The unconscious

by Morton Prince

For such purposes certain persons with pathological ideas (e. g., phobias)[^[169]] are very favorable subjects for various reasons not necessary to go into.

Now, as respects the simple normal ideas of everyday life, such as I have just cited, a person can give very clearly his viewpoint. He has a very definite notion of the meaning of his perceptions and can give his reasons for them based on his associative memories of past experiences which he can recall. But in the conditions to which I am now referring a person can give no explanation of a particular viewpoint which may be of a very definite but unusual (abnormal) character. Nor can he recall any experiences which would explain the origin of it. I have in mind particularly the obsessions.

Now, according to my observations, we find in the marginal zones of the content of consciousness conscious elements which in particular cases may even give a hitherto unsuspected meaning to the pathological idea. I have found in these zones thoughts which gave meaning to emotions and other symptoms excited by apparently inadequate objects. Thus, in H. O., attacks of recurrent nausea and fear almost prohibiting social intercourse were always due to thoughts of self-disgust hidden in the fringe.

Let us take a concrete case, that of a person who has a pathological fear and who, as we know is often the case, can give no explanation of his viewpoint. The fear may be that of fainting, or of thunderstorms, of a particular disease, say cancer, or of so-called “unreality” attacks, or what not. This so-called “fear” is of course an idea of self or other object linked with, or which occasions as a reaction, the strong emotion of fear. It recurs in attacks which are excited by stimuli, of one kind or another, that are associated with the idea. The patient can give no explanation of the meaning of this idea that renders intelligible why it should occasion his fear. There is nothing in his consciousness, so far as he knows, which gives an adequate meaning to it.

Thus, for example, C. D. was the victim of attacks of fear; the attacks were so intense that at times she had been almost a prisoner in her house, in dread of attacks away from home; and yet she was unable even after two prolonged searching examinations to define the exact nature of the fear which was the salient feature of the attacks, or, from her ordinary memories, to give any explanation of its origin. She remembered many moments in the last twenty years when the fear had come upon her with great intensity, but she could not recall the date of its inception and, therefore, the conditions under which it originated; consequently nothing satisfactory could be elicited beyond an early history of “anxiety attacks” or indefinable fear of great intensity attached to no specific idea that she knew.

As a result of searching investigation by technical methods it was brought out that the specific object of the fear was fainting. When an attack developed, besides intense physiological disturbances and confusion of thought, there was in the content of consciousness a feeling that her mind was flying off into space and a definite thought of losing consciousness or fainting, and that she was going to faint. There was amnesia for these thoughts following the attacks. She never had fainted in the attacks and, as it later transpired, had fainted only once in her life. Here then, dimly in the content of consciousness, was the object of the fear in an attack. But the object was afterwards forgotten; hence she could not explain what she was afraid of. Why fainting should be such a terrible accident to be feared she also could not explain.

The question now was, what possible meaning could fainting have for her that she so feared it? This she did not know.

Now, on still further investigation, I found that there was always in the fringe of consciousness during an attack and also during the anticipatory fear of an attack, an idea and fear of death. This, to use her expression, “was in the background of her mind”; it referred to impending fainting. It appeared then that in the fringe or ultra-marginal zone was the idea of death as the meaning of fainting. Of this she was never aware. It was really subconscious. It was the meaning of her idea of herself fainting. In consequence of this meaning fainting was equivalent to her own death. She would not have been afraid of fainting if she had not believed or could have been made to believe that in her case it did not mean death. We might properly say that the real object of the fear was death.

When this content of the fringe of attention was recovered, the patient voluntarily remarked that she had not been aware of the presence during the attacks of that idea, but now she remembered it clearly, and also realized plainly why she was afraid of fainting,—what she had not understood before. (It must be borne in mind that this meaning of fainting, as a state equivalent to death, did not pertain to fainting in general but solely to herself. She knew perfectly well that fainting in other people was not dangerous; it was only an unrecognized belief regarding a possible accident to herself.) Besides this content of the fringe of attention it was also easy to show that the fringe often included the thought (or idea) which had been the immediate excitant of each attack. Sometimes this stimulus-idea entered the focus of attention; sometimes it was only in the fringe. In either case there was apt to be amnesia for it, but it could always be recalled to memory in abstraction or hypnosis.

The content of consciousness taken as a whole, i.e., to include both the focus and the fringe of attention, then would adequately determine the meaning of this subject’s idea of fainting as applied to herself.