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Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy by Josephine A. Jackson;Helen M. Salisbury
page 96 of 353 (27%)
_3 Primitive yet Refined_

The lowest level, representing the past of the race, is primitive like
a savage, and infantile, like a child; it is instinctive, unalterable,
and universal; it knows no restraint, no culture, and no prudence. The
higher level, the storehouse of individual experience, bears the
marks of acquired ideals, of cultivated refinement, and represents
among other things the precepts and prudence of civilized society.

_4 Emotional yet Intellectual_

Our records of the past are not dead archives, but living
forces--persistent, urging, dynamic and emotional. They give meaning
to new experiences, color our judgments, shape our beliefs, determine
our interests, and, if wrongly handled, make their way into
consciousness as neurotic symptoms.

However, the subconscious is not all emotion. It is a mind capable of
elaborate thought, able to calculate, to scheme, to answer doubts, to
solve problems, to fabricate the purposeful, fantastic allegories of
dreams and to create from mere knowledge the inspired works of genius.

But the subconscious has one great limitation, it cannot reason
inductively. Given a premise, this mind can reason as unerringly as
the most skilful logician; that is, it can reason deductively, but it
cannot arrive at a general conclusion from a number of particular
facts. However, except for inductive reasoning and awareness, the
subconscious seems to possess all the attributes of conscious mind and
is in fact an intellectual force to be reckoned with.

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