The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams, стр. 822

BOOK 8

tion between the two systems. One which is in abeyance during hypnosis resumes, as the main stream of awareness, the personal consciousness. The other system “goes under” at the end of the trance. But though it is not apparent in consciousness, it is still somehow active. It becomes apparent by its influence as an urge of which the sources are hidden. Possibly it bears with it a faint consciousness of its own which has no relation with the consciousness of the general self.

In the language of psychology, a language repudiated by the Behaviourists, the phenomena of suggestion are a proof of the existence of an underworld of mind, a welter of activities, of which the personal self is unconscious and which are yet of the same nature as consciousness. ‘This underworld is called by the psychologists “‘ the Unconscious’ or ‘“‘the Subconscious,’ using the article “‘ the” and a capital letter to indicate that the word is used in a special and definite sense for this world of masked, hidden, disconnected and unremembered activities. In the work we shall prefer the former term, the Unconscious. It is a region of events out of reach either of direct observation or direct introspection. We can, as we have just seen, get reactions from it through hypnosis and we shall find that in many other ways its activities well up and affect the conscious sphere. The realization of the existence and activities of the Unconscious is the fundamental idea of this modern psychology.

Generally the Behaviourist avoids the use of any particular name for the restrained, sleeping, or inactive regions of the cortex outside the system concerned in the behaviour of the subject. Clearly, he will find no difficulty in recognizing that the inhibition of any region may be incomplete and that a secondary system of nervous reactions may arise and at last come to mingle or conflict with the ruling system in progress. Or that a ruling system of reactions may be split into divergent systems with a decreasing and disappearing amount of inter-communication. In such terms all this world of phenomena we are now describing, all this splitting of the personality, and all this appearance of barriers between process and process, may perhaps be stated. But for the last thirty years it is the language of psychology that has ruled this field of research, and in that language it is that we must deal with its facts here.

It is a language very liable to certain forms of misconception that have to be

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THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER 7

borne in mind. In the first place the name (with its capital letter) of “‘ the Unconscious for this outer welter of “ mental ”’ activity “below the threshold of consciousness ” gives a false unity to what is really a vast and vaguely defined miscellany. Indeed, at times it personifies this miscellany. The tendency to think of it as a second self, a self in the dark, equivalent in its complexity and homogeneity to the conscious self, is a very powerful tendency and few escape it altogether. But it has no such cohesive factor as the consciousness of self provides. Its groupings and systems are capable of limitless inconsistency. Selfhood is precisely what it does not possess. It is not indeed a mere confusion, a chaos of unrelated things. It has its systems; its groupings of emotions and ideas, and some of them may be very complicated systems. But they gather to no head until they enter the conscious field.

In no science perhaps is terminology so metaphorical and inexact as in this field of psychology. Consciousness as consciousness seems to be nonspatial and the Unconscious is of the same nature, yet, for want of anything better, we are continually driven to use spatial metaphors in talking about its activities and to speak of “parts of the mind,” to distinguish between “ superficial’? and “ deep’? mental processes and the like. So long as the loosely metaphorical quality of such statements is remembered, we may not be greatly misled by them.

And having made these explanations we can proceed to explore this “stirring and teeming wilderness,’ this underworld of the Unconscious, as the psychologist sees it. It has many “ levels” and many “ regions,” and hypnosis enables us to make a general survey of its extent. Many hypnotic results are concerned only with the superficial unconscious. When a post-hypnotic command, such as shutting a door at a given signal, is concerned, we seem to be altogether at the superficial level. There is*a barrier, which has somehow been inserted and left, between shutting the door and knowing why we want to shut it, that a simple verbal suggestion can remove. The unconscious element here is quite of the same stuff as normal conscious thinking and doing.

But hypnosis can carry us down from such surface effects as this to regions normally inaccessible to conscious activities. During hypnosis, the operator, as we have already noted, can tap regions of the subject’s being which in healthy waking life are partially or wholly out of conscious control, and can

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