Unconscious mind

“ For instance, we can prescribe a conflict between the subconsciousness and the personal consciousness, between a subconscious wish and a conscious wish, or volition, and observe the resultant mental and physical behavior, which may be inhibition of thought, hallucinations, amnesia, motor phenomena, etc. The possibilities and limitations of subconscious influences can in this way be experimentally studied. Subconscious personalities, therefore, afford a valuable means for studying the mechanism of the mind. ”

“ All that we are thus able to discover becomes, ipso facto, of no further moment as a content of the unconscious, and we may then expect to find only those things contained in the unconscious which we have not found in the conscious mind. ”

“ Perhaps the most fruitful of all our recent discoveries in the mental region will turn out to be that which is gradually revealing to us the extent and character of the unconscious mind; and the possibility of tapping its resources, bending its plastic shape to our own mould. It seems as though the laws of its being are at last beginning to be understood ”

“ 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. ”

“ Contraction of the field of consciousness and of personality.—In every-day life intense emotion excludes from the field of awareness thoughts that are unrelated, antagonistic to and incompatible with the ideas exciting the emotion, and perceptions of the environment that ordinarily would enter awareness. The field of consciousness is thereby contracted and limited to thoughts excited by or associated with the emotion. Thus, for example, in the heat of anger the mind is dominated by the particular object or thought which gave rise to the anger, or by anger exciting associated ideas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But every thought, relegated to the unconscious, through its association there—for it is plastic by nature—comes back to consciousness never quite the same, and meets never quite the same stimulus. And as a result a repeated mental experience is never twice exactly the same. So the conscious becomes the unconscious and the unconscious the conscious, and neither can be without the other.
Our problem is to understand the workings of the mind as it exists today, and to try to find some of its most constructive uses; and on that we shall focus attention. ”

“ No doubt there exists a certain dim region described as the unconscious mind, a sort of half-way house between mind and matter, a place where the intellect is subdued to the action of nerves and blood. Mind is of its nature infinitely and always conscious and to speak of the unconscious mind is a contradiction in terms; but what is meant is that the mind thinks in ways of which we are unconscious; and that our business is to make ourselves aware by much introspection, much self-occupation, of the nature and tendencies of this ‘unconscious’ region. ”

“ A sentiment, being an idea about which a system of emotional dispositions has been organized, when repressed by conflict, or when simply out of mind, whether capable of reproduction as memory or not, may, like all ideas, still be conserved, as we have seen, as an unconscious neurogram. As we have also seen, so long as it is conserved it is still a part of the personality. Even though repressed it is not necessarily absolutely inhibited but may be simply dissociated and then be able to take on dissociated subconscious activity. ”

“ As the subconscious and its processes are fundamentals both in the structure of personality and in viiithe many mechanisms through which personality, normal and abnormal, finds expression, the first eight lectures are devoted to its exposition. Indeed, as has been said, the subconscious is not only the most important problem of psychology, it is the problem. The study of its phenomena must be preliminary to that of the functioning mechanisms of both the normal mind and of those special pathological conditions—the psycho-neuroses—which modern investigators are tracing to its perversions. ”

“ Reverse this belief, and the results would be perceptibly different.
The unconscious thought, in the corporeal substratum of mortal mind, produces nothing; and that condition of Substratum of the mind. the body which we call sensation, is erroneous; but mortal mind is ignorant of itself, — ignorant of the errors it includes, and of their effects upon the body. ”

“ In a mind thus disassembled nearly every mental phenomenon, conscious and subconscious—conflicts, hallucinations, coconscious processes, defense reactions, etc.,—can be observed in an isolated form and systematically studied. ”

“ To sum up, I may say that the function of the unconscious in conditions of mental disturbance, is essentially a compensation of the content of the conscious mind. But because of the characteristic condition of one-sidedness of the conscious striving in all such cases, the compensating correctives are rendered useless. It is, however, inevitable that these unconscious tendencies break through into the conscious mind, but in adapting themselves to the character of the one-sided conscious aims, it is only possible for them to appear in a distorted and unacceptable form. ”

“ Arrived at this point, however, we have attained the logical mechanism peculiar to and inseparable from all mind, and find unconscious purpose to be an indispensable link in every instinctive action. With this, therefore, the conception of a mental mechanism, dead and predestined from without, has disappeared, and has become transformed into the spiritual life inseparable from logic, so that we have reached the sole remaining requirement for the conception of an actual instinct, which proves to be a conscious willing of the means towards an unconsciously willed purpose. ”

“ To sum up, the unconscious is a collection of mental processes, memories, desires, and influences [Pg 8] of infinite variety which are not always or even often perceived as such by our conscious mind, but the presence of which may and does influence our thoughts and actions. ”

“ All ultimately become unconscious. They may, however, be started or stopped at will. They are, therefore, still related to the conscious mind. They occupy a semi-automatic middle ground between conscious and subconscious activities. ”

“ Doubtless, a great part of it still falls entirely in the realm of the conscious, but, at least, just as much goes along in half shadows, and generally an undetermined amount in the unconscious; and this can, therefore, be disclosed only indirectly.37 By means of phantastic thinking, directed thinking is connected with the oldest foundations of the human mind, which have been for a long time beneath the threshold of the consciousness. ”

“ If this work were confined to the consideration of instinct alone, the conception of an unconscious activity of mind might excite opposition, inasmuch as it is one with which our educated public is not yet familiar; but in a work like the present, every chapter of which adduces fresh facts in support of the existence of such an activity and of its remarkable consequences, the novelty of the theory should be taken no farther into consideration. ”

“ Through a similar incubating process, the stored material needed for the solution of baffling problems is gathered together and oftentimes assimilated and arranged and formulated as an answer to the question. On the other hand, subconscious processes may be but a hidden part of that mechanism which determines our everyday judgment and our points of view, our attitudes of mind, the meanings of our ideas, and the traits of our characters. Antecedent experiences functioning 264as such processes may determine our fantasies and our dreams. ”

“ All happens as if subconscious processes had been at work, as if the problem had been going through a subconscious incubation, switching in this and switching in that set of facts, and presenting them to consciousness, the final selection of the deciding point of view being left to the latter. The subconscious garners from the storehouse of past experiences, those which have a bearing on the question and are required for its solution, brings them into consciousness, and then our logical conscious processes form the judgment. ”

“ That some of the lowest forms of life are endowed with consciousness, in any sense in which the word has psychological meaning, seems incredible, though they manifest instinctive intelligence of no mean order. ”

“ It is obvious that, so long as the setting to a central idea remains organized and conserved in the unconscious, the corresponding perception and meaning are always liable under favoring conditions (such as fatigue, ill health, etc.) to be switched into consciousness and replace the new formed perception. ”

“ Consequently as we know from numerous observations, the feelings and emotions (pleasantness and unpleasantness, exaltation and depression; fear, anger, etc.) pertaining to subconscious processes tend to emerge into consciousness; [171] and likewise ideational constituents of the process often emerge into the fringe of the content of consciousness and even the focus of awareness. Given such a subconsciously functioning setting to an idea, it would necessarily tend by the impulsive force of its emotion to make the latter insistent, and resist the inhibiting control of the personal consciousness. ”

“ We have also seen that it is not only these mental experiences which occupied the focus of our attention that leave their counterpart in neurograms, but those as well of which we are only partially aware—absent-minded thoughts and acts and sensations and perceptions which never entered our awareness at all—subconscious or coconscious ideas as they are called. Finally, we have seen that the mental experiences of every state, normal, artificial, or pathological, whatever may be the state of the personal consciousness, are subject to the same principle of conservation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If it could not directly overcome the impulses of the conscious process it might circumvent the latter by inducing mental and physiological disturbances which would indirectly prevent the conscious impulses from fulfilling their aim; e. g., inhibition of the will, dissociation or total inhibition of consciousnessconsciousness, amnesia for particular memories, motor phenomena interfering with normal activity, etc. The subconscious sentiment engaging in such a conflict could be excited to activity by any associative antagonistic idea in consciousness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The result of digging down into the hidden psyche has been to produce a mass of material from below the threshold of consciousness, so astonishing and disturbing and out of relation with the previously held values, as to arouse in any one unfamiliar with the process the strongest antagonism and criticism. ”

“ But what we fail to know, yet what we must know, is the nature of the pristine consciousness which lies integral and progressive within every functioning organism. The brain is the seat of the ideal consciousness. And ideal consciousness is only the dead end of consciousness, the spun silk. The vast bulk of consciousness is non-cerebral. It is the sap of our life, of all life. ”

“ It is the unconscious, rather than the conscious, which is the important factor in personality and intelligence. The unconscious furnishes the formative material out of which our judgments, our beliefs, our ideals, and our characters are shaped.
In the second place, the unconscious, besides being a static storehouse, has dynamic functions. It is evident that, theoretically, if unconscious complexes are once formed they may, under favoring conditions of the psycho-physical organism, become revived and play an important part in pathological mental life. ”

“ In other words, there are in us mental processes which have consciousness, but no self-consciousness. This is precisely what I mean by the subconscious,―mental states which have consciousness, but do not reach the personal consciousness. In short, the only possible psychological assumption is a subconscious consciousness. ”