From such a point of view, he will certainly acknowledge that submission to a greater power is a splendid effect of inhibition and at the same time a powerful effect for the stimulation of unused energies; but he will recognize also that the use of those silent energies is not without dangers. Certainly nature has supplied us with a reservoir of normally unused psychophysical strength, to which we may resort just as the tissues of our body may nourish us for a few days when we are deprived of food, but such supply, which in exceptional cases may become the last refuge, cannot be used without a serious intrusion and interference with the normal household of mind and body. To extract these lowest layers of energies may mean for the psychophysical system a most exhausting effort which may soon bring a reaction of physical and nervous weakness. The chances are great that such a religious excitement, if it is really to have a deep effect, may go over into a mystic fascination which leads to hysteria or into an exhausting eruption of energies which ends in neurasthenic after-effects.

The immediate successes of the strong religious influence on the weakened nervous system, especially on the nervous system of a weak inherited constitution, are too often stage effects which do not last. From a mere purposive point of view, they may be complete successes. They may have turned the immoral man into a moral man, the skeptic into a believer, but the physician cannot overlook that the result may be a moral man with a crippled nervous system, a believer with psychasthenic symptoms.

From the point of view of the church, there cannot be too much religion; from a therapeutic point of view, religion works there like any other nervous remedy of which five grains may help and fifty grains may be ruinous. Moreover this power of inhibiting the little troubles of the body and of bringing to work and effectiveness the deepest powers of the mind belongs not less to any other important idea and overpowering purpose. The soldier in battle does not feel the pain of his wound, and in an emergency everybody develops powers of which he was not aware. The same effect which religion produces may thus be secured by any other deep interest: service for a great human cause, enthusiasm for a gigantic plan, even the prospect of a great personal success.

Thus in a psychotherapeutic system, religion has only to take its place in line with many other efforts to inhibit the feeling of misery and to reinforce will and self-control by submission under a greater will. That in the case of religion this submission, from an entirely different purposive point of view, also has a moral and religious value, has in itself no relation to the question of its therapeutic character. It ought not to lead to any one-sided preference, inasmuch as religiously indifferent agencies may be in the particular case a more reliable means of improvement.

Moreover the psychological symptoms are, after all, only a fraction of the disease and very different bodily factors, digestion and nutrition, heart and lungs and sexual organs may be most intimately connected with the disturbance of the equilibrium. Medicine today no longer believes that hysteria originates in the diseases of the uterus or that neurasthenia necessarily results from insufficiencies of the stomach, but it would be a graver mistake to believe that mental factors alone decide the progress of the disease, however prominent the mental symptoms may be in it. From the physician’s encouragement and the minister’s influence towards new faith in life, a short way leads to the influence of suggestion. It is on the whole the way which leads from the general psychotherapeutic treatment to the specific one directed against particular symptoms.

There is no nation on earth which is more proud of its rush and its hurry than the American people; and yet what an abundance of time is leisurely wasted that would have to be used for work if the country could not live from its richness.
Moreover our life has probably become cooler, there is less emotionalism, less sentimentality, more business-like attitude, and that all means less inner friction and excitement; in public life too, less fear of war and less religious struggle. All has become a question of administration and efficiency. Our time is certainly not worse off on the score of neurasthenia than its predecessors. Above all the intensity of mental stimuli is always relative.
The psychologist knows the experiments which determine that we perceive the difference of impressions as alike when the stimuli are proportional. If I have a ten-pound weight in one hand, I may find that I must have one pound more in the other hand to discriminate the difference. Now if I take twenty pounds in the one hand, then it is not sufficient to have one pound more in the other, but I must have twenty-two pounds in the other to feel a difference, and if I take thirty pounds, the other weight must be thirty-three.
We feel equal differences when the weights stand in the same relation. The man who owns a hundred dollars will enjoy the gain of five and regret the loss of five just as much as the owner of a hundred thousand dollars would feel the gain or loss of five thousand. This fundamental law of the relativity of psychical impressions controls our whole life. The rush of stimuli which might mean a source of nervous disturbance for the villager whose quiet country life has brought about an adjustment to faint impressions may cause very slight stimulation for the metropolitan accustomed for a lifetime to the rhythm of the surroundings. Yet that quiet countryman may react in his narrow system not less when the modest changes in his surroundings provoke him.

The gossip of his neighbor may undermine his nervous system just as much as a political fight or the struggles of the exchange that of the city man. The same holds true for the purely intellectual engagements. The work which the scholar undertakes should not be measured by the effect which the same appeal to concentrated attention would make on the average man of practical life. There, too, an adjustment to the demand has resulted during the whole period of training and professional work. Every effort should be estimated with reference to the standard of the particular case. This relativity of the mental reaction on the demands of life must always be in the foreground of the psychotherapeutic régime. Even the best physicians too often sin against this principle and accuse the life which a man or woman leads as too exhausting and overstraining simply because it would be overstraining and exhausting to others who are not adjusted to that special standard. Simply to withdraw a patient from the one kind of life and to force on him a new kind with new standards may not be a gain at all.
A new adjustment begins and smaller differences from the standard may bring about the same strong intensities of reaction as the large differences brought before. Complete rest, for instance, for a hard brain-worker hardly ought to be recommended unless a high degree of exhaustion has come on.
If routine prescriptions are to be admitted at all, they should not be complete rest or complete change of life for any length of time but a continuation of the life for which adjustment has been learned with a reasonable reduction of the demands and stimulations.
The intellectual worker ought to decrease his work, the over busy society woman ought to stay in bed one day in the week, the man in the midst of the rush of life ought to cut down his obligations, but probably each of them does better to go on than simply to swear off altogether. Their rest ought to have the character of vacation; that means interruptions without the usual activity ought to be short periods spent with the distinct feeling that they are interruptions of that which must last and that they are not themselves to become lasting states. Thus the inner adjustment to the work ought to be kept up and ought not to be substituted by a new adjustment to a less exacting life. In this way the episode of the vacation rest ought to be in a way included in the strenuous life almost as a part of its program.

Strenuosity must not mean an external rush with the gestures of over busy excitement, but certainly the doctrine of the lazy life is wretched psychotherapy, as long as no serious illness is in question. By far the best alteration is, therefore, even in the periods of interruption, not simply rest but new engagements which awaken new interests and stimulate neglected mental factors, disburdening the over-strained elements of mental life. The most effective agency for this task is contact with beauty, beauty in nature and life, beauty in art and literature and music. To enjoy a landscape ought to be not merely a negative rest for the man of the office building, and good literature or music absorbs the mental energies and harmonizes them. In the second place come games and sport, which may enter into their right if fatigue can be avoided. Harmonious joyful company, as different as possible from the depressing company of the sanitariums, will add its pleasantness. While the advice of the physician ought thus to emphasize the positive elements which work, not towards rest, but toward a harmonious mental activity, we must not forget some essential negative prescriptions. Everything is to be avoided which interferes with the night’s sleep. Furthermore, in the first place, alcohol must be avoided.

There cannot be any doubt that alcoholic intemperance is one of the chief sources of brain disturbances and that the fight against intemperance, which in this country is essentially the fight against the disgusting saloon, is a duty of everyone who wants to prevent nervous disaster. There may and must be divergence of opinion as to the safest way to overcome intemperance. The conservative physician will feel grave doubt whether the hasty recommendation of complete prohibition is such a safe way, whether it does not contain many conditions of evil, and whether the fight against the misuse of alcohol will not be more successful if a true education for temperance is accepted as the next goal.

But for the man of neurasthenic constitution and for any brain of weak resistance, the limit for permissible alcoholic beverages ought to be drawn very narrow and in such cases temporary abstinence is usually the safest advice. Individual cases must indicate where a glass of light beer with the meal or a glass of a mild wine may be permissible. Strong drinks like cocktails are absolutely to be excluded.

In the same way a strong reduction is advisable in tobacco, tea, and especially coffee. A complete withdrawal of all stimulations to which a nervous system has been accustomed for years is not wise, or at least mild substitutes ought to be suggested, but if coffee can be ruled out at once, often much is gained. In the same way all passionate excitements are to be eliminated and sexual life to be wisely regulated. An especial warning signal is to be posted before all strong emotions, and if the patient cannot be asked to leave his worry at home, he can at least be asked to avoid situations which will necessarily lead to excitement and quarrel and possible disappointment.

It is one of the surest tests of psychotherapeutic skill to discriminate wisely whether one or the other of these features of general treatment ought to be emphasized. They usually demand more insight than specific forms of psychotherapy like hypnotic suggestions. These general efforts are also much more directed against the disease itself where the specific methods are merely directed against the symptoms. The separation from disturbing surroundings, the reduction of engagements and work, the complete rest, the suppression of artificial stimulants, the enjoyment of art, of nature, of sport, the distractions of social life, each might be in one case a decisive help and indifferent, perhaps even harmful in another.

All is a matter of choice and adjustment to the particular needs in which all the personal factors of inherited constitution, acquired adjustments, social surroundings, temperament, and education, and the probable later development have to be most tactfully weighed. Yet this general treatment may take and very often ought to take the opposite direction, not towards rest but towards work, not towards light distraction but towards serious effort, not towards reduction of engagements but towards energetic regulation. We said that it was an exaggeration to blame the external conditions of our life, the technical manifoldness of our surroundings as the source of the widespread nervousness.
The mere complexity of the life, the rapidity of the demands, the amount of intellectual effort is in itself not dangerous and our time is not more pernicious than the past has been; but it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that our time is by many of its features more than the past tending towards an unsound inner attitude of man. Much of the present civilization leads the average man and woman to a superficiality and inner hastiness which undermines sound mental life much more than the external factors.

We look with a condescending smile at the old-fashioned periods in which the demands of authority and discipline controlled the education of the child and after all the education of the adult to his last days. We have substituted for it the demand of freedom with all its blessings, but instead of the blessings we too often get all its vices. A go-as-you-please method characterizes our whole society from the kindergarten to the height of life. We eulogize the principle of following the paths of own true interest and mean by that too often paths of least resistance. Study becomes play, the child learns a hundred things but does not learn the most important one, to do his duty and to do it accurately and with submission to a general purpose.

The power of attention thus never becomes trained, the energy to concentrate on that which is not interesting by its own appeal is slowly lost, a flabby superficiality must set in which is moved by nothing but the personal advantage and the zigzag impulses of the chance surroundings. He who has never learned obedience can never become his own master, and whoever is not his own master through all his life lacks the mental soundness and mental balance which a harmonious life demands.
Flippancy and carelessness, haphazard interests and recklessness must result, mediocrity wins the day, cheap aims pervade the social life, hasty judgments, superficial emotions, trivial problems, sensational excitements, and vulgar pleasures appeal to the masses. Yellow papers and vaudeville shows–vaudeville shows on the stage, in the courtroom, on the political platform, in the pulpit of the church–are welcome, and of all the results, one is the most immediate, the disorganization of the brain energies.

A sound mind is a well-organized mind in which a controlling idea is able to inhibit the opposites and is in no danger of being overrun by any chance intrusion into the mind. This power is the act of attention. An attention which is trained and disciplined can hold its ideas against chance impulses. An untrained attention is attracted by everything which is loud and shining, big and amusing. The trouble is not with the rush and hurry of the impressions which demand our attention; the trouble is with our attention which seeks a quick change of new and ever new impressions because it is not disciplined to hold firmly to one important interest.

We want the hundred short-cut superficial magazines because we lack the energy to study one large volume; we want the thousand engagements because we are not concentrated enough to devote ourselves fully to one ideal task. The strong mind may find its sound adjustment even without such training for concentrated attention through obedience and discipline but the weak mind has to pay the penalty.

For not a few it will mean social disaster. Yet our society is sufficiently adapted to this state so that it gives some good social chances to the superficial too, and this not only to the rich, but to those on every level. Only the nervous system cannot so easily be adjusted to the new régime.

The loose interplay of the brain cells without the serious training of discipline must involve disorganization of the mind-brain system which may count often most powerfully in those spheres in which the mere needs of life are felt the least. There is only one great remedy: discipline, training for concentrated attention, for a work in submission of will to a steady purpose. And psychotherapeutic effort will often demand such a training for work rather than a reduction of work and rest. The most alarming product of the neglect in training is found in many of those retarded children who at fifteen show the intelligence of a boy of eight.
They are not imbeciles and do not belong in the psychiatric domain; their development has simply been suspended by a mistaken education. Of course no neglect would have led to it without a constitutional, inherited weakness of the central nervous system, but the weakness would never have led to the retardation if perhaps a mistaken parental indulgence had not allowed a life without forced effort and, therefore, without progress.
Even such extreme cases may not show on the surface. The boy may pass as all right if we meet him at a ball; only his tutor knows the whole misery. Still less does the surface view of many a grown-up neurasthenic alarm us who seems to live a well-ordered, perhaps an enviable life, and yet who suffers the penalty of a life without concentrated effort, really without anything to do in spite of a thousand engagements. Moreover this lack of important activity may often be forced on our patients.
Married women without children, without household responsibilities, and without interests of their own and without strong nervous constitution will soon lose the power of effort and their brain will succumb. A dreary monotony is dangerous even for the worker; for the non-worker it may be ruinous. Yet mere flippant excitement and superficial entertainment is nothing but a cheap counterfeit of what is needed.
Voluntary effort is needed, and this is the field where the psychotherapist must put in his most intelligent effort.
There is no one for whom there is not a chance for work in our social fabric. The prescription of work has not only to be adjusted to the abilities, the knowledge, and social condition, but has to be chosen in such a way that it is full of associations and ultimately of joyful emotions. Useless work can never confer the greatest benefits; mere physical exercises are therefore psychophysically not as valuable as real sport while physically, of course, the regulated exercises may be far superior to the haphazard work in sport. To solve picture puzzles, even if they absorb the attention for a week, can never have the same effect as a real interest in a human puzzle. There is a chance for social work for every woman and every man, work which can well be chosen in full adjustment to the personal preference and likings.
Not everybody is fit for charity work, and those who are may be entirely unfitted for work in the interest of the beautification of the town. Only it has to be work; mere automobile to charity places or talking in meetings on problems which have not been studied will, of course, be merely another form of the disorganizing superficiality. The hysterical lady on Fifth Avenue and the psychasthenic old maid in the New England country town both simply have to learn to do useful work with a concentrated effort and a high purpose. From a long experience I have to confess that I have seen that this unsentimental remedy is the safest and most important prescription in the prescription book of the psychotherapist.

There is one more feature of general treatment which seems almost a matter of course, and yet which is perhaps the most difficult to apply because it cannot simply be prescribed: the sympathy of the psychotherapist. The feelings with which an operation is performed or drugs given do not determine success, but when we build up a mental life, the feelings are a decisive factor.

To be sure, we must not forget that we have to deal here with a causal and not with a purposive point of view. Our sympathy is therefore not in question in its moral value but only as a cause of a desired effect. It is therefore not really our sympathy which counts but the appearance of sympathy, the impression which secures the belief of the patient that sympathy for him exists. The physician who, although full of real sympathy, does not understand how to express it and make it felt will thus be less successful than his colleague who may at heart remain entirely indifferent but has a skillful routine of going through the symptoms of sympathy.

The sympathetic vibration of the voice and skillful words and suggestive movements may be all that is needed, but without some power of awakening this feeling of personal relation, almost of intimacy, the wisest psychotherapeutic treatment may remain ineffective. That reaches its extreme in those frequent cases in which social conditions have brought about an emotional isolation of the patient and have filled him with an instinctive longing to break his mental loneliness, or in the still more frequent cases where the patient’s psychical sufferings are misunderstood or ridiculed as mere fancies or misjudged as merely imaginary evils. Again everything depends upon the experience and tact of the physician. His sympathy may easily overdo the intention and further reinforce the patient’s feeling of misery or make him an hypochondriac.

It ought to be sympathy with authority and sympathy which always at the same time shows the way to discipline. Under special conditions it is even advisable to group patients with similar diseases together and to give them strength through the natural mutual sympathy; yet this too can be in question only where this community becomes a starting point for common action and common effort, not for mere common depression. In this way a certain psychical value must be acknowledged for the social classes of tuberculosis as they have recently been instituted. From sympathy it is only one step to encouragement, which indeed is effective only where sympathy or at least belief in sympathy exists.

He who builds up a new confidence in a happy future most easily brings to the patient also that self-control and energy which is the greatest of helping agencies. The physical and mental efforts of the physician are alike deprived of their best efficiency if they are checked by worry and fear that the developments of the disease will be disastrous. As soon as new faith in life is given, and given even where a sincere prognosis must be a sad one, a great and not seldom unexpected improvement is secured. There is no doubt that the routine physician is doing by far too little in these respects. His instinctive feeling that disease is a causal process, and that he should therefore keep away from the purposive attitude, leads him too easily to a dangerous narrowness.

He treats disease as if it were an isolated process and overlooks the thousand fold connections in which the nervous system stands with the patient’s whole life experience in past and future. The physician is thus too easily inclined to underestimate the good which may come in the fight against disease from the ideas and emotions which form the background of the mind of the patient. Even if the disease cannot be vanquished, the mental disturbances which result from it, the pains and discomforts, may be inhibited, as soon as hopes and joyful purposes gain a dominating control of the mind. The nervous patient often needs a larger hold upon life, while the routine prescriptions may too easily reduce that hold by fixing the attention on the symptoms. Here then is the right place for the moral appeal and the religious stimulation. How psychotherapy is related to the church will interest us later. At this moment morality and religion are for us not inspirations but medicines. But from such a causal point of view, we should not underestimate the manifold good which can come from the causal effect of religious and ethical ideas.

Those faith curists who bring mutual help by impressing each other with the beauty and goodness of the world really bring new strength to the wavering mind; and the most natural channel for religious help remains, of course, the word of the minister and the own prayer. Religion may work there causally in a double way. The own personality is submerging into a larger all-embracing hold and thus inhibits the small cares and troubles of merely personal origin. The consciousness sinks into God, a mental process which reaches its maximum in mysticism. The haphazard pains of the personality disappear and are suppressed by the joy and glory of the whole.

This submission of will under a higher will and its inhibitory effect for suppression of disturbing symptoms must be wonderfully reinforced by the attitude of prayer. Even the physiological conditions of it, the clasping of the hands, the kneeling, and monotonous sounds reinforce this inhibition of the insignificant dissatisfactions. On the other hand, contact with the greater will must open the whole reservoir of suppressed energies, and this outbreak of hidden forces may work towards the regeneration of the whole psychophysical system. Neglected functions of the brain become released and give to the mind an energy and discipline and self-control and mastery of difficulties which restitutes the whole equilibrium, and with the equilibrium comes a new calmness and serenity which may react almost miraculously on the entire nervous system and through it on the whole organism and its metabolism.

The psychological work of the physician does not begin with his curative
efforts. Therapy is always only the last step. Diagnosis and observation
have to precede, and an inquiry into the causes of the disease is
essential, and in every one of these steps psychology may play its role.
The means of psycho diagnostic are not less manifold than those of
psychotherapy. Moreover there the technique may be more complex and
subtle. The whole equipment of the modern laboratory ought to be put at
its disposal. Perceptions and associations, reactions and expressions
ought to be examined with the same carefulness with which the
conscientious physician examines the blood and the urine.

A particular difficulty of the task more or less foreign to every other
medical inquiry is the intentional or unintentional effort of the
patient to hide the sources of the trouble and to mislead as to their
true character. Too often he is entirely unconscious of the sources of
trouble or else he has social reasons to deceive the world and himself,
and ultimately the physician. And yet no psychical treatment can start
successfully so long as the patient is brooding on secret thoughts at
the bottom of his mind. The desire to hide them may often be itself a
part of the disease. It is surprising how often unsuspected vistas of
thoughts and impulses and emotions are opened by an inquiring analysis
where the direct report of the patient does not awaken the least
suspicion. In the field of insanity, naturally the physician at once
goes to an examination on his own account, but in the borderland regions
of the psychasthenics and hysterics and neurasthenics, the intellectual
clearness of the patient too easily tempts one into trusting the
sincerity of his story; and yet the most important ideas clustering
perhaps about love or ambition, about vice or crime, about business
failure or family secrets, about inherited or acquired diseases may be
cunningly withheld and may frustrate every psychotherapeutic influence.
Where suspicion is awake and mere confidential talk and persuasion seem
insufficient, the physician may feel justified in the interest of his
patient in drawing the thoughts out of their hiding-place by artificial
means. Skill, tact, and experience are needed there.

As a matter of course, in the overwhelming mass of cases the frankness
and the good will of the patient himself will support the physician and
accordingly his examination is not obliged to trap the patient but
simply to guide him to important points. But then begins the most
essential study of diagnostically differentiation. With all the means not
only of psychology but of neurology and internal medicine, he has to
separate the particular case from similar ones and to examine whether
he deals with, for instance, a hysteric or with a paranoiac, with a
neurasthenic or with a case of dementia præcox; and he will not forget
that there exist almost no symptoms of serious diseases which the
nervous system of the hysteric may not imitate for a time. Not ours is
the task of analyzing special methods of neurological and mental
differential diagnosis such as are used in the psychiatric clinic and in
the office of the nerve specialist. There the family history with
reference to nervous and other diseases, the history of the patient
himself, the infectious diseases which he has passed through, his habits
and anomalies, his use of alcohol and of drugs, his experiences in
social life, the demands of his profession, his recent troubles and
their first origin are to be recorded carefully. Then begins the
physical examination, the study of his sense organs and his nerves, of
the motor inabilities, the pains, the local anesthesia and
paræsthesias, the disturbances of the reflexes, of the spasms, tremors,
convulsions, and incoordinations, of the vasomotor and trophic
disorders, and so on. In a similar way the psychical examination tests
the hallucinations and illusions, the variations and defects of memory
and attention, of judgment and reasoning, of orientation and
self-consciousness, of emotions and volitions, of intellectual
capacities and organized actions. But we do not have to enter here into
a discussion of such diagnostic means; our chief interest belongs to the
therapy.

The variety of the psychotherapeutic methods is great and only some
types are to be characterized here. But one rule is common to all of
them: never use psychotherapeutic methods in a schematic way like a
rigid pattern. Schematic treatment is a poor treatment in every
department of medicine, but in psychotherapeutics it is disastrous.
There are no two cases alike and not only the easily recognizable
differences of sex and age, and occupation and education, and financial
means, and temperament and capacity are decisive, but all the subtle
variations of prejudices and beliefs, preferences and dislikes, family
life and social surroundings, ambitions and prospects, memories and
fancies, diet and habits must carefully be considered. Every element of
a man's life history, impressions of early childhood, his love and his
successes, his diseases and his distresses, his acquaintances and his
reading, his talent, his character, his sincerity, his energy, his
intelligence--everything--ought to determine the choice of the
psychotherapeutic steps. As it is entirely impossible to determine all
those factors by any sufficient inquiry, most of the adjustment of
method must be left to the instinct of the physician, in which wide
experience, solid knowledge, tact, and sympathy ought to be blended.
Even the way in which the patient reacts on the method will often guide
the instinct of the well-trained psychotherapist.

It is therefore certainly not enough that the knowledge of the physician
simply decide beforehand on a definite course of psychical treatment and
leave the carrying out to a well-meaning minister or any other medical
amateur who schematically follows the indicated path. The finest
adjustment has to come in during the treatment itself and the response
of the patient often has to suggest entirely new lines of procedure.
More than in any other field of medicine, the physician himself has to
extend his influence far beyond the office hours and the strictly
medical relations. And yet, on the other hand, there is no department of
medicine in which the treatment might not profit by the
psychotherapeutic influence. With a few vague words of encouragement
mechanically uttered, or with a routine of tricks of suggestion by bread
pills and colored water and tuning forks, not much will be gained even
in the ordinary physician's practice. Subtle adjustment to the personal
needs and to the individual conditions is necessary in every case where
the psychical factor is to play an important role. It cannot be denied
that the one great obstacle in the work of the routine physician is the
lack of time and patience which is needed for successful treatment. To
prescribe drugs is always quicker than to influence the mind; to cure a
morphine by hyoscine needs less effort than to cure him by suggestion.

The first method to bring back the psychophysical equilibrium is of
course the one which is also demanded by common-sense, namely, to remove
the external sources of the disturbance. External indicates there not
only the outer world but also the own body outside the conscious parts
of the brain. If we take it in the widest meaning, this would evidently
include every possible medical task from filling a painful tooth to
operating on a painful appendix, as in every case where pain results,
the mental equilibrium is disturbed by it and the normal mental life of
the patient reduced in its efficiency. But in the narrower sense of the
word, we shall rather think of those sources of trouble in the organism
itself which interfere directly with the mental functions. The
examination of any public school quickly leads to the discovery that
much which is taken for impaired mental activity, for lack of attention,
for stupidity, or laziness may be the result of defective hearing or
sight or abnormal growth of the adenoids. Growths in the nose may be
operated upon, the astigmatic or the short-sighted eye may be corrected
by glasses, the child who is hard of hearing may at least be seated near
the teacher; and the backward children quickly reach the average level.
No doubt in the life of the adult as well, often almost insignificant
and from a strictly physical point of view unimportant abnormities in
the bodily system, especially in the digestive and sexual spheres, are
sources of irritation which slowly influence the whole personality. To
be sure, the brain disturbance may have reached a point where the mere
removal of the original affliction is not sufficient to reinstate the
normal balance of mental energies, but wherever such a bodily irritation
goes on, it is never too late to abolish it in the interests of
psychotherapy.

The less evident and yet even more important source of the painful
intrusions may lie outside of the organism in the social surroundings
and conditions of life. Most of that has to be accepted. The physician
cannot bring back the friend who died or the fortune which was lost in
speculation or the man who married another girl. He will even avoid
suggesting far-reaching social changes in the private life of the
patient, changes like divorce in an unhappy marriage or the breaking of
the home ties, however often he may get the impression that such a
liberation would stop the source of the mental trouble. He will be the
more careful not to overstep his medical rights as he seldom has the
possibility to judge fairly on the basis of the one-sided complaint, and
the probability is great that the character and temperament of the
complainant may be a more essential factor of the ailment than the
personalities which surround him. Yet even the conservative physician
will find abundant opportunities for advice which will remove disturbing
energies from the social surroundings of the sufferer. Even a short
release from the burdening duties, a short vacation from the incessant
needs of the nursery, a break in the monotony of the office, may often
do wonders with a neurasthenic. Often within a surprisingly short time
the brain gathers the energies to overcome the frictions with
unavoidable surroundings.

Yet here the physician has to adjust the prescribed dose of outing very
carefully to the special case. We may be guided by the psychological
experiments which have been made in the interest of testing the fatigue
induced by mental work. If perhaps four hours of concentrated work are
done without pauses, experiment shows that the quality of the work
deteriorates, measured for instance by the number of mistakes in quick
calculation. If certain relatively long pauses are introduced, the
standard of work can be kept high all through. But if frequent pauses
are made, and each short, the result is with many individuals the
opposite. The experiment indicates that these frequent pauses are
working as interruptions which hinder the perfect adjustment to the work
in hand. That is suggestive. Our neurasthenic may complain about the
life which he has to live and yet after all he is frequently so
completely adjusted to it that it may not be in his interest to remove
him far away from the conditions which cannot ultimately be changed but
to which he has to return. The instinct of the physician has to find the
middle way between a temporary removal of irritation which really allows
a development of new energies and a mere interruption which simply
damages the acquired relative adjustment. Every cause of friction which
can be permanently annihilated for the patient certainly should be
removed.

This negative remedy demands its positive supplement. The patient must
be brought under conditions and influences which give fair chances for
the recuperation of his energies. Too often from the standpoint of the
psychologist, the prescription is simply rest. As far as rest involves
sleep, it is certainly the ideal prescription. There is no other
influence which builds up the injured central nervous system as safely
as sound natural sleep, and loss of sleep is certainly one of the most
pernicious conditions for the brain. Again rest is a great factor in
those systematic rest cures which for a long while were almost the
fashion with the neurologist. Experience has shown that their
stereotyped use is often unsuccessful, and moreover that the advantage
gained by those months spent in bed completely isolated and overfed is
perhaps due to the separation and changed nutrition more than to the
overlong absolute rest. Yet used with discrimination, the physiological
and the psychical effect of lying in bed for a few weeks has certainly
often been a marked improvement, especially with young women. But more
often the idea of rest in bed during daytime is not meant at all when
the nerve specialist recommends rest to his over-strained patient. It is
simply meant that he give up his fatiguing daily work, even if that work
is made up of a round of entertainments and calls and social
engagements. The neurasthenic and all similar varieties are sent away
from the noise of the city, away from the rush of their busy life, away
from telephones and street cars, away from the hustling business and
politics.

If, instead, we stick to the scientific view, we find the following facts. First, we have everywhere with us the fact that the earlier experiences may again enter into consciousness as memory images or as imaginative ideas, that is, in the order in which they are experienced a long time before or in a new order, either with a feeling of acquaintance or without it. Certainly at no time is the millionth part of what we may be able to reproduce present in our consciousness. Where are those words of the language, those faces of our friends, those landscapes, and those thoughts; where have they lingered in the time of their seclusion? Scientific psychology has no right to propose any other theory as explanation but that no mental states at all remain and that all which remained was the disposition of physiological centers. When I coupled the impression of a man with the sound of his name, a certain excitement of my visual centers occurred together with the excitement of my acoustical centers; the connecting paths became paths of least resistance, and any subsequent excitement of the one cell group now flows over into the other. It is the duty of physiology to elaborate such a clumsy scheme and to make us understand in detail how those processes in the neurons can occur and it is not the duty of psychology to develop detailed physiological hypotheses. Psychology has to be satisfied with the fact that all the requirements of the case can be furnished by principle through physiological explanation. Least of all ought we to be discouraged by the mere complexity of the process. If a simple sound and a simple color sensation, or a simple taste and simple smell sensation, can associate themselves through mere nervous conditions of the brain, then there is nothing changed by going over to more and more complex contents of consciousness. We may substitute a whole landscape for a color patch or the memory of a book for a word, but we do not reach by that a point where the physiological principle of explanation, once admitted, begins to lose its value. Complexity is certainly in good harmony with the bewildering manifoldness of those thousands of millions of possible connections between the brain cells.

Every experience leaves the brain altered. The nerve fibers and the cells have gone into new stages of disposition for certain excitements. This disposition may be slowly lost. In that case the earlier experience cannot be reproduced; we have forgotten it. But as long as the disposition lasts–it is quite indifferent whether we conceive it more in terms of chemical changes or physical variations, as processes in the nerve cells or between the nerve cells–the physiological change alone is responsible for the awakening of the memory idea under favoring associative conditions. Of course, someone might reply: can we not fancy that there remains on the psychical side also a disposition? Each idea which we have experienced may have left a psychical trace which alone may make it possible that the idea may come back to us again. But what is really meant and what is gained by such a hypothesis?

First, do not let us forget that such a proposition could only have one possible end in view, namely, the explanation of the reappearance of memories. But when we discussed the basis of physiological psychology, we convinced ourselves that mental facts as such are not causally connected anyhow. Our real inner life has its internal connections, connections of will and purpose, but as soon as we have taken that great psychological step and look on inner life as merely psychological objects, then the material is connected only through the underlying physiological processes and we can never explain causally the appearance of an idea through the preceding existence of another idea. We may expect one after the other, but we have no insight into the mechanism which makes the second follow after the first. Such insight into necessary connection we find only on the physical side, and we saw that just here lies the starting point for the modern view of physiological psychology. If that holds true for the connections between idea and idea, of course it holds true in the same way for the connection between mental disposition and the corresponding memory. We can understand causally that a chemical disposition in the nerve fibers brings about a chemical excitement in those neurons, but how a mental disposition is to create mental experience we could not understand; and to explain it casually, we should need again a reference to the underlying physiological processes. The hypothesis of mental dispositions would thus be an entirely superfluous addition by which we transcend the real experience without gaining anything for the explanation.

Secondly, if we really needed a mental disposition for each memory picture, in addition to the physiological disposition of the brain cells, can we overlook that exactly the same thing would then be necessary for every perception also? The outer impression produces, perhaps through eye or ear or skin, an excitement of the brain cell and this excitement is accompanied by a sensation; and no one fancies that the appearance of this sensation is dependent upon a special disposition for it on the mental side. No one fancies it, because it is evident that such a hypothesis again would be entirely useless. If every new perception needed such a special mental disposition, we should have to presuppose dispositions for everything which possibly can come into our surroundings. Every smell, every word, every face which comes anew to us would need its special ready-made disposition. In other words, our mind would contain the disposition for every possible idea and that would mean that these dispositions would be in no way helps for explanation. If the disposition exists for everything, no one particular thing can be explained by the existence of that disposition. Again we should have to rely entirely upon the physiological brain excitement for explaining that this word or that word is perceived by our mind. But if the brain excitement alone is sufficient to explain the new perception in the mind, then no reason can be found why the renewed brain excitement would not be sufficient to renew the mental experience. Thus there is nowhere room for mental dispositions below the level of consciousness.

Thirdly, what could we really mean by such mental dispositions? A physiological disposition for a physiological action is certainly not the action itself. The finger movement in piano playing finds only a disposition in my brain centers, in case I am trained; the movement itself does not last. But the disposition is at least itself a change in the physical world. The molecules are somehow differently placed, the disposition has thus as much objective existence as the resulting movement. Nothing at all similar can be imagined in the sphere of psychical contents. Such mental dispositions would have to exist entirely outside the world of concrete mental experiences and, if we scrutinize carefully, we soon discover that such theories are only lingering reminiscences of the purposive view of life, and do not fit at all into the causal one. If we take the purposive attitude, then every idea and every will contains indeed all that its meaning involves and everything which we can logically develop out of it is by intention contained in it. All mathematical calculations are then contained in the thought of figures and forms, but they are contained there only by intention, they are logically enclosed; psychologically the consciousness of the figures and forms does not contain any disposition for the development of mathematical systems. We indeed have no right to throw into a psychological sub consciousness all that which is not present but involved by intention in the ideas and volitions of our purposive life.

If thus the memory idea is linked with the past experience entirely by the lasting physiological change in the brain, we have no reason to alter the principle, when we meet the memory processes of the hypnotized person or the hysteric. It is true their memory may bring to light earlier experiences which are entirely forgotten by the conscious personality, but that ought to mean, of course, only that nerve paths have become accessible in which the propagation of the excitement was blocked up before. That does not bring us nearer to the demand for a subconscious mental memory. The threshold of excitability changes under most various conditions. Cells which respond easily in certain states may need the strongest stimulation in others. The brain cells which are too easily excited perhaps in maniacal exultation would respond too slowly in a melancholic depression. Hypnotism, too, by closing the opposite channels and opening wide the channels for the suggested discharge, may stir up excitements for which the disposition may have lingered since the days of childhood and yet which would not have been excited by the normal play of the neurons. Quite secondary remains the question of how these reproduced images finally appear in consciousness, that is, whether they appear with reference to earlier happenings and are thus felt as remembrances, or whether they enter as independent imaginations, or whether they finally, under special conditions, take the character of real, new perceptions. The latter case is well-known in crystal-gazing, where long-forgotten memory ideas project themselves into the visual field like hallucinations. But for the theory of the subconscious, even these uncanny crystal visions do not mean more than the simplest awakening of the experience of a landscape image of yesterday.

We turn to a second group of facts and again we have no fault to find with the observation of the facts, even of the most surprising and exceptional ones. Our objection refers to the interpretation of them. This second group contains the active results of such physiological nervous dispositions. In the first group, the dispositions come in question only as conditions for a new excitement which was accompanied by mental experience. In this second group, the dispositions are causes for other physiological processes which either lead to actions or to influences on other mental processes. The dispositions are here working like the setting of switches which turn the nervous process into special tracks. In the simple cases, of course no one doubts that a purely physiological basis is involved. The decapitated frog rubs its skin where it is touched with a drop of muriatic acid in a way which is ordinarily referred to the trained apparatus of his spinal cord, as no brain is left, and the usefulness of the action and its adjustment is very well understood as the result of the connecting paths in the nervous system.

From such simple adjustment of reactions of the spinal cord, we come step by step to the more complex activities of the sub cortical brain centers, and finally to those which are evidently only short-cuts of the higher brain processes. That we react at every change of position with the right movements to keep our bodily balance, that we walk without thinking of our steps, that we speak without giving conscious impulse for the various speech movements, that we write without being aware of the motor activity which we had to learn slowly, that we play the piano without thinking of the special impulses of the hands, that we select the words of a hasty speech, if we have its aim in mind, without consciously selecting the appropriate words–all that is by continuous transitions connected with those simplest automatic reactions. And from here again, we are led over gradually perhaps to the automatic writings of the hysteric who writes complex messages without having any idea of their content in consciousness. It is in such cases certainly a symptom of disease that the activity of these lower brain centers can go over into the motor impulse of writing without producing secondary effects in the highest conscious brain centers; it is hysterical. But that the message of the pencil can be brought about by such operation of lower brain centers, or at least with imperfect cooperation of the higher brain centers, is certainly entirely within the limits of the same physiological explanation.

On the other hand, nothing is changed in the theoretic principles of the case if the effect of these automatic processes in the nervous system is not an external muscle action at first, but an influence on other brain centers which may furnish the consciousness with new contents. We try to remember a name, that is, a large number of neuron processes are setting in which normally lead to the excitement of that particular process which furnishes us the memory image of the name. But those brain cells may not respond, the channels may be blocked somehow or the excitability of those cells may be lowered. Now new excitements engage our psychophysical system. We are thinking of other problems. In the meantime, by the new equilibrium in the brain the blockade in these first paths may slowly disappear or the threshold of excitability may be changed. The physiological excitement may now be carried effectively into those tracts. The cell response sets in and suddenly the name comes to our mind. This purely physiological operation in our brain paths must thus have exactly the same result which it would have had, if more parts of the process had been accompanied by conscious experience. And again from mere remembering a forgotten name, we come by slow steps to the solution of a problem, to the invention, and finally to the creation of the genius.

Superficiality of thought is easily inclined to object to such a physiological interpretation and perhaps to denounce it pathetically as a crude materialism which lowers the dignity of mental work. Nothing shows more clearly the confusion between a purposive and causal view of the mind. In the purposive view of our real life, only our will and our personality have a meaning and can be related to the ideas and higher aims. Nature is there nothing but the dead material which is the tool of our will and which has to be mastered by the personality. In that world alone lie our duty and our morality. But as soon as we have gone over to the causal aspect of our life and have taken the point of view of the psychologist, making our inner life a series of contents of consciousness, of psychical phenomena, we have transformed our inner experience in such a way that it has become itself nothing but nature.

It is mental nature, nature of psychical stuff, but each part of it is nothing but a mental element, a mental atom without any meaning and without any value; nothing but a link in the chain, nothing but a factor in the explanation of the whole, nothing to which any ethical or esthetic or logical or religious significance can any longer be attached. The psychical sensations and the physical atoms are equally material for naturalistic explanation. To understand causally a certain effect, for instance the creation of a work of art, of a discovery or a thought or a deed as the product of psychical processes, is thus in no way more dignified or more valuable than to understand it as the product of physiological brain processes. The one is not more dignified than the other because both alike have nothing whatever to do with dignity. Both alike are the necessary results of the foregoing processes, and to attach a kind of sentimental preference to the explanation through conscious factors is nothing but a confused reminiscence again of the entirely different purposive view of life. And surely nothing is gained for the higher values of life if this confusion sets in, because if the popular mind becomes unable to discriminate between the secondary, causal, artificial aspect of science and the primary, purposive aspect of life, the opposite effect lies still nearer: the values of the real life suffer and are crowded out by the knowledge of the scientific facts. Man’s moral freedom is then wrongly brought in question, as soon as it is learned that every action is the product of brain processes. Life and science alike will gain the more, the more clearly the purposive and the causal point of view are separated and the more it is understood that this causal aspect itself is demanded by certain purposes of life. The oratory of those who denounce the physiological theories as lacking idealism in reality undermines true moral philosophy. There is no idealism which can really flourish merely by ignoring the progress of science and confusing the issues. The true values of the higher life cannot be safely protected by that thoughtless idealism which draws its life from vagueness and which therefore has to be afraid of every new discovery in scientific psychology. Our real ideals do not lie at all in the sphere in which the problem of causally explaining the psychological phenomena arises.

Our conscious experiences are thus indeed not only here and there, but usually the products of chains of processes which go on entirely on the physiological side. We have no reason at all to seek for those preceding actions any mental accompaniment outside of consciousness, that means, any subconscious mental states. Then, of course, this physiological explanation also covers entirely those after-effects of earlier experiences, especially emotional experiences, which the physician nowadays likes to call subconscious “complexes.” We shall see what an important role belongs to these facts, especially in the treatment of hysteria and psychasthenia, but the interpretation again ought to avoid all playing with the conception of the subconscious. Emotional experiences may produce there some strong stable dispositions in the brain system which become mischievous in reinforcing or inhibiting certain thoughts and actions without awakening directly conscious experiences. The whole psychological switch system may have been brought into disorder by such abnormal setting of certain parts, but the connection of each resulting accident with the primary emotional disturbances does not contradict the fact that all the causes lie entirely in disturbances of the central paths. It is a change in the neurons and their connections. To discover it we may have to go back to early conscious experiences, but in the process itself there is no mental factor, and therefore no subconscious emotion is responsible for the mischief carried out.

Both groups of facts which we have studied so far, have dealt with processes which were indeed not conscious but which we had no right to call subconscious inasmuch as they contained no mental process at all but only physiological dispositions and actions. We turn finally to the other smaller and more abnormal group of so-called subconscious facts in which the facts are mental indeed and not only physiological, but not at all outside of consciousness and thus again not subconscious. A conscious fact may easily suggest the appeal to subconscious theories to those who have accepted such theories for other reasons. There are, for instance, plenty of mental experiences which we do not notice or which we do not recognize. Yet if we find later that they must have influenced our mind, we are easily inclined to refer them to subconscious activity. But it is evident that to be content of consciousness means not at all necessarily to be object of attention or object of recognition. Awareness does not involve interest. If I hear a musical sound, I may not recognize at all the overtones which are contained in it. As soon as I take resonators and by them reinforce the loudness of those overtones, they become vivid for me and I can now notice them well even when the resonators are removed. I surely was aware of them, that is, had them in consciousness all the time but there were no contrast feelings and no associations in consciousness which gave them sufficient clearness to attract attention.

In this way I may be again led by gradual stages to more and more complex experiences. I may overlook and yet include within my content of consciousness most various parts of my surroundings; and yet the neglected is not less in consciousness itself than the attended. Much that figures in literature as subconscious means indeed nothing else but the unattended. But it belongs to the elements of psychological analysis to recognize that the full content of consciousness is always larger than the narrow field of attention. This narrow field on the other hand has certainly no sharp demarcation line. There is a steady shading off from the most vivid to the least vivid. We cannot grasp those least vivid contents of consciousness, we cannot fixate them as such, because as soon as we try to hold them, they move from the periphery of the content into its center and become themselves vivid and clear. But as we are surely aware of different degrees of clearness and vividness in our central mass of contents, we have no difficulty in acknowledging the existence of still lower degrees of vividness in those elements which are blending and fusing into a general background of conscious experiences. Nothing stands out there, nothing can be discriminated in its detail. That background is not even made up of whole ideas and whole memories and whole emotions and feelings and judgments and volitions, but of loose fragments; half ideas and quarter ideas, atoms of feelings and incipient impulses and bits of memory images are always mixed in that half-dark background. And yet it is by principle not less in consciousness, and consciousness itself is not different for these contents. It is not half-clear consciousness, not a lower degree of awareness, only the objects of awareness are crumbled and fading.

Whether these background objects really exist can only be made out by studying carefully the changes which result under different conditions, the influences which those loose parts have on the structure of the whole, and the effect of their complete disappearance. I may never really notice a little thing in my room and yet may be aware that it has been taken away. The visual image of it was an element of my mental background, when I was sitting at my desk, but it never before moved to the center of my conscious content. But this center itself is also constantly changing. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other idea may enter into it, but in this alternation that which is not in the focus either remains in consciousness unattended or when it disappears from it it loses its mental character altogether. If I attend a tiresome lecture while my mind is engaged with a practical problem of my own life, there may be a steady rivalry between the words which come with the force of outer stimulus to my brain and make me listen and my inner difficulties which claim my attention. I listen for a while, and then suddenly, without noticing it, my own thoughts may have taken the center of the stage and again without sudden interruption a word may catch my attention. While I was thinking of my own problem the sounds of the lecturer were really outside of my field of attention, yet some remark now pushes itself again into the center. That does not mean that a subconscious mind is listening while my lucid mind was thinking, but it does mean that those words were unattended and remained in the periphery of the field of consciousness. But when some of the sentences stirred up in that peripheral field some important associations, they were strong enough to produce a new motor reaction by which the mental equilibrium became changed again and by which the lecturer overwhelmed my private thoughts. Yet even this state of mind, without any break, can go over into an absolutely physiological process. I may for a while really inhibit the lecturer’s voice completely and remain in the thoughts of my own imagination. After a minute or two, the resistance against the acoustical stimulus will certainly be broken and the sound will again enter into my consciousness, but in that interval there was no subconscious and not even any unattended mental function; there was no mental process at all. The sound reached my brain but as the motor setting was adverse, the sounds did not bring about that highest act of physiological transmission which is accompanied by mental contents. Thus it became entirely physiological. Yet of course every word reached my brain and left traces there. If I were hypnotized after the lecture and thus the threshold for the real awakening of brain excitements lowered, it might not be impossible that some of the thoughts of the lecturer which did not enter my consciousness at all, are now afterwards in the hypnotic state stirred up in me. Yet even that would not indicate that they had become mental and thus subconscious at the time of the lecture.

The so-called subconscious, which in reality is fully in consciousness but only unnoticed, easily shades over into that unconscious which is also in consciousness but dissociated from the idea of the own personality and thus somewhat split off from the interconnected mass of conscious contents. Wherever we meet such phenomena, we are in the field of the abnormal. The normal mental life is characterized by the connectedness of the contents. Yet even that holds true, of course, only if we think of those mental states which exist at one and the same instant in consciousness. As soon as we consider the succession of mental events, we cannot doubt that even normal experience shows breaks, lapses, and complete annihilation of that which a moment before was a real content in our consciousness. We may have looked at our watch and certainly had in glancing at the dial a conscious impression, but in the next moment we no longer know how late it is. The impression did not connect itself with our continuous personal experience, that is, with that chief group of our conscious contents which we associate with the perception of our personality. Under abnormal conditions of the brain, larger and larger parts of the completely conscious experience may thus be cut off from the continuity of conscious life. But to be in consciousness, and therefore to be not-subconscious, does not mean to be through memory ties connected with the idea of our own personality.

The somnambulist, for instance, may get up at night time and write a letter, then go to bed again and not know anything of the event when he awakes in the morning. We have no reason to claim that he had no knowledge of the letter in his consciousness when he wrote it. It is exactly the same consciousness from a psychological standpoint as the one with which he wakes up. Only that special content has in an abnormal way entirely disappeared, has not left a possibility of awakening a memory image, and the action of the personality in writing has thus become separated and cut off from the connected experiences of the man. But while the nocturnal episode may be entirely forgotten, it was not less in consciousness for the time being, than if a normal man should leave his bed hastily to write a letter. Moreover under abnormal conditions, as for instance in severe hysteric cases, those dissociated contents may form large clusters of mental experiences in the midst of which a new idea of the own personality may develop. Considering that through such disconnection many channels of discharge are blocked, while others are abnormally opened, it seems only natural that the idea of the own acting personality becomes greatly changed. Thus we have in such an episode a new second personality which may be strikingly different in its behavior and in its power, in its memories and in its desires, from the continuous normal one, and this secondary personality may now develop its own continuity and may arise under special conditions in attacks which are connected among one another by their own memory bonds.

The two personalities may even alternate from day to day and the normal one may itself become pathologically altered. In that case the two alternating personalities would both be different from the original one. But again we have even in such most complex and exceptional cases only an alternation in the contents, not an alternation in the consciousness itself. Different ideas of the own personality with different associations and impulses follow each other in consciousness and the abnormality of the situation lies in the lack of memory connections and of mutual influences, but consciousness remains the same throughout. It remains the same, just as we do not change consciousness if we feel ourselves in one hour as members of our family, in the next hour as professional workers in our office, again later as social personalities at a party or as citizens at a political meeting or as esthetic subjects at the theater. Each time we are to a high degree a different personality, the idea of our self is each time determined by different groups of associations, memories, emotions, and impulses. The differentiation is to be considered as normal only because broad memory bridges lead over from one to the other. The connection of the various contents with the various ideas of the own personality constitutes thus in no way a break of consciousness itself and relegates no one content into a subconscious sphere.

The story of the subconscious mind can be told in three words: there is
none. But it may need many more words to make clear what that means, and
to show where the misunderstanding of those who give to the subconscious
almost the chief role in the mental performance sets in. The psychology
of suggestion, for instance, which we have now fully discussed without
even mentioning the word subconscious, figures in most popular books in
the treatises of both physicians and ministers as a wonderful dominance
of the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind alone receives the
suggestions and makes them effective, the subconscious mind controls the
suggestive processes in consciousness, and the subconscious mind comes
into the foreground and takes entire hold of the situation when the
hypnotic state sets in.

But we are always assured that there is no need of turning to the
mystery of suggestion and hypnotism to find that uncanny sub personality
in us. We try to remember a name, or we think of the solution of a
problem; what we are seeking does not come to consciousness and now we
turn to other things; and suddenly the name flashes up in our mind or
the solution of the problem becomes clear to us. Who can doubt that the
subconscious mind has performed the act? While our attention was given
over to other questions, the subconscious mind took up the search and
troubled itself with the problem and neatly performed what our conscious
mind was unable to produce. Moreover in every situation we are
performing a thousand useful and well-adapted acts with our body without
thinking of the end and aim. What else but the subconscious mind directs
our steps, controls our movements, and adjusts our life to its
surroundings? And is not every memory picture, every reminiscence of
earlier experiences a sufficient proof that the subconscious mind holds
its own? The poem which we learned years ago did not remain somewhere
lingering in our consciousness, and if we can repeat it today, it must
be because our subconscious mind has kept it carefully in its store and
is ready to supply us when consciousness has need for it.

Surely if we think how this, our subconscious mind, is able to hold all
our memories and all our learning, and how it transacts all the work of
controlling our useful actions and of bringing up the right ideas, we
may well acknowledge that compared with it our conscious life is rather
a small part. It is as with the iceberg in the ocean; we know that only
a small part is visible above the surface of the water and a ten times
larger mountain swims below the sea. It seems, therefore, only logical
to attach this whole subconscious mental life to a special subconscious
personality. Then we come to the popular theory of the two minds in us,
the upper and the lower, of which we can hardly doubt that the lower one
has on the whole the larger part of the business to perform. And we
certainly have no right to give to the word lower mind the side-meaning
that the activity is of a lower order. The most brilliant thoughts of
the genius are not manufactured in his upper consciousness, they spring
suddenly into his mind, their whole creation belongs thus to the
assiduous work of the subconscious neighbor. There the inventor and
discoverer gets his guidance, there the poet gets his inspiration, there
the religious mind gets its beliefs. In short, the constitution of the
mental state allows on the whole to the upper consciousness a rather
decorative part while the real work is left for the lower house.

Yet it must be acknowledged that the scholars somewhat disagree as to
the dignity of the lower mind. Considering the usually accepted fact
that in hypnotism the lower mind comes entirely over the surface, just
these hypnotic events can indeed suggest two different views of the
subconscious and this doubleness is reinforced if we still add the
entertaining material which comes to light by the automatic writing of
mediums in their trance. The hypnotized person is ready to perform any
foolishness, is not influenced by any considerations of tact and taste
and wisdom and respect, and thus some of the chief believers in the
subconscious personality stick to the diagnosis that the lower mind in
us which shows up in hypnotism is a rather brutal, stupid, lazy,
cowardly, immoral creature which ordinarily rather deserves to be
subdued by our noble and wise upper personality. And the automatic
writings of the mediums indorse this disrespectful view, for it is
difficult to gather more idiotic slang than the emanations of these
letters of the planchette. On the other hand, the hypnotized person
shows an increase of sensitiveness and hyperesthesia in which perhaps
optical impressions or smells may be noticed which the ordinary man
cannot perceive. Moreover the memory of the hypnotized is, as we saw,
abnormally sharpened. Entirely forgotten experiences may awake again.
The same holds true for the hysteric in whom also, of course, the
subconscious takes hold of the inner life. Thus it seems entirely safe
to say that the powers of the subconscious personality far surpass those
of the upper conscious fellow, and that agrees with all those facts as
to the subconscious origin of the work of the genius. Further, has it
not been found again and again that the hypnotized and the hysteric
cannot only remember long-forgotten parts of the past but have
telepathic knowledge for distant events and even mysterious premonitions
of the field of occurrences of the future?