The Omnipotent Self, a Study in Self-Deception and Self-Cure

CHAPTER I. The Unconscious Mind

THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND

In considering the question of character, with its various irregularities and idiosyncracies, we shall have to accustom ourselves to dealing with factors which do not exist in consciousness at all. Strange as it may seem to the uninitiated, many of our thoughts, ideas, and motives are quite outside our normal consciousness, and of them only the resulting emotions and actions appear on the surface. This may be taken as an absolute and indisputable fact, and one which the reader should try to appreciate at the outset, although it is somewhat difficult to realise, for we always find it hard to apprehend and understand something which we can neither see nor touch.

If one were to tell the ordinary labourer that water is composed of two gases which when combined form a liquid, he would probably be quite incredulous, and possibly in his ignorance might even deny emphatically any such possibility, on the grounds that it was against all common-sense and experience; he failing to realise, of course, how very limited were both his sense and his experience. In spite of his feelings of absolute certainty, and in spite of complete faith in the unshakable logic behind his belief, he would be wrong.

While it is not to be expected that many readers of this book will deny the existence of the unconscious part of the mind, it may well be that many will fail to realise that it is of more than theoretical value. It therefore becomes necessary for us to examine the matter somewhat carefully, and to familiarise ourselves with the ideas of the working of this unconscious mind.

Without going into the further sub-divisions recognised in psychology, we will confine ourselves to dividing the mind into two parts--the conscious and the unconscious. And of these, at any given moment, the conscious is by far the smaller part. We are actually conscious at any moment of but very few things, such as the book we are reading, the chair we are sitting on, and dimly of our immediate surroundings. A thousand memories which we might conjure up of our childhood and our past are, for the time being, far from consciousness. Yet these matters exist somewhere in the mind, for we are able, if we choose, to search about in it, and bring them into consciousness, even though we may not have thought of them for many years. This leads us at once to a striking fact, namely, that while many things can be remembered at will, others which we feel we ought to remember, cannot be brought to mind at all. It is an extremely common experience to find that one has forgotten a name completely, and that no effort will bring it into consciousness, yet later on, apparently without effort, the name will “come back to us,” as we say. In fact, the very phrase we use--“come back to us”--implies that it has been somewhere away from us, that it has been lodged in some place that is foreign and unknown to us, yet which we are aware is somewhere within us.

It is also common knowledge that a great many events and scenes of considerable importance to us at the time of action are forgotten, and that they can only be recollected if some sort of stimulus or reminder be given. For instance, a person may have forgotten completely where and how he spent a holiday ten years ago. No amount of racking his brain brings anything to light. But having been reminded of a single incident that occurred during that holiday, the whole of the rest may come up from the unconscious in full detail.

There is a third kind of memory more important still, if one may be permitted to call it memory, and that is the memory of facts which no ordinary stimulus of this sort will ever bring up into consciousness again. The term “memory” is used here because we have every reason to believe that somewhere in the unconscious all facts have been registered, and in many cases may be partially brought into consciousness again by suitable means, such for instance, as hypnotism or psycho-analysis, (two very different methods, by the way). Yet, though these impressions have been made on the mind, and though there is this unconscious memory still in existence, in the ordinary course of events we should never again be conscious of them.

We may, however, be very conscious of actions and emotions emanating from the unconscious memory. Thus, suppose that as a child one had lived in the country, and on several very happy occasions a bonfire had been lighted at a picnic, and that later on one lived in a town, and that this picnic which happened at the age of three or four years had become completely forgotten, so much so that even photographs of the scenes or conversations on the subject carried on by other people brought no memory to light and seemed to touch no chord; it would still be quite likely that the mere smell of a bon-fire in the distance or any smell resembling this would be enough to cause a considerable feeling of elation and happiness in the person, a feeling that something pleasant was taking place, an idea that if only one could remember, a pleasant picture could be called up. This is because it is associated in the unconscious mind with these previous happy occasions.

Or again, suppose a child at the age of two or three years has been dropped into a pond and nearly drowned. Although the incident may in later years be completely forgotten, the horror of deep water and all its associations may vividly persist. It seems probable, and a considerable amount of work has been done on this subject in psycho-analysis, that every action, thought, or idea that has ever been registered in the mind, even to some extent before birth, is permanently fixed; and that although much of this cannot be brought into consciousness by present methods, yet all the feelings and emotions, however slight, which attended these thoughts, ideas, and actions are perpetually being called forth by slight stimuli of which we are unaware, and these are playing their part in moulding our thoughts, feelings and actions in the present time.

I had an interesting patient a short time ago who, owing to certain experiences in the war, was suffering from complete loss of memory; so complete that he did not know his own wife nor even his parents. Under hypnosis, the whole of his memory was rapidly brought back; and when it appeared to be normal and both he and his parents were quite confident that it was as good as it had ever been, I suggested that we might try an experiment to see if we could improve it still further. I asked him, amongst other things, if he could voluntarily remember the first time he wore knickerbockers. He had not the faintest recollection of the matter. I then hypnotised him, and told him to give me the details. He described the knickerbockers minutely, the number of buttons on them, the fact that he wore them on his third birthday, that his father had given him a penny, and told him that “now he was a little man, he must have money in his pocket,” together with a very large number of other details. I enquired of his father and mother and sisters, and they corroborated the details in every particular.

I have tried several similar experiments with him and with one or two other patients under hypnosis with considerable success, and have even tried to take them back to the memory of their own birth. They have frequently produced many memories of events that occurred before the age of one year, but previous to that could only give reproductions of movements and pleasant and unpleasant emotions. Whether these latter are memories or not one has unfortunately no means of proving. But the fact that under hypnosis both educated and uneducated people alike exhibit extremely similar ideas as to types of movements, expressions, and feelings at the various stages of their very early life, inclines one to think that these reproductions may be memories. One has, however, to beware of the fact that observation and knowledge acquired in later periods of their lives might be the real factor underlying their apparent reproductions. Further evidence of a different nature will be given on this point, however, at a later stage in the book.

So far, we have shown that there is an unconscious part of the mind which acts as a store-house for memories, ideas, and emotions of the past. We have not, however, shown that it is anything more than a store-house. But if we look into it from other points of view, we shall see that it is a great deal more than a mere store-house, for it thinks, reasons, comes to conclusions, and in fact assists in controlling our acts at every turn; indeed this unconscious part of our mind wields driving forces of the utmost potency in moulding our lives.

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