Monday, November 14, 2011

Paracelsus on the Unconscious


Wikipedia on Paracelsus' Contribution to Psychotherapy
Paracelsus is credited as providing the first clinical/scientific mention of the unconscious. In his work Von den Krankeiten he writes: "Thus, the cause of the disease chorea lasciva is a mere opinion and idea, assumed by imagination, affecting those who believe in such a thing. This opinion and idea are the origin of the disease both in children and adults. In children the case is also imagination, based not on thinking but on perceiving, because they have heard or seen something. The reason is this: their sight and hearing are so strong that unconsciously they have fantasies about what they have seen or heard."


reminds me of this PKD quote

One long-past innocent day, in my prefolly youth, I came upon a statement in an undistinguished textbook on psychiatry that, as when Kant read Hume, woke me forever from my garden-of-eden slumber. "The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis."

"Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality" (1964)

1 comment:

  1. Numerous ancient civilizations have already proved to the world that the meaning of dreams is extremely important and contains divine messages, but various barbarous civilizations have eliminated their glory. The fact that we can understand the divine guidance when we translate the meaning of dreams according to Carl Jung's method of dream interpretation is a real revolution.

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