Psychotherapy by Hugo Münsterberg (world of reading .TXT) 📕

The story of the subconscious mind can be told in three words: there is none. But it may need many more words to make clear what that means, and to show where the misunderstanding of those who give to the subconscious almost the chief rôle in the mental performance sets in. The psychology of suggestion, for instance, which we have now fully discussed without even mentioning the word subconscious, figures in most popular books in the treatises of both physicians and ministers as a wonderful dominance of the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind alone receives the suggestions and makes them effective, the subconscious mind controls the suggestive processes in consciousness, and the subconscious mind comes into the foreground and takes entire hold of the situation when the hypnotic state sets in.

But we are always assured that there is no need of turning to the mystery of suggestion and hypnotism to find that uncanny subpersonality in us. We try to remember a name, or we think of the solution of a problem; what we are seeking does not come to consciousness and now we turn to other things; and suddenly the name flashes up in our mind or the solution of the problem becomes clear to us. Who can doubt that the subconscious mind has performed the act? While our attention was given over to other questions, the subconscious mind took up the search and troubled itself with the problem and neatly performed what our conscious mind was unable to produce. Moreover in every situation we are performing a thousand useful and well-adapted acts with our body without thinking of the end and aim. What else but the subconscious mind directs our steps, controls our movements, and adjusts our life to its surroundings? And is not every memory picture, every reminiscence of earlier experiences a sufficient proof that the subconscious mind holds its own? The poem which we learned years ago did not remain somewhere lingering in our consciousness, and if we can repeat it today, it must be because our subconscious mind has kept it carefully in its store and is ready to supply us when consciousness has need for it.

Surely if we think how this, our subconscious mind, is able to hold all our memories and all our learning, and how it transacts all the work of controlling our useful actions and of bringing up the right ideas, we may well acknowledge that compared with it our conscious life is rather a small part. It is as with the iceberg in the ocean; we know that only a small part is visible above the surface of the water and a ten times larger mountain swims below the sea. It seems, therefore, only logical to attach this whole subconscious mental life to a special subconscious personality. Then we come to the popular theory of the two minds in us, the upper and the lower, of which we can hardly doubt that the lower one has on the whole the larger part of the business to perform. And we certainly have no right to give to the word lower mind the side-meaning that the activity is of a lower order. The most brilliant thoughts of the genius are not manufactured in his upper consciousness, they spring suddenly into his mind, their whole creation belongs thus to the assiduous work of the subconscious neighbor. There the inventor and discoverer gets his guidance, there the poet gets his inspiration, there the religious mind gets its beliefs. In short, the constitution of the mental state allows on the whole to the upper consciousness a rather decorative part while the real work is left for the lower house.

Yet it must be acknowledged that the scholars somewhat disagree as to the dignity of the lower mind. Considering the usually accepted fact that in hypnotism the lower mind comes entirely over the surface, just these hypnotic events can indeed suggest two different views of the subconscious and this doubleness is reënforced if we still add the entertaining material which comes to light by the automatic writing of mediums in their trance. The hypnotized person is ready to perform any foolishness, is not influenced by any considerations of tact and taste and wisdom and respect, and thus some of the chief believers in the subconscious personality stick to the diagnosis that the lower mind in us which shows up in hypnotism is a rather brutal, stupid, lazy, cowardly, immoral creature which ordinarily rather deserves to be subdued by our noble and wise upper personality. And the automatic writings of the mediums indorse this disrespectful view, for it is difficult to gather more idiotic slang than the emanations of these letters of the planchette. On the other hand, the hypnotized person shows an increase of sensitiveness and hyperæsthesia in which perhaps optical impressions or smells may be noticed which the ordinary man cannot perceive. Moreover the memory of the hypnotized is, as we saw, abnormally sharpened. Entirely forgotten experiences may awake again. The same holds true for the hysteric in whom also, of course, the subconscious takes hold of the inner life. Thus it seems entirely safe to say that the powers of the subconscious personality far surpass those of the upper conscious fellow, and that agrees with all those facts as to the subconscious origin of the work of the genius. Further, has it not been found again and again that the hypnotized and the hysteric cannot only remember long-forgotten parts of the past but have telepathic knowledge for distant events and even mysterious premonitions of the field of occurrences of the future?

Hypnotism is essentially the same as the old mesmerism, and mesmerism was widely acknowledged as clairvoyance, and all that harmonizes again with the experiences of the mediums whose subconscious mind in trance enters into contact with the spirits of the dead. The subconscious personality is thus really a metaphysical power which transcends the limitations of the earthly person altogether and has steady connection with the endless world of spirit and the inner soul of the universe. Most popular books, it is true, do not demand from their readers the choice between the one or the other type of the lower personality, between that brutal, vicious, ignorant creature and that far-seeing, inspired, powerful soul. They simply mix the two and adapt the special faculties of this underground man to the special requirements of the particular chapter, the subconscious being unusually wise or unusually stupid in accordance with the special facts which are just then to be explained. Even that does not always settle all difficulties. They may discover, for instance, that the subconscious mind with which we deal in the hypnotized person has again itself a subconsciousness. If we tell the hypnotized person not to see a certain picture on the wall, this subconscious personality perceives the whole room with the exception of the picture. Yet after all someone sees this picture, because if we hypnotize him the next time and ask him what the picture contained, he now knows its contents. Thus they must have been recognized in a sub-subconsciousness, and we therefore come to a personality which lives on a floor still below the basement. But experiment can demonstrate that even this most hidden personality has still its secrets which are handed downwards. In short, we finally have not merely two but a number of personalities in us.

But now let us leave these fantasies of psychological fiction. Let us turn to the concrete facts, let us see them in the spirit of modern scientific psychology, let us try to explain them in harmony with the principles of psychological explanation, and let us discriminate the various groups of facts which have led to that easy-going hypothesis of the subconscious. Discrimination indeed is needed, as it would be impossible to bring the whole manifold of facts under one formula, but there is certainly no unification reached by simply putting the same label on all the varieties and behaving as if they are all at once explained when they are called the functions of the subconscious. Two large groups may be separated. Facts are referred to the subconscious mind which do not belong to the mind at all, neither to a conscious nor to a subconscious one, but which are simply processes in the physical organism; and secondly, facts are referred to the subconscious mind which go on in the conscious mind but which are abnormally connected. Thus the subconscious mental facts are either not mental but physiological, or mental but not subconscious.

What does the scientific psychologist really mean by consciousness? We must now think back to our discussion of the principles which control the fundamental conceptions of modern psychology. We saw clearly that the psychology which is a descriptive and explanatory science of mental phenomena can by no means have the ambition to be a full interpretation of the inner reality. Our inner life, we saw, is not a series of phenomena, is not a chain of objects which we are aware of and which we therefore can describe, and which finally we can explain. But in its living reality, we saw that it is purposive, has a meaning and aim, is will and intention, and can thus be understood in its true character, not by describing and explaining it but by interpreting it and appreciating it. This is the life attitude towards personalities when we deal man to man. We do not at first consider ourselves or our fellows as mental objects to be explained but always as subjects to be understood in their meaning. If we pass from this primary attitude to the attitude of the scientific psychologist we gain, as we saw, an artificial perspective. We must consider then our inner experience of ourselves with all our states as a series of objects made up of elements connected by law. Instead of the real things which in our real life are objects of will and purpose, tools and means for us, the psychologist knows only objects of awareness, objects which have no meaning, but which simply exist and which are no longer related to a will but are connected with other objects as causes and effects. Now we deal no longer with the chairs and tables before us but from a psychological point of view they become perceptive ideas of chairs and tables, ideas which are not in the room but in our own minds. While these objects of our will and of our personality become mere ideas, our will and personality themselves become, too, a series of phenomena. Our self is now no longer the purposive will but is that group of sensations and ideas which clusters about the perception of our organism and its actions; in short, our self itself becomes an object of awareness.

Our whole inner experience thus becomes a manifold of objects. Our self and the actions of our self are thus alike for the psychologist mere phenomena, mere objects which are perceived. Will and emotion, memory idea and thought—they all are now passing appearances like the sunshine and rain, the flowers and waves. By this transformation the immediate will character of real life is given up, but instead of it a system of objects