§ 116
There is no question whatever of the ability of most men to attain the degree of control necessary to practise Karezza, or the Succession Plan advocated in this book.
The only question is the amount of clear thinking a man may be willing to do concerning himself, to realize whether he should remain in the infant class of autoerotics, or should represent to himself in vivid colours the advantages of ascending into a truly allerotic adult level of control. It is certain that if a man realizes the advantage, not only to himself but to his wife and to everyone else in his own milieu, he will make the outline of it so clear in his mind that all his unconscious energy will assist him in the attainment of it as an objective reality.
This ideal is here called a representation, or an imagination on the principle adopted by the autosuggestionists that “where the will and the imagination come into conflict, the imagination always wins”—Coué’s Law of Reversed Effort. Therefore the natural and obvious expression was avoided above. It might have been said that when a man realizes the advantages of the Succession Plan in the love episode, he will exert every effort of which he is capable to attain it. But for this form of statement was expressly substituted the form “he will make the outline of it so clear in his own mind.”
For what autosuggestion has so convincingly shown is that the unconscious imagination of the opposite of what one says or thinks consciously is the result that may possibly follow unless he is forewarned. If a man say to himself a hundred times a day, “I will control myself,” he may yet have in his unconscious a clear picture of lack of control, of hasty abandon, and it is that picture which forms the pattern of his acts as they are carried out.
§ 117
The question will at once be asked: first, how one can tell whether one’s unconscious imagination, which controls one’s acts and one’s physiological reactions, contains the picture of control or of lack of control, and, second, how one can change the lineaments of this pattern.
The first question is answered by saying that if a man show lack of erotic control it is proved that his unconscious imagination is thus, and not otherwise, patterned.
The second question requires a longer consideration.
If the unconscious is to be controlled at all, it can be controlled by conscious thinking only by means of substituting one pattern of action for another.