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SOCIOLOGY WOULD BENEFIT from a more comprehensive theory of cumulative social change in the course of history. We are here concerned with social and historical changes over decades and centuries, not with the much longer term evolutionary changes due to modifications in the human genetic inheritance. The question is: What makes history the story of change? The main factors are technological changes and the growth of knowledge. But these are the consequences of a deeper primary cause: the human imagination and its ability to form novelties and to accumulate them. This covers a great range of achievements, unconscious and conscious, from the early development of language and tools to all new inventions, words, ideas, and methods. This ability arises from the formative mental processes of individuals—here called the imagination.
We may ask: Is this accumulation always conscious, or is there also an unconscious accumulation? Can the products of the imagination be accumulated without awareness? To clarify this some distinctions must be drawn.
1It has been well established during this century that pathological mental processes, the sources of which lie in unconscious processes, play an important role in the individual life. Freud's work lay mainly in this realm, where unconscious conflicts distort behavior. I am using the term "pathological, " which is a matter of degree, to refer to particular mental processes and components of behavior which reveal dissociation, conflict, and distortion.