Our contemporary ideas around the personal and collective unconscious also have their roots somewhat earlier than Freud and Jung – partly in Enlightenment thinking (although, ironically, the unconscious mind was rejected as a concept by Enlightenment) and notably in the German Romantic philosophy of Carus, Schopenhauer, von Hartmann and von Schelling. Whyte has written of how, ‘The general conception of unconscious mental processes was conceivable … around 1700, topical around 1800, and fashionable around 1870–1880’ (Whyte 1960: 168–169; emphasis in original).
