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UNCONSCIOUS
MIND PRIOR TO FRUED:
The term
“unconscious “was coined by the 18th-century German romantic philosopher
Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
The
unconscious mind (or the unconscious) consists of the processes in the mind
that occur automatically and are not available to introspection. It include thought processes, memory, affect,
and motivation. Even though these processes exist well under the surface of
conscious awareness they are theorized to exert an impact on behavior.
Paracelsus
is credited as the first to make mention of an unconscious aspect of cognition
in his work Von den Krankheiten ("About illnesses", 1567), and his
clinical methodology created a cogent system that is regarded by some as the
beginning of modern scientific psychology. Several concepts of unconscious in
his characterizations can be seen in the plays of William Shakespeare.
Western
philosophers such as Espinoza, Leibniz,
A Schopenhauer , Fichte, Hegel , Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, developed a view of the mind which foreshadowed Freud's
theories. Psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer points out that, "the
unconscious was not discovered by Freud”.
In 1890, when psychoanalysis was still unheard
of, William James, in his monumental treatise on psychology, examined the way
Schopenhauer, von Hartmann , Janet, Binet and others had used the term 'unconscious'
and 'subconscious'".
Historian of
psychology Mark Altschule observes that unconscious, cerebral activity and debth psychology were well known to the
nineteenth century psychologists and physicians who practiced psychiatry( like
Eugene Bleuler and Emil Kraeplein).
The
Rediscovery of the Unconscious:
In the last quarter of the 19th century, as
the new science of psychology began to emerge from its roots in philosophy and
physiology, consciousness was at the center of the enterprise.
Beginning
with Wundt and Titchener, the whole structuralist school of psychology
attempted to analyze conscious mental states in terms of their constituent
sensations, images, and feelings. Its preferred method of introspection assumed
that people had accurate introspective awareness of their own mental states.
E.G. Boring summarized the achievements of structuralism with a monograph
entitled The Physical Dimensions of Consciousness (1927).
Even William
James, opposed as he was to the doctrines of structuralism, embraced a version
of introspection as his preferred research method (he had a collection of brass
instruments, but he hated using them). James began his Principles of Psychology
with the assertion that "Psychology is the science of mental life" .
By this he meant conscious mental life -- as he made abundantly clear in the
Briefer Course, where he adopted G.T. Ladd’s definition of psychology as
"the description and explanation of states of consciousness as such".
At the same
time, both James and the structuralists understood that there was more to
mental life than was accessible to introspection. The notion that unconscious
processes are important elements of mental life is commonly ascribed to Sigmund
Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, but in fact it was an old idea before
Freud was even born.
At the
beginning of the 18th century, the German philosopher Leibniz had written that
our conscious thoughts are influenced by sensory stimuli of which we are not
aware:
...at every
moment there is in us an infinity of perceptions, unaccompanied by awareness or
reflection.... That is why we are never indifferent, even when we appear to be
most so.... The choice that we make arises from these insensible stimuli,
which... make us find one direction of movement more comfortable than the
other.
At the close
of that century, Immanuel Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,
the philosopher’s last work and arguably the first comprehensive textbook of
psychology, devoted a major section to a discussion "Of the ideas which we
have without being conscious of them":
To have
ideas, and yet not be conscious of them, -- there seems to be a contradiction
in that; for how can we know that we have them, if we are not conscious of
them? Nevertheless, we may become aware indirectly that we have an idea,
although we be not directly cognizant of the same .
In the 19th
century, Herbart, drawing on the views of Leibniz, defined the limen, or
sensory threshold, as a mental battleground where various perceptions,
themselves mostly unconscious, competed for representation in consciousness.
One of the
older ideas can... be completely driven out of consciousness by a new much
weaker idea. On the other hand its
pressure there is not to be regarded as without effect; rather it works with
full power against the ideas which are present in consciousness. It thus causes a particular state of
consciousness, though its object is in no sense really imagined.
In the
Treatise on Physiological Optics, Hermann von Helmholtz argued that our
conscious perceptions are determined by unconscious inferences:
The psychic
activities that lead us to infer that there in front of us at a certain place
there is a certain object of a certain character, are generally not conscious
activities, but unconscious ones. In their result they are the equivalent to
conclusion, to the extent that the observed action on our senses enables us to
form an idea as to the possible cause of this action.... But what seems to
differentiate them from a conclusion, in the ordinary sense of that word, is
that a conclusion is an act of conscious thought.... Still it may be
permissible to speak of the psychic acts of ordinary perception as unconscious
conclusions....
The
pre-Freudian analysis of unconscious mental life reached its apex with Eduard
von Hartmann and his Philosophy of the Unconscious (1868/1931), an extremely
popular work whose three volumes, running to more than a thousand pages, went
through a total of 12 editions.
For
Hartmann, the universe was ruled by the unconscious, a highly intelligent
dynamic force composed of three layers: the absolute unconscious, accounting
for the mechanics of the physical universe; the physiological unconscious,
underlying the origin, evolution, development, and mechanisms of life; and the
relative unconscious, which Hartmann considered to be the origin of conscious
mental life.
If we now
institute a comparison between the Conscious and Unconscious, it is first of
all obvious that there is a sphere which is always reserved to the Unconscious,
because it remains forever inaccessible to consciousness.
Secondly, we
find a sphere which in certain beings only belongs to the Unconscious, but in
others is also accessible to consciousness. Both the scale of organisms as well
as the course of the world's history may teach us that all progress consists in
magnifying and deepening the sphere open to consciousness; that therefore in a
certain sense consciousness must be the higher of the two.
Furthermore,
if in man we consider the sphere belonging both to the Unconscious and also to
consciousness, this much is certain, that everything which any consciousness
has the power to accomplish can be executed equally well by the Unconscious,
and that too always far more strikingly, and therewith far more quickly and
more conveniently for the individual, since the conscious performance must be
striven for, whereas the Unconscious comes of itself and without effort.
Hartmann’s
"relative unconscious" is what I prefer to call the psychological
unconscious – a term referring to those mental states and processes which
influence our experience, thought, and action outside phenomenal awareness and
independent of voluntary control.
We owe to
Hartmann the Romantic notion, still with us in some quarters today, that the
unconscious possesses capacities and powers which are superior to those
available to consciousness. As Hartmann put it: "the Unconscious can
really outdo all the performances of conscious reason".In the end,
however, Hartmann’s ideas proved to be too speculative for the first generation
of scientific psychologists.
Ebbinghaus,
discussing Hartmann’s book, concluded that "what is true is not new, and
what is new is not true". William James also offered a warning which would
reverberate throughout the 20th century exploration of the unconscious:The
distinction… between the unconscious and the conscious being of the mental
state… is the sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, and
of turning what might become a science into a tumbling-ground for whimsies.
James’s
criticism was prophetic, as we can see in the ensuing controversy, ranging
across the entire 20th century, concerning Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of
mental life.
Still, all
of this activity, from Leibniz and Kant to Helmholtz and Hartmann, laid the
foundation for what Henri Ellenberger, the great historian of psychiatry, called
The Discovery of the Unconscious. This discovery was consolidated with what
Ellenberger called a new dynamic psychiatry – the psychiatry of Freud, Jung,
and Adler.
Based on
their clinical observations, for example, Breuer and Freud concluded that the
symptoms of hysteria were produced by unconscious memories of traumatic events:
"hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences".
Our
observations have shown... that the memories which have become the determinants
of hysterical phenomena persist for a long time with astonishing freshness and
with the whole of their affective coloring. We must, however, mention another
remarkable fact... that these memories, unlike other memories of their past
lives, are not at the patients' disposal. On the contrary, these experiences
are completely absent from the patients' memory when they are in a normal
psychical state, or are only present in highly summary form. Not until they
have been questioned under hypnosis do these memories emerge with the
undiminished vividness of a recent event.
I shall
continue with the unconsciousness related developments in the subsequent
decades after Freud and psycho-analytic scholars.
Affectionately,
gandhibabu
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