Instinct and the Unconscious. W.H.R.Rivers
to the unconscious experience of war, fall into two main groups. There are, on the one hand, general changes in personality, and changes in tastes, in likes and dislikes, in preferences and prejudices, while on the other hand, there are specific dreads or other morbid experiences of waking or sleeping life, such as nightmares, hallucinations or morbid impulses, which can be more or less directly ascribed to the activity of the unconscious experience. In such cases we have definite evidence, not merely for the existence of unconscious experience, but for its activity, or capacity for activity, in this unconscious state.
I will conclude this chapter by considering a way in which the term "unconscious" is often used which I shall endeavour to avoid. If an idea springs spontaneously into the mind without obvious antecedents in consciousness we are accustomed to speak of this mode of appearance as unconscious. Again, when a person behaves in a manner which corresponds to something taking place in the mind of another person, but is not wholly, or perhaps not at all, determined by anything in the mind of the behaver, we regard the behaviour as due to the suggestion of the second person and we are accustomed to speak of this process of suggestion as unconscious. In these instances the antecedent of the thought or behaviour may, and probably does, come from the unconscious, in the sense already proposed, either of the person who experiences the thought or of the person by whom the behaviour is suggested, but it is a question whether it is convenient to use the term "unconscious " for the [p. 16] process by which the thought or the behaviour is promoted. It is only necessary to point out that in such a case we are speaking of a change being set up in consciousness unconsciously to see how unsatisfactory is this usage and how little relation there is between the use of the word "unconscious" in this sense and that in which I propose that it shall be used. I shall not, therefore, call such processes as I have mentioned unconscious, but shall make use of a special term to denote them and shall speak of them as "unwitting." When a thought or feeling comes into the mind without antecedents in consciousness so that we suppose it to have come from the unconscious, I shall not speak of the thought as having arisen unconsciously but unwittingly. Similarly, I shall speak of the process of suggestion as taking place unwittingly and not unconsciously, leaving open how far the source of the suggested thought or behaviour is in the "unconscious" as the term will be used in this book.
III. Suppression
In the last chapter I have attempted to make clear the sense in which I shall speak of "the unconscious" in this book. I have illustrated its nature by three kinds of example; one taken from a definitely pathological state dependent on an experience of early life; the second derived from my own history, also derived from the unconscious experience of early life, but one which may be regarded as coming within the limits of normal psychology; while the others are taken from cases of psycho-neurosis in which the experience which has become unconscious is made up of the events and memories of warfare. I have now to consider how such experience becomes and remains unconscious.
The first process to be considered is that by which experience becomes unconscious. I shall speak of this process as suppression. Writers on the unconscious often use "repression" for the process in question, but I propose to reserve this term for the process by which we wittingly endeavour to banish experience from consciousness. It seems that this process of witting repression may be one means of producing suppression, that experience wittingly repressed may, at any rate under certain conditions, succeed in becoming suppressed and inaccessible to the general body of consciousness. But there is little doubt that this is only one of the ways in which suppression occurs, and that more often it takes place wholly without the intervention of volition, especially when it occurs as the result of some physical or mental shock. We are still in much uncertainty concerning the exact mechanism by which suppression occurs, but there is reason to believe that in the majority of [p. 18] cases it takes place without conscious effort, or according to the terminology I propose to use, unwittingly. There is even some reason to believe that suppression only follows witting repression, when conditions of some other kind favourable to suppression are present. One of the chief aims of this book is to discover the nature and biological significance of the mechanism of suppression.
One line of inquiry which may be used to this end is the comparison of suppression with the ordinary process of forgetting. Suppression is only one form of forgetting -- a form in which the forgetting is especially complete -- and light should be thrown upon the nature of suppression by a general study of the process by which we forget. Formerly psychologists were especially concerned with the process by which we remember, but they have gradually been coming to recognise that the more important problem is to discover how and why we forget. It is one of the many merits of Freud[1] that he has thrown much light on this problem and with a wealth of examples has illustrated the complex nature of forgetting in the ordinary course of daily life. According to him forgetting is not a passive process, dependent on lack of interest and meaning, or varying with the intensity of an impression, but is an active process in which some part of the mental content is suppressed. The content which is thus suppressed does not disappear because it is uninteresting or unimportant; on the contrary, it is usually of very special interest and has a very definite meaning. It is suppressed because the interest and meaning are of a kind which arouse pain or discomfort and, if present in consciousness, would set up activities which would be painful or uncomfortable. Active forgetting is thus a protective process or mechanism, one by which consciousness is protected from influences which would interfere with the harmony essential to pleasure or comfort. The examples of the unconscious which were recorded in the last chapter are only pronounced examples of a similar process. Just as we tend to forget an appointment which seems likely to be the occasion of a quarrel or forget to write a letter [p. 19] which involves the undertaking of an unpleasant responsibility, so we may suppose that the painful experience of my claustrophobic patient was forgotten because the memories of the passage and the dog were so painful as to interfere with his happiness. The completeness of the suppression may have been due to the fact that the interference with the comfort of the child was so great as seriously to disturb his health. In the case of my own experience it is not possible to say why the memory of the upper floor has been forgotten, since I do not yet know the nature of the suppressed experience, but we can be fairly confident that it was of an unpleasant kind and was forgotten because the memory of it interfered with my comfort and happiness. The memories which disappear in war-neurosis are always of happenings so distressing that the most painful emotions arise when the happenings are recalled. The conclusion to which we are led both by the experience of everyday life and by the analysis of pathological and semi-pathological states is that there is no difference in nature between the forgetting of he [sic] unpleasant experience of ordinary life, often quite trivial in character, and such examples of complete and life-long suppression as those which I have chosen to illustrate the nature of the unconscious.
If these two kinds of forgetting are essentially alike, if they furnish the two ends of a continuous series, a study of the forgetting of everyday life should provide a means of understanding the suppression which occurs in pathological states. If we attempt such a study the first point which may be noticed is that the active forgetting of everyday life is not voluntary and intentional, but is essentially a process which takes place unwittingly. If we try to forget an appointment which we expect to lead to a quarrel, or try to forget a letter undertaking an unpleasant responsibility, we should not succeed. We should probably only fix these duties the more firmly in our memories. It is characteristic of the active forgetting of which Freud has provided such a wealth of examples[2] that it occurs spontaneously. In such instances as I have given, we do not know that [p. 20] we have forgotten. It is only when we are reminded of the missed appointment, or the overdue letter, that we become aware of the lapse. In other cases, as when we forget the name or address of a correspondent to whom we should write, we know that we have forgotten, but the act of forgetting has still been involuntary and unwitting.
The pathological suppression taking place in adult life seems in most cases to be clearly involuntary and unwitting. The most complete cases of suppression do not occur in people who have tried consciously to repress painful experience, but have come about without any conscious activity on the part of the sufferer, especially as the result