SPECIAL PROBLEMS OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS
As one of our foremost psychologists has said, the subconscious is not only the most important problem of psychology, it is the problem. But of course it involves many problems of practical and theoretical interest. Among them are:
First of all the evidential justification of the postulation of subconscious processes in general.
Second; the intrinsic nature of such processes. In other words and more specifically, whether the neurograms of experiences after becoming active subconscious processes continue to be devoid of consciousness, nothing but a brain process,—i.e., unconscious; or whether in becoming activated they become conscious (monism), or acquire conscious equivalents (parallelism), notwithstanding they are outside (dissociated from) the content of the personal consciousness.
Third; the kind and complexity of functions a subconscious process can perform. Can it perform the same functions as are ordinarily performed by conscious intelligence (as we commonly understand that term); that is to say memory, perception, reasoning, imagination, volition, affectivity, etc.? If so, to what extent?
Fourth; are the processes of the conscious mind only a part of a larger mechanism of which a submerged part is a subconscious process?
Fifth; to what extent can and do subconscious processes determine the processes of the conscious mind and bodily behavior in normal and abnormal conditions?
These are some of the problems of the subconscious which for the most part have been only incompletely investigated.
It is, of course, beyond the scope of these introductory lectures to discuss with any completeness the evidence at hand bearing upon these problems or to even touch upon many of the points involved. We may, however, study more deeply than we have done some of the phenomena with which we have become familiar with a view to seeing what light they throw upon some of these problems, particularly the first three.
1, 2, and 3; Actuality, Intrinsic Nature and Intelligence of Subconscious Processes.—As to the first question, whether subconscious processes can be established in principle as a sound induction from experimental and clinical facts and not merely as a hypothetical concept, I have already pointed out that many manifestations of conservation already cited in the exposition of the theory of memory are of equal evidential value for the actuality of such processes. Let us now consider them in more detail from the point of view, more particularly, of the second and third questions—the intrinsic nature (whether coconscious or unconscious) and intelligence of the underlying processes at work. In any given case however the actuality of the subconscious process must always be first demonstrated.
If we leave aside those conditions (hysteria, coconscious personalities) wherein specific memory of a coconscious process can be recovered, or such a process can be directly communicated with (automatic writing and speech), the conditions required for the valid postulation of a subconscious process underlying any given phenomenon are: first, that the causal factor shall be positively known; second, that it shall be an antecedent experience; and, third, that it shall not be in the content of consciousness at the moment of the occurrence of the phenomenon. If the causal factor and the phenomenon are both known, then the only unknown factor to be determined is the process, if any, intervening between the two. If this is not in consciousness, a subconscious process must be postulated.
Obviously, if the known causal factor is immediately related to the caused phenomenon, the subconscious process must be the causal factor itself. But if the known causal factor is not immediately related to the caused phenomenon, there must be an intervening process which must be subconscious, perhaps consisting of a succession of processes eventuating in the final phenomenon. For instance, if the causal factor is a hypnotic suggestion (for which there is afterwards amnesia) that the subject when awake shall automatically raise the right arm, a subconscious process which is the memory of that suggestion immediately provokes the automatic phenomenon. If, however, the suggestion is that of a series of automatic actions involving complicated behavior, or if it is a mathematical calculation, the intervening process which provokes the end result must not only be subconscious but must be a more or less complicated succession of processes.
When, on the other hand, the causal factor is not known but only inferred with greater or less probability, the justification of the postulation of a subconscious process may be invalidated by the uncertainty of the inference. If for example a person raises his right hand or has a number come into his head without obvious cause, any inferred antecedent experience as the causal factor must be open to more or less doubt, and, therefore, a subconscious process cannot be postulated with certainty. This uncertainty seriously affects the validity of conclusions drawn from clinical phenomena where the antecedent experience as well as a subconscious process must be inferred and perhaps even a matter of guesswork.
Let us examine then, a few selected phenomena where the causal factor in the process is a known antecedent conscious experience, one which can be logically related to the succeeding phenomenon only by the postulation of an intervening process of some kind. By an analysis of the antecedent experience and the caused phenomenon into their constituent elements we shall often be able to infer the functional characteristics of this intervening process. Then, if the subject is a favorable one, by the use of hypnotic and other methods we may be able to obtain an insight into the intrinsic nature of the subconscious process and determine how far it is conscious and how far unconscious. Necessarily the most available phenomena are those experimentally induced. We can arrange beforehand the causal experience and the phenomenon which it is to determine—an hallucination, a motor automatism, a dream, a conscious process of thought, or the product of an intellectual operation. The number of observations we shall examine might be made much larger and the types more varied. Those I have selected have such close analogies with certain experiences of everyday and pathological life that what is found to be true of them will afford valuable fundamentals in the elucidation of these latter experiences.[[80]]
Subconscious processes in which the causal factor was antecedently known.—I. The evidential value of post-hypnotic phenomena ranks perhaps in the first place for our purpose as the conditions under which they occur are largely under control. Among these showing subconscious processes of a high order of intelligence are:
(a) The well-known subconscious mathematical calculations which I cited in a previous lecture (p. 96). There is no possible explanation of this phenomenon except that the calculation was a subconscious process and done either coconsciously or unconsciously. That it may be done, in some cases, by coconscious processes of which the subject is unaware is substantiated by the evidence.[[81]] In other cases this does not appear to be wholly the case if we can rely upon hypnotic memories. We will examine this process in connection with:
(b) A second class of post-hypnotic phenomena, namely, those of suggested actions carried out by the subject more or less automatically, in a sort of absent-minded way, without his being aware of what he is doing. The subject is directed in hypnosis to perform such or such an action after being awakened. Sometimes the suggested action is performed consciously, the suggested ideas with their impulses arising in his mind, but without his knowing why. In other instances, however, he performs the action automatically without being consciously aware at the moment that he is doing it, his attention being directed toward something else. Such actions must be performed by some kind of subconscious processes instigated by the ideas suggested in hypnosis.
Now hypnotic and other technically evoked memories sometimes reveal the conscious content of the processes involved in both classes of phenomena. For instance: two intelligent subjects, who have been the object of extensive observations on this point, are able to recall in hypnosis the previous occurrence of coconscious ideas of a peculiar character. The description of these ideas has been very precise and has carried a conviction, I believe, to all those who have had an opportunity to be present at these observations that these recollections were true memories and not fabrications.[[82]] The statements of these subjects is that in their own cases, under certain conditions of everyday life, coconscious ideas of which the principal consciousness is not aware emerge into the subconscious, persist for a longer or shorter time, and then subside to be replaced by others. So long as the conditions of their occurrence continue these coconscious ideas keep coming and going, interchanging with one another. Sometimes these ideas take the form of images, or what is described as visual “pictures.” When the conditions are those of the subconscious solution of a mathematical calculation then the same “pictures” occur and take the form of the figures involved in the calculation; the figures come and go, apparently add, subtract, and multiply themselves until the final result appears in figures. An example will make this clear.
While the subject was in hypnosis the problem was given to add 458 and 367, the calculation to be done subconsciously after she was awake. The problem was successfully accomplished in the usual way. The mode in which the calculation was effected was then investigated with the following result: In what may be termed for convenience the secondary consciousness, i.e., the subconsciousness, the numbers 458 and 367 appeared as distinct visualizations. These numbers were placed one over the other, “with a line underneath them such as one makes in adding. The visualization kept coming and going; sometimes the line was crooked and sometimes it was straight. The secondary consciousness did not do the sum at once, but by piecemeal. It took a long time before it was completed.” The sum was not apparently done as soon as one would do it when awake, by volitional calculation, “but rather the figures added themselves, in a curious sort of way. The numbers were visualized and the visualization kept coming and going and the columns at different times added themselves, as it seemed, the result appearing at the bottom.” In another problem (453 to be multiplied by 6) the process was described as follows: The numbers were visualized in a line, thus, 453 × 6. Then the 6 arranged itself under the 453. The numbers kept coming and going the same as before. Sometimes, however, they added themselves, and sometimes the 6 subtracted itself from the larger number. Finally, however, the result was obtained. As in the first problem, the numbers kept coming and going in the secondary consciousness until the problem was solved and then they ceased to appear. It is to be understood, of course, that the principal or personal consciousness was not aware of these coconscious figures, or even that any calculation was being or to be performed.
In suggested post-hypnotic actions, the pictures that come and go correspond to and represent the details of the action as it is carried out. Each detail is preceded or accompanied by its coconscious image or picture. Likewise, when somatic phenomena have followed dreams, pictures representing certain elements of the dream have appeared as secondary conscious states. When the subject has been disturbed by some unsolved moral or social problem (not suggested) the pictures have been symbolic representations of the disturbing doubts and scruples.[[83]]
One of these two subjects, while in hypnosis and able to recollect what goes on in the secondary consciousness, thus describes the coconscious process during the spontaneous subconscious solution of problems. “When a problem on which my waking self is engaged remains unsettled, it is still kept in mind by the secondary consciousness even though put aside by my waking self. My secondary consciousness often helps me to solve problems which my waking consciousness has found difficulty in doing. But it is not my secondary consciousness that accomplishes the final solution itself, but it helps in the following way: Suppose, for instance, I am trying to translate a difficult passage in Virgil. I work at it for some time and am puzzled. Finally, unable to do it, I put it aside, leaving it unsolved. I decide that it is not worth bothering about and so put it out of my mind. But it is a mistake to say you put it out of your mind. What you do is, you put it into your mind; that is to say, you don’t put it out of your mind if the problem remains unsolved and unsettled. By putting it into your mind I mean that, although the waking consciousness may have put it aside, the problem still remains in the secondary consciousness. In the example I used the memory of the passage from Virgil would be retained persistently by my secondary consciousness. Then from time to time a whole lot of fragmentary memories and thoughts connected with the passage would arise in this consciousness. Some of these thoughts, perhaps, would be memories of the rules of grammar, or different meanings of words in the passage, in fact, anything I had read, or thought, or experienced in connection with the problem. These would not be logical, connected thoughts, and they would not solve the problem. My secondary consciousness does not actually do this, i.e., in the example taken, translate the passage. The translation is not effected here. But later when my waking consciousness thinks of the problem again, these fragmentary thoughts of my secondary consciousness arise in my mind, and with this information I complete the translation. The actual translation is put together by my waking consciousness.[[84]] I am not conscious of the fact that these fragments of knowledge existed previously in my secondary consciousness. I do not remember a problem ever to have been solved by the secondary consciousness.[[85]] It is always solved by the waking self, although the material for solving it may come from the secondary. When my waking consciousness solves it in this way, the solution seems to come in a miraculous sort of way, sometimes as if it came to me from somewhere else than my own mind. I have sometimes thought, in consequence, that I had solved it in my sleep.”[[86]]
A series of observations conducted with a fourth subject (O. N.) gave the following results, briefly summarized. (This subject, like the others, is practiced in introspection and can differentiate her memories with precision.) She distinguishes “two strata” in her mental processes (an upper and lower). The “upper stratum” consists of the thoughts in the focus of attention. The lower (also called the background of her mind) consists of the perceptions and thoughts which are not in the focus. This stratum, of course, corresponds with what is commonly recognized as the fringe of consciousness, and, as is usual, when her attention is directed elsewhere she is not aware of it. She can, however, bring this fringe within the field of attention and then she becomes aware of, or rather remembers, its content during the preceding moment. To be able to do this is nothing out of the ordinary, but what is unusual is this: by a trick of abstraction which she has long practiced, she can bring the memory of the fringe or stratum into the full light of awareness and then it is discovered that it has been exceedingly rich in thoughts, far richer than ordinary attention would show and a fringe is supposed to be. It is indeed a veritable coconsciousness in which there goes on a secondary stream of thoughts often of an entirely different character and with different affects from those of the upper stratum. It is common for thoughts which she has resolutely put out of her mind as intolerable or unacceptable, or problems which have not been solved, to continue functioning in the lower stratum without entering awareness.[[87]] She can, however, at any time become aware of them by the trick of abstraction referred to, and sometimes they emerge apparently spontaneously and suddenly[[88]] replace the “upper stratum.” In hypnosis also the content of the lower stratum can be distinctly recalled.
Now the point I have been coming to is, the subject has acquired the habit of postponing the decision of many everyday problems and giving them, as a matter of convenience, to this second stratum or fringe to solve. She puts one aside, that is out of (or into) her mind and it goes into this stratum. Then, later, when the time for action comes, she voluntarily goes into abstraction, becomes aware of the subconscious thoughts of the second stratum and, lo and behold! the problem is found to be solved. If a plan of action, all the details are found arranged as if planned “consciously.” If asked a moment before what plans had been decided upon and decision reached she would have been obliged in her conscious ignorance to reply, “I don’t know.”[[89]]
An analysis of these different observations shows, first, that the post-hypnotic phenomena—calculations (a) and actions (b)—were performed by a subconscious process. Of this there can be no manner of doubt, even if the subsequent hypnotic memories of the process be rejected as untrustworthy. The phenomenon—the answer to the mathematical problem in the one case and the motor acts in the other—is so logically related to the suggestion, and can be predicted with such certainty, that only a causal relation can be admitted.
Second, in the calculation phenomena the process is clearly of an intellectual character requiring reasoning and the coöperation of mathematical memory. (Reasoning is more conspicuous when the problem is more complicated, as in the calculation of the number of seconds intervening between, say, twenty-two minutes past eleven and seventeen minutes past three o’clock.)[[90]] The phenomenon is the solution of a problem.
The final phenomenon was not immediately related to the suggested idea. It was the final result of a quite long series of logical processes of a more or less complex character occurring over a period of time as in conscious calculation. Conation (volition?) would seem also to be essential to carry the suggested idea to fulfilment. Subconscious cognition would seem also to be required. There must have been an intelligent appreciation of what the problem was and as soon as the solution was accomplished the process stopped. Random figuring did not continue.
In the post-hypnotic motor acts conation is obvious. Here too there is a series of subconscious processes covering a period of time and carrying out a purpose. The suggested causal idea did not include the acts necessary for the fulfillment of the idea. Each step was adapted to an end, ceased as soon as it accomplished that end, and was followed by another in logical sequence, the whole taking place as if performed by an intelligence. Reasoning may or may not be involved according to the complexity of the actions.
Third; the coconscious figures in the calculation experiments do not constitute the whole of the process. They would seem to be the product of some deeper underlying process. The figures “kept coming and going” and seemed to “add themselves.” There was no conscious process that related the figures to one another and determined whether the problem was one of addition or multiplication—as is the case when we do a calculation consciously; that is to say, of course, if the hypnotic personality remembered the whole of the conscious calculation. It was more as if there was an underlying unconscious process which did the calculation, certain final results of which appeared as dissociated states of consciousness, i.e., figures which did not enter the personal consciousness. The process reminds us of the printing of visible letters by the concealed works of a typewriter; or of visible letters of an electrically illuminated sign appearing and disappearing according as the concealed mechanism is worked. This interpretation is in entire accord with the spontaneous occurrence of the coconscious images during the everyday life of these subjects. These images were pictorial representations of antecedent thoughts and seemed to be the products or elements of these thoughts apparently functioning as underlying unconscious processes. Likewise, in post-hypnotic suggested actions, I have not been able to obtain memories of coconscious thoughts directing the actions, but only the images described. These behave as if they were the product of another underlying process determining the action. Inferences of this sort are as compulsory as the inference that the illumination of a sensitive plate observed in the study of radio-activity must be due to the bombardment of the plate by invisible particles emitted by the radio-active substance. These particles and the process which ejects them can only be inferred from the effects which they produce. So, in the above observations, it would seem as if the coconscious figures, and other images involved, must be ejected as conscious phenomena by an underlying process. There is no explicit evidence that this is conscious.
I said advisedly, a moment ago, “if the hypnotic personality remembered the whole of the conscious calculation,” for, as a matter of fact, we find, when we examine several different hypnotic states in the same subject, that their memories for coconscious ideas are not coextensive, one (or more) being fuller than another. Indeed in certain states there may not be any such memories at all. It is necessary, therefore, to obtain by hypnosis a degree of dissociation which will allow the complete memories of this kind to be evoked. In the subjects I made use of this procedure was followed. Theoretically it might be held that, no matter how complete the memories evoked in the various states, some other state might possibly be obtained in which still more complete memory would be manifested. Theoretically this is true and all conclusions are subject to this criticism. Practically, however, I found, when making these investigations, that I seemed to have come to the limit of such possibilities, for, obtain as I would new dissociated arrangements of personality, after a certain point no additional memories could be evoked. There is still another possibility that there may be coconscious processes for which no memories can be evoked by any method or in any state.
II. Artificially induced visual hallucinations with which we have already become familiar can, as we have seen, only be interpreted as the product of subconscious processes. If only because of the important part that hallucinations play in insanity and other pathological states and of the frequency with which they occur in normal people (mystics and others), the characteristics of the subconscious process are well worth closer study. What is found to be true of the experimental type is probably true of the spontaneous variety whether occurring in pathological or normal conditions. Indeed, as we shall see, spontaneous hallucinations have the same characteristics. We have considered them thus far only from two points of view, viz. (1) as evidence of conservation of forgotten experiences, and (2) as evidence for specific residua of such experiences functioning as subconscious processes. Now, artificial visual hallucinations, like the spontaneous ones, may be limited—relatively speaking—to what is apparently little more than an exact reproduction of an antecedent visual perception, e. g., a person or object. But, generally speaking, it is more than this and when analyzed will be found almost always to be the expression of a complicated process. For instance, take the relatively simple crystal vision, of the subject smoking a cigarette in a particular situation during hypnosis, which I have previously cited. (Lecture III.) As a matter of fact, the subject had no primary visual perceptions at the time of the original episode at all. She was in hypnosis, her eyes were closed, and she did not and could not see herself (particularly her own face) or the cigarette or her surroundings. And yet the vision pictured everything exactly as it had occurred in my presence, even to the expression of her features. Looking into the crystal the subject saw herself sitting in a particular place, enacting a series of movements, talking and smoking a cigarette with a peculiar smile and expression of enjoyment on her face.[[91]] For this experience there was complete amnesia after waking from hypnosis and at the time of the vision.
Now consider further the facts and their implications. In the mechanism of the process eventuating in the visual phenomenon we obviously have two known factors: the antecedent causal factor—the hypnotic episode—and, after a time interval, the end result—the vision. As there was no conscious memory of the hypnotic episode the neurograms of the latter must have functioned subconsciously to have produced the vision. But what particular neurograms? As the subject’s eyes had been closed in hypnosis, and, in any event, as she could not have seen her own face, there were at the time no visual perceptions of herself smoking a cigarette, and therefore the vision could not have been simply a reproduction of a visual experience. There were, however, tactual, gustatory, and other perceptions and ideas of self and environment, and these perceptions and ideas of course possessed secondary visual images.[[92]] The simplest mechanism would be that the neurograms of this complex of perception and ideas of self, etc., functioned subconsciously and their secondary visual images emerged into consciousness to be the vision. I give this as the simplest mechanism by which we can conceive of a visual representation of an antecedent experience emerging out of a subconscious process.[[93]] There is a considerable body of data supporting this interpretation.
But the original experiences of the episode included more than the mere perceptions and movements of the subject. They included trains of thought and enjoyment of the cigarette smoking experience. All formed a complex of which the tactual and other perceptions of self were subordinate elements. At one moment, of course, one element, and, at another moment another element, had been in the focus of awareness, the others becoming shifted into the fringe where at all times were secondary visual images of herself. Did the subconscious process underlying the vision include the whole of this complex? As to this, one peculiarity of the vision has much significance. In behavior it acted after the manner of a cinematographic or “moving picture,” and delineated each successive movement of the episode, as if a rapid series of photographs had been taken for reproduction. In this manner even the emotional and changing play of the features of the vision-self, expressive of the previous thoughts and enjoyment, were depicted. Such a cinematographic series of visual images would seem to require a concurrent subconscious process to produce the successive changes in the hallucinatory images. As these changes apparently correspond from moment to moment with the changes that had occurred in the content of consciousness during the causal episode, it would also seem that the subconscious process was a reproduction in subconscious terms of substantially the whole original mental episode. This conclusion is fortified by the following additional facts: In many experiments of this kind, if the subject’s face be watched during the visualization, it will be observed that it shows the same play of features as is displayed by the vision face,[[94]] and the visualizer at the same moment experiences the same emotion as is expressed by the features of the vision face,[[95]] and sometimes knows “what her [my] vision self is thinking about.” In other words, in particular instances, sometimes the feelings alone and sometimes both the thoughts and feelings expressed in pantomime in the hallucination arise at the same moment in consciousness. This would seem to indicate that the same processes which determined the mimetic play of features in the hallucination were determining at the same moment the same play in the features of the visualizer, and that these processes were a subconscious memory of substantially all the original perceptions and thoughts. That is to say, this memory in such cases remains sometimes entirely subconscious and sometimes emerges into consciousness. The hallucination is simply a projected visualization induced by what is taking place subconsciously in the subject’s mind at the moment. Whether this shall remain entirely subconscious or shall emerge partially or wholly into consciousness depends upon psychological conditions peculiar to the subject.
That even when the thoughts of the causal experience emerge in consciousness along with the vision a portion of the functioning complex—e. g., the perceptual elements—may still remain submerged is shown by the following example: The vision, one of several of the same kind, portrayed in pantomime an elaborate nocturnal somnambulistic act. It represented the subject walking in her sleep with eyes closed; then sitting before the fire in profound and depressing thought; then joyously dancing; then writing letters, etc., and finally ascending the stairs, unconsciously dropping one of the letters from her hand on the way,[[96]] and returning to bed. During the visualization the thoughts and feelings of the vision-self, even the contents of the letters, arose in the mind of the visualizer whose features and tone of voice betrayed the feelings.
The point to be noted in this observation is that the vision reproduced as a detail of the somnambulistic act the accidental dropping of a letter from the hand of the somnambulist who was unaware of the fact; it reproduced what was not in conscious experience. How came it that an act for which there had been no awareness could appear in the vision? The only explanation is that originally in the somnambulistic state, as is so commonly observed in hypnotic somnambulism, there was a subconscious tactual perception (with secondary visual images?) of dropping the letter and now the memory of this antecedent perception, functioning subconsciously, induced this detail of the vision. The general conclusion then would seem to be justified that this hallucination was determined by a fairly large complex of antecedent somnambulistic experiences of which a part emerged as the hallucination and the thoughts of the somnambulist into consciousness, and a part—the tactual and other perceptions—remained submerged as the subconscious process. How much more may have been contained in this process the facts do not enable us to determine.
An examination, then, of even the more simple artificial hallucinations discloses that underlying them there is a residual process which is quite an extensive subconscious memory of antecedent thoughts, perceptions and affective experiences. Whether this memory is only an unconscious functioning neurogram or whether it is also a coconscious memory, or partly both, cannot be determined from the data.[[97]] The bearing of these results upon the interpretation of insane hallucinations is obvious.
Our examination of subconscious processes in the two classes of phenomena thus far studied—post-hypnotic[post-hypnotic] phenomena and artificial hallucinations—permits the following general conclusions: First, there is positive evidence to show that in some instances, in their intrinsic nature, they are coconscious. In other instances, in the absence of such evidence, it is permissible to regard them as unconscious. Second, that in the quality of the functions performed they frequently exhibit that which is characteristic of Intelligence. This characteristic will be seen to be still more pronounced in the phenomena which we shall next study.
[72]. I forbear to enter into the question of the nature of consciousness and matter. In the last analysis, matter and mind probably are to be identified as different manifestations of one and the same principle—the doctrine of monism—call it psychical, spiritual, or material, or energy, as you like, according to your fondness for names. For our purpose it is not necessary to touch this philosophical problem as we are dealing only with specific biological experiences.
[73]. Also quite commonly termed the Subconscious. Unfortunately the term unconscious, as noun or adjective, is used in two senses, viz., (1) pertaining to unawareness (for example, I am unconscious of such and such a thing), and (2) in the sense of not having the psychological attribute of consciousness, i.e., non-conscious.
In the first sense the adjective is used, as in the phrase “unconscious process” to define a process of which we are unaware without connotation as to whether it is a psychological process or a brain process; also the noun (The Unconscious) is used to signify something not in awareness regardless of whether that something is psychological or not; on the other hand, as an adjective it is also used, as in the phrase “unconscious ideas,” to specifically signify real ideas of which we are unaware.
In the second sense, as noun or adjective, it is used to denote specifically brain residua or processes, which, of course, are devoid of consciousness. With this interchange of meaning the term is apt to be confusing and is lacking in precision. In the text unconscious will be used always with the second meaning, unless inverted commas or the context plainly indicate the first meaning. (Cf. Lecture VIII, pp. 248-254).
[74]. Also termed by some writers unconscious. (See preceding footnote.)
[75]. Pierre Janet: L’automatisme psychologique, Paris, 1889, and numerous other works.
[76]. Not included in this volume.
[77]. Cf. Prince: The Dissociation; also A Symposium on the Subconscious, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, June-July, 1907; Experiments to Determine Coconscious (Subconscious) Ideation, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, April-May, 1908; Experiments in Psycho-Galvanic Reactions from Coconscious (Subconscious) Ideas in a Case of Multiple Personality, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, June-July, 1908; The Subconscious [Rapports et Comptes Rendus, 6me Congrès International de Psychologie, 1909]; also, My Life as a Dissociated Personality, by B. C. A., Journal of Abnormal Psychology, October-November, 1908.
[78]. The value of subconscious personalities for this purpose has been overlooked, owing, I suppose, to such conditions being unusual and bizarre, and the assumption that they have little in common with ordinary subconscious processes. But it ought to be obvious that in principle it makes little difference whether a subconscious system is constellated into a large self-conscious system called a personality, or whether it is restricted to a system limited to a few particular coconscious ideas. In the former case the possibilities of its interfering with the personal consciousness may be more extended and more influential, that is all.
[79]. Of course, from a practical (clinical) point of view, it is of no consequence whether given phenomena are induced by coconscious or unconscious processes; the individual is not aware of either. Let me answer, however, a strange objection that has been made to such an inquiry. It has been objected that as it makes no practical difference whether the subconscious process, which induces a given phenomenon, is coconscious or unconscious, and as in many given cases it is difficult or impossible to determine the question, therefore, that such inquiries are useless. Plainly such an objection only concerns applied science, not science itself. It concerns only the practicing physician who deals solely with reactions. Likewise it makes no difference to the practicing chemist whether some atoms are positive and some negative ions, and whether on further analysis they are systems of electrons, and whether, again, electrons are points of electricity. The practical chemist deals only with reactions. Such questions, however, having to do with the ultimate nature of matter are of the highest interest to science. Likewise the nature of subconscious processes is of the highest interest to psychological science.
[80]. I have passed over the classical hysterical phenomena as they open a very large subject which needs a special treatment by itself. The subconscious processes underlying them, so far as they have been determined, are, as I have explained, admittedly coconscious, though some may be in part unconscious. They are too complicated to be entered into here.
[81]. Prince: Experiments to Determine Coconscious (Subconscious) Ideation, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, April-May, 1908.
[82]. Among these I might mention the names of a dozen or more well-known psychologists and physicians of experience and repute who have observed one or both of these cases. Through the kindness of Dr. G. A. Waterman I have had an opportunity to investigate a third case, one of his patients, who described similar coconscious “pictures” accompanying certain impulsive conscious acts. The pictures, when of persons, were described as “life size,” and were likened to those of a cinematograph. Also, as with one of my cases, suggested post-hypnotic actions were accompanied by such coconscious pictures representing in successive stages the act to be performed. An analysis of both the impulsive and the suggested phenomena seemed to clearly show that the pictures emerged from a deeper lying submerged process induced by the residuum of a dream and of the suggestion, respectively.
[83]. Cf. Lecture IV. These coconscious pictures are so varied and occur in so many relations that they need to be studied by themselves.
[84]. This, of course, so far as she could determine from the data of memory. The more correct interpretation probably is that the thoughts of the “secondary consciousness” were supplied by a still deeper underlying subconscious process, certain elements of which emerged as dissociated conscious states (not in the focus of attention). This same process probably was the real agent in doing the actual translation, and later thrust the necessary data into awareness in such fashion that the translation seemed to be performed consciously. If all the required data is supplied to consciousness the problem is thereby done.
[85]. The subject here, of course, refers not to experimental but to spontaneous solutions. When experimentally performed the whole problem was solved subconsciously. Furthermore, a memory of a detail of this kind of remote experiences obviously would not be reliable, but only immediately after an experience. In fact, spontaneous solutions sometimes occurred entirely subconsciously. (Cf. Lecture VII.) In the experimental calculation experiments the solution is made subconsciously in accordance with the prescribed conditions of the experiment. In other observations on this subject the coconscious pictures represented past experiences of the subject, much as do crystal visions, and suggest that these past experiences were functioning unconsciously.
[86]. Prince: Some of the Present Problems of Abnormal Psychology, Congress of Arts and Sciences, St. Louis, 1904, V. 5, p. 770.
[87]. Practically similar conditions I have found in B. C. A., and Miss B., though described by the subjects in different phraseology.
[88]. For instance, to take a sensational example, on one occasion in the midst of hilarity while singing, laughing, etc., she suddenly became depressed and burst into tears. What happened was this: It was a sorrowful anniversary, and in the “lower stratum” sad memories had been recurring during the period of hilarity. These memories had come into consciousness early in the morning, but she had resolutely put them out of her mind. They had, however, kept recurring in the lower stratum, and suddenly emerged into the upper stratum of consciousness with the startling effect described. More commonly, however, the emergence of the lower stratum is simply a shifting play of thought. It is interesting to note that censored thoughts and temptations are apt to go into the lower stratum and here with their affects continue at play. These sometimes reappear as dreams.
[89]. The validity of the evidence of memory as applied to subconscious processes needs to be carefully weighed. It is a question of method, and if the method is fallacious all conclusions fall to the ground. In the sciences of normal psychology and psychiatry and psychopathology, the data given by memory are and necessarily must be relied upon to furnish a knowledge of the content of mental processes and the mental symptoms, and all methods of psychological analysis are based on the data of memory. Without such data there could be no such sciences. As a matter of experience the method is found to be reliable when properly checked by multiple observations. If by special methods of technique mental processes, which do not enter the awareness of the moment, are later brought into consciousness as data of memory, are these data per contra to be rejected as hallucinatory? This is what their rejection would mean. Now, as a fact, there are phenomena, like coconscious personalities, which compel the postulation of coconscious processes. If this is the case, if there are coconscious processes which do not enter awareness, it would be the strangest thing if there were not conditions of the personality in which a memory of these processes could be obtained. This fact would have to be explained. The bringing of coconscious processes into consciousness as data of memory does not seem therefore to be anything a priori improbable and there would seem to be no reason why the memory of them should be more unreliable than that of conscious processes in the forms of attention. Indeed, if the fringe of consciousness be regarded as coconscious, it is an every-day act common to everybody. Such data necessarily should be checked up by multiple observations.
[90]. For examples of this kind, see Prince, Experiments to Determine Coconscious Ideation, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, April-May, 1908.
[91]. The Dissociation, pp. 55, 56.
[92]. It is only necessary to close one’s eyes, then grimace and move one’s limbs to become conscious of these secondary images which picture each movement of the features, etc.
[93]. The mechanism is probably not quite so simple as this, probably past visual perceptions of self and the environment took part, so that the vision was a fusion or composite of these older primary images and the secondary images. The principle of mechanism, however, would not be affected by this added element. Sidis (The Doctrine of Primary and Secondary Sensory Elements, Psych. Rev., January-March, 1908) has maintained that all hallucinations are the emerging of the secondary images of previous perceptions. If, on the other hand, the vision be interpreted as something fabricated by the subconscious process—as must be the case with some hallucinations—then this process must have been much more complicated than memory. Something akin at least to constructive imagination and intelligence that translated the experiences into visual terms.
[94]. That is to say, as described by the visualizer.
[95]. Cf. The Dissociation, pp. 211-220.
[96]. At this point the subject watching the vision remarked, “I drop one of the letters, but I do not know I have done so.” In other words, conscious of the content of the somnambulist’s consciousness, the visualizer knows that there is no awareness of this act. The letter was afterward found by the servant on the stairs.
[97]. Coconscious ideas may provoke hallucinations. (For examples consult “Hallucinations” in Index to The Dissociation.)
LECTURE VII
SUBCONSCIOUS INTELLIGENCE
(Continued)
III. Subconscious intelligence underlying spontaneous hallucinations.—Spontaneous hallucinations often offer opportunities to study subconscious processes exhibiting constructive intelligence. Although properly belonging to clinical phenomena, they often can be so clearly related to an antecedent experience as to allow us to determine the causal factor with the same exactness as in the experimental type, and, therefore, to infer the connecting subconscious link with equal probability. Some of these spontaneous visions indicate that the subconscious link must be of considerable complexity and equivalent to logical processes of reasoning, volition, and purposive intelligence. Sometimes the same subconscious processes which fabricate the vision determine also other processes of conscious thought and movements.
In illustration I may cite an incident in the life of Miss B., which I have previously described:
“Miss B., as a child, frequently had visions of the Madonna and Christ, and used to believe that she had actually seen them. It was her custom when in trouble, if it was only a matter of her school lessons, or something that she had lost, to resort to prayer. Then she would be apt to have a vision of Christ. The vision never spoke, but sometimes made signs to her, and the expression of His face made her feel that all was well. After the vision passed she felt that her difficulties were removed, and if it was a bothersome lesson which she had been unable to understand it all became intelligible at once. Or, if it was something that she had lost, she at once went to the spot where it was.”... [For example, while under observation.] "Miss B. had lost a bank check and was much troubled concerning it. For five days she had made an unsuccessful hunt for it, systematically going through everything in her room. She remembered distinctly placing the check between the leaves of a book, when some one knocked at her door, and this was the last she saw of the check. She had become very much troubled about the matter, and in consequence, after going to bed that night she was unable to sleep, and rose several times to make a further hunt. Finally, at 3 o’clock in the morning, she went to bed and fell asleep. At 4 o’clock she woke with the consciousness of a presence in the room. She arose, and in a moment saw a vision of Christ, who did not speak, but smiled. She at once felt, as she used to, that everything was well, and that the vision foretold that she should find the check. All her anxiety left her at once. The figure retreated toward the bureau, but the thought flashed into her mind that the lost check was in the drawer of her desk. A search, however, showed that it was not there. She then walked automatically to the bureau, opened the top drawer, took out some stuff upon which she had been sewing, unfolded it, and there was the check along with one or two other papers.
“Neither Miss B. nor BII [hypnosis] has any memory of any specific thought which directed her to open the drawer and take out her sewing, nor of any conscious idea that the check was there. Rather, she did it, so far as her consciousness goes, automatically, as she used to do automatic writing.”[[98]]
Further investigation revealed the fact that the money had been put away absent-mindedly and “unconsciously”; in hypnosis the memory of this act was recovered.
In this observation we have two so-called automatic phenomena of different types—one a sensory automatism, the vision, the other a motor automatism or actions leading to the finding of the money. The motor acts being automatic were necessarily determined by subconscious processes and plainly required a knowledge of the hiding-place. This knowledge also plainly must have been conserved in the unconscious and now, in answer to her wish to find the lost money, acting as a subconscious process, fulfilled her wish in a practical way.
The vision was of Christ smiling. Seeing it the subject at once “felt that all was well,” and her anxiety vanished. It was plainly therefore a fabricated visual symbolism though one which she had frequently before experienced. It may be taken as a message sent by subconscious processes to her anxious consciousness and it is not too much to say had a purposive meaning, viz., to allay her anxiety. The question is, What was the causal factor which determined this symbolism? Logically it is a compulsory inference that the same conserved knowledge and subconscious processes, which eventuated in the motor automatisms, must have been the causal factor that determined the visual symbolism which carried the reassuring message to consciousness. This subconscious knowledge first allayed her anxiety and then proceeded to answer her problem of the whereabouts of the lost money. More specifically, the primary causal factor was the preceding anxious wish to find the money; the resulting phenomena were the sensory and motor automatisms, allaying the anxiety and fulfilling the wish; between the two as connecting links were subconscious processes of an intelligent, purposive, volitional character which first fabricated a visual symbolism as a message to consciousness and then made use of the conserved knowledge of her previous absent-minded act to solve her problem. The subconscious process as a whole we thus see was of quite a complicated character. In this example it is impossible to determine from the data at hand whether the subconscious process was coconscious or unconscious.
The observation which I have elsewhere described as “an hallucination from the subconscious”[[99]] is an excellent example of an intelligent subconscious process indicative of judgment and purpose. The hallucination occurred in my presence as a result of an antecedent experience for which I was a moment before responsible. It was therefore of the nature of an experiment and the causal factor was known. The antecedent experience consisted of certain remarks and behavior of the subject while under the influence of an illusion during a dissociated state for which there was subsequent amnesia. The vision was of a friend whose face was sad, as of one who had been injured, and seemed to reproach her. At the same moment she heard his voice which said, “How could you have betrayed me?” The hallucinatory words and the visual image were in no sense a reproduction of the causal, i.e., antecedent, experience. They were the expression of a subconscious self-reproach in consequence of that experience. This reproach connoted a subconscious belief or logical judgment, drawn from the experience, that she had broken a promise.[[100]] It was a subconscious reaction to a subconscious belief. I say both the reproach and the judgment were subconscious because, in the dissociated state, owing to the illusion, and in the normal after-state owing to the amnesia, she was entirely ignorant of having done anything that could be construed into breaking a promise. This interpretation of the episode must therefore have been entirely subconscious. The self-reproach emerged into consciousness but translated into visual and auditory hallucinations. These were plainly a condemnatory message sent from the subconscious to the personal consciousness and might aptly be termed “the prickings of a subconscious conscience.” The primary causal factor was simply certain statements (conserved in the unconscious) made to me by the subject and for which afterwards there was amnesia. Intervening between this antecedent experience and the resulting hallucinatory phenomena a subconscious process must be postulated as a necessary connecting link. This process plainly involved memory and an intelligent judgment, an emotional reaction, and an expression of this judgment and reaction translated into hallucinatory phenomena. Apparently also a distinct purpose to upbraid the personality was manifested.
The accounts of sudden religious conversion are full of instances of hallucinations occurring at the time of the “crisis” and these—visions and voices—are often logical symbolisms of antecedent thoughts of the subject. By analogy with similar experimental phenomena we are compelled to interpret them in the same way and postulate these antecedent experiences as the causal factors. If this postulation is sound then the connecting subconscious link is often a quite complicated process of an intelligent character.
In one instance in which the occurrence was similar in principle to sudden religious conversion I was able to determine beyond question the causal antecedents of the hallucinatory phenomenon. I will not repeat the details here;[[101]] suffice it to say that the hallucination, consisting of a vision and an auditory message from the subject’s deceased husband (see p. 40), answered the doubts and scruples with which the subject had been previously tormented. It was a logical answer calculated to allay distressing memories against which she had been fighting, “the old ideas of dissatisfaction with life, the feelings of injury, bitterness, and rebellion against fate and the ‘kicking against the pricks’ which these memories evoked.” It expressed previously entertained ideas which she had tried to accept but without success. The exposition of this answer in the hallucinatory symbolism required a subconscious process involving considerable reasoning. The phenomenon as a whole was a message addressed to her own consciousness by subconscious processes to answer her doubts and anxious questionings of herself, and to settle the conflict going on in her mind. The logical connection between the different elements of this hallucination and certain antecedent experiences which had harassed the subject are so close that there is no room left for doubting that these experiences were the causal factors. And so I might analyze a large number of spontaneous hallucinations wherein you would find the same evidence for subconscious processes showing intelligent constructive imagination, reasoning, volition, and purposive effort, and expressing themselves in automatisms which either solve a disturbing problem or carry to fruition a subconscious purpose.
I offer no excuse for multiplying these observations of hallucinatory phenomena, even at the expense of tedious repetition, for such studies give an insight into the mechanism of the hallucinations met with in the insanities and other pathological states. They offer, too, an insight into the basic process involved in dreams as these are a type of hallucinatory phenomena. It is by a study of hallucinations experimentally created, and others where we are in a position to know the causal factors, that we can learn the mechanisms underlying similar phenomena occurring in normal pathological conditions. As a rule in the latter conditions it is difficult to determine beyond question the true causal factors and, therefore, the particular subconscious processes involved. Such phenomena as I have presented justify the conclusion of the “new psychology” that the hallucinations of the insane are not haphazard affairs but the resultant of subconscious processes evoked by antecedent experiences. In conclusion, then, we may say that in artificial hallucinations as experimentally conducted, and in certain spontaneous hallucinations, we have two known factors; the causal factor (the antecedent experience) and the hallucinatory phenomenon—the effect. Intervening between the two is an inferred subconscious process of considerable complexity which is required to explain the causal connection. With the exact mechanism of hallucinatory phenomena we are not at present concerned, but only with the evidence of the actuality of a subconscious process, of its character as an intelligence, and with its intrinsic nature.
As to the last problem it is plain that further investigations are required and that the methods at present at our disposal for its solution leave much to be desired. All things considered a conservative summing up would be that the subconscious process may be both coconscious and unconscious.
IV. Subconscious intelligence underlying dreams. As is well known, Freud advanced the theory, now well fortified by numerous observations of others, that underlying a dream is a subconscious process which fabricates the conscious dream. According to Freud and his followers this subconscious process is always an antecedent wish and the dream is an imaginary fulfillment of that wish. This part of the theory (as well as the universality of an underlying process) is decidedly questionable. My own observations lead me to believe that a dream may be also the expression of antecedent doubts, scruples, anxieties, etc., or may be an answer to an unsolved problem. We need not concern ourselves with this particular question here. I refer to it simply to point out that its correct solution depends upon the correct determination of the true causal factor which is necessarily antecedently unknown and must be inferred. It is inferred or selected from the associated memories evoked by the so-called method of analysis. Hence it must be always an element open to greater or less doubt. Dreams are a type of hallucinatory phenomena and therefore we should expect that their mechanism would correspond more or less closely with that of other hallucinatory phenomena.
With the object in view of determining whether a dream could be produced experimentally and brought within the category of phenomena where the causal factor was antecedently known, and thus determine the actuality of a subconscious process as a necessary intervening link between the two, I made the following experiment. It should be noted that a wish fulfilment necessarily means a dream content so far different in form from the content of the wish itself that the postulation of a connecting link, conscious or subconscious, is required. I also sought, if a subconscious process could be postulated, to discover how elaborate and what sort of a work of constructive imagination a subconscious wish could evolve.
To a suitable subject while in a deep hypnotic trance state I gave a suggestion in the form of a wish to be worked out to fulfilment in a dream. It so happened that this subject was going through a period of stress and strain for which she sought relief. I also knew that she had a very strong desire to do a good piece of original psychological work and had advised her to take up the work as a solution of her difficulties. So, taking advantage of this desire, I impressed upon her, for the purpose of emphasizing the impulsive force of the desire, that she now had the longed-for opportunity as the culmination of her previous years of training to do the work. I then gave her the following suggestion: “You want to do a good piece of original work and your dream to-night will be the fulfillment of the wish.” No hint as to what form the dream fulfilment should take was given, nor had she any knowledge before being put into the trance state that I intended to make an experiment.
It is interesting to note how the dream has a logical form which is unfolded as an argument. This itself is an allegorical transcript of the reasons previously suggested to her for the particular solution of her problem.
The dream was a long one and into it were logically introduced as a part of the argument the actual distressing circumstances for the relief of which I had advised taking up the piece of psychological work as an outlet to her feelings and solution of her problem of life. I will give in detail only so much of the dream as contains the wish fulfilment (which became also a part of the dream argument), summarizing the remainder. The dream begins with an allegorical description of the great task involved in the study of psychology by all the workers of the world. The science of psychology is symbolized by a temple. “I dreamed I was where they were building a great temple or cathedral; an enormous place covering many acres of ground. Hundreds of men were building. Some were building spires, some were building foundations, and some were tearing down what they had built, some parts had fallen down of themselves. I was wandering around looking on.” Then she proceeds to help one of the builders who was building a particular part of the temple by bringing him material in the form of stones. This she had actually done, in real life, contributing much psychological material out of her own experiences. Many of these experiences had been very intimate ones from her inner life and had involved much suffering; hence the stones which she contributed in her dream were big and heavy and were beyond her strength to carry, so that she could only roll them,—and some were sharp and made her hands bleed, so that her contribution involved much suffering. This part of the dream was not only a prelude to the suggested wish fulfilment but, as interpreted, contained a wish fulfilment in itself.
Then there was interjected an allegorical but very accurate description of the distressing circumstances to which I have referred and for which, as a problem of life, the suggested work was advised as a solution. Then logically followed the wish fulfilment and solution. She heard the voice of the builder whom she had been helping say to her, “‘Now, here are all the materials and you must build a temple of your own,’ and I [she] said, ‘I cannot,’ and he said, ‘you can, and I will help you.’ So I began to build the stones I had taken him. It was hard work, but I kept on, and a most beautiful temple grew up.... All the stones were very brilliant in color, but each one was stained with a drop of blood that came from a wound in my heart. And the temple grew up; and I handled all the stones; but somehow the temple grew up of itself and lots of people were coming from all directions to look at it, and someone, who seemed to be William James, said, ‘It is the most valuable part of the temple,’ and I felt very proud....’” After another interjection of the distressing problem of her life just alluded to, the dream ends with the figure of “a beautiful shining angel with golden spreading wings and the word ‘Hope’ written on his forehead.” This figure “spread his lovely wings and rose right up through the temple and became the top of the spire, a gorgeous shining figure of Hope.”[[102]]
After this dream was obtained the subject, who had no knowledge that any suggestion had been given to induce the dream, was told to analyze the dream herself by the method of associative memories. As is customary in the use of this method, in which she had had considerable experience, the memories associated with each element of the dream were obtained. These memories all led back directly to her interest in psychology and desire to contribute some original work, and to her own life’s experiences. Every one of the dream-elements (temple, spires, foundations, stones, bleeding hands, drop of blood from the wound in her heart, etc.) evoked associative memories which justified the inference that these elements were symbolisms of past experiences or of constructive imagination.
That this dream was determined by, and the explicit imaginary fulfilment of the antecedent wish made use of in the experiment and motivated by the suggestion would seem to be conclusively shown.
If, then, in any case a causal relation between an antecedent wish and its dream fulfilment exists, it follows that there must be some link between that wish experienced in the past and the present dream fulfilment, some mode, mechanism, or process by which a past thought, without entering consciousness, can continue to its own fulfilment in a conscious work of the imagination, the dream. I say without entering consciousness because the original specific thought-wish does not appear in the dream consciousness, which is only the fulfilment. The phenomenon as a whole is also inexplicable unless there was some motivating factor or force which determined the form of the dream just as in conscious fabrication and argument “we” consciously motivate and arrange the form of the product. The only logical and intelligible inference is that the original wish, becoming reawakened (by the preceding suggestion) during sleep, continued to function outside of the dream consciousness, as a motivating and directing subconscious process.
But what was the content of this process, and to what extent can its elements be correlated with those of the dream? The experimental data of this dream do not afford an answer to this question. (Those of the observation I shall next give will permit a deeper insight into the character and content of their process.) It is a reasonable inference, however, inasmuch as the different elements of the dream—temple, stones, etc., the material out of which it is constructed—are found to be logical symbolizations of their associative memories, that these memories took part in the subconscious process and consequently may be correlated with their dream-symbols. In other words the content of the subconscious process was more than a wish, or wish neurogram, it included a large complex of memories of diverse experiences that can be recognized through their symbolizations in the dream. This complex, motivated by a particular wish, fabricated the dream, just as in the hallucinations I have cited an underlying process fabricated the hallucination as a symbolic expression of a subconscious judgment, self-reproach, etc. To do this a process that must be termed a subconscious intelligence was required. The dream was an allegory, a product of constructive imagination in the logical form of an argument, and if constructed by an underlying process the latter must have had the same characteristics.[[103]]
This experimental dream confirms therefore the general principle formulated by Freud from the analysis of dreams in which the causal factor is an inferred wish. It is likewise on the assumption of my having correctly inferred this factor that I have insisted that a dream may be a fabricated expression of thoughts other than wishes or may be the solution of an unsolved problem. In this last case the dream phenomena and mechanism seem to be analogous in every way to the subconscious solution of mathematical problems which I have already described. In such and other cases the subconscious process would seem to be a continuation and elaboration of the antecedent suggested problem.
In dreams, then, or, as we should strictly limit ourselves for the present to saying, in certain dreams, there are, as Freud first showed, two processes; one is the conscious dream, the other is a subconscious process which is the actuated residuum of a previous experience and determines the dream.[[104]] It would be going beyond the scope of our subject to enter into a full exposition of this interpretation at this time and I must refer you for a discussion of the dream problem to works devoted to the subject.
We have not, of course, touched the further problem of the How: how a subconscious intelligence induces a conscious dream which is not an emergence of the elements of that intelligence into self-consciousness, but a symbolization of them. This is a problem which still awaits solution. From certain data at hand it seems likely that so far as concerns the hallucinatory perceptual elements of a dream they can be accounted for as the emergence of the secondary images pertaining to the subconscious “ideas.”
The following observation is an example of subconscious versification and also of constructive imagination. It also, I think, gives an insight into the character and content of the underlying process which constructs a dream. I give the observation in the subject’s own words:
"I woke suddenly some time between three and four in the morning. I was perfectly wide awake and conscious of my surroundings but for a short time—perhaps two or three minutes—I could not move, and I saw this vision which I recognized as such.
"The end of my room seemed to have disappeared, and I looked out into boundless space. It looked misty but bright, as if the sun was shining behind a light fog. There were shifting wisps of fog blowing lightly about, and these wisps seemed to gather into the forms of a man and a woman. The figures were perfectly clear and lifelike—I recognized them both. The man was dressed in dark every-day clothes, the woman in rather flowing black; her face was partly hidden on his breast; one arm was laid around his neck; both his arms were around her, and he was looking down at her, smiling very tenderly. They seemed to be surrounded by a sort of rosy atmosphere; a large, very bright star was above their heads—not in the heavens, but just over them; tall rose bushes heavy with red roses in full bloom grew up about them, and the falling petals were heaped up around their feet. Then the man bent his head and kissed her.
"The vision was extraordinarily clear and I thought I would write it down at once. I turned on the light by my bedside, took pencil and paper lying there and wrote, as I supposed, practically what I have written here. I then got up, was up some minutes, went back to bed, and after a while to sleep. The clock struck four soon after getting back into bed. I do not think I experienced any emotion at the moment of seeing the vision, but after writing it down I did.
"The next morning I picked up the paper to read over what I had written and was amazed at the language and the rhythm. This is what I had written:
"‘Last night I waked from sleep quite suddenly,
And though my brain was clear my limbs were tranced.
Beyond the walls of my familiar room
I gazed outward into luminous space.
Before my staring eyes two forms took shape,
Vague, shadowy, slowly gathering from the mists,
Until I saw before me, you—my Love!
And folded to your breast in close embrace
Was she, that other, whom I may not name.
A rosy light bathed you in waves of love;
Above your heads there shone a glowing star;
Red roses shed their leaves about your feet.
And as I gazed with eyes that could not weep
You bent your head and laid your lips on hers.
And my rent soul’ ... [Apparently unfinished.]
“The thoughts were the same as my conscious thoughts had been—the vision was well described—but the language was entirely different from anything I had thought, and the writing expressed the emotion which I had not consciously experienced in seeing the vision, but which (I have since learned) I had felt during the dream, and which I did consciously feel after writing. When I wrote I meant simply to state the facts of the vision.”[[105]]
The subject was unable to give any explanation of the vision or of the composition of the verse. She rarely remembers her dreams and had no memory of any dream the night of this vision. By hypnotic procedure, however, I was able to recover memories of a dream which occurred just before she woke up. It appeared that in the dream she was wandering in a great open space and saw this “picture in a thin mist. The mist seemed to blow apart” and disclosed the “picture” which was identical with the vision. At the climax of the dream picture the dreamer experienced an intense emotion well described in the verse by the unfinished phrase, “My rent soul...” The dreamer “shrieked, and fell on the ground on her face, and grew cold from head to foot and waked up.”
The vision after waking, then, was a repetition of a preceding dream vision and we may safely assume that it was fabricated by the same underlying process which fabricated the dream, this process repeating itself after waking.
So far the phenomenon was one which is fairly common. Now when we come to examine the automatically written script we find it has a number of significant characteristics. (1) It describes a conscious episode, (2) As a literary effort for one who is not a poetical writer it is fairly well written and probably quite as good verse as the subject can consciously write; (3) It expresses the mental attitude, sentiments and emotions experienced in the dream but not at the time of the vision. These had also been antecedent experiences; (4) Both the central ideas of the verse and the vision symbolically represented certain antecedent presentiments of the future; (5) The script gives of the vision an interpretation which was not consciously in mind at the moment of writing.
Now, inasmuch as these sentiments and interpretations were not in the conscious mind at the moment of writing, the script suggests that the process that wrote it was not simply a subconscious memory of the vision but the same process which fabricated the dream. Indeed, the phenomenon is open to the suspicion that this same process expresses the same ideas in verbal symbolism as a substitution for the hallucinatory symbolism. To determine this point, an effort was made to recover by technical methods memories of this process; that is to determine what wrote the verse and by what sort of a process. The following was brought out:
1. The script was written automatically. The subject thought she was writing certain words and expressing certain thoughts and did not perceive that she was writing different words. “Something seemed to prevent her seeing the words she wrote.” There were two trains of “thought.”
2. The “thoughts” of the verse were in her “subconscious mind.”[[106]] These “thoughts” (also described as “words”) were not logically arranged or as written in the verse, but “sort of tumbled together—mixed up a little.” “They were not like the thoughts one thinks in composing a verse.” There did not seem to be any attempt at selection from the thoughts or words. No evidence could be elicited to show that the composing was done here.
3. Concurrently with these subconscious, mixed-up thoughts coconscious “images” of the words of the verse came just at the moment of writing them down. The images were bright, printed words. Sometimes one or two words would come at a time and sometimes a whole line.
In other words all happened as if there was a deeper underlying process which did the composing and from this process certain thoughts without logical order emerged to form a subconscious stream and after the composing was done the words of the verse emerged as coconscious images as they were to be written. This underlying process, then, “automatically” did the writing and the composing. Hence it seemed to the subject even when remembering in hypnosis the subconscious thoughts and images that both were done unconsciously.
As to whether this underlying process was the same as that which fabricated the dream and the hallucination, the evidence, albeit circumstantial, would seem to render this almost certain. In the first place the verse was only a poetical arrangement of the subconscious thoughts disclosed; the vision was an obvious symbolic expression or visual representation of the same thoughts (that is, of course, of those concerned with the subject matter of the vision). The only difference would seem to be in the form of the expression—verbal and visual imagery respectively.[[107]] In the second place the vision was an exact repetition of the dream vision. It is not at all rare to find certain phenomena of dreams (visual, motor, sensory, etc.) repeating themselves after waking.[[108]] This can only be explained by the subconscious repetition of the dream process. Consequently we are compelled to infer the same subconscious process underlying the dream-vision. More than this, it was possible to trace these thoughts back to antecedent experiences of the dreamer, so that in the last analysis the dream-vision, waking-vision, and poetical expression of the vision could be related with almost certainty to the same antecedent experiences as the causal factors.
Certain conclusions then seem compulsory: underlying the dream, vision, and script was a subconscious process in which the fundamental factors were the same. As this process showed itself capable of poetical composition, constructive imagination, volition, memory, and affectivity it was a subconscious intelligence.
As to its intrinsic nature—coconscious or unconscious[unconscious]—according to the evidence at least the process that wrote the script contained conscious elements—the coconscious thoughts and images.
We may assume the same for the dream and the vision. As to the mechanism of the vision it is quite conceivable, not to say probable, that, corresponding to the coconscious images of the printed words during the writing, there were similar images of the vision scene (both in the dream and the waking state), but these instead of remaining coconscious emerged into consciousness to be the vision.[[109]] Whether the still deeper underlying process was conscious or unconscious could not be determined by any evidence accessible and must be a matter of hypothesis.
The chief importance that attaches to this observation, it seems to me, is the insight it gives into the character of the underlying process of a dream. If the conclusions I have drawn are sound, then the subconscious process which determines the conscious dream may be what is actually an intelligence and it matters not whether a coconscious or unconscious one. This seems to me to be a conclusion fraught with the highest significance for the theory of dreams and hallucinatory phenomena in general. Of course we all know well enough that dissociated subconscious processes may be intelligent and influence the content of the personal consciousness, as witness coconscious personalities. If the underlying process of a dream may be something akin to such a personality, something capable of reasoning, imagination and volition, it renders intelligible the fundamental principle of the Freudian theory of a double process—the “latent” and “manifest” dream. One of the difficulties in the general acceptance of this theory has been, I think, the difficulty of conceiving a subconscious process—the “latent dream”—capable of the intelligent fabrication of a “manifest” dream phantasy which is a cryptic symbolization of the subject’s thoughts. Such a fabrication has all the earmarks of purpose, fore-thought and constructive imagination. But if this underlying process can be identified, even though it be in a single case, with such an intelligence as that which wrote the poetical script we have studied, it is plainly quite capable of fabricating the wildest dream phantasy.
I have suggested that the subconscious intelligence may be comparable to the phenomenon of a coconscious personality. It is worth noting in this connection that in the case of Miss B. the coconscious personality, Sally, who claimed to be awake while Miss B. was dreaming, also claimed that Miss B. sometimes dreamed about what Sally was thinking of at the moment.[[110]] In other words, the thoughts of a large systematized coconscious intelligence determined the dream just as these thoughts sometimes emerged into Miss B.’s mind when awake. That a coconscious personality may persist awake while the principal personality is asleep I have been able to demonstrate in another case (B. C. A.). It was also noted in Dr. Barrows’ case of Anna Winsor. Moreover, Sally was shown to be a persistent, sane coconsciousness while Miss B. was delirious and also while she was apparently deeply etherized and unconscious.[[111]] After all it is difficult to distinguish in principle the condition of sleep with a persisting coconsciousness from a state of deep hypnotic trance where the subject is apparently unconscious. In this condition, although the waking consciousness has disappeared, there can be shown to be a persisting “secondary” consciousness which can be communicated with by automatic writing and which later can exhibit memories of occurrences in the environment during the hypnotic trance. (B. C. A.)
What has been said does not touch, of course, the other mechanisms of the Freudian theory nor the unessential, greatly over-emphasized theory that the subconscious dream is always a sexual wish. On the contrary, the principle throws a strong, a priori doubt upon the correctness of this generalization. It is plainly, however, a matter of fact which might be easily determined by observation were it not for the difficulty of correctly referring clinical phenomena to the correct antecedent experiences as their causal factors. In the last analysis it becomes always a matter of interpretation.
Applied psychology.—Much has been discovered in recent years regarding the part played by subconscious processes in the production of normal and abnormal phenomena. But we do not as yet know the possibilities and limitations of these processes. We have as yet but an imperfect knowledge of what they can do, what they can’t do, and what they do do, and of the mechanisms by which they are called into play and provoke phenomena. Many pathological phenomena have been shown to be due to subconscious processes; and it is quite probable that these play an important part in determining the mental processes of normal life, but this is still largely theory. In applied psychology and psychopathology the “subconscious” has been made use of to explain many phenomena with which we have practically to deal. Assumed as a concept the phenomena are explained by it with a greater or less degree of probability. In those hysterical conditions where the subconscious processes have been shown to be split-off conscious processes, we can often recover memories of the latter and demonstrate their relation to the hysterical phenomena by the various technical methods already mentioned. But where this cannot be done, as is ordinarily the case, some conserved antecedent experience must be inferred as the causal factor and assumed to be the functioning subconscious process which determines the phenomenon. To a large extent, then, in applied psychology and psychopathology the postulation in specific cases of a subconscious process is theoretical and open to more or less doubt. In other words, although a principle may be established, its application, as in all applied sciences, is apt to meet with difficulties.[difficulties.]
Now the application of the principle of a subconscious process to the explanation of a given phenomenon is rendered peculiarly difficult because for practical purposes it is not so much the question of a subacting process that is at issue as it is of what particular antecedent experience is concerned in the process. The question is of the causal factor. For example, we may know from general experience in a large number of instances that a given hysterical phenomenon—a tic or a convulsive attack or an hallucination or a dream—must be in all probability determined by a subconscious process derived from some conserved experience, but what specific experience may be a matter of considerable uncertainty. Hence the different theories and schools of interpretation that have arisen. The importance of clearly appreciating the nature of such problems and properly estimating the different theories at their true value is so great that I may be permitted a few words in further explanation.
Let us take dreams as a type. The conscious dream may be made up of fantastic imagery and apparently absurd thoughts without apparent logical meaning. Now from general experience we may believe that the dream is a cryptic symbolic expression of a logical subconscious process—perhaps a wish. The question is, what wish? The symbolism cannot be deciphered on its face. Now, by the analytic method associative memories pertaining to each element of the dream are recovered in abstraction. When a memory of antecedent thoughts of which the dream element is a logical symbolism or synonym and which give an intelligent meaning to the dream is recovered, we infer that these antecedent thoughts are contained in the determining subconscious process. Further, as it is found that certain objects or actions (e. g., snakes, flying, etc.) frequently occur in the dreams of different people as symbolisms of the same thoughts, it is inferred that whenever these objects or actions appear in the dream they are always symbolisms of the same underlying thoughts.
Obviously the mere fact of an antecedent experience arising as an associative memory is not of itself evidence of its being the causal factor. Hundreds of such memories might be obtained. To have evidential value the memory must give logical meaning to the dream or dream element under investigation. Now, as a matter of fact, more than one memory can often be obtained which answers these conditions. Consequently it becomes a matter of selection from memories, or interpretation, as to which is the correct solution of a given dream problem—and mutatis mutandis of a pathological phenomenon. Naturally the selection is largely determined by personal views and a priori concepts. It also follows that if one accepts the universality of a given symbolism and is committed to a given theory one can, by going far enough, find associations in vast numbers of dreams that will support that theory. The correct solution of a dream problem, that is, the correct determination of the specific underlying process, depends upon the correct determination of the causal factor and this must be inferred. The inferential nature of the latter factor therefore introduces a possible source of error. There must frequently be considerable latitude in the interpretation. This is not to gainsay that in a large number of instances the logical relation between antecedent experiences (recovered by associative memories) and the dream is so close and obtrusive that doubt as to the true subconscious process can scarcely be entertained.
An example of a condensed analysis of a dream will illustrate the practical difficulty often presented in determining by clinical methods the correct causal factor and subconscious process of a dream. I select a simple one which consists of two scenes:[[112]]
"C. was somewhere and saw an old woman who appeared to be a Jewess. She was holding a bottle and a glass, and seemed to be drinking whisky. Then this woman changed into her own mother, who had the bottle and glass, and appeared likewise to be drinking whisky.
“Then the door opened and her father appeared. He had on her husband’s dressing gown, and he was holding two sticks of wood in his hand.”
Before interpreting this dream I will state that the subject had been tormented (as was brought out by the associative memories) by the question whether poor people should be condemned if they yielded to temptation, particularly that of drinking. This problem she could not answer satisfactorily to herself. It is the inferred causal factor in the dream process. The dream gave an answer to this problem.
Let me also point out that the material, that is, the elements out of which this dream was constructed (indicated by the words italicized), was found in the thoughts of the dreamer on the preceding day and particularly just before going to sleep. The first scene of the dream ends with the mother drinking whisky: the second scene represents the father appearing with two sticks of wood. For the sake of simplicity of illustration I will confine myself to the interpretation of this first scene as it will answer our present purposes.
“As to the first scene” (by technical methods of analysis) “a rich collection of memories was obtained. It appeared that on the previous morning the subject had walked with a poor Jewess through the slums, and had passed by some men who had been drinking. This led her to think at the time of the lives of these poor people; of the temptations to which they were exposed; of how little we know of this side of life and of its temptations. She wondered what the effect of such surroundings, particularly of seeing people drinking, would have upon the child of the Jewess. She wondered if such people ought to be condemned if they yielded to drink and other temptations. She thought that she herself would not blame such people if they yielded, and that we ought not to condemn them. Then in the psychoanalysis there came memories of her mother, whose character she admired and who never condemned any one. She remembered how her mother, who was an invalid, always had a glass of whisky and water on her table at night, and how the family used to joke her about it. Then came memories again of her husband sending bottles of whisky to her mother; of the latter drinking it at night; of the men whom she had seen in the slums and who had been drinking. These, very briefly, were the experiences accompanied by strong feeling tones which were called up as associative memories of this scene of the dream. With these in mind, it is not difficult to construct a logical, though symbolic, meaning of it. In the dream a Jewess (not the Jewess, but a type) is in the act of drinking whisky—in other words, the poor, whom the Jewess represents, yield to the temptation which the dreamer had thought of with considerable intensity of feeling during the day. The dreamer’s own judgment, after considerable cogitation, had been that such people were not to be condemned. Was she right? The dream answers the question, for the Jewess changes in the dream to her mother, for whose judgment she had the utmost respect. Her mother now drinks the whisky as she had actually done in life, a logical justification (in view of her mother’s fine character and liberal opinion) of her own belief, which was somewhat intensely expressed in her thoughts of that morning, a belief in not condemning poor people who yield to such temptations. The dream scene is therefore the symbolical representation and justification of her own belief,[[113]] and answers the doubts and scruples that beset her mind.”
Whether or not this is the correct interpretation of this dream depends entirely upon whether the true causal factors were found. If through the analysis this was the case, as I believe—namely, the scruple or ethical problem whether poor people who yield to temptation ought to be condemned—then the interpretation given is logically sound and the dream is an answer to the doubts and scruples that beset the dreamer’s mind. But the answer is a pictorial symbolism and therefore requires an intervening subconscious process which induces and finally expresses itself in the symbolism. We may suppose that this process in response to and as a subconscious incubation of the ethical problem took some form like this: “Poor people like the Jewess are not to be condemned for yielding to the temptation (of drinking) for my mother, who was beyond criticism, showed by her life she would not have condemned them.”
This may or may not be the true subconscious process and the correct interpretation of the dream. But it is one possible and logical interpretation based upon the actually found antecedent experiences and associative memories of the dreamer. Now it so happens that this interpretation and that of other dreams[[114]] which I endeavored to trace to antecedent experiences have been warmly challenged by certain clinicians because the inferred causal factors were not found to be antecedent repressed sexual wishes. It is insisted on theoretical grounds that the content of the dreams plainly indicated that there must have been such wishes and that if these had been found this dream would have been unfolded as a logical symbolical fulfilment of a sexual wish. Which interpretation is correct is inconsequential for our present purpose. The controversy only relates to the universality of the sexual theory of dreams. The point is that this difference in interpretation shows the possibility of error in the determination of the causal factor and the subconscious process by clinical methods. The dream may be logically related to two or more antecedent experiences and we have no criterion of which is the correct one. To insist upon one or the other savors of pure dogmatism.[[115]] Indeed, the justification for the postulation in a dream of any subconscious process in the last analysis depends upon the soundness of the postulation of the antecedent experience as the causal factor. If this factor falls to the ground the subconscious process falls with it.
The second point to which this discussion leads us is that the latitude of interpretation allowed by the method of analysis has given rise to different views as to the specific character of the subconscious process found in many dreams. According to the theory of Freud, to whose genius we are indebted for the discovery of this process, it is almost always a sexual wish and the dream is always the imaginary, even though cryptic, fulfilment of that wish. On the other hand, as a result of my own studies, if I may venture to lay weight upon them, I have been forced to the conclusion that a dream may be the symbolical expression of almost any thought to which strong emotional tones with their impulsive forces have been linked, particularly anxieties, apprehensions, sorrows, beliefs, wishes, doubts, and scruples, which function subconsciously in the dream. It may be a solution of unsolved problems with which the mind has been occupied,[[116]] just as in the waking state a mathematical or other problem may be solved subconsciously. In some subjects the problem is particularly apt to be one involving a conflict between opposing impulses, therefore one which has troubled the dreamer.[[117]]
We have seen that in experimental and spontaneous hallucinatory phenomena, where the causal factor is known, a subconscious process is the essential feature of the mechanism. In this respect the mechanism is identical with that of certain dreams. Indeed, dreams are one type of hallucinatory phenomena. In fact we met with one dream the chief element of which was repeated afterward in the waking state as a vision. We are justified, then, in applying the principle of a subconscious process to the elucidation of the visions of normal people, although it may be difficult to determine exactly the specific content of the process and the antecedent thought from which it was derived. Sometimes the content of a vision and the known circumstances under which it occurred are sufficient to enable us to interpret the phenomenon with reasonable certainty. In the following historical examples it is not difficult to recognize that the vision was a symbolic answer to a problem which had troubled the conscience of the Archduke Charles of Austria. Unable to solve his problem consciously and come to a decision, it was solved for him by a subconscious process. Indeed, as a fact, the vision was accepted by Charles as an answer to his doubts and perhaps changed the future history of Austria.
“The Archduke Charles (the father of the present Emperor of Austria) was also greatly troubled in his mind as to the right to waive his claim to the crown in favor of his son. According to his own statement he only finally made up his mind when, while earnestly praying for guidance in his perplexity, he had a vision of the spirit of his father, the late Emperor Francis, laying his hand on the head of his youthful grandson and thus putting all his own doubts to rest.”[[118]]
The likeness in type of the dream which we have just discussed to this vision is instructive. In the former the mother of the dreamer answers the question of conscience by drinking the whisky; in the latter the father of the visualizer does the same by laying his hand on the head of the object of the doubt.
I have already pointed out the evidence for a subconscious process underlying the hallucinatory phenomena of sudden religious conversion.[[119]] I may further cite here, as an analogous phenomenon, the following historical example of not only hallucinatory symbolism, but of explicitly conscious processes of thought which were elaborated by subconscious processes. It is Margaret Mary’s vision of the Sacred Heart. Margaret earnestly desired (according to her biographer)——
“To be loved by God! and loved by him to distraction (aimé jusqu’à la folie)!—Margaret melted away with love at the thought of such a thing. Like St. Philip of Neri in former times, or like St. Francis Xavier, she said to God: ‘Hold back, O my God, these torrents which overwhelm me, or else enlarge my capacity for their reception.’”
The answer and the form of the fulfilment of this wish came as an hallucination. She had a vision of Christ’s Sacred Heart
“‘surrounded with rays more brilliant than the sun, and transparent like a crystal. The wound which he received on the cross visibly appeared upon it. There was a crown of thorns roundabout this divine Heart, and a cross above it.’ At the same time Christ’s voice told her that, unable longer to contain the flames of his love for mankind, he had chosen her by a miracle to spread the knowledge of them. He thereupon took out her mortal heart, placed it inside of his own and inflamed it, and then replaced it in her breast, adding: ‘Hitherto thou hast taken the name of my slave, hereafter thou shalt be called the well-beloved disciple of my Sacred Heart.’”[[120]]
There is scarcely room to doubt, on the strength of the evidence as presented, that the antecedent longings of Margaret impelled by the conative force of their emotions were the causal factor of this vision. These longings, organized in the unconscious, must have gone through subconscious incubation (as William James has pointed out) and then emerged after maturity into consciousness as a symbolic visualization accompanied by hallucinatory words which were the expression of explicit subconscious imagination. Indeed, all such hallucinatory symbolisms—like the mental phenomena in general of sudden religious conversion—can only be psychologically explained as the emergence into consciousness of subconscious processes. The problem in each case is the determination of the content of the process.[[121]]
Reflection, consideration, meditation.—We are entering upon more uncertain ground in attempting to apply the mechanism of subconscious processes to every-day thought. There are certain types of thought, however, which behave as if this mechanism were at work. When, for instance, we take a problem “under advisement,” reflect upon it, give it “thoughtful consideration,” it seems as if, in weighing the facts pro and con, in looking at it from different points of view, i.e., in switching it into different settings, in considering all the facts related to it, we voluntarily recall each fact that comes into consciousness. Yet it is quite possible, and indeed I think more than probable, reasoning from analogy, that the processes which present each fact, switch each point of view, or setting into consciousness, are subconscious and that what we do is chiefly to select from those which are thus brought into consciousness the ideas, settings, etc., which fulfil best the requirements of the question. In profound reflection or attention to thought (a form of absentmindedness) it seems as if it were more a matter of attention to and selection from the “free associations” which involuntarily come into the mind than of determining voluntarily what shall come in. If this be so, it is evident that the subconscious plays a much more extensive part in the mechanism of thought than is ordinarily supposed. We have not, however, sufficient data to allow us to do much more than theorize in the matter. Yet there are certain data which suggest the probability of the correctness of this hypothesis. In this connection I would point out how entirely confirmatory of this view is the testimony of the hypnotic consciousness which was cited in the previous lecture and which I will ask you to recall. You will remember that this testimony was to the effect that when a problem was under consideration associative memories required for its solution kept emerging out of the unconscious into the secondary consciousness.[[122]]
Consider certain facts of every-day experience. A novel and difficult question is put up to us for decision. We have, we will say, to decide whether a certain piece of property situated in a growing district of a city shall be sold or held for future development: or a political manager has to decide whether or not to pursue a certain policy to win an election; or the President of the United States has to decide the policy of the government in certain land questions in Alaska. Now each of us would probably say that we could not decide such a question offhand; we would want time for consideration. If we attempted voluntarily, at the moment the question is put, to recall to mind all the different facts involved, to consider the given question from all aspects, to switch the main facts into their different settings, we would find it an impossible thing to do. We consequently take the matter “under advisement,” to use the conventional expression. We want time. Now what we apparently, and I think undoubtedly, do is to put the problem into our minds and leave it, so to speak, to incubate. Then, from time to time, as we take up the matter for consideration, the various facts involved in the different aspects of the question, and belonging to their different settings, arise to mind. Then we weigh, compare, and estimate the value of these different facts and arrive at a judgment. All happens as if subconscious processes had been at work, as if the problem had been going through a subconscious incubation, switching in this and switching in that set of facts, and presenting them to consciousness, the final selection of the deciding point of view being left to the latter. The subconscious garners from the storehouse of past experiences, those which have a bearing on the question and are required for its solution, brings them into consciousness, and then our logical conscious processes form the judgment. The degree to which subconscious processes in this way take part in forming judgments would vary according to the mental habits of the individual, the complexity of the problem, the affectivity and conflicting character of the elements involved. Under this theory we see that there is a deeper psychological basis for the every-day practice of taking “under advisement” or “into consideration” a matter, before giving judgment, than would appear on the surface. There is considerable experimental evidence in favor of this theory. In discussing above the subconscious solution of problems I cited certain evidence, obtained from the memories of subjects in hypnosis, for coconscious and unconscious processes taking part in such solutions. I have been able to accumulate evidence of this kind showing the coöperation of processes outside of consciousness in determining the point of view and final judgment of the subject when a matter has been under advisement; particularly when the subject has been disturbed by doubts and scruples. It is plain that in the final analysis any question on which we reserve our judgment is a problem which we put into our minds. And, after all, it is only a question of degree and affectivity between the state of mind which hesitates to decide an impersonal question, like a judicial decision, and one that involves a scruple of conscience. This latter state often eventuates in hallucinatory and other phenomena involving subconscious processes. Scruples of conscience, it is true, usually have strong affective elements as constituents, but the former may also have them, particularly when involving personal ambitions, political principles, etc.
[98]. The Dissociation, Appendix L, p. 548.
[99]. The Dissociation, Chapter XXXI.
[100]. As a matter of fact, the judgment was erroneous, though a justifiable inference.
[101]. Cf. The Dissociation, 2d edition, p. 567.
[102]. William James had once said to her in my presence that she could make a valuable contribution to psychology. It is interesting to note, although it is aside from the question at issue, that this subject had strenuously denied that there was any “hope,” insisting that she was absolutely devoid of any such sentiment. Through hypnotic memories, however, I was able to demonstrate that this was only consciously true, and that there were very evident and strong coconscious ideas of hope of which she was not consciously aware. She had refused to acknowledge these ideas to herself and by repression had dissociated them from the personal consciousness. These ideas now expressed themselves symbolically in the dream.
[103]. We must remember that a dreaming state is a dissociated state (like a fugue or trance), and numerous observations have shown that in such conditions any of the dormant related experiences of life may modify, repress, resist, alter, and determine the content of the dissociated consciousness. It is difficult to conceive of a dream allegory being constructed by the dream consciousness itself. If that were the mechanism, we should expect that the associative ideas for which symbols are chosen would appear during the dream construction as is the case in waking imagination. The method of the mental processes is very different in the latter. We there select from a number of associative ideas that crowd into consciousness, choose our symbols, and remember the rejected ideas. This is not the case with dream imagination. The imagery develops as if done by something else.
[104]. It must not be assumed that all dreams are determined by a subconscious process or that all are symbolic. On the contrary, from evidence in hand, there is reason to believe that some dreams have substantially the same mechanism as waking imagination subject to the limitations imposed by the existing dissociation of consciousness during sleep. Just as, in the waking state, thoughts may or may not be determined by subconscious processes, so in the sleeping state. We know too little about the mechanisms of thought to draw wide generalizations or to dogmatize.
[105]. “For two or three days previously I had been trying to write some verses, and had been reading a good deal of poetry. I had been thinking in rhythm. I had also been under considerable nervous and emotional strain for some little time in reference to the facts portrayed in the verse.”
[106]. By this is meant “thoughts” of which she was not aware. Numerous observations on this subject have disclosed such subconscious ideas in connection with other phenomena. This corresponds with the testimony of other subjects previously cited. (Lecture VI.)
[107]. As a theory of the mechanism of the vision I would suggest that it was the emergence of the secondary visual images belonging to the subconscious ideas.
[108]. See page [102]. Also Prince: The Mechanism and Interpretation of Dreams. Jour. Abnormal Psychology. Oct.-Nov., 1910. G. A. Waterman: Dreams as a Cause of Symptoms. Ibid. Oct.-Nov., 1910.
[109]. I base this theory on other observations where coconscious images or “visions” of scenes occurred. When these images emerge into consciousness the subject experienced a vision.
[110]. The Dissociation, p. 332.
[111]. The Dissociation of a Personality, p. 330.
[112]. Mechanism and Interpretation of Dreams, Journal Abnormal Psychology, Oct.-Nov., 1910.
[113]. The symbolic expression of beliefs and symbolic answers to doubts and scruples is quite common in another type of symbolism, viz., visions. Religious and political history is replete with examples.
[114]. Loc. cit.
[115]. It has been answered that experience in a large number of cases shows that dreams always can be related logically to sexual experiences. To this it may be answered they can also in an equal number of cases, indeed in many of these same cases, be related to non-sexual experiences.
[116]. Loc. cit. It is possible, however, that sometimes the problem has been solved subconsciously in the waking state, the answer then appearing in the dream.
[117]. Here we find an analogy with certain allied phenomena—the visions and voices experienced as phenomena of sudden religious conversion.
[118]. Francis Joseph and His Sir[Sir] Horace Rumbold. Page 151. (Italics mine.)
[119]. See also, “The Psychology of Sudden Religious Conversion,” Journal Abnormal Psychology, April, 1906, and “The Dissociation,” 2nd Edit., pages 344 and 564; also James’ “The Varieties of Religious Experience.”
[120]. Quoted by William James, page 343.
[121]. Some will undoubtedly read into Margaret’s vision a cryptic sexual symbolism. To do so seems to me too narrow a view, in that it fails to give full weight to other instincts (and emotions) and to appreciate all the forces of human personality.
[122]. Lecture VI, pp. 169-172.
LECTURE VIII
THE UNCONSCIOUS
Our studies up to this point have led us to the general conclusion that a large measure of the experiences of life are conserved or deposited in what may be called a storehouse of neurographic dispositions or residua. This storehouse is the unconscious. From this storehouse our conscious processes draw for the material of thought. Further, a large amount and variety of evidence, which we have briefly and incompletely reviewed, has shown that conserved experiences may function without arising into consciousness, i.e., as a subconscious process. To what extent such processes take part in the mechanism of thought, contribute to the formation of judgments, determine the point of view and meaning of ideas, give direction to the stream and formulate the content of consciousness, and in particular conditions, by a species of translation, manifest themselves consciously as phenomena which we designate abnormal constitute special problems which require to be studied by themselves.
Physiological memory and processes.—There is one phase of the unconscious which for the sake of completeness ought to be touched upon here, particularly as it is of considerable importance in any biological conception of intelligence. There is every reason to believe that intrinsically there is no essential difference between those physiological dispositions and activities of the lower nervous centers (subcortical ganglia and spinal cord), which condition and determine unconscious behavior, and those dispositions and activities of the higher centers—the cortex—which condition and determine both conscious and unconscious behavior. The former are undoubtedly innate in that they are primarily conditioned by inherited anatomical and physiological prearrangements of neurons and the latter are pre-eminently acquired through experience although probably not wholly so. (Our knowledge of the localization of function in the nervous system is not sufficiently definite to enable us to delimit the localization of either innate or acquired dispositions.) The innate activities of the lower nervous centers so far as represented by movements can be clearly differentiated from those of the higher centers and recognized in the behavior of so-called “spinal” animals and of animals from which the cerebral hemispheres have been removed. In the former the connection between the spinal cord and all parts of the nervous system above having been severed, whatever movements are executed are performed by the spinal cord alone and therefore of course by unconscious processes. The latter animals, although their actions are more complex and closely approximate (with important differences) those of normal animals, are also devoid or nearly devoid of consciousness. I say “nearly devoid” because in the interpretation of the experiments it is difficult to disprove that, as some hold, elementary sensations—qua sensation—are retained, though others regard the animals as purely unconscious physiological machines.
In the spinal animal, in response to specific stimuli, various movements are elicited which though of a purposive character are effected, as has been so admirably worked out by Sherington, by complex spinal mechanisms of a reflex character. The so-called “scratch reflex” and the reflex movements of walking, trotting, and galloping (the animal being suspended in air) are examples. Such reflexes involve not only the excitation of certain movements appropriate to the stimulus but the inhibition of antagonistic muscles and reflex movements. Further in the integration of the spinal system, reflexes are compounded, one bringing to the support of another allied accessory reflexes so that various coöperative[coöperative] movements are executed. A constellation of reflexes leads to quite complex spinal mechanisms responsive to groups of stimuli acting concurrently and resulting in behavior which is purposive and adaptive to the situation. The neural processes executing such movements are necessarily conditioned by inherited dispositions and structural arrangements of the neurons.
In the animal from which the cerebral hemispheres only have been removed there can be little doubt that the physiological mechanisms governing behavior differ only in complexity, not in kind, from those of the spinal reflexes; that in passing through successive anatomical levels from the spinal animal to this decerebrate animal with the addition of each successive ganglion the increasing complexity of behavior corresponds to increasing complexity of mechanisms or compounding of reflexes. And yet in the decerebrate animal without consciousness, as we must believe (excepting perhaps elementary sensations), the subcortical ganglia and spinal cord continue to perform exceedingly complex actions ordinarily, as we suppose, guided in the normal animal by consciousness. The reptile crawls; the fish swims; indeed the lancet fish has no brain, all its functions being regulated by its spinal cord. The frog hops and swims; the hen preens its feathers, walks and flies; the dog walks and runs. These, however, are the simplest examples of decerebrate behavior. Indeed it may be quite complex. The more recent experiments of Schräder on the pigeon and falcon and Goltz and Rothmann on the dog, not to mention those of earlier physiologists, have shown that the decerebrate unconscious (?) animal performs about all the movements performed by the normal animal.[[123]] “A mammal such as a rabbit, in the same way as a frog and a bird, may in the complete or all but complete absence of the cerebral hemispheres maintain a natural posture, free from all signs of disturbance of equilibrium, and is able to carry out with success at all events all the usual and common bodily movements. And as in the bird and frog, the evidence also shows that these movements not only may be started by, but in their carrying out are guided by and coordinated by, afferent impulses along afferent nerves, including those of the special senses. But in the case of the rabbit it is even still clearer than in the case of the bird that the effects of these afferent impulses are different from those which result when the impulses gain access to an intact brain. The movements of the animal seem guided by impressions made on its retina, as well as on other sensory nerves; we may perhaps speak of the animal as the subject of sensations; but there is no satisfactory evidence that it possesses either visual or other perceptions, or that the sensations which it experiences give rise to ideas.”[[124]]
Even spontaneity which at one time was supposed to be lost it is now agreed returns if the animal is kept alive long enough. It “wanders about in the room untiringly the greater part of the day” (Loeb).
Of course there are differences in the animal’s behavior when compared with normal behavior, but these differences are not so easy to interpret in psychological terms. Loeb, apparently following Schräder, does not believe the animal is blind or deaf or without sensation for it reacts to light, to noise, to smell, to tactile impressions, etc. It avoids obstacles and is guided by visual impressions, etc. The falcon jumps at and catches a mouse introduced in its cage; the dog growls and snaps if its paw is pinched and endeavors to get away or bite the offending hand; the pigeon flies and alights upon a bar, apparently visually measuring distance, and so on. But though it is guided by visual and other sensory impressions, does it have visual, auditory and other images, that is, conscious sensory states? This is not easy to answer. It certainly acts like an animal that is not blind nor deaf nor without tactual sensation, and yet it is conceivable that it is guided simply by sensory mechanisms without conscious sensation. The main reason, apparently, for believing the animal to be without sensation, as some believe (e. g., Morgan) is the absence of the cerebral cortex in which alone sensation is believed to be “localized.” Recently Rothmann[[125]] has succeeded in keeping alive for three years a dog from which the entire cerebrum was extirpated. It was then killed. Although the dog, like Goltz’ dog, in its behavior exhibited an abundance of functions in the spheres of mobility, sensibility, feeding, barking, etc., Rothmann came to the conclusion that it was blind and deaf.[[126]] Although apparently without taste for bitter, sweet, sour, and acid, yet the dog reacted differently to edible and non-edible substances, swallowing the former and rejecting the latter (moist sand); raw flesh was eaten preferably to cooked flesh and Goltz’ dog rejected from its mouth food made bitter with quinine. Some kind of gustatory processes (probably purely reflex as in Pawlow’s association experiments) were therefore retained though not necessarily taste as such. But blindness and deafness in the dog cannot negative the retention in birds and other animals of visual and auditory impressions of some kind which guide and originate behavior. But whether such impressions are psychologically sensations or not, the animal certainly does not possess visual or other perceptions, because the “sensations” have no “meaning.” Schräder’s falcon, for example, would jump at and catch with its claws a moving mouse in the cage, but there the matter was at an end; it did not devour it as would a normal falcon. Any moving object had for it the same meaning as a mouse and excited the same movement. So the decerebrate dog does not distinguish friend from stranger and other dogs have no meaning for it. All objects are alike to all decerebrate animals. In the popular language of the street “all coons look alike” to them. In other words the main defect is loss of memory for conscious experiences, of what Loeb calls associative-memory, the conscious memory which gives meaning to sensations, transforms them by synthesis into perception of objects and gives still further meaning to the objects. Hence for the pigeon without its cerebrum “Everything is only a mass in space, it moves aside for every pigeon or attempts to climb over it, just as it would in the case of a stone. All authors agree in the statement that to these animals all objects are alike. They have no enemies and no friends. They live like hermits no matter in how large a company they find themselves. The languishing coo of the male makes as little impression upon the female deprived of its cerebrum as the rattling of peas or the whistle which formerly made it hasten to its feeding place. Neither does the female show interest in its young. The young ones that have just learned to fly pursue the mother, crying unceasingly for food, but they might as well beg food of a stone.”[[127]]
One of the chief utilities of conscious memory is the means it offers the psycho-physiological organism to make use of past experiences to adapt present conduct to a present situation. This the brainless animal cannot do. Hence it is a mindless physiological automaton. All the actions performed by it, however complex they may be, are unquestionably performed and primarily conditioned by inherited neural arrangements and dispositions. They may be even regarded as complexly compounded reflex processes similar excepting in complexity, as Sherrington has held, to the mechanisms of the spinal cord. The behavior of the animal is therefore by definition instinctive. But even so this fact in no way throws light upon the intrinsic nature of the physiological process, but only upon the conditions of its occurrence. Acquired behavior is also conditioned—conditioned by acquired dispositions. The difference physiologically between the two is that in instinctive behavior the neural processes are confined to pathways established by evolutionary development, and in acquired behavior to pathways established by experience. Both must be conditioned by pathways, and the process in its inner nature must be the same in both. Many cortical processes, to be sure, are conscious—i.e., correlated with consciousness—but probably not all. And this quality of consciousness permitting of conscious memory is of great utility in the organization of acquired dispositions that provide the means for the adaption of the animal to each new environmental situation.
Furthermore, it is not at all certain that the behavior of the decerebrate animal is not in part determined by secondarily acquired dispositions. In the normal animal instinctive actions become modified and perfected after the very first performances of the act by conscious experience[[128]] and it is not at all certain that dispositions so acquired and essential for these modifications are not conserved and incorporated in the unconscious neural arrangements of the subcortical centers. So far as this may be the case the acquired modifications of instinctive behavior may be manifested in the actions of the decerebrate animals. In other words, the unconscious processes of the lower nervous centers motivating movements (and visceral functions) may include acquired dispositions or physiological memories.
That the subcortical centers are capable of memory seems to have been shown for the first time by Rothmann’s dog. This mindless animal proved to be capable of a certain amount of education. It learned to avoid hitting against objects, and to do certain tricks—jumping over a hurdle and following on its hind legs a stool upon which its fore feet were placed as the stool was dragged forward. “In the perfection of all these performances the influence of practice was easily recognized.” This means, if the interpretation given is correct, that new dispositions and new connections may be acquired within the lower centers without the intervention of the integrating influence of the cortex or conscious intelligence.[[129]] This is an important contribution for apparently the attempt to educate brainless animals had not been previously made, and their capability for education demonstrated.
The important bearing which this fact has upon this discussion is that it shows that unconscious processes are capable of memory, that is physiological memory. It may be said that this statement needs some modification if the sensory “impressions” guiding the decerebrate animal are to be interpreted as true psychological, however elementary, “sensations.” It would seem to me on the contrary only to accentuate the fact that the processes of the brainless animal are on a transition level between the purely unconscious processes of the spinal animal and the purely (if ever wholly so) conscious processes of the normal animal, and that intrinsically all are of the same nature. If sensation enters into the complex reflex reactions of the brainless animal it would seem that it can only be an elemental conscious factor in a complicated unconscious physiological mechanism. In this mechanism it can have no more specific importance in determining behavior, because of the fact of its being a psychological state, than if it were a receptor “impression” intercalated in the arc of an innate process. It is not linked with any associative memories of the past or foresight into the future; it does not constitute conscious intelligence. As a conscious experience it cannot have that kind of “meaning” which in the normal animal modifies instinctive processes and determines conduct. It probably plays simply the same part in the whole process, which otherwise is wholly unconscious, that the associative sensory image plays in determining the flow of thick or thin saliva in Pawlow’s dogs—simply a single link in a chain of associated reflex processes.
The next point to which I would direct attention is that from an objective point of view the behavior of the decerebrate animal may be in nature intelligent in the empirical sense of that word. The dog that growls and snaps when his foot is pinched, tries to draw it away, and, failing that, bites at the offending hand; the “educated” dog that jumps over a hurdle, and walks on his hind legs, following a stool supporting his front legs, to my way of thinking performs intelligent actions whether it has a brain or not. If intelligence is arbitrarily limited to actions performed by conscious processes, then intelligence becomes a mere question of terms.[[130]] There arises also the practical difficulty that certain types of behavior, which by common assent and common sense are regarded as purely automatic and unintelligent, must be termed intelligent because guided by consciousness. I cannot help thinking that “intelligence” is a pragmatic question, not a biological or psychological one. It would be much more conducive to a clear understanding of biological problems to use intelligence only as a convenient and useful expression, like sanity or insanity, to designate certain behavior which conforms to a type which, without strictly defining its limits, popular language has defined as intelligent. Sanity and insanity have ceased to be terms of scientific value because they cannot be defined in terms of specific mental conditions and much less in terms of mental processes. So intelligence cannot be defined in terms of conscious and unconscious processes. Any attempt to do so meets with insuperable difficulties and becomes “confusion worse confounded.” When we say then that the behavior of the decerebrate dog may be intelligent, all that is meant is that the animal exhibits behavior identical with that which in the normal animal we would empirically call intelligent. In this sense unconscious processes may exhibit intelligence. It was from this viewpoint, I think, that Foster concluded: “In short, the more we study the phenomena exhibited by animals possessing a part only of their brain, the closer we are pushed to the conclusion that no sharp line can be drawn between volition and lack of volition, or between the possession and absence of intelligence. Between the muscle-nerve preparation at one limit, and our conscious willing selves at the other, there is a continuous gradation without a break; we cannot fix on any linear barrier in the brain or in the general nervous system, and say ‘beyond this there is volition and intelligence, but up to this there is none.’”[[131]]
It has already been pointed out (Lecture V) that, in man, complicated actions which have been volitionally and perhaps laboriously acquired may be afterwards involuntarily and unconsciously performed.[[132]] In other words, after intelligent actions have been acquired by conscious processes, they may be performed by subconscious processes for which there is no conscious awareness and probably these may be either coconscious or entirely unconscious. There is no sharp dividing line between the activities of the unconscious, coconscious, and conscious.
When we descend in the scale of animal life to the insects (bees, ants, etc.,) we observe motor activity of a highly complex character of a kind that is termed intelligent, but we are forced to conclude, from various considerations, that the elements of consciousness have dwindled away to what can be nothing more than mere sensibility. In other words consciousness is reduced to its lowest terms, but behavior and the neural processes are maintained at a high level of complexity. Accordingly there is a disproportion between the complexity of the motor behavior and the inferred simplicity of consciousness, for in the higher animals the former would be correlated with complex psychological processes. If this be so, the motor activities must be determined by processes which are mostly unconscious.
In still lower forms of life the motor activities can be referred to simple tropisms, and thus necessarily are wholly unconscious.
Between the most complex unconscious physiological processes performed by the nervous system and the simpler cerebral processes accompanied by consciousness there is not as wide a step as might seem when superficially viewed. The physiological process may, as we have seen, manifest itself in acts of quite as intelligent a character as those exhibited by the conscious process, and indeed more so; for the conscious act may be little more than a limited reflex. On the other hand a psychological process may be so elementary that it contains nothing of awareness of self, of intelligence, or of volition in the true sense—nothing more, perhaps, than an elementary sensation without even perception. But it may be said that the presence of the most rudimentary state of consciousness makes all the difference and renders the gulf between the two impassable.
We are not called upon to discuss that question here. It is one which involves the ultimate nature of physical processes. A distinction should be made between psychological and psychical, these not being coextensive and always interchangeable terms. Psychological pertains to the empirical data of consciousness, (thoughts, ideas, sensations, etc.) while psychical pertains to the inner or ultimate nature of these data. Though the data as given in consciousness are psychical, that which is psychical may not be solely manifested as psychological phenomena. It may be manifested as physical phenomena and perhaps be identified with the energy of the universe. Hence the doctrine of panpsychism. And so it may be that in its ultimate analysis an unconscious process is psychical (monism) although not psychological and not manifesting itself as a datum of consciousness. Certain it is that, objectively viewed, there is nothing to distinguish physiological from psychological intelligence. If the extraordinary instinctive habits exhibited by insects, such as bees and ants and by still lower forms of animal life, can rightly be interpreted as, in large part at least, manifestations of physiological processes, as is quite possible, the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious in respect to intelligence and adaptability to environment would be reduced to one only of degree. That some of the lowest forms of life are endowed with consciousness, in any sense in which the word has psychological meaning, seems incredible, though they manifest instinctive intelligence of no mean order. The fact probably is, as I have just intimated, that those processes we call physiological and those we call psychological are in their inner nature identical, and the former are quite capable of functioning, incredible as it may seem, in a fashion that we are accustomed to believe can only be the attribute of conscious intelligence. This does not mean, of course, that the physiological intelligence can reach the same degree of perfection as that reached by conscious intelligence, though conversely, the latter may be of a lower order than physiological intelligence.[[133]] From this point of view we are logically entitled to regard physiological processes, even of the lower nervous centers and even though they are not acquired but due to congenital structural and functional arrangement, as phases of the unconscious.
Psycho-physical parallelism and monism.—According to the doctrine of psycho-physical parallelism every mental process is correlated with (accompanied by) a brain process. As brain processes thus viewed are “unconscious” (in the sense of not having the attribute of consciousness) we may express this in other terms and say: every “conscious” process is accompanied by an “unconscious” process. I have no intention of entering here into the question of the validity of the doctrine of psycho-physical parallelism. I wish merely to point out that if parallelism is a true formulation of the mind-brain problem, as I have just stated it, the converse ought to hold true, namely, that every brain process of a certain kind involving intelligence ought to be correlated with consciousness. But if some subconscious processes manifesting what is equivalent to thought, reasoning, judgment, imagination, volition, etc., are unconscious—as seems likely if not probable—then this converse does not hold true. This has some bearing on the validity of the doctrine; for if physical processes can perform substantially the same function as conscious intelligence it is difficult to reconcile this fact with what I may call naïve psycho-physical parallelism.
It is reconcilable, however, with psychic monism. According to this doctrine it is not a question of parallelism at all. There is only one process—the psychical. The physical brain process is only an aspect or special mode of apprehending this one. All is psychical but not psychological. That which we apprehend in the form of the unconscious is really psychical and hence is capable of performing the same kind of function as it performs when it becomes psychological. It is not at all certain that unconscious processes may not comprise an intelligence possessing faculties identical in kind with those of conscious intelligence and indistinguishable from the latter. Subconscious processes may exhibit perception, cognition, reason, imagination, conation (will), feeling, etc., and it is possible that some of these processes may be correctly interpreted as unconscious. At any rate, from the point of view of monism, whether the real psychical process or, probably more correctly, how much of it shall emerge as a psychological state of consciousness depends upon intrinsic conditions. Though we cannot penetrate within them it is quite conceivable that it is a matter of complexity of synthesization and coöperative activity of psychical energies. This is a most interesting problem closely related to that of awareness and self-consciousness.
The meanings of the unconscious, subconscious, and coconscious.—Though the term “unconscious” is in general use it has so many connotations derived from its various meanings in metaphysics, psychology, and physiology that its use has given rise to considerable confusion of thought, particularly, I am compelled to believe, in the interpretation of specific psycho-physiological phenomena. Nevertheless, it has been so well established in our nomenclature that we could not replace it if we would. Nor is it wholly desirable to do so. It is a good and useful term, but I believe that with each advance in the precision of our knowledge we ought, so far as accumulative data permit, to give precision to the concept for which it stands. Just as in physical science we attempt to give precision to our concept of electricity in conformity with new data accumulated from time to time, so our psychological concepts should be defined and limited in accordance with the advance in knowledge. Some do not like to define the term, not being quite willing to commit themselves unreservedly to the complete acceptance of the physiological theory of memory and to cut adrift from the metaphysical concept of a subliminal mind. If the psycho-physiological theory of memory, which is now generally accepted, is sound, we have one meaning of the unconscious which is a very definite concept, namely, the brain residua, physiological “dispositions” or neurograms in which the experiences of life are conserved. These terms become, therefore, synonyms for the unconscious. That, under certain conditions, the passive neurograms may, under stimulation, become active and function unconsciously (i.e., without corresponding psychological equivalents being introduced into the personal consciousness), need not invalidate the concept. We are then dealing with an unconscious and dynamic process. The effects of such functioning are simply the manifestations of the unconscious and may be recognized either in modifications of the stream of consciousness or in bodily disturbances. The term unconscious is an appropriate and descriptive term to characterize that which is devoid of the attributes of consciousness. This use of the term has been sanctioned by common usage.
Unfortunately, however, the term has been also employed to characterize another and distinct class of facts, namely Co-[or Sub-]conscious Ideas. We shall have occasion to study these psychological phenomena in other lectures.[[134]] We have seen examples in many of the phenomena I have cited. It is sufficient to say here, that as conceived of, and as we have seen, they are very definite states of coconsciousness—a coexisting dissociated consciousness or coconsciousness of which the personal consciousness is not aware, i.e., of which it is “unconscious.” Hence they have been called “unconscious ideas” and have been included in the unconscious, particularly by German writers. But this is plainly using the term in a different sense—using it as a synonym for the longer phrase, “ideas we are unaware of,” and not as a characterization of that which is physiological and non-psychological.
“Unconscious ideas” in this sense (the equivalent of coconscious ideas) would include conscious states that we are not aware of simply because not in the focus of attention but in the fringe of the content of consciousness. The term would also include pathologically split-off and independently acting coconscious ideas or systems of ideas such as occur in hysteria, reaching their apogee in coconscious personalities and in automatic writings. Here we have a series of facts essentially different from the conceptual facts of physical residua, the form in which experiences are conceived to be conserved. Manifestly it is confusing and incorrect to define both by “the unconscious.” And to speak of the former as “unconscious ideas” and of the latter as “unconscious,” although technically correct, leads to confusion from using the term “unconscious” in two different senses.[[135]]
As a concept in a scheme of metaphysics, “unconscious ideas”—i.e., ideas of which we are not conscious, have long been recognized. Leibnitz was the first to maintain, on theoretical grounds and by a priori reasoning, the existence of ideas of which we are not aware, as did likewise Kant, influenced by Leibnitz, and later Schilling, and Herbart; while Hartmann evolved the unconscious into a biological and metaphysical system.[[136]]
By most American, English, and French psychologists such ideas, as conceived at least by Leibnitz, Kant, and Herbart, would to-day be called subconscious or coconscious ideas. Hartmann included all physiological processes of the nervous system in the Unconscious and ascribed to them special attributes (will, purpose, etc.). The Unconscious accordingly has connotations from which it is not easy to rid ourselves in dealing with it. It is generally agreed that it is desirable to have a term which shall cover all classes of facts—coconscious ideas, conserved experiences, and physiological processes—without committal of opinion as to interpretation.[[137]]
It does not follow, however, that the term “unconscious” is the one that should be chosen. On the contrary, as unconscious has two distinct and different meanings (that pertaining to unawareness and that which is non-psychological) it is a very undesirable term if we wish to be precise in our terminology. That we should have a term which shall precisely define ideas which are not in awareness and which shall distinguish them from physiological processes is necessitated by the fact that such ideas in themselves form a distinct field of investigation.
The term “subconscious” is commonly used, excepting by German writers, to characterize these coconscious ideas. In fact, by some French medical writers, particularly Janet, it is very precisely limited to such ideas. By other authors it is employed in this sense and also to include the physical residua of experiences, and sometimes with the additional meaning of unconscious physiological neurograms, or processes, which it defines—in fact, to denote any conserved experience or process outside of consciousness. On the other hand, among these authors, some do not admit the validity of the concept of coconscious ideas, but interpret all so-called subconscious manifestations as the expression of the physiological functioning of physiological neurograms in which the experiences of life are conserved. Subconscious and unconscious are, therefore, quite commonly, but not always, employed as synonyms to define two or three different classes of facts. For practical reasons, as already stated, it is desirable to have a term which shall embrace all classes of facts, and of the two terms in common use, subconscious and unconscious, the former is preferable, as it is not subject to the double meaning above mentioned. I, therefore, use the term subconscious in a generic sense to include (a) coconscious ideas or processes; (b) unconscious neurograms, and (c) unconscious processes. Of course it is only a matter of terminology. The conceptual facts may then be thus classified:
The subconscious
The coconscious
The unconscious
(synonym: subconscious ideas.)
a: Conserved dormant neurograms or neural dispositions.
b: Active functioning neurograms or neuralprocesses.
(synonym: unconscious processes.)
Subconscious as an adjective used to qualify ideas is plainly equivalent to coconscious ideas. This terminology I have found useful in keeping the different classes of conceptual facts separate in my mind and I believe it will prove to be equally useful to others. With the conceptual facts clearly differentiated it will be generally easy to recognize the various senses in which the terms are used when found in the writings of others.
The unconscious as a fundamental of personality.—A survey of all the facts and their relations, which I have outlined in the preceding lectures, brings into strong relief the important principle that no matter in what state complexes of ideas are formed, so long as they are conserved, they become a part of our personality. They become dormant, but, being conserved, they may under favorable conditions be awakened and enter our conscious life. It matters not whether complexes of ideas have been formed in our personal consciousness, or in a state of hypnosis, in dreams, in conditions of dissociated personality, in coconsciousness, or any other dissociated state. They all become parts of ourselves and may afterwards be revived under favoring conditions, whether volitionally, automatically, by artificial devices, by involuntary stimuli, or other agencies. They may or may not be subject to voluntary recall as recollections, but, so long as they form part of our dormant consciousness as physiological neurograms, they belong to the personal self. “After all,” as Miss B. used to say, and correctly, referring to her different dissociated personalities, BI, B III, and BIV, “after all, they are all myself.” It makes no difference in what state an experience has occurred. A potential memory of it may persist and may, in one way or another, be revived, no matter how or when it originated.
Through the conception of the subconscious as resolvable, on the one hand, into the unconscious, passive or active physiological dispositions, and, on the other hand, into coactive conscious states, the subconscious becomes simplified and intelligible. It offers a basis on which may be constructed comprehensible theories of memory, suggestibility, post-hypnotic phenomena, dreams, automatic writing and similar phenomena, artificial hallucinations, the protean phenomena of hysteria, and the psycho-neuroses, as well as the mechanism of thought. It enables us also to construct a rational concept of personality and self. As we shall see, when we take up the study of multiple personality in later lectures, out of the aggregate of the accumulated and varied experience of the past conserved in the unconscious may be constructed a number of different personalities, each depending upon a synthesis and rearrangement of life’s neurograms and innate dispositions and instincts. All dormant ideas with their feeling tones and conative tendencies belong to our personality, but they may be arranged with varying instincts and innate dispositions into a number of differentiated systems, each synthesized into a corresponding personality. In the unconscious may be conserved a vast number of life’s experiences ranging in time almost from the cradle to the grave. The hopes, the wishes, the anxieties of childhood may still be there, lying fallow, but capable of injecting themselves under favoring conditions into our personalities. Properly speaking, from this point of view, aside from certain artificial and pathological conditions, there is, normally, no distinct “subconscious self,” or “subliminal self,” or “secondary self,” or “hidden self.” In artificial and pathological conditions there may be, as has been frequently shown, a splitting of consciousness and the aggregation into a secondary coconscious system of large systems of ideas which have all the characteristics of personality. This secondary personality (of which the primary personality is not aware) may have its own memories, feelings, perceptions, and thoughts. It may appropriate to itself various complexes of neurograms deposited by the experiences of life which are not at the disposal of the principal personality. Such a coconscious system may properly be spoken of as a subconscious self. But there is no evidence that, normally, such systems exist. All that we are entitled to affirm is that every individual’s consciousness may include ideas of which he is not aware, and that he has at his disposal, to a greater or less extent, a large unconscious storehouse in which are neurographically conserved a large and varied mass of life’s experiences. These experiences may be arranged in systems, as we shall see in the next lecture, but they do not constitute a “self.” To speak of them as a subconscious, subliminal, secondary, or hidden self is to construct concepts which are allegories, metaphors, symbolisms, personifications of concrete phenomena. Their use tends to fallacious reasoning and to perverted inductions from the facts. Becoming major premises in a syllogism, they lead to erroneous interpretations of the simplest facts, just as fixed ideas or obsessions tend to a perverted interpretation of the environment.
We are now in a position to see that the psycho-physiological theory of memory has a far-reaching significance. The facts which have been brought before you in evidence of the theory have been selected largely from those which were capable of verification by experimentation and by other objective testimony. They include a large variety of experiences which occurred in pathological conditions like amnesia and multiple personality, and in artificial conditions like hypnosis and intoxication. Such abnormal conditions enable us to show by testimony, independent of the individual, that these experiences had actually occurred, and, therefore, to show that the reproductions of these experiences were in principle truthful memories. They also enable us to appreciate the enormous variety and quantity of experiences which, although absolutely beyond the power of voluntary recall, may be conserved nevertheless as neurograms, and also to appreciate the minuteness of detail in which the brain records may be preserved.
If you will stop a moment to think, and give play to your imagination, you will see that the principle of the neurographic conservation of experiences must be true not only of our outer life, of our experiences with our environment, but of our whole inner life, normal as well as abnormal. It is always possible that any thought, any feeling, however trivial and transitory, may leave neurograms in the brain. It is always possible that even a fleeting doubt or scruple, thoughts which flash into the mind and straightway are put out again, all may leave their records and dispositions to function again. Even a passing doubt which any of you may entertain regarding the interpretation of the phenomena I have described, and the correctness of our conclusions, may be recorded. Indeed, it is a matter of some importance for the understanding of abnormal[abnormal] mental conditions that many of those horrid little sneaking thoughts which we do not like to admit to ourselves, the thoughts which for one reason or another we endeavor to repress, to put out of our minds, may leave their indelible traces. In fact, these are the very thoughts, the ones which we try hardest to forget, to push aside, which are most likely to be conserved. The harder we try, the stronger the feelings attached to them, the more likely they are to leave neurograms in the brain though they may never be reproduced. This has been shown by observation of pathological conditions, like hysteria and psychasthenia, and by experimentation. In repressing our thoughts we do not put them out of our minds, but, as the subject previously cited, who in hypnosis could recall such repressed thoughts, said, we put them into our minds. In other words, we conserve them as neurograms.
In one sense, I suppose, we may say that every one leads a double life. Let me hasten to say to you, I mean this not in a moral but in an intellectual sense. Every one’s mental life may fairly be said to be divided between those ideas, thoughts, and feelings which he receives from and gives out to his social world, the social environment in which he lives, and those which belong more properly to his inner life and the innermost sanctuary of his personality and character. The former include the activities and the educational acquisitions which he seeks to cultivate and conserve for future use. The latter include the more intimate communings with himself, the doubts and fears and scruples pertaining to the moral, religious, and other problems of life, and the struggles and trials and difficulties which beset its paths; the internal contests with the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. The conventionalities of the social organization require that the outward expression of many of these should be put under restraint. Indeed, society insists that some, the sexual strivings, are aspects of life and human nature which are not to be spoken or thought of. Now, of course, this inner life must also leave its neurographic tracings along with the outer life, and must, potentially at least, become a part of our personality, liable to manifest itself in character and in other directions. But, more than this, abnormal psychology, through its technical methods of investigation and through the perverted manifestations exhibited in sick conditions of mind and body, has shown us that the neurograms deposited as the experiences of this inner life may flower, to use an expression of the lamented William James, below the threshold of consciousness, and, under certain conditions, where the mind is in unstable equilibrium, burst forth in mental and bodily manifestations of an unusual character. Thus in processes of this kind we find an explanation of religious phenomena like sudden conversion; of dreams and of certain pathological phenomena like the hallucinations, deliria, crises, and bodily manifestations of hysteria, and the numerous automatic phenomena of spiritualistic mediums. Such phenomena may then be interpreted as the flowering or functioning of the unconscious.
The essential difference in the consequences which follow from this psycho-physiological conception of memory, based as it is on the unconscious, and those which follow from that conception which is popularly held must be obvious. According to popular understanding the mental life which we have outlived, the life which we have put behind us, whether that of childhood or of passing phases of adult life, is only an ephemeral, evanescent phase of consciousness which once out of mind, put aside or forgotten, need no longer be taken into consideration as pertaining to, much less influencing, our personality. Writers of fiction who undertake to depict human nature almost invariably, I believe, are governed by this point of view. They describe their characters as throwing overboard their past, their dominating beliefs, convictions, and other traits as easily as we should toss undesirable refuse into the ocean. Their heroes and heroines jettison their psychological cargoes as if they were barrels of molasses whenever their personalities show signs of going down in the storms of life’s experiences. According to this view, which is derived from an imperfect conception of mental processes, any passing phase of consciousness ceases to have potential existence or influence as soon as it is forgotten, or as soon as it ceases to be a consciously dominating belief or motive of life. It is assumed that so long as we do not bring it back into consciousness it belongs to us no more than as if it had originated in the mind of another, or had taken flight on the wings of a dove. This is true in part only. A phase of consciousness may not be conserved, or it may become so modified by the clash with new experiences that a rearrangement of its elements takes place and it becomes, for instance, a new motive or belief, or a new setting to give a new meaning to an idea. On the other hand, any passing phase may, as we have seen, still belong to our personality even though it lies hidden in its depths. That we no longer recall it, bring it voluntarily into the field of our personal consciousness, does not negative its continuing (though dormant) existence, and its further influence upon the personality through the subconscious workings of the mind.
In conclusion, and by way of partial recapitulation, we may say, first: The records of our lives are written in unconscious dormant complexes and therein conserved so long as the residua retain their dynamic potentialities. It is the unconscious, rather than the conscious, which is the important factor in personality and intelligence. The unconscious furnishes the formative material out of which our judgments, our beliefs, our ideals, and our characters are shaped.
In the second place, the unconscious, besides being a static storehouse, has dynamic functions. It is evident that, theoretically, if unconscious complexes are once formed they may, under favoring conditions of the psycho-physical organism, become revived and play an important part in pathological mental life. If through dissociation they could be freed from the normal inhibition and the counterbalancing influences of the normal mental mechanism, and given an independence and freedom from voluntary control, they might, by functioning, produce abnormal states like fixed ideas, delusions, automatisms, hallucinations, etc. A study of such abnormal phenomena confirms this theoretical view and finds in this conception of the unconscious an explanation of the origin of many of them. The hallucinations and bizarre notions and delusions of the insane, the hysteric, and psychasthenic, where all seems chaos, without law or order, are often due to the resurrection and fabricating effect of unconscious complexes formed by the earlier experiences of the patient’s life. Of course, the mechanism by which such phenomena are produced is a complicated one about which there is much difference of opinion and which we cannot enter into here. In post-hypnotic phenomena and artificial hallucinations we have experimental examples of the principle.
More than this, and more important, there is considerable evidence going to show that conserved experiences functioning as subconscious processes take part in and determine the conscious processes of everyday life. On the one hand stored neurograms may undergo subconscious incubation, assimilating the material deposited by the varied experiences of life to finally burst forth in ripened judgments, beliefs, and convictions, as is so strikingly shown in sudden religious conversions and allied mental manifestations. Through a similar incubating process, the stored material needed for the solution of baffling problems is gathered together and oftentimes assimilated and arranged and formulated as an answer to the question. On the other hand, subconscious processes may be but a hidden part of that mechanism which determines our everyday judgment and our points of view, our attitudes of mind, the meanings of our ideas, and the traits of our characters. Antecedent experiences functioning as such processes may determine our fantasies and our dreams. Thus functioning as dynamic processes the stored residua of the past may provide the secrets of our moods, our impulses, our prejudices, our beliefs, and our judgments.
It remains, however, for future investigation to determine the exact mechanism and the relative extent to which subconscious processes play their parts.
[123]. For a general account of the behavior of decerebrate animals and summary of these experiments see Loeb’s “Physiology of the Brain,” and Schäfer’s Text Book of Physiology.
[124]. M. Foster: A Text Book of Physiology, 1895, page 726.
[125]. Von M. Rothmann: Demonstration des Hundes ohne Grossirn. Bericht über den V Kongress f. Experiment. Psychol. in Berlin, 1912, page 256. The report is too meager to admit of independent judgment of the animal’s behavior in many of its details.
[126]. Until the basal ganglia have been microscopically examined it cannot be determined that the loss of function was not due to secondary organic lesions. In Goltz’ dog, which acted like a blind dog, one optic nerve was cut and the corpora striata and optic thalami were partly involved in the lesion.
[127]. Quoted from Schräder by Loeb.
[128]. Cf. Lloyd Morgan: Instinct and Experience, 1912.
[129]. Dr. Morgan in his work, “Instinct and Experience,” 1912, published before Rothmann’s observations, remarks that this “is not inherently improbable” although it had not as yet been demonstrated.
[130]. From the point of view here adopted, the recent discussions and controversies over the problems of “instinct and intelligence” have been much muddled by the arbitrary denial of conscious elements to an instinctive process, and by the acceptation of consciousness or conscious experience as the criterion of intelligence. In this view instinct and intelligence become contrasted concepts which to my way of thinking they are not necessarily at all. If it is admitted that instinct is an innate disposition, its contrasted quality is that which is acquired and not the quality of consciousness. It is true that acquired behavior is commonly if not always determined by conscious processes (conscious experience), but likewise innate behavior may be determined by processes which contain conscious elements. Surely fear is instinctive and is a conscious element in an innate process; and so must be visual and other sensory images, as in the first peck of a chicken. To look upon the first visual image simply as conscious “experience,” as an “onlooker,” and reject it as a factor in the process which determines that first peck, seems to me to be arbitrary psychology if not physiology. If consciousness may be a quality of an innate process—and why not?—it cannot be a criterion of intelligence. The true converse of the conscious is the unconscious.
This adopted antithesis between consciousness and instinct, from this point of view as well as the arbitrary limitation of the localization of the whole of an instinctive process to the subcortical centers, vitiates the force of the very able presentation of the subject by Dr. Morgan, if I correctly understand him. I know of no data which forbid the cortex to be included in the innate mechanism of an instinctive process. On the contrary, it is difficult to understand instinctive behavior and its modifications through conscious experience unless cortical centers are included in the psycho-physiological arcs. At any rate we may define instinct and intelligence in terms of the conscious and the unconscious, or in brain terms, but we should not mix up these aspects with that of localization in the definition. Mr. McDougall’s conception of instinct appeals to me more strongly from both a biological and a psychological point of view, and further seems to me to be more in consonance with the data of experience.
[131]. A Text Book of Physiology, 1893, page 727.
[132]. The localization of the processes concerned in all such acquired automatic behavior—whether it is in the cortex or subcortical centers—is an unsolved problem.
[133]. If the subconscious processes which perform a mathematical calculation and other problems, which logically determine the symbolism of a dream, etc., can be correctly interpreted as unconscious, they plainly exhibit a higher order of intelligence than any conscious processes in lower animals, or even some conscious processes of man, like brushing away a fly.
[134]. Not included in this volume.
[135]. It has been objected that to speak of unconscious ideas is a contradiction of terms. This seems to me to smack of quibbling as we know well enough that the adjective is used in the sense of unawareness.
[136]. For a good account of the history of the theory of unconscious ideas in philosophy see Hartmann’s “Philosophy of the Unconscious,” where the following quotations may be found: “To have ideas and yet not to be conscious of them—there seems to be a contradiction in that—for how can we know that we have them if we are not conscious of them? Nevertheless, we may become aware indirectly that we have an idea, although we be not directly cognizant of the same.” (Kant, Anthropology, sec. 5.) And again: "Innumerable are the sensations and perceptions whereof we are not conscious although we must undoubtedly conclude that we have them, obscure ideas as they may be called (to be found in animals as well as in man). The clear ideas, indeed, are but an infinitely small fraction of these same exposed to consciousness. That only a few spots on the great chart of our minds are illuminated may well fill us with amazement in contemplating this nature of ours. (Ibid.)
“Now unconscious ideas” are such “as are in consciousness without our being aware of them” (Herbart).
It is interesting to notice how Kant’s statement might well be substituted for that of Myers’ of his “Subliminal.” It is difficult to understand the peculiar antagonistic attitude of certain theoretical psychologists to the theory of subconscious (coconscious) ideas in view of the history of this theory in philosophy. They seem to have forgotten their philosophy and not to have kept pace with experimental psychology.
[137]. See [footnote] on p. 149.
LECTURE IX
THE ORGANIZATION OF UNCONSCIOUS COMPLEXES
Everyday life.—It will be well at this point to state in orderly fashion a few general principles governing the organization of complexes or syntheses of ideas[[138]] which, as we shall see, play an important part in normal and abnormal life. Although this statement will be little more than descriptive of what is common experience it will be helpful in classifying and obtaining a useful perspective of the phenomena with which we shall deal.
Now, as every one knows, the elemental ideas which make up the experience of any given moment tend to become organized (i.e., synthesized and conserved) into a system or complex of ideas, linked with emotions, feelings and other innate dispositions, so that when one of the ideas belonging to the experience comes to mind the experience as a whole is recalled. We may conveniently term such a system when in a state of conservation, an unconscious complex[[139]] or neurogram, or system of neurograms. If we wish to use psychological terms we may speak of it as a complex or synthesis of dormant ideas. Although we may formulate this principle as the “association of ideas” the formula can have only a descriptive significance pertaining to a relation in time (and not a causal one) unless there be included an unconscious factor by which the association becomes effective in exciting one idea through another—i.e., through a linking of neural dispositions. We cannot conceive of any conscious relation between ideas that can possibly induce this effect. It must be some unconscious dynamic relation[[140]] and be explained in terms of neural dispositions. If this be so, all ideas are dynamically associated and related in a process which does not appear in consciousness and which is essential for organization into a complex. Every system of associated ideas, therefore, implies conservation through an organized unconscious complex.
Complexes may be very feebly organized in that the elemental ideas are weakly conserved or weakly associated; in which case when we try to recall the original experience only a part or none of it is recalled.
On the other hand, a complex may be strongly organized and include a large number of details of an experience. This is usually owing to the fact that the original experience was accompanied by strong emotional tones, or by marked interest and attention, or was frequently repeated.
Emotional Complexes: 1. When the original experience was accompanied by an emotion it may be regarded as having excited one or more of the emotional instincts of anger, fear, disgust, etc. The excitation of the instinct or instincts is in one sense a reaction to the ideas of the experience. The instincts then become organized about one or more of the ideas to form a sentiment (Shand) and the whole is incorporated in a complex which then acquires an affective character. The impulsive force of the instinct thereafter largely determines the behavior of the complex. (To this we shall return later when we consider the instincts.) General observation shows that emotional experiences are more likely to be conserved and also voluntarily recalled. Given such an emotional complex nearly anything associated with some detail of the experience may, by the law of association, automatically or involuntarily revive it, or the emotional reaction with a greater or less number of its associated memories. This tendency seems to be directly proportionate to the intensity of the instinct (fear, anger, etc.) incorporated in the complex. Sometimes, it is true, a strongly emotional experience, even an experience of great moment in an individual’s life, is completely forgotten, so completely that no associated idea avails as a stimulus to awaken it. Usually in all such cases the neurograms are isolated, etc., by dissociation. They still, however, may be strongly organized and conserved as an unconscious complex and sometimes may be excited as a subconscious process by an associated stimulus. In such conditions it very frequently is found that the dissociation is due to conflict between the emotion belonging to the complex and another emotional complex. The impulsive force of the latter dissociates the former complex which then cannot be voluntarily reproduced as memory, nor awakened by any association under normal conditions. We have then a condition of amnesia and often an hysterical condition. To this important phenomenon we shall return when we consider the emotions. Passing over these exceptional conditions of conflicting emotions (which being explained “prove the rule”), it still remains true that in everyday life emotional experiences are not only more likely to be conserved but to be subject to voluntary recall, or awakened involuntarily by an associated stimulus.
If, for instance, we have experienced a railroad accident involving exciting incidents, loss of life, etc., the words “railroad,” “accident,” “death,” or a sudden crashing sound, or the sight of blood, or even riding in a railroad train may recall the experience, or at least the prominent features in it. The earlier events and those succeeding the accident may have passed out of all possibility of voluntary recall. To take an instance commonplace enough, but which happens to have come within my recent observation: a fireman, hurrying to a fire, was injured severely by being thrown from a hose-wagon against a telegraph-pole with which the wagon collided. He narrowly escaped death. Although three years have elapsed he still cannot ride on a wagon to a fire without the memory of substantially the whole accident rising in his mind. When he does so he again lives through the accident, including the thoughts just previous to the actual collision when realizing his situation he was overcome with terror, and he again manifests all the organic physical expressions of fear, viz., perspiration, tremor, and muscular weakness. Here is a well organized and fairly limited complex. It is also plainly an imperative memory, that is to say, any stimulus-idea associated with some element in the complex reproduces the experience as memory whether it is wished or not. Try as hard as he will he cannot prevent its recurrence. The stimulus that excites such involuntary memories may be a spoken word (as in the psycho-galvanic and other associative experiments which we shall consider in a later lecture), or it may be a visual perception of the environment—of a person or place—or it may be a repetition of the circumstances attending the original experience, however induced. The phenomenon may also be regarded as an automatism or automatic process. As the biological instinct of fear is incorporated in the complex it is also a phobia.
Why our fireman suffered the intense terror that he did at the time of the accident, why he experienced the thoughts which surged into his mind, why he suffered this emotional experience, while another man going through the same accident suffers no more than the physical injury (if any) at the time, and why the experience continues to recur as an imperative memory are problems which we are not considering now. The fact is that he did suffer the terror and its agonizing thoughts, and, this being the case, their constant recurrence, i.e., the reproduction of the experience, is a memory. And this memory consists of a well organized complex of ideas, feelings, and physiological accompaniments. I emphasize this point because an imperatively recurring mental experience of this sort is a psychosis, and, so far as the principle of memory enters into it, so far memory becomes a part of the mechanism of obsessions.
The reason why the man at the moment of the accident experienced the terrorizing thoughts that he did, and why he continued to experience them, must be sought in associated conserved experiences of his past. These experiences were the psycho-genetic factors. It would take us too far out of the way to consider this problem, which belongs to the obsessions, at this time, but, as I have touched upon it, I may say in passing that the accident would have awakened no sense of terror and no emotional shock if a psychological torch had not already been prepared. This torch was made up of ideas previously imbibed from the social environment and made ready to be set aflame by the match set to it by the accident. In the unconsciousness of this man were written in neurographic records the dangers attending accidents of this kind and dangers which still threatened his present and future.
Likewise the insistence of the memory can be related to a setting of associated thoughts which gave meaning to his perception of himself as one affected, as he believed, with a serious injury threatening his future. His fear was also, therefore, a fear of the present and future. Thus not only the experiences of the accident itself became organized into a group and conserved as a memory, but were organized with memories of still other experiences which stood in a genetic relation to them. If it were necessary I could give from my personal observation numerous examples of this mode of organization of complexes through emotional experiences and of their reproduction as automatic memories.
An historical example of complex-organizing of this kind is narrated in Tallentyre’s delightful life of Voltaire. Toward the end of Voltaire’s famous residence at the court of Frederick the Great, as the latter’s guest, one of those pestiferous friends who cannot help repeating disagreeable personal gossip for our benefit swore to Voltaire to having heard Frederick remark, “I shall want him (Voltaire) at the most another year; one squeezes the orange and throws away the rind.” From that moment a complex of emotional ideas was formed in Voltaire’s mind, that, do what he would, he could not get rid of. He wrote it to his friends, thought about it, dreamed about it; he tried to forget it, but to no purpose; it would not “down”; the rind kept constantly rising. It brought with it every memory of Frederick’s character and actions that fitted the remark.
Voltaire, like many men of genius, was a neurasthenic and his ideas with strong emotional tones tended to become strongly organized and acquire great force. “The orange rind haunts my dreams,” he wrote; “I try not to believe it.... We go to sup with the king and are gay enough sometimes;—the man who fell from the top of a steeple and found the fall through the air soft and said, ‘Good, provided it lasts,’ is not a little as I am.” The emotional complex which so tormented Voltaire that it literally became an obsession was a recurring memory. The experience had been strongly registered and conserved, owing to the emotional tone, but the reason why there was so much emotion, and why it absorbed so many associated ideas into itself and kept recurring would undoubtedly have been found to lie, if we could have probed Voltaire’s mind, in its settings—his previous stormy experiences with Frederick, his knowledge of Frederick’s character, his previous apprehensions of what later actually occurred, and, most probably, self-reproach for his own behavior, the consequences of which he feared to face. All this, conserved as neurograms, was set ablaze by the remark and furnished not only the emotion but the material for the content of the complex. These previous experiences, therefore, stood in genetic relation to the latter, excited the emotional reaction of anger, resentment and fear, and prevented the complex from subsiding. The exciting cause for each recurrence of the complex was, of course, some associated stimulus from the environment, or train of thought.
Another interesting historical example is the foolish complex which is said to have disturbed the pretty Mme. Leclerc (Pauline Bonaparte, who was afterward the Princess Borghese). This fascinating and beautiful woman was enjoying her triumph at a ball. Seated in a little boudoir off the ball-room she was entertaining “guests who came to admire her and fill her cup to overflowing. There was, however, a Mme. de Contades, who had been deserted by her own cavaliers at the appearance of Pauline. Approaching, now, on the arm of her escort, she said in a tone sufficiently loud so that every one, including Pauline, could hear perfectly: ‘Mon Dieu, what a misfortune! Oh, what a pity! She would be so pretty but for that!’ ‘But for what?’ asked her cavalier. All eyes were turned upon poor Mme. Leclerc, who thought there must be something the matter with her coiffure and began to redden and suffocate. ‘But do you not see what I mean?’ persisted Mme. de Contades, with the cold cruelty of a jealous woman. ‘What a pity! Yes, truly, how unfortunate! Such a really pretty head to have such ears! If I had ears like those I would have them cut off. Yes, positively, they are like those of a pug dog. You who know her, Monsieur, advise her to have it done; it would be a charitable act.’ Pauline, more beautiful than ever in her blushes, rose, tears blinding her eyes, then sank back upon the sofa, hiding her face in her hands, sick with mortification and shame. As a matter of fact, her ears were not ugly, only a little too flat. From that day, however, she always dressed her hair over them or concealed them under a bandeau, as in the well-known painting of her.”[[141]]
Fixed ideas relating to physical blemishes are not uncommonly observed as obsessions in psychasthenics. With our knowledge of such psychical manifestations it is easy to imagine Pauline’s antecedent thoughts regarding her own flat ears, and repugnance to this defect in others, her suspicions of unfavorable criticisms and of not being admired, etc., all organized with the instinct of self-abasement (emotion of subjection) and forming a sentiment of self-depreciation and shame in her mind.
2. The outbreak of such automatic memories is particularly prone to occur in persons of a particular temperament (the apprehensive temperament, in which the biological instinct of fear is the paramount factor), in fatigue states, and in so-called neurotic people—neurasthenics, psychasthenics, and hysterics. In such people the organization of the complex probably has been largely a previously subconscious incubating process, as in the phenomenon of “sudden religious conversion.” Later the sudden suggestion or awakening by whatsoever means of an idea, which has roots in the antecedent thoughts engaged in the subconscious process, readily gives occasion for the outbreak of the complex. The latter then excites the emotional reaction of anger, horror, antipathy, fear, jealousy, etc., which becomes incorporated in the complex. When once formed the automatism becomes the psychosis. The following case is an illustration:
L. E. W., forty-nine years of age, farmer and lawyer by occupation, a man of strenuous disposition, broke down under stress and strain with severe but common symptoms of mental and physical fatigue modified and exaggerated by apprehensions of incurable illness. At the end of a year there developed scruples and jealous suspicions of his wife’s chastity, not persistent but recurring from time to time in attacks, and always awakened by a suggestion of some kind—an associated idea, a remark heard, an act of some kind on the part of the wife, etc. Between the attacks he was entirely free from such thoughts, but during the attack, which came on with the usual suddenness, these thoughts—always the same doubts, suspicions, reasonings, jealousy, and fear—were dominating, imperative, and painful. An open-minded, frank, intelligent man he fully realized that his scruples were entirely unfounded and even characterized them as “delusions.” It was interesting, so clear was he in this respect, to hear him discuss his attacks between times with his wife, as if they were recurrent appendicitis. The attacks would pass off in a short time after discussing his scruples with his wife, and then he became natural again; they involved great suffering and he feared, as people thus afflicted so often do, that they spelled impending insanity. And yet it was easy to determine that they were only imperative recurrent memories, conserved complexes emerging from the unconscious. He had been married twenty-two years. He was of a jealous nature, and before marriage it annoyed him to think that his wife had been courted by other men, that she wrote them letters, etc. He began to think of her as a flirt, that she was going to jilt him, and to have misgivings of her character. He grew jealous and suspicions of possible unchastity worried him, but reasoning with himself he would say, “O, pshaw! it is an abominable suspicion,” “an hallucination,” and put the thought out of his mind, as he said. But we know he really put the thought into his mind to be conserved in the unconscious, as a complex of chastity scruples, and there undergo incubation and further development. Later he had had spells of jealousy during his married life but no true imperative ideas until he broke down in health, and then, as he himself expressed it, “the devil got the upper hand and said, ‘I’ve got you now.’”
The devil was the complex organized twenty-two years previously with the emotion of jealousy[[142]] centered about the idea of his wife and the whole neurographically conserved. The impulsive force of the emotion was constantly striving to awaken and give expression to the unconscious complex. He was able to hold it in check, to repress it, by the conflicting force of other sentiments until these became weakened by the development of the psychasthenic state. Then these latter controlling elements of personality were repressed in turn whenever the more powerful jealousy complex was awakened. The whole mechanism was undoubtedly more complicated than this, in that the jealousy complex had a setting in certain unsophisticated and puritanical ideas of conduct (brought to light in the analysis) which gave a peculiar meaning (for him) to his wife’s actions. So long as this setting persisted it would be next to impossible to modify the jealousy complex.
Whatever the mechanism, ideas with strong emotional tones (particularly fear, anger, jealousy, and disgust), no matter how absurd or repellent, or unjustified, and whether acceptable or unacceptable, tend to become organized and welded into a complex which is thereby conserved. The impulsive force of the incorporated emotion tends to awaken and give expression to the complex whenever stimulated. The recurrence of such an organized complex so far as it is reproduction is, of course, in principle, memory, and an imperative memory or fixed idea. Whether the complex shall be awakened as such a recurrent memory, or shall function as a dissociated subconscious process, producing other disturbances, or remain quiescent in the unconscious, depends upon other factors which we need not now consider.
3. Clinically the periodic recurrence of such complexes is an obsession. An obsession as met with is most likely to be characterized by fear not only because the instinct of fear is the most painful of the emotions, but for another reason. Although biologically fear is useful as a defense for the preservation of the individual, when perverted by useless associations it becomes harmful, in that it is not only painful but prevents the adjustment of the individual to his environment and thereby takes on a pathological taint. Complexes with other emotions are less likely to be harmful and therefore less frequently apply for relief. Yet imperative ideas with jealousy, anger, hatred, love, disgust, etc., centered about an object are exceedingly common though their possessors less often resort to a physician.
From another point of view abnormal complexes, represented by these examples, may be regarded as “association psychoses.” Sometimes the physiological bodily accompaniments form the greater part of the complex which is for the most part made up of physiological disturbances (vasomotor, cardiac, gastric, respiratory, secretory, muscular, etc.); almost pure association neuroses they then become. Neuroses of this kind we shall consider in a later lecture.[[143]]
Sometimes, particularly in people of intensive temperaments, “imperative ideas” are formed by gradual evolution in consequence of the mind constantly dwelling with emotional intensity on certain phases of thought—i.e., through repetition. This we see in the development of religious complexes or faiths, but it is also obtrusive in other fields of thought, political, industrial, social, etc. Hence the evolution of fanatics. A. D. is a man of strong feeling and great imagination. As a child he was a constant witness of quarrels between his father and mother. His mind dwelt upon these experiences and there developed in him at an early date strong aversions toward marriage. Aversion means the instinct of repulsion or disgust. This instinct therefore became systematized with the idea of marriage as its object forming an intense sentiment of aversion. Even as a boy the aversion impelled him to determine never to marry and later he formed strong theoretical anti-matrimonial views which became almost a religion. For years he talked about his views, argued and preached about them like a fanatic to his friends. His aversion rose in successful conflict against every temptation to matrimony and his anti-matrimonial complex became an obsession. The consequences were what might have been expected when, later in life, he allowed himself in a moment of sympathetic weakness and owing to compromising situations to slip within the matrimonial noose. The complex then, like that of Voltaire’s orange rind, would not down at his own bidding, or at that of his devoted spouse for whom he had, in other respects, a strong affection mingled with personal admiration. The resulting situation can be imagined.
4[4]. Hysterical attacks. It is of practical importance to note another part which emotional complexes may play in psychopathology. In certain pathological conditions in which there is limitation of the field of consciousness (involving a disappearance of a large part of the normal mental life) often all that persists of consciousness and represents the personal self is the obsessing complex which previously tormented the patient. In hysterical crises, psycholeptic attacks, trance, and certain types of epilepsy this is peculiarly the case. In these states the content of consciousness consists almost wholly, or at least largely, of a recurrent memory of an experience which originated in the normal life and which has been conserved in the unconscious. Here the obsessing ideas, which at one time were voluntarily entertained by the subject, or, as frequently happens, originated in some emotional experience, automatically recur, while the remainder of the conscious life becomes dissociated and suppressed; in other words the obsessing ideas emerge out of the unconscious (neurograms) and became substantially the whole conscious field. In hysterical attacks, particularly, the complex is accompanied by the same strong emotional tone—such as fear, anxiety, jealousy, or anger—which belonged to the original experience. In such pathological subjects, whenever the complex is awakened, the remainder of the conscious field tends to become dissociated and the psychological state to be reproduced. Hence, in such states, the ideas repeat themselves over and over again with the recurrence of the attacks. The subject lives over again as in a dream the original attack, which is a stereotyped revivification of the original experience. This peculiarity of the mental condition in attacks has been described by various writers. The dream of the hystero-epileptic is substantially always the same. Janet has accurately described the origin and rôle of the fixed ideas in the hysterical attack. “These ideas,” he says, “are not conceived, invented at the moment; they formulate themselves; they are only repetitions. Thus, the most important of the hallucinations which harassed Marcelle during her cloud-attack was but the exact reproduction of a scene which had taken place the previous year. The fixed ideas of dying, of not eating, are the reproduction of certain desperate resolutions taken some years ago. Formerly these ideas had some sense, were more or less well connected with a motive. A desperate love affair had been the cause of her attempts at suicide; she refused to eat in order to let herself die of hunger, etc. To-day these ideas are again reproduced, but without connection and without reason. She has, we convinced ourselves, completely forgotten her old despair, and has not the least wish to die. The idea of suicide comes to her to-day without any relation to her present situation, and she is in despair at the idea of this suicide which imposes itself on her as a relic of her past, so to say. She does not know why she refuses to eat; the ideas of suicide and refusal of food are dissociated. The one exists without the other. At one moment she hears the voice, ‘Do not eat,’ and yet she has no thought of death; at another, she thinks of killing herself and yet she accepts nourishment. We always find in fixed ideas this characteristic of automatic repetition of the past without connection[connection], without actual logic.”[[144]]
When certain emotional and distressing ideas of wounded love are awakened in M. C., an hysteric, she is thrown into an hysterical attack in which these ideas recur over and over again and dominate consciousness. In P. M., another hysteric, ideas of loneliness and jealousy, which had previously been entertained but which had been thrust out of her mind again and again in a conscientious struggle with her moral nature, recur, emerge from the unconscious and dominate the field of consciousness in each hysterical attack which they induce.
6. In the psycholeptic, a variant of the hysteric, the same sensations, motor phenomena, and hallucinations, and the same bizarre ideas—whatever the symptomatic phenomena—characterize each attack. This could be shown experimentally in M——l.[[145]]
Of course the degree of dissociation of consciousness, the content of the fixed idea, and the physiological manifestations vary in individual cases, according to the nature of the case. Sometimes the disturbance of consciousness is slight and the physiological manifestations predominant.
From a consideration of all the facts we see that a conserved complex associated with strong feeling tones may play a disastrous and pathological part in certain individuals.
It is well to bear in mind here, as before, that in these statements we are only giving a literal description of the psychological events without attempt to form any theory of the mechanism of the processes, or the antecedent psychogenetic factors which lead to the development of the particular fixed ideas or complexes. About this there may be and is a difference of view.
Systematized Complexes. In contrast with the limited group of fixed ideas, organized with one or more emotions (i.e., instincts) I have been describing, are the large systems of complexes or associated experiences which become organized and fairly distinctly differentiated in the course of the development of every one’s personality. In many, at least, of these systems there will be found a predominant emotion and certain instinctive tendencies, and a predominant feeling tone—of pleasure or pain, of exaltation or depression, etc. It is quite possible that careful investigation would disclose that it is this conflicting affective force which is responsible for the differentiation of one system from another with opposing affects and tendencies. The differentiation of such systematized complexes is of considerable practical importance for normal and abnormal personality. Among such systems may here be mentioned those which are related to certain subjects or departments of human experience, or are related in time, or to certain dispositions or moods of the individual. The first may be called subject systems, the second chronological systems, and the last mood systems.
1. Subject systems: I find myself interested, for instance, in several fields of human knowledge; (a) abnormal psychology; (b) public franchises; (c) yachting; (d) local politics; (e) business affairs. To each of these I give a large amount of thought, accumulate many data belonging to each, and devote a considerable amount of active work to carrying into effect my ideas in each field. Five large systems are thus formed, each consisting of facts, opinions, memories, experiences, etc., distinct from those belonging to the others. To each there is an emotion and a feeling tone which have more or less distinctive qualities; these coming from the intellectual interest of abnormal psychology differing qualitatively from those of the “joy of battle” excited by a public contest with a railroad corporation or gas company, as it does from that of the exhilarating sport of a yacht race, or from the annoying and rather depressing care of business interests; and so on.
These five subject-complexes do not form independent automatisms or isolated systems which may intrude themselves in any conscious field, but comprise large associations, memories of experiences in a special field of thought. Within that field the ideas of the system are no more strongly organized than are ideas in general; but it can be recognized that the system as a whole with its affective tones is fairly well delimited from the other complexes of other spheres of thought. It is difficult, for certain individuals at least, to introduce the associations of one subject-complex into the focus of attention so long as another is invested with personal interest and occupies the attention of consciousness. They find it difficult to switch[[146]] their minds from one subject to another and back again. On the other hand, it is said of Napoleon that he had all the subjects of his experiences arranged in drawers of his mind, and that he could open each drawer at will, take out any subject he wished, and shut it up again as he wished. Ability of this kind involves remarkable control over the mind and is not given to all.
I have frequently made observations like the following on myself, showing the organization and differentiation of systems: I collect the various data belonging to one of the problems discussed in these lectures. I arrange all in an orderly fashion in my mind, work out the logical relations and the conclusions to which they lead, as well as their relations to other data and problems. The whole is then schematically arranged on paper to await proper elaboration the next morning, when it will be written out on waking, the preliminary mental arrangement having been done at night. A large complex has been created, the various details of which are luminously clear and the sequence of the ideas vividly conceived, the conclusions definite. There is, further, an affective tone of joy and exaltation which is apt to accompany the accomplishment of an intellectual problem and which produces a feeling of increased energy.
The next morning, as I awake and gradually return to full consciousness, another and very different kind of complex almost exclusively fills my mind, owing probably to the fatigue following the previous night’s work. All sorts of gloomy thoughts, memories of experiences better forgotten, course through the mind; and entirely different emotions (instincts), and a strong feeling of depression dominate the mental panorama. The whole—ideas, emotions, and feelings—makes a complex which has been experienced over and over again, and is recognized as such. The same old ideas, emotions, thoughts, and memories, conserved as neurograms, repeat themselves almost in stereotyped fashion. The mental complex has completely changed and the exuberant energy of the night before has given place to listless inertia.
All this is commonplace enough, merely morning depression you will say, due to fatigue; and so it is. But mark the sequel.
I now remember that I have a task to perform and before rising take paper and pencil, lying ready at my side, to write out the theme previously arranged in skeleton. But to my surprise I find that it cannot be recalled. To be sure, I can, by effort of will, recall individual facts, but the facts have lost their associations and meaning, they remain comparatively isolated in memory; all their correlated ramifications, their associated ideas and relations, which the night before stood out in relief and crowded into consciousness, have gone. The emotional tone and impulses which energized the thoughts have also disappeared, and with them the system of complexes as a whole. It has been dissociated, inhibited, repressed, and there is amnesia for it. With the fatigue depression a new system, with different emotions and feelings, now dominates the mind and the desired system cannot be switched in.
This amnesia is not one of conservation but one of reproduction; for later in the day the fatigue and depression disappear, a new energizing emotional tone arises and the sought-for system is switched in and returns in its entirety. With this change the depression system in turn disappears, and now it is difficult to recall it, excepting that as an intellectual fact I remember that such thoughts occupied my mind in the early morning hours. The two systems as a whole are distinctly differentiated from and alternate with one another.
All this is only expressing in somewhat technical language a common experience, as most people, I suppose, have such alternations of complexes. The facts are trite enough; but, because they are of common experience, it is well to formulate them and so, as far as possible, give precision to our conception of the psychological relations which have a distinct bearing on the principles of dissociated personality and other psychoses, on character and psycho-therapeutics. When, at a later time, we take up for study the subject of dissociated personality[[147]] we shall find that the dissociation of consciousness sometimes takes its lines of cleavage between systems of complexes of this kind.[[148]] And, above all, the formation of complexes is the foundation stone of psycho-therapeutics.
The methods of education and therapeutic suggestion are variants of this mode of organizing mental processes. Both, in principle, are substantially the same, differing only in detail. They depend for their effect upon the implantation in the mind of ideational complexes organized by repetition, or by the impulsive force of their affective tones, or both. Every form of education necessarily involves the artificial formation of such complexes, whether in a pedagogical, religious, ethical, scientific, social, or professional field. So in psychotherapy by artfully directed suggestion, or education in the narrower sense, complexes may be similarly formed and organized. New points of view and “sentiments” may be inculcated, useful emotions and feelings excited, and the personality correspondingly modified. Roughly speaking, this is accomplished by suggesting ideas that will form settings (associations) that give new and desired meanings to previously harmful ideas; and these ideas, as well as any others we desire to implant in the mind, are organized by suggestion with emotions (instincts) of a useful, pleasurable, and exalting kind to form desirable sentiments, and to carry the ideas to fulfilment. Thus sentiments of right, or of ambition, or of sympathy, or of altruism, or of disinterestedness in self are awakened; and, with all this, opposing emotions are aroused to conflict with and repress the distressing ones, and the whole welded into a complex which becomes conserved neurographically and thereby a part of the personality.
Under ordinary conditions of every-day mental life social suggestion acts like therapeutic suggestion. But the suggestions of every-day life are so subtle and insidious that they are scarcely consciously recognized.
2. Chronological systems (using complex in a rather extended sense) are those which embrace the experiences of certain epochs of our lives rather than the subject material included in them. In a general way events as they are successively experienced become associated together, and with other elements of personality, so that the later recollection of one event in the chain of an epoch recalls successively the others. Conversely a break in the chain of memory may occur at any point and the chain only be picked up at a more distant date, leaving between, as a hiatus, an epoch for which there is amnesia of reproduction. This normally common amnesia affords confirmatory evidence of the associative relation of successive events. Involving as it does the unimportant and unemotional experiences as well as the important and emotional—though the former may be as well conserved as the latter—it is not easy to understand. The principle, however, plays an important part in abnormal amnesia particularly, but not necessarily, where there is a dissociation of personality.
The epoch may be of a few hours, or it may be of days, of months, or years. The simplest example is the frequent amnesia for the few hours preceding a physical injury to the head resulting in temporary unconsciousness. In other cases it is the result of extensive dissociation effected by suggestion (e. g., in hypnosis), or psychical trauma including therein emotional conflicts. Thus, to cite an experimental example: Miss B. is troubled by a distressing memory which constantly recurs to her mind during the twenty-four hours. To relieve her I suggest that she will completely forget the original experience. To my surprise, though the suggestion is limited to the experience alone, the whole twenty-four hours are completely wiped out of her memory. She cannot recall a single incident of that day. The whole epoch which had associations with the memory is dissociated.
When the epochal amnesia follows psychical trauma the condition of memory is apt to present the following peculiarity and the personality may be altered. When the epoch is the immediate past, i.e., includes the experiences extending from a certain past date up to the present, it sometimes happens that memory reverts to that past date. That is to say, the personality goes back to the period last remembered in which he believes, for the moment, he is still living, the memory of the succeeding last epoch being dissociated from the personal consciousness. Under such conditions there is something more than amnesia. The neurographic residua of the remembered epoch are revived and its experiences remembered as if they had just been lived. There is not only a dissociation of the memories of one epoch, but a resurrection of the conserved and maybe forgotten experiences of a preceding one. The synthesis of these memories restores again the personal consciousness of that period. Before the cleavage took place the recollection of the resurrected epoch may have been very incomplete and vague; afterward the new personality remembers it as if just experienced. The personality is, however, in other respects generally (always?) something different from the personality of that particular epoch. The dissociation is apt to involve a certain number of acquired traits and certain innate dispositions and instincts, while other outlived and repressed traits and innate dispositions and instincts are apt to be reawakened and synthesized into an altered abnormal personality. But this is another story that does not concern us now.
As an example of epochal amnesia I may cite Mrs. J——, who, after dissociation occurs, has amnesia for all the events of several years succeeding a certain hour of a certain day when a psychical trauma (shock) occurred. She thinks she is living on that day and remembers in great detail its events as if they had just occurred.
Miss B. reverts on one occasion to a day, six years back, when she received a psychical shock; the complexes of her personality of that day are revived as if just lived, all the succeeding years being forgotten; on another occasion she reverts to a day when she was living in another city seven or eight years before.
M——l reverts to an early period of his life when he was living in Russia, and forgets all since including even his knowledge of English.
B. C. A. on several occasions reverts to different epochs of her life with complete amnesia for all after events. On each occasion she takes up the thread of her mental life as if living in the past, and recites the events as if just lived.
Likewise, after a subject reverts from the abnormal to the normal state, after a short or long condition of altered personality, there may be a complete amnesia for the abnormal epoch, and although now normal he thinks it the same day on which dissociation occurred.
Thus, Miss O. develops a condition of dissociated personality lasting six months during which, as it unfortunately happens, she falls in love with a man whom she had never known in her normal state. At the end of this period she “wakes up” with a complete loss of memory for the phase of altered personality and, therefore, to find that her fiancé is apparently a stranger to her (!).
The same amnesia in the normal state for prolonged epochs in which the personality was altered was conspicuous in the case of Miss B. In William James’ often-cited case of Ansel Bourne and Dr. E. E. Mayer’s case of Chas. W. the subjects returned to their normal states with complete amnesia for the abnormal epochs of two months and seventeen years respectively.
After all, the common amnesia for the hypnotic state after waking is the same phenomenon.
Such observations show the possible systematization of epoch complexes, although the determining conditions are not as yet understood.
3. Disposition or Mood systems.—Among the loosely organized complexes in many individuals, and possibly in all of us, there are certain dispositions toward views of life which represent natural inclinations, desires, and modes of activity, which, for one reason or another, we tend to suppress or are unable to give full play to. Many individuals, for example, are compelled by the exactions of their duties and responsibilities to lead serious lives, to devote themselves to pursuits which demand all their energies and thought and which, therefore, do not permit of indulgence in the lighter enjoyments of life; and yet they may have a natural inclination to partake of the pleasures which innately appeal to all mankind and which many actually pursue; in other words, to yield to the impulsive force of the innate disposition, or instinct, of play. But these desires are repressed. Nevertheless the longing for these pleasures, under the impulses of this instinct, recurs from time to time. The mind dwells on them, the imagination is excited and weaves a fabric of pictures, sentiments, thoughts, and emotions the whole of which thus becomes organized into a systematized complex.
There may be a conflict, a rebellion and “kicking against the pricks” and, thereby, a liberation of emotional force of the instinct, impressing, on the one hand, a stronger organization of the whole process, and, on the other, repressing all conflicting desires. Or, the converse of this may hold and a person who devotes his life to the lighter enjoyments may have aspirations and longings for the more serious pursuits, and in this respect the imagination may similarly build up a complex which may similarly express itself. The recurrence of such complexes is one form of what we call a “mood” which has a distinctively emotional tone of its own derived from the instincts and sentiments which are dominant. Such a “disposition” system is often spoken of as “a side to one’s character,” to which a person may from time to time give play. Thus a person is said to have “many sides to his character,” and exhibits certain alternations of personality which may be regarded as normal prototypes of those which occur as abnormal states.
It may be interesting to note in passing that the well-known characteristics of people of a certain temperament, in consequence of which they can pursue their respective vocations only when they are “in the mood for it,” can be referred to this principle of complex formations and dissociation of rival systems. Literary persons, musicians, and artists in whom “feeling” is apt to be cultivated to a degree of self-pampering are conspicuous in this class. The ideas pertaining to the development of their craft form mixed subject and mood complexes which tend to have strong emotional and feeling tones. When some other affective tone is substituted, organized within a conflicting complex, it is difficult for such persons to revive the subject complex belonging to the piece of work in hand and necessary for its prosecution. “The ideas will not come,” because the whole subject complex which supplies the material with which the imagination is to work has been dissociated and replaced by some other. Certain elements in the complex can be revived piece-meal, as it were, but the complex will not develop in mass with the emotional driving energy which belongs to it. Not having their complexes and affects under voluntary control it is necessary for such persons to wait until, from an alteration in the coenesthesis or for some other reason, an alteration in the “feeling” has taken place with a revival of the right complex in mass.
No more exquisite illustration of these “disposition complexes” could be found than in the personality of William Sharp. Sharp’s title to literary fame very largely rests upon the writings which he gave to the world under the feminine name of Fiona Macleod. The identity of the author was concealed from the world until his death, and it is still a common belief that this concealment and the assumption of the feminine pseudonym were nothing more than a literary hoax. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There were two William Sharps; by which I mean, of course, there were two very strongly organized and sharply cut sides to his character. Each had its points of view, its complexes of ideas, its imaginings, and, above all, its creative tendencies and feeling tones. The one side—the one christened William Sharp—was the bread and butter earner, the relatively practical man who came in contact with the world—literary critic, “biographer, essay and novel writer as well as poet”—the experienced side which was obliged to correct its imagination by constant comparison with reality. The other side—Fiona Macleod—was the so-called inner man; what he himself called his “true inward self.” As Fiona he lived in his imagination and dreamed. The development of this side of his personality began while, as he said, “I was still a child.” “He found,” his biographer writes,[[149]] “as have other imaginative, psychic children, that he had an inner life, a curious power of visions unshared by any one about him, so that what he related was usually discredited; but the psychic side of his nature was too intimate a part of his mind to be killed by misunderstanding. He learned to shut it away—to keep it as a thing apart—a mystery of his own, a mystery to himself.”
This inner life, as time went on, became a mood which he fostered and developed and in which he built up great complexes of fancies, points of view, and emotions, which, when the other side of his character came uppermost, remained neurographically conserved and dormant in the unconscious. The Fiona complexes he distinctly felt to be feminine in type so that when he came to give expression to them, as he felt he must, he concealed this side of his character under a feminine pseudonym. “My truest self,” he wrote, “the self who is below all other selves, and my most intimate life, and joys, and sufferings, thoughts, emotions, and dreams must find expression, yet I cannot save in this hidden way.”
“From time to time the emotional, the more intimate self, would sweep aside all conscious control; a dream, a sudden inner vision, an idea that had lain dormant in what he called ‘the mind behind the mind’ would suddenly visualize itself and blot out everything else from his consciousness, and under such impulse he would write at great speed, hardly aware of what, or how, he wrote, so absorbed was he in the vision with which for the moment he was identified.”
“All my work,” he said, “is so intimately wrought with my own experiences that I cannot tell you about Pharais, etc., without telling you my whole life.”
William Sharp himself realized the two moods or “sides,” which became in time developed into two distinct personalities. These he distinctly recognized, although there was no amnesia. “Rightly or wrongly,” he wrote, “I am conscious of something to be done by one side of me, by one-half of me, by the true inward mind as I believe—(apart from the overwhelmingly felt mystery of a dual mind, and a reminiscent life, and a woman’s life and nature within concurring with and oftenest dominating the other)....” This dual personality was so strongly realized by him that on his birthdays he wrote letters to himself as Fiona signed “Will,” and vice versa.
I have dwelt upon this historical example of the exaggerated development of mood complexes because, while well within the limits of normal life, it brings home to us the recognition of psychological facts which we all, more or less, have in common. But, more important than this, in certain abnormal conditions where the dissociation between systems of complexes becomes more exaggerated, mood, subject, chronological and other complexes, linked as each is with its own characteristic emotions and feelings—instincts and other innate dispositions—play a paramount part and dominate the personality. In the hysterical personality, in particular, there is more or less complete reversion to or a subconscious awakening of one or other such complex. Where the hysterical dissociation becomes so extreme as to eventuate in amnesia in one state for another the different systems of complexes are easily recognized as so many phases of multiple personality. But in so identifying the ideational content of phases of personality it should not be overlooked that intensive studies of multiple personality disclose the fact that the dissociation of one phase for another carries with it certain of the instincts innate in every organism. What I mean to say is, observation of psychopathological states has shown that instincts, such as play, hunger, anger, fear, love, disgust, the sexual instincts, etc., may be dissociated separately or in conjunction with complexes of ideas. In every case of multiple personality that I have had the opportunity to study each phase has been shorn of one or more of these inborn psycho-physiological dispositions and I believe this obtains in every true case. As a result certain sentiments and traits are lost while those that are retained stamp an individuality upon the phase. And as the conative forces of the retained instincts are not balanced and checked by the dissociated opposing instincts, the sentiments which they form and the emotional reactions to which they give rise stand out as dominating traits. Thus one phase may be characterized by pugnacity, self-assertion, and elation; another by submission, fear and tender feeling; and so on.
This is not the place to enter into an explanation of dissociated personality, but I may point out, in anticipation of a deeper discussion of the subject, that, in accordance with these two principles, in such conditions we sometimes find that disposition and other complexes conserved in the unconscious come to the surface and displace or substitute themselves for the other complexes which dominate a personality. A complex or system of complexes that is only a mood or a “side of the character” of a normal individual, may in conditions of dissociation become the main complex and chief characteristic of the new personality. In Miss B., for instance, the personality known as BI was made up almost entirely of the religious and ethical ideas with corresponding instincts which formed one side of the original self. In the personality known as Sally we had for the most part the chronological and mood complexes of youth representing the enjoyment of youthful pleasures and sports, the freedom from conventionalities and artificial restraints generally imposed by duties and responsibilities; she was a resurrection of child life. In BIV the complex represented the ambitions and activities of practical life. In Miss B., as a whole, normal, without disintegration, it was easy to recognize all three dispositions as sides of her character, though each was kept ordinarily within proper bounds by the conflicting influence of the others. It was only necessary to put her in an environment which encouraged one or the other side, to associate her with people who strongly suggested one or the other of her own characteristics, whether religious, social, pleasure-loving, or intellectual, to see the characteristics of BI, Sally, or BIV stand out in relief as the predominant personality. Then we had the alternating play of these different sides of her character.
Likewise in B. C. A. In each of the personalities, B and A, similar disposition complexes could be recognized each corresponding to a side of the character of the original personality C. In A were represented the complexes formed by ideas of duty, responsibility, and moral scruples; in B were represented the complexes formed by the longing for fun and the amusements which life offered. When the cleavage of personality took place it was between these two complexes, just as it was in Miss B. between the several complexes above described. This is well brought out in the respective autobiographies of B[[150]] and Sally[[151]] in these two cases. In many cases of hysteria in which dissociation of personality can be recognized the same phenomenon is often manifest. A careful study will reveal it also, I believe, in other cases of multiple personality, although, of course, as we have seen, the dissociation may be along other lines; that is, between other complexes than those of disposition.
This principle of the conservation, as neurograms in the unconscious, of complexes representing “sides” to one’s character, gives a new meaning to the saying In vino veritas. In alcoholic and other forms of intoxication there results a loss of inhibition, of self-control, and the disposition complexes, which have been repressed or concealed by the individual as a matter of social defense, arise out of the unconscious, and, for the time being, become the dominant mood or phase of personality. When these complexes represent the true inner life and nature of the individual, freed from the repressing protection of expediency, we can then truly say “In vino veritas.”
Complexes organized in hypnotic and other dissociated conditions.—1. We have been speaking thus far of complexes formed in the course of every-day life and which take part in the composition of the normal personality. But it is obvious that a complex may be organized in any condition of personality so long as we are dealing with consciousness, however limited or disturbed. Thus in artificial states, like hypnosis and the subconscious process which produces automatic writing, ideas may be synthesized into systems as well as in normal waking life. This is exemplified by the fact that in hypnosis the memories of past hypnotic experiences are conserved and form systems of memories dissociated from the memories of waking life. When the subject regains the normal condition of the personal self, though there may be amnesia for the hypnotic experiences their neurograms remain conserved to the same extent and in the same fashion as do those of the waking life. Consequently on the return to the hypnotic state the memories of previous hypnotic experiences are recovered.
This systematization of hypnotic experiences is easily recognized in those cases where several different hypnotic states can be obtained in the same individual. Each state has its own system of memories differing from, and with amnesia for, those of the others. Each system also has its own feeling tones, one system, for example, having a tone of elation, another, of depression, etc. The systematization is still more accentuated in cases like the one mentioned in the second lecture (p. 19), where the subject goes into a hypnotic state resembling a trance, and lives in an ideal world, peopled by imaginary persons, and in an imaginary environment, perhaps a spirit world or another planet. The content of consciousness consists of fabrications which make up a fancied life. In the instance I have mentioned the subject imagined she was living in a world of spirits; in Flournoy’s classical case, Mlle Hélène Smith imagined she was an inhabitant of the planet Mars, and spoke a fabricated language. In these states the same systems of ideas invariably appeared.
2. In consequence of this principle of systematization it is in our power by educational suggestion in hypnosis to organize mental processes and build complexes of the same kind and in the same way as when the subject is awake. In fact, it is more readily done, inasmuch as in hypnosis the critical judgment and reflection tend to be suspended. The suggested ideas are accepted and education more easily accomplished. While in hypnosis the individual may thus be made to accept and hold new beliefs, new judgments, in short, new knowledge.[[152]] After waking he may or may not remember his hypnotic experiences. Generally he does. If he does the new knowledge, if firmly organized (by repetition and strong affective tones) is still retained, and if accepted (i.e., not repressed by conflicting ideas) shapes his views and conduct in accordance therewith. Even if his hypnotic experiences are not remembered, they still belong to his personality, inasmuch as they are neurographically conserved, and, experience shows, may still influence his stream of consciousness. His views are modified by his unconscious personality. His ideas may and generally do awaken the neurograms of associated systems created in hypnosis. Not remembering the hypnotic state as a whole he does not remember the origin of his new knowledge; that is all.
One point to be borne in mind is that conserved ideas, whether we can recall them or not, so long as they are conserved are a part of our personality, as I have previously pointed out, and ideas can emerge from the unconscious into the field of the conscious though we have completely forgotten their origin. It requires but a single experiment in the induction of suggested post-hypnotic phenomena to demonstrate these principles.
3. As to those pathological states where there is a splitting of personality—hysterical crises, psycholeptic attacks, trance states, certain types of epilepsy, etc.—complexes may similarly be formed in them. In these conditions there is a dissociation of a large part of the normal mental life, and that which is left is only a limited field of consciousness. A new synthesis comes into being out of the unconscious to represent the personal self. Though the content of consciousness is a reproduction of, or determined by certain previous experiences, it is also true that in these states new experiences may result in new complexes which then take part in the personality as with hypnotic experiences.
Personality as the survival of organized antecedent experiences.—Of course all our past mental experiences do not persist as organized complexes. The latter, after they have served their purpose, tend to become disaggregated, just as printer’s type is disaggregated or distributed after it has served its purpose in printing. In the organization and development of personality the elements of the mental experiences become sifted, as it were. Normally, in the adaptation of the individual to the environment, the unessential and useless, the intermediate steps leading to the final and useful, tend to drop out without leaving surviving residua, while the essential and useful tend to remain as memories capable of recall. In the unconscious these remain more or less permanently fixed as limited ideas, sentiments, and systems of complexes. Further, those complexes of experiences which persist not only provide the material for our memories, but tend, consciously or unconsciously, to shape the judgments, beliefs, convictions, habits, and tendencies of our mental lives. Whence they came, how they were born, we have long ceased to remember. We often arrive at conclusions which we imagine in our ignorance we have constructed at the moment unaided out of our inner consciousness. In one sense this is true, but that inner consciousness has been largely determined by the vestiges furnished by forgotten experiences. Many of these we imbibed from our environment and the experiences of our fellows; in this sense we are all plagiarists of the past.
Furthermore, we react, to a large extent, to our environment in a way that we do not thoroughly understand because these reactions are determined by the impulses of unconscious complexes organized with innate dispositions. Indeed, our reactions to the environment, our moral and social conduct, the affective reactions of our sentiments, instincts, feelings, and other conative tendencies, our “habits,” judgments, points of view, and attitudes of mind—all that we term character and personality—are predetermined by the mental experiences of the past by which they are developed, organized, and conserved in the unconscious. Otherwise all would be chaos. We are thus the offspring of our past and the past is the present.
This same principle underlies what is called the “social conscience,” the “civic” and “national conscience,” patriotism, public opinion, what the Germans call “Sittlichkeit,” the war attitude of mind, etc. All these mental attitudes may be reduced to common habits of thought and conduct derived from mental experiences common to a given community and conserved as complexes in the unconscious of the several individuals of the community.[[153]]
Through education, whether scholastic, vocational, or social, we inherit the experiences of our predecessors and become “... the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time.” But the conceptions of one age can never represent those of a preceding age. The veriest layman in science today could not entertain the conceptions underlying many hypotheses formulated by the wisest of the preceding age—of a Galileo, a Descartes, or Pascal. Lucretius, in the first century B. C., argued, with what for the time was great force, that the soul of man was corporeal and that it “must consist of very small seeds and be inwoven through veins and flesh and sinews; inasmuch as, after it has all withdrawn from the whole body the exterior contour of the limbs preserves itself entire and not a tittle of the weight is lost.”
Lucretius gave much thought to this problem, but to-day the least cultured person, who has never reflected at all on psychological matters, would recognize the foolishness of such a conception and reject the hypothesis.[[154]] He would call it common-sense which guided him, but common-sense depends upon the fact that in the unconscious lie memories, the reasons for and origin of which we do not remember; these nullify such an hypothesis. These contradicting ideas, sifted out of those belonging to the social education, have become fixed as dormant or organized memories, and determine the judgments and trends of the personal consciousness. These memory vestiges may work for good or evil, shape our personal consciousness into a useful or useless form, one that adapts or unfits the organism to its environment. In the latter case they drive the organism into the field of pathological psychology.
[138]. I am using this word in the general sense of any mental experience as in the common phrase, “the association of ideas,” and not in the restricted sense of Titchener as the equivalent of a perception.
[139]. I use this word “complex” in the general sense in which it is commonly used and not with the specific meaning given to it by the Zurich school, which limits it to a system of ideas to which a strong affective tone is attached and which, because of its personally distressing character, is repressed into the subconscious.
[140]. Which may be psychical, although not psychological.
[141]. Sisters of Napoleon, by M. Joseph Turquan.
[142]. McDougall (Social Psychology) regards jealousy as a complex emotional state in which anger, tender emotion, and other innate dispositions are factors.
[143]. Not included in this volume.
[144]. Aboulie et idées fixes, Revue philosophique, 1891, i., p. 279. Mental State of Hystericals, p. 408.
[145]. P. 33.
[146]. The switching process is an interesting problem in itself. (Cf. Max Levy-Suhl: Ueber Einstellungsvorgänge in normalen und anormalen Seelenzuständen. Zeitschrift für Psychotherapie und Medizinishe Psychologie, Bd. 11, Hft. 3, 1910.) An example is the well-known psychological diagram which may be perceived at one moment as a flight of steps and at another as an overhanging wall, according as which perception of the same line is switched in.
[147]. Lectures not included in this volume.
[148]. In the case of Miss B., for example, Sally had absolute amnesia for certain systems of subject-complexes (Latin, French, etc.) possessed by the other personalities.
[149]. William Sharp, A Memoir, by Elizabeth A. Sharp.
[150]. My Life as a Dissociated Personality, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, October-November, 1908, December-January, 1909.
[151]. The Dissociation, Chapter XXIII.
[152]. Provided, of course, this new knowledge is justified and not contradicted by the facts and principles of life. In other words, it must be believed, at least, to be the truth.
[153]. While these pages were in press, Lord Haldane in his Montreal address (before the American Bar Association), which has attracted wide attention, developed the psychological principle of “Sittlichkeit,” as applied to communities, the nation and groups of nations. By “Sittlichkeit” is meant the social habit of mind and action underlying social customs, the instinctive sense of social obligation which is the foundation of society. This plainly includes what is often called the social conscience and actions impelled thereby. In further definition of this principle Lord Haldane quotes Fichte as stating “Sittlichkeit” to mean “those principles of conduct which regulate people in their relations to each other, and have become matter of habit and second nature at the stage of culture reached, and of which, therefore, we are not explicitly conscious.” The point was made that the citizen is governed “only to a small extent by law and legality on the one hand, and by the dictates of the individual conscience on the other.” It is the more extensive system of “Sittlichkeit” which plays the predominant rôle. Out of this system there develops a unity of thought and “a common ideal” which can be made to penetrate the soul of a people and to take complete possession of it. Likewise there develops “a general will with which the will of the good citizen is in accord.” This will of the community (inspired by the common ideal) is common to the individuals composing it. Lord Haldane goes on to make the point that what is now true within a single nation may in time come to be true between nations or a group of nations. Thus an international habit of looking to common ideals may grow up sufficiently strong to develop a general will, and to make the binding power of those ideas a reliable sanction for their obligations to each other. With this thesis, ably presented and fortified though it be, we are not here concerned. The point I wish to make is that this conception of “Sittlichkeit” which Lord Haldane in his remarkable address, destined I believe to become historic, so ably develops and applies to the solution of a world-problem is in psychological terms identical with that of complexes of ideas and affects organized in the unconscious.
[154]. Professor G. S. Fullerton, in the course of an essay, “Is the Mind in the Body?” interestingly refers to this fact and points out that common sense directs the common man in repudiating ancient doctrines, and that it is “part of his share in the heritage of the race.” “The common sense which guides men is the resultant attitude due to many influences, some of them dating very far back indeed.” The Popular Science Monthly, May, 1907.
LECTURE X
THE MEANING OF IDEAS AS DETERMINED BY SETTINGS
In the preceding lecture when describing the organization of emotional complexes, I mentioned, somewhat incidentally, that their fuller meaning was to be found in antecedent experiences of life; and that these experiences conserved in the unconscious formed a setting that gave the point of view and attitude of mind. It was pointed out also that if we wish to know the reason why a given experience, like that of Voltaire with Frederick, awakens a strong emotional reaction, and why the memory of this experience continues persistently organized with the emotion or gives rise to the emotional reaction whenever stimulated, we must look to this setting of antecedent experiences which gives the ideas of the complexes meaning. We need now to inquire to what extent the unconscious complex in which the setting has roots may take part in the process which gives meaning to an idea. It is a problem in psychogenesis and psychological mechanisms. As an imperatively recurring emotional complex is an obsession the full meaning of any given obsession is involved in the psychological problem of “Idea and Meaning.”
Let us, then, take up for discussion this latter problem as preliminary to the study of that important psychosis—obsessing ideas and emotions.
A perception, or, what is in principle the same thing, an idea of an object, although apparently a simple thing, is really, as a rule, a complex affair. Without attempting to enter deeply into the psychology of perception (and ideas), and particularly into the conventional conception of perception as usually expounded in the text-books—a conception which to my mind is inadequate and incomplete[[155]]—it is sufficient for our immediate purposes to point out in a general rough way the following facts concerning perception.
Perception a synthesis of primary and secondary images.—Perception may be regarded both as a process and as a group of conscious elements some of which are within the focus of attention or awareness and some of which are outside this focus. As a process it undoubtedly may include much that is entirely subconscious and therefore without conscious equivalents, and much that appears in consciousness. As a group of conscious elements it is a fusion, amalgamation, or compounding of many elements.
My perception of X., for example, whom I recognize as an acquaintance, is much more than a cluster of visual sensations—I mean the sensations of color and form that come from the stimulation of my retina. Besides these sensations it includes a number of imaginal memory images some of which are only in the fringe of consciousness and can only be recognized by introspection or under special conditions. These secondary images, as they are called, may be (as they most often are) visual, orienting him in space and in past associative relations, according to my previous experiences; they may be auditory—the imaginal sound of his voice or verbal images of his name; or they may be the so-called kinesthetic images, etc.; and all these images supplement the actual visual sensations of color and form.
That such images take part in perception is of course well recognized in every text-book on psychology where they will be found described. It is easy to become aware of them under certain conditions. For instance, to take an auditory perception from every-day life, you are listening through the telephone and hear a strange voice speaking. Aside from the meaning of the words you are conscious of little more than auditory sensations although you do perceive them as those of a human voice and not of a phonograph. Then of a sudden you recognize the voice as that of an acquaintance. Instantly visual images of his face, and perhaps of the room in which he is speaking and his situation therein, of the furnishings of the room, etc., become associated with the voice. Your perception of the voice now takes on a fuller meaning in accordance with these imaginal images. In such an experience, common probably to everybody, the secondary images which take part in perception are unusually clear and easily detected.
Again, let us take a visual perception. You meet face to face a person whom at first sight seems unfamiliar; then in a flash visual images of a scene in a room where you first met, verbal images of his name, and the sound of his voice rush into consciousness. The comparatively simple perception of a man has now given place to a more complex perception (apperception) of an acquaintance and has acquired a new meaning. This new meaning is in part due to these images which have supplemented the visual sensations; but it is also due to the coöperation of another and important factor—the context—which I will presently consider.
Another situation of every-day life in which we become aware of the images is when riding in a street car at night we look out of the window and fail to recognize the individual buildings as we pass them though we perceive them as houses. The neighborhood being obscured by darkness, the buildings have no meaning from the point of view of their uses, proprietorship, locality, etc., but only from an architectural point of view. Then suddenly, by some apparently subconscious process, visual memory images of the unseen neighborhood (hidden in darkness), and of the interior of the buildings, flash into consciousness in conjunction with the actual visual pictures of the buildings. In imagination we at once see the locality and recognize (or apperceive) the buildings which acquire a new meaning as particular shops, which we have often entered, located in a particular locality, etc.
Again, take a tactual perception: If you close your eyes and touch, say a point on your left hand, with your finger, you not only perceive the touch but you perceive the exact spot that you touched. Your perception includes localization. Now if you fix your attention and introspect carefully you will find that you visualize your hand and see, more or less vividly, the point touched (and the touching finger). If you draw a figure on the hand you will visualize that figure. That is to say imaginal visual images of the hand, figure, etc., enter into the tactual perceptions. You will probably also be able to feel faint tactual “images” of the hand (joints, fingers, etc.) which combine with the visualization.[[156]] The whole complex is the perception proper.
The images which take part in actual perception, or in ideas of objects, vary with the mode of perception (whether visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) and with objects, and in different people. Reading, or the perception of words, is in many people accompanied by the sound of the words or kinesthetic images of words. If the printed words are those of a person whose voice is familiar to us we may actually hear his voice.[[157]] General kinesthetic images may occur in perception, as with objects which look heavy, i.e., have secondary tactual sensations of heaviness. Likewise tactile and olfactory images may enter the perceptual field and supplement the visual sensations. When the sensational experiences of perception are tactile, auditory, olfactory, or gustatory visual images probably always take part in the perceptual field if the object is perceived as, e. g., the perception of velvet by touch and of an orange by smell. Summing all this up we may say, using Titchener’s words: “perceptions are selected groups of sensations in which images are incorporated as an integral part of the whole process.” We may further say the secondary images give meaning to sensations in forming a perception.
Now, before proceeding further in this exposition, I would point out that if memory images are habitually synthesized with sensations to form a given perception, and if perception is a matter of synthesis, then, theoretically, it ought to be possible to dissociate these images. Further, in that case, the perception as such ought to disappear. That this theoretical assumption correctly represents the facts I have been able to demonstrate by the following experiment which I have repeated many times. I should first explain that it has been shown by Janet that by certain technical procedures some hysterics can be distracted in such a way that the experimenter’s voice is not consciously heard by them, but is heard and understood subconsciously. The ordinary procedure is to whisper to the subject while his attention is focused on something else. The whisper undoubtedly acts as a suggestion that the subject will not consciously hear what is whispered. The whispered word-images are accordingly dissociated, but are perceived coconsciously, and whatever coconsciousness exists can be in this way surreptitiously communicated with and responses obtained without the knowledge of the personal consciousness. In this way I have been able to make numerous observations showing the presence of dissociated coconscious complexes which otherwise would not have been suspected. Now the experiment which I am about to cite was made for the purpose of determining whether certain experiences for which the subject had amnesia were coconsciously remembered, but the results obtained, besides giving affirmative evidence on this point, furnished certain instructive facts indicative of the dissociation of secondary images.
The subject, Miss B., was in the state known as BIVa, an hypnotic state, her eyes closed. While she was conversing with me on a subject which held her attention I whispered in her ear with the view of communicating with coconscious ideas as above explained. While I was whispering, she remarked, “Where have you gone?” and later asked why I went away and what I kept coming and going for. On examination it then appeared that it seemed to her that during the moments when I whispered in her ear I had gone away. That is to say, she could no longer visualize my body, the secondary imaginal visual images being dissociated with my whispered words. At these times, however, she continued the conversation and was not at all in a dreamy state. Testing her tactile sense it was found that there was no dissociation of this sense during these moments. She felt tactile impressions while she was not hearing my voice, but she explained afterwards [while whispering, of course, I could not ask questions regarding sensations aloud] that when I touched her, and when she held my hand, palpating it in a curious way as if trying to make out what it was, she felt the tactile impressions, or tactile sensations, but not naturally. It appeared as the result of further observations that this feeling of unnaturalness and strangeness was due to a dissociation of the secondary visual images which normally occur with the tactile images. (She described the tactile impressions of my hand as similar to those she felt when she lifted her own hand when it had “gone to sleep”; it felt dead and heavy as if it belonged to no one in particular.
Testing further it was found that, before abstraction, while she held my hand she could definitely visualize my hand, arm, and even face. While she was thus visualizing I again abstracted her auditory perceptions by the whispering process. At once the secondary visual images of my hand, etc., disappeared. As with the auditory perceptions she could not obtain these visual images, although a moment before she could visualize as far as the elbow.
Desiring now to learn whether these dissociated visual images were perceived coconsciously I whispered, at the same time holding her hand, “Do you see my hand, arm, and face?” She nodded (automatically) “Yes.” “Does she [meaning the personal consciousness] see them?” (Answer by nod) “No.” (The personal consciousness (BIVa) was unaware of the questions and nodding; the latter was performed subconsciously.)
This experiment was repeated several times. As often as she ceased to hear my voice she ceased to visualize my hand, though she could feel it without recognizing it. It follows, therefore, that the dissociation of the auditory perceptions of my voice having also robbed the subject’s personal consciousness of all visual images of my body, her previous tactual perception of my hand lost thereby its visual images and ceased to be a perception.
Let us take another observation: We have seen that a tactual perception of the body includes secondary imaginal visual and other sensory images besides the tactile sensation. Now, of course, if sensation is dissociated so that one has complete anesthesia, no tactile sensation can be perceived. Under such conditions an anesthetic person theoretically might not be able to imagine the dissociated tactile sensations and the associated visual images included in tactile perception. If so such a person would not be able to visualize his body. In other words, in accordance with the well-known principle that the dissociation of a specific memory robs the personal consciousness of other elements of experiences synthesized with the specific memory, the dissociation of the tactile images carries with it the visual images associated in perception. This theoretical proposition is confirmed by actual observation. Thus B. C. A. in one hypnotic state has general anesthesia, so complete that she has no consciousness of her body whatsoever. She does not know whether she is standing or sitting, nor the attitude of her limbs, or her location in space; she is simply thought in space. Now it is found that she can visualize the experimenter, the room, and the objects in the room although she cannot visualize any part of her own body. The dissociation of the tactual field of consciousness is so complete that she cannot evoke imaginal tactual images of the body, and this dissociation of these images carries with it that of the associated imaginal visual images. Visual images of the environment, however, not being synthesized with the tactual body images, can be still evoked. So we see from observations based on introspection and experimentation that perception includes, besides primary simple sensations of an object, secondary imaginal images of various kinds and in various numbers.
Besides images the content of ideas includes “Meaning”.—What I have said thus far refers to perception and idea as the content of consciousness—a group of conscious states. But this is not all when perception is regarded as a process. The objects of experience have associative relations to other objects, actions, conduct, stimuli, constellated ideas, etc., i.e., past experiences represented by conserved (unconscious) complexes. As a result of previous experiences various associations have been organized with ideas and these complexes form the setting or the “context” (Tichener) which gives ideas meaning. As the secondary images give meaning to sensations to form ideas (or perceptions), so these associated complexes as settings give meaning to ideas. This setting in more general terms may be regarded as the attitude of mind, point of view, interest, etc. Just as the context in a printed sentence gives meaning to a given word, and determines which of two or more ideas it is meant to be the sign of, so in the process of all perceptions the associated ideas give meaning to the perception. Indeed it is probable that the context as a process determines what images shall become incorporated with sensations to form the nucleus of the perception. Perception thus takes one meaning when it is constellated with one complex and another meaning when constellated with another complex.
“Meaning” plays such an important part in the mental reactions of pathological and everyday life that I feel we must study it a little more closely before proceeding with our theme.
The idea horse[[158]] as the content of consciousness includes more than the primary and secondary sensory images which constitute a perception of an animal with four legs distinguished anatomically from other animals: The idea includes the meaning of a particular kind of animal possessing certain functions, useful for particular purposes and occupying a particular place in civilization, etc. We are distinctly conscious of this meaning; and although we may abstract more or less successfully the visual image of the animal from the meaning, and attend to the former alone, the result is an artifact. Likewise we may as an artifice abstract, to a large degree, the meaning from the image, keeping the latter in the background, and attend to the meaning.
That meaning—just as much as the sensory image of an object—is part of the conscious content of an idea becomes apparent at once, the moment the setting becomes altered and an object is collocated with a new set of experiences (knowledge regarding it). X, for example, has been known to the world as a pious, god-fearing, moral man, a teacher of the Christian religion. My perception of him, so far as made up of images, is, properly speaking, that which distinguishes him anatomically from other men of my acquaintance, that by which I recognize him as X and not as Y. But my perception also has a distinctly conscious meaning, that of a Christian man. This meaning also distinguishes him in his qualities from other men. Now it transpires to every one’s astonishment that X is a foul, cruel, murderer of women—a Jack-the-Ripper. My perception of him is the same but it has acquired an entirely different meaning. A bestial, villainous meaning has replaced the Christian meaning. So almost all objects have different meanings in different persons’ minds, or at different times in the same person’s mind, according to the settings (experiences) with which they are collocated. My perception of A has the meaning of physician, while one of his family perceives him as father or husband. My perception of a snake, it may be, has the meaning of a loathsome, venomous animal, while a naturalist’s perception may be that of a vertebrate representing a certain stage of evolution, and a psychologist holding certain theories may perceive it with a meaning given by those theories, viz.: as a sexual symbol.
This fact of meaning becomes still more obvious when we reflect that the meaning of a perception, as of A’s personality as a physician or father, may occupy the focus of attention while the images of his face, voice, etc., may sink into the background.
Every one is agreed then that every idea or combination of ideas has “meaning” of some sort. Even nonsense syllables have in a psychological sense some meaning, which may be an alliteration of sound, or a symbolism of nonsense (e. g., “fol-de-rol-di-rol-dol-day”) or as suitable tests for psychological experiments. I am speaking now, of course, of meaning as dealt with by psychology as a content of consciousness, and not as dealt with by logic. Every one also will probably agree that the content of an idea is a composite of sensory elements (images) and meaning—I would like to say of perception and meaning; but the use of two abstract terms is likely to lead to a juggling with words by turning attention away from the concrete facts for which the terms stand, and by connoting a sharp distinction between perception and meaning which, as I observe the facts, does not hold. Indeed the common though useful habit of psychologists of treating meaning as an abstract symbol without specific reference to those elements of the content of consciousness for which it stands has, it seems to me, led to considerable confusion of thought.
Mr. Hoernlé, who has given us one of the clearest expositions of idea and meaning that I have read,[[159]] designates that constituent of an idea which is the psychical image of an object (e. g., “the visual perception of a horse”) by the term “sign.” “Signs,” he states “are always sensational in nature, whether they are actual sensations (as in sense-perception) or ideas (images or ‘revived’ sensations).” Accordingly an idea is a composite of sign and meaning, or, as Mr. Hoernlé has well expressed it: “Both the idea[[160]] and its meaning, then, must be present in consciousness. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they form together a complex psychical whole, a ‘psychosis,’ of which the different elements, however, enjoy different degrees of prominence in consciousness or draw upon themselves different amounts of attention.... Normally we apperceive merely the meaning, and the image or sign remains in the background, in the shade as it were. But of course we can make the image or sign the special object of attention; we can apperceive it and correspondingly the meaning falls into the background. But it does not disappear; it remains in consciousness.” And again, “every idea is a concrete whole of sign and meaning, in which the meaning, even when unanalyzed and ‘implicit’ is what is essential and prominent in consciousness. The sign on the other hand which we saw reason to identify with certain sensational elements in this conscious experience is normally subordinate and I have called this concrete idea a ‘psychic whole’....”
I quote these passages from Mr. Hoernlé as they are admirably clear statements of the theory, but as descriptions they are a very incomplete analysis of the content of ideas, and fall far short of what we require to know when dealing with the problem of mental mechanisms. It is all very well to speak of meaning in this general way; but to rest content with such an abstract term is to only present the problem and there stop short. Mr. Hoernlé rests content with the negative statement that meaning “does not consist in images and other words.” What then does it consist in?
It must be admitted that the problem is a very difficult one and therefore it is, I suppose, that most psychologists, as if scenting danger, seem to dodge the question and rest content to use meaning as a symbol like the unknown x and y of algebra. If meaning is a part of the content of consciousness it must be analyzable into specific conscious elements (images, thoughts, words, feelings or what not) representing to some extent and in some way past experiences.
Obviously a full rounded-out psychology of meaning must include an analysis of the content of meaning.[[161]] I have no intention of entering upon this task here and it is not my business. It would, however, be of very great assistance in solving many of the problems of abnormal psychology if the psychology of meaning were better worked out. But conversely, I would say, considerable light on the psychology of meaning can be derived from the study of abnormal conditions, and of the mental phenomena artificially provoked by hypnotic procedures. Some of the observations which I shall presently cite contribute, I believe, to this end.
Permit me also to point out—as the point is one which has considerable bearing on our theme—that the descriptive statement that ideas are a composite of two distinct elements, perception (images, signs) and meaning, is inadequate in another respect; it is too static and schematic. Although it is convenient to distinguish between perception and meaning, they shade into one another and indeed there does not seem to be any justification for regarding them as other than one dynamic process. As we have seen, perception is made up of a primary sensory image of an object combined with a number of secondary images. This in itself is a “psychic whole”, and, as I view it, contains meaning. My perception of a watch contains secondary images which give it the meaning of a watch and make it something more than a visual image. It may have a still larger and different meaning, that of a souvenir of a dead friend, and in this larger meaning the perception of the watch becomes subordinate, as a sign or group of images, and sinks into the background, while the added meaning occupies the focus of attention. Indeed the primary image of a perception may sink into relative insignificance in the background, while the secondary images become all-important and practically constitute the actual perception (or idea) as a psychic whole. Consider, for instance, what different secondary images (and meaning) are in the focus and how the primary image of the word “son” (spoken or written) almost disappears, according as the context shows it to be my son or your son; and how correspondingly different are those ideas. And so with a wider filial meaning of son. It is safe to say that King Lear’s idea of “daughter” had not the filial meaning conventionally ascribed to that relationship.
If all this that I have said is valid the difference between that which we call perception and that which we call meaning is one of complexity. The less complex we call perception, the more complex, meaning. Both are determined by past experiences the residua of which are the settings.
This may be illustrated by the following: We will suppose that three persons in imagination perceive a certain building used as a department store on a certain street I have in mind now, in a growing section of the city. One of these persons is an architect, another is an owner of property on this street, and the third is a woman who is in the habit of making purchases in the department store. When the architect thinks of the building he perceives it in his mind’s eye in an architectural setting, that is, its architectural style, proportions, features, and relations. His perception includes a number of secondary images of the neighboring buildings, of their styles of architecture, and of their relations from an æsthetic point of view. In the perception of the owner of property there are also a number of secondary images, but these are of the passing people and traffic, of neighboring buildings as shops and places of business. In the perception of the woman the secondary images are of the interior of the store, the articles for sale, clothes she would like to purchase and possibly bargains dear to every woman’s heart. Plainly each perceives the building from a different point of view. Each might perceive the building from the same point of view, but the point of view differs because of the differences in the past experiences of each.
In the case of the architect these experiences were those of previous observations on the architecture of the growing neighborhood. In the case of the property owner they were of thoughtful reflections on the future development of neighboring property, on the industrial relations of the building to business, and on the speculative future value of the property. In the case of the woman they were of purchases she had made, of articles she had seen and desired, of scenes inside the shop, etc. Out of these experiences respectively a complex was built and conserved in the mind of each. The idea of the building is set in these respective experiences which therefore may be called its setting. The imaginal perception of the building obviously has a different meaning for each of our three observers, and it is plainly the setting which governs the meaning, i.e., an architectural, industrial, or shopping meaning, as the case happens to be; and we may further say the setting determines the point of view or attitude of mind or interest. Either the perception proper of the building or the meaning may be in the focus of attention and the other recede into the background or the fringe of awareness.
Further, different affects may enter into each setting and, therefore, into the perception. With the architectural perception there may be linked an æsthetic joyful emotion; with the industrial perception a depressing emotion of anxiety; with the shopping perception perhaps one of anger. (This linking of an emotion, of course, has a great importance for psychopathic states.)
The dependence of perceptions upon their settings for meaning has been very beautifully expressed by Emerson in “Each and All”:
“Nothing is fair or good alone.
I thought the sparrow’s note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it cheers not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky;
He sang to my ear—they sang to my eye.
The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave,
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.”
The practical application of the theory to emotional outbreaks of everyday life.—The significance of these principles for our purpose lies in the fact that they enable us to understand numerous psychological events of everyday and pathological life that otherwise would be unintelligible. It is worth while then to study a little more closely the practical application in everyday life of this principle of settings before applying it to the more difficult problem of imperative ideas or obsessions.
No psychological event, any more than a physical event, stands entirely isolated, all alone by itself, without relation to other events. Every psychological event is related more or less intimately to antecedent events, and the practical importance or value of this relation depends for the individual partly upon the nature of the relation itself, and partly upon the ontological value of those anterior events, i.e., the part they played and still play in the personality of the individual. No event, therefore, if it is to be completely interpreted, should be viewed by itself but only in relation to preceding ones. For example: a husband good humoredly and thoughtlessly chaffs his wife about the cost of a new hat which she exhibits with pride and pleasure. The wife in reply expresses herself by an outburst of anger which, to the astonished bystander, seems an entirely unjustifiable and inexplicable response to an entirely inadequate cause. Now if the bystander were permitted to make a psychological inquiry into the mental processes of the wife, he would find that the chaffing remark had meaning for her very different from what it had for him, and probably also for the husband; that it meant much more to her than the cost of that hat. He would find that it was set in her mind in a number of antecedent experiences consisting of criticisms of the wife by the husband for extravagance in dress; and perhaps criminations and recriminations involving much angry feeling on the part of both, and he would probably find that when the hat was purchased the possibility of criticism on the ground of extravagance passed through her mind. The chaffing remark of the husband therefore in the mind of the wife had for a context all these past experiences which formed a setting and gave an unintended meaning to the remark. The angry response, therefore, was dictated by these antecedent experiences and not simply by the trivial matter of the cost of a hat, standing by itself. The event can only be interpreted in the light of these past conserved experiences. How much of all this antecedent experience was in consciousness at the moment is another question which we shall presently consider.
I have often had occasion to interpret cryptic occurrences of this kind happening with patients or acquaintances. They make quite an amusing social game. (A knowledge of this principle shows the impossibility of outsiders judging the rightness or wrongness of misunderstandings and contretemps between individuals—particularly married people.) To complete the interpretation of this episode of the hat—although a little beside the point under consideration: plainly the anger to which the wife gave expression was the affect linked with and the reaction to the setting-complex formed by antecedent experiences. To state the matter in another way, these experiences were the formative material out of which a psychological torch had been plastically fashioned ready to be set ablaze by the first touch of a match—in this case the chaffing remark or associated idea. This principle of the setting, which gives meaning to an idea, being the conserved neurograms of related antecedent experiences is strikingly manifest in pathological and quasi-pathological conditions. I will mention only two instances.
The first, that of X. Y. Z., I shall have occasion to refer to in more detail in connection with the emotions and instincts in a later lecture.[[162]] This lady, on the first night of her marriage, felt deeply hurt in her pride from a fancied neglect on the part of her husband. The cause was trivial and could not possibly be taken by any sensible person as an adequate justification for the resentment which followed and the somewhat tragic revenge which she practiced (continuous voluntary repression of the sexual instinct during many years). But the fancied slight had a meaning for her which did not appear on the surface. As she herself insisted, in attempted extenuation of her conduct, “You must not take it alone by itself but in connection with the past.” It appeared that during the betrothal period there had been a number of experiences wounding to her pride and leading to angry resentment. These had been ostensibly but not really forgiven. The action of her spouse on the important night in question had a meaning for her of a slight, because it stood in relation to all these other antecedent experiences, and through these only could its meaning (for her) be interpreted. As a practical matter of therapeutics it became evident that the cherished resentment of years and the physiological consequences could only be removed by readjusting the setting—the memories of all the antecedent experiences with their resentment.
The second instance was a case of hysteria of the neurasthenic type with outbreaks of emotional attacks in a middle-aged woman. It developed immediately, in the midst of good health, out of a violent and protracted fit of anger, almost frenzy, two years ago, culminating in the first emotional or hysterical attack. Looked at superficially the fit of anger would be considered childish because it was aroused by the fact that some children were allowed to make the day hideous by firing cannon-crackers continually under her window in celebration of the national holiday. When more deeply analyzed it was found that the anger was really resentment at what she considered unjustifiable treatment of herself by others, and particularly by her husband, who would not take steps to have the offense stopped. It is impossible to go into all the details here; suffice it to say that below the surface the experiences of life had deposited a large accumulation of grievances against which resentment had been continuous over a long series of years. Although loving and respecting her husband, a man of force and character, yet she had long realized she was not as necessary to his life as she wanted to be; that he could get along without her, however fond he was of her; and that he was the stronger character in one way. She wanted to be wanted. Against all this for years she had felt anger and resentment. She had concealed her feelings, controlled them, repressed them, if you will, but there remained a general dissatisfaction against life, a “kicking against the pricks,” and a quickness to anger, though its expression had been well controlled. These were the formative influences which laid the mine ready to be fired by a spark, feelings of resentment and anger which had been incubating for years. Finally the spark came in the form of a childish offense. The frenzy of anger was ostensibly only the reaction to that offense, but it was really the explosion of years of antecedent experiences. The apparent offense was only the manifested cause, symbolic if you like so to express it, of the underlying accumulated causes contained in life’s grievances.[[163]] After completion of the analysis the patient herself recognized this interpretation to be the true meaning of her anger and point of view.
Similarly in everyday life the emotional shocks from fear in dangerous situations, to which most people are subject and which so often give rise to traumatic psychoses, must primarily find their source in the psychological setting of the perception of the situation (railroad, automobile, and other accidents). This setting is fashioned from the conserved knowledge of the fatal and other consequences of such accidents. This knowledge, deposited by past mental experiences—that which has been heard and read—induces a dormant apprehension of accidents and gives the meaning of danger to a perception of a present situation, and in itself, I may add, furnishes the neurographic fuel ready to be set ablaze by the first accident.[[164]]
[155]. In that it takes into account only a limited number of the data at our disposal and neglects methods of investigation which afford data essential for the understanding of this psychological process.
[156]. It is of interest to note again in this connection that these secondary images may emerge from a subconscious process to form the structure of an hallucination. Various facts of observation which I have collected support the thesis advanced by Sidis (loc. cit.) on theoretical grounds “that hallucinations are synthesized compounds of secondary sensory elements dissociated completely or incompletely from their primary elements.” It would carry us too far away from our theme to consider here this problem of special pathology. Sidis further insists that hallucinations are not central, but always “are essentially of peripheral origin,” a view which, it seems to me, is incompatible with numerous facts of observation.
[157]. I once dictated into a phonograph a passage of a published work. Whenever I read that passage now I hear the sound of my own voice as it was emitted by the phonograph.
[158]. I intentionally do not here say idea of a horse because the use of the preposition (while, of course, correctly used to distinguish horse as an idea from a material horse, or the former as a particular idea among ideas in general) has led, as it seems to me, insidiously to specious reasoning. Thus Mr. Hoernlé (Image, Idea and Meaning, Mind, January, 1907) argues that every idea has a meaning because every idea is an idea of some thing. Although this is true in a descriptive sense, psychologically idea-of-a-horse is a compound term and an imagined horse. The idea itself is horse. The speciousness of the reasoning appears when we substitute horse for idea; then the phrase would read, a “horse is always a horse of something.” I agree, of course, that every idea has a meaning, but not to this particular reasoning by which the conclusion is reached, as when, for example, Mr. Hoernlé when traversing James’ theory cites “image of the breakfast table” to denote that the breakfast table is the meaning of the image. The image is the (imagined) breakfast table. They are not different things as are leg and chair in the phrase, “leg of the chair,” where chair plainly gives the meaning to leg.
[159]. R. F. Hoernlé, Image, Idea and Meaning, Mind, January, 1907.
[160]. Idea, according to Mr. Hoernlé’s context, is here used in the sense of a word, image or sign.
[161]. Of course the constituents of the content must vary in each individual instance, but the kind of conscious elements that in general give meaning to the sensory part of the idea can be determined.
[162]. P. 462, Lecture XIV.
[163]. Prince: The Mechanism of Recurrent Psychopathic States, with Special Reference to Anxiety States, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, June-July, 1911, pp. 153-154.
[164]. Ibid., p. 152. It is interesting to note that statistics show that traumatic psychoses following railway accidents are comparatively rare among trainmen, while exceedingly common among passengers. The reason is to be found in the difference in the settings of ideas of accidents in the two classes of persons. It is the same psychological difference that distinguishes the seasoned veteran soldier from the raw recruit in the presence of the enemy.
LECTURE XI
MEANING, SETTING, AND THE FRINGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
The content of the fringe of consciousness considered as a subconscious zone.—It is obvious that all the past experiences which originate the meaning of an idea cannot be in consciousness at a given moment. If I carefully introspect my imaginal perception or idea of an object, say of a politician, I do not find in my consciousness all the elements which have given me my viewpoint or attitude of mind toward him—the meaning of my idea of him as a great statesman or a demagogue, whichever it be—and yet it may not be difficult, by referring to my memory, to find the past experiences which have furnished the setting which gives this viewpoint. Very little of all these past experiences can be in the content of consciousness, and much less in the focus of attention, at any given moment, nevertheless I cannot doubt that these experiences really determined the meaning of my idea, for if challenged I proceed to recite this conserved knowledge. And so it is with everyone who defends the validity of the meaning of his ideas.
The question at once comes to mind in the case of any given perception, how much of past experience (associated ideas) is in consciousness at any given moment as the setting which provides the meaning?
That the meaning must be in consciousness is obvious; else the term “meaning” would have no meaning—it would be sheer nonsense to talk of ideas having meaning. As I have said, the meaning may be in the focus of attention or it may be in the fringe or background according to the point of interest. If in the focus of attention, meaning plainly may, synchronously or successively, include ideas of quite a large number of past experiences, but if in the background it may be another matter. In this case it may be held, and probably in many instances quite rightly, that meaning is a short summary of past experiences, or summing up in the form of a symbol, and that this summary or symbol is in the focus of attention or in the fringe of awareness, i. e., is clearly or dimly conscious. Thus, in one of the examples above given, the industrial meaning of the owner’s idea of the building might be a short summing up of his past cogitations on the business value of the property; in the case of my idea of the politician, the symbol “statesman” or “demagogue”—as the case might be—might be in consciousness and be the meaning. All the rest of the past associative experiences in either case would furnish the origin of the setting but would not be the actual functioning setting itself.
It must be confessed, however, that the content of meaning, when it is not in the focus of attention, often becomes very elusive when we try to clearly revive it retrospectively and differentiate the particular states of consciousness present at any given moment. It is probably because of this elusiveness, as of something that seems to evade analysis, that it was so long overlooked as an object of psychological study. Yet if meaning is not something more than an abstract term, and is really a component of a moment’s consciousness, we ought to be able to analyze it in any given instance provided our methods of investigation are adequate. The difficulty, I think, largely arises from the fact that the minute we direct attention to such elements of the content of consciousness of any given moment as are not in the focus of attention they at once become shifted into the focus and the composition of the content also becomes altered. Consequently we are never immediately vividly or fully aware of the whole content. The only method of learning what is the whole content at any given moment is by retrospection—the recovery of it as memory. Further, special technical methods are required. Then, too, image and meaning are constantly shifting their relative positions, at one time the one being in the focus of attention, the other in the fringe, and vice versa.
When speaking colloquially of the content of consciousness we have in mind those ideas or components of ideas—elements of thought—which are in the focus of attention, and therefore that of which we are more or less vividly aware. If you were asked to state what was in your mind at a given moment it is the vivid elements, upon which your attention was focused, that you would describe. But, as everyone knows, these do not constitute the whole field of consciousness at any given moment. Besides these there is in the background of the mind, outside the focus, a conscious margin or fringe of varying extent (consisting of sensations, perceptions, and even thoughts) of which you are only dimly aware. It is a sort of twilight zone in which the contents are so slightly illuminated by awareness as to be scarcely recognizable. The contents of this zone are readily forgotten owing to their having been outside the focus of attention; but much can be recalled if an effort to do so (retrospection) is made immediately after any given moment’s experience. Much can only be recalled by the use of special technical methods of investigation. I believe that the more thoroughly this wonderful region is explored the richer it will be found to be in conscious elements.
It must not be thought that because we are only dimly aware of the contents of this twilight zone therefore the individual elements lack definiteness and positive reality. To do so is to confuse the awareness of a certain something with that something itself. To so think would be like thinking that, because we do not distinctly recognize objects in the darkness, therefore they are but shadowy forms without substance. When, in states of abstraction or hypnosis, the ideas of this fringe of attention are recalled, as often is easily done, they are remembered as very definite, real, conscious elements, and the memory of them is as vivid as that of most thoughts. That these marginal ideas are not “vivid” at the time of their occurrence means simply that they are not in such dynamic relations with the whole content of consciousness as to be the focus of awareness or attention. What sort of relations are requisite for “awareness” is an unsolved problem. It seems to be a matter not only of synthesis but of dynamic relations within the synthesis.
However that may be, outside that dynamic synthesis which we distinguish as the focus of attention we can at certain moments recognize or recall to memory (whether through technical devices or not) a number of different conscious states. These may be roughly classified as follows:
1: Visual, auditory, and other sensory impressions to which we are not giving attention—(e. g., the striking of a clock; the sound of horses passing in the street; voices from the next room; coenæsthetic and other sensations of the body.
2: The secondary sensory images of which I spoke in the last lecture as taking part in perception.
3: Associative memories and thoughts pertaining to the ideas in the focus of attention.
4: Secondary independent trains of thought not related to those in the focus of attention. (As when we are doing one thing or listening to conversation and thinking of something else. Very likely, however, what appear to be secondary trains of thought are often only alternating trains. I have, however, a considerable collection of data showing such concomitant secondary trains in certain subjects (cf. Lecture VI). Such a train can be demonstrated to be a precisely differentiated “stream” of consciousness in absent-minded conditions, where it may constitute a veritable doubling of consciousness.
Some of these marginal elements may be so distinctly within the field of awareness that we are conscious of them, but dimly so.[[165]] Others, in particular cases at least, may be so far outside and hidden in the twilight obscurity that the subject is not even dimly aware of them. In more technical parlance, we may say, they are so far dissociated that they belong to an ultra-marginal zone and are really subconscious. Evidence of their having been present can only be obtained through memories recovered in hypnosis, abstraction, and by other methods. These may be properly termed coconscious. Undoubtedly the degree of awareness for marginal elements, i.e., the degree of dissociation between the elements of the content of consciousness, varies at different moments in the same individual according to the degree of concentration of attention and the character of the fixation, e. g., whether upon the environment or upon inner thoughts. It also varies much in different individuals. Therefore some persons lend themselves as more favorable subjects for the detection of marginal and ultra-marginal states than others. Furthermore, according to certain evidence at hand, there is, in some persons at least, a constant shifting or interchange of elements going on between the field of attention and the marginal and the ultra-marginal zone—what is within the first at one moment is in the second, or is entirely subconscious, the next, and vice versa.
Amnesia develops very rapidly for the contents of the twilight region, as I have already stated, and this renders their recognition difficult.[[166]]
In favorable subjects memory of that portion of the content of consciousness which is commonly called the fringe can be recovered in abstraction and hypnosis. In these states valuable information can be obtained regarding the content of consciousness at any given previous moment,[[167]] and this information reveals that there were present in the fringe conscious states of which the subject was never aware, or of which he is later ignorant owing to amnesia. I have studied the fringe of consciousness by this method in a number of subjects. A number of years ago a systematic study of the field of the content of consciousness outside the focus of awareness, including not only the fringe but what may be called the ultra-marginal (subconscious) zone, was made in a very favorable subject (Miss B.), and the general results were given in an address on the “Problems of Abnormal Psychology”[[168]] at the Congress of Arts and Sciences held in St. Louis (1904). I may be permitted to quote that summary here. The term “secondary consciousness” is used in this passage to designate the fringe and ultra-marginal (subconscious) zone.
"A systematic examination was made of the personal consciousness in hypnosis regarding the perceptions and content of the secondary consciousness during definite moments, of which the events were prearranged or otherwise known, the subject not being in absent-mindedness. It is not within the scope of an address of this sort to give the details of these observations, but in this connection I may state briefly a summary of the evidence, reserving the complete observation for future publication. It was found that—
"1. A large number of perceptions—visual, auditory, tactile, and thermal images, and sometimes emotional states—occurred outside of the personal consciousness and, therefore, the subject was not conscious of them when awake. The visual images were particularly those of peripheral vision, such as the extra-conscious [marginal or ultra-marginal] perception of a person in the street who was not recognized by the personal waking consciousness; and the perception of objects intentionally placed in the field of peripheral vision and not perceived by the subject, whose attention was held in conversation. Auditory images of passing carriages, of voices, footsteps, etc., thermal images of heat and cold from the body were similarly found to exist extra-consciously, and to be entirely unknown to the personal waking consciousness.
"2. As to the content of the concomittant (dissociated) ideas, it appeared, by the testimony of the hypnotic self, that as compared with those of the waking consciousness the secondary ideas were quite limited. They were, as is always the experience of the subject, made up for the most part of emotions (e. g., annoyances), and sensations (visual, auditory, and tactile images of a room, of particular persons, people’s voices, etc). They were not combined into a logical proposition, though in using words to describe them it is necessary to so combine them and therefore give them a rather artificial character as ‘thoughts.’ It is questionable whether the word ‘thoughts’ may be used to describe mental states of this kind, and the word was used by the hypnotic self subject to this qualification. Commonly, I should infer, a succession of such ‘thoughts’ may arise, but each is for the most part limited to isolated emotions and sensorial images and lacks the complexity and synthesis of the waking mentation.
"3. The memories, emotions, and perceptions of which the subject is not conscious when awake are remembered in hypnosis and described. The thoughts of which the subject is conscious when awake are those which are concentrated on what she is doing. The others, of which she is not conscious, are a sort of side-thoughts. These are not logically connected among themselves, are weak, and have little influence on the personal (chief) train of thought. Now, although when awake the subject is conscious of some thoughts and not of others, both kinds keep running into one another and therefore the conscious and the subconscious are constantly uniting, disuniting, and interchanging. There is no hard and fast line between the conscious and the subconscious, for at times what belongs to one passes into the other, and vice versa. The waking self is varying the grouping of its thoughts all the time in such a way as to be continually including and excluding the subconscious thoughts. The personal pronoun ‘I,’ or, when spoken to, ‘you,’ applied equally to her waking self and to her hypnotic self, but these terms were not applicable to her unconscious thoughts, which were not self-conscious. For convenience of terminology it was agreed to arbitrarily call the thoughts of which the subject is conscious when awake the waking consciousness, and the thoughts of which when awake she is not conscious the secondary consciousness. In making this division the hypnotic self insisted most positively on one distinction, namely that the secondary consciousness was in no sense a personality. The pronoun I could not be applied to it. In speaking of the thoughts of this second group of mental states alone, she could not say ‘I felt this,’ ‘I saw that.’ These thoughts were better described as, for the most part, unconnected, discrete sensations, impressions, and emotions, and were not synthesized into a personality. They were not, therefore, self-conscious. When the waking self was hypnotized, the resulting hypnotic self acquired the subconscious perceptions of the second consciousness; she then could say ‘I,’ and the hypnotic ‘I’ included what were formerly ‘subconscious’ perceptions. In speaking of the secondary personality by itself, then, it is to be understood that self-consciousness and personality are always excluded. This testimony was verified by test instances of subconscious perception of visual and auditory images of experiences occurring in my presence.
"4. Part played by the secondary consciousness in (a) normal mentation. The hypnotic self testified that the thoughts of the secondary consciousness do not form a logical chain. They do not have volition. They are entirely passive and have no direct control over the subject’s voluntary actions.
"(b) Part played by the secondary consciousness in absent-mindedness. (1) Some apparently absent-minded acts are only examples of amnesia. There is no doubling of consciousness at the time. It is a sort of continuous amnesia brought about by lack of attention. (2) In true absent-mindedness there does occur a division of consciousness along lines which allow a large field to, and relatively wide synthesis of the dissociated states. The personal consciousness is proportionately restricted. The subconscious thoughts may involve a certain amount of volition and judgment, as when the subject subconsciously took a book from the table, carried it to the bookcase, started to place it on the shelf, found that particular location unsuitable, arranged a place on another shelf where the book was finally placed. No evidence, however, was obtained to show that the dissociated consciousness is capable of wider and more original synthesis than is involved in adapting habitual acts to the circumstances of the moment.
"(c) Solving problems by the secondary consciousness. [The statement of the hypnotic self regarding the part played by the ‘secondary consciousness’ has already been given in Lecture VI, p. 167.]
“The subject of these observations was at the time in good mental and physical condition. Criticism may be made that, the subject being one who had exhibited for a long time previously the phenomena of mental dissociation, she now, though for the time being recovered, tended to a greater dissociation and formation of subconscious states than does a normal person, and that the subconscious phenomena were therefore exaggerated. This is true. It is probable that the subconscious flora of ideas in this subject are richer than in the ordinary individual. These phenomena probably represent the extreme degree of dissociation compatible with normality. And yet, curiously enough, the evidence tended to show that the more robust the health of the individual, the more stable her mind, the richer the field of these ideas.”
Of course it is a question how far the findings in a particular and apparently specially favorable subject are applicable to people in general. I would say, however, that I have substantially confirmed these observations in another subject, B. C. A., when in apparent health. In this latter subject the richness of the fringe and what may be called the ultra-marginal region in conscious states is very striking. The same is true of O. N. (cf. Lecture VI, p. 174). Again in psychasthenics, suffering from attacks of phobia, association, or habit psycho-neuroses, etc., I have been able to recover, after the attack has passed off, memories of conscious states which during and preliminary to the attack were outside the focus of attention. Of some of these the subject had been dimly aware, and of some apparently entirely unaware (i.e., they were coconscious). For the former as well as the latter there followed complete amnesia, so that the subject was ignorant of their previous presence, and believed that the whole content of consciousness was included in the anxiety or other state which occupied the focus of attention. Consequently I am in the habit, when investigating a pathological case, like an obsession, of inquiring (by technical methods) into the fringe of attention and even the ultra-marginal region, and reviving the ideas contained therein, particularly those for which there is amnesia. My purpose has been to discover the presence of ideas or thoughts which as a setting would explain the meaning of the idea which was the object of fear (a phobia), the exciting cause of psycho-neurotic attacks, etc. To this I shall presently return.
If all that I have said is true, it follows that the whole content or field of consciousness at any given moment includes not only considerably more than that which is within the field of attention but more than is within the field of awareness. The field of conscious states as a whole comprises the focus of attention plus the marginal fringe; and besides this there may be a true subconscious ultra-marginal field comprising conscious states of which the personal consciousness is not even dimly aware. We may schematically represent the relations of the different fields by a diagram (Fig. 1).
It will be noted that the field of conscious states includes A., B., and C. and is larger than that of awareness, which includes A. and B. The field of awareness is larger than that of attention (A.), but the focus of awareness coincides with the field of attention, or, as it is ordinarily termed, the focus of attention. Of course there is no sharp line of demarcation between any of these fields, but a gradual shading from A. to D. Any such diagrammatic representation, although of help to those who like to visualize concepts, must give a false viewpoint; as in reality the relations are dynamic or functional, and the different fields more properly should be viewed as different but inter-related participants in a large dynamic mechanism.
| Fig. 1. | A. Attention and focus of awareness. |
| B. Fringe of awareness. | |
| C. Subconscious, i.e., coconscious states (ultramarginal). | |
| D. Unconscious processes. |
The meaning of ideas may be found in the fringe of consciousness.—Let us now return from this general survey of the fringe of consciousness to our theme—the setting which gives meaning to ideas.
It is obvious that, theoretically, when I attend to the perceptive images of an idea, the meaning of that idea, not being in the focus of awareness, may be found among the conscious states that make up the fringe of the dynamic field. For instance, if my idea of a certain politician, my knowledge of whom, we will say, has been gained entirely from the newspapers, is that of a bad man—a “crook”—this meaning may be dimly in the fringe of my awareness. It is not necessary that any large part of this knowledge should be in the marginal zone of the content of consciousness but only a summary of all the knowledge I have acquired regarding him. The origin of this meaning—a crook—I can easily find in my associative memories of what I have read. But there would seem to be no need of all these to persist as a functioning setting—a short summary in the form of an idea, secondary image, a word or symbol of a bad man would seem to be sufficient. The same principle is applicable to a large number of the simple images of objects in my environment—a book, an electric lamp, a horse, etc.
It is not easy with such normal ideas of everyday life to analyze the fringe and determine precisely its contents. There is no sharp dividing line between the various zones—the whole being a dynamic system. The moment attention is directed to the marginal zones they become the focus and vice versa. To obtain accurate knowledge of the marginal zones we require individuals suitable for a special technique by which the constituents of these zones can be brought back as memory.
For such purposes certain persons with pathological ideas (e. g., phobias)[[169]] are very favorable subjects for various reasons not necessary to go into.
Now, as respects the simple normal ideas of everyday life, such as I have just cited, a person can give very clearly his viewpoint. He has a very definite notion of the meaning of his perceptions and can give his reasons for them based on his associative memories of past experiences which he can recall. But in the conditions to which I am now referring a person can give no explanation of a particular viewpoint which may be of a very definite but unusual (abnormal) character. Nor can he recall any experiences which would explain the origin of it. I have in mind particularly the obsessions.
Now, according to my observations, we find in the marginal zones of the content of consciousness conscious elements which in particular cases may even give a hitherto unsuspected meaning to the pathological idea. I have found in these zones thoughts which gave meaning to emotions and other symptoms excited by apparently inadequate objects. Thus, in H. O., attacks of recurrent nausea and fear almost prohibiting social intercourse were always due to thoughts of self-disgust hidden in the fringe.
Let us take a concrete case, that of a person who has a pathological fear and who, as we know is often the case, can give no explanation of his viewpoint. The fear may be that of fainting, or of thunderstorms, of a particular disease, say cancer, or of so-called “unreality” attacks, or what not. This so-called “fear” is of course an idea of self or other object linked with, or which occasions as a reaction, the strong emotion of fear. It recurs in attacks which are excited by stimuli, of one kind or another, that are associated with the idea. The patient can give no explanation of the meaning of this idea that renders intelligible why it should occasion his fear. There is nothing in his consciousness, so far as he knows, which gives an adequate meaning to it.
Thus, for example, C. D. was the victim of attacks of fear; the attacks were so intense that at times she had been almost a prisoner in her house, in dread of attacks away from home; and yet she was unable even after two prolonged searching examinations to define the exact nature of the fear which was the salient feature of the attacks, or, from her ordinary memories, to give any explanation of its origin. She remembered many moments in the last twenty years when the fear had come upon her with great intensity, but she could not recall the date of its inception and, therefore, the conditions under which it originated; consequently nothing satisfactory could be elicited beyond an early history of “anxiety attacks” or indefinable fear of great intensity attached to no specific idea that she knew.
As a result of searching investigation by technical methods it was brought out that the specific object of the fear was fainting. When an attack developed, besides intense physiological disturbances and confusion of thought, there was in the content of consciousness a feeling that her mind was flying off into space and a definite thought of losing consciousness or fainting, and that she was going to faint. There was amnesia for these thoughts following the attacks. She never had fainted in the attacks and, as it later transpired, had fainted only once in her life. Here then, dimly in the content of consciousness, was the object of the fear in an attack. But the object was afterwards forgotten; hence she could not explain what she was afraid of. Why fainting should be such a terrible accident to be feared she also could not explain.
The question now was, what possible meaning could fainting have for her that she so feared it? This she did not know.
Now, on still further investigation, I found that there was always in the fringe of consciousness during an attack and also during the anticipatory fear of an attack, an idea and fear of death. This, to use her expression, “was in the background of her mind”; it referred to impending fainting. It appeared then that in the fringe or ultra-marginal zone was the idea of death as the meaning of fainting. Of this she was never aware. It was really subconscious. It was the meaning of her idea of herself fainting. In consequence of this meaning fainting was equivalent to her own death. She would not have been afraid of fainting if she had not believed or could have been made to believe that in her case it did not mean death. We might properly say that the real object of the fear was death.
When this content of the fringe of attention was recovered, the patient voluntarily remarked that she had not been aware of the presence during the attacks of that idea, but now she remembered it clearly, and also realized plainly why she was afraid of fainting,—what she had not understood before. (It must be borne in mind that this meaning of fainting, as a state equivalent to death, did not pertain to fainting in general but solely to herself. She knew perfectly well that fainting in other people was not dangerous; it was only an unrecognized belief regarding a possible accident to herself.) Besides this content of the fringe of attention it was also easy to show that the fringe often included the thought (or idea) which had been the immediate excitant of each attack. Sometimes this stimulus-idea entered the focus of attention; sometimes it was only in the fringe. In either case there was apt to be amnesia for it, but it could always be recalled to memory in abstraction or hypnosis.
The content of consciousness taken as a whole, i.e., to include both the focus and the fringe of attention, then would adequately determine the meaning of this subject’s idea of fainting as applied to herself.
But why this meaning of fainting? It must have been derived from antecedent experiences. An idea can no more have a meaning without antecedent experiences with which it is or once was linked than can the word “parallelopipedon” have a geometrical meaning without a previous geometrical experience, or “Timbuctoo” a personal meaning without being set in a personal experience, whether of missionaries or hymn-books.
I will not take the time to give the detailed results of the investigation by hypnotic procedures that followed. I will merely summarize by stating that the fear of death from fainting was a recurrent memory, i.e., a recurrence of the content of consciousness of a moment during an incident that occurred more than twenty years before, when she was a young girl about 18 years of age. At the time as the result of a nervous shock she had fainted, and just before losing consciousness she definitely thought her symptoms meant death. At this thought she became frightened, and ever since she has been afraid of fainting. There was no conscious association between her phobia and this youthful episode. When the memory of the latter was recovered she remarked, “I wonder why I never thought of that before.”
But this again was not all. A searching investigation of the unconscious (residua) in deep hypnosis revealed the fact that death from fainting was organized with still wider experiences involving a fear of death. At the moment of the nervous shock just before fainting (fancied as dying) she thought of her mother who was dangerously ill from cancer in an adjoining room, and a great fear swept over her at the thought of what might happen to her mother if she should hear of the cause of her (the patient’s) nervous shock and of her death. It further transpired that the idea of death and fear of it were set in a still larger series of experiences.[[170]] It had, indeed, dated from a childhood experience when she was eight years of age. At that time she was frightened when a pet animal died and a fear of death had been more or less continuously present in her mind ever since, but not always consciously so; meaning that it was sometimes in awareness and sometimes in the ultra-marginal zone of consciousness. She had been able to conceal the fear until the fainting episode occurred and, as she in hypnosis asserted, fear afterward had continued to be present more or less persistently, although she was not conscious of the fact when awake (excepting in the phobic attacks) and it had attached itself to various ideas of intercurrent illnesses. But these ideas could all be reduced to two, fainting and cancer. Ever since her mother’s illness and death she had a fear of death from cancer, believing she might inherit the disease. This thought and the fear it aroused had been constantly in her mind but never previously confessed. It was the real meaning of her fear of illness which had been conspicuous and puzzling to her physician. She had imagined that each illness might mean cancer, but had successfully concealed this thought. The idea of death and the fear it excited had thus become constellated in a large unconscious complex derived from past experiences which included the fainting episode, her mother’s death from cancer and the possibility of having cancer herself. This last was still consciously believed and was very real to her.
Without pursuing further the details it is evident that although the meaning of fainting—death—was in the fringe of consciousness and subconscious, it had as a setting a large group of fear-inspiring experiences, more particularly those involving cancer. But there was no conscious association between her fear of fainting and that of cancer. Of this setting, during a phobic attack, only the ideas of fainting and fear-inspiring death enter the various zones of consciousness.
As to why this apparently unsophisticated idea of death still persisted in connection with that of fainting is another problem with which we are not concerned at this moment. We should have to consider more specifically the content of the setting in which, besides the cancer-belief, probably subconscious self-reproaches would be found.
Meaning may be the conscious elements of a functioning larger subconscious complex.—However, whatever be its conscious constituents, obviously meaning must be derived from antecedent experiences and without such experiences no idea can have meaning. If, then, antecedent experiences determine the meaning of the idea, it is theoretically possible, particularly with insistent ideas, that the conscious elements involved in meaning are, with many ideas at least, only part and parcel of a larger complex which is for the most part unconscious. That is to say, a portion of this complex—perhaps the larger portion represented by the residua of past experiences—would, under this hypothesis, be unconscious while certain elements would arise in consciousness as the meaning of a given idea. Under such conditions a hidden subconscious process would really determine the conscious setting which gives the meaning. The whole setting would be partly conscious and partly hidden in the unconscious. Such a mechanism may be roughly likened to that of a clock, so far as concerns the relation of the chimes and hands to the works concealed inside the case. Though the visible hands and the audible chimes appear to indicate the time, the real process at work is that of the hidden mechanism. To inhibit the chime or regulate the time rate the mechanism must be altered. And so with an insistent idea: The unconscious part of the complex setting must be altered to alter the meaning of the idea. Of course the analogy must not be carried too far as in the case of the clock the chimes and hands are only epiphenomena, while conscious ideas are elements in the functioning mechanism.
Such a theory would afford an adequate explanation of the psychogenesis and mechanism of certain pathological ideas such as the phobia of C. D. At any rate, it is plain that an explanation of such ideas must be sought, on the one hand, in their meanings and in the antecedent experiences to which they are related, and, on the other, in the processes which determine their insistency or fixation.
The facts which support this theory, to which our studies have led us, we will take up for consideration in our next lecture.
[165]. It is very doubtful whether vivid awareness is a matter of intensity because, among other reasons, subconscious ideas of which the individual is entirely unaware and elements in the fringe may have decided intensity.
[166]. The development of amnesia seems to be inversely proportionate to the degree of awareness, provided there are no other dissociating factors, such as an emotional complex.
[167]. This is due to the well-known fact (demonstrated in a large variety of phenomena) that ideas dissociated from the personal consciousness awake may become synthesized as memories with this same consciousness in hypnosis.
[168]. See Proceedings, also The Psychological Review, March-May, 1905.
[169]. All pathological processes are only the normal under altered conditions.
[170]. Among them was the following: A few months later her mother died. C. D. was in the room with the body, her back turned toward the bed where the body lay. Suddenly she was startled by the window curtain blowing out of the window. The noise and the partial vision of the curtain gave her a start, for she thought the body had risen up in bed. At this point, while in hypnosis, C. D. remarked, “Ah! that explains the dream which I am always having. I am constantly having a frightful dream of my mother lying dead and rising up as a corpse from the bed. This dream always gives me a great terror.”
LECTURE XII
SETTINGS OF IDEAS AS SUBCONSCIOUS PROCESSES IN OBSESSIONS
In our last lecture we were led to two conclusions: (1) that the conscious elements which are the meaning of an idea may be in the marginal zones; and (2) more important, that “meaning” may be only a part of a larger setting of antecedent experiences, which is an unconscious complex.
Let us now consider the further question raised in the theory finally proposed; namely, whether the submerged elements of a complex remain quiescent or whether, in some cases at least, this portion functions subconsciously and takes part as an active factor in the whole process by which the meaning of an idea and its accompanying emotional tone invades the content of consciousness. If the latter be true, a hidden subconscious process would, according to the theory (to repeat what was previously said), really determine the conscious setting which gives the meaning. Such a mechanism was roughly likened to that of a clock. If such were the mechanism in insistent ideas, obsessions, and impulsions, it would, as I have intimated, explain their insistency, their persisting recurrence, the difficulty in modifying them, notwithstanding the subject realizes their falsity, the point of view often inexplicable to the subject, and the persistence of the affect. There is a constant striving of affective subconscious processes, when stimulated, to carry themselves to fulfilment. Consequently as we know from numerous observations, the feelings and emotions (pleasantness and unpleasantness, exaltation and depression; fear, anger, etc.) pertaining to subconscious processes tend to emerge into consciousness;[[171]] and likewise ideational constituents of the process often emerge into the fringe of the content of consciousness and even the focus of awareness. Given such a subconsciously functioning setting to an idea, it would necessarily tend by the impulsive force of its emotion to make the latter insistent, and resist the inhibiting control of the personal consciousness.
In the case of C. D., cited in the last lecture, we were led to the conclusion, as the result of analysis, that her insistent phobia might be due to the impulsive force of such subconscious complexes. The whole problem is a very difficult one, dealing as we are with complicated mechanisms and such elusive and fluid factors as conscious and subconscious processes. It is useless, therefore, to attempt to formulate the mechanisms with anything like scientific exactness.
It must be borne in mind, further, that the method of analysis (employed with C. D.), meaning thereby the bringing to light associated memories of past experiences, cannot positively demonstrate that those experiences take part as the causal factor in a present process. It can demonstrate the sequence of mental events, and, therefore, each successive link in a chain of evidence leading to the final act; or it can demonstrate the material out of which we can select with a greater or less degree of probability the factor which, in accordance with a theory—in this case that of subconscious processes—seems most likely to be the causal factor. Thus in the analysis of a bacterial culture we can select the one which seems on various considerations to be the most likely cause of an etiologically undetermined disease, but for actual demonstration we must employ synthetic methods; that is, actually reproduce the disease by inoculation with a bacterium. So with psychological processes synthetic methods are required for positive demonstration.
We have available synthetic methods in hypnotic procedures. These give, it seems to me, positive results of value. If a subject is hypnotized and in this state a complex is formed, it will be found that this complex will determine, after the subject is awakened, the point of view and therefore the meaning of the central idea when it comes into consciousness, and this though the subject has complete amnesia for the hypnotic experience. In this manner, if the idea is one which previously had a very definite and undesirable meaning which we wish to eradicate, we can organize a complex which shall include that idea and yet give it a very different meaning, provided it is one acceptable to the subject.
To take simple examples, and to begin with a hypothetical case, but one which in practice I have frequently duplicated: A subject is hypnotized and although, in fact, the day is a beautifully fair one we point out that it is really disagreeable because the sunshine is glowing and hot; that such weather means dusty roads, drought, the drying up of the water supply, the withering of the foliage, that the country needs rain, etc. We further assert that this will be the subject’s point of view. In this way we form a cluster of ideas as a setting to the weather which gives it, fair as it is, an entirely different and unpleasant meaning and one which is accepted. The subject is now awakened and has complete amnesia for the hypnotic experience. When attention is directed to the weather it is found that his point of view, for the time being at least, is changed from what it was before being hypnotized. The perception of the clear sky and the sunlight playing upon the ground includes secondary images of heat, of dust, of withered foliage, etc., such as have been previously experienced on disagreeable, hot, dusty days, and some of the associated thoughts with their affects suggested in hypnosis arise in consciousness; perhaps only a few, but, if he continues to think about the weather, perhaps many. Manifestly the new setting formed in hypnosis has been switched into association with the conscious perceptions of the environment and has induced the secondary images and associated thoughts, emotions, and feelings which give meaning. But it is equally manifest, though many elements bubble up, so to speak, from the unconscious setting into consciousness, that most of this setting remains submerged in the unconscious.
In similar fashion I made a subject regard, metaphorically speaking, as a cesspool for sewage a river which was being converted into a beautiful water park by a dam.[[172]] It is scarcely necessary to cite additional observations.
Manifestly such phenomena belong to the well-known class of so-called “suggested post-hypnotic phenomena.” These we have already seen (solution of problems predetermined actions, &c., Lecture VI) require the postulate of a subconscious process. It is therefore difficult to resist the conclusion that, when the suggested phenomenon is the “meaning” of an idea, this also involves a subconscious process—that a hypnotically organized setting functioning subconsciously ejects the meaning into consciousness. In other words, the unconscious setting is a part of the whole “psychosis” or complex, a factor in the functioning mechanism; it is dynamic and not merely static, and is a functioning part of the “psychic whole” of the given ideas (sign, perception, and meaning). To use the analogy of the clock, the unconscious part of the complex corresponds in a way to the works and determines what shall appear in consciousness. In the case of the ideas of everyday life, and particularly of pathological insistent ideas, unconscious complexes can be shown, by methods of analysis and by interpretation, to be existent and to be settings. We therefore infer that they similarly take part in the functioning process of ideation. But, as I have said, as any idea has many different settings and associated complexes, it is difficult to determine by this method with positiveness which setting or other complex, if any, is in activity and takes part in the process. Hence the different theories that have been offered to explain the precise psychogenesis of insistent ideas.
Therapeutic application.—By similar procedures in a very large number of instances, for therapeutic purposes, I have changed the setting, the viewpoint, and the meaning of ideas without any realization on the patient’s part of the reason for this change. This is the goal of psychotherapy, and in my judgment the one fundamental principle common to all technical methods of such treatment, different as these methods appear to be when superficially considered.
It is obvious that in everyday life when by arguments, persuasion, suggestion, punishment, exhortation, or prayer we change the viewpoint of a person, we do so by building up complexes which shall act as settings and give new meanings to his ideas. I may add, if we wish to sway him to carry this new viewpoint to fulfilment through action we introduce into the complex an emotion which by the driving force of its impulses shall carry the ideas to practical fruition. This is the art of the orator in swaying audiences to his views. Shakespeare has given us a classic example in Marc Antony’s speech to the Roman populace.
The practical application to therapeutics of these principles of rearranging the setting of a perception by artificial complex building may be seen from the following actual case, which I have already cited in previous contributions.[[173]]
I suggest to B. C. A. in hypnosis ideas of well-being, of recovery from her infirmity; I picture a future roseate with hope, stimulate her ambitions with suggestions of duties to be performed, deeds to be accomplished. With all this there goes an emotional tone of exaltation which takes the place of the depression and of the sense of failure previously present. This emotional tone gives increased energy to her organization, revitalizing, as it were, her psycho-physiological processes [and by conflict represses the previously dissociating affect and sentiment]. The whole I weave artfully and designedly into a complex. Whatever neurotic symptoms were previously present I do not allow to enter this complex. Indeed, the complex is such that they are incompatible with it. The headache, nausea, and other bodily discomforts, pure functional disturbances in this instance, are dissociated and cease to torment. After “waking” there is complete amnesia for the complex. Yet it is still organized, for it can be recovered again in hypnosis. It is simply dormant. But the emotional tone still persists after waking, and invades the personal synthesis, which takes on a correspondingly ecstatic tone. The aspect of her environment, her conception of her relation to the world and her past, present, and future mental life have become colored, so to speak, by the new feeling, as if under a new light. But, more than this, new syntheses have been formed with new tones. If we probe deep enough we find that many ideas of the dormant complex have, through association with the environment (point de repère), become interwoven with those of the previous personal consciousness and given all a new meaning. A moment ago [her view was that] she was an invalid, incapacitated, exiled from her social and family life, etc. What was there to look forward to? Now: What of that? She is infinitely better; what a tremendous gain; at such a rate of progress in a short time a new life will be open to her, etc.—a radically new point of view. Now, too, she feels buoyant with health and energy, ready to start afresh on her crusade for health and life. Her neurotic symptoms have vanished. Such is the change that she gratefully speaks of it as the work of a wizard. But the mechanism of the transformation is simple enough. The exaltation, artificially suggested in hypnosis, persists, altering the trend of her ideas and giving new energy. The perceptions of her environment, cognition of herself, etc., have entered into new syntheses which the introduction of new ideas, new points of view have developed; thus the content of her ideas has taken a definite, precise shape. Whence came these new ideas? They seem to her to have come miraculously, for she has forgotten the hypnotic complex. But forgetting an experience is not equivalent to its not having happened, or to that experience not having been a part of one’s own psychic life. The hypnotic consciousness remains a part of one’s self (as a neurographic complex), however absolutely we have lost awareness of it. Its experiences become fixed, though dormant, just as do the experiences of our personal conscious life. The mechanism is the same.
The following letter from this patient, received by chance after these paragraphs were written, well expresses the psychological conditions following hypnotic suggestion:
“Something has happened to me—I have a new point of view. I don’t know what has changed me so all at once, but it is as if scales had fallen from my eyes; I see things differently. That affair at L—— was nothing to be ashamed of, Dr. Prince. I showed none of the common sense which I really possess; I regret it bitterly; but I was not myself, and even as [it was] I did nothing to be ashamed of—quite the contrary, indeed.... Anyway, for some reason—I don’t know why, but perhaps you do—I have regained my own self-respect and find to my amazement that I need never have lost it. You know what I was a year ago—you know what I am now—not much to be proud of, perhaps; but I am the work of your hands, and a great improvement on [my poor old self]. I owe you what is worth far more than life itself ... namely, the desire to live. You have given me life and you have given me something to fill it with ... I feel more like myself than for a long time. I am ‘my own man again,’ so to say, and if you keep me and help me a little longer I shall be well.”
In interpreting the phenomena it must be remembered that in such suggestive experiments the subject after waking has complete amnesia for the whole hypnotic experience, for all the ideas which were organized into the complex to form the setting. And yet this viewpoint, in spite of this amnesia, is that which was suggested, and he does not know why his view has changed. That a large fraction of the hypnotic complex (or setting) remains submerged in the unconscious can be readily shown. The only question is whether it becomes an active subconscious process out of which certain elements emerge as meaning into consciousness.
The setting in obsessions.—This question of the functioning of unconscious complexes as subconscious processes is of fundamental importance for psychology, whether normal or abnormal, and if well established gives an entirely new aspect to its problems. We cannot therefore be too exacting in demanding proof for the postulation of subconscious processes as part of the mechanisms we are considering, or, at least, requiring sufficient evidence to justify them as a reasonable theory. If assumed as an hypothesis many otherwise obscure phenomena become intelligible by one or other theory making use of them.
Let us examine for a moment the obsessions as one of the most important problems with which abnormal psychology has to deal, and which offer themselves as exaggerated examples of ideas with insistent meanings. The phenomena are psychological and physical. They occur in a sporadic form, as well as in a recurring obsessional form. Let us consider them simply as phenomena irrespective of recurrence. They may be arranged by gradations in types in which they appear:
A, as purely physical disturbances;
B, as physical disturbances plus conscious emotion;
C, as physical disturbances plus conscious emotion plus a specific idea of the object of the emotion, but without logical meaning;
D, as physical disturbances plus emotion plus idea plus meaning.
In the first type the physical phenomena (such as commonly attend emotion) can be traced to a functioning subconscious emotional complex of which the phenomena are physical manifestations; in the second to a functioning subconscious complex ejecting its emotion into consciousness. In the third we find by analysis an associated unconscious complex (setting), which logically would account for the emotion of the obsessing idea, and infer, by analogy with A and B, that it is a dynamic factor in the psychosis. In the fourth we find a similar complex, which logically would account for all the physical and conscious phenomena.
Type A: The following observation may be cited as an example. At the conclusion of some experiments, made on one subject in the presence of another patient and while conversing socially at afternoon tea, I noticed that the subject manifested marked tremor of the hands to such an extent that the cup in her hand shook and rattled in its saucer. She herself commented on the fact, and laughingly remarked that she did not know what was the matter with her; at times she would “get awfully hot all over and would break out in perspiration.” She could give no explanation of this phenomenon which had not been present before the experiments were begun. The subject was now put into deep hypnosis, in a state in which communication was obtained only by writing, and thereby the subconscious tapped. Without going into all the details, the sum and substance of the information obtained in this hypnotic state was this: coconscious images (pictures), of which she was not consciously aware, kept coming and going; these were the coconscious phenomena I have previously described (p. 169). When certain images appeared coconsciously the tremor developed, and when others appeared the tremor ceased; when still others appeared there were vasomotor disturbances and perspiration as well as tremor.
The images as I interpret them were the secondary images belonging to subconscious ideas or processes.[[174]] To understand the conditions in this instance it will be necessary to explain certain antecedent facts. I had arranged to make certain hypnotic and other experiments on two patients in the presence of each other. The one in question, the subject of this observation, hesitated to have them made on herself in the presence of a second person, fearing lest the various subconscious phenomena which she exhibited would be regarded as stigmata and she be thought “queer.” Each, of course, wished to see the experiments on the other. The subject in question had for a long time been rather obsessed with the insistent foolish idea that if people knew she manifested these phenomena they would not care to know her socially. It was a point of view which had been more or less obstinately maintained in spite of all contradictory arguments. The idea had specifically recurred from time to time in particular situations, and had caused considerable emotional disturbance. If not a true obsession it was close to one. Nevertheless she wanted to take part both for the object of seeing the experiments and also of meeting the second patient. Still there were anxious doubts and scruples in her mind arising from her desire, on the one hand, and a fear, on the other, that it was a social mistake to do so. This had been going on during several days and had been even the subject of correspondence, discussions, etc. It was only at the last moment that she could screw up her courage to take part in the experiments.
Finally the experiments were made, with the result as above stated. Now the coconscious images which were accompanied by the tremors, etc., were pictures of herself, of the second patient, and of myself. These images coming and going seemed, as in a pantomime, to symbolize her previous thoughts. Sometimes the image of the second patient turned away from the subject, sometimes the three images were present, but the one of the subject stood apart from the others as if an outcast, and in both these latter cases particularly she would shake with tremor, and would “get awfully hot all over,” and break out in perspiration. Then apparently reassuring pictures would come and the tremor would cease.
Besides these coconscious images there was a train of coconscious thought of which she was not personally aware. There was the thought that perhaps, after all, it was a mistake to have taken part in the experiments, as X, the second patient, was not a physician, and her wish to see the subject hypnotized must have been largely curiosity. Of this train of thought the subject was not aware. At the same time concurrently there was in her personal consciousness the “thought that she liked X, that it was very good of her to have come, and awfully kind of you to take your time to conduct the experiments.” There was also a conscious emotion of pleasure and something akin to hope, and nervousness at the situation. By contrast coconsciously there was a greater feeling of nervousness and the emotion of fear of which she was not consciously aware. By a few appropriate suggestions all these phenomena were made to disappear.
It would take us too long and be too much of a digression to go more deeply into these subconscious phenomena. From what has been given, which is corroborated by a large number of observations of the same sort, it seems to me we are justified in concluding that the physical manifestations of emotion (tremor, etc.) in the instance were determined by subconscious processes which were the functioning residua of antecedent thoughts with their emotions.
But more than this these antecedent thoughts were obsessing ideas of self-abasement, i.e., of herself as a person who socially was stamped with a stigma and, therefore, as a sort of outcast. These thoughts had formed one setting to the actual situation in which she found herself. The subconscious complex, therefore, contained a perception plus the meaning of the situation plus emotion; in other words, the whole of the psychosis including the affect was subconscious in that none of its elements emerged into consciousness. Another and rival perception of the situation was that which was actually in consciousness and which has been described. The physical phenomena were the manifestation of the subconscious affect and would have been equally manifested if the affect had become conscious. In such a case, then, we may say the whole of one setting actually functions subconsciously.
The case of H. O. is the same in principle as I interpret it, but is distinguished by the fact that the dissociation of processes was not so extreme. The obsessing idea was in the ultramarginal zone of consciousness and, to this extent, subconscious. Briefly stated, H. O. for many years was the victim of an intense obsession, in consequence of which she had practically foregone social life, and found herself unable to travel for fear she would be afflicted with her psychosis in trains, etc. The physical symptom was intense nausea suddenly arising as an attack. When attacked with this there developed also depression and a mental state which is perhaps best described as a mood. She could give no explanation of the attacks. On examination it developed that always in the “background of her mind,” just preceding the attack, there came the idea of disgust of self. At once the nausea as the physical expression of disgust was experienced. The disgust-idea was always excited by some associated stimulus. The meaning of this “sentiment” was set in a large complex of past experiences. Into all this I will not go. The point is that the only conscious elements of her obsession were in the extreme fringe of consciousness, sufficiently dissociated to be practically coconscious,[[175]] but the physical symptoms were distressingly prominent. Relief was easily effected simply by organizing a new complex giving a new point of view of self.
Complexes consisting entirely of the physiological manifestations of emotion without conscious emotion undoubtedly occur. A long time ago I described such a neurosis under the name of Fear Neurosis[[176]] in distinction from psychosis. The symptom complex was interpreted as a persisting automatism derived from antecedent fear states that had been outgrown. From our present standpoint and fuller knowledge we must believe that underlying this automatism is probably an unconscious complex of these antecedent experiences including the fear which takes part in the functioning mechanism. It may be called, then, a subconscious psychosis.
True hysterical laughter and crying are undoubtedly phenomena of this type and due to the same mechanism. These phenomena are well known to be purely automatic; that is to say, they are emotional manifestations unaccompanied in consciousness by thoughts or even by emotions corresponding to them. The subject laughs or cries without knowing why and without even feeling merry or sad. I forbear to digress sufficiently to present the evidence for the interpretation that the phenomena are due to subconscious processes of the kind just described. Let me merely say that in one instance, N. O., intensely studied, the automatic crying was traced by experimental and clinical methods to a persisting and often insistent subconscious childhood’s perception and meaning of self—as a lonely, unhappy child. This perception, etc., could be differentiated from the conscious perception belonging to adult age.
Numerous observations of emotional phenomena similar in principle have been recorded in the case of Miss B.[[177]] These observations included automatic facial expressions of pleasure, anger, and fear. These expressions could always be traced to subconscious processes and in this case to actual ideas of a coconscious personality. But the principle is the same. Sometimes the affect linked to the process welled up into consciousness and sometimes it did not. When, in the case of Miss B., the automatic phenomena were determined by coconscious ideas it was because the perceptions of the secondary subconscious personality had a humorous, angry, or fear setting, as the case might be. These particular observations are of especial interest because they allow us to clearly distinguish at almost one and the same moment the different manifestations corresponding to the different settings with which the same idea may be clustered. While, for instance, the personal consciousness of Miss B. perceived a person or situation with apprehension and manifested this apprehension in her facial expression as well as verbally, the subconscious perception of the same person or situation was one of joy which broke through Miss B.’s apprehensive feature in automatic smiles. In other words, two different perceptions (with opposite meanings) of one and the same object functioned at the same time.
These observations, as interpreted, are of wider significance in that they allow us to understand the mechanism of many phenomena of everyday life. For instance, the hysteria of crowds may be explained on the same principle; likewise the outbreak of emotional physical manifestations in a person whose attention is absorbed (abstraction and distraction) in reading or hearing something (e. g., at a play), which, it may be inferred, touches some inner emotional experience of his life. In the kind of instance I have in mind introspection fails to reveal the presence of conscious thoughts or sometimes even emotions which adequately explain the physical disturbance. When not abstracted by the reading or play, the same ideas he was attending to a moment before fail to excite these disturbances.
As has been said, “everyone is a little hysterical,” meaning that under certain conditions—particularly those of stress and strain and strong emotion—the mind becomes a bit disintegrated, and unconscious complexes manifest themselves through what are called hysterical symptoms.
Type B: In this class the subject is afflicted with attacks of conscious emotion, most conspicuously and commonly fear, plus the same physical disturbances as in type A, but without any specific idea in consciousness to which the emotion is related. When we examine certain favorable subjects like Miss B., B. C. A., H. O. and O. N., in whom memories of subconscious processes can be obtained by technical procedures, specific coconscious ideas can be demonstrated during the attacks of fear. These ideas are those of fear of some specific object. The emotion pertaining to these ideas alone emerges into consciousness, the subject remaining unaware of the ideas themselves. In the case of Miss B. numerous observations of this kind were recorded.[[178]] When the obsessing fear constantly recurs it is a so-called “anxiety neurosis,”[[179]] as I interpret the phenomena.
A typically perfect example of anxiety neurosis was the recurring attacks of intense anxiety accompanied by a feeling of suffocation and oppression of the chest experienced by one of my subjects. Investigation disclosed that the first attack immediately followed a dream which was forgotten, but recovered in hypnosis. It appeared that in the dream she was accused by a certain person of certain delinquencies and threatened with exposure. At this point in the dream she was overcome with fear and anguish as in the after attacks. It also appeared that previously she had been and still was apprehensive of this person’s loyalty. By inference and analogy with the well-established after-phenomena of dreams (p. 101), we must assume that the dream process still functioned subconsciously and produced the anxiety attacks.[[180]]
In this connection it is well to notice that it is a common observation that not only the affect of emotion but that of feeling also may emerge from the subconscious into consciousness and color the attitude of the personal consciousness. This may be demonstrated by hypnotic procedures. When in hypnosis complexes of ideas with strong feeling tones, whether of pleasure or displeasure, of exaltation or depression, are suggested, the subject after awakening experiences these same feeling tones which dominate the personality. The subject then feels pleasantly exalted or unpleasantly depressed, as the case may be, without knowing the reason why. In alternating personalities the same phenomena may sometimes be observed. In the case of Miss B. the feeling tones which dominated the one personality invaded the consciousness of the other personality, often causing considerable distress after the alternation had occurred and although there was amnesia for all that had gone before.[[181]] Thus BIV complained of the feelings of depression from which BI shortly before had suffered, although her own ideas were far from being of a depressing nature. This depression welled up from the unconscious. It was in consequence of this phenomenon that BIV wrote: “BI’s constant grieving wears on my nerves. It is harder to endure than one would believe possible. I would rather give and take with Sally—a thousand times rather.” Likewise when a subject has feelings of unpleasantness and depression which he cannot explain it is easy in certain subjects to demonstrate the concurrence of coconscious ideas with these feeling tones. The affect in such cases emerges into consciousness, though the subject is unaware of the coconscious ideas. Correspondingly the feelings may be those of pleasantness and exaltation. The demonstration of coconscious processes as the sources of the conscious feelings of course can only be made in subjects in whom memories of coconscious processes can be evoked. In such subjects I have observed the phenomena on almost numberless occasions. But it can be provoked in almost any good hypnotic subject. To awake pleasurable and exalting feelings, to substitute them for their opposite when such are present, belongs to therapeutic art. The skillful therapeutist endeavors to provoke the former by the various procedures at his command. The important principle underlying such procedures is that the feeling tones pertaining to ideas may still invade the personal consciousness after the ideas have become dormant in the unconscious.
This principle, it seems to me, is of far-reaching application. The persistence of the feeling tone in a pleasant or unpleasant mental attitude after the experience giving rise to it has become dormant is observed in everyday life and can be explained on this principle. We have an exalting experience, engage in a spirited game of tennis, watch an exciting football match, or take part in an exhilarating dance. For the remainder of the day or the next day we still experience all the stimulating pleasurable feeling, even though in the cares of our vocation the memories of the previous experiences have remained dormant, not having once been called to mind. The only difference between such experiences of everyday life and those of hypnosis is that in one case we can, if we will, recall the origin of the feeling and in the other we cannot. In both we do not.[[182]]
Dormant dream complexes may give rise to similar phenomena. In a minor way everyone, probably, has experienced the persistence of the emotional effects of a dream after waking and after the memory of the dream has vanished. More commonly, of course, the dream is remembered, but in the cases of people who do not remember their dreams the phenomenon is precise. B. C. A., for example, does not as a rule remember her dreams, but nevertheless frequently awakes in a state of anxiety or exaltation which has considerable persistency. In hypnosis the dream which gives rise to the emotional state is recovered.
In pathological conditions these post-hypnotic, hysterical, dream, and other phenomena suggest, among other questions, whether in depressive and excited psychoses the affective element is not derived from submerged unconscious complexes. Melancholias, for example, may in some cases at least derive their feeling tone from such complexes.
[171]. Janet: The Mental States of Hystericals, pp. 289-290. Prince: The Dissociation, pp. 132-5, 262, 297–8, 324-5, 497.
[172]. The Unconscious, Journal Abnormal Psychology, April-May, 1909.
[173]. Morton Prince: (Psychotherapeutics; A Symposium. Richard G. Badger, Boston, 1910.) Also The Unconscious, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, April-May, and June-July, 1909.
[174]. See p. [178], Lecture VI.
[175]. Memory of them could only be obtained in abstraction and hypnosis.
[176]. Fear Neurosis, Boston Med. and Surg. Journal, September 28, 1898.
[177]. The Dissociation, see index, “Subconscious Ideas,” and “Subconscious Self.”
[178]. The Dissociation, loc. cit.
[179]. Ibid., p. 132.
[180]. It is worth noting that this interpretation is supported by the therapeutic result. The attacks completely and quickly ceased after the setting to her apprehensive idea was so altered, by one single explanation, that she no longer feared the loyalty of her friend.
[181]. The Dissociation, pp. 262, 297, 298 and 324, 325, 497; also The Unconscious, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, April-May, 1909.
[182]. Prince: The Unconscious, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, April-May and June-July, 1909.
LECTURE XIII
TWO TYPES OF PHOBIA
(Obsessions Continued)
Type C: In this type the affect is linked with an idea as its object in consciousness but without meaning, so that whenever this idea is awakened it is accompanied by the affect alone. Some of the phobias are the most common pathological exemplars. Nor is there anything in the content of consciousness which gives meaning to the idea as something that should occasion anxiety. The subject, in other words, does not know why he is afraid of the given object. In such cases the restoration of dormant memories will disclose antecedent experiences in which the idea is set and which explains the origin and meaning of the fear. Here again we have the principle shown in a clear cut way in conditions of alternating personality. For instance take the case of Miss B. An emotion, apparently paradoxical, would be aroused in BIV in connection with a strange person or place, or in consequence of a reference by some one to an unknown event. BIV, without apparent reason, would feel an intense emotion in connection with something or other which she did not remember to have ever heard or seen before. A face, a name, a particular locality where she happened to find herself would arouse a strong emotional effect without her knowing the reason. The memories of the experiences to which these emotions belonged were a part of BI’s life and could easily be recalled by her when the personalities again alternated and BI came into existence. When BIV came again these experiences, of course, would be forgotten and become dormant, but the emotions associated with the visual, auditory, and other images of a given person or place, or whatever it might be, would be liable to be aroused in her by the perception, in spite of the amnesia, whenever the given person or place, as it might be, came into her daily life. Here the conscious content of the psychosis consists of perception plus affect without meaning.
I formerly was inclined to interpret such paradoxical emotions on the principle of the simple linking of an affect to a perception. But when we consider that, on the reversion of the personality to BI the perception, meaning, and affect still remained organized as a conscious psychic whole, it is much more probable that the meaning took part as a subconscious process in the mechanism of BIV’s emotional psychosis and was responsible for the paradox. In the case of recurrent fears the antecedent experiences which contain their meaning are conserved as unconscious complexes. The psychosis differs clinically from types A and B only in that another conscious element has been added,—viz.: the idea of an object of the fear. It is consistent therefore to infer that the unconscious complexes are a submerged part of the mechanism by which the affect is maintained in association with the object. The conscious and the subconscious form a psychic whole.
As an instance let us take the following case of phobia. It was ostensibly one of church-steeples and towers of any kind. The patient, a woman about forty years of age, dreaded and tried in consequence to avoid the sight of one. When she passed by such a tower she was very strongly affected emotionally, experiencing always a feeling of terror or anguish accompanied by the usual marked physical symptoms. Sometimes even speaking of a tower would at once awaken this emotional complex which expressed itself outwardly in her face, as I myself observed on several occasions. Considering the frequency with which church and schoolhouse towers are met with in everyday life, one can easily imagine the discomfort arising from such a phobia. Before the mystery was unraveled she was unable to give any explanation of the origin or meaning of this phobia, and could not connect it with any episode in her life, or even state how far back in her life it had existed. Vaguely she thought it existed when she was about fifteen years of age and that it might have existed before that. Now it should be noted that an idea of a tower with bells had in her mind no meaning whatsoever that explained the fear. It had no more meaning than it would have in anybody’s mind. In the content of consciousness there was only the perception plus emotion and no corresponding meaning. Accordingly I sought to discover the origin and meaning of the phobia by the so-called psycho-analytic method.
When I attempted to recover the associated memories by this method, the mere mention of bells in a tower threw her into a panic in which anxiety, “thrills,” and perspiration were prominent. Before making the analysis I had constructed a theory in my mind to the effect that a phobia for bells in a tower was a sexual symbolism, being led to this partly by the suggestiveness of the object and partly by the fact that I had found symbolisms of a sexual kind in her dreams.[[183]]
Analysis was conducted at great length and memories covering a wide field of experiences were elicited. When asked to think of bells in a tower, or each of these objects separately, there was at first a complete blocking of thought in that her mind became a blank. Later, memories which to a large extent, but not wholly, played in various relations around her mother (who is dead) as the central object came into the field of consciousness. Nothing, however, was awakened that gave the slightest meaning to the phobia even on the wildest interpretation. The patient, who had been frequently hypnotized by another physician, tended during the analysis to go into a condition of unusually deep abstraction, to such a degree that on breaking off the analysis she failed to remember, save very imperfectly, the memories elicited. Such an abstraction is hypnosis.
Finally, after all endeavors to discover the genesis of the phobia by analysis were in vain, I tried another method. While she was in hypnosis I put a pencil in her hand with the object of obtaining the desired information through automatic writing. While she was narrating some irrelevant memories of her mother, the hand rapidly wrote as follows: “G.... M.... church and my father took my mother to Bi.... where she died and we went to Br.... and they cut my mother. I prayed and cried all the time that she would live and the church bells were always ringing and I hated them.”
When she began to write the latter part of this script she became depressed, sad, indeed anguished; tears flowed down her cheeks and she seemed to be almost heartbroken. In other words, it appeared as if she were subconsciously living over again the period described in the script. I say subconsciously for she did not know what her hand had written or why she was anguished. During the writing of the first part of the script she was verbally describing other memories; during the latter part she ceased speaking.
After awakening from hypnosis and when she had become composed in her mind she narrated, at my request, the events referred to in the script. She remembered them clearly as they happened when she was about fifteen years of age. It appeared that she was staying at that time in G.... M...., a town in England. Her mother, who was seriously ill, was taken to a great surgeon to be operated upon. She herself suffered great anxiety and anguish lest her mother should not recover. She went twice a day to the church to pray for her mother’s recovery and in her anguish declared that if her mother did not recover she would no longer believe in God. The chimes in the tower of the church, which was close to her hotel, sounded every quarter hour; they got on her nerves; she hated them; she could not bear to hear them, and while she was praying they added to her anguish. Ever since this time the ringing of bells has continued to cause a feeling of anguish. This narrative was not accompanied by emotion as was the automatic script.
It now transpired that it was the ringing of the church bells, or the anticipated ringing of bells, that caused the fear, and not the perception of a tower itself. When she saw a tower she feared lest bells should ring. This was the object of the phobia.[[184]] She could not explain why she had never before connected her phobia with the episode she described. This failure of association as we know is not uncommon, and in this case was apparently related to a determination to put out of mind an unbearable episode associated with so much anguish. There had been for years a more or less constant mental conflict with her phobia. The subject had striven not to think of or look at belfries, churches, schoolhouses, or any towers, or to hear the ringing of their bells, or to talk about them. She had endeavored to protect herself by keeping such ideas out of her mind. Before further analyzing the case there are two points which are well worth calling attention to:
1. When the subject subconsciously described the original childhood experience by automatic script there was intense emotion—fear—which emerged into consciousness without her knowing the reason thereof. When, on the other hand, she later from her conscious memories described the same experience there was no such emotion. In other words it was only when the conserved residua of the experience functioned consciously and autonomously as a dissociated, independent process that emotion was manifested. So long as the memories were described from the view-point of the matured adult personal consciousness there was no emotion. As a subconscious process they were unmodified by this later viewpoint. This suggests at least that when the phobia was excited by the sight or idea of a tower it was due likewise to a subconscious process and that this was one and the same as that which induced the experimental phobia.
2. The phraseology of the script is noticeable. The account is just such as a child might have written. It reads as if the conserved thoughts of a child had awakened and functioned subconsciously.
From this history, so far as given, it is plain that the psychosis in one sense is a recurring antecedent experience or memory, but it is only a partial memory. The whole of the experience does not recur but only the emotion in association with the ringing of bells. The rest of that experience, viz., the idea of the possible death of her mother with its attendant grief and anguish associated with the visits to the church, the praying for recovery and finally the realization of the fatal ending—all that which originally excited the fear and gave the ringing-of-bells-in-a-tower meaning was conserved as a setting in the unconscious. That the rest of the experience was conserved was shown by the fact that it could be recalled not only by automatic writing but, although not in association with the phobia, to conscious memory. From this point of view the fear of bells ringing may be regarded as a recurrence of the original fear—that of her mother’s death—now derived from a subconsciously functioning setting. The child was afraid to face her grief and so now the matured adult was also afraid.
From another point of view the ringing of bells may be regarded as standing for, or a symbol of, her mother’s death with which it was so intimately associated, and this symbol awakened the same fear as did originally the idea itself of the death. An object may still be the symbol of another, although the association between the two cannot be recalled. (The transference of the emotional factor of an experience to some element in it is a common occurrence; e. g., a fear of knives in a person who has had the fear of committing suicide.)
The discovered antecedent experiences of childhood then give a hitherto unsuspected meaning to the ringing of bells. It is a meaning—the mise en scène of a tragedy of grief and a symbol of that tragedy. But was that tragedy with its grief the real meaning of the child’s fear or, perhaps more correctly, the whole of the meaning? And is it still the meaning in the mind of the adult woman? Does the mere conservation of a painful memory of grief explain its persistent recurrent subconscious functioning during twenty-five years, well into adult life, so that the child’s emotion shall be reawakened whenever one element (bell-tower) of the original experience is presented to consciousness? And, still more, can the persistence of a mere association of the affect with the object independently of a subconscious process explain the psychosis? Either of these two last propositions is absurd on its face as being opposed to the experience of the great mass of mankind. The vast majority of people have undergone disturbing, sorrowful or fear-inspiring experiences at some time during the course of their lives and they do not find that they cannot for years afterwards face some object or idea belonging to that experience without being overwhelmed with the same emotion. Such emotion in the course of time subsides and dies out. A few, relatively speaking, do so suffer and then, because contrary to general experience, it is called a psychosis.
We must, then, seek some other and adequate factor in the case under examination. When describing the episode in the church, the subject stated that on one occasion she omitted to go to church to pray and the thought came to her that if her mother died it would be due to this omission, and it would be her fault. The “eye of God”[[185]] she thought was literally upon her in her every daily act and when her mother did die she thought that it was God’s punishment of herself because of that one failure. Consequently she thought that she was to blame for her mother’s death; that her mother’s death was her fault. She feared to face her mother’s death, not because of grief—that was a mere subterfuge, a self-deception—but because she thought she was to blame; and she feared to face towers with bells, or rather the ringing of bells, because they symbolized or stood for that death (just as a tomb-stone would stand for it), and in facing that fact she had to face her own fancied guilt and self-reproach and this she dared not do. This was the real fear, the fear of facing her own guilt. The emotion then was not only a recurrence of the affect associated with the church episode but a reaction to self-reproach. The ringing of bells, somewhat metaphorically speaking, reproached her as Banquo’s ghost reproached Macbeth.
All this was the child’s point of view.
But I found that the patient, an adult woman, still believed and obstinately maintained that her mother’s death was her fault. She had never ceased to believe it. Why was this? Why had not the unsophisticated belief of a child become modified by the maturity of years? It did not seem to be probable that the given child’s reason was the real adult reason for self-reproach. I did not believe it. A woman forty years of age could not reproach herself on such grounds. And, even if this belief had been originally the real reason, as a matter of fact she had outgrown the child’s religious belief. She was a thorough-going agnostic. Further probing brought out the following:
Two years before her mother’s death, the patient, then thirteen years old, owing to her own carelessness and disobedience to her mother’s instructions, had contracted a “cold” which had been diagnosed as incipient phthisis. By the physician’s advice her mother took her to Europe for a “cure” and was detained there (as she believed) for two years, all on account of the child’s health. At the end of this period a serious, chronic disease from which the mother had long suffered was found to have so developed as to require an emergency operation. The patient still believed and argued that if her mother had not been compelled to take her abroad she (the mother) would have been under medical supervision at home, would have been operated upon long before and in all probability would not have died. Furthermore, as the patient had heedlessly and disobediently exposed herself to severe cold and thereby contracted the disease compelling the sojourn in Europe, she was to blame for the train of circumstances ending fatally.
All this was perfectly logical and true, assuming the facts as presented. Here then was the real reason for the patient’s persistent belief that her mother’s death was her fault and the persistent self-reproach. It also transpired that all this had weighed upon the child’s mind and that the child had likewise believed it. So the child had two reasons for self-reproach. One was neglecting to pray and the other was being the indirect cause of the fatal operation. Both were intensely believed in. The first based on the “eye of God” theory she had outgrown, but the other had persisted.
Summing up our study to this point: All these memories involving grief, suffering, self-reproach, bells and mother formed an unconscious setting which gave meaning to bells in towers and took part in the functioning to form a psychic whole. The conscious psychosis was first the emergence into consciousness of two elements only, the perception and the affect, and the fear was a reaction to self-reproach, a fear to face self-blame.
Now even if the mother’s death were logically, by a train of fortuitous circumstances, the patient’s fault, why did an otherwise intelligent woman lay so much stress upon an irresponsible child’s behavior? The child after all behaved no differently from other children. People do not consciously blame themselves in after life for the ultimate consequences of childhood’s heedlessness. According to common experience such self-reproaches do not last into adult life without some continuously acting factor.
A search in this case into the unconscious brought to light a persisting idea that when events in her life happened unfortunately it was due to her fault. It had cropped out again and again in connection with inconsequential as well as consequential matters. She had, for instance, been really unable on many occasions to leave home on pleasure trips for fear lest some accident might happen within the home and consequently it would be due to her fault; and if away she was in constant dread of something happening for which she would be to blame. It was not a fear of what might happen—an accident to the children, for example—but that it would be her fault. I have heard her, when some matter of apparently little concern had gone wrong, suddenly exclaim, “Was it my fault?” her voice and features manifesting a degree of emotion almost amounting to terror. When her brother died (still earlier, before her mother’s death) she had blamed herself for that death, as later with her mother, on the same religious grounds. This self-reproach for happenings, fancied as due to her fault, has frequently appeared in her dreams. It would take us too far afield to trace the origin and psychogenesis of this idea. Suffice to say, it can be followed back to early childhood when she was five or six years of age. She was a lonely, unhappy child. She thought herself ugly and unattractive and disliked and that so it always would be through life, and it was all her fault because she was ugly, as she thought.[[186]] The instinct of self-abasement (McDougall[[187]]) or negative self-feeling (Ribot) dominated the personality as the most insistent instinct and from its intensity within the self-regarding sentiment (McDougall) formed a sentiment of self-depreciation. She wanted to be liked and believed it to be her own fault that, as she fancied, she was not and never would be, and reproached herself accordingly. This sentiment of self depreciation with its impulse to render self-reproach has persisted, as with many people, all her life and has been fostered by unwise and thoughtless domestic criticism. The persistence to the present day of this impulse to self-reproach is shown in the following observation:
Quite recently this subject began to suffer from general fatigue, insomnia, distressing dreams, hysterical crying, indefinable anxiety and pseudo twilight states or extreme states of abstraction. In these states she became oblivious of her environment, did not hear the conversation going on about her, nor answer when directly spoken to. This became so noticeable that she became the jest of her companions. In these states her mind was always occupied with reveries (not fantasies), though mostly pleasant, regarding a very near relative who had died about six months previously. Her distressing dreams also concerned this relative. It appeared, therefore, probable, on the face of the symptoms that they were in some way related to this relative’s death.
Now it transpired, as I already knew, that the relative had died under somewhat tragic circumstances and that our subject’s experience during the last illness was unusually distressing and sorrowful. This experience, she asserted, she could not bear to speak or even think about and over and over again had refused to do so and put it out of her mind. She further asserted that her reason for this attitude was the distressing nature of the scenes in which she took part.
Now I did not believe that this was the true reason, although given in good faith. It was improbable on its face. To say that a grown woman, forty years of age, could not do what every woman can do, tolerate sorrowful memories simply because they were sorrowful, and must perforce put them out of her mind, is sheer nonsense. There must be some other reason.
On examining a dream it was found to be peculiar in one respect: It was not an imaginative or fantastic composition, but a detailed and precise living over again of the scenes at the death bed: that is to say, it was a sort of somnambulistic state. In recalling this dream[[188]] she could not for some time recover the ending. Finally it “broke through,” as she expressed it. The dream was as follows: First came many details of the vigil of the last night of the illness; then she went to her room and to bed to snatch a few moments’ sleep; she was waked up by the husband of the dying relative appearing in her room. He sat on the edge of her bed and said to her, “All is over.” Up to this point the facts of the dream were actual representations in great detail of the actual facts as they had occurred, but at this moment the dream presented a fact which had not occurred in the real scene; she suddenly, in the dream, sat up in bed and exclaimed, “My God! then I ought to have sent for the doctor!”
Here was the key to the intolerance for memories of the illness of the relative and the death-bed scene. What had happened was this: The question had arisen early in the illness whether or not a doctor should be sent for from London in consultation. The expense, owing to the distance, would have been considerable. The whole responsibility and decision rested upon the subject. Against the opinion of other relatives she had decided that it was inadvisable. After the fatal ending the question had arisen again whether or not she ought to have sent for the consultant and she had been tormented by the doubt as to whether she did right; was the fatal result her fault? Although she had reasoned with herself that her decision was good judgment and right still there had always lurked a doubt in her mind. She was also somewhat disturbed by the thought of what the husband’s opinion might be.
The real reason why she could not tolerate the memories of the last illness of this relative, and the psychogenesis of the symptoms now were plain: they were not grief but self-reproach with its instinct of self-abasement. The memories brought to her mind that the fault was her’s and with the thought came self-reproach. This self-reproach she was afraid of and unwilling to face. This fact she recognized and frankly confessed after the disclosures of the analysis.
Now follows the therapeutic sequel. The relative’s illness at the beginning was in no way of a dangerous nature and the proposed consultation had nothing to do with the question of danger to life. The death was due to purely an accidental factor and could not have been foreseen. When I assured her in hypnosis, with full explanation, that her decision had been medically sound, as it was, the change in her mental attitude was delightful to look upon. “Wasn’t it my fault! Wasn’t it my fault!” she exclaimed in excitement. Anxiety, dread, and depression gave way to exhilaration and joyousness. Thereupon she woke up completely relieved in mind, and retained the same feeling of joy, but without knowing the reason thereof. The explanation was repeated to her in the waking state and she then fully realized (as she did also in hypnosis) that her previous view was a pure subterfuge and fully appreciated the truth of the discovered reason for her inability to face her painful memories. The twilight states, the insomnia, and the distressing dreams, the anxiety, and other symptoms ceased at once.
Returning to the phobia for bells, in the light of all these facts, the patient’s belief that her mother’s death was her fault and the consequent self-reproach were obviously only a particular concrete example of a lifelong emotional tendency originating in the experiences of childhood to blame herself; and this tendency was the striving to express itself of the instinct of self-abasement (with the emotion of self-subjection) which, incorporated within “the self-regarding sentiment” (McDougall), was so intensely cultivated and had played so large a part in her life. Indeed this instinct had almost dominated her self-regarding sentiment and had given rise time and again to self-reproach for accidental happenings. It now specifically determined her attitude of mind toward the series of events which led up to the fatal climax and determined her judgment of self-condemnation and self-reproach. These last most probably received increased emotional force from the large number of roots in painful associations of antecedent experiences (particularly of childhood) in which the self-regarding sentiment, self-debasement, and self-reproaches were incorporated.[[189]] Nevertheless the fear was of a particular concrete self-reproach. The general tendency was of practical consequence only so far as it explained the particular point of view and might induce other self-reproaches.
As a general summary of this study it would appear that we can postulate a larger setting to the phobia than the grief inspiring experiences attending her mother’s death. The unconscious complex included the belief that she was to blame and the sentiment of self-reproach, and the whole gave a fuller meaning to the ringing of bells in a tower. The fear besides being a recurring association was also a reaction to the subconsciously excited setting of a fancied truth or self-accusation. Although excited by towers and steeples the fear was really of self-reproach. Towers, steeples, and bells not only in a sense symbolized her mother’s death, but her own fancied fault. It was in this sense and for this reason that she dared not face such objects. The conscious and the unconscious formed a psychic whole.[[190]]
Now in reaching these conclusions see how far we have traveled: Starting with an ostensible phobia for towers, we find it is more correctly one of ringing-of-bells, but without conscious association; then we reach a childhood’s tragedy; then a self-reproach on religious grounds; then a belief in a fault of childhood’s behavior culminating in a lifelong self-reproach—the causal factor and psychologically the true object of the phobia: and between this last self-reproach and the phobia no conscious association.
The therapeutic procedure and results are instructive. As the fear was induced by a belief in a fancied fault exciting a self-reproach, obviously if this belief should be destroyed the self-reproach must cease and the fear must disappear. Now when all the facts were brought to light, the patient, as is usual, recognized the truth of them. She also recognized fully and completely the real nature of the fear, of the self-blame and of the self-reproach. There remained no lingering doubt in her mind, nevertheless the bringing to “the full light of day” of all this did not cure the phobia. As the first procedure in the therapeusis it was pointed out that it was contrary to common sense to blame herself for the heedlessness of a child; that all children were disobedient; that she would have been a little prig if she had been the sort of a child that never disobeyed, and that she would not have blamed any other child who had behaved in a similar way under similar circumstances, and so on. She simply said that she recognized all this intellectually as true and yet, although it was the point of view which she would take with another person in the same situation, it did not in any way alter her attitude toward herself. In other words the bringing to the full light of day of the facts did not cure the phobia. It was necessary to change the setting of her belief. To do this either the alleged facts had to be shown to be not true or else new facts had to be introduced which would give them a new meaning. This, briefly told, was done in the following way:
She was put into light hypnosis in order that exact and detailed memories of her childhood might be brought out. Then, through her own memories, it was demonstrated, that is to say, the patient herself demonstrated, that there was considerable doubt about her having had phthisis at all; that she was not taken to the usual places of “cures” for phthisis but sojourned in the gay and pleasant cities and watering places of Europe; that her mother really staid in Europe because she enjoyed it and made an excuse of her daughter’s health not to come home; that she might have returned at any time but did not want to do so; and that the fault lay, if anywhere, with her physician at home. When this was brought out the patient remarked, “Why, of course, I see it now! My mother did not stay in Europe on account of my health but because she enjoyed it, and might have returned if she had wanted to. I never thought of that before! It was not my fault at all!” After coming out of hypnosis the facts as elicited were laid before the patient; she again said that she saw it all clearly, as she had done in hypnosis, and her whole point of view was changed.
The therapeutics, then, consisted in showing that the alleged facts upon which the patient’s logical conclusions had been based were false. The setting thereby was altered, and a new and true meaning given to the real facts. The result was towers and steeples no longer excited fears, the phobia ceased at once—an immediate cure.[[191]]
Type D. In this type the conscious psychosis consists of idea, meaning, affect, and physical disturbance. F. E. suffered from attacks of so-called “unreality” accompanied with intense fear. She was unable to give an intelligent explanation as to why she was afraid of the attacks—harmless in themselves—until it was brought out that there was in the background of her mind the thought that the attacks spelled insanity (or that she was likely to go insane) and also death. Following the attacks there was amnesia for these thoughts. Her fear really, then, was of insanity and death. The content of consciousness in the attacks contained the perception of herself as an insane person, thoughts which expressed the meaning of her attacks, and fear. (The usual physical disturbances of course accompanied the fear.) No amount of explanation of the harmlessness of the unreality syndrome sufficed to change her point of view, i.e., its meaning to her. But going further it was discovered that her self-regarding sentiment and her ideas of insanity and death were organized with a large number of fear-inspiring antecedent experiences which explained why she regarded the attacks as dangerous to her mentality and life; and why the biological instinct of fear was incorporated with the self-regarding sentiment. These experiences had long passed out of mind and there was no conscious association between them and her phobia, but they could be recalled as associative memories.[[192]] The unreality attacks had for her two meanings which were within the content of consciousness, viz., 1, insanity, and 2, death. The first was derived from (a) antecedent girlhood and later experiences which had engendered the unsophisticated belief that having the mind fixed on one subject, as was obtrusively and painfully the case at one time, meant insanity: and (b), from the fact that the bewildering, irreconcilable, absurd thoughts, conflicts, and emotions in which the unreality attacks culminated meant insanity.
The second meaning (death) was derived from (a) the previous fixed idea (just referred to), organized with that of insanity—namely, an unsophisticated medieval idea of hell which was conceived of as the equivalent of death and which had excited an intense horror of both; and (b) from the fact that in the unreality attacks there was a struggling for air; struggling was in her mind, the equivalent of convulsions;[[193]] convulsions of unconsciousness; and unconsciousness of death. All these various ideas and the intense fears which each gave rise to had become organized into a complex, and, in consequence of these antecedent experiences in which self took a prominent part, the instinct of fear—as I conceive the matter—became incorporated within the self-regarding sentiment. (Anything that aroused this sentiment tended to arouse the emotion of fear, as in another person it would tend to arouse the emotion of pride, or self-abasement.) At any rate this organized complex was the setting which gave the meaning to her phobia. There can be, I think, no manner of doubt about this. The patient herself explained her viewpoint through these ideas here briefly summarized. The only question is as to the mechanism of the phobia. Now as Type D, of which these cases are examples, differs clinically from the preceding three types only in the addition of one more element—meaning—to the conscious psychic whole, a consistent interpretation would seem to compel us to postulate also a functioning subconscious complex or setting and in this case of the antecedent experiences disclosed as a factor in the mechanism and a part of the psychic whole. Out of this complex emerged into consciousness the idea of insanity and death and fear as the meaning of the unreality syndrome, the whole constituting the phobia psychosis.
That there was in fact a subconsciously functioning process derived from this complex would seem to be almost conclusively shown by another phenomenon manifested. I refer to the vivid visualization of herself in a convulsion, struggling for air and manifesting fright, which she experienced in each attack. We have seen that such a visualization (i.e., a modified vision) is the expression (secondary images?) of a subconscious process (co-conscious ideas?). As a matter of fact this particular visualization was a pictorial representation of antecedent thoughts organized with thoughts of death and insanity and still conserved in the unconscious. We must believe, then, that it was these antecedent thoughts (in the first place her apprehension of inheriting Bright’s disease and convulsions from her father, and in the second place her conception of the unreality syndrome as a state which might possibly end in convulsions) which, functioning subconsciously, induced the quasi hallucinatory expression of themselves.[[194]] It is difficult to get away from the conclusion that the remainder of the setting from which the ideas of insanity and death were derived also functioned as a subconscious process. Whether this process was conscious or unconscious is a secondary question which we need not consider.
In weighing the probabilities of this interpretation we should bear in mind that there were two conscious beliefs of which the patient was fully aware and which were very real to her; namely, the liability of becoming insane and to convulsions and death. The conative force of the instinct of fear linked to such ideas is quite sufficient to drive them to expression when out of mind and subconscious. Or expressed differently we may say that the fear was a reaction to these ideas which the patient dared not face.
We ought not, however, to be too sweeping in our generalizations and go further than the facts warrant. We are not justified in concluding that the linking of an affect to an idea always includes a subconscious mechanism. On the contrary, as I have previously said, probably in the great majority of such experiences, aside from obsessions, no such mechanism is required to explain the facts.
The Inability to Voluntarily Modify Obsessions.—We are now in a position on this theory to look a little more deeply into the structure and mechanism of an obsession and thereby realize why it is that the unfortunate victims are so helpless to modify or control them. Indeed this behavior of the setting could be cited as another piece of circumstantial evidence for the theory that the setting is largely unconscious and that only a few elements of it enter the field of consciousness. If we simply explain to a person who has a true obsession, i.e., an insistent idea with a strong feeling tone, the falsity of the point of view, the explanation in many cases at least has no or little effect in changing the viewpoint, though the patient admits the correctness of the explanation. The patient cannot modify his idea even if he will. But if the original complex, which is hidden in the unconscious and which gives rise to the meaning of the idea, is discovered, and so altered that it takes on a new meaning and different feeling tones, the patient’s conscious idea becomes modified and ceases to be insistent. This would imply that the insistent idea is only an element in a larger unconscious complex which is the setting and unconsciously determines the viewpoint. The reason why the patient cannot voluntarily alter his viewpoint becomes intelligible by this theory, because that which determines it is unconscious and unknown. He may not even know what his point of view is, owing to the meaning being in the fringe of consciousness.
If this theory of the mechanism is soundly established the difficulty of correcting obsessions becomes obvious and intelligible. It is also obvious that there are theoretically two ways in which an obsession might be corrected.
1. A new setting with strong affects may be artificially created so that the perception acquires another equally strong meaning and interest.
2. The second way theoretically would be to bring into consciousness the setting and the past experiences of which the setting is a sifted residuum, and reform it by introducing new elements, including new emotions and feelings. In this way the old setting and point of view would become transformed and a new point of view substituted which would give a new meaning to the perception.
Now in practice both these theoretical methods of destroying an obsession are found to work, although both are not always equally efficacious in the same case. In less intense obsessions where the complex composing the setting is only partially and inconsequently submerged, and to a slight degree differentiated from the mass of conscious experiences, the first and simpler method practically is amply sufficient. We might say that the greater the degree to which the setting is conscious and the less the degree to which it has acquired, as an unconscious process, independent autonomous activity the more readily it may be transformed by this method.
On the other hand in the more intense obsessions, where a greater part of the setting is unconscious, has wide ramifications and has become differentiated as an independent autonomous process, the more difficult it is to suppress it and prevent its springing into activity whenever excited by some stimulus (such as an associated idea). In such instances the second method is more efficacious. It is obvious that, so long as the setting to a central idea remains organized and conserved in the unconscious, the corresponding perception and meaning are always liable under favoring conditions (such as fatigue, ill health, etc.) to be switched into consciousness and replace the new formed perception. This means of course a recurrence. Nevertheless medical experience from the beginning of time has shown that this is not necessarily or always the case. The technique, therefore, of the treatment of obsessions will vary from “simple explanations” (Taylor) without preliminary analysis to the more complicated and varying procedures of analysis and re-education in its many forms.
Affects.—Here a word of caution in the interpretation of emotional reactions is necessary. In the building of complexes, as we have seen, an affect becomes linked to an idea through an emotional experience. The recurrence of that idea always involves the recurrence of the affect. It is not a logical necessity that the original experience which occasioned the affect should always be postulated as a continuing subconscious process to account for the affect in association with the idea. It is quite possible, if not extremely probable, that in the simpler types, at least, of the emotional complexes, the association between the idea and affect becomes so firmly established that the conscious idea alone, without the coöperation of a subconscious process, is sufficient to awake the emotion; just as in Pawlow’s dogs the artificially formed association between a tactile stimulus and the salivary glands is sufficient to excite the glands to activity, or as in human beings the idea of a ship by pure association may determine fear and nausea, the sound of running water by the force of association may excite the bladder reflex, or an ocular stimulus the so-called hay fever complex. So in word-association reactions, when a word is accompanied by an affect-reaction the word itself may be sufficient to excite the reaction without assuming that an “unconscious complex has been struck.” The total mechanism of the process we are investigating must be determined in each case for itself.
In the study and formulation of psychological phenomena there is one common tendency and danger, and that is of making the phenomena too schematic and sharply defined, as if we were dealing with material objects. Mental processes are not only plastic but shifting, varying, unstable, and undergo modifications of structure almost from moment to moment. We describe a complex schematically as if it had a fixed, immutable, and well-defined structure. This is far from being the case. Although there may be a fairly fixed nucleus, the cluster, as a whole, is ill defined and undergoes considerable modification from moment to moment. New elements enter the cluster and replace or are added to those which previously took part in the composition. An analogy might be made with a large cluster of electric lights arranged about a central predominant light, but so arranged that individual lights could be switched in and cut out of the cluster at any moment and different colored lights substituted. The composition and structure of the cluster, and the intensity and color of the light, could be varied from moment to moment, yet the cluster as a cluster maintained. We might carry the analogy farther and imagine the cluster to be an advertising sign which had a meaning—the advertisement. This meaning might or might not be altered by the changes in the individual lamps.
The same indefiniteness pertains to the demarcation between the conscious and the subconscious. What was conscious at one moment may be subconscious the next and vice versa. Under normal conditions there is a continual shifting between the conscious and subconscious. I have made numerous investigations to determine this point, and the evidence is fairly precise, and to me convincing, that this shifting continually occurs,[[195]] as might well be inferred on theoretical grounds. Nor, excepting in special pathological and artificial dissociated conditions, is the distinction between the conscious and subconscious at any moment always sharp and precise; it is often rather a matter of vividness and shading, and whether a conscious state is in the focus of attention or in the fringe. Experimental observation confirms introspection in this respect.
In view of the foregoing we can now appreciate a fallacy which has been too commonly accepted in the interpretation of therapeutic facts. It is quite generally held that it is a necessity that the underlying unconscious complexes cannot be modified without bringing them to the “full light of day” by analysis. The facts of everyday observation do not justify this conclusion. The awakening of dormant memories of past experiences is mainly of importance for the purpose of giving us exact information of what we need to modify, not necessarily for the purpose of effecting the modification. Owing to the fluidity of complexes, whether unconscious or conscious, our conscious ideas can become incorporated in unconscious complexes. This means that any new setting in which we may incorporate our conscious ideas to give them a new meaning becomes effective in the associations which these ideas have as a dormant complex. The latter is able to assimilate from the conscious any new material offered to it. Practical therapeutics and everyday experience abundantly have shown this. I have accomplished this, and I believe every therapeutist has done the same time and again. We should be cautious not to overlook common experience in the enthusiasm for new theories and dramatic observations. The difficulty is in knowing what we want to modify, and for this purpose analytical investigations of one sort or another are of the highest assistance, because they furnish us with the required information. If we recover the memories of the unconscious complex our task is easier, as we can apply our art with the greater skill.
When we speak of a setting to an idea we are not entitled to think of it as a sharply defined group of ideas, or sharply limited subconscious process. When we identify it with the residua of past experiences we are not entitled, on the basis of exact knowledge, to arbitrarily make up a selected cluster of residua which shall exclude those and include these residual elements of antecedent associated experiences, and dogmatically postulate the composition of the complex which we call the setting. Analysis by the very limitations of the method fails to permit of such arbitrary selection, and synthetic methods are not sufficiently exact for the purpose. All we can say is that from the residua of various past experiences a complex is sifted out to become the setting. And even then no process is entirely autonomous and entirely removed from the interfering, directing, and coöperative influence of other processes. Even with simple and purely physiological processes, such as the knee jerk, this is true. Although the knee jerk may be schematically conceived as a simple reflex arc involving the peripheral nerves and the spinal cord, nevertheless other parts of the nervous system—the brain and the spinal cord—provide coöperative processes which take part, and under special conditions take a very active part, in modifying the phenomenon. While we are justified, for the clarifying purposes of exposition, in schematizing the phenomenon by selecting the spinal reflex as the predominant process, yet we do not overlook the coöperative processes which may control and modify the spinal reflex. If this is true of purely physiological processes, it is still more true of the enormously more complex processes of human intelligence.
We may say, then, not only that with our present knowledge and our present methods we are not able to precisely differentiate the settings of ideas, but that it is highly improbable that settings as complexes of residua are with any preciseness functionally entirely autonomous and removed from the influence of other associative processes.
We need further investigations into the psychology and processes of settings, and until we have wider and more exact knowledge it is well not to theorize and still more not to dogmatize. It is an inviting field which awaits the psychologist.
[183]. In making the analysis, therefore, I was in no way antagonistic in my mind to the Freudian hypothesis.
[184]. I want to emphasize this point, because certain students, assuming the well-known alleged sexual symbolism as the meaning of steeples and towers, will read and have read such an interpretation into this phobia. As a matter of fact, although these objects had been originally alleged by the subject herself to be the object of the fear it was done thoughtlessly as the result of careless introspection. Later she clearly distinguished the true object. They were no more the object than the churches and schoolhouses themselves. They bore an incidental association only, and only indicated where the ringing of bells might be expected to be heard, having been an element in the original episode. Nor were bells, qua bells, the object of the phobia, but the ringing-of-bells of the kind that recalled the mother’s death. In other words, the fear was of bells with a particular meaning. Nor was the fear absolutely limited to tower-bells, for it transpired that the subject had refrained from having, as she desired, an alarm bell arranged in her house in the country (in case of fire, etc.), because of her phobia. (This note is perhaps made necessary by the violent shaking of the heads of my Freudian friends that I noticed at this point during the presentation of this case before the American Psychopathological Association.) See Jour. Abn. Psychol., Oct.-Nov., 1913.
[185]. This idea had its origin in a child’s fairy tale, and had been fostered by the governess as a useful expedient in enforcing good behavior. The child accepting the fairy legend believed the Eye of God was always on her and every one in the world, and observed all that each did or omitted to do. The legend excited her imagination, and she used to think about it and wonder how God could keep His eye on so many people as there were in the world. At a still earlier age, when she was about eight, she had thought her little brother’s death was also her fault, because she had neglected one night, at the time of his illness, God’s eye being upon her, to say her prayers. For a long time afterward she suffered similarly from self-reproach. It is interesting to compare the outgrowing with maturity of this self-reproach with the persistence of the later one, evidently owing to the reasons given in the text.
[186]. Another example of this idea and of the way it induced a psychosis is the following: She had an intense dislike to hearing the sound of running water. This sound induced an intense feeling of unhappiness and loneliness. This feeling was so intense that whenever she heard the sound of running water she endeavored to get away from it. The sound of a fountain or rainwater running from a roof, for example, would cause such unpleasant feelings that she would change her sleeping room to avoid them. Likewise drawing water to fill the bathtub was so unpleasant that she would insist upon the door being closed to exclude the sound. She could give no explanation of this psychosis. It was discovered in the following way: She had been desirous of finding out the cause, and we had discussed the subject. I had promised that I would unravel the matter in due time, after the other phobia had been cured. I then hypnotized her and, while she was in hypnosis and just after we had completed the other problem, she remarked that a memory of the running water association was on the verge of emerging into her mind. She could not get it for some time, and then, after some effort, it suddenly emerged. She described it as follows: “It was at Bar Harbor. She was about eight years of age. There was a brook there called Duck Brook. The older girls used to go up there on Sundays for a walk with the boys. I went with them one Sunday, accompanied by the governess, and was standing by the brook with a boy. It was a very noisy brook, the water running down from the hillside. While I was standing by the brook, watching the running water, the boy left me to join the other girls, who had gone off. I thought that was the way it would always be in life; that I was ugly, and that they would never stay with me. I felt lonely and unhappy. During that summer I would not join parties of the same kind, fearing or feeling that the same thing would happen. I stayed at home by myself, and when I refused to go it was attributed to sullenness. They did not know my real reasons. Ever since I have been unable to bear the sound of running water, which produces the feeling of unhappiness and loneliness, the same feeling that I had at that time. I thought then that it was all my fault, because I was ugly.” It was then tentatively pointed out at some length to the subject that as she now knew all the facts which had been brought to the “full light of day,” etc., she, of course, would no longer have her former unpleasant emotions from the sound of running water. Hereupon, to put the question to the test, I reached out my hand and poured some water from a caraffe, by chance standing by, into a tumbler, letting the water fall from a height to make a sound. At once she manifested discomfort, and sought to restrain me with her hand. Plainly the setting had to be changed. This was easily done by leading her to see that her childhood’s ideas had been proven by life’s experiences to be false. When this became apparent she laughed at herself, and the psychosis ceased at once.
[187]. Social Psychology.
[188]. This was done in hypnosis, the dream being forgotten when awake.
[189]. For instance, when I came to the therapeutics I found in abstraction that the patient did not want to give up her point of view “because,” as she said, “it forms an excuse so that when I feel lonely, if there is nothing else to be lonely about, I have that memory and point of view to fall back upon as something to justify my crying and feeling lonely and blue.”
When she now feels blue and cries, as happens occasionally, and she asks herself Why? then she drifts back in her mind to childhood and remembers she was lonely and then cries the harder. Then she vaguely thinks of her mother’s death being her fault. She likes therefore to hold on to this as a peg on which to hang any present feeling of blueness and loneliness.
[190]. Some, I have no doubt, will insist upon seeing in towers with bells a sexual symbol, and in the self-reproach a reaction to a repressed infantile or other sexual wish. But I cannot accede to this view first, because a tower was not only not the real object of the phobia, but not even the alleged object, which was the ringing of bells; secondly, because it is an unnecessary postulate unsupported by evidence, and, thirdly, because in fact, the associative memories of early life were conspicuously free from sex knowledge, wishes, curiosity, episodes and imaginings, nor was there any evidence of the so-called “mother complex” or “father-complex,” or any other sexual complex that I could find after a most exhaustive probing. The impulses of instincts other than sexual are sufficient to induce psychical trauma, insistent ideas, and emotion. To hold otherwise is to substitute dogma for the evidence of experience.
[191]. It is worth noting that between the bringing to the “full light of day” the facts furnished by the analysis and the cure a full year and a half elapsed, during which the phobia continued. The “cure” was effected at one sitting. The original study was undertaken on purely psychological grounds; the cure for the purpose of completing the study.
[192]. This account will be clearer if read in connection with the full analysis (“A Clinical Study of a Case of Phobia”), published in the Jour, of Abn. Psychol., October-November, 1912.
[193]. She was apprehensive of having inherited Bright’s disease from her father, who had convulsions.
[194]. It is quite possible that this subconscious process induced the unreality syndrome in which struggling for air was the salient symptom.
[195]. I am excluding conditions like split personalities, automatic writing, etc., and refer rather to normal mental processes.
LECTURE XIV
THE PHYSIOLOGICAL MANIFESTATIONS OF EMOTION
Emotion,[[196]] more particularly fear, plays so large a part in the psychogenesis and symptomatology of the psychoses that it is desirable to have a clear realization of its physiological and psychological manifestations and of the disturbances of the organism which it can induce. It is not necessary for our purpose to discuss the various theories of the nature of emotion that have been propounded; we need deal only with the manifestations of emotion and its effect upon the organism.[[197]] We will consider the physiological manifestations first.
When a strong emotion is awakened in consciousness there are a large number of physiological reactions, for the most part visceral, which can be noted. Some of these may be graphically recorded and measured by means of instruments of precision. These physiological reactions are numerous and have been extensively described by Féré[[198]] among others. The earlier work of Mosso upon the disturbances of the respiration and vasomotor apparatus induced by sensory stimulation is well known.
More recently considerable experimental work has been done, particularly by German investigators, to determine the influence of affective states upon the circulation and respiration.
Modifications of the peripheral circulation, manifested through pallor or turgescence of the skin and measured by changes recorded by the plethismograph in the volume of the limbs; modifications of the volume of the heart and of the rhythm and force of the beats recorded by the sphygmograph, and of arterial tension measured by the sphygmomonometer are common phenomena. (Fear is more particularly accompanied by pallor, and shame by turgescence—blushing. Anger in some is manifested by pallor and in others by turgescence, and so on.) Changes in rate of the heart-beats belong to popular knowledge. It is not so well known, even to physiologists that the volume of the heart may be affected by emotion. In several series of observations made under conditions of emotional excitement upon a large number of healthy men, candidates for civil service appointments, I recorded in a high percentage not only alterations in the rate and rhythm and force of the heart-beat, but temporary dilatation of the heart lasting during the period of excitement.[[199]] This dilatation in some cases was sufficient to lead to insufficiency of the mitral valve and to give rise to murmurs. The examination was purposely conducted so as to induce a high degree of emotional excitement, at least in many men. In another series of observations (not published) the arterial tension was measured, and it was found, as would be expected, that an increase of tension accompanied the cardiac excitation under emotion.[[200]]
Fig. 2. J., acute katatonic stupor. b is a wave selected from the
series in which 6 is sudden call by name. The galvanometer curve (a)
is slight, but the change in the pneumograph curve is notable.
(Peterson and Jung.[[201]])
As to the respiratory apparatus the effect of emotion in altering the rate and depth of respiration may be shown by the pneumograph; by this method the effects of slight emotion that otherwise would escape observation may be detected. Such a disturbance of respiration is shown in the tracing, Fig. 2.
That emotion will profoundly affect the respiration has of course been common knowledge from time immemorial, and has been made use of by writers of fiction and actors for dramatic effect. The same may be said of modifications of the functioning of the whole respiratory apparatus, including the nostrils and the mouth; and likewise of the decrease or increase of secretions (dryness of the mouth from fear, and “foaming” from anger). These are among the well known physiological effects of emotions.
Increase of sweat sometimes amounting to an outpour, and alterations in the amount of the various glandular secretions (salivary, gastric, etc.), and rigor are important phenomena.
The remarkable researches of Pawlow[[202]] and his co-workers in Russia on the work of the digestive glands, and those of Cannon[[203]] in America on the movements of the stomach and intestines have revealed that these functions are influenced in an astonishing degree by psychical factors.
Although it has long been known that the sight of food under certain conditions would call forth a secretion of gastric juice in a hungry dog (Bidder and Smith, 1852), and common observation has told us that emotion strongly affects the gastrointestinal functions, increasing or diminishing the secretions of saliva and gastric juice, and even producing dyspeptic disturbances and diarrhœa, it has remained for Pawlow and his co-workers to demonstrate the important part which the “appetite,” as a psychical state, plays in the process of digestion. In hungry dogs a large quantity of gastric juice, rich in ferment, is poured out when food is swallowed, and even at the sight of food, and it was proved that this outpouring was due to psychical influences. Simply teasing and tempting the animal with food cause secretions, and food associations in the environment may have the same effect. “If the dog has not eaten for a long time every movement, the going out of the room, the appearance of the attendant who ordinarily feeds the animal—in a word, every triviality—may give rise to excitation of the gastric glands.” (Pawlow, p. 73.) This first secreted juice is called “appetite juice,” and is an important factor in the complicated process of digestion. “The appetite is the first and mightiest exciter of the secretory nerves of the stomach.” (Pawlow, p. 75.) Pawlow’s results have been confirmed in man by Hornborg, Umber, Bickel, and Cade and Latarjet. The mere chewing of appetizing food, for instance, is followed by a copious discharge of gastric juice, while chewing of rubber and distasteful substances has a negative result. Depressing emotions inhibit the secretion of juice (Bickel). More than this, Cannon,[[204]] in his very remarkable experiments on the movements of the stomach and intestines, found that in animals (cat, rabbit, dog, etc.), gastric peristalsis is stopped whenever the animal manifests signs of rage, distress, or even anxiety. “Any signs of emotional disturbance, even the restlessness and continual mewing which may be taken to indicate uneasiness and discomfort, were accompanied in the cat by total cessation of the segmentation movements of the small intestines, and of antiperistalsis in the proximal colon.” Bickel and Sasaki have confirmed in dogs these emotional effects obtained by Pawlow and Cannon.
The effect of the emotions on the digestive processes is so important from the standpoint of clinical medicine that I quote the following summary of published observations from Cannon: "Hornborg found that when the boy whom he studied chewed agreeable food a more or less active secretion of the gastric juice was started, whereas the chewing of indifferent material was without influence.
"Not only is it true that normal secretion is favored by pleasurable sensations during mastication, but also that unpleasant feelings, such as vexation and some of the major emotions, are accompanied by a failure of secretion. Thus Hornborg was unable to confirm in his patient the observation of Pawlow that mere sight of food to a hungry subject causes the flow of gastric juice. Hornborg explains the difference between his and Pawlow’s results by the difference in the reaction of the subjects to the situation. When food was shown, but withheld, Pawlow’s hungry dogs were all eagerness to secure it, and the juice at once began to flow. Hornborg’s little boy, on the contrary, became vexed when he could not eat at once, and began to cry; then no secretion appeared. Bogen also reports that his patient, a child, aged three and a half years, sometimes fell into such a passion in consequence of vain hoping for food, that the giving of the food, after calming the child, was not followed by any secretion of the gastric juice.
"The observations of Bickel and Sasaki confirm and define more precisely the inhibitory effects of violent emotion on gastric secretion. They studied these effects on a dog with an œsophageal fistula, and with a side pouch of the stomach which, according to Pawlow’s method, opened only to the exterior. If the animal was permitted to eat while the œsophageal fistula was open the food passed out through the fistula and did not go to the stomach. Bickel and Sasaki confirmed the observation of Pawlow that this sham feeding is attended by a copious flow of gastric juice, a true ‘psychic secretion,’ resulting from the pleasurable taste of the food. In a typical instance the sham feeding lasted five minutes, and the secretion continued for twenty minutes, during which time 66.7 c. c. of pure gastric juice was produced.
"On another day a cat was brought into the presence of the dog, whereupon the dog flew into a great fury. The cat was soon removed, and the dog pacified. Now the dog was again given the sham feeding for five minutes. In spite of the fact that the animal was hungry and ate eagerly, there was no secretion worthy of mention. During a period of twenty minutes, corresponding to the previous observation, only 9 c. c. of acid fluid was produced, and this was rich in mucus. It is evident that in the dog, as in the boy observed by Bogen, strong emotions can so profoundly disarrange the mechanisms of secretion that the natural nervous excitation accompanying the taking of food cannot cause the normal flow.
"On another occasion Bickel and Sasaki started gastric secretion in the dog by sham feeding, and when the flow of gastric juice had reached a certain height the dog was infuriated for five minutes by the presence of the cat. During the next fifteen minutes there appeared only a few drops of a very mucous secretion. Evidently in this instance a physiological process, started as an accompaniment of a psychic state quietly pleasurable in character, was almost entirely stopped by another psychic state violent in character.
"It is noteworthy that in both the positive and negative results of the emotional excitement illustrated in Bickel and Sasaki’s dog the effects persisted long after the removal of the exciting condition. This fact Bickel was able to confirm in a girl with œsophageal and gastric fistulas; the gastric secretion long outlasted the period of eating, although no food entered the stomach. The importance of these observations to personal economics is too obvious to require elaboration.
“Not only are the secretory activities of the stomach unfavorably affected by strong emotions; the movements of the stomach as well, and, indeed, the movements of almost the entire alimentary canal, are wholly stopped during excitement.”[[205]]
So you see that the proverb, “Better a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith,” has a physiological as well as a moral basis.
Nearly any sensory or psychical stimulus can be artificially made to excite the secretion of saliva as determined by experimentation on animals by Pawlow.
It is probable that all the ductless glands (thyroid, suprarenal, etc.), are likewise under the influence of the emotions. The suprarenal glands secrete a substance which in almost infinitesimal doses has a powerful effect upon the heart and blood vessels, increasing the force of the former and contracting the peripheral arterioles. The recent observations of Cannon and de la Paz have demonstrated in the cat that under the influence of fear or anger an increase of this substance is poured into the circulation.[[206]] Cannon, Shohl and Wright have also demonstrated that the glycosuria which was known to occur in animals experimented upon in the laboratory is due (in cats) to the influence of the emotions, very probably discharging through the sympathetic system on the adrenal glands and increasing their secretion.[[207]] The glycosuria is undoubtedly due to an increase of sugar in the blood. It is interesting to note, in this connection, that there is considerable clinical evidence that indicates that some cases of diabetes and glycosuria have an emotional origin. The same is true of disease of the thyroid gland (exophthalmic goiter).
Most of the viscera are innervated by the sympathetic system, and the visceral manifestations of emotion indicate the dominance of sympathetic impulses. “When, for example, a cat becomes frightened, the pupils dilate, the stomach and intestines are inhibited, the heart beats rapidly, the hairs of the back and tail stand erect—all signs of nervous discharge along sympathetic paths” (Cannon). Cannon and his co-workers have further made the acute suggestion that, as adrenalin itself is capable of working the effects evoked by sympathetic stimulation, “the persistence of the emotional state, after the exciting object has disappeared, can be explained” by the persistence of the adrenalin in the blood. There is reason to believe that some of the adrenal secretion set free by nervous stimulation returning in the blood stream to the glands stimulates them to further activity, and this would tend to continue the emotional effect after the emotion has subsided. “Indeed it was the lasting effect of excitement in digestive processes which suggested” to Cannon his investigations.[[208]]
According to Féré[[209]] the pupils may dilate under the influence of asthenic emotions and contract with sthenic emotions. However that may be, the dilatation of the pupils during states of fear may be demonstrated in animals.
exert force of which he is ordinarily incapable. Or this energy, instead of being discharged into the channels being made use of by the will, and so augmenting its effects, may be so discharged as to inhibit the will, and produce paralysis of the will and muscular action.
These muscular vasomotor and secretory changes need not surprise us, as indeed they have a biological meaning. As Sherrington[[210]] has pointed out, “there is a strong bond between emotion and muscular action. Emotion ‘moves’ us, hence the word itself. If developed in intensity, it impels toward vigorous movement. Every vigorous movement of the body ... involves also the less noticeable co-operation of the viscera, especially of the circulatory and respiratory [and, I would add, the secretory glands of the skin]. The extra demand made upon the muscles that move the frame involves a heightened action of the nutrient organs which supply to the muscles the material for their energy”; and also involves a heightened action of the sweat glands to maintain the thermic equilibrium. “We should expect,” Sherrington remarks, “visceral action to occur along with the muscular expression of emotion,” and we should expect, it may be added, that through this mechanism emotion should become integrated with vasomotor, secretory, and other visceral functions.
Another physiological effect of emotion ought to be mentioned, as of recent years it has been the object of much and intensive study by numerous students and has been frequently made use of in the clinical study of mental derangements and in the study of subconscious phenomena. I refer to the so-called “psycho-galvanic reflex.” As an outcome of all the investigations which have been made by numerous students into this phenomenon, it now seems clear that there are two types of galvanic reactions, distinct from each other, which can be recognized. The one type first described by Féré[[211]] consists in an increase, brought about by emotion, of a galvanic current made to pass through the body from a galvanic cell. If a very sensitive galvanometer is put in circuit with the body and such a cell, a certain deviation of the needle of course may be noted varying in amplitude according to the resistance of the body. Now, if an idea associated with emotion—i.e., possessing a sufficient amount of affective tone—is made to enter the consciousness of the person experimented upon, there is observed an increased deflection of the needle, showing an increase of current under the influence of the emotion. The generally accepted interpretation of this increase is that it is due to diminished resistance of the skin (with which the electrodes are in contact) caused by an increase of the secretions of the sweat glands. A similar increase of current follows various sensory stimulations, such as the pricking of a pin, loud noises, etc. It may be interesting for historical reasons to quote here Féré’s statement of his observations, as they seem to be generally overlooked. In his volume, “La Pathologie des Emotions,” in 1892, he thus sums up his earlier and later observations: "I then produce various sensory stimulations—visual (colored glasses), auditory (tuning fork), gustatory, olfactory, etc. Whereupon there results a sudden deviation of the needle of the galvanometer which, for the strongest stimulations, may travel fifteen divisions (milliampères). The same deviation may also be produced under the influence of sthenic emotions, that is to say, it is produced under all the conditions where I have previously noticed an augmentation of the size of the limbs, made evident through the plethysmograph. Absence of stimulation, on the contrary, increases the resistance; in one subject the deviation was reduced by simply closing the eyes.
“Since these facts were first described at the Biological Society I have been enabled to make more exact observations by using the process recommended by A. Vigouroux (De la résistance électrique chez[chez] les mélancoliques, Th. 1890, p. 17), and I have ascertained that under the influence of painful emotions or tonic emotions the electrical resistance may, in hystericals, instantaneously vary from 4,000 to 60,000 ohms.”
It will be noticed that Féré attributed the variations of the current to variations of resistance of the body induced by sensations and emotions.
The method of obtaining the psycho-galvanic reaction may be varied in many ways, the underlying principle being the same, namely, the arousing of an emotion of some kind. This may be simply through imagined ideas, or by expectant attention, sensory stimulation, suggested thoughts, verbal stimuli, etc. According to Peterson and Jung,[[212]] “excluding the effect of attention, we find that every stimulus accompanied by an emotion causes a rise in the electric curve, and directly in proportion to the liveliness and actuality of the emotion aroused. The galvanometer is therefore a measurer of the amount of emotional tone, and becomes a new instrument of precision in psychological research.” This last statement can hardly be said to be justified, as we have no means of measuring the “liveliness and actuality” of an emotion and, therefore, of co-relating it with a galvanic current, nor have we any grounds for assuming that the secretion of sweat (upon which the diminished resistance of the body presumably depends) is proportionate to the liveliness of the emotion, or, indeed, even that it always occurs. It is enough to say that the galvanic current is in general a means of detecting the presence of emotion.
The second type of galvanic reaction, as shown by Sidis and Kalmus,[[213]] does not depend upon the diminished resistance of the body to a galvanic current passing from without through the body, but is a current originating within the body under the influence of emotion. Sidis and Kalmus concluded that “active psycho-physiological processes, sensory and emotional processes, with the exception of purely ideational ones, initiated in a living organism, bring about electromotive forces with consequent galvanometric deflections.” In a later series of experiments Sidis and Nelson[[214]] came to the conclusion that the origin of the electromotive force causing the galvanic deflection was in the muscles.[[215]] Wells and Forbes,[[216]] on the other hand, conclude from their own investigation that the origin of the galvanic current is to be found in the sweat gland activity and believe the muscular origin improbable. From a clinical standpoint the question is unimportant.
Sensory disturbances. On the sensory side the effect of emotions, particularly unpleasant ones, in awakening “thrills” and all sorts of sensations in different parts of the body is a matter of everyday observation. Nausea, dizziness, headache, pains of different kinds are common accompaniments. Such reactions, however, largely vary as idiosyncrasies of the individual, and are obviously not open to experimentation or measurement. Whether they should be spoken of as physiological or aberrant reactions is a matter of terminology. They are, however, of common occurrence. In pathological conditions disagreeable sensations accompanying fear, grief, disgust, and other distressing forms of emotion often play a prominent part, and as symptoms contribute to the syndromes of the psychosis. The following quaintly described case quoted by Cannon from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is as good as a more modern illustration: “A gentlewoman of the same city saw a fat hog cut up; when the entrails were opened, and a noisome savour offended her nose, she much disliked, and would not longer abide; a physician in presence told her, as that hog, so was she full of filthy excrements, and aggravated the matter by some other loathsome instances, insomuch this nice gentlewoman apprehended it so deeply that she fell forthwith a vomiting; was so mightily distempered in mind and body that, with all his art and persuasion, for some months after, he could not restore her to herself again; she could not forget or remove the object out of her sight.” Cannon remarks: “Truly, here was a moving circle of causation, in which the physician himself probably played the part of a recurrent augmenter of the trouble. The first disgust disturbed the stomach, and the disturbance of the stomach, in turn, aroused in the mind greater disgust, and thus between them the influences continued to and fro until digestion was impaired and serious functional derangement supervened. The stomach is ‘king of the belly,’ quotes Burton, ‘for if he is affected all the rest suffer with him.’”
Such cases could be multiplied many fold from the records of every psychopathologist. I happen by chance to be interrupted while writing this page by a patient who presents herself suffering from a phobia of fainting. When this fear (possibly with other emotions) is awakened she is attacked by nausea and eructation of the gastric contents, and, if she takes food, by vomiting of the meal. (Owing to a misunderstanding of the true pathology by her physician, her stomach was washed out constantly for a period of two years without relief!)
General psychopathology.—In the light of all these well-known physiological effects of emotion it is apparent that when an idea possessing a strong emotional tone, such as fear or its variants, enters consciousness, it is accompanied by a complex of physiological reactions. In other words, fear, as a biological reaction of the organism to a stimulus, does not consist of the psychical element alone, but includes a large syndrome of physiological processes. We can, indeed, theoretically construct a schema which would represent the emotional reaction. This schema would undoubtedly vary in detail in particular cases, according to the excitability of the different visceral functions involved in different individuals and to the mixture of the emotions taking part (fear, disgust, shame, anger, etc.). As one type, for instance, of a schema, taking only the most obtrusive phenomena which do not require special technique for their detection, we would have:
Fear (or one of its variants, anxiety, apprehension, etc., or a compound emotion that includes fear).
Inhibition of thought (confusion).
Pallor of the skin.
Increased perspiration.
Cardiac palpitation.
Respiratory disturbances.
Tremor.
Muscular weakness.
Gastric and intestinal disturbances.
(Blushing or congestion of the skin would replace pallor if the fear was represented or accompanied by shame or bashfulness, etc. (self-debasement and self-consciousness),[[217]] or if the affective state was anger.)
On the sensory side we would have various paresthesiæ varying with the idiosyncrasies of the individual, and apparently dependent upon the paths through which the emotional energy is discharged:
“Thrills.”
Feeling of oppression in the chest.
Headache.
Nausea (with or without vomiting).
Pains, fatigue, etc.
It is of practical importance to note that attacks of powerful emotions, according to common experience, are apt to be followed by exhaustion; consequently in morbid fears fatigue is a frequent sequela.