Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 2.djvu/65

 NORMAL PSYCHOLOGY 221

in an increased difficulty in performing all operations in which these figures are involved. This is the case with the 'high figures' (6 — 9) and also with 3 and 7. It is these figures also which present the greatest difficulties in learning arithmetical tables. Spielrein maintains to have demonstrated the unpleasant feeling tone attach- ing to these figures by Jung's reaction method and by the method of continuously writing down single place figures (Freud's continuous association).

In general it has been denied that *pain' exercises any com- pelling motive power. Rose however (27), by means of very thor-, oughgoing experiments with Storring's dynamograph finds that sensory 'pain' — i. e. 'pain' which the subject does not ascribe to himself but to his sensations — produces an increase of motor effect (as compared with the result of indifferent stimuli).

E. INDIVIDUAL PSYCHIC FUNCTIONS AND STRUCTURES

Freud (11) supplements our views with regard to the all imp- ortant function of repression by introducing the concept of 'being overcome' (Uberwundensein). In this process there takes place not a dissociation of affect from the content of thought, but a cessa- tion of belief in the reality of the content. Civilised man has not repressed the more primitive animistic convictions of humanity but has overcome them; these convictions may reappear in the experience of the mysterious or the 'uncanny', "an experience which comes about when some impression reanimates an infantile repressed complex or when primitive ' overcome ' convictions appear to be confirmed".

According to Ferenczi (5, 6) there is utilised in the concen- tration of attention a portion of the energy which is otherwise engaged in the process of repression — a view which is in harmony with Freud's concept of displaceable, qualitatively undifferentiated • charges ' {Besetzungsenergien). By way of supplement to this ' eco- nomic' description, we must look upon the act of attention from the dynamic point of view as an inhibition of all processes other than those particular ones which are primarily concerned in the act Acts of thought and attention run parallel with motor innerv- ations, standing in a relationship of quantitative and reciprocal dependence to these latter. Nevertheless the manner in which

IB