Frau E. Förster-Nietzsche, the poet's sister, told me, in reply to my inquiry, that Nietzsche took up Just. Kerner between the age of twelve and fifteen, when stopping with his grandfather, Pastor Oehler, in Pobler, but certainly never afterwards. It could never have been the poet's intention to commit a plagiarism from a ship's log; if this had been the case, he would certainly have omitted the very prosaic "to shoot rabbits," which was, moreover, quite unessential to the situation. In the poetical sketch of Zarathustra's journey into Hell there was obviously interpolated, half or wholly unconsciously, that forgotten impression from his youth.
This is an instance which shows all the peculiarities of cryptomnesia. A quite unessential detail, which deserves nothing but speedy forgetting, is reproduced with almost verbal fidelity, whilst the chief part of the narrative is, one cannot say altered, but recreated quite distinctively. To the distinctive core, the idea of the journey to Hell, there is added a detail, the old, forgotten impression of a similar situation. The original is so absurd that the youth, who read everything, probably skipped through it, and certainly had no deep interest in it. Here we get the required minimum of associated links, for we cannot easily conceive a greater jump, than from that old, absurd story to Nietzsche's consciousness in the year 1883. If we picture to ourselves Nietzsche's mood at the time when "Zarathustra" was composed,[113] and think of the ecstasy that at more than one point approached the pathological, we shall comprehend the abnormal reminiscence. The second of the two possibilities mentioned, the acceptance of some object, not itself uninteresting, in a state of dispersion or half interest from lack of understanding, and its cryptomnesic reproduction we find chiefly in somnambulists; it is also found in the literary chronicles dealing with dying celebrities.[114]
Amid the exhaustive selection of these phenomena we are chiefly concerned with talking in a foreign tongue, the so-called glossolalia. This phenomenon is mentioned everywhere when it is a question of similar ecstatic conditions. In the New Testament, in the Acta Sanctorum,[115] in the Witchcraft Trials, more recently in the Prophetess of Prevorst, in Judge Edmond's daughter Laura, in Flournoy's Helen Smith. The last is unique from the point of view of investigation; it is found also in Bresler's[116] case, which is probably identical with Blumhardt's[117] Gottlieben Dittus. As Flournoy shows, glossolalia is, so far as it really is independent speech, a cryptomnesic phenomenon, [Greek: Kat' exochên]. The reader should consult Flournoy's most interesting exposition.
In our case glossolalia was only once observed, when the only understandable words were the scattered variations on the word "vena." The source of this word is clear. A few days previously the patient had dipped into an anatomical atlas for the study of the veins of the face, which were given in Latin. She had used the word "vena" in her dreams, as happens occasionally to normal persons. The remaining words and sentences in a foreign language betray, at the first glance, their derivation from French, in which the patient was somewhat fluent. Unfortunately I am without the more accurate translations of the various sentences, because the patient would not give them; but we may hold that it was a phenomenon similar to Helen Smith's Martian language. Flournoy found that the Martian language was nothing but a childish translation from French; the words were changed but the syntax remained the same. Even more probable is the view that the patient simply ranged next to each other meaningless words that rang strangely, without any true word-formation;[118] she borrowed certain characteristic sounds from French and Italian and combined them into a kind of language, just as Helen Smith completed the lacunæ in the real Sanscrit words by products of her own resembling that language. The curious names of the mystical system can be reduced, for the most part, to known roots. The writer vividly recalls the botanical schemes found in every school atlas; the internal resemblance of the relationship of the planets to the sun is also pretty clear; we shall not be going astray if we see in the names reminiscences from popular astronomy. Thus can be explained the names Persus, Fenus, Nenus, Sirum, Surus, Fixus, and Pix, as the childlike distortions of Perseus, Venus, Sirius and Fixed Star, analogous to the Vena variations. Magnesor vividly recalls Magnetism, whose mystic significance the patient knew from the Prophetess of Prevorst. In Connesor, the contrary to Magnesor, the prefix "con" is probably the French "contre." Hypnos and Hyfonismus recall hypnosis and hypnotism (German hypnotismus), about which there are the most superstitious ideas circulating in lay circles. The most used suffixes in "us" and "os" are the signs by which as a rule people decide the difference between Latin and Greek. The other names probably spring from similar accidents to which we have no clues. The rudimentary glossolalia of our case has not any title to be a classical instance of cryptomnesia, for it only consisted in the unconscious use of various impressions, partly optical, party acoustic, and all very close at hand.
2. The cryptomnesic image arrives at consciousness through the senses (as a hallucination). Helen Smith is the classic example of this kind. I refer to the case mentioned on the date "18 Mars."[119]
3. The image arrives at consciousness by motor automatism. H. Smith had lost her valuable brooch, which she was anxiously looking for everywhere. Ten days later her guide Leopold informed her by means of the table where the brooch was. Thus informed, she found it at night-time in the open field, covered by sand.[120] Strictly speaking, in cryptomnesia there is not any additional creation in the true sense of the word, since the conscious memory experiences no increase of its function, but only an enrichment of its content. By the automatism certain regions are merely made accessible to consciousness in an indirect way, which were formerly sealed against it. But the unconscious does not thereby accomplish any creation which exceeds the capacity of consciousness qualitatively or quantitatively. Cryptomnesia is only an apparent additional creation, in contrast to hypermnesia, which actually represents an increase of function.[121]
We have spoken above of a receptivity of the unconscious greater than that of the consciousness, chiefly in regard to the simple attempts at thought-reading of numbers. As mentioned, not only our somnambulist but a relatively large number of normal persons are able to guess from the tremors lengthy thought-sequences, if they are not too complicated. These experiments are, so to speak, the prototype of those rarer and incomparably more astonishing cases of intuitive knowledge displayed at times by somnambulists.[122] Zschokke[123] in his "Introspection" has shown us that these phenomena do not belong only to the domain of somnambulism, but occur among non-somnambulic persons. The formation of such knowledge seems to be arrived at in various ways: first and foremost there is the fineness, already noted, of unconscious perceptions; then must be emphasised the importance of the enormous suggestibility of somnambulists. The somnambulist not only incorporates every suggestive idea to some extent, but actually lives in the suggestion, in the person of his doctor or observer, with that abandonment characteristic of the suggestible hysteric. The relation of Frau Hauffe to Kerner is a striking example of this. That in such cases there is a high degree of association-concordance can cause no astonishment; a condition which Richet might have taken more account of in his experiments in thought-transference. Finally there are cases of somnambulic additional creative work which are not to be explained solely by hyperæsthesia of the unconscious activity of the senses and association-concordance, but presuppose a highly developed intellectual activity of the unconscious. The deciphering of the purposive tremors demand an extreme sensitiveness and delicacy of feeling, both psychological and physiological, to combine the individual perceptions into a complete unity of thought, if it is at all permissible to make an analogy between the processes of cognition in the realm of the unconscious and the conscious. The possibility must always be considered that in the unconscious, feeling and concept are not clearly separated, perhaps even are one. The intellectual elevation which certain somnambulists display in ecstasy, though a rare thing, is none the less one that has sometimes been observed.[124] I would designate the scheme composed by our patient as just one of those pieces of creative work that exceed the normal intelligence. We have already seen whence one portion of this scheme probably came. A second source is no doubt the life-crisis of Frau Hauffe, portrayed in Kerner's book. The external form seems to be determined by these adventitious facts. As already observed in the presentation of the case, the idea of dualism arises from the conversations picked up piecemeal by the patient during those dreamy states occurring after her ecstasies. This exhausts my knowledge of the sources of S. W.'s creations. Whence arose the root-idea the patient is unable to say. I naturally examined occultistic literature pertinent to the subject, and discovered a store of parallels with her gnostic system from different centuries scattered through all kinds of work mostly quite inaccessible to the patient. Moreover, at her youthful age, and with her surroundings, the possibility of any such study is quite excluded. A brief survey of the system in the light of her own explanations shows how much intelligence was used in its construction. How highly the intellectual work is to be estimated is a matter of opinion. In any case, considering her youth, her mentality must be regarded as quite extraordinary.