PSYCHOANALYSIS
ITS HISTORY
THEORY
AND PRACTICE
by
ANDRE TRIDON
" We are what we are because we have been what we have been, and what is
needed for solving the problem of human life and motives is not moral
estimates but more knowledge."
FREUD
[SECOND PRINTING]
NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. MCMXX
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY B W. HUEBSCH
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
TO
FLORENCE TRIDON
THE author acknowledges his indebtedness to Dr.
C. J. Jung of Zurich, Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe of New York
City, Dr. William A. White of Washington, D. C., Dr.
Edward J. Kempf of Washington, D. C.~ Dr. Gregory
Stragnell of New York City, Stanton Leeds and Robert Allerton Parker of
New York City who have either supplied him with material or revised parts
of his manuscript or offered editorial suggestions.
PREFACE
THERE is no dearth of excellent books on psychoanalysis. For the general
public, however, they are of lit-tie practical value. They presuppose a
knowledge of the subject and a familiarity with medical and analytic terms
which the average reader does not possess. Moreover, they are, in the
majority of cases, special monographs dealing with some definite detail of
theory or practice from the exclusive point of view of one of the various
schools of analysis.
What I have attempted to do in the present volume is to sum up in a
concise form the views of the greatest American and foreign analysts which
at present are scattered in hundreds of books, pamphlets and magazine
articles. I have, whenever possible, presented their thought in their own
words, through either direct quotation or condensation.
This is to be an unpartisan treatment of the subject. While I profess the
deepest respect for Sigmund Freud, and believe that but for his scientific
insight and his untiring labors, psychoanalysis would probably be t~day an
undeveloped, inaccurate set of hypotheses, I hold that Jung's and Adler's
theories are of inestimable value, and that no analysis would be complete
which did not take into account the researches of the " Zurich School" and
of the "Individual Psychologists."
An unprejudiced perusal of the history of the analytic
PREFACE
movement has convinced me that personal animus was in the main responsible
for the fact that the three great European analysts struck diverging paths.
There are, however, no irreconcilable differences separating their points
of view.
It is most gratifying to note that no such unpleasant feelings have
disturbed the relations existing between men like White, Jellifte, Jones
and Kempf in the United States and Canada.
Rising far above the level of personal likes and dislikes, the American
analysts have done much to unify the analytic theories into a coherent and
inclusive system and to make psychoanalysis a means of reinterpretation of
life and behavior.
An effort has been made in the present book to avoid technical terms
whenever the current vernacular offered adequate equivalents. The
terminology of psychoanalysis being new and unusual, every analytical
expression has been elucidated when first encountered. Should the
reader's memory fail him, he will find at the end of the book a glossary
explaining in the simplest possible way the meaning of every new word
employed by the new science.
121 Madison Avenue, New York City.
October II, 1919.
ANDRE' TRIDON.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE VII
I THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOANALYTIC RESEARCH I
II THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE URGES '7
III THE REPRESSION OF THE URGES 29
IV NIGHT DREAMS AND DAY DREAMS 39
V SYMBOLS, THE LANGUAGE OF THE DREAM · 52
VI THE DREAMS OF THE HUMAN RACE
VII THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY ACTIONS 76
VIII FEMINISM AND RA~ICALISM . 89
IX THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WIT · 103
X THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 119
XI THE URGES AND LITERATURE · 128
XII THE URGES AND THE ARTS · 137
XIII FORMS OF ABNORMAL COMPENSATION · '46
XIV THE CEDIPUS COMPLEX . · ISO
XV THE NEUROSES, EPILEPSIES AND PSYCHOSES · 163
PERVERSIONS .
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT . · '94
THE PSYCHOANALYTIC TREATMENT .201
XIX THE TRANSFERENCE · 223
XX RE-EDUCATION AND PROPHYLAXIS .230
XXI THE NEW ETHICS · 241
GLOSSARY . · 255
BIBLIOGRAPHY 259
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PSYCHOANALYSIS
CHAPTER I
THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOANALYTIC RESEARCH
PSYCHOANALYSIS is a very young science. The world knew nothing of it
until Freud delivered his first lectures on the subject in 1895. In those
few years, however, psychoanalysis has made a deep impression on all the
mental sciences and has especially revolutionized psychology, ethics and
psychiatry.
Its terminology, at first forbidding, has enriched the language with
entirely new expressions, without which the cultured would find themselves
helpless in psycholo~cal discussions. It has supplied not only physicians
but artists, thinkers, sociologists, educators and critics, with a new
point of view. It offers to the average man and woman a new rational code
of behavior based on science instead of faith.
A survey of the gradual development of psychoanalysis will make the novel
point of view it has introduced into intellectual life more vital and more
understandable.
Psychoanalysis is too accurate a scientific instrument to be mastered in
one day. It requires close application rather than flights of fancy, a
painstaking study of all details rather than broad and facile
generalizations.
It was gradually brought into being by applying Claude
2 PSYCHOANALYSIS
Bernard's method, "Lo6k at facts over and over again, without previous
bias, until they begin to tell you something."
It must be studied in the same spirit.
Socrates was probably the first thinker who realized the importance of the
unconscious and of self~knowledge. His commandment: "Know Thyself" and his
theory of "intellectual midwifery" remind one strangely of the modern
analyst's creed and methods.
From Socrates to Charcot, however, very little progress was accomplished
in the practical study of the unconscious. The Stoics' denial of pain,
Kant's pamphlet on
The power of the mind, through simple determination, to master morbid
ideas," Feuchtersleben's search for a harmony against which sickness could
not prevail, merely paved the way for Mrs. Eddy's religious therapeutics.
At the end of the sixties, the study of the unconscious from a medical
point of view suddenly spread over Eu-rope. Dr. Charcot of the
Salpetrie~re made valuable observations on the connection between
suggestion and hysterical symptoms. He denied, however, that any
therapeutic method could be established upon that basis. In Nancy, Dr.
Berheim and Dr. Lie'bault came to the conclusion that hypnotism could
always be relied upon to bring about some change, however slight, for the
better, in the course of functional diseases. In Sweden, Wetter-strand,
influenced by Lie'bault's writings, treated thousands of patients by the
hypnotic rest cure and by suggestion in waking states.
A'ustrian scientists were destined to throw an entirely new light upon the
study of mental states, and to devise a novel method of treatment for
mental disturbances.
t
TH~ HISTORY OF PSYCHOANALYTIC RESEARCH 3
About i88o an old Viennese physician, Dr. Breuer, had among his patients a
young woman of twenty-one, suffering from curious hysterical symptoms,
among them severe paralysis of the right arm, disturbance of
eye-movements, a loss of the power to drink, almost complete aphasia,
states of " absence'," etc.
The disturbances first appeared while the patient was nursing her father,
to whom she was greatly attached, during the severe illness which led to
his death.
Dr. Breuer diagnosed the case as hysteria. He vainly tried to remove the
symptoms through hypnotism, and for a while all he could do was to observe
the development of the malady. This he did with unusual sympathy and
interest. He noticed first that the patient in her states of" absence"
mumbled strange words to herself; Breuer hypnotized her and made her
repeat those words a great many times, causing her to reproduce for him
the fancies which dominated her mind in her "absences." Those fancies
were sad day dreams which commonly took as their starting-point the
situation of a young girl beside the sick-bed of her father.
Whenever she told ?hose fancies she was for several hours restored to a
normal condition. A few hours later the "clouds " reappeared and the
newly created obsession had to be removed under hypnosis.
One symptom, however, her inability to drink, vanished entirely, without
recurrence, after the fancy connected with it had been told jn detail and
with a great deal of emotion.
She began to tell about her English governess whom she disliked greatly
and of that woman's little dog whom she abhorred. One day she saw the dog
drink outof a
4 PSYCHOANALYSIS
glass. She felt an intense disgust which she repressed out of
conventional respect for the governess.
After giving unrestrained expression in the hypnotic state to her hatred
for the governess and the dog, and to her disgust over the dog's action,
the patient felt considerably relieved. When awakened she could take a
glass and drink a large quantity of water.
Her visual disturbances were also traced to a painful scene in which a
strong emotion was repressed: The patient, with tears in her eyes, was
sitting at the bedside of her dying father. The father suddenly asked
what the time was. She tried to suppress the tears which blinded her, and
to conceal them, and for that purpose raised her watch very close to her
eyes, so that the ial seemed very large and distorted. The resultant
symptoms were an abnormal enlarging of the objects she saw and severe
strabism.
We come finally to the paralysis of her left arm.
One night, while waiting for the surgeon who was coming from Vienna to
operate on her father, she fell asleep, exhausted, her arm hanging over
the back of her chair.
She had a dream in which she saw a black snake coming out of the wall and
creeping toward the bed. She tried to frighten the snake away by a motion
of her right arm. But her arm had " gone to sleep" and she could not move
it. Looking at the fingers of her right hand she saw them transformed into
little snakes. Terrified by the combination of the dream and the
anaesthesia of her arm, she tried to pray but could only utter a few
English sentences which turned out to be scraps of nursery rhymes. After
this she continued to think and speak in English,
THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOANALYTIC RESEARCH 5
being unable to speak or understand her native tongue, which was German.
Repeated descriptions of that frightful scene gradually removed the
disturbance of her speech power. A little later the paralysis of her
right arm and all the other symptoms disappeared completely.
This method of investigation under hypnosis which Breuer's patient called
the " talking cure " or " chimney sweeping," and which Breuer designated
as the ·" cathartic method," constituted a tremendous advance upon the
mere suggestive technique under which commands were given to the patient
and which precluded the possibility of any scientific inquiry.
Breuer did not seem to realize the importance of his discovery, and only
resumed his " talking treatments
when Freud, after studying under Charcot, returned to Vienna and prevailed
upon him to do so. He and Freud practiced that method for a while, guiding
the patient's attention to the scene during which morbid symptoms had made
their first appearance, and causing the patient to live it over and get
rid, in the process, of the excitement he once repressed.
They noticed that if the patient remained unmoved while reproducing the
crucial scene, the process had no curative effect. Their conclusion was
that the patient fell ill because the emotion developed in the crucial
situation had been prevented from escaping normally and had been "
converted" into some abnormal physical or mental symptom.
They discovered then one of the characteristics of neurotic processes,
which Freud later called the " regres
6 PSYCHOANALYSI$
sion." The patient's memory generally carried him back to a period
antedating the crucial scene which ushered in the neurosis. This forced
the analyst to occupy himself, not with the present but with the past.
The regression sometimes led him back to the period of puberty. Sometimes
it even led him back to the years of childhood and infancy, which until
then had not been accessible to any sort of investigation. Freud and
Breuer were compelled to admit that every pathological experience
presupposed an earlier one which, while not necessarily pathological in
itself, lent a pathological character to the later occurrence.
Freud and Breuer soon parted company, as they disagreed upon the role
which sexuality plays in the formation of neuroses. But Freud has always
expressed the most respectful gratitude to his old teacher and given him
full credit for many things he himself originated.
In 1893 Freud published the results of his first experiments, and in that
year he gave up entirely the practice of hypnotism.
The fanciful and mystical character of hynotism repelled him, as it
repelled Jung, and when he discovered that some of his patients could not
be hypnotized he decided to make his method of treatment independent of
hypnotic suggestion.
While studying with Bernheim in Nancy he had learned that, contrary to the
current opinion, patients who have been hypnotized do not actually lose the
memory of their somnambulic experiences. The memory of those experiences
can be brought back in normal waking states, by persistent urging and by
giving the patient the assurance
4'
A
THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOANALYTIC RESEARCH 7
that he can remember all that took place during his somnambulic "trance."
Freud adopted that procedure with his patients. When he reached a point at
which the patient declared that he knew nothing more, Fr~d assured him that
his memory would return when he laid his hand on the patient's forehead.
He abandoned that " laying of hands" later and simply let the patient
speak on any subject that came to his mind, convinced that nothing could
occur to the patient which did not bear directly or indirectly upon the
"sore spot "in his unconscious.
He decided to communicate his discoveries to the public by means of
lectures. His first lectures, delivered in 1895, attracted an audience of
only three, Sadger, Adler and Stekel. Sadger remained his faithful
follower; Adler and StekeFstruck out paths of their own.
After studying a number of striking dreams his patients related to him,
Freud came to the conclusion that the patient' 5 dreams stand in a close
connection with his mental conflict. He began to collect an enormous
amount of material which was all assembled by 1896 and reduced to book
form in 1899.
In 1900 a group of Swiss physicians, led by C. G. Jung, began to treat
patients according to the analytic method in Burgh6lzli, the clinic of
psychiatry in Zurich. One after another, they went to confer with Freud,
and in 1908 the first analytical~congress took place in Salzburg by
invitation of Jung. The first result of that congress was the founding of
a review, Jahrbuch fu"r Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschun
yen, published by Bleuler and Freud and edited by Jung.
L
8
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Freud, who had been violently attacked by every medical publication, and
treated with scant courtesy at meetings where he read reports of his
cases, found in the Zurich men faithful supporters. Most of his followers
came to him by way of Zurich.
The Zurich school developed cleverly the association experiments initiated
by the Wundt School, and thus bridged the chasm between experimental
psychology and psychoanalysis.
Jung propounded also the important theory of "complexes " or groups of
emotional ideas in a repressed state.
The second psychoanalytic congress took place in Nuremberg in March, 1910.
A certain disharmony was noticeable among those present. The
International Psychoanalytic Association was organised, with Jung as
chairman and Ricklin as secretary. It was also decided to publish a
journal " to foster and further the science of psychoanalysis as founded
by Freud, both as pure psychology and in its application to medicine and
the mental sciences, and to assist the members in their efforts to acquire
and to spread psychoanalytic knowledge."
The Viennese group opposed the project and Adler expressed publicly his
fear of a possible censorship and limitation of scientific freedom by
Freud.
The new journal Zentralblatt fu~r Psychoanalyse, was 'to be edited by
Freud and the first issue appeared in September, 1910.
The third congress took place at Weimar in September, 1911, the fourth one
in Munich in September, 1913, both of them with Jung as chairman. Jung was
reelected chairman of the International Psychoanalytic Association,
although two-fifths of the members refused him
THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOANALYTIC RESEARCH 9
their support. "We took leave from one another," Freud wrote on that
occasion, "without feeling the need to meet again."
The dissensions which had been breeding for some time brought about two
secessions in the psychoanalytic group.
Adler left the Vienna group shortly before the Weimar congress and the
Swiss 8Ch001 seceded soon afterward. Adler founded a new group called the
Society for Free Psychoanalysis, then abandoned altogether the word ~ and
designated his teaching an "Individual Psychology." While psychoanalysis
under Freud's guidance endeavored to show that all ego strivings were
tinged with sexuality, Adler insisted that all sexual feelings contained
an admixture of egotism. He traced the origin of the neurosis to a real
or imaginary feeling of inferiority due to some organ deficiency.
The Swiss school, many members of which were clergymen, modified Freud's
sexual theories so as to bring about a reconciliation between
psychoanalysis on the one hand, and traditional ethics and religion on the
other. This they did by assuming that certain elements considered by Freud
as sexual are purely symbolical and hence conventionally unobjectionable.
In a letter dated September 5, 1919, Jung, asked to define his attitude to
the various schools of psychoanalysis, wrote me that he was trying to
reconcile the contradictory views through a theory of attitude and a
different appreciation of symbolism. He was working on a book on the
Problem of Attitude and Types of Attitude. His present views concerning
Freud and Adler are presented, he added, in his " Collected Papers on
Analytical Psychology," pp.299, 336, 367, sqq.
5 U
'V;
I0 PSYCHOANALYSIS
The Zurich method, especially as applied by pastors, pays little attention
to tracing the neurosis to its actual source in childhood but prescribes
inner concentration, religious meditation, etc.
Whether one sides with one of the three schools or, as the author does,
finds in every one of the three points of view suggestions of value in the
study of every case, (for in certain patients the sex element is more
accentuated, in others parental influences in a symbolic or desexualized
form are clearly paramount, in others a feeling of inferiority dominates
the situation, the three elements being always present), only a thorough
study of Freud's writings can enable the student to acquire a clear
understanding of psychoanalysis.
His " Papers on Hysteria," his " Contributions to the Sexual Theory" and
his "Interpretation of Dreams," constitute the foundation of modern
psychoanalysis.
His book on " Wit and the Unconscious and on the "Psychopathplogy of
Everyday Life " furnished the first examples of application of the
analytical theory to aesthetic themes and to normal actions. In "Totem
and Taboo" he has discussed the problems of-race psychology in the light
of analytical psychology.
Practical applications of the analytical method to the study of art and
letters have been published by Karl Abraham, Otto Rank, Ricklin and others
who have shown that myths, fairy tales and hero legends are akin to the
infantile scenes of many of our dreams and constitute, so to speak, the
day-dreams of the human race in its infancy.
Psychoanalysis found ready acceptance L.~ Austria, Germany, England and
the British colonies.
I
THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOANALYTIC RESEARCH I I
France showed herself rather unreceptive. Moncheau-Beauchant of Poitiers
was. the first Frenchman to accept it openly. Re'gis and Henard of
Bordeaux accepted it in part, rejecting only the Freudian symbolism.
Italy has taken very little interest in the new science. Psychoanalysis
was introduced in Holland by Jelgersma, rector of the University of
Leyden, in 1904, and has been studied by Van Emden, Van Ophuijsen and Van
Renterghem particul~rly from the theoretical side.
In Sweden, Poul Bjerre, Wetterstrand's successor, gave up his practice of
hypnosis to join the Freudian school.
In Norway, A. Vogt of Christiania mentioned psychoanalysis in a book on
psychiatry published in 1907.
In Russia psychoanalysis is generally known Wulif of Odessa, Ossipof and
Bernstein of Moscow, and Povnitzki of Petrograd, have published numerous
articles on the subject.
In Poland the practice and literature of psychoanalysis have been
introduced by L. Jekels.
In the autumn of 1909 psychoanalysis was officially introduced to the
scientists of America when Freud and Jung were invited by Stanley Hall of
Clark University to come and lecture on Psychoanalysis. S. Ferenezi
accompanied them. Canada was represented by Ernest Jones of Toronto
University, the United States by A. A. Brill of New York. Professor James
J. Putnam of Harvard, who, until then, had been rather sceptical in his
attitude toward psychoanalysis, befriended the new movement on which he
delivered many lectures. A. A. Brill began to translate Freud's work into
English, an undertaking which required infinite effort and a great deal of
ingenuity, for Freud's technical terms were very novel at
it
it
12 PSYCHOANALYSIS
the time and equivalents had to be coined for them in English.
Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe of New York City has made valuable contributions
not only to the technique of the psychoanalytic treatment but to the
applications of the psychoanalytic point of view in other fields.
He has suggested a new method for handling the more dynamic transference
situa6'ons (see Chapter XIX) which arise in dementia praecox and the
manic-depressive psychoses. In collaboration with Louise Brink he has
published a study on "The Role of Animals in the Unconscious," outlining a
new method for the understanding of cultural fossils in the individual
unconscious and their recognition when used as symbols.
He has developed the Freudian conceptions of displacement and conversion
which he considers as the origin not only of neuroses but of certain
so-called organic diseases. The technique likely to deal adequately with
such conditions must follow, he thinks, the Freudian formulas, although he
considers that those formulas can be improved upon.
His studies along this line are comprised in his contributions on
"Psoriasis as an Hysterical Conversion Syndrome" and "Hypertension
Nephritis and its Unconscious Psychogenic Foundations."
Finally, Dr. Jelliffe has occupied himself with the question of mass
psychotherapy and the part played by the artist in freeing the unconscious
of the population and thus helping to keep the masses mentally healthy. He
has analyzed from that point of view many plays and novels, such as "Eyes
of Youth," " Peter Ibbetson," " Dear Brutus," "The Willow Tree," "The
Yellow Jacket,"
THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOANALYTIC RESEARCH 13
The Jest," "I, Mary MacLane." He has 'in preparation a volume on Ibsen's
plays treated in the same manner.
William H. White, superintendent of Saint Elizabeth Hospital, Washington,
D. C., has amplified the Adlerian doctrine of organ inferiority but should
not be described as an Adlerian in the narrow sense of the word. His
feeling about the psychoanalytic movement is that it has come to be so
inclusive that there is plenty of room for all the points of view that are
emphasized by the different movements. Each one of the movements has
contributed something valuable, and he thinks it is more important to see
the value of each contribution than to become immersed in disputes as to
their priority or relative importance.
White's personal contribution to the psychoanalytic movement is largely
along the lines of correlating it with fundamental scientific principles
as exhibited in other branches of knowledge. He has done this in his "
Mechanisms of Character Formation." He has pointed out, there and in
various other works, that the principles involved in psychoanalysis are
the same principles which obtain throughout the biological sciences. In
making this correlation he has examined some of the current antithetical
concepts, such as mind and body, individual and environment, functional
and organic, germ plasm and soma, and has shown that those concepts have
become static and need revaluation in order to be useful in the present
stage of development. He has shown that the distinctions between these
pairs of opposites are by no 'means as rigid as has heretofore been
supposed, and that a revaluation of these concepts which tends to do away
Ii;
'4 PSYCHOANALYSIS
with the clear-cut distinctions between them, makes them more useful, more
fluid, more dynamic. In "The Diseases of the Nervous System," written in
collaboration with Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe, he has built up a concept of
the individual as a biological unit with reactions at the various levels
and shown the interrelations of these several reacting levels. This is a
distinctly new note in neurology.
Dr. Edward J. Kempf, of Washington, D. C., sub-scribes to Freud's view of
the influence exerted upo~ the personality by repressed wishes, and to
Freud's inference that the wishes which cause, directly or indirectly,
most, if not all, pathological adaptations, are essentially sexual. But he
rejects Freud's theory of the " conversion ,~ of libido, or what is being
termed " psychic energy," into physiological or physical derangements. He
follows the James-Lange theory of the peripheral origin of the emotions in
the sense organs of the visceral and circulatory systems. We are
compelled to think with our muscles by our cravings as they seek for
appropriate stimuli. Wishes and cravings continue active until they are
neutralized through acquiring appropriate counterstimulation. The
repressed wish flows from the heightened p05tural tension of the segment
in which it had its origin. The segment becomes conditioned through years
of experiences to seek relatively well-defined types of stimuli which
alone have the capacity to neutralize (satisfy) the craving. When these
conditioned needs happen to be tabooed by society as unjust, asocial or
perverse, or are unobtainable, the foundation of the neurotic or psychotic
personality is established.
Kempf's book, "The Autonomic Functions of the Per-
V
THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOANALYTIC RESEARCH 15
sonality," opens a new chapter in the psychology of the emotions and the
part they play in the personality makeup of the individual. It strikes a
note distinc~y in advance of Adler's theory of organ inferiority, but like
that theory founds character traits in definitely located
neuro-physiological processes. Recent advances in the anatomical and
physiological knowledge of the autonomic nervous system and its relations
to the glands and the visceral and somatic musculature have made his work
possible.
Kempf sees in the autonomic nervous' system the primitive means for
recording the inherent cravings - organic needs - of the individual and in
the cerebro-spinal or projicient nervous system the means for so relating
the organism to its environment as to secure a neutralization of these
needs - a satisfaction of its cravings. From this point of view the
familiar psychoanalytic problems of the conflict, repression, and the
unconscious receive a new interpretation in anatomo-physiological terms.
The energy of the repression is seen as bound up in visceral tonicities
and postural tensions and a distinctly new viewpoint is opened up for a
consideration of many obscure visceral and neuro-psychiatric problems.
Kempf has suggested a new classification of mental disturbances which will
be presented in detail in Chapter
XV.
There are several periodicals, most of them in the German language,
devoted to psychoanalysis.
To the "Jahrbuch fur Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen
" and the " Zentralblatt fur Psychoanalyse" which I mentioned above, I
shall add "Imago," a hi-monthly founded by Freud in 1912, edited
U
I
i6 PSYCHOANALYSIS
by 0. Rank and H. Sachs, and containing among other things extensive
bibliographies of studies on the application of psychoanalysis to the
mental sciences.
In January, 1913, the " Internationale Zeitschrift fjjr Aerztliche
Psychoanalyse" was founded by Freud and edited by S. Ferenczi and 0. Rank.
It covers the same field as the Zentralblatt which later it replaced.
Besides this, Freud publishes at varying intervals monographs entitled "
Freud1s Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde."
Adler and Fortmu~ller founded in 1913 the "Zeitschrift fjjr Individuale
Psychologie " which presents the views of the Adlerian school. Adler is
the editor of a monograph series entitled " Schriften des Vereins fjir
freie Psychoanalytische For schung."
The only Journal published in English is the "Psychoanalytic Review,"
which aims to be catholic in its tendencies, a faithful mirror of the
psychoanalytic movement and to represent no schisms or schools but a free
forum for all.
it contains besides original articles, a very extensive digest of all the
periodical literature. It is edited by Dr. William A. White and Dr. Smith
Ely Jelliffe, and is now in its sixth year.
The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease" and the "Nervous and Mental
Disease Monographs" have also supplied the English reading public with
many special psychoanalytic studies.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II
THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE URGES
PSYCHOANALYSIS is not a panacea for all mental ills. It is much less and
much more than that. It attempts to rectify but few mental abnormalities.
At the same time, psychQanalytic information, if widely disseminated would
probably prevent every mental disturbance which is not the result of
temporary or permanent organic deterioration, but which is psychogenic,
that is, due to purelY unconscious causes.
For psychoanalysis is not merely a new theory of the unconscious; it is a
practical method of studying the unconscious. Matter-of-fact minds
manifest a justified impatience when encountering the countless hypotheses
and definitions offered by academic psychologists. Defining the
unconscious, the foreconscious and the subconscious, dilating on the
relative merits of the terms consciousness and awareness, is a most barren
form of mental gymnastics.
Bergson's vital urge is an interesting conceit, as long as we do not care
to know its origin or its goal; his theory of dreams is plausible but we
should not seek in it a solution for the riddle of our sleeping fantasies.
His distinction between thoughts that float on the surface of our
consciousness like dead leaves on a pool and those that, like unto rain
drops, merge immediately with the rest of our mental acquisitions,
supplies the reader with
17
i
I
5 ,
i8 PSYCHOANALYSIS
pretty images; and so do his statements about ideas ~ocking at the portals
of consciousness. Those pleasantly worded assertions, however, are
unilluminating to the student of real life. They have no practical
application in the life of the average human being.
Psychoanalysis will supersede entirely the guesswork of academic
psychologists, bent on generalizing about character, tendencies,
instincts. Psychoanalysis is not interested in mental states as such; it
aims at tracing their origin and at bringing about their removal when they
prove harmful to the individual.
It seeks to direct into useful channels mental activities which are a
dangerous or a wasteful display of energy. It searches the unconscious,
not for literary illustrations and similes, but for positive, scientific,
practical information concerning the operations of the mind.
Before Freud began his experiments, the unconscious had been regarded as
the province of the theoretical psychologists who simply filled it with
their own personal fancies, then took those fancies out, one by one, and
described them to us. Practical men sneered at the word "unconscious and
ignored the possibilities which its study held out for many sciences.
Our unconscious is a tremendous storage-plant full of potential energy
which can be expended for beneficial or harmful ends. Like every
apparatus for storing up power, it can be man's most precious tally, if
man is familiar with it and, hence, not afraid of it. Ignorance and fear,
on the other hand, can transform a live electric wire into an engine of
destruction and death.
Many indeed are the mental disturbances which are due to some fear,
induced in its turn by lack of under-
I
F-
THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE URGES '9
standing of some perfectly simple unconscious process. Let us illustrate
our meaning: A noise wakes us up
at night. The darkness, the half stupor out of which we are painfully
struggling, conspire to exaggerate the sound we have perceived and to
endow it with a sinister import. Our heart beats wildly, our breathing is
impeded, we may perspire profusely, we may be even too weak to move a
limb. We press the switch, we flood the room with light and behold: a
very small mouse was trying to drag a nut shell into his hole. As soon as
we establish a direct connection between the insignificant cause and the
sinister effect, the effect shrinksto the size of its cause; the anxiety
which a minute ago tortured us appears to us preposterous. That mouse may
wake us up again, but we shall not go into a cold sweat on its account. We
shall get a cat or buy a trap or seal up the mouse hole.
Roughly speaking, the task of the analyst consists in helping the patient
to trace a certain mental anxiety which is assuming an exaggerated
importance to its actual cause, which, nine times out of ten, is as
insignificant as a small mouse, and, in making him laugh over the
incongruous disproportion between the minute cause and its gigantic
effect, after which, analyst and patient can consult with cach other as to
whether a cat or a trap will be best to prevent further disturbances of the
peace.
In other words, we shall not treat the patient for heart trouble,
difficulty in breathing or weakness of the limbs, unleds we have made sure
that there was no mouse in the room. We shall throw a flood of light into
the room and locate the mouse or at least its hiding-place.
Old fashioned medicine was too frequently guilty of the sin with which we
have charged academic philoso
I
20 PSYCHOANALYSIS
phers. It too often took a label for an explanation. A young woman may be
taken sick with vomiting fits.
Nothing she ate seems responsible for that gastric disturbance. No
physiological condition, such as pregnancy, can be invoked as a cause.
The family physician -gravely diagnoses " hysterical vomiting."
A child goes to school and is affected in the same way without any
apparent cause. He is sent home and the trouble diagnosed as " school
nausea.
In other words, people who vomit without any physiological reason can be
said to be suffering from " hysterical " or " school " vomiting. And,
inversely, " hysterical vomiting " or " school nausea '' are conditions in
which people vomit without any apparent cause; which is extremely
illuminating and helpful.
Ascribing a name to such symptoms and prescribing a tonic will not prevent
the mysterious symptoms from reappearing or becoming habitual.
Analyzing the trouble on the other hand according to the methods devised
by Freud, Jung, Adler, Jelliffe, White and Kempf, will bring to the
patient's consciousness the unconscious forces which produced the
disturbance.
When both woman and child are made to realize that they may have harbored
a grudge against a husband or a teacher who did not respond to their
craving for attention, and in a morbid way forced their environment to
offer them compensation for that slight, they may take a saner view of
their trouble. Some simple readjustment may be suggested in both cases.
The vomiting woman and child were the victims of their unconscious.
Something, of which they were not aware, compelled them to perform actions
of a distress-
q
THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE URGES 21
I
mg nature. They were like a subject to whom a hypnotizer has given a
command, for instance, to arise at five o'clock and then go and knock at
some one's door. The subject will carry out the command but will not
remember the hypnotic scene and will substitute for the command, which has
become unconscious, some perfectly plausible reason for performing the acts
prescribed by the hypnotist.
On the other hand when the memory of the hypnotic scene is re-awakened, as
Lie'bault and Bernheim have shown can be done, the subject readily realizes
the absurdity of the excellent reasons he gave for his peculiar behavior.
Our woman and child suffering from nausea would in all likelihood assure
us that the heat or something they ate, saw or heard, had distressed them.
The hypnotized subject would tell us that he heard moans in the other
person's room and was trying to offer help, or some other story of the
same type. And all of them would be perfectly sincere. Their
fabrications would be purely unconscious and no one would be justified in
impeaching their good faith.
They would tell us what they were conscious of, but their behavior would
be prompted by psych~ic forces of which they are unconscious.
Our unconscious can be described as the sum of all the experiences of our
life. Some can be readily made conscious, are easily recalled, and are
constantly at our disposal; some have been apparently forgotten, and
cannot be brought easily to consciousness, except through special efforts,
either because they were too trifling, or because their unpleasant or
painful character caused them
-5
22 PSYCHOANALYSIS
to be repressed and to sink, so to speak, to the bottom of our
unconscious.
We discover the presence of some of those repressed ideas only through the
disturbances they may produce, even as astronomers sometimes discover the
existence of an unseen planet by observing the influence it has on the
course of-other celestial bodies.
The unconscious has been likened by Stanley Hall to an iceberg which
proceeds on its voyage regardless of the direction of the wind. Most of
the berg, however, is hidden under the surface and it is by powerful
currents, invisible to the casual -observer, and not by the wind, that the
mass of floating ice is being driven irresistibly toward its goal.
Many of the ideas, desires, cravings, which we have repressed in the
course of our life, for the reason that they did not fit in with the
environment in which we were born, continue to live a life of their own in
our unconscious mind. For nothing in human nature can be suppressed or
annihilated. Those unconscious ideas which at times exert a mysterious
influence upon our conduct and upon our mental and physical health, have
been designated by psychoanalysts as complexes. Interrelated groups of
complexes are called constellations of complexes.
Those complexes, which represent points of collision between a vital urge
and the ruthless world of reality, act -much like steam in a boiler. They
constantly seek an outlet. If the boiler is strong and supplied with a
good safety-valve, no explosion will take place. If the human specimen is
healthy, without organic defects and can indulge in a reasonable amount of
pleasurable activity, no
U ~
¼~
THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE URGES 23
mental or physical disturbance may take place. Given a certain weakness
somewhere, with no mental or physical safety-valve, and the repressed
urges may assert themselves through a neurosis, a psychoneurosis, a
psychosis or a perversion, converting themselves at times into strange
physical symptoms, which do not seem traceable to any apparent physical
cause.
What are then the elements which seek an outlet and through what mechanism
are they repressed?
There is in man something which for lack of a better word we would
designate after Bergson as the "vital urge " and which operates in three
directions.
Man must be fed and hence impelled by a certain urge-to seek sufficient
food. He must be impelled by some urge to perpetuate his species. -He
must avoid encounters with harmful stimuli.
We may then speak of a nutrition urge, of a sex urge and of a safety urge.
The normal satisfaction of those three urges is always accompanied by a
feeling of pleasure or, at least, of well being. Their denial is always
accompanied by a feeling of displeasure or discomfort.
The three urges have been greatly developed by civilization and partake of
its complexity. Desire for food awakened in man a desire to extend his
domination over a certain territory from which he derived his food supply
and to drive away from it other individuals when he could not extend his
domination over them. The will-topower was born. That will-to-power,
gratified or ungratified, became a source of egotism. The ego, weak in
the animals, becar~e extraordinary powerful in man. Animals -are static,
man seeks constantly a higher level.
The nutrition-power-ego utge may be located in the
5
24 PSYCHOANALYSIS
-i
U,
cranial division of the autonomic nervous system whose function is the
upbuilding of the body (the vagus nerve causes saliva and gastric juice to
flow, slows down the heart and activates intestinal peristalsis).
The sex urge is still connected nervously with the function of voiding the
urine and feces as it was anatomically in primitive animals. It might be
designated as the sex-excretion urge and located in the sacral division of
the autonomic nervous system which regulates the bladder, rectum and
genitals.
The safety urge is located in the sympathetic or thoracico-lumbar division
of the autonomic nervous system whose fibers extend all over the organism
and which at every point balances and opposes the specific action of the
cranial and sacral divisions.
In emergencies the sympathetic fibers stop the flow of saliva and of
gastric juice, release sugar from the liver, cause the heart to beat
faster and interrupt sexual activities, thus stopping all display of
energy which is not directly necessary in a struggle and supplying more
energy to the skeletal muscles.
In the normal individual, the safety urge preserves the organic
equilibrium, only overthrowing the ego and sex urge when a specific danger
has to be warded off.
The realm of the urges is both mental and physical:
the self-protection urge will ward us against a fall and ~gainst speaking
the wrong word, the ego-power urge will prompt us to lie about our social
standing or to assault a possible rival.
The self-protection urge is so important that whenever it appears to be
deficient in an individual, that individual is taken in hand by society.
Anyone exposing himself
THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE URGES 25
uselessly to danger or death is soon restrained by the authorities.
As Kempf says, "The whole question of the individual's successful struggle
for life depends upon what stimuli in the environment cause fear reactions
in the autonomic apparatus." The fear of danger and the craving for
self-protection in animals are not entirely instinctive but partly
acquired. Hunters entering virgin territories can approach game without
precautions or concealment; the young of many animals which in their adult
state carefully avoid man's nearness, are often unafraid and lend
themselves to painless handling, unless imitation of their panicky elders
compels them to go through flight motions.
Kempf tells the following incident, illustrating the workings of the
self-protection urge and its unconscious character: "I well remember an
experience while walking across a field. As my foot was descending in the
stride, a partly coiled something caught my eye, lying very near the place
where the foot was to touch the~ ground. Instantly the leg supporting the
body reflexly projected it onward and the foot which had descended too-far
to be retracted was extended out of danger by a movement which started as
a step but terminated in a leap. Painful visceral reactions seem to have
started before the perception of a snake was formed. The autonomic reflex
activities are quicker than perception."
The sex urge and the ego urge are far from being as -necessary for the
individual's survival as the self-protection and nutrition urge. Society
affects to ignore their existence and in certain cases denies it entirely.
While a prisoner is kept forcibly alive and is not allowed to
26 PSYCHOANALYSIS
commit suicide or to injure himself physically, no gratification is
vouchsafed to his sexual desires or any other craving for pleasure, and
his personality disappears, his name being replaced by a number; he is
shorn of all power over himself and others; his opinion on any subject is
completely disregarded.
The sex urge has been designated by Freud as the sexual libido, a term
which unless carefully explained leads to many misunderstandings. In the
Freudian sense of the word, sexual must not be considered as synonymous
with genital, but includes all the pleasurable physical activities which
in the infant resemble the primary and secondary sexual activities of the
adult, and include primitive infantile suggestions of later perversions,
all activities which Freud has grouped under the rubric of" polymorphous
perverse activities" and which at puberty are clearly differentiated into
genital and nongenital activities.
It may be said that in a general way the conscious aim of this urge is
physical pleasure, its unconscious aim procreation.
The ego urge constitutes the main difference between man and the animals.
- Animals, as I said before, are static. Beavers erect their dams and
bees build their combs according to formulas which do not seem to have
changed through the ages and which are not, judging from the observations
made during several centuries, likely to change considerably in the near
future. -
Man, on the contrary, is constantly modifying his formulas. He is
constantly inventing new devices. Animals either adapt themselves to
their environment and survive, or fail to adapt themselves and die off.
Man
THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE URGES 27
adapts his environment to his needs. Primitive man first walked, then he
tamed various animals available as mounts, then hitched vehicles to them,
then substituted steam and, later, electricity for horse or ox power, then
soared helplessly above the earth, then developed as much freedom and more
speed in the air than on the surface of the earth. The ego urge is a
source of restlessness, discontent and ambition, creating desire to reach
a new level, preferably a higher one.
While the Freudian school has attributed an extreme importance to sex, an
observation made frequently by Lombroso would suggest that the ego urge
was more stubborn in its striving for expression than the sex urge.
Hypnotized subjects can be made to accept the suggestion that their sex
has been changed; men readily accept the fiction that they are women. Men
and women on the other hand will resist stubbornly the suggestion that
their social status has been diminished and the resistance they present to
the hypnotizer who tries to make them play a menial or humiliating r6le
generally leads to their awakening. The yellow press, in its efforts to
appeal to the multitude, fills its columns with news which gratifies the
dis-paraging instincts of its readers, murders, scandals, stories of
deceit and dishonesty, all of which by displaying other people's
inferiority, flatter the readers' ego. Any moral weakness exhibited by the
powerful and wealthy lends itself to screaming headlines.
The ego urge permeates every relation of life, even the purely sexual
relations. "The test of real love," Adler says, "would be the fact that
the loved pers-on would be allowed to preserve his or her personality.
The average love relation, on the contrary, is the more pleasant
U
28 PSYCHOANALYSIS
to each partner as one of them seems to sacrifice some of his personal
worth, thus increasing the personal worth of the other. There is a
continuous tendency to put one 5
love partner to some tests and possibly to humiliate him
- - or her slightly thereby. Then jealousy comes into play,
revealing the desire of the jealous partner to monopolize
the object of his love, and in a measure pleasing the sus
pected person, as being an evidence of his or her worth
and attraction to others."
We must always bear in mind that the three main
urge-s, like all human phenomena, are closely related and
can never be considered as absolute entities. Sucking the
mother's nipple which in the infant is primarily an activ
ity meant to secure food, develops into a semi-sexual ac
tivity totally unrelated to nutrition and from which kiss
ing originates. The physical pleasure a Don Juan de
rives from a new conquest increases his egotism and his
sense of power; and reciprocally Don Juan's newly ac
quired sense of power and increased egotism, revealed
by certain attitudes, postures, buoyancy, mental and phys
ical may increase his sexual pleasures by vouchsafing him
new conquests, etc. A great egotist may be so filled with
a sense of his importance that he will desire an increase
in protection commensurate with the growth of his real
or imaginary power, etc.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A
CHAPTER III
THE REPRESSION OF THE URGES
A HUMAN couple placed alone on the earth, supplied with plenty of food and
surrounded by a harmless fauna, would not have to repress many of their
urges. They could avoid collisions with obstacles, falls - from elevated
points or into pits, the broiling sun or the chilling rain, satisfy
without reservation their various cravings for pleasure, rule despotically
over their environment, and as long as desire made them the two incomplete
halves of a human unit, they could live on without severe strife.
In other words such a couple in such an environment1 Adam and Eve in an
earthly paradise, could thrive with-out developing their sense of reality.
As soon as a billion or more human beings must disport themselves on the
surface of the same planet, conditions change entirely. Collisions between
moving objects are less avoidable than collisions between a moving object,
on the one hand, and a motionless obstacle on the other; proprietary
interest of the male in one female and of one female in one male, and the
unsynchronized manifestations of pleasure cravings in variously
constituted individuals prevent the unregulated expression and
gratification of desire on the part of individuals and couples; no one
couple can any longer tyrannize over the earth. Every individual and
every couple must develop a keen sense of reality or come to grief,
physically or mentally.
29
I
Ii
PSYCHOANALYSIS
The acquisition of a sense of reality is a slow process in the life of the
individual. For heredity does not seem to carry that characteristic from
generation to generation. Reality is the enemy against which we struggle
all our life, trying all the while to minimize the harm it may inflict
upon us. The compromise which most of us finally reach with reality is at
best a shaky arrangement which has to be revised frequently. In that
struggle the strongest and the weakest go down in defeat.
The struggle begins early in life. Before birth the human being finds
itself in a state of unconditional omnipotence, to use Ferenczi' s words.
The inimical outer world exists only in a very restricted degree; only
light and sound sensations penetrate the mother's body; all of the child's
needs for protection, warmth and nourishment are assured by the mother;
oxygen and food are brought directly into its blood vessels. The foetus
is omnipotent, for it has everything it needs without even wishing for it.
As mind and memory probably begin to function before birth, the human
being's revolt against restriction, its ideas of megalomania, the latter
being the more irresistible as the human being reverts more completely to
an infantile level, are seen to be promptings of the ego urge which
undoubtedly develops long before any other.
The stage which the child traverses after birth is designated by Ferenczi
as the period of magic~hallucinatory omnipotence.
The child has wishes and as soon as it has them the nurse knows those
wishes and proceeds to satisfy them at once. After the first nursing, the
child's anger at its first contact with the hostile outer world and its
resultant loss of power, is quieted and the child goes to sleep, re
Ii
THE REPR1~SION OF THE URGES 3'
vertirig more or less completely to the womb condition. Having no
knowledge of the concatenation of cause and effect, or of the nurse's
existence, the child feels itself obscurely in the possession of a magic
capacity which can realize its wishes through the mere imagination of
their satisfaction.
Gradually the child begins to suspect the existence of reality, and to
differentiate between the "I" and the
Not I." The complexity of wishes increases. They soon require signals to
be understood by the environment. The infant that wants to be fed, imitates
the motions of sucking, it stretches out its hands for the objects it wants
The child develops a system of signals, a gesture-language which is well
understood by the environment. The infant is still omnipotent. This is
the period of omnipotence by the help of magic gestures. Later the infant
learns the code signals, silent or spoken, in use in its environment, it
expresses its needs in the current vernacular and those needs are
generally satisfied as soon as they are expressed and perceived by its
environment. This is the period of almost complete omnipotence through
magic words.
We see how mental deterioration corresponds to those four grades of
infantilism. The hopeless paranoiac, who has reverted to the first period
of infancy, feels himself omnipotent; in a less advanced degree of
deterioration he may fulfill his wishes through hallucinations, like the
in-fant in his second stage; the savage or the childlike man believes in
magic gestures, casting off- the evil eye, sprinkling the ground to bring
rain, etc.; finally the superstitious individual trusts in certain
formulas, prayers, incantations, magic numbers, curses, etc.
The fourth period in the infant's life brings the first
32 P5YCHOANAL~SIS
feeling of inferiority. Reality must henceforth be reckoned with.
Childhood begins. The barriers which surround the child assume more and
more consistency. At first they were the caressing ~ands of a loving
mother. They end by becoming steel walls. Movable at first, they will, in
later life, assume an unchangeable position, allowing the individual little
freedom of motion except in certain definite directions.
The repression of all the urges begins
The infant was first supplied with liquid food at the proper temperature
which could be assimilated without any exertion; later with foods - of
pleasant taste and of little consistency. It enjoyed all the imaginable
pleasures, plenty of sleep, the absence of harmful sights or sounds,
absolute freedom to exert its lungs at any time, day or night, and to
satisfy physical needs at any time or place. It could display its body
without clothing, indulge in all sorts of muscular activities, satisfy its
curiosity as to its own or some one else's body; it had the pleasant
feeling of being constantly a center of attention and interest and an
object of affection.
When the infant becomes a child, most of his liberties~ are taken away.
He must wear clothes and keep them on during the day; he must partake of
certain foods which are not necessarily pleasant, which present a
sometimes disagreeable consistency and must be handled with a certain
amount of skill. Instead of cooing, howling or singing whenever he
pleases, the child discovers conversation, which consists in waiting until
some other person stops making vocal noises before we can produce some
ourselves. He must observe a thousand rules of" decency."
1
THE REPRESSION OF THE URGES 33
The "Not I" appears monstrously developed in comparison with the "I."
All the statements made by poets and fiction writers to the contrary
notwithstanding, childhood is probably the most painful period of our
life. There takes place a terrific transformation of values which makes a
misdemeanor of many an action which in the infant was praiseworthy. The
fluctuation of standards at that age is harrowing. In certain respects
the child must be a grown-up, in others an infant. He must respect the
truth and yet many of his troubles come from the fact that he has not
acquired as yet the hypocrisy whereby he shall conceal his displeasure or
hostility or express conventional pleasure and sympathy.
The activities which Freud has designated as "polymorphous perverse" must
be completely repressed when childhood begins and remain repressed or, at
least, unmentioned and unnoticed until puberty. The infant, first
interested in its own body, develops what is called " narcism." Curiosity
of a justifiable character about the most important parts of that body, the
mouth and the excretory outlets, leads the child to put into its mouth
every object it comes in contact with and to indulge in coprophilic plays,
(playing with feces or urine). Narcism leads to exhibitionism. After
studying its wonderful body, the infant wishes to show it to others,
boasting of it as it would of a curious toy. The handling of that toy
leads to the discovery of some especially erogenous, pleasurable zones.
The desire to expend whatever interest cannot be expended upon its own
body gradually causes the infant to conceive some attachment for other
I
it,
34 PSYCHOANALYSIS
human beings, for its mother, the great supplier of wants, for the father,
the source of possible protection, for similar human beings, the other
infants, male or female. It is not until puberty that the incest taboo and
the homosexual taboo bring about a strict differentiation in the child's
attitude to blood relations and to strangers, to individuals of the same
or of a different sex.
Technically, the infant holds in a latent state the stuff from which every
perversion will be made.
The repression of all the elements which are either useless, or harmful,
or undesirable, for life as it mu-st be lived in reality, will be the
great task of childhood.
The repression will be the more arduous as all those polymorphous
activities are protean in their nature, and before puberty the tendencies
of the various urges are far from being as clearly defined as they are
after puberty.
There is as much pleasure-seeking as there is egotism and infantile
sexuality in exhibitionism. For instance:
the child feels strong and free, and wishes to show that strength and
freedom to others, and perhaps to prove it to himself.
No illustrations are needed to show how our sex-pleas-ure urge and our
ego-power urge are being repressed in childhood and adulthood, by our
self-protection urge, by society or our environment. We are prevented
from performing certain sexual or egotistic actions by our self-protection
urge, educated gradually by life among human beings.
Certain acts would decrease our food supply, our physical safety, and
endanger our social standing, our power, our sense of superiority.
THE REPRESSION OF THE URGES 3£
ln many cases, however, the struggle betwe-en the self-protection urge and
the sex and ego urge is an uneven one. Our egotism and will-to-power cause
us to repress fear and to pretend that we are not afraid. We throw
ourselves into the water to save a drowning person; soldiers in the
trenches behave bravely under fire; children are trained to enter dark
rooms; a man may disregard all the rules of physical safety in order to
win a certain
-woman.
It is in childhood that the strife is-most bitter. It is in childhood
that we force ourselves to forget the greatest number of cravings. But as
we said before nothing can be suppressed and nothing can be forgotten which
was not extremely unimportant. Hypnosis and analysis bring back to
consciousness thousands of details which had been apparently buried
forever in our unconscious.
Our childhood is the period of our lives which we remember the least
distinctly. Its events seem to have never taken place. Some of us are
deceived on that point. They remember themselves as children. That alone
shows that such memories as they have are only cover-memories, concealing
something unpleasant, or acquired memories, based upon statements made by
their parents or pictures seen in family albums. For in real memories we
never see ourselves; we are as in our dreams, in the center of the stage
and everything else present is related to us, the things not related to us
being inexistent.
That amnesia of our childhood happenings is due to the unpleasant
character of that period of continuous repression.
When adulthood is reached, no new form of repression takes place except in
emergencies, or when the human
I
-36 PSYCHOANALYSIS
being moves from his original environment into an entirely new one.
Then, of course, the sense of reality is submitted to a definite revision.
Normality is simply the ability to adapt oneself to one's environment
without too much friction. Abnormality is either the inability or the
unwillingness to adapt oneself.
What may be normal in one part of the world may- be abnormal elsewhere.
It is normal for a human being to build a snow house, to go fishing and
hunting at all seasons, if he was born under the Arctic circle and intends
to live there. The same behavior, observed in a busy metropolis, would
necessitate some interference on the part of the police. A ceremonial
highly reputable in Central Africa might be considered as a proof of
insanity in the temperate zone.
The normal individual is, then, the one who submits, at least in
appearance, to the rules restricting individual freedom in his environment
and who seeks compensation for whatever he gives up in ways which are
either social or harmless.
The abnormal individual either refuses to submit, or seeks compensation in
ways which are either asocial or harmful to the individual himself.
The form of compensation which the individual will seek depends on the
type to which he belongs.
The process of repression of the urges produces two human types which Jung
has defined as follows: "The introverted type, which finds unconditioned
values within himself, and the extroverted type which finds the
unconditioned value outside himself. The introverted considers everything
under the aspect of the value of- his
I
THE REPRESSION OF THE URGES 37 --
own ego; the extroverted depends upon the value of his object."
The " classicists '~ of Ostwald, the " Apollonians " of Nietzsche, the
"tender-minded" of James are introverted; the " romanticists " of Ostwald,
the " Dionysians " of Nietzsche, the "tough-minded" of James are
extroverted. Civilizations can be classified from that point of view.
The East is more introverted, the West more extroverted. As White puts
it, " To the extent that our interests flow outward and attach themselves
to objects and events in the outer world of reality, we are extroverted. .
. The introverted person is one who views the world from within,
considers the world according to the effect it has upon him."
Introverts and extroverts will go through life seeking different kinds of
compensation for the repression of their
-~- urges. That compens-ation shall be either normal or abnormal. An
inkling of what the normal compensation will be is given us by Mencken in
his definition of the Apollonians and Dionysians (introverts and
extroverts) ; " Epic poetry, sculpture, painting and story telling are
apollonic: they represent, not life itself, but some man's visualized view
of life. Dan&ing, great deeds and, in some cases, music, are dionysian;
they are part and parcel of life as some actual human being or collection
of human beings, is living it." The compensation may be abnormal. "We
see,"~ White writes, " extroversion in a severe hysteria or a maniacal
excitement, or introversion manifested in a psychoneurosis or a dementia
praecox. . . . We constantly see people so extroverted that they are
confused by the multiplicity of objects . .
we find people . . . so introverted that they are severely
U
U
w
PSYCHOANALYSIS
38
hampered . . . by superstitions, about thirteen perhaps, or starting
anything on Friday."
The next nine chapters will be devoted to a study of the ways in which
normal people find compensation for the various wishes, desires and
cravings which social adaptation, without which community life is
impossible, has repressed during their infancy, childhood and adulthood.
Some of those compensatory activities are purely selfish; some have a high
social value which in certain cases has been recognized and rewarded by
society.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV
NiGHT DREAMS AND DAY DREAMS
FOREMOST among the normal outlets for the energy which our daily clashes
with civilization repress and store up in our unconscious are night and
day dreams. In our dreams we no longer know any limitations. Our freedom
is absolute. We generally develop forms of power with which mankind has
not been endowed, such as flying or moving at a terrific speed; in every
scene we occupy the center of the stage; custom and ethics hardly bother
us.
There had been thousands of dr~am books before Freud's day, but no
scientist worthy of the name had ever occupied himself with those
apparently nonsensical phenomena until Freud observed a strange
relationship between the condition of some of his patients and their
dreams.
Here again, he proceeded, not from a preconceived theory, but in a purelY
empirical way, collecting numberless dreams and analyzing them as
m~hodically as a scientist, finding himself in the presence of an unknown
body, would determine its nature and composition by weighing it, measuring
it, and submitting it to the action of various re-agents.
What causes dreams? Certain scientists consider dreams as the remnants of
the day's unfinished thoughts, which, in some erratic way, complete
themselves or spend themselves at night.
40 PSYCHOANALYSIS
Bergson, as delightfully vague on this as on any other subject, supposes
that in our sleep our powers of attention are weakened and allow certain
ideas to escape.
Others attribute to dreams a purely physical cause: a heavy dinner may
cause nightmares, insufficient bed clothing may cause us to dream that we
are at the North Pole, etc.
Maury, who studied dreams experimentally for years, gives in " Le Sommeil
et les Reves " a most interesting list of dreams produced in himself by
physical stimuli.
One of his students was instructed to tickle him on the nose and lips with
a feather. He dreamed that a mask of pitch was applied to his face and
then removed suddenly, tearing off the skin.
A piece of wood having struck the back of his neck, he dreamed that he had
taken part in the French Revolution, had been arrested, sentenced to death
and that the executioner was letting the guillotine's knife descend to cut
off his head.
The " scrap of thoughts" theory explains nothing, nor does Bergson's
ingenious supposition; while Maury's experiments fail to show why the same
stimulus never causes exactly the same dream.
The first important observation Freud made about dreams was that they
always contain an allusion to some detail of our life during the previous
waking state. Something we saw, heard, said or did between the time of our
previous awakening and the time when we went to sleep plays a certain'part
in every one of our dreams. An enormous amount of condensation also takes
place. Things, people, ideas, ar~ frequently compressed into
F
NIGHT DREAMS AND DAY DREAMS 4'
composite formations, like the monstr.osity seen by one of Ferenczi's
patients, a creature which was half a horse, half a physician, and attired
in a night gown.
The discussion of a dream with the dreamer brings out such an infinite
variety of reminiscences that it is obvious that the dream thoughts exceed
greatly the remembered dream content.
A displacement of interest also takes place in every dream.
Some insignificant detail of the dream is extremely exaggerated, while
some important detail is hardly mentioned.
Also the dream always represents the " story " in a dramatic form. The
story is never told us in the dream but always " acted."
Finally a re-arrangement of the dream seems to take place in which the
thoughts which, owing to displacement and dramatization, coupled with
allusions to events of the day previous and the condensation of people or
objects, might appear completely absurd, are given an appearance of sense
and connection.
This is what Freud calls the secondary elaboration.
The majority of the dreams of adults deal with erotic subjects.
Finally, many dreams caused by physical stimuli have a tendency to protect
our sleep by making the physical stimulus, sound, light, heat, etc.,
plausible and unlikely to worry us and wake us up.
A light flashed in the sleeper's eyes may be dramatized ' by the " dream
work" so as to represent lightning or
a beacon light at sea.
The unexpected and unexplained character of the stim
I
I
I
I
42 PSYCHOANALYSIS
u. lu:s no longer causes the sleeper to question the source of the
stimulus and he remains peacefully asleep.
As it is probable that we never stop thinking night or day, any more than
our heart stops beating, our lungs absorbing oxygen, our blood coursing
through our arteries and veins, and liver storing up sugar, our night
thinking is conditioned, like our day thinking, by the same struggle
between our urges.
In our waking states, our constantly active and seldom repressed
self-protection urge, which Freud calls the
censor," prevents us from doing, speaking of, and very often thinking of
actions which would endanger our life or comfort. In our waking life, the
self-protection urge, backed by our social and physical environment,
generally carries the day and successfully suppresses all the activities
which society would censure severely. At night, however, when the
self-protection urge can relax its vigilance (for in the sleep-paralysis
of the motor centers, thoughts are seldom likely to be translated into
deeds), the repressed sex and ego urges gain the upper hand.
Their victory, however, is not won without a strenuous fight. That fight
is often revealed by horrible dreams known as anxiety dreams, in the
course of which we may undergo great physical or mental suffering and be
tortured by various fears.
Careful study of all d~ams, however, including nightmares, anxiety dreams
and " horrors," will reveal to us that every dream is the fulfilment of a
conscious or unconscious wish, and a form of compensation for the
repressed strivings of our urges.
Certain obvious dreams will confirm this statement.
Otto Nordenskj old in his book "The Antarctic," pub-
NIGHT DREAMS AND DAY DREAMS 43
lished in 1904, described the dreams which he and his men, marooned in a
Polar wilderness, living on preserves, cut off from the world's news,
vainly straining their eyes to catch sight of a sail, had night after
night. They would dream of attending dinner parties where meals of many
courses would be served; the postman appeared with bags of mail; there
were mountains of tobacco to be had; ships were approaching under full
sail, etc.
Other dreams, however, are not quite so obvious, and require more
ingenuity if they are to be interpreted as wish fulfilment.
Some are so cpmpletely disfigured by condensation and displacement that
they may appear to be anything but wish fulfilment.
Freud says that all the dreams of one night, when considered with respect
to their content, are simply parts of one unit. Their separation into
several portions, their gr~upings, have a special meaning. The first part
of our dreams is more disfigured, more bashful, than the end.
This lends credibility to Maeder's theory that our dreams seek constantly
a satisfying solution for our unconscious problems.
In seeking that solution, that is, in trying to liberate the suppressed
unconscious, the dream is hampered by the censor, which, being in part
acquired, while the other urges are congenital, goes down to defeat at the
end of the dream or at the end of the night.
The censor then disfigures the action of the drama in such a way that we
have a so-called " anxiety dream," which appears just the opposite of a
wish fulfilment.
But that anxiety is simply due to the struggle between an impulse
emanating from the unconscious and the cen
U
PSYCHOANALYSIS
44
sor. Therefore when a sensation of inhibition in the dream is
accomplished by anxiety there must be present a volition which has at one
time been capable of arousing a desire.
Unable to prevent the wish from being fulfilled, our censor transforms the
wish and its satisfaction into 5yln-bolic presentations, which are not
consciously understood by the dreamer. We shall see in another chapter
what symbols mean.
Symbols are the lingua franca of the dream and no attempt at dream
interpretation should be made by anyone who has not mastered that
language. Let us give one example which will enable the reader to find a
confirmation of Freud's theory.even in dreams which seem to contradict it
flatly. A young woman may dream that a horse is stamping over her. In
all dreams of all nations at all periods of history, being trampled upon
by a horse is a symbol of submission to the sexual act. .
The displacement of interest may also create at times a scepticism as to
Freud's theory.
One of Freud's patients told him that she had dreamed of attending the
funeral of her little nephew to whom she was greatly attached. It turned
out, however, that at the funeral of another nephew she. had met a man
with whom she fell in love.
The dream of the second funeral was really meant to bring her together
with that man under circumstances similar to the ones under which she met
him first. The most important detail of the dream, the 'man she loved,
was hardly noticeable, while the funeral, which was a mere pretext, was
exaggerated considerably.
This displacement can well be illustrated by incidents
N"
NIGHT DREAMS AND DAY DREAMS 45
of our daily life. A man who finds no plausible excuse for calling on a
woman he likes, may pretend that he left his umbrella at her house. He
will ask the servants, the family, for the missing umbrella, in other
words magnify greatly a detail which in itself is insignificant. He will
not even allude to the all-important reason of his call, his desire to see
the woman of his fancies.
The dramatization of every incident by the dream-work is one more piece of
evidence that the dream is meant to fulfill a wish.
Frazer mentions in the "Golden Bough" that savage and rimitive races
always present dramatically the events
d
which they esire to bring about, for instance, sprinkling
the ground in order to produce rain, their belief being that the visual
presentation of an event effectively contributes to its production.
The way in which our dream seeks solutions for mental conflicts is well
illustrated by one of my dreams.
One night before the date set for a lecture which I was to deliver on a
rather delicate subject, likely to involve me in difficulties, and which I
would have preferred not to deliver, I had the following dream:
I was seated on the stage at Carnegie Hall where an enormous audience had
gathered to hear me. The chairman was busy making various announcements.
I looked at my feet and discovered that I wore bed slippers. I' felt
embarrassed at that undignified detail of my toilet and for a second or so
planned to go home and return in more conventional attire. I finally
decided to stay. Then, as the chairman was beginning to announce me, I
looked for my lecture notes, and could not find them. I made an effort to
remember the outline of my lecture
I
I
46 PSYCHOANALYSIS
and could not recall anything whatever. I then decided to disappear
without warning the chairman. As I emerged into the hall, I met two women
I knew and felt the need of explaining my action. I explained t& them that
the heat was nauseating me and that I would have to go home. A few step~
further down the hall I met a
physician who looked at me and said with deep compassion, " The poor
fellow is very sick." Then I began to vomit and went home.
The dream offered me several excuses for breaking my engagement. My
appearance was undignified (bed slippers), I was not sufficiently
prepared, I was sick. I secured a friendly physician's testimonial as to
my physical condition.
The choice of sickness (nausea) made by the dream, is the more interesting
as hysterical vomiting is often brought about by a more or less unconscious
unwillingness to perform an unpleasant task.
While the dream was, in its general make-up, an" anxiety dream," still,
for the time being, it had solved the problem raised by that unpleasant
lecture engagement and had replaced one form of mental anguish by one
infinitely more bearable.
My self-protection urge wished me to cancel the engagement. The dream
cancelled it, at the same time giving plenty of satisfaction to my ego
urge: Carnegie Hall, one of the largest halls in New York City, where, by
the way, I have never spoken, a large audience, and finally humiliation
av6ided, thanks to the physician's statement as to my physical condition,
which " saved my face."
I may add that at the time I was expecting the particular physician who
appeared in the dream to perform
I
NIGHT DREAMS AND DAY DREAMS 41
a similar service for me. One of the two women was a hospital nurse I had
seen the day before (an actual event from my previous waking state).
Finally the dream-work did not simply give me advice as to means of
breaking my engagement but dramatized the breaking of that engagement.
Certain dreams only fulfill our wish by appealing to our logic. Among
those are examination dreams. Examination dreams generally precede some
trial in our life which we are not sure of undergoing successfully. Only
those, who have passed examinations, dream that they fail. It is as
though the dream said to us: " Your difficulties are imaginary; this is
only a dream, for you know very well that you passed this examination
years ago."
Certain anxiety dreams play the part of mental comforters. We have a
feeling while dreaming that "it is only a dream," that we can wake
ourselves up and escape the horror by a mere act of will, or a sudden
motion. And we generally manage to do so.
Maeder gives interesting illustrations of solution dreams in his "Dream
Problem." A man who had been struggling for a long time with certain bad
habits saw himself traveling in a railroad carriage, stepping out of the
car, climbing a house and disappearing at the top of the lightning rod.
Another, in the same predicam6nt, saw an objectionable man, symbolizing
his own bad habits, ejected forcibly from a church.
Certain dreams may be so unpleasant that it is difficult for laymen to
consider them as any form of wish fulfil-ment.
F
48 PSYCHOANALYSIS
4
Some appear unpleasant on account of the process of displacement I have
mentioned before.
A poor man dreamed that he was in the office of the tax commissioner,
filling out his income tax report. He declared the $2000 on which no tax
was due, but the clerk, who received his report, eyed him in a hostile
way, called a policeman and had him arrested. He was taken to court and
convicted of concealing an income of several millions. The " anxiety"
element of the fantasy was simply due to the struggle of the censor or
self-protection urge restraining the man's ego urge from imagining such
incredible financial prosperity.
Other so-called " anxiety dreams" are the fulfilment of some repressed
infantile wish, such as incest or the death of our parents. Freud has
proved the presence of many incestuous ideas in the infantile mind. Those
ideas are repressed when the infant becomes a child or later in life when
ethical teachings make it impossible for him even to entertain such
thoughts. They linger in the unconscious, however, and some time become
liberated by the dream-work.
Freud calls our attention to the fact that in the child's vocabulary, "to
die" simply means to go away, to disappear. Children, after attending
their father's funeral, may ask anxiously the next day: "Why don't Daddy
come home? " The threat often expressed by children in their disputes, "I
hope you'll die," is to be interpreted in that harmless way.
And likewise, the feeling of burden, of encumbrance produced at times by
our parents, relatives or friends, which makes us long for a larger
freedom, may translate
NIGHT DREAMS AND DAY DREAMS 49
itself into the infantile parlance of dreams and visualize for us an event
which would in reality be extremely painful for us.
The reason why we forget our dreams and sometimes imagine that we never
dream, is probably the same reason which causes us to forget many
happenings of our life. Some are insignificant and some are painful.
Freud says that much of the apparently disconnected character of our
dreams is due to the fact that the censor has cut out bodily entire parts
of the dream or at least repressed our memory of them, as they touch
unpleasant complexes.
He compares the " disconnected " character of dreams with the rambling
talk of delirious patients, in which gaps represent what the patient would
like to say but is prevented from saying by the censor. The patient's
words are also disconnected, but a knowledge of his history and of his
complexes enables one to fill those gaps.
Dreams may be at times prophetic, and at other times may be made to appear
so on account of a coincidence.
Any subject which obsesses our minds is likely to occupy our dreams
frequently. Our dream-work, constantly seeking the solution of our life
problems, may easily point out a solution which is practicable in our
actual life. Almost all the dreams of the race have at some time come to
pass. The most universal dream is that of flying. Man now flies. Magic
mirrors, magic horns, enabling man to see distant parts of the earth and
to talk to distant countries, have given birth to the telescope and the
telephone.
Our mind, dreaming of thousands of solutions, may well visualize some
night on~ solution which will turn
i
50 PSYCHOANALYSIS
out to be the actual one, after which the coincidence strikes us and makes
us forget all the other solutions which were discarded earlier.
A newspaper headline may remind us suddenly of some dream we had the night
before. Thousands of people who had dreams of shipwrecks or merely of
ships may have credited their dreams with prophetic power when the next
morning they read of the sinking of the Titanic or of the Lusitania.
Self-suggestion in such cases adds many details which were not actually a
part of the dream. Munsterberg's experiments with students who often
reported with fantastic inaccuracy happenings taking place in the
class-room should make us slightly suspicious of our ability to remember
exactly the details of our dreams.
Day dreams are very similar to night dreams, the principal difference
being that we are more likely to remember our day dreams than our night
dreams and therefore the former appear more consistent. In them, also, we
seem to pay closer attention to physical probability and possibility,
although that does not apply to all cases and rather depends upon
individual fancies and habits.
There is as much condensation in day dreams as in night dreams, there
being a gradual transformation in the appearance of people and things
instead of simultaneous combinations of heterogeneous elements. We
observe in them the same dramatization, displacement and secondary
elaboration. In artists, that secondary elaboration may become the thread
and woof of a novel or play in which the primal elements have been
absorbed.
Day dreams, like night dreams, show a strong sexual content, one half of
their component elements being sex-
NIGHT DREAMS AND DAY DREAMS 5'
ual, the other half egotistic. In other words, love and ambition are
their subject matter. The censor, being able in our waking states to
repress more easily certain thoughts, does not resort as often to
symbolization as it does in night dreams. Since logic and conventionality
are in our waking state the allies of the self-protection urge, symbols are
not so necessary for purposes of represSi on.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER V
SYMBOLS, THE LANGUAGE OF THE DREAM
BEFORE attempting to decipher the meaning of dreams we must become
familiar with the language in which they generally express themselves.
Whatever desire rising from the 8ex or the ego urge is denied expression
in our sleeping state by our self-protection urge forces its way into our
consciousness in the disguise of a symbol. Denied the use of the current
vernacular, the repressed urge speaks in another language in which it says
whatever it wishes to say. And curiously enough, the sleeper himself may
not have the faintest idea of the wishes thus expressed. The sleeper
expresses many wishes symbolically and yet does not understand the meaning
of those symbols. It sounds paradoxical, if not absurd, until we remember
certain traditional customs which have been carefully preserved, although
their meaning is absolutely unknown to the majority of people.
One example will suffice: the rice and shoes which wedding guests in many
parts of the world throw at the newly married couple when they depart on
their honeymoon journey. The wedding guests are on that occasion
expressing openly a wish of which they are totally unconscious. They
express that wish in a language which they do not understand. This is
exactly what we do in our dreams.
Wh~n we remember that, at all times and in all na52
SYMBOLS, THE LANGUAGE OF THE DREAM 53
t
ions, grains like rice, barley, wheat, etc., have symbolized the
fructifying seed, and that shoes are a symbol of the female genitals, we
understand at once the meaning of that symbolic custom.
The wish thus expressed by the wedding guests is unconscious, for if it
were conscious, social niceties would not permit its public expression,
nor would the perfectly proper, conservative girls who show their respect
for that tradition, be guilty of such an indecent action, if they
suspected the symbolic meaning of the rice and shoes.
Symbolism may be made clear by ~ comparison of the various symbols with
the ideographs of the Chinese language. Every one of the characters found
in the Chinese dictionary was, when it was first invented, a graphic
likeness of the person, animal or object it represented. A drawing of a
man meant man; that of a horse meant horse; the sun, moon, water, fire,
were represented through recognizable drawings. The fanciful free hand of
innumerable penmen gradually transformed those recognizable representations
into unrecognizable characters. At the present day, an illiterate Chinaman
looking at the signs that mean man, horse or sun, would never suspect
their meaning, although an illiterate Chinaman would have, let us say five
thousand years ago, recognized them at once.
The human race undoubtedly knew in archaic times the exact meaning of
symbols, but it has consciously forgotten it, while remembering it
unconsciously.
Symbols have in our life, and especially in our speech, an importance
which cannot be minimized, and which is not commonly realized. The
language of all races is symbolical and man is constantly instituting, in
his speech,
PSYCHOANALYSIS
54
comparisons, for instance, between certain aspects of nature and parts of
the human body. White calls our attention to the fact that we speak of
the mouth of a river, or a cave; of the lap, the bosom, the womb, the
bowels of the earth; of the head of a lake; of a neck of land; of a chest
of tools; of the foot of the mountains. We say that potatoes have eyes~;
that a color is warm, facts dry; that we scent trouble. .
A mere dollar hill is charged with a wealth of symbolism. Without actual
value in itself, however torn or soiled it may be, it represents a certain
purchasing power, a certain amount of commercial safety based on the
resources of a nation ruled by a solvent government which is pledged to
redeem that piece of paper under certain conditions. A drop of water on
the forehead of a child symbolizes the intermihable story of Adam and Eve,
the temptation, the original sin, purification, the properties of water as
a cleansing fluid, etc. A triangle, or a snake biting its tail,
symbolizes all the meditations of the fathers of the church touching the
attributes of the divinity, eternity, a triple nature, eternal recurrence
of the identical, etc. .
Silberer and Jung have offered illuminating hypotheses that will lead us
to a closer understanding of symbol formation.
According to Silberer, symbols may originate when man tries to grasp
mentally something which his intellect finds too remote; they may also
originate when man's intellectual powers are reduced by sleep or mental
disturbances. In other words, an inferior mind, or a mind inferior to a
certain mental task, unable to use the language of science or philosophy,
will resort to a symbol.
I
I
SYMBOLS, THE LANGUAGE OF THE DREAM 55
Jung tells us what the symbol is. To Jung the dream is the unconscious
picture of the psychological condition of the individual in his waking
state. It presents asummary of the unconscious association material
brought together by a definite psychological situation. What Freud calls
the repressed desire is to Jung a means of expression. There are tasks
which the individual must accomplish and every one of those tasks demands
a solution. In many cases the solution is unknown and our consciousness
tries to find it by comparing the present situation with some previous
similar situation. For instance, Jung writes, when America was first
discovered by the Spaniards, the Indians, who had never seen horses, took
the mounts of the conquerors for huge pigs, pigs being the nearest objects
of comparison they could find. The apparently repressed thoughts contained
in the dream are volitional tendencies which serve as language material for
unconscious expression.
The use of very ancient symbols, whose meaning has been forgotten by our
conscious mind but seems clear to our unconscious, is due, according to
Jung, to the archaic nature of dream thinking.
Our unconscious mind is older than our conscious mind, and hence speaks,
when necessary, an older language.
In other words, thinking in symbols is infantile, archaic, inferior
thinking. It follows the line of least effort. Instead of determining in
scientific ways, by the application of logical, inental operations, the
nature, the essence and the significance of a new phenomenon, it simply
compares it with some already familiar phenomenon, much as that facile
comparison may disregard certain essentials, and however inaccurate it may
be.
I
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Primitive people, unable or unwilling to seek the meaning of the thunder,
the tides, the setting or rising of the sun and moon, of sleep and death,
of all the forces, in a word, which influence mankind physically or
mentally, personified them through gods or demons endowed with certain
attributes, Jupiter, Neptune, Apollo, the devil. The devil, once a symbol
of the dark forces which sway our minds, thus acquired gradually a fully
built personality whose original meaning has been forgotten. For the
superstitious the devil finally acquired an actual, almost tangible
existence.
Then the anthropomorphic symbols became in their turn resymbolized through
some representation of their powers. A certain attribute of the divinity
was symbolized by Jesus, then Jesus was symbolized by the cross, and that
symbol, wherever represented, is supposed to drive away the devil. In old
cults, fertility was represented by a certain god; then one essential part
of the god's body, his phallus, in turn symbolized the god himself and was
carried through the fields in the spring to insure their fertility. Human
sacrifices were replaced by a lamb or some other animal, symbolizing a
human being; then the symbolic lamb was symbolized through a more or less
recognizable image of the lamb made of dough, and later of clay. In China
the animal victim was finally represented by a piece of paper stating the
market value of the animal which the devout worshipper "would have liked"
to offer to the divinity.
Symb.qls constituting a visual, pictorial language, are especially
appropriate for use in dream thinking. As we set forth in the previous
chapter, the dream work dramatizes every thou~ht, "movieizes" every
conflict. Asin
(
SYMBOLS, THE LANGUAGE OF THE DREAM 57
"Everyman," the various impulses appear on the stage, transformed into men
or women. Instead of someone 5 expatiating on virtue and vice, a woman
called virtue and a woman called vice appear and hold a debate, not in
words but in pantomime.
Our hypocrisy, which is one of the avatars of the self-protection urge,
finds immense advantages in that pictonal representation, for it is in
many cases very indefinite and lends itself to various interpretations.
Anyone usmg figures of speech may, in an emergency, seek shelter behind
the very indefiniteness of those figures of speech. Sometimes the
pictorial, symbolic representation of a desire may create in the sleeper a
feeling which makes the concealment of the actual repressed desire even
more complete.
A young and chaste woman may dream that a horse is trampling her body.
Called upon to prove that such a dream is not the fulfilment of a wish,
she may offer as evidence the feeling of fear, anxiety and suffering
attendant upon such an experience.
Fear and anxiety, however, lose their painful meaning, and only become
synonymous with great excitement, when we know that such a dream is the
universal symbol of a sexual attack, a desire for which would be repressed
in a woman of that type, and the visualization of which would be
accompanied by ambivalent feelings of pleasurepain, hope-fear.
For a complete list of symbols I refer the reader to Freud's
"Interpretation of Dreams," Jelliffe's " Practice of Psychoanalysis" and
Silberer's work on "Symbolism and Mysticism." I shall only mention the
most frequently encountered symbols and those, moreover, on
PSYCHOANALYSIS
whose meaning all schools of analysis are practically agreed.
The human body is generally indicated by a building, cabin, house or
church. Degrees of nakedness correspond to the draperies, hangings, nets
found in the buildmg. Parts that show through the draperies reveal peepmg
or exhibitionism tendencies. The male body is represented by flat things,
smooth walls over which one is climbing, the female body by set tables,
walls with balconies, mounds, hills, a rolling landscape.
The male organ can be symbolized by all sorts of elongated objects,
sticks, tree-trunks, pillars, fruits or vegetables of similar shape,
women's hats, men's cravats, birds, fishes, toads, snakes, all sharp
weapons, knives, daggers, etc. Feminine genitals are represented by
boxes, caves, stoves, closets, windows, gardens, sometimes by the figure
2.
Potency and impotency symbols correspond to the erect or reclining
position of the various male symbols. Moving vehicles which elude the
dreamer indicate, according to the dreamer's sex, either the man's
impotency or the woman's lack of gratification due to the man's impotency
or premature ejaculation.
In dreams the father may be represented, according to the local form of
government, by the highest person in authority, god, emperor, king,
governor, mayor, or an old man. (Compare the slang expressions
"governor,"
old man.") The mother may be the empress, the queen, or a ship, a tree, a
fountain.
Birth symbols are concerned mostly with water, such as falling into the
water or swimming out of it, saving people or animals, retrieving objects
from a lake or the
¾
I
I
SYMBOLS, THE L'ANGUAGE OF THE DREAM 59
sea Death wishes represent the unwelcome persons going on journeys by
rail or boat, vanishing into darkness.
According to Stekel, right and left have a symbolic meaning, as they have
in spoken language, right indicating righteousness, left indicating crime,
right the normal way, left the perversion.
Colors have a symbolic meaning. Tests made by Jastrow in the United
States and Wissler in Europe show that blue seems to wield the strongest
attraction upon men and red upon women, making blue in some way a feminine
color and red a masculine one. (Adam means red.) Arrah B. Evarts, who has
compiled the symbolic meanings of colors among the various nations, says
that color symbolism follows, the world over, fairly well marked lines.
White is the color of the deity, of purity, of unity, of immortality.
Black is the color of sin and death. Red the color of passion and of the
creative force. Blue is the color of coldness, impassivity, truth; green
of activity and active reproduction; yellow, of religious aspirations and
beneficence, also of decay; purple of controlled passion. Brown is not
infrequently associated with feces.
Color symbolism is constantly related to the symbolism of stones or
metals. The language of gems and metals was carefully codified by the
heraldists many years ago. We find the following associations in an almost
invariable order: silver-white-pearl; lead-black-diamond; iron-red-ruby;
tin-blue-sapphire; copper-green-emerald; gold-yellow-topaz;
mercury-purple-amethyst.
Flowers also have their symbolism, corresponding to their color: the red
rose is the flower of passion; white flowers indicate purity. In one
case, however, the sym
6o PSYCHOANALYSIS
bolism seems to have been fotgotten and given a new content. The orange
blossoms of the bridal wreath once implied a wish for fecundity connected
with the fact that the orange tree is the most fecund of all trees. Later
their white petals were assumed to indicate the bride's virginity.
Number symbolism is also curiously connected with color symbolism. White
is the unity, black the zero. Red is the number three which symbolizes the
male principle. Four is yellow and eight is brown.
Colors are also associated with certain objects which they represent
symbolically, red with fire, brown with smoke, yellow with the dog which
in several mythologies was constantly associated with the divinities of
death.
Certain animals are universally associated in dreams with the sexual act,
the horse (especially when trampling down a woman) and the dog (when
trying to bite her). Language, with its highly symbolic trend, has in all
races confirmed that association by speaking of the " animal" side of our
nature.
The sexual act is frequently represented by going up or down the stairs,
dancing, swinging the arms, being rocked in a swing, in other words by
many rhythmical motions of the body that imply advancing and retreating.
Conception is symbolized by lily stems, hazel twigs, or by the eating of
certain sorts of food, rice, apples, fish, or by some animal, generally a
fish, entering the body.
Dental dreams (falling teeth) may indicate onanism, homosexualism or
pollution. Flying dreams are either sexual dreams or symbols of the
world-old desire to escape the limitations of human nature and to acquire
superhuman power.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
F
CHAPTER VI
THE DREAMS OF THE HUMAN RACE
FAIRY-TALES, legends and religions are the dreams of the human race,
expressing as they do the fulfilment of mankind's desire for happiness,
and power or compensating mankind for the many restrictions imposed upon
it by man's own biological status.
We must at the outset dissipate a misapprehension fostered by superficial
observers. Attempts have been frequently made to characterise races or
nations by their particular folklore. A reasonable amount of unprejudiced
reading, however, will soon convince us that it is a waste of time and
effort to seek the " soul" of the Eskimo, of the Basuto, or of the
Russian, in Eskimo, Basuto or Russian legends. Dwellers in the Arctic, in
tropical lands and in the steppes of Eastern Eur~pe, have been drawing
their legends from one and the same common fund, the human fund.
Geographical influences have introduced different sets of scenery into the
folklore of the different races: An Eskimo cannot be expected to visualize
hot yellow sand plains in his dreams, nor can a Central African negro
imagine snow igloos; an Oriental will, for certain definite reasons, dream
of a magic carpet which transports him swiftly and comfortably over the
deserts, while a muzhic may prefer to ride a gigantic grey wolf.
Yairy-tales and legends can be divided, as dreams were,
62 PSYCHOANALYSIS
into wish fulfilment stories, compensation stories, anxiety stories, etc.
We shall find in them the symbols which disguise the nakedness of our urges
so that they may elude the censor. We shall find in them our pleasure and
power urges engaged in the same struggle with our environment. They will
prove just as asocial as our dreams. Egotism and hedonism will always be
found triumphant in the end.
The hero of tales and legends has the same origin and the same biography
the world over. He is invariably the child of distinguished parents,
preferably of a king or a god.
His birth is preceded by romantic obstacles to his parents' love,
continence, barrenness, secret intercourse, a great deal of mystery. He
is either unwelcome or illegitimate or there is a prophecy announcing how
powerful and dangerous he is to become; and his father generally wishes to
get rid of him. He is generally exposed immediately after birth on the
water in " a basket made of reeds." In inland and mountain regions he is
exposed on barren cliffs. He is saved either by lowly people or helpful
animals and suckled either by a humble woman or a she-wolf or goat.
Afterwards he grows up, finds his real parents, often takes revenge on his
father and not infrequently marries his mother, like Oedipus, Tristan, St.
Gregory, Lohengrin, etc. He sometimes dies through the instrumentality of
a traitor, Hagen, Judas, etc.
The Oedipus legend is quite characteristic.
Lajus, king of Thebes, was warned by an oracle that he would die at the
hands of his son. When the child was born he fastened his ankles with a
pin and gave him to a herdsman to be exposed.
THE DREAMS OF THE HUMAN RACE 63
The herdsman, ignorant of the oracle, saved the child and gave him to a
Corinthian. Oedipus, brought up in Corinth, heard of the oracle, and fled
from the man and woman he considered as his actual father and mother. In a
narrow place in the road, he met an old man, Lajus, disputed his right of
way and killed him. Proceeding on his journey he reached Thebes, which
was beset by the Sphinx. He answered the riddle of the Sphinx and thus
destroyed the monster. Thebes rewarded him by giving him the hand of the
widowed queen, Jocasta. When a pestilence visited the city, the oracle
was consulted and it was discovered that Oedipus was the son of Lajus and
Jocasta; Jocasta hanged herself and Oedipus put out his eyes.
I cite the legend at length for Freud has selected. it to typify certain
relations between child and parents which will be discussed in detail in
Chapter XIV.
Rivalry with the father, not necessarily for the mother's physical love,
but for her affection and care, leads the boy to do away with his
relationship to his father, either by imagining that he is not the real
father, or by inventing a grudge which enables him to punish the father.
Also in his egotism the child easily dreams of a wealthier, more brilliant
and more powerful father, one who may help him to claim more respect or
admiration.
Greek mythology gives us many examples of that hostility between son and
father. Ouranos tries to do away with his sons, the Titans. His son,
Cronos, avenges him-self by castrating Ouranos.
Cronos, in his turn, devours his children. One of them, Zeus, compels him
to disgorge them and then castrates him.
64 PSYCHOANALYSIS
More recent legends are less bloodthirsty and show us the hero getting rid
of his father in more subtle ways.
The story of Moses is the best known among the stories based upon a sexual
indiscretion on the part of the mother, a young princess, as a rule, who
exposes her child and then finds it again.
Whatever changes of costume and scenery may have been introduced by
geographical influences, local customs, etc., there is, strangely enough,
one detail which is never lacking in that type of stories, be they Greek,
Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian, Hebrew or Russian.
The unwelcome child is placed in a basket of reeds, made waterproof with
pitch or wax, and allowed to float away on a lake, a river or the sea.
The oldest of those stories is that of King Sargon of Babylon, dating to
2800 B. C. An inscription on Sargon's tomb reads:
"Sargon, the mighty king of Agade, am I. My mother was a vestal; my
father I knew not. In a hidden place my mother bore me. She laid me in a
vessel made of reeds, closed the door with pitch and dropped me into the
river which did not drown me. Akki, the water carrier, lifted me up,
raised me as his own son and made me his gardener. In my work I was
beloved by Istar, became king and for 45 years held kingly sway.
We have here the first version on record of the virgin birth, which was
destined to have a very successful career.
Among other well known heroes corresponding to the
Sargon type we find: The Hebrew Moses, the Hindoo
Karna, son of the Virgin Kunti and the Sun-God, the
Greek Ion, ancestor of the lonians, son of Kreusa and
Apollo, Telephos, son of the vestal Auge and the Gdd
THE DREAMS OF THE HUMAN RACE
Heracles, the Roman Romulus and Remus, sons of the vestal Rhea Sylvia and
the God Mars; Hercules, son of the virgin Alkmene and Jupiter, not to
forget7 of course Jesus, son of Mary the Virgin.
The feminine counterpart of the Oedipus story has been typified in
psychoanalytic literature by the Electra story, in which Electra, daughter
of Agamemnon, kills
'V
her mother to avenge her father's death. That conflict between two women
is repeated in folklore by hundreds of varied Cinderella stories. The
daughter is jealous of her mother and eliminates her by various
subterfuges. One of them is the denial of the relationship and the
transformation of the mother into a stepmother; another is the assumption
of her death.
The incest part is generally glossed over and rather hard to detect. One
group of stories, found the world over, run as follows
A queen dies, leaving a daughter who resembles her strangely. One day the
king notices that resemblance and wishes to marry his daughter. The
daughter flees to some strange land, where she meets another old king, an
exact replica of her own father, becomes his slave and then his wife or
concubine.
Sex and ego satisfaction are interestingly blended in Cinderella stories.
They all emphasize the conflict between the young girl and her mother or
stepmother, and all end with the humiliation of the mother and the other
daughters and Cinderella's marriage to a beautiful prince. Local
conditions have modified the story and sometimes through a certain
displacement lay the stress on a new character, but the conflict is always
the same and so is the solution.
66 PSYCHOANALYSIS
Take for instance the Russian version of the Cinderella story, known as
Jack Frost, and which seems to be only one of the adventures of Iva'n
Mor6z, the evil genius of the Russian winter:
There is the usual fairy-tale family, with a weak father, a wicked
stepmother and three daughters. Two of the daughters are vain, arrogant
creatures, the stepmother's own daughters. The third girl is the kind,
simple, obedient, overworked daughter of the father by his first wife. The
henpecked husband is commanded one day to take his daughter into the
snow-covered woods and abandon her.
Jack Frost comes jumping from tree to tree and asks her, " Are you warm,
little maiden? " She is s |
