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
The methods of _education and therapeutic suggestion_ are variants of
this mode of organizing mental processes. Both, in principle, are
substantially the same, differing only in detail. They depend for their
effect upon the implantation in the mind of ideational complexes
organized by repetition, or by the impulsive force of their affective
tones, or both. Every form of education necessarily involves the
artificial formation of such complexes, whether in a pedagogical,
religious, ethical, scientific, social, or professional field. So in
psychotherapy by artfully directed suggestion, or education in the
narrower sense, complexes may be similarly formed and organized. New
points of view and “sentiments” may be inculcated, useful emotions and
feelings excited, and the personality correspondingly modified. Roughly
speaking, this is accomplished by suggesting ideas that will form
_settings_ (associations) that give new and desired meanings to
previously harmful ideas; and these ideas, as well as any others we
desire to implant in the mind, are organized by suggestion with emotions
(instincts) of a useful, pleasurable, and exalting kind to form
desirable sentiments, and to carry the ideas to fulfilment. Thus
sentiments of right, or of ambition, or of sympathy, or of altruism, or
of disinterestedness in self are awakened; and, with all this, opposing
emotions are aroused to conflict with and repress the distressing ones,
and the whole welded into a complex which becomes conserved
neurographically and thereby a part of the personality.
Under ordinary conditions of every-day mental life _social suggestion_
acts like therapeutic suggestion. But the suggestions of every-day life
are so subtle and insidious that they are scarcely consciously
recognized.
2. _Chronological systems_ (using complex in a rather extended sense)
are those which embrace the experiences of certain epochs of our lives
rather than the subject material included in them. In a general way
events as they are successively experienced become associated together,
and with other elements of personality, so that the later recollection
of one event in the chain of an epoch recalls successively the others.
Conversely a break in the chain of memory may occur at any point and the
chain only be picked up at a more distant date, leaving between, as a
hiatus, an epoch for which there is amnesia of reproduction. This
normally common _amnesia affords confirmatory evidence_ of the
associative relation of successive events. Involving as it does the
unimportant and unemotional experiences as well as the important and
emotional—though the former may be as well conserved as the latter—it is
not easy to understand. The principle, however, plays an important part
in abnormal amnesia particularly, but not necessarily, where there is a
dissociation of personality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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