Case 6. A woman, aged 28. “Three years ago, I used to go and see a relative who was undergoing treatment at an establishment in the neighbourhood of P——. My visits were very frequent, and always began with a long wait in a room overlooking the garden. If I wish to repeat the impressions of this time of waiting, which was always disagreeable to me, all I have to do is to sit down in a chair, as I was then seated, to close my eyes and put myself in the same frame of mind, which I can do quite easily. Not half a minute passes between the evocation and the clear and absolute reconstruction of the scene. First, I feel the carpet under my feet, then I see its pattern of red and brown roses; then the table with the books lying on it, their colour and style of binding; then the windows, and through them the branches of the trees, of which I hear the sound as they beat against the glass; lastly, the peculiar atmosphere of the room, its unmistakable smell. After this, I feel over again all the weariness of waiting, complicated by an intense dread of the doctor’s arrival, a state of apprehension ending in a violent palpitation of the heart, which I find it impossible to escape. When once I have entered on this train of thought, I have to follow it out to the end, passing through the whole series of states which I passed through at the time. If I wished to eliminate any of them I am sure that I could not do so, as when, in a dream, one tries, without ever succeeding, to avoid an unpleasant fall which one foresees.”
Here nothing is wanting, either the circumstances, or the repetition of the emotion itself; and this case shows that the complete revival of an emotion is the beginning of the emotion itself.
Lastly, there remains a third category of answers, of which I have only four cases. I mention these merely as a curiosity, and in order to omit nothing. These persons represent the emotion objectively to themselves, by localising it in another. One can only represent anger to himself under the force of some particular angry man. Another incarnates fear and hatred in a certain person whose countenance or attitude expresses fear or hatred. The emotional state is, for these, only represented under its bodily form.
Is this because they have, personally, little experience of these different emotions?
III.
This series of facts, with their multiform and often contradictory manifestations, may perhaps leave the reader in perplexity, which would be still greater were I to enumerate all. Let us try to bring them into some sort of order, and understand their significance.
If—placing ourselves at the point of view of the question stated above, the possibility of a revival not produced by an actual occurrence—we propose to ourselves to classify all images whatsoever, we shall see that they fall into these groups, viz.:—
Those of direct and easy revivability (visual, auditory, tactile-motor, with some reservations for the last named).
Those of indirect and comparatively easy revivability: pleasures and pains, emotions. They are indirect, because the emotional state is only induced through the intermediary of the intellectual states with which it is associated.[[104]]
Those of difficult revivability, either direct or indirect. This heterogeneous and difficult group includes tastes, odours, and internal sensations.