Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/74

62 very crude and wholesale, can be shown by experiment to be partly suppressed—though not abolished, since it remains latent in its entirety—by a supervening variety termed "epicritic" inasmuch as it is altogether more discriminating and capable of fine grades or shades. So too, then, at the higher levels of mind a like process is supposed to take place, the "unconscious" being a store-house or dump of relatively protopathic tendencies which more refined tendencies have superseded after partial assimilation has taken place. There in their subterranean cavern the ancient dethroned gods cower, stripped of much vitality, yet capable of freakish resurrection in the glimpses of the moon. This account of the biological import of suppression is very plausible; though there are difficulties of detail, more especially as regards the attribution to certain forms of the unconscious of epicritic powers barely distinguishable in practice from those usually taken as the differentia of conscious intelligence. It is a stratigraphic theory of mind, we may say. Normally, the later deposit keeps the earlier down; but sometimes there are volcanic upheavals.

A good instance of such an upheaval is that of the soldier who after shell-shock loses the power of speech. According to Dr. Rivers, this type of neurosis is due to the recrudescence of the earliest of the fear-impulses, that which leads a group of gregarious animals to sham dead together. The common soldier—gregarius miles—was especially liable to hysterical seizures of this order. This fact Dr. Rivers attributes to the effects of a discipline that enhances suggestibility; mutual suggestion in his view being essentially the process by which the gregarious instinct works. In another typical set of cases, however, namely the anxiety-neuroses to which the officer is more especially liable, the atavistic explanation, as one might almost call it, seems less probable, seeing that in extreme forms there appears to be an absence of any organised and protective reaction, however primitive in type. Or, again, if we regard such neuroses as aggravated by repression, that is, control from the highest level of consciousness, it is hard to understand on the atavistic theory how spontaneous suppression, an older and lower kind of mechanism can be expected to bring about