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
An observation like this, dealing with the conservation of long
forgotten childhood or other experiences, is not unique. Quite a
collection of recorded cases might be cited. Mr. C. Lowe Dickinson has
put on record[7] one of a young woman (Miss C.), who, in an hypnotic
trance, narrated a dream-like fabrication of a highly imaginative
character. On one occasion, through the imaginary intermediation of the
spirit of a fictitious person, who was supposed to have lived in the
time of Richard II, she gave a great many details about the Earl and
Countess of Salisbury, “and other personages of the time, and about the
manners and customs of that age. The personages referred to, the details
given in connection with them, and especially the genealogical data,
were found on examination to be correct, although many of them were such
as apparently it would not have been easy to ascertain without
considerable historical research.” Miss C. after coming out of the
hypnotic trance was in entire ignorance of how she could have obtained
this knowledge and could not recall ever having read any book which
contained the information she had given. Through automatic writing,
however, it was discovered that it was to be found in a book called _The
Countess Maud_, by E. Holt. It then appeared—and this is the point of
interest bearing on the conservation of forgotten knowledge—that this
book had been read to her by her aunt _fourteen years previously, when
she was a child about eleven years old_. Both ladies had so completely
forgotten its contents that they could not recall even the period with
which it dealt. Here were conscious experiences of childhood which, if
voluntary recollection were to be made use of as a test, would be
rightly said to have been extinguished, but that they had only lain
fallow, conserved in some unconscious fashion, was shown by their
reproduction in the hypnotic trance.[8]
In this connection I may instance the case of Mrs. C. D., who suffers
from a fixed fear of fainting. She cannot recall, even after two
prolonged searching examinations, the first occasion when this fear
developed, or why she has it, and is, therefore, ignorant of its
genesis. Yet put into abstraction or light hypnosis she recalls vividly
its first occurrence as the effect of an emotional scene of twenty years
ago. The details of its psychological content come clearly into
consciousness, and its meaning, as a fear of death, is remembered as a
part of the original episode. That the fixed idea is a recurrence or
partial memory of the original complex becomes logically plain and is
recognized as such.
Instances of the reproduction in automatic script of _forgotten passages
from books_ are to be found in Mrs. Verrall’s[9] elaborate records of
her own automatic writings. Investigation showed that numerous pieces of
English, Latin, and Greek script were not original compositions but only
forgotten passages from authors previously read.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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