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
That there was in fact a subconsciously functioning process derived from
this complex would seem to be almost conclusively shown by another
phenomenon manifested. I refer to the vivid _visualization of herself in
a convulsion, struggling for air and manifesting fright_, which she
experienced in each attack. We have seen that such a visualization
(i.e., a modified vision) is the expression (secondary images?) of a
subconscious process (co-conscious ideas?). As a matter of fact this
particular visualization was a pictorial representation of antecedent
thoughts organized with thoughts of death and insanity and still
conserved in the unconscious. We must believe, then, that it was these
antecedent thoughts (in the first place her apprehension of inheriting
Bright’s disease and convulsions from her father, and in the second
place her conception of the unreality syndrome as a state which might
possibly end in convulsions) which, functioning subconsciously, induced
the quasi hallucinatory expression of themselves.[194] It is difficult
to get away from the conclusion that the remainder of the setting from
which the ideas of insanity and death were derived also functioned as a
subconscious process. Whether this process was conscious or unconscious
is a secondary question which we need not consider.
In weighing the probabilities of this interpretation we should bear in
mind that there were two conscious beliefs of which the patient was
fully aware and which were very real to her; namely, the liability of
becoming insane and to convulsions and death. The conative force of the
instinct of fear linked to such ideas is quite sufficient to drive them
to expression when out of mind and subconscious. Or expressed
differently we may say that the fear was a reaction to these ideas which
the patient dared not face.
We ought not, however, to be too sweeping in our generalizations and go
further than the facts warrant. We are not justified in concluding that
the linking of an affect to an idea always includes a subconscious
mechanism. On the contrary, as I have previously said, probably in the
great majority of such experiences, aside from obsessions, no such
mechanism is required to explain the facts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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