I look at the question from a historical perspective. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the word "unconscious," denoting an absence of free will, was not common prior to the late 19th century when Freudian psychology made its claim to be a legitimate scientific discipline. If that is the case, isn't Marilyn's original question similar to the question about the sound of the tree falling in the forest? If the idea of an unconscious did not exist, doesn't that indicate that few readers considered that there might be an meaning the author did not intend? Can we say that such a meaning existed if there was no one there to encode it?
Lance Levens
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