Home > International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis > Fechner, Gustav Theodor (1801-1887)

Gustav Fechner, German physician, physicist, and philosopher, was born on April 19, 1801, in Gross-Sächen, Prussia, and died in Leipzig on November 18, 1887. Freud admired Fechner as the pioneer of psychophysics and a founder of scientific and experimental psychology. Together with his boyhood friend Eduard Silberstein, Freud attended Fechner's lectures in Leipzig in 1874.

Fechner studied medicine at the University of Leipzig. While still a student, he began writing articles (under the pseudonym Dr. Mises) that satirized contemporary science, and he did not become a practicing physician after receiving his degree. Instead, he turned his interest to physics and mathematics. His research demonstrating the validity of Ohm's laws in relation to a galvanic current led to his appointment as professor of physics in 1834. About 1839 Fechner was forced to leave his academic post due to an eye ailment that he attributed to exhausting research in optics. In his diary, which has been preserved at the University of Leipzig, Fechner described his experiences while ill and the existential crisis and depression that followed.

In the wake of his illness, Fechner developed his interest in sensation, the relation of mind to body, and panpsychism. "The great G. T. Fechner," as Freud called him, was appointed professor of philosophy and anthropology in 1843. In the course of this second creative period, he set out the foundations of psychophysics, such as the Fechner-Weber law, by which he is remembered as a founder of experimental psychology. His two-volume Elemente der Psychophysik was published in 1860.

Fechner's ambitions extended beyond experimental research. He hoped to organize psychophysics and metaphysics in a way that united philosophy and the human sciences. Major works toward fulfilling this aim include his 1848 article on the pleasure principle and Einige Ideen zur Schöpfungsund Entwicklungsgeschichte des Organismen (Certain ideas on the creation and development of organisms; 1873). In this latter work Fechner offers the "principle of constancy" to explain how a progressively ordered and structured system can evolve from a disorganized state, a notion that suggests Freud's famous formula, "Where id was there ego shall be." (In this sense Fechner was also a precursor of the theory of the ego's self-organization [see, for example, Prigogine and Glansdorff].) Although Fechner's works inspired Freud when he conceived his concepts of the pleasure principle and the death instinct (Nitzschke), a systematic study tends to demonstrate that they were separated by fundamental differences in outlook.

BERND NITZSCHKE

See also: Alpha function; Autism; Beta-elements; Castration complex; Coprophilia; Partial drive; Pregnancy, fantasy of; Stammering; Symbolism; Unconscious concept.