From the Unconscious to the Conscious 



past life, all his knowledge and all his acquirements, and 

 returned to the psychological state of a new-born babe 

 who has everything to learn. But curiously enough, 

 though the memory had disappeared, the capacity to 

 learn was intact. Now during this process of re- 

 education, M. Flournoy records, ' he had dreams and 

 visions, incomprehensible to himself, which he described 

 with astonishment to his relations, and in which they 

 recognised very exact recollections of places where the 

 patient had been before his accident.' There was, 

 therefore, a latent memory, also clearly shown by his 

 power of very rapid learning. 



In fine, the study of cryptomnesia clearly brings out 

 that everything happens as though the psychic state 

 which we call a remembrance, registered by the cerebral 

 cells, ephemeral as they and destined soon to disappear 

 with them, were at the same time registered in ' a 

 something ' permanent, of which this remembrance 

 will henceforward be an integral and permanent part. 



Let us clearly retain this conclusion; its importance 

 will appear later. It will suffice at present to establish 

 a first inference from the facts. 



There are in the living being powerful and extended 

 but subconscious faculties which, although cryptoid and 

 not in the main within the consciousness nor under the 

 normal and direct control of the will, yet condition the 

 individual psychism. 



There is a subconscious memory different from the 

 normal memory, more certain and more extensive than 

 it and seeming almost illimitable. 



These facts take us far beyond the limits of classical 

 notions on the Self, its origin, its end, and its destinies. 

 There is nothing in the academic knowledge which we 

 have thought definitely established by the natural 

 sciences, by physiology or psychology, that can account 

 for subconscious phenomena, or which is not in flagrant 

 opposition to them. 



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