In Western historiography of psychology the discovery of the unconscious has often been attributed to Sigmund Freud. However, hundreds of years earlier, a systematic differentiation of consciousness and unconscious personality processes was established by Indian scholars. Already 800 years ago, psychology had an academic status in the universities for the brahman elite; not as an independent discipline, of course, but within the Indian philosophical systems. Even more, this system offers far more differentiated explanations of psychological processes and an approach bridging the gap between the conscious and unconscious cognitive spheres that has not been followed up much since.