A note on psycho-analytic publications and prizes 15 страница

‘But there is a further circumstance: the next night I dreamt that my deceased wife, my daughter’s own mother, had undertaken the care of forty-eight new-born infants. When the first dozen were being brought in, I protested. At that point the dream ended.

‘My late wife was very fond of children. She often talked about it, saying she would like a whole troop round her, the more the better, and that she would do very well if she had charge of a Kindergarten and would be quite happy so. The noise children make was music to her. From time to time she would invite in a whole troop of children from the streets and regale them with chocolate and cakes in the courtyard of our villa. My daughter must have thought at once of her mother after her confinement, especially because of the surprise of its coming on prematurely, the arrival of twins, and their difference in sex. She knew her mother would have greeted the event with the liveliest joy and sympathy. "Only think what mother would say, if she were with me now!" This thought must undoubtedly have gone through her mind. And then I dream of my dead wife, of whom I very seldom dream, and had neither spoken of nor thought of after the first dream.

‘Do you think that the coincidence between dream and event was accidental in both cases? My daughter is much attached to me and was most certainly thinking of me during her labour, particularly because we had often exchanged letters about her mode of living during her pregnancy and I had constantly given her advice.’

It is easy to guess what my answer to this letter was. I was sorry to find that my correspondent’s interest in analysis had been so completely killed by his interest in telepathy. I therefore avoided his direct question, and, remarking that the dream contained a good deal besides its connection with the birth of the twins, I asked him to give me any information or ideas that occurred to him which could give me a clue to the meaning of the dream.

Thereupon I received the following second letter which, it must be admitted, did not give me quite all I wanted:

‘I have not been able to answer your kind letter of the 24th until to-day. I shall be only too pleased to tell you "without omission or reserve" all the associations that occur to me. Unfortunately there is not much; more would come out in talking.3

‘Well then - my wife and I do not wish for any more children. We almost never have sexual intercourse; at any rate at the time of the dream there was certainly no "danger". My daughter’s confinement, which was expected about the middle of December, was naturally a frequent subject of conversation between us. My daughter had been examined and X-rayed in the summer, and the doctor making the examination was certain that the child would be a boy. My wife said at the time, "I should laugh if it was a girl after all." At the time she also remarked that it would be better if it were an H. rather than a G. (my son-in-law’s family name); my daughter is handsomer and has a better figure than my son-in-law, although he has been a naval officer. I have made some study of the question of heredity and am in the habit of looking at babies to see whom they resemble. One more thing. We have a small dog which sits with us at table in the evening to have his food and licks the plates and dishes. All this material appears in the dream.

‘I am fond of small children and have often said that I should like to have the bringing up of a child once more, now that I should have so much more understanding, interest and time to devote to it; but with my wife I should not wish it, as she does not possess the necessary qualities for rearing a child judiciously. The dream makes me a present of two children - I did not observe their sex. I see them even at this moment lying in the bed and I recognize the features, the one more "me", the other more my wife, but each with minor traits from the other side. My wife has red-gold hair, but the one child had chestnut (reddish) brown hair. I said, "Oh well, it will go red, too, later on." Both the children crawl round a large wash basin in which my wife has been stirring jam and lick its bottom and sides (dream). The origin of this detail is easily explicable, just as is the dream as a whole. The dream would not be difficult to understand or interpret if it had not coincided with the unexpectedly early arrival of my grandchildren (three weeks too soon), a coincidence of time almost to the hour. (I cannot exactly say when the dream began; my grandchildren were born at nine p. m. and a quarter past; I went to bed at about eleven and had my dream during the course of the night.) Our knowledge too that the child would be a boy adds to the difficulty, though possibly the doubt whether this had been fully established might account for the appearance of twins in the dream. All the same, there remains the coincidence of the dream with the unexpected and premature appearance of my daughter’s twins.

‘It is not the first time that distant events have become known to me before I received the actual news. To give one instance among many. In October I had a visit from my three brothers. We had not all been together for thirty years, except for quite a short time, once at my father’s funeral and once at my mother’s. Both deaths were expected, and I had had no ‘presentiments’ in either case. But about twenty-five years ago my youngest brother died quite suddenly and unexpectedly when he was ten. As the postman handed me the postcard with the news of his death, before I had glanced at it, the thought came to me at once, "It is to say that your brother is dead." He was the only one left at home, a strong healthy lad, while we four elder brothers were already fully fledged and had left our parents’ house. At the time of my brothers’ visit the talk by chance came round to this experience of mine, and, as if at the word of command, all three brothers came out with the declaration that exactly the same thing had happened to them. Whether it happened in exactly the same manner I cannot say; at all events each one said that he had felt perfectly certain of the death just before the quite unexpected news had arrived. We are all from the mother’s side of a sensitive disposition, though tall, strong men, but not one of us is in the least inclined towards spiritualism or occultism; on the contrary, we disclaim adherence to either. My brothers are all three University men, two are schoolmasters, one a surveyor, all rather pedants than visionaries. - That is all I can tell you in regard to the dream. If you can turn it to literary account, I am delighted to place it at your disposal.’5 I am afraid that you may behave like the writer of these two letters. You, too, will be primarily interested in the question whether this dream can really be regarded as a telepathic notification of the unexpected birth of the twin children, and you will not be disposed to submit this dream to analysis like any other. I foresee that it will always be so when psycho-analysis and occultism encounter each other. The former has, so to speak, all our mental instincts against it; the latter is met half-way by powerful and mysterious sympathies. I am not, however, going to take up the position that I am nothing but a psycho-analyst, that the problems of occultism do not concern me: you would rightly judge that to be only an evasion of a problem. On the contrary, I may say that it would be a great satisfaction to me if I could convince myself and others on unimpeachable evidence of the existence of telepathic processes, but I also consider that the information provided about this dream is altogether inadequate to justify any such pronouncement. You will observe that it does not once occur to this intelligent man, deeply interested as he is in the problem of his dream, to tell us when he had last seen his daughter or what news he had lately had from her. He writes in the first letter that the birth was a month too soon; in the second, however, the month has become three weeks only, and in neither are we told whether the birth was really premature, or whether, as so often happens, those concerned were out in their reckoning. But we should have to consider these and other details of the occurrence if we are to weigh the probability of the dreamer having made unconscious estimates and guesses. I felt too that it would be of no use even if I succeeded in getting answers to such questions. In the course of arriving at the information new doubts would constantly arise, which could only be set at rest if one had the man in front of one and could revive all the relevant memories which he had perhaps dismissed as unessential. He is certainly right in what he says at the beginning of his second letter that more would have come out in talking.

Consider another and similar case, in which the disturbing interest of occultism has no part. You must often have been in a position to compare the anamnesis and the information about the illness given during the first session by any neurotic with what you have gained from him after some months of psycho-analysis. Apart from inevitable abbreviations, how many essentials were left out or suppressed, how many connections were displaced - in fact, how much that was incorrect or untrue was told you on that first occasion! You will not call me hyper-critical if I refuse in the circumstances to make any pronouncement whether the dream in question is a telepathic event or a particularly subtle achievement on the part of the dreamer’s unconscious or whether it is simply to be taken as a striking coincidence. Our curiosity must be satisfied with the hope of some later occasion on which it may be possible to make a detailed oral examination of the dreamer. But you cannot say that this outcome of our investigation has disappointed you, for I prepared you for it; I said you would hear nothing which would throw any light on the problem of telepathy.

If we now pass on to the analytic treatment of this dream, we are obliged once more to express dissatisfaction. The thoughts that the dreamer associates with the manifest content of the dream are again insufficient; they do not enable us to make any analysis of the dream. For instance, the dream goes into great detail over the likeness of the children to the parents, discusses the colour of their hair and the probable change of colour at a later age, and as an explanation of these elaborate details we only have the dry piece of information from the dreamer that he has always been interested in questions of likeness and heredity. We are accustomed to expect rather more material than this! But at one point the dream does admit of an analytic interpretation, and precisely at this point analysis, which has otherwise no connection with occultism, comes to the aid of telepathy in a remarkable way. It is only on account of this single point that I am asking for your attention to this dream at all.

Correctly speaking, this dream has no right whatever to be called ‘telepathic’. It did not inform the dreamer of anything which (outside his normal knowledge) was taking place elsewhere. What the dream did relate was something quite different from the event reported in the telegram received on the second day after the night of the dream. The dream and the actual occurrence diverge at a particularly important point; but they agree, apart from the coincidence of time, in another very interesting element. In the dream the dreamer’s wife had twins. The occurrence, however, was that his daughter had given birth to twins in her distant home. The dreamer did not overlook this difference; he did not seem to know any way of getting over it and, as according to his own account he had no leaning towards the occult, he only asked quite tentatively whether the coincidence between dream and occurrence on the point of the twin-birth could be more than an accident. The psycho-analytic interpretation of dreams, however, does away with this difference between the dream and the event, and gives both the same content. If we consult the associative material to this dream, it shows, in spite of its sparseness, that an intimate bond of feeling existed between the father and daughter, a bond of feeling which is so usual and so natural that we ought to cease to be ashamed of it, one that in daily life merely finds expression as a tender interest and is only pushed to its logical conclusion in dreams. The father knew that his daughter clung to him, he was convinced that she often thought of him during her labour. In his heart I think he grudged her to his son-in-law, to whom in one letter he makes a few disparaging references. On the occasion of her confinement (whether expected or communicated by telepathy) the unconscious wish became active in the repressed part of his mind: ‘she ought to be my (second) wife instead’; it was this wish that had distorted the dream-thoughts and was the cause of the difference between the manifest content of the dream and the event. We are entitled to replace the second wife in the dream by the daughter. If we possessed more associations to the dream, we could undoubtedly verify and deepen this interpretation.

And now I have reached the point I wish to put before you. We have endeavoured to maintain the strictest impartiality and have allowed two conceptions of the dream to rank as equally probable and equally unproved. According to the first the dream is a reaction to a telepathic message: ‘your daughter has just brought twins into the world.’ According to the second an unconscious process of thought underlies the dream, which may be reproduced somewhat as follows: ‘To-day is the day the confinement should take place if the young people in Berlin are really out in their reckoning by a month, as I suspect. And if my (first) wife were still alive, she certainly would not be content with one grandchild. To please her there would have to be at least twins!’ If this second view is right, no new problems arise. It is simply a dream like any other. The (preconscious) dream-thoughts as outlined above are reinforced by the (unconscious) wish that no other than the daughter should be the dreamer’s second wife, and thus the manifest dream as described to us arises.

If you prefer to assume that a telepathic message about the daughter’s confinement reached the sleeper, further questions arise of the relation of a message such as this to a dream and of its influence on the formation of dreams. The answer is not far to seek and is quite unambiguous. A telepathic message will be treated as a portion of the material that goes to the formation of a dream, like any other external or internal stimulus, like a disturbing noise in the street or an insistent organic sensation in the sleeper’s own body. In our example it is evident how the message, with the help of a lurking repressed wish, became remodelled into a wish-fulfilment; it is unfortunately less easy to show that it combined with other material that had become active at the same time and was blended into a dream. Telepathic messages - if we are justified in recognizing their existence - can thus make no alteration in the process of forming a dream; telepathy has nothing to do with the nature of dreams. And in order to avoid the impression that I am trying to conceal a vague notion behind abstract and fine-sounding words, I am willing to repeat: the essential nature of dreams consists in the peculiar process of ‘dream-work’ which, with the help of an unconscious wish, carries the preconscious thoughts (day’s residues) over into the manifest content of the dream. The problem of telepathy concerns dreams as little as does the problem of anxiety.

I am hoping that you will grant this, but that you will raise the objection that there are, nevertheless, other telepathic dreams in which there is no difference between the event and the dream, and in which there is nothing else to be found but an undistorted reproduction of the event. I have no knowledge of such dreams from my own experience, but I know they have often been reported. If we assume that we have such an undisguised and unadulterated telepathic dream to deal with, another question arises. Ought we to call such a telepathic experience a ‘dream’ at all? You will certainly do so as long as you keep to popular usage, in which everything that takes place in mental life during sleep is called a dream. You, too, perhaps say, ‘I tossed about in my dream’, and still less are you conscious of anything incorrect when you say, ‘I shed tears in my dream’ or ‘I felt apprehensive in my dream’. But you will no doubt notice that in all these cases you are using ‘dream’ and ‘sleep’ and ‘state of being asleep’ interchangeably, as if there were no distinction between them. I think it would be in the interests of scientific accuracy to keep ‘dream’ and ‘state of sleep’ more distinctly separate. Why should we provide a counterpart to the confusion evoked by Maeder who, by refusing to distinguish between the dream-work and the latent dream-thoughts, has discovered a new function for dreams? Supposing, then, that we are brought face to face with a pure telepathic ‘dream’, let us rather call it instead a telepathic experience in a state of sleep. A dream without condensation, distortion, dramatization, above all, without wish-fulfilment, surely does not deserve the name. You will remind me that, if so, there are other mental products in sleep to which the right to be called ‘dreams’ would have to be refused. Actual experiences of the day are sometimes simply repeated in sleep; reproductions of traumatic scenes in ‘dreams’ have led us only lately to revise the theory of dreams. There are dreams which are to be distinguished from the usual type by certain special qualities, which are, properly speaking, nothing but night-phantasies, not having undergone additions or alterations of any kind and being in all other ways similar to the familiar day-dreams. It would be awkward, no doubt, to exclude these structures from the domain of ‘dreams’. But still they all come from within, are products of our mental life, whereas the very conception of the purely ‘telepathic dream’ lies in its being a perception of something external, in relation to which the mind remains passive and receptive.

II

The second case which I shall bring before your notice in fact follows along other lines. This is not a telepathic dream, but a dream that has recurred from childhood onwards, in a person who has had many telepathic experiences. Her letter, which I reproduce here, contains some remarkable things, about which we cannot form any judgement. A part of it is of interest in connection with the problem of the relation of telepathy to dreams.

(1) ‘... My doctor, Herr Dr. N., advises me to give you an account of a dream that has pursued me for some thirty or thirty-two years. I am following his advice, and perhaps the dream may possess interest for you in some scientific respect. Since, in your opinion, such dreams are to be traced to an experience of a sexual nature in the first years of my childhood, I relate some reminiscences of childhood. They are experiences whose impression on me still persists and which were of so marked a character as to have determined my religion for me.

‘May I beg of you to send me word in what way you explain this dream and whether it is not possible to banish it from my life, for it haunts me like a ghost, and the circumstances that always accompany it - I always fall out of bed, and have inflicted on myself not inconsiderable injuries - make it particularly disagreeable and distressing.’

(2) ‘I am thirty-seven years old, very strong and in good physical health, but in childhood I had, besides measles and scarlet fever, an attack of nephritis. Furthermore, in my fifth year I had a very severe inflammation of the eyes, which left double vision. The images are at an angle to each other and their outline is blurred, as the scars from the ulcers affect clearness of vision. In the specialist’s opinion there is nothing more to be done to the eyes and no chance of improvement. The left side of my face is drawn up from having screwed up my left eye to see better. By dint of practice and determination I can do the finest needlework; and, similarly, when a six-year old child, I broke myself of squinting by practising in front of a looking-glass, so that now there is no external sign of the defect in vision.

‘From my very earliest years I was always solitary. I kept apart from other children, and had visions (clairvoyance and clairaudience). I was not able to distinguish these from reality, and in consequence often found myself in conflict with other people in embarrassing positions, with the result that I have become a very reserved and shy person. Since as a quite small child I already knew far more than I could have learnt, I simply did not understand children of my own age. I am myself the eldest of a family of twelve.

‘From six to ten years old I attended the parish school and up to sixteen the high-school of the Ursuline Nuns in B--. At ten I had taken in as much French in four weeks, in eight lessons, as other children learn in two years. I had only to say it over. It was just as if I had already learnt it and only forgotten it. I have never had any need to learn French, in contradistinction to English, which gave me no trouble, certainly, but which was not known to me beforehand. The same thing happened to me with Latin as with French and I have never properly learnt it, only knowing it from Church Latin, which is, however, quite familiar to me. If I read a French book to-day, then I immediately begin thinking in French, whereas this never happens to me with English, although I have more command of English. My parents are peasant people (who for generations have never spoken any languages except German and Polish.

‘Visions. - Sometimes reality vanishes for some moments and I see something quite different. In my house, for example, I often see an old married couple and a child; and the house is then differently furnished. In the sanatorium a friend once came into my room at about four in the morning; I was awake, had the lamp burning, and was sitting at my table reading, as I suffer much from sleeplessness. This apparition of her always means a trying time for me - as it did on this occasion.

‘In 1914 my brother was on active service; I was not with my parents in B-- but in Ch--. It was ten a. m. on August 22 when I heard my brother’s voice calling, "Mother! Mother!" It came again ten minutes later, but I saw nothing. On August 24 I came home, found my mother greatly depressed, and in answer to my questions she said that she had had a message from the boy on August 22. She had been in the garden in the morning, when she had heard him call, "Mother! Mother!" I comforted her and said nothing about myself. Three weeks after there came a card from my brother, written on August 22 between nine and ten in the morning; shortly after that he died.

‘On September 27, 1921, while in the sanatorium, I received a message of some kind. There were violent knockings two or three times repeated on the bed of the patient who shared my room. We were both awake; I asked if she had knocked; she had not even heard anything. Eight weeks later I heard that one of my friends had died in the night of September 26-7. 0

‘Now something which is regarded as a hallucination - a matter of opinion! I have a friend who married a widower with five children; I got to know the husband only through my friend. Nearly every time that I have been to see her, I have seen a lady going in and out of the house. It was natural to suppose that this was the husband’s first wife. I asked at some convenient opportunity for a portrait of her, but could not identify the apparition with the photograph. Seven years later I saw a picture with the features of the lady, belonging to one of the children. It was the first wife after all. In the picture she looked in much better health: she had just been through a feeding-up treatment and that alters the appearance of a consumptive patient. These are only a few examples out of many.

‘The dream. - I saw a tongue of land surrounded by water. The waves were being driven forward and then back by the breakers. On this piece of land stood a palm-tree, bent somewhat towards the water. A woman had her arm wound round the stem of the palm and was bending low towards the water, where a man was trying to reach the shore. At last she lay down on the ground, held tightly to the palm-tree with her left hand and stretched out her right hand as far as she could towards the man in the water, but without reaching him. At that point I would fall out of bed and wake. I was about fifteen or sixteen years old when I realized that this woman was myself, and from that time I not only experienced all the woman’s apprehensions on behalf of the man but sometimes stood there as a third person looking on at the scene without taking part in it. I dreamed this dream too in separate scenes. As an interest in men awoke in me (at eighteen to twenty years old), I tried to see the man’s face; but this was never possible. The foam hid everything but his neck and the back of his head. I have twice been engaged to be married, but judging by his head and build he was neither of the two men I was engaged to. - Once, when I was lying in the sanatorium under the influence of paraldehyde, I saw the man’s face, which I now always see in this dream. It was that of the doctor under whose care I was. I liked him as a doctor, but I was not drawn to him in any other way.

‘Memories. Six to nine months old. - I was in a perambulator. On my right were two horses; one, a brown, was looking at me very intently and expressively. This was my most vivid experience; I had the feeling that it was a human being.1

‘One year old. - Father and I in the town-park, where a park-keeper was putting a little bird into my hand. Its eyes looked back into mine. I felt "That is a creature like yourself".

‘Animals being slaughtered. - When I heard the pigs squealing I always called for help and cried out "You are killing a person" (four years old). I always refused to eat meat. Pork always makes me vomit. It was not till the war that I came to eat meat, and only unwillingly; now I am learning to do without it again.

‘Five years old. - My mother was confined and I heard her cry out. I had the feeling, "There is a human being or an animal in the greatest distress", just as I had over the pig-killing.

‘I was quite indifferent as a child to sexual matters; at ten years old I had as yet no conception of offences against chastity. Menstruation came on at the age of twelve. The woman first awakened in me at six-and-twenty, after I had given life to a child; up to that time (six months) I constantly had violent vomiting after intercourse. This also came on whenever I was at all oppressed in mood.

‘I have extraordinarily keen powers of observation, and quite exceptionally sharp hearing, also a very keen sense of smell. With my eyes bandaged I can pick out by smell people I know from among a number of others.

‘I do not regard my abnormal powers of sight and hearing as pathological, but ascribe them to finer perceptions and greater quickness of thought; but I have only spoken of it to my pastor and to Dr.-- (very unwillingly to the latter, as I was afraid he would tell me that what I regarded as plus-qualities were minus-qualities, and also because from being misunderstood in childhood I am very reserved and shy).’2 The dream which the writer of the letter asks us to interpret is not hard to understand. It is a dream of rescuing from water, a typical birth-dream. The language of symbolism, as you are aware, knows no grammar; it is an extreme case of a language of infinitives, and even the active and passive are represented by one and the same image. If in a dream a woman pulls (or tries to pull) a man out of the water, that may mean that she wants to be his mother (takes him for her son as Pharaoh’s daughter did with Moses). Or it may mean that she wants him to make her into a mother: she wants to have a son by him, who, as a likeness of him, can be his equivalent. The tree-trunk to which the woman was clinging is easily recognized as a phallic symbol, even though it is not standing straight up, but inclined towards the surface of the water - in the dream the word is ‘bent’. The onrush and recoil of the breakers brought to the mind of another dreamer who was relating a similar dream a comparison with the intermittent pains of labour; and when, knowing that she had not yet borne a child, I asked her how she knew of this characteristic of labour, she said that she imagined labour as a kind of colic - a quite unimpeachable description physiologically. She gave the association ‘The Waves of the Sea and of Love’. How our present dreamer at so early as age can have arrived at the finer details of symbolism - tongue of land, palm-tree - I am naturally unable to say. We must not, moreover, overlook the fact that, when people assert that they have for years been pursued by the same dream, it often turns out that the manifest content is not quite the same. Only the kernel of the dream has recurred each time; the details of the content are changed or additions are made to them.

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