EXPLORING THE SUBCONSCIOUS
(Discusses automatic writing, the analysis of dreams, and other
methods by which a whole new universe of life has been brought to
human knowledge.)
One of the most common methods of exploring the subconscious mind is the
method of automatic writing. I have never tried this myself, but tens of
thousands of people are sitting every night with a "ouija" in front of
them, holding a pencil on a piece of paper and letting their
subconscious minds write what they please. Most of them are hoping to
get messages from the dead--a problem which we shall discuss in the next
chapter. Suffice it for the moment to say that automatic writing and
table rapping and other devices of mediumship have opened up to us a
vast mass of subconscious mentality. A part of the scientific world
still takes a contemptuous attitude and calls this all humbug, but many
of our greatest scientists have been persuaded to investigate, and have
become convinced that in this mass of subconsciousness there is mingled,
not merely the mind of the medium, but the minds of all those present,
and possibly other minds as well. For my part, I do not see how any one
can study disinterestedly the proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research and not become convinced that telepathy at least is one of the
powers of the subconscious mind.
Telepathy is what is popularly known as "thought transmission." Every
one must know people who are what is called "psychic," and will know
what is happening to some friend in another part of the world, or will
go upstairs because they "sense" that some one wants them, or will go to
the door because they "have a hunch" that some one is coming. And maybe
these things are only chance, but you will be unscientific if you do not
take the trouble to read and learn what modern investigators have
brought out on such subjects.
This much is certain, and is denied by no competent investigator:
whatever has been in your mind is there still, and it is possible to
find a way of tapping the buried memory. An old woman, delirious with
fever, begins to babble in a strange language, and it is discovered that
she is talking ancient Hebrew. The woman is entirely illiterate, and her
conscious memory knows no language but her own, her conscious mind has
no ideas beyond those of her domestic life and the gossip of the
village. But investigation is made, and it is discovered that when this
woman was a girl, she worked in the home of a Hebrew scholar, and heard
him reading aloud. She did not understand a word of what she heard, and
was not consciously listening to it; nevertheless, every syllable of it
had been stored away forever by her subconscious mind. Innumerable cases
of this sort have been established; and, as a matter of fact, we might
have been prepared for such discoveries by the memory-feats of the
conscious mind. It is well known that Mozart, when a child, could listen
to a new opera, and go home and play it over note for note. At present
there is a child in America, giving exhibitions in public, carrying on
thirty games of chess at the same time. There have been others who do
sums of mental arithmetic, such as multiplying thirty-two figures by
thirty-two figures, or reciting the Bible backwards.
All this seems incredible; and yet there is something still more
incredible. Suppose that these same powers, which are stored in our
subconscious minds, were stored also in the minds of animals! A few
years ago Maurice Maeterlinck published a book, "The Unknown Guest," in
the course of which he tells about his experiments with the so-called
Elberfeld horses: two animals which had been trained for years by their
owner to give signals by moving their forefeet, and which apparently
could count and divide and multiply large sums, and extract square and
cube root, and spell out names, and recognize sounds, scents and colors,
and read time from the face of a watch. Of course, it is easy to say
that this is absurd, that the horses must have got some signals from
their trainer; but, as it happened, they would do their work in the
absence of their trainer; they would do it in the dark, or with a sack
over their heads, and the best scientific minds of Germany were unable
to suggest any test conditions which could not be met. There have been
many gigantic frauds in the world, and this may have been one of them;
on the other hand, there have been many new discoveries, and for my part
I will finish exploring the miracles of the subconscious mind of man,
before I presume to say that anything is impossible in the subconscious
mind of a horse or a dog. Also I will wait for some learned person to
explain to me how the subconscious minds of horses and dogs know enough
to build and repair their bones and teeth, so cleverly that modern
architectural and engineering science could teach them nothing. I ask,
also, if it is possible to find a region in the subconsciousness which
is common to two people, why is it absurd to suggest that there might be
a region common to a man and a horse? Why is this any more absurd than
that they should eat the same food and breathe the same air and feel the
same affection and be frightened at the same dangers?
The only persons who will be dogmatic about such subjects are the
persons who are ignorant. Those who take the trouble to investigate,
discover more wonderful things every day, and they realize that we have
here a whole universe of knowledge, to which we have as yet barely
opened the doors. Consider, for example, the facts which we are
acquiring on the subject of personality and what it means. You would
say, perhaps, that if there is anything you know positively, it is that
you are one person, and have never been anybody else, and that your body
belongs to you, and that nobody else ever has used or ever can use it.
But what would you say if I told you that tomorrow "you" might cease to
be, and somebody else might be in possession of your body, walking it
around and wearing its clothes and spending its money? What if I were to
tell you that there might be in "you," or in your body, half a dozen
different personalities which you have never known or dreamed of, and
that tomorrow there might break out a war between them and "you," as to
which of the half dozen people should hear with your ears and speak with
your tongue and walk about with your clothes on? Unless you are familiar
with the literature of multiple personality, you would surely say that
this was unbelievable--quite as much so as a mathematical horse!
Let us begin with the case of the Reverend Ansel Bourne, who was many
years ago a perfectly respectable clergyman in a Rhode Island town. One
day he disappeared, and his family did not hear of him. A year or two
later there was a store-keeper in a town in Pennsylvania, who suddenly
came to himself as the Reverend Ansel Bourne, not knowing what he had
been in the meantime, or how he came to be keeping a store. Under
hypnotism it developed that he had in him two personalities, and his
trance personality recollected all that had been happening in the
meantime and told about it freely.
Or take the still more fascinating case of the young lady who is known
in the literature of psychotherapy as Miss Beauchamp. Her story is told
in a book, "The Dissociation of a Personality," by Dr. Morton Prince of
Boston. Some thirty years ago Miss Beauchamp, a very conscientious and
dignified young lady, became nervous and ill, and took to doing strange
things, which were a source of shame and humiliation to her. Under
hypnotism it was discovered to be a case of multiple personality. The
other personality, who finally gave herself the name of Sally, was
entirely different in character from Miss Beauchamp, being mischievous,
vain, and primitive as a child. She conceived an intense dislike for
Miss Beauchamp, whom she called by abusive names; at times when she
could get possession of Miss Beauchamp's body, she delighted in playing
humiliating tricks upon her enemy, spending her money, running her into
debt, breaking her engagements, disgracing her before her friends. Sally
was always well and Miss Beauchamp was always ill, and Sally would take
the body, for which they fought for possession, and take it for long and
exhausting walks, and leave it cold and miserable, lost and penniless,
in the possession of Miss Beauchamp! And of course this made Miss
Beauchamp more and more a wreck, and Sally took possession of more and
more of her time. Sally knew everything that Miss Beauchamp did and
thought, but Miss Beauchamp did not know about Sally. She only knew that
there were gaps in her life, during which she did things she could not
explain. And because she did not want her friends to think her insane,
she would try to hide this dreadful condition of affairs; but Sally
would spoil her plans by writing letters to her friends, and also by
writing insulting letters for Miss Beauchamp to find when she took
possession again.
Then one day, after several years of treatment, there appeared yet
another personality, who knew nothing about Miss Beauchamp or Sally
either, and only knew what Miss Beauchamp had known up to some years
before. Miss Beauchamp had a college education, and wrote and spoke
French; Sally knew no French, and tried in vain to learn it; the new
personality did not have a college education at all. Nevertheless,
after long experiment, the story of which is as fascinating as any novel
you ever read, Dr. Prince discovered that this was the real Miss
Beauchamp; the others were "split off" personalities. He traced the
cause to a severe mental shock, and succeeded in the end in combining
the first Miss Beauchamp with the last, and in suppressing the obstinate
and wanton Sally. As you read this story, you watch him mentally
murdering a human being; "Sally" clamors pitifully for life, but he
condemns her to death, and relentlessly executes his sentence. It is a
"movie" thriller with a happy ending, and I should think it would make
disconcerting reading to persons who believe that each of us is one
immortal soul, or "has" one immortal soul, and is responsible for it to
a personal God.
There is never any end to the problems of these multiple personalities,
and each case is a test of the judgment and ingenuity of the specialist.
He will try to make one personality "stick," and will fail, and will
have to accept another, or a combination of two. In one case, he found
that he could not get the right personality to "stick" except under
hypnosis, so he decided to leave the man in a mild state of trance, and
the new personality lived all the rest of its life in that condition. If
you wish to know more about this subject you can find books in any
well-equipped library. I mention one, "The Riddle of Personality," by H.
Addington Bruce, because it contains in the appendix an excellent list
of the literature of the subconscious in all its many aspects.
There is another, and most fascinating method of exploring this
underworld of the mind, and that is the study of dreams. Some fifteen
years ago a psychotherapist in New York told me about the discoveries of
a physician in Vienna, and gave me some pamphlets, written in very
difficult and technical German. Since then this Professor Freud has been
translated, and has become a fad, and the absurdities of his followers
make one a little apologetic for him. But we do not give up Jesus
because of the torturers and bigots who call themselves Christians, and
in the same way we have no right to blame Freud for all the absurdities
of the psychoanalysts.
Probably there never was a time in human history when there were not
people who interpreted dreams, and you can still buy "dream books" for
twenty-five cents, and learn that a white horse means that you are going
to get a letter from your sweetheart tomorrow; then you can buy another
dream book, telling you that a white horse means there is going to be a
death in your family within the year. Naturally this prejudices thinking
people against dream analysis; yet, dreams are facts, and every fact has
its cause, and if you dream about a white horse, there must assuredly be
some reason for your dreaming this particular thing. Of course we know
that if you eat mince-pie and welsh-rabbit at midnight, you will dream
about something terrible; but will it be snakes, or will it be a
railroad wreck, or will it be white horses trampling over you?
Obviously, it may be a million different unpleasant things; and what is
it that picks out this or that from the infinite store of your memory,
and brings it into the region of half-consciousness which we call the
dream?
Professor Freud's discovery is in brief that the dream is a
wish-fulfillment. Our instincts present to our consciousness a great
mass of impulses and desires, and among these the consciousness selects
what it pleases, and represses and refuses to recognize or to act upon
the others. But maybe these decisions are not altogether satisfactory to
the subconsciousness. The mind of the body is in rebellion against the
mind--shall we say of reason, or shall we say of society? The mind of
society, otherwise known as the moral law, says that you shall be a good
little boy, and shall go to school and learn what you are told, and on
Sunday go to church and sit very still through a long sermon; whereas,
the body of a boy would rather be a savage, hunting birds' nests and
scalping enemies and exploring magic caves full of precious jewels. So
the subconsciousness of the boy, balked and miserable, awaits its time,
and finds its satisfaction when the boy is asleep and his moral censor
has relaxed its control.
This dream mind is not a logical and orderly thing like the conscious
mind; it is not business-like and civilized, it does not deal in
abstractions. It is far more interested in things than in words; it does
not present us with formulas, but with pictures, and with stories of
weird and wonderful happenings. It is like the mind of the race, which
we study in legends and religions. It does not tell us that the sun is a
mass of incandescent hydrogen gas, so and so many miles in diameter; it
tells us that the sun is a cosmic hero who slays the black dragon of
night. So the mind of our body presents us with innumerable pictures and
symbols, exactly such as we find in poetry. There may be, and frequently
is, dispute as to just what a poet meant by this or that particular
image, but if we read all the work of any particular poet, we get a
certain impression of that poet's individuality. If he is always talking
about the perfume of women's hair and the gleam of the white flesh of
nymphs in the thickets, we are not left in doubt as to what is wrong
with this poet.
And just so, when the expert sets to work to examine all the dreams that
any one person can remember, day after day, sooner or later the expert
observes that these dreams hover continually about one particular
subject; and by questioning the person, he can find out what is the
secret which is troubling the person, perhaps without the person himself
being aware of it. Of course there are many people who like nothing so
much as to talk about themselves; and many are spending their time and
their money on the latest fad of being "psyched," who would, in any
properly organized world, be put to work at hoeing weeds or washing
their own clothes. Nevertheless, it is a fact that there are real mental
disorders in the world, and innumerable honest and earnest people who
have something the matter with them which they do not understand. Here
is one way by which the conscientious investigator can find out what the
trouble is, and make it clear to them, and by establishing harmony
between their conscious and their subconscious minds, can many times put
them in the way of health and happiness.
Through psychoanalysis we are enabled to understand the "split"
personality and its cause. We discover that almost everyone has more or
less rudimentary forms of multiple personality hidden within him; made
out of desires and traits which he does not like, or which the world
forces him to drive into the deeps of his being. These may be evil
impulses, of sex or violence; they may be the most noble altruisms, or
artistic yearnings, ridiculous things in a world of "hustle." A quite
normal man or woman may keep a separate self, apart from the world,
living a Jekyll life of business propriety and a Hyde life of religious
or musical ecstasy. Or again, the repressed impulses may integrate
themselves in the unconscious, and you may have genius or lunacy or
both--"great wits to madness near allied." The modern knowledge on such
dark mysteries you may find in Hart's "The Psychology of Insanity."