Page:The Source and Aim of Human Progress.djvu/22

18 "I wanted to get an insight into the very nature of the subwaking self; I wished to make a personal acquaintance with it. 'What is its personal character?' I asked. How surprised I was when, after a close interrogation, the answer came to me that there can possibly be no personal acquaintance with it,—for the subwaking self lacks personality."

Under certain conditions a cleavage may occur between the two selves, and then the subwaking self may rapidly grow, develop, and attain (apparently) the plane of self-consciousness, get crystallized into a person, and give itself a name, imaginary, or borrowed from history. (This accounts for the spiritualistic phenomena of personality, guides, controls, and communications by dead personalities, or spirits coming from another world, such as have been observed in the case of Mrs. Piper and other mediums of like type; it accounts for all the phenomena of multiple personality, simulating the dead or the living, or formed anew out of the matrix of the subconsciousness. All such personality metamorphoses can be easily developed, under favorable conditions, in any psycho-pathological laboratory). The newly crystallized personality is, as a rule, extremely unstable, ephemeral, shadowy in its outlines (spirit-like, ghost-like), tends to become amorphous, being formed again and again under the influence of favorable conditions and suggestions, rising to the surface of consciousness, then sinking into the subconsciousness, and disappearing, only to give rise to new personality metamorphoses, bursting like so many bubbles on the surface of the upper stream of consciousness.

A few quotations from my work on the subject of the subconscious may help to elucidate the main traits of the lower secondary self with its extreme suggestibility and automatic, reflex consciousness:

"The subwaking self is extremely credulous; it lacks all sense of the true and the rational. 'Two and two make five.' 'Yes.'  Anything is accepted, if sufficiently emphasized by the hypnotizer. The suggestibility and imitativeness of the subwaking self were discussed by me at great length. What I should like to point out here is the extreme servility and cowardliness of that self. Show hesitation, and it will show fight; command authoritatively, and it will obey slavishly.

"The subwaking self is devoid of all morality. It will steal without the least scruple; it will poison; it will stab; it will assassinate its best friends without the least scruple. When completely cut off from the waking person, it is precluded from conscience."

This explains the many atrocities committed by the Assyrian,