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
Through education, whether scholastic, vocational, or social, we inherit
the experiences of our predecessors and become “... the heir of all the
ages, in the foremost files of time.” But the conceptions of one age can
never represent those of a preceding age. The veriest layman in science
today could not entertain the conceptions underlying many hypotheses
formulated by the wisest of the preceding age—of a Galileo, a Descartes,
or Pascal. Lucretius, in the first century B. C., argued, with what for
the time was great force, that the soul of man was corporeal and that it
“must consist of very small seeds and be inwoven through veins and flesh
and sinews; inasmuch as, after it has all withdrawn from the whole body
the exterior contour of the limbs preserves itself entire and not a
tittle of the weight is lost.”
Lucretius gave much thought to this problem, but to-day the least
cultured person, who has never reflected at all on psychological
matters, would recognize the foolishness of such a conception and reject
the hypothesis.[154] He would call it _common-sense_ which guided him,
but common-sense depends upon the fact that in the unconscious lie
memories, the reasons for and origin of which we do not remember; these
nullify such an hypothesis. These contradicting ideas, sifted out of
those belonging to the social education, have become fixed as dormant or
organized memories, and determine the judgments and trends of the
personal consciousness. These memory vestiges may work for good or evil,
shape our personal consciousness into a useful or useless form, one that
adapts or unfits the organism to its environment. In the latter case
they drive the organism into the field of pathological psychology.
-----
Footnote 138:
I am using this word in the general sense of any mental experience as
in the common phrase, “the association of ideas,” and not in the
restricted sense of Titchener as the equivalent of a perception.
Footnote 139:
I use this word “complex” in the general sense in which it is commonly
used and not with the specific meaning given to it by the Zurich
school, which limits it to a system of ideas to which a strong
affective tone is attached and which, because of its personally
distressing character, is repressed into the subconscious.
Footnote 140:
Which may be psychical, although not psychological.
Footnote 141:
Sisters of Napoleon, by M. Joseph Turquan.
Footnote 142:
McDougall (Social Psychology) regards jealousy as a complex emotional
state in which anger, tender emotion, and other innate dispositions
are factors.
Footnote 143:
Not included in this volume.
Footnote 144:
Aboulie et idées fixes, Revue philosophique, 1891, i., p. 279. Mental
State of Hystericals, p. 408.
Footnote 145:
P. 33.
Footnote 146:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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