necessary for a construction of the connection," etc. What I wish to point out is that Freud depends on learning the pathogenic state of wish or memory "from the patient"; his most satisfactory evidence of the rightness of his 'psycho-analysis' is that the patient recognizes its rightness, by introspection. Oftentimes this recognition amounts to a new item of self-consciousness on the patient's part, the naming of an unavowed or half-concealed motive. Sometimes it is like recovering the thread of a forgotten experience. Often it bears the character of a confession, and as Freud has somewhere remarked, has some of the values and dangers of the confessional. But always it is an appeal to more searching introspection. No doubt the states of consciousness thus revealed are represented in nervous structure by subtle interplay of motor settings;[1] but the point is, that Freud neither seeks nor finds them there. Freud uses behavior as an aid to introspection. And what he finds is a radically different region of subconsciousness from that which Holt describes in the passages referred to.
The most obvious difference is that the subconscious wish recovered by psycho-analysis is supposed to be driven into subconsciousness by the censor, whereas the subconscious described by Holt is as likely as not to be the censor itself or an element thereof. The former aspect of subconsciousness is artificial, a consequence of repression; the latter is natural, entirely free, constantly cooperating with conscious thought instead of antagonizing or being antagonized by it, actively relating our conscious deeds to their widest horizons.[2] This latter aspect of subconsciousness may fairly be identified in a special way with the man himself:—As a man thinketh in his
- ↑ Holt, pp. 93, 94.
- ↑ I have elsewhere described in some detail the difference in function and origin of these aspects of subconsciousness, referring to them as the coöperative and the critical subconsciousness, respectively. The Meaning of God in Human Experience, Appendix I, pp. 527-538. The point of this distinction is well expressed in a quatrain of John B. Tabb:
'Tis not what I am fain to hide
That doth in deepest darkness dwell,
But what my tongue hath often tried,
Alas, in vain, to tell.
