^aDepartment of English, University of Birmingham, Arts Building, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK

Abstract

This paper explores a suggestive, virtual and non-psychological unconscious in relation to three important writers in the late nineteenth century: Freud, Henri Bergson and Frederick Myers. Reading psychoanalysis through the concept of lived duration in Bergson's work enables us to understand an immanent model of a non-psychological unconscious. This is also a virtual unconscious that is located within Frederick Myer's concepts of a subliminal self. The virtual and non-psychological unconscious is implicit in the way Freud thought about the primary processes and in how he understood the basis of the unconscious, as dreaming. This paper explores the implications of such an account for psychoanalysis, how it allows us to perceive the unconscious, as not just a psychological entity, but as an unknowable life force of history.