Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of PsychotherapyJackson, Josephine A. (Josephine Agnes)
Science
Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of Psychotherapy
Jackson, Josephine A. (Josephine Agnes)
Nervous system -- Diseases; Psychoanalysis; Therapeutics, Suggestive
The lowest level, representing the past of the race, is primitive like
a savage, and infantile, like a child; it is instinctive, unalterable,
and universal; it knows no restraint, no culture, and no prudence. The
higher level, the storehouse of individual experience, bears the
marks of acquired ideals, of cultivated refinement, and represents
among other things the precepts and prudence of civilized society.
_4 Emotional yet Intellectual_
Our records of the past are not dead archives, but living
forces--persistent, urging, dynamic and emotional. They give meaning
to new experiences, color our judgments, shape our beliefs, determine
our interests, and, if wrongly handled, make their way into
consciousness as neurotic symptoms.
However, the subconscious is not all emotion. It is a mind capable of
elaborate thought, able to calculate, to scheme, to answer doubts, to
solve problems, to fabricate the purposeful, fantastic allegories of
dreams and to create from mere knowledge the inspired works of genius.
But the subconscious has one great limitation, it cannot reason
inductively. Given a premise, this mind can reason as unerringly as
the most skilful logician; that is, it can reason deductively, but it
cannot arrive at a general conclusion from a number of particular
facts. However, except for inductive reasoning and awareness, the
subconscious seems to possess all the attributes of conscious mind and
is in fact an intellectual force to be reckoned with.
_5 Organized yet Disorganizable_
The subconscious mind is a highly organized institution, but like all
such institutions it is liable to disorganization when rent by
internal dissension. Ordinarily it keeps its ideas and emotions, its
complexes and moods in fairly accurate order, but when upset by
emotional warfare, it gets its records confused and falls into a
chaotic state which makes regular business impossible.
_6 Masterful yet Obedient_
The subconscious, which is master of the body, is in normal life the
servant of consciousness. One of its outstanding qualities is
suggestibility. Since it cannot reason from particulars to a general
conclusion it takes any statement given it by consciousness, believes
it implicitly and acts accordingly.
The pilot wheel of the ship is, after all, the conscious mind,
insignificant in size when compared with the great mass of the vessel,
but all-powerful in its ability to direct the course of the voyage.
Nervous persons are people who are too much under the sway of the
subconscious; so, too, are some geniuses, who narrowly escape a
neurosis by finding a more useful outlet for their subconscious
energies. While the poet, the inventor, and the neurotic are likely to
be too largely controlled by the subconscious, the average man is to a
greater extent ruled by the conscious mind; and the highest type of
genius is the man whose conscious and subconscious minds work together
in perfect harmony, each up to its full power.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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