Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Jean-Martin Charcot (1835–1893) was perhaps the first proximate precursor of Freud. The greatest neurologist of his time, who treated patients ‘from Samarkand to the West Indies’, he was the man who made hypnotism respectable when he used it to distinguish hysterical paralysis from organic paralysis. He proved his case by having patients produce paralyses under hypnosis. Subsequently he was able to show that hysterical paralyses often occurred after traumas. He also showed that hysterical memory loss could be recovered under hypnosis. Freud spent four months at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, studying with Charcot, though doubt has recently been thrown on the Frenchman’s work: it now seems that his patients behaved as they did to accommodate their therapists’ expectations.⁶

Hypnosis was a very popular form of treatment throughout the nineteenth century, linked also to a condition known as ambulatory automatism, when people seemed to hypnotise themselves and perform tasks of which they were unaware until they recovered. Hypnosis likewise proved useful with a number of cases of what we now call fugue, where people suddenly dissociate from their lives, leave their homes and may even forget who they are.⁷ As the nineteenth century progressed, however, interest in hypnosis waned, though hysteria remained a focus of psychiatric attention. Because there were, roughly speaking, twenty female cases for every male one, hysteria was from the beginning looked upon as a female disease and although the root cause had originally been conceived as in some mysterious way having to do with the movement or ‘wandering’ of the uterus, it soon became clear that it was a form of psychological illness. A sexual role was considered possible, even likely, because hysteria was virtually absent among nuns but common in prostitutes.⁸

Arguably the first appearance of the unconscious as we now understand the term came after the magnetisers noticed that when they induced magnetic sleep in someone, ‘a new life manifested itself of which the subject was unaware, and that a new and often more brilliant personality emerged’.⁹

These ‘two minds’ fascinated the nineteenth century, and there emerged the concept of the ‘double ego’ or ‘dipsychism’.¹⁰ People were divided as to whether the second mind was ‘closed’ or ‘opened’. The dipsychism theory was developed by Max Dessoir in The Double Ego, published to great acclaim in 1890, in which he divided the mind into the Oberbewussten and the Unterbewussten

, ‘upper consciousness’ and ‘under consciousness’, the latter, he said, being revealed occasionally in dreams.

Among the general background factors giving rise to the unconscious, romanticism was intimately involved, says Ellenberger, because romantic philosophy embraced the notion of Urphänomene, ‘primordial phenomena’ and the metamorphoses deriving from them.¹¹ Among the Urphänomene were the Urpflanze

, the primordial plant, the All-Sinn, the universal sense, and the unconscious. Another primordial phenomenon, according to Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert (1780–1860), was Ich-Sucht (self-love). Von Schubert said man was a ‘double star’, endowed with a Selbstbewussten, a second centre.¹²

Johann Christian August Heinroth (1773–1843), described by Ellenberger as a ‘romantic doctor’, argued that the main cause of mental illness was sin. He theorised that conscience originated in another primordial phenomenon, the Über-Uns (over-us).¹³ Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887), a Swiss, promulgated the theory of matriarchy, publishing in 1861 The Law of Mothers.¹⁴ He believed, he said, that history had gone through three phases, ‘hetairism, matriarchy and patriarchy’. The first had been characterised by sexual promiscuity, when children did not know their fathers; the second was established only after thousands of years of struggle, but women had won out, founded the family and agriculture and wielded all the social and political power. The main virtue at this time was love for the mother, with the mothers together favouring a social system of general freedom, equality and peace. Matriarchal society praised education of the body (practical values) above education of the intellect. Patriarchal society emerged only after another long period of bitter struggle. It involved a complete reversal of matriarchal society, favouring individual independence and isolating men from one another. Paternal love is a more abstract principle than maternal love, says Bachofen, less down-to-earth and leading to high intellectual achievement. He believed that many myths contain evidence of matriarchal society, for example the myth of Oedipus.¹⁵