Part 4

When put into hypnosis, however, the memory assumes a different character. She is taken back in imagination to the scene of the accident. Once more the train is entering the station; she leaves the car, steps from the platform upon a truck; then, unawares, steps off the truck and falls to the ground. As she falls her face suddenly becomes distorted with fear; tears stream down her cheeks, which become suffused; her heart palpitates; she suffers again acute pain in her arm, and so on. Her physical and mental anguish is painful to look upon. Though I try to persuade her that she is not hurt and that the accident is a delusion my effort is not very successful.

In this experiment, as in the others, there is substantially a reproduction in all its details of the content of consciousness which obtained at the time of the accident, and also of the emotion and its physiological manifestations—all were faithfully conserved. Further, each event follows in the same chronological sequence as in the original experience.

But in these observations the reproduction differs somewhat from that of ordinary memory. It is in the form of a dream, hypnotic or normal, and the subject goes back to the time of the experience, which he thinks is the present, and actually lives over again the original episode. Unlike the conditions of ordinary memory the whole content of his consciousness is practically limited to that which originally was present, all else, the present and the intervening past, being dissociated and excluded. The original psychological processes and their psycho-physiological accompaniments (pain, paralysis, anesthesia, spasms, etc.) repeat themselves as if the present were the past. Plainly, for such a reproduction, the original episode must have left conserved dispositions of some kind which when excited were capable of reënacting the episode in all its psycho-physiological details. From a consideration of such phenomena it is easy to understand how certain psycho-neuroses may be properly regarded as memories of certain past experiences. The experiences are conserved and under certain conditions reproduced from time to time.

I may cite one other experiment dealing with the conservation of the details of a day’s experiences after the lapse of several months. The subject was a little girl who suffered from hysterical tics. Hoping to discover the exciting cause of her nervous disturbance, I put her into deep hypnosis, and evoked the memories of the events of the day on which her disease developed, _about six months previously_. It was astonishing to hear her recall a continuous series of precise thoughts and acts, many of them trivial, of the kind that would be transient and forgotten by anybody. She began with the events of the early morning, giving her own thoughts and acts; the remarks of her father and mother, describing exactly the location in the house at the time of each member of the family; her arrival at school; the several lessons of the day; the remarks of the teacher; the happenings during recess; her final entry into the laboratory; and the sudden onset of the tic. Everything was given in chronological order. The memories were vivid and, as they came up into her mind, were recognized as true recollections.[16] All this was forgotten when she was awake, that is to say, although conserved, it could not be reproduced. There was no way, of course, of determining the accuracy of these memories and, therefore, their correctness lacks scientific proof. On the other hand, the facts, which are in entire correspondence with similar results obtained under conditions where confirmation is possible, have value as cumulative evidence.[17]

It is not difficult to arrange experiments which will test the accuracy with which the minute details of experiences may be conserved when reproduction is at fault. A simple test is to have a suitable subject endeavor to repeat _verbatim_ the contents of a letter written by him at some preceding time—one week, two weeks, a month, or more. Few people, of course, can do this. If, now, the subject is a suitable one for the abstraction or hypnotic method it may be that he will be able to reproduce by one or the other method the test letter, word for word; a comparison of the reproduction with the letter will, of course, determine the accuracy of the memory. In such an experiment I have succeeded in getting two subjects, Miss B.[18] and B. C. A., to repeat _verbatim_ the contents of fairly long letters, and this even, on certain occasions, when, on account of the subject being a dissociated personality, there was no recollection of the letter at all, not even that it had been written. Such minute reproduction affords further evidence that the conservation of experiences may be much more complete and exact than ordinary conscious memory would lead us to suppose.

=Evidence from hallucinatory phenomena=.—I may mention one more example of conservation of a forgotten experience of everyday life as it is an example or mode of reproduction which differs in certain important respects both from that of ordinary memory and that observed under the artificial methods thus far described. This mode is that of a _visual_ or an _auditory hallucination_ which may be an exact reproduction in vividness and detail of the original experience. It is a type of a certain class of memory phenomena. One of my subjects, while in a condition of considerable stress of mind owing to the recurrence of the anniversary of her wedding-day, had a vision of her deceased husband, who addressed to her a certain consoling message. It afterwards transpired that this message was an actual reproduction of the words which a friend, in the course of a conversation some months previously, had quoted to her as the words of her own husband just before his death. In the vision the words were put into the mouth of another person, the subject’s husband, and were actually heard as an hallucination. Under the peculiar circumstances of their occurrence, however, these words awakened no sense of familiarity; nor did she recognize the source of the words until the automatic writing, which I later obtained, described the circumstances and details of the original episode. Then the original experience came back vividly to memory. On the other hand, the “automatic writing” not only remembered the experience but recognized the connection between it and the hallucination. (The truth of the writing is corroborated by the written testimony of the other party to the conversation.)

Although such types of hallucinatory memories are not actual reproductions of an experience but rather translated representations, yet they show the experience must have been conserved in order to have determined the representation. The actual experience, as we shall see later, is translated into a visual or auditory form which pictures or verbally expresses it, as the case may be. This type of hallucination is common. That which is translated may be previous thoughts, or perceptions received through another sense. Thus Mrs. Holland records a visual hallucination which pictured a verbal description previously narrated to her by a friend, but forgotten. The hallucination included “the figure of a very tall thin man, dressed in gray, standing with his back to the fire. He had a long face, I think a mustache—certainly no beard—and suggested young middle age.”... On a second occasion “the tall figure in gray was lying on the bed in a very flung-down, slack-jointed attitude. The face was turned from me, the right arm hanging back across the body which lay on the left side. I started violently and my foot seemed to strike an empty bottle on the floor.”

There is very little doubt that these visions of Mrs. Holland’s represented Mr. Gurney, who had died from an accidental dose of chloroform. Mrs. Holland “took very little interest” in Mr. Gurney, hence she had entirely forgotten that the main facts of his death had been told to her a few months previously by the narrator, Miss Alice Johnson.[19]

In an hallucination of this sort we have a dramatic pictorial representation of previous though forgotten knowledge which must have determined it. In order to have determined the hallucination the knowledge must have been conserved somehow. I have frequently observed a similar reproduction of a forgotten experience, which was not visual, through translation into a newly created _visual_ representation in the form of an artificial hallucination. The following is of this kind: Miss B., looking into a crystal,[20] saw a scene laid in a wood near a lake, etc. Several figures appeared in this scene, which was that of a murder. Although she had no recollection of anything that could have given rise to the hallucination, investigation showed that the original experience was to be found in one of Marie Correlli’s novels which she had read but forgotten. The vision was a correct representation of the scene as described in the book.

In suitable subjects almost any past experience, whether forgotten or not, can be reproduced in this way if conserved, and observation shows that the number which are conserved is enormous. I shall have occasion to cite further examples in other connections. The phenomenon of translation we shall find when we come to study it, as we shall do in another lecture, throws light upon the nature of conservation for here we are dealing with something more than simple reproduction; what is conserved becomes elaborated into a new composition.

=Evidence obtained from dreams.=—Another not uncommon mode in which forgotten experiences are recovered is through dreams. The content of the dream may, as Freud has shown, be a cryptic and symbolical expression or representation of the experience,[21] or a visualized representation or obvious symbolism, much as a painted picture may be a symbolized expression of an idea,[22] or it may be a realistic reproduction in the sense that the subject lives over again the actual experience. A relative of mine gave me a very accurate description of a person whom she had never seen from a dream in which he appeared. After describing his hair, eyes, contour of face, mouth, etc., she ended with the words, “He looks like a cross between a Scotchman and an Irishman.” After she had most positively insisted that she had never seen this person or heard him described—against my protest to the contrary—I reminded her that I had myself described him to her only a few days before in the identical words, ending my description with the remark, “He looks like a cross between a Scotchman and an Irishman.” Even then she could not recall the fact. Von Bechterew has recorded the case of a man who frequently after hearing an opera dreamed the whole opera through.[23] One subject of mine frequently dreamed over again in very minute detail, after an interval of eight or nine months, the scenes attending the deathbed of a relative. Indeed, in the dream she realistically lived them again in a fashion similar to that of hypnotic dreams such as I have related. Although she had not forgotten these scenes it is highly improbable that she could have voluntarily recalled them, particularly after the lapse of so long a time, without the aid of the dream, so rich was it in detail, with each event in its chronological order.

Dream reproductions, whether in a symbolic form or not, are too common to need further statement. I would merely point out that the frequency with which childhood’s experiences occur in dreams is further evidence of the conservation of these early experiences. The symbolic dream, cryptic or obvious, deserves, however, special consideration because of the data it offers to the problem of the nature of conservation which we shall later study. In this type of dream, if the fundamental principle of the theory of Freud is correct, the content is a symbolical continuation in some form of an antecedent thought (experience) of the dreamer.[24] When this thought, which may be forgotten, is recovered the symbolic character of the dream, in many cases, is recognized beyond reasonable doubt.[25] If this principle is well established, and nearly all investigators are in accord on this point, though we need not always accept the given interpretation of individual dreams—if the principle is sound, then it follows that symbolism includes memory of the original experience which must be conserved. So that even this type of dream offers evidence of conservation of experiences for which there may be total loss of memory (amnesia).

Before closing this lecture I will return to the point which I temporarily passed by, namely, the significance of the _difference in the form of reproduction_ according as whether it is by automatic writing or through associative memories in abstraction. In the latter case, as we have seen, the memories are identical in form and principle with those of everyday life. They enter the personal consciousness and become conscious memories in the sense that the individual personally remembers the experience in question. Abstraction may be regarded simply as a favorable condition or moment when the subject remembers what he had at another previous moment forgotten. We have seen also that the same thing is true of remembering in hypnosis (excepting those special realistic reproductions when the subject enters a dream-like or somnambulistic state and lives over again the past experience in question). In automatic writing, on the other hand, the reproduction is by a secondary process entirely separate and independent of the personal consciousness. In the examples I cited the latter was in entire ignorance of the reproduction which did not become a personally conscious memory. At the very same moment when the experiences could not be voluntarily remembered, and without a change in the moment’s consciousness, something was tapped, as it were, and thereby they were graphically revealed without the knowledge of the subject, without memory of them being introduced into the personal consciousness, and even without the subject being able to remember the incident after reading the automatic script. Even this stimulus failed to bring back the desired phase of consciousness. It was very much like surreptitiously inserting your hand into the pocket of another and secretly withdrawing an object which he thinks he has lost. What really happened was this: a secondary process was awakened and this process (of which the principal or personal consciousness was unaware) revealed the memory lost by the personal consciousness. At least this is the interpretation which is the one which all the phenomena of this kind pertaining to subconscious manifestations compel us to draw.[26] At any rate the automatic script showed that somehow and somewhere _outside the personal consciousness_ the experiences were conserved and under certain conditions could be reproduced.

We now also see that the same principle of reproduction by a secondary process holds in hallucinatory phenomena whether artificial or spontaneous, and in many dreams. When a person looking into a crystal sees a scene which is a truthful pictorial representation of an actual past experience which he does not consciously remember, it follows that that visual hallucination must be induced and constructed by some secondary subconscious process outside of and independent of the processes involved in his personal consciousness. And, likewise, when a dream is a translation of a forgotten experience into symbolical terms it follows that there must be, underlying the dream consciousness, some subconscious process which continues and translates the original experience into and constructs the dream.

This being so we are forced to two conclusions: first, in all these types of phenomena the secondary process must in some way be closely related to the original experience in order to reproduce it; and, second, a mental experience must be conserved in some form which permits of a subconscious process reproducing the experience in one or other of the various forms in which memory appears. Further than this I will not go at present, not until we have more extensively reviewed the number and kinds of mental experiences that may be conserved. This we will do in the next lecture.

Footnote 5:

Automatic writing is script which has been produced unconsciously or involuntarily, although the writer is in an alert state, whether it be the normal waking state or hypnosis. The hand writes, though the subject does not consciously direct it. Ordinarily, though not always, the subject is entirely unaware of what the hand is writing, and often the writing is obtained better if the attention is diverted and directed toward other matters. The first knowledge then obtained by the subject of what has been written, or that the hand has written at all, is on reading the script. Some persons can cultivate the art of this kind of writing. Mrs. Verrall and Mrs. Holland, for example, deliberately educated themselves to write automatically, and each published a volume of her records. In other normal people automatic writing seems to develop accidentally or under special circumstances. In certain types of hysteria it is very easily obtained. “Planchette,” which many years ago was in vogue as a parlor game, was only a particular device to effect automatic writing.

Footnote 6:

In this particular experiment, when the hand wrote “automatically,” the second _hypnotic consciousness vanished_ and the subject went into a _trance_ state, or what is equivalent to a third hypnotic state. There was no consciousness present, excepting that which was associated with the writing hand. At other times, in experiments of this class with this same subject, the hypnotic or the waking consciousness, as the case might be, persisted _alert_ while the hand wrote. For the purpose of the experiment in recovering memories this change in the psychological condition is not of importance, the principle remains the same.

Footnote 7:

_Journal of the S. P. R._, July, 1906. A fuller account of this case was later published in the same journal, August, 1911.

Footnote 8:

A remark made by the subject in the trance state, though passed over in the report as apparently inconsequential, has really much meaning when interpreted through that conception of the unconscious memory process which will be developed in succeeding chapters. The subject, while in the trance, claimed to be in a mental world wherein “is to be found, it is said, not only everything that has ever happened or will happen, but all thoughts, dreams, and imagination.” In other words, in that psychical condition into which she passed, all the conserved conscious experiences of her life could be awakened into memory.

Footnote 9:

_Proceedings of the S. P. R._, October, 1906, Chap. XII.

Footnote 10:

In the automatic script, which purported to be a spiritistic message from a dead friend named Annette, occurred the enigmatical sentence: “Tell her this comes from the friend who loved cradles and cradled things.” The meaning of this was revealed by the above-mentioned letter to Mrs. Holland, written twenty years previously. It was from a friend of Annette’s, and quoted an extract from Annette’s will, which ran, “because I love cradles and cradled things.” When Mrs. Holland was tearing up some old letters she came across this one. (“On the automatic writing of Mrs. Holland,” by Miss Alice Johnson: _Proceedings of the S. P. R._, June, 1908, pp. 288, 289.)

Footnote 11:

It would have required a stenographer, whom I did not have, to record fully all these recovered memories. They would fill several printed pages, and I can give only a general résumé of them. Some weeks later the experiment was repeated and a record taken as fully as possible in long hand.

Footnote 12:

Later in the day she discovered the loss of her gloves and, not remembering where she had left them, was obliged to retrace her steps in search of them.

Footnote 13:

Of course the memories recovered by either method may be fabrications as with ordinary voluntary memory, and the automatic script may stimulate the conscious memory to recollect the experiences in question. Nevertheless, while the memories are being recorded by the script, no “conscious” memory is present with subjects who are unaware of what the hand is writing.

Footnote 14:

Sidis, Prince, and Linenthal: A contribution to the Pathology of Hysteria, _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_, June 23, 1904.

Footnote 15:

The Dissociation of a Personality, by Morton Prince. (New York; Longmans, Green & Co., 1906.) P. 77. Hereafter, when this work is referred to, the title will be indicated simply by “The Dissociation.”

Footnote 16:

Undoubtedly much was forgotten and, therefore, there must have been hiatuses of which she was not aware; but the remarkable thing is that not only so much, but so much that was inconsequential and evanescent was recalled. If additional technical methods had been employed probably more memories could have been recalled.

Footnote 17:

The objection will probably be made that the memories and statements of hypnotized persons are unreliable on several grounds, chiefly suggestibility, liability to illusions and, in some cases, tendency to fabrications. This criticism is more likely to come from those who have had a special rather than a wide experience with hypnotism.

Footnote 18:

Miss B., in these pages, always refers to Miss Beauchamp, an account of whose case is given in “The Dissociation.” In this connection cf. pp. 501, 81 and 238 of that work.

Footnote 19:

_Proceedings of the S. P. R._, June, 1908.

Footnote 20:

Crystal or artificial visions are hallucinatory phenomena which, like automatic writing, can be cultivated by some people. The common technic is to have a person look into a crystal, at the same time concentrating the mind, or putting himself into a state of abstraction. Under these conditions the subject sees a vision, i.e., has a visual hallucination. The vision may be of some person or place, or may represent a scene which may be enacted. Because of the use of a crystal such hallucinations are called “crystal visions,” but a crystal is not requisite; any reflecting surface may be sufficient, or even the concentration of the attention. The crystal or other object used of course acts only by aiding the concentration of attention and by force of suggestion.—_The subconscious is tapped._

Footnote 21:

Freud: Traumdeutung, 2 aufl. 1909.

Footnote 22:

Morton Prince: The Mechanism and Interpretation of Dreams. _The Journal of Abnormal Psychology_, October-November, 1910.

Footnote 23:

Zentralblatt für Nervenheilkunde und Psychiatrie; 1909, Heft 12.

Footnote 24:

According to Freud and his school it is always the imaginary fulfilment of a suppressed wish, almost always sexual. For our purposes it is not necessary to inquire into the correctness of this interpretation or the details of the Freudian theory.

Footnote 25:

For an example, see p. 98.

Footnote 26:

If the physiological interpretation be maintained, i.e., that the script was produced by a pure physiological process, this phenomenon would be a crucial demonstration of the nature of conservation, that it is in the form of physical alterations in nervous structure. I do not believe, however, that this interpretation can be maintained.

LECTURE III CONSERVATION OF FORGOTTEN EXPERIENCES OF NORMAL, ARTIFICIAL, AND PATHOLOGICAL LIFE

I. Normal Life (Continued)