Observations placeholder
Théodule-Armand Ribot - The Diseases of Memory - Higher spirit, Perceptions and Personalities
Identifier
014061
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Théodule-Armand Ribot (December 18, 1839 – December 9, 1916) was a French psychologist In 1888 was appointed professor of psychology at the College of France. His thesis for his doctors' degree, republished in 1882, Hérédité: étude psychologique (5th ed., 1889), was his most important and best known book.
"Following the experimental and synthetic methods, he brought together a large number of instances of inherited peculiarities"
Besides numerous articles, he wrote on Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosophie de Schopenhauer (1874; 7th ed., 1896), and on the contemporary psychology of Germany (La Psychologie allemande contemporaine, 1879; 13th ed., 1898), also four little monographs on Les Maladies de la mémoire (1881; x3th ed., 1898); De la volonté (1883; 14th ed., 1899); De la personnalité (1885; 8th ed., 1899); and La Psychologie de l'attention (1888), which supplied useful data to the study of mental illness.
A description of the experience
M. Th. Ribot - The Diseases of Memory, pp. 107-8
[The] law of regression provides us with an explanation for extraordinary revivification of certain recollections when the mind turns backward to conditions of existence that had apparently disappeared for ever.
The 'Ego' [Higher spirit] subjectively considered consists of a sum of conscious states, comparable to ‘Personalities’. In brief, the Ego may be considered in two ways: either in its actual form, and then it is the sum of existing ‘conscious states’; or, in its continuity with the past, and then it is formed by the perceptions according to the process outlined above.
It would seem, according to this view, that the identity of the Ego depended entirely upon the perceptions. But such a conception is only partial. Beneath the unstable compound phenomenon in all its protean phases of growth, degeneration, and reproduction, there is a something that remains: and this something is the undefined consciousness.
The source of the experience
Scientist otherConcepts, symbols and science items
Concepts
Higher spiritPerceptions
Perceptions - what happens to perceptions
Perceptions and memory
Personality