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
This may be illustrated by the following: We will suppose that three
persons in imagination perceive a certain building used as a department
store on a certain street I have in mind now, in a growing section of
the city. One of these persons is an architect, another is an owner of
property on this street, and the third is a woman who is in the habit of
making purchases in the department store. When the architect thinks of
the building he perceives it in his mind’s eye in an architectural
setting, that is, its architectural style, proportions, features, and
relations. His perception includes a number of secondary images of the
neighboring buildings, of their styles of architecture, and of their
relations from an æsthetic point of view. In the perception of the owner
of property there are also a number of secondary images, but these are
of the passing people and traffic, of neighboring buildings as shops and
places of business. In the perception of the woman the secondary images
are of the interior of the store, the articles for sale, clothes she
would like to purchase and possibly bargains dear to every woman’s
heart. Plainly each perceives the building from a different point of
view. Each might perceive the building from the same point of view, but
the point of view differs because of the differences in the past
experiences of each.
In the case of the architect these experiences were those of previous
observations on the architecture of the growing neighborhood. In the
case of the property owner they were of thoughtful reflections on the
future development of neighboring property, on the industrial relations
of the building to business, and on the speculative future value of the
property. In the case of the woman they were of purchases she had made,
of articles she had seen and desired, of scenes inside the shop, etc.
Out of these experiences respectively a complex was built and conserved
in the mind of each. The idea of the building is set in these respective
experiences which therefore may be called its setting. The imaginal
perception of the building obviously has a different meaning for each of
our three observers, and it is plainly the setting which governs the
meaning, i.e., an architectural, industrial, or shopping meaning, as the
case happens to be; and we may further say the setting determines the
point of view or attitude of mind or interest. _Either the perception
proper of the building or the meaning may be in the focus of attention
and the other recede into the background or the fringe of awareness._
Further, different _affects_ may enter into each setting and, therefore,
into the perception. With the architectural perception there may be
linked an æsthetic joyful emotion; with the industrial perception a
depressing emotion of anxiety; with the shopping perception perhaps one
of anger. (This linking of an emotion, of course, has a great importance
for psychopathic states.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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