PHANTASIES, DREAMS, AND DELUSIONS
We have already seen that emotion is intimately allied with instinct,
and that it is the thrust of the urging instincts that drives us
to action, making us seek to appease the needs of our nature and
incidentally fulfil certain racial and evolutionary ends.
Our first attempt, urged on by these promptings, is to bring about
the realisation of our desires in the external world by means of
bodily effort; but should this effort fail to achieve its purpose, or
should circumstances deny us the opportunity to make this effort with
any hope of success, then the mind often falls back upon a secondary
achievement, and images its success in the realms of phantasy and
make-believe, where there are no laws of cause and effect to check its
operations, and Cinderella in her kitchen constructs a phantasy of the
Prince’s ball. She sees her wish acted out to its fulfilment in the
theatre of her mind.
This factor in our nature influences a large proportion of our mental
processes, and is considered to be the chief factor in determining the
nature, not only of our dreams, but also of the symptoms of nervous and
mental diseases, as will be seen later.
During sleep the avenues of the physical senses, whereby impressions
reach the mind, are more or less closed, and the ego, which never
ceases its activities, is thrown back upon the resources of its
memories. Unguided by the reason and judgment, it reviews these,
following along the chains of associated ideas according to the laws of
memory, which we considered in an earlier chapter.
These wanderings, however, though carried out with the illogicality
which distinguishes the lower levels of our mind, are not entirely
purposeless, being determined by various factors. It may be that
physical or sensory impressions, dimly discerned during sleep through
the partially closed doors of the senses, will give rise to a train
of thought, or the matters upon which the mind has been busied during
the day may continue to occupy it in an undirected fashion during
sleep; but the dream-determining element to which most attention has
been directed in modern psychology is the upsurging of the instinctive
wishes which have been denied fulfilment in waking life, so that in our
dreams we see realised, as in phantasy, the wishes which have failed to
gain realisation in reality, or may even have failed to gain access to
our consciousness owing to the operation of the censor which strives to
exclude from consciousness all distressing or repulsive matters; for in
sleep all our painfully acquired civilisation falls away from us, the
higher centres of our being are in abeyance, and our primitive, natural
self, controlled but never abolished, expresses its fundamental,
untutored desires in their elemental form.
These wishes, however, are seldom expressed directly. So foreign are
they to our civilised selves that even in sleep our habits of thinking
assert themselves and exercise some check upon what shall be expressed;
but they are generally distorted almost beyond recognition by the
substitutions of more acceptable ideas for crude images of instinctive
needs, and as the subconscious mind links ideas together according to
their superficial or accidental associations, it will be seen that
strange and tangled dramas will be acted out upon the stage of the mind
in an effort to represent the fulfilment of some primitive instinctive
wish.
Modern methods of psychological research make much use of dreams in the
effort to investigate the levels of the mind to which we have no direct
access, and psychotherapy uses the same method in order to trace the
disorders of the mind to their cause. For if the train of thought which
the mind has followed in its progression from a crude instinctive,
often physical, wish to the completed dream-drama be traced back again
from the images of the dream to the underlying ideas which gave rise to
them, we can lay bare the hidden springs of motive and character; hence
the great use that has been made of the method of dream analysis in
modern psychotherapy.
It is interesting to note that the delusions of lunatics are
constructed upon exactly the same principles as the phantasies of
our castles in the air; they also represent the fulfilment of wishes
that have been denied their realisation, and have achieved their
ultimate form through the same primitive methods of thinking that
are responsible for our dreams; in fact, they may be looked upon as
a phantasy which has progressed a step nearer realisation than the
day-dream.
The symptoms of the hysteric have a similar origin, but represent the
wishes of dissociated complexes instead of the wishes of the whole
personality as happens in insanity.
Thus we may see that, should our desires be denied expression in
our lives, they will construct dream castles for themselves during
sleep in which we may temporarily dwell as monarch of all we survey;
and should these desires be very imperative, should a large part of
our nature be involved in them, then the dream may overflow into
waking consciousness, and we shall live among our own subjective mind
pictures, instead of among objective realities, and act out the part
we have assigned ourselves in the dream-drama, to the consternation of
onlookers who pronounce us insane.
The lunatic, however, is not irrational, he is absolutely rational if
once his premises be granted, for he carries the logical deductions
from these premises to their ultimate conclusion. And once it be
realised that some fundamental and essentially natural wish lies at the
root of these phantasies which we see him acting out, then we shall see
that the clue to the treatment of insanity lies in these wishes and the
region of the mind that gives rise to them.