It is widely felt that the psychoanalyst would weaken his own hold on the strong typically analytic principles through which painful conflicts are to be removed if he should form the habit of dealing with ethical issues, and talking of "duties", instead of stimulating his patients to the discovery of resistances and repressions, even of repression the origin of which is not to be found within the conscious life. Yet,—parallel, as one might say, with this clear-cut standard of professional psychoanalytic obligation, the force of which I recognize,—it has to be admitted that there are certain fairly definite limitations to the usefulness of psychoanalysis. As one of these limitations, well-pronounced symptoms of egoism, taking the form of narcissism, are to be reckoned. These symptoms are not easily analyzed away. But if one asks oneself, or asks one's patients, what conditions might, if they had been present from the outset, have prevented this narcistic outcome (Jehovah type, etc.), the influence that suggests itself—looming up in large shape—is just this broad sense of ethical obligation to which repeated reference has here been made. If these patients could have had it brought home to them in childhood that they belonged, not to themselves conceived of narrowly (that is, as separate individuals) but only to themselves conceived of broadly as representatives of a series of communities taken in the largest sense, the outcome that happened might perhaps have been averted.
And what might have happened may still happen. What is to be done? Each physician must decide this for himself. He should be able both to do his best as a psychoanalyst and at the same time help the patient to free himself from that sort of repression in consequence of which he is unable to see his own best possibilities. But he cannot do this unless he has trained himself to see and feel in himself the outlines of this vision any more than he could help the patient to rid himself of an infantile complex if he did not appreciate what this complex means. We must trust ourselves, as physicians, with deadly weapons, and with deadly responsibilities, and we ought to be well harried by our consciences if we should do injustice, in using them, either to our scientific or our philosophic training.
ASPECTS OF DREAM LIFE[*]
[*] It should be stated as possibly bearing on the interpretation of the dreams recorded by the author, who is well known to me, that she is the subject of an intense and unusual obsession of hatred of an obtrusively pathological character against a relative. The psycho-pathology of the obsession, of which I have an intimate knowledge, has not been determined. A reasonable interpretation is that the main etiological factor is jealousy. She has undergone prolonged psychoanalytic treatment by a skilled psycho-analyst without improvement of the obsession and without revealing a satisfactory explanation of its pathology. To what extent the contents of the dreams have been determined or coloured by culture acquired by this treatment and by the study of Freudian doctrines is also a question deserving of consideration.—Editor.
The Contribution of a Woman
IT is an easy matter to accept upon authority a given scientific theory and bring to its support certain selected evidence, but quite another to carefully observe and report phenomena, inspired, influenced and guided indeed by the scientific-theory but drawing conclusions no wider or deeper than individual insight warrants. Scientific knowledge advances not by ready acceptance of theories but by original observation and experiment and the following study of dreams is offered as fulfilling in some degree the latter requirement. While there is a certain familiarity on the part of the writer with the general theory advanced by Freud and with his principles of interpretation, there is no acquaintance at first hand with his Die Traumdeutung, the reading of which has been postponed lest there be excess of influence.
No apology is offered for this invasion of the domain of psychology by a layman. The laboratory of the mind is open to all and he who has missed conventional training may yet chance upon valuable facts and their interpretation. Neither is apology offered for the intimate nature of the data reported. Belonging as dreams do to the most personal and private life of the individual it is nevertheless true that continued and careful study of this form of mentation insensibly alters one's attitude so that at length the dream appears as a fact of nature, impersonal and objective.
It is a common remark that if one tells his dreams their number will increase but this increase is probably only apparent. With attention the products of the dream-self become more accessible until one who is practiced in introspection can raise the number of his remembered dreams from one in two or three nights to five, ten, or even fourteen in a single night. Even at this maximum of remembrance one feels that but a fraction of the mind's nocturnal activity is recalled. Images emerge in consciousness and fall back into obscurity before the waking thought can grasp them. Or it may be more accurate to say that upon awakening consciousness rises from level to level. It sometimes happens that when first awake I recall several dreams which vanish utterly as a sudden shifting of consciousness occurs. Then, upon this new level, a new set of dreams appears. There is reason to believe that in thinking again of a dream which has once been recalled it is not the original dream experience which comes to mind but the copy made in the waking consciousness when it first emerged. On the other hand visions recognized as dreams belonging to a long past time occasionally float into the mind giving rise to the suspicion that they have not before reached the waking consciousness. It is possible that all dreams are recorded in the depths of the mind, themselves influencing and merging with later dreams.
The number of my dreams recalled and written out during three years closely approaches five thousand and without doubt the total number far exceeds this. I am inclined to the belief that constantly, by day as well as by night, we are dreaming; that unnoticed and independent trains of thought are carried on. At times when resting if I fall into an abstracted state—not of set purpose—I find myself in the midst of a stream of thought appearing, for the moment, perfectly natural, familiar and intelligible, as if I knew the beginning and end of the matter. But only for a moment will consciousness remain at this lower level. There is a sudden return to the normal plane, the passage fades from memory and I wonder what on earth it was all about. These phases of subconscious activity differ from dreams proper in the absence of visual images. The ideas are embodied in words, heard with the mind one might say. The source may be the same as that of the night visions but it is evident that during the day the incessant stimulation of the eye from without leaves no opportunity for the emergence of the secondary visual images pertaining to subconscious ideas, which, we are told by Dr. Morton Prince, furnish the perceptual elements of the dream. The other senses are sometimes represented. Often we are performing, or trying to perform, some action. But dreams are predominantly visual. Goethe has said, "I believe men only dream that they may not cease to see."
An account of the probable genesis of the memory images not only furnishes a clue to the mechanism of dreaming but to the underlying conditions as well. The lowest forms of life possess no image-forming power. They have no sense organs; sensation is diffused over the entire form and undifferentiated. Gradually, as the scale of life is ascended, certain parts of the organisms become specially sensitive to certain stimuli and eventually individual organs give separate and distinct reports of phenomena. A substance hitherto merely felt, is seen, heard, smelled, tasted. The passage from sensation to perception occurs when but one or two of the sense organs are stimulated by an object, yet, because of nervous connections established during former more close and complete experience of the object the remaining sense organs are faintly roused, sending into consciousness copies of former sensations. Thus the whole is present to mind while but a part to sense. In the developing brain the store of memory images of various kinds would rapidly increase and these images would come at length to have a more or less independent existence. It is probable that the next step in the making of mind was the synthesis of one set of sense impressions to form an idea of the object, the first abstraction, and thenceforth a sensation gave rise to an idea. There is at this stage no impulse to explain sensations, but involuntarily, from the store of memory images, and from the reservoir of ideas above, emerges a representation of the exciting object. If this is one to which the organism is accustomed the resulting complex in the highest nerve centers fits the subject, but as evolution proceeds and environment and capacity for sensation grow more complex, new stimulations occur. In the absence of the capacity for knowledge and understanding of the object the developing mind, true to its law, brings forward mental images most nearly related—those which fit in one or two respects,—and thus we have the birth of analogy, "the inference of a further degree of resemblance from an observed degree of resemblance."