Alfred Maury and the politics of the Unconscious in nineteenth-century France

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
As scholars have observed recently, the study of hallucinations, hypnosis, and dreaming in nineteenth-century France was often linked to divisive social, political and cultural issues. For example, during the July Monarchy (1830-1848) many secular and religious figures on the political Left celebrated these phenomena for their capacity to disclose moral strategies that would lead to the regeneration of French economic and political life. The revolutionary implications of these views alarmed moderate liberals like Alfred Maury (1817-1892) who instead believed that all involuntary mental states were no more than the natural results of physiological conditions in the brain and nervous system. Maury's pioneering studies of the psychology of the unconscious mind are important not only because they cast doubt on the reliability of Catholic ideas, but also for the way they refracted growing bourgeois anxiety about the escalating threat of revolution from France's 'dangerous classes'.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: