From his earliest lectures on psychoanalysis in 1915–1917 to his very last works on the subject in 1938, Sigmund Freud remarked upon the vehement opposition provoked by the very idea of the unconscious, especially in scientific circles: “The concept of the unconscious has long been knocking at the gates of psychology and asking to be let in. Philosophy and literature have often toyed with it, but science could find no use for it.” From the outset, he insisted that the existence of the unconscious had been empirically proven, challenging “anyone in the world to give a more correct scientific account of this state of affairs, and if he does we will gladly renounce our hypothesis of unconscious mental processes. Till that happens, however, we will hold fast to the hypothesis; and if someone objects that here the unconscious is nothing real in a scientific sense, is a makeshift, une façon de parler, we can only shrug our shoulders resignedly and dismiss what he says as unintelligible.”
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References
Sigmund Freud, “Some Elementary Lessons in Psycho-analysis [1940]”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1966–1974), vol. XXIII, p. 286.
Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis [1916–1917], in Standard Edition, vol. XVI, pp. 277–278.
Ibid. vol. XVI, p. 285.
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id [1923], in Standard Edition, vol. XIX, pp. 25–26.
For general surveys of these theories, see Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 182–330; Alexander Jacob, De Natura Naturae: A Study of Idealistic Conceptions of Nature and the Unconscious (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992), pp. 56–158.
These papers were probably presented to the Royal Danish Society circa 1807: Ole Immanuel Franksen, H. C. Ørsted: A Man of the Two Cultures (Birkerød: Strandbergs Forlag, 1981), p. 14.
I shall rely on the German translations that first appeared in 1851 in a collection entitled Neue Beiträge zu dem Geist in der Natur; I very much regret that my lack of Danish prevents me from working from the original versions.
Hans Christian Ørsted, Ueber die Gründe des Vergnügens, welches die Töne hervorbringen, in Neue Beiträge zu dem Geist der Natur, trans. K. L. Kannegießer, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Carl B. Lorch, 1855), vol. 1, pp. 1–38, on p. 34; Ørsted, Die Naturwirkung des geordneten Lautausdrucks, in ibid. vol. 1, pp. 39–67, on p. 45.
Ørsted, Ueber die Gründe, p. 15.
Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1787).
Franz Melde, Chladni’s Leben und Wirken, 2nd ed. (Marburg: N.G. Elwert’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1888), pp. 11–12. Chladni also described Lichtenberg as the Geburtshilfer of his later hypothesis that meteorites were of extraterrestrial origin: ibid., pp. 48–50.
Hans Christian Ørsted, “A Letter from Mr.Ørsted, Professor of Philosophy in Copenhagen, to Professor Pictet on Acoustic Vibrations [1805]”, in Karen Jelved, Andrew D. Jackson, and Ole Knudsen, trans. and eds., Selected Scientific Works of Hans Christian Ørsted, with an Introduction by Andrew D. Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 181–184, on p. 182.
Ørsted, Ueber die Gründe, p. 15. Lichtenberg also seized upon this aspect of Chladni’s discovery: in a 1792 letter introducing Chladni to the astronomer Heinrich Olbers, he praised what “this excellent man [Chladni] has done for the theory of the vibrations of sounding bodies by making these visible [durch Sichtbarmachung derselben]”. Quoted in Dieter Ullmann, Chladni und die Entwicklung der Akustik von 1750–1860 (Basel/Boston/Berlin: Birkhäuser, 1996), p. 49.
Hans Christian Ørsted, “On the Harmony between Electrical Figures and Organic Forms [1805]”, in Jelved et al. Selected Scientific Works, pp. 185–191, on p. 185.
Hans Christian Ørsted, Zwei Kapitel der Naturlehre des Schönen, in Neue Beiträge, vol. 1, pp. 69–125, on p. 78.
Ørsted, Ueber die Gründe, p. 19.
Ibid. p. 21. Cp. Kant’s remarks on the “infinitely many splendid properties” of the circle, and the delight it and other mathematical figures inspire by revealing “intellectual purposiveness” in nature: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment [1790], translated by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1987), II. 62, pp. 239–240 (Akademie ed. pp. 362–364).
Ibid. p. 23.
Ibid. p. 27.
Cp. Hans Christian Ørsted, “View of the Chemical Laws of Nature Obtained through Recent Discoveries [1812]”, in Jelved et al., Selected Scientific Works, pp. 310–392, on p. 384: “However, what finally gives the study of nature its ultimate meaning is the clear understanding that natural laws are identical with the laws of reason, so they are in their application like thoughts; the totality of the laws of an objcet, regarded as its essence, is therefore an idea of Nature, and the law or the essence of the universe is the quintessence of all ideas, identical with absolute reason. And so we see all of nature as the manifestation of one infinite force and one infinite reason united, as the revelation of God”.
Andrew D. Wilson, “Introduction”, in Jelved et al., Selected Scientific Works, p. xxxvi; Timothy Shanahan, “Kant, Naturphilosophie, and Ørsted’s Discovery of Electromagnetism: A Reassessment”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20(1989): 287–305.
F.W. J. Schelling, Einleitung zu seinen Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie [1799], edited by Wilhelm G. Jacobs (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1988), pp. 19–21.
Hans Christian Ørsted, “Fundamentals of the Metaphysics of Nature Partly According to a New Plan [1799]”, in Jelved et al. Selected Scientific Works, pp. 46–78, on pp. 47, 77.
Hans Christian Ørsted, Ueber das “Unschöne” in der Natur, in Neue Beiträge, vol. 1, pp. 127–142, pp. 130–132.
Ørsted, Naturwirkung, p. 57.
Ørsted, Zwei Kapitel, p. 86.
Ørsted, Ueber die Gründe, p. 32.
Heinrich von Kleist, Über das Marionettentheater [1810] in Der Zweikampf und andere Prosa, ed. Christine Ruhrberg (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), pp. 84–92, on pp. 89, 92.
Ørsted, Ueber die Gründe, p. 32.
Ibid. pp. 37–38.
According to Ørsted, the circle was more beautiful than the triangle, the major chord composed of ground tone, third, and fifth than the minor chord, light than darkness: Ørsted, Ueber die Gründe, pp. 23, 31; Zwei Kapitel, p. 99.
Hermann von Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1863), pp. 552–553.
Ibid. p. 554.
Ibid. p. 555.
Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1867), p. 450.
Hermann von Helmholtz, Über Goethe’s naturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten [1853], in Vorträge und Reden, 5th ed., 2 vols. (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1903), vol. 1, pp. 23–45, on pp. 38–41.
Hermann von Helmholtz, Goethes’s Vorahnungnen kommender naturwissenschaftlicher Ideen [1892], in Vorträge, vol. 2, pp. 335–361, on p. 344.
Hermann von Helmholtz, Über das Verhältnis der Naturwissenschaften zur Gesammtheit der Wissenschaft [1862], in Vorträge, vol. 1, pp. 158–185, on pp. 172–176.
Ibid. p. 178.
Helmholtz, Goethe’s Vorahnungen, p. 341.
Ørsted, Ueber die Gründe, p. 26.
Kant, Critique of Judgement, II.46–47, pp. 174–178 (Akademie ed. pp. 307–310).
Jacques Hadamard, An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field [1945] (New York: Dover, 1954), pp. 12–14; 21–42.
Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers [1959] (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1963), pp. 334–336; 520–524.
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Daston, L.J. (2007). Ørsted And The Rational Unconscious. In: Brain, R.M., Cohen, R.S., Knudsen, O. (eds) Hans Christian Ørsted And The Romantic Legacy In Science. Boston Studies In The Philosophy Of Science, vol 241. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2987-5_12
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