[302]. Prince: The Dissociation of a Personality, Longmans, Green & Co.
[303]. “My Life as a Dissociated Personality,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. III, Nos. 4 and 5.
SUMMARY AND GENERAL CONCLUSIONS
We may now bring this study of human personality to a close, incomplete as it is. We have not by any means exhausted all the factors of personality, but, guided by practical consideration, we have at least examined the chief of its fundamentals, more particularly those which are concerned in the disturbances which general psychopathology makes the object of study. Such a study should be undertaken preparatory to that of special pathology or particular complexes of disturbances of function (the functional psychoneuroses). The aim of psychology should be to become capable of being an applied science. So far as a science is only of academic interest it fails to be of real value to the world. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, mineralogy, geology, physiology, bacteriology, botany, and many departments of zoology, etc., can be applied, and other sciences at least tend to form our notions of the universe in which we live, and thus to mould our religious, philosophical and other conceptions. Until very recent years it was an opprobium of psychology, as studied and taught, that it had not become divorced from philosophy[[304]] and stood amongst the few sciences that could not be applied to practical life and was for the most part of academic interest only. Now, however, in the field of medicine psychology is fast looming to the front as of great practical interest—not the older psychology, but the new psychology of functions and mechanisms. In the field of human efficiency in the mechanical arts it is also fast becoming capable of practical application. With the above aim in view we have dealt in these lectures more particularly with those psychological activities a knowledge of which can be applied in the theory and practice of medicine. But as the laws governing the organism are general, not special, what has been found is as applicable to normal as to pathological life.
We have not attempted to enter the field of special pathology to study the psycho-pathology of special diseases. So far as this has been done it has been mainly for the purpose of seeking data. Our aim has been rather to obtain that knowledge of functions which will serve as an introduction to such medical studies. Even in this limited field there are any number of specific problems which have been scarcely more than touched upon and any one of which, by itself, would be a rich field of investigation.
It is well now, in conclusion, to make a general survey of the fields which we have tilled, and gather together into a whole, so far as possible, the results of our gleaning.
We have seen on the basis of the phenomena of memory that the “mind” includes more than conscious processes; that it includes a vast storehouse of acquired “dispositions” deposited by the experiences of life, and that these dispositions (by which mental experiences are conserved) may be regarded as chemical or physical in their nature, as sort of residua deposited (if we are asked to confine ourselves to terms of the same order) by the neural processes correlated with the conscious experiences of life. This storehouse of acquired dispositions provides the material for conscious and subconscious processes; and thus provides the wherewithal which enables the personality to be guided in its behavior by the experiences of the past. It provides the elements of memory which we know must be supplied by the mind in every perception of the environment—even the simplest—and which are required for every process of thought. Indeed throughout our review of processes and manifestations of mind, which we need not recapitulate, we have continually come upon evidences of these dispositions playing as I foretold in our first lecture an underlying and responsible part.
The fact that brain dispositions are of one order of events (physical) while psychological processes are of another (psychical) is in no way an objection to such an interpretation, as in this antithesis we have only the old mind-matter problem—dualism, or monism, or parallelism.
We have also seen that in neural dispositions, whether acquired or innate, we have a conception of the unconscious that is definite, precise.
We have also reviewed the evidence going to show that though the main teleological function of the unconscious, so far as it represents acquired dispositions, is to provide the material for conscious memory and conscious processes, in order that the organism may be consciously guided in its reactions by experience, yet under certain conditions neurographic residua can function as a subconscious process which may be unconscious, i.e., without being accompanied by conscious equivalents. The latter were classed as a sub-order of subconscious processes. We saw reason for believing that any neurogram deposited by life’s experience can, given certain other factors, thus function subconsciously, either autonomously or as a factor in a large mechanism embracing both conscious and unconscious elements; and that this was peculiarly the case when the neurogram was organized with an emotional disposition or instinct. The impulsive force of the latter gives energy to the former and enables it to be an active factor in determining behavior. The organism may then be subconsciously governed in its reactions to the environment.