Morton Prince

“ And, still more, can the persistence of a mere association of the affect with the object independently of a subconscious process explain the psychosis? Either of these two last propositions is absurd on its face as being opposed to the experience of the great mass of mankind. The vast majority of people have undergone disturbing, sorrowful or fear-inspiring experiences at some time during the course of their lives and they do not find that they cannot for years afterwards face some object or idea belonging to that experience without being overwhelmed with the same emotion. ”

“ It is only as such physiological complexes that ideas that have become dormant can be regarded as still existing. If our knowledge were deep enough, if by any technical method we could determine the exact character of the modifications of the dispositions of the neurons that remain as vestiges of thought and could decipher their meaning, we could theoretically read in our brains the record of our lives, as if graphically inscribed on a tablet. ”

“ The only question is, in what form can a thought be so conserved that it can, while still in a state of conservation, without itself rising into consciousness, fabricate a symbolism, allegory, or other work requiring imagination and reasoning? The only logical and intelligible inference is that the antecedent conscious experience has been either itself specifically conserved as such outside of the personal consciousness, or has left some neural residuum or disposition capable of functioning and constructing the conscious dream fabrication. ”

“ It would be a gross exaggeration to say, on the basis of the evidence at our disposal, that all life’s experiences persist as potential memories, or even that this is true of the greater number. It is, however, undoubtedly true that of the great mass of experiences which have passed out of all voluntary recollection, an almost incredible, even if relatively small, number still lie dormant, and, under favoring conditions, many can be brought within the field of conscious memory. The significance of this fact will become apparent to us later after we have studied the nature of conservation. ”

“ A phase of consciousness may not be conserved, or it may become so modified by the clash with new experiences that a rearrangement of its elements takes place and it becomes, for instance, a new motive or belief, or a new setting to give a new meaning to an idea. On the other hand, any passing phase may, as we have seen, still belong to our personality even though it lies hidden in its depths. ”

“ I refer to those complexes known as the sentiments. By this term, as we have seen, is understood the organization of an acquired disposition—the idea of an object—or complex of such dispositions (the psychic whole of idea plus its “meaning” derived from the setting of associated experiences) with one or more innate emotional dispositions. It must not be overlooked for one moment that a sentiment is something more than the organization of an emotion or other affect with an idea. There is nothing novel or fruitful in such a limited conception of the structure of a sentiment as this. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Personality is the sum total of all the biological innate dispositions, impulses, tendencies, appetites and instincts of the individual and of all the acquired dispositions and tendencies—acquired by experience. ”

“ To attribute these effects of emotion to repression from conflict is only to express the facts in different terms. But it would be often an over-emphasis to describe what takes place as a specific conflict between particular sentiments. It is often rather the discharge of a blind impulsive force in every direction which, like a blast of dynamite, suppresses or dissociates every other process which might come into consciousness and displace it. ”

“ The point to which I wish in this connection to call attention is that when a simple emotion-instinct, or an idea linked with an instinct (a sentiment) is awakened by any stimulus, its impulsive force is discharged in three directions: the first is toward the excitation of those articulated movements and ideas which guide and carry the instinct to fruition—to fight in the case of anger, to flee in the case of fear, to cherish in the case of love, etc. ”

“ It is always difficult for one to analyze one’s self accurately and the conditions have been very complex. I think, however, that I have a clear conception and appreciation of my case. I remember myself perfectly as “A” and as “B.” I remember my thoughts, my feelings, and my points of view in each personality, and can see where they are the same and where they depart from my normal self. These points of view will appear as we go on and I feel sure that my memory can be trusted. ”

“ Thus the affective element of an instinctive process—a process which is a biological reaction—provides the driving force, makes the idea a dynamic factor, moves us to carry the idea to fulfilment. As McDougall has expressed it:
"We may say, then, that directly or indirectly the instincts are the prime movers of all human activity; by the conative or impulsive force of some instinct (or of some habit derived from some instinct) , every train of thought, however cold and passionless it may seem, is borne along toward its end, and every bodily activity is initiated and sustained. ”

“ From the point of view here adopted, the recent discussions and controversies over the problems of “instinct and intelligence” have been much muddled by the arbitrary denial of conscious elements to an instinctive process, and by the acceptation of consciousness or conscious experience as the criterion of intelligence. In this view instinct and intelligence become contrasted concepts which to my way of thinking they are not necessarily at all. If it is admitted that instinct is an innate disposition, its contrasted quality is that which is acquired and not the quality of consciousness. ”

“ Whence came these new ideas? They seem to her to have come miraculously, for she has forgotten the hypnotic complex. But forgetting an experience is not equivalent to its not having happened, or to that experience not having been a part of one’s own psychic life. The hypnotic consciousness remains a part of one’s self (as a neurographic complex) , however absolutely we have lost awareness of it. Its experiences become fixed, though dormant, just as do the experiences of our personal conscious life. The mechanism is the same. ”

“ Their heroes and heroines jettison their psychological cargoes as if they were barrels of molasses whenever their personalities show signs of going down in the storms of life’s experiences. According to this view, which is derived from an imperfect conception of mental processes, any passing phase of consciousness ceases to have potential existence or influence as soon as it is forgotten, or as soon as it ceases to be a consciously dominating belief or motive of life. ”

“ Aversion means the instinct of repulsion or disgust. This instinct therefore became systematized with the idea of marriage as its object forming an intense sentiment of aversion. Even as a boy the aversion impelled him to determine never to marry and later he formed strong theoretical anti-matrimonial views which became almost a religion. For years he talked about his views, argued and preached about them like a fanatic to his friends. His aversion rose in successful conflict against every temptation to matrimony and his anti-matrimonial complex became an obsession. ”

“ The conscious psychosis was first the emergence into consciousness of two elements only, the perception and the affect, and the fear was a reaction to self-reproach, a fear to face self-blame.
Now even if the mother’s death were logically, by a train of fortuitous circumstances, the patient’s fault, why did an otherwise intelligent woman lay so much stress upon an irresponsible child’s behavior? The child after all behaved no differently from other children. People do not consciously blame themselves in after life for the ultimate consequences of childhood’s heedlessness. ”

“ It is, we may say with almost literal truth, when these factors work to cross purposes that a personality ceases to be a harmonious whole; just as the individuals composing a group of persons, a football team, for example, when they fail to work together and each strives to fulfill his own purposes, cease to be a single team. Consciousness is not a unity in any sense that the term has any significant meaning beyond that which is a most banal platitude. ”

“ We have an exalting experience, engage in a spirited game of tennis, watch an exciting football match, or take part in an exhilarating dance. For the remainder of the day or the next day we still experience all the stimulating pleasurable feeling, even though in the cares of our vocation the memories of the previous experiences have remained dormant, not having once been called to mind. ”

“ Surely fear is instinctive and is a conscious element in an innate process; and so must be visual and other sensory images, as in the first peck of a chicken. To look upon the first visual image simply as conscious “experience,” as an “onlooker,” and reject it as a factor in the process which determines that first peck, seems to me to be arbitrary psychology if not physiology. If consciousness may be a quality of an innate process—and why not?—it cannot be a criterion of intelligence. The true converse of the conscious is the unconscious. ”

“ I wish merely to point out that if parallelism is a true formulation of the mind-brain problem, as I have just stated it, the converse ought to hold true, namely, that every brain process of a certain kind involving intelligence ought to be correlated with consciousness. But if some subconscious processes manifesting what is equivalent to thought, reasoning, judgment, imagination, volition, etc., are unconscious—as seems likely if not probable—then this converse does not hold true. ”

“ The bringing of coconscious processes into consciousness as data of memory does not seem therefore to be anything a priori improbable and there would seem to be no reason why the memory of them should be more unreliable than that of conscious processes in the forms of attention. Indeed, if the fringe of consciousness be regarded as coconscious, it is an every-day act common to everybody. ”

“ I owe you what is worth far more than life itself ... namely, the desire to live. You have given me life and you have given me something to fill it with ... I feel more like myself than for a long time. I am ‘my own man again,’ so to say, and if you keep me and help me a little longer I shall be well.”
In interpreting the phenomena it must be remembered that in such suggestive experiments the subject after waking has complete amnesia for the whole hypnotic experience, for all the ideas which were organized into the complex to form the setting. ”

“ Probably our voluntary memory is not absolutely perfect for any experience in all its details but the details that are conserved often far exceed those that can be recalled.
In the survey of life’s experiences which we have studied we have, for the most part, considered those which have had objective relation and have been subject to confirmation by collateral testimony. But we should not overlook the fact that among mental experiences are those of the inner as well as outer life. ”

“ When we speak of a setting to an idea we are not entitled to think of it as a sharply defined group of ideas, or sharply limited subconscious process. When we identify it with the residua of past experiences we are not entitled, on the basis of exact knowledge, to arbitrarily make up a selected cluster of residua which shall exclude those and include these residual elements of antecedent associated experiences, and dogmatically postulate the composition of the complex which we call the setting. ”

“ Such a persisting repression may be brought about either directly by volitional conflict or indirectly through the cultivation of antagonistic sentiments. The cultivation of an instinct is a common enough observation. Every one can point to some one of his acquaintance who has so fostered his instinct of anger or fear, has so cultivated the habit of one or the other reaction that he has become the slave of his emotion. ”

“ Now we have known for many years from numerous observations that emotion tends to disrupt the mind and to dissociate the experiences which give rise to the affective state so that they cannot be brought back into consciousness. We may particularize further and, making use of the known impulsive force of emotion, attribute the dissociation (or inhibition) in many cases to a conflict between certain ideas belonging to the experience and other opposing ideas which, with the emotion, they have awakened. ”

“ If you will stop a moment to think, and give play to your imagination, you will see that the principle of the neurographic conservation of experiences must be true not only of our outer life, of our experiences with our environment, but of our whole inner life, normal as well as abnormal. ”

“ It has been objected that as it makes no practical difference whether the subconscious process, which induces a given phenomenon, is coconscious or unconscious, and as in many given cases it is difficult or impossible to determine the question, therefore, that such inquiries are useless. Plainly such an objection only concerns applied science, not science itself. It concerns only the practicing physician who deals solely with reactions. ”

“ If we reject the evidence of hysterical phenomena, of that furnished by a coconscious personality, and by automatic script and speech, etc., we shall have to reject precisely similar evidence for consciousness in other people than ourselves. ”

“ More than this it is important that the theory of memory should be removed if possible from the domain of purely speculative psychological concepts and placed on a sound basis of observation and experiment like other accepted theories of science.
From the point of view of animism, and indeed of dualism, nothing becomes of the ideas that have passed out of mind; they simply, for the time being, cease to exist. Consciousness changes its form. Nothing is preserved, nothing is stored up. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every one’s mental life may fairly be said to be divided between those ideas, thoughts, and feelings which he receives from and gives out to his social world, the social environment in which he lives, and those which belong more properly to his inner life and the innermost sanctuary of his personality and character. ”

“ INSTINCTS, SENTIMENTS, AND CONFLICTS It is generally agreed that emotions proper (as distinguished from other affective states) may be divided into those which are primary (anger, fear, disgust, etc.) , and those (jealousy, admiration, hatred, etc.) , which are compounded of two or more primary emotions. McDougall has made a great contribution to our knowledge in having made clear that a primary emotion is not only instinctive, but is the central or psychical element in a reflex process consisting, besides, of an ingoing stimulus and an outgoing impulse. The whole process is the instinct. ”

“ Physiological memory.—Memory as commonly regarded and known to psychology is a conscious manifestation but, plainly, if we regard it, as we have thus far, as a process, then, logically, we are entitled to regard any process which consists of the three factors, registration, conservation, and reproduction of experiences, as memory, whether the final result be the reproduction of a conscious experience, or one to which no consciousness was ever attached. ”

“ To explore the most sacred depths of the unconscious, to labor in what I have just called the subsoil of consciousness, that will be the principal task of psychology in the century which is opening. I do not doubt that wonderful discoveries await it there, as important perhaps as have been in the preceding centuries the discoveries of the physical and natural sciences. ”

“ Indeed, our reactions to the environment, our moral and social conduct, the affective reactions of our sentiments, instincts, feelings, and other conative tendencies, our “habits,” judgments, points of view, and attitudes of mind—all that we term character and personality—are predetermined by the mental experiences of the past by which they are developed, organized, and conserved in the unconscious. Otherwise all would be chaos. We are thus the offspring of our past and the past is the present. ”

“ There is no sharp dividing line between the activities of the unconscious, coconscious, and conscious.
When we descend in the scale of animal life to the insects (bees, ants, etc.,) we observe motor activity of a highly complex character of a kind that is termed intelligent, but we are forced to conclude, from various considerations, that the elements of consciousness have dwindled away to what can be nothing more than mere sensibility. In other words consciousness is reduced to its lowest terms, but behavior and the neural processes are maintained at a high level of complexity. ”

“ The unconscious, representing as it does all the past experiences of life that have been conserved, is not limited to any particular type of experiences; nor are the subconscious and conscious processes to which it gives rise more likely to be determined by any particular antecedents, such as those of childhood, as some would have us believe. Nor are these motivated by any particular class of emotional instincts or strivings of human personality. ”