W.H.R.Rivers

“ If this value of Freud's theory were only a probability, or even only a possibility, are we justified in ignoring it as an instrument for the better understanding of disorders of which at present we know so little? Are we to reject a helping hand with contumely because it sometimes leads us to discover unpleasant aspects of human nature and because it comes from Vienna? ”

“ When a group of animals react to danger by means of flight it is certainly for the welfare of each individual that it shall act with the rest, but it is not so clear that complete uniformity is necessary in this mode of reaction. It may even be that in some cases individual safety, as well as the safety of the greatest number, would be promoted by flight in different directions rather than by the absolute uniformity which would result from a perfect process of suggestion. In the reaction by aggression again, absolute uniformity is not imperative. ”

“ The disturbed sleep only exhausts the sufferer's strength and makes still more unequal the struggle between the fear, horror or shame, and the forces by which the attempt is made to subdue the ever-rising storm. ”

“ Freud's theory of the unconscious should appeal to the physician in that it provides him with a definite working scheme of influences, which he has long known to be active in the causation of mental disorders and of the bodily disorders which are traceable to mental factors. The modern conception of such disorders is that they are not merely the result of some shock or strain, but are the outcome of the whole life-history of those who suffer, that they are the result of the totality of the individual experience of the patient as well as of that ancestral experience which we call heredity. ”

“ Thus, if "imitation" is used as a term for the motor or effector aspect of the gregarious instinct, it must be clearly recognised that the imitation is unwitting. It is this kind of imitation who is especially important in the life of the infant and in all those reactions upon which depend the special characters of the collective behaviour of Mankind. It is in this form that imitation is most effective. Witting imitation can never attain the completeness and harmony which follow the action of the instinctive process. ”

“ Childhood is one long conflict between individual instinctive tendencies and the social traditions and ideals of society. Whether the outcome of this conflict is to be a genius or a paranoiac; a criminal or a philanthropist; a good citizen or a wastrel; depends in some measure, we do not yet know with any degree of exactness in what measure, on education, on the direction which is given by the environment, material, psychological and social, to the energy engendered in the conflicts made necessary by the highly complex character of the past history of our race. ”

“ I have taken the frog as an instance of an amphibian because it is one with which we are especially familiar, but the process of dissociation and the property of alternate consciousness would be still more necessary to such an amphibian as the newt, which is for long spaces of time the subject of purely aquatic experience and then for long periods leads a life upon the ground. In such an animal, the process of dissociation might be expected to be even more complete than in an animal, such as the frog, which passes habitually and quickly from one mode of existence to the other. ”

“ It often happens that we only become aware that we have dreamed owing to some event of the day which recalls an image or incident of a dream which has occurred during the preceding night, or even on some more remote occasion. This has often raised the question whether sleep is not habitually accompanied by dreams, only a small proportion of which are remembered. Whether this be so or not, we can be confident that dream-experience bulks largely in the content of the unconscious. We all know that dreams differ greatly in the ease and completeness with which they are forgotten. ”

“ Few scientific theories escape the fate of being pushed by their advocates beyond the positions which they are fitted to hold, with the result that, failing to fulfil the expectations thus aroused, their merits are under-estimated or they are even thrust into the limbo reserved for dead hypotheses, only to be rescued therefrom by some later generation. If we are to trust the contemporary medical literature of Great Britain, this fate is now in store for Freud's theory of the unconscious. ”

“ There must be a definite stage of mental development in which the child is learning to distinguish imagination from reality, and there can be little doubt that this stage must be accompanied by some degree of the doubt and discomfort which so often occur as features of the psychoses and psycho-neuroses. I have seen cases in which the regression in childhood in this respect has been very definite. I have seen more than one soldier with a history of having been very imaginative in childhood, when they had amused their relatives by tales of the wonderful adventures in which they had taken part. ”

“ Assuming that animals whose common action is thus determined possess something we call mind, the effect of suggestion is to produce in all the members of the group a mental content so similar that all act with complete harmony towards some common end. There is reason to believe that the harmony so produced is more complete than is ever produced by the common possession of an idea or other form of intellectual motive. It is no great assumption that the more gregarious is a species of animal, the more perfect is its gregarious instinct. ”

“ Those who escape from danger by the performance of some complex activity bear almost unanimous witness that, while so engaged they were wholly free from the fear which the danger might have been expected to arouse. Highly complex acts designed to allow escape from, or to overcome, the danger are carried out as coolly as, or even more coolly than, is customary in the ordinary behaviour of daily life. There seems to be in action a process of suppression of the fear or other affective state. ”

“ It seems as if the thoughts repressed by day assume a painful quality when they come to the surface at night far more intense than is ever attained if they are allowed to occupy the attention during the day. It is as if the process of repression keeps the painful memories or thoughts under a kind of pressure during the day, accumulating such energy by the time night comes that they race through the mind with abnormal speed and violence when the patient is wakeful, or take the most vivid and painful forms when expressed by the imagery of dreams. ”

“ Taking the various forms of instinctive reaction to danger as my examples, I have illustrated the need for suppression and the value of the unconscious as means of preserving the life and the integrity of the individual, I have now to consider the additional factors which come into action when danger threatens a group of animals associated together, factors which in the case of Man will contribute to maintain the cohesion of society. ”

“ In the waking state the censorship is held to be even more active, or rather more efficient. It only allows unconscious experience to escape in the form of slips of the tongue or pen or to show its influence in apparently motiveless acts which, owing to the complete failure of the agent to recognise their nature, in no way interfere with the efficiency of the censorship. ”

“ Moreover, we must not be content merely to advise our patients to give up repression, we must help them by every means in our power to put this advice into practice. We must show them how to overcome the difficulties which are put in their way by enfeebled volition, and by the distortion of their experience due to its having for long been seen exclusively from some one point of view. It is only by a process of prolonged re-education that it becomes possible for the patient to give up the practice of repressing war experience. ”

“ It is, perhaps, the greatest merit of Freud's theory that it provides us with such an explanation. According to Freud, forgetting -- and especially the forgetting of unpleasant experience -- is not a passive but an active process, one in which such experience is thrust out of consciousness and kept under control by a mechanism which by a metaphorical simile Freud has termed the censorship. ”

“ Thus, we cannot force ourselves to become pleased. Pleasure and other affective states must arrive spontaneously. They come without invitation or conscious direction, and resemble in this respect sleep, hypnotism, and active forgetting.
I have so far considered the relationship of sleep and suggestion. I have now to deal with the relation of sleep to other processes of the unconscious. Sleep affords a striking example of suppression. Not only does the conscious activity of the waking life disappear, but any experience acquired in sleep is forgotten, or tends to be forgotten, when we awake. ”

“ Throughout his life it has been when he sees no way of escape, whether at a distance from an exit, in a tunnel, or tube-railway, that the dread comes upon him, and when he went to France it was more especially the fear of being buried in his dug-out which drove him to leave conditions usually regarded as those of comparative safety to wander in the more dangerous trenches. ”

“ For the physician who is not content to walk in the old ruts when in the presence of the greatest afflictions which can befall mankind, Freud has provided a working scheme of diagnosis and therapeutics to aid him in his attempts to discover the causes of mental disorder and to find means by which it may be remedied. My own standpoint is that Freud's psychology of the unconscious provides a consistent working hypothesis to aid us in our attempts to discover the rôle of unconscious experience in the production of disease. ”

“ The bias as a whole, however, is a very complicated affair which in the main is a product, not of suppression, but of fusion, a fusion between trends of certain lines of thought and conduct which may or may not be determined by unconscious experience, together with other influences, such as those of parents, teachers and friends, which have never been either suppressed or repressed, but very much the opposite. ”

“ There is good reason to believe that in many cases suppression is reinstated in a healthy manner, or at least in a manner which is compatible with health and efficiency. Thus, a frequent form of the conflict by which the neuroses of war are produced is that between the re-awakened instinct of danger with its accompaniment of fear and the ordinary standard of our social life that fear is disgraceful. ”

“ Through our work we have been led to see how great a part is taken in the formation of character by influences, especially those of early childhood, which do not lie on the surface but are embedded in the unconscious strata of the mind. ”

“ Similarly, those whose memories of some painful experience of war have been suppressed have at the same time lost the memory of all that happened over a period much longer than that of the unpleasant experience itself. ”

“ The cessation of the repression was followed by the disappearance of the most distressing symptoms, sad great improvement in the general health. It is not always, however, that the line of treatment adopted in these cases is so successful. Sometimes the experience which a patient is striving to forget is so utterly horrible or disgusting so wholly free from any redeeming feature which can be used as a means of readjusting the attention, that it is difficult or impossible to find an aspect which will make its contemplation endurable. ”

“ One who has down or fought without fear, perhaps for many months, finds himself the subject of apprehensions which he regards with shame and strives to banish from his mind. A short rest at such a time, by allowing the unwitting controlling process to regain the upper hand, will often bring about the disappearance of the apprehensions, so that danger can again be faced with equanimity and without the necessity for witting repression. ”

“ The older psychiatry regarded such a complete breakdown, which it labelled acute mania, as the expression of a mere disorderly jumble of disintegrated mental process, but if we look on the whole situation as a means of reacting to the conflict between suppressed instinctive tendencies and controlling forces, it becomes a question whether the acute psychosis, with all its apparent disorder, is not merely the expression of a victory of the instinctive forces running riot after their escape from a lifelong period of suppression and control. ”

“ If the disability were the unwitting outcome of a conflict between the instinct of self-preservation and a simple conception of military duty, it might suffice to be paralysed or mute, but if the morbid state depends primarily upon sentiments of responsibility towards his military unit or his comrades, such a solution is not likely to satisfy his nature long. His conflict differs from that of the private soldier in that it is founded largely upon acquired experience rather than upon instinctive trends. It is more actively conscious than the process which has produced a paralysis or mutism. ”

“ Existing families of Mankind differ greatly in their degree of gregariousness and with this there seem to go different degrees in the potency of suggestion as a means of producing uniformity of social action. Thus, the Melanesian is distinctly more gregarious than the average European. His whole social system is on a communistic basis, and communistic principles work throughout the whole of his society with a harmony which is only present in certain aspects of the activity of our own society, and even there the harmony is less complete than in Melanesia. ”

“ The subject of a fugue is certainly not unconscious. So far as we know, he is capable of experiencing all the modifications of consciousness which are open to the mind in its normal state. We have not at all to do with an example of the unconscious, but with consciousness cut off or dissociated from the consciousness of the normal waking life. A person in a fugue usually behaves in a manner somewhat different from that of his normal state, and shows what is usually described as a difference of personality, but the difference may be very slight. ”

“ According to my view hysteria is primarily due to the activity of a danger-instinct, to the coming into action of an instinct whose primary function is protection from danger. I have now to consider whether the hysteria of civil practice can also be referred to danger, or whether it is the result of the transference of the reaction from a connection with the danger-instincts to some other instinct. ”

“ Again, the frequency of neurosis in the recent war has certainly been due in part to the call made upon instinctive tendencies which in the usual peaceful character of our modern civilisation receive no stimulus so that the more adventurous have to resort to excessive speed, dangerous sports, big game hunting, and other similar pursuits to excite their danger-instincts, and give that spice of conflict which redeems the monotonous calm of our modern life in times of peace. ”

“ We may assume with some confidence that sleep is a state which is allied to hypnotism, and therefore stands in some relation to the process of suggestion. This raises the problem of the nature of sleep, which I must now consider.
Sleep is an aspect of life which has been strangely neglected by the psychologist. Students of psychology are profoundly interested in the dreams which occur during sleep and in their more abnormal varieties, such as nightmares and somnambulism, but they seem to have been content to regard sleep itself as a process which belongs to the realm of physiology. ”

“ I may perhaps mention here that my own belief in the value of Freud's theory of the unconscious as a guide to the better understanding of human conduct is not so much based on my clinical experience as on general observation of human behaviour, on evidence provided by the experience of my friends, and most of all on the observation of my own mental activity, waking and sleeping. ”