356 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



working; for it is a peculiarity of such split-off complexes that they 

 may cause all sorts of conscious disturbances, though the patient him- 

 self has forgotten all about the event which started the disturbances, 

 or sees no connection between it and the disturbances which it has set 

 up. Here, for instance, is a young German girl (the classic case of 

 Anna 0. reported by Breuer and Freud), well educated, knowing some 

 English, yet not using it as fluently as German. At a certain period 

 in her life she suddenly becomes unable to speak or read her mother- 

 tongue, and is obliged to use English altogether. Finally, in a hyp- 

 noidal state, she remembers that, once while she was watching by the 

 bedside of her father, she was frightened by a sudden hallucination. 

 Terrified, she tried to pray, but all that came into her mind were the 

 words of an old English nursery rhyme. The shock, and her manner 

 of reaction to it, caused her to forget her German, and to retain only 

 the English, which had come to her aid at this critical period. There 

 was no connection in her mind between the shock and the disturbances 

 which it had left behind, yet the association, though not a conscious one, 

 had been set up somewhere, somehow. 



But all this is abnormal. We do not have to go so far afield to see 

 instances of the same mysterious workings. Who of us has not had the 

 experience of giving up a knotty point in despair for the time, to come 

 back to it and find that our ideas had somehow fallen into place, had 

 apparently worked themselves over without our help. Or how often a 

 name that we have tried unsuccessfully to recall pops into our mind in 

 the midst of some other train of thought. In such cases we have not 

 been dealing with conscious activities as we know them. What has been 

 the process ? What has been going on ? 



It is such considerations as these that have led to the building up 

 of theories of unconscious action, which fill out the gaps in our con- 

 scious life. By unconscious action we understand action which goes on 

 without our being aware of it, and yet which seems intelligent, adapted 

 to a purpose. In short, it is activity which it is hard to differentiate 

 from conscious action, except in its lack of this very property of aware- 

 ness. Most psychologists to-day admit that activities which are more 

 or less like conscious activities go on under the threshold of conscious- 

 ness; but the orthodox psychological explanation is that they are mere 

 physiological activities, complex changes in the neurones, and that 

 there is nothing mental about them. The brain itself is so complex, 

 they say, that there is no need of supposing that we really think and 

 feel unconsciously, all that occurs is a change in physiological arrange- 

 ment. The mental and the conscious are co-extensive terms. On the 

 other hand, those who have dealt most with the abnormal phenomena, 

 and are less at home in the field of pure psychology, see in such con" 

 Bcious activities something mental as well. The phenomena are so 



