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
great coconscious field where they would continue their existence in
specific form as ideas, and whence they could be drawn upon for use at
any future time.
Various difficulties are raised by this hypothesis. In the first place,
there is no evidence that coconscious ideas have a continuous existence.
The technical methods of investigation which give evidence of such ideas
functioning outside of the awareness of the personal consciousness do
not show that at any given moment they are any more extensive than are
those which fill the field of the personal consciousness. Indeed,
usually, the coconscious field is of very limited extent. There remains
an enormous field of conserved experiences to be accounted for. So far
then as coconscious ideas can be discovered by our methods of
investigation they are _inadequate to account for the whole of the
conservation of life’s experiences_.
In the second place, these ideas come and go in the same fashion as do
those which make up the content of the main personal consciousness; and
many are constantly recurring to become coconscious memories. The same
problem, of the nature of conservation, therefore confronts us with
coconscious ideas in the determination of the mechanism of coconscious
memory. To explain conservation through coconscious ideas is but a
shifting of the problem. If a broader concept be maintained, namely,
that this coconsciousness, which can be demonstrated in special
conditions, is but a fraction of the sum total of coconscious ideas
outside of the personal awareness, we are confronted with a concept
which from its philosophical nature deals with postulates beyond
experience. We can neither prove nor disprove it. There is much that can
be said in its support for the deeper we dive into the subconscious
regions of the mind the more extensively do we come across evidences of
coconscious states underlying specific phenomena. Nevertheless, the
demonstration of coconscious states in any number of specific phenomena
does not touch the problem of the nature of conservation. In weighing
the probability of the hypothesis on theoretical grounds it would seem,
as I have already said in a preceding lecture, to be hardly conceivable
that ideas that had passed out of mind, the thoughts of the moment of
which we are no longer aware, can be treasured, conserved as such in a
sort of psychological storehouse or reservoir of consciousness, just as
if they were static or material facts. Such a conception would require
that every specific state of consciousness, every idea, every thought,
perception, sensation and feeling, after it had passed out of mind for
the moment, should enter a great sea of ideas which would be the sum
total of all our past experiences. In this sum-total millions of ideas
would have to be conserved _in concrete_ form until wanted again for use
by the personal consciousness of the moment. Here would be found, in
what you will see at once would be a real subconscious mind beyond the
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