Subconscious traumatic memories.—When an emotional complex has once been organized by an emotional trauma and more or less dissociated from the personality by the conflicting emotional impulses, it is conserved as a neurogram more or less isolated. The fact of amnesia for the experience is evidence of its isolation in that it cannot be awakened and synthesized with the personal consciousness. Now, given such an isolated neurogram, observation shows that it may be excited to autonomous subconscious activity by associative stimuli of one kind or another. It thus becomes an emotional subconscious memory-process and may by further incubation and elaboration induce phenomena of one kind or another.
This is readily understood when it is remembered that such a memory, or perhaps more precisely speaking its neurogram, is organized with one or more emotional dispositions (instincts) and these dispositions by their impulsive forces tend when stimulated to awaken the memory and carry its ideas to fulfillment. The subconscious memory thus acquires a striving to fulfil its aim. We ought to distinguish in this mechanism between the isolation of the neurogram and that of the process. The former is antecedent to the latter.
The phenomena which may be induced by such a subconscious memory may be of all kinds such as we have seen are induced by subconscious processes and emotions—hallucinations, various motor phenomena, disturbances of conscious thought, dreams and those phenomena which we have seen are the physiological and psychological manifestation of emotion and its conflicts, etc.
Undoubtedly the mental feebleness, manifested by a feeling of exhaustion or fatigue, which so frequently is the sequel of intense conscious emotion, favors the excitation to activity of such subconscious autonomous processes or memory when antecedent isolation has occurred. This enfeeblement of personality probably is the more marked the larger the systems included in the dissociation. Certain it is that in fatigued states, whether induced by physical or mental “storm and stress,” subconscious processes become more readily excited. The greater the dissociation the greater the mental instability and liability to autonomous processes. Time and again it was noted, for instance in the case of Miss B. and B. C. A., that when the primary personality was exhausted by physical and emotional strain, the subconscious personality was able to manifest autonomous activity producing all sorts of phenomena (when it could not do so in conditions of mental health) even to inhibiting the whole primary personality.[[259]] The direct testimony of the subconscious personality was to the same effect.
Mental confusion.—Fortunate is the person who has never felt embarrassment when the attention of others has been directed to himself, or when some act or thought which he wished to conceal has become patent to others, or when called upon without warning to make a speech in public. Unless one is endowed with extraordinary self-assurance he will become, under such or similar circumstances, bashful, self-conscious, and shy, his thought confused, and he will find it difficult to respond with ready tongue. Associated ideas à propos of the matter in hand fail to enter consciousness, his thoughts become blocked even to his mind becoming a blank; he hesitates, stammers, and stands dumb, or too many ideas, in disorderly fashion and without apparent logical relation, crowd in and he is unable to make selection of the proper words. In short, his mind becomes confused, perhaps even to the extent of dizziness. The ideas that do arise are inadequate and are likely to be inappropriate, painful, and perhaps suspicious. The dominating emotion is early reinforced by the awakening of its ally, the fear instinct, with all its physiological manifestations. Then tremor, palpitation, perspiration, and vasomotor disturbances break out. Shame may be added to the emotional state.
1. This reaction becomes intelligible if we regard it as one of conflict resulting in painful bashfulness and shame, inhibition of thought; the excitation of painful ideas, amnesia, and limitation of the field of consciousness. The self-regarding sentiment is awakened and dominates the content of consciousness. The conflict is primarily between two instincts organized within this sentiment—that of self-abasement (negative self-feeling) and that of self-assertion (positive self feeling). The impulsive force of the former, awakened by the stimulus of the situation—let us say the presence and imagined criticism of others—opposes and contends with that of the latter which is excited by the desire of the person to display his powers and meet the occasion. The result of the struggle between the two impulses is emotional agitation or bashfulness. If this bashfulness is “qualified by the pain of baffled positive self feeling” there results the emotion of shame.[[260]] But these emotional states are not the whole consequences of the conflict. Almost always fear comes to the rescue as a biological reaction for the protection of the individual and impels to flight. The impulsive force of this instinct is now united to that of self-abasement and the conjoined force inhibits or blocks the development of ideas, memories, and speech symbols appropriate to the occasion and dissociates many perceptions of the environment. On the other hand, the self-regarding sentiment evokes various associative abasing ideas of self and related memories. The victim is fortunate if unfounded suspicions and other painful thoughts (through which criticism of self is imagined and the situation falsely interpreted) do not arise. Or there may be an oscillation of ideas corresponding to the conflicting sentiments and instincts. A person in such a condition experiences mental confusion and embarrassment. The condition is often loosely spoken of as self-consciousness and shyness.
2. Painfully emotional self-consciousness of this type as the sequence of special antecedent psychogenetic factors is frequently met with as an obsession. Then fear, with its physiological manifestations, is always an obtrusive element. Individuals who suffer from this psychosis sometimes cannot even come into the presence of strangers or any public situation without experiencing an attack of symptoms such as I have somewhat schematically described. The phenomena may be summarized as bashfulness, emotion of fear, inhibition, dissociation, limitation of the field of consciousness, ideas of self, confusion of thought and speech, inappropriate and delayed response, delusions of suspicion, tremor, palpitation, etc.
The symptomatic structure of the psychoneuroses.—When studying the physiological manifestations of emotion (Lecture XIV), we saw how a large variety of disturbances of bodily functions, induced by the discharge of emotional impulses, may be organized into a symptom-complex which might, if repeatedly stimulated, recur from time to time. On the basis of these physiological manifestations we were able to construct a schema of the physiological symptoms occurring in the emotional psycho-neuroses. We obtained a structure of such symptoms corresponding to the facts of clinical experience. We then went on in the next lecture to examine the psychological disturbances induced by emotion and found a number of characteristic phenomena. The view was held that emotion is the driving force which bears along ideas to their end and makes the organism capable of activity. We found conflicts between opposing impulses resulting in repression, dissociation, and inhibition of ideas and instincts, and limitation of the field of consciousness. We saw that sentiments in which strong emotions were incorporated tended to become dominating, to the exclusion of other sentiments from consciousness, and to acquire organic intensity and thereby to be carried to fruition. We saw also that the dominating emotional discharges might come from sentiments within the field of consciousness, and therefore of which the individual is aware, or from entirely subconscious sentiments of which he is unaware. And we saw that conflicts might be between entirely conscious sentiments or between a conscious and a subconscious sentiment, and so on. (Indeed, a conflict may be between two subconscious sentiments as may be experimentally demonstrated with corresponding phenomena.)
Now the practical significance of these phenomena of emotion, both as observed in every-day life and under experimental conditions, lies in the fact that they enable us to understand the symptomatic structure, and up to a certain point the psychogenesis of certain psychoneuroses of very common occurrence. (For a complete understanding of the psychogenesis of any given psychoneurosis, such as a phobia, we must know all the antecedent experiences which formed the setting and gave meaning to the dominating ideas and determined the instincts which have become incorporated with them to form sentiments. This we saw when studying the settings in obsessions (Lectures XII and XIII).)
It is evident, that, theoretically, if antecedent conditions have prepared the emotional soil, and if an emotional complex, an intense sentiment, or instinct should be aroused by some stimulus, any one of a number of different possible psychopathic states might ensue, largely through the mechanism of conflict, according, on the one hand, to the degree and extent of the dissociation, inhibition, etc., established, and on the other to the character and systematization of the emotional complex or instinct. As with the physiological manifestations of emotion, we can construct various theoretical schemata to represent the psychological structure of these different states. Practically both types—the physiological and psychological—must necessarily almost always be combined.