Describe the theories of the unconscious developed by Leibnitz and Herbart.
Philosophical speculation about unconscious psychological phenomena was one of the major source of influence on the psychoanalytic movement. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz developed the idea of monadology in the early eighteenth century. The monads are not made up entirely of matter as described by the physicists. They are considered as the individual elements. Clustering of all monads together led to the creation of an extension.
Perceptions can be compared to monads. It was thought that psychiatric actions that are made as a result of Monads’ activity had consciousness of different levels varying from entirely unconscious level to distinctly conscious one. Lesser consciousness level was named as petite perceptions. Their conscious realizations were described as apperception. For example, the waves produce a sound when it hit the shore; it is called as an apperception.
However, it is made up of individual drops that fall on the shore. Each drop of water is not consciously perceived by us. However, when sufficient drops get collected, they cluster to p an apperception. After a century, Johann Friedrich Herbart modified the proposition of Leibnitz about the unconscious into the idea of portal of consciousness.
In Herbert’s view, disagreement develops amid the ideas, as they scuffle for realizing conscious. Fechner also hypothesized the concept of unconscious. Using the idea of threshold, he suggested that a similarity exist between mind and an iceberg, which greatly affected Sigmund Freud.
Fechner proposed that similar to the major part of the iceberg, much ideas of the mind, remain hidden beneath the outer surface, that gets affected by forces that are unobservable. Thus, we observe that many people discuss the unconscious human mind very seriously. Philosophers had dealt with the notion of the unconscious before, but Freud was the first to discover a scientific way to study it.