Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 3-4.djvu/93

 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE 347

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I up, it is soon found that a number of other experiences, entirely

I forgotten, many of them dating from early childhood, have become

associatively linked to the painful occurrence or incident and have


 * fortified the fear or other unreasonable symptom with their own

j emotional strength. While this is going on another strange thing

happens. As the painfully unpleasant, apparently forgotten memories are brought to the surface and the emotions with which they were originally associated are recalled, the fear which was the object of investigation disappears either suddenly or more or less rapidly. The reawakening of painful reminiscences, apparently lost from , memory, dissolves the unreasonable and apparently meaningless

fear. The connection between the painful incident and the later fear is thus disclosed.

But what is the nature of that relationship ? The two are linked through a common emotion or complementary affect. Where the condition is not entirely reheved by the recall of certain painful reminiscences, further inquiry leads to the unearthing of additional occurrences which had become similarly excluded from ordinary consciousness and have added their emotional strength to the un-


 * pleasant existing state. This teaches us that when painful experiences

are pushed out of memory, they are really only pushed further in; they disappear from conscious memory but only to lie dormant and to influence the subject unconsciously, throwing up emotional bubbles in most unexpected ways. No matter how deeply this in-

! grown emotion may lie buried it does not wholly get out of reach.

I Following up the free association of ideas, especially those which

arise around the subject's dreams, the submerged memory is brought back, element by element.

One of the most remarkable features of repressed emotions is that they belong in large part to our childhood life. Even when

the events to which they pertain belong to a later period the

' reaction they evoke is characteristic of our childish or infantile

j attitude towards life and does not belong to the age at which

it appears. In other words certain infantile emotional reactions persist in the unconscious and become the center of psychic shocks

' or injuries.

', Previous to Freud's discovery of these important facts clinical

psychology, as I have pointed out already, was concerned chiefly with description and classification. In the. case mentioned it would have limited itself to inquire: what is the person most afraid of?