Extending The Field of Conscious Control1

Barbellion in his journal said “there are people who have seen most things but have never seen themselves walking across the stage of life. If someone shows them glimpses of themselves they will not recognize the likeness.” This is not only true of “people who have seen most things” but is equally true of the much larger proportion of people with a more limited range of vision. No matter how broad and deep our knowledge may be it may not and usually does not include, in any true sense, a comprehensive understanding of our own intimate selves. That we all have an intimate self is a commonplace but like so many commonplaces, time and space, the twinkling of a star, does not bear examination; at the first question, almost, recourse must be had to evasions and subterfuges, for the fact is we are not really acquainted with it. It is only since the rise of the new psychology, a very few years, that we have come to any orderly understanding of this inner self of ours and have learned how to question it and discover its characteristics. This knowledge grew, in the first instance, out of the necessities of the consultation room, as the old methods were found increasingly less satisfactory for estimating the patient's condition by what he was pleased to volunteer regarding it, by accepting his explanation of his nervousness, sleeplessness, lack of interest and then prescribing more or less at his dictation, rest, a trip abroad, perhaps an operation. It took a long time to discover the obvious in this department of medicine and to learn that the patient's symptoms had a meaning which could be discovered by effort aimed in the right direction. When this was found out it also appeared that the treatment, the trip abroad for example, which had been slyly suggested by the patient and gratefully caught up by the physician as an easy way out of a difficult situation, was desired by the patient and the doctor had been used only as a convenience and because of his authority, to obtain