Instinct and the unconscious (II) / by Charles S. Myers.

  • Myers, Charles S. (Charles Samuel), 1873-1946.
Date:
[1919?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Instinct and the unconscious (II) / by Charles S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    10/12 (page 14)
    Moreover, I cannot agree that what is dissociated in any conflict between instinct and intelligence consists merely in the protopathic characters of the former, and that it is these characters that “ emerge in sleep or in such states as hypnotism” or after excessive shocks and strains in which the control of intelligence is supposed to be in abeyance. Loss of control is not, I think, to be confused with protopathic reaction. The dreaming or hypnotised person exhibits graded instincts. Whilst I agree fully with Dr Rivers that dissociation and repression occur through incompatibility and incopresentability, I would point out that the former are not the only solution for the latter. When p and e, or ins. and int. are opposed, fusion and integration, instead of dissociation and repression, may well arise from their compresence. Repression may, of course, occur when instinct meets intelligence, but it is not confined to such conflict. It may also occur when a lower form of instinct meets an uncompromising, incompatible, higher form, when one affective ex¬ perience meets another diametrically opposite to it, or when two uncom¬ promising, incompatible, cognitive or intellectual experiences strive independently to coexist. What is then thrust into the unconscious is not merely or necessarily the protopathic constituents, but the entire experience (cognitive, conative and affective, intellectual, emotional and ‘instinctive’) which is involved in the incompatible conduct. While I am writing this article, a clock strikes or some one asks me a question. I am ‘not at home’ to these experiences. They are temporarily inhibited or repressed, but a little later I may become aware of them1. Or I may forget an experience because it is unpleasant. Yet what is dissociated, what returns when control is in abeyance, is in neither case an instinct, nor is it characterized by protopathic features. What returns from the unconscious has often suffered strange meta¬ morphosis. I have already written at too great length to discuss the causes of incomplete repression, or the purposes of the sublimation, con¬ densation, symbolism, etc., which dissociated experiences undergo in the unconscious. But it is clear that out of the unconscious there emerge not merely the more or less imperfectly repressed activities which have been dismissed thither through dissociation from consciousness, but also fresh activities, intellectual as well as instinctive. In the unconscious germinate (perhaps in accord with Mendelian conceptions) new instincts for the species and the creative flights of individual genius, which, when the time is ripe, sprout forth into consciousness for its use. 1 I am, of course, fully aware of the differences in fate that may attend an inhibited cognitive and a dissociated emotional experience.