What caused the awakening of the A system? We have seen that the
awakening of the rebellious B personality was an emotional trauma which
was the same in kind as that which originally gave rise to the primitive
“rebellion” as a reaction to the emotion. A similar trauma later
awakened the same rebellion but one grown to the large proportions of
the “B complex.” So in like fashion the new trauma to B awakened the A
system as a reaction and associative phenomenon. What was the new
trauma?
C in her written statement does not give the nature of the “strong
emotion which swept over” her when the “revelation came in a flash.”
It was very different in character from the other. It was
_apprehension_—the apprehension of moral disaster to the person whom
she was trying to save. There was no resentment at the discovered
deception, no thought of wounded self, no feeling of injury as might
be inferred from the language of the writer, but only the thought of
her own _responsibility_ in the circumstances, and of _duty_
undertaken, and the feeling of _anxiety_ for the future of this other
person; and there was a sense of _disappointment and failure_. These
erupted from the submerged A system.
It was this same system of ideas, but organized about her husband as
their object, which had been dominant in C during the four years period
of stress-and-strain and “neurasthenia.” They had lain dormant in the
unconscious during the B period. Now they are struck and excited to
activity. There is a conflict. The impulses from the conflicting A
emotions, being the stronger, repress the B impulses and the A system is
awakened as a personality.
The question at once comes to mind whether the object of B. C. A.’s
solicitude was not a surrogate for her deceased husband, a sort of
symbol, and had not become the object of the transference (to use the
language of the psycho-analysts) of the solicitude which had previously
been bestowed upon her husband’s health and future well-being; whether
this new person had not been substituted for the ill husband in that A
system of ideas which during four years had been characterized by
responsibility, duty, anxiety, disappointment, failure, etc.; whether,
indeed, it might not be held that the solicitude for the salvation of
this drug addict was not a defense reaction against self-reproach for an
imaginary responsibility for the illness of her husband. Such
self-reproaches she describes.
If this were true, the awakening of the A system by the discovery of the
deception (which was only the banal one of money matters) and
realization of failure, disappointment, etc., would be all the more
comprehensible in view of the very strong and close associations which
the new object would have in the system. But if true I cannot see that
it would have any further or deeper significance. There was no need for
disguisement. Certainly solicitude for a husband, disguised in another
person, needs no disguisement and could not be unacceptable. But painful
_self-reproaches_ for former failure could not be faced, and
satisfaction could be found in the performance of a new duty as a sort
of atonement.
Again was there any subconscious sex wish or urge that could not be
admitted to herself and to which the change to A was a defense reaction?
I have been unable to discover any. And if there were I am unable to see
how the revelation of deception in money matters required a defense
reaction against the fulfillment of this wish. That sounds like Alice in
Wonderland.
But why did the revelation shock B, who with her traits would not have
cared? I can answer this from my intimate and fuller knowledge of C’s
and A’s ideas. It was a revelation of the truth. The true character of
the object of their solicitude, “whom everyone else had given up as
hopeless,” was revealed in a flash, and this “revelation” had struck,
not B, but the submerged A (or C) system, which immediately emerged in
an uprush from the unconscious. The shock was not to B but to
subconscious A. And the reaction was “disappointment,” “failure,”
“apprehension,” etc. Similar phenomena have been observed over and over
again in psychological studies as I have frequently witnessed them in
this case.