"To use a metaphor, it is as if the activity of the suppressed body of experience is accompanied by an affective disturbance which boils over on certain occasions, so that some of the steam reaches the conscious level, while the main disturbance still continues to be wholly cut off from consciousness."
— Rivers, William H. R. (1864-1922)
Work Title
Date
1920
Metaphor
"To use a metaphor, it is as if the activity of the suppressed body of experience is accompanied by an affective disturbance which boils over on certain occasions, so that some of the steam reaches the conscious level, while the main disturbance still continues to be wholly cut off from consciousness."
Metaphor in Context
I assume, therefore, that suppression often exists without anything which we can regard as dissociation, that in many cases the suppressed content exhibits no form of independent activity with no evidence that it is accompanied by any form of consciousness. In other cases in which there is definite activity of the suppressed content, there is no clear evidence of consciousness accompanying this activity, but yet cut off from the general body of conscious experience. This seems to be so in the case of claustrophobia which I have taken as my most characteristic example of suppression. I shall now consider whether we ought to regard this disorder as an example of dissociation. The dreads to which the patient was subject are most naturally explained if the memories of his four-year-old experience existed in a state of suspended animation, always ready to be aroused whenever the boy or man was brought into contact with circumstances which resembled those of his experience with the dog in the narrow passage, circumstances which would tend to stir up the buried memory. The simplest way of regarding this case is to suppose that the suppression was not complete, but that the suppressed experience lay for thirty years so near the threshold of consciousness that it was capable of being roused into activity by any conditions resembling those of the events in which the suppression had its origin. On these occasions all that reached consciousness was the affective side of the experience and then only in a more or less vague form. To use a metaphor, it is as if the activity of the suppressed body of experience is accompanied by an affective disturbance which boils over on [p. 78] certain occasions, so that some of the steam reaches the conscious level, while the main disturbance still continues to be wholly cut off from consciousness. (pp. 77-8)
Categories
Provenance
Searching "metaphor" at Christopher D. Green's Classics in the History of Pyschology (http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/)
Citation
Electronic edition at http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Rivers/chap10.htm
Date of Entry
08/11/2005
