the emphasis on rationality and reason above all else tended to hierarchise aspects of our psychology which resulted in emotions and ‘irrational’ thinking (called ‘superstition’ among other things) being displaced as inferior activities of the mind. This meant that the notion of an unconscious became devalued if not redundant. Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ was the summation of our human ‘being’ depicted as consisting solely of our conscious rational awareness.
