The machinery of the mind

Throughout every inch of our organism is a network of specialised fibres whose function it is to carry nervous impulses from the sense organs to the central nervous system of br...

In single-celled animalculæ, the most primitive type of living creatures, a single cell performs all the functions of life; it moves, breathes, assimilates, excretes, and feels....

When an impression is made on a sense organ, the sensation derived from it is telegraphed up the connecting nerve fibre to the brain, and there translated, by a process of which...

Those untrained in psychology generally conceive of the mind as a homogeneous whole; our first systematic examination reveals to us, however, that the mind is just as organic as...

Some psychologists say that the memory of every impression which has ever been received by a sense organ is registered here as on a photographic plate, but this opinion is not u...

Having studied the levels into which the mind is divided, we must next consider the nature of the material that is stored in them, and to do this we must study the workings of M...

We have already considered the mind as a tank divided into compartments by sieves of varying diameters of mesh, let us now consider the currents that move in the water that fill...

The self-preservation instinct appears to our consciousness under the guise of that deep-rooted clinging to life, that desire to live, which characterises every living thing. It...

The self-preservation instinct, having its source in the sense of individuality, of separateness, is the motive of our self-assertion. It is necessary that each member of a herd...

As soon as the demands of the self-preservation instinct are satisfied, as soon as the individual is secure, adequately fed and sufficiently developed, then life tends to overfl...

The sex instinct, in the course of development from its infantile aspect to its adult manifestation, goes through well-marked phases which are little known outside the ranks of...

I. Should an individual be lacking in vigour, he may fail to reach his full psychic development, and stick fast at one of the earlier phases. The adult sex force therefore manif...

Should an instinct be denied its expression and all ideas connected with it be repressed into the subconscious, trouble will ensue. The lower reaches of a river can be emptied b...

The classification of diseases was carried out at a time when the body was regarded as the whole of man and the mind looked upon as an unimportant by-product whose influence was...

As we have already seen, our life is motived by three great instincts. A moment’s thought, however, will cause us to realise that, as these instincts are diverse in their aims,...

Repression is a refusal to permit an idea to enter consciousness. The instant it looms up upon the fringe of consciousness the attention is resolutely turned away from it. This...

While the device of repression may adequately deal with many of the unwelcome thoughts that intrude themselves upon us, it is not capable of doing so in every case, and then the...

We may picture the dissociated complex, with the pressure of an instinct behind it, constantly seeking to evade the censor and return to consciousness, where its wishes can be t...

We have already seen that emotion is intimately allied with instinct, and that it is the thrust of the urging instincts that drives us to action, making us seek to appease the n...

While many forms of mental disease have a physical origin in the brain, nervous system, and state of the blood, many others are purely mental from beginning to end, although the...

The foundations of this method and theory were laid by Sigmund Freud of Vienna, and set forth by him in his epoch-making book, the _Interpretation of Dreams_, published in 1900....

Much popular misapprehension exists with regard to the phenomenon known as hypnosis. It may briefly be described as a condition in which the reason and judgment of the subject a...

Those who have read the foregoing pages will see that there are certain broad divisions into which they fall. Let us now review these divisions in their relation to the practica...

It has been said that there is no scrap of knowledge concerning the remotest star which will not, sooner or later, be found to have its bearing upon the problems of human life,...