Psyche/Psychism

PSYCHE/PSYCHISM

In their most general sense, the words "psyche" and "mind" refer to phenomena and processes associated with the "soul," understood empirically, without consideration of its content (conscious, unconscious, life principle) but excluding any metaphysical or religious meaning (unity of the soul, distinction between soul and body, immortality).

Although "psyche" and "mind" can, to some extent, be considered synonymous, the first is not really a modern term (except, obviously, in modern Greek) and its use is based on the desire to allude to a context that is as much literary as philosophical. Freud rarely used it outside of such a context (however, see An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 1940a [1938]). Nonetheless, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), he refers to the fact that "the Ancients . . . provided Psyche with butterfly wings." The mythical character of Psyche—who, in a story by Apuleius, loses her husband, Eros, after having looked upon him as he slept—has been the theme of numerous works of literature and art. The fact that, as a common noun, the word "psyche" refers to a type of mirror, has led us to reconsider the concept of the soul as a narcissistic double.

The word "mind" on the contrary is—or claims to be—"scientific." As such it can only be defined with reference to the science whose object it supposedly represents, namely psychology. While the concept of "consciousness" has escaped definition (we can only speak of lived experience), it is likely that any definition of mind will turn out to be circular, or simply limited: "Mind" is the object of psychology as a discipline distinct from metaphysics and biology. But since the limits and principles of psychology are themselves problematic, the difficulty remains.

Introducing the concept of the unconscious does nothing to alleviate the difficulty, since mind cannot be defined as the simple addition of conscious to unconscious. For Freud unconscious is not identical with non-conscious, and the question of just how mind should be defined remains. Hence a reliance on a history of the concept, a history in which, it should be noted, the problem of conscious versus unconscious has only marginal importance.

To vastly oversimplify the matter, we can say that for the early Greeks, "psyche" referred to the breath of life, and for Descartes the soul was identified with consciousness. In Homer the psyche, sometimes represented with butterfly wings, resembles a dream and an unreal image of a man, while the breath of life is called thumos. In the Pythagoreans and Plato the psyche appears as a reality belonging to the moral order. It is capable of good or evil, it will be judged, and it is immortal. But it is also in Plato that we find—following chapter 4 of the Republic —the celebrated distinction between intelligence, anger (thumos ), and the base instincts, which Freud associated, in 1923, with the concepts of ego, superego, and id. This Platonic distinction enriched the notion of the soul with anthropological features and supplied the foundation for a rational and empirical psychology, which was developed in Aristotle, who emphasized, although not exclusively, mental functions that were vital, if not biological (biology did not yet exist as an autonomous science). In fact the Aristotelian notion of the psyche covers a very broad range of functions (metaphysical, "psychological" in the modern sense, biological), while "mind" was not distinguished until the modern era.

The important milestones in this development are not those of the history of the unconscious but of the genesis of empirical psychology. The appearance in 1590, in the Latin title of a work by Rudolf Goeckel, of the word psychologia, in Greek (although the term did not exist in ancient Greek), indicates the tendency of Renaissance culture to use the term to delimit a specific field of thought and research. However, the decisive event was the distinction made by Christian Wolff, in 1732 and 1734, in two works respectively entitled Psychologia Empirica and Psychologia Rationalis. Even though Wolff's first text remains highly speculative, the initial break with rational psychology has been made, through metaphysics, along with a top-down demarcation of the object that the term "mind" would designate. A bottom-up demarcation would take place in the nineteenth century with the development of scientific biology.

What of the unconscious? It is true that Descartes, by defining mens in terms of thought and by rejecting the scholastic concept of soul and its vital aspects, made it necessary to introduce, as early as the seventeenth century, the concept of the unconscious (the term itself did not appear until the eighteenth century and did not become popular until the nineteenth). But when, in German romantic philosophy, the concept was used to designate a form of foundation or first principle, the connection with representation would be broken. For example, Eduard von Hartmann, in his famous Philosophy of the Unconscious of 1869, describes a form of panpsychism that makes it possible to introduce the notion of psychism. Freud himself was familiar with this point of view. When, in a well-known passage from The Interpretation of Dreams, he wrote that "the unconscious is the true reality of the psyche," he destroyed any possibility of defining mind in terms of representation (conscious or non-conscious) and left untouched the problem of the characteristics that could be used to distinguish the psychic from the biological, and from metaphysics.

It is only through an epistemology of psychology that the concept of mind can be defined. And since psychology, in its current form, comprises various disciplines whose epistemological foundations are difficult to reconcile, we must resign ourselves to the fact that the terms "psyche" and "mind" designate only those highly amorphous objects considered by psychology as understood in the broadest sense of the terms.

Yvon BrÈs

See also: Agency; Animus-Anima (analytic psychology); Archetype; Collective unconscious; Determinism; Drive/instinct; Maternal reverie, capacity for; Ontogenesis; "Outline of Psychoanalysis, An"; Phylogenesis; Primal; Principle; Psychosomatic limit/boundary; Psychic apparatus; Psychic reality; Self; Strata/stratification; Thought-thinking apparatus; Unconscious, the.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. Part I, SE, 4:1-338. Part II, SE, 5:339-625.

Hartmann, Eduard von. (1931). Philosophy of the unconscious. speculative results according to the inductive method of physical science (W. C. Coupland, Trans.). London: Routledge. (Original work published 1869)

Wolff, Christian (1968). Psychologia empirica. Hildesheim: Olms. (Original work published 1732)

——. (1968). Psychologia rationalis. Hildesheim: Olms. (Original work published 1734)