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THE UNCONSCIOUS

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

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THE UNCONSCIOUS

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF HUMAN

PERSONALITY NORMAL AND

ABNORMAL

BY

MORTON PRINCE, M.D., LL.D.

PROFESSOR (EMERITUS) OF DISEASES OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM,

TUFTS COLLEGE MEDICAL SCHOOL; CONSULTING PHYSICIAN

TO THE BOSTON CITY HOSPITAL

SECOND EDITION

REVISED

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1921

Copyright, 1914 and 1921

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1914.

New Edition, June, 1921.

PREFACE

This work is designed to be an introduction to abnormal psychology. The problems considered, however, belong equally to normal psychology in that they are problems of psycho-physiological functions and mechanisms. I have made no attempt to develop any particular school of psychological theory but rather, so far as may be, to gather together the knowledge already gained and lay a foundation which can be built upon by any school for the solution of particular problems, especially those of special pathology. I have therefore endeavored to avoid controversial questions although this, of course, has not been wholly possible, and indeed so far as special pathological conditions (the psychoses) have been considered, it has been for the purpose of providing data and testing the principles adduced. The inductive method, alone, I believe, as in the physical sciences, can enable us to arrive at sound conclusions—justify the formulation of theories to explain psychological phenomena. Because of the very difficulties of this field of research—one of which is that of submitting to experimental conditions complex psychological phenomena having so many factors—it is all the more incumbent that the inductive method should be employed. To my way of thinking we should begin at the bottom and build up bit by bit, drawing, as we go, no wider conclusions than the facts developed warrant; or if we do, these should be recognized clearly as working hypotheses or speculative theories. Skyscrapers should not be erected until the foundations have been examined to see if they will bear the superstructure. That I have wholly succeeded in so rigorously restricting my own endeavors I can scarcely hope. I trust, however, that I have succeeded in consistently maintaining the distinction between facts and their interpretations.

The present volume consists of selected lectures (with the exception of four) from courses on abnormal psychology delivered at the Tufts College Medical School (1908-10) and later at the University of California (1910).[^[1]] These again were based on a series of papers on the Unconscious published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (1908-9) of which they are elaborations. Since the lectures were delivered a large amount of new material has been incorporated and the subject matter considered in more detail and more exhaustively than was practical before student bodies. The four additional lectures (X, XI, XII and XIII) appeared in abbreviated form in the same Journal (Oct., Nov., 1912) under the title “The Meaning of Ideas as Determined by Unconscious Settings.” The lecture form has been retained, offering as it does many advantages where, in the exposition of a difficult subject, much that is elemental needs to be stated.

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

In a recently published article M. Bergson concludes with the following prophesy: “To explore the most sacred depths of the unconscious, to labor in what I have just called the subsoil of consciousness, that will be the principal task of psychology in the century which is opening. I do not doubt that wonderful discoveries await it there, as important perhaps as have been in the preceding centuries the discoveries of the physical and natural sciences. That at least is the promise which I make for it, that is the wish that in closing I have for it.”[^[2]]

And yet one reads and hears all sorts of contradictory statements, made by those who it is presumed should know, regarding the actuality of the subconscious. Thus one or another writer, assuming to know, states most positively that there is no such thing as the subconscious. Others, equally emphatic, postulate it as an established fact rather than a theory, or assume it as a philosophical concept or hypothesis to explain particular phenomena. One difficulty is that the term, as commonly used, has many meanings, and it has followed that different writers have assumed it with respectively different meanings. Consequently the subconscious as an actuality has been unwittingly denied when the intent has been really to deny some particular meaning or interpretation, and particular meanings have been subsumed which are only philosophical concepts.

There should be no difficulty in deciding what the facts permit us to postulate. The subconscious is a theory based upon observed facts and formulated to explain those facts. There are many precise phenomena of different kinds which can only be explained as due to explicitly subconscious processes, that is, processes which do not appear in the content of consciousness; just as the phenomena manifested by radium can only be explained by emanations (or rays) which themselves are not visible and cannot be made the object of conscious experience. In each case it is the manifestations of such processes of which we become aware. Subconscious processes and radio-activity stand on precisely the same basis so far as the determination of their actuality is concerned. (The latter have the advantage, of course, in that being physical they are subject to quantitative measurement.) Such being the case it ought to be possible to construct the theory of the subconscious by inductive methods on the basis of facts of observation just as any theory of the physical sciences is constructed.

This task I have set before myself as well as that of giving precision to our conception of the theory and taking it out of the domain of philosophical concepts. With this purpose in view I have endeavored to apply the method of science and construct the theory by induction from the data of observation and experiment. I dare say this has been a somewhat ambitious and some will say, perhaps, overbold undertaking. Undoubtedly, too, this attitude toward this and other individual problems has not been always consistently maintained, nor perhaps is it completely possible in the present state of the science.

Our formulations should be as precise as possible and facts and concepts of a different order should not be included in one and the same formula. I have, accordingly, divided the subconscious into two classes, namely (1) the unconscious, or neural dispositions and processes, and (2) the coconscious, or actual subconscious ideas which do not enter the content of conscious awareness. An unconscious process and a coconscious process are both therefore subconscious processes but particular types thereof—the one being purely neural or physical and the other psychological or ideational.

The soundness of the conclusions reached in this work I leave to the judgment of my critics, of whom I doubt not I shall have many. I do not hesitate to say, however, that it is only by practical familiarity with the phenomena of mental pathology and artificially induced phenomena (such as those of hypnosis, suggestion, etc.), requiring a long training in this field of research (as in other scientific fields), that we can correctly estimate the value of data and the conclusions drawn therefrom; and even then many of our conclusions can be regarded as only provisional.

In these lectures I have also endeavored (Lectures XIV-XVI) to develop the phenomena of the emotional innate dispositions which I conceive play one of the most fundamental parts in human personality and in determining mental and physiological behavior.

Experimental methods and the well-known clinical methods of investigation have been employed by me as far as possible. The data made use of have been derived for the most part from my own observations, though confirmatory observations of others have not been neglected. Although a large number and variety of subjects or cases have been studied, as they have presented themselves in private and hospital practice, the data have been to a large extent sought in intensive studies, on particular subjects, carried on in some cases over a period of many years. These subjects, because of the ease with which subconscious and emotional phenomena were either spontaneously manifested or could be experimentally evoked, were particularly suitable for such studies and fruitful in results. It is by such intensive studies on special subjects, rather than by casual observation of many cases, that I believe the deepest insight into mental processes and mechanisms can be obtained.

In conclusion I wish to express my great obligation to Mrs. William G. Bean for the great assistance she has rendered in many ways in the preparation of this volume. Not the least has been the transcription and typing of my manuscript, for the most part written in a quasi shorthand, reading the printer’s proofs, and much other assistance in the preparation of the text for the press. For this her practical and unusually extensive acquaintance with the phenomena has been of great value.

I am also indebted to Mr. Lydiard Horton for kindly reading the proofs and for many helpful suggestions in clarifying the arrangement of the text—a most difficult task considering the colloquial form of the original lectures.

Boston.

458 Beacon Street.

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

The favorable reception which was given to the first edition of this work has tempted me in preparing a new edition at the request of the publishers to incorporate four additional chapters dealing with the general principles underlying the structure and dynamic elements of human personality (Lecture XVII) and a study of a special problem in personality in which these principles are involved, namely, the psychogenesis of multiple personality as illustrated by a study of the case known as B. C. A.[^[3]] (Lectures XVIII-XX.) The latter study was omitted (with other lectures) from the first edition in order to limit the number of subjects treated and the size of the volume.

Although the theory of the subconscious and that of the dynamics of specific conscious and subconscious processes (to the fundamental principles of both of which these lectures were limited) owe their value to our being able through them to explain many mental and physiological abnormalities, they possess an equal value from the light they throw upon the structure and dynamics of that composite whole best termed human personality. Over and above a knowledge of the abnormal, what we as human beings want to know is not only what sort of physiological beings but what sort of conscious beings we are; and how we think and act, and what motives and other impulses whether hidden or in the clear light of awareness, regulate and determine our behavior; what are the forces that do it and how. We want to know the answer to a lot of problems of this character, all of which involve principles of innate and acquired dispositions.

A comprehensive study of human personality would include, as far as may be, answers to all these problems and would require a volume in itself. I have, therefore, not been able more than to give an outline in Lecture XVII of what seem to me to be the fundamental principles involved and the dynamic unitary systems out of which the structure is built up. There are various points of view from which the structure of the mind may be considered, just as with the structure of a literary work of art, or of a complicated mechanism like an automobile. We may consider the structure of the latter, for instance, as an assembly of complex units or mechanisms—cylinders, carburetors, ignition systems, etc.,—each analyzed into its elements, without regard to the dynamic, integrative functioning of the units in the total mechanism. This would be the static point of view. Or we may consider these units as wholes from the standpoint of the forces they generate, the processes they subserve and the parts they play in the total functioning of the whole machine. This is the dynamic point of view. It is this latter which alone has a vital practical interest. The former is of interest only to the technician. So with the mind. The dynamic point of view alone is of practical importance and alone awakens fascinating interest of stirring intensity. So long as psychology held to the static viewpoint it was only of academic value. For submitted to the pragmatic test it made little difference whether it was right or wrong. Nor could it become an applied science. Consequently it is from the dynamic viewpoint that I have sketched in—and it is little more than a sketch—the application of the principles laid down in these lectures to the peculiarly appealing problem of personality. Closely related to this is multiple personality, for it is a special problem in personality, and one that is a fascinating study in itself. But aside from its own intrinsic interest, its practical interest, its chief value is derived from the fact that it is a veritable vivisection of the mind by the mind’s own vital forces, and as such gives us much more definite and precise data for the determination of normal mental mechanisms and processes than can introspective analysis; just as the vivisection of the body in the laboratory and by disease has given us our most precise knowledge of physiology. Consequently the phenomena acquire a greater interest and value from the insight they give into the normal. For there is no more fruitful material for the study of the mechanisms and processes of personality than cases of this sort where there is a disintegration of the normally integrated structural wholes and a reassembling of the component elements into new composite wholes. In the construction of these new personalities certain normal structures and mechanisms are dissected out, so to speak, of the original composite by the stress of the forces that cause the cleavage between systems and are then reassembled into new functioning wholes. There is a veritable vivisection of the mind. In a mind thus disassembled nearly every mental phenomenon, conscious and subconscious—conflicts, hallucinations, coconscious processes, defense reactions, etc.,—can be observed in an isolated form and systematically studied. They are veritable gold mines of psychological phenomena, as William James once expressed it to me in reference to one of my cases. It is strange, therefore, that such cases have been neglected by psychologists who would study mental mechanisms. It is true that for a complete understanding of multiple personality a study of a number of cases should be presented, particularly as many variations are to be observed constituting differing types. But in a volume of this kind this would be impracticable. I have, therefore, limited myself to the psychogenesis of a single case, that of B. C. A. This will I believe be of interest not only as illustrating the basic principles underlying the pathology of multiple personality, but because of the data it offers for the understanding of the structure and mechanisms of the normal self, something that curiously appeals to the egoistic interest of human nature.

Morton Prince.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE UNCONSCIOUS

THE UNCONSCIOUS:

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF HUMAN PERSONALITY,

NORMAL AND ABNORMAL

LECTURE I
THEORY OF MEMORY AS A PROCESS

Gentlemen:

The subject which I have chosen for our first lecture is the theory of the mechanism of memory. I begin with the study of this problem because a knowledge of the facts which underlie the theory of memory is a necessary introduction to an understanding of the Unconscious, and of the part which subconscious processes play in normal and abnormal mental life.[^[4]] Speaking more specifically, without such a preliminary study I do not believe we can interpret correctly a very large number of the disturbances of mind and body which are traceable to the activity of subconscious processes and with which we shall later have to do.

If we consider memory as a process, and not as specific phases of consciousness, we shall find that it is an essential factor in the mechanisms underlying a large variety of phenomena of normal and abnormal life. These phenomena include those of both mind and body of a kind not ordinarily conceived of as manifestations of memory. I would have you dwell in your minds for a moment on the fact that I make this distinction between memory as a process and memory as a phase of consciousness or specific mental experience. What we ordinarily and conventionally have in mind when we speak of memory is the conscious thought of some past mental experience. But when we conceive of memory as a process we have in mind the whole mechanism through the working of which this past experience is registered, conserved, and reproduced, whether such reproduction be in consciousness or below the surface of consciousness.

Memory is usually looked upon as something that pertains solely to consciousness. Such a conception is defensible if the meaning of the term is restricted to those facts alone which come within our conscious experience. But when we consider the mechanism by which a particular empirical fact of this kind is introduced into consciousness we find that this conception is inadequate. We find then that we are obliged to regard conscious memory as only the end result of a process and, in order to account for this end result, to assume other stages in the process which are not phases of consciousness. Though the end result is a reproduction of the ideas which constituted the previous conscious experience, this reproduction is not the whole process.

More than this, the conscious experience is not the only experience that may be reproduced by the process, nor is the end result always and necessarily a state of consciousness. Conscious memory is only a particular type of memory. The same process may terminate in purely unconscious or physiological effects, or what may be called physiological memory to distinguish it from conscious memory. Along with the revived ideas and their feeling tones there may be a revival of the physiological experiences, or processes, which originally accompanied them; such as secretion of sweat, saliva and gastric juice, the contraction and dilatation of the blood vessels, the inhibition or excitation of the heart, lungs and other viscera, the contraction of muscles, etc. These visceral mechanisms, being originally elements in a complex process and accompaniments of the idea, may be reproduced along with the conscious memory, and even without conscious memory. As this physiological complex is an acquired experience it is entitled to be regarded as memory so far as its reproduction is the end result of the same kind of process or mechanism as that which reproduces ideas.

Then, again, investigations into the subconscious have shown that the original experience may be reproduced subconsciously without rising into awareness.

The more comprehensive way, then, of looking at memory is to regard it as a process and not simply as an end result. The process, as we shall see, is made up of three factors—Registration, Conservation, and Reproduction. Of these the end result is reproduction; conservation being the preservation of that which was registered.

This view is far more fruitful, as you will presently see, for memory acquires a deeper significance and will be found to play a fundamental and unsuspected part in the mechanism of many obscure mental processes.

From this point of view, upon memory, considered as a process, depend the acquired conscious and subconscious habits of mind and body.

The process involves unconscious as well as conscious factors and may be wholly unconscious (subconscious).

Two of its factors—registration and conservation—are responsible for the building up of the unconscious as the storehouse of the mind and, therefore, primarily for all subconscious processes, other than those which are innate.

To it may be referred the direct excitation of many subconscious manifestations of various kinds.

Consciously or subconsciously it largely determines our prejudices, our superstitions, our beliefs, our points of view, our attitudes of mind.

Upon it to a large degree depend what we call personality and character.

It often is the unsuspected and subconscious secret of our judgments, our sentiments, and impulses.

It is the process which most commonly induces dreams and furnishes the material out of which they are constructed.

It is the basis of many hypnotic phenomena.

In the field of pathology, memory, through its perversions, takes part in and helps to determine the form of a variety of disturbances such as obsessions, impulsions, tics, habit psychoses and neuroses, many of the manifestations of that great protean psychosis, hysteria, and other common ailments which it is the fashion of the day to term neurasthenia and psychasthenia. It is largely responsible for the conscious and subconscious conflicts which disrupt the human mind and result in various pathological states.

Finally, upon the utilization of the processes of memory modern psychotherapeutics, or the educational treatment of disease, is largely based. For many of these reasons an understanding of the mechanism of memory is essential for an understanding of the subconscious. In short, memory furnishes a standpoint from which we can productively study the normal and abnormal processes of the mind—conscious and subconscious.

These somewhat dogmatic general statements—which I have put before you much after the fashion of the lawyer who presents a general statement of his case in anticipation of the evidence—I hope will become clear and their truth evident as we proceed; likewise, their bearing upon the facts of abnormal psychology. To make them clear it will be necessary to explain in some detail the generally accepted theory of memory as a process and to cite the numerous data upon which it rests.

There may be, as, indeed, you will find there are, wide differences of opinion as to the exact psychological mechanism by which a memory-process plays its part in the larger processes of mental life, normal and abnormal, such as I have just mentioned, but that the memory-process is a fundamental factor is revealed by whatever method the problems are attacked. A study, therefore, of this fundamental factor and a determination of its mechanism are a prerequisite for a study of the more complex processes in which it takes part. For this reason I shall begin the study of the Unconscious (subconscious), to which I shall ask your attention in these lectures, with a consideration of the processes of memory.

If you ask the average person, as I have often done, how or why he remembers he will be puzzled and he is apt to reply, “Why, I just remember,” or, “I never thought of that before.” If you push him a bit and ask what becomes of ideas after they have passed out of mind and have given place to other ideas, and how an idea that has passed out of mind, that has gone, disappeared, can be brought back again as memory, he becomes further puzzled. We know that ideas that have passed out of mind may be voluntarily recalled, or reproduced, as memory; we may say that meantime they have become what may be called dormant. But surely something must have happened to enable these conscious experiences to be conserved in some way and recalled. Ideas are not material things which, like books, can be laid away on a shelf to be taken up again when wanted, and yet we can recall, or reproduce, many ideas when we want them just as we can go to a shelf and take down any book we want.

We learn the alphabet and the multiplication table in childhood. During the greater part of our lives the sensory images, auditory language symbols, etc., which may be summarized as ideas representing these educational experiences, are out of our minds and do not form a continuous part of our conscious experiences, but they may be recalled at any moment as memory. In fact, try as hard as we may, we cannot forget our alphabet or multiplication table. Why is this?

The older psychology did not bother itself much with these questions which puzzle the average man. It was content for the most part with a descriptive statement of the facts of conscious memory. It did not concern itself with the process by which memory is effected; nor, so long as psychology dealt only with phases of consciousness, was it of much consequence. It has been only since subconscious processes have loomed large in psychology and have been seen to take part on the one hand in the mechanism of conscious thought and on the other to produce various bodily phenomena, that the process of memory has acquired great practical importance. For it has been seen that in these subconscious processes previous conscious experiences are resurrected to take part as subconscious memory, consequently a conscious experience that has passed out of mind may not only recur again as conscious memory, but may recur subconsciously below the threshold of awareness. The study of subconscious processes therefore necessarily includes the processes of memory. And so it has become a matter of considerable moment to follow the fate of experiences after they have passed out of mind with a view to determining the mechanism by which they can be reproduced consciously and subconsciously. More than this it is important that the theory of memory should be removed if possible from the domain of purely speculative psychological concepts and placed on a sound basis of observation and experiment like other accepted theories of science.

From the point of view of animism, and indeed of dualism, nothing becomes of the ideas that have passed out of mind; they simply, for the time being, cease to exist. Consciousness changes its form. Nothing is preserved, nothing is stored up. This is still the popular notion according to which a mental experience at any given moment—the content of my consciousness, for instance, at this moment as I speak to you—is only one of a series of kaleidoscopic changes or phases of my self-consciousness. In saying this what is meant plainly must be that the content of consciousness at any given moment is a phase of a continuing psychical something. We may, perhaps, call this my self-consciousness, and say that when I reproduce an experience as memory I simply bring back (by the power of self-determination) that same previous phase of the psychical something. If I cannot bring it back my failure may be due to a failure of the power of self-determination or—and here is a weak point—to a failure in the formative cohesion of the elementary ideas of that experience. In this latter alternative no note is taken of a seeming contradiction paradox. If nothing is preserved, if nothing continues to exist, if memory is only one of a series of kaleidoscopic phases of consciousness, how can there be any cohesion or organization within what does not exist? Consciousness according to this notion might be likened to the water of a lake in which vortices were constantly being formed, either by the current of inflowing springs from the bottom or the influences of external agencies. One vortex would give place to a succeeding vortex. Memory would be analogous to the reproduction of a previously occurring vortex.

When, however, such a notion of memory is examined in the light of all the facts which have to be explained it will be found to be descriptive only of our conscious experiences. It does not explain memory; it does not answer the question of the ordinary man, “How can ideas which have ceased to exist be reproduced again as memory?” For, putting aside various psychological difficulties such as, How can I determine the reproduction of a former phase of consciousness—that is, memory—without first remembering what I want to determine?, or, if this be answered, “By the association of phases (ideas),” how can there be any bond of association between an existing idea and one that does not exist?, and, therefore, how can association bring back that which has ceased to exist?—putting aside such questions, there are a number of psycho-physiological facts which this conception of memory will be found inadequate to meet. As a matter of fact, investigations into the behavior of mental processes, particularly under artificial and pathological conditions, have disclosed certain phenomena which can be adequately explained only on the supposition that ideas as they pass out of mind—the mental experiences of the moment—leave something behind, some residuum which is preserved, stored up as it were, and which plays a subsequent part in the process of memory. These phenomena seem to require what may be called a psycho-physiological theory of memory. Although the theory has long been one of the concepts of normal psychology it can be said to have been satisfactorily validated only by the investigations of recent years in abnormal psychology.

The full significance as well as the validity of this theory can be properly estimated only in the light of the facts which have been revealed by modern technical methods of investigation. After all, it is the consequences of a theory which count, and this will be seen to be true particularly as respects memory. The pragmatic point of view of counting the consequences, of determining the difference that the theory makes in the understanding of the mental processes of normal and abnormal life, reveals the importance to us of validating the theory. The consequences of the psycho-physiological theory are so far-reaching, in view of its bearing upon a large number of problems in normal and abnormal psychology, that it is worthy of sustained and exhaustive examination. I will, therefore, briefly résumé the various classes of facts which support the theory and which any adequate theory of memory must satisfactorily explain. For, as will appear, besides the common facts of memory pertaining to everyday life, there are a large number of other facts which can be observed only when the mind is dissected, so to speak, by pathological processes, and by the production of artificial conditions, and when investigations are carried out by special technic. Irrespective of any theory of explanation, a knowledge of these facts is extremely important for an understanding of many phenomena in the domain of both normal and abnormal psychology.

The meaning of conservation.—We all know, as an everyday experience of mankind, that at one time we can recall what happened to us at some particular moment in the past, and at another time we cannot. We know that when we have forgotten some experience if we stimulate or refresh our memory, as the lawyers say to us on the witness-stand, by reference to our notes, appropriately called memoranda, the original experience may come back to mind. Often at one moment we cannot recall a verse, or a name, or a piece of acquired knowledge, while at another time, a little later, we can. We have a feeling, a perhaps justifiable belief, that a desired piece of knowledge is not lost, that it is back somewhere in our minds but we cannot get at it. If, sooner or later, under one circumstance or another, with or without the aid of some kind of stimulus, we can recall the desired knowledge we say it was preserved (or conserved). If we continue, under all circumstances and at all moments, to be unable to recall it we say it is lost, that our memory of it is not conserved. So the notion of conservation of knowledge being something apart from recollection enters even into popular language. What sort of thing conservation is, popular language does not attempt to define. It is clear, however, that we may with propriety speak of the conservation of experiences, using this term in a descriptive sense without forming any definite concept of the nature of conservation. Provisionally, then, I shall speak of conservation of a given experience in this sense only, meaning that the memory of it is not permanently lost but that under certain particular circumstances we can recall it.

Now a large mass of observations demonstrate that there are an enormous number of experiences, belonging to both normal and abnormal mental life, which we are unable to voluntarily recall during any period of our lives, no matter how hard we try, or what aids to memory we employ. For these experiences there is life-long amnesia. Nevertheless, it is easy to demonstrate that, though the personal consciousness of everyday life cannot recall them, they are not lost, properly speaking, but conserved; for when the personal consciousness has undergone a peculiar change, at moments when certain special alterations have taken place in the conditions of the personal consciousness, at such moments you find that the subject under investigation recalls the apparently lost experiences. These moments are those of hypnosis, abstraction, dreams, and certain pathological states. Again, in certain individuals it is possible by technical devices to awaken secondary mental processes in the form of a subconsciousness which may manifest the memories of the forgotten experiences without awareness therefor on the part of the personal consciousness. These manifestations are known as automatic writing and speech. Then, again, by means of certain post-hypnotic phenomena, it is easy to study conservation experimentally. We can make, as you will later see, substantially everything that happened to the subject of the experiment in hypnosis—his thoughts, his speech, his actions, for all of which he has complete and irretrievable loss of memory in a waking state—we can make memory for all these lost experiences reappear when hypnosis is again induced. Thus we can prove conservation when voluntary memory for experiences is absolutely lost. These experiments, among others, as we shall also see, also give an insight into the nature of conservation which is the real problem involved in an investigation into the process of memory.

Before undertaking to solve this problem—so far as may be done—it is well to obtain a full realization of the extent to which experiences which have been forgotten may be still conserved. I will therefore, as I promised you, résumé the experimental and other evidence supporting this principle, making use of both personal observations and those of others.

NOTE—In the following exposition of the evidence for the theory of memory it has been necessary to make use of phenomena subsuming subconscious processes before the subconscious itself has been demonstrated. A few words in explanation of the terms used is therefore desirable to avoid confusing the reader.

Dividing as I do the subconscious into the unconscious and the coconscious, the former is either simply a neural disposition, or an active neural process without any quality of consciousness; the latter is an actual subconscious idea or a process of thought of which, nevertheless, we are not aware. An unconscious and a coconscious process are both, therefore, only particular types of a subconscious process. I might have used the single term subconscious throughout the first seven lectures, but in that case, though temporarily less confusing, the data necessary for the appreciation of the division of the subconscious into two orders would not have been at hand. Typical phenomena having been described as unconscious or coconscious (instead of simply subconscious), the reader will have already become familiar with examples of each type and be thus prepared for the final discussion in Lecture VIII. PROVISIONALLY, these three terms may be regarded as synonyms. To indicate the synonym, the term “subconscious” has often been added in parenthesis in the text to one or other of the subdivisional terms, and vice versa.

[1]. In this connection it is a satisfaction to the author to note that more recently a committee was appointed by the American Psychological Association (December, 1911) to investigate the relation of psychology to medical education. This committee, after an extensive inquiry by correspondence with all the medical schools of the country, has made a report (Science, Oct. 17, 1913) based upon the preponderating opinion of the best medical schools and of the schools as a whole. The second (in substance) and third conclusions reached in the report were as follows:

2nd: For entrance in certain schools requiring a preliminary college training of greater or less length an introductory or pre-medical course in psychology should be required in the same way as they now require chemistry, biology, physics, etc., or, in lieu thereof, a course in the medical schools.

3rd: “It is the belief of most of the best schools that a second course in psychology should precede the course in clinical psychiatry and neurology. This course should have more of a practical nature, and should deal especially with abnormal mental processes and with the application of psychological principles and facts to medical topics. Although this course should deal chiefly with psychopathology, it should not be permitted to develop, or degenerate, into a course in psychiatry, neurology or psychotherapeutics. This course should be clinical in the sense that, as far as possible, clinical material should be the basis of the course, but it should not be clinical in the sense that the students are given particular cases for the purpose of diagnosis or of treatment. The functions of the courses in psychiatry and neurology should not be assumed by this course.”

The courses, from which I have selected twelve lectures for my present purpose, were designed for just such instruction as is recommended in this report. They were, I believe, the first to be given on these subjects in any medical school or college in this country. Necessarily they covered a wider range of topics than the lectures now published which more properly serve as an introduction to the general subject.

[2]. “The Birth of the Dream,” The Independent, Oct. 30, 1913.

[3]. A descriptive account of this case, written as a sort of autobiography by the subject herself, was published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (Vol. 3, Nos. 4 & 5, 1908-1909) under the title “My Life as a Dissociated Personality.” This remarkable account includes an instructive description of the coconscious self of considerable value.

[4]. I divide the Subconscious into two parts, namely the Unconscious and the Coconscious. See preface and Lecture VIII.

LECTURE II
CONSERVATION OF FORGOTTEN EXPERIENCES OF NORMAL, ARTIFICIAL, AND PATHOLOGICAL LIFE

I. Normal Life

Evidence obtained by the method of automatic writing.—If we take a suitable subject, one in whom “automatic writing”[^[5]] has been developed, and study the content of the script, we may find that to a large extent it contains references to, i.e., memories of, experiences which have long been forgotten by the subject and which cannot even by the stimulus of memoranda be voluntarily recalled. These experiences may be actions performed even as far back as childhood, or passages read in books, or fragments of conversation, etc. Thus B. C. A., who suffers from an intense fear or phobia of cats, particularly white cats, can recall no experience in her life which could have given rise to it. Yet when automatic writing is resorted to the hand writes a detailed account of a fright into which she was thrown, when she was only five or six years of age, by a white kitten which had a fit while she was playing with it. The writing also describes in minute detail the furnishings of the room where the episode occurred, the pattern of the carpet, the decorative designs of the window shades, the furniture, etc. As this observation is typical of many others, it may be well to dwell upon it long enough to describe it in some detail for the benefit of those who are not familiar with this class of phenomena.

After it had been determined, by a searching examination, that B. C. A. could not recall any experience that might throw light upon her phobia, an attempt was made to recover a possible memory in hypnosis. As is well known, the memory often broadens in hypnosis and events which are forgotten when “awake” may be recovered. In this instance the subject was put into two different hypnotic states, but without success. This, again, is a matter of some importance for the principle of conservation. Different hypnotic states in the same individual may be distinguished in that each, among other characteristics, may have different and independent systems of memories, as we shall see later. The memories which belong to one state cannot be recalled in another. Hence the fact that a memory cannot be recovered in one state is not proof that it is not conserved, nor is a failure to recover the memory of an episode in all states of hypnosis evidence of failure of conservation, any more than is the failure to recover a memory in the waking state at any given moment.

In the experiment with B. C. A., after failing to awaken a possible memory in either state of hypnosis, a pencil was put in her hand while she was still hypnotized. The hand then wrote automatically, without the knowledge of the hypnotized subject, the following account of this childhood episode that I have just mentioned:[^[6]]

“I think I know about the cats. I can remember myself, a little child, playing on the floor with a kitten, and it began to run about the room and had a fit, I think, and it jumped on me, and I was alone, and I screamed and cried and called my mother, but no one came, and I was very much frightened. I do not believe I ever told anyone. It was a white kitten. It ran out of the room and after a bit I went on playing.”

To test the extent of the conserved memories still further the hand was asked to describe the furnishings of the room and the plan of the house. It wrote:

“There were two windows on the side of the room. The shades were gray, I think, with a border of grapes, or something of that color. The carpet was green or gray with green figures. There was a large old-fashioned sofa between one window and the door which led into the dining-room. A bookcase and desk-combination, you know. There was a mantle, I think, between the windows. It was the ground floor.”

This childhood episode and the furnishings of the room were completely forgotten by B. C. A. in the sense that they could not be voluntarily recalled. Even after reading the script she could not remember them. She had not seen the room since she was six years of age, the family having removed at that time from the town in which the incident took place. As to the accuracy of the “automatic” account and the possibility of fabrication, the description of the room has been corroborated by the independent and written testimony of an older member of the family. It was not possible to confirm the incident of the kitten as there were no witnesses. This portion of the account, therefore, cannot be proved not to be a fabrication, but I have never known a fabricated statement to be made in this subject’s automatic script, and I have obtained from her a large number of statements of different kinds in the course of several years’ observation.

However that may be, the point is not essential, for the minute description, by a special technic, of the furnishings of a room which had not been seen since childhood, a matter of some thirty-five years, and which were totally forgotten, is a sufficient demonstration of the principle of conservation of conscious experiences that cannot be voluntarily recalled. The reproduction of the conscious experience by automatic writing was, of course, an act of memory effected by a special device, and this fact compels us to postulate the conservation of the experience during this long period of time, notwithstanding that the experience could not be recalled voluntarily. Although the conserved experience could not be awakened into memory by voluntary processes of the personal consciousness it could be so awakened by an artificial stimulus under artificial conditions.

An observation like this, dealing with the conservation of long forgotten childhood or other experiences, is not unique. Quite a collection of recorded cases might be cited. Mr. C. Lowe Dickinson has put on record[^[7]] one of a young woman (Miss C.), who, in an hypnotic trance, narrated a dream-like fabrication of a highly imaginative character. On one occasion, through the imaginary intermediation of the spirit of a fictitious person, who was supposed to have lived in the time of Richard II, she gave a great many details about the Earl and Countess of Salisbury, “and other personages of the time, and about the manners and customs of that age. The personages referred to, the details given in connection with them, and especially the genealogical data, were found on examination to be correct, although many of them were such as apparently it would not have been easy to ascertain without considerable historical research.” Miss C. after coming out of the hypnotic trance was in entire ignorance of how she could have obtained this knowledge and could not recall ever having read any book which contained the information she had given. Through automatic writing, however, it was discovered that it was to be found in a book called The Countess Maud, by E. Holt. It then appeared—and this is the point of interest bearing on the conservation of forgotten knowledge—that this book had been read to her by her aunt fourteen years previously, when she was a child about eleven years old. Both ladies had so completely forgotten its contents that they could not recall even the period with which it dealt. Here were conscious experiences of childhood which, if voluntary recollection were to be made use of as a test, would be rightly said to have been extinguished, but that they had only lain fallow, conserved in some unconscious fashion, was shown by their reproduction in the hypnotic trance.[^[8]]

In this connection I may instance the case of Mrs. C. D., who suffers from a fixed fear of fainting. She cannot recall, even after two prolonged searching examinations, the first occasion when this fear developed, or why she has it, and is, therefore, ignorant of its genesis. Yet put into abstraction or light hypnosis she recalls vividly its first occurrence as the effect of an emotional scene of twenty years ago. The details of its psychological content come clearly into consciousness, and its meaning, as a fear of death, is remembered as a part of the original episode. That the fixed idea is a recurrence or partial memory of the original complex becomes logically plain and is recognized as such.

Instances of the reproduction in automatic script of forgotten passages from books are to be found in Mrs. Verrall’s[^[9]] elaborate records of her own automatic writings. Investigation showed that numerous pieces of English, Latin, and Greek script were not original compositions but only forgotten passages from authors previously read.

Mrs. Holland’s script records, as investigation seemed to show, the exact words expressing a personal sentiment contained in a letter written to her twenty years before and long forgotten. The letter proving this was accidentally discovered.[^[10]]

The following instance of a forgotten experience is, in itself, common enough with everybody, but its recovery by automatic writing illustrates how conservation of the thousand and one simply forgotten acts of everyday life may still persist. It forces, too, a realization of the reason why it is possible that though an act may be forgotten at any given moment it may later at any time flash into the mind. It is still conserved.

B. C. A. had been vainly hunting for a bunch of keys which she had not seen or thought of for four months, having been in Europe. One day, soon after her return, while writing a letter to her son she was interrupted by her hand automatically and spontaneously writing the desired information. The letter to her son began as follows: “October 30, 19—. Dear Boy: I cannot find those keys—have hunted everywhere”.... [Here the hand began to write the following, automatically.] “O, I know—take a pencil” [Here she did as she was bidden] “you put those keys in the little box where X’s watch is.”

In explanation B. C. A. sent me the following letter: “The keys were found in the box mentioned. I had hunted for them ever since coming home, October 4th. One key belonged to my box in the safety deposit vault and I had felt very troubled and anxious at not being able to find them. I have no recollection now of putting them where I found them.” [Nor was recollection subsequently recovered.]

I could give from my own observation if it were necessary as many instances as could be desired of “automatic” reproductions of forgotten experiences of one kind or another the truth of which could be verified by notebook records or other evidence. By a forgotten experience of course is meant something more than what cannot for the moment be voluntarily recalled. I mean something that cannot be remembered at any moment nor under any conditions, even after the memory has been prodded by the reproduction in the script—something that is apparently absolutely forgotten. The experience may not only be of a trivial nature but something that happened long in the past and of the kind that is ordinarily absolutely forgotten. I have often invoked the automatic writing (memories) of the subject to recover data elicited in the past in psychological examinations but which both I and the subject had forgotten. Reference to notes always verified the automatic memories. The records of automatic writing to be found in the literature are rich in reproductions showing conservation of forgotten experiences. In fact, given a good subject who can write automatically it is easy to obtain experimentally evidence of this kind at will.

Evidence from abstraction.—One of the most striking of artificial memory performances is the recovery of the details of inconsequential experiences of everyday life by inducing simple states of abstraction in normal people. It is often astonishing to see with what detail these experiences are conserved. A person may remember any given experience in a general way, such as what he does during the course of the day, but the minute details of the day he ordinarily forgets. Now, if he allows himself to fall into a passive state of abstraction, simply concentrating his attention upon a particular past moment, and gives free rein to all the associative memories belonging to that moment that float into his mind, at the same time taking care to forego all critical reflection upon them, it will be found that the number of details that will be recalled will be enormously greater than can be recovered by voluntary memory. Memories of the details of each successive moment follow one another in continuous succession. This method requires some art and practice to be successfully carried out. In the state of abstraction attention to the environment must be completely excluded and concentrated upon the past moments which it is desired to recall. For instance, a young woman, a university student, had lost some money several days before the experiment and desired to learn what had become of it. She remembered, in a general way, that she had gone to the bank that day, had cashed some checks, made some purchases in the shops of the town, returned to the university, attended lectures, etc., and later had missed the money from her purse. Her memory was about as extensive as that of the ordinary person would be for similar events after the lapse of several days. I put her into a state of abstraction and evoked her memories in the way I have just described. The minuteness and vividness with which the details of each successive act in the day’s experiences were recovered were remarkable, and, to the subject, quite astonishing. As the memories arose she recognized them as being accurate, for she then remembered the events as having occurred, just as one remembers any occurrence.[^[11]] In abstraction, she remembered with great vividness every detail at the bank teller’s window, where she placed her gloves, purse, and umbrella, the checks, the money, etc.; then there came memories of seating herself at a table in the bank, of placing her umbrella here, her purse there, etc.; of writing a letter, and doing other things; of absent-mindedly forgetting her gloves and leaving them on the table;[^[12]] of going to a certain shop where, after looking at various articles and thinking certain thoughts and making certain remarks, she finally made certain purchases, giving a certain piece of money and receiving the change in coin of certain denominations; of seeing in her purse the exact denominations of the coins (ten and five-dollar gold pieces and the pieces of subsidiary coinage) which remained; then of going to another shop and similar experiences. Then of numerous details which she had forgotten; of other later incidents including lectures, exercising in the gymnasium, etc. Through it all ran the successive fortunes of her purse until the moment came when, looking into it, she found one of the five-dollar gold pieces gone. It became pretty clear that the piece had disappeared at a moment when the purse was out of her possession, a fact which she had not previously remembered but had believed the contrary. The hundred and one previously forgotten details which surged into her mind as vivid conscious recollections would take too long to narrate.

(I have made quite a number of experiments of this kind with similar results. That the memories are not fabrications is shown by the fact that, as they arise, they become recollections in the sense that the subject can then consciously recall the events and place them in time and space as one does in ordinary memory, and particularly by the fact that many of them are often capable of confirmation.

I would here point out that the recovery of forgotten experiences by the method of abstraction differs in one important psychological respect from their recovery by automatic writing. In the former case the recalled experiences being brought back by associative memories enter into the associations and become true conscious recollections, like any other recollections, while in automatic writing the memories are reproduced in script without entering the personal consciousness at all and while the subject is still in ignorance. Often even after reading the script his memory still remains a blank. It is much as if one’s ideas had been preserved on a phonographic record and later reproduced without awakening a memory of their original occurrence.[^[13]] The significance of this difference for the theory of conservation I will point out later after we have considered some other modes of reproduction.)

Among the conserved forgotten experiences are often to be found fleeting thoughts, ideas, and perceptions, so insignificant and trifling that it would not be expected that they would be remembered. Some of them may have entered only the margin or fringe of the content of consciousness, and, therefore, the subject was only dimly aware of them. Some may have been so far outside the focus of awareness that there was no awareness of them at all, i.e., they were subconscious. Instructive examples of such conserved experiences may be found in persons who suffer from attacks of phobia, i.e., obsessions. The experiences to which I refer occur immediately before and during the attacks. After the attack the ideas of these periods are usually largely or wholly forgotten, particularly the ideas which were in the fringe of consciousness and the idea which, according to my observation, was the exciting cause of the attack. By the method of abstraction I have been able to recover the content of consciousness during the periods in question, including the fringe of consciousness, and thus discover the nature of the fear of which the patient was unaware because the idea was in the fringe.

Mrs. C. D., whom I have mentioned as having suffered intensely from attacks of fear, and Miss F. E., who is similarly afflicted with such attacks accompanied by the feeling of unreality, are instances in point. As is well known such attacks come on suddenly in the midst of mental tranquillity, often without apparent cause so far as the patient can discover. While in the state of abstraction the thoughts, perceptions, and acts of the period just preceding and during the attack, as they successively occurred, could be evoked in these subjects in great detail and with striking vividness. The recovery of these memories has been always a surprise to the patient who, a moment before, had been utterly unable to recall them, and had declared the attack had developed without cause. In the case of Mrs. C. D. it was discovered in this way the real fear was of fainting and death, and in that of Miss F. E. of insanity. These ideas having been in the fringe of consciousness, or background of the mind, the subjects were at the time scarcely aware of them and, therefore, were ignorant of the true nature of their phobias, notwithstanding the overwhelming intensity of the attacks. Among the memories recovered in these and other cases I have always been able to find one of a thought or of a sensory stimulus from the environment which immediately preceded and which through association occasioned the attack. When this particular memory was recovered the patient, who had declared that the attack had developed without cause, at once recognized the original idea which was the cause of the attack, just as one recognizes the idea which causes one to blush. The idea sometimes has been a thought suggested by a casual and apparently insignificant word in a sentence occurring in a conversation on indifferent matters, or by a dimly conscious perception of the environment, sometimes an idea occurring as a secondary train of thought perhaps bearing upon some future course of action, and so on.

As instances of such dimly-conscious perceptions of the environment which I have found I may mention a gateway through which the subject was passing, or a bridge about to be crossed; these particular points in the environment being places where previous attacks had occurred. The perceptions which precipitated the attack may have been entirely subconscious and yet may be brought back to memory. With the pathogenesis of the attacks we are not now directly concerned. The point of interest for us lies in the fact that such forgotten casual ideas and perceptions, some of which had been actually subconscious and some had only entered the margin of the focus of attention may, notwithstanding the amnesia, be conserved; and the same is true of any succession of trivial ideas occurring at an inconsequential moment in a person’s life.

However that may be, if you will try to recall in exact detail the thoughts and feelings which successively passed through your mind at any given moment say three or four weeks ago—or even days ago—and their accompanying acts, and then (if you can do this, which I very much doubt) try to give them in their original sequence, I think you will realize the force of these observations and appreciate the significance of the conservation of such minute experiences and of their reproduction in abstraction.

Evidence furnished by the method of hypnosis.—It is almost common knowledge that when a person is hypnotized—whether lightly or deeply—he may be able to remember once well-known events of his conscious life which he has totally forgotten in the full waking state. It is not so generally known that he may also be able to recall conscious events of which he was never consciously aware, that is to say, experiences which were entirely subconscious. The same is true, of course, of forgotten experiences which originally had entered only the margin of the content of consciousness and of which he was dimly aware. Among the experiences thus recalled may be perceptions of minute details of the environment which escape the attentive notice of the individual, or they may be thoughts which were in the background of the mind and, therefore, never in the full light of attention. You must not fall into the common error of believing every hypnotized person can do this, or that any person can do it in any state of hypnosis. There are various “degrees” or states of hypnosis representing different conditions of dissociation and synthesis. One person may successively be put into several different states; many persons can be put into only one, but the degree of dissociation and capacity for synthesis in each state and in every person varies very much, and, indeed, according to the technical devices employed. Each state is apt to exhibit different systems of memories, that is, to synthesize (recall) past conserved experiences in a different degree. What cannot be recalled in one state may be in another. We may say as a general principle that theoretically any experience that has been conserved can be recalled in some state, and, conversely, there is theoretically some state in which any conserved experience can be recalled. Practically, of course, we can never induce a state which synthesizes all conserved experiences, nor always one in which any given experience is synthesized. I shall later, in connection with particular types of conscious states, give examples of hypnotic memories showing conservation of such experiences as I have just mentioned. The point you will not lose sight of is that we are concerned with hypnotic phenomena only so far as they may be evidence of the conservation of forgotten experiences.

There is a class of hypnotic memory phenomena which acquire additional importance because of the bearing they have upon the psycho-genesis of certain pathological conditions. They show the conservation of the details of an episode in their original chronological order with an exactness that is beyond the powers of voluntary memory to reproduce. These phenomena consist of the realistic reproduction of certain emotional episodes which as a whole may or may not be forgotten. The reproduction is realistic in the sense that the episodes are acted over again by the individual as if once more he were actually experiencing them. Apparently every detail is reproduced, including the emotion with its facial expressions and its other physiological manifestations, and pathological disturbances like pain, paralysis, anesthesia, movements, etc. I will cite the following three examples:

M——l, a Russian, living in this country, suffers from psycholeptic attacks dating from an episode which occurred seven years previously and which he has completely forgotten. At that time he was living in Russia. It happened that after returning from a ball he was sent back late at night by his employer, a woman, to look for a ring which she had lost in the ballroom. His way led over a lonely road by a graveyard. As he was passing this place he heard footsteps behind him and became frightened. Overcome with terror he fell, partially unconscious, and his whole right side became affected with spasms and paralysis. He was picked up in this condition and taken to a hospital. Each year since that time he has had recurring attacks of spasms and paralysis.[^[14]]

In hypnosis he remembers and relates a dream. This dream is one which recurs periodically but is forgotten after waking from sleep. This is the dream: He is back in his native land; it is the night of the ball; he sees his employer with outstretched hand commanding him to go search for the ring. Once more he makes his way along the lonely road; he hears footsteps; he becomes frightened, falls, and then awakes, with entire oblivion for the dream, to find his right side paralyzed and in spasms.

The following experiment is now made. By suggestion in hypnosis he is made to believe that he is fifteen years of age. As a consequence in his hypnotic dream he is once more living in Russia before he had learned English. It is now found that he has spontaneously lost all knowledge of the English language and can speak only Russian. He is told it is the night of the ball and, as in a dream, he is carried successively through the different events of that night. Finally he returns in search of the ring, passes again over the lonely road, hears the footsteps and becomes frightened. At this point his face is suddenly contorted with an expression of fright, the whole right side becomes paralyzed and anesthetic, and the muscles of face, arm, and leg affected with clonic spasms. At the same time he moans with pain which he experiences in his side, which he hurt when he fell. Though consciousness is confused he answers questions and describes the pain which he feels. On being awakened all passes off.

Mrs. W. on her return to Boston after an absence in Europe happened to pass by a certain house on her way to her hotel; the house (a private hospital) was one with which she had very distressing associations. On leaving the steamer she took a street car which she left a block distant from the hotel. She walked this distance and as she passed the house she was seized with a sudden attack of fear, dizziness, palpitation, etc. Although it is beside the point I may say that she had not noticed the locality and did not consciously recognize the house until the attack developed. The attack was, therefore, induced by a subconscious perception.[^[15]] She recalls the incident and describes the attack, remembers that it occurred at this particular spot, but without further detail.

Now in hypnosis she is taken back to the day of her arrival on the steamship. In imagination, as in a sort of dream, she is living over again that day; she disembarks from the ship, enters the street car in which she rides a certain distance; she leaves the car at the point nearest her destination and proceeds to walk the remainder of the distance; suddenly her face exhibits the liveliest emotion; she becomes strongly agitated and her respiration is short and quick; her head and eyes turn toward the left and upward, as if in search of a cause, and she exclaims, “Yes, that’s it, that’s it,” as she recognizes in imagination the house which had been the scene of her previous distress. Then the attack subsides as she passes by, continuing her way toward her hotel.

Mrs. E. B. suffers from traumatic hysteria as the result of a slight but emotional accident—a fall—when alighting from a railway train. The accident resulted in a sprained shoulder and neuritis of the arm. She fully remembers the accident and describes it as any one might.

When put into hypnosis, however, the memory assumes a different character. She is taken back in imagination to the scene of the accident. Once more the train is entering the station; she leaves the car, steps from the platform upon a truck; then, unawares, steps off the truck and falls to the ground. As she falls her face suddenly becomes distorted with fear; tears stream down her cheeks, which become suffused; her heart palpitates; she suffers again acute pain in her arm, and so on. Her physical and mental anguish is painful to look upon. Though I try to persuade her that she is not hurt and that the accident is a delusion my effort is not very successful.

In this experiment, as in the others, there is substantially a reproduction in all its details of the content of consciousness which obtained at the time of the accident, and also of the emotion and its physiological manifestations—all were faithfully conserved. Further, each event follows in the same chronological sequence as in the original experience.

But in these observations the reproduction differs somewhat from that of ordinary memory. It is in the form of a dream, hypnotic or normal, and the subject goes back to the time of the experience, which he thinks is the present, and actually lives over again the original episode. Unlike the conditions of ordinary memory the whole content of his consciousness is practically limited to that which originally was present, all else, the present and the intervening past, being dissociated and excluded. The original psychological processes and their psycho-physiological accompaniments (pain, paralysis, anesthesia, spasms, etc.) repeat themselves as if the present were the past. Plainly, for such a reproduction, the original episode must have left conserved dispositions of some kind which when excited were capable of reënacting the episode in all its psycho-physiological details. From a consideration of such phenomena it is easy to understand how certain psycho-neuroses may be properly regarded as memories of certain past experiences. The experiences are conserved and under certain conditions reproduced from time to time.

I may cite one other experiment dealing with the conservation of the details of a day’s experiences after the lapse of several months. The subject was a little girl who suffered from hysterical tics. Hoping to discover the exciting cause of her nervous disturbance, I put her into deep hypnosis, and evoked the memories of the events of the day on which her disease developed, about six months previously. It was astonishing to hear her recall a continuous series of precise thoughts and acts, many of them trivial, of the kind that would be transient and forgotten by anybody. She began with the events of the early morning, giving her own thoughts and acts; the remarks of her father and mother, describing exactly the location in the house at the time of each member of the family; her arrival at school; the several lessons of the day; the remarks of the teacher; the happenings during recess; her final entry into the laboratory; and the sudden onset of the tic. Everything was given in chronological order. The memories were vivid and, as they came up into her mind, were recognized as true recollections.[^[16]] All this was forgotten when she was awake, that is to say, although conserved, it could not be reproduced. There was no way, of course, of determining the accuracy of these memories and, therefore, their correctness lacks scientific proof. On the other hand, the facts, which are in entire correspondence with similar results obtained under conditions where confirmation is possible, have value as cumulative evidence.[^[17]]

It is not difficult to arrange experiments which will test the accuracy with which the minute details of experiences may be conserved when reproduction is at fault. A simple test is to have a suitable subject endeavor to repeat verbatim the contents of a letter written by him at some preceding time—one week, two weeks, a month, or more. Few people, of course, can do this. If, now, the subject is a suitable one for the abstraction or hypnotic method it may be that he will be able to reproduce by one or the other method the test letter, word for word; a comparison of the reproduction with the letter will, of course, determine the accuracy of the memory. In such an experiment I have succeeded in getting two subjects, Miss B.[^[18]] and B. C. A., to repeat verbatim the contents of fairly long letters, and this even, on certain occasions, when, on account of the subject being a dissociated personality, there was no recollection of the letter at all, not even that it had been written. Such minute reproduction affords further evidence that the conservation of experiences may be much more complete and exact than ordinary conscious memory would lead us to suppose.

Evidence from hallucinatory phenomena.—I may mention one more example of conservation of a forgotten experience of everyday life as it is an example or mode of reproduction which differs in certain important respects both from that of ordinary memory and that observed under the artificial methods thus far described. This mode is that of a visual or an auditory hallucination which may be an exact reproduction in vividness and detail of the original experience. It is a type of a certain class of memory phenomena. One of my subjects, while in a condition of considerable stress of mind owing to the recurrence of the anniversary of her wedding-day, had a vision of her deceased husband, who addressed to her a certain consoling message. It afterwards transpired that this message was an actual reproduction of the words which a friend, in the course of a conversation some months previously, had quoted to her as the words of her own husband just before his death. In the vision the words were put into the mouth of another person, the subject’s husband, and were actually heard as an hallucination. Under the peculiar circumstances of their occurrence, however, these words awakened no sense of familiarity; nor did she recognize the source of the words until the automatic writing, which I later obtained, described the circumstances and details of the original episode. Then the original experience came back vividly to memory. On the other hand, the “automatic writing” not only remembered the experience but recognized the connection between it and the hallucination. (The truth of the writing is corroborated by the written testimony of the other party to the conversation.)

Although such types of hallucinatory memories are not actual reproductions of an experience but rather translated representations, yet they show the experience must have been conserved in order to have determined the representation. The actual experience, as we shall see later, is translated into a visual or auditory form which pictures or verbally expresses it, as the case may be. This type of hallucination is common. That which is translated may be previous thoughts, or perceptions received through another sense. Thus Mrs. Holland records a visual hallucination which pictured a verbal description previously narrated to her by a friend, but forgotten. The hallucination included “the figure of a very tall thin man, dressed in gray, standing with his back to the fire. He had a long face, I think a mustache—certainly no beard—and suggested young middle age.”... On a second occasion “the tall figure in gray was lying on the bed in a very flung-down, slack-jointed attitude. The face was turned from me, the right arm hanging back across the body which lay on the left side. I started violently and my foot seemed to strike an empty bottle on the floor.”

There is very little doubt that these visions of Mrs. Holland’s represented Mr. Gurney, who had died from an accidental dose of chloroform. Mrs. Holland “took very little interest” in Mr. Gurney, hence she had entirely forgotten that the main facts of his death had been told to her a few months previously by the narrator, Miss Alice Johnson.[^[19]]

In an hallucination of this sort we have a dramatic pictorial representation of previous though forgotten knowledge which must have determined it. In order to have determined the hallucination the knowledge must have been conserved somehow. I have frequently observed a similar reproduction of a forgotten experience, which was not visual, through translation into a newly created visual representation in the form of an artificial hallucination. The following is of this kind: Miss B., looking into a crystal,[^[20]] saw a scene laid in a wood near a lake, etc. Several figures appeared in this scene, which was that of a murder. Although she had no recollection of anything that could have given rise to the hallucination, investigation showed that the original experience was to be found in one of Marie Correlli’s novels which she had read but forgotten. The vision was a correct representation of the scene as described in the book.

In suitable subjects almost any past experience, whether forgotten or not, can be reproduced in this way if conserved, and observation shows that the number which are conserved is enormous. I shall have occasion to cite further examples in other connections. The phenomenon of translation we shall find when we come to study it, as we shall do in another lecture, throws light upon the nature of conservation for here we are dealing with something more than simple reproduction; what is conserved becomes elaborated into a new composition.

Evidence obtained from dreams.—Another not uncommon mode in which forgotten experiences are recovered is through dreams. The content of the dream may, as Freud has shown, be a cryptic and symbolical expression or representation of the experience,[^[21]] or a visualized representation or obvious symbolism, much as a painted picture may be a symbolized expression of an idea,[^[22]] or it may be a realistic reproduction in the sense that the subject lives over again the actual experience. A relative of mine gave me a very accurate description of a person whom she had never seen from a dream in which he appeared. After describing his hair, eyes, contour of face, mouth, etc., she ended with the words, “He looks like a cross between a Scotchman and an Irishman.” After she had most positively insisted that she had never seen this person or heard him described—against my protest to the contrary—I reminded her that I had myself described him to her only a few days before in the identical words, ending my description with the remark, “He looks like a cross between a Scotchman and an Irishman.” Even then she could not recall the fact. Von Bechterew has recorded the case of a man who frequently after hearing an opera dreamed the whole opera through.[^[23]] One subject of mine frequently dreamed over again in very minute detail, after an interval of eight or nine months, the scenes attending the deathbed of a relative. Indeed, in the dream she realistically lived them again in a fashion similar to that of hypnotic dreams such as I have related. Although she had not forgotten these scenes it is highly improbable that she could have voluntarily recalled them, particularly after the lapse of so long a time, without the aid of the dream, so rich was it in detail, with each event in its chronological order.

Dream reproductions, whether in a symbolic form or not, are too common to need further statement. I would merely point out that the frequency with which childhood’s experiences occur in dreams is further evidence of the conservation of these early experiences. The symbolic dream, cryptic or obvious, deserves, however, special consideration because of the data it offers to the problem of the nature of conservation which we shall later study. In this type of dream, if the fundamental principle of the theory of Freud is correct, the content is a symbolical continuation in some form of an antecedent thought (experience) of the dreamer.[^[24]] When this thought, which may be forgotten, is recovered the symbolic character of the dream, in many cases, is recognized beyond reasonable doubt.[^[25]] If this principle is well established, and nearly all investigators are in accord on this point, though we need not always accept the given interpretation of individual dreams—if the principle is sound, then it follows that symbolism includes memory of the original experience which must be conserved. So that even this type of dream offers evidence of conservation of experiences for which there may be total loss of memory (amnesia).

Before closing this lecture I will return to the point which I temporarily passed by, namely, the significance of the difference in the form of reproduction according as whether it is by automatic writing or through associative memories in abstraction. In the latter case, as we have seen, the memories are identical in form and principle with those of everyday life. They enter the personal consciousness and become conscious memories in the sense that the individual personally remembers the experience in question. Abstraction may be regarded simply as a favorable condition or moment when the subject remembers what he had at another previous moment forgotten. We have seen also that the same thing is true of remembering in hypnosis (excepting those special realistic reproductions when the subject enters a dream-like or somnambulistic state and lives over again the past experience in question). In automatic writing, on the other hand, the reproduction is by a secondary process entirely separate and independent of the personal consciousness. In the examples I cited the latter was in entire ignorance of the reproduction which did not become a personally conscious memory. At the very same moment when the experiences could not be voluntarily remembered, and without a change in the moment’s consciousness, something was tapped, as it were, and thereby they were graphically revealed without the knowledge of the subject, without memory of them being introduced into the personal consciousness, and even without the subject being able to remember the incident after reading the automatic script. Even this stimulus failed to bring back the desired phase of consciousness. It was very much like surreptitiously inserting your hand into the pocket of another and secretly withdrawing an object which he thinks he has lost. What really happened was this: a secondary process was awakened and this process (of which the principal or personal consciousness was unaware) revealed the memory lost by the personal consciousness. At least this is the interpretation which is the one which all the phenomena of this kind pertaining to subconscious manifestations compel us to draw.[^[26]] At any rate the automatic script showed that somehow and somewhere outside the personal consciousness the experiences were conserved and under certain conditions could be reproduced.

We now also see that the same principle of reproduction by a secondary process holds in hallucinatory phenomena whether artificial or spontaneous, and in many dreams. When a person looking into a crystal sees a scene which is a truthful pictorial representation of an actual past experience which he does not consciously remember, it follows that that visual hallucination must be induced and constructed by some secondary subconscious process outside of and independent of the processes involved in his personal consciousness. And, likewise, when a dream is a translation of a forgotten experience into symbolical terms it follows that there must be, underlying the dream consciousness, some subconscious process which continues and translates the original experience into and constructs the dream.

This being so we are forced to two conclusions: first, in all these types of phenomena the secondary process must in some way be closely related to the original experience in order to reproduce it; and, second, a mental experience must be conserved in some form which permits of a subconscious process reproducing the experience in one or other of the various forms in which memory appears. Further than this I will not go at present, not until we have more extensively reviewed the number and kinds of mental experiences that may be conserved. This we will do in the next lecture.

[5]. Automatic writing is script which has been produced unconsciously or involuntarily, although the writer is in an alert state, whether it be the normal waking state or hypnosis. The hand writes, though the subject does not consciously direct it. Ordinarily, though not always, the subject is entirely unaware of what the hand is writing, and often the writing is obtained better if the attention is diverted and directed toward other matters. The first knowledge then obtained by the subject of what has been written, or that the hand has written at all, is on reading the script. Some persons can cultivate the art of this kind of writing. Mrs. Verrall and Mrs. Holland, for example, deliberately educated themselves to write automatically, and each published a volume of her records. In other normal people automatic writing seems to develop accidentally or under special circumstances. In certain types of hysteria it is very easily obtained. “Planchette,” which many years ago was in vogue as a parlor game, was only a particular device to effect automatic writing.

[6]. In this particular experiment, when the hand wrote “automatically,” the second hypnotic consciousness vanished and the subject went into a trance state, or what is equivalent to a third hypnotic state. There was no consciousness present, excepting that which was associated with the writing hand. At other times, in experiments of this class with this same subject, the hypnotic or the waking consciousness, as the case might be, persisted alert while the hand wrote. For the purpose of the experiment in recovering memories this change in the psychological condition is not of importance, the principle remains the same.

[7]. Journal of the S. P. R., July, 1906. A fuller account of this case was later published in the same journal, August, 1911.

[8]. A remark made by the subject in the trance state, though passed over in the report as apparently inconsequential, has really much meaning when interpreted through that conception of the unconscious memory process which will be developed in succeeding chapters. The subject, while in the trance, claimed to be in a mental world wherein “is to be found, it is said, not only everything that has ever happened or will happen, but all thoughts, dreams, and imagination.” In other words, in that psychical condition into which she passed, all the conserved conscious experiences of her life could be awakened into memory.

[9]. Proceedings of the S. P. R., October, 1906, Chap. XII.

[10]. In the automatic script, which purported to be a spiritistic message from a dead friend named Annette, occurred the enigmatical sentence: “Tell her this comes from the friend who loved cradles and cradled things.” The meaning of this was revealed by the above-mentioned letter to Mrs. Holland, written twenty years previously. It was from a friend of Annette’s, and quoted an extract from Annette’s will, which ran, “because I love cradles and cradled things.” When Mrs. Holland was tearing up some old letters she came across this one. (“On the automatic writing of Mrs. Holland,” by Miss Alice Johnson: Proceedings of the S. P. R., June, 1908, pp. 288, 289.)

[11]. It would have required a stenographer, whom I did not have, to record fully all these recovered memories. They would fill several printed pages, and I can give only a general résumé of them. Some weeks later the experiment was repeated and a record taken as fully as possible in long hand.

[12]. Later in the day she discovered the loss of her gloves and, not remembering where she had left them, was obliged to retrace her steps in search of them.

[13]. Of course the memories recovered by either method may be fabrications as with ordinary voluntary memory, and the automatic script may stimulate the conscious memory to recollect the experiences in question. Nevertheless, while the memories are being recorded by the script, no “conscious” memory is present with subjects who are unaware of what the hand is writing.

[14]. Sidis, Prince, and Linenthal: A contribution to the Pathology of Hysteria, Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, June 23, 1904.

[15]. The Dissociation of a Personality, by Morton Prince. (New York; Longmans, Green & Co., 1906.) P. 77. Hereafter, when this work is referred to, the title will be indicated simply by “The Dissociation.”

[16]. Undoubtedly much was forgotten and, therefore, there must have been hiatuses of which she was not aware; but the remarkable thing is that not only so much, but so much that was inconsequential and evanescent was recalled. If additional technical methods had been employed probably more memories could have been recalled.

[17]. The objection will probably be made that the memories and statements of hypnotized persons are unreliable on several grounds, chiefly suggestibility, liability to illusions and, in some cases, tendency to fabrications. This criticism is more likely to come from those who have had a special rather than a wide experience with hypnotism.

[18]. Miss B., in these pages, always refers to Miss Beauchamp, an account of whose case is given in “The Dissociation.” In this connection cf. pp. 501, 81 and 238 of that work.

[19]. Proceedings of the S. P. R., June, 1908.

[20]. Crystal or artificial visions are hallucinatory phenomena which, like automatic writing, can be cultivated by some people. The common technic is to have a person look into a crystal, at the same time concentrating the mind, or putting himself into a state of abstraction. Under these conditions the subject sees a vision, i.e., has a visual hallucination. The vision may be of some person or place, or may represent a scene which may be enacted. Because of the use of a crystal such hallucinations are called “crystal visions,” but a crystal is not requisite; any reflecting surface may be sufficient, or even the concentration of the attention. The crystal or other object used of course acts only by aiding the concentration of attention and by force of suggestion.—The subconscious is tapped.

[21]. Freud: Traumdeutung, 2 aufl. 1909.

[22]. Morton Prince: The Mechanism and Interpretation of Dreams. The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, October-November, 1910.

[23]. Zentralblatt für Nervenheilkunde und Psychiatrie; 1909, Heft 12.

[24]. According to Freud and his school it is always the imaginary fulfilment of a suppressed wish, almost always sexual. For our purposes it is not necessary to inquire into the correctness of this interpretation or the details of the Freudian theory.

[25]. For an example, see p. [98].

[26]. If the physiological interpretation be maintained, i.e., that the script was produced by a pure physiological process, this phenomenon would be a crucial demonstration of the nature of conservation, that it is in the form of physical alterations in nervous structure. I do not believe, however, that this interpretation can be maintained.

LECTURE III
CONSERVATION OF FORGOTTEN EXPERIENCES OF NORMAL, ARTIFICIAL, AND PATHOLOGICAL LIFE

I. Normal Life (Continued)

I have directed your attention up to this point to the conservation of experiences which at the time of their occurrence, although lost beyond voluntary recall, for the most part occupied the focus of attention of the individual—were within the full light of consciousness. If these experiences were the only ones which were subject to conservation—and I would have you still bear in mind that I am using the term only in the limited sense of the ability to recover an experience in some favorable condition, or moment of consciousness, or through some fortunate or technical mode of reproduction—if, I say, these were the only ones to be conserved, then the conservation of the experiences which make up our mental lives would be considerably curtailed. It so happens, however, that a large part of our mental activity is occupied with acts of which at the moment we are only dimly aware—or half aware—in that they do not occupy the focus of attention. Some of these are what we call absent-minded acts. Again, many sensations and perceptions do not enter the focus of attention, so that we are either not aware of them, or, if we are, there is so little vividness attached to them that they are almost immediately lost to voluntary memory. The same is true of certain trains of thoughts which course through the mind while one’s attention is concentrated on some other line of thought. They are sometimes described as being in the background of the mind. Then, again, we have our dream life, and that of reverie, and the important artificial state of hypnosis; also certain pathological states to which some individuals are subject, such as intoxication, hysterical crises, deliria, and multiple personality. Accordingly it is important in any investigation into the extent of the field of conservation to inquire whether all this mental life is only fleeting, evanescent, psychological experience, or whether it is subject to the same principle of conservation. If the latter be the case it presages consequences which are portentous in the possible multiplicity and manifoldness of the elements which may enter into and may govern the mechanism of mental processes. But let me not get ahead of my exposition.

Absent-minded acts.—In a study made some time ago I recorded the reproduction, as a crystal vision, of an absent-minded act, i.e., one which had not fully entered the focus of consciousness during deep concentration of the attention. It is a type of numerous experiments of this kind that I have made. Miss B. is directed to look into a crystal. She sees therein a vision of herself walking along a particular street in Boston in a brown study. She sees herself take out of her pocket some bank notes, tear them up, and throw them into the street. Now this artificial hallucination, or vision, was a picture of an actual occurrence; in an absent-minded reverie the subject had actually performed this very act under the circumstances portrayed in the vision and had retained no memory of it.[^[27]]

Similarly I have frequently recovered knowledge of the whereabouts of articles mislaid absent-mindedly. Sometimes the method used has been, as in the above examples, that of crystal gazing or artificial hallucinations; sometimes hypnotism, sometimes automatic writing, etc. By the last two methods not only the forgotten acts but the ideas and feelings which were outside the focus of attention, but in the fringe of consciousness, and prompted the acts are described. It is needless to give the details of the observations; it suffices to say that each minute detail of the absent-minded act and the thoughts and feelings that determined it are described or mirrored, as the case may be. The point of importance is that concentration of attention is not essential for conservation, and, therefore, among the vast mass of the conserved experiences of life may be found many which, though once conscious, only entered the margin of awareness (not the focus of attention) and never were subject to voluntary recollection. In the absence of attentive awareness at the time for such an experience (and therefore of recollection), we often can only be assured that it ever occurred by circumstantial evidence. When this assurance is wanting we are tempted to deny its occurrence and our responsibility, but experiment shows that the process of conservation, like the dictagraph, is a more faithful custodian of our experiences than are our voluntary memories.

Subconscious perceptions.—It is not difficult to show that perceptions of the environment which never even entered the fringe of the personal consciousness, i.e., of which the individual was never even dimly aware, may be conserved. Indeed, the demonstration of their conservation is one of the important pieces of evidence for the occurrence of coconscious perception and, therefore, of the splitting of consciousness. Mrs. Holland, both by automatic writing and in hypnosis, describes perceptions of the environment (objects seen, etc.) of which she was not aware at the time. Miss B. and B. C. A. recall, in hypnosis and by automatic writing, paragraphs in the newspapers read through casual glances without awareness thereof. The same is true of perceptions of the environment experienced under experimental conditions as well as fortuitously. I have made a large number of experiments and other observations of this kind, and have been in the habit of demonstrating before the students at my lectures this evidence of coconscious perception. A simple method is to ask a suitable subject to describe the dress of some person in the audience, or of objects in the environment; if he is unable to do this, then to attempt to obtain as minute a description as possible by automatic writing or verbally after he has been hypnotized. It is often quite surprising to note with what detail the objects which almost entirely escaped conscious observation are subconsciously perceived and remembered. Sometimes the descriptions of my students have been quite embarrassing from their naïve truthfulness to nature.

The following is an example of such an observation: 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 for 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; shirt with three little stripes in it; black laced shoes; false teeth; one finger gone; three buttons 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 buttons to make sure of their number owing to their partial concealment by the folds of the unbuttoned coat. The shoe strings I am sure, under the conditions, would have escaped nearly everyone’s observation.

Subconscious perceptions even more than absent-minded acts offer some of the most interesting phenomena of conservation, for these phenomena give evidence of the ability, under certain conditions, to reproduce, in one mode or another, experiences which were never a phase of the personal consciousness, never entered even the fringe of the content of this consciousness and of which, therefore, we were never aware. For this reason they are not, properly speaking, forgotten experiences. Their reproduction sometimes produces dramatic effects. The following is an instance: B. C. A., waking one night out of a sound sleep, saw a vision of a young girl dressed in white, standing at the foot of her bed. The vision was extraordinarily vivid, the face so distinct that she was able to give a detailed description of it. She had no recollection of having seen the face before, and it awakened no sense of familiarity. Suspecting, for certain reasons, the figure to be that of a young girl who had recently died and whom I knew that B. C. A. had never known and was not aware that she had ever seen, I placed before her a collection of a dozen or more photographs of different people among which was one of this girl. This photograph she picked out as the one which most resembled the vision (it was a poor likeness) and automatic writing confirmed most positively the choice. Now it transpired that she had passed by this girl on one occasion while the latter was talking to me in the hall of my house, but she had purposely, for certain reasons, not looked at her. Subconsciously, however, she had seen her since she could give, both in hypnosis and by automatic writing, an accurate account of the incident, which I also remembered. B. C. A., however, had no recollection of it. The subconscious perception was later reproduced (after having undergone secondary elaboration) as a vision.

Similarly I have known paragraphs read in the newspapers out of the corner of her eye, so to speak, and probably by casual glances, not only, as I have said, to be recalled in hypnosis and by automatic writing, but to be reproduced with more or less elaboration in her dreams. She had, as the evidence showed, no awareness at the time of having read these paragraphs and no after recollection of the same.

Experimentally, as I have said, it is possible to demonstrate other phenomena which are the same in principle. The experiment consists, after surreptitiously placing objects under proper precautions in the peripheral field of vision, in having the subject fix his eyes on central vision and his attention distracted from the environment by intense concentration or reading. Immediately after removing the objects it is determined that the subject did not consciously perceive them. But in hypnosis or by other methods it is found that memory for perceptions of the peripheral objects returns, i.e., the perceptions are reproduced. Auditory stimuli may be used as tests with similar results.

Likewise, with Miss B., I have frequently obtained reproductions of perceptions of which at the time she was unaware. This has been either under similar experimental conditions, or under accidental circumstances when I could confirm the accuracy of the reproductions. For instance, to cite one out of numerous examples, on one occasion I saw her pass by in the street while I was standing on the door-step of a house some fifteen or twenty feet away, well outside the line of her central vision. She was in a brown study. I called to her three times saying, “Good morning, Miss B.,” laying the accent each time on a different word. She did not hear me and later had no recollection of the episode. In hypnosis she recalled the circumstances accurately and reproduced my words with the accents properly placed. Such observations and experiments I have frequently made. They can be varied indefinitely in form and condition.

The phenomenon of subconscious perception of sensory stimulations applied to anesthetic areas (tactile[(tactile], visual, etc.), in hysterics, first demonstrated by Janet, is of the same order, but has been so often described that only a reference to it is necessary. I mention examples here merely that the different kinds of phenomena that may be brought within the sphere of memory shall be mentioned. For instance, Mrs. E. B.[^[28]] has an hysterical loss of sensibility in the hand which, in consequence, can be severely pinched or pricked, or an object placed in it, etc., without her being aware of the fact. Notwithstanding this absence of awareness these tactile experiences were conserved since an accurate detailed memory of them is recovered in hypnosis, or manifested through automatic writing. The same phenomenon can be demonstrated in Mrs. R., whose right arm is anesthetic.[^[29]] The same conservation of subconscious perceptions can be experimentally demonstrated during automatic writing. At such times the writing hand becomes anesthetic and if a screen is interposed so that the subject cannot see the hand he is not aware of any stimulations applied to it. Nevertheless such sensory stimulations—a prick or a pinch or more complicated impressions—are conserved, for the hand will accurately describe all that is done.

An observation which I made on one of my subjects probably belongs here rather than to the preceding types. Several different objects were successively brought into the field of vision, but so far toward the periphery that they could not be sufficiently clearly seen to be identified. In hypnosis, however, they were accurately described, showing the conservation of perceptions that did not enter the vivid awareness or clear perception of the subject.

It is true, as a study of the coconscious would show, that such phenomena of anesthesia and unrecognized perceptions are dependent upon a dissociation of consciousness and upon coconscious perception. But this is a matter of mechanism with which we are not now concerned. The point simply is that subconscious perceptions which never entered the awareness of the personal consciousness may be conserved.

I will cite one more observation, one in which the reproduction was through secondary translation, as we shall see later that it belongs to a class which enables us to determine the nature of conservation.

B. C. A., actuated by curiosity, looked into a crystal and saw there some printed words which had no meaning for her whatever and awakened no memory of any previous experience. It was afterward found that these words represented a cablegram message which she unconsciously overheard while it was being transmitted over the telephone to the telegraph office by my secretary in the next room. She had no recollection of having heard the words, as she was absorbed in reading a book at the time. The correctness of the visual reproduction is shown, not only by automatic writing which remembered and recorded the whole experience, but also by comparison with the original cablegram.

Again, in other experiments there appear, in the crystal, visions rich in detail of persons whom she does not remember having seen, although it can be proved that she actually has seen them.

The reproduction of subconscious perceptions and forgotten knowledge in dreams, visions, hypnosis, trance states, by automatic writing, etc., is interesting apart from the theory of memory. Facts of this kind offer a rational interpretation of many well-authenticated phenomena exploited in spiritistic literature. Much of the surprising information given by planchette, table rapping, and similar devices commonly employed by mediums, depends upon the translation of forgotten dormant experiences into manifestations of this sort. In clinical medicine, too, we can often learn, through reproductions obtained by special methods of investigation, the origin of obsessions and other ideas which otherwise are unintelligible.

Dreams and somnambulisms.—Many people remember their dreams poorly or not at all, and, in the latter case, are under the belief that they do not dream. But often circumstantial evidence, such as talking in their sleep, shows that they do dream. Now, though ordinarily they cannot remember the dreams, by changing the waking state to an hypnotic one, or through the device of crystal visions or automatic writing, it is possible in some people to reproduce the whole dream. Amnesia for dreams, therefore, cannot be taken as evidence that they do not occur, and forgotten dream consciousness is subject to the same principles of conservation and reproduction as the experiences of waking life. Thus in B. C. A. dreams totally forgotten on awakening are easily recovered in hypnosis and in crystal visions.[^[30]] In the case of M——l, which I cited to you a little while ago, the forgotten dream in which he lived over again the original episode which led to the development of his hysterical condition and which when repeated in the dream induced each successive attack, was easily recovered in hypnosis. The same was true of the forgotten dreams of Mrs. H. and Miss B.

The reproduction of nocturnal somnambulistic acts and the ideas which occupied the content of consciousness of the somnambulist can be effected in the same manner. I have quite a collection of observation of this kind. In the study of visions,[^[31]] to which I have already referred, may be found the observation where Miss B., looking into a crystal, sees herself walking in her sleep and hiding some money under a tablecloth and books lying on the table. The money (which was supposed to have been lost) was found where it was seen in the vision.

In my notebook are the records of numerous artificial hallucinations of this kind which reproduce sleep-walking acts of B. C. A. To cite one instance: in the crystal she sees herself arise from her bed, turn on the lights, descend the stairs, enter one of the lower rooms, sit by the fire in deep, pensive reflection, then get up and dance merrily as her somnambulistic mood changes. Presently, as the cinematograph-like picture unfolds itself in the crystal, she sees herself go to the writing table, write two letters, ascend the stairs, dropping one letter on the way,[^[32]] reënter her room, open a glove box, place the remaining letter under the gloves, and finally put out the lights and get into bed when, with the advent of sleep, the vision ends. In the vision the changing expression of her face displays each successive mood. In hypnosis also the scene is remembered and then even the thoughts which accompanied each act of the somnambulist are described. Here again, then, we have evidence that even forgotten dreams and somnambulistic thoughts are not lost but under certain special conditions can be revived in one mode or another.

II. Forgotten Experiences of Artificial and Pathological States

The experiences that I have thus far cited in evidence of the principle of the conservation of dormant experiences that cannot be voluntarily recalled have been drawn almost entirely from normal everyday life. We now come to a series of facts which are very important in that they show that what is true of the experiences of everyday life is also true of those of artificial and pathological states of which the normal personal consciousness has no cognizance. These facts are also vital for the comprehension of post-hypnotic phenomena, of amnesia, multiple personality, and allied dissociated states. Let us consider some of the states from the point of view of conservation.

Artificial states.—After a person passes from one dissociated state to another, or from a dissociated state to the full waking state, it is commonly found that there is amnesia for the previous state. This is a general principle. The forgetting of dreams is an example from normal life. For the psychological state of sleep in which dreams occur is one of normal dissociation of consciousness by which the perception of the environment, and the great mass of life’s experiences, can no longer be brought within the content of the dream consciousness. Hence there is a general tendency to the development of amnesia for dreams after waking when the normal synthesis of the personality has been established. Yet, as we have seen, forgotten dreams can generally be recalled in hypnosis or by some other technical method (e. g., crystal visions and abstraction). Now hypnosis is an artificially dissociated state. After passing from one hypnotic state to another,[^[33]] or after waking, it is very common to find complete amnesia for the whole of the experience belonging to the previous hypnotic state. By no effort whatsoever can it be recalled and this inability persists during the remainder of the life of the subject. And yet those hypnotic experiences may have been very extensive, particularly if the subject has been hypnotized a great many times. Nevertheless, it is easy to demonstrate that they are conserved and therefore, like all conserved experiences, potentially still existing, subject to recall under favoring conditions; for, as is well known, if the subject be rehypnotized they are recalled as normal memories. With the restitution of the hypnotic state the memories which were dormant become synthesized with the hypnotic personality and conscious.

The method of producing crystal visions may also be used to demonstrate the dormant conservation of experiences originating in hypnotic states. By this method and that of automatic writing, as I have already explained, the memories may be made to reveal themselves, without inducing recollection, at the very moment when the subject cannot voluntarily recall them. The subject, of course, being ignorant of what happened in hypnosis cannot recognize the visions as pictorial memories. In illustration of this I would recall the observation in the case of Miss B. where, in such an artificial vision, she saw herself sitting on a sofa smoking a cigarette.[^[34]] This vision represented an incident which occurred during one of the subject’s hypnotic states when she had smoked a cigarette. Naturally Miss B., in her ignorance of the facts, denied the truthfulness of the vision. Other examples of a like kind might be cited if it were necessary.

By automatic writing, also, evidence of the same principle may be obtained. The conserved memories are tapped, so to speak. Thus I suggest to Mrs. R. in hypnosis that after waking she shall write certain verses or sentences. After being awakened she reproduces automatically, as directed, the desired verses or sentences which, of course, belonged to her hypnotic experiences.[^[35]] In other words, although the personal consciousness did not remember the hypnotic experience of having received the command and of having given the promise to write the verses, etc., the automatic writing by the act of fulfilling the command showed that all this was conserved; here again was evidence of conservation, in some form, of an experience at the very moment when the personal consciousness was unable to voluntarily recall what had taken place in hypnosis. Such experiments may be varied indefinitely.

The following is an instance of the same phenomenon obtained by tapping without the use of previous suggestion in hypnosis: subject B. C. A. One of the hypnotic states, b, was waked up to become B, this change being followed, as usual, by amnesia. By means of automatic writing an accurate account was now obtained of the experiences which had taken place during the previous moments in hypnosis, the subject being unaware of what the hand wrote. Here were complete memories of the whole period of which the personal consciousness, B, had no knowledge. One of the most striking, not to say dramatic, demonstrations of this kind can sometimes be obtained in cases exhibiting several different hypnotic states. For instance: “c” and “b” are two different hypnotic phases belonging to the same individual (B. C. A.). c knows nothing of the experiences of b, and b nothing of c, each having amnesia for the other. Now one has only to whisper in the ear of c, asking a question of b, and at once, by automatic speech, the dormant b phase responds, giving such information as is sought in proof of the conservation of any given experience belonging to the tapped b phase. The consciousness of c apparently continues uninterruptedly during the experiment. The same evidence could be obtained by automatic writing under the same conditions. Again in the b phase another state known as “Alpha and Omega” can be tapped, giving similar evidence of conservation. In the case of Miss B. the same phenomena could be elicited. In this respect hypnotic states may show the same behavior as alternating personalities of which I shall presently speak.

Suggested post-hypnotic phenomena depend, in part, on the conservation of dormant complexes. In hypnosis I give a suggestion that the subject on waking shall, at a given moment, take a cigarette and smoke it. There is thus formed a complex of ideas which becomes dormant and forgotten after waking. Later, by some mechanism which we need not inquire into now, the ideas of the dormant complex enter the field of the personal self; the idea of smoking a cigarette arises therein and the subject puts the idea into execution. These consequences of the suggestion could not occur unless the experiences were conserved. Or, we may take an experiment where the hypnotic experiences are reproduced automatically by writing. Here the conserved experiences form a secondary system split off from the personal consciousness. This system reproduces the hypnotic experiences as memory outside of the personal consciousness.

From a practical point of view this principle of the conservation of the experiences of the hypnotic state is of the utmost importance. The fact that a person does not remember them on waking—if such be the case—is of little consequence in principle, and, practically, this amnesia does not preclude these experiences from influencing the waking personality. As experiences and potential memories they all belong to and are part of the personality. The hypnotic experiences being conserved our personality may still be modified and determined in its judgments, points of view, and attitudes by them, as by other unrecognized memories when such modifications have been effected in the hypnotic state. When the last is the case the hypnotically modified judgments, etc., may introduce themselves into the content of consciousness in the waking state by association without being recognized as memories. There may be no recollection of the source of the new ideas, of the reason for the modification of a given judgment or attitude of mind, because there is no recollection of the hypnotic state as a whole; but so far as the new judgment or attitude is a reproduction of an hypnotic experience it is memory, although not perfect memory or recollection in the sense of localizing the experience in the past.

This principle can easily be demonstrated experimentally. It is only necessary, for instance, to state to a suitably suggestible subject that the weather, with which previously he was discontented is, after all, fine; for although it is raining, still, the crops need rain; it will allay the dust and make motoring pleasant, it will give him an opportunity to finish his neglected correspondence, etc. The whole prospect, he is told, is pleasing. He accepts, we assume, the new point of view. He is then waked up and has complete amnesia for the experience. Now these ideas, developed in the hypnotic state, are conserved as potential memories. Though with the change of the moment-consciousness they cannot be voluntarily recalled, they have entered into associations to form a new viewpoint. Just speak to him about the weather and watch the result. His discontent has disappeared and given place to satisfaction. He expresses himself as quite pleased with the weather and gives the same reasons for his satisfaction as were suggested to and accepted by him in hypnosis. He does not recognize his new views as reproductions, i.e., memories, of previous experiences because he has no recollection of the hypnotic state. He does not remember when and how he changed his mind; but these experiences have determined his views because they have become a part of his conscious system of thought. The principle applies to a large part of our judgments not formed in hypnosis. There is nothing very remarkable about it. The process is similar to that of ordinary thought though it has had an artificial and different origin. The complex of ideas having been formed in hypnosis still remains organized and some of its elements enter the complexes of the personal consciousness, just as in normal life ideas of buried experiences of which we have no recollection intrude themselves from time to time and shape our judgments and the current of our thoughts without our realizing what has determined our mental processes. We have forgotten the source of our judgments, but this forgetfulness does not affect the mechanism of the process.

Pathological states.—In the functional amnesias of a pathological character we find the same phenomenon of conservation. Various types of amnesia are encountered. I will specify only the episodic, epochal, and the continuous, so commonly observed in hysteria. This field has been threshed over by many observers and I need refer only to a few instances as illustrations. In the first two types the experiences which are forgotten may have occurred during the previous normal condition. In the episodic the particular episode which is forgotten may have been, strangely enough, one which from the very important part it played in the life of the subject and its peculiar impressiveness and significance we should expect would be necessarily remembered, especially as memory in other respects is normal. But for the same reasons it is not surprising to find that the experience has been conserved somehow and somewhere although it cannot be recalled. The classical cases of Fräulein O. and Lucy R. reported by Breuer and Freud[^[36]] are typical.

From my own collection of cases I will cite the following episode from the case of B. C. A. This subject received a mental shock as the result of an emotional conflict of a distressing character. This experience was the exciting factor in the development of her psychosis, a dissociation of personality. In the resulting “neurasthenic” state, although her memory was normal for all other experiences of her life, this particular episode with all its manifold details, notwithstanding its great significance in her life, completely dropped out of her memory.[^[37]]

This incident was a very intimate one and it is not necessary to give the details. When put to the test all effort to recall the episode voluntarily is without result, and even suggestions in two hypnotic states fail to awaken it in those states. Yet when a pencil is put in her hand these memories are made to manifest themselves by automatic writing. During the writing the subject remains in a perfectly alert state but is unaware of what her hand is doing. At a later period after the subject had been restored to the normal condition she could voluntarily recall these memories thus, again, showing their conservation.

One other example of episodic amnesia I will cite, inasmuch as, aside from the question of conservation, it is of practical importance, being typical of experiences which lead to obsessions of phobia. The subject, O. N., had an intense fear of towers such as might contain bells that might ring. She had no recollection of the first occasion when the fear occurred or of any experience which might have given rise to it, and, of course, could give no explanation of the obsession. Neither in abstraction or hypnosis could any related memories be evoked, but by automatic writing she “unconsciously” described an emotional and dramatic scene which was the occasion of the first occurrence of the fear and which had taken place some twenty-five years previously when she was a young girl.

With the reason for the amnesia we are not particularly concerned at present excepting so far as it serves to make clear the distinction between recollection and conservation, and to throw light on the nature of the latter. The episodes in both these instances were of a strongly emotional character. Now we have known for many years from numerous observations that emotion tends to disrupt the mind and to dissociate the experiences which give rise to the affective state so that they cannot be brought back into consciousness. We may particularize further and, making use of the known impulsive force of emotion, attribute the dissociation (or inhibition) in many cases to a conflict between certain ideas belonging to the experience and other opposing ideas which, with the emotion, they have awakened. The impulsive force of the latter ideas, being the stronger, dissociates, or, to use the expressive term introduced by Freud, represses, the former. The principle of dissociation by conflict has been formulated and elaborated by Freud in his well-known theory which has been made use of to explain all functional amnesias. It is not necessary to go as far as that, nor does the theory as such concern us now. It is sufficient if in certain cases the amnesia (or dissociation) is a dissociation (repression) induced by the conative force of conflicting emotion. If so we should expect that the amnesia would be of a temporary nature and would continue only so long as the conflict and dissociating force continued. In any favorable moment when repression ceased or failed to be operative, as in hypnosis or abstraction, reproduction (recollection) could occur. But this requires that the registration of the experience should be something specific that can be dissociated without obliteration. And, further, it must be something that can be so conserved, somehow and somewhere, during dissociation that, as in the case of reproduction by automatic writing, it can escape the influence of the repressing force and express itself autonomously, i.e., without the expressed memory of the experience entering the personal consciousness. To this we shall return later.

In the two examples I have cited, if my interpretation is correct, the amnesia was due to dissociation by conflict and hence the conservation, as is the rule in functional dissociation, and the reproduction by automatic writing. This principle of dissociation by conflict and of conservation of the dissociated remembrances is of great practical importance as we shall see in later lectures. It can be best studied experimentally with cases of multiple personality. In the case of Miss B. numerous examples of amnesia from conflict were observed. Owing to the precise organization of the consciousness into two distinct personalities it was possible to definitely determine beyond question the antagonistic ideas of one personality which voluntarily induced the conflict and, by the impulsive force of their emotion, caused the amnesia in the other personality.[^[38]] The same phenomena were observed in the case of B. C. A. As memory for the forgotten experiences in these instances returned as soon as the conflict ceased, conservation of them necessarily persisted during the amnesia.

Perhaps I may be permitted to digress here slightly to point out that this same (in principle) phenomenon may be effected experimentally by suggestion. The suggested idea which has the force of a volition or unexpressed wish, coming in conflict with the knowledge of previously familiar facts, inhibits or represses the reproduction in consciousness of this knowledge as memory. It is easy to prove, however, that this knowledge is conserved though it cannot be recalled. Thus, I give appropriate suggestions to B. C. A. in hypnosis that she shall be unable, when awake, to remember a certain unpleasant episode connected with a person named “August.” After being awakened she has complete amnesia, not only for the episode, but even for the name. The suppression of the memory of the episode carries with it by association the name of the person. In fact, the name itself has no meaning for her. When asked to give the names of the calendar months after mentioning “July” she hesitates, then gives “September” as the next. Even when the name “August” is mentioned to her it has no meaning and sounds like a word of a foreign language. The memory of the episode has become dormant so far as volitional recollection is concerned. It can, however, be recalled as a coconscious process through automatic writing, as in the preceding experiment, and then the word in all its meanings and associations is also awakened in the coconsciousness.

The same phenomenon may be observed clinically in transition types standing halfway between the amnesia following emotional episodes and that produced by external suggestion. Auto-suggestion may then be a factor in the mechanism, as in the following example: In a moment of discouragement and despair B. C. A., torn by an unsolved problem, said to herself after going to bed at night, “I shall go to sleep and I shall forget everything, my name and everything else.” Of course she did not intend or expect to forget literally her name, but she gave expression to a petulant despairing conditional wish which if fulfilled would be a solution to her problem; as much as if she said, “If I should forget who I am my troubles would be ended.” Nevertheless the auto-suggestion with its strong feeling tones worked for repression. The next day, when about to give her name by telephone, she discovered that she had forgotten it. On testing her later I found that she could not speak, write, or read her name. She could not even understandingly read the same word when used with a different signification, i.e., stone [her name, we will suppose, is Stone], nor the letters of the same. This amnesia persisted for three days until removed by my suggestion. That the lost knowledge was all the time conserved is further shown by the fact that during the amnesia the name was remembered in hypnosis and also reproduced by automatic writing.

In the epochal type of amnesia a person, perhaps after a shock, suddenly loses all memory for lost epochs, it may be for days and even for years of his preceding life. In the classical case of Mr. Hanna, studied by Boris Sidis, the amnesia was for his whole previous life, so that the subject was like a new-born child. It is easy to show, however, that the forgotten epoch is normally conserved by making use of the various methods of reproduction at our disposal. In the case of Hanna, Sidis was able through “hypnoidization” and suggestion to bring back memory pictures of the amnesic periods. “While the subject’s attention is thus distracted, events, names of persons, of places, sentences, phrases, whole paragraphs of books totally lapsed from memory, and in language the very words of which sounded bizarre to his ears and the meaning of which was to him inscrutable—all that flashed lightning-like on the patient’s mind. So successful was this method that on one occasion the patient was frightened by the flood of memories that rose suddenly from the obscure subconscious [unconscious] regions, deluged his mind, and were expressed aloud, only to be forgotten the next moment. To the patient himself it appeared as if another being took possession of his tongue.”[^[39]]

In another class of cases of epochal amnesia known as fugues the subject, having forgotten his past life and controlled by fancied ideas, perhaps wanders away not knowing who he is or anything of the previous associations of his life. The “Lowell Case” of amnesia, which I had an opportunity to carefully observe and which later was more extensively studied for me by Dr. Coriat, may be instanced.[^[40]] A woman suddenly left her home without apparent rhyme or reason. When later found she had lost all recollection of her name, her personality, her family, and her surroundings, and her identity was only accidentally discovered through the publication of her photograph in the newspaper. She then had almost complete amnesia for her previous life.

Another case, also studied by Dr. Coriat and the writer, was that of a policeman who suddenly deserted his official duty in Boston and went to New York, where he wandered about without knowledge of who he was, his name, his age, his occupation, indeed, as there is reason to believe, of his past life. When he came to himself three days later he found himself in a hospital with complete amnesia for the three days’ fugue. When I examined him some days later this amnesia still persisted but Dr. Coriat was able to recover memories of his vagrancy in New York showing that the experiences of this fugue were still conserved. It is hardly necessary to remind you that, of course, the memories of his normal life which during the fugue it might have been thought were lost were shown to have been conserved, as on “coming to himself” they were recovered. In the “Lowell Case” substantially similar conditions were found.

In continuous or anterograde amnesia the subject forgets every experience nearly as fast as it happens. The classical case of Mme. D., studied by Charcot and later more completely by Janet, is an example. The conservation of the forgotten experiences was demonstrated by these authors.

In multiple personality amnesia for large epochs in the subject’s life is quite generally a prominent feature. In one phase of personality there is no knowledge whatsoever of existence in another phase. Thus, for instance, all the experiences of BI and BIV, in the case of Miss B., were respectively unknown to the other. When, however, the change took place from one personality to the other, with accompanying amnesia, all the great mass of experiences of the one personality still remained organized and conserved during the cycle of the other’s existence. With the reversion to the first personality, whichever it might be, the previously formed experiences of that personality became capable of manifesting themselves as conscious memories. This conservation could also be shown, in this case, by the method of tapping the conserved memories and producing crystal visions or artificial hallucinations. Those who are familiar with the published account of the case will remember that BIV was in the habit at one time of acquiring knowledge of the amnesic periods of BI’s existence by “fixing” her mind and obtaining a visual picture of the latter’s acts. Likewise, it will be remembered that by crystal visions I was enabled to bring into consciousness a vision of the scene at the hospital which, through its emotional influence, caused the catastrophe of dissociation of personality, and also of the scene enacted by BI just preceding the awakening of BIV, of all of which BIV had no knowledge.[^[41]] As with Mr. Hanna sometimes these memories instead of being complex pictures were scrappy—mere flashes in the pan. The same condition of conservation of the experiences of one personality during the existence of another obtained in the case of B. C. A. and numerous cases recorded in the literature. In this respect the condition is the same as that which obtains in hypnotic states and which I mentioned a few moments ago.

We may, in fact, lay it down as a general law that during any dissociated state, no matter how extensive or how intense the amnesia, all the experiences that can be recalled in any other state, whether the normal one or another dissociated state, are conserved and, theoretically at least, can be made to manifest themselves. And, likewise and to the same extent, during the normal state the experiences which belong to a dissociated state are still conserved, notwithstanding the existing amnesia for those experiences. Furthermore, if we were dealing with special pathology we would be able to show that many pathological phenomena are due to the subconscious manifestations of such conserved and forgotten experiences.

Observation shows that the experiences of trance states and allied conditions are similarly conserved. Fanny S., as the result of an emotional shock, due to a distressing piece of news, goes into a trance-like state of which she has no memory afterwards. Later, a recollection of this supposedly unconscious state, including the content of her trance thoughts and the sayings and doings of those about her, is recovered by a special device. B. C. A. likewise fell into a trance of which there was no recollection. The whole incident was equally fully recovered in a crystal vision, and also conscious memory of it brought back to personal consciousness by a special technic. In the vision she saw herself apparently unconscious, the various people about her each performing his part in the episode; the doctor administering a hypodermic dose of medicine, etc. In hypnosis she remembered in addition the thoughts of the trance consciousness and the various remarks made by different people in attendance.

Even delirious states for which there is complete amnesia may be conserved. I have observed numerous instances of this in the case of Miss B. For instance, the delirious acts occurring in the course of pneumonia were reproduced in a crystal vision by Miss B. and the delirious thoughts as well were remembered by the secondary personality, Sally.[^[42]] I have records of several examples of conservation of delirium in this case. Quite interesting was the repetition of the same delirium due to ether narcosis in succeeding states of narcosis as frequently happened. A very curious phenomenon of the same order was the following: After the subject had been etherized a number of times I adopted the ruse of pretending to etherize one of the secondary personalities, using the customary inhaler but without ether. The efficient factor was, of course, suggestion. The subject would, at least apparently, become unconscious, passing into a state which had all the superficial appearances of deep etherization. At the end of the procedure she would slowly return to consciousness, repeat the same stereotyped expletives and other expressions which she regularly made use of when ether was actually used, and make the same grimaces and signs of discomfort, etc. This behavior would seem to indicate that the mental and physical experiences originally induced by a physical agent were conserved and later reproduced under imaginary conditions.

Mental experiences formed in states of alcoholic intoxication without delirium may be conserved as dormant complexes. Dr. Isador Coriat,[^[43]] in his studies of alcoholic amnesia, was able to restore memories of experiences occurring during the alcoholic state showing that they were still conserved. The person, during the period for which later there is amnesia, may or may not be what is ordinarily called drunk, although under the influence of alcohol. Later, when he comes to himself, he is found to have forgotten the whole alcoholic period—perhaps several days or a week—during which he may have acted with apparently ordinary intelligence, and perhaps have committed criminal acts. By one or another of several technical methods memory of the forgotten period may often be recalled. Dr. C. W. Pilgrim[^[44]] also has reported two cases of this kind in which he succeeded in restoring the memories of the forgotten alcoholic state. I might also recall here the case, cited by Ribot, of the Irish porter who, having lost a package while drunk, got drunk again and remembered where he had left it.

Of course, in order to demonstrate the conservation of forgotten experiences it is necessary, when abstraction is not sufficient, to employ subjects in whom more profound dissociation of consciousness can be produced by one or another of the artificial means described so as to permit of the reproduction of the hidden (conserved) experiences of mental life. Such subjects, however, are sufficiently common. Often the passive state of abstraction after some practice is sufficient.

Summary

Although in the above résumé of the phenomena of memory I have for the most part made use of personal observations, these, so far as the phenomena themselves are concerned, are in accord with those of other observers. It would have been easy to have drawn for corroboration upon the writings of Gurney, Janet, Charcot, Breuer, Freud, Sidis, Coriat, and others.

A survey of all the facts which I have outlined in this lecture forces us to ask ourselves the question: To what extent are life’s experiences conserved? Indeed it was to meet this question that I have reviewed so large a variety of forgotten experiences which experiment or observation in individual cases has shown to be conserved. If my aim had been to show simply that an experience, which has been lost beyond all possible voluntary recall, may still be within the power of reproduction when special devices adapted to the purpose are employed, it would not have been necessary to cover such a wide field of inquiry. To meet the wider question it was necessary to go farther afield and examine a large variety of experiences occurring in multiform conditions of mental life.

After doing this the important principle is forced upon us in strong relief that it matters not in what period of life, or in what state, experiences have occurred, or how long a time has intervened since their occurrence; they may still be conserved. They become dormant, but under favorable conditions they may be awakened and may enter conscious life. We have seen, even by the few examples I have given, that childhood experiences that are supposed to have long been buried in oblivion may be conserved. We have seen that the mental life of artificial and pathological states is subject to the same principle; that the experiences of hypnosis, trance states, deliria, intoxication, dissociated personality—though there may be absolute amnesia in the normal waking state for them—may still be capable of reproduction as memory. Yet of the vast number of mental experiences which we have during the course of our lives we can voluntarily recall but a fractional part. What proportion of the others is conserved is difficult, if not impossible, to determine. The difficulty is largely a practical one due to the inadequacy of our technical methods of investigation. In the first place, our technic is only applicable to a limited number of persons. In the second place, it is obvious that when an episode—occurring in the course of everyday life—is forgotten, but is recovered under one or another of the conditions I have described, it is only in a minority of instances that circumstances will permit confirmation of this evidence by collateral and independent testimony. Still, if we take the evidence as a whole its cumulative force is such as to compel the conviction that a vast number of experiences, more than we can possibly voluntarily recall, are conserved, and that it is impossible to affirm that any given experience may not persist in a dormant state. It is impossible to say what experiences of our daily life have failed to be conserved and what are awaiting only a favorable condition of reproduction to be stimulated into activity as memory. Even if they cannot be reproduced by voluntary effort, or by some one particular device, they may be by another and, if all devices fail, they may be recovered in pathological conditions like delirium, trance, spontaneous hallucinations, etc., or in normal dissociated states like dreams. The inability to recall an experience is no evidence whatever that it is not conserved. Indeed, even when the special methods and moments fail it is still not always possible to say that it is not conserved.

It would be a gross exaggeration to say, on the basis of the evidence at our disposal, that all life’s experiences persist as potential memories, or even that this is true of the greater number. It is, however, undoubtedly true that of the great mass of experiences which have passed out of all voluntary recollection, an almost incredible, even if relatively small, number still lie dormant, and, under favoring conditions, many can be brought within the field of conscious memory. The significance of this fact will become apparent to us later after we have studied the nature of conservation. Still more significant, particularly for abnormal psychology, is the fact we have brought out by our technical methods of investigation; namely, that almost any conserved experience under certain conditions can function as a subconscious memory and become translated into, i.e., produce sensory and motor automatic phenomena, such as hallucinations, writing, speech, etc. It will not be surprising if we shall find that various other disturbances of mind and body are produced by such subconscious processes.

Two striking facts brought out by some of these investigations are the minuteness of the details with which forgotten experiences may be conserved and the long periods of time during which conservation may persist. Thus, as we have seen, experiences dating back to early childhood may be shown to be preserved in extremely minute detail though the individual has long forgotten them. Furthermore, it has been shown that even remembered experiences may be conserved in far more elaborate detail than would appear from so much of the experience as can be voluntarily recalled. Probably our voluntary memory is not absolutely perfect for any experience in all its details but the details that are conserved often far exceed those that can be recalled.

In the survey of life’s experiences which we have studied we have, for the most part, considered those which have had objective relation and have been subject to confirmation by collateral testimony. But we should not overlook the fact that among mental experiences are those of the inner as well as outer life. To the former belong the hopes and aspirations, the regrets, the fears, the doubts, the self-communings and wrestlings with self, the wishes, the loves, the hates, all that we are not willing to give out to the world, and all that we would forget and would strive not to admit to ourselves. All this inner life belongs to our experience and is subject to the same law of conservation.

Finally, it should be said that much of what is not ordinarily regarded as memory is made up of conserved experiences. A large part of every mental content is memory the source of which is forgotten. Just as our vocabulary is memory, though we do not remember how and where it was acquired, so our judgments, beliefs, and opinions are in large part made up of past experiences which are forgotten but which have left their traces as integral parts of concepts ingrained in our personalities.

[27]. For a full account of this experiment, see An Experimental Study of Visions, Brain, Winter Number, 1898; The Dissociation, pp. 81, 82.

[28]. The Dissociation, p. 77.

[29]. For numerous observations of this kind, see Pierre Janet: The Mental States of Hystericals.

[30]. The Mechanism and Interpretation of Dreams, loc. cit.

[31]. Loc. cit. See p. 51.

[32]. See Lecture VI, p. 185.

[33]. Gurney was among the first to demonstrate the induction of several states in the same subject. He was able to obtain three different hypnotic states (Proceedings S. P. R., Vol. IV, p. 515), and Mrs. Sidgwick and Miss Johnson eight in one individual, each with amnesia for the other. Janet, of course, demonstrated the same phenomena. In the cases of Miss B. and B. C. A. I obtained a large number of such states.

[34]. Morton Prince: The Dissociation, p. 55; also An Experimental Study of Visions, Brain, Winter Number, 1898.

[35]. Some of the Revelations of Hypnotism, Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, May 22, 1890.

[36]. Studien über Hysterie.

[37]. Of course I am not discussing here the genetic mechanism of the amnesia, being concerned only with the principle of conservation.

[38]. The Dissociation, pp. 284-5, 456-9.

[39]. Boris Sidis: The Psychology of Suggestion, p. 224; see also Multiple Personality, p. 143.

[40]. The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. II, p. 93.

[41]. The Dissociation, pp. 220, 221, 255, 531, 532.

[42]. The Dissociation, p. 83.

[43]. The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. I, No. 3.

[44]. American Journal of Insanity, July, 1910.

LECTURE IV
CONSERVATION A RESIDUUM OF EXPERIENCES

A consideration of all the facts of observation and experiment of the kind which I have recited in the last two lectures—and I might have multiplied them many times—forces us to the conclusion that whether or not we can recall any given experience it may be still conserved. Bear in mind that I have used conservation, thus far, only in the sense that under favoring changes in the moment’s consciousness, or by special methods of stimulation, a past experience may reproduce itself, or may be made to reproduce itself, in one form or another of memory.

It may be, for example, that you have to-day only a vague and general recollection of the last lecture and if you should endeavor to write an account of it from memory the result would be but a fragmentary report. And yet it is quite possible that, if one or another of the various technical methods I have described could be applied to some one of you, we should be able to recover quite exact memories, of certain portions at least, of the lecture—perhaps verbatim transcripts of certain portions, and large numbers of facts which are quite beyond your present recollection.

Our study of those phenomena of memory which I cited in the last lecture was carried only so far as to allow us to draw the conclusions as to conservation which I have just stated. And, in drawing these conclusions, let me repeat—we have provisionally limited the meaning of the term conservation simply to the potential ability to reproduce experiences, with or without recollection, either in their original form, or translated into a graphic, visual, or auditory expression of them. We have not attempted from these phenomena to draw conclusions as to the nature of conservation, or as to whether it is anything apart from reproduction under favorable conditions. If we do not look below the surface of the phenomena it might be held that memory is only a recurrent phase of consciousness, and that the term conservation is only a figure of speech to express the ability to determine that recurrence in our self-consciousness.

Let us examine now a little more closely some of the phenomena we have already examined but inadequately.

Residual processes underlying automatic motor phenomena: writing, speech, gestures, etc.—We will take writing as a type and the following as an example: In a state of hypnosis a subject learns a verse by heart. It is then suggested that this verse shall be written automatically after he has been awakened. (By arranging the conditions of the experiment in this way we make certain that the script afterwards written shall express a memory and not a fabrication.) After the subject returns to the normal waking state he has complete amnesia for the whole hypnotic state and therefore for the verse. Now, if the experiment is successful, his hand writes the given verse without the subject being aware of what his hand is writing, and it may be without being aware that his hand is writing anything at all. The whole thing has been done without participation of his consciousness and without his knowing that any such phenomenon was to occur. (Of course any of his conscious experiences while in the hypnotic state might have been used as a test, these being known to the experimenter as well.) Now the things to be noted are:

1, that the script expresses a memory; that is, reproduces previous conserved conscious ideas—the verse. It expresses memory just exactly as it would express it if it had been consciously and voluntarily written.

2, that these ideas while in a state of conservation and without entering consciousness—i.e., becoming conscious memory—express themselves in written language.

3, that this occurs while the subject has complete amnesia for the conserved ideas and therefore he could not possibly reproduce them as conscious memory.

4, that that which effects the writing is not a recurring phase of the self-consciousness which is concerned at the moment with totally different ideas.

5, that the “state of conservation” is, at least during the writing, a specific state existing and functioning independently and outside of the personal self-consciousness.

6, that in functioning it induces specific processes which make use of the same organized physiological mechanisms which ordinarily are made use of by conscious memory to express itself in writing and that these processes are not in, but independent of, consciousness.

We are forced to conclude therefore that a conscious experience—in this case the ideas of the verse—is conserved through the medium of some kind of residuum of itself capable of specific functioning and inducing processes which reproduce in the form of written symbols the ideas of the original experience.

We need not consider for the present the nature of the residuum, and its process, whether it is the ideas themselves or something else.

Residual processes underlying hallucinations.—We will take the observation of B. C. A. looking into a crystal and reading some printed words—a cablegram—which she had previously unconsciously overheard.[^[45]] The words were, let us say, “Best Wishes and a Happy New Year.” This visual picture was not a literal reproduction of the original experience, which was a subconscious auditory experience of the same words, of which she was not aware; but plainly, nevertheless, the visual picture must have been determined somehow by the auditory experience. Equally plainly the visual image was not a recurrent phase of the consciousness, for the words of the message had not been previously seen. What occurred was this: the antecedent auditory perception manifested itself in consciousness after an interval of time as a visual hallucination of the words. There was a reproduction of the original experience but not in its original form. It had undergone a secondary alteration by which the visual perception replaced the auditory perception. As a memory it was a conversion or translation of an auditory experience into terms of another sense. Now the conversion must have been effected by some mechanism outside of consciousness; that is to say, it was not an ordinary visualization, i.e., intensely vivid secondary images pertaining to a conscious memory, as when one thinks of the morning’s breakfast table and visualizes it; for there was no conscious memory of the words, or knowledge that there ever had been such an experience. The visualization therefore must have been induced by something not in the content of consciousness,—something we have called a secondary process, of which the individual is unaware.

We can conceive of the phenomenon originating in either one of two possible modes. Either the hallucination was a newly fabricated conscious experience; or it was a reproduction of secondary visual images originally belonging to the auditory perception at the time of its occurrence and now thrust into consciousness in an intensely vivid form. In either case, for this to have taken place something must have been left by the original experience and conserved apart from and independent of the content of the personal consciousness at any and all moments—something capable of functioning after an interval of time as a secondary process outside of the personal consciousness. The only intelligible explanation of the phenomenon is that the original auditory impression persisted, somehow and somewhere, in a form capable of conservation as a specific and independent residuum during all subsequent changes in the content of consciousness. This residuum either fabricated the hallucination or thrust its secondary images into consciousness to become the hallucination.

The phenomenon by itself does not permit a conclusion as to the nature of the residuum, whether it is psychological or neural; i.e., whether an auditory perception, as perception, still persists subconsciously outside the focus of awareness of consciousness, or whether it has left an alteration of some kind in the neurons. Whatever the inner nature of the conserved experience it obviously must have a very specific and independent existence, somehow and somewhere, outside of the awareness of consciousness, and one capable of secondary functioning in a way that can reproduce the original experience in terms of another sense. In other words, conservation must be in the form of some kind of residuum, psychological or neural. It must be, therefore, something very different from reproduction or a recurrent phase of consciousness. Further, it must form a stage in the process of memory of which reproduction is the final result.

This observation of course does not stand alone. I have cited a number of observations and might cite many more in which the same phenomenon of transformation or conversion of sensory images of one sense into images of another sense was prominent. Indeed a study of hallucinations, artificial or spontaneous, which are representations of former experiences and where the determining factors can be ascertained, will show that in most, if not all, of them this same mechanism of conversion is at work. Take, for instance, the experiment cited in our last lecture, the one in which Miss B. was directed to look into a crystal for the purpose of discovering the whereabouts of some money she had lost without being aware of the fact. In the crystal she sees a vision of herself walking along a particular street in Boston absorbed in thought. She sees herself in a moment of absent-mindedness take some banknotes out of her pocket, tear them up, and throw them into the street.

Now this artificial hallucination was, as we have seen, a picture of an actual occurrence for which there was amnesia. It must, therefore, have been determined by that experience. The psychological phenomena manifested, however, were really much more complicated than would appear at first sight. An analysis of this vision, which unfolded itself like a cinematograph picture, would show that it was a composite visual representation of several different kinds of experiences—of past perceptions of her body and face, of her conscious knowledge of her relation to the environment (in the street), of muscular movements, and of her knowledge derived from subconscious tactile impressions of the act. Of these last she was not aware at the time of their occurrence. Much of this knowledge must have persisted as a residuum of the original experience and functioned subconsciously. Thereby, perhaps, the original secondary visual images were reproduced and emerged into consciousness as the hallucination or pictorial memory.

Similar phenomena indicative of conservation being effected by means of a residuum of the original experience may be produced experimentally in various ways. For instance, in certain hysterics with anesthesia if you prick a number of times a part of the body—say the hand—in which all tactile sensation has been lost, and later direct the subject to look into a crystal, he will see a number, perhaps written on a hand. This number, let us say five, will correctly designate the number of times the hand was pricked. Now, because of the loss of sensibility, the subject was unaware of the pin-pricks. Nevertheless, of course, they were recorded subconsciously, coconsciously)[coconsciously)]. Their subsequent transformation into a visual hallucination not only shows that they were conserved, but that they left something which was capable of taking part, outside of consciousness, in a secondary process which gave rise to the hallucination.

An examination of all crystal visions, so far as they are translated memories of actual experiences, will show this same evidence for a conserved residuum.

That conservation is not merely a figure of speech to express the ability to determine the recurrence of a previous experience, but means a specific residuum capable of independent and elaborate functioning, is brought out more conspicuously in those visions which are elaborately fabricated symbolisms of an antecedent experience. In other words, the vision is not a literal recurrence of a previous phase of consciousness, in that the latter has been worked over, so to speak, so as to appear in consciousness in a reconstructed form. Though reconstructed it either still retains its original meaning or is worked out to a completion of its thoughts, or to a fulfilment of the emotional strivings pertaining to them (anxieties, wishes, etc.). These visions, perhaps, more frequently occur spontaneously, often at moments of crises in a person’s life, but also are observed under experimental conditions. Sometimes they answer the doubts, scruples and other problems which have troubled the subject, sometimes they express the imaginary fulfilment of intense longings or of anxieties and dreads which have been entertained, or disturbing thoughts which have pricked the conscience.[^[46]] We are obliged to conclude, in the light of experimental observations of the same class, that such phenomena are determined by the specific residua of antecedent thoughts which must be conserved and function in a specific manner to appear in this metamorphosed form.

Similar residual processes underlying post-hypnotic phenomena.—Conserved experiences which give rise to more complicated secondary elaboration may be observed in suggested post-hypnotic phenomena. Experiments of this kind may be varied in many ways. The phenomenon may be an hallucination similar to the one I have just described in hysterics, or a so-called subconscious calculation. You suggest in hypnosis to a suitable subject that he shall multiply certain numbers, or calculate the number of seconds intervening between certain hours—let us say between 10:43 and 5:13 o’clock—the answer to be given in writing on a certain day. The subject is then awakened immediately, before he has time to do the calculation while in hypnosis. Later, if the experiment is successful, at the time designated the subject will absent-mindedly or automatically write the figures giving the answer.

There are two modes in which these calculations may be accomplished. In a special and limited class of cases, where there is a large split-off subconscious personality, or doubling of consciousness, the calculation may be made entirely by this secondary subconscious self, in the same fashion as it would be made by the principal personality if the problem were given in the waking state. The subconscious personality will go through each conscious step in the calculation in the same way.[^[47]] In a second class of cases the calculations are worked out, apparently, unconsciously, without participation in the process by a subconscious personality even when such exists. At most it would seem that isolated numbers representing different steps in the calculation arise from time to time coconsciously as a limited secondary consciousness (of which the personal consciousness is unaware) until finally the figures of the completed answer appear therein. The calculation itself appears to be still another process outside both the personal and the secondary consciousness. When the problem has been finished the answer is finally given automatically. The whole process is too complicated to go into at this time before we have studied the problems of the coconscious.[^[48]] It is enough to say that it is[it is] plain that the hypnotic experience—the suggested problem—must be considered as some kind of specific residuum, psychological or neural, and that this residuum must be one capable of quite elaborate independent and subconscious intellectual activity before finally becoming transformed into the final answer.

Residual processes underlying dreams.—When citing the evidence of dreams for the conservation of forgotten experiences I spoke of one type of dream as a symbolical memory. I may now add it is more than this; it is a fabrication. The original experience or thought may appear in the dream after being worked over into a fantasy, allegory, symbolism, or other product of imagination. Such a dream is not a recurrent phase of consciousness, but a newly fabricated phase. Further, analytical and experimental researches go to show that the fabrication is performed by the original phase without the latter recurring in the content of the personal consciousness. The original phase must therefore have been conserved in some form capable of such independent and specific functioning, i.e., fabrication below the threshold of consciousness. For instance:

The subject dreamed that she was standing where two roads separated. One was broad and bright and beautiful, and many people she knew were going that way. The other road was the rocky path, quite dark, and no one was going that way, but she had to go. And she said, “Oh, why must I go this way? Will no one go with me?” And a voice replied, “I will go with you.” She looked around, and there were some tall black figures; they all had names across their foreheads in bright letters, and the one who spoke was Disappointment; and all the others said, “We will go with you,” and they were Sorrow, Loss, Pain, Fear, and Loneliness, and she fell down on her face in anguish.

Now an analysis of the antecedent thought of this subject and a knowledge of her circumstances and mental life, though we cannot go into them here, make it perfectly clear that as a fact, whether there was any causal connection or not, this dream was a symbolic expression of those thoughts. The rocky path has been shown to be symbolic of her conception of her own life entertained through years—the other road symbolic of the life longed for and imagined as granted to others. Likewise the rest of the dream symbolized, in a way which any one can easily recognize, the lot which she had in her disappointment actually fancied was hers. The thoughts thus symbolized had been constantly recurring thoughts and therefore had been conserved. They were reproduced in the dream, not in their original form, but translated into symbols and an allegory. Something must, therefore, have effected the translation. In other words, the dream is not a recurrent phase of consciousness but an allegorical fabrication which expresses these thoughts, not literally as they originally occurred, but in the form of an imaginative story. Now the similarity of the allegorical dream thoughts to the original thoughts can be explained only in two ways: either as pure chance coincidence, or through a relation of cause and effect. In the latter case the dream might have been determined either by the specific antecedent thoughts in question—those revealed as memories in the analysis, or both series might have been determined by a third, as yet unrevealed, series. For the purposes of the present problem it is immaterial which so long as the dream was determined by some antecedent thought. The very great frequency, not to say universality, with which this same similarity or a logical relation with antecedent thoughts is found in dreams after analysis renders chance coincidence very improbable. We must believe, therefore, that the dream was determined by antecedent experiences. It is beyond my purpose to enter here into an exposition of the theory of the mechanism of dreams, although I shall touch upon it later in some detail in connection with subconscious processes. We need here only concern ourselves with this mechanism so far as it bears upon the principle of conservation. Suffice it to say that analytical observations (Freud) have, it seems to me, conclusively shown that conserved experiences may be not only the determining factors in dreams, but that while in a state of conservation they are capable of undergoing elaborate fabrication and afterwards appearing so thoroughly transformed in consciousness as not to be superficially recognizable. I have also been able to reach the same conclusions by the method of experimental production of dreams.

The only question is, in what form can a thought be so conserved that it can, while still in a state of conservation, without itself rising into consciousness, fabricate a symbolism, allegory, or other work requiring imagination and reasoning? The only logical and intelligible inference is that the antecedent conscious experience has been either itself specifically conserved as such outside of the personal consciousness, or has left some neural residuum or disposition capable of functioning and constructing the conscious dream fabrication.

Residual processes underlying physiological bodily disturbances.—Before proceeding further I would invite your attention to another class of facts as these facts must be taken into consideration in any theory of conservation. These facts show that the residua can, by subconscious functioning, induce physiological bodily manifestations without reproducing the original mental experience as conscious memory. In certain abnormal conditions of the nervous system, i.e., in certain psychoneuroses, we meet with certain involuntary actions of the limbs or muscles known as spasms and contractures; also with certain impairment of functions such as blindness, deafness, loss of sensation (anesthesia), paralysis, etc. These disturbances are purely functional, meaning that they are not due to any organic disease. Now the evidence seems to be conclusive that these physiological disturbances are caused sometimes by ideas after they have passed out of consciousness and become, as ideas, dormant, i.e., while they are in a state of conservation and have ceased to be ideas—or, at least, ideas of which the subject is aware. A moment’s consideration will convince you that this means that ideas, or, at least, experiences in a state of conservation, and without being reproduced as conscious memory, can so function as to affect the body in one or other of the ways I have mentioned. To do this they must exist in some specific form that is independent of the personal consciousness of the moment. To take, for example, an actual case which I have elsewhere described:

B. C. A., in a dream, had a visual hallucination of a flash of light which revealed a scene in a cave and which was followed by blindness such as would physiologically follow a tremendous flash. In the dream she is warned that if she looks into the cave, she will be blinded. She looks; there is a blinding flash and loss of vision follows; after waking she was still partially blind, but she continued from time to time to see momentary flashes of light revealing certain of the objects seen in the dream in the cave, and these flashes would be succeeded temporarily by absolute blindness as in the dream. She had no memory of the dream. Now psychological analysis disclosed the meaning of the dream; it was a symbolical representation of certain conserved (subconscious) previous thoughts—thoughts apprehensive of the future into which she dared not look, thinking she would be overwhelmed. While in a state of conservation the residua of these antecedent thoughts had translated themselves into the symbolical hallucination of the dream and the loss of vision. Similarly after waking, although she had no memory of the dream, the conserved residua of the same thoughts continued to translate themselves into visual hallucinations and to induce blindness.[^[49]] It would take too long for me to enter here into the details of the analysis which forces this conclusion.[^[50]]

Similarly, as is well known, convulsions resembling epilepsy, paralysis, spasms, tics, contractures, etc., may be caused directly or indirectly by ideas, after they have passed out of consciousness and ceased to take part in the conscious processes of thought. At least that is the interpretation which the facts elicited by the various methods of investigation seem to require.

There is an analogous class of phenomena which ought to be mentioned among the possible data bearing upon the theory of memory, although too much weight cannot be placed upon them as their interpretation is not wholly clear. I will discuss them in detail later in connection with the phenomena of the emotions. They are certain emotional phenomena which are attributed by some writers to ideas in a state of conservation. It has been demonstrated that ideas to which strong feeling tones are attached are accompanied by such physiological effects as disturbance of respiration, of the heart’s action, of the vaso-motor system, of the secretions, etc., and also by certain galvanic phenomena which are due to the diminution of the electrical resistance of the body, probably caused by increased secretion of sweat.[^[51]]

Now the point is that such phenomena are sometimes experimentally obtained in connection with certain test words[^[52]] spoken to the subject experimented upon, although he has no recollection of any incident in his life which could have given an emotional tone to the word and, therefore, can give no explanation of the physical reaction. By various technical methods, however, memories of a forgotten emotional experience in which the idea (represented by the word) plays a part and through which it derived its emotional tone are resurrected. I have been able to obtain such reactions from test words which investigation showed referred to the incidents of terrifying dreams which were completely forgotten in the waking state. When the test word was given, the subject might, for instance, exhibit a respiratory disturbance—a sudden gasp—without conscious knowledge of its significance, and the galvanometer, with which the subject was in circuit, would show a wide deflection. Recovery of the dream in hypnosis would explain the meaning of the emotional disturbance excited by the word. The interpretation which has been put upon such phenomena is that the residua of the forgotten experience are “struck” by the test word. As the forgotten experience originally included the emotion and its physiological reaction, so the residua are linked by association to the emotional mechanism and when stimulated function as a subconscious process and excite the reaction. If this interpretation, strongly held by some, be correct, the phenomena are important for the support they give to the theory of conservation. They would indicate that conscious experiences must be conserved in a very specific subconscious form, one that is capable, without becoming conscious memory, of exciting the physiological apparatus of the emotions in a manner identical with that of conscious emotional ideas. They are open, however, to a simpler explanation, whether more probable or not: namely, that it is not the residua of the forgotten experience which unconsciously excite the physiological reaction, but the auditory symbol, the test word itself. The symbol having been once associated with the emotional reaction, it afterwards of itself, through a short circuit so to speak, suffices to induce the reaction, though the origin of the association has been forgotten and, therefore, the subject is in entire ignorance of the reason for the strong feeling manifestation. On the other hand, in some instances test words associated with emotional experiences which originally were entirely coconscious and had never entered conscious awareness at all give the reactions in question.[^[53]] As coconscious memories of such experiences can be demonstrated it would seem at first sight as if under such conditions the word-reactions must come from a true subconscious process—the subconscious memory. And yet even here it is difficult to eliminate absolutely the possibility of the second interpretation. There are, however, a large number of emotional phenomena occurring in pathological conditions which can only be intelligibly interpreted as being due to the residua of previously conscious experiences functioning as a subconscious process. These phenomena we shall have occasion to review in succeeding lectures. They are too complex to enter upon at this stage.

Aside, then, from these word-reactions we have a sufficient number of other phenomena, such as I have cited, which indicate that conscious experiences when conserved must persist in a form capable of exciting purely physiological reactions without the experiences themselves rising into consciousness again as memory. The form must also be one which permits of their functioning as intelligent processes although not within the conscious field of awareness of the moment.

As a final summing up of the experiments and observations of the kind which I have thus far cited, dealing with forgotten experiences, we may say that they lead us to the following conclusions:

1. That conservation is something very different from reproduction.

2. A given experience is conserved through the medium of some kind of residuum of that experience. This residuum must have a specific existence independent of consciousness, in that it is capable of specific and independent functioning, coincidentally with and outside of the consciousness of any given moment. Its nature must be such that it can incite through specific processes the following phenomena in none of which the conscious processes of the moment take part as factors:

(a) Specific memory for the given experience expressed through the established physiological mechanisms of external expression (speech, writing, gestures) after the manner of a mnesic process.

(b) A mnesic hallucination which is a representation of the antecedent perceptual experience but after having undergone translation into terms of another sense.

(c) A mnesic hallucination in which the original experience appears synthesized with various other experiences into an elaborate representation of a complex experience, or secondarily elaborated into a symbolism, allegory or other fabrication.

(d) Mnesic phenomena which are a logical continuation of the antecedent conscious experiences and such as ordinarily are produced by conscious processes of thought—reasoning, imagination, volition (mathematical calculations, versification, fabrication, etc.).

(e) Physical phenomena (paralyses contractures, vasomotor disturbances, etc.).

In other words a specific experience while in a state of conservation and without being reproduced in consciousness can incite or induce processes which incite these and similar phenomena.

[45]. Lecture III, p. [58].

[46]. For specific instances, see Lecture VII.

[47]. Morton Prince: Experimental Evidence for Coconscious Ideation, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, April-May, 1908.

[48]. For further details, see Lecture VI, p. 169.