Americans and the Unconscious

Abstract

Beginning with Emerson and the Transcendentalists, Americans have tended to view the as the psychological faculty through which individuals might come to experience a higher spiritual realm. On the whole, psychologists see the as a symbol of harmony, restoration and revitalization, imbuing it with the capacity to restore peace between the individual and an immanent spiritual power. Americans and the Unconscious studies the symbolic dimensions of psychology, tracing the historical development of the concept of the from its early formulations in nineteenth-century theology through its elaboration by the major schools of contemporary academic psychology. In the process, it provides portraits of William James, early Freudians and the Neo-Freudians, New Psychology, and humanistic psychologies. Fuller draws attention to the ways in which the concept of the unconscious--while originating in the world of scientific discourse--symbolizes philosophical and religious interpretations of human nature, and shows how the American unconscious helps locate the development of psychological ideas within the broader contexts of religious and intellectual history.

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