Free Hidden Minds by Frank Tallis

example, ‘The size of an object’s image varies inversely with its distance from the eye’. Subsequently, if an individual perceives a ball getting smaller, then it follows that the ball is receding; however, most people are not aware of engaging in laborious syllogisms to work out the direction of a ball during a game of tennis. Helmholtz suggested that the basic rules of perception are so well learned they operate automatically. Thus, we understand the visual environment with the help of a process Helmholtz called
unconscious inference.
    Clearly, the unconscious, as understood by the likes of Carpenter, Huxley, and Helmholtz, was a rather different unconscious from that as understood by De Quincey, Carus, or Flournoy. The romantic conception of the unconscious was many things, but principally it was an independent agency -within the mind. It could create great works of art, conjure visions in the sensory apparatus, or organise itself around an identity. This other, cooler version of the unconscious was much more ‘mechanistic’. It was almost as though the Enlightenment table clock had made a comeback. But this time, the mind didn’t only operate
like
a clock, the mind was actually
generated
by a clock. Beneath the awareness threshold, impersonal and disinterested processes – processes that worked like clockwork or neural reflexes – were responsible for recollection, perception, and action. This new group of theorists seemed to be suggesting that Pandora’s box contained no intelligence, no wise agencies – merely brain circuits that twitched insensibly, like frog’s legs prodded with wire. Could they possibly be right? It would be almost a hundred years before this kind of thinking was given the serious consideration it properly deserved.
    After the mid nineteenth century and the sanitization of hypnotism, its use as both a treatment and an exploratory tool became more frequent in medical circles – particularly among neurologists and psychiatrists. The phenomenon of post-hypnotic suggestion had become well established. It had been repeatedly demonstrated that instructions capable of influencing behaviour could be planted in the unconscious. This led some practitioners to consider the role of latent ideas in the formation of behavioural symptoms. Could, for example, certain ideas enter the mind and work their way down into the unconscious? Could the mind be poisoned – as it were – from below the awareness threshold, and could such a mechanism explain mental illness?
    In 1873 the physician, Auguste Ambroise Liebeault, wrote that an idea planted in the mind of a hypnotised individual might become lodged inside -or ‘fixed’ in the terminology of the day.
    … while the mind is occupied with the daily actions of normal life which the subject accomplishes consciously and of his own free will, some of the ideas suggested in that former passive state continue their hidden movement. No obstacle can hinder them in their fatal course …
    If mental illness was caused by pernicious ideas that had become fixed in the unconscious, then how could they be discovered? How could they be brought into awareness? And how could they be removed? It was in pursuit of the answers to questions such as these that psychotherapy was born.
    In the early 1880s psychotherapy did not exist (and hypnosis had proved to be an unreliable treatment). By the end of the 1880s, however, everything would change. The unconscious was to have a central role to play in
fin-de-siècle
explanations of mental illness. Moreover, psychotherapy would be the institution and vehicle through which the unconscious would become the most celebrated of ail psychological concepts.

3

The philosophy teacher
    I n 1885 something very strange was happening in Le Havre. That autumn a young philosophy teacher, Pierre Janet, had begun a remarkable set of experiments on a woman called (in order to preserve her anonymity) Madame B. His findings were presented before