Man's unconscious spirit; the psychoanalysis of spiritism

Preface

From the point of view indicated in Chapter III, namely that the energy expended by psychics and psychical researchers, in attempting to prove immortality and the various other phenomena, is a conscious desire prompted by an unconscious fear, and is therefore an activity really not in line with the constructive employment of the libido, it will be evident that I approach the discussion of spiritistic phenomena with a certain natural reluctance; because I do not wish to be accused of an undue interest in either the validity or the invalidity of the alleged proofs.

On a subject in which all my unconscious desire would be centred, if consciousness permitted me to know that a proof was available, I do not, from one point of view, wish to be heard at all. But it has seemed to me that enough importance, to make it wholly worth while, attaches to the question which one might, as a student of psychoanalysis, put to the psychical researchers, namely, How can you say so confidently that such and such things have happened when we really, as yet, know so little about the part played in all these phenomena by the unconscious wishes of the medium and of the observers?

Part I. Consciousness Pass

I The Stream of Consciousness 13

1. The Feeling of Reality 20

2. Meaning 22

3. Degrees of Reality Feeling 23

4. Feeling of Sameness 25

5. Deja Vue 26

6. Absence of Sameness 28

7. Peculiarity of Sameness 29

8. Feelings Are Sensations 31

9. Reality Feeling an Internal Sensation . . 34

10. The Panorama 36

11. Hallucinations 39

12. Reality Feeling and Images 41

13. The Feelings and the Emotions .... 42

14. Complexity of Consciousness 44

15. Feeling of Reality Detachable .... 47

II Emotions 56

1. Emotions Contribute Energy .... 57

2. Emotions Indefinite 59

3. Emotions and Unity of Function ... 60

4. The Objective Situation 62

5. The Conflict 63

6. Fear 65

Part II. The Unconscious Of Psychoanalysis

III Psychoanalysis 73

1. Ignorance About Psychoanalysis ... 74

2. Spiritism and Love 75 t/

8 CONTENTS

PAOB

3. What Psychoanalysis Is Not 76

4. Repression 78

5. The Medium 86

6. Unconscious Trends 87

IV The Unconscious as an Urge 93

1. Resistance to Knowledge ...... 93

2. Complexity 99

3. Non-Conscious Ideas and Feelings . . . 101

4. Reassoeiation of Ideas 106

5. Occurrence 107

6. Current Conscious Psychology .... 114

7. The Unconscious an Hypothesis .... 117

8. An Illustration 118

9. Accidents 121

10. Another Illustration 123

11. Magnification 130

12. Limit on Size 134

13. Fission and Fusion 136

14. The Unconscious as Omnipercipient . . . 138

15. The Medium as Unconscious 141

16. Unconscious Wishes 143

V Mechanisms 147

1. Association 147

2. Humans Subject to Natural Law . . . 151

3. Personality 153

4. Unconscious Memory 157

5. Earliest Sensations 160

6. Introjection 161

7. Projection 165

8. Animism 168

9. Attitude Toward Departed 170

10. Science and the Reality Feeling . . . 171

11. Science and Projection . ^ 173

12. Reality Thinking and Life 176

13. The Reality Feeling vs. Reality Thinking . 178

14. Unconscious Perceptions 181

15. Reading Mechanisms 182

CONTENTS 9

PAGE

16. The Unconscious Combination of Ideas . . 187

17. Miracles 189

18. Desire for the Extraordinary .... 191

19. Desire for Excitement 193

20. Transference 195

VI Unconscious Emotions and Will 201

1. The Conflict-Split Character 201

2. The Postural Tonus 202

3. Emotion a Change of Relation .... 204

4. Repression 207

5. Repression and Conflict 209

6. Emotion Unceasing 212

7. Emotion and Health 215

10. Will and Emotion 220

11. Images and Will 224

12. Recalling a Name 226

13. Freedom of the Will 232

14. The Unconscious Will 232

15. Summary 235

16. Telepathy .237

17. Pleasure-Pain vs. Reality Principle . . . 240

PART III. THE UNCONSCIOUS SPIRIT VII Belief Before Knowledge . 247

1. Belief 247

2. Fear of Death 248

3. Continuousness of Urge 251

4. Verbal Expression ......... 256

5. Belief and Wish 259

6. Sadistic Wish 260

7. Spiritism and War 263

VIII Knowledge Above Belief 265

1. Ambivalence 265

2. A Mental Microscope 266

10 CONTENTS

PAGX

3. The Neurotic 268

4. The Normal Compulsion 271

5. The Taboo 271

6. The Totem . " 273

7. "Spirit" a Projection 275

8. Repression of Mating Instinct .... 279 v'

9. Belief Is Not Knowledge 284

IX Man's Unconscious Spieit 286

1. Divisions of Psychical Research .... 286

2. Unwarranted Inferences 288

3. Narrowing of Consciousness 291

4. Transfer of Reality Feeling 294

5. Relativity of Images 297

X Scientific Investigations 300

1. The Personal Factor in Science .... 300

2. Exclusion of Unconscious Factor . . . 303

3. Belief a Wish 307

4. Dr. Q/s Case 311

5. Elsa Barker 315

6. The Value of Phantasy 321

XI Peesent Status 325

1. The Medium's Material Reward .... 325

2. Physical Manifestations 326

3. What Is "Spirit"? 327

4. Quality of Content 328

5. Infantility in Civilized Spirit World . . 331

6. Reality Thinking 334

Chapter I

If at the end of a busy day we reflect upon what have been the day's experiences, we are struck with the constant change of sensations, from sight to sound, to touch, to taste, to smell, to pleasure, to pain, and so on incessantly. The busiest days in which we hurry from one detail of routine to another or pass from one exciting scene into another, leave no opportunity for imagination. When rest finally comes, we find ourselves thinking over the many incidents and, like the flickerings of a dying fire, our memories spontaneously flash into consciousness, and then vanish, in an apparently incoherent manner. Like a string still vibrating, after we have set it in motion by our day's activities, our minds naturally reverberate the events of the day, and we finally prepare our minds for sleep. We might say that during the day we have sensations of various kinds, and, at the end of it, memories, that have come to us in our moments of relaxation.

For some people the easiest thing in the world to do is to sit and day-dream. This habit is formed early in life, but, even in later life, when the demands of the environment are so exacting that we have to exercise control over our thoughts as vigorously as we can, the natural relaxation, which has however in some highly trained minds become practically impossible, is to let our thoughts come on, as they will, a process which in the general run of people, takes place through the medium of desultory conversation. In all the trains of thought there are apparent gaps, breaks, incoherences, the causes of which will later become apparent to the reader.

If we relax our thoughts to the utmost, which can best be done alone or with some completely trusted person, and examine the stream of ideas, which comes of its own accord, without any effort on our part, we may notice, if we take the trouble to observe, that these ideas are now visual, now auditory and again have other qualities, different from either of these. The different qualities of consciousness are, to careful introspection, much more numerous than the ordinarily accepted " five " senses.

What I shall have to say about the specifically different qualities of consciousness applies equally to sensations and ideas. But before attempting to enumerate and name these different qualities which consciousness, whether idea or sensation, presents, we shall have to make a distinction between idea and sensation and discuss two theories about them.

When I look at an object, and all my attention is centred on the visual appearance of it, I may say that my consciousness is mainly, if not entirely, visual in quality. It yet may have elements of other qualities in it, interspersed in temporal sequence, with brief periods of existence. But though these others, the sounds, smells, touches and innumerable feelings of all kinds exist in the stream, they are so brief as to be insignificant, and may be likened to the cessations in impulse between the alternations of an electric current.

When I hear music, at an orchestral concert, for example, and fix my eyes upon some single point, as the conductor's score, and the whole concert room becomes an indefinite blur of light, my consciousness is mainly, if not entirely, a consciousness of sound. If then the music stops and I look at my companion's face, my consciousness may be said to change from an auditory to a visual quality. Thus my consciousness changes all day long, as I go through the multitude of the day's experiences, from one sense quality to another.

At times the stream of consciousness, as I see it in *ny own case, is like a thread on which are strung various coloured beads. If the stream of consciousness is mainly visual (most of the beads being one colour, say white), there may be a bead or two of some other colour or colours between the white ones. But as these beads pass at the rate of a hundred or so a second, the presence of a blue bead in a white section is naturally not noticed. Or if we say auditory sensations are represented by blue beads, then a few white ones interspersed with the blue would hardly be noticed. At other times the stream of consciousness is like a number of such strings of beads,, each a different colour, from one of which strings the attention goes to another, while yet the bulk of them are fancied to be in consciousness all the time, because the transitions from one to another are so instantaneous.

This is a series of changes in quality. But there is also another change, which might be called a quantity change. The actual sight of one thing may become so subsidiary and unimportant for me that it becomes less in intensity than a mere visual thought. An example of this is the familiar phenomenon observed in silent reading, where the actual sight of the printed page has less visual validity than the visual images that are evoked in the reader's mind by the description he is reading.

In this case the visual mental image may blot out entirely the sight of the page, although the reading goes on automatically, the pages are turned and the reader is oblivious of all except the scenes of the story he is reading. I think he may truly be said then to be conscious only of the subjective phantasy which the actual printed page arouses in him, and to be quite unconscious of the occurrence of external stimuli to his sense organs of all types including the visual stimuli of the black letters on the white page. His consciousness may therefore be not only visual in quality, but at times auditory or any other. It is also subjective in quantity.

The visual images are obviously not the only quality of subjective consciousness that we have, for we have in our mind's ear at times the sounds of nature, of musical themes ; we may also have in mind the odours of the country or the city and the mental images, as I shall call these subjective intensities of the same quality, for every different quality of objective consciousness.

Thus we ride up in an express elevator and receive actual impressions of pressure on our joints and of translation through space coming from the semicircular canals of the ears ; we ride down in a fast elevator and feel the very peculiar sensation of a sudden and gradually diminished fall, as the elevator slows; and later, when thinking about it, we have mental images of the rise and the fall.

We have other sensations coming both from without the body and within it, sensations different from the ordinary five senses and really amounting in number of specific qualities to over twenty. In addition to these we have not only sight and sound and joint pressure and translation, but all the other qualities, in that diminished intensity not connected with external stimuli occurring at the time, an intensity I have referred to above as the mental image. My own experience and that of many other persons I have interrogated is that most of the sensations actually experienced may be later revived in the shape of mental images, so that it will easily be conceivable by any one, even if he has noticed the images in himself, that they are possible, at least, as occurrences in the conscious life of others, who may be more introspective.

I am obliged to admit that there are persons who not only say they have no mental images, but also maintain that others cannot possibly have them. I confess I do not understand their arguments any more than I should understand the argument of a man born blind, who tried to convince me that there is no such sense as sight, for I feel that it is a poor argument, and that it is frequently illogical to try to prove a negative statement.

Whether those persons who deny the existence of mental images have them or not, they must have conscious memories, that come to their minds in some shape; and my experience is that they come now in one sense quality and now in another, in constant succession, interspersed with impressions of external origin, a stream ever changing in quality and intensity. Each quality, whether it be sensation or feeling, may have the intensity usually associated with the reality feeling (see Sec. 1) and be regarded as an objective truth. A hallucination is therefore the occurrence of an image, or series or group of images, with the reality feeling. An illusion is the concurrence of an external sensation with an image, or of two or more external sensations which interact upon each other in such a way as to arouse and lull the reality feeling, in association with contradictory impressions, almost at the same time.

The main divisions of the qualities of consciousness as I have observed them in myself are, as far as I am able to distinguish them, the following :

THE STKEAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 19

Qualities

Senses

Feelings

1. Sight

2. Hearing

3. Smell

4. Taste

5. Skin (Passive) 1 ~ ,

• _, / a /• n fOutaneous

6. Pressure (Active) J

7. Heat

8. Cold

9. Tendinous

10. Articular

11. Muscular

12. Hunger

13. Thirst

14. Sex

15. Dizziness

16. Nausea

17. Pleasure

18. Pain

19. Feeling of sameness

20. Feeling of Reality

21. Feeling of Will

I should call different colours and shades of the same colour, also the various odours, etc., subqualities.

My experience is that the feeling of sameness and the feeling of reality are qualities that may, under appropriate circumstances, occupy the focus of attention and thus be the only sense quality in consciousness for certain brief periods. As will later appear, this is a most important point in considering the validity of the so-called proofs of the existence of disembodied spirit.

§ 1. The Feeling of Reality

If we look long enough through a telescope at a detail of a distant scene, the reality of that scene is at its height at the beginning of the view, and diminishes toward the end on account of the repeated visual impressions being unaccompanied by auditory and other ones. In looking at a stereoscopic view there is a similar and very striking diminuendo in the internal sensation called in consciousness the feeling of reality. There is first a strong feeling of reality caused by the unusualness of the third dimension illusion in the photograph, as one notices, for instance, how clearly the man in the picture stands out from the background. But, after a few seconds, the feeling of reality pales rapidly, on noticing the motionlessness of the man. This paling of interest is due to the lack of the internal sensations usually connected with a real sight. When they fail, interest is gone. In the moving pictures the movements maintain the feeling of reality quite strongly until there comes a " close up " of some one speaking, or of a dog barking, when the feeling of reality is at once lessened, because the sound of the voice or of the dog's bark is not heard.

The feeling of reality is just as different from the sense of sight, to take any sense at random, as sight is different from hearing. I have mentioned elsewhere the fact that part of the meaning of a sight is its sound value, another part of its meaning is its smell value or its taste value, its touch value — value here being what associations of other sense qualities it has acquired and, as it were, made a part of itself. Similarly part of the meaning of a sound is its visual value or the sights associated with it. It is obvious that these values may be quite different for one person from what they are for another, depending on the different experience of the persons.

The meaning for the internal sensations attained by a sight, a sound, a taste, a smell or a touch is sometimes its reality, sometimes its identity. It is inconceivable that any sense might not have a value acquired from any other sense, and that any sense does not have implicitly and unconsciously the value of all and each of the various internal sensations, as they are all present all the time. That is, the strongest meaning of any sight for one person may be the sounds associated with it, for another the smells associated with it, for another the cutaneous or kinesthetic sensations. An important source of meaning for odours is the internal or organic sensations aroused by them.

The meaning of a sight is sometimes built up of the auditory sensations of words associated with it. And the meaning of a word for a given individual consists of the visual, auditory and all other sensations associated in his own mind with that particular word and individual. This is why the same word has different shades of meaning for different people, and why words are so unstable in their meaning while quite identical in their form.

§ 2. Meaning

And the growth of society as an organism is partly dependent on these associations with words ( which themselves are identical ) being made up in the majority of people by preponderatingly similar groups of visual, auditory, etc., and organic sensations.

Unless the word " thief " was able to waken in the majority of people's minds an unpleasant organic sensation, it would not mean what it does and people would not react toward it as they do. One can see the associations collect about a word that has not before had them, or which has lost them for centuries, e. g., the word " Hun," to which have been added as meaning, the organic reactions aroused by the Lusitania, by liquid fire, by poison gas, and many other acts which were designed by the German mind to arouse these organic reactions that they do and others, such as fear, which they do not.

It is obvious, too, that the Hun himself, thinking so much about fear in the other fellow, must have counted it unconsciously very large in himself. Only because to his own soul would it make a compelling appeal, could he have thought it out as a motive force in others. As soon as the word " Schrecklichkeit " went around the world, one could have known that that was the way for the Allies, had they been so low-minded as to use it, to make the deepest impression on the mind of the Boche.

What war meant to the allied mind is the emotions aroused by a just war of defence. To the Allies war was warding or guarding, with all that implies both of what is warded off and what is guarded in the shape of the morally inalienable. The reality feeling, a variety of internal sensation, associated with a sight, is no variation of the visual quality itself. The faint blue of distant mountains is just as real a sight, no matter how pale, as is the brilliance of a rose petal held near the eye. And the actual tone of the colour may be exactly reproduced in a coloured photograph or in a scene in a theatre. But the holding of the photograph in the hand, or the sitting in a badly ventilated auditorium, are factors in the total situation which cause internal sensations, whether conscious or not, that diminish the sense of reality by being exceptions to that sense which we should have if we were sitting or walking in the country and looking at real distant mountains. The realness of the visual impression is measured only by the other impressions simultaneous with the visual.

§ 3. Degrees of Reality Feeling

There are thus various categories or degrees of reality perceptible in connection with sight and dependent on the coexistence of fewer or more numerous internal sensations. The sight alone of a person who is standing, but motionless, has a degree of reality mediated through a feeling of sameness, a sameness with a previous visual impression that has been received simultaneously with other impressions, sights, sounds and all the rest. This degree of reality feeling is augmented by the sight of his movements. If he were chopping wood and I could not hear the sound of his blows, even though he was within hearing, my sense of his reality would be altered, diminished. If I hear the blows, and hear him whistle or talk or sing, these are additional factors in the total of the reality feeling, which receives quite a shock, if any one of these factors and many others, are lacking from the ensemble. Of course, there are persons whose reality contains the internal sensations from more of these physical factors than does that of others.

Here emerges the relation between desire and reality, for reality, thus regarded, seems but the gratification of desire or of the unconscious wish. The reality of the particular individual cannot be other than the sum of the internal sensations associated with the stimuli of his environment, reactions which come to specific form only in presentations and representations. These are determined by his birth, bringing up and education and are the only means whereby he can judge the reality of his impressions. To the man with a physically defective eye, one who, for example, is colour blind, reality is different from that of an artist who, starting though he may with an innate weakness in colour discrimination, has, by compensation of constant attention, so refined his sensibilities as to excel the average man.

The world, to a hypothetical man who has a sense not possessed by other men, say, for example, one that would enable him to read the mind of whomsoever he chose, would be a world having more reality than the ordinary man's world. Thus we might truthfully say that the more senses the more reality, and that the perfectly real world would exist only to the omnipercipient, to coin a word on the analogy of omniscient, which does not seem to mean exactly what I have in mind. This implies that the more one knows about the world, the more real it is, and that the ignorant live in a world of unreality, as they " know so many things that aren't so."

Actual reality, as distinguished from the purely subjective reality feeling here described, is the relation of cause and effect, extensity, intensity of things external to the ego, relations which are made manifest to the ego only when it thinks or perceives in accordance with the reality principle, to be more fully described in a later section (Chap. VI, Sec. 16).

§ 4. Feeling of Sameness

The feeling of sameness includes the feeling of similarity, for similarity is but partial identity. The feeling of partial or complete identity is one that functions daily in all our discriminations and classifications and regulates our conduct hourly and our actions every second. It operates both in and out of consciousness, generally out, as when we are sorting things, such as separating a pack of cards into its four suits, where we are consciously absorbed in the external action of putting a heart with the other hearts, a diamond in the pile of diamonds, etc., and the feeling of sameness which governs our actions does not appear in consciousness.

But, like any other feeling, this feeling can receive the full light of consciousness, as in certain discrimination tests. For example when we are given a number of pill boxes containing, some different, and others the same, weight of lead, we are voluntarily attending to this feeling, as we lift now one, now another.

The feeling of sameness bursts upon us with surprising force and apparently unconnected with external experiences in the deja vue situation.

I have mentioned elsewhere the effect of the feeling of reality upon the opinions of men and the essential difference between the feeling of reality and the perception of the relations of things. It may be objected that the feeling of sameness also mentioned may be quite the same feeling as the feeling of reality, and that when we experience what I call the feeling of reality, we may be having a feeling of the sameness of this experience, in its essential feelings, with a previous experience. As a matter of fact, the two feelings are different, as is shown by the deja vue experience, which, as it may not be familiar to every one, I will describe.

§ 5. Deja Vue

Many of us have had a sudden feeling that a situation in which we find ourselves is the same as one we have been in before, although we know that this could not possibly be the case. I am talking with some one whom I have never met before, in a place I have never been before, about something I have never before discussed, when suddenly I am impressed with a feeling which I know to be contrary to actual fact — a feeling which, for the moment, gives me the impression that just now everything is a repetition, an exact replica, of a situation that I have been in before at some time. The feeling of sameness in these so-called deja vue situations is exceedingly strong for a brief period — a few seconds — but it in no way affects the feeling of reality, which remains constant throughout, maintaining itself through the multitudinous changes of sensations — from one colour to another, from sight to sound, etc., and back again. The reality feeling retains, I think, in the average human, and particularly in the tough-minded type, a more even level of constancy than any other feeling.

Only when something happens which is a sudden and catastrophic blow to our wishes, such as some rapid and stupendous loss, of a friend or a fortune or a life partner, does the feeling of reality fluctuate with huge undulations. Now we cannot believe the facts to be true, and now we cannot doubt the evidence of our senses and the corroborative force of many concomitant circumstances. Our wishes, conscious and unconscious, struggle in a seething mass with the feelings of reality, which are reanimated again and again by repeated stimuli from the external world.

Thus, in the dejd vue situation, the feeling of familiarity (or sameness), which is a specific feeling and like no other sense quality, i. e., is not sight or hearing itself, but is an internal sensation, had functioned without stimulus, or at any rate without the usual stimulus, but with another. Of course it is possible that in the situation felt as similar or identical, there may be enough elements, in different factors of the situation, that are similar or analogous, to create a sort of summation of stimuli sufficient to evoke, in the internal sensations, that reaction which is known to me as the feeling of sameness, and this, even though the actual situation is really different in other respects.

The feeling of sameness and the feeling of reality are related in that there is a sameness experienced in the repeated functioning of the reality feeling occurring uniformly on perception of external stimuli. The very existence of sameness might almost be said to be the backbone of the reality feeling. And, from another point of view, too, reality is measured by uniformity. The greatest degree of objective reality is dependent on universality or conformity to natural law.

§ 6. Absence of Sameness

And the noticed absence of the feeling of sameness gives a sense of unreality in the following situation. One wakes up in a room that one has slept in for the first time. While it has been seen the night before, previous to going to sleep, there is for a moment no recognition of its being the same. It all looks strange and new. The internal sensation that would ordinarily report the sameness has not yet waked up. To recognize that the room is the same, one has to have the feeling of sameness accompany the vision. But the feeling of sameness of visual sensations is not in the eye, for we have, in this illustration, the visual sensation (which is the same) but we have it without the feeling of sameness, which is here evidently absent. Therefore the two sensations of sight and of sameness are qualitatively different and are not reported by the same sense organ.

The same sensation reported by the same sense organ, or in other words, a repeated identical stimulation, of the same external sense organ, does not constitute the feeling of sameness. It does, on the contrary, have the effect of difference, in the sense that presently there come no reports from the identically stimulated organ. Consciousness leaves that organ and goes to some other, or to images, where the qualities may be different enough from each other to keep consciousness awake.