6 - Romanticism and animal magnetism

Summary

REIL

The second wave of Romanticism centred on Berlin and Dresden and differed markedly from the Romanticism of Novalis and the Schlegels. Whereas the latter, even if it sometimes treated Idealism ironically, was a continuation of the Idealist project, the second wave of Romanticism took a more positive interest in psychology, which it interpreted through Schellingian Naturphilosophie, although, as we shall see, even this had its limits. Naturphilosophisch psychology tended to emphasise the role of the unconscious, inspired by Schelling's view of nature as the unconscious absolute. For a time, encouraged by German nationalism, the pseudo-science of animal magnetism became philosophically acceptable in parts of Germany. Animal magnetism enjoyed its highest popularity in the twenty years following the defeat of Prussia by Napoleon in 1806. For writers of the second wave of Romanticism animal magnetism was a specifically German science.

Johann Christian Reil (1759–1813) became influential because of his Rhapsodien über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen (Rhapsodies on the Use of the Psychological Method of Heading on Mental Disturbances, 1803), in which he opposed the incarceration and physical maltreatment of the mentally ill. Writing in a ‘rhapsodic’ manner, Reil argued that the mentally ill should be hospitalised and treated by the ‘psychological method’, a therapy that aimed to reform behaviour by persuasion, training, and aversion. Reil appealed to a Romantic spirit of revolt against eighteenth-century rationalism, but there is actually little Romanticism in the psychology of the Rhapsodies.