CHAPTER SEVEN (Continued...)
F. The Unconscious and Consciousness. Reality.
If we look more closely, we may observe that the
psychological considerations examined in the foregoing chapter require us
to assume, not the existence of two systems near the motor end of the
psychic apparatus, but two kinds of processes or courses taken by
excitation. But this does not disturb us; for we must always be ready to
drop our auxiliary ideas, when we think we are in a position to replace
them by something which comes closer to the unknown reality. Let us now
try to correct certain views which may have taken a misconceived form as
long as we regarded the two systems, in the crudest and most obvious
sense, as two localities within the psychic apparatus- views which have
left a precipitate in the terms repression and penetration. Thus, when we
say that an unconscious thought strives for translation into the
preconscious in order subsequently to penetrate through to consciousness,
we do not mean that a second idea has to be formed, in a new locality,
like a paraphrase, as it were, whilst the original persists by its side;
and similarly, when we speak of penetration into consciousness, we wish
carefully to detach from this notion any idea of a change of locality.
When we say that a preconscious idea is repressed and subsequently
absorbed by the unconscious, we might be tempted by these images, borrowed
from the idea of a struggle for a particular territory, to assume that an
arrangement is really broken up in the one psychic locality and replaced
by a new one in the other locality. For these comparisons we will
substitute a description which would seem to correspond more closely to
the real state of affairs; we will say that an energic cathexis is shifted
to or withdrawn from a certain arrangement, so that the psychic formation
falls under the domination of a given instance or is withdrawn from it.
Here again we replace a topographical mode of representation by a dynamic
one; it is not the psychic formation that appears to us as the mobile
element, but its innervation. *
* This conception underwent elaboration and
modification when it was recognized that the essential character of a
preconscious idea was its connection with the residues of verbal ideas.
See The Unconscious, p. 428 below.
Nevertheless, I think it expedient and justifiable to
continue to use the illustrative idea of the two systems. We shall avoid
any abuse of this mode of representation if we remember that ideas,
thoughts, and psychic formations in general must not in any case be
localized in organic elements of the nervous system but, so to speak,
between them, where resistances and association-tracks form the correlate
corresponding to them. Everything that can become an object of internal
perception is virtual, like the image in the telescope produced by the
crossing of light-rays. But we are justified in thinking of the systems-
which have nothing psychic in themselves, and which never become
accessible to our psychic perception- as something similar to the lenses
of the telescope, which project the image. If we continue this comparison,
we might say that the censorship between the two systems corresponds to
the refraction of rays on passing into a new medium.
Thus far, we have developed our psychology on our own
responsibility; it is now time to turn and look at the doctrines
prevailing in modern psychology, and to examine the relation of these to
our theories. The problem of the unconscious in psychology is, according
to the forcible statement of Lipps, * less a psychological problem than
the problem of psychology. As long as psychology disposed of this problem
by the verbal explanation that the psychic is the conscious, and that
unconscious psychic occurrences are an obvious contradiction, there was no
possibility of a physician's observations of abnormal mental states being
turned to any psychological account. The physician and the philosopher can
meet only when both acknowledge that unconscious psychic processes is the
appropriate and justified expression for all established fact. The
physician cannot but reject, with a shrug of his shoulders, the assertion
that consciousness is the indispensable quality of the psychic; if his
respect for the utterances of the philosophers is still great enough, he
may perhaps assume that he and they do not deal with the same thing and do
not pursue the same science. For a single intelligent observation of the
psychic life of a neurotic, a single analysis of a dream, must force upon
him the unshakable conviction that the most complicated and the most
accurate operations of thought, to which the name of psychic occurrences
can surely not be refused, may take place without arousing consciousness.
*(2) The physician, it is true, does not learn of these unconscious
processes until they have produced an effect on consciousness which admits
of communication or observation. But this effect on consciousness may show
a psychic character which differs completely from the unconscious process,
so that internal perception cannot possibly recognize in the first a
substitute for the second. The physician must reserve himself the right to
penetrate, by a Process of deduction, from the effect on consciousness to
the unconscious psychic process; he learns in this way that the effect on
consciousness is only a remote psychic product of the unconscious process,
and that the latter has not become conscious as such, and has, moreover,
existed and operated without in any way betraying itself to consciousness.
-
* Der Begriff des Unbewussten in der Psychologie.
Lecture delivered at the Third International Psychological Congress at
Munich, 1897.
*(2) I am happy to be able to point to an author who
has drawn from the study of dreams the same conclusion as regards the
relation between consciousness and the unconscious.
Du Prel says: "The problem: what is the psyche,
manifestly requires a preliminary examination as to whether consciousness
and psyche are identical. But it is just this preliminary question which
is answered in the negative by the dream, which shows that the concept of
the psyche extends beyond that of consciousness, much as the gravitational
force of a star extends beyond its sphere of luminosity" (Philos. d.
Mystik, p. 47).
"It is a truth which cannot be sufficiently emphasized
that the concepts of consciousness and of the psyche are not co-extensive"
(p. 306).
A return from the over-estimation of the property of
consciousness is the indispensable preliminary to any genuine insight into
the course of psychic events. As Lipps has said, the unconscious must be
accepted as the general basis of the psychic life. The unconscious is the
larger circle which includes the smaller circle of the conscious;
everything conscious has a preliminary unconscious stage, whereas the
unconscious can stop at this stage, and yet claim to be considered a full
psychic function. The unconscious is the true psychic reality; in its
inner nature it is just as much unknown to us as the reality of the
external world, and it is just as imperfectly communicated to us by the
data of consciousness as is the external world by the reports of our
sense-organs.
We get rid of a series of dream-problems which have
claimed much attention from earlier writers on the subject when the old
antithesis between conscious life and dream-life is discarded, and the
unconscious psychic assigned to its proper place. Thus, many of the
achievements which are a matter for wonder in a dream are now no longer to
be attributed to dreaming, but to unconscious thinking, which is active
also during the day. If the dream seems to make play with a symbolical
representation of the body, as Scherner has said, we know that this is the
work of certain unconscious phantasies, which are probably under the sway
of sexual impulses and find expression not only in dreams, but also in
hysterical phobias and other symptoms. If the dream continues and
completes mental work begun during the day, and even brings valuable new
ideas to light, we have only to strip off the dream-disguise from this, as
the contribution of the dream-work, and a mark of the assistance of dark
powers in the depths of the psyche (cf. the devil in Tartini's
sonata-dream). The intellectual achievement as such belongs to the same
psychic forces as are responsible for all such achievements during the
day. We are probably much too inclined to over-estimate the conscious
character even of intellectual and artistic production. From the reports
of certain writers who have been highly productive, such as Goethe and
Helmholtz, we learn, rather, that the most essential and original part of
their creations came to them in the form of inspirations, and offered
itself to their awareness in an almost completed state. In other cases,
where there is a concerted effort of all the psychic forces, there is
nothing strange in the fact that conscious activity, too, lends its aid.
But it is the much-abused privilege of conscious activity to hide from us
all other activities wherever it participates.
It hardly seems worth while to take up the historical
significance of dreams as a separate theme. Where, for instance, a leader
has been impelled by a dream to engage in a bold undertaking, the success
of which has had the effect of changing history, a new problem arises only
so long as the dream is regarded as a mysterious power and contrasted with
other more familiar psychic forces. The problem disappears as soon as we
regard the dream as a form of expression for impulses to which a
resistance was attached during the day, whilst at night they were able to
draw reinforcement from deep-lying sources of excitation. * But the great
respect with which the ancient peoples regarded dreams is based on a just
piece of psychological divination. It is a homage paid to the unsubdued
and indestructible element in the human soul, to the demonic power which
furnishes the dream- wish, and which we have found again in our
unconscious.
* Cf. (chapter II.), the dream (Sa-Turos) of Alexander
the Great at the siege of Tyre.
It is not without purpose that I use the expression in
our unconscious, for what we so call does not coincide with the
unconscious of the philosophers, nor with the unconscious of Lipps. As
they use the term, it merely means the opposite of the conscious. That
there exist not only conscious but also unconscious psychic processes is
the opinion at issue, which is so hotly contested and so energetically
defended. Lipps enunciates the more comprehensive doctrine that everything
psychic exists as unconscious, but that some of it may exist also as
conscious. But it is not to prove this doctrine that we have adduced the
phenomena of dreams and hysterical symptom-formation; the observation of
normal life alone suffices to establish its correctness beyond a doubt.
The novel fact that we have learned from the analysis of
psycho-pathological formations, and indeed from the first member of the
group, from dreams, is that the unconscious- and hence all that is
psychic- occurs as a function of two separate systems, and that as such it
occurs even in normal psychic life. There are consequently two kinds of
unconscious, which have not as yet been distinguished by psychologists.
Both are unconscious in the psychological sense; but in our sense the
first, which we call Ucs, is likewise incapable of consciousness; whereas
the second we call Pcs because its excitations, after the observance of
certain rules, are capable of reaching consciousness; perhaps not before
they have again undergone censorship, but nevertheless regardless of the
Ucs system. The fact that in order to attain consciousness the excitations
must pass through an unalterable series, a succession of instances, as is
betrayed by the changes produced in them by the censorship, has enabled us
to describe them by analogy in spatial terms. We described the relations
of the two systems to each other and to consciousness by saying that the
system Pcs is like a screen between the system Ucs and consciousness. The
system Pcs not only bars access to consciousness, but also controls the
access to voluntary motility, and has control of the emission of a mobile
cathectic energy, a portion of which is familiar to us as attention. *
* Cf. here my remarks in the Proceedings of the Society
for Psychical Research, vol. xxvi, in which the descriptive, dynamic and
systematic meanings of the ambiguous word Unconscious are distinguished
from one another.
We must also steer clear of the distinction between the
super- conscious and the subconscious, which has found such favor in the
more recent literature on the psychoneuroses, for just such a distinction
seems to emphasize the equivalence of what is psychic and what is
conscious.
What role is now left, in our representation of things,
to the phenomenon of consciousness, once so all-powerful and over-
shadowing all else? None other than that of a sense-organ for the
perception of psychic qualities. According to the fundamental idea of our
schematic attempt we can regard conscious perception only as the function
proper to a special system for which the abbreviated designation Cs
commends itself. This system we conceive to be similar in its mechanical
characteristics to the perception-system P, and hence excitable by
qualities, and incapable of retaining the trace of changes: i.e., devoid
of memory. The psychic apparatus which, with the sense-organ of the
P-systems, is turned to the outer world, is itself the outer world for the
sense-organ of Cs, whose teleological justification depends on this
relationship. We are here once more confronted with the principle of the
succession of instances which seems to dominate the structure of the
apparatus. The material of excitation flows to the sense-organ Cs from two
sides: first from the P-system, whose excitation, qualitatively
conditioned, probably undergoes a new elaboration until it attains
conscious perception; and, secondly, from the interior of the apparatus
itself, whose quantitative processes are perceived as a qualitative series
of pleasures and pains once they have reached consciousness after
undergoing certain changes.
The philosophers, who became aware that accurate and
highly complicated thought-structures are possible even without the co-
operation of consciousness, thus found it difficult to ascribe any
function to consciousness; it appeared to them a superfluous mirroring of
the completed psychic process. The analogy of our Cs system with the
perception-systems relieves us of this embarrassment. We see that
perception through our sense-organs results in directing an
attention-cathexis to the paths along which the incoming sensory
excitation diffuses itself; the qualitative excitation of the P-system
serves the mobile quantity in the psychic apparatus as a regulator of its
discharge. We may claim the same function for the overlying sense-organ of
the Cs system. By perceiving new qualities, it furnishes a new
contribution for the guidance and suitable distribution of the mobile
cathexis-quantities. By means of perceptions of pleasure and pain, it
influences the course of the cathexes within the psychic apparatus, which
otherwise operates unconsciously and by the displacement of quantities. It
is probable that the pain- principle first of all regulates the
displacements of cathexis automatically, but it is quite possible that
consciousness contributes a second and more subtle regulation of these
qualities, which may even oppose the first, and perfect the functional
capacity of the apparatus, by placing it in a position contrary to its
original design, subjecting even that which induces pain to cathexis and
to elaboration. We learn from neuro- psychology that an important part in
the functional activity of the apparatus is ascribed to these regulations
by the qualitative excitations of the sense-organs. The automatic rule of
the primary pain-principle, together with the limitation of functional
capacity bound up with it, is broken by the sensory regulations, which are
themselves again automatisms. We find that repression, which, though
originally expedient, nevertheless finally brings about a harmful lack of
inhibition and of psychic control, overtakes memories much more easily
than it does perceptions, because in the former there is no additional
cathexis from the excitation of the psychic sense-organs. Whilst an idea
which is to be warded off may fail to become conscious because it has
succumbed to repression, it may on other occasions come to be repressed
simply because it has been withdrawn from conscious perception on other
grounds. These are clues which we make use of in therapy in order to undo
accomplished repressions.
The value of the hyper-cathexis which is produced by
the regulating influence of the Cs sense-organs on the mobile quantity is
demonstrated in a teleological context by nothing more clearly than by the
creation of a new series of qualities, and consequently a new regulation,
which constitutes the prerogative of man over animals. For the mental
processes are in themselves unqualitative except for the excitations of
pleasure and pain which accompany them: which, as we know, must be kept
within limits as possible disturbers of thought. In order to endow them
with quality, they are associated in man with verbal memories, the
qualitative residues of which suffice to draw upon them the attention of
consciousness, which in turn endows thought with a new mobile cathexis.
It is only on a dissection of hysterical mental
processes that the manifold nature of the problems of consciousness
becomes apparent. One then receives the impression that the transition
from the preconscious to the conscious cathexis is associated with a
censorship similar to that between Ucs and Pcs. This censorship, too,
begins to act only when a certain quantitative limit is reached, so that
thought-formations which are not very intense escape it. All possible
cases of detention from consciousness and of penetration into
consciousness under certain restrictions are included within the range of
psychoneurotic phenomena; all point to the intimate and twofold connection
between the censorship and consciousness. I shall conclude these
psychological considerations with the record of two such occurrences.
On the occasion of a consultation a few years ago, the
patient was an intelligent-looking girl with a simple, unaffected manner.
She was strangely attired; for whereas a woman's dress is usually
carefully thought out to the last pleat, one of her stockings was hanging
down and two of the buttons of her blouse were undone. She complained of
pains in one of her legs, and exposed her calf without being asked to do
so. Her chief complaint, however, was as follows: She had a feeling in her
body as though something were sticking into it which moved to and fro and
shook her through and through. This sometimes seemed to make her whole
body stiff. On hearing this, my colleague in consultation looked at me:
the trouble was quite obvious to him. To both of us it seemed peculiar
that this suggested nothing to the patient's mother, though she herself
must repeatedly have been in the situation described by her child. As for
the girl, she had no idea of the import of her words, or she would never
have allowed them to pass her lips. Here the censorship had been
hoodwinked so successfully that under the mask of an innocent complaint a
phantasy was admitted to consciousness which otherwise would have remained
in the preconscious.
Another example: I began the psycho-analytic treatment
of a boy fourteen who was suffering from tic convulsif, hysterical
vomiting, headache, etc., by assuring him that after closing his eyes he
would see pictures or that ideas would occur to him, which he was to
communicate to me. He replied by describing pictures. The last impression
he had received before coming to me was revived visually in his memory. He
had been playing a game of checkers with his uncle, and now he saw the
checkerboard before him. He commented on various positions that were
favorable or unfavorable, on moves that were not safe to make. He then
saw a dagger lying on the checker-board- an object belonging to his
father, but which his phantasy laid on the checker-board. Then a sickle
was lying on the board; a scythe was added; and finally, he saw the image
of an old peasant mowing the grass in front of his father's house far
away. A few days later I discovered the meaning of this series of
pictures. Disagreeable family circumstances had made the boy excited and
nervous. Here was a case of a harsh, irascible father, who had lived
unhappily with the boy's mother, and whose educational methods consisted
of threats; he had divorced his gentle and delicate wife, and remarried;
one day he brought home a young woman as the boy's new mother. The illness
of the fourteen-year-old boy developed a few days later. It was the
suppressed rage against his father that had combined these images into
intelligible allusions. The material was furnished by a mythological
reminiscence. The sickle was that with which Zeus castrated his father;
the scythe and the image of the peasant represented Kronos, the violent
old man who devours his children, and upon whom Zeus wreaks his vengeance
in so unfilial a manner. The father's marriage gave the boy an opportunity
of returning the reproaches and threats which the child had once heard his
father utter because he played with his genitals (the draught-board; the
prohibited moves; the dagger with which one could kill). We have here
long-impressed memories and their unconscious derivatives which, under the
guise of meaningless pictures, have slipped into consciousness by the
devious paths opened to them.
If I were asked what is the theoretical value of the
study of dreams, I should reply that it lies in the additions to
psychological knowledge and the beginnings of an understanding of the
neuroses which we thereby obtain. Who can foresee the importance a
thorough knowledge of the structure and functions of the psychic apparatus
may attain, when even our present state of knowledge permits of successful
therapeutic intervention in the curable forms of psychoneuroses? But, it
may be asked, what of the practical value of this study in regard to a
knowledge of the psyche and discovery of the hidden peculiarities of
individual character? Have not the unconscious impulses revealed by dreams
the value of real forces in the psychic life? Is the ethical significance
of the suppressed wishes to be lightly disregarded, since, just as they
now create dreams, they may some day create other things?
I do not feel justified in answering these questions. I
have not followed up this aspect of the problem of dreams. In any case,
however, I believe that the Roman Emperor was in the wrong in ordering one
of his subjects to be executed because the latter had dreamt that he had
killed the Emperor. He should first of all have endeavored to discover
the significance of the man's dreams; most probably it was not what it
seemed to be. And even if a dream of a different content had actually had
this treasonable meaning, it would still have been well to recall the
words of Plato- that the virtuous man contents himself with dreaming of
that which the wicked man does in actual life. I am therefore of the
opinion that dreams should be acquitted of evil. Whether any reality is to
be attributed to the unconscious wishes, I cannot say. Reality must, of
course, be denied to all transitory and intermediate thoughts. If we had
before us the unconscious wishes, brought to their final and truest
expression, we should still do well to remember that psychic reality is a
special form of existence which must not be confounded with material
reality. It seems, therefore, unnecessary that people should refuse to
accept the responsibility for the immorality of their dreams. With an
appreciation of the mode of functioning of the psychic apparatus, and an
insight into the relations between conscious and unconscious, all that is
ethically offensive in our dream-life and the life of phantasy for the
most part disappears.
"What a dream has told us of our relations to the
present (reality) we will then seek also in our consciousness and we must
not be surprised if we discover that the monster we saw under the
magnifying-glass of the analysis is a tiny little infusorian" (H. Sachs).
For all practical purposes in judging human character,
a man's actions and conscious expressions of thought are in most cases
sufficient. Actions, above all, deserve to be placed in the front rank;
for many impulses which penetrate into consciousness are neutralized by
real forces in the psychic life before they find issue in action; indeed,
the reason why they frequently do not encounter any psychic obstacle on
their path is because the unconscious is certain of their meeting with
resistances later. In any case, it is highly instructive to learn
something of the intensively tilled soil from which our virtues proudly
emerge. For the complexity of human character, dynamically moved in all
directions, very rarely accommodates itself to the arbitrament of a simple
alternative, as our antiquated moral philosophy would have it.
And what of the value of dreams in regard to our
knowledge of the future? That, of course, is quite out of the question.
One would like to substitute the words: in regard to our knowledge of the
past. For in every sense a dream has its origin in the past. The ancient
belief that dreams reveal the future is not indeed entirely devoid of the
truth. By representing a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us
into the future; but this future, which the dreamer accepts as his
present, has been shaped in the likeness of the past by the indestructible
wish.
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