Translation Exercise 7
He hears and does not hear; he sees, yet is blind; he knows and is ignorant. Such examples are so common that the specialist soon realizes that unconscious contents of the mind behave as if they were conscious and that you can never be sure, in such cases, whether thought, speech, or action is conscious or not.
It is this kind of behavior that makes so many physicians dismiss statements by hysterical patients as utter lies. Such persons certainly produce more untruths than most of us, but "lie" is scarcely the right word to use. In fact, their mental state causes an uncertainty of behavior because their consciousness is liable to unpredictable eclipse by an interference from the unconscious. Even their skin sensations may reveal similar fluctuations of awareness. At one moment the hysterical person may feel a needle prick in the arm; at the next it may pass unnoticed. If his attention can be focused on a certain point, the whole of his body can be completely anesthetized until the tension that causes this blackout of the senses has been relaxed. Sense perception is then immediately restored. All the time, however, he has been unconsciously aware of what was happening.
The physician can see this process quite clearly when he hypnotizes such a patient. It is easy to demonstrate that the patient has been aware of every detail. The prick in the arm or the remark made during an eclipse of consciousness can be recalled as accurately as if there had been no anesthesia or "forgetfulness." I recall a woman who was once admitted to the clinic in a state of complete stupor. When she recovered consciousness next day, she knew who she was but did not know where she was, how or why she had come there, or even the date. Yet after I had hypnotized her, she told me why she had fallen ill, how she had got to the clinic, and who had admitted her. All these details could be verified. She was even able to tell the time at which she had been admitted, because she had seen a clock in the entrance hall. Under hypnosis, her memory was as clear as if she had been completely conscious all the time.
When we discuss such matters, we usually have to draw on evidence supplied by clinical observation. For this reason, many critics assume that the unconscious and all its subtle manifestations belong solely to the sphere of psychopathology. They consider any expression of the unconscious as something neurotic, or psychotic, which has nothing to do with a normal mental state. But neurotic phenomena are by no means the products exclusively of disease. They are m fact no more than pathological exaggerations of normal occurrences; it is only because they are exaggerations that they are more obvious than their normal counterparts. Hysterical symptoms can be observed in all normal persons, but they are so slight that they usually pass unnoticed.
Forgetting, for instance, is a normal process, in which certain conscious ideas lose their specific energy because one’s attention has been deflected. When interest turns elsewhere, it leaves in shadow the things with which one was previously concerned, just as a searchlight lights upon a new area by leaving another in darkness. This is unavoidable, or consciousness can keep only a few images in full clarity at one time, and even this clarity fluctuates. But the forgotten ideas have not ceased to exist. Although they cannot be reproduced at will, they are present in a subliminal state - just beyond the threshold of recall - from which they can rise again spontaneously at any time, often after many years of apparently total oblivion.