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
It may be, for example, that you have to-day only a vague and general
recollection of the last lecture and if you should endeavor to write an
account of it from memory the result would be but a fragmentary report.
And yet it is quite possible that, if one or another of the various
technical methods I have described could be applied to some one of you,
we should be able to recover quite exact memories, of certain portions
at least, of the lecture—perhaps _verbatim_ transcripts of certain
portions, and large numbers of facts which are quite beyond your present
recollection.
Our study of those phenomena of memory which I cited in the last lecture
was carried only so far as to allow us to draw the conclusions as to
conservation which I have just stated. And, in drawing these
conclusions, let me repeat—we have provisionally limited the meaning of
the term conservation simply to the potential ability to reproduce
experiences, with or without recollection, either in their original
form, or translated into a graphic, visual, or auditory expression of
them. We have not attempted from these phenomena to draw conclusions as
to the nature of conservation, or as to whether it is anything apart
from reproduction under favorable conditions. If we do not look below
the surface of the phenomena it might be held that memory is only a
recurrent phase of consciousness, and that the term conservation is only
a figure of speech to express the ability to determine that recurrence
in our self-consciousness.
Let us examine now a little more closely some of the phenomena we have
already examined but inadequately.
=Residual processes underlying automatic motor phenomena: writing,
speech, gestures, etc.=—We will take writing as a type and the following
as an example: In a state of hypnosis a subject learns a verse by heart.
It is then suggested that this verse shall be written automatically
after he has been awakened. (By arranging the conditions of the
experiment in this way we make certain that the script afterwards
written shall express a memory and not a fabrication.) After the subject
returns to the normal waking state he has complete amnesia for the whole
hypnotic state and therefore for the verse. Now, if the experiment is
successful, his hand writes the given verse without the subject being
aware of what his hand is writing, and it may be without being aware
that his hand is writing anything at all. The whole thing has been done
without participation of his consciousness and without his knowing that
any such phenomenon was to occur. (Of course any of his conscious
experiences while in the hypnotic state might have been used as a test,
these being known to the experimenter as well.) Now the things to be
noted are:
1, that the script expresses a memory; that is, reproduces previous
_conserved_ conscious ideas—the verse. It expresses memory just exactly
as it would express it if it had been consciously and voluntarily
written.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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