Review of Markus Iseli's 'Thomas de Quincey’s Subconscious: Nineteenth Century Intimations of the Cognitive Unconscious' for the Journal of Literature and Science

Highlighting a dearth of critical attention to the creation and first appearance in print of the word subconscious, Markus Iseli’s essay sets out to offer a more nuanced understanding of the popular term via an examination of its nineteenth-century usage. The article argues that while Thomas De Quincey’s concept of the word is similar to that of modern cognitive psychologists, all too frequently Freudian psychoanalytic theories have been used to interpret De Quincey’s works and that, in wider terms, the nineteenth-century idea of the subconscious has been “almost completely obliterated by Freud’s psychoanalysis” (294). Rather than the Freudian unconscious, which focuses on “the irrational, the innate sex drives, and the symbolic instantiation of repressed childhood experiences,” Iseli’s article seeks to reorientate present scholarship, foregrounding instead the “cognitive unconscious” – those “complex and rational processes that are not part of conscious reflection” – as a way of understanding De Quincey’s use of the term (295). In short, Iseli’s article “seeks to provide an alternative approach to the unconscious in literary studies, the cognitive unconscious, at the example of De Quincey’s coinage and usage of subconscious” in order to “to sharpen our awareness of the pre-Freudian tradition and determine the frequently implicit meanings of nineteenth-century accounts” (295). The rest of the review is available via the link.