Ernst Mach: The Unconscious Motives of an Empiricist

It is commonly agreed that Ernst Mach was the founder of modern scientific empiricism. That Mach was above all a practitioner of the genetic method in the history of and philosophy of science is also well known. Less well known, however, is the extent to which he approximated a psychoanalytic method as an approach to the logic of the sciences. In his very last publication Kultur und Mechanik Mach wrote that whereas in his earlier studies he had regarded the science of mechanics as having arisen from the intellectual refinement of handicraft experience, he now perceived a more basic source for scientific ideas:

The possibility now presented itself of going a step further, as my son Ludwig, who from his earliest childhood was mechanistically inclined, succeeded at my request, by constantly repeated efforts of memory, in reproducing in essentials that early period of his development with many details, which showed that the powerful inextinguishable dynamic sensational experiences of that time transport us suddenly nearer the instinctive origin of all contrivances such as tools, weapons, and machines. (17, p. 5; 7, p. 384).

The elucidation of such childhood experiences, Mach felt, would lead to “an incomparable increase in our knowledge of the primitive history of mechanism, and besides, might also lead to the founding of a general genetic technology …” Mach had arrived at a theory of the unconscious similar to that of Breuer and Freud to whom in his Die Principien der Wärmelehre he made explicit acknowledgment:

It is quite probable, therefore, that ideas once formed, even if they are no longer in consciousness, maintain their existence. This seems peculiarly the case if these ideas, on entering consciousness, have been prevented from liberating

Page 12

their associated ideas, movements, etc. In these circumstances they seem to act as a sort of charge … to a certain extent related to these are the phenomena which Breuer and Freud described recently in their book on hysteria. (2