The Buried Idea

How the hidden mind was found and named — the pathogenic secret, the magnetic sleep, Charcot's clinic, and Janet's dissociation.

A course on the thought of The Unconscious.

Course outline

1. The Pathogenic Secret — Before any science of the mind, illness was blamed on something HIDDEN — a lost soul, an intruding spirit, an unconfessed transgression — and the cure, everywhere, was to make the hidden thing…
2. The Magnetic Sleep — With exorcism unfit for a rational age, Mesmer offered a cure the Enlightenment could accept — an invisible physical fluid, redistributed by "crises." A royal commission (Franklin, Lavoisier, Bailly)…
3. The Philosophers' Unconscious — Before the clinic there was a library. Fifty years before Freud, German philosophy had the dynamic unconscious, repression, the sexual instinct as the master drive, and the dream that thinks in…
4. Charcot: The Unconscious Made Visible — For centuries a paralysis with no lesion meant one thing: the patient is faking. Charcot's wager was that hysteria is a real disorder with a lawful cause — only the cause is not in the nerve. His…
5. Janet: The Idea That Splits Off — Charcot proved the hidden idea acts; Janet named the mechanism. *Dissociation*: under strain the field of consciousness narrows and a part of the mind — most often a traumatic memory — splits off and…

Part of the Simposeum course library.