There IS a subconsciousness in that much of the nervous activity
of the organism has but little or no relation to consciousness.
There are mechanisms laid down by heredity and by the racial
structure that accomplish great functions without any but the
most indirect effect on consciousness and without any control by
the conscious personality. We are spurred on to sex life, to
marriage, to the care of our children by instinct; but the
instinct is not a personality any more than the automatic
heartbeat is. We repress a forbidden desire; if we are successful
and really overcome the desire by setting up new desires or in
some other way, the inhibited desire is not locked up in a
subterranean limbo. There is nothing pathological about
inhibition, for inhibition is as normal a part of character as
desire, and the social instinct which bids us inhibit is as
fundamental as the sex instinct. Most conflicts are on a
conscious plane, but most people will not admit to any one else
their deeply abhorrent desires. To all of us, or nearly all, come
desires and temptations that we would not acknowledge for the
world. If a wise examiner succeeds in getting us to admit them,
it is very agreeable to find a scapegoat in the form of the
subconsciousness. I have often said this to students: if all our
thoughts and conscious desires could be exposed, the most of us
would almost die of shame. True, we do not clearly understand
ourselves and our conflicts and explanation is often necessary,
but that is not equivalent to the subconsciousness; it merely
means that introspection is not sagacious.
Nor is it true, in my belief, that dreams are important psychical
events, nor that the subconsciousness evades a censor in
elaborating them. To what end would that be done? What would be
the use of it? Suppose that Freud and his school had never been;
then dreams would always be useless, for they would have no
interpreter. Men have dreamed in the countless ages before Freud
was born,--in vain. Think how the poor, misguided
subconsciousness has labored for nothing,--and how grateful it
should be to Freud! Dreams are results and have the same kind of
function that a stomach-ache has.
Things, experiences are forgotten, and whether they are
remembered or not depends upon the number of times they are
experienced, the attention they are given, the use they are put
to and the quality of the brain experiencing them. Disease and
old age may lower the recording power of the brain so that
experiences and sensations do not stick, and now and then the
brain is hypermnesic so that things are remembered with
surprising ease.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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