INTRODUCTION
“The interpretation of dreams,” says Professor Freud in one place, “is the royal road to a knowledge of the part the unconscious plays in the mental life.”
Even standing alone this statement is sufficiently striking; it is at once a theory and a challenge. But it does not stand alone. It comes at the end of many years of research among every class of mental diseases. It comes, therefore, with the authentication of experience. It is not to be lightly set aside; it claims our study; and the study of it will not go unrewarded. The short essay here translated by Dr. Eder is but an introduction to the vast field opened up by Professor Sigm. Freud and his colleagues. Already the journals of clinical psychology, normal or morbid, are full of the discussions of Professor Freud’smethods and results. There is a “Freud School.” That alone is a proof that the method is novel if not new. There are, of course, violent opponents and critical students. The opponents may provoke, but it is to the critical students that Professor Freud will prefer to speak. “The condemnation,” said Hegel, “that a great man lays upon the world is to force it to explain him.” Of a new method, either of research or of treatment—and the Freud method is both—the same may be said. It is certain that, whatever our prejudice against details may be, the theory of “psycho-analysis” and the treatment based upon it deserves, if only as a mental exercise, our critical consideration. But Professor Freud is not alone in the world of morbid psychology. Let me digress for a moment.
Over twenty years ago it was my special business to study and criticise several textbooks on insanity. To the study of these textbooks I came after many years of discipline in normal psychology and the relatedsciences. When I came to insanity proper, I found that practically not a single textbook made any systematic effort to show how the morbid symptoms we classified as “mental diseases” had their roots in the mental processes of the normal mind. In his small book, “Sanity and Insanity,” Dr. Charles Mercier did make an effort to lay out, as it were, the institutes of insanity, the normal groundwork out of which the insanities grew, the groups of ideas that to-day serve to direct our conduct and to-morrow lose their adjustment to any but a specially adapted environment. In his later works, particularly in “Psychology, Normal and Morbid,” Dr. Mercier has followed up the central ideas of the early study. All the more recent textbooks in English contain efforts in the same direction; but with a few striking exceptions they are studies rather of physical symptoms associated with mental processes than of morbid psychology proper. It was not until there came from across the Channel Dr. PierreJanet’s carefully elaborated studies on Hysteria that I realised what a wealth of psychological material had remained hidden in our asylums, in our nervous homes, even in our ordinary hospitals, and in the multitudes of strange cases that occur in private practice. Janet, a pupil of the Charcot School—Charcot, who madela Salpetrièrefamous—pushed the minute analysis of morbid mental states into regions practically hitherto untouched. He was not alone. His colleague, Professor Raymond, and others in France and Germany, all work with the same main ideas. Janet’s books read like romances. His studies on Psychological Automatism, the Mental State of Hystericals, Neuroses and Fixed Ideas, and many others on the part played by the unconscious, were such rich mines of fact and suggestion that Professor William James, in his “Principles of Psychology,” said of them: “All these facts taken together, form unquestionably the beginning of an inquiry which is destined to throw anew light into the very abysses of our nature.” Curiously, not in this country—the country of great psychologists, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Hartley, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Adam Smith, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Bain, Spencer, among the dead, and whole schools of distinguished psychologists among the living—not in this country, but in America, was the value of the new material seriously considered. Here and there, within recent years, in this country, Janet’s elaborate studies have not been fruitless; but I could not readily name any clinician in this country that has produced similar studies. It is to the continents of Europe and America, which in this field are in intimate touch, that we must go if we are to see the rich outgrowths of morbid psychology. I do not say that the work done by our English students of insanity is not, of its kind, as great and as important as any done in the world, but it is none the less true that, until a few years ago, the methods of Janet, Raymond,Bernheim, Beaunis, not to speak of Moll, Forel, and Oppenheim, were practically unstudied here. In America it has been entirely different. Even the names of the men are now familiar in our English magazines—Muensterberg, Morton Prince, Boris Sidis, Ernest Jones, J. Mark Baldwin, not to mention William James and Stanley Hall. It looks as if every new idea unearthed in the Old World is put to the test by someone in the new. Britain remains curiously cold.
It would be interesting to ask the reason. Is it our metaphysical training? Is it the failure of the philosophical schools to realize the value of all this new raw material of study? Is it, perhaps, the fear that “the unity of consciousness” may be endangered by the study of Double Personality, Multiple Personality, Dissociation of Consciousness, Dormant Complexes, Hysterias, Phobias, Obsessions, Psychoneuroses, Fixed Ideas, Hysterical Amnesias, Hypermnesias, and the masses of other notions correlated,roughly, under the term “unconscious”? The suggestion of fear is not mere conjecture. Many years ago a distinguished student of philosophy, a pupil and friend of Sir William Hamilton, indicated to me, when I spoke to him of some recent work on Double Personality, that he had difficulty in placing the new work, feeling that, in admitting the possibility of multiple personality, he was sacrificing the primary concept of philosophy, the unity of consciousness. It did not perhaps occur to him that, when two so-called “persons” speak together, there are, in popular language, “two personalities”—each, no doubt, in a separate body, but each having his own “unity of consciousness.”
If this be a fact, is there any greater difficulty in explaining the other fact that two persons may be, as James put it, under the same hat? The metaphysical difficulty, if there be a difficulty, is neither more nor less in the one case than in the other. But it is needless to ask why a wholefield of study has been, relatively, neglected in this country. For now we have begun to make up leeway.
This translation by Dr. Eder is an introduction to the latest phase of the study of the unconscious. It brings us back to the point I began with, the relation of the normal to the morbid. Dreams are a part of everyone’s normal experience, yet they are shown here to be of the same tissue, of the same mental nature, as other phenomena that are undoubtedly morbid. Dreams therefore offer in the normal a budding-point for the study of morbid growths. And the study of dreams by Freud came long after his studies of such neuroses as the phobias, hysterias, and the rest. To dreams he applied the same method of investigation and treatment as to the others, and he found that dreams offered an unlimited field for the same kind of study.
Perhaps, before going further, I should attempt to disarm criticism about the term “unconscious.” We speak of subconsciousness,co-consciousness, unconscious mind, unconscious cerebration; or what other terms should we use? Here it is better to avoid discussion, for we are concerned less with theory than with practice. And in Freud’s work, whether we accept his theory or not, the practice is of primary importance. He takes the view that no conscious experience is entirely lost; what seems to have vanished from the current consciousness has really passed into a subconsciousness, where it lives on in an organised form as real as if it were still part of the conscious personality. This view, with various modifications, is adopted by many students of morbid psychology. But there is another view. Muensterberg, for instance, maintains that it is unnecessary to speak of “subconsciousness,” for every fact can be explained in terms of physiology. He would accept the term “co-conscious” or “co-consciousness”; but in one chapter he ends the discussion by saying: “But whether we prefer the physiologicalaccount or insist on the co-conscious phenomena, in either case is there any chance for the subconscious to slip in? That a content of consciousness is to a high degree dissociated, or that the idea of the personality is split off, is certainly a symptom of pathological disturbance, but it has nothing to do with the constituting of two different kinds of consciousness, or with breaking the continuous sameness of consciousness itself. The most exceptional and most uncanny occurrences of the hospital teach after all the same which our daily experience ought to teach us: there is no subconsciousness” (“Psychotherapy,” p. 157).
There are many refinements of distinction that we could make here, and if any reader is anxious to consider them, he will find some of them in a small volume on “Subconscious Phenomena,” by Muensterberg, Ribot, and others (Rebman, London).
Here it is not of primary importance to come to any conclusion on the best termto use or the complement theory of the facts. The discussion is far from an end; but the harvest of facts need not wait for the end of the discussion.
Meanwhile, let it be said that Professor Freud has been steeped in this whole subject from his student days. It is, however, less important to discuss his theory than to understand his method. The method is called “psycho-analysis.” The name is not inviting, and it might apply to any form of mental analysis; but it is at least consistently Greek in etymology, and has taken on a technical meaning in the medical schools. What is the method?
Let it be granted that a person has undergone a strongly emotional experience—for example, a sudden shock or fright. If the person is highly nervous, the shock may result in some degree of dissociation. This may take the form of a loss of memory for certain parts of the experience. Let it be so. The ultimate result may be an unreasonable fear of some entirely harmlessobject or situation. The person is afraid of a crowd, or afraid of a closed door, or has an intense fear of some animal or person. For this fear he can give no reason; he cannot tell when it began nor why it persists. He may more or less overcome it; but he may not. All through his future life he will go about with a helplessly unreasonable fear of a closed door (claustrophobia) or of a crowd (agoraphobia). Minor varieties of such an affection are to be found in every person’s experience. On investigation, however, the root of the fear can be discovered: it is the product of the original emotional shock. The intellectual details of the emotional experience have completely vanished from the memory, but the emotion remains, and it is attached to some accidental object or circumstance present in the original experience. Thousands of illustrations could be given. They are, unfortunately, only too numerous. In this essay on the Interpretation of Dreams the reader will find many simple cases.
If, now, the person so affected is placed in a quiet room, if he is requested to concentrate his mind on the disturbing object or idea associated with his fear, if he is encouraged to observe passively the chance ideas which float up to him when he thus concentrates himself, if he utters, under the direction of his medical attendant, every such idea as it comes into his mind, there is a strange result. These ideas, coming apparently by chance from nowhere in particular, are, when carefully studied, found to be linked up with some past experience, dating, perhaps, from months or years away. If each idea as it emerges is followed up, if the other ideas dragged into consciousness by it are carefully recorded, it is found that sooner or later entirely forgotten experiences come into clear consciousness. There are many ways of helping this process. One of the ways is this: Let a series of words be arranged; let the doctor speak one of them to the patient; let the patient, in the shortest time possibleto him, say right out whatever idea is suggested to him by the word; let the time taken to make the response be recorded in seconds and fractions of a second—a thing easy enough to do with a stop-watch. Then, when the responses to a long series of words are all recorded, and the time each response has taken, it is found that some responses have taken much longer than others. This prolongation of the response-time is always found whenever the test word has stirred up a memory associated with emotion. By following up further the ideas stirred by this word, more ideas of a related kind are discovered, often to the patient’s surprise. Things long forgotten come back to memory; circumstances that apparently had no relation to the present consciousness are found to be linked in sequence with it—emotions, unreasoning fears, anxieties, that apparently had no relation to any particular experience, are found at last to be part and parcel of things that happened long ago. Once the doctorhas his cue, he can range in many directions, and probe the mind again and again, until he reveals multitudes of suppressed memories, forgotten ideas, forgotten elements of experience. He can even get back into early childhood, which, to the patient himself, leaves many and many a blank area in the memory. But always the doctor lights, sooner or later, on some complex experience in which the particular fear or anxiety arose.
But now, if the case is a suitable one, a still stranger thing happens. When the forgotten experience has thus artfully been brought into the full light of consciousness, the patient finds himself satisfied with the explanation, and loses his particular fear. He can now go back over the whole history of its genesis; he can link up the old experience to the new, and so he attains once more satisfaction and peace of mind. Up till now he could not be reasoned out of his anxiety; he had always an answer for any explanation; he had always a fresh foolishreason for his fear. Now all this vanishes. He finds his mind once more running smoothly, and his “phobia” gone. The unreasoning dread has been tracked back to its lair, and its lair has been destroyed in the process.
There are many other methods of achieving the same result; let this generalised sketch suffice.
What now is the theory? The theory is that the mental experience or “complex” had, for some reason and by some mechanism, been submerged, or suppressed, or forgotten. Freud maintains that there is a fundamental tendency in the mind to suppress every experience that is associated with painful emotion. This doctrine is allied to Bain’s “Law of Conservation”—that painful experiences depress the vitality and tend to disappear, while pleasant experiences exalt the vitality and tend to remain in memory. At any rate, by some process the painful experience disappears from conscious memory, but it does not cease toexist. It may lie dormant, or it may work subconsciously, and throw up the emotional bubbles that continue, without a known reason, to excite the ordinary consciousness. But the complex, though deep and partly dormant, never gets beyond reach. By the method of concentration, by the use of “free associations,” by the following up of all the clues offered by the ideas “fished up,” the submerged complex can, element by element, be brought back. When once it is brought back the patient is restored, the dormant complexes once more resume their place in the total current of his experience, and the mind flows at peace.
This is, roughly, the method of psycho-analysis. It has been applied in various types of neurosis—hysterias, obsessions, phobias, etc. It has not always succeeded in removing the morbid conditions, but it has succeeded so often that it may legitimately be regarded as a method of treatment. As a matter of discovery it is arduous, and demands the highest skill and invention ifit is to succeed. Incidentally it reveals masses of unpleasant ideas, of painful ideas, even of disgusting ideas; but, in the right hands, it leads to the healing of the mind.
And here, insensibly, we have passed into the World of Dreams. The morbid and the normal have come together. Dreamsare the awaking of dormant complexes; they are transfigured experiences; they come into consciousness trailing clouds of emotion, and fill the dreamer’s imagination with mysterious images. It is here that the method of psycho-analysis most fascinates the student. It looks as if once more the “interpretation of dreams” had become a reality. The results of psycho-analysis, even when the method is applied with a master hand and the details are interpreted with a skill that comes only of a quick imagination, are not entirely convincing; but they are certainly such as to make more and more observation desirable. In the present short essay Professor Freud gives a sketch of psycho-analysis as it is applied to the interpretations of dreams. His examples, if they are enough to illustrate the theory, are hardly enough to prove it, but they are intended as an introduction to his more elaborate studies; and, hitherto, observers as they have increased in experience have gained in conviction. That themethod goes a long way to prove that dreams are not a chaotic sport of the brain, but are a manifestation of ordered mental experience, is beyond doubt. It would be easy to show where the theory does not cover facts, but it is equally easy to show many facts that it does cover.
What, then, is the theory? Briefly this, that dreams are very largely the expressions of unfulfilled desires. Where, as in children, the waking experience and the sleeping experience differ from each other by very little, the dream, or sleeping experience, readily takes the form of the ungratified desires of the day. But as the mind grows older the dream expression of a desire gets more intricate. By-and-by it is too intricate to be deciphered from direct memory, and then there is a chance for the method of psycho-analysis. What of the dream is remembered gives the cue for the analysis. Take a remembered element of a dream, track it back and back by free association or other method, and you willfind that, at one or two removes, the remembered element stirs up forgotten elements, and ultimately brings coherence out of incoherence.
This appears simple, but let the reader study the dreams analysed in this essay, and he will find himself stirred by a thousand suggestions. For Professor Freud has constructed empirical laws out of his masses of material. The dream as it appears to the dreamer he calls themanifest dream ideas. But as these are too absurd to form a coherent reality, he gives ground for believing that they representlatent dream ideas. The manifest dream is a mass of symbols representing elements in the latent dream ideas. How the latent dream ideas generate the manifest dream is discovered by psycho-analysis, the translation from the latent to the manifest is the effect of thedream work. The dream work is the very core of the difficulty. It is round this that Professor Freud’s greatest subtleties of method are focussed. Heshows that every dream is linked to something that occurs on the previous day, some recent experience, but the experience emerges in the dream as part of the current panorama of the subjective life, and there is no date to the beginning of the panorama—it may go back to any point in the individual’s history, even into the preconscious days of early infancy. The day’s experience and the life’s experience flow in a single stream, and the images that appear in dreams are but the symbols of all the latent ideas of that experience. How, by displacement of this element or that, compound symbols are formed; how, by the foreshortening of experience and the linking of the past with the present in a single idea, masses of old memories are clotted into a single point; how, in the freedom of the dream world, where the tension of the waking life is relaxed, where the exacting stimulations of the day are reduced, where the consciousness of duty to be done in the highly organised conditions of social conductis lowered, where, in a word, thecensoris drowsy or asleep, where the dream symbols shape themselves into dramatic scenes of endless variety—these it is that Professor Freud’s theory endeavours to set forth. Displacement, condensation, dramatisation—these are the short names for these long and complicated processes. In the course of his expositions, Professor Freud uses these processes almost as if they were demons, and he admits frankly their figurative character. But he pleads that they represent real processes, and is ready to accept better names when he finds them. To trace back the dream images to a definite meaning in experience is the aim of the psycho-analysis of dreams. And the successes in these must be tested by the facts. Sometimes the results are highly persuasive, sometimes they look highly fanciful, always they are full of suggestion and keep close to realities.
The dream symbolism, in particular, it is easy to criticise; but, after all, dream symbolismis a reality. The point to investigate is, what dream images are legitimately considered symbolic and what not. One has only to remember that every word spoken or written is a symbol, and a symbol in much the same sense as the symbolism of dreams, for every written or spoken word is a complicated series of motions that express meanings. The dream images are complicated series of images that express meanings. The difficulty of symbolism is no greater in the one case than in the other. But the variety of dream symbols is so immense that the difficulties of tracing their meaning are enormous. It is here that the method meets its greatest difficulties; but, equally, it is here that it scores its greatest triumphs. Spoken or written language is a technically organised system of symbols; dream language is as yet a poorly organised system of symbols. The method of psycho-analysis aims at organising them. Some test results are described in this essay; multitudes of others are to be found in theliterature that is flowing from the application of the psycho-analytic method. Time alone will show how far the organisation of dream symbols into a definite “language of dreams” is, in any given society, actual or possible. But the effort of organisation has led Professor Freud to another fine fetch of theory, for his dream symbolism suggests many curious explanations for the mythologies of all ages and all countries. Myth symbols, that seem to defy explanation, he traces back to their roots in the “unconscious” of primitive man.
That the emotions of sex should play an enormous part in the processes of analysis is to be expected; for the sex emotions are among the deepest, if not the deepest, of our nature, and colour every experience. From their proximate beginning in infancy—and Freud’s theory here is of immense significance—to their multiform derivatives in adult life, the sex emotions exercise an influence on every phase of development, and, in one form or another, are themselvesa normal index of the stages of development. It is therefore reasonable to expect that they should play a great part in the formation of obsessions, of fixed ideas, of perversions, of repressed complexes. In every civilisation, as Freud indicates, the sex emotions are the most difficult to control, and have demanded the greatest amount of restraint.
Restraints lead to repressions, repressions lead to dissociations, dissociations lead to irregularities of action. When, therefore, as in dreams, the restraints of the social day are withdrawn, naturally the repressed ideas tend to emerge once more. How much these ideas account for in the hysterias, how much “the shocks of despised love” affect even the normal life, needs no emphasis, but Freud pushes his analysis farther, and tracks the sex emotions, like many other fundamental emotions, into a thousand by-paths of ordinary experience. But it would be foolishness to say that sex emotions are everything in the ruins of the“Buried Temple.” Far from it. What is true of the sex emotions is true of all other emotions in their varying degrees, and often what looks like predominant sex emotions may turn out to be accidental rather than causative, a concomitant symptom rather than the initiatory centre of disturbance. But these points are all controversial. It is the object of Freud to put them to the test. If his general theory be true, the dream-world will more and more become the revealer of our deepest and oldest experience.
It would be easy to fill many pages with illustrative items and relative criticisms, but that is not the purpose of an introduction. Here I am concerned simply to recommend this essay to the careful study of all those interested in the mental history of the individual, and in the blotting out from the mind of needless fears and anxieties. And no one need hesitate to enter on this study, whatever his metaphysical theories may be. Even the “unityof consciousness” will not suffer, for, through his unending efforts to link the experiences of the day with the whole experience of the individual life, Professor Freud, by the union of buried consciousness, restores to the mind a new unity of consciousness.
Dr. Eder, whose studies in this field have been long and varied, does well to present to British readers this essay which serves as an introduction to the more elaborate studies ofFreudand his school, and I am glad to have the privilege of saying so.
W. LESLIE MACKENZIE.
W. LESLIE MACKENZIE.
W. LESLIE MACKENZIE.
W. LESLIE MACKENZIE.