VOL. V. (Beginning January, 1918.)

All the leading foreign psychoanalytic journals are regularly abstracted, and all books dealing with psychoanalysis are reviewed.

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[1] Über Nachtwandeln und Mondsucht. Eine medizinisch-literarische Studie, von Dr. J. Sadger, Nervenarzt in Wien; Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, Herausgegeben von Prof. Dr. Sigm. Freud, Sechzehntes Heft, Leipzig und Wien, Franz Deuticke, 1914.

[2] Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Psychopathologie.

[3] I introduce as the most important sources Peter Jessen: “Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Begründung der Psychologie,” Berlin, 1855 (with many examples); Heinrich Spitta: “Die Schlaf- und Traumzustände der menschlichen Seele,” 2d edition, 1882 (with abundant casuistic and literature); finally based upon these L. Löwenfeld: “Somnambulismus und Spiritismus,” Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens, Vol. I, 1900.

[4] The text of Bellini's “Nachtwandlerin” could hardly be called literature, nor Theodor Mundt's fabulous novel, “Lebensmagie, Wirklichkeit und Traum.” The latter I will mention later in the text.

[5] This homosexual tendency was first directed toward her own mother in childhood and early puberty.

[6] “Über den sado-masochistischen Komplex,” Jahrb. f. psychoanal. Forsch., Vol. 5, pp. 224–230.

[7] Cf. [note 6], p. 163.

[8] I have here given word for word what the patient wrote down. When I then pointed out to her the evident contradiction, that she had misplaced something into the seventeenth year, which according to an earlier statement must have happened in the eleventh year, she answered that here was in fact an earlier mistake, since her brother-in-law Emil had first taken breakfast with her mother in her seventeenth year. The facts were these: She had walked a great deal in her sleep from her eleventh to her seventeenth year, for her mother had always suffered from hemoptysis, with occasional intermissions, and on this account had a nurse at various times. She had in fact at eleven years done everything which she has described above, only the making of the coffee for the brother-in-law happened in the seventeenth year. Besides, all the other actions performed in sleep are correctly given. On being questioned, she stated that her menses occurred first between her thirteenth and fourteenth years and at the time of menstruation particularly she had walked a great deal. She was always very much excited sexually before her period, slept very restlessly and had always at that time arisen in her sleep. Blood always excited her excessively sexually, as has been already mentioned in the text. I will add just at this place that her exact dates, when an event appears in the very first years of her life, must be taken with a grain of salt, because falsification of memory is always to be found there. This, however, is not of great importance because the facts are authentically correct and at least agree approximately with the times specified, as I have convinced myself through questioning her relatives.

[9] E. g., “A monk of a melancholy disposition and known to be a sleep walker, betook himself one evening to the room of his prior, who, as it happened, had not yet gone to bed, but sat at his work table. The monk had a knife in his hand, his eyes were open and without swerving he made straight at the bed of the prior without looking at him or the light burning in the room. He felt in the bed for the body, stuck it three times with the knife and turned with a satisfied countenance back to his cell, the door of which he closed. In the morning he told the horrified prior that he had dreamed that the latter had murdered his mother, and that her bloody shadow had appeared to him to summon him to avenge her. He had hastened to arise and had stabbed the prior. Immediately he had awakened in his bed, bathed in perspiration, and had thanked God that it had been only a frightful dream. The monk was horrified when the prior told him what had taken place.” The following cases besides: “A shoemaker's apprentice, tortured for a long time with jealousy, climbed in his sleep over the roof to his beloved, stabbed her and went back to bed.” Another, “A sleep walker in Naples stabbed his wife because of an idea in a dream that she was untrue to him!” We may conclude, on the ground of our analytical experiences, that the untrue maiden always represents the mother of the sleep walker, who has been faithless to him with the father. The hatred thoughts toward this rival lead in the first dream to the reverse Hamlet motive, the mother has demanded that the son take revenge upon the father. Finally Krafft-Ebing gives still other cases: “A pastor, who would have been removed from his post on account of the pregnancy of a girl, was acquitted because he proved that he was a sleep walker and made it appear that in this condition (?) the forbidden relationship had taken place.” Also, “The case of a girl who was sexually mishandled in the somnambulistic condition. Only in the attacks had she consciousness of having submitted to sexual relations, but not in the free intervals.”

[10] One thinks of the halo in religious pictures, which indeed is nothing else than the shining of the light about the head.

[11] Cf. with this Krafft-Ebing, [l. c.] “Slight convulsions or cataleptic muscular rigidity sometimes precede the attacks.”

[12] Cf. [note 6], p. 163.

[13] In Rumania the folk belief prevails that children readily wet themselves in full moonlight. (Told by a patient.)

[14] They are both passionately devoted to sports, thus also endowed with a heightened muscle erotic.

[15] Phantasy of the mother's body? The moon's disk = the woman's body?

[16] A clear coitus phantasy.

[16a] Cf. Barrie: “Dear Brutus,” Act. II. for the dream daughter, who bears the name of the author's mother. See also “Margaret Ogilvy.” The dream daughter's apostrophe to the moon is also interesting in connection with the present study. Tr.

[17] One may also think of the fear of castration, associated with the threats of parents so very frequently made when children practice masturbation.

[18] Literally, “Moonsick.” [Tr.]

[19] Has not the bringing in of these animals and of the word mooncalves a hidden closeness of meaning? The repetition twice of the same motive, the analogy with the case at the beginning which I analyzed, and at last the fact that Lena, when she looked at the stars, wanted to see a farmhouse where some one was just driving out the calves, all this gives food for thought.

[20] According to my psychoanalytic experience children who cling so to inanimate things see in them either sexual symbols or those things were once objects of their secret sexual enjoyment. It may happen, for example, that such a child falls in love with the furniture, the walls of the room, yes, even a closet, stays there by the hour, kisses the walls, tells them its joys and sorrows and hangs them with all sorts of pictures. One very often sees children talking with inanimate things. They are embarrassed and break off at once if surprised by their elders. If there were not something forbidden behind this, there would be no ground for denying what they are doing, the more so since in fairy tales beasts, plants and also inanimate things speak with mankind and with one another without the child taking offense at it. The latter first becomes confused by the same action when he is pilfering from the tree of knowledge and has something sexual to hide. Hug-Hellmuth has convincingly demonstrated the erotic connection of the child's enthusiasm for plants as well as the different synesthesias. (See her study, “Über Farbenhören,” Imago, Vol. I, pp. 218 ff. Abstracted in Psa. Rev., Vol. II, No. 1, January, 1915.)

[21] One thinks of Eisener's panegyric: “Before her clear look confusion cannot exist, the coarse word of insolence sinks back unspoken into the shame filled breast. The brightness of a lost paradise shines from her eyes upon the fallen bringing pain and warning, the consolation of eternal pity smiles upon the penitent.”

[22] Like Otto Ludwig himself.

[23] The well-known psychic overcompensation in congenital organic inferiority.

[24] Cf. with this also the interesting passage … “the passionate self accusations, in torturing himself with which he found comfort a short time before.”

[25] Cf. with this especially Ernst Jentsch, “Das Pathologische bei Otto Ludwig,” “Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens,” published by L. Löwenfeld, No. 90.

[26] Cf. here the poet's words: “It is strange that nature is personified for me, that I not only live in her, but as one human being with another, exchanging, not merely receiving, thoughts and feelings, and even so, that different places become as individual to me, distinct from others and, as it were, transformed in consciousness, so that I not only feel that they effect an influence upon me but it seems to me as if I work upon them, and the forms, as they appear to me, show the traces of this influence.” Further: “I … who stood even in a wonderful mutual understanding with mountain and flora, because the kingdom of love was not to be restrained.…”

[27] “Rhapsodies over the Employment of the Psychical Method of Treatment for Mental Disturbances.” See Critical Historical Review by W. A. White, Journ. Nerv. and Ment. Dis., Vol. 43, No. 1. [Tr.]

[28] It is significant to compare here the Consul Brutus, who permitted the execution of his sons.

[29] Otto Rank, “Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage,” 1912, Franz Deuticke.

[30] “Heinrich von Kleist. Eine pathographisch-psychologische Studie,” 1910, J. F. Bergmann.

[31] [L. c.]

[32] It is now plainly understood that the prince can name among the dear ones who appear to him the elector and the electress, that is his mother, but not the third, who is merely a split-off from the latter, at bottom identical with her.

[33] I cite this according to “Die Quellen des Shakespeare,” by Karl Simrock, 2d edition, 1870.

[34] The words of Holinshed's chronicle.

[35] One notes the emptiness of this passage. She could scarcely have said much less, if she wished to comfort him. And yet this passage is always quoted by those authors who accept love on the part of Lady Macbeth for her husband as the driving motive for her action. Indeed, Friedrich Theodor Vischer himself does not shrink from an interpolation and translates the passage: Lady Macbeth (“caressingly”)—“Come, come, my noble lord, remove thy wrinkles, smooth thy gloomy brow, be jovial this evening, well-disposed toward thy guests.” And although the original English text contains no word for “caressingly,” yet Vischer gives this commentary: “His wife's answer to him must be spoken on the stage with an altogether tender accent. She embraces him and strokes his forehead.” (Shakespeare-Vorträge, Vol. 2, pp. 36, 102.)

[36] This is not without significance as a direct precipitating cause, although naturally not the true source of her night wandering.

[37] A second still more important motivation for the nightly visit I will discuss later.

[38] Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by A. A. Brill. The Macmillan Company, London, New York, 4th edition, p. 218.

[39] Holinshed's chronicle lays emphasis upon this: “She … burned with an inextinguishable desire to bear the name of queen.”

[40] Freud, [l. c.], p. 219.

[41] Freud, [l. c.], pp. 215, 216.

[42] Going back into Shakespeare's own life gives further illumination and foundation for Lady Macbeth's behavior in the sleep walking scene. The reader may already have secretly thought that those little tendernesses on the part of ordinary parents hardly enter into consideration in the case of a thane's daughter. It may be said in answer to this that Shakespeare often, as in the presentation of ancient scenes, put without scruple the environment of his own time in place of the historical setting. And according to the above he would be quite likely to utilize with Lady Macbeth recollections from the Stratford childhood.

[43] Otto Rank in his book, “Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage,” furnishes a beautiful and convincing example of such repression: It comes from a second drama based on a king's murder, “Julius Cæsar.” I quote from the author's words: “A heightened significance and at the same time an incontrovertible conclusiveness is given to our whole conception and interpretation of the son relationship of Brutus to Cæsar by the circumstance that in the historical source, which Shakespeare evidently used and which he followed almost word for word, namely in Plutarch, it is shown that Cæsar considered Brutus his illegitimate son. In this sense Cæsar's outcry, which has become a catch-word, may be understood, which he may have uttered again and again when he saw Brutus pressing upon his body with drawn sword, ‘And you too my son Brutus?’ With Shakespeare the wounded Cæsar merely calls out, ‘Et tu Brute! Then fall, Cæsar!’ Shakespeare has set aside this son relationship of Brutus to Cæsar, though doubtless known to the poet, in his working out of the traditional sources. Not only is there deep psychic ground for the modifications to which the poet subjects the historical and traditional circumstances and characters or the conceptions of his predecessor, but also for the omissions from the sources. These originate from the repressive tendency toward the exposure of impulses which work painfully and which are restrained as a result of the repression, and this was doubtless the case with Shakespeare in regard to his strongly affective father complex.” Rank has in the same work demonstrated that this father complex runs through all of Shakespeare's dramatic work, from his first work, “Titus Andronicus,” down to his very last tragedy. I cannot go into detail on this important point for my task here is merely to explain Lady Macbeth's sleep walking, but any one who is interested may find overwhelming abundance of evidence in Rank's book on incest (Chapter 6). It is not only that I have introduced Shakespeare's strong father complex here to make comprehensible Lady Macbeth's sleep walking, but his own chief complex stood affectively in the foreground, and was worked out, at the same time, as Macbeth.

[44] I also recall that it is in fact she who expresses Duncan's character as father, “Had he not so resembled my father.…”