The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams, S. 828

BOOK 8

—he moved his fingers again as well as ever he could. The explanation appears to have been as follows: The man was reacting against his work in the prisoners’ camphe hated working for the enemies of his country; the work itself was hard and unpleasant. Then came the accident. His hand was quite severely hurt, the fingers stiffened with pain. Here steps in the Unconscious, seizes the heaven-sent opportunity of finding an excuse for stopping work, and commands the fixing of the hand in the outstretched attitude, just as the operator in. a hypnotic seance might do, The conscious self knows nothing of all this ; all he knows is that the fingers are paralysed. (We are manifestly taking the utmost liberty of metaphor here. We are personifying the Unconscious outrageously.) The paralysis was real, but hysterical. If the subject had been consciously malingering, a doctor could have detected the fraud in a few minutes, and he would have found it physically impossible to keep it up. Only suggestion acting through the Unconscious can control bodily functions in so perfect a way.

In many such cases the paralysis of movement will persist even in deep sleep. As complete proof that this patient’s inhibition was genuine, comes the fact that his paralysis did not disappear when he came back to England and wanted to work. The Unconscious is blind ; it operates in a dark realm and in very different ways from the conscious. A reaction once established through it may work even against the desires of consciousness. The paralysis continued because the patient believed in it ; but once he realized that he need not believe in it, it disappeared.

Another case of Dr. Gordon’s was a man suffering from blindness—purely hysterical blindness ; there was nothing wrong with his eyes, but he could not see. Here the accident which set off the blindness was an attack of conjunctivitis. The man’s mind had been distressed by certain hidden conflicts and these were waiting for some chance of pacification. ‘This conjunctivitis served its purpose excellently. Symbolism is a primitive way of thinking which preceded abstraction. In the Unconscious, as in dreaming, symbolism.is the normal method of interaction. ‘The man, it turned out, was feeling exaggerated remorse over some private misdemeanours, and, as he himself put it, ‘‘ could not bear to look himself in the face.” He could not bring himself to look squarely at the situation and

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CHAPTER 7

face up to it practically, either by coming to some worldly compromise with his conscience, by cutting loose entirely from certain habits he felt were wicked, or at least by not crying over spilt milk and tormenting himself; and the Unconscious, with its incapacity for logical solution, solved his distresses by this device of mental blindness. He was cured of his hysteria by a few explanations and a course of waking suggestion which enabled him to master his moral problem.

The hysterical symptom may be a loss of memory just as well as a loss of some power of movement or a loss of sight; and then we have conditions which grade imperceptibly up into the “‘ fugues” and double personalities described in a previous section. In War cases, the peg which the Unconscious used to hang the symptom on was often some sudden physical shock, like a shell-explosion. The man recovers consciousness ; he is dazed, and cannot remember properly what has happened. He cannot remember

This is precisely what half of him has been wanting to do for months; he would like to forget all about the War and the horrors he has seen, but his sense of duty has repressed his wish. Now, while he is suffering from the shock, the repressed wish has its chance. *“T can’t remember,” thinks the conscious self. ‘‘ Quite right, you can’t,” respond the repressions in the Unconscious, “and you shan’t.”? And the memories are dissociated from the rest of the mind.

Here are two simple War cases from McDougall. In one, only the memory of the incident was thus split off. A soldier brought to hospital, dazed after an explosion, was about to be discharged as fit, when it was discovered that he walked in his sleep. He got out of his bed and went over to the bed of the only sergeant in the ward. When hypnotized, memory returned, and he re-lived the scene. A shell had killed several men in his party ; he was running off to report to his sergeant, when a second shell exploded near by and left him half unconscious. With the recovery of the lost memory, the sleep-walking came to an end.

In the second case the loss of memory lasted longer. A sergeant carrying dispatches had, as it turned out later, been blown off his motor-cycle by a shell-burst. A few hours after, he found himself on the sea-coast, over a hundred miles from the front, with no recollection of the shell-burst or of anything that had happened later. Distressed at his dereliction of duty, he surrendered himself to the military police.