Wringhim’s own dark side. A few decades later, Hans Christian Andersen wrote an enigmatic fairy story called TTie
Shadow
(1847), in which a scholar becomes separated from his shadow. When the shadow returns, they exchange roles, which proves fatal for the scholar. A similar theme emerges in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s early novel
The Double
(1845): Mr Golyadkin, a government clerk, encounters a pernicious doppelganger whose actual existence is never properly established and who may be the embodiment of everything the ‘real’ Mr Golyadkin hates (and fears) about himself.
The definitive novel of this genre is, of course, Robert Louis Stevenson’s much celebrated
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886). By using drugs, Jekyll liberates his dark side, which surfaces as the repellent Mr Hyde in whose person Jekyll commits acts of brutality and murder. Yet even this masterpiece was not the final word. Very late in the nineteenth century the theme of dipsychism was still being explored in literature. As, for example, in Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891) – the tale of a beautiful young man who does not age while his portrait is ravaged by time and the consequences of a decadent lifestyle.
Clearly, the ‘psychological’ novels of the nineteenth century preserve the romantic tradition: the human mind is fathomless and the unconscious a secret chamber. Unlocking the unconscious can release elemental forces, some of which can assume identities. Thus, we are provided with a new demonology – sanctioned by science. And the new demons of the unconscious, like their hellish counterparts, are just as capable of taking control. The unconscious is the source of everything imaginable, but, in a world where anything can be imagined, to open the sluice gates of the unconscious is always potentially dangerous. By the late nineteenth century the unconscious had become like Pandora’s box – something fascinating but something to be handled with care. Something that merited a plethora of cautionary tales.
This rather disconcerting view of the unconscious also emerges in the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings appeared at roughly the same time as several of the literary masterpieces cited above. Friedrich Nietzsche (a man whose public image has suffered unfairly because of friendship with Wagner and the indiscriminate approval of Nazi ‘intellectuals’), viewed man as a self-deceiving creature with compromised insight, largely ruled by a chaotic, primitive unconscious – a maelstrom of confused thoughts, feelings, and instincts.
Throughout the nineteenth century many ‘scientific’ commentaries on the unconscious were still steeped in the romantic tradition; however, at the same time, another approach to the unconscious was also beginning to develop. A cooler approach. Less grandiose and less ‘literary’. By contemporary standards, more recognisably scientific.
In 1786 the physician and physicist Luigi Galvani produced muscular contractions in a frog by prodding its nerves with a pair of scissors during an electrical storm. This discovery initiated a programme of research which eventually resulted in the publication of
Commentary on the Effect of Electricity on Muscular Motion
(1791). In this work, Galvani proposed that muscle contraction was produced by an electrical ‘fluid’ that originated in the brain and flowed through the nervous system.
From earliest times animation has always been associated with spirit forces and the soul. In De
Anima,
Aristotle discusses how the soul enables animals to move, by releasing
pneuma
(or spirit) which runs through the body. By getting a frog’s leg to twitch with metal probes and pieces of wire, Galvani was seizing control of a process that had hitherto been strongly associated with the divine. It was God who permitted animals to move, by equipping them not only with the means, but also the will to do so.
It was assumed that ‘animals’ –
Shadow
(1847), in which a scholar becomes separated from his shadow. When the shadow returns, they exchange roles, which proves fatal for the scholar. A similar theme emerges in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s early novel
The Double
(1845): Mr Golyadkin, a government clerk, encounters a pernicious doppelganger whose actual existence is never properly established and who may be the embodiment of everything the ‘real’ Mr Golyadkin hates (and fears) about himself.
The definitive novel of this genre is, of course, Robert Louis Stevenson’s much celebrated
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886). By using drugs, Jekyll liberates his dark side, which surfaces as the repellent Mr Hyde in whose person Jekyll commits acts of brutality and murder. Yet even this masterpiece was not the final word. Very late in the nineteenth century the theme of dipsychism was still being explored in literature. As, for example, in Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891) – the tale of a beautiful young man who does not age while his portrait is ravaged by time and the consequences of a decadent lifestyle.
Clearly, the ‘psychological’ novels of the nineteenth century preserve the romantic tradition: the human mind is fathomless and the unconscious a secret chamber. Unlocking the unconscious can release elemental forces, some of which can assume identities. Thus, we are provided with a new demonology – sanctioned by science. And the new demons of the unconscious, like their hellish counterparts, are just as capable of taking control. The unconscious is the source of everything imaginable, but, in a world where anything can be imagined, to open the sluice gates of the unconscious is always potentially dangerous. By the late nineteenth century the unconscious had become like Pandora’s box – something fascinating but something to be handled with care. Something that merited a plethora of cautionary tales.
This rather disconcerting view of the unconscious also emerges in the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings appeared at roughly the same time as several of the literary masterpieces cited above. Friedrich Nietzsche (a man whose public image has suffered unfairly because of friendship with Wagner and the indiscriminate approval of Nazi ‘intellectuals’), viewed man as a self-deceiving creature with compromised insight, largely ruled by a chaotic, primitive unconscious – a maelstrom of confused thoughts, feelings, and instincts.
Throughout the nineteenth century many ‘scientific’ commentaries on the unconscious were still steeped in the romantic tradition; however, at the same time, another approach to the unconscious was also beginning to develop. A cooler approach. Less grandiose and less ‘literary’. By contemporary standards, more recognisably scientific.
In 1786 the physician and physicist Luigi Galvani produced muscular contractions in a frog by prodding its nerves with a pair of scissors during an electrical storm. This discovery initiated a programme of research which eventually resulted in the publication of
Commentary on the Effect of Electricity on Muscular Motion
(1791). In this work, Galvani proposed that muscle contraction was produced by an electrical ‘fluid’ that originated in the brain and flowed through the nervous system.
From earliest times animation has always been associated with spirit forces and the soul. In De
Anima,
Aristotle discusses how the soul enables animals to move, by releasing
pneuma
(or spirit) which runs through the body. By getting a frog’s leg to twitch with metal probes and pieces of wire, Galvani was seizing control of a process that had hitherto been strongly associated with the divine. It was God who permitted animals to move, by equipping them not only with the means, but also the will to do so.
It was assumed that ‘animals’ –
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