[5] "The Interpretation of Dreams," 219.
[6] The dreams falling within this class (together with some others) appear to exhibit what is, at first sight at least, a puzzling exception to the general rule governing the formation of dreams which give expression to repressed tendencies, inasmuch as the obnoxious wish is gratified openly and undisguisedly instead of appearing in an indirect and symbolic form, as is usually the case. It would seem however, that this departure from the rule may to a large extent be explained and reconciled with the ordinary methods of repression by the following considerations:—(1) although the content of the wish appears directly in consciousness, it nevertheless fails (both during the dream and after waking) to be appreciated in its full significance for the mental life of the personality, i. e. there is no realisation of the fact that the dream represents in any way the fulfilment of a wish; there is present a sort of functional agnosia, in virtue of which the thought of the death is dissociated from its actual psychical concomitants, which alone can endow it with its full meaning; (2) in addition to this cognitive dissociation there is an emotional substitution, the emotion actually experienced being one of sorrow instead of one of joy, which the simple gratification of a wish would by itself most naturally occasion. This sorrow corresponds of course to the very genuine grief which would be felt at the conscious level in case of any real mishap to the relatives concerned and at the same time serves as an additional screen to hide the underlying hostile wish in the Unconscious; (3) on rarer occasions it would seem that the process of emotional substitution may be replaced by one of deëmotionalisation which prevents the cognitive elements from calling up any of the feelings which would normally accompany them; thus the death of a near relative will appear not as a sorrowful (or as it would be at certain levels of the Unconscious, a joyful) event, but as one devoid of all affective significance or as one that is absurd, ridiculous or unthinkable.
[7] Or sometimes, in the case of women, the Electra complex; though the Electra myth gives a rather less complete expression of the combined love and hate tendencies in the female than is found in the Œdipus story for the corresponding tendencies of the male.
The whole subject of the manifestations of these complexes in legend and literature and in the mind of the poet and the artist is treated at length in Otto Rank's comprehensive and most valuable work "Das Inzestmotiv in Dichtung und Sage".
[8] This is a most important and far-reaching limitation. In order to avoid entering upon many difficult but weighty matters which are not strictly relevant to our present theme, we have here—and throughout the book—necessarily had to content ourselves with a somewhat one-sided and misleading portrayal of human psychic development as a whole. This deficiency is most marked with regard to the treatment of the great group of self-preserving and self-regarding tendencies, which we have only touched upon occasionally and of which we have nowhere attempted any adequate presentation. As a consequence of this, it must be borne in mind that from the point of view of general psychology, we have frequently laid too much stress upon the object-regarding tendencies (see below), to the relative neglect of much that is more primitive and fundamental in human nature. Our excuse must be that our subject naturally brings us into far closer touch with the social and (to use a convenient term of Ferenczi's) allo-erotic aspects of the mind than with those other aspects which are more intimately concerned with the individual as an independent microcosmic organism. To correct and amplify the inadequate conception of the human mind and of human mental development to which our present treatment might lead if taken by itself, the reader should consult Freud's "Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex" and his important paper "Zur Einführung des Narzißmus," Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, VI, 1. The works of Alfred Adler, though often both exaggerated and, especially in their English form, very nearly unreadable, contain some interesting material in this connection.
A very illuminating consideration of the problem with which we are immediately concerned at this point—the early development of object love in the child and the relations of this object love to the activities of the auto-erotic stage—will be found in a paper on the "Psychology of the New Born Infant" by David Forsyth. (To be published in the British Journal of Psychology).
[9] Cp. especially Freud, "Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex."
[10] "Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex," 80, 81.
[11] Among other reasons for the greater liability of women to neurosis, one of great importance is the transference, in the course of sexual development, of the chief seat of erotic sensibility from the clitoris to the vagina.
[12] "The Interpretation of Dreams," 219.