Note 89 — LECTURE VI SUBCONSCIOUS PROCESSES

The validity of the evidence of memory as applied to subconscious processes needs to be carefully weighed. It is a question of method, and if the method is fallacious all conclusions fall to the ground. In the sciences of normal psychology and psychiatry and psychopathology, the data given by memory are and necessarily must be relied upon to furnish a knowledge of the content of mental processes and the mental symptoms, and all methods of psychological analysis are based on the data of memory. Without such data there could be no such sciences. As a matter of experience the method is found to be reliable when properly checked by multiple observations. If by special methods of technique mental processes, which do not enter the awareness of the moment, are later brought into consciousness as data of memory, are these data per contra to be rejected as hallucinatory? This is what their rejection would mean. Now, as a fact, there are phenomena, like coconscious personalities, which compel the postulation of coconscious processes. If this is the case, if there are coconscious processes which do not enter awareness, it would be the strangest thing if there were not conditions of the personality in which a memory of these processes could be obtained. This fact would have to be explained. The bringing of coconscious processes into consciousness as data of memory does not seem therefore to be anything a priori improbable and there would seem to be no reason why the memory of them should be more unreliable than that of conscious processes in the forms of attention. Indeed, if the fringe of consciousness be regarded as coconscious, it is an every-day act common to everybody. Such data necessarily should be checked up by multiple observations.