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
of some kind which guide and originate behavior. But whether such
impressions are psychologically sensations or not, the animal certainly
does not possess visual or other _perceptions_, because the “sensations”
have no “meaning.” Schräder’s falcon, for example, would jump at and
catch with its claws a moving mouse in the cage, but there the matter
was at an end; it did not devour it as would a normal falcon. Any moving
object had for it the same meaning as a mouse and excited the same
movement. So the decerebrate dog does not distinguish friend from
stranger and other dogs have no meaning for it. All objects are alike to
all decerebrate animals. In the popular language of the street “all
coons look alike” to them. In other words the main defect is loss of
memory for conscious experiences, of what Loeb calls associative-memory,
the conscious memory which gives meaning to sensations, transforms them
by synthesis into _perception_ of objects and gives still further
meaning to the objects. Hence for the pigeon without its cerebrum
“Everything is only a mass in space, it moves aside for every pigeon or
attempts to climb over it, just as it would in the case of a stone. All
authors agree in the statement that to these animals all objects are
alike. They have no enemies and no friends. They live like hermits no
matter in how large a company they find themselves. The languishing coo
of the male makes as little impression upon the female deprived of its
cerebrum as the rattling of peas or the whistle which formerly made it
hasten to its feeding place. Neither does the female show interest in
its young. The young ones that have just learned to fly pursue the
mother, crying unceasingly for food, but they might as well beg food of
a stone.”[127]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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