The unconscious

by Morton Prince

2. The phraseology of the script is noticeable. The account is just such as a child might have written. It reads as if the conserved thoughts of a child had awakened and functioned subconsciously.

From this history, so far as given, it is plain that the psychosis in one sense is a recurring antecedent experience or memory, but it is only a partial memory. The whole of the experience does not recur but only the emotion in association with the ringing of bells. The rest of that experience, viz., the idea of the possible death of her mother with its attendant grief and anguish associated with the visits to the church, the praying for recovery and finally the realization of the fatal ending—all that which originally excited the fear and gave the ringing-of-bells-in-a-tower meaning was conserved as a setting in the unconscious. That the rest of the experience was conserved was shown by the fact that it could be recalled not only by automatic writing but, although not in association with the phobia, to conscious memory. From this point of view the fear of bells ringing may be regarded as a recurrence of the original fear—that of her mother’s death—now derived from a subconsciously functioning setting. The child was afraid to face her grief and so now the matured adult was also afraid.

From another point of view the ringing of bells may be regarded as standing for, or a symbol of, her mother’s death with which it was so intimately associated, and this symbol awakened the same fear as did originally the idea itself of the death. An object may still be the symbol of another, although the association between the two cannot be recalled. (The transference of the emotional factor of an experience to some element in it is a common occurrence; e. g., a fear of knives in a person who has had the fear of committing suicide.)

The discovered antecedent experiences of childhood then give a hitherto unsuspected meaning to the ringing of bells. It is a meaning—the mise en scène of a tragedy of grief and a symbol of that tragedy. But was that tragedy with its grief the real meaning of the child’s fear or, perhaps more correctly, the whole of the meaning? And is it still the meaning in the mind of the adult woman? Does the mere conservation of a painful memory of grief explain its persistent recurrent subconscious functioning during twenty-five years, well into adult life, so that the child’s emotion shall be reawakened whenever one element (bell-tower) of the original experience is presented to consciousness? And, still more, can the persistence of a mere association of the affect with the object independently of a subconscious process explain the psychosis? Either of these two last propositions is absurd on its face as being opposed to the experience of the great mass of mankind. The vast majority of people have undergone disturbing, sorrowful or fear-inspiring experiences at some time during the course of their lives and they do not find that they cannot for years afterwards face some object or idea belonging to that experience without being overwhelmed with the same emotion. Such emotion in the course of time subsides and dies out. A few, relatively speaking, do so suffer and then, because contrary to general experience, it is called a psychosis.

We must, then, seek some other and adequate factor in the case under examination. When describing the episode in the church, the subject stated that on one occasion she omitted to go to church to pray and the thought came to her that if her mother died it would be due to this omission, and it would be her fault. The “eye of God”[^[185]] she thought was literally upon her in her every daily act and when her mother did die she thought that it was God’s punishment of herself because of that one failure. Consequently she thought that she was to blame for her mother’s death; that her mother’s death was her fault. She feared to face her mother’s death, not because of grief—that was a mere subterfuge, a self-deception—but because she thought she was to blame; and she feared to face towers with bells, or rather the ringing of bells, because they symbolized or stood for that death (just as a tomb-stone would stand for it), and in facing that fact she had to face her own fancied guilt and self-reproach and this she dared not do. This was the real fear, the fear of facing her own guilt. The emotion then was not only a recurrence of the affect associated with the church episode but a reaction to self-reproach. The ringing of bells, somewhat metaphorically speaking, reproached her as Banquo’s ghost reproached Macbeth.

All this was the child’s point of view.

But I found that the patient, an adult woman, still believed and obstinately maintained that her mother’s death was her fault. She had never ceased to believe it. Why was this? Why had not the unsophisticated belief of a child become modified by the maturity of years? It did not seem to be probable that the given child’s reason was the real adult reason for self-reproach. I did not believe it. A woman forty years of age could not reproach herself on such grounds. And, even if this belief had been originally the real reason, as a matter of fact she had outgrown the child’s religious belief. She was a thorough-going agnostic. Further probing brought out the following:

Two years before her mother’s death, the patient, then thirteen years old, owing to her own carelessness and disobedience to her mother’s instructions, had contracted a “cold” which had been diagnosed as incipient phthisis. By the physician’s advice her mother took her to Europe for a “cure” and was detained there (as she believed) for two years, all on account of the child’s health. At the end of this period a serious, chronic disease from which the mother had long suffered was found to have so developed as to require an emergency operation. The patient still believed and argued that if her mother had not been compelled to take her abroad she (the mother) would have been under medical supervision at home, would have been operated upon long before and in all probability would not have died. Furthermore, as the patient had heedlessly and disobediently exposed herself to severe cold and thereby contracted the disease compelling the sojourn in Europe, she was to blame for the train of circumstances ending fatally.

All this was perfectly logical and true, assuming the facts as presented. Here then was the real reason for the patient’s persistent belief that her mother’s death was her fault and the persistent self-reproach. It also transpired that all this had weighed upon the child’s mind and that the child had likewise believed it. So the child had two reasons for self-reproach. One was neglecting to pray and the other was being the indirect cause of the fatal operation. Both were intensely believed in. The first based on the “eye of God” theory she had outgrown, but the other had persisted.

Summing up our study to this point: All these memories involving grief, suffering, self-reproach, bells and mother formed an unconscious setting which gave meaning to bells in towers and took part in the functioning to form a psychic whole. The conscious psychosis was first the emergence into consciousness of two elements only, the perception and the affect, and the fear was a reaction to self-reproach, a fear to face self-blame.