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IT is a fact that good-hearted people can honestly deceive themselves. There exists a definite mechanism which can be used by one part of our mind (the subconscious) to deceive and mislead the other half of our intelligence (the conscious mind). Let us now take a square look at this mechanism which so readily lends itself to the queer business of self-deception. In order to make clear this tendency of the subconscious to practice deception upon its lord and master, let us go back to the nursery and locate some of the early origins of dishonest thinking and insincere psychic behavior.
Much of the trouble that neurotics have with themselves, in trying to face the realities of life, is due to their having carried over into adult experience the tendencies of childhood to confuse facts and fantasy. When we are young, our developing ego tends to regard itself as the center of the world. Our personality during childhood is very real, and we come to confuse the outside world of reality with the imaginative creations of our own world of fantasy.
Parents tell fairy-stories to their children with the idea of developing the imagination. In the case of the average child, however, the imagination does not need developing; it needs to be educated, trained, curbed, and disciplined: - The child's early life is largely one of fantasy. He lives in the realms of his own imagination. Instead of being told fairy-stories he should be told about interesting and thought-provoking facts and people.
Early in the nursery days "directive thinking" should be encouraged. As the child grows up, he cannot attain the fulfillment of his fairy-tale imaginings; he is destined to find that life is real, that the world is a workshop as well as a playhouse. I think the old-fashioned fairy-story is merely something which parents find easy and ready-at-hand to tell the children. It is too much trouble to make the facts of real life and the experiences of real people sufficiently interesting and attractive to these young minds so largely given to fantasy and so completely preoccupied with imagination. Early in life children should be taught to control their thoughts and be instructed in the technique of mental concentration; and it is failure to do this in the nursery that causes much of our psychic trouble. It is the children from such nurseries who, later, when grown up, file in as so many neurotic wrecks to consult our nerve specialists, to haunt the offices of other medical practitioners, and to throng our various sanatoriums. Too early we are encouraged in the thought that we may possibly dodge the realities of life. Too early we indulge the fantasy that we may rub Aladdin's lamp and have fulfilled our every wish. Altogether too late do parents seek to turn the minds of their children into "directive thinking", controlled thinking.
During nursery days, if one cannot have a real pony he can compromise on a hobby-horse or get astride a broom-handle and indulge the imagination while the pony of fantasy prances over the meadow or climbs to mountain tops. But there comes a time when he has to bid farewell to such fantasies. If, when grown up, he would travel, this boy must get a real horse, an automobile, or perchance an airplane. He can no longer tour the world by sailing his little boats in the bathtub - with the aid of his imagination and the alluring pictures supplied by the tourist agencies. It will require real money and a real steamship.
The mind of the neurotic individual always tends to look at things in a childlike fashion, to cringe before reality and dodge responsibility as would an inexperienced youth. Our nervous sufferers dislike to face the realities of actual living. Instead of indulging in "directive thought" and intelligently meeting the difficulties of each day, they shrink from the slightest responsibility and resort for a solution of their troubles to the fantasies and imaginations of childhood. Controlled thinking is painful to these neurotics; it really hurts them to concentrate. They are filled with dismay and seized with panic when they feel they must actually confront and settle a problem. They would like to solve the problems of adult life and the real world by the methods of the nursery, by the fairy-story technique; they long for a glorified Aladdin's lamp or an up-to-date version of the magic carpet. The physician who deals with these cases comes to see the harm of over-doing this fairy-story business of the early nursery days.
Day-dreams are all right; we are benefited by indulging in them now and then; but when a grown-up man makes a business of trying to weed the garden by means of fairy assistants, there is trouble ahead, and nothing but trouble. When the neurotic woman tries to solve her problems by merely wishing, she can expect nothing but sorrow and defeat.
Nervous children especially should be taught to face facts, to play the game, early to learn how to be good losers; and to this end, I think it is far better that children should be given useful toys, toys that would lead to "directive thinking". How much more good a nervous boy could get out of a toy wheelbarrow in which he could wheel stones about the yard and move his sand-pile, than out of a toy engine, and merely imagining that he is riding about as a passenger or driving a locomotive over the country. I am not advocating, of course, that children should be given no toys that stimulate the imagination, but rather that they also be given toys to stimulate directive and constructive thinking.
It is in this connection that I would call attention to the folly of too long prolonging those stories about Santa Claus and the stork. Fables of this sort may become so entwined in the growing child's mind that he will be tremendously upset in his mental life when these sentimental associations are torn asunder by subsequent disillusionment. He often feels that he has been deceived by those whom he trusted most, and the result is upsetting to the neurotic temperament. It is better early to build on fact and learn how to make the real world more attractive to the imaginative little folks; there is plenty that a child will never have to unlearn, that is both fascinating and satisfying to the imagination.
The one great delusion of the nervous sufferer is that somehow, in some way, someone is going to solve his problems for him. He is disinclined to accept the fact that he alone can effect the cure. He steadily refuses to face the fact that his problems must be solved by real thinking and real acting, and that they cannot be solved by the fantasy-fairy technique of merely wishing and hoping.
The imagination is, in reality, the creative power of the mind, and it is ever at work forming new experiences out of our old ones. It is the province of imagination to take our ideas and fashion them into ideals; that is, this is the higher work of the creative imagination. Still another function of this mental power is reproductive imagination, which is closely allied to memory.
Closely allied to imagination, but entirely distinct from it, is the power of fantasy. Fantasy must not be confused with fancy, however, for the two terms are by no means interchangeable. Fantasy represents what might be called the safety-valve of the mind. It is the playhouse of the soul. Our powers of fantasy ordinarily find expression in our day-reveries. Fantasy represents consciousness adrift. It is the state of mind one finds himself in while resting in the hammock on a beautiful summer afternoon, oblivious to all surroundings, wide awake, and yet letting the thoughts drift down the stream of the mind, without guidance, help, or hindrance.
There can be little doubt that certain human beings possess a tremendously large "bump" of fantasy. That is, they have the day-dreaming faculty developed to the point where it has well-nigh acquired the proportions of a separate personality. This must be the case with many neurotics, hysterics, clairvoyants, mediums, and other occult practitioners. They might be said to possess an automatic power of fantasy - one that acts quite independently of their ordinary mental processes - and one which forms its conclusions and formulates its statements quite without the conscious knowledge of the higher powers of such individuals' minds.
As we ascend higher in the realms of thought, we reach more and greater possibilities of mental confusion and mind deception. It is often quite impossible for a child of three years to discriminate between imagination and memory of reality. He will vividly describe his meetings with lions and other wild beasts in the back yard, and may relate these things as real experiences which have just happened. He is really recalling the pictures of lions from his story books, or reviving the memory-images of the beasts observed at the zoo; and many of our mediums and clairvoyants are so constituted of mind that their own subconscious plays the same subtle trick upon them. They see, hear, feel, perceive, and portray as facts, the figments of their own imagination. These experiences are the fantasms of a short-circuited memory acting under the impulse and inspiration of a misguided imagination.
In the case of certain hysterics and mediums, the mind has grown up in some respects, but in this particular feature they have remained juvenile, and we all know that the younger we are the more active, vivid, and uncontrolled is the imagination. And herein is a fruitful field, in the case of nervously unstable individuals, for the birth of imaginary diseases, the creation of false difficulties, and the confounding of the mind by the sophistries of occultism.
When the fantasy unduly influences the mind, it is not difficult to conceive of mental perversions in which the psychic self drifts aimlessly over an imaginary sea beset with unreal dangers, harassed by fantastic spirits, threatened with false reefs, storm-tossed, battered and beaten by imaginary winds, living in momentary danger of shipwreck and eternal doom - all of which is either wholly or in part mere fantasy. What is to hinder an over-developed fantasy from setting in operation fictitious feelings and impressions, and, by its well-known powers of reconstruction, creating spiritualistic forms, unreal apparitions, and the fantastic concepts of the spirit world? The creative power of human imagination is not always exercised in developing labor-saving machinery and improved conditions of living. It is often engaged in producing mischief in the realms of psychic deception.
Feelings and emotions are real - they are experiences which must be recognized and reckoned with in the stream of consciousness. On the other hand, demonstrated truths - scientific facts - are not necessarily a part of the stream of consciousness. Feelings and emotions are, rather, the statement or expression of the laws of relationship governing those qualities which exist and function in the stream of consciousness. And here is where our nervous patients fall down. They assume certain qualities of consciousness to be facts. They interpret feelings and emotions, projected from the subconscious mind, as realities, and having thus fallen into grievous error so early in their process of reasoning, they go on with their successive deductions in that wild and reckless manner which can lead only to the sorry plight of the psychoneuroses.
I recently attended a séance where one of the highly suggestible women present said that she saw a table rise several inches off the floor. I did not see the table rise. I am not, however, going to accuse this good woman of deliberate falsehood. It would be unfair thus to indict her, because, I am convinced, she had all the emotions and sensations of seeing the table rise. The event was in every way real to her; that is, real to her stream of consciousness. But it was not real to me. I do not believe that the table rose off the floor. Others present agreed with me in this belief. I am, therefore, willing to say, in the common acceptance of the term, that I know the table did not rise. Thus I think that while many spiritualists, like our neurotics, are victims of self-deception, they are not consciously fraudulent. I really believe that they are many times sincere in the statements they make; to them the incident happened, but not to the rest of the world. The sufferings of the neurotic, in like manner, are real - to him. It will then be clear to the reader that feelings and sensations - emotions - are in a sense real, and that we can easily become victims of our own feelings.
In the case of an ordinary neurotic individual, or at a spiritualistic séance, the stream of consciousness consists of two distinct elements - the subjective and the objective emotions, sensations, messages, etc. Now, sensations enter the mind through the body after having been aroused by something in the external world. Sensations also have an internal or psychic origin. They may be aroused by memories, association of ideas, and other influences operating in the mind and nervous system itself. The only standards we have by which to judge sensations are those feelings and other conscious experiences which are aroused by external sensations coming into the mind from outside the body. So that it comes to be a fact that we tend to judge, recognize, and classify our sensations of internal origin largely by the reactions we experience to similar sensations which have a genuine external origin. Therefore, we come to build up in our minds what someone has called the "reality feeling" in connection with some inward image and its associated emotions, as that image navigates down the stream of consciousness, in just the same manner that we associate such feelings with the real images and emotions that have had their origin in sensory contact with the actual objects of the material world - with the result that we are led into monstrous self-deception.
I attended a séance not long ago, in which, I am thoroughly satisfied, the medium really saw and heard what she claimed to see and hear. I have no doubt many of the believers in the spirit circle also saw and heard what they claimed to see and hear. But I was unable to see or hear what they saw and heard. Moreover, I saw things which none of them saw: I saw the medium deliberately trick us on three occasions. The last time I almost failed to see it, because she was indulging in such a flow of words that my attention had come very near to being diverted, and I all but missed catching the technique of her clever trick. I came very near to seeing what she saw and what her devotees saw; but by carefully navigating my bark of attention down the stream of consciousness I avoided the rock, I steered closer to the center of the stream, and I caught the medium in the act - I detected the method of her fraud. In the meantime others navigated with her over to one side of the stream of consciousness and saw exactly what she described to them - the beautiful things on the farther shore of their suggestive and collective streams of consciousness.
We can hear and see things without going to a séance. I am not much of a musician, but I can sit down and imagine tunes I have one time heard. I can imagine that I hear bands play, and I am not indulging in any insane prank; you, reader, can hear the same. I can even hear melodies in my mind that, as far as conscious memory goes, I have never heard; but I dare say they are built up of melodies and strains I have heard at some time in my life. I can see visions of landscapes that I have never seen. If this were not possible, how could the artist give us new paintings, and how could the musician give us new melodies? It will be observed that most spirit mediums are highly sensitive, nervous persons, who could, in and of their own imagination, and at will, lead themselves in fantasy to run almost the whole gamut of physical suffering and pain, of mental pleasure and psychic joy.
If I have the "feeling of reality" which leads me to believe that I have conversed with a spirit or seen apparitions that are spirit realities; then, reasoning from experience, I can cite such psychic phenomena as positive proof to my own consciousness of the reality of spiritualistic phenomena. If I can truthfully describe such emotions and feelings to others, I am offering scientific evidence of the existence of a creative imagination - of the psychic power of memory, fantasy, reverie, etc.; but I cannot offer such an experience to scientists as scientific proof of the reality of disembodied spirits. And this is where our friends, the spiritualists, fall down in their logic. They offer us phenomena which furnish abundant proof of the existence of these spirits in their own consciousness, and they ask us, as scientists, to accept this valid evidence in the realm of consciousness, as scientific evidence in the material world. We cannot do it. Sensations and emotions are real things in consciousness; but they do not constitute material proof of the actual existence of the spirits which these psychic phenomena impersonate.
Just as an honest spirit medium may so deceive herself as to come actually to believe in the reality of her psychic experiences, which are wholly of subconscious origin, so may the vast army of neurotic sufferers come to that point where they thoroughly believe in the reality of their miseries, fictitious pains, and other forms of imaginary disease. It is just as difficult to talk these neurotics out of a belief in the reality of their complaints as it is to convince the honest and sincere, but none the less self-deceived, spiritualistic medium that the thing which she sees and hears is not in reality a spirit apparition, but rather an outwardly projected creation of her own falsifying subconscious.
The technique by which the subconscious is able so thoroughly to deceive its possessor will be better understood as we go on to examine the many and diverse methods whereby an uncontrolled subconscious may come to dominate the consciousness of a neurotic individual and eventually to enslave his whole mind.
We come, then, to recognize that the "feeling of reality" is a transferable, floating bit of consciousness, which may be attached now to one group of sensations and images, now to another. We learn that the "feeling of reality" may be attached to an image reflected through the retina of the eye from without inward - the image of a real, material thing, which has weight, dimensions, and substance; again, that this "feeling of reality" may be attached to an image projected outward, from the archives of memory, to a creature created by consciousness - by the association of ideas. It would appear that some "psychics" and "sensitives" are able conveniently to shift the gears of consciousness as regards the "feeling of reality" and thus cause this state of mind to be attached to things both real and unreal.
Our more profound types of chronic neurotics and confirmed hysterics are victims of this "shifting of gears" with reference to the "reality feeling". They are able to "ring the changes" in almost endless profusion as concerns an astounding variety of alarming symptoms and elusive ailments.
The consciousness of the "feeling of reality" tends to follow the channels of our pleasure longings and our wish-complexes. In other words, the unconscious wish always tends to attach this feeling of reality to something of its own choosing. Now, in the séance room, be it noted, we have a group of people who intently long - who ardently wish - for communication with the dead. This is true of both the medium and the believing spectators. Under such extraordinary conditions it must be evident that this "feeling of reality", as it floats about in consciousness, is in a highly unstable and unattached state, and that it is ready to seize upon the least bit of evidential phenomena and give it the sanctity of actual evidence.
The séance favors bringing forth from the unconscious those images and complexes which are subservient to the wish to prove that beings live after death and are able to return to this world and manifest themselves to the living. And in this way numerous unattached feelings of reality are brought forth and are able quickly to fasten themselves upon those images and emotions which are the offspring of the unconscious mind in the peculiarly favorable and suggestive environment of the average spiritualistic séance.
The unconscious wish, the unsatisfied longing for spirit communication, in the absence of any real external stimuli, finds itself readily attachable to the internal images and emotions aroused by the deep-rooted wish to prove life dominant over death, as well as by the peculiar psychical atmosphere of the séance itself.
It is now an accepted psychological fact that our experiences are all more or less perfectly preserved as memories in the subconscious mind, and there can be no question but that many spirit mediums and victims of hysteria are in possession of routes to the subconscious not used by normal individuals. In brief, genuine psychic mediums are able, at will, more or less fully to tap their sub-conscious reservoirs. Major hysterics are able to do the same thing under certain favorable circumstances.
Another evidence of the residue of memory-experiences which remains in the subconscious mind is disclosed by our dreams. Much of the content of our dream-life is only camouflage, a symbolic parade of things suppressed but, nevertheless, literally existing in our subconscious psychic reservoir. But these dreams are presenting themselves all through the night, even in the case of those persons who do not recall them. This is shown in many ways, such as by what is said when one talks in his sleep; and, working on such a clue of words spoken in sleep, it has also been discovered that through crystal vision, automatic writing, and hypnosis, whole dreams can be reproduced in all their original vividness, tho the dreamer could not recall them when awake.
As we progress in our study of the psychology of the subconscious, we shall discover that a vast number of neurotic men and women are more or less sincere as regards their own inner experiences. As neurotics, they are wholly honest in their presentation of complaints to the physician. As mediums, they are frauds, it is true, and are deceiving the public; but they are not conscious frauds. These "psychics" really and truly believe in themselves - just as certainly as the neurotic believes in the reality of his ailments. This class of mediums is self-deceived; they are ignorant of the technique of the workings of their own peculiar minds, and while they do not see spirit forms and do not hear invisible beings of one world delivering messages to the sojourners of another world, they do, in their own minds, through the technique of the psychology I have here explained, seem actually to see the forms and hear the voices which they describe to their superstitious followers. They are deluded by the tricks of their own minds - deceived by the intricate workings of their own intellects.
Neurotic sufferers really experience the sensations and suffer the miseries which they so eloquently and pathetically describe to their doctors. Their imaginations may trick them, but they are essentially honest - they are unfortunate victims of subconscious self-hunger. And so, in dealing with these slaves of the psychoneuroses, we must recognize the fact that their ever-present and sorry plight is excruciatingly real.