xternal effectors of education, for better, for
worse. The training and education of the endocrine-vegetative system
is the basis of all social rules (Habit, Custom, Convention, Law,
Conscience). An unresolved discord, a continued conflict among the
parts of the vegetative system, in spite of such education, is the
foundation of the unhappiness of the acute or chronic misfits and
maladjusted, the neurotic and the psychotic.

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

4. Another vastly important law that governs the content of the
conscious and the unconscious, and resultant behaviour is the fact
that the nerves and nerve cells of the vegetative apparatus, the
nerves leading to the viscera and the endocrine glands, like the solar
plexus, are affected by stimuli of lower value than those which arouse
the brain cells. In the metaphorical language of the old psychology,
the threshold value, that is the strength or loudness of stimulus
sufficient to make itself felt or heard, is less for the vegetative
apparatus than for the brain. So we begin to glimpse why an emotion
seems to be experienced before the visceral changes that really
preceded it, but pressed their way into consciousness later. This
gives us a clue to the unconscious as the more sensitive and deeper
part of the mind.

More than that, it supplies us with a physical basis for the
unconscious which will explain much of the observed laws of
its workings. It provides a reason for the apparent swiftness,
spontaneity, and unreasonableness of what is called intuition. And it
may show us a source for a good deal of the material of dreams and
dream states.

We have said that we think and we remember, not alone with the brain,
but with the muscles, the viscera and the endocrines. So do we forget
not alone with the brain, but with the muscles, the viscera, the
endocrines and their nerves. The utmost importance of muscle attitudes
in remembering has been established in the experimental laboratory.

It is one of the great services Freud rendered to psychology (and one,
by the way, largely responsible for the acceptance of his doctrines
by the disinterested intelligence) that he showed that a species
of forgetting is nothing casual, but active and purposeful, a
manifestation of the life of the unconscious. However, though his
description of the process was correct, he left it to occur in a
vacuum. As a matter of fact this forgetting consists in the inhibition
of associativ