There are three reasons why psycho-analysts do not more often encounter this
variable element, this Hidden Z. First, such dreams as they elect to deal
with, are mostly sexual. Second, they do not apply the methods of
individual differences which have been made so familiar and so useful by
Professor Cattell in this country.[*] Thirdly, their type of culture leads
them to study the dream extensively rather than intensively and all the
while in apparent disregard of those conceptions of physiological psychology
which we now associate with the work of Wundt, of Ladd and of Woodworth, and
with the psychopathology of Prince.
[*] The writer's present psychophysiological theory of dreams was first
broached in public, at a series of meetings on the subject of Individual
Differences, held in honor of Professor Cattell, at Columbia University, in
the Department of Psychology, in April, 1914.
To be sure, Jung's recent utterances before the Psycho-Medical Society of
London, demonstrate his dissatisfaction with the Freudian conception of the
dream; but he is still far from those studies of specific mental and nervous
dispositions to which psychology has slowly come, and for which we now have
a tool in the shape of Prince's conception of the neurogram. In
psycho-analytic work a more vague use of "dream material" is preferred and
it is only by good luck that the real settings-of-ideas come into account.
Jung, no less than Freud, has forgotten that philosophy has become
mechanistic since Descartes'[21] famous year of 1637, and Jung would throw
us back to the early seventeenth century, with his energic conception of the
Libido, or the Ur-libido, now called Horme and sometimes merely elan vital.
And this, fifty years after Herbert Spencer's tremendous emphasis on
specific studies in reflex-action![22]
Fontenelle, the wittiest of Cartesians, writing in 1686, gives us a classic
tableau of this sort of speculative temper. [23] He pictures worthies like
Pythagoras, Heraclitus; Empedocles, as being invited to witness Lulli's
opera "Phaeton," at the Paris Odeon. In characteristic fashion, each in
turn tries to explain the spectacular aerial flight of the actor in the
title-role, from the floor of the stage to the ceiling. One says, that
Phaeton is able to fly by the potency of certain numbers of which he is
composed; another, that a secret virtue carries him aloft; still another,
that Phaeton travels through the air because he abhors to leave a vacuum in
the upper corner of the stage; and so on, with a hundred and one
speculations which, as Fontenelle remarks, should have ruined the reputation
of antiquity. Finally, he pictures Descartes coming along and saying: "This
actor is able to rise from the floor because he hangs by a cord, at the
other end of which is a counterpoise, heavier than he, which is descending."
This is mechanistic . . . If Freud and Jung had been of the party, can it be
doubted that the one would have ascribed Phaeton's aviation to a
wish-fulfilment of the flying-dream type, derived from a reminiscence of
erotic motion-pleasure[24] in childhood, or that Jung, for his part, would
have said Phaeton was levitated by the energic force of a sublimation of the
Ur-Libido, alias elan vital, alias Horme!
* * *