Psychology in Search of Psyches: Friedrich Schelling, Gotthilf Schubert and the Obscurities of the Romantic Soul

This artice explores the intellectual dialogue between the philosopher Friedrich Schelling and the psychologist and anthropologist G.H. Schubert in the early part of the nineteenth century as they search for an appropriate description of the psyche. In this German context, he argues that the psyche is a forum not just for constructing new languages of mind, but also new justifications of individuality: the psyche is considered to be the inner seat of selfhood. Schelling and Schubert move between various different paradigms in their desire to give the psyche an appropriate descriptive and theoretical articulation. These include models of will, inner fire, archetypes and polar conflict, all of which aim to supplant the language of determinism and formulate a more inscrutable inner law of the self. This need to surround the principle of the self with obscurity will ultimately root itself in the structural possibilities offered by a theory of the unconscious. The article concludes by suggesting a distinction might be made between empirical psychology and an idealised philosophy of the psyche, which have here become tacitly entangled. However, it also argues that the desire to use the psyche as a domain within which to formulate an idealised view of the self, has been a persistent one in modernity.