A Chinese in the early days of San Francisco stands spell-bound at the sight of a cable car. "No pushee. No pullee. Go allee samee like hellee!" He does not know about the hidden string.

A woman of refinement and culture thinks a thought that horrifies her sensitive soul. It is entirely out of keeping with her character as she knows it. In her misunderstanding she considers it wicked and thrusts it from her, wondering how it ever could have been hers. She does not know about the hidden string.

In the last two chapters we thought together about some of these strings, examining the fibers of which they are made and learning in what directions they pull. We found them to be more powerful than we should have supposed, more insistent and less visible. We found that instinctive desire is the string, the cable that energizes our every act, but that our desires are neither single nor simple, and are but rarely on the surface. Many of us live with them a long time, feeling the tug, but not recognizing the string.

There's a Reason. We take our thoughts and feelings and actions for granted, without stopping very often to wonder where they come from. But there is always a reason. When the law of cause and effect reaches the doorsill of our minds, it does not stop short to give way to the law of chance. We wake up in the morning with a certain thought on top. We say it "just happens." But nothing ever just happens. No thought that ever comes into our heads has been without its history,—its ancestors and its determining causes. But what about dreams? They, at least, you say, have no connections, no past and no future, only a weird, fantastic present. Strange to say, dreams have been found to be as closely related to our real selves, as interwoven with the warp and woof of our lives as are any of our waking thoughts. Even dreams have a reason.

We find ourselves holding certain beliefs and prejudices, interested in certain things and indifferent to others, liking some foods, some colors and disliking others. Search our minds as we will, we find no clue to many of these inner trends. Why?

The answer is simple. The cause is hidden below the surface. If we try to explain ourselves on the basis of the open-to-inspection part of our minds, we must come to the conclusion that we are queer creatures indeed. Only by assuming that there is more to us than we know, can we find any rational basis for the way we think and feel and act.

A Real Mind. We learn of our internal machinery by what it does. We must infer a part of our minds which introspection does not reveal, a mind within the mind, able to work for us even while we are unaware of its existence. This inner mind is usually known as the subconscious, the mind under the level of consciousness.[16] We forget a name, but we know that it will come to us if we think about something else. Presently, out of somewhere, there flashes the word we want. Where was it in the meanwhile, and what hunted it out from among all our other memories and sent it up into consciousness? The something which did that must be capable of conserving memories, of recognizing the right one and of communicating it,—surely a real mind.

[Footnote 16: Writers of the psycho-analytic school use the word "unconscious" to denote the lower layers of this region, and "fore-conscious" to denote its upper layers. Morton Prince uses the terms "unconscious" and "conscious" to denote the different strata. As there is still a good deal of confusion in the use of terms, it has seemed to us simpler to use throughout only the general term "subconscious."]

One evening my collaborator fumbled unsuccessfully for the name of a certain well-known journalist and educator. It was on the tip of her tongue, but it simply would not come, not even the initial letter. In a whimsical mood she said to herself just as she went to sleep, "Little subconscious mind, you find that name to-night." In the middle of the night she awoke, saying, "Williams—Talcott Williams." The subconscious, which has charge of her memories, had been at work while she slept.

The history of literature abounds in stories of under-the-surface work. The man of genius usually waits until the mood is on, until the muse speaks; then all his lifeless material is lighted by new radiance. He feels that some one outside himself is dictating. Often he merely holds the pen while the finished work pours itself out spontaneously as if from a higher source.

But it is not only the man of genius who makes use of these unseen powers. He may have readier access to his subconscious than the rest of us, but he has no monopoly. The most matter-of-fact man often says that he will "sleep over" a knotty problem. He puts it into his mind and then goes about his business, or goes to sleep while this unseen judge weighs and balances, collects related facts, looks first at one side of the question and then at the other, and finally sends up into consciousness a decision full of conviction, a decision that has been formulated so far from the focus of attention that it seems to be something altogether new, a veritable inspiration.

We must infer the subconscious from what it does. Things happen,—there must be a cause. Some of the things that happen presuppose imagination, reason, intelligence, will, emotion, desire, all the elements of mind. We cannot see this mind, but we can see its products. To deny the subconscious is to deny the artist while looking at his picture, to disbelieve in the poet while reading his poem, and to doubt the existence of the explosive while listening to the report. The subconscious is an artist, a poet, and an explosive by turns. If we deny its existence, a good portion of man's doings are unintelligible. If we admit it, many of his actions and his afflictions which have seemed absurd stand out in a new light as purposeful efforts with a real and adequate cause.

The Submerged Nine Tenths. The more deeply psychologists and physicians have studied into these things, the more certainly have they been forced to the conclusion that the conscious mind of man, the part that he can explore at will, is by far the smaller part of his personality. Since this is to some people a rather startling proposition, we can do no better than quote the following statement from White on the relation of consciousness to the rest of the psychic life:

Consciousness includes only that of which we are aware, while outside of this somewhat restricted area there lies a much wider area in which lie the deeper motives for conduct, and which not only operates to control conduct, but also dictates what may and what may not become conscious. Stanley Hall has very forcibly put the matter by using the illustration of the iceberg. Only one-tenth of the iceberg is visible above water; nine-tenths is beneath the surface. It may appear in a given instance that the iceberg is being carried along by the prevailing winds and surface currents, but if we keep our eyes open we shall sooner or later see a berg going in the face of the wind, and, so, apparently putting to naught all the laws of aerodynamics. We can understand this only when we come to realize that much the greater portion of the berg is beneath the surface and that it is moving in response to invisible forces addressed against this submerged portion.

Consciousness only arises late in the course of evolution and only in connection with adjustments that are relatively complex. When the same or similar conditions in the environment are repeatedly presented to the organism so that it is called upon to react in a similar and almost identical way each time, there tends to be organized a mechanism of reaction which becomes more and more automatic and is accompanied by a state of mind of less and less awareness.[17]

[Footnote 17: White: Mechanisms of Character Formation.]

It is easy to see the economy of this arrangement which provides ready-made patterns of reaction for habitual situations and leaves consciousness free for new decisions. Since an automatic action, traveling along well-worn brain paths, consumes little energy and causes the minimum of fatigue, the plan not only frees consciousness from a confusing number of details, but also works for the conservation of energy. While consciousness is busy lighting up the special problems of the moment, the vast mass of life's demands are taken care of by the subconscious, which constitutes the bulk of the mind. "Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psyche."[18]

[Footnote 18: Freud: Interpretation of Dreams, p. 486.]

The Heart of Psychology. In the face of all this, it is not to be wondered at that the problem of the subconscious has been called not one problem of psychology but the problem. It cannot be denied that the discoveries which have already been made as to its activities have been of immense practical importance in the understanding of normal conduct and in the treatment of the psycho-neuroses.

If some of the methods—such as hypnosis, automatic writing, and interpretation of dreams—which are used to investigate its activities seem to savor of the charlatan and the mountebank, it is because they have occasionally been appropriated by the ignorant and the unscrupulous. Their real setting is the psychological laboratory and the physician's office. In the hands of men like Sigmund Freud, Boris Sidis, and Morton Prince, they are as scientific as the apparatus of any other laboratory and their findings are as susceptible of proof. We may, then, go forward with the conviction that we are walking on solid ground and that the main paths, at least, will turn into beaten highways.

ANCESTRAL MEMORIES

Race-Memories. An individual as he stands at any moment is the product of his past,—the past which he has inherited and the past which he has lived. In other words, he is a bundle of memories accumulated through the experience of the race, and through his own experience as a person. Some of these memories are conscious, and these he calls his, while others fail to reach consciousness and are not recognized as part of his assets.

The instincts form the starting-point of mind, conscious and subconscious, and are the foundation upon which the rest is built. They often show themselves as part of our conscious lives, but their roots are laid deep in the subconscious from which they can never be eradicated. This deepest-laid instinctive layer of the subconscious is little subject to change. It represents the earlier adjustments of the race, crystallized into habit. It takes no account of the differences between the present and the past. It knows no culture, no reason, no lately acquired prudence. It is all energy and can only wish, or urge toward action. But since only those race-memories became instincts which had proved needful to the race in the long run, they are on the whole beneficent forces, working for the good of the race and the good of the individual, if he learns how to handle them aright and to adapt them to present conditions.

This instinctive urge toward action arouses in the individual an organic response that is felt as a tension or craving and is mainly dependent upon its own chemical constitution at the moment. Hunger is the sensation caused by the little muscular contractions in the stomach when the body is low in its food supply. Sudden fright is felt as an all-gone sensation "at the pit of the stomach." What really happens is a tightening up of the circular muscles of the blood-vessels lying in the network of the solar plexus, and a spasm of the muscles of the digestive tract. The hungry stomach impels to action until satisfied; the physical discomfort in fear impels toward measures of safety. The apparatus that is made use of by the subconscious in carrying out this instinctive urge is called the autonomic nervous system.[19] It regulates all the functions of living, not only under the stress of emotion, but during every moment of waking or sleeping.

[Footnote 19: Kempf: "The Tonus of Automatic Segments as a Cause of Abnormal Behavior," Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, January, 1921.]

A Capable Manager. The conscious mind could not possibly send messages to the numerous glands that fit the body for action, nor attend to all the delicate adjustments that enter into the process. The conscious mind in most of us does not even know of the existence of the organs and secretions involved, but something sends the messages and it is something that has a remarkable likeness to mind as we usually think of mind,—something which takes advantage of the past and gages means to an end with a nicety that excites our wonder.

Take no Anxious Thought. We take food into our stomachs and forget about it, if we are wise; and this subconscious overseer who through millions of years of experience has learned how to digest food does the rest. As with digestion, so with our heart-action; we lie down at night fairly sure that there will be no break in the regular rhythm of its beat. The subconscious overseer is "on the job" and he never rests. No matter how hard we sleep, he never lets us forget to take a breath; and if we trust him, he is very likely to wake us up at the appointed time in the morning. Also, if we trust him, he carries us off to sleep as though we were babies. Has he not had long practice in the days before insomnia was invented?

First Aid to the Injured. In times of infection or injury, this subconscious manager is better than any doctor. The doctors say with truth that they only assist nature. If the infection is internal, antitoxins are produced within the body. If the injury is external, like a cut, the messages fly, and white blood-corpuscles are marshaled to take care of poisons and build up the tissue. If the injury is of the kind that needs rest, the subconscious doctor knows it. He therefore causes pain and rigidity, in order to induce us to hold the injured part still until it is restored.

Crile reminds us of a fact that is often noticed by surgeons. If patients under ether are handled roughly, especially in the intestinal region, respiration quickens and there are tremors and even convulsive efforts which interfere with the surgeon's work. The conscious mind cannot feel. It is asleep. But the subconscious mind, whose business it is to protect the body, is trying to get away from injury. The body uses up as much energy as though it had run for miles, and when the patient wakes up, we say that he is suffering from shock. The subconscious mind which is not affected by ether, has been exhausting itself in a vain attempt to get the body away from harm.

A Tireless Servant. When the conscious mind undertakes a job, it is always more or less subject to fatigue. But the subconscious after its long practice seems never to tire. We say that its activities have become automatic. With all its inherited skill, the subconscious, if left to itself, can be depended upon to run the bodily machinery without effort and without hitch. The only things that can interfere with its work are the wrong kind of emotions and the wrong kind of suggestions from the conscious mind. Barring these, it goes its way like a trusty servant, looking after details and leaving its master's mind free for other things. Having been "in the family" for generations, it knows its business and resents any interference with its duties or any infringement of its rights.

No man, then, comes into this world without inheritance: he receives from his ancestors two goodly sets of heirlooms, the instincts and the mechanism which carries on bodily functions. This is the capital with which man starts life; but immediately he begins increasing this capital, adding memories from his own experience to the accumulated race-records.

PERSONAL MEMORIES

No more startling secret has been unearthed by science than the discovery of the length and minuteness of our memories. No matter how much one may think he has forgotten, the tablets of his mind are closely written with records of infinitesimal experiences, shadowy sensations, old happenings which the conscious self has lost entirely and would scarcely recognize as its own. Many of these brain records, or neurograms, as Prince calls them, are never aroused from their dormant conditions. But others, aroused by emotion or association of ideas, may after years of inactivity, come forth again either as conscious memories or as subconscious forces, or even as physiological memories,—bodily repetitions of the pains, palpitations, and tremors of old emotional experiences.

Irresistible Childhood. An experience that is forgotten is not necessarily lost. Although the first few years of childhood are lost to conscious memory, these years outweigh all others in their influence on character. The Jesuit priest was right when he said, "Give me a child until he is six years old, and he will be a Catholic all his life." As Frink has so ably shown, the determining factors that enter into any adult choice, such as the choice of the Catholic or the Protestant faith, are in a large measure made up of subconscious memories from early childhood, forgotten memories of Sunday-school and church, of lessons at home or passages in books,—experiences which no voluntary effort could recall, but which still live unrecognized in our mature judgments and beliefs. Naturally we do not acknowledge these subconscious motives. We like to believe that all our decisions are based on reason, and so we invent plausible arguments for our attitudes and our actions, arguments which we ourselves implicitly believe. This process of substituting a plausible reason for a subconscious one is known as rationalization, a process which every one of us engages in many times a day.

It is indeed true that the child is father to the man. Those first impressionable years, when we believed implicitly whatever any one told us and when through ignorance we reacted emotionally to ordinary experiences, are molding us still, making us the men and women we are to-day, coloring with childish ideas many of the attitudes of our supposedly reasoning life. Bergson says:

The unconscious is our historical past. In reality the past is preserved automatically. In its entirety probably it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.

Spontaneous Outbursts. "How do we know all this?" some one says. "What is the evidence for these sweeping statements? If we cannot remember, how can we discover these strange memories that are so powerful but so elusive? If they are below the level of consciousness, are they not, in the very nature of the case, forever hidden from view, in the sphere of the occult rather than that of science?"

The answer to these questions is determined by one important fact; the line between the conscious and subconscious minds does not always remain in the same place; the "threshold of consciousness" is sometimes displaced, automatically allowing these buried memories to come to the surface. In sleep and delirium, in trance and hallucination, in hysteria and intoxication, the tables are turned; the restraining hand of the conscious mind is loosened and the submerged self comes forth with all its ancient memories.

It is a common experience to have a patient in delirium repeat long-forgotten verses or descriptions of events that the "real man" has lost entirely. The renowned servant-girl, quoted by Hudson, who in delirium recited passage after passage of Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, which she had heard her one-time master repeat in his study, is typical of many such instances.[20]

[Footnote 20: Hudson: The Law of Psychic Phenomena, p. 44. Quoted from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Vol. I, p. 117 (edit. 1847).]

A young girl of nineteen, a patient of mine, lapsed for several weeks into a dissociated state in which she forgot all the memories and ideas of her adult life, and returned to the period of her childhood. She used to say that she saw things inside her head and would accurately describe events that took place before she was two years of age,—scenes which she had completely forgotten in her normal life. One day when I asked her to tell me what she was seeing, she began to talk about "little sister" (herself) and "little brother." "Little sister and brother were the two little folks that lived with their mother and their daddy and they were playing on the sand-pile. You know there was only one sand-pile, not like all the ones they have down here (at the seaside), and they had a bucket that they would put sand in and they would dump it out again and they would make nice things, you know; they would play with their little dog Ponto and he was white with black and brown spots on him. Little brother had white hair and he was bigger than little sister and he had a little waist with ruffles down the front and around the collar and a black coat that came down to his knees and it had two little white bands around it. Some of the waists he wore had blue specks and some had red and black specks in it.

"Little sister had yellow curls and she had a blue coat with jiggly streaks of white in it, and she had a little white bonnet that was crocheted, and she had little blue mittens on that were tied to a string that went around her neck and down the other arm. It got pretty cold where they lived. Little sister and little brother would go out to the pile of leaves and jump on them and bounce and they would crackle. The leaves came down from the trees all of a sudden when they got tired, and they were different colors, brown and red. Little sister could walk then but she could not walk one other time before then; she could stand up by holding to a chair, but she could not go herself. One morning Big Tom said 'Run to Daddy' and she went to her daddy, and after that she always walked; they were glad and she was glad. She walked all day long. Big Tom was a man who used to help Daddy and little sister always liked him. He was a nice man."

The mother verified this scene of the first walking, saying that it had occurred on her own wedding-anniversary when the child was twenty-three months old.

One night I heard the same patient talk in her sleep in the slow and hesitating manner of a child reading phonetically from a printed page. I soon recognized the words as those of a poem of Tagore's, called "My Prayer," and remembered that a magazine containing the poem had been lying on the bed during the day. When she had finished I wakened her, saying, "Now tell me what you have been dreaming." She answered in her childish way, "I think I do not dream." She went to sleep immediately and again repeated the poem, word for word, without a single mistake. Again I awakened her with the words, "Now tell me what you have been dreaming." And again she answered, "I think I do not dream." I said: "But yes; don't you remember you were just saying, 'When the time comes for me to go'?" (the last line of the poem). "Oh, yes," she said, "I was seeing it, and I think I'll not go to sleep again. It tires me so to see it."

While she was awake she had no recollection of having seen the poem and was indeed in her dissociated state quite incapable of understanding its meaning. Asleep, she saw every word as plainly as if the page had been before her eyes.

The distorted pictures of dreams are always made of the material which past experiences have furnished and which have in many cases been dropped out of consciousness for years only to rise out of their long oblivion when the conscious mind has been put to sleep.

Unearthing Old Experiences. However, psychology does not have to wait for buried memories to come forth of their own free will. It has a number of successful ways of summoning them from their hiding-place and helping them across the line into consciousness. In the hands of skilled investigators and therapeutists, hypnosis, hypnoidization, automatic writing, crystal-gazing, abstraction, free association, word-association, and interpretation of dreams have all been repeatedly successful in bringing to light memories which apparently have been for many years completely blotted out of mind. As we become better acquainted with these technical devices we shall find that there are four kinds of experiences whose records are carefully stored away in our minds. Some were always so far from the center of our attention that we could swear they never had been ours; others, although once present in consciousness, were so trivial and unimportant that it seems ridiculous to suppose them conserved; others never came into our waking minds at all and entered our lives only in special states, such as sleep or delirium or dreams. All these we should expect to forget; the astonishing thing is that they ever were conserved. But there is a fourth class that is different. It is made up of experiences that were so vital, so emotional, so closely woven into the fiber of our being that it seems impossible that they ever could be forgotten. Let us look at a few examples of records of all these four kinds of experiences, examples chosen from hundreds of their kind as illustrations of the all-embracing character of buried memories.[21]

[Footnote 21: For further examples see Prince, The Unconscious; Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality, and Hudson, The Law of Psychic Phenomena.]

Out of the Corners of Our Eyes. In the first place, we are much more observing than we imagine. We may be so interested in our own thoughts that details of our environment are entirely lost on the conscious mind, but the subconscious has its eyes open, and its ears. People in hypnosis have been known to repeat verbatim whole passages from newspapers which they had never consciously read. While they were busy with one column, their wide-awake subconscious was devouring the next one, and remembering it. Prince relates the story of a young woman who unconsciously "took in" the details of a friend's appearance:

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 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 every one's notice.[22]

[Footnote 22: Prince: The Unconscious, p. 53.]

Automatic writing, the method used to uncover this subconscious perception, is a favorite method with some investigators and is often used by Morton Prince. The hand writes without the direction of the personal consciousness and usually without the person's being aware that it is writing. A dissociated person does this very easily; other people can cultivate the ability, and perhaps most of us approach it when we are at the telephone, busily writing or drawing remarkable pictures while the rest of us is engaged in conversation.

The present epidemic of the Ouija board shows how many persons there are who are able to switch off the conscious mind and let the subconscious control the muscles that are used in writing. The fact that the writer has no understanding of what he is doing and believes himself directed by some outside power, in no way interferes with the subconscious phenomenon.

Everyday Doings. Besides perceptions which were originally so far from the focus of attention that the conscious mind never caught them at all, there are the little experiences of everyday life, fleeting thoughts and impressions which occupy us for a minute and then disappear. Every experience is a dynamic fact and no matter how trivial the experience may be or how completely forgotten, it still exists as a part of the personality.

An amusing example of the everyday kind of forgotten experience occurred during the writing of this chapter. I wrote a sentence which pleased me very well. This is the sentence: "In the esthetic processes of evolution they [man's desires] have sunk below the surface as soon as formed, and have been covered over by an elastic and snug-fitting consciousness as the skin covers in the tissues and organs of the body." After showing this passage to my collaborator and remarking that this figure had never been used before, I was partly chagrined and partly amused to have her bring me the following sentence from White and Jelliffe: "Consciousness covered over and obscured the inner organs of the psyche just as the skin hides the inner organs of the body from vision." My originality had vanished and I was close to plagiarism. Indeed, if a history of plagiarism could be written, it would probably abound in just such stories. I had read the article containing this sentence only once, about three years before, and had never quoted it or consciously thought of it. It had lain buried for three years, only to come forth as an original idea of my own. Who knows how many times we all do just this thing without catching ourselves in the trick?

Back-Door Memories. There are other kinds of memories which hide in the subconscious, memories of experiences which have not come in by the front door, but have entered the mind during special states, such as sleep, delirium, intoxication, or hypnosis. What is known as post-hypnotic suggestion is the functioning of a suggestion received during hypnosis and emerging later as an impulse without being recognized as a memory. A man in a hypnotic state is told that at five o'clock he will take off his clothes and go to bed, without remembering that such a suggestion has been given him. He awakens with no recollection of the suggestion, but at five o'clock he suddenly feels impelled to go to bed, even though his unreasonable desire puts him into a highly embarrassing position. The suggestion, to be thus effective, must have been conserved somewhere in his mind outside of consciousness.

Suggestions that enter the mind during the normal sleep are also recorded,—a fact that carries a warning to people who are in the habit of talking of all sorts of matters while in the room with sleeping children. I have sometimes suggested to sleeping patients that on waking they will remember and tell me the cause of their symptoms. The following example shows not only the conservation of impressions gained in sleep, but also the sway of forgotten ideas of childhood, still strong in mature years. This young woman, a trained nurse, with many marked symptoms of hysteria, had been asked casually to bring a book from the Public Library. She cried out in consternation, "Oh, no, I am afraid!" After a good deal of urging she finally brought the book, although at the cost of considerable effort. Later, while she was taking a nap, I said to her, "You will not remember that I have talked to you. You will stay asleep while I am talking and while you are asleep there will come to your mind the reasons why you are afraid to go to the Public Library. When you waken, you will tell me all about it." Upon awakening, she said: "Oh, do you know, I can tell you why I have always been afraid to go to the Public Library. While I was in Parochial School, Father —— used to come in and tell us children to use the books out of the school library and never to go to the Public Library." I questioned her concerning her idea of the reason for such an injunction and what she thought was in the books which she was told not to read. She hesitatingly stated that it was her idea, even in childhood, that the books dealt with topics concerning the tabooed subject of the birth of children and kindred matters.

Smoldering Volcanoes. Let us now consider those emotional experiences which seem far too compelling to be forgotten, but which may live within us for years without giving any evidence of their existence. Memories like these are apt to be anything but a dead past.

Many of my own patients have uncovered emotional memories through simply talking out to me whatever came into their minds, laying aside their critical faculty and letting their minds wander on into whatever paths association led them. This is known as the free-association method, and simple as it seems, is one of the most effective in uncovering memories which have been forgotten for years. One of my patients, a refined, highly educated woman of middle age, had suffered for two years with almost constant nausea. One day, after a long talk, with no suggestion on my part, only an occasional, "What does that remind you of?" she told with great emotion an experience which she had had at eighteen years of age, in which she had for a moment been sexually attracted to a boy friend, but had recoiled as soon as she realized where her impulse was leading her. She had been so horrified at the idea of her degradation, so nauseated at what she considered her sin, that she had put it out of her mind, denied that such a thought had ever been hers, repressed the desire into the subconscious, where it had continued to function unsatisfied, unassimilated with her mature judgments. Her nausea was the symbol of a moral disgust. Physical nausea she was willing to acknowledge, but not this other thing. Upon reciting this old experience, with every sign of the original shame, she cried: "Oh, Doctor! why did you bring this up? I had forgotten it. I haven't thought of it in thirty years." I reminded her that I couldn't bring it up,—I had never known anything about it. With the emotional incoming of this memory and the saner attitude toward it which the mature woman's mind was able to take, the nausea disappeared for good. This case is typical of the psycho-neuroses and we shall have occasion to refer to it again. The present emphasis is on the fact that an emotional memory may be buried for many years while it still retains the power of reappearing in more or less disguised manifestation.

Repressed Memories. If we ask how so burning a memory could escape from the consciousness of a grown woman, we are driven to the conclusion that this forgetting can be the result of no mere quiet fading away, but that there must have been some active force at work which kept the memory from coming into awareness. It was not lost. It was not passive. Out of sight was not out of mind. There must have been a reason for its expulsion from the personal consciousness. In fact, we find that there is a reason. We find that whenever a vital emotional experience disappears from view, it is because it is too painful to be endured in consciousness. Nor is it ever the pain of an impersonal experience or even the thought of what some one else has done to us that drives a memory out of mind. As a matter of fact, we never expel a memory except when it bears directly on ourselves and on our own opinion of ourselves. We can stand almost anything else, but we cannot stand an idea that does not fit in with our ideal for ourselves. This is not the pious ideal that we should like to live up to and that we hope to attain some day, not the ideal that we think we ought to have—like never speaking ill of others or never being selfish—but the secret picture that each of us has, locked away within him, the specifications of ourselves reduced to their lowest terms, below which we cannot go. Energized by the instinct of positive self-feeling, and organized with the moral sentiments which we have acquired from education and the ideals of society, especially those acquired in early childhood, this ideal of ourselves becomes incorporated into our conscience and is an absolute necessity for our happiness.

We have found that when two emotions clash, one drives out the other. So in this case, the woman's positive self-feeling of self-respect, combined with disgust, drove from the field that other emotion of the reproductive instinct which was trying to get expression. Speaking technically, one repressed the other. The woman said to herself, "No, I never could have had such a thought," and promptly forgot it. Needless to say, this kind of handling did not kill the impulse. Buried in the depths of her soul, it continued to live like a live coal, until in later years, fanned by the wind of some new experience, it burst into flame.

In this case the wish had originally flashed into awareness for an instant, but very often the impulse never gets into consciousness at all. The upper layers of the subconscious, where the acquired ideals live, automatically work to keep down any desires which are thought to be out of keeping with the person as he knows himself. He then would emphatically deny that such desires had ever had any place in his life.

Freud has called this repressing force the psychic censor. To get into consciousness, any idea from the subconscious must be able to pass this censor. This force seems to be a combination of the self-regarding and herd-instincts, which dispute with the instinct for reproduction the right to "the common path" for expression.

A considerable part of any person's subconscious is made up of memories, wishes, impulses, which are repressed in this way. Of course any instinctive desire may be repressed, but it is easy to understand why the most frequently denied impulse, the instinct of reproduction, against whose urgency society has cultivated so strong a feeling, should be repressed more frequently than any other.[23]

[Footnote 23: See foot-note, p. 145, Chap. VII.]

Past and Present. It matters not, then, in what state experiences come to us, whether in sleep or delirium, intoxication or hypnosis, or in the normal waking condition. They are conserved and may exert great influence on our normal lives. It matters not whether the experiences be full of meaning and emotion or whether they be so slight as to pass unnoticed, they are conserved. It matters not whether these experiences be mere sense-impressions, or inner thoughts, whether they be unacknowledged hopes or fears, undesirable moods and unworthy desires or fine aspirations and lofty ideals. They are conserved and they may at a later day rise up to bless or to curse us long after we had thought them buried in the past. The present is the product of the past. It is the past plus an element of choice which keeps us from settling down in the despair of fatalism and enables us to do something toward making the present that is, a help and not a stumbling-block to the present that is to be.

SOME HABITS OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS

The Association of Ideas. It is only by something akin to poetic license that we can speak of lower and higher strata of mind. When we carry over the language of material things into the less easily pictured psychic realm, it is sometimes well to remind ourselves that figures of speech, if taken too literally, are more misleading than illuminating. When we speak of the deep-laid instinctive lower levels of mind and the higher acquired levels, we must not imagine that these strata are really laid in neat, mutually exclusive layers, one on top of the other in the chambers of the mind. Nor must we imagine the mental elements of instinct, idea, and memory as jumbled together in chaotic confusion, or in scattered isolated units. As a matter of fact, the best word to picture the inside of our minds is the word "group." We do not know just how ideas and instincts can group themselves together, but we do know that by some arrangement of brain paths and nerve-connections, the laws of association of ideas and of habit take our mental experiences and organize them into more or less permanent systems. Instinctive emotions tend to organize themselves around ideas to form sentiments; ideas or sentiments, which through repetition or emotion are associated together, tend to stay together in groups or complexes which act as a whole; complexes which pertain to the same interests tend to bind themselves into larger systems or constellations, forming moods, or sides to one's character. It is not highly important to differentiate in every case a sentiment from a complex, or a complex from a constellation, especially as many writers use "complex" as the generic term for all sorts of groups; but a general understanding of the much-used word "complex" is necessary for a comprehension of modern literature on psychology, psychotherapy or general education.

"What Is a Complex?" Reduced to its lowest terms, a complex is a group. It may be simply a group of associated movements, like lacing one's shoes or knitting; it may be a group of movements and ideas, like typewriting or piano-playing, which through repetition have become automatic or subconscious; it may be merely a group of ideas, such as the days of the week, the alphabet or the multiplication table. In all these types it is repetition working through the law of habit that ties the ideas and movements together into an organic whole. Usually, however, the word complex is reserved for psychic elements that are bound together by emotion. In this sense, a complex is an emotional thought-habit. Frink's definition, which is one of the simplest, recognizes only this emotional type: "A complex is a system of connected ideas, having a strong emotional tone, and displaying a tendency to produce or influence conscious thought and action in a definite and predetermined direction."[24]

[Footnote 24: Frink: "What Is a Complex?" Journal American Medical Assoc., Vol. LXII, No. 12, Mar. 21, 1914.]

Emotion and repetition are the great welders of complexes. Emotion is the strongest cement in the world. A single emotional experience suffices to bind together ideas that were originally as far apart as the poles.

Sometimes a complex includes not only ideas, movements, and emotions, but physiological disturbances and sensations. Some people cannot go aboard a stationary ship without vomiting, nor see a rose, even though it prove to be a wax one, without the sneezing and watery eyes of hay-fever. This is what is known as a "conditioned reflex." Past associations plus fear have so welded together idea and bodily manifestation that one follows the other as a matter of course, long after the real cause is removed. In such ways innumerable nervous symptoms arise. The same laws which form healthy complexes, and, indeed, which make all education possible, may thus be responsible for the unhealthy mal-adaptive association-habits which lie back of a neurosis. Fortunately, a knowledge of this fact furnishes the clue to the re-education that brings recovery.

A complex may be either conscious or unconscious, but as it usually happens that either all or part of its elements are below the surface, the word is oftenest used to mean those buried systems of the subconscious mind that influence thought or behavior without themselves being open to scrutiny. It is these buried complexes, memory groups, gathered through the years of experience, that determine action in uniform and easily prophesied directions. Every individual has a definite complex about religion, about politics, about patriotism, about business, and it is the sum of these buried complexes which makes up his total personality.

Displacement. Association or grouping is, then, an intrinsic power of mind; but as all life seems to be built on opposites—light and darkness, heat and cold, love and hate—so mind, which is capable of association, is capable also of displacement or the splitting apart of elements which belong together. There is such a thing as the simple breaking up of complexes, when education or experience or neglect separate ideas and emotions which had been previously welded together; but displacement is another matter. Here there is still a path between idea and emotion; they still belong to the same complex, but the connection is lost sight of. The impulse or emotion attaches itself to another substitute idea which is related to the first but which is more acceptable to the personality. Sometimes the original idea is forgotten; repressed, or dissociated into the subconscious, as in anxiety neurosis; and sometimes it is merely shorn of its emotional interest and remembered as an unrelated or insignificant idea, as in compulsion neurosis.

Transference. Another kind of displacement which seems hard to believe possible until it is repeatedly encountered in intelligent human beings is the process called transference, by which everybody at some time or other acts toward the people he meets, not according to rational standards but according to old unconscious attitudes toward other people. Each of us carries, within, subconscious pictures of the people who surrounded us when we were children; and now when we meet a new person we are likely unconsciously to say to ourselves—not, "This person has eyebrows like my mother, or a voice like my nurse," or, "This person bosses me around as my father used to do," but, "This is my mother, this is my nurse, this is my father." Whereupon we may proceed to act toward that person very much as we did toward the original person in childhood.

Transference is subconsciously identifying one person with another and behaving toward the one as if he were that other. Analysis has discovered that many a man's hostile attitude toward the state or religion or authority in general, is nothing more than this kind of displacement of his childhood's attitude toward authority in the person of his perhaps too-domineering father. Many a woman has married a husband, not for what he was in himself, but because she unconsciously identified him with her childish image of her father.

Students of human nature have always recognized the kind of displacement which transfers the sense of guilt from some major act or attitude to a minor one which is more easily faced, just as Lady Macbeth felt that by washing her hands she might free herself from her deeper stain. This is a frequent mechanism in the psychoneuroses—not that neurotics are likely to have committed any great crime, but that they feel subconsciously that some of their wishes or thoughts are wicked.

The Phenomena of Dissociation. When an idea or a complex, a perception or a memory is either temporarily or permanently shoved out of consciousness into the subconscious, it is said to be dissociated. When we are asleep, the part of us that is usually conscious is dissociated and the submerged part takes the stage. When we forget our surroundings in concentration or absent-mindedness, a part of us is dissociated and our friends say that we are "not all there," or as popular slang has it, "Nobody home." When a mood or system of complexes drives out all other moods, one becomes "a different person." But if this normal dissociation is carried a step farther, we may lose the power to put ourselves together again, and then we may truly be said to be dissociated. Almost any part of us is subject to this kind of apparent loss. In neurasthenia the happy, healthy complexes which have hitherto dominated our lives may be split off and left lying dormant in the subconscious; or the power of will or concentration may seem to be gone. In hysteria we may seem to lose the ability to see or feel or walk, or we may lose for the time all recollection of certain past events, or of whole periods of our lives, or of everything but one system of ideas which monopolizes the field of attention. Sometimes great systems of memories, instincts, and complexes are alternately shifted in and out of gear, leaving first one kind of person on top and then another.[25] Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not so fantastic a character as he seems. Any one who doubts the ability of the mind to split itself up into two or more distinct personalities, entertaining totally different conceptions of life, disliking each other, playing tricks on each other, writing notes to each other, and carrying on a perpetual feud as each tries to get the upper hand, should read Morton Prince's "Dissociation of a Personality," a fascinating account of his famous case, Miss Beauchamp.

[Footnote 25: When a memory or system of memories is suddenly lost from consciousness the person is said to be suffering from amnesia or pathological loss of memory.]

Internal Warfare. Conflict, often accentuated by shock or fatigue, represses or drives down certain ideas, perceptions, wishes, memories, or complexes into the subconscious, where they remain, sometimes dormant and passive but often dynamic, emotional, carrying on an over-excited, automatic activity, freed from the control of reason and the modifying influence of other ideas, and able to cause almost any kind of disturbance. So long as there is team-work between the various parts of our personality we are able to act as a unit; but just as soon as we break up into factions with no communication between the warring camps, so soon do we become quite incapable of cooerdination or adjustment, like a nation torn by civil war. Many of the seemingly fantastic and bizarre mental phenomena of which a human being is capable are the result of this kind of disintegration.

However, nature has a remarkable power for righting herself, and it is only under an accumulation of unfortunate circumstances that there appears a neurosis, which is nothing more than a functioning of certain parts of the personality with all the rest dissociated. We shall later inquire more fully into the causes that lead up to such a result and shall find that the mechanisms involved are these processes of organization and disorganization by which mind is wont to group together or separate the various elements within its borders.

SUMMARY

Gathering up our impressions, we find a number of outstanding qualities which we may summarize in the following way:

The Subconscious is:

1 Vast yet Explorable

The fraction that could accurately show the relation of the conscious to the unconscious part of ourselves would have such a small numerator and such a huge denominator that we might well wonder where consciousness came in at all.[26] Some one has likened the subconscious to the great far-reaching depths of the Mammoth Cave, and consciousness to the tiny, flickering lamp which we carry to light our way in the darkness. However, ever the subconscious mind is becoming explorable, and it may be that science is giving the tiny lamp the revealing power of a great searchlight.

[Footnote 26: "The entire active life of the individual may be represented by a fraction, the numerator of which is any particular moment, the denominator is the rich inheritance of the past."—Jelliffe: "The Technique of Psychoanalysis," Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. III, No. 2, p. 164.]

2 Ancient yet Modern

The lowest layers of the subconscious, represented by the instincts, are as old as life itself, with their lineage reaching back in direct and unbroken line to the first living things on the ooze of the ocean floor. The higher strata are more modern, full, and accurate records of our own lifetime, beginning with our first cry and ending with to-day's thoughts.

3 Primitive yet Refined

The lowest level, representing the past of the race, is primitive like a savage, and infantile, like a child; it is instinctive, unalterable, and universal; it knows no restraint, no culture, and no prudence. The higher level, the storehouse of individual experience, bears the marks of acquired ideals, of cultivated refinement, and represents among other things the precepts and prudence of civilized society.

4 Emotional yet Intellectual

Our records of the past are not dead archives, but living forces—persistent, urging, dynamic and emotional. They give meaning to new experiences, color our judgments, shape our beliefs, determine our interests, and, if wrongly handled, make their way into consciousness as neurotic symptoms.

However, the subconscious is not all emotion. It is a mind capable of elaborate thought, able to calculate, to scheme, to answer doubts, to solve problems, to fabricate the purposeful, fantastic allegories of dreams and to create from mere knowledge the inspired works of genius.

But the subconscious has one great limitation, it cannot reason inductively. Given a premise, this mind can reason as unerringly as the most skilful logician; that is, it can reason deductively, but it cannot arrive at a general conclusion from a number of particular facts. However, except for inductive reasoning and awareness, the subconscious seems to possess all the attributes of conscious mind and is in fact an intellectual force to be reckoned with.

5 Organized yet Disorganizable

The subconscious mind is a highly organized institution, but like all such institutions it is liable to disorganization when rent by internal dissension. Ordinarily it keeps its ideas and emotions, its complexes and moods in fairly accurate order, but when upset by emotional warfare, it gets its records confused and falls into a chaotic state which makes regular business impossible.

6 Masterful yet Obedient

The subconscious, which is master of the body, is in normal life the servant of consciousness. One of its outstanding qualities is suggestibility. Since it cannot reason from particulars to a general conclusion it takes any statement given it by consciousness, believes it implicitly and acts accordingly.

The pilot wheel of the ship is, after all, the conscious mind, insignificant in size when compared with the great mass of the vessel, but all-powerful in its ability to direct the course of the voyage.

Nervous persons are people who are too much under the sway of the subconscious; so, too, are some geniuses, who narrowly escape a neurosis by finding a more useful outlet for their subconscious energies. While the poet, the inventor, and the neurotic are likely to be too largely controlled by the subconscious, the average man is to a greater extent ruled by the conscious mind; and the highest type of genius is the man whose conscious and subconscious minds work together in perfect harmony, each up to its full power.

If, as many believe, the next great strides of science are to be in this direction, it may pay some of us to be pioneers in learning how to make use of these undeveloped riches of memory, organization, and surplus energy. The subconscious, which can on occasion behave like a very devil within us, is, when rightly used, our greatest asset, the source of powers whose appearance in the occasional individual has been considered almost superhuman, but which prove to be characteristically human, the common inheritance of the race of man.



CHAPTER VI

In which we learn why it pays to be cheerful

BODY AND MIND

THE MISSING LINK

Ancient Knowledge. People have always known that mind in some strange way carries its moods over into the body. The writer of the Book of Proverbs tells us, from that far-off day, that "A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones." Jesus in His healing ministry always emphasized the place of faith in the cure of the body. "Thy faith hath made thee whole," is a frequent word on His lips, and ever since His day people have been rediscovering the truth that faith, even in the absence of a worthy object, does often make whole. Faith in the doctor, the medicine, the charm, the mineral waters, the shrine, and in the good God, has brought health to many thousands of sufferers. People have always reckoned on this bodily result from a mental state. They have intuitively known better than to tell a sick person that he is looking worse, but they have not always known why. They have known that a fit of anger is apt to bring on a headache, but they have not stopped to look for the reason, or if they have, they have often gotten themselves into a tangle. This is because there has always been, until recently, a missing link. Now the link has been found. After the last chapter, it will not be hard to understand that this connecting link, this go-between of body and mind, is nothing else than the subconscious mind. When we remember that it has the double power of knowing our thoughts and of controlling our bodies, it is not hard to see how an idea can translate itself into a pain, nor to realize with new vividness the truth of the statement that healthy mental states make for health, and unhealthy mental states for illness.

Suggestion and Emotion. There are still many gaps in our knowledge of the ways of the subconscious, but investigation has thrown a good deal of light on the problem. Two of the principles already discussed are sufficient to explain most of the phenomena. These are, first, that the subconscious is amenable to control by suggestion, and secondly, that it is greatly influenced by emotion. Tracing back the principles behind any example of the power of mind over body, one finds at the root of the matter either a suggestion or an emotion, or both. If, then, the stimulating and depressing effects of mental states are to be understood, the first Step must be a fuller understanding of the laws governing suggestion and emotion.

THE CONTAGION OF IDEAS

One of the most important points about the subconscious mind is its openness to suggestion. It likes to believe what it is told and to act accordingly. The conscious mind, too,—proud seat of reason though it may be,—shares this habit of accepting ideas without demanding too much proof of their truth. Even at his best, man is extremely susceptible to the contagion of ideas. Most of us are even less immune to this mental contagion than we are to colds or influenza; for ideas are catching. They are such subtle, insinuating things that they creep into our minds without our knowing it at all; and once there, they are as powerful as most germs.

Let a person faint in a crowded room, and a good per cent. of the women present will begin to fan themselves. The room has suddenly become insufferably close. After we have read half a hundred times that Ivory soap floats, a fair proportion of the population is likely to be seized with desire for a soap that floats,—not because they have any good reason for doing so, but simply because the suggestion has "taken." As for the harbingers of spring, they are neither the birds nor the wild flowers, but the blooming windows of the milliners, which successfully suggest in wintry February that summer is coming, and that felt and fur are out of season. It is evident that all advertising is suggestion.

The training of children, also, if it is done in the right way, is largely a matter of suggestion. The little child who falls down and bumps his head is very likely to cry if met with a sympathetic show of concern, while the same child will often take his mishaps as a joke if his elders meet them with a laugh or a diverting remark. Unlucky is the child whose mother does not know, either consciously or intuitively, that example and contagion are more powerful—and more pleasant—than command and prohibition.

Everything Suggestive. Human beings are constantly communicating, one to another. Sometimes they "get over" an idea by means of words, but often they do it in more subtle ways,—by the elevation of an eyelid, the gesture of a hand, composure of manner in a crisis, or a laugh in a delicate situation. A suggestion is merely an idea passed from one person to another, an idea that is accepted with conviction and acted upon, even though there may be no logic, no reason, no proof of its truth. It is an influence that takes hold of the mind and works itself out to fulfilment, quite apart from its worth or reasonableness. Of course, logical persuasion and argument have their place in the communication of ideas; an idea may be conveyed by other ways than suggestion. But while suggestion is not everything, it is equally true that there is suggestion in everything. The doctor may give a patient a very rational explanation of his case, but the doubtful shake of the head or the encouraging look of his eye is quite likely to color the patient's general impression. The eyes of our subconscious are always open, and they are constantly getting impressions, subtle suggestions that are implied rather than expressed.

Abnormal Suggestibility. While everybody is suggestible, nervous people are abnormally so. It may be, as McDougall suggests, that they have so large an amount of submission or negative self-feeling in their make-up that they believe anything, just because some one else says it is true. Sometimes it is lack of knowledge that makes us gullible, and at other times the cause of our suggestibility is failure to use the knowledge that we have. Sometimes our ideas are locked away in air-tight compartments with no interaction between them. The psychologists tell us that suggestion is greatly favored by a narrowing of the attention, a "contraction of the field of consciousness," a dissociation of other ideas through concentration. This all simply means that we forget to let our common sense bring to bear counter ideas that might challenge a false one; or that worry—a veritable "spasm of the attention"—has fixed upon an idea to the exclusion of all others; or that through fatigue or the dissociation of sleep or hypnosis or hysteria, our reasoning powers have been locked out and for the time being are unable to act.

It was through experiments on hypnotized subjects that scientists first learned of the suggestibility of the subconscious mind. In hypnosis a person can be made to believe almost anything and to do almost anything compatible with the safety and the moral sense of the individual. The instinct of self-preservation will not allow the most deeply hypnotized person to do anything dangerous to himself; and the moral complexes, laid in the subconscious, never permit a person to perform in earnest an act of which the waking moral sense would disapprove. Within these limits, a person in the dissociated hypnotic state can be made to accept almost any suggestion. We found in the last chapter how open to suggestion is a person in normal sleep. Of the dissociation of hysteria we shall have occasion to speak in later chapters. Although all these special states heighten suggestibility, we must not forget how susceptible each of us is in his normal waking state.

Living Its Faith. All this gathers meaning only when we realize that ideas are dynamic. They always tend to work themselves out to fulfilment. The subconscious no sooner gets a conviction than it tries to act it out. Of course it can succeed only up to a certain limit. If it believes the stomach to have cancer, it cannot make cancer, but it can make the stomach misbehave. One of my patients, on hearing of a case of brain-tumor immediately imagined this to be her trouble, and developed a pain in her head. She could not manufacture a tumor, but she could manufacture what she believed to be the symptoms.

There was another patient who was supposed to have brain-tumor. This young woman seemed to have lost almost entirely the power to keep her equilibrium in walking. Her center of gravity was never over her feet, but away out in space, so that she was continually banging from one side of the room to the other, only saving herself from injury by catching at the wall or the furniture with her hands. Several physicians who had been interested in the case had found the symptoms strongly suggestive of brain-tumor. There were, however, certain unmistakable earmarks of hysteria, such as childlike bland indifference to the awkwardness of the gait which was a grotesque caricature of several brain and spinal-cord diseases, with no accurate picture of any single one. This was evidently a case, not of actual loss of power but a dissociation of the memory-picture of walking. The patient was a trained nurse and knew in a general way the symptoms of brain-tumor. When the suggestion of brain-tumor had fixed itself in her mind she was able subconsciously to manufacture what she believed to be the symptoms of that disease.

By injecting a keen sense of disapprobation and skepticism into the hitherto placidly accepted state of disability, by flashing a mirror on the physical and moral attitudes which she was assuming, I was able to rob the pathological complex of its (altogether unconscious) pleasurable feeling-tone, and to restore to its former strength and poise a personality of exceptional native worth and beauty. After a few weeks at my house she was able to walk like a normal person and went back to her work, for good.

We have already learned enough about the inner self to see in a faint way how it works out its ideas. Since the subconscious mind runs the bodily machinery, since it regulates digestion, the building up of tissue, circulation, respiration, glandular secretion, muscular tonus, and every other process pertaining to nutrition and growth, it is not difficult to see how an idea about any of these matters can work itself out into a fact. A thought can furnish the mental machinery needed to fulfil the thought. Some one catches the suggestion: "Concentration is hard on the brain. It soon brings on brain-fag and headache." Not knowing facts to the contrary, the suggestible mind accepts the proposition. Then one day, after a little concentration, the idea begins to work. Whereupon the autonomic nervous system tightens up the blood-vessels that regulate the local blood supply, too much blood stays in the head, and lo, it aches! The next time, the suggestion comes with greater force, and soon the habit is formed,—all the result of an idea. It is a good thing to remember that constant thought about any part of the body never fails to send an over-supply of blood to that part; of course that means congestion and pain.

Hands Off! By sending messages directly to an organ through the nerve-centers or by changing circulation, the subconscious director of our bodies can make any part of us misbehave in a number of ways. All it needs is a suggestion of an interfering thought about an organ. As we have insisted before, the subconscious cannot stand interference. Sadler well says: "Man can live at the equator or exist at the poles. He can eat almost anything and everything, but he cannot long stand self-contemplation. The human mind can accomplish wonders in the way of work, but it is soon wrecked when directed into the channels of worry."[27] In other words, hands off!—or rather, minds off! Don't get ideas that make you think about your body. The surest way to disarrange any function is to think about it. It is a stout heart that will not change its beat with a frequent finger on the pulse, and a hearty stomach that will not "act up" under attention. "Judicious neglect" is a good motto for most occasions. Take no anxious thought if you would be well. Know enough about your body to counteract false suggestions; fulfil the common-sense laws of hygiene,—eight hours in bed, plenty of exercise and fresh air, and three square meals a day. Then forget all about it. "A mental representation is already a sensation,"[28] and we have enough legitimate sensations without manufacturing others.

[Footnote 27: Sadler: Physiology of Faith and Fear.]

[Footnote 28: DuBois: Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders.]

From Real Life. Startling indeed are the tricks that we can play on ourselves by disregarding these laws. A patient who was unnecessarily concerned about his stomach once came to me in great alarm, exhibiting a distinct, well-defined swelling about the size of a match-box in the region of his stomach. I looked at it, laughed, and told him to forget it. Whereupon it promptly disappeared. The first segment of the rectus muscle had tied itself up into a knot, under the stimulus of anxious attention.

Another patient appeared at my door one day saying, "Look here!" Examination showed that her abdomen was swollen to the size of more than a six-months pregnancy. As it happened, this woman had a friend who a short time before had developed a pseudo, or hysterical pregnancy which continued for several months. My patient, accepting the suggestion, was prepared to imitate her. I gave her a punch or two and told her to go and dress for luncheon. In the afternoon she had returned to her normal size.

Another woman, suffering from chronic constipation, was firmly convinced that her bowels could not move without a cathartic, which I refused to give. However, I did give her some strychnine pills, carefully explaining that they were not for her intestines and that they would have no effect there. She did not believe me, and promptly began to have an evacuation every day. It seems that sometimes two wrong ideas are equal to a right one.

If doctors fully realized the power of suggestion, they would be more careful than they sometimes are about suggesting symptoms by the questions they ask their patients.

A patient of mine with locomotor-ataxia suffered from the usual train of symptoms incident to that disease. It turned out, however, that many of the symptoms had been suggested by the questions of former physicians who had asked him whether he had certain symptoms and certain disabilities. The patient had answered in the negative and then promptly developed the suggested symptoms. When I told him what had happened, these false symptoms disappeared leaving only those which had a real physical foundation.

Another patient, a young girl, complained of a definite localized pain in her arm, and told me that she was suffering from angina pectoris. As we do not expect to find this disease in a young person, I asked her where she got such an idea. "Dr. —— told me so last May." "Did you feel the pain in this same place before that time?" I asked. She thought a minute and then answered: "Why no, I had a pain around my heart but I did not notice it in my arm until after that consultation." The wise physician lets his patients describe their own symptoms without suggesting others by the implication of his questions.

Autosuggestion. Of course we must remember that an idea cannot always work itself out immediately. Conditions are not always ripe. It often lies fallow a long time, buried in the subconscious, only to come up again as an autosuggestion, a suggestion from the self to the self. If some one tells us that nervous insomnia is disastrous, and we believe it, we shall probably store up the idea until the next time that chance conditions keep us awake. Then the autosuggestion "bobs up," common sense is side-tracked, we toss and worry—and of course stay awake. An autosuggestion often repeated becomes the strongest of suggestions, successfully opposing most outside ideas that would counteract it,—reason enough for seeing to it that our autosuggestions are of the healthful variety.

At the base of every psycho-neurosis is an unhealthful suggestion. This is never the ultimate cause. There are other forces at work. But the suggestion is the material out of which those other forces weave the neurosis. Suggestibility is one of the earmarks of nervousness. A sensible and sturdy spirit, stable enough to maintain its equilibrium, is a fairly good antidote to attack. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."

WHY FEELINGS COUNT

The Emotions Again. It seems impossible to discuss any psychological principle without finally coming back to the subject of emotions. It truly seems that all roads lead to the instincts and to the emotions which drive them. And so, as we follow the trail of suggestion, we suddenly turn a corner and find ourselves back at our starting-point—the emotional life. Like all other ideas, suggestions get tied up with emotions to form complexes, of which the driving-power is the emotion.

If we look into our emotional life, we find, besides the true emotions, with which we have become familiar in Chapter III, a great number of feelings or feeling-tones which color either pleasurably or painfully our emotions and our ideas. On the one hand there are pleasure, joy, exaltation, courage, cheer, confidence, satisfaction; and on the other, pain, sorrow, depression, apprehension, gloom, distrust, and dissatisfaction. Every complex which is laid away in our subconscious is tinted, either slightly or intensely, with its specific feeling-tone.

Emotions—Tonic and Poisonous. All this is most important because of one vital fact; joyful emotions invigorate, and sorrowful emotions depress; pleasurable emotions stimulate, and painful emotions burden; satisfying emotions revitalize, and unsatisfying emotions sap the strength. In other words, our bodies are made for courage, confidence, and cheer. Any other atmosphere puts them out of their element, handicapped by abnormal conditions for which they were never fashioned. We were written in a major key, and when we try to change over into minor tones we get sadly out of tune.

There is another factor; painful emotions make us fall to pieces, while pleasant emotions bind us together. We can see why this is so when we remember that powerful emotions like fear and anger tend to dissociate all but themselves, to split up the mind into separate parts and to force out of consciousness everything but their own impulse. Morton Prince in his elaborate studies of the cases of multiple personality, Miss Beauchamp and B.C.A., found repeatedly that he had only to hypnotize the patient and replace painful, depressing complexes by healthy, happy ones to change her from a weak, worn-out person, complaining of fatigue, insomnia, and innumerable aches and pains, into a vigorous woman, for the time being completely well. On this point he says:

Exalting emotions have an intense synthesizing effect, while depressing emotions have a disintegrating effect. With the inrushing of depressive memories or ideas ... there is suddenly developed a condition of fatigue, ill-being and disintegration, followed after waking by a return or accentuation of all the neurasthenic symptoms. If on the other hand, exalting ideas and memories are introduced and brought into the limelight of attention, there is almost a magical reversal of processes. The patient feels strong and energetic, the neurasthenic symptoms disappear and he exhibits a capacity for sustained effort. He becomes re-vitalized, so to speak.[29]

[Footnote 29: Prince: Psycho-therapeutics, Chap. I.]

In cases like this the needed strength and energy are not lost; they are merely side-tracked, but the person feels as weak as though he were physically ill.

BODILY RESPONSE TO EMOTIONAL STATES

Secretions. Let us look more carefully into some of the physiological processes involved in emotional changes. Among the most apparent of bodily responses are the various external secretions. Tears, the secretion of the lachrymal glands in response to an emotion, are too common a phenomenon to arouse comment. It is common knowledge that clammy hands and a dry mouth betray emotion. Every nursing mother knows that she dares not become too disturbed lest her milk should dry up or change in character. Most people have experienced an increase in urine in times of excitement; recently physiologists have discovered the presence of sugar in the urine of students at the time of athletic contests and difficult examinations.[30] We have seen what an important role the various internal secretions, such as the adrenal and thyroid secretions play in fitting the body for flight and combat, and how large a part fear and anger have in their production. Constant over-production of these secretions through chronic states of worry is responsible for many a distressing symptom.

[Footnote 30: Cannon.]

Most graphic evidence of the disturbance of secretions by emotion is found in the response of the salivary and gastric glands to painful or pleasurable thinking. As these are the secretions which play the largest part in the digestive processes, they lead us naturally to our next heading.

Digestion. Everybody knows that appetizing food makes the mouth water, but not everybody realizes that it makes the stomach water also. Nor do we often realize the vital place that this watering has in taking care of our food. "Well begun is half-done," is literally true of digestion. A good flow of saliva brings the food into contact with the taste-buds in the tongue. Taste sends messages to the nerve-centers in the medulla oblongata; these centers in turn flash signals to the stomach glands, which immediately "get busy" preparing the all-important gastric juice. It takes about five minutes for this juice to be made ready, and so it happens that in five minutes after the first taste, or even in some cases after the first smell, the stomach is pouring forth its "appetite juice" which determines all the rest of the digestive process, in intestines as well as in stomach. Experiments on dogs and cats by Pawlow, Cannon, and others have shown what fear and anger and even mildly unpleasant emotions do to the whole digestive process. Cannon tells of a dog who produced 66.7 cubic centimeters of pure gastric juice in the twenty minutes following five minutes of sham feeding (feeding in which food is swallowed and then dropped out of an opening in the esophagus into a bucket instead of into the stomach). Although there was no food in the stomach, the juice was produced by the enjoyment of the taste and the thought of it. On another day, after this dog had been infuriated by a cat, and then pacified, the sham feeding was given again. This time, although the dog ate eagerly, he produced only 9 cubic centimeters of gastric juice, and this rich in mucus. Evidently a good appetite and attractively served food are not more important than a cheerful mind. Spicy table talk, well mixed with laughter, is better than all the digestive tablets in the world. What is true of stomach secretions is equally true of stomach contractions. "The pleasurable taking of food" is a necessity if the required contractions of stomach and intestines are to go forward on schedule time. A little extra dose of adrenalin from a mild case of depression or worry is enough to stop all movements for many minutes. What a revelation on many a case of nervous dyspepsia! The person who dubbed it "Emotional Dyspepsia" had facts on his side.

Circulation. It is not the heart only that pumps the blood through the body. The tiny muscles of the smallest blood-vessels, by their elasticity are of the greatest importance in maintaining an even flow, and this is especially influenced by fear and depression. Blushing, pallor, cold hands and feet, are circulatory disturbances based largely on emotions. Better than a hot-water bottle or electric pads are courage and optimism. A patient of mine laughingly tells of an incident which she says happened a number of years ago, but which I have forgotten. She says that she asked me one night as she carried her hot-water bottle to bed, "Doctor, what makes cold feet?" and that I lightly answered "Cowardice!" Whereupon she threw away her beloved water-bag and has never needed it since.

There is a disturbance of the circulation which results in very marked swelling and redness of the affected part. This is known as angio-neurotic edema, or nervous swelling. I do not have to go farther than my own person for an example of this phenomenon. When I was a young woman I taught school and went home every day for luncheon. One day at luncheon, some one of the family criticized me severely. I went back to school very angry. Before I entered the school-room, the principal handed me some books which she had ordered for me. They were not at all the books I wanted, and that upset me still more. As I went into the schoolroom, I found that my face was swollen until my eyes were almost shut; it was a bright red and covered with purplish blotches. My fingers were swollen so that I could not bend the joints in the slightest degree. It was a day or two before the disturbance disappeared, and the whole of it was the result of anger.

We hear much to-day about high blood pressure. They say that a man is as old as his arteries, and now it is known that the health of the arteries depends largely on blood pressure. Since this is a matter that can be definitely measured at any minute, we have an easy way of noting the remarkable effect of shifting emotions. Sadler tells of an ex-convict with a blood pressure of 190 millimeters. It seems that he was worrying over possible rearrest. On being reassured on this point, his blood pressure began to drop within a few minutes, falling 20 mm. in three hours, and 35 mm. by the following day.

Muscular Tone. A force that affects circulation, blood pressure, respiration, nutrition of cells, secretion, and digestion, can hardly fail to have a marked effect on the tone of the muscles, internal as well as external. When we remember that heart, stomach, and intestines are made of muscular tissue, to say nothing of the skeletal muscles, we begin to realize how important is muscular tone for bodily health. Over and over again have I demonstrated that a courageous mind is the best tonic. Perhaps an example from my "flat-footed" patients will be to the point. One woman, the young mother of a family, came to me for a nervous trouble. Besides this, she had suffered for seven or eight years from severe pains in her feet and had been compelled to wear specially made shoes prescribed by a Chicago orthopedist. The shoes, however, did not seem to lessen the pain. After an ordinary day's occupation, she could not even walk across the floor at dinner-time. A walk of two blocks would incapacitate her for many days. She was convinced that her feet could never be cured and came to me only on account of nervous trouble. On the day of her arrival she flung herself down on the couch, saying that she would like to go away from everybody, where the children would never bother her again. She was sure nobody loved her and she wanted to die. Within three weeks, in ordinary shoes, this woman tramped nine miles up Mount Wilson and the next day tramped down again. Her attitude had changed from that of irritable fretfulness to one of buoyant joy, and with the moral change had come new strength in the muscles. The death of her husband has since made it necessary for her to support the family, and she is now on her feet from eight to fourteen hours a day, a constant source of inspiration to all about her, and no more weary than the average person.