Unconscious Cerebration Research Articles

“I have not a word about my own sensations”: Intoxication, Trauma and Imperialism in The Moonstone

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between intoxication, trauma, and imperialism in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, exploring how altered states of consciousness recuperate and repress the shameful secrets of colonial history. Throughout the novel, the characters attempt to explicate the violence of empire by retracing the past through textual fragments, such as journals, letters, and diary-entries. However, in doing so, they succumb to quasi-narcotic states of unconscious cerebration, psychic repression, and automatic action. As such, the process of detection becomes a painful, and even traumatic, experience in which psychical information is forgotten, yet never erased. Thus, while the novel attempts to formulate a critique of the British Empire, its critical voice remains regulated by the psychosomatic logic at work, simultaneously concealing and revealing the traumas of colonial dispossession. Drawing upon the work of Judith Herman, Cathy Caruth, Jill Matus, and other contemporary trauma theorists, as well as Victorian theories of addiction, unconscious memory, and psychic shock, this article suggests that while Collins frames the imperial project as both “trauma” and “intoxication,” demonstrating how political violence creates a disturbance in memory and consciousness, the novel occupies an ideologically ambivalent space, unable to assimilate fully the horrors of British imperialism.

'Il corpo incantato': Medicine, Magic and Aesthetics of 'Unconscious Cerebration'

The essay explores the notion of ‘unconscious cerebration’ elaborated by British physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter in the first half of the nineteenth century, foregrounding its hybrid genealogy and its afterlife in both science and magic, as well as its transnational impact on the arts and psychology as an already available alternative to the Freudian unconscious. Carpenter’s idea of a corporeal unconscious is traced to the intersections of (occult) science, literature and visual culture, but also comparatively as it rippled off into European, American and Russian cultures, offering a shared notion of a bodily, physiological nonconscious that the Freudian tradition in psychoanalysis has long eclipsed and obscured. Italian Futurism is taken as a test case of the rich, and still underexplored, potentials of Carpenter’s intuition for an archeology both of ‘the unconscious’ and of contemporary returns in the humanities to materiality and embodiment.

Archaeologies of the Mind: James Joyce’s Ulysses and Pre-Freudian Psychology of the Unconscious

This essay analyses the representation of mental processes in James Joyce’s Ulysses in light of ‘scientific’ or ‘experimental’ psychology, whose impact on the composition of the novel has been quite underestimated. Since concepts such as ‘unconscious cerebration’ and ‘mental latency’, or the theorisation of a close connection between dreams and repression, regularly appeared in nineteenth-century psychological treatises along with discussions of insanity and deranged states of consciousness, these ideas are likely to have made inroads into the cultural milieu in which Ulysses was composed. By analysing the stratified representation of the characters’ minds, this essay attempts to read the novel through a focus on pre-Freudian conceptions of unconscious mental processes and latent memory, and to show that some of the ideas propounded by early psychologists may have provided the substance for Joyce’s understanding of the functioning of consciousness, the unconscious and memory portrayed in Ulysses.

General

If you have ever had a premonition, or if ever some inner voice has dissuaded you from a certain action, you might have noticed that this experience involves a different kind of knowledge than that preceded by an inference. We call it a ‘hunch’, an ‘intuition’, or a ‘gut feeling’; in the nineteenth century this particular subvolitional form of thinking was called ‘unconscious cerebration’, and modern cognitive science recognizes it as a specific type of cognition characterized by quick, pre-attentive, and preconscious processing – Daniel Kahneman's famous ‘thinking fast’. The most fascinating aspect of Peter Struck's book on divination is an attempt to distinguish the type of cognition it entailed. The book offers an insightful analysis of Plato's, Aristotle's, the Stoics’, and the Neoplatonists’ views on divination, concluding that they saw divination as ‘surplus insight’, a specific kind of cognition. Since ‘our ability to know exceeds our capacity to understand that ability’, ‘our cognitive selves are to some…degree mysterious to us…The messages that we receive from the world around us add up, sometimes in uncanny ways, to more than the sum of their parts’ (15). Struck argues that, in the ancient world, the process by which we arrive at such surplus knowledge was acculturated as divination. He focuses on the philosophers’ views and does not attempt to provide an analysis of the technical and practical side of divination, which was based on knowledge and skill (though it must have involved intuition to some degree as well), or of the popular views on divination. Nevertheless, his book will be very useful to those interested in the philosophical views on divination and in the cognitive history of intuition. Cognitive science has spurred several important recent studies in Greek religion and is continuing to provide a useful framework for conceptualizing ancient (and modern) religious thinking and behaviour.

Trevor Hamilton, Immortal Longings: F.W.H. Myers and the Victorian Search for Life after Death (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2009), pp. 359, £19.95, hardback, ISBN: 9-781845-401238.

Since Henri Ellenberger’s Discovery of the Unconscious (1970), historical interest in Frederic Myers (1843–1901), a Trinity classicist and poet, Cambridgeshire inspector of schools, and co-founder of the Society for Psychical Research, has grown slowly but steadily. Immortal Longings, based on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, is the first biographical monograph dedicated to this unusual figure. While the focus of the book is clearly on Myers’ research into ‘supernormal’ phenomena, and particularly the question of the survival of the human personality after bodily death, Trevor Hamilton also provides original insights into Myers the man of letters and, perhaps most interesting to readers of this journal, Myers the psychologist. Lacking formal scientific or medical training, Myers was a hugely disciplined and gifted autodidact well versed in physiology and science at large. Together with his close friend Edmund Gurney (1847–88), he studied the psychology of sensory and motor automatisms as well as hypnotism. Gurney and Myers were the first to present strong arguments contradicting W.B. Carpenter’s notion of automatisms as ‘unconscious cerebration’, and they upset the dominant medical view of hallucinations and dissociative phenomena as intrinsically pathological. Popular for having coined the term ‘telepathy’, Myers’s coinage of ‘hypnopompic’ is less known. With his brother, the physician Arthur Myers (with whom he undertook a scientific evaluation of alleged miraculous healings at Lourdes), his intimate friend Henry Sidgwick and Sidgwick’s wife Eleanor, Myers actively participated in the making of fledgling academic psychology. They attended and helped to organise the International Congresses for Physiological/Experimental Psychology, with Myers serving as secretary of the second Congress in 1892 at University College, London. The first British author to identify the significance of Freud’s work in 1893, Myers was a friend of Theodore Flournoy and William James, whose psychology cannot be understood without an appreciation of the considerable impact Myers’ concept of the ‘subliminal Self’ had on both. Though Myers was a very visible author when alive, and respected by most contemporary psychologists interested in the psychology of the unconscious, his work was quickly forgotten after his death. Doing justice to the immense diversity and often conflicting facets of Myers’ personality, Hamilton competently stands up to the challenge to paint a nuanced and psychologically plausible picture of this controversial figure. Presenting a well-substantiated alternative to certain previous portrayals of Myers as a ruthless philanderer and cheat, and, as an intrinsically gullible victim of a desperate will to believe, Hamilton offers an impartial and detached revision of former accounts that appear to have retroactively punished rather than explained Myers’ and other eminent intellectuals’ epistemic deviance. For example, Hamilton argues that, contrary to popular, widely promulgated accounts of Myers and his fellow psychical researchers, a ‘will to believe’ in post-mortem survival, telepathy and other scientifically unpopular notions, does not necessarily exclude a ‘will to know’ and thus the capacity for thorough self-criticism, methodological rigour and relentless suspicion of errors. At the same time, Hamilton does not gloss over certain sins doubtlessly committed by Myers, but he makes a compelling case that they do not detract from the overall value of his contributions to contemporary studies of the human mind, which, as William James observed in an obituary of Myers, had an enormous significance for the mind sciences quite independent from the unpopular research questions they were entangled with. To be sure, the Myers who emerges from this overdue biographical study is a terrible snob. But he was also a man of high intellectual integrity and courage, whose friendship with men of equally independent minds, such as Henry Sidgwick and William James, appears more comprehensible in Hamilton’s account than in previous ones that had a metaphysical axe to grind. Even though Immortal Longings might be a little too concerned with clarifying the question of whether or not Myers was a nasty or likeable fellow, it shows, current trends in historical scholarship notwithstanding, that there is still considerable use for traditional biographical studies – particularly if they serve to rehabilitate misunderstood historical figures who may have fallen victim to ideological boundary-work which historians have not always resisted participating in.

Somnambulism and Trance States in the Works of John William Polidori, Author of The Vampyre

English physician John William Polidori (1795–1821) is today best known as the author of The Vampyre (1819) and as the traveling companion of Lord Byron. Less appreciated is Polidori’s interest in somnambulism and trance states, the subjects of his 1815 medical thesis at the University of Edinburgh. Until now, this little‐known document existed only in the original Latin. This essay draws upon a new English translation of the thesis in order to demonstrate how Polidori’s medical writing responded to the influences of mesmerism and phrenology, while anticipating mid‐Victorian theories of “unconscious cerebration” developed by William Benjamin Carpenter and Thomas Laycock. Polidori’s interest in somnambulism carried over into his fiction. Lord Ruthven, the villain of The Vampyre, experiences trance‐like states and sensory lapses peculiar to somnambulists. These behaviors evoke Romantic‐era medical controversies surrounding the activity of the brain during sleep, as well as the potential conflict between higher faculties like the will or the soul and automatic brain functions that could be carried out without conscious awareness. By foregrounding such concerns, The Vampyre set the stage for the somnambulistic, hypnotic vampire villains of tales like Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

Victorian Framings of the Mind: Recent Work on Mid‐Nineteenth Century Theories of the Unconscious, Memory, and Emotion

AbstractSurveying recent work by literary critics and historians on Victorian psychology, this article begins with an account of the disciplinary and theoretical shifts that have influenced the way psychology as a field has been reconceptualized in the past decades and then focuses on critical studies that address such topics as the role of Victorian periodicals in the emergence of psychology as a discipline and the persistence of Victorian conceptions of the soul alongside increasingly materialist accounts of mind. It is surprising that, given the richness and depth of recent historical work on the psyche in the Victorian period, it has not informed contemporary trauma theory, the genealogical exploration of which seldom pushes back beyond Freud and then only to focus on the medico‐legal discourse around the railway accident. The second part of the article acknowledges the salience of trauma studies in literary criticism today but points to the theoretical and historical problems of applying contemporary definitions of trauma to Victorian literature. Research on Victorian architectures of the psyche (in particular, states of altered consciousness, theories of memory, trance, emotion, and involuntary thought or ‘unconscious cerebration’) can offer a fuller account of the emergence of trauma as a concept than critics have previously recognized. A historicist account of the theories of mind on which trauma as a concept is dependent may also elucidate the ideological freight of recurrent, structuring binaries such as agency/passivity in both Victorian texts and contemporary trauma and emotion theory.

Objectifying Anxieties: Scientific Ideologies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and The Lair of the White Worm

Scientific ideologies swirl throughout Stoker’s two most gothic novels, Dracula (1897) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911), and this essay will address those ideologies as literary manifestations of just some of the “weird science” that was permeating late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe. Specifically, the essay examines racial theories, physiognomy, criminology, brain science, and sexology as they appear in Stoker’s two novels. Stoker owned a copy Johann Caspar Lavater’s five-volume edition of Essays on Physiognomy (1789), and declared himself to be a “believer of the science” of physiognomy. The second major “weird science” infecting the gothic works of Stoker is the new field of criminology, or the bourgeois attempt to codify, control, and exterminate criminal elements in the human population. Stoker drew on both Havelock Ellis’s The Criminal, published in 1890, and the Italian Cesare Lombroso’s work, Uomo Delinquente (1876), a book that was available to Stoker in a two volume French translation published as L’Homme Criminel (1895). Stoker derived a number of his passages about the workings of the brain from the theories of the well-known professor of physiology, W. B. Carpenter, founder of the notion of “unconscious cerebration,” a concept developed in his book Principles of Mental Physiology (1874). Finally, Richard von Krafft-Ebing published his pioneering text on sexuality in 1886, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Special Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study, and invented the scientific study of sex. Of a piece with criminology, sexology attempted to categorize and medicalize human behaviors in such a way that all would become clear to the informed and enlightened bourgeois consciousness. As another weirdly scientific effort to “discipline and punish,” sexology sought to transform crime into perversion, and the man or woman suffering from vampiric tendencies became just another case study of sexual deviancy.

Fictions of Medical Minds: Victorian Novels and Medical Epistemology

Victorian mental science led both scientists and nonscientists to consider whether between reason and emotion, thinking and feeling there exists a third type of thought, "thinking without thinking," that can serve as an epistemological alternative to reasoned thought. Drawing on physiological theories of mental reflex action, mid-nineteenth-century scientists made the startling claim that the mind performs some of its most complicated, innovative, and creative work mechanically. In probing the realities, possibilities, and dangers of nondeliberate thought, Victorian novelists turned to the emphasis on "experience" in medical practice as a possible model for integrating tacit knowledge into a theory of learning and action. Today, bolstered by work in cognitive science on the central role of nondeliberate thought in complex as well as everyday decisions, the concept of "thinking without thinking" is again gaining recognition in terms that echo the nineteenth-century insistence on "unconscious cerebration" as a positive and pragmatic problem-solving mode.

The Grace of Revision, the Profit of "Unconscious Cerebration"; or What Happened When Teaching the Canon Became Child's Play

Academic study generally highlights the work of consciousness, which operates in terms of a few variables, simple causal relations, and coherent stories. A course on "Big Books of American Literature" brought to the foreground the activities of the more generally neglected unconscious: an extraordinarily rich repertoire of behavior that operates in terms of complex multidimensional values, and so is more likely to provide grist for interesting, productive, open-ended conversations.

The Grace of Revision, the Profit of “Unconscious Cerebration”; or What Happened When Teaching the Canon Became Child's Play

ABSTRACT Academic study generally highlights the work of consciousness, which operates in terms of a few variables, simple causal relations, and coherent stories. A course on “Big Books of American Literature” brought to the foreground the activities of the more generally neglected unconscious: an extraordinarily rich repertoire of behavior that operates in terms of complex multidimensional values, and so is more likely to provide grist for interesting, productive, open-ended conversations.

The Grace of Revision, the Profit of “Unconscious Cerebration”; or What Happened When Teaching the Canon Became Child's Play

ABSTRACT Academic study generally highlights the work of consciousness, which operates in terms of a few variables, simple causal relations, and coherent stories. A course on “Big Books of American Literature” brought to the foreground the activities of the more generally neglected unconscious: an extraordinarily rich repertoire of behavior that operates in terms of complex multidimensional values, and so is more likely to provide grist for interesting, productive, open-ended conversations.

"Unconscious Cerebration" and the Happy Ending of Dracula

"Unconscious Cerebration" and the Happy Ending of Dracula

An "Unconscious and Profitable Cerebration": Mark Twain and Literary Intentionality

Scholars have been guilty of assuming that Mark Twain was fully self-conscious in his literary intentions. The liabilities entailed by this assumption are manifest in Henry B. Wonham's recent Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale. A survey of the evidence bearing on this pivotal question reveals that Mark Twain was an artist of decidedly inchoate intentions, and that he was perfectly willing to admit it. Thus the burden of proof in this matter rests most heavily on those who want to characterize Mark Twain as a highly self-conscious writer.

Science, Common Sense and Decency

WHEN a man of science deals with subjects outside his special sphere the result is always interesting, but not always illustrative of the caution and rigour of the scientific method. It is rather startling to find Dr. Irving Langmuir declaring (see NATURE, March 6) that “Reason is too slow and difficult”, and adding that when we do not possess the necessary data or when we find a problem too complex for the methods of reasoning we must use “common sense, judgment and experience” and should not underrate the importance of intuition. Surely common sense (carefully controlled), judgment and experience are factors in the process of reasoning ? As for intuition, the example given by Dr. Langmuir is this : “In almost every problem which I have succeeded in solving, even those that have involved days or months of work, the final solution has come to my mind in a fraction of a second by a process which is not consciously one of reasoning”. Can this culmination of days and months of concentration be properly described as intuition? Or are we to conclude that Dr. Langmuir's concentration on the problems of physics has prevented him acquiring any knowledge, even intuitive, of unconscious cerebration ?

Should we Still Retain the Expression 'Unconscious cerebration' to Designate certain Processes Connected with Mental Life?

Should we Still Retain the Expression 'Unconscious cerebration' to Designate certain Processes Connected with Mental Life?

Should We Still Retain the Expression `Unconscious Cerebration' to Designate Certain Processes Connected With Mental Life?

Should We Still Retain the Expression `Unconscious Cerebration' to Designate Certain Processes Connected With Mental Life?

"Unconscious Cerebration."

"Unconscious Cerebration."

"Unconscious Cerebration."

"Unconscious Cerebration."

Statistics of "Unconscious Cerebration"

Statistics of "Unconscious Cerebration"