To assume the greater ease of the first person singular, I should perhaps say in passing, or by way of apology, that if I appear somewhat unduly and indecently personal in my observations on the new psychology, it is a habit fastened upon me by a half year of indulgence in an orgy of such voluble self discussion and analysis as I had previously fondly fancied to exist only in young ladies’ boarding schools. Figure to yourself, if you can, the inevitable result of conversing about your “soul,” and unburdening all its secrets and reserves in tri-weekly sessions with an inquisitive stranger! The process is a throw-back to those unsophisticated days when the Knight of La Mancha and a group of other romantics, met for the first time by accident in a country inn, whiled away the long evening in the unrestrained and interminable narrations of their lives and loves, complacently revealing to one anothers’ sympathetic and, one would imagine, sometimes startled gaze, the secret springs of their existence.
The psychoanalytic process begins, I may explain, with such a relating of one’s personal history, occupying many hours, and covering all that one has ever done, said or thought. One starts with reminiscences of the nursery and the kindergarten, and passes on to a detailed description of the coloring, height and contour of one’s first love. As this, in the case of a woman, is supposed to be her father, it is necessary to pause for some time on the aspects of the paternal figure, which affect all her subsequent emotional reactions, according to the well-known course of the so-called “Oedipus complex.” This is the imposing designation for the generally observed preference for each other of mothers and sons and of fathers and daughters, a phenomenon that the new psychologists, who take the common place with a seriousness! deem worthy of the most painstaking examination and erudite elucidation. “The root complex” and “the family romance” are other alluring titles for this parental-filial relation. This sentiment is supposed to modify all the so-called “affective” life. If father happens to be tall and thin and blond, then daughter, having a “fixation” on him, is, for all time to come, particularly susceptible to the attractions of tall, thin, blond men of advanced years. The analyst inquires minutely into the shades of complexion of all the patient’s inamorati in a manner that recalls the familiar “I see a dark man coming over deep water” of the tea-leaves in the tea-cup stage of one’s experience.
After the patient has sternly and heroically resisted the temptation to invent in the interest of her own self-respect, and also in mitigation of the ill-concealed contempt of the masculine practitioner for the paucity of her experience, a few more numerous and more romantic emotional episodes than have actually been doled out to her by a penurious fate, and has completed the short and simple annals of her poverty-stricken heart history, and after the incredulous inquisitor has become at last convinced that there is indeed nothing more to be told, this chapter is closed, and then begins the régime of dreams and “free association.”
The interpreting of one’s dreams seems to furnish the doctor with a secret source of amusement that he tries in vain to dissemble, and as one is only too glad to make up to him in some measure for the hours of obvious boredom that he has endured while listening to one’s apologia pro vita sua, one indulges him by forming the careful habit of grasping firmly by the tail every elusive dream as it tries to whisk around the corner of consciousness during one’s first waking moments, pulling it painfully and resistingly back for close and detailed scrutiny, and laboriously committing to memory and subsequently describing its every feature and function at the next matinée performance at which one makes an appearance.
The chastening discovery of the dreamer who relates his dreams to the professional interpreter is that all that has been carefully withheld from revelation in the related autobiography, is disclosed with the most embarrassing crudity, and that secret sins of which one was quite unconscious are displayed with mortifying clarity. The dream is a mechanism for letting the cat out of the bag, all kinds of strange cats, of the existence of which their harborer was often unaware.
Dreams seem to reveal the dreamer as a hypocritical, evasive, self-deluding coward, unable to face the commonest facts of life, or to call a spade anything less innocent than a parasol, or even to confront his own friends and acquaintances, except by forcing them to masquerade under some so-called “surrogate” form.
My previous personal experience had led me to identify a surrogate as some kind of judge, but I soon learned that this narrow and technical meaning must be replaced by the more general signification of “substitute,” though why the word substitute should not be considered good enough to use in this connection, I never learned. This is but one of the many examples of the perverse preference of the technicians of the new science for strange distortions of words with well recognized and frequently quite different meanings in common parlance. It comes as somewhat of a shock to the beginner to hear all emotion summarily classified as “sexual,” normal filial or parental affection designated as “incestuous,” friendship as “homosexual,” self-respect as “narcissistic” and the life force or will to power as “the libido.” Soon, however, one becomes as resigned to this strong language as to the evolutionary hypothesis, and finds it a no more unpalatable thought that all emotion is derived from sex than that all human beings are descended from an apelike ancestor. That this common use of the exaggerated statement leaves no adequate expression for the more intense emotions fails to disturb a cult that apparently regards all differences of feeling as of degree rather than of kind.
The narration of dreams puts slight work on the dreamer, and sorely taxes the mental resources and the ingenuity of the interpreter, but the real labor, the strenuous and unremitting toil to which the unhappy victim of this ritual is subjected by a pitiless practitioner is in the rigors of what goes by the disingenuous name of “free association.” This may sound like some pleasant if not spicy and highly unconventional pastime, but is in fact and literally a procrustean bed of torture. The helpless patient is forced to remove her bonnet and shawl and recline upon a couch with her eyes closed. Her merciless tormentor retires to a comfortable armchair in a corner of the room. There, because he is out of sight of the patient, he is supposed, according to the workings of the mysterious masculine psychology, to be entirely removed from her consciousness, so that she can concentrate her mind on nothingness, just as if she were alone by the fireside. Then he starts in with something like the following initiation of the third degree: “What are your associations with the word authority?” You are supposed to respond to this irrelevant inquiry with something like the following idiotic emanations, “Government—Washington—the President—Mrs. Wilson—orchids—grandfather’s greenhouse,” and if you are entirely resigned to making a fool of yourself, and can abandon yourself to the spirit of this child’s play, this is what you finally learn to do, after many strenuous efforts to play the game, and the final attainment of a reasonable self-stultification.