A SLAVE TO DREAMS
1. THE CONFESSIONS OF SIGMUND FREUD
Psycho-analysis, we are told by Hingley[47] began with a “very
interesting case of hysteria” suffered by a patient of Dr. J. Breuer,
of Vienna. Sigmund Freud, then a young man, was in Paris, studying
with Charcot at the Salpêtrière. The patient lost the use of the right
arm, lost the power to drink; but recovered both when Dr. Breuer,
resorting to hypnotism, revived the memory of a painful experience in
the patient’s childhood.
Mesmer, with his magnetic fluid and his “passes,” had almost been
forgotten, but in France the hypnotists of the Salpêtrière were still
battling against the “suggestion” school of Nancy--as in deed they are
today. Here, therefore, was a case after Freud’s own heart. He hurried
back home.
The two doctors worked for a while in harmony, and soon arrived at the
conclusion that to cure hysteria it was not sufficient to revive the
past. Patients must re-live the painful experience in all its original
emotional intensity. Thus the ground was prepared for the later
Naturopaths, who insist that one must have all one’s diseases over
again in inverse order, avoiding remedies as these merely “suppress the
symptoms.”
But some people have had diseases which they do not care to have over
again, and prefer suppressed symptoms to almost any other kind. So
Naturopathy has had a hard row to hoe. At first there was the same
reluctance on the part of the public in regard to painful emotional
experiences. Not until Freud, abandoned by Breuer but accompanied by
a disciple named Jung, visited America in 1919, was sales-resistance
finally overcome. By this time it was generally known that, though the
method was called the “cathartic method,” no cathartics were used;
and that the “painful experiences” to be re-lived were all sexual
experiences, painful only in a Pickwickian sense.
For he came with the announcement that there was within each one of us
a bogie, or endo-psychic censor, which prevented us from dwelling with
any real enjoyment upon the more unsavory episodes of the past; that
it was this spoil-sport which made us ill; and that it could be put to
rout by “Psycho-Analysis.”
Soon it was discovered that an outer censor, familiarly known as
Anthony Comstock--a rather ignorant gentleman with the annoying habit
of sending policemen after those who published what was, in those days,
quaintly termed “pornographic literature,”--could be floored by the
same means. Psychology was not “literature.” Therefore it could not be
“pornographic literature,” within the meaning of the law. The Venusburg
_motif_ shivered with joy. The Pilgrim’s Chorus sank to a gruff base.
So the Austrian became a best-seller, out-vending even Havelock Ellis,
who had previously had our perversions pretty much in his politer
charge. Dr. Breuer, on the contrary, clinging to hypnotism, which Freud
had discarded, and more or less discarding the eroticism to which
Freud had nailed his colors, sank back straightway into his native
oblivion, a warning to all.
It need not be thought that the cathartic method did us no good. The
United States, just emerging from the taboos of Queen Victoria, was
in need of hyssop. Some of us, brought up among tables and chairs
having limbs in lieu of legs, were really in a bad way. But Freud has
become much more than a physician. Through books which sell in hundreds
of thousands, he seeks to officiate as a pedagogue, a scientist, a
philosopher and a priest.
Therefore it may not be amiss to enquire into his antecedents and his
character, and then to ask ourselves what his teachings amount to as
theory and how they influence our lives if put into practice.
In order to be perfectly fair, I shall confine myself almost
exclusively to the analysis of a single book, the master-piece into
which he has put his most fully elaborated and carefully worked out
speculations, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” using the third edition
of the authoritative English translation of A. A. Brill.
This work, whatever it may be as psychology, is certainly one of the
greatest autobiographies in existence; for in it Freud not only tells
us his dreams--which alone would tell us nothing--but the incidents
from which he deems the dreams to have sprung, and the thoughts and
memories which his study of the dreams have brought to mind. It is a
method to be recommended for those who wish to stand quite naked before
the world. By the time he has done, not even Rousseau or Benvenuto
Cellini are better revealed.
“When I was six years old,” he writes,[48] “and was receiving my first
instructions from my mother, I was asked to believe that we are made
of earth, and that therefore we must return to earth. But this did not
suit me, and I doubted her teaching. Thereupon my mother rubbed the
palms of her hands together--just as in making dumplings, except that
there was no dough between them--and showed me the blackish scales of
epidermis which were thus rubbed off as a proof that it is earth of
which we are made. My astonishment at this demonstration _ad oculos_
was without limit, and I acquiesced in the idea.”
And so, in maturer years, when he came to dream of a woman rubbing her
hands together, the incident was recalled, and he identifies the dream
woman as one of the Fates!
For once his conclusion is not far-fetched. One of the Fates, indeed!
To speak his own jargon, it may have been from those blackish scales
of epidermis that he received the psychic blow which resulted in his
life-long anti-religious mania. His love of God (he once used to
read Philippson’s Bible, and to dream of the illustrations) was made
ashamed by this ridiculous demonstration _ad oculos_, and forced out
of consciousness. The course of history was turned on a certain famous
occasion by the cackling of a flock of geese. It might have been turned
again by the timely use of a cake of soap upon a maternal epidermis.
Freud describes the inability of a child to detach its “libido” from
the parent whom he asserts first awakens it, as a “mother-fixation.”
His own mother-fixation takes the following startling form:[49] “It is
only of late that I have learned to value the significance of fancies
and unconscious thoughts about life in the womb. They contain the
explanation of the curious fear felt by so many people of being buried
alive, as well as the profoundest unconscious reason for the belief in
a life after death, which represents nothing but a projection into the
future of this mysterious life before birth. The act of birth [he means
the act of being born] is the first experience with fear, and is thus
the source and model of the emotion of fear.”
Here emerges his marvelous gift for the enunciation of inconsistent
formulas. Birth, the “first experience with fear,” is the “source and
the model of all fear.” Yet it is the pre-natal life, which knew no
fear, which is the source of the fear of being buried alive. Moreover,
unconscious thoughts about this happy life _in ventro_ have but to be
projected into the future to become the source of a belief in a life
after death--a belief which is fraught both with fear and hope to all
those who entertain it.
Then, to make his inconsistency complete, he maintains (in his essay
on “The Anxiety Neurosis,” and in many other places) that “neurotic
fear has its origin in the sexual life and corresponds to a libido
which has been turned from its object.” From what object? One of the
erogenous zones. Birth thus ceases to be the source of fear--at least
of “neurotic” fear--unless we assumed that it was a the moment of birth
that erotic passion was first awakened.
Dr. Ernest Jones, in “_Zur Psycho-analyse der Kriegsneurosen_,” says
that all fear is due to suppressed libidinousness, but adds that
fear consists in anxiety lest the suppression be overcome and the
erotic demon escape control. The natural hero, then, would be the
man who either had no erotic impulses or was indifferent as to when
and where and how they manifested themselves. Freud, perhaps, agrees
with this. Yet evidently, like Hamlet (to whom also he attributes a
mother-fixation) he still carries with him another fear--a “fear of
something after death,” an apprehension of such “dreams” as may come
in such a “sleep,” baffling all psycho-analysis and worse than the
delusions of a suppressed libido--and this notwithstanding the blackish
scales in the demonstration _ad ocolus_ and the incredible reasons
which he gives for his “symptom.”
Freud hates to abandon anything altogether. He likes to keep a little
fear, a little shame--not enough to control conduct, but just enough to
lend a thrill to transgression. “The original situation which calls out
the observable love-responses ... the stroking or manipulation of some
erogenous zone, tickling, shaking, gentle rocking, patting and turning
upon the stomach across the attendant’s knee,” would become intolerably
monotonous if sought to be prolonged for a lifetime. Anatole France’s
penguins were not “excessively occupied” by it even after they became
human, before they learned to wear clothes. Dr. Watson, could he
really prevent other stimuli from being “built in” or “grafted upon”
this unconditioned reflex, would reduce all love-interest to that
seasonal intermittance owned to by the beasts of the field--with
what consequences to the film industry, who can say? Freud, though
he prefers the words “mother-fixation” to “gut-reaction,” and
“polymorphous perverse” to “unconditioned reflexes,”--to say nothing of
“original sin”--agrees perfectly with the behaviorist as to what the
natural stimuli are and that they should be spared all interference.
But he can never quite get over the idea that, though natural, they
are wrong. He speaks sometimes of “pollution” and of “filth.” The
love-adventure thus becomes as exciting as a pact with the devil. At
the same time he drives us to it with the threat of psycho-neurosis and
possible paralysis if we refrain. In his hands, psychology becomes an
aphrodisiac.
From this same autobiography we learn that he was once actually in a
grave, though only “an empty Etruscan grave near Orvieto.” And when he
dreams of death, it is, he sometimes thinks, from a wish that _if_ he
must go (“if” is the word he uses!) it may be to a grave something like
this “pleasant one.”
For a moment one thinks that the uterine obsession has abated. Yet I
remember that somewhere he explains that the fondness of youths for
flinging themselves down in the open is due to the fact that the ground
is “the womb of mother earth,” and to a longing for return--whether in
a fœtal or other capacity I do not recall. The Etruscan tomb-dream is
not so pastoral as it seems.
“Dreams which are conspicuously innocent,” he warns us,[50] “invariably
(sic!) embody coarse erotic wishes.” Note the word “coarse,” a term of
condemnation. And yet if we refine them we go mad!
He can look forwards at times, for he asks,[51] “Is not the having of
children the only access to immortality for us all?” Which is certainly
an inadequate--no man really “lives again” in his children--yet a
better explanation for the general belief in immortality than the
extremely psycho-analytic idea that it comes from thoughts and memories
of the unborn state. But the mother hypothesis seizes him again when
he comes to interpret dreams “about landscapes and localities in which
emphasis is ... laid upon the assurance” that one has “been there
before.” For he adds, “the locality [indicated] is always the genital
organ of the mother.”
Freud was born in a little village of Moravia, “inhabited by Slavs,”
and “must have understood the Czech language during the first three
years of childhood.” Until the end of his third year, his “inseparable”
companion was his nephew, John, a boy about a twelvemonth older than
himself. John occasionally took advantage of signority, treating the
future psychiatrist “very badly”; and the memory of this association
has, in his own opinion, “colored” Freud’s relationships with people of
his own age ever since.
He had, when he was fourteen, the pleasure of playing Brutus to the
hated and beloved playmate’s Cæsar--not in Shakespeare’s drama but
in Schiller’s poem--the audience being composed of children. Long
afterwards he dreams of the event, and connects up the “associations”
in characteristic style. The dream-month, it seems, was July--named
after the mighty Cæsar himself. Which leads him at once to Brutus’
speech in Shakespeare: “As Cæsar loved me, I weep for him; as he was
fortunate, I rejoiced at it; as he was valiant, I honor him; but as he
was ambitious, I slew him.” So old scores are evened, if only in that
thing less than a dream--dream-analysis. Freud’s favorite method of
taking revenge is in his sleep.
Yet there is a certain truculence in his waking character too, a
_Schlagerfertigkeit_ which he acknowledges to be his. This seems to owe
its origin not so much to the teasing John as to a conversation which
took place when Freud was ten or twelve. His father was telling him
how, in his own youth, he was walking on a Saturday through a street in
the village where Freud was born.
“Along comes a Christian,” says the father to the boy, “knocks my cap
into the mud with one blow, and shouts, ‘Jew, get off the sidewalk!’”
Sigmund asks, “And what did _you_ do?” his eyes big with wonder and the
hope for some happy issue. But the father answers simply, “I went into
the street and picked up the cap.”
Here was born another complex--this time an inferiority complex--with
which all right-minded persons must sympathize. Stoutly has he sought
to fight it off, to assert himself. But it is easy to see how he has
been hurt by the anti-Semitic feeling which from time to time has
disgraced Austrian politics; how he hates the white carnations that, in
Vienna, are the insignia of the Jew-baiters.
But with what gusto he tells us of the old peasant midwife who assisted
at his “first experience with fear” and prophesied, after the manner
of her kind, that he would become “a great man!” His father, not to
be outdone, was of the opinion that he was “poetically gifted” from
the start. The idea of anticipated power may also lie behind the fact
that the favorite toy of his babyhood was a yellow porcelain lion. And
were I to follow his own method of the free association of ideas yet
further, I might suggest that it was this lion which afterwards led him
to visit England.
In any case, visit England he did, when he was nineteen, and spent a
day on the shore of the Irish sea, amusing himself by catching the
“sea animals” left behind by the waves. A pretty little girl, seeing
him engaged with a starfish, approaches and asks, “Isn’t it alive?” He
answers in halting English but correctly enough, “Yes, he is alive.”
And now the adult Freud must needs spoil this idyl by explaining that
he was much embarrassed by his grammatical “mistake,” and hastened to
substitute an _it_ for the _he_, fearing that the slip of the tongue
in dealing with gender had already betrayed the improper meaning which
in his thoughts he had attached to the masculine pronoun. Really, at
times Freud is quite intolerable--and he seems to fancy, even yet, that
he improved matters by his “correction” of himself.
Since visiting England, he has always wanted to visit Rome, but has
never done so, pretending to himself that Rome is not healthy in
summer, the only time he is free to travel. He knows quite well that
this excuse is about a hundred years out of date, but appears to be
prevented by a complex from entering the Eternal City. For Freud, all
roads lead to sex, and no road leads to Rome--which becomes quite
understandable when we learn that for him Rome meant Catholicism. And
when he tells us further that he often dreams that he is Hannibal, whom
he identifies as Judaism, he makes it plain that with him it is _aut
Cæsar aut nullus_. He would like to enter Rome as Hannibal the Semitic
commander, would have liked to enter it--in the rôle of conqueror. At
present the Pope and Mussolini stand like inhibitions at the gate.
At one time in Vienna he lived in a house having one set of rooms upon
the ground floor, serving him for an office, and a second set upon the
story above, where he had his domestic quarters. The two levels were
connected only by an outside stairway, and it was his custom always to
“jump over the steps,” two at a time, arriving at the top suddenly and
out of breath. And from this he derives his unrepeatable description of
the symbolism of staircases as seen in dreams, where he gives them a
sexual, even a rhythmic, significance.
It is also his custom, it appears, not only to run up stairs but to
spit upon them as he goes. He does this, he says, even in the houses
of patients unless spittoons are provided at convenient intervals. And
on the occasions when he has been reproved by servants, he has always
been able to retort that a spittoon was missing.
As to his wife, we learn that he “kept her waiting five years” before
he married her, but derived great satisfaction from the circumstance,
soon evident, that the marriage was not to be unfruitful. And, being
on a visit to Breslau and seeing the sign of a “Dr. Herrod” in an
office window, he at once cried out, “I hope he is not a children’s
specialist!” Since then Freud’s most likeable trait has been his
anxiety over the future of his offspring. He seems to have worried,
both sleeping and waking, because of the fact that, as they are Jews,
he cannot give them “a native country of their own.”
Concerned lest one of his sons should grow up one-sided either in
mind or body, he dreamed that the boy said at first “salted” and then
“unsalted.” This, he assures us, was a wish-fulfillment, because in the
dream at least the boy was acting “in obedience to bilateral symmetry.”
Freud’s incredible ingenuity never fails him. Nor is he, except when
discussing metaphysics, lacking in abundant wit, humor, and other
amiable qualities. He says that he will put in italics all the features
of a certain young lady’s dream that have a sexual significance--and
follows this up with two solidly italicised pages and no other remark.
He tells with glee how a lady in the audience at one of his lectures in
America interrupted him by exclaiming, “Maybe all Austrian dreams are
erotic, but I am sure it is not so in the United States.”
He is suffering from a boil, which had been poulticed, and dreams that
he is in a saddle riding a horse, the poultice being the “day-remnant”
now transformed into a saddle. He declares that the dream (which,
among other things is “the guardian of sleep”) meant to say to him,
“Keep on sleeping. You have no furnucle [boil] at all. You are riding
on a horse, and with a furnucle where you [think] you have it, riding
would be impossible.”[52] This also means that his friend, F., has been
putting on airs, “riding the high horse” with him ever since he (Freud)
superceded him in the treatment of a particular female patient. So the
saddle becomes a side-saddle to indicate the lady, and the dreamer
performs circus antics upon it as a dream-boast of the great things he
had been doing for her while she was under his care. And to those who
object to the super-abundance of his “associations” he retorts that it
is always the rich who have the most money.
Real money he seems to regard as “filthy lucre,” since he holds
that “the uncleanliness of childhood is often replaced in the dream
by greediness for gold.” His stout republicanism comes out in his
statement that “aristocrats can be readily confounded with coachmen,”
that their merit is “that they have taken the trouble to be born”; that
“to us middle-class plebeians” an aristocrat is one who likes to put
himself “on the driver’s seat,” as Count Thun once liked to drive the
Austrian car of state.
Much light is thrown upon the author’s environment, perhaps even some
justification to be found for his American auditor’s exception to the
inclusion of the United States in the all-erotic hypothesis, by such
remarks as the one which distinguishes page 462: “That the sexual
intercourse of adults appears strange to children who observe it, and
arouses fear in them, _I dare say is a fact of daily experience_.”
This, as they say in Vienna, must have been “grown on his own manure.”
I have added only the italics. It also reminds one of a Hungarian
proverb which Freud is fond of quoting, “Pigs dream of acorns, geese of
maize.”
In his part of the country, he informs us,[53] “It is hardly possible
to go through a village ... without meeting a two-or-three-year-old
tot who lifts up his or her shirt before the traveler, perhaps in his
honor.” And lest there be any doubt about the sort of life with which
Freud is familiar, his translator takes the trouble to note[54] the
custom of _Fensterlein_ as practiced in the Schwarzwald. Lovers there,
he says, are in the habit of mounting by ladders to the windows of
their sweethearts, and “becoming so intimate that they practically
enjoy a system of trial marriage.” And he adds, “The reputation of
the young woman never suffers on account of _Fensterlein_ unless she
becomes intimate with too many suitors.”
Still, it is hardly fair to single out the Black Forest, which after
all is not Vienna. Even the Welsh have their _carangwelly_; Irving
found evidences of bundling in the history of Father Knickerbocker; and
companionate marriage knows how to speak English.
Freud himself has become a linguist, partly through searching for the
“bad” sense of words in all languages, partly by looking for puns, the
pun being one of the tools with which he digs out “meanings” from his
patients’ dreams. A great mass of knowledge is required to trace some
of these word-plays. For instance, a dream of a botanical monograph
leads from cyclamen to cocaine, from cocaine to a _Festschrift_,
and thence to Dr. Königstein, to Prof. Gartner and his _blooming_
wife whose name is Flora, to Freud’s wife and her favorite flower,
to his own favorite flower (the artichoke) and thus to Italy. To
dream that there is “a terrible storm outside” may mean that somebody
is superfluous, for everything is overflowing with water, “with
fluid,”--“superfluid”--“superfluous.”
“People who dream often of swimming, of cleaving the waves with great
enjoyment, have usually been persons who wetted their beds, and they
now repeat in the dream a _pleasure_ which they have long since learned
to forego.” This also seems superfluous.
He accuses people who form collections of neckties of using this bit
of haberdashery as a sex-symbol. Nothing in Freud is harmless, though
he professes that his constant digging for muck sometimes wearies him.
Thus one day after a lecture upon the usual subject he felt a longing
to get away “from rummaging in human filth,” and was reassured only
when a student followed him to a café and told him that he was a great
man. Filth and greatness are again associated in his dream of being
Gulliver and cleansing a foul closet by the means used by that famous
traveler in putting out a never-to-be-forgotten fire in the queen’s
palace at Lilliput. In the same dream he became Hercules cleansing the
Augean stables.
Naturally he reads Rabelais; but he has also read C. F. Meyer’s “_Die
Leiden eines Knaben_.” And when Louise N., a visitor to his home,
asked for a book, he recommended Rider Haggard’s “She,” “which deals
with the eternal feminine,” and the Haggard-Lang romance, “The Heart
of the World,” which he attributes to Haggard alone. This may indeed
be the eternal feminine, but it has at least undergone a charming
sea-change--“she-change,” Freud undoubtedly would say. Strain a desert
and the lions remain. Strain Freud, and if sex does not remain nothing
does--except his wit. After all he is no _Deutzenmensch_, not of the
sort who come in dozens, and is always rich enough, at least in humor,
to be able to ask the price of Graz.[55]
He adores the tale of the husband who said to the wife, “If one of us
dies I shall move to Paris.” And the story of the dreamer, who, when
asked “Are you asleep?” answered “No”; but at the words “Then lend
me ten florins,” promptly responded, “Yes, I am asleep.” But some
sexual implication of a sort lower than animal is liable to germinate,
whatever the occasion, and rise, as he would say, “like a toadstool
from its mycelium” to poison the air. In Vienna they employ an art
called Gsnas, which consists in making “something valuable out of
trifles.” Nothing valuable comes from the Freudian Gsnas, unless you
count a bad conscience which uses vestigial inhibitions merely to
heighten tumescence.
He confesses that he was once “a green youth, full of the materialistic
doctrine.”[56] What he does not seem to realize is that he has never
recovered from this adolescent characteristic. But it is always a
relief to turn from his “interpretations” to the honest facts of his
life--to read that he once spent a “charmingly beautiful day” with his
wife looking from the window of a hotel (evidently the Danieli) on the
riva Schiavoni, at Venice, watching the English warships that were
taking part in a _fiesta_; and to know that his wife was interested in
the toilet-table of an “Etruscan lady” in a Venetian museum. It was “a
rectangular black object with two handles, with little boxes for rouge
and powders,” and the _gnädige Frau_ “thought it would be nice to have
in the house.” By rare good fortune, Freud failed to dream of these
little boxes, or at least forgot to mention it if he did.
Upon a less happy occasion he becomes so vexed with Mrs. Freud that
when she gives him a book as a present he immediately forgets it--thus
living up to his absurd theory that we only remember things which
have agreeable associations. Then his “beloved mother” falls sick,
and his wife takes such “tender care of her” that the domestic breach
is healed. So the victim of amnesia suddenly recovers his memory, and
walks straight to the lost book, “like a somnambulist.”
One likes also to turn to the amusingly recounted hardships of his
student days, and to learn that the five years provided for the study
of medicine was “as usual” not enough for the future great man. So
he “worked along unconcernedly,” though “considered a loafer” by
his associates, who doubted if he would ever “get through.” He had
intended to study law, but was moved to take up science upon reading
Goethe’s “beautiful essay on Nature.” He never did get through very
far, and failed in his examinations for the degree of Doctor of Legal
Medicine. Consequently, when he dreams of examinations the subject is
invariably botany, zoology, chemistry or history--it being another of
his contentions that no one ever dreams of examinations excepting those
in which one has succeeded. On the other hand, one dreams only of the
trains which one has missed, such dreams being “consolation” dreams,
directed against the fear of dying. One missed the train--that is, one
did not “depart,” did not die. Railroad travel seems to be dangerous in
Austria.
Freud always wanted to be “a professor _extraordinarius_,” but was held
back by the fact that he was a Jew in a country where appointments were
in the hands of Gentile politicians. By way of compensation he is now a
doctor of laws, _honoris causa_.
But first, what struggles! The “honored teacher” of his youth was
Bruecke, who in his age had eyes which were “wonderfully beautiful,”
yet was a terrible fellow in his prime. One morning Freud, then a
demonstrator at the Physiological Institute, came late to work--and the
eyes, not yet so beautiful, turned to a “terrible blue,” and before
their glare the hapless demonstrator “melted away.” But Bruecke has his
day; he dies. And Freud takes characteristic revenge by dreaming that
he denounces him as a ghost before a group of living people with whom
the deceased was presuming to mingle as an equal.
It is interesting to note that “the first scientific task” at which
Bruecke set him “was concerned with the nervous system of a fish--the
Ammocœtes.”[57] Have we here the origin of the Freudian philosophy?
It seems to me so, but perhaps this is merely because I have recently
been reading Roland Pertwee’s inimitable “Fish are Such Liars,” in _The
Saturday Evening Post_.
2. THE ELABORATION OF A FICTION
But it is time to leave the fascinating subject of Freud the man
and turn to Freud the psychologist. Everybody understands his
psycho-analysis in a vague, general way, but I know of no one who has
ever taken the trouble to reduce its chaos to order and so expose the
kind of “logic” which rules it. His disciples merely choose such bits
as please them, add a rhetorical pæan, and say, “This is Freud!”
Others skip all but the salacious passages. Let us take it fairly, the
lean and the fat together. After all, it is important. For if this
theory be “true” we must submit to it though the heavens fall. We are
not “irrational” I hope.
[Illustration: DR. SIGMUND FREUD
He tells us his dreams]
Psycho-analysis is based upon six main assumptions, but even
assumptions deserve for once to be stated in plain language.
_First Assumption_: That we are born with a certain equipment, called
the Primary Psychic Apparatus, or the Unconscious Mind. This is much
like the “Instinctive” apparatus of McDougall, or the “Unconditioned
Reflex” apparatus of Watson. It has a certain resemblance to the Old
Adam of popular speech, with that Flesh which was formerly associated
with the World and the Devil. It is Psyche’s house as originally
bequeathed to her.
“We have elaborated the fiction of a primitive psychic apparatus whose
work is regulated by the efforts to avoid accumulation of excitement,”
says Freud.[58] “For this reason it was constructed after the plan of a
reflex apparatus. The accumulation of excitement is perceived as pain
and sets the apparatus in motion in order to reproduce a feeling of
gratification in which the diminution of the excitement is perceived as
pleasure.”
This “fiction” then is Oriental. Pain is positive, pleasure merely the
diminution of excitement. The logical procedure would be to get rid of
such an apparatus, if in no other way then by committing suicide. But
later we shall learn that notwithstanding its perception of pain and
pleasure, the apparatus is unconscious. Freud and Watson together give
us a no-conscious, an unconscious, and a pre-conscious, and not a bit
of consciousness in any of the three.
_Second Assumption_: That as we develop under stress of
circumstances,--conform to our environment as a Darwinian would say,
or in other words become educated--we develop a Secondary Psychic
Apparatus whose emotional reactions are different from and often
in opposition to the emotional reactions of the first. This is the
non-instinctive, reasonable, or acquired mental equipment, the
conditioned reflex system--what we ordinarily term our second nature.
Freud divides it further into the Pre-Conscious and the Conscious--and
here at last we become really conscious. But we shall be “compelled
to build a series of new assumptions concerning the structure of the
psychic apparatus,” he informs us.[59] And here they begin. “From the
moment that we wish to penetrate deeper into the psychic processes
... all paths lead to darkness.”[60] The darkness is about to be
ours--darkness abundant, Stygian, Egyptian; darkness which may be felt.
_Third Assumption_: That, owing to the emotional differences of the two
psychic systems, the Second System offers a resistance to the desires,
thoughts and memories (all unconscious) of the first. “Whenever a
wish-fulfillment is unrecognizable or concealed, there must be a
present feeling of repulsion towards the wish, and in consequence
of this repulsion the wish is unable to gain expression except in a
disfigured state.”[61] It is this resistance which he personifies as
the Endo-Psychic Censor and imagines standing like a watch-dog at the
threshold of the pre-conscious. He even imagines a second censor
standing at the threshold of the conscious.
Everybody must admit that this resistance, personified or otherwise,
is a fact. The adult does acquire a distaste for childishness. He at
times exercises upon himself a sort of discipline. He has different
inclinations which are at war with one another. Freud’s contribution to
psychology at this point consists in the discovery that such discipline
is a perilous thing to indulge in. For--
_Fourth Assumption_: A desire so disciplined does not cease to exist,
but continues in being. The opposition of the Secondary Apparatus
causes it to be forgotten, to became a part of the unconscious. But
there it remains, “suppressed” but biding its time.
These unconscious wishes “suffer the same form of annihilation as
[do] the shades of the lower region in the Odyssey, who awoke to
new life the moment they drank blood.”[62] Shall we then keep them
away from blood? That is not the programme. But for the moment Freud
merely says:[63] “Nothing can be brought to an end in the unconscious;
nothing can cease or be forgotten.” Adding:[64] “I believe that these
unconscious wishes are always active and ready for expression--the as
it were immortal wishes from the unconscious.”
This implies that a wish cannot be deflected, but persists as a desire
for its original object--which is totally contrary to reason and
common sense, to experience, and to physical science. It is the same
as saying that a boy who was looking forward to a Saturday afternoon
visit to his grandmother’s grave and was induced to go to the circus
instead, would--especially if he suppressed his cemeterial inclination
to the point of not telling the fellows about it--straightway forget
everything but the circus, and yet be haunted by an unconscious desire
for the grave. Nor could anything but a conscious visit to the scene of
interment (or to a psycho-analyst) ever set the desire at rest.
Such a suppressed, abashed and forgotten but far-from-done-with desire
is called a “complex.” There are many complexes, but they all reduce
themselves to two, the Œdipus and the Inferiority. Let us pause to
consider them before going on to other suppositions.
3. TWO OFT-THWARTED PASSIONS
An inferiority complex originates in a blow to our self-love, to our
sense of personal regard. And as Dr. McDougall is the most eminent
godfather of this instinct, we had better go to him for a working
example.
A famous architect visits his alma mater after many years of successful
post-graduate life. Suddenly he begins knocking men down right and
left, shouting, and trying to climb over the head of the bed in
spite of the efforts of three attendants to hold him within bounds.
An old-fashioned expert would have pronounced him a paranoic, a
megalomaniac, or something equally disagreeable. But Jung, McDougall’s
one-time co-worker, was called in. He said that it was only a case
of schizophrenia, and that what the patient needed was--not a
straight-jacket but a quiz.
By “free word-association” (Jung’s personal invention) it was
discovered that the schizophreniac had once been jilted by a fair co-ed
at the dear old school, and had quite sensibly forgotten all about
it. But when he returned to the scene of his adolescent chagrin, it
all came back--the very campus seemed to him suddenly to sway beneath
a purple sea of emotion. He thought that the fair one was not really
married to another after all, notwithstanding rumors which he had heard
to that most likely effect, but was still waiting for him--waiting
until he should prove himself a man. So he commenced knocking other men
down. Proof enough. He even added song and gymnastics by way of good
measure; and a second attack, like the first but milder, occurred upon
his next visit to the fateful place.
What had happened (internally) was this. The co-ed had given him a
mental traumatism, a blow upon the solar plexus of his vanity. And
he was so shamed that he could not bear to think of it. So he put it
from his mind--as he fondly thought. But alas, there is no such thing
as putting anything from one’s mind. Things so put only go into the
unconscious mind, there to fester like a potato in a damp cellar. The
psychiatrist digs it out, and all is well. This is the story as set
forth (in quite other language) in McDougall’s “Outline of Abnormal
Psychology.”
Unquestionably it is a great discovery--that we are not always crazy
when we appear to be. Introverts, schizoids, dreamy people (you may
have your choice of terms) are especially to be congratulated. For
they are apt to find themselves battling suddenly with a suspiciously
insane looking bosom monster long hidden from themselves--the battle
resulting in hysteria if they give way and in compulsion-neurosis if
they resist. If one happens not to be a schizoid but an extrovert--that
is, a commonplace, practical sort of person--a bad inferiority-complex
merely leads to multiple personality, a splitting of individuality
into parts, one of which may go about calling itself Smith, another
Jones, another Brown.
But what shall we do with our famous architects, introvert or
extrovert, when they begin to misbehave along non-professional lines?
McDougall quite rightly attributes the cure of the one in question
to Jung’s showing him just how ridiculous he had been in laying the
co-ed’s treachery so much to heart in the first place. He need not have
been so rich in false pride, Jung seems to have told him; need not have
been ashamed of being jilted. Into each life some rain must fall. His
was but the common fate of all men in general and of undergraduates in
particular. He should have laughed the incident off, or perhaps have
sought relief in another bite from another vampire, on the homeopathic
principle of _similia similibus curantur_. What he had needed as a
child was not the indulgence of self-esteem, for life is not always
kind, but early preventative measures tending to curb self-esteem’s
abnormal growth.
One may agree with the diagnosis and treatment of this case without
difficulty. It was not a Freudian case. The wound was only remotely
sexual, and McDougall manages to ignore its erotic elements altogether.
He is always the Dr. Jekyll of the couple of which Freud is the Mr.
Hyde.
Jung, for some reason, also enjoys a Jekyllian reputation, but he
hardly deserves it. Indeed, he frequently out-Hydes his former teacher.
For Freud observes that the “significance of sexual complexes must
never be forgotten, nor must they, of course, be exaggerated to the
point of being considered exclusive.”[65] Jung on the other hand writes
(I am certain of his words but have forgotten the book and the page),
“I am often asked why it is just the erotic complex rather than any
other which is the cause of the neuroses. There is but one answer. No
one asserts that this ought to be the case.... But as a simple matter
of fact, it is always found to be so, notwithstanding all the cousins
and aunts, godparents and teachers who rage against it.”
In another place, Jung declares quite sensibly that the real cause of
trouble is “the non-fulfillment of life’s task.” He is, it seems, so
anxious not to be lost beneath the shadow of the master that he seeks
to outshine him even in the production of self-contradictions.
What chiefly distinguishes this noted citizen of Zurich, however,
is the vast array of complications which he has added to the map of
our psychic “localities” by drawing in the “archetypes ... the great
primordial images”; the “collective unconscious” (inherited or innate
tendencies of various awesome shades); the “Persona,” or mask beneath
which the developed self timidly confronts the world; the “Anima,”
or submerged personality; the “Kabyr,” or undeveloped intuitive
premonitions, and many other romantic features whose names seem to have
been taken from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Yet his attempt to write
as picturesquely as Freud is a failure, like his endeavor to evolve an
independent philosophy. Jung is merely Freud, McDougall, and water.
His principal Avatars in this country are Dr. Maurice Nicoll and Dr.
Constance Long.
And now for the Œdipus Complex.
“King Œdipus, who has struck his father, Laius, dead and has married
his mother, Jocasta, is nothing,” says Freud,[66] “but the realized
wish of our childhood.... His fate moves us only for the reason that
it might have been ours, for the oracle has put the same curse upon us
... as upon him.” He adds that, unless we have become psycho-neurotics,
we have since “succeeded ... in withdrawing our sexual impulses from
our mothers and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers,”--and
presumably we have withdrawn, too, from the cousins, aunts, godparents
and teachers listed by Jung. If these impulses have found their
way into the unconscious, however, they must have become eternal.
Psycho-analysis drags them into consciousness, not to kill them but to
give them a transfer. The patient, it is said, always falls in love
with the operator as a half-way step on the road to cure. But in regard
to “falling in love with one member of the parental couple and hatred
of the other,” Freud does not think that “psycho-neurotics are ...
sharply distinguished from ordinary human beings.”[67] The only way to
preserve normality, then, without calling in the doctor, would be never
to lose consciousness of our original polymorphus perversities.
In such a case, how is a transfer to be brought about? Not by
discipline, evidently. Considering the dire horrors said to lie in the
wake of any attempt to thwart the perversities in question, the natural
conclusion is that children should just grow, like Topsy, without
having to suffer the stern and perilous ordeal of being brought up. And
does not such a scheme leave perversity in control?
Certainly the effect of the study of Freudianism everywhere has been
to make parents afraid of resorting to corrective measures when their
children are “naughty.” A stern word, let alone a sound spanking, may
(according to the Freudian theory) cause a suppression of desire, a
thrusting of a native impulse into the Sheol of the lower psychic
locality, “where ... wishes ... recall the legendary Titans who from
time immemorial have borne the ponderous mountains which were once
rolled upon them by the victorious gods, and which even now quiver from
time to time from the convulsions of their mighty limbs.”[68]
Must one, then, totally abstain from mountain-rolling for fear of
earthquakes? A boy’s “libido” is first excited by his mother, so that
he wants to murder his father because the fellow is this woman’s
husband and the boy would like to be her husband himself. Is this to
go on? And of the two ways out of the situation, which shall we chose?
Let the boy murder the father? Or shall we let him marry the mother?
It seems to be a Hobson’s choice. We do not want to run the risk of
creating a “complex” by harshly thwarting either of these amiable
desires, for a complex, Freud assures us, may produce psycho-neurotic
symptoms ranging all the way from a mild hysterical excitement to
paralysis, blindness and homicidal mania.
If there happens to be a daughter born in the family before the murder
can take place, another difficulty arises. For the daughter’s “libido”
will be excited by the father even as was the son’s by the mother.
So the girl will want to kill her mother for being the wife of the
father--will want to become her own father’s bride. In case all these
instincts are given sway, there will be two murders; but where are
the weddings coming from? The boy now has no mother. His sister has
murdered her to get her out of the way. And the girl has no father, he
having been murdered by the jealous boy. Brother and sister have nobody
left but each other. Ergo, they should make the easiest transference
available, and live happily ever after.
In some instances, due to circumstances over which the infants have no
control, the libidos may not reach out to the parent of the opposite
sex, but attach the daughter to the mother and the son to the father.
But this only complicates the situation. The murders will take place
as before, the murderers’ parts being merely exchanged, and in the
end brother and sister will be left as before, the sole survivors of
the massacre. And in this case they will have especial difficulty
in making the necessary libidinous transference. They have, through
some accident in the nursery bringing similars instead of dissimilars
together in the field of desire, become homo-sexual. The future of the
race is threatened. Either that, or we must run the risk of a race of
maniacs by teaching the young that some things are--not “unspeakable,”
“unverbalizable,” or “unthinkable,” but shameful--murder and incest
being among the number. If they cannot endure the shock of such
knowledge, driven home until it becomes effective, so much the worse.
Freud leaves the prospect gloomy indeed. And yet David Seabury, author
of “Unmasking our Minds,”--Seabury, whom William James is said once
to have dandled on his knee--endeavors to convince us in an article
entitled “The Bogey of Sex,”[69] that Freud has spent his life in
beautifying and ennobling human love.
Beautiful and ennobling or not, the assumption that a desire and its
first object are a pair of Siamese twins incapable of separation, is
the very father of fallacies. Nor does it become more reasonable if
by object is understood a class of objects. In either case desire in
general is cut up into particulars, each one deathless and indomitable.
Why should those who deny free will to the individual be permitted
thus to attribute all powerful will to his several reactions?
Freudians always instance hunger as an example of a persistent
desire. You want your dinner, they say, and you go to the theatre
instead of dining. You forget all about food, but you still continue
to crave it; and when the show is over you discover that you are
starving. Incidentally, this desire persists even if not driven into
the unconscious by shame beyond hope of easy recall--which somewhat
enlarges the hypothesis. A further enlargement is made with the
admission that the hunger here is not a desire for turkey, or for
chicken, but merely for food.
Now it must be admitted that the Freudian supposition so understood has
the superficial appearance of truth. In a case of this sort it does
look as if only a limited transference were possible. One dish may be
served in place of another, but unless we eat we continue to be hungry.
But do we?
Had Freud known anything about fasting, had he been a good Jew and kept
the Passover, he would have learned that the symptoms soon cease. The
sensation of hunger is produced by certain tensions in the stomach.
The glands containing the digestive fluids are distended. The forces
designed to attack the food are mobilized, and where the food should
be yawns only emptiness. But soon the digestive fluids dissipate
themselves; in the course of a few hours the last feeling of appetite
is gone. One does not have to be a Dr. Tanner to be aware of this. Many
people have gone without food for long periods, and with little or no
suffering or ill effects.
It is not pretended that we can go without food forever. The body
cannot be altogether ignored--not by the majority of us; and one
must remember the farmer’s horse, who, taught to live upon one straw
a day, was so inconsiderate as then to die. But even with this, the
most fundamental and imperative of all the desires, discipline may
operate to a great extent. Gluttony is not a _sine qua non_ of health.
Indeed, if no discipline be exercised there is likely to ensue--if not
psycho-neurosis at least another and most distressing symptom, known as
gout.
And how is it with sex-hunger? This not being actually necessary to
the preservation of the earthly life of the individual, is even more
amenable to the curb, and may be divorced altogether from its carnal
object. We are certain of this because it has been done and is being
done in innumerable instances.
I am not claiming that sex should be suppressed by cold negation, any
more than I hold that one ceases to be hungry if one has nothing to
do but think about dinner. But there is such a thing as sublimation,
which may be defined as a transference of libido upon such a broad
and magnificent scale that we may say not only that one object is
substituted for another but that one desire is substituted for
another. Thus lust--and I use the word without implications of the
unnatural--may be overwhelmed by love, and a lower love by a higher.
Even without going very high we find that the ardently moved members
of the endocrine system at times cease to trouble in the absence of
exterior physical stimuli, and a different type of autocoid than
the burning one makes its appearance in the blood-stream. Those who
pretend that lack of indulgence perpetually increases the store of
sexual desire and capacity, conscious or unconscious, run the risk of
being likened to that boastful bridegroom so inimitably described by
Montaigne, who, because of the sheer extravagance of his claims, was
eventually adjudged “unfamiliar with the practice” under consideration.
A particular wish, then, is a wish with a direction--a direction which
may be changed. The belief that a grown man has an unappeased longing
to be fed once more at the breast or the bottle--a longing suppressed
in his primary psychic apparatus--deserves itself to be classed as a
psycho-neurotic symptom.
And now we may resume our suppositions.
4. MORE SUPPOSITIONS
_Fifth Assumption_: That dreams open the road for the discovery of
festering wish-thoughts in the unconscious.
“The dream is the distorted fulfillment of a suppressed wish.... The
wish manifested in the dream must be an infantile one.”[70]
The ingenuity which our author has expended in the attempt to prove
that “dreams are never nonsense” passes belief. To begin, he makes a
sharp distinction between “manifest” and “latent” content, between the
dream as it appears and the dream as it secretly is. Then he divides
the modes of disguise which this latent content or meaning of the
unconscious mind adopts in sneaking its obscenities past the censor for
the production of the manifest dream-show into three categories: (a)
Condensation; (b) Displacement; (c) Regard for Presentability--which
means presentability in pictures or symbols. The word “distortion”
sufficiently covers these three processes. Then there is a fourth
category, (e) called Secondary Elaboration.
“A psychic function which cannot be differentiated from our waking
thoughts may make contributions to the dream content.... It is an
expression of the _esprit d’escalier_ on the part of the psychic
censor.... The result is that the dream loses the appearance of
absurdity and incoherence [given it by distortion] and approaches
the pattern of an intelligible experience.”[71] That is, we half
wake up, and give to the manifest dream a specious logic--which the
psycho-analyst warns us to ignore.
Now it is clear that the principle of symbolical interpretation, if
once admitted, will open wide the gates for whatever “meanings” it
is necessary to find in order to establish the general theory. For
these are not “arbitrary” symbols, like “those used in stenography.”
They are such symbols as may be taken from “folk-lore,” or any other
available source, their meanings loosely worn. All that is required of
them is that they shall yield a general sexual significance whenever
sufficiently squeezed.
For example,[72] an “intelligent and refined young lady” related the
following dream to Freud: “Her husband asks: Should not the piano be
tuned? She answers: It won’t pay; the hammers would have to be newly
buffed.”
This, we learn, “repeats an actual event of the previous day,”--for in
every dream there is a “day-remnant” to furnish stuff for the manifest
content, as well as a suppressed infantile wish to give it its real
“meaning,” and some of this remnant at least must relate to the waking
experiences of the past twenty-four hours. Once we grasp the general
idea, we shall see meaning after meaning, each one deeper than the
preceding, revealing itself like so many skins peeled from an onion.
The lady’s husband had actually asked her about the piano; but that,
being real, amounts to nothing. What is more significant is that the
lady, lying upon Freud’s couch and relaxing, refers to the piano as “a
disgusting old box,” and says that it was one of the things which her
husband had before his marriage.
The outer onion-skin has now come off. But it promises to be so
unsavory that we would better drop this particular bulb and take up
another. For dream onions are not only laminated, but there are always
several onions to every dream. Let us regard the one from which sprang
the phrase, “It won’t pay.” The outer skin here was a visit the patient
had made the day before to a lady friend who asked her to take off her
coat; but as she had to go in a moment she replied that it would not
pay. And here again I am forced to drop the subject, or at least to
avoid the line of thought which is immediately suggested by a knowledge
of the symbolism here involved. Freud himself takes a new lead by
remarking that during a previous analytical séance this same patient
_had_ taken off her coat, “a button of which had opened,”--taken it
off with a gesture which seemed to say, “Please don’t look in this
direction; it won’t pay.” From which he concludes that among the many
things which “disgusting old box” refers to is “chest,” or “bust.”
Were this lady but an American we might now conclude (without
exaggerating the Freudian procedure in the slightest) that this means
“Pike’s Peak or Bust”; that this in turn recalls a bust which she went
on when she was younger and in the neighborhood of 142nd street, New
York, locally known as “Pike’s Peak”; that the peak of her ambition was
to marry a Jew--with incidentally a hidden desire to be peeked at; and
that because of her failure to realize these wishes she was piqued, and
suffered accordingly.
But as she seems to be an Austrian we must be content with the idea
that “the interpretation of the dream leads directly to a time in her
bodily development when she was dissatisfied with her shape.” She
wanted to be fat--an eminently Austrian thought. And from here we
are led to a yet earlier period. For the words “disgusting” and “bad
tone,” make it necessary, Freud informs us, to remember “how often in
allusions and in dreams the two small hemispheres of the ... body take
the place--as a substitute and as an antithesis--of the larger ones.”
That is, the piano was a dream disguise for the buttocks.
It now hardly seems necessary to remark that “the dreamer, owing to
a peculiar set of circumstances, may create for himself the right to
use anything whatever as a sexual symbol.”[73] Still less to add that,
generally speaking, “all elongated objects, sticks, tree-trunks and
umbrellas, all sharp weapons, knives, daggers and pikes,” are masculine
symbols; while “all little cases, boxes, caskets, closets and stoves”
have a feminine signification; or that “stairways, stairs, ladders
... or anything analogous to them” are to be regarded as specifically
erotic suggestions. And to make the system complete, whenever a symbol
refuses to fit in with the desired significance, we are at liberty to
regard it as “misplaced emphasis” due to distortion, and to interpret
it in an opposite sense. So pain may mean pleasure, and a crowd a
secret.
Nor is even this enough. He goes on and invents a veritable grammar
of dreams. Logical connection (in the latent content) is rendered (in
the manifest content) by simultaneousness; causation is expressed by
succession; “either--or” by “and--and” (you dream of both alternates as
being true); similarity or agreement is pictured by the concentration
of several images into a fantastic unity, etc., etc.
Freud commits the common and fatal error of proving too much. He should
have been warned by the fate of the late Ignatius Donnelly, once
Lieutenant-Governor of Minnesota. Donnelly, having shown that Bacon
wrote Shakespeare’s plays, went on to show that he also wrote Burton’s
“Anatomy of Melancholy” and Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” And having
discovered that these works had all a sort of sense when read from left
to right, proceeded to demonstrate (in “The Great Cryptogram”) that
they had an even better sense when read more or less from right to left.
Using the Freudian premises, we are forced to conclude that the average
child’s aversion to the multiplication table is a blind to cover his
unconscious but shamefaced eagerness for illegitimate parenthood. The
very name, “Multiplication,” gives us the key. Freud has met this
objection by saying that he does not permit himself to wander at random
over the field of conjecture, but is always guided by a principle. What
principle? That dreams come from suppressed erotic desires--the very
principle he is trying to prove. No, the court does not admit evidence
at random, it measures it by the supposition that the defendant is
guilty.
The Multiplication Table is quite admissible, for dreams are not the
only things which may be subjected to dream-analysis. Waking thoughts
are interpreted in the same way. If a patient refuses to dream,
the analyst pounces upon his inventions, his replies to questions.
The “Œdipus Tyrannus” of Sophocles and Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” fall
naturally into the dream category.
“We are far too much inclined to over-estimate the conscious character
of intellectual and artistic productions,” since “from communications
of some of the most highly productive persons, such as Goethe and
Helmholtz, we learn that the most essential and original parts in their
creations came to them in the form of inspirations and reached their
preceptions almost finished.”[74]
But though a dream can compose a “Hamlet” or an “Œdipus,” it cannot
compose a speech. “No matter how many speeches and answers may occur
in dreams, analysis always shows ... that the dream has only taken
... fragments of speeches which have been delivered or heard.”[75]
What, then, is this dreaming faculty which is at once so competent and
incompetent? Is it a gift, or a disease?
“A dream,” says Freud, in the Introductory Remarks to the book we
have been following, “is the first link in a chain of abnormal
psychic structures whose other links [are] the hysterical phobia, the
obsession, and the delusion.” Then on page 482 he declares, “The dream
is not a pathological phenomenon and does not leave behind [it] an
enfeeblement of the mental faculties.”
Those whose mental faculties have not been too much enfeebled by the
attempt to reconcile these two statements, may try their logic’s teeth
upon page 437, where it is said that “in view of the complete identity
[to be] found between the peculiarities of the dream-work and the
psychic activity forming the psycho-neurotic symptoms, we shall feel
justified in transferring to the dream the conclusions urged upon us by
hysteria.” Or one may turn to page 471, and read: “It is condensation
that is mainly responsible for the strange impression of the dream,
for we know of nothing analogous to it in the normal psychic life
accessible to consciousness.” Remember, too, that Freud does not think
that in regard to “falling in love with one member of the parental
couple and hatred of the other,” psycho-neurotics are “sharply
distinguished from ordinary human beings.”
Now if you are not very sharply distinguished from ordinary human
beings you naturally indulge in “typical dreams,”--the dreams that
everybody has. And among typical dreams is the Œdipus dream of the
death of parents or other near relatives. But here a difficulty arises.
“These dreams show the very unusual case where the dream-thought,
which has been created by the repressed wish, completely escapes the
censor, and is transferred to the dream without alteration.”[76] Is the
theory then at fault? No; but the censor is. “There is no wish which we
believe further from us.... The dream censor is therefore not prepared
for this monstrosity, just as the legislation of Solon was incapable of
establishing a punishment for parricide.”[77]
Objections to the Freudian theory are vain; the theory bends to
accommodate whatever it encounters, then straightens out and goes its
way as if nothing had happened.
If we are consciously anxious about our dear ones, the wily unconscious
merely takes advantage of that fact to stage a dream about somebody’s
death, well knowing that the conscious anxiety will blind us to the
deep-down truth. But there is consolation in the thought that “if
someone dreams ... that his father or mother, his brother or sister has
died,” Freud does not “use the dream as a proof that he wishes them
dead _now_.... The theory of dreams ... is satisfied with concluding
that the dreamer has wished them dead ... at some one time in
childhood.”[78] And to console us still further, he adds (p. 214) that
a child has no idea “of the terror of the Infinite Nothing.”
Pursuing the infinite nothing of this now happily satisfied dream
theory, we discover that “dreams of the death of parents predominately
refer to that member of the parental couple which shares the sex of the
dreamer,” except, of course, in the case of the homo-sexual. Or, “to
express the matter boldly, it is as though a sexual preference becomes
active at an early period, as though the boy regards his father as a
rival in love, and as though the girl takes the same attitude towards
her mother ... a rival by getting rid of whom he or she cannot but
profit.”[79] Dr. Watson, though he knew not the reason, was certainly
right in saying that bringing up children was a perilous business. What
else would the fate of Laius and Jocasta lead us to expect?
To put the matter beyond doubt, Freud cites the case of an
eight-year-old girl of his acquaintance, who, if her mother happens to
be called away from the table, reveals her psychic enormity by saying,
“Now I shall be Mamma. Charles, do you want some more vegetables?”[80]
Freud is not a man to be deceived by the seeming innocence of play. And
he blames “that sanctity which we have ascribed to the injunctions of
the Decalogue”[81] for the dullness which keeps us from perceiving the
incestuous and homicidal tendencies of our young.
It may be admitted that “no other impulse has had to undergo so much
suppression from the time of childhood as the sex impulse”;[82] and,
the parental instinct of self-preservation being what it is, the fact
is not surprising. And these suppressive tactics seem to have been in
vogue from the earliest times. “The obscure and primitive ages of human
society give us an unpleasant idea of the power of the father” and
the ruthlessness with which it was used. Kronos devours his children
as the wild boar devours the brood of the sow; Zeus [in the rôle of
retributive justice] castrates his father ... and takes his place as
ruler.”[83]
Now, as I remember this legend, Zeus operated with a sickle--an
immemorial image of Time. And as Kronos is himself a symbol of Time,
I long supposed that here was a figurative way of saying that Time
(Kronos), which devours all things (his children), shall himself
eventually be devoured, as it were by himself--the sickle. But
evidently the theory of dreams cannot be satisfied by symbols when they
are used to interpret mythology.
Evidently, too, the time has now arrived in this, our Freudian era,
for Kronos to suffer again and as literally as before, notwithstanding
the “frantic attempts” of modern parents to hold on to “whatever
remnants of the ... _potestas patris_” remain. The newspapers certainly
chronicle occasional incidents of this childish rebellion, if not of
the frantic efforts which are being made to resist it. Freud even knows
of a little girl--this one not yet three years old--who “tried to
strangle a suckling in the cradle, because she suspected its continued
presence boded her no good.”[84] So not the parents alone are in
danger. In the case of his own children, “who followed one another
rapidly,” he “missed the opportunity to make such observations,” the
supplanted baby always being too young to be dangerous at the time when
its nose was broken--another argument in favor of large families.
He foresees, however, what is to be dreaded later, for he describes the
predicament of a man of 31 who had a compulsion-neurosis which took
such a pronounced homicidal form that he (the young man) was forced
to lock himself in his room and to give the housekeeper the key for
fear that he should one day commit a murder. The father in this case
was dead and beyond the reach of reprisals, so “the obsessive reproach
transferred itself to strangers.”[85]
I do not wish for a moment to suggest that this case was unreal or to
belittle its horror. I am dealing merely with a peculiarity of the
diagnosis. You will observe that the blame is laid to a “reproach.” Had
the patient never reproached himself he would have remained normal.
Now if he was guilty of nothing but some childish fit of temper, and,
because of some senseless system of early training, led to magnify it
beyond all reason, the diagnosis may be sound. The danger comes from
the attempt to elaborate from these instances of abnormality a general
system of philosophy applicable to life in general. The implication
that reproaches should give way and any sort of conduct spared even
criticism, is inescapable. For example, Freud says[86] that “a
compulsion-neurosis ... corresponds to a super-morality, imposed upon
the primary character.” He chooses morality by name as the target of
_his_ “reproach.”
In the case under consideration, the patient remembered, under
psycho-analytic treatment, that at the age of seven he had “expressed
enmity” towards his father, and (still under treatment) at once
“realized that the hatred lay much deeper still.” Remorse, awakened
by the father’s painful last illness, had brought about that
fatal “super-morality,” without which the son might have remained
unrepentant, normal and happy. “Anyone,” Freud ominously adds, “capable
of wishing to push his own father from a mountain-top into an abyss is
certainly not to be trusted to spare the lives of those not so closely
bound to him. He does well to lock himself into his room.”[87]
Here the psychiatrist distinctly gives to the childish wish that very
importance which would naturally lead to excessive repressive measures
and to abnormal interior reproach. Moreover, it follows that all of us
who are not “sharply distinguished from ordinary human beings” would do
well to lock ourselves up. For we are not only capable of entertaining
such a wish, we have--so Freud has been telling us through fifty or
sixty pages--already entertained it, time and time again. Which brings
us to our--
_Sixth and Last Assumption_: That the cure for hysterical symptoms (and
these include most of the ills to which flesh is heir) is the recapture
by consciousness of the lost knowledge of that circumstance which drove
the original wish-thought into the limbo of the lower psychic locality.
The procedure is for the patient to dream a dream, or if he cannot do
this to make up a dream, which the psychiatrist “analyzes.” Then the
patient lies down on a couch, “relaxes,” and repeats whatever random
thoughts come into his head as the various parts of the dream are
brought to his attention. These “associated” thoughts are analyzed
in their turn. If there is reluctance, the operator knows he has
encountered modesty (“resistance,” he calls it) and has got the range.
He can now tell where to train his guns. For all these neuroses,
psychoses and psycho-neuroses (mental troubles in general and their
physical results) are, according to the hypothesis, the children of
shame. Kill shame, and the brats perish. That is what it amounts to.
It may have seemed unaccountable that it should have been thought
necessary to invent an elaborate system of dream interpretation when
the psychiatrist is convinced from the moment his office door-bell
rings that he is about to be confronted with a case of suppressed
incest. But the hocus-pocus serves its turn. Never has the ingenuity
of man devised a more effective excuse for the discussion of the
abominations of the human heart.
“But,” cries Freud, “my analyses bring about cures!”
Granted. But that only proves that Freud the man is better than Freud
the scientist and philosopher.
The world is full of miserable wretches whose early education was of
the most atrocious kind; who were first permitted improper contacts,
and then taught that their infantile imaginings were unpardonable
sins. The doctor poo-poos the whole matter, and they are relieved. In
other words, if he is a wise doctor, he tries to remedy the defects
of education by re-education. So long as he has to deal with those
suffering from abuse, or from starvation of natural desires--desires
which have failed of their ordinary satisfaction without having been
sublimated by devotion to higher aims--so long as he deals with these
unwilling anchorites and pitiable social victims, he does well.
But what if he writes books, circulating in huge editions among the
normal and spreading the doctrine that mental disease comes from
restraint, and not from the rank growth of passions, undisciplined or
merely balked?
As to this, I will quote the opinion of Judge William McAdoo, Chief
Magistrate of the City of New York. The Judge sees some half-million
criminal cases pass through the courts every year, so can hardly be
accused of speaking without opportunities for gathering information.
And he says in a recent article[88] that psycho-analysis is one of the
most “active” evils “effecting modern youth.” Parents, he tells us,
have been led to believe that any attempt to “suppress” the desires of
their children is likely to lead to dangerous “complexes.” Hence “the
complete collapse of parental authority,” of what Freud himself has
called “the antiquated _potestas patris_.”
But Freud is but one of the figures in a movement, and by following
his dreaming for a few more pages we shall be able to learn yet other
strange things which are not so, and some--yet stranger--which are.
5. FREUD THE METAPHYSICIAN
Superficially considered, Freud is the very antithesis of Dr. Watson.
The behaviorist, indeed, will have none of him. In his “Myth of the
Unconscious” he accuses him of having “resorted to voodooism instead of
falling back upon his early scientific training.”[89] He even suggests
that the psychiatrist was “much influenced in his youth by the fable
of the devils who took flight into the Gadarene swine.” Nevertheless,
Watsonianism and Freudianism are parts of the same gigantic piece of
mystification.
Freud may speak of the “unconscious” and Dr. Watson of the
“unverbalized”; the one of “unconditioned reflexes,” the other of “a
primary psychic apparatus”; but both agree in effect that the will is
a mere phenomenon resulting from the preponderance of forces, that the
self is a collection of movements after the things which move have been
taken away. In other words, both are mechanists. Their difference is in
temperament.
Nor is even this difference very profound. The two philosophies
have but one effect--to sanction _laissez-faire_ in matters of sex.
A verbalized but otherwise unconditioned “gut-reaction” is but a
conscious “libido” freed from the suppression which might create
a “complex.” Dr. Watson’s superiority lies in his insistence upon
education where sex is not involved. Freud’s superiority is literary.
But there are two Freuds, the literary and the metaphysical. In
telling dreams no mortal ever dared to tell before, he uses language
that he who runs may read. In his book on “Wit in its Relation to the
Unconscious”--one of the most complete compendiums of smutty stories in
the world--he proves himself a lively raconteur. But when he seeks to
plunge deep down to the roots of things, his style suddenly becomes a
Chinese puzzle. Take, for instance, the following paragraph from pages
478 and 479 of “The Interpretation of Dreams”: “When I termed one of
the psychic processes in the psychic apparatus the primary process,
I did so not only in consideration of the order of precedence and
capability, but also as admitting the temporal relations to a share
in the nomenclature. As far as our knowledge goes there is no psychic
apparatus possessing only the primary process, and in so far it is a
theoretic fiction; but so much is based on fact, that the primary
processes are present in the apparatus from the beginning, while the
secondary processes develop gradually in the course of life.”
In the original German this seems, to me at least, even less like
language than it does in the Brill translation. So much less that one
evening as I was puzzling over it, trying in vain to make it fit into
any conceivable sense, I fell asleep. And as I slept I dreamed; and as
I dreamed Freud appeared to me, and, after considerable persuasion,
proceeded to re-translate:
“When I said that one of the psychic processes was the primary process,
I meant that it was not only first in capacity but first in the time of
its appearance.”
“Very good,” said I. “Kindly go on.”
“As far as we know,” he did go on, “there is no psychic apparatus in
existence, and there never was one, which possesses only the primary
process. Therefore it is a theoretic fiction to suppose that there can
be a primary process standing alone.”
“Why then,” I interrupted, “do you complicate matters with a theoretic
fiction when they are complicated enough, in all conscience, if we
bother only with facts?”
“Because,”--and his tone showed some asperity, as if he were addressing
a stupid pupil, “because the primary processes are present in the
apparatus from the beginning, while the secondary processes develop
gradually in the course of life.”
I gasped. “According to that there _is_ a time when the primary
apparatus _does_ stand alone, viz, the time before the secondary
process develops. I thought you just said there was no such time?”
“You needn’t be rude,” said the great man. “Nobody is supposed to read
these obscure passages. But I have to write them, just as a doctor
has to talk a little Latin when you go to him for a prescription. You
wouldn’t respect him if he didn’t. Besides, what difference does it
make whether the primary apparatus ever stands alone or not?”
In my dream I pondered this for a long time before replying:
“Perhaps it doesn’t make any difference, in a theoretic fiction. But if
you mean that the primary apparatus is real, the idea that it can come
first and stand alone seems to imply that it really comes first and
really stands alone, not only in the individual but in the universe.
That would mean that the universe was built from the bottom upwards.”
The Freudian dream-image nodded. “Of course--just the way we build a
house.”
“But,” I objected, “if we build a house _we_ build it--the house does
not build itself. Therefore the house begins with something even higher
than its roof. So it is really built from the top down. So is the
cosmos, if you will admit that its builder and maker was God. But if I
let you build a man from his primary psychic apparatus up, you will be
saying next that the universe was built from _its_ primary apparatus
up--that is, from a theoretic fiction.”
Freud lighted a dream-cigar and sat down. “I’m no worse than the
theologians,” he smiled. “They say the universe was created out of
nothing.”
“What theologian,” I retorted, “ever said that the universe created
itself out of nothing? Your own Old Testament suggests that God created
the universe out of nothing but Himself.”
“And you profess to understand that?”
“Certainly not. The beginning and the end are postulated together in
one great mystery. But it isn’t a mystery which we invented. We found
it here. It is a mystery with force in it--something which goes.”
“We are such stuff as dreams are made of,” said Freud. “And dreams come
from a suppressed libido.”
“So? How about a dog’s dream?” I suddenly asked. “Does that, too, come
from a suppressed libido--a suppressed puppy libido? Or is it due to a
super-morality restraining a mother-fixation?”
“How do you know that dogs dream?”
“In the same way I know that you dream. I infer it from the way you
act.”
“To dream of a dog,” he responded heavily, paraphrasing one of his own
pages, “is to dream of the major function--French, _chien_; German,
_Chier_.” He had willfully missed the point.
And so the dream went on and on, until I finally woke up and began idly
to turn the pages of the great Dream Book itself. It was difficult
to believe that I was not still asleep, for I kept coming upon such
passages as the following, from page 442: “To speak figuratively,
it is quite possible that a day-thought plays the part of the
contractor (_entrepreneur_) in the dream. But ... no matter what idea
the contractor may have in his mind, and how desirous he may be of
putting it into operation, he must depend upon a capitalist to defray
the necessary expenses; and this capitalist ... is invariably and
indisputably a wish from the unconscious. In other cases the capitalist
himself is the contractor for the dream; this, indeed, seems to be the
more usual case. An unconscious wish is produced by the day’s work,
which in turn creates the dream. The dream processes, moreover, run
parallel with all the other possibilities of the economic relationship
used here as an illustration. Thus the _entrepreneur_ may contribute
some capital himself, or several _entrepreneurs_ may jointly supply the
capital required by the _entrepreneur_.”
This is certainly a moving picture. We seem to be looking upon
a lively scene in the financial district, with contractors and
capitalists running hither and thither, forming combinations for the
prosecution of great works. Yet it is a scene which belongs properly
to “Alice in Wonderland,” not in a book purporting to be scientific.
It is a conjurer’s trick, worked by that initial phrase, “To speak
figuratively.”
Now anybody who admits the existence of God, of a life which is vital
rather than mechanical, has the right to speak figuratively. With him
figures are the signs and symbols of real things. They have force
because they are the personifications of real forces whose existence he
is prepared to admit outside of metaphor.
But with the materialist, figures of speech are dishonest subterfuges.
They make the impossible seem possible and reasonable. By being
admittedly figures of speech, they escape criticism when they come upon
the stage. And once there, they act parts possible only to entities
possessing energy and will--the very things which the mechanistic
hypothesis professes to exclude from the picture. And in the end it
is claimed that all things which may be done by these flesh and blood
actors may be done by the nothings which they stand for.
This psychic contractor of Freud’s has something “in his mind” which
he is “desirous” of putting into operation! On the stage he is as full
of reason, consciousness and vim as is Mr. Douglas Fairbanks. But in
the Freudian philosophical system, literally considered, he is one of
the processes of a primary psychic system standing alone--that is, a
process in a state of things admittedly fictitious.
But the Great Man goes on:
“The story of Œdipus is the reaction of the imagination to these two
typical dreams [of murdering one’s father and marrying one’s mother].
And just as the dream when occurring to an adult is experienced
with feelings of resistance, so the legend must contain terror and
self-chastisement. The appearance which it further assumes is the
result of an uncomprehending secondary elaboration which tries to
make it serve a theological purpose. The attempt to reconcile divine
omnipotence with human responsibility must, of course, fail with this
material as with every other.”[90]
So it is an “uncomprehending” elaboration which busies itself with
trying to reconcile divine omnipotence with human responsibility. One
would hardly expect an uncomprehending elaboration to succeed in such a
task. As to actual incompatibility of the two ideas, it is such a large
question that I prefer to consider it later under another head. Freud
goes on:[91]
“The unconscious idea, as such, is altogether incapable of entering
into the foreconscious, and ... it can exert an influence there only by
uniting with a harmless idea already belonging to the foreconscious, to
which it transfers its intensity and under which it allows itself to be
concealed.”
“Allows itself to be concealed!” It has intelligence and purpose, this
unconscious thought. A cunning fellow for a mere reflex in a process
antedating memory and reason. But the theatre has suddenly become dark
with purple shadows through which absurdity stalks, obscure but naked
and unashamed. The unconscious wish is incapable of entering into the
foreconscious, but, without entering it, nevertheless manages to exert
an influence there, by means of what go-between Freud only knows; for
the “harmless idea” with which union is to be made is already beyond
reach in the foreconscious. Nor is this all.
“The relations existing for the repressed idea are similar to the
situation existing in Austria for the American dentist, who is
forbidden to practice unless he gets permission from a regular
physician to use his name on the public signboard and thus cover the
legal requirements. Moreover, just as it is naturally not the busiest
physicians who form such alliances with dental practitioners, so in
the psychic life only such foreconscious or conscious ideas are chosen
to cover a repressed idea as have not themselves attracted much ...
attention.”[92]
The _entrepreneur_ (French for “undertaker”) has now become a dentist,
and the entire Austrian code of civil procedure has been introduced
into the psychic apparatus. Yet, such is the lure of figurative speech,
so easy is it to fancy that whatever can be true of the figure is
necessarily true of the abstraction for which it “doubles,” that even
Freud obviously thinks he is saying something.
He proceeds to speak of “occupation,” meaning not occupation but the
possession of energy. And in this way we come to the problem of Will,
in these words:[93] “It is probable that the principle of pain first
regulates the displacements of occupation automatically, but it is
quite possible that the consciousness of these qualities adds a second
and more subtile regulation which may even oppose the first.... The
automatic control of the primary principle of pain and the restriction
of mental capacity connected with it are broken by the sensible
regulations which in their turn are again automatisms.” And again: “The
mental processes are in themselves devoid of quality except for the
excitement of pleasure and pain accompanying them,” which, as we know,
are to be held in check as possible “disturbers of thought.”[94]
This, if it means anything, means that energy in the primary psychic
system is automatically regulated by pleasure and pain. But the primary
processes are not only unconscious, they are incapable of becoming
conscious. “There are,” we are told,[95] “two kinds of unconscious
... both are unconscious in the psychological sense; but in our sense
the first, which we call the unconscious, is likewise incapable of
consciousness.” Freud, like Dr. Watson, attempts to conceive of
pleasure, pain and unconsciousness altogether. He, like the great
behaviorist, subtracts the quality of painfulness from pain and the
quality of pleasurableness from pleasure, and fancies that he has
something left--something capable of regulating our unconscious conduct
automatically.
Even when we come to the secondary process, with its “sensible
regulation,” these “in their turn are again automatisms.” And though
they have no quality except as exciters of pleasure and pain, this
excitement must be held in check as a possible disturber of thought--of
the sensible regulations. So these higher mental processes, which
have no quality save the one of which they are deprived, yet
exercise a control at once “sensible” and “automatic” over their more
humble neighbors in the psychic basement. And somewhere there is “a
restriction of mental capacity.” With this last statement I have no
quarrel.
“What part,” Freud wants to know,[96] “now remains in our description
of the once all-powerful and all overshadowing consciousness?” Very
little, one would think. “None,” he says, “other than that of a sensory
organ for the perception of psychic qualities.... The psychic process
which is turned to the outer world is itself the outer world for the
sensory organ of consciousness.”
So the lower sensory organ, turned towards the world, is unconscious.
And the higher sensory organ, turned towards the lower, is an
automatism. No doubt it is true that “the most complex mental
operations are possible without the cooperation of consciousness,” and
that “the state of becoming conscious depends upon the exercise of a
certain psychic function, viz, attention.”[97] But not even attention
can be moved about by nothing. And one complex mental operation which
cannot operate without consciousness is rational control. To suppose
that the boss of a job does not know what he is doing is to suppose
that the job is without a rational boss.
For yet another time the attempt to create a psychology without a
veritable Psyche falls to the ground. Freud’s fictional apparatus lands
him squarely upon the spot marked by Dr. McDougall’s X. Once more
his verbalization has brought him into complete agreement with the
unappreciative Dr. Watson. But what has all this to do with science?
Let us find out.
FOOTNOTES:
[47] “Psycho-Analysis,” by R. B. Hingley, B.A., Edinburgh, second
edition, 1922, p. 17.
[48] “The Interpretation of Dreams,” p. 172.
[49] _Ibid._, p. 244, note.
[50] _Op. cit._, p. 241.
[51] _Ibid._, p. 388.
[52] _Op. cit._, p. 195.
[53] _Op. cit._, p. 106.
[54] At the bottom of p. 171.
[55] “What is the price of Graz?” An expression used by the Viennese
when they wish to boast of wealth.
[56] _Op. cit._, p. 179.
[57] _Op. cit._, p. 325.
[58] _Ibid._, p. 474.
[59] _Op. cit._, p. 405.
[60] _Loc. cit._
[61] _Op. cit._, p. 120.
[62] _Op. cit._, p. 439, note.
[63] _Ibid._, p. 456.
[64] _Ibid._, p. 439.
[65] “The Interpretation of Dreams,” p. 240.
[66] _Op. cit._, p. 224.
[67] _Op. cit._, p. 221.
[68] _Ibid._, p. 439.
[69] _The Century Magazine_, September, 1927.
[70] “The Interpretation of Dreams,” p. 136.
[71] _Op. cit._, p. 390.
[72] _Vide_ p. 155.
[73] _Op. cit._, p. 246.
[74] _Op. cit._, p. 486.
[75] _Ibid._, p. 329.
[76] _Ibid._, p. 226.
[77] _Ibid._, p. 226.
[78] _Op. cit._, p. 211.
[79] _Ibid._, pp. 216-217.
[80] _Ibid._, p. 218.
[81] _Vide_ _op. cit._, p. 217.
[82] _Ibid._, p. 240.
[83] _Ibid._, p. 217.
[84] _Ibid._, p. 213.
[85] _Op. cit._, p. 221.
[86] _Ibid._, p. 212.
[87] _Ibid._, p. 221.
[88] _The Ladies’ Home Journal_, October, 1927.
[89] _Harper’s Magazine_, September, 1927
[90] _Op. cit._, p. 224.
[91] _Ibid._, p. 443.
[92] _Op. cit._, p. 444.
[93] _Ibid._, p. 388-489.
[94] _Ibid._, p. 490.
[95] _Ibid._, p. 488.
[96] _Op. cit._, p. 489.
[97] _Ibid._, pp. 469-470.