Instinct and the Unconscious. W.H.R.Rivers

      II. The Unconscious

       Table of Contents

      The concept of "the unconscious" in psychology is one which has aroused the liveliest differences of opinion and has been met by bitter opposition. Even those who are ready to accept the vast influence of unconscious factors in psychology may well be appalled by the difficulties of treating the unconscious in a scientific manner and fitting so necessarily hypothetical a factor into the explanation of behaviour. One line of opposition has come from advocates of the older introspective school of psychologists who have found it difficult to fit an unconscious region of the mind into their schemes of description and explanation. The aim of the older psychology was to furnish a rational explanation of human behaviour and endeavour. As the material for such explanation they used almost exclusively the happenings in their own minds, which could be directly, though really only retrospectively, observed, and made this material the basis of constructions whereby they fitted into coherent schemes the infinitely varied experience of the human mind. When their introspective method failed them, and they were driven to assume the existence of factors lying outside those accessible to introspection, they were accustomed to assume subconscious processes, or to speak of psychological dispositions and tendencies, or they would even throw psychology wholly aside, bringing into their schemes of explanation factors belonging to the wholly different order of the material world, and used physiological processes as links in the chain whereby they connected one psychological happening with another.

       Those who adopted subconscious processes as elements of their constructions, viz., processes which only differed from other [p. 8] mental processes in the lesser degree of distinctness and clearness with which they could be observed, paid in this way lip-service to the supposed essential character of consciousness in psychology, but failed to recognise that they were only evading a difficulty by clinging to a simulacrum of the conscious, the existence of which was just as hypothetical as any of the constructions of the thoroughgoing advocates of the unconscious.

       Those who spoke of psychological dispositions, or going still further, adopted physiological dispositions in their place, were also positing purely hypothetical factors where those open to direct observation failed them. These measures were only means by which these psychologists and psycho-physiologists escaped from the necessity of facing the difficulties presented by many aspects of animal and human behaviour, and especially those presented in Man by the phenomena of disease.

       It is noteworthy that the due recognition of the importance of the unconscious and the first comprehensive attempt to formulate a scheme of its organisation and of the mechanisms by which it is brought into relation with the conscious should have come from those whose business it is to deal with the morbid aspect of the human mind. The necessity for the use of unconscious factors continually arises when dealing with the experience of health, but the opportunities afforded by such experience are usually so fleeting, and the experience itself often so apparently trivial, that they failed to force the psychologist of the normal to face the situation. It was only when unconscious experience had contributed to wreck a life or produce a state with which the physician had to struggle, and then often ineffectually, for months or years that it became impossible to push such experience aside or take any other line than that involved in the full recognition of its existence. It is only the urgent and inevitable needs of the sick that have driven the physician into the full recognition of the unconscious, while it has needed the vast scale on which nervous and mental disorders have been produced in the war to force this recognition upon more than the few specialists to whom it had been previously confined. [p. 9]

       In entering upon an attempt to make clear the sense in which the term "unconscious" will be used in this book, I will begin by pointing out one sense in which it will not be used. At any given moment we are only clearly conscious of the experience which is in the focus of attention. This forms only an infinitesimal proportion of the experience which is capable, by being brought into the focus of attention, of becoming conscious with an equal degree of clearness. Again, at any one moment a much larger amount of experience is within the region of the conscious though less clearly, but even the largest amount which can thus I be brought within the outermost fringe of consciousness at any instant or even within any brief space of time, forms but a very small proportion of that which, with other directions of the attention, could come into the field of consciousness. At any given instant there is a vast body of experience which is not in consciousness because at that instant it is neither the object of attention nor so connected therewith as to occupy consciousness with more or less clearness at the same time. Experience of this kind will not be included within "the unconscious" as the term is used in this book. In so far as the term "the unconscious" applies to experience, it will be limited to such as is not capable of being brought into the field of consciousness by any of the ordinary processes of memory or association, but can only be recalled under certain special conditions, such as sleep, hypnotism, the method of free association, and certain pathological states.

       The kind of experience which will form the main subject-matter of this book may best be illustrated by some examples.

       A good instance of the unconscious is afforded by the conditions underlying the claustrophobia of a sufferer from war-neurosis, whose case is described in full in Appendix II. as long as he could remember, this patient had been subject to a dread of confined spaces so severe, and producing states so painful and unendurable, that he was debarred from taking part in many of the ordinary occupations of life, or could do so only at the risk of suffering and discomfort. When his profession as a doctor took him at the age of thirty to the front his specific [p. 10] dread was brought into pronounced activity by the necessity of working in dug-outs, and the strain so produced formed a most important factor in producing a state of anxiety-neurosis. During a course of treatment to discover the origin of his claustrophobia, there came to the patient's consciousness an experience at the age of four in which he had been confined in a narrow passage with no means of escape from a dog by which he was terrified. In spite of attempts, continued over several years, to discover some experience of childhood which could explain his symptoms, this memory of the dog in a passage had wholly failed to appear in consciousness, and was only brought to memory by a special procedure. We have no direct evidence that the incident had been wholly unconscious during childhood, but owing to his prolonged search for such experience at a later period of life, and its total failure to appear in consciousness, we have the most decisive evidence that an arresting experience, one accompanied by an emotional state of the most poignant kind, can lie dormant and evade the most searching attempts to bring it into the field of consciousness. When it was at last recalled, this did not happen through any association of waking life but came in the semi-waking state following a dream. Its coming to consciousness occurred in definite connection with an experience of sleep which we know to furnish conditions especially favourable to emergence from the unconscious.

       This patient not only affords conclusive evidence for the existence of experience shut off from consciousness under ordinary conditions, but his case shows that this experience, though inaccessible to consciousness directly, may yet be capable of affecting it indirectly. His dread of confined spaces had so definite a relation to the early experience that the two were undoubtedly connected, while the complete disappearance of his claustrophobia, after bringing the long dormant experience to the surface, affords further, though standing alone, not necessarily conclusive, evidence in the same direction.

       Psychological literature contains many similar histories. I take this case of claustrophobia as an example, partly because, having come under my own notice, I am able to estimate its [p. 11] trustworthiness. Still more important is the fact that it was possible to obtain conclusive