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
Analysis was conducted at great length and memories covering a wide
field of experiences were elicited. When asked to think of bells in a
tower, or each of these objects separately, there was at first a
complete blocking of thought in that her mind became a blank. Later,
memories which to a large extent, but not wholly, played in various
relations around her mother (who is dead) as the central object came
into the field of consciousness. Nothing, however, was awakened that
gave the slightest meaning to the phobia even on the wildest
interpretation. The patient, who had been frequently hypnotized by
another physician, tended during the analysis to go into a condition of
unusually deep abstraction, to such a degree that on breaking off the
analysis she failed to remember, save very imperfectly, the memories
elicited. Such an abstraction is hypnosis.
Finally, after all endeavors to discover the genesis of the phobia by
analysis were in vain, I tried another method. While she was in hypnosis
I put a pencil in her hand with the object of obtaining the desired
information through automatic writing. _While she was narrating some
irrelevant memories of her mother_, the hand rapidly wrote as follows:
“G.... M.... church and my father took my mother to Bi.... where she
died and we went to Br.... and they cut my mother. I prayed and cried
all the time that she would live and the church bells were always
ringing and I hated them.”
When she began to write the latter part of this script she became
depressed, sad, indeed anguished; tears flowed down her cheeks and she
seemed to be almost heartbroken. In other words, it appeared as if she
were subconsciously living over again the period described in the
script. I say subconsciously for she did not know what her hand had
written or why she was anguished. During the writing of the first part
of the script she was verbally describing other memories; during the
latter part she ceased speaking.
After awakening from hypnosis and when she had become composed in her
mind she narrated, at my request, the events referred to in the script.
She remembered them clearly as they happened when she was about fifteen
years of age. It appeared that she was staying at that time in G....
M...., a town in England. Her mother, who was seriously ill, was taken
to a great surgeon to be operated upon. She herself suffered great
anxiety and anguish lest her mother should not recover. She went twice a
day to the church to pray for her mother’s recovery and in her anguish
declared that if her mother did not recover she would no longer believe
in God. The chimes in the tower of the church, which was close to her
hotel, sounded every quarter hour; they got on her nerves; she hated
them; she could not bear to hear them, and while she was praying they
added to her anguish. Ever since this time the ringing of bells has
continued to cause a feeling of anguish. This narrative was not
accompanied by emotion as was the automatic script.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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