The Journal of Abnormal Psychology

Part 2 out of 8

becomes his own, he cannot think any more, he cannot write any more, and he
sees death approaching. In the dream he is apparently dead, but his youth,
his strength refuses to die, and this is translated in his attempts to get
out of the coffin, which explains the fear.

The explanation brings relaxation. After some days, during which the
patient communicates his secret thoughts in detail, he feels very much
better, his heavy burden has been rolled away, and he cannot find words
enough to express his thanks to the doctor. The latter points out to him
that however natural this feeling of thankfulness may be, it is partly a
symptom of the cure at his hands. He shows the patient how the latter, who
had seen through the analysis that his love for his father has been
exaggerated and morbid, had been able to control this, and how he now
transfers to him, the assisting physician, the need for love, freed from
suffering along the way of sublimated homo-sexuality. He impresses upon him
that he must now learn to moderate the sympathy, which he expresses too
feelingly, and that he must not desire to see another father in the doctor,
but simply a friend, who is teaching him to stand on his own feet and to
become an independent man. After a few more weeks the young man was entirely
cured of his neurosis, freed from his exaggerations and returned home a well
man.

ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF SLEEPLESSNESS

Once when traveling I made the acquaintance of a naturalist who not long
before had completed a famous exploring expedition in distant countries.
During this expedition he had been almost constantly in peril of his life.
Almost every night he had had to stay awake and watch so as not to be set
upon and killed. He had been back in England a short time and had
completely recovered from the privations and sufferings he had experienced,
but he suffered desperately from insomnia. On his return he had slept well,
but a month before his sleep had suddenly begun to be disturbed.

Knowing me to be a neurologist, he asked my advice. I inquired about the
patient's former life, but discovered that my traveling companion was little
inclined to be communicative in this direction, in fact he was strikingly
reticent. To my inquiry about the immediate origin of the insomnia, he told
me it was immediately connected with a miserable dream which he had dreamt a
month past, and from which he had awakened in terrible anxiety. I asked him
to tell me this dream and gave him hope that perhaps the analysis of this
might succeed in laying bare the cause of the insomnia. The substance of the
dream was as follows:

"I was in a narrow gorge, formed by almost perpendicular walls of rock. This
made me think of a similar narrow gorge which, during my journey, I had
passed through at peril of my life. Upon a jutting rock a hundred yards
high above the abyss, I saw a man and woman standing, shoulder to shoulder,
both covering their eyes with their hands. They step forward and I see them
plunge downwards together, and hear their bodies falling to destruction.
Screaming wildly I awoke. Since that time I dare not let myself sleep for
fear of the repetition of this dream.

The patient, accustomed to deadly peril on his long expedition, could not
explain to himself the anxiety caused by this dream. I called Mr. X's
attention to the fact that in my opinion an erotic conflict was concealed in
the dream, and asked him point blank whether he had taken part in a love
story. At this the patient grew deadly pale, struck the table with his fist
and said "That you should have guessed it!" Now the confession followed, how
he had had a love affair in which he had not cut a good figure and which
ruined a woman's life, and that afterwards he had been violently remorseful
and had lived with the idea of suicide. Then he had seized upon the
opportunity offered him to lead a dangerous expedition. He wanted to die and
here he would not find death ingloriously.

It is clear that the two people upon the rocks above symbolized the two, who
went to meet destruction.

Soon afterwards the travelers parted. A year later the newspapers contained
the report of the marriage of the famous explorer. The surmise is allowable
that the analysis of this dream was the cause of this fortunate solution.

As I have already pointed out, the original cathartic method of Breuer and
Freud, explained to some extent, is still followed by some investigators, by
Muthman, Bezzola, Frank and many others. I had the opportunity in June and
July, 1912, of observing for some time the treatment of patients by Dr.
Frank in Zurich at his private clinic, and of gaining for myself a
satisfactory idea of his technique. Frank by no means rejects the Freudian
psychoanalysis with all its helps, but uses it only when he does not succeed
in hypnotizing his patient. Preferably, and in a great number of cases, he
uses, in a state of hypnotism, a cathartic method he originated.

Where Breuer and Freud profited from the spontaneous or the provoked
somnabulistic state of the patient, and by questioning dug up the hidden
depths, Frank decided to be satisfied with a light hypnose, a state of
hypotaxie, which might be termed analogous to the half-conscious state of
the person who after taking a mid-day nap frequently denies having been
asleep. In this condition we can give an account on waking of what happened
around us. One sleeps and one does not sleep; the upper-consciousness then
can control what the sub-consciousness brings up.

Frank says that, except in the peculiarity that he is satisfied with a
lighter degree of hypnose, his method differs from that of Breuer and Freud
in that generally he does not question the patient when under hypnotism,
neither suggests. Experience has taught him, he says, that the ideas loaded
with affect, spontaneously discharge. They are the very ones which would do
so in a dream, but are differentiated from the occurrences in the dream in
the sense that these last enter phantastically dressed, while the first
express themselves with the mental affects belonging to them, precisely as
they were lived through.

Precisely as in the primitive-cathartic method, the affects pushing in here
are disemburdened here, but at the same time, the connection between the
existent sick-phenomena and the causes having a place here were
automatically conscious to the patient. In some cases suggestion is called
upon for help in order to free an affect or to direct the attention to the
expected scene.

In most cases the process goes on itself, after the introduction of
hypnosis. If the sleep is too deep, then the ideas are transferred into real
dreams, which the patient immediately recognizes as such, or the production
of scenes discontinues; the superconsciousness no longer works.

The scenes described are usually recalled by the patients, just as they were
experienced by them, even when taken from the earliest youth. The reality
of the events which happened in childhood, lived over again in hypnose, are
substantiated as much as possible by the patient's parents or associates. He
succeeds best in inducing this semi-sleep by exhorting the patient as he
closes his eyes not to bother about whether he sleeps or not, but to fasten
his attention upon the scenes which are about to present themselves; that
is, to think himself, so to speak, into the state of someone at a moving
picture show.

As an example I give a fragment of a Frankian analysis of a case of

FEAR NEUROSIS (ANGST-NEUROSE)

Y. B., born 1883, a law clerk. Patient comes on the third of December,
1908, to Frank's consultation hour; he complains of periods of short breath;
during these he feels as if his heart were ceasing to beat, especially when
he is just going to bed. He feels then as if something heavy were striking
him on the chest, great restlessness, and a feeling of faintness comes over
him. After taking a glass of wine the condition is aggravated and becomes
insupportable. These attacks come once or twice a day, mostly in the
evenings. At times they keep off for eight or ten days. He lives
continually in an excited state, he suffers from palpitations of the heart,
from pain in the left thigh, pain in the left side, and at night cannot get
to sleep.

Patient attributes this condition to an automobile accident which happened
to him on June 2, 1908. Even before this accident he had been a trifle
nervous on account of overwork. In the automobile accident he had been
thrown out, and had been thrown a distance of ten or fifteen yards. The
automobile, which was at high speed, had also plunged down the decline, but
luckily the patient was not caught directly under the machine. He did not
lose consciousness, and escaped with some scratches and a bad fright; it was
a marvel that he and the chauffeur escaped with their lives. He plainly
recalls thinking, during the fall, that his last hour had come, and even yet
is amazed how extremely untroubled he had been by that thought. The days
following the accident he felt as if his face were burning, and he was
inwardly agitated whenever he thought of an automobile. On June 30, 1908, he
was obliged to take a business journey. While seated in the station
restaurant it suddenly grew dark before his eyes. He could breathe only with
difficulty, his heartbeats were irregular and he had a strange sensation of
fear. This condition lasted the whole day. On the return journey his train
ran into an automobile truck. The patient was thrown to the floor of the
coupe by the shock. This incident made a great impression upon him;
nevertheless, for eight days he was free from the uneasiness already
described. After that an attack of fear again set in, continuing at
intervals, with periods of greater or lesser violence, until the present.

December 7, 1908. A first attempt to induce hypnosis was successful.

December 8, 1908. Patient goes to sleep immediately, becomes frightened and
gives frequent signs of terror. When awakened, he mentioned that he had had
a feeling as if he were falling into a hole, that had given him a very
strange sensation. The patient speaks while he sleeps; his
super-consciousness therefore remains awake and is able to take notice
directly of the scene taking place. After some minutes he sees in the
hypnosis a locomotive approaching. He cries out, "There it comes out of the
tunnel." He is afraid of being run over, and is terrified. Two years
previously he had been through this scene. He was standing on the track when
a train approached, and he was afraid of being run over. In his sleep, the
patient communicates the details and sees everything clearly. After a short
interval of complete rest, he begins to breathe heavily, his pulse quickens,
then he cries out in fright and excitement and dread, "Now it's coming, now
the auto's coming, it's turning over, we're under it, there it's riding over
us!" Gradually he quiets down again, and after a quarter of an hour, awakes.
He says he now feels something lifted from his chest, that he has slept
well, and feels better. He recalls everything. The train came out of the
tunnel with gleaming lights; this scene took place in the evening. The
automobile scene was reproduced precisely as he had taken part in it, no
detail escaped him; his breathing is unobstructed now, and he has no more
heart palpitations.

On the day appointed for the seance I was unexpectedly obliged to go away.
When I wished to resume the treatment, January 9, the patient wrote me that
his condition was strikingly improved, the heart palpitations and feelings
of anxiety had not reappeared. His pleasure in life and work had returned
once more, his night's rest left nothing to be desired, his appetite was
excellent, therefore he thought that further treatment was not necessary for
the present. To a later inquiry, February 12, 1910, a year afterwards, I
obtained this answer: "Without exaggeration I am able to write you that in
my whole life I have never felt so well as now. There has been no question
of any nervous attacks or feelings of dread. My weight, which had gone down
to fifty-eight kilos during my nervous sickness, has gone up to seventy
kilos."

When Frank shuts himself up with his patients in a room, from which all
outer noises are excluded as much as possible, by means of double windows
and doors, although he--by means of electric light signals visible to him
alone--keeps in touch with the servant outside, he has the patient recline
as comfortably as possible upon a low sofa. He kneels on a cushion at the
head, bends down over the patient and has the latter look upwards directly
into his eyes. Meanwhile he lets his left hand rest upon the patient's
forehead and gently presses the latter's eyelids with his thumb and
forefinger. As soon as the patient shows signs of weariness, he carefully
gets up, takes a seat next to the patient and continues carefully observant
of the latter's behavior and expression of countenance. He makes note of
everything that shows itself and rouses the patient after about a quarter of
an hour, unless the latter awakes spontaneously. Now he talks over with him
the material which has been procured and then has the patient go into a
renewed hypnosis, until the end of an hour. Sometimes the seances are
protracted when important scenes come up, and in the interest of the
treatment it might be lengthened to two or even three hours.

Bezzola makes use of a small, light, black silk mask, which he puts on the
eyes of the patient. He induces hypnosis, and for the rest follows Frank's
technique already described.

While analysts who avail themselves of hypnosis as a means of help have all
their patients take a reclining position, those who have given up hypnotism
in their treatment, have also given up this reclining position. Freud
continues to prefer having the patient assume a reclining position, and
takes his position with his back to the patient, behind the head of the
sofa. He considers that this manner of treatment induces the greatest
calmness in the patient and makes it easier for him to express himself and
to confess. He keeps as quiet as possible, listens with undivided attention,
does not take any notes during the seance, not wishing to give rise to the
suspicion that all the confession will be written down and perhaps seen by
other eyes.

Jung receives the patient in his study just as he would receive any ordinary
visitor. He thinks that in this way the patient is put most at his ease and
that it makes him feel he is not considered as a patient, but rather as some
one who, being in difficulties, comes to ask advice and needs to tell his
troubles to a trusted friend. Even less than Freud does he take notes in the
presence of the patient.

Stekel does as Jung, the only difference being that he remains seated at his
writing-table and makes notes of the most important points.

The most satisfactory way for the uninitiated to make himself familiar with
the technique of psychoanalysis is to submit himself to psychoanalysis. For
that purpose one turns to an experienced analyst, and takes to him one's
ideas and dreams. Consequently I submitted myself for two months to
analysis from Dr. Jung, who in that way initiated me into the practice of
psychological investigation. The interpretation of one's own dreams,
reading and studying of the principal literature about analytical psychology
or deep psychology, as Bleuler calls it; and the application of what is thus
learned, at the start to simple, later to more difficult cases, must do the
rest in making an independent investigator in this branch of psycho-therapy.

As has already been said, psychoanalysis aims at bringing into consciousness
all the forgotten things. When all the gaps in the memory are filled in,
when all the puzzling operations of the psychological life are explained,
then the continuance and the return of the suffering has become impossible.
The attainment of this ideal state is truly the attainment of Utopia. Most
certainly a treatment does not need to be carried so far. One may be
satisfied with the practical cure of the patient, with the restoration of
his power for work, and with the abolition of the most difficult functional
disturbances.

It is applicable in cases of chronic psychoneurosis which exhibit no
difficult or dangerous phenomena. Among these are counted all sorts of
compulsive neuroses, compulsive thoughts, compulsive behavior and cases of
hysteria, where phobias and obsessions play a chief role, also somatic
phenomena of hysteria which do not need to be acted upon quickly, such as,
for example, anorexia. In acute cases of hysteria it is better to wait for
a calmer period before applying psychoanalysis. In cases of nervous
prostration this manner of treatment, which demands the serious co-operation
and attention of the patient, which lasts a long time and at first takes no
notice of the continuance of the phenomena, is difficult. This form of
psychotherapy places great demands on the physician's patience and
understanding. Psychoanalyses which last more than a year, are no rarity. It
cannot be applied to the seriously degenerated; to people who have passed
far beyond middle life, because among the last named the accumulated
material compasses too much; to those who are entangled in a state of great
fear and who live in deep depression. Analysis can be applied to the
neuroses of children. It is desirable in those cases for the physician to
be supported by a trusted person, as for example a woman assistant, but
preferably by parents enlightened sufficiently to observe the spontaneous
remarks of the child, to make notes of them, and communicate them to the
physician. According to the experiments undertaken by the Zurich school, the
expectation is justified within certain limits, that psychoanalysis will be
therapeutically useful in certain forms of paranoia and dementia praecox.

I think that it will soon be said of psychoanalysis, as of so many other
systems which like it were decried and yet later were highly valued, that
the enemies of to-day are the friends of to-morrow.

Whoever wishes to judge Freud must take the trouble to initiate himself
seriously into his doctrines, and use his methods for a long time in
practice, according to his instructions.

Most of the condemnations are brought forward by investigators who judge a
priori, without acquaintance with the facts, upon uncertain theoretical
grounds and with prepossession against his sexual theory.

Whoever initiates himself seriously into the practice of psychoanalysis,
will arrive at the conclusion that this new form of psychical curing
deserves, to a great degree, the attention of the physician and that it may
be considered as an enrichment of the armory of the psychotherapy, not yet
sufficiently valued.

Does it render other forms of psychotherapy superfluous? There can be no
thought of that.

Taking the pros and cons given here, we see that each of the forms of
psychical therapy deserves in its turn preference, and that all support and
complement each other.

Jung, as well as Freud, both of whom have made their life's aim the
perfection of psychoanalysis, and who for that reason now concern themselves
exclusively with it, appreciate all forms of verbal treatment, as well with
hypnotism as without it. Hypnotic suggestion and suggestion given when awake
was used at an earlier period by both of them with good results, and they
still are not averse to using this method where quick comprehension and the
immediate subdual of a troublesome symptom is desired.

The psychoanalyst follows the longer road, and assails rather the root of
the sickness; it works more radically; hypnotic treatment takes hold quicker
and is directed at the symptoms.

Freud explains it in this manner: when one treats the patient by hypnotic
suggestion, one introduces a new idea from outside in exchange for the
morbid idea; if psychoanalysis is applied, then one simply eliminates the
morbid idea. Within certain limits the modus agendi of the two methods is in
absolute opposition.

The suggestion method, substituting one idea for another, puts in something;
the analytical, expelling an idea, takes out something. Both aim at and
obtain the same end, a more or less lasting cure. Suggestion neutralizes,
stops the poison; analysis expels the harmful matter. The latter manner of
treatment is positive and the most decisive.

"Don't we all analyze?" Bernheim inquires, and once more I agree that all
forms of psychotherapeutics do, but there is a difference in analysis.

Superficial analysis can bring us a long way toward the goal. In many cases
it may suffice. But the profound, the Freudian analysis, is what we need if
we wish to attain the radical cure of psychoneurosis, as far as we can ever
speak of a radical cure. Many cases of illness do not lend themselves to
deep analysis.

When, because of the nature of the illness, or the lifetime, or the feeble
intelligence of the patient, or because of temporary circumstances of a
moral or material nature, its adaptation is excluded or impossible, it is
advisable, especially in chronic cases-- to take refuge in the more
palliative forms of the psychic methods of cure.

Thus the psychotherapeutic as moral leader fills the role of guide
(directeur-d'ames), one who helps along the doubter, encourages the toilers,
calms the frightened, arouses courage, keeps up hope and comforts where
comfort is needed.

Pierre Janet, in his instructive book ("Obsessions et Idees Fixes"),
observes that one of his chronic patients gave him the pet name of "le
remonteur de pendules," an expression which luminously describes the role of
the physician of souls, who, tirelessly, day in, day out, lifts the burdens,
and for a time breathes new life into the depressed.

Hypnotic suggestion, which induces sleep, stills pain, silences fear,
abolishes functional disturbances, works chiefly palliatively. The place for
its application is where quick comprehension is desired. In its simplest
form it resembles the treatment of a mother, who soothes her child with
pacifying words and loving touch, and rocks him to sleep, and also it
resembles the behavior of the father, who asserts his authority by force and
breaks down the childish opposition. We find hypnotic suggestion, perfected
and clothed in its scientific garment, in Liebeault's assertion: "It is a
cure of authority, of faith, of confidence, a cure which frequently performs
semi-miracles. Respect on one side, sympathy on the other, is what gives the
hypnotiser results."

However highly we may value this last mentioned form of therapy, however
numerous the cures due to it may be, however indispensable it may be in the
practice of medicine, yet its splendor pales before the light which shines
forth from the cures which aim at reeducation and which are directed toward
the understanding. Those are the cures which make use of analysis.

One method, which we will call the superficial analytical method, is
directed exclusively toward the upper consciousness and cures principally
through exhorting, convincing, exercising and hardening. Its sponsors are
Bernheim, Rosenbach, P. E. Levy, Dubois. At least it is true to its birth,
it has suggestion blood in its veins.

The other method is the deeper: the Freudian analysis. This does not allow
itself to be satisfied with seeing only one side of the medal, it does not
limit its field of activity to the superliminal consciousness, in searching
for the causes of psychogenic illnesses, but it penetrates into the strata
which lie hidden under the threshold of the consciousness.

Where the moral and the suggestive methods of cure are limited exclusively
to symptomatic treatment, the first form of educative therapy, limited
merely to a superficial analysis, is only partly symptomatic, but the second
form of educative therapy penetrates with its deep-going analysis to the
root of the trouble, and has as its aim a fundamental cure.

Only too frequently the physician must be satisfied with the cure of the
symptoms, with lightening the load. He always strives to remove the cause.
Freud's great service is that he has opened before the physician a path
which leads to the cause.

These lines of Vondel's seem as if composed for him:

"The physician must not only know How high the pulse has mounted, And
where the sickness lies, which makes him groan with pain, But he must see
the cause, from where The great weakness of this sickness came."

REVIEWS

AN ELEMENTARY STUDY OF THE BRAIN, BASED ON THE DISSECTION OF THE BRAIN OF
THE SHEEP. By Eben W. Fiske, A.M., M.D. Illustrated with photographs and
diagrams by the author. The Macmillan Company, New. York, 1913.

The study of the brain is confessedly a difficult subject, and particularly
so for the elementary student. There is certainly no royal road to its
conquest, but this is an added reason why an introduction to its study
should be made as simple as the subject permits, and also as interesting.
Dr. Fiske has attempted this task in this book, which he entitles "An
elementary study of the brain." The brain of the sheep is chosen as the
basis of study because of its availability, its relative simplicity of
structure, and its essential similarity to that of man. It appears to the
author, and we think with justice, that the subject should be approached
from a biological standpoint; hence, throughout the book, there is constant
reference to the evolution of nervous structure and to fundamental
conceptions of a biological character. Further than this, the relations of
cerebral anatomy and function, together with allied psychological
considerations, demand continual reference as a supplement to purely
anatomical considerations. The secret of exciting interest in any anatomical
study surely lies in a consideration of the function of the organ or
structure in relation to its anatomical form. Bare descriptions cannot and
should not inspire interest, whereas the driest anatomical facts, if seen in
their broader relationships, at once assume a significance in the student's
mind which may be attained in no other way.

The first chapter is a brief statement of phylogeny, followed, as are
succeeding chapters, by directions to the student regarding means of study.
The second chapter concerns itself with ontogeny, and the student is wisely
advised to make drawings of various stages in the development of the brain
of one of the higher mammals. An actual brain is always to be preferred to a
model. The third chapter gives directions of a simple and practical sort as
to methods of removing the sheep's brain. Thereafter, chapters follow,
descriptive of the various surfaces of the brain, of sagital, horizontal and
transverse sections, and of certain of the internal structures and the brain
stem.

A summary concludes the volume, and a very brief but well selected
bibliography. The illustrations are thoroughly adequate, the excellent
method being used of photographic reproductions, with accompanying
descriptive plates done in outline. In general, the book, modest though it
is, should prove a most admirable laboratory guide, not only for students of
zoology, but also for those who propose, as physicians, to make a final
study of the human brain. It is, no doubt, more difficult to write an
acceptable elementary text-book than a more complete treatise, but the
author, we have no hesitation in saying, has succeeded in this object, and
has added a book of positive value to the long list which has gone before.
The BNA nomenclature has been adopted in part, but by no means to the
exclusion of the old terminology, which is certainly a far more efficient
means of introducing an ultimate uniform nomenclature than an immediate
complete change to the BNA system. The text is well printed and readable,
and the proof reading in general good. We note, however, on page 86, that
the name Von Gudden is spelled with one d instead of two. E. W. TAYLOR.

THE BACKWARD CHILD, A STUDY OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BACKWARDNESS: A PRACTICAL
MANUAL FOR TEACHERS AND STUDENTS. By Barbara Spoffard Morgan. G. P.
Putnam's Sons, New York, 1914. Pp. xvii plus 263.

This book by Mrs. Morgan, which is somewhat unique and certainly very
different from other books on the same subject, promises to be one of the
most widely read educational works which has recently appeared. It is based
on two years' experience in an experimental clinic for backward children in
New York City and the author states that, "It is an effort to persuade
teachers and parents, in spite of a hide-bound educational system, to study
the children that interest them as individuals and to recognize their
faculties and tendencies." It "Looks to a future when teachers will so
understand every child's mental structure that his whole education will be
directed to the fortifying of his weak points and the development of his
tendencies."

The author terms her process "mental analysis" and says it differs from the
Binet and Simon tests in that they are merely to classify children, and her
method discovers peculiarities and also gives the training necessary to
bring the child up to normal. She gives a psychological basis for her work
which will be surprising to many readers because of its great divergence
from the usual psychological treatment. The child's mind is considered as
having four primary processes, namely: (1) Sense Impressions, (2)
Recollections of Sense Impressions, (3) Association Channels (4) Abstraction
Processes. As the child grows older these are elaborated into Imagination,
Reasoning, and Expression. Attention is of three kinds: (1) Homogeneous
Attention or concentrating, which consists in attending to one thing for a
period of time; (2) Simultaneous Attention or observing, which consists in
giving attention to a number of things at once; and (3) Disparate Attention,
or giving attention to two or more things over a period of time. Memory may
be (1) Automatic, (2) Voluntary, or (3) Retentive. The function of the
tests is to determine just which one of these processes are weak or strong
and discover a method of education which is suited to the individual. Other
mental processes, such as sensation, perception, abstraction, and judgment
are discussed, and an interesting treatment distinguishing between the
analytic and synthetic type of mind is given.

One of the most important parts of the book is the discussion of the way in
which the tests are given. She insists that the relation of the child and
the examiner be very personal and informal and that the process be varied as
much as possible in order to prevent crystallization. Many of the tests are
the same, or much the same, as those of Simon and Binet, but the greatest of
liberty is taken in adapting them to the particular case. Much use is made
of conversation, puzzle-pictures and other little friendly means by which
the personal characteristics of the child may be learned. After this is
done, the proper training of the child is to be selected and the effort made
to bring him back to normality, for which purpose, some quaint and
interesting devices are used. One case given is that of a little girl whose
senses of sound and form were defective and who therefore could not learn
her letters. These letters were pasted on the keys of a piano and she was
taught to play a piece with one finger, meanwhile chanting over the names of
the letters as they were struck. In this way her sense of sound was trained,
she learned her letters and gained ability to learn more and faster.
Abstraction may be strengthened by having the child measure distances with a
rule, first calculating the distance with his eye. The power of association
may be made stronger by having the individual sort words or pictures which
are pasted on slips of cardboard; he is to arrange them according to meaning
or according to the activities with which they have to do. Simultaneous
attention may be trained by such games as "Hide-the-thimble" or Jack-straws,
and homogeneous attention may be trained by some such action as hammering
nails in the upper left hand corners of all the squares on a board.
Imagination is developed by retelling stories, and invention by solving
puzzles; voluntary memory is strengthened by writing original rhymes and
automatic memory may be strengthened by having the child write out a list of
all the things in his kitchen or any other room with which he may happen to
be familiar.

Different types of backward children are described and a few pages are
devoted to a discussion of hysteria.

It is a book which will, in all probability, arouse considerable discussion
and which will find some warm friends and some determined enemies. As one
more publication calling attention to this important problem, it is of great
value and it will probably be read more widely than any other book in this
field which has appeared. Perhaps its greatest practical value lies in its
suggestiveness as to the ways in which one may use his personality and
initiative in dealing with backward children, rather than sticking so
closely to prescribed tests and methods.
RAYMOND BELLAMY. Emory & Henry College, Emory, Va.

CONTINUITY: THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS TO THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR 1913.
By Sir Oliver Lodge. G. P. Putnam s Sons, New York and London, 1914. Pp.
v, 131.

The most obvious particular wisdom of the present scientific period is
undoubtedly just that concept denoted by the title of this volume,
continuity. And this wisdom is advanced wisdom and, withal, wisdom which is
very expedient and even indispensable at this day, as a reaction required to
set right the over-specialization of recent minds thoughtful only of some
little branch of knowledge. Just in proportion as one esteems "authority"
will one give heed to the pronouncement of the presidential address before
the British Association, yet for its own intrinsic sake it is a piece of
work which cannot be ignored.

Interesting and revolutionary as are the recent additions to philosophical
physics brought about by the discovery of radium and its like, it is the
other phase of this great physicist's mental trend which particularly
interests the student of human behavior-- that wisdom which gives him (as it
gave William James, and for a like reason), the bravery to look a bit beyond
the more or less materialistic confines of mere science into the broader
realm. And strange, is it not, that a man NEED be brave in this twentieth
century Domini to discuss spiritism and survival and telepathy? Only those
do it who cannot "lose their jobs." Can one indeed honestly doubt that many
an intelligent psychologist to-day is kept from investigating this pressing
phase of knowledge largely, or even solely, by the materialistic incubus
whose continuance still stands for an academic salary usually sufficient to
buy wife and children bread, if not a little meat?

"Material bodies are all that we have any control over, are all that we are
experimentally aware of; anything that we can do with these is open to us;
any conclusions we can draw about them may be legitimate and true. But to
step outside their province and to deny the existence of any other region
because we have no sense-organs for its appreciation, or because (like the
ether) it is too uniformly omnipresent for our ken, is to wrest our
advantages and privileges from their proper use and apply them to our own
misdirection." . . . "I am one of those who think that the methods of
science are not so limited in their scope as has been thought: that they can
be applied much more widely, and that the psychic region can be studied and
brought under law too. Allow us anyhow to make the attempt. Give us a fair
field. Let those who prefer the materialistic hypothesis by all means
develop their thesis as far as they can; but let us try what we can do in
the psychical region, and see which wins. Our methods are really the same as
theirs--the subject-matter differs. Neither should abuse the other for
making the attempt."

Here is this matter in a nutshell, and the evolution of cosmology in the
last few years makes this argument and this plea greatly more persuasive
still, for it forges one more link in the actual knowledge of continuity.

Twenty-four pages of useful, explanatory notes follow in this volume, the
text of the Address. The book lacks an index. To those sapient ones who
have not already saved the important little work out of Science, the dollar
which this volume costs is a dollar well-spent, unless, indeed, philosophy
be to him but a reproach. GEORGE V. N. DEARBORN. Tufts Medical and Dental
Schools.

ADVENTURINGS IN THE PSYCHICAL. By H. Addington Bruce. Little, Brown & Co.,
1914.

Professor Flournoy, in the Preface to his Spiritism and Psychology, made the
remark: "It will be a great day when the subliminal psychology of Myers and
his followers, and the abnormal psychology of Freud and his school, succeed
in meeting, and will supplement and complete one another. That will be a
great forward step in science and in the understanding of our nature."
(Page VI.)

Any one who attacks the problem from this standpoint, in the right manner,
is to be commended; and this is, very largely, the method of attack taken by
a certain group of "psychical researches"; it is also the method of approach
of Mr. Bruce, in the book under review. Although it will probably contain
but little new to the student of abnormal psychology, it is, nevertheless, a
welcome and extremely sane presentation of the problems discussed; while,
for the general public, the effect of the book cannot be other than
beneficial,-- giving a sound and scientific view-point of many of these
obscure and outlying problems.

Much of this book will be familiar to readers of the JOURNAL. The chapters
on the "Subconscious" (extended and amplified in his final chapter on "The
Larger Self"), "Dissociation and Disease," and "The Singular Case of B. C.
A.," contain a summary of material long familiar to general psychological
students--though this data has not been sufficiently popularized as
yet,--while the case of B. C. A. is a relief after the oft-quoted earlier
cases!

The first chapter, "Ghosts and their Meaning," deals with apparitions of the
living, of the dying, and of the dead--according to the tentative
arrangement of these cases made by the English S. P. R. Most of these are
quoted from the Society's Proceedings, and the usual theories are offered to
account for them; in the case of apparitions of the dead, e. g., "ghosts,"
the theory of deferred telepathic suggestion being held. This brings us
naturally to the second chapter, "Why I believe in Telepathy," which again
contains a summary of much of the S. P. R. work in this field; accompanied,
however, by some other cases and a few interesting incidents which fell
under the author's personal observation. The next two chapters deal with
"Clairvoyance and Crystal Gazing" and "Automatic Speaking and Writing"
respectively. Here, again, the bulk of the material is familiar to
psychical and psychological students; though it must be admitted that this
material is all excellently and carefully summarized. The author's attitude,
throughout, is strictly critical and scientific; and while he believes in
telepathy and other supernormal powers, he rejects spiritism as an
explanation, and his views throughout are temperate and modest.

The remaining chapter, dealing as it does with "Poltergeists and Mediums,"
takes us into the more dubious field of "physical phenomena"--spontaneous
and experimental--and cases are discussed which lie outside the province of
the psychologist,-- since they entrench more upon the domain of physics and
biology. As such they have been treated and discussed by the majority of
Continental savants.

One word more regarding the famous medium, Eusapia Palladino, whom Mr. Bruce
refers to in several passages in this Chapter, referring to her in a
footnote on page 196, as "The discredited Eusapia Palladino, once the marvel
of two continents." May I take this occasion to repeat here what I have
often repeated in public and private, elsewhere? and that is, that I retain
my unshaken belief, amounting to a conviction, in the genuineness of
Eusapia's power, and that, despite the trickery which was undoubtedly
discovered here--and which had also been discovered, I may add, more than
twenty years before she ever came to this country--she yet possesses
genuine, remarkable powers of a supernormal character, and this belief, I
may say, is shared equally by all the continental investigators, who remain
unaffected by the so-called American expose. A statement of their attitude
is perhaps well summarized by Flournoy, in his Spiritism and Psychology
(Chap. VII); while I have published the records of the American seances--
for those who may be interested--in my "Personal Experiences in
Spiritualism," where copious extracts from the shorthand notes of the
American sittings are given.

To return, however: If there is a criticism to make of Mr. Bruce's book, it
is that it displays a lack of personal investigation and experimentation,
and bears throughout the ear-marks of a literary compilation. But this is,
after all, not a serious detraction from a work of this character,--which
is, as I have said before, excellently done. HEREWARD CARRINGTON.

DES TROUBLES PSYCHIQUES ET NEVROSIQUES POST-TRAUMATIQUES, Par R. Benon.
Ancien interne de la Clinique des Maladies Mentales et de l'Encephale a la
Faculte de Paris, Medecin de l'Hospice General de Nantes (Quartiers
d'Hospice). G. Steinheil, editeur, Paris, 1913; pp. x-449.

The author in this volume has written a clinical and medico-legal treatise
on traumatic nervous affections from a broad and philosophical standpoint.
The subject is treated under the following headings: "Generalities," in
which is discussed the historical development of our knowledge of the
effects of traumatism, the etiology, the evolution of the various
disturbances, and the legal side of the questions at issue.

Following this introduction, under Chapter I, the general topic of what the
writer terms the traumatic dysthenias or the traumatic sthenopathies is
discussed under the following subheadings: (a) Simple post-traumatic
asthenia; (b) Post-traumatic astheno-mania; (c) Prolonged asthenia and
chronic traumatic asthenia, under which he includes traumatic neurasthenia,
traumatic hystero-neurasthenia, traumatic neurosis, and traumatic
psychoneurosis; (d) Chronic post-traumatic mania; (e) Periodic
post-traumatic dysthenias; (f) Asthenic mania and pathological anatomy.
Chapter II, under the general heading, "Traumatic Dysthymias: (a) Anxiety
post-traumatic hyperthymia; (b) Traumatic hypochondriasis and traumatic
hysteria; (c) Special hyperthymia of accidents; (d) Hysterical and traumatic
crises; (e) Prolonged or permanent post-traumatic disturbances of character
in children and adults. Chapter III, under the general heading, "Traumatic
Dysthymias": (a) Traumatic amnesia; (b) Post-traumatic Korsakoff syndrome;
(c) Traumatic mental confusion; (d) Post-traumatic agnosia; (e)
Post-traumatic dementias; (f) Systematized chronic post-traumatic deliriums.
Chapter IV, under the general heading, "Psychic states and Diverse
Post-Traumatic Neuroses": (a) Post-traumatic epilepsy; (b) Traumatic
aphasia; (c) Alcoholism, traumatism and hallucinatory conditions; (d)
Post-traumatic sensual perversions; (e) Pains, vertigos, deafness, etc.,
following trauma; (f) Distant post-traumatic psychic disorders with cerebral
lesions; (g) Unclassifiable observations. To this comprehensive material is
added an appendix on the topic of psychic and neurotic disturbances as
indications for trephining.

This outline of the contents of the book, which contains in addition many
subheadings, gives a sufficiently clear idea of its scope and of the pains
which the author has taken to subdivide his subject matter to the last
possible degree. Whether such a detailed classification has merit sufficient
to justify its complexity must be left to the individual reader to
determine. It may, however, with justice be said that the author has spared
no pains to illustrate by case reports the various phases of traumatic
disorder which he enumerates. He has a keen sense of the significance of
psychiatric knowledge in a proper understanding of the various results of
trauma, and lays special stress upon the breadth of the psychiatric field,
under which he properly enough includes the various so-called psychoneuroses
as well as epilepsy, tics and aphasia. He believes that one may only arrive
at a diagnostic criterion of such affections through the sensations and
emotions expressed by the patients. The somatic phenomena he regards as
always subordinate and accessory. Under this point of view, he attacks his
problem, and with considerable success An admirable brief historical review
of traumatism in relation to the nervous system constitutes a valuable
section of the book, in which he brings out the conflicting views which have
prevailed since the earlier work of Erichsen down through the fundamental
investigations of Westphal, Charcot, Knapp, Oppenheim and others.

The author finds fault with the common use of the word traumatism in the
sense of trauma, and correctly draws attention to the fact that traumatism
should express a general condition, whereas, trauma should be used as
indicative of a local lesion. This distinction has been too often
overlooked, with resulting confusion.

In general, the book represents a vast amount of painstaking thought and an
earnest but somewhat confusing attempt to bring light into the somewhat dark
places of a much-discussed subject, which has frequently been the source of
more or less acrimonious discussion. Not the least significant part of the
volume is the constant reference to the legal implications of the traumatic
affections. It should therefore be useful, not only to the physician, but
also to the legal profession. It will doubtless be used rather as a book of
reference than as a readable treatise. E. W. TAYLOR.

VERBRECHERTYPEN. 1 Heft. Geliebtenmorder von Albrecht Wetzel und Karl
Wilmanns. Verlag Julius Springer, Berlin: 1913.

With a better understanding of psychopathic phenomena, the underlying
psychology of criminology becomes more clearly defined. Maladjustment may
express itself in an insane outbreak, criminal act, or in an anti-social
deed, indeed, in all of them the underlying phenomenon is a psychopathic
condition which comes under the realm of abnormal psychology. The large
group of criminals SHOULD not be looked upon as a homogenous class, but the
individuality of criminal and the type of the delinquent act in reaction to
his heredity, mental make-up and environmental influences should be fully
considered. Herein lies the great value of Wetzel's and Willmann's
Monograph--these authors report three cases in which criminal acts were
attributed to abnormal mental life.

The first case was that of a young man of twenty-three, who showed a
psychopathic personality with tainted heredity on the paternal side. He was
subject to convulsive attacks, which were regarded as hysterical and not
epileptic. In his intelligence he was above the average. He was engaged to
a young woman, and because she refused to marry him, he at first
contemplated to take his life, but later shot at her three times without
injuring her, and then made an unsuccessful attempt at suicide. His
delinquent act was determined not only by his environment, but also by his
peculiar type of personality, which was taken into consideration by the
court, and on this ground he was acquitted.

In the second case, a young man of twenty shot his fiancee through the
temporal region, injuring her severely. Soon after committing this act he
surrendered himself to the police. He also showed striking evidences of a
psychopathic personality with a strong suggestion of epilepsy, but with
intact intelligence. He was given to periods of depression and was unstable
mentally. He was easily suggestible and his general conduct was not only
controlled by environmental influences, but also by his mood. Suicidal ideas
and jealousy played a very important role in his mental life; especially
they were marked when he began to keep company with the young woman.
Although his abnormal constitution was taken into account, nevertheless he
was punished by one year's imprisonment. During confinement he attempted
suicide, but was unsuccessful. Some time after his release he committed
suicide, the cause of which he assigned to an abortion that was induced by
his sweetheart.

The third case is very interesting and rather intricate, by reason of the
fact that murder or double suicide was suspected. The following are the
details of this case: A young man of eighteen kept company with a young
woman about the same age, from another town. The girls of the town were
jealous of her and began to gossip about her to the extent of casting
aspersions upon her character, etc. The young man's father, without
investigating this case, forbade his son to marry her. However, the two
lovers would have frequent secret rendezvous, and his fiancee became
depressed over this scandalous and groundless rumor and also because of the
peculiar attitude her young man's father assumed. One evening the young man
returned home late, and upon confessing to his father of his secret meetings
with his fiancee, he was severely beaten and prohibited to see her again.

A few days later the young man wrote a letter to his sweetheart, telling her
of his father's emphatic determinations, but soon they met again and she
suggested that they should die together on account of this gossip that was
circulated about her. A day following this meeting both of them were missed,
and after some search the young woman was found lying on the ground with two
shots in her head and one in the breast, and the young man was hanging from
a tree, in a near-by wood; the latter was resuscitated, but the former was
dead. It is interesting to note that the autopsy showed that death in her
case was due to strangulation and not to the bullets. This young man was
endowed with a psychopathic personality, and there was a history of short
attacks of depression. He received several head traumata and suffered from
enuresis in his early life.

Following the resuscitation, he grew confused and excited, and within
twenty-four hours he recovered from the acute episode but showed incomplete
amnesia for his act. He stated that he remembered firing the shots, but had
no remembrance of strangulating her. Soon after this he passed into a
peculiar state of confusion; in addition, fabrications and retention defect
were also demonstrated. The cerebrospinal fluid revealed some abnormal
changes which were suggestive of an organic brain disease. The Wassermann
test was negative. Finally, he made a complete recovery except for the
incomplete amnesia.

Since the death of the young woman was caused by strangulation, the question
had to be decided whether he was the cause of her death or she died as the
result of her own hand. The court favored suicide, and held that the bodily
injury was inflicted with the pistol by the young man. He received a lenient
sentence--only nine months imprisonment. In this case, the type of his
personality, and all the circumstances that led to the development of the
act were taken into consideration.

Although the authors presented this subject purely objectively, yet their
studies are extremely interesting and important, and show conclusively the
importance of psychopathological methods in criminology. One who is
interested in this subject will find this monograph of great value and help.
It may also be added that the authors give a complete list of the casuistic
literature of the murder among lovers. MORRIS J. KARPAS.

DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE. AN ESSAY TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. By L.
T. Hobhouse, Martin White Professor of Sociology in the University of
London. Macmillan & Co., London: 1913; pp. xxix, 383.

"Development and Purpose" is essentially the complement of Professor
Hobhouse's well-known and valuable "Mind in Evolution," published in 1901;
if it were rather a continuation than the complement, many would be pleased,
for the exposition already made practically guarantees a rich application,
were it undertaken, to matters still further "away" in the realm of thought.
The present volume lacks the multitude of scientific data and references
which make "Mind in Evolution" so important for the study of psychology (as
behavior or not as behavior, as the reader pleases), but it contains in
their space many timely discussions, in some cases seemingly prophetic, of
teleology in its relation to evolution.

The seventeen chapters of the book (there is also an extremely thoughtful
Introduction and a full Index), are divided into two parts, one entitled
"Lines of Development" and the other "The Conditions of Development." The
reviewer's lazy cortex, and possibly those of other and more leisurely
readers, is made glad by a complete chapter-synopsis or syllabus, occupying
seven pages). So much of the whole treatise is suggested in the synopsis of
the first three chapters that it is well to give them in full, as follows:

"I. The Nature and the Significance of Mental Evolution. (1) The biological
view regards Mind as an organ evolved to adapt behavior to the environment,
(2) and tends to reduce its action to a mechanical process. (3) Parallelism
in the end reduces Mind to an epi-phenomenon {an important undoubted fact
which has been often ignored by what are left of the Parallelists!] (4) The
object of Comparative Psychology is to determine empirically the actual
function of Mind in successive stages of development. (5) It involves a
social as well as an individual psychology. (6) The statement of the higher
phases also opens up philosophical questions, (7) and on the solution of
these depends the final interpretation of the recorded movement.

"II. The Structure of Mind. (1) Mental operations are known in the first
instance as objects of consciousness. (2) Mind is the permanent unity
including consciousness and the sum of processes continuous with
consciousness and determining it. (3) These processes involve, but are not
identical with physical processes, constituting with them a psychophysical
unity.

"III. The General Function of Mind and Brain. (1) The generic function of
Mind, as of the nervous system, is correlation (2) The special organ for
effecting fresh correlation is consciousness. (3) The deliverances of
consciousness arise from stimuli acting upon structures built up by
experience, (4) on foundations laid by heredity, (5) which supplies not only
specific adaptations, but a background to the entire life of consciousness."

It would be hard to find a more concise, complete, and timely
formularization of the seeming trend of present resultants in this
particular direction than these sentences set forth for whomsoever will
ponder each carefully-built statement and really understand what it means as
part of a system. "Mind is the permanent unity including consciousness and
the sum of processes continuous with consciousness and determining it. These
processes involve, but are not identical with, physical processes,
constituting with them a psychophysical unity,"--this quotation might almost
serve as the motto of early Twentieth Century scientific philosophy. It
seems to the present reviewer to have almost as much philosophy in it as
Harold Hoffding's well-known sentence has of psychology: ("the unity of
mental life has its expression not only in memory and synthesis, but also in
a dominant fundamental feeling, characterized by the contrast between
pleasure and pain, and in an impulse, springing from this fundamental
feeling, to movement and activity"). It might be the creed of the
Neoidealism.

Hobhouse's discussion of mechanism in relation to teleology and to the
universal harmony and reality is fairly representative of the drift of
thought as set forth by recent English and French writers such as J. S.
Haldane, Oliver Lodge and some of the prominent biologists, and by Henri
Bergson: "An organic whole is therefore like a machine in being purposive,
though unlike it in that its purpose is within." "A purposive process is one
determined by its tendency to produce a certain result, purpose itself being
an act [sic] determined in its character by that which it tends to bring
about. As such it differs fundamentally from a mechanical cause." "The
empirical and philosophical arguments point to the same general conclusion,
that reality is the process of the development of Mind." As a guide to
one's thinking, and as integrators of one's subconscious intuitions and
resultants, such concise formulae certainly have much value, especially
when, as here, clearly and ably expounded in the text proper. Tufts College.
GEORGE V. N. DEARBORN.

BOOKS RECEIVED

ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY. Isador H. Coriat. Pp. xvi and 428. 2d Ed. Moffat,
Yard & Co., 1914. $2.00 net.

MENTAL MEDICINE & NURSING. Robert Howland Chase. Pp. xv and 244. J. B.
Lippincott Co., 1914. $1.50.

THE TEACHING OF DRAWING. S. Polak and H. C. Whilter. Pp. 168. Warwick &
York, Inc. 85 cents.

OUTLINE OF A STUDY OF THE SELF. Robert M. Yerkes, A.M., Ph.D., and David W.
LaRue, A.M., Ph.D. Pp. 24. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1914.

EROS. Emil Lucka. Pp. xx and 379. G. P. Putnam & Sons. 1915. $1.75.

COLLECTED PAPERS OF MARGARET BANCROFT. Ware Brothers Company, Philadelphia,
1915.

EUGENICS: A SCIENCE AND AN IDEAL. Edgar Schuster. Pp. 263. Warwick &
York, Inc. 40 cents.

LIFE AND WORK OF PESTALOZZI. J. A. Green. Pp. 393. Warwick & York, Inc.
$1.40.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL METHODS OF TESTING INTELLIGENCE. Wm. Stern. Translated
by Guy Montrose Whipple. Pp. 160. Warwick & York $1.25.

THE JOURNAL OF ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY

ANGER AS A PRIMARY EMOTION, AND THE APPLICATION OF FREUDIAN MECHANISMS TO
ITS PHENOMENA[*]

[*] Read at a meeting of the American Psychopathological Association, New
York City, May 5, 1915.

BY G. STANLEY HALL

THE exact sciences consist of a body of truth which all accept, and to which
all experts strive to contribute. Philosophy, however, like religion, has
always been broken into sects, schools or parties, and the body of truth
which all accept in these fields is relatively far less, and the
antagonistic views far greater. Normal psychology, which a few decades ago,
started out to be scientific with the good old ideal of a body of truth
semper ubique et ad omnibus, is already splitting into introspectionists,
behaviorists, genetic, philosophical and other groups, while in the new
Freudian movement, Adler and Jung are becoming sectaries, the former drawing
upon himself the most impolitic and almost vituperative condemnation of the
father of psychoanalysis. With this latter schism we are not here concerned,
but we are deeply concerned with the more general relations between the
psychologists of the normal and those of the abnormal; with a very few
negligible exceptions psychoanalysis has hardly ever had a place on the
program of our American Psychological Association, and the normal has had
little representation in your meetings and publications. This I deem
unfortunate for both, for unsatisfactory as this sadly needed rapprochement
is on the continent, it is far more so here. That the normalists in this
country so persistently ignore the unique opportunity to extend their
purview into the psychopathological domain at the unique psychological
moment that the development of Freudianism has offered, is to me a matter of
sad disappointment and almost depression. In reading a plea for Freud in our
association of normalists, I am a vox clamantis in deserto and can evoke no
response, and even the incursions of psychoanalysis into the domain of
biography, myth, religion and dreams, have not evoked a single attempt at
appreciation or criticism worthy of mention by any American psychologist of
the normal. I have sought in various ways the causes of this reticence, not
to say ignorance. While I received various answers, the chief one was to the
effect that the alleged hypertrophy of sex in its gross pathological forms,
and the conviction of the kind and degree of sex consciousness found in the
many hundreds of analyzed cases, are so unique and constitute the very
essence of the neurotic and psychotic cases, and conscious and unconscious
sex factors are slight or absent in most normal cases, that these patients
and their doctors alike are sex-intoxicated, and that the Freudian
psychology applies only to perverts and erotomania or other abnormal cases.
To ascribe all this aversion to social or ethical repression is both shallow
and banousic, for the real causes are both manifold and deeper. They are
part of a complicated protest of normality, found in all and even in the
resistance of subjects of analysis, which is really a factor which is basal
for self-control of the varying good sides of which Freudians tell us
nothing. The fact is that there are other things in the human psyche than
sex, and its ramifications. Hunger, despite Jung, fear despite Sadger, and
anger despite Freud, are just as primary, aboriginal and independent as sex,
and we fly in the face of fact and psychic experience to derive them all
from sex, although it is freely granted that in morbid cases each may take
on predominant sex features. In what follows I can only very briefly hint at
the way in which some of the Freudian mechanisms are applied to one of the
emotions, viz., anger.

Anger in most of its forms is the most dynamogenic of all the emotions. In
paroxysms of rage with abandon we stop at nothing short of death and even
mutilation. The Malay running amuck, Orlando Furioso, the epic of the wrath
of Achilles, hell-fire, which is an expression of divine wrath, are some
illustrations of its power. Savages work themselves into frenzied rage in
order to fight their enemies. In many descriptions of its brutal aspects,
which I have collected, children and older human brutes spit, hiss, yell,
snarl, bite noses and ears, scratch, gouge out eyes, pull hair, mutilate sex
organs, with a violence that sometimes takes on epileptic features and which
in a number of recorded cases causes sudden death at its acme, from the
strain it imposes upon the system. Its cause is always some form of
thwarting wish or will or of reduction of self-feeling, as anger is the acme
of self-assertion. The German criminalist, Friedrich, says that probably
every man might be caused to commit murder if provocation were sufficient,
and that those of us who have never committed this crime owe it to
circumstances and not to superior power of inhibition. Of course it may be
associated with sex but probably no human experience is per se more
diametrically opposite to sex. Some temperaments seem to crave, if not need,
outbreaks of it at certain intervals, like a well-poised lady, so
sweet-tempered that everybody imposed on her, till one day at the age of
twenty-three she had her first ebullition of temper end went about to her
college mates telling them plainly what she thought of them, and went home
rested and happy, full of the peace that passeth understanding. Otto Heinze,
and by implication Pfister, think nations that have too long or too
assiduously cultivated peace must inevitably sooner or later relapse to the
barbarisms of war to vent their instincts for combat, and Crile thinks anger
most sthenic, while Cannon says it is the emotion into which most others
tend to pass. It has of course been a mighty agent in evolution, for those
who can summate all their energies in attack have survived. But few if any
impulsions of man, certainly not sex, have suffered more intense, prolonged
or manifold repressions. Courts and law have taken vengeance into their
hands or tried to, and not only a large proportion of assaults, but other
crimes, are still due to explosions of temper, and it may be a factor in
nearly every court case. Society frowns on it, and Lord Chesterfield says
the one sure and unfailing mark of a gentleman is that he never shows
temper. Its manifestations are severely tabooed in home and school. Religion
teaches us not to let the sun go down upon our wrath and even to turn the
other cheek, so that we go through life chronically afraid that we shall
break out, let ourselves go, or get thoroughly mad, so that the moment we
begin to feel a rising tide of indignation or resentment (in the
nomenclature of which our language is so very rich, Chamberlain having
collected scores of English expressions of it), the censorship begins to
check it. In many cases in our returns repression is so potent from long
practice, that the sweetest smile, the kindest remarks or even deeds are
used either to veil it to others, or to evict it from our own consciousness,
or else as a self-inflicted penance for feeling it, while in some tender
consciences its checked but persistent vestiges may become centers of morbid
complexes and in yet other cases it burrows and proliferates more or less
unconsciously, and finds secret and circuitous ways of indulgence which only
psychoanalysis or a moral or religious confessional could trace.

I. Anger has many modes of Verschiebung, both instinctive and cultivated.
One case in our returns carries a bit of wood in his vest-pocket and bites
it when he begins to feel the aura of temper. Girls often play the piano
loudly, and some think best of all. One plays a particular piece to divert
anger, viz., the "Devil's Sonata." A man goes down cellar and saws wood,
which he keeps for such occasions. A boy pounds a resonant eavespout. One
throws a heavy stone against a white rock. Many go off by themselves and
indulge in the luxury of expressions they want none to hear. Others take out
their tantrum on the dog or cat or perhaps a younger child, or implicate
some absent enemy, while others curse. A few wound themselves, and so on,
till it almost seems, in view of this long list of vicariates, as if almost
any attack, psychic or physical, might thus be intensified, and almost
anything or person be made the object of passion. Be it remembered, too,
that not a few look, do, think, feel their best under this impulsion.

II. Besides these modes of Abreagierung there are countless forms of
sublimation. In anger a boy says: I will avenge myself on the bully who
whipped me and whom I cannot or will not whip, by besting him in his
studies, class-work, composition, or learn skilful stunts that he cannot do,
dress, or behave better, use better language, keep better company, and thus
find my triumph and revenge. A man rejected or scorned by a woman sometimes
makes a great man of himself, with the motivation more or less developed to
make her sorry or humiliated. Anger may prompt a man to go in to win his
enemy's girl. A taunt or an insult sometimes spurs the victim of it to
towering ambition to show the world and especially the abuser better, and to
be able to despise him in return; and there are those who have been thus
stung to attempt greatness and find the sweetest joy of success in the
feeling that by attaining it they compensate for indignities they suffered
in youth. In fact, when we analyze ambition and the horror of
Minderwertigkeit that goes with it, we shall doubtless find this factor is
never entirely absent, while if we were to apply the same pertinacity and
subtlety that Jung in his "Wandlungen" has brought to bear in working over
the treacherous material of mythology, we might prove with no less
verisimilitude than he has shown the primacy of the libido that in the
beginning was anger, and that not Anaxagoras' love or the strife of
Heraclitus was the fons et origo of all things, that the Ichtrieb is basal,
and that the fondest and most comprehensive of all motives is that to excel
others, not merely to survive, but to win a larger place in the sun, and
that there is some connection between the Darwinian psychogenesis and Max
Stirner and Nietzsche, which Adler has best evaluated.

III. Anger has also its dreams and reveries. When wronged the imagination
riots in fancied humiliation and even tortures of an enemy. An object of
hate may be put through almost every conceivable series of degradation,
ridicule, exposure and disgrace. He is seen by others for what our hate
deems him to be. All disguises are stripped off. Children sometimes fancy a
hated object of anger flogged until he is raw, abandoned by all his friends,
an outcast, homeless, alone, in the dark, starving, exposed to wild animals,
and far more often more prosaic fancies conceive him as whipped by a parent
or stronger friend, or by the victim himself later. Very clever strategies
are thought out in detail by which the weaker gets even with or vanquishes
the stronger, and one who suffers a rankling sense of injustice can hardly
help day-dreaming of some form of comeuppance for his foe, although it takes
years to do it. In these reveries the injurer in the end almost always gives
up and sues for mercy at the feet of his quondam victim. So weird and
dramatic are these scenes often that to some minds we must call anger and
hate the chief springs of the imagination. A pubescent girl who was deeply
offended went off by herself and held an imaginary funeral of her enemy,
hearing in fancy the disparaging remarks of the bystanders, and when it was
all over and the reaction came, she made up with the object of her passion
by being unusually sweet to her and even became solicitous about her health
as fearing that her revery might come true. We all too remember Tolstoi's
reminiscences when, having been flogged by his tutor, he slunk off to the
attic, weeping and broken-hearted, and finally after a long brooding
resolved to run away and become a soldier, and this he did in fancy,
becoming corporal, lieutenant, captain, colonel. Finally came a great
battle where he led a desperate charge that was crowned with victory, and
when all was over and he stood tottering, leaning on his sword, bloody and
with many a wound, and the great Czar of all the Russias approached, saluted
him as saviour of his fatherland and told him to ask whatever he wanted and
it was his, replied magnanimously that he had only done his duty and wanted
no reward. All he asked was that his tutor might be brought up and his head
cut off. Then the scene changed to other situations, each very different,
florid with details, but motivated by ending in the discomfiture of the
tutor. In the ebb or ambivalent reaction of this passion he and the tutor
got on better.

IV. Richardson has collected 882 cases of mild anger, introspected by
graduate students of psychology, and finds not only over-determination,
anger fetishes and occasionally anger in dreams with patent and latent
aspects and about all the Freudian mechanisms, but what is more important,
finds very much of the impulsion that makes us work and strive, attack and
solve problems has an element of anger at its root. Life is a battle and for
every real conquest man has had to summate and focus all his energies, so
that anger is the acme of the manifestation of Schopenhauer's will to live,
achieve and excel. Hiram Stanley rather absurdly described it as an epoch
when primitive man first became angry and fought, overcoming the great
quaternary carnivora and made himself the lord of creation. Plato said
anger was the basis of the state, Ribot made it the establisher of justice
in the world, and Bergson thinks society rests on anger at vice and crime,
while Stekel thinks that temper qualities should henceforth be treated in
every biography and explored in every case that is psychoanalyzed. Hill's
experiments with pugilism, and Cannon's plea for athletics as a legitimate
surrogate for war in place of James' moral substitute, Frank Howard's
opinion that an impulse that Darwin finds as early as the sixth week and
hardly any student of childhood later than the sixth month, and which should
not be repressed but developed to its uttermost, although carefully directed
to worthy objects, are all in point. Howard pleads for judicious scolding
and flogging, to be, done in heat and not in cold blood, and says that there
is enough anger in the world, were it only rightly directed, to sweep away
all the evils in it. In all these phenomena there is no trace of sex or any
of its symbols, and sadism can never explain but must be explained by it. My
thesis is, then, that every Freudian mechanism applies to anger as truly as
it does to sex. This by no means assumes the fundamental identity of every
feeling-emotion in the sense of Weissfeld's very speculative theory.

In this very slight paper I am only trying to make the single point which I
think fear and sympathy or the gregarious or social instinct would still
better illustrate, although it would require more time, that the movement
inaugurated by Freud opens up a far larger field than that of sex. The
unconscious that introspectionists deny, (asserting that all phenomena
ascribed to it are only plain neural mechanisms, and therefore outside the
realm of psychology,) the feelings which introspection can confessedly never
tell much about and concerning which our text-books in psychology still say
so little: studies in these fields are marking a new epoch, and here the
chief merit of Freudism is found.

THE NECESSITY OF METAPHYSICS

BY JAMES J. PUTNAM, M. D.

SOME years ago, at the Weimar Congress of the International Psychoanalytic
Association, I read a paper on the importance of a knowledge of philosophy
and metaphysics for psychoanalysts regarded as students of human life.
Perhaps if I had had the experience and ability to contribute the results of
some original analytic investigation on specific lines, I should not then
have ventured into the philosophic field. Perhaps, indeed, if those
conditions now obtained I should not be bringing forward similar arguments
again, and if any one feels tempted to maintain that philosophic speculation
is a camp of refuge for those who, in consequence of temperamental
limitations and infantile fixations which ought to be overcome, draw back
from the more robust study of emotional repressions on scientific lines, I
should admit that the allegation contains an element of truth. But in spite
of this, and in spite of the fact that there is some truth also in the
statement that the effects--good and bad--of emotional repression make
themselves felt, as a partial influence, in all the highest reaches of human
endeavor, including art, literature, and religion;--in spite of these
partial truths, philosophy and metaphysics are the only means through which
the essential nature of many tendencies can be studied of which
psychoanalysis describes only the transformations. And this being so it is
perhaps reasonable that one paper should be read at an annual meeting such
as this, where men assemble whose duty it is to study the human mind in all
its aspects.

I presume that just as, and just because men have minds AND bodies, an
evolutional history in the ordinary sense and a mental history in a sense
not commonly considered, so there will always be two, or perhaps three,
parties among psychologists and men of science, and each one, in so far as
it is limited in its vision, may be considered as abnormal, if one will. I
decline, however, to admit that the temperamental peculiarities of one group
are more in need either of justification or of rectification through
psychoanalysis than those of the others. It is probably true that emotional
tension often plays a larger part among persons who love a priori
reasoning--the "tender-minded" of Dr. James--than it does in those who work
through observation; but on the other hand exclusively empirical attitude
has its limitations and its dangers. Philosophy and metaphysics deal more
distinctively with essential function--that is with real existence,--while
natural science and the genetic psychology (of which psychoanalysis,
strictly speaking, is a branch) deal rather with appearances and with
structure. Both are in need of investigation. The FORM which art, religion,
and literature assume is determined by men's personal experiences and
special cravings. The essential motive of art and religion is, however, the
dim recognition by men of their relation to the creative spirit of the
universe.

No one can doubt that function logically precedes structure; or if any one
does doubt this, he need only observe his own experience and see how in
every new acquisition of knowledge or of power there come, first, the
thought, the idea, then the effort, next the habit, and finally the
modification of cerebral mechanism, in which the effort and the habit become
represented in relatively permanent and static form. In fact, the crux of
the whole discussion between science and metaphysics turns on, or harks back
to the discussion between function and structure; and it is the latter, in
the sense in which I mean the word, that has had of late a too large share
of our attention.

The enterprise on which we are all of us embarked,--whether we define it as
an investigation, pure and simple, into human nature and human motives, or
as a therapeutic attempt to relieve invalids of their symptoms,--is a larger
one than it is commonly conceived of as being. Each physician and each
investigator has, indeed, the right to say that for practical reasons he
prefers to confine his attention to some single portion of one or the other
of these tasks, be it never so small. But each one should regard himself as
virtually under an obligation to recognize the respects in which this chosen
task is incomplete. Every physicist is aware that there is some form of
energy underlying, or rather expressing itself in, light and heat and
gravitation. Physicists do not study this form of energy, not because they
do not wish to but simply because they cannot do so by the only methods that
they are allowed to use. But, as a reaction of defense, they sometimes
assert that no one else can do so either, that this underlying energy cannot
be explained. To say this is, however, in my judgment, to misappreciate
what an explanation is.

To explain any matter is to discover the points of similarity, or virtual
identity, between the matter studied and ourselves. But in order to do this
thoroughly, or rather in order to do it with relation to the essential
nature of some form of energy (the "Libido," for example, considered as an
unpicturable force) one must first consider what we, the investigators, are,
not at our less good, but at our best. It is with us, as given, with our
best qualities regarded as defining in part the Q. E. D. of the experiment,
that the investigation must begin. The nature of any and every form of real
underlying energy or essence must be defined in terms of our sense of our
own will and freedom. And this means that we must conceive and describe
ourselves, and expect to conceive and to describe the powers that animate
us, no longer as a system of forces subject to the so-called laws of nature
(which are, in reality, not immutable) but as relatively free, creative
agents; no longer as the product of the interplay of instincts, but as
individuals possessed of real reason, real power of love and real
self-consistent will. To claim to study the effects of the "Libido," to
which we ascribe the vast powers with which we are familiar, yet fail to
seek in it what would correspond to our own best attributes, would be to lay
aside our duties as students of human nature. It would be to confine our
attention to the "structure" of the mind, the form under which it manifests
itself, without having studied the laws of its action under conditions which
are more favorable to its development.

It must, now, have struck students of psychoanalytic literature that a
marked tendency has been shown toward supplementing the study of
structure,--that is, the detailed history of men's experiences and
evolution, regarded as sequences of phenomena,--by the study of the function
or creative energy for which the experiences stand. Silberer, whose work is
endorsed by Freud, has gone to a considerable length in this direction; and
the whole tendency of Freud's insistence on the relevancy, in the mental
sphere, of the law of the conservation of energy has been a movement,
though, I think, a narrow one, in this direction. More recently, Jung has
emphasized the importance of this tendency, and has dwelt more strongly, as
I think, than the facts warrant, on the supposed unwillingness of Freud to
recognize its importance.

Behind the experiences of childhood, for example, lie the temperamental
trends of childhood, and it is these with which we really need to get
acquainted; for these trends, if not the whole causes and equivalents of the
experiences which are recounted to us by our patients, constitute the
conditions without which the latter would not have been what they became.

But Jung himself, strangely enough, in both of his carefully prepared
arguments, specifically rejects all intention of dealing "metaphysically"
with this theme, in spite of the fact that every movement toward a fuller
recognition of creative energy is nothing less than metaphysics, even though
not in name.

The skilled observer, scrutinizing the motives and peering into the history
of the person whose traits and trends he is called on to investigate, must
see, in imagination, not only a vast host of acts, but also a vast network
of intersecting lines of energy of which the casual observer, and even the
intimate friend, may be wholly unaware. We call these lines of energy by
many special names,--"Libido" or "Urlibido," first of all, then love and
hate and jealousy, and so on.

What are these lines of energy, and how can we study them to the best
purpose? Obviously they are incomplete editions of the love and reason and
will the laws of which we can study to best advantage in ourselves and in
men where they are displayed in their best, that is, in their most
constructive form. To make such studies is to recognize metaphysics, but
instead of doing of doing this tacitly and implicitly we should do it openly
and explicitly.

The study of human nature should, in short, begin at the top, rather than at
the bottom; just as, if one had to choose what phase of a symphony one would
choose in order to get an idea of its perfection, one would take some
culminating moment rather than the first few notes simply because they were
the first. To be accurate, one could not do justice to the symphony except
by studying it as a whole, and similarly one should study the man as a
whole, including his relations to the universe as a whole. It is as wholes
that great poets conceived of their poems and great artists of their
pictures, and it is as a whole that each and every human life, standing as
it does as the representative of the body of the universe, and the spirit of
the universe, on the other, should implicitly be viewed.

The psychologist should sympathize deeply with the anatomist and the
physiologist and the student of cerebral pathology, but equally deeply with
the philosopher and the metaphysician who study the implications, present
although hidden, that point to the bonds between the individual and the
universe. To fail to recognize that these bonds exist,--as is done when the
attempt is made to study human beings as if they were really and exclusively
the product of their historic past conceived of in an organic sense,--would
be to try to build one-half of an arch and expect it to endure. The truth
is, we do not, in my opinion, genuinely believe that a human is nothing but
the product of his organic past, or the product of his experience.

We believe, by implication, in our metaphysical selves and our corresponding
obligations, more strongly than we have taught ourselves to recognize. But
to this fact we make ourselves blind through a species of repression, just
as many a child, confident of its parents' affection, assumes, for his own
temporary purposes, the right to accuse them of hostile intentions which
they do not entertain.

We forget, or repress, the fact that the mind of man cannot be made subject
to the laws of physics, and yet we proceed to deal with the phenomena
dependent on the working of the mind of man as if these laws actually did
prevail.

The misleading effects of this tendency are clearly seen where it is a
question of the conclusions to be drawn from the researches, admirable in
themselves, made under the influence of the genetic method.

The notion seems to prevail that we should prepare ourselves for the
formation of just ideas with regard to the mode in which the higher
faculties of men come into existence by wiping the slate clean to the extent
of assuming that we have before us no data except some few acts or thoughts
that are definable in the simplest possible terms, and then watching what
happens as the situation becomes more complicated. But one is apt to forget,
in doing this, that there is one thing which we cannot wipe off the
slate,--namely, ourselves, not taken in the Bergsonian sense alone, but as
fully fledged persons, possessed of the very qualities for which we
undertake to search, yet without the possession of which the search could
not begin. This does not, of course, militate against the value of these
genetic researches in one sense. The study of evolutional sequences is
still, and forever will be, of enormous value. But it does not teach us
nearly as much of the nature of real creativeness as we can learn through
the introspection of ourselves in the fullest sense; and I maintain that
psychoanalysts are persons who could do this to advantage.

Is not the notion that through the careful watching of the sequences of the
evolutionary process, as if from without, we can get an adequate idea of the
forces that really are at work, exactly the delusion by which the skillful
juggler tries to deceive his audience when he directs their attention to the
shifting objects that he manipulates, and away from his own swiftly moving
hands?

My contention is that there are other means of studying the force which we
call "Libido" besides that of noting its effects. The justification for this
statement is that the force itself is identical, in the last analysis, with
that which we feel within ourselves and know as reason, as imagination, and
as will, conscious of themselves, and capable of giving to us, directly or
indirectly, the only evidence we could ever hope to get, for the existence
of real creativeness, spontaneity and freedom.

Every work of art, worthy of the name, gives evidence of the action not
alone of a part of a man, but of the whole man; not only of his repressed
emotions, but of his intelligence and insight, and of relationships existing
between his life and all the other forms of life with which his own is
interwoven.

Unity must prevail throughout all nature. Either we are,--altogether, and
through and through, our best as well as our less good,--nothing but the
expression of repressed cravings, in the sense that they or the conflicts
based on them constitute the final causa vera of all progress; or else the
best that is in us and also our repressed cravings are alike due to the
action of a form of energy which is virtually greater than either one of
them, inasmuch as it has the capacity of developing into something greater
than either.

This is the agency which we should preeminently study and it is best studied
under conditions when, instead of being obviously subject to repression, it
is most free from repression. That is, it is best studied as it appears in
the thoughts and conduct of the best men, at their best, their most
constructive moments.

We cannot use our power of reason to deny our reason; for in so doing we
affirm the very thing which we deny. Nor are we under the necessity of using
our reason to affirm our reason, since that is the datum without which we
cannot undertake our task.

If this view is sound, what practical conclusions can we draw from it? I
wish to insist on this question because it was distinctly and positively
with the practical end in mind that I ventured to write this paper, and I
suggest the following as a few of these conclusions.

(I) We should not speak of the "Libido," in whatever sense this word is
taken, as if it were a fixed quantity, like so much heat, or so much fluid,
that is, as representing so much mesaurable force. One current notion which
has played a very useful part in psychoanalytic work, yet is misleading in
its tendency, is that the "Libido" may be likened to a river which if it
cannot find an outlet through its normal channel is bound to overflow its
banks and perhaps furrow out a new path. This conception is based on this
same law of the conservation of energy to which reference has been made.
If, however, I am right in my contention that the "Libido" is only one
manifestation of an energy,-- greater than simply "vital,"--which can be
studied to the best purpose only among men whose powers have been cultivated
to the best advantage, then it will be seen that this conception of "Libido"
as a force of definite amount is not justifiable by the facts.

One does not find that love or reason is subject to this quantitative law.
On the contrary, the persons whom most of us recognize as of the highest
type do not love any given individual less because their love takes in
another. The bond of love holds not only three, but an indefinite number.

The same statement may be made with regard to reason and to will. The power
and quantity of them are not exhausted but are increased by use.

I maintain, then, that although the "Libido," in so far as it is regarded as
an instinct, does not stand on the same footing with the reason and
disinterested love of a person of high cultivation and large views, neither
does it stand on the same footing with the physical energy that manifests
itself in light and heat and gravitation.

When we come to deal with man and any of his attributes, or as we find them
at any age, we ought to look upon him, in my estimation, as animated in some
measure by his self-foreshadowing best. And whether it is dreams with which
we have to do, or neurotic conflicts, or wilfulness, or regression, we shall
learn to see, more and more, as we become accustomed to look for evidences
thereof, the signs of this sort of promise, just as we might hope to learn
to find, more and more, through the inspection of a lot of seeds of
different plants, the evidences which would enable us to see the different
outcomes which each one is destined to achieve, even though, at first, they
all looked just alike.

(2) The next point has reference to "sublimation." This outcome of
individual evolution, as defined by Freud, has a strictly social, not an
ethical, meaning. Jung also, in the interesting paper referred to, in his
description of the rational aims of psychoanalysis, makes sublimation
(though he does not there use the word) the equivalent of a subjective sense
of well being, combined with the maximum of biologic effectiveness.

"Die Psychoanalyse soll eine biologische Methode sein, welche das hoechste
subjektive Wohlbefinden mit der wertwollsten biologischen Leistung zu
vereinigen sucht."

But in my opinion, while it may be true that the psychoanalyst may often
have reason to be thankful if he can claim a therapeutic outcome of this
sort, the logical goal of a psychoanalytic treatment is not covered by the
securing of a relative freedom from subjective distress, even when combined
with the satisfactory fulfillment of one's biologic mission. A man has
higher destinies than this, and the sense of incompleteness felt by the
neurotic patient, which was emphasized by Janet and is recognized by us all,
must be more or less painfully felt by every man whose conscience does not
assure him that he is really working for an end greater than that here
specified. The logical end of a psychoanalytic treatment is the recovery of
a full sense of one's highest destiny and origin and of the bearings and
meanings of one's life.

On similar grounds I think that the conflicts to which all men find
themselves subjected, must be considered, in the last analysis, as conflicts
of an ethical description. For it is only in ethical terms that one can
define one's relation to the universe regarded as a whole, just as it is
only in ethical terms that a man could describe his sense of obligation to
support the dignity of fine family traditions or the ideals represented by a
team or a social group of which he felt reason to be proud. I realize that a
man's sense of pride of his family, his team, or his country may be a
symptom of narcistic self-adulation; but like all such signs and
symbols--the symbol of the church tower, for example--this is a case where
two opposing meanings meet.

Every act and motive of our lives, from infancy to age, is controlled by two
sets of influences, the general nature of which has here been made
sufficiently clear. They correspond on the one hand, to the numerous partial
motives which psychoanalysis studies to great advantage, and on the other
hand, to the ethical motives which are only thoroughly studied by
philosophy.

(3) Another conclusion, which seems to me practically of great importance,
follows from this same view. Every one who has studied carefully the life
histories of patients, especially of children, and has endeavored in so
doing to follow step by step the experiences through which they reach the
various mile-stones on their journey, must have been astonished to observe
the evidences of PREPAREDNESS on their part for each new step in this long
journey. Human beings seem predestined, as it were, not only in a physical
but in a mental sense, for what is coming, and the indications of this in
the mental field are greater than the conditions of organic evolution could
readily account for. The transcendency of the mind over the brain shows
itself here as elsewhere.

We are told that our visions of the unpicturable, the ideal world, which our
imagination paints and which our logical reasoning calls for as the
necessary cap or final corollary to any finite world which our intelligence
can actually define,-- that such visions are nothing but the pictures of
infantile desires projected on to a great screen and made to mock us with
the appearance of reality.

I have nothing whatever to say against the value of the evidence that a
portion of our visions are of this origin. In fact, I believe this as
heartily as does any one. But I desire strenuously to oppose the view
tacitly implied in the statement of the projection theory just cited, the
acceptance of which as an exclusive doctrine would involve the virtual
rejection of our right, as scientific men, to rely on the principle that the
evidence afforded by logical presuppositions and logical inference is as
cogent as that furnished through observation.

It is, in my opinion, just because we all belong to a world which is in
outline not "in the making" but completed,--because, in short, we are in one
sense like heirs returning to our estates,--that this remarkable
preparedness of each child is found that impresses us so strongly. The
universe is, in a sense, ours by prescriptive right and by virtue of the
constitution of our minds. But the unity of such a universe must, of
course, be of a sort that includes and indeed implies diversity and conflict
as essential elements of its nature.

Psychoanalysts should not make light of inferential forms of reasoning, for
it is on this form of reasoning that the value of their own conclusions
largely rests. We infer contrary meanings for words that are used
ostensibly in one sense, and we infer special conflicts in infancy of which
we have but little evidence at hand, and cravings and passions of which it
may be impossible to find more than a few traces by way of direct testimony.

Our immediate environment and the world that surrounds us in that sense,
appear to our observation, indeed, as "in the making." But besides the power
of observation which enables, and indeed forces us to see the imperfection
in this environmental world, we possess, or are possessed by, a mental
constitution which compels us, with still greater force, to the belief in a
goal of positive perfection of which our nearer goals are nothing but the
shadow.

It is because I believe in the necessity of such reasoning as this that I am
not prepared to accept the "Lust-Unlust" principle (that is, to use
philosophical terms, the "hedonistic" principle) as representing the forces
by which even the child is finally animated. Men do not reach their best
accomplishments, if indeed they reach any accomplishment, through the
exclusive recognition, either unconscious or instinctive, of a utilitarian
result, or a result which can be couched in terms of pleasure or personal
satisfaction as the goal of effort. They may state the goal to themselves in
these terms; but this is, then, the statement of what is really a fictitious
principle, a principle in positing which the patient does but justify
himself and does not define his real motive. Utilitarianism and hedonism
and the pleasure-pain principle, useful though they are, are alike imperfect
in that they refer to partial motives, partial forms of self-expression;
whereas that which finally moves men to their best accomplishments and makes
them dissatisfied with anything less than this, is the necessity rather than
the desire to take complete self-expression as their final aim. The partial
motives are more or less traceable as if by observation. The larger motives
must be felt and reached through inferential reasoning, based on observation
of ourselves through careful introspection.

Finally, the practical, therapeutic question arises, as to what measures the
psychoanalyst is justified in taking to bring about the best sort of outcome
in a given case?

It is widely felt that the psychoanalyst would weaken his own hold on the
strong typically analytic principles through which painful conflicts are to
be removed if he should form the habit of dealing with ethical issues, and
talking of "duties", instead of stimulating his patients to the discovery of
resistances and repressions, even of repression the origin of which is not
to be found within the conscious life. Yet,--parallel, as one might say,
with this clear-cut standard of professional psychoanalytic obligation, the
force of which I recognize,--it has to be admitted that there are certain
fairly definite limitations to the usefulness of psychoanalysis. As one of
these limitations, well-pronounced symptoms of egoism, taking the form of
narcissism, are to be reckoned. These symptoms are not easily analyzed away.
But if one asks oneself, or asks one's patients, what conditions might, if
they had been present from the outset, have prevented this narcistic outcome
(Jehovah type, etc.), the influence that suggests itself--looming up in
large shape--is just this broad sense of ethical obligation to which
repeated reference has here been made. If these patients could have had it
brought home to them in childhood that they belonged, not to themselves
conceived of narrowly (that is, as separate individuals) but only to
themselves conceived of broadly as representatives of a series of
communities taken in the largest sense, the outcome that happened might
perhaps have been averted.

And what might have happened may still happen. What is to be done? Each
physician must decide this for himself. He should be able both to do his
best as a psychoanalyst and at the same time help the patient to free
himself from that sort of repression in consequence of which he is unable to
see his own best possibilities. But he cannot do this unless he has trained
himself to see and feel in himself the outlines of this vision any more than
he could help the patient to rid himself of an infantile complex if he did
not appreciate what this complex means. We must trust ourselves, as
physicians, with deadly weapons, and with deadly responsibilities, and we
ought to be well harried by our consciences if we should do injustice, in
using them, either to our scientific or our philosophic training.

ASPECTS OF DREAM LIFE[*]

[*] It should be stated as possibly bearing on the interpretation of the
dreams recorded by the author, who is well known to me, that she is the
subject of an intense and unusual obsession of hatred of an obtrusively
pathological character against a relative. The psycho-pathology of the
obsession, of which I have an intimate knowledge, has not been determined.
A reasonable interpretation is that the main etiological factor is jealousy.
She has undergone prolonged psychoanalytic treatment by a skilled
psycho-analyst without improvement of the obsession and without revealing a
satisfactory explanation of its pathology. To what extent the contents of
the dreams have been determined or coloured by culture acquired by this
treatment and by the study of Freudian doctrines is also a question
deserving of consideration.--Editor.

The Contribution of a Woman

IT is an easy matter to accept upon authority a given scientific theory and
bring to its support certain selected evidence, but quite another to
carefully observe and report phenomena, inspired, influenced and guided
indeed by the scientific-theory but drawing conclusions no wider or deeper
than individual insight warrants. Scientific knowledge advances not by ready
acceptance of theories but by original observation and experiment and the
following study of dreams is offered as fulfilling in some degree the latter
requirement. While there is a certain familiarity on the part of the writer
with the general theory advanced by Freud and with his principles of
interpretation, there is no acquaintance at first hand with his Die
Traumdeutung, the reading of which has been postponed lest there be excess
of influence.

No apology is offered for this invasion of the domain of psychology by a
layman. The laboratory of the mind is open to all and he who has missed
conventional training may yet chance upon valuable facts and their
interpretation. Neither is apology offered for the intimate nature of the
data reported. Belonging as dreams do to the most personal and private life
of the individual it is nevertheless true that continued and careful study
of this form of mentation insensibly alters one's attitude so that at length
the dream appears as a fact of nature, impersonal and objective.

It is a common remark that if one tells his dreams their number will
increase but this increase is probably only apparent. With attention the
products of the dream-self become more accessible until one who is practiced
in introspection can raise the number of his remembered dreams from one in
two or three nights to five, ten, or even fourteen in a single night. Even
at this maximum of remembrance one feels that but a fraction of the mind's
nocturnal activity is recalled. Images emerge in consciousness and fall back
into obscurity before the waking thought can grasp them. Or it may be more
accurate to say that upon awakening consciousness rises from level to level.
It sometimes happens that when first awake I recall several dreams which
vanish utterly as a sudden shifting of consciousness occurs. Then, upon this
new level, a new set of dreams appears. There is reason to believe that in
thinking again of a dream which has once been recalled it is not the
original dream experience which comes to mind but the copy made in the
waking consciousness when it first emerged. On the other hand visions
recognized as dreams belonging to a long past time occasionally float into
the mind giving rise to the suspicion that they have not before reached the
waking consciousness. It is possible that all dreams are recorded in the
depths of the mind, themselves influencing and merging with later dreams.

The number of my dreams recalled and written out during three years closely
approaches five thousand and without doubt the total number far exceeds
this. I am inclined to the belief that constantly, by day as well as by
night, we are dreaming; that unnoticed and independent trains of thought are
carried on. At times when resting if I fall into an abstracted state--not
of set purpose--I find myself in the midst of a stream of thought appearing,
for the moment, perfectly natural, familiar and intelligible, as if I knew
the beginning and end of the matter. But only for a moment will
consciousness remain at this lower level. There is a sudden return to the
normal plane, the passage fades from memory and I wonder what on earth it
was all about. These phases of subconscious activity differ from dreams
proper in the absence of visual images. The ideas are embodied in words,
heard with the mind one might say. The source may be the same as that of the
night visions but it is evident that during the day the incessant
stimulation of the eye from without leaves no opportunity for the emergence
of the secondary visual images pertaining to subconscious ideas, which, we
are told by Dr. Morton Prince, furnish the perceptual elements of the dream.
The other senses are sometimes represented. Often we are performing, or
trying to perform, some action. But dreams are predominantly visual. Goethe
has said, "I believe men only dream that they may not cease to see."

An account of the probable genesis of the memory images not only furnishes a
clue to the mechanism of dreaming but to the underlying conditions as well.
The lowest forms of life possess no image-forming power. They have no sense
organs; sensation is diffused over the entire form and undifferentiated.
Gradually, as the scale of life is ascended, certain parts of the organisms
become specially sensitive to certain stimuli and eventually individual
organs give separate and distinct reports of phenomena. A substance
hitherto merely felt, is seen, heard, smelled, tasted. The passage from
sensation to perception occurs when but one or two of the sense organs are
stimulated by an object, yet, because of nervous connections established
during former more close and complete experience of the object the remaining
sense organs are faintly roused, sending into consciousness copies of former
sensations. Thus the whole is present to mind while but a part to sense. In
the developing brain the store of memory images of various kinds would
rapidly increase and these images would come at length to have a more or
less independent existence. It is probable that the next step in the making
of mind was the synthesis of one set of sense impressions to form an idea of
the object, the first abstraction, and thenceforth a sensation gave rise to
an idea. There is at this stage no impulse to explain sensations, but
involuntarily, from the store of memory images, and from the reservoir of
ideas above, emerges a representation of the exciting object. If this is one
to which the organism is accustomed the resulting complex in the highest
nerve centers fits the subject, but as evolution proceeds and environment
and capacity for sensation grow more complex, new stimulations occur. In the
absence of the capacity for knowledge and understanding of the object the
developing mind, true to its law, brings forward mental images most nearly
related--those which fit in one or two respects,--and thus we have the birth
of analogy, "the inference of a further degree of resemblance from an
observed degree of resemblance."

To look at one's self is a late endowment. The kitten pursues its own tail
but would chase that of its mother with equal ardor. I once saw a monkey
searching industriously with eyes and hands upon its own body. The sight
was startling. I had never before seen an animal look intelligently at
itself. It was long before man distinguished his self from the world
without, and longer still before he began to understand himself. Physical
and mental phenomena, pain and pleasure, could not be tracked to their
sources and so came to be expressed in terms of the world of nature, and for
a reason precisely similar that portion of the self functioning in sleep
makes use of symbolism. Occasionally the higher thought centers are involved
but the typical dream is the product of a restricted, primitive self,
lacking the resources of the complete personality and limited in power of
expression. In dreams we are deficient in self-consciousness because it is
only a partial self that dreams. Our wishes are rarely given clear and
definite expression for the reason that the section of the mind then active
is incapable of clear, definite and adequate concepts. Symbolism and
reasoning by analogy are the resources of the mind until the power of
knowledge dawns.

Predicating then a dream-self by its nature largely restricted to the use of
symbolism and having at its disposal a vast store of images endlessly
susceptible to influences which combine and alter their form, we reach the
crucial question, what initiates the dream? This is by no means a mere
purposeless thronging of visual images as occasionally happens in the period
preceding sleep when faces, forms and scenes flit aimlessly before the
mind's eye, some bare replicas of stimulations of the eye from without,
others the attendant visual images of past thoughts and experiences and
their distorted combination. Somewhat closer to actual dreaming is the rise
of images accompanying present bodily and mental states. I sometimes see a
body in the posture my own body has that moment assumed and one night, when
recalling a passage from Wilhelm Meister, I saw a young man seated
bareheaded on a doorstep, plainly a picture of Wilhelm at Marianna's
threshold. In the last example we come definitely upon a vision induced from
within, an idea working downward upon the visual centers. Still nearer
dreams, indeed if occurring in sleep they would be classed with them, are
the purely imaginative pictures whose cause is as mysterious as that of the
actual dream. Fire in the wall near the pantry door, a garden with a woman
rising from a clump of bushes, high, rocky mountain tops, a perpendicular
wall of rock and against it a man on a ladder reaching for a flower, a long
vista ending with a pillared temple on a hill,--these are a few of my
visions before sleep. But to return,--why the dream? Are all or most dreams
sexual? Can we say with Freud that they express the fulfillment of repressed
desires?

It is not my purpose to attempt a complete answer to this question as I am
far from understanding even the majority of my own dreams. Broadly speaking
I should say that considering the amount and complexity of the material on
hand which the mind may use and the probable inconceivable number of dreams
it is unlikely that all are concerned with this matter. This question may
well be allowed to rest for the present. But certain convictions have arisen
in my mind as the result of the study of hundreds of personal dreams,
convictions which do not rest upon the arbitrary interpretation of accepted
symbolism, though I am far from questioning the validity of this procedure.
I venture little beyond the region illuminated by individual insight though
examples are cited far exceeding my power of interpretation.

The sexual theory of dreams has by some authorities been characterized as
greatly over-emphasized, as failing to take account of other factors and
interests of human personality. To those critics let me present the matter
briefly and simply. The very fact of a person's being alive today
presupposes an ancestry stretching backward through uncounted ages, an
ancestry whose chief function, up to very recent times, was sexual and
reproductive. Modern interests, business, social, intellectual, religious,
artistic and philanthropic, which today loom so large, are a recent
innovation, occupying in comparison with the period when they were not but a
moment of time. In a vertical section of man--both racial and individual,
they are seen to constitute but a superficial layer, from a contemporary
standpoint predominant and paramount but in the light of the ages secondary
and unstable. Biologically a woman is only an agent for the reproduction of
her kind; more than this, with mind, all save the conscious, socially and
ethically restricted sections, set toward the same end and toward the means
for its accomplishment. There is no gainsaying this fact and in my dreams
which yielded to analysis it stands paramount. I am inclined to disregard
the theory of a "censor" for the reason that after I had admitted to my
thought and frankly considered certain facts, by a thousand devious hints,
by a thousand subterfuges, my subconsciousness continued to express these
same facts by means of obscure symbolism. As the savage seizes upon one link
in a chain of events expecting thereby to repossess the whole, as the native
of Borneo makes a wax figure of his enemy in the belief that as the image
melts, the enemy's body will waste away, as the women of Sumatra when sowing
rice let the hair hang loose down their backs in order that the rice may
grow luxuriantly and have long stalks, so this woman, this under-self,
ignorant of the true law of cause and effect, and unable to form definite
concepts, instinctively selects from the innumerable memories and visual
images at her disposal those having relation to her unfulfilled function and
forms a picture or weaves a tale, expecting through the performance of some
remotely associated act the complete result.

To the events of an hour or so, supremely significant from a biological
standpoint, are related a very large number of my dreams. Again and again
events of that day and of the preceding days form the basis of dreams;
trivial circumstances are revived one by one and fragments of the experience
itself are seized, distorted and each woven into what I can no longer term
"the baseless fabric of a vision." For instance the day preceding I broke
my umbrella and found a shop where it was mended. In dream after dream
appears that broken umbrella under various circumstances and when I ask the
reason for its apparent importance I can not escape the conclusion that the
article in question stands for a period of time, a series of events, in
which the dream-self would again be placed. Apparently on that road
opportunity lay in waiting, therefore by any means at her disposal must that
path be regained. Involuntarily the language of metaphor is assumed in
attempting to describe a process so far removed from actual knowledge. Still
are we driven to avail ourselves of the expedient of primitive man.

Of the dreams presently to be cited only a part fall within the category of
analogical reasoning. In none of the examples is a complete analysis
attempted. The mind of each reader may carry the solution of the problem as
far as it will. I am content merely to furnish a clue. That each dream is
of great significance must not be assumed. But that each one, even though it
appear a mere fanciful reverie, means SOMETHING can hardly be doubted. At
the outset it is acknowledged that the dreams recorded followed a period of
intense emotion when, through the exigencies of life the strongest instinct
of humanity required control and repression. Further the writer is a
musician and a botanist, and especially interested in biological and social
problems. Study of the latter subjects was continued throughout the period
in question. It must be confessed also that though loth to accept the
sexual theory of dreams, once convinced of its at least partial truth I was
on the watch for confirmation. I expected sexual symbolism. On the other
hand each dream was absolutely spontaneous, an utter surprise, having no
slightest likeness to any creation of my waking mind and seeming to rise
from a region so remote as to be not myself. It should be noted also that
the greater number of the nearly five thousand remembered dreams, all but
very few in fact, would have remained in the limbo of the unconscious but
for the persistent and trained effort which rescued them from oblivion.
Neither by, nor apparently for my waking self were they formed.

Each individual mind, besides sharing in the symbolism common to mankind,
has doubtless its own particular and special forms. For instance during the
period covered by my study no less than ninety different varieties of plant
life figured in my dreams, not including indefinite ferns, moss, grass,
weeds and trees, and several plants noted somewhat in detail yet unlike any
form known to me. Of the recognizable plants a number were used somewhat
cleverly for their analogical significance. Of these may be mentioned the
snowball and hydrangea whose flowers as every botanist knows are sterile,
the size of the individual blossom being gained at the expense of loss of
stamens and pistils. These plants were plainly used to indicate barrenness
and the predominance of traits other than sexual. The keen critic will here
interpose an objection. How is the primitive, unreasoning dream-self able
to make use of symbolism whose import is known only to higher and developed
states of mind? The force of the objection is granted and without attempting
fully to answer it I will say that the likeness of the primitive mind of the
race to that surviving in the highly evolved individual is only partial.
Like tendencies exist but the influence of a great body of knowledge above
inevitably alters the action of the latter. Maidenhair fern stood
indubitably in several instances for the pubic hair, once surrounding a
cluster of trailing arbutus when talcum powder of that fragrance had been
used on the body. I dreamed of Linnaea borealis, the little twin-flower, in
connection with a woman who a few days before when told of the birth of
twins to a friend, said, "That is the way to have them come." Lettuce, for
its milky juice obviously, appeared in two bunches on the front of the waist
of a woman into whose house I had broken by leaning against a screen door,
and a lawn bordered by cowslips, our common name for Caltha palustris,
certainly represented a certain lawn that a friend told me had been kept
mown by the cows feeding upon it when driven from pasture.

In each of the above instances the floral symbolism was part of an elaborate
dream having wider significance leaving no doubt as to the accuracy of my
conclusions. A particularly interesting and devious use of flowers occurs
in the following dream--I am in front of a certain house over which, in the
dream, is growing a vine having white, star-like, fragrant blossoms. I want
one flower and the woman living there says I may have it. The name of the
vine seems to be "Dyak." There is no plant having that name but a few
months before I was reading of the Dyak girls of Borneo who "are very
careful of their clothing, and often very vain, but when they are married
they frequently become exceedingly untidy." I quoted the passage in an
article thus fixing it in my mind. The link with the dream consists in the
fact that the woman living in the vine-decorated house is, in reality,
notoriously untidy. Her two daughters as they approached womanhood greatly
improved in the daintiness of their garb, and one had become pregnant--
outside marriage. Another dream:--I see a friend, by name Anna, stoop and
pull from the ground a tiny lily-of-the-valley plant. It has no roots. I
say, "What a pity." This dream had no meaning until into my mind came the
thought of another Anna, a young girl who was led astray and who, I had just
been told, had taken medicine to terminate her pregnancy. When I learned of
this I had thought of the loss of the incipient life. The same night I
dreamed of going upstairs in a shed or barn. At the top of the stairs
something--a door--is in the way. I go by it. A child is there. Again:--I
am crossing a level field and come upon little star-like flowers which I try
to analyse. I find many with pistils but no stamens,--the pollen bearing
organs which effect fertilization. I wonder if they will keep fresh until I
reach home. Once more:--I approach a city. I see woods and two gardens,
either flower or vegetable, from which comes music. On a mound wild flowers
are growing, some white, some small and dark. I gather them. Then very
remote and vague,--my brother is there. I see a long snake which my brother
puts on(?) and covers my flowers. Still another vision was of a branch of
beautiful; fragrant apple blossoms growing through the wall of a room. Some
of the flowers were pistillate, some staminate,--a condition false to nature
as regards the apple.

A dream, which in common with many others, seems not the fulfillment of a
wish but the symbolical expression of a bodily and mental state, is the
following:--After a day of very great physical restlessness I dream that I
am walking in a path by a river. I can not see the water for the
over-hanging trees beneath whose branches grow quantities of Impatiens
fulva, the spotted touch-me-not,--named from the sudden bursting of the pod
when touched. The plant in question I had not seen for some time and the
fitness of the symbolism to the bodily state was too close to be accidental.
After a walk in the spring when the ground was white with the cotton-tufted
seeds of the poplar and I thought if all germinated how overwhelmed we
should be with poplars, I dream that I am sweeping a floor upon which cotton
is scattered, some of which flies and is caught in my hair. I dream of
walking under pine trees whose pollen falls on me, and finally--though
examples of the significant use of plants are by no means exhausted--I have
upon awakening the vision of a pine tree growing from my nose. This strange
anomaly becomes intelligible when I recall that a friend told me that the
pores of her nose were enlarged, and I said mine were also; we had been
talking of a quotation from Emerson relating to nature's fecundity; my
friend was soon to be married; and a line from Emerson often in my thought
is that in regard to pines "throwing out pollen for the benefit of the next
century."

For a musician to dream of playing, or of trying to play, upon an organ or
piano is apparently the most natural thing in the world and an attempt at
interpretation is, to uninstructed common sense, a journey far afield. Yet
the strange and striking variations introduced and the hindrances to my
accomplishment of the act invest the dream with marked significance. For
instance:--It is after church service and I want to play upon the pipe
organ. I find my music. The stool is a kettle of water with a board over
it. A stream of water comes from the organ. There is a horse near which
kicks or bites me. Again:--I play on the piano to a friend who is a German
scholar the opening theme of the Tristan and Isolde Prelude. My friend
tells me the pronunciation of the title of the opera and it sounds to me
like Froebel. That the name of the world-famous music drama, the apotheosis
of passion, should be transformed to that of the notable child educator is
nonsense or otherwise according to the observer's point of view. Another
dream:--Some children want me to play and I go to the piano and try to play
the Spring Song. But the piano stops sounding; only a few bass notes
respond. I dream that a table of sheet music is on fire. Sometimes the
music is too far away or too high for me to see: the notes are flowers, or
books, or animals, or "hanging objects," or queer figures; in the book from
which I play are pictures of the sea, a ship, a person, and birds--sea
gulls, among them. The bed becomes an organ upon which I try to play. I
begin to play the Witches' Dance and there are not enough keys to the piano.
Again the keys are covered by a cloth or there are no keys. An organ behind
me is played and I see no organist, or I move the pedals of an organ and
music begins before the instrument is open. I try to play and the stops are
wrong. Often I search frantically for the hymn given out by the minister
and can not find it. Once I picked flowers in its place, drooping racemes of
sweet alyssum, which I gave to a woman. Oddest of all on the keys of a
piano I see a small boy who salutes me. Lastly, I play for children to
sing. At the top of the page of music are whole notes--easy to play; below
there are whole notes in groups of two, joined like confluent living cells.

There are several examples of punning to record--not brilliant, even
somewhat vulgar yet interesting as exhibiting varieties of mental action. I
dream that I am at a barn yard trying to hold the gate shut. In the yard are
two men, each with an animal, a kid, one light, one dark. The light kid is
unmanageable, pawing and shaking its head. Some days elapsed before the
interpretation dawned upon me but once noted could not be doubted. Several
weeks previously I had a business engagement and of two pairs of
gloves--kids--I hesitated which to wear. I was to do some writing
necessitating their removal and as one fastening of a light glove was
difficult I fixed upon the dark pair, as to ask help would under the
circumstances, have proved exceedingly embarrassing.

A friend had informed me of her approaching marriage. I dream of eating at
a table with her. I take meat but she wants me to do she does. So I return

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