DECISIVE VALUE OF CONTEXT AND APPERCEPTION MASS
To Freudians such statements seem paradoxical, to say the least; but the simple fact is that never is it correct to assume, as they do, a transcendental connection between a symbol C and a signification A, as if the Unconscious Mind disposed of ready-made symbols of its own. Barring words used in their proper sense, and similar borrowings from waking habit, the so-called symbols in dreams are essentially impromptu fabrications, in which the association is not a direct causal connection between A and C, but a mediate association involving a third element, which psycho-analysts usually leave out of account.
An element of this kind, overlooked in the formulation of a supposedly simple connection between cause A and effect C, is labeled Hidden Z, by Alfred Sedgwick. The Hidden Z in this case is what James calls the topic-of-thought, Ebbinghaus the set-of-the-mind, and others apperception-mass. In rhetoric it is familiar as context. It has an important place in thought and speech. For example, when I utter the phrase—Pas de lieu Rhone qne nous—the idea obtained is different according to whether your language apperception-mass is set for French or for English. It may have happened that while I was uttering the French nonsense phrase you were hearing it as the English saying. Similarly, the traveler in Egypt may correctly apperceive the meaning of architectural forms of temples as phallic; whereas it would be manifestly out of context to do so in connection with churchly edifices of the Gothic type, which do not represent the generative powers of nature, as do the former.
Conversely, the Freudian disciple may apperceive, in error, a sexual meaning in a dream, when the dreamer's mind contained no reference to this topic. Hence, the interpreter must make sure that his own apperception-mass is attuned to that of the dreamer in the given case. That is, one must be free from apperceptive bias. One must reject all hastily formed causal laws to the effect that C is the sign of A in every case. Otherwise absurd conclusions must result, as in Freud's theory of the birth-phantasies. For the same "symbol" may proceed from entirely different significations according to the set-of-the-mind or apperception-mass. The following analogy of Ebbinghaus puts the matter clearly: "When a train enters a large station there are many paths over which it might pass; but its actual path depends on the position which was given to the switches immediately before the train's arrival."[19] That is why one needs to detect, experimentally, the dream material that really represents the set-of-the-mind, and thence the significant relations called MEANING.
In this connection, I published a year ago the dream of a child of six, containing seemingly typical phallic symbols.[20] Not one of them could be correlated with a sexual context; but every one was concretely shown to have reached its position in the dream through the influence of an entirely different set-of-the-mind. It is, therefore, not safe to assume stereotyped meanings in dreams.
METAPHYSICAL CONCEPTIONS IN PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
There are three reasons why psycho-analysts do not more often encounter this variable element, this Hidden Z. First, such dreams as they elect to deal with, are mostly sexual. Second, they do not apply the methods of individual differences which have been made so familiar and so useful by Professor Cattell in this country.[*] Thirdly, their type of culture leads them to study the dream extensively rather than intensively and all the while in apparent disregard of those conceptions of physiological psychology which we now associate with the work of Wundt, of Ladd and of Woodworth, and with the psychopathology of Prince.
[*] The writer's present psychophysiological theory of dreams was first broached in public, at a series of meetings on the subject of Individual Differences, held in honor of Professor Cattell, at Columbia University, in the Department of Psychology, in April, 1914.
To be sure, Jung's recent utterances before the Psycho-Medical Society of London, demonstrate his dissatisfaction with the Freudian conception of the dream; but he is still far from those studies of specific mental and nervous dispositions to which psychology has slowly come, and for which we now have a tool in the shape of Prince's conception of the neurogram. In psycho-analytic work a more vague use of "dream material" is preferred and it is only by good luck that the real settings-of-ideas come into account. Jung, no less than Freud, has forgotten that philosophy has become mechanistic since Descartes'[21] famous year of 1637, and Jung would throw us back to the early seventeenth century, with his energic conception of the Libido, or the Ur-libido, now called Horme and sometimes merely elan vital. And this, fifty years after Herbert Spencer's tremendous emphasis on specific studies in reflex-action![22]
Fontenelle, the wittiest of Cartesians, writing in 1686, gives us a classic tableau of this sort of speculative temper. [23] He pictures worthies like Pythagoras, Heraclitus; Empedocles, as being invited to witness Lulli's opera "Phaeton," at the Paris Odeon. In characteristic fashion, each in turn tries to explain the spectacular aerial flight of the actor in the title-role, from the floor of the stage to the ceiling. One says, that Phaeton is able to fly by the potency of certain numbers of which he is composed; another, that a secret virtue carries him aloft; still another, that Phaeton travels through the air because he abhors to leave a vacuum in the upper corner of the stage; and so on, with a hundred and one speculations which, as Fontenelle remarks, should have ruined the reputation of antiquity. Finally, he pictures Descartes coming along and saying: "This actor is able to rise from the floor because he hangs by a cord, at the other end of which is a counterpoise, heavier than he, which is descending." This is mechanistic . . . If Freud and Jung had been of the party, can it be doubted that the one would have ascribed Phaeton's aviation to a wish-fulfilment of the flying-dream type, derived from a reminiscence of erotic motion-pleasure[24] in childhood, or that Jung, for his part, would have said Phaeton was levitated by the energic force of a sublimation of the Ur-Libido, alias elan vital, alias Horme!