Recessive states, becoming marginal and subconscious, lapse from voluntary control, they cannot be recalled deliberately and consciously by the activities of voluntary, recognitive, associative memories, constituting the mental life of personality, and hence may be regarded as mental systems in a state of dissociation. The lapsed states are present subconsciously when not completely blurred and obliterated by the process of decay or regression.
Dissociated, subconscious states, when affected by the impulse of self-preservation and the fear instinct, tend to become parasitic, and like malignant growths may suck the life energy of the affected individual. Under such conditions we have psychopathic, subconscious, dissociated states.
VIII. The Principle of Irradiation and Diffusion
In the dormant, subconscious states the fear instinct gradually extends to other subconscious states. The fear instinct acts like a malignant growth, like a fermenting enzyme. The subconscious fear instinct gradually infiltrates, diffuses, irradiates its affective state throughout the subconscious life of the patient, finally giving rise to a psychopathic disposition with its selfishness, apparent repressions, apprehension, anxiety, anguish, terror, and panic. This may also give rise to the general psychopathic character of doubt, indecision, and conflicting states, all being determined by the underlying fear instinct.
IX. The Principle of Differentiation
With the growth of the impulse of self preservation and with the development of an exaggerated fear instinct, the individual becomes more and more neurotic and psychopathic. This general, neurotic, mental state attaches itself to various events in the life of the individual. The psychopathic disposition keeps on progressing from one event to another. Each one may be regarded as a separate fear state, or phobia. Finally the disposition may settle on the last event in the patient’s life experience. This last event may often become the nucleus, or rather the apparent nucleus of the neurosis.
The last experience appears to be central. As a matter of fact there is a great number of fear states or of phobias in the neurotic patient. A few only appear to predominate in the network of fear events. The network of fears is woven into an incongruous whole by the impulse of self-preservation and the fear instinct. This network becomes differentiated into a tangle of numerous fear states.
X. The Principle of Dominance
The last fear states or Ultimate Fear States which stand out clearly and distinctly in the patient’s mind become the leading, the dominant abnormal, pathological states. The patient thinks that they are the real source of all his troubles, and if they were removed he would be cured. As a matter of fact the ultimate states are not causes, but occasions. The real causes of the psychopathic constitution are the exaggerated impulse of self-preservation and the intensified fear instinct.