Published in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 34(1):176—179, 2000

HENRI ELLENBERGER’S THE DISCOVERY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS THE

HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF DYNAMIC PSYCHIATRY: A TIMELESS CLASSIC

REVISITED

Zvi Lothane, M. D.

I am still awash with fond memories of the days I spent in Melbourne (and Sydney, and

beyond), where I was invited to speak of love, life, Freud, and Schreber at the Freud

Conference 1998, a 21 year-old tradition that came into being thanks to the indefatigable

Douglas Kirsner. It was thus with great satisfaction that I accepted the invitation to write

a reappraisal of Ellenberger’s seminal work. I would like to emphasize the book’s

continued relevance to the operational grounding of the concept of unconscious mental

processes and, currently, to the storms buffeting dynamic psychiatry and psychoanalysis

in the United States (Lothane, 1996a, b, 1998d). It is also a testimonial to how this book

affected my personal development.

Upon first reading, Ellenberger instantly appealed to me for two reasons: one

general and one specific. The first had to do with his sweep of his scholarship, the

incredible volume of references, and the historical grounding of dynamic psychiatry in

the cultural climate of the various periods and in the work of psychologically minded

psychiatrists, such as Janet, Freud, and Jung. The second was Ellenberger’s particular

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focus on the historic importance of the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734—

1815) as a forerunner of hypnosis, suggestion, psychotherapy, depth psychology, and

later psychoanalysis. My own keen interest in Mesmer was kindled in the mid-1960’s,

when I was still a resident in psychiatry but thoroughly committed to becoming a

psychological psychiatrist and already planning to go into psychoanalytic training. I had

an early association between Freud and Mesmer thanks to a widely read 1932 book by

Stefan Zweig, Mental Healers. Few people today realize that such household words as

magnetic personality, personal magnetism, to mesmerize or be mesmerized, and rapport

derive from the practices and theories of what was the rage of the late 18th and early 19th

century: Mesmer’s animal magnetism, an intellectual revolution that that inspired major

cultural movements, such as Romanticism and the Philosophy of Nature.

My overarching purpose is to reaffirm the importance of Ellenberger’s tracing of

the genealogy of psychoanalysis from Mesmer, recently restated by a noted follower of

Ellenberger (Crabtree, 1993). In brief: the crimson thread runs from Mesmer to his

disciple the Marquis de Puységur, to Liébault and Bernheim, the Nancy school of

hypnosis and its Austrian branch, represented by Josef Breuer and Freud, and leading to

Breuer’s historic treatment of Anna O., to culminate in the Breuer-Freud 1893

psychodynamic manifesto, their joint Preliminary Communication (Breuer & Freud,

1895), the founding document of psychoanalysis.

As the title of Ellenberger’s great book spells out, Breueur’s and Freud’s great

fundamental discovery is that of “the unconscious,” using the noun form. My own

preference is to use the adjective ‘unconscious’ and to speak of unconscious dynamics, or

unconscious processes, in keeping with the basic observations of a depth psychology,

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namely: psychological processes, both ideational and emotional, show a surface and a

depth, a manifest phenomenological surface and an underlying latent layer, accessible

through the procedure, or technique, of psychoanalytic investigation. This was duly

operationalized by Mesmer’s most important follower, Marquis de Puységur.

Early on in the 19th century, the Marquis de Puységur, the true founder of

psychological Mesmerism, magnetized a young peasant on his estate, Victor Race,

suffering from a “mild respiratory disease,” who then showed two distinct personas: “he

fell into a strange kind of sleep in which he seemed more awake and aware than in his

normal waking state. He spoke aloud, answered questions and displayed a far brighter

mind than in his normal condition. … Intrigued, Puységur produced this type of crisis

again in Victor and tried it successfully on several other subjects. Once they were in that

state, they were able to diagnose their own diseases, foresee its course of evolution, and

prescribe the treatments” (Ellenberger, p. 71). What Ellenberger does not spell out is that

in his magnetic-hypnotic state, roughly equivalent to the state of free association, the

shepherd youth Victor was able to speak freely about how he had been personally

affected by his boss Puységur in their social relationship. Hirschmüller (1989), the author

of the definitive biography of Breuer, does not mention Mesmer or Puységur but only the

late 19th century practitioners of this method Binet, Janet and Delboef, quoted in Breuer’s

and Freud’s footnote: “We can now explain how the hypnotist promotes cure. He puts the

subject back into the state in which his trouble first appeared and uses words to combat

that trouble, as it now makes its emergence. … we shall perhaps find that by taking the

patient back by means of a mental artifice to the very moment at which the symptoms

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first appeared, we may make him more susceptible to a therapeutic suggestion” (Breuer

& Freud, 1895 [1893], p. 7).

The technique as described was called by Breuer abreaction and applied in his

treatment of Anna O.; later Freud renamed it the cathartic method. Thus Breuer, noting

the influence of “Binet and two Janets [Perre and Jules],” feels “obliged to speak of

abnormal states of consciousness in which these pathogenic ideas arise, and to emphasize

the fact (my italics) that the recollection of the operative psychical trauma is not to be

found in the patient’s normal memory but in his memory when he is hypnotized,” that the

ensuing “splitting of consciousness … is so striking in the well-known cases under the

form of ‘double conscience’ [the French term] (italics in the original)” (Breuer & Freud,

1895 [1893], p. 12), which includes normal state of consciousness, the so-called

condition prime (first consciousness) and the condition seconde (the second, or secondary

state, i.e., the hypnotic state of consciousness). What is essential to realize is that

unconscious dynamics was not merely a theory, it was a phenomenon, endowed with the

highest degree of psychic reality, in spite of the false allegation of the current crop of

Freud detractors, e.g., Adolf Grünbaum in the USA and Australia’s own Malcolm

Macmillan.

In other words, normal consciousness is the manifest utterances and gestures of

the person behind which lies the expanded, unconscious, second layer, or the

unconscious, latent content. It takes the special condition of hypnosis, of the widening of

consciousness, to bring the latent content into the sphere of awareness. That is why I

italicized the word fact in the quote above: unconscious mental processes are not just a

hypothesis, a theory, they are a factual reality, hidden for the time being but potentially

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discoverable when certain preconditions are met. Thus, in Anna O., “throughout the

entire illness her two states of consciousness persisted side by side: the primary one in

which she was quite normal psychically, and the secondary one which may well be

likened to a dream in view of its wealth of imaginative products and hallucinations, …

acting as a stimulus ‘in the unconscious.’ … It is hard to avoid expressing the situation by

saying that the patient was split into two personalities of which one was mentally normal

and the other insane” (Breuer, 1895, p. 45).

But here comes the surprising discovery: those situations of the condition

seconde, also called in French ‘absences,’ or states of absent-mindedness, were at the

same time the occasions of cause of the pathological formations as well as occasions of

cure of those formations: “the ideational complexes which were produced during her

absences or condition seconde [were in] fact … disposed of by being given verbal

expression during hypnosis,” for “every one of the spontaneous products of her

imagination and every event which had been assimilated by the pathological part of her

mind persisted as a psychical stimulus until it had been narrated in her hypnosis, after

which it completely ceased to operate” (Breuer, 1895, pp. 31—32).

The equation of the symptoms and the dream discovered by Breuer, Freud’s

mentor, is completed by Freud in his second seminal methodological work, The

Interpretation of Dreams (1900, 1901). Ellenberger, citing the seminal work of

Aristotelian psychoanalyst Roland Dalbiez (1941[1936]), “summarized depth

psychology’s assumptions regarding hysteria, dreams, parapraxes and jokes … as two

common models, one simple the other complex. [diagram omitted] The simple model can

be expressed graphically by two lines running parallel, the upper is the level of

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consciousness and apparent manifestations, the lower is the level of unconsciousness and

the hidden manifestations that are the cause [my italics] of the conscious manifestations.

Psychological life is displayed simultaneously on these two levels … There is a

relationship of cause and effect and … there is a therapeutic relationship. The S[ymptom]

can be removed by exerting a certain maneurver on T[raumatic reminisence] by …

bringing it into awareness and abreacting it. The clinical interpretation, the scientific

understanding and the therapeutic removal thus almost coincide. This is a development of

what Janet and Breuer have found. Freud’s innovation was his dynamic concept of the

relationship of S and T. T has a tendency to express itself in consciousness but is checked

and held in the unconscious by means of an active force called repression [italics in the

original]. … The same model applies to the psychology of dreams, with the difference

that instead of symptom S we have the manifest content, instead of trauma T we have the

latent content, and between them the forces of repression are called censor and result in

the mechanism of displacement and condensation” (pp. 497—498). It was Dalbiez who

profoundly understood that symptoms and dreams are in that both showing a two-tiered

structure: a manifest phenomenological content and a latent dynamic one in constant

causal and reciprocal semiotic relationship. This reality makes the Freudian method of

interpretation unique and different from any other hermeneutic approach: Traumdeutung,

dream interpretation, is the reverse of Traumbildung, the way the dream is unconsciously

constructed by means of the Traumarbeit, or the aforementioned displacement and

condensation, the latter equally at work in the construction of poetic tropes. But whereas

hermeneutic of tropes relies on reading the shared symbols embedded in the structure of a

shared language, dream and symptom interpretation are individual and require the causal

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psychoanalytic method of free association in order to arrive at the personal-historical

latent content hidden by the manifest content.

I have adhered to this conception (Lothane, 1983) and based my therapeutic

method on it as well (Balter, Lothane, & Spencer; Lothane, 1981, 1984, 1994a, 1997). I

have also applied this methodological approach to what still remains incomplete in

Freud’s opus: the dynamics of love (1982, 1987a, 1987b, 1987c, 1989, 1998b, 1998f)

and of the ethics of love (Lothane, 1987, 1998a, 1998b, 1998d, 1999).

Ellenberger’s approach has been consistently methodological, phenomenological,

and commonsensical. It is sad but true that both Freud believers and Freud bashers have

not pursued this path: both became ensnared in putting theory above method. The most

remarkable instance of a collision course between apostles and apostates occurred in the

fateful feud between notorious Freud detractor Jeffrey Masson (1984) and the late Freud

defender Kurt Eissler concerning Freud’s alleged abandonment of the seduction theory

(Malcolm, 1984): I argued against both and showed that Freud never did such a thing

(Lothane, 1987) because in spite of certain self-contradictions, Freud never abandoned

his allegiance to method.

The problem started with Freud himself: he did not often speak of method but was

not entirely silent about it either. In 1903 Freud composed a brief article, “Die Freud’sche

psychoanalytische Methode” (Freud, 1904), correctly translated in the Collected Papers

edition as “Freud’s Psychoanalytic Method.” Strachey went former translator J. Bernays

one better and rendered: “Freud’s psychoanalytic procedure,” not incorrect, since both

method and procedure refer to doing rather than theorizing, but imprecise. Freud did not

say Verfahren, or Prozedur: Why not stick to Freud’s own term, “method”? This

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translation reflects Strachey’s disregard of method and in keeping with his life-long

ambition to make Freud “scientific” (Lothane, 1996a, b, 1998c, 1998d). The latter

ambition is deployed with a vengeance by the current crop of Freud bashers, such as

Grünbaum (Lothane, 1998e), Macmillan (Lothane, 1994b), and Storr (Lothane, 1998g).

These critics variously attacked the man Freud and his method and theories without

realizing the difference between method and theory and between arguments ad rem and

arguments ad hominem. A dubious distinction in the last category was achieved by

Farrell (1996) who scaled new heights of ad hominem bashing by “diagnosing” Freud as

clinically paranoid! Had these authors studied Ellenberger diligently and taken him to

heart, they might not have erred so egregiously.

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preliminary communication (1893). Standard Edition, 2:3—17, in: Breuer, J, &
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