Chapter VII: Symbolism in Dreams (2)

Similarly in insanity we have an even more constant and pronounced tendency for the subject to attribute his own sensations to imaginary individuals, and to create personalities out of portions of the real personality. All the illusions, delusions, and hallucinations of the insane are merely the manifold manifestations of this tendency. Without it the insanity would not exist. It is not because he is subjected to unusual sensations--visionary, auditory, tactile, olfactory, visceral, etc.--that a man is insane. It is because he creates imaginary personalities to account for these sensations; if his food tastes strange some one has given him poison if he hears a strange voice it is some one communicating with him by telephones or microphones or hypnotism; if he feels a strange internal sensation it is perhaps because he has another person inside him. The case has even been recorded of a man who attributed any feeling he experienced, even the most normal sensations of hunger and thirst, to the people around him. It is exactly the same process as goes on in our dreams. The sane man, the normal waking man, may experience all these strange sensations, but he recognises that they are the spontaneous outcome of his own organisation.

We may, however, advance a step beyond this position. This self-objectivation, this dramatisation of our experiences, is not confined to sleep and to pathological conditions which resemble sleep. It is natural and primitive in a far wider sense. The infant will gaze inquisitively at its own feet, watch their movements, play with them, 'punish' them; consciousness has not absorbed them as part of the self.[174] The infant really acts and feels towards the remote parts of his own body as the adult acts and feels in dreaming. We are reminded of the generalisation of Giessler that dream consciousness corresponds to the normal psychic state in childhood, while sleeping subconsciousness corresponds to the embryonic psychic state; so that the dream state represents the renascence of the ego disentangling itself from the impersonal sensations and indistinct images of the embryonic stage of life. That sleeping consciousness is the primitive embryonic consciousness is, indeed, indicated, it has often seemed to me, by the fact that in many animals the embryonic position is the position of rest and sleep. Ducklings and chicks in the shell have their heads beneath their wing. The dog lies with his feet together, head flexed, and hind-quarters drawn up. Man, alike in the womb and asleep, tends to be curled up, with the flexors predominating over the extensors.

The savage has gone beyond the infant in ability to assimilate the impressions of his own limbs, but on the psychic side he still constantly tends to objectify his own feelings and ideas, re-creating them as external beings. Primitive man has done so from the first, and this impulse has struck its roots into all our most fundamental human traditions even as they survive in civilisation to-day. The man of the early world moves, like the dreamer, among a sea of emotions and ideas which he cannot recognise the origin of, and, like the dreamer, he instinctively dramatises them. But, unlike the dreamer, he gives stability to the images he has thus created and in good faith mistaken for independent beings. Thus we have the animistic stages of culture, and early man peoples his world with gods and spirits and demons and fairies and ghosts which enter into the traditions of his race, and are more or less accepted even by a later race which no longer creates them for itself.

In our more advanced civilisations we are still struggling with later forms of that Protean tendency to objectify the self and to animate the things and even the people around us with our own spirit. The impatient and imperfectly bred child, or even man, kicks viciously the object he stumbles against, animate or inanimate, in order to revenge a wrong which exists only in himself. On a slightly higher plane, the men of mediæval times brought actions in the law courts against offending animals and solemnly pronounced sentence against them as 'criminals,'[175] while even to-day society still 'punishes' the human criminal because it has imaginatively re-created him in the image of an ordinary normal person, and lacks the intelligence to perceive that he has been moulded by the laws of his nature and environment into a creature which we do well to protect ourselves against, but have no right to 'punish.'[176] Everywhere we still see around us the surviving relics of this primitive tendency of men to project their own personalities into external objects. A fine civilisation lies largely in the due subordination of this tendency, in the realisation and control of our own emotional possibilities, and in the resultant growth of personal responsibility.

It is thus impossible to over-estimate the immense importance of the primitive symbolic tendency to objectify the subjective. Men have taken out of their own hearts their best feelings and their worst feelings, and have personalised and dramatised them, bowed down to them or stamped on them, unable to hear the voice with which each of their images spoke: 'I am thyself.' Our conceptions of religion, of morals, of many of the mightiest phenomena of life, especially the more exceptional phenomena, have grown up under this influence, which still serves to support many movements of to-day by some people imagined to be modern.

Dreaming, as we have seen, is not the sole source of such conceptions. But they could scarcely have been found convincing, and possibly could not even have arisen, among races which were wholly devoid of dream experiences. A large part of all progress in psychological knowledge, and, indeed, a large part of civilisation itself, lies in realising that the apparently objective is really subjective, that the angels and demons and geniuses of all sorts that once seemed to be external forces taking possession of feeble and vacant individualities are themselves but modes of action of marvellously rich and varied personalities. In our dreams we are brought back into the magic circle of early culture, and we shrink and shudder in the presence of imaginative phantoms that are built up of our own thoughts and emotions, and are really our own flesh.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 130: See _e.g._ Galton, _Inquiries_ (Everyman's Library edition), pp. 79-112. Among more recent writings on this subject may be mentioned Bleuler, art. 'Secondary Sensations,' Tuke's _Dictionary of Psychological Medicine;_ Suarez de Mendoza, _L'Audition Colorée;_ Jules Millet, _Audition Colorée;_ and especially a useful summary by Clavière, 'L'Audition Colorée,' _L'Année Psychologique_, fifth year, 1899. A case of auditory gustation is recorded by A. M. Pierce, _American Journal of Psychology_, 1907. It may be noted that Boris Sidis has argued (_Psychological Review_, January 1904) that all hallucinations are of the nature of secondary sensations.]

[Footnote 131: Ferrero, in his _Lois Psychologiques du Symbolisme_ (1895), deals broadly with symbolism in human thought and life.]

[Footnote 132: _Revue Philosophique_, November 1902.]

[Footnote 133: 'Richard Wagner et Tannhauser' in _L'Art Romantique_.]

[Footnote 134: The motor imagery suggested by music is in some persons profuse and apparently capricious, and may be regarded as an anomaly comparable to a synaesthesia. Heine was an example of this, and he has described in _Florentine Nights_ the visions aroused by the playing of Paganini, and elsewhere the visions evoked in him by the music of Berlioz. Though I do not myself experience this phenomenon, I have found that there is sometimes a tendency for music to arouse ideas of motor imagery; thus some melodies of Handel suggest a giant painting frescoes on a vast wall space. The most elementary motor relationship of music is seen in the tendency of many people to sway portions of their body--to 'beat time'--in sympathy with the music. (This phenomenon has been experimentally studied by J. B. Miner, 'Motor, Visual, and Applied Rhythms,' Monograph Supplement to the _Psychological Review_, vol. v., No. 4, June 1903). Music is fundamentally an audible dance, and the most primitive music is dance music.]

[Footnote 135: The instinctive nature of this tendency is shown by the fact that it persists even in sleep. Thus Weygandt relates that he once fell asleep in the theatre during one of the last scenes of _Cavalleria Rusticana_, when the tenor was singing in ever higher and higher tones, and dreamed that in order to reach the notes the performer was climbing up ladders and stairs on the stage.]

[Footnote 136: See, especially the attractive book of André Pirro, _L'Esthétique de J. S. Bach_ (1907), and also Albert Schweitzer, _J. S. Bach_ (1908), especially chapters xix.-xxiii. 'Concrete things,' says Ernest Newman, summarising some of these results (_Nation_, December 25, 1909), 'incessantly suggested abstract ideas or inward moods to Bach, and _vice versâ_. He would time after time use the same musical formula for the same word or idea. He first suggests the external concepts of "high" and "low," as other composers have done, by high or low notes, and motion up or down by ascending or descending themes. But Bach correlates with the outward, objective thing a whole series of things that are purely subjective. Thus moods of elation or of depression are to him the mental equivalents of the physical acts of going up or down. So he gives us a whole series of ascending themes to words that express "mounting" states of mind, as it were--such as pride, courage, strength, resolution--and descending themes to words that express "declining" states of mind--such as prostration, adoration, depression, discouragement, grief at sin, humility, poverty, fatigue, and illness. For the two sets of concepts, internal and external, he will use the same musical symbols. To represent the physical concept of "surrounding," again, he adopts the device of a circling or undulating theme. A crown or a garland suggests the same idea to him, so for this, too, he uses the same kind of theme. But the correspondence goes still further; for when he comes to the word "considering," he uses the same curving musical symbol once more--his notion of "considering" being that of looking round on all sides. Again, a word of purely external signification that suggests something twisted will have an appropriately twisted theme. Then come the subjective applications of the theme--the same disordered melodic outline is used to express a frame of mind like anxiety or confusion, or to depict the wiles of Satan. Careful study of the vocal works of Bach, and especially of the cantatas, has revealed a host of these curious symbols.' The whole subject, it may be added, has been briefly and suggestively discussed by Goblot, 'La Musique Descriptive,' _Revue Philosophique_, July 1901.]

[Footnote 137: T. Piderit, _Mimik und Physiognomik_, 1867, p. 73.]

[Footnote 138: J. Cleland, _Evolution, Expression and Sensation_, 1881.]

[Footnote 139: Féré, 'La Physiologie dans les Métaphores,' _Revue Philosophique_, October 1895.]

[Footnote 140: Maeder discusses symbolism in some of these fields in his 'Die Symbolik in den Legenden, Märchen, Gebräuchen und Träumen,' _Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift_, Nos. 6 and 7, May 1908.]

[Footnote 141: So Philostratus, and Pliny (_Natural History_, Bk. X. ch. CCXI.) puts the same point on somewhat more natural grounds.]

[Footnote 142: It has been translated by F. S. Krauss, _Symbolik der Träume_, 1881.]

[Footnote 143: A translation of Synesius's 'Treatise on Dreams' is included in Druon's _Œuvres de Synésius_, pp. 347 _et seq._ Synesius is probably best known to modern English readers through Charles Kingsley's novel, _Hypatia_. His treatise on dreams has been unduly neglected, though it commended itself mightily to the pioneering mind of Lord Monboddo, who even says (_Ancient Metaphysics_, vol. ii., 1782, p. 217) in reference to this treatise: 'Indeed it appears to me that since the days of Plato and Aristotle there has not been a philosopher of greater depth than Synesius.']

[Footnote 144: K. A. Scherner, _Das Leben des Traumes_, 1861. In France Hervey de Saint-Denis, in a remarkable anonymous work which I have not seen (_Les Rêves et les Moyens de les Diriger_, p. 356, quoted by Vaschide and Piéron, _Psychologie du Rêve_, p. 26), tentatively put forward a symbolic theory of dreams, as a possible rival to the theory that permanent associations are set up as the result of a first chance coincidence. 'Do there exist,' he asked, 'bizarre analogies of internal sensations in virtue of which certain vibrations of the nerves, certain instinctive movements of our viscera, correspond to sensations apparently quite different? According to this hypothesis experience would bring to light mysterious affinities, the knowledge of which might become a genuine science;... and a real key to dreams would not be an unrealisable achievement if we could bring together and compare a sufficient number of observations.']

[Footnote 145: It is interesting to note that hallucinations may also be symbolic. Thus the Psychical Research Society's Committee on Hallucinations recognised a symbolic group, and recorded, for instance, the case of a man who, when his child lies dying, sees a blue flame in the air and hears a voice say, 'That's his soul' (_Proceedings Society for Psychical Research_, August 1894, p. 125).]

[Footnote 146: Maeder states that the tendency to symbolism in dreams and similar modes of psychic activity is due to 'vague thinking in a condition of diminished attention.' This is, however, an inadequate statement and misses the central point.]

[Footnote 147: In the other spheres in which symbolism most tends to appear, the same or allied conditions exist. In hallucinations, which (as Parish and others have shown) tend to occur in hypnagogic or sleep-like states, the conditions are clearly the same. The symbolism of an art, and notably music, is due to the very conditions of the art, which exclude any appeal to other senses. The primitive mind reaches symbolism through a similar condition of things, coming as the result of ignorance and undeveloped powers of apperception. In insanity these powers are morbidly disturbed or destroyed, with the same result.]

[Footnote 148: The magnification we experience in dreams is manifested in their emotional aspects and in the emotional transformation of actual sensory stimuli, from without or from within the organism. The size of objects recalled by dreaming memory usually remains unchanged, and if changed it seems to be more usually diminished. 'Lilliputian hallucinations,' as they are termed by Leroy, who has studied them (_Revue de Psychiatrie_, 1909, No. 8), in which diminutive, and frequently coloured, people are observed, may also occasionally occur in alcoholic and chloral intoxication, in circular insanity, and in various other morbid mental conditions. They are usually agreeable in character.]

[Footnote 149: Sollier, 'L'Autoscopie Interne,' _Revue Philosophique_, January 1903. Sollier deals with the objections made to the reality of the phenomenon.]

[Footnote 150: 'Many people,' writes Dr. Marie de Manacéïne (_Sleep_, 1897, p. 294), 'when threatened by a gastric or intestinal attack dream of seeing fish. The late Professor Sergius Botkine told me that he had found this coincidence in his own case, and I have myself several times found it in the case of a young girl who is well known to me. Some have supposed that the sleeping consciousness receives an impression of the elongated shape of the stomach or intestine; but such a supposition is easier to make than to prove.' Scherner associated dreams of fish with sensations arising from the bladder, and here also it may be said that we are concerned with a fish-like viscus. Greenwood (_Imagination in Dreams_, p. 195) stated that he had always been subject, at intervals of months or years, to a recurrent dream in which he would see a river swarming with fish that were finally piled in a horrible sweltering mass; this dream always left a feeling of 'squalid horror,' but he was never able to ascertain its cause and significance.]

[Footnote 151: Freud states (_Die Traumdeutung_, p. 233) that he knows a case in which (as in the _Song of Songs_) columns and pillars appear in dreams as symbols of the legs, and doors as symbols of the openings of the body.]

[Footnote 152: Freud, _Die Traumdeutung_, p. 66. This work, published in 1900, is the chief and most extensive statement of Freud's views. A shorter statement is embodied in a little volume of the 'Grenzfrägen' Series, _Ueber den Traum_, 1901. A brief exposition of Freud's position is given by Dr. A. Maeder of Zurich in 'Essai d'Interpretation de Quelques Rêves,' _Archives de Psychologie_, April 1907; as also by Ernest Jones ('Freud's Theory of Dreams,' _Review of Neurology and Psychiatry_, March 1910, and _American Journal of Psychology_, April 1910). For Freud's general psychological doctrine, see Brill's translation of 'Freud's Selected Papers on Hysteria,' 1909. There have been many serious criticisms of Freud's methods. As an example of such criticism, accompanying an exposition of the methods, reference may be made to Max Isserlin's 'Die Psychoanalytische Methode Freuds,' _Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie_, Bd. 1. Heft i. 1910. A judicious and qualified criticism of Freud's psychotherapeutic methods is given by Löwenfeld ('Zum gegenwärtigen Stande der Psychotherapeutie,' _Münchener medizinische Wochenschrift_, Nos. 3 and 4, 1910).]

[Footnote 153: I have set forth Freud's views of hysteria, now regarded as almost epoch-making in character, in _Studies of the Psychology of Sex_, vol. i. 3rd ed. pp. 219 _et seq._]

[Footnote 154: This is supported by the fact that in waking reverie, or day-dreams, wishes are obviously the motor force in building up visionary structures. Freud attaches great importance to reverie, for he considers that it furnishes the key to the comprehension of dreams (_e.g._ _Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre_, 2nd series, pp. 138 _et seq._, 197 _et seq._). But it must be remembered that day-dreaming is not real dreaming, which takes place under altogether different physiological conditions, although it may quite fairly be claimed that day-dreaming represents a state intermediate between ordinary waking consciousness and consciousness during sleep.]

[Footnote 155: The special characteristics of dreaming in the hysterical were studied, before Freud turned his attention to the question, by Sante de Sanctis (_I Sogni e il Sonno nell' Isterismo_, 1896). See also Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, vol. i. 3rd ed., 1910, 'Auto-erotism.']

[Footnote 156: Gissing, the novelist, an acute observer of psychic states, in the most of his books, _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_, has described this phenomenon: 'Every one, I suppose, is subject to a trick of mind which often puzzles me. I am reading or thinking, and at a moment, without any association or suggestion that I can discover, there rises before me the vision of a place I know. Impossible to explain why that particular spot should show itself to my mind's eye; the cerebral impulse is so subtle that no search may trace its origin.' Gissing proceeds to say that a thought, a phrase, an odour, a touch, a posture of the body, may possibly have furnished the link of association, but he knows no evidence for this theory.]

[Footnote 157: Extrospection has been specially studied by Vaschide and Vurpas in _La Logique Morbide_.]

[Footnote 158: On the psychic importance of fears, see G. Stanley Hall, 'A Study of Fears,' _American Journal of Psychology_, 1897, p. 183. Metchnikoff (_Essais Optimistes_, pp. 247 _et seq._) insists on the mingled fear and strength of the anthropoid apes.]

[Footnote 159: Foucault has pointed this out, and Morton Prince, and Giessler (who admits that the wish-dream is common in children), and Flournoy (who remarks that not only a fear but any emotion can be equally effective), as well as Claparède. The last remarks that Freud might regard a fear as a suppressed desire, but it may equally be said that a desire involves, on its reverse side, a fear. Freud has indeed himself pointed out (_e.g._ _Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen_, Bd. 1., 1909, p. 362) that fears may be instinctively combined with wishes; he regards the association with a wish of an opposing fear as one of the components of some morbid psychic states. But he holds that the wish is the positive and fundamental element: 'The unconscious can only wish' ('Das Unbewusste kann nichts als wünschen'), a statement that seems somewhat too metaphysical for the psychologist.]

[Footnote 160: Thus A. Wiggam ('A Contribution to the Data of Dream Psychology,' _Pedagogical Seminary_, June 1909) records a great many wish-dreams, mostly in the young.]

[Footnote 161: Laud, _Works_, vol. iii. p. 144.]

[Footnote 162: Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, vol. iii., 'Love and Pain.']

[Footnote 163: The dramatic element in dreaming was dealt with at length by Carl du Prel (_Philosophy of Mysticism_, vol. i. ch. iii.), but he threw little light on it.]

[Footnote 164: Thus in the Psychical Research Society's 'Report on the _Census of Hallucinations_,' the case is given of an over-worked and worried man who, a few moments after leaving a tram car, had the vivid feeling that some one touched him on the shoulder, though on turning round he found no one near. He then remembered that on the car he had been leaning against an iron bolt, and that, therefore, what he had experienced was doubtless a spontaneous muscular contraction excited by the pressure (_Proceedings, Society for Psychical Research_, August 1894, p. 3). Touches felt on awakening, in correspondence with a dream, are not so very uncommon. Thus Wagner, when in love with Mathilde Wesendonk, wrote, in the private diary he kept for her, how, after a dream, 'as I awoke I distinctly felt a kiss on my brow.']

[Footnote 165: Various pressures lead to dreams of blood. Thus a friend with a weak heart tells me that when he sleeps on his left side he dreams of blood. In some of these cases it is possible that there are retinal sensations of red.]

[Footnote 166: In the _Census of Hallucinations_ (chapter ix.) it was pointed out by the Psychical Research Society's Committee that hallucinations are specially apt to occur on awakening, or in the state between sleeping and waking; and Parish in his very searching study, _Hallucinations and Illusions_ (Contemporary Science Series), has further developed this fact and insisted on its significance.]

[Footnote 167: Dr. Johnson's remark on this point has often been quoted. He dreamed that he had been worsted in a verbal argument, and was thereby much mortified. 'Had not my judgment failed me,' he said, 'I should have seen that the wit of this supposed antagonist, by whose superiority I felt myself depressed, was as much furnished by me as that which I thought I had been uttering in my own character' (Boswell's _Johnson_, ed. by Hill, vol. iv. p. 5).]

[Footnote 168: Maury, _Le Sommeil et les Rêves_, 1861, p. 118.]

[Footnote 169: Delbœuf, _Le Sommeil et les Rêves_, pp. 24, _et seq_.]

[Footnote 170: Foucault, _Le Rêve_, p. 137.]

[Footnote 171: Giessler, 'Das Ich im Träume,' _Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane_, 1905, Heft 4 and 5, pp. 300 _et seq._]

[Footnote 172: See especially Pierre Janet's works, and also those of Morton Prince, Albert Wilson, etc. Flournoy's very elaborate study of Mlle. Helène Smith (_Des Indes à la Planète Mars_, 1900) is noteworthy. A summary of some important cases of multiple personality will be found in Marie de Manacéïne's _Sleep_, pp. 127 _et seq._, and some bibliographical references, _ib._ p. 151.]

[Footnote 173: J. Milne Bramwell argues ('Secondary and Multiple Personalities,' _Brain_, 1900) that such cases are not invariably hysterical.]

[Footnote 174: See G. Stanley Hall, 'The Early Sense of Self,' _American Journal of Psychology_, April 1898. Cooley ('The Early Use of Self-Words by a Child,' _Psychological Review_, 1909, p. 94) finds that the child distinguishes between itself as (1) body and as (2) self-assertion united with action; it refers to the former as 'Baby,' and to the latter as 'I.']

[Footnote 175: See, _e.g._, Havelock Ellis, _The Criminal_, 4th ed., 1910, p. 367.]

[Footnote 176: In the existing traditions of law and police, it is still possible to find many survivals of this tendency to objectify subjective impressions. Thus Mr. Theodore Schroeder has shown (_Free Press Anthology_, 1909, pp. 171 _et seq._) that the prosecutions which have in various so-called civilised countries pursued many estimable and even noble works of literature, science, and art are based on the primitive notion that 'indecency' resides in the object and not in the person who experiences the feeling, and who ought, therefore, alone to be suppressed, if suppression is called for. This psychological fallacy continues to subsist, though it was unmasked in the clearest manner even by St. Paul (_e.g._ Romans xiv. 14). It is somewhat analogous to the mediæval conception of the criminality of animals.]