Rescission

“ A still deeper difficulty results from such an effort to evade the double sense in which the facts of succession are known in your experience. If you can have present to you only one event at a time in a series of successive events, how long, or rather how short, must an event be to contain within itself no succession at all, or no difference between former and latter contents? In vain do you suppose that, at any time, you have directly present to your consciousness only one of the successive words that you hear me speak. ”

“ There is, to be sure, another frequent way of describing our consciousness of succession, — and a way that on the whole I find unsatisfactory. According to this view, events come to us in succession in our experience, — let us say the words of a spoken verse, — and then something often called the synthetic activity of the mind supervenes, and later binds together into unity, these successive facts, so that when this binding has taken place we then recognize the whole fagot of experience as a single succession. ”

“ It would be very grievous, you say, to be precipitated upon measures that may make the desirable reconciliation more difficult. Is it now, my dear, a time for you to be afraid of being precipitated? At present, if ever, there can be no thought of reconciliation. The upshot of your precipitation must first be seen. There may be murder yet, as far as we know. Will the man you are with part willingly with you? ”

“ It is very plain that during my corporeal life, as I perceive nothing but by means of my senses, whatever is not submitted to their cognizance must escape me. When the union of the body and the soul is broken, I conceive that the one may be dissolved, and the other preserved entire. Why should the dissolution of the one necessarily bring on that of the other? On the contrary, being so different in their natures, their state of union is a state of violence, and when it is broken they both return to their natural situation. ”

“ Now, under the Restoration, the reaction set in, and the lower and earthly side of human nature—none the less human because it is at the bottom and not at the top—seemed determined to take its full revenge. ”

“ But when concession is made, when tears of penitence are wept, and when, in moments of returning confidence, that luckless tendency of temper is candidly confessed, and sincerely bewailed; when all the different acts committed under its influence, are acknowledged to have been wrong, how complete ought to be the reconciliation thus begun, and how zealous our endeavours for the future to avert the consequences of this sad calamity! ”

“ As usual, once the dissociation is established, there is [Pg 97] no limit to its manifestations. Picture three or four Dissociates at work at a table, all bent upon producing signs of the marvellous, all blind to the mechanism at work, and with the hypersensitiveness of the dissociated stream ready to draw on the memories of the unconscious.
Mixed with this is the possibility of more elaborate deceit: when the hands of all are raised from the table their knees may still be under it; and if the knees are clear of it a blackened lath concealed up a sleeve can still work miracles. ”

“ The physical occasion enters into the mental occasion, as already actual, and as contributing to its ground. The reversion from its ground, which the consequent of ideal novelty must exhibit, is now of the most fundamental character. The reversion is the undoing of the synthesis exhibited in the ground. Thus the transition from bodily occasion to mental occasion exhibits a new dimension of transition from that exhibited in the transition from bodily occasion to bodily occasion. In the latter transition there is the novelty of contrast within the one concept of synthesis. ”

“ REPERCUSSION The principle of sympathetic vibration mentioned above also provides the explanation of the strange and little-known phenomenon called repercussion, by means of which any injury done to, or any mark made upon, the materialized body in the course of its wanderings will be reproduced in the physical body. ”

“ The first process to be considered is that by which experience becomes unconscious. I shall speak of this process as suppression. Writers on the unconscious often use "repression" for the process in question, but I propose to reserve this term for the process by which we wittingly endeavour to banish experience from consciousness. It seems that this process of witting repression may be one means of producing suppression, that experience wittingly repressed may, at any rate under certain conditions, succeed in becoming suppressed and inaccessible to the general body of consciousness. ”

“ Work was out of the question that day, when he waited as if for a sentence of death. He paced his narrow room, incessantly, afraid to go out, for fear of missing her reply. The hours dragged themselves by, as it is their special province to do in crises of life ”

“ Thus he is to move along the path of an ever brightening transfiguration; at once open-eyed, and in the dark; seeing the Lord, and so with a sure instinct gravitating to His will, yet content to let the mists of the unknown always hang over the next step but one.
It is a process, not a crisis; "grow transfigured." The origin of the process, the liberation of the movement, is, at least in idea, as critical as possible; "Give over your bodies." That precept is conveyed, in its Greek form (παραστῆσαι, aorist) , so as to suggest precisely the thought of a critical surrender. ”

“ On the contrary, it will be found, in the Progress of the Collection, that they very often make such Reflections upon each other, and each upon himself, and upon his Actions, as reasonable Beings, who disbelieve not a future State of Rewards and Punishments (and who one day propose to reform) must sometimes make:—One of them actually reforming, and antidoting the Poison which some might otherwise apprehend would be spread by the gayer Pen, and lighter Heart, of the other. ”

“ Or, again, sentiments, thoughts, dispositions, tendencies, instincts which, though intimately belonging to the individual, have been restrained, repressed, concealed from the world for one reason or another, may, being set free through dissociation 550from the repressing thoughts, rise to the surface and take part in the synthesis of the new personality.
In other words there is a rearrangement and readjustment of the innate dispositions and those deposited by the experiences of life which go to form personality. Some by the process of dissociation are expelled from the personal synthesis ”

“ Will any one pretend to deny, that the unregenerate sinner is called upon to seek, ask, repent, believe, &c? And what do such scriptures mean? The acts of the mind here enjoined must constitute regeneration, or they must follow regeneration as an effect of that work, or they must precede it as a necessary and required condition. To say that these acts are the very definition of regeneration itself—are only synonymous terms to express this renewal of the heart, is to make regeneration consist in exercises merely—is in fact to make it the sinner’s appropriate and exclusive work ”

“ It is your own thoughts that take bodily shape to haunt you. But this sad accident calls loudly for reparation and repentance. Confess your sins to God, Henry. Ask Him to forgive them—tell Him everything—your unhallowed wishes and desires, your hasty temper and revenge, your disregard of advice and entreaty. ”

“ On the contrary, the more we scrutinise that succession the more we are struck by the rigid uniformity, the punctual precision with which, wherever we can follow them, the operations of nature are carried on. ”

“ They do not see any need of a literal resurrection of the body; they cannot perceive by what process it can be resuscitated; and not being able to comprehend how this great change can come, how the scattered elements of the body can be brought together again, they reject the doctrine altogether. ”

“ When such distressing, if not terrible, symptoms disappear or alter in character as soon as repression ceases, it is natural to conclude that the two processes stand to one another in the relation of cause and effect, but so great is the complexity of the conditions with which we are dealing in the medicine of the mind that it is necessary to consider certain alternative explanations. ”

“ Then, with a heavy sigh, he moves to his work, and stands looking at it, with his head down; he does a stitch or two, having the air of a man so lost in sadness that each stitch is, as it were, a coming to life. Then, turning abruptly, he begins pacing his cell, moving his head, like an animal pacing its cage. ”

“ The conclusion to which I am tending is that the definition [p. 79] of dissociation, which will make the term of most service to psychology and pathology, is: one which lays special stress on the feature of alternate consciousness. ”

“ Out of ten thousand conflicting spurs of action comes, in the snapping of a finger, a sinister unity of purpose, which knows not the individual brain that conceived it, nor the logic of its action. Ten thousand clods, jumbled in confusion, are instantly turned into a single straight furrow. ”

“ The work entitled, Hermes Trismegistos, contains a resumé of that idea, saying, among other things: "What was composed is divided. That division is not Death, it is the analysis of a combination; but the aim of that analysis is not destruction, it is the renewment. What is in effect the energy of life? ”

“ He learned that no matter how philosophically we may have borne a separation, the prospect of its near end shows us how strong the repression has been; the lifting of the bonds makes evident how much they have galled. ”

“ A quiet hint to Conservatives.—That which we did not know formerly, and know now, or might know if we chose,—is the fact that a retrograde formation, a reversion in any sense or degree, is absolutely impossible. ”

“ When disposition, like a sail unfurled,
Shews all its rents and patches to the world.
Disposition however is the one thing which undergoes no other change than that of growth in after life. The physical constitution, when any morbid principle is innate in it, rarely alters ”

“ True resignation consists in a thorough conformity to the whole will of God; who wills and does all (excepting sin) which comes to pass in the world. In order to this we have only to embrace all events, good and bad, as His will. ”

“ This element is our feeling of succession, or time—a feeling, which necessarily, involves the notion of divisibility or series of parts, that is so essential a constituent of our more complex notion of matter,—and to which notion of continuous divisibility, if the notion of resistance be added, it is scarcely possible for us to imagine, that we should not have acquired, by this union, the very notion of physical extension,—that which has parts, and that which resists our effort to grasp it. ”

“ Things in themselves, abstracted from our intuition, are susceptible of change. Where there is change, there is succession, and where there is succession, there is a certain order in the things which succeed,—an order which is really in the things themselves, although it does not subsist by itself, separated from them. ”

“ It would seem, on the contrary, that such a tendency may continue to exist for a long period (even for a whole lifetime) in the unconscious regions of the mind, where its presence may be demonstrated by the use of suitable methods. Such an outcome of conflict, in which one tendency is driven down to the Unconscious and confined there by the other, is—as we have already stated—usually designated by the term Repression. ”

“ I emphasize the expression "overcome resistance" because without competing motives and a sense of resistance we have no clear consciousness of volition. Where only one desire is present in consciousness, or where it is of overwhelming strength, feeling is succeeded by action without any recognizable hiatus. It is the sense of conflict, the break, that is essential to creating a lively sense of volition, and also, as shall see later, to the sense of choice and deliberation. ”

“ It is feared by many who realize that in these painfully acquired repressions and symptoms lie their safety and their protection from directly facing and dealing with tendencies and characteristics with which they feel unable to cope. The repression and the accompanying symptoms indicate a difficulty and a struggle, and in this way are a sort of compromise or substitute formation which permit, although only in a wasteful and futile manner, the activity of the repressed tendencies. ”

“ The occurrence of definite dissociation with altered personality may be regarded as an attempt at solution, especially when it takes the form of the fugue with its independent activity and its independent consciousness. ”

“ The phenomena of imperative concepts, insistent or fixed ideas, uncontrollable impulses, all grow and develop along the general lines of the synthetic moment. They are reinstatements of portions of dissociated moments buried in the subconscious and growing by the process of modification with each recurrent reinstatement. ”

“ It is impossible for any one to know the horror and contempt with which I regard modern restoration{158}—but it is so great that it simply paralyzes me in despair,—and in the sense of such difference in all thought and feeling between me and the people I live in the midst of, almost makes it useless for me to talk to them. ”

“ A sudden and complete disturbance of the measure may result in the gravest consequences, even in death. We have here an instance in point. We must therefore lay ourselves out to restore as quickly, and as effectually as possible, the steady measure that has been disturbed ”