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 epoch may be of a few hours, or it may be of days, of months, or
years. The simplest example is the frequent amnesia for the few hours
preceding a physical injury to the head resulting in temporary
unconsciousness. In other cases it is the result of extensive
dissociation effected by suggestion (e. g., in hypnosis), or psychical
trauma including therein emotional conflicts. Thus, to cite an
experimental example: Miss B. is troubled by a distressing memory which
constantly recurs to her mind during the twenty-four hours. To relieve
her I suggest that she will completely forget the original experience.
To my surprise, though the suggestion is limited to the experience
alone, the whole twenty-four hours are completely wiped out of her
memory. She cannot recall a single incident of that day. The whole epoch
which had associations with the memory is dissociated.
When the epochal amnesia follows psychical trauma the condition of
memory is apt to present the following peculiarity and the personality
may be altered. When the epoch is the immediate past, i.e., includes the
experiences extending from a certain past date up to the present, it
sometimes happens that memory reverts to that past date. That is to say,
the personality goes back to the period last remembered in which he
believes, for the moment, he is still living, the memory of the
succeeding last epoch being dissociated from the personal consciousness.
Under such conditions there is something more than amnesia. The
neurographic residua of the remembered epoch are revived and its
experiences remembered as if they had just been lived. There is not only
a dissociation of the memories of one epoch, but a resurrection of the
conserved and maybe forgotten experiences of a preceding one. The
synthesis of these memories restores again the personal consciousness of
that period. Before the cleavage took place the recollection of the
resurrected epoch may have been very incomplete and vague; afterward the
new personality remembers it as if just experienced. The personality is,
however, in other respects generally (always?) something different from
the personality of that particular epoch. The dissociation is apt to
involve a certain number of acquired traits and certain innate
dispositions and instincts, while other outlived and repressed traits
and innate dispositions and instincts are apt to be reawakened and
synthesized into an altered abnormal personality. But this is another
story that does not concern us now.
As an example of epochal amnesia I may cite Mrs. J——, who, after
dissociation occurs, has amnesia for all the events of several years
succeeding a certain hour of a certain day when a psychical trauma
(shock) occurred. She thinks she is living on that day and remembers in
great detail its events as if they had just occurred.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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