who generally displayed great feeling for such tunes, suddenly began to rail at it, saying that he could not bear the disgusting ringing in the major key, that it sounded abominably, that this was an especially disagreeable church and unsightly village (the village is famous for its charming location). This remarkable and inadequate affect interested me and I continued my investigation. My companion then began to abuse the local parson. His reason for the abuse was that the minister had an ugly beard and—wrote very bad poetry. My companion, too, was talented lyrically. The affect then lay in poetic rivalry.
This example shows how the molecule (the chiming, etc.) takes part in the feeling tone of the whole mass of presentations[1] of the poetic rivalry. We designate this by the name of the emotionally accentuated complex. Considered in this sense the complex is a higher psychic entity. When we come to examine our psychic material, for example, that supplied by the association experiments, we find that every association belongs, as it were, to some complex. (I refer to Contribution IV ff. of the Diag. Assoz.-Stud.) To be sure, it is somewhat difficult to prove this in practice, but the more carefully we analyze the more we find that single associations belong to some complex. Undoubtedly they are related to the ego-complex more than any other. The ego-complex in the normal person is the highest psychic instance. By it we understand the ideational mass of the ego which we believe to be accompanied by the potent and ever-living feeling-tone of our own body.
The feeling-tone is an affective state which is accompanied by bodily innervations. The ego is the psychological expression for the firmly associated union of all general bodily sensations. The personality proper is therefore the firmest and strongest complex, and asserts itself (provided it be healthy) throughout all psychological storms. It is for that reason that the ideas which directly concern one's own personality are the most stable and interesting; in other words, they possess the strongest attention-tone. (Attention in the sense of Bleuler is a state of affectivity.[2])
- ↑ The individual presentations are connected among themselves according to the different laws of associations (similarity, coexistence, etc.). But the higher connections are grouped and selected by an affect.
- ↑ Bleuler: Affektivität, etc., p. 31, says: "Attention is nothing more than a special form of affectivity" (p. 30). "The attention just like all our
