The mind is master of itself; and is endowed with powers that might enable I to laugh at the tyrant’s vigilance. I have ever perceived, that where the mind was capacious, the affections were good. The art of reading the inner human nature by the outer aspect is of immeasurable interest and boundless practical value, and the individual who can practice it skillfully and apply it sagaciously is on the high road to fortune. However, in considering perception, traditional realism and idealism have made two unjustified assumptions. First, they have assumed that perception is a kind of photographic process that yields a picture of what is perceived. The mind is envisaged as a camera obscura inside which images are generated. Second, they have regarded perception as a cognitive function whose aim is to provide pure knowledge. Nonetheless, I contend that perception cannot possibly be a photographic process, for images are not inside the mind, but are part of the spatially extended World. Where what is of most importance is the selection and the retention of the right conceptual material.  #RandolphHarris 1 of 11

The perceptions which transfer their intensities to one another are very loosely connected, and are joined together by such forms of association as are disdained by our serious thinking, and left to then be exploited by the memory. These perceptions then form compromises for which we can understand and recall. As the main feature of these processes, we may see that the greatest importance is attached to rendering the cathecting energy mobile ad capable of discharge; the content and the intrinsic significance of the psychic elements to which these cathexes adhere become matters of secondary importance. One might perhaps assume that condensation and compromise-formation are effected only in the service of regression, when the occasion arises for changing thoughts into images. Moreover, perception does not generate images, but selects those images that have a possible bearing on actions. Nothing remotely akin to pure knowledge is involved at the perceptual level. Once these assumptions are discarded, the dispute between realism and idealism can be resolved.  #RandolphHarris 2 of 11

From this assumption, however, we learn that the same incorrect psychic processes—as well as others not enumerated—control the production of hysterical symptoms. In hysteria, too, we find at first a series of perfectly correct and fitting thoughts, equivalent to our conscious ones, of whose existence in this form we can, however, learn nothing, i.e., which we can only subsequently reconstruct. If they have forced their way anywhere to perception, we discover from the analysis of the symptom formed that these normal thoughts have been subjected to abnormal treatment, and that by means of condensation and compromise-formation, through superficial associations which cover up contradictions, and eventually along the path of regression, they have been conveyed into the symptom. Such an abnormal psychic elaboration of a normal train of thought takes place only when the latter has been used for the transference of an unconscious wish which dates from the infantile life and is in a state of repression. The false images cannot be universally demonstrated, even though they cannot be refuted.  #RandolphHarris 3 of 11

However, in order to enable us to say just what repression is, after employing this term so freely, we shall be obliged to make a further addition to our psychosocial scaffolding. Biologist are agreed that there have been an evolution of the structure and the functions of the central nervous system in living organisms. This evolution has proceeded from relatively simple types of organization toward greater and greater complexity, through a series of minute, adaptively significant changes. In simple organisms, the rudiments of perception are found to be in mechanical responses to external stimulation. Direct contact with bodies, such as we experience in tactile perception, belongs to this stage. We know many of the problems come about because communications are blocked by expectations and assumptions, prejudices, fears, refusal to let meaning through, or to actually hear what the other person is trying to say. There are thousands of other interferences, as well. Sometimes a person’s attempt to understand something in the World outside of oneself is clouded by the way one’s brain or nervous system picks up the impression an individual gets from one’s own eyes and ears. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11

Vision, the ability to see, is possibly the most important means of sensation-gathering available to human being. We have all been impressed with stories of the visually impaired people who somehow manage not only to survive, but to succeed superbly. Success stories of people like Alec Templeton and Ray Charles mystify those of us who can see fine and yet cannot even make our fingers work out Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number 2 on the piano. We know how panicky we feel when the lights go out, how unsure we feel when we walk into a darkened theater or try to drive when heavy rain obscures the car windshield. However, vision involves more than the physical ability to see. The role of the rudimentary nervous system is to facilitate action. What occurs is a reflect activity, not a representation of things. The sole difference between this stage and much later ones is that voluntary action became possible as a result of the evolution of the higher brain centers. However, the difference is not one of kind, but only one of complication. Accordingly, since the nervous system is constructed from one end of the evolutionary scale to the other as a utilitarian device, we must conclude that perception, whose evolution is regulated by the evolution of the nervous system, is also directed toward action, not toward knowledge.  #RandolphHarris 5 of 11

If that is so, why is human perception a conscious process, and why does everything happen as if consciousness were a product of brain activity? The reason is that perception is the process of interpreting the information brought to the brain by the senses. Receptors are the neurons or nerve cells, which receive the stimulation in the sensory process and relay it along nerve endings to the central nervous system. The human perception is supplied with memory images. It is possible to form a metaphysical concept of pure perception free from any admixture of memory. It is even possible to have such a pure perception known as an intuition. However, most of the time our perceptions are interlaced with memories; conversely, a memory becomes actual by being embodied in some perception. The convergences that takes place accounts for the fact that perceptual images (objects perceived) have a subjectivity. We become conscious of them. This phenomenon has a biological significance, for in humans, and in higher organisms generally, perception is predominantly directed toward distant objects spread over a wide field. These objects have a great many potential effects on action.  #RandolphHarris 6 of 11

One way an organism has of adapting to this situation is to anticipate the effects by reflecting possible lines of action from its body to the distant objects. This gives the organism a biological advantage by putting it in a position where it can select a course of action that will serve its needs. Thus, the World is consciously perceived by us; however, it is not a different World from the one that antedated our perception. It is the same World related to our need and intentions. Without the work in natural science, we should never have known human beings as they really are. In no other activity can one come so close to direct perception and clear though, or realize so fully the errors of their senses, the mistake of the intellect, the weakness and greatness of human character. To change the outer World appropriately by means of motility requires the accumulation of a large total of experiences in the memory-systems, as well as a manifold consolidation of the relations which are evoked in this memory-material by various directing ideas. A superfluous expenditure of energy is sent along the individual thought-paths in large quantities of cathexis, which then flows away to no purpose and thus diminishing the quantity needed for changing the outer World.  #RandolphHarris 7 of 11

Body and mind, then, are united in the selective act of perception. The body contributes perceptive centers that respond to the influences of environing bodies. The mind contributes appropriate memory images that give to what is perceived a completed, meaningful form. There is no constructing of the external World out of subjective impressions; no inferring of the existence of that World from ideas in the mind; no positing of things in themselves that are beyond the limits of possible experience. By interpreting the material World as directly perceivable. Traditional idealism was therefore repudiated. Yet a partial concession to idealism was made by calling thins images. This term implies a rejection of the realist’s view that things consist only of material particles, or of primary qualities, or of some hidden substance. All thinking is merely a detour from the memory of gratification (take as a purposive idea) to the identical cathexis of the same memory, which is to be reached once more by the path of motor experiences. Thought must concern itself with the connecting ideas without allowing itself to be misled by their intensities.  Things have all the qualities they are perceived to have. The totality of perceived things, past, present, and future, must always be a small fragment of reality.  #RandolphHarris 8 of 11

However, it is obvious that condensation of ideas and intermediate or compromise-formations are obstacles to the attainment of the identity which is aimed at; by substituting one idea for another they swerve away from the path which would have led onward from the first idea. Such procedures are, therefore, carefully avoided in our secondary thinking. The upshot is a doctrine intermediate between idealism and realism, that combines what is sound in each and discards what is unsound. It will readily be seen, moreover, that the pain-principle, although at other times it provides the thought-process with its most important clues, may also put difficulties in its way in the pursuit of identity of thought. Hence, the tendency of the thinking process must always be free itself more and more from exclusive regulation by the pain-principle and to restrict the development of affect through the work of thought to the very minimum which remains effective as a signal. This refinement in functioning is to be achieved by a fresh hyper-cathexis, effected with the help of consciousness. However, we are aware that this refinement is seldom completely successful, even in normal psychic life, and that our thinking always remains liable to falsification by the intervention of the pain-principle.  #RandolphHarris 9 of 11

Body and mind are above all untied in real duration, for perception is an event in the concrete present, and the present is no geometrical point or knife edge separating past from the future. It is a continuous flowing, an invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future. Perceptual acts are intrinsically temporal and dynamic. Yet the World we come to know by means of them is not a flux. It has a relative stability. Our concepts often refer to things that remain much the same for long periods. These things may have fixed positions, sharp outlines, and clearly marked qualities. In view of what has been said about perception, how are such facts accounted for? The reply involves the conception of the intellect and its functioning. Emotionally significant stimuli influence attention. This result may come as no surprise to you if you have even been infatuated with someone and then fallen out of love. A person who once seemed highly attractive may look quite different when your feelings change. Perceptual expectancy prepares you to perceive in things in a certain way. You might be offended by a symbol, but see nothing wrong with breaking the law. My most important goal is to make sure you all can accept symbols and get along with others.  #RandolphHarris 10 of 11

A symbol which once represented beauty might be offensive by some, but on the other hand, these same people have no problem attacking and torturing the son of a veteran, as a group, for fun and forcing him into labor, stealing his identity and money. Perceptual expectancies are frequently created by suggestion. This is especially true of perceiving other people. For example, a psychology professor once arranged for a guest lecturer to teach his class. Half the students in the class were given a page of notes that described the lecturer as a rather cold person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined. Students who received the cold description perceived the lecturer as unhappy and irritable and did not volunteer in class discussion. Those who got the warm description saw the lecturer as happy and good natured, and they actively took part in discussion with him. This result is the breach in the functional efficiency of our psychic apparatus which makes it possible for thoughts representing the result of the secondary thought-work to fall into the power of the primary psychic process; by which formula we may now describe the operations resulting in the symptoms of hysteria. I am thankful I have parents who taught me to love all people, forgive, love the planet and animals.  #RandolphHarris 11 of 11