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A study of Northeast India is incomplete without an examination of the region's association with Christianity. Several states of the region have a substantial number of Christian adherents, the result of nineteenth and twentieth century conversions. In the case of Mizoram too, the prominence of the religion cannot be missed. The landscape of the capital city of Aizawl, for instance, is dotted with churches, while everyday life significantly revolves around notions of ‘time’ set up by church practice. Most ‘ethnic’ Mizos claim to be Christian, although exact figures are wanting. Notwithstanding the presence of several ‘Christian’ and ‘indigenous religion’ based cult groups as well as non-Christian migrants, it is still 80 per cent of the population that professes Christianity. This makes Mizoram one of the few states in India that can claim to be predominantly Christian. In comparison, the national average is only a little over 2 per cent. The collective consciousness of the Mizos, I believe, actively propagates a ‘Mizo Christianity’. Mizos are not just ‘Mizos’, but Mizo Kristian or ‘Christian Mizos’. The aim of this chapter is to examine the history of this nomenclature, and the cultural politics that underline it. I explore how ‘Mizo Christianity’ comes into being, how a ‘world religion’ becomes a local religion, and discovers a home in a specific social milieu. While such an appropriation is not unique to the region or even worldwide, what is unique in the Mizo case is the religion's close associations with the people's understanding of their identity. The religion, to a large extent, has become an important identity marker for the Mizos and, in the zones where the borders of identity-making are porous, Christianity also becomes an important tool of incorporation and exclusion. In other words, Christianity not only forms a crucial aspect of the identity make-up of the people, but also a criterion for the incorporation of new members into the Mizo fold. It is this easy identification with Christianity and its associated notions of progress that led people to convert in large numbers to Christianity. The chapter will not delve into the localness of Christian practice; rather, it focuses on how this ‘vernacularization’ has come to be, especially within such a short period of time.

In the course of the nineteenth century, concepts of consciousness underwent a transformation as competing concepts of unconscious mental functioning were developed in philosophy, physiology, biology, and psychology and psychical research in Europe and the United States. The papers in this volume have mainly traced trajectories of concepts of the unconscious in nineteenth-century German philosophical and literary thought. Alongside these philosophical developments, concepts of the unconscious were developed in other disciplines. For example, in nineteenth-century British physiology, this took place through an expansion of the concept of reflex action. Under the rubric of “unconscious cerebration,” William Carpenter (1813–85) maintained that a large proportion of mental activity takes place automatically, which is to say unconsciously. At the same time, notions of organic memory arose in German biology, based on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's (1744–1829) theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and Ernst Haeckel's (1834–1919) biogenetic law that ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny. Through figures such as the German physiologist Ewald Hering (1834–1918), trans-individual and collective concepts of the unconscious were developed, wherein the unconscious was seen to contain and transmit the history of the race. However, the most lasting legacy of these developments lay in the dynamic psychologies and psychotherapies of the twentieth century. As the basis for an explanation of psychopathology, the term was taken up for a while in twentieth-century psychiatry, and more widely within psychotherapy, where it became a means of explaining human behavior in general and a new source for self-knowledge, which increasingly came to signify knowledge of what was unconscious, in some shape or form, to the self.

Locating the unconscious Philosophical investigations which trace the genesis of a concept from what preceded it, and then trace how the concept influenced what succeeded it, encounter a problem in relation to “the unconscious.” This problem might admittedly seem to arise in relation to any concept, because disagreements about the content of a concept inevitably result from the never finally delimitable contexts in which it is encountered. Philosophers don't even agree, for example, on whether “Water is H 2 O” is “necessarily true in all possible worlds.” In such a case we can at least refer to the familiar fluid that we are disagreeing about and describe some of its properties. With respect to the unconscious the problem is more fundamental because we don't know what we are talking about: if we did, it would not be unconscious. As we shall see, much will depend here on the sense of “know.” Before getting to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1770–1854), who has some claim to being the first person to use the term “unconscious” in the kind of ways which have been important in modern thought, we therefore need to explore some of the issues that make the unconscious a peculiarly recalcitrant topic. This should also enable us both to avoid the problem of just parroting what Schelling says when he employs the word “unconscious” and related terms, and to gauge whether his ideas are still philosophically significant.

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her – powerless to leave her and powerless to enter her more deeply. Unasked and without warning she sweeps us away in the round of her dance and dances on until we fall exhausted from her arms. She brings forth ever new forms: what is there, never was; what was, never will return. All is new, and yet forever old. We live within her, and are strangers to her. She speaks perpetually with us, and does not betray her secret. Thus begins, in what could be read as a vivid evocation of the intertwining of the twin forces of Eros and Thanatos, the fragmentary text “On Nature,” the text – allegedly written by Goethe – that made Freud, or so he later claimed, decide to study, not law, but medicine, after he had heard it read at a public lecture by Carl Bruhl (1820–99). At the opening of this volume, which takes us on a chronological journey – from Schelling, the late Goethe, and romanticism, via Schopenhauer, Carl Gustav Carus, Eduard von Hartmann, Gustav Theodor Fechner, to Nietzsche and Freud – through the concept of the unconscious in nineteenth-century German thought, where should one begin? The history of the concept of the unconscious reveals itself to be a complex and much-contested one, and the story of that complexity and contestation has been told by a variety of narrators.

© Cambridge University Press 2010. In the entire world one does not speak of the unconscious since, according to its essence, it is unknown; only in Berlin does one speak of and know something about it, and explain to us what actually sets it apart. So wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in 1873, as part of his ironic response to the success of the Philosophy of the Unconscious (Philosophie des Unbewussten, 1869), written by the Berlin philosopher Eduard von Hartmann. If the influence of a concept can be gauged by the way in which it is received by the public at large, if not in academic circles, then Hartmann's volume, which ran to some eleven editions during his lifetime alone and was seen by some as introducing an entirely new Weltanschauung, might be regarded as marking one of the pinnacles of the career of das Unbewusste (the unconscious) during the nineteenth century. Although Hartmann's understanding of the unconscious was, like Freud's, subjected to a scathing critique at the hands of academic philosophy and psychology, it nevertheless took some half a century or so for Freud to supersede Hartmann's public role as the chief theorist and interpreter of the unconscious for the German-speaking public. Today the concept of the unconscious is arguably still first and foremost associated with Freud and with his successors such as Carl Gustav Jung and Jacques Lacan; in short: with psychoanalysis in general.

Introduction: the unconscious in relation to the human and natural sciences Perhaps the most important legacy of the various nineteenth-century German discourses on the unconscious is the cardinal status of this concept within what Freud understood to be the “science” of psychoanalysis. Despite the much-disputed scientific status of psychoanalysis, even as late as the second half of the twentieth century Michel Foucault saw the unconscious as an epistemological category which demarcates not only psychoanalysis or psychology, but also the field of the human sciences in general. “On the horizon of any human science,” writes Foucault, there is the project of bringing man's consciousness back to its real conditions, of restoring it to the contents and forms that brought it into being, and elude us within it; this is why the problem of the unconscious – its possibility, status, mode of existence, the means of knowing it and of bringing it to light – is not simply a problem within the human sciences which they can be thought of as encountering by chance in their steps; it is a problem that is ultimately coextensive with their very existence. Foucault argues that what separates the human from the natural sciences is that in the former, the category of “the human” necessarily becomes both the subject and the object of any possible knowledge. Thus, while Descartes had assumed that the logical cogito may have the capacity to know the non-human world of extended substance through purely rational deduction, this situation changed radically during the nineteenth century, when “the human” came, in newly professionalized fields such as psychology and sociology, to be an empirical object of scientific investigation.

© Cambridge University Press 2010. Shortly before his mental breakdown at the beginning of January 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo (1888) that “out of my writings there speaks a psychologist who has not his equal, that is perhaps the first thing a good reader will notice.” Since then, posterity has subscribed to his verdict. Today his opus is regarded as an essential contribution to a psychology of the unconscious and he himself is supposed to have been a precursor to psychoanalysis. This is rather surprising, as Nietzsche's philosophy contains no explicit theory of the unconscious; in other words, the concept of the unconscious is not at the center of his thinking. Instead one can – especially in the early writings – detect an understanding of the unconscious which aligns Nietzsche with a tradition of thought from early Romanticism to Schopenhauer, a concept with which he assumed his learned audience would be familiar. But at the same time he began – in his unpublished observations, and under the influence of contemporary scientific and linguistic theories – to bestow his own meaning upon this conception of the unconscious. This stream of thought led, in connection with his theory of the drives, to a somatic understanding of the unconscious in his middle period. As I will argue, Nietzsche's middle-period writings already pointed towards the dissolution of the concept of the unconscious, a process that was finally completed in Nietzsche's late writings on the will to power.

National literatures are an assumption of modern cultural landscapes. In countries around the world schoolchildren in state-mandated courses read the “Great Works” of their nation. Universities offer literature courses in a smorgasbord of national units: course catalogues list classes such as “Russian Masterpieces,” “The Brazilian Novel,” and “Major American Authors.” The style, themes, and narratives of each nation's literary canon, the pantheon of most valorized and legitimated texts, are analyzed and debated both in the scholarly literature and in more general social commentaries. Educated people are simply assumed to be conversant with their national canons. In the United States “everyone” is familiar with – even if one hasn't actually read – The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick . National literatures are the cornerstones of national cultures. National literature and national character National literatures have traditionally been understood as reflections of the unique character and experiences of the nation. That is, it is felt that the unique experience of national life generates a national, collective consciousness, or in some formulations a “collective unconscious” marked by a distinctive set of values, tensions, myths, and psychological foci, that produces in turn a certain readily identifiable national character – the American cowboy or the French sophisticate, for example. This character, and the values, tensions, and myths from which it springs, is then discernible in indigenous cultural products. Thus the distinctiveness of a national literature is seen as the natural embodiment of the distinctive national character (e.g., Wolfenstein and Leites 1950; Goldmann 1964, 1970).

In 1932, Cambridge University Press published Remembering, by psychologist, Frederic Bartlett. The landmark book described fascinating studies of memory and presented the theory of schema which informs much of cognitive science and psychology today. In Bartlett's most famous experiment, he had subjects read a Native American story about ghosts and had them retell the tale later. Because their background was so different from the cultural context of the story, the subjects changed details in the story that they could not understand. Based on observations like these, Bartlett developed his claim that memory is a process of reconstruction, and that this construction is in important ways a social act. His concerns about the social psychology of memory and the cultural context of remembering were long neglected but are finding an interested and responsive audience today. Now reissued in paperback, Remembering has a new Introduction by Walter Kintsch of the University of Colorado, Boulder.

From reductionism to schema theory The language of mental phenomena often sets the stage for our study of the brain, and many neural phenomena can best be described in terms of their role within mental acts or the behaviors of organisms. Yet, we do not see neural levels of description as superseded by the mental. Rather, our aim is to develop a schema theory that makes contact with the phenomena of everyday experience but that can, where appropriate, be supplemented at the neural level of description. All of the many kinds of mind/brain reductionism have in common a naturalistic basis: there are no mental events not explicable by brain science. It follows from this statement that the terms of mental language are all in principle describable in terms of brain language. As we shall see, however, it is possible that mind and brain science are not yet complete enough for the descriptions to be carried out in practice. Dualism, on the other hand (as exemplified by Eccles, Section 4.2), holds that mind involves some entity or substance not identifiable with anything in the material brain.

Fanon's early writings on colonialism are heavily imbued with the tradition of psychoanalytic theory. The eclecticism of Masks is such that it incorporates the whole gamut of the intellectual spectrum, ranging from Freud and Adler to Jaspers and Sartre and Helene Deutsch. The sixth chapter of Masks entitled ‘The Negro and psychopathology’ indicates why this width is so great: Fanon aimed at nothing less than the invention of a theory of the psychic life of colonial man. He believed this project necessary in the absence of any coherent body of thought to provide a satisfactory account of the psychology of the Negro. The existing literature was either unconcerned with the non-European or else gravely lacking in objectivity. According to Fanon, there are substantial difficulties in attempting to apply such theories as those of Freud, Adler, and Jung to the study of the Negro. These difficulties arise because of the differences between the cultural milieus of western Europe where such theories originated, and colonial Africa and the West Indies where the Negro peoples live. In the Antilles Fanon found no significant incidence of mental disorders which fitted the categories of western science. Furthermore, the neurosis and other pathological behaviour that did occur appeared to be related in some fundamental way to the social and cultural situation of the Antillean. Because of this it would be necessary to apply a method of analysis that took cognisance of social, as well as individual history.