Pierre Janet, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The subconscious is not a metaphysical abyss, not a seething underworld of forbidden desires. It is a precise clinical fact — demonstrable, not merely inferred. What I mean by the subconscious is this: a group of psychological phenomena — ideas, sensations, memories, movements — that continue to exist and to act, but that have fallen outside the field of personal consciousness.
They are not destroyed; they are separated. The unity of the mind has loosened, and a portion of its contents has been dropped from the synthesis that constitutes the ordinary personality. That dropped portion goes on working, as actively as anything in the waking mind, but unknown to the person who carries it.1 That this is a fact and not a speculation can be shown at the bedside.
When I place a pencil in the anaesthetic hand of a patient like Margaret, she writes — words she has not consciously intended to write, developments of her own thought that she does not know she is producing. Two groups of phenomena, separated as to personal perception, collaborate without the person's awareness.2 The subject reads her own subconscious writing and encounters it as she might encounter the act of a stranger — she did not feel it originate within herself.3
The power of these subconscious elements depends precisely on their isolation. Fixed ideas — born very often of an emotional shock that the mind could not assimilate — install themselves, as I have put it, in the manner of parasites, and cannot be stopped in their development by the efforts of the subject, because they are not known, because they exist aside, in a second thought, separated from the first.4
They determine disturbances of movement, give rise to hallucinations, cloud the mind, induce the strangest forgetfulness — not because the patient wills any of this, but because the dissociated idea acts from without, as an emancipated force. In the more complex cases, it is not a single fixed idea but an entire feeling — a system of thoughts and tendencies — that has separated from general consciousness and develops independently, giving birth to the odd deliriums of fugues and polyideic somnambulisms.5
The dissociation can bear on something as unified and yet as difficult to articulate as an emotion — a feeling of jealousy, of bondage, of fear — and that feeling, once emancipated, organizes a whole secondary existence the primary personality knows nothing of. What is dissolved, in hysteria above all, is not the individual functions themselves — they continue to subsist, emancipated, with their own systematization — but personality: the grouping of functions around a single self.6
Hysteria is a malady of the personal synthesis, characterized by the retraction of the field of personal consciousness and the tendency to the dissociation and emancipation of the systems of ideas and functions that constitute personality.7 The subconscious is what falls outside that contracted field and acts in the dark. This is demonstrable.
The subject, by automatic writing while awake, can express those fixed ideas; in hypnotic states, the memory of the subconscious fixed ideas is recovered completely.8 These are not inferences from theory — they are clinical findings, produced again and again in the examination of patients whose symptoms otherwise made no sense. The subconscious, then, is the sum of psychological facts that have been dropped from the personal synthesis and continue to act on their own. It is not a depth; it is a division.
What is dissolved is personality, the system of grouping of the different functions around the same personality.The Major Symptoms of Hysteria
if we put a pencil into Margaret's anaesthetic hand she writes the word she thinks of, yet she had no thought of writing it. There is here more than an execution; there is a development of her conscious thought. It is a real collaboration of the two groups of thoughts separated as to personal perception, but still very closely allied.The Mental State of Hystericals
He has not felt the act within himself, for, as yet, he does not know what the question is, but he has perceived its outward manifestations as he might have perceived the act of a stranger.The Mental State of Hystericals
they install themselves in the mind in the manner of parasites, and cannot be stopped in their development by the efforts of the subject because they are not known, because they exist aside, in a second thought, separated from the first.The Mental State of Hystericals
It is a feeling in its entirety, a more or less precise feeling that has separated from general consciousness, and that develops in an independent way, giving birth to these odd deliriums.The Major Symptoms of Hysteria
in hysteria, the functions do not dissolve entirely, that they continue to subsist emancipated with their systematization. What is dissolved is personality, the system of grouping of the different functions around the same personality.The Major Symptoms of Hysteria
Hysteria is a form of mental depression characterized by the retraction of the field of personal consciousness and a tendency to the dissociation and emancipation of the systems of ideas and functions that constitute personality.The Major Symptoms of Hysteria
How often have we not shown that the subject, by automatic writing, could, while awake, express those fixed ideas? Oftener still have we established that the subject, while in such or such hypnotic state, recovered completely the memory of those subconscious fixed ideas.The Mental State of Hystericals