Identification (psychology)

“ The representative elements entering into the idea or image of an object change from reproduction to reproduction but they always mirror, refer to the same sensory elements and compounds; they recognize their object.
The recognition of an object or an event, however vague, means some experience that has been lived through before. In other words, the representation, although experienced, as a present psychic element, must have a glow of pastness about it. Representation is a present experience referring to a past life, to an event that is passing or that has passed away. ”

“ The represented object floats so to say in a stream of consciousness. The subject matter which the psychologist investigates is not the objective reality itself, but objective states of consciousness. ”

“ First, natural science served—if we overlook the hasty identification of mind and matter which had its origin in natural science—as a shining and fruitful example to psychology. ”

“ Recognition is the function of representation and is the essential characteristic of this type of moment-consciousness. Ideational psychosis germinates and develops with the growth of the recognitive moment. For the very function of the idea is the cognition over again of what has been cognized in perception, in short, recognition is the essence of the idea. ”

“ The reproduced state in its recognition recognizes the object as presented to sense-experience, recognizes, or is aware at least, that it has had some such recognitions on previous occasions, and at the same time recognizes, or is aware of its present recognition. ”

“ What he claims is, that in the analysis of consciousness we detect a class of facts or ideas which are not psychological or subjective, but really ontological, and do actually carry us out of the region of psychology into that of ontology. ”

“ The fully developed type of consciousness characteristic of the adult human mind, namely, self-consciousness, is substituted for the lower forms, or for types of consciousness characteristic of the lower animals. The psychologist, and, especially the physiologist, when writing on psychological matters is apt, to substitute, either on account of the introspective method used or on account of lack of discrimination, the type of consciousness of the observer, namely, self-consciousness. ”

“ The identification is, of course, limited by the measure of the individual intelligence, meaning, not merely the intellectual perception of the sequence of cause and effect, but also that indescribable reciprocity of feeling by which we instinctively recognize something in another making them akin to ourselves ”

“ Or does one seriously think he understands better how the knower 'connects' its objects, when one calls the former a transcendental Ego and the latter a 'Manifold of Intuition' than when one calls them Thought and Things respectively? Knowing must have a vehicle. Call the vehicle Ego, or call it Thought, Psychosis, Soul, Intelligence, Consciousness, Mind, Reason, Feeling,—what you like—it must know. ”

“ When an experience enters into a number of systems, or as James would put it into a number of "settings," then the special character of the "setting" becomes confused or even obliterated. The experience present calls forth so many different systems or "settings" that the recognition element lapses and reverts to the psychic state characteristic of the lower forms of moment consciousness, passing through the more elementary forms of recognition to cognition. ”

“ In other words, consciousness thereafter can determine in a newly discovered object something it knows well merely because that something corresponds to a representation which experience and memory have already formed. ”

“ The genesis of the peculiar frame of mind of these persons is for the most part lost in obscurity, for it is only very rarely that one of these remarkable personalities can be subjected to exact observation. ”

“ The moment, then, that we get beyond the first crude sense-perception consciousness consists not of detached sensory images but of "ideas," the complex [Pg 19] product of present sense-perceptions, past sense-perceptions and the mental processes known to psychology as association and discrimination.
How Ideas are Created
Every concrete conception or idea, such as "horse," "rose," "mountain," is made up of a number of associated properties. It has mass, form and various degrees of color, light and shade. ”

“ A study of the psychogenesis of a concrete case will on the one hand illustrate these principles and, on the other, the structure and dynamics of normal personality.
Before making such a study, however, we ought to have a working conception of the normal; and this we are entitled, from the point of view of dynamic psychology, to construct on the basis of data supplied by studies of abnormal and normal mental behavior. The older way of considering human personality was to conceive it as an “ego” with various faculties. ”

“ The faintest and most obscure representation requires the presence of recognition in the background. We may say that without recognition representation becomes an impossibility. Recognition is the function of representative elements. Just as cognition is the function of sensory, presentative elements so recognition, or secondary cognition is the function of representative elements. Now that moment consciousness which has representative elements among the constituents of its content may be termed recognitive moment-consciousness. ”

“ The different objects which other sciences treat of may be regarded psychologically, and studied from the standpoint of their rise and development in consciousness. For objects to be known at all must first be perceived or conceived by consciousness. Psychology implies knowledge of the physical world as the content of consciousness. In order to know how perception and conception of objects originate, those objects must first of all be given. A thing that is not yet in existence cannot possibly be analyzed. ”

“ If we have been right in our analysis of mind, the ultimate data of psychology are only sensations and images and their relations. Beliefs, desires, volitions, and so on, appeared to us to be complex phenomena consisting of sensations and images variously interrelated. Thus (apart from certain relations) the occurrences which seem most distinctively mental, and furthest removed from physics, are, like physical objects, constructed or inferred, not part of the original stock of data in the perfected science. ”

“ The contents of the psyche are fundamentally images indicating function on the one hand, and upon the other objects and the world generally. The conscious contains the recent object-images; the personal unconscious, the object-images of the individual past, so far as they have either been forgotten or repressed; whilst the absolute or collective unconscious contains the inherited world-images generally, under the form of primordial images or mythical themes. ”

“ But even were all the mythology true, the process of synthesis would in no whit be explained by calling the inside of the mind its seat. No mystery would be made lighter by such means. It is just as much a puzzle how the 'Ego' can employ the productive Imagination to make the Understanding use the categories to combine the data which Recognition, Association, and Apprehension receive from sensible Intuition, as how the Thought can combine the objective facts. ”

“ The something else may be a merely physical brain-process, or it may be another conscious idea. Either of these things may perform much the same function as the first idea, refer to the same object, and roughly stand in the same relations to the upshot of our thought. But that is no reason why we should throw away the logical principle of identity in psychology, and say that, however it may fare in the outer world, the mind at any rate is a place in which a thing can be all kinds of other things without ceasing to be itself as well. ”

“ Some such shadowy view of the evolution of the centres, of the relation of consciousness to them, and of the hemispheres to the other lobes, is, it seems to me, that in which it is safest to indulge. If it has no other advantage, it at any rate makes us realize how enormous are the gaps in our knowledge, the moment we try to cover the facts by any one formula of a general kind. ”

“ Some psychologists attempt to find the origin of recognition in the feeling of familiarity. Familiarity, however, is not a primary state out of which recognition develops, but on the contrary recognition is the primary state and familiarity is derivative only. ”

“ It may perhaps be well to notice now that our senses only give us acquaintance with facts of body, and that of the mental states of other persons [Pg 223] we only have conceptual knowledge. Of our own past states of mind we take cognizance in a peculiar way. ”

“ According to the assumptions of this book, thoughts accompany the brain's workings, and those thoughts are cognitive of realities. The whole relation is one which we can only write down empirically, confessing that no glimmer of explanation of it is yet in sight. That brains should give rise to a knowing consciousness at all, this is the one mystery which returns, no matter of what sort the consciousness and of what sort the knowledge may be. Sensations, aware of mere qualities, involve the mystery as much as thoughts, aware of complex systems, involve it. ”

“ For similar reasons it is a great aid in looking for an object to know what to look for; to be readily found, the object, though lost to sight, should be to memory clear. Searching is a mental process similar to the matching of a piece of fabric in texture or color, when one has forgotten the sample and must rely upon the remembrance of its appearance. If the recollection is clear and distinct, recognition takes place when the judgment decides that what the physical eye sees corresponds to the image in the mind's eye; with an indistinct mental image the recognition becomes doubtful or faulty. ”

“ He uses the tests we all practically use. If the state of mind resembles his own idea of a certain reality; or if without resembling his idea of it, it seems to imply that reality and refer to it by operating upon it through the bodily organs; or even if it resembles and operates on some other reality that implies, and leads up to, and terminates in, the first one,—in either or all of these cases the psychologist admits that the state of mind takes cognizance, directly or remotely, distinctly or vaguely, truly or falsely, of the reality's nature and position in the world. ”

“ Many of the stanchest believers in the soul admit that we know it only as an inference from experiencing its states. In Chapter X, accordingly, we must return to its consideration again, and ask ourselves whether, after all, the ascertainment of a blank unmediated correspondence, term for term, of the succession of states of consciousness with the succession of total brain-processes, be not the simplest psycho-physic formula, and the last word of a psychology which contents itself with verifiable laws, and seeks only to be clear, and to avoid unsafe hypotheses. ”

“ Thus if anyone ask what is the mind's object when you say 'Columbus discovered America in 1492,' most people will reply 'Columbus,' or 'America,' or, at most, 'the discovery of America.' They will name a substantive kernel or nucleus of the consciousness, and say the thought is 'about' that,—as indeed it is,—and they will call that your thought's 'object.' Really that is usually only the grammatical object, or more likely the grammatical subject, of your sentence. ”

“ A representative element is neither of the nature of the primary nor of the secondary sensory elements, it differs from both in the character of its psychic "stuff." The difference consists in the fact that a representative element is not cognitive, but recognitive. ”

“ It is not the feeling of familiarity that gives rise to recognition, but it is vague, indistinct, marginal, or subconscious recognition that gives rise to the feeling of familiarity. When a person, a scene, an event, or situation is familiar, the psychic state is one of having gone through the same experience before. ”

“ The postulated objective reality acts upon the given individual consciousness and gives rise to mental states which along with the objective representation of that reality has also its own coloring, its own subjective side. ”

“ Mutations and Multiplications of the Self.—The Me, like every other aggregate, changes as it grows. The passing states of consciousness, which should preserve in their succession an identical knowledge of its past, wander from their duty, letting large portions drop from out of their ken, and representing other portions wrong. The identity which we recognize as we survey the long procession can only be the relative identity of a slow shifting in which there is always some common ingredient retained. The commonest element of all, the most uniform, is the possession of some common memories. ”

“ He who undertakes the examination and study of mental phenomena must bear in mind the simple and important, but frequently forgotten truth, that facts of consciousness are not of a physical, mechanical character. ”

“ The retention of n, it will be observed, is no mysterious storing up of an 'idea' in an unconscious state. It is not a fact of the mental order at all. It is a{292} purely physical phenomenon, a morphological feature, the presence of these 'paths,' namely, in the finest recesses of the brain's tissue. The recall or recollection, on the other hand, is a psycho-physical phenomenon, with both a bodily and a mental side. The bodily side is the excitement of the paths in question; the mental side is the conscious representation of the past occurrence, and the belief that we experienced it before. ”

“ This explanation by a 'faculty' is one thing which explanation by association has superseded altogether. If, by saying we have a faculty of memory, you mean nothing more than the fact that we can remember, nothing more than an abstract name for our power inwardly to recall the past, there is no harm done: we do have the faculty; for we unquestionably have such a power. But if, by faculty, you mean a principle of explanation of our general power to recall, your psychology is empty. The associationist psychology, on the other hand, gives an explanation of each particular fact of recollection ”