The Antecedents of Psychoanalysis

Roots of Psychoanalysis

• The Unconscious in Philosophy• The Unconscious in Psychology• Darwin and the Unconscious• Approaches to Mental Illness and the

Unconscious• Hypnosis and the Unconscious

The Unconscious in Philosophy

• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716)• Arthur Schopenhauer(1788-1860)• Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841)

Leibnitz

...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.

Unconscious (petites) perceptions guide our choices.

Schopenhauer

• Wrote The World as Will and Representation.

• The will is unconscious• It manifests itself as sexual desire (the

strongest, most active of desires) and as “love of life”

• Uses the concept of “repression”

Herbart

• Notion of “threshold of consciousness”• To emerge into consciousness, an idea

cannot be incongruous or irrelevant• Inhibited ideas are unconscious• Ideas struggle for conscious realization

The Unconscious in Psychology

• Fechner: the mind as an iceberg, most of it submerged and unconscious

• Wundt’s distinction between apprehension and apperception

• Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Darwin and the Unconscious

• (through Romanes’ books)• Hidden symbolism of behaviors and

dreams• Non rational aspects of thought and

behavior (leading to the “id”)• Centrality of sexuality, present in

children too.

Approaches to Mental Illness

• Spiritual (demonology)• Sociological (emprisonment w/ poor and

criminal)• Biological• Psychological (moral therapy, hypnosis)

Therapy and the Unconscious: Hypnosis

• Anton Mesmer (1734-1815): magnetism• Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893):

catharsis under hypnosis• Bernheim (1840-1919: post-hypnotic

amnesia and suggestion• Pierre Janet(1859-1947) hysteria

caused by repression and unconscious forces

The End