It had become evolved and organized out of the original “rebellious” complex as its nucleus by receiving successive accretions from later rebellious ideas and wishes in conflict with the personality, much as the pearl in the oyster grows by successive accretions.
From one point of view it was a highly developed “mood.”
It was still under control but later, as we shall find, it was destined to assume autonomous activity and play a dominant rôle.
“C was still conscious of these thoughts, [B wrote in her account], but they represented to her the selfish and weak part of her nature and she tried to suppress them; tried to put them out of her mind but they still persisted, and she was always to a greater or less extent aware of them. There was no lack of awareness and no amnesia. As the months and years went on the sorrow and anxiety of the C group increased, and the conflicting thoughts and rebellion of the B group increased. C was ashamed of the latter and always tried to suppress such thoughts as they arose. If during those years anything happy had come to C the formation of this rebellious complex would, I believe, have been retarded, perhaps stopped altogether, but nothing pleasant happened; it was all grief, and everything went wrong.”
Notwithstanding the continuing stress and strain and lack of joy all probably would have gone well if C’s husband had recovered and she had retained her physical health. Returning to her normal life, she would have been only one more of those who have lived through a period of anxious perturbation. But unfortunately, as it happened, “C’s husband died suddenly away from home, the one thing she had [dreaded and] felt she could not bear.” She received the news over the telephone.
She did not recover [B states] from the shock and became more and more nervous, was very much depressed, easily fatigued, suffered constantly from headache, and was possessed by all sorts of doubts and fears, reproaching herself for things done and undone. She also overtaxed her strength in attending to business matters.
C’s physical health immediately and suddenly gave way. Her own account, already given, goes more into detail and lets us see the extent to which she was handicapped by physical and mental ill-health in her struggle against her rebellious impulses—against fate. She was not given half a chance. Her description of her condition at this period, as noted at the beginning of this account, is worth repeating here in this connection:
I was at that time in good physical health, though nervously worn, but this death occurred in such a way as to cause me a great shock and within the six days following I lost twenty pounds in weight. For nearly three months I went almost entirely without food, seemingly not eating enough to sustain life, and I did not average more than three or four hours’ sleep out of the twenty-four, but I felt neither hungry nor faint, and was extremely busy and active, being absorbed both by home responsibilities and business affairs. The end of the year, however, found me in very poor health physically and I was nervously and mentally exhausted. I was depressed, sad, felt that I had lost all that made life worth living and, indeed, I wished to die. I was very nervous, unable to eat or sleep, easily fatigued, suffered constantly from headache, to which I had always been subject, and was not able to take much exercise. The physician under whose care I was at this time told me, when I asked him to give my condition a name, that I was suffering from “nervous and cerebral exhaustion.”
It is always the case in so-called neurasthenic states that the power of self-control is weakened, resistance to obsessing thoughts diminishes and the latter tend to take on automaticity and invade and dissociate the personality. And there is also a certain degree of repression and dissociation of previously dominant systems of ideas. In other words every case of real so-called “neurasthenia” and hysteria is a greater or less alteration of personality.[[282]]
Accordingly, although at the beginning of period II the B complex was only a loosely organized system of rebellious thoughts, wishes and impulses recurring from time to time, this system now began in her physically and mentally weakened condition to acquire increased force, to invade the personal consciousness, and breaking through the repressing force of the will to gain autonomous sovereignty and temporarily to dominate the conduct. In the prolonged conflict the rebellion with its contrary wishes was at moments to gain the ascendency. In other words, these other elements came to the surface and gathered to themselves all the discordant elements of personality, much as a radical political party gathers to itself all the rebellious discordant factions that are in antagonism to the governing conservative party. In one sense another side to the character had become crystallized and autonomous, and, through the intensity of its feeling tones, became periodically dominant. But not without protest from the previously dominant elements of personality. This protest, however, had certain psychological peculiarities which show that the conditions were not quite as simple as this. I will speak of them later.