Chapter IV: A Slave to Dreams (1)

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.

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.