Abstract

The dissertation is a systematic and historical investigation of the problem of the unconscious in several untranslated works in German philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine. Levels of evidence for the unconscious in perception, movement, expression, communication and psychopathology are ascertained by the phenomenological, abstractive method of reflection and description. It is demonstrated, however, that Husserl's philosophy of reflection is unable to establish priority among its own abstractions in determining a fundamental organization of structured meaning as the origin of sense given to consciousness. ;It is necessary to turn to the more existential approach of Viktor von Weizsaecker to account for the unconscious functioning of the human subject as "higher" levels of evidence are investigated. It is found that the relationship between perception and movement, and the relationship between self and other involve an unconscious, concealed unity of organization in which opposing terms exclude, and yet, mutually presuppose each other. This is not directly accessible to transcendental phenomenological method. Von Weizsaecker develops a methodology for the introduction of the subject in the study of human physiology and the practice of medicine. He conceptualizes the "biological act" as "Gestalt-circle," . This concept arises from his observations of the concealed unity between perception and movement in the experimental study of the physiology of the senses, and the concealed unity in the communication between patient and doctor in the clinical treatment of illness. ;In his effort to overcome the metaphysical dualism between the mind and body in Freud's psychoanalytic unconscious, von Weizsaecker develops a concept of illness in which the outbreak of every illness has a biographical meaning. Psychic and physiological aspects stand as two sides of the same coin in a relationship of "Stellvertretung," or substitutional representation. There is something productive or spontaneous in the Gestalt-formation of each biological act including the "transformation of function" which occurs in illness. The spontaneous formation of Gestalt cannot be ascribed to antecedent conditions. ;The phenomenological-anthropological unconscious is able to account for a psychoanalytic or "dynamic" unconscious. It is able to offer psychoanalysis a deeper and more comprehensive account of repression than psychoanalytic theory because it locates repression and the unconscious at the very heart of subjective existence itself