Association of ideas; Memory; Paragrammatism; Psychoanalysis; Psychology, Pathological; Repression (Psychology)
I do not believe that an occurrence in which my mental life takes no
part can teach me anything hidden concerning the future shaping of
reality; but I do believe that an unintentional manifestation of my own
mental activity surely contains something concealed which belongs only
to my mental life--that is, I believe in outer (real) chance, but not
in inner (psychic) accidents. With the superstitious person the case
is reversed: he knows nothing of the motive of his chance and faulty
actions, he believes in the existence of psychic contingencies; he
is therefore inclined to attribute meaning to external chance, which
manifests itself in actual occurrence, and to see in the accident a
means of expression for something hidden outside of him. There are two
differences between me and the superstitious person: first, he projects
the motive to the outside, while I look for it in myself; second, he
explains the accident by an event which I trace to a thought. What
he considers hidden corresponds to the unconscious with me, and the
compulsion not to let chance pass as chance, but to explain it as
common to both of us.
Thus I admit that this conscious ignorance and unconscious knowledge of
the motivation of psychic accidentalness is one of the psychic roots
of superstition. _Because_ the superstitious person knows nothing of
the motivation of his own accidental actions, and because the fact of
this motivation strives for a place in his recognition, he is compelled
to dispose of them by displacing them into the outer world. If such
a connection exists it can hardly be limited to this single case. As
a matter of fact, I believe that a large portion of the mythological
conception of the world which reaches far into the most modern
religions _is nothing but psychology projected into the outer world_.
The dim perception (the endo-psychic perception, as it were) of psychic
factors and relations[79] of the unconscious was taken as a model in
the construction of a _transcendental reality_, which is destined to be
changed again by science into _psychology of the unconscious_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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