[89]. The validity of the evidence of memory as applied to subconscious processes needs to be carefully weighed. It is a question of method, and if the method is fallacious all conclusions fall to the ground. In the sciences of normal psychology and psychiatry and psychopathology, the data given by memory are and necessarily must be relied upon to furnish a knowledge of the content of mental processes and the mental symptoms, and all methods of psychological analysis are based on the data of memory. Without such data there could be no such sciences. As a matter of experience the method is found to be reliable when properly checked by multiple observations. If by special methods of technique mental processes, which do not enter the awareness of the moment, are later brought into consciousness as data of memory, are these data per contra to be rejected as hallucinatory? This is what their rejection would mean. Now, as a fact, there are phenomena, like coconscious personalities, which compel the postulation of coconscious processes. If this is the case, if there are coconscious processes which do not enter awareness, it would be the strangest thing if there were not conditions of the personality in which a memory of these processes could be obtained. This fact would have to be explained. The bringing of coconscious processes into consciousness as data of memory does not seem therefore to be anything a priori improbable and there would seem to be no reason why the memory of them should be more unreliable than that of conscious processes in the forms of attention. Indeed, if the fringe of consciousness be regarded as coconscious, it is an every-day act common to everybody. Such data necessarily should be checked up by multiple observations.
[90]. For examples of this kind, see Prince, Experiments to Determine Coconscious Ideation, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, April-May, 1908.
[91]. The Dissociation, pp. 55, 56.
[92]. It is only necessary to close one’s eyes, then grimace and move one’s limbs to become conscious of these secondary images which picture each movement of the features, etc.
[93]. The mechanism is probably not quite so simple as this, probably past visual perceptions of self and the environment took part, so that the vision was a fusion or composite of these older primary images and the secondary images. The principle of mechanism, however, would not be affected by this added element. Sidis (The Doctrine of Primary and Secondary Sensory Elements, Psych. Rev., January-March, 1908) has maintained that all hallucinations are the emerging of the secondary images of previous perceptions. If, on the other hand, the vision be interpreted as something fabricated by the subconscious process—as must be the case with some hallucinations—then this process must have been much more complicated than memory. Something akin at least to constructive imagination and intelligence that translated the experiences into visual terms.
[94]. That is to say, as described by the visualizer.
[95]. Cf. The Dissociation, pp. 211-220.
[96]. At this point the subject watching the vision remarked, “I drop one of the letters, but I do not know I have done so.” In other words, conscious of the content of the somnambulist’s consciousness, the visualizer knows that there is no awareness of this act. The letter was afterward found by the servant on the stairs.
[97]. Coconscious ideas may provoke hallucinations. (For examples consult “Hallucinations” in Index to The Dissociation.)