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
"3. The memories, emotions, and perceptions of which the subject is not
conscious when awake are remembered in hypnosis and described. The
thoughts of which the subject is conscious when awake are those which
are concentrated on what she is doing. The others, of which she is not
conscious, are a sort of side-thoughts. These are not logically
connected among themselves, are weak, and have little influence on the
personal (chief) train of thought. Now, although when awake the subject
is conscious of some thoughts and not of others, both kinds keep running
into one another and therefore the conscious and the subconscious are
constantly uniting, disuniting, and interchanging. _There is no hard and
fast line between the conscious and the subconscious, for at times what
belongs to one passes into the other, and vice versa._ The waking self
is varying the grouping of its thoughts all the time in such a way as to
be continually including and excluding the subconscious thoughts. The
personal pronoun ‘I,’ or, when spoken to, ‘you,’ applied equally to her
waking self and to her hypnotic self, _but these terms were not
applicable to her unconscious thoughts, which were not self-conscious_.
For convenience of terminology it was agreed to arbitrarily call the
thoughts of which the subject is conscious when awake the _waking
consciousness_, and the thoughts of which when awake she is not
conscious the _secondary consciousness_. In making this division the
hypnotic self insisted most positively on one distinction, namely that
the secondary consciousness was in no sense a _personality_. The pronoun
_I_ could not be applied to it. In speaking of the thoughts of this
second group of mental states alone, she could not say ‘I felt this,’ ‘I
saw that.’ These thoughts were better described as, for the most part,
unconnected, discrete sensations, impressions, and emotions, and were
not synthesized into a personality. They were not, therefore,
self-conscious. When the waking self was hypnotized, the resulting
hypnotic self acquired the subconscious perceptions of the second
consciousness; she then could say ‘_I_,’ and the hypnotic ‘_I_’ included
what were formerly ‘subconscious’ perceptions. In speaking of the
secondary personality by itself, then, it is to be understood that
self-consciousness and personality are always excluded. This testimony
was verified by test instances of subconscious perception of visual and
auditory images of experiences occurring in my presence.
"4. Part played by the secondary consciousness in (a) normal mentation.
The hypnotic self testified that the thoughts of the secondary
consciousness do not form a logical chain. They do not have volition.
They are entirely passive and have no direct control over the subject’s
voluntary actions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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