The unconscious : $b The fundamentals of human personality, normal and abnormalPrince, Morton
Science
The unconscious : $b The fundamentals of human personality, normal and abnormal
Prince, Morton
Psychology, Pathological; Subconsciousness
I said advisedly, a moment ago, “if the hypnotic personality remembered
the whole of the conscious calculation,” for, as a matter of fact, we
find, when we examine several different hypnotic states in the same
subject, that their memories for coconscious ideas are not coextensive,
one (or more) being fuller than another. Indeed in certain states there
may not be any such memories at all. It is necessary, therefore, to
obtain by hypnosis a degree of dissociation which will allow the
complete memories of this kind to be evoked. In the subjects I made use
of this procedure was followed. Theoretically it might be held that, no
matter how complete the memories evoked in the various states, some
other state might possibly be obtained in which still more complete
memory would be manifested. Theoretically this is true and all
conclusions are subject to this criticism. Practically, however, I
found, when making these investigations, that I seemed to have come to
the limit of such possibilities, for, obtain as I would new dissociated
arrangements of personality, after a certain point no additional
memories could be evoked. There is still another possibility that there
may be coconscious processes for which no memories can be evoked by any
method or in any state.
II. _Artificially induced visual hallucinations_ with which we have
already become familiar can, as we have seen, only be interpreted as the
product of subconscious processes. If only because of the important part
that hallucinations play in insanity and other pathological states and
of the frequency with which they occur in normal people (mystics and
others), the characteristics of the subconscious process are well worth
closer study. What is found to be true of the experimental type is
probably true of the spontaneous variety whether occurring in
pathological or normal conditions. Indeed, as we shall see, spontaneous
hallucinations have the same characteristics. We have considered them
thus far only from two points of view, viz. (1) as evidence of
conservation of forgotten experiences, and (2) as evidence for specific
residua of such experiences functioning as subconscious processes. Now,
artificial visual hallucinations, like the spontaneous ones, may be
limited—relatively speaking—to what is apparently little more than an
exact reproduction of an antecedent visual perception, e. g., a person
or object. But, generally speaking, it is more than this and when
analyzed will be found almost always to be the expression of a
complicated process. For instance, take the relatively simple crystal
vision, of the subject smoking a cigarette in a particular situation
during hypnosis, which I have previously cited. (Lecture III.) As a
matter of fact, the subject had no primary visual perceptions at the
time of the original episode at all. She was in hypnosis, her eyes were
closed, and she did not and could not see herself (particularly her own
face) or the cigarette or her surroundings.
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