W.H.R.Rivers

“ When a thought or feeling comes into the mind without antecedents in consciousness so that we suppose it to have come from the unconscious, I shall not speak of the thought as having arisen unconsciously but unwittingly. Similarly, I shall speak of the process of suggestion as taking place unwittingly and not unconsciously, leaving open how far the source of the suggested thought or behaviour is in the "unconscious" as the term will be used in this book. ”

“ The necessity for the use of unconscious factors continually arises when dealing with the experience of health, but the opportunities afforded by such experience are usually so fleeting, and the experience itself often so apparently trivial, that they failed to force the psychologist of the normal to face the situation. ”

“ There are, on the one hand, general changes in personality, and changes in tastes, in likes and dislikes, in preferences and prejudices, while on the other hand, there are specific dreads or other morbid experiences of waking or sleeping life, such as nightmares, hallucinations or morbid impulses, which can be more or less directly ascribed to the activity of the unconscious experience. In such cases we have definite evidence, not merely for the existence of unconscious experience, but for its activity, or capacity for activity, in this unconscious state. ”

“ The concept of "the unconscious" in psychology is one which has aroused the liveliest differences of opinion and has been met by bitter opposition. Even those who are ready to accept the vast influence of unconscious factors in psychology may well be appalled by the difficulties of treating the unconscious in a scientific manner and fitting so necessarily hypothetical a factor into the explanation of behaviour. ”

“ It is only the urgent and inevitable needs of the sick that have driven the physician into the full recognition of the unconscious, while it has needed the vast scale on which nervous and mental disorders have been produced in the war to force this recognition upon more than the few specialists to whom it had been previously confined. ”

“ Though my memories of later houses are more vague than the early memory, they are quite as definite for the upper as for the lower parts of the buildings.
The two cases I have given are examples of the experience of [p. 14] early life which has become inaccessible to consciousness. This period of life is especially apt to afford occasions for experiences to become unconscious, but the passing of experience into the unconscious may happen at any age, and its occurrence has been brought to notice very widely by the experience of war. ”

“ When his profession as a doctor took him at the age of thirty to the front his specific [p. 10] dread was brought into pronounced activity by the necessity of working in dug-outs, and the strain so produced formed a most important factor in producing a state of anxiety-neurosis. During a course of treatment to discover the origin of his claustrophobia, there came to the patient's consciousness an experience at the age of four in which he had been confined in a narrow passage with no means of escape from a dog by which he was terrified. ”

“ One line of opposition has come from advocates of the older introspective school of psychologists who have found it difficult to fit an unconscious region of the mind into their schemes of description and explanation. The aim of the older psychology was to furnish a rational explanation of human behaviour and endeavour. ”

“ These measures were only means by which these psychologists and psycho-physiologists escaped from the necessity of facing the difficulties presented by many aspects of animal and human behaviour, and especially those presented in Man by the phenomena of disease.
It is noteworthy that the due recognition of the importance of the unconscious and the first comprehensive attempt to formulate a scheme of its organisation and of the mechanisms by which it is brought into relation with the conscious should have come from those whose business it is to deal with the morbid aspect of the human mind. ”

“ One of the most frequent features of the nervous disturbances of war has been the complete blotting out of the memories of certain events, the obliteration usually extending considerably beyond the event which furnished its special occasion. ”

“ We have no direct evidence that the incident had been wholly unconscious during childhood, but owing to his prolonged search for such experience at a later period of life, and its total failure to appear in consciousness, we have the most decisive evidence that an arresting experience, one accompanied by an emotional state of the most poignant kind, can lie dormant and evade the most searching attempts to bring it into the field of consciousness. ”

“ In some cases, where the loss of memory for a period of the soldier's life has been produced by physical shock accompanied by complete unconsciousness, as in cerebral concussion, the obliteration has been complete, and the case does not come within the scope of this book, for there is no evidence that any experience exists capable of being again brought to consciousness. ”

“ In such cases soldiers have lost the entire memory of their lives from some moment preceding a shock or severe strain until they have found themselves in hospital, perhaps weeks later, although during at least part of the intervening time they may have been to all appearance fully conscious and may even have distinguished themselves by actions on the field of which they have no recollection. ”