other somnambulists, is that condition which French investigators call “Cryptomnesia.”[1] By this term is meant the becoming conscious of a memory-picture which cannot be regarded as in itself primary, but at most is secondary, by means of subsequent recalling or abstract reasoning. It is characteristic of cryptomnesia that the picture which emerges does not bear the obvious mark of the memory-picture, is not, that is to say, bound up with the idiosyncratic super-conscious ego-complex.
Three ways may be distinguished in which the cryptomnesic picture is brought to consciousness.
1. The picture enters consciousness without any intervention of the sense-spheres (intra-psychically). It is an inrushing idea whose causal sequence is hidden within the individual. In so far cryptomnesia is quite an everyday occurrence, concerned with the deepest normal psychic events. How often it misleads the investigator, the author or the composer into believing his ideas original, whilst the critic quite well recognises their source! Generally the individuality of the representation protects the author from the accusation of plagiarism and proves his good faith; still, cases do occur of unconscious verbal reproduction. Should the passage in question contain some remarkable idea, the accusation of plagiarism, more or less conscious, is justified. After all a valuable idea is linked by numerous associations with the ego-complex; at different times, in different situations, it has already been meditated upon and thus leads by innumerable links in all directions. It can therefore never so disappear from consciousness that its continuity could be entirely lost from the sphere of conscious memory. We have, however, a criterion by which we can always recognise objectively intra-psychic cryptomnesia. The cryptomnesic presentation is linked to the ego-complex by the minimum of associations. The reason for this lies in the relation of the individual to the particular object, in the disproportion of interest to
- ↑ Cryptomnesia must not be regarded as synonymous with Hypermnesia; by the latter term is meant the abnormal quickening of the power of recollection which reproduces the memory-pictures as such.
