Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert

Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert (1780 to 1860) was a German physician, naturalist and natural philosopher. Born in Hohenstein in the Ore Mountains as the son of a Pietist pastor, he studied theology and then medicine at Leipzig and Jena, where he came under the influence of Johann Wilhelm Ritter and Friedrich Schelling. He took his doctorate in 1803 with a work on galvanic therapy for congenital deafness and practised briefly as a doctor in Altenberg before turning to writing, teaching and research. His public lectures on the night side of natural science made his name, and he later held chairs of natural history at Erlangen (from 1819) and Munich (from 1827), where he also directed the zoological collection. His writings on animal magnetism, dreams and the soul, such as The Symbolism of Dreams (1814) and The History of the Soul (1830), influenced Romantic psychology and were still cited by Freud and Jung.