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
But the original experiences of the episode included more than the mere
perceptions and movements of the subject. They included trains of
thought and enjoyment of the cigarette smoking experience. All formed a
complex of which the tactual and other perceptions of self were
subordinate elements. At one moment, of course, one element, and, at
another moment another element, had been in the focus of awareness, the
others becoming shifted into the fringe _where at all times were
secondary visual images of herself_. Did the subconscious process
underlying the vision include the whole of this complex? As to this, one
peculiarity of the vision has much significance. In behavior it acted
after the manner of a cinematographic or “moving picture,” and
delineated each successive movement of the episode, as if a rapid series
of photographs had been taken for reproduction. In this manner even the
emotional and changing play of the features of the vision-self,
expressive of the previous thoughts and enjoyment, were depicted. Such a
cinematographic series of visual images would seem to require a
concurrent subconscious process to produce the successive changes in the
hallucinatory images. As these changes apparently correspond from moment
to moment with the changes that had occurred in the content of
consciousness during the causal episode, it would also seem that the
subconscious process was a reproduction in subconscious terms of
substantially the whole original mental episode. This conclusion is
fortified by the following additional facts: In many experiments of this
kind, if the subject’s face be watched during the visualization, it will
be observed that _it shows the same play of features as is displayed by
the vision face_,[94] and the visualizer at the same moment _experiences
the same emotion as is expressed by the features of the vision
face_,[95] and sometimes knows “what her [my] vision self is thinking
about.” In other words, _in particular instances_, sometimes the
feelings alone and sometimes both the thoughts and feelings expressed in
pantomime in the hallucination arise at the same moment in
consciousness. This would seem to indicate that the same processes which
determined the mimetic play of features in the _hallucination_ were
determining at the same moment the same play in the features of the
visualizer, and that these processes were a subconscious memory of
substantially all the original perceptions and thoughts. That is to say,
this memory in such cases remains sometimes entirely subconscious and
sometimes emerges into consciousness. The hallucination is simply a
projected visualization induced by what is taking place subconsciously
in the subject’s mind at the moment. Whether this shall remain entirely
subconscious or shall emerge partially or wholly into consciousness
depends upon psychological conditions peculiar to the subject.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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