we came to view the soul as the conscious (historically)

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I wonder if anyone can help with history of how we came to view the soul as the conscious and thus paved the way for such terms as double consciousness Multiple Personality Disorder and not possession. Is this post-modernism, (etc?)and wehn did it happen

-- David Leslie Crook (dawidcrook@yahoo.co.uk), November 11, 2003

Answers

There is no straightforward answer to this question. There is no one moment when "consciousness" came to be associated with the soul, though it was certainly a PRE-modern acheivement rather than a postmodern one. People often casually associate it with Descartes, but what he did was more akin to crystalizing beliefs that had long been in circulation. The gradual recognition of "consciousness" as a unitary phenomenon seems to have taken place over the millennium between A.D 500 and 1500. "Double consciousness" by contrast, was proposed in the 19th century. The myth that "everyone" believed, at some point in time, that psychopathology of various kinds was casued by "possession" (by the devil, etc.) is simply false. Although this was one possible explanation for bizarre during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the occasional conclusion in some celebrated cases, the much more common conclusions were that it was due to imbalances of the humors; bad air, food, water, etc.; or brain damage (and while we're on the subject, note that the "witch craze" (mainly in France, but other places as well) was not primarily in the middle ages (which get a bad rap for all sorts of things) but, rather, a product of the Renaissance).

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), November 11, 2003.

You'll find other aspects of this discussed in Henri Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious and Gregory Zilboorg's History of Medical Psychology. But I'm not sure that phrasing it as "to view the soul as the conscious" captures what really happened. Isn't it also true that we came to posit the unconscious, which then accounted for various phenomena that were previously externalized? I find the literature review in the first 100 or so pages of Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind to be quite illuminating as a perspective on this question.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), November 11, 2003.

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