[23]. “Lehrbuch der Psychologie,” X, 26.
[24]. James Mark Baldwin: “Thought and Things, or Genetic Logic.”
[25]. In this connection I must refer to an experiment which Eberschweiler (Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, 1908) has made at my request, which discloses the remarkable fact that in an association experiment the intra-psychic association is influenced by phonetic considerations (“Untersuchungen über den Einfluss der sprachlichen Komponente auf die Assoziation,” Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, 1908).
[26]. So at least this form of thought appears to Consciousness. Freud says in this connection (“The Interpretation of Dreams,” tr. by Brill, p. 418): “It is demonstrably incorrect to state that we abandon ourselves to an aimless course of ideas when we relinquish our reflections, and allow the unwilled ideas to emerge. It can be shown that we are able to reject only those end-presentations known to us, and that immediately upon the cessation of these unknown or, as we inaccurately say, unconscious end-presentations come into play which now determine the course of the unwilled ideas—a thought without end-presentation cannot be produced through any influence we can exert on our own psychic life.”
[27]. “Grundriss der Psychologie,” p. 464.
[28]. Behind this assertion stand, first of all, experiences taken from the field of the normal. The undirected thinking is very far removed from “meditation,” and especially so as far as readiness of speech is concerned. In psychological experiments I have frequently found that the subjects of the investigation—I speak only of cultivated and intelligent people, whom I have allowed to indulge in reveries, apparently unintentionally and without previous instruction—have exhibited affect-expressions which can be registered experimentally. But the basic thought of these, even with the best of intentions, they could express only incompletely or even not at all. One meets with an abundance of similar experiences in association experiments and psychoanalysis—indeed, there is hardly an unconscious complex which has not at some time existed as a phantasy in consciousness.
However, more instructive are the experiences from the domain of psychopathology. But those arising in the field of the hysterias and neuroses, which are characterized by an overwhelming transference tendency, are rarer than the experiences in the territory of the introversion type of neuroses and psychoses, which constitute by far the greater number of the mental derangements, at least the collected Schizophrenic group of Bleuler. As has already been indicated by the term “introversion,” which I briefly introduced in my study, “Konflikte der kindlichen Seele,” pp. 6 and 10, these neuroses lead to an overpowering autoerotism (Freud). And here we meet with this unutterable purely phantastic thinking, which moves in inexpressible symbols and feelings. One gets a slight impression of this when one seeks to examine the paltry and confused expressions of these people. As I have frequently observed, it costs these patients endless trouble and effort to put their phantasies into common human speech. A highly intelligent patient, who interpreted such a phantasy piece by piece, often said to me, “I know absolutely with what it is concerned, I see and feel everything, but it is quite impossible for me to find the words to express it.” The poetic and religious introversion gives rise to similar experiences; for example, Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans viii:26—“For we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered.”
[29]. Similarly, James remarks, “The great difference, in fact, between that simple kind of rational thinking which consists in the concrete objects of past experience merely suggesting each other, and reason distinctively so called, is this, that whilst the empirical thinking is only reproductive, reasoning is productive.”
[30]. Compare the impressive description of Petrarch’s ascent of Mt. Ventoux, by Jacob Burckhardt (“Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien,” 1869, p. 235):
“One now awaits a description of the view, but in vain, not because the poet is indifferent to it, but, on the contrary, because the impression affects him all too strongly. His entire past life, with all its follies, passes before him; he recalls that it is ten years ago to-day that he, as a young man, left Bologna, and he turns a yearning glance toward Italy. He opens a book—‘Confessions of St. Augustine,’ his companion at that time—and his eye falls upon this passage in the tenth chapter: ‘and the people went there and admired the high mountains, the wide wastes of the sea and the mighty downward rushing streams, and the ocean and the courses of the stars, and forgot themselves.’ His brother, to whom he reads these words, cannot comprehend why, at this point, he closes the book and is silent.”