The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceact—usual or eccentric, it makes no difference—after he wakes fromhis hypnotic sleep. Punctually, when the signal comes or the timeelapses upon which you have told him that the act must ensue, heperforms it;—but in so doing he has no recollection of your suggestion,and he always trumps up an improvised pretext for his behaviorif the act be of an eccentric kind. It may even be suggested to a subjectto have a vision or to hear a voice at a certain interval after waking,and when the time comes the vision is seen or the voice heard, withno inkling on the subject’s part of its source.In the wonderful explorations by Binet, Janet, Breuer, Freud,Mason, Prince, and others, of the subliminal consciousness of patientswith hysteria, we have revealed to us whole systems of undergroundlife, in the shape of memories of a painful sort which lead aparasitic existence, buried outside of the primary fields of consciousness,and making irruptions thereinto with hallucinations, pains,convulsions, paralyses of feeling and of motion, and the whole processionof symptoms of hysteric disease of body and of mind. Alteror abolish by suggestion these subconscious memories, and the patientimmediately gets well. His symptoms were automatisms, inMr. Myers’s sense of the word. These clinical records sound likefairy-tales when one first reads them, yet it is impossible to doubttheir accuracy; and, the path having been once opened by these firstobservers, similar observations have been made elsewhere. Theythrow, as I said, a wholly new light upon our natural constitution.And it seems to me that they make a farther step inevitable. Interpretingthe unknown after the analogy of the known, it seems to me thathereafter, wherever we meet with a phenomenon of automatism, be itmotor impulses, or obsessive idea, or unaccountable caprice, or delusion,or hallucination, we are bound first of all to make search whetherit be not an explosion, into the fields of ordinary consciousness, of ideaselaborated outside of those fields in subliminal regions of the mind. Weshould look, therefore, for its source in the Subject’s subconscious life.In the hypnotic cases, we ourselves create the source by our suggestion,so we know it directly. In the hysteric cases, the lost memories which arethe source have to be extracted from the patient’s Subliminal by a numberof ingenious methods, for an account of which you must consultthe books. In other pathological cases, insane delusions, for example, or214