Psychology Part 59

Often the secondary state likes to have a name for itself and to be considered as a secondary personality, as if two persons were inhabiting the same body--a very forced conception. The secondary personality will even a.s.sert that it stays awake in the background and watches the primary personality when the latter is active, spying on it without {560} that personality being aware of it. Thus two fractions of the individual would be functioning at the same time, but still not working together as a unit.

This claim of the secondary personality has been experimentally checked up by Dr. Morton Prince, in the following way. He was able to cause his subject, a young woman, to pa.s.s from the primary to the secondary state and back again, by a procedure resembling hypnotism.

While she was in the secondary state, he told her that she (the secondary personality) was to solve an arithmetical problem, the general nature of which he described to her then and there, while the actual numbers were not shown till she was put back in the primary state. He then put her into the primary state for a few moments, and placed the numbers un.o.btrusively before her, without the primary personality seeming to notice them. Put back now into the secondary state, she instantly shouted out the answer to the problem, and a.s.serted that she (the secondary personality) had had the answer ready for some time, and had been impatiently waiting to be brought back and announce it. This is at least prima facie evidence in favor of Dr.

Prince's view, that two separate fractions of the individual were both functioning consciously at the same time.

It is weird business, however interpreted, and raises the question whether anything of the same sort, only milder in degree, occurs in ordinary experience. Here is one somewhat similar fact that we are all familiar with: we have two matters in hand at the same time, very different in their emotional tone, one perhaps a worrisome matter of business, the other an interesting personal matter; and the shift from one to the other feels almost like changing personalities. Also, while busy with one, we may sometimes feel the other stirring, just barely awake and dimly conscious.

Also, is not something like this true?--A person, very {561} conscientious in the performance of his duties, always doing what he is told, feels stirrings of a carefree, independent spirit, as if some sides of his nature were not finding expression, and in little ways he gives it expression, not exactly by taking a "moral holiday"

[Footnote: This is one of William James's expressive phrases.] or going on a spree of some sort, but by venting his impulses just an instant at a time, so that he scarcely remembers it later, and in such little ways that other people, also, are scarcely aware of It. He has a "secondary personality", only it is little developed, and it has its little place in the conscious life, instead of being dissociated.

In the cases of true dissociation, there was often a violent emotional shock that started the cleavage. One celebrated case started at 8 years of age, when the subject, a little girl, was thrown to the floor by a drunken father angered by finding the child asleep in his bed.

From that moment, it would seem that the frolicsome side of childish behavior was banished from the main personality, and could get into action only when the main personality relaxed its control and became dormant; so that thereafter the child alternated between two states, one very quiet, industrious and conscientious, the other vivacious and mischievous; and the main personality never remembered what was done in this secondary, mischievous state. In such cases, it would appear that the cleavage resulted from a violent thrusting out from the main personality of tendencies inconsistent with the dominant (here serious) att.i.tude of that personality.

The Unconscious, or, the Subconscious Mind

Here at last, it may strike the reader, we have come to the core of the whole subject of psychology; for many readers will undoubtedly have been attracted by the statements {562} sometimes made, to the effect that the "unconscious" represents the deeper and more significant part of mental life, and that psychologists who confine their attention mostly to the conscious activities are treating their subject in a very partial and superficial manner. There is a sort of fascination about the notion of a subconscious mind, and yet it will be noticed that psychologists, as a rule, are inclined to be wary and critical in dealing with it. Let as take up in order the various sorts of unconscious mental processes.

In the first place, _retention is unconscious_. The host of memories that a person possesses and can recall under suitable conditions is carried about with him in an unconscious condition. But there need be no special mystery about this, nor is it just to speak about memories being "preserved in the unconscious". The fact simply is that retention is a resting condition, whereas consciousness is an active condition. Retention is a matter of brain structure, neurone connections, neural mechanisms ready for action when the proper stimulus reaches them but remaining inactive till the stimulus comes.

An idea is like a motor reaction, to the extent that it is a reaction; and we retain ideas in the same way that we retain learned motor reactions. Now no one would think of saying that a learned motor reaction was retained in the unconscious. The motor reaction is not present at all, until it is aroused; the neuro-muscular mechanism for executing the reaction is present, but needs a stimulus to make it active and give the reaction. In the same way, an idea is not present in the individual except when it is activated, but its neural mechanism is present, and unconscious just because it is inactive.

Unconscious inactivity is therefore no great problem. But there is such a thing as _unconscious activity_. Two sorts of such activity are well known. First, there are the {563} purely "physiological"

processes of digestion, liver and kidney secretion, etc. We are quite reconciled to these being unconscious, and this is not the sort of unconscious activity that gives us that fascinatingly uncanny feeling.

Second, there are the "secondarily automatic" processes, once conscious, now almost or quite unconscious through the effect of frequent repet.i.tion.

Such unconscious activities occur as _side-activities_, carried on while something else occupies attention, or as _part-activities_ that go on while attention is directed to the total performance of which they are parts. In either case, the automatism may be motor or perceptive, and the degree of consciousness may range from moderate down to zero. [Footnote: See pp. 265-267.]

For example, the letters of your name you write almost unconsciously, while fully conscious of writing your name. When you are reading, the letters are only dimly conscious, and even the words are only moderately conscious, while the whole performance of reading is highly conscious. These are instances of unconscious (or dimly conscious) part-activities. Unconscious side-activities are ill.u.s.trated by holding your books firmly but unconsciously under your arm, while absorbed in conversation, by drumming with your fingers while puzzling over a problem, and by looking at your watch and reading the time, but so nearly unconsciously that the next instant you have to look again.

In all such cases, the unconscious or barely conscious activity has been made easy by previous practice, and there is no special fascination about it, except such as comes through the use of that awesome word, "unconscious".

But now for the real "subconscious mind". You try to recall a familiar name, but are stuck; you drop the matter, and "let your subconscious mind work"; and, sure enough, after a few minutes you have the name.

Or, you are all {564} tangled up in a difficult problem; you let the subconscious mind work on it overnight, and next morning it is perfectly clear. Just here it is that psychology begins to take issue with the popular idea. The popular interpretation is that work has been done on the problem during the interval when it was out of consciousness--unconscious mental work of a high order. But is it necessary to suppose that any work has been done on the problem during the interval?

The difficulty, when you first attacked the problem, arose from false clues which, once they got you, held you by virtue of their "recency value". [Footnote: See pp. 390-391.] The matter laid aside, these false clues lost their recency value with lapse of time, so that when you took the matter up again you were free from their interference and had a good chance to go straight towards the goal.

It is the same with motor acts. On a certain day, a baseball pitcher falls into an inefficient way of handling the ball, and, try as he may, cannot recover his usual form. He has to give up for that day, but after a rest is as good as ever. Shall we say that his subconscious mind has been practising pitching during the rest interval? It is much more likely that here, as in the preceding case, the value of a fresh start lies in freshness, in rest and the consequent disappearance of interferences, rather than in any work that has been done during the interval of rest.

Next, consider the "co-conscious" as Morton Prince has well named the presence and activity of the secondary personality along with the primary, as in his experiment described above. Here it seems that two streams of consciousness were flowing along side by side within the same individual. There is the activity of the main personality, and there is the activity of the secondary personality, going on at the same time without the knowledge of the main {565} personality. This is a way of reading the facts, rather than a simple statement of fact, but at least it is a reasonable interpretation, and worthy of consideration.

Unconscious Wishes and Motives

Schopenhauer wrote much of the "will to live", which was, in his view, as unconscious as it was fundamental, and only secondarily gave rise to the conscious life of sensations and ideas. Bergson's "elan vital"

has much the same meaning. In a sense, the will to live is the fountain of all our wishes; in another sense, it is the sum total of them all; and in another sense, it is an abstraction, the concrete facts consisting in the various particular wishes and tendencies of living creatures. The will to live is not simply the will to stay alive; it is the will to _live_ with all that that includes. Life is activity, and to live means, for any species, to engage in the full activity possible for that species.

The will to live is in a sense unconscious, since it is seldom present simply in that bald, abstract form. But since life is activity, any will to act is the will to live in a special form, so that we may perfectly well say that the will to live is always conscious whenever there is any conscious impulse or purpose.

In this simple statement we may find the key to all unconscious motives, disregarding the case of dissociation and split personality.

If you a.n.a.lyze your motives for doing a certain act and formulate them in good set terms, then you have to admit that this motive was unconscious before, or only dimly conscious, since it was not formulated, it was not isolated, it was not present in the precise form you have now given it. Yet it was there, implicated in the total conscious activity. It was not unconscious in the sense of being active in a different, unconscious realm. The realm in which it was active was that of conscious activity, and it formed an {566} una.n.a.lyzed part of that activity. It was there in the same way that overtones are present in perceiving the tone quality of a particular instrument; the overtones are not _separately_ heard and may be very difficult to a.n.a.lyze, yet all the time they are playing an important part in the conscious perception.

In the same way, we may not "realize" that we are helping our friend as a way of dominating over him, but think, so far as we stop to think, that our motive is pure helpfulness. Later, a.n.a.lyzing our motives, we may separate out the masterful tendency, which was present all the time and consciously present, but so bound up with the other motive of helpfulness that it did not attract attention to itself. Now if our psychology makes us cynics, and leads us to ascribe the whole motivation of the helpful act to the mastery impulse, and therefore to regard this as working in the unconscious, we are fully as far from the truth as when we uncritically a.s.sumed that helpfulness was the only motive operating.

For man, to live means a vast range of activity--more than can possibly be performed by any single individual. We wish to do a thousand things that we never can do. We are constantly forced to limit the field of our activity. Physical incapacity, mental incapacity, limitations of our environment, conflict between one wish and another of our own, opposition from other people, and mere lack of time, compel us to give up many of our wishes. Innumerable wishes must be laid aside, and some, resisting, have to be forcibly suppressed.

Renunciation is the order of the day, from childhood up to the age when weakness and weariness supervene upon the zest for action, and the will to live fades out into readiness to die.

What becomes of the suppressed wishes, we have already briefly considered. [Footnote: See p. 533.] We have noticed Freud's conception {567} that they live on "in the unconscious". Nothing ever learned, he would say, can ever be forgotten, and no wish ever aroused can ever be quieted, except by being gratified either directly or through some subst.i.tute response. Each one of us, according to this view, carries around inside of him enough explosive material to blow to bits the whole social structure in which he lives. It is the suppressed s.e.x wishes, and spite wishes growing out of thwarted s.e.x wishes, that mostly const.i.tute the unconscious.

These unconscious wishes, according to Freud, motivate our dreams, our queer and apparently accidental actions, such as slips of the tongue and other "mistakes", the yet queerer and much more serious "neurotic symptoms" that appear in some people, and even a vast deal of our serious endeavor in life. All the great springs of action are sought in the unconscious. The biologist, consciously, is driven by his desire to know the world of plants and animals, but what really motivates him, on this view, is his childish s.e.x curiosity, thwarted, driven back upon itself, and finding a subst.i.tute outlet in biological study. And so, in one way or another, with every one of us.

All this seems to depart pretty far from sober reality, and especially from proved fact. It involves a very forced interpretation of child life, an interpretation that could never have arisen from a direct study of children, but which has seemed useful in the psychoa.n.a.lysis of maladjusted adults. It is a far cry from the facts that Freud seeks to explain, to the conception of the infantile unconscious with which he endeavors to explain them.

Freud's conception of life and its tendencies is much too narrow.

There is not half enough room in his scheme of things for life as it is willed and lived. There is not room in it even for all the instincts, nor for the "native likes and dislikes"; and there is still less room for the will to live, in {568} the sense of the zest for all forms of activity, each for its own sake as a form of vital activity.

Any scheme of motivation, which traces all behavior back to a few formulated wishes, is much too abstract, as was ill.u.s.trated just above in the case of the helpful act.

Freud is apparently guilty of yet another error, in supposing that any specific wish, ungratified, lives on as the same, identical, precise wish. A very simple instance will make clear the point of this criticism. Suppose that the first time you definitely mastered the fact that "3 times 7 are 21", it was in a certain schoolroom, with a certain teacher and a certain group of schoolfellows. You were perhaps animated at that moment by the desire to secure the approval of that teacher and to shine before those schoolfellows. Does it follow, then, that every time you now make use of that bit of the multiplication table, you are "unconsciously" gratifying that wish of long ago? To believe that would be to neglect all that we have learned of "shortcircuiting" and of the "subst.i.tute stimulus" generally.

[Footnote: See p. 338.] That wish of long ago played its part in linking the response to the stimulus, but the linkage became so close that that precise wish was no longer required. The same response has been made a thousand times since, with other wishes in the game, and when the response is made to-day, a new wish is in the game. It is the same with the biologist. Suppose, for the sake of argument, what probably is true in only a fraction of the cases, that the biologist's first interest in making any minute study of animals arose from s.e.x curiosity. As soon, however, as he engaged in any real study of animals, subst.i.tute stimuli entered and got attached to his exploring responses; and to suppose that that identical wish of long ago is still subconsciously active, whenever the biologist takes his microscope in hand, is to throw out all {569} these subst.i.tute stimuli and their attachments to many new responses, and to see in a very complex activity only one little element.

In making use of the conception of the unconscious to a.s.sist us in interpreting human conduct, we are thus exposed to two errors. First, finding a motive which was not a.n.a.lyzed out by the individual, and which was only vaguely and implicitly conscious, and formulating that motive in an explicit way, we are then liable to the error of supposing that the motive must have been explicitly present, not indeed in consciousness but in the unconscious; whereas the whole truth is exhausted when we say that it was consciously but only implicitly present--active, but not active all alone. Second, having traced out how a certain act was learned, we are apt to suppose that its history is repeated whenever it is performed afresh--that the wishes and ideas that were essential to its original performance must be unconsciously present whenever it is once more performed--neglecting thus the fact that what is retained and renewed consists of responses, rather than experiences. What is renewed when a learned act is performed is not the history of the act, but the act itself. In a new situation, the act is part of a new performance, and its motivation is to some degree new.

Though his theories are open to criticism, Freud has made important contributions to the study of personality. The same can be said of other schools of psycho-pathology. Jung and Adler deserve mention as representing varieties of psychoa.n.a.lysis that differ more or less radically from that of Freud. Outside of the psychoa.n.a.lytic school altogether, Janet and Morton Prince have added much to psychological knowledge from their studies of dissociated and maladjusted personalities. In endeavoring to a.s.sist the maladjusted individual, all these schools have much in common, since they all seek to bring to his attention elements in his personality {570} of which he is not clearly aware. Clear consciousness of implicit or dissociated elements in one's personality often proves to be a step towards a firmer organization of the personality and towards a better adjustment to the conditions of life.

{571}

EXERCISES

1. Outline the chapter.

2. Mention some personal traits that appear when the individual is dealing with inanimate things, and some that only appear in dealing with other persons.

3. Construct a "rating scale" for the trait of independence, as follows. Think of some one who is extremely independent, and call him A; of some one who is at the opposite extreme and call him E; of some one standing halfway, and call him C; and fill in the positions B and D with other persons standing between A and C and between C and E, in this matter of independence. You now have a sort of measuring rod, with the five persons A, B, C, D and E marking degrees of the trait. To rate any other individual, consider where he belongs on this scale--whether even with A, with B, etc.

4. How does the embarra.s.sing "self-consciousness" of one who is speaking in public differ from simple consciousness of self?

5. Consider what was conscious and what unconscious in the following case of "sh.e.l.l shock": A sharpshooter had a certain peekhole in the front of the trench through which he was accustomed to take aim at the enemy. The enemy evidently spotted him, for bullets began to strike close by as soon as ever he got up to shoot. He stood this for a time, and then suddenly lost the sight of his right eye, which he used in aiming.

6. Explain the difference between unconscious action of the dissociated type and of the implicit type.

REFERENCES

For attempts to utilize psychological methods in the study of personality, see F. L. Wells, _Mental Adjustments_, 1917; also Chapter 11 in Watson's _Psychology_, 1919.

Much interesting psychological material, along with a good deal of philosophical discussion, is contained in James's chapter on the "Consciousness of Self" in Vol. I of his _Principles of Psychology_, 1890.

For a discussion of the unconscious, see the symposium on _Subconscious Phenomena_, 1910, partic.i.p.ated in by Munsterberg, Ribot, Janet, Jastrow, Hart and Prince.