The unconscious : $b The fundamentals of human personality, normal and abnormal — John Shaqi
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
in this sense only, meaning that the memory of it is not permanently
lost but that under certain particular circumstances we can recall it.
Now a large mass of observations demonstrate that there are an enormous
number of experiences, belonging to both normal and abnormal mental
life, which we are unable to voluntarily recall during any period of our
lives, no matter how hard we try, or what aids to memory we employ. For
these experiences there is life-long amnesia. Nevertheless, it is easy
to demonstrate that, though the personal consciousness of everyday life
cannot recall them, they are not lost, properly speaking, but conserved;
for when the personal consciousness has undergone a peculiar change, at
moments when certain special alterations have taken place in the
conditions of the personal consciousness, at such moments you find that
the subject under investigation recalls the apparently lost experiences.
These moments are those of hypnosis, abstraction, dreams, and certain
pathological states. Again, in certain individuals it is possible by
technical devices to awaken secondary mental processes in the form of a
subconsciousness which may manifest the memories of the forgotten
experiences without awareness therefor on the part of the personal
consciousness. These manifestations are known as automatic writing and
speech. Then, again, by means of certain post-hypnotic phenomena, it is
easy to study conservation experimentally. We can make, as you will
later see, substantially everything that happened to the subject of the
experiment in hypnosis—his thoughts, his speech, his actions, for all of
which he has complete and irretrievable loss of memory in a waking
state—we can make memory for all these lost experiences reappear when
hypnosis is again induced. Thus we can prove conservation when voluntary
memory for experiences is absolutely lost. These experiments, among
others, as we shall also see, also give an insight into the nature of
conservation which is the real problem involved in an investigation into
the process of memory.
Before undertaking to solve this problem—so far as may be done—it is
well to obtain a full realization of the extent to which experiences
which have been forgotten may be still conserved. I will therefore, as I
promised you, résumé the experimental and other evidence supporting this
principle, making use of both personal observations and those of others.
_NOTE—In the following exposition of the evidence for the theory of
memory it has been necessary to make use of phenomena subsuming
subconscious processes before the subconscious itself has been
demonstrated. A few words in explanation of the terms used is therefore
desirable to avoid confusing the reader._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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