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

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'.

History of Psychiatry, Vol. 1, No. 3, 255-287 (1990)
DOI: 10.1177/0957154X9000100301


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				K. Kroker Book review: Archives of the imaginary: Alfred Maury, erudit et reveur: Les sciences de l'homme au milieu du XIXe siecle [Alfred Maury, Scholar and Dreamer: The Sciences of Man during the Mid-nineteenth Century], sous le direction de Jacqueline Carroy et Nathalie Richard. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007. ISBN 978--2-7535--0515--5. 204 pp. 18 History of the Human Sciences, July 1, 2009; 22(3): 101 - 103. [PDF]