has built a new understanding of unconscious processes, including ingeniously designed empirical studies of self-deception, first impressions, preconscious volition and subliminal influence. But Tallis's argument weakens when it tries to tie all the pieces together in explicit support of Freud. Tallis has to work hard rhetorically to relate the unconscious mapped by contemporary scientists to the Freudian version. He tries to strengthen Freud's blow by attempting to demonstrate that our conscious self and free will are illusions, and maybe even that Buddhism is right-that the world is, too. But these claims go far beyond his well-presented empirical evidence, extending into philosophy without the necessary nuance and rigor. At best, the literature review here provides a unique narrative of a key modern construct's development. (Sept.)
Library Journal
A renewed interest in the nature of the unconscious is evident in the publication of several books on the subject this fall: Timothy Wilson's Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive, Barry Opatow's Psychoanalysis as a Theory of Consciousness and Willy Apollon's After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious. This work, a brief but thorough overview of the unconscious as a concept from the Enlightenment to modern times, is perhaps the most accessible. A clinical psychiatrist and award-winning fiction writer, Tallis offers a roughly chronological approach that begins with Wilhelm Liebnez's groundbreaking rebuttal to John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and then goes on to describe how conceptions have changed with the emergence of new ideas, such as Romanticism, Darwinism, and computer technology. Not surprisingly, considerable space is given to the dominant influence of Freud and his early adherents, such as Carl Jung. Tallis also includes accounts of early experimenters with the unconscious mind, such as Franz Mesmer (an early hypnotist and the source of the term mesmerized), the manipulation of the unconscious in subliminal advertising, and its appearance in art and literature. Highly readable and possessing a surprising degree of depth, this book manages to be both entertaining and informative. Recommended for all public libraries.-David Valencia, King Cty. Lib. Syst., Washington
Kirkus Reviews
Of Sigmund Freud, ghosts in the machine, and voices in the head: a capable overview of the hidden landscapes of the mind and how they came to be known. Freud, writes English psychiatrist Tallis, believed that his "discovery" of the unconscious was as significant as Copernicus's discovery of the heliocentric universe and Darwin's formulation of the laws of evolution. He believed, too, that the characteristics that supposedly distinguish humans from lower animals, such as the possession of rationality and free will, were mere illusions-a view that drew considerable fire from the religiously inclined. Freud's ideas are commonplace today, Tallis notes, but for much of the 20th century, scientists were not especially interested in the unconscious, having found, among other things, that "advances in drug treatments threatened to make psychoanalysis redundant" and that behavioristic theories of what makes humans tick were more satisfactory than such Viennese notions as transference and cathexis. In any event, Tallis adds, Freud did not discover the unconscious, whose existence the ancient Greek philosophers suspected and the mighty Leibniz took time out from inventing the calculus to ponder. Recent developments in the cognitive sciences, however, have restored the unconscious to an important place in theories of the mind. Now, Tallis observes, the dominant metaphor for the "automatic, unconscious processes operating in the brain" is borrowed from the world of computer processing, with the workings of the brain likened to the functioning of complex software. Today, he adds, the argument is not so much whether the unconscious exists as how it came to be and exactly how it works, with contendingschools providing theories on such matters as the adaptive role of daydreams or the efficacy of hypnopedia, questions better suited to the lab than the couch. Tallis is reasonably current with the exploding body of literature on the matter of the unconscious, and though his narrative is dry as a bone, he offers a competent survey that will be of interest to analysts and analysands alike.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781559706438
  • Publisher: Arcade Publishing
  • Publication date: 9/20/2002
  • Edition description: REV
  • Pages: 208
  • Product dimensions: 6.50 (w) x 9.50 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

F. R. Tallis is a writer and clinical psychologist. Between 1999 and 2012, he has received or been nominated for numerous awards, including the New London Writers’ Award, the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, the Elle Prix de Letrice, the Crime Writers’ Association Historical Dagger Award, and two Edgar Allen Poe Awards. His critically acclaimed Liebermann series
(written as Frank Tallis) has been translated into fourteen languages and optioned for TV adaptation.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Depths below depths 1
2 Mystery and imagination 16
3 The philosophy teacher 35
4 The icon 53
5 Darkness rising 72
6 A new vocabulary 91
7 The unconscious brain 110
8 Darwin in the dark 130
9 The uses of darkness 148
10 The third blow 171
Bibliography 183
Index 191
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Sort by: Showing 1 Customer Review

  • Anonymous

    Posted July 23, 2002

    Really wonderful reading, revealing & helpful.

    I have read 80 pages so far and it is hard to put it down. It starts with the Introduction where Dr. Tallis quotes St. Augustine, 'I cannot grasp all that I am'. Then Dr. Tallis says, 'Schiller, Goethe, Mozart, Coleridge and Blake all produced masterpieces which seemed to enter awareness whole-completed and ready for transcription...' I sort of knew that but it was just a superficial fact. Narcissistic humanity has suffered three blows. The first was Copernicus, then Darwin, and finally Freud. The First chapter entitled 'Depths below depths' talks about Leibniz reading Locke's, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and himself writing, New Essays...This was 'the first significant entry into philosophical discussion of unconscious mental operations.' The Enlightenment saw the mind in one harmonious way and Romanticism emphasized the hidden, dark, powerful, etc. aspects of the mind. There are so many interesting points to this book that it is a pleasure to read.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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