Fragments and Wholes

Thoughts on the dissolution of the human mind

This book seeks to investigate the range of influence of the « inconscient à la française » and to explore its genealogy. An intellectual tradition arising at the start of the nineteenth century and particularly developed in France, it has since spread to various other fields of the humanities such as philosophy, psychiatry and literature. The work of Henri Bergson, for instance, and even of Gilles Deleuze, was influenced by hypnotism, Leibniz's monadism and the observations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on human behavior, or the works of Maine de Biran. Pierre Janet with his theory on dissociative disorders was a significant link between a number of thinkers, but also writers such as Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Henri Michaux or Marguerite Duras. This tendency in modern French thought might be termed the « Neo-Jacksonist Tradition ». Starting with Théodule Ribot, it reached its peak with Henri Ey but is present in a much wider range of works.