Our unconscious mind and how to use it

Front matter

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Book

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Foreword

THE form of this book has been determined by a considerable body of those who will read it, for it is arranged to meet the need, so many times expressed in my lecture audiences, of a simple and practical treatment of the subject that should be written in terms comprehensible to the layman. Terminology, the jargon of a science, is invented by scientists for purposes of convenience and accuracy; but in recent psychological research the progress has been so rapid and the lines of development so diversified that there has not yet been time for crystallization of descriptive terms, with the result that even among psychologists themselves there is not yet an effective agreement. Tansley's use of the word "complex," for example, is in a far different sense from that of the psychoanalytic school; and there is wide divergence of meaning among various writers who use the term "libido," few of them giving it exclusively the sense in which it was originally used by Jung. To discard technical language entirely, in the preparation of this work, was well-nigh out of the question; but I have tried to use it as little as possible and wherever its use was compulsory I have tried to define my meaning so that it should be both clear and accurately stated.

viii Foreword

For the most part I have omitted discussion of psychoanalysis and kept to the underlying principles. Experience has convinced me that the average casual reader of psychoanalytic works has found himself hopelessly entangled in the maze of mechanisms for which his mind has not been prepared. To understand the activities of the Unconscious and their relation to those of the Conscious, it seems to me that one should first have a clear picture of such matters as how perceptions are conditioned by wish-feelings en route to response, and the nature of the difference between wish-feelings at the two levels. It seems equally important to grasp the relation of mental states to endocrine gland activities. Furthermore, jsince Suggestion is one of the vitally important determinants in human conduct, and since I have been so fortunate during my work in Switzerland as to be in contact with its most advanced theory and practice, it has seemed logical to point out its relation to what might be termed the Physiological Unconscious — f*he involuntary nerve-and-muscle system.

The new law advanced — the "Law of Dominant Affect" — has proved accurate experimentally and of real importance in the additions which it has made possible to Autosuggestion technique. A theory, as Kempf has remarked, is worth its working value; and the applications of this theory have given definite results. Critical comparison will show that it is a radical advance from the admitted law of auxil-

Foreword ix

iary emotion, since the Law of Dominant Affect bases the entire technique on the creation and stimulation of a carefully designed phantasy.

If any apology is needed for including the section on Advertising and Selling in this general work, it must be pleaded that in our busy country one may fairly suppose a considerable number of readers to be interested in the business applications as well as in those which relate to home, family, and personal problems.

For valuable suggestions in studies during past years, my sincere thanks are extended to Dr. A. A. Brill, Dr. Smith Ely Jelliff e, and Dr. Walter Timme, of New York. To Dr. Hector Mortimer of London, and to Prof. Dr. Charles Baudouin of Geneva, I wish to acknowledge a particular debt of gratitude — to the one for his constructive criticism during the preparation of the book, and to the other for his generous exposition of the Autosuggestion work at the Rousseau Institute. Finally toward those groups in the cities of the Middle West who first extended ,to me an invitation to their platforms, there is a deeply felt and enduring gratitude for their generous and always stimulating welcome. To encounter them again will be one of the pleasures of homecoming. F. P.

Contents

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Explanatory: The Why and Wherefor ... i

CHAPTER

Chapter I The Operating Tower

TF the denizens of our large cities, who spend a ■ part of each day anathematizing the telephone operators in central stations, could pay a half-hour's visit to one of these stations during a peak-load period, there is little doubt that the anathemas would cease then, there, and forevermore. For a central station telephone exchange is a striking object lesson in how nearly a complicated series of human actions, mental and physical, may be brought to the state and speed of an automatic machine.

Somewhere a receiver is snatched from a hook. On the operator's desk a signal flashes, her hand lifts a plug and snaps it into place, her voice inquires, her ear registers a number (often spoken indistinctly), her voice repeats it, her hand snaps in another plug for the second station, her ear registers an answer, her voice again repeats the number. At the second station the other operator has seen a signal, answered, heard a number, repeated it, snapped in a plug and set a bell ringing. Complicated enough, in itself, this series of actions, when one considers the relatively few seconds consumed in the entire process; but add to them the number of other wires that are signalling or being held while rung by other stations, and it quickly becomes impossible for any person but a trained operator to follow the speed of the perception-and-response pattern.

Rapid and adroit as it is, however, it can give but the palest and faintest impression of the central station of the human body. If I am so unlucky as to stick a pin in the end of my finger, the signal is carried along an inward-bound nerve path, the perception is registered in consciousness, an order is despatched over a parallel outward-bound nerve path to a whole series of muscles, the finger is jerked away, and the whole process of affect and effect has taken perhaps the fiftieth part of a second. (The reaction time varies widely for reasons that will appear in another section.) Speed is not the point which I want to emphasize; it is merely of incidental interest in some of the functions of the system that we are examining. What is really important in the illustration just given is the reason why the finger was jerked away. It will not suffice merely to say that there was pain, because pain is only a name for a certain sort of affect. And there are many sorts of pain to which there is no such reflexive act as attempting to get away. What happened was that the central station received information that the environment of the finger was unsatisfactory. Whereupon it called upon cooperative muscles to move the finger away; in other words to change the unsatisfactory environment.

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If now we pass from an external touch perception to an internal one — let us take the stomach for example — we may find the same mechanism at work. A child has partaken of too much rich food. The terminals of the stomach's perceptive nerves transmit the information that the internal environment is unsatisfactory, whereupon an order is sent over the parallel lines to the appropriate muscles and these set in motion a reversed peristalsis, thus emptying the stomach — changing the unsatisfactory environment. A still higher degree of cooperation is instanced when the blood vessels around a wound mobilize the white corpuscles of the blood to fight an infection.

Let us suppose that a woman is passing under a lighted gas jet around which someone has been so careless as to arrange a paper shade. The shade takes fire and ignites the woman's hair. The perception of the unsatisfactory environment of the head promptly registers, but no good will come of sending any order over the outgoing paths to the scalp. Cooperation is required here between separate members of the body; the order goes to the muscles of both legs, which obligingly remove the head from the cause of the unsatisfactory environment — and it is to be hoped that the hands will do their bit also in quickly stopping the conflagration in the hair, thus completing the change in the head's environment.

These suppositions have dealt only with surroundings that were unsatisfactory. But if a fragrant flower be held under the nose the reaction is quite different. The order sent out will be, not to change, but to get more. Instead of avoidance of, there will now be extension toward, as a response to the stimulus. The same will be true if sugar is put in a baby's mouth; if the eye perceives an agreeable combination of colors or grouping of lines; or if the ear is stimulated by harmonious sounds.

The principle then is that, of any perception coming into the central station, one of three things must be true of the affect. It must be either agreeable, disagreeable, or indifferent. And the tendency is to transmit orders which will adjust the environment, or adjust to the environment, accordingly. The terminal end of any perceptive nerve may be spoken of as a "receptor" (or "receiver") ; the impression which its message makes at the central station is an "affect"; and the order (if any) transmitted over the Outward bound lines may be called the "response" or effort at adjustment. Some of these efforts at adjustment seem to be wholly instinctive, but in studying them we quickly get beyond that level and find in them thought processes, habit, and established response-models. If I am driving an automobile on a main road, and suddenly from a blind intersection another car appears directly in front of me, the motions which I apply to clutch, brake, and steering wheel, are not instinctive ; they are the result of habit based on definite models. If these models had not

The Operating Tower 9

been formed, and the habit responses acquired, the right motions would not be made. Similarly, there is no thought process involved; at least none at the conscious level; for time is lacking. The thought process has been worked out beforehand, during earliest driving practice, thus establishing the response model ready for instant reproduction when needed, i.e., when the dangerous environment occurs. The tremendous importance of model formation and habit response will be seen in later pages dealing with practical methods of analyzing and improving one's self.

The muscular processes of a newly born child when it is first given the mother's breast may be taken as a purely instinctive response to a stimulated perception. At adolescence one sees instinct still at work but now working through a most complex system of stimuli, affects, ideas and responses. The increased action of the thyroid gland is stimulating (through its secretions in the blood-stream) other glands and organs — particularly the procreative system. There is an actual change in the chemistry of the blood, which acts as an exciter or stimulus to certain nerves. This in turn produces its affects; the whole complicated and wonderful birth and growth of romancefeeling in a human being. Scarcely perceptible at first, the signs of effort at adjustment multiply slowly. Fortunate is the boy or girl in whom this process is not too rapid. Under our system of education it coincides with the period when the brain is called io Our Unconscious Mind

upon to assume the more intensive activity of the secondary school. Later we shall see how the energy may be so divided as to make satisfactory school work almost impossible. In many children these are the most critical years of the entire life. If it is true that the seeds of every neurosis are planted during the first seven years, it is equally true that during adolescence they have their greatest chance of intermediate growth.

But to return to the mechanisms:

The background of instinct, in the adolescent, is obvious; and it is equally obvious that no such simple act of adjustment as that of the pin-pricked finger, or the cooperation of feet and hands with the scorched head, will serve to gratify the desire to love and to be loved in the mating sense, with all the manifold adult wishes that follow in train; the ideas of companionship, a home, achievement, children, etc. It must not be forgotten that whatever models the child has for these things — its emotional models, so to speak — for various situations, are none of them practical. They have not been developed out of specific teaching, or out of experience. They have come mainly from observation; and in the average child they hardly exist in consciousness. (Emphatically this does not imply that they are weak. We shall see later that they exist mainly in a field which we shall call the "unconscious," and that they have a very great intensity which is partly primitive.) The situation is something like that of the man who when

The Operating Tower ii

asked if he could play the piano replied that he didn't know because he had never tried. There is a chemical stimulation going on which produces affects that demand radical efforts at adjustment. Neither experience nor training has provided any thought processes that would establish adequate models of response. Unfortunately, in the average instance, there has grown up a barrier of reserve between child and parents making impossible that simple confidence by which the child might have steady access through these difficult years, to the stored experience and knowledge of life in the parents' minds. In the hour of our greatest trial we are alone. There remains nothing for the adolescent but to make the adjustment by the often painful process of trial and error; acquiring its own experiences and from them developing its own forms of response. At each step there will be a thought process; so that from the first half-formed phantasies of having a sweetheart, through the (usually, I think, unconsciously experimental) "calf loves," to the final goal of successful mating in marriage, and the founding of a home, we may trace a series of the most intricate and complex cooperative acts, all originating from the same stimulus, and all aiming toward acquiring a satisfactory change of environment.

The stimulus affect has had to call on thought processes. These have had to turn over, examine, regroup and consider such images, or models, as observation, hearsay and reading have imprinted on the memory. The orders over the outward bound lines have then been to reproduce and try out these models. From the results of these try-outs new material has been supplied for the thought processes, so that gradually, by trial-and-failure as well as by trial-andsuccess, the models of action have been found that will lead to the desired goal.

We must not overlook the fact that all the time two conflicting forces have been at work; on the one hand the primitive instinctive effort of the central station so to operate the machine as to get its wishes: on the other hand the effort of cultural training to keep the operation within bounds approved by the social group. Here then are two divisions of mental activity sharply opposed to each other; one functioning chiefly at an unconscious, the other at a conscious level. The first is natural, instinctive, primitive, concerned not with morals or manners but solely with securing a satisfactory environment — in other words, fulfilling its wishes. The second has the job of finding a working compromise, of checking the primitive when it fails to square with the conscious ethical sense and public opinion.

The main effort of the central station in the foregoing instance was toward a change of environment that would produce gratification. But suppose a manufacturer is confronted with a business situation that threatens serious loss. The affect is painful, and the effort will be to avert disaster. Fear will powerfully reinforce the motive. His thought processes;

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have adequate stores of experiences (images or models of response) to turn to, but it is necessary to arouse affects in the central stations of others; his assistants, his friends, his bankers, etc. The series of stimuli and responses, with their reinforcing fears, desire for money, desire for power, personal regard, and the like, through which the trouble is finally avoided, would require an entire book for their analysis. The final result has been to change an environment that was acutely distressing. This in itself fulfills a wish. As a matter of fact every operation of the central station is toward that end. We have now the following principles in hand:

1. That through inbound and outbound nerve paths any perceptive stimulus may produce an affect to which there is an effort at response.

2. That the response, however complex, is in the general form of extension toward, or change of, the environment.

3. That response-models are formed through experience and observation.

4. That the response may be instinctive, may follow an acquired model (habit response) , or may have to wait for a thought process.

5. That the driving force is always a wish.

6. That the wish may be either unconscious or conscious.

7. That the two wish-fields are often in conflict.

8. That the thought processes required are often elaborate in the extreme, and that they are always at the service of two masters — the unconscious and the conscious.

In the next chapter, "Behind the Scenes with a Human Mind" we shall see these principles at work under extraordinary circumstances.

Chapter II

THE following very interesting case of conversion hysteria has been selected because by taking it apart and putting it together again one may construct a complete working diagram of the. human mind; not in the sense of anatomy but in the sense of graphics. The case shows many of the operations of the central station, it shows the interplay of the conscious and unconscious, and it reveals many things which explain human conduct far beyond our average everyday understanding of it.

A man of thirty, married, and the father of two children, goes to bed at night apparently in ordinarily good health. He awakens in the morning to find that his right arm is fixed firmly behind him, with the forearm across the small of his back. He is unable to move it. In every other respect he feels perfectly well, is in full possession of all his senses and faculties. There is no pain in the arm, and it is only slightly numb. There is no apparent reason why he should not move it and use it as freely as ever; but he cannot do it.

Examination by physicians shows that the arm is perfectly sound, and that there is no evidence of illness of any sort whatever. The man himself has not the remotest idea why the arm is immovable, yet he has no more power over it than if it were paralyzed. If sufficient force is applied by others the arm can be moved, but this occasions severe pain and when the force is removed the arm resumes instantly its fixed position. To add to the puzzle, there is no sense of fatigue. This fact we shall find later gives the key to one of the most valuable of recent discoveries in methods of doing mental work, a discovery which has possibilities of tremendous importance to all of us.

Fortunately, the knowledge and technique are today available both to give an accurate diagnosis and to cure the symptom. The case is one of conversion of an unconscious mental conflict into a physical symbol of the conflict. (Hysteria, a neurotic disease, should not be confused with the spasmodic laughing and crying commonly called "hysterics.") It is well to say "cure the symptom," rather than "cure the disease," because while the arm may surely be released to its full natural use there is no absolute certainty that at some future time the man will not give evidence of his hysteric trend in some other way.

It is not necessary to describe here the psychoanalytic method by which the case is to be explored, further than to say that, with the assistance of the analyst, the patient is going to be enabled to recover significant memory impressions which, have been entirely lost to (suppressed from) consciousness. Psychoanalysis has been so extensively written of by competent authorities — and by some who are neither competent nor authorities — that there is an ample literature available to all who wish to study it. What we are concerned with here is an understanding of the mental mechanisms rather than of the method of treating them when they get out of gear. Arrangements are made for our patient to have an hour or more a day with the analyst, and he is encouraged to discuss whatever thoughts may be in his mind or may come to him in the course of his talking. For several days the interviews may be taken up by an apparently pointless stream of ideas. He will be encouraged to recall if possible his recent dreams and relate them, for a purpose which will appear later. It develops, in this case only after many sessions, for a reason which also will appear later, that on the very evening before the attack there had been a most unpleasant domestic scene. The patient had boxed the ears of his older child, a boy aged seven. His wife had resented this, had reproached him angrily, and had declared that in thus striking the child he might injure him for life. In telling of the incident he recalls that while he had felt that the boy's mother had absurdly overrated the importance of what to him seemed only slight and ordinary punishment of a disobedient child, nevertheless he had for some reason felt a sense of guilt and had not been able to make any adequate reply. He recalls further, now, that very often during his eight years of married life he had felt this inability to defend himself when his wife had reproached him for anything. His general description of the family life makes it evident enough that the wife is the real head of the household, that he is in fact dominated by her, although this last has not been admitted in his conscious mind; in other words he is unaware of it as a domination.

Aside from the fact that the analyst's training enables him to see in this incident the key to his case, two things mark it as important. In the first place, it is rather noteworthy that this memory of something by no means unimportant, which had occurred just before the onset of the illness, should not have appeared in one of the very first interviews. In the second place, the patient's reactions while discussing it give evidence of considerable emotional affect. The analyst encourages a thorough review of the episode with all of the associated memories which it stimulates. In succeeding interviews these lead back over the trail of the years to childhood, and it becomes evident from the patient's description of his early life that his mother had been much the same sort of energetic and "masterful" woman as is his wife, quick of temper and forthright of speech. When he v/as two years old, a younger brother had been born, a child who as he recalls quite definitely, "everybody said looked like my father," and from then on he felt that the mother's love was centered on the new arrival and he himself was shut out. "She did her duty by me," he expresses it, "but I always knew I didn't count as much as little Jack did. She seemed to care about him the way she did about Father. I came third."

As this series of memories comes into consciousness, there is a flood of material that seems to urge for utterance, and there is marked evidence of its emotional character. A point is reached, however, when the patient suddenly stops, and refuses to continue relating his present train of thought. He takes refuge in evasion, says that there is nothing of importance, or that he is tired, or that his memory fails. The practical eye of the analyst, however, has caught signs of great emotional tension. He insists patiently but earnestly that the chain of memories cannot have been broken abruptly unless a part of the mind had strong reasons for breaking it, and that the man must, for his own sake, continue. The resistance is at last overcome and the man relates the following circumstances :

He recognizes that his feeling toward his younger brother was always jealousy. He does not think that he hated him; indeed he is sure there were times when he was fond of the little chap ; but always there was a smouldering jealousy and once in a while it would flare up quite uncontrollably. On such occasions he would give way to a fit of childish rage in which he tried to square the situation by using his small fists. Punishments followed, and their gradually increasing severity as he grew older served for the most part to restrain him. But on the younger boy's seventh birthday there had been a climax. The celebration of the day, culminating with a party, contrasted sharply with the observance of his own birthday which for some reason had been rather slighted. At the children's bedtime, the mother was unusually demonstrative over her favorite, held him in her arms and caressed him extravagantly before putting him in his crib, and left the room declaring that he was "the sweetest child in the whole world." The patient remembers that in an agony of spirit he created a phantasy of himself as dead and the mother broken-hearted with remorse over her neglect of him. The next morning he had started a quarrel with the younger boy and was having decidedly the better of the fight which followed, when the mother overheard the affair and put a stop to it. Four months later little Jack had been seized with an illness which the old-fashioned country doctor had announced was "brain fever," and in a fortnight had died. The mother, doubtless hardly herself, what with the strain of the sleepless nights and of her grief, had bitterly accused the patient of having been the cause of his little brother's illness, and hence of his death, because of the blows he had struck on the younger boy's head.

At this point, the patient's memories of the trouble seem really to have run out. He recalls many minor circumstances but nothing that seems actually important. Yet the analyst knows that there is something missing. Stimulation of the memory has recovered the emotional images on which the present onset is modelled, but there still remains the physical image — the fixed arm. It is to this which he now directs attention, asking the patient to try to think of the connection between it and the events he has related. At first, the patient cannot recall any. His mind dwells on the brother's death, the mother's reproaches and the terrible guilt which they had made him feel. The delay is not long, however, for the association stimulus (with which we shall presently experiment) is a strong one. His thought drifts back to the fight. To being discovered. To the punishment — and now it comes back in a flash. His mother had been violently angry, angrier than at any other time he could remember. She had said she "would give him a lesson he would never forget." She had tied his right arm behind his back and forced him to go about with it in that position for seven days.

With the recovery of these memories, and an explanation of the mechanisms, our patient is cured of the symptom. The arm is released. The affectenergy, having been given a psychic discharge, no longer has to use a physical path.

If a normal adult becomes involved in an argument with an inefficient or impertinent waiter, he may be for the moment quite angry, but the anger (emotional affect) is dismissed as soon as the episode is over. Unless the matter is serious enough to report to the management, there has been in the mere act of reproof a sufficient response to the affect, partiallarly if it has secured better service, and thus a more agreeable environment. Experience, and practice in living, supply enough familiar response-models for the needs of every day. The adult is more or less an emotional veteran, able to take any ordinary stroke without wound and without conscious effort. Our patient was able to do this. His wife's reproaches annoyed him but he was not conscious of any serious disturbance. It was a deeper affect, stimulated far back in childhood, to which he had at that time been powerless to make any adequate response, that caused his trouble.

How was this old, forgotten affect stirred into such extraordinary life and activity again?

If you will take pencil and paper and set down in a column a number of simple words, such as dog, blue, high, boy, night, grass, bright, etc., and then have someone pronounce clearly each word, waiting after each one until you respond, you will of course find that after a short interval of time each word brings into your mind either another word or a group of words in the form of phrase or sentence. When "dog" is pronounced you may very likely think of "cat"; to "blue" you may respond with "sky"; to "high" with "hill" ; and so on. This is simple association of ideas. But now let us carry the experiment a step farther. Instead of the group let us take one single word, set it down on a clean sheet of paper, retire to a quiet place, relax thoroughly, think of the word, and then set down the entire train of other words and ideas that follow through the next quarter of an hour. The result will be a good deal of material. This latter can then be separated into divisions or groups of related ideas. I will take an example from one of my note-books, giving only the associations of the first two minutes — some of them were slow in forming: