Chapter IV: A Slave to Dreams (2)

The outer onion-skin has now come off. But it promises to be so unsavory that we would better drop this particular bulb and take up another. For dream onions are not only laminated, but there are always several onions to every dream. Let us regard the one from which sprang the phrase, “It won’t pay.” The outer skin here was a visit the patient had made the day before to a lady friend who asked her to take off her coat; but as she had to go in a moment she replied that it would not pay. And here again I am forced to drop the subject, or at least to avoid the line of thought which is immediately suggested by a knowledge of the symbolism here involved. Freud himself takes a new lead by remarking that during a previous analytical séance this same patient _had_ taken off her coat, “a button of which had opened,”--taken it off with a gesture which seemed to say, “Please don’t look in this direction; it won’t pay.” From which he concludes that among the many things which “disgusting old box” refers to is “chest,” or “bust.”

Were this lady but an American we might now conclude (without exaggerating the Freudian procedure in the slightest) that this means “Pike’s Peak or Bust”; that this in turn recalls a bust which she went on when she was younger and in the neighborhood of 142nd street, New York, locally known as “Pike’s Peak”; that the peak of her ambition was to marry a Jew--with incidentally a hidden desire to be peeked at; and that because of her failure to realize these wishes she was piqued, and suffered accordingly.

But as she seems to be an Austrian we must be content with the idea that “the interpretation of the dream leads directly to a time in her bodily development when she was dissatisfied with her shape.” She wanted to be fat--an eminently Austrian thought. And from here we are led to a yet earlier period. For the words “disgusting” and “bad tone,” make it necessary, Freud informs us, to remember “how often in allusions and in dreams the two small hemispheres of the ... body take the place--as a substitute and as an antithesis--of the larger ones.” That is, the piano was a dream disguise for the buttocks.

It now hardly seems necessary to remark that “the dreamer, owing to a peculiar set of circumstances, may create for himself the right to use anything whatever as a sexual symbol.”[73] Still less to add that, generally speaking, “all elongated objects, sticks, tree-trunks and umbrellas, all sharp weapons, knives, daggers and pikes,” are masculine symbols; while “all little cases, boxes, caskets, closets and stoves” have a feminine signification; or that “stairways, stairs, ladders ... or anything analogous to them” are to be regarded as specifically erotic suggestions. And to make the system complete, whenever a symbol refuses to fit in with the desired significance, we are at liberty to regard it as “misplaced emphasis” due to distortion, and to interpret it in an opposite sense. So pain may mean pleasure, and a crowd a secret.

Nor is even this enough. He goes on and invents a veritable grammar of dreams. Logical connection (in the latent content) is rendered (in the manifest content) by simultaneousness; causation is expressed by succession; “either--or” by “and--and” (you dream of both alternates as being true); similarity or agreement is pictured by the concentration of several images into a fantastic unity, etc., etc.

Freud commits the common and fatal error of proving too much. He should have been warned by the fate of the late Ignatius Donnelly, once Lieutenant-Governor of Minnesota. Donnelly, having shown that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, went on to show that he also wrote Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” and Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” And having discovered that these works had all a sort of sense when read from left to right, proceeded to demonstrate (in “The Great Cryptogram”) that they had an even better sense when read more or less from right to left.

Using the Freudian premises, we are forced to conclude that the average child’s aversion to the multiplication table is a blind to cover his unconscious but shamefaced eagerness for illegitimate parenthood. The very name, “Multiplication,” gives us the key. Freud has met this objection by saying that he does not permit himself to wander at random over the field of conjecture, but is always guided by a principle. What principle? That dreams come from suppressed erotic desires--the very principle he is trying to prove. No, the court does not admit evidence at random, it measures it by the supposition that the defendant is guilty.

The Multiplication Table is quite admissible, for dreams are not the only things which may be subjected to dream-analysis. Waking thoughts are interpreted in the same way. If a patient refuses to dream, the analyst pounces upon his inventions, his replies to questions. The “Œdipus Tyrannus” of Sophocles and Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” fall naturally into the dream category.

“We are far too much inclined to over-estimate the conscious character of intellectual and artistic productions,” since “from communications of some of the most highly productive persons, such as Goethe and Helmholtz, we learn that the most essential and original parts in their creations came to them in the form of inspirations and reached their preceptions almost finished.”[74]

But though a dream can compose a “Hamlet” or an “Œdipus,” it cannot compose a speech. “No matter how many speeches and answers may occur in dreams, analysis always shows ... that the dream has only taken ... fragments of speeches which have been delivered or heard.”[75] What, then, is this dreaming faculty which is at once so competent and incompetent? Is it a gift, or a disease?

“A dream,” says Freud, in the Introductory Remarks to the book we have been following, “is the first link in a chain of abnormal psychic structures whose other links [are] the hysterical phobia, the obsession, and the delusion.” Then on page 482 he declares, “The dream is not a pathological phenomenon and does not leave behind [it] an enfeeblement of the mental faculties.”

Those whose mental faculties have not been too much enfeebled by the attempt to reconcile these two statements, may try their logic’s teeth upon page 437, where it is said that “in view of the complete identity [to be] found between the peculiarities of the dream-work and the psychic activity forming the psycho-neurotic symptoms, we shall feel justified in transferring to the dream the conclusions urged upon us by hysteria.” Or one may turn to page 471, and read: “It is condensation that is mainly responsible for the strange impression of the dream, for we know of nothing analogous to it in the normal psychic life accessible to consciousness.” Remember, too, that Freud does not think that in regard to “falling in love with one member of the parental couple and hatred of the other,” psycho-neurotics are “sharply distinguished from ordinary human beings.”

Now if you are not very sharply distinguished from ordinary human beings you naturally indulge in “typical dreams,”--the dreams that everybody has. And among typical dreams is the Œdipus dream of the death of parents or other near relatives. But here a difficulty arises.

“These dreams show the very unusual case where the dream-thought, which has been created by the repressed wish, completely escapes the censor, and is transferred to the dream without alteration.”[76] Is the theory then at fault? No; but the censor is. “There is no wish which we believe further from us.... The dream censor is therefore not prepared for this monstrosity, just as the legislation of Solon was incapable of establishing a punishment for parricide.”[77]

Objections to the Freudian theory are vain; the theory bends to accommodate whatever it encounters, then straightens out and goes its way as if nothing had happened.

If we are consciously anxious about our dear ones, the wily unconscious merely takes advantage of that fact to stage a dream about somebody’s death, well knowing that the conscious anxiety will blind us to the deep-down truth. But there is consolation in the thought that “if someone dreams ... that his father or mother, his brother or sister has died,” Freud does not “use the dream as a proof that he wishes them dead _now_.... The theory of dreams ... is satisfied with concluding that the dreamer has wished them dead ... at some one time in childhood.”[78] And to console us still further, he adds (p. 214) that a child has no idea “of the terror of the Infinite Nothing.”

Pursuing the infinite nothing of this now happily satisfied dream theory, we discover that “dreams of the death of parents predominately refer to that member of the parental couple which shares the sex of the dreamer,” except, of course, in the case of the homo-sexual. Or, “to express the matter boldly, it is as though a sexual preference becomes active at an early period, as though the boy regards his father as a rival in love, and as though the girl takes the same attitude towards her mother ... a rival by getting rid of whom he or she cannot but profit.”[79] Dr. Watson, though he knew not the reason, was certainly right in saying that bringing up children was a perilous business. What else would the fate of Laius and Jocasta lead us to expect?

To put the matter beyond doubt, Freud cites the case of an eight-year-old girl of his acquaintance, who, if her mother happens to be called away from the table, reveals her psychic enormity by saying, “Now I shall be Mamma. Charles, do you want some more vegetables?”[80] Freud is not a man to be deceived by the seeming innocence of play. And he blames “that sanctity which we have ascribed to the injunctions of the Decalogue”[81] for the dullness which keeps us from perceiving the incestuous and homicidal tendencies of our young.

It may be admitted that “no other impulse has had to undergo so much suppression from the time of childhood as the sex impulse”;[82] and, the parental instinct of self-preservation being what it is, the fact is not surprising. And these suppressive tactics seem to have been in vogue from the earliest times. “The obscure and primitive ages of human society give us an unpleasant idea of the power of the father” and the ruthlessness with which it was used. Kronos devours his children as the wild boar devours the brood of the sow; Zeus [in the rôle of retributive justice] castrates his father ... and takes his place as ruler.”[83]

Now, as I remember this legend, Zeus operated with a sickle--an immemorial image of Time. And as Kronos is himself a symbol of Time, I long supposed that here was a figurative way of saying that Time (Kronos), which devours all things (his children), shall himself eventually be devoured, as it were by himself--the sickle. But evidently the theory of dreams cannot be satisfied by symbols when they are used to interpret mythology.

Evidently, too, the time has now arrived in this, our Freudian era, for Kronos to suffer again and as literally as before, notwithstanding the “frantic attempts” of modern parents to hold on to “whatever remnants of the ... _potestas patris_” remain. The newspapers certainly chronicle occasional incidents of this childish rebellion, if not of the frantic efforts which are being made to resist it. Freud even knows of a little girl--this one not yet three years old--who “tried to strangle a suckling in the cradle, because she suspected its continued presence boded her no good.”[84] So not the parents alone are in danger. In the case of his own children, “who followed one another rapidly,” he “missed the opportunity to make such observations,” the supplanted baby always being too young to be dangerous at the time when its nose was broken--another argument in favor of large families.

He foresees, however, what is to be dreaded later, for he describes the predicament of a man of 31 who had a compulsion-neurosis which took such a pronounced homicidal form that he (the young man) was forced to lock himself in his room and to give the housekeeper the key for fear that he should one day commit a murder. The father in this case was dead and beyond the reach of reprisals, so “the obsessive reproach transferred itself to strangers.”[85]

I do not wish for a moment to suggest that this case was unreal or to belittle its horror. I am dealing merely with a peculiarity of the diagnosis. You will observe that the blame is laid to a “reproach.” Had the patient never reproached himself he would have remained normal. Now if he was guilty of nothing but some childish fit of temper, and, because of some senseless system of early training, led to magnify it beyond all reason, the diagnosis may be sound. The danger comes from the attempt to elaborate from these instances of abnormality a general system of philosophy applicable to life in general. The implication that reproaches should give way and any sort of conduct spared even criticism, is inescapable. For example, Freud says[86] that “a compulsion-neurosis ... corresponds to a super-morality, imposed upon the primary character.” He chooses morality by name as the target of _his_ “reproach.”

In the case under consideration, the patient remembered, under psycho-analytic treatment, that at the age of seven he had “expressed enmity” towards his father, and (still under treatment) at once “realized that the hatred lay much deeper still.” Remorse, awakened by the father’s painful last illness, had brought about that fatal “super-morality,” without which the son might have remained unrepentant, normal and happy. “Anyone,” Freud ominously adds, “capable of wishing to push his own father from a mountain-top into an abyss is certainly not to be trusted to spare the lives of those not so closely bound to him. He does well to lock himself into his room.”[87]

Here the psychiatrist distinctly gives to the childish wish that very importance which would naturally lead to excessive repressive measures and to abnormal interior reproach. Moreover, it follows that all of us who are not “sharply distinguished from ordinary human beings” would do well to lock ourselves up. For we are not only capable of entertaining such a wish, we have--so Freud has been telling us through fifty or sixty pages--already entertained it, time and time again. Which brings us to our--

_Sixth and Last Assumption_: That the cure for hysterical symptoms (and these include most of the ills to which flesh is heir) is the recapture by consciousness of the lost knowledge of that circumstance which drove the original wish-thought into the limbo of the lower psychic locality.

The procedure is for the patient to dream a dream, or if he cannot do this to make up a dream, which the psychiatrist “analyzes.” Then the patient lies down on a couch, “relaxes,” and repeats whatever random thoughts come into his head as the various parts of the dream are brought to his attention. These “associated” thoughts are analyzed in their turn. If there is reluctance, the operator knows he has encountered modesty (“resistance,” he calls it) and has got the range. He can now tell where to train his guns. For all these neuroses, psychoses and psycho-neuroses (mental troubles in general and their physical results) are, according to the hypothesis, the children of shame. Kill shame, and the brats perish. That is what it amounts to.

It may have seemed unaccountable that it should have been thought necessary to invent an elaborate system of dream interpretation when the psychiatrist is convinced from the moment his office door-bell rings that he is about to be confronted with a case of suppressed incest. But the hocus-pocus serves its turn. Never has the ingenuity of man devised a more effective excuse for the discussion of the abominations of the human heart.

“But,” cries Freud, “my analyses bring about cures!”

Granted. But that only proves that Freud the man is better than Freud the scientist and philosopher.

The world is full of miserable wretches whose early education was of the most atrocious kind; who were first permitted improper contacts, and then taught that their infantile imaginings were unpardonable sins. The doctor poo-poos the whole matter, and they are relieved. In other words, if he is a wise doctor, he tries to remedy the defects of education by re-education. So long as he has to deal with those suffering from abuse, or from starvation of natural desires--desires which have failed of their ordinary satisfaction without having been sublimated by devotion to higher aims--so long as he deals with these unwilling anchorites and pitiable social victims, he does well.

But what if he writes books, circulating in huge editions among the normal and spreading the doctrine that mental disease comes from restraint, and not from the rank growth of passions, undisciplined or merely balked?

As to this, I will quote the opinion of Judge William McAdoo, Chief Magistrate of the City of New York. The Judge sees some half-million criminal cases pass through the courts every year, so can hardly be accused of speaking without opportunities for gathering information. And he says in a recent article[88] that psycho-analysis is one of the most “active” evils “effecting modern youth.” Parents, he tells us, have been led to believe that any attempt to “suppress” the desires of their children is likely to lead to dangerous “complexes.” Hence “the complete collapse of parental authority,” of what Freud himself has called “the antiquated _potestas patris_.”

But Freud is but one of the figures in a movement, and by following his dreaming for a few more pages we shall be able to learn yet other strange things which are not so, and some--yet stranger--which are.

5. FREUD THE METAPHYSICIAN

Superficially considered, Freud is the very antithesis of Dr. Watson. The behaviorist, indeed, will have none of him. In his “Myth of the Unconscious” he accuses him of having “resorted to voodooism instead of falling back upon his early scientific training.”[89] He even suggests that the psychiatrist was “much influenced in his youth by the fable of the devils who took flight into the Gadarene swine.” Nevertheless, Watsonianism and Freudianism are parts of the same gigantic piece of mystification.

Freud may speak of the “unconscious” and Dr. Watson of the “unverbalized”; the one of “unconditioned reflexes,” the other of “a primary psychic apparatus”; but both agree in effect that the will is a mere phenomenon resulting from the preponderance of forces, that the self is a collection of movements after the things which move have been taken away. In other words, both are mechanists. Their difference is in temperament.

Nor is even this difference very profound. The two philosophies have but one effect--to sanction _laissez-faire_ in matters of sex. A verbalized but otherwise unconditioned “gut-reaction” is but a conscious “libido” freed from the suppression which might create a “complex.” Dr. Watson’s superiority lies in his insistence upon education where sex is not involved. Freud’s superiority is literary.

But there are two Freuds, the literary and the metaphysical. In telling dreams no mortal ever dared to tell before, he uses language that he who runs may read. In his book on “Wit in its Relation to the Unconscious”--one of the most complete compendiums of smutty stories in the world--he proves himself a lively raconteur. But when he seeks to plunge deep down to the roots of things, his style suddenly becomes a Chinese puzzle. Take, for instance, the following paragraph from pages 478 and 479 of “The Interpretation of Dreams”: “When I termed one of the psychic processes in the psychic apparatus the primary process, I did so not only in consideration of the order of precedence and capability, but also as admitting the temporal relations to a share in the nomenclature. As far as our knowledge goes there is no psychic apparatus possessing only the primary process, and in so far it is a theoretic fiction; but so much is based on fact, that the primary processes are present in the apparatus from the beginning, while the secondary processes develop gradually in the course of life.”

In the original German this seems, to me at least, even less like language than it does in the Brill translation. So much less that one evening as I was puzzling over it, trying in vain to make it fit into any conceivable sense, I fell asleep. And as I slept I dreamed; and as I dreamed Freud appeared to me, and, after considerable persuasion, proceeded to re-translate:

“When I said that one of the psychic processes was the primary process, I meant that it was not only first in capacity but first in the time of its appearance.”

“Very good,” said I. “Kindly go on.”

“As far as we know,” he did go on, “there is no psychic apparatus in existence, and there never was one, which possesses only the primary process. Therefore it is a theoretic fiction to suppose that there can be a primary process standing alone.”

“Why then,” I interrupted, “do you complicate matters with a theoretic fiction when they are complicated enough, in all conscience, if we bother only with facts?”

“Because,”--and his tone showed some asperity, as if he were addressing a stupid pupil, “because the primary processes are present in the apparatus from the beginning, while the secondary processes develop gradually in the course of life.”

I gasped. “According to that there _is_ a time when the primary apparatus _does_ stand alone, viz, the time before the secondary process develops. I thought you just said there was no such time?”

“You needn’t be rude,” said the great man. “Nobody is supposed to read these obscure passages. But I have to write them, just as a doctor has to talk a little Latin when you go to him for a prescription. You wouldn’t respect him if he didn’t. Besides, what difference does it make whether the primary apparatus ever stands alone or not?”

In my dream I pondered this for a long time before replying:

“Perhaps it doesn’t make any difference, in a theoretic fiction. But if you mean that the primary apparatus is real, the idea that it can come first and stand alone seems to imply that it really comes first and really stands alone, not only in the individual but in the universe. That would mean that the universe was built from the bottom upwards.”

The Freudian dream-image nodded. “Of course--just the way we build a house.”

“But,” I objected, “if we build a house _we_ build it--the house does not build itself. Therefore the house begins with something even higher than its roof. So it is really built from the top down. So is the cosmos, if you will admit that its builder and maker was God. But if I let you build a man from his primary psychic apparatus up, you will be saying next that the universe was built from _its_ primary apparatus up--that is, from a theoretic fiction.”

Freud lighted a dream-cigar and sat down. “I’m no worse than the theologians,” he smiled. “They say the universe was created out of nothing.”

“What theologian,” I retorted, “ever said that the universe created itself out of nothing? Your own Old Testament suggests that God created the universe out of nothing but Himself.”

“And you profess to understand that?”

“Certainly not. The beginning and the end are postulated together in one great mystery. But it isn’t a mystery which we invented. We found it here. It is a mystery with force in it--something which goes.”

“We are such stuff as dreams are made of,” said Freud. “And dreams come from a suppressed libido.”

“So? How about a dog’s dream?” I suddenly asked. “Does that, too, come from a suppressed libido--a suppressed puppy libido? Or is it due to a super-morality restraining a mother-fixation?”

“How do you know that dogs dream?”

“In the same way I know that you dream. I infer it from the way you act.”

“To dream of a dog,” he responded heavily, paraphrasing one of his own pages, “is to dream of the major function--French, _chien_; German, _Chier_.” He had willfully missed the point.

And so the dream went on and on, until I finally woke up and began idly to turn the pages of the great Dream Book itself. It was difficult to believe that I was not still asleep, for I kept coming upon such passages as the following, from page 442: “To speak figuratively, it is quite possible that a day-thought plays the part of the contractor (_entrepreneur_) in the dream. But ... no matter what idea the contractor may have in his mind, and how desirous he may be of putting it into operation, he must depend upon a capitalist to defray the necessary expenses; and this capitalist ... is invariably and indisputably a wish from the unconscious. In other cases the capitalist himself is the contractor for the dream; this, indeed, seems to be the more usual case. An unconscious wish is produced by the day’s work, which in turn creates the dream. The dream processes, moreover, run parallel with all the other possibilities of the economic relationship used here as an illustration. Thus the _entrepreneur_ may contribute some capital himself, or several _entrepreneurs_ may jointly supply the capital required by the _entrepreneur_.”

This is certainly a moving picture. We seem to be looking upon a lively scene in the financial district, with contractors and capitalists running hither and thither, forming combinations for the prosecution of great works. Yet it is a scene which belongs properly to “Alice in Wonderland,” not in a book purporting to be scientific. It is a conjurer’s trick, worked by that initial phrase, “To speak figuratively.”

Now anybody who admits the existence of God, of a life which is vital rather than mechanical, has the right to speak figuratively. With him figures are the signs and symbols of real things. They have force because they are the personifications of real forces whose existence he is prepared to admit outside of metaphor.

But with the materialist, figures of speech are dishonest subterfuges. They make the impossible seem possible and reasonable. By being admittedly figures of speech, they escape criticism when they come upon the stage. And once there, they act parts possible only to entities possessing energy and will--the very things which the mechanistic hypothesis professes to exclude from the picture. And in the end it is claimed that all things which may be done by these flesh and blood actors may be done by the nothings which they stand for.

This psychic contractor of Freud’s has something “in his mind” which he is “desirous” of putting into operation! On the stage he is as full of reason, consciousness and vim as is Mr. Douglas Fairbanks. But in the Freudian philosophical system, literally considered, he is one of the processes of a primary psychic system standing alone--that is, a process in a state of things admittedly fictitious.

But the Great Man goes on:

“The story of Œdipus is the reaction of the imagination to these two typical dreams [of murdering one’s father and marrying one’s mother]. And just as the dream when occurring to an adult is experienced with feelings of resistance, so the legend must contain terror and self-chastisement. The appearance which it further assumes is the result of an uncomprehending secondary elaboration which tries to make it serve a theological purpose. The attempt to reconcile divine omnipotence with human responsibility must, of course, fail with this material as with every other.”[90]

So it is an “uncomprehending” elaboration which busies itself with trying to reconcile divine omnipotence with human responsibility. One would hardly expect an uncomprehending elaboration to succeed in such a task. As to actual incompatibility of the two ideas, it is such a large question that I prefer to consider it later under another head. Freud goes on:[91]

“The unconscious idea, as such, is altogether incapable of entering into the foreconscious, and ... it can exert an influence there only by uniting with a harmless idea already belonging to the foreconscious, to which it transfers its intensity and under which it allows itself to be concealed.”

“Allows itself to be concealed!” It has intelligence and purpose, this unconscious thought. A cunning fellow for a mere reflex in a process antedating memory and reason. But the theatre has suddenly become dark with purple shadows through which absurdity stalks, obscure but naked and unashamed. The unconscious wish is incapable of entering into the foreconscious, but, without entering it, nevertheless manages to exert an influence there, by means of what go-between Freud only knows; for the “harmless idea” with which union is to be made is already beyond reach in the foreconscious. Nor is this all.

“The relations existing for the repressed idea are similar to the situation existing in Austria for the American dentist, who is forbidden to practice unless he gets permission from a regular physician to use his name on the public signboard and thus cover the legal requirements. Moreover, just as it is naturally not the busiest physicians who form such alliances with dental practitioners, so in the psychic life only such foreconscious or conscious ideas are chosen to cover a repressed idea as have not themselves attracted much ... attention.”[92]

The _entrepreneur_ (French for “undertaker”) has now become a dentist, and the entire Austrian code of civil procedure has been introduced into the psychic apparatus. Yet, such is the lure of figurative speech, so easy is it to fancy that whatever can be true of the figure is necessarily true of the abstraction for which it “doubles,” that even Freud obviously thinks he is saying something.

He proceeds to speak of “occupation,” meaning not occupation but the possession of energy. And in this way we come to the problem of Will, in these words:[93] “It is probable that the principle of pain first regulates the displacements of occupation automatically, but it is quite possible that the consciousness of these qualities adds a second and more subtile regulation which may even oppose the first.... The automatic control of the primary principle of pain and the restriction of mental capacity connected with it are broken by the sensible regulations which in their turn are again automatisms.” And again: “The mental processes are in themselves devoid of quality except for the excitement of pleasure and pain accompanying them,” which, as we know, are to be held in check as possible “disturbers of thought.”[94]

This, if it means anything, means that energy in the primary psychic system is automatically regulated by pleasure and pain. But the primary processes are not only unconscious, they are incapable of becoming conscious. “There are,” we are told,[95] “two kinds of unconscious ... both are unconscious in the psychological sense; but in our sense the first, which we call the unconscious, is likewise incapable of consciousness.” Freud, like Dr. Watson, attempts to conceive of pleasure, pain and unconsciousness altogether. He, like the great behaviorist, subtracts the quality of painfulness from pain and the quality of pleasurableness from pleasure, and fancies that he has something left--something capable of regulating our unconscious conduct automatically.

Even when we come to the secondary process, with its “sensible regulation,” these “in their turn are again automatisms.” And though they have no quality except as exciters of pleasure and pain, this excitement must be held in check as a possible disturber of thought--of the sensible regulations. So these higher mental processes, which have no quality save the one of which they are deprived, yet exercise a control at once “sensible” and “automatic” over their more humble neighbors in the psychic basement. And somewhere there is “a restriction of mental capacity.” With this last statement I have no quarrel.

“What part,” Freud wants to know,[96] “now remains in our description of the once all-powerful and all overshadowing consciousness?” Very little, one would think. “None,” he says, “other than that of a sensory organ for the perception of psychic qualities.... The psychic process which is turned to the outer world is itself the outer world for the sensory organ of consciousness.”

So the lower sensory organ, turned towards the world, is unconscious. And the higher sensory organ, turned towards the lower, is an automatism. No doubt it is true that “the most complex mental operations are possible without the cooperation of consciousness,” and that “the state of becoming conscious depends upon the exercise of a certain psychic function, viz, attention.”[97] But not even attention can be moved about by nothing. And one complex mental operation which cannot operate without consciousness is rational control. To suppose that the boss of a job does not know what he is doing is to suppose that the job is without a rational boss.

For yet another time the attempt to create a psychology without a veritable Psyche falls to the ground. Freud’s fictional apparatus lands him squarely upon the spot marked by Dr. McDougall’s X. Once more his verbalization has brought him into complete agreement with the unappreciative Dr. Watson. But what has all this to do with science? Let us find out.

FOOTNOTES:

[47] “Psycho-Analysis,” by R. B. Hingley, B.A., Edinburgh, second edition, 1922, p. 17.

[48] “The Interpretation of Dreams,” p. 172.

[49] _Ibid._, p. 244, note.

[50] _Op. cit._, p. 241.

[51] _Ibid._, p. 388.

[52] _Op. cit._, p. 195.

[53] _Op. cit._, p. 106.

[54] At the bottom of p. 171.

[55] “What is the price of Graz?” An expression used by the Viennese when they wish to boast of wealth.

[56] _Op. cit._, p. 179.

[57] _Op. cit._, p. 325.

[58] _Ibid._, p. 474.

[59] _Op. cit._, p. 405.

[60] _Loc. cit._

[61] _Op. cit._, p. 120.

[62] _Op. cit._, p. 439, note.

[63] _Ibid._, p. 456.

[64] _Ibid._, p. 439.

[65] “The Interpretation of Dreams,” p. 240.

[66] _Op. cit._, p. 224.

[67] _Op. cit._, p. 221.

[68] _Ibid._, p. 439.

[69] _The Century Magazine_, September, 1927.

[70] “The Interpretation of Dreams,” p. 136.

[71] _Op. cit._, p. 390.

[72] _Vide_ p. 155.

[73] _Op. cit._, p. 246.

[74] _Op. cit._, p. 486.

[75] _Ibid._, p. 329.

[76] _Ibid._, p. 226.

[77] _Ibid._, p. 226.

[78] _Op. cit._, p. 211.

[79] _Ibid._, pp. 216-217.

[80] _Ibid._, p. 218.

[81] _Vide_ _op. cit._, p. 217.

[82] _Ibid._, p. 240.

[83] _Ibid._, p. 217.

[84] _Ibid._, p. 213.

[85] _Op. cit._, p. 221.

[86] _Ibid._, p. 212.

[87] _Ibid._, p. 221.

[88] _The Ladies’ Home Journal_, October, 1927.

[89] _Harper’s Magazine_, September, 1927

[90] _Op. cit._, p. 224.

[91] _Ibid._, p. 443.

[92] _Op. cit._, p. 444.

[93] _Ibid._, p. 388-489.

[94] _Ibid._, p. 490.

[95] _Ibid._, p. 488.

[96] _Op. cit._, p. 489.

[97] _Ibid._, pp. 469-470.