[145] It is interesting to note that hallucinations may also be symbolic. Thus the Psychical Research Society's Committee on Hallucinations recognised a symbolic group, and recorded, for instance, the case of a man who, when his child lies dying, sees a blue flame in the air and hears a voice say, 'That's his soul' (Proceedings Society for Psychical Research, August 1894, p. 125).
[146] Maeder states that the tendency to symbolism in dreams and similar modes of psychic activity is due to 'vague thinking in a condition of diminished attention.' This is, however, an inadequate statement and misses the central point.
[147] In the other spheres in which symbolism most tends to appear, the same or allied conditions exist. In hallucinations, which (as Parish and others have shown) tend to occur in hypnagogic or sleep-like states, the conditions are clearly the same. The symbolism of an art, and notably music, is due to the very conditions of the art, which exclude any appeal to other senses. The primitive mind reaches symbolism through a similar condition of things, coming as the result of ignorance and undeveloped powers of apperception. In insanity these powers are morbidly disturbed or destroyed, with the same result.
[148] The magnification we experience in dreams is manifested in their emotional aspects and in the emotional transformation of actual sensory stimuli, from without or from within the organism. The size of objects recalled by dreaming memory usually remains unchanged, and if changed it seems to be more usually diminished. 'Lilliputian hallucinations,' as they are termed by Leroy, who has studied them (Revue de Psychiatrie, 1909, No. 8), in which diminutive, and frequently coloured, people are observed, may also occasionally occur in alcoholic and chloral intoxication, in circular insanity, and in various other morbid mental conditions. They are usually agreeable in character.
[149] Sollier, 'L'Autoscopie Interne,' Revue Philosophique, January 1903. Sollier deals with the objections made to the reality of the phenomenon.
[150] 'Many people,' writes Dr. Marie de Manacéïne (Sleep, 1897, p. 294), 'when threatened by a gastric or intestinal attack dream of seeing fish. The late Professor Sergius Botkine told me that he had found this coincidence in his own case, and I have myself several times found it in the case of a young girl who is well known to me. Some have supposed that the sleeping consciousness receives an impression of the elongated shape of the stomach or intestine; but such a supposition is easier to make than to prove.' Scherner associated dreams of fish with sensations arising from the bladder, and here also it may be said that we are concerned with a fish-like viscus. Greenwood (Imagination in Dreams, p. 195) stated that he had always been subject, at intervals of months or years, to a recurrent dream in which he would see a river swarming with fish that were finally piled in a horrible sweltering mass; this dream always left a feeling of 'squalid horror,' but he was never able to ascertain its cause and significance.
[151] Freud states (Die Traumdeutung, p. 233) that he knows a case in which (as in the Song of Songs) columns and pillars appear in dreams as symbols of the legs, and doors as symbols of the openings of the body.
[152] Freud, Die Traumdeutung, p. 66. This work, published in 1900, is the chief and most extensive statement of Freud's views. A shorter statement is embodied in a little volume of the 'Grenzfrägen' Series, Ueber den Traum, 1901. A brief exposition of Freud's position is given by Dr. A. Maeder of Zurich in 'Essai d'Interpretation de Quelques Rêves,' Archives de Psychologie, April 1907; as also by Ernest Jones ('Freud's Theory of Dreams,' Review of Neurology and Psychiatry, March 1910, and American Journal of Psychology, April 1910). For Freud's general psychological doctrine, see Brill's translation of 'Freud's Selected Papers on Hysteria,' 1909. There have been many serious criticisms of Freud's methods. As an example of such criticism, accompanying an exposition of the methods, reference may be made to Max Isserlin's 'Die Psychoanalytische Methode Freuds,' Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, Bd. 1. Heft i. 1910. A judicious and qualified criticism of Freud's psychotherapeutic methods is given by Löwenfeld ('Zum gegenwärtigen Stande der Psychotherapeutie,' Münchener medizinische Wochenschrift, Nos. 3 and 4, 1910).
[153] I have set forth Freud's views of hysteria, now regarded as almost epoch-making in character, in Studies of the Psychology of Sex, vol. i. 3rd ed. pp. 219 et seq.
[154] This is supported by the fact that in waking reverie, or day-dreams, wishes are obviously the motor force in building up visionary structures. Freud attaches great importance to reverie, for he considers that it furnishes the key to the comprehension of dreams (e.g. Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 2nd series, pp. 138 et seq., 197 et seq.). But it must be remembered that day-dreaming is not real dreaming, which takes place under altogether different physiological conditions, although it may quite fairly be claimed that day-dreaming represents a state intermediate between ordinary waking consciousness and consciousness during sleep.