Class Book <3cpigM _ COPSRIGHT DEPOSIT. OUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from The Library of Congress http://www.archive.org/details/ourunconsciousmiOOpier OUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND AND HOW TO USE IT BY FREDERICK PIERCE NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 68 1 FIFTH AVENUE Copyright 1922, by E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY All Rights Reserved rf 1 Printed in the United States of America \ Hflr?15?2 §)CI.A659138 J To an Unfailing Friend To an Inspiring Love To an Unfaltering Trust and To Human Service THIS BOOK IS REVERENTLY DEDICATED ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For permission to make quotations, the author expresses his gratitude to the following: The Macmillan Company for permission to quote from An Outline of History, by H. G. Wells. Dodd, Mead & Company for permission to quote from Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion, by Charles Baudouin; The New Psychology and its Relation to Life, by A. G. Tansley; and The Child's Unconscious Mind, by Wilfred Lay. Henry Holt & Company for permission to quote from The Freudian Wish and its Place in Ethics, by E. B. Holt. Dr. Edward J. Kempf for permission to quote from Autonomic Functions and the Personality, published by the Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company. William Wood & Company for permission to quote from The Organs of Internal Secretion, by I. G. Cobb. FOREWORD THE form of this book has been determined by a considerable body of those who will read it, for it is arranged to meet the need, so many times ex- pressed in my lecture audiences, of a simple and practical treatment of the subject that should be written in terms comprehensible to the layman. Ter- minology, the jargon of a science, is invented by scien- tists for purposes of convenience and accuracy; but in recent psychological research the progress has been so rapid and the lines of development so diver- sified that there has not yet been time for crystalliza- tion of descriptive terms, with the result that even among psychologists themselves there is not yet an effective agreement. Tansley's use of the word "complex," for example, is in a far different sense from that of the psychoanalytic school; and there is wide divergence of meaning among various writers who use the term "libido," few of them giving it ex- clusively the sense in which it was originally used by Jung. To discard technical language entirely, in the preparation of this work, was well-nigh out of the question; but I have tried to use it as little as possible and wherever its use was compulsory I have tried to define my meaning so that it should be both clear and accurately stated. viii Foreword For the most part I have omitted discussion of psychoanalysis and kept to the underlying principles. Experience has convinced me that the average casual reader of psychoanalytic works has found himself hopelessly entangled in the maze of mechanisms for which his mind has not been prepared. To under- stand the activities of the Unconscious and their re- lation to those of the Conscious, it seems to me that one should first have a clear picture of such matters as how perceptions are conditioned by wish-feelings en route to response, and the nature of the difference between wish-feelings at the two levels. It seems equally important to grasp the relation of mental states to endocrine gland activities. Furthermore, jsince Suggestion is one of the vitally important de- terminants in human conduct, and since I have been so fortunate during my work in Switzerland as to be in contact with its most advanced theory and practice, it has seemed logical to point out its rela- tion to what might be termed the Physiological Un- conscious — f*he involuntary nerve-and-muscle system. The new law advanced — the "Law of Dominant Affect" — has proved accurate experimentally and of real importance in the additions which it has made possible to Autosuggestion technique. A theory, as Kempf has remarked, is worth its working value; and the applications of this theory have given defi- nite results. Critical comparison will show that it is a radical advance from the admitted law of auxil- Foreword ix iary emotion, since the Law of Dominant Affect bases the entire technique on the creation and stim- ulation of a carefully designed phantasy. If any apology is needed for including the section on Advertising and Selling in this general work, it must be pleaded that in our busy country one may fairly suppose a considerable number of readers to be interested in the business applications as well as in those which relate to home, family, and personal problems. For valuable suggestions in studies during past years, my sincere thanks are extended to Dr. A. A. Brill, Dr. Smith Ely Jelliff e, and Dr. Walter Timme, of New York. To Dr. Hector Mortimer of Lon- don, and to Prof. Dr. Charles Baudouin of Geneva, I wish to acknowledge a particular debt of gratitude — to the one for his constructive criticism during the preparation of the book, and to the other for his generous exposition of the Autosuggestion work at the Rousseau Institute. Finally toward those groups in the cities of the Middle West who first extended ,to me an invitation to their platforms, there is a deeply felt and enduring gratitude for their gen- erous and always stimulating welcome. To encoun- ter them again will be one of the pleasures of home- coming. F. P. Celigny, Switzerland, October 8th, 192 1. CONTENTS PAGE Explanatory: The Why and Wherefor ... i CHAPTER I. The Operating Tower 5 II. Behind the Scenes with a Human Mind . 15 III. Libido and the Dominant Wish .... 46 IV. The Endocrine Glands, Compensation Striving, and False Goals .... 67 V. Autosuggestion 89 VI. Application to Everyday Life . . . .132 VII. Making a Contented Human Group . . 230 VIII. The New Psychology in Advertising and Selling 267 Bibliography 321 OUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND OUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND EXPLANATORY: THE WHY AND WHEREFOR WHAT ONE MAY GET FROM THESE PAGES FOR PER- SONAL USE npHE healthiest and most promising sign of the ■*■ current day in American life is the rapid growth of popular interest in an understanding of the true inwardness of a human being. It is as if the collect- ive mind of the people, unconsciously stimulated by evidence of progress that follows research in agricul- ture, biology, medicine, chemistry, machines, manu- facturing methods, and scores of other branches of human activity, was stirring itself to a direct demand for the same intensive effort and progress in the field of human motives. "If science can improve the prod- ucts of the soil," people seem to be asking, "if it can raise the standard of living, lower the death rate and increase the expectation of life, why should it not show the way to a better group cooperation and human relationship?" It can. It is already beginning to chart the route. It has brought to light an understanding of the hid- den motives — the real driving power that controls 2 Our Unconscious Mind men, women, and children — which promises to Hu- man beings a tremendous advance in the art of living together. This understanding has come from re- search in the field of what may be most simply de- scribed as the unconscious mind; a field which we know was one of the thought foci of the speculative thinkers of Egypt at least thirty centuries ago. Tansley, in the conclusion of his admirable work, The New Psychology * remarks: ". . . though still in its infancy, still facing a great deal that is obscure, still with many of its concepts and analyses somewhat vague and hesitating, still without the means of apply- ing quantitative methods, the new science of the mind has made a definite successful beginning. It can al- ready give the conclusions of intuitive wisdom some- thing of the precision of science, it can exhibit unsus- pected connections, throw light on the dark places of the mind, and obtain definitely successful results in psychotherapy. Its fundamental postulates, the doctrines of psychic determination and of the deriva- tion of the springs of all human action from instinct- ive sources, are essential as working hypotheses." The man who many believe will go down in his- tory as the most important discoverer and blazer of trails in the recent research is Prof. Sigmund Freud, of Vienna. Working in neurology and psychiatry, his discoveries, and the theories which he developed from them, necessarily dealt with the abnormal. It * The New Psychology and its Relation to Life, by A. G. Tansley. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. The Why and Wherefor 3 is, however, a common experience that from a study of the abnormal we learn of the normal. When a newly designed machine breaks down, the designer learns as much from the breaking as from the ma- chine's normal performance. Freud's theories, often ignorantly and sensationally handled by writers who had only the most sketchy knowledge of them, at first met with the reception so frequently accorded to discoveries which upset comfortably rutted minds. But their essential truth was irresistible, and by 19 15 we find such an authority as Prof. E. B. Holt re- marking in the preface to his admirable book The Freudian Wish* "Now Freud's contribution to science is notable, and in my opinion epoch-making. ... he has given us a key to the explanation of mind. ... It is the first key which psychology has ever had which fitted, and moreover I believe it is the only one that psychology will ever need." For my part, I am glad to acknowledge that it is this key which unlocked the door to my study and experiment of the last six years. Therefore to the Vienna master more than to any other I owe what- ever I have been able to get clear in my own mind, and which in the succeeding pages I shall try to pass on to the service of my fellow Americans, about the following : Some riddles in human conduct, our own as well as others' — Control and operation of the will (and * The Freudian Wish and its Place in Ethics, by E. B. Holt. Henry Holt & Co., New York. 4 Our Unconscious Mind better than that, something that can be substituted for "will" which makes the attainment of one's goal much easier than by "force of will") — Ridding the day of conflict and contention — Elimination of worry — Growing abler, in place of growing old — Raising successful children — A new view of the "difficult" child — Tapping the reservoir of greatest energy — Setting the unconscious mind at work — A business organization that will get more done — Making pro- duction a pleasure instead of a labor — Constructing a satisfied human group (the practical steps toward ironing out some of our industrial and political wrinkles) — Replacing personal opinion with exact knowledge, in merchandising, advertising and selling. CHAPTER I THE OPERATING TOWER TF the denizens of our large cities, who spend a ■ part of each day anathematizing the telephone operators in central stations, could pay a half-hour's visit to one of these stations during a peak-load period, there is little doubt that the anathemas would cease then, there, and forevermore. For a central station telephone exchange is a striking object lesson in how nearly a complicated series of human actions, mental and physical, may be brought to the state and speed of an automatic machine. Somewhere a receiver is snatched from a hook. On the operator's desk a signal flashes, her hand lifts a plug and snaps it into place, her voice inquires, her ear registers a number (often spoken indis- tinctly), her voice repeats it, her hand snaps in an- other plug for the second station, her ear registers an answer, her voice again repeats the number. At the second station the other operator has seen a signal, answered, heard a number, repeated it, snapped in a plug and set a bell ringing. Complicated enough, in itself, this series of actions, when one considers the relatively few seconds consumed in the entire process; but add to them the number of other wires that 6 Our Unconscious Mind are signalling or being held while rung by other sta- tions, and it quickly becomes impossible for any person but a trained operator to follow the speed of the perception-and-response pattern. Rapid and adroit as it is, however, it can give but the palest and faintest impression of the central sta- tion of the human body. If I am so unlucky as to stick a pin in the end of my finger, the signal is carried along an inward-bound nerve path, the perception is registered in consciousness, an order is despatched over a parallel outward-bound nerve path to a whole series of muscles, the finger is jerked away, and the whole process of affect and effect has taken perhaps the fiftieth part of a second. (The reaction time varies widely for reasons that will appear in another section.) Speed is not the point which I want to emphasize; it is merely of incidental interest in some of the functions of the system that we are examining. What is really important in the illustration just given is the reason why the finger was jerked away. It will not suffice merely to say that there was pain, because pain is only a name for a certain sort of affect. And there are many sorts of pain to which there is no such reflexive act as attempting to get away. What hap- pened was that the central station received informa- tion that the environment of the finger was unsatis- factory. Whereupon it called upon cooperative muscles to move the finger away; in other words to change the unsatisfactory environment. The Operating Tower 7 If now we pass from an external touch perception to an internal one — let us take the stomach for ex- ample — we may find the same mechanism at work. A child has partaken of too much rich food. The terminals of the stomach's perceptive nerves transmit the information that the internal environment is un- satisfactory, whereupon an order is sent over the parallel lines to the appropriate muscles and these set in motion a reversed peristalsis, thus emptying the stomach — changing the unsatisfactory environ- ment. A still higher degree of cooperation is in- stanced when the blood vessels around a wound mobilize the white corpuscles of the blood to fight an infection. Let us suppose that a woman is passing under a lighted gas jet around which someone has been so careless as to arrange a paper shade. The shade takes fire and ignites the woman's hair. The percep- tion of the unsatisfactory environment of the head promptly registers, but no good will come of sending any order over the outgoing paths to the scalp. Co- operation is required here between separate members of the body; the order goes to the muscles of both legs, which obligingly remove the head from the cause of the unsatisfactory environment — and it is to be hoped that the hands will do their bit also in quickly stopping the conflagration in the hair, thus completing the change in the head's environment. These suppositions have dealt only with surround- 8 Our Unconscious Mind ings that were unsatisfactory. But if a fragrant flower be held under the nose the reaction is quite different. The order sent out will be, not to change, but to get more. Instead of avoidance of, there will now be extension toward, as a response to the stimu- lus. The same will be true if sugar is put in a baby's mouth; if the eye perceives an agreeable com- bination of colors or grouping of lines; or if the ear is stimulated by harmonious sounds. The principle then is that, of any perception com- ing into the central station, one of three things must be true of the affect. It must be either agreeable, dis- agreeable, or indifferent. And the tendency is to transmit orders which will adjust the environment, or adjust to the environment, accordingly. The ter- minal end of any perceptive nerve may be spoken of as a "receptor" (or "receiver") ; the impression which its message makes at the central station is an "affect"; and the order (if any) transmitted over the Outward bound lines may be called the "response" or effort at adjustment. Some of these efforts at adjustment seem to be wholly instinctive, but in studying them we quickly get beyond that level and find in them thought processes, habit, and established response-models. If I am driving an automobile on a main road, and suddenly from a blind intersec- tion another car appears directly in front of me, the motions which I apply to clutch, brake, and steering wheel, are not instinctive ; they are the result of habit based on definite models. If these models had not The Operating Tower 9 been formed, and the habit responses acquired, the right motions would not be made. Similarly, there is no thought process involved; at least none at the conscious level; for time is lacking. The thought process has been worked out beforehand, during ear- liest driving practice, thus establishing the response model ready for instant reproduction when needed, i.e., when the dangerous environment occurs. The tremendous importance of model formation and habit response will be seen in later pages dealing with practical methods of analyzing and improving one's self. The muscular processes of a newly born child when it is first given the mother's breast may be taken as a purely instinctive response to a stimulated percep- tion. At adolescence one sees instinct still at work but now working through a most complex system of stimuli, affects, ideas and responses. The increased action of the thyroid gland is stimulating (through its secretions in the blood-stream) other glands and organs — particularly the procreative system. There is an actual change in the chemistry of the blood, which acts as an exciter or stimulus to certain nerves. This in turn produces its affects; the whole compli- cated and wonderful birth and growth of romance- feeling in a human being. Scarcely perceptible at first, the signs of effort at adjustment multiply slowly. Fortunate is the boy or girl in whom this process is not too rapid. Under our system of education it coincides with the period when the brain is called io Our Unconscious Mind upon to assume the more intensive activity of the secondary school. Later we shall see how the energy may be so divided as to make satisfactory school work almost impossible. In many children these are the most critical years of the entire life. If it is true that the seeds of every neurosis are planted during the first seven years, it is equally true that during adolescence they have their greatest chance of inter- mediate growth. But to return to the mechanisms: The background of instinct, in the adolescent, is obvious; and it is equally obvious that no such simple act of adjustment as that of the pin-pricked finger, or the cooperation of feet and hands with the scorched head, will serve to gratify the desire to love and to be loved in the mating sense, with all the mani- fold adult wishes that follow in train; the ideas of companionship, a home, achievement, children, etc. It must not be forgotten that whatever models the child has for these things — its emotional models, so to speak — for various situations, are none of them practical. They have not been developed out of specific teaching, or out of experience. They have come mainly from observation; and in the average child they hardly exist in consciousness. (Emphatic- ally this does not imply that they are weak. We shall see later that they exist mainly in a field which we shall call the "unconscious," and that they have a very great intensity which is partly primitive.) The situation is something like that of the man who when The Operating Tower ii asked if he could play the piano replied that he didn't know because he had never tried. There is a chem- ical stimulation going on which produces affects that demand radical efforts at adjustment. Neither ex- perience nor training has provided any thought processes that would establish adequate models of response. Unfortunately, in the average instance, there has grown up a barrier of reserve between child and parents making impossible that simple con- fidence by which the child might have steady access through these difficult years, to the stored experience and knowledge of life in the parents' minds. In the hour of our greatest trial we are alone. There remains nothing for the adolescent but to make the adjustment by the often painful process of trial and error; acquiring its own experiences and from them developing its own forms of response. At each step there will be a thought process; so that from the first half-formed phantasies of having a sweetheart, through the (usually, I think, unconsciously experi- mental) "calf loves," to the final goal of successful mating in marriage, and the founding of a home, we may trace a series of the most intricate and complex cooperative acts, all originating from the same stimulus, and all aiming toward acquiring a satisfac- tory change of environment. The stimulus affect has had to call on thought proc- esses. These have had to turn over, examine, re- group and consider such images, or models, as obser- vation, hearsay and reading have imprinted on the 12 Our Unconscious Mind memory. The orders over the outward bound lines have then been to reproduce and try out these models. From the results of these try-outs new material has been supplied for the thought processes, so that gradually, by trial-and-failure as well as by trial-and- success, the models of action have been found that will lead to the desired goal. We must not overlook the fact that all the time two conflicting forces have been at work; on the one hand the primitive instinctive effort of the central station so to operate the machine as to get its wishes: on the other hand the effort of cultural training to keep the operation within bounds approved by the social group. Here then are two divisions of mental activity sharply opposed to each other; one function- ing chiefly at an unconscious, the other at a conscious level. The first is natural, instinctive, primitive, con- cerned not with morals or manners but solely with securing a satisfactory environment — in other words, fulfilling its wishes. The second has the job of find- ing a working compromise, of checking the primitive when it fails to square with the conscious ethical sense and public opinion. The main effort of the central station in the fore- going instance was toward a change of environment that would produce gratification. But suppose a manufacturer is confronted with a business situation that threatens serious loss. The affect is painful, and the effort will be to avert disaster. Fear will power- fully reinforce the motive. His thought processes; The Operating Tower 13 have adequate stores of experiences (images or mod- els of response) to turn to, but it is necessary to arouse affects in the central stations of others; his assistants, his friends, his bankers, etc. The series of stimuli and responses, with their reinforcing fears, desire for money, desire for power, personal regard, and the like, through which the trouble is finally avoided, would require an entire book for their analysis. The final result has been to change an environment that was acutely distressing. This in itself fulfills a wish. As a matter of fact every opera- tion of the central station is toward that end. We have now the following principles in hand: 1. That through inbound and outbound nerve paths any perceptive stimulus may produce an affect to which there is an effort at response. 2. That the response, however complex, is in the general form of extension toward, or change of, the environment. 3. That response-models are formed through ex- perience and observation. 4. That the response may be instinctive, may fol- low an acquired model (habit response) , or may have to wait for a thought process. 5. That the driving force is always a wish. 6. That the wish may be either unconscious or con- scious. 7. That the two wish-fields are often in conflict. 8. That the thought processes required are often elaborate in the extreme, and that they are always at 14 Our Unconscious Mind the service of two masters — the unconscious and the conscious. In the next chapter, "Behind the Scenes with a Human Mind" we shall see these principles at work under extraordinary circumstances. CHAPTER II BEHIND THE SCENES WITH A HUMAN MIND THE following very interesting case of conversion hysteria has been selected because by taking it apart and putting it together again one may construct a complete working diagram of the. human mind; not in the sense of anatomy but in the sense of graph- ics. The case shows many of the operations of the central station, it shows the interplay of the conscious and unconscious, and it reveals many things which explain human conduct far beyond our average every- day understanding of it. A man of thirty, married, and the father of two children, goes to bed at night apparently in ordi- narily good health. He awakens in the morning to find that his right arm is fixed firmly behind him, with the forearm across the small of his back. He is unable to move it. In every other respect he feels perfectly well, is in full possession of all his senses and faculties. There is no pain in the arm, and it is only slightly numb. There is no apparent reason why he should not move it and use it as freely as ever; but he cannot do it. Examination by physicians shows that the arm is perfectly sound, and that there is no evidence of ill- 15 1 6 Our Unconscious Mind ness of any sort whatever. The man himself has not the remotest idea why the arm is immovable, yet he has no more power over it than if it were para- lyzed. If sufficient force is applied by others the arm can be moved, but this occasions severe pain and when the force is removed the arm resumes instantly its fixed position. To add to the puzzle, there is no sense of fatigue. This fact we shall find later gives the key to one of the most valuable of recent discov- eries in methods of doing mental work, a discovery which has possibilities of tremendous importance to all of us. Fortunately, the knowledge and technique are to- day available both to give an accurate diagnosis and to cure the symptom. The case is one of conversion of an unconscious mental conflict into a physical sym- bol of the conflict. (Hysteria, a neurotic disease, should not be confused with the spasmodic laughing and crying commonly called "hysterics.") It is well to say "cure the symptom," rather than "cure the disease," because while the arm may surely be re- leased to its full natural use there is no absolute certainty that at some future time the man will not give evidence of his hysteric trend in some other way. It is not necessary to describe here the psychoana- lytic method by which the case is to be explored, fur- ther than to say that, with the assistance of the ana- lyst, the patient is going to be enabled to recover significant memory impressions which, have been en- tirely lost to (suppressed from) consciousness. Psy- Behind the Scenes with a Human Mind 17 choanalysis has been so extensively written of by competent authorities — and by some who are neither competent nor authorities — that there is an ample literature available to all who wish to study it. What we are concerned with here is an understanding of the mental mechanisms rather than of the method of treating them when they get out of gear. Arrange- ments are made for our patient to have an hour or more a day with the analyst, and he is encouraged to discuss whatever thoughts may be in his mind or may come to him in the course of his talking. For several days the interviews may be taken up by an apparently pointless stream of ideas. He will be encouraged to recall if possible his recent dreams and relate them, for a purpose which will appear later. It develops, in this case only after many sessions, for a reason which also will appear later, that on the very evening before the attack there had been a most unpleasant domestic scene. The patient had boxed the ears of his older child, a boy aged seven. His wife had re- sented this, had reproached him angrily, and had declared that in thus striking the child he might in- jure him for life. In telling of the incident he recalls that while he had felt that the boy's mother had absurdly overrated the importance of what to him seemed only slight and ordinary punishment of a dis- obedient child, nevertheless he had for some reason felt a sense of guilt and had not been able to make any adequate reply. He recalls further, now, that very often during his eight years of married life he 1 8 Our Unconscious Mind had felt this inability to defend himself when his wife had reproached him for anything. His general de- scription of the family life makes it evident enough that the wife is the real head of the household, that he is in fact dominated by her, although this last has not been admitted in his conscious mind; in other words he is unaware of it as a domination. Aside from the fact that the analyst's training enables him to see in this incident the key to his case, two things mark it as important. In the first place, it is rather noteworthy that this memory of some- thing by no means unimportant, which had occurred just before the onset of the illness, should not have appeared in one of the very first interviews. In the second place, the patient's reactions while discussing it give evidence of considerable emotional affect. The analyst encourages a thorough review of the episode with all of the associated memories which it stimu- lates. In succeeding interviews these lead back over the trail of the years to childhood, and it becomes evident from the patient's description of his early life that his mother had been much the same sort of ener- getic and "masterful" woman as is his wife, quick of temper and forthright of speech. When he v/as two years old, a younger brother had been born, a child who as he recalls quite definitely, "everybody said looked like my father," and from then on he felt that the mother's love was centered on the new arrival and he himself was shut out. "She did her duty by me," he expresses it, "but I always knew I didn't count Behind the Scenes with a Human Mind 19 as much as little Jack did. She seemed to care about him the way she did about Father. I came third." As this series of memories comes into conscious- ness, there is a flood of material that seems to urge for utterance, and there is marked evidence of its emotional character. A point is reached, however, when the patient suddenly stops, and refuses to con- tinue relating his present train of thought. He takes refuge in evasion, says that there is nothing of im- portance, or that he is tired, or that his memory fails. The practical eye of the analyst, however, has caught signs of great emotional tension. He insists patiently but earnestly that the chain of memories cannot have been broken abruptly unless a part of the mind had strong reasons for breaking it, and that the man must, for his own sake, continue. The resistance is at last overcome and the man relates the following circumstances : He recognizes that his feeling toward his younger brother was always jealousy. He does not think that he hated him; indeed he is sure there were times when he was fond of the little chap ; but always there was a smouldering jealousy and once in a while it would flare up quite uncontrollably. On such oc- casions he would give way to a fit of childish rage in which he tried to square the situation by using his small fists. Punishments followed, and their gradually increasing severity as he grew older served for the most part to restrain him. But on the younger boy's seventh birthday there had been a climax. The cele- 20 Our Unconscious Mind bration of the day, culminating with a party, con- trasted sharply with the observance of his own birth- day which for some reason had been rather slighted. At the children's bedtime, the mother was unusually demonstrative over her favorite, held him in her arms and caressed him extravagantly before putting him in his crib, and left the room declaring that he was "the sweetest child in the whole world." The patient remembers that in an agony of spirit he created a phantasy of himself as dead and the mother broken-hearted with remorse over her neglect of him. The next morning he had started a quarrel with the younger boy and was having decidedly the better of the fight which followed, when the mother overheard the affair and put a stop to it. Four months later little Jack had been seized with an illness which the old-fashioned country doctor had announced was "brain fever," and in a fortnight had died. The mother, doubtless hardly herself, what with the strain of the sleepless nights and of her grief, had bitterly accused the patient of having been the cause of his little brother's illness, and hence of his death, because of the blows he had struck on the younger boy's head. At this point, the patient's memories of the trouble seem really to have run out. He recalls many minor circumstances but nothing that seems actually im- portant. Yet the analyst knows that there is some- thing missing. Stimulation of the memory has re- covered the emotional images on which the present Behind the Scenes with a Human Mind 21 onset is modelled, but there still remains the physical image — the fixed arm. It is to this which he now directs attention, asking the patient to try to think of the connection between it and the events he has re- lated. At first, the patient cannot recall any. His mind dwells on the brother's death, the mother's re- proaches and the terrible guilt which they had made him feel. The delay is not long, however, for the association stimulus (with which we shall presently experiment) is a strong one. His thought drifts back to the fight. To being discovered. To the punish- ment — and now it comes back in a flash. His mother had been violently angry, angrier than at any other time he could remember. She had said she "would give him a lesson he would never forget." She had tied his right arm behind his back and forced him to go about with it in that position for seven days. With the recovery of these memories, and an ex- planation of the mechanisms, our patient is cured of the symptom. The arm is released. The affect- energy, having been given a psychic discharge, no longer has to use a physical path. If a normal adult becomes involved in an argument with an inefficient or impertinent waiter, he may be for the moment quite angry, but the anger (emo- tional affect) is dismissed as soon as the episode is over. Unless the matter is serious enough to report to the management, there has been in the mere act of reproof a sufficient response to the affect, partial- 22 Our Unconscious Mind larly if it has secured better service, and thus a more agreeable environment. Experience, and practice in living, supply enough familiar response-models for the needs of every day. The adult is more or less an emotional veteran, able to take any ordinary stroke without wound and without conscious effort. Our patient was able to do this. His wife's re- proaches annoyed him but he was not conscious of any serious disturbance. It was a deeper affect, stimulated far back in childhood, to which he had at that time been powerless to make any adequate response, that caused his trouble. How was this old, forgotten affect stirred into such extraordinary life and activity again? If you will take pencil and paper and set down in a column a number of simple words, such as dog, blue, high, boy, night, grass, bright, etc., and then have someone pronounce clearly each word, waiting after each one until you respond, you will of course find that after a short interval of time each word brings into your mind either another word or a group of words in the form of phrase or sentence. When "dog" is pronounced you may very likely think of "cat"; to "blue" you may respond with "sky"; to "high" with "hill" ; and so on. This is simple asso- ciation of ideas. But now let us carry the experiment a step farther. Instead of the group let us take one single word, set it down on a clean sheet of paper, retire to a quiet place, relax thoroughly, think of the word, and then set down the entire train of other Behind the Scenes with a Human Mind 23 words and ideas that follow through the next quarter of an hour. The result will be a good deal of material. This latter can then be separated into di- visions or groups of related ideas. I will take an example from one of my note-books, giving only the associations of the first two minutes — some of them were slow in forming: Stimulus-word, "black"; "Black — white — house — mother — sister — tease — temptation — pleasure — pretty — she is prettier than I — but men like me better — men — I like them tall and dark — my brother — swimming — the lake — camping — the fun we have — the S. boys and their big canoe." With "black" as the stimulus word it is fair to say that "white" is a simple habit response. The word "house" serves as a junction with the first group of ideas, which concern the family. The word "tease" serves as a junction with some acquired childhood association of pleasure with temptation; possibly a surviving memory-trace of some purloining of for- bidden cookies or jam. The word "pretty" forms a junction with ideas of self. "Tall and dark" leads directly to an idea of an idolized brother who plainly has become the image for selecting a mate. The prompt suppression of this idea is significant and in- teresting. "Swimming" leads quickly to ideas of pleasure derived from close contact with nature, and broader social relations. The foregoing are simple stimuli applied to the 24 Our Unconscious Mind perceptive nerves (inbound paths) of eye and ear. No analysis is required to observe that the stimulus soon excites an idea which in turn can stimulate an affect in the central station, either agreeable or otherwise. And if the stimulated affect is a strong one the response may be instantaneous — we are all familiar with such remarks as, "I never see lilies of the valley without being reminded of death and fu- nerals." What then prevents consciousness, which is getting all sorts of perceptive stimuli in a more or less constant stream during the waking hours, from being overwhelmed by the mass of associated ideas? Several things. In the first place the affects excited by many of the stimuli are of such low intensity that no response is required; they have not sufficient energy to demand any discharge; no environmental adjustment is needed. In the second place an adult has acquired so many images, or habit-response models, that the adjustments are made almost auto- matically, e.g., the many complex motions made in driving an automobile while carrying on a lively con- versation which engrosses the conscious attention. But in the third place there is an active censorship which is protecting consciousness much as an efficient private secretary protects the General Manager from callers who would disturb him or waste his time and energy. If we think of an idea as a perception plus its first associations, then we can see clearly the action of this Censor as the idea arrives at the door. It will be to stop all the associations that would be dis- Behind the Scenes with a Human Mind 25 turbing or non-essential. That at least, if not always its action, will be its duty. All too often it is not working well and we say we are "not able to concen- trate," or we are "not thinking clearly." If one con- siders all that the Conscious Censor has to do, one may easily excuse its not being hundred-per-cent effi- cient. It is proper to inquire here what becomes of the material that is stopped at the door and refused admittance to consciousness. It has certainly been stimulated into activity, and most of it is easily acces- sible if it is wanted. The latter factor differentiates it clearly from the material which caused our pa- tient's trouble. In his case both the memory, afd the affects excited by the aroused memory, were 1 aried deeply in the Unconscious and were anything b it ac- cessible. An intermediate field is suggested therefore, between the Unconscious and the Conscious, and for this has been used the term "Fore-conscious," or "Pre-conscious." The former name will serve our purpose perfectly. The associations, then, which are stopped by the Conscious Censor, are in the Fore- conscious ; that is, they are within reach of the Con- scious. That the Fore-conscious is, besides, an affect-field (or wish-field) of the central station is also certain, since the great majority of our outbound responses to inbound perception stimuli are either conscious or may readily become so. The effort to change the stomach's environment, when the affect of hunger is 26 Our Unconscious Mind registered, is conscious. The rythmic drumming of feet or fingers when dance-music is heard, is conscious or soon becomes so. The answer to a call; the smile and extended hands when a child appeals to be taken; the stepping aside at the sound of a motor-horn — examples could be multiplied endlessly — all are at, or near, the Conscious level; hence are responses to Fore-conscious affects. But our patient's response of the rigid arm was certainly not at that level, or any- where within reach of it except through patient, prolonged and skillfully directed effort. Yet it was surely a response to an affect, a true effort at adjust- ment, feeble and ineffective as it proved. So that behind the Fore-conscious there is yet another affect (or i- '/ish) field; that of the Unconscious. Its affects, or w?sh feelings, are stimulated by ideas. The ideas consist of perceptions plus their associations. In our patient's case there was a whole series of perceptions; touch when he boxed his son's ears, seeing the child's avertive movements, hearing its cries, seeing and hearing his wife's reproaches. These, with many added associations which were aroused, came through to the Fore-conscious and were allowed access to the Conscious. Assuredly they produced affects in the Fore-conscious, but these as we know were not sufficient to prevent the man's retiring for the night in his usual health. The important point for us is that somewhere en route these perceptions picked up an association which stimulated an affect (or more properly a group of affects) the response Behind the Scenes with a Human Mind 27 to which, to say nothing of the Conscious, was not allowed entrance even to the Fore-conscious. An additional censorship is established, therefore, be- tween the Unconscious and the Fore-conscious. Without it we shall soon see that there would be no such thing as a civilized human being. The first step will be to analyze the group of affects aroused in our patient's Unconscious, and thus find out what an Unconscious consists of. A baby is a primitive being. It has perceptions, which produce affects or wish feelings, but it has neither morals nor manners. Its sole concern is to obtain gratification for the wish feelings; procure- ment of what is agreeable and change of the dis- agreeable. This direct, primitive, unmoral, wholly self-seeking attitude toward life persists for some time and its manifestations are repressed only by the incessant training, precept and example of others. The affects are primitive and uncensored; the re- sponses (efforts at procurement or avoidance) are likewise. At the time when his little brother was born our patient was about two years old. Except for the father, he had been in sole possession of his mother's attention and affection. At the primitive level all affection is in terms of possession. He had cared for her to the extent that she was his. With the appearance of the baby and the mother's transfer of attention, he felt that she was his no longer. He had lost her. His love-feeling became conditioned with deprivation, jealousy, anger, sense of loss, re- 28 Our Unconscious Mind sentment, protest, hatred of another, frustration, and a feeling of helplessness. No possible response was adequate to produce the desired change of environment. The emotional affects had such intensity as to compel some sort of action, and at times were strong enough to overcome the fear of the mother's anger and punishment, but on every such occasion the punishment was sure to follow, and with it came the sense of guilt. The nature of the entire series of affects was primitive. What their every response (effort at adjustment) encountered was cultural training — the will of the group. The latter was the stronger. There could be very little compromise. The primitive had to be repressed. This conflict of the primitive with the cul- tural is the important part of the mental history of all children during the first five or six years of life. The elements of the conflict vary with the circum- stances of the individual, but always the conflict is the critical fact of life. We should not overlook the fact that affect images and response-models are being formed during this period which will powerfully in- fluence responses to affects in later life. Our patient's response to the complicated affects of the mating urge was eventually to marry a woman whose personality in many respects resembled that of his mother. The net result was to recreate some- thing resembling the unsquared situation of early childhood, and the end product was near disaster. The childhood series of affects then, with all their un- Behind the Scenes with a Human Mind 29 fulfilled wish-feelings, had persisted for twenty-eight years and had retained the possibility of becoming fully energized. They certainly were not in the Fore-conscious, or the Conscious would have become aware of them many times. Moreover, if they had remained in the Fore-conscious, the conflict would have so occupied the patient's childhood as to produce a neurosis and a complete breakdown of education and adjustment to life. It is equally cer- tain that they were not voluntarily suppressed. They encountered superior force. They could not have expression. Their pain was completely upsetting to daily progress. They had to be more than sup- pressed: they had to be repressed. And so into the deep Unconscious they were forced, behind the bar- rier of the primary censorship; along with all the other primitive affects, impulses, wish-feelings, which were denied expression by the will of the group — cultural training. The material of which the Unconscious consists, then, and the function of the censorship between Un- conscious and Fore-conscious, is clear enough. The Unconscious has all of the affects, impulses, wish-feel- ings and images of the instinctive primitive. These are held in repression by a cultural censorship. When stimulated they are capable of carrying, doubtless be- cause of their primitive nature, a high energy charge. Analysis will show that they are being incessantly stimulated. Our experiments in association show that it cannot be otherwise, for starting from the 30 Our Unconscious Mind stimulus of a single word the widening ripples can sooner or later reach the very shores of our memory- experience. What becomes of the energy? A study of Freud's work on the Psychopathology of Every Day Life shows that some of it finds its way out in symbolic acts. No motion of the body is meaningless. If it has not a conscious purpose it is surely a response to an unconscious affect. The same is true of day- dream or phantasy. Some affect, some feeling, denied its immediate direct expression, is making use of a symbol. I may be thinking of a problem in psychoanalysis, and suddenly observe that my fingers have been lightly drumming a rythm on the table. Allowing the associations to become apparent, I think of a fox-trot, of many dances, of one in the moonlight out of doors, and then of a description I have read of the orgic dances of the Marquesans. The associations need not be pursued farther to dis- cover that we are back near the primitive Uncon- scious. In the book mentioned, Freud also shows that the inevitable conflict between these Unconscious wish-feelings and the Censor is often revealed by little symbolic acts such as slips of speech, and errors in writing familiar words. To be sure, such symbolic acts are also used to give expression to wishes which are not repressed in the Unconscious but merely sup- pressed in the Fore-conscious; but any adequate dis- cussion of this division of the subject would require much more space than can be allotted to it here. Behind the Scenes with a Human Mind 31 It is necessary for our purpose only to point out the mechanism. The important factor is the amount of energy that is used in maintaining the repression and suppression of these affects. Every function uses energy, therefore the two Censors use it; and the amount of energy required must vary as the intensity of the affects which are to be repressed. An emo- tionally-toned affect is obviously of higher intensity than one which is not charged with any emotion. Practically all of the repressed primitive wish-feel- ings of childhood are emotionally toned. Hence if any such affect or group of affects goes into repres- sion without having been adequately adjusted, it will, whenever excited, require a large use of energy by the Censor to keep it repressed. As there is only a certain amount of energy available in any central station, we may now see, in part at least, why people often are unable to accomplish in practical life any- thing like what their ability would seem to warrant. We shall examine this further in a later section. Reference has been made to the fact that the secondary Censor, at the portal of consciousness, was protecting the Conscious, both to keep painful ideas in the background and to keep the stream of thought clear. The primary Censor between Un- conscious and Fore-conscious is also protective. But in the struggle of this primary Censor to keep back an Unconscious wish which is striving to break through, we see something which may properly be called "conflict." It is the battle between the Un- 32 Our Unconscious Mind conscious — primitive, unmoral, wholly self-seeking; and the Fore-conscious — cultural, moral, and coop- erative in terms of the civilized group. This strug- gle, and the compromises which it produces, form the basis of our psychology. A thorough under- standing of it provides complete answers to many of the riddles of human conduct. In a preceding paragraph, mention was made of the fact that the primitive wish-feelings and repressed affects in the Unconscious are being frequently stimu- lated by various ideas in the course of the day, and that a part of the energy finds outlet in symbolic acts. Much the highest type of these and obviously the most valuable, is seen in the mechanism called sublimation. This is the conversion of the primitive wish into a cultural one which symbolizes the primi- tive but is acceptable to both Censors. A very prop- erly repressed childish impulse to kill may later find highly useful expression in the trade of the killer and dresser of meat. A child who successfully re- presses a precocious procreative impulse may later become a most valuable creative writer. The great actor may be sublimating a primitive hero-wish of earliest childhood. Examples could be multiplied without number. In this mechanism a law of com- pensation is also at work, but that will be elaborated, with its application, in the chapter on glands of in- ternal secretion. Finally, the third important energy outlet, for both the repressed and the suppressed wish-feelings, Behind the Scenes with a Human Mind 33 is in the dream. A whole volume would be required to discuss adequately the mechanisms of dreams. To those who wish to give it the requisite hard study, supplemented by necessary experiment, I recommend a year of work in this field as likely to be both fascinating and valuable. But at present I propose to deal only with such points as are necessary to show the energy outlet. Study and analysis of dreams through several years have convinced me that Freud's theories of the dream are correct. The exciters of the dream may be of three sorts: I. Ordinary perceptive stimuli, such as touch, taste, scent, sound, varying intensity of light falling on the eyelids, or an internal state. 2. Undischarged affects aroused by ideas in the Fore-conscious: 3. Undischarged affects aroused in the Unconscious. Always, directly or indirectly (sometimes so con- cealed as to appear to do exactly the opposite), the dream represents the fulfillment of one or more wish-feelings. Either straightforwardly, or in sym- bolic phantasy, it creates an adequate response to an affect or group of affects. In so doing it discharges affect energy. Usually it is censored, but by no means always. There is no apparent censorship when a child, in response to its stomach's perception of the unsatisfactory environment of hunger, in the early morning hours, dreams of eating. But in an elaborate and apparently meaningless dream there is censorship of a high degree. The affects have had to make use of symbols, sometimes condensing a 34 Our Unconscious Mind whole group of emotions in a single momentary phase of the drama. I have often called these sym- bols the "building blocks" of the dream. An illus- tration will suffice to show that even in waking life a single tiny symbol may stand for a large group of affects and ideas. Suppose that a woman has motored with a friend to a place from which, at the top of a high hill, there is a beautiful sunset view. During a half hour there she may have seen and enjoyed all the details of a wonderful panorama of lake and woods and changing sky. Associations form of many other beautiful places she has seen. If the friend she is with happens to be a man with whom she is in love, there may be many emotional exchanges of thought, or caress, or both. When returning to the motor she plucks a flower from a wild vine, and on arriving home presses the flower in a book as a souvenir. Years after, com- ing upon that flower between the pages of the book she may fall into a reverie in which the whole episode is recreated and lived over again, with all its ideas and affects in full play — the latter getting much sat- isfaction from the phantasy. Thus the simple flower may stand as a symbol for a most complex group of perceptions, ideas, affects, responses, and gratifi- cations. So in the dream, the simplest fragment of phase or phrase, if "used in the same way that we used the stimulus-word "black" in our association Behind the Scenes with a Human Mind 35 experiment, will often reproduce many pages of affects and ideas. With one other item, the memory, we shall have all the elements of our apparatus complete, and may construct our working diagram of the central sta- tion — the psycho-physical mental apparatus of a human being. Broadly speaking, the memory is an accumulation of the entire experiences of the indi- vidual, added to instinct-traces, and certain shadowy hints (which appear sometimes under hypnosis, and also in psychoanalytic experiment) of pre-natal im- pressions. Its material is subject to all sorts of per- ception stimuli, and is accessible to both the Uncon- scious and the Fore-conscious affect (or wish) fields. In the opinion of most psychoanalysts, no significant impression is ever lost from the memory beyond the possibility of recall by association or other means. We are now ready for our diagram (next page). THE APPARATUS It may be quite unnecessary to state again at this point that our diagram is in no sense anatomical, yet Ifeel that it is perhaps wise to emphasize it and to suggest the reason why I have not thought best to discuss at any length the anatomy of the brain and of the nervous system. For one thing compara- tively little is as yet accurately known about the location of the various functionings of the brain. But more important is the fact that a concept is most 36 Our Unconscious Mind 5 sr <