It is to be assumed that the celebrated specialist was a specialist in diseases of the mind. If that is so, the writer is in error. No celebrated alienist of New York has died insane within the past quarter of a century. In the second place, there has never been a celebrated alienist in New York who would fit the description,
“forty, rich, famous, living in an elegant home amid exquisite surroundings on University Heights with his wife, one of the most beautiful women I ever looked upon, a statuesque blonde of astounding loveliness.”
save in the last qualification. Each one of them has had a beautiful wife, but none “a statuesque blonde of astounding loveliness.”
If the writer consulted a physician who made that statement to him, he had the misfortune not only to be insane himself but to seek the counsel of a physician who was also insane.
The writer of the article says that he will attempt seriously to show that the centre of the will is distinct from the centre of the mind, and is a separately functioning organ; but in the stress of relating his experiences he forgot to do so. In fact, there would be no more satisfactory way of estimating his mental possessions and equilibrium than from an examination of this written document.
Those who are experienced with the insane give great diagnostic weight to their writings, not only the orthography and the syntax, but the sequence of thought, the rhythm of expression, the continuity of narrative, the pertinency of reference, the credibility of citation or example, the discursiveness of the narrative, and the way in which the writer develops and finally presents the central thought or idea. All these and other features of the written document are evidences to which he gives great weight. “Up from Insanity” is neither sequential in thought nor in narrative. Nearly every paragraph furnishes evidence of the distractibility of the writer's mind, and the discursiveness of the entire article amounts almost to rambling. It is marked with journalese jargon which reminds me of the newspaper accounts of the kidnapping or spiriting from Cuba of Señorita Cisneros.
The pith of the human document that we are discussing is that “every man's strength wells up from some centre deeper in him than the brain.” It does. A man's personality at any moment is the sum total of all the reactions of every cell or physiological unit in his body; but acceptance of this fact does not alter the universally accepted belief that the brain is the organ of mind. To have it said by a psychopathic individual that his restoration to a normal mental state came after he had observed “that a double nerve centre at the base of the spine had been aroused and the function of these centres brought balance and poise and strength, which was instantly reflected in every movement and thought, and that these basic nerve centres are the centre of the will,” neither proves that there is such a centre nor makes it at all probable that it exists.
Why such humanistic and scientific puerilities as these should have been taken seriously is not easy to understand.
Our knowledge concerning the human mind is not by any means complete or satisfactory, but there are certain things about it which we know. For instance, we know that there is a conscious mind and a subconscious mind. The discovery in 1866 of the “subliminal consciousness” of the psychologist (the “unconscious mind” of the psychoanalyst), was called by William James the greatest discovery in modern psychology. We know that the person the individual thinks he is is the equivalent of his conscious mind. The man that he really is is the man his unconscious mind makes him. The face that he sees when he looks in the glass is the face that goes with his conscious mind. The face that others see is the one that fits his unconscious mind. Anyone who would observe the revelations of that unconscious mind in literature can readily gratify his wish by reading the “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” that remarkable presentation by James Joyce.
Many believe today that a man's ego or individuality is the equivalent of this unconscious mind; that therein lies the power of genius, the source of vision, the springs of inspiration that gush forth in prophecy, in artistic creation, in invention.