Hidden Minds (4 page)

But why should De Quincey’s
Confessions
and
Suspiria
be regarded as travelogues of the unconscious? In what sense did he really descend – like Orpheus – into a psychic underworld? Why make such an assertion in the first place?

Although De Quincey did not articulate a specific theory of the unconscious, his experiences (and the experiences of his romantic predecessors) do suggest a particular model of mind. A model of a mind partitioned into two distinct parts: an upper, conscious division and a lower, unconscious division (unconscious insofar as the contents of this lower division are ordinarily not available for conscious inspection). The upper mind was considered rational while the lower mind was considered irrational.

De Quincey describes descending into his sleeping mind, which conjures an image of his shrunken consciousness sinking like a diving bell into the murky depths of his own unconscious; however, such metaphors can be misleading and fail to reflect how the mechanisms responsible for producing strange experiences (such as De Quincey’s) were eventually understood by nineteenth-century psychologists. The most popular explanation was nothing to do with consciousness shrinking and descending into the unconscious, but rather the contents of the unconscious expanding and rising into awareness. This was an idea with a fine philosophical pedigree, for example, Plato suggested that, in dreams, the will is unable to operate and rational control cannot be exerted over the passions. Subsequently, activities and themes emerge in the dream world that might cause considerable shame in the dreamer on waking.

If, when asleep, the conscious, rational mind is incapacitated, then any experiences (such as dreams) must reflect activity in the unconscious mind. In De Quincey’s case, his consciousness, made inert by a powerful narcotic, was forced to bear mute witness to a completely unregulated eruption of unconscious material. A similar explanation could also be employed to account for bizarre hallucinations – which might be produced by the same process but then projected on to the ‘screen’ of the external world.

In 1861, Karl Albert Schemer published
The Life of the Dream
further evidence of romanticism’s continuing influence on works of an academic nature. Schemer believed that the language of dreams was symbolic. Moreover, he agreed that dreams were influenced by mystical or spiritual forces; however, he also recognised the influence of more mundane factors, such as physical stimulation of the sleeping body or illness. Again, like von Schubert, Schemer was an advocate of dream interpretation, but his method was somewhat prescriptive. For example, he suggested that objects such as a clarinet or knife represented the penis while narrow courtyards and staircases represented the vagina. Schemer’s account of sexual symbolism is of considerable interest, as it foreshadows psychoanalytic thinking.

Exploration of the dream world continued (more in the tradition of Coleridge and De Quincey than von Schubert and Schemer) with the publication of
Dreams and the Means to Direct Them
(1867). The author was Marie-Jean Hervey de Saint-Denis, a teacher of Chinese language and literature at the Collège de France, His book contained instructions for individuals wishing to control their dreams – a skill he had acquired through systematic self-experimentation. Initially, Hervey de Saint-Denis kept detailed records of his dreams, which helped him to remember them. He then discovered that he could interrupt a dream, waking himself up in order to record unusual or particularly interesting events. As his research progressed, Hervey de Saint-Denis became increasingly self-aware during dreams. He recognised that he was dreaming and practised turning his attention towards the most interesting features of the dream environment. Finally, Hervey de Saint-Denis was able to influence the narrative of his dreams, although this degree of control was never complete. From 1896, techniques for the conscious control of dreams were refined by the Dutch psychiatrist and poet Frederick van Eaden, who coined the term
lucid dreaming
to describe the experience.

As the concept of the unconscious became consolidated, attention settled on the theoretical line dividing the mind into upper and lower chambers – the
limen
or threshold of consciousness. One of the first to consider the exact nature of this horizontal partition was the German philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart, who discussed it at length in a two-volume work,
Knowledge Newly Founded on Experience, Metaphysics, and Mathematics
(1824-25).

In some ways, Herbart’s ideas show an outmoded loyalty to the traditions of Enlightenment thinking. His model of the mind was based on principles borrowed from the physical sciences. Thus, he compared mental events (such as thoughts and perceptions) to interacting particles and sought to describe their dynamic relations using Newtonian-style mathematics; however, unlike a true representative of the Enlightenment, Herbart fully accepted the existence of the unconscious.

For Herbart, the threshold of awareness was not a smooth surface, disturbed only by the graceful ascent of memories. The limen was a plane of perpetual conflict – seething with activity. Thoughts and perceptions jostled each other, vying for a place in awareness. Stronger thoughts and impressions pushed the weaker ones below the threshold, from where they immediately fought to recover their former position. This account is peculiarly Darwinian. Animated cognitions and percepts compete with each other for a limited resource – consciousness – and only the ‘fittest’ survive in awareness.

Herbart can also be credited for introducing the now familiar concept of
repression.
Clearly, the ‘fittest’ thoughts and objects of perception must exert some kind of force to keep the weaker ones below the awareness threshold. Therefore, forgetting is not a passive process, but an active process. Forgotten information must be continuously inhibited, or it would simply fight its way back into consciousness.

The proper scientific investigation of the awareness threshold began with the advent of Gustav Fechner’s
Psychophysics —
a new discipline that attempted to use mathematics to describe the limits of perception. It ís ironic that Fechner, now canonised in the history of psychology as a very rigorous scientist, was also the author of works such as
Nanna, or on the Soul-life of Plants
(1848), and
Zand-Avesta, or on the Things of Heaven and the Beyond
(1851).

In 1850 Fechner started to employ mathematics to quantify perception. He determined the smallest intensity of a stimulus that could be perceived consciously. This then served as a zero point on a scale and represented what he called the
absolute threshold,
fechner plotted the relationship between physical and subjective stimulus intensities above the absolute threshold and expressed them in a logarithmic formula, now known as Fechner’s Law. This work was eventually published in 1860 as
Elements of Psychopnysics.
If the unconscious were a country, then Fechner had succeeded in mapping its border; however, it was the physician and painter Karl Gustav Carus who declared that country independent in 1846, with the publication of
Psyche -
the first attempt to provide a complete and objective theory of unconscious mental life. It is the progenitor of all subsequent works that deal exclusively with the nature of the unconscious.

Instead of conceptualising the unconscious as a unitary phenomenon, Carus distinguished three different levels, each varying with respect to degree of accessibility. Moreover, he began to list what he considered to be the defining features of the unconscious. For example, he suggested that the unconscious is constantly flowing (thus, if an idea sinks into the unconscious it will continue to evolve and develop); indefatigable (unlike the conscious mind which needs periods of rest); and the unconscious has its own laws (although these are very different from those that govern conscious mental activity). Cams also showed a continuing commitment to romanticism by suggesting that the unconscious was a repository of ancient wisdom, connecting all of humanity.

A later successor to Cams was Eduard von Hartmann, whose
Philosophy of the Unconscious
(1869) overlapped with
Psyche,
but was better argued on account of frequent references to factual evidence. Like Carus, von Hartmann described different levels of the unconscious, ranging from the absolute unconscious (which corresponds with romanticism’s world soul) to the psychological unconscious (which underlies the consciousness of every individual).

Although the works of Carus and von Hartmann have not been greatly influential, they mark the beginning of a new epoch. From the middle of the nineteenth century the unconscious was established as a topic worthy of independent study. A topic that merited its own literature.

In 1884, the American psychologists Charles Peirce and Joseph Jastrow published an academic paper titled On small differences of sensation’, it was a report on the seemingly uninspiring and dry topic of weight discrimination; however, in fact, Peirce and Jastrow’s modest study is the first investigation of what would one day be known as subliminal perception.

Peirce and Jastrow gave their experimental subjects weights and asked them to judge which was the heaviest. This task was extremely difficult because the weights were almost – but not quite – identical. Consequently, subjects were forced to make a wild guess; however, these so-called guesses proved to be remarkably accurate. Even though subjects claimed that they had no idea which was the heaviest weight, they showed a marked tendency to select the right one. This suggested that the difference between weights was being accurately determined by the unconscious mind, which was then influencing conscious guesses. Peirce and Jastrow had demonstrated that the hidden intelligence of the unconscious could be engaged in a laboratory task by feeding it information delivered below the threshold of awareness.

Back in 1702, Bernard de Fontenelle (a populariser of science) had famously anticipated ‘a century that will become more enlightened day by day, so that all previous centuries will be lost in darkness by comparison’. For psychology, this was true. The workings of the mind had been illuminated for nearly a hundred years by the brilliant torch of the Enlightenment. But by 1850 the romantics had cast long shadows across the drawing rooms of Europe. The polished table clocks, which had provided the Age of Reason with such a powerful metaphor, had lost their shine. The mind was not like a well-regulated clock, it could not be dismantled and put together again by introspection. The mind was vast, deep, possibly infinite and its depths could be visited in sleep and experienced as dreams.

The unconscious had arrived.

I
n the 1850s, the senior residents of Meersburg on the shores of Lake Constance were still able to remember the old ‘aristocrat’. He had possessed, so they said, a remarkable affinity with birds. Indeed, he was often followed by a large flock – an entourage of avian disciples. Moreover, the residents recalled that the aristocrat’s pet canary had become like a personal retainer, waking his master in the morning and sugaring his drink. So close was the relationship between man and bird that when the man died on 5 March 1815 the canary was heartbroken. It refused to sing or eat, and expired within a few days. The old ‘aristocrat’ – the birdman of Meersburg – was Franz Anton Mesmer. He died a bitter man, because
mesmerism,
his revolutionary treatment for all ailments, had been neither appreciated nor accepted by the scientific establishment. He had also discovered, inadvertently, a powerful method for gaining entry into the unconscious mind; however, unlike his many followers, Mesmer chose to ignore it.

Mesmer, the son of a game warden, was born in the Swabian town of Iznang. He studied medicine in Vienna, but demonstrated an early interest in universal forces by submitting a thesis on planetary influence and disease. After graduating, Mesmer practised medicine, but managed to escape a humdrum career (and his humble social background) by getting married in 1767 to an extremely wealthy widow, Maria Anna von Bosch – a woman descended from the German nobility. Thereafter, the young doctor’s circumstances were dramatically altered. He continued to practise medicine, but did so while living the pampered life of an aristocrat. Mesmer’s large estate attracted celebrity visitors such as Gluck and Haydn, and the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had his first operetta,
Bastiert und Bastienne,
performed in Mesmer’s private garden theatre.

Between 1773 and 1774 Mesmer began to experiment with a treatment which employed magnets; however, he soon concluded that any therapeutic benefit arising from this treatment was attributable to a subtle ‘fluid’ or force emanating from his own body. He named this fluid ‘animal magnetism’. The word ‘animal’, in this context, does not reflect Mesmer’s assessment of his own brute power to charm but rather an etymological origin – the latin
anima
meaning soul. Although Mesmer had dispensed with the idea that magnetism per se was therapeutic, he continued to employ magnets to boost and direct his own exotic emanations.

Mesmer considered himself a product of the Enlightenment, and he was subsequently keen to develop a scientific, rational theory that could account for his clinical successes. Framing his explanation in terms of invisible fluids or forces was, in fact, entirely consistent with the most respectable science of the day. After all, no less a figure than Sir Isaac Newton had proposed a theory of universal gravitation. Moreover, Newton was known to have speculated on the existence of a universal substance (later called ether) which acted as a medium through which gravity and light might travel. Therefore, Mesmer’s insistence on the existence of a weightless, invisible ‘fluid’, is not quite so strange when considered in a contemporary context.