find yourself in tension

In the passage above, Whyte discusses his central concern that the twentieth-century does not fully understand the significance of Freud's conception of the unconscious, a development that is in fact indebted to an intellectual history going back to the eighteenth century. Given the rapid progress of technology and science in the late modern period, it is easy to use the narrative of progress to occlude the aspects of our society that are repressed, held under an order structured by an impatient rationality that thinks itself as already mature and enlightened. As Paul Bishop notes in "The unconscious from the Storm and Stress to Weimar Classicism: the dialectic of time and pleasure", the ego that emerges as a thinking thing in Descartes' cogito has traditionally been thought of as selftransparent, since all one's being is what one thinks consciously, and therefore is only consciousness (Bishop 31). In conceptualizing the identity of the mind as consciousness, which Freud objects to explicitly in his work, we philosophically relegate out the possibility of parts of the self that are not visible to the stated "I" or the ego.