The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud

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СКАЧАТЬ ideas and weakness of judgment are the main characteristics of the dream and of insanity." The over-estimation of one's own mental capacity, which appears absurd to sober judgment, is found alike both in one and the other, and the rapid course of ideas in the dream corresponds to the flight of ideas in the psychosis. Both are devoid of any measure of time. The dissociation of personality in the dream, which, for instance, distributes one's own knowledge between two persons, one of whom, the strange one, corrects in the dream one's own ego, fully corresponds to the well-known splitting of personality in hallucinatory paranoia; the dreamer, too, hears his own thoughts expressed by strange voices. Even the constant delusions find their analogy in the stereotyped recurring pathological dreams (rêve obsedant). After recovering from a delirium, patients not infrequently declare that the disease appeared to them like an uncomfortable dream; indeed, they inform us that occasionally, even during the course of their sickness, they have felt that they were only dreaming, just as it frequently happens in the sleeping dream.

      Considering all this, it is not surprising that Radestock condenses his own opinion and that of many others into the following: Insanity, an abnormal phenomenon of disease, is to be regarded as an enhancement of the periodically recurring normal dream states" (p. 228).

      Krauss³⁹ attempted to base the relationship between the dream and insanity upon the etiology (or rather upon the exciting sources), perhaps making the relationship even more intimate than was possible through the analogy of the phenomena they manifest. According to him, the fundamental element common to both is, as we have learned, the organically determined sensation, the sensation of physical stimuli, the general feeling produced by contributions from all the organs. Cf. Peise, cited by Maury⁴⁸ (p. 60).

      The incontestable agreement between the dream and mental disturbance, extending into characteristic details, constitutes one of the strongest supports of the medical theory of dream life, according to which the dream is represented as a useless and disturbing process and as the expression of a reduced psychic activity. One cannot expect, however, to derive the final explanation of the dream from the mental disturbances, as it is generally known in what unsatisfactory state our understanding of the origin of the latter remains. It is very probably, however, that a modified conception of the dream must also influence our views in regard to the inner mechanism of mental disturbances, and hence we may say that we are engaged in the elucidation of the psychosis when we endeavour to clear up the mystery of the dream.

      I shall have to justify myself for not extending my summary of the literature of the dream problems over the period between the first appearance of this book and its second edition. If this justification may not seem very satisfactory to the reader, I was nevertheless influenced by it. The motives which mainly induced me to summarise the treatment of the dream in the literature have been exhausted with the foregoing introduction; to have continued with this work would have cost me extraordinary effort and would have afforded little advantage or knowledge. For the period of nine years referred to has yielded nothing new or valuable either for the conception of the dream in actual material or in points of view. In most of the publications that have since appeared my work has remained unmentioned and unregarded; naturally least attention has been bestowed upon it by the so-called "investigators of dreams," who have thus afforded a splendid example of the aversion characteristic of scientific men to learning something new. "Les savants ne sont pas curieux," said the scoffer Anatole France. If there were such a thing in science as right to revenge, I in turn should be justified in ignoring the literature since the appearance of this book. The few accounts that have appeared in scientific journals are so full of folly and misconception that my only possible answer to my critics would be to request them to read this book over again. Perhaps also the request should be that they read it as a whole.

      In the works of those physicians who make use of the psychoanalytic method of treatment (Jung, Abraham, Riklin, Muthmann, Stekel, Rank, and others), an abundance of dreams have been reported and interpreted in accordance with my instructions. In so far as these works go beyond the confirmation of my assertions I have noted their results in the context of my discussion. A supplement to the literary index at the end of this book brings together the most important of these new publications. The voluminous book on the dream by Sante de Sanctis, of which a German translation appeared soon after its publication, has, so to speak, crossed with mine, so that I could take as little notice of him as the Italian author could of me. Unfortunately, I am further obliged to declare that this laborious work is exceedingly poor in ideas, so poor that one could never divine from it the existence of the problems treated by me.

I have finally to mention two publications which show a near relation to my treatment of the dream problems. A younger philosopher, H. Swoboda, who has undertaken to extend W. Fliesse's discovery of biological periodicity (in groups of twenty-three and twenty-eight days) to the psychic field, has produced an imaginative work,¹³ in which, among other things, he has used this key to solve the riddle of the dream. The interpretation of dreams would herein have fared badly; the material contained in dreams would be explained through the coincidence of all those memories which during the night complete one of the biological periods for the first or the n-th time. A personal statement from the author led me to assume that he himself no longer wished to advocate this theory earnestly. But it seems I was mistaken in this conclusion; I shall report in another place some observations in reference to Swoboda's assertion, concerning the conclusions of which I am, however, not convinced. It gave me far greater pleasure to find accidentally, in an unexpected place, a conception of the dream in essentials fully agreeing with my own. The circumstances of time preclude the possibility that this conception was influenced by a reading of my book; I must therefore greet this as the only demonstrable concurrence in the literature with the essence of my dream theory. The book which contains the passage concerning the dream which I have in mind was published as a second edition in 1900 by Lynkus under the title Phantasien eines Realisten.

      

      1. To the first publication of this book, 1900.

      2. Compare, on the other hand, O. Gruppe, Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte, p. 390. "Dreams were divided into two classes; the first were influenced only by the present (or past), and were unimportant for the future: they embraced the ένύπνια, insomnia, which immediately produces the given idea or its opposite, e.g. hunger or its satiation, and the φαντάσματα, which elaborates the given idea phantastically, as e.g. the nightmare, ephialtes. The second class was, on the other hand, determinant for the future. To this belong: (1) direct prophecies received in the dream (χρηματωμδς, oraculum); (2) the foretelling of a future event (ὅραμα); (3) the symbolic or the dream requiring interpretation (ὅνειρος, somnium). This theory has been preserved for many centuries."

      3. From subsequent experience I am able to state that it is not at all rare to find in dreams repetitions of harmless or unimportant occupations of the waking state, such as packing trunks, preparing food, work in the kitchen, &c., but in such dreams the dreamer himself emphasizes not the character but the reality of the memory, "I have really done all this in the day time."

4. Chauffeurs were bands of robbers in the Vendée who resorted to this form of torture.

      5. Gigantic persons in a dream justify the assumption that it deals with a scene from the dreamer's childhood.

      6. The first volume of this Norwegian author, containing a complete description of dreams, has recently appeared in German. See Index of Literature, No. 74 a.

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