In addition, these activities, which are so all-important,
determine the basic conduct by arousing the basic appetites and
desires of the individual. It is the change in the
gastro-intestinal tract and in the tissues of the body that
starts up the hunger feeling and the impulses which prompt men to
seek food; in other words, this type of coenaesthesia has set
going all the physical and mental activities relating to food; it
is the basic impulse behind agriculture and stock raising, as
well as energizing work activities of all kinds. It is the
tension in the seminal vessels of the male that wakes up his
passion, if it is not the sole source of that passion. Sex desire
in the adult male has many elements in it, not pertinent at
present, but the coenaesthetic influence of the physical
structures is its starting point. In men as well as women there
is a cycle of desire, with height due to physical tension and
abyss following the discharge or disappearance of tension, that
profoundly influences life and conduct. Here the sympathetic
nervous system and the internal secretion of the genital glands
awaken into sexual activity brain, spinal cord and muscles, so
that the individual seeks a mate, plunges into marriage and
directs his conduct, conscious of taste and desire, but largely
unconscious of the physical condition that is impelling him on.
In this sense the subconscious activities dominate in life,
because the functions of nutrition and reproduction are largely
unconscious in their origin, but there is no organized, plotting
subconsciousness at work.
Once a thing is experienced, it is stored in memory. What is the
basis and position of a memory when we are not conscious of it,
when our conscious minds are busy with other matters? What
happens when a desire is repressed, inhibited into inaction; when
consciousness revolts against part of its own content? Is a
"forgotten" memory ever really lost, or a desire that is
squelched and thrust out of "mind" really made inactive? Do our
inhibitions really inhibit, or do we build up another self or set
of selves that rise to the surface under strange forms, under the
guise of disease manifestations?
Sigmund Freud and his followers have made definite answers to the
foregoing, answers that are incorporated in a doctrine called
Freudianism. Freud is an Austrian Jew, a physician, and one that
soon specialized in nervous and mental diseases. Early in his
career he did some excellent work in the study of the paralysis
of childhood (infantile hemiplegia), but his attention and that
of an older colleague, Breuer, were soon drawn (as has occurred
to almost every neurologist) to the manifestations of that
extraordinary disease, hysteria. Hysteria has played so important
a role in human history, and Freud's ideas are permeating so
deeply into modern thought that I deem it advisable to devote a
chapter to them.
CHAPTER V. HYSTERIA, SUBCONSCIOUSNESS AND FREUDIANISM
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