[The "impersonal id" and resolution of the ego. On Karl Philipp Moritz]

Long before Freud, 18th and 19th century thinkers were speculating on the nature of the unconscious. One such thinker was the German littérateur and psychologist Karl Philipp Moritz, a representative of the "Storm and Stress" movement with roots in late German Enlightenment thinking. In the historiography of psychoanalysis his significance as an early theoretician of the unconscious has yet to be adequately appreciated. The author shows that the very term "Es" (German for "id") and an (albeit fragmentary and inconsistent) conception of what the term implies can in fact be traced back to Moritz. His view of the "id" was that of an uncanny force invested with an "energy" that is the very essence of Nature and frequently overwhelms the ego of the individual human agent. Moritz' concept of two opposing urges, one cohesive, the other disintegrative, is related to the Freudian dualism between life instinct and death wish and reveals Moritz as a thinker caught up in the conflict between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment and adumbrating some of the essential features of irrationalist thinking in the late 19th century.