Instinct and the Unconscious. W.H.R.Rivers
evidence that the infantile experience had really occurred, and was neither the fancy of the patient nor the result of suggestion on the part of the physician, the latter possibility being especially present when a supposed experience of childhood is discovered by means of hypnotism.
The records of others can never, however, carry the conviction which comes from one's own experience, even though such experience can rarely have the dramatic and conclusive character of my case of claustrophobia. One who wishes to satisfy himself whether or no unconscious experience exists should subject his own life-history to the severest scrutiny, either aided by another in a course of psycho-analysis or, though less satisfactory and less likely to convince, by a process of self-analysis. It will perhaps be instructive if I give a result of my own self-analysis, which though at present incomplete, has done much to convince me of the reality of the unconscious.
I am one of those persons whose normal waking life is almost wholly free from sensory imagery, either visual, auditory, tactile or of any other kind. Through the experience of dreams, of the half-waking, half-sleeping state, and of slight delirium in fever, I am quite familiar with imagery, especially of a visual kind, which, so far as I can tell, corresponds with that of the normal experience of others. I am able to recognise also that in the fully waking state I have imagery of the same order, but in general it is so faint and fragmentary that the closest scrutiny is required for its detection. It is clear to me that if it were not for my special knowledge and interest I should be wholly ignorant of its existence. On looking back in my life I am aware that my mental imagery was more definite in youth, and I can remember the presence at that period of fairly vivid visual imagery in connection with certain kinds of experience, especially of an emotional kind.
Some years ago, as part of an examination into my memories of childhood, I discovered that I had a more definite knowledge of the topography of the house I left at the age of five than of [p. 12] any of the many houses I have lived in since. I can make a plan of that house far more detailed, based on memories clearer to myself, than I can make of houses in which I have lived far longer and at times of life when one might expect more permanent and vivid memories. Moreover, I can even now obtain visual images of the early house more clear and definite than any I usually experience, while other memories of my first five years bring with them imagery more definite than accompany the memories of later life. I have concluded, and I think I am justified in doing so, that before the age of five my visual imagery was far more definite than it became later and was perhaps as good as that of the average child.
For some time I explained the loss of imagery of which I am the subject as part of a process by which I had become especially interested in the abstract. I supposed that my imagery had faded for lack of the attention and interest which would have kept it active, even if they had not promoted its development into the instrument which imagery has become in the mental life of the majority of human beings. It is only during the last year or two that I have discovered an aspect of my early experience which has led me to revise this earlier opinion. This discovery is that my knowledge of the house I left when five years old is strictly limited to certain parts of it, and that the rest of the building is even more inaccessible to memory than any of the houses in which I have lived since. So far as I remember the house had three floors. I can remember, and even now image fairly vividly, every room, passage and doorway of the ground-floor. I can in imagination go downstairs into a kitchen in a basement and I can go upstairs towards the upper door, but when I reach the top of the stairs I come to the absolutely unknown, an unknown far more complete than is the case with any house occupied more recently, where I have some idea of the topography, though this is inexact and vague. For more than two years I have been attempting, by means which have succeeded in evoking other early experience, to penetrate into the mysterious unknown of the upper storey. Though I have recalled many incidents of my early life which took place on the [p. 13] ground-floor, in the basement, in the regions before and behind the house, no event of any kind which happened in the upper storey has ever come to my consciousness. Now and then, when in the half-waking, half-sleeping state, peculiarly favourable in my experience to the recovery of long-forgotten events, I have had the sense that something is there, lying very near emergence into consciousness. But I have not yet succeeded in penetrating the veil which separates me from all knowledge of my life in that upper storey.
The evidence for the existence of unconscious experience which is provided by these memories of my infancy is, of course, incomplete, in that I have not yet discovered the nature of the unconscious experience and have even no certain guarantee that it exists. The feature of the experience which impresses me -- I cannot expect it to have an equal influence on others -- is the completeness of the blank in my mind in connection with that upper storey. I fail to explain that blank by any mechanism provided by differences in the effect of interest on memory. A psychologist of the old school would probably say that we tend especially to remember the striking and unusual, and that it is therefore natural that my memories of the upper storey, where I probably passed most of my life at that time, should be less vivid than those of the lower parts of the house, which I visited less often. This might well explain a different degree of distinctness of memory, but it cannot explain the completeness of the blank left by the memories of the upper storey. Another line which might be taken is that, at any rate during the year before I left the house, I lived on the ground-floor during the day and only visited the upper floor at night when tired. But even if such a reason were valid, it cannot explain the completeness of the blank. Moreover, such explanations seem to be put out of court by the fact that when I recall memories of houses lived in later, I find no such difference between upper and lower storeys. Though my memories of later houses are more vague than the early memory, they are quite as definite for the upper as for the lower parts of the buildings.
The two cases I have given are examples of the experience of [p. 14] early life which has become inaccessible to consciousness. This period of life is especially apt to afford occasions for experiences to become unconscious, but the passing of experience into the unconscious may happen at any age, and its occurrence has been brought to notice very widely by the experience of war. One of the most frequent features of the nervous disturbances of war has been the complete blotting out of the memories of certain events, the obliteration usually extending considerably beyond the event which furnished its special occasion. In some cases, where the loss of memory for a period of the soldier's life has been produced by physical shock accompanied by complete unconsciousness, as in cerebral concussion, the obliteration has been complete, and the case does not come within the scope of this book, for there is no evidence that any experience exists capable of being again brought to consciousness. In many cases, however, in which the obliteration is due to mental shock or other physical factors, the experience which is inaccessible to the consciousness of the subject under the usual conditions of memory has been recovered in the hypnotic state or by the method of free association or has expressed itself, usually in a distorted form, in dreams. In such cases soldiers have lost the entire memory of their lives from some moment preceding a shock or severe strain until they have found themselves in hospital, perhaps weeks later, although during at least part of the intervening time they may have been to all appearance fully conscious and may even have distinguished themselves by actions on the field of which they have no recollection. Although these memories may remain for months or years quite inaccessible to memory when approached by the ordinary channels, they may be brought to the surface by means of hypnotism or by the method of free association.
In a case of a somewhat different kind under my care a soldier had lost all memory of his life from a day in July when he was training in England until the following January when he found himself in hospital in Egypt, having no recollection whatever of his service in various parts of England, of the voyage to Egypt, or of his life in Egypt before going to hospital. The memory [p. 15] of this period was not recovered until more than a year later following the disclosure of a painful experience in his life which had a definite connection with his amnesia.
In cases such as these the loss of memory forms part of the complex group of changes which make up the state we call psycho-neurosis. There is reason to believe that many of the manifestations or symptoms of this state are due to the activity of the experience which has become unconscious, just as the dread of my claustrophobic patient has been ascribed to the unconscious experience of which he was the subject at the age of four. The effects which can be thus ascribed, at any rate in part,