Until the end of the nineteenth century it was taken for granted that a person knows himself. Freud destroyed that assumption. Most of what moves us is closed to us. Jung went further: the unconscious is not merely personal — it is collective, it is mythological. After Auschwitz, Frankl added that even at the darkest point of the unconscious there is room for choice. Three men — three different answers to one question: what is happening inside?
Freud was a doctor who listened to his patients. What he heard changed the world: most of mental life is hidden from consciousness. The desires, fears and memories we have repressed go on governing us. Slips of the tongue, dreams, neurotic symptoms — these are the language of the unconscious. His discovery: man is not master in his own house. It was an insult — and a liberation at the same time.
Jung began as Freud's pupil — and parted with him over the central question. The unconscious is not only personal: beneath it lies the collective, shared by all of humanity. Archetypes — the Shadow, the Anima, the Self, the Hero — surface in the dreams of different cultures, in myths that never met. His work with alchemy, mandalas and Eastern philosophy looked like heresy — and turned out to be the most fruitful heresy of the twentieth century.
Dostoevsky was not a psychologist in the clinical sense. But Freud called him “the greatest psychologist who ever lived.” His method: polyphony. Every character carries his own truth — and it is convincing even when the one who carries it is a murderer. He knew that there is something in a human being that reason does not control — fifty years before Freud. And he knew that in the same place lies the possibility of freedom — seventy years before Frankl.
Frankl worked out logotherapy before the war — a theory that the chief engine of a human being is not pleasure (Freud) and not power (Adler) but meaning. In 1942 he was taken to a concentration camp. He lost his manuscript, his wife, his parents. And he spent three years testing his theory in practice. His conclusion: everything can be taken from a person except the choice of how to face it. This is the last freedom — and it is real.
If the unconscious decides most of what we do — to what extent are we responsible for it at all?