Part 5 (1/2)
Irresistible Childhood. An experience that is forgotten is not necessarily lost. Although the first few years of childhood are lost to conscious memory, these years outweigh all others in their influence on character. The Jesuit priest was right when he said, ”Give me a child until he is six years old, and he will be a Catholic all his life.” As Frink has so ably shown, the determining factors that enter into any adult choice, such as the choice of the Catholic or the Protestant faith, are in a large measure made up of subconscious memories from early childhood, forgotten memories of Sunday-school and church, of lessons at home or pa.s.sages in books,-experiences which no voluntary effort could recall, but which still live unrecognized in our mature judgments and beliefs. Naturally we do not acknowledge these subconscious motives. We like to believe that all our decisions are based on reason, and so we invent plausible arguments for our att.i.tudes and our actions, arguments which we ourselves implicitly believe. This process of subst.i.tuting a plausible reason for a subconscious one is known as rationalization, a process which every one of us engages in many times a day.
It is indeed true that the child is father to the man. Those first impressionable years, when we believed implicitly whatever any one told us and when through ignorance we reacted emotionally to ordinary experiences, are molding us still, making us the men and women we are to-day, coloring with childish ideas many of the att.i.tudes of our supposedly reasoning life. Bergson says:
The unconscious is our historical past. In reality the past is preserved automatically. In its entirety probably it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.
Spontaneous Outbursts. ”How do we know all this?” some one says. ”What is the evidence for these sweeping statements? If we cannot remember, how can we discover these strange memories that are so powerful but so elusive? If they are below the level of consciousness, are they not, in the very nature of the case, forever hidden from view, in the sphere of the occult rather than that of science?”
The answer to these questions is determined by one important fact; the line between the conscious and subconscious minds does not always remain in the same place; the ”threshold of consciousness” is sometimes displaced, automatically allowing these buried memories to come to the surface. In sleep and delirium, in trance and hallucination, in hysteria and intoxication, the tables are turned; the restraining hand of the conscious mind is loosened and the submerged self comes forth with all its ancient memories.
It is a common experience to have a patient in delirium repeat long-forgotten verses or descriptions of events that the ”real man” has lost entirely. The renowned servant-girl, quoted by Hudson, who in delirium recited pa.s.sage after pa.s.sage of Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, which she had heard her one-time master repeat in his study, is typical of many such instances. [20]
[20] Hudson: The Law of Psychic Phenomena, p. 44. Quoted from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Vol. I, p. 117 (edit. 1847).
A young girl of nineteen, a patient of mine, lapsed for several weeks into a dissociated state in which she forgot all the memories and ideas of her adult life, and returned to the period of her childhood. She used to say that she saw things inside her head and would accurately describe events that took place before she was two years of age,-scenes which she had completely forgotten in her normal life. One day when I asked her to tell me what she was seeing, she began to talk about ”little sister” (herself) and ”little brother.” ”Little sister and brother were the two little folks that lived with their mother and their daddy and they were playing on the sand-pile. You know there was only one sand-pile, not like all the ones they have down here (at the seaside), and they had a bucket that they would put sand in and they would dump it out again and they would make nice things, you know; they would play with their little dog Ponto and he was white with black and brown spots on him. Little brother had white hair and he was bigger than little sister and he had a little waist with ruffles down the front and around the collar and a black coat that came down to his knees and it had two little white bands around it. Some of the waists he wore had blue specks and some had red and black specks in it.
”Little sister had yellow curls and she had a blue coat with jiggly streaks of white in it, and she had a little white bonnet that was crocheted, and she had little blue mittens on that were tied to a string that went around her neck and down the other arm. It got pretty cold where they lived. Little sister and little brother would go out to the pile of leaves and jump on them and bounce and they would crackle. The leaves came down from the trees all of a sudden when they got tired, and they were different colors, brown and red. Little sister could walk then but she could not walk one other time before then; she could stand up by holding to a chair, but she could not go herself. One morning Big Tom said 'Run to Daddy' and she went to her daddy, and after that she always walked; they were glad and she was glad. She walked all day long. Big Tom was a man who used to help Daddy and little sister always liked him. He was a nice man.”
The mother verified this scene of the first walking, saying that it had occurred on her own wedding-anniversary when the child was twenty-three months old.
One night I heard the same patient talk in her sleep in the slow and hesitating manner of a child reading phonetically from a printed page. I soon recognized the words as those of a poem of Tagore's, called ”My Prayer,” and remembered that a magazine containing the poem had been lying on the bed during the day. When she had finished I wakened her, saying, ”Now tell me what you have been dreaming.” She answered in her childish way, ”I think I do not dream.” She went to sleep immediately and again repeated the poem, word for word, without a single mistake. Again I awakened her with the words, ”Now tell me what you have been dreaming.” And again she answered, ”I think I do not dream.” I said: ”But yes; don't you remember you were just saying, 'When the time comes for me to go'?” (the last line of the poem). ”Oh, yes,” she said, ”I was seeing it, and I think I'll not go to sleep again. It tires me so to see it.”
While she was awake she had no recollection of having seen the poem and was indeed in her dissociated state quite incapable of understanding its meaning. Asleep, she saw every word as plainly as if the page had been before her eyes.
The distorted pictures of dreams are always made of the material which past experiences have furnished and which have in many cases been dropped out of consciousness for years only to rise out of their long oblivion when the conscious mind has been put to sleep.
Unearthing Old Experiences. However, psychology does not have to wait for buried memories to come forth of their own free will. It has a number of successful ways of summoning them from their hiding-place and helping them across the line into consciousness. In the hands of skilled investigators and therapeutists, hypnosis, hypnoidization, automatic writing, crystal-gazing, abstraction, free a.s.sociation, word-a.s.sociation, and interpretation of dreams have all been repeatedly successful in bringing to light memories which apparently have been for many years completely blotted out of mind. As we become better acquainted with these technical devices we shall find that there are four kinds of experiences whose records are carefully stored away in our minds. Some were always so far from the center of our attention that we could swear they never had been ours; others, although once present in consciousness, were so trivial and unimportant that it seems ridiculous to suppose them conserved; others never came into our waking minds at all and entered our lives only in special states, such as sleep or delirium or dreams. All these we should expect to forget; the astonis.h.i.+ng thing is that they ever were conserved. But there is a fourth cla.s.s that is different. It is made up of experiences that were so vital, so emotional, so closely woven into the fiber of our being that it seems impossible that they ever could be forgotten. Let us look at a few examples of records of all these four kinds of experiences, examples chosen from hundreds of their kind as ill.u.s.trations of the all-embracing character of buried memories. [21]
[21] For further examples see Prince, The Unconscious; Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality, and Hudson, The Law of Psychic Phenomena.
Out of the Corners of Our Eyes. In the first place, we are much more observing than we imagine. We may be so interested in our own thoughts that details of our environment are entirely lost on the conscious mind, but the subconscious has its eyes open, and its ears. People in hypnosis have been known to repeat verbatim whole pa.s.sages from newspapers which they had never consciously read. While they were busy with one column, their wide-awake subconscious was devouring the next one, and remembering it. Prince relates the story of a young woman who unconsciously ”took in” the details of a friend's appearance:
I asked B.C.A. (without warning and after having covered her eyes) to describe the dress of a friend who was present and with whom she had been conversing perhaps some twenty minutes. She was unable to do so beyond saying that he wore dark clothes. I then found that I myself was unable to give a more detailed description of his dress, although we had lunched and been together about two hours. B.C.A. was then asked to write a description automatically. Her hand wrote as follows (she was unaware that her hand was writing):
”He has on a dark greenish gray suit, a stripe in it-little rough stripe; black bow cravat; s.h.i.+rt with three little stripes in it; black laced shoes; false teeth; one finger gone; three b.u.t.tons on his coat.”
The written description was absolutely correct. The stripes in the coat were almost invisible. I had not noticed his teeth or the loss of a finger and we had to count the b.u.t.tons to make sure of their number owing to their partial concealment by the folds of the unb.u.t.toned coat. The shoe-strings I am sure under the conditions would have escaped nearly every one's notice. [22]
[22] Prince: The Unconscious, p. 53.
Automatic writing, the method used to uncover this subconscious perception, is a favorite method with some investigators and is often used by Morton Prince. The hand writes without the direction of the personal consciousness and usually without the person's being aware that it is writing. A dissociated person does this very easily; other people can cultivate the ability, and perhaps most of us approach it when we are at the telephone, busily writing or drawing remarkable pictures while the rest of us is engaged in conversation.
The present epidemic of the Ouija board shows how many persons there are who are able to switch off the conscious mind and let the subconscious control the muscles that are used in writing. The fact that the writer has no understanding of what he is doing and believes himself directed by some outside power, in no way interferes with the subconscious phenomenon.
Everyday Doings. Besides perceptions which were originally so far from the focus of attention that the conscious mind never caught them at all, there are the little experiences of everyday life, fleeting thoughts and impressions which occupy us for a minute and then disappear. Every experience is a dynamic fact and no matter how trivial the experience may be or how completely forgotten, it still exists as a part of the personality.
An amusing example of the everyday kind of forgotten experience occurred during the writing of this chapter. I wrote a sentence which pleased me very well. This is the sentence: ”In the esthetic processes of evolution they [man's desires] have sunk below the surface as soon as formed, and have been covered over by an elastic and snug-fitting consciousness as the skin covers in the tissues and organs of the body.” After showing this pa.s.sage to my collaborator and remarking that this figure had never been used before, I was partly chagrined and partly amused to have her bring me the following sentence from White and Jelliffe: ”Consciousness covered over and obscured the inner organs of the psyche just as the skin hides the inner organs of the body from vision.” My originality had vanished and I was close to plagiarism. Indeed, if a history of plagiarism could be written, it would probably abound in just such stories. I had read the article containing this sentence only once, about three years before, and had never quoted it or consciously thought of it. It had lain buried for three years, only to come forth as an original idea of my own. Who knows how many times we all do just this thing without catching ourselves in the trick?
Back-Door Memories. There are other kinds of memories which hide in the subconscious, memories of experiences which have not come in by the front door, but have entered the mind during special states, such as sleep, delirium, intoxication, or hypnosis. What is known as post-hypnotic suggestion is the functioning of a suggestion received during hypnosis and emerging later as an impulse without being recognized as a memory. A man in a hypnotic state is told that at five o'clock he will take off his clothes and go to bed, without remembering that such a suggestion has been given him. He awakens with no recollection of the suggestion, but at five o'clock he suddenly feels impelled to go to bed, even though his unreasonable desire puts him into a highly embarra.s.sing position. The suggestion, to be thus effective, must have been conserved somewhere in his mind outside of consciousness.
Suggestions that enter the mind during the normal sleep are also recorded,-a fact that carries a warning to people who are in the habit of talking of all sorts of matters while in the room with sleeping children. I have sometimes suggested to sleeping patients that on waking they will remember and tell me the cause of their symptoms. The following example shows not only the conservation of impressions gained in sleep, but also the sway of forgotten ideas of childhood, still strong in mature years. This young woman, a trained nurse, with many marked symptoms of hysteria, had been asked casually to bring a book from the Public Library. She cried out in consternation, ”Oh, no, I am afraid!” After a good deal of urging she finally brought the book, although at the cost of considerable effort. Later, while she was taking a nap, I said to her, ”You will not remember that I have talked to you. You will stay asleep while I am talking and while you are asleep there will come to your mind the reasons why you are afraid to go to the Public Library. When you waken, you will tell me all about it.” Upon awakening, she said: ”Oh, do you know, I can tell you why I have always been afraid to go to the Public Library. While I was in Parochial School, Father -- used to come in and tell us children to use the books out of the school library and never to go to the Public Library.” I questioned her concerning her idea of the reason for such an injunction and what she thought was in the books which she was told not to read. She hesitatingly stated that it was her idea, even in childhood, that the books dealt with topics concerning the tabooed subject of the birth of children and kindred matters.