“The interpretation of dreams,” says Professor Freud in one place, “is
the royal road to a knowledge of the part the unconscious plays in the
mental life.”
Even standing alone this statement is sufficiently striking; it is at
once a theory and a challenge. But it does not stand alone. It comes at
the end of many years of research among every class of mental diseases.
It comes, therefore, with the authentication of experience. It is not to
be lightly set aside; it claims our study; and the study of it will not
go unrewarded. The short essay here translated by Dr. Eder is but an
introduction to the vast field opened up by Professor Sigm. Freud and
his colleagues. Already the journals of clinical psychology, normal or
morbid, are full of the discussions of Professor Freud’s methods and
results. There is a “Freud School.” That alone is a proof that the
method is novel if not new. There are, of course, violent opponents and
critical students. The opponents may provoke, but it is to the critical
students that Professor Freud will prefer to speak. “The condemnation,”
said Hegel, “that a great man lays upon the world is to force it to
explain him.” Of a new method, either of research or of treatment—and
the Freud method is both—the same may be said. It is certain that,
whatever our prejudice against details may be, the theory of
“psycho-analysis” and the treatment based upon it deserves, if only as a
mental exercise, our critical consideration. But Professor Freud is not
alone in the world of morbid psychology. Let me digress for a moment.
Over twenty years ago it was my special business to study and criticise
several textbooks on insanity. To the study of these textbooks I came
after many years of discipline in normal psychology and the related
sciences. When I came to insanity proper, I found that practically not a
single textbook made any systematic effort to show how the morbid
symptoms we classified as “mental diseases” had their roots in the
mental processes of the normal mind. In his small book, “Sanity and
Insanity,” Dr. Charles Mercier did make an effort to lay out, as it
were, the institutes of insanity, the normal groundwork out of which the
insanities grew, the groups of ideas that to-day serve to direct our
conduct and to-morrow lose their adjustment to any but a specially
adapted environment. In his later works, particularly in “Psychology,
Normal and Morbid,” Dr. Mercier has followed up the central ideas of the
early study. All the more recent textbooks in English contain efforts in
the same direction; but with a few striking exceptions they are studies
rather of physical symptoms associated with mental processes than of
morbid psychology proper. It was not until there came from across the
Channel Dr. Pierre Janet’s carefully elaborated studies on Hysteria that
I realised what a wealth of psychological material had remained hidden
in our asylums, in our nervous homes, even in our ordinary hospitals,
and in the multitudes of strange cases that occur in private practice.
Janet, a pupil of the Charcot School—Charcot, who made _la Salpetrière_
famous—pushed the minute analysis of morbid mental states into regions
practically hitherto untouched. He was not alone. His colleague,
Professor Raymond, and others in France and Germany, all work with the
same main ideas. Janet’s books read like romances. His studies on
Psychological Automatism, the Mental State of Hystericals, Neuroses and
Fixed Ideas, and many others on the part played by the unconscious, were
such rich mines of fact and suggestion that Professor William James, in
his “Principles of Psychology,” said of them: “All these facts taken
together, form unquestionably the beginning of an inquiry which is
destined to throw a new light into the very abysses of our nature.”
Curiously, not in this country—the country of great psychologists,
Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Hartley, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Adam Smith,
James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Bain, Spencer, among the dead, and whole
schools of distinguished psychologists among the living—not in this
country, but in America, was the value of the new material seriously
considered. Here and there, within recent years, in this country,
Janet’s elaborate studies have not been fruitless; but I could not
readily name any clinician in this country that has produced similar
studies. It is to the continents of Europe and America, which in this
field are in intimate touch, that we must go if we are to see the rich
outgrowths of morbid psychology. I do not say that the work done by our
English students of insanity is not, of its kind, as great and as
important as any done in the world, but it is none the less true that,
until a few years ago, the methods of Janet, Raymond, Bernheim, Beaunis,
not to speak of Moll, Forel, and Oppenheim, were practically unstudied
here. In America it has been entirely different. Even the names of the
men are now familiar in our English magazines—Muensterberg, Morton
Prince, Boris Sidis, Ernest Jones, J. Mark Baldwin, not to mention
William James and Stanley Hall. It looks as if every new idea unearthed
in the Old World is put to the test by someone in the new. Britain
remains curiously cold.
It would be interesting to ask the reason. Is it our metaphysical
training? Is it the failure of the philosophical schools to realize the
value of all this new raw material of study? Is it, perhaps, the fear
that “the unity of consciousness” may be endangered by the study of
Double Personality, Multiple Personality, Dissociation of Consciousness,
Dormant Complexes, Hysterias, Phobias, Obsessions, Psychoneuroses, Fixed
Ideas, Hysterical Amnesias, Hypermnesias, and the masses of other
notions correlated, roughly, under the term “unconscious”? The
suggestion of fear is not mere conjecture. Many years ago a
distinguished student of philosophy, a pupil and friend of Sir William
Hamilton, indicated to me, when I spoke to him of some recent work on
Double Personality, that he had difficulty in placing the new work,
feeling that, in admitting the possibility of multiple personality, he
was sacrificing the primary concept of philosophy, the unity of
consciousness. It did not perhaps occur to him that, when two so-called
“persons” speak together, there are, in popular language, “two
personalities”—each, no doubt, in a separate body, but each having his
own “unity of consciousness.”
If this be a fact, is there any greater difficulty in explaining the
other fact that two persons may be, as James put it, under the same hat?
The metaphysical difficulty, if there be a difficulty, is neither more
nor less in the one case than in the other. But it is needless to ask
why a whole field of study has been, relatively, neglected in this
country. For now we have begun to make up leeway.
This translation by Dr. Eder is an introduction to the latest phase of
the study of the unconscious. It brings us back to the point I began
with, the relation of the normal to the morbid. Dreams are a part of
everyone’s normal experience, yet they are shown here to be of the same
tissue, of the same mental nature, as other phenomena that are
undoubtedly morbid. Dreams therefore offer in the normal a budding-point
for the study of morbid growths. And the study of dreams by Freud came
long after his studies of such neuroses as the phobias, hysterias, and
the rest. To dreams he applied the same method of investigation and
treatment as to the others, and he found that dreams offered an
unlimited field for the same kind of study.
Perhaps, before going further, I should attempt to disarm criticism
about the term “unconscious.” We speak of subconsciousness,
co-consciousness, unconscious mind, unconscious cerebration; or what
other terms should we use? Here it is better to avoid discussion, for we
are concerned less with theory than with practice. And in Freud’s work,
whether we accept his theory or not, the practice is of primary
importance. He takes the view that no conscious experience is entirely
lost; what seems to have vanished from the current consciousness has
really passed into a subconsciousness, where it lives on in an organised
form as real as if it were still part of the conscious personality. This
view, with various modifications, is adopted by many students of morbid
psychology. But there is another view. Muensterberg, for instance,
maintains that it is unnecessary to speak of “subconsciousness,” for
every fact can be explained in terms of physiology. He would accept the
term “co-conscious” or “co-consciousness”; but in one chapter he ends
the discussion by saying: “But whether we prefer the physiological
account or insist on the co-conscious phenomena, in either case is there
any chance for the subconscious to slip in? That a content of
consciousness is to a high degree dissociated, or that the idea of the
personality is split off, is certainly a symptom of pathological
disturbance, but it has nothing to do with the constituting of two
different kinds of consciousness, or with breaking the continuous
sameness of consciousness itself. The most exceptional and most uncanny
occurrences of the hospital teach after all the same which our daily
experience ought to teach us: there is no subconsciousness”
(“Psychotherapy,” p. 157).
There are many refinements of distinction that we could make here, and
if any reader is anxious to consider them, he will find some of them in
a small volume on “Subconscious Phenomena,” by Muensterberg, Ribot, and
others (Rebman, London).
Here it is not of primary importance to come to any conclusion on the
best term to use or the complement theory of the facts. The discussion
is far from an end; but the harvest of facts need not wait for the end
of the discussion.
Meanwhile, let it be said that Professor Freud has been steeped in this
whole subject from his student days. It is, however, less important to
discuss his theory than to understand his method. The method is called
“psycho-analysis.” The name is not inviting, and it might apply to any
form of mental analysis; but it is at least consistently Greek in
etymology, and has taken on a technical meaning in the medical schools.
What is the method?
Let it be granted that a person has undergone a strongly emotional
experience—for example, a sudden shock or fright. If the person is
highly nervous, the shock may result in some degree of dissociation.
This may take the form of a loss of memory for certain parts of the
experience. Let it be so. The ultimate result may be an unreasonable
fear of some entirely harmless object or situation. The person is afraid
of a crowd, or afraid of a closed door, or has an intense fear of some
animal or person. For this fear he can give no reason; he cannot tell
when it began nor why it persists. He may more or less overcome it; but
he may not. All through his future life he will go about with a
helplessly unreasonable fear of a closed door (claustrophobia) or of a
crowd (agoraphobia). Minor varieties of such an affection are to be
found in every person’s experience. On investigation, however, the root
of the fear can be discovered: it is the product of the original
emotional shock. The intellectual details of the emotional experience
have completely vanished from the memory, but the emotion remains, and
it is attached to some accidental object or circumstance present in the
original experience. Thousands of illustrations could be given. They
are, unfortunately, only too numerous. In this essay on the
Interpretation of Dreams the reader will find many simple cases.
If, now, the person so affected is placed in a quiet room, if he is
requested to concentrate his mind on the disturbing object or idea
associated with his fear, if he is encouraged to observe passively the
chance ideas which float up to him when he thus concentrates himself, if
he utters, under the direction of his medical attendant, every such idea
as it comes into his mind, there is a strange result. These ideas,
coming apparently by chance from nowhere in particular, are, when
carefully studied, found to be linked up with some past experience,
dating, perhaps, from months or years away. If each idea as it emerges
is followed up, if the other ideas dragged into consciousness by it are
carefully recorded, it is found that sooner or later entirely forgotten
experiences come into clear consciousness. There are many ways of
helping this process. One of the ways is this: Let a series of words be
arranged; let the doctor speak one of them to the patient; let the
patient, in the shortest time possible to him, say right out whatever
idea is suggested to him by the word; let the time taken to make the
response be recorded in seconds and fractions of a second—a thing easy
enough to do with a stop-watch. Then, when the responses to a long
series of words are all recorded, and the time each response has taken,
it is found that some responses have taken much longer than others. This
prolongation of the response-time is always found whenever the test word
has stirred up a memory associated with emotion. By following up further
the ideas stirred by this word, more ideas of a related kind are
discovered, often to the patient’s surprise. Things long forgotten come
back to memory; circumstances that apparently had no relation to the
present consciousness are found to be linked in sequence with
it—emotions, unreasoning fears, anxieties, that apparently had no
relation to any particular experience, are found at last to be part and
parcel of things that happened long ago. Once the doctor has his cue, he
can range in many directions, and probe the mind again and again, until
he reveals multitudes of suppressed memories, forgotten ideas, forgotten
elements of experience. He can even get back into early childhood,
which, to the patient himself, leaves many and many a blank area in the
memory. But always the doctor lights, sooner or later, on some complex
experience in which the particular fear or anxiety arose.
But now, if the case is a suitable one, a still stranger thing happens.
When the forgotten experience has thus artfully been brought into the
full light of consciousness, the patient finds himself satisfied with
the explanation, and loses his particular fear. He can now go back over
the whole history of its genesis; he can link up the old experience to
the new, and so he attains once more satisfaction and peace of mind. Up
till now he could not be reasoned out of his anxiety; he had always an
answer for any explanation; he had always a fresh foolish reason for his
fear. Now all this vanishes. He finds his mind once more running
smoothly, and his “phobia” gone. The unreasoning dread has been tracked
back to its lair, and its lair has been destroyed in the process.
There are many other methods of achieving the same result; let this
generalised sketch suffice.
What now is the theory? The theory is that the mental experience or
“complex” had, for some reason and by some mechanism, been submerged, or
suppressed, or forgotten. Freud maintains that there is a fundamental
tendency in the mind to suppress every experience that is associated
with painful emotion. This doctrine is allied to Bain’s “Law of
Conservation”—that painful experiences depress the vitality and tend to
disappear, while pleasant experiences exalt the vitality and tend to
remain in memory. At any rate, by some process the painful experience
disappears from conscious memory, but it does not cease to exist. It may
lie dormant, or it may work subconsciously, and throw up the emotional
bubbles that continue, without a known reason, to excite the ordinary
consciousness. But the complex, though deep and partly dormant, never
gets beyond reach. By the method of concentration, by the use of “free
associations,” by the following up of all the clues offered by the ideas
“fished up,” the submerged complex can, element by element, be brought
back. When once it is brought back the patient is restored, the dormant
complexes once more resume their place in the total current of his
experience, and the mind flows at peace.
This is, roughly, the method of psycho-analysis. It has been applied in
various types of neurosis—hysterias, obsessions, phobias, etc. It has
not always succeeded in removing the morbid conditions, but it has
succeeded so often that it may legitimately be regarded as a method of
treatment. As a matter of discovery it is arduous, and demands the
highest skill and invention if it is to succeed. Incidentally it reveals
masses of unpleasant ideas, of painful ideas, even of disgusting ideas;
but, in the right hands, it leads to the healing of the mind.
MACBETH. How does your patient, doctor?
DOCTOR. Not so sick, my lord,
As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies,
That keep her from her rest.
MACBETH. Cure her of that;
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d;
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;
Raze out the written troubles of the brain;
And, with some sweet oblivious antidote,
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff,
Which weighs upon the heart?