While Wundt was researching the conscious in Germany, Sigmund Freud was researching the unconscious in Austria. As a medical doctor, Freud believed that all behavior and mental processes had a physical basis in the nervous system. However, in the late 1800s, under the influence of several of his patients, he changed his mind. The common feature of these patients was that although they showed the symptoms of the disease, they had no physical cause of their disease. Freud, who interviewed these patients with methods such as hypnosis, suggested that the causes of their illness were not physical, and that the problems they dismissed from their consciousness gave rise to the illness.
After these discussions, Freud came to the conclusion that there was only one cause for all behavior and even serious mental problems. According to him, the reason was conflicts in our subconscious. For nearly fifty years
Freud gathered his work and ideas under the name of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis includes both a theory of personality, a theory of mental illness, and a series of treatment modalities.
Freud’s theory is based on a limited number of case studies, not extensive laboratory studies. Therefore, it is not accepted as completely scientific and valid today. However, Freud formed the basis of many theories in psychology with his innovations.
Another German psychologist who did important studies in the same period as Wundt was Hermann Ebbinghaus. According to Ebbinghaus, another subject that needs to be examined as much as consciousness is mental processes such as learning and memory. Ebbinghaus’s work forms the basis of what we know about memory even today.
In 1912, other German psychologists such as Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Köhler opposed Wundt’s idea of dissecting human experience and consciousness. The word Gestalt, which means all in German, became the name of the movement created by these psychologists. According to the Gestalt movement, the whole of an experience is not the same as the sum of its parts. The way to understand consciousness is to study the whole experience as a whole, not its parts.
