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James P. Keeley 767

JAMES P. KEELEY

Subliminal Promptings: Psychoanalytic Theory

and the Society for Psychical Research

In 1912 Freud published “A Note on the Unconscious in

Psycho-Analysis” in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research. The Society for Psychical Research, or the SPR, was
founded in London in 1882, the result of the efforts of several
prominent British intellectuals, scientists, and professionals
sympathetic to, but by no means unanimously convinced of,
the claims and practices of Spiritualism—the belief that the
human personality survives the death of the body and can be
contacted by the still living. The SPR originally intended to
investigate those claims and practices by subjecting them to
rigorous scientific investigation: this in a (as it turned out)
futile attempt to salvage such religious beliefs as the spiritual,
the miraculous, and the afterlife from the predations of post-
Darwinian science by placing them firmly, if possible, on a
scientific foundation. In response to various early develop-
ments, however, the original purpose of the SPR quickly
evolved to include explorations into such occult phenomena
as trance states, clairvoyance, and telepathy; into such psycho-
logical issues as hypnotism, dreams, and mental pathology;
into such occult movements as Theosophy; and into such
historically spiritual matters as supernatural events recorded in
the Bible and in the lives of the saints and the history of the
Church.
For several reasons, however—the SPR’s original link to
Spiritualism, the persistent subscription to the tenets of Spiri-
tualism on the part of an importunate minority in its member-
ship, its investigations into the possibility of the survival of
bodily death, among them—many critics of the SPR, in Britain’s
American Imago, Vol. 58, No. 4, 767–791. © 2001 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

767
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768 Subliminal Promptings

scientific establishment and in its cultural elite, identified the

Society itself with its professed object of study. Indeed, a
considerable part of the contemporary and current discussion
about the SPR concerns itself with the related questions of the
validity of its claims to scientific standing and the extent of its
participation in the very occult practices it professed to investi-
gate. Nevertheless, as a result of these explorations, by the
1890s the leading thinkers of the Society, chiefly under the
direction of F. W. H. Myers, the Society’s dominant theoreti-
cian, were engaged in elaborating a theory of the human self—
that is, a comprehensive psychology—an explanation of mul-
tiple psychological components of the human individual and
of the complex interaction between the individual and the
outside world. In one of the ironies of cultural history, the
psychology developed by the SPR, based upon the theory of a
“subliminal self,” the workings of which are not immediately
accessible to the conscious self, was to be eclipsed after the
Great War by the psychology developed by the person to whom
in 1912 the Society extended a request for a contribution to a
special medical edition of its Proceedings—Sigmund Freud.1
Given the Society’s problematic relations to occultism,
and given Freud’s well-known protectiveness toward the move-
ment he engendered, that Freud responded to the SPR’s
request with an essay for publication in its Proceedings is
remarkable. Ronald W. Clark (1980) has informed us that
“Freud surmised, no doubt correctly, that the existence of any
link between the founding fathers of psychoanalysis and inves-
tigation of the paranormal would hamper acceptance of psy-
choanalysis” (277). Freud’s anxious care that psychoanalysis
should steer clear of any perceived involvement with the occult
is recorded in detail by Ernest Jones in his biography of Freud
(1957, 386, 389, 393–94).2 Nevertheless, this remarkable event
has gone largely unremarked by Freud scholarship. Jones, for
instance, simply leaves Freud’s publication in the SPR’s Proceed-
ings out of his account of Freud’s relations with psychical
research (397). Elsewhere in his biography of Freud, before
his commentary on “A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-
Analysis,” Jones (1955) informs us matter-of-factly that Freud
wrote the essay in response to a request from the Society for a
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James P. Keeley 769

contribution to a Medical Supplement (315). While Jones

notes in his commentary that Freud in this essay registered a
“cardinal distinction” between the notions of the preconscious
and the unconscious, and made as well a “significant advance”
upon his earlier view of the contents of the unconscious, the
reader cannot help but register a strange incongruity between
Jones’s recounting of these achievements and the nonchalant
tone of the commentary in which he does so (315).
On the other hand, as if to underscore the strangeness of
Jones’s eliding this publication in his account of Freud’s
activities in psychical research, Christian Moreau (1976), in a
monograph exploring Freud’s relations to the occult move-
ments of his time, offers Freud’s publication in the SPR’s
Proceedings as his only engagement in psychical research: “His
activity [in psychical research] seems to have been limited to
writing an article for a special edition of the Proceedings of the
Society for Psychical Research dedicated to medical psychol-
ogy” (89; my translation). Disappointingly, though, Moreau
then describes the essay in understated fashion as Freud’s
applying himself “to the task of defining the word ‘uncon-
scious’ as it is used in psychoanalysis and situating it in its
specificity.” Janet Oppenheim (1985), at least, perceives the
need for an explanation for Freud’s complying with the SPR’s
request for an essay, even if her explanation is unconvincing
given Freud’s aforementioned defensiveness concerning psy-
choanalysis: Freud’s gratitude for F. W. H. Myers’s earlier
publicizing of Freud’s work in England (245). And Richard
Wollheim (1971), in his explanation of his tardy attention to
Freud’s formal theory of the unconscious, repeats Jones’s
pattern of unconcern toward the site of the essay’s publication,
muted acknowledgement of the essay’s achievement, and an
incongruous tone of nonchalance throughout his comments:

If it seems strange that little attention has been paid to

the concept [of the unconscious] so far in this study, this
in part reflects the casual or informal way in which it
makes its appearance in Freud’s writings. It was not until
1912 that Freud, in response to an invitation from the
London Society of [sic] Psychical Research for a contri-
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770 Subliminal Promptings

bution to its Proceedings, presented his first systematic

statement of the hypothesis of unconscious mental pro-
cesses and the grounds upon which it rested. (176)

Like these commentators, James Strachey (1958) also

seems unaware of any noteworthiness in Freud’s publishing “A
Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis” in the SPR’s
Proceedings (257), but he does help us to prepare to recognize
it by establishing quite another perspective on the essay itself:

[T]his is among the most important of Freud’s theoreti-

cal papers. Here for the first time he gave a long and
reasoned account of the grounds for his hypothesis of
unconscious mental processes and set out the various
ways in which he used the term “unconscious.” The
paper is in fact a study for the major work on the same
subject which he was to write some three years later
(1915). Like the earlier paper “On the Two Principles of
Mental Functioning” (1911) and Section 3 of the
Schreber analysis (1911), the present one is evidence of
Freud’s renewed concern with psychological theory.
The discussion of the ambiguities inherent in the
word “unconscious” is of particular interest, with the
distinction between its three uses—the “descriptive,” the
“dynamic” and the “systematic.” The present account is
both more elaborate and clearer than the much shorter
one given in Section 2 of the great paper (1915, 172).
For there only two uses are differentiated, the “descrip-
tive” and the “systematic”; and no plain distinction
appears to be made between the latter and the “dy-
namic”—the term which in the present paper is applied
to the repressed unconscious. In two later discussions of
the same topic, in Chapter 1 of The Ego and the Id (1923)
and in Lecture 31 of the New Introductory Lectures (1933),
Freud returned to the triple distinction made here; and
the third use of the term, the “systematic” (touched
upon only slightly at the end of the present paper), was
then seen to be a step towards the structural division of
the mind into “id”, “ego,” and “super-ego,” which was so
greatly to clarify the whole situation. (258–59)
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James P. Keeley 771

Among the most important of Freud’s theoretical papers,

the first detailed explanation of Freud’s use of the term
“unconscious,” an indicator of a renewed interest on Freud’s
part in psychological theory, a preparation for the later “great
paper” on the unconscious, in certain ways more helpful than
the great paper itself in its explanation of the “dynamic” or
“repressed” unconscious, a presentation of this explanation
without which the world would have had to wait another
eleven years—we are a long way here from Moreau’s nonde-
script “an article,” an equally long way from the implied
neutrality of Freud’s choice of venue suggested by Jones’s
silence, and again—and perhaps most importantly for the
point I am making here—an equally long way from Wollheim’s
view of the essay’s introduction of the concept of the uncon-
scious as an “informal . . . appearance in Freud’s writings.” One
cannot help but have the impression that the fact of Freud’s
essay’s being published in the Proceedings of the Society for
Psychical Research is responsible for Jones’s and Wollheim’s
subdued acknowledgements of its accomplishments and for
the weirdly cool tone of their commentaries, in that if they had
given the essay its clarion due, they would at the same time be
drawing attention to its embarrassing site of publication. But
whether or not this is the case, no one to date has come up
with a satisfying explanation for Freud’s choosing such an
apparently exceptional site for the publication of an essay
“among the most important of Freud’s theoretical papers.”3

I have mentioned at the outset of this essay that the SPR,

chiefly under Myers’s direction, had developed a comprehen-
sive psychology based on Myers’s view of a subliminal con-
sciousness, the “subliminal self.” Myers developed these ideas
during the 1890s in a series of essays in the SPR’s Proceedings
collectively titled The Subliminal Consciousness (1889–95), even-
tually bringing them into final form in his magnum opus,
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, posthumously
published in 1903. I have also mentioned Myers’s publicizing
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772 Subliminal Promptings

of Freud’s work in England. In fact, Myers holds the distinction

of being the first writer to introduce Freud to England.
This distinction has been noted by a variety of writers—
psychologists, historians, biographers, psychical researchers—
but the manner in which Myers did so has never been pointed
out, much less appreciated, and this essay will demonstrate
that this context not only provides the explanation for Freud’s
publishing “A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis” in
the Society’s Proceedings but also offers new knowledge con-
cerning the place of this essay in the development of psycho-
analytic theory. First, understanding this context will allow us
to recognize that it was Freud’s perception of rivalry with
Myers’s psychology of the subliminal self that spurred Freud to
his first systematic theorization of the unconscious in “A Note
on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis.” Second, this recogni-
tion will reveal surprisingly close textual relations between “A
Note” and Myers’s work, especially Myers’s 1894 essay “The
Mechanism of Hysteria.” These close textual relations, once
recognized, will in turn open up an entirely new dimension of
significance for “A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analy-
sis.” More than Freud’s first systematic theorization of the
unconscious, this essay turns out to be a crucial text in the
history of psychology: the textual site of Freud’s liberating
himself from the influence of nineteenth-century psychology,
as represented by the SPR’s psychology of the subliminal self,
and his orienting himself—and the discipline of psychology as
well—toward future developments that are recognizable from
today’s perspective as the characteristics of twentieth-century
psychology.
Briefly, Myers’s subliminal self functions within a compos-
ite human personality. It contains elements ranging from the
pathological through the normal to the supernormal. At times,
in response to pressures upon the personality from the outside
world, it obtrudes those elements variously, in the form of
“uprushes” through a “psychical diaphragm,” into the everyday
consciousness, or the “supraliminal self,” for good or for ill,
depending upon the robustness or morbidness of the materi-
als in the “uprush.” At other times, in response to worldly
pressures, it receives elements of the personality from the
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James P. Keeley 773

supraliminal self in the form of “down-draughts” through that

same diaphragm, usually producing mental impairment for
the individual. Myers’s psychology, it should be noted, is part
of a metaphysical view of man, in which the healthy aspects of
the subliminal self connect man to transcendent—spiritual—
processes, thereby working hand-in-hand with man’s evolu-
tionary development to propel him toward ever higher stages
of progression along a continuum of related aspects of his life,
from physical or material existence, to psychological integra-
tion, to psychological advancement, to spiritual being.4
Freud’s name is invoked—for the first time in England—
in Myers’s “The Mechanism of Hysteria” (1893–94) as a wel-
come source of clinical support for Myers’s theory of the
subliminal self (14–15). Myers had developed his theory mainly
from observations of automatism; that is, he arrived at his
theory from observations of behavior conducted while his
subjects were in a state of trance, either hypnotically induced,
self-induced, sleep-induced (somnambulism and dreams), or,
in the case of certain mediums, allegedly induced by spirit
possession. He therefore values Breuer and Freud’s “On the
Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena” (1894) be-
cause it provides evidence from another, entirely different
domain—the medical clinic—for this theory: “I could not wish
for a more emphatic support, from wide clinical experience, of
the view of hysteria to which my own observations on different
branches of automatism had already, by mere analogical
reasoning, directed my thought” (Myers 1893–94, 14–15).
If Myers was grateful for Freud and Breuer’s work, how-
ever, he found it wanting in comparison to his. The Viennese
physicians seemed to Myers to be stuck in and limited by their
focus on morbidity, while he considered morbidity the patho-
logical counterpart to healthy, even supernormal, aspects of
the human personality. Myers believed this recognition to be
necessary for understanding the unity of the personality:

I need not point out the independent coincidence

between these views [of Breuer and Freud in “On the
Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena”] and those
already expressed in my chapter on “The Mechanism of
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774 Subliminal Promptings

Suggestion,” and elsewhere. But I may repeat my convic-

tion that this problem can only be solved by continued
research into what I deem the healthy and orderly
functioning of those subliminal faculties which hypnotic
suggestion reveals to us acting blindly as in a dream, and
which hysteria reveals to us acting wildly as in a night-
mare. . . .
What I would fain add to the exposition of Drs.
Breuer and Freud the reader may have already divined.
That extraordinary potency of subliminal action, which
they frankly present as insoluble by pure physiology, is
part and parcel of my scheme of man; and its occasional
appearance in this disordered form is to me but the
natural concomitant of its habitual and inevitable resi-
dence within us; in readiness—if we can contrive to
summon it—to subserve our highest needs. (14–15)

These assertions—that Myers’s own work on subliminal

consciousness is more fully comprehensive of the workings of
the human personality than the work of Breuer and Freud, but
that the latter lends medical and scientific support to his
views—were made in 1894, but Myers repeated them, with
respect to the complete Studies on Hysteria (1893–95), in an
address on “Hysteria and Genius” presented to the Society for
Psychical Research in 1897, and again in 1903 with the
posthumous publication of his Human Personality.5 In addition,
in “The Mechanism of Hysteria” (1893–94) Myers implies
strongly that Freud’s work is only a recent addition to original
work performed earlier by himself and others:

Conceptions of what I have called stratified consciousness

are now coming to the front in so many places that it
may be of interest to remark that (so far as I know) such
a conception first presented itself independently to
three observers, as the result of three different lines of
experiment. Mr. Gurney was led that way by experiments
on hypnotic memory; M. Pierre Janet by experiments on
hysteria; and to myself the observation of various
automatisms neither hysterical nor hypnotic,—as auto-
matic script and the like—brought a still more devel-
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James P. Keeley 775

oped (I do not say a better established) conception of

the stratified nature of our psychical being, of the
higher faculties discernable in the deeper strata, and of
the unity which comprehends them all.6 (15)

In addition, then, to Myers’s repeated subordination of Freud’s

work to his own, Myers in this passage also assumes Freud’s
conceptualization of the human personality to be more or less
similar to that developed by himself and others. For Myers, the
difference between (Breuer and) Freud’s work and his own lay
in its method—clinical practice—rather than in its essential
theory. Freud’s work, Myers asserts, is only the most recent to
enter a field—stratified consciousness—that had been estab-
lished and extensively developed by Myers and others before
Freud.
In 1912, when the SPR invited Freud to submit an article
to a special “Medical” issue of the Society’s Proceedings, Myers’s
assessment of the subordinate relation of Freud’s work to his
own, and Myers’s assumption of the likeness of Freud’s views to
other contemporary views on stratified consciousness, were
still circulating within the SPR, and within the larger world of
psychology as well. Whatever Freud may have thought during
the 1890s of Myers’s understanding of his work, we can be
fairly certain that by 1912 he felt that it required correction.
Originally a therapeutic method rooted in the late-nineteenth-
century practice of hypnotism, psychoanalysis had grown by
1912 into a depth psychology of its own, with a distinctive
method—free association—and theory of the workings of the
human personality, based upon the existence of the dynamic
unconscious as revealed (primarily) by the analysis of dreams
and the occurrence of such essentially neurotic behavior in
otherwise healthy people as slips of the tongue, memory
lapses, and so on.
What is more, in “The Mechanism of Hysteria” Myers
introduces the work of Pierre Janet, a psychologist contempo-
rary with Freud and founder of the psychology of dissociation.
Myers sees Janet’s work in the same way he sees Freud’s: as
supportive of his own. He thereby implies a comparison
between the two psychologists’ approaches to stratified con-
sciousness. In the passage reproduced above, he names Janet’s
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776 Subliminal Promptings

work on stratified consciousness along with Gurney’s and his

own as one of the three foundations of the subject, implying
thereby that Freud’s work was derivative from Janet’s. By 1912
Freud and Janet had been professional rivals for many years,
and we can be certain that by then Freud would have been
annoyed by Myers’s implied comparison between the two, and
downright vexed by the implication of his derivativeness vis-à-
vis Janet.7 Like Myers’s understanding of his work, this de-
meaning comparison to Janet, Freud would have felt, also
required his correction.
Lastly, Freud had to be irked by his perception, around
1912, of Myers’s presenting in the subliminal self a rival theory
to psychoanalysis. As Hearnshaw (1964) has pointed out in his
history of British psychology, one reason for the subsequent
interest in Myers’s work is its being “in some respects a
foretaste of the analytic psychology of Freud” (159). According
to the same author, another reason is that, upon Freud’s first
systematic incursion into England in 1912 with the publication
of Ernest Jones’s Papers on Psychoanalysis (1912) and Bernard
Hart’s The Psychology of Insanity (1912), psychoanalysis found
itself having to share its new dominion with the psychology of
Myers (and of Havelock Ellis as well), a situation that did not
change until the ascendancy of psychoanalysis at the end of
the First World War (Hearnshaw 1964, 164–67).8
Myers’s subordination of psychoanalysis to his psychology
of the subliminal self, his relegating of psychoanalysis to the
level of Janet’s theory of dissociation, his implication that
Freud’s work was derived from Janet’s, the SPR’s keeping these
views in circulation into the first decade or so of the new
century, the rivalry between Myers’s psychology and psycho-
analysis—all of these “contextual” matters present external
evidence that Freud’s publishing “A Note on the Unconscious
in Psycho-Analysis” in the SPR’s Proceedings had little of hap-
penstance or informality about it. Indeed, Freud’s essay itself
contains the corresponding internal evidence for this view:
reading the essay in the light of this context leaves no doubt
that Freud took deliberate advantage of the SPR’s invitation to
contribute to a medical volume of its Proceedings by writing
nothing less than a corrective manifesto for psychoanalysis,
and sending it into the heart of this rival school.
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James P. Keeley 777

But more: once we accept the invitation to examine

Freud’s essay in the context of Myers’s work, “A Note on the
Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis” emerges as an even more
pivotal text in the history of psychoanalysis than this context
might have led us to expect. Such examination reveals that the
Society for Psychical Research, in its concern with hypnotism,
trance states, “stratified consciousness,” and multiple personal-
ity, represented for Freud the world of late-nineteenth-century
psychology in toto. Ellenberger (1970) has comprehensively
mapped out the contours of a unified and coherent psychol-
ogy preceding the great systems of Freud, Jung, and Adler. He
terms this psychology “the First Dynamic Psychiatry.” Lasting
from 1775–1900 and international in scope (110), its primary
features were hypnotism as the “main approach” to the uncon-
scious; attention to such disorders as somnambulism, lethargy,
catalepsy, multiple personality, and hysteria; a “new model of
the human mind” based (earlier) upon dual consciousness
and (later) upon subconscious personalities; the theorization
of nervous illnesses culminating in the concept of fragmented
personality; and reliance on hypnotism for the psychothera-
peutic treatment of nervous pathology (111). Ellenberger sees
late-nineteenth-century psychology as the efflorescence of the
First Dynamic Psychiatry, and he introduces Myers as a repre-
sentative figure within it (171–74).
With “A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis,”
then, Freud does more than correct Myers’s assumptions about
psychoanalysis. Because Myers is representative of late-nine-
teenth-century psychology in general, in rebutting Myers Freud
liberates himself from the theoretical influences of an entire
school; and by presenting this manifesto of psychoanalytic theory
Freud reorients himself—and the world of psychology—toward
the future. “A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis” is
the textual site of that liberation and that reorientation.9

In presenting this manifesto Freud’s method is, first, to

define the term “unconscious,” and then to subject it to a
series of continuous refinements. As this series proceeds, the
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778 Subliminal Promptings

term—and the discipline of psychoanalysis, for which the

theory of the unconscious is the foundation—becomes pro-
gressively more individuated from the other views of “stratified
consciousness” contemporary with it until, by the end of the
essay, Freud has, as it were, lifted psychoanalysis out of Myers’s
domain and placed it upon its own disciplinary and theoretical
footing. But since the psychology developed by the SPR,
through its reliance on hypnosis for its explorations of the
human personality, metonymically stands for all of late-nine-
teenth-century psychology, Freud does nothing less in “A Note
on the Unconscious” than, through segregating himself in his
essay from any hypnotically based psychology, to differentiate
himself and psychoanalysis dramatically and decisively from
late-nineteenth-century psychology and to orient himself and
psychoanalysis toward the future of psychology. Moreover, as
we shall see, through placing his essay in the Proceedings of the
Society for Psychical Research, Freud has accomplished what
can only be described as a rhetorical tour de force; that is, at the
level of textual relations, by publishing the essay in the
Society’s Proceedings Freud has in effect created a new world of
psychology out of the materials of the older, hypnosis-based,
late-nineteenth-century world of psychology. And, again, this
endeavor was prompted by Myers’s published opinions about
the place of Freud’s work in the contemporary world of
psychology.
Freud establishes his definition of the unconscious early
in the essay. The unconscious indicates a “conception . . . of
which we are not aware, but the existence of which we are
nevertheless ready to admit on account of other proofs or
signs”; the unconscious stands in opposition to those concep-
tions “present to our consciousness and of which we are aware”
(1912, 260). He then introduces two refinements upon his
definition. The first one “teaches us to insist upon the impor-
tance of the distinction between conscious and unconscious and
seems to increase its value” (261; italics in original). This
refinement is the insight that unconscious ideas can produce
effects on the subject’s behavior. Freud derives it from experi-
ment with posthypnotic suggestion, in which the hypnotist’s
command itself remains unconscious even while the subject is
executing its content. In other words, unconscious thoughts
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James P. Keeley 779

can be simultaneously active and unconscious. This refine-

ment, Freud informs us, has led us “from the purely descriptive
to a dynamic view of the phenomenon” (261; italics in original).
Freud then turns to the “theory of hysterical phenomena
first put forward by P. Janet and elaborated by Breuer and
myself [Freud]” (261). Doing so affords him further evidence
for the existence of unconscious-but-active ideas, in that ac-
cording to this theory the hysterical patient suffers precisely
from such ideas in the form of memories from earlier in her
life. But it also allows him to make the second refinement in
his view of the unconscious: that unlike unconscious ideas that
enter into consciousness when they achieve a certain level of
force, the unconscious ideas that Freud is introducing in this
essay, as demonstrated by those hysterics suffering from them,
remain unconscious despite their strength: “We were accus-
tomed to think that every latent idea was so because it was weak
and that it grew conscious as soon as it became strong. We have
now gained the conviction that there are some latent ideas
which do not penetrate into consciousness, however strong
they may have become” (262). Latent ideas that achieve
consciousness upon acquiring increased force Freud desig-
nates as “foreconscious” (later “preconscious”) ideas; for those
ideas that remain unconscious no matter their strength he
reserves the term “unconscious (proper)”:

The term unconscious, which was used in the purely

descriptive sense before, now comes to imply something
more. It designates not only latent ideas in general, but
especially ideas with a certain dynamic character, ideas
keeping apart from consciousness in spite of their inten-
sity and activity. (262)

With these two refinements in his definition of the uncon-

scious Freud has accomplished a rearrangement—now well-
known but at the time revolutionary—of the hitherto estab-
lished categories of mental spheres. Freud has thereby also
effectively separated his psychology from that of Myers, whose
notion of psychological workings postulated an always-in-mo-
tion commerce between an unconscious subliminal self and a
conscious supraliminal self (Gauld 1968, 278–83). It turns out
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780 Subliminal Promptings

that Myers’s subliminal self is preconscious not unconscious,

and according to Freud we know this precisely by its commerce
with the supraliminal self. This is more than an academic
distinction because fundamental implications for the human
personality lurk in Freud’s assertion of the dynamic quality of
unconscious ideas. For Myers, with the exception of abnormal
cases the various parts of the human personality, subliminal
and supraliminal, worked in synthesis with each other to
produce a fundamentally integrated personality.10
Freud’s assertion of dynamism, however, prepares the
reader for an unconscious that is fundamentally opposed to
consciousness, and thereby for a human personality composed
of irreconcilable parts. But just as important as the discovery
and definition here of the unconscious proper is the method
through which Freud arrived at it: the investigation of hysteri-
cal phenomena. The reader will remember that, according to
Myers, Freud’s work held a subordinate position to his own
precisely because it depended upon a limited purview, namely,
the study of hysteria. In basing his groundbreaking rearrange-
ment of mental spheres, a rearrangement that opens up an
entirely new domain of psychological inquiry, on his studies in
hysteria, then, Freud is in effect contesting Myers’s earlier
appraisal of his work and asserting his own work as ascendant
over Myers’s. Working in hysteria, it turns out, instead of
merely supporting Myers’s views, offers a new conception of
the mind.
Regarding these first two refinements of the term “the
unconscious,” it remains only to stress that Freud’s empirical
references for these theoretical propositions are hypnotism
and hysteria. At this point in “A Note on the Unconscious,”
then, Freud is still thinking within the orientation of late-
nineteenth-century psychology.
Next Freud anticipates, and refutes, two objections to his
exposition; both the objections and their refutations play their
part in the goal of Freud’s essay: to respond to and to
supersede late-nineteenth-century psychology as represented
by Myers and the SPR. The first objection is the assertion “that
consciousness can be split up” (1912, 263) into separate
consciousnesses, with the implication that the unconscious
would be described more appropriately as one of these
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James P. Keeley 781

consciousnesses split off from the main consciousness of the

personality. Freud rebuts this objection by pointing out the
semantic contradiction of an unconscious consciousness, and
proposes that such mental conditions might better be de-
scribed as shifts between consciousnesses rather than as a split
consciousness. With this rejoinder Freud evades the categories
of late-nineteenth-century psychology that would assimilate his
unconscious to itself. But a further significance also emerges.
Split consciousness served as the framework for understanding
the morbid condition known as multiple personality, which
was the central theoretical interest and the most prominent
therapeutic employment of late-nineteenth-century psychol-
ogy (Ellenberger 1970, 126–41).
Because these cases, in their apparent alternations of
consciousnesses, had close resemblances to mediumistic trance
states, the SPR was profoundly interested in their study,
producing a sizable number of investigations into and reports
on them in their Proceedings and Journal (Prince 1900–1901;
Wilson 1903–1904; McDougall 1905–1907; Hodgson 1891–92;
anonymous 1899–1900). Dr. Azam, to whom Freud refers in “A
Note” as an example of such work, was a prominent contempo-
rary psychotherapist who used hypnotism to explore and to
treat multiple personality; further, he was a member of the
SPR, and the SPR had a strong interest in his work (Podmore
1897, 401–403). In sharply distinguishing the unconscious
from consciousness, therefore, Freud is administering a theo-
retical correction to late-nineteenth-century psychology, and
to the SPR’s theory of the personality in particular, from the
vantage point of his own more recent, and assumedly more
accurate, perspective. When this correction is considered in
combination with Myers’s assumption that studies of hysterics
could do no more than support his own work, the ultimate
intent of Freud’s essay reveals itself clearly: to supersede
Myers’s psychological views, and those of the wider psychologi-
cal world in which Myers participates, by his own psychology of
the human personality—psychoanalysis.
The second objection anticipated by Freud is that “we
[psychoanalysts] apply to normal psychology conclusions which
are drawn chiefly from the study of pathological conditions”
(1912, 263). Freud refutes this objection by pointing out its
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782 Subliminal Promptings

fallacy. Psychoanalysis, he informs his reader, has demon-

strated that healthy people also reveal unconscious ideas at
work in “lapsus linguae, errors in memory and speech, forget-
ting of names, etc.” (263); and he promises further evidence of
the same later in his discussion (this, of course, will be the
universal human activity of dreaming). Most pertinent for us
about this objection, however, is that it is precisely the one that
Myers in the SPR’s Proceedings had directed against Freud’s
work, and that Freud’s refutation here is in return aimed
directly at Myers and the SPR.
With these objections out of the way, Freud moves from
matters of “classification” to those of “functional and dynami-
cal relations in psychical action” (263). He introduces the
psychoanalytic concept of resistance as a force that keeps the
unconscious ideas unconscious; this resistance is the conse-
quence of a “distinct feeling of repulsion” connected to those
ideas. Freud informs us that “every psychical act begins as an
unconscious one, and it may either remain so or go on
developing into consciousness, according as it meets with
resistance or not” (264).
Two elements are highly relevant here. The first is Freud’s
assertion of the essential nature of the unconscious: “Psycho-
analysis leaves no room for doubt that the repulsion from
unconscious ideas is only provoked by the tendencies embod-
ied in their contents” (264). The second is an image Freud
proposes for illustration of how an unconscious idea achieves
consciousness, the process of photographic development:

A rough but not inadequate analogy to this supposed

relation of conscious to unconscious activity might be
drawn from the field of ordinary photography. The first
stage of the photograph is the “negative”; every photo-
graphic picture has to pass through the “negative pro-
cess,” and some of these negatives which have held good
in examination are admitted to the “positive process”
ending in the picture. (264)

With these elements Freud lays bare the decisive difference

between Myers’s work and his own. For Myers, the processes of
the subliminal and the supraliminal consciousnesses do not
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James P. Keeley 783

differ essentially, but only in degree. Subliminal processes can

be abnormal or supernormal, but they are fundamentally the
same as the normal processes of the supraliminal conscious-
ness. Myers’s favored image for human consciousness was the
spectrum of light: the supraliminal consciousness he com-
pared to the visible spectrum, the subliminal to the invisible:

The limits of our spectrum do not inhere in the sun that

shines, but in the eye that marks his shining. Beyond
each end of that prismatic ribbon are ether-waves of
which our retina takes no cognisance. Beyond the violet
end are waves still more mysterious; whose very exist-
ence man for ages never suspected, and whose intimate
potencies are still but obscurely known. Even thus, I
venture to affirm, beyond each end of our conscious
spectrum extends a range of faculty and perception,
exceeding the known range, but as yet indistinctly
guessed. The artifices of the modern physicist have
extended far in each direction the visible spectrum
known to Newton. It is for the modern psychologist to
discover artifices which may extend in each direction
the conscious spectrum as known to Plato or to Kant.
The phenomena cited in this work carry us, one may say,
as far onwards as flourescence carries us beyond the
violet end. The “X-rays” of the psychical spectrum re-
main for a later age to discover. (1903, 1:17–18)

What makes the invisible spectrum invisible is not any-

thing intrinsic to it but rather the limits of human perception.
So that which is subliminal is subliminal because of the limits
of human perception, not because of any quality essential to it.
The subliminal consciousness, for Myers, contains nothing
antithetical to the supraliminal consciousness. For Freud, on
the other hand, the unconscious differs essentially from con-
sciousness. It is not the limits of perception causing these ideas
to remain unconscious but “the tendencies embodied in their
contents”; in other words, unconscious ideas are inadmissible
to consciousness in the same manner that Satan cannot occupy
the same locality as Christ in Paradise Lost: they are profoundly
incompatible. In short, for Myers the subliminal self is subliminal
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784 Subliminal Promptings

because it falls outside human self-perception; for Freud, on

the other hand, the unconscious falls outside human self-
perception because it is essentially unconscious.
Furthermore, just as Myers developed the image of the
spectrum of light bands that successfully figured his model of
the human personality—gradations of consciousness, really—
so Freud through his image of photographic development
successfully figured his model: dynamic opposition between
conscious and unconscious and the transformation of ideas
between them. But given the connections already unconvered
between Freud and Myers in “A Note on the Unconscious,”
and given that Myers employed an image based upon the
workings of light for his illustration of the subliminal and
supraliminal consciousnesses, there can be little doubt that
Freud intended his image of the unconscious as a photo-
graphic process to stand, as it were, as the deliberate “negative”
to Myers’s image of the visible and invisible spectrum.
If Freud in this section of his essay differentiates his
psychology from Myers’s, in the next and final section he
leaves both Myers and the late-nineteenth-century world of
psychology far behind. Freud begins this section by asserting
that the antagonism between the unconscious and conscious-
ness “is not the last or the most important result of the psycho-
analytic investigation of psychical life” (1912, 264). This “most
important result” is, of course, the discovery of dream analysis
as the foundation of psychoanalysis (265). Freud then de-
scribes the manner in which dream analysis permits knowledge
of the unconscious. Briefly, latent thoughts in the mind, left
over from the day’s mental activities and now residing in the
preconscious, connect in the state of sleep with unconscious
thoughts “ordinarily repressed from . . . conscious life” (265).
Using the energy from this connection with the unconscious,
these latent thoughts find expression in an apparent or
manifest dream, with the double result that an unconscious
idea, through its connection with the latent ideas, has found its
way into consciousness and that the latent thoughts, through
their connection with the unconscious, have taken on proper-
ties of the unconscious. Through “the art” (265) of psycho-
analysis, the analyst ascertains the latent dream thoughts, then
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James P. Keeley 785

compares them to the manifest dream to determine the extent

and nature of their transformations:

And here is the opportunity to learn what we could not

have guessed from speculation, or from another source
of empirical information—that the laws of unconscious
activity differ widely from those of the conscious. We
gather in detail what the peculiarities of the Unconscious
are, and we may hope to learn still more about them by
a profounder investigation of the processes of dream-
formation. (265–66)

In this concluding section several themes that have pre-

sented themselves throughout Freud’s essay now find comple-
tion. First, by establishing the analysis of dreams as a means of
discovery and exploration of the unconscious, Freud com-
pletes his rebuttal of Myers’s charge that Freud has based his
work solely on abnormal conditions such as hysteria. Earlier,
when he first refuted this charge by adducing psychoanalytic
work on slips of the tongue and lapses of memory, Freud had
promised “another still more convincing argument at a later
stage of this discussion” (263). That argument is the analysis of
dreams, “one psychical product to be met with in the most
normal persons” (264). Also belonging to Freud’s direct rebut-
tal of Myers is his assertion that the analysis of dreams presents
“the opportunity to learn what we could not have guessed from
speculation, or from another source of empirical informa-
tion.” It is likely that Freud is referring here, in a most specific
manner, to the two charges leveled at his work by Myers in
“The Mechanism of Hysteria.” Myers, it will be recalled, had
charged first that Freud’s work provided clinical support for
his own conclusions about the human personality, which had
been arrived at through “mere analogical reasoning.” His
second charge was that Freud’s work was derivative to work
done by Gurney, Janet, and himself using “experiments” on
hypnotic memory, “experiments” on hysteria, and “observa-
tions” of automatisms, respectively. Does not Freud have Myers’s
“analogical reasoning” in mind when he refers to what cannot
be “guessed from speculation,” and the work of Gurney, Janet,
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786 Subliminal Promptings

and also Myers in mind in referring to “another source of

empirical information”?
The second theme finding completion in this section of
the essay is the distinction between Myers’s subliminal con-
sciousness and Freud’s unconscious. Myers’s subliminal con-
sciousness was so like the supraliminal consciousness that it
could be understood by analogy. What the analysis of dreams
teaches Freud, on the other hand, is that the unconscious is so
alien to consciousness that its operations can be glimpsed only
by observing the distortions of the latent dream thoughts when
compared to the manifest dream; further, what those distor-
tions tell us is that “the laws of unconscious activity differ
widely from those of the conscious.”
The third theme finding completion here is the chief
purpose of Freud’s essay: the supplanting of late-nineteenth-
century psychology, represented mainly by the work of Myers
and the SPR but including such psychologists of the subcon-
scious as Janet, by his own original method of psychoanalytic
investigation. Unlike late-nineteenth-century psychology,
founded upon the investigation of automatisms mainly hyp-
notic or hysteric, “psycho-analysis is founded upon the analysis
of dreams; the interpretation of dreams is the most complete
piece of work the young science has done up to the present”
(265). The analysis of dreams has revealed the existence and
nature of the unconscious, while Myers’s, Gurney’s, and Janet’s
work with automatisms produced only the confusion of the
preconscious with the unconscious. The implication is that the
study of hypnosis and hysteria, the cornerstones of late-
nineteenth-century psychology, will now become subordinated
to the investigation of dreams, thereby supporting the findings
of that investigation with clinical evidence—an inversion of the
previous relations between the work of Myers and of Freud:

Unconsciousness seemed to us at first only an enigmati-

cal characteristic of a definite psychical act. Now it
means more for us. It is a sign that this act partakes of
the nature of a certain psychical category known to us by
other and more important characters and that it belongs
to a system of psychical activity which is deserving of our
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James P. Keeley 787

fullest attention. The index-value of the unconscious has

far outgrown its importance as a property. (266)

With the analysis of dreams as Freud’s master key to the

recently discovered—and newly theorized—unconscious, psy-
choanalysis leaves behind the world of late-nineteenth-century
psychology, represented in “A Note on the Unconscious in
Psycho-Analysis” chiefly by Myers and the SPR, a world based
upon investigations of hypnotism, hysteria, and subconscious
personalities, to proceed in a completely new direction.
This understanding that Freud was motivated to publish
“A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis” in the Proceed-
ings of the Society for Psychical Research because of his
perceived rivalry with the work of the Society for Psychical
Research on human personality affords several fresh insights
into the development of psychoanalysis as theory and as
discipline. First, it dispels, most decisively, any sense of surprise
or thought of happenstance in Freud’s publishing this essay in
the Society’s Proceedings. Second, it allows us to see that it was
the SPR’s influence on Freud that first antithetically prompted
Freud to articulate in systematic fashion, in what Strachey has
justly called “among the most important of Freud’s theoretical
papers,” his theory of the unconscious. Without this prompt-
ing psychoanalysis would have had to wait longer—at least
three years (until the publication of “The Unconscious”),
perhaps even eleven years (until The Ego and the Id)—for the
conceptualization of the unconscious presented in this essay.11
Finally, this understanding reveals “A Note on the Uncon-
scious in Psycho-Analysis” to be the textual site of Freud’s
liberation—under the impetus of his increasingly comprehen-
sive and more fully realized theory of the human personality—
from the world of nineteenth-century psychology as repre-
sented by the Society for Psychical Research, and of his
reorienting himself toward the world of psychology that we
have been inhabiting in various forms for the past century.
333 E. 88th St., Apt. 1A
New York, NY 10128
jpk5@columbia.edu
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788 Subliminal Promptings

Notes
1. The brief history of the SPR just presented is indebted to Oppenheim (1985, ch.
4), Gauld (1968, 137–339), Haynes (1982), Salter (1948), and Brandon (1984,
84–97). Haynes and Salter, both affiliated with the SPR, argue for the SPR’s
success in maintaining its objectivity in its researches into Spiritualism.
Oppenheim and Gauld recognize attraction toward the Spiritualist position of
personal immortality on the part of several prominent investigators in the SPR,
but nevertheless claim value for the Society’s work, especially in psychology.
Brandon, a strident critic of the SPR’s claims to scientific objectivity, argues that
a religious drive, or “will-to-believe,” on the part of the psychical researchers
compromised their investigations and conclusions. Hearnshaw (1964, 157–60)
provides a helpful thumbnail history of the Society. A short history that places
the Society for Psychical Research within the history of parapsychology can be
found in Beloff (1977). On Freud’s eclipsing of Myers, see Hearnshaw (1964,
159) and Oppenheim (1985, 266).
2. Later in his life, Freud’s need to make a series of statements about the relations
of psychoanalysis to such occult phenomena as telepathy and prophetic dreams
would override his anxiety over the danger to psychoanalysis from perceived
associations with the occult (Jones 1957, 394–95).
3. Consulting the correspondence between Freud and Jones (Paskauskas 1993) on
this matter only adds to the mystery. In a letter dated February 26, 1911, Freud
asks Jones what he makes of an offer of corresponding membership in the SPR:
“Do you think it a sign of rising interest in Ψ in your dear old England, that I
have been invited to become a corresp. member of the London society for
psychical research [sic]? The names on their [membership] lists are all
excellent” (93). On March 17, 1911, Jones replies: “You ask me of the Society of
[sic] Psychical Research. I am sorry to say that in spite of the good names in it,
the society is not of good repute in scientific circles. You will remember that
they did some valuable work in the eighties on hypnotism, automatic writing
etc., but for the past 15 years they have confined their attention to ‘spook-
hunting,’ mediumship, and telepathy, the chief aim being to communicate with
departed souls. Did you accept the corresp. membership? It does not seem that
your researches lend much support to spiritism, in spite of William James’
ardent hope” (97–98). Then, a year later, on February 24, 1912, with no warning
Freud informs Jones of his submission to the SPR’s Proceedings: “The Society
for Ψ [sic] Research has prevailed upon me to send her a paper on the
‘Unconscious in ΨA,’ which does not contain any news but tries to explain our
points of view to english [sic] readers and in english [sic] words. It has been
mildly corrected by one of the Society’s members and is to appear in the
‘Proceedings’ of the Society” (133). Apparently Freud never responded to
Jones’s question about whether he had accepted the offered membership, and
never addressed Jones’s critical view of the Society. There is no mention of the
SPR in the letters between March 17, 1911 and February 24, 1912, or for years
thereafter.
4. The articles comprising The Subliminal Consciousness are “General Characteristics
of Subliminal Messages,” “The Mechanism of Suggestion,” “The Mechanism of
Genius,” “Hypermnesic Dreams,” “Sensory Automatism and Induced Hallucina-
tions,” “The Mechanism of Hysteria,” “Motor Automatism,” “The Relation of
Supernormal Phenomena to Time;—Retrocognition,” and “The Relation of
Supernormal Phenomena to Time.—Precognition.” The reader interested in
Myers’s psychology should perhaps skip its development through the 1890s in
the SPR’s Proceedings and simply go to the first five chapters of his Human
Personality (1903). Useful summaries of Myers’s psychology of the subliminal self
can be found in Oppenheim (1985, 254–62), Gauld (1968, 275–312), and
Hearnshaw (1964, 157–60).
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James P. Keeley 789

5. For Myers’s address to the Society, presented Friday, March 12, 1897, see the
summary in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (1897–98); see also
Ellenberger (1970, 772). For Myers’s 1903 repetition of this assertion, see his
Human Personality (1:43).
6. Mr. Gurney is Edmund Gurney, one of the three central workers of the SPR, the
other two being Myers and the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick.
7. For the rivalry between Freud and Janet, see Ellenberger (1970, 344, 346) and
Jones (1955, 99–100, 112; 1957, 24, 98, 213–14). The best summary of Janet’s
work—and the account largely responsible for renewed interest in it—is by
Ellenberger (1970, ch. 6).
8. Evidence of Myers’s ideas’ circulating within the larger world of psychology, and
indeed in the even larger world of lettered culture, comes from several
interesting sources. The first is the tenth lecture of William James’s The Varieties
of Religious Experience (1902). In this lecture James accounts for instances of
sudden religious conversion by classifying them as a kind of automatism studied
by late-nineteenth-century psychology and explained by subconscious menta-
tion, for which James uses Myers’s term “the subliminal self” (240). In James’s
explanation of automatism, we find Freud in the same place as in Myers’s essay:
linked with Janet and several other psychologists, and subordinated to Myers’s
theoretical framework. The terms and theories used by James are Myers’s, while
the work of these psychologists serves to support Myers’s theorization:
Mr. Myers has given the name of automatism . . . to this whole sphere of
effects [psychopathological symptoms such as compulsive acts, obses-
siveness, and hallucinations], due to “uprushes” into the ordinary
consciousness of energies originating in the subliminal parts of the
mind.
The simplest instance of an automatism is the phenomenon of
post-hypnotic suggestion, so-called. You give to a hypnotized subject,
adequately susceptible, an order to perform some designated act . . .
after he wakes from his hypnotic sleep. Punctually, when the signal
comes or the time elapses upon which you have told him that the act
must ensue, he performs it. . . . In the wonderful explorations by Binet,
Janet, Freud, Mason, Prince, and others, of the subliminal conscious-
ness of patients with hysteria, we have revealed to us whole systems of
underground life, in the shape of memories of a painful sort which lead
a parasitic existence, buried outside of the primary fields of conscious-
ness, and making irruptions thereinto with hallucinations, pains, con-
vulsions, paralyses of feeling and of motion, and the whole procession
of symptoms of hypnotic disease of body and of mind. Alter or abolish
by suggestion these subconscious memories, and the patient immedi-
ately gets well. His symptoms were automatisms, in Mr. Myers’s sense of
the word. (234–35)
The second source is Theodore Flournoy’s (at the time) highly influential
From India to the Planet Mars (1899), a psychological study of mediumship.
Throughout this study Flournoy uses Myers’s theory of the subliminal self for
explaining the mediumistic phenomena he encounters (181, 259, 261, 266, 271,
312, 353, 403), only once referring to Freud as representing, narrowly, “the
point of view of psychopathology” (338). Flournoy’s obvious preference for
Myers’s psychology receives illumination, perhaps, from Chari’s (1963) intro-
duction to this work, which informs us of Flournoy’s rejection of Freud’s theory
of repression—as well as of Janet’s theory of dissociation—as too narrow in its
focus (xiii–xiv). Freud would have been comforted little by Flournoy’s state-
ment, quoted in that introduction, that “it will be a great day when the
subliminal psychology of Myers and his followers and the abnormal psychology
of Freud and his school succeed in meeting, supplementing and completing
each other. That will be a great forward step in science and understanding of
our nature” (xv).
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790 Subliminal Promptings

Finally, we have Subconscious Phenomena (1910), a collection of talks by
Hugo Münsterberg, Theodore Ribot, Pierre Janet, Joseph Jastrow, Bernard
Hart, and Morton Prince. In this volume, Myers’s psychology of the subliminal
self receives treatment as one of six major views of subconscious mentation, and
as such is compared and contrasted with the views of Freud and, again, Freud’s
rival Janet (9–15, 127–29).
John Kerr (1994) sums up this whole matter succinctly: “At the beginning
of the decade [the 1910s], before Freud had entered so strongly upon the
scene, Myers, Flournoy, and James had ranked preeminent, along with Janet, as
investigators of the subliminal world” (305).
9. Two questions present themselves here. How is it that Freud did not theorize
the unconscious until 1912, when he had certainly discovered it as early as 1900
in The Interpretation of Dreams? And why would Freud have waited almost ten
years, from 1903, the year of publication of Myers’s Human Personality and Its
Survival of Bodily Death, to 1912, to refute Myers’s view of his work? In answer to
the first question I would speculate that it took a decade or so for Freud to
develop and systematize his discovery into a rigorous theory. This would be an
instance of protracted thought that receives a parallel in Freud’s delayed
theorization of the Oedipus complex. Laplanche and Pontalis (1964, 1844–46;
see also Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 53–54) point out that, while Freud
discovered the Oedipus complex in his self-analysis in 1897, he did not present
a systematic theorization of it until The Ego and the Id in 1923. This response to
the first question bears on the response to the second: Freud could not rebut
Myers’s fully worked-out theory until he had one of his own.
10. Oppenheim (1985) points out a tension in Myers’s work between his quest for
a unified soul, representing the essential person, that would survive bodily
death and thereby allow the survival of the distinct personality, and his method
of searching for that soul, which entailed the dissection of the human personal-
ity into multiple layers existing within two larger orders of the subliminal and
the supraliminal selves: “Aiming above all else to prove that the human
personality survived bodily death, he had virtually destroyed the human
personality” (260). Despite the inconsistencies in Myers’s work, and despite
Oppenheim’s assertion that Myers perceived these troublesome implications,
however, Myers himself, as Oppenheim points out, always maintained that the
human personality is “at once profoundly unitary” notwithstanding its being
“almost infinitely composite” (Myers 1903, 1:xxvi, qtd. in Oppenheim 1985,
261). Thus, one of the fundamental differences between Myers and Freud is
that Freud accepted the implications of his work in psychology—the fragmenta-
tion of the self—while Myers never could bring himself to do so.
11. If Strachey is right that “A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis” is a
study for “The Unconscious” (1915), then it is perfectly possible that, without
Freud’s having written “A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis,” he
would not have written “The Unconscious” as early as he did, if ever.

References
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Brandon, Ruth. 1984. The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus.
Chari, C. T. K. 1963. Introduction to Flournoy 1899, pp. v–xix.
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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
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