DISCOVERY 



69 



mind. The deeper impressions will take longer to 

 fade away than the fainter ; but fading is the inevitable 

 fate of them all. 



How, on this basis, can we explain the forgetfulness 

 that leads to shell-shock ? WTiy should the \nctim 

 forget an experience which must have made a profound 

 impression upon him ? To all appearances it seems 

 just the sort of experience that a person would be 

 least likely to forget. To explain this obliteration of 

 so moving, so disturbing a memory, we must postulate 

 another kind of forgetting which differs totally from 

 obliviscence. ObUviscence attacks the weak ; this 

 the strong. Deep emotion hinders one and favours 

 the other. ObUviscence acts graduallj', and gently 

 carries the experience over the line that separates the 

 recoverable from the irrecoverable ; this other forget- 

 ting suddenly and violently pushes the experience 

 beyond the Umit of recall. In one case there is a slow 

 and steady sinking into the unconscious, in the other 

 a sudden fall. 



This latter type of forgetting has by the new school 

 of psychologists, the psycho-analysts, been termed 

 "repression"; and the resulting forgetfulness has for 

 many years been known as amnesia. Is repression a 

 normal process or is it pathological ? Is it a healthy 

 or harmless thing that, like obliviscence, happens to 

 everybody, or is it a malady that happens to few ? 

 Dr. W. H. R. Rivers favours the former theory .^ He 

 maintains that repression has a definite biological 

 value. There is probably in the mind of man a 

 machinery of repression which works on the whole for 

 his benefit and comfort ; there is certainly some such 

 machinery in the mind of the lower animals. The 

 frog, for instance. In the early stages of its life it is 

 a fish, a tadpole. It inherits fish-hke instincts and 

 acquires fish-Uke habits. It breathes wth gills, has a 

 ven,' ser\-iceable tail, and useless rudimentary legs. 

 But when it becomes a frog it gives up fish-hke things. 

 It lives on land, breathes with lungs, has very service- 

 able legs, and a useless vestigial tail. To forget the 

 experiences and habits of tadpoledom, and to acquire 

 a new set of habits and customs, is the whole duty of 

 frogdom. But simple obliviscence is far too slow a 

 process to help him within the necessary time. For 

 of all memories, motor memories, when organically 

 fixed, seem the most difficult to forget. The swimmer, 

 after long years of abstinence from the water, swims 

 as readily as if there had been no intermission at all. 

 In fact, repression must have been at work. The frog 

 forgets his infancy, the fuU-grown insect forgets the 

 metamorphoses through which it has passed. 



This survival value of repression in the lower animals 

 suggests the function of repression in the human mind. 

 It may be useful in the preservation of life ; or, on 



• The British Journal of Psychology, vol. ix, pp. 236-46. 



the other hand, it may be the vestige of a process 

 once useful, but now indifferent or even harmful. By 

 deahng with the concrete facts, and quite independently 

 of such biological speculations as I have outhned, 

 the psycho-analysts have arrived at the conclusion 

 that repressed material is always unpleasant. The 

 motive for repression is one's personal comfort. One 

 represses to preserve one's peace of mind. This is 

 obviously so in the case of shell-shock ; it is demon- 

 strably so in the case of hysteria ; it is probably so 

 in other and less harmful forms of repression. The 

 shell-shocked soldier had to face terrors that were more 

 than he could bear ; be became unconscious and 

 forgot ; a beneficent Nature threw over his mind a 

 pall which, although it ultimately did him harm, 

 preserved him at the time from a still greater harm — 

 death from shock. 



The curious amnesias of hysteria I have no space 

 to discuss : I must content myself with an illustration 

 from one of the common occurrences of everyday 

 hfe — the forgetting of proper names. Why are people's 

 names so hard to remember as compared with other 

 words ? Why does one particular name sometimes 

 shp out of the mind and defy all efforts at recall ? 

 The most plausible explanation seems to be that we 

 think of a friend in pictorial terms. We catch in 

 imagination a fleeting glimpse of his face, or of some 

 characteristic feature of dress or person, which serves 

 as his symbol and saves us the trouble of recalling 

 his name. I cannot in this way envisage an abstract 

 relation : to think clearly of general and abstract 

 things I must think in words. And thus it comes to 

 pass that my friend's name, unless I have to speak it 

 aloud, tends to fade away through sheer lack of repe- 

 tition. Now mark how the psycho-analyst explains 

 it. He holds that, when we are prone to forget a 

 person's name, it is because we disUke him, or because 

 there is somebody else of the same name whom we 

 dislike ; or because his name, or his dress, or his face, 

 or his conduct is in some way, direct or devious, 

 connected with some unpleasant experience of our 

 own, and the censor (as Freud calls the repressing 

 force), to make assurance doubly sure, not only 

 represses the unpleasant experience itself, but also 

 all the mental factors that are likely to bring that 

 experience back to consciousness. It may be that 

 we are unconscious of this connection (indeed, we 

 generally are), but the connection is there, and if 

 sufficient trouble be taken it can be brought to hght. 

 For a full defence of this position I must refer the 

 reader to Dr. Ernest Jones's article on " The Theory 

 of Repression in its Relation to Memory." ^ It must 

 not be thought that these two theories, obhviscence 

 and repression, are alternative theories, one of which 

 - Ibid., vol. viii, pp. 33-47. 



