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 offer no excuse for multiplying these observations of hallucinatory
phenomena, even at the expense of tedious repetition, for such studies
give an insight into the mechanism of the hallucinations met with in the
insanities and other pathological states. They offer, too, an insight
into the basic process involved in dreams as these are a type of
hallucinatory phenomena. It is by a study of hallucinations
experimentally created, and others where we are in a position to know
the causal factors, that we can learn the mechanisms underlying similar
phenomena occurring in normal pathological conditions. As a rule in the
latter conditions it is difficult to determine beyond question the true
causal factors and, therefore, the particular subconscious processes
involved. Such phenomena as I have presented justify the conclusion of
the “new psychology” that the _hallucinations of the insane_ are not
haphazard affairs but the resultant of subconscious processes evoked by
antecedent experiences. In conclusion, then, we may say that _in
artificial hallucinations as experimentally conducted, and in certain
spontaneous hallucinations, we have two known factors; the causal factor
(the antecedent experience) and the hallucinatory phenomenon—the effect.
Intervening between the two is an inferred subconscious process of
considerable complexity which is required to explain the causal
connection_. With the exact mechanism of hallucinatory phenomena we are
not at present concerned, but only with the evidence of the actuality of
a subconscious process, of its character as an intelligence, and with
its intrinsic nature.
As to the last problem it is plain that further investigations are
required and that the methods at present at our disposal for its
solution leave much to be desired. All things considered a conservative
summing up would be that the subconscious process may be both
coconscious and unconscious.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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