Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology

Introduction

We saw in Chapter 7 that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche questioned the Enlightenment idea that human beings are motivated by rational thought and argued instead that we are driven largely by unconscious urges. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche envisaged the unconscious as not only hidden from conscious inspection, but as qualitatively different from conscious thought: it operated according to its own bizarre logic and did not follow the path of reason. Conscious rationality was, far from being the most important influence on our actions, merely the tool of the unconscious drives and existed solely to serve their ends. These ideas, as we shall see in this chapter, were also at the root of Freud’s view of the mind, but he attempted to give them a new, biological, interpretation that owed something to the psychophysical ideas of Helmholtz and Fechner.

The biological background

For Freud, the basic drive behind our behaviour is the drive to minimise stimulation within the nervous system. This, as we shall see, is the fundamental conception that underlies the whole Freudian view of the world. Our nervous system, as a result of stimulation, becomes excited and full of energy. Though the precise nature of this nervous energy was not clear to Freud, as a materialist he had no doubt that it was some form of physical energy. In this, Freud’s position was completely in accord with the principles put forward by leading German physiologists of the day, such as Helmholtz (in whose laboratory Freud’s own teacher, Brücke, had worked). As we saw in Chapter 8, Helmholtz and his colleagues argued that there was no such thing as a spiritual ‘life force’ that animated living things, but that everything, including the energy coursing through the nervous systems of people and animals, was purely physical.