The Antecedents of Psychoanalysis

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The Antecedents of Psychoanalysis
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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

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The Unconscious in Philosophy

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

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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.

Ph
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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

Ph
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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

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The Unconscious in Psychology

• Fechner the mind as an iceberg, most of it
  submerged and unconscious
• Wundts distinction between apprehension and
  apperception
• Robert Louis Stevensons novel Dr Jekyll and Mr
  Hyde

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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.

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Approaches to Mental Illness

• Spiritual (demonology)
• Sociological (emprisonment w/ poor and criminal)
• Biological
• Psychological (moral therapy, hypnosis)

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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

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The End