On Tue, 21 Dec 2010 02:40:08 -0800, Allen Esterson wrote: >Mike Palij cites Douglas Whitman’s “Cognition” textbook giving the >“consciousness is the tip of the iceberg” analogy: >>A check of his references shows two entries by Freud, both >>in Strachey's "The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological >>Works of Sigmund Freud" (Hogarth Press). First is the 1925 >>"Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety" (pp77-175). Second is 1895 >>"Project for a scientific psychology" (page 302). > >As Annette reminds us, the TIPSter Iceberg Group established that no >such analogy occurs in Freud’s writings, and this is the case with the >above citations, which may refer to something else in Whitman’s text. > >As should be well known by now, the general notion in question was a >commonplace among psychologists in the latter half of the nineteenth >century, as expressed by Henry Maudsley (*The Physiology and Pathology >of the Mind*, 1867): [snip]
I think that it can be reasonably argued that many 19th century psychologists probably derived the iceberg metaphor from the writings of Johann Friedrich Herbart (circa 1824) who articulated a mathematical model of how "ideas" could move between consciousness and unconsciousness and whose theory/ideas were well known to people like Fechner, Wundt, Ebbinghaus, Muller, and other experimental psychologists -- Freud was exposed to Herbart's ideas indirectly through his coursework. The pattern of influence is outlined in the following article: Boudewijnse, G.A. Murray, D.J. & Bandomir, C. A. (2001). The fate of Herbart's mathematical psychology. History of Psychology, 4(2), 107-132. A copy of this article is available as a Google doc here: http://tinyurl.com/googleherbart Herbart's mathematical psychology may be more accessible to contemporary psychologists because a number of the ideas that he treated mathematically (e.g., inhibition, excitation, etc.) are used in many current models of cognition and memory. An earlier article by the above authors provides a detailed presentation of Herbart's mathematics which he attempted to model on Newton's mathematics; see: Boudewijnse, Geert-Jan A.; Murray, David J.; Bandomir, Christina A. (1999). Herbart's mathematical psychology. History of Psychology, 2(3), 163-193. doi: 10.1037/1093-4510.2.3.163 Wikipedia has an entry Herbart (yadda-yadda) and the section relevant to the iceberg metaphor is presented here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Friedrich_Herbart#Apperception Quoting from this section: |Herbart believed ideas crossed a limen of consciousness, or a boundary |between the conscious and the unconscious, as they became clearer and |strong enough to preserve themselves against their struggle with other forces. |The ideas powerful enough to break through to the conscious formed the |apperceiving mass, or a congregation of similar and related ideas dominating |the conscious at any given moment. Expounding upon Leibniz’s concept |of petites apperceptions and the idea of apperception, Herbart believed |the apperceiving mass to be crucial in selecting similar ideas from down |in the unconscious to join its forces in the conscious. Although the individual |is focusing all of his/her attention on those complex ideas a part of the |apperceiving mass in the conscious, it is possible for ideas in the unconscious |to combine with other ideas related to them and struggle to break through |the limen into the conscious, disrupting the present ideas a part of the |apperceiving mass. Apperception played a key role in Herbart’s educational |theory. He saw apperception as more pivotal in the classroom than |sense-perception because focusing on a child’s apperceiving mass in relation |to the material being taught can inform teachers of how to implement the |material in such a way as to direct the child’s ideas and thoughts to attend |to certain information. The "apperceptive mass" is the collection of "ideas" representing a person's knowledge and at some point this was metaphorically referred to as an iceberg, with all of the associated baggage. When this happened is unclear but at least one late 19th century article makes the connection between Herbart and the iceberg metaphor (though not in a compelling way). Whitman might be better off reviewing Herbart's work instead of Freud's, for a variety of reasons. -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=7402 or send a blank email to leave-7402-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
