rer overwhelmed my private
thoughts. Yet even this state of mind, without any break, can go over
into an absolutely physiological process. I may for a while really
inhibit the lecturer's voice completely and remain in the thoughts of my
own imagination. After a minute or two, the resistance against the
acoustical stimulus will certainly be broken and the sound will again
enter into my consciousness, but in that interval there was no
subconscious and not even any unattended mental function; there was no
mental process at all. The sound reached my brain but as the motor
setting was adverse, the sounds did not bring about that highest act of
physiological transmission which is accompanied by mental contents. Thus
it became entirely physiological. Yet of course every word reached my
brain and left traces there. If I were hypnotized after the lecture and
thus the threshold for the real awakening of brain excitements lowered,
it might not be impossible that some of the thoughts of the lecturer
which did not enter my consciousness at all, are now afterwards in the
hypnotic state stirred up in me. Yet even that would not indicate that
they had become mental and thus subconscious at the time of the lecture.

The so-called subconscious, which in reality is fully in consciousness
but only unnoticed, easily shades over into that unconscious which is
also in consciousness but dissociated from the idea of the own
personality and thus somewhat split off from the interconnected mass of
conscious contents. Wherever we meet such phenomena, we are in the field
of the abnormal. The normal mental life is characterized by the
connectedness of the contents. Yet even that holds true, of course, only
if we think of those mental states which exist at one and the same
instant in consciousness. As soon as we consider the succession of
mental events, we cannot doubt that even normal experience shows breaks,
lapses, and complete annihilation of that which a moment before was a
real content in our consciousness. We may have looked at our watch and
certainly had in glancing at the dial a conscious impression, but in the
next moment we no longer know how late it is. The impression did not
connect itself with our continuous personal experience, that is, with
that chief group of our conscious contents which we associate with the
perception of our personality. Under abnormal conditions of the brain,
larger and larger parts of the completely conscious exper