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
And yet the vision pictured
everything exactly as it had occurred in my presence, even to the
expression of her features. Looking into the crystal the subject saw
herself sitting in a particular place, enacting a series of movements,
talking and smoking a cigarette with a peculiar smile and expression of
enjoyment on her face.[91] For this experience there was complete
amnesia after waking from hypnosis and at the time of the vision.
Now consider further the facts and their implications. In the mechanism
of the process eventuating in the visual phenomenon we obviously have
two known factors: the antecedent causal factor—the hypnotic
episode—and, after a time interval, the end result—the vision. As there
was no conscious memory of the hypnotic episode the neurograms of the
latter must have functioned subconsciously to have produced the vision.
But what particular neurograms? As the subject’s eyes had been closed in
hypnosis, and, in any event, as she could not have seen her own face,
there were at the time no _visual_ perceptions of herself smoking a
cigarette, and therefore the vision could not have been simply a
reproduction of a visual experience. There were, however, tactual,
gustatory, and other perceptions and ideas of self and environment, and
these perceptions and ideas of course possessed _secondary visual
images_.[92] The simplest mechanism would be that the neurograms of this
complex of perception and ideas of self, etc., functioned subconsciously
and their _secondary_ visual images emerged into consciousness to be the
vision. I give this as the simplest mechanism by which we can conceive
of a visual representation of an antecedent experience emerging out of a
subconscious process.[93] There is a considerable body of data
supporting this interpretation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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