The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry is a classic work of medical history

Medical history

The medical history or anamnesis of a patient is information gained by a physician by asking specific questions, either of the patient or of other people who know the person and can give suitable information , with the aim of obtaining information useful in formulating a diagnosis and providing...

 and historiography

Historiography

Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...

, written by the Swiss medical historian Henri F. Ellenberger

Henri Ellenberger

Henri F. Ellenberger was a Canadian-Swiss psychiatrist, medical historian, and criminologist, sometimes considered the founding historiographer of psychiatry....

. First published in 1970 and constantly in print since then, it has become the standard historical reference for the early and middle development of dynamic psychiatry

Psychiatry

Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...

, covering the period from antiquity

Ancient history

Ancient history is the study of the written past from the beginning of recorded human history to the Early Middle Ages. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, with Cuneiform script, the oldest discovered form of coherent writing, from the protoliterate period around the 30th century BC...

 up to about 1950.

The main focus of this 932-page work is on the contributions and thought of Pierre Janet

Pierre Janet

Pierre Marie Félix Janet was a pioneering French psychologist, philosopher and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory....

, Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

, Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement as a core member of the Vienna...

 and Carl Jung

Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...

, but the five large chapters on earlier centuries contain a wealth of information on the many precursors of modern psychiatry, including exorcism

Exorcism

Exorcism is the religious practice of evicting demons or other spiritual entities from a person or place which they are believed to have possessed...

, Mesmerism, and hypnotherapy

Hypnotherapy

Hypnotherapy is a therapy that is undertaken with a subject in hypnosis.The word "hypnosis" is an abbreviation of James Braid's term "neuro-hypnotism", meaning "sleep of the nervous system"....

. The work describes the earliest inklings in medicine of the existence of an unconscious mind

Unconscious mind

The unconscious mind is a term coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge...

. Ellenberger relates the gradual exploration of this uncharted world of unconscious thought and feeling. The work is encyclopedic, with thousands of references into the literature, but the author is not without a particular point of view, nor is the work free of polemics.

Chapters

• The Ancestry of Dynamic Psychiatry
• The Emergence of Dynamic Psychiatry
• The First Dynamic Psychiatry
• The Background of Dynamic Psychiatry
• On the Threshold of a New Dynamic Psychiatry
• Pierre Janet and Psychological Analysis
• Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis
• Alfred Adler and Individual Psychology
• Carl Gustav Jung and Analytical Psychology
• The Dawn and Rise of the New Dynamic Psychiatry
• Conclusion

Bibliographic information

Ellenberger, Henri F. (1970) The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books. Hardcover ISBN 0-465-01672-3, softcover ISBN 0-465-01672-3.