Josef popper-lynkeus and the theory of dreams

(1923)

There is much of interest to be said on the subject of apparent scientific originality. When some new idea comes up in science, which is hailed at first as a discovery and is also as a rule disputed as such, objective research soon afterwards reveals that after all it was in fact no novelty. Usually the discovery has already been made repeatedly and has afterwards been forgotten, often at very long intervals of time. Or at least it has had forerunners, had been obscurely surmised or incompletely enunciated. This is too well known to call for further discussion.

But the subjective side of originality also deserves consideration. A scientific worker may sometimes ask himself what was the source of the ideas peculiar to himself which he has applied to his material. As regards some of them he will discover without much reflection the hints from which they were derived, the statements made by other people which he has picked out and modified and whose implications he has elaborated. But as regards others of his ideas he can make no such acknowledgements; he can only suppose that these thoughts and lines of approach were generated - he cannot tell how - in his own mental activity, and it is on them that he bases his claim to originality.

Careful psychological investigation, however, diminishes this claim still further. It reveals hidden and long-forgotten sources which gave the stimulus to the apparently original ideas, and it replaces the ostensible new creation by a revival of something forgotten applied to fresh material. There is nothing to regret in this; we had no right to expect that what was ‘original’ could be untraceable and undetermined.

In my case, too, the originality of many of the new ideas employed by me in the interpretation of dreams and in psycho-analysis has evaporated in this way. I am ignorant of the source of only one of these ideas. It was no less than the key to my view of dreams and helped me to solve their riddles, so far as it has been possible to solve them hitherto. I started out from the strange, confused and senseless character of so many dreams, and hit upon the notion that dreams were bound to become like that because something was struggling for expression in them which was opposed by a resistance from other mental forces. In dreams hidden impulses were stirring which stood in contradiction to what might be called the dreamer’s official ethical and aesthetic creed; the dreamer was thus ashamed of these impulses, turned away from them and refused to acknowledge them in day-time, and if during the night he could not withhold expression of some kind from them, he submitted them to a ‘dream-distortion’ which made the content of the dream appear confused and senseless. To the mental force in human beings which keeps watch on this internal contradiction and distorts the dream’s primitive instinctual impulses in favour of conventional or of higher moral standards, I gave the name of ‘dream-censorship’.

Precisely this essential part of my theory of dreams was, however, discovered by Popper-Lynkeus independently. I will ask the reader to compare the following quotation from a story called ‘Träumen wie Wachen’ in his Phantasien eines Realisten which was certainly written in ignorance of the theory of dreams which I published in 1900, just as I myself was then in ignorance of Lynkeus’s Phantasien:

‘About a man who has the remarkable attribute of never dreaming nonsense.

‘"This splendid gift of yours, for dreaming as though you were waking, is a consequence of your virtues, of your kindness, your sense of justice, and your love of truth; it is the moral serenity of your nature which makes me understand all about you."

‘"But when I think the matter over properly", replied the other, "I almost believe that everyone is made like me, and that no one at all ever dreams nonsense. Any dream which one can remember clearly enough to describe it afterwards - any dream, that is to say, which is not a fever-dream - must always make sense, and it cannot possibly be otherwise. For things that were mutually contradictory could not group themselves into a single whole. The fact that time and space are often thrown into confusion does not affect the true content of the dream, since no doubt neither of them are of significance for its real essence. We often do the same thing in waking life. Only think of fairy tales and of the many daring products of the imagination, which are full of meaning and of which only a man without intelligence could say: ‘This is nonsense, for it is impossible.’"

‘"If only one always knew how to interpret dreams in the right way, as you have just done with mine!" said his friend.

‘"That is certainly no easy task; but with a little attention on the part of the dreamer himself it should no doubt always succeed. - You ask why it is that for the most part it does not succeed? In you other people there seems always to be something that lies concealed in your dreams, something unchaste in a special and higher sense, a certain secret quality in your being which it is hard to follow. And that is why your dreams so often seem to be without meaning or even to be nonsense. But in the deepest sense this is not in the least so; indeed, it cannot be so at all - for it is always the same man, whether he is awake or dreaming."’

I believe that what enabled me to discover the cause of dream-distortion was my moral courage. In the case of Popper it was the purity, love of truth and moral serenity of his nature.1

DR. SÁNDOR FERENCZI

(ON HIS 5Oth BIRTHDAY)

(1923)

Not many years after its publication (in 1900), The Interpretation of Dreams fell into the hands of a young Budapest physician, who, although he was a neurologist, psychiatrist and expert in forensic medicine, was eagerly in search of new scientific knowledge. He did not get far in reading the book; very soon he had thrown it aside - whether out of boredom or disgust is not known. Soon afterwards, however, the call for fresh possibilities of work and discovery took him to Zurich, and thence he was led to Vienna to meet the author of the book that he had once contemptuously cast aside. This first visit was succeeded by a long, intimate and hitherto untroubled friendship, in the course of which he too made the journey to America in 1909 to lecture at Clark University at Worcester, Mass.

Such were the beginnings of Ferenczi, who has since himself become a master and teacher of psycho-analysis and who in the present year, 1923, completes alike the fiftieth anniversary of his birth and the first decade of his leadership of the Budapest Psycho-Analytical Society.

Ferenczi has repeatedly played a part, too, in the external affairs of psycho-analysis. His appearance at the Second Analytical Congress, at Nuremberg in 1910, will be remembered, where he proposed and helped to bring about the foundation of an International Psycho-Analytical Association as a means of defence against the contempt with which analysis was treated by official Medicine. At the Fifth Analytical Congress, at Budapest, in September, 1918, he was elected President of the Association. He appointed Anton von Freund as Secretary; and there is no doubt that the combined energy of the two men, together with Freund’s generous schemes of endowment, would have made Budapest the analytic capital of Europe, had not political catastrophes and personal tragedy put a merciless end to these fair hopes. Freund fell ill and died in January, 1920. In view of Hungary’s isolation from contact with the rest of the world, Ferenczi had resigned his position in October, 1919, and had transferred the Presidency of the International Association to Ernest Jones in London. For the duration of the Soviet Republic in Hungary Ferenczi had been allotted the functions of a University teacher, and his lectures had attracted crowded audiences. The Branch Society, which he had founded in 1913,¹ survived every storm and, under his guidance, became a centre of intense and productive work and was distinguished by an accumulation of abilities such as were exhibited in combination by no other Branch Society. Ferenczi, who, as a middle child in a large family, had to struggle with a powerful brother complex, had, under the influence of analysis, become an irreproachable elder brother, a kindly teacher and promoter of young talent.

¹ Its Inaugural General Meeting was held on May 19, 1913, with Ferenczi as President, Dr. Radó as Secretary, and Drs. Hollós, Ignotus and Lévy as members.4

Ferenczi’s analytic writings have become universally known and appreciated. It was not until 1922 that his Popular Lectures on Psycho-Analysis were published by our Verlag as Volume XIII of the ‘Internationale Psychoanalytische Bibliothek’. These lectures, clear and formally perfect, sometimes most fascinatingly written, offer what is in fact the best ‘Introduction to Psycho-Analysis’ for those who are unfamiliar with it. There is still no collection of his purely technical medical writings, a number of which have been translated into English by Ernest Jones. The Verlag will fulfil this task as soon as more favourable times make it possible. Those of his books and papers which have appeared in Hungarian have passed through many editions and have made analysis familiar to educated circles in Hungary.

Ferenczi’s scientific achievement is impressive above all from its many-sidedness. Besides well-chosen case histories and acutely observed clinical communications (‘A Little Chanticleer’, ‘Transitory Symptom-Constructions during the Analysis’, and shorter clinical works) we find exemplary critical writings such as those upon Jung’s Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, upon Régis and Hesnard’s views on psycho-analysis, as well as effective polemical writings such as those against Bleuler on alcohol and against Putnam on the relation between psycho-analysis and philosophy, moderate and dignified in spite of their decisiveness. But besides all these there are the papers upon which Ferenczi’s fame principally rests, in which his originality, his wealth of ideas and his command over a well-directed scientific imagination find such happy expression, and with which he has enlarged important sections of psycho-analytic theory and has promoted the discovery of fundamental situations in mental life: ‘Introjection and Transference’, including a discussion of the theory of hypnosis, ‘Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality’ and his discussion of symbolism. Finally there are the works of these last few years - ‘The Psycho-Analysis of the War Neuroses’, Hysterie und Pathoneurosen and, in collaboration with Hollós, Psycho-Analysis and the Psychic Disorder of General Paresis (in which the medical interest advances from the psychological conditions to the somatic determinants), and his approaches to an ‘active’ therapy.

However incomplete this enumeration may seem to be, his friends know that Ferenczi has held back even more than he has been able to make up his mind to communicate. On his fiftieth birthday they are united in wishing that he may be granted strength, leisure and a frame of mind to bring his scientific plans to realization in fresh achievements.5

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