tortion of the whole matter. The symposium on the unconscious showed that a fundamental solution of this matter transcends the boundaries of empirical psychology and is directly tied to general philosophical convictions. Whether we accept with Brentano that the unconscious does not exist, or with Munsterberg that it is simply physiology, or with Sehubert—Soldern that it is an epistemologically indispensable category, or with Freud that it is sexual—in all these cases our argumentation and conclusions transcend the boundaries of empirical psychology. [31]

Among the Russian authors it is Dale who emphasizes the epistemological motives which led to the formation of the concept of the unconscious. In his opinion it is precisely the attempt to defend the independence of psychology as an explanatory science against the usurpation of physiological methods and principles that is the basis of this concept. The demand to explain the mental from the mental, and not from the physical, that psychology in the analysis and description of the facts should stay itself, within its own boundaries, even if this implied that one had to enter the path of broad hypotheses—this is what gave rise to the concept of the unconscious. Dale observes that psychological constructions or hypotheses are no more than the theoretical continuation of the description of homogeneous phenomena in one and the same independent system of reality. [32] The tasks of psychology and theoretical-epistemological demands require that it fight the usurpationist attempts of physiology by means of the unconscious. Mental life proceeds with interruptions, it is full of gaps. What happens with consciousness during sleep, with reminiscences that we do not now recollect, with ideas of which we are not consciously aware at the moment? In order to explain the mental from the mental, in order not to turn to another domain of phenomena—physiology—to fill the pauses, gaps and blanks in mental life, we must assume that they continue to exist in a special form: as the unconscious mental. Stern [1919, pp. 241-243] as well develops such a conception of the unconscious as both an essential assuniption and a hypothetical continuation and complement to mental experience.

Dale distinguishes two aspects of the problem: the factual and the hypothetical or methodological, which determines the epistemological or methodological value of the category of the unconscious for psychology. Its task is to clarify the meaning of this concept, the domain of phenomena it covers, and its role for psychology as an explanatory science. Following Jerusalem [33], for the author it is first of all a category or a way of thinking which is indispensable in the explanation of mental life. Apart from that, it is also a specific area of phenomena. He is completely right in saying that the unconscious is a concept created on the basis of indisputable mental experience and its necessary hypothetical completion. Hence the very complex nature of each statement operating with this concept: in each statement one must distinguish what comes from the data of indisputable mental experience, what comes from the hypothetical completion, and what is the degree of reliability of both. In the critical works examined above, the two things, both sides of the problem, have been mixed up: hypothesis and fact, principle and empirical observation, fiction and law, construction and generalization—it is all lumped together.

Most important of all is the fact that the main question was left out of consideration. Lenz and Luria assure Freud that psychoanalysis is a physiological system. But Freud himself belongs to the opponents of a physiological conception of the unconscious. Dale is completely right in saying that this question of the psychological or physiological nature of the unconscious is the primai’y, most important phase of the whole problem. Before we describe and classify the phenomena of the unconscious for psychological purposes, we must know whether we are operating with something physiological or with something mental. We must prove that the unconscious in fact is a mental reality. In other words, before we turn to the