Autobiographical note 7 страница

As regards another writer, Maury, it would almost seem as though he too attributes to the dreaming condition a capacity, not for the arbitrary destruction of mental activity, but for analysing it into its components. He writes as follows of dreams which transgress the bounds of morality: ‘Ce sont nos penchants qui parlent et qui nous font agir, sans que la conscicnce nous retienne, bien que parfois elle nous avertisse. J’ai mes défauts et mes penchants vicieux; à l’état de veille je tâche de lutter contre eux, et il m’arrive assez souvent de n’y pas succomber. Mais dans mes songes j’y succombe toujours ou pour mieux dire j’agis par leur impulsion, sans crainte et sans remords.... Evidemment les visions qui se déroulent devant ma pensée et qui constituent le rêve, me sont suggérées par les incitations que je ressens et que ma volonté absente ne cherche pas à refouler.’ (Maury, 1878, 113.)¹

No one who believes in the capacity of dreams to reveal an immoral tendency of the dreamer’s which is really present though suppressed or concealed, could express his view more precisely than in Maury’s words: ‘En rêve l’homme se révèle donc tout entier à soi-même dans sa nudité et sa misère natives. Dès qu’il suspend l’exercice de sa volonté, il devient le jouet de toutes les passions contres lesquelles, à l’état de veille, la conscience, le sentiment de l’honneur, la crainte nous défendent.’ (Ibid., 165.)² In another passage we find these pertinent sentences: ‘Dans le songe, c’est surtout l’homme instinctif qui se révèle.... L’homme revient pour ainsi dire à l’eéat de nature quand il rêve; mais moins les idées acquises ont pénétré dans son esprit, plus les penchants en désaccord avec elles conservent encore sur lui l’influence dans le rêve.’ (Ibid., 462.)³ He goes on to relate by way of example how in his dreams he is not infrequently the victim of the very superstition which he has been attacking in his writings with particular vehemence.

¹ [‘It is our impulses that are speaking and making us act, while our conscience does not hold us back, though it sometimes warns us. I have my faults and my vicious impulses; while I am awake I try to resist them, and quite often I succeed in not yielding to them. But in my dreams I always yield to them, or rather I act under their pressure without fear or remorse.... The visions which unroll before my mind and which constitute a dream are clearly suggested by the urges which I feel and which my absent will does not attempt to repress.’]

² [‘Thus in dreams a man stands self-revealed in all his native nakedness and poverty. As soon as he suspends the exercise of his will, he becomes the plaything of all the passions against which he is defended while he is awake by his conscience, his sense of honour and his fears.’]

³ [‘What is revealed in dreams is primarily the man of instinct.... Man may be said to return in his dreams to a state of nature. But the less his mind has been penetrated by acquired ideas, the more it remains influenced in dreams by impulses of a contrary nature.’]

These penetrating reflections of Maury’s, however, lose their value in the investigation of dream-life owing to the fact that he regards the phenomena which he has observed with such accuracy as no more than proofs of an ‘automatisme psychologique’ which, in his view, dominates dreams and which he looks upon as the exact opposite of mental activity.

Stricker (1879) writes: ‘Dreams do not consist solely of illusions. If, for instance, one is afraid of robbers in a dream, the robbers, it is true, are imaginary - but the fear is real.’ This calls our attention to the fact that affects in dreams cannot be judged in the same way as the remainder of their content; and we are faced by the problem of what part of the psychical processes occurring in dreams is to be regarded as real, that is to say, has a claim to be classed among the psychical processes of waking life.

(G)THEORIES OF DREAMING AND ITS FUNCTION

Any disquisition upon dreams which seeks to explain as many as possible of their observed characteristics from a particular point of view, and which at the same time defines the position occupied by dreams in a wider sphere of phenomena, deserves to be called a theory of dreams. The various theories will be found to differ in that they select one or the other characteristic of dreams as the essential one and take it as the point of departure for their explanations and correlations. It need not necessarily be possible to infer a function of dreaming (whether utilitarian or otherwise) from the theory. Nevertheless, since we have a habit of looking for teleological explanations, we shall be more ready to accept theories which are bound up with the attribution of a function to dreaming.

We have already made the acquaintance of several sets of views which deserve more or less to be called theories of dreams in this sense of the term. The belief held in antiquity that dreams were sent by the gods in order to guide the actions of men was a complete theory of dreams, giving information on everything worth knowing about them. Since dreams have become an object of scientific research a considerable number of theories have been developed, including some that are extremely incomplete.

Without attempting any exhaustive enumeration, we may try to divide theories of dreams into the following three rough groups, according to their underlying assumptions as to the amount and nature of psychical activity in dreams.

(1) There are the theories, such as that of Delboeuf, according to which the whole of psychical activity continues in dreams. The mind, they assume, does not sleep and its apparatus remains intact; but, since it falls under the conditions of the state of sleep, which differ from those of waking life, its normal functioning necessarily produces different results during sleep. The question arises in regard to these theories whether they are capable of deriving all the distinctions between dreams and waking thought from the conditions of the state of sleep. Moreover, there is no possibility of their being able to suggest any function for dreaming; they offer no reason why we should dream, why the complicated mechanism of the mental apparatus should continue to operate even when set in circumstances for which it appears undesigned. Either dreamless sleep or, if disturbing stimuli intervene, awakening, would seem to be the only expedient reactions - rather than the third alternative of dreaming.

(2) There are the theories which, on the contrary, presuppose that dreams imply a lowering of psychical activity, a loosening of connections, and an impoverishment of the material accessible. These theories must imply the attribution to sleep of characteristics quite different from those suggested, for instance, by Delboeuf. Sleep, according to such theories, has a far reaching influence upon the mind; it does not consist merely in the mind being shut off from the external world; it forces its way, rather, into the mental mechanism and throws it temporarily out of use. If I may venture on a simile from the sphere of psychiatry, the first group of theories construct dreams on the model of paranoia, while the second group make them resemble mental deficiency or confusional states.

The theory according to which only a fragment of mental activity finds expression in dreams, since it has been paralysed by sleep, is by far the most popular with medical writers and in the scientific world generally. In so far as any general interest may be supposed to exist in the explanation of dreams, this may be described as the ruling theory. It is to be remarked how easily this theory avoids the worst stumbling-block in the way of any explanation of dreams - the difficulty of dealing with the contradictions involved in them. It regards dreams as a result of a partial awakening - ‘a gradual, partial and at the same time highly abnormal awakening’, to quote a remark of Herbart’s upon dreams (1892, 307). Thus, this theory can make use of a series of conditions of ever-increasing wakefulness, culminating in the completely waking state, in order to account for the series of variations in efficiency of mental functioning in dreams, ranging from the inefficiency revealed by their occasional absurdity up to fully concentrated intellectual functioning.

Those who find that they cannot dispense with a statement in terms of physiology, or to whom a statement in such terms seems more scientific, will find what they want in the account given by Binz (1878, 43): ‘This condition’ (of torpor) ‘comes to an end in the early hours of the morning, but only by degrees. The products of fatigue which have accumulated in the albumen of the brain gradually diminish; more and more of them are decomposed or eliminated by the unceasing flow of the blood stream. Here and there separate groups of cells begin to emerge into wakefulness, while the torpid state still persists all around them. The isolated work of these separate groups now appears before our clouded consciousness, unchecked by other portions of the brain which govern the process of association. For that reason the images produced, which correspond for the most part to material impressions of the more recent past, are strung together in a wild and irregular manner. The number of the liberated brain-cells constantly grows and the senselessness of the dreams correspondingly diminishes.’

This view of dreaming as an incomplete, partial waking state is no doubt to be found in the writings of every modern physiologist and philosopher. The most elaborate exposition of it is given by Maury (1878, 6 f.). It often appears as though that author imagined that the waking or sleeping state could be shifted from one anatomical region to another, each particular anatomical region being linked to one particular psychical function. I will merely remark at this point that, even if the theory of partial waking were confirmed, its details would still remain very much open to discussion.

This view naturally leaves no room for assigning any function to dreaming. The logical conclusion that follows from it as to the position and significance of dreams is correctly stated by Binz (1878, 35): ‘Every observed fact forces us to conclude that dreams must be characterized as somatic processes, which are in every case useless and in many cases positively pathological....’

The application to dreams of the term ‘somatic’, which is italicized by Binz himself, has more than one bearing. It alludes, in the first place, to the aetiology of dreams which seemed particularly plausible to Binz when he studied the experimental production of dreams by the use of toxic substances. For theories of this kind involve a tendency to limit the instigation of dreams so far as possible to somatic causes. Put in its most extreme form the view is as follows. Once we have put ourselves to sleep by excluding all stimuli, there is no need and no occasion for dreaming until the morning, when the process of being gradually awakened by the impact of fresh stimuli might be reflected in the phenomenon of dreaming. It is impracticable, however, to keep our sleep free from stimuli; they impinge upon the sleeper from all sides - like the germs of life of which Mephistopheles complained - from without and from within and even from parts of his body which are quite unnoticed in waking life. Thus sleep is disturbed; first one corner of the mind is shaken into wakefulness and then another; the mind functions for a brief moment with its awakened portion and is then glad to fall asleep once more. Dreams are a reaction to the disturbance of sleep brought about by a stimulus - a reaction, incidentally, which is quite superfluous.

But the description of dreaming - which, after all is said and done, remains a function of the mind - as a somatic process implies another meaning as well. It is intended to show that dreams are unworthy to rank as psychical processes. Dreaming has often been compared with ‘the ten fingers of a man who knows nothing of music wandering over the keys of a piano’; and this simile shows as well as anything the sort of opinion that is usually held of dreaming by representatives of the exact sciences. On this view a dream is something wholly and completely incapable of interpretation; for how could the ten fingers of an unmusical player produce a piece of music?

Even in the distant past there was no lack of critics of the theory of partial waking. Thus Burdach (1838, 508 f.) wrote: ‘When it is said that dreams are a partial waking, in the first place this throws no light either on waking or on sleeping, and in the second place it says no more than that some mental forces are active in dreams while others are at rest. But variability of this kind occurs throughout life.’

This ruling theory, which regards dreams as a somatic process, underlies a most interesting hypothesis put forward for the first time by Robert in 1886. It is particularly attractive since it is able to suggest a function, a utilitarian purpose, for dreaming. Robert takes as the groundwork of his theory two facts of observation which we have already considered in the course of our examination of the material of dreams (see above, p. 532 ff.), namely that we dream so frequently of the most trivial daily impressions and that we so rarely carry over into our dreams our important daily interests. Robert (1886, 10) asserts that it is universally true that things which we have thoroughly thought out never become instigators of dreams but only things which are in our minds in an uncompleted shape or which have merely been touched upon by our thoughts in passing: ‘The reason why it is usually impossible to explain dreams is precisely because they are caused by sensory impressions of the preceding day which failed to attract enough of the dreamer’s attention.’ Thus the condition which determines whether an impression shall find its way into a dream is whether the process of working over the impression was interrupted or whether the impression was too unimportant to have a right to be worked over at all.

Robert describes dreams as ‘a somatic process of excretion of which we become aware in our mental reaction to it’. Dreams are excretions of thought that have been stifled at birth. ‘A man deprived of the capacity for dreaming would in course of time become mentally deranged, because a great mass of uncompleted, unworked-out thoughts and superficial impressions would accumulate in his brain and would be bound by their bulk to smother the thoughts which should be assimilated into his memory as completed wholes.’ Dreams serve as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain. They possess the power to heal and relieve. (Ibid., 32.)

We should be misunderstanding Robert if we were to ask him how it can come about that the mind is relieved through the presentation of ideas in dreams. What Robert is clearly doing is to infer from these two features of the material of dreams that by some means or other an expulsion of worthless impressions is accomplished during sleep as a somatic process, and that dreaming is not a special sort of psychical process but merely the information we receive of that expulsion. Moreover, excretion is not the only event which occurs in the mind at night. Robert himself adds that, besides this, the suggestions arising during the previous day are worked out and that ‘whatever parts of the undigested thoughts are not excreted are bound together into a rounded whole by threads of thought borrowed from the imagination and thus inserted in the memory as a harmless imaginative picture.’ (Ibid., 23.)

But Robert’s theory is diametrically opposed to the ruling one in its estimate of the nature of the sources of dreams. According to the latter, there would be no dreaming at all if the mind were not being constantly wakened by external and internal sensory stimuli. But in Robert’s view the impulsion to dreaming arises in the mind itself - in the fact of its becoming overloaded and requiring relief; and he concludes with perfect logic that causes derived from somatic conditions play a subordinate part as determinants of dreams, and that such causes would be quite incapable of provoking dreams in a mind in which there was no material for the construction of dreams derived from waking consciousness. The only qualification he makes is to admit that the phantasy-images arising in dreams out of the depths of the mind may be affected by nervous stimuli. (Ibid., 48.) After all, therefore, Robert does not regard dreams as so completely dependent upon somatic events. Nevertheless, in his view dreams are not psychical processes, they have no place among the psychical processes of waking life; they are somatic processes occurring every night in the apparatus that is concerned with mental activity, and they have as their function the task of protecting that apparatus from excessive tension - or, to change the metaphor - of acting as scavengers of the mind.

Another writer, Yves Delage, bases his theory on the same features of dreams, as revealed in the choice of their material; and it is instructive to notice the way in which a slight variation in his view of the same things leads him to conclusions of a very different bearing.

Delage (1891, 41) tells us that he experienced in his own person, on the occasion of the death of someone of whom he was fond, the fact that we do not dream of what has occupied all our thoughts during the day, or not until it has begun to give place to other daytime concerns. His investigations among other people confirmed him in the general truth of this fact. He makes what would be an interesting observation of this kind, if it should prove to have general validity, on the dreams of young married couples: ‘S’ils ont été fortement épris, presque jamais ils n’ont rêvé l’un de l’autre avant le mariage ou pendant la lune de miel; et s’ils ont rêvé d’amour c’est pour être infidèles avec quelque personne indifférente ou odieuse.’ What, then, do we dream of? Delage identifies the material that occurs in our dreams as consisting of fragments and residues of the preceding days and of earlier times. Everything that appears in our dreams, even though we are inclined at first to regard it as a creation of our dream-life, turns out, when we have examined it more closely, to be unrecognized reproduction - ‘souvenir inconscient’. But this ideational material possesses a common characteristic: it originates from impressions which probably affected our senses more strongly than our intelligence or from which our attention was diverted very soon after they emerged. The less conscious and at the same time the more powerful an impression has been, the more chance it has of playing a part in the next dream.

Here we have what are essentially the same two categories of impressions as are stressed by Robert: the trivial ones and those that have not been dealt with. Delage, however, gives the situation a different turn, for he holds that it is because these impressions have not been dealt with that they are capable of producing dreams, not because they are trivial. It is true in a certain sense that trivial impressions, too, have not been dealt with completely; being in the nature of fresh impressions, they are ‘autant de ressorts tendus’ which are released during sleep. A powerful impression which happens to have met with some check in the process of being worked over or which has been purposely held under restraint has more claim to play a part in dreams than an impression which is weak and almost unnoticed. The psychical energy which has been stored up during the daytime by being inhibited and suppressed becomes the motive force for dreams at night. Psychical material that has been suppressed comes to light in dreams.¹

At this point, unluckily, Delage interrupts his train of thought. He can attribute only the smallest share in dreams to any independent psychical activity; and thus he brings his theory into line with the ruling theory of the partial awakening of the brain: ‘En somme le rêve est le produit de la pensée errante, sans but et sans direction, se fixant successivement sur les souvenirs, qui ont gardé assez d’intensité pour se placer sur sa route et l’arrêter au passage, établissant entre eux un lien tantôt faible et indécis, tantôt plus fort et plus serré, selon que l’activité actuelle du cerveau est plus ou moins abolie par le sommeil.’ ²

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] Anatole France expresses exactly the same idea in Le lys rouge: ‘Ce que nous voyons la nuit, ce sont les restes malheureux de ce que nous avons négligé dans la veille. Le rêve est souvent la revanche des choses qu’on méprise ou le reproche des êtres abandonnés.’ [‘What we see during the night are the miserable remnants of what we have neglected during the previous day. A dream is often a retaliation on the part of what we despise or a reproach on the part of those we have deserted.’]

² [‘In short, dreams are the product of thought wandering without purpose or direction, attaching itself in turn to memories which have retained enough intensity to stand in its way and interrupt its course, and linking them together by a bond which is sometimes weak and vague and sometimes stronger and closer, according as the brain’s activity at the moment is abolished by sleep to a greater or less extent.’] (3) We may place in a third group those theories which ascribe to the dreaming mind a capacity and inclination for carrying out special psychical activities of which it is largely or totally incapable in waking life. The putting of these faculties into force usually provides dreaming with a utilitarian function. Most of the estimates formed of dreaming by earlier writers on psychology fall into this class. It will be enough, however, for me to quote a sentence from Burdach (1838, 512). Dreaming, he writes, ‘is a natural activity of the mind which is not limited by the power of individuality, which is not interrupted by self-consciousness and which is not directed by self-determination, but which is the freely operating vitality of the sensory centres.’

This revelling of the mind in the free use of its own forces is evidently regarded by Burdach and the rest as a condition in which the mind is refreshed and collects new strength for the day’s work - in which, in fact, it enjoys a sort of holiday. Thus Burdach quotes with approval the charming words in which the poet Novalis praises the reign of dreams: ‘Dreams are a shield against the humdrum monotony of life; they set imagination free from its chains so that it may throw into con fusion all the pictures of everyday existence and break into the unceasing gravity of grown men with the joyful play of a child. Without dreams we should surely grow sooner old; so we may look on them - not, perhaps as a gift from on high- but as a precious recreation, as friendly companions on our pilgrimage to the grave.’

The reviving and healing function of dreams is described with still more insistence by Purkinje (1846, 456): ‘These functions are performed especially by productive dreams. They are the easy play of the imagination and have no connection with the affairs of daytime. The mind has no wish to prolong the tensions of waking life; it seeks to relax them and to recover from them. It produces above all conditions contrary to the waking ones. It cures sorrow by joy, cares by hopes and pictures of happy distraction, hatred by love and friendliness, fear by courage and foresight; it allays doubt by conviction and firm faith, and vain expectation by fulfilment. Many of the spirit’s wounds which are being constantly re-opened during the day are healed by sleep, which covers them and shields them from fresh injury. The healing action of time is based partly on this.’ We all have a feeling that sleep has a beneficial effect upon mental activities, and the obscure working of the popular mind refuses to let itself be robbed of its belief that dreaming is one of the ways in which sleep dispenses its benefits.

The most original and far-reaching attempt to explain dreaming as a special activity of the mind, capable of free expansion only during the state of sleep, was that undertaken by Scherner in 1861. His book is written in a turgid and high-flown style and is inspired by an almost intoxicated enthusiasm for his subject which is bound to repel anyone who cannot share in his fervour. It puts such difficulties in the way of an analysis of its contents that we turn with relief to the clearer and briefer exposition of Scherner’s doctrines given by the philosopher Volkelt. ‘Suggestive gleams of meaning proceed like lightning flashes out of these mystical agglomerations, these clouds of glory and splendour - but they do not illuminate a philosopher’s path.’ It is in these terms that Scherner’s writings are judged even by his disciple.

Scherner is not one of those who believe that the capacities of the mind continue undiminished in dream-life. He himself shows how the centralized core of the ego - its spontaneous energy - is deprived of its nervous force in dreams, how as a result of this decentralization the processes of cognition, feeling, willing and ideation are modified, and how the remnants of these psychical functions no longer possess a truly mental character but become nothing more than mechanisms. But by way of contrast, the mental activity which may be described as ‘imagination’, liberated from the domination of reason and from any moderating control, leaps into a position of unlimited sovereignty. Though dream-imagination makes use of recent waking memories for its building material, it erects them into structures bearing not the remotest resemblance to those of waking life; it reveals itself in dreams as possessing not merely reproductive but productive powers. Its characteristics are what lend their peculiar features to dreams. It shows a preference for what is immoderate, exaggerated and monstrous. But at the same time, being freed from the hindrances of the categories of thought, it gains in pliancy, agility and versatility. It is susceptible in the subtlest manner to the shades of the tender feelings and to passionate emotions, and promptly incorporates our inner life into external plastic pictures. Imagination in dreams is without the power of conceptual speech. It is obliged to paint what it has to say pictorially, and, since there are no concepts to exercise an attenuating influence, it makes full and powerful use of the pictorial form. Thus, however clear its speech may be, it is diffuse, clumsy and awkward. The clarity of its speech suffers particularly from the fact that it has a dislike of representing an object by its proper image, and prefers some extraneous image which will express only that particular one of the object’s attributes which it is seeking to represent. Here we have the ‘symbolizing activity’ of the imagination.... Another very important point is that dream-imagination never depicts things completely, but only in outline and even so only in the roughest fashion. For this reason its paintings seem like inspired sketches. It does not halt, however, at the mere representation of an object; it is under an internal necessity to involve the dream-ego to a greater or less extent with the object and thus produce an event. For instance, a dream caused by a visual stimulus may represent gold coins in the street; the dreamer will pick them up delightedly and carry them off.

The material with which dream-imagination accomplishes its artistic work is principally, according to Scherner, provided by the organic somatic stimuli which are so obscure during the daytime. (See above, p. 544 ff.) Thus the excessively fantastic hypothesis put forward by Scherner and the perhaps unduly sober doctrines of Wundt and other physiologists, which are poles asunder in other respects, are entirely at one in regard to their theory of the sources and instigators of dreams. According to the physiological view, however, the mental reaction to the internal somatic stimuli is exhausted with the provoking of certain ideas appropriate to the stimuli; these ideas give rise to others along associative lines and at this point the course of psychical events in dreams seems to be at an end. According to Scherner, on the other hand, the somatic stimuli do no more than provide the mind with material of which it can make use for its imaginative purposes. The formation of dreams only begins, in Scherner’s eyes, at the point which the other writers regard as its end.

What dream-imagination does to the somatic stimuli cannot, of course, be regarded as serving any useful purpose. It plays about with them and pictures the organic sources, from which the stimuli of the dream in question have arisen, in some kind of plastic symbolism. Scherner is of the opinion - though here Volkelt and others refuse to follow him - that dream imagination has one particular favourite way of representing the organism as a whole: namely as a house. Fortunately, however, it does not seem to be restricted to this one method of representation On the other hand, it may make use of a whole row of houses to indicate a single organ; for instance, a very long street of houses may represent a stimulus from the intestines. Again, separate portions of a house may stand for separate portions of the body; thus, in a dream caused by a headache, the head may be represented by the ceiling of a room covered with disgusting, toad-like spiders.

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