The Physiological and Psychological Unconscious: A History of the Term Inconscient in Nineteenth-Century France

This chapter investigates the introduction of the term ‘unconscious’ into French philosophical debate. It focuses in particular on the theoretical and strategic role with which it was endowed. In the first two sections, alongside presenting a novel hypothesis about the coining of the term inconscient, it will attempt to highlight its provenance. In the third section, the emphasis will be instead on Claude-Joseph Tissot’s idea of the unconscious, conceived as allegedly the first French philosophical theorization of this concept. In the final part of the chapter, it will show how this conception – and its ambivalent status, somewhere between physiology and psychology – penetrated the era’s philosophical debate, in order to shed light on the process that gradually led to later (and more renowned) theories of the unconscious.