I may cite one other experiment dealing with the conservation of the details of a day’s experiences after the lapse of several months. The subject was a little girl who suffered from hysterical tics. Hoping to discover the exciting cause of her nervous disturbance, I put her into deep hypnosis, and evoked the memories of the events of the day on which her disease developed, about six months previously. It was astonishing to hear her recall a continuous series of precise thoughts and acts, many of them trivial, of the kind that would be transient and forgotten by anybody. She began with the events of the early morning, giving her own thoughts and acts; the remarks of her father and mother, describing exactly the location in the house at the time of each member of the family; her arrival at school; the several lessons of the day; the remarks of the teacher; the happenings during recess; her final entry into the laboratory; and the sudden onset of the tic. Everything was given in chronological order. The memories were vivid and, as they came up into her mind, were recognized as true recollections.[[16]] All this was forgotten when she was awake, that is to say, although conserved, it could not be reproduced. There was no way, of course, of determining the accuracy of these memories and, therefore, their correctness lacks scientific proof. On the other hand, the facts, which are in entire correspondence with similar results obtained under conditions where confirmation is possible, have value as cumulative evidence.[[17]]
It is not difficult to arrange experiments which will test the accuracy with which the minute details of experiences may be conserved when reproduction is at fault. A simple test is to have a suitable subject endeavor to repeat verbatim the contents of a letter written by him at some preceding time—one week, two weeks, a month, or more. Few people, of course, can do this. If, now, the subject is a suitable one for the abstraction or hypnotic method it may be that he will be able to reproduce by one or the other method the test letter, word for word; a comparison of the reproduction with the letter will, of course, determine the accuracy of the memory. In such an experiment I have succeeded in getting two subjects, Miss B.[[18]] and B. C. A., to repeat verbatim the contents of fairly long letters, and this even, on certain occasions, when, on account of the subject being a dissociated personality, there was no recollection of the letter at all, not even that it had been written. Such minute reproduction affords further evidence that the conservation of experiences may be much more complete and exact than ordinary conscious memory would lead us to suppose.
Evidence from hallucinatory phenomena.—I may mention one more example of conservation of a forgotten experience of everyday life as it is an example or mode of reproduction which differs in certain important respects both from that of ordinary memory and that observed under the artificial methods thus far described. This mode is that of a visual or an auditory hallucination which may be an exact reproduction in vividness and detail of the original experience. It is a type of a certain class of memory phenomena. One of my subjects, while in a condition of considerable stress of mind owing to the recurrence of the anniversary of her wedding-day, had a vision of her deceased husband, who addressed to her a certain consoling message. It afterwards transpired that this message was an actual reproduction of the words which a friend, in the course of a conversation some months previously, had quoted to her as the words of her own husband just before his death. In the vision the words were put into the mouth of another person, the subject’s husband, and were actually heard as an hallucination. Under the peculiar circumstances of their occurrence, however, these words awakened no sense of familiarity; nor did she recognize the source of the words until the automatic writing, which I later obtained, described the circumstances and details of the original episode. Then the original experience came back vividly to memory. On the other hand, the “automatic writing” not only remembered the experience but recognized the connection between it and the hallucination. (The truth of the writing is corroborated by the written testimony of the other party to the conversation.)
Although such types of hallucinatory memories are not actual reproductions of an experience but rather translated representations, yet they show the experience must have been conserved in order to have determined the representation. The actual experience, as we shall see later, is translated into a visual or auditory form which pictures or verbally expresses it, as the case may be. This type of hallucination is common. That which is translated may be previous thoughts, or perceptions received through another sense. Thus Mrs. Holland records a visual hallucination which pictured a verbal description previously narrated to her by a friend, but forgotten. The hallucination included “the figure of a very tall thin man, dressed in gray, standing with his back to the fire. He had a long face, I think a mustache—certainly no beard—and suggested young middle age.”... On a second occasion “the tall figure in gray was lying on the bed in a very flung-down, slack-jointed attitude. The face was turned from me, the right arm hanging back across the body which lay on the left side. I started violently and my foot seemed to strike an empty bottle on the floor.”
There is very little doubt that these visions of Mrs. Holland’s represented Mr. Gurney, who had died from an accidental dose of chloroform. Mrs. Holland “took very little interest” in Mr. Gurney, hence she had entirely forgotten that the main facts of his death had been told to her a few months previously by the narrator, Miss Alice Johnson.[[19]]
In an hallucination of this sort we have a dramatic pictorial representation of previous though forgotten knowledge which must have determined it. In order to have determined the hallucination the knowledge must have been conserved somehow. I have frequently observed a similar reproduction of a forgotten experience, which was not visual, through translation into a newly created visual representation in the form of an artificial hallucination. The following is of this kind: Miss B., looking into a crystal,[[20]] saw a scene laid in a wood near a lake, etc. Several figures appeared in this scene, which was that of a murder. Although she had no recollection of anything that could have given rise to the hallucination, investigation showed that the original experience was to be found in one of Marie Correlli’s novels which she had read but forgotten. The vision was a correct representation of the scene as described in the book.
In suitable subjects almost any past experience, whether forgotten or not, can be reproduced in this way if conserved, and observation shows that the number which are conserved is enormous. I shall have occasion to cite further examples in other connections. The phenomenon of translation we shall find when we come to study it, as we shall do in another lecture, throws light upon the nature of conservation for here we are dealing with something more than simple reproduction; what is conserved becomes elaborated into a new composition.
Evidence obtained from dreams.—Another not uncommon mode in which forgotten experiences are recovered is through dreams. The content of the dream may, as Freud has shown, be a cryptic and symbolical expression or representation of the experience,[[21]] or a visualized representation or obvious symbolism, much as a painted picture may be a symbolized expression of an idea,[[22]] or it may be a realistic reproduction in the sense that the subject lives over again the actual experience. A relative of mine gave me a very accurate description of a person whom she had never seen from a dream in which he appeared. After describing his hair, eyes, contour of face, mouth, etc., she ended with the words, “He looks like a cross between a Scotchman and an Irishman.” After she had most positively insisted that she had never seen this person or heard him described—against my protest to the contrary—I reminded her that I had myself described him to her only a few days before in the identical words, ending my description with the remark, “He looks like a cross between a Scotchman and an Irishman.” Even then she could not recall the fact. Von Bechterew has recorded the case of a man who frequently after hearing an opera dreamed the whole opera through.[[23]] One subject of mine frequently dreamed over again in very minute detail, after an interval of eight or nine months, the scenes attending the deathbed of a relative. Indeed, in the dream she realistically lived them again in a fashion similar to that of hypnotic dreams such as I have related. Although she had not forgotten these scenes it is highly improbable that she could have voluntarily recalled them, particularly after the lapse of so long a time, without the aid of the dream, so rich was it in detail, with each event in its chronological order.
Dream reproductions, whether in a symbolic form or not, are too common to need further statement. I would merely point out that the frequency with which childhood’s experiences occur in dreams is further evidence of the conservation of these early experiences. The symbolic dream, cryptic or obvious, deserves, however, special consideration because of the data it offers to the problem of the nature of conservation which we shall later study. In this type of dream, if the fundamental principle of the theory of Freud is correct, the content is a symbolical continuation in some form of an antecedent thought (experience) of the dreamer.[[24]] When this thought, which may be forgotten, is recovered the symbolic character of the dream, in many cases, is recognized beyond reasonable doubt.[[25]] If this principle is well established, and nearly all investigators are in accord on this point, though we need not always accept the given interpretation of individual dreams—if the principle is sound, then it follows that symbolism includes memory of the original experience which must be conserved. So that even this type of dream offers evidence of conservation of experiences for which there may be total loss of memory (amnesia).
Before closing this lecture I will return to the point which I temporarily passed by, namely, the significance of the difference in the form of reproduction according as whether it is by automatic writing or through associative memories in abstraction. In the latter case, as we have seen, the memories are identical in form and principle with those of everyday life. They enter the personal consciousness and become conscious memories in the sense that the individual personally remembers the experience in question. Abstraction may be regarded simply as a favorable condition or moment when the subject remembers what he had at another previous moment forgotten. We have seen also that the same thing is true of remembering in hypnosis (excepting those special realistic reproductions when the subject enters a dream-like or somnambulistic state and lives over again the past experience in question). In automatic writing, on the other hand, the reproduction is by a secondary process entirely separate and independent of the personal consciousness. In the examples I cited the latter was in entire ignorance of the reproduction which did not become a personally conscious memory. At the very same moment when the experiences could not be voluntarily remembered, and without a change in the moment’s consciousness, something was tapped, as it were, and thereby they were graphically revealed without the knowledge of the subject, without memory of them being introduced into the personal consciousness, and even without the subject being able to remember the incident after reading the automatic script. Even this stimulus failed to bring back the desired phase of consciousness. It was very much like surreptitiously inserting your hand into the pocket of another and secretly withdrawing an object which he thinks he has lost. What really happened was this: a secondary process was awakened and this process (of which the principal or personal consciousness was unaware) revealed the memory lost by the personal consciousness. At least this is the interpretation which is the one which all the phenomena of this kind pertaining to subconscious manifestations compel us to draw.[[26]] At any rate the automatic script showed that somehow and somewhere outside the personal consciousness the experiences were conserved and under certain conditions could be reproduced.