A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins.

  • Mary Whiton Calkins
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    surprising things — broken appointments or walked unheard-of distances, that she is in strange situations, wound round and round and tangled in yards of worsted, for example. Sometimes she finds before her a note written to herself in her own handwriting, and on her own notepaper, purporting to come from another self which has taken the walks, broken the appointments, involved her in difficulties.* II. THE EXPLANATION The most common explanation, nowadays advanced, for abnor¬ mal phenomena of consciousness, is the hypothesis, already sug¬ gested, of secondary selves, or personalities. Such a secondary self is variously known as sub-conscious or co-conscious, as sub¬ liminal or supra-liminal. It is conceived as a self other than the ordinary waking self, yet in some way connected with it. There may be several of these alternating secondary selves. Dr. Prince, for example, believes that the facts of Miss Beauchamp’s case can be explained only by the hypothesis of six distinct personalities, one of whom — the mischievous Sally who writes the notes and tangles her alter ego in the yarn — is entirely antagonistic to the main self. This hypothesis is believed to be necessary to account for the extreme forms of dissociation just illustrated; and the theory is then often extended to apply to other abnormal phenomena. Thus, on such a theory, the dreaming self, or the hypnotized self, or the self who sees figures in the crystal, is the sub-conscious or co-conscious self. There is no time to discuss in detail the complicated issues in¬ volved in such a theory. The following comments are, therefore, dogmatically stated, though they run counter to the view of many psychologists: The majority of so-called abnormal phenomena are perfectly well explained without recourse to a secondary self hy¬ pothesis. It has appeared already that dream illusions are the natural result of the dissociation natural in sleep. It is likewise obvious that abnormal automatisms are extreme instances of the natural outcome of consciousness in action, and of the anatomical unity of afferent and efferent processes. Hypnosis, also, strik- * Cf. “The Dissociation of a Personality,” by Morton Prince, 1905.
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