In the 18th Century major thinkers, mostly philosophers, but also the new and rising Class of Scientists, began to take a real interest in how the human mind works. You had Hume and Locke, both, publishing major treatises going into great detail, attempting to explain how it is that we humans, with this mind that we have, along with its various apparent faculties such as intellection, sensation, imagination, is able to think up stuff like Geometry, Algebra, and, Physics…

In particular, Newtonian Mechanics.

This interest in the human mind wasn’t anything flash in the pan either.
It continues today in all sorts of ways, scientifically, as biomedical engineering, and…

Along came your Physicians who were treating mental illness and who attested to the fact that the primary phenomenon under investigation by Psychologists in the 19th Century, wasn’t the Mind, per se, or even Consciousness.

But rather… the Unconscious.

And so, you see big contributors like William James writing massive compilations of everything we thought we knew, and didn’t know, about the human mind, consciousness, and, this newly found thing… the Unconscious. Then we got Freud, Jung, Adler, Reich, and a host of other contributors coming at the problem set in an empirical fashion, utilizing long known anecdotal evidence of altered states of Consciousness from Medical Science.

It turned out that the primary phenomenon, Consciousness, is not a perfect on/off kind of thing like a light switch. Hypnagogic states and free dreaming were just two of the many phenomena that Psychology would need to explain in order to earn its true Scientific bonafides.

Freud and Jung were absolutely critical to the rise of modern Critical Psychological Theory. And, as it turned out, when it is turned toward figuring out the overall functioning of human consciousness, and how it impacts human behavior, this kind of Psychology turns out to be a lot like…

ARCHAEOLOGY.

The word Archaeology comes from the Greek ἀρχαιολογία which means… “antiquarian lore, ancient legends, history.”

Once again. We bump into this notion that we are somehow wrapped up in an ongoing Narrative. A Story that is being told. Made up. Like… a Myth.