From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology, from Erasmus Darwin to William James by Edward S. Reed

Author:Edward S. Reed [Reed, Edward S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Yale University Press, ISBN-13: 9780300075816
Published: 2011-08-25T08:13:28+00:00

Page 141

THE UNCONCIOUS TRIUMPHANT

Interestingly, although Bailey's attack was a strong one, it played a minor historical role, as little more than a rearguard action of the Scottish commonsense school against the onslaught of associationism, phenomenalism, and positivism. The Scottish school's unwillingness to countenance almost any form of unconscious psychological processes, combined with its preference for the narrowest methods of introspection, probably doomed it to extinction, even though the proponents of the logical unconscious had the less tenable argument. By the 1860s everyone wanted a theory of the unconscious, or so it seemed. It was widely understood that to formulate a coherent associationist account of perception without enlisting the notion of unconscious inferences was impossible. Thus, in a matter of two short decades, the idea of a logical unconscious went from being a radical innovation to being a bulwark of mainstream theorizing—a concept found useful by several different schools within the new psychology. The opponents of this theory of a logical unconscious were the natural metaphysicians, with their theory of an ontological unconscious, and the spiritualists, with their belief in a supernatural unconscious. The widespread revival of interest in Schopenhauer, the wildfire success of von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious (the bestselling German philosophy book of the second half of the century), and the great vogue of spiritualism in Britain and the United States made both these views strong competitors of the drier, more technical neoassociationism.

Mill's logical unconscious has explanatory value only for those who insist on basing their psychology on sensationalist and associationist premises. The logical unconscious serves to patch up the inconsistencies between the associationists' claims that all knowledge derives from either intuition or inference Page 142

(to use Mill's language) and their embarrassment at being unable to point to the intuitions from which all the inferences are supposedly drawn. The concept of the unconscious that most appealed to the new psychologists of the 1860s and 1870s was thus the one that did the least explanatory work.

The opponents of the logical unconscious were not welcomed by the new psychologists—they could not be, because they doubted the fundamental explanatory trick used in the new discipline. Neither the supernatural nor the ontological unconsciousness had a place in the new psychology. Wundt and Helmholtz—and even James—

abhorred Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, and made sure to say so in no uncertain terms. It is interesting that these more robust concepts of the unconscious were also incompatible with the emerging liberal Protestant theology. The idea of a natural soul that gives us direct access to the Godhead, an idea repeatedly adverted to by Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, has always been treated with derision as ‘‘entusiasm” by mainstream Christian thinkers. And the idea of a supernatural soul, promoted by some of the medical practitioners, spiritualists, and mesmerists of midcentury, which implies that coherent unconscious (and potentially wicked) selves exist within many of us, was also anathema to mainstream European thought. It is only after the turn of the twentieth century, with Freud's work and James's studies of

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