The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams, стр. 824

BOOK 8

Unconscious in the same disguised way as the bad ones. As Freud himself has acutely remarked (in The Ego and the Id), “‘ The normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes, but also far more moral than he has any idea of.”

Hypnosis is one way of getting into touch with the Unconscious, but it is not the only way. At moments between the unconsciousness of sleep and the full consciousness of waking existence come those flashes of something neither real nor absolutely nonexistent which we call dreams. We have opened to us a world of emotions and images, undisciplined, uncontrolled by any logic, regardless of criticisms. Sometimes dreaming may bring before us things in our mind we never imagined were there : hates, desires, fantastic suggestions. Sometimes it may reveal unsuspected connections. Sometimes it may diagnose disease. As we come awake, logical thinking and self-control assert themselves. We try to lay hold of these strange intimations before they sink back into the darkness. We attempt to rationalize the strange vision. It is rare that the Unconscious produces an abstract idea or a logical process—perhaps it never does so. It thinks —if we can say it thinks—not in abstractions, but in sensuous symbols. We do not find the idea of power in our dreams, we find giants and monsters. We do not find truth, but balances and rectilinear figures. We do not find love, but endearments and embraces. ‘This is no longer the method of adult human thought ; it recalls the fantasies of childhood, the mythologies of savages and a more primitive stage in the development of our race. The psycho-analysts have gone far in codifying of the symbols the Unconscious uses, and connecting them with the intricately symbolic art of the early world. Early man had to express and work out his ideas in complex images, because the methods of abstraction and_ logical thought had still to develop. He was incapable of abstractions, and so it seems is the ordinary Unconscious, the artist of our dreams, to this day.

The conception of the Unconscious as, among other things, a realm of repressions, it must be understood, is a relative one. Relative to the conscious self. When dissociation is at work, the dissociated mindsystem is, from the viewpoint of the rest of the mind, part of the Unconscious ; but the processes going on may be conscious within its own boundaries. There are numerous well-authenticated cases where two part-systems within one mind can be

798

THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER 7

made to do different things at the same time, without one being conscious of what the other is doing. Some people, for example, with the gift of automatic writing, can be engaged in conversation, and then, if a pencil be put softly into their hand and questions whispered to them, will write perfectly intelligent answers—without the main self knowing anything about it. The system that writes behaves just as if it were conscious ; to believe it is not conscious raises more difficulties than to believe it is.

§ 6 The Splitting of the Self: Multiple

Personalities

This concurrent activity of entirely separate mental processes is our first introduction to a series of phenomena, which in their complete development amount to the existence, side by side, in one brain, of two or more active mental systems so disconnected and so highly developed as to be in effect separate persons.

A classical example of multiple personality, as this type of derangement is called, has been described by Morton Prince in a book

far more absorbing than most novels, The Dissociation of a Personality. Let us tell the story as briefly as we can. Miss B had

been a nervous child, solitary and addicted to day-dreaming, living in an unhappy home. She became a hospital nurse, and when eighteen formed a romantic attachment to a young man, but soon afterwards went through an emotional crisis, apparently because the young man’s expression of his affection was not so idealistic as hers. During the next six years Miss B’s character changed considerably. She went to college and became very studious; but remained neurotic, with poor general health, and eventually called in Dr. Prince.

Then came another emotional shock, again connected with her love-affair; she sent for Dr. Prince, and in his presence actually underwent a sudden change of personality. From now on, for over a year, this new personality alternated with the old; first one and then the other was in possession of Miss B’s bodily equipment.

Dr. Prince speaks of these two personalities as Br and By. Analysis showed that they represented complementary phases ot character. Br was the girl Dr. Prince had known before the crisis. She remained studious, submissive, retiring, religious, selfsacrificing and highly suggestible. B4 was quite a different creature—self-assertive and: