Is there someone else in my head?

You meet someone new. They’re perfectly nice. They haven’t done anything. And you just… don’t like them. “I don’t know, I just get a weird vibe.” Two years later you realise they have exactly the same laugh as the girl who bullied you in year six.

A song has been stuck in your head all day. You finally listen to the lyrics. It’s about someone leaving. You had a fight with your partner this morning. Coincidence, surely.

You walk into the kitchen with a clear purpose, stand there, and have absolutely no idea why you came. Your body walked you here. Your mind just came along for the ride.

You dream that you’re back in school, it’s exam day, and you haven’t studied. You finished school years ago. Why is your brain still worried about a chemistry test?

In horror films there’s a classic moment: the babysitter keeps getting creepy phone calls, the police trace them, and the terrible news arrives. The call is coming from inside the house.

That’s this chapter. All those strange feelings, songs, dreams and vibes? Nobody’s calling from outside. There’s someone else in there with you.

The question is: who?

Let’s start with a confession on Freud’s behalf. Everyone thinks he discovered the unconscious. He didn’t. It was already there when he arrived, sitting on the sofa, eating his snacks.

Go back to around 1700. The German philosopher Leibniz notices something about the sound of the sea. When you stand on a beach, you hear the roar of the waves. But that roar is made of thousands of tiny sounds, each drop of water hitting another. You don’t hear any of them individually. You only hear them all together. So, said Leibniz, your mind must be picking up loads of little perceptions you’re not aware of. Tiny unconscious bits of experience, adding up to what you notice.

Then, in 1818, a very grumpy philosopher called Arthur Schopenhauer publishes a book arguing that underneath everything, including you, there’s a blind, restless force that wants and wants and never stops wanting. Your conscious mind thinks it’s the boss. It’s not. We’ll meet him properly in a minute.

Then in 1869, another philosopher, Eduard von Hartmann, publishes a book called, and I’m not joking, The Philosophy of the Unconscious. It becomes a bestseller. People are talking about “the unconscious” in fashionable salons across Europe while Freud is still a teenager.

And the doctors are on it too. In the 1880s, young Freud goes to Paris and then Nancy, in France, to watch doctors hypnotising patients. And he sees something he never forgets. A patient is hypnotised and told to do something odd later, after waking up. Something silly, like opening an umbrella indoors. The patient wakes up, has no memory of the instruction, and then, at the right moment, does it. And when you ask them why? They don’t say “I don’t know.” They immediately come up with a perfectly reasonable explanation. “Oh, I just wanted to check if it was broken.”

Remember the rider and the horse from chapter 1? That’s it, live on stage. The horse does something, and the rider instantly invents a reason.

So if Freud didn’t invent the unconscious, what did he actually do? Two things. He turned it from a vague idea into a battlefield: not just a storage room for stuff you haven’t noticed, but a place full of wishes and memories that are actively being pushed away, and pushing back. And he built a method to go in and look.

So, detective, here’s our case: the idea was already out there. Freud gave it a plot.

Meet Arthur Schopenhauer. Born in 1788, died in 1860. Possibly the grumpiest man in the history of philosophy, and that’s a competitive category.

Some highlights. As a young lecturer in Berlin, he scheduled his classes at exactly the same time as Hegel, the superstar philosopher of the day, to prove he was better. Almost nobody came to his. He gave up teaching. Later he lived alone in Frankfurt with a series of poodles, and he named one of them Atma, a Sanskrit word for the world-soul. His big book barely sold for decades. Fame only arrived when he was old, at which point he was extremely smug about it.

And his view of life? He said life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom. When you want something, you suffer because you don’t have it. When you get it, you’re bored, and you start wanting something else. That’s it. That’s the pendulum. Happy Monday.

Why he matters to us: in his main book, The World as Will and Representation, published in 1818, Schopenhauer says that underneath everything, the stars, the plants, the animals, and you, there’s one force. He calls it the Will. And no, not “willpower.” Not your New Year’s resolutions. The Will is blind, restless, endless wanting. It’s what makes plants grow towards light, animals hunt, and you open the fridge for the fourth time even though nothing new has appeared in there.

And your conscious, thinking mind? It’s not the boss. It’s the servant. Schopenhauer had an image for this, and it’s almost identical to Freud’s rider and horse. He said the Will is like a strong blind man carrying a lame man on his shoulders. The lame man can see, so he gives directions. But the blind giant is the one doing the walking, and he’s the one who decides where to go.

It gets better. Schopenhauer said that the strongest expression of the Will in humans is… sex. Almost a hundred years before Freud became famous for saying it. He wrote that when you fall in love, you think it’s about this person’s beautiful soul, or their smile, or their taste in music. But really, it’s nature using you to make the next generation. Your romantic feelings are the species’ marketing department.

He even described something that looks a lot like repression: that the mind resists painful thoughts, pushes them away, keeps them out of awareness, and that when this goes too far, it can break a person.

So what’s his solution? Not much fun, honestly. Art, especially music, gives you a short break from the endless wanting. And long term, he said the way out is compassion and quieting your desires, ideas he’d found in Buddhism and Hindu philosophy, which he was one of the first European philosophers to take seriously.

So: blind force underneath, the conscious mind as a servant, sex at the centre, painful thoughts pushed away. Sound like anyone we know?

So how did Freud react when someone pointed out that Schopenhauer had said a lot of this first? One of his students literally showed him the passage where Schopenhauer describes the mind pushing painful thoughts away. Freud’s answer, more or less: “Well, I got there on my own. I owe my originality to the fact that I don’t read very much.”

Which is the most Freud sentence ever written. Later, he did admit that psychoanalysis overlaps with Schopenhauer on a lot: the importance of feelings over reason, the power of sex, even repression. But he insisted he’d only read him late in life. Sure, Sigmund. Sure.

But Freud did add something new. Schopenhauer said there’s a blind force down there. Freud said: let’s draw a map. And his map was a house. His own image, not mine.

Picture a big, crowded entrance hall. It’s full of people pushing and shoving: wishes, urges, memories, fears. Everyone wants to get into the next room. This hall is the unconscious.

Next to it, there’s a smaller, nicer room, like a living room. That’s where things go when they’re allowed in. This is the preconscious: stuff you’re not thinking about right now but could easily bring to mind if someone asked. Your childhood phone number. What you ate for breakfast. The name of that actor from that thing. It’s not hidden, it’s just waiting.

And sitting in that living room, watching whoever comes in, is consciousness: the tiny bit of your mind that’s actually aware of what’s happening right now.

Then there’s the most important person in the whole house. Standing at the door between the crowded hall and the living room, there’s a bouncer. He checks every wish and memory that tries to get in. The acceptable ones get through. The embarrassing, painful, forbidden or scary ones? Turned away. Pushed back into the hall. That bouncer’s job is what Freud called repression.

And this is the key difference between the unconscious and just forgetting. Forgetting your dentist appointment is the preconscious; remind yourself and it’s back. The unconscious is different. That stuff isn’t lost. It’s being actively kept out. And it doesn’t give up. It keeps trying to get past the bouncer, and when it can’t go through the front door, it finds sneaky ways in: disguised in dreams, slipping out in accidental words, hiding in jokes, showing up as feelings you can’t explain. Like disliking someone for no reason, and only years later realising they laugh like your old bully.

So the call really is coming from inside the house. It’s coming from the entrance hall.

This is where they split. Schopenhauer’s Will is the same blind force in everyone, in animals, even in plants. It’s cosmic. Freud’s unconscious is personal. It’s full of your stuff: your childhood, your family, your particular wishes and your particular fears. Schopenhauer wrote about the universe. Freud wrote your biography.

Quick warning: Freud later redesigned the whole house, and brought in three new residents called the id, the ego and the superego. That’s chapter 3.

Tonight’s debate: a philosopher who lived alone with his poodles versus a doctor who spent all day listening to people’s secrets.

So who wins?

No winner, but a clear difference in mood. They agree on the big thing: your conscious mind is not the boss. Something older, stronger and blinder is doing a lot of the steering.

Schopenhauer’s answer is resignation: accept it and want less. Freud’s answer is exploration: go in, look around, and take back a little territory.

So you can choose. Make peace with the giant, or start drawing the map.

Freud didn’t invent the unconscious. The idea of mental processes outside awareness existed long before him. Leibniz argued for “small perceptions” we register without noticing (New Essays on Human Understanding, written c. 1704, published 1765). Schopenhauer placed a blind, unconscious Will at the root of human behaviour (1818). Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) was a bestseller before Freud’s career began. Doctors like Charcot and Bernheim used hypnosis to show that people act on instructions they can’t remember and then invent reasons for their actions.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860): German philosopher, author of The World as Will and Representation (1818, expanded 1844). He argued that reality at its deepest level is Will: a blind, endless striving present in all of nature, including humans. The intellect serves the Will rather than directing it, like a lame man who can see being carried by a strong blind man. He saw sexual desire as the Will’s strongest expression, described life as swinging between pain and boredom, and found relief in art, music, compassion and the quieting of desire, drawing on Buddhist and Hindu thought.

Freud’s contribution: Freud made the unconscious dynamic: not just unnoticed material, but wishes and memories actively kept out of awareness through repression, which keep trying to return in disguised forms such as dreams, slips and symptoms. He also developed a method, psychoanalysis, to explore it.

Freud’s first map (the topographical model): Set out in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). The unconscious holds repressed content; the preconscious holds material not currently in awareness but easily recalled; consciousness is what we are aware of right now. In his Introductory Lectures (1916–17), Freud pictured this as a crowded entrance hall, a reception room, and a watchman at the door between them. In 1923 he added a second model: id, ego and superego (chapter 3).

Freud and Schopenhauer: Freud acknowledged a large overlap with Schopenhauer, including the primacy of emotion, the importance of sexuality and something close to repression, but claimed he reached his ideas independently and read Schopenhauer late (On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, 1914; An Autobiographical Study, 1925).

Where they differ: Schopenhauer’s Will is universal and metaphysical, the same force in everything. Freud’s unconscious is personal and shaped by each individual’s history. Schopenhauer’s response is resignation and the reduction of desire; Freud’s is to make unconscious material conscious, with the modest aim, as he put it in Studies on Hysteria (1895), of transforming “hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”

Where to go next:

• Schopenhauer’s Essays and Aphorisms (Penguin Classics), the most readable way into him.
• Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, especially the lectures on the unconscious and repression.
• Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Janaway.