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
Subconscious perceptions even more than absent-minded acts offer some of
the most interesting phenomena of conservation, for these phenomena give
evidence of the ability, under certain conditions, to reproduce, in one
mode or another, experiences which were never a phase of the personal
consciousness, never entered even the fringe of the content of this
consciousness and of which, therefore, we were never aware. For this
reason they are not, properly speaking, forgotten experiences. Their
reproduction sometimes produces dramatic effects. The following is an
instance: B. C. A., waking one night out of a sound sleep, saw a vision
of a young girl dressed in white, standing at the foot of her bed. The
vision was extraordinarily vivid, the face so distinct that she was able
to give a detailed description of it. She had no recollection of having
seen the face before, and it awakened no sense of familiarity.
Suspecting, for certain reasons, the figure to be that of a young girl
who had recently died and whom I knew that B. C. A. had never known and
was not aware that she had ever seen, I placed before her a collection
of a dozen or more photographs of different people among which was one
of this girl. This photograph she picked out as the one which most
resembled the vision (it was a poor likeness) and automatic writing
confirmed most positively the choice. Now it transpired that she had
passed by this girl on one occasion while the latter was talking to me
in the hall of my house, but she had purposely, for certain reasons, not
looked at her. Subconsciously, however, she had seen her since she could
give, both in hypnosis and by automatic writing, an accurate account of
the incident, which I also remembered. B. C. A., however, had no
recollection of it. The subconscious perception was later reproduced
(after having undergone secondary elaboration) as a vision.
Similarly I have known paragraphs read in the newspapers out of the
corner of her eye, so to speak, and probably by casual glances, not
only, as I have said, to be recalled in hypnosis and by automatic
writing, but to be reproduced with more or less elaboration in her
dreams. She had, as the evidence showed, no awareness at the time of
having read these paragraphs and no after recollection of the same.
Experimentally, as I have said, it is possible to demonstrate other
phenomena which are the same in principle. The experiment consists,
after surreptitiously placing objects under proper precautions in the
peripheral field of vision, in having the subject fix his eyes on
central vision and his attention distracted from the environment by
intense concentration or reading. Immediately after removing the objects
it is determined that the subject did not consciously perceive them. But
in hypnosis or by other methods it is found that memory for perceptions
of the peripheral objects returns, i.e., the perceptions are reproduced.
Auditory stimuli may be used as tests with similar results.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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