Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/73

Rh more than present consciousness, as for instance the memories that we can recall at will. Such memories, then, belong to a dormant or potential form of consciousness. For his purpose, however, which is chiefly to assist pathology. Dr. Rivers would limit the unconscious to that body of potential experience which it is not possible to recall by ordinary means. Conditions either morbid or at least involving, as does sleep, a certain suppression of full consciousness, must be there to enable the latent consciousness to emerge beyond the "threshold." A rather confusing result of this terminology is that we are asked to allow that, in certain cases covered by the term "dissociation," the unconscious may be conscious—may, in other words, exert an independent or "alternate" consciousness, which is, however, shut off from the normal consciousness or ego. We can, indeed, hardly refuse to credit with consciousness a secondary "personality" with whom, under the artificial conditions produced by hypnotism, we can actually converse. If, therefore, the verbal contradiction involved in the conception of a conscious unconscious is to be resolved, it must be by substituting some other term for the unconscious such as the "subliminal"; or, perhaps, transliminal might be used to express the variety of the subliminal not subject to ordinary means of recall.

Meanwhile, the unconscious, in Dr. Rivers' sense of the word, is always in a state termed "suppression." This state in its turn implies a process of suppression which falls likewise within the sphere of the unconscious, in so far as it is a spontaneous, non-voluntary, or, as Dr. Rivers would have us say, "unwitting" process. The analogous process which is voluntary is distinguished as one of "repression." Of course such a word as suppression is taken over from the language applicable to consciousness, and originally implies a will to suppress. Even in its transferred sense the term bears a teleological implication, since the suppressed experience is assumed to be shut off in the biological interest of the organism, or, as one might say, by its will to live. Considered from this wide biological standpoint, suppression is found to occur even at the low level of cutaneous sensibility. Here a "protopathic" variety of sensibility,