30154	----	Copyright 2002, 2009 by Lidija Rangelovska Please see the Rich Text File (RTF) for the content of this eBook. 
32126	----	Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Freudian Slip By FRANKLIN ABEL Illustrated by HARRINGTON Things are exactly what they seem? Life is real? Life is earnest? Well, that depends. * * * * * On the day the Earth vanished, Herman Raye was earnestly fishing for trout, hip-deep in a mountain stream in upstate New York. Herman was a tall, serious, sensitive, healthy, well-muscled young man with an outsize jaw and a brush of red-brown hair. He wore spectacles to correct a slight hyperopia, and they had heavy black rims because he knew his patients expected it. In his off hours, he was fond of books with titles like _Personality and the Behavior Disorders_, _Self-esteem and Sexuality in Women_, _Juvenile Totem and Taboo: A study of adolescent culture-groups_, and _A New Theory of Economic Cycles_; but he also liked baseball, beer and bebop. This day, the last of Herman's vacation, was a perfect specimen: sunny and still, the sky dotted with antiseptic tufts of cloud. The trout were biting. Herman had two in his creel, and was casting into the shallow pool across the stream in the confident hope of getting another, when the Universe gave one horrible sliding lurch. Herman braced himself instinctively, shock pounding through his body, and looked down at the pebbly stream-bed under his feet. It wasn't there. He was standing, to all appearances, in three feet of clear water with sheer, black nothing under it: nothing, the abysmal color of a moonless night, pierced by the diamond points of a half-dozen incredible stars. He had only that single glimpse; then he found himself gazing across at the pool under the far bank, whose waters reflected the tranquil imagery of trees. He raised his casting rod, swung it back over his shoulder, brought it forward again with a practiced flick of his wrist, and watched the lure drop. Within the range of his vision now, everything was entirely normal; nevertheless, Herman wanted very much to stop fishing and look down to see if that horrifying void was still there. He couldn't do it. Doggedly, he tried again and again. The result was always the same. It was exactly as if he were a man who had made up his mind to fling himself over a cliff, or break a window and snatch a loaf of bread, or say in a loud voice to an important person at a party, "I think you stink." Determination was followed by effort, by ghastly, sweating, heart-stopping fear, by relief as he gave up and did something else. _All right_, he thought finally, _there's no point going on with it_. _Data established: hallucination, compulsion, inhibition._ _Where do we go from here?_ The obvious first hypothesis was that he was insane. Herman considered that briefly, and left the question open. Three or four selected psychoanalyst jokes paraded through his mind, led by the classic, "You're fine, how am I?" There was this much truth, he thought, in the popular belief that all analysts were a little cracked themselves: a good proportion of the people who get all the way through the man-killing course that makes an orthodox analyst--a course in which an M.D. degree is only a beginning--are impelled to do so in the first place by a consuming interest in their own neuroses. Herman, for example, from the age of fifteen up until the completion of his own analysis at twenty-six, had been so claustrophobic that he couldn't force himself into a subway car or an elevator. But was he now insane? Can a foot-rule measure itself? Herman finished. At an appropriate hour he waded ashore, cleaned his catch, cooked it and ate it. Where the ground had been bare around his cooking spot, he saw empty darkness, star-studded, rimmed by a tangled webwork of bare rootlets. He tried to go on looking at it when he had finished eating the fish. He couldn't. After the meal, he tried to take out his notebook and pen. He couldn't. In fact, it occurred to him, _he was helpless to do anything that he wouldn't normally have done_. Pondering that discovery, after he had cleaned his utensils and finished his other chores, Herman crawled into his tent and went to sleep. Burying the garbage had been an unsettling experience. Like a lunatic building a machine nobody else can see, he had lifted successive shovels-full of nothing, dropped the empty cans and rubbish ten inches into nothing, and shoveled nothing carefully over them again.... * * * * * The light woke him, long before dawn. From where he lay on his back, he could see an incredible pale radiance streaming upward all around him, outlining the shadow of his body at the ridge of the tent, picking out the under-surfaces of the trees against the night sky. He strained, until he was weak and dizzy, to roll over so that he could see its source; but he had to give up and wait another ten minutes until his body turned "naturally," just as if he had still been asleep. Then he was looking straight down into a milky transparency that started under his nose and continued into unguessable depths. First came the matted clumps of grass, black against the light, every blade and root as clear as if they had been set in transparent plastic. Then longer, writhing roots of trees and shrubs, sprouting thickets of hair-thin rootlets. Between these, and continuing downward level by level, was spread an infinity of tiny specks, seed-shapes, spores. Some of them moved, Herman realized with a shock. Insects burrowing in the emptiness where the Earth should be? In the morning, when he crawled out of the tent and went to the bottomless stream to wash, he noticed something he had missed the day before. The network of grasses gave springily under his feet--not like turf, but like stretched rubber. Herman conceived an instant dislike for walking, especially when he had to cross bare ground, because when that happened, he felt exactly what he saw: nothing whatever underfoot. "Walking on air," he realized, was not as pleasant an experience as the popular songs would lead you to expect. Herman shaved, cooked and ate breakfast, washed the dishes, did the chores, and packed up his belongings. With a mighty effort, he pried out the tent stakes, which were bedded in nothing but a loose network of roots. He shouldered the load and carried it a quarter of a mile through pine woods to his car. The car stood at ground level, but the ground was not there any more. The road was now nothing more than a long, irregular trough formed by the spreading roots of the pines on either side. Shuddering, Herman stowed his gear in the trunk and got in behind the wheel. When he put the motor into gear, the sedan moved sedately and normally forward. But the motor raced madly, and there was no feeling that it was taking hold. With screaming engine, Herman drove homeward over a nonexistent road. Inwardly and silently, he gibbered. Six miles down the mountain, he pulled up beside a white-painted fence enclosing a neat yard and a fussy little blue-shuttered house. On the opposite side of the fence stood a middle-aged woman with a floppy hat awry on her head and a gardening trowel in one of her gloved hands. She looked up with an air of vague dismay when he got out of the car. "Some more eggs today, Dr. Raye?" she asked, and smiled. The smile was like painted china. Her eyes, lost in her fleshy face, were clearly trying not to look downward. "Not today, Mrs. Richards," Herman said. "I just stopped to say good-by. I'm on my way home." "Isn't that a shame?" she said mechanically. "Well, come again next year." Herman wanted to say, "Next year I'll probably be in a strait-jacket." He tried to say it. He stuttered, "N-n-n-n--" and ended, glancing at the ground at her feet, "Transplanting some petunias?" The woman's mouth worked. She said, "Yes. I thought I might's well put them along here, where they'd get more sun. Aren't they pretty?" "Very pretty," said Herman helplessly. The petunias, roots as naked as if they had been scrubbed, were nesting in a bed of stars. Mrs. Richards' gloves and trowel were spotlessly clean. * * * * * On Fourth Avenue, below Fourteenth Street, Herman met two frightful little men. He had expected the city to be better, but it was worse; it was a nightmare. The avenues between the buildings were bottomless troughs of darkness. The bedrock was gone; the concrete was gone; the asphalt was gone. The buildings themselves were hardly recognizable unless you knew what they were. New York had been a city of stone--built on stone, built of stone, as cold as stone. Uptown, the city looked half-built, but insanely occupied, a forest of orange-painted girders. In the Village the old brick houses were worse. No brick; no mortar; nothing but the grotesque shells of rooms in lath and a paper-thickness of paint. The wrought-iron railings were gone, too. On Fourth Avenue, bookseller's row, you could almost persuade yourself that nothing had happened, provided you did not look down. The buildings had been made of wood, and wood they remained. The second-hand books in their wooden racks would have been comforting except that they were so clean. There was not a spot of dirt anywhere; the air was more than country-pure. There was an insane selective principle at work here, Herman realized. Everything from bedrock to loam that belonged to the Earth itself had disappeared. So had everything that had a mineral origin and been changed by refinement and mixture: concrete, wrought iron, brick, but steel and glass, porcelain and paint remained. It looked as if the planet had been the joint property of two children, one of whom didn't want to play any more, so they had split up their possessions--this is yours, this is yours, this is _mine_.... The two little men popped into view not six feet in front of Herman as he was passing a sidewalk bookstall. Both were dressed in what looked like workmen's overalls made of lucite chain-mail, or knitted glow-worms. One of them had four eyes, two brown, two blue, with spectacles for the middle pair. Ears grew like cabbages all over his bald head. The other had two eyes, the pupils of which were cross-shaped, and no other discernible features except when he opened his gap-toothed mouth: the rest of his head, face and all, was completely covered by a dense forest of red hair. As they came forward, Herman's control of his body suddenly returned. He was trying his best to turn around and go away from there, and that was what his body started to do. Moreover, certain sounds of a prayerful character, namely "Oh dear sweet Jesus," which Herman was forming in his mind, involuntarily issued from his lips. Before he had taken the first step in a rearward direction, however, the hairy little man curved around him in a blur of motion, barring the way with two long, muscular, red-furred arms. Herman turned. The four-eyed little man had closed in. Herman, gasping, backed up against the bookstall. People who were headed directly for them, although showing no recognition that Herman and the little men were there, moved stiffly aside like dancing automatons, strode past, then made another stiff sidewise motion to bring them back to the original line of march before they went on their way. "Olaph dzenn Härm Rai gjo glerr-dregnarr?" demanded Hairy. Herman gulped, half-stunned. "Huh?" he said. Hairy turned to Four-Eyes. "Grinnr alaz harisi nuya." "Izzred alph! Meggi erd-halaza riggbörd els kamma gredyik. Lukhhal!" Hairy turned back to Herman. Blinking his eyes rapidly, for they closed like the shutter of a camera, he made a placating gesture with both huge furry hands. "Kelagg ikri odrum faz," he said, and, reaching out to the bookstall, he plucked out a handful of volumes, fanned them like playing cards and displayed them to Four-Eyes. A heated discussion ensued, at the end of which Hairy kept _For Whom the Bell Tolls_, Four-Eyes took _The Blonde in the Bathtub_, and Hairy threw the rest away. Then, while Herman gaped and made retching sounds, the two disgusting little men tore pages out of the books and stuffed them in their mouths. When they finished the pages, they ate the bindings. Then there was a rather sick pause while they seemed to digest the contents of the books they had literally devoured. Herman had the wild thought that they were blurb writers whose jobs had gone to their heads. The one with the four eyes rolled three of them horribly. "That's more like it," he said in nasal but recognizable English. "Let's start over. Are you Herman Raye, the skull doc?" Herman produced a series of incoherent sounds. "My brother expresses himself crudely," said Hairy in a rich, fruity baritone. "Please forgive him. He is a man of much heart." "Uh?" said Herman. "Truly," said Hairy. "And of much ears," he added with a glance at his companion. "But again, as to this affair--tell me true, are you Herman Raye, the analyst of minds?" "Suppose I am?" Herman asked cautiously. Hairy turned to Four-eyes. "Arghraz iktri 'Suppose I am,' Gurh? Olaph iktri erz ogromat, lekh--" "Talk English, can't you?" Four-eyes broke in. "You know he don't understand that caveman jabber. Anyhow, yeah, yeah, it's him. He just don't want to say so." He reached out and took Herman by the collar. "Come on, boy, the boss is waitin'." There were two circular hair-lines of glowing crimson where Hairy and Four-eyes had originally appeared. They reached the spot in one jump, Hairy bringing up the rear. "But tell me truly," he said anxiously. "You _are_ that same Herman Raye?" Herman paid no attention. Below, under the two glowing circles, was the terrifying gulf that had replaced the Earth; and this time, Herman was somehow convinced, it was not going to hold him up. "Let go!" he shouted, struggling. "Ouch!" He had struck Four-eyes squarely on the flat nose, and it felt as if he had slugged an anvil. Paying no attention, Four-eyes turned Herman over, pinned his arms to his sides, and dropped him neatly through the larger of the two circles. Herman shut his eyes tightly and despairingly repeated the multiplication table up to 14 x 14. When he opened them again, he was apparently hanging in mid-space, with Hairy to his left and Four-eyes to his right. The visible globe around them was so curiously tinted and mottled that it took Herman a long time to puzzle it out. Ahead of them was the darkest area--the void he had seen before. This was oval in shape, and in places the stars shone through it clearly. In others, they were blocked off entirely or dimmed by a sort of haze. Surrounding this, and forming the rest of the sphere, was an area that shaded from gold shot with violet at the borders, to an unbearable blaze of glory at the center, back the way they had come and a little to the right. Within this lighted section were other amorphous areas which were much darker, almost opaque; and still others where the light shone through diluted to a ruddy ghost of itself, like candlelight through parchment. Gradually Herman realized that the shapes and colors he saw were the lighted and dark hemispheres of Earth. The dark areas were the oceans, deep enough in most places to shut out the light altogether, and those parts of the continents, North and South America behind him, Europe and Asia ahead, Africa down to the right, which were heavily forested. Herman's earlier conviction returned. Things like this just did not happen. _Physician, heal thyself!_ "You're not real," he said bitterly to Four-eyes. "Not very," Four-eyes agreed. "I'm twice as real as that jerk, though," he insisted, pointing to Hairy. Ahead of them, or "below," a point of orange light was slowly swelling. Herman watched it without much interest. Hairy broke out into a torrent of cursing. "I this and that in the milk of your this!" he said. "I this, that and the other in the this of your that. Your sister! Your cousin! Your grandmother's uncle!" Four-eyes listened with awed approval. "Them was good books, hah?" he asked happily. "Better than those scratchings in the caves," Hairy said. "Something to think about till they haul us out again. Well," said Four-eyes philosophically, "here we are." * * * * * The orange spot had enlarged into the semblance of a lighted room, rather like a stage setting. Inside were two enormous Persons, one sitting, one standing. Otherwise, and except for three upholstered chairs, the room was bare. No--as they swooped down toward it, Herman blinked and looked again. A leather couch had appeared against the far wall. At the last moment, there was a flicker of motion off to Herman's left. Something that looked like a short, pudgy human being accompanied by two little men the size of Hairy and Four-eyes whooshed off into the distance, back toward the surface of the planet. Herman landed. Hairy and Four-eyes, after bowing low to the standing Person, turned and leaped out of the room. When Herman, feeling abandoned, turned to see where they had gone, he discovered that the room now had four walls and no windows or doors. The Person said, "How do you do, Doctor Raye?" Herman looked at him. Although his figure had a disquieting tendency to quiver and flow, so that it was hard to judge, he seemed to be about eight feet tall. He was dressed in what would have seemed an ordinary dark-blue business suit, with an equally ordinary white shirt and blue tie, except that all three garments had the sheen of polished metal. His face was bony and severe, but not repellently so; he looked absent-minded rather than stern. The other Person, whose suit was brown, had a broad, kindly and rather stupid face; his hair was white. He sat quietly, not looking at Herman, or, apparently, at anything else. Herman sat down in one of the upholstered chairs. "All right," he said with helpless defiance. "What's it all about?" "I'm glad we can come to the point at once," said the Person. He paused, moving his lips silently. "Ah, excuse me. I'm sorry." A second head, with identical features, popped into view next to the first. His eyes were closed. "It's necessary, I'm afraid," said head number one apologetically. "I have so much to remember, you know." Herman took a deep breath and said nothing. "You may call me Secundus, if you like," resumed the Person, "and this gentleman Primus, since it is with him that you will have principally to deal. Now, our problem here is one of amnesia, and I will confess to you frankly that we ourselves are totally inadequate to cope with it. In theory, we are not subject to disorders of the mind, and that's what makes us so vulnerable now that it has happened. Do you see?" A fantastic suspicion crept into Herman's mind. "Just a moment," he said carefully. "If you don't mind telling me, what is it that you have to remember?" "Well, Doctor, my field is human beings; that's why it became my duty to search you out and consult with you. And there _is_ a great deal for me to carry in my mind, you know, especially under these abnormal conditions. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it is a full-time job." "Are you going to tell me," asked Herman, more carefully still, "that this--gentleman--is the one who is supposed to remember the Earth itself? The rocks and minerals and so on?" "Yes, exactly. I was about to tell you--" "And that the planet has disappeared because he has amnesia?" Herman demanded on a rising note. Secundus beamed. "Concisely expressed. I myself, being, so to speak, saturated with the thoughts and habits of human beings, who are, you must admit, a garrulous race, could not--" "Oh, no!" said Herman. "Oh, yes," Secundus corrected. "I can understand that the idea is difficult for you to accept, since you naturally believe that you yourself have a real existence, or, to be more precise, that you belong to the world of phenomena as opposed to that of noumena." He beamed. "Now I will be silent, a considerable task for me, and let you ask questions." Herman fought a successful battle with his impulse to stand Up and shout "To hell with it!" He had been through a great deal, but he was a serious and realistic young man. He set himself to think the problem through logically. If, as seemed more than probable, Secundus, Primus, Hairy, Four-eyes, and this whole Alice-in-Wonderland situation existed only as his hallucinations, then it did not matter much whether he took them seriously or not. If they were real, then he wasn't, and vice versa. It didn't make any difference which was which. He relaxed deliberately and folded his hands against his abdomen. "Let me see if I can get this clear," he said. "I'm a noumenon, not a phenomenon. In cruder terms, I exist only in your mind. Is that true?" Secundus beamed. "Correct." "If _you_ got amnesia, I and the rest of the human race would disappear." Secundus looked worried, "That is also correct, and if that should happen, you will readily understand that we _would_ be in difficulty. The situation is extremely--But pardon me. I had promised to be silent except when answering questions." "This is the part I fail to understand, Mr. Secundus. I gather that you brought me here to treat Mr. Primus. Now, if I exist as a thought in your mind, you necessarily know everything I know. Why don't you treat him yourself?" Secundus shook his head disapprovingly. "Oh, no, Dr. Raye, that is not the case at all. It cannot be said that I _know_ everything that you know; rather we should say that I _remember_ you. In other words, that I maintain your existence by an act of memory. The two functions, knowledge and memory, are not identical, although, of course, the second cannot be considered to exist without the first. But before we become entangled in our own terms, I should perhaps remind you that when I employ the word 'memory' I am only making use of a convenient approximation. Perhaps it would be helpful to say that my memory is comparable to the structure-memory of a living organism, although that, too, has certain semantic disadvantages. Were you about to make a remark, Doctor?" "It still seems to me," Herman said stubbornly, "that if you remember me, structurally or otherwise, that includes everything I remember. If you're going to tell me that you remember human knowledge, including Freudian theory and practice, but are unable to manipulate it, that seems to me to be contradicted by internal evidence in what you've already said. For example, it's clear that in the field of epistemology--the knowledge of knowledge, you might say--you have the knowledge _and_ manipulate it." "Ah," said Secundus, smiling shyly, "but, you see, that happens to be my line. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, being specializations, are not. As I mentioned previously, persons of our order are theoretically not capable of psychic deterioration. That is why we come to you, Dr. Raye. We are unable to help ourselves; we ask your help. We place ourselves unreservedly in your hands." The question, "How was I chosen?" occurred to Herman, but he left it unasked. He knew that the answer was much likelier to be, "At random," than, "Because we wanted the most brilliant and talented psychoanalyst on the planet." "I gather that I'm not the first person you've tried," he said. "Oh, you saw Dr. Buddolphson departing? Yes, it is true that in our ignorance of the subject we did not immediately turn to practitioners of your psychological orientation. In fact, if you will not be offended, I may say that you are practically our last hope. We have already had one eminent gentleman whose method was simply to talk over Mr. Primus's problems with him and endeavor to help him reach an adjustment; he failed because Mr. Primus, so far as he is aware, has no problems except that he has lost his memory. Then we had another whose system, as he explained it to me, was simply to repeat, in a sympathetic manner, everything that the patient said to him; Mr. Primus was not sufficiently prolix for this method to be of avail. "Then there was another who wished to treat Mr. Primus by encouraging him to relive his past experiences: 'taking him back along the time-track,' as he called it; but--" Secundus looked mournful--"Mr. Primus has actually _had_ no experiences in the usual sense of the term, though he very obligingly made up a number of them. Our ontogeny, Dr. Raye, is so simple that it can scarcely be said to exist at all. Each of us normally has only one function, the one I have already mentioned, and, until this occurrence, it has always been fulfilled successfully. "We also had a man who proposed to reawaken Mr. Primus's memory by electric shock, but Mr. Primus is quite impervious to currents of electricity and we were unable to hit upon an acceptable substitute. In short, Dr. Raye, if you should prove unable to help us, we will have no one left to fall back upon except, possibly, the Yogi." "They might do you more good, at that," Herman said, looking at Mr. Primus. "Well, I'll do what I can, though the function of analysis is to get the patient to accept reality, and this is the opposite. What can you tell me, to begin with, about Mr. Primus's personality, the onset of the disturbance, and so on--and, in particular, what are you two? Who's your boss? What's it all for and how does it work?" Secundus said, "I can give you very little assistance, I am afraid. I would characterize Primus as a very steady person, extremely accurate in his work, but not very imaginative. His memory loss occurred abruptly, as you yourself witnessed yesterday afternoon. As to your other questions--forgive me, Dr. Raye, but it is to your own advantage if I fail to answer them. I am, of course, the merest amateur in psychology, but I sincerely feel that your own psyche might be damaged if you were to learn the fragment of the truth which I could give you." He paused. A sheaf of papers, which Herman had not noticed before, lay on a small table that he had not noticed, either. Secundus picked them up and handed them over. "Here are testing materials," he said. "If you need anything else, you have only to call on me. But I trust you will find these complete." He turned to go. "And one more thing, Dr. Raye," he said with an apologetic smile. "_Hurry_, if you possibly can." * * * * * Primus, looking rather like a sarcophagus ornament, lay limply supine on the ten-foot couch, arms at his sides, eyes closed. When Herman had first told him to relax, Primus had had to have the word carefully explained to him; from then on he had done it--or seemed to do it--perfectly. In his preliminary tests, the Binet, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index and the Berneuter P.I., he had drawn almost a complete blank. Standard testing methods did not work on Mr. Primus, and the reason was obvious enough. Mr. Primus simply was not a human being. This room, no doubt, was an illusion, and so was Mr. Primus's anthropomorphic appearance.... Herman felt like a surgeon trying to operate blindfolded while wearing a catcher's mitt on each hand. But he kept trying; he was getting results, though whether or not they meant anything, he was unable to guess. On the Rorschach they had done a little better, at least in volume of response. "That looks like a cliff," Primus would say eagerly. "That looks like a--piece of sandstone. This part looks like two volcanoes and a cave." Of course, Herman realized, the poor old gentleman was only trying to please him. He had no more idea than a goldfish what a volcano or a rock looked like, but he wanted desperately to help. Even so, it was possible to score the results. According to Herman's interpretation, Primus was a case of arrested infantile sexualism, with traces of conversion hysteria and a strong Oedipus complex. Herman entered the protocol solemnly in his notes and kept going. Next came free association, and, after that, recounting of dreams. Feeling that he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, Herman carefully explained to Primus what "sleep" and "dreams" were. Primus had promised to do his best; he had been lying there now, without moving, for--how long? Startled, Herman looked at his watch. It had stopped. Scoring the Rorschach alone, Herman realized suddenly, should have taken him nearly a full day, even considering the fact that he hadn't eaten anything, or taken time out to rest, or--Herman bewilderedly felt his jaw. There was only the slightest stubble. He didn't feel hungry or tired, or cramped from sitting.... "Secundus!" he called. A door opened in the wall to his right, and Secundus stepped through. The door disappeared. "Yes, Dr. Raye? Is anything wrong?" "How long have I been here?" Secundus' right-hand head looked embarrassed. "Well, Doctor, without bringing in the difficult questions of absolute versus relative duration, and the definition of an arbitrary position--" "Don't stall. How long have I been here in my own subjective time?" "Well, I was about to say, without being unnecessarily inclusive, the question is still very difficult. However, bearing in mind that the answer is only a rough approximation--about one hundred hours." Herman rubbed his chin. "I don't like your tampering with me," he said slowly. "You've speeded me up--is that it? And at the same time inhibited my fatigue reactions, and God knows what else, so that I didn't even notice I'd been working longer than I normally could until just now?" Secundus looked distressed. "I'm afraid I have made rather a botch of it, Dr. Raye. I should not have allowed you to notice at all, but it is growing increasingly difficult to restrain your fellow-creatures to their ordinary routines. My attention strayed, I am sorry to say." He glanced at the recumbent form of Primus. "My word! What is Mr. Primus doing, Dr. Raye?" "Sleeping," Herman answered curtly. "Remarkable! I hope he does not make a habit of it. Will he awaken soon, do you think, Doctor?" "I have no idea," said Herman helplessly; but at that moment Primus stirred, opened his eyes, and sat up with his usual vague, kindly smile. "Did you dream?" Herman asked him. Primus blinked slowly. "Yes. Yes, I did," he said in his profoundly heavy voice. "Tell me all you can remember about it." "Well," said Primus, sinking back onto the couch, "I dreamed I was in a room with a large bed. It had heavy wooden posts and a big bolster. I wanted to lie down and rest in the bed, but the bolster made me uncomfortable. It was too dark to see, to rearrange the bed, so I tried to light a candle, but the matches kept going out...." Herman took it all down, word for word, with growing excitement and growing dismay. The dream was too good. It might have come out of Dr. Freud's original case histories. When Primus had finished, Herman searched back through his notes. Did Primus _know_ what a bed was, or what a bolster was, or a candle? How much had Herman told him? "Bed" was there, of course. Primus: "What are 'dreams?'" Herman: "Well, when a human being goes to bed, and sleeps...." "Bolster" was there, too, but not in the same sense. Herman: "To bolster its argument, the unconscious--what we call the id--frequently alters the person's likes and dislikes on what seem to be petty and commonplace subjects...." And "candle?" Herman: "I want you to understand that I don't know all about this subject myself, Mr. Primus. Nobody does; our knowledge is just a candle in the darkness...." Herman gave up. He glanced at Secundus, who was watching him expectantly. "May I talk to you privately?" "Of course." Secundus nodded to Primus, who stood up awkwardly and then vanished with a _pop_. Secundus tut-tutted regretfully. Herman took a firm grip on himself. "Look," he said, "the data I have now suggest that Primus had some traumatic experience in his infancy which arrested his development in various ways and also strengthened his Oedipus complex--that is, intensified his feelings of fear, hatred and rivalry toward his father. Now, that may sound to you as if we're making some progress. I would feel that way myself--if I had the slightest reason for believing that Primus ever had a father." Secundus started to speak; but Herman cut him off. "Wait, let me finish. I can go ahead on that basis, but as far as I'm concerned I might just as well be counting the angels on the head of a pin. You've got to give me more information, Secundus. I want to know who you are, and who Primus is, and whether there's any other being with whom Primus could possibly have a filial relationship. And if you can't tell me all that without giving me the Secret of the Universe, then you'd better give it to me whether it's good for me or not. I can't work in the dark." Secundus pursed his lips. "There is justice in what you say, Doctor. Very well, I shall be entirely frank with you--in so far as it is possible for me to do so of course. Let's see, where can I begin?" "First question," retorted Herman. "Who are you?" "We are--" Secundus thought a moment, then spread his hands with a helpless smile. "There are no words, Doctor. To put the case in negatives, we are not evolved organisms, we are not mortal, we are not, speaking in the usual sense, alive, although, of course--I hope you will not be offended--neither are you." Herman's brow wrinkled. "Are you _real_?" he demanded finally. Secundus looked embarrassed. "You have found me out, Dr. Raye. I endeavored to give you that impression--through vanity, I am ashamed to say--but, unhappily, it is not true. I, too, belong to the realm of noumena." "Then, blast it all, what _is_ real? This planet isn't. You're not. What's it all for?" He paused a moment reflectively. "We're getting on to my second question, about Primus's attitude toward his 'father.' Perhaps I should have asked just now, '_Who_ is real?' Who remembers you, Secundus?" "This question, unfortunately, is the one I cannot answer with complete frankness, Doctor. I assure you that it is not because I do not wish to; I have no option in the matter. I can tell you only that there is a Person of whom it might be said that He stands in the parental relationship to Primus, to me, and all the rest of our order." "God?" Herman inquired. "Jahweh? Allah?" "Please, no names, Doctor." Secundus looked apprehensive. "Then, damn it, tell me the rest!" Herman realized vaguely that he was soothing his own hurt vanity at Secundus's expense, but he was enjoying himself too much to stop. "You're afraid of something; that's been obvious right along. And there must be a time limit on it, or you wouldn't be rushing me. Why? Are you afraid that if this unnamable Person finds out you've botched your job, He'll wipe you out of existence and start over with a new bunch?" A cold wind blew down Herman's back. "Not us alone, Dr. Raye," said Secundus gravely. "If the Inspector discovers this blunder--and the time is coming soon when He must--no corrections will be attempted. When a mistake occurs, it is--painted out." "Oh," said Herman after a moment. He sat down again, weakly. "How long have we got?" "Approximately one and a quarter days have gone by at the Earth's normal rate since Primus lost his memory," Secundus said. "I have not been able to 'speed you up,' as you termed it, by more than a twenty-to-one ratio. The deadline will have arrived, by my calculation, in fifteen minutes of normal time, or five hours at your present accelerated rate." Primus stepped into the room, crossed to the couch and lay down placidly. Secundus turned to go, then paused. "As for your final question, Doctor--you might think of the Universe as a Pointillist painting, in which this planet is one infinitesimally small dot of color. The work is wholly imaginary, of course, since neither the canvas nor the pigment has what you would term an independent existence. Nevertheless, the artist takes it seriously. He would not care to find, so to speak, mustaches daubed on it." Herman sat limply, staring after him as he moved to the door. Secundus turned once more. "I hope you will not think that I am displeased with you, Doctor," he said. "On the contrary, I feel that you are accomplishing more than anyone else has. However, should you succeed, as I devoutly hope, there may not be sufficient time to congratulate you as you deserve. I shall have to replace you immediately in your normal world-line, for your absence would constitute as noticeable a flaw as that of the planet. In that event, my present thanks and congratulations will have to serve." With a friendly smile, he disappeared. Herman wound his watch. Two hours later, Primus's answers to his questions began to show a touch of resentment and surly defiance. _Transference_, Herman thought, with a constriction of his throat, and kept working desperately. Three hours. "What does the bolster remind you of?" "I seem to see a big cylinder rolling through space, sweeping the stars out of its way...." Four hours. Only three minutes left now, in the normal world. _I can't wait to get any deeper_, Herman thought. _It's got to be now or never._ "You must understand that these feelings of resentment and hatred are normal," he said, trying to keep the strain out of his voice, "but, at the same time, you have outgrown them--you can rise above them now. You are an individual in your own right, Primus. You have a job to do that only you can fill, and it's an important job. That's what matters, not all this infantile emotional clutter...." He talked on, not daring to look at his watch. Primus looked up, and a huge smile broke over his face. He began, "Why, of--" * * * * * Herman found himself walking along Forty-second Street, heading toward the Hudson. The pavement was solid under his feet; the canyon between the buildings was filled with the soft violet-orange glow of a summer evening in New York. In the eyes of the people he passed, he saw the same incredulous relief he felt. It was over. He'd done it. He'd broken all the rules, but, incredibly, he'd got results. Then he looked up and a chill spread over him. No one who knew the city would accept that ithyphallic parody as the Empire State Building, or those huge fleshy curves, as wanton as the mountains in which Mr. Maugham's "Sadie Thompson" had her lusty existence, as the prosaic hills of New Jersey. Psychoanalysis had certainly removed Mr. Primus's inhibitions. The world was like a fence scrawled on by a naughty little boy. Mr. Primus would outgrow it in time, but life until then might be somewhat disconcerting. Those two clouds, for instance.... --FRANKLIN ABEL * * * * * 
35875	----	produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) REFLECTIONS ON WAR AND DEATH REFLECTIONS ON WAR AND DEATH _By_ PROFESSOR DR. SIGMUND FREUD, LL.D. _Authorized English Translation By_ DR. A. A. BRILL and ALFRED B. KUTTNER [Illustration: colophon] MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY NEW YORK 1918 Copyright, 1918, by MOFFAT, YARD, AND COMPANY This book is offered to the American public at the present time in the hope that it may contribute something to the cause of international understanding and good will which has become the hope of the world. THE TRANSLATORS. REFLECTIONS ON WAR AND DEATH I THE DISAPPOINTMENTS OF WAR Caught in the whirlwind of these war times, without any real information or any perspective upon the great changes that have already occurred or are about to be enacted, lacking all premonition of the future, it is small wonder that we ourselves become confused as to the meaning of impressions which crowd in upon us or of the value of the judgments we are forming. It would seem as though no event had ever destroyed so much of the precious heritage of mankind, confused so many of the clearest intellects or so thoroughly debased what is highest. Even science has lost her dispassionate impartiality. Her deeply embittered votaries are intent upon seizing her weapons to do their share in the battle against the enemy. The anthropologist has to declare his opponent inferior and degenerate, the psychiatrist must diagnose him as mentally deranged. Yet it is probable that we are affected out of all proportion by the evils of these times and have no right to compare them with the evils of other times through which we have not lived. The individual who is not himself a combatant and therefore has not become a cog in the gigantic war machinery, feels confused in his bearings and hampered in his activities. I think any little suggestion that will make it easier for him to see his way more clearly will be welcome. Among the factors which cause the stay-at-home so much spiritual misery and are so hard to endure there are two in particular which I should like to emphasize and discuss. I mean the disappointment that this war has called forth and the altered attitude towards death to which it, in common with other wars, forces us. When I speak of disappointment everybody knows at once what I mean. One need not be a sentimentalist, one may realize the biological and physiological necessity of suffering in the economy of human life, and yet one may condemn the methods and the aims of war and long for its termination. To be sure, we used to say that wars cannot cease as long as nations live under such varied conditions, as long as they place such different values upon the individual life, and as long as the animosities which divide them represent such powerful psychic forces. We were therefore quite ready to believe that for some time to come there would be wars between primitive and civilized nations and between those divided by color, as well as with and among the partly enlightened and more or less civilized peoples of Europe. But we dared to hope differently. We expected that the great ruling nations of the white race, the leaders of mankind, who had cultivated world wide interests, and to whom we owe the technical progress in the control of nature as well as the creation of artistic and scientific cultural standards--we expected that these nations would find some other way of settling their differences and conflicting interests. Each of these nations had set a high moral standard to which the individual had to conform if he wished to be a member of the civilized community. These frequently over strict precepts demanded a great deal of him, a great self-restraint and a marked renunciation of his impulses. Above all he was forbidden to resort to lying and cheating, which are so extraordinarily useful in competition with others. The civilized state considered these moral standards the foundation of its existence, it drastically interfered if anyone dared to question them and often declared it improper even to submit them to the test of intellectual criticism. It was therefore assumed that the state itself would respect them and would do nothing that might contradict the foundations of its own existence. To be sure, one was aware that scattered among these civilized nations there were certain remnants of races that were quite universally disliked, and were therefore reluctantly and only to a certain extent permitted to participate in the common work of civilization where they had proved themselves sufficiently fit for the task. But the great nations themselves, one should have thought, had acquired sufficient understanding for the qualities they had in common and enough tolerance for their differences so that, unlike in the days of classical antiquity, the words "foreign" and "hostile" should no longer be synonyms. Trusting to this unity of civilized races countless people left hearth and home to live in strange lands and trusted their fortunes to the friendly relations existing between the various countries. And even he who was not tied down to the same spot by the exigencies of life could combine all the advantages and charms of civilized countries into a newer and greater fatherland which he could enjoy without hindrance or suspicion. He thus took delight in the blue and the grey ocean, the beauty of snow clad mountains and of the green lowlands, the magic of the north woods and the grandeur of southern vegetation, the atmosphere of landscapes upon which great historical memories rest, and the peace of untouched nature. The new fatherland was to him also a museum, filled with the treasure that all the artists of the world for many centuries had created and left behind. While he wandered from one hall to another in this museum he could give his impartial appreciation to the varied types of perfection that had been developed among his distant compatriots by the mixture of blood, by history, and by the peculiarities of physical environment. Here cool, inflexible energy was developed to the highest degree, there the graceful art of beautifying life, elsewhere the sense of law and order, or other qualities that have made man master of the earth. We must not forget that every civilized citizen of the world had created his own special "Parnassus" and his own "School of Athens." Among the great philosophers, poets, and artists of all nations he had selected those to whom he considered himself indebted for the best enjoyment and understanding of life, and he associated them in his homage both with the immortal ancients and with the familiar masters of his own tongue. Not one of these great figures seemed alien to him just because he spoke in a different language; be it the incomparable explorer of human passions or the intoxicated worshiper of beauty, the mighty and threatening seer or the sensitive scoffer, and yet he never reproached himself with having become an apostate to his own nation and his beloved mother tongue. The enjoyment of this common civilization was occasionally disturbed by voices which warned that in consequence of traditional differences wars were unavoidable even between those who shared this civilization. One did not want to believe this, but what did one imagine such a war to be like if it should ever come about? No doubt it was to be an opportunity to show the progress in man's community feeling since the days when the Greek amphictyonies had forbidden the destruction of a city belonging to the league, the felling of her oil trees and the cutting off of her water supply. It would be a chivalrous bout of arms for the sole purpose of establishing the superiority of one side or the other with the greatest possible avoidance of severe suffering which could contribute nothing to the decision, with complete protection for the wounded, who must withdraw from the battle, and for the physicians and nurses who devote themselves to their care. With every consideration, of course, for noncombatants, for the women who are removed from the activities of war, and for the children who, when grown up, are to become friends and co-workers on both sides. And with the maintenance, finally, of all the international projects and institutions in which the civilized community of peace times had expressed its corporate life. Such a war would still be horrible enough and full of burdens, but it would not have interrupted the development of ethical relations between the large human units, between nations and states. But the war in which we did not want to believe broke out and brought--disappointment. It is not only bloodier and more destructive than any foregoing war, as a result of the tremendous development of weapons of attack and defense, but it is at least as cruel, bitter, and merciless as any earlier war. It places itself above all the restrictions pledged in times of peace, the so-called rights of nations, it does not acknowledge the prerogatives of the wounded and of physicians, the distinction between peaceful and fighting members of the population, or the claims of private property. It hurls down in blind rage whatever bars its way, as though there were to be no future and no peace after it is over. It tears asunder all community bonds among the struggling peoples and threatens to leave a bitterness which will make impossible any re-establishment of these ties for a long time to come. It has also brought to light the barely conceivable phenomenon of civilized nations knowing and understanding each other so little that one can turn from the other with hate and loathing. Indeed one of these great civilized nations has become so universally disliked that it is even attempted to cast it out from the civilized community as though it were barbaric, although this very nation has long proved its eligibility through contribution after contribution of brilliant achievements. We live in the hope that impartial history will furnish the proof that this very nation, in whose language I am writing and for whose victory our dear ones are fighting, has sinned least against the laws of human civilization. But who is privileged to step forward at such a time as judge in his own defense? Races are roughly represented by the states they form and these states by the governments which guide them. The individual citizen can prove with dismay in this war what occasionally thrust itself upon him already in times of peace, namely, that the state forbids him to do wrong not because it wishes to do away with wrongdoing but because it wishes to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco. A state at war makes free use of every injustice, every act of violence, that would dishonor the individual. It employs not only permissible cunning but conscious lies and intentional deception against the enemy, and this to a degree which apparently outdoes what was customary in previous wars. The state demands the utmost obedience and sacrifice of its citizens, but at the same time it treats them as children through an excess of secrecy and a censorship of news and expression of opinion which render the minds of those who are thus intellectually repressed defenseless against every unfavorable situation and every wild rumor. It absolves itself from guarantees and treaties by which it was bound to other states, makes unabashed confession of its greed and aspiration to power, which the individual is then supposed to sanction out of patriotism. Let the reader not object that the state cannot abstain from the use of injustice because it would thereby put itself at a disadvantage. For the individual, too, obedience to moral standards and abstinence from brutal acts of violence are as a rule very disadvantageous, and the state but rarely proves itself capable of indemnifying the individual for the sacrifice it demands of him. Nor is it to be wondered at that the loosening of moral ties between the large human units has had a pronounced effect upon the morality of the individual, for our conscience is not the inexorable judge that teachers of ethics say it is; it has its origin in nothing but "social fear." Wherever the community suspends its reproach the suppression of evil desire also ceases, and men commit acts of cruelty, treachery, deception, and brutality, the very possibility of which would have been considered incompatible with their level of culture. Thus the civilized world-citizen of whom I spoke before may find himself helpless in a world that has grown strange to him when he sees his great fatherland disintegrated, the possessions common to mankind destroyed, and his fellow citizens divided and debased. Nevertheless several things might be said in criticism of his disappointment. Strictly speaking it is not justified, for it consists in the destruction of an illusion. Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces. Two things have roused our disappointment in this war: the feeble morality of states in their external relations which have inwardly acted as guardians of moral standards, and the brutal behavior of individuals of the highest culture of whom one would not have believed any such thing possible. Let us begin with the second point and try to sum up the view which we wish to criticise in a single compact statement. Through what process does the individual reach a higher stage of morality? The first answer will probably be: He is really good and noble from birth, in the first place. It is hardly necessary to give this any further consideration. The second answer will follow the suggestion that a process of development is involved here and will probably assume that this development consists in eradicating the evil inclinations of man and substituting good inclinations under the influence of education and cultural environment. In that case we may indeed wonder that evil should appear again so actively in persons who have been educated in this way. But this answer also contains the theory which we wish to contradict. In reality there is no such thing as "eradicating" evil. Psychological, or strictly speaking, psychoanalytic investigation proves, on the contrary, that the deepest character of man consists of impulses of an elemental kind which are similar in all human beings, the aim of which is the gratification of certain primitive needs. These impulses are in themselves neither good or evil. We classify them and their manifestations according to their relation to the needs and demands of the human community. It is conceded that all the impulses which society rejects as evil, such as selfishness and cruelty, are of this primitive nature. These primitive impulses go through a long process of development before they can become active in the adult. They become inhibited and diverted to other aims and fields, they unite with each other, change their objects and in part turn against one's own person. The formation of reactions against certain impulses give the deceptive appearance of a change of content, as if egotism had become altruism and cruelty had changed into sympathy. The formation of these reactions is favored by the fact that many impulses appear almost from the beginning in contrasting pairs; this is a remarkable state of affairs called the ambivalence of feeling and is quite unknown to the layman. This feeling is best observed and grasped through the fact that intense love and intense hate occur so frequently in the same person. Psychoanalysis goes further and states that the two contrasting feelings not infrequently take the same person as their object. What we call the character of a person does not really emerge until the fate of all these impulses has been settled, and character, as we all know, is very inadequately defined in terms of either "good" or "evil." Man is seldom entirely good or evil, he is "good" on the whole in one respect and "evil" in another, or "good" under certain conditions, and decidedly "evil" under others. It is interesting to learn that the earlier infantile existence of intense "bad" impulses is often the necessary condition of being "good" in later life. The most pronounced childish egotists may become the most helpful and self-sacrificing citizens; the majority of idealists, humanitarians, and protectors of animals have developed from little sadists and animal tormentors. The transformation of "evil" impulses is the result of two factors operating in the same sense, one inwardly and the other outwardly. The inner factor consists in influencing the evil or selfish impulses through erotic elements, the love needs of man interpreted in the widest sense. The addition of erotic components transforms selfish impulses into social impulses. We learn to value being loved as an advantage for the sake of which we can renounce other advantages. The outer factor is the force of education which represents the demands of the civilized environment and which is then continued through the direct influence of the cultural _milieu_. Civilization is based upon the renunciation of impulse gratification and in turn demands the same renunciation of impulses from every newcomer. During the individual's life a constant change takes place from outer to inner compulsion. The influences of civilization work through the erotic components to bring about the transformation of more and more of the selfish tendencies into altruistic and social tendencies. We may indeed assume that the inner compulsion which makes itself felt in the development of man was originally, that is, in the history of mankind, a purely external compulsion. Today people bring along a certain tendency (disposition) to transform the egotistic into social impulses as a part of their hereditary organization, which then responds to further slight incentives to complete the transformation. A part of this transformation of impulse must also be made during life. In this way the individual man is not only under the influence of his own contemporary cultural _milieu_ but is also subject to the influences of his ancestral civilization. If we call a person's individual capacity for transforming his egotistical impulses under the influence of love his cultural adaptability, we can say that this consists of two parts, one congenital and the other acquired, and we may add that the relation of these two to each other and to the untransformed part of the emotional life is a very variable one. In general we are inclined to rate the congenital part too highly, and are also in danger of over-valuing the whole cultural adaptability in its relation to that part of the impulse life which has remained primitive, that is, we are misled into judging people to be "better" than they really are. For there is another factor which clouds our judgment and falsifies the result in favor of what we are judging. We are of course in no position to observe the impulses of another person. We deduce them from his actions and his conduct, which we trace back to motives springing from his emotional life. In a number of cases such a conclusion is necessarily incorrect. The same actions which are "good" in the civilized sense may sometimes originate in "noble" motives and sometimes not. Students of the theory of ethics call only those acts "good" which are the expression of good impulses and refuse to acknowledge others as such. But society is on the whole guided by practical aims and does not bother about this distinction; it is satisfied if a man adapts his conduct and his actions to the precepts of civilization and asks little about his motives. We have heard that the outer compulsion which education and environment exercise upon a man brings about a further transformation of his impulse life for the good, the change from egotism to altruism. But this is not the necessary or regular effect of the outer compulsion. Education and environment have not only love premiums to offer but work with profit premiums of another sort, namely rewards and punishments. They can therefore bring it about that a person subject to their influence decides in favor of good conduct in the civilized sense without any ennobling of impulse or change from egotistic into altruistic inclinations. On the whole the consequence remains the same; only special circumstances will reveal whether the one person is always good because his impulses compel him to be so while another person is good only in so far as this civilized behavior is of advantage to his selfish purposes. But our superficial knowledge of the individual gives us no means of distinguishing the two cases, and we shall certainly be misled by our optimism into greatly over-estimating the number of people who have been transformed by civilization. Civilized society, which demands good conduct and does not bother about the impulse on which it is based, has thus won over a great many people to civilized obedience who do not thereby follow their own natures. Encouraged by this success, society has permitted itself to be misled into putting the ethical demands as high as possible, thereby forcing its members to move still further from their emotional dispositions. A continual emotional suppression is imposed upon them, the strain of which is indicated by the appearance of the most remarkable reactions and compensations. In the field of sexuality, where such suppression is most difficult to carry out, it results in reactions known as neurotic ailments. In other fields the pressure of civilization shows no pathological results but manifests itself in distorted characters and in the constant readiness of the inhibited impulses to enforce their gratification at any fitting opportunity. Anyone thus forced to react continually to precepts that are not the expressions of his impulses lives, psychologically speaking, above his means, and may be objectively described as a hypocrite, whether he is clearly conscious of this difference or not. It is undeniable that our contemporary civilization favors this sort of hypocrisy to an extraordinary extent. One might even venture to assert that it is built upon such a hypocrisy and would have to undergo extensive changes if man were to undertake to live according to the psychological truth. There are therefore more civilized hypocrites than truly cultured persons, and one can even discuss the question whether a certain amount of civilized hypocrisy is not indispensable to maintain civilization because the already organized cultural adaptability of the man of today would perhaps not suffice for the task of living according to the truth. On the other hand the maintenance of civilization even on such questionable grounds offers the prospect that with every new generation a more extensive transformation of impulses will pave the way for a better civilization. These discussions have already afforded us the consolation that our mortification and painful disappointment on account of the uncivilized behavior of our fellow world citizens in this war were not justified. They rested upon an illusion to which we had succumbed. In reality they have not sunk as deeply as we feared because they never really rose as high as we had believed. The fact that states and races abolished their mutual ethical restrictions not unnaturally incited them to withdraw for a time from the existing pressure of civilization and to sanction a passing gratification of their suppressed impulses. In doing so their relative morality within their own national life probably suffered no rupture. But we can still further deepen our understanding of the change which this war has brought about in our former compatriots and at the same time take warning not to be unjust to them. For psychic evolution shows a peculiarity which is not found in any other process of development. When a town becomes a city or a child grows into a man, town and child disappear in the city and in the man. Only memory can sketch in the old features in the new picture; in reality the old materials and forms have been replaced by new ones. It is different in the case of psychic evolution. One can describe this unique state of affairs only by saying that every previous stage of development is preserved next to the following one from which it has evolved; the succession stipulates a co-existence although the material in which the whole series of changes has taken place remains the same. The earlier psychic state may not have manifested itself for years but nevertheless continues to exist to the extent that it may some day again become the form in which psychic forces express themselves, in fact the only form, as though all subsequent developments had been annulled and made regressive. This extraordinary plasticity of psychic development is not without limits as to its direction; one can describe it as a special capacity for retrograde action or regression, for it sometimes happens that a later and higher stage of development that has been abandoned cannot be attained again. But the primitive conditions can always be reconstructed; the primitive psyche is in the strictest sense indestructible. The so-called mental diseases must make the impression on the layman of mental and psychic life fallen into decay. In reality the destruction concerns only later acquisitions and developments. The nature of mental diseases consists in the return to former states of the affective life and function. An excellent example of the plasticity of the psychic life is the state of sleep, which we all court every night. Since we know how to interpret even the maddest and most confused dreams, we know that every time we go to sleep we throw aside our hard won morality like a garment in order to put it on again in the morning. This laying bare is, of course, harmless, because we are paralyzed and condemned to inactivity by the sleeping state. Only the dream can inform us of the regression of our emotional life to an earlier stage of development. Thus, for instance, it is worthy of note that all our dreams are governed by purely egotistic motives. One of my English friends once presented this theory to a scientific meeting in America, whereupon a lady present made the remark that this might perhaps be true of Austrians, but she ventured to assert for herself and her friends that even in dreams they always felt altruistically. My friend, although himself a member of the English race, was obliged to contradict the lady energetically on the basis of his experience in dream analysis. The noble Americans are just as egotistic in their dreams as the Austrians. The transformation of impulses upon which our cultural adaptability rests can therefore also be permanently or temporarily made regressive. Without doubt the influences of war belong to those forces which can create such regressions; we therefore need not deny cultural adaptibility to all those who at present are acting in such an uncivilized manner, and may expect that the refinement of their impulses will continue in more peaceful times. But there is perhaps another symptom of our fellow citizens of the world which has caused us no less surprise and fear than this descent from former ethical heights which has been so painful to us. I mean the lack of insight that our greatest intellectual leaders have shown, their obduracy, their inaccessibility to the most impressive arguments, their uncritical credulity concerning the most contestable assertions. This certainly presents a sad picture, and I wish expressly to emphasize that I am by no means a blinded partisan who finds all the intellectual mistakes on one side. But this phenomenon is more easily explained and far less serious than the one which we have just considered. Students of human nature and philosophers have long ago taught us that we do wrong to value our intelligence as an independent force and to overlook its dependence upon our emotional life. According to their view our intellect can work reliably only when it is removed from the influence of powerful incitements; otherwise it acts simply as an instrument at the beck and call of our will and delivers the results which the will demands. Logical argumentation is therefore powerless against affective interests; that is why arguing with reasons which, according to Falstaff, are as common as blackberries, are so fruitless where our interests are concerned. Whenever possible psychoanalytic experience has driven home this assertion. It is in a position to prove every day that the cleverest people suddenly behave as unintelligently as defectives as soon as their understanding encounters emotional resistance, but that they regain their intelligence completely as soon as this resistance has been overcome. This blindness to logic which this war has so frequently conjured up in just our best fellow citizens, is therefore a secondary phenomenon, the result of emotional excitement and destined, we hope, to disappear simultaneously with it. If we have thus come to a fresh understanding of our estranged fellow citizens we can more easily bear the disappointment which nations have caused us, for of them we must only make demands of a far more modest nature. They are perhaps repeating the development of the individual and at the present day still exhibit very primitive stages of development with a correspondingly slow progress towards the formation of higher unities. It is in keeping with this that the educational factor of an outer compulsion to morality, which we found so active in the individual, is barely perceptible in them. We had indeed hoped that the wonderful community of interests established by intercourse and the exchange of products would result in the beginning of such a compulsion, but it seems that nations obey their passions of the moment far more than their interests. At most they make use of their interests to justify the gratification of their passions. It is indeed a mystery why the individual members of nations should disdain, hate, and abhor each other at all, even in times of peace. I do not know why it is. It seems as if all the moral achievements of the individual were obliterated in the case of a large number of people, not to mention millions, until only the most primitive, oldest, and most brutal psychic inhibitions remained. Perhaps only later developments will succeed in changing these lamentable conditions. But a little more truthfulness and straightforward dealing on all sides, both in the relation of people towards each other and between themselves and those who govern them, might smooth the way for such a change. II OUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS DEATH It remains for us to consider the second factor of which I have already spoken which accounts for our feeling of strangeness in a world which used to seem so beautiful and familiar to us. I refer to the disturbance in our former attitude towards death. Our attitude had not been a sincere one. To listen to us we were, of course, prepared to maintain that death is the necessary termination of life, that everyone of us owes nature his death and must be prepared to pay his debt, in short, that death was natural, undeniable, and inevitable. In practice we were accustomed to act as if matters were quite different. We have shown an unmistakable tendency to put death aside, to eliminate it from life. We attempted to hush it up, in fact, we have the proverb: to think of something as of death. Of course we meant our own death. We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators. The school of psychoanalysis could thus assert that at bottom no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality. As far as the death of another person is concerned every man of culture will studiously avoid mentioning this possibility in the presence of the person in question. Only children ignore this restraint; they boldly threaten each other with the possibility of death, and are quite capable of giving expression to the thought of death in relation to the persons they love, as, for instance: Dear Mama, when unfortunately, you are dead, I shall do so and so. The civilized adult also likes to avoid entertaining the thought of another's death lest he seem harsh or unkind, unless his profession as a physician or a lawyer brings up the question. Least of all would he permit himself to think of somebody's death if this event is connected with a gain of freedom, wealth, or position. Death is, of course, not deferred through our sensitiveness on the subject, and when it occurs we are always deeply affected, as if our expectations had been shattered. We regularly lay stress upon the unexpected causes of death, we speak of the accident, the infection, or advanced age, and thus betray our endeavor to debase death from a necessity to an accident. A large number of deaths seems unspeakably dreadful to us. We assume a special attitude towards the dead, something almost like admiration for one who has accomplished a very difficult feat. We suspend criticism of him, overlooking whatever wrongs he may have done, and issue the command, _de mortuis nil nisi bene_: we act as if we were justified in singing his praises at the funeral oration, and inscribe only what is to his advantage on the tombstone. This consideration for the dead, which he really no longer needs, is more important to us than the truth and to most of us, certainly, it is more important than consideration for the living. This conventional attitude of civilized people towards death is made still more striking by our complete collapse at the death of a person closely related to us, such as a parent, a wife or husband, a brother or sister, a child or a dear friend. We bury our hopes, our wishes, and our desires with the dead, we are inconsolable and refuse to replace our loss. We act in this case as if we belonged to the tribe of the Asra who also die when those whom they love perish.[1] But this attitude of ours towards death exerts a powerful influence upon our lives. Life becomes impoverished and loses its interest when life itself, the highest stake in the game of living, must not be risked. It becomes as hollow and empty as an American flirtation in which it is understood from the beginning that nothing is to happen, in contrast to a continental love affair in which both partners must always bear in mind the serious consequences. Our emotional ties, the unbearable intensity of our grief, make us disinclined to court dangers for ourselves and those belonging to us. We do not dare to contemplate a number of undertakings that are dangerous but really indispensable, such as aeroplane flights, expeditions to distant countries, and experiments with explosive substances. We are paralyzed by the thought of who is to replace the son to his mother, the husband to his wife, or the father to his children, should an accident occur. A number of other renunciations and exclusions result from this tendency to rule out death from the calculations of life. And yet the motto of the Hanseatic League said: _Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse_: It is necessary to sail the seas, but not to live. It is therefore inevitable that we should seek compensation for the loss of life in the world of fiction, in literature, and in the theater. There we still find people who know how to die, who are even quite capable of killing others. There alone the condition for reconciling ourselves to death is fulfilled, namely, if beneath all the vicissitudes of life a permanent life still remains to us. It is really too sad that it may happen in life as in chess, where a false move can force us to lose the game, but with this difference, that we cannot begin a return match. In the realm of fiction we find the many lives in one for which we crave. We die in identification with a certain hero and yet we outlive him and, quite unharmed, are prepared to die again with the next hero. It is obvious that the war must brush aside this conventional treatment of death. Death is no longer to be denied; we are compelled to believe in it. People really die and no longer one by one, but in large numbers, often ten thousand in one day. It is no longer an accident. Of course, it still seems accidental whether a particular bullet strikes this man or that but the survivor may easily be struck down by a second bullet, and the accumulation of deaths ends the impression of accident. Life has indeed become interesting again; it has once more received its full significance. Let us make a division here and separate those who risk their lives in battle from those who remain at home, where they can only expect to lose one of their loved ones through injury, illness, or infection. It would certainly be very interesting to study the changes in the psychology of the combatants but I know too little about this. We must stick to the second group, to which we ourselves belong. I have already stated that I think the confusion and paralysis of our activities from which we are suffering is essentially determined by the fact that we cannot retain our previous attitude towards death. Perhaps it will help us to direct our psychological investigation to two other attitudes towards death, one of which we may ascribe to primitive man, while the other is still preserved, though invisible to our consciousness, in the deeper layers of our psychic life. The attitude of prehistoric man towards death is, of course, known to us only through deductions and reconstructions, but I am of the opinion that these have given us fairly trustworthy information. Primitive man maintained a very curious attitude towards death. It is not at all consistent but rather contradictory. On the one hand he took death very seriously, recognized it as the termination of life, and made use of it in this sense; but, on the other hand, he also denied death and reduced it to nothingness. This contradiction was made possible by the fact that he maintained a radically different position in regard to the death of others, a stranger or an enemy, than in regard to his own. The death of another person fitted in with his idea, it signified the annihilation of the hated one, and primitive man had no scruples against bringing it about. He must have been a very passionate being, more cruel and vicious than other animals. He liked to kill and did it as a matter of course. Nor need we attribute to him the instinct which restrains other animals from killing and devouring their own species. As a matter of fact the primitive history of mankind is filled with murder. The history of the world which is still taught to our children is essentially a series of race murders. The dimly felt sense of guilt under which man has lived since archaic times, and which in many religions has been condensed into the assumption of a primal guilt, a hereditary sin, is probably the expression of a blood guilt, the burden of which primitive man assumed. In my book entitled "Totem and Taboo," 1913, I have followed the hints of W. Robertson Smith, Atkinson, and Charles Darwin in the attempt to fathom the nature of this ancient guilt, and am of the opinion that the Christian doctrine of today still makes it possible for us to work back to its origin.[2] If the Son of God had to sacrifice his life to absolve mankind from original sin, then, according to the law of retaliation, the return of like for like, this sin must have been an act of killing, a murder. Nothing else could call for the sacrifice of a life in expiation. And if original sin was a sin against the God Father, the oldest sin of mankind must have been a patricide--the killing of the primal father of the primitive human horde, whose memory picture later was transfigured into a deity.[3] Primitive man was as incapable of imagining and realizing his own death as any one of us are today. But a case arose in which the two opposite attitudes towards death clashed and came into conflict with each other, with results that are both significant and far reaching. Such a case was given when primitive man saw one of his own relatives die, his wife, child, or friend, whom he certainly loved as we do ours; for love cannot be much younger than the lust for murder. In his pain he must have discovered that he, too, could die, an admission against which his whole being must have revolted, for everyone of these loved ones was a part of his own beloved self. On the other hand again, every such death was satisfactory to him, for there was also something foreign in each one of these persons. The law of emotional ambivalence, which today still governs our emotional relations to those whom we love, certainly obtained far more widely in primitive times. The beloved dead had nevertheless roused some hostile feelings in primitive man just because they had been both friends and enemies. Philosophers have maintained that the intellectual puzzle which the picture of death presented to primitive man forced him to reflect and became the starting point of every speculation. I believe the philosophers here think too philosophically, they give too little consideration to the primary effective motive. I should therefore like to correct and limit the above assertion; primitive man probably triumphed at the side of the corpse of the slain enemy, without finding any occasion to puzzle his head about the riddle of life and death. It was not the intellectual puzzle or any particular death which roused the spirit of inquiry in man, but the conflict of emotions at the death of beloved and withal foreign and hated persons. From this emotional conflict psychology arose. Man could no longer keep death away from him, for he had tasted of it in his grief for the deceased, but he did not want to acknowledge it, since he could not imagine himself dead. He therefore formed a compromise and concealed his own death but denied it the significance of destroying life, a distinction for which the death of his enemies had given him no motive. He invented spirits during his contemplation of the corpse of the person he loved, and his consciousness of guilt over the gratification which mingled with his grief brought it about that these first created spirits were transformed into evil demons who were to be feared. The changes wrought by death suggested to him to divide the individual into body and soul, at first several souls, and in this way his train of thought paralleled the disintegration process inaugurated by death. The continued remembrance of the dead became the basis of the assumption of other forms of existence and gave him the idea of a future life after apparent death. These later forms of existence were at first only vaguely associated appendages to those whom death had cut off, and enjoyed only slight esteem until much later times; they still betrayed a very meagre knowledge. The reply which the soul of Achilles made to Odysseus comes to our mind: Erst in the life on the earth, no less than a god we revered thee, We the Achaeans; and now in the realm of the dead as a monarch Here thou dost rule; then why should death thus grieve thee, Achilles? Thus did I speak: forthwith then answering thus he addressed me. Speak not smoothly of death, I beseech, O famous Odysseus, Better by far to remain on the earth as the thrall of another, E'en of a portionless man that hath means right scanty of living, Rather than reign sole king in the realm of the bodiless phantoms. Odysseus XI, verse 484-491 Translated by H. B. Coterill. Heine has rendered this in a forcible and bitter parody: The smallest living philistine, At Stuckert on the Neckar Is much happier than I am, Son of Pelleus, the dead hero, Shadowy ruler of the Underworld. It was much later before religions managed to declare this after-life as the more valuable and perfect and to debase our mortal life to a mere preparation for the life to come. It was then only logical to prolong our existence into the past and to invent former existences, transmigrations of souls, and reincarnations, all with the object of depriving death of its meaning as the termination of life. It was as early as this that the denial of death, which we described as the product of conventional culture, originated. Contemplation of the corpse of the person loved gave birth not only to the theory of the soul, the belief in immortality, and implanted the deep roots of the human sense of guilt, but it also created the first ethical laws. The first and most important prohibition of the awakening conscience declared: Thou shalt not kill. This arose as a reaction against the gratification of hate for the beloved dead which is concealed behind grief, and was gradually extended to the unloved stranger and finally also to the enemy. Civilized man no longer feels this way in regard to killing enemies. When the fierce struggle of this war will have reached a decision every victorious warrior will joyfully and without delay return home to his wife and children, undisturbed by thoughts of the enemy he has killed either at close quarters or with weapons operating at a distance. It is worthy of note that the primitive races which still inhabit the earth and who are certainly closer to primitive man than we, act differently in this respect, or have so acted as long as they did not yet feel the influence of our civilization. The savage, such as the Australian, the Bushman, or the inhabitant of Terra del Fuego, is by no means a remorseless murderer; when he returns home as victor from the war path he is not allowed to enter his village or touch his wife until he has expiated his war murders through lengthy and often painful penances. The explanation for this is, of course, related to his superstition; the savage fears the avenging spirit of the slain. But the spirits of the fallen enemy are nothing but the expression of his evil conscience over his blood guilt; behind this superstition there lies concealed a bit of ethical delicacy of feeling which has been lost to us civilized beings.[4] Pious souls, who would like to think us removed from contact with what is evil and mean, will surely not fail to draw satisfactory conclusions in regard to the strength of the ethical impulses which have been implanted in us from these early and forcible murder prohibitions. Unfortunately this argument proves even more for the opposite contention. Such a powerful inhibition can only be directed against an equally strong impulse. What no human being desires to do does not have to be forbidden, it is self-exclusive. The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours. The ethical strivings of mankind, with the strength and significance of which we need not quarrel, are an acquisition of the history of man; they have since become, though unfortunately in very variable quantities, the hereditary possessions of people of today. Let us now leave primitive man and turn to the unconscious in our psyche. Here we depend entirely upon psychoanalytic investigation, the only method which reaches such depths. The question is what is the attitude of our unconscious towards death. In answer we say that it is almost like that of primitive man. In this respect, as well as in many others, the man of prehistoric times lives on, unchanged, in our conscious. Our unconscious therefore does not believe in its own death; it acts as though it were immortal. What we call our unconscious, those deepest layers in our psyche which consist of impulses, recognizes no negative or any form of denial and resolves all contradictions, so that it does not acknowledge its own death, to which we can give only a negative content. The idea of death finds absolutely no acceptance in our impulses. This is perhaps the real secret of heroism. The rational basis of heroism is dependent upon the decision that one's own life cannot be worth as much as certain abstract common ideals. But I believe that instinctive or impulsive heroism is much more frequently independent of such motivation and simply defies danger on the assurance which animated Hans, the stone-cutter, a character in Anzengruber, who always said to himself: Nothing can happen to me. Or that motivation only serves to clear away the hesitations which might restrain the corresponding heroic reaction in the unconscious. The fear of death, which controls us more frequently than we are aware, is comparatively secondary and is usually the outcome of the consciousness of guilt. On the other hand we recognize the death of strangers and of enemies and sentence them to it just as willingly and unhesitatingly as primitive man. Here there is indeed a distinction which becomes decisive in practice. Our unconscious does not carry out the killing, it only thinks and wishes it. But it would be wrong to underestimate the psychic reality so completely in comparison to the practical reality. It is really important and full of serious consequences. In our unconscious we daily and hourly do away with all those who stand in our way, all those who have insulted or harmed us. The expression: "The devil take him," which so frequently crosses our lips in the form of an ill-humored jest, but by which we really intend to say, "Death take him," is a serious and forceful death wish in our unconscious. Indeed our unconscious murders even for trifles; like the old Athenian law of Draco, it knows no other punishment for crime than death, and this not without a certain consistency, for every injury done to our all-mighty and self-glorifying self is at bottom a _crimen laesae majestatis_. Thus, if we are to be judged by our unconscious wishes, we ourselves are nothing but a band of murderers, just like primitive man. It is lucky that all wishes do not possess the power which people of primitive times attributed to them.[5] For in the cross fire of mutual maledictions mankind would have perished long ago, not excepting the best and wisest of men as well as the most beautiful and charming women. As a rule the layman refuses to believe these theories of psychoanalysis. They are rejected as calumnies which can be ignored in the face of the assurances of consciousness, while the few signs through which the unconscious betrays itself to consciousness are cleverly overlooked. It is therefore in place here to point out that many thinkers who could not possibly have been influenced by psychoanalysis have very clearly accused our silent thought of a readiness to ignore the murder prohibition in order to clear away what stands in our path. Instead of quoting many examples I have chosen one which is very famous. In his novel, _Père Goriot_, Balzac refers to a place in the works of J. J. Rousseau where this author asks the reader what he would do if, without leaving Paris and, of course, without being discovered, he could kill an old mandarin in Peking, with great profit to himself, by a mere act of the will. He makes it possible for us to guess that he does not consider the life of this dignitary very secure. "To kill your mandarin" has become proverbial for this secret readiness to kill, even on the part of people of today. There are also a number of cynical jokes and anecdotes which bear witness to the same effect, such as the remark attributed to the husband: "If one of us dies I shall move to Paris." Such cynical jokes would not be possible if they did not have an unavowed truth to reveal which we cannot admit when it is baldly and seriously stated. It is well known that one may even speak the truth in jest. A case arises for our consciousness, just as it did for primitive man, in which the two opposite attitudes towards death, one of which acknowledges it as the destroyer of life, while the other denies the reality of death, clash and come into conflict. The case is identical for both, it consists of the death of one of our loved ones, of a parent or a partner in wedlock, of a brother or a sister, of a child or a friend. These persons we love are on the one hand a part of our inner possessions and a constituent of our own selves, but on the other hand they are also in part strangers and even enemies. Except in a few instances, even the tenderest and closest love relations also contain a bit of hostility which can rouse an unconscious death wish. But at the present day this ambivalent conflict no longer results in the development of ethics and soul theories, but in neuroses which also gives us a profound insight into the normal psychic life. Doctors who practice psychoanalysis have frequently had to deal with the symptom of over tender care for the welfare of relatives or with wholly unfounded self reproaches after the death of a beloved person. The study of these cases has left them in no doubt as to the significance of unconscious death wishes. The layman feels an extraordinary horror at the possibility of such an emotion and takes his aversion to it as a legitimate ground for disbelief in the assertions of psychoanalysis. I think he is wrong there. No debasing of our love life is intended and none such has resulted. It is indeed foreign to our comprehension as well as to our feelings to unite love and hate in this manner, but in so far as nature employs these contrasts she brings it about that love is always kept alive and fresh in order to safeguard it against the hate that is lurking behind it. It may be said that we owe the most beautiful unfolding of our love life to the reaction against this hostile impulse which we feel in our hearts. Let us sum up what we have said. Our unconscious is just as inaccessible to the conception of our own death, just as much inclined to kill the stranger, and just as divided, or ambivalent towards the persons we love as was primitive man. But how far we are removed from this primitive state in our conventionally civilized attitude towards death! It is easy to see how war enters into this disunity. War strips off the later deposits of civilization and allows the primitive man in us to reappear. It forces us again to be heroes who cannot believe in their own death, it stamps all strangers as enemies whose death we ought to cause or wish; it counsels us to rise above the death of those whom we love. But war cannot be abolished; as long as the conditions of existence among races are so varied and the repulsions between them are so vehement, there will have to be wars. The question then arises whether we shall be the ones to yield and adapt ourselves to it. Shall we not admit that in our civilized attitude towards death we have again lived psychologically beyond our means? Shall we not turn around and avow the truth? Were it not better to give death the place to which it is entitled both in reality and in our thoughts and to reveal a little more of our unconscious attitude towards death which up to now we have so carefully suppressed? This may not appear a very high achievement and in some respects rather a step backwards, a kind of regression, but at least it has the advantage of taking the truth into account a little more and of making life more bearable again. To bear life remains, after all, the first duty of the living. The illusion becomes worthless if it disturbs us in this. We remember the old saying: _Si vis pacem, para bellum._ If you wish peace, prepare for war. The times call for a paraphrase: _Si vis vitam, para mortem._ If you wish life, prepare for death. FOOTNOTES: [1] Compare Heine's poem, "Der Asra," Louis Untermeyer's translation, p. 269, Henry Holt & Co., 1917. [2] Totem and Taboo, translated by Dr. A. A. Brill, Moffat, Yard & Co., 1918. [3] Totem and Taboo, Chapter IV. [4] Totem and Taboo, Chapter IV. [5] See Totem and Taboo, Chapter III. 
44085	----	generously made available by The Internet Archive.) PSYCHOANALYSIS SLEEP and DREAMS PSYCHOANALYSIS AND BEHAVIOR BY ANDRÉ TRIDON "Tridon applies the psychoanalytical doctrine to a number of everyday problems, a business that ought to be undertaken on a far more extensive scale. His chapters on the psychology of war hysteria and of comstockery are acute and constructive."--_H. L. Mencken._ "His presentation of psychoanalysis is admirable."--_New York Medical Journal._ _$2.50 net at all booksellers_ ALFRED A. KNOPF, PUBLISHER, N.Y. PSYCHOANALYSIS SLEEP and DREAMS BY ANDRÉ TRIDON _Author of "Psychoanalysis, its History, Theory and Practice" and "Psychoanalysis and Behavior"_ "Nothing is more genuinely ourselves than our dreams." Nietzsche. NEW YORK ALFRED A. KNOPF 1921 COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FOR ADÈLE LEWISOHN I wish to thank Dr. J. W. Brandeis, Dr. N. Philip Norman, and Dr. Gregory Stragnell, for valuable data and editorial assistance, and Mr. Carl Dreher who lent himself to many experiments. PREFACE St. Augustine was glad that God did not hold him responsible for his dreams. From which we may infer that his dreams must have been "human, all too human" and that he experienced a certain feeling of guilt on account of their nature. His attitude is one assumed by many people, laymen and scientists, some of them concealing it under a general scepticism as to dream interpretation. Few people are willing to concede as Nietzsche did, that "nothing is more genuinely ourselves than our dreams." This is why the psychoanalytic pronouncement that dreams are the fulfilment of wishes meets with so much hostility. The man who has a dream of gross sex or ego gratification dislikes to have others think that the desire for such gross pleasure is a part of his personality. He very much prefers to have others believe that some extraneous agent, some whimsical power, such as the devil, forced such thoughts upon him while the unconsciousness of sleep made him irresponsible and defenceless. This is due in part to the absurd and barbarous idea that it is meet to inflict punishment for mere thoughts, an idea which is probably as deeply rooted in ignorant minds in our days as it was in the mind of the Roman emperor who had a man killed because the poor wretch dreamed of the ruler's death. We must not disclaim the responsibility for our unconscious thoughts as they reveal themselves through dreams. They are truly a part of our personality. But our responsibility is merely psychological; we should not punish people for harbouring in their unconscious the lewd or murderous cravings which the caveman probably gratified in his daily life; nor should we be burdened with a sense of sin because we cannot drive out of our consciousness certain cravings, biologically natural, but socially unjustifiable. The first prerequisite for a normal mental life is the acceptance of all biological facts. Biology is ignorant of all delicacy. The possible presence of broken glass, coupled with the fact that man lacks hoofs, makes it imperative for man to wear shoes. The man who is unconsolable over the fact that his feet are too tender in their bare state to tread roads, and the man who decides to ignore broken glass and to walk barefoot, are courting mental and physical suffering of the most useless type. He who accepts the fact that his feet are tender and broken glass dangerous, and goes forth, shod in the proper footgear, will probably remain whole, mentally and physically. When we realize that our unconscious is ours and ourselves, but not of our own making, we shall know our limitations and our potentialities and be free from many fears. No better way has been devised for probing the unconscious than the honest and scientific study of dreams, a study which must be conducted with the care and the freedom from bias that characterize the chemist's or the physicist's laboratory experiments. Furthermore, dream study and dream study alone, can help us solve a problem which scientists have generally disregarded or considered as solved, the tremendous problem of sleep. Algebra and Latin, which are of no earthly use to 999/1000 of those studying them, are a part of the curriculum of almost every high school. Sleep, in which we spend one-third of our life, is not considered as of any importance. How could we understand sleep unless we understood the phenomena which take place in sleep: dreams? Even Freud, whose research work lifted dream study from the level of witchcraft to that of an accurate science, seems to have been little concerned with the enigma of sleep and sleeplessness. This book is an attempt at correlating sleep and dreams and at explaining sleep through dreams. Briefly stated, my thesis is that we sleep in order to dream and to be for a number of hours our simpler and unrepressed selves. Sleeplessness is due to the fact that, in our fear of incompletely repressed cravings, we do not dare to become, through the unconsciousness of sleep, our primitive selves. In nightmares, repressed cravings which seek gratification under a symbolic cloak, and are therefore unrecognizable, cause us to be tortured by fear. The cure for sleeplessness and nightmares is, accordingly, the acceptance of biological facts observable in our unconscious and our willingness to grant, through the unconsciousness of sleep, dream gratification to conscious and unconscious cravings of a socially objectionable kind which we must, however, accept as a part of our personality. February, 1921. 121 Madison Avenue New York City TABLE OF CONTENTS I. SLEEP DEFINED 1 II. FATIGUE AND REST 11 III. THE FLIGHT FROM REALITY 20 IV. HYPNOGOGIC AND HYPNOPOMPIC VISIONS 32 V. WHERE DREAMS COME FROM 36 VI. CONVENIENCE DREAMS 44 VII. DREAM LIFE 48 VIII. WISH FULFILMENT 58 IX. NIGHTMARES 67 X. TYPICAL DREAMS AND SLEEP WALKING 75 XI. PROPHETIC DREAMS 85 XII. ATTITUDES REFLECTED IN DREAMS 92 XIII. RECURRENT DREAMS 102 XIV. DAY DREAMS 113 XV. NEUROSIS AND DREAMS 118 XVI. SLEEPLESSNESS 127 XVII. DREAM INTERPRETATION 144 BIBLIOGRAPHY 158 CHAPTER I: SLEEP DEFINED Literary quotations and time-worn stereotypes exert a deplorable influence on our thinking. They lead us to consider certain open questions as settled, certain puzzling problems as solved. From time immemorial, the unthinking and thinking alike, have accepted the idea of a kinship between sleep and death. Expressions like "eternal sleep" show by the frequency with which they recur, how constantly associated the two ideas are in the average mind. Not only is that association absurd but its consequences are regrettable, at least from one point of view: if sleep is a form of death, the psychic phenomena connected with it are bound to be misinterpreted and either granted a dignity they do not deserve or scornfully ignored. The superstitious may loose all critical sense and see in sleep and sleep thinking something mysterious and mystical. The scientist, on the other hand, may consider such phenomena as beneath his notice. No sober appreciation of sleep and dreams can be expected from any one who associates in any way the idea of sleep and the idea of death. Respiration seems to be the essential feature of life, and its lack, the essential feature of death. As long as respiration takes place, the two ferments of the body, pepsin and trypsin, break up insoluble food molecules into soluble acid molecules which are then absorbed by the blood and carried to the cells of the body where they are utilized to build up new solid cell matter. When respiration ceases, a degree of acidity is reached which enables the two ferments to digest the body of disintegrating each cell. This is according to Jacques Loeb the meaning of death. No such chemical action is observable in any form of sleep. From that point of view, sleep is a form of life. Sleep is even a more normal form of life than the average waking states. In the normal waking states, the vagotonic nerves of the autonomic system which upbuild the body and insure the continuance of the race should dominate the organism, being checked in emergencies only by the sympathetic nerves which constitute the human safety system. The vagotonic nerves contract the pupil, make saliva and gastric juice flow, slow down the heart beats, decrease the blood pressure, promote sexual activities, etc. The sympathetic nerves on the contrary, dilate the pupil, dry the mouth, stop the gastric activities, increase the heart beats, raise the blood pressure, decrease or arrest the sexual activities, etc. In peaceful sleep, we observe that the vagotonic functions hold full sway. In sleep, our pupils are contracted. Even when they have been dilated by atropine, they become contracted again in sleep. In sleep, the digestive organs continue to perform their specific work, all the popular beliefs to the contrary notwithstanding. Infants and animals generally go to sleep as soon as they finish feeding. Animals digest infinitely better if allowed to sleep after being fed, than if compelled to stay awake, walk or run. The activity of the sexual organs is as great in sleep as in waking life; in certain cases, it is even greater. At certain times, during sleep, the pressure of the blood in the brain is greatly reduced, and certain authors have concluded that sleep was characterized by brain anaemia, which some of them consider as the cause of sleep. Indeed, unconsciousness can be induced by producing a temporary brain anaemia, for instance by compressing the carotid arteries of the neck for a minute or so. Sleepiness almost always appears then and lasts as long as the pressure is exerted. Special manometers show that the fall in the blood pressure invariably precedes the appearance of sleep. In dogs whose skulls have been trephined for purposes of observation, the brain can be seen to turn pale as soon as the animals fall asleep. But we have here simply one of the vagotonic activities mentioned previously. In the normal organism, the blood pressure should be low, rising only in emergencies, when the organism is facing some danger and must be prepared for fight or flight. And in fact, the slightest light, noise, pain or smell stimulus, is sufficient to bring the blood back to the brain during sleep. Our sympathetic nerves are on the watch and even if the subject does not wake up, they rush the blood whenever it is needed for emergency action, in this case, to the general switchboard of the organism, the brain. But this so-called brain anaemia is not constant during the entire period of sleep. The pressure falls gradually before sleep sets in and only reaches its minimum an hour after sleep has begun. Then it increases gradually and becomes normal again about the usual waking time. We shall see later that attention follows an identical curve. It has been pointed out that in sleep the respiration becomes slower and that the amount of air inspired and consequently of oxygen assimilated is lowered. But inaction in the waking states will show exactly the same results. A smaller quantity of carbonic acid is eliminated in sleep, the decrease being about sixteen per cent. But that condition is not due to sleep. It is due to many other factors such as the absence of light, etc. The nature of the food taken before retiring has also a notable influence on the quantity of carbonic acid eliminated by the sleeper; the quantity varies from seventy five per cent after a meat supper to ninety per cent after a diet of starches. The sweat glands of the skin secrete more actively in sleep than in waking life, which is also a vagotonic symptom and is also due to the fact that the sweat centre is easily affected by carbonic acid. This increase in the activity of the skin accounts for the decrease we notice in the activity of the kidneys. (More urine is produced on cold days when the perspiration is scanty than on hot summer days.) The lowering of the temperature in sleep is simply a result of inactivity, not of sleep. We know that many pains, especially neuralgias, disappear in sleep. Many of those ailments, however, are of a neurotic origin and constitute a form of escape from reality. When reality has been practically abolished by unconsciousness, they are no longer "needed." Experiments made on instructors of the University of Iowa who were kept awake for ninety hours showed that the weight of the subjects increased during the experiments, decreasing later when the subjects were allowed to resume their natural life and to sleep. The increase was solely due to the fact that during the experiments, the subjects were relieved of their duties, remained idle in the psychological laboratory and hence consumed less organic matter than if they had led an active life, preparing their courses and teaching several hours a day. It has been stated many times that a form of motor paralysis sets in during sleep. Yet we all know of the many motions performed by every sleeper, turning from side to side, drawing or pushing away the bed clothes, removing stimuli applied to the face, talking, not to mention, of course, sleep walking. Sleep does not even mean complete muscular relaxation, for sentinels have been observed who could sleep standing; some people sleep sitting up in their chairs. Many animals, birds, bats, horses, sleep in positions which make muscular relaxation impossible; when their balance is disturbed by an observer, they re-establish it without awaking. Sleeping ducks keep on paddling in circles to avoid drifting against dangerous shores, etc. In other words, there is not a part of our body which ceases in sleep to perform its specific work. Our lungs continue to breathe, our heart to send blood to all parts of the body, our glands secrete various chemicals; we hear, smell and to a certain extent, see. The lowering of our eyelids is simply a half-conscious effort to remove sight stimuli. Our nails and hair continue to grow, although, for that matter, they do so for some time even after death. Finally our mental activity does not cease during sleep. Wake up a sleeper at any time and he will awaken _from a dream_. He may not be able to tell that dream but he will know for sure that, not only was he dreaming, but had been dreaming for a long while before awaking. Wherein, then, does sleep differ from waking life? Solely in the form of our mental activities. Sleep is not as Manacéine, the author of the most complete book on sleep, stated: the resting time of consciousness. We do not withdraw our attention completely from the environment in sleep. When we make up our minds, for instance, to wake up at a certain time, we seldom fail to carry out our purpose. Which does not mean that we are suddenly aroused out of our unconsciousness by something within ourselves, but more probably that our attention has been concentrated all night on certain stimuli indicating time, distant chimes, activities taking place at a definite hour, and which we had noticed unconsciously, although they may have escaped our conscious attention. It has even been suggested that as respiration and pulse are more or less constant in rest, they are used by the organism as unconscious time-registers. This is possibly one of the phenomena due to the activity of the pituitary body in which may reside the "sense of time" and which controls all the rhythms of the body. Jouffroy, Manacéine and Kempf have remarked that nursing mothers may sleep soundly in spite of the disturbances which take place about them, but that the slightest motion of their infant will awaken them. Many nurses not only can wake up at regular intervals to administer a drug to their patients, but, besides, can be aroused out of a sound sleep by a change in the patient's breathing foreboding some danger. Our withdrawal of attention from reality follows the same curve as that followed by the withdrawal of blood from the brain. Many experiments have been made to determine that curve and to sound the depth of sleep. In one case a metallic ball was allowed to fall from varying heights until the noise awakened the sleeper; in another case electric currents of varying voltage were used to stimulate the subject, etc. All experiments have yielded the same results: Sleep reaches its lowest depth during the first two or three hours, _the average time being shorter during the day than at night_. In the majority of subjects, the greatest depth is reached about the end of the first hour. After the third hour, sleep is easily disturbed, the more so as the usual awakening time approaches. To conclude, we will say that sleep partakes of all the characteristics of normal life, the only essential difference we can establish scientifically being a greater withdrawal of attention from reality in normal sleep than in normal waking life. We insist on using the terms _normal waking life_, for there are forms of abnormal waking life in which attention is withdrawn as completely from reality as it is in normal sleep. In the disease designated by psychiatrists as _dementia praecox_, the patient may become entirely negative, some time regressing to the level of the unborn child, and withdraw even more entirely from reality than the sleeper who, without awaking, is conscious of certain stimuli and performs certain actions showing a comprehension of their nature. CHAPTER II: FATIGUE AND REST What causes sleep? What causes us to withdraw partly our attention from our environment? The answer: brain anaemia, is unsatisfactory for we may ask in turn: what causes brain anaemia? A study of brain anaemia leads one to conclude that it coincides with the usual sleeping period and that it is produced by sleep instead of producing sleep. The large majority of laymen and scientists, however, give a much simpler answer: we go to sleep because we are tired and need rest. Even as sleep and death have been coupled in the literature of all nations, fatigue and sleepiness, rest and sleep have come to be generally considered as synonymous. Fatigue, however, is as difficult to define scientifically as sleep. Drawing a line between physical fatigue and mental fatigue does not simplify the problem; on the contrary, it complicates it by positing it wrongly. We know that there is no purely physical fatigue. Fatigue is only caused in a very restricted measure by the accumulation of "fatigue" products or the depletion of repair stocks. Under certain "mental" influences, our muscles can perform much more than their usual "stint" without showing fatigue. Hypnotize a man and he will do things he could not attempt in the waking state. He can lie rigid, reposing on nothing but his neck and heels; he can even support in that position the weight of a full-sized man. Men on the march can show wonderful endurance provided their "spirits" are kept up by some form of cheer, band music, etc. Ergograph observations show that signs of muscular fatigue appear and disappear without any obvious "physical" reason. Standardized motions which have been made almost automatic, tire us less than conscious activity. We shall not deny that in certain cases fatigue may appear purely "physical." When a continued expenditure of energy, walking, carrying heavy burdens, has induced muscular soreness, the organism must cease exerting itself for a while and recuperate. But relatively few people perform physical activities which actually wear out the organism. Even then, if that form of exhaustion was conducive to sleep, the more complete the exhaustion was, the deeper the sleep should be. Yet we know that people can be "too tired to sleep." This is easily explained through a consideration of a phenomenon known as the "second wind" and which, before Cannon's observations on the chemistry of the emotions, was rather mysterious. Athletes competing on the running track are often seen to falter and fall back, apparently exhausted; after which, they suddenly seem to breathe more freely, they overcome their limpness and start out on a fresh spurt which may cause them to head off steadier runners. What happens in such a case is this: great physical exertion causes a form of asphyxiation. Asphyxiation and the concomitant fear, liberate adrenin which restores the tone of tired muscles and also glycogen (sugar) which supplies the body with new fuel. If the exertion continues long enough to use up all these emergency chemicals, the muscular relaxation necessary for sleep may be obtained. Otherwise, the organism prepared for a struggle with reality, will not lend itself to a flight from it. Although we are "worn out" we toss about in our bed, try all possible sleeping positions and only sleep when the energy which was supplied for a long struggle has been entirely burnt up. The majority of people, after all, busy themselves with tasks which do not really deplete their stores of energy, but which prove monotonous. That monotony is then interpreted as fatigue. In such cases, rest seems to be more easily attained through a change of activity than through mere cessation of activity. A business man has been closeted in his office attending to many tedious details, reading letters and answering them, etc., and by five o'clock he feels "tired." He will then go home, change his day suit for evening wear, attend a dinner at which he will do perhaps much talking, then watch actors for three hours and feel "rested." Or at the end of a "heavy" week, he will gather up his golf outfit and walk miles in the wake of a rubber ball. He returns to his work "rested," although he has only exchanged one form of activity for other forms of activity. Of actual "rest" he has had none. Children "tired" of sitting in a class room will romp wildly, shout at the tops of their lungs, jostle and fight one another and return to meet their teacher "rested." Undirected activity in the young, pleasurable activity in the adult do not seem to make rest necessary, and in fact are a form of "rest." Egotistical gratification easily takes the place of rest. Heads of large businesses have sometimes mentioned to me that they worked much harder than some of their employés. Some of them kept on revolving commercial schemes in their heads or attending business meetings long after their office workers had left. "And yet," they added, "we are not complaining about being tired." Nor were they as tired, after fifteen hours of "free labor" as their employés were after six or eight hours of routine work allowing them very little initiative and independence of action. Edison works eighteen hours a day and only "rests" through sleep some four hours out of the twenty four. I wager that if he were put at work in his own plant, under the direction of a foreman, performing regular, monotonous tasks, he would break down under the strain of such long hours and would have to "rest" twice as much as he does now. His work satisfies him, and every new detail he perfects, every novelty he initiates, vouchsafes him a powerful ego gratification. Napoleon, too, could perform incredible feats of muscular activity and endurance after which four hours' sleep were sufficient to rest him. His life was for many years a continuous round of ego gratifications, won at the cost of great exertions, it is true, but proclaiming to him and the world his almost unrestricted power and luck. One is forced to the conclusion that a desire for rest is a desire, not for decreased activity but for increased activity. I shall make this point clear through a simile. The manufacturer who "attends to business" must, in order to succeed, "concentrate" on a few subjects and exclude all others from his mind. He may for a few hours think of nothing but, let us say, a certain grade of woollens, certain machinery, a certain customer and perhaps a certain engineer and some financial problem connected with those four thoughts. He must therefore exclude from his mind at the time, thoughts of playing golf, buying new clothes, going to the theatre, renting an apartment, repairing his motor car, thoughts of meals, women, card playing, and many other thoughts which are clamouring for admission to consciousness because they all represent human cravings. In his relaxed moments he will let all those other thoughts come to the surface. Which means that, what tired him, was the fact that he had to keep all those subjects down and allow only the other four to rise to consciousness. Mental rest consists in admitting ideas pell mell into consciousness without exercising any censorship on them. It consists in passing from a reduced but directed mental activity to an increased but undirected mental activity. In other words, rest is the free, normal, unimpeded functioning of the vagotonic nerves which upbuild the body and assure the continuance of the race. Ego and sex activities, mental and physical, are constantly struggling for admission to consciousness and for their gratification. They are held down, however, by the sympathetic nerves which play the part of a safety device, moderating or inhibiting the vagotonic activities whenever the latter might endanger the personality. Physical and mental rest, however, being easily attained through a change of activities, cannot be entirely synonymous with sleep. Sleep takes place mainly while we are resting, although we know of cases when sleep sets in regardless of continued muscular activity, but sleep is not exactly "rest." We do not sleep because we need rest. In many cases we can or could rest very well, although in such cases sleep is an impossibility. What then induces sleep? The certainty that we can for a time relax our watch on our environment; a feeling of perfect safety; the conscious or unconscious knowledge that no danger threatens us. Our receptive contact with reality is attained through the action of our vagotonic nerves which, as stated before, upbuild the body and assure the continuance of the race. Our defensive contact, on the other hand is attained through our sympathetic nerves which interrupt all the activities which are not necessary for fight or flight. As long as some stimulus is interpreted by those nerves as indicating a possible danger, we cannot sleep, although we may, under the influence of terrifying fear, fall into unconsciousness. A light flashed on our closed lids at night causes us to wake up because sympathetic activities bid us to prepare for an emergency. A light burning evenly in our bedroom and not too bright to cause physical pain, will, on the other hand, allow us to sleep soundly because the constant character of the stimulus does not cause us to expect any danger therefrom. A mouse rustling a bit of paper will wake us up, but trains passing in front of our window at regular intervals, or the constant rumble of a neighbouring power house will not prove a disturbance as soon as our nerves have learnt to interpret those stimuli as harmless. Conversation with a dull, witless person, unlikely to best us in debate, puts us to sleep. Argument with keen, sharp-minded people, who keep us on the defensive, may lead to sleeplessness for the rest of the night. A dull book in which nothing happens or is expected to happen, acts as a soporific; we cannot close our eyes before we know the dénouement of a thrilling piece of fiction. In other words, monotony transforms itself into a symbol of safety. Safety does not require the muscular tension, the blood stream speed which the organism needs in order to cope with possible emergencies. We "let go" and no longer pay any close attention to our environment. We sleep. CHAPTER III: THE FLIGHT FROM REALITY Monotony symbolizing safety _enables_ us to withdraw our attention from our environment, from a reality which we no longer fear, but it does not _compel_ us to do so. There is in sleep a certain amount of compulsion which is not accounted for by the mere monotony of environmental stimuli. We go to sleep willingly but not entirely of our own free will. We yield to sleep. A consideration of abnormal sleep states will help us considerably in determining the actual cause of sleep. Abnormal states always throw a flood of light on normal states of which they are only an exaggerated variety. The neurosis is the best magnifying glass through which to watch normal life, provided of course that we afterward reduce our observations to the proper scale. The average person sleeps from six to ten hours out of the twenty four, some time between eight at night and ten in the morning. In abnormal cases, on the other hand, we see the duration of sleep considerably prolonged and the onset of sleepiness appearing at times when complete wakefulness is usually the rule. The circumstances surrounding those abnormal cases are never pleasant. We never hear of any one falling asleep while witnessing a very amusing play, while in the company of a very interesting person or while busy with some extremely attractive occupation. One incident from Napoleon's biography will make my meaning clear. During his days of glory Napoleon never slept more than four or five hours out of the twenty four. His physical and intellectual activities were prodigious. He would, at times, ride on horseback for ten hours at a stretch, then hold conferences with his staff until late into the night, then dictate innumerable letters. Yet he did not feel tired or sleepy and a few hours of sleep were sufficient to "relieve his fatigue." On the other hand, let us remember what happened after the battle of Aspern, the first he lost after a series of seventeen victories: He fell asleep after a long, unsuccessful struggle with drowsiness and for thirty-six hours could not be aroused. His biographers also mention that when his life dream was shattered at Waterloo and he was sent into exile on a remote island, he began to sleep as many hours as the average, normal man. After Aspern and after Waterloo, reality had become such, that an escape from it, via the unconsciousness of sleep, must have been welcome. That the reaction of defeat must have been more keenly felt by the young man who lost Aspern and who presented strong neurotic traits, than by the more settled man who lost Waterloo, can be easily understood. Nansen in his Polar exile slept twenty hours a day. He certainly was not in need of rest or recuperation, for his idleness was complete, but the reality of ice and snow which kept him a prisoner, was one from which he was glad to withdraw his attention. I personally observed two cases in which sudden fits of sleepiness could be interpreted as an escape from reality. A gambler could go for several days and nights without sleep, _provided he was winning_. After a heavy loss or a period during which his earnings were offset by his losses, he would go to bed and sleep as much as four days and four nights at a time, arising once or twice a day to partake of some food and returning at once to his slumbers. A neurotic with a strong inferiority complex was overwhelmed by sleepiness every time he encountered a defeat of a sexual or egotistic nature. After a quarrel, or whenever a discussion in which he took part turned to his disadvantage, he had to lie down and "sleep it off." This is probably the key to the enigma of Casper Hauser's case. He was born in Germany at the beginning of the last century and brought up in complete solitude, in a small dark room. At the age of seventeen, he had never seen men, animals or plants, the sun, moon or stars. He then was taken out of his cell, and abandoned on the streets of Nuremberg, dazed and helpless. All the efforts made by kind Samaritans to develop his mentality proved futile. They had only one result: to make him fall asleep. Accustomed for years to the peace, quiet and safety of his cell, he reacted to a new, troublesome and complicated environment as newly born infants do, who in incredibly long periods of sleep, in no wise explainable through fatigue, escape reality and return to the perfect happiness of the fetal state. In certain forms of the disturbance known as sleeping sickness, people merge into a sleep which continues for weeks, months or even years, and which sometimes culminates in death. (In many cases, however, the sleepiness may be totally lacking.) The sleeping sickness was first observed some hundred years ago on the West Coast of Africa and, since then, in an area of the African continent extending from Senegal to the Congo. Negroes are almost the only sufferers, although a few whites have been affected by this disease which, at times, extends to large numbers of the population. According to various medical observers, the sleeping sickness usually appears among slaves doing _arduous, exhausting work_. It is the individuals who stand lowest in intelligence who are most severely affected. In communities where the mental development has been retarded, imitation easily spreads the contagion and this is probably the reason why entire villages are decimated by that curious malady. Whether the sleeping sickness is in certain cases induced by the bite of a fly or appears without obvious physical cause is immaterial.[1] Paranoia induced by syphilis is in no way different from ordinary paranoia. Hence we are justified in linking together certain aspects of the African sleeping sickness and the lethargic ailment which affects the white races in Europe and America. Both have the appearance of normal sleep, the only striking difference, barring certain physical syndromes, being the unusual length of the sleeping period or its onset at unusual and unexpected times. In white subjects, narcolepsy is seldom fatal but has been known to last for years. The most famous case on record is probably that of Karoline Ollson reported in a Salpétrière publication for 1912. Karoline Ollson was born in 1861 in a small town of Sweden. At the age of 14, at the onset of her menstruation, she once came home complaining of toothache, went to bed and remained bedridden till 1908. For thirty-two years she slept all day and all night, waking up now and then for a few minutes, taking dim notice of happenings in her environment and speaking a few words. Two glasses of milk a day seemed to be sufficient to sustain her. She was kept for a fortnight in a hospital from which she was discharged when her ailment was diagnosed as "hysteria." When her mother died in 1905 she woke up and wept as long as the corpse remained in the house. Then she became quiet again and resumed her slumbers. In April, 1908, when her menstruation stopped, she woke up, left her bed and has led a normal life since. Dr. Toedenström who describes the case states that she looked incredibly young. Two weeks after she left her bed she had become strong enough to take charge of the household. Stekel, discussing this strange case in one of his lectures, said: "This woman spent the entire time of her womanhood in sleep, for she fell asleep at the time of her first menstruation period and her awakening coincided with her climacteric. She was a child and wished to remain a child. The first question she asked on arising, 'Where is mama?' shows that she was suffering from psychic infantilism. It is probable that dreams of childhood filled her thirty-year sleep and she may even have dreamt that she was still an unborn child for whom life had not yet begun." Medical literature contains many reports of freakish cases in which the subject falls asleep suddenly, while attending to duties of an uninteresting character; a young waiter, for instance, falling asleep while waiting on a table, remaining absolutely motionless for a whole minute and then waking up and resuming his work. Manacéine mentions two similar cases she observed personally. Both patients were illiterate and of slow intellect. One of them, a housemaid of nineteen, was a sound sleeper at night and yet, in the day time, one could never be sure of her remaining awake. She fell asleep once in the act of announcing a visitor and while bringing in a tray loaded with cups of coffee. The other was a woman of fifty, who was employed as a nurse until one day, falling asleep suddenly, she dropped an infant on the floor and almost killed him. In both the pulse was remarkably slow (a vagotonic symptom): in the girl it varied from 50 to 70 when awake, in the older woman from 40 to 60. An epidemic of sleeping fits, lasting only a few minutes at a time, raged for several years in a small German town near Würzburg. The attacks took place at any moment and were liable to leave the patient immobilized in some curious position. It was the weaker part of the population, physically and mentally, which was affected by that curious trouble, apparently transmitted from parents to children, probably, as all neurotic complaints are, through imitation. Stekel considers hysterical and epileptic fits as forms of morbid sleep during which hysterics gratify sexual cravings and epileptics sadistic cravings. This is how Dr. Isador Abrahamson describes, from recent cases observed at Mount Sinai Hospital, the course of lethargic encephalitis which is one of the scientific names coined to designate the sleeping sickness: "At the onset of the disease, there is a period of variable duration in which the patient experiences increasing difficulty in attending to his work. Next a time of yawning ensues, in which there may be also the _irritability of the overtired_. Then the eyes close, _chiefly from lack of interest_.... (The patient's) pulse, temperature, and respiration may all be of a normal character.... From the depth of this seeming slumber, he may respond immediately when questioned and his _short but coherent answers_ show _no loss either of memory or of orientation_.... His answer given, he straightway resumes his seeming sleep.... _His attitude expresses a desire to be let alone_, a desire which is sometimes articulate in him.... The somnolence may deepen into a stupor from which the patient is not easily aroused to conscious repose.... In the night watches ... a restless delirium of inconstant severity often appears. Spontaneous movements and sounds are made. The movements are purposeful graspings and pointings at unseen things, tossings and turnings...." The author adds in another part of his article that "The depth of the somnolence and also its duration are unrelated to the severity of the cerebral lesions.... _The extent of the mental disturbance bears no correspondence to the extent of the lesions_, the amount of fever or the blood picture...." [Italics mine.] We have a perfect picture of a flight from reality into a somnolence into which the unconscious complexes force at times a terrifying presentation of the dreaded reality through nightmares. The few cases of sleeping sickness reported in recent medical literature show a decided neurotic trend in the subjects affected and reveal circumstances in the patient's life which would make a flight from reality highly desirable. One typical case reported to me by a Boston physician who personally considers the sleeping sickness as being "unquestionably an acute organic disease of the cerebro-spinal system" has all the earmarks of a neurotic affection: "The patient, a middle aged woman lost a child she loved dearly one year and a half before the onset of the disease. The circumstances of the child's death were particularly sad as the mother was not allowed to visit the little sufferer at the hospital on account of the contagious character of his disease. She also felt disturbing doubts as to the competence of the first physician who attended her child. "She had been 'nervous and run down' since the child's death. She is married to a cripple twenty years her senior. She had to go to work in order to help support the household and to live with relatives of her husband's who did not contribute to the pleasantness of her home life." Have we not here all the environmental conditions which would drive a neurotic to withdraw his attention from reality through a protracted period of sleep? From the fact that I have instituted a comparison between sleep and the sleeping sickness, the reader should not draw the conclusion that I attribute to sleep any neurotic character. Sleep is a compromise, as I shall show later, when discussing dream life, between what the human animal was meant to do and what it can do in reality. The neurosis, also is a compromise, but it is a compromise that fails, while sleep is a compromise which is successful, beneficial and acceptable to all. CHAPTER IV: HYPNOGOGIC AND HYPNOPOMPIC VISIONS The curve of sleep depth shows that our withdrawal from reality is not sudden but gradual. The transition from wakefulness to sleep is characterized at first by blurred visions, colours, shapes, moving objects with a scarcely defined outline, and immediately after by curiously symbolical visions, known as hypnogogic visions. Those phenomena are difficult to study for they are forgotten by the end of the night. The observer has to train himself to wake up after a few minutes of unconsciousness, a result which is achieved without difficulty after a few trials. The first visions of the night are in every subject I have asked and in myself, symbolical of the passage from one state to another. One hypnogogic vision I have had many times is of wading slowly into a lake or the sea, until the water reaches to the middle of my body after which I start swimming.[2] One night when I had a little difficulty in falling asleep my hypnogogic vision represented a truckman looking like myself whipping a team of horses hitched to a big load who were crossing a very high bridge leading from the city into the open. Another night, after seeing the "Follies," I dreamt that the police was trying vainly to quell a disturbance and that the rioters succeeded in placing their own police in charge of the disturbance. The newcomers were attired like the front row girls of the Follies. No more symbolical picture of the whole nervous situation could be found. The day's repressions being gradually replaced by the "follies" of dreamland. Not only is the passage from reality into dreamland thus symbolized by appropriate representation but the mental work of reality gradually merges with the mental work of the sleeping state. Thoughts of the day merge directly with the dream thoughts. There is no gap between waking thoughts and sleeping thoughts. This has been demonstrated by Silberer's experiments. "The very first dream," Silberer says, "visualizes, dramatises and interprets the very last waking thought." 1st EXAMPLE: "I applied some boric ointment to the mucous of my nose before retiring to relieve a painful dryness." DREAM: "I see some one offering money to some one else. Only I notice that it is my right hand which is putting money into my left hand." INTERPRETATION: "I have often thought that this medication did not help my nose trouble but simply concealed it. The action is therefore presented as illusory help." 2nd EXAMPLE: "I am thinking of a dramatic scene in which a character would intimate a certain fact to another character without putting the thought into words." DREAM: "One man is offering to another man a hot metallic cup." INTERPRETATION: "The cup transmits an impression of heat which has not to be expressed through spoken words." 3rd EXAMPLE: "I try to remember something which in my sleepy state eludes me." DREAM: "I apply for information to a grouchy clerk who refuses to impart it to me. The interpretation is obvious." 4th EXAMPLE: "I think that many simple arguments could be brought forth to prove some thesis of mine." DREAM: "A drove of white horses moves downward through my field of vision. Interpretation obvious." Likewise sleeping thoughts gradually merge with waking thoughts in the moments preceding awakening. The last dreams of the night or hypnopompic visions generally dramatize our awakening in picturesque, symbolical fashion. Here are several examples collected by Silberer from observations on himself: "I return to my home with a party of people, take leave of them at the door and enter." "After visiting some place, I drive home along the same road which lead me there." "One morning I woke up and decided to doze off for another half hour: I dreamt then that I was locked up in a house and I woke up saying: 'I must have the lock broken open.'" In hypnopompic visions we generally enter a house, a forest, a dark valley or take a train or a boat, or we fall (see typical dreams). CHAPTER V: WHERE DREAMS COME FROM To sleep does not mean "perchance to dream," but to dream from the very second when we close our eyes to the time when we open them again. "But I never dream," some one will surely say. To which I will answer: Make experiments on yourself or some one else. Have some one wake you up fifty times or a hundred times in one night. Repeat the experiment as many nights as your constitution will allow and every time you wake up, you will wake up with the clear or confused memory of some dream. Most people forget their dreams as they forget their waking thoughts. Unless some very striking idea came to my mind yesterday afternoon, I am likely to be embarrassed if some one asks me: "What were you thinking of yesterday afternoon?" We shall see in another chapter that our dream thoughts are not in any way different from our waking thoughts, and that unless they have a special meaning there is no reason why they should obsess us more than our waking thoughts do. In fact, a remembered dream is as important as an obsessive idea and has the same meaning. Thousands of futile dreams dreamt in one night may not leave a deeper impression on our "mind" than thousands of futile thoughts which flit through our consciousness in one day. Before considering the origin of dreams I must restate briefly a proposition which I have discussed at length in _Psychoanalysis and Behaviour_, the indivisibility of the human organism. The words physical and mental are lacking in any real meaning and there is no physical manifestation which it not inseparably linked with some psychic phenomenon. Emotions, secretions and attitudes may be studied separately for the sake of convenience, but in reality there cannot be any emotion which is not unavoidably accompanied by a secretion and betrayed by some attitude, nor can there be any attitude which is not accompanied by a secretion and interpreted by some emotion. This must be constantly borne in mind when we attempt to answer the question: Where do dreams come from? If dreams "come from the stomach" why should distressed minds seek refuge in them? If they are purely psychic phenomena, what relief can they afford to our dissatisfied body? We shall not deny that a full bladder may at times induce urination dreams, that a full stomach may at times conjure up anxiety visions in which heavy masses oppress us, or that long continence and the consequent accumulation of sexual products may be at times responsible for sexual dreams. What the physical theory of dreams, most scientifically and conscientiously expounded by the Scandinavian Mourly Vold, will not explain, however, is that, in one subject, a urination dream may be a pleasurable visualization of relief, leading to continued sleep and, in another, an anxiety episode, picturing frustrated gratification and ending in an unpleasant awakening. A heavy dinner may people one sleeper's visions with large animals treading his stomach, and cause another to dream of vomiting fits which relieve the pressure of food. In one sleeper, sexual desire evokes libidinous visions, in another, terrifying scenes of violence. On the other hand, the very close relation observed in thousands of cases between the sleeper's dreams and his physical condition, invalidates any theory which would revert more or less literally to the belief held in ancient times that dreams were purely psychic phenomena, visions sent by the gods. Maury whose book, "Sleep and Dreams," published in 1865, was probably the first serious attempt at deciphering the enigma of dream thoughts, had various experiments performed on himself to determine what dreams would be brought forth by physical stimuli. He was tickled with a feather on the lips and nostrils. He dreamt that a mask of pitch was applied to his face and then pulled off, tearing the skin. A pair of tweezers was held close to his ear and struck with a metallic object. He heard the tolling of bells and thought of the revolutionary days of 1848. A bottle of perfume was held to his nose. He dreamt of the East and of a trip to Egypt. A lighted match was held close to his nostrils. He dreamt that he was on a ship whose magazine had exploded. A pinch on the back of the neck suggested the application of a blister and evoked the memory of a family physician. A sensation of heat made him dream that robbers had entered the house and were compelling the inmates to reveal where their money was hidden by scorching the soles of their feet. Words were pronounced aloud. He attributed them to some people with whom he had been talking in his dreams. A drop of water was allowed to fall on his forehead. He dreamt that he was in Italy, feeling very hot and drinking wine. A red light suggested to him a storm at sea. Struck on the neck, he dreamt that he was a revolutionist, arrested, tried, sentenced to death and guillotined. I have had some of Maury's experiments repeated on myself and the connection between the physical stimulus and the content of the dream leaves no doubt as to the direct relation between the two. On the other hand, the reader will notice that the same stimuli applied to Maury and to me produced absolutely different results. Compare my first and second experiments with his first and third. 1. I was tickled on the nose with a feather. I dreamt that I was entering a forest and that branches and leaves were brushing against my face. I made an effort to push them away with my hand. (I had taken a ride through Central Park that very day). 2. A bottle of perfume was held open under my nose. I dreamt of a landscape with thick clouds and mist to the left. Two dark figures carrying grips were hurrying toward the right where there seemed to be open fields, flowers, and sunlight. (The day preceding the dream had been cloudy.) 3. My nose was stroked with a piece of paper. I dreamt I met a certain writer who asked me whether another writer had seen a certain lady and her daughter. I answered rather indifferently and went on my way. Then I saw either the other writer or myself seated before a window and showing a tall gaunt woman and another indistinct figure, either Japanese prints or some manuscript, and I woke up. (The day preceding the dream I had revised a manuscript for a woman and also spoken of one of the two writers.) 4. Cold steel was applied to my throat. I dreamt that a cold wind was blowing; I tried to turn up my overcoat collar and woke myself up. Carl Dreher has devised an apparatus which can be set to throw flashes of light at a given time during the night and then wakes him up by means of a buzzer. The flashes have translated themselves in many cases into interesting visions: In one dream the last picture seen before the alarm went off was that of a building in front of which stood very white marble columns standing on a background of intense black. On another occasion extremely bright green snakes hung from trees, the space between the snakes being very dark. On another occasion he was talking to a girl who declares herself to be "intermittently in love." In another dream, he saw himself operating a moving picture machine which threw flashes on the screen regardless of whether he opened or closed the switch. After many such experiments, he saw his apparatus in a dream and woke up without having been directly affected by the light. In this last dream we have a case of dream insight, the dreamer refusing to pay any attention to a stimulus which has become familiar. This explains the phenomenon of adaptation to stimuli. People whose bedroom is near some source of regular constant noise can sleep in spite of that stimulus for their nervous system no longer translates it into fear; nor has it to interpret it lest it might create fear. Every one of the dreams thus produced artificially were closely related to experiences of the day before and to some of the dreamer's memories and complexes. The dreamer's unconscious was merely stimulated by the light flashes to express itself through images including an allusion to those flashes. In other words, the physical stimulus, be it an impression made upon one of the sense organs or an inner secretion, is interpreted by the sleeper according to the ideas which dominate the sleeper's mind at the time, memories of recent experiences or obsessive ideas. Which means that the personality of the dreamer expresses itself through his dreams. We need not heed Pythagoras' warning against eating beans. It is not the stimulus that counts; it is the end result. And the end result seems to depend from the memories which have accumulated in our autonomic nerves. Freud compares the dream work to a promoter who could never carry out his brilliant ideas if he could not draw upon funds accumulated elsewhere (in the unconscious). Silberer says that the appearance of a dream is like the outbreak of a war. There is a popular tendency among the ignorant to attribute a war to some superficial, visible cause, disagreement, insult, invasion. The real causes, however, are much deeper and lie not only in the present but in the past as well. CHAPTER VI: CONVENIENCE DREAMS Some of the hypnogogic visions and experimental dreams I have mentioned contradict the wide-spread belief that sound sleep is untroubled by dreams. The hypnagogic vision I have so often, that I wade into a body of water and finally start swimming, only adds one more pleasant feature to my escape from reality. Swimming is really my favourite sport. When my nose was tickled and I interpreted the stimulus as foliage brushing my face on entering a forest, that vision was not meant to awaken me, but on the contrary to keep me asleep by explaining away the tickling sensation and removing any sense of fear which would have compelled me to take notice once more of reality and protect myself. Such dreams have been designated as convenience dreams. Dreams of urination can be considered as typical convenience dreams. In the morning, when the pressure of urine on the walls of the bladder becomes stronger, dreams build up a convenient explanation around that unpleasant stimulus. Our wish to urinate is either represented as gratified or we are shown the impossibility of gratifying it (no toilet, doors locked, people looking, etc.). Unless the pressure is absolutely unbearable, we generally sleep on, satisfied or discouraged by such convenience dreams. Freud tells in his "Interpretation of Dreams" of a striking convenience dream of his and of a variation it underwent on one occasion: "If in the evening I eat anchovies, olives or any other strongly salted food, I become thirsty at night, whereupon I awaken. The awakening, however, is preceded by a dream, which, each time has the same content, namely that I am drinking. The dream serves a function, the nature of which I soon guess. If I succeed in assuaging my thirst by means of a dream that I am drinking, I need not wake up in order to satisfy that need. The dream substitutes itself for action, as elsewhere in life. This same dream recently appeared in modified form. On this occasion I became thirsty before going to bed and emptied the glass of water which stood on a chest near my bed. Several hours later in the night, came a new attack of thirst, accompanied by discomfort. In order to obtain water I would have had to get up and fetch the glass which stood on a chest near my wife's bed. I appropriately dreamt that my wife was giving me to drink from a vase, an Etruscan cinerary urn. But the water in it tasted so salty, apparently from the ashes, that I had to wake up." On a chilly summer night a woman patient had the following dream: "A man took me in a canoe to the middle of a lake and upset the canoe, saying: 'Now you belong to me.'" She woke up shivering. The lake, the canoe upset and the man in the dream were associated with many conscious thoughts and memories of hers. But this was mainly a convenience dream, which endeavoured to explain away the chilliness of the night through an appropriate scene. When the unavoidable awakening took place it was dramatized, as it is in so many cases of awakening, through a fall accompanied by a certain fear of death. The few examples I have given and which could be multiplied, tend to show that the dream, far from being a disturber of sleep, is sleep's best protector. It seeks to explain away physical stimuli which might cause the sleeper to awake and it visualizes many reasons for not experiencing the fear usually connected with a certain stimulus. In every convenience dream which I have analysed, I have found a close connection between the image conjured up by the dream work and the ideas generally occupying the dreamer's mind in his waking states. In almost every case it could also be noticed that the convenience dream made use of some experience or observation of the previous waking state, which increases the plausibility of the dream's visualization. CHAPTER VII: DREAM LIFE The life we lead in our dreams, especially in healthy, pleasant dreams, is simpler and easier than our waking life. We obliterate distance and transport ourselves wherever our fancy chooses; our strength is herculean; we defy the law of gravitation and rise or soar with or without wings; we brave law and custom; we abandon all modesty and make ourselves the centre of the world, which is OUR world, not any one else's world. The simplification of life is attained in dreams through three processes, visualization, condensation and symbolization. The dream is always a vision. Other sensations than visual ones may be experienced in dreams but they are only secondary elements. In other words, we may now and then hear sounds, perceive odours, etc., but the dream is based primarily on a scene which is perceived visually, not on sounds, odours, etc., now and then accompanied by a visual perception. In fact we seldom hear sounds in our dreams, unless they are actual sounds produced in our immediate environment; the people who address us in dreams do not actually emit sounds but seem to communicate their thought to us directly without any auditory medium. Seldom do we taste or smell things in dreams. On the other hand, we translate every stimulus reaching our senses in sleep, be it sound, taste, smell, touch, into a visual presentation. This process is to be compared to the gesticulation of primitive individuals who attempt to visualize everything they describe, indicating the length, height, bulk of objects through more or less appropriate mimic and who convey the idea of a bad odour by holding their nose, of pleasing food, by rubbing their stomach, etc. The dramatization of every thought and every problem follows the line of least effort. And this explains the popularity of the movies, the enjoyment of which does not presuppose on the part of the audience any capacity to conceive abstract ideas. Movie audiences are undoubtedly the least intelligent aggregations of people. They are not _told_ that a crime has been committed, they are _shown_ the crime while it is being committed. Captions warn them of what they are going to see, that they may not misunderstand the meaning of any scene. The movie, like our unconscious, translates every thought into a visual sensation, and when a psychological change cannot very well be visualized, for instance when the villain decides not to kill the ingenue, the fact is flashed on the screen in large type. Pleasures of the eye are probably stronger and simpler than those vouchsafed by other sensory organs.[3] The most uninteresting parade will attract thousands of people, many more for instance, than free concerts in the open. Illustrated lectures appeal to more people than lectures without illustrations. Displays in shop windows, picturesque signs, possess a greater selling power than the best advertising copy. In our waking life, we express our thoughts to ourselves and others through the algebra of abstract concepts. We speak of length, height, volume, weight, hardness, coldness, etc. It is doubtful, however, whether we can imagine length without thinking specifically of something long. In our dreams, the concept length disappears and is always replaced by something long. We notice that abstract thinking is more tiresome than descriptive thinking, that abstract facts demand more exertion in order to be grasped, than concrete facts. A philosopher expounding his theories to an audience tires himself and the audience quicker than an explorer would, describing his travels and possibly illustrating his talk by means of lantern slides. Dream life is further simplified through condensation. This process is the one through which, in waking life, we reach generalizations. When we think of a house we select the essential characteristics of the various houses we have seen, the properties wherein a house essentially differs from, let us say, a bird or a river. In our dreams, condensation is less subtle and more directly based upon our experience. We combine several persons into one, selecting as a rule the most striking features of every one of them. We may see a dream character with the eyes of one person, the nose of another and the beard of a third one. Freud having made one proposal to two different men, Dr. M. and his brother, the former having a beard and the latter being clean shaven and suffering from hip trouble, combined them in a dream in a figure which looked like Dr. M., but was beardless and limped. One of Ferenczi's patients dreamt of a monster with the head of a physician, the body of a horse and draped in a nightgown. Silberer dreamt of an animal which had the head of a tiger and the body of a horse. This is a process similar to the one which in the infancy of the race gave birth to strange composite gods and mythological creatures like the Assyrian bull a combination of man's intelligence, the bull's strength and the bird's power of flight, the various Egyptian deities in whom the process was reversed, for so many had the heads of animals and the bodies of men, the satyrs and syrens, combining respectively man and goat, woman and fish, Pegasus, the winged horse, etc. Finally, dream life is simplified through the symbolic representation of human beings or inanimate things. In symbolization, one striking characteristic of some complicated object is isolated from the others and some other object with only one characteristic substituted for it. Slang is made up of such symbolizations. Think of the expression "bats in the belfry," in which the complicated human head is replaced by an architectural detail much simpler in character and occupying in an edifice the same position which the head occupies in human anatomy. Then, instead of describing absurd ideas, of a sinister colouring, without definite direction, we simply visualize queer creatures, half bird and half mouse, flitting about blindly. Instead of explaining that the central figure of the christian religion is a godlike creature who died crucified, we select the most striking detail of the Passion, the cross, which to the initiated and uninitiated alike signifies christianity. In many cases we do not even represent the cross as that instrument of torture really looked but we simplify it, we symbolize it, by using a conventional design in which the proportion between the cross pieces has been entirely disregarded. Symbolization is a reduction of an object to one essential detail which has struck us as more important than the others. A child will designate a watch as a "tick-tick," a dog as a "bow-wow," because to his simple mind, ticking and barking are the essential characteristics of a watch and a dog. In dreams, we simplify the concept of the body and often represent it by a house. The authority vested in the father and mother causes them often to be symbolized by important personages, etc. Without any more explanation, I shall sum up the various dream symbols whose selection is easily understood. Birth is often symbolized by a plunge into water or some one climbing out of it or rescuing some one from the water. Death is represented by taking a journey, being dead, by darksome suggestions. A great many symbols in dreams are sexual symbols. The figure 3, all elongated or sharp objects, such as sticks, umbrellas, knifes, daggers, revolvers, plowshares, pencils, files, objects from which water flows, faucets, fountains, animals such as reptiles and fishes, in certain cases hats and cloaks are used to represent the male sex. The female sex is symbolized on the contrary by hollow objects, pits, caves, boxes, trunks, pockets, ships. The breasts are represented by apples, peaches and fruits in general, balconies, etc. Fertility is symbolized by ploughed fields, gardens, etc. I have shown in another book, "Psychoanalysis, Its History, Theory and Practice," that symbols are absolutely universal and that the folklore of the various races and of the various centuries draws upon the same material for the purpose of simplified representation. Differences in climate, fauna and flora are purely superficial. Dwellers of the Polar regions are not likely to compare anything to a palm tree which they have never seen, nor will tropical races symbolize coldness through snowfields. Experiments made by Dr. Karl Schrötter have confirmed Freud's and Jung's theories of symbolization in dreams. To the uninitiated and sceptical, dream symbols generally appear rather ludicrous fancies and not a few opponents of psychoanalysis hold that symbols were resorted to by analysts unable to read an obvious wish fulfilment in every dream. Schrötter hypnotized his patients, then suggested to them a dream outline, ordering them also to indicate through an appropriate gesture when the dream would begin and end. This enabled him, by the way, to record the duration of every dream.[4] He then awakened the subject and made him tell his dream. One of his patients, a woman drawing toward middle age, who had been greatly upset when she learnt that the man she loved was suffering from syphilis, was asked to have a dream symbolizing her state of mind. Here is the vision she had: "I am walking through a forest on an autumn day. The path is steep and I feel chilly. Some one whom I cannot distinguish is near me. I only feel the touch of a hand. I am very thirsty. I would like to slake my thirst at a spring but there is a sign on the spring that means poison: a skull and cross bones." The fancy is rather poetical and this example is quite typical of the symbolization of our life's incidents by the dream work. A patient with a strong resistance to the analytic method saw me in a dream "carrying a fake refrigerator full of make-believe meats, vegetables and fruits." The interpretation is obvious. I am carrying in a deceptive way an assortment of ideas which can be of no use to any one. The refrigerator implies that the ideas are not even new but old and stale. The patient's repressions were such that, although the dream struck him as strange and he remembered it several months, he was unable to puzzle out its meaning. It expressed his mental state at the time and yet having made up his mind not to doubt me or the analytic treatment, he become unable to accept any disparaging thought consciously. Unconsciously, however, he expressed his doubts in most striking symbolism which he did not himself understand. This should be borne in mind if we wish to understand the psychology of nightmares. For in nightmares we may express a wish through a symbol which expresses it fittingly, but which we do not understand and which, on that account, may frighten us. Let those who sneer at the study of symbols watch some of the attitudes assumed by insane people[5] who have reached the lowest level of deterioration. Let them see a picture published in the issue of the _Journal of Mental and Nervous Disease_ for January, 1920, and which represents a hospital patient who has reached the lowest degree of infantilism. The patient hung herself in a blanket attached to a nail in front of a window. There she spent her days in the characteristic attitude of the unborn child in the womb. Everything in that attitude was symbolical of her regression to, not only infancy, but the prenatal condition. CHAPTER VIII: WISH FULFILMENT An evening paper published recently a cartoon showing a kiddie in bed who asks his mother: "What makes me dream?"--"You eat too much meat," the mother answers. The next scene is laid in the kitchen where the mother finds her child ransacking the ice box for meat. Parents could testify to the illustrator's knowledge of the childish soul. Children like to dream and Freud's statement that every dream contains the fulfilment of some wish is confirmed by the dreams of healthy children. Children attain in their sleep visions the simple pleasures which are denied them in their waking states. Freud's little daughter, three and a half years old, being kept one day on a rather strict diet, owing to some gastric disturbance, was heard to call excitedly in her sleep: "Anna Freud, strawberry, huckleberry, omelette, pap." On one occasion she was taken across a lake and enjoyed the trip so much that she cried bitterly at the landing when compelled to leave the boat. The next morning she told the family a dream in which she had been sailing on the lake. Freud's little nephew, Hermann, aged twenty-one months, was once given the task of offering his uncle, as a birthday present, a little basket full of cherries. He performed that duty rather reluctantly. The following day he awakened joyously with the information which could only have been derived from a dream: "Hermann ate all the cherries." The _London Times_ of Nov. 8, 1919, had a report of a lecture by Dr. C. W. Kimmins, chief inspector of the London Education Committee, on the significance of children's dreams. He based his statements on the written records of the dreams of 500 children between the ages of eight and sixteen years. Up to the age of ten, dreams of eating predominated, but their number fell off after ten, when dreams of visits to the country began to increase. Dreams of presents and eating at all ages from eight to fourteen, were much more frequent with children of the poorer classes that with those from well-to-do districts and there was an appreciable increase of their number about Christmas time. Retrospective dreams were very uncommon among all children. Obvious wish fulfilment dreams were less common among boys than among girls, the proportion being respectively twenty-eight and forty-two per cent. Boys below ten had more fear dreams than girls of the same age. In both sexes it was some "old man" who terrified the dreamers. Both sexes suffered equally from the fear of animals, lions, tigers and bulls in the case of the boys, dogs, rats, snakes and mice in the case of the girls. From ten to fifteen a falling off in the number of fear dreams was very noticeable among boys, whereas among girls it rather increased. That increase was especially striking among girls of 16 and over, who were generally frightened by animals and strange men and women. When school life played a part in children's dreams it was more frequently the playgrounds than the classrooms which were visualized. The war affected boys' more than girls' dreams. The dreaming boy was a valorous fighter, mentioned in dispatches, rewarded with the Victoria Cross, thanked personally by the King; or he returned home wildly cheered by crowds. Girls, thirteen or over, saw themselves as Red Cross nurses, but no such dreams were observed in girls below ten. Normal, healthy children delighted in dreaming and telling their dreams with a wealth of detail. Dr. Kimmins mentioned that, while the dreams of school children were generally easy to interpret, the dreams of students from 18 to 22 "were so heavily camouflaged that it would be impossible for any one who was not a trained expert in psychoanalysis to deal with them satisfactorily." We can see how the repression made necessary by life conditions in modern communities slowly but surely transforms the obvious wish-fulfilment dreams of children into the symbolical and often distressing visions of the adult. The development of sexuality in boys and girls and the repression to which it is submitted explains easily the proportion of fear dreams in girls and boys. Sexual talk and sexual curiosity are more common among boys than girls and therefore occupy the boys' minds more constantly than the girls' minds. On the other hand, many of the boys above sixteen find forms of sexual satisfaction of which the girls of the same age are deprived. Fear dreams are therefore more frequent among growing girls, being simply a symbolical form of sexual gratification. The dreams of adults are far from being as uniformly pleasurable as those of young and healthy children. A few of them are frankly pleasant; most of them are apparently indifferent and a few of them frankly unpleasant. The pleasant dreams of the adults require as little interpretation as those of children and are obviously the fulfilment of conscious or unconscious wishes. A patient of mine, camping in the woods alone, dreamt during a rainy night that some of his friends were camping with him, that one of them had gone to a neighbouring inn to secure better accommodations and finally that he was in his own bed at home. Nordenskjold in his book "The Antarctic," published in 1904, mentions that during the winter which he spent in the polar wilderness, his dreams and those of his men "were more frequent and more vivid than they had ever been before. They all referred to the outer world which was so far from us.... Eating and drinking formed the central point around which most of our dreams were grouped. One of us, who was fond of going to big dinner parties, was exceedingly glad when he could report in the morning that he had had a three course dinner. Another dreamed of tobacco, mountains of it; still another dreamed of a ship approaching on the open sea under full sail. Still another dream deserves mention: the postman brought the mail and gave a long explanation of why he had to wait so long.... One can readily understand why we longed for sleep. IT ALONE COULD GIVE US ALL THE THINGS WHICH WE MOST ARDENTLY DESIRED." [Capitals mine.] Other dreams of wish-fulfilment appear at first glance either indifferent or absurd. Interpreted according to the technique outlined in Chapter XVII, however, they soon yield a meaning which is rather convincing. The following dream, recorded by a patient, would not lead the inexperienced interpreter to suspect the sinister death wish which it is meant to express in an indirect way. "I was visiting a factory and saw Charles working as a glassblower." Charles was the first name of a wealthy man who seduced a girl with whom the dreamer was in love. The wealthy man is reduced to the condition of a working man. The patient's unconscious association to _glass blower_ proved to be _consumption_. The patient had once read statistics showing that a large number of glassblowers died from that disease. A very neatly concealed death wish. In other cases the death wish, while obvious in the manifest dream content, appears absurd and may cause the patient some anxiety. One of Ferenczi's patients, who was extremely fond of dogs, dreamt that she was choking a little white dog to death. Word associations brought out the memory of a relative with an unusually _pallid_ face whom she had recently ordered out of her house, saying later that she would not have such a snarling _dog_ about her. It was that white-faced woman, not a white dog, whose neck she wished to wring. Here is another example in which the wish fulfilment is cleverly concealed. "I am standing on a hill with Albert and somebody else. Bombs are falling about us. One of them strikes his car which is destroyed."[6] The patient, a woman, is in love with Albert and enjoys greatly riding with him in his car. Why should she wish to see it wrecked? The key to the enigma was given by the associations to the "somebody else." The somebody else was another woman whom Albert had taken to ride on several occasions and of whom my patient was very jealous. By destroying the car, the jealous woman was putting an end to the rides which had especially aroused her jealousy. The following dream seems rather unpleasant without being however an actual nightmare. DREAM: I heard a noise downstairs and went to investigate. Upon reaching the bottom of the stairs, I found a man lying on the floor with his coat off and drunk. Later he was hiding from me and running about the house. The man was captured and brought back by another man who cross-examined him. The other man made excuses for the thief and said he probably intended to steal but as he had a toothache he had sought the cellar and drunk to deaden the pain. To prove his explanations he opened the thief's mouth and pointed to a large cavity in one tooth. INTERPRETATION: The patient who brought me the dream was a young woman who, at the time, was worrying lest her husband should discover an indiscretion she had committed in her own house. The thief in the dream turned out to be her lover and the man who captures him, her husband. Everything is made simple and pleasant by the fact that the husband takes it upon himself to make excuses for the man he has captured. The excuse of the cavity was an allusion to alleged visits to a dentist's office which supplied her with alibis on various occasions. We spend a part of the night, if not the entire night, seeking solutions for the problems of the day. Patients who have been trained to remember and record their dreams accurately, sometimes bring a series of visions, apparently unrelated, but which after interpretation, prove to be successive presentations of one and the same problem from different angles. CHAPTER IX: NIGHTMARES The Freudian theory of wish-fulfilment easily accepted by the layman as solving the problem of pleasant or indifferent dreams, meets with a most sceptical reception when it is applied to unpleasant dreams, to nightmares, which are characterized by a varying degree of anxiety. What I said in a previous chapter on the subject of symbols explains why certain wish-fulfilment dreams are perceived and remembered as nightmares. A woman may dream that she is surrounded by snakes, bitten by a dog, pursued by a bull, trampled down by a horse. A man may dream that he is stabbed in the back or that he is sinking slowly into water. In the first case we have a symbolic expression of the woman's desire for sexual intercourse, in the second a symbolic expression of the man's desire for homosexual gratification or for regression to the fetal stage (assuming of course that those various symbols have not a personal significance for the subject). The anxiety connected with those visions is due to the subject's inability or unwillingness to recognize as his the unconscious desires expressed by symbols. In not a few cases, the sleeper creates a dream situation which is distressing, full of danger, but which leads to a triumphal climax in which his ego reaps a rich reward of glory. Stekel in "The Language of the Dream," records a fine dream of his in which his egotism is vouchsafed all forms of gratification. DREAM: "I am in a great hall. On the stage there is a composite, centaurlike creature, half horse and half wolf or tiger. I am standing near the door, fearing that the beast might get out of bounds. In fact the tiger tears himself loose from the horse and leaps toward the door. I slam it shut and lock it up. After a while, I re-enter the hall. I behold a wild panic. Krafft-Ebing, the lion tamer, is rushing here and there. A man with two children is shaking with fear. Trumpet calls are heard coming from the tower." INTERPRETATION: "The dream was connected with a heated discussion in which I had taken part, about Zola's 'The Human Beast.' I contended that in every man there is a pathological strain and that no one is in absolute control of the beast. I see myself under two different aspects. I am the wolf or tiger and I lock the door in order that the wild cravings may not get loose. How great I am in this dream! Krafft-Ebing, the famous expert in sexual pathology, runs about helpless, while I hold the beasts in my power. The fear-stricken fellow with the two children is myself, an obviously tragic figure, symbolizing another side of my nature. The trumpet calls are from Beethoven's Fidelio. My marital faithfulness triumphs over my wildest urges. I am a model for all to imitate and I sound loud warnings." In a dream reported by a patient who was unconsciously trying to break his appointment with me, the anxiety is purely hypocritical, for each new obstacle placed in the dreamer's path is a new excuse for not reaching my office on time. "I was on Riverside Drive, strolling north. Mr. Tridon came along in the same direction, bare-headed and riding on a bicycle. He came near running into a boy, also on a bicycle, but swerved sharply and avoided a collision. "I was hurrying to keep the appointment with Mr. Tridon which I had for 5.30 P. M. (I really had an appointment for 11.30 in the morning) but felt that I could not be there on time. My watch had stopped and the clocks I saw in stores had stopped likewise. The location was the slope of Morningside Heights and my direction still seemed to be northerly. "Another transition and I was climbing a hill near what looked like the 99th Street station of the 3rd Avenue L. Near the summit the going became very steep and I was unable to go on, although I tried to scramble up on my hands and knees. I turned to the left, however, and climbed stairs leading through a white house, which I understood to be a school. There was a woman there with a few children. I then issued into a wide avenue running east and west which looked like Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn. A trolley came along but as I ran for it, it seemed as though I had lost my coat. I turned back anxiously to find it but discovered that I was carrying it on my arm. I woke up before the next car came along." After attempting to ridicule me, the dreamer rehearsed all the excuses he might offer me for missing an appointment: Mistake about the hour, clocks stopped, going to the wrong direction (north instead of south), finally landing in Brooklyn, far from my office and missing several cars, etc.... A young woman who had been invited several times by a friend to come and visit her and who had exhausted all the possible excuses for refusing such an invitation had the following dream after receiving one more letter renewing the invitation: "My friend's abode was a new apartment and I spent a night there. Upon awaking in the morning I discovered something crawling on my bed which looked like a caterpillar. I was disgusted and frightened. I went into the bathroom and there too found insects of the same species but very small in size. They reminded me of spiders and the ceiling and the walls were entirely 'decorated' with them. "I then decided to tell my friend to call this to the attention of the landlady and as I entered my friend's room I found her and the landlady cleaning my friend's bed. "I told the landlady how unpleasant it is to have such creatures in one's apartment and she said: 'The rooms were left unpainted for some time and this is the cause of it.'" An unpleasant dream, containing a little anxiety and some disgust and yet, a solution offered for the young woman's problem, a reason for not accepting the invitation. The place is not clean. The next dream is also an effort at finding a solution for a distressing problem: DREAM: "I was at home; some one looking like a nurse said: 'Come up stairs. You are going to have a baby.' I was neither surprised nor worried. The nurse added: 'When you have had the baby, you can select a husband for yourself.' I followed her and lay on a bed waiting for pains. Feeling nothing I grew impatient and went downstairs. Suddenly I became frightened and decided I must not have the child. I started to think how I could find a doctor to perform an abortion. I awoke suddenly with a tremendous sense of relief." INTERPRETATION: The patient is a southern girl living in New York. Home for her means the small town where her family resides. She has had a liaison and has often worried about possible consequences. The first part of the dream is a solution offered by the dream. She is at home, pregnant, but it seems natural to every one and the nurse (a nurse girl of her childhood days) is not only taking the matter as natural but shows her the advantages of her condition. On the other hand, the girl is frigid in love and used to associate pregnancy with orgasm. The pregnancy means here the fulfilment of her wish for an orgasm. Also it reveals her secret desire that her lover might be compelled to marry her. The lack of labor pains is another form of wish-fulfilment. The end of the dream indicates the mental processes of the patient, and her struggle against a regression. She first attempts to solve the problem by running back to "home and nurse" but insight enables her to analyse her dream and return to real life. There is no doubt but some painful dreams are, without any symbolism or distortion of any kind, dreams of obvious wish-fulfilment. There is a human type which enjoys pain, be it inflicted by others or self-torture, and to which fear and anxiety vouchsafe a good deal of gratification. When we remember the workings of our autonomic nerves we may not wonder at that fact. Pain, anxiety or fear pour into our blood stream fuel which gives us for a few minutes or a few hours a feeling of energy and power we may lack, and secretions which cause an arterial tension translated easily into "excitement," "exhilaration," etc. Children of the masochistic type like to have some one tell them stories of the most nightmarish variety which fill them with terror. We have all met the child who at some time or other makes the strange request: "Scare me." Anxiety dreams may play the part of a bracer and tonic in subjects of that type. The strange ritual of some primitive races, ancient and modern, in which mourners slash themselves or pull their hair or beards, corresponds closely from the endocrine point of view to the craving for terrible fairy tales or the frequency of certain anxiety dreams. The secretions brought forth by that self-inflicted pain may combat successfully the depression due to the loss of a dearly beloved person. CHAPTER X: TYPICAL DREAMS AND SLEEP WALKING Thousands of explanations have been offered for typical dreams which almost every one has had at least once, such as dreams of falling or flying, but none of them should be accepted as covering all cases. The human mind is compelled to do its thinking along certain lines and to use certain categories like time, space, etc. Naturally, dreams, which are in no way different from waking thoughts, must move along certain definite grooves too; but we must remember that no symbol has an absolute meaning. Every symbol is likely to have a slightly different meaning for every individual. We shall see in the chapter on "Attitudes in Dreams" that it is the type of dreams rather than their content which is important psychologically. And it is the type of man who dreams which is important to bear in mind when we try to ferret out the meaning of a typical dream. Generally speaking, flying dreams seem to correspond to one of the most universal cravings of mankind: to liberate itself from the tyranny of the law of gravity and enjoy the freedom which winged creatures enjoy. All races have wished to fly and that desire, never gratified in waking life until recently, was bound to express itself in the dreams of all races at all periods of history. Freud has suggested that such dreams repeat memories of childhood games, rocking, see-sawing; Federn has seen in them a symbol of sexual excitement, both of which explanations sound unconvincing. There may be a symbolism of a different sort about flying dreams. If for some reason or other, our sleep becomes suddenly much deeper, we may represent our "flight" from reality through a flight through the air. We soar to the dream level which we feel to be higher than the waking level, to which on awakening, we fall painfully. Variations in the sleep depth would thus account for the frequent relation of sequence which is observable between flying and falling dreams. Flying dreams are never connected with any fear of anxiety, while falling dreams are almost always nightmares of usually short duration. The Freudians see in many falling dreams memories of falls in childhood. "Nearly all children," Freud writes, "have fallen occasionally and then been picked up and fondled; if they fell out of bed at night, they were picked up by their nurse and taken into her bed." This explanation fits only an insignificant number of cases. The symbolism of the falling dream is found upon analysis to be much richer. In women, dreams of falling are very often symbolical of sexual surrender. Anxiety or pleasure connected with falling dreams reveals the fear or pleasure connected with such a thought in the dreamer's mind. Not a few falling dreams transform themselves after a slight period of anxiety into flying dreams, thus indicating that the feeling of inferiority connected with the idea of surrender was very slight and easily replaced by a feeling of power, freedom and superiority to environment and conventions. Dreams of falling are sometimes "followed" by a terrified awakening. In reality it is the awakening due to some physical stimulus, noise, light, pain, etc., _which is followed by a falling dream_. The dream in that case is symbolical of the act of awaking. The anxiety is the natural displeasure felt by the dreamer when suddenly compelled to pass from dreamland into reality. This symbolism is rather apt, for the awakening lowers us from the free and irresponsible estate of the dream creature to the slavery entailed by leading a real life. We fall from the heights of our dreams to the depths of reality. At times, the dreamer has the impression of being mangled or killed as a result of that fall. Death is again a powerful symbol indicative of the dreamer's attitude. He feels he is dying when compelled to return to reality. Such a type is more dangerously attached to his fiction than the one who only resents awaking as a diminution of his ego and power. Dreams of falling teeth may be symbolical of unconscious onanistic tendencies. The slang of many languages has established a connection which cannot be casual between the pulling of teeth and sexual self-gratification. In dreams in which teeth grow again in the dreamer's mouth we may see a return to childish attitudes and memories of the years when the first teeth fell out and were replaced by stronger ones. An optimistic attitude, if somewhat regressive. When a certain tooth or group of teeth keeps on recurring in dream pictures, an X-ray examination of the entire denture should be made. I have observed several cases in which such dreams revealed the presence of root abscesses causing absolutely no conscious irritation and only felt unconsciously. Those dreams were both a warning and a wish-fulfilment (painless extraction). Dreams of nakedness, like dreams of flying, seem to express one of mankind's cravings, freedom from clothes. In the Earthly Paradise, Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed; all the gods and goddesses of the ancient religions were unclothed; even in our days academic sculptors represent modern heroes naked. Painters and sculptors of all epochs have been inclined to glorify the nude in their works. It is quite unnecessary to construct such dreams as a return to infantilism, as a regression, as the Freudians generally do. The attitude of the onlookers in those dreams contains a very obvious form of wish-fulfilment: whether we sit at a banquet or walk across a drawing room or appear on a street naked or half unclothed, no one seems to notice us. We generally try to hide or to drape ourselves in as dignified a manner as possible in whatever scanty garments we retain, but the anxiety is all on our side. Such dreams cannot be dreams of exhibitionism for they are never accompanied by the wish that people should see us, nor do we ever derive any pleasure from our exposure. I would be inclined to consider them in almost every case as symbolic dreams of attitudes. We are labouring under the burden of some secret which we are afraid of revealing. In spite of our anxiety, we are comforted by the fact that our secret (our total or partial nakedness) escapes the beholders. Our danger and our escape are simply visualized and symbolized. The symbolism of our exposure is quite obvious. The upper part of our body is usually covered up and it is the "lower" part of it which is exposed, and which we awkwardly try to wrap up in our shirt tails or to conceal under a table cloth or behind furniture or bushes. We are concealing something shameful, "low." Everybody knows the symbolism of high and low, right and left, which is expressed by the language of all races. One form of anxiety dream in which we grope our way through endless narrow passages, room after room, up and down flights of stairs, has been considered by some analysts as a memory of the first event of our life, when we were forced violently, painfully, through a narrow passage and finally reached the light of day. When the detail of those dreams is closely analysed it will prove much more valuable and important than a mere regression to the infantile. They will generally turn out to be the sort of dreams that coincide with the solution of a crisis and indicate that an adaptation to life has been reached, that the subject has been "reborn." Sleep walking is one variety of typical dream characterized by a greater motor activity than the usual dream in which we either lie still or only perform incomplete motions. Sleep walkers, like ordinary dreamers, performed in their somnambulistic states actions which they have refrained from performing in their waking states. While the sense of direction and of orientation seems unimpaired in sleep walkers, their perception of reality is very rudimentary. Two cases reported by the Encyclopédie Française and by Krafft-Ebing, respectively, illustrate that point. A young man used to get up at night, go to his study and write. Observers would now and then substitute a sheet of blank paper for the sheet which he had covered with writing. When he had finished, he would read over his manuscript aloud and repeat correctly, while holding the blank sheet before his eyes, the words written on the sheet which had been taken from him. One night the prior of a monastery was seated at his desk. A monk entered, a knife in his hand. He took no notice of the prior but went to the bed and plunged his knife into it several times; after which he returned to his cell. The next morning the monk told the prior of a terrible dream he had had. The prior had killed the monk's mother and the monk had avenged her by stabbing the prior to death. Thereupon he had awakened, horrified, and thanking God that the whole affair had only been a dream. In sleep walking dreams there is an accuracy, a singleness of purpose, a concentration of attention which has always struck all observers. The sleeper often wakes up when called by name, but he generally obeys without waking, all commands of a sensible character, such as to go back to bed. The sleeper often finds his way and locates the objects he may need for the purposes of his dream with his eyes closed, but noises and collisions with objects often fail to bring him back to waking consciousness. Sadger has attempted to point a connection between moonlight and sleep walking, which he calls at times "moon walking." The conclusions which he reaches at the end of his book on the subject are as follows: "Sleep walking, under or without the influence of the moon, represents a motor outbreak of the unconscious and serves, like the dream, the fulfilment of secret, forbidden wishes, first of the present, behind which, however, infantile wishes regularly hide. Both prove themselves _in all the cases analysed_ more or less completely as of a sexual erotic nature. "Also those wishes which present themselves without disguise, are mostly of the same nature. The leading wish may be claimed to be that the sleepwalker, male or female, would climb into bed with the loved object as in childhood. The love object need not belong necessarily to the present; it can much more likely be one of earliest childhood. "Not infrequently the sleep walker identifies himself with the beloved person, sometimes even puts on his clothes, linen or outer garments, or imitates his manner. "Sleep walking can also have an infantile prototype, when the child pretends to be asleep, that it may be able without fear or punishment to experience all sorts of forbidden things, because it cannot be held accountable for what it does 'unconsciously in its sleep.' The same cause works also psychically, when sleep walking occurs mostly in the deepest sleep, even if organic causes are likewise responsible for it. "The motor outbreak during sleep, which drives one from rest in bed and results in sleep walking and wandering under the light of the moon, may be referred to this, that all sleep walkers exhibit a heightened muscular irritability and muscle erotic, the endogenous excitement of which can compensate for the giving up of the rest in bed. In accordance with this, these phenomena are especially frequent in the offspring of alcoholics, epileptics, sadists and hysterics, with preponderating involvement of the motor apparatus. "Sleep walking and moon walking are in themselves as little symptoms of hysteria as of epilepsy; yet they are found frequently in conjunction with the former. "The moon's light is reminiscent of the light in the hand of a beloved parent. Fixed gazing upon the planet also has probably an erotic colouring. "It seems possible that sleep walking and moon walking may be permanently cured through the psychoanalytic method." CHAPTER XI: PROPHETIC DREAMS Every one has heard relations of prophetic dreams which seem to imply a sense of unconscious sight going far beyond the limits of our conscious visual perceptions. It may be that, even as certain vibrations can be sent and received without any transmitting medium except the atmosphere, by wireless, certain visual information can be received, at times, under certain conditions, without any perception of such phenomena reaching the consciousness. At the same time, this is a field on which one must tread most carefully, for telepathy has never been studied very scientifically and the telepathic dreams which have been related to me or which I have read about had been recorded rather carelessly and the circumstances surrounding them had not been noted with the regard for accuracy which must characterize scientific research. A few times in my life, I have had the infinite surprise when lifting the telephone receiver, of hearing the voice of the very person I was going to call up and who had called me up at the same minute. On the other hand, I have endeavoured with the help of very intimate friends to effect synchronic transmission of thought and have failed dismally on every occasion. While I have never had prophetic dreams I have recorded one dream of mine which might be characterized as a "second sight" dream. One day I mislaid some documents which once belonged to my father. That night my father appeared to me and pointed to a desk drawer where the papers would be found. The next morning I looked in that drawer and found the documents. I certainly placed the documents myself in that drawer the day before and forgot the fact. But the unconscious memory of that action was retained and came up at night while my mind was at work solving the problem of the lost documents. If that explanation should meet with scepticism I would remind the reader that the wealth of information with which our unconscious is filled permits of unconscious mental operations of which in our conscious states we would be incapable. Janet's subject, Lucie, who was lacking in mathematical ability, could, in her unconscious states, perform calculations of an extreme complication. He would give her under hypnosis the following order: "When the figures which I am going to read off to you, leave six when subtracted one from the other, make a gesture of the hand." Then he would wake her up, and ask several people to talk to her and to make her talk. Standing at a certain distance from her, he would then read rapidly in a low voice a list of figures, but when the appropriate figures were read, Lucie never failed to make the gesture agreed upon. We notice thousands of things unconsciously, which means simply that every sensorial impression causes a modification of our autonomic system and probably of our sensory-motor system which is never completely effaced. During our waking hours only those memory impressions which are needed rise to consciousness. The many observations we have made, consciously or otherwise, enable us to calculate the distance between us and an automobile, the speed of that automobile, the width of the street, the dryness or the slippery conditions of the pavement, and to select the time for crossing as well as the speed at which we shall cross. In our sleep, when we are revolving the day's problems and searching for solutions, many other facts, stored up in our nervous systems, rise to consciousness and are used in solving the problem. In the personal case I cited, my unconscious applied its searchlight to recent events; in other cases reported in the literature of the subject the unconscious is shown bringing back events which seemed to have been entirely forgotten. Our organism never forgets. Forgotten incidents which suddenly rise to consciousness in dreams are sometimes responsible for visions which on superficial observation appear truly prophetic. Maury cites the following in his book on "Sleep and Dreams": "Mr. F. decided once to visit the house where he had been brought up in Montbrison and which he had not seen in twenty-five years. The night before he started on his trip, he dreamt that he was in Montbrison and that he met a man who told him he was a friend of his father. Several days later, while in Montbrison he actually met the man he had seen in his dream and who turned out to be some one he really knew in his childhood, but had forgotten in the intervening years. The real person was much older than the one in the dream, which is quite natural." One finds in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research many remarkable examples of dreams which, to the uninitiated, appear truly miraculous. Remembering, however, the wonders accomplished by Lucie under the influence of a hypnotic command, we may realize that the book-keepers who suddenly find in a dream the mistakes which have prevented them from balancing their books, or the various people who locate missing objects, are simply continuing in their sleep the day's work, drawing no longer upon their limited store of conscious memories and impressions, but upon all the wealth of information which is contained in their unconscious. Even the famous dream of Professor Hilprecht loses much of its glamour when viewed from this angle. Hilprecht had spent quite some time trying to decipher two small fragments of agate which were supposed to belong to the finger rings of some Babylonian god. He had given up the task and classified the fragments as undecipherable in a book on the subject. One night he had put his "o. k." on the final proofs of that book, feeling, however, rather dissatisfied at his inability to account for the inscriptions found on those ancient stones. He went to bed, weary and exhausted and had a remarkable dream: A tall, thin priest of Nippur appeared to him, led him to the treasure chamber of the temple of Bel and told him that the two fragments in question should be put together, as they were, not finger rings, but earrings made for a god by cutting a votive cylinder into three parts. The next morning he did as the dream priest had told him to do, and was able to read the inscription without any difficulty. I have received many letters from persons relating that they had dreamt of the San Francisco earthquake, of the sinking of the _Lusitania_, of the death of some friend or relative the very night preceding the event. I show in another chapter how treacherous and unreliable our memory of dreams can be at times. Happenings following quickly the awakening are likely to become "parasites" on the night's dreams and to appear as a component part of them. Time and over again, the newspaper one reads at breakfast adds details to the night's remembered dreams. Reading about some accident in the early morning may cause us to believe that we dreamt of the accident in the course of the night. When the German submarines began to sink passenger ships, thousands of dreamers who either wished unconsciously for such sinkings or feared them (which is generally the same thing) and many also who craved the excitement such catastrophes would bring them, must have had dreams in which large ships were sunk. And those thousands must have impressed themselves and their family circle by announcing, when the morning newspaper came out, that they had seen the tragedy enacted in a dream. Here again we are groping our way over uncharted fields and not until thousands of scientific observations made with the care characteristic of the chemical laboratory have been made, all explanations will only be tentative and all positive statements misleading. Those mentioning such dreams to me have at times been rather annoyed when I made them confess the wish lurking in them. One man told me that he had three brothers at the front during the war and that in a dream he saw one of them killed by the Germans. Soon afterward, news of his death reached the family. I asked him point blank why he wanted to get rid of that brother. He avoided giving me a direct answer but admitted that if one of the three was to die, the one whose death he saw in his dream would be least missed by his family as he had always made trouble and was the "black sheep."... Even in such cases the wish fulfilment theory holds good. CHAPTER XII: ATTITUDES REFLECTED IN DREAMS Dreams reveal to us what our unconscious cravings are and this is of course valuable information. But cravings are only symptoms of something more important and less easily dealt with: the subject's attitude to life. The neurosis is merely a wrong attitude to life and its problems. A fear of darkness, an incestuous desire, an abnormal craving for a certain food are no more important in themselves than a small sore appearing on one's lip. But as the sore may mean that the organism is infected with the spirochaeta of syphilis, the "psychic" phenomena I mentioned may mean that the organism has adopted toward reality a negative attitude leading to death instead of life. Owing to its visualizing powers, the dream makes attitudes extremely obvious at the very first glance. We are as we see ourselves in our dreams. Positive, energetic dreams, full of action, indicate strength either in resolve or in resistance. Vague dreams, full of moods rather than of action, indicate stagnation, aimlessness. Dreams of adulthood, dealing with the present or the future, indicate progression. Dreams of childhood or dealing mainly with the past, indicate attempts at a regression. In his latest book, "Introduction to Psychoanalysis," Freud states that "the unconscious in our psychic life is the infantile." This is one of the great Freudian exaggerations. Such a statement is true of the neurotic and explains why he is a neurotic. In fact the more infantile the unconscious appears to be, the more severe the neurosis generally is, until in certain forms of malignant regression, the patient acts like a helpless newly born infant. The predominance of infantile material in dreams indicates a fixation on infantile gratifications which makes the subject especially ill adapted to adult life. But in the normal individual the amount of infantile material is very small indeed. We start gathering unconscious material at the very minutes of our birth, if not before birth, but we keep on accumulating experiences, most of them unconscious and only rising to consciousness when needed, and conscious experiences which become unconscious when not needed. It is the proportion of material from the various periods of our life which enables us to gauge the level a human being has reached through his intelligent, positive acceptance of present day reality. I say acceptance of reality rather than adaptation to reality, for adaptation implies a certain suppression, and suppression may mean neurosis. It is the human being who satisfies all his infantile cravings within a sphere of activity beneficial to himself and the world, who remains healthy. He who tries to satisfy them through infantile or childish ways merges into a neurosis. We have seen that the dreams of children and of simple, normal people are obvious and devoid of any symbolic disfigurement. Children dream of the food or the pleasures they had to forego in the previous waking state. Nordenskjold and his sailors, icebound in the Antarctic, dreamt of fine meals, of tobacco, of ships sailing the open sea, of mail from home, in other words of the things of which they had been deprived for months. The use of symbols in dreams, on the other hand, indicates a lack of freedom of expression due to some fear or repression. A repressed vision appears on the screen of our mind in symbolized form. A highly symbolical dream is almost always a pathological dream. It means that we do not dare, even in our dreams, to visualize directly the thing we are thinking of. The phenomenon which Freud has designated as "displacement" also indicates an attempt at repressing certain important facts by harping on other facts of lesser importance. A child surprised in a part of the house where his presence is suspicious is not likely to reveal abruptly his plans. He will in all likelihood tell some story from which the real reason for his presence is carefully excluded. A young pie fiend found in the pantry would never mention the word pie but make great ado over the "fact" that his ball has rolled under the cupboard. And likewise it is very often the part of a dream which a patient has not told which holds the key to the enigma of the patient's mental disturbance. One of my hypnagogic visions which I have already mentioned, simple as it is, reveals my entire attitude, not only to sleep, but to life in general. I do not feel overwhelmed by sleep. I give myself up to sleep as voluntarily as I wade into the sea or plunge into a swimming pool. Sleep will refresh me as a swim would. When the proper depth is reached I swim out, conscious of my ability and experiencing no fear. I use sleep as a means to exercise my mental activities as I enjoy the muscular exertion necessary for swimming. Finally there is no one in the picture but myself. I am the central figure of the dream. To go into more details, I may confide to the reader that I have never enjoyed any form of sport, indoor or outdoors in which I do not play an important, if not the leading part, or which prevents me from indulging my own whims. Witnessing some one else's athletic performances bores me to extinction and games such as cards, checkers or golf which are surrounded with iron clad regulations appear to me not as a relaxation but as a useless form of hard work. Readers may think that these self-revelations are prompted by egotism, but an analyst should analyse himself as ruthlessly as he analyses others and egotism happens to be the dominant feature of my attitude to life. The following dream draws a remarkable picture of uncertainty, indecision and gloom: DREAM. "I am standing at the foot of marble stairs. I expect some danger from the left where a person clothed in authority, with tyrannical appearance, is approaching. I ask a female figure standing at the top of the steps, and who seems to be some acquaintance, relative, mother or sister, for help. I try to run up the steps but cannot. The figure extends me a helping hand but that hand is so weak, lifeless, that I feel helpless. I wake up in deep anxiety." ATTITUDE. We have in this case a "flight to the mother" coupled with fear of the powerful father. The patient had always suffered from some fear, fear of examinations as a school child, fear of competition in all life matters, fear of marriage, fear of decisions. He lived with his mother and sister and had an affair with a woman considerably older than himself whom he called "mother" and who called him her "boy." We shall now see a dreamer wrestling with a sentimental problem, seeking a solution for it and refusing to accept the solution suggested by an outsider. DREAM. "I was in a car with Albert, sitting in my usual seat but the steering gear had been moved so that I could steer from my seat. I was very inexperienced and felt anxiety. I was going down a steep city street and at the bottom, saw a house before which I wished to park; there were red lanterns and signs, however, which prevented me from stopping there. I went on and Albert disappeared, then I was in the open country climbing a hill and a man (A.T.) stood there and I asked him which way to go. The machinery bothered me, I didn't know what button to push but trusted my intuition and went all right. Finally I reached a desert stretch where there was nothing and in great anxiety awoke." ATTITUDE. The subject in love with a married man, had long hoped that he would secure a divorce and marry her. She often went motoring with him. Their affair was not satisfactory, however, and she had often considered the possibility of a separation. The situation is handled in the dream as follows. She has had her way and is running the car from her usual seat (he has come to her point of view) but she has misgivings about the experiment (unconsciously, she is not very keen any more to marry him); she tries to park in front of a house (their future home); red lanterns (danger signs, obstacles, law, custom) prevent her from doing so. She then starts out without him and asks her analyst for advice. He encourages her to go on her way but she reaches a deserted place and feels so forlorn, so hungry for human company that she escapes from the nightmare through awaking. Even when no change is observable in a patient's condition in the course of an analysis, constant attention to his dreams will enable the analyst to notice unconscious changes which very soon afterward translate themselves into a conscious modification of attitude. The following dreams illustrate that point: At the beginning of the analysis a patient, following in his dreams as well as in his neurosis, the line of least effort, dreamt he had solved a mechanical problem by means of a very simple apparatus consisting in a rocking chair, two thumb tacks and an old rubber coat. Later when he resumed closer contact with life, the machinery of his dreams became real machinery and he continued in his sleeping thoughts the calculations which had occupied him during the day and which to him were a constant source of pleasure. A patient whose ambition was to become a singer but whose husband was decidedly hostile to her plans, first brought me the following dream in which she frankly relied on me for advice: "I am on the stage, singing. I forget my part. A foreign looking conductor prompts me. In the wings, a man is looking at me, weeping. He falls in a faint. I rush to him. He looks like my husband. A foreign looking doctor picks him up and says to me: 'He will sleep now, after which he will feel better.' I go back to the stage and sing beautifully." Later, having acquired more self-confidence she visualized the situation as follows: "I see a man leading a Jersey cow on a rope. The cow is trying to get under the fence but cannot. Then the cow is changed into a yellow bird which flies away, perches on top of a barn and sings joyfully." In the first dream, I am, of course the conductor and the doctor. In the second dream, the cow is an allusion to the patient's tendency to gain weight. The song-bird is a very obvious symbol. A series of dreams reported by a stammering patient not only presented the Freudian feature of wish-fulfilment but indicated clearly the patient's changing attitude and his growing self-confidence, which finally culminated in his complete cure. One of the first dreams he brought me at the beginning of the treatment read as follows: "A congressman called Max Sternberg, who looks like me, is on the platform, making a speech. A gang of little Irish boys in the rear starts a disturbance. The audience, unable to hear the speaker, leaves the hall." On numberless occasions, small boys prevented him in his dreams from accomplishing his object, and in particular, disturbed him when he was speaking. Later the small boys became less and less aggressive. On one occasion he lead a group of them through a museum and they listened to his explanations without interrupting him. One night he had the following dream. "I am near Grand Central and thousands of children are lined on both sides of the avenue to welcome a school principal who is landing from the train. He arrives and they all cheer wildly and I have a feeling that I am that school principal." Little boys never disturbed the dreamer after that. He had conquered his regressive tendencies and his speech was improving. His self-confidence grew to such a point that he had the following dream: "I was in a room with John and Lionel Barrymore and I rehearsed them for a Shakespearian play. Lionel forgot his part and stopped. I prompted him and declaimed a few lines myself very eloquently. This was accompanied by the thought: Very egotistical-good." CHAPTER XIII: RECURRENT DREAMS Whenever one and the same motive, with perhaps slight variations, recurs frequently in dreams we may assume that it is the leading motive of the dreamer's waking life. Whenever a person plays a dominant part in our dreaming, we can rest assured that that person dominates and directs our behaviour directly or indirectly. A man of forty-five, suffering from dizziness, was sent to me by his family physician after numberless tests had failed to attribute his illness to a "physical" cause. The patient had been troubled for two years with vertigo, which he insisted on attributing to arteriosclerosis (against the advice of several physicians). His legs had become very weak and unsteady. He had developed a deep sense of worthlessness and was haunted by suicidal ideas. My query as to his most frequent dream elicited the answer: "I dream very frequently of my father." His father had died two years before, from arteriosclerosis, and his main complaint had been dizziness, weakness of the legs and depression. To any one but the patient, the psychological connection between his illness and his father's illness would have been obvious. He, too, saw some connection between the two, only he placed upon that fact a more sinister construction. The heredity bogey was terrifying him. His father had bequeathed his illness to him, and he was to die as his father had died. It came out in the course of the analysis that he had been from infancy his father's constant companion, working for him till he was over forty years of age. Although he had always been fond of women, he had never thought of marrying until his father died. After reciting the usual arguments of the average bachelor directed against matrimony, he confessed that he had never had the courage to bring to his home any young woman he liked and who might have become his wife. Fear of his father's sarcastic remarks set to nought any plans he might have made for a home of his own. After his father's death, he went half-heartedly into various business ventures of which his father would have disapproved and he naturally lost his investment. Every time he met with a reverse, he would be tortured by remorse. "This is my father's money which I have been squandering." "My father would be furious if he knew what I have done." He would then dream that his father stalked past him, cold, indifferent, stern, and he "knew" his father had "come back" to show him his resentment. The superficial symptoms of the patient's trouble were easily removed when he acquired enough insight to realize that he had been imitating all of his father's attitudes and repressing his own ego. Physical exercise soon restored to his legs the steadiness which they had lost while the patient, imitating his father's helplessness, would sit in his father's chair day after day, never taking a walk. A more critical attitude of mind toward the father whom he worshipped, removed gradually the sense of worthlessness which had almost lead him to suicide. Suicide to him was the road that led back to his father, upon whom he wished to shift his responsibilities, and for whom he wished to work (as a younger man), etc. The case was much more complicated but the few details of it which I have presented are sufficient to show the close connection which existed between the patient's most frequent dream and his imaginary neurotic goal. A homosexual patient always dreamt of her stepmother whom her father married when she, the patient, was only twelve years of age. That marriage was the culmination of a complicated family tragedy, double divorce, unsavoury publicity, bitterness and hostility, puritanical gossip about sex, passion, etc., which made on the child an indelible impression. She felt obscurely then that relations between sexes were something unutterably filthy and while she liked a few boys in her flapper days, she could not master a feeling of disgust whenever their attitude reminded her of the "nasty" things which had wrecked her family. On the other hand, the pretty young woman whom her father introduced into his home, personified in her thoughts sexual attraction in its most irresistible form, a symbol of sin and bliss. To this day she has love affair after love affair with women, every affair followed by a "nervous breakdown" in which she repents her immorality and experiences terrible remorse. At every stay in a sanitarium, however, dreams of her stepmother, representing veiled and symbolized homosexual situations, obsess her night after night. In one of those dreams she took the place of her father and married the young woman, after which the hostility of the family, manifesting itself in various forms, transformed the pleasant fancy into a painful anxiety dream. Another patient, tyrannized over by an aunt who had brought her up, would, whenever an emergency arose and she had to take a decision, dream of the severe, forbidding aunt and feel so depressed the next day that she could not accomplish anything and thus postponed the solution of her difficulties. In certain cases, a recurring dream may bear a strange likeness to a splitting of the personality such as we observed in cases of dual personalities. The famous Rosegger dream, analysed by Freud and Maeder, should be reanalysed in the light of the statements made in the previous chapters. Rosegger went through a hard mental struggle from which he emerged victorious, but the recurring dream he relates in his book "Waldheimat" tells us much about the trials of a little tailor who managed to make a place for himself in the artistic world but for a long while felt out of place in his new environment. "I usually enjoy a sound sleep," Rosegger writes, "but many a night I have no rest. I lead side by side with my life as student and littérateur, the shadow life of a tailor's apprentice. This I have dragged with me through long years, like a ghost, without being able to get rid of it.... Whenever I dreamed, I was the tailor's apprentice, ... working without compensation in my master's workshop.... I felt I did not belong there any more ... and regretted the loss of time in which I could have employed myself more usefully.... How happy I was to wake up after such tedious hours! I resolved that if this insistent dream should come again, I would throw it off and shout: 'This is only a make believe. I am in bed and wish to sleep.' Yet the next time I was again in the tailor's workshop. One night, at last, the master said to me: 'You have no talent for tailoring. You can go, you are dismissed.' I was so frightened by this that I awoke." Freud compares this dream with a similar dream which pestered him for years and in which he saw himself as a young physician, working in a laboratory, making analyses and unable as yet to earn a regular living. This is his interpretation of it: "I had as yet no standing and did not know how to make ends meet; but just then it was clear to me that I might have the choice of several women whom I could have married. I was young again in the dream and she was young too, the wife who had shared with me all those years of hardship. "This betrayed the unconscious dream agent as being one of the insistent gnawing wishes of the aging man. The fight between vanity and self-criticism, waged in other psychic layers, had decided the dream content, but only the deeper rooted wish for youth had made it possible as a dream. Often, awake, we say to ourselves: Everything is all right as it is today and those were hard times, but it was fine at that time. You are still young." Maeder, of Zurich, refuses to accept such a simple explanation and offers a more complicated one, burdened, like many psychological interpretations of the Swiss school, with ethical considerations. "By his own efforts," Maeder writes, "Rosegger had worked himself up to a high position in life. This has made him proud and vain, two faults which easily disturb mankind, for they cause a man to suffer in the presence of superiors and place him in a parvenu position among the lowly.... Deep down, there takes place, in the sensitive poet, a gradual elaboration, a development of the moral personality.... The long series of tormenting dreams shows us the development of the psychic process which ends in a deep but effective humiliation of the dreamer.... His being sent away, dismissed, symbolizes in my opinion, the overcoming of the pride and vanity of the upstart." I agree with Freud on the wish for youth expressed by Rosegger's dream and fulfilled by way of a regression. But neither Freud, bent on introducing a sexual element into his interpretation, nor Maeder, overfond of moralizing, seem to have realized the tremendous meaning of such a series of dreams, culminating as they did in a changed attitude to life. I have shown in another book, "Psychoanalysis and Behavior," that in cases of dual personalities, the second personality is always one that leads a simpler, less arduous life, fraught with lesser responsibilities, than the normal life led by the first personality. The Rev. Ansel Bourne, being tired and needing rest, was transformed for several weeks into A. Brown, a fruit dealer in a small town far away from his home. Miss Beauchamp, prim, overconsciencious, repressed, became the irresponsible Sallie, devoid of manners or taste. The Rev. Thomas Carson Hanna, overworked and a spiritual disciplinarian, woke up from a fit of unconsciousness a newborn baby, helpless and in-organized. Rosegger, rising from manual to intellectual labour, compelled to adapt himself to the mannerisms of a different world, and to adopt a new set of social habits and customs for which his bringing up in a proletarian home had not prepared him, compelled also to ransack his brain constantly for new ideas to express or for new forms in which to clothe old ideas, may have at times regretted unconsciously the simpler life of a tailor, less rich in egotistical satisfactions but more comfortable intellectually and requiring infinitely less ingenuity. And some of the remarks which he appends to his dream, confirm my suspicions. What does he say of his awakening? "I felt as if I had just newly recovered this idylically sweet life of mine, peaceful, poetical, spiritualized, in which so often I had realized human happiness to the uttermost." Undoubtedly he had for a long while failed to enjoy it and unconsciously planned to escape from it through a regression to his former estate. Several lines further down the page we find this statement which is, I think, absolutely conclusive proof of what his mental attitude had been and of the crisis he had lived through. "I no longer dream of my tailoring days _which in their way were so jolly in their simplicity and without demands_." Rosegger's dream is one of those morbid manifestations which enable us to follow a neurotic struggle going on within the organism, a struggle for adaptation to life, a struggle of which the subject is consciously ignorant, because he has burnt his bridges and has repressed the most fleeting thought of a possible change. Rosegger must have smarted under the _demands_ of his new life, but it was out of the question for him to do anything else. The conflict, however, played itself off in his dreams, offering a solution of a regressive type. When, years later, the tailor's adaptation to the life of a writer was completed, his master dismissed him. The dream solution was no longer needed. Recurring dreams often give us valuable indications of physical trouble which should be investigated and remedied at once. Even in ancient times, the relation between recurring dreams of physical disability and some physical disability setting in at a later date had been noticed. In those days, however, the interpretation of such dreams was that the vision was a warning sent by the gods, or that the vision was responsible for the subsequent trouble. We read for instance of a man who dreamt that he had a stone leg. A few days later paralysis set in. In discussing dental dreams I have pointed out the importance of having the denture examined for possible pus pockets. Dreams of animals gnawing at some organ may indicate a cancer developing in that region. Dreams of exhaustion from climbing hills often denote heart disease. H. Addington Bruce had for several months had the same dream: a cat was clawing at his throat. Examination of the throat revealed a small growth which required immediate surgical intervention. The cat never came back. CHAPTER XIV: DAY DREAMS We do not always need to sleep in order to escape _normally_ from reality. Some of us manage to do it with their eyes open. Day dreams are not essentially different from night dreams and would not be mentioned separately but for the fact that they at times verge on a neurosis and that in certain cases they are not easily distinguished from delusions and hallucinations. Whatever was said of night dreams in the preceding chapters holds true of day dreams. There are pleasant day dreams, unpleasant day dreams and even day "nightmares" or anxiety day dreams. Like the sleep walker, the day dreamer manages at times to take just enough notice of reality to direct himself through his house or along the streets, while his mind is elaborating stories of varying complication. A day dreamer who consulted me during the war would imagine himself, while walking along the streets, enlisting, taking a tearful farewell from his relatives and friends and accomplishing deeds of valour which made him famous; after which he would be so affected by his greatness that tears would roll down his cheeks. Or the dream would end tragically and he would die and then again a cascade of tears would be let loose at the thought of all the grief his demise would cause. The result was that day after day he would suddenly "wake up" in some public place, his face wet with tears, annoyed and embarrassed by the attention which his appearance would attract. Those day dreams constituted in spite of their sad cast a fulfilment of his egotistical cravings. Even death was not too high a price to pay for the importance he acquired in his dream, a psychological fancy which is often found at the bottom of some sensational forms of suicide. The anxiety day dream is the form of compensation sought by many neurotics, weak in body and frequently taken advantage of by more vigorous and ruthless persons. It also plays at times the same part as masochistic nightmares, filling as it does, the body with glycogen and a sense of power. I have heard patients suffering from a sense of real or imaginary inferiority tell me of their obsessive anger finding relief in scenes which they made, while walking along the streets or when sleepless of nights, to some absent person whom they held responsible for their troubles. They would then rehearse some annoying or humiliating incident provoked by the offensive person and let loose a torrent of abuse leading unavoidably to a fight in which they would beat, scratch or murder their enemy. The sound of their own voice or the remarks of passers by would generally wake them up at the climax; their hearts then would beat wildly, they would be out of breath, if not bathed in perspiration, but they would experience withal a certain amount of satisfaction from the victory they had won and they would feel full of what a patient of mine termed "almost murderous energy." This form of "abreaction," when it does not assume the form of a constant indulgence taking the place of positive action, is rather desirable. The psychoanalytic treatment consists, in part at least, in the production of day dreams based on memories which free in the patient a certain amount of repressed energy. Thus a great deal of unrelated and unconscious material is made conscious and related. Day dreams, without any definite direction and unchecked, are likely, however, to be very dangerous and to exert a paralysing influence on the dreamer. The concentration and meditation recommended by some Hindoo philosophers can accomplish valuable results if the subject has a clear, analytical mind and knows how to correlate the scraps of thoughts which are thus allowed to rise to consciousness. For childish people, which are easily caught in the meshes of their fancies and let their imagination run away with them, that indulgence is deadly and it has led millions of Orientals into a nirvana-like idleness and weakness, destructive of energy and life, a negative escape from reality. This is one of the reasons why, in many forms of neurosis, a rest cure is the most dangerous form of treatment. The neurotic's attention is generally directed away from reality. His energy is too often deflected toward fictitious goals located outside of the real world. The neurotic has to be brought back into contact with life and human beings; he has to be trained to accept them _as they are_ and to enjoy them _for what they are_, instead of imagining _what they might be_. The idleness and seclusion of the rest cure may negative all efforts in that direction. The rest cure from which day dreams cannot be excluded, is simply an abnormal flight from reality sanctioned and abetted by a physician ignorant of psychology. The day dreams which produce happiness, which promote creation, scientific or artistic, and which lead the individual into the stream of life, are sound and healthy dreams. Those which only lead to more dreaming and away from life, are neurotic phenomena, devoid of any redeeming grace. CHAPTER XV: NEUROSIS AND DREAMS Not infrequently neuroses and psychoses are ushered in by a dream and their termination is announced by a dream. This should not be understood to mean that the dream either "causes" the neurosis or "cures" it. That mistake has often been made by psychologists of the old school. Taine, among others, cites the case of a policeman who once attended a capital execution. This spectacle made such an impression on him that he often dreamt of his own execution and finally committed suicide. It would be absurd to believe that the sight of the execution "put the idea of suicide into his head." He undoubtedly had been consciously or unconsciously revolving death thoughts in his mind. The sight of the execution made those ideas more concrete and more obsessive. The recurrence of a death dream simply showed that the obsession was gradually overpowering his personality and seeking realization. The dream work, endeavouring to solve the problem of how to end his life, offered an easy solution: he did not have to commit suicide; he was being put to death. Finally the death wishes overthrew his personality and he killed himself. An epileptic was tortured every night by a dream in which a group of boys playing Wild West (he personifying the Indian) were pursuing him, throwing sticks and stones at him and finally cornering him. At the very minute where they were laying hands on him, he would experience a "dying" feeling and wake up in great discomfort. One night he turned round to face the gang which dwindled down to one small urchin whom he spanked. That night he slept soundly and the next day his fears of having a new fit disappeared. Neither that dream nor his fits have returned. It was not the dream that gave him fits, nor was it the last dream which cured him. The obsessive dreams were wish-fulfilment dreams, showing him how to dodge life's duties through his sickness which was a convenient, though painful, unconscious excuse and how to solve his life problems by getting out of reality. The last dream revealed a change in his mental attitude. He was not to seek any longer a neurotic escape from reality but face reality and fight his own battles. A patient suffering from delusions had the following dream: "A woman appeared to me and told me that it was all a dream and that all my troubles would soon end." Associations to that dream showed that the woman who appeared to my patient was a midwife who had helped her in a confinement some thirty years before (rebirth symbolism). At that time she almost died from puerperal fever and was also "saved" by a dream in which her grandparents appeared to her and told her that she would recover. Her dreams, in which she placed in the mouth of other people the expression of her own wish for health, corresponded well in their mechanism with her delusions in which she heard people berating her for her imaginary sins. At the time of the dreams, her delusions had lost their terrifying character and were only a mild annoyance to her. She had acquired enough insight to doubt their reality and to refer them to her unconscious thoughts. The woman who imagines that in every voice she hears she can distinguish the voice of the man she unconsciously loves builds up a "story" like the dreamer who, perceiving coldness in her feet at night, saw herself falling into a lake. The technique is exactly the same in both cases. Actual sensations are transformed into delusions closely associated with the dreamer's or the neurotic's complexes. People subject to hallucinations project outside of their body symbolic figures representing wishes they have endeavoured to repress and which they refuse to recognize as a part of their personality. They hear voices which say certain things they are trying not to think of, for they consider such thoughts as obscene, criminal or otherwise unjustifiable. Dreamers likewise represent their disabilities as something entirely separate from their bodies and their personality. The stammering patient dreaming that he was delivering a very eloquent speech but was interrupted by howling hoodlums, repressed out of consciousness the idea of his speech disturbance and gratified his ego by saying: "But for those hoodlums I could speak very well." Trumbull Ladd suffering from inflammation of the eyelids dreamt that he was trying to decipher a book in microscopic type: An attempt at shifting upon the book the responsibility for his difficulties in reading. The dream said: "There is nothing wrong with your eyes, but the type is too small." A young woman struggling with an unjustifiable attachment for a married man told me the following dream: "I was surrounded by little devils carrying pitchforks. I was afraid of them at first, but I finally grabbed them all in a bunch and dropped them into the fireplace. A pit opened under them and closed again and I felt free." Her psychology was the same psychology which in the Middle Ages caused religious people to invent the devil. Her desires which she refused to recognize as hers were little devils endeavouring to tempt her. We deal more easily with a stranger than with ourselves and "the devil tempted me" sounds more forgivable than "I did what I had always wanted to do." What makes it difficult for neurotics at times to tell the difference between their dreams and reality is that the emotions felt in dreams are accompanied by the same inner secretions as when felt in the waking life. A fear dream releases adrenin and a vivid sexual dream is followed by a pollution. The bodily sensations following certain dreams are evidential facts which some neurotics do not know how to controvert. The hallucinations of _delirium tremens_ patients which are generally accompanied by anxiety, illustrate the fact that we can be terrified and tortured by a dream which is a symbolized fulfilment of our conscious or unconscious wishes. It is admitted by all but the very ignorant that immoderate drinking is not induced by a taste for drink but by a desire to escape reality, in the majority of cases, to drown the consciousness of financial or sexual difficulties. The most common hallucinations of drunkards are those of snakes and lice. Snakes are almost without exception symbolical of the male sex. To the majority of neurotics, lice are symbolical of money and American slang recognizes that association in the expression _lousy with money_. The "DT" patient has his wishes fulfilled. He is covered with vermin and snakes crawl about his bed. He has all the symbolical wealth and the symbolical potency or homosexual love he could wish for. But curiously enough he does not understand those symbols and is terrified by the manifest content of his morbid dream. The story of Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel is a fine illustration of the relation between dreams and insanity. The king began to lose his sleep which was disturbed by nightmares. In the morning, however, the memory of those nightmares seemed to be entirely gone. Daniel contrived to reconstruct a forgotten anxiety dream in which the king saw a gigantic figure with head of gold, breast and arms of silver, belly and thighs of brass, legs of iron and feet of iron and clay and which toppled down when struck by a stone. Here we have a morbid attitude to reality, the king visualizing his position (which unconsciously appeared to him precarious), through that unstable figure, and also expressing a neurotic wish to be delivered from his anxiety through the final catastrophe. Later the king had another dream visualizing his fears and death wishes through a different image: A mighty tree grew till its head reached the heavens. Then an angel cried: "Hew down the tree, leave the stump and roots in the earth, in the tender grass of the field; let it be wet with the dew and let his portion be with the beasts." Fear of defeat and a neurotic desire to escape reality via a regression to the animal level are clearly indicated in this dream and in Daniel's interpretation of it. Very soon after, auditory hallucinations began to appear. "A voice fell from heaven," speaking out the unconscious wishes which the king craved to gratify. In a siege of _dementia praecox_, Nebuchadnezzar ate grass like oxen and his body was wet with the dew from heaven; his hair grew like eagle's feathers and his nails like birds' claws. After a period during which he, like all cases of changed personality, led an easier, simpler, more primitive life, without any responsibilities, Nebuchadnezzar recovered and related thus his return to reality: "My reason returned unto me; for the glory of my kingdom, mine honour and brightness returned unto me; and my counsellors and lords sought unto me; I was established in my kingdom and excellent majesty was added unto me." In the meantime he had become reconciled with reality and had given up his paranoid attempts at being the mightiest factor in the world. By accepting as a possibility the existence of a mightier power, he protected himself against the ignominy of a possible defeat. Against an omnipotent God, even he could not prevail. Freud writes: "The overestimation of one's mental capacity, which appears absurd to sober judgment, is found alike in insanity and in dreams, and the rapid course of ideas in the dream corresponds to the flight of ideas in the psychosis. Both are devoid of any measure of time. "The dissociation of personality in the dream, which, for instance, distributes one's own knowledge between two persons, one of whom, the strange one, corrects in the dream one's own ego, fully corresponds to the well-known splitting of the personality in hallucinatory paranoia; the dreamer, too, hears his own thoughts expressed by strange voices. "Even the constant delusions find their analogy in the stereotyped recurring pathological dreams. "After recovering from a delirium, patients not infrequently declare that the disease appeared to them like an uncomfortable dream; indeed, they inform us that occasionally, even during the course of their sickness, they have felt that they were only dreaming, just as it frequently happens in the sleeping dreams." CHAPTER XVI: SLEEPLESSNESS I have given in the previous chapters many reasons why human beings are compelled to seek at regular intervals an escape from reality which is made possible by the unconsciousness of sleep. Why is it then, that many people suffer from insomnia? Many physical factors are generally mentioned as the direct causes of sleep disturbances. None of them should be dismissed as unimportant; nor should any one of them, however, be accepted as an exclusive and all-sufficient explanation of sleeplessness. Coffee, tea and cocoa (the latter even in the shape of chocolate candy) taken in large quantities, particularly before retiring, affect our sympathetic or safety nerves. They make us, therefore, more sensitive to slight sound, light, pressure, smell, etc., stimuli, which under ordinary circumstances we would not notice consciously. In other words, they create imaginary "emergencies" which require the usual preparation for fight or flight, that is, keen observation of our environment, arterial tension, etc., all conditions which make sleep impossible. Yet we cannot say that coffee, tea or cocoa, without some other contributing cause would always bring about sleep disturbances. Bleuler writes: "I had been in the habit of drinking every night several cups of very strong tea which never prevented me from sleeping. Since I have had the influenza, things have been very different. I must be careful not to partake of such stimulants before going to bed. But even then, their effect depends on my mental condition. They affect me more at certain times than they do at others. If I am the least bit excited their effect is increased. When I am perfectly relaxed, I may not feel any bad effects." A bedroom into whose windows flashes of light or waves of sound may pour, is the not ideal place in which to seek escape from reality. Yet thousands of people sleep soundly in Pullman berths or even in day coaches, unmindful of the noise, light and bustle. We must keep in mind an observation made by Bleuler at the Zürich clinic: "When many people sleep in the same room, as in an insane asylum, some complain that they cannot sleep because their neighbour is snoring. Whoever tries to prevent the snoring or to move the snorer to another bed will have an endless task. The trouble is with the patient who is disturbed by snoring. It is not the noise itself but the attention he pays to it which disturbs him. One can see in wards for agitated patients most of the patients sleeping peacefully while some one disturbs the ward with the most savage howling. "The trouble lies, not in a special sensitiveness of the nervous system, but in the attitude we take toward a certain noise." Lack of exercise during the day will often cause us to toss and turn many times in our bed after retiring. There seems to be in every living being a craving for activity without any positive aim, activity which accomplishes nothing besides using up unused energy or relieving certain inhibitions. Children and all young animals seem to be unable to remain motionless for any length of time. In children and puppies, for example, the gleeful shouts and barking which accompany that display of muscular activity show unmistakably that it vouchsafes them a great amount of gratification. The satisfaction of the free activity urge which is one of the aspects of the ego-power urge is probably submitted to a strong repression in men and animals at a rather early age by the safety urge; frightened children and animals stop playing and become at times paralysed by fear. On the other hand there are many sluggish individuals who lead an most inactive life and yet sleep long hours without any interruption. Indigestion causes insomnia and so does hunger but it is also a fact that many indiscreet eaters are made drowsy by their very indiscretion and sleep soundly after a meal which would distress many other people. Also we find in the sayings of many races statements to the effect that sleep assuages hunger; the average prisoner sleeps in spite of the insufficient meal served at night in the majority of jails. Constipation seems at times to bear the guilt for restless nights and so do cathartics which, with some subjects, produce intestinal tension several times during the night but whose effect is not noticeable in other subjects until they wake up in the morning at the regular time. Toothache will keep some people awake while others will go to sleep in order to forget their toothache. Examples of that sort could be cited ad infinitum. In case of sleeplessness, the first thing to do is to remove all the possible physical causes which can be reached directly or with the help of a physician. Thyroid irritation for instance may at times make one more sensitive to even faint noises and a thorough medical examination should be undergone. The dentature should be examined with the help of X-ray photography in order that pus pockets, impaction, and other defects, not observable with the naked eye, may be revealed and remedied. The diet should be regulated so as to exclude indigestible foods while assuring, especially at night, sufficient nourishment. All stimulants should be avoided. A walk before retiring is very beneficial in all cases, not because it "tires" the subject, but because it absorbs the chemical products thrown into the blood for emergencies which did not arise in the course of the day. A long walk or any arduous exercise, on the other hand, might do more harm than good if they brought about the phenomenon of the second wind. Any form of physical or mental exercise involving rivalry or competition is to be avoided at night. The excitement caused by the "fear of losing" would again fill the blood with "fight or flight" products. Heated discussions, the witnessing of exciting films or plays, drives with a daredevil chauffeur, etc., are not conducive to peaceful sleep. When all those means fail, many devices have been offered to insomnia sufferers, such as prayer or counting sheep, reading, listening to some monotonous stimulus like the buzzing of a faradic inductor, or of an electric fan. A distinction must be made between stereotyped prayer (such as the Lord's Prayer) and personal prayer rehearsing one's worries and asking for help. The latter kind is not unlikely to revive all the day's problems and to set the would-be-sleeper solving them over again at the very time when he should forget them. The repetition of some passage which was memorized in childhood and which, from long familiarity has become perfectly impersonal, may go a long way toward creating the monotony, and hence the feeling of safety, without which there cannot be any sleep. After following all the rules I have laid down a number of people will still be unable to sleep. When the physico-psychic causes have been removed without improving the condition of the subject, the psychico-physical factors should then receive attention. As I said before, normal people can sleep under almost any conditions because their vagotonic activities function regularly, while neurotics cannot sleep well even under ideal conditions because their sympathicotonic activities are constantly raising a signal danger and imagining emergencies amidst the safest surroundings, mental and physical. The insomnia sufferer is suffering from some fear. That fear has to be determined and uprooted by psychoanalysis. Some people cannot sleep because they have gone through a period of sleeplessness and expect it to endure for ever. The men of the Emmanuel movement often had the following experience: a subject would explain that he could not sleep under any circumstances. The Emmanuel healer would ask him to sit in a chair in which, he said, many people had fallen asleep, and after a few minutes of soothing conversation or concentration, the insomniac would doze off peacefully. In certain cases, such a cure may be permanent; in other cases, when the results are obtained through transference and suggestion, the help of the psychological adviser or hypnotist may be too frequently required. Other subjects are prevented from sleeping by "worry." Telling a careworn insomniac not to worry is as silly and useless as telling a lovelorn person to stop being in love. Discussing a patient's worries with him, however, often accomplishes much good, for it compels him to sift all his evidence, which may be convincing to him but to no one else. The worried person who is beginning to experience doubts as to the magnitude of his trouble, is like the patient suffering from delusions who has lost faith in his delusions. The parasitic fears and cravings which attach themselves to some small worry and, at times, magnify it out of proportion, may in such a way be disintegrated and dissociated from the actual, justified fear. Giving the patient "good reasons" why he should not worry, is again a sort of suggestion of the most futile and least durable type. Obsessive fear which is at the bottom of every worry is due to certain complexes, at times apparently unrelated to the actual disturbance, and which cannot be unearthed and uprooted except by a thoroughgoing psychological analysis. This is especially true of certain cases of insomnia which the patient reports as follows. "I fall asleep with difficulty and with a certain apprehension. I sleep an hour or two during which I have awful dreams which I cannot remember. After which I hardly dare to close my eyes again." This is what I would call the fear of the unknown nightmare, and the anxiety dreams responsible for it must be patiently reconstituted from the scraps which invariably linger in the subject's memory, even when he imagines that he cannot remember any dreams. The procedure will be explained in the next chapter. While the psychoanalytic treatment is being applied, however, the patient must be made aware of a fact which will comfort him to a certain extent. Patients often fear that if their sleeplessness is not relieved "at once" they will "loose their minds." Thereupon they beg to be given some narcotic. We must remember that the results of sleeplessness depend mostly upon the attitude which we assume toward that condition. It may seem paradoxical to state that its bad results are mainly due to our fear of them but it is true nevertheless. We assume that we shall be exhausted by a sleepless night. We go to bed in fear and trembling, wondering whether we will or will not sleep. That anxiety is sufficient to liberate secretions which produce an unpleasant muscular tension and a desire for activity. This keeps us awake until the chemical contained in those secretions have been eliminated. In the meantime, we develop a fit of anger which releases some more of the identical chemicals. After which we are doomed to many hours of unrest and agitation. During those restless hours we toss about angrily and exhaust ourselves physically. About dawn, when sleepiness generally overtakes even the most restless, we finally doze off and are awakened by our alarm clock or some other familiar disturbance and once more relapse into anger at the waste of our sleeping hours and the disability which we feel is sure to result from it. We naturally feel worn out. If, on the other hand, we would resign ourselves to our sleeplessness, realize that rest, even in the waking state, will relieve our organism of all its "fatigue" and that, by complete relaxation in the waking state, we can liberate almost as many of our unconscious cravings as in the unconsciousness of sleep; if we were as careful not to waste uselessly our inner secretions as we are not to touch live wires, we would lie down as motionlessly as possible, and would consign to the scrap heap all the absurd notions as to the dire results of a sleepless night; we would then awaken in the morning as refreshed by the two or three hours of sleep that would finally be vouchsafed us as by the usual eight or ten. The amount of sleep one needs varies with every individual and increases or decreases according to unconscious requirements. Hence, statements to the effect that one needs eight or ten hours' sleep are absurd and dangerous. Many people are worried over the fact that their sleep is irregular, that is, that they sleep six hours one night and ten the next night and possibly only four hours the third night. This is probably as it should be. Our requirements vary with varying conditions. After eating salt fish one may need several glasses of water to slake one's thirst, while one may not need to drink a drop of any liquid after partaking of juicy fruit. One should also dismiss as an idle superstition the dictum according to which sleep before midnight is more beneficial than sleep after midnight. Hundreds of newspapermen, watchmen, policemen, printers, railroadmen, etc., work nights and sleep in the day time and do not contribute more heavily than other professions to the ranks of the mentally deranged. Older people, whose urges are at low ebb and do not require the satisfaction vouchsafed by dream life should become reconciled to the fact that they need few hours sleep; they should refrain from taking narcotics and go to bed later than they do, so as not to "lay awake all night," which generally means that after dozing an hour or two in an armchair and retiring at ten they wake up normally about one or two in the morning. Sleep is important in health but even more so in mental disturbances. The solution for the complicated problems of the neurotic's life depends upon the wealth of facts contained in the unconscious rising freely to the surface in dreams and relieving the uncertainty. The tragedy is that except in cases of sleeping sickness, the neurotic who needs more sleep than the healthy subject, generally gets much less. The neurotic should sleep preferably at night and avoid day sleep. This for two reasons. He should keep in touch with reality when reality is active and obvious, as during the day. With the falling of the shadows, reality acquires a tinge of indefiniteness which lends itself to many misinterpretations and to fancies of the morbid type. Sleeplessness in the ghostly hours of the night is a poison for the neurotic, for everything at such times is exaggerated, distorted and the slightest worry is transformed into a terrible danger. Many children could be spared fits of "night terrors" if they were not forced to go to bed very early, after which they are likely to wake up in the middle of the night, disoriented and fearful. It has been said that insomnia was the cause of insanity and experiments such as those made at the University of Iowa show that men kept awake for a prolonged period of time begin to have delusions and hallucinations similar to those of dementia praecox. But it must be remembered that the men who submitted to those experiments were not allowed to "_rest_." The contrary proposition, that is, that insomnia is induced by insanity is more plausible psychologically. And indeed every psychiatrist has made the observation that some insane people sleep very little, so little in fact that such protracted periods of sleeplessness would kill the average normal person. That observation has been confirmed by Bleuler, who as the head of the Zurich psychiatric clinic and one of the most tireless psychological experimenters in the world, is in a position to speak with authority. Neurotics sleep very little, and the more severe their case is, the less they sleep. Return of normal sleep generally coincides with a cure and has been by many credited with bringing about the cure. Hence the many "rest cures" suggested for the mentally disturbed patient. The truth of the matter is that the absolutely insane person who lives all his absurd dreams in his waking life no longer needs the unconsciousness which the normal individual requires in order to escape from reality. The insane man who knows he is a combination of a Don Juan, a millionaire and a powerful ruler, need not dream of becoming all those characters. He has attained his goal and it is only the continued conflicts with reality which may reach his consciousness in his lucid moments which necessitate the unconsciousness of a few minutes or hours of sleep in which reality no longer intrudes into his absurd world. Since insomniacs can rest without sleep and insomnia does not lead to insanity, there is no reason why narcotics should be administered. There is a very good reason on the other hand why they should never be administered except in case some harrowing pain has to be relieved and shock avoided. For one thing, their effect is problematic and depends also to a great extent from the subject's mental condition. Kraepelin noticed that large doses of alcohol failed to produce the usual muscular lameness in subjects who were agitated. Bleuler makes the interesting suggestion that our central nervous system only "accepts" narcotics when they are "wanted" and keeps drugs, carried about in the blood stream, from being assimilated by the organism when the organism is not "willing" to submit to their influence. But the most cogent reason why narcotics should never be resorted to in "nervous" sleeplessness is that they do not relax the organism but paralyse it by killing it partly. If they only dulled consciousness and freed the unconscious, they would accomplish some good but we do not know of any agent besides sleep, which accomplishes that successfully. Narcotics partly kill both consciousness and unconscious. While their effect lasts, the very phenomenon which makes the neurotic a neurotic is exaggerated. In the neurotic's waking state, unconscious complexes manage to free themselves, somewhat indirectly. In the stupor of drugged sleep, the repression is complete. Hence the horrible feeling which is often experienced when awakening from drug-induced sleep. Normal sleep is brother to life, but drug induced sleep is indeed akin to death. Neither can hypnotic suggestion be recommended as a cure for sleeplessness, except of course, in emergencies. About the end of the nineteenth century, a Swedish physician, Wetterstrand, inaugurated a method of treatment which was founded on a just estimate of the value of sleep, although Wetterstrand himself could not at the time have understood the psychology of it. He had in Upsala a "house of sleep" furnished with innumerable divans and couches on which his patients were allowed to rest for hours in hypnotic sleep. Of course this procedure had two glaring defects: hypnotism is a neurotic phenomenon which should not be applied to the treatment of a neurosis and, secondly, sleep in the daytime is generally enjoyed at the expense of the night's sleep. At the same time, the sleep which patients enjoyed in Wetterstrand's "Grotto of Sleep," as it was called at the time, must have been of a somewhat curative kind; for the house was as silent as a grave. Thick carpets deadened all sounds and all the lights were dimmed. No stimuli were allowed to produce in the sleepers any fear reactions. What Wetterstrand really supplied to his patients was an ideal bedroom and an opportunity for an absolutely uninterrupted sleep of several hours. We do not know, however, how many of them were robbed of the effect of such an ideal environment by the anxiety dreams which the quietest bedroom cannot exclude. The conclusion to be drawn from what has been said in the preceding chapters is that the real mission of sleep is to free the unconscious, to relieve the tension due to repressions and to give absolutely free play to the organic activities which build up the individual. Hence the goal is sleep of sufficient duration, sleep undisturbed by physical stimuli, sleep FULL OF DREAMS but FREE FROM NIGHTMARES. No more potent curative agent could be found than that kind of sleep, whether the ills to be remedied are of a "mental" or of a "physical" nature. Not until all the fear-creating complexes have been disintegrated by psychoanalysis, however, can the insomniac hope to enjoy that perfect form of "rest." CHAPTER XVII: DREAM INTERPRETATION Dream interpretation is not an idle pastime or a mysterious performance. Carried out in accordance with certain scientific rules based on common sense and not on mere theory, it has a positive value in health as well as in sickness. A nightmare whose meaning has been interpreted rightly ceases to be a nightmare. It disappears, or rather, is replaced by an obvious wish-fulfilment dream of the same import, which does not disturb sleep. The same modification is observable in recurrent dreams which, while not burdened with anxiety, may have puzzled us and created a certain apprehension. Insight into our own dreams enables us to release more completely the unconscious cravings which it is the mission of sleep to free from the repressions of waking life. The technique of dream interpretation is unfortunately, like every detail of the psychoanalytic technique, very slow and at times discouraging. The layman trained by quack literature to expect quick results, is apt to appear scornful when a conscientious analyst, asked to interpret offhand an apparently simple dream, refuses to perform that task and confesses that he does not know the meaning of it. When little Anna Freud dreamt that she was feasting on all sorts of dainties, no elaborate technique was needed to ferret out the enigma of such a vision. When Ferenczi's patient, however, saw herself strangling a white dog, the wish-fulfilment formula, applied indiscriminately, would have given poor results. _To the patient_, the white dog symbolized a snarling woman with a very pale face. Dream interpretation must never be attempted without the dreamer's assistance. Snakes are _almost always_ sexual symbols, but if on the day preceding the dream the subject was frightened by a snake or killed one or played with one, we should require a good deal of other evidence before we could safely assert that a snake dream on that night indicated fear, desire or repression of sexual cravings. A tooth pulling dream related by a subject who expects to go through the ordeal of dental extraction should not be hastily admitted to be a symbolical dream. Even apparently obvious dreams may assume an entirely different complexion when we inquire into the associations which every detail of them conjures up from the subject's unconscious. A year ago or so a Chicago woman sued her husband for divorce because he had been, while talking in his sleep, saying endearing things to his stenographer. That woman was both right and wrong. The fact that her husband dreamt of his stenographer was evidence that the girl was "on his mind," consciously or unconsciously. But we could not, without examining the husband's unconscious reactions decide to what extent the stenographer herself, as a distinct personality, obsessed him. Every man is more or less of a fetichist, irresistibly attracted by certain details of the feminine body, for ever seeking those characteristics and appreciating them above all others wherever found. When only one such characteristic and no other attracts a man, the man is known as a perverse fetichist. When the various fetiches which attract a man are found in one woman, let us say red hair, dark eyes and a slender build, we have the foundation for a passionate and durable love. When only one of those characteristics is found in a woman, that characteristic is bound to attract the man's attention regardless of the interest or lack of interest the woman may present for him. A red haired woman, while otherwise totally unattractive, might, to a red hair fetichist, symbolize the beauty he seeks and intrude into his dream pictures, _although she personally could not attract him sexually in his waking state_. Every one has had the experience of embracing in dreams some person who in the waking state would not inspire the dreamer with any desire. If we analyse carefully the appearance of the "ghostly love" we will in every case notice that he or she is endowed with a certain characteristic which is one of the constituting elements of our "love image." The Chicago woman should have taken her troubles to an analyst, not to a judge. I have dwelt at length on that example to show a few of the pitfalls which threaten the careless interpreter of dreams. The second rule I would formulate is this: Do not try to interpret one dream. Wait until you have collected a large number of dreams, let us say, twenty or thirty of them. Then classify them according to their character as follows: Pleasant and unpleasant dreams. Healthy and morbid. Masochistic and sadistic. Childish or adult. Regressive, static or progressive. Positive or negative. Varied or recurrent. Personal or typical. Hypnogogic and hypnapagogic visions, etc. Care must be taken then to note all the words and thoughts which appear most frequently in many dreams and which are likely to refer to important complexes. Whenever possible two versions of each dream should be studied. The subject should write down his dreams as soon as he wakes up, either in the morning or right after an anxiety dream which may have disturbed him in the course of the night. The version of almost any important dream which the subject tells the analyst will be found quite at variance with the version written immediately after awakening. Here is a dream reported orally to me by a patient. "I saw you through a restaurant window, having lunch with your wife." Here is the same dream as I found it in the patient notes: "You were to deliver a lecture in a park. There was a number of good looking girls there. One especially attracted my attention. As there was quite a little mud in the park she wore rubber boots. You were late in appearing and I went to look for you. I saw you sitting at a table in a restaurant with your wife, waving to some acquaintance on the side walk." The discrepancy between the two versions is quite amusing. After that preparatory work of classification and comparison, the actual work of interpretation can begin. Hebbel once wrote: "If a man could make up his mind TO WRITE DOWN ALL HIS DREAMS, WITHOUT ANY EXCEPTIONS OR RESERVATIONS, TRUTHFULLY AND WITHOUT OMITTING ANY DETAILS, TOGETHER WITH A RUNNING COMMENTARY CONTAINING ALL THE EXPLANATIONS OF HIS DREAMS WHICH HE COULD DERIVE FROM HIS LIFE MEMORIES AND FROM HIS READING, he would make to mankind a present of inestimable value. But as long as mankind is what it is, no one is likely to do that." The technique of dream interpretation could not have been described more accurately nor more aptly. The person whose dreams are to be analysed should relax completely, stretched out on a couch in a quiet room, listening for a while to some monotonous noise such as the buzzing of a fan or of an inductor, his mind concentrated on the story of the dream. Then he should tell in a rambling way, without trying to edit the things that rise to his consciousness, all the associations of ideas connected with every word of the dream. While we can interpret our own dreams and jot down our own ideas, the assistance of some sympathetic, discreet person makes the process much simpler. Jotting down notes detracts one's attention from the images rising to consciousness. The assistant, however, should confine himself to mentioning the next word or the next part of the dream as soon as the subject seems to have exhausted the associations brought forth by one part of it. The most surprising results are often obtained in that simple way. Facts which the subject had entirely forgotten, connections he had never been aware of, will suddenly jump into consciousness; the dream will gradually assume a meaning and its interpretation may at times reach an unexpected length. A dream of one line may suggest associations covering five or six pages. It may happen that in spite of the subject's efforts to remember his dreams and of devices such as being awakened in the course of the night, etc., the only memories preserved of the night's visions will be scraps such as "going somewhere," "talking to somebody," "something unpleasant," etc. In such cases, the subject should be allowed to sink into what Boris Sidis calls "hypnoidal sleep" by being made to listen to some continuous noise in a partly darkened room, all the while thinking of the "dream scrap." "While in this hypnoidal state," Sidis writes, "the patient hovers between the conscious and the subconscious, somewhat in the same way as in the drowsy condition, one hovers between wakefulness and sleep. The patient keeps on fluctuating from moment to moment, now falling more deeply into a subconscious condition in which outlived experiences are easily aroused, and again rising to the level of the waking state. Experiences long submerged and forgotten rise to the full height of consciousness. They come in bits, in chips, in fragments, which may gradually coalesce and form a connected series of interrelated systems of experiences apparently long dead and buried. The resurrected experiences then stand out clear and distinct in the patient's mind. The recognition is fresh, vivid, and instinct with life, as if the experiences had occurred the day before." Through this procedure, patients are often enabled to recollect forgotten dreams and nightmares. Certain patients do not forget their dreams but refuse to report them. In such cases the simplest procedure consists in asking the patient to make up a dream while in the analyst's office, that is to put himself in the hypnoidal state described above and to tell the images and thoughts that come to his mind. Or if the analyst suspects the existence of a certain complex, he may ask the patient to build up a dream on a topic so selected that it will touch that complex. A question which audiences have asked me hundreds of times is: "Cannot the patient make up something that will deceive you entirely and throw you on the wrong trail?" My answer to such a question is emphatically negative. A study of the literary and artistic productions of all races has shown that in every "story" and in every work of art, the writer or artist was solely bringing to consciousness his own preoccupations, in a form which may have deceived him but which does not deceive the psychologist slightly familiar with the author's biography. Brill tells somewhere how his attention was first drawn to the value of artificial dreams and of so called "fake dreams." In 1908, he was treating an out of town physician, suffering from severe anxiety hysteria. The patient was very sceptical, did not co-operate with Brill, never talked freely and pretended he never had dreams. One morning, however, he came for his appointment bringing at last one dream. "He had given birth to a child and felt severe labour pains. X., a gynecologist who assisted him, was unusually rough and stuck the forceps into him more like a butcher than a physician." It was a homosexual fancy. Asked who X. was, the patient said he was a friend with whom he had had some unpleasantness. Then he interrupted the conversation, saying: "There is no use fooling you any longer. What I told you was not a dream. I just made it up to show you how ridiculous your dream theories are." Further examination, however, proved that the patient was homosexual and that his anxiety states were due to the cessation of his perverse relations with X. The lie he had made up was simply a distorted wish closely connected with the cause of his neurosis. As Brill states very justly, "everything which necessitates lying must be of importance to the individual concerned." Personally, I have found that, with certain patients, the artificial dream method is productive of better results than the free association method. With the docile patient who has much insight and a positive desire to rid himself of his troubles, the association method reveals quickly the darkest corners of the unconscious. The patient who, on the other hand, constantly answers: "I cannot think of anything," and is always on his guard, the association method wastes much valuable time and is very discouraging to patient and analyst. It is not always advisable for the analyst to reveal to his subjects the import of their dreams. It is especially when the meaning of their dreams is frankly sexual that discretion and tact are necessary. In cases of a severe repression of sexual cravings extending over many years, when, for instance, one has to deal with a woman, no longer young and whose attitude to life has been rather puritanical, a good deal of educational work has to be undertaken before the subject can be enlightened. She must be gradually led to consider sex as a "natural" phenomenon before she can be made to accept the sexual components revealed by her dreams as a part of her personality. Repressed homosexualism is perhaps even harder to reveal to the subject. I have found my task infinitely simpler when the subject had done a good deal of reading along psychoanalytic lines or had attended many lectures on the subject. In fact it is my conviction that when psychoanalytic books are read by a larger proportion of the population, thousands of "sex" cases will disappear, together with the absurd fears based on ignorance which are responsible for many a mental upset. Interpreting a subject's dreams is the best known means of probing and sounding his unconscious, but in the majority of cases it only helps indirectly in treating the case. When we deal with nightmares, however, the results are more direct and more rapidly attained. A nightmare interpreted rightly will never recur, or if it does, WILL NOT FRIGHTEN OR AWAKEN THE SUBJECT. Insight will develop which, even in the sleeping state, will enable the subject to recognize that his dream is only a dream and to sleep on undisturbed. A patient who was often terrorized by a dream in which some man stabbed him in the back, gradually came to recognize his unconscious homosexual leanings and analysed the nightmare in his sleep when it occurred again with excellent results. It did not frighten him and gradually disappeared, being replaced by grosser dreams devoid of anxiety. A patient was bothered by dreams in which he was repelling onslaughts of large beasts with a walking stick or an umbrella which invariably broke and which he was always trying to tip with iron rods or tacks. He finally gained insight into his unconscious fear of impotence which was dispelled by a visit at a specialist's office. Not only did that nightmare disappear but very soon after, his dreams changed to visions of successful sex-gratification. Dream insight based upon the personality of the analyst should not be considered as real insight. When a patient reports, "I dreamt that I was a baby but remembered that Mr. Tridon would call that a regression dream and I awoke," or, "I felt that Mr. Tridon would characterize the whole thing as a masochistic performance and awoke," much work remains to be done. The dreamer must _know_ that his nightmare is a symbol and not merely know that his analyst would call it a symbol. When the dreamer has acquired the technical skill which enables him, after a little concentration and meditation, to interpret his own sleep visions, he is no longer at the mercy of the annoyance called nightmare. When he can see at a glance where the repression seems unbearable, he may devise ways and means to satisfy his cravings more completely if they are justifiable and lawful; if they are unjustifiable or socially taboo, he may seek substitutes for them and, especially as I have explained in another book, free them from the parasitic cravings which make them unduly obsessive. He who can read the indications of his own dreams, has at his disposal an instrument of great precision which indicates to him the slightest fluctuations of his personality and, besides, points out various solutions for the problems of adaptation which the normal, progressive human being must solve every day of his life. Oneiromancy is the algebra which enables us to perform rapidly complicated calculations in the mathematics of psychology. BIBLIOGRAPHY ABRAHAMSON, I.--Mental disturbances in lethargic encephalitis. _Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease._ September 1920. A study of the sleeping sickness based mainly upon cases observed at Mt. Sinai Hospital. ABRAHAM, K.--Dreams and Myths. _Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series._ No. 28. A monograph proving that legends and myths are in reality the day dreams of the human race. ADLER, A.--Traum and Traumdeutung. _Zentralblatt f. Ps. A. III_, p. 574. A short essay on dream interpretation from the point of view of the ego urge. ASCHAFFENBURG, G.--Der Schlaf in Kindesalter und seine Störungen. Bergmann, Wiesbaden. Observations on the disturbances of the sleep of children. BRUCE, H. A.--Sleep and Sleeplessness. Little Brown. A popular exposé of the problem of sleeplessness from a modern point of view. CORIAT, I.--The Meaning of Dreams. Little Brown. A small book containing the analyses of many dreams according to the Freudian technique. CORIAT, I.--The Nature of Sleep. _Journal of Abnormal Psycho._ VI. No. 5. CORIAT, I.--The Evolution of Sleep and Hypnosis. Ibidem, VII. No. 2. DELAGE, Y.--La nature des images hypnagogiques. _Bulletin de l' Inst. Gen. Psycho._ 1903, p. 235. DU PREL, CARL.--Künstliche Träume. _Sphinx_, July 1889. A study of artificial dreams. FREUD, S.--The Interpretation of Dreams. Macmillan. FREUD, S.--Dream Psychology, with an introduction by André Tridon. McCann. The most important books on Dream Interpretation. FRÖMNER, E.--Das Problem des Schlafs. Bergmann, Wiesbaden. HENNING, H.--Der Traum ein assoziativer Kurzschluss. Bergmann, Wiesbaden. MAURY, A.--Le Sommeil et les Rêves. Paris 1878. The first attempt at a methodical study of dreams and at correlating them to physical stimuli. MAEDER, A. E.--The Dream Problem. _Nervous and Mental Disease monograph series._ No. 22. A presentation of the subject from the point of view of the Swiss School. HALL, B.--The Psychology of sleep. Moffat Yard. A review of the various sleep theories from the academic point of view. KAPLAN, L.--Ueber wiederkehrende Traumsymbole. _Zentrablatt f. Ps. A._ IV, p. 284. An essay on dream symbolism. MANACÉINE, M. DE.--Sleep, its physiology, pathology, hygiene and psychology. Scribner. The most complete study of sleep from every possible point of view, placing the emphasis, however, on the physical aspects of sleep. SACHS, H.--Traumdeutung und Menschenkenntniss. _Jahrb. d. Ps. A._ III, p. 121. SCHROTTER, K.--Experimentelle Träume. _Zentralblatt f. Psy. A._ II, p. 638. A record of very interesting experiments in the production of artificial dreams through hypnotism. SILBERER, H.--Der Traum Enke. Stuttgart. A very clear primer in dream study, epitomizing the latest hypotheses in interpretation. SILBERER, H.--Ueber die Symbolbildung. _Jahrbuch d. Psy-A._ III, p. 661. SILBERER, H.--Zur Symbolbildung. _Jahrbuch d. Psy-A._ IV, p. 607. SILBERER, H.--Bericht über eine methode Hallucinationserscheinungen herbeizurefen. _Jahrbuch d. Psy.-A._ I, p. 513. STEKEL, W.--Die Sprache des Traumes. Wiesbaden, 1911. STEKEL, W.--Die Traüme der Dichter. Wiesbaden, 1912. STEKEL, W.--Fortschritte in der Traumdeutung. _Zentralblatt f. Psy-A._ III, pp. 154, 426. STEKEL, W.--Individuelle Traumsymbole. _Zentralblatt f. Psy-A._ IV, p. 289. Stekel is essentially a Freudian but his books contain hundreds of illustrations and case histories, making his books more understandable to laymen than Freud's writings. "Die Sprache des Traumes" is the most useful text book of Symbol Study. TRIDON, A.--Psychoanalysis, Its History, Theory and Practice. Huebsch. See Chapter V: Symbols, the language of the dreams, and Chapter VI: The dreams of the human race. TRIDON, A.--Psychoanalysis and Behaviour. Knopf. See part IV, chapter II: Self-knowledge through dream study. TRIDON, A.--Introduction to Freud's "Dream Psychology." McCann. VOLD, J. M.--Ueber den Traum. Leipzig 1910-1912. Void holds that every dream is caused by a physical stimulus. VASCHIDE, N.--Le Sommeil et les Rêves. Paris, 1911. A physical explanation of sleep and dreams. FOOTNOTES: [1] Readers unfamiliar with my previous works might accuse me of placing undue emphasis upon "mental" causes and ignoring the influence of bacilli, toxins, etc., in disease. I refer them to the chapter: Mind and Body, an indivisible unit, in my book, "Psychoanalysis and Behaviour." It is a truism that in tuberculosis for instance the prognosis depends greatly from the "mental" condition of the patient and on his will to live. We are protected against disease germs by the various secretions of the mouth, stomach, intestine, etc. Whenever a "mental" cause, such as fear, intense sorrow, etc., translates itself into an action of the sympathetic system which stops the flow of saliva and gastric juice and the intestinal peristalsis, we can see how the organism is then predisposed to an invasion of pathogenic bacteria. The depressed, the stupid and the ignorant are the first victims in any epidemic, the depressed because their protective vagotonism is too low, the stupid and the ignorant because they are more frequently than the intelligent and well informed a prey to fear. [2] The orthodox Freudian would of course interpret such a vision as a symbol of an attempted regression to the fetal condition, return to the mother's womb, etc. As a matter of fact, sleep is to a certain extent a return to the period of the fetus' almost complete omnipotence of thought. I have noticed, however, that I never dream of swimming except on days when I have been prevented from indulging in my favourite sport at the shore or in the swimming pool. This is to my mind a perfectly obvious dream needing no far fetched interpretation, symbolical only in so far as it expresses my attitude to sleep (See chapter on Attitudes reflected in dreams). [3] Dr. Percy Fridenberg has shown the exaggerated shock reactions felt by the organism after the eye suffers an injury or is operated on, and recalls Crile's saying that our activation patterns come from sight. [4] The duration of a dream is not as short as some of Maury's experiments would lead us to believe. Some of the experimental dreams timed by Schroetter lasted almost as long as it takes to relate them. [5] Insanity is simply a day dream from which we cannot awake at will. [6] All the dreams cited in this book are reported in the patient's own words. 
15489	----	Proofreading Team. DREAM PSYCHOLOGY _PSYCHOANALYSIS FOR BEGINNERS_ BY PROF. DR. SIGMUND FREUD AUTHORIZED ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY M.D. EDER WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANDRÉ TRIDON Author of "Psychoanalysis, its History, Theory and Practice." "Psychoanalysis and Behavior" and "Psychoanalysis, Sleep and Dreams" NEW YORK THE JAMES A. McCANN COMPANY 1920 THE JAMES A. McCANN COMPANY PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. INTRODUCTION The medical profession is justly conservative. Human life should not be considered as the proper material for wild experiments. Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions. Remember the scornful reception which first was accorded to Freud's discoveries in the domain of the unconscious. When after years of patient observations, he finally decided to appear before medical bodies to tell them modestly of some facts which always recurred in his dream and his patients' dreams, he was first laughed at and then avoided as a crank. The words "dream interpretation" were and still are indeed fraught with unpleasant, unscientific associations. They remind one of all sorts of childish, superstitious notions, which make up the thread and woof of dream books, read by none but the ignorant and the primitive. The wealth of detail, the infinite care never to let anything pass unexplained, with which he presented to the public the result of his investigations, are impressing more and more serious-minded scientists, but the examination of his evidential data demands arduous work and presupposes an absolutely open mind. This is why we still encounter men, totally unfamiliar with Freud's writings, men who were not even interested enough in the subject to attempt an interpretation of their dreams or their patients' dreams, deriding Freud's theories and combatting them with the help of statements which he never made. Some of them, like Professor Boris Sidis, reach at times conclusions which are strangely similar to Freud's, but in their ignorance of psychoanalytic literature, they fail to credit Freud for observations antedating theirs. Besides those who sneer at dream study, because they have never looked into the subject, there are those who do not dare to face the facts revealed by dream study. Dreams tell us many an unpleasant biological truth about ourselves and only very free minds can thrive on such a diet. Self-deception is a plant which withers fast in the pellucid atmosphere of dream investigation. The weakling and the neurotic attached to his neurosis are not anxious to turn such a powerful searchlight upon the dark corners of their psychology. Freud's theories are anything but theoretical. He was moved by the fact that there always seemed to be a close connection between his patients' dreams and their mental abnormalities, to collect thousands of dreams and to compare them with the case histories in his possession. He did not start out with a preconceived bias, hoping to find evidence which might support his views. He looked at facts a thousand times "until they began to tell him something." His attitude toward dream study was, in other words, that of a statistician who does not know, and has no means of foreseeing, what conclusions will be forced on him by the information he is gathering, but who is fully prepared to accept those unavoidable conclusions. This was indeed a novel way in psychology. Psychologists had always been wont to build, in what Bleuler calls "autistic ways," that is through methods in no wise supported by evidence, some attractive hypothesis, which sprung from their brain, like Minerva from Jove's brain, fully armed. After which, they would stretch upon that unyielding frame the hide of a reality which they had previously killed. It is only to minds suffering from the same distortions, to minds also autistically inclined, that those empty, artificial structures appear acceptable molds for philosophic thinking. The pragmatic view that "truth is what works" had not been as yet expressed when Freud published his revolutionary views on the psychology of dreams. Five facts of first magnitude were made obvious to the world by his interpretation of dreams. First of all, Freud pointed out a constant connection between some part of every dream and some detail of the dreamer's life during the previous waking state. This positively establishes a relation between sleeping states and waking states and disposes of the widely prevalent view that dreams are purely nonsensical phenomena coming from nowhere and leading nowhere. Secondly, Freud, after studying the dreamer's life and modes of thought, after noting down all his mannerisms and the apparently insignificant details of his conduct which reveal his secret thoughts, came to the conclusion that there was in every dream the attempted or successful gratification of some wish, conscious or unconscious. Thirdly, he proved that many of our dream visions are symbolical, which causes us to consider them as absurd and unintelligible; the universality of those symbols, however, makes them very transparent to the trained observer. Fourthly, Freud showed that sexual desires play an enormous part in our unconscious, a part which puritanical hypocrisy has always tried to minimize, if not to ignore entirely. Finally, Freud established a direct connection between dreams and insanity, between the symbolic visions of our sleep and the symbolic actions of the mentally deranged. There were, of course, many other observations which Freud made while dissecting the dreams of his patients, but not all of them present as much interest as the foregoing nor were they as revolutionary or likely to wield as much influence on modern psychiatry. Other explorers have struck the path blazed by Freud and leading into man's unconscious. Jung of Zurich, Adler of Vienna and Kempf of Washington, D.C., have made to the study of the unconscious, contributions which have brought that study into fields which Freud himself never dreamt of invading. One fact which cannot be too emphatically stated, however, is that but for Freud's wishfulfillment theory of dreams, neither Jung's "energic theory," nor Adler's theory of "organ inferiority and compensation," nor Kempf's "dynamic mechanism" might have been formulated. Freud is the father of modern abnormal psychology and he established the psychoanalytical point of view. No one who is not well grounded in Freudian lore can hope to achieve any work of value in the field of psychoanalysis. On the other hand, let no one repeat the absurd assertion that Freudism is a sort of religion bounded with dogmas and requiring an act of faith. Freudism as such was merely a stage in the development of psychoanalysis, a stage out of which all but a few bigoted camp followers, totally lacking in originality, have evolved. Thousands of stones have been added to the structure erected by the Viennese physician and many more will be added in the course of time. But the new additions to that structure would collapse like a house of cards but for the original foundations which are as indestructible as Harvey's statement as to the circulation of the blood. Regardless of whatever additions or changes have been made to the original structure, the analytic point of view remains unchanged. That point of view is not only revolutionising all the methods of diagnosis and treatment of mental derangements, but compelling the intelligent, up-to-date physician to revise entirely his attitude to almost every kind of disease. The insane are no longer absurd and pitiable people, to be herded in asylums till nature either cures them or relieves them, through death, of their misery. The insane who have not been made so by actual injury to their brain or nervous system, are the victims of unconscious forces which cause them to do abnormally things which they might be helped to do normally. Insight into one's psychology is replacing victoriously sedatives and rest cures. Physicians dealing with "purely" physical cases have begun to take into serious consideration the "mental" factors which have predisposed a patient to certain ailments. Freud's views have also made a revision of all ethical and social values unavoidable and have thrown an unexpected flood of light upon literary and artistic accomplishment. But the Freudian point of view, or more broadly speaking, the psychoanalytic point of view, shall ever remain a puzzle to those who, from laziness or indifference, refuse to survey with the great Viennese the field over which he carefully groped his way. We shall never be convinced until we repeat under his guidance all his laboratory experiments. We must follow him through the thickets of the unconscious, through the land which had never been charted because academic philosophers, following the line of least effort, had decided _a priori_ that it could not be charted. Ancient geographers, when exhausting their store of information about distant lands, yielded to an unscientific craving for romance and, without any evidence to support their day dreams, filled the blank spaces left on their maps by unexplored tracts with amusing inserts such as "Here there are lions." Thanks to Freud's interpretation of dreams the "royal road" into the unconscious is now open to all explorers. They shall not find lions, they shall find man himself, and the record of all his life and of his struggle with reality. And it is only after seeing man as his unconscious, revealed by his dreams, presents him to us that we shall understand him fully. For as Freud said to Putnam: "We are what we are because we have been what we have been." Not a few serious-minded students, however, have been discouraged from attempting a study of Freud's dream psychology. The book in which he originally offered to the world his interpretation of dreams was as circumstantial as a legal record to be pondered over by scientists at their leisure, not to be assimilated in a few hours by the average alert reader. In those days, Freud could not leave out any detail likely to make his extremely novel thesis evidentially acceptable to those willing to sift data. Freud himself, however, realized the magnitude of the task which the reading of his _magnum opus_ imposed upon those who have not been prepared for it by long psychological and scientific training and he abstracted from that gigantic work the parts which constitute the essential of his discoveries. The publishers of the present book deserve credit for presenting to the reading public the gist of Freud's psychology in the master's own words, and in a form which shall neither discourage beginners, nor appear too elementary to those who are more advanced in psychoanalytic study. Dream psychology is the key to Freud's works and to all modern psychology. With a simple, compact manual such as _Dream Psychology_ there shall be no longer any excuse for ignorance of the most revolutionary psychological system of modern times. ANDRÉ TRIDON. 121 Madison Avenue, New York. November, 1920. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I DREAMS HAVE A MEANING 1 II THE DREAM MECHANISM 24 III WHY THE DREAM DISGUISES THE DESIRES 57 IV DREAM ANALYSIS 78 V SEX IN DREAMS 104 VI THE WISH IN DREAMS 135 VII THE FUNCTION OF THE DREAM 164 VIII THE PRIMARY AND SECONDARY PROCESS--REGRESSION 186 IX THE UNCONSCIOUS AND CONSCIOUSNESS--REALITY 220 DREAM PSYCHOLOGY I DREAMS HAVE A MEANING In what we may term "prescientific days" people were in no uncertainty about the interpretation of dreams. When they were recalled after awakening they were regarded as either the friendly or hostile manifestation of some higher powers, demoniacal and Divine. With the rise of scientific thought the whole of this expressive mythology was transferred to psychology; to-day there is but a small minority among educated persons who doubt that the dream is the dreamer's own psychical act. But since the downfall of the mythological hypothesis an interpretation of the dream has been wanting. The conditions of its origin; its relationship to our psychical life when we are awake; its independence of disturbances which, during the state of sleep, seem to compel notice; its many peculiarities repugnant to our waking thought; the incongruence between its images and the feelings they engender; then the dream's evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it--all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory. Before all there is the question as to the meaning of the dream, a question which is in itself double-sided. There is, firstly, the psychical significance of the dream, its position with regard to the psychical processes, as to a possible biological function; secondly, has the dream a meaning--can sense be made of each single dream as of other mental syntheses? Three tendencies can be observed in the estimation of dreams. Many philosophers have given currency to one of these tendencies, one which at the same time preserves something of the dream's former over-valuation. The foundation of dream life is for them a peculiar state of psychical activity, which they even celebrate as elevation to some higher state. Schubert, for instance, claims: "The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter." Not all go so far as this, but many maintain that dreams have their origin in real spiritual excitations, and are the outward manifestations of spiritual powers whose free movements have been hampered during the day ("Dream Phantasies," Scherner, Volkelt). A large number of observers acknowledge that dream life is capable of extraordinary achievements--at any rate, in certain fields ("Memory"). In striking contradiction with this the majority of medical writers hardly admit that the dream is a psychical phenomenon at all. According to them dreams are provoked and initiated exclusively by stimuli proceeding from the senses or the body, which either reach the sleeper from without or are accidental disturbances of his internal organs. The dream has no greater claim to meaning and importance than the sound called forth by the ten fingers of a person quite unacquainted with music running his fingers over the keys of an instrument. The dream is to be regarded, says Binz, "as a physical process always useless, frequently morbid." All the peculiarities of dream life are explicable as the incoherent effort, due to some physiological stimulus, of certain organs, or of the cortical elements of a brain otherwise asleep. But slightly affected by scientific opinion and untroubled as to the origin of dreams, the popular view holds firmly to the belief that dreams really have got a meaning, in some way they do foretell the future, whilst the meaning can be unravelled in some way or other from its oft bizarre and enigmatical content. The reading of dreams consists in replacing the events of the dream, so far as remembered, by other events. This is done either scene by scene, _according to some rigid key_, or the dream as a whole is replaced by something else of which it was a _symbol_. Serious-minded persons laugh at these efforts--"Dreams are but sea-foam!" One day I discovered to my amazement that the popular view grounded in superstition, and not the medical one, comes nearer to the truth about dreams. I arrived at new conclusions about dreams by the use of a new method of psychological investigation, one which had rendered me good service in the investigation of phobias, obsessions, illusions, and the like, and which, under the name "psycho-analysis," had found acceptance by a whole school of investigators. The manifold analogies of dream life with the most diverse conditions of psychical disease in the waking state have been rightly insisted upon by a number of medical observers. It seemed, therefore, _a priori_, hopeful to apply to the interpretation of dreams methods of investigation which had been tested in psychopathological processes. Obsessions and those peculiar sensations of haunting dread remain as strange to normal consciousness as do dreams to our waking consciousness; their origin is as unknown to consciousness as is that of dreams. It was practical ends that impelled us, in these diseases, to fathom their origin and formation. Experience had shown us that a cure and a consequent mastery of the obsessing ideas did result when once those thoughts, the connecting links between the morbid ideas and the rest of the psychical content, were revealed which were heretofore veiled from consciousness. The procedure I employed for the interpretation of dreams thus arose from psychotherapy. This procedure is readily described, although its practice demands instruction and experience. Suppose the patient is suffering from intense morbid dread. He is requested to direct his attention to the idea in question, without, however, as he has so frequently done, meditating upon it. Every impression about it, without any exception, which occurs to him should be imparted to the doctor. The statement which will be perhaps then made, that he cannot concentrate his attention upon anything at all, is to be countered by assuring him most positively that such a blank state of mind is utterly impossible. As a matter of fact, a great number of impressions will soon occur, with which others will associate themselves. These will be invariably accompanied by the expression of the observer's opinion that they have no meaning or are unimportant. It will be at once noticed that it is this self-criticism which prevented the patient from imparting the ideas, which had indeed already excluded them from consciousness. If the patient can be induced to abandon this self-criticism and to pursue the trains of thought which are yielded by concentrating the attention, most significant matter will be obtained, matter which will be presently seen to be clearly linked to the morbid idea in question. Its connection with other ideas will be manifest, and later on will permit the replacement of the morbid idea by a fresh one, which is perfectly adapted to psychical continuity. This is not the place to examine thoroughly the hypothesis upon which this experiment rests, or the deductions which follow from its invariable success. It must suffice to state that we obtain matter enough for the resolution of every morbid idea if we especially direct our attention to the _unbidden_ associations _which disturb our thoughts_--those which are otherwise put aside by the critic as worthless refuse. If the procedure is exercised on oneself, the best plan of helping the experiment is to write down at once all one's first indistinct fancies. I will now point out where this method leads when I apply it to the examination of dreams. Any dream could be made use of in this way. From certain motives I, however, choose a dream of my own, which appears confused and meaningless to my memory, and one which has the advantage of brevity. Probably my dream of last night satisfies the requirements. Its content, fixed immediately after awakening, runs as follows: _"Company; at table or table d'hôte.... Spinach is served. Mrs. E.L., sitting next to me, gives me her undivided attention, and places her hand familiarly upon my knee. In defence I remove her hand. Then she says: 'But you have always had such beautiful eyes.'.... I then distinctly see something like two eyes as a sketch or as the contour of a spectacle lens...."_ This is the whole dream, or, at all events, all that I can remember. It appears to me not only obscure and meaningless, but more especially odd. Mrs. E.L. is a person with whom I am scarcely on visiting terms, nor to my knowledge have I ever desired any more cordial relationship. I have not seen her for a long time, and do not think there was any mention of her recently. No emotion whatever accompanied the dream process. Reflecting upon this dream does not make it a bit clearer to my mind. I will now, however, present the ideas, without premeditation and without criticism, which introspection yielded. I soon notice that it is an advantage to break up the dream into its elements, and to search out the ideas which link themselves to each fragment. _Company; at table or table d'hôte._ The recollection of the slight event with which the evening of yesterday ended is at once called up. I left a small party in the company of a friend, who offered to drive me home in his cab. "I prefer a taxi," he said; "that gives one such a pleasant occupation; there is always something to look at." When we were in the cab, and the cab-driver turned the disc so that the first sixty hellers were visible, I continued the jest. "We have hardly got in and we already owe sixty hellers. The taxi always reminds me of the table d'hôte. It makes me avaricious and selfish by continuously reminding me of my debt. It seems to me to mount up too quickly, and I am always afraid that I shall be at a disadvantage, just as I cannot resist at table d'hôte the comical fear that I am getting too little, that I must look after myself." In far-fetched connection with this I quote: "To earth, this weary earth, ye bring us, To guilt ye let us heedless go." Another idea about the table d'hôte. A few weeks ago I was very cross with my dear wife at the dinner-table at a Tyrolese health resort, because she was not sufficiently reserved with some neighbors with whom I wished to have absolutely nothing to do. I begged her to occupy herself rather with me than with the strangers. That is just as if I had _been at a disadvantage at the table d'hôte_. The contrast between the behavior of my wife at the table and that of Mrs. E.L. in the dream now strikes me: _"Addresses herself entirely to me."_ Further, I now notice that the dream is the reproduction of a little scene which transpired between my wife and myself when I was secretly courting her. The caressing under cover of the tablecloth was an answer to a wooer's passionate letter. In the dream, however, my wife is replaced by the unfamiliar E.L. Mrs. E.L. is the daughter of a man to whom I _owed money_! I cannot help noticing that here there is revealed an unsuspected connection between the dream content and my thoughts. If the chain of associations be followed up which proceeds from one element of the dream one is soon led back to another of its elements. The thoughts evoked by the dream stir up associations which were not noticeable in the dream itself. Is it not customary, when some one expects others to look after his interests without any advantage to themselves, to ask the innocent question satirically: "Do you think this will be done _for the sake of your beautiful eyes_?" Hence Mrs. E.L.'s speech in the dream. "You have always had such beautiful eyes," means nothing but "people always do everything to you for love of you; you have had _everything for nothing_." The contrary is, of course, the truth; I have always paid dearly for whatever kindness others have shown me. Still, the fact that _I had a ride for nothing_ yesterday when my friend drove me home in his cab must have made an impression upon me. In any case, the friend whose guests we were yesterday has often made me his debtor. Recently I allowed an opportunity of requiting him to go by. He has had only one present from me, an antique shawl, upon which eyes are painted all round, a so-called Occhiale, as a _charm_ against the _Malocchio_. Moreover, he is an _eye specialist_. That same evening I had asked him after a patient whom I had sent to him for _glasses_. As I remarked, nearly all parts of the dream have been brought into this new connection. I still might ask why in the dream it was _spinach_ that was served up. Because spinach called up a little scene which recently occurred at our table. A child, whose _beautiful eyes_ are really deserving of praise, refused to eat spinach. As a child I was just the same; for a long time I loathed _spinach_, until in later life my tastes altered, and it became one of my favorite dishes. The mention of this dish brings my own childhood and that of my child's near together. "You should be glad that you have some spinach," his mother had said to the little gourmet. "Some children would be very glad to get spinach." Thus I am reminded of the parents' duties towards their children. Goethe's words-- "To earth, this weary earth, ye bring us, To guilt ye let us heedless go"-- take on another meaning in this connection. Here I will stop in order that I may recapitulate the results of the analysis of the dream. By following the associations which were linked to the single elements of the dream torn from their context, I have been led to a series of thoughts and reminiscences where I am bound to recognize interesting expressions of my psychical life. The matter yielded by an analysis of the dream stands in intimate relationship with the dream content, but this relationship is so special that I should never have been able to have inferred the new discoveries directly from the dream itself. The dream was passionless, disconnected, and unintelligible. During the time that I am unfolding the thoughts at the back of the dream I feel intense and well-grounded emotions. The thoughts themselves fit beautifully together into chains logically bound together with certain central ideas which ever repeat themselves. Such ideas not represented in the dream itself are in this instance the antitheses _selfish, unselfish, to be indebted, to work for nothing_. I could draw closer the threads of the web which analysis has disclosed, and would then be able to show how they all run together into a single knot; I am debarred from making this work public by considerations of a private, not of a scientific, nature. After having cleared up many things which I do not willingly acknowledge as mine, I should have much to reveal which had better remain my secret. Why, then, do not I choose another dream whose analysis would be more suitable for publication, so that I could awaken a fairer conviction of the sense and cohesion of the results disclosed by analysis? The answer is, because every dream which I investigate leads to the same difficulties and places me under the same need of discretion; nor should I forgo this difficulty any the more were I to analyze the dream of some one else. That could only be done when opportunity allowed all concealment to be dropped without injury to those who trusted me. The conclusion which is now forced upon me is that the dream is a _sort of substitution_ for those emotional and intellectual trains of thought which I attained after complete analysis. I do not yet know the process by which the dream arose from those thoughts, but I perceive that it is wrong to regard the dream as psychically unimportant, a purely physical process which has arisen from the activity of isolated cortical elements awakened out of sleep. I must further remark that the dream is far shorter than the thoughts which I hold it replaces; whilst analysis discovered that the dream was provoked by an unimportant occurrence the evening before the dream. Naturally, I would not draw such far-reaching conclusions if only one analysis were known to me. Experience has shown me that when the associations of any dream are honestly followed such a chain of thought is revealed, the constituent parts of the dream reappear correctly and sensibly linked together; the slight suspicion that this concatenation was merely an accident of a single first observation must, therefore, be absolutely relinquished. I regard it, therefore, as my right to establish this new view by a proper nomenclature. I contrast the dream which my memory evokes with the dream and other added matter revealed by analysis: the former I call the dream's _manifest content_; the latter, without at first further subdivision, its _latent content_. I arrive at two new problems hitherto unformulated: (1) What is the psychical process which has transformed the latent content of the dream into its manifest content? (2) What is the motive or the motives which have made such transformation exigent? The process by which the change from latent to manifest content is executed I name the _dream-work_. In contrast with this is the _work of analysis_, which produces the reverse transformation. The other problems of the dream--the inquiry as to its stimuli, as to the source of its materials, as to its possible purpose, the function of dreaming, the forgetting of dreams--these I will discuss in connection with the latent dream-content. I shall take every care to avoid a confusion between the _manifest_ and the _latent content_, for I ascribe all the contradictory as well as the incorrect accounts of dream-life to the ignorance of this latent content, now first laid bare through analysis. The conversion of the latent dream thoughts into those manifest deserves our close study as the first known example of the transformation of psychical stuff from one mode of expression into another. From a mode of expression which, moreover, is readily intelligible into another which we can only penetrate by effort and with guidance, although this new mode must be equally reckoned as an effort of our own psychical activity. From the standpoint of the relationship of latent to manifest dream-content, dreams can be divided into three classes. We can, in the first place, distinguish those dreams which have a _meaning_ and are, at the same time, _intelligible_, which allow us to penetrate into our psychical life without further ado. Such dreams are numerous; they are usually short, and, as a general rule, do not seem very noticeable, because everything remarkable or exciting surprise is absent. Their occurrence is, moreover, a strong argument against the doctrine which derives the dream from the isolated activity of certain cortical elements. All signs of a lowered or subdivided psychical activity are wanting. Yet we never raise any objection to characterizing them as dreams, nor do we confound them with the products of our waking life. A second group is formed by those dreams which are indeed self-coherent and have a distinct meaning, but appear strange because we are unable to reconcile their meaning with our mental life. That is the case when we dream, for instance, that some dear relative has died of plague when we know of no ground for expecting, apprehending, or assuming anything of the sort; we can only ask ourself wonderingly: "What brought that into my head?" To the third group those dreams belong which are void of both meaning and intelligibility; they are _incoherent, complicated, and meaningless_. The overwhelming number of our dreams partake of this character, and this has given rise to the contemptuous attitude towards dreams and the medical theory of their limited psychical activity. It is especially in the longer and more complicated dream-plots that signs of incoherence are seldom missing. The contrast between manifest and latent dream-content is clearly only of value for the dreams of the second and more especially for those of the third class. Here are problems which are only solved when the manifest dream is replaced by its latent content; it was an example of this kind, a complicated and unintelligible dream, that we subjected to analysis. Against our expectation we, however, struck upon reasons which prevented a complete cognizance of the latent dream thought. On the repetition of this same experience we were forced to the supposition that there is an _intimate bond, with laws of its own, between the unintelligible and complicated nature of the dream and the difficulties attending communication of the thoughts connected with the dream_. Before investigating the nature of this bond, it will be advantageous to turn our attention to the more readily intelligible dreams of the first class where, the manifest and latent content being identical, the dream work seems to be omitted. The investigation of these dreams is also advisable from another standpoint. The dreams of _children_ are of this nature; they have a meaning, and are not bizarre. This, by the way, is a further objection to reducing dreams to a dissociation of cerebral activity in sleep, for why should such a lowering of psychical functions belong to the nature of sleep in adults, but not in children? We are, however, fully justified in expecting that the explanation of psychical processes in children, essentially simplified as they may be, should serve as an indispensable preparation towards the psychology of the adult. I shall therefore cite some examples of dreams which I have gathered from children. A girl of nineteen months was made to go without food for a day because she had been sick in the morning, and, according to nurse, had made herself ill through eating strawberries. During the night, after her day of fasting, she was heard calling out her name during sleep, and adding: "_Tawberry, eggs, pap_." She is dreaming that she is eating, and selects out of her menu exactly what she supposes she will not get much of just now. The same kind of dream about a forbidden dish was that of a little boy of twenty-two months. The day before he was told to offer his uncle a present of a small basket of cherries, of which the child was, of course, only allowed one to taste. He woke up with the joyful news: "Hermann eaten up all the cherries." A girl of three and a half years had made during the day a sea trip which was too short for her, and she cried when she had to get out of the boat. The next morning her story was that during the night she had been on the sea, thus continuing the interrupted trip. A boy of five and a half years was not at all pleased with his party during a walk in the Dachstein region. Whenever a new peak came into sight he asked if that were the Dachstein, and, finally, refused to accompany the party to the waterfall. His behavior was ascribed to fatigue; but a better explanation was forthcoming when the next morning he told his dream: _he had ascended the Dachstein_. Obviously he expected the ascent of the Dachstein to be the object of the excursion, and was vexed by not getting a glimpse of the mountain. The dream gave him what the day had withheld. The dream of a girl of six was similar; her father had cut short the walk before reaching the promised objective on account of the lateness of the hour. On the way back she noticed a signpost giving the name of another place for excursions; her father promised to take her there also some other day. She greeted her father next day with the news that she had dreamt that _her father had been with her to both places_. What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes. The following child-dream, not quite understandable at first sight, is nothing else than a wish realized. On account of poliomyelitis a girl, not quite four years of age, was brought from the country into town, and remained over night with a childless aunt in a big--for her, naturally, huge--bed. The next morning she stated that she had dreamt that _the bed was much too small for her, so that she could find no place in it_. To explain this dream as a wish is easy when we remember that to be "big" is a frequently expressed wish of all children. The bigness of the bed reminded Miss Little-Would-be-Big only too forcibly of her smallness. This nasty situation became righted in her dream, and she grew so big that the bed now became too small for her. Even when children's dreams are complicated and polished, their comprehension as a realization of desire is fairly evident. A boy of eight dreamt that he was being driven with Achilles in a war-chariot, guided by Diomedes. The day before he was assiduously reading about great heroes. It is easy to show that he took these heroes as his models, and regretted that he was not living in those days. From this short collection a further characteristic of the dreams of children is manifest--_their connection with the life of the day_. The desires which are realized in these dreams are left over from the day or, as a rule, the day previous, and the feeling has become intently emphasized and fixed during the day thoughts. Accidental and indifferent matters, or what must appear so to the child, find no acceptance in the contents of the dream. Innumerable instances of such dreams of the infantile type can be found among adults also, but, as mentioned, these are mostly exactly like the manifest content. Thus, a random selection of persons will generally respond to thirst at night-time with a dream about drinking, thus striving to get rid of the sensation and to let sleep continue. Many persons frequently have these comforting _dreams_ before waking, just when they are called. They then dream that they are already up, that they are washing, or already in school, at the office, etc., where they ought to be at a given time. The night before an intended journey one not infrequently dreams that one has already arrived at the destination; before going to a play or to a party the dream not infrequently anticipates, in impatience, as it were, the expected pleasure. At other times the dream expresses the realization of the desire somewhat indirectly; some connection, some sequel must be known--the first step towards recognizing the desire. Thus, when a husband related to me the dream of his young wife, that her monthly period had begun, I had to bethink myself that the young wife would have expected a pregnancy if the period had been absent. The dream is then a sign of pregnancy. Its meaning is that it shows the wish realized that pregnancy should not occur just yet. Under unusual and extreme circumstances, these dreams of the infantile type become very frequent. The leader of a polar expedition tells us, for instance, that during the wintering amid the ice the crew, with their monotonous diet and slight rations, dreamt regularly, like children, of fine meals, of mountains of tobacco, and of home. It is not uncommon that out of some long, complicated and intricate dream one specially lucid part stands out containing unmistakably the realization of a desire, but bound up with much unintelligible matter. On more frequently analyzing the seemingly more transparent dreams of adults, it is astonishing to discover that these are rarely as simple as the dreams of children, and that they cover another meaning beyond that of the realization of a wish. It would certainly be a simple and convenient solution of the riddle if the work of analysis made it at all possible for us to trace the meaningless and intricate dreams of adults back to the infantile type, to the realization of some intensely experienced desire of the day. But there is no warrant for such an expectation. Their dreams are generally full of the most indifferent and bizarre matter, and no trace of the realization of the wish is to be found in their content. Before leaving these infantile dreams, which are obviously unrealized desires, we must not fail to mention another chief characteristic of dreams, one that has been long noticed, and one which stands out most clearly in this class. I can replace any of these dreams by a phrase expressing a desire. If the sea trip had only lasted longer; if I were only washed and dressed; if I had only been allowed to keep the cherries instead of giving them to my uncle. But the dream gives something more than the choice, for here the desire is already realized; its realization is real and actual. The dream presentations consist chiefly, if not wholly, of scenes and mainly of visual sense images. Hence a kind of transformation is not entirely absent in this class of dreams, and this may be fairly designated as the dream work. _An idea merely existing in the region of possibility is replaced by a vision of its accomplishment._ II THE DREAM MECHANISM We are compelled to assume that such transformation of scene has also taken place in intricate dreams, though we do not know whether it has encountered any possible desire. The dream instanced at the commencement, which we analyzed somewhat thoroughly, did give us occasion in two places to suspect something of the kind. Analysis brought out that my wife was occupied with others at table, and that I did not like it; in the dream itself _exactly the opposite_ occurs, for the person who replaces my wife gives me her undivided attention. But can one wish for anything pleasanter after a disagreeable incident than that the exact contrary should have occurred, just as the dream has it? The stinging thought in the analysis, that I have never had anything for nothing, is similarly connected with the woman's remark in the dream: "You have always had such beautiful eyes." Some portion of the opposition between the latent and manifest content of the dream must be therefore derived from the realization of a wish. Another manifestation of the dream work which all incoherent dreams have in common is still more noticeable. Choose any instance, and compare the number of separate elements in it, or the extent of the dream, if written down, with the dream thoughts yielded by analysis, and of which but a trace can be refound in the dream itself. There can be no doubt that the dream working has resulted in an extraordinary compression or _condensation_. It is not at first easy to form an opinion as to the extent of the condensation; the more deeply you go into the analysis, the more deeply you are impressed by it. There will be found no factor in the dream whence the chains of associations do not lead in two or more directions, no scene which has not been pieced together out of two or more impressions and events. For instance, I once dreamt about a kind of swimming-bath where the bathers suddenly separated in all directions; at one place on the edge a person stood bending towards one of the bathers as if to drag him out. The scene was a composite one, made up out of an event that occurred at the time of puberty, and of two pictures, one of which I had seen just shortly before the dream. The two pictures were The Surprise in the Bath, from Schwind's Cycle of the Melusine (note the bathers suddenly separating), and The Flood, by an Italian master. The little incident was that I once witnessed a lady, who had tarried in the swimming-bath until the men's hour, being helped out of the water by the swimming-master. The scene in the dream which was selected for analysis led to a whole group of reminiscences, each one of which had contributed to the dream content. First of all came the little episode from the time of my courting, of which I have already spoken; the pressure of a hand under the table gave rise in the dream to the "under the table," which I had subsequently to find a place for in my recollection. There was, of course, at the time not a word about "undivided attention." Analysis taught me that this factor is the realization of a desire through its contradictory and related to the behavior of my wife at the table d'hôte. An exactly similar and much more important episode of our courtship, one which separated us for an entire day, lies hidden behind this recent recollection. The intimacy, the hand resting upon the knee, refers to a quite different connection and to quite other persons. This element in the dream becomes again the starting-point of two distinct series of reminiscences, and so on. The stuff of the dream thoughts which has been accumulated for the formation of the dream scene must be naturally fit for this application. There must be one or more common factors. The dream work proceeds like Francis Galton with his family photographs. The different elements are put one on top of the other; what is common to the composite picture stands out clearly, the opposing details cancel each other. This process of reproduction partly explains the wavering statements, of a peculiar vagueness, in so many elements of the dream. For the interpretation of dreams this rule holds good: When analysis discloses _uncertainty_, as to _either_--_or_ read _and_, _taking_ each section of the apparent alternatives as a separate outlet for a series of impressions. When there is nothing in common between the dream thoughts, the dream work takes the trouble to create a something, in order to make a common presentation feasible in the dream. The simplest way to approximate two dream thoughts, which have as yet nothing in common, consists in making such a change in the actual expression of one idea as will meet a slight responsive recasting in the form of the other idea. The process is analogous to that of rhyme, when consonance supplies the desired common factor. A good deal of the dream work consists in the creation of those frequently very witty, but often exaggerated, digressions. These vary from the common presentation in the dream content to dream thoughts which are as varied as are the causes in form and essence which give rise to them. In the analysis of our example of a dream, I find a like case of the transformation of a thought in order that it might agree with another essentially foreign one. In following out the analysis I struck upon the thought: _I should like to have something for nothing_. But this formula is not serviceable to the dream. Hence it is replaced by another one: "I should like to enjoy something free of cost."[1] The word "kost" (taste), with its double meaning, is appropriate to a table d'hôte; it, moreover, is in place through the special sense in the dream. At home if there is a dish which the children decline, their mother first tries gentle persuasion, with a "Just taste it." That the dream work should unhesitatingly use the double meaning of the word is certainly remarkable; ample experience has shown, however, that the occurrence is quite usual. Through condensation of the dream certain constituent parts of its content are explicable which are peculiar to the dream life alone, and which are not found in the waking state. Such are the composite and mixed persons, the extraordinary mixed figures, creations comparable with the fantastic animal compositions of Orientals; a moment's thought and these are reduced to unity, whilst the fancies of the dream are ever formed anew in an inexhaustible profusion. Every one knows such images in his own dreams; manifold are their origins. I can build up a person by borrowing one feature from one person and one from another, or by giving to the form of one the name of another in my dream. I can also visualize one person, but place him in a position which has occurred to another. There is a meaning in all these cases when different persons are amalgamated into one substitute. Such cases denote an "and," a "just like," a comparison of the original person from a certain point of view, a comparison which can be also realized in the dream itself. As a rule, however, the identity of the blended persons is only discoverable by analysis, and is only indicated in the dream content by the formation of the "combined" person. The same diversity in their ways of formation and the same rules for its solution hold good also for the innumerable medley of dream contents, examples of which I need scarcely adduce. Their strangeness quite disappears when we resolve not to place them on a level with the objects of perception as known to us when awake, but to remember that they represent the art of dream condensation by an exclusion of unnecessary detail. Prominence is given to the common character of the combination. Analysis must also generally supply the common features. The dream says simply: _All these things have an "x" in common_. The decomposition of these mixed images by analysis is often the quickest way to an interpretation of the dream. Thus I once dreamt that I was sitting with one of my former university tutors on a bench, which was undergoing a rapid continuous movement amidst other benches. This was a combination of lecture-room and moving staircase. I will not pursue the further result of the thought. Another time I was sitting in a carriage, and on my lap an object in shape like a top-hat, which, however, was made of transparent glass. The scene at once brought to my mind the proverb: "He who keeps his hat in his hand will travel safely through the land." By a slight turn the _glass hat_ reminded me of _Auer's light_, and I knew that I was about to invent something which was to make me as rich and independent as his invention had made my countryman, Dr. Auer, of Welsbach; then I should be able to travel instead of remaining in Vienna. In the dream I was traveling with my invention, with the, it is true, rather awkward glass top-hat. The dream work is peculiarly adept at representing two contradictory conceptions by means of the same mixed image. Thus, for instance, a woman dreamt of herself carrying a tall flower-stalk, as in the picture of the Annunciation (Chastity-Mary is her own name), but the stalk was bedecked with thick white blossoms resembling camellias (contrast with chastity: La dame aux Camelias). A great deal of what we have called "dream condensation" can be thus formulated. Each one of the elements of the dream content is _overdetermined_ by the matter of the dream thoughts; it is not derived from one element of these thoughts, but from a whole series. These are not necessarily interconnected in any way, but may belong to the most diverse spheres of thought. The dream element truly represents all this disparate matter in the dream content. Analysis, moreover, discloses another side of the relationship between dream content and dream thoughts. Just as one element of the dream leads to associations with several dream thoughts, so, as a rule, the _one dream thought represents more than one dream element_. The threads of the association do not simply converge from the dream thoughts to the dream content, but on the way they overlap and interweave in every way. Next to the transformation of one thought in the scene (its "dramatization"), condensation is the most important and most characteristic feature of the dream work. We have as yet no clue as to the motive calling for such compression of the content. In the complicated and intricate dreams with which we are now concerned, condensation and dramatization do not wholly account for the difference between dream contents and dream thoughts. There is evidence of a third factor, which deserves careful consideration. When I have arrived at an understanding of the dream thoughts by my analysis I notice, above all, that the matter of the manifest is very different from that of the latent dream content. That is, I admit, only an apparent difference which vanishes on closer investigation, for in the end I find the whole dream content carried out in the dream thoughts, nearly all the dream thoughts again represented in the dream content. Nevertheless, there does remain a certain amount of difference. The essential content which stood out clearly and broadly in the dream must, after analysis, rest satisfied with a very subordinate rôle among the dream thoughts. These very dream thoughts which, going by my feelings, have a claim to the greatest importance are either not present at all in the dream content, or are represented by some remote allusion in some obscure region of the dream. I can thus describe these phenomena: _During the dream work the psychical intensity of those thoughts and conceptions to which it properly pertains flows to others which, in my judgment, have no claim to such emphasis_. There is no other process which contributes so much to concealment of the dream's meaning and to make the connection between the dream content and dream ideas irrecognizable. During this process, which I will call _the dream displacement_, I notice also the psychical intensity, significance, or emotional nature of the thoughts become transposed in sensory vividness. What was clearest in the dream seems to me, without further consideration, the most important; but often in some obscure element of the dream I can recognize the most direct offspring of the principal dream thought. I could only designate this dream displacement as the _transvaluation of psychical values_. The phenomena will not have been considered in all its bearings unless I add that this displacement or transvaluation is shared by different dreams in extremely varying degrees. There are dreams which take place almost without any displacement. These have the same time, meaning, and intelligibility as we found in the dreams which recorded a desire. In other dreams not a bit of the dream idea has retained its own psychical value, or everything essential in these dream ideas has been replaced by unessentials, whilst every kind of transition between these conditions can be found. The more obscure and intricate a dream is, the greater is the part to be ascribed to the impetus of displacement in its formation. The example that we chose for analysis shows, at least, this much of displacement--that its content has a different center of interest from that of the dream ideas. In the forefront of the dream content the main scene appears as if a woman wished to make advances to me; in the dream idea the chief interest rests on the desire to enjoy disinterested love which shall "cost nothing"; this idea lies at the back of the talk about the beautiful eyes and the far-fetched allusion to "spinach." If we abolish the dream displacement, we attain through analysis quite certain conclusions regarding two problems of the dream which are most disputed--as to what provokes a dream at all, and as to the connection of the dream with our waking life. There are dreams which at once expose their links with the events of the day; in others no trace of such a connection can be found. By the aid of analysis it can be shown that every dream, without any exception, is linked up with our impression of the day, or perhaps it would be more correct to say of the day previous to the dream. The impressions which have incited the dream may be so important that we are not surprised at our being occupied with them whilst awake; in this case we are right in saying that the dream carries on the chief interest of our waking life. More usually, however, when the dream contains anything relating to the impressions of the day, it is so trivial, unimportant, and so deserving of oblivion, that we can only recall it with an effort. The dream content appears, then, even when coherent and intelligible, to be concerned with those indifferent trifles of thought undeserving of our waking interest. The depreciation of dreams is largely due to the predominance of the indifferent and the worthless in their content. Analysis destroys the appearance upon which this derogatory judgment is based. When the dream content discloses nothing but some indifferent impression as instigating the dream, analysis ever indicates some significant event, which has been replaced by something indifferent with which it has entered into abundant associations. Where the dream is concerned with uninteresting and unimportant conceptions, analysis reveals the numerous associative paths which connect the trivial with the momentous in the psychical estimation of the individual. _It is only the action of displacement if what is indifferent obtains recognition in the dream content instead of those impressions which are really the stimulus, or instead of the things of real interest_. In answering the question as to what provokes the dream, as to the connection of the dream, in the daily troubles, we must say, in terms of the insight given us by replacing the manifest latent dream content: _The dream does never trouble itself about things which are not deserving of our concern during the day, and trivialities which do not trouble us during the day have no power to pursue us whilst asleep_. What provoked the dream in the example which we have analyzed? The really unimportant event, that a friend invited me to a _free ride in his cab_. The table d'hôte scene in the dream contains an allusion to this indifferent motive, for in conversation I had brought the taxi parallel with the table d'hôte. But I can indicate the important event which has as its substitute the trivial one. A few days before I had disbursed a large sum of money for a member of my family who is very dear to me. Small wonder, says the dream thought, if this person is grateful to me for this--this love is not cost-free. But love that shall cost nothing is one of the prime thoughts of the dream. The fact that shortly before this I had had several _drives_ with the relative in question puts the one drive with my friend in a position to recall the connection with the other person. The indifferent impression which, by such ramifications, provokes the dream is subservient to another condition which is not true of the real source of the dream--the impression must be a recent one, everything arising from the day of the dream. I cannot leave the question of dream displacement without the consideration of a remarkable process in the formation of dreams in which condensation and displacement work together towards one end. In condensation we have already considered the case where two conceptions in the dream having something in common, some point of contact, are replaced in the dream content by a mixed image, where the distinct germ corresponds to what is common, and the indistinct secondary modifications to what is distinctive. If displacement is added to condensation, there is no formation of a mixed image, but a _common mean_ which bears the same relationship to the individual elements as does the resultant in the parallelogram of forces to its components. In one of my dreams, for instance, there is talk of an injection with _propyl_. On first analysis I discovered an indifferent but true incident where _amyl_ played a part as the excitant of the dream. I cannot yet vindicate the exchange of amyl for propyl. To the round of ideas of the same dream, however, there belongs the recollection of my first visit to Munich, when the _Propyloea_ struck me. The attendant circumstances of the analysis render it admissible that the influence of this second group of conceptions caused the displacement of amyl to propyl. _Propyl_ is, so to say, the mean idea between _amyl_ and _propyloea_; it got into the dream as a kind of _compromise_ by simultaneous condensation and displacement. The need of discovering some motive for this bewildering work of the dream is even more called for in the case of displacement than in condensation. Although the work of displacement must be held mainly responsible if the dream thoughts are not refound or recognized in the dream content (unless the motive of the changes be guessed), it is another and milder kind of transformation which will be considered with the dream thoughts which leads to the discovery of a new but readily understood act of the dream work. The first dream thoughts which are unravelled by analysis frequently strike one by their unusual wording. They do not appear to be expressed in the sober form which our thinking prefers; rather are they expressed symbolically by allegories and metaphors like the figurative language of the poets. It is not difficult to find the motives for this degree of constraint in the expression of dream ideas. The dream content consists chiefly of visual scenes; hence the dream ideas must, in the first place, be prepared to make use of these forms of presentation. Conceive that a political leader's or a barrister's address had to be transposed into pantomime, and it will be easy to understand the transformations to which the dream work is constrained by regard for this _dramatization of the dream content_. Around the psychical stuff of dream thoughts there are ever found reminiscences of impressions, not infrequently of early childhood--scenes which, as a rule, have been visually grasped. Whenever possible, this portion of the dream ideas exercises a definite influence upon the modelling of the dream content; it works like a center of crystallization, by attracting and rearranging the stuff of the dream thoughts. The scene of the dream is not infrequently nothing but a modified repetition, complicated by interpolations of events that have left such an impression; the dream but very seldom reproduces accurate and unmixed reproductions of real scenes. The dream content does not, however, consist exclusively of scenes, but it also includes scattered fragments of visual images, conversations, and even bits of unchanged thoughts. It will be perhaps to the point if we instance in the briefest way the means of dramatization which are at the disposal of the dream work for the repetition of the dream thoughts in the peculiar language of the dream. The dream thoughts which we learn from the analysis exhibit themselves as a psychical complex of the most complicated superstructure. Their parts stand in the most diverse relationship to each other; they form backgrounds and foregrounds, stipulations, digressions, illustrations, demonstrations, and protestations. It may be said to be almost the rule that one train of thought is followed by its contradictory. No feature known to our reason whilst awake is absent. If a dream is to grow out of all this, the psychical matter is submitted to a pressure which condenses it extremely, to an inner shrinking and displacement, creating at the same time fresh surfaces, to a selective interweaving among the constituents best adapted for the construction of these scenes. Having regard to the origin of this stuff, the term _regression_ can be fairly applied to this process. The logical chains which hitherto held the psychical stuff together become lost in this transformation to the dream content. The dream work takes on, as it were, only the essential content of the dream thoughts for elaboration. It is left to analysis to restore the connection which the dream work has destroyed. The dream's means of expression must therefore be regarded as meager in comparison with those of our imagination, though the dream does not renounce all claims to the restitution of logical relation to the dream thoughts. It rather succeeds with tolerable frequency in replacing these by formal characters of its own. By reason of the undoubted connection existing between all the parts of dream thoughts, the dream is able to embody this matter into a single scene. It upholds a _logical connection_ as _approximation in time and space_, just as the painter, who groups all the poets for his picture of Parnassus who, though they have never been all together on a mountain peak, yet form ideally a community. The dream continues this method of presentation in individual dreams, and often when it displays two elements close together in the dream content it warrants some special inner connection between what they represent in the dream thoughts. It should be, moreover, observed that all the dreams of one night prove on analysis to originate from the same sphere of thought. The causal connection between two ideas is either left without presentation, or replaced by two different long portions of dreams one after the other. This presentation is frequently a reversed one, the beginning of the dream being the deduction, and its end the hypothesis. The direct _transformation_ of one thing into another in the dream seems to serve the relationship of _cause_ and _effect_. The dream never utters the _alternative "either-or,"_ but accepts both as having equal rights in the same connection. When "either-or" is used in the reproduction of dreams, it is, as I have already mentioned, to be replaced by "_and_." Conceptions which stand in opposition to one another are preferably expressed in dreams by the same element.[2] There seems no "not" in dreams. Opposition between two ideas, the relation of conversion, is represented in dreams in a very remarkable way. It is expressed by the reversal of another part of the dream content just as if by way of appendix. We shall later on deal with another form of expressing disagreement. The common dream sensation of _movement checked_ serves the purpose of representing disagreement of impulses--a _conflict of the will_. Only one of the logical relationships--that of _similarity, identity, agreement_--is found highly developed in the mechanism of dream formation. Dream work makes use of these cases as a starting-point for condensation, drawing together everything which shows such agreement to a _fresh unity_. These short, crude observations naturally do not suffice as an estimate of the abundance of the dream's formal means of presenting the logical relationships of the dream thoughts. In this respect, individual dreams are worked up more nicely or more carelessly, our text will have been followed more or less closely, auxiliaries of the dream work will have been taken more or less into consideration. In the latter case they appear obscure, intricate, incoherent. When the dream appears openly absurd, when it contains an obvious paradox in its content, it is so of purpose. Through its apparent disregard of all logical claims, it expresses a part of the intellectual content of the dream ideas. Absurdity in the dream denotes _disagreement, scorn, disdain_ in the dream thoughts. As this explanation is in entire disagreement with the view that the dream owes its origin to dissociated, uncritical cerebral activity, I will emphasize my view by an example: _"One of my acquaintances, Mr. M----, has been attacked by no less a person than Goethe in an essay with, we all maintain, unwarrantable violence. Mr. M---- has naturally been ruined by this attack. He complains very bitterly of this at a dinner-party, but his respect for Goethe has not diminished through this personal experience. I now attempt to clear up the chronological relations which strike me as improbable. Goethe died in 1832. As his attack upon Mr. M---- must, of course, have taken place before, Mr. M---- must have been then a very young man. It seems to me plausible that he was eighteen. I am not certain, however, what year we are actually in, and the whole calculation falls into obscurity. The attack was, moreover, contained in Goethe's well-known essay on 'Nature.'"_ The absurdity of the dream becomes the more glaring when I state that Mr. M---- is a young business man without any poetical or literary interests. My analysis of the dream will show what method there is in this madness. The dream has derived its material from three sources: 1. Mr. M----, to whom I was introduced at a dinner-party, begged me one day to examine his elder brother, who showed signs of mental trouble. In conversation with the patient, an unpleasant episode occurred. Without the slightest occasion he disclosed one of his brother's _youthful escapades_. I had asked the patient the _year of his birth_ (_year of death_ in dream), and led him to various calculations which might show up his want of memory. 2. A medical journal which displayed my name among others on the cover had published a _ruinous_ review of a book by my friend F---- of Berlin, from the pen of a very _juvenile_ reviewer. I communicated with the editor, who, indeed, expressed his regret, but would not promise any redress. Thereupon I broke off my connection with the paper; in my letter of resignation I expressed the hope that our _personal relations would not suffer from this_. Here is the real source of the dream. The derogatory reception of my friend's work had made a deep impression upon me. In my judgment, it contained a fundamental biological discovery which only now, several years later, commences to find favor among the professors. 3. A little while before, a patient gave me the medical history of her brother, who, exclaiming "_Nature, Nature!_" had gone out of his mind. The doctors considered that the exclamation arose from a study of _Goethe's_ beautiful essay, and indicated that the patient had been overworking. I expressed the opinion that it seemed more _plausible_ to me that the exclamation "Nature!" was to be taken in that sexual meaning known also to the less educated in our country. It seemed to me that this view had something in it, because the unfortunate youth afterwards mutilated his genital organs. The patient was eighteen years old when the attack occurred. The first person in the dream-thoughts behind the ego was my friend who had been so scandalously treated. _"I now attempted to clear up the chronological relation."_ My friend's book deals with the chronological relations of life, and, amongst other things, correlates _Goethe's_ duration of life with a number of days in many ways important to biology. The ego is, however, represented as a general paralytic (_"I am not certain what year we are actually in"_). The dream exhibits my friend as behaving like a general paralytic, and thus riots in absurdity. But the dream thoughts run ironically. "Of course he is a madman, a fool, and you are the genius who understands all about it. But shouldn't it be the _other way round_?" This inversion obviously took place in the dream when Goethe attacked the young man, which is absurd, whilst any one, however young, can to-day easily attack the great Goethe. I am prepared to maintain that no dream is inspired by other than egoistic emotions. The ego in the dream does not, indeed, represent only my friend, but stands for myself also. I identify myself with him because the fate of his discovery appears to me typical of the acceptance of _my own_. If I were to publish my own theory, which gives sexuality predominance in the ætiology of psychoneurotic disorders (see the allusion to the eighteen-year-old patient--_"Nature, Nature!"_), the same criticism would be leveled at me, and it would even now meet with the same contempt. When I follow out the dream thoughts closely, I ever find only _scorn_ and _contempt_ as _correlated with the dream's absurdity_. It is well known that the discovery of a cracked sheep's skull on the Lido in Venice gave Goethe the hint for the so-called vertebral theory of the skull. My friend plumes himself on having as a student raised a hubbub for the resignation of an aged professor who had done good work (including some in this very subject of comparative anatomy), but who, on account of _decrepitude_, had become quite incapable of teaching. The agitation my friend inspired was so successful because in the German Universities an _age limit_ is not demanded for academic work. _Age is no protection against folly._ In the hospital here I had for years the honor to serve under a chief who, long fossilized, was for decades notoriously _feebleminded_, and was yet permitted to continue in his responsible office. A trait, after the manner of the find in the Lido, forces itself upon me here. It was to this man that some youthful colleagues in the hospital adapted the then popular slang of that day: "No Goethe has written that," "No Schiller composed that," etc. We have not exhausted our valuation of the dream work. In addition to condensation, displacement, and definite arrangement of the psychical matter, we must ascribe to it yet another activity--one which is, indeed, not shared by every dream. I shall not treat this position of the dream work exhaustively; I will only point out that the readiest way to arrive at a conception of it is to take for granted, probably unfairly, that it _only subsequently influences the dream content which has already been built up_. Its mode of action thus consists in so coördinating the parts of the dream that these coalesce to a coherent whole, to a dream composition. The dream gets a kind of façade which, it is true, does not conceal the whole of its content. There is a sort of preliminary explanation to be strengthened by interpolations and slight alterations. Such elaboration of the dream content must not be too pronounced; the misconception of the dream thoughts to which it gives rise is merely superficial, and our first piece of work in analyzing a dream is to get rid of these early attempts at interpretation. The motives for this part of the dream work are easily gauged. This final elaboration of the dream is due to a _regard for intelligibility_--a fact at once betraying the origin of an action which behaves towards the actual dream content just as our normal psychical action behaves towards some proffered perception that is to our liking. The dream content is thus secured under the pretense of certain expectations, is perceptually classified by the supposition of its intelligibility, thereby risking its falsification, whilst, in fact, the most extraordinary misconceptions arise if the dream can be correlated with nothing familiar. Every one is aware that we are unable to look at any series of unfamiliar signs, or to listen to a discussion of unknown words, without at once making perpetual changes through _our regard for intelligibility_, through our falling back upon what is familiar. We can call those dreams _properly made up_ which are the result of an elaboration in every way analogous to the psychical action of our waking life. In other dreams there is no such action; not even an attempt is made to bring about order and meaning. We regard the dream as "quite mad," because on awaking it is with this last-named part of the dream work, the dream elaboration, that we identify ourselves. So far, however, as our analysis is concerned, the dream, which resembles a medley of disconnected fragments, is of as much value as the one with a smooth and beautifully polished surface. In the former case we are spared, to some extent, the trouble of breaking down the super-elaboration of the dream content. All the same, it would be an error to see in the dream façade nothing but the misunderstood and somewhat arbitrary elaboration of the dream carried out at the instance of our psychical life. Wishes and phantasies are not infrequently employed in the erection of this façade, which were already fashioned in the dream thoughts; they are akin to those of our waking life--"day-dreams," as they are very properly called. These wishes and phantasies, which analysis discloses in our dreams at night, often present themselves as repetitions and refashionings of the scenes of infancy. Thus the dream façade may show us directly the true core of the dream, distorted through admixture with other matter. Beyond these four activities there is nothing else to be discovered in the dream work. If we keep closely to the definition that dream work denotes the transference of dream thoughts to dream content, we are compelled to say that the dream work is not creative; it develops no fancies of its own, it judges nothing, decides nothing. It does nothing but prepare the matter for condensation and displacement, and refashions it for dramatization, to which must be added the inconstant last-named mechanism--that of explanatory elaboration. It is true that a good deal is found in the dream content which might be understood as the result of another and more intellectual performance; but analysis shows conclusively every time that these _intellectual operations were already present in the dream thoughts, and have only been taken over by the dream content_. A syllogism in the dream is nothing other than the repetition of a syllogism in the dream thoughts; it seems inoffensive if it has been transferred to the dream without alteration; it becomes absurd if in the dream work it has been transferred to other matter. A calculation in the dream content simply means that there was a calculation in the dream thoughts; whilst this is always correct, the calculation in the dream can furnish the silliest results by the condensation of its factors and the displacement of the same operations to other things. Even speeches which are found in the dream content are not new compositions; they prove to be pieced together out of speeches which have been made or heard or read; the words are faithfully copied, but the occasion of their utterance is quite overlooked, and their meaning is most violently changed. It is, perhaps, not superfluous to support these assertions by examples: 1. _A seemingly inoffensive, well-made dream of a patient. She was going to market with her cook, who carried the basket. The butcher said to her when she asked him for something: "That is all gone," and wished to give her something else, remarking; "That's very good." She declines, and goes to the greengrocer, who wants to sell her a peculiar vegetable which is bound up in bundles and of a black color. She says: "I don't know that; I won't take it."_ The remark "That is all gone" arose from the treatment. A few days before I said myself to the patient that the earliest reminiscences of childhood _are all gone_ as such, but are replaced by transferences and dreams. Thus I am the butcher. The second remark, _"I don't know that"_ arose in a very different connection. The day before she had herself called out in rebuke to the cook (who, moreover, also appears in the dream): "_Behave yourself properly_; I don't know _that_"--that is, "I don't know this kind of behavior; I won't have it." The more harmless portion of this speech was arrived at by a displacement of the dream content; in the dream thoughts only the other portion of the speech played a part, because the dream work changed an imaginary situation into utter irrecognizability and complete inoffensiveness (while in a certain sense I behave in an unseemly way to the lady). The situation resulting in this phantasy is, however, nothing but a new edition of one that actually took place. 2. A dream apparently meaningless relates to figures. _"She wants to pay something; her daughter takes three florins sixty-five kreuzers out of her purse; but she says: 'What are you doing? It only cost twenty-one kreuzers.'"_ The dreamer was a stranger who had placed her child at school in Vienna, and who was able to continue under my treatment so long as her daughter remained at Vienna. The day before the dream the directress of the school had recommended her to keep the child another year at school. In this case she would have been able to prolong her treatment by one year. The figures in the dream become important if it be remembered that time is money. One year equals 365 days, or, expressed in kreuzers, 365 kreuzers, which is three florins sixty-five kreuzers. The twenty-one kreuzers correspond with the three weeks which remained from the day of the dream to the end of the school term, and thus to the end of the treatment. It was obviously financial considerations which had moved the lady to refuse the proposal of the directress, and which were answerable for the triviality of the amount in the dream. 3. A lady, young, but already ten years married, heard that a friend of hers, Miss Elise L----, of about the same age, had become engaged. This gave rise to the following dream: _She was sitting with her husband in the theater; the one side of the stalls was quite empty. Her husband tells her, Elise L---- and her fiancé had intended coming, but could only get some cheap seats, three for one florin fifty kreuzers, and these they would not take. In her opinion, that would not have mattered very much._ The origin of the figures from the matter of the dream thoughts and the changes the figures underwent are of interest. Whence came the one florin fifty kreuzers? From a trifling occurrence of the previous day. Her sister-in-law had received 150 florins as a present from her husband, and had quickly got rid of it by buying some ornament. Note that 150 florins is one hundred times one florin fifty kreuzers. For the _three_ concerned with the tickets, the only link is that Elise L---- is exactly three months younger than the dreamer. The scene in the dream is the repetition of a little adventure for which she has often been teased by her husband. She was once in a great hurry to get tickets in time for a piece, and when she came to the theater _one side of the stalls was almost empty_. It was therefore quite unnecessary for her to have been in _such a hurry_. Nor must we overlook the absurdity of the dream that two persons should take three tickets for the theater. Now for the dream ideas. It was _stupid_ to have married so early; I _need not_ have been _in so great a hurry_. Elise L----'s example shows me that I should have been able to get a husband later; indeed, one a _hundred times better_ if I had but waited. I could have bought _three_ such men with the money (dowry). [1] "Ich möchte gerne etwas geniessen ohne 'Kosten' zu haben." A a pun upon the word "kosten," which has two meanings--"taste" and "cost." In "Die Traumdeutung," third edition, p. 71 footnote, Professor Freud remarks that "the finest example of dream interpretation left us by the ancients is based upon a pun" (from "The Interpretation of Dreams," by Artemidorus Daldianus). "Moreover, dreams are so intimately bound up with language that Ferenczi truly points out that every tongue has its own language of dreams. A dream is as a rule untranslatable into other languages."--TRANSLATOR. [2] It is worthy of remark that eminent philologists maintain that the oldest languages used the same word for expressing quite general antitheses. In C. Abel's essay, "Ueber den Gegensinn der Urworter" (1884, the following examples of such words in England are given: "gleam--gloom"; "to lock--loch"; "down--The Downs"; "to step--to stop." In his essay on "The Origin of Language" ("Linguistic Essays," p. 240), Abel says: "When the Englishman says 'without,' is not his judgment based upon the comparative juxtaposition of two opposites, 'with' and 'out'; 'with' itself originally meant 'without,' as may still be seen in 'withdraw.' 'Bid' includes the opposite sense of giving and of proffering." Abel, "The English Verbs of Command," "Linguistic Essays," p. 104; see also Freud, "Ueber den Gegensinn der Urworte"; _Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen_, Band II., part i., p. 179).--TRANSLATOR. III WHY THE DREAM DISGUISES THE DESIRES In the foregoing exposition we have now learnt something of the dream work; we must regard it as a quite special psychical process, which, so far as we are aware, resembles nothing else. To the dream work has been transferred that bewilderment which its product, the dream, has aroused in us. In truth, the dream work is only the first recognition of a group of psychical processes to which must be referred the origin of hysterical symptoms, the ideas of morbid dread, obsession, and illusion. Condensation, and especially displacement, are never-failing features in these other processes. The regard for appearance remains, on the other hand, peculiar to the dream work. If this explanation brings the dream into line with the formation of psychical disease, it becomes the more important to fathom the essential conditions of processes like dream building. It will be probably a surprise to hear that neither the state of sleep nor illness is among the indispensable conditions. A whole number of phenomena of the everyday life of healthy persons, forgetfulness, slips in speaking and in holding things, together with a certain class of mistakes, are due to a psychical mechanism analogous to that of the dream and the other members of this group. Displacement is the core of the problem, and the most striking of all the dream performances. A thorough investigation of the subject shows that the essential condition of displacement is purely psychological; it is in the nature of a motive. We get on the track by thrashing out experiences which one cannot avoid in the analysis of dreams. I had to break off the relations of my dream thoughts in the analysis of my dream on p. 8 because I found some experiences which I do not wish strangers to know, and which I could not relate without serious damage to important considerations. I added, it would be no use were I to select another instead of that particular dream; in every dream where the content is obscure or intricate, I should hit upon dream thoughts which call for secrecy. If, however, I continue the analysis for myself, without regard to those others, for whom, indeed, so personal an event as my dream cannot matter, I arrive finally at ideas which surprise me, which I have not known to be mine, which not only appear _foreign_ to me, but which are _unpleasant_, and which I would like to oppose vehemently, whilst the chain of ideas running through the analysis intrudes upon me inexorably. I can only take these circumstances into account by admitting that these thoughts are actually part of my psychical life, possessing a certain psychical intensity or energy. However, by virtue of a particular psychological condition, the _thoughts could not become conscious to me_. I call this particular condition "_Repression_." It is therefore impossible for me not to recognize some casual relationship between the obscurity of the dream content and this state of repression--this _incapacity of consciousness_. Whence I conclude that the cause of the obscurity is _the desire to conceal these thoughts_. Thus I arrive at the conception of the _dream distortion_ as the deed of the dream work, and of _displacement_ serving to disguise this object. I will test this in my own dream, and ask myself, What is the thought which, quite innocuous in its distorted form, provokes my liveliest opposition in its real form? I remember that the free drive reminded me of the last expensive drive with a member of my family, the interpretation of the dream being: I should for once like to experience affection for which I should not have to pay, and that shortly before the dream I had to make a heavy disbursement for this very person. In this connection, I cannot get away from the thought _that I regret this disbursement_. It is only when I acknowledge this feeling that there is any sense in my wishing in the dream for an affection that should entail no outlay. And yet I can state on my honor that I did not hesitate for a moment when it became necessary to expend that sum. The regret, the counter-current, was unconscious to me. Why it was unconscious is quite another question which would lead us far away from the answer which, though within my knowledge, belongs elsewhere. If I subject the dream of another person instead of one of my own to analysis, the result is the same; the motives for convincing others is, however, changed. In the dream of a healthy person the only way for me to enable him to accept this repressed idea is the coherence of the dream thoughts. He is at liberty to reject this explanation. But if we are dealing with a person suffering from any neurosis--say from hysteria--the recognition of these repressed ideas is compulsory by reason of their connection with the symptoms of his illness and of the improvement resulting from exchanging the symptoms for the repressed ideas. Take the patient from whom I got the last dream about the three tickets for one florin fifty kreuzers. Analysis shows that she does not think highly of her husband, that she regrets having married him, that she would be glad to change him for some one else. It is true that she maintains that she loves her husband, that her emotional life knows nothing about this depreciation (a hundred times better!), but all her symptoms lead to the same conclusion as this dream. When her repressed memories had rewakened a certain period when she was conscious that she did not love her husband, her symptoms disappeared, and therewith disappeared her resistance to the interpretation of the dream. This conception of repression once fixed, together with the distortion of the dream in relation to repressed psychical matter, we are in a position to give a general exposition of the principal results which the analysis of dreams supplies. We learnt that the most intelligible and meaningful dreams are unrealized desires; the desires they pictured as realized are known to consciousness, have been held over from the daytime, and are of absorbing interest. The analysis of obscure and intricate dreams discloses something very similar; the dream scene again pictures as realized some desire which regularly proceeds from the dream ideas, but the picture is unrecognizable, and is only cleared up in the analysis. The desire itself is either one repressed, foreign to consciousness, or it is closely bound up with repressed ideas. The formula for these dreams may be thus stated: _They are concealed realizations of repressed desires_. It is interesting to note that they are right who regard the dream as foretelling the future. Although the future which the dream shows us is not that which will occur, but that which we would like to occur. Folk psychology proceeds here according to its wont; it believes what it wishes to believe. Dreams can be divided into three classes according to their relation towards the realization of desire. Firstly come those which exhibit a _non-repressed, non-concealed desire_; these are dreams of the infantile type, becoming ever rarer among adults. Secondly, dreams which express in _veiled_ form some _repressed desire_; these constitute by far the larger number of our dreams, and they require analysis for their understanding. Thirdly, these dreams where repression exists, but _without_ or with but slight concealment. These dreams are invariably accompanied by a feeling of dread which brings the dream to an end. This feeling of dread here replaces dream displacement; I regarded the dream work as having prevented this in the dream of the second class. It is not very difficult to prove that what is now present as intense dread in the dream was once desire, and is now secondary to the repression. There are also definite dreams with a painful content, without the presence of any anxiety in the dream. These cannot be reckoned among dreams of dread; they have, however, always been used to prove the unimportance and the psychical futility of dreams. An analysis of such an example will show that it belongs to our second class of dreams--a _perfectly concealed_ realization of repressed desires. Analysis will demonstrate at the same time how excellently adapted is the work of displacement to the concealment of desires. A girl dreamt that she saw lying dead before her the only surviving child of her sister amid the same surroundings as a few years before she saw the first child lying dead. She was not sensible of any pain, but naturally combatted the view that the scene represented a desire of hers. Nor was that view necessary. Years ago it was at the funeral of the child that she had last seen and spoken to the man she loved. Were the second child to die, she would be sure to meet this man again in her sister's house. She is longing to meet him, but struggles against this feeling. The day of the dream she had taken a ticket for a lecture, which announced the presence of the man she always loved. The dream is simply a dream of impatience common to those which happen before a journey, theater, or simply anticipated pleasures. The longing is concealed by the shifting of the scene to the occasion when any joyous feeling were out of place, and yet where it did once exist. Note, further, that the emotional behavior in the dream is adapted, not to the displaced, but to the real but suppressed dream ideas. The scene anticipates the long-hoped-for meeting; there is here no call for painful emotions. There has hitherto been no occasion for philosophers to bestir themselves with a psychology of repression. We must be allowed to construct some clear conception as to the origin of dreams as the first steps in this unknown territory. The scheme which we have formulated not only from a study of dreams is, it is true, already somewhat complicated, but we cannot find any simpler one that will suffice. We hold that our psychical apparatus contains two procedures for the construction of thoughts. The second one has the advantage that its products find an open path to consciousness, whilst the activity of the first procedure is unknown to itself, and can only arrive at consciousness through the second one. At the borderland of these two procedures, where the first passes over into the second, a censorship is established which only passes what pleases it, keeping back everything else. That which is rejected by the censorship is, according to our definition, in a state of repression. Under certain conditions, one of which is the sleeping state, the balance of power between the two procedures is so changed that what is repressed can no longer be kept back. In the sleeping state this may possibly occur through the negligence of the censor; what has been hitherto repressed will now succeed in finding its way to consciousness. But as the censorship is never absent, but merely off guard, certain alterations must be conceded so as to placate it. It is a compromise which becomes conscious in this case--a compromise between what one procedure has in view and the demands of the other. _Repression, laxity of the censor, compromise_--this is the foundation for the origin of many another psychological process, just as it is for the dream. In such compromises we can observe the processes of condensation, of displacement, the acceptance of superficial associations, which we have found in the dream work. It is not for us to deny the demonic element which has played a part in constructing our explanation of dream work. The impression left is that the formation of obscure dreams proceeds as if a person had something to say which must be agreeable for another person upon whom he is dependent to hear. It is by the use of this image that we figure to ourselves the conception of the _dream distortion_ and of the censorship, and ventured to crystallize our impression in a rather crude, but at least definite, psychological theory. Whatever explanation the future may offer of these first and second procedures, we shall expect a confirmation of our correlate that the second procedure commands the entrance to consciousness, and can exclude the first from consciousness. Once the sleeping state overcome, the censorship resumes complete sway, and is now able to revoke that which was granted in a moment of weakness. That the _forgetting_ of dreams explains this in part, at least, we are convinced by our experience, confirmed again and again. During the relation of a dream, or during analysis of one, it not infrequently happens that some fragment of the dream is suddenly forgotten. This fragment so forgotten invariably contains the best and readiest approach to an understanding of the dream. Probably that is why it sinks into oblivion--_i.e._, into a renewed suppression. Viewing the dream content as the representation of a realized desire, and referring its vagueness to the changes made by the censor in the repressed matter, it is no longer difficult to grasp the function of dreams. In fundamental contrast with those saws which assume that sleep is disturbed by dreams, we hold the _dream as the guardian of sleep_. So far as children's dreams are concerned, our view should find ready acceptance. The sleeping state or the psychical change to sleep, whatsoever it be, is brought about by the child being sent to sleep or compelled thereto by fatigue, only assisted by the removal of all stimuli which might open other objects to the psychical apparatus. The means which serve to keep external stimuli distant are known; but what are the means we can employ to depress the internal psychical stimuli which frustrate sleep? Look at a mother getting her child to sleep. The child is full of beseeching; he wants another kiss; he wants to play yet awhile. His requirements are in part met, in part drastically put off till the following day. Clearly these desires and needs, which agitate him, are hindrances to sleep. Every one knows the charming story of the bad boy (Baldwin Groller's) who awoke at night bellowing out, "_I want the rhinoceros_." A really good boy, instead of bellowing, would have _dreamt_ that he was playing with the rhinoceros. Because the dream which realizes his desire is believed during sleep, it removes the desire and makes sleep possible. It cannot be denied that this belief accords with the dream image, because it is arrayed in the psychical appearance of probability; the child is without the capacity which it will acquire later to distinguish hallucinations or phantasies from reality. The adult has learnt this differentiation; he has also learnt the futility of desire, and by continuous practice manages to postpone his aspirations, until they can be granted in some roundabout method by a change in the external world. For this reason it is rare for him to have his wishes realized during sleep in the short psychical way. It is even possible that this never happens, and that everything which appears to us like a child's dream demands a much more elaborate explanation. Thus it is that for adults--for every sane person without exception--a differentiation of the psychical matter has been fashioned which the child knew not. A psychical procedure has been reached which, informed by the experience of life, exercises with jealous power a dominating and restraining influence upon psychical emotions; by its relation to consciousness, and by its spontaneous mobility, it is endowed with the greatest means of psychical power. A portion of the infantile emotions has been withheld from this procedure as useless to life, and all the thoughts which flow from these are found in the state of repression. Whilst the procedure in which we recognize our normal ego reposes upon the desire for sleep, it appears compelled by the psycho-physiological conditions of sleep to abandon some of the energy with which it was wont during the day to keep down what was repressed. This neglect is really harmless; however much the emotions of the child's spirit may be stirred, they find the approach to consciousness rendered difficult, and that to movement blocked in consequence of the state of sleep. The danger of their disturbing sleep must, however, be avoided. Moreover, we must admit that even in deep sleep some amount of free attention is exerted as a protection against sense-stimuli which might, perchance, make an awakening seem wiser than the continuance of sleep. Otherwise we could not explain the fact of our being always awakened by stimuli of certain quality. As the old physiologist Burdach pointed out, the mother is awakened by the whimpering of her child, the miller by the cessation of his mill, most people by gently calling out their names. This attention, thus on the alert, makes use of the internal stimuli arising from repressed desires, and fuses them into the dream, which as a compromise satisfies both procedures at the same time. The dream creates a form of psychical release for the wish which is either suppressed or formed by the aid of repression, inasmuch as it presents it as realized. The other procedure is also satisfied, since the continuance of the sleep is assured. Our ego here gladly behaves like a child; it makes the dream pictures believable, saying, as it were, "Quite right, but let me sleep." The contempt which, once awakened, we bear the dream, and which rests upon the absurdity and apparent illogicality of the dream, is probably nothing but the reasoning of our sleeping ego on the feelings about what was repressed; with greater right it should rest upon the incompetency of this disturber of our sleep. In sleep we are now and then aware of this contempt; the dream content transcends the censorship rather too much, we think, "It's only a dream," and sleep on. It is no objection to this view if there are borderlines for the dream where its function, to preserve sleep from interruption, can no longer be maintained--as in the dreams of impending dread. It is here changed for another function--to suspend the sleep at the proper time. It acts like a conscientious night-watchman, who first does his duty by quelling disturbances so as not to waken the citizen, but equally does his duty quite properly when he awakens the street should the causes of the trouble seem to him serious and himself unable to cope with them alone. This function of dreams becomes especially well marked when there arises some incentive for the sense perception. That the senses aroused during sleep influence the dream is well known, and can be experimentally verified; it is one of the certain but much overestimated results of the medical investigation of dreams. Hitherto there has been an insoluble riddle connected with this discovery. The stimulus to the sense by which the investigator affects the sleeper is not properly recognized in the dream, but is intermingled with a number of indefinite interpretations, whose determination appears left to psychical free-will. There is, of course, no such psychical free-will. To an external sense-stimulus the sleeper can react in many ways. Either he awakens or he succeeds in sleeping on. In the latter case he can make use of the dream to dismiss the external stimulus, and this, again, in more ways than one. For instance, he can stay the stimulus by dreaming of a scene which is absolutely intolerable to him. This was the means used by one who was troubled by a painful perineal abscess. He dreamt that he was on horseback, and made use of the poultice, which was intended to alleviate his pain, as a saddle, and thus got away from the cause of the trouble. Or, as is more frequently the case, the external stimulus undergoes a new rendering, which leads him to connect it with a repressed desire seeking its realization, and robs him of its reality, and is treated as if it were a part of the psychical matter. Thus, some one dreamt that he had written a comedy which embodied a definite _motif_; it was being performed; the first act was over amid enthusiastic applause; there was great clapping. At this moment the dreamer must have succeeded in prolonging his sleep despite the disturbance, for when he woke he no longer heard the noise; he concluded rightly that some one must have been beating a carpet or bed. The dreams which come with a loud noise just before waking have all attempted to cover the stimulus to waking by some other explanation, and thus to prolong the sleep for a little while. Whosoever has firmly accepted this _censorship_ as the chief motive for the distortion of dreams will not be surprised to learn as the result of dream interpretation that most of the dreams of adults are traced by analysis to erotic desires. This assertion is not drawn from dreams obviously of a sexual nature, which are known to all dreamers from their own experience, and are the only ones usually described as "sexual dreams." These dreams are ever sufficiently mysterious by reason of the choice of persons who are made the objects of sex, the removal of all the barriers which cry halt to the dreamer's sexual needs in his waking state, the many strange reminders as to details of what are called perversions. But analysis discovers that, in many other dreams in whose manifest content nothing erotic can be found, the work of interpretation shows them up as, in reality, realization of sexual desires; whilst, on the other hand, that much of the thought-making when awake, the thoughts saved us as surplus from the day only, reaches presentation in dreams with the help of repressed erotic desires. Towards the explanation of this statement, which is no theoretical postulate, it must be remembered that no other class of instincts has required so vast a suppression at the behest of civilization as the sexual, whilst their mastery by the highest psychical processes are in most persons soonest of all relinquished. Since we have learnt to understand _infantile sexuality_, often so vague in its expression, so invariably overlooked and misunderstood, we are justified in saying that nearly every civilized person has retained at some point or other the infantile type of sex life; thus we understand that repressed infantile sex desires furnish the most frequent and most powerful impulses for the formation of dreams.[1] If the dream, which is the expression of some erotic desire, succeeds in making its manifest content appear innocently asexual, it is only possible in one way. The matter of these sexual presentations cannot be exhibited as such, but must be replaced by allusions, suggestions, and similar indirect means; differing from other cases of indirect presentation, those used in dreams must be deprived of direct understanding. The means of presentation which answer these requirements are commonly termed "symbols." A special interest has been directed towards these, since it has been observed that the dreamers of the same language use the like symbols--indeed, that in certain cases community of symbol is greater than community of speech. Since the dreamers do not themselves know the meaning of the symbols they use, it remains a puzzle whence arises their relationship with what they replace and denote. The fact itself is undoubted, and becomes of importance for the technique of the interpretation of dreams, since by the aid of a knowledge of this symbolism it is possible to understand the meaning of the elements of a dream, or parts of a dream, occasionally even the whole dream itself, without having to question the dreamer as to his own ideas. We thus come near to the popular idea of an interpretation of dreams, and, on the other hand, possess again the technique of the ancients, among whom the interpretation of dreams was identical with their explanation through symbolism. Though the study of dream symbolism is far removed from finality, we now possess a series of general statements and of particular observations which are quite certain. There are symbols which practically always have the same meaning: Emperor and Empress (King and Queen) always mean the parents; room, a woman[2], and so on. The sexes are represented by a great variety of symbols, many of which would be at first quite incomprehensible had not the clews to the meaning been often obtained through other channels. There are symbols of universal circulation, found in all dreamers, of one range of speech and culture; there are others of the narrowest individual significance which an individual has built up out of his own material. In the first class those can be differentiated whose claim can be at once recognized by the replacement of sexual things in common speech (those, for instance, arising from agriculture, as reproduction, seed) from others whose sexual references appear to reach back to the earliest times and to the obscurest depths of our image-building. The power of building symbols in both these special forms of symbols has not died out. Recently discovered things, like the airship, are at once brought into universal use as sex symbols. It would be quite an error to suppose that a profounder knowledge of dream symbolism (the "Language of Dreams") would make us independent of questioning the dreamer regarding his impressions about the dream, and would give us back the whole technique of ancient dream interpreters. Apart from individual symbols and the variations in the use of what is general, one never knows whether an element in the dream is to be understood symbolically or in its proper meaning; the whole content of the dream is certainly not to be interpreted symbolically. The knowledge of dream symbols will only help us in understanding portions of the dream content, and does not render the use of the technical rules previously given at all superfluous. But it must be of the greatest service in interpreting a dream just when the impressions of the dreamer are withheld or are insufficient. Dream symbolism proves also indispensable for understanding the so-called "typical" dreams and the dreams that "repeat themselves." Dream symbolism leads us far beyond the dream; it does not belong only to dreams, but is likewise dominant in legend, myth, and saga, in wit and in folklore. It compels us to pursue the inner meaning of the dream in these productions. But we must acknowledge that symbolism is not a result of the dream work, but is a peculiarity probably of our unconscious thinking, which furnishes to the dream work the matter for condensation, displacement, and dramatization. [1] Freud, "Three Contributions to Sexual Theory," translated by A.A. Brill (_Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease_ Publishing Company, New York). [2] The words from "and" to "channels" in the next sentence is a short summary of the passage in the original. As this book will be read by other than professional people the passage has not been translated, in deference to English opinion.--TRANSLATOR. IV DREAM ANALYSIS Perhaps we shall now begin to suspect that dream interpretation is capable of giving us hints about the structure of our psychic apparatus which we have thus far expected in vain from philosophy. We shall not, however, follow this track, but return to our original problem as soon as we have cleared up the subject of dream-disfigurement. The question has arisen how dreams with disagreeable content can be analyzed as the fulfillment of wishes. We see now that this is possible in case dream-disfigurement has taken place, in case the disagreeable content serves only as a disguise for what is wished. Keeping in mind our assumptions in regard to the two psychic instances, we may now proceed to say: disagreeable dreams, as a matter of fact, contain something which is disagreeable to the second instance, but which at the same time fulfills a wish of the first instance. They are wish dreams in the sense that every dream originates in the first instance, while the second instance acts towards the dream only in repelling, not in a creative manner. If we limit ourselves to a consideration of what the second instance contributes to the dream, we can never understand the dream. If we do so, all the riddles which the authors have found in the dream remain unsolved. That the dream actually has a secret meaning, which turns out to be the fulfillment of a wish, must be proved afresh for every case by means of an analysis. I therefore select several dreams which have painful contents and attempt an analysis of them. They are partly dreams of hysterical subjects, which require long preliminary statements, and now and then also an examination of the psychic processes which occur in hysteria. I cannot, however, avoid this added difficulty in the exposition. When I give a psychoneurotic patient analytical treatment, dreams are always, as I have said, the subject of our discussion. It must, therefore, give him all the psychological explanations through whose aid I myself have come to an understanding of his symptoms, and here I undergo an unsparing criticism, which is perhaps not less keen than that I must expect from my colleagues. Contradiction of the thesis that all dreams are the fulfillments of wishes is raised by my patients with perfect regularity. Here are several examples of the dream material which is offered me to refute this position. "You always tell me that the dream is a wish fulfilled," begins a clever lady patient. "Now I shall tell you a dream in which the content is quite the opposite, in which a wish of mine is _not_ fulfilled. How do you reconcile that with your theory? The dream is as follows:-- _"I want to give a supper, but having nothing at hand except some smoked salmon, I think of going marketing, but I remember that it is Sunday afternoon, when all the shops are closed. I next try to telephone to some caterers, but the telephone is out of order.... Thus I must resign my wish to give a supper."_ I answer, of course, that only the analysis can decide the meaning of this dream, although I admit that at first sight it seems sensible and coherent, and looks like the opposite of a wish-fulfillment. "But what occurrence has given rise to this dream?" I ask. "You know that the stimulus for a dream always lies among the experiences of the preceding day." _Analysis._--The husband of the patient, an upright and conscientious wholesale butcher, had told her the day before that he is growing too fat, and that he must, therefore, begin treatment for obesity. He was going to get up early, take exercise, keep to a strict diet, and above all accept no more invitations to suppers. She proceeds laughingly to relate how her husband at an inn table had made the acquaintance of an artist, who insisted upon painting his portrait because he, the painter, had never found such an expressive head. But her husband had answered in his rough way, that he was very thankful for the honor, but that he was quite convinced that a portion of the backside of a pretty young girl would please the artist better than his whole face[1]. She said that she was at the time very much in love with her husband, and teased him a good deal. She had also asked him not to send her any caviare. What does that mean? As a matter of fact, she had wanted for a long time to eat a caviare sandwich every forenoon, but had grudged herself the expense. Of course, she would at once get the caviare from her husband, as soon as she asked him for it. But she had begged him, on the contrary, not to send her the caviare, in order that she might tease him about it longer. This explanation seems far-fetched to me. Unadmitted motives are in the habit of hiding behind such unsatisfactory explanations. We are reminded of subjects hypnotized by Bernheim, who carried out a posthypnotic order, and who, upon being asked for their motives, instead of answering: "I do not know why I did that," had to invent a reason that was obviously inadequate. Something similar is probably the case with the caviare of my patient. I see that she is compelled to create an unfulfilled wish in life. Her dream also shows the reproduction of the wish as accomplished. But why does she need an unfulfilled wish? The ideas so far produced are insufficient for the interpretation of the dream. I beg for more. After a short pause, which corresponds to the overcoming of a resistance, she reports further that the day before she had made a visit to a friend, of whom she is really jealous, because her husband is always praising this woman so much. Fortunately, this friend is very lean and thin, and her husband likes well-rounded figures. Now of what did this lean friend speak? Naturally of her wish to become somewhat stouter. She also asked my patient: "When are you going to invite us again? You always have such a good table." Now the meaning of the dream is clear. I may say to the patient: "It is just as though you had thought at the time of the request: 'Of course, I'll invite you, so you can eat yourself fat at my house and become still more pleasing to my husband. I would rather give no more suppers.' The dream then tells you that you cannot give a supper, thereby fulfilling your wish not to contribute anything to the rounding out of your friend's figure. The resolution of your husband to refuse invitations to supper for the sake of getting thin teaches you that one grows fat on the things served in company." Now only some conversation is necessary to confirm the solution. The smoked salmon in the dream has not yet been traced. "How did the salmon mentioned in the dream occur to you?" "Smoked salmon is the favorite dish of this friend," she answered. I happen to know the lady, and may corroborate this by saying that she grudges herself the salmon just as much as my patient grudges herself the caviare. The dream admits of still another and more exact interpretation, which is necessitated only by a subordinate circumstance. The two interpretations do not contradict one another, but rather cover each other and furnish a neat example of the usual ambiguity of dreams as well as of all other psychopathological formations. We have seen that at the same time that she dreams of the denial of the wish, the patient is in reality occupied in securing an unfulfilled wish (the caviare sandwiches). Her friend, too, had expressed a wish, namely, to get fatter, and it would not surprise us if our lady had dreamt that the wish of the friend was not being fulfilled. For it is her own wish that a wish of her friend's--for increase in weight--should not be fulfilled. Instead of this, however, she dreams that one of her own wishes is not fulfilled. The dream becomes capable of a new interpretation, if in the dream she does not intend herself, but her friend, if she has put herself in the place of her friend, or, as we may say, has identified herself with her friend. I think she has actually done this, and as a sign of this identification she has created an unfulfilled wish in reality. But what is the meaning of this hysterical identification? To clear this up a thorough exposition is necessary. Identification is a highly important factor in the mechanism of hysterical symptoms; by this means patients are enabled in their symptoms to represent not merely their own experiences, but the experiences of a great number of other persons, and can suffer, as it were, for a whole mass of people, and fill all the parts of a drama by means of their own personalities alone. It will here be objected that this is well-known hysterical imitation, the ability of hysteric subjects to copy all the symptoms which impress them when they occur in others, as though their pity were stimulated to the point of reproduction. But this only indicates the way in which the psychic process is discharged in hysterical imitation; the way in which a psychic act proceeds and the act itself are two different things. The latter is slightly more complicated than one is apt to imagine the imitation of hysterical subjects to be: it corresponds to an unconscious concluded process, as an example will show. The physician who has a female patient with a particular kind of twitching, lodged in the company of other patients in the same room of the hospital, is not surprised when some morning he learns that this peculiar hysterical attack has found imitations. He simply says to himself: The others have seen her and have done likewise: that is psychic infection. Yes, but psychic infection proceeds in somewhat the following manner: As a rule, patients know more about one another than the physician knows about each of them, and they are concerned about each other when the visit of the doctor is over. Some of them have an attack to-day: soon it is known among the rest that a letter from home, a return of lovesickness or the like, is the cause of it. Their sympathy is aroused, and the following syllogism, which does not reach consciousness, is completed in them: "If it is possible to have this kind of an attack from such causes, I too may have this kind of an attack, for I have the same reasons." If this were a cycle capable of becoming conscious, it would perhaps express itself in _fear_ of getting the same attack; but it takes place in another psychic sphere, and, therefore, ends in the realization of the dreaded symptom. Identification is therefore not a simple imitation, but a sympathy based upon the same etiological claim; it expresses an "as though," and refers to some common quality which has remained in the unconscious. Identification is most often used in hysteria to express sexual community. An hysterical woman identifies herself most readily--although not exclusively--with persons with whom she has had sexual relations, or who have sexual intercourse with the same persons as herself. Language takes such a conception into consideration: two lovers are "one." In the hysterical phantasy, as well as in the dream, it is sufficient for the identification if one thinks of sexual relations, whether or not they become real. The patient, then, only follows the rules of the hysterical thought processes when she gives expression to her jealousy of her friend (which, moreover, she herself admits to be unjustified, in that she puts herself in her place and identifies herself with her by creating a symptom--the denied wish). I might further clarify the process specifically as follows: She puts herself in the place of her friend in the dream, because her friend has taken her own place relation to her husband, and because she would like to take her friend's place in the esteem of her husband[2]. The contradiction to my theory of dreams in the case of another female patient, the most witty among all my dreamers, was solved in a simpler manner, although according to the scheme that the non-fulfillment of one wish signifies the fulfillment of another. I had one day explained to her that the dream is a wish of fulfillment. The next day she brought me a dream to the effect that she was traveling with her mother-in-law to their common summer resort. Now I knew that she had struggled violently against spending the summer in the neighborhood of her mother-in-law. I also knew that she had luckily avoided her mother-in-law by renting an estate in a far-distant country resort. Now the dream reversed this wished-for solution; was not this in the flattest contradiction to my theory of wish-fulfillment in the dream? Certainly, it was only necessary to draw the inferences from this dream in order to get at its interpretation. According to this dream, I was in the wrong. _It was thus her wish that I should be in the wrong, and this wish the dream showed her as fulfilled._ But the wish that I should be in the wrong, which was fulfilled in the theme of the country home, referred to a more serious matter. At that time I had made up my mind, from the material furnished by her analysis, that something of significance for her illness must have occurred at a certain time in her life. She had denied it because it was not present in her memory. We soon came to see that I was in the right. Her wish that I should be in the wrong, which is transformed into the dream, thus corresponded to the justifiable wish that those things, which at the time had only been suspected, had never occurred at all. Without an analysis, and merely by means of an assumption, I took the liberty of interpreting a little occurrence in the case of a friend, who had been my colleague through the eight classes of the Gymnasium. He once heard a lecture of mine delivered to a small assemblage, on the novel subject of the dream as the fulfillment of a wish. He went home, dreamt _that he had lost all his suits_--he was a lawyer--and then complained to me about it. I took refuge in the evasion: "One can't win all one's suits," but I thought to myself: "If for eight years I sat as Primus on the first bench, while he moved around somewhere in the middle of the class, may he not naturally have had a wish from his boyhood days that I, too, might for once completely disgrace myself?" In the same way another dream of a more gloomy character was offered me by a female patient as a contradiction to my theory of the wish-dream. The patient, a young girl, began as follows: "You remember that my sister has now only one boy, Charles: she lost the elder one, Otto, while I was still at her house. Otto was my favorite; it was I who really brought him up. I like the other little fellow, too, but of course not nearly as much as the dead one. Now I dreamt last night that _I saw Charles lying dead before me. He was lying in his little coffin, his hands folded: there were candles all about, and, in short, it was just like the time of little Otto's death, which shocked me so profoundly_. Now tell me, what does this mean? You know me: am I really bad enough to wish my sister to lose the only child she has left? Or does the dream mean that I wish Charles to be dead rather than Otto, whom I like so much better?" I assured her that this interpretation was impossible. After some reflection I was able to give her the interpretation of the dream, which I subsequently made her confirm. Having become an orphan at an early age, the girl had been brought up in the house of a much older sister, and had met among the friends and visitors who came to the house, a man who made a lasting impression upon her heart. It looked for a time as though these barely expressed relations were to end in marriage, but this happy culmination was frustrated by the sister, whose motives have never found a complete explanation. After the break, the man who was loved by our patient avoided the house: she herself became independent some time after little Otto's death, to whom her affection had now turned. But she did not succeed in freeing herself from the inclination for her sister's friend in which she had become involved. Her pride commanded her to avoid him; but it was impossible for her to transfer her love to the other suitors who presented themselves in order. Whenever the man whom she loved, who was a member of the literary profession, announced a lecture anywhere, she was sure to be found in the audience; she also seized every other opportunity to see him from a distance unobserved by him. I remembered that on the day before she had told me that the Professor was going to a certain concert, and that she was also going there, in order to enjoy the sight of him. This was on the day of the dream; and the concert was to take place on the day on which she told me the dream. I could now easily see the correct interpretation, and I asked her whether she could think of any event which had happened after the death of little Otto. She answered immediately: "Certainly; at that time the Professor returned after a long absence, and I saw him once more beside the coffin of little Otto." It was exactly as I had expected. I interpreted the dream in the following manner: "If now the other boy were to die, the same thing would be repeated. You would spend the day with your sister, the Professor would surely come in order to offer condolence, and you would see him again under the same circumstances as at that time. The dream signifies nothing but this wish of yours to see him again, against which you are fighting inwardly. I know that you are carrying the ticket for to-day's concert in your bag. Your dream is a dream of impatience; it has anticipated the meeting which is to take place to-day by several hours." In order to disguise her wish she had obviously selected a situation in which wishes of that sort are commonly suppressed--a situation which is so filled with sorrow that love is not thought of. And yet, it is very easily probable that even in the actual situation at the bier of the second, more dearly loved boy, which the dream copied faithfully, she had not been able to suppress her feelings of affection for the visitor whom she had missed for so long a time. A different explanation was found in the case of a similar dream of another female patient, who was distinguished in her earlier years by her quick wit and her cheerful demeanors and who still showed these qualities at least in the notion, which occurred to her in the course of treatment. In connection with a longer dream, it seemed to this lady that she saw her fifteen-year-old daughter lying dead before her in a box. She was strongly inclined to convert this dream-image into an objection to the theory of wish-fulfillment, but herself suspected that the detail of the box must lead to a different conception of the dream.[3] In the course of the analysis it occurred to her that on the evening before, the conversation of the company had turned upon the English word "box," and upon the numerous translations of it into German, such as box, theater box, chest, box on the ear, &c. From other components of the same dream it is now possible to add that the lady had guessed the relationship between the English word "box" and the German _Büchse_, and had then been haunted by the memory that _Büchse_ (as well as "box") is used in vulgar speech to designate the female genital organ. It was therefore possible, making a certain allowance for her notions on the subject of topographical anatomy, to assume that the child in the box signified a child in the womb of the mother. At this stage of the explanation she no longer denied that the picture of the dream really corresponded to one of her wishes. Like so many other young women, she was by no means happy when she became pregnant, and admitted to me more than once the wish that her child might die before its birth; in a fit of anger following a violent scene with her husband she had even struck her abdomen with her fists in order to hit the child within. The dead child was, therefore, really the fulfillment of a wish, but a wish which had been put aside for fifteen years, and it is not surprising that the fulfillment of the wish was no longer recognized after so long an interval. For there had been many changes meanwhile. The group of dreams to which the two last mentioned belong, having as content the death of beloved relatives, will be considered again under the head of "Typical Dreams." I shall there be able to show by new examples that in spite of their undesirable content, all these dreams must be interpreted as wish-fulfillments. For the following dream, which again was told me in order to deter me from a hasty generalization of the theory of wishing in dreams, I am indebted, not to a patient, but to an intelligent jurist of my acquaintance. "_I dream_," my informant tells me, "_that I am walking in front of my house with a lady on my arm. Here a closed wagon is waiting, a gentleman steps up to me, gives his authority as an agent of the police, and demands that I should follow him. I only ask for time in which to arrange my affairs._ Can you possibly suppose this is a wish of mine to be arrested?" "Of course not," I must admit. "Do you happen to know upon what charge you were arrested?" "Yes; I believe for infanticide." "Infanticide? But you know that only a mother can commit this crime upon her newly born child?" "That is true."[4] "And under what circumstances did you dream; what happened on the evening before?" "I would rather not tell you that; it is a delicate matter." "But I must have it, otherwise we must forgo the interpretation of the dream." "Well, then, I will tell you. I spent the night, not at home, but at the house of a lady who means very much to me. When we awoke in the morning, something again passed between us. Then I went to sleep again, and dreamt what I have told you." "The woman is married?" "Yes." "And you do not wish her to conceive a child?" "No; that might betray us." "Then you do not practice normal coitus?" "I take the precaution to withdraw before ejaculation." "Am I permitted to assume that you did this trick several times during the night, and that in the morning you were not quite sure whether you had succeeded?" "That might be the case." "Then your dream is the fulfillment of a wish. By means of it you secure the assurance that you have not begotten a child, or, what amounts to the same thing, that you have killed a child. I can easily demonstrate the connecting links. Do you remember, a few days ago we were talking about the distress of matrimony (Ehenot), and about the inconsistency of permitting the practice of coitus as long as no impregnation takes place, while every delinquency after the ovum and the semen meet and a foetus is formed is punished as a crime? In connection with this, we also recalled the mediæval controversy about the moment of time at which the soul is really lodged in the foetus, since the concept of murder becomes admissible only from that point on. Doubtless you also know the gruesome poem by Lenau, which puts infanticide and the prevention of children on the same plane." "Strangely enough, I had happened to think of Lenau during the afternoon." "Another echo of your dream. And now I shall demonstrate to you another subordinate wish-fulfillment in your dream. You walk in front of your house with the lady on your arm. So you take her home, instead of spending the night at her house, as you do in actuality. The fact that the wish-fulfillment, which is the essence of the dream, disguises itself in such an unpleasant form, has perhaps more than one reason. From my essay on the etiology of anxiety neuroses, you will see that I note interrupted coitus as one of the factors which cause the development of neurotic fear. It would be consistent with this that if after repeated cohabitation of the kind mentioned you should be left in an uncomfortable mood, which now becomes an element in the composition of your dream. You also make use of this unpleasant state of mind to conceal the wish-fulfillment. Furthermore, the mention of infanticide has not yet been explained. Why does this crime, which is peculiar to females, occur to you?" "I shall confess to you that I was involved in such an affair years ago. Through my fault a girl tried to protect herself from the consequences of a _liaison_ with me by securing an abortion. I had nothing to do with carrying out the plan, but I was naturally for a long time worried lest the affair might be discovered." "I understand; this recollection furnished a second reason why the supposition that you had done your trick badly must have been painful to you." A young physician, who had heard this dream of my colleague when it was told, must have felt implicated by it, for he hastened to imitate it in a dream of his own, applying its mode of thinking to another subject. The day before he had handed in a declaration of his income, which was perfectly honest, because he had little to declare. He dreamt that an acquaintance of his came from a meeting of the tax commission and informed him that all the other declarations of income had passed uncontested, but that his own had awakened general suspicion, and that he would be punished with a heavy fine. The dream is a poorly-concealed fulfillment of the wish to be known as a physician with a large income. It likewise recalls the story of the young girl who was advised against accepting her suitor because he was a man of quick temper who would surely treat her to blows after they were married. The answer of the girl was: "I wish he _would_ strike me!" Her wish to be married is so strong that she takes into the bargain the discomfort which is said to be connected with matrimony, and which is predicted for her, and even raises it to a wish. If I group the very frequently occurring dreams of this sort, which seem flatly to contradict my theory, in that they contain the denial of a wish or some occurrence decidedly unwished for, under the head of "counter wish-dreams," I observe that they may all be referred to two principles, of which one has not yet been mentioned, although it plays a large part in the dreams of human beings. One of the motives inspiring these dreams is the wish that I should appear in the wrong. These dreams regularly occur in the course of my treatment if the patient shows a resistance against me, and I can count with a large degree of certainty upon causing such a dream after I have once explained to the patient my theory that the dream is a wish-fulfillment.[5] I may even expect this to be the case in a dream merely in order to fulfill the wish that I may appear in the wrong. The last dream which I shall tell from those occurring in the course of treatment again shows this very thing. A young girl who has struggled hard to continue my treatment, against the will of her relatives and the authorities whom she had consulted, dreams as follows: _She is forbidden at home to come to me any more. She then reminds me of the promise I made her to treat her for nothing if necessary, and I say to her: "I can show no consideration in money matters."_ It is not at all easy in this case to demonstrate the fulfillment of a wish, but in all cases of this kind there is a second problem, the solution of which helps also to solve the first. Where does she get the words which she puts into my mouth? Of course I have never told her anything like that, but one of her brothers, the very one who has the greatest influence over her, has been kind enough to make this remark about me. It is then the purpose of the dream that this brother should remain in the right; and she does not try to justify this brother merely in the dream; it is her purpose in life and the motive for her being ill. The other motive for counter wish-dreams is so clear that there is danger of overlooking it, as for some time happened in my own case. In the sexual make-up of many people there is a masochistic component, which has arisen through the conversion of the aggressive, sadistic component into its opposite. Such people are called "ideal" masochists, if they seek pleasure not in the bodily pain which may be inflicted upon them, but in humiliation and in chastisement of the soul. It is obvious that such persons can have counter wish-dreams and disagreeable dreams, which, however, for them are nothing but wish-fulfillment, affording satisfaction for their masochistic inclinations. Here is such a dream. A young man, who has in earlier years tormented his elder brother, towards whom he was homosexually inclined, but who had undergone a complete change of character, has the following dream, which consists of three parts: (1) _He is "insulted" by his brother._ (2) _Two adults are caressing each other with homosexual intentions._ (3) _His brother has sold the enterprise whose management the young man reserved for his own future._ He awakens from the last-mentioned dream with the most unpleasant feelings, and yet it is a masochistic wish-dream, which might be translated: It would serve me quite right if my brother were to make that sale against my interest, as a punishment for all the torments which he has suffered at my hands. I hope that the above discussion and examples will suffice--until further objection can be raised--to make it seem credible that even dreams with a painful content are to be analyzed as the fulfillments of wishes. Nor will it seem a matter of chance that in the course of interpretation one always happens upon subjects of which one does not like to speak or think. The disagreeable sensation which such dreams arouse is simply identical with the antipathy which endeavors--usually with success--to restrain us from the treatment or discussion of such subjects, and which must be overcome by all of us, if, in spite of its unpleasantness, we find it necessary to take the matter in hand. But this disagreeable sensation, which occurs also in dreams, does not preclude the existence of a wish; every one has wishes which he would not like to tell to others, which he does not want to admit even to himself. We are, on other grounds, justified in connecting the disagreeable character of all these dreams with the fact of dream disfigurement, and in concluding that these dreams are distorted, and that the wish-fulfillment in them is disguised until recognition is impossible for no other reason than that a repugnance, a will to suppress, exists in relation to the subject-matter of the dream or in relation to the wish which the dream creates. Dream disfigurement, then, turns out in reality to be an act of the censor. We shall take into consideration everything which the analysis of disagreeable dreams has brought to light if we reword our formula as follows: _The dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish_. Now there still remain as a particular species of dreams with painful content, dreams of anxiety, the inclusion of which under dreams of wishing will find least acceptance with the uninitiated. But I can settle the problem of anxiety dreams in very short order; for what they may reveal is not a new aspect of the dream problem; it is a question in their case of understanding neurotic anxiety in general. The fear which we experience in the dream is only seemingly explained by the dream content. If we subject the content of the dream to analysis, we become aware that the dream fear is no more justified by the dream content than the fear in a phobia is justified by the idea upon which the phobia depends. For example, it is true that it is possible to fall out of a window, and that some care must be exercised when one is near a window, but it is inexplicable why the anxiety in the corresponding phobia is so great, and why it follows its victims to an extent so much greater than is warranted by its origin. The same explanation, then, which applies to the phobia applies also to the dream of anxiety. In both cases the anxiety is only superficially attached to the idea which accompanies it and comes from another source. On account of the intimate relation of dream fear to neurotic fear, discussion of the former obliges me to refer to the latter. In a little essay on "The Anxiety Neurosis,"[6] I maintained that neurotic fear has its origin in the sexual life, and corresponds to a libido which has been turned away from its object and has not succeeded in being applied. From this formula, which has since proved its validity more and more clearly, we may deduce the conclusion that the content of anxiety dreams is of a sexual nature, the libido belonging to which content has been transformed into fear. [1] To sit for the painter. Goethe: "And if he has no backside, how can the nobleman sit?" [2] I myself regret the introduction of such passages from the psychopathology of hysteria, which, because of their fragmentary representation and of being torn from all connection with the subject, cannot have a very enlightening influence. If these passages are capable of throwing light upon the intimate relations between the dream and the psychoneuroses, they have served the purpose for which I have taken them up. [3] Something like the smoked salmon in the dream of the deferred supper. [4] It often happens that a dream is told incompletely, and that a recollection of the omitted portions appear only in the course of the analysis. These portions subsequently fitted in, regularly furnish the key to the interpretation. _Cf._ below, about forgetting in dreams. [5] Similar "counter wish-dreams" have been repeatedly reported to me within the last few years by my pupils who thus reacted to their first encounter with the "wish theory of the dream." [6] See _Selected Papers on Hysteria and other Psychoneuroses_, p. 133, translated by A.A. Brill, _Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases_, Monograph Series. V SEX IN DREAMS The more one is occupied with the solution of dreams, the more willing one must become to acknowledge that the majority of the dreams of adults treat of sexual material and give expression to erotic wishes. Only one who really analyzes dreams, that is to say, who pushes forward from their manifest content to the latent dream thoughts, can form an opinion on this subject--never the person who is satisfied with registering the manifest content (as, for example, Näcke in his works on sexual dreams). Let us recognize at once that this fact is not to be wondered at, but that it is in complete harmony with the fundamental assumptions of dream explanation. No other impulse has had to undergo so much suppression from the time of childhood as the sex impulse in its numerous components, from no other impulse have survived so many and such intense unconscious wishes, which now act in the sleeping state in such a manner as to produce dreams. In dream interpretation, this significance of sexual complexes must never be forgotten, nor must they, of course, be exaggerated to the point of being considered exclusive. Of many dreams it can be ascertained by a careful interpretation that they are even to be taken bisexually, inasmuch as they result in an irrefutable secondary interpretation in which they realize homosexual feelings--that is, feelings that are common to the normal sexual activity of the dreaming person. But that all dreams are to be interpreted bisexually, seems to me to be a generalization as indemonstrable as it is improbable, which I should not like to support. Above all I should not know how to dispose of the apparent fact that there are many dreams satisfying other than--in the widest sense--erotic needs, as dreams of hunger, thirst, convenience, &c. Likewise the similar assertions "that behind every dream one finds the death sentence" (Stekel), and that every dream shows "a continuation from the feminine to the masculine line" (Adler), seem to me to proceed far beyond what is admissible in the interpretation of dreams. We have already asserted elsewhere that dreams which are conspicuously innocent invariably embody coarse erotic wishes, and we might confirm this by means of numerous fresh examples. But many dreams which appear indifferent, and which would never be suspected of any particular significance, can be traced back, after analysis, to unmistakably sexual wish-feelings, which are often of an unexpected nature. For example, who would suspect a sexual wish in the following dream until the interpretation had been worked out? The dreamer relates: _Between two stately palaces stands a little house, receding somewhat, whose doors are closed. My wife leads me a little way along the street up to the little house, and pushes in the door, and then I slip quickly and easily into the interior of a courtyard that slants obliquely upwards._ Any one who has had experience in the translating of dreams will, of course, immediately perceive that penetrating into narrow spaces, and opening locked doors, belong to the commonest sexual symbolism, and will easily find in this dream a representation of attempted coition from behind (between the two stately buttocks of the female body). The narrow slanting passage is of course the vagina; the assistance attributed to the wife of the dreamer requires the interpretation that in reality it is only consideration for the wife which is responsible for the detention from such an attempt. Moreover, inquiry shows that on the previous day a young girl had entered the household of the dreamer who had pleased him, and who had given him the impression that she would not be altogether opposed to an approach of this sort. The little house between the two palaces is taken from a reminiscence of the Hradschin in Prague, and thus points again to the girl who is a native of that city. If with my patients I emphasize the frequency of the Oedipus dream--of having sexual intercourse with one's mother--I get the answer: "I cannot remember such a dream." Immediately afterwards, however, there arises the recollection of another disguised and indifferent dream, which has been dreamed repeatedly by the patient, and the analysis shows it to be a dream of this same content--that is, another Oedipus dream. I can assure the reader that veiled dreams of sexual intercourse with the mother are a great deal more frequent than open ones to the same effect. There are dreams about landscapes and localities in which emphasis is always laid upon the assurance: "I have been there before." In this case the locality is always the genital organ of the mother; it can indeed be asserted with such certainty of no other locality that one "has been there before." A large number of dreams, often full of fear, which are concerned with passing through narrow spaces or with staying, in the water, are based upon fancies about the embryonic life, about the sojourn in the mother's womb, and about the act of birth. The following is the dream of a young man who in his fancy has already while in embryo taken advantage of his opportunity to spy upon an act of coition between his parents. _"He is in a deep shaft, in which there is a window, as in the Semmering Tunnel. At first he sees an empty landscape through this window, and then he composes a picture into it, which is immediately at hand and which fills out the empty space. The picture represents a field which is being thoroughly harrowed by an implement, and the delightful air, the accompanying idea of hard work, and the bluish-black clods of earth make a pleasant impression. He then goes on and sees a primary school opened ... and he is surprised that so much attention is devoted in it to the sexual feelings of the child, which makes him think of me."_ Here is a pretty water-dream of a female patient, which was turned to extraordinary account in the course of treatment. _At her summer resort at the ... Lake, she hurls herself into the dark water at a place where the pale moon is reflected in the water._ Dreams of this sort are parturition dreams; their interpretation is accomplished by reversing the fact reported in the manifest dream content; thus, instead of "throwing one's self into the water," read "coming out of the water," that is, "being born." The place from which one is born is recognized if one thinks of the bad sense of the French "la lune." The pale moon thus becomes the white "bottom" (Popo), which the child soon recognizes as the place from which it came. Now what can be the meaning of the patient's wishing to be born at her summer resort? I asked the dreamer this, and she answered without hesitation: "Hasn't the treatment made me as though I were born again?" Thus the dream becomes an invitation to continue the cure at this summer resort, that is, to visit her there; perhaps it also contains a very bashful allusion to the wish to become a mother herself.[1] Another dream of parturition, with its interpretation, I take from the work of E. Jones. _"She stood at the seashore watching a small boy, who seemed to be hers, wading into the water. This he did till the water covered him, and she could only see his head bobbing up and down near the surface. The scene then changed to the crowded hall of a hotel. Her husband left her, and she 'entered into conversation with' a stranger."_ The second half of the dream was discovered in the analysis to represent a flight from her husband, and the entering into intimate relations with a third person, behind whom was plainly indicated Mr. X.'s brother mentioned in a former dream. The first part of the dream was a fairly evident birth phantasy. In dreams as in mythology, the delivery of a child _from_ the uterine waters is commonly presented by distortion as the entry of the child _into_ water; among many others, the births of Adonis, Osiris, Moses, and Bacchus are well-known illustrations of this. The bobbing up and down of the head in the water at once recalled to the patient the sensation of quickening she had experienced in her only pregnancy. Thinking of the boy going into the water induced a reverie in which she saw herself taking him out of the water, carrying him into the nursery, washing him and dressing him, and installing him in her household. The second half of the dream, therefore, represents thoughts concerning the elopement, which belonged to the first half of the underlying latent content; the first half of the dream corresponded with the second half of the latent content, the birth phantasy. Besides this inversion in order, further inversions took place in each half of the dream. In the first half the child _entered_ the water, and then his head bobbed; in the underlying dream thoughts first the quickening occurred, and then the child left the water (a double inversion). In the second half her husband left her; in the dream thoughts she left her husband. Another parturition dream is related by Abraham of a young woman looking forward to her first confinement. From a place in the floor of the house a subterranean canal leads directly into the water (parturition path, amniotic liquor). She lifts up a trap in the floor, and there immediately appears a creature dressed in a brownish fur, which almost resembles a seal. This creature changes into the younger brother of the dreamer, to whom she has always stood in maternal relationship. Dreams of "saving" are connected with parturition dreams. To save, especially to save from the water, is equivalent to giving birth when dreamed by a woman; this sense is, however, modified when the dreamer is a man. Robbers, burglars at night, and ghosts, of which we are afraid before going to bed, and which occasionally even disturb our sleep, originate in one and the same childish reminiscence. They are the nightly visitors who have awakened the child to set it on the chamber so that it may not wet the bed, or have lifted the cover in order to see clearly how the child is holding its hands while sleeping. I have been able to induce an exact recollection of the nocturnal visitor in the analysis of some of these anxiety dreams. The robbers were always the father, the ghosts more probably corresponded to feminine persons with white night-gowns. When one has become familiar with the abundant use of symbolism for the representation of sexual material in dreams, one naturally raises the question whether there are not many of these symbols which appear once and for all with a firmly established significance like the signs in stenography; and one is tempted to compile a new dream-book according to the cipher method. In this connection it may be remarked that this symbolism does not belong peculiarly to the dream, but rather to unconscious thinking, particularly that of the masses, and it is to be found in greater perfection in the folklore, in the myths, legends, and manners of speech, in the proverbial sayings, and in the current witticisms of a nation than in its dreams. The dream takes advantage of this symbolism in order to give a disguised representation to its latent thoughts. Among the symbols which are used in this manner there are of course many which regularly, or almost regularly, mean the same thing. Only it is necessary to keep in mind the curious plasticity of psychic material. Now and then a symbol in the dream content may have to be interpreted not symbolically, but according to its real meaning; at another time the dreamer, owing to a peculiar set of recollections, may create for himself the right to use anything whatever as a sexual symbol, though it is not ordinarily used in that way. Nor are the most frequently used sexual symbols unambiguous every time. After these limitations and reservations I may call attention to the following: Emperor and Empress (King and Queen) in most cases really represent the parents of the dreamer; the dreamer himself or herself is the prince or princess. All elongated objects, sticks, tree-trunks, and umbrellas (on account of the stretching-up which might be compared to an erection! all elongated and sharp weapons, knives, daggers, and pikes, are intended to represent the male member. A frequent, not very intelligible, symbol for the same is a nail-file (on account of the rubbing and scraping?). Little cases, boxes, caskets, closets, and stoves correspond to the female part. The symbolism of lock and key has been very gracefully employed by Uhland in his song about the "Grafen Eberstein," to make a common smutty joke. The dream of walking through a row of rooms is a brothel or harem dream. Staircases, ladders, and flights of stairs, or climbing on these, either upwards or downwards, are symbolic representations of the sexual act. Smooth walls over which one is climbing, façades of houses upon which one is letting oneself down, frequently under great anxiety, correspond to the erect human body, and probably repeat in the dream reminiscences of the upward climbing of little children on their parents or foster parents. "Smooth" walls are men. Often in a dream of anxiety one is holding on firmly to some projection from a house. Tables, set tables, and boards are women, perhaps on account of the opposition which does away with the bodily contours. Since "bed and board" (_mensa et thorus_) constitute marriage, the former are often put for the latter in the dream, and as far as practicable the sexual presentation complex is transposed to the eating complex. Of articles of dress the woman's hat may frequently be definitely interpreted as the male genital. In dreams of men one often finds the cravat as a symbol for the penis; this indeed is not only because cravats hang down long, and are characteristic of the man, but also because one can select them at pleasure, a freedom which is prohibited by nature in the original of the symbol. Persons who make use of this symbol in the dream are very extravagant with cravats, and possess regular collections of them. All complicated machines and apparatus in dream are very probably genitals, in the description of which dream symbolism shows itself to be as tireless as the activity of wit. Likewise many landscapes in dreams, especially with bridges or with wooded mountains, can be readily recognized as descriptions of the genitals. Finally where one finds incomprehensible neologisms one may think of combinations made up of components having a sexual significance. Children also in the dream often signify the genitals, as men and women are in the habit of fondly referring to their genital organ as their "little one." As a very recent symbol of the male genital may be mentioned the flying machine, utilization of which is justified by its relation to flying as well as occasionally by its form. To play with a little child or to beat a little one is often the dream's representation of onanism. A number of other symbols, in part not sufficiently verified are given by Stekel, who illustrates them with examples. Right and left, according to him, are to be conceived in the dream in an ethical sense. "The right way always signifies the road to righteousness, the left the one to crime. Thus the left may signify homosexuality, incest, and perversion, while the right signifies marriage, relations with a prostitute, &c. The meaning is always determined by the individual moral view-point of the dreamer." Relatives in the dream generally play the rôle of genitals. Not to be able to catch up with a wagon is interpreted by Stekel as regret not to be able to come up to a difference in age. Baggage with which one travels is the burden of sin by which one is oppressed. Also numbers, which frequently occur in the dream, are assigned by Stekel a fixed symbolical meaning, but these interpretations seem neither sufficiently verified nor of general validity, although the interpretation in individual cases can generally be recognized as probable. In a recently published book by W. Stekel, _Die Sprache des Traumes_, which I was unable to utilize, there is a list of the most common sexual symbols, the object of which is to prove that all sexual symbols can be bisexually used. He states: "Is there a symbol which (if in any way permitted by the phantasy) may not be used simultaneously in the masculine and the feminine sense!" To be sure the clause in parentheses takes away much of the absoluteness of this assertion, for this is not at all permitted by the phantasy. I do not, however, think it superfluous to state that in my experience Stekel's general statement has to give way to the recognition of a greater manifoldness. Besides those symbols, which are just as frequent for the male as for the female genitals, there are others which preponderately, or almost exclusively, designate one of the sexes, and there are still others of which only the male or only the female signification is known. To use long, firm objects and weapons as symbols of the female genitals, or hollow objects (chests, pouches, &c.), as symbols of the male genitals, is indeed not allowed by the fancy. It is true that the tendency of the dream and the unconscious fancy to utilize the sexual symbol bisexually betrays an archaic trend, for in childhood a difference in the genitals is unknown, and the same genitals are attributed to both sexes. These very incomplete suggestions may suffice to stimulate others to make a more careful collection. I shall now add a few examples of the application of such symbolisms in dreams, which will serve to show how impossible it becomes to interpret a dream without taking into account the symbolism of dreams, and how imperatively it obtrudes itself in many cases. 1. The hat as a symbol of the man (of the male genital): (a fragment from the dream of a young woman who suffered from agoraphobia on account of a fear of temptation). "I am walking in the street in summer, I wear a straw hat of peculiar shape, the middle piece of which is bent upwards and the side pieces of which hang downwards (the description became here obstructed), and in such a fashion that one is lower than the other. I am cheerful and in a confidential mood, and as I pass a troop of young officers I think to myself: None of you can have any designs upon me." As she could produce no associations to the hat, I said to her: "The hat is really a male genital, with its raised middle piece and the two downward hanging side pieces." I intentionally refrained from interpreting those details concerning the unequal downward hanging of the two side pieces, although just such individualities in the determinations lead the way to the interpretation. I continued by saying that if she only had a man with such a virile genital she would not have to fear the officers--that is, she would have nothing to wish from them, for she is mainly kept from going without protection and company by her fancies of temptation. This last explanation of her fear I had already been able to give her repeatedly on the basis of other material. It is quite remarkable how the dreamer behaved after this interpretation. She withdrew her description of the hat, and claimed not to have said that the two side pieces were hanging downwards. I was, however, too sure of what I had heard to allow myself to be misled, and I persisted in it. She was quiet for a while, and then found the courage to ask why it was that one of her husband's testicles was lower than the other, and whether it was the same in all men. With this the peculiar detail of the hat was explained, and the whole interpretation was accepted by her. The hat symbol was familiar to me long before the patient related this dream. From other but less transparent cases I believe that the hat may also be taken as a female genital. 2. The little one as the genital--to be run over as a symbol of sexual intercourse (another dream of the same agoraphobic patient). "Her mother sends away her little daughter so that she must go alone. She rides with her mother to the railroad and sees her little one walking directly upon the tracks, so that she cannot avoid being run over. She hears the bones crackle. (From this she experiences a feeling of discomfort but no real horror.) She then looks out through the car window to see whether the parts cannot be seen behind. She then reproaches her mother for allowing the little one to go out alone." Analysis. It is not an easy matter to give here a complete interpretation of the dream. It forms part of a cycle of dreams, and can be fully understood only in connection with the others. For it is not easy to get the necessary material sufficiently isolated to prove the symbolism. The patient at first finds that the railroad journey is to be interpreted historically as an allusion to a departure from a sanatorium for nervous diseases, with the superintendent of which she naturally was in love. Her mother took her away from this place, and the physician came to the railroad station and handed her a bouquet of flowers on leaving; she felt uncomfortable because her mother witnessed this homage. Here the mother, therefore, appears as a disturber of her love affairs, which is the rôle actually played by this strict woman during her daughter's girlhood. The next thought referred to the sentence: "She then looks to see whether the parts can be seen behind." In the dream façade one would naturally be compelled to think of the parts of the little daughter run over and ground up. The thought, however, turns in quite a different direction. She recalls that she once saw her father in the bath-room naked from behind; she then begins to talk about the sex differentiation, and asserts that in the man the genitals can be seen from behind, but in the woman they cannot. In this connection she now herself offers the interpretation that the little one is the genital, her little one (she has a four-year-old daughter) her own genital. She reproaches her mother for wanting her to live as though she had no genital, and recognizes this reproach in the introductory sentence of the dream; the mother sends away her little one so that she must go alone. In her phantasy going alone on the street signifies to have no man and no sexual relations (coire = to go together), and this she does not like. According to all her statements she really suffered as a girl on account of the jealousy of her mother, because she showed a preference for her father. The "little one" has been noted as a symbol for the male or the female genitals by Stekel, who can refer in this connection to a very widespread usage of language. The deeper interpretation of this dream depends upon another dream of the same night in which the dreamer identifies herself with her brother. She was a "tomboy," and was always being told that she should have been born a boy. This identification with the brother shows with special clearness that "the little one" signifies the genital. The mother threatened him (her) with castration, which could only be understood as a punishment for playing with the parts, and the identification, therefore, shows that she herself had masturbated as a child, though this fact she now retained only in memory concerning her brother. An early knowledge of the male genital which she later lost she must have acquired at that time according to the assertions of this second dream. Moreover the second dream points to the infantile sexual theory that girls originate from boys through castration. After I had told her of this childish belief, she at once confirmed it with an anecdote in which the boy asks the girl: "Was it cut off?" to which the girl replied, "No, it's always been so." The sending away of the little one, of the genital, in the first dream therefore also refers to the threatened castration. Finally she blames her mother for not having been born a boy. That "being run over" symbolizes sexual intercourse would not be evident from this dream if we were not sure of it from many other sources. 3. Representation of the genital by structures, stairways, and shafts. (Dream of a young man inhibited by a father complex.) "He is taking a walk with his father in a place which is surely the Prater, for the _Rotunda_ may be seen in front of which there is a small front structure to which is attached a captive balloon; the balloon, however, seems quite collapsed. His father asks him what this is all for; he is surprised at it, but he explains it to his father. They come into a court in which lies a large sheet of tin. His father wants to pull off a big piece of this, but first looks around to see if any one is watching. He tells his father that all he needs to do is to speak to the watchman, and then he can take without any further difficulty as much as he wants to. From this court a stairway leads down into a shaft, the walls of which are softly upholstered something like a leather pocketbook. At the end of this shaft there is a longer platform, and then a new shaft begins...." Analysis. This dream belongs to a type of patient which is not favorable from a therapeutic point of view. They follow in the analysis without offering any resistances whatever up to a certain point, but from that point on they remain almost inaccessible. This dream he almost analyzed himself. "The Rotunda," he said, "is my genital, the captive balloon in front is my penis, about the weakness of which I have worried." We must, however, interpret in greater detail; the Rotunda is the buttock which is regularly associated by the child with the genital, the smaller front structure is the scrotum. In the dream his father asks him what this is all for--that is, he asks him about the purpose and arrangement of the genitals. It is quite evident that this state of affairs should be turned around, and that he should be the questioner. As such a questioning on the side of the father has never taken place in reality, we must conceive the dream thought as a wish, or take it conditionally, as follows: "If I had only asked my father for sexual enlightenment." The continuation of this thought we shall soon find in another place. The court in which the tin sheet is spread out is not to be conceived symbolically in the first instance, but originates from his father's place of business. For discretionary reasons I have inserted the tin for another material in which the father deals, without, however, changing anything in the verbal expression of the dream. The dreamer had entered his father's business, and had taken a terrible dislike to the questionable practices upon which profit mainly depends. Hence the continuation of the above dream thought ("if I had only asked him") would be: "He would have deceived me just as he does his customers." For the pulling off, which serves to represent commercial dishonesty, the dreamer himself gives a second explanation--namely, onanism. This is not only entirely familiar to us, but agrees very well with the fact that the secrecy of onanism is expressed by its opposite ("Why one can do it quite openly"). It, moreover, agrees entirely with our expectations that the onanistic activity is again put off on the father, just as was the questioning in the first scene of the dream. The shaft he at once interprets as the vagina by referring to the soft upholstering of the walls. That the act of coition in the vagina is described as a going down instead of in the usual way as a going up, I have also found true in other instances[2]. The details that at the end of the first shaft there is a longer platform and then a new shaft, he himself explains biographically. He had for some time consorted with women sexually, but had then given it up because of inhibitions and now hopes to be able to take it up again with the aid of the treatment. The dream, however, becomes indistinct toward the end, and to the experienced interpreter it becomes evident that in the second scene of the dream the influence of another subject has begun to assert itself; in this his father's business and his dishonest practices signify the first vagina represented as a shaft so that one might think of a reference to the mother. 4. The male genital symbolized by persons and the female by a landscape. (Dream of a woman of the lower class, whose husband is a policeman, reported by B. Dattner.) ... Then some one broke into the house and anxiously called for a policeman. But he went with two tramps by mutual consent into a church,[3] to which led a great many stairs;[4] behind the church there was a mountain,[5] on top of which a dense forest.[6] The policeman was furnished with a helmet, a gorget, and a cloak.[7] The two vagrants, who went along with the policeman quite peaceably, had tied to their loins sack-like aprons.[8] A road led from the church to the mountain. This road was overgrown on each side with grass and brushwood, which became thicker and thicker as it reached the height of the mountain, where it spread out into quite a forest. 5. A stairway dream. (Reported and interpreted by Otto Rank.) For the following transparent pollution dream, I am indebted to the same colleague who furnished us with the dental-irritation dream. "I am running down the stairway in the stair-house after a little girl, whom I wish to punish because she has done something to me. At the bottom of the stairs some one held the child for me. (A grown-up woman?) I grasp it, but do not know whether I have hit it, for I suddenly find myself in the middle of the stairway where I practice coitus with the child (in the air as it were). It is really no coitus, I only rub my genital on her external genital, and in doing this I see it very distinctly, as distinctly as I see her head which is lying sideways. During the sexual act I see hanging to the left and above me (also as if in the air) two small pictures, landscapes, representing a house on a green. On the smaller one my surname stood in the place where the painter's signature should be; it seemed to be intended for my birthday present. A small sign hung in front of the pictures to the effect that cheaper pictures could also be obtained. I then see myself very indistinctly lying in bed, just as I had seen myself at the foot of the stairs, and I am awakened by a feeling of dampness which came from the pollution." Interpretation. The dreamer had been in a book-store on the evening of the day of the dream, where, while he was waiting, he examined some pictures which were exhibited, which represented motives similar to the dream pictures. He stepped nearer to a small picture which particularly took his fancy in order to see the name of the artist, which, however, was quite unknown to him. Later in the same evening, in company, he heard about a Bohemian servant-girl who boasted that her illegitimate child "was made on the stairs." The dreamer inquired about the details of this unusual occurrence, and learned that the servant-girl went with her lover to the home of her parents, where there was no opportunity for sexual relations, and that the excited man performed the act on the stairs. In witty allusion to the mischievous expression used about wine-adulterers, the dreamer remarked, "The child really grew on the cellar steps." These experiences of the day, which are quite prominent in the dream content, were readily reproduced by the dreamer. But he just as readily reproduced an old fragment of infantile recollection which was also utilized by the dream. The stair-house was the house in which he had spent the greatest part of his childhood, and in which he had first become acquainted with sexual problems. In this house he used, among other things, to slide down the banister astride which caused him to become sexually excited. In the dream he also comes down the stairs very rapidly--so rapidly that, according to his own distinct assertions, he hardly touched the individual stairs, but rather "flew" or "slid down," as we used to say. Upon reference to this infantile experience, the beginning of the dream seems to represent the factor of sexual excitement. In the same house and in the adjacent residence the dreamer used to play pugnacious games with the neighboring children, in which he satisfied himself just as he did in the dream. If one recalls from Freud's investigation of sexual symbolism[9] that in the dream stairs or climbing stairs almost regularly symbolizes coitus, the dream becomes clear. Its motive power as well as its effect, as is shown by the pollution, is of a purely libidinous nature. Sexual excitement became aroused during the sleeping state (in the dream this is represented by the rapid running or sliding down the stairs) and the sadistic thread in this is, on the basis of the pugnacious playing, indicated in the pursuing and overcoming of the child. The libidinous excitement becomes enhanced and urges to sexual action (represented in the dream by the grasping of the child and the conveyance of it to the middle of the stairway). Up to this point the dream would be one of pure, sexual symbolism, and obscure for the unpracticed dream interpreter. But this symbolic gratification, which would have insured undisturbed sleep, was not sufficient for the powerful libidinous excitement. The excitement leads to an orgasm, and thus the whole stairway symbolism is unmasked as a substitute for coitus. Freud lays stress on the rhythmical character of both actions as one of the reasons for the sexual utilization of the stairway symbolism, and this dream especially seems to corroborate this, for, according to the express assertion of the dreamer, the rhythm of a sexual act was the most pronounced feature in the whole dream. Still another remark concerning the two pictures, which, aside from their real significance, also have the value of "Weibsbilder" (literally _woman-pictures_, but idiomatically _women_). This is at once shown by the fact that the dream deals with a big and a little picture, just as the dream content presents a big (grown up) and a little girl. That cheap pictures could also be obtained points to the prostitution complex, just as the dreamer's surname on the little picture and the thought that it was intended for his birthday, point to the parent complex (to be born on the stairway--to be conceived in coitus). The indistinct final scene, in which the dreamer sees himself on the staircase landing lying in bed and feeling wet, seems to go back into childhood even beyond the infantile onanism, and manifestly has its prototype in similarly pleasurable scenes of bed-wetting. 6. A modified stair-dream. To one of my very nervous patients, who was an abstainer, whose fancy was fixed on his mother, and who repeatedly dreamed of climbing stairs accompanied by his mother, I once remarked that moderate masturbation would be less harmful to him than enforced abstinence. This influence provoked the following dream: "His piano teacher reproaches him for neglecting his piano-playing, and for not practicing the _Etudes_ of Moscheles and Clementi's _Gradus ad Parnassum_." In relation to this he remarked that the _Gradus_ is only a stairway, and that the piano itself is only a stairway as it has a scale. It is correct to say that there is no series of associations which cannot be adapted to the representation of sexual facts. I conclude with the dream of a chemist, a young man, who has been trying to give up his habit of masturbation by replacing it with intercourse with women. _Preliminary statement._--On the day before the dream he had given a student instruction concerning Grignard's reaction, in which magnesium is to be dissolved in absolutely pure ether under the catalytic influence of iodine. Two days before, there had been an explosion in the course of the same reaction, in which the investigator had burned his hand. Dream I. _He is to make phenylmagnesium-bromid; he sees the apparatus with particular clearness, but he has substituted himself for the magnesium. He is now in a curious swaying attitude. He keeps repeating to himself, "This is the right thing, it is working, my feet are beginning to dissolve and my knees are getting soft." Then he reaches down and feels for his feet, and meanwhile (he does not know how) he takes his legs out of the crucible, and then again he says to himself, "That cannot be.... Yes, it must be so, it has been done correctly." Then he partially awakens, and repeats the dream to himself, because he wants to tell it to me. He is distinctly afraid of the analysis of the dream. He is much excited during this semi-sleeping state, and repeats continually, "Phenyl, phenyl."_ II. _He is in ... ing with his whole family; at half-past eleven. He is to be at the Schottenthor for a rendezvous with a certain lady, but he does not wake up until half-past eleven. He says to himself, "It is too late now; when you get there it will be half-past twelve." The next instant he sees the whole family gathered about the table--his mother and the servant girl with the soup-tureen with particular clearness. Then he says to himself, "Well, if we are eating already, I certainly can't get away."_ Analysis: He feels sure that even the first dream contains a reference to the lady whom he is to meet at the rendezvous (the dream was dreamed during the night before the expected meeting). The student to whom he gave the instruction is a particularly unpleasant fellow; he had said to the chemist: "That isn't right," because the magnesium was still unaffected, and the latter answered as though he did not care anything about it: "It certainly isn't right." He himself must be this student; he is as indifferent towards his analysis as the student is towards his synthesis; the _He_ in the dream, however, who accomplishes the operation, is myself. How unpleasant he must seem to me with his indifference towards the success achieved! Moreover, he is the material with which the analysis (synthesis) is made. For it is a question of the success of the treatment. The legs in the dream recall an impression of the previous evening. He met a lady at a dancing lesson whom he wished to conquer; he pressed her to him so closely that she once cried out. After he had stopped pressing against her legs, he felt her firm responding pressure against his lower thighs as far as just above his knees, at the place mentioned in the dream. In this situation, then, the woman is the magnesium in the retort, which is at last working. He is feminine towards me, as he is masculine towards the woman. If it will work with the woman, the treatment will also work. Feeling and becoming aware of himself in the region of his knees refers to masturbation, and corresponds to his fatigue of the previous day.... The rendezvous had actually been set for half-past eleven. His wish to oversleep and to remain with his usual sexual objects (that is, with masturbation) corresponds with his resistance. [1] It is only of late that I have learned to value the significance of fancies and unconscious thoughts about life in the womb. They contain the explanation of the curious fear felt by so many people of being buried alive, as well as the profoundest unconscious reason for the belief in a life after death which represents nothing but a projection into the future of this mysterious life before birth. _The act of birth, moreover, is the first experience with fear, and is thus the source and model of the emotion of fear._ [2] Cf. _Zentralblatt für psychoanalyse_, I. [3] Or chapel--vagina. [4] Symbol of coitus. [5] Mons veneris. [6] Crines pubis. [7] Demons in cloaks and capucines are, according to the explanation of a man versed in the subject, of a phallic nature. [8] The two halves of the scrotum. [9] See _Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_, vol. i., p. 2. VI THE WISH IN DREAMS That the dream should be nothing but a wish-fulfillment surely seemed strange to us all--and that not alone because of the contradictions offered by the anxiety dream. After learning from the first analytical explanations that the dream conceals sense and psychic validity, we could hardly expect so simple a determination of this sense. According to the correct but concise definition of Aristotle, the dream is a continuation of thinking in sleep (in so far as one sleeps). Considering that during the day our thoughts produce such a diversity of psychic acts--judgments, conclusions, contradictions, expectations, intentions, &c.--why should our sleeping thoughts be forced to confine themselves to the production of wishes? Are there not, on the contrary, many dreams that present a different psychic act in dream form, _e.g._, a solicitude, and is not the very transparent father's dream mentioned above of just such a nature? From the gleam of light falling into his eyes while asleep the father draws the solicitous conclusion that a candle has been upset and may have set fire to the corpse; he transforms this conclusion into a dream by investing it with a senseful situation enacted in the present tense. What part is played in this dream by the wish-fulfillment, and which are we to suspect--the predominance of the thought continued from, the waking state or of the thought incited by the new sensory impression? All these considerations are just, and force us to enter more deeply into the part played by the wish-fulfillment in the dream, and into the significance of the waking thoughts continued in sleep. It is in fact the wish-fulfillment that has already induced us to separate dreams into two groups. We have found some dreams that were plainly wish-fulfillments; and others in which wish-fulfillment could not be recognized, and was frequently concealed by every available means. In this latter class of dreams we recognized the influence of the dream censor. The undisguised wish dreams were chiefly found in children, yet fleeting open-hearted wish dreams _seemed_ (I purposely emphasize this word) to occur also in adults. We may now ask whence the wish fulfilled in the dream originates. But to what opposition or to what diversity do we refer this "whence"? I think it is to the opposition between conscious daily life and a psychic activity remaining unconscious which can only make itself noticeable during the night. I thus find a threefold possibility for the origin of a wish. Firstly, it may have been incited during the day, and owing to external circumstances failed to find gratification, there is thus left for the night an acknowledged but unfulfilled wish. Secondly, it may come to the surface during the day but be rejected, leaving an unfulfilled but suppressed wish. Or, thirdly, it may have no relation to daily life, and belong to those wishes that originate during the night from the suppression. If we now follow our scheme of the psychic apparatus, we can localize a wish of the first order in the system Forec. We may assume that a wish of the second order has been forced back from the Forec. system into the Unc. system, where alone, if anywhere, it can maintain itself; while a wish-feeling of the third order we consider altogether incapable of leaving the Unc. system. This brings up the question whether wishes arising from these different sources possess the same value for the dream, and whether they have the same power to incite a dream. On reviewing the dreams which we have at our disposal for answering this question, we are at once moved to add as a fourth source of the dream-wish the actual wish incitements arising during the night, such as thirst and sexual desire. It then becomes evident that the source of the dream-wish does not affect its capacity to incite a dream. That a wish suppressed during the day asserts itself in the dream can be shown by a great many examples. I shall mention a very simple example of this class. A somewhat sarcastic young lady, whose younger friend has become engaged to be married, is asked throughout the day by her acquaintances whether she knows and what she thinks of the fiancé. She answers with unqualified praise, thereby silencing her own judgment, as she would prefer to tell the truth, namely, that he is an ordinary person. The following night she dreams that the same question is put to her, and that she replies with the formula: "In case of subsequent orders it will suffice to mention the number." Finally, we have learned from numerous analyses that the wish in all dreams that have been subject to distortion has been derived from the unconscious, and has been unable to come to perception in the waking state. Thus it would appear that all wishes are of the same value and force for the dream formation. I am at present unable to prove that the state of affairs is really different, but I am strongly inclined to assume a more stringent determination of the dream-wish. Children's dreams leave no doubt that an unfulfilled wish of the day may be the instigator of the dream. But we must not forget that it is, after all, the wish of a child, that it is a wish-feeling of infantile strength only. I have a strong doubt whether an unfulfilled wish from the day would suffice to create a dream in an adult. It would rather seem that as we learn to control our impulses by intellectual activity, we more and more reject as vain the formation or retention of such intense wishes as are natural to childhood. In this, indeed, there may be individual variations; some retain the infantile type of psychic processes longer than others. The differences are here the same as those found in the gradual decline of the originally distinct visual imagination. In general, however, I am of the opinion that unfulfilled wishes of the day are insufficient to produce a dream in adults. I readily admit that the wish instigators originating in conscious like contribute towards the incitement of dreams, but that is probably all. The dream would not originate if the foreconscious wish were not reinforced from another source. That source is the unconscious. I believe that _the conscious wish is a dream inciter only if it succeeds in arousing a similar unconscious wish which reinforces it_. Following the suggestions obtained through the psychoanalysis of the neuroses, I believe that these unconscious wishes are always active and ready for expression whenever they find an opportunity to unite themselves with an emotion from conscious life, and that they transfer their greater intensity to the lesser intensity of the latter.[1] It may therefore seem that the conscious wish alone has been realized in a dream; but a slight peculiarity in the formation of this dream will put us on the track of the powerful helper from the unconscious. These ever active and, as it were, immortal wishes from the unconscious recall the legendary Titans who from time immemorial have borne the ponderous mountains which were once rolled upon them by the victorious gods, and which even now quiver from time to time from the convulsions of their mighty limbs; I say that these wishes found in the repression are of themselves of an infantile origin, as we have learned from the psychological investigation of the neuroses. I should like, therefore, to withdraw the opinion previously expressed that it is unimportant whence the dream-wish originates, and replace it by another, as follows: _The wish manifested in the dream must be an infantile one_. In the adult it originates in the Unc., while in the child, where no separation and censor as yet exist between Forec. and Unc., or where these are only in the process of formation, it is an unfulfilled and unrepressed wish from the waking state. I am aware that this conception cannot be generally demonstrated, but I maintain nevertheless that it can be frequently demonstrated, even when it was not suspected, and that it cannot be generally refuted. The wish-feelings which remain from the conscious waking state are, therefore, relegated to the background in the dream formation. In the dream content I shall attribute to them only the part attributed to the material of actual sensations during sleep. If I now take into account those other psychic instigations remaining from the waking state which are not wishes, I shall only adhere to the line mapped out for me by this train of thought. We may succeed in provisionally terminating the sum of energy of our waking thoughts by deciding to go to sleep. He is a good sleeper who can do this; Napoleon I. is reputed to have been a model of this sort. But we do not always succeed in accomplishing it, or in accomplishing it perfectly. Unsolved problems, harassing cares, overwhelming impressions continue the thinking activity even during sleep, maintaining psychic processes in the system which we have termed the foreconscious. These mental processes continuing into sleep may be divided into the following groups: 1, That which has not been terminated during the day owing to casual prevention; 2, that which has been left unfinished by temporary paralysis of our mental power, _i.e._ the unsolved; 3, that which has been rejected and suppressed during the day. This unites with a powerful group (4) formed by that which has been excited in our Unc. during the day by the work of the foreconscious. Finally, we may add group (5) consisting of the indifferent and hence unsettled impressions of the day. We should not underrate the psychic intensities introduced into sleep by these remnants of waking life, especially those emanating from the group of the unsolved. These excitations surely continue to strive for expression during the night, and we may assume with equal certainty that the sleeping state renders impossible the usual continuation of the excitement in the foreconscious and the termination of the excitement by its becoming conscious. As far as we can normally become conscious of our mental processes, even during the night, in so far we are not asleep. I shall not venture to state what change is produced in the Forec. system by the sleeping state, but there is no doubt that the psychological character of sleep is essentially due to the change of energy in this very system, which also dominates the approach to motility, which is paralyzed during sleep. In contradistinction to this, there seems to be nothing in the psychology of the dream to warrant the assumption that sleep produces any but secondary changes in the conditions of the Unc. system. Hence, for the nocturnal excitation in the Force, there remains no other path than that followed by the wish excitements from the Unc. This excitation must seek reinforcement from the Unc., and follow the detours of the unconscious excitations. But what is the relation of the foreconscious day remnants to the dream? There is no doubt that they penetrate abundantly into the dream, that they utilize the dream content to obtrude themselves upon consciousness even during the night; indeed, they occasionally even dominate the dream content, and impel it to continue the work of the day; it is also certain that the day remnants may just as well have any other character as that of wishes; but it is highly instructive and even decisive for the theory of wish-fulfillment to see what conditions they must comply with in order to be received into the dream. Let us pick out one of the dreams cited above as examples, _e.g._, the dream in which my friend Otto seems to show the symptoms of Basedow's disease. My friend Otto's appearance occasioned me some concern during the day, and this worry, like everything else referring to this person, affected me. I may also assume that these feelings followed me into sleep. I was probably bent on finding out what was the matter with him. In the night my worry found expression in the dream which I have reported, the content of which was not only senseless, but failed to show any wish-fulfillment. But I began to investigate for the source of this incongruous expression of the solicitude felt during the day, and analysis revealed the connection. I identified my friend Otto with a certain Baron L. and myself with a Professor R. There was only one explanation for my being impelled to select just this substitution for the day thought. I must have always been prepared in the Unc. to identify myself with Professor R., as it meant the realization of one of the immortal infantile wishes, viz. that of becoming great. Repulsive ideas respecting my friend, that would certainly have been repudiated in a waking state, took advantage of the opportunity to creep into the dream, but the worry of the day likewise found some form of expression through a substitution in the dream content. The day thought, which was no wish in itself but rather a worry, had in some way to find a connection with the infantile now unconscious and suppressed wish, which then allowed it, though already properly prepared, to "originate" for consciousness. The more dominating this worry, the stronger must be the connection to be established; between the contents of the wish and that of the worry there need be no connection, nor was there one in any of our examples. We can now sharply define the significance of the unconscious wish for the dream. It may be admitted that there is a whole class of dreams in which the incitement originates preponderatingly or even exclusively from the remnants of daily life; and I believe that even my cherished desire to become at some future time a "professor extraordinarius" would have allowed me to slumber undisturbed that night had not my worry about my friend's health been still active. But this worry alone would not have produced a dream; the motive power needed by the dream had to be contributed by a wish, and it was the affair of the worriment to procure for itself such wish as a motive power of the dream. To speak figuratively, it is quite possible that a day thought plays the part of the contractor (_entrepreneur_) in the dream. But it is known that no matter what idea the contractor may have in mind, and how desirous he may be of putting it into operation, he can do nothing without capital; he must depend upon a capitalist to defray the necessary expenses, and this capitalist, who supplies the psychic expenditure for the dream is invariably and indisputably _a wish from the unconscious_, no matter what the nature of the waking thought may be. In other cases the capitalist himself is the contractor for the dream; this, indeed, seems to be the more usual case. An unconscious wish is produced by the day's work, which in turn creates the dream. The dream processes, moreover, run parallel with all the other possibilities of the economic relationship used here as an illustration. Thus, the entrepreneur may contribute some capital himself, or several entrepreneurs may seek the aid of the same capitalist, or several capitalists may jointly supply the capital required by the entrepreneur. Thus there are dreams produced by more than one dream-wish, and many similar variations which may readily be passed over and are of no further interest to us. What we have left unfinished in this discussion of the dream-wish we shall be able to develop later. The "tertium comparationis" in the comparisons just employed--_i.e._ the sum placed at our free disposal in proper allotment--admits of still finer application for the illustration of the dream structure. We can recognize in most dreams a center especially supplied with perceptible intensity. This is regularly the direct representation of the wish-fulfillment; for, if we undo the displacements of the dream-work by a process of retrogression, we find that the psychic intensity of the elements in the dream thoughts is replaced by the perceptible intensity of the elements in the dream content. The elements adjoining the wish-fulfillment have frequently nothing to do with its sense, but prove to be descendants of painful thoughts which oppose the wish. But, owing to their frequently artificial connection with the central element, they have acquired sufficient intensity to enable them to come to expression. Thus, the force of expression of the wish-fulfillment is diffused over a certain sphere of association, within which it raises to expression all elements, including those that are in themselves impotent. In dreams having several strong wishes we can readily separate from one another the spheres of the individual wish-fulfillments; the gaps in the dream likewise can often be explained as boundary zones. Although the foregoing remarks have considerably limited the significance of the day remnants for the dream, it will nevertheless be worth our while to give them some attention. For they must be a necessary ingredient in the formation of the dream, inasmuch as experience reveals the surprising fact that every dream shows in its content a connection with some impression of a recent day, often of the most indifferent kind. So far we have failed to see any necessity for this addition to the dream mixture. This necessity appears only when we follow closely the part played by the unconscious wish, and then seek information in the psychology of the neuroses. We thus learn that the unconscious idea, as such, is altogether incapable of entering into the foreconscious, and that it can exert an influence there only by uniting with a harmless idea already belonging to the foreconscious, to which it transfers its intensity and under which it allows itself to be concealed. This is the fact of transference which furnishes an explanation for so many surprising occurrences in the psychic life of neurotics. The idea from the foreconscious which thus obtains an unmerited abundance of intensity may be left unchanged by the transference, or it may have forced upon it a modification from the content of the transferring idea. I trust the reader will pardon my fondness for comparisons from daily life, but I feel tempted to say that the relations existing for the repressed idea are similar to the situations existing in Austria for the American dentist, who is forbidden to practise unless he gets permission from a regular physician to use his name on the public signboard and thus cover the legal requirements. Moreover, just as it is naturally not the busiest physicians who form such alliances with dental practitioners, so in the psychic life only such foreconscious or conscious ideas are chosen to cover a repressed idea as have not themselves attracted much of the attention which is operative in the foreconscious. The unconscious entangles with its connections preferentially either those impressions and ideas of the foreconscious which have been left unnoticed as indifferent, or those that have soon been deprived of this attention through rejection. It is a familiar fact from the association studies confirmed by every experience, that ideas which have formed intimate connections in one direction assume an almost negative attitude to whole groups of new connections. I once tried from this principle to develop a theory for hysterical paralysis. If we assume that the same need for the transference of the repressed ideas which we have learned to know from the analysis of the neuroses makes its influence felt in the dream as well, we can at once explain two riddles of the dream, viz. that every dream analysis shows an interweaving of a recent impression, and that this recent element is frequently of the most indifferent character. We may add what we have already learned elsewhere, that these recent and indifferent elements come so frequently into the dream content as a substitute for the most deep-lying of the dream thoughts, for the further reason that they have least to fear from the resisting censor. But while this freedom from censorship explains only the preference for trivial elements, the constant presence of recent elements points to the fact that there is a need for transference. Both groups of impressions satisfy the demand of the repression for material still free from associations, the indifferent ones because they have offered no inducement for extensive associations, and the recent ones because they have had insufficient time to form such associations. We thus see that the day remnants, among which we may now include the indifferent impressions when they participate in the dream formation, not only borrow from the Unc. the motive power at the disposal of the repressed wish, but also offer to the unconscious something indispensable, namely, the attachment necessary to the transference. If we here attempted to penetrate more deeply into the psychic processes, we should first have to throw more light on the play of emotions between the foreconscious and the unconscious, to which, indeed, we are urged by the study of the psychoneuroses, whereas the dream itself offers no assistance in this respect. Just one further remark about the day remnants. There is no doubt that they are the actual disturbers of sleep, and not the dream, which, on the contrary, strives to guard sleep. But we shall return to this point later. We have so far discussed the dream-wish, we have traced it to the sphere of the Unc., and analyzed its relations to the day remnants, which in turn may be either wishes, psychic emotions of any other kind, or simply recent impressions. We have thus made room for any claims that may be made for the importance of conscious thought activity in dream formations in all its variations. Relying upon our thought series, it would not be at all impossible for us to explain even those extreme cases in which the dream as a continuer of the day work brings to a happy conclusion and unsolved problem possess an example, the analysis of which might reveal the infantile or repressed wish source furnishing such alliance and successful strengthening of the efforts of the foreconscious activity. But we have not come one step nearer a solution of the riddle: Why can the unconscious furnish the motive power for the wish-fulfillment only during sleep? The answer to this question must throw light on the psychic nature of wishes; and it will be given with the aid of the diagram of the psychic apparatus. We do not doubt that even this apparatus attained its present perfection through a long course of development. Let us attempt to restore it as it existed in an early phase of its activity. From assumptions, to be confirmed elsewhere, we know that at first the apparatus strove to keep as free from excitement as possible, and in its first formation, therefore, the scheme took the form of a reflex apparatus, which enabled it promptly to discharge through the motor tracts any sensible stimulus reaching it from without. But this simple function was disturbed by the wants of life, which likewise furnish the impulse for the further development of the apparatus. The wants of life first manifested themselves to it in the form of the great physical needs. The excitement aroused by the inner want seeks an outlet in motility, which may be designated as "inner changes" or as an "expression of the emotions." The hungry child cries or fidgets helplessly, but its situation remains unchanged; for the excitation proceeding from an inner want requires, not a momentary outbreak, but a force working continuously. A change can occur only if in some way a feeling of gratification is experienced--which in the case of the child must be through outside help--in order to remove the inner excitement. An essential constituent of this experience is the appearance of a certain perception (of food in our example), the memory picture of which thereafter remains associated with the memory trace of the excitation of want. Thanks to the established connection, there results at the next appearance of this want a psychic feeling which revives the memory picture of the former perception, and thus recalls the former perception itself, _i.e._ it actually re-establishes the situation of the first gratification. We call such a feeling a wish; the reappearance of the perception constitutes the wish-fulfillment, and the full revival of the perception by the want excitement constitutes the shortest road to the wish-fulfillment. We may assume a primitive condition of the psychic apparatus in which this road is really followed, _i.e._ where the wishing merges into an hallucination, This first psychic activity therefore aims at an identity of perception, _i.e._ it aims at a repetition of that perception which is connected with the fulfillment of the want. This primitive mental activity must have been modified by bitter practical experience into a more expedient secondary activity. The establishment of the identity perception on the short regressive road within the apparatus does not in another respect carry with it the result which inevitably follows the revival of the same perception from without. The gratification does not take place, and the want continues. In order to equalize the internal with the external sum of energy, the former must be continually maintained, just as actually happens in the hallucinatory psychoses and in the deliriums of hunger which exhaust their psychic capacity in clinging to the object desired. In order to make more appropriate use of the psychic force, it becomes necessary to inhibit the full regression so as to prevent it from extending beyond the image of memory, whence it can select other paths leading ultimately to the establishment of the desired identity from the outer world. This inhibition and consequent deviation from the excitation becomes the task of a second system which dominates the voluntary motility, _i.e._ through whose activity the expenditure of motility is now devoted to previously recalled purposes. But this entire complicated mental activity which works its way from the memory picture to the establishment of the perception identity from the outer world merely represents a detour which has been forced upon the wish-fulfillment by experience.[2] Thinking is indeed nothing but the equivalent of the hallucinatory wish; and if the dream be called a wish-fulfillment this becomes self-evident, as nothing but a wish can impel our psychic apparatus to activity. The dream, which in fulfilling its wishes follows the short regressive path, thereby preserves for us only an example of the primary form of the psychic apparatus which has been abandoned as inexpedient. What once ruled in the waking state when the psychic life was still young and unfit seems to have been banished into the sleeping state, just as we see again in the nursery the bow and arrow, the discarded primitive weapons of grown-up humanity. _The dream is a fragment of the abandoned psychic life of the child._ In the psychoses these modes of operation of the psychic apparatus, which are normally suppressed in the waking state, reassert themselves, and then betray their inability to satisfy our wants in the outer world. The unconscious wish-feelings evidently strive to assert themselves during the day also, and the fact of transference and the psychoses teach us that they endeavor to penetrate to consciousness and dominate motility by the road leading through the system of the foreconscious. It is, therefore, the censor lying between the Unc. and the Forec., the assumption of which is forced upon us by the dream, that we have to recognize and honor as the guardian of our psychic health. But is it not carelessness on the part of this guardian to diminish its vigilance during the night and to allow the suppressed emotions of the Unc. to come to expression, thus again making possible the hallucinatory regression? I think not, for when the critical guardian goes to rest--and we have proof that his slumber is not profound--he takes care to close the gate to motility. No matter what feelings from the otherwise inhibited Unc. may roam about on the scene, they need not be interfered with; they remain harmless because they are unable to put in motion the motor apparatus which alone can exert a modifying influence upon the outer world. Sleep guarantees the security of the fortress which is under guard. Conditions are less harmless when a displacement of forces is produced, not through a nocturnal diminution in the operation of the critical censor, but through pathological enfeeblement of the latter or through pathological reinforcement of the unconscious excitations, and this while the foreconscious is charged with energy and the avenues to motility are open. The guardian is then overpowered, the unconscious excitations subdue the Forec.; through it they dominate our speech and actions, or they enforce the hallucinatory regression, thus governing an apparatus not designed for them by virtue of the attraction exerted by the perceptions on the distribution of our psychic energy. We call this condition a psychosis. We are now in the best position to complete our psychological construction, which has been interrupted by the introduction of the two systems, Unc. and Forec. We have still, however, ample reason for giving further consideration to the wish as the sole psychic motive power in the dream. We have explained that the reason why the dream is in every case a wish realization is because it is a product of the Unc., which knows no other aim in its activity but the fulfillment of wishes, and which has no other forces at its disposal but wish-feelings. If we avail ourselves for a moment longer of the right to elaborate from the dream interpretation such far-reaching psychological speculations, we are in duty bound to demonstrate that we are thereby bringing the dream into a relationship which may also comprise other psychic structures. If there exists a system of the Unc.--or something sufficiently analogous to it for the purpose of our discussion--the dream cannot be its sole manifestation; every dream may be a wish-fulfillment, but there must be other forms of abnormal wish-fulfillment beside this of dreams. Indeed, the theory of all psychoneurotic symptoms culminates in the proposition _that they too must be taken as wish-fulfillments of the unconscious_. Our explanation makes the dream only the first member of a group most important for the psychiatrist, an understanding of which means the solution of the purely psychological part of the psychiatric problem. But other members of this group of wish-fulfillments, _e.g._, the hysterical symptoms, evince one essential quality which I have so far failed to find in the dream. Thus, from the investigations frequently referred to in this treatise, I know that the formation of an hysterical symptom necessitates the combination of both streams of our psychic life. The symptom is not merely the expression of a realized unconscious wish, but it must be joined by another wish from the foreconscious which is fulfilled by the same symptom; so that the symptom is at least doubly determined, once by each one of the conflicting systems. Just as in the dream, there is no limit to further over-determination. The determination not derived from the Unc. is, as far as I can see, invariably a stream of thought in reaction against the unconscious wish, _e.g._, a self-punishment. Hence I may say, in general, that _an hysterical symptom originates only where two contrasting wish-fulfillments, having their source in different psychic systems, are able to combine in one expression_. (Compare my latest formulation of the origin of the hysterical symptoms in a treatise published by the _Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft_, by Hirschfeld and others, 1908). Examples on this point would prove of little value, as nothing but a complete unveiling of the complication in question would carry conviction. I therefore content myself with the mere assertion, and will cite an example, not for conviction but for explication. The hysterical vomiting of a female patient proved, on the one hand, to be the realization of an unconscious fancy from the time of puberty, that she might be continuously pregnant and have a multitude of children, and this was subsequently united with the wish that she might have them from as many men as possible. Against this immoderate wish there arose a powerful defensive impulse. But as the vomiting might spoil the patient's figure and beauty, so that she would not find favor in the eyes of mankind, the symptom was therefore in keeping with her punitive trend of thought, and, being thus admissible from both sides, it was allowed to become a reality. This is the same manner of consenting to a wish-fulfillment which the queen of the Parthians chose for the triumvir Crassus. Believing that he had undertaken the campaign out of greed for gold, she caused molten gold to be poured into the throat of the corpse. "Now hast thou what thou hast longed for." As yet we know of the dream only that it expresses a wish-fulfillment of the unconscious; and apparently the dominating foreconscious permits this only after it has subjected the wish to some distortions. We are really in no position to demonstrate regularly a stream of thought antagonistic to the dream-wish which is realized in the dream as in its counterpart. Only now and then have we found in the dream traces of reaction formations, as, for instance, the tenderness toward friend R. in the "uncle dream." But the contribution from the foreconscious, which is missing here, may be found in another place. While the dominating system has withdrawn on the wish to sleep, the dream may bring to expression with manifold distortions a wish from the Unc., and realize this wish by producing the necessary changes of energy in the psychic apparatus, and may finally retain it through the entire duration of sleep.[3] This persistent wish to sleep on the part of the foreconscious in general facilitates the formation of the dream. Let us refer to the dream of the father who, by the gleam of light from the death chamber, was brought to the conclusion that the body has been set on fire. We have shown that one of the psychic forces decisive in causing the father to form this conclusion, instead of being awakened by the gleam of light, was the wish to prolong the life of the child seen in the dream by one moment. Other wishes proceeding from the repression probably escape us, because we are unable to analyze this dream. But as a second motive power of the dream we may mention the father's desire to sleep, for, like the life of the child, the sleep of the father is prolonged for a moment by the dream. The underlying motive is: "Let the dream go on, otherwise I must wake up." As in this dream so also in all other dreams, the wish to sleep lends its support to the unconscious wish. We reported dreams which were apparently dreams of convenience. But, properly speaking, all dreams may claim this designation. The efficacy of the wish to continue to sleep is the most easily recognized in the waking dreams, which so transform the objective sensory stimulus as to render it compatible with the continuance of sleep; they interweave this stimulus with the dream in order to rob it of any claims it might make as a warning to the outer world. But this wish to continue to sleep must also participate in the formation of all other dreams which may disturb the sleeping state from within only. "Now, then, sleep on; why, it's but a dream"; this is in many cases the suggestion of the Forec. to consciousness when the dream goes too far; and this also describes in a general way the attitude of our dominating psychic activity toward dreaming, though the thought remains tacit. I must draw the conclusion that _throughout our entire sleeping state we are just as certain that we are dreaming as we are certain that we are sleeping_. We are compelled to disregard the objection urged against this conclusion that our consciousness is never directed to a knowledge of the former, and that it is directed to a knowledge of the latter only on special occasions when the censor is unexpectedly surprised. Against this objection we may say that there are persons who are entirely conscious of their sleeping and dreaming, and who are apparently endowed with the conscious faculty of guiding their dream life. Such a dreamer, when dissatisfied with the course taken by the dream, breaks it off without awakening, and begins it anew in order to continue it with a different turn, like the popular author who, on request, gives a happier ending to his play. Or, at another time, if placed by the dream in a sexually exciting situation, he thinks in his sleep: "I do not care to continue this dream and exhaust myself by a pollution; I prefer to defer it in favor of a real situation." [1] They share this character of indestructibility with all psychic acts that are really unconscious--that is, with psychic acts belonging to the system of the unconscious only. These paths are constantly open and never fall into disuse; they conduct the discharge of the exciting process as often as it becomes endowed with unconscious excitement To speak metaphorically they suffer the same form of annihilation as the shades of the lower region in the _Odyssey_, who awoke to new life the moment they drank blood. The processes depending on the foreconscious system are destructible in a different way. The psychotherapy of the neuroses is based on this difference. [2] Le Lorrain justly extols the wish-fulfilment of the dream: "Sans fatigue sérieuse, sans être obligé de recourir à cette lutte opinâtre et longue qui use et corrode les jouissances poursuivies." [3] This idea has been borrowed from _The Theory of Sleep_ by Liébault, who revived hypnotic investigation in our days. (_Du Sommeil provoqué_, etc.; Paris, 1889.) VII THE FUNCTION OF THE DREAM Since we know that the foreconscious is suspended during the night by the wish to sleep, we can proceed to an intelligent investigation of the dream process. But let us first sum up the knowledge of this process already gained. We have shown that the waking activity leaves day remnants from which the sum of energy cannot be entirely removed; or the waking activity revives during the day one of the unconscious wishes; or both conditions occur simultaneously; we have already discovered the many variations that may take place. The unconscious wish has already made its way to the day remnants, either during the day or at any rate with the beginning of sleep, and has effected a transference to it. This produces a wish transferred to the recent material, or the suppressed recent wish comes to life again through a reinforcement from the unconscious. This wish now endeavors to make its way to consciousness on the normal path of the mental processes through the foreconscious, to which indeed it belongs through one of its constituent elements. It is confronted, however, by the censor, which is still active, and to the influence of which it now succumbs. It now takes on the distortion for which the way has already been paved by its transference to the recent material. Thus far it is in the way of becoming something resembling an obsession, delusion, or the like, _i.e._ a thought reinforced by a transference and distorted in expression by the censor. But its further progress is now checked through the dormant state of the foreconscious; this system has apparently protected itself against invasion by diminishing its excitements. The dream process, therefore, takes the regressive course, which has just been opened by the peculiarity of the sleeping state, and thereby follows the attraction exerted on it by the memory groups, which themselves exist in part only as visual energy not yet translated into terms of the later systems. On its way to regression the dream takes on the form of dramatization. The subject of compression will be discussed later. The dream process has now terminated the second part of its repeatedly impeded course. The first part expended itself progressively from the unconscious scenes or phantasies to the foreconscious, while the second part gravitates from the advent of the censor back to the perceptions. But when the dream process becomes a content of perception it has, so to speak, eluded the obstacle set up in the Forec. by the censor and by the sleeping state. It succeeds in drawing attention to itself and in being noticed by consciousness. For consciousness, which means to us a sensory organ for the reception of psychic qualities, may receive stimuli from two sources--first, from the periphery of the entire apparatus, viz. from the perception system, and, secondly, from the pleasure and pain stimuli, which constitute the sole psychic quality produced in the transformation of energy within the apparatus. All other processes in the system, even those in the foreconscious, are devoid of any psychic quality, and are therefore not objects of consciousness inasmuch as they do not furnish pleasure or pain for perception. We shall have to assume that those liberations of pleasure and pain automatically regulate the outlet of the occupation processes. But in order to make possible more delicate functions, it was later found necessary to render the course of the presentations more independent of the manifestations of pain. To accomplish this the Forec. system needed some qualities of its own which could attract consciousness, and most probably received them through the connection of the foreconscious processes with the memory system of the signs of speech, which is not devoid of qualities. Through the qualities of this system, consciousness, which had hitherto been a sensory organ only for the perceptions, now becomes also a sensory organ for a part of our mental processes. Thus we have now, as it were, two sensory surfaces, one directed to perceptions and the other to the foreconscious mental processes. I must assume that the sensory surface of consciousness devoted to the Forec. is rendered less excitable by sleep than that directed to the P-systems. The giving up of interest for the nocturnal mental processes is indeed purposeful. Nothing is to disturb the mind; the Forec. wants to sleep. But once the dream becomes a perception, it is then capable of exciting consciousness through the qualities thus gained. The sensory stimulus accomplishes what it was really destined for, namely, it directs a part of the energy at the disposal of the Forec. in the form of attention upon the stimulant. We must, therefore, admit that the dream invariably awakens us, that is, it puts into activity a part of the dormant force of the Forec. This force imparts to the dream that influence which we have designated as secondary elaboration for the sake of connection and comprehensibility. This means that the dream is treated by it like any other content of perception; it is subjected to the same ideas of expectation, as far at least as the material admits. As far as the direction is concerned in this third part of the dream, it may be said that here again the movement is progressive. To avoid misunderstanding, it will not be amiss to say a few words about the temporal peculiarities of these dream processes. In a very interesting discussion, apparently suggested by Maury's puzzling guillotine dream, Goblet tries to demonstrate that the dream requires no other time than the transition period between sleeping and awakening. The awakening requires time, as the dream takes place during that period. One is inclined to believe that the final picture of the dream is so strong that it forces the dreamer to awaken; but, as a matter of fact, this picture is strong only because the dreamer is already very near awakening when it appears. "Un rêve c'est un réveil qui commence." It has already been emphasized by Dugas that Goblet was forced to repudiate many facts in order to generalize his theory. There are, moreover, dreams from which we do not awaken, _e.g._, some dreams in which we dream that we dream. From our knowledge of the dream-work, we can by no means admit that it extends only over the period of awakening. On the contrary, we must consider it probable that the first part of the dream-work begins during the day when we are still under the domination of the foreconscious. The second phase of the dream-work, viz. the modification through the censor, the attraction by the unconscious scenes, and the penetration to perception must continue throughout the night. And we are probably always right when we assert that we feel as though we had been dreaming the whole night, although we cannot say what. I do not, however, think it necessary to assume that, up to the time of becoming conscious, the dream processes really follow the temporal sequence which we have described, viz. that there is first the transferred dream-wish, then the distortion of the censor, and consequently the change of direction to regression, and so on. We were forced to form such a succession for the sake of _description_; in reality, however, it is much rather a matter of simultaneously trying this path and that, and of emotions fluctuating to and fro, until finally, owing to the most expedient distribution, one particular grouping is secured which remains. From certain personal experiences, I am myself inclined to believe that the dream-work often requires more than one day and one night to produce its result; if this be true, the extraordinary art manifested in the construction of the dream loses all its marvels. In my opinion, even the regard for comprehensibility as an occurrence of perception may take effect before the dream attracts consciousness to itself. To be sure, from now on the process is accelerated, as the dream is henceforth subjected to the same treatment as any other perception. It is like fireworks, which require hours of preparation and only a moment for ignition. Through the dream-work the dream process now gains either sufficient intensity to attract consciousness to itself and arouse the foreconscious, which is quite independent of the time or profundity of sleep, or, its intensity being insufficient it must wait until it meets the attention which is set in motion immediately before awakening. Most dreams seem to operate with relatively slight psychic intensities, for they wait for the awakening. This, however, explains the fact that we regularly perceive something dreamt on being suddenly aroused from a sound sleep. Here, as well as in spontaneous awakening, the first glance strikes the perception content created by the dream-work, while the next strikes the one produced from without. But of greater theoretical interest are those dreams which are capable of waking us in the midst of sleep. We must bear in mind the expediency elsewhere universally demonstrated, and ask ourselves why the dream or the unconscious wish has the power to disturb sleep, _i.e._ the fulfillment of the foreconscious wish. This is probably due to certain relations of energy into which we have no insight. If we possessed such insight we should probably find that the freedom given to the dream and the expenditure of a certain amount of detached attention represent for the dream an economy in energy, keeping in view the fact that the unconscious must be held in check at night just as during the day. We know from experience that the dream, even if it interrupts sleep, repeatedly during the same night, still remains compatible with sleep. We wake up for an instant, and immediately resume our sleep. It is like driving off a fly during sleep, we awake _ad hoc_, and when we resume our sleep we have removed the disturbance. As demonstrated by familiar examples from the sleep of wet nurses, &c., the fulfillment of the wish to sleep is quite compatible with the retention of a certain amount of attention in a given direction. But we must here take cognizance of an objection that is based on a better knowledge of the unconscious processes. Although we have ourselves described the unconscious wishes as always active, we have, nevertheless, asserted that they are not sufficiently strong during the day to make themselves perceptible. But when we sleep, and the unconscious wish has shown its power to form a dream, and with it to awaken the foreconscious, why, then, does this power become exhausted after the dream has been taken cognizance of? Would it not seem more probable that the dream should continually renew itself, like the troublesome fly which, when driven away, takes pleasure in returning again and again? What justifies our assertion that the dream removes the disturbance of sleep? That the unconscious wishes always remain active is quite true. They represent paths which are passable whenever a sum of excitement makes use of them. Moreover, a remarkable peculiarity of the unconscious processes is the fact that they remain indestructible. Nothing can be brought to an end in the unconscious; nothing can cease or be forgotten. This impression is most strongly gained in the study of the neuroses, especially of hysteria. The unconscious stream of thought which leads to the discharge through an attack becomes passable again as soon as there is an accumulation of a sufficient amount of excitement. The mortification brought on thirty years ago, after having gained access to the unconscious affective source, operates during all these thirty years like a recent one. Whenever its memory is touched, it is revived and shows itself to be supplied with the excitement which is discharged in a motor attack. It is just here that the office of psychotherapy begins, its task being to bring about adjustment and forgetfulness for the unconscious processes. Indeed, the fading of memories and the flagging of affects, which we are apt to take as self-evident and to explain as a primary influence of time on the psychic memories, are in reality secondary changes brought about by painstaking work. It is the foreconscious that accomplishes this work; and the only course to be pursued by psychotherapy is the subjugate the Unc, to the domination of the Forec. There are, therefore, two exits for the individual unconscious emotional process. It is either left to itself, in which case it ultimately breaks through somewhere and secures for once a discharge for its excitation into motility; or it succumbs to the influence of the foreconscious, and its excitation becomes confined through this influence instead of being discharged. It is the latter process that occurs in the dream. Owing to the fact that it is directed by the conscious excitement, the energy from the Forec., which confronts the dream when grown to perception, restricts the unconscious excitement of the dream and renders it harmless as a disturbing factor. When the dreamer wakes up for a moment, he has actually chased away the fly that has threatened to disturb his sleep. We can now understand that it is really more expedient and economical to give full sway to the unconscious wish, and clear its way to regression so that it may form a dream, and then restrict and adjust this dream by means of a small expenditure of foreconscious labor, than to curb the unconscious throughout the entire period of sleep. We should, indeed, expect that the dream, even if it was not originally an expedient process, would have acquired some function in the play of forces of the psychic life. We now see what this function is. The dream has taken it upon itself to bring the liberated excitement of the Unc. back under the domination of the foreconscious; it thus affords relief for the excitement of the Unc. and acts as a safety-valve for the latter, and at the same time it insures the sleep of the foreconscious at a slight expenditure of the waking state. Like the other psychic formations of its group, the dream offers itself as a compromise serving simultaneously both systems by fulfilling both wishes in so far as they are compatible with each other. A glance at Robert's "elimination theory," will show that we must agree with this author in his main point, viz. in the determination of the function of the dream, though we differ from him in our hypotheses and in our treatment of the dream process. The above qualification--in so far as the two wishes are compatible with each other--contains a suggestion that there may be cases in which the function of the dream suffers shipwreck. The dream process is in the first instance admitted as a wish-fulfillment of the unconscious, but if this tentative wish-fulfillment disturbs the foreconscious to such an extent that the latter can no longer maintain its rest, the dream then breaks the compromise and fails to perform the second part of its task. It is then at once broken off, and replaced by complete wakefulness. Here, too, it is not really the fault of the dream, if, while ordinarily the guardian of sleep, it is here compelled to appear as the disturber of sleep, nor should this cause us to entertain any doubts as to its efficacy. This is not the only case in the organism in which an otherwise efficacious arrangement became inefficacious and disturbing as soon as some element is changed in the conditions of its origin; the disturbance then serves at least the new purpose of announcing the change, and calling into play against it the means of adjustment of the organism. In this connection, I naturally bear in mind the case of the anxiety dream, and in order not to have the appearance of trying to exclude this testimony against the theory of wish-fulfillment wherever I encounter it, I will attempt an explanation of the anxiety dream, at least offering some suggestions. That a psychic process developing anxiety may still be a wish-fulfillment has long ceased to impress us as a contradiction. We may explain this occurrence by the fact that the wish belongs to one system (the Unc.), while by the other system (the Forec.), this wish has been rejected and suppressed. The subjection of the Unc. by the Forec. is not complete even in perfect psychic health; the amount of this suppression shows the degree of our psychic normality. Neurotic symptoms show that there is a conflict between the two systems; the symptoms are the results of a compromise of this conflict, and they temporarily put an end to it. On the one hand, they afford the Unc. an outlet for the discharge of its excitement, and serve it as a sally port, while, on the other hand, they give the Forec. the capability of dominating the Unc. to some extent. It is highly instructive to consider, _e.g._, the significance of any hysterical phobia or of an agoraphobia. Suppose a neurotic incapable of crossing the street alone, which we would justly call a "symptom." We attempt to remove this symptom by urging him to the action which he deems himself incapable of. The result will be an attack of anxiety, just as an attack of anxiety in the street has often been the cause of establishing an agoraphobia. We thus learn that the symptom has been constituted in order to guard against the outbreak of the anxiety. The phobia is thrown before the anxiety like a fortress on the frontier. Unless we enter into the part played by the affects in these processes, which can be done here only imperfectly, we cannot continue our discussion. Let us therefore advance the proposition that the reason why the suppression of the unconscious becomes absolutely necessary is because, if the discharge of presentation should be left to itself, it would develop an affect in the Unc. which originally bore the character of pleasure, but which, since the appearance of the repression, bears the character of pain. The aim, as well as the result, of the suppression is to stop the development of this pain. The suppression extends over the unconscious ideation, because the liberation of pain might emanate from the ideation. The foundation is here laid for a very definite assumption concerning the nature of the affective development. It is regarded as a motor or secondary activity, the key to the innervation of which is located in the presentations of the Unc. Through the domination of the Forec. these presentations become, as it were, throttled and inhibited at the exit of the emotion-developing impulses. The danger, which is due to the fact that the Forec. ceases to occupy the energy, therefore consists in the fact that the unconscious excitations liberate such an affect as--in consequence of the repression that has previously taken place--can only be perceived as pain or anxiety. This danger is released through the full sway of the dream process. The determinations for its realization consist in the fact that repressions have taken place, and that the suppressed emotional wishes shall become sufficiently strong. They thus stand entirely without the psychological realm of the dream structure. Were it not for the fact that our subject is connected through just one factor, namely, the freeing of the Unc. during sleep, with the subject of the development of anxiety, I could dispense with discussion of the anxiety dream, and thus avoid all obscurities connected with it. As I have often repeated, the theory of the anxiety belongs to the psychology of the neuroses. I would say that the anxiety in the dream is an anxiety problem and not a dream problem. We have nothing further to do with it after having once demonstrated its point of contact with the subject of the dream process. There is only one thing left for me to do. As I have asserted that the neurotic anxiety originates from sexual sources, I can subject anxiety dreams to analysis in order to demonstrate the sexual material in their dream thoughts. For good reasons I refrain from citing here any of the numerous examples placed at my disposal by neurotic patients, but prefer to give anxiety dreams from young persons. Personally, I have had no real anxiety dream for decades, but I recall one from my seventh or eighth year which I subjected to interpretation about thirty years later. The dream was very vivid, and showed me _my beloved mother, with peculiarly calm sleeping countenance, carried into the room and laid on the bed by two (or three) persons with birds' beaks_. I awoke crying and screaming, and disturbed my parents. The very tall figures--draped in a peculiar manner--with beaks, I had taken from the illustrations of Philippson's bible; I believe they represented deities with heads of sparrowhawks from an Egyptian tomb relief. The analysis also introduced the reminiscence of a naughty janitor's boy, who used to play with us children on the meadow in front of the house; I would add that his name was Philip. I feel that I first heard from this boy the vulgar word signifying sexual intercourse, which is replaced among the educated by the Latin "coitus," but to which the dream distinctly alludes by the selection of the birds' heads. I must have suspected the sexual significance of the word from the facial expression of my worldly-wise teacher. My mother's features in the dream were copied from the countenance of my grandfather, whom I had seen a few days before his death snoring in the state of coma. The interpretation of the secondary elaboration in the dream must therefore have been that my mother was dying; the tomb relief, too, agrees with this. In this anxiety I awoke, and could not calm myself until I had awakened my parents. I remember that I suddenly became calm on coming face to face with my mother, as if I needed the assurance that my mother was not dead. But this secondary interpretation of the dream had been effected only under the influence of the developed anxiety. I was not frightened because I dreamed that my mother was dying, but I interpreted the dream in this manner in the foreconscious elaboration because I was already under the domination of the anxiety. The latter, however, could be traced by means of the repression to an obscure obviously sexual desire, which had found its satisfying expression in the visual content of the dream. A man twenty-seven years old who had been severely ill for a year had had many terrifying dreams between the ages of eleven and thirteen. He thought that a man with an ax was running after him; he wished to run, but felt paralyzed and could not move from the spot. This may be taken as a good example of a very common, and apparently sexually indifferent, anxiety dream. In the analysis the dreamer first thought of a story told him by his uncle, which chronologically was later than the dream, viz. that he was attacked at night by a suspicious-looking individual. This occurrence led him to believe that he himself might have already heard of a similar episode at the time of the dream. In connection with the ax he recalled that during that period of his life he once hurt his hand with an ax while chopping wood. This immediately led to his relations with his younger brother, whom he used to maltreat and knock down. In particular, he recalled an occasion when he struck his brother on the head with his boot until he bled, whereupon his mother remarked: "I fear he will kill him some day." While he was seemingly thinking of the subject of violence, a reminiscence from his ninth year suddenly occurred to him. His parents came home late and went to bed while he was feigning sleep. He soon heard panting and other noises that appeared strange to him, and he could also make out the position of his parents in bed. His further associations showed that he had established an analogy between this relation between his parents and his own relation toward his younger brother. He subsumed what occurred between his parents under the conception "violence and wrestling," and thus reached a sadistic conception of the coitus act, as often happens among children. The fact that he often noticed blood on his mother's bed corroborated his conception. That the sexual intercourse of adults appears strange to children who observe it, and arouses fear in them, I dare say is a fact of daily experience. I have explained this fear by the fact that sexual excitement is not mastered by their understanding, and is probably also inacceptable to them because their parents are involved in it. For the same son this excitement is converted into fear. At a still earlier period of life sexual emotion directed toward the parent of opposite sex does not meet with repression but finds free expression, as we have seen before. For the night terrors with hallucinations (_pavor nocturnus_) frequently found in children, I would unhesitatingly give the same explanation. Here, too, we are certainly dealing with the incomprehensible and rejected sexual feelings, which, if noted, would probably show a temporal periodicity, for an enhancement of the sexual _libido_ may just as well be produced accidentally through emotional impressions as through the spontaneous and gradual processes of development. I lack the necessary material to sustain these explanations from observation. On the other hand, the pediatrists seem to lack the point of view which alone makes comprehensible the whole series of phenomena, on the somatic as well as on the psychic side. To illustrate by a comical example how one wearing the blinders of medical mythology may miss the understanding of such cases I will relate a case which I found in a thesis on _pavor nocturnus_ by _Debacker_, 1881. A thirteen-year-old boy of delicate health began to become anxious and dreamy; his sleep became restless, and about once a week it was interrupted by an acute attack of anxiety with hallucinations. The memory of these dreams was invariably very distinct. Thus, he related that the _devil_ shouted at him: "Now we have you, now we have you," and this was followed by an odor of sulphur; the fire burned his skin. This dream aroused him, terror-stricken. He was unable to scream at first; then his voice returned, and he was heard to say distinctly: "No, no, not me; why, I have done nothing," or, "Please don't, I shall never do it again." Occasionally, also, he said: "Albert has not done that." Later he avoided undressing, because, as he said, the fire attacked him only when he was undressed. From amid these evil dreams, which menaced his health, he was sent into the country, where he recovered within a year and a half, but at the age of fifteen he once confessed: "Je n'osais pas l'avouer, mais j'éprouvais continuellement des picotements et des surexcitations aux _parties_; à la fin, cela m'énervait tant que plusieurs fois, j'ai pensé me jeter par la fenêtre au dortoir." It is certainly not difficult to suspect: 1, that the boy had practiced masturbation in former years, that he probably denied it, and was threatened with severe punishment for his wrongdoing (his confession: Je ne le ferai plus; his denial: Albert n'a jamais fait ça). 2, That under the pressure of puberty the temptation to self-abuse through the tickling of the genitals was reawakened. 3, That now, however, a struggle of repression arose in him, suppressing the _libido_ and changing it into fear, which subsequently took the form of the punishments with which he was then threatened. Let us, however, quote the conclusions drawn by our author. This observation shows: 1, That the influence of puberty may produce in a boy of delicate health a condition of extreme weakness, and that it may lead to a _very marked cerebral anæmia_. 2. This cerebral anæmia produces a transformation of character, demonomaniacal hallucinations, and very violent nocturnal, perhaps also diurnal, states of anxiety. 3. Demonomania and the self-reproaches of the day can be traced to the influences of religious education which the subject underwent as a child. 4. All manifestations disappeared as a result of a lengthy sojourn in the country, bodily exercise, and the return of physical strength after the termination of the period of puberty. 5. A predisposing influence for the origin of the cerebral condition of the boy may be attributed to heredity and to the father's chronic syphilitic state. The concluding remarks of the author read: "Nous avons fait entrer cette observation dans le cadre des délires apyrétiques d'inanition, car c'est à l'ischémie cérébrale que nous rattachons cet état particulier." VIII THE PRIMARY AND SECONDARY PROCESS--REGRESSION In venturing to attempt to penetrate more deeply into the psychology of the dream processes, I have undertaken a difficult task, to which, indeed, my power of description is hardly equal. To reproduce in description by a succession of words the simultaneousness of so complex a chain of events, and in doing so to appear unbiassed throughout the exposition, goes fairly beyond my powers. I have now to atone for the fact that I have been unable in my description of the dream psychology to follow the historic development of my views. The view-points for my conception of the dream were reached through earlier investigations in the psychology of the neuroses, to which I am not supposed to refer here, but to which I am repeatedly forced to refer, whereas I should prefer to proceed in the opposite direction, and, starting from the dream, to establish a connection with the psychology of the neuroses. I am well aware of all the inconveniences arising for the reader from this difficulty, but I know of no way to avoid them. As I am dissatisfied with this state of affairs, I am glad to dwell upon another view-point which seems to raise the value of my efforts. As has been shown in the introduction to the first chapter, I found myself confronted with a theme which had been marked by the sharpest contradictions on the part of the authorities. After our elaboration of the dream problems we found room for most of these contradictions. We have been forced, however, to take decided exception to two of the views pronounced, viz. that the dream is a senseless and that it is a somatic process; apart from these cases we have had to accept all the contradictory views in one place or another of the complicated argument, and we have been able to demonstrate that they had discovered something that was correct. That the dream continues the impulses and interests of the waking state has been quite generally confirmed through the discovery of the latent thoughts of the dream. These thoughts concern themselves only with things that seem important and of momentous interest to us. The dream never occupies itself with trifles. But we have also concurred with the contrary view, viz., that the dream gathers up the indifferent remnants from the day, and that not until it has in some measure withdrawn itself from the waking activity can an important event of the day be taken up by the dream. We found this holding true for the dream content, which gives the dream thought its changed expression by means of disfigurement. We have said that from the nature of the association mechanism the dream process more easily takes possession of recent or indifferent material which has not yet been seized by the waking mental activity; and by reason of the censor it transfers the psychic intensity from the important but also disagreeable to the indifferent material. The hypermnesia of the dream and the resort to infantile material have become main supports in our theory. In our theory of the dream we have attributed to the wish originating from the infantile the part of an indispensable motor for the formation of the dream. We naturally could not think of doubting the experimentally demonstrated significance of the objective sensory stimuli during sleep; but we have brought this material into the same relation to the dream-wish as the thought remnants from the waking activity. There was no need of disputing the fact that the dream interprets the objective sensory stimuli after the manner of an illusion; but we have supplied the motive for this interpretation which has been left undecided by the authorities. The interpretation follows in such a manner that the perceived object is rendered harmless as a sleep disturber and becomes available for the wish-fulfillment. Though we do not admit as special sources of the dream the subjective state of excitement of the sensory organs during sleep, which seems to have been demonstrated by Trumbull Ladd, we are nevertheless able to explain this excitement through the regressive revival of active memories behind the dream. A modest part in our conception has also been assigned to the inner organic sensations which are wont to be taken as the cardinal point in the explanation of the dream. These--the sensation of falling, flying, or inhibition--stand as an ever ready material to be used by the dream-work to express the dream thought as often as need arises. That the dream process is a rapid and momentary one seems to be true for the perception through consciousness of the already prepared dream content; the preceding parts of the dream process probably take a slow, fluctuating course. We have solved the riddle of the superabundant dream content compressed within the briefest moment by explaining that this is due to the appropriation of almost fully formed structures from the psychic life. That the dream is disfigured and distorted by memory we found to be correct, but not troublesome, as this is only the last manifest operation in the work of disfigurement which has been active from the beginning of the dream-work. In the bitter and seemingly irreconcilable controversy as to whether the psychic life sleeps at night or can make the same use of all its capabilities as during the day, we have been able to agree with both sides, though not fully with either. We have found proof that the dream thoughts represent a most complicated intellectual activity, employing almost every means furnished by the psychic apparatus; still it cannot be denied that these dream thoughts have originated during the day, and it is indispensable to assume that there is a sleeping state of the psychic life. Thus, even the theory of partial sleep has come into play; but the characteristics of the sleeping state have been found not in the dilapidation of the psychic connections but in the cessation of the psychic system dominating the day, arising from its desire to sleep. The withdrawal from the outer world retains its significance also for our conception; though not the only factor, it nevertheless helps the regression to make possible the representation of the dream. That we should reject the voluntary guidance of the presentation course is uncontestable; but the psychic life does not thereby become aimless, for we have seen that after the abandonment of the desired end-presentation undesired ones gain the mastery. The loose associative connection in the dream we have not only recognized, but we have placed under its control a far greater territory than could have been supposed; we have, however, found it merely the feigned substitute for another correct and senseful one. To be sure we, too, have called the dream absurd; but we have been able to learn from examples how wise the dream really is when it simulates absurdity. We do not deny any of the functions that have been attributed to the dream. That the dream relieves the mind like a valve, and that, according to Robert's assertion, all kinds of harmful material are rendered harmless through representation in the dream, not only exactly coincides with our theory of the twofold wish-fulfillment in the dream, but, in his own wording, becomes even more comprehensible for us than for Robert himself. The free indulgence of the psychic in the play of its faculties finds expression with us in the non-interference with the dream on the part of the foreconscious activity. The "return to the embryonal state of psychic life in the dream" and the observation of Havelock Ellis, "an archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect thoughts," appear to us as happy anticipations of our deductions to the effect that _primitive_ modes of work suppressed during the day participate in the formation of the dream; and with us, as with Delage, the _suppressed_ material becomes the mainspring of the dreaming. We have fully recognized the rôle which Scherner ascribes to the dream phantasy, and even his interpretation; but we have been obliged, so to speak, to conduct them to another department in the problem. It is not the dream that produces the phantasy but the unconscious phantasy that takes the greatest part in the formation of the dream thoughts. We are indebted to Scherner for his clew to the source of the dream thoughts, but almost everything that he ascribes to the dream-work is attributable to the activity of the unconscious, which is at work during the day, and which supplies incitements not only for dreams but for neurotic symptoms as well. We have had to separate the dream-work from this activity as being something entirely different and far more restricted. Finally, we have by no means abandoned the relation of the dream to mental disturbances, but, on the contrary, we have given it a more solid foundation on new ground. Thus held together by the new material of our theory as by a superior unity, we find the most varied and most contradictory conclusions of the authorities fitting into our structure; some of them are differently disposed, only a few of them are entirely rejected. But our own structure is still unfinished. For, disregarding the many obscurities which we have necessarily encountered in our advance into the darkness of psychology, we are now apparently embarrassed by a new contradiction. On the one hand, we have allowed the dream thoughts to proceed from perfectly normal mental operations, while, on the other hand, we have found among the dream thoughts a number of entirely abnormal mental processes which extend likewise to the dream contents. These, consequently, we have repeated in the interpretation of the dream. All that we have termed the "dream-work" seems so remote from the psychic processes recognized by us as correct, that the severest judgments of the authors as to the low psychic activity of dreaming seem to us well founded. Perhaps only through still further advance can enlightenment and improvement be brought about. I shall pick out one of the constellations leading to the formation of dreams. We have learned that the dream replaces a number of thoughts derived from daily life which are perfectly formed logically. We cannot therefore doubt that these thoughts originate from our normal mental life. All the qualities which we esteem in our mental operations, and which distinguish these as complicated activities of a high order, we find repeated in the dream thoughts. There is, however, no need of assuming that this mental work is performed during sleep, as this would materially impair the conception of the psychic state of sleep we have hitherto adhered to. These thoughts may just as well have originated from the day, and, unnoticed by our consciousness from their inception, they may have continued to develop until they stood complete at the onset of sleep. If we are to conclude anything from this state of affairs, it will at most prove _that the most complex mental operations are possible without the coöperation of consciousness_, which we have already learned independently from every psychoanalysis of persons suffering from hysteria or obsessions. These dream thoughts are in themselves surely not incapable of consciousness; if they have not become conscious to us during the day, this may have various reasons. The state of becoming conscious depends on the exercise of a certain psychic function, viz. attention, which seems to be extended only in a definite quantity, and which may have been withdrawn from the stream of thought in Question by other aims. Another way in which such mental streams are kept from consciousness is the following:--Our conscious reflection teaches us that when exercising attention we pursue a definite course. But if that course leads us to an idea which does not hold its own with the critic, we discontinue and cease to apply our attention. Now, apparently, the stream of thought thus started and abandoned may spin on without regaining attention unless it reaches a spot of especially marked intensity which forces the return of attention. An initial rejection, perhaps consciously brought about by the judgment on the ground of incorrectness or unfitness for the actual purpose of the mental act, may therefore account for the fact that a mental process continues until the onset of sleep unnoticed by consciousness. Let us recapitulate by saying that we call such a stream of thought a foreconscious one, that we believe it to be perfectly correct, and that it may just as well be a more neglected one or an interrupted and suppressed one. Let us also state frankly in what manner we conceive this presentation course. We believe that a certain sum of excitement, which we call occupation energy, is displaced from an end-presentation along the association paths selected by that end-presentation. A "neglected" stream of thought has received no such occupation, and from a "suppressed" or "rejected" one this occupation has been withdrawn; both have thus been left to their own emotions. The end-stream of thought stocked with energy is under certain conditions able to draw to itself the attention of consciousness, through which means it then receives a "surplus of energy." We shall be obliged somewhat later to elucidate our assumption concerning the nature and activity of consciousness. A train of thought thus incited in the Forec. may either disappear spontaneously or continue. The former issue we conceive as follows: It diffuses its energy through all the association paths emanating from it, and throws the entire chain of ideas into a state of excitement which, after lasting for a while, subsides through the transformation of the excitement requiring an outlet into dormant energy.[1] If this first issue is brought about the process has no further significance for the dream formation. But other end-presentations are lurking in our foreconscious that originate from the sources of our unconscious and from the ever active wishes. These may take possession of the excitations in the circle of thought thus left to itself, establish a connection between it and the unconscious wish, and transfer to it the energy inherent in the unconscious wish. Henceforth the neglected or suppressed train of thought is in a position to maintain itself, although this reinforcement does not help it to gain access to consciousness. We may say that the hitherto foreconscious train of thought has been drawn into the unconscious. Other constellations for the dream formation would result if the foreconscious train of thought had from the beginning been connected with the unconscious wish, and for that reason met with rejection by the dominating end-occupation; or if an unconscious wish were made active for other--possibly somatic--reasons and of its own accord sought a transference to the psychic remnants not occupied by the Forec. All three cases finally combine in one issue, so that there is established in the foreconscious a stream of thought which, having been abandoned by the foreconscious occupation, receives occupation from the unconscious wish. The stream of thought is henceforth subjected to a series of transformations which we no longer recognize as normal psychic processes and which give us a surprising result, viz. a psychopathological formation. Let us emphasize and group the same. 1. The intensities of the individual ideas become capable of discharge in their entirety, and, proceeding from one conception to the other, they thus form single presentations endowed with marked intensity. Through the repeated recurrence of this process the intensity of an entire train of ideas may ultimately be gathered in a single presentation element. This is the principle of _compression or condensation_. It is condensation that is mainly responsible for the strange impression of the dream, for we know of nothing analogous to it in the normal psychic life accessible to consciousness. We find here, also, presentations which possess great psychic significance as junctions or as end-results of whole chains of thought; but this validity does not manifest itself in any character conspicuous enough for internal perception; hence, what has been presented in it does not become in any way more intensive. In the process of condensation the entire psychic connection becomes transformed into the intensity of the presentation content. It is the same as in a book where we space or print in heavy type any word upon which particular stress is laid for the understanding of the text. In speech the same word would be pronounced loudly and deliberately and with emphasis. The first comparison leads us at once to an example taken from the chapter on "The Dream-Work" (trimethylamine in the dream of Irma's injection). Historians of art call our attention to the fact that the most ancient historical sculptures follow a similar principle in expressing the rank of the persons represented by the size of the statue. The king is made two or three times as large as his retinue or the vanquished enemy. A piece of art, however, from the Roman period makes use of more subtle means to accomplish the same purpose. The figure of the emperor is placed in the center in a firmly erect posture; special care is bestowed on the proper modelling of his figure; his enemies are seen cowering at his feet; but he is no longer represented a giant among dwarfs. However, the bowing of the subordinate to his superior in our own days is only an echo of that ancient principle of representation. The direction taken by the condensations of the dream is prescribed on the one hand by the true foreconscious relations of the dream thoughts, an the other hand by the attraction of the visual reminiscences in the unconscious. The success of the condensation work produces those intensities which are required for penetration into the perception systems. 2. Through this free transferability of the intensities, moreover, and in the service of condensation, _intermediary presentations_--compromises, as it were--are formed (_cf._ the numerous examples). This, likewise, is something unheard of in the normal presentation course, where it is above all a question of selection and retention of the "proper" presentation element. On the other hand, composite and compromise formations occur with extraordinary frequency when we are trying to find the linguistic expression for foreconscious thoughts; these are considered "slips of the tongue." 3. The presentations which transfer their intensities to one another are _very loosely connected_, and are joined together by such forms of association as are spurned in our serious thought and are utilized in the production of the effect of wit only. Among these we particularly find associations of the sound and consonance types. 4. Contradictory thoughts do not strive to eliminate one another, but remain side by side. They often unite to produce condensation _as if no contradiction_ existed, or they form compromises for which we should never forgive our thoughts, but which we frequently approve of in our actions. These are some of the most conspicuous abnormal processes to which the thoughts which have previously been rationally formed are subjected in the course of the dream-work. As the main feature of these processes we recognize the high importance attached to the fact of rendering the occupation energy mobile and capable of discharge; the content and the actual significance of the psychic elements, to which these energies adhere, become a matter of secondary importance. One might possibly think that the condensation and compromise formation is effected only in the service of regression, when occasion arises for changing thoughts into pictures. But the analysis and--still more distinctly--the synthesis of dreams which lack regression toward pictures, _e.g._ the dream "Autodidasker--Conversation with Court-Councilor N.," present the same processes of displacement and condensation as the others. Hence we cannot refuse to acknowledge that the two kinds of essentially different psychic processes participate in the formation of the dream; one forms perfectly correct dream thoughts which are equivalent to normal thoughts, while the other treats these ideas in a highly surprising and incorrect manner. The latter process we have already set apart as the dream-work proper. What have we now to advance concerning this latter psychic process? We should be unable to answer this question here if we had not penetrated considerably into the psychology of the neuroses and especially of hysteria. From this we learn that the same incorrect psychic processes--as well as others that have not been enumerated--control the formation of hysterical symptoms. In hysteria, too, we at once find a series of perfectly correct thoughts equivalent to our conscious thoughts, of whose existence, however, in this form we can learn nothing and which we can only subsequently reconstruct. If they have forced their way anywhere to our perception, we discover from the analysis of the symptom formed that these normal thoughts have been subjected to abnormal treatment and _have been transformed into the symptom by means of condensation and compromise formation, through superficial associations, under cover of contradictions, and eventually over the road of regression_. In view of the complete identity found between the peculiarities of the dream-work and of the psychic activity forming the psychoneurotic symptoms, we shall feel justified in transferring to the dream the conclusions urged upon us by hysteria. From the theory of hysteria we borrow the proposition that _such an abnormal psychic elaboration of a normal train of thought takes place only when the latter has been used for the transference of an unconscious wish which dates from the infantile life and is in a state of repression_. In accordance with this proposition we have construed the theory of the dream on the assumption that the actuating dream-wish invariably originates in the unconscious, which, as we ourselves have admitted, cannot be universally demonstrated though it cannot be refuted. But in order to explain the real meaning of the term _repression_, which we have employed so freely, we shall be obliged to make some further addition to our psychological construction. We have above elaborated the fiction of a primitive psychic apparatus, whose work is regulated by the efforts to avoid accumulation of excitement and as far as possible to maintain itself free from excitement. For this reason it was constructed after the plan of a reflex apparatus; the motility, originally the path for the inner bodily change, formed a discharging path standing at its disposal. We subsequently discussed the psychic results of a feeling of gratification, and we might at the same time have introduced the second assumption, viz. that accumulation of excitement--following certain modalities that do not concern us--is perceived as pain and sets the apparatus in motion in order to reproduce a feeling of gratification in which the diminution of the excitement is perceived as pleasure. Such a current in the apparatus which emanates from pain and strives for pleasure we call a wish. We have said that nothing but a wish is capable of setting the apparatus in motion, and that the discharge of excitement in the apparatus is regulated automatically by the perception of pleasure and pain. The first wish must have been an hallucinatory occupation of the memory for gratification. But this hallucination, unless it were maintained to the point of exhaustion, proved incapable of bringing about a cessation of the desire and consequently of securing the pleasure connected with gratification. Thus there was required a second activity--in our terminology the activity of a second system--which should not permit the memory occupation to advance to perception and therefrom to restrict the psychic forces, but should lead the excitement emanating from the craving stimulus by a devious path over the spontaneous motility which ultimately should so change the outer world as to allow the real perception of the object of gratification to take place. Thus far we have elaborated the plan of the psychic apparatus; these two systems are the germ of the Unc. and Forec, which we include in the fully developed apparatus. In order to be in a position successfully to change the outer world through the motility, there is required the accumulation of a large sum of experiences in the memory systems as well as a manifold fixation of the relations which are evoked in this memory material by different end-presentations. We now proceed further with our assumption. The manifold activity of the second system, tentatively sending forth and retracting energy, must on the one hand have full command over all memory material, but on the other hand it would be a superfluous expenditure for it to send to the individual mental paths large quantities of energy which would thus flow off to no purpose, diminishing the quantity available for the transformation of the outer world. In the interests of expediency I therefore postulate that the second system succeeds in maintaining the greater part of the occupation energy in a dormant state and in using but a small portion for the purposes of displacement. The mechanism of these processes is entirely unknown to me; any one who wishes to follow up these ideas must try to find the physical analogies and prepare the way for a demonstration of the process of motion in the stimulation of the neuron. I merely hold to the idea that the activity of the first [Greek: Psi]-system is directed _to the free outflow of the quantities of excitement_, and that the second system brings about an inhibition of this outflow through the energies emanating from it, _i.e._ it produces a _transformation into dormant energy, probably by raising the level_. I therefore assume that under the control of the second system as compared with the first, the course of the excitement is bound to entirely different mechanical conditions. After the second system has finished its tentative mental work, it removes the inhibition and congestion of the excitements and allows these excitements to flow off to the motility. An interesting train of thought now presents itself if we consider the relations of this inhibition of discharge by the second system to the regulation through the principle of pain. Let us now seek the counterpart of the primary feeling of gratification, namely, the objective feeling of fear. A perceptive stimulus acts on the primitive apparatus, becoming the source of a painful emotion. This will then be followed by irregular motor manifestations until one of these withdraws the apparatus from perception and at the same time from pain, but on the reappearance of the perception this manifestation will immediately repeat itself (perhaps as a movement of flight) until the perception has again disappeared. But there will here remain no tendency again to occupy the perception of the source of pain in the form of an hallucination or in any other form. On the contrary, there will be a tendency in the primary apparatus to abandon the painful memory picture as soon as it is in any way awakened, as the overflow of its excitement would surely produce (more precisely, begin to produce) pain. The deviation from memory, which is but a repetition of the former flight from perception, is facilitated also by the fact that, unlike perception, memory does not possess sufficient quality to excite consciousness and thereby to attract to itself new energy. This easy and regularly occurring deviation of the psychic process from the former painful memory presents to us the model and the first example of _psychic repression_. As is generally known, much of this deviation from the painful, much of the behavior of the ostrich, can be readily demonstrated even in the normal psychic life of adults. By virtue of the principle of pain the first system is therefore altogether incapable of introducing anything unpleasant into the mental associations. The system cannot do anything but wish. If this remained so the mental activity of the second system, which should have at its disposal all the memories stored up by experiences, would be hindered. But two ways are now opened: the work of the second system either frees itself completely from the principle of pain and continues its course, paying no heed to the painful reminiscence, or it contrives to occupy the painful memory in such a manner as to preclude the liberation of pain. We may reject the first possibility, as the principle of pain also manifests itself as a regulator for the emotional discharge of the second system; we are, therefore, directed to the second possibility, namely, that this system occupies a reminiscence in such a manner as to inhibit its discharge and hence, also, to inhibit the discharge comparable to a motor innervation for the development of pain. Thus from two starting points we are led to the hypothesis that occupation through the second system is at the same time an inhibition for the emotional discharge, viz. from a consideration of the principle of pain and from the principle of the smallest expenditure of innervation. Let us, however, keep to the fact--this is the key to the theory of repression--that the second system is capable of occupying an idea only when it is in position to check the development of pain emanating from it. Whatever withdraws itself from this inhibition also remains inaccessible for the second system and would soon be abandoned by virtue of the principle of pain. The inhibition of pain, however, need not be complete; it must be permitted to begin, as it indicates to the second system the nature of the memory and possibly its defective adaptation for the purpose sought by the mind. The psychic process which is admitted by the first system only I shall now call the _primary_ process; and the one resulting from the inhibition of the second system I shall call the _secondary_ process. I show by another point for what purpose the second system is obliged to correct the primary process. The primary process strives for a discharge of the excitement in order to establish a _perception_ identity with the sum of excitement thus gathered; the secondary process has abandoned this intention and undertaken instead the task of bringing about a _thought identity_. All thinking is only a circuitous path from the memory of gratification taken as an end-presentation to the identical occupation of the same memory, which is again to be attained on the track of the motor experiences. The state of thinking must take an interest in the connecting paths between the presentations without allowing itself to be misled by their intensities. But it is obvious that condensations and intermediate or compromise formations occurring in the presentations impede the attainment of this end-identity; by substituting one idea for the other they deviate from the path which otherwise would have been continued from the original idea. Such processes are therefore carefully avoided in the secondary thinking. Nor is it difficult to understand that the principle of pain also impedes the progress of the mental stream in its pursuit of the thought identity, though, indeed, it offers to the mental stream the most important points of departure. Hence the tendency of the thinking process must be to free itself more and more from exclusive adjustment by the principle of pain, and through the working of the mind to restrict the affective development to that minimum which is necessary as a signal. This refinement of the activity must have been attained through a recent over-occupation of energy brought about by consciousness. But we are aware that this refinement is seldom completely successful even in the most normal psychic life and that our thoughts ever remain accessible to falsification through the interference of the principle of pain. This, however, is not the breach in the functional efficiency of our psychic apparatus through which the thoughts forming the material of the secondary mental work are enabled to make their way into the primary psychic process--with which formula we may now describe the work leading to the dream and to the hysterical symptoms. This case of insufficiency results from the union of the two factors from the history of our evolution; one of which belongs solely to the psychic apparatus and has exerted a determining influence on the relation of the two systems, while the other operates fluctuatingly and introduces motive forces of organic origin into the psychic life. Both originate in the infantile life and result from the transformation which our psychic and somatic organism has undergone since the infantile period. When I termed one of the psychic processes in the psychic apparatus the primary process, I did so not only in consideration of the order of precedence and capability, but also as admitting the temporal relations to a share in the nomenclature. As far as our knowledge goes there is no psychic apparatus possessing only the primary process, and in so far it is a theoretic fiction; but so much is based on fact that the primary processes are present in the apparatus from the beginning, while the secondary processes develop gradually in the course of life, inhibiting and covering the primary ones, and gaining complete mastery over them perhaps only at the height of life. Owing to this retarded appearance of the secondary processes, the essence of our being, consisting in unconscious wish feelings, can neither be seized nor inhibited by the foreconscious, whose part is once for all restricted to the indication of the most suitable paths for the wish feelings originating in the unconscious. These unconscious wishes establish for all subsequent psychic efforts a compulsion to which they have to submit and which they must strive if possible to divert from its course and direct to higher aims. In consequence of this retardation of the foreconscious occupation a large sphere of the memory material remains inaccessible. Among these indestructible and unincumbered wish feelings originating from the infantile life, there are also some, the fulfillments of which have entered into a relation of contradiction to the end-presentation of the secondary thinking. The fulfillment of these wishes would no longer produce an affect of pleasure but one of pain; _and it is just this transformation of affect that constitutes the nature of what we designate as "repression," in which we recognize the infantile first step of passing adverse sentence or of rejecting through reason_. To investigate in what way and through what motive forces such a transformation can be produced constitutes the problem of repression, which we need here only skim over. It will suffice to remark that such a transformation of affect occurs in the course of development (one may think of the appearance in infantile life of disgust which was originally absent), and that it is connected with the activity of the secondary system. The memories from which the unconscious wish brings about the emotional discharge have never been accessible to the Forec., and for that reason their emotional discharge cannot be inhibited. It is just on account of this affective development that these ideas are not even now accessible to the foreconscious thoughts to which they have transferred their wishing power. On the contrary, the principle of pain comes into play, and causes the Forec. to deviate from these thoughts of transference. The latter, left to themselves, are "repressed," and thus the existence of a store of infantile memories, from the very beginning withdrawn from the Forec., becomes the preliminary condition of repression. In the most favorable case the development of pain terminates as soon as the energy has been withdrawn from the thoughts of transference in the Forec., and this effect characterizes the intervention of the principle of pain as expedient. It is different, however, if the repressed unconscious wish receives an organic enforcement which it can lend to its thoughts of transference and through which it can enable them to make an effort towards penetration with their excitement, even after they have been abandoned by the occupation of the Forec. A defensive struggle then ensues, inasmuch as the Forec. reinforces the antagonism against the repressed ideas, and subsequently this leads to a penetration by the thoughts of transference (the carriers of the unconscious wish) in some form of compromise through symptom formation. But from the moment that the suppressed thoughts are powerfully occupied by the unconscious wish-feeling and abandoned by the foreconscious occupation, they succumb to the primary psychic process and strive only for motor discharge; or, if the path be free, for hallucinatory revival of the desired perception identity. We have previously found, empirically, that the incorrect processes described are enacted only with thoughts that exist in the repression. We now grasp another part of the connection. These incorrect processes are those that are primary in the psychic apparatus; _they appear wherever thoughts abandoned by the foreconscious occupation are left to themselves, and can fill themselves with the uninhibited energy, striving for discharge from the unconscious_. We may add a few further observations to support the view that these processes designated "incorrect" are really not falsifications of the normal defective thinking, but the modes of activity of the psychic apparatus when freed from inhibition. Thus we see that the transference of the foreconscious excitement to the motility takes place according to the same processes, and that the connection of the foreconscious presentations with words readily manifest the same displacements and mixtures which are ascribed to inattention. Finally, I should like to adduce proof that an increase of work necessarily results from the inhibition of these primary courses from the fact that we gain a _comical effect_, a surplus to be discharged through laughter, _if we allow these streams of thought to come to consciousness_. The theory of the psychoneuroses asserts with complete certainty that only sexual wish-feelings from the infantile life experience repression (emotional transformation) during the developmental period of childhood. These are capable of returning to activity at a later period of development, and then have the faculty of being revived, either as a consequence of the sexual constitution, which is really formed from the original bisexuality, or in consequence of unfavorable influences of the sexual life; and they thus supply the motive power for all psychoneurotic symptom formations. It is only by the introduction of these sexual forces that the gaps still demonstrable in the theory of repression can be filled. I will leave it undecided whether the postulate of the sexual and infantile may also be asserted for the theory of the dream; I leave this here unfinished because I have already passed a step beyond the demonstrable in assuming that the dream-wish invariably originates from the unconscious.[2] Nor will I further investigate the difference in the play of the psychic forces in the dream formation and in the formation of the hysterical symptoms, for to do this we ought to possess a more explicit knowledge of one of the members to be compared. But I regard another point as important, and will here confess that it was on account of this very point that I have just undertaken this entire discussion concerning the two psychic systems, their modes of operation, and the repression. For it is now immaterial whether I have conceived the psychological relations in question with approximate correctness, or, as is easily possible in such a difficult matter, in an erroneous and fragmentary manner. Whatever changes may be made in the interpretation of the psychic censor and of the correct and of the abnormal elaboration of the dream content, the fact nevertheless remains that such processes are active in dream formation, and that essentially they show the closest analogy to the processes observed in the formation of the hysterical symptoms. The dream is not a pathological phenomenon, and it does not leave behind an enfeeblement of the mental faculties. The objection that no deduction can be drawn regarding the dreams of healthy persons from my own dreams and from those of neurotic patients may be rejected without comment. Hence, when we draw conclusions from the phenomena as to their motive forces, we recognize that the psychic mechanism made use of by the neuroses is not created by a morbid disturbance of the psychic life, but is found ready in the normal structure of the psychic apparatus. The two psychic systems, the censor crossing between them, the inhibition and the covering of the one activity by the other, the relations of both to consciousness--or whatever may offer a more correct interpretation of the actual conditions in their stead--all these belong to the normal structure of our psychic instrument, and the dream points out for us one of the roads leading to a knowledge of this structure. If, in addition to our knowledge, we wish to be contented with a minimum perfectly established, we shall say that the dream gives us proof that the _suppressed, material continues to exist even in the normal person and remains capable of psychic activity_. The dream itself is one of the manifestations of this suppressed material; theoretically, this is true in _all_ cases; according to substantial experience it is true in at least a great number of such as most conspicuously display the prominent characteristics of dream life. The suppressed psychic material, which in the waking state has been prevented from expression and cut off from internal perception _by the antagonistic adjustment of the contradictions_, finds ways and means of obtruding itself on consciousness during the night under the domination of the compromise formations. _"Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo."_ At any rate the interpretation of dreams is the _via regia_ to a knowledge of the unconscious in the psychic life. In following the analysis of the dream we have made some progress toward an understanding of the composition of this most marvelous and most mysterious of instruments; to be sure, we have not gone very far, but enough of a beginning has been made to allow us to advance from other so-called pathological formations further into the analysis of the unconscious. Disease--at least that which is justly termed functional--is not due to the destruction of this apparatus, and the establishment of new splittings in its interior; it is rather to be explained dynamically through the strengthening and weakening of the components in the play of forces by which so many activities are concealed during the normal function. We have been able to show in another place how the composition of the apparatus from the two systems permits a subtilization even of the normal activity which would be impossible for a single system. [1] _Cf._ the significant observations by J. Bueuer in our _Studies on Hysteria_, 1895, and 2nd ed. 1909. [2] Here, as in other places, there are gaps in the treatment of the subject, which I have left intentionally, because to fill them up would require on the one hand too great effort, and on the other hand an extensive reference to material that is foreign to the dream. Thus I have avoided stating whether I connect with the word "suppressed" another sense than with the word "repressed." It has been made clear only that the latter emphasizes more than the former the relation to the unconscious. I have not entered into the cognate problem why the dream thoughts also experience distortion by the censor when they abandon the progressive continuation to consciousness and choose the path of regression. I have been above all anxious to awaken an interest in the problems to which the further analysis of the dreamwork leads and to indicate the other themes which meet these on the way. It was not always easy to decide just where the pursuit should be discontinued. That I have not treated exhaustively the part played in the dream by the psychosexual life and have avoided the interpretation of dreams of an obvious sexual content is due to a special reason which may not come up to the reader's expectation. To be sure, it is very far from my ideas and the principles expressed by me in neuropathology to regard the sexual life as a "pudendum" which should be left unconsidered by the physician and the scientific investigator. I also consider ludicrous the moral indignation which prompted the translator of Artemidoros of Daldis to keep from the reader's knowledge the chapter on sexual dreams contained in the _Symbolism of the Dreams_. As for myself, I have been actuated solely by the conviction that in the explanation of sexual dreams I should be bound to entangle myself deeply in the still unexplained problems of perversion and bisexuality; and for that reason I have reserved this material for another connection. IX THE UNCONSCIOUS AND CONSCIOUSNESS--REALITY On closer inspection we find that it is not the existence of two systems near the motor end of the apparatus but of two kinds of processes or modes of emotional discharge, the assumption of which was explained in the psychological discussions of the previous chapter. This can make no difference for us, for we must always be ready to drop our auxiliary ideas whenever we deem ourselves in position to replace them by something else approaching more closely to the unknown reality. Let us now try to correct some views which might be erroneously formed as long as we regarded the two systems in the crudest and most obvious sense as two localities within the psychic apparatus, views which have left their traces in the terms "repression" and "penetration." Thus, when we say that an unconscious idea strives for transference into the foreconscious in order later to penetrate consciousness, we do not mean that a second idea is to be formed situated in a new locality like an interlineation near which the original continues to remain; also, when we speak of penetration into consciousness, we wish carefully to avoid any idea of change of locality. When we say that a foreconscious idea is repressed and subsequently taken up by the unconscious, we might be tempted by these figures, borrowed from the idea of a struggle over a territory, to assume that an arrangement is really broken up in one psychic locality and replaced by a new one in the other locality. For these comparisons we substitute what would seem to correspond better with the real state of affairs by saying that an energy occupation is displaced to or withdrawn from a certain arrangement so that the psychic formation falls under the domination of a system or is withdrawn from the same. Here again we replace a topical mode of presentation by a dynamic; it is not the psychic formation that appears to us as the moving factor but the innervation of the same. I deem it appropriate and justifiable, however, to apply ourselves still further to the illustrative conception of the two systems. We shall avoid any misapplication of this manner of representation if we remember that presentations, thoughts, and psychic formations should generally not be localized in the organic elements of the nervous system, but, so to speak, between them, where resistances and paths form the correlate corresponding to them. Everything that can become an object of our internal perception is virtual, like the image in the telescope produced by the passage of the rays of light. But we are justified in assuming the existence of the systems, which have nothing psychic in themselves and which never become accessible to our psychic perception, corresponding to the lenses of the telescope which design the image. If we continue this comparison, we may say that the censor between two systems corresponds to the refraction of rays during their passage into a new medium. Thus far we have made psychology on our own responsibility; it is now time to examine the theoretical opinions governing present-day psychology and to test their relation to our theories. The question of the unconscious, in psychology is, according to the authoritative words of Lipps, less a psychological question than the question of psychology. As long as psychology settled this question with the verbal explanation that the "psychic" is the "conscious" and that "unconscious psychic occurrences" are an obvious contradiction, a psychological estimate of the observations gained by the physician from abnormal mental states was precluded. The physician and the philosopher agree only when both acknowledge that unconscious psychic processes are "the appropriate and well-justified expression for an established fact." The physician cannot but reject with a shrug of his shoulders the assertion that "consciousness is the indispensable quality of the psychic"; he may assume, if his respect for the utterings of the philosophers still be strong enough, that he and they do not treat the same subject and do not pursue the same science. For a single intelligent observation of the psychic life of a neurotic, a single analysis of a dream must force upon him the unalterable conviction that the most complicated and correct mental operations, to which no one will refuse the name of psychic occurrences, may take place without exciting the consciousness of the person. It is true that the physician does not learn of these unconscious processes until they have exerted such an effect on consciousness as to admit communication or observation. But this effect of consciousness may show a psychic character widely differing from the unconscious process, so that the internal perception cannot possibly recognize the one as a substitute for the other. The physician must reserve for himself the right to penetrate, by a process of deduction, from the effect on consciousness to the unconscious psychic process; he learns in this way that the effect on consciousness is only a remote psychic product of the unconscious process and that the latter has not become conscious as such; that it has been in existence and operative without betraying itself in any way to consciousness. A reaction from the over-estimation of the quality of consciousness becomes the indispensable preliminary condition for any correct insight into the behavior of the psychic. In the words of Lipps, the unconscious must be accepted as the general basis of the psychic life. The unconscious is the larger circle which includes within itself the smaller circle of the conscious; everything conscious has its preliminary step in the unconscious, whereas the unconscious may stop with this step and still claim full value as a psychic activity. Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; _its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs_. A series of dream problems which have intensely occupied older authors will be laid aside when the old opposition between conscious life and dream life is abandoned and the unconscious psychic assigned to its proper place. Thus many of the activities whose performances in the dream have excited our admiration are now no longer to be attributed to the dream but to unconscious thinking, which is also active during the day. If, according to Scherner, the dream seems to play with a symboling representation of the body, we know that this is the work of certain unconscious phantasies which have probably given in to sexual emotions, and that these phantasies come to expression not only in dreams but also in hysterical phobias and in other symptoms. If the dream continues and settles activities of the day and even brings to light valuable inspirations, we have only to subtract from it the dream disguise as a feat of dream-work and a mark of assistance from obscure forces in the depth of the mind (_cf._ the devil in Tartini's sonata dream). The intellectual task as such must be attributed to the same psychic forces which perform all such tasks during the day. We are probably far too much inclined to over-estimate the conscious character even of intellectual and artistic productions. From the communications of some of the most highly productive persons, such as Goethe and Helmholtz, we learn, indeed, that the most essential and original parts in their creations came to them in the form of inspirations and reached their perceptions almost finished. There is nothing strange about the assistance of the conscious activity in other cases where there was a concerted effort of all the psychic forces. But it is a much abused privilege of the conscious activity that it is allowed to hide from us all other activities wherever it participates. It will hardly be worth while to take up the historical significance of dreams as a special subject. Where, for instance, a chieftain has been urged through a dream to engage in a bold undertaking the success of which has had the effect of changing history, a new problem results only so long as the dream, regarded as a strange power, is contrasted with other more familiar psychic forces; the problem, however, disappears when we regard the dream as a form of expression for feelings which are burdened with resistance during the day and which can receive reinforcements at night from deep emotional sources. But the great respect shown by the ancients for the dream is based on a correct psychological surmise. It is a homage paid to the unsubdued and indestructible in the human mind, and to the demoniacal which furnishes the dream-wish and which we find again in our unconscious. Not inadvisedly do I use the expression "in our unconscious," for what we so designate does not coincide with the unconscious of the philosophers, nor with the unconscious of Lipps. In the latter uses it is intended to designate only the opposite of conscious. That there are also unconscious psychic processes beside the conscious ones is the hotly contested and energetically defended issue. Lipps gives us the more far-reaching theory that everything psychic exists as unconscious, but that some of it may exist also as conscious. But it was not to prove this theory that we have adduced the phenomena of the dream and of the hysterical symptom formation; the observation of normal life alone suffices to establish its correctness beyond any doubt. The new fact that we have learned from the analysis of the psychopathological formations, and indeed from their first member, viz. dreams, is that the unconscious--hence the psychic--occurs as a function of two separate systems and that it occurs as such even in normal psychic life. Consequently there are two kinds of unconscious, which we do not as yet find distinguished by the psychologists. Both are unconscious in the psychological sense; but in our sense the first, which we call Unc., is likewise incapable of consciousness, whereas the second we term "Forec." because its emotions, after the observance of certain rules, can reach consciousness, perhaps not before they have again undergone censorship, but still regardless of the Unc. system. The fact that in order to attain consciousness the emotions must traverse an unalterable series of events or succession of instances, as is betrayed through their alteration by the censor, has helped us to draw a comparison from spatiality. We described the relations of the two systems to each other and to consciousness by saying that the system Forec. is like a screen between the system Unc. and consciousness. The system Forec. not only bars access to consciousness, but also controls the entrance to voluntary motility and is capable of sending out a sum of mobile energy, a portion of which is familiar to us as attention. We must also steer clear of the distinctions superconscious and subconscious which have found so much favor in the more recent literature on the psychoneuroses, for just such a distinction seems to emphasize the equivalence of the psychic and the conscious. What part now remains in our description of the once all-powerful and all-overshadowing consciousness? None other than that of a sensory organ for the perception of psychic qualities. According to the fundamental idea of schematic undertaking we can conceive the conscious perception only as the particular activity of an independent system for which the abbreviated designation "Cons." commends itself. This system we conceive to be similar in its mechanical characteristics to the perception system P, hence excitable by qualities and incapable of retaining the trace of changes, _i.e._ it is devoid of memory. The psychic apparatus which, with the sensory organs of the P-system, is turned to the outer world, is itself the outer world for the sensory organ of Cons.; the teleological justification of which rests on this relationship. We are here once more confronted with the principle of the succession of instances which seems to dominate the structure of the apparatus. The material under excitement flows to the Cons, sensory organ from two sides, firstly from the P-system whose excitement, qualitatively determined, probably experiences a new elaboration until it comes to conscious perception; and, secondly, from the interior of the apparatus itself, the quantitative processes of which are perceived as a qualitative series of pleasure and pain as soon as they have undergone certain changes. The philosophers, who have learned that correct and highly complicated thought structures are possible even without the coöperation of consciousness, have found it difficult to attribute any function to consciousness; it has appeared to them a superfluous mirroring of the perfected psychic process. The analogy of our Cons. system with the systems of perception relieves us of this embarrassment. We see that perception through our sensory organs results in directing the occupation of attention to those paths on which the incoming sensory excitement is diffused; the qualitative excitement of the P-system serves the mobile quantity of the psychic apparatus as a regulator for its discharge. We may claim the same function for the overlying sensory organ of the Cons. system. By assuming new qualities, it furnishes a new contribution toward the guidance and suitable distribution of the mobile occupation quantities. By means of the perceptions of pleasure and pain, it influences the course of the occupations within the psychic apparatus, which normally operates unconsciously and through the displacement of quantities. It is probable that the principle of pain first regulates the displacements of occupation automatically, but it is quite possible that the consciousness of these qualities adds a second and more subtle regulation which may even oppose the first and perfect the working capacity of the apparatus by placing it in a position contrary to its original design for occupying and developing even that which is connected with the liberation of pain. We learn from neuropsychology that an important part in the functional activity of the apparatus is attributed to such regulations through the qualitative excitation of the sensory organs. The automatic control of the primary principle of pain and the restriction of mental capacity connected with it are broken by the sensible regulations, which in their turn are again automatisms. We learn that the repression which, though originally expedient, terminates nevertheless in a harmful rejection of inhibition and of psychic domination, is so much more easily accomplished with reminiscences than with perceptions, because in the former there is no increase in occupation through the excitement of the psychic sensory organs. When an idea to be rejected has once failed to become conscious because it has succumbed to repression, it can be repressed on other occasions only because it has been withdrawn from conscious perception on other grounds. These are hints employed by therapy in order to bring about a retrogression of accomplished repressions. The value of the over-occupation which is produced by the regulating influence of the Cons. sensory organ on the mobile quantity, is demonstrated in the teleological connection by nothing more clearly than by the creation of a new series of qualities and consequently a new regulation which constitutes the precedence of man over the animals. For the mental processes are in themselves devoid of quality except for the excitements of pleasure and pain accompanying them, which, as we know, are to be held in check as possible disturbances of thought. In order to endow them with a quality, they are associated in man with verbal memories, the qualitative remnants of which suffice to draw upon them the attention of consciousness which in turn endows thought with a new mobile energy. The manifold problems of consciousness in their entirety can be examined only through an analysis of the hysterical mental process. From this analysis we receive the impression that the transition from the foreconscious to the occupation of consciousness is also connected with a censorship similar to the one between the Unc. and the Forec. This censorship, too, begins to act only with the reaching of a certain quantitative degree, so that few intense thought formations escape it. Every possible case of detention from consciousness, as well as of penetration to consciousness, under restriction is found included within the picture of the psychoneurotic phenomena; every case points to the intimate and twofold connection between the censor and consciousness. I shall conclude these psychological discussions with the report of two such occurrences. On the occasion of a consultation a few years ago the subject was an intelligent and innocent-looking girl. Her attire was strange; whereas a woman's garb is usually groomed to the last fold, she had one of her stockings hanging down and two of her waist buttons opened. She complained of pains in one of her legs, and exposed her leg unrequested. Her chief complaint, however, was in her own words as follows: She had a feeling in her body as if something was stuck into it which moved to and fro and made her tremble through and through. This sometimes made her whole body stiff. On hearing this, my colleague in consultation looked at me; the complaint was quite plain to him. To both of us it seemed peculiar that the patient's mother thought nothing of the matter; of course she herself must have been repeatedly in the situation described by her child. As for the girl, she had no idea of the import of her words or she would never have allowed them to pass her lips. Here the censor had been deceived so successfully that under the mask of an innocent complaint a phantasy was admitted to consciousness which otherwise would have remained in the foreconscious. Another example: I began the psychoanalytic treatment of a boy of fourteen years who was suffering from _tic convulsif_, hysterical vomiting, headache, &c., by assuring him that, after closing his eyes, he would see pictures or have ideas, which I requested him to communicate to me. He answered by describing pictures. The last impression he had received before coming to me was visually revived in his memory. He had played a game of checkers with his uncle, and now saw the checkerboard before him. He commented on various positions that were favorable or unfavorable, on moves that were not safe to make. He then saw a dagger lying on the checker-board, an object belonging to his father, but transferred to the checker-board by his phantasy. Then a sickle was lying on the board; next a scythe was added; and, finally, he beheld the likeness of an old peasant mowing the grass in front of the boy's distant parental home. A few days later I discovered the meaning of this series of pictures. Disagreeable family relations had made the boy nervous. It was the case of a strict and crabbed father who lived unhappily with his mother, and whose educational methods consisted in threats; of the separation of his father from his tender and delicate mother, and the remarrying of his father, who one day brought home a young woman as his new mamma. The illness of the fourteen-year-old boy broke out a few days later. It was the suppressed anger against his father that had composed these pictures into intelligible allusions. The material was furnished by a reminiscence from mythology, The sickle was the one with which Zeus castrated his father; the scythe and the likeness of the peasant represented Kronos, the violent old man who eats his children and upon whom Zeus wreaks vengeance in so unfilial a manner. The marriage of the father gave the boy an opportunity to return the reproaches and threats of his father--which had previously been made because the child played with his genitals (the checkerboard; the prohibitive moves; the dagger with which a person may be killed). We have here long repressed memories and their unconscious remnants which, under the guise of senseless pictures have slipped into consciousness by devious paths left open to them. I should then expect to find the theoretical value of the study of dreams in its contribution to psychological knowledge and in its preparation for an understanding of neuroses. Who can foresee the importance of a thorough knowledge of the structure and activities of the psychic apparatus when even our present state of knowledge produces a happy therapeutic influence in the curable forms of the psychoneuroses? What about the practical value of such study some one may ask, for psychic knowledge and for the discovering of the secret peculiarities of individual character? Have not the unconscious feelings revealed by the dream the value of real forces in the psychic life? Should we take lightly the ethical significance of the suppressed wishes which, as they now create dreams, may some day create other things? I do not feel justified in answering these questions. I have not thought further upon this side of the dream problem. I believe, however, that at all events the Roman Emperor was in the wrong who ordered one of his subjects executed because the latter dreamt that he had killed the Emperor. He should first have endeavored to discover the significance of the dream; most probably it was not what it seemed to be. And even if a dream of different content had the significance of this offense against majesty, it would still have been in place to remember the words of Plato, that the virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life. I am therefore of the opinion that it is best to accord freedom to dreams. Whether any reality is to be attributed to the unconscious wishes, and in what sense, I am not prepared to say offhand. Reality must naturally be denied to all transition--and intermediate thoughts. If we had before us the unconscious wishes, brought to their last and truest expression, we should still do well to remember that more than one single form of existence must be ascribed to the psychic reality. Action and the conscious expression of thought mostly suffice for the practical need of judging a man's character. Action, above all, merits to be placed in the first rank; for many of the impulses penetrating consciousness are neutralized by real forces of the psychic life before they are converted into action; indeed, the reason why they frequently do not encounter any psychic obstacle on their way is because the unconscious is certain of their meeting with resistances later. In any case it is instructive to become familiar with the much raked-up soil from which our virtues proudly arise. For the complication of human character moving dynamically in all directions very rarely accommodates itself to adjustment through a simple alternative, as our antiquated moral philosophy would have it. And how about the value of the dream for a knowledge of the future? That, of course, we cannot consider. One feels inclined to substitute: "for a knowledge of the past." For the dream originates from the past in every sense. To be sure the ancient belief that the dream reveals the future is not entirely devoid of truth. By representing to us a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer as present, has been formed into the likeness of that past by the indestructible wish. 
20654	----	FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS by D. H. LAWRENCE New York Thomas Seltzer 1922 Copyright, 1922, by Thomas Seltzer, Inc. CONTENTS CHAPTER FOREWORD I. INTRODUCTION II. THE HOLY FAMILY III. PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON IV. TREES AND BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS V. THE FIVE SENSES VI. FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND VII. FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION VIII. EDUCATION AND SEX IN MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD IX. THE BIRTH OF SEX X. PARENT LOVE XI. THE VICIOUS CIRCLE XII. LITANY OF EXHORTATIONS XIII. COSMOLOGICAL XIV. SLEEP AND DREAMS XV. THE LOWER SELF EPILOGUE FOREWORD The present book is a continuation from "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious." The generality of readers had better just leave it alone. The generality of critics likewise. I really don't want to convince anybody. It is quite in opposition to my whole nature. I don't intend my books for the generality of readers. I count it a mistake of our mistaken democracy, that every man who can read print is allowed to believe that he can read all that is printed. I count it a misfortune that serious books are exposed in the public market, like slaves exposed naked for sale. But there we are, since we live in an age of mistaken democracy, we must go through with it. I warn the generality of readers, that this present book will seem to them only a rather more revolting mass of wordy nonsense than the last. I would warn the generality of critics to throw it in the waste paper basket without more ado. As for the limited few, in whom one must perforce find an answerer, I may as well say straight off that I stick to the solar plexus. That statement alone, I hope, will thin their numbers considerably. Finally, to the remnants of a remainder, in order to apologize for the sudden lurch into cosmology, or cosmogony, in this book, I wish to say that the whole thing hangs inevitably together. I am not a scientist. I am an amateur of amateurs. As one of my critics said, you either believe or you don't. I am not a proper archæologist nor an anthropologist nor an ethnologist. I am no "scholar" of any sort. But I am very grateful to scholars for their sound work. I have found hints, suggestions for what I say here in all kinds of scholarly books, from the Yoga and Plato and St. John the Evangel and the early Greek philosophers like Herakleitos down to Fraser and his "Golden Bough," and even Freud and Frobenius. Even then I only remember hints--and I proceed by intuition. This leaves you quite free to dismiss the whole wordy mass of revolting nonsense, without a qualm. Only let me say, that to my mind there is a great field of science which is as yet quite closed to us. I refer to the science which proceeds in terms of life and is established on data of living experience and of sure intuition. Call it subjective science if you like. Our objective science of modern knowledge concerns itself only with phenomena, and with phenomena as regarded in their cause-and-effect relationship. I have nothing to say against our science. It is perfect as far as it goes. But to regard it as exhausting the whole scope of human possibility in knowledge seems to me just puerile. Our science is a science of the dead world. Even biology never considers life, but only mechanistic functioning and apparatus of life. I honestly think that the great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece were the last living terms, the great pagan world which preceded our own era once, had a vast and perhaps perfect science of its own, a science in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magic and charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles. I believe that this great science previous to ours and quite different in constitution and nature from our science once was universal, established all over the then-existing globe. I believe it was esoteric, invested in a large priesthood. Just as mathematics and mechanics and physics are defined and expounded in the same way in the universities of China or Bolivia or London or Moscow to-day, so, it seems to me, in the great world previous to ours a great science and cosmology were taught esoterically in all countries of the globe, Asia, Polynesia, America, Atlantis and Europe. Belt's suggestion of the geographical nature of this previous world seems to me most interesting. In the period which geologists call the Glacial Period, the waters of the earth must have been gathered up in a vast body on the higher places of our globe, vast worlds of ice. And the sea-beds of to-day must have been comparatively dry. So that the Azores rose up mountainous from the plain of Atlantis, where the Atlantic now washes, and the Easter Isles and the Marquesas and the rest rose lofty from the marvelous great continent of the Pacific. In that world men lived and taught and knew, and were in one complete correspondence over all the earth. Men wandered back and forth from Atlantis to the Polynesian Continent as men now sail from Europe to America. The interchange was complete, and knowledge, science was universal over the earth, cosmopolitan as it is to-day. Then came the melting of the glaciers, and the world flood. The refugees from the drowned continents fled to the high places of America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Isles. And some degenerated naturally into cave men, neolithic and paleolithic creatures, and some retained their marvelous innate beauty and life-perfection, as the South Sea Islanders, and some wandered savage in Africa, and some, like Druids or Etruscans or Chaldeans or Amerindians or Chinese, refused to forget, but taught the old wisdom, only in its half-forgotten, symbolic forms. More or less forgotten, as knowledge: remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth-story. And so, the intense potency of symbols is part at least memory. And so it is that all the great symbols and myths which dominate the world when our history first begins, are very much the same in every country and every people, the great myths all relate to one another. And so it is that these myths now begin to hypnotize us again, our own impulse towards our own scientific way of understanding being almost spent. And so, besides myths, we find the same mathematic figures, cosmic graphs which remain among the aboriginal peoples in all continents, mystic figures and signs whose true cosmic or scientific significance is lost, yet which continue in use for purposes of conjuring or divining. If my reader finds this bosh and abracadabra, all right for him. Only I have no more regard for his little crowings on his own little dunghill. Myself, I am not so sure that I am one of the one-and-onlies. I like the wide world of centuries and vast ages--mammoth worlds beyond our day, and mankind so wonderful in his distances, his history that has no beginning yet always the pomp and the magnificence of human splendor unfolding through the earth's changing periods. Floods and fire and convulsions and ice-arrest intervene between the great glamorous civilizations of mankind. But nothing will ever quench humanity and the human potentiality to evolve something magnificent out of a renewed chaos. I do not believe in evolution, but in the strangeness and rainbow-change of ever-renewed creative civilizations. So much, then, for my claim to remarkable discoveries. I believe I am only trying to stammer out the first terms of a forgotten knowledge. But I have no desire to revive dead kings, or dead sages. It is not for me to arrange fossils, and decipher hieroglyphic phrases. I couldn't do it if I wanted to. But then I can do something else. The soul must take the hint from the relics our scientists have so marvelously gathered out of the forgotten past, and from the hint develop a new living utterance. The spark is from dead wisdom, but the fire is life. And as an example--a very simple one--of how a scientist of the most innocent modern sort may hint at truths which, when stated, he would laugh at as fantastic nonsense, let us quote a word from the already old-fashioned "Golden Bough." "It must have appeared to the ancient Aryan that the sun was periodically recruited from the fire which resided in the sacred oak." Exactly. The fire which resided in the Tree of Life. That is, life itself. So we must read: "It must have appeared to the ancient Aryan that the sun was periodically recruited from life."--Which is what the early Greek philosophers were always saying. And which still seems to me the real truth, the clue to the cosmos. Instead of life being drawn from the sun, it is the emanation from life itself, that is, from all the living plants and creatures which nourish the sun. Of course, my dear critic, the ancient Aryans were just doddering--the old duffers: or babbling, the babes. But as for me, I have some respect for my ancestors, and believe they had more up their sleeve than just the marvel of the unborn me. One last weary little word. This pseudo-philosophy of mine--"pollyanalytics," as one of my respected critics might say--is deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. The novels and poems come unwatched out of one's pen. And then the absolute need which one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one's experiences as a writer and as a man. The novels and poems are pure passionate experience. These "pollyanalytics" are inferences made afterwards, from the experience. And finally, it seems to me that even art is utterly dependent on philosophy: or if you prefer it, on a metaphysic. The metaphysic or philosophy may not be anywhere very accurately stated and may be quite unconscious, in the artist, yet it is a metaphysic that governs men at the time, and is by all men more or less comprehended, and lived. Men live and see according to some gradually developing and gradually withering vision. This vision exists also as a dynamic idea or metaphysic--exists first as such. Then it is unfolded into life and art. Our vision, our belief, our metaphysic is wearing woefully thin, and the art is wearing absolutely threadbare. We have no future; neither for our hopes nor our aims nor our art. It has all gone gray and opaque. We've got to rip the old veil of a vision across, and find what the heart really believes in, after all: and what the heart really wants, for the next future. And we've got to put it down in terms of belief and of knowledge. And then go forward again, to the fulfillment in life and art. Rip the veil of the old vision across, and walk through the rent. And if I try to do this--well, why not? If I try to write down what I see--why not? If a publisher likes to print the book--all right. And if anybody wants to read it, let him. But why anybody should read one single word if he doesn't want to, I don't see. Unless of course he is a critic who needs to scribble a dollar's worth of words, no matter how. TAORMINA October 8, 1921 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Let us start by making a little apology to Psychoanalysis. It wasn't fair to jeer at the psychoanalytic unconscious; or perhaps it _was_ fair to jeer at the psychoanalytic unconscious, which is truly a negative quantity and an unpleasant menagerie. What was really not fair was to jeer at Psychoanalysis as if Freud had invented and described nothing but an unconscious, in all his theory. The unconscious is not, of course, the clue to the Freudian theory. The real clue is sex. A sexual motive is to be attributed to all human activity. Now this is going too far. We are bound to admit than an element of sex enters into all human activity. But so does an element of greed, and of many other things. We are bound to admit that into all human relationships, particularly adult human relationships, a large element of sex enters. We are thankful that Freud has insisted on this. We are thankful that Freud pulled us somewhat to earth, out of all our clouds of superfineness. What Freud says is always _partly_ true. And half a loaf is better than no bread. But really, there is the other half of the loaf. All is _not_ sex. And a sexual motive is _not_ to be attributed to all human activities. We know it, without need to argue. Sex surely has a specific meaning. Sex means the being divided into male and female; and the magnetic desire or impulse which puts male apart from female, in a negative or sundering magnetism, but which also draws male and female together in a long and infinitely varied approach towards the critical act of coition. Sex without the consummating act of coition is never quite sex, in human relationships: just as a eunuch is never quite a man. That is to say, the act of coition is the essential clue to sex. Now does all life work up to the one consummating act of coition? In one direction, it does, and it would be better if psychoanalysis plainly said so. In one direction, all life works up to the one supreme moment of coition. Let us all admit it, sincerely. But we are not confined to one direction only, or to one exclusive consummation. Was the building of the cathedrals a working up towards the act of coition? Was the dynamic impulse sexual? No. The sexual element was present, and important. But not predominant. The same in the building of the Panama Canal. The sexual impulse, in its widest form, was a very great impulse towards the building of the Panama Canal. But there was something else, of even higher importance, and greater dynamic power. And what is this other, greater impulse? It is the desire of the human male to build a world: not "to build a world for you, dear"; but to build up out of his own self and his own belief and his own effort something wonderful. Not merely something useful. Something wonderful. Even the Panama Canal would never have been built _simply_ to let ships through. It is the pure disinterested craving of the human male to make something wonderful, out of his own head and his own self, and his own soul's faith and delight, which starts everything going. This is the prime motivity. And the motivity of sex is subsidiary to this: often directly antagonistic. That is, the essentially religious or creative motive is the first motive for all human activity. The sexual motive comes second. And there is a great conflict between the interests of the two, at all times. What we want to do, is to trace the creative or religious motive to its source in the human being, keeping in mind always the near relationship between the religious motive and the sexual. The two great impulses are like man and wife, or father and son. It is no use putting one under the feet of the other. The great desire to-day is to deny the religious impulse altogether, or else to assert its absolute alienity from the sexual impulse. The orthodox religious world says faugh! to sex. Whereupon we thank Freud for giving them tit for tat. But the orthodox scientific world says fie! to the religious impulse. The scientist wants to discover a cause for everything. And there is no cause for the religious impulse. Freud is with the scientists. Jung dodges from his university gown into a priest's surplice till we don't know where we are. We prefer Freud's _Sex_ to Jung's _Libido_ or Bergson's _Elan Vital_. Sex has at least _some_ definite reference, though when Freud makes sex accountable for everything he as good as makes it accountable for nothing. We refuse any _Cause_, whether it be Sex or Libido or Elan Vital or ether or unit of force or _perpetuum mobile_ or anything else. But also we feel that we cannot, like Moses, perish on the top of our present ideal Pisgah, or take the next step into thin air. There we are, at the top of our Pisgah of ideals, crying _Excelsior_ and trying to clamber up into the clouds: that is, if we are idealists with the religious impulse rampant in our breasts. If we are scientists we practice aeroplane flying or eugenics or disarmament or something equally absurd. The promised land, if it be anywhere, lies away beneath our feet. No more prancing upwards. No more uplift. No more little Excelsiors crying world-brotherhood and international love and Leagues of Nations. Idealism and materialism amount to the same thing on top of Pisgah, and the space is _very_ crowded. We're all cornered on our mountain top, climbing up one another and standing on one another's faces in our scream of Excelsior. To your tents, O Israel! Brethren, let us go down. We will descend. The way to our precious Canaan lies obviously downhill. An end of uplift. Downhill to the land of milk and honey. The blood will soon be flowing faster than either, but we can't help that. We can't help it if Canaan has blood in its veins, instead of pure milk and honey. If it is a question of origins, the origin is always the same, whatever we say about it. So is the cause. Let that be a comfort to us. If we want to talk about God, well, we can please ourselves. God has been talked about quite a lot, and He doesn't seem to mind. Why we should take it so personally is a problem. Likewise if we wish to have a tea party with the atom, let us: or with the wriggling little unit of energy, or the ether, or the Libido, or the Elan Vital, or any other Cause. Only don't let us have sex for tea. We've all got too much of it under the table; and really, for my part, I prefer to keep mine there, no matter what the Freudians say about me. But it is tiring to go to any more tea parties with the Origin, or the Cause, or even the Lord. Let us pronounce the mystic Om, from the pit of the stomach, and proceed. There's not a shadow of doubt about it, the First Cause is just unknowable to us, and we'd be sorry if it wasn't. Whether it's God or the Atom. All I say is Om! The first business of every faith is to declare its ignorance. I don't know where I come from--nor where I exit to. I don't know the origins of life nor the goal of death. I don't know how the two parent cells which are my biological origin became the me which I am. I don't in the least know what those two parent cells were. The chemical analysis is just a farce, and my father and mother were just vehicles. And yet, I must say, since I've got to know about the two cells, I'm glad I do know. The Moses of Science and the Aaron of Idealism have got the whole bunch of us here on top of Pisgah. It's a tight squeeze, and we'll be falling very, very foul of one another in five minutes, unless some of us climb down. But before leaving our eminence let us have a look round, and get our bearings. They say that way lies the New Jerusalem of universal love: and over there the happy valley of indulgent Pragmatism: and there, quite near, is the chirpy land of the Vitalists: and in those dark groves the home of successful Analysis, surnamed Psycho: and over those blue hills the Supermen are prancing about, though you can't see them. And there is Besantheim, and there is Eddyhowe, and there, on that queer little tableland, is Wilsonia, and just round the corner is Rabindranathopolis.... But Lord, I can't see anything. Help me, heaven, to a telescope, for I see blank nothing. I'm not going to try any more. I'm going to sit down on my posterior and sluther full speed down this Pisgah, even if it cost me my trouser seat. So ho!--away we go. In the beginning--there never was any beginning, but let it pass. We've got to make a start somehow. In the very beginning of all things, time and space and cosmos and being, in the beginning of all these was a little living creature. But I don't know even if it was little. In the beginning was a living creature, its plasm quivering and its life-pulse throbbing. This little creature died, as little creatures always do. But not before it had had young ones. When the daddy creature died, it fell to pieces. And that was the beginning of the cosmos. Its little body fell down to a speck of dust, which the young ones clung to because they must cling to something. Its little breath flew asunder, the hotness and brightness of the little beast--I beg your pardon, I mean the radiant energy from the corpse flew away to the right hand, and seemed to shine warm in the air, while the clammy energy from the body flew away to the left hand, and seemed dark and cold. And so, the first little master was dead and done for, and instead of his little living body there was a speck of dust in the middle, which became the earth, and on the right hand was a brightness which became the sun, rampaging with all the energy that had come out of the dead little master, and on the left hand a darkness which felt like an unrisen moon. And that was how the Lord created the world. Except that I know nothing about the Lord, so I shouldn't mention it. But I forgot the soul of the little master. It probably did a bit of flying as well--and then came back to the young ones. It seems most natural that way. Which is my account of the Creation. And I mean by it, that Life is not and never was anything but living creatures. That's what life is and will be just living creatures, no matter how large you make the capital L. Out of living creatures the material cosmos was made: out of the death of living creatures, when their little living bodies fell dead and fell asunder into all sorts of matter and forces and energies, sun, moons, stars and worlds. So you got the universe. Where you got the living creature from, that first one, don't ask me. He was just there. But he was a little person with a soul of his own. He wasn't Life with a capital L. If you don't believe me, then don't. I'll even give you a little song to sing. "If it be not true to me What care I how true it be . ." That's the kind of man I really like, chirping his insouciance. And I chirp back: "Though it be not true to thee It's gay and gospel truth to me. . ." The living live, and then die. They pass away, as we know, to dust and to oxygen and nitrogen and so on. But what we don't know, and what we might perhaps know a little more, is how they pass away direct into life itself--that is, direct into the living. That is, how many dead souls fly over our untidiness like swallows and build under the eaves of the living. How many dead souls, like swallows, twitter and breed thoughts and instincts under the thatch of my hair and the eaves of my forehead, I don't know. But I believe a good many. And I hope they have a good time. And I hope not too many are bats. I am sorry to say I believe in the souls of the dead. I am almost ashamed to say, that I believe the souls of the dead in some way reënter and pervade the souls of the living: so that life is always the life of living creatures, and death is always our affair. This bit, I admit, is bordering on mysticism. I'm sorry, because I don't like mysticism. It has no trousers and no trousers seat: _n'a pas de quoi_. And I should feel so uncomfortable if I put my hand behind me and felt an absolute blank. Meanwhile a long, thin, brown caterpillar keeps on pretending to be a dead thin beech-twig, on a little bough at my feet. He had got his hind feet and his fore feet on the twig, and his body looped up like an arch in the air between, when a fly walked up the twig and began to mount the arch of the imitator, not having the least idea that it was on a gentleman's coat-tails. The caterpillar shook his stern, and the fly made off as if it had seen a ghost. The dead twig and the live twig now remain equally motionless, enjoying their different ways. And when, with this very pencil, I push the head of the caterpillar off from the twig, he remains on his tail, arched forward in air, and oscillating unhappily, like some tiny pendulum ticking. Ticking, ticking in mid-air, arched away from his planted tail. Till at last, after a long minute and a half, he touches the twig again, and subsides into twigginess. The only thing is, the dead beech-twig can't pretend to be a wagging caterpillar. Yet how the two commune! However--we have our exits and our entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts. More than he dreams of, poor darling. And I am entirely at a loss for a moral! Well, then, we are born. I suppose that's a safe statement. And we become at once conscious, if we weren't so before. _Nem con._ And our little baby body is a little functioning organism, a little developing machine or instrument or organ, and our little baby mind begins to stir with all our wonderful psychical beginnings. And so we are in bud. But it won't do. It is too much of a Pisgah sight. We overlook too much. _Descendez, cher Moïse. Vous voyez trop loin._ You see too far all at once, dear Moses. Too much of a bird's-eye view across the Promised Land to the shore. Come down, and walk across, old fellow. And you won't see all that milk and honey and grapes the size of duck's eggs. All the dear little budding infant with its tender virginal mind and various clouds of glory instead of a napkin. Not at all, my dear chap. No such luck of a promised land. Climb down, Pisgah, and go to Jericho. _Allons_, there is no road yet, but we are all Aarons with rods of our own. CHAPTER II THE HOLY FAMILY We are all very pleased with Mr. Einstein for knocking that eternal axis out of the universe. The universe isn't a spinning wheel. It is a cloud of bees flying and veering round. Thank goodness for that, for we were getting drunk on the spinning wheel. So that now the universe has escaped from the pin which was pushed through it, like an impaled fly vainly buzzing: now that the multiple universe flies its own complicated course quite free, and hasn't got any hub, we can hope also to escape. We won't be pinned down, either. We have no one law that governs us. For me there is only one law: _I am I._ And that isn't a law, it's just a remark. One is one, but one is not all alone. There are other stars buzzing in the center of their own isolation. And there is no straight path between them. There is no straight path between you and me, dear reader, so don't blame me if my words fly like dust into your eyes and grit between your teeth, instead of like music into your ears. I am I, but also you are you, and we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity. We need it much more than the universe does. The stars know how to prowl round one another without much damage done. But you and I, dear reader, in the first conviction that you are me and that I am you, owing to the oneness of mankind, why, we are always falling foul of one another, and chewing each other's fur. You are _not_ me, dear reader, so make no pretentions to it. Don't get alarmed if _I_ say things. It isn't your sacred mouth which is opening and shutting. As for the profanation of your sacred ears, just apply a little theory of relativity, and realize that what I say is not what you hear, but something uttered in the midst of my isolation, and arriving strangely changed and travel-worn down the long curve of your own individual circumambient atmosphere. I may say Bob, but heaven alone knows what the goose hears. And you may be sure that a red rag is, to a bull, something far more mysterious and complicated than a socialist's necktie. So I hope now I have put you in your place, dear reader. Sit you like Watts' Hope on your own little blue globe, and I'll sit on mine, and we won't bump into one another if we can help it. You can twang your old hopeful lyre. It may be music to you, so I don't blame you. It is a terrible wowing in my ears. But that may be something in my individual atmosphere; some strange deflection as your music crosses the space between us. Certainly I never hear the concert of World Regeneration and Hope Revived Again without getting a sort of lock-jaw, my teeth go so keen on edge from the twanging harmony. Still, the world-regenerators may _really_ be quite excellent performers on their own jews'-harps. Blame the edginess of my teeth. Now I am going to launch words into space so mind your cosmic eye. As I said in my small but naturally immortal book, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious," there's more in it than meets the eye. There's more in you, dear reader, than meets the eye. What, don't you believe it? Do you think you're as obvious as a poached egg on a piece of toast, like the poor lunatic? Not a bit of it, dear reader. You've got a solar plexus, and a lumbar ganglion not far from your liver, and I'm going to tell everybody. Nothing brings a man home to himself like telling everybody. And I _will_ drive you home to yourself, do you hear? You've been poaching in my private atmospheric grounds long enough, identifying yourself with me and me with everybody. A nice row there'd be in heaven if Aldebaran caught Sirius by the tail and said, "Look here, you're not to look so green, you damm dog-star! It's an offense against star-regulations." Which reminds me that the Arabs say the shooting stars, meteorites, are starry stones which the angels fling at the poaching demons whom they catch sight of prowling too near the palisades of heaven. I must say I like Arab angels. My heaven would coruscate like a catherine wheel, with white-hot star-stones. Away, you dog, you prowling cur.--Got him under the left ear-hole, Gabriel--! See him, see him, Michael? That hopeful blue devil! Land him one! Biff on your bottom, you hoper. But I wish the Arabs wouldn't entice me, or you, dear reader, provoke me to this. I feel with you, dear reader, as I do with a deaf-man when he pushes his vulcanite ear, his listening machine, towards my mouth. I want to shout down the telephone ear-hole all kinds of improper things, to see what effect they will have on the stupid dear face at the end of the coil of wire. After all, words must be very different after they've trickled round and round a long wire coil. Whatever becomes of them! And I, who am a bit deaf myself, and may in the end have a deaf-machine to poke at my friends, it ill becomes me to be so unkind, yet that's how I feel. So there we are. Help me to be serious, dear reader. In that little book, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious," I tried rather wistfully to convince you, dear reader, that you had a solar plexus and a lumbar ganglion and a few other things. I don't know why I took the trouble. If a fellow doesn't believe he's got a nose, the best way to convince him is gently to waft a little pepper into his nostrils. And there was I painting my own nose purple, and wistfully inviting you to look and believe. No more, though. You've got first and foremost a solar plexus, dear reader; and the solar plexus is a great nerve center which lies behind your stomach. I can't be accused of impropriety or untruth, because any book of science or medicine which deals with the nerve-system of the human body will show it to you quite plainly. So don't wriggle or try to look spiritual. Because, willy-nilly, you've got a solar plexus, dear reader, among other things. I'm writing a good sound science book, which there's no gainsaying. Now, your solar plexus, most gentle of readers, is where you are you. It is your first and greatest and deepest center of consciousness. If you want to know _how_ conscious and _when_ conscious, I must refer you to that little book, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious." At your solar plexus you are primarily conscious: there, behind you stomach. There you have the profound and pristine conscious awareness that you are you. Don't say you haven't. I know you have. You might as well try to deny the nose on your face. There is your first and deepest seat of awareness. There you are triumphantly aware of your own individual existence in the universe. Absolutely there is the keep and central stronghold of your triumphantly-conscious self. There you _are_, and you know it. So stick out your tummy gaily, my dear, with a _Me voilà_. With a _Here I am!_ With an _Ecco mi!_ With a _Da bin ich!_ There you are, dearie. But not only a triumphant awareness that _There you are_. An exultant awareness also that outside this quiet gate, this navel, lies a whole universe on which you can lay tribute. Aha--at birth you closed the central gate for ever. Too dangerous to leave it open. Too near the quick. But there are other gates. There are eyes and mouths and ears and nostrils, besides the two lower gates of the passionate body, and the closed but not locked gates of the breasts. Many gates. And besides the actual gates, the marvelous wireless communication between the great center and the surrounding or contiguous world. Authorized science tells you that this first great plexus, this all-potent nerve-center of consciousness and dynamic life-activity is a sympathetic center. From the solar plexus as from your castle-keep you look around and see the fair lands smiling, the corn and fruit and cattle of your increase, the cottages of your dependents and the halls of your beloveds. From the solar plexus you know that all the world is yours, and all is goodly. This is the great center, where in the womb, your life first sparkled in individuality. This is the center that drew the gestating maternal blood-stream upon you, in the nine-months lurking, drew it on you for your increase. This is the center whence the navel-string broke, but where the invisible string of dynamic consciousness, like a dark electric current connecting you with the rest of life, will never break until you die and depart from corporate individuality. They say, by the way, that doctors now perform a little operation on the born baby, so that no more navel shows. No more belly-buttons, dear reader! Lucky I caught you this generation, before the doctors had saved your appearances. Yet, _caro mio_, whether it shows or not, there you once had immediate connection with the maternal blood-stream. And, because the male nucleus which derived from the father still lies sparkling and potent within the solar plexus, therefore that great nerve-center of you, still has immediate knowledge of your father, a subtler but still vital connection. We call it the tie of blood. So be it. It is a tie of blood. But much more definite than we imagine. For true it is that the one bright male germ which went to your begetting was drawn from the blood of the father. And true it is that that same bright male germ lies unquenched and unquenchable at the center of you, within the famous solar plexus. And furthermore true is it that this unquenched father-spark within you sends forth vibrations and dark currents of vital activity all the time; connecting direct with your father. You will never be able to get away from it while you live. The connection with the mother may be more obvious. Is there not your ostensible navel, where the rupture between you and her took place? But because the mother-child relation is more plausible and flagrant, is that any reason for supposing it deeper, more vital, more intrinsic? Not a bit. Because if the large parent mother-germ still lives and acts vividly and mysteriously in the great fused nucleus of your solar plexus, does the smaller, brilliant male-spark that derived from your father act any less vividly? By no means. It is different--it is less ostensible. It may be even in magnitude smaller. But it may be even more vivid, even more intrinsic. So beware how you deny the father-quick of yourself. You may be denying the most intrinsic quick of all. In the same way it follows that, since brothers and sisters have the same father and mother, therefore in every brother and sister there is a direct communication such as can never happen between strangers. The parent nuclei do not die within the new nucleus. They remain there, marvelous naked sparkling dynamic life-centers, nodes, well-heads of vivid life itself. Therefore in every individual the parent nuclei live, and give direction connection, blood connection we call it, with the rest of the family. It _is_ blood connection. For the fecundating nuclei are the very spark-essence of the blood. And while life lives the parent nuclei maintain their own centrality and dynamic effectiveness within the solar plexus of the child. So that every individual has mother and father both sparkling within himself. But this is rather a preliminary truth than an intrinsic truth. The intrinsic truth of every individual is the new unit of unique individuality which emanates from the fusion of the parent nuclei. This is the incalculable and intangible Holy Ghost each time--each individual his own Holy Ghost. When, at the moment of conception, the two parent nuclei fuse to form a new unit of life, then takes place the great mystery of creation. A new individual appears--not the result of the fusion merely. Something more. The quality of individuality cannot be derived. The new individual, in his singleness of self, is a perfectly new whole. He is not a permutation and combination of old elements, transferred through the parents. No, he is something underived and utterly unprecedented, unique, a new soul. This quality of pure individuality is, however, only the one supreme quality. It consummates all other qualities, but does not consume them. All the others are there, all the time. And only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them. "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" But this does not alter the fact that within him lives the mother-quick and the father-quick, and that though in his wholeness he is rapt away beyond the old mother-father connections, they are still there within him, consummated but not consumed. Nor does it alter the fact that very few people surpass their parents nowadays, and attain any individuality beyond them. Most men are half-born slaves: the little soul they are born with just atrophies, and merely the organism emanates, the new self, the new soul, the new swells into manhood, like big potatoes. So there we are. But considering man at his best, he is at the start faced with the great problem. At the very start he has to undertake his tripartite being, the mother within him, the father within him, and the Holy Ghost, the self which he is supposed to consummate, and which mostly he doesn't. And there it is, a hard physiological fact. At the moment of our conception, the father nucleus fuses with the mother nucleus, and the wonder emanates, the new self, the new soul, the new individual cell. But in the new individual cell the father-germ and the mother-germ do not relinquish their identity. There they remain still, incorporated and never extinguished. And so, the blood-stream of race is one stream, for ever. But the moment the mystery of pure individual newness ceased to be enacted and fulfilled, the blood-stream would dry up and be finished. Mankind would die out. Let us go back then to the solar plexus. There sparkle the included mother-germ and father-germ, giving us direct, immediate blood-bonds, family connection. The connection is as direct and as subtle as between the Marconi stations, two great wireless stations. A family, if you like, is a group of wireless stations, all adjusted to the same, or very much the same vibration. All the time they quiver with the interchange, there is one long endless flow of vitalistic communication between members of one family, a long, strange _rapport_, a sort of life-unison. It is a ripple of life through many bodies as through one body. But all the time there is the jolt, the rupture of individualism, the individual asserting himself beyond all ties or claims. The highest goal for every man is the goal of pure individual being. But it is a goal you cannot reach by the mere rupture of all ties. A child isn't born by being torn from the womb. When it is born by natural process that is rupture enough. But even then the ties are not broken. They are only subtilized. From the solar plexus first of all pass the great vitalistic communications between child and parents, the first interplay of primal, pre-mental knowledge and sympathy. It is a great subtle interplay, and from this interplay the child is built up, body and psyche. Impelled from the primal conscious center in the abdomen, the child seeks the mother, seeks the breast, opens a blind mouth and gropes for the nipple. Not mentally directed and yet certainly directed. Directed from the dark pre-mind center of the solar plexus. From this center the child seeks, the mother knows. Hence the true mindlessness of the pristine, healthy mother. She does not need to think, mentally to know. She knows so profoundly and actively at the great abdominal life-center. But if the child thus seeks the mother, does it then know the mother alone? To an infant the mother is the whole universe. Yet the child needs more than the mother. It needs as well the presence of men, the vibration from the present body of the man. There may not be any actual, palpable connection. But from the great voluntary center in the man pass unknowable communications and unreliable nourishment of the stream of manly blood, rays which we cannot see, and which so far we have refused to know, but none the less essential, quickening dark rays which pass from the great dark abdominal life-center in the father to the corresponding center in the child. And these rays, these vibrations, are not like the mother-vibrations. Far, far from it. They do not need the actual contact, the handling and the caressing. On the contrary, the true male instinct is to avoid physical contact with a baby. It may not need even actual presence. But present or absent, there should be between the baby and the father that strange, intangible communication, that strange pull and circuit such as the magnetic pole exercises upon a needle, a vitalistic pull and flow which lays all the life-plasm of the baby into the line of vital quickening, strength, knowing. And any lack of this vital circuit, this vital interchange between father and child, man and child, means an inevitable impoverishment to the infant. The child exists in the interplay of two great life-waves, the womanly and the male. In appearance, the mother is everything. In truth, the father has actively very little part. It does not matter much if he hardly sees his child. Yet see it he should, sometimes, and touch it sometimes, and renew with it the connection, the life-circuit, not allow it to lapse, and so vitally starve his child. But remember, dear reader, please, that there is not the slightest need for you to believe me, or even read me. Remember, it's just your own affair. Don't implicate me. CHAPTER III PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON The primal consciousness in man is pre-mental, and has nothing to do with cognition. It is the same as in the animals. And this pre-mental consciousness remains as long as we live the powerful root and body of our consciousness. The mind is but the last flower, the _cul de sac_. The first seat of our primal consciousnesses the solar plexus, the great nerve-center situated behind the stomach. From this center we are first dynamically conscious. For the primal consciousness is always dynamic, and never, like mental consciousness, static. Thought, let us say what we will about its magic powers, is instrumental only, the soul's finest instrument for the business of living. Thought is just a means to action and living. But life and action take rise actually at the great centers of dynamic consciousness. The solar plexus, the greatest and most important center of our dynamic consciousness, is a sympathetic center. At this main center of your first-mind we know as we can never mentally know. Primarily we know, each man, each living creature knows, profoundly and satisfactorily and without question, that _I am I._ This root of all knowledge and being is established in the solar plexus; it is dynamic, pre-mental knowledge, such as cannot be transferred into thought. Do not ask me to transfer the pre-mental dynamic knowledge into thought. It cannot be done. The knowledge that _I am I_ can never be thought: only known. This being the very first term of our life-knowledge, a knowledge established physically and psychically the moment the two parent nuclei fused, at the moment of the conception, it remains integral as a piece of knowledge in every subsequent nucleus derived from this one original. But yet the original nucleus, formed from the two parent nuclei at our conception, remains always primal and central, and is always the original fount and home of the first and supreme knowledge that _I am I._ This original nucleus is embodied in the solar plexus. But the original nucleus divides. The first division, as science knows, is a division of recoil. From the perfect oneing of the two parent nuclei in the egg-cell results a recoil or new assertion. That which was perfect _one_ now divides again, and in the recoil becomes again two. This second nucleus, the nucleus born of recoil, is the nuclear origin of all the great nuclei of the voluntary system, which are the nuclei of assertive individualism. And it remains central in the adult human body as it was in the egg-cell. In the adult human body the first nucleus of independence, first-born from the great original nucleus of our conception, lies always established in the lumbar ganglion. Here we have our positive center of independence, in a multifarious universe. At the solar plexus, the dynamic knowledge is this, that _I am I._ The solar plexus is the center of all the sympathetic system. The great prime knowledge is sympathetic in nature. I am I, in vital centrality. I am I, the vital center of all things. I am I, the clew to the whole. All is one with me. It is the one identity. But at the lumbar ganglion, which is the center of separate identity, the knowledge is of a different mode, though the term is the same. At the lumbar ganglion I know that I am I, in distinction from a whole universe, which is not as I am. This is the first tremendous flash of knowledge of singleness and separate identity. I am I, not because I am at one with all the universe, but because I am other than all the universe. It is my distinction from all the rest of things which makes me myself. Because I am set utterly apart and distinguished from all that is the rest of the universe, therefore _I am I._ And this root of our knowledge in separateness lies rooted all the time in the lumbar ganglion. It is the second term of our dynamic psychic existence. It is from the great sympathetic center of the solar plexus that the child rejoices in the mother and in its own blissful centrality, its unison with the as yet unknown universe. Look at the pictures of Madonna and Child, and you will even _see_ it. It is from this center that it draws all things unto itself, winningly, drawing love for the soul, and actively drawing in milk. The same center controls the great intake of love and of milk, of psychic and of physical nourishment. And it is from the great voluntary center of the lumbar ganglion that the child asserts its distinction from the mother, the single identity of its own existence, and its power over its surroundings. From this center issues the violent little pride and lustiness which kicks with glee, or crows with tiny exultance in its own being, or which claws the breast with a savage little rapacity, and an incipient masterfulness of which every mother is aware. This incipient mastery, this sheer joy of a young thing in its own single existence, the marvelous playfulness of early youth, and the roguish mockery of the mother's love, as well as the bursts of temper and rage, all belong to infancy. And all this flashes spontaneously, _must_ flash spontaneously from the first great center of independence, the powerful lumbar ganglion, great dynamic center of all the voluntary system, of all the spirit of pride and joy in independent existence. And it is from this center too that the milk is urged away down the infant bowels, urged away towards excretion. The motion is the same, but here it applies to the material, not to the vital relation. It is from the lumbar ganglion that the dynamic vibrations are emitted which thrill from the stomach and bowels, and promote the excremental function of digestion. It is the solar plexus which controls the assimilatory function in digestion. So, in the first division of the egg-cell is set up the first plane of psychic and physical life, remaining radically the same throughout the whole existence of the individual. The two original nuclei of the egg-cell remain the same two original nuclei within the corpus of the adult individual. Their psychic and their physical dynamic is the same in the solar plexus and lumbar ganglion as in the two nuclei of the egg-cell. The first great division in the egg remains always the same, the unchanging great division in the psychic and the physical structure; the unchanging great division in knowledge and function. It is a division into polarized duality, psychical and physical, of the human being. It is the great vertical division of the egg-cell, and of the nature of man. Then, this division having taken place, there is a new thrill of conjunction or collision between the divided nuclei, and at once the second birth takes place. The two nuclei now split horizontally. There is a horizontal division across the whole egg-cell, and the nuclei are now four, two above, and two below. But those below retain their original nature, those above are new in nature. And those above correspond again to those below. In the developed child, the great horizontal division of the egg-cell, resulting in four nuclei, this remains the same. The horizontal division-wall is the diaphragm. The two upper nuclei are the two great nerve-centers, the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion. We have again a sympathetic center primal in activity and knowledge, and a corresponding voluntary center. In the center of the breast, the cardiac plexus acts as the great sympathetic mode of new dynamic activity, new dynamic consciousness. And near the spine, by the wall of the shoulders, the thoracic ganglion acts as the powerful voluntary center of separateness and power, in the same vertical line as the lumbar ganglion, but horizontally so different. Now we must change our whole feeling. We must put off the deep way of understanding which belongs to the lower body of our nature, and transfer ourselves into the upper plane, where being and functioning are different. At the cardiac plexus, there in the center of the breast, we have now a new great sun of knowledge and being. Here there is no more of self. Here there is no longer the dark, exultant knowledge that _I am I._ A change has come. Here I know no more of myself. Here I am not. Here I only know the delightful revelation that you are you. The wonder is no longer within me, my own dark, centrifugal, exultant self. The wonder is without me. The wonder is outside me. And I can no longer exult and know myself the dark, central sun of the universe. Now I look with wonder, with tenderness, with joyful yearning towards that which is outside me, beyond me, not me. Behold, that which was once negative has now become the only positive. The other being is now the great positive reality, I myself am as nothing. Positivity has changed places. If we want to see the portrayed look, then we must turn to the North, to the fair, wondering, blue-eyed infants of the Northern masters. They seem so frail, so innocent and wondering, touching outwards to the mystery. They are not the same as the Southern child, nor the opposite. Their whole life mystery is different. Instead of consummating all things within themselves, as the dark little Southern infants do, the Northern Jesus-children reach out delicate little hands of wondering innocence towards delicate, flower-reverential mothers. Compare a Botticelli Madonna, with all her wounded and abnegating sensuality, with a Hans Memling Madonna, whose soul is pure and only reverential. Beyond me is the mystery and the glory, says the Northern mother: let me have no self, let me only seek that which is all-pure, all-wonderful. But the Southern mother says: This is mine, this is mine, this is my child, my wonder, my master, my lord, my scourge, my own. From the cardiac plexus the child goes forth in bliss. It seeks the revelation of the unknown. It wonderingly seeks the mother. It opens its small hands and spreads its small fingers to touch her. And bliss, bliss, bliss, it meets the wonder in mid-air and in mid-space it finds the loveliness of the mother's face. It opens and shuts its little fingers with bliss, it laughs the wonderful, selfless laugh of pure baby-bliss, in the first ecstasy of finding all its treasure, groping upon it and finding it in the dark. It opens wide, child-wide eyes to see, to see. But it cannot see. It is puzzled, it wrinkles its face. But when the mother puts her face quite near, and laughs and coos, then the baby trembles with an ecstasy of love. The glamour, the wonder, the treasure beyond. The great uplift of rapture. All this surges from that first center of the breast, the sun of the breast, the cardiac plexus. And from the same center acts the great function of the heart and breath. Ah, the aspiration, the aspiration, like a hope, like a yearning constant and unfailing with which we take in breath. When we breathe, when we take in breath, it is not as when we take in food. When we breathe in we aspire, we yearn towards the heaven of air and light. And when the heart dilates to draw in the stream of dark blood, it opens its arms as to a beloved. It dilates with reverent joy, as a host opening his doors to an honored guest, whom he delights to serve: opening his doors to the wonder which comes to him from beyond, and without which he were nothing. So it is that our heart dilates, our lungs expand. They are bidden by that great and mysterious impulse from the cardiac plexus, which bids them seek the mystery and the fulfillment of the beyond. They seek the beyond, the air of the sky, the hot blood from the dark under-world. And so we live. And then, they relax, they contract. They are driven by the opposite motion from the powerful voluntary center of the thoracic ganglion.. That which was drawn in, was invited, is now relinquished, allowed to go forth, negatively. Not positively dismissed, but relinquished. There is a wonderful complementary duality between the voluntary and the sympathetic activity on the same plane. But between the two planes, upper and lower, there is a further dualism, still more startling, perhaps. Between the dark, glowing first term of knowledge at the solar plexus: _I am I, all is one in me_; and the first term of volitional knowledge: _I am myself, and these others are not as I am_;--there is a world of difference. But when the world changes again, and on the upper plane we realize the wonder of other things, the difference is almost shattering. The thoracic ganglion is a ganglion of power. When the child in its delicate bliss seeks the mother and finds her and is added on to her, then it fulfills itself in the great upper sympathetic mode. But then it relinquishes her. It ceases to be aware of her. And if she tries to force its love to play upon her again, like light revealing her to herself, then the child turns away. Or it will lie, and look at her with the strange, odd, curious look of knowledge, like a little imp who is spying her out. This is the curious look that many mothers cannot bear. Involuntarily it arouses a sort of hate in them--the look of scrutinizing curiosity, apart, and as it were studying, balancing them up. Yet it is a look which comes into every child's eyes. It is the reaction of the great voluntary plexus between the shoulders. The mother is suddenly set apart, as an object of curiosity, coldly, sometimes dreamily, sometimes puzzled, sometimes mockingly observed. Again, if a mother neglect her child, it cries, it weeps for her love and attention. Its pitiful lament is one of the forms of compulsion from the upper center. This insistence on pity, on love, is quite different from the rageous weeping, which is compulsion from the lower center, below the diaphragm. Again, some children just drop everything they can lay hands on over the edge of their crib, or their table. They drop everything out of sight. And then they look up with a curious look of negative triumph. This is again a form of recoil from the upper center, the obliteration of the thing which is outside. And here a child is acting quite differently from the child who joyously _smashes_. The desire to smash comes from the lower centers. We can quite well recognize the will exerted from the lower center. We call it headstrong temper and masterfulness. But the peculiar will of the upper center--the sort of nervous, critical objectivity, the deliberate forcing of sympathy, the play upon pity and tenderness, the plaintive bullying of love, or the benevolent bullying of love--these we don't care to recognize. They are the extravagance of spiritual _will_. But in its true harmony the thoracic ganglion is a center of happier activity: of real, eager curiosity, of the delightful desire to pick things to pieces, and the desire to put them together again, the desire to "find out," and the desire to invent: all this arises on the upper plane, at the volitional center of the thoracic ganglion. CHAPTER IV TREES AND BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS Oh, damn the miserable baby with its complicated ping-pong table of an unconscious. I'm sure, dear reader, you'd rather have to listen to the brat howling in its crib than to me expounding its plexuses. As for "mixing those babies up," I'd mix him up like a shot if I'd anything to mix him with. Unfortunately he's my own anatomical specimen of a pickled rabbit, so there's nothing to be done with the bits. But he gets on my nerves. I come out solemnly with a pencil and an exercise book, and take my seat in all gravity at the foot of a large fir-tree, and wait for thoughts to come, gnawing like a squirrel on a nut. But the nut's hollow. I think there are too many trees. They seem to crowd round and stare at me, and I feel as if they nudged one another when I'm not looking. I can _feel_ them standing there. And they won't let me get on about the baby this morning. Just their cussedness. I felt they encouraged me like a harem of wonderful silent wives, yesterday. It is half rainy too--the wood so damp and still and so secret, in the remote morning air. Morning, with rain in the sky, and the forest subtly brooding, and me feeling no bigger than a pea-bug between the roots of my fir. The trees seem so much bigger than me, so much stronger in life, prowling silent around. I seem to feel them moving and thinking and prowling, and they overwhelm me. Ah, well, the only thing is to give way to them. It is the edge of the Black Forest--sometimes the Rhine far off, on its Rhine plain, like a bit of magnesium ribbon. But not to-day. To-day only trees, and leaves, and vegetable presences. Huge straight fir-trees, and big beech-trees sending rivers of roots into the ground. And cuckoos, like noise falling in drops off the leaves. And me, a fool, sitting by a grassy wood-road with a pencil and a book, hoping to write more about that baby. Never mind. I listen again for noises, and I smell the damp moss. The looming trees, so straight. And I listen for their silence. Big, tall-bodied trees, with a certain magnificent cruelty about them. Or barbarity. I don't know why I should say cruelty. Their magnificent, strong, round bodies! It almost seems I can hear the slow, powerful sap drumming in their trunks. Great full-blooded trees, with strange tree-blood in them, soundlessly drumming. Trees that have no hands and faces, no eyes. Yet the powerful sap-scented blood roaring up the great columns. A vast individual life, and an overshadowing will. The will of a tree. Something that frightens you. Suppose you want to look a tree in the face? You can't. It hasn't got a face. You look at the strong body of a trunk: you look above you into the matted body-hair of twigs and boughs: you see the soft green tips. But there are no eyes to look into, you can't meet its gaze. You keep on looking at it in part and parcel. It's no good looking at a tree, to know it. The only thing is to sit among the roots and nestle against its strong trunk, and not bother. That's how I write all about these planes and plexuses, between the toes of a tree, forgetting myself against the great ankle of the trunk. And then, as a rule, as a squirrel is stroked into its wickedness by the faceless magic of a tree, so am I usually stroked into forgetfulness, and into scribbling this book. My tree-book, really. I come so well to understand tree-worship. All the old Aryans worshiped the tree. My ancestors. The tree of life. The tree of knowledge. Well, one is bound to sprout out some time or other, chip of the old Aryan block. I can so well understand tree-worship. And fear the deepest motive. Naturally. This marvelous vast individual without a face, without lips or eyes or heart. This towering creature that never had a face. Here am I between his toes like a pea-bug, and him noiselessly over-reaching me. And I feel his great blood-jet surging. And he has no eyes. But he turns two ways. He thrusts himself tremendously down to the middle earth, where dead men sink in darkness, in the damp, dense under-soil, and he turns himself about in high air. Whereas we have eyes on one side of our head only, and only grow upwards. Plunging himself down into the black humus, with a root's gushing zest, where we can only rot dead; and his tips in high air, where we can only look up to. So vast and powerful and exultant in his two directions. And all the time, he has no face, no thought: only a huge, savage, thoughtless soul. Where does he even keep his soul?--Where does anybody? A huge, plunging, tremendous soul. I would like to be a tree for a while. The great lust of roots. Root-lust. And no mind at all. He towers, and I sit and feel safe. I like to feel him towering round me. I used to be afraid. I used to fear their lust, their rushing black lust. But now I like it, I worship it. I always felt them huge primeval enemies. But now they are my only shelter and strength. I lose myself among the trees. I am so glad to be with them in their silent, intent passion, and their great lust. They feed my soul. But I can understand that Jesus was crucified on a tree. And I can so well understand the Romans, their terror of the bristling Hercynian wood. Yet when you look from a height down upon the rolling of the forest--this Black Forest--it is as suave as a rolling, oily sea. Inside only, it bristles horrific. And it terrified the Romans. The Romans! They too seem very near. Nearer than Hindenburg or Foch or even Napoleon. When I look across the Rhine plain, it is Rome, and the legionaries of the Rhine that my soul notices. It must have been wonderful to come from South Italy to the shores of this sea-like forest: this dark, moist forest, with its enormously powerful intensity of tree life. Now I know, coming myself from rock-dry Sicily, open to the day. The Romans and the Greeks found everything human. Everything had a face, and a human voice. Men spoke, and their fountains piped an answer. But when the legions crossed the Rhine they found a vast impenetrable life which had no voice. They met the faceless silence of the Black Forest. This huge, huge wood did not answer when they called. Its silence was too crude and massive. And the soldiers shrank: shrank before the trees that had no faces, and no answer. A vast array of non-human life, darkly self-sufficient, and bristling with indomitable energy. The Hercynian wood, not to be fathomed. The enormous power of these collective trees, stronger in their somber life even than Rome. No wonder the soldiers were terrified. No wonder they thrilled with horror when, deep in the woods, they found the skulls and trophies of their dead comrades upon the trees. The trees had devoured them: silently, in mouthfuls, and left the white bones. Bones of the mindful Romans--and savage, preconscious trees, indomitable. The true German has something of the sap of trees in his veins even now: and a sort of pristine savageness, like trees, helpless, but most powerful, under all his mentality. He is a tree-soul, and his gods are not human. His instinct still is to nail skulls and trophies to the sacred tree, deep in the forest. The tree of life and death, tree of good and evil, tree of abstraction and of immense, mindless life; tree of everything except the spirit, spirituality. But after bone-dry Sicily, and after the gibbering of myriad people all rattling their personalities, I am glad to be with the profound indifference of faceless trees. Their rudimentariness cannot know why we care for the things we care for. They have no faces, no minds and bowels: only deep, lustful roots stretching in earth, and vast, lissome life in air, and primeval individuality. You can sacrifice the whole of your spirituality on their altar still. You can nail your skull on their limbs. They have no skulls, no minds nor faces, they can't make eyes of love at you. Their vast life dispenses with all this. But they will live you down. The normal life of one of these big trees is about a hundred years. So the Herr Baron told me. One of the few places that my soul will haunt, when I am dead, will be this. Among the trees here near Ebersteinburg, where I have been alone and written this book. I can't leave these trees. They have taken some of my soul. * * * * * Excuse my digression, gentle reader. At first I left it out, thinking we might not see wood for trees. But it doesn't much matter what we see. It's nice just to look round, anywhere. So there are two planes of being and consciousness and two modes of relation and of function. We will call the lower plane the sensual, the upper the spiritual. The terms may be unwise, but we can think of no other. Please read that again, dear reader; you'll be a bit dazzled, coming out of the wood. It is obvious that from the time a child is born, or conceived, it has a permanent relation with the outer universe, relation in the two modes, not one mode only. There are two ways of love, two ways of activity and independence. And there needs some sort of equilibrium between the two modes. In the same way, in physical function there is eating and drinking, and excrementation, on the lower plane and respiration and heartbeat on the upper plane. Now the equilibrium to be established is fourfold. There must be a true equilibrium between what we eat and what we reject again by excretion: likewise between the systole and diastole of the heart, the inspiration and expiration of our breathing. Suffice to say the equilibrium is never quite perfect. Most people are either too fat or too thin, too hot or too cold, too slow or too quick. There is no such thing as an _actual_ norm, a living norm. A norm is merely an abstraction, not a reality. The same on the psychical plane. We either love too much, or impose our will too much, are too spiritual or too sensual. There is not and cannot be any actual norm of human conduct. All depends, first, on the unknown inward need within the very nuclear centers of the individual himself, and secondly on his circumstance. Some men _must_ be too spiritual, some _must_ be too sensual. Some _must_ be too sympathetic, and some _must_ be too proud. We have no desire to say what men _ought_ to be. We only wish to say there are all kinds of ways of being, and there is no such thing as human perfection. No man can be anything more than just himself, in genuine living relation to all his surroundings. But that which _I_ am, when I am myself, will certainly be anathema to those who hate individual integrity, and want to swarm. And that which I, being myself, am in myself, may make the hair bristle with rage on a man who is also himself, but very different from me. Then let it bristle. And if mine bristle back again, then let us, if we must, fly at one another like two enraged men. It is how it should be. We've got to learn to live from the center of our own responsibility only, and let other people do the same. To return to the child, however, and his development on his two planes of consciousness. There is all the time a direct dynamic connection between child and mother, child and father also, from the start. It is a connection on two planes, the upper and lower. From the lower sympathetic center the profound intake of love or vibration from the living co-respondent outside. From the upper sympathetic center the outgoing of devotion and the passionate vibration of _given_ love, given attention. The two sympathetic centers are always, or should always be, counterbalanced by their corresponding voluntary centers. From the great voluntary ganglion of the lower plane, the child is self-willed, independent, and masterful. In the activity of this center a boy refuses to be kissed and pawed about, maintaining his proud independence like a little wild animal. From this center he likes to command and to receive obedience. From this center likewise he may be destructive and defiant and reckless, determined to have his own way at any cost. From this center, too, he learns to use his legs. The motion of walking, like the motion of breathing, is twofold. First, a sympathetic cleaving to the earth with the foot: then the voluntary rejection, the spurning, the kicking away, the exultance in power and freedom. From the upper voluntary center the child watches persistently, wilfully, for the attention of the mother: to be taken notice of, to be caressed, in short to exist in and through the mother's attention. From this center, too, he coldly refuses to notice the mother, when she insists on too much attention. This cold refusal is different from the active rejection of the lower center. It is passive, but cold and negative. It is the great force of our day. From the ganglion of the shoulders, also, the child breathes and his heart beats. From the same center he learns the first use of his arms. In the gesture of sympathy, from the upper plane, he embraces his mother with his arms. In the motion of curiosity, or interest, which derives from the thoracic ganglion, he spreads his fingers, touches, feels, explores. In the motion of rejection he drops an undesired object deliberately out of sight. And then, when the four centers of what we call the first _field_ of consciousness are fully active, then it is that the eyes begin to gather their sight, the mouth to speak, the ears to awake to their intelligent hearings; all as a result of the great fourfold activity of the first dynamic field of consciousness. And then also, as a result, the mind wakens to its impressions and to its incipient control. For at first the control is non-mental, even non-cerebral. The brain acts only as a sort of switchboard. The business of the father, in all this incipient child-development, is to stand outside as a final authority and make the necessary adjustments. Where there is too much sympathy, then the great voluntary centers of the spine are weak, the child tends to be delicate. Then the father by instinct supplies the roughness, the sternness which stiffens in the child the centers of resistance and independence, right from the very earliest days. Often, for a mere infant, it is the father's fierce or stern presence, the vibration of his voice, which starts the frictional and independent activity of the great voluntary ganglion and gives the first impulse to the independence which later on is life itself. But on the other hand, the father, from his distance, supports, protects, nourishes his child, and it is ultimately on the remote but powerful father-love that the infant rests, in a rest which is beyond mother-love. For in the male the dominant centers are naturally the volitional centers, centers of responsibility, authority, and care. It is the father's business, again, to maintain some sort of equilibrium between the two modes of love in his infant. A mother may wish to bring up her child from the lovely upper centers only, from the centers of the breast, in the mode of what we call pure or spiritual love. Then the child will be all gentle, all tender and tender-radiant, always enfolded with gentleness and forbearance, always shielded from grossness or pain or roughness. Now the father's instinct is to be rough and crude, good-naturedly brutal with the child, calling the deeper centers, the sensual centers, into play. "What do you want? My watch? Well, you can't have it, do you see, because it's mine." Not a lot of explanations of the "You see, darling." No such nonsense.--Or if a child wails unnecessarily for its mother, the father must be the check. "Stop your noise, you little brat! What ails you, you whiner?" And if children be too sensitive, too sympathetic, then it will do the child no harm if the father occasionally throws the cat out of the window, or kicks the dog, or raises a storm in the house. Storms there must be. And if the child is old enough and robust enough, it can occasionally have its bottom soundly spanked--by the father, if the mother refuses to perform that most necessary duty. For a child's bottom is made occasionally to be spanked. The vibration of the spanking acts direct upon the spinal nerve-system, there is a direct reciprocity and reaction, the spanker transfers his wrath to the great will-centers in the child, and these will-centers react intensely, are vivified and educated. On the other hand, given a mother who is too generally hard or indifferent, then it rests with the father to provide the delicate sympathy and the refined discipline. Then the father must show the tender sensitiveness of the upper mode. The sad thing to-day is that so few mothers have any deep bowels of love--or even the breast of love. What they have is the benevolent spiritual will, the will of the upper self. But the will is not love. And benevolence in a parent is a poison. It is bullying. In these circumstances the father must give delicate adjustment, and, above all, some warm, native love from the richer sensual self. The question of corporal punishment is important. It is no use roughly smacking a shrinking, sensitive child. And yet, if a child is too shrinking, too sensitive, it may do it a world of good cheerfully to spank its posterior. Not brutally, not cruelly, but with real sound, good-natured exasperation. And let the adult take the full responsibility, half humorously, without apology or explanation. Let us avoid self-justification at all costs. Real corporal punishments apply to the sensual plane. The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack. The pained but resigned disapprobation of a mother is usually a very bad thing, much worse than the father's shouts of rage. And sendings to bed, and no dessert for a week, and so on, are crueller and meaner than a bang on the head. When a parent gives his boy a beating, there is a living passionate interchange. But in these refined punishments, the parent suffers nothing and the child is deadened. The bullying of the refined, benevolent spiritual will is simply vitriol to the soul. Yet parents administer it with all the righteousness of virtue and good intention, sparing themselves perfectly. The point is here. If a child makes you so that you really want to spank it soundly, then soundly spank the brat. But know all the time _what_ you are doing, and always be responsible for your anger. Never be ashamed of it, and never surpass it. The flashing interchange of anger between parent and child is part of the responsible relationship, necessary to growth. Again, if a child offends you deeply, so that you really can't communicate with it any more, then, while the hurt is deep, switch off your connection from the child, cut off your correspondence, your vital communion, and be alone. But never persist in such a state beyond the time when your deep hurt dies down. The only rule is, do what you _really_, impulsively, wish to do. But always act on your own responsibility sincerely. And have the courage of your own strong emotion. They enrichen the child's soul. For a child's primary education depends almost entirely on its relation to its parents, brothers, and sisters. Between mother and child, father and child, the law is this: I, the mother, am myself alone: the child is itself alone. But there exists between us a vital dynamic relation, for which I, being the conscious one, am basically responsible. So, as far as possible, there must be in me no departure from myself, lest I injure the preconscious dynamic relation. I must absolutely act according to my own true spontaneous feeling. But, moreover, I must also have wisdom for myself and for my child. Always, always the deep wisdom of responsibility. And always a brave responsibility for the soul's own spontaneity. Love--what is love? We'd better get a new idea. Love is, in all, generous impulse--even a good spanking. But wisdom is something else, a deep collectedness in the soul, a deep abiding by my own integral being, which makes me responsible, not for the child, but for my certain duties towards the child, and for maintaining the dynamic flow between the child and myself as genuine as possible: that is to say, not perverted by ideals or by my _will_. Most fatal, most hateful of all things is bullying. But what is bullying? It is a desire to superimpose my own will upon another person. Sensual bullying of course is fairly easily detected. What is more dangerous is ideal bullying. Bullying people into what is ideally good for them. I embrace for example an ideal, and I seek to enact this ideal in the person of another. This is ideal bullying. A mother says that life should be all love, all delicacy and forbearance and gentleness. And she proceeds to spin a hateful sticky web of permanent forbearance, gentleness, hushedness around her naturally passionate and hasty child. This so foils the child as to make him half imbecile or criminal. I may have ideals if I like--even of love and forbearance and meekness. But I have no right to ask another to have these ideals. And to impose _any ideals_ upon a child as it grows is almost criminal. It results in impoverishment and distortion and subsequent deficiency. In our day, most dangerous is the love and benevolence ideal. It results in neurasthenia, which is largely a dislocation or collapse of the great voluntary centers, a derangement of the will. It is in us an insistence upon the one life-mode only, the spiritual mode. It is a suppression of the great lower centers, and a living a sort of half-life, almost entirely from the upper centers. Thence, since we live terribly and exhaustively from the upper centers, there is a tendency now towards pthisis and neurasthenia of the heart. The great sympathetic center of the breast becomes exhausted, the lungs, burnt by the over-insistence of one way of life, become diseased, the heart, strained in one mode of dilation, retaliates. The powerful lower centers are no longer fully active, particularly the great lumbar ganglion, which is the clue to our sensual passionate pride and independence, this ganglion is atrophied by suppression. And it is this ganglion which holds the spine erect. So, weak-chested, round-shouldered, we stoop hollowly forward on ourselves. It is the result of the all-famous love and charity ideal, an ideal now quite dead in its sympathetic activity, but still fixed and determined in its voluntary action. Let us beware and beware, and beware of having a high ideal for ourselves. But particularly let us beware of having an ideal for our children. So doing, we damn them. All we can have is wisdom. And wisdom is not a theory, it is a state of soul. It is the state wherein we know our wholeness and the complicate, manifold nature of our being. It is the state wherein we know the great relations which exist between us and our near ones. And it is the state which accepts full responsibility, first for our own souls, and then for the living dynamic relations wherein we have our being. It is no use expecting the other person to know. Each must know for himself. But nowadays men have even a stunt of pretending that children and idiots alone know best. This is a pretty piece of sophistry, and criminal cowardice, trying to dodge the life-responsibility which no man or woman can dodge without disaster. The only thing is to be direct. If a child has to swallow castor-oil, then say: "Child, you've got to swallow this castor-oil. It is necessary for your inside. I say so because it is true. So open your mouth." Why try coaxing and logic and tricks with children? Children are more sagacious than we are. They twig soon enough if there is a flaw in our own intention and our own true spontaneity. And they play up to our bit of falsity till there is hell to pay. "You love mother, don't you, dear?"--Just a piece of indecent trickery of the spiritual will. The great emotions like love are unspoken. Speaking them is a sign of an indecent bullying will. "Poor pussy! You must love poor pussy!" What cant! What sickening cant! An appeal to love based on false pity. That's the way to inculcate a filthy pharisaic conceit into a child.--If the child ill-treats the cat, say: "Stop mauling that cat. It's got its own life to live, so let it live it." Then if the brat persists, give tit for tat. "What, you pull the cat's tail! Then I'll pull your nose, to see how you like it." And give his nose a proper hard pinch. Children _must_ pull the cat's tail a little. Children _must_ steal the sugar sometimes. They _must_ occasionally spoil just the things one doesn't want them to spoil. And they _must_ occasionally tell stories--tell a lie. Circumstances and life are such that we must all sometimes tell a lie: just as we wear trousers, because we don't choose that everybody shall see our nakedness. Morality is a delicate act of adjustment on the soul's part, not a rule or a prescription. Beyond a certain point the child _shall_ not pull the cat's tail, _or_ steal the sugar, _or_ spoil the furniture, _or_ tell lies. But I'm afraid you can't fix this certain soul's humor. And so it must. If at a sudden point you fly into a temper and thoroughly beat the boy for hardly touching the cat--well, that's life. All you've got to say to him is: "There, that'll serve you for all the times you _have_ pulled her tail and hurt her." And he will feel outraged, and so will you. But what does it matter? Children have an infinite understanding of the soul's passionate variabilities, and forgive even a real injustice, if it was _spontaneous_ and not intentional. They know we aren't perfect. What they don't forgive us is if we pretend we are: or if we _bully_. CHAPTER V THE FIVE SENSES Science is wretched in its treatment of the human body as a sort of complex mechanism made up of numerous little machines working automatically in a rather unsatisfactory relation to one another. The body is the total machine; the various organs are the included machines; and the whole thing, given a start at birth, or at conception, trundles on by itself. The only god in the machine, the human will or intelligence, is absolutely at the mercy of the machine. Such is the orthodox view. Soul, when it is allowed an existence at all, sits somewhat vaguely within the machine, never defined. If anything goes wrong with the machine, why, the soul is forgotten instantly. We summon the arch-mechanic of our day, the medicine-man. And a marvelous earnest fraud he is, doing his best. He is really wonderful as a mechanic of the human system. But the life within us fails more and more, while we marvelously tinker at the engines. Doctors are not to blame. It is obvious that, even considering the human body as a very delicate and complex machine, you cannot keep such a machine running for one day without most exact central control. Still more is it impossible to consider the automatic evolution of such a machine. When did any machine, even a single spinning-wheel, automatically evolve itself? There was a god in the machine before the machine existed. So there we are with the human body. There must have been, and must be a central god in the machine of each animate corpus. The little soul of the beetle makes the beetle toddle. The little soul of the _homo sapiens_ sets him on his two feet. Don't ask me to define the soul. You might as well ask a bicycle to define the young damsel who so whimsically and so god-like pedals her way along the highroad. A young lady skeltering off on her bicycle to meet her young man--why, what could the bicycle make of such a mystery, if you explained it till doomsday. Yet the bicycle wouldn't be spinning from Streatham to Croydon by itself. So we may as well settle down to the little god in the machine. We may as well call it the individual soul, and leave it there. It's as far as the bicycle would ever get, if it had to define Mademoiselle. But be sure the bicycle would not deny the existence of the young miss who seats herself in the saddle. Not like us, who try to pretend there is no one in the saddle. Why even the sun would no more spin without a rider than would a cycle-pedal. But, since we have innumerable planets to reckon with, in the spinning we must not begin to define the rider in terms of our own exclusive planet. Nevertheless, rider there is: even a rider of the many-wheeled universe. But let us leave the universe alone. It is too big a bauble for me.--_Revenons._--At the start of me there is me. There is a mysterious little entity which is my individual self, the god who builds the machine and then makes his gay excursion of seventy years within it. Now we are talking at the moment about the machine. For the moment we are the bicycle, and not the feather-brained cyclist. So that all we can do is to define the cyclist in terms of ourself. A bicycle could say: Here, upon my leather saddle, rests a strange and animated force, which I call the force of gravity, as being the one great force which controls my universe. And yet, on second thoughts, I must modify myself. This great force of gravity is not _always_ in the saddle. Sometimes it just is not there--and I lean strangely against a wall. I have been even known to turn upside down, with my wheels in the air; spun by the same mysterious Miss. So that I must introduce a theory of Relativity. However, mostly, when I am awake and alive, she is in the saddle; or _it_ is in the saddle, the mysterious force. And when it is in the saddle, then two subsidiary forces plunge and claw upon my two pedals, plunge and claw with inestimable power. And at the same time, a kind and mysterious force sways my head-stock, sways most incalculably, and governs my whole motion. This force is not a driving force, but a subtle directing force, beneath whose grip my bright steel body is flexible as a dipping highroad. Then let me not forget the sudden clutch of arrest upon my hurrying wheels. Oh, this is pain to me! While I am rushing forward, surpassing myself in an _élan vital_, suddenly the awful check grips my back wheel, or my front wheel, or both. Suddenly there is a fearful arrest. My soul rushes on before my body, I feel myself strained, torn back. My fibers groan. Then perhaps the tension relaxes. So the bicycle will continue to babble about itself. And it will inevitably wind up with a philosophy. "Oh, if only the great and divine force rested for ever upon my saddle, and if only the mysterious will which sways my steering gear remained in place for ever: then my pedals would revolve of themselves, and never cease, and no hideous brake should tear the perpetuity of my motions. Then, oh then I should be immortal. I should leap through the world for ever, and spin to infinity, till I was identified with the dizzy and timeless cycle-race of the stars and the great sun...." Poor old bicycle. The very thought is enough to start a philanthropic society for the prevention of cruelty to bicycles. Well, then, our human body is the bicycle. And our individual and incomprehensible self is the rider thereof. And seeing that the universe is another bicycle riding full tilt, we are bound to suppose a rider for that also. But we needn't say what sort of rider. When I see a cockroach scuttling across the floor and turning up its tail I stand affronted, and think: A rum sort of rider _you_ must have. You've no business to have such a rider, do you hear?--And when I hear the monotonous and plaintive cuckoo in the June woods, I think: Who the devil made _that_ clock?--And when I see a politician making a fiery speech on a platform, and the crowd gawping, I think: Lord, save me--they've all got riders. But Holy Moses! you could never guess what was coming.--And so I shouldn't like, myself, to start guessing about the rider of the universe. I am all too flummoxed by the masquerade in the tourney round about me. We ourselves then: wisdom, like charity, begins at home. We've each of us got a rider in the saddle: an individual soul. Mostly it can't ride, and can't steer, so mankind is like squadrons of bicycles running amok. We should every one fall off if we didn't ride so thick that we hold each other up. Horrid nightmare! As for myself, I have a horror of riding _en bloc_. So I grind away uphill, and sweat my guts out, as they say. Well, well--my body is my bicycle: the whole middle of me is the saddle where sits the rider of my soul. And my front wheel is the cardiac plane, and my back wheel is the solar plexus. And the brakes are the voluntary ganglia. And the steering gear is my head. And the right and left pedals are the right and left dynamics of the body, in some way corresponding to the sympathetic and voluntary division. So that now I know more or less how my rider rides me, and from what centers controls me. That is, I know the points of vital contact between my rider and my machine: between my invisible and my visible self. I don't attempt to say what is my rider. A bicycle might as well try to define its young Miss by wriggling its handle-bars and ringing its bell. However, having more or less determined the four primary motions, we can see the further unfolding. In a child, the solar plexus and the cardiac plexus, with corresponding voluntary ganglia, are awake and active. From these centers develop the great functions of the body. As we have seen, it is the solar plexus, with the lumbar ganglion, which controls the great dynamic system, the functioning of the liver and the kidneys. Any excess in the sympathetic dynamism tends to accelerate the action of the liver, to cause fever and constipation. Any collapse of the sympathetic dynamism causes anæmia. The sudden stimulating of the voluntary center may cause diarrhoea, and so on. But all this depends so completely on the polarized flow between the individual and the correspondent, between the child and mother, child and father, child and sisters or brothers or teacher, or circumambient universe, that it is impossible to lay down laws, unless we state particulars. Nevertheless, the whole of the great organs of the lower body are controlled from the two lower centers, and these organs work well or ill according as there is a true dynamic _psychic_ activity at the two primary centers of consciousness. By a _true_ dynamic psychic activity we mean an activity which is true to the individual himself, to his own peculiar soul-nature. And a dynamic psychic activity means a dynamic polarity between the individual himself and other individuals concerned in his living; or between him and his immediate surroundings, human, physical, geographical. On the upper plane, the lungs and heart are controlled from the cardiac plane and the thoracic ganglion. Any excess in the sympathetic mode from the upper centers tends to burn the lungs with oxygen, weaken them with stress, and cause consumption. So it is just criminal to make a child too loving. No child should be induced to love too much. It means derangement and death at last. But beyond the primary physiological function--and it is the business of doctors to discover the relation between the functioning of the primary organs and the dynamic psychic activity at the four primary consciousness-centers,--beyond these physical functions, there are the activities which are half-psychic, half-functional. Such as the five senses. Of the five senses, four have their functioning in the face-region. The fifth, the sense of touch, is distributed all over the body. But all have their roots in the four great primary centers of consciousness. From the constellation of your nerve-nodes, from the great field of your poles, the nerves run out in every direction, ending on the surface of the body. Inwardly this is an inextricable ramification and communication. And yet the body is planned out in areas, there is a definite area-control from the four centers. On the back the sense of touch is not acute. There the voluntary centers act in resistance. But in the front of the body, the breast is one great field of sympathetic touch, the belly is another. On these two fields the stimulus of touch is quite different, has a quite different psychic quality and psychic result. The breast-touch is the fine alertness of quivering curiosity, the belly-touch is a deep thrill of delight and avidity. Correspondingly, the hands and arms are instruments of superb delicate curiosity, and deliberate execution. Through the elbows and the wrists flows the dynamic psychic current, and a dislocation in the current between two individuals will cause a feeling of dislocation at the wrists and elbows. On the lower plane, the legs and feet are instruments of unfathomable gratifications and repudiations. The thighs, the knees, the feet are intensely alive with love-desire, darkly and superbly drinking in the love-contact, blindly. Or they are the great centers of resistance, kicking, repudiating. Sudden flushing of great general sympathetic desire will make a man feel weak at the knees. Hatred will harden the tension of the knees like steel, and grip the feet like talons. Thus the fields of touch are four, two sympathetic fields in front of the body from the throat to the feet, two resistant fields behind from the neck to the heels. There are two fields of touch, however, where the distribution is not so simple: the face and the buttocks. Neither in the face nor in the buttocks is there one single mode of sense communication. The face is of course the great window of the self, the great opening of the self upon the world, the great gateway. The lower body has its own gates of exit. But the bulk of our communication with all the outer universe goes on through the face. And every one of the windows or gates of the face has its direct communication with each of the four great centers of the first field of consciousness. Take the mouth, with the sense of taste. The mouth is primarily the gate of the two chief sensual centers. It is the gateway to the belly and the loins. Through the mouth we eat and we drink. In the mouth we have the sense of taste. At the lips, too, we kiss. And the kiss of the mouth is the first sensual connection. In the mouth also are the teeth. And the teeth are the instruments of our sensual will. The growth of the teeth is controlled entirely from the two great sensual centers below the diaphragm. But almost entirely from the one center, the voluntary center. The growth and the life of the teeth depend almost entirely on the lumbar ganglion. During the growth of the teeth the sympathetic mode is held in abeyance. There is a sort of arrest. There is pain, there is diarrhoea, there is misery for the baby. And we, in our age, have no rest with our teeth. Our mouths are too small. For many ages we have been suppressing the avid, negroid, sensual will. We have been converting ourselves into ideal creatures, all spiritually conscious, and active dynamically only on one plane, the upper, spiritual plane. Our mouth has contracted, our teeth have become soft and un-quickened. Where in us are the sharp and vivid teeth of the wolf, keen to defend and devour? If we had them more, we should be happier. Where are the white negroid teeth? Where? In our little pinched mouths they have no room. We are sympathy-rotten, and spirit-rotten, and idea-rotten. We have forfeited our flashing sensual power. And we have false teeth in our mouths. In the same way the lips of our sensual desire go thinner and more meaningless, in the compression of our upper will and our idea-driven impulse. Let us break the conscious, self-conscious love-ideal, and we shall grow strong, resistant teeth once more, and the teething of our young will not be the hell it is. Teething is strictly the period when the voluntary center of the lower plane first comes into full activity, and takes for a time the precedence. So, the mouth is the great sensual gate to the lower body. But let us not forget it is also a gate by which we breathe, the gate through which we speak and go impalpably forth to our object, the gate at which we can kiss the pinched, delicate, spiritual kiss. Therefore, although the main sensual gate of entrance to the lower body, it has its reference also to the upper body. Taste, the sense of taste, is an intake of a pure communication between us and a body from the outside world. It contains the element of touch, and in this it refers to the cardiac plexus. But taste, _quâ_ taste, refers purely to the solar plexus. And then smell. The nostrils are the great gate from the wide atmosphere of heaven to the lungs. The extreme sigh of yearning we catch through the mouth. But the delicate nose advances always into the air, our palpable communicator with the infinite air. Thus it has its first delicate root in the cardiac plexus, the root of its intake. And the root of the delicate-proud exhalation, rejection, is in the thoracic ganglion. But the nostrils have their other function of smell. Here the delicate nerve-ends run direct from the lower centers, from the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion, or even deeper. There is the refined sensual intake when a scent is sweet. There is the sensual repudiation when a scent is unsavoury. And just as the fullness of the lips and the shape of the mouth depend on the development from the lower or the upper centers, the sensual or the spiritual, so does the shape of the nose depend on the direct control of the deepest centers of consciousness. A perfect nose is perhaps the result of a balance in the four modes. But what is a perfect nose!--We only know that a short snub nose goes with an over-sympathetic nature, not proud enough; while a long nose derives from the center of the upper will, the thoracic ganglion, our great center of curiosity, and benevolent or objective control. A thick, squat nose is the sensual-sympathetic nose, and the high, arched nose the sensual voluntary nose, having the curve of repudiation, as when we turn up our nose from a bad smell, but also the proud curve of haughtiness and subjective authority. The nose is one of the greatest indicators of character. That is to say, it almost inevitably indicates the mode of predominant dynamic consciousness in the individual, the predominant primary center from which he lives.--When savages rub noses instead of kissing, they are exchanging a more sensitive and a deeper sensual salute than our lip-touch. The eyes are the third great gateway of the psyche. Here the soul goes in and out of the body, as a bird flying forth and coming home. But the root of conscious vision is almost entirely in the breast. When I go forth from my own eyes, in delight to dwell upon the world which is beyond me, outside me, then I go forth from wide open windows, through which shows the full and living lambent darkness of my present inward self. I go forth, and I leave the lovely open darkness of my sensient self revealed; when I go forth in the wonder of vision to dwell upon the beloved, or upon the wonder of the world, I go from the center of the glad breast, through the eyes, and who will may look into the full soft darkness of me, rich with my undiscovered presence. But if I am displeased, then hard and cold my self stands in my eyes, and refuses any communication, any sympathy, but merely stares outwards. It is the motion of cold objectivity from the thoracic ganglion. Or, from the same center of will, cold but intense my eyes may watch with curiosity, as a cat watches a fly. It may be into my curiosity will creep an element of warm gladness in the wonder which I am beholding outside myself. Or it may be that my curiosity will be purely and simply the cold, almost cruel curiosity of the upper will, directed from the ganglion of the shoulders: such as is the acute attention of an experimental scientist. The eyes have, however, their sensual root as well. But this is hard to transfer into language, as all _our_ vision, our modern Northern vision is in the upper mode of actual seeing. There is a sensual way of beholding. There is the dark, desirous look of a savage who apprehends only that which has direct reference to himself, that which stirs a certain dark yearning within his lower self. Then his eye is fathomless blackness. But there is the dark eye which glances with a certain fire, and has no depth. There is a keen quick vision which watches, which beholds, but which never yields to the object outside: as a cat watching its prey. The dark glancing look which knows the _strangeness_, the danger of its object, the need to overcome the object. The eye which is not wide open to study, to _learn_, but which powerfully, proudly or cautiously glances, and knows the terror or the pure desirability of _strangeness_ in the object it beholds. The savage is all in all in himself. That which he sees outside he hardly notices, or, he sees as something odd, something automatically desirable, something lustfully desirable, or something dangerous. What we call vision, that he has not. We must compare the look in a horse's eye with the look in a cow's. The eye of the cow is soft, velvety, receptive. She stands and gazes with the strangest intent curiosity. She goes forth from herself in wonder. The root of her vision is in her yearning breast. The same one hears when she moos. The same massive weight of passion is in a bull's breast; the passion to go forth from himself. His strength is in his breast, his weapons are on his head. The wonder is always outside him. But the horse's eye is bright and glancing. His curiosity is cautious, full of terror, or else aggressive and frightening for the object. The root of his vision is in his belly, in the solar plexus. And he fights with his teeth, and his heels, the sensual weapons. Both these animals, however, are established in the sympathetic mode. The life mode in both is sensitively sympathetic, or preponderantly sympathetic. Those animals which like cats, wolves, tigers, hawks, chiefly live from the great voluntary centers, these animals are, in our sense of the word, almost visionless. Sight in them is sharpened or narrowed down to a point: the object of prey. It is exclusive. They see no more than this. And thus they see unthinkably far, unthinkably keenly. Most animals, however, smell what they see: vision is not very highly developed. They know better by the more direct contact of scent. And vision in us becomes faulty because we proceed too much in one mode. We see too much, we attend too much. The dark, glancing sightlessness of the intent savage, the narrowed vision of the cat, the single point of vision of the hawk--these we do not know any more. We live far too much from the sympathetic centers, without the balance from the voluntary mode. And we live far, far too much from the _upper_ sympathetic center and voluntary center, in an endless objective curiosity. Sight is the least sensual of all the senses. And we strain ourselves to see, see, see--everything, everything through the eye, in one mode of objective curiosity. There is nothing inside us, we stare endlessly at the outside. So our eyes begin to fail; to retaliate on us. We go short-sighted, almost in self-protection. Hearing the last, and perhaps the deepest of the senses. And here there is no choice. In every other faculty we have the power of rejection. We have a choice of vision. We can, if we choose, see in the terms of the wonderful beyond, the world of light into which we go forth in joy to lose ourselves in it. Or we can see, as the Egyptians saw, in the terms of their own dark souls: seeing the strangeness of the creature outside, the gulf between it and them, but finally, its existence in terms of themselves. They saw according to their own unchangeable idea, subjectively, they did not go forth from themselves to seek the wonder outside. Those are the two chief ways of sympathetic vision. We call our way the objective, the Egyptian the subjective. But objective and subjective are words that depend absolutely on your starting point. Spiritual and sensual are much more descriptive terms. But there are, of course, also the two ways of volitional vision. We can see with the endless modern critical sight, analytic, and at last deliberately ugly. Or we can see as the hawk sees the one concentrated spot where beats the life-heart of our prey. In the four modes of sight we have some choice. We have some choice to refuse tastes or smells or touch. In hearing we have the minimum of choice. Sound acts direct upon the great affective centers. We may voluntarily quicken our hearing, or make it dull. But we have really no choice of what we hear. Our will is eliminated. Sound acts direct, almost automatically, upon the affective centers. And we have no power of going forth from the ear. We are always and only recipient. Nevertheless, sound acts upon us in various ways, according to the four primary poles of consciousness. The singing of birds acts almost entirely upon the centers of the breast. Birds, which live by flight, impelled from the strong conscious-activity of the breast and shoulders, have become for us symbols of the spirit, the upper mode of consciousness. Their legs have become idle, almost insentient twigs. Only the tail flirts from the center of the sensual will. But their singing acts direct upon the upper, or spiritual centers in us. So does almost all our music, which is all Christian in tendency. But modern music is analytical, critical, and it has discovered the power of ugliness. Like our martial music, it is of the upper plane, like our martial songs, our fifes and our brass-bands. These act direct upon the thoracic ganglion. Time was, however, when music acted upon the sensual centers direct. We hear it still in savage music, and in the roll of drums, and in the roaring of lions, and in the howling of cats. And in some voices still we hear the deeper resonance of the sensual mode of consciousness. But the tendency is for everything to be brought on to the upper plane, whilst the lower plane is just worked automatically from the upper. CHAPTER VI FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND We can now see what is the true goal of education for a child. It is the full and harmonious development of the four primary modes of consciousness, always with regard to the individual nature of the child. The goal is _not_ ideal. The aim is _not_ mental consciousness. We want _effectual_ human beings, not conscious ones. The final aim is not _to know_, but _to be_. There never was a more risky motto than that: _Know thyself_. You've got to know yourself as far as possible. But not just for the sake of knowing. You've got to know yourself so that you can at last _be_ yourself. "Be yourself" is the last motto. The whole field of dynamic and effectual consciousness is _always_ pre-mental, non-mental. Not even the most knowing man that ever lived would know how he would be feeling next week; whether some new and utterly shattering impulse would have arisen in him and laid his nicely-conceived self in ruins. It is the impulse we have to live by, not the ideals or the idea. But we have to know ourselves pretty thoroughly before we can break the automatism of ideals and conventions. The savage in a state of nature is one of the most conventional of creatures. So is a child. Only through fine delicate knowledge can we recognize and release our impulses. Now our whole aim has been to force each individual to a maximum of mental control, and mental consciousness. Our poor little plans of children are put into horrible forcing-beds, called schools, and the young idea is there forced to shoot. It shoots, poor thing, like a potato in a warm cellar. One mass of pallid sickly ideas and ideals. And no root, no life. The ideas shoot, hard enough, in our sad offspring, but they shoot at the expense of life itself. Never was such a mistake. Mental consciousness is a purely individual affair. Some men are born to be highly and delicately conscious. But for the vast majority, much mental consciousness is simply a catastrophe, a blight. It just stops their living. Our business, at the present, is to prevent at all cost the young idea from shooting. The ideal mind, the brain, has become the vampire of modern life, sucking up the blood and the life. There is hardly an original thought or original utterance possible to us. All is sickly repetition of stale, stale ideas. Let all schools be closed at once. Keep only a few technical training establishments, nothing more. Let humanity lie fallow, for two generations at least. Let no child learn to read, unless it learns by itself, out of its own individual persistent desire. That is my serious admonition, gentle reader. But I am not so flighty as to imagine you will pay any heed. But if I thought you would, I should feel my hope surge up. And if you _don't_ pay any heed, calamity will at length shut your schools for you, sure enough. The process of transfer from the primary consciousness to recognized mental consciousness is a mystery like every other transfer. Yet it follows its own laws. And here we begin to approach the confines of orthodox psychology, upon which we have no desire to trespass. But this we _can_ say. The degree of transfer from primary to mental consciousness varies with every individual. But in most individuals the natural degree is very low. The process of transfer from primary consciousness is called sublimation, the sublimating of the potential body of knowledge with the definite reality of the idea. And with this process we have identified all education. The very derivation of the Latin word _education_ shows us. Of course it should mean the leading forth of each nature to its fullness. But with us, fools that we are, it is the leading forth of the primary consciousness, the potential or dynamic consciousness, into mental consciousness, which is finite and static. Now before we set out so gayly to lead our children _en bloc_ out of the dynamic into the static way of consciousness, let us consider a moment what we are doing. A child in the womb can have no _idea_ of the mother. I think orthodox psychology will allow us so much. And yet the child in the womb must be dynamically conscious of the mother. Otherwise how could it maintain a definite and progressively developing relation to her? This consciousness, however, is utterly non-ideal, non-mental, purely dynamic, a matter of dynamic polarized intercourse of vital vibrations, as an exchange of wireless messages which are never translated from the pulse-rhythm into speech, because they have no need to be. It is a dynamic polarized intercourse between the great primary nuclei in the foetus and the corresponding nuclei in the dynamic maternal psyche. This form of consciousness is established at conception, and continues long after birth. Nay, it continues all life long. But the particular interchange of dynamic consciousness between mother and child suffers no interruption at birth. It continues almost the same. The child has no conception whatsoever of the mother. It cannot see her, for its eye has no focus. It can hear her, because hearing needs no transmission into concept, but it has no oral notion of sounds. It knows her. But only by a form of vital dynamic correspondence, a sort of magnetic interchange. The idea does not intervene at all. Gradually, however, the dark shadow of our object begins to loom in the formless mind of the infant. The idea of the mother is, as it were, gradually photographed on the cerebral plasm. It begins with the faintest shadow--but the figure is gradually developed through years of experience. It is never quite completed. How does the figure of the mother gradually develop as a _conception_ in the child mind? It develops as the result of the positive and negative reaction from the primary centers of consciousness. From the first great center of sympathy the child is drawn to a lovely oneing with the mother. From the first great center of will comes the independent self-assertion which locates the mother as something outside, something objective. And as a result of this twofold notion, a twofold increase in the child. First, the dynamic establishment of the individual consciousness in the infant: and then the first shadow of a mental conception of the mother, in the infant brain. The development of the _original_ mind in every child and every man always and only follows from the dual fulfillment in the dynamic consciousness. But mark further. Each time, after the fourfold interchange between two dynamic polarized lives, there results a development in the individuality and a sublimation into consciousness, both simultaneously in each party: _and this dual development causes at once a diminution in the dynamic polarity between the two parties_. That is, as its individuality and its mental concept of the mother develop in the child, there is a corresponding _waning_ of the dynamic relation between the child and the mother. And this is the natural progression of all love. As we have said before, the accomplishment of individuality never finally exhausts the dynamic flow between parents and child. In the same way, a child can never have a finite conception of either of its parents. It can have a very much more finite, finished conception of its aunts or its friends. The portrait of the parent can never be quite completed in the mind of the son or daughter. As long as time lasts it must be left unfinished. Nevertheless, the inevitable photography of time upon the mental plasm does print at last a very substantial portrait of the parent, a very well-filled concept in the child mind. And the nearer a conception comes towards finality, the nearer does the dynamic relation, out of which this concept has arisen, draw to a close. To know, is to lose. When I have a finished mental concept of a beloved, or a friend, then the love and the friendship is dead. It falls to the level of an acquaintance. As soon as I have a finished mental conception, a full idea even of myself, then dynamically I am dead. To know is to die. But knowledge and death are part of our natural development. Only, of course, most things can never be known by us in full. Which means we do never absolutely die, even to our parents. So that Jesus' question to His mother, "Woman, what have I to do with thee!"--while expressing a major truth, still has an exaggerated sound, which comes from its denial of the minor truth. This progression from dynamic relationship towards a finished individuality and a finished mental concept is carried on from the four great primary centers through the correspondence medium of all the senses and sensibilities. First of all, the child knows the mother only through touch--perfect and immediate contact. And yet, from the moment of conception, the egg-cell repudiated complete adhesion and even communication, and asserted its individual integrity. The child in the womb, perfect a contact though it may have with the mother, is all the time also dynamically polarized against this contact. From the first moment, this relation in touch has a dual polarity, and, no doubt, a dual mode. It is a fourfold interchange of consciousness, the moment the egg-cell has made its two spontaneous divisions. As soon as the child is born, there is a real severance. The contact of touch is interrupted, it now becomes occasional only. True, the dynamic flow between mother and child is not severed when simple physical contact is missing. Though mother and child may not touch, still the dynamic flow continues between them. The mother knows her child, feels her bowels and her breast drawn to it, even if it be a hundred miles away. But if the severance continue long, the dynamic flow begins to die, both in mother and child. It wanes fairly quickly--and perhaps can never be fully revived. The dynamic relation between parent and child may fairly easily fall into quiescence, a static condition. For a full dynamic relationship it is necessary that there be actual contact. The nerves run from the four primary dynamos, and end with live ends all over the body. And it is necessary to bring the live ends of the nerves of the child into contact with the live ends of corresponding nerves in the mother, so that a pure circuit is established. Wherever a pure circuit is established, there occurs a pure development in the individual creation, and this is inevitably accompanied by sensation; and sensation is the first term of mental knowledge. So, from the field of the breast and arms, the upper circuit, and from the field of the knees and feet and belly, the lower circuit. And then, the moment a child is born, the face is alive. And the face communicates direct with both planes of primary consciousness. The moment a child is born, it begins to grope for the breast. And suddenly a new great circuit is established, the four poles all working at once, as the child sucks. There is the profound desirousness of the lower center of sympathy, and the superior avidity of the center of will, and at the same time, the cleaving yearning to the nipple, and the tiny curiosity of lips and gums. The nipple of the mother's breast is one of the great gates of the body, hence of the living psyche. In the nipple terminate vivid nerves which flash their very powerful vibrations through the mouth of the child and deep into its four great poles of being and knowing. Even the nipples of the man are gateways to the great dynamic flow: still gateways. Touch, taste, and smell are now active in the baby. And these senses, so-called, are strictly sensations. They are the first term of the child's mental knowledge. And on these three _cerebral_ reactions the foundation of the future mind is laid. The moment there is a perfect polarized circuit between the first four poles of dynamic consciousness, at that moment does the mind, the terminal station, flash into cognition. The first cognition is merely sensation: sensation and the remembrance of sensation being the first element in all knowing and in all conception. The circuit of touch, taste, and smell must be well established, before the eyes begin actually to see. All mental knowledge is built up of sensation and of memory. It is the continually recurring sensation of the touch of the mother which forms the basis of the first conception of the mother. After that, the gradually discriminated taste of the mother, and scent of the mother. Till gradually sight and hearing develop and largely usurp the first three senses, as medium of correspondence and of knowledge. And while, of course, the sensational _knowledge_ is being secreted in the brain, in some much more mysterious way the living individuality of the child is being developed in the four first nuclei, the four great nerve-centers of the primary field of consciousness and being. As time goes on, the child learns to see the mother. At first he sees her face as a blur, and though he knows her, knows her by a direct glow of communication, as if her face were a warm glowing life-lamp which rejoiced him. But gradually, as the circuit of touch, taste, and smell become powerfully established; gradually, as the individual develops in the child, and so retreats towards isolation; gradually, as the child stands more immune from the mother, the circuit of correspondence extends, and the eyes now communicate across space, the ears begin to discriminate sounds. Last of all develops discriminate hearing. Now gradually the picture of the mother is transferred to the child's mind, and the sound of the first baby-words is imprinted. And as the child learns to discriminate visually, objectively, between the mother and the nurse, he learns to choose, and becomes individually free. And still, the dynamic correspondence is not finished. It only changes its circuit. While the brain is registering sensations, the four dynamic centers are coming into perfect relation. Or rather, as we see, the reverse is the case. As the dynamic centers come into perfect relation, the mind registers and remembers sensations, and begins consciously to know. But the great field of activity is still and always the dynamic field. When a child learns to walk, it learns almost entirely from the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion, the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion balancing the upper body. There is a perfected circuit of polarity. The two lower centers are the positive, the two upper the negative poles. And so the child strikes out with his feet for the earth, presses, and strikes away again from the earth, the two upper centers meanwhile corresponding implicitly in the balance of the upper body. It is a chain of spontaneous activity in the four primary centers, establishing a circuit through the whole body. But the positive poles are the lower centers. And the brain has probably nothing at all to do with it. Even the _desire_ to walk is not born in the brain, but in the primary nuclei. The same with the use of the hands and arms. It means the establishment of a pure circuit between the four centers, the two upper poles now being the positive, the lower the negative poles, and the hands the live end of the wire. Again the brain is not concerned. Probably, even in the first deliberate grasping of an object, the brain is not concerned. Not until there is an element of recognition and sensation-memory. All our primal activity originates and circulates purely in the four great nerve centers. All our active desire, our genuine impulse, our love, our hope, our yearning, everything originates mysteriously at these four great centers or well-heads of our existence: everything vital and dynamic. The mind can only register that which results from the emanation of the dynamic impulse and the collision or communion of this impulse with its object. So now we see that we can never know ourselves. Knowledge is to consciousness what the signpost is to the traveler: just an indication of the way which has been traveled before. Knowledge is not even in direct proportion to being. There may be great knowledge of chemistry in a man who is a rather poor _being_: and those who _know_, even in wisdom like Solomon, are often at the end of the matter of living, not at the beginning. As a matter of fact, David did the living, the dynamic achievement. To Solomon was left the consummation and the finish, and the dying down. Yet we _must_ know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how _not to know_. That is, how not to _interfere_. That is, how to live dynamically, from the great Source, and not statically, like machines driven by ideas and principles from the head, or automatically, from one fixed desire. At last, knowledge must be put into its true place in the living activity of man. And we must know deeply, in order even to do that. So a new conception of the meaning of education. Education means leading out the individual nature in each man and woman to its true fullness. You can't do that by stimulating the mind. To pump education into the mind is fatal. That which sublimates from the dynamic consciousness into the mental consciousness has alone any value. This, in most individuals, is very little indeed. So that most individuals, under a wise government, would be most carefully protected from all vicious attempts to inject extraneous ideas into them. Every extraneous idea, which has no inherent root in the dynamic consciousness, is as dangerous as a nail driven into a young tree. For the mass of people, knowledge _must_ be symbolical, mythical, dynamic. This means, you must have a higher, responsible, conscious class: and then in varying degrees the lower classes, varying in their degree of consciousness. Symbols must be true from top to bottom. But the interpretation of the symbols must rest, degree after degree, in the higher, responsible, conscious classes. To _those who cannot divest_ themselves again of mental consciousness and definite ideas, mentality and ideas are death, nails through their hands and feet. CHAPTER VII FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION The first process of education is obviously not a mental process. When a mother talks to a baby, she is not encouraging its little mind to think. When she is coaxing her child to walk, she is not making a theoretic exposition of the science of equilibration. She crouches before the child, at a little distance, and spreads her hands. "Come, baby--come to mother. Come! Baby, walk! Yes, walk! Walk to mother! Come along. A little walk to its mother. Come! Come then! Why yes, a pretty baby! Oh, he can toddle! Yes--yes--No, don't be frightened, a dear. No--Come to mother--" and she catches his little pinafore by the tip--and the infant lurches forward. "There! There! A beautiful walk! A beautiful walker, yes! Walked all the way to mother, baby did. Yes, he did--" Now who will tell me that this talk has any rhyme or reason? Not a spark of reason. Yet a real rhyme: or rhythm, much more important. The song and the urge of the mother's voice plays direct on the affective centers of the child, a wonderful stimulus and tuition. The words hardly matter. True, this constant repetition in the end forms a mental association. At the moment they have no mental significance at all for the baby. But they ring with a strange palpitating music in his fluttering soul, and lift him into motion. And this is the way to educate children: the instinctive way of mothers. There should be no effort made to teach children to think, to have ideas. Only to lift them and urge them into dynamic activity. The voice of dynamic sound, not the words of understanding. Damn understanding. Gestures, and touch, and expression of the face, not theory. Never have ideas about children--and never have ideas _for_ them. If we are going to teach children we must teach them first to move. And not by rule or mental dictation. Horror! But by playing and teasing and anger, and amusement. A child must learn to move blithe and free and proud. It must learn the fullness of spontaneous motion. And this it can only learn by continuous reaction from all the centers, through all the emotions. A child must learn to contain itself. It must learn to sit still if need be. Part of the first phase of education is the learning to stay still and be physically self-contained. Then a child must learn to be alone, and to adventure alone, and to play alone. Any peevish clinging should be quite roughly rebuffed. From the very first day, throw a child back on its own resources--even a little cruelly sometimes. But don't neglect it, don't have a negative attitude to it. Play with it, tease it and roll it over as a dog her puppy, mock it when it is too timorous, laugh at it, scold it when it really bothers you--for a child must learn not to bother another person--and when it makes you genuinely angry, spank it soundly. But always remember that it is a single little soul by itself; and that the responsibility for the wise, warm relationship is yours, the adult's. Then always watch its deportment. Above all things encourage a straight backbone and proud shoulders. Above all things despise a slovenly movement, an ugly bearing and unpleasing manner. And make a mock of petulance and of too much timidity. We are imbeciles to start bothering about love and so forth in a child. Forget utterly that there is such a thing as emotional reciprocity. But never forget your own honor as an adult individual towards a small individual. It is a question of honor, not of love. A tree grows straight when it has deep roots and is not too stifled. Love is a spontaneous thing, coming out of the spontaneous effectual soul. As a deliberate principle it is an unmitigated evil. Also morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil. A child which is proud and free in its movements, in all its deportment, will be quite as moral as need be. Honor is an instinct, a superb instinct which should be kept keenly alive. Immorality, vice, crime, these come from a suppression or a collapse at one or other of the great primary centers. If one of these centers fails to maintain its true polarity, then there is a physical or psychic derangement, or both. And viciousness or crime are the result of a derangement in the primary system. Pure morality is only an instinctive adjustment which the soul makes in every circumstance, adjusting one thing to another livingly, delicately, sensitively. There can be no law. Therefore, at every cost and charge keep the first four centers alive and alert, active, and vivid in reaction. And then you need fear no perversion. What we have done, in our era, is, first, we have tried as far as possible to suppress or subordinate the two sensual centers. We have so unduly insisted on and exaggerated the upper spiritual or selfless mode--the living in the other person and through the other person--that we have caused already a dangerous over-balance in the natural psyche. To correct this we go one worse, and try to rule ourselves more and more by the old ideas of sympathy and benevolence. We think that love and benevolence will cure anything. Whereas love and benevolence are our poison, poison to the giver, and still more poison to the receiver. Poison only because there is practically _no_ spontaneous love left in the world. It is all _will_, the fatal love-will and insatiable morbid curiosity. The pure sympathetic mode of love long ago broke down. There is now only deadly, exaggerated volition. This is also why general education should be suppressed as soon as possible. We have fallen into a state of fixed, deadly will. Everything we do and say to our children in school tends simply to fix in them the same deadly will, under the pretence of pure love. Our idealism is the clue to our fixed will. Love, beauty, benevolence, progress, these are the words we use. But the principle we evoke is a principle of barren, sanctified compulsion of all life. We want to put all life under compulsion. "How to outwit the nerves," for example.--And therefore, to save the children as far as possible, elementary education should be stopped at once. No child should be sent to any sort of public institution before the age of ten years. If I could but advise, I would advise that this notice should be sent through the length and breadth of the land. "Parents, the State can no longer be responsible for the mind and character of your children. From the first day of the coming year, all schools will be closed for an indefinite period. Fathers, see that your boys are trained to be men. Mothers, see that your daughters are trained to be women. "All schools will shortly be converted either into public workshops or into gymnasia. No child will be admitted into the workshops under ten years of age. Active training in primitive modes of fighting and gymnastics will be compulsory for all boys over ten years of age. "All girls over ten years of age must attend at one domestic workshop. All girls over ten years of age may, in addition, attend at one workshop of skilled labor, or of technical industry, or of art. Admission for three months' probation. "All boys over ten years of age must attend at one workshop of domestic crafts, and at one workshop of skilled labor, or of technical industry, or of art. A boy may choose, with his parents' consent, his school of labor, or technical industry or art, but the directors reserve the right to transfer him to a more suitable department, if necessary, after a three months' probation. "It is the intention of this State to form a body of active, energetic citizens. The danger of a helpless, presumptuous, news-paper-reading population is universally recognized. "All elementary education is left in the hands of the parents, save such as is necessary to the different branches of industry. "Schools of mental culture are free to all individuals over fourteen years of age. "Universities are free to all who obtain the first culture degree." The fact is, our process of universal education is to-day so uncouth, so psychologically barbaric, that it is the most terrible menace to the existence of our race. We seize hold of our children, and by parrot-compulsion we force into them a set of mental tricks. By unnatural and unhealthy compulsion we force them into a certain amount of cerebral activity. And then, after a few years, with a certain number of windmills in their heads, we turn them loose, like so many inferior Don Quixotes, to make a mess of life. All that they have learnt in their heads has no reference at all to their dynamic souls. The windmills spin and spin in a wind of words, Dulcinea del Toboso beckons round every corner, and our nation of inferior Quixotes jumps on and off tram-cars, trains, bicycles, motor-cars, buses, in one mad chase of the divine Dulcinea, who is all the time chewing chocolates and feeling very, very bored. It is no use telling the poor devils to stop. They read in the newspapers about more Dulcineas and more chivalry due to them and more horrid persons who injure the fair fame of these bored females. And round they skelter, after their own tails. That is, when they are not forced to grind out their lives for a wage. Though work is the only thing that prevents our masses from going quite mad. To tell the truth, ideas are the most dangerous germs mankind has ever been injected with. They are introduced into the brain by injection, in schools and by means of newspapers, and then we are done for. An idea which is merely introduced into the brain, and started spinning there like some outrageous insect, is the cause of all our misery to-day. Instead of living from the spontaneous centers, we live from the head. We chew, chew, chew at some theory, some idea. We grind, grind, grind in our mental consciousness, till we are beside ourselves. Our primary affective centers, our centers of spontaneous being, are so utterly ground round and automatized that they squeak in all stages of disharmony and incipient collapse. We are a people--and not we alone--of idiots, imbeciles and epileptics, and we don't even know we are raving. And all is due, directly and solely, to that hateful germ we call the Ideal. The Ideal is _always_ evil, no matter what ideal it be. No idea should ever be raised to a governing throne. This does not mean that man should immediately cut off his head and try to develop a pair of eyes in his breasts. But it does mean this: that an idea is just the final concrete or registered result of living dynamic interchange and reactions: that no idea is ever perfectly expressed until its dynamic cause is finished; and that to continue to put into dynamic effect an already perfected idea means the nullification of all living activity, the substitution of mechanism, and all the resultant horrors of _ennui_, ecstasy, neurasthenia, and a collapsing psyche. The whole tree of our idea of life and living is dead. Then let us leave off hanging ourselves and our children from its branches like medlars. The idea, the actual idea, must rise ever fresh, ever displaced, like the leaves of a tree, from out of the quickness of the sap, and according to the forever incalculable effluence of the great dynamic centers of life. The tree of life is a gay kind of tree that is forever dropping its leaves and budding out afresh, quite different ones. If the last lot were thistle leaves, the next lot may be vine. You never can tell with the Tree of Life. So we come back to that precious child who costs us such a lot of ink. By what right, I ask you, are we going to inject into him our own disease-germs of ideas and infallible motives? By the right of the diseased, who want to infect everybody. There are _few, few people_ in whom the living impulse and reaction develops and sublimates into mental consciousness. There are all kinds of trees in the forest. But few of them indeed bear the apples of knowledge. The modern world insists, however, that every individual shall bear the apples of knowledge. So we go through the forest of mankind, cut back every tree, and try to graft it into an apple-tree. A nice wood of monsters we make by so doing. It is not the _nature_ of most men to know and to understand and to reason very far. Therefore, why should they make a pretense of it? It is the nature of some few men to reason, then let them reason. Those whose nature it is to be rational will instinctively ask why and wherefore, and wrestle with themselves for an answer. But why every Tom, Dick and Harry should have the why and wherefore of the universe rammed into him, and should be allowed to draw the conclusion hence that he is the ideal person and responsible for the universe, I don't know. It is a lie anyway--for neither the whys nor the wherefores are his own, and he is but a parrot with his nut of a universe. Why should we cram the mind of a child with facts that have nothing to do with his own experiences, and have no relation to his own dynamic activity? Let us realize that every extraneous idea effectually introduced into a man's mind is a direct obstruction of his dynamic activity. Every idea which is introduced from outside into a man's mind, and which does not correspond to his own dynamic nature, is a fatal stumbling-block for that man: is a cause of arrest for his true individual activity, and a derangement to his psychic being. For instance, if I teach a man the idea that all men are equal. Now this idea has no foundation in experience, but is logically deduced from certain ethical or philosophic principles. But there is a disease of idealism in the world, and we all are born with it. Particularly teachers are born with it. So they seize on the idea of equality, and proceed to instil it. With what result? Your man is no longer a man, living his own life from his own spontaneous centers. He is a theoretic imbecile trying to frustrate and dislocate all life. It is the death of all life to force a pure _idea_ into practice. Life must be lived from the deep, self-responsible spontaneous centers of every individual, in a vital, _non-ideal_ circuit of dynamic relation between individuals. The passions or desires which are thought-born are deadly. Any particular mode of passion or desire which receives an exclusive ideal sanction at once becomes poisonous. If this is true for men, it is much more true for women. Teach a woman to act from an idea, and you destroy her womanhood for ever. Make a woman self-conscious, and her soul is barren as a sandbag. Why were we driven out of Paradise? Why did we fall into this gnawing disease of unappeasable dissatisfaction? Not because we sinned. Ah, no. All the animals in Paradise enjoyed the sensual passion of coition. Not because we sinned. But because we got our sex into our head. When Eve ate that particular apple, she became aware of her own womanhood, mentally. And mentally she began to experiment with it. She has been experimenting ever since. So has man. To the rage and horror of both of them. These sexual experiments are really anathema. But once a woman is sexually self-conscious, what is she to do? There it is, she is born with the disease of her own self-consciousness, as was her mother before her. She is bound to experiment and try one idea after another, in the long run always to her own misery. She is bound to have fixed one, and then another idea of herself, herself as woman. First she is the noble spouse of a not-quite-so-noble male: then a _Mater Dolorosa_: then a ministering Angel: then a competent social unit, a Member of Parliament or a Lady Doctor or a platform speaker: and all the while, as a side show, she is the Isolde of some Tristan, or the Guinevere of some Lancelot, or the Fata Morgana of all men--in her own idea. She can't stop having an idea of herself. She can't get herself out of her own head. And there she is, functioning away from her own head and her own consciousness of herself and her own automatic self-will, till the whole man and woman game has become just a hell, and men with any backbone would rather kill themselves than go on with it--or kill somebody else. Yet we are going to inculcate more and more self-consciousness, teach every little Mary to be more and more a nice little Mary out of her own head, and every little Joseph to theorize himself up to the scratch. And the point lies here. There will _have_ to come an end. Every race which has become self-conscious and idea-bound in the past has perished. And then it has all started afresh, in a different way, with another race. And man has never learnt any better. We are really far, far more life-stupid than the dead Greeks or the lost Etruscans. Our day is pretty short, and closing fast. We can pass, and another race can follow later. But there is another alternative. We still have in us the power to discriminate between our own idealism, our own self-conscious will, and that other reality, our own true spontaneous self. Certainly we are so overloaded and diseased with ideas that we can't get well in a minute. But we can set our faces stubbornly against the disease, once we recognize it. The disease of love, the disease of "spirit," the disease of niceness and benevolence and feeling good on our own behalf and good on somebody else's behalf. Pah, it is all a gangrene. We can retreat upon the proud, isolate self, and remain there alone, like lepers, till we are cured of this ghastly white disease of self-conscious idealism. And we really can make a move on our children's behalf. We really can refrain from thrusting our children any more into those hot-beds of the self-conscious disease, schools. We really can prevent their eating much more of the tissues of leprosy, newspapers and books. For a time, there should be no compulsory teaching to read and write at all. _The great mass of humanity should never learn to read and write_--_never_. And instead of this gnawing, gnawing disease of mental consciousness and awful, unhealthy craving for stimulus and for action, we must substitute genuine action. The war was really not a bad beginning. But we went out under the banners of idealism, and now the men are home again, the virus is more active than ever, rotting their very souls. The mass of the people will never _mentally understand_. But they will soon instinctively fall into line. Let us substitute action, all kinds of action, for the mass of people, in place of mental activity. Even twelve hours' work a day is better than a newspaper at four in the afternoon and a grievance for the rest of the evening. But particularly let us take care of the children. At all cost, try to prevent a girl's mind from dwelling on herself, Make her act, work, play: assume a rule over her girlhood. Let her learn the domestic arts in their perfection. Let us even artificially set her to spin and weave. Anything to keep her busy, to prevent her reading and becoming self-conscious. Let us awake as soon as possible to the repulsive machine quality of machine-made things. They smell of death. And let us insist that the home is sacred, the hearth, and the very things of the home. Then keep the girls apart from any familiarity or being "pals" with the boys. The nice clean intimacy which we now so admire between the sexes is sterilizing. It makes neuters. Later on, no deep, magical sex-life is possible. The same with the boys. First and foremost establish a rule over them, a proud, harsh, manly rule. Make them _know_ that at every moment they are in the shadow of a proud, strong, adult authority. Let them be soldiers, but as individuals not machine units. There are wars in the future, great wars, which not machines will finally decide, but the free, indomitable life spirit. No more wars under the banners of the ideal, and in the spirit of sacrifice. But wars in the strength of individual men. And then, pure individualistic training to fight, and preparation for a whole new way of life, a new society. Put money into its place, and science and industry. The leaders must stand for life, and they must not ask the simple followers to point out the direction. When the leaders assume responsibility they relieve the followers forever of the burden of finding a way. Relieved of this hateful incubus of responsibility for general affairs, the populace can again become free and happy and spontaneous, leaving matters to their superiors. No newspapers--the mass of the people never learning to read. The evolving once more of the great spontaneous gestures of life. We can't go on as we are. Poor, nerve-worn creatures, fretting our lives away and hating to die because we have never lived. The secret is, to commit into the hands of the sacred few the responsibility which now lies like torture on the mass. Let the few, the leaders, be increasingly responsible for the whole. And let the mass be free: free, save for the choice of leaders. Leaders--this is what mankind is craving for. But men must be prepared to obey, body and soul, once they have chosen the leader. And let them choose the leader for life's sake only. Begin then--there is a beginning. CHAPTER VIII EDUCATION AND SEX IN MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD The one thing we have to avoid, then, even while we carry on our own old process of education, is this development of the powers of so-called self-expression in a child. Let us beware of artificially stimulating his self-consciousness and his so-called imagination. All that we do is to pervert the child into a ghastly state of self-consciousness, making him affectedly try to show off as we wish him to show off. The moment the least little trace of self-consciousness enters in a child, good-by to everything except falsity. Much better just pound away at the ABC and simple arithmetic and so on. The modern methods do make children sharp, give them a sort of slick finesse, but it is the beginning of the mischief. It ends in the great "unrest" of a nervous, hysterical proletariat. Begin to teach a child of five to "understand." To understand the sun and moon and daisy and the secrets of procreation, bless your soul. Understanding all the way.--And when the child is twenty he'll have a hysterical understanding of his own invented grievance, and there's an end of him. Understanding is the devil. A child mustn't understand things. He must have them his own way. His vision isn't ours. When a boy of eight sees a horse, he doesn't see the correct biological object we intend him to see. He sees a big living presence of no particular shape with hair dangling from its neck and four legs. If he puts two eyes in the profile, he is quite right. Because he does _not_ see with optical, photographic vision. The image on his retina is _not_ the image of his consciousness. The image on his retina just does not go into him. His unconsciousness is filled with a strong, dark, vague prescience of a powerful presence, a two-eyed, four-legged, long-maned presence looming imminent. And to _force_ the boy to see a correct one-eyed horse-profile is just like pasting a placard in front of his vision. It simply kills his inward seeing. We don't _want_ him to see a proper horse. The child is _not_ a little camera. He is a small vital organism which has direct dynamic _rapport_ with the objects of the outer universe. He perceives from his breast and his abdomen, with deep-sunken realism, the elemental nature of the creature. So that to this day a Noah's Ark tree is more real than a Corot tree or a Constable tree: and a flat Noah's Ark cow has a deeper vital reality than even a Cuyp cow. The mode of vision is not one and final. The mode of vision is manifold. And the optical image is a mere vibrating blur to a child--and, indeed, to a passionate adult. In this vibrating blur the soul sees its own true correspondent. It sees, in a cow, horns and squareness, and a long tail. It sees, for a horse, a mane, and a long face, round nose, and four legs. And in each case a darkly vital presence. Now horns and squareness and a long thin ox-tail, these are the fearful and wonderful elements of the cow-form, which the dynamic soul perfectly perceives. The ideal-image is just outside nature, for a child--something false. In a picture, a child wants elemental recognition, and not correctness or expression, or least of all, what we call understanding. The child distorts inevitably and dynamically. But the dynamic abstraction is more than mental. If a huge eye sits in the middle of the cheek, in a child's drawing, this shows that the deep dynamic consciousness of the eye, its relative exaggeration, is the life-truth, even if it is a scientific falsehood. On the other hand, what on earth is the good of saying to a child, "The world is a flattened sphere, like an orange." It is simply pernicious. You had much better say the world is a poached egg in a frying pan. _That_ might have some dynamic meaning. The only thing about the flattened orange is that the child just sees this orange disporting itself in blue air, and never bothers to associate it with the earth he treads on. And yet it would be so much better for the mass of mankind if they never heard of the flattened sphere. They should never be told that the earth is round. It only makes everything unreal to them. They are balked in their impression of the flat good earth, they can't get over this sphere business, they live in a fog of abstraction, and nothing is anything. Save for purposes of abstraction, the earth is a great plain, with hills and valleys. Why force abstractions and kill the reality, when there's no need? As for children, will we never realize that their abstractions are never based on observations, but on subjective exaggerations? If there is an eye in the face, the face is all eye. It is the child soul which cannot get over the mystery of the eye. If there is a tree in a landscape, the landscape is all tree. Always this partial focus. The attempt to make a child focus for a whole view--which is really a generalization and an adult abstraction--is simply wicked. Yet the first thing we do is to set a child making relief-maps in clay, for example: of his own district. Imbecility! He has not even the faintest impression of the total hill on which his home stands. A steepness going up to a door--and front garden railings--and perhaps windows. That's the lot. The top and bottom of it is, that it is a crime to teach a child anything at all, school-wise. It is just evil to collect children together and teach them through the head. It causes absolute starvation in the dynamic centers, and sterile substitute of brain knowledge is all the gain. The children of the middle classes are so vitally impoverished, that the miracle is they continue to exist at all. The children of the lower classes do better, because they escape into the streets. But even the children of the proletariat are now infected. And, of course, as my critics point out, under all the school-smarm and newspaper-cant, man is to-day as savage as a cannibal, and more dangerous. The living dynamic self is denaturalized instead of being educated. We talk about education--leading forth the natural intelligence of a child. But ours is just the opposite of leading forth. It is a ramming in of brain facts through the head, and a consequent distortion, suffocation, and starvation of the primary centers of consciousness. A nice day of reckoning we've got in front of us. Let us lead forth, by all means. But let us not have mental knowledge before us as the goal of the leading. Much less let us make of it a vicious circle in which we lead the unhappy child-mind, like a cow in a ring at a fair. We don't want to educate children so that they may understand. Understanding is a fallacy and a vice in most people. I don't even want my child to know, much less to understand. _I_ don't want my child to know that five fives are twenty-five, any more than I want my child to wear my hat or my boots. I _don't_ want my child to _know_. If he wants five fives let him count them on his fingers. As for his little mind, give it a rest, and let his dynamic self be alert. He will ask "why" often enough. But he more often asks why the sun shines, or why men have mustaches, or why grass is green, than anything sensible. Most of a child's questions are, and should be, unanswerable. They are not questions at all. They are exclamations of wonder, they are _remarks_ half-sceptically addressed. When a child says, "Why is grass green?" he half implies. "Is it really green, or is it just taking me in?" And we solemnly begin to prate about chlorophyll. Oh, imbeciles, idiots, inexcusable owls! The whole of a child's development goes on from the great dynamic centers, and is basically non-mental. To introduce mental activity is to arrest the dynamic activity, and stultify true dynamic development. By the age of twenty-one our young people are helpless, hopeless, selfless, floundering mental entities, with nothing in front of them, because they have been starved from the roots, systematically, for twenty-one years, and fed through the head. They have had all their mental excitements, sex and everything, all through the head, and when it comes to the actual thing, why, there's nothing in it. _Blasé._ The affective centers have been exhausted from the head. Before the age of fourteen, children should be taught only to move, to act, to _do_. And they should be taught as little as possible even of this. Adults simply cannot and do not know any more what the mode of childish intelligence is. Adults _always_ interfere. They _always_ force the adult mental mode. Therefore children must be preserved from adult instructions. Make a child work--yes. Make it do little jobs. Keep a fine and delicate and fierce discipline, so that the little jobs are performed as perfectly as is consistent with the child's nature. Make the child alert, proud, and becoming in its movements. Make it know very definitely that it shall not and must not trespass on other people's privacy or patience. Teach it songs, tell it tales. But _never_ instruct it school-wise. And mostly, leave it alone, send it away to be with other children and to get in and out of mischief, and in and out of danger. Forget your child altogether as much as possible. All this is the active and strenuous business of parents, and must not be shelved off on to strangers. It is the business of parents _mentally_ to forget but dynamically never to forsake their children. It is no use expecting parents to know _why_ schools are closed, and _why_ they, the parents, must be quite responsible for their own children during the first ten years. If it is quite useless to expect parents to understand a theory of relativity, much less will they understand the development of the dynamic consciousness. But why should they understand? It is the business of very few to understand and for the mass, it is their business to believe and not to bother, but to be honorable and humanly to fulfill their human responsibilities. To give active obedience to their leaders, and to possess their own souls in natural pride. Some must understand why a child is not to be mentally educated. Some must have a faint inkling of the processes of consciousness during the first fourteen years. Some must know what a child beholds, when it looks at a horse, and what it means when it says, "Why is grass green?" The answer to this question, by the way, is "Because it is." The interplay of the four dynamic centers follows no one conceivable law. Mental activity continues according to a law of co-relation. But there is no logical or rational co-relation in the dynamic consciousness. It pulses on inconsequential, and it would be impossible to determine any sequence. Out of the very lack of sequence in dynamic consciousness does the individual himself develop. The dynamic abstraction of a child's precepts follows no mental law, and even no law which can ever be mentally propounded. And this is why it is utterly pernicious to set a child making a clay relief-map of its own district, or to ask a child to draw conclusions from given observations. Dynamically, a child draws no conclusions. All things still remain dynamically possible. A conclusion drawn is a nail in the coffin of a child's developing being. Let a child make a clay landscape, if it likes. But entirely according to its own fancy, and without conclusions drawn. Only, let the landscape be vividly made--always the discipline of the soul's full attention. "Oh, but where are the factory chimneys?"--or else--"Why have you left out the gas-works?" or "Do you call that sloppy thing a church?" The particular focus should be vivid, and the record in some way true. The soul must give earnest attention, that is all. And so actively disciplined, the child develops for the first ten years. We need not be afraid of letting children see the passions and reactions of adult life. Only we must not strain the _sympathies_ of a child, in _any_ direction, particularly the direction of love and pity. Nor must we introduce the fallacy of right and wrong. Spontaneous distaste should take the place of right and wrong. And least of all must there be a cry: "You see, dear, you don't understand. When you are older--" A child's sagacity is better than an adult understanding, anyhow. Of course it is ten times criminal to tell young children facts about sex, or to implicate them in adult relationships. A child has a strong evanescent sex consciousness. It instinctively writes impossible words on back walls. But this is not a fully conscious mental act. It is a kind of dream act--quite natural. The child's curious, shadowy, indecent sex-knowledge is quite in the course of nature. And does nobody any harm at all. Adults had far better not notice it. But if a child sees a cockerel tread a hen, or two dogs coupling, well and good. It _should_ see these things. Only, without comment. Let nothing be exaggeratedly hidden. By instinct, let us preserve the decent privacies. But if a child occasionally sees its parent nude, taking a bath, all the better. Or even sitting in the W. C. Exaggerated secrecy is bad. But indecent exposure is also very bad. But worst of all is dragging in the _mental_ consciousness of these shadowy dynamic realities. In the same way, to talk to a child about an adult is vile. Let adults keep their adult feelings and communications for people of their own age. But if a child sees its parents violently quarrel, all the better. There must be storms. And a child's dynamic understanding is far deeper and more penetrating than our sophisticated interpretation. But _never_ make a child a party to adult affairs. Never drag the child in. Refuse its sympathy on such occasions. Always treat it as if it had _no_ business to hear, even if it is present and _must_ hear. Truly, it has no business mentally to hear. And the dynamic soul will always weigh things up and dispose of them properly, if there be no interference of adult comment or adult desire for sympathy. It is despicable for any one parent to accept a child's sympathy against the other parent. And the one who _received_ the sympathy is always more contemptible than the one who is hated. Of course so many children are born to-day unnaturally mentally awake and alive to adult affairs, that there is nothing left but to tell them everything, crudely: or else, much better, to say: "Ah, get out, you know too much, you make me sick." To return to the question of sex. A child is born sexed. A child is either male or female, in the whole of its psyche and physique is either male or female. Every single living cell is either male or female, and will remain either male or female as long as life lasts. And every single cell in every male child is male, and every cell in every female child is female. The talk about a third sex, or about the indeterminate sex, is just to pervert the issue. Biologically, it is true, the rudimentary formation of both sexes is found in every individual. That doesn't mean that every individual is a bit of both, or either, _ad lib._ After a sufficient period of idealism, men become hopelessly self-conscious. That is, the great affective centers no longer act spontaneously, but always wait for control from the head. This always breeds a great fluster in the psyche, and the poor self-conscious individual cannot help posing and posturing. Our ideal has taught us to be gentle and wistful: rather girlish and yielding, and _very_ yielding in our sympathies. In fact, many young men feel so very like what they imagine a girl must feel, that hence they draw the conclusion that they must have a large share of female sex inside them. False conclusion. These girlish men have often, to-day, the finest maleness, once it is put to the test. How is it then that they feel, and look, so girlish? It is largely a question of the direction of the polarized flow. Our ideal has taught us to be _so_ loving and _so_ submissive and _so_ yielding in our sympathy, that the mode has become automatic in many men. Now in what we will call the "natural" mode, man has his positivity in the volitional centers, and women in the sympathetic. In fulfilling the Christian love ideal, however, men have reversed this. Man has assumed the gentle, all-sympathetic rôle, and woman has become the energetic party, with the authority in her hands. The male is the sensitive, sympathetic nature, the woman the active, effective, authoritative. So that the male acts as the passive, or recipient pole of attraction, the female as the active, positive, exertive pole, in human relations. Which is a reversal of the old flow. The woman is now the initiator, man the responder. They seem to play each other's parts. But man is purely male, playing woman's part, and woman is purely female, however manly. The gulf between Heliogabalus, or the most womanly man on earth, and the most manly woman, is just the same as ever: just the same old gulf between the sexes. The man is male, the woman is female. Only they are playing one another's parts, as they must at certain periods. The dynamic polarity has swung around. If we look a little closer, we can define this positive and negative business better. As a matter of fact, positive and negative, passive and active cuts both ways. If the man, as thinker and doer, is active, or positive, and the woman negative, then, on the other hand, as the initiator of emotion, of feeling, and of sympathetic understanding the woman is positive, the man negative. The man may be the initiator in action, but the woman is initiator in emotion. The man has the initiative as far as voluntary activity goes, and the woman the initiative as far as sympathetic activity goes. In love, it is the woman naturally who loves, the man who is loved. In love, woman is the positive, man the negative. It is woman who asks, in love, and man who answers. In life, the reverse is the case. In knowing and in doing, man is positive and woman negative: man initiates, and woman lives up to it. Naturally this nicely arranged order of things may be reversed. Action and utterance, which are male, are polarized against feeling, emotion, which are female. And which is positive, which negative? Was man, the eternal protagonist, born of woman, from her womb of fathomless emotion? Or was woman, with her deep womb of emotion, born from the rib of active man, the first created? Man, the doer, the knower, the original in _being_, is he lord of life? Or is woman, the great Mother, who bore us from the womb of love, is she the supreme Goddess? This is the question of all time. And as long as man and woman endure, so will the answer be given, first one way, then the other. Man, as the utterer, usually claims that Eve was created out of his spare rib: from the field of the creative, upper dynamic consciousness, that is. But woman, as soon as she gets a word in, points to the fact that man inevitably, poor darling, is the issue of his mother's womb. So the battle rages. But some men always agree with the woman. Some men always yield to woman the creative positivity. And in certain periods, such as the present, the majority of men concur in regarding woman as the source of life, the first term in creation: woman, the mother, the prime being. And then, the whole polarity shifts over. Man still remains the doer and thinker. But he is so only in the service of emotional and procreative woman. His highest moment is now the emotional moment when he gives himself up to the woman, when he forms the perfect answer for her great emotional and procreative asking. All his thinking, all his activity in the world only contributes to this great moment, when he is fulfilled in the emotional passion of the woman, the birth of rebirth, as Whitman calls it. In his consummation in the emotional passion of a woman, man is reborn, which is quite true. And there is the point at which we all now stick. Life, thought, and activity, all are devoted truly to the great end of Woman, wife and mother. Man has now entered on to his negative mode. Now, his consummation is in feeling, not in action. Now, his activity is all of the domestic order and all his thought goes to proving that nothing matters except that birth shall continue and woman shall rock in the nest of this globe like a bird who covers her eggs in some tall tree. Man is the fetcher, the carrier, the sacrifice, the crucified, and the reborn of woman. This being so, the whole tendency of his nature changes. Instead of being assertive and rather insentient, he becomes wavering and sensitive. He begins to have as many feelings--nay, more than a woman. His heroism is all in altruistic endurance. He worships pity and tenderness and weakness, even in himself. In short, he takes on very largely the original rôle of woman. Woman meanwhile becomes the fearless, inwardly relentless, determined positive party. She grips the responsibility. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Nay, she makes man discover that cradles should not be rocked, in order that her hands may be left free. She is now a queen of the earth, and inwardly a fearsome tyrant. She keeps pity and tenderness emblazoned on her banners. But God help the man whom she pities. Ultimately she tears him to bits. Therefore we see the reversal of the old poles. Man becomes the emotional party, woman the positive and active. Man begins to show strong signs of the peculiarly strong passive sex desire, the desire to be taken, which is considered characteristic of woman. Man begins to have all the feelings of woman--or all the feelings which he attributed to woman. He becomes more feminine than woman ever was, and worships his own femininity, calling it the highest. In short, he begins to exhibit all signs of sexual complexity. He begins to imagine he really is half female. And certainly woman seems very male. So the hermaphrodite fallacy revives again. But it is all a fallacy. Man, in the midst of all his effeminacy, is still male and nothing but male. And woman, though she harangue in Parliament or patrol the streets with a helmet on her head, is still completely female. They are only playing each other's rôles, because the poles have swung into reversion. The compass is reversed. But that doesn't mean that the north pole has become the south pole, or that each is a bit of both. Of course a woman should stick to her own natural emotional positivity. But then man must stick to his own positivity of _being_, of action, _disinterested, non-domestic, male_ action, which is not devoted to the increase of the female. Once man vacates his camp of sincere, passionate positivity in disinterested being, his supreme responsibility to fulfill his own profoundest impulses, with reference to none but God or his own soul, not taking woman into count at all, in this primary responsibility to his own deepest soul; once man vacates this strong citadel of his own genuine, not spurious, divinity; then in comes woman, picks up the scepter and begins to conduct a rag-time band. Man remains man, however he may put on wistfulness and tenderness like petticoats, and sensibilities like pearl ornaments. Your sensitive little big-eyed boy, so much more gentle and loving than his harder sister, is male for all that, believe me. Perhaps evilly male, so mothers may learn to their cost: and wives still more. Of course there should be a great balance between the sexes. Man, in the daytime, must follow his own soul's greatest impulse, and give himself to life-work and risk himself to death. It is not woman who claims the highest in man. It is a man's own religious soul that drives him on beyond woman, to his supreme activity. For his highest, man is responsible to God alone. He may not pause to remember that he has a life to lose, or a wife and children to leave. He must carry forward the banner of life, though seven worlds perish, with all the wives and mothers and children in them. Hence Jesus, "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" Every man that lives has to say it again to his wife or mother, once he has any work or mission in hand, that comes from his soul. But again, no man is a blooming marvel for twenty-four hours a day. Jesus or Napoleon or any other of them ought to have been man enough to be able to come home at tea-time and put his slippers on and sit under the spell of his wife. For there you are, the woman has her world, her positivity: the world of love, of emotion, of sympathy. And it behooves every man in his hour to take off his shoes and relax and give himself up to his woman and her world. Not to give up his purpose. But to give up himself for a time to her who is his mate.--And so it is one detests the clock-work Kant, and the petit-bourgeois Napoleon divorcing his Josephine for a Hapsburg--or even Jesus, with his "Woman, what have I to do with thee?"--He might have added "just now."--They were all failures. CHAPTER IX THE BIRTH OF SEX The last chapter was a chapter of semi-digression. We now return to the straight course. Is the straightness none too evident? Ah well, it's a matter of relativity. A child is born with one sex only, and remains always single in his sex. There is no intermingling, only a great change of rôles is possible. But man in the female rôle is still male. Sex--that is to say, maleness and femaleness--is present from the moment of birth, and in every act or deed of every child. But sex in the real sense of dynamic sexual relationship, this does not exist in a child, and cannot exist until puberty and after. True, children have a sort of sex consciousness. Little boys and little girls may even commit indecencies together. And still it is nothing vital. It is a sort of shadow activity, a sort of dream-activity. It has no very profound effect. But still, boys and girls should be kept apart as much as possible, that they may have some sort of respect and fear for the gulf that lies between them in nature, and for the great strangeness which each has to offer the other, finally. We are all wrong when we say there is no vital difference between the sexes. There is every difference. Every bit, every cell in a boy is male, every cell is female in a woman, and must remain so. Women can never feel or know as men do. And in the reverse men can never feel and know, dynamically, as women do. Man, acting in the passive or feminine polarity, is still man, and he doesn't have one single unmanly feeling. And women, when they speak and write, utter not one single word that men have not taught them. Men learn their feelings from women, women learn their mental consciousness from men. And so it will ever be. Meanwhile, women live forever by feeling, and men live forever from an inherent sense of _purpose_. Feeling is an end in itself. This is unspeakable truth to a woman, and never true for one minute to a man. When man, in the Epicurean spirit, embraces feeling, he makes himself a martyr to it--like Maupassant or Oscar Wilde. Woman will _never_ understand the depth of the spirit of purpose in man, his deeper spirit. And man will never understand the sacredness of feeling to woman. Each will play at the other's game, but they will remain apart. The whole mode, the whole everything is really different in man and woman. Therefore we should keep boys and girls apart, that they are pure and virgin in themselves. On mixing with one another, in becoming familiar, in being "pals," they lose their own male and female integrity. And they lose the treasure of the future, the vital sex polarity, the dynamic magic of life. For the magic and the dynamism rests on _otherness_. For actual sex is a vital polarity. And a polarity which rouses into action, as we know, at puberty. And how? As we know, a child lives from the great field of dynamic consciousness established between the four poles of the dynamic psyche, two great poles of sympathy, two great poles of will. The solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion, great nerve-centers below the diaphragm, act as the dynamic origin of all consciousness in man, and are immediately polarized by the other two nerve-centers, the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion above the diaphragm. At these four poles the whole flow, both within the individual and from without him, of dynamic consciousness and dynamic creative relationship is centered. These four first poles constitute the first field of dynamic consciousness for the first twelve or fourteen years of the life of every child. And then a change takes place. It takes place slowly, gradually and inevitably, utterly beyond our provision or control. The living soul is unfolding itself in another great metamorphosis. What happens, in the biological psyche, is that deeper centers of consciousness and function come awake. Deep in the lower body the great sympathetic center, the hypogastric plexus has been acting all the time in a kind of dream-automatism, balanced by its corresponding voluntary center, the sacral ganglion. At the age of twelve these two centers begin slowly to rumble awake, with a deep reverberant force that changes the whole constitution of the life of the individual. And as these two centers, the sympathetic center of the deeper abdomen, and the voluntary center of the loins, gradually sparkle into wakeful, _conscious_ activity, their corresponding poles are roused in the upper body. In the region of the throat and neck, the so-called cervical plexuses and the cervical ganglia dawn into activity. We have now another field of dawning dynamic consciousness, that will extend far beyond the first. And now various things happen to us. First of all actual sex establishes its strange and troublesome presence within us. This is the massive wakening of the lower body. And then, in the upper body, the breasts of a woman begin to develop, her throat changes its form. And in the man, the voice breaks, the beard begins to grow round the lips and on to the throat. There are the obvious physiological changes resulting from the gradual bursting into free activity of the hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion, in the lower body, and of the cervical plexuses and ganglia of the neck, in the upper body. Why the growth of hair should start at the lower and upper sympathetic regions we cannot say. Perhaps for protection. Perhaps to preserve these powerful yet supersensitive nodes from the inclemency of changes in temperature, which might cause a derangement. Perhaps for the sake of protective warning, as hair warns when it is touched. Perhaps for a screen against various dynamic vibrations, and as a receiver of other suited dynamic vibrations. It may be that even the hair of the head acts as a sensitive vibration-medium for conveying currents of physical and vitalistic activity to and from the brain. And perhaps from the centers of intense vital surcharge hair springs as a sort of annunciation or declaration, like a crest of life-assertion. Perhaps all these things, and perhaps others. But with the bursting awake of the four new poles of dynamic consciousness and being, change takes place in everything, the features now begin to take individual form, the limbs develop out of the soft round matrix of child-form, the body resolves itself into distinctions. A strange creative change in being has taken place. The child before puberty is quite another thing from the child after puberty. Strange indeed is this new birth, this rising from the sea of childhood into a new being. It is a resurrection which we fear. And now, a new world, a new heaven and a new earth. Now new relationships are formed, the old ones retire from their prominence. Now mother and father inevitably give way before masters and mistresses, brothers and sisters yield to friends. This is the period of _Schwärmerei_, of young adoration and of real initial friendships. A child before puberty has playmates. After puberty he has friends and enemies. A whole new field of passional relationship. And the old bonds relaxing, the old love retreating. The father and mother bonds now relax, though they never break. The family love wanes, though it never dies. It is the hour of the stranger. Let the stranger now enter the soul. And it is the first hour of true individuality, the first hour of genuine, responsible solitariness. A child knows the abyss of forlornness. But an adolescent alone knows the strange pain of growing into his own isolation of individuality. All this change is an agony and a bliss. It is a cataclysm and a new world. It is our most serious hour, perhaps. And yet we cannot be responsible for it. Now sex comes into active being. Until puberty, sex is submerged, nascent, incipient only. After puberty, it is a tremendous factor. What is sex, really? We can never say, satisfactorily. But we know so much: we know that it is a dynamic polarity between human beings, and a circuit of force _always_ flowing. The psychoanalyst is right so far. There can be no vivid relation between two adult individuals which does not consist in a dynamic polarized flow of vitalistic force or magnetism or electricity, call it what you will, between these two people. Yet is this dynamic flow inevitably sexual in nature? This is the moot point for psychoanalysis. But let us look at sex, in its obvious manifestation. The _sexual_ relation between man and woman consummates in the act of coition. Now what is the act of coition? We know its functional purpose of procreation. But, after all our experience and all our poetry and novels we know that the procreative purpose of sex is, to the individual man and woman, just a side-show. To the individual, the act of coition is a great psychic experience, a vital experience of tremendous importance. On this vital individual experience the life and very being of the individual largely depends. But what is the experience? Untellable. Only, we know something. We know that in the act of coition the _blood_ of the individual man, acutely surcharged with intense vital electricity--we know no word, so say "electricity," by analogy--rises to a culmination, in a tremendous magnetic urge towards the magnetic blood of the female. The whole of the living blood in the two individuals forms a field of intense, polarized magnetic attraction. So, the two poles must be brought into contact. In the act of coition, the two seas of blood in the two individuals, rocking and surging towards contact, as near as possible, clash into a oneness. A great flash of interchange occurs, like an electric spark when two currents meet or like lightning out of the densely surcharged clouds. There is a lightning flash which passes through the blood of both individuals, there is a thunder of sensation which rolls in diminishing crashes down the nerves of each--and then the tension passes. The two individuals are separate again. But are they as they were before? Is the air the same after a thunder-storm as before? No. The air is as it were new, fresh, tingling with newness. So is the blood of man and woman after successful coition. After a false coition, like prostitution, there is not newness but a certain disintegration. But after coition, the actual chemical constitution of the blood is so changed, that usually sleep intervenes, to allow the time for chemical, biological readjustment through the whole system. So, the blood is changed and renewed, refreshed, almost recreated, like the atmosphere after thunder. Out of the newness of the living blood pass the new strange waves which beat upon the great dynamic centers of the nerves: primarily upon the hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion. From these centers rise new impulses, new vision, new being, rising like Aphrodite from the foam of the new tide of blood. And so individual life goes on. Perhaps, then, we will allow ourselves to say what, in psychic individual reality, is the act of coition. It is the bringing together of the surcharged electric blood of the male with the polarized electric blood of the female, with the result of a tremendous flashing interchange, which alters the constitution of the blood, and the very quality of _being_, in both. And this, surely, is sex. But is this the whole of sex? That is the question. After coition, we say the blood is renewed. We say that from the new, finely sparkling blood new thrills pass into the great affective centers of the lower body, new thrills of feeling, of impulse, of energy.--And what about these new thrills? Now, a new story. The new thrills are passed on to the great upper centers of the dynamic body. The individual polarity now changes, within the individual system. The upper centers, cardiac plexus and cervical plexuses, thoracic ganglion and cervical ganglia now assume positivity. These, the upper polarized centers, have now the positive rôle to play, the solar and the hypogastric plexuses, the lumbar and the sacral ganglia, these have the submissive, negative rôle for the time being. And what then? What now, that the upper centers are finely active in positivity? Now it is a different story. Now there is new vision in the eyes, new hearing in the ears, new voice in the throat and speech on the lips. Now the new song rises, the brain tingles to new thought, the heart craves for new activity. The heart craves for new activity. For new _collective_ activity. That is, for a new polarized connection with other beings, other men. Is this new craving for polarized communion with others, this craving for a new unison, is it sexual, like the original craving for the woman? Not at all. The whole polarity is different. Now, the positive poles are the poles of the breast and shoulders and throat, the poles of activity and full consciousness. Men, being themselves made new after the act of coition, wish to make the world new. A new, passionate polarity springs up between men who are bent on the same activity, the polarity between man and woman sinks to passivity. It is now daytime, and time to forget sex, time to be busy making a new world. Is this new polarity, this new circuit of passion between comrades and co-workers, is this also sexual? It is a vivid circuit of polarized passion. Is it hence sex? It is not. Because what are the poles of positive connection?--the upper, busy poles. What is the dynamic contact?--a unison in spirit, in understanding, and a pure commingling in one great _work_. A mingling of the individual passion into one great _purpose_. Now this is also a grand consummation for men, this mingling of many with one great impassioned purpose. But is this sex? Knowing what sex is, can we call this other also sex? We cannot. This meeting of many in one great passionate purpose is not sex, and should never be confused with sex. It is a great motion in the opposite direction. And I am sure that the ultimate, greatest desire in men is this desire for great _purposive_ activity. When man loses his deep sense of purposive, creative activity, he feels lost, and is lost. When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his _secret_ soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair. When he makes woman, or the woman and child the great center of life and of life-significance, he falls into the beginnings of despair. Man must bravely stand by his own soul, his own responsibility as the creative vanguard of life. And he must also have the courage to go home to his woman and become a perfect answer to her deep sexual call. But he must never confuse his two issues. Primarily and supremely man is _always_ the pioneer of life, adventuring onward into the unknown, alone with his own temerarious, dauntless soul. Woman for him exists only in the twilight, by the camp fire, when day has departed. Evening and the night are hers. The psychoanalysts, driving us back to the sexual consummation always, do us infinite damage. We have to break away, back to the great unison of manhood in some passionate _purpose_. Now this is not like sex. Sex is always individual. A man has his own sex: nobody else's. And sexually he goes as a single individual; he can mingle only singly. So that to make sex a general affair is just a perversion and a lie. You can't get people and talk to them about their sex, as if it were a common interest. We have got to get back to the great purpose of manhood, a passionate unison in actively making a world. This is a real commingling of many. And in such a commingling we forfeit the individual. In the commingling of sex we are alone with _one_ partner. It is an individual affair, there is no superior or inferior. But in the commingling of a passionate purpose, each individual sacredly abandons his individual. In the living faith of his soul, he surrenders his individuality to the great urge which is upon him. He may have to surrender his name, his fame, his fortune, his life, everything. But once a man, in the integrity of his own individual soul, _believes_, he surrenders his own individuality to his belief, and becomes one of a united body. He knows what he does. He makes the surrender honorably, in agreement with his own soul's deepest desire. But he surrenders, and remains responsible for the purity of his surrender. But what if he believes that his sexual consummation is his supreme consummation? Then he serves the great purpose to which he pledges himself only as long as it pleases him. After which he turns it down, and goes back to sex. With sex as the one accepted prime motive, the world drifts into despair and anarchy. Of all countries, America has most to fear from anarchy, even from one single moment's lapse into anarchy. The old nations are _organically_ fixed into classes, but America not. You can shake Europe to atoms. And yet peasants fall back to peasantry, artisans to industrial labor, upper classes to their control--inevitably. But can you say the same of America? America must not lapse for one single moment into anarchy. It would be the end of her. She must drift no nearer to anarchy. She is near enough. Well, then, Americans must make a choice. It is a choice between belief in man's creative, spontaneous soul, and man's automatic power of production and reproduction. It is a choice between serving _man_, or woman. It is a choice between yielding the soul to a leader, leaders, or yielding only to the woman, wife, mistress, or mother. The great collective passion of belief which brings men together, comrades and co-workers, passionately obeying their soul-chosen leader or leaders, this is not a sex passion. Not in any sense. Sex holds any _two_ people together, but it tends to disintegrate society, unless it is subordinated to the great dominating male passion of collective _purpose_. But when the sex passion submits to the great purposive passion, then you have fulness. And no great purposive passion can endure long unless it is established upon the fulfillment in the vast majority of individuals of the true sexual passion. No great motive or ideal or social principle can endure for any length of time unless based upon the sexual fulfillment of the vast majority of individuals concerned. It cuts both ways. Assert sex as the predominant fulfillment, and you get the collapse of living purpose in man. You get anarchy. Assert _purposiveness_ as the one supreme and pure activity of life, and you drift into barren sterility, like our business life of to-day, and our political life. You become sterile, you make anarchy inevitable. And so there you are. You have got to base your great purposive activity upon the intense sexual fulfillment of all your individuals. That was how Egypt endured. But you have got to keep your sexual fulfillment even then subordinate, just subordinate to the great passion of purpose: subordinate by a hair's breadth only: but still, by that hair's breadth, subordinate. Perhaps we can see now a little better--to go back to the child--where Freud is wrong in attributing a sexual motive to all human activity. It is obvious there is no real sexual motive in a child, for example. The great sexual centers are not even awake. True, even in a child of three, rudimentary sex throws strange shadows on the wall, in its approach from the distance. But these are only an uneasy intrusion from the as-yet-uncreated, unready biological centers. The great sexual centers of the hypogastric plexus, and the immensely powerful sacral ganglion are slowly prepared, developed in a kind of prenatal gestation during childhood before puberty. But even an unborn child kicks in the womb. So do the great sex-centers give occasional blind kicks in a child. It is part of the phenomenon of childhood. But we must be most careful not to charge these rather unpleasant apparitions or phenomena against the individual boy or girl. We must be _very_ careful not to drag the matter into mental consciousness. Shoo it away. Reprimand it with a pah! and a faugh! and a bit of contempt. But do not get into any heat or any fear. Do not startle a passional attention. Drive the whole thing away like the shadow it is, and be _very_ careful not to drive it into the consciousness. Be very careful to plant no seed of burning shame or horror. Throw over it merely the cold water of contemptuous indifference, dismissal. After puberty, a child may as well be told the simple and necessary facts of sex. As things stand, the parent may as well do it. But briefly, coldly, and with as cold a dismissal as possible.--"Look here, you're not a child any more; you know it, don't you? You're going to be a man. And you know what that means. It means you're going to marry a woman later on, and get children. You know it, and I know it. But in the meantime, leave yourself alone. I know you'll have a lot of bother with yourself, and your feelings. I know what is happening to you. And I know you get excited about it. But you needn't. Other men have all gone through it. So don't you go creeping off by yourself and doing things on the sly. It won't do you any good.--I know what you'll do, because we've all been through it. I know the thing will keep coming on you at night. But remember that I know. Remember. And remember that I want you to leave yourself alone. I know what it is, I tell you. I've been through it all myself. You've got to go through these years, before you find a woman you want to marry, and whom you can marry. I went through them myself, and got myself worked up a good deal more than was good for me.--Try to contain yourself. Always try to contain yourself, and be a man. That's the only thing. Always try and be manly, and quiet in yourself. Remember I know what it is. I've been the same, in the same state that you are in. And probably I've behaved more foolishly and perniciously than ever you will. So come to me if anything _really_ bothers you. And don't feel sly and secret. I do know just what you've got and what you haven't. I've been as bad and perhaps worse than you. And the only thing I want of you is to be manly. Try and be manly, and quiet in yourself." That is about as much as a father can say to a boy, at puberty. You have to be _very_ careful what you do: especially if you are a parent. To translate sex into mental ideas is vile, to make a scientific fact of it is death. As a matter of fact there should be some sort of initiation into true adult consciousness. Boys should be taken away from their mothers and sisters as much as possible at adolescence. They should be given into some real manly charge. And there should be some actual initiation into sex life. Perhaps like the savages, who make the boy die again, symbolically, and pull him forth through some narrow aperture, to be born again, and make him suffer and endure terrible hardships, to make a great dynamic effect on the consciousness, a terrible dynamic sense of change in the very being. In short, a long, violent initiation, from which the lad emerges emaciated, but cut off forever from childhood, entered into the serious, responsible pale of manhood. And with his whole consciousness convulsed by a great change, as his dynamic psyche actually is convulsed.--And something in the same way, to initiate girls into womanhood. There should be the intense dynamic reaction: the physical suffering and the physical realization sinking deep into the soul, changing the soul for ever. Sex should come upon us as a terrible thing of suffering and privilege and mystery: a mysterious metamorphosis come upon us, and a new terrible power given us, and a new responsibility. Telling?--What's the good of telling?--The mystery, the terror, and the tremendous power of sex should never be explained away. The mass of mankind should _never_ be acquainted with the scientific biological facts of sex: _never_. The mystery must remain in its dark secrecy, and its dark, powerful dynamism. The reality of sex lies in the great dynamic convulsions in the soul. And as such it should be realized, a great creative-convulsive seizure upon the soul.--To make it a matter of test-tube mixtures, chemical demonstrations and trashy lock-and-key symbols is just blasting. Even more sickening is the line: "You see, dear, one day you'll love a man as I love Daddy, more than anything else in the _whole_ world. And then, dear, I hope you'll marry him. Because if you do you'll be happy, and I want you to be happy, my love. And so I hope you'll marry the man you really love (kisses the child).--And then, darling, there will come a lot of things you know nothing about now. You'll want to have a dear little baby, won't you, darling? Your own dear little baby. And your husband's as well. Because it'll be his, too. You know that, don't you, dear? It will be born from both of you. And you don't know how, do you? Well, it will come from right inside you, dear, out of your own inside. You came out of mother's inside, etc., etc." But I suppose there's really nothing else to be done, given the world and society as we've got them now. The mother is doing her best. But it is all wrong. It is wrong to make sex appear as if it were part of the dear-darling-love smarm: the spiritual love. It is even worse to take the scientific test-tube line. It all kills the great effective dynamism of life, and substitutes the mere ash of mental ideas and tricks. The scientific fact of sex is no more sex than a skeleton is a man. Yet you'd think twice before you stock a skeleton in front of a lad and said, "You see, my boy, this is what you are when you come to know yourself."--And the ideal, lovey-dovey "explanation" of sex as something wonderful and extra lovey-dovey, a bill-and-coo process of obtaining a sweet little baby--or else "God made us so that we must do this, to bring another dear little baby to life"--well, it just makes one sick. It is disastrous to the deep sexual life. But perhaps that is what we want. When humanity comes to its senses it will realize what a fearful Sodom apple our understanding is. What terrible mouths and stomachs full of bitter ash we've all got. And then we shall take away "knowledge" and "understanding," and lock them up along with the rest of poisons, to be administered in small doses only by competent people. We have almost poisoned the mass of humanity to death with _understanding_. The period of actual death and race-extermination is not far off. We could have produced the same barrenness and frenzy of nothingness in people, perhaps, by dinning it into them that every man is just a charnel-house skeleton of unclean bones. Our "understanding," our science and idealism have produced in people the same strange frenzy of self-repulsion as if they saw their own skulls each time they looked in the mirror. A man is a thing of scientific cause-and-effect and biological process, draped in an ideal, is he? No wonder he sees the skeleton grinning through the flesh. Our leaders have not loved men: they have loved ideas, and have been willing to sacrifice passionate men on the altars of the blood-drinking, ever-ash-thirsty ideal. Has President Wilson, or Karl Marx, or Bernard Shaw ever felt one hot blood-pulse of love for the working man, the half-conscious, deluded working man? Never. Each of these leaders has wanted to abstract him away from his own blood and being, into some foul Methuselah or abstraction of a man. And me? There is no danger of the working man ever reading my books, so I shan't hurt him that way. But oh, I would like to save him alive, in his living, spontaneous, original being. I can't help it. It is my passionate instinct. I would like him to give me back the responsibility for general affairs, a responsibility which he can't acquit, and which saps his life. I would like him to give me back the responsibility for the future. I would like him to give me back the responsibility for thought, for direction. I wish we could take hope and belief together. I would undertake my share of the responsibility, if he gave me his belief. I would like him to give me back books and newspapers and theories. And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life. CHAPTER X PARENT LOVE In the serious hour of puberty, the individual passes into his second phase of accomplishment. But there cannot be a perfect transition unless all the activity is in full play in all the first four poles of the psyche. Childhood is a chrysalis from which each must extricate himself. And the struggling youth or maid cannot emerge unless by the energy of all powers; he can never emerge if the whole mass of the world and the tradition of love hold him back. Now we come to the greater peril of our particular form of idealism. It is the idealism of love and of the spirit: the idealism of yearning, outgoing love, of pure sympathetic communion and "understanding." And this idealism recognizes as the highest earthly love, the love of mother and child. And what does this mean? It means, for every delicately brought up child, indeed for all the children who matter, a steady and persistent pressure upon the upper sympathetic centers, and a steady and persistent starving of the lower centers, particularly the great voluntary center of the lower body. The center of sensual, manly independence, of exultation in the sturdy, defiant self, willfulness and masterfulness and pride, this center is steadily suppressed. The warm, swift, sensual self is steadily and persistently denied, damped, weakened, throughout all the period of childhood. And by sensual we do not mean greedy or ugly, we mean the deeper, more impulsive reckless nature. Life must be always refined and superior. Love and happiness must be the watchword. The willful, critical element of the spiritual mode is never absent, the silent, if forbearing disapproval and distaste is always ready. Vile bullying forbearance. With what result? The center of upper sympathy is abnormally, inflamedly excited; and the centers of will are so deranged that they operate in jerks and spasms. The true polarity of the sympathetic-voluntary system within the child is so disturbed as to be almost deranged. Then we have an exaggerated sensitiveness alternating with a sort of helpless fury: and we have delicate frail children with nerves or with strange whims. And we have the strange cold obstinacy of the spiritual will, cold as hell, fixed in a child. Then one parent, usually the mother, is the object of blind devotion, whilst the other parent, usually the father, is an object of resistance. The child is taught, however, that both parents should be loved, and only loved: and that love, gentleness, pity, charity, and all "higher" emotions, these alone are genuine feelings, all the rest are false, to be rejected. With what result? The upper centers are developed to a degree of unnatural acuteness and reaction--or again they fall numbed and barren. And then between parents and children a painfully false relation grows up: a relation as of two adults, either of two pure lovers, or of two love-appearing people who are really trying to bully one another. Instead of leaving the child with its own limited but deep and incomprehensible feelings, the parent, hopelessly involved in the sympathetic mode of selfless love, and spiritual love-will, stimulates the child into a consciousness which does not belong to it, on the one plane, and robs it of its own spontaneous consciousness and freedom on the other plane. And this is the fatality. Long before puberty, by an exaggeration and an intensity of spiritual love from the parents, the second centers of sympathy are artificially aroused into response. And there is an irreparable disaster. Instead of seeing as a child should see, through a glass, darkly, the child now opens premature eyes of sympathetic cognition. Instead of knowing in part, as it should know, it begins, at a fearfully small age, to know in full. The cervical plexuses and the cervical ganglia, which should only begin to awake after adolescence, these centers of the higher dynamic sympathy and cognition, are both artificially stimulated, by the adult personal love-emotion and love-will into response, in a quite young child, sometimes even in an infant. This is a holy obscenity. Our particular mode of idealism causes us to suppress as far as possible the sensual centers, to make them negative. The whole of the activity is concentrated, as far as possible, in the upper or spiritual centers, the centers of the breast and throat, which we will call the centers of dynamic cognition, in contrast to the centers of sensual comprehension below the diaphragm. And then a child arrives at puberty, with its upper nature already roused into precocious action. The child nowadays is almost invariably precocious in "understanding." In the north, spiritually precocious, so that by the time it arrives at adolescence it already has experienced the extended sympathetic reactions which should have lain utterly dark. And it has experienced these extended reactions with whom? With the parent or parents. Which is man devouring his own offspring. For to the parents belongs, once and for all, the dynamic reaction on the first plane of consciousness only, the reaction and relationship at the first four poles of dynamic consciousness. When the second, the farther plane of consciousness rouses into action, the relationship is with strangers. All human instinct and all ethnology will prove this to us. What sex-instinct there is in a child is always _adverse_ to the parents. But also, the parents are all too quick. They all proceed to swallow their children before the children can get out of their clutches. And even if parents do send away their children at the age of puberty--to school or elsewhere--it is not much good. The mischief has been done before. For the first twelve years the parents and the whole community forcibly insist on the child's living from the upper centers only, and particularly the upper sympathetic centers, without the balance of the warm, deep sensual self. Parents and community alike insist on rousing an adult sympathetic response, and a mental answer in the child-schools, Sunday-schools, books, home-influence--all works in this one pernicious way. But it is the home, the parents, that work most effectively and intensely. There is the most intimate mesh of love, love-bullying, and "understanding" in which a child is entangled. So that a child arrives at the age of puberty already stripped of its childhood's darkness, bound, and delivered over. Instead of waking now to a whole new field of consciousness, a whole vast and wonderful new dynamic impulse towards new connections, it finds itself fatally bound. Puberty accomplishes itself. The hour of sex strikes. But there is your child, bound, helpless. You have already aroused in it the dynamic response to your own insatiable love-will. You have already established between your child and yourself the dynamic relation in the further plane of consciousness. You have got your child as sure as if you had woven its flesh again with your own. You have done what it is vicious for any parent to do: you have established between your child and yourself the bond of adult love: the love of man for man, woman for woman, or man for woman. All your tenderness, your cherishing will not excuse you. It only deepens your guilt. You have established between your child and yourself the bond of further sympathy. I do not speak of sex. I speak of pure sympathy, sacred love. The parents establish between themselves and their child the bond of the higher love, the further spiritual love, the sympathy of the adult soul. And this is fatal. It is a sort of incest. It is a dynamic _spiritual_ incest, more dangerous than sensual incest, because it is more intangible and less instinctively repugnant. But let psychoanalysis fall into what discredit it may, it has done us this great service of proving to us that the intense upper sympathy, indeed the dynamic relation either of love-will or love-sympathy, between parent and child, upon the upper plane, inevitably involves us in a conclusion of incest. For although it is our aim to establish a purely spiritual dynamic relation on the upper plane only, yet, because of the inevitable polarity of the human psychic system, we shall arouse at the same time a dynamic sensual activity on the lower plane, the deeper sensual plane. We may be as pure as angels, and yet, being human, this will and must inevitably happen. When Mrs. Ruskin said that John Ruskin should have married his mother she spoke the truth. He _was_ married to his mother. For in spite of all our intention, all our creed, all our purity, all our desire and all our will, once we arouse the dynamic relation in the upper, higher plane of love, we inevitably evoke a dynamic consciousness on the lower, deeper plane of sensual love. And then what? Of course, parents can reply that their love, however intense, is pure, and has absolutely no sensual element. Maybe--and maybe not. But admit that it is so. It does not help. The intense excitement of the upper centers of sympathy willy-nilly arouses the lower centers. It arouses them to activity, even if it denies them any expression or any polarized connection. Our psyche is so framed that activity aroused on one plane provokes activity on the corresponding plane, automatically. So the intense _pure_ love-relation between parent and child inevitably arouses the lower centers in the child, the centers of sex. Now the deeper sensual centers, once aroused, should find response from the sensual body of some other, some friend or lover. The response is impossible between parent and child. Myself, I believe that biologically there is radical sex-aversion between parent and child, at the deeper sensual centers. The sensual circuit _cannot_ adjust itself spontaneously between the two. So what have you? Child and parent intensely linked in adult love-sympathy and love-will, on the upper plane, and in the child, the deeper sensual centers aroused, but finding no correspondent, no objective, no polarized connection with another person. There they are, the powerful centers of sex, acting spasmodically, without balance. They must be polarized somehow. So they are polarized to the active upper centers within the child, and you get an introvert. This is how introversion begins. The lower sexual centers are aroused. They find no sympathy, no connection, no response from outside, no expression. They are dynamically polarized by the upper centers within the individual. That is, the whole of the sexual or deeper sensual flow goes on upwards in the individual, to his own upper, from his own lower centers. The upper centers hold the lower in positive polarity. The flow goes on upwards. There _must_ be some reaction. And so you get, first and foremost, self-consciousness, an intense consciousness in the upper self of the lower self. This is the first disaster. Then you get the upper body exploiting the lower body. You get the hands exploiting the sensual body, in feeling, fingering, and in masturbation. You get a pornographic longing with regard to the self. You get the obscene post cards which most youths possess. You get the absolute lust for dirty stories, which so many men have. And you get various mild sex perversions, such as masturbation, and so on. What does all this mean? It means that the activity of the lower psyche and lower body is polarized by the upper body. Eyes and ears want to gather sexual activity and knowledge. The mind becomes full of sex: and always, in an introvert, of his _own_ sex. If we examine the apparent extroverts, like the flaunting Italian, we shall see the same thing. It is his own sex which obsesses him. And to-day what have we but this? Almost inevitably we find in a child now an intense, precocious, secret sexual preoccupation. The upper self is rabidly engaged in exploiting the lower self. A child and its own roused, inflamed sex, its own shame and masturbation, its own cruel, secret sexual excitement and sex _curiosity_, this is the greatest tragedy of our day. The child does not so much want to _act_ as to _know_. The thought of actual sex connection is usually repulsive. There is an aversion from the normal coition act. But the craving to feel, to see, to taste, to _know_, mentally in the head, this is insatiable. Anything, so that the sensation and experience shall come through the _upper_ channels. This is the secret of our introversion and our perversion to-day. Anything rather than spontaneous direct action from the sensual self. Anything rather than the merely normal passion. Introduce any trick, any idea, any mental element you can into sex, but make it an affair of the upper consciousness, the mind and eyes and mouth and fingers. This is our vice, our dirt, our disease. And the adult, and the ideal are to blame. But the tragedy of our children, in their inflamed, solitary sexual excitement, distresses us beyond any blame. It is time to drop the word love, and more than time to drop the ideal of love. Every frenzied individual is told to find fulfillment in love. So he tries. Whereas, there is no fulfillment in love. Half of our fulfillment comes _through_ love, through strong, sensual love. But the central fulfillment, for a man, is that he possess his own soul in strength within him, deep and alone. The deep, rich aloneness, reached and perfected through love. And the passing beyond any further _quest_ of love. This central fullness of self-possession is our goal, if goal there be any. But there are two great _ways_ of fulfillment. The first, the way of fulfillment through complete love, complete, passionate, deep love. And the second, the greater, the fulfillment through the accomplishment of religious purpose, the soul's earnest purpose. We work the love way falsely, from the upper self, and work it to death. The second way, of active unison in strong purpose, and in faith, this we only sneer at. But to return to the child and the parent. The coming to the fulfillment of single aloneness, through love, is made impossible for us by the ideal, the monomania of more love. At the very _âge dangereuse_, when a woman should be accomplishing her own fulfillment into maturity and rich quiescence, she turns rabidly to seek a new lover. At the very crucial time when she should be coming to a state of pure equilibrium and rest with her husband, she turns rabidly against rest or peace or equilibrium or husband in any shape or form, and demands more love, more love, a new sort of lover, one who will "understand" her. And as often as not she turns to her son. It is true, a woman reaches her goal of fulfillment through feeling. But through being "understood" she reaches nowhere, unless the lover understands what a vice it is for a woman to get herself and her sex into her head. A woman reaches her fulfillment through love, deep sensual love, and exquisite sensitive communion. But once she reaches the point of fulfillment, she should not break off to ask for more excitements. She should take the beauty of maturity and peace and quiet faithfulness upon her. This she won't do, however, unless the man, her husband, goes on beyond her. When a man approaches the beginning of maturity and the fulfillment of his individual self, about the age of thirty-five, then is not his time to come to rest. On the contrary. Deeply fulfilled through marriage, and at one with his own soul, he must now undertake the responsibility for the next step into the future. He must now give himself perfectly to some further purpose, some passionate purposive activity. Till a man makes the great resolution of aloneness and singleness of being, till he takes upon himself the silence and central appeasedness of maturity; and _then, after this_, assumes a sacred responsibility for the next purposive step into the future, there is no rest. The great resolution of aloneness and appeasedness, and the further deep assumption of responsibility in purpose--this is necessary to every parent, every father, every husband, at a certain point. If the resolution is never made, the responsibility never embraced, then the love-craving will run on into frenzy, and lay waste to the family. In the woman particularly the love-craving will run on to frenzy and disaster. Seeking, seeking the fulfillment in the deep passional self; diseased with self-consciousness and sex in the head, foiled by the very loving weakness of the husband who has not the courage to withdraw into his own stillness and singleness, and put the wife under the spell of his fulfilled decision; the unhappy woman beats about for her insatiable satisfaction, seeking whom she may devour. And usually, she turns to her child. Here she provokes what she wants. Here, in her own son who belongs to her, she seems to find the last perfect response for which she is craving. He is a medium to her, she provokes from him her own answer. So she throws herself into a last great love for her son, a final and fatal devotion, that which would have been the richness and strength of her husband and is poison to her boy. The husband, irresolute, never accepting his own higher responsibility, bows and accepts. And the fatal round of introversion and "complex" starts once more. If man will never accept his own ultimate being, his final aloneness, and his last responsibility for life, then he must expect woman to dash from disaster to disaster, rootless and uncontrolled. "_On revient toujours à son premier amour._" It sounds like a cynicism to-day. As if we really meant: "_On ne revient jamais à son premier amour._" But as a matter of fact, a man never leaves his first love, once the love is established. He may leave his first attempt at love. Once a man establishes a full dynamic communication at the deeper and the higher centers, with a woman, this can never be broken. But sex in the head breaks down, and half circuits break down. Once the full circuit is established, however, this can never break down. Nowadays, alas, we start off self-conscious, with sex in the head. We find a woman who is the same. We marry because we are "pals." The sex is a rather nasty fiasco. We keep up a pretense of "pals"--and nice love. Sex spins wilder in the head than ever. There is either a family of children whom the dissatisfied parents can devote themselves to, thereby perverting the miserable little creatures: or else there is a divorce. And at the great dynamic centers nothing has happened at all. Blank nothing. There has been no vital interchange at all in the whole of this beautiful marriage affair. Establish between yourself and another individual a dynamic connection at only _two_ of the four further poles, and you will have the devil of a job to break the connection. Especially if it be the first connection you have made. Especially if the other individual be the first in the field. This is the case of the parents. Parents are first in the field of the child's further consciousness. They are criminal trespassers in that field. But that makes no matter. They are first in the field. They establish a dynamic connection between the two upper centers, the centers of the throat, the centers of the higher dynamic sympathy and cognition. They establish this circuit. And break it if you can. Very often not even death can break it. And as we see, the establishment of the upper love-and-cognition circuit inevitably provokes the lower sex-sensual centers into action, even though there be no correspondence on the sensual plane between the two individuals concerned. Then see what happens. If you want to see the real desirable wife-spirit, look at a mother with her boy of eighteen. How she serves him, how she stimulates him, how her true female self is his, is wife-submissive to him as never, never it could be to a husband. This is the quiescent, flowering love of a mature woman. It is the very flower of a woman's love: sexually asking nothing, asking nothing of the beloved, save that he shall be himself, and that for his living he shall accept the gift of her love. This is the perfect flower of married love, which a husband should put in his cap as he goes forward into the future in his supreme activity. For the husband, it is a great pledge, and a blossom. For the son also it seems wonderful. The woman now feels for the first time as a true wife might feel. And her feeling is towards her son. Or, instead of mother and son, read father and daughter. And then what? The son gets on swimmingly for a time, till he is faced with the actual fact of sex necessity. He gleefully inherits his adolescence and the world at large, without an obstacle in his way, mother-supported, mother-loved. Everything comes to him in glamour, he feels he sees wondrous much, understands a whole heaven, mother-stimulated. Think of the power which a mature woman thus infuses into her boy. He flares up like a flame in oxygen. No wonder they say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates. And then?--and then, with this glamorous youth? What is he actually to do with his sensual, sexual self? Bury it? Or make an effort with a stranger? For he is taught, even by his mother, that his manhood must not forego sex. Yet he is linked up in ideal love already, the best he will ever know. No woman will give to a stranger that which she gives to her son, her father or her brother: that beautiful and glamorous submission which is truly the wife-submission. To a stranger, a husband, a woman insists on being queen, goddess, mistress, the positive, the adored, the first and foremost and the one and only. This she will not ask from her near blood-kin. Of her blood-kin, there is always one she will love devotedly. And so, the charming young girl who adores her father, or one of her brothers, is sought in marriage by the attractive young man who loves his mother devotedly. And a pretty business the marriage is. We can't think of it. Of course they may be good pals. It's the only thing left. And there we are. The game is spoilt before it is begun. Within the circle of the family, owing to our creed of insatiable love, intense adult sympathies are provoked in quite young children. In Italy, the Italian stimulates adult sex-consciousness and sex-sympathy in his child, almost deliberately. But with us, it is usually spiritual sympathy and spiritual criticism. The adult experiences are provoked, the adult devotional sympathies are linked up, prematurely, as far as the child is concerned. We have the heart-wringing spectacle of intense parent-child love, a love intense as the love of man and woman, but not sexual; or else the great brother-sister devotion. And thus, the great love-experience which should lie in the future is forestalled. Within the family, the love-bond forms quickly, without the shocks and ruptures inevitable between strangers. And so, it is easiest, intensest--and seems the best. It seems the highest. You will not easily get a man to believe that his carnal love for the woman he has made his wife is as high a love as that he felt for his mother or sister. The cream is licked off from life before the boy or the girl is twenty. Afterwards--repetition, disillusion, and barrenness. And the cause?--always the same. That parents will not make the great resolution to come to rest within themselves, to possess their own souls in quiet and fullness. The man has not the courage to withdraw at last into his own soul's stillness and aloneness, and _then_, passionately and faithfully, to strive for the living future. The woman has not the courage to give up her hopeless insistence on love and her endless demand for love, demand of being loved. She has not the greatness of soul to relinquish her own self-assertion, and believe in the man who believes in himself and in his own soul's efforts:--if there _are_ any such men nowadays, which is very doubtful. Alas, alas, the future! Your son, who has tasted the real beauty of wife-response in his mother or sister. Your daughter, who adores her brother, and who marries some woman's son. They are so charming to look at, such a lovely couple. And at first it is all such a good game, such good sport. Then each one begins to fret for the beauty of the lost, non-sexual, partial relationship. The sexual part of marriage has proved so--so empty. While that other loveliest thing--the poignant touch of devotion felt for mother or father or brother--why, this is missing altogether. The best is missing. The rest isn't worth much. Ah well, such is life. Settle down to it, and bring up the children carefully to more of the same.--The future!--You've had all your good days by the time you're twenty. And, I ask you, what good will psychoanalysis do you in this state of affairs? Introduce an extra sex-motive to excite you for a bit and make you feel how thrillingly immoral things really are. And then--it all goes flat again. Father complex, mother complex, incest dreams: pah, when we've had the little excitement out of them we shall forget them as we have forgotten so many other catch-words. And we shall be just where we were before: unless we are worse, with _more_ sex in the head, and more introversion, only more brazen. CHAPTER XI THE VICIOUS CIRCLE Here is a very vicious circle. And how to get out of it? In the first place, we have to break the love-ideal, once and for all. Love, as we see, is not the only dynamic. Taking love in its greatest sense, and making it embrace every form of sympathy, every flow from the great sympathetic centers of the human body, still it is not the whole of the dynamic flow, it is only the one-half. There is always the other voluntary flow to reckon with, the intense motion of independence and singleness of self, the pride of isolation, and the profound fulfillment through power. The very first thing of all to be recognized is the danger of idealism. It is the one besetting sin of the human race. It means the fall into automatism, mechanism, and nullity. We know that life issues spontaneously at the great nodes of the psyche, the great nerve-centers. At first these are four only: then, after puberty, they become eight: later there may still be an extension of the dynamic consciousness, a further polarization. But eight is enough at the moment. First at four, and then at eight dynamic centers of the human body, the human nervous system, life starts spontaneously into being. The soul bursts day by day into fresh impulses, fresh desire, fresh purpose, at these our polar centers. And from these dynamic generative centers issue the vital currents which put us into connection with our object. We have really no will and no choice, in the first place. It is our soul which acts within us, day by day unfolding us according to our own nature. From the objective circuits and from the subjective circuits which establish and fulfill themselves at the first four centers of consciousness we derive our first being, our child-being, and also our first mind, our child-mind. By the objective circuits we mean those circuits which are established between the self and some external object: mother, father, sister, cat, dog, bird, or even tree or plant, or even further still, some particular place, some particular inanimate object, a knife or a chair or a cap or a doll or a wooden horse. For we must insist that every object which really enters effectively into our lives does so by direct connection. If I love my mother, it is because there is established between me and her a direct, powerful circuit of vital magnetism, call it what you will, but a direct flow of dynamic _vital_ interchange and intercourse. I will not call this vital flow a _force_, because it depends on the incomprehensible initiative and control of the individual soul or self. Force is that which is directed only from some universal will or law. Life is _always_ individual, and therefore never controlled by one law, one God. And therefore, since the living really sway the universe, even if unknowingly; therefore there is no one universal law, even for the physical forces. Because we insist that even the sun depends, for its heartbeat, its respiration, its pivotal motion, on the beating hearts of men and beast, on the dynamic of the soul-impulse in individual creatures. It is from the aggregate heartbeat of living individuals, of we know not how many or what sort of worlds, that the sun rests stable. Which may be dismissed as metaphysics, although it is quite as valid or even as demonstrable as Newton's Law of Gravitation, which law still remains a law, even if not quite so absolute as heretofore. But this is a digression. The argument is, that between an individual and any external object with which he has an affective connection, there exists a definite vital flow, as definite and concrete as the electric current whose polarized circuit sets our tram-cars running and our lamps shining, or our Marconi wires vibrating. Whether this object be human, or animal, or plant, or quite inanimate, there is still a circuit. My dog, my canary has a polarized connection with me. Nay, the very cells in the ash-tree I loved as a child had a dynamic vibratory connection with the nuclei in my own centers of primary consciousness. And further still, the boots I have worn are so saturated with my own magnetism, my own vital activity, that if anyone else wear them I feel it is a trespass, almost as if another man used my hand to knock away a fly. I doubt very much if a blood-hound, when it takes a scent, _smells_, in our sense of the word. It receives at the infinitely sensitive telegraphic center of the dog's nostrils the vital vibration which remains in the inanimate object from the individual with whom the object was associated. I should like to know if a dog would trace a pair of quite new shoes which had merely been dragged at the end of a string. That is, does he follow the smell of the leather itself, or the vibration track of the individual whose vitality is communicated to the leather? So, there is a definite vibratory rapport between a man and his surroundings, once he definitely gets into contact with these surroundings. Any particular locality, any house which has been lived in has a vibration, a transferred vitality of its own. This is either sympathetic or antipathetic to the succeeding individual in varying degree. But certain it is that the inhabitants who live at the foot of Etna will always have a certain pitch of life-vibration, antagonistic to the pitch of vibration even of a Palermitan, in some measure. And old houses are saturated with human presence, at last to a degree of indecency, unbearable. And tradition, in its most elemental sense, means the continuing of the same peculiar pitch of vital vibration. Such is the objective dynamic flow between the psychic poles of the individual and the substance of the external object, animate or inanimate. The subjective dynamic flow is established between the four primary poles within the individual. Every dynamic connection begins from one or the other of the sympathetic centers: is, or should be, almost immediately polarized from the corresponding voluntary center. Then a complete flow is set up, in one plane. But this always rouses the activity on the other, corresponding plane, more or less intense. There is a whole field of consciousness established, with positive polarity of the first plane, negative polarity of the second. Which being so, a whole fourfold field of dynamic consciousness now working within the individual, direct cognition takes place. The mind begins to know, and to strive to know. The business of the mind is first and foremost the pure joy of knowing and comprehending the pure joy of consciousness. The second business is to act as medium, as interpreter, as agent between the individual and his object. The mind should _not_ act as a director or controller of the spontaneous centers. These the soul alone must control: the soul being that forever unknowable reality which causes us to rise into being. There is continual conflict between the soul, which is for ever sending forth incalculable impulses, and the psyche, which is conservative, and wishes to persist in its old motions, and the mind, which wishes to have "freedom," that is spasmodic, idea-driven control. Mind, and conservative psyche, and the incalculable soul, these three are a trinity of powers in every human being. But there is something even beyond these. It is the individual in his pure singleness, in his totality of consciousness, in his oneness of being: the Holy Ghost which is with us after our Pentecost, and which we may not deny. When I say to myself: "I am wrong," knowing with sudden insight that I _am_ wrong, then this is the whole self speaking, the Holy Ghost. It is no piece of mental inference. It is not just the soul sending forth a flash. It is my whole being speaking in one voice, soul and mind and psyche transfigured into oneness. This voice of my being I may _never_ deny. When at last, in all my storms, my whole self speaks, then there is a pause. The soul collects itself into pure silence and isolation--perhaps after much pain. The mind suspends its knowledge, and waits. The psyche becomes strangely still. And then, after the pause, there is fresh beginning, a new life adjustment. Conscience is the being's consciousness, when the individual is conscious _in toto_, when he knows in full. It is something which includes and which far surpasses mental consciousness. Every man must live as far as he can by his own soul's conscience. But not according to any ideal. To submit the conscience to a creed, or an idea, or a tradition, or even an impulse, is our ruin. To make the mind the absolute ruler is as good as making a Cook's tourist-interpreter a king and a god, because he can speak several languages, and make an Arab understand that an Englishman wants fish for supper. And to make an ideal a ruling principle is about as stupid as if a bunch of travelers should never cease giving each other and their dragoman sixpence, because the dragoman's main idea of virtue is the virtue of sixpence-giving. In the same way, we _know_ we cannot live purely by impulse. Neither can we live solely by tradition. We must live by all three, ideal, impulse, and tradition, each in its hour. But the real guide is the pure conscience, the voice of the self in its wholeness, the Holy Ghost. We have fallen now into the mistake of idealism. Man always falls into one of the three mistakes. In China, it is tradition. And in the South Seas, it seems to have been impulse. Ours is idealism. Each of the three modes is a true life-mode. But any one, alone or dominant, brings us to destruction. We must depend on the wholeness of our being, ultimately only on that, which is our Holy Ghost within us. Whereas, in an ideal of love and benevolence, we have tried to automatize ourselves into little love-engines always stoked with the sorrows or beauties of other people, so that we can get up steam of charity or righteous wrath. A great trick is to pour on the fire the oil of our indignation at somebody else's wickedness, and then, when we've got up steam like hell, back the engine and run bish! smash! against the belly of the offender. Because he said he didn't want to love any more, we hate him for evermore, and try to run over him, every bit of him, with our love-tanks. And all the time we yell at him: "Will you deny love, you villain? Will you?" And by the time he faintly squeaks, "I want to be loved! I want to be loved!" we have got so used to running over him with our love-tanks that we don't feel in a hurry to leave off. "_Sois mon frère, ou je te tue._" "_Sois mon frère, ou je me tue._" There are the two parrot-threats of love, on which our loving centuries have run as on a pair of railway-lines. Excuse me if I want to get out of the train. Excuse me if I can't get up any love-steam any more. My boilers are burst. We have made a mistake, laying down love like the permanent way of a great emotional transport system. There we are, however, running on wheels on the lines of our love. And of course we have only two directions, forwards and backwards. "Onward, Christian soldiers, towards the great terminus where bottles of sterilized milk for the babies are delivered at the bedroom windows by noiseless aeroplanes each morn, where the science of dentistry is so perfect that teeth are planted in a man's mouth without his knowing it, where twilight sleep is so delicious that every woman longs for her next confinement, and where nobody ever has to do anything except turn a handle now and then in a spirit of universal love--" That is the forward direction of the English-speaking race. The Germans unwisely backed their engine. "We have a city of light. But instead of lying ahead it lies direct behind us. So reverse engines. Reverse engines, and away, away to our city, where the sterilized milk is delivered by noiseless aeroplanes, _at the very precise minute when our great doctors of the Fatherland have diagnosed that it is good for you_: where the teeth are not only so painlessly planted that they grow like living rock, but where their composition is such that the friction of eating stimulates the cells of the jaw-bone and develops the _superman strength of will which makes us gods_: and where not only is twilight sleep serene, but into the sleeper are inculcated the most useful and instructive dreams, calculated to perfect the character of the young citizen at this crucial period, and to enlighten permanently the mind of the happy mother, with regard to her new duties towards her child and towards our great Fatherland--" Here you see we are, on the railway, with New Jerusalem ahead, and New Jerusalem away behind us. But of course it was very wrong of the Germans to reverse their engines, and cause one long collision all along the line. Why should we go _their_ way to the New Jerusalem, when of course they might so easily have kept on going our way. And now there's wreckage all along the line! But clear the way is our motto--or make the Germans clear it. Because get on we will. Meanwhile we sit rather in the cold, waiting for the train to get a start. People keep on signaling with green lights and red lights. And it's all very bewildering. As for me, I'm off. I'm damned if I'll be shunted along any more. And I'm thrice damned if I'll go another yard towards that sterilized New Jerusalem, either forwards or backwards. New Jerusalem may rot, if it waits for me. I'm not going. So good-by! There we leave humanity, encamped in an appalling mess beside the railway-smash of love, sitting down, however, and having not a bad time, some of 'em, feeding themselves fat on the plunder: others, further down the line, with mouths green from eating grass. But all grossly, stupidly, automatically gabbling about getting the love-service running again, the trains booked for the New Jerusalem well on the way once more. And occasionally a good engine gives a screech of love, and something seems to be about to happen. And sometimes there is enough steam to set the indignation-whistles whistling. But never any more will there be enough love-steam to get the system properly running. It is done. Good-by, then! You may have laid your line from one end to the other of the infinite. But still there's plenty of hinterland. I'll go. Good-by. Ach, it will be so nice to be alone: not to hear you, not to see you, not to smell you, humanity. I wish you no ill, but wisdom. Good-by! To be alone with one's own soul. Not to be alone without my own soul, mind you. But to be alone with one's own soul! This, and the joy of it, is the real goal of love. My own soul, and myself. Not my ego, my conceit of myself. But my very soul. To be at one in my own self. Not to be questing any more. Not to be yearning, seeking, hoping, desiring, aspiring. But to pause, and be alone. And to have one's own "gentle spouse" by one's side, of course, to dig one in the ribs occasionally. Because really, being alone in peace means being two people together. Two people who can be silent together, and not conscious of one another outwardly. Me in my silence, she in hers, and the balance, the equilibrium, the pure circuit between us. With occasional lapses of course: digs in the ribs if one gets too vague or self-sufficient. They say it is better to travel than to arrive. It's not been my experience, at least. The journey of love has been rather a lacerating, if well-worth-it, journey. But to come at last to a nice place under the trees, with your "amiable spouse" who has at last learned to hold her tongue and not to bother about rights and wrongs: her own particularly. And then to pitch a camp, and cook your rabbit, and eat him: and to possess your own soul in silence, and to feel all the clamor lapse. That is the best I know. I think it is terrible to be young. The ecstasies and agonies of love, the agonies and ecstasies of fear and doubt and drop-by-drop fulfillment, realization. The awful process of human relationships, love and marital relationships especially. Because we all make a very, very bad start to-day, with our idea of love in our head, and our sex in our head as well. All the fight till one is bled of one's self-consciousness and sex-in-the-head. All the bitterness of the conflict with this devil of an amiable spouse, who has got herself so stuck in her own head. It is terrible to be young.--But one fights one's way through it, till one is cleaned: the self-consciousness and sex-idea burned out of one, cauterized out bit by bit, and the self whole again, and at last free. The best thing I have known is the stillness of accomplished marriage, when one possesses one's own soul in silence, side by side with the amiable spouse, and has left off craving and raving and being only half one's self. But I must say, I know a great deal more about the craving and raving and sore ribs, than about the accomplishment. And I must confess that I feel this self-same "accomplishment" of the fulfilled being is only a preparation for new responsibilities ahead, new unison in effort and conflict, the effort to make, with other men, a little new way into the future, and to break through the hedge of the many. But--to your tents, my Israel. And to that precious baby you've left slumbering there. What I meant to say was, in each phase of life you have a great circuit of human relationship to establish and fulfill. In childhood, it is the circuit of family love, established at the first four consciousness centers, and gradually fulfilling itself, completing itself. At adolescence, the first circuit of family love should be completed, dynamically finished. And then, it falls into quiescence. After puberty, family love should fall quiescent in a child. The love never breaks. It continues static and basic, the basis of the emotional psyche, the foundation of the self. It is like the moon when the moon at last subsides into her eternal orbit, round the earth. She travels in her orbit so inevitably that she forgets, and becomes unaware. She only knits her brows over the earth's greater aberrations in space. The circuit of parental love, once fulfilled, is not done away with, but only established into silence. The child is then free to establish the new connections, in which he surpasses his parents. And let us repeat, parents should never try to establish adult relations, of sympathy or interest or anything else, between themselves and their children. The attempt to do so only deranges the deep primary circuit which is the dynamic basis of our living. It is a clambering upwards only by means of a broken foundation. Parents should remain parents, children children, for ever, and the great gulf preserved between the two. Honor thy father and thy mother should always be a leading commandment. But this can only take place when father and mother keep their true parental distances, dignity, reserve, and limitation. As soon as father and mother try to become the _friends_ and _companions_ of their children, they break the root of life, they rupture the deepest dynamic circuit of living, they derange the whole flow of life for themselves and their children. For let us reiterate and reiterate: you cannot mingle and confuse the various modes of dynamic love. If you try, you produce horrors. You cannot plant the heart below the diaphragm or put an ocular eye in the navel. No more can you transfer parent love into friend love or adult love. Parent love is established at the great primary centers, where man is father and child, playmate and brother, but where he _cannot_ be comrade or lover. Comrade and lover, this is the dynamic activity of the further centers, the second four centers. And these second four centers must be active in the parent, their intense circuit established even if not fulfilled, long before the child is born. The circuit of friendship, of personal companionship, of sexual love must needs be established before the child is begotten, or at least before it attains to adolescence. These circuits of the extended field are already fully established in the parent before the centers of correspondence in the child are even formed. When therefore the four great centers of the extended consciousness arouses in a child, at adolescence, they must needs seek a strange complement, a foreign conjunction. Not only is this the case, but the actual dynamic impulse of the new life which rouses at puberty is _alien_ to the original dynamic flow. The new wave-length by no means corresponds. The new vibration by no means harmonizes. Force the two together, and you cause a terrible frictional excitement and jarring. It is this instinctive recognition of the different dynamic vibrations from different centers, in different modes, and in different directions of positive and negative, which lies at the base of savage taboo. After puberty, members of one family should be taboo to one another. There should be the most definite limits to the degree of contact. And mothers-in-law should be taboo to their daughters' husbands, and fathers-in-law to their sons' wives. We must again begin to learn the great laws of the first dynamic life-circuits. These laws we now make havoc of, and consequently we make havoc of our own soul, psyche, mind and health. This book is written primarily concerning the child's consciousness. It is not intended to enter the field of the post-puberty consciousness. But yet, the dynamic relation of the child is established so directly with the physical and psychical soul of the parent, that to get any inkling of dynamic child-consciousness we must understand something of parent-consciousness. We assert that the parent-child love-mode excludes the possibility of the man-and-woman, or friend-and-friend love mode. We assert that the polarity of the first four poles is inconsistent with the polarity of the second four poles. Nay, between the two great fields is a certain dynamic opposition, resistance, even antipathy. So that in the natural course of life there is no possibility of confusing parent love and adult love. But we are mental creatures, and with the explosive and mechanistic aid of ideas we can pervert the whole psyche. Only, however, in a destructive degree, not in a positive or constructive. Let us return then. In the ordinary course of development, by the time that the child is born and grown to puberty the whole dynamic soul of the mother is engaged: first, with the children, and second, on the further, higher plane, with the husband, and with her own friends. So that when the child reaches adolescence it must inevitably cast abroad for connection. But now let us remember the actual state of affairs to-day, when the poles are reversed between the sexes. The woman is now the responsible party, the law-giver, the culture-bearer. She is the conscious guide and director of the man. She bears his soul between her two hands. And her sex is just a function or an instrument of power. This being so, the man is really the servant and the fount of emotion, love and otherwise. Which is all very well, while the fun lasts. But like all perverted processes, it is exhaustive, and like the fun wears out. Leaving an exhaustion, and an irritation. Each looks on the other as a perverter of life. Almost invariably a married woman, as she passes the age of thirty, conceives a dislike, or a contempt of her husband, or a pity which is too near contempt. Particularly if he be a good husband, a true modern. And he, for his part, though just as jarred inside himself, resents only the fact that he is not loved as he ought to be. Then starts a new game. The woman, even the most virtuous, looks abroad for new sympathy. She will have a new man-friend, if nothing more. But as a rule she has got something more. She has got her children. A relation between mother and child to-day is practically _never_ parental. It is personal--which means, it is critical and deliberate, and adult in provocation. The mother, in her new rôle of idealist and life-manager never, practically for one single moment, gives her child the unthinking response from the deep dynamic centers. No, she gives it what is good for it. She shoves milk in its mouth as the clock strikes, she shoves it to sleep when the milk is swallowed, and she shoves it ideally through baths and massage, promenades and practice, till the little organism develops like a mushroom to stand on its own feet. Then she continues her ideal shoving of it through all the stages of an ideal up-bringing, she loves it as a chemist loves his test-tubes in which he analyzes his salts. The poor little object is his mother's ideal. But of her head she dictates his providential days, and by the force of her deliberate mentally-directed love-will she pushes him up into boyhood. The poor little devil never knows one moment when he is not encompassed by the beautiful, benevolent, idealistic, Botticelli-pure, and finally obscene love-will of the mother. Never, never one mouthful does he drink of the milk of human kindness: always the sterilized milk of human benevolence. There is no mother's milk to-day, save in tigers' udders, and in the udders of sea-whales. Our children drink a decoction of ideal love, at the breast. Never for one moment, poor baby, the deep warm stream of love from the mother's bowels to his bowels. Never for one moment the dark proud recoil into rest, the soul's separation into deep, rich independence. Never this lovely rich forgetfulness, as a cat trots off and utterly forgets her kittens, utterly, richly forgets them, till suddenly, click, the dynamic circuit reverses itself in her, and she remembers, and rages round in a frenzy, shouting for her young. Our miserable infants never know this joy and richness and pang of real maternal warmth. Our wonderful mothers never let us out of their minds for one single moment. Not for a second do they allow us to escape from their ideal benevolence. Not one single breath does a baby draw, free from the imposition of the pure, unselfish, Botticelli-holy, detestable _love-will_ of the mother. Always the _will_, the will, the love-will, the ideal will, directed from the ideal mind. Always this stone, this scorpion of maternal nourishment. Always this infernal self-conscious Madonna starving our living guts and bullying us to death with her love. We have made the idea supplant both impulse and tradition. We have no spark of wholeness. And we live by an evil love-will. Alas, the great spontaneous mode is abrogated. There is no lovely great flux of vital sympathy, no rich rejoicing of pride into isolation and independence. There is no reverence for great traditions of parenthood. No, there is substitute for everything--life-substitute--just as we have butter-substitute, and meat-substitute, and sugar-substitute, and leather-substitute, and silk-substitute, so we have life-substitute. We have beastly benevolence, and foul good-will, and stinking charity, and poisonous ideals. The poor modern brat, shoved horribly into life by an effort of will, and shoved up towards manhood by every appliance that can be applied to it, especially the appliance of the maternal will, it is really too pathetic to contemplate. The only thing that prevents us wringing our hands is the remembrance that the little devil will grow up and beget other similar little devils of his own, to invent more aeroplanes and hospitals and germ-killers and food-substitutes and poison gases. The problem of the future is a question of the strongest poison-gas. Which is certainly a very sure way out of our vicious circle. There is no way out of a vicious circle, of course, except breaking the circle. And since the mother-child relationship is to-day the viciousest of circles, what are we to do? Just wait for the results of the poison-gas competition presumably. Oh, ideal humanity, how detestable and despicable you are! And how you deserve your own poison-gases! How you deserve to perish in your own stink. It is no use contemplating the development of the modern child, born out of the mental-conscious love-will, born to be another unit of self-conscious love-will: an ideal-born beastly little entity with a devil's own will of its own, benevolent, of course, and a Satan's own seraphic self-consciousness, like a beastly Botticelli brat. Once we really consider this modern process of life and the love-will, we could throw the pen away, and spit, and say three cheers for the inventors of poison-gas. Is there not an American who is supposed to have invented a breath of heaven whereby, drop one pop-cornful in Hampstead, one in Brixton, one in East Ham, and one in Islington, and London is a Pompeii in five minutes! Or was the American only bragging? Because anyhow, whom has he experimented on? I read it in the newspaper, though. London a Pompeii in five minutes. Makes the gods look silly! CHAPTER XII LITANY OF EXHORTATIONS I thought I'd better turn over a new leaf, and start a new chapter. The intention of the last chapter was to find a way out of the vicious circle. And it ended in poison-gas. Yes, dear reader, so it did. But you've not silenced me yet, for all that. We're in a nasty mess. We're in a vicious circle. And we're making a careful study of poison-gases. The secret of Greek fire was lost long ago, when the world left off being wonderful and ideal. Now it is wonderful and ideal again, much wonderfuller and _much_ more ideal. So we ought to do something rare in the way of poison-gas. London a Pompeii in five minutes! How to outdo Vesuvius!--title of a new book by American authors. There is only one single other thing to do. And it's more difficult than poison-gas. It is to leave off loving. It is to leave off benevolenting and having a good will. It is to cease utterly. Just leave off. Oh, parents, see that your children get their dinners and clean sheets, but don't love them. Don't love them one single grain, and don't let anybody else love them. Give them their dinners and leave them alone. You've already loved them to perdition. Now leave them alone, to find their own way out. Wives, don't love your husbands any more: even if they cry for it, the great babies! Sing: "I've had enough of that old sauce." And leave off loving them or caring for them one single bit. Don't even hate them or dislike them. Don't have any stew with them at all. Just boil the eggs and fill the salt-cellars and be quite nice, and in your own soul, be alone and be still. Be alone, and be still, preserving all the human decencies, and abandoning the indecency of desires and benevolencies and devotions, those beastly poison-gas apples of the Sodom vine of the love-will. Wives, don't love your husbands nor your children nor anybody. Sit still, and say Hush! And while you shake the duster out of the drawing-room window, say to yourself--"In the sweetness of solitude." And when your husband comes in and says he's afraid he's got a cold and is going to have double pneumonia, say quietly "surely not." And if he wants the ammoniated quinine, give it him if he can't get it for himself. But don't let him drive you out of your solitude, your singleness within yourself. And if your little boy falls down the steps and makes his mouth bleed, nurse and comfort him, but say to yourself, even while you tremble with the shock: "Alone. Alone. Be alone, my soul." And if the servant smashes three electric-light bulbs in three minutes, say to her: "How very inconsiderate and careless of you!" But say to yourself: "Don't hear it, my soul. Don't take fright at the pop of a light-bulb." Husbands, don't love your wives any more. If they flirt with men younger or older than yourselves, let your blood not stir. If you can go away, go away. But if you must stay and see her, then say to her, "I would rather you didn't flirt in my presence, Eleanora." Then, when she goes red and loosens torrents of indignation, don't answer any more. And when she floods into tears, say quietly in your own self, "My soul is my own"; and go away, be alone as much as possible. And when she works herself up, and says she must have love or she will die, then say: "Not my love, however." And to all her threats, her tears, her entreaties, her reproaches, her cajolements, her winsomenesses, answer nothing, but say to yourself: "Shall I be implicated in this display of the love-will? Shall I be blasted by this false lightning?" And though you tremble in every fiber, and feel sick, vomit-sick with the scene, still contain yourself, and say, "My soul is my own. It shall not be violated." And learn, learn, learn the one and only lesson worth learning at last. Learn to walk in the sweetness of the possession of your own soul. And whether your wife weeps as she takes off her amber beads at night, or whether your neighbor in the train sits in your coat bottoms, or whether your superior in the office makes supercilious remarks, or your inferior is familiar and impudent; or whether you read in the newspaper that Lloyd George is performing another iniquity, or the Germans plotting another plot, say to yourself: "My soul is my own. My soul is with myself, and beyond implication." And wait, quietly, in possession of your own soul, till you meet another man who has made the choice, and kept it. Then you will know him by the look on his face: half a dangerous look, a look of Cain, and half a look of gathered beauty. Then you two will make the nucleus of a new society--Ooray! Bis! Bis!! But if you should never meet such a man: and if your wife should torture you every day with her love-will: and even if she should force herself into a consumption, like Catherine Linton in "Wuthering Heights," owing to her obstinate and determined love-will (which is quite another matter than love): and if you see the world inventing poison-gas and falling into its poisoned grave: never give in, but be alone, and utterly alone with your own soul, in the stillness and sweet possession of your own soul. And don't even be angry. And _never_ be sad. Why should you? It's not your affair. But if your wife should accomplish for herself the sweetness of her own soul's possession, then gently, delicately let the new mode assert itself, the new mode of relation between you, with something of spontaneous paradise in it, the apple of knowledge at last digested. But, my word, what belly-aches meanwhile. That apple is harder to digest than a lead gun-cartridge. CHAPTER XIII COSMOLOGICAL Well, dear reader, Chapter XII was short, and I hope you found it sweet. But remember, this is an essay on Child Consciousness, not a tract on Salvation. It isn't my fault that I am led at moments into exhortation. Well, then, what about it? One fact now seems very clear--at any rate to me. We've got to pause. We haven't got to gird our loins with a new frenzy and our larynxes with a new Glory Song. Not a bit of it. Before you dash off to put salt on the tail of a new religion or of a new Leader of Men, dear reader, sit down quietly and pull yourself together. Say to yourself: "Come now, what is it all about?" And you'll realize, dear reader, that you're all in a fluster, inwardly. Then say to yourself: "Why am I in such a fluster?" And you'll see you've no reason at all to be so: except that it's rather exciting to be in a fluster, and it may seem rather stale eggs to be in no fluster at all about anything. And yet, dear little reader, once you consider it quietly, it's _so_ much nicer _not_ to be in a fluster. It's so much nicer not to feel one's deeper innards storming like the Bay of Biscay. It is so much better to get up and say to the waters of one's own troubled spirit: Peace, be still ...! And they will be still ... perhaps. And then one realizes that all the wild storms of anxiety and frenzy were only so much breaking of eggs. It isn't our business to live anybody's life, or to die anybody's death, except our own. Nor to save anybody's soul, nor to put anybody in the right; nor yet in the wrong, which is more the point to-day. But to be still, and to ignore the false fine frenzy of the seething world. To turn away, now, each one into the stillness and solitude of his own soul. And there to remain in the quiet with the Holy Ghost which is to each man his own true soul. This is the way out of the vicious circle. Not to rush round on the periphery, like a rabbit in a ring, trying to break through. But to retreat to the very center, and there to be filled with a new strange stability, polarized in unfathomable richness with the center of centers. We are so silly, trying to invent devices and machines for flying off from the surface of the earth. Instead of realizing that for us the deep satisfaction lies not in escaping, but in getting into the perfect circuit of the earth's terrestrial magnetism. Not in breaking away. What is the good of trying to break away from one's own? What is the good of a tree desiring to fly like a bird in the sky, when a bird is rooted in the earth as surely as a tree is? Nay, the bird is only the topmost leaf of the tree, fluttering in the high air, but attached as close to the tree as any other leaf. Mr. Einstein's Theory of Relativity does not supersede the Newtonian Law of Gravitation or of Inertia. It only says, "Beware! The Law of Inertia is not the simple ideal proposition you would like to make of it. It is a vast complexity. Gravitation is not one elemental uncouth force. It is a strange, infinitely complex, subtle aggregate of forces." And yet, however much it may waggle, a stone does fall to earth if you drop it. We should like, vulgarly, to rejoice and say that the new Theory of Relativity releases us from the old obligation of centrality. It does no such thing. It only makes the old centrality much more strange, subtle, complex, and vital. It only robs us of the nice old ideal simplicity. Which ideal simplicity and logicalness has become such a fish-bone stuck in our throats. The universe is once more in the mental melting-pot. And you can melt it down as long as you like, and mutter all the jargon and abracadabra, _aldeboronti fosco fornio_ of science that mental monkey-tricks can teach you, you won't get anything in the end but a formula and a lie. The atom? Why, the moment you discover the atom it will explode under your nose. The moment you discover the ether it will evaporate. The moment you get down to the real basis of anything, it will dissolve into a thousand problematic constituents. And the more problems you solve, the more will spring up with their fingers at their nose, making a fool of you. There is only one clue to the universe. And that is the individual soul within the individual being. That outer universe of suns and moons and atoms is a secondary affair. It is the death-result of living individuals. There is a great polarity in life itself. Life itself is dual. And the duality is life and death. And death is not just shadow or mystery. It is the negative reality of life. It is what we call Matter and Force, among other things. Life is individual, always was individual and always will be. Life consists of living individuals, and always did so consist, in the beginning of everything. There never was any universe, any cosmos, of which the first reality was anything but living, incorporate individuals. I don't say the individuals were exactly like you and me. And they were never wildly different. And therefore it is time for the idealist and the scientist--they are one and the same, really--to stop his monkey-jargon about the atom and the origin of life and the mechanical clue to the universe. There isn't any such thing. I might as well say: "Then they took the cart, and rubbed it all over with grease. Then they sprayed it with white wine, and spun round the right wheel five hundred revolutions to the minute and the left wheel, in the opposite direction, seven hundred and seventy-seven revolutions to the minute. Then a burning torch was applied to each axle. And lo, the footboard of the cart began to swell, and suddenly as the cart groaned and writhed, the horse was born, and lay panting between the shafts." The whole scientific theory of the universe is not worth such a tale: that the cart conceived and gave birth to the horse. I do not believe one-fifth of what science can tell me about the sun. I do not believe for one second that the moon is a dead world spelched off from our globe. I do not believe that the stars came flying off from the sun like drops of water when you spin your wet hanky. I have believed it for twenty years, because it seemed so ideally plausible. Now I don't accept any ideal plausibilities at all. I look at the moon and the stars, and I know I don't believe anything that I am told about them. Except that I like their names, Aldebaran and Cassiopeia, and so on. I have tried, and even brought myself to believe in a clue to the outer universe. And in the process I have swallowed such a lot of jargon that I would rather listen now to a negro witch-doctor than to Science. There is nothing in the world that is true except empiric discoveries which work in actual appliances. I know that the sun is hot. But I won't be told that the sun is a ball of blazing gas which spins round and fizzes. No, thank you. At length, for _my_ part, I know that life, and life only is the clue to the universe. And that the living individual is the clue to life. And that it always was so, and always will be so. When the living individual dies, then is the realm of death established. Then you get Matter and Elements and atoms and forces and sun and moon and earth and stars and so forth. In short, the outer universe, the Cosmos. The Cosmos is nothing but the aggregate of the dead bodies and dead energies of bygone individuals. The dead bodies decompose as we know into earth, air, and water, heat and radiant energy and free electricity and innumerable other scientific facts. The dead souls likewise decompose--or else they don't decompose. But if they _do_ decompose, then it is not into any elements of Matter and physical energy. They decompose into some psychic reality, and into some potential will. They reënter into the living psyche of living individuals. The living soul partakes of the dead souls, as the living breast partakes of the outer air, and the blood partakes of the sun. The soul, the individuality, never resolves itself through death into physical constituents. The dead soul remains always soul, and always retains its individual quality. And it does not disappear, but reënters into the soul of the living, of some living individual or individuals. And there it continues its part in life, as a death-witness and a life-agent. But it does not, ordinarily, have any separate existence there, but is incorporate in the living individual soul. But in some extraordinary cases, the dead soul may really act separately in a living individual. How this all is, and what are the laws of the relation between life and death, the living and the dead, I don't know. But that this relation exists, and exists in a manner as I describe it, for my own part I know. And I am fully aware that once we direct our living attention this way, instead of to the absurdity of the atom, then we have a whole _living_ universe of knowledge before us. The universe of life and death, of which we, whose business it is to live and to die, know nothing. Whilst concerning the universe of Force and Matter we pile up theories and make staggering and disastrous discoveries of machinery and poison-gas, all of which we were much better without. It is life we have to live by, not machines and ideals. And life means nothing else, even, but the spontaneous living soul which is our central reality. The spontaneous, living, individual soul, this is the clue, and the only clue. All the rest is derived. How it is contrived that the individual soul in the living sways the very sun in its centrality, I do not know. But it is so. It is the peculiar dynamic polarity of the living soul in every weed or bug or beast, each one separately and individually polarized with the great returning pole of the sun, that maintains the sun alive. For I take it that the sun is the great sympathetic center of our inanimate universe. I take it that the sun breathes in the effluence of all that fades and dies. Across space fly the innumerable vibrations which are the basis of all matter. They fly, breathed out from the dying and the dead, from all that which is passing away, even in the living. These vibrations, these elements pass away across space, and are breathed back again. The sun itself is invisible as the soul. The sun itself is the soul of the inanimate universe, the aggregate clue to the substantial death, if we may call it so. The sun is the great active pole of the sympathetic death-activity. To the sun fly the vibrations or the molecules in the great sympathy-mode of death, and in the sun they are renewed, they turn again as the great gift back again from the sympathetic death-center towards life, towards the living. But it is not even the dead which _really_ sustain the sun. It is the dynamic relation between the solar plexus of individuals and the sun's core, a perfect circuit. The sun is materially composed of all the effluence of the dead. But the _quick_ of the sun is polarized with the living, the sun's quick is polarized in dynamic relation with the quick of life in all living things, that is, with the solar plexus in mankind. A direct dynamic connection between my solar plexus and the sun. Likewise, as the sun is the great fiery, vivifying pole of the inanimate universe, the moon is the other pole, cold and keen and vivifying, corresponding in some way to a _voluntary_ pole. We live between the polarized circuit of sun and moon. And the moon is polarized with the lumbar ganglion, primarily, in man. Sun and moon are dynamically polarized to our actual tissue, they affect this tissue all the time. The moon is, as it were, the pole of our particular terrestrial _volition_, in the universe. What holds the earth swinging in space is first, the great dynamic attraction to the sun, and then counterposing assertion of independence, singleness, which is polarized in the moon. The moon is the clue to our earth's individual identity, in the wide universe. The moon is an immense magnetic center. It is quite wrong to say she is a dead snowy world with craters and so on. I should say she is composed of some very intense element, like phosphorus or radium, some element or elements which have very powerful chemical and kinetic activity, and magnetic activity, affecting us through space. It is not the sun which we see in heaven. It is the rushing thither and the rushing thence of the vibrations expelled by death from the body of life, and returned back again to the body of life. Possibly even a dead soul makes its journey to the sun and back, before we receive it again in our breast. Just as the breath we breathe out flies to the sun and back, before we breathe it in again. And as the water that evaporates rises right to the sun, and returns here. What we see is the great golden rushing thither, from the death exhalation, towards the sun, as a great cloud of bees flying to swarm upon the invisible queen, circling round, and loosing again. This is what we see of the sun. The center is invisible for ever. And of the moon the same. The moon has her back to us for ever. Not her face, as we like to think. The moon also pulls the water, as the sun does. But not in evaporation. The moon pulls by the magnetic force we call gravitation. Gravitation not being quite such a Newtonian simple apple as we are accustomed to find it, we are perhaps farther off from understanding the tides of the ocean than we were before the fruit of the tree fell to Sir Isaac's head. It is certainly not simple little-things tumble-towards-big-things gravitation. In the moon's pull there is peculiar, quite special force exerted over those water-born substances, phosphorus, salt, and lime. The dynamic energy of salt water is something quite different from that of fresh water. And it is this dynamic energy which the sea gives off, and which connects it with the moon. And the moon is some strange coagulation of substance such as salt, phosphorus, soda. It certainly isn't a snowy cold world, like a world of our own gone cold. Nonsense. It is a globe of dynamic substance like radium or phosphorus, coagulated upon a certain vivid pole of energy, which pole of energy is directly polarized with our earth, in opposition with the sun. The moon is born from the death of individuals. All things, in their oneing, their unification into the pure, universal oneness, evaporate and fly like an imitation breath towards the sun. Even the crumbling rocks breathe themselves off in this rocky death, to the sun of heaven, during the day. But at the same time, during the night they breathe themselves off to the moon. If we come to think of it, light and dark are a question both of the third body, the intervening body, what we will call, by stretching a point, the individual. As we all know, apart from the existence of molecules of individual matter, there is neither light nor dark. A universe utterly without matter, we don't know whether it is light or dark. Even the pure space between the sun and moon, the blue space, we don't know whether, in itself, it is light or dark. We can say it is light, we can say it is dark. But light and dark are terms which apply only to ourselves, the third, the intermediate, the substantial, the individual. If we come to think of it, light and dark only mean whether we have our face or our back towards the sun. If we have our face to the sun, then we establish the circuit of cosmic or universal or material or infinite sympathy. These four adjectives, cosmic, universal, material, and infinite are almost interchangeable, and apply, as we see, to that realm of the non-individual existence which we call the realm of the substantial death. It is the universe which has resulted from the death of individuals. And to this universe alone belongs the quality of infinity: to the universe of death. Living individuals have no infinity save in this relation to the total death-substance and death-being, the summed-up cosmos. Light and dark, these great wonders, are relative to us alone. These are two vast poles of the cosmic energy and of material existence. These are the vast poles of cosmic sympathy, which we call the sun, and the other white pole of cosmic volition, which we call the moon. To the sun belong the great forces of heat and radiant energy, to the moon belong the great forces of magnetism and electricity, radium-energy, and so on. The sun is not, in any sense, a material body. It is an invariable intense pole of cosmic energy, and what we see are the particles of our terrestrial decomposition flying thither and returning, as fine grains of iron would fly to an intense magnet, or better, as the draught in a room veers towards the fire, attracted infallibly, as a moth towards a candle. The moth is drawn to the candle as the draught is drawn to the fire, in the absolute spell of the material polarity of fire. And air escapes again, hot and different, from the fire. So is the sun. Fire, we say, is combustion. It is marvelous how science proceeds like witchcraft and alchemy, by means of an abracadabra which has no earthly sense. Pray, what is combustion? You can try and answer scientifically, till you are black in the face. All you can say is that it is _that which happens_ when matter is raised to a certain temperature--and so forth and so forth. You might as well say, a word is that which happens when I open my mouth and squeeze my larynx and make various tricks with my throat muscles. All these explanations are so senseless. They describe the apparatus, and think they have described the event. Fire may be accompanied by combustion, but combustion is not necessarily accompanied by fire. All A is B, but all B is not A. And therefore fire, no matter how you jiggle, is not identical with combustion. Fire. FIRE. I insist on the absolute word. You may say that fire is a sum of various phenomena. I say it isn't. You might as well tell me a fly is a sum of wings and six legs and two bulging eyes. It is the fly which has the wings and legs, and not the legs and wings which somehow nab the fly into the middle of themselves. A fly is not a sum of various things. A fly is a fly, and the items of the sum are still fly. So with fire. Fire is an absolute unity in itself. It is a dynamic polar principle. Establish a certain polarity between the moon-principle and the sun-principle, between the positive and negative, or sympathetic and volitional dynamism in any piece of matter, and you have fire, you have the sun-phenomenon. It is the sudden flare into the one mode, the sun mode, the material sympathetic mode. Correspondingly, establish an opposite polarity between the sun-principle and the water-principle, and you have decomposition into water, or towards watery dissolution. There are two sheer dynamic principles in our universe, the sun-principle and the moon-principle. And these principles are known to us in immediate contact as fire and water. The sun is not fire. But the principle of fire is the sun-principle. That is, fire is the sudden swoop towards the sun, of matter which is suddenly sun-polarized. Fire is the sudden sun-assertion, the release towards the one pole only. It is the sudden revelation of the cosmic One Polarity, One Identity. But there is another pole. There is the moon. And there is another absolute and visible principle, the principle of water. The moon is not water. But it is the soul of water, the invisible clue to all the waters. So that we begin to realize our visible universe as a vast dual polarity between sun and moon. Two vast poles in space, invisible in themselves, but visible owing to the circuit which swoops between them, round them, the circuit of the universe, established at the cosmic poles of the sun and moon. This then is the infinite, the positive infinite of the positive pole, the sun-pole, negative infinite of the negative pole, the moon-pole. And between the two infinites all existence takes place. But wait. Existence is truly a matter of propagation between the two infinites. But it needs a third presence. Sun-principle and moon-principle, embracing through the æons, could never by themselves propagate one molecule of matter. The hailstone needs a grain of dust for its core. So does the universe. Midway between the two cosmic infinites lies the third, which is more than infinite. This is the Holy Ghost Life, individual life. It is so easy to imagine that between them, the two infinites of the cosmos propagated life. But one single moment of pause and silence, one single moment of gathering the whole soul into knowledge, will tell us that it is a falsity. It was the living individual soul which, dying, flung into space the two wings of the infinite, the two poles of the sun and the moon. The sun and the moon are the two eternal death-results of the death of individuals. Matter, all matter, is the Life-born. And what we know as inert matter, this is only the result of death in individuals, it is the dead bodies of individuals decomposed and resmelted between the hammer and anvil, fire and sand of the sun and the moon. When time began, the first individual died, the poles of the sun and moon were flung into space, and between the two, in a strange chaos and battle, the dead body was torn and melted and smelted, and rolled beneath the feet of the living. So the world was formed, always under the feet of the living. And so we have a clue to gravitation. We, mankind, are all one family. In our individual bodies burns the positive quick of all things. But beneath our feet, in our own earth, lies the intense center of our human, individual death, our grave. The earth has one center, to which we are all polarized. The circuit of our life is balanced on the living soul within us, as the positive center, and on the earth's dark center, the center of our abiding and eternal and substantial death, our great negative center, away below. This is the circuit of our immediate individual existence. We stand upon our own grave, with our death fire, the sun, on our right hand, and our death-damp, the moon, on our left. The earth's center is no accident. It is the great individual pole of us who die. It is the center of the first dead body. It is the first germ-cell of death, which germ-cell threw out the great nuclei of the sun and the moon. To this center of our earth we, as humans, are eternally polarized, as are our trees. Inevitably, we fall to earth. And the clue of us sinks to the earth's center, the clue of our death, of our _weight_. And the earth flings us out as wings to the sun and moon: or as the death-germ dividing into two nuclei. So from the earth our radiance is flung to the sun, our marsh-fire to the moon, when we die. We fall into the earth. But our rising was not from the earth. We rose from the earthless quick, the unfading life. And earth, sun, and moon are born only of our death. But it is only their polarized dynamic connection with us who live which sustains them all in their place and maintains them all in their own activities. The inanimate universe rests absolutely on the life-circuit of living creatures, is built upon the arch which spans the duality of living beings. CHAPTER XIV SLEEP AND DREAMS This is going rather far, for a book--nay, a booklet--on the child consciousness. But it can't be helped. Child-consciousness it is. And we have to roll away the stone of a scientific cosmos from the tomb-mouth of that imprisoned consciousness. Now, dear reader, let us see where we are. First of all, we are ourselves--which is the refrain of all my chants. We are ourselves. We are living individuals. And as living individuals we are the one, pure clue to our own cosmos. To which cosmos living individuals _have always_ been the clue, since time began, and _will always_ be the clue, while time lasts. I know it is not so fireworky as the sudden evolving of life, somewhere, somewhen and somehow, out of force and matter with a pop. But that pop never popped, dear reader. The boot was on the other leg. And I wish I could mix a few more metaphors, like pops and legs and boots, just to annoy you. Life never evolved, or evoluted, out of force and matter, dear reader. There is no such thing as evolution, anyhow. There is only development. Man was man in the very first plasm-speck which was his own individual origin, and is still his own individual origin. As for the origin, I don't know much about it. I only know there is but one origin, and that is the individual soul. The individual soul originated everything, and has itself no origin. So that time is a matter of living experience, nothing else, and eternity is just a mental trick. Of course every living speck, amoeba or newt, has its own individual soul. And we sit on our own globe, dear reader, here individually located. Our own individual being is our own single reality. But the single reality of the individual being is dynamically and directly polarized to the earth's center, which is the aggregate negative center of all terrestrial existence. In short, the center which in life we thrust away from, and towards which we fall, in death. For, our individual existence being positive, we must have a negative pole to thrust away from. And when our positive individual existence breaks, and we fall into death, our wonderful individual gravitation-center succumbs to the earth's gravitation-center. So there we are, individuals, single, life-born, life-living, yet all the while poised and polarized to the aggregate center of our substantial death, our earth's quick, powerful center-clue. There may be other individuals, alive, and having other worlds under their feet, polarized to their own globe's center. But the very sacredness of my own individuality prevents my pronouncing about them, lest I, in attributing qualities to them, transgress against the pure individuality which is theirs, beyond me. If, however, there be truly other people, with their own world under their feet, then I think it is fair to say that we all have our infinite identity in the sun. That in the rush and swirl of death we pass through fiery ways to the same sun. And from the sun, can the spores of souls pass to the various worlds? And to the worlds of the cosmos seed across space, through the wild beams of the sun? Is there seed of Mars in my veins? And is astrology not altogether nonsense? But if the sun is the center of our infinite oneing in death with all the other after-death souls of the cosmos: and in that great central station of travel, the sun, we meet and mingle and change trains for the stars: then ought we to assume that the moon is likewise a meeting-place of dead souls? The moon surely is a meeting-place of cold, dead, angry souls. But from our own globe only. The moon is the center of our terrestrial individuality in the cosmos. She is the declaration of our existence in separateness. Save for the intense white recoil of the moon, the earth would stagger towards the sun. The moon holds us to our own cosmic individuality, as a world individual in space. She is the fierce center of retraction, of frictional withdrawal into separateness. She it is who sullenly stands with her back to us, and refuses to meet and mingle. She it is who burns white with the intense friction of her withdrawal into separation, that cold, proud white fire of furious, almost malignant apartness, the struggle into fierce, frictional separation. Her white fire is the frictional fire of the last strange, intense watery matter, as this matter fights its way out of combination and out of combustion with the sun-stuff. To the pure polarity of the moon fly the essential waters of our universe. Which essential waters, at the moon's clue, are only an intense invisible energy, a polarity of the moon. There are only three great energies in the universal life, which is always individual and which yet sways all the physical forces as well as the vital energy; and then the two great dynamisms of the sun and the moon. To the dynamism of the sun belong heat, expansion-force, and all that range. To the dynamism of the moon the _essential_ watery forces: not just gravitation, but electricity, magnetism, radium-energy, and so on. The moon likewise is the pole of our night activities, as the sun is the pole of our day activities. Remember that the sun and moon are but great self-abandons which individual life has thrown out, to the right hand and to the left. When individual life dies, it flings itself on the right hand to the sun, on the left hand to the moon, in the dual polarity, and sinks to earth. When any man dies, his soul divides in death; as in life, in the first germ, it was united from two germs. It divides into two dark germs, flung asunder: the sun-germ and the moon-germ. Then the material body sinks to earth. And so we have the cosmic universe such as we know it. What is the exact relationship between us and the death-realm of the afterwards we shall never know. But this relation is none the less active every moment of our lives. There is a pure polarity between life and death, between the living and the dead, between each living individual and the outer cosmos. Between each living individual and the earth's center passes a never-ceasing circuit of magnetism. It is a circuit which in man travels up the right side, and down the left side of the body, to the earth's center. It never ceases. But while we are awake it is entirely under the control and spell of the total consciousness, the individual consciousness, the soul, or self. When we sleep, however, then this individual consciousness of the soul is suspended for the time, and we lie completely within the circuit of the earth's magnetism, or gravitation, or both: the circuit of the earth's centrality. It is this circuit which is busy in all our tissue removing or arranging the dead body of our past day. For each time we lie down to sleep we have within us a body of death which dies with the day that is spent. And this body of death is removed or laid in line by the activities of the earth-circuit, the great active death-circuit, while we sleep. As we sleep the current sweeps its own way through us, as the streets of a city are swept and flushed at night. It sweeps through our nerves and our blood, sweeping away the ash of our day's spent consciousness towards one form or other of excretion. This earth-current actively sweeping through us is really the death-activity busy in the service of life. It behooves us to know nothing of it. And as it sweeps it stimulates in the primary centers of consciousness vibrations which flash images upon the mind. Usually, in deep sleep, these images pass unrecorded; but as we pass towards the twilight of dawn and wakefulness, we begin to retain some impression, some record of the dream-images. Usually also the images that are accidentally swept into the mind in sleep are as disconnected and as unmeaning as the pieces of paper which the street cleaners sweep into a bin from the city gutters at night. We should not think of taking all these papers, piecing them together, and making a marvelous book of them, prophetic of the future and pregnant with the past. We should not do so, although every rag of printed paper swept from the gutter would have some connection with the past day's event. But its significance, the significance of the words printed upon it is so small, that we relegate it into the limbo of the accidental and meaningless. There is no vital connection between the many torn bits of paper--only an accidental connection. Each bit of paper has reference to some actual event: a bus-ticket, an envelope, a tract, a pastry-shop bag, a newspaper, a hand-bill. But take them all together, bus-ticket, torn envelope, tract, paper-bag, piece of newspaper and hand-bill, and they have no individual sequence, they belong more to the mechanical arrangements than to the vital consequence of our existence. And the same with most dreams. They are the heterogeneous odds and ends of images swept together accidentally by the besom of the night-current, and it is beneath our dignity to attach any real importance to them. It is always beneath our dignity to go degrading the integrity of the individual soul by cringing and scraping among the rag-tag of accident and of the inferior, mechanic coincidence and automatic event. Only those events are significant which derive from or apply to the soul in its full integrity. To go kow-towing before the facts of change, as gamblers and fortune-readers and fatalists do, is merely a perverting of the soul's proud integral priority, a rearing up of idiotic idols and fetishes. Most dreams are purely insignificant, and it is the sign of a weak and paltry nature to pay any attention to them whatever. Only occasionally they matter. And this is only when something _threatens_ us from the outer mechanical, or accidental _death_-world. When anything threatens us from the world of death, then a dream may become so vivid that it arouses the actual soul. And when a dream is so intense that it arouses the soul--then we must attend to it. But we may have the most appalling nightmare because we eat pancakes for supper. Here again, we are threatened with an arrest of the mechanical flow of the system. This arrest becomes so serious that it affects the great organs of the heart and lungs, and these organs affect the primary conscious-centers. Now we shall see that this is the direct reverse of real living consciousness. In living consciousness the primary affective centers control the great organs. But when sleep is on us, the reverse takes place. The great organs, being obstructed in their spontaneous-automatism, at last with violence arouse the active conscious-centers. And these flash images to the brain. These nightmare images are very frequently purely mechanical: as of falling terribly downwards, or being enclosed in vaults. And such images are pure physical transcripts. The image of falling, of flying, of trying to run and not being able to lift the feet, of having to creep through terribly small passages, these are direct transcripts from the physical phenomena of circulation and digestion. It is the directly transcribed image of the heart which, impeded in its action by the gases of indigestion, is switched out of its established circuit of earth-polarity, and is as if suspended over a void, or plunging into a void: step by step, falling downstairs, maybe, according to the strangulation of the heart beats. The same paralytic inability to lift the feet when one needs to run, in a dream, comes directly from the same impeded action of the heart, which is thrown off its balance by some material obstruction. Now the heart swings left and right in the pure circuit of the earth's polarity. Hinder this swing, force the heart over to the left, by inflation of gas from the stomach or by dead pressure upon the blood and nerves from any obstruction, and you get the sensation of being unable to lift the feet from earth: a gasping sensation. Or force the heart to over-balance towards the right, and you get the sensation of flying or of falling. The heart telegraphs its distress to the mind, and wakes us. The wakeful soul at once begins to deal with the obstruction, which was too much for the mechanical night-circuits. The same holds good of dreams of imprisonment, or of creeping through narrow passages. They are direct transfers from the squeezing of the blood through constricted arteries or heart chambers. Most dreams are stimulated from the blood into the nerves and the nerve-centers. And the heart is the transmission station. For the blood has a unity and a consciousness of its own. It has a deeper, elemental consciousness of the mechanical or material world. In the blood we have the body of our most elemental consciousness, our almost material consciousness. And during sleep this material consciousness transfers itself into the nerves and to the brain. The transfer in wakefulness results in a feeling of pain or discomfort--as when we have indigestion, which is pure blood-discomfort. But in sleep the transfer is made through the dream-images which are mechanical phenomena like mirages. Nightmares which have purely mechanical images may terrify us, give us a great shock, but the shock does not enter our souls. We are surprised, in the morning, to find that the bristling horror of the night seems now just nothing--dwindled to nothing. And this is because what was a purely material obstruction in the physical flow, temporary only, is indeed a nothingness to the living, integral soul. We are subject to such accidents--if we will eat pancakes for supper. And that is the end of it. But there are other dreams which linger and haunt the soul. These are true soul-dreams. As we know, life consists of reactions and interrelations from the great centers of primary consciousness. I may start a chain of connection from one center, which inevitably stimulates into activity the corresponding center. For example, I may develop a profound and passional love for my mother, in my days of adolescence. This starts, willy-nilly, the whole activity of adult love at the lower centers. But admission is made only of the upper, spiritual love, the love dynamically polarized at the upper centers. Nevertheless, whether the admission is made or not, once establish the circuit in the upper or spiritual centers of adult love, and you will get a corresponding activity in the lower, passional centers of adult love. The activity at the lower center, however, is denied in the daytime. There is a repression. Then the friction of the night-flow liberates the repressed psychic activity explosively. And then the image of the mother figures in passionate, disturbing, soul-rending dreams. The Freudians point to this as evidence of a repressed incest desire. The Freudians are too simple. It is _always_ wrong to accept a dream-meaning at its face value. Sleep is the time when we are given over to the automatic processes of the inanimate universe. Let us not forget this. Dreams are automatic in their nature. The psyche possesses remarkably few dynamic images. In the case of the boy who dreams of his mother, we have the aroused but unattached sex plunging in sleep, causing a sort of obstruction. We have the image of the mother, the dynamic emotional image. And the automatism of the dream-process immediately unites the sex-sensation to the great stock image, and produces an incest dream. But does this prove a repressed incest desire? On the contrary. The truth is, every man has, the moment he awakes, a hatred of his dream, and a great desire to be free of the dream, free of the persistent mother-image or sister-image of the dream. It is a ghoul, it haunts his dreams, this image, with its hateful conclusions. And yet he cannot get free. As long as a man lives he may, in his dreams of passion or conflict, be haunted by the mother-image or sister-image, even when he knows that the cause of the disturbing dream is the wife. But even though the actual subject of the dream is the wife, still, over and over again, for years, the dream-process will persist in substituting the mother-image. It haunts and terrifies a man. Why does the dream-process act so? For two reasons. First, the reason of simple automatic continuance. The mother-image was the first great emotional image to be introduced in the psyche. The dream-process mechanically reproduces its stock image the moment the intense sympathy-emotion is aroused. Again, the mother-image refers only to the upper plane. But the dream-process is mechanical in its logic. Because the mother-image refers to the great dynamic stress of the upper plane, therefore it refers to the great dynamic stress of the lower. This is a piece of sheer automatic logic. The living soul is _not_ automatic, and automatic logic does not apply to it. But for our second reason for the image. In becoming the object of great emotional stress for her son, the mother also becomes an object of poignancy, of anguish, of arrest, to her son. She arrests him from finding his proper fulfillment on the sensual plane. Now it is almost always the object of arrest which becomes impressed, as it were, upon the psyche. A man very rarely has an image of a person with whom he is livingly, vitally connected. He only has dream-images of the persons who, in some way, _oppose_ his life-flow and his soul's freedom, and so become impressed upon his plasm as objects of resistance. Once a man is dynamically caught on the upper plane by mother or sister, then the dream-image of mother or sister will persist until the dynamic _rapport_ between himself and his mother or sister is finally broken. And the dream-image from the upper plane will be automatically applied to the disturbance of the lower plane. Because--and this is very important--the dream-process _loves_ its own automatism. It would force everything to an automatic-logical conclusion in the psyche. But the living, wakeful psyche is so flexible and sensitive, it has a horror of automatism. While the soul really lives, its deepest dread is perhaps the dread of automatism. For automatism in life is a forestalling of the death process. The living soul has its great fear. The living soul _fears_ the automatically logical conclusion of incest. Hence the sleep-process invariably draws this conclusion. The dream-process, fiendishly, plays a triumph of automatism over us. But the dream-conclusion is almost invariably just the _reverse_ of the soul's desire, in any distress-dream. Popular dream-telling understood this, and pronounced that you must read dreams backwards. Dream of a wedding, and it means a funeral. Wish your friend well, and fear his death, and you will dream of his funeral. Every desire has its corresponding fear that the desire shall not be fulfilled. It is _fear_ which forms an arrest-point in the psyche, hence an image. So the dream automatically produces the fear-image as the desire-image. If you secretly wished your enemy dead, and feared he might flourish, the dream would present you with his wedding. Of course this rule of inversion is too simple to hold good in all cases. Yet it is one of the most general rules for dreams, and applies most often to desire-and-fear dreams of a psychic nature. So that an incest-dream would not prove an incest-desire in the living psyche. Rather the contrary, a living fear of the automatic conclusion: the soul's just dread of automatism. And though this may sound like casuistry, I believe it does explain a good deal of the dream-trick.--That which is lovely to the automatic process is hateful to the spontaneous soul. The wakeful living soul fears automatism as it fears death: death being automatic. It seems to me these are the first two dream-principles, and the two most important: the principle of automatism and the principle of inversion. They will not resolve everything for us, but they will help a great deal. We have to be _very_ wary of giving way to dreams. It is really a sin against ourselves to prostitute the living spontaneous soul to the tyranny of dreams, or of chance, or fortune or luck, or any of the processes of the automatic sphere. Then consider other dynamic dreams. First, the dream-image generally. Any _significant_ dream-image is usually an image or a symbol of some arrest or scotch in the living spontaneous psyche. There is another principle. But if the image is a symbol, then the only safe way to explain the symbol is to proceed from the quality of emotion connected with the symbol. For example, a man has a persistent passionate fear-dream about horses. He suddenly finds himself among great, physical horses, which may suddenly go wild. Their great bodies surge madly round him, they rear above him, threatening to destroy him. At any minute he may be trampled down. Now a psychoanalyst will probably tell you off-hand that this is a father-complex dream. Certain symbols seem to be put into complex catalogues. But it is all too arbitrary. Examining the emotional reference we find that the feeling is sensual, there is a great impression of the powerful, almost beautiful physical bodies of the horses, the nearness, the rounded haunches, the rearing. Is the dynamic passion in a horse the danger-passion? It is a great sensual reaction at the sacral ganglion, a reaction of intense, sensual, dominant volition. The horse which rears and kicks and neighs madly acts from the intensely powerful sacral ganglion. But this intense activity from the sacral ganglion is male: the sacral ganglion is at its highest intensity in the male. So that the horse-dream refers to some arrest in the deepest sensual activity in the male. The horse is presented as an object of terror, which means that to the man's automatic dream-soul, which loves automatism, the great sensual male activity is the greatest menace. The automatic pseudo-soul, which has got the sensual nature repressed, would like to keep it repressed. Whereas the greatest desire of the living spontaneous soul is that this very male sensual nature, represented as a menace, shall be actually accomplished in life. The spontaneous self is secretly yearning for the liberation and fulfillment of the deepest and most powerful sensual nature. There may be an element of father-complex. The horse may also refer to the powerful sensual being in the father. The dream may mean a love of the dreamer for the sensual male who is his father. But it has nothing to do with _incest_. The love is probably a just love. The bull-dream is a curious reversal. In the bull the centers of power are in the breast and shoulders. The horns of the head are symbols of this vast power in the upper self. The woman's fear of the bull is a great terror of the dynamic _upper_ centers in man. The bull's horns, instead of being phallic, represent the enormous potency of the upper centers. A woman whose most positive dynamism is in the breast and shoulders is fascinated by the bull. Her dream-fear of the bull and his horns which may run into her may be reversed to a significance of desire for connection, not from the centers of the lower, sensual self, but from the intense physical centers of the upper body: the phallus polarized from the upper centers, and directed towards the great breast center of the woman. Her wakeful fear is terror of the great breast-and-shoulder, _upper_ rage and power of man, which may pierce her defenseless lower self. The terror and the desire are near together--and go with an admiration of the slender, abstracted bull loins. Other dream-fears, or strong dream-impressions, may be almost imageless. They may be a great terror, for example, of a purely geometric figure--a figure from pure geometry, or an example of pure mathematics. Or they may have no image, but only a sensation of smell, or of color, or of sound. These are the dream-fears of the soul which is falling out of human integrity into the purely mechanical mode. If we idealize ourselves sufficiently, the spontaneous centers do at last work only, or almost only, in the mechanical mode. They have no dynamic relation with another being. They cannot have. Their whole power of dynamic relationship is quenched. They act now in reference purely to the mechanical world, of force and matter, sensation and law. So that in dream-activity sensation or abstraction, abstract law or calculation occurs as the predominant or exclusive image. In the dream there may be a sensation of admiration or delight. The waking sensation is fear. Because the soul fears above all things its fall from individual integrity into the mechanic activity of the outer world, which is the automatic death-world. And this is our danger to-day. We tend, through deliberate idealism or deliberate material purpose, to destroy the soul in its first nature of spontaneous, integral being, and to substitute the second nature, the automatic nature of the mechanical universe. For this purpose we stay up late at night, and we rise late in the morning. To stay up late into the night is always bad. Let us be as ideal as we may, when the sun goes down the natural mode of life changes in us. The mind changes its activity. As the soul gradually goes passive, before yielding up its sway, the mind falls into its second phase of activity. It collects the results of the spent day into consciousness, lays down the honey of quiet thought, or the bitter-sweet honey of the gathered flower. It is the consciousness of that which is past. Evening is our time to read history and tragedy and romance--all of which are the utterance of that which is past, that which is over, that which is finished, is concluded: either sweetly concluded, or bitterly. Evening is the time for this. But evening is the time also for revelry, for drink, for passion. Alcohol enters the blood and acts as the sun's rays act. It inflames into life, it liberates into energy and consciousness. But by a process of combustion. That life of the day which we have not lived, by means of sun-born alcohol we can now flare into sensation, consciousness, energy and passion, and live it out. It is a liberation from the laws of idealism, a release from the restriction of control and fear. It is the blood bursting into consciousness. But naturally the course of the liberated consciousness may be in either direction: sharper mental action, greater fervor of spiritual emotion, or deeper sensuality. Nowadays the last is becoming much more unusual. The active mind-consciousness of the night is a form of retrospection, or else it is a form of impulsive exclamation, direct from the blood, and unbalanced. Because the active physical consciousness of the night is the blood-consciousness, the most elemental form of consciousness. Vision is perhaps our highest form of _dynamic_ upper consciousness. But our deepest lower consciousness is blood-consciousness. And the dynamic lower centers are swayed from the blood. When the blood rouses into its night intensity, it naturally kindles first the lowest dynamic centers. It transfers its voice and its fire to the great hypogastric plexus, which governs, with the help of the sacral ganglion, the flow of urine through us, but which also voices the deep swaying of the blood in sex passion. Sex is our deepest form of consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure blood-consciousness. It is the basic consciousness of the blood, the nearest thing in us to pure material consciousness. It is the consciousness of the night, when the soul is _almost_ asleep. The blood-consciousness is the first and last knowledge of the living soul: the depths. It is the soul acting in part only, speaking with its first hoarse half-voice. And blood-consciousness cannot operate purely until the soul has put off all its manifold degrees and forms of upper consciousness. As the self falls back into quiescence, it draws itself from the brain, from the great nerve-centers, into the blood, where at last it will sleep. But as it draws and folds itself livingly in the blood, at the dark and powerful hour, it sends out its great call. For even the blood is alone and in part, and needs an answer. Like the waters of the Red Sea, the blood is divided in a dual polarity between the sexes. As the night falls and the consciousness sinks deeper, suddenly the blood is heard hoarsely calling. Suddenly the deep centers of the sexual consciousness rouse to their spontaneous activity. Suddenly there is a deep circuit established between me and the woman. Suddenly the sea of blood which is me heaves and rushes towards the sea of blood which is her. There is a moment of pure frictional crisis and contact of blood. And then all the blood in me ebbs back into its ways, transmuted, changed. And this is the profound basis of my renewal, my deep blood renewal. And this has nothing to do with pretty faces or white skin or rosy breasts or any of the rest of the trappings of sexual love. These trappings belong to the day. Neither eyes nor hands nor mouth have anything to do with the final massive and dark collision of the blood in the sex crisis, when the strange flash of electric transmutation passes through the blood of the man and the blood of the woman. They fall apart and sleep in their transmutation. But even in its profoundest, and most elemental movements, the soul is still individual. Even in its most material consciousness, it is still integral and individual. You would think the great blood-stream of mankind was one and homogeneous. And it is indeed more nearly one, more near to homogeneity than anything else within us. The blood-stream of mankind is almost homogeneous. But it isn't homogeneous. In the first place, it is dual in a perfect dark dynamic polarity, the sexual polarity. No getting away from the fact that the blood of woman is dynamically polarized in opposition, or in difference to the blood of man. The crisis of their contact in sex connection is the moment of establishment of a new flashing circuit throughout the whole sea: the dark, burning red waters of our under-world rocking in a new dynamic rhythm in each of us. And then in the second place, the blood of an individual is his _own_ blood. That is, it is individual. And though we have a potential dynamic sexual connection, we men, with almost every woman, yet the great outstanding fact of the individuality even of the blood makes us need a corresponding individuality in the woman we are to embrace. The more individual the man or woman, the more unsatisfactory is a non-individual connection: promiscuity. The more individual, the more does our blood cry out for its own specific answer, an individual woman, blood-polarized with us. We have made the mistake of idealism again. We have thought that the woman who thinks and talks as we do will be the blood-answer. And we force it to be so. To our disaster. The woman who thinks and talks as we do is almost sure to have no dynamic blood-polarity with us. The dynamic blood-polarity would make her different from me, and not like me in her thought mode. Blood-sympathy is so much deeper than thought-mode, that it may result in very different expression, verbally. We have made the mistake of turning life inside out: of dragging the day-self into the night, and spreading the night-self over into the day. We have made love and sex a matter of seeing and hearing and of day-conscious manipulation. We have made men and women come together on the grounds of this superficial likeness and commonalty--their mental, and upper sympathetic consciousness. And so we have forced the blood to submission. Which means we force it into disintegration. We have too much light in the night, and too much sleep in the day. It is an evil thing for us to prolong as we do the mental, visual, ideal consciousness far into the night when the hour has come for this upper consciousness to fade, for the blood alone to know and to act. By provoking the reaction of the great blood-stress, the sex-reaction, from the upper, outer mental consciousness and mental lasciviousness of conscious purpose, we thereby destroy the very blood in our bodies. We prevent it from having its own dynamic sway. We prevent it from coming to its own dynamic crisis and connection, from finding its own fundamental being. No matter how we work our sex, from the upper or outer consciousness, we don't achieve anything but the falsification and impoverishment of our own blood-life. We have no choice. Either we must withdraw from interference, or slowly deteriorate. We have made a corresponding mistake in sleeping on into the day. Once the sun rises our constitution changes. Once the sun is well up our sleep--supposing our life fairly normal--is no longer truly sleep. When the sun comes up the centers of active dynamic upper consciousness begin to wake. The blood changes its vibration and even its chemical constitution. And then we too ought to wake. We do ourselves great damage by sleeping too long into the day. The half-hour's sleep after midday meal is a readjustment. But the long hours of morning sleep are just a damage. We submit our now active centers of upper consciousness to the dominion of the blood-automatic flow. We chain ourselves down in our morning sleep. We transmute the morning's blood-strength into false dreams and into an ever-increasing force of inertia. And naturally, in the same line of inertia we persist from bad to worse. With the result that our chained-down, active nerve-centers are half-shattered before we arise. We never become newly day-conscious, because we have subjected our powerful centers of day-consciousness to be trampled and wasted into dreams and inertia by the heavy flow of the blood-automatism in the morning sleeps. Then we arise with a feeling of the monotony and automatism of life. There is no good, glad refreshing. We feel tired to start with. And so we protract our day-consciousness on into the night, when we _do_ at last begin to come awake, and we tell ourselves we must sleep, sleep, sleep in the morning and the daytime. It is better to sleep only six hours than to prolong sleep on and on when the sun has risen. Every man and woman should be forced out of bed soon after the sun has risen: particularly the nervous ones. And forced into physical activity. Soon after dawn the vast majority of people should be hard at work. If not, they will soon be nervously diseased. CHAPTER XV THE LOWER SELF So it comes about that the moon is the planet of our nights, as the sun of our days. And this is not just accidental, or even mechanical. The influence of the moon upon the tides and upon us is not just an accident in phenomena. It is the result of the creation of the universe by life itself. It was life itself which threw the moon apart on the one hand, the sun on the other. And it is life itself which keeps the dynamic-vital relation constant between the moon and the living individuals of the globe. The moon is as dependent upon the life of individuals, for her continued existence, as each single individual is dependent upon the moon. The same with the sun. The sun sets and has his perfect polarity in the life-circuit established between him and all living individuals. Break that circuit, and the sun breaks. Without man, beasts, butterflies, trees, toads, the sun would gutter out like a spent lamp. It is the life-emission from individuals which feeds his burning and establishes his sun-heart in its powerful equilibrium. The same with the moon. She lives from us, primarily, and we from her. Everything is a question of relativity. Not only is every force relative to other force or forces, but every existence is relative to other existences. Not only does the life of man depend on man, beast, and herb, but on the sun and moon, and the stars. And in another manner, the existence of the moon depends absolutely on the life of herb, beast, and man. The existence of the moon depends upon the life of individuals, that which alone is original. Without the life of individuals the moon would fall asunder. And the moon particularly, because she is polarized dynamically to this, our own earth. We do not know what far-off life breathes between the stars and the sun. But our life alone supports the moon. Just as the moon is the pole of our single terrestrial individuality. Therefore we must know that between the moon and each individual being exists a vital dynamic flow. The life of individuals depends directly upon the moon, just as the moon depends directly upon the life of individuals. But in what way does the life of individuals depend directly upon the moon? The moon is the mother of darkness. She is the clue to the active darkness. And we, below the waist, we have our being in darkness. Below the waist we are sightless. When, in the daytime, our life is polarized upwards, towards the open, sun-wakened eyes and the mind which sees in vision, then the powerful dynamic centers of the lower body act in subservience, in their negative polarity. And then we flow upwards, we go forth seeking the universe, in vision, speech, and thought--we go forth to see all things, to hear all things, to know all things by acquaintance and by knowledge. One flood of dynamic flow are we, upwards polarized, in our tallness and our wide-eyed spirit seeking to bring all the universe into the range of our conscious individuality, and eager always to make new worlds, out of this old world, to bud new green tips on the tree of life. Just as a tree would die if it were not making new green tips upon all its vast old world of a body, so the whole universe would perish if man and beast and herb were not always putting forth a newness: the toad taking a vivider color, spreading his hands a little more gently, developing a more rusé intelligence, the birds adding a new note to their speech and song, a new sharp swerve to their flight, a new nicety to their nests; and man, making new worlds, new civilizations. If it were not for this striving into new creation on the part of living individuals, the universe would go dead, gradually, gradually and fall asunder. Like a tree that ceases to put forth new green tips, and to advance out a little further. But each new tip arises out of the apparent death of the old, the preceding one. Old leaves have got to fall, old forms must die. And if men must at certain periods fall into death in millions, why, so must the leaves fall every single autumn. And dead leaves make good mold. And so dead men. Even dead men's souls. So if death has to be the goal for a great number, then let it be so. If America must invent this poison-gas, let her. When death is our goal of goals we shall invent the means of death, let our professions of benevolence be what they will. But this time, it seems to me, we have consciously and responsibly to carry ourselves through the winter-period, the period of death and denudation: that is, some of us have, some _nation_ even must. For there are not now, as in the Roman times, any great reservoirs of energetic barbaric life. Goths, Gauls, Germans, Slavs, Tartars. The world is very full of people, but all fixed in civilizations of their own, and they all have all our vices, all our mechanisms, and all our means of destruction. This time, the leading civilization cannot die out as Greece, Rome, Persia died. It must suffer a great collapse, maybe. But it must carry through all the collapse the living clue to the next civilization. It's no good thinking we can leave it to China or Japan or India or Africa--any of the great swarms. And here we are, we don't look much like carrying through to a new era. What have we got that will carry through? The latest craze is Mr. Einstein's Relativity Theory. Curious that everybody catches fire at the word Relativity. There must be something in the mere suggestion, which we have been waiting for. But what? As far as I can see, Relativity means, for the common amateur mind, that there is no one absolute force in the physical universe, to which all other forces may be referred. There is no one single absolute central principle governing the world. The great cosmic forces or mechanical principles can only be known in their relation to one another, and can only exist in their relation to one another. But, says Einstein, this relation between the mechanical forces is constant, and may be expressed by a mathematical formula: which mathematical formula may be used to equate all mechanical forces of the universe. I hope that is not scientifically all wrong. It is what I understand of the Einstein theory. What I doubt is the equation formula. It seems to me, also, that the velocity of light through space is the _deus ex machina_ in Einstein's physics. Somebody will some day put salt on the tail of light as it travels through space, and then its simple velocity will split up into something complex, and the Relativity formula will fall to bits.--But I am a confirmed outsider, so I'll hold my tongue. All I know is that people have got the word Relativity into their heads, and catch-words always refer to some latent idea or conception in the popular mind. It has taken a Jew to knock the last center-pin out of our ideally spinning universe. The Jewish intelligence for centuries has been picking holes in our ideal system--scientific and sociological. Very good thing for us. Now Mr. Einstein, we are glad to say, has pulled out the very axle pin. At least that is how the vulgar mind understands it. The equation formula doesn't count.--So now, the universe, according to the popular mind, can wobble about without being pinned down.--Really, an anarchical conclusion. But the Jewish mind insidiously drives us to anarchical conclusions. We are glad to be driven from false, automatic fixities, anyhow. And once we are driven right on to nihilism we may find a way through. So, there is nothing absolute left in the universe. Nothing. Lord Haldane says pure knowledge is absolute. As far as it goes, no doubt. But pure knowledge is only such a tiny bit of the universe, and always relative to the thing known and to the knower. I feel inclined to Relativity myself. I think there is no one absolute principle in the universe. I think everything is relative. But I also feel, most strongly, that in itself each individual living creature is absolute: in its own being. And that all things in the universe are just relative to the individual living creature. And that individual living creatures are relative to each other. And what about a goal? There is no final goal. But every step taken has its own little relative goal. So what about the next step? Well, first and foremost, that every individual creature shall come to its own particular and individual fullness of being.--Very nice, very pretty--but _how_? Well, through a living dynamic relation to other creatures.--Very nice again, pretty little adjectives. But what _sort_ of a living dynamic relation?--Well, _not_ the relation of love, that's one thing, nor of brotherhood, nor equality. The next relation has got to be a relationship of men towards men in a spirit of unfathomable trust and responsibility, service and leadership, obedience and pure authority. Men have got to choose their leaders, and obey them to the death. And it must be a system of culminating aristocracy, society tapering like a pyramid to the supreme leader. All of which sounds very distasteful at the moment. But upon all the vital lessons we have learned during our era of love and spirit and democracy we can found our new order. We wanted to be all of a piece. And we couldn't bring it off. Because we just _aren't_ all of a piece. We wanted first to have nothing but nice daytime selves, awfully nice and kind and refined. But it didn't work. Because whether we want it or not, we've got night-time selves. And the most spiritual woman ever born or made has to perform her natural functions just like anybody else. We must _always_ keep in line with this fact. Well, then, we have night-time selves. And the night-self is the very basis of the dynamic self. The blood-consciousness and the blood-passion is the very source and origin of us. Not that we can _stay_ at the source. Nor even make a _goal_ of the source, as Freud does. The business of living is to travel away from the source. But you must start every single day fresh from the source. You must rise every day afresh out of the dark sea of the blood. When you go to sleep at night, you have to say: "Here dies the man I am and know myself to be." And when you rise in the morning you have to say: "Here rises an unknown quantity which is still myself." The self which rises naked every morning out of the dark sleep of the passionate, hoarsely-calling blood: this is the unit for the next society. And the polarizing of the passionate blood in the individual towards life, and towards leader, this must be the dynamic of the next civilization. The intense, passionate yearning of the soul towards the soul of a stronger, greater individual, and the passionate blood-belief in the fulfillment of this yearning will give men the next motive for life. We have to sink back into the darkness and the elemental consciousness of the blood. And from this rise again. But there is no rising until the bath of darkness and extinction is accomplished. As social units, as civilized men we have to do what we do as physical organisms. Every day, the sun sets from the sky, and darkness falls, and every day, when this happens, the tide of life turns in us. Instead of flowing upwards and outwards towards mental consciousness and activity, it turns back, to flow downwards. Downwards towards the digestion processes, downwards further to the great sexual conjunctions, downwards to sleep. This is the soul now retreating, back from the outer life of day, back to the origins. And so, it stays its hour at the first great sensual stations, the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion. But the tide ebbs on, down to the immense, almost inhuman passionate darkness of sex, the strange and moon-like intensity of the hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion, then deep, deeper, past the last great station of the darkest psyche, down to the earth's center. Then we sleep. And the moon is the tide-turner. The moon is the great cosmic pole which calls us back, back out of our day-self, back through the moonlit darknesses of the sensual planes, to sleep. It is the moon that sways the blood, and sways us back into the extinction of the blood.--And as the soul retreats back into the sea of its own darkness, the mind, stage by stage, enjoys the mental consciousness that belongs to this retreat back into the sensual deeps; and then it goes extinguished. There is sleep. And so we resolve back towards our elementals. We dissolve back, out of the upper consciousness, out of mind and sight and speech, back, down into the deep and massive, swaying consciousness of the dark, living blood. At the last hour of sex I am no more than a powerful wave of mounting blood. Which seeks to surge and join with the answering sea in the other individual. When the sea of individual blood which I am at that hour heaves and finds its pure contact with the sea of individual blood which is the woman at that hour, then each of us enters into the wholeness of our deeper infinitude, our profound fullness of being, in the ocean of our oneness and our consciousness. This is under the spell of the moon, of sea-born Aphrodite, mother and bitter goddess. For I am carried away from my sunny day-self into this other tremendous self, where knowledge will not save me, but where I must obey as the sea obeys the tides. Yet however much I go, I know that I am all the while myself, in my going. This then is the duality of my day and my night being: a duality so bitter to an adolescent. For the adolescent thinks with shame and terror of his night. He would wish to have no night-self. But it is Moloch, and he cannot escape it. The tree is born of its roots and its leaves. And we of our days and our nights. Without the night-consummation we are trees without roots. And the night-consummation takes place under the spell of the moon. It is one pure motion of meeting and oneing. But even so, it is a circuit, not a straight line. One pure motion of meeting and oneing, until the flash breaks forth, when the two are one. And this, this flashing moment of the ignition of two seas of blood, this is the moment of begetting. But the begetting of a child is less than the begetting of the man and the woman. Woman is begotten of man at that moment, into her greater self: and man is begotten of woman. This is the main. And that which cannot be fulfilled, perfected in the two individuals, that which cannot take fire into individual life, this trickles down and is the seed of a new life, destined ultimately to fulfill that which the parents could not fulfill. So it is for ever. Sex then is a polarization of the individual blood in man towards the individual blood in woman. It is more, also. But in its prime functional reality it is this. And sex union means bringing into connection the dynamic poles of sex in man and woman. In sex we have our basic, most elemental being. Here we have our most elemental contact. It is from the hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion that the dark forces of manhood and womanhood sparkle. From the dark plexus of sympathy run out the acute, intense sympathetic vibrations direct to the corresponding pole. Or so it should be, in genuine passionate love. There is no mental interference. There is even no interference of the upper centers. Love is supposed to be blind. Though modern love wears strong spectacles. But love is really blind. Without sight or scent or hearing the powerful magnetic current vibrates from the hypogastric plexus in the female, vibrating on to the air like some intense wireless message. And there is immediate response from the sacral ganglion in some male. And then sight and day-consciousness begin to fade. In the lower animals apparently any male can receive the vibration of any female: and if need be, even across long distances of space. But the higher the development the more individual the attunement. Every wireless station can only receive those messages which are in its own vibration key. So with sex in specialized individuals. From the powerful dynamic center the female sends out her dark summons, the intense dark vibration of sex. And according to her nature, she receives her responses from the males. The male enters the magnetic field of the female. He vibrates helplessly in response. There is established at once a dynamic circuit, more or less powerful. It would seem as if, while ever life remains free and wild and independent, the sex-circuit, while it lasts, is omnipotent. There is one electric flow which encompasses one male and one female, or one male and one particular group of females all polarized in the same key of vibration. This circuit of vital sex magnetism, at first loose and wide, gradually closes and becomes more powerful, contracts and grows more intense, until the two individuals arrive into contact. And even then the pulse and flow of attraction and recoil varies. In free wild life, each touch brings about an intense recoil, and each recoil causes an intense sympathetic attraction. So goes on the strange battle of desire, until the consummation is reached. It is the precise parallel of what happens in a thunder-storm, when the dynamic forces of the moon and the sun come into collision. The result is threefold: first, the electric flash, then the birth of pure water, new water. So it is in sex relation. There is a threefold result. First, the flash of pure sensation and of real electricity. Then there is the birth of an entirely new state of blood in each partner. And then there is the liberation. But the main thing, as in the thunder-storm, is the absolute renewal of the atmosphere: in this case, the blood. It would no doubt be found that the electro-dynamic condition of the white and red corpuscles of the blood was quite different after sex union, and that the chemical composition of the fluid of the blood was quite changed. And in this renewal lies the great magic of sex. The life of an individual goes on apparently the same from day to day. But as a matter of fact there is an inevitable electric accumulation in the nerves and the blood, an accumulation which weighs there and broods there with intolerable pressure. And the only possible means of relief and renewal is in pure passional interchange. There is and must be a pure passional interchange from the upper self, as when men unite in some great creative or religious or constructive activity, or as when they fight each other to the death. The great goal of creative or constructive activity, or of heroic victory in fight, _must_ always be the goal of the daytime self. But the very possibility of such a goal arises out of the vivid dynamism of the conscious blood. And the blood in an individual finds its great renewal in a perfected sex circuit. A perfected sex circuit and a successful sex union. And there can be no successful sex union unless the greater hope of purposive, constructive activity fires the soul of the man all the time: or the hope of passionate, purposive _destructive_ activity: the two amount religiously to the same thing, within the individual. Sex as an end in itself is a disaster: a vice. But an ideal purpose which has no roots in the deep sea of passionate sex is a greater disaster still. And now we have only these two things: sex as a fatal goal, which is the essential theme of modern tragedy: or ideal purpose as a deadly parasite. Sex passion as a goal in itself always leads to tragedy. There must be the great purposive inspiration always present. But the automatic ideal-purpose is not even a tragedy, it is a slow humiliation and sterility. The great thing is to keep the sexes pure. And by pure we don't mean an ideal sterile innocence and similarity between boy and girl. We mean pure maleness in a man, pure femaleness in a woman. Woman is really polarized downwards, towards the center of the earth. Her deep positivity is in the downward flow, the moon-pull. And man is polarized upwards, towards the sun and the day's activity. Women and men are dynamically different, in everything. Even in the mind, where we seem to meet, we are really utter strangers. We may speak the same verbal language, men and women: as Turk and German might both speak Latin. But _whatever_ a man says, his meaning is something quite different and changed when it passes through a woman's ears. And though you reverse the sexual polarity, the flow between the sexes, still the difference is the same. The _apparent_ mutual understanding, in companionship between a man and a woman, is always an illusion, and always breaks down in the end. Woman can polarize her consciousness upwards. She can obtain a hand even over her sex receptivity. She can divert even the electric spasm of coition into her upper consciousness: it was the trick which the snake and the apple between them taught her. The snake, whose consciousness is _only_ dynamic, and non-cerebral. The snake, who has no mental life, but only an intensely vivid dynamic mind, he envied the human race its mental consciousness. And he knew, this intensely wise snake, that the one way to make humanity pay more than the price of mental consciousness was to pervert woman into mentality: to stimulate her into the upper flow of consciousness. For the true polarity of consciousness in woman is downwards. Her deepest consciousness is in the loins and belly. Even when perverted, it is so. The great flow of female consciousness is downwards, down to the weight of the loins and round the circuit of the feet. Pervert this, and make a false flow upwards, to the breast and head, and you get a race of "intelligent" women, delightful companions, tricky courtesans, clever prostitutes, noble idealists, devoted friends, interesting mistresses, efficient workers, brilliant managers, women as good as men at all the manly tricks: and better, because they are so very headlong once they go in for men's tricks. But then, after a while, pop it all goes. The moment woman has got man's ideals and tricks drilled into her, the moment she is competent in the manly world--there's an end of it. She's had enough. She's had more than enough. She hates the thing she has embraced. She becomes absolutely perverse, and her one end is to prostitute herself and her ideals to sex. Which is her business at the present moment. We bruise the serpent's head: his flat and brainless head. But his revenge of bruising our heel is a good one. The heels, through which the powerful downward circuit flows: these are bruised in us, numbed with a horrible neurotic numbness. The dark strong flow that polarizes us to the earth's center is hampered, broken. We become flimsy fungoid beings, with no roots and no hold in the earth, like mushrooms. The serpent has bruised our heel till we limp. The lame gods, the enslaved gods, the toiling limpers moaning for the woman. You don't find the sun and moon playing at pals in the sky. Their beams cross the great gulf which is between them. So with man and woman. They must stand clear again. They must fight their way out of their self-consciousness: there is nothing else. Or, rather, each must fight the other out of self-consciousness. Instead of this leprous forbearance which we are taught to practice in our intimate relationships, there should be the most intense open antagonism. If your wife flirts with other men, and you don't like it, say so before them all, before wife and man and all, say you won't have it. If she seems to you false, in any circumstance, tell her so, angrily, furiously, and stop her. Never mind about being justified. If you hate anything she does, turn on her in a fury. Harry her, and make her life a hell, so long as the real hot rage is in you. Don't silently hate her, or silently forbear. It is such a dirty trick, so mean and ungenerous. If you feel a burning rage, turn on her and give it to her, and _never_ repent. It'll probably hurt you much more than it hurts her. But never repent for your real hot rages, whether they're "justifiable" or not. If you care one sweet straw for the woman, and if she makes you that you can't bear any more, give it to her, and if your heart weeps tears of blood afterwards, tell her you're thankful she's got it for once, and you wish she had it worse. The same with wives and their husbands. If a woman's husband gets on her nerves, she should fly at him. If she thinks him too sweet and smarmy with other people, she should let him have it to his nose, straight out. She should lead him a dog's life, and never swallow her bile. With wife or husband, you should never swallow your bile. It makes you go all wrong inside. Always let fly, tooth and nail, and never repent, no matter what sort of a figure you make. We have a vice of love, of softness and sweetness and smarminess and intimacy and promiscuous kindness and all that sort of thing. We think it's so awfully nice of us to be like that, in ourselves. But in our wives or our husbands it gets on our nerves horribly. Yet we think it oughtn't to, so we swallow our spleen. We shouldn't. When Jesus said "if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out," he was beside the point. The eye doesn't really offend us. We are rather fond of our own squint eye. It only offends the person who cares for us. And it's up to this person to pluck it out. This holds particularly good of the love and intimacy vice. It'll never offend us in ourselves. While it will be gall and wormwood to our wife or husband. And it is on this promiscuous love and intimacy and kindness and sweetness, all a vice, that our self-consciousness really rests. If we are battered out of this, we shall be battered out of self-consciousness. And so, men, drive your wives, beat them out of their self-consciousness and their soft smarminess and good, lovely idea of themselves. Absolutely tear their lovely opinion of themselves to tatters, and make them look a holy ridiculous sight in their own eyes. Wives, do the same to your husbands. But fight for your life, men. Fight your wife out of her own self-conscious preoccupation with herself. Batter her out of it till she's stunned. Drive her back into her own true mode. Rip all her nice superimposed modern-woman and wonderful-creature garb off her. Reduce her once more to a naked Eve, and send the apple flying. Make her yield to her own real unconscious self, and absolutely stamp on the self that she's got in her head. Drive her forcibly back, back into her own true unconscious. And then you've got a harder thing still to do. Stop her from looking on you as her "lover." Cure her of that, if you haven't cured her before. Put the fear of the Lord into her that way. And make her know she's got to believe in you again, and in the deep purpose you stand for. But before you can do that, you've got to _stand_ for some deep purpose. It's no good faking one up. You won't take a woman in, not really. Even when she _chooses_ to be taken in, for prettiness' sake, it won't do you any good. But combat her. Combat her in her sexual pertinacity, and in her secret glory or arrogance in the sexual goal. Combat her in her cock-sure belief that she "knows" and that she is "right." Take it all out of her. Make her yield once more to the male leadership: if you've got anywhere to lead to. If you haven't, best leave the woman alone; she has _one_ goal of her own, anyhow, and it's better than your nullity and emptiness. You've got to take a new resolution into your soul, and break off from the old way. You've got to know that you're a man, and being a man means you must go on alone, ahead of the woman, to break a way through the old world into the new. And you've got to be alone. And you've got to start off ahead. And if you don't know which direction to take, look round for the man your heart will point out to you. And follow--and never look back. Because if Lot's wife, looking back, was turned to a pillar of salt, these miserable men, for ever looking back to their women for guidance, they are miserable pillars of half-rotten tears. You'll have to fight to make a woman believe in you as a real man, a real pioneer. No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer. You'll have to fight still harder to make her yield her goal to yours: her night goal to your day goal. The moon, the planet of women, sways us back from our day-self, sways us back from our real social unison, sways us back, like a retreating tide, in a friction of criticism and separation and social disintegration. That is woman's inevitable mode, let her words be what they will. Her goal is the deep, sensual individualism of secrecy and night-exclusiveness, hostile, with guarded doors. And you'll have to fight very hard to make a woman yield her goal to yours, to make her, in her own soul, _believe_ in your goal as the goal beyond, in her goal as the way by which you go. She'll never believe until you have your soul filled with a profound and absolutely inalterable purpose, that will yield to nothing, least of all to her. She'll never believe until, in your soul, you are cut off and gone ahead, into the dark. She may of course already love you, and love you for yourself. But the love will be a nest of scorpions unless it is overshadowed by a little fear or awe of your further purpose, a living _belief_ in your going beyond her, into futurity. But when once a woman _does_ believe in her man, in the pioneer which he is, the pioneer who goes on ahead beyond her, into the darkness in front, and who may be lost to her for ever in this darkness; when once she knows the pain and beauty of this belief, knows that the loneliness of waiting and following is inevitable, that it must be so; ah, then, how wonderful it is! How wonderful it is to come back to her, at evening, as she sits half in fear and waits! How good it is to come home to her! How good it is then when the night falls! How richly the evening passes! And then, for her, at last, all that she has lost during the day to have it again between her arms, all that she has missed, to have it poured out for her, and a richness and a wonder she had never expected. It is her hour, her goal. That's what it is to have a wife. Ah, how good it is to come home to your wife when she _believes_ in you and submits to your purpose that is beyond her. Then, how wonderful this nightfall is! How rich you feel, tired, with all the burden of the day in your veins, turning home! Then you too turn to your other goal: to the splendor of darkness between her arms. And you know the goal is there for you: how rich that feeling is. And you feel an unfathomable gratitude to the woman who loves you and believes in your purpose and receives you into the magnificent dark gratification of her embrace. That's what it is to have a wife. But no man ever had a wife unless he served a great predominant purpose. Otherwise, he has a lover, a mistress. No matter how much she may be married to him, unless his days have a living purpose, constructive or destructive, but a purpose beyond her and all she stands for; unless his days have this purpose, and his soul is really committed to his purpose, she will not be a wife, she will be only a mistress and he will be her lover. If the man has no purpose for his days, then to the woman alone remains the goal of her nights: the great sex goal. And this goal is no goal, but always cries for the something beyond: for the rising in the morning and the going forth beyond, the man disappearing ahead into the distance of futurity, that which his purpose stands for, the future. The sex goal needs, absolutely needs, this further departure. And if there _be_ no further departure, no great way of belief on ahead: and if sex is the starting point and the goal as well: then sex becomes like the bottomless pit, insatiable. It demands at last the departure into death, the only available beyond. Like Carmen, or like Anna Karenina. When sex is the starting point and the returning point both, then the only issue is death. Which is plain as a pike-staff in "Carmen" or "Anna Karenina," and is the theme of almost _all_ modern tragedy. Our one hackneyed, hackneyed theme. Ecstasies and agonies of love, and final passion of death. Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion. Lovers, pure lovers should say "Let it be so." And one is always tempted to say "Let it be so." But no, let it be not so. Only I say this, let it be a great passion and then death, rather than a false or faked purpose. Tolstoi said "No" to the passion and the death conclusion. And then drew into the dreary issue of a false conclusion. His books were better than his life. Better the woman's goal, sex and death, than some _false_ goal of man's. Better Anna Karenina and Vronsky a thousand times than Natasha and that porpoise of a Pierre. This pretty, slightly sordid couple tried so hard to kid themselves that the porpoise Pierre was puffing with great purpose. Better Vronsky than Tolstoi himself, in my mind. Better Vronsky's final statement: "As a soldier I am still some good. As a man I am a ruin"--better that than Tolstoi and Tolstoi-ism and that beastly peasant blouse the old man wore. Better passion and death than any more of these "isms." No more of the old purpose done up in aspic. Better passion and death. But still--we _might_ live, mightn't we? For heaven's sake answer plainly "No," if you feel like it. No good temporizing. EPILOGUE "_Tutti i salmi finiscono in gloria._" All the psalms wind up with the Gloria.--"As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, World without end. Amen." Well, then, Amen. I hope you say Amen! along with me, dear little reader: if there be any dear little reader who has got so far. If not, I say Amen! all by myself.--But don't you think the show is all over. I've got another volume up my sleeve, and after a year or two years, when I have shaken it down my sleeve, I shall bring it and lay it at the foot of your Liberty statue, oh Columbia, as I do this one. I suppose Columbia means the States.--"Hail Columbia!"--I suppose, etymologically, it is a nest of turtle-doves, Lat. _columba_, a dove. Coo me softly, then, Columbia; don't roar me like the sucking doves of the critics of my "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious." And when I lay this little book at the foot of the Liberty statue, that brawny lady is not to look down her nose and bawl: "Do you see any green in my eye?" Of course I don't, dear lady. I only see the reflection of that torch--or is it a carrot?--which you are holding up to light the way into New York harbor. Well, many an ass has strayed across the uneasy paddock of the Atlantic, to nibble your carrot, dear lady. And I must say, you can keep on slicing off nice little carrot-slices of guineas and doubloons for an extraordinarily inexhaustible long time. And innumerable asses can collect themselves nice little heaps of golden carrot-slices, and then lift up their heads and brag over them with fairly pan-demoniac yells of gratification. Of course I don't see any green in your eye, dear Libertas, unless it is the smallest glint from the carrot-tips. The gleam in your eye is golden, oh Columbia! Nevertheless, and in spite of all this, up trots this here little ass and makes you a nice present of this pretty book. You needn't sniff, and glance at your carrot-sceptre, lady Liberty. You needn't throw down the thinnest carrot-paring you can pare off, and then say: "Why should I pay for this tripe, this wordy mass of rather revolting nonsense!" You can't pay for it, darling. If I didn't make you a present of it you could never buy it. So don't shake your carrot-sceptre and feel supercilious. Here's a gift for you, Missis. You can look in its mouth, too. Mind it doesn't bite you.--No, you needn't bother to put your carrot behind your back, nobody wants to snatch it. How do you do, Columbia! Look, I brought you a posy: this nice little posy of words and wisdom which I made for you in the woods of Ebersteinburg, on the borders of the Black Forest, near Baden Baden, in Germany, in this summer of scanty grace but nice weather. I made it specially for you--Whitman, for whom I have an immense regard, says "These States." I suppose I ought to say: "Those States." If the publisher would let me, I'd dedicate this book to you, to "Those States." Because I wrote this book entirely for you, Columbia. You may not take it as a compliment. You may even smell a tiny bit of Schwarzwald sap in it, and be finally disgusted. I admit that trees ought to think twice before they flourish in such a disgraced place as the Fatherland. "_Chi va coi zoppi, all' anno zoppica._" But you've not only to gather ye rosebuds while ye may, but _where_ ye may. And so, as I said before, the Black Forest, etc. I know, Columbia, dear Libertas, you'll take my posy and put your carrot aside for a minute, and smile, and say: "I'm sure, Mr. Lawrence, it is a _long_ time since I had such a perfectly beautiful bunch of ideas brought me." And I shall blush and look sheepish and say: "So glad you think so. I believe you'll find they'll keep fresh quite a long time, if you put them in water." Whereupon you, Columbia, with real American gallantry: "Oh, they'll keep for _ever_, Mr. Lawrence. They _couldn't_ be so cruel as to go and die, such perfectly lovely-colored ideas. Lovely! Thank you ever, ever so much." Just think of it, Columbia, how pleased we shall be with one another: and how much nicer it will be than if you snorted "High-falutin' Nonsense"--or "Wordy mass of repulsive rubbish." When they were busy making Italy, and were just going to put it in the oven to bake: that is, when Garibaldi and Vittorio Emmanuele had won their victories at Caserta, Naples prepared to give them a triumphant entry. So there sat the little king in his carriage: he had short legs and huge swagger mustaches and a very big bump of philoprogeniture. The town was all done up, in spite of the rain. And down either side of the wide street were hasty statues of large, well-fleshed ladies, each one holding up a fore-finger. We don't know what the king thought. But the staff held their breath. The king's appetite for strapping ladies was more than notorious, and naturally it looked as if Naples had done it on purpose. As a matter of fact, the fore-finger meant _Italia Una_! "Italy shall be one." Ask Don Sturzo. Now you see how risky statues are. How many nice little asses and poets trot over the Atlantic and catch sight of Liberty holding up this carrot of desire at arm's length, and fairly hear her say, as one does to one's pug dog, with a lump of sugar: "Beg! Beg!"--and "Jump! Jump, then!" And each little ass and poodle begins to beg and to jump, and there's a rare game round about Liberty, zap, zap, zapperty-zap! Do lower the carrot, gentle Liberty, and let us talk nicely and sensibly. I don't like you as a _carotaia_, precious. Talking about the moon, it is thrilling to read the announcements of Professor Pickering of Harvard, that it's almost a dead cert that there's life on our satellite. It is almost as certain that there's life on the moon as it is certain there is life on Mars. The professor bases his assertions on photographs--hundreds of photographs--of a crater with a circumference of thirty-seven miles. I'm not satisfied. I demand to know the yards, feet and inches. You don't come it over me with the triteness of these round numbers. "Hundreds of photographic reproductions have proved irrefutably the springing up at dawn, with an unbelievable rapidity, of vast fields of foliage which come into blossom just as rapidly (sic!) and which disappear in a maximum period of eleven days."--Again I'm not satisfied. I want to know if they're cabbages, cress, mustard, or marigolds or dandelions or daisies. Fields of foliage, mark you. And _blossom_! Come now, if you can get so far, Professor Pickering, you might have a shrewd guess as to whether the blossoms are good to eat, or if they're purely for ornament. I am only waiting at last for an aeroplane to land on one of these fields of foliage and find a donkey grazing peacefully. Hee-haw! "The plates moreover show that great blizzards, snow-storms, and volcanic eruptions are also frequent." So no doubt the blossoms are edelweiss. "We find," says the professor, "a living world at our very doors where life in some respects resembles that of Mars." All I can say is: "Pray come in, Mr. Moony. And how is your cousin Signor Martian?" Now I'm sure Professor Pickering's photographs and observations are really wonderful. But his _explanations_! Come now, Columbia, where is your High-falutin' Nonsense trumpet? Vast fields of foliage which spring up at dawn (!!!) and come into blossom just as quickly (!!!!) are rather too flowery even for my flowery soul. But there, truth is stranger than fiction. I'll bet my moon against the Professor's, anyhow. So long, Columbia. _A riverderci._ 
14980	----	Proofreading Team. OUTWITTING OUR NERVES A PRIMER OF PSYCHOTHERAPY BY JOSEPHINE A. JACKSON, M.D. HELEN M. SALISBURY [Illustration] NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1922 1921, by THE CENTURY CO. PRINTED IN U.S.A. TO MARY PATTERSON MANLY A LOVER OF TRUTH FOREWORD "Your trouble is nervous. There is nothing we can cut out and there is nothing we can give medicine for." With these words a young college student was dismissed from one of our great diagnostic clinics. The physician was right. In a nervous disorder there is nothing to cut out and there is nothing to give medicine for. Nevertheless there is something to be done,--something which is as definite and scientific as a prescription or a surgical operation. Psychotherapy, which is treatment by the mental measures of psycho-analysis and re-education, is an established procedure in the scientific world to-day. Nervous disorders are now curable, as has been proved by the clinical results in scores of cases from civil life, under treatment by Freud, Janet, Prince, Sidis, DuBois, and others; and in thousands of cases of war neuroses as reported by Smith and Pear, Eder, MacCurdy, and other military observers. These army experts have shown that shell-shock in war is the same as nervousness in civil life and that both may be cured by psycho-analysis and re-education. For more than a decade, in handling nervous cases, I have made use of the findings of recognized authorities on psychopathology. Truths have been applied in a special way, with the features of re-education so emphasized that my home has been called a psychological boarding-school. As the alumni have gone back to the game of life with no haunting memories of usual sanatorium methods, but with the equipment of a fuller self-knowledge and sense of power, they have sent back a call for some word that shall extend this helpful message to a larger circle. There has come, too, a demand for a book which shall give accurate and up-to-date information to those physicians who are eager for light on the subject of nervous disorders, and especially for knowledge of the significant contributions of Sigmund Freud, but who are too busy to devote time to highly technical volumes outside their own specialties. This need for a simple, comprehensive presentation of the Freudian principles I have attempted to meet in this primer of psychotherapy, providing enough of biological and psychological background to make them intelligible, and enough application and illustration to make them useful to the general practitioner or the average layman. JOSEPHINE A. JACKSON. Pasadena, California, 1921. CONTENTS PART I: THE STRANGE WAYS OF NERVES CHAPTER I PAGE In which most of us plead guilty to the charge of "nerves." NERVOUS FOLK 3 CHAPTER II In which we learn what "nerves" are not and get a hint of what they are. THE DRAMA OF NERVES 10 PART II: "HOW THE WHEELS GO ROUND" CHAPTER III In which we find a goodly inheritance. THE STORY OF THE INSTINCTS 33 CHAPTER IV In which we learn more about ourselves. THE STORY OF THE INSTINCTS (Continued) 51 CHAPTER V In which we look below the surface and discover a veritable wonderland. THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND 77 CHAPTER VI In which we learn why it pays to be cheerful. BODY AND MIND 118 CHAPTER VII In which we go to the root of the matter. THE REAL TROUBLE 141 PART III: THE MASTERY OF "NERVES" CHAPTER VIII In which we pick up the clue. THE WAY OUT 183 CHAPTER IX In which we discover new stores of energy and relearn the truth about fatigue. THAT TIRED FEELING 219 CHAPTER X In which the ban is lifted. DIETARY TABOOS 250 CHAPTER XI In which we learn an old trick. THE BUGABOO OF CONSTIPATION 278 CHAPTER XII In which handicaps are dropped. A WOMAN'S ILLS 300 CHAPTER XIII In which we lose our dread of night. THAT INTERESTING INSOMNIA 322 CHAPTER XIV In which we raise our thresholds. FEELING OUR FEELINGS 333 CHAPTER XV In which we learn discrimination. CHOOSING OUR EMOTIONS 359 CHAPTER XVI In which we find new use for our steam. FINDING VENT IN SUBLIMATION 379 GLOSSARY 386 BIBLIOGRAPHY 390 INDEX 393 OUTWITTING OUR NERVES CHAPTER I _In Which Most of Us Plead Guilty to the Charge of "Nerves."_ NERVOUS FOLK WHO'S WHO Whenever the subject of "nerves" is mentioned most people begin trying to prove an alibi. The man who is nervous and knows that he is nervous, realizes that he needs help, but the man who has as yet felt no lack of stability in himself is quite likely to be impatient with that whole class of people who are liable to nervous breakdown. It is therefore well to remind ourselves at once that the line between the so-called "normal" and the nervous is an exceedingly fine one. "Nervous invalids and well people are indistinguishable both in theory and in practice,"[1] and "after all we are most of us more or less neurasthenic."[2] The fact is that everybody is a possible neurotic. [Footnote 1: Putnam: _Human Motives_, p. 117.] [Footnote 2: DuBois: _Physic Treatment of Nervous Disorders_, p. 172.] So, as we think about nervous folk and begin to recognize our friends and relatives in this class, it may be that some of us will unexpectedly find ourselves looking in the mirror. Some of our lifelong habits may turn out to be nervous tricks. At any rate, it behooves us to be careful about throwing stones, for most of us live in houses that are at least part glass. THE EARMARKS =Am I "Like Folks"?= Before we begin to talk about the real sufferer from "nerves," the nervous invalid, let us look for some of the earmarks that are often found on the supposedly well person. All of these signs are deviations from the normal and are sure indications of nervousness. The test question for each individual is this: "Am I 'like folks'?" To be normal and to be well is to be "like folks." Can the average man stand this or that? If he can, then you are not normal if you cannot. Do the people around you eat the thing that upsets you? If they do, ten chances to one your trouble is not a physical idiosyncrasy, but a nervous habit. In bodily matters, at least, it is a good thing to be one of the crowd. Many people who would resent being called anything but normal--in general--are not at all loth to be thought "different," when it comes to particulars. Are there not many of us who are at small pains to hide the fact that we "didn't sleep a wink last night," or that we "can't stand" a ticking clock or a crowing rooster? We sometimes consider it a mark of distinction to have a delicate appetite and to have to choose our food with care. If we are frank with ourselves, some of us will have to admit that our own ailments seem interesting, while the other person's ills are "merely nervous" or imaginary or abnormal. After all, a good many of us will have to plead guilty to the charge of nervousness. We have only to read the endless advertisements of cathartics and "internal baths," or to check up the quantity of laxatives sold at any drug store, to realize the wide-spread bondage to that great bugaboo constipation. He who is constipated can hardly prove an alibi to "nerves." Then there are the school-teachers and others who are worn out at the end of each year's work, hardly able to hold on until vacation; and the people who can't manage their tempers; and those who are upset over trifles; and those who are dissatisfied with life. To a certain degree, at least, all of these are nervous persons. The list grows. =Half-Power Engines.= These people are all supposed to be well. They keep going--by fits and starts--and as they are used to running on three cylinders, with frequent stops for repairs, they accept this rate of living as a matter of course, never realizing that they might be sixty horse-power engines, instead of their little thirty or forty. For this large and neglected class of people psychotherapy has a stimulating message, and for them many of the following pages have been written. =The Real Sufferers.= These so-called normal people are merely on the fringe of nervousness, on the border line between normality and disease. Beyond them there exists a great company of those whose lives have been literally wrecked by "nerves." Their work interrupted or given up for good, their minds harassed by doubts and fears, their bodies incapacitated, they crowd the sanatoria and the health resorts in a vain search for health. From New England to Florida they seek, and on to Colorado and California, and perhaps to Hawaii and the Orient, thinking by rest and change to pull themselves together and become whole again. There are thousands of these people--lawyers, preachers, teachers, mothers, social workers, business and professional folk of all sorts, the kind of persons the world needs most--laid off for months or years of treatment, on account of some kind of nervous disorder. =Various Types of Nervousness.= The psychoneuroses are of many forms.[3] To some people "nerves" means nervous prostration, breakdown, fatigue, weakness, insomnia, the blues, upset stomach, or unsteady heart,--all signs of so-called neurasthenia or nerve-weakness. To others the word "nerves" calls up memories of strange, emotional storms that seem to rise out of nowhere, to sweep the sky clear of everything else, and to pass as they came, leaving the victim and the family equally mystified as to their meaning. These strange alterations of personality are but one manifestation of hysteria, that myriad-faced disorder which is able to mimic so successfully the symptoms of almost every known disease, from tumors and fevers to paralysis and blindness. [Footnote 3: The technical term for nervousness is _psycho-neurosis_--disease of the psyche. There are certain "real neuroses" such as paralysis and spinal-cord disease, which involve an organic impairment of nerve-tissue. However, as this book deals only with psychic disturbance, we shall, throughout, use the term _neuroses_ and _psycho-neuroses_ indiscriminately, to denote nervous or functional disorders.] To still other people nervous trouble means fear,--just terrible fear without object or meaning or reason (anxiety neuroses); or a definite fear of some harmless object (phobia); or a strange, persistent, recurrent idea, quite foreign to the personality and beyond the reach of reason (obsession); or an insistent desire to perform some absurd act (compulsion); or perhaps, a deadly and pall-like depression (the blues). As a matter of fact, the neuroses include all these varieties, and various shades and combinations of each. There are, however, certain mental characteristics which recur with surprising regularity in most of the various phases--dissatisfaction, lack of confidence, a sense of being alone and shut in to oneself, doubt, anxiety, fear, worry, self-depreciation, lack of interest in outside affairs, pessimism, fixed belief in one's powerlessness, along whatever line it may be. Underneath all these differing forms of nervousness are the same mechanisms and the same kind of difficulty. To understand one is to understand all, and to understand normal people as well; for in the last analysis we are one and all built on the same lines and governed by the same laws. The only difference is, that, as Jung says, "the nervous person falls ill of the conflicts with which the well person battles successfully." SUMMARY Since at least seventy-five per cent. of all the people who apply to physicians for help are nervous patients; and since these thousands of patients are not among the mental incompetents, but are as a rule among the highly organized, conscientious folk who have most to contribute to the leadership of the world, it is obviously of vital importance to society that its citizens should be taught how to solve their inner conflicts and keep well. In this strategic period of reconstruction, the world that is being remodeled cannot afford to lose one leader because of an unnecessary breakdown. There is greater need than ever for people who can keep at their tasks without long enforced rests; people who can think deeply and continuously without brain-fag; people who can concentrate all their powers on the work in hand without wasting time or energy on unnecessary aches and pains; people whose bodies are kept up to the top notch of vitality by well-digested food, well-slept sleep, well-forgotten fatigue, and well-used reserve energy. That such a state of affairs is no Utopian dream, but is merely a matter of knowing how, will appear more clearly in later chapters. CHAPTER II _In which we learn what "nerves" are not, and get a hint of what they are_ THE DRAMA OF NERVES AN EXPLODED THEORY ="Nerves" not Nerves.= Pick up any newspaper, turn over a few pages, and you will be sure to come to an advertisement something like this: Tired man, your nerves are sick! They need rest and a tonic to restore their worn-out depleted cells! No wonder people have believed this kind of thing. It has been dinned into their ears for many years. They have read it with their breakfast coffee and gazed at it in the street cars and even heard it from their family physicians, until it has become part and parcel of their thinking; yet all the time the fundamental idea has been false, and now, at last, the theory is exploded. So far as the modern laboratory can discover, the nerves of the most confirmed neurotic are perfectly healthy. They are not starved, nor depleted, nor exhausted; the fat-sheath is not wanting, there is no inflammation, there is nothing lacking in the cell itself, and there is no accumulation of fatigue products. Paradoxical as it may sound, there is nothing the matter with a nervous person's nerves. The faithful messengers have borne the blame for so long that their name has gotten itself woven into the very language as symbolic of disease. When we speak of nervous prostration, neurasthenia, neuroses, nervousness, and "nerves" we mean that body and mind are behaving badly because of functional disorder. These terms are good enough as figures of speech, so long as we are not fooled by them; but accepting them in their literal sense has been a costly procedure. Thanks to the investigations of physiologist and psychologist, usually combined in the person of a physician, "nervousness" has been found to be not an organic disease but a functional one. This is a very important distinction, for an organic disease implies impairment of the tissues of the organ, while a functional disorder means only a disturbance of its action. In a purely nervous disorder there seems to be no trouble with what the nerves and organs are, but only with what they do; it is behavior and not tissue that is at fault. Of course, in real life, things are seldom as clear-cut as they are in books, and so it happens that often there is a combination of organic and functional disease that is puzzling even to a skilled diagnostician. The first essential is a diagnosis as to whether it be an organic disease, with accompanying nervous symptoms, or a functional disturbance complicated by some minor organic trouble. If the main cause is organic, only physical means can cure it, but if the trouble is functional, no amount of medicine or surgery, diet or rest, will touch it; yet the symptoms are so similar and the dividing line is so elusive, that great skill is sometimes required to determine whether a given symptom points to a disturbance of physical tissue or only to behavior. If the physician is sometimes fooled, how much more the sufferer himself! Nausea from a healthy stomach is just as sickening as nausea from a diseased one. A fainting-spell is equally uncomfortable, whether it come from an impaired heart or simply from one that is behaving badly for the moment. It must be remembered that in functional nervousness the trouble is very real. The organs are really "acting up." Sometimes it is the brain that misbehaves instead of the stomach or heart. In that case it often reports all kinds of pains that have no origin outside of the brain. Pain, of course, is perceived only by the brain. Cut the telegraph wire, the nerve, and no amount of injury to the finger can cause pain. It is equally true that a misbehaving brain can report sensations that have no external cause, that have not come in through the regular channel along the nerve. The pain feels just the same, is every bit as uncomfortable as though its cause were external. Sometimes, instead of reporting false pains, the brain misbehaves in other ways. It seems to lose its power to decide, to concentrate, or to remember. Then the patient is almost sure to fancy himself going insane. But insanity is a physical disease, implying changes or toxins in the brain cells. Functional disorders tell another story. Their cause is different, even though the picture they present is often a close copy of an organic disease. =Distorted Pictures.= It should not be thought, however, that the symptoms of functional and organic troubles are identical. Hysteria and neurasthenia closely simulate every imaginable physical disease, but they do not exactly parallel any one of them. It may take a skilled eye to discover the differences, but differences there are. Functional troubles usually show a near-picture of organic disease, with just enough contradictory or inconsistent features to furnish a clue as to their real nature. For this reason it is important that the treatment of the disease be solely the province of the physician; for only the carefully trained in all the requirements of diagnosis can differentiate the pseudo from the real, the innocuous from the disastrous. False or nervous neuritis may feel like real neuritis (the result of poisons in the blood), but it gives itself away when it localizes itself in parts of the body where there is no nerve trunk. The exhaustion of neurasthenia sometimes seems extreme enough to be the result of a dangerous physical condition; but when this exhaustion disappears as if by magic under the proper kind of treatment, we know that the trouble cannot be in the body. Let it be said, then, with all the emphasis we can command, "nerves" are not physical. Laboratory investigation, contradictory symptoms, and response to treatment all bear witness to this fact. Whatever symptoms of disturbance there may be in pure nervousness, the nerves and organs can in no way be shown to be diseased. THE POSITIVE SIDE ="Nerves" not Imaginary.= "But," some one says, "how can healthy organs misbehave in this way? Something must be wrong. There must be some cause. If 'nerves' are not physical, what are they? They surely can't be imaginary." Most emphatically, they are real; nothing could be more maddening than to have some one suggest that our troubles are "mere imagination." No wonder such theories have been more popular with the patient's family than with the patient himself. Many years ago a physician put the whole truth into a few words: "The patient says, 'I cannot'; his friends say, 'He will not'; the doctor says, 'He cannot will.'" He tries, but in the circumstances he really cannot. =The Man behind the Body.= The trouble is real; the organs do "act up"; the nerves do carry the wrong messages. But the nerves are merely telegraph wires. They are not responsible for the messages that are given them to carry. Behind the wires is the operator, the man higher up, and upon him the responsibility falls. In functional troubles the body is working in a perfectly normal way, considering the perverted conditions. It is doing its work well, doing just what it is told, obeying its master. The troubles are not with the bodily machine but with the master. The man behind the body is in trouble and he really has no way of showing his pain except through his body. The trouble in nervous disorders is in the personality, the soul, the realm of ideas, and that is not your body, but _you_. Loss of appetite may mean either that the powers of the physical organism are busily engaged in combating some poison circulating in the blood, or that the ego is "up against" conditions for which it has "no stomach." Paralysis may be due to a hemorrhage into the brain tissues from a diseased blood vessel, or it may symbolize a sense of inadequacy and defeat. Exaggerated exhaustion, halting feet, stammering tongue, may give evidence of a disturbed ego rather than of a diseased brain. =All Body and no Mind.= At last we have begun to realize what we ought to have known all along,--that the body is not the whole man. The medical world for a long time has been in danger of forgetting or ignoring psychic suffering, while it has devoted itself to the treatment of physical disease. By way of condoning this fault it must be recognized that the five years of medical school have been all too short to learn what is needed of physiology and anatomy, histology, bacteriology, and the various other physical sciences. But at last the medical schools are realizing that they have been sending their graduates out only half-prepared--conversant with only one half of a patient, leaving them to fend for themselves in discovering the ways of the other half. Many an M.D. has gone a long way in this exploration. Native common sense, intuition, and careful study have enabled him to go beyond what he had learned in his text-books. But in the best universities the present-day student of medicine is now being given an insight into the ways of man as a whole--mind as well as body. The movement can hardly proceed too rapidly, and when it has had time to reach its goal, the day of the long-term sentence to nervousness will be past. In the meanwhile most physicians, lacking such knowledge and with the eye fixed largely on the body, have been pumping out the stomach, prescribing lengthy rest-cures, trying massage, diet, electricity, and surgical operations, in a vain attempt to cure a disease of the personality. Physical measures have been given a good trial, but few would contend that they have succeeded. Sometimes the patient has recovered--in time--but often, apparently, despite the treatment rather than because of it. Sometimes, in the hands of a man like Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, results seem good, until we realize that the same measures are ineffective when tried by other men, and that, after all, what has counted most has been the personality of the physician rather than his physical treatment. No wonder that most doctors have disliked nervous cases. To a man trained in all the exactness of the physical sciences, the apparent lawlessness and irresponsibility of the psychic side of the personality is especially repugnant. He is impatient of what he fails to comprehend. =All Mind and no Body.= This unsympathetic attitude, often only half conscious on the part of the regular practitioners, has led many thousands of people to follow will-o'-the-wisp cults, which pay no attention to the findings of science, but which emphasize a realization of man's spiritual nature. Many of these cults, founded largely on untruth or half-falsehood, have succeeded in cases where careful science has failed. Despite fearful blunders and execrable lack of discrimination in attempting to cure all the ills that flesh is heir to by methods that apply only to functional troubles, ignorant enthusiasts and quacks have sometimes cured nervous troubles where the conscientious medical man has had to acknowledge defeat. =The Whole Man.= But thinking people are not willing to desert science for cults that ignore the existence of these physical bodies. If they have found it unsatisfactory to be treated as if they were all body, they have also been unwilling to be treated as if they were all mind. They have been in a dilemma between two half-truths, even if they have not realized the dilemma. It has remained for modern psychotherapy to strike the balance--to treat the whole man. Solidly planted on the rock of the physical sciences, with its laboratories, physiological and psychological, and with a long record of investigation and treatment of pathological cases, it resembles the mind cure of earlier days or the assertions of Christian Science about as much as modern medicine resembles the old bloodletting, leeching practices of our forefathers. For the last quarter-century there have been scattered groups of physicians,--brilliant, patient pioneers,--who, recognizing man as spirit inhabiting body, have explored the realm of man's mind and charted its paths. These pioneers, beginning with Charcot, have been men of acknowledged scientific training and spirit, whose word must be respected and whose success in treating functional troubles stands out in sharp contrast to the fumblings of the average practitioner in this field. The results of their work have been positive, not negative. They have not merely asserted that nervous disorders are not physical; they have discovered what the trouble is and have found it to be discoverable and removable in almost every case, provided only that the right method is used. =Ourselves and Our Bodies.= If the statement that "nervous troubles are neither physical nor imaginary but a disease of the personality," sounds rather mystifying to the average person, it is only because the average person is not very conversant with his own inner life. We shall hope, later on, to find some definite guide-posts and landmarks which will help us feel more at home in this fascinating realm. At present, we are not attempting anything more than a suggestion of the itinerary which we shall follow. A book on physical hygiene can presuppose at least a rudimentary knowledge of heart and lungs and circulation, but a book on mental hygiene must begin at the beginning, and even before the beginning must clear away misconceptions and make clear certain fundamental principles. But the gist of the whole matter is this: in a neurosis, certain forces of the personality--instincts and their accompanying emotions--which ought to work harmoniously, having become tangled up with some erroneous ideas, have lost their power of coöperation and are working at cross purposes, leaving the individual mis-adapted to his environment, the prey of all sorts of mental and physical disturbances. The fact that the cause is mental while the result is often physical, should cause no surprise. In the physiological realm we are used to the idea that cause and effect are often widely separated. A headache may be caused by faulty eyes, or it may result from trouble in the intestines. In the same way, we should not be too much surprised if the cause of nervous troubles is found to be even more remote, provided there is some connecting link between cause and effect. The difficulty in this case is the apparent gulf between the realm of the spirit and the realm of the body. It is hard to see how an intangible thing like a thought can produce a pain in the arm or nausea in the stomach. Philosophers are still arguing concerning the nature of the relation between mind and body, but no one denies that the closest relation does exist. Every year science is learning that ideas count and that they count physically, as well as spiritually. =Such Stuff as "Nerves" are Made Of.= Dr. Tom A. Williams in the little composite volume "Psychotherapeutics" says that the neuroses are based not on inherently weak nervous constitutions but on ignorance and on false ideas. What, then, are some of these erroneous ideas, these misconceptions, that cause so much trouble? We shall want to examine them more carefully in later chapters, but we might glance now at a few examples of these popular bugaboos that need to be slain by the sword of cold, hard fact. =Popular Misconceptions about the Body.= 1 "Eight hours' sleep is essential to health. All insomnia is dangerous and is incompatible with health. Nervous insomnia leads to shattered nerves and ultimately to insanity." 2 "Overwork leads to nervous breakdown. Fatigue accumulates from day to day and necessitates a long rest for recuperation." 3 "A carefully planned diet is essential to health, especially for the nervous person. A variety of food, eaten at the same time, is harmful. Acid and milk--for example, oranges and milk--are difficult to digest. Sour stomach is a sign of indigestion." 4 "Modern life is so strenuous that our nerves cannot stand the strain." 5 "Brain work is very fatiguing. It causes brain-fag and exhaustion." 6 "Constipation is at the root of most physical ailments and is caused by eating the wrong kind of food." Some of these misconceptions are household words and are so all but universally believed that the thought that they can be challenged is enough to bewilder one. However, it is ideas like this that furnish the material out of which many a nervous trouble is made. Based on a half-knowledge of the human body, on logical conclusions from faulty premises, on hastily swallowed notions passed on from one person to another, they tend by the very power of an idea to work themselves out to fulfilment. THE POWER BEHIND IDEAS =Ideas Count.= Ideas are not the lifeless things they may appear. They are not merely intellectual property that can be locked up and ignored at will, nor are they playthings that can be taken up or discarded according to the caprice of the moment. Ideas work themselves into the very fiber of our being. They are part of us and they _do_ things. If they are true, in line with things as they are, they do things that are for our good, but if they are false, we often discover that they have an altogether unsuspected power for harm and are capable of astonishing results, results which have no apparent relation to the ideas responsible for them and which are, therefore, laid to physical causes. Thinking straight, then, becomes a hygienic as well as a moral duty. =Ideas and Emotions.= Ideas do not depend upon themselves for their driving-power. Life is not a cold intellectual process; it is a vivid experience, vibrant with feeling and emotion. It therefore happens that the experiences of life tend to bring ideas and emotions together and when an idea and an emotion get linked up together, they tend to stay together, especially if the emotion be intense or the experience is often repeated. The word emotion means outgoing motion, discharging force. This force is like live steam. An emotion is the driving part of an instinct. It is the dynamic force, the electric current which supplies the power for every thought and every action of a human life. Man is not a passive creature. The words that describe him are not passive words. Indeed, it is almost impossible to think about man at all except in terms of desire, impulse, purpose, action, energy. There are three things that may be done with energy: First, it may be frittered away, allowed to leak, to escape. Secondly, it may be locked up; this results usually in an explosion, a finding of destructive outlets. Finally, it may be harnessed, controlled, used in beneficent ways. Health and happiness depend upon which one of the three courses is taken. CHARACTER AND HEALTH Evidently, it is highly important to have a working knowledge of these emotions and instincts; important to know enough about them and their purpose to handle them rightly if they do not spontaneously work together for our best character and health. The problems of character and the problems of health so overlap that it is impossible to write a book about nervous disorders which does not at the same time deal with the principles of character-formation. The laws and mechanisms which govern the everyday life of the normal person are the same laws and mechanisms which make the nervous person ill. As Boris Sidis puts it, "The pathological is the normal out of place." The person who is master of himself, working together as a harmonious whole, is stronger in every way than the person whose forces are divided. Given a little self-knowledge, the nervous invalid often becomes one of the most successful members of society,--to use the word successful in the best sense. =It Pays to Know.= To be educated is to have the right idea and the right emotion in the right place. To be sure, some people have so well learned the secret of poise that they do not have to study the why nor the how. Intuition often far outruns knowledge. It would be foolish indeed to suggest that only the person versed in psychological lore is skilled in the art of living. Psychology is not life; it can make no claim to furnish the motive nor the power for successful living, for it is not faith, nor hope, nor love; but it tries to point the way and to help us fulfil conditions. There is no more reason why the average man should be unaware of the instincts or the subconscious mind, than that he should be ignorant of germs or of the need of fresh air. If it be argued that character and health are both inherently by-products of self-forgetful service, rather than of painstaking thought, we answer that this is true, but that there can be no self-forgetting when things have gone too far wrong. At such times it pays to look in, if we can do it intelligently, in order that we may the sooner get our eyes off ourselves and look out. The pursuit of self-knowledge is not a pleasurable pastime but simply a valuable means to an end. KNOWING OUR MACHINE =Counting on Ourselves.= Knowing our machine makes us better able to handle it. For, after all, each of us is, in many ways, very like a piece of marvelous and complicated machinery. For one thing, our minds, as well as our bodies, are subject to uniform laws upon which we can depend. We are not creatures of chaos; under certain conditions we can count on ourselves. Freedom does not mean freedom from the reign of law. It means that, to a certain extent, we can make use of the laws. Psychic laws are as susceptible to investigation, verification, and use as are any laws in the physical world. Each person is so much the center of his own life that it is very easy for him to fall into the way of thinking that he is different from all the rest of the world. It is a healthful experience for him to realize that every person he meets is made on the same principles, impelled by the same forces, and fighting much the same fight. Since the laws of the mental world are uniform, we can count on them as aids toward understanding other people and understanding ourselves. ="Intelligent Scrutiny versus Morbid Introspection."= It helps wonderfully to be able to look at ourselves in an objective, impersonal way. We are likely to be overcome by emotion, or swept by vague longings which seem to have no meaning and which, just because they are bound up so closely with our own ego, are not looked at but are merely felt. Unknown forces are within us, pulling us this way and that, until sometimes we who should be masters are helpless slaves. One great help toward mastery and one long step toward serenity is a working-knowledge of the causes and an impersonal interest in the phenomena going on within. Introspection is a morbid, emotional fixation on self, until it takes on this quality of objectivity. What Cabot calls the "sin of impersonality" is a grievous sin when directed toward another person, but most of us could stand a good deal of ingrowing impersonality without any harm. The fact that the human machine can run itself without a hitch in the majority of cases is witness to its inherent tendency toward health. People were living and living well through all the centuries before the science of psychology was formulated. But not with all people do things run so smoothly. There were demoniacs in Bible times and neurotics in the Middle Ages, as there are nervous invalids and half-well people to-day. Psychology has a real contribution to make, and in recent years its lessons have been put into language which the average man can understand. Psychology is not merely interested in abstract terms with long names. It is no longer absorbed merely in states of consciousness taken separately and analyzed abstractly. The newer functional psychology is increasingly interested in the study of real persons, their purposes and interests, what they feel and value, and how they may learn to realize their highest aspirations. It is about ordinary people, as they think and act, in the kitchen, on the street cars, at the bargain-counter, people in crowds and alone, mothers and their babies, little children at play, young girls with their lovers, and all the rest of human life. It is the science of _you_, and as such it can hardly help being interesting. While psychology deals with such topics as the subconscious mind, the instincts, the laws of habit, and association of ideas and suggestion, it is after all not so much an academic as a practical question. These forces govern the thought you are thinking at this moment, the way you will feel a half-hour from now, the mood you will be in to-morrow, the friends you will make and the profession you will choose, besides having a large share in the health or ill-health of your body in the meantime. SUMMARY Perhaps it would be well before going farther to summarize what we have been saying. Here in a nutshell is the kernel of the subject: Disease may be caused by physical or by psychic forces. A "nervous" disorder is not a physical but a psychic disease. It is caused not by lack of energy but by misdirected energy; not by overwork or nerve-depletion, but by misconception, emotional conflict, repressed instincts, and buried memories. Seventy-five per cent. of all cases of ill-health are due to psychic causes, to disjointed thinking rather than to a disjointed spine. Wherefore, let us learn to think right. In outline form, the trouble in a neurosis may be stated something like this: Lack of adaptation to the social environment--caused by Lack of harmony within the personality--caused by Misdirected energy--caused by Inappropriate emotions--caused by Wrong ideas or ignorance. Working backward, the cure naturally would be: Right ideas--resulting in Appropriate emotions--resulting in Redirected energy--resulting in Harmony--resulting in Readjustment to the environment. If the reader is beginning to feel somewhat bewildered by these general statements, let him take heart. So far we have tried merely to suggest the outline of the whole problem, but we shall in the future be more specific. Nervous troubles, which seem so simple, are really involved with the whole mechanism of mental life and can in no way be understood except as these mechanisms are understood. We have hinted at some of the causes of "nerves," but we cannot give a real explanation until we explain the forces behind them. These forces may at first seem a bit abstract, or a bit remote from the main theme, but each is essential to the story of nerves and to the understanding of the more practical chapters in Part III. As in a Bernard Shaw play, the preface may be the most important part of this "drama of nerves." Nor is the figure too far-fetched, because, strange as it may seem, every neurosis is in essence a drama. It has its conflict, its villain, and its victim, its love-story, its practical joke, its climax, and its denouement. Sometimes the play goes on forever with no solution, but sometimes psychotherapy steps in as the fairy god-mother, to release the victim, outwit the villain, and bring about the live-happily-ever-after ending. PART II: "HOW THE WHEELS GO ROUND" CHAPTER III _In which we find a goodly inheritance_ THE STORY OF THE INSTINCTS EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE A fire mist and a planet, A crystal and a cell, A jelly-fish and a saurian, And caves where cavemen dwell; Then a sense of law and beauty, And a face turned from the clod; Some call it evolution And others call it God.[4] If we begin at the beginning, we have to go back a long way to get our start, for the roots of our family tree reach back over millions of years. "In the beginning--God." These first words of the book of Genesis must be, in spirit at least, the first words of any discussion of life. We know now, however, that when God made man, He did not complete His masterpiece at one sitting, but instead devised a plan by which the onward urge within and the environment without should act and interact until from countless adaptations a human being was made. [Footnote 4: William Herbert Carruth.] As the late Dr. Putnam of Harvard University says, "We stand as the representative of a Creative Energy that expressed itself first in far simpler forms of life and finally in the form of human instincts."[5] And again: "The choices and decisions of the organisms whose lives prepared the way through eons of time for ours, present themselves to us as instincts."[6] [Footnote 5: Putnam: _Human Motives_, p. 32.] [Footnote 6: Putnam: _Human Motives_, p. 18.] INTRODUCING THE INSTINCTS =Back of Our Dispositions.= What is it that makes the baby jump at a noise? What energizes a man when you tell him he is a liar? What makes a young girl blush when you look at her, or a youth begin to take pains with his necktie? What makes men go to war or build tunnels or found hospitals or make love or save for a home? What makes a woman slave for her children, or give her life for them if need be? "Instinct" you say, and rightly. Back of every one of these well-known human tendencies is a specific instinct or group of instincts. The story of the life of man and the story of the mind of man must begin with the instincts. Indeed, any intelligent approach to human life, whether it be that of the mother, the teacher, the preacher, the social worker or the neurologist, leads back inevitably to the instincts as the starting-point of understanding. But what is instinct? We are apt to be a bit hazy on that point, as we are on any fundamental thing with which we intimately live. We reckon on these instinctive tendencies every hour of the day, but as we are not used to labeling them, it may help in the very beginning of our discussion to have a list before our eyes. Here, then, is a list of the fundamental tendencies of the human race and the emotions which drive them to fulfilment. THE SPECIFIC INSTINCTS AND THEIR EMOTIONS (AFTER MCDOUGALL) _Instinct_ _Emotion_ Nutritive Instinct Hunger Flight Fear Repulsion Disgust Curiosity Wonder Self-assertion Positive Self-feeling (Elation) Self-abasement Negative Self-feeling (Subjection) Gregariousness Emotion unnamed Acquisition Love of Possession Construction Emotion unnamed Pugnacity Anger Reproductive Instinct Emotion unnamed Parental Instinct Tender Emotion These are the fundamental tendencies or dispositions with which every human being is endowed as he comes into the world. Differing in degree in different individuals, they unite in varying proportions to form various kinds of dispositions, but are in greater or less degree the common property of us all. There flows through the life of every creature a steady stream of energy. Scientists have not been able to decide on a descriptive term for this all-important life-force. It has been variously called "libido," "vital impulse" or "élan vital," "the spirit of life," "hormé," and "creative energy." The chief business of this life-force seems to be the preservation and development of the individual and the preservation and development of the race. In the service of these two needs have grown up these habit-reactions which we call instincts. The first ten of our list belong under the heading of self-preservation and the last two under that of race-preservation. As hunger is the most urgent representative of the self-preservative group, and as reproduction and parental care make up the race-preservative group, some scientists refer all impulses to the two great instincts of nutrition and sex, using these words in the widest sense. However, it will be useful for our purpose to follow McDougall's classification and to examine individually the various tendencies of the two groups. =In Debt to Our Ancestors.= An instinct is the result of the experience of the race, laid in brain and nerve-cells ready for use. It is a gift from our ancestors, an inheritance from the education of the age-long line of beings who have gone before. In the struggle for existence, it has been necessary for the members of the race to feed themselves, to run away from danger, to fight, to herd together, to reproduce themselves, to care for their young, and to do various other things which make for the well-being or preservation of the race. The individuals that did these things at the right time survived and passed on to their offspring an inherited tendency to this kind of reaction. McDougall defines an instinct as "an inherited or innate psycho-physical disposition which determines its possessor to perceive or pay attention to objects of a certain class, to experience an emotional excitement of a particular quality upon perceiving such an object, and to act in regard to it in a particular manner, or at least to experience an impulse to such action." This is just what an instinct is,--an inherited disposition to notice, to feel, and to want to act in certain ways in certain situations. It is the something which makes us act when we cannot explain why, the something that goes deeper than reason, and that links us to all other human beings,--those who live to-day and those who have gone before. It is true that East is East and West is West, but the two do meet in the common foundation of our human nature. The likeness between men and between races is far greater and far more fundamental than the differences can ever be. =Firing Up the Engine.= Purpose is writ large across the face of an instinct, and that purpose is always toward action. Whenever a situation arises which demands instantaneous action, the instinct is the means of securing it. Planted within the creature is a tendency which makes it perceive and feel and act in the appropriate way. It will be noticed that there are three distinct parts to the process, corresponding to intellect, emotion, will. The initial intellectual part makes us sensitive to certain situations, makes us recognize an object as meaningful and significant, and waves the flag for the emotion; the emotion fires up the engine, pulls the levers all over the body that release its energy and get it ready for action, and pushes the button that calls into the mind an intense, almost irresistible desire or impulse to act. Once aroused, the emotion and the impulse are not to be changed. In man or beast, in savage or savant, the intense feeling, the marked bodily changes, and the yearning for action are identical and unchangeable. The brakes can be put on and the action suppressed, but in that case the end of the whole process is defeated. Could anything be plainer than that an instinct and its emotion were never intended to be aroused except in situations in which their characteristic action is to be desired? An emotion is the hot part of an instinct and exists solely for securing action. If all signs of the emotion are to be suppressed, all expression denied, why the emotion? But although the emotion and the impulse, once aroused, are beyond control, there is yet one part of the instinct that is meant to be controlled. The initial or receptive portion, that which notices a situation, recognizes it as significant, and sends in the signal for action, can be trained to discrimination. This is where reason comes in. If the situation calls for flight, fear is in order; if it calls for fight, anger is in order; if it calls for examination, wonder is in order; but if it calls for none of these things, reason should show some discrimination and refuse to call up the emotion. =The Right of Way.= There is a law that comes to the aid of reason in this dilemma and that is the "law of the common path."[7] By this is meant that man is capable of but one intense emotion at a time. No one can imagine himself strenuously making love while he is shaken by an agony of fear, or ravenously eating while he is in a passion of rage. The stronger emotion gets the right of way, obtains control of mental and bodily machinery, and leaves no room for opposite states. If the two emotions are not antagonistic, they may blend together to form a compound emotion, but if in the nature of the case such a blending is impossible, the weaker is for the time being forgotten in the intensity of the stronger. "The expulsive power of a new affection" is not merely a happy phrase; it is a fact in every day life. The problem, then, resolves itself into ways of making the desirable emotion the stronger, of learning how to form the habit of giving it the head start and the right of way. In our chapter on "Choosing the Emotions," we shall find that much depends on building up the right kind of sentiments, or the permanent organization of instincts around ideas. However, we must first look more closely at the separate instincts to acquaint ourselves with the purpose and the ways of each, and to discover the nature of the forces with which we have to deal. [Footnote 7: Sherrington: _Integrative Action of the Nervous System_.] I THE SELF-PRESERVATIVE INSTINCTS =Hunger.= Hunger is the most pressing desire of the egoistic or self-preserving impulse. The yearning for food and the impulse to seek and eat it are aroused organically within the body and are behind much of the activity of every type of life. As the impulse is so familiar, and its promptings are so little subject to psychic control, it seems unnecessary to do more than mention its importance. =Flight and Fear.= All through the ages the race has been subject to injury. Species has been pitted against species, individual against individual. He who could fight hardest or run fastest has survived and passed his abilities on to his offspring. Not all could be strongest for fight, and many species have owed their existence to their ability to run and to know when to run. Thus it is that one of the strongest and most universal tendencies is the instinct for flight, and its emotion, fear. "Fear is the representation of injury and is born of the innumerable injuries which have been inflicted in the course of evolution."[8] Some babies are frightened if they are held too loosely, even though they have never known a fall. Some persons have an instinctive fear of cats, a left-over from the time when the race needed to flee from the tiger and others of the cat family. Almost every one, no matter in what state of culture, fears the unknown because the race before him has had to be afraid of that which was not familiar. [Footnote 8: Crile: _Origin and Nature of the Emotions_.] The emotion of fear is well known, but its purpose is not so often recognized. An emotion brings about internal changes, visceral changes they are called, which enable the organism to act on the emotion,--to accomplish its object. There is only so much energy available at a given moment, stored up in the brain cells, ready for use. In such an emergency as flight every ounce of energy is needed. The large muscles used in running must have a great supply of extra energy. The heart and lungs must be speeded up in order to provide oxygen and take care of extra waste products. The special senses of sight and hearing must be sensitized. Digestion and intestinal peristalsis must be stopped in order to save energy. No person could by conscious thought accomplish all these things. How, then, are they brought about? =Internal Laboratories.= In the wonderful internal laboratory of the body there are little glands whose business it is to secrete chemicals for just these emergencies. When an object is sighted which arouses fear, the brain cells flash instantaneous messages over the body, among others to the supra-renal glands or adrenals, just over the kidneys, and to the thyroid gland in the neck. Instantly these glands pour forth adrenalin and thyroid secretion into the blood, and the body responds. Blood pressure rises; brain cells speed up; the liver pours forth glycogen, its ready-to-burn fuel; sweat-glands send forth cold perspiration in order to regulate temperature; blood is pumped out from stomach and intestines to the external muscles. As we have seen, the body as a whole can respond to just one stimulus at a time. The response to this stimulus has the right of way. The whole body is integrated, set for this one thing. When fear holds the switchboard no other messages are allowed on the line, and the creature is ready for flight. But after flight comes concealment with the opposite bodily need, the need for absolute silence. This is why we sometimes get the opposite result. The heart seems to stop beating, the breath ceases, the limbs refuse to move, all because our ancestors needed to hide after they had run, and because we are in a very real way a part of them. =Old-Fashioned Fear.= There is one passage from Dr. Crile's book which so admirably sums up these points that it seems worth while to insert it at length. We fear not in our hearts alone, not in our brains alone, not in our viscera alone--fear influences every organ and tissue. Each organ or tissue is stimulated or inhibited according to its use or hindrance in the physical struggle for existence. By thus concentrating all or most of the nerve force on the nerve-muscular mechanism for defense, a greater physical power is developed. Hence it is that under the stimulus of fear animals are able to perform preternatural feats of strength. For the same reason, the exhaustion following fear will be increased as the powerful stimulus of fear drains the cup of nervous energy even though no visible action may result.... Perhaps the most striking difference between man and animals lies in the greater control which man has gained over his primitive instinctive reactions. As compared with the entire duration of organic evolution, man came down from his arboreal abode and assumed his new rôle of increased domination over the physical world but a moment ago. And now, though sitting at his desk in command of the complicated machinery of civilization, when he fears a business catastrophe his fear is manifested in the terms of his ancestral physical battle in the struggle for existence. He cannot fear intellectually, he cannot fear dispassionately, he fears with all his organs, and the same organs are stimulated and inhibited as if, instead of its being a battle of credit, or position, or of honor, it were a physical battle with teeth and claws.... Nature has but one means of response to fear, and whatever its cause the phenomena are always the same--always physical.[9] [Footnote 9: Crile: _Origin and Nature of the Emotions_, p. 60 ff.] * * * * * The moral is as plain as day: Learn to call up fear only when speedy legs are needed, not a cool head or a comfortable digestion. Fear is a costly proceeding, an emergency measure like a fire-alarm, to be used only when the occasion is urgent enough to demand it. How often it is misused and how large a part it plays in nervous symptoms, both mental and physical, will appear more clearly in later chapters. =Repulsion and Disgust.= Akin to the instinct of flight is that of repulsion, which impels us, instead of fleeing, to thrust the object away. It leads us to reject from the mouth noxious and disgusting objects and to shrink from slimy, creepy creatures, and has of course been highly useful in protecting the race from poisons and snakes. It still operates in the tendency to put away from us those things, mental or physical, toward which we feel aversion or disgust. Recent psychological discoveries have revealed how largely a neurosis consists in putting away from us--out of consciousness,--whatever we do not wish to recognize, and so it happens that disgust plays an unexpected part in nervous disorders. =Curiosity and Wonder.= Fortunately for the race, it has not had to wait until different features of the environment prove to be helpful or harmful. There is an instinct which urges forward to exploration and discovery and which enables the creature not only to adapt itself to the environment but to learn how to adapt the environment to itself. This is the instinct of curiosity. It is the impulse back of all advance in science, religion, and intellectual achievement of every kind, and is sometimes called "intellectual feeling." =Self-Assertion.= It goes almost without saying that one of the strongest and most important impulses of mankind is the instinct of self-assertion; it often gets us into trouble, but it is also behind every effort toward developed character. At its lowest level self-assertion manifests itself in the strutting of the peacock, the prancing of the horse, and the "See how big I am," of the small boy. At its highest level, when combined with self-consciousness and the moral sentiments acquired from society and developed into the self-regarding sentiment, it is responsible for most of our ideas of right, our conception of what is and what is not compatible with our self-respect. =Self-Abasement.= Self-assertion is aroused primarily by the presence of others and especially of those to whom we feel in any way superior, but when the presence of others makes us feel small, when we want to hide or keep in the background, we are being moved by the opposite instinct of self-abasement and negative self-feeling. It may be either the real or the fancied superiority of the spectators that arouses this feeling,--their wisdom or strength, beauty or good clothes. Sometimes, as in stage-fright, it is their numerical superiority. Bashfulness is the struggle between the two self-instincts, assertion and abasement. Our impulse for self-display urges us on to make a good impression, while our feeling of inferiority impels us to get away unnoticed. Hence the struggle and the painful emotion. =Gregariousness.= Man has been called a gregarious animal. That is, like the animals, he likes to run with his kind, and feels a pronounced aversion to prolonged isolation. It is this "herd-instinct," too, which makes man so extremely sensitive to the opinions of the society in which he lives. Because of this impulse to go with the crowd, ideas received through education are accepted as imperative and are backed up by all the force of the instinct of self-regard. When the teachings of society happen to run counter to the laws of our being, the possibilities of conflict are indeed great.[10] [Footnote 10: For a thorough discussion of the importance of this instinct, see Trotter's _Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War_.] =Acquisition.= Another fundamental disposition in both animals and men is the instinct for possession, the instinct whose function it is to provide for future needs. Squirrels and birds lay up nuts for the winter; the dog hides his bone where only he can find it. Children love to have things for their "very own," and almost invariably go through the hoarding stage in which stamps or samples or bits of string are hoarded for the sake of possession, quite apart from their usefulness or value. Much of the training of children consists in learning what is "mine" and what is "thine," and respect for the property of others can develop only out of a sense of one's own property rights. =Construction.= There is an innate satisfaction in making something,--from a doll-dress to a poem,--and this satisfaction rests on the impulse to construct, to fashion something with our own hands or our own brain. The emotion accompanying this instinct is too indefinite to have a name but it is nevertheless a real one and plays a large part in the sense of power which results from the satisfaction of good work well done. Later it will be seen how closely related is this impulse to the creative instinct of reproduction and how useful it can be in drawing off the surplus energy of that much denied instinct. =Pugnacity and Anger.= What is it that makes us angry? A little thought will convince us that the thing which arouses our fury is not the sight of any special object, but the blocking of any one of the other instincts. Watch any animal at bay when its chance for flight has gone. The timidest one will turn and fight with every sign of fury. Watch a mother when her young are threatened,--bear, or cat or lion or human. Fear has no place then. It is entirely displaced by anger over the balking of the maternal instinct of protection. Strictly speaking, pugnacity belongs among the instincts neither of self-preservation nor of race-preservation, but is a special device for reinforcing both groups. As fear supplies the energy for running, so anger fits us for fight,--and for nothing but fight. The mechanism is almost identical with that of fear. Brain and liver, adrenals and thyroid are the means, but the emotion presses the button and releases the energy, stopping all digestion and energizing all combat-muscles. The blood is flooded with fuel and with substances which, if not used, are harmful to the body. We were never meant to be angry without fighting. The habit of self-control has its distinct advantages, but it is hard on the body, which was patterned before self-control came into fashion. The wise man, once he is aroused, lets off steam at the woodpile or on a long, vigorous walk. He probably does not say to himself that he is a motor animal integrated for fight and that he must get rid of glycogen and adrenalin and thyroid secretion. He only knows that he feels better "on the move." The wiser man does not let himself get angry in the first place unless the situation calls for fight. However, the fight need not be a hand-to-hand combat with one's fellow man. William James has pointed out that there is a "moral equivalent for war," and that the energy of this instinct may be used to reinforce other impulses and help overcome obstacles of all sorts. A good deal of the business man's zest, the engineer's determination, and the reformer's zeal spring from the fight-instinct used in the right way. As James, Cannon, and others have pointed out, the way to end war may be to employ man's instinct of pugnacity in fighting the universal enemies of the race--fire, flood, famine, disease, and the various social evils--rather than let it spend its force in war between nations. Even our sports may be offshoots of the fight-instinct, for McDougall holds that the play-tendency has its root in the instinct of rivalry, a modified form of pugnacity. Evidently fighting-blood is a useful inheritance, even to-day, and rightly directed is a necessary part of a complete and forceful personality. This, then, completes the list of self-preservative instincts, those which are commonly called egoistic and which have been given us for the maintenance of our own individual personal lives. But our endowment includes another set of impulses which are no less important and which must be reckoned with if human conduct is to be understood. CHAPTER IV _In which we learn more about ourselves_ THE STORY OF THE INSTINCTS (Continued) II. THE RACE-PRESERVATIVE INSTINCTS =Looking beyond Ourselves.= We sometimes speak of self-preservation as though it were the only law of life, while as a matter of fact it is but half the story. Nature has seen to it that there shall be planted in every living creature an innate urge toward the larger life of the race. Although the creature may never give a conscious thought to the welfare of the race, he still bears within himself a set of instincts which have as their end and aim, not the individual at all, but society as a whole, and the life of generations that are to come. He is bigger than he knows. Although he may have no notion why he feels and acts as he does, and although he may pervert the purpose for his own selfish end, he is continually being moved by the mighty impulse of the race-life, an impulse which often outrivals the desire I or his own personal existence. The craving to reproduce ourselves and the craving to cherish and protect our young are among the most dynamic forces in life. The two desires are so closely bound together that they are often spoken of as one under the name of the sex-instinct, or the family instincts. Let us look first at that part of the yearning which urges toward perpetuating our own life in offspring. =Watching Nature Work.= It is wonderful, indeed, to watch Nature in the long process of Evolution, as she adapts her methods to the growing complexity of the organism. With a variety and ingenuity of means, but always with the same steady purpose, she works from the lowest levels,--where there is no true reproduction, only multiplication by division,--on through the beginning of reproduction proper, where a single parent produces the offspring; then on to the level where it takes two parents of different structure to produce a new organism, and sex-life begins. At first Nature does not even demand that father and mother shall come near each other. In the water, the female of this type lays an egg, and the male, guided by his instinct, swims to it and deposits his fertilizing fluid. In plant life, bird and bee, attracted by wonderfully planned perfumes and color and honey, are called in to carry the pollen from male to female cell. But it is when we come to the highest level that we find even more subtle ways planned to accomplish the desired end. Here we enter the realm of individual initiative, for it is not now enough to leave to external forces the joining of the two life-elements. In order to make a new individual, father and mother must be drawn together, and so there enters into the situation a personal relationship with all that that implies. Because Nature has had to provide ways of drawing individuals to one another, she has put into the higher types of life the power of mutual attraction,--a power which in man, the highest of all types, is responsible for many outgrowths that seem far removed from the original purpose. =The Love-Motif.= On the one hand, there is the persistent desire to be attractive, which manifests itself in the subtlest ways. How many of the yearnings and activities of human life have their roots in this ancient and honorable desire! The love of pretty clothes,--however it may seem to be motivated and however it may be complicated by other motives,-draws its energy, fundamentally, from the same need that provides the gay plumage and limpid song of the bird or the painted wings of the butterfly. On the other hand, there is the capability of being attracted, with all the personal relationships which spring from the power of admiring and loving another person. The interest in others does not expend its whole force on its primary objects,--mate and children. It flows out into all human relationships, developing all the possibilities of loving which mean so much in human life; the love of man for man and woman for woman, as well as mutual love of man and woman. A force like this, once planted, especially in the higher types of life, does not spend all its energies in its main trunk. It sends out branches in many directions, bearing by-products which are rich in value for all of life. Many of our richest relationships, our best impulses, and our most firmly fixed social habits spring from the family instincts of reproduction and parental care. The social life of our young people, so well calculated to bring young men and women together; all the beauty of family life and, as we shall later see, all the broader benevolent activities for society in general, are energized by the same love-instincts which form so large a part of human nature. LEARNING TO LOVE =A Four-Grade School.= It is impossible to watch the growth of the love-life of a human being, to trace its development from babyhood up to its culmination in mating and parenthood, without a sense of wonder at the steady purpose behind it all. We used to believe that the love for the young girl that suddenly blooms forth in the callow youth was an entirely new affair, something suddenly planted in him as he developed into manhood; but now we know, thanks to the uncovering of human nature by the painstaking investigations of the psycho-analytic school of psychologists, that the seeds of the love-life are planted, not in puberty, but with the beginning of life itself. Looked at in one way, all infancy and childhood are a preparation, a training of the love-instinct which is to be ready at the proper time to find its mate and play its part in the perpetuation of the race. Nature begins early. As she plants in the tiny baby all the organs that shall be needed during its lifetime, so she plants the rudiments of all the impulses and tendencies that shall later be developed into the full-grown instincts. There have been found to be four periods in the love-life of the growing child, three of them preparatory steps leading up to maturity; periods in which the main current of love is directed respectively toward self, parents, comrades, and finally toward lover or mate. =Like Narcissus.= In the first stage, the baby's interest is in his own body. He is getting acquainted with himself, and he soon finds that his body contains possibilities of pleasurable sensations which may be repeated by the proper stimulation. Besides the hunger-satisfaction that it brings, the act of sucking is pleasurable in itself, and so the baby begins to suck his thumb or his quilts or his rattle. Later, this impulse to stimulate the nerves about the mouth finds its satisfaction in kissing, and still later it plays a definite part in the wooing process; but at first the child is self-sufficient and finds his pleasure entirely within himself. Other regions of the body yield similar pleasure. We often find a tiny child rubbing his genital organs or his thighs or taking exaggerated pleasure in riding on someone's foot in order to stimulate these nerves, which he has discovered at first merely by chance. When he begins to run around, he loves to exhibit his own body, to go about naked. None of this is naughtiness or perversion; it is only Nature's preparation of trends that she will later need to use. The child is normally and naturally in love with himself.[11] But he must not linger too long in this stage. None of the channels which his life-force is cutting must be dug too deep, else in later life they will offer lines of least resistance which may, on occasion, invite illness or perversion. [Footnote 11: This is the stage which is technically known as auto-eroticism or self-love.] =In Love with His Family.= Presently Nature pries the child loose from love of himself and directs part of his interests to people outside himself. Before he is a year old, part of his love is turned to others. In this stage it is natural that at first his affection should center on those who make up his home circle,--his parents and other members of the household. Even in this early choice we see a foreshadowing of his future need. The normal little boy is especially fond of his mother, and the normal little girl of her father. Not all the love goes to the parent of the opposite sex, but if the child be normal, a noticeably larger part finds its way in that direction. Observing parents can often see unmistakable signs of jealousy: toward the parent of the same sex, or the brother or sister of the same sex. The little boy who sleeps with his mother while his father is away, or who on these occasions gets all the attention and all the petting he craves, is naturally eager to perpetuate this state of affairs. Many a small boy has been heard to say that he wished his father would go away and stay all the time,--to the horror of the parents who do not understand. All this is natural enough, but it is not to be encouraged. The pattern of the father or the mother must not be stamped too deep in the impressionable child-mind. Too little love and sympathy are bad, leading to repression and a morbid turning in of the love-force; but too much petting, too many caresses are just as bad. Sentimental self-indulgence on the part of the parents has been repeatedly proved to be the cause of many a later illness for the child. As the right kind of family love and comradeship, the kind that leads to freedom and self-dependence, is among the highest forces in life, so the wrong kind is among the worst. Parents and their substitutes--nurses, sisters, and brothers--are but temporary stopping-places for the growing love, stepping-stones to later attachments which are biologically more necessary. The small boy who lets himself be coddled and petted too long by his adoring relatives, who does not shake off their caresses and run away to the other boys, is doomed to failure, and, as we shall later see, probably to illness.[12] [Footnote 12: One of the best discussions of this theme is found in the chapter "The Only or Favorite Child," by A.A. Brill, in _Psychoanalysis_.] In the later infantile period, the child, besides wanting to exhibit his own body, shows marked interest in looking at the bodies of others, and marked curiosity on sex-questions in general. He particularly wants to know "where babies come from." If his questions are unfortunately met by embarrassment or laughing evasion, or by obvious lying about the stork or the doctor or the angels, his curiosity is only whetted, and he comes to the very natural conclusion that all matters of sex are sinful, disgusting, and indecent, and to be investigated only on the sly. This conception cannot be brought into harmony with the unconscious mental processes arising from his race-instincts nor with his instinctive sense that "whatever is is right." The resulting conflict in some four-year-old children is surprisingly intense. Astonished indeed would many parents be if they knew what was going on inside the heads of their "innocent" little children; not "bad" things, but pathetic things which a little candor would have avoided. Alongside the rudimentary impulses of showing and looking, there is developed another set of trends which Nature needs to use later on, the so-called sadistic and masochistic impulses, the desire to dominate and master and even to inflict pain, and its opposite impulse which takes pleasure in yielding and submitting to mastery. These traits, harking back to the time when the male needed to capture by force, are of course much more evident in adolescence and especially in love-making, but have their beginning in childhood, as many a mother of cruel children knows to her sorrow. In adolescence, when sex-differentiation is much more marked, the dominating impulse is stronger in the boy and the yielding impulse in the girl; but in little children the differentiation has not yet begun. =Gang and Chum.= At about four or five years the child leaves the infantile stage of development, with its self-love and its intense devotion to parents and their substitutes. He begins to be especially interested in playmates of his own sex, to care more for the opinions of the gang--or if it be a little girl, of the chum--than for those of the parents. The life-force is leading him on to the next step in his education, freeing him little by little from a too-hampering attachment to his family. This does not mean that he does not love his father and mother. It means only that some of his love is being turned toward the rest of the world, that he may be an independent, socially useful man. This period between infancy and puberty is known as the latency period. All interest in sex disappears, repressed by the spontaneously developing sense of shame and modesty and by the impact of education and social disapproval. The child forgets that he was ever curious on sex-matters and lets his curiosity turn into other, more acceptable channels. =The Mating-Time.= We are familiar with the changes that take place at puberty. We laugh at the girl who, throwing off her tom-boy ways, suddenly wants her skirts let down and her hair done up. We laugh at the boy who suddenly leaves off being a rowdy, and turns into a would-be dandy. We scold because this same boy and girl who have always been so "sweet and tractable" become, almost overnight, surly and cantankerous, restive under authority and impatient of family restraint. We should neither laugh nor scold, if we understood. Nature is succeeding in her purpose. She has led the young life on from self to parents, from parents to gang or chum, and now she is trying to lead it away from all its earlier attachments, to set it free for its final adventure in loving. The process is painful, so painful that it sometimes fails of accomplishment. In any case, the strain is tremendous, needing all the wisdom and understanding which the family has to offer. It is no easy task for any person to free himself from the sense of dependence and protection, and the shielding love that have always been his; to weigh anchors that are holding him to the past and to start out on the voyage alone. At this time of change, the chemistry of the body plays an important part in the development of the mental traits; all half-developed tendencies are given power through the maturing of the sex-glands, which bind them into an organization ready for their ultimate purpose. The current is now turned on, and the machinery, which has been furnished from the beginning, is ready for its task. After a few false starts in the shape of "puppy love," the mature instinct, if it be successful, seeks until from among the crowd it finds its mate. It has graduated from the training-school and is ready for life. CIVILIZATION'S PROBLEM =When Nature's Plans Fall Through.= We have been describing the normal course of affairs. We know that all too often the normal is not achieved. Inner forces or outer circumstances too often conspire to keep the young man or the young woman from the culmination toward which everything has been moving. If the life-force cannot liberate itself from the old family grooves to forge ahead into new channels, or if economic demands or other conditions make postponement necessary, then marriage is not possible. All the glandular secretions and internal stimuli have been urging on to the final consummation, developing physical and emotional life for an end that does not come; or if it does come, is not sufficient to satisfy the demands of the age-old instinct which for millions of years knew no restraint. In any case, man finds himself, and woman herself, face to face with a pressing problem, none the less pressing because it is in most cases entirely unrecognized. =Blundering Instincts.= The older a person is, the more fixed are his habits. Now, an instinct is a race-habit and represents the crystallized reactions of a past that is old. Whatever has been done over and over again, millions of times, naturally becomes fixed, automatic, tending to conserve itself in its old ways, to resist any change and to act as it has always acted. This conserves energy and works well so long as conditions remain the same. But if for any reason there comes a change, things are likely to go wrong. By just so far as things are different, an automatic habit becomes a handicap instead of a help. This having to act under changed conditions is exactly the trouble with the reproductive instinct. Under civilization, conditions have changed but the instinct has not. It is trying to act as it always has acted, but civilized man wills otherwise. The change that has come is not in the physical, external environment, but in man himself and in the social environment which he has created. There is in man an onward urge toward new and better things. Side by side with the desire to live as he always has lived, there is a desire to make new adaptations which are for the advancement of the whole race-life. Besides the natural wish to take his desires as he finds them, there is also the wish to modify them and use them for higher and more socially useful ends. As the race has found through long experience that monogamy is to be preferred to promiscuous mating; that the highest interests of life are fostered by loyalty to the institution of the family; that the careful rearing of several children rather than the mere production of many is in the long run to be desired; and that a single standard of morality is practicable; so society has established for its members a standard which is in direct opposition to the immeasurable urge of the past. To make matters worse, there have at the same time grown up in many communities a standard of living and an economic competition which still further limit the size of the family and the satisfaction of the reproductive impulse. =The Perpetual Feud.= There thus arises the strategic struggle between that which the race has found good in the past and that which the race finds good in the present. As the older race-experience is laid in they body and built into the very fiber of the individual, inherited as an innate impulse, it has become an integral part of himself, an individual need rather than a social one. On the other hand, man has, as another innate part of his being, the desire to go with the herd, to conform to the standards of his fellows, to be what he has learned society wants him to be. Hence the struggle, insistent, ever more pressing, between two sets of desires within the man himself; the feud between the past and the present, between the natural and the social, between the selfish and the ideal. On one side, there is the demand for instinctive satisfaction; on the other, for moral control; on one side the demand for pleasure; on the other, the demands of reality.[13] [Footnote 13: "All the burdens of men or society are caused by the inadequacies in the association of primal animal emotions with those mental powers which have been so rapidly developed in man-kind."--Shaler quoted by Hinkle: Introduction to Jung's _Psychology of the Unconscious_.] Two factors intensify the conflict. In the first place, the older habits have the head start. Compared with the almost limitless extent of our past history, our desire for the control of the instincts is very new indeed. It requires the long look and the right perspective to understand how very lately we have entered into our new conditions and how old a habit we are trying to break. In the second place, the larger part of the stimulus comes from within the body itself. When studying the other instincts, we saw that the best way to control was to refuse to stimulate when the situation was not suitable for discharge. But with the organically aroused sex-instinct there is no such power of choice. We may fan the flame by the thoughts we think or the environment we seek, or we may smother the flame until it is out of sight, but we cannot extinguish it by any act of ours. The issue has always been too important to be left to the individual. The stimulation comes, primarily, not by way of the mind but by way of the body. With this instinct we cannot "stop before we begin," because Nature has taken the matter out of our hands and begins for us. THE BULWARK WE HAVE BUILT With the competing forces so strong and the issues so great, it is not to be wondered at that society has had to build up a massive bulwark of public opinion, to establish regulations and fix penalties that are more stringent than those imposed in any other direction. Nor is it remarkable that in its effort to protect itself, society has sometimes made mistakes. These blunders seem to lie in two directions. Assuming that it is nearly impossible for the male to control his instincts, and that, after all, it does not matter so much whether he does or not, society has blinked at license in men, and thus has fostered a demoralizing, anti-social double standard which has broken up countless homes, has been responsible for the spread of venereal diseases, and has been among the greatest curses of modern civilization. At the same time society, in its efforts to maintain its standards for woman, has taught its children, especially its girls, that anything savoring of the word "sexual" is sinful, disgusting, and impure. To be sure, very many women have modified their childish views, but an astonishingly large number conserve, even in maturity, their warped ideas about the whole subject of sex. Many a mature woman secretly believes that she, at least, is not guilty of harboring anything so "vulgar" as a reproductive instinct, not realizing that if this were so, she would be, in very truth, a freak of nature. Of course, woman is by nature as fully endowed with sex instincts as is man. Kipling portrays the female of the species as "deadlier than the male" in that the very framework of her constitution outlines the one issue for which it was launched,--stanch against any attack which might endanger the carrying on of life. Feeling the force of this instinctive urge, she braces herself against precipitancy in response by what seems almost a negation. Just as we lean well in when riding around a corner, in order to keep ourselves from falling out, so by an "over-compensation" for what is unconsciously felt to be danger woman increases her feeling of safety by setting up a taboo on the whole subject of sex. It is time that we freed our minds from the artificial and perverted attitude toward this dominant impulse; time to rescue the word "sex" from its implications of grossness and sensuousness, and to recognize the instinct in its true light as one of the necessary and holy forces of life, a force capable of causing great damage, but also holding infinite possibilities for good if wisely directed. Society only gets its members into trouble when, even by implication, it attempts to deny its natural make-up, and allows little children to grow up with the false idea that one of their strongest impulses is to be shunned by them as a thing of shame. We cannot dam back the flood by building a bulwark of untruth, and then expect the bulwark to hold. =Adaptable Energy.= We neither have to give in to our over-insistent desires nor to deny that they exist. Man has a power of adaptation. Just when we seem to run up against a dead wall, to face an irreconcilable conflict, we find a wonderful power of indirect expression that affords satisfaction to all the innate forces without doing violence to the ethical standards which have proved so necessary for the development of character. Hunger, which, like the reproductive instinct, is stimulated by the changing chemistry of the body, can be satisfied only by achieving its primary purpose, the taking of material food; but the creative impulse to reproduce oneself possesses a unique ability to spiritualize itself and expend its energy in other lines of creative endeavor. There seems to be some sort of close connection between the especially intense energy of the reproductive instinct and the modes of expression of the instinct for construction; a connection which makes possible the utilization of threatening destructive energy by directing it toward socially valuable work. Just as we harness the mountain stream and use its wild force to light our cities, or catch the lightning to run our trolley cars, so we find man and woman--under the right conditions--easily and naturally switching over the power of their surplus sex-energy to ends which seem at first only slightly related to its original aim, but which resemble it in that they too are self-expressive and creative. If a person is able to express himself in some real way, to give himself to socially needed work; if he can reproduce himself intellectually and spiritually in artistic production, in invention, in literature, in social betterment, he is drawing on an age-old reservoir of creative energy, and by so doing is relieving himself of inner tension which would otherwise seek less beneficent ways of expression. The world knew all this intuitively for a long time before it knew it theoretically. The novelists, who are unconsciously among the best psychologists, have thoroughly worked the vein. The average man knows it. "He was disappointed in love," we say, "and we thought he would go to pieces, but now he has found himself in his work"; or, "She will go mad if she doesn't find some one who needs her." It is only lately that science has caught up with intuition, but now the physicians and psychologists who have had the most intimate and first-hand acquaintance with the human heart are recognizing, to a man, this unique power of the love-instinct and its possibilities for creative work of every sort.[14] [Footnote 14: Among those who have shown this connection between the love-force and creative work are Freud, Jung, Jelliffe, White, Brill, Jones, Wright, Frink, and the late Dr. Putnam of Harvard University, who writes: "Freud has never asserted it as his opinion and it certainly is not mine, that this is the only root from which artistic expression springs. On the other hand, it is probable that all artistic productions are partly referable to this source. A close examination of many of them would enable any one to justify the opinion that it is a source largely drawn upon."--_Human Motives_. p. 87.] =Higher Levels.= Freud has called this spiritualization of natural forces by a term borrowed from chemistry. As a solid is "sublimated" when transformed into a gas, so a primal impulse is said to be "sublimated" when it is diverted from its original object and made to serve other ends. By this power of sublimation the little exhibitionist, who loved to show himself, may become an actor; the "cruel" boy who loved to dissect animals may become a surgeon; the sexually curious child may turn his curiosity to other things and become a scholar; the "born mother," if denied children of her own or having finished with their upbringing, may take to herself the children of the city, working for better laws and better care for needy little ones; the man or woman whose sex-instinct is too strong to find expression in legitimate, direct ways, may find it a valuable resource, an increment of energy for creative work, along whatever line his talent may lie. There is no more marvelous provision in all life than this power of sublimation of one form of energy into another, a provision shadowing forth almost limitless possibilities for higher adaptations and for growth in character. As we think of the distance we have already traveled and the endless possibilities of ever higher excursions of the life-force, we feel like echoing Paul's words: "He who began a good work in you will perfect it unto the end." The history of the past holds great promise for the future. =When Sublimation Fails.= But in the meantime we cannot congratulate ourselves too heartily. Sublimation too often fails. There are too many nervous wrecks by the way, too many weak indulgers of original desires, too many repressed, starved lives with no outlet for their misunderstood yearnings; and, as we shall see, too many people who, in spite of a big lifework, fail to find satisfaction because of unnecessary handicaps carried over from their childhood days. "Society's great task is, therefore, the understanding of the life-force, its manifold efforts at expression and the way of attaining this, and to provide as free and expansive ways as possible for the creative energy which is to work marvelous things for the future." If "the understanding of the life force" is to be available for use, it must be the property of the average man and woman, the fathers and mothers of our children, the teachers and physicians who act as their advisers and friends.[15] This chapter is intended to do its bit toward such a general understanding. [Footnote 15: "Appropriate educational processes might perhaps guide this enormous impulsive energy toward the maintenance instead of the destruction of marriage and the family. But up to the present time, education with respect to this moral issue has commonly lacked any such constructive method. The social standard and the individual impulse have simply collided, and the individual has been left to resolve the conflict, for the most part by his own resources."--G.A. Coe: _Psychology of Religion_, p. 150.] PARENTAL INSTINCT AND TENDER EMOTION =Until They Can Fly.= Only half of Nature's need is met by the reproductive instinct. Her carefulness in this direction would be largely wasted without that other impulse which she has planted, the impulse to protect the new lives until they are old enough to fend for themselves. The higher the type of life and the greater the future demands, the longer is the period of preparation and consequent period of parental care. This fact, coupled with man's power for lasting relationships through the organization of permanent sentiments, has made the, bond between parent and child an enduring one. Needless to say, this relationship is among the most beautiful on earth, the source of an incalculable amount of joy and gain. However, as we have already suggested, there lurks here, as in every beneficent force, a danger. If parents forget what they are for, and try to foster a more than ordinary tie, they make themselves a menace to those whom they most love. Any exaggeration is abnormal. If the childhood bond is over-strong, or the childhood dependence too long cultivated, then the relationship has overstepped its purpose, and, as we shall later see, has laid the foundation for a future neurosis. =Mothering the World.= Probably no instinct has so many ways of indirect expression as this mothering impulse of protection. Aroused by the cry of a child in distress, or by the thought of the weakness, or need, or ill-treatment of any defenseless creature, this mother-father impulse is at the root of altruism, gratitude, love, pity, benevolence, and all unselfish actions. There is still a great difference of opinion as to how man's spiritual nature came into being; still discussion as to whether it developed out of crude beginnings as the rest of his physical and mental endowment has developed, or whether it was added from the outside as something entirely new. Be that as it may, the fact remains that man has as an innate part of his being an altruistic tendency, an unselfish care for the welfare of others, a relationship to society as a whole,--a relationship which is the only foundation of health and happiness and which brings sure disaster if ignored. The egoistic tendencies are only a part of human nature. Part of us is naturally socially minded, unselfish, spiritual, capable of responding to the call to lose our lives in order that others may find theirs. SUMMARY Civilized man as he is to-day is a product of the past and can be understood only as that past is understood. The conflicts with which he is confronted are the direct outcome of the evolutional history of the race and of its attempt to adapt its primitive instincts to present-day ideals. Character is what we do with our instincts. According to Freud, all of a man's traits are the result of his unchanged original impulses, or of his reactions against those impulses, or of his sublimation of them. In other words, there are three things we may do with our instincts. We may follow our primal desires, we may deny their existence, or we may use them for ends which are in harmony with our lives as we want them to be. As the first course leads to degeneracy, the second to nervous illness, and the third to happy usefulness, it is obviously important to learn the way of sublimation. Sometimes this is accomplished unconsciously by the life-force, but sometimes sublimation fails, and is reestablished only when the conscious mind gains an understanding of the great forces of life. This method of reeducation of the personality as a means of treatment in nervousness is called psycho-therapy. =Religion's Contribution.= If it be asked why, amid all this discussion of instincts and motives we have made no mention of that great energizer religion, we answer that we have by no means forgotten it, but that we have been dealing solely with those primary tendencies out of which all of the compound emotions are made. Man has been described as instinctively and incurably religious, but there seems no doubt that religion is a compound reaction, made up of love,--sympathetic response to the parental love of God,--fear, negative self-feeling, and positive self-feeling in the shape of aspiration for the desired ideal of character; all woven into several compound emotions such as awe, gratitude, and reverence. It goes almost without saying that religion, if it be vital, is one of the greatest sources of moral energy and spiritual dynamic, and that it is and always has been one of the greatest aids to sublimation that man has found. A force like the Christian religion, which sets the highest ideal of character and makes man want to live up to it, and which at the same time says, "You can. Here is strength to help you"; which unifies life and fills it with purpose; which furnishes the highest love-object and turns the thought outward to the good of mankind--such a force could hardly fail to be a dynamic factor in the effort toward sublimation. This book, however, deals primarily with those cases for which religion has had, to call science to her aid in order to find the cause of failure, to flood the whole subject with light, and to help cut the cords which, binding us to the past, make it impossible to utilize the great resources that are at hand for all the children of men. =Where We Keep Our Instincts.= It must have been impossible to read through these two chapters on instinct without feeling that, after all, we are not very well acquainted with ourselves. The more we look into human nature, the more evident it becomes that there is much in each one of us of which we are only dimly aware. It is now time for us to look a little deeper,--to find where we keep these instinctive tendencies with which it is possible to live so intimately without even suspecting their existence. We shall find that they occupy a realm of their own, and that this realm, while quite out of sight, is yet open to exploration. CHAPTER V _In which we look below the surface and discover a veritable wonderland_ THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND STRANGERS TO OURSELVES =Hidden Strings.= A collie dog lies on the hearthrug. A small boy with mischievous intent ties a fine thread to a bone, hides himself behind a chair, and pulls the bone slowly across the floor. The dog is thrown into a fit of terror because he does not know about the hidden string. A Chinese in the early days of San Francisco stands spell-bound at the sight of a cable car. "No pushee. No pullee. Go allee samee like hellee!" He does not know about the hidden string. A woman of refinement and culture thinks a thought that horrifies her sensitive soul. It is entirely out of keeping with her character as she knows it. In her misunderstanding she considers it wicked and thrusts it from her, wondering how it ever could have been hers. She does not know about the hidden string. In the last two chapters we thought together about some of these strings, examining the fibers of which they are made and learning in what directions they pull. We found them to be more powerful than we should have supposed, more insistent and less visible. We found that instinctive desire is the string, the cable that energizes our every act, but that our desires are neither single nor simple, and are but rarely on the surface. Many of us live with them a long time, feeling the tug, but not recognizing the string. =There's a Reason.= We take our thoughts and feelings and actions for granted, without stopping very often to wonder where they come from. But there is always a reason. When the law of cause and effect reaches the doorsill of our minds, it does not stop short to give way to the law of chance. We wake up in the morning with a certain thought on top. We say it "just happens." But nothing ever just happens. No thought that ever comes into our heads has been without its history,--its ancestors and its determining causes. But what about dreams? They, at least, you say, have no connections, no past and no future, only a weird, fantastic present. Strange to say, dreams have been found to be as closely related to our real selves, as interwoven with the warp and woof of our lives as are any of our waking thoughts. Even dreams have a reason. We find ourselves holding certain beliefs and prejudices, interested in certain things and indifferent to others, liking some foods, some colors and disliking others. Search our minds as we will, we find no clue to many of these inner trends. Why? The answer is simple. The cause is hidden below the surface. If we try to explain ourselves on the basis of the open-to-inspection part of our minds, we must come to the conclusion that we are queer creatures indeed. Only by assuming that there is more to us than we know, can we find any rational basis for the way we think and feel and act. =A Real Mind.= We learn of our internal machinery by what it does. We must infer a part of our minds which introspection does not reveal, a mind within the mind, able to work for us even while we are unaware of its existence. This inner mind is usually known as the subconscious, the mind under the level of consciousness.[16] We forget a name, but we know that it will come to us if we think about something else. Presently, out of somewhere, there flashes the word we want. Where was it in the meanwhile, and what hunted it out from among all our other memories and sent it up into consciousness? The something which did that must be capable of conserving memories, of recognizing the right one and of communicating it,--surely a real mind. [Footnote 16: Writers of the psycho-analytic school use the word "unconscious" to denote the lower layers of this region, and "fore-conscious" to denote its upper layers. Morton Prince uses the terms "unconscious" and "conscious" to denote the different strata. As there is still a good deal of confusion in the use of terms, it has seemed to us simpler to use throughout only the general term "subconscious."] One evening my collaborator fumbled unsuccessfully for the name of a certain well-known journalist and educator. It was on the tip of her tongue, but it simply would not come, not even the initial letter. In a whimsical mood she said to herself just as she went to sleep, "Little subconscious mind, you find that name to-night." In the middle of the night she awoke, saying, "Williams--Talcott Williams." The subconscious, which has charge of her memories, had been at work while she slept. The history of literature abounds in stories of under-the-surface work. The man of genius usually waits until the mood is on, until the muse speaks; then all his lifeless material is lighted by new radiance. He feels that some one outside himself is dictating. Often he merely holds the pen while the finished work pours itself out spontaneously as if from a higher source. But it is not only the man of genius who makes use of these unseen powers. He may have readier access to his subconscious than the rest of us, but he has no monopoly. The most matter-of-fact man often says that he will "sleep over" a knotty problem. He puts it into his mind and then goes about his business, or goes to sleep while this unseen judge weighs and balances, collects related facts, looks first at one side of the question and then at the other, and finally sends up into consciousness a decision full of conviction, a decision that has been formulated so far from the focus of attention that it seems to be something altogether new, a veritable inspiration. We must infer the subconscious from what it does. Things happen,--there must be a cause. Some of the things that happen presuppose imagination, reason, intelligence, will, emotion, desire, all the elements of mind. We cannot see this mind, but we can see its products. To deny the subconscious is to deny the artist while looking at his picture, to disbelieve in the poet while reading his poem, and to doubt the existence of the explosive while listening to the report. The subconscious is an artist, a poet, and an explosive by turns. If we deny its existence, a good portion of man's doings are unintelligible. If we admit it, many of his actions and his afflictions which have seemed absurd stand out in a new light as purposeful efforts with a real and adequate cause. =The Submerged Nine Tenths.= The more deeply psychologists and physicians have studied into these things, the more certainly have they been forced to the conclusion that the conscious mind of man, the part that he can explore at will, is by far the smaller part of his personality. Since this is to some people a rather startling proposition, we can do no better than quote the following statement from White on the relation of consciousness to the rest of the psychic life: Consciousness includes only that of which we are _aware_, while outside of this somewhat restricted area there lies a much wider area in which lie the deeper motives for conduct, and which not only operates to control conduct, but also dictates what may and what may not become conscious. Stanley Hall has very forcibly put the matter by using the illustration of the iceberg. Only one-tenth of the iceberg is visible above water; nine-tenths is beneath the surface. It may appear in a given instance that the iceberg is being carried along by the prevailing winds and surface currents, but if we keep our eyes open we shall sooner or later see a berg going in the face of the wind, and, so, apparently putting to naught all the laws of aerodynamics. We can understand this only when we come to realize that much the greater portion of the berg is beneath the surface and that it is moving in response to invisible forces addressed against this submerged portion. Consciousness only arises late in the course of evolution and only in connection with adjustments that are relatively complex. When the same or similar conditions in the environment are repeatedly presented to the organism so that it is called upon to react in a similar and almost identical way each time, there tends to be organized a mechanism of reaction which becomes more and more automatic and is accompanied by a state of mind of less and less awareness.[17] [Footnote 17: White: _Mechanisms of Character Formation_.] It is easy to see the economy of this arrangement which provides ready-made patterns of reaction for habitual situations and leaves consciousness free for new decisions. Since an automatic action, traveling along well-worn brain paths, consumes little energy and causes the minimum of fatigue, the plan not only frees consciousness from a confusing number of details, but also works for the conservation of energy. While consciousness is busy lighting up the special problems of the moment, the vast mass of life's demands are taken care of by the subconscious, which constitutes the bulk of the mind. "Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psyche."[18] [Footnote 18: Freud: _Interpretation of Dreams_, p. 486.] =The Heart of Psychology.= In the face of all this, it is not to be wondered at that the problem of the subconscious has been called not one problem of psychology but the problem. It cannot be denied that the discoveries which have already been made as to its activities have been of immense practical importance in the understanding of normal conduct and in the treatment of the psycho-neuroses. If some of the methods--such as hypnosis, automatic writing, and interpretation of dreams--which are used to investigate its activities seem to savor of the charlatan and the mountebank, it is because they have occasionally been appropriated by the ignorant and the unscrupulous. Their real setting is the psychological laboratory and the physician's office. In the hands of men like Sigmund Freud, Boris Sidis, and Morton Prince, they are as scientific as the apparatus of any other laboratory and their findings are as susceptible of proof. We may, then, go forward with the conviction that we are walking on solid ground and that the main paths, at least, will turn into beaten highways. ANCESTRAL MEMORIES =Race-Memories.= An individual as he stands at any moment is the product of his past,--the past which he has inherited and the past which he has lived. In other words, he is a bundle of memories accumulated through the experience of the race, and through his own experience as a person. Some of these memories are conscious, and these he calls his, while others fail to reach consciousness and are not recognized as part of his assets. The instincts form the starting-point of mind, conscious and subconscious, and are the foundation upon which the rest is built. They often show themselves as part of our conscious lives, but their roots are laid deep in the subconscious from which they can never be eradicated. This deepest-laid instinctive layer of the subconscious is little subject to change. It represents the earlier adjustments of the race, crystallized into habit. It takes no account of the differences between the present and the past. It knows no culture, no reason, no lately acquired prudence. It is all energy and can only wish, or urge toward action. But since only those race-memories became instincts which had proved needful to the race in the long run, they are on the whole beneficent forces, working for the good of the race and the good of the individual, if he learns how to handle them aright and to adapt them to present conditions. This instinctive urge toward action arouses in the individual an organic response that is felt as a tension or craving and is mainly dependent upon its own chemical constitution at the moment. Hunger is the sensation caused by the little muscular contractions in the stomach when the body is low in its food supply. Sudden fright is felt as an all-gone sensation "at the pit of the stomach." What really happens is a tightening up of the circular muscles of the blood-vessels lying in the network of the solar plexus, and a spasm of the muscles of the digestive tract. The hungry stomach impels to action until satisfied; the physical discomfort in fear impels toward measures of safety. The apparatus that is made use of by the subconscious in carrying out this instinctive urge is called the autonomic nervous system.[19] It regulates all the functions of living, not only under the stress of emotion, but during every moment of waking or sleeping. [Footnote 19: Kempf: "The Tonus of Automatic Segments as a Cause of Abnormal Behavior," _Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases_, January, 1921.] =A Capable Manager.= The conscious mind could not possibly send messages to the numerous glands that fit the body for action, nor attend to all the delicate adjustments that enter into the process. The conscious mind in most of us does not even know of the existence of the organs and secretions involved, but something sends the messages and it is something that has a remarkable likeness to mind as we usually think of mind,--something which takes advantage of the past and gages means to an end with a nicety that excites our wonder. =Take no Anxious Thought.= We take food into our stomachs and forget about it, if we are wise; and this subconscious overseer who through millions of years of experience has learned how to digest food does the rest. As with digestion, so with our heart-action; we lie down at night fairly sure that there will be no break in the regular rhythm of its beat. The subconscious overseer is "on the job" and he never rests. No matter how hard we sleep, he never lets us forget to take a breath; and if we trust him, he is very likely to wake us up at the appointed time in the morning. Also, if we trust him, he carries us off to sleep as though we were babies. Has he not had long practice in the days before insomnia was invented? =First Aid to the Injured.= In times of infection or injury, this subconscious manager is better than any doctor. The doctors say with truth that they only assist nature. If the infection is internal, antitoxins are produced within the body. If the injury is external, like a cut, the messages fly, and white blood-corpuscles are marshaled to take care of poisons and build up the tissue. If the injury is of the kind that needs rest, the subconscious doctor knows it. He therefore causes pain and rigidity, in order to induce us to hold the injured part still until it is restored. Crile reminds us of a fact that is often noticed by surgeons. If patients under ether are handled roughly, especially in the intestinal region, respiration quickens and there are tremors and even convulsive efforts which interfere with the surgeon's work. The conscious mind cannot feel. It is asleep. But the subconscious mind, whose business it is to protect the body, is trying to get away from injury. The body uses up as much energy as though it had run for miles, and when the patient wakes up, we say that he is suffering from shock. The subconscious mind which is not affected by ether, has been exhausting itself in a vain attempt to get the body away from harm. =A Tireless Servant.= When the conscious mind undertakes a job, it is always more or less subject to fatigue. But the subconscious after its long practice seems never to tire. We say that its activities have become automatic. With all its inherited skill, the subconscious, if left to itself, can be depended upon to run the bodily machinery without effort and without hitch. The only things that can interfere with its work are the wrong kind of emotions and the wrong kind of suggestions from the conscious mind. Barring these, it goes its way like a trusty servant, looking after details and leaving its master's mind free for other things. Having been "in the family" for generations, it knows its business and resents any interference with its duties or any infringement of its rights. No man, then, comes into this world without inheritance: he receives from his ancestors two goodly sets of heirlooms, the instincts and the mechanism which carries on bodily functions. This is the capital with which man starts life; but immediately he begins increasing this capital, adding memories from his own experience to the accumulated race-records. PERSONAL MEMORIES No more startling secret has been unearthed by science than the discovery of the length and minuteness of our memories. No matter how much one may think he has forgotten, the tablets of his mind are closely written with records of infinitesimal experiences, shadowy sensations, old happenings which the conscious self has lost entirely and would scarcely recognize as its own. Many of these brain records, or neurograms, as Prince calls them, are never aroused from their dormant conditions. But others, aroused by emotion or association of ideas, may after years of inactivity, come forth again either as conscious memories or as subconscious forces, or even as physiological memories,--bodily repetitions of the pains, palpitations, and tremors of old emotional experiences. =Irresistible Childhood.= An experience that is forgotten is not necessarily lost. Although the first few years of childhood are lost to conscious memory, these years outweigh all others in their influence on character. The Jesuit priest was right when he said, "Give me a child until he is six years old, and he will be a Catholic all his life." As Frink has so ably shown, the determining factors that enter into any adult choice, such as the choice of the Catholic or the Protestant faith, are in a large measure made up of subconscious memories from early childhood, forgotten memories of Sunday-school and church, of lessons at home or passages in books,--experiences which no voluntary effort could recall, but which still live unrecognized in our mature judgments and beliefs. Naturally we do not acknowledge these subconscious motives. We like to believe that all our decisions are based on reason, and so we invent plausible arguments for our attitudes and our actions, arguments which we ourselves implicitly believe. This process of substituting a plausible reason for a subconscious one is known as rationalization, a process which every one of us engages in many times a day. It is indeed true that the child is father to the man. Those first impressionable years, when we believed implicitly whatever any one told us and when through ignorance we reacted emotionally to ordinary experiences, are molding us still, making us the men and women we are to-day, coloring with childish ideas many of the attitudes of our supposedly reasoning life. Bergson says: The unconscious is our historical past. In reality the past is preserved automatically. In its entirety probably it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. =Spontaneous Outbursts.= "How do we know all this?" some one says. "What is the evidence for these sweeping statements? If we cannot remember, how can we discover these strange memories that are so powerful but so elusive? If they are below the level of consciousness, are they not, in the very nature of the case, forever hidden from view, in the sphere of the occult rather than that of science?" The answer to these questions is determined by one important fact; the line between the conscious and subconscious minds does not always remain in the same place; the "threshold of consciousness" is sometimes displaced, automatically allowing these buried memories to come to the surface. In sleep and delirium, in trance and hallucination, in hysteria and intoxication, the tables are turned; the restraining hand of the conscious mind is loosened and the submerged self comes forth with all its ancient memories. It is a common experience to have a patient in delirium repeat long-forgotten verses or descriptions of events that the "real man" has lost entirely. The renowned servant-girl, quoted by Hudson, who in delirium recited passage after passage of Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, which she had heard her one-time master repeat in his study, is typical of many such instances.[20] [Footnote 20: Hudson: _The Law of Psychic Phenomena_, p. 44. Quoted from _Coleridge's Biographia Literaria_, Vol. I, p. 117 (edit. 1847).] A young girl of nineteen, a patient of mine, lapsed for several weeks into a dissociated state in which she forgot all the memories and ideas of her adult life, and returned to the period of her childhood. She used to say that she saw things inside her head and would accurately describe events that took place before she was two years of age,--scenes which she had completely forgotten in her normal life. One day when I asked her to tell me what she was seeing, she began to talk about "little sister" (herself) and "little brother." "Little sister and brother were the two little folks that lived with their mother and their daddy and they were playing on the sand-pile. You know there was only one sand-pile, not like all the ones they have down here (at the seaside), and they had a bucket that they would put sand in and they would dump it out again and they would make nice things, you know; they would play with their little dog Ponto and he was white with black and brown spots on him. Little brother had white hair and he was bigger than little sister and he had a little waist with ruffles down the front and around the collar and a black coat that came down to his knees and it had two little white bands around it. Some of the waists he wore had blue specks and some had red and black specks in it. "Little sister had yellow curls and she had a blue coat with jiggly streaks of white in it, and she had a little white bonnet that was crocheted, and she had little blue mittens on that were tied to a string that went around her neck and down the other arm. It got pretty cold where they lived. Little sister and little brother would go out to the pile of leaves and jump on them and bounce and they would crackle. The leaves came down from the trees all of a sudden when they got tired, and they were different colors, brown and red. Little sister could walk then but she could not walk one other time before then; she could stand up by holding to a chair, but she could not go herself. One morning Big Tom said 'Run to Daddy' and she went to her daddy, and after that she always walked; they were glad and she was glad. She walked all day long. Big Tom was a man who used to help Daddy and little sister always liked him. He was a nice man." The mother verified this scene of the first walking, saying that it had occurred on her own wedding-anniversary when the child was twenty-three months old. One night I heard the same patient talk in her sleep in the slow and hesitating manner of a child reading phonetically from a printed page. I soon recognized the words as those of a poem of Tagore's, called "My Prayer," and remembered that a magazine containing the poem had been lying on the bed during the day. When she had finished I wakened her, saying, "Now tell me what you have been dreaming." She answered in her childish way, "I think I do not dream." She went to sleep immediately and again repeated the poem, word for word, without a single mistake. Again I awakened her with the words, "Now tell me what you have been dreaming." And again she answered, "I think I do not dream." I said: "But yes; don't you remember you were just saying, 'When the time comes for me to go'?" (the last line of the poem). "Oh, yes," she said, "I was seeing it, and I think I'll not go to sleep again. It tires me so to see it." While she was awake she had no recollection of having seen the poem and was indeed in her dissociated state quite incapable of understanding its meaning. Asleep, she saw every word as plainly as if the page had been before her eyes. The distorted pictures of dreams are always made of the material which past experiences have furnished and which have in many cases been dropped out of consciousness for years only to rise out of their long oblivion when the conscious mind has been put to sleep. =Unearthing Old Experiences.= However, psychology does not have to wait for buried memories to come forth of their own free will. It has a number of successful ways of summoning them from their hiding-place and helping them across the line into consciousness. In the hands of skilled investigators and therapeutists, hypnosis, hypnoidization, automatic writing, crystal-gazing, abstraction, free association, word-association, and interpretation of dreams have all been repeatedly successful in bringing to light memories which apparently have been for many years completely blotted out of mind. As we become better acquainted with these technical devices we shall find that there are four kinds of experiences whose records are carefully stored away in our minds. Some were always so far from the center of our attention that we could swear they never had been ours; others, although once present in consciousness, were so trivial and unimportant that it seems ridiculous to suppose them conserved; others never came into our waking minds at all and entered our lives only in special states, such as sleep or delirium or dreams. All these we should expect to forget; the astonishing thing is that they ever were conserved. But there is a fourth class that is different. It is made up of experiences that were so vital, so emotional, so closely woven into the fiber of our being that it seems impossible that they ever could be forgotten. Let us look at a few examples of records of all these four kinds of experiences, examples chosen from hundreds of their kind as illustrations of the all-embracing character of buried memories.[21] [Footnote 21: For further examples see Prince, _The Unconscious_; Prince, _The Dissociation of a Personality_, and Hudson, _The Law of Psychic Phenomena_.] =Out of the Corners of Our Eyes.= In the first place, we are much more observing than we imagine. We may be so interested in our own thoughts that details of our environment are entirely lost on the conscious mind, but the subconscious has its eyes open, and its ears. People in hypnosis have been known to repeat verbatim whole passages from newspapers which they had never consciously read. While they were busy with one column, their wide-awake subconscious was devouring the next one, and remembering it. Prince relates the story of a young woman who unconsciously "took in" the details of a friend's appearance: I asked B.C.A. (without warning and after having covered her eyes) to describe the dress of a friend who was present and with whom she had been conversing perhaps some twenty minutes. She was unable to do so beyond saying that he wore dark clothes. I then found that I myself was unable to give a more detailed description of his dress, although we had lunched and been together about two hours. B.C.A. was then asked to write a description automatically. Her hand wrote as follows (she was unaware that her hand was writing): "He has on a dark greenish gray suit, a stripe in it--little rough stripe; black bow cravat; shirt with three little stripes in it; black laced shoes; false teeth; one finger gone; three buttons on his coat." The written description was absolutely correct. The stripes in the coat were almost invisible. I had not noticed his teeth or the loss of a finger and we had to count the buttons to make sure of their number owing to their partial concealment by the folds of the unbuttoned coat. The shoe-strings I am sure under the conditions would have escaped nearly every one's notice.[22] [Footnote 22: Prince: _The Unconscious_, p. 53.] Automatic writing, the method used to uncover this subconscious perception, is a favorite method with some investigators and is often used by Morton Prince. The hand writes without the direction of the personal consciousness and usually without the person's being aware that it is writing. A dissociated person does this very easily; other people can cultivate the ability, and perhaps most of us approach it when we are at the telephone, busily writing or drawing remarkable pictures while the rest of us is engaged in conversation. The present epidemic of the Ouija board shows how many persons there are who are able to switch off the conscious mind and let the subconscious control the muscles that are used in writing. The fact that the writer has no understanding of what he is doing and believes himself directed by some outside power, in no way interferes with the subconscious phenomenon. =Everyday Doings.= Besides perceptions which were originally so far from the focus of attention that the conscious mind never caught them at all, there are the little experiences of everyday life, fleeting thoughts and impressions which occupy us for a minute and then disappear. Every experience is a dynamic fact and no matter how trivial the experience may be or how completely forgotten, it still exists as a part of the personality. An amusing example of the everyday kind of forgotten experience occurred during the writing of this chapter. I wrote a sentence which pleased me very well. This is the sentence: "In the esthetic processes of evolution they [man's desires] have sunk below the surface as soon as formed, and have been covered over by an elastic and snug-fitting consciousness as the skin covers in the tissues and organs of the body." After showing this passage to my collaborator and remarking that this figure had never been used before, I was partly chagrined and partly amused to have her bring me the following sentence from White and Jelliffe: "Consciousness covered over and obscured the inner organs of the psyche just as the skin hides the inner organs of the body from vision." My originality had vanished and I was close to plagiarism. Indeed, if a history of plagiarism could be written, it would probably abound in just such stories. I had read the article containing this sentence only once, about three years before, and had never quoted it or consciously thought of it. It had lain buried for three years, only to come forth as an original idea of my own. Who knows how many times we all do just this thing without catching ourselves in the trick? =Back-Door Memories.= There are other kinds of memories which hide in the subconscious, memories of experiences which have not come in by the front door, but have entered the mind during special states, such as sleep, delirium, intoxication, or hypnosis. What is known as post-hypnotic suggestion is the functioning of a suggestion received during hypnosis and emerging later as an impulse without being recognized as a memory. A man in a hypnotic state is told that at five o'clock he will take off his clothes and go to bed, without remembering that such a suggestion has been given him. He awakens with no recollection of the suggestion, but at five o'clock he suddenly feels impelled to go to bed, even though his unreasonable desire puts him into a highly embarrassing position. The suggestion, to be thus effective, must have been conserved somewhere in his mind outside of consciousness. Suggestions that enter the mind during the normal sleep are also recorded,--a fact that carries a warning to people who are in the habit of talking of all sorts of matters while in the room with sleeping children. I have sometimes suggested to sleeping patients that on waking they will remember and tell me the cause of their symptoms. The following example shows not only the conservation of impressions gained in sleep, but also the sway of forgotten ideas of childhood, still strong in mature years. This young woman, a trained nurse, with many marked symptoms of hysteria, had been asked casually to bring a book from the Public Library. She cried out in consternation, "Oh, no, I am afraid!" After a good deal of urging she finally brought the book, although at the cost of considerable effort. Later, while she was taking a nap, I said to her, "You will not remember that I have talked to you. You will stay asleep while I am talking and while you are asleep there will come to your mind the reasons why you are afraid to go to the Public Library. When you waken, you will tell me all about it." Upon awakening, she said: "Oh, do you know, I can tell you why I have always been afraid to go to the Public Library. While I was in Parochial School, Father ---- used to come in and tell us children to use the books out of the school library and never to go to the Public Library." I questioned her concerning her idea of the reason for such an injunction and what she thought was in the books which she was told not to read. She hesitatingly stated that it was her idea, even in childhood, that the books dealt with topics concerning the tabooed subject of the birth of children and kindred matters. =Smoldering Volcanoes.= Let us now consider those emotional experiences which seem far too compelling to be forgotten, but which may live within us for years without giving any evidence of their existence. Memories like these are apt to be anything but a dead past. Many of my own patients have uncovered emotional memories through simply talking out to me whatever came into their minds, laying aside their critical faculty and letting their minds wander on into whatever paths association led them. This is known as the free-association method, and simple as it seems, is one of the most effective in uncovering memories which have been forgotten for years. One of my patients, a refined, highly educated woman of middle age, had suffered for two years with almost constant nausea. One day, after a long talk, with no suggestion on my part, only an occasional, "What does that remind you of?" she told with great emotion an experience which she had had at eighteen years of age, in which she had for a moment been sexually attracted to a boy friend, but had recoiled as soon as she realized where her impulse was leading her. She had been so horrified at the idea of her degradation, so nauseated at what she considered her sin, that she had put it out of her mind, denied that such a thought had ever been hers, repressed the desire into the subconscious, where it had continued to function unsatisfied, unassimilated with her mature judgments. Her nausea was the symbol of a moral disgust. Physical nausea she was willing to acknowledge, but not this other thing. Upon reciting this old experience, with every sign of the original shame, she cried: "Oh, Doctor! why did you bring this up? I had forgotten it. I haven't thought of it in thirty years." I reminded her that I couldn't bring it up,--I had never known anything about it. With the emotional incoming of this memory and the saner attitude toward it which the mature woman's mind was able to take, the nausea disappeared for good. This case is typical of the psycho-neuroses and we shall have occasion to refer to it again. The present emphasis is on the fact that an emotional memory may be buried for many years while it still retains the power of reappearing in more or less disguised manifestation. =Repressed Memories.= If we ask how so burning a memory could escape from the consciousness of a grown woman, we are driven to the conclusion that this forgetting can be the result of no mere quiet fading away, but that there must have been some active force at work which kept the memory from coming into awareness. It was not lost. It was not passive. Out of sight was not out of mind. There must have been a reason for its expulsion from the personal consciousness. In fact, we find that there is a reason. We find that whenever a vital emotional experience disappears from view, it is because it is too painful to be endured in consciousness. Nor is it ever the pain of an impersonal experience or even the thought of what some one else has done to us that drives a memory out of mind. As a matter of fact, we never expel a memory except when it bears directly on ourselves and on our own opinion of ourselves. We can stand almost anything else, but we cannot stand an idea that does not fit in with our ideal for ourselves. This is not the pious ideal that we should like to live up to and that we hope to attain some day, not the ideal that we think we ought to have--like never speaking ill of others or never being selfish--but the secret picture that each of us has, locked away within him, the specifications of ourselves reduced to their lowest terms, below which we cannot go. Energized by the instinct of positive self-feeling, and organized with the moral sentiments which we have acquired from education and the ideals of society, especially those acquired in early childhood, this ideal of ourselves becomes incorporated into our conscience and is an absolute necessity for our happiness. We have found that when two emotions clash, one drives out the other. So in this case, the woman's positive self-feeling of self-respect, combined with disgust, drove from the field that other emotion of the reproductive instinct which was trying to get expression. Speaking technically, one repressed the other. The woman said to herself, "No, I never could have had such a thought," and promptly forgot it. Needless to say, this kind of handling did not kill the impulse. Buried in the depths of her soul, it continued to live like a live coal, until in later years, fanned by the wind of some new experience, it burst into flame. In this case the wish had originally flashed into awareness for an instant, but very often the impulse never gets into consciousness at all. The upper layers of the subconscious, where the acquired ideals live, automatically work to keep down any desires which are thought to be out of keeping with the person as he knows himself. He then would emphatically deny that such desires had ever had any place in his life. Freud has called this repressing force the psychic censor. To get into consciousness, any idea from the subconscious must be able to pass this censor. This force seems to be a combination of the self-regarding and herd-instincts, which dispute with the instinct for reproduction the right to "the common path" for expression. A considerable part of any person's subconscious is made up of memories, wishes, impulses, which are repressed in this way. Of course any instinctive desire may be repressed, but it is easy to understand why the most frequently denied impulse, the instinct of reproduction, against whose urgency society has cultivated so strong a feeling, should be repressed more frequently than any other.[23] [Footnote 23: See foot-note, p. 145, Chap. VII.] =Past and Present.= It matters not, then, in what state experiences come to us, whether in sleep or delirium, intoxication or hypnosis, or in the normal waking condition. They are conserved and may exert great influence on our normal lives. It matters not whether the experiences be full of meaning and emotion or whether they be so slight as to pass unnoticed, they are conserved. It matters not whether these experiences be mere sense-impressions, or inner thoughts, whether they be unacknowledged hopes or fears, undesirable moods and unworthy desires or fine aspirations and lofty ideals. They are conserved and they may at a later day rise up to bless or to curse us long after we had thought them buried in the past. The present is the product of the past. It is the past plus an element of choice which keeps us from settling down in the despair of fatalism and enables us to do something toward making the present that is, a help and not a stumbling-block to the present that is to be. SOME HABITS OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS =The Association of Ideas.= It is only by something akin to poetic license that we can speak of lower and higher strata of mind. When we carry over the language of material things into the less easily pictured psychic realm, it is sometimes well to remind ourselves that figures of speech, if taken too literally, are more misleading than illuminating. When we speak of the deep-laid instinctive lower levels of mind and the higher acquired levels, we must not imagine that these strata are really laid in neat, mutually exclusive layers, one on top of the other in the chambers of the mind. Nor must we imagine the mental elements of instinct, idea, and memory as jumbled together in chaotic confusion, or in scattered isolated units. As a matter of fact, the best word to picture the inside of our minds is the word "group." We do not know just how ideas and instincts can group themselves together, but we do know that by some arrangement of brain paths and nerve-connections, the laws of association of ideas and of habit take our mental experiences and organize them into more or less permanent systems. Instinctive emotions tend to organize themselves around ideas to form sentiments; ideas or sentiments, which through repetition or emotion are associated together, tend to stay together in groups or complexes which act as a whole; complexes which pertain to the same interests tend to bind themselves into larger systems or constellations, forming moods, or sides to one's character. It is not highly important to differentiate in every case a sentiment from a complex, or a complex from a constellation, especially as many writers use "complex" as the generic term for all sorts of groups; but a general understanding of the much-used word "complex" is necessary for a comprehension of modern literature on psychology, psychotherapy or general education. "=What Is a Complex=?" Reduced to its lowest terms, a complex is a group. It may be simply a group of associated movements, like lacing one's shoes or knitting; it may be a group of movements and ideas, like typewriting or piano-playing, which through repetition have become automatic or subconscious; it may be merely a group of ideas, such as the days of the week, the alphabet or the multiplication table. In all these types it is repetition working through the law of habit that ties the ideas and movements together into an organic whole. Usually, however, the word complex is reserved for psychic elements that are bound together by emotion. In this sense, a complex is an emotional thought-habit. Frink's definition, which is one of the simplest, recognizes only this emotional type: "A complex is a system of connected ideas, having a strong emotional tone, and displaying a tendency to produce or influence conscious thought and action in a definite and predetermined direction."[24] [Footnote 24: Frink: "What Is a Complex?" _Journal American Medical Assoc_., Vol. LXII, No. 12, Mar. 21, 1914.] Emotion and repetition are the great welders of complexes. Emotion is the strongest cement in the world. A single emotional experience suffices to bind together ideas that were originally as far apart as the poles. Sometimes a complex includes not only ideas, movements, and emotions, but physiological disturbances and sensations. Some people cannot go aboard a stationary ship without vomiting, nor see a rose, even though it prove to be a wax one, without the sneezing and watery eyes of hay-fever. This is what is known as a "conditioned reflex." Past associations plus fear have so welded together idea and bodily manifestation that one follows the other as a matter of course, long after the real cause is removed. In such ways innumerable nervous symptoms arise. The same laws which form healthy complexes, and, indeed, which make all education possible, may thus be responsible for the unhealthy mal-adaptive association-habits which lie back of a neurosis. Fortunately, a knowledge of this fact furnishes the clue to the re-education that brings recovery. A complex may be either conscious or unconscious, but as it usually happens that either all or part of its elements are below the surface, the word is oftenest used to mean those buried systems of the subconscious mind that influence thought or behavior without themselves being open to scrutiny. It is these buried complexes, memory groups, gathered through the years of experience, that determine action in uniform and easily prophesied directions. Every individual has a definite complex about religion, about politics, about patriotism, about business, and it is the sum of these buried complexes which makes up his total personality. =Displacement.= Association or grouping is, then, an intrinsic power of mind; but as all life seems to be built on opposites--light and darkness, heat and cold, love and hate--so mind, which is capable of association, is capable also of displacement or the splitting apart of elements which belong together. There is such a thing as the simple breaking up of complexes, when education or experience or neglect separate ideas and emotions which had been previously welded together; but displacement is another matter. Here there is still a path between idea and emotion; they still belong to the same complex, but the connection is lost sight of. The impulse or emotion attaches itself to another substitute idea which is related to the first but which is more acceptable to the personality. Sometimes the original idea is forgotten; repressed, or dissociated into the subconscious, as in anxiety neurosis; and sometimes it is merely shorn of its emotional interest and remembered as an unrelated or insignificant idea, as in compulsion neurosis. =Transference.= Another kind of displacement which seems hard to believe possible until it is repeatedly encountered in intelligent human beings is the process called transference, by which everybody at some time or other acts toward the people he meets, not according to rational standards but according to old unconscious attitudes toward other people. Each of us carries, within, subconscious pictures of the people who surrounded us when we were children; and now when we meet a new person we are likely unconsciously to say to ourselves--not, "This person has eyebrows like my mother, or a voice like my nurse," or, "This person bosses me around as my father used to do," but, "This is my mother, this is my nurse, this is my father." Whereupon we may proceed to act toward that person very much as we did toward the original person in childhood. Transference is subconsciously identifying one person with another and behaving toward the one as if he were that other. Analysis has discovered that many a man's hostile attitude toward the state or religion or authority in general, is nothing more than this kind of displacement of his childhood's attitude toward authority in the person of his perhaps too-domineering father. Many a woman has married a husband, not for what he was in himself, but because she unconsciously identified him with her childish image of her father. Students of human nature have always recognized the kind of displacement which transfers the sense of guilt from some major act or attitude to a minor one which is more easily faced, just as _Lady Macbeth_ felt that by washing her hands she might free herself from her deeper stain. This is a frequent mechanism in the psychoneuroses--not that neurotics are likely to have committed any great crime, but that they feel subconsciously that some of their wishes or thoughts are wicked. =The Phenomena of Dissociation.= When an idea or a complex, a perception or a memory is either temporarily or permanently shoved out of consciousness into the subconscious, it is said to be dissociated. When we are asleep, the part of us that is usually conscious is dissociated and the submerged part takes the stage. When we forget our surroundings in concentration or absent-mindedness, a part of us is dissociated and our friends say that we are "not all there," or as popular slang has it, "Nobody home." When a mood or system of complexes drives out all other moods, one becomes "a different person." But if this normal dissociation is carried a step farther, we may lose the power to put ourselves together again, and then we may truly be said to be dissociated. Almost any part of us is subject to this kind of apparent loss. In neurasthenia the happy, healthy complexes which have hitherto dominated our lives may be split off and left lying dormant in the subconscious; or the power of will or concentration may seem to be gone. In hysteria we may seem to lose the ability to see or feel or walk, or we may lose for the time all recollection of certain past events, or of whole periods of our lives, or of everything but one system of ideas which monopolizes the field of attention. Sometimes great systems of memories, instincts, and complexes are alternately shifted in and out of gear, leaving first one kind of person on top and then another.[25] Stevenson's _Dr. Jekyll_ and _Mr. Hyde_ is not so fantastic a character as he seems. Any one who doubts the ability of the mind to split itself up into two or more distinct personalities, entertaining totally different conceptions of life, disliking each other, playing tricks on each other, writing notes to each other, and carrying on a perpetual feud as each tries to get the upper hand, should read Morton Prince's "Dissociation of a Personality," a fascinating account of his famous case, Miss Beauchamp. [Footnote 25: When a memory or system of memories is suddenly lost from consciousness the person is said to be suffering from amnesia or pathological loss of memory.] =Internal Warfare.= Conflict, often accentuated by shock or fatigue, represses or drives down certain ideas, perceptions, wishes, memories, or complexes into the subconscious, where they remain, sometimes dormant and passive but often dynamic, emotional, carrying on an over-excited, automatic activity, freed from the control of reason and the modifying influence of other ideas, and able to cause almost any kind of disturbance. So long as there is team-work between the various parts of our personality we are able to act as a unit; but just as soon as we break up into factions with no communication between the warring camps, so soon do we become quite incapable of coördination or adjustment, like a nation torn by civil war. Many of the seemingly fantastic and bizarre mental phenomena of which a human being is capable are the result of this kind of disintegration. However, nature has a remarkable power for righting herself, and it is only under an accumulation of unfortunate circumstances that there appears a neurosis, which is nothing more than a functioning of certain parts of the personality with all the rest dissociated. We shall later inquire more fully into the causes that lead up to such a result and shall find that the mechanisms involved are these processes of organization and disorganization by which mind is wont to group together or separate the various elements within its borders. SUMMARY Gathering up our impressions, we find a number of outstanding qualities which we may summarize in the following way: The Subconscious is: _1 Vast yet Explorable_ The fraction that could accurately show the relation of the conscious to the unconscious part of ourselves would have such a small numerator and such a huge denominator that we might well wonder where consciousness came in at all.[26] Some one has likened the subconscious to the great far-reaching depths of the Mammoth Cave, and consciousness to the tiny, flickering lamp which we carry to light our way in the darkness. However, ever the subconscious mind is becoming explorable, and it may be that science is giving the tiny lamp the revealing power of a great searchlight. [Footnote 26: "The entire active life of the individual may be represented by a fraction, the numerator of which is any particular moment, the denominator is the rich inheritance of the past."--Jelliffe: "The Technique of Psychoanalysis," _Psychoanalytic Review,_ Vol. III, No. 2, p. 164.] _2 Ancient yet Modern_ The lowest layers of the subconscious, represented by the instincts, are as old as life itself, with their lineage reaching back in direct and unbroken line to the first living things on the ooze of the ocean floor. The higher strata are more modern, full, and accurate records of our own lifetime, beginning with our first cry and ending with to-day's thoughts. _3 Primitive yet Refined_ The lowest level, representing the past of the race, is primitive like a savage, and infantile, like a child; it is instinctive, unalterable, and universal; it knows no restraint, no culture, and no prudence. The higher level, the storehouse of individual experience, bears the marks of acquired ideals, of cultivated refinement, and represents among other things the precepts and prudence of civilized society. _4 Emotional yet Intellectual_ Our records of the past are not dead archives, but living forces--persistent, urging, dynamic and emotional. They give meaning to new experiences, color our judgments, shape our beliefs, determine our interests, and, if wrongly handled, make their way into consciousness as neurotic symptoms. However, the subconscious is not all emotion. It is a mind capable of elaborate thought, able to calculate, to scheme, to answer doubts, to solve problems, to fabricate the purposeful, fantastic allegories of dreams and to create from mere knowledge the inspired works of genius. But the subconscious has one great limitation, it cannot reason inductively. Given a premise, this mind can reason as unerringly as the most skilful logician; that is, it can reason deductively, but it cannot arrive at a general conclusion from a number of particular facts. However, except for inductive reasoning and awareness, the subconscious seems to possess all the attributes of conscious mind and is in fact an intellectual force to be reckoned with. _5 Organized yet Disorganizable_ The subconscious mind is a highly organized institution, but like all such institutions it is liable to disorganization when rent by internal dissension. Ordinarily it keeps its ideas and emotions, its complexes and moods in fairly accurate order, but when upset by emotional warfare, it gets its records confused and falls into a chaotic state which makes regular business impossible. _6 Masterful yet Obedient_ The subconscious, which is master of the body, is in normal life the servant of consciousness. One of its outstanding qualities is suggestibility. Since it cannot reason from particulars to a general conclusion it takes any statement given it by consciousness, believes it implicitly and acts accordingly. The pilot wheel of the ship is, after all, the conscious mind, insignificant in size when compared with the great mass of the vessel, but all-powerful in its ability to direct the course of the voyage. Nervous persons are people who are too much under the sway of the subconscious; so, too, are some geniuses, who narrowly escape a neurosis by finding a more useful outlet for their subconscious energies. While the poet, the inventor, and the neurotic are likely to be too largely controlled by the subconscious, the average man is to a greater extent ruled by the conscious mind; and the highest type of genius is the man whose conscious and subconscious minds work together in perfect harmony, each up to its full power. If, as many believe, the next great strides of science are to be in this direction, it may pay some of us to be pioneers in learning how to make use of these undeveloped riches of memory, organization, and surplus energy. The subconscious, which can on occasion behave like a very devil within us, is, when rightly used, our greatest asset, the source of powers whose appearance in the occasional individual has been considered almost superhuman, but which prove to be characteristically human, the common inheritance of the race of man. CHAPTER VI _In which we learn why it pays to be cheerful_ BODY AND MIND THE MISSING LINK =Ancient Knowledge.= People have always known that mind in some strange way carries its moods over into the body. The writer of the Book of Proverbs tells us, from that far-off day, that "A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones." Jesus in His healing ministry always emphasized the place of faith in the cure of the body. "Thy faith hath made thee whole," is a frequent word on His lips, and ever since His day people have been rediscovering the truth that faith, even in the absence of a worthy object, does often make whole. Faith in the doctor, the medicine, the charm, the mineral waters, the shrine, and in the good God, has brought health to many thousands of sufferers. People have always reckoned on this bodily result from a mental state. They have intuitively known better than to tell a sick person that he is looking worse, but they have not always known why. They have known that a fit of anger is apt to bring on a headache, but they have not stopped to look for the reason, or if they have, they have often gotten themselves into a tangle. This is because there has always been, until recently, a missing link. Now the link has been found. After the last chapter, it will not be hard to understand that this connecting link, this go-between of body and mind, is nothing else than the subconscious mind. When we remember that it has the double power of knowing our thoughts and of controlling our bodies, it is not hard to see how an idea can translate itself into a pain, nor to realize with new vividness the truth of the statement that healthy mental states make for health, and unhealthy mental states for illness. =Suggestion and Emotion.= There are still many gaps in our knowledge of the ways of the subconscious, but investigation has thrown a good deal of light on the problem. Two of the principles already discussed are sufficient to explain most of the phenomena. These are, first, that the subconscious is amenable to control by suggestion, and secondly, that it is greatly influenced by emotion. Tracing back the principles behind any example of the power of mind over body, one finds at the root of the matter either a suggestion or an emotion, or both. If, then, the stimulating and depressing effects of mental states are to be understood, the first Step must be a fuller understanding of the laws governing suggestion and emotion. THE CONTAGION OF IDEAS One of the most important points about the subconscious mind is its openness to suggestion. It likes to believe what it is told and to act accordingly. The conscious mind, too,--proud seat of reason though it may be,--shares this habit of accepting ideas without demanding too much proof of their truth. Even at his best, man is extremely susceptible to the contagion of ideas. Most of us are even less immune to this mental contagion than we are to colds or influenza; for ideas are catching. They are such subtle, insinuating things that they creep into our minds without our knowing it at all; and once there, they are as powerful as most germs. Let a person faint in a crowded room, and a good per cent. of the women present will begin to fan themselves. The room has suddenly become insufferably close. After we have read half a hundred times that Ivory soap floats, a fair proportion of the population is likely to be seized with desire for a soap that floats,--not because they have any good reason for doing so, but simply because the suggestion has "taken." As for the harbingers of spring, they are neither the birds nor the wild flowers, but the blooming windows of the milliners, which successfully suggest in wintry February that summer is coming, and that felt and fur are out of season. It is evident that all advertising is suggestion. The training of children, also, if it is done in the right way, is largely a matter of suggestion. The little child who falls down and bumps his head is very likely to cry if met with a sympathetic show of concern, while the same child will often take his mishaps as a joke if his elders meet them with a laugh or a diverting remark. Unlucky is the child whose mother does not know, either consciously or intuitively, that example and contagion are more powerful--and more pleasant--than command and prohibition. =Everything Suggestive.= Human beings are constantly communicating, one to another. Sometimes they "get over" an idea by means of words, but often they do it in more subtle ways,--by the elevation of an eyelid, the gesture of a hand, composure of manner in a crisis, or a laugh in a delicate situation. A suggestion is merely an idea passed from one person to another, an idea that is accepted with conviction and acted upon, even though there may be no logic, no reason, no proof of its truth. It is an influence that takes hold of the mind and works itself out to fulfilment, quite apart from its worth or reasonableness. Of course, logical persuasion and argument have their place in the communication of ideas; an idea may be conveyed by other ways than suggestion. But while suggestion is not everything, it is equally true that there is suggestion in everything. The doctor may give a patient a very rational explanation of his case, but the doubtful shake of the head or the encouraging look of his eye is quite likely to color the patient's general impression. The eyes of our subconscious are always open, and they are constantly getting impressions, subtle suggestions that are implied rather than expressed. =Abnormal Suggestibility.= While everybody is suggestible, nervous people are abnormally so. It may be, as McDougall suggests, that they have so large an amount of submission or negative self-feeling in their make-up that they believe anything, just because some one else says it is true. Sometimes it is lack of knowledge that makes us gullible, and at other times the cause of our suggestibility is failure to use the knowledge that we have. Sometimes our ideas are locked away in air-tight compartments with no interaction between them. The psychologists tell us that suggestion is greatly favored by a narrowing of the attention, a "contraction of the field of consciousness," a dissociation of other ideas through concentration. This all simply means that we forget to let our common sense bring to bear counter ideas that might challenge a false one; or that worry--a veritable "spasm of the attention"--has fixed upon an idea to the exclusion of all others; or that through fatigue or the dissociation of sleep or hypnosis or hysteria, our reasoning powers have been locked out and for the time being are unable to act. It was through experiments on hypnotized subjects that scientists first learned of the suggestibility of the subconscious mind. In hypnosis a person can be made to believe almost anything and to do almost anything compatible with the safety and the moral sense of the individual. The instinct of self-preservation will not allow the most deeply hypnotized person to do anything dangerous to himself; and the moral complexes, laid in the subconscious, never permit a person to perform in earnest an act of which the waking moral sense would disapprove. Within these limits, a person in the dissociated hypnotic state can be made to accept almost any suggestion. We found in the last chapter how open to suggestion is a person in normal sleep. Of the dissociation of hysteria we shall have occasion to speak in later chapters. Although all these special states heighten suggestibility, we must not forget how susceptible each of us is in his normal waking state. =Living Its Faith.= All this gathers meaning only when we realize that ideas are dynamic. They always tend to work themselves out to fulfilment. The subconscious no sooner gets a conviction than it tries to act it out. Of course it can succeed only up to a certain limit. If it believes the stomach to have cancer, it cannot make cancer, but it can make the stomach misbehave. One of my patients, on hearing of a case of brain-tumor immediately imagined this to be her trouble, and developed a pain in her head. She could not manufacture a tumor, but she could manufacture what she believed to be the symptoms. There was another patient who was supposed to have brain-tumor. This young woman seemed to have lost almost entirely the power to keep her equilibrium in walking. Her center of gravity was never over her feet, but away out in space, so that she was continually banging from one side of the room to the other, only saving herself from injury by catching at the wall or the furniture with her hands. Several physicians who had been interested in the case had found the symptoms strongly suggestive of brain-tumor. There were, however, certain unmistakable earmarks of hysteria, such as childlike bland indifference to the awkwardness of the gait which was a grotesque caricature of several brain and spinal-cord diseases, with no accurate picture of any single one. This was evidently a case, not of actual loss of power but a dissociation of the memory-picture of walking. The patient was a trained nurse and knew in a general way the symptoms of brain-tumor. When the suggestion of brain-tumor had fixed itself in her mind she was able subconsciously to manufacture what she believed to be the symptoms of that disease. By injecting a keen sense of disapprobation and skepticism into the hitherto placidly accepted state of disability, by flashing a mirror on the physical and moral attitudes which she was assuming, I was able to rob the pathological complex of its (altogether unconscious) pleasurable feeling-tone, and to restore to its former strength and poise a personality of exceptional native worth and beauty. After a few weeks at my house she was able to walk like a normal person and went back to her work, for good. We have already learned enough about the inner self to see in a faint way how it works out its ideas. Since the subconscious mind runs the bodily machinery, since it regulates digestion, the building up of tissue, circulation, respiration, glandular secretion, muscular tonus, and every other process pertaining to nutrition and growth, it is not difficult to see how an idea about any of these matters can work itself out into a fact. A thought can furnish the mental machinery needed to fulfil the thought. Some one catches the suggestion: "Concentration is hard on the brain. It soon brings on brain-fag and headache." Not knowing facts to the contrary, the suggestible mind accepts the proposition. Then one day, after a little concentration, the idea begins to work. Whereupon the autonomic nervous system tightens up the blood-vessels that regulate the local blood supply, too much blood stays in the head, and lo, it aches! The next time, the suggestion comes with greater force, and soon the habit is formed,--all the result of an idea. It is a good thing to remember that constant thought about any part of the body never fails to send an over-supply of blood to that part; of course that means congestion and pain. =Hands Off!= By sending messages directly to an organ through the nerve-centers or by changing circulation, the subconscious director of our bodies can make any part of us misbehave in a number of ways. All it needs is a suggestion of an interfering thought about an organ. As we have insisted before, the subconscious cannot stand interference. Sadler well says: "Man can live at the equator or exist at the poles. He can eat almost anything and everything, but he cannot long stand self-contemplation. The human mind can accomplish wonders in the way of work, but it is soon wrecked when directed into the channels of worry."[27] In other words, hands off!--or rather, minds off! Don't get ideas that make you think about your body. The surest way to disarrange any function is to think about it. It is a stout heart that will not change its beat with a frequent finger on the pulse, and a hearty stomach that will not "act up" under attention. "Judicious neglect" is a good motto for most occasions. Take no anxious thought if you would be well. Know enough about your body to counteract false suggestions; fulfil the common-sense laws of hygiene,--eight hours in bed, plenty of exercise and fresh air, and three square meals a day. Then forget all about it. "A mental representation is already a sensation,"[28] and we have enough legitimate sensations without manufacturing others. [Footnote 27: Sadler: _Physiology of Faith and Fear_.] [Footnote 28: DuBois: _Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders_.] =From Real Life.= Startling indeed are the tricks that we can play on ourselves by disregarding these laws. A patient who was unnecessarily concerned about his stomach once came to me in great alarm, exhibiting a distinct, well-defined swelling about the size of a match-box in the region of his stomach. I looked at it, laughed, and told him to forget it. Whereupon it promptly disappeared. The first segment of the rectus muscle had tied itself up into a knot, under the stimulus of anxious attention. Another patient appeared at my door one day saying, "Look here!" Examination showed that her abdomen was swollen to the size of more than a six-months pregnancy. As it happened, this woman had a friend who a short time before had developed a pseudo, or hysterical pregnancy which continued for several months. My patient, accepting the suggestion, was prepared to imitate her. I gave her a punch or two and told her to go and dress for luncheon. In the afternoon she had returned to her normal size. Another woman, suffering from chronic constipation, was firmly convinced that her bowels could not move without a cathartic, which I refused to give. However, I did give her some strychnine pills, carefully explaining that they were not for her intestines and that they would have no effect there. She did not believe me, and promptly began to have an evacuation every day. It seems that sometimes two wrong ideas are equal to a right one. If doctors fully realized the power of suggestion, they would be more careful than they sometimes are about suggesting symptoms by the questions they ask their patients. A patient of mine with locomotor-ataxia suffered from the usual train of symptoms incident to that disease. It turned out, however, that many of the symptoms had been suggested by the questions of former physicians who had asked him whether he had certain symptoms and certain disabilities. The patient had answered in the negative and then promptly developed the suggested symptoms. When I told him what had happened, these false symptoms disappeared leaving only those which had a real physical foundation. Another patient, a young girl, complained of a definite localized pain in her arm, and told me that she was suffering from angina pectoris. As we do not expect to find this disease in a young person, I asked her where she got such an idea. "Dr. ---- told me so last May." "Did you feel the pain in this same place before that time?" I asked. She thought a minute and then answered: "Why no, I had a pain around my heart but I did not notice it in my arm until after that consultation." The wise physician lets his patients describe their own symptoms without suggesting others by the implication of his questions. =Autosuggestion.= Of course we must remember that an idea cannot always work itself out immediately. Conditions are not always ripe. It often lies fallow a long time, buried in the subconscious, only to come up again as an autosuggestion, a suggestion from the self to the self. If some one tells us that nervous insomnia is disastrous, and we believe it, we shall probably store up the idea until the next time that chance conditions keep us awake. Then the autosuggestion "bobs up," common sense is side-tracked, we toss and worry--and of course stay awake. An autosuggestion often repeated becomes the strongest of suggestions, successfully opposing most outside ideas that would counteract it,--reason enough for seeing to it that our autosuggestions are of the healthful variety. At the base of every psycho-neurosis is an unhealthful suggestion. This is never the ultimate cause. There are other forces at work. But the suggestion is the material out of which those other forces weave the neurosis. Suggestibility is one of the earmarks of nervousness. A sensible and sturdy spirit, stable enough to maintain its equilibrium, is a fairly good antidote to attack. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." WHY FEELINGS COUNT =The Emotions Again.= It seems impossible to discuss any psychological principle without finally coming back to the subject of emotions. It truly seems that all roads lead to the instincts and to the emotions which drive them. And so, as we follow the trail of suggestion, we suddenly turn a corner and find ourselves back at our starting-point--the emotional life. Like all other ideas, suggestions get tied up with emotions to form complexes, of which the driving-power is the emotion. If we look into our emotional life, we find, besides the true emotions, with which we have become familiar in Chapter III, a great number of feelings or feeling-tones which color either pleasurably or painfully our emotions and our ideas. On the one hand there are pleasure, joy, exaltation, courage, cheer, confidence, satisfaction; and on the other, pain, sorrow, depression, apprehension, gloom, distrust, and dissatisfaction. Every complex which is laid away in our subconscious is tinted, either slightly or intensely, with its specific feeling-tone. =Emotions--Tonic and Poisonous.= All this is most important because of one vital fact; joyful emotions invigorate, and sorrowful emotions depress; pleasurable emotions stimulate, and painful emotions burden; satisfying emotions revitalize, and unsatisfying emotions sap the strength. In other words, our bodies are made for courage, confidence, and cheer. Any other atmosphere puts them out of their element, handicapped by abnormal conditions for which they were never fashioned. We were written in a major key, and when we try to change over into minor tones we get sadly out of tune. There is another factor; painful emotions make us fall to pieces, while pleasant emotions bind us together. We can see why this is so when we remember that powerful emotions like fear and anger tend to dissociate all but themselves, to split up the mind into separate parts and to force out of consciousness everything but their own impulse. Morton Prince in his elaborate studies of the cases of multiple personality, Miss Beauchamp and B.C.A., found repeatedly that he had only to hypnotize the patient and replace painful, depressing complexes by healthy, happy ones to change her from a weak, worn-out person, complaining of fatigue, insomnia, and innumerable aches and pains, into a vigorous woman, for the time being completely well. On this point he says: Exalting emotions have an intense synthesizing effect, while depressing emotions have a disintegrating effect. With the inrushing of depressive memories or ideas ... there is suddenly developed a condition of fatigue, ill-being and disintegration, followed after waking by a return or accentuation of all the neurasthenic symptoms. If on the other hand, exalting ideas and memories are introduced and brought into the limelight of attention, there is almost a magical reversal of processes. The patient feels strong and energetic, the neurasthenic symptoms disappear and he exhibits a capacity for sustained effort. He becomes re-vitalized, so to speak.[29] [Footnote 29: Prince: _Psycho-therapeutics_, Chap. I.] In cases like this the needed strength and energy are not lost; they are merely side-tracked, but the person feels as weak as though he were physically ill. BODILY RESPONSE TO EMOTIONAL STATES =Secretions.= Let us look more carefully into some of the physiological processes involved in emotional changes. Among the most apparent of bodily responses are the various external secretions. Tears, the secretion of the lachrymal glands in response to an emotion, are too common a phenomenon to arouse comment. It is common knowledge that clammy hands and a dry mouth betray emotion. Every nursing mother knows that she dares not become too disturbed lest her milk should dry up or change in character. Most people have experienced an increase in urine in times of excitement; recently physiologists have discovered the presence of sugar in the urine of students at the time of athletic contests and difficult examinations.[30] We have seen what an important role the various internal secretions, such as the adrenal and thyroid secretions play in fitting the body for flight and combat, and how large a part fear and anger have in their production. Constant over-production of these secretions through chronic states of worry is responsible for many a distressing symptom. [Footnote 30: Cannon.] Most graphic evidence of the disturbance of secretions by emotion is found in the response of the salivary and gastric glands to painful or pleasurable thinking. As these are the secretions which play the largest part in the digestive processes, they lead us naturally to our next heading. =Digestion.= Everybody knows that appetizing food makes the mouth water, but not everybody realizes that it makes the stomach water also. Nor do we often realize the vital place that this watering has in taking care of our food. "Well begun is half-done," is literally true of digestion. A good flow of saliva brings the food into contact with the taste-buds in the tongue. Taste sends messages to the nerve-centers in the medulla oblongata; these centers in turn flash signals to the stomach glands, which immediately "get busy" preparing the all-important gastric juice. It takes about five minutes for this juice to be made ready, and so it happens that in five minutes after the first taste, or even in some cases after the first smell, the stomach is pouring forth its "appetite juice" which determines all the rest of the digestive process, in intestines as well as in stomach. Experiments on dogs and cats by Pawlow, Cannon, and others have shown what fear and anger and even mildly unpleasant emotions do to the whole digestive process. Cannon tells of a dog who produced 66.7 cubic centimeters of pure gastric juice in the twenty minutes following five minutes of sham feeding (feeding in which food is swallowed and then dropped out of an opening in the esophagus into a bucket instead of into the stomach). Although there was no food in the stomach, the juice was produced by the enjoyment of the taste and the thought of it. On another day, after this dog had been infuriated by a cat, and then pacified, the sham feeding was given again. This time, although the dog ate eagerly, he produced only 9 cubic centimeters of gastric juice, and this rich in mucus. Evidently a good appetite and attractively served food are not more important than a cheerful mind. Spicy table talk, well mixed with laughter, is better than all the digestive tablets in the world. What is true of stomach secretions is equally true of stomach contractions. "The pleasurable taking of food" is a necessity if the required contractions of stomach and intestines are to go forward on schedule time. A little extra dose of adrenalin from a mild case of depression or worry is enough to stop all movements for many minutes. What a revelation on many a case of nervous dyspepsia! The person who dubbed it "Emotional Dyspepsia" had facts on his side. =Circulation.= It is not the heart only that pumps the blood through the body. The tiny muscles of the smallest blood-vessels, by their elasticity are of the greatest importance in maintaining an even flow, and this is especially influenced by fear and depression. Blushing, pallor, cold hands and feet, are circulatory disturbances based largely on emotions. Better than a hot-water bottle or electric pads are courage and optimism. A patient of mine laughingly tells of an incident which she says happened a number of years ago, but which I have forgotten. She says that she asked me one night as she carried her hot-water bottle to bed, "Doctor, what makes cold feet?" and that I lightly answered "Cowardice!" Whereupon she threw away her beloved water-bag and has never needed it since. There is a disturbance of the circulation which results in very marked swelling and redness of the affected part. This is known as angio-neurotic edema, or nervous swelling. I do not have to go farther than my own person for an example of this phenomenon. When I was a young woman I taught school and went home every day for luncheon. One day at luncheon, some one of the family criticized me severely. I went back to school very angry. Before I entered the school-room, the principal handed me some books which she had ordered for me. They were not at all the books I wanted, and that upset me still more. As I went into the schoolroom, I found that my face was swollen until my eyes were almost shut; it was a bright red and covered with purplish blotches. My fingers were swollen so that I could not bend the joints in the slightest degree. It was a day or two before the disturbance disappeared, and the whole of it was the result of anger. We hear much to-day about high blood pressure. They say that a man is as old as his arteries, and now it is known that the health of the arteries depends largely on blood pressure. Since this is a matter that can be definitely measured at any minute, we have an easy way of noting the remarkable effect of shifting emotions. Sadler tells of an ex-convict with a blood pressure of 190 millimeters. It seems that he was worrying over possible rearrest. On being reassured on this point, his blood pressure began to drop within a few minutes, falling 20 mm. in three hours, and 35 mm. by the following day. =Muscular Tone.= A force that affects circulation, blood pressure, respiration, nutrition of cells, secretion, and digestion, can hardly fail to have a marked effect on the tone of the muscles, internal as well as external. When we remember that heart, stomach, and intestines are made of muscular tissue, to say nothing of the skeletal muscles, we begin to realize how important is muscular tone for bodily health. Over and over again have I demonstrated that a courageous mind is the best tonic. Perhaps an example from my "flat-footed" patients will be to the point. One woman, the young mother of a family, came to me for a nervous trouble. Besides this, she had suffered for seven or eight years from severe pains in her feet and had been compelled to wear specially made shoes prescribed by a Chicago orthopedist. The shoes, however, did not seem to lessen the pain. After an ordinary day's occupation, she could not even walk across the floor at dinner-time. A walk of two blocks would incapacitate her for many days. She was convinced that her feet could never be cured and came to me only on account of nervous trouble. On the day of her arrival she flung herself down on the couch, saying that she would like to go away from everybody, where the children would never bother her again. She was sure nobody loved her and she wanted to die. Within three weeks, in ordinary shoes, this woman tramped nine miles up Mount Wilson and the next day tramped down again. Her attitude had changed from that of irritable fretfulness to one of buoyant joy, and with the moral change had come new strength in the muscles. The death of her husband has since made it necessary for her to support the family, and she is now on her feet from eight to fourteen hours a day, a constant source of inspiration to all about her, and no more weary than the average person. Flabbiness in the muscles often causes this trouble with the feet. "The arches of the foot are maintained by ligaments between the bones, supported by muscle tendons which prevent undue stretching of the ligaments and are a protection against flat-foot."[31] Muscle tissue has an abundant blood supply, while ligaments have very little and soon lose their resiliency if unsupported. Any lack of tone in the calf-muscles throws the weight on the less resistant ligaments and on the cartilages placed as cushions between the bony structures of the arch. This is what causes the pain.[32] [Footnote 31: Grey's Anatomy--"The Articulations."] [Footnote 32: Actual loss of the arch by downward displacement of the bones cannot be overcome by restoring muscle-tone. The majority of so-called cases of flatfoot are, however, in the stage amenable to psychic measures.] Flat-footedness is only one result of weak muscles. Eye-strain is another; ptosis, or falling of the organs, is another. In a majority of cases the best treatment for any of these troubles is an understanding attempt to go to the root of the matter by bracing up the whole mental tone. The most scientific oculists do not try to correct eye trouble due to muscular insufficiency by any special prisms or glasses. They know that the eyes will right themselves when the general health and the general spirits improve. I have found by repeated experience with nervous patients that it takes only a short time for people who have been unable to read for months or years to regain their old faculty. So remarkable is the power of mind. SUMMARY We have found that the gap between the body and the mind is not so wide as it seems, and that it is bridged by the subconscious mind, which is at once the master of the body and the servant of consciousness. In recording the physical effects of suggestion and emotion, we have not taken time to describe the galvanometers, the weighing-machines and all the other apparatus used in the various laboratory tests; but enough has been said to show that when doctors and psychologists speak of the effect of mind on body, they are dealing with definite facts and with laws capable of scientific proof. We have emphasized the fact that downcast and fearful moods have an immediate effect on the body; but after all, most people know this already. What they do not know is the real cause of the mood. When a nervous person finds out why he worries, he is well on the way toward recovery. An understanding of the cause is among the most vital discoveries of modern science. The discussion, so far, has merely prepared us to plunge into the heart of the question: What is it that in the last analysis makes a person nervous, and how may he find his way out? This question the next two chapters will try to answer. CHAPTER VII _In which we go to the root of the matter_ THE REAL TROUBLE PIONEERS =Following the Gleam.= Kipling's Elephant-child with the "'satiable curiosity" finally asked a question which seemed simple enough but which sent him on a long journey into unknown parts. In the same way man's modest and simple question, "What makes people nervous?" has sent him far-adventuring to find the answer. For centuries he has followed false trails, ending in blind alleys, and only lately does he seem to have found the road that shall lead him to his journey's end. We may be thankful that we are following a band of pioneers whose fearless courage and passion for truth would not let them turn back even when the trail led through fields hitherto forbidden. The leader of this band of pioneers was a young doctor named Freud. THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH =Early Beginnings.= In 1882, when Freud was the assistant to Dr. Breuer of Vienna, there was brought to them for treatment a young woman afflicted with various hysterical pains and paralyses. This young woman's case marked an epoch in medical history; for out of the effort to cure her came some surprising discoveries of great significance to the open-minded young student. It was found that each of this girl's symptoms was related to some forgotten experience, and that in every case the forgetting seemed to be the result of the painfulness of the experience. In other words, the symptoms were not visitations from without, but expressions from within; they were a part of the mental life of the patient; they had a history and a meaning, and the meaning seemed in some way to be connected with the patient's previous attitude of mind which made the experience too painful to be tolerated in consciousness. These previous ideas were largely subconscious and had been acquired during early childhood. When by means of hypnosis a great mass of forgotten material was brought to the surface and later made plain to her consciousness, the symptoms disappeared as if by magic. =A Startling Discovery.= For a time Breuer and Freud worked together, finding that their investigations with other patients served to corroborate their former conclusions. When it became apparent that in every case the painful experience bore some relation to the love-life of the patient, both doctors were startled. Along with most of the rest of the world, they had been taught to look askance at the reproductive instinct and to shrink from realizing the vital place which sex holds in human life. Breuer dropped the work, and after an interval Freud went on alone. He was resolved to know the truth, and to tell what he saw. When he reported to the world that out of all his hundreds of patients, he had been unable, after the most careful analysis, to find one whose illness did not grow from some lack of adjustment of the sex-life, he was met by a storm of protest from all quarters. No amount of evidence seemed to make any difference. People were determined that no such libel should be heaped on human nature. Sex-urge was not respectable and nervous people were to be respected. Despite public disapproval, the scorn of other scientists, and the resistance of his own inner prejudices, Freud kept on. He was forced to acknowledge the validity of the facts which invariably presented themselves to view. Like Luther under equal duress, he cried: "Here I stand. I can do no other." =Freudian Principles.= Gradually, as he worked, he gathered together a number of outstanding facts about man's mental life and about the psycho-neuroses. These facts he formulated into certain principles, which may be summed up in the following way. 1 There is no _chance_ in mental life; every mental phenomenon--hence every nervous phenomenon--has a cause and meaning. 2 Infantile mental life is of tremendous importance in the direction of adult processes. 3 Much of what is called forgetting is rather a repression into the subconscious, of impulses which were painful to the personality as a whole. 4 Mental processes are dynamic, insisting on discharge, either in reality or in phantasy. 5 An emotion may become detached from the idea to which it belongs and be displaced on other ideas. 6 Sex-interests dominate much of the mental life where their influence is unrecognized. The disturbance in a psycho-neurosis is always in this domain of sex-life. "In a normal sexual life, no neurosis." If a shock is the precipitating cause of the trouble, it is only because the ground was already prepared by the sex-disturbance. Freud was perhaps unfortunate in his choice of the word "sex," which has so many evil connotations; but as he found no other word to cover the field, he chose the old one and stretched its meaning to include all the psychic and physical phenomena which spring directly and indirectly from the great processes of reproduction and parental care, and which ultimately include all and more than our word "love."[33] [Footnote 33: Freud and his followers have always said that they saw no theoretical reason why any other repressed instinct should not form the basis of a neurosis, but that, as a matter of fact, they never had found this to be the case, probably because no other instinct comes into such bitter and persistent conflict with the dictates of society. Now, however, the Great War seems to have changed conditions. Under the strain and danger of life at the front there has developed a kind of nervous breakdown called shellshock or war-neurosis, which seems in some cases to be based not on the repression of the instinct of race-preservation but on the unusual necessity for repression of the instinct of self-preservation. Army surgeons report that wounded men almost never suffer from shell-shock. The wound is enough to secure the unconsciously desired removal to the rear. But in the absence of wounds, a desire for safety may at the same time be so intense and so severely repressed that it seizes upon the neurosis as the only possible means of escape from the unbearable situation. In time of peace, however, the instinct of reproduction seems to be the only impulse which is severely enough repressed to be responsible for a nervous breakdown.] =Later Developments.= Little by little, the scientific world came to see that this wild theorizer had facts on his side; that not only had he formulated a theory, but he had discovered a cure, and that he was able to free people from obsessions, fears, and physical symptoms before which other methods were powerless. One by one the open-minded men of science were converted by the overpowering logic of the evidence, until to-day we find not only a "Freudian school," counting among its members many of the eminent scientists of the day, but we find in medical schools and universities courses based on Freudian principles, with text-books by acknowledged authorities in medicine and psychology. We find magazines devoted entirely to psycho-analytic subjects,[34] besides articles in medical journals and even numerous articles in popular magazines. Not only is the treatment of nervous disorders revolutionized by these principles but floods of light are thrown on such widely different fields of study as ancient myths and folk lore, the theory of wit, methods of child training, and the little slips of the tongue and everyday "breaks" that have until recently been considered the meaningless results of chance. [Footnote 34: _The Psychoanalytic Review_ and the _International Journal of Psychoanalysis._] =A Searching Question.= We find, then, that when we ask, "What makes people nervous?" we are really asking: "What is man like, inside and out, up and down? What makes him think, feel, and act as he does every hour of every day?" We are asking for the source of human motives, the science of human behavior, the charting of the human mind. It is hard to-day to understand how so much reproach and ridicule could have been aroused by the statement that the ultimate cause of nervousness is a disturbance of the sex-life. There has already been a change in the public attitude toward things sexual. Training-courses for mothers and teachers, elementary teaching in the schools, lectures and magazine articles have done much to show the fallacy of our old hypersensitive attitude. Since the war, some of us know, too, with what success the army has used the Freudian principles in treating war-neurosis, which was mistakenly called shell-shock by the first observers. We know, too, more about the constitution of man's mind than the public knew ten years ago. When we remember the insistent character of the instincts and the repressive method used by society in restraining the most obstreperous impulse, when we remember the pain of such conflict and the depressing physical effects of painful emotions, we cannot wonder that this most sharply repressed instinct should cause mental and physical trouble. =What about Sublimation?= On the other hand, it has been stated in Chapter IV that although this universal urge cannot be repressed, it can be sublimated or diverted to useful ends which bring happiness, not disaster, to the individual. We have a right, then, to ask why this happy issue is not always attained, why sublimation ever fails. If a psycho-neurosis is caused by a failure of an insistent instinct to find adequate expression, by a blocking of the libido or the love-force, what are the conditions which bring about this blocking? The sex-instinct of every respectable person is subject to restraint. Some people are able to adjust themselves; why not all? The question, "What makes people nervous?" then turns out to mean: What keeps people from a satisfactory outlet for their love-instincts? What is it that holds them back from satisfaction in direct expression, and prevents indirect outlet in sublimation? Whatever does this must be the real cause of "nerves." THE CAUSES OF "NERVES" =Plural, not Singular.= The first thing to learn about the cause is that it is not a cause at all, but several causes. We are so well made that it takes a combination of circumstances to upset our equilibrium. In other words, a neurosis must be "over-determined." Heredity, faulty education, emotional shock, physical fatigue, have each at various times been blamed for a breakdown. As a matter of fact, it seems to take a number of ingredients to make a neurosis,--a little unstable inheritance plus a considerable amount of faulty upbringing, plus a later series of emotional experiences bearing just the right relationship to the earlier factors. Heredity, childhood reactions, and later experiences, are the three legs on which a neurosis usually stands. An occasional breakdown seems to stand on the single leg of childhood experiences but in the majority of cases each of the three factors contributes its quota to the final disaster. =Born or Made?= It used to be thought that neurotics, like poets, were born, not made. Heredity was considered wholly responsible, and there seemed very little to do about it. But to-day the emphasis on heredity is steadily giving way to stress on early environment. There are, no doubt, such factors as a certain innate sensitiveness, a natural suggestibility, an intensity of emotion, a little tendency to nervous instability, which predispose a person to nerves, but unless the inborn tendency is reinforced by the reactions and training of early childhood, it is likely to die a natural death. CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES =Early Reactions.= Freud found that a neurotic is made before he is six years old. When by repeated explorations into the minds of his patients, he made this important discovery, he at first believed that the disturbing factor was always some single emotional experience or shock in childhood,--usually of a sexual nature. But Freud and later investigators have since found that the trouble is not so often a single experience as a long series of exaggerated emotional reactions, a too intense emotional life, a precocity in feeling tending toward fixation of childhood habits, which are thus carried over into adult life. =Fixation of Habits.= Fixation is the word that expresses all this,--fixation of childish habits. A neurotic is a person who made such strong habits in childhood that he cannot abandon them in maturity. He is too much ruled by the past. His unconscious emotional thought-habits are the complexes which were made in childhood and therefore lack the power of adaptation to mature life. We saw in Chapter IV that Nature takes great pains to develop in the child the psychic and physical trends which he will need later on in his mature love-life, and that this training is accomplished in a number of well-defined periods which lead from one to the other. If, however, the child reacts too intensely, lingers too long in any one of these phases, he lays for himself action lines of least resistance which he may never leave or to which he may return during the strain and stress of adult life. In either case, the neurotic is a grown-up child. He may be a very learned, very charming person, but he is nevertheless dragging behind him a part of his childhood which he should have outgrown long ago. Part of him is suffering from an arrest of development,--not a leg or an arm but an impulse. =Precocious Emotions.= The habits which tend to become fixed too soon seem to be of four kinds; the habit of loving, the habit of rebelling, the habit of repressing normal instincts, and the habit of dreaming. In each case it is the excess of feeling which causes the trouble,--too much love, too much hate, too much disgust, or too much pleasure in imagination. Exaggeration is always a danger-signal. An overdeveloped child is likely to be an underdeveloped man. Especially in the emotions is precocity to be deplored. A premature alphabet or multiplication table is not nearly so serious as premature intensity of feeling, nor so likely to lead later to trouble. Of course fixation in these emotional habits does not always lead to a serious breakdown. If the fixation is not too extreme, and if later events do not happen to accentuate the trouble, the arrest of development may merely show itself in certain weaknesses of character or in isolated symptoms without developing a real neurosis. Let us examine each of these arrested habits and the excess emotion which sets the mold before it is ready for maturity. =Too Much Self-Love.= In the chapter on the reproductive instinct, we found that the natural way to learn to love is by successively loving oneself, one's parents and family, one's fellows, and one's mate. If the love-force gets too much pleasure in any one of these phases, it finds it hard to give up its old love and to pass on to the next phase. Thus some children take too much pleasure in their own bodies or, a little later, in their own personalities. If they are too much interested in their own physical sensations and the pleasure they get by stimulating certain zones of the body, then in later life they cannot free themselves from the desire for this kind of satisfaction. Try as they may, they cannot be satisfied with normal adult relations, but sink back into some form of so-called sex-perversion. Perhaps it is another phase of self-love which holds the child too much. If, like Narcissus, he becomes too fond of looking at himself, is too eager to show off, too desirous of winning praise, then forever after he is likely to be self-conscious, self-centered, thinking always of the impression he is making, unable ever to be at leisure from himself. He is fixed in the Narcissistic stage of his life, and is unadapted to the world of social relations. =Too Much Family-love.= We have already spoken of the danger of fixation in the second period, that of object-love--the period of family relationships. The danger is here again one of degree and may be avoided by a little knowledge and self-control on the part of the parents. The little girl who is permitted to lavish too much love on her father, who does not see anybody else, who cannot learn to like the boys is a misfit. The wise mother will see that her love for her boy does not express itself too much by means of hugs and kisses. The mother who shows very plainly that she loves her little boy better than she loves her husband and the mother who boasts that her adolescent boy tells her all his secrets and takes her out in preference to any girl--that deluded mother is trying to take something that is not hers, and is thereby courting trouble. When her son grows up, he may not know why, but no girl will suit him, and he will either remain a bachelor or marry some older woman who reminds him subconsciously of his mother. His love-requirements will be too strict; he will be forever trying either in phantasy or in real life to duplicate his earlier love-experiences. This, of course, cannot satisfy the demands of a mature man. He will be torn between conflicting desires, unhappy without knowing why, unable either to remain a child or to become a man, and impelled to gain self-expression in indirect and unsatisfactory ways. Since it is not possible in this space to recite specific cases which show how often a nervous trouble points back to the father-mother complex,[35] it may help to cite the opinions of a few of our best authorities. Freud says of the family complex, "This is the root complex of the neurosis." Jelliffe: "It is the foot-rule of measurement of success in life": by which he means that just so far as we are able at the right time to free ourselves from dependence on parents are we able to adjust ourselves to the world at large. Pfister: "The attitude toward parents very often determines for a life-time the attitude toward people in general and toward life itself." Hinkle: "The entire direction of lives is determined by parental relationships." [Footnote 35: This is technically known as the Oedipus Complex.] =Too Much Hate.= Besides loving too hard, there is the danger of hating too hard. If it sounds strange to talk of the hatreds of childhood, we must remember that we are thinking of real life as it is when the conventions of adult life are removed and the subconscious gives up its secrets. Several references have been made to the jealousy of the small child when he has to share his love with the parent of the same sex. For every little boy the father gets in the way. For every little girl the mother gets in the way. At one time or other there is likely to be a period when this is resented with all the violence of a child's emotions. It is likely to be very soon repressed and succeeded by a real affection which lasts through life. But underneath, unmodified by time, there may exist simultaneously the old childish image and the old unconscious reaction to it, unconscious but still active in indirect ways. Jealousy is very often united with the natural rebellion of a child against authority. The rebellion may, of course, be directed against either parent who is final in authority in the home. In most cases this is the father. As the impulse of self-assertion is usually stronger in boys than in girls, and as the boy's impulse in this direction is reinforced by any existing jealousy toward his father, we find a strong spirit of rebellion more often playing a subconscious part in the life of men than of women. The novelist's favorite theme of the conflict between the young man and "the old man" represents the conscious, unrepressed complex. More often, however, there is true affection for the father, while the rebellion which really belongs to the childish father-image is displaced or transferred to other symbols of authority,--the state, the law, the king, the school, the teacher, the church, or perhaps to religion and authority in general. Anarchists and atheists naturally rationalize their reasons for dissent, but, for all that, they are not so much intellectual pioneers as rebellious little boys who have forgotten to grow up. =Liking to be "Bossed."= There is a worse danger, however, than too much rebellion, and that is too little rebellion. Sometimes this yielding spirit is the result of an overdose of negative self-feeling and an under-dose of positive self-feeling; but sometimes it is over-compensation for the repressed spirit of rebellion which the child considers wicked. Consciously he becomes over-meek, because he has to summon all his powers to fight his subconscious insurrection. Whether he be meek by nature or by training, he is likely to be a failure. Everybody knows that the child who is too good never amounts to anything. He who has never disobeyed is a weakling. Naturally resenting all authority, the normal individual, if he be well trained, soon learns that some authority is necessary. He rebels, but he learns to acquiesce, to a certain degree. If he acquiesces too easily, represses too severely his rebellious spirit, swings to the other extreme of wanting to be "bossed," he is very likely to end as a nervous invalid, unfitted for the battles of life. The neurotic in the majority of cases likes authority, clings to it too long, wants the teacher to tell him what to do, wants the doctor to order him around, is generally over-conscientious, and afraid he will offend the "boss" or some one else who reminds him of the father-image. All this carries a warning to parents who cannot manage their children without dominating their lives, even when the domination is a kindly one. Perhaps the modern child is in more danger of being spoiled than bullied, but analysis of nervous patients shows that both kinds of danger still exist. =Too Much Disgust.= The third form of excessive emotion is disgust. The love-force, besides being blocked by a fixation of childish love and of childish reactions toward authority, is very often kept from free mature self-expression by a perpetuation of a childish reaction against sex. We hardly need dwell longer on the folly of teaching children to be ashamed of so inevitable a part of their own nature. Disgust is a very strong emotion, and when it is turned against a part of ourselves, united with that other strong impulse of self-regard and incorporated into the conscience, it makes a Chinese wall of exclusion against the baffled, misunderstood reproductive instinct, which is thrust aside as alien. =Restraint versus Denial.= Repression is not merely restraint. It is restraint plus denial. To the clamoring instinct we say not merely, "No, you _may_ not," but "No, you _are_ not. You do not exist. Nothing like you could belong to me." The woman with nausea (Chapter V) did not say to herself: "You are a normal, healthy woman, possessed of a normal woman's desires. But wait a while until the proper time comes." Controlled by an immature feeling of disgust, she had said: "I never thought it. It cannot be." The difference is just this. When an ungratifiable desire is honestly faced and squarely answered, it is modified by other desires, chooses another way of discharge, and ceases to be desire. When a desire is repressed, it is still desire, unsatisfied, insistent, unmodifiable by mature points of view, untouched by time, automatic, and capable of almost any subterfuge in order to get satisfaction. A repressed desire is buried, shut away from the disintegrating effects of sunlight and air. While the rest of the personality is constantly changing under the influence of new ideas, the buried complex lives on in its immaturity, absolutely untouched by time. =Childish Birth-theories.= When a child's questions about where babies come from are met by evasions, he is forced to manufacture his own theories. His elders would laugh if they knew some of these theories, but they would not laugh if they knew how often the childish ideas, wide of the truth, furnish the material for future neuroses. Frink tells the story of a young woman who had a compulsion for taking drugs. Although not a drug-fiend in the usual sense, she was constantly impelled to take any kind of drug she could obtain. It was finally revealed that during her childhood she had tried hard to discover how babies were made, and had at last concluded that they grew in the mother as a result of some medicine furnished by the doctor. The idea had long been forgotten, only to reappear as a compulsion. The natural desire for a child was strong in her, but was repressed as unholy in an unmarried woman. The associated childish idea of drug-taking was not repellent to her moral sense and was used as a substitute for the real desire to bear a child. Many of my patients have suffered from the effect of some such birth-theories. One young girl, twenty years old, was greatly afflicted with myso-phobia, or the fear of contamination. She spent most of her time in washing her hands and keeping her hands and clothing free from contamination by contact with innumerable harmless objects. When cleaning her shoes on the grass, she would kneel so that the hem of her skirt would touch the grass, lest some dust should fly up under her clothes. After eating luncheon in the park with a girl who had tuberculosis, she said that she was not afraid of tuberculosis in the lungs, but asked if something like tuberculosis might not get in and begin to grow somewhere else. Her life was full to overflowing of such compulsive fears. As opportunity offered itself from day to day, I would catch her compulsive ideas in the very act of expressing themselves, and would pin her down as to the association and the source of her fear, always taking care not to make suggestions or ask leading questions. She was finally convinced out of her own mouth that her real fear was the idea of something getting into her body and growing there. Then she told how she had questioned her mother about the reproductive life and had been put off with signs of embarrassment. For a long time she had been afraid to walk or talk with a boy, because, not knowing how conception might occur, she feared grave consequences. Very soon after the beginning of her conversations with me, the girl realized that her fear was really a disguised desire that something might be planted within and grow. With her new understanding of herself, her compulsions promptly slipped away. She began to eat and sleep, and to live a happy, natural life. =Chronic Repression.= It takes first-hand acquaintance with nervous patients to realize how common are stories like these. Unnecessary repressions based on false training are the cause of many a physical symptom and mental distress which a little parental frankness might have forestalled.[36] [Footnote 36: Parents who are eager to handle this subject in the right way are often sincerely puzzled as to how to go about it. No matter how complete their education, it is very likely to fail them at this critical point. For the benefit of such parents, let it be said with all possible emphasis that the first and most important step must be a change in their own mental attitude. If there is left within them the shadow of embarrassment on the subject of sex, their children will not fail to sense the situation at once. A feeling of hesitation or a tendency to apologize for nature makes a far deeper impression on the child-mind than do the most beautiful of half-believed words on the subject. And this impression, subtle and elusive as it may seem, is a real and vital experience which is quite likely to color the whole of the child's life. If you would give your children a fair start, you must first get rid of your own inner resistances. After that, all will be clear sailing. In the second place, take the earliest opportunity to bring up the subject in a natural way. A young father told me recently that his little daughter had asked her mother why she didn't have any lap any more. "And of course your wife took that chance to tell her about the baby that is coming," I said. "Oh, no," he answered, "she did nothing of the kind. Mary is far too young to know about such things." There are always chances if we are on the look out for them--and the earlier the better. It has been noticed that children are never repelled by the idea of any natural process unless the new idea runs counter to some notion which has already been formed. The wise parent is the one who gets in the right impression before some other child has had a chance to plant the wrong one. Then, too, we elders are judged quite as much by what we do not say as by what we do. Happy is the child who is not left to draw his own conclusions from the silence and evasiveness of his parents. The sex-instruction which children are getting in the schools is often good, but it usually comes too late--the damage is always done before the sixth year. When it comes to the exact words in which to explain the phenomena of generation and birth each parent must naturally find his own way. The main point is that we must tell the truth and not try to improve on nature. If we say that the baby grows under the mother's heart and later the child learns that this is not true, he inevitably gets the idea that there is something not nice about the part of the body in which the baby does grow. What could be wrong with the simple truth that the father plants a tiny seed in the mother's body and that this seed joins with another little seed already there and grows until it is a real baby ready to come into the world? The question as to how the father plants the seed need cause no alarm. If brothers and sisters are brought up together with no artificial sense of false modesty, they very early learn the difference between the male and the female body. It is simple enough to tell the little child the function of the male structure. And it is easy to explain that the seeds do not grow until the little boy and girl have grown to be man and woman and that the way to be well and to have fine strong children is to leave the generative organs alone until that time. A sense of the dignity and high purpose of these organs is far more likely to prevent perversions--to say nothing of nervousness--than is an attitude of taboo and silence.] A certain amount of repression is inevitable and useful, but a neurotic is merely an exaggerated represser. He represses so much of himself that it will not stay down.[37] He builds up a permanent resistance which automatically acts as a dam to his normal sex instinct and forces it into undesirable outlets. [Footnote 37: "A neurosis is a partial failure of repression." Frink: _Morbid Fears and Compulsions_.] A resistance is a chronic repression, repression that has become fixed and subconscious, a habit that has lost its flexibility and outlives its usefulness. It is a fixation of repression, and is built out of an over-strong complex or emotional thought habit, acquired during childhood, incorporated into the conscience and carried over into maturity, where it warps judgment and interferes with normal development because it is fundamentally untrue and at variance with the laws of nature. =Too Much Day-Dreaming.= The fourth habit which holds back the adult from maturity and predisposes toward "nerves" is the habit of imagination. It need hardly be said that a certain kind of imagination is a good thing and one of man's greatest assets. But the essence of day-dreaming is the exact opposite; it is the desire to see things as they are not, but as we should like them to be,--not in order that we may bring them to pass, but for the mere pleasure of dreaming. Instead of turning a microscope or a telescope on the world of reality, as positive imagination does, this negative variety refuses even to look with the naked eye. To dream is easier than to do; to build up phantasies is easier than to build up a reputation or a fortune; to think a forbidden pleasure is easier than to sublimate. "Pleasure-thinking" is not only easier than "reality-thinking,"--it is the _older_ way. Children gratify many of their desires simply by imagining them gratified. Much of the difficulty of later life might be avoided if the little child could be taught to work for the accomplishment of his pleasures rather than to dream of them. The normal child gradually abandons this "pleasure-thinking" for the more purposeful thinking of the actual world, but the child who loiters too long in the realm of fancy may ever after find it hard to keep away from its borders. His natural interest in sex, if artificially repressed, is especially prone to satisfy itself by way of phantasy. =Turning back to Phantasy.= In later life, when the love-force for one reason or another becomes too strong to be handled either directly or indirectly in the real world, there comes the almost irresistible impulse to regress to the infantile way and to find expression by means of phantasy. After long experience Freud concluded that phantasy lies at the root of every neurosis. Jung says that a sex-phantasy is always at least one determiner of a nervous illness, and Jelliffe writes that the essence of the neurosis is a special activity of the imagination. Such a statement need not shock the most sensitive conscience. The very fact that a neurosis breaks out is proof that the phantasies are repellent to the owners of them and are thrust down into the subconscious as unworthy. In fact, every neurosis is witness to the strength of the human conscience. No phantasy could cause illness. It is the phantasy plus the repression of it that makes the trouble, or rather it is the conflict between the forces back of the phantasy and the repression. The neurosis, then, turns out to be a "flight from the real," the result of a desire to run away from a difficulty. When a problem presses or a disagreeable situation is to be faced, it is easier to give up and fall ill than to see the thing through to the end. Here again, we find that nervousness is a regression to the irresponsible reactions of childhood. =Maturity versus Immaturity.= We have been thinking of the main causes of "nerves" and have found them to be infantile habits of loving, rebelling, repressing, and dreaming. We have tried to show that these habits are able to cause trouble because of their bearing on that inevitable conflict between the ancient urge of the reproductive instinct and the later ideals which society has acquired. If this conflict be met in the light of the present, free from the backward pull, of outgrown habits, an adjustment is possible which satisfies both the individual and society. We call this adjustment sublimation. This is rather a synthesis than a compromise, a union of the opposing forces, a happy utilization of energy by displacement on more useful ideas. But if the conflict has to be met with the mind hampered by immature thinking and immature feeling; if the demands of the here-and-now are met as if it were long ago; if unhealthy and untrue complexes, old loves and hates complicate the situation; if to the necessary conflict is added an unnecessary one; then something else happens. Compromise of some kind must be made, but instead of a happy union of the two forces a poor compromise is effected, gaining a partial satisfaction for both sides, but a real one for neither. The neurosis is this compromise. LATER EXPERIENCES =The Last Straw.= The precipitating cause may be one of a number of things. It may be entirely within, or it may be external. Perhaps it is only a quickening of the maturing instincts at the time of adolescence, making the love-force too strong to be held by the old repressions. Perhaps the husband, wife, or lover dies, or the life-work is taken away, depriving the vital energy of its usual outlets. Perhaps the trigger is pulled by an emotional shock which bears a faint resemblance to old emotional experiences, and which stimulates both the repressing and repressed trends and makes the person at the same time say both "Yes," and "No."[38] Perhaps physical fatigue lets down the mental and moral tension and makes the conflict too strong to be controlled. Perhaps an external problem presses and arouses the old habit of fleeing from disagreeable reality. Any or all these factors may cooperate, but not one of them is anything more than a last straw on an overburdened back. No calamity, deprivation, fatigue, or emotion has been able to bring about a neurosis unless the ground was prepared for it by the earlier reactions of childhood. [Footnote 38: "The external world can only cause repression when there was already present beforehand a strong initial tension reaching back even to childhood."--Pfister: _Psychoanalytic Method_, p. 94.] THE BREAKDOWN ITSELF ="Two Persons under One Hat."= We can understand now why a neurotic can be described in so many ways. We often hear him called an especially moral, especially ethical person, with a very active conscience; an intensely social being, unable to be satisfied with anything but a social standard; a person with "finer intellectual insight and greater sensitiveness than the rest of mankind." At the same time we are told that a neurosis is a partial triumph of anti-social, non-moral factors, and that it is a cowardly flight from reality; we hear a nervous invalid called selfish, unsocial, shut in, primitive, childish, self-deceived. Both these descriptions are true to life. A neurosis is an ethical struggle between these two sets of forces. If the lower set had triumphed, the man would have been merely weak; if the higher set had been victorious, he would have been strong. As it is, he is neither one nor the other,--only nervous. The neurosis is the only solution of the struggle which he is able to find, and serves the purpose of a sort of armed armistice between the two camps. SERVING A PURPOSE If a neurosis is a compromise, if it is the easiest way out, if it serves a purpose, it must be that the individual himself has a hand in shaping that purpose. Can it be that a breakdown which seems such an unmitigated disaster is really welcomed by a part of our own selves? Nothing is more intensely resented by the nervous invalid than the accusation that he likes his symptoms,--and no wonder. The conscious part of him hates the pain, the inconvenience, and the disability with a real hatred. It is not pleasant to be ill. And yet, as it turns out, it is pleasanter to be ill than it is to bear the tension of unsatisfied desire or to be undeceived about oneself. Every symptom is a means of expression for repressed and forgotten impulses and is a relief to the personality. It tends to the preservation of the individual, rather than to his destruction. The nervous invalid is not short-lived, but his family may be! It has been said that a neurosis is not so much a disease as a dilemma. Rather might it be said that the neurosis is a way out of the dilemma. It is a harbor after a stormy sea, not always a quiet harbor, but at least a usable one. Unpleasant as it is, every nervous symptom is a form of compensation which has been deliberately though unconsciously chosen by its owner. =Rationalizing Our Distress.= Among other things, a nervous symptom furnishes a seemingly reasonable excuse for the sense of distress which is behind every breakdown. Something troubles us. We are not willing to acknowledge what it is. On the other hand, we must appear reasonable to ourselves, so we manufacture a reason. Perhaps at the time when the person first feels distress, he is on a railroad train. So he says to himself, "It is the train. I must not go near the railway"; and he develops a phobia for cars. Perhaps at the onset of the fear he happens to have a slight pain in the arm. He makes use of the pain to explain his distress. He thinks about it and holds on to it. It serves a purpose, and is on the whole less painful than the feeling of unexplained impending disaster which is attached to no particular idea. Perhaps he happens to be tired when the conflict first gets beyond control. So he seizes the idea of fatigue to explain his illness. He develops chronic fatigue and talks proudly of overwork. In every case the symptom serves a real purpose, and is, despite its discomfort, a relief to the distressed personality. A neurosis is a subconscious effort at adjustment. Like a physical symptom, it is Nature's way of trying to cure herself. It is an attempt to get equilibrium, but it is an awkward attempt and hardly the kind that we would choose when we see what we are doing. =Securing an Audience.= Besides furnishing relief from too intense strain, a nervous breakdown brings secondary advantages that are at most only dimly recognized by the individual. One of the most intense cravings of the primitive part of the subconscious is for an audience; a nervous symptom always secures that audience. The invalid is the object of the solicitous care of the family, friends, physician, and specialist. Pomp and ceremony, so dear to the child-mind, make their appeal to the dissociated part of the personality. The repressed instincts, hungry for love and attention, delight in the petting and special care which an illness is sure to bring. Secretly and unconsciously, the neurotic takes a certain pleasure in all the various changes that are made for his benefit,--the dismantling of striking clocks, the muffling of household noises, the banishing of crowing roosters, and the changes in menu which must be carefully planned for his stomach. This characteristic of finding pleasure in personal ministrations is plainly a regression to the infantile phase of life. The baby demands and obtains the center of the stage. Later he has to learn to give it up, but the neurotic gets the center again and is often very loth to leave it for a more inconspicuous place. =Capitalizing an Illness.= Then, too, a neurosis provides a way of escape from all sorts of disagreeable duties. It can be capitalized in innumerable ways,--ways that would horrify the invalid if he realized the truth. Much of the resentment manifested against the suggestion that the neurosis is psychic in origin is simply a resistance against giving up the unconsciously enjoyed advantages of the illness. An honest desire to get well is a long step toward cure. The purposive character of a nervous illness is well illustrated by two cases reported by Thaddeus Hoyt Ames.[39] A young woman, the drudge of the family, suddenly became hysterically blind, that is, she became blind despite the fact that her eyes and optic nerves proved to be unimpaired. She remained blind until it was proved to her that a part of her welcomed the blindness and had really produced it for the purpose of getting away from the monotony of her unappreciated life at home. She naturally resented the charge but finally accepted it and "turned on" her eyesight in an instant. The other patient, a man, became blind in order to avoid seeing his wife who had turned out to be not at all what he had hoped. When he realized what he was doing, he decided that there might be better ways of adjusting himself to his wife. He then switched on his seeing power, which had never been really lost, but only disconnected and dissociated from the rest of his mind. [Footnote 39: Thaddeus Hoyt Ames: _Archives of Ophthalmology_, Vol. XLIII, No. 4, 1914.] That the conscious mind has no part in the subterfuge is shown by the fact that both patients gave up their artificial haven as soon as they saw how they had been fooling themselves. The fact remains that every neurosis is the fulfilment of a wish,--a distorted, unrecognized, unsatisfactory fulfilment to be sure, but still an effort to satisfy desire. As Frink remarks, "A neurosis is a kind of behaviour." We always choose the conduct we like. It is a matter of choice. Does not this answer our question as to why some people always take unhealthy suggestions? If we take the bad one, it is because it serves the need of a part of our being. SIGN LANGUAGE =Talking in Symbols.= We have several times suggested that a nervous symptom is a disguised, indirect expression of subconscious impulses. It is the completeness of the disguise which makes it so hard for us to realize its true meaning. It takes a stretch of the imagination to believe that a pain in the body can mean a pain in the soul, or that a fear of contamination can signify a desire to bear a child. But in all this we must not forget the primitive, childlike nature of the instinctive life. The savage and the child do not think as civilized man thinks. Savage or child thinks in pictures; he acts his feelings; he groups things according to superficial resemblances, he expresses an idea by its opposite; he talks in symbols. We still use these devices in poetic speech and in everyday thought. A wedding-ring stands for the marriage bond; the flag for a nation; a greyhound for fleetness; a wild beast for ferocity; sunrise for youth; and sunset for old age. "The essence of language consists in the statement of resemblance. The expression of human thought is an expression of association."[40] [Footnote 40: Trigant Burrow: _Journal of American Medical Association_, Vol. LXVI, No. II, 1916.] The association may be so accidental and superficial as to seem absurd to another person, or it may be so fundamental as to express the universal thought of man from the beginning of time. Many of the signs and symbols which crop out in neurotic symptoms and in normal dreams are the same as those which appear in myths, fairy tales and folk-lore and in the art of the earlier races. =A Secret Code.= When the denied instincts of a man's repressed life insist on expression, and when the shocked proprieties of his repressing life demand conformity to social standards, the subconscious, held back from free speech, strikes a compromise by making use of figurative language. As Trigant Burrow says, if the moral repugnance is very strong, the disguise must be more elaborate, the symbols more far-fetched. The symbols of nervous symptoms and of dreams are a "secret code," understood by the sender but meaningless to the censoring conscience, which passes them as harmless. =The Right Kind of Symbolism.= Sublimation itself is merely a symbolic expression of basic impulses. It follows the line of our make-up, which naturally and fundamentally is wont to let one thing stand for another and to express itself in indirect ways. Sublimation says: "If I cannot recreate myself in the person of a child, I will recreate myself in making a bridge, or a picture, or a social settlement,--or a pudding." It says: "If I cannot have my own child to love, I will adopt an orphan-asylum, or I will work for a child-labor law." It merely lets one thing stand for another and transfers all the passions that belong to the one on to the other, which is the same thing as saying that it gives vent to its original desire by means of symbolic expression. =The Wrong Kind of Symbolism.= A nervous disorder is an unfortunate choice of symbols. Instead of spiritualizing an innate impulse, it merely disguises it. The disguise takes a number of forms. One of the commonest ways is to act out in the body what is taking place in the soul. The woman with nausea converted her moral disgust into a physical nausea, which expressed her distress while it hid its meaning. The girl who was tired of seeing her work, and the man who wanted to avoid seeing his wife chose a way out which physically symbolized their real desire. A dentist once came to me with a paralyzed right arm. He had given up his office and believed that he would never work again. It turned out that his only son had just died and that he was dramatizing his soul-pain by means of his body. His subconscious mind was saying, "My good right arm is gone," and saying it in its own way. Within a week the arm was playing tennis, and ever since it has been busy filling teeth. There were, of course, other factors leading up to the trouble, but the factor which determined its form was the sense of loss which acted itself out through the body. Sometimes, as we have seen, the disguise takes another form. Instead of conversion into a physical symptom, it lets one idea stand for another and displaces the impulse or the emotion to the substitute idea. The girl with the impulse to take drugs fooled her conscience by letting the drug-taking idea stand for the idea of conception. The girl with the fear of contamination carried the disguise still farther by changing the desire into fear,--a very common subterfuge. =The Case of Mrs. Y.= There came to me a short time ago a little woman whose face showed intense fright. For several months she had spent much of the time walking the floor and wringing her hands in an agony of terror. In the night she would waken from her sleep, shaking with fear; soon she would be retching and vomiting, although she herself recognized the fact that there was nothing the matter with her stomach. Part of the time her fear was a general terror of some unknown thing, and part of the time it was a specialized fear of great intensity. She was afraid she would choke her son, to whom she was passionately devoted. During the course of the treatment, which followed the lines of psycho-analysis to be described in the next chapter, I found that this fear had arisen one evening when she was lying reading by the side of her sleeping child. Suddenly, without warning, she had a sort of mental picture of her own hands reaching out and choking the boy. Naturally she was terrified. She jumped out of bed, decided that she was losing her mind and went into a hysterical state which her husband had great trouble in dispelling. After that she was afraid to be left alone with her children lest she should kill them. During the analysis it was discovered that what she had been reading on that first night was the thirteenth verse of the ninety-first Psalm. "Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder. The young lion and the dragon thou shalt trample under foot." To her the adder meant the snake, the tempter in the Garden of Eden, and hence sex. What she wanted to choke was her own insistent sex urge of which the child was the symbol and the result. On later occasions she had the same sort of hallucinations in connection with another child and on sight of a brutish kind of man who symbolized to the subconscious mind the sex-urge, of which she was afraid. Not so much by what her mother had said as by what she had avoided saying, and by her expression whenever the subject was mentioned, had she given her little daughter a fundamentally wrong idea of the reproductive instinct. Later when the girl was woman grown she still clung to the old conception, deploring the sex-part of the marriage relation and feeling herself too refined to be moved by any such sensual urge. But the strong sex-instinct within her would not be downed. It was so insistent as to be an object of terror to her repressing instinct, which could not bring itself to acknowledge its presence. The fear that came to the surface was merely a disguised and symbolic representation of this real fear which was turning her life into a nightmare. The nausea and vomiting in this woman seemed to be symbolic of the disgust which she felt subconsciously at the thought of her own sex-desires, but sometimes the physical disturbances which accompany such phobias are the natural physical reactions to the constant fear state. Indigestion, palpitation, and tremors are not in themselves symbolic of the inner trouble but may be the result of an overdose of the adrenal and thyroid secretions and the other accompaniments of fear. In such cases the real symptom is the fear, and the physical disturbance an incidental by-product of the emotional state. In any case a nervous symptom is always the sign of something else--a hieroglyph which must be deciphered before its real meaning can be discovered. SUMMARY =Three Kinds of People.= Absurd as it sounds, "nerves" turn out to be a question of morals; a neurosis, an affair of conscience; a nervous symptom an unsettled ethical struggle. The ethical struggle is not unusual; it is a normal part of man's life, the natural result of his desire to change into a more civilized being. The people in the world may be divided into three classes, according to the way they decide the conflict. =The Primitive.= The first class merely capitulate to their primitive desires. They may not be nervous, but it is safe to say that they are rarely happy. The voice of conscience is hard to drown, even when it is not strong enough to control conduct. Happily it often succeeds in making us miserable, when we desert the ways that have proved best for our kind. The "immoral" person has not yet "arrived"; he simply disregards the collective wisdom of society and gives the victory to the primitive forces which try to keep man back on his old level. We cannot break the ideals by which man lives, and still be happy. =The Salt of the Earth.= The second class of people decide the conflict in a way that satisfies both themselves and society. They give the victory to the higher trends and at the same time make a lasting peace by winning over the energy of the undesirable impulses. By sublimation they divert the threatening force to useful work and turn it out into real life, using its steam to make the world's wheels go round. Their love-force, unhampered by childish habits, is free to give itself to adult relationships or to express itself symbolically in socially helpful ways. =Nervous People.= To the third class belong the people who have not finished the fight. These are the folk with "nerves," the people in whom the conflict is fiercest because both sides are too strong. The victory goes to neither side; the tug of war ends in a tie. Since the energy of the nervous person is divided between the effort to repress and the effort to gain expression, there is little left for the external world. There is plenty of energy wasted on emotion, physical symptoms, phantasy, or useless acts symbolizing the struggle. A neurotic is a normal person, "only more so." His impulses are the same impulses as those of every other person; his complexes are the same kind of complexes, only more intense. He is an exaggerated human being. He may be only slightly exaggerated, showing merely a little character-weakness or a slight physical symptom, or he may be so intensified as to make life miserable for himself and everybody near him. It is quantity, not quality, that ails him, for he differs from his steady-going neighbor not in kind but in degree. More of him is repressed and a larger part of him is fixed in a childish mold. =Tricking Ourselves.= A neurosis is a confidence game that we play on ourselves. It is an attempt to get stolen fruit and to look pious at the same time,--not in order to fool somebody else but to fool ourselves. No nervous symptom is what it seems to be. It is an arch pretender. It pretends to be afraid of something it does not fear at all, or to ignore something that interests it intensely. It pretends to be a physical disease, when primarily it has nothing to do with the body; and the person most deluded is the one who "owns" the symptom. Its purpose is to avoid the pain of disillusionment and to furnish relief to a distracted soul which dares not face itself. Although the true meaning of a symptom is hidden, there is fortunately a clue by which it can be traced. Sometimes it takes the art of a psychic detective to follow the clues down, down through the different layers of the subconscious mind, until the troublesome impulses and complexes are found and dragged forth,--not to be punished for breaking the peace but to be led toward reconciliation. But "that is another story," and belongs to another chapter. We are approaching THE WAY OUT. PART III--THE MASTERY OF "NERVES" CHAPTER VIII _In which we pick up the clue_ THE WAY OUT THE SCIENCE OF RE-EDUCATION There is a story of an Irishman at the World's Fair in Chicago. Although his funds were getting low, he made up his mind that he would not go home without a ride on a camel. For several minutes he stood before a sign reading: "First ride 25¢, second ride 15¢, third ride 10¢." Then, scratching his head, he exclaimed, "Faith, and I'll take the third ride!" Should there by any chance be a reader who, eager to find the way out without paying the price of knowledge, is tempted to say to himself "Faith, and I'll begin with Part III," we give him fair warning that if he does so, he will in all probability end by putting down the book in a confused and skeptical frame of mind. It is difficult to find our way out of a maze without some faint idea of the path by which we got in. He who brings to this chapter the popular notion that nervousness is the result of worn-out nerve-cells, can hardly be expected to understand how it can be cured by a process of mental adjustment. Suggestion to that effect can scarcely fail to appear to him faddish and unpractical. But once a person has grasped the idea that "nerves" are merely a slip in the cog of hidden mental machinery, and has acquired at least a working-knowledge of "the way the wheels go round," he can scarcely fail to understand that the only logical cure must consist in some kind of readjustment of this underground machinery. If "nerves" were physical, then only physical measures could cure, but as they are psychic, the only effective measures must be psychic. =Gross Misconceptions.= Nervousness is caused by a lack of adjustment to the world as it is; therefore the only possible cure must be some sort of readjustment between the person's inner forces and the demands of the social world. As this lack of adjustment is concerned chiefly with the repressed instinct of reproduction, it is only natural that there should be people who believe that "the way out" lies in some form of physical satisfaction of the sex-impulse--in marriage, in changing or ignoring the social code, in homo-sexual relations or in the practice of masturbation. But we have only to look about us to see that this prescription does not cure. Freud naïvely asks whether he would be likely to take three years to uncover and loosen the psychic resistances of his patients, if the simple prescription of sex-license would give relief. Since there are as many married neurotics as single, it is evident that even marriage is not a sure preventive of nervousness. License, on the other hand, can satisfy only a part of the individual's craving. Freud insists that the sex-instinct has a psychic component as well as a physical one, and that it is this psychic part which is most often repressed. He maintains that for complete satisfaction there must be psychic union between mates, and that gratification of the physical component of sex when dissociated from psychic satisfaction, results in an accumulation of tension that reacts badly on the whole organism. The psychic tension accumulating in adult sex-relations has its inception in the mistaken attitude on the part of the wife, who remains true to her childhood training that any pleasure in sex is vulgar; or on the part of the man, who reacts to the mood of the wife, or is held by his own unbroken mother-son complex; or on the part of both the tension piles up because of society's taboo upon rearing large families. As the first two factors in this lack of adjustment grew largely out of some kind of faulty education or from faulty reaction to early experiences, the only effective way to secure a better adaptation must be through a re-education which reaches down to that part of the personality that bears the stamp of the unfortunate early factors. =Remaking Ourselves.= As a matter of fact, the science of psychotherapy or mental treatment is simply the science of re-education,--a process designed to break up old unhealthy complexes which disrupt the forces of the individual, and to build up healthy complexes which adjust him to the social world and enable him to use his energy in useful ways. Fortunately, minds can be changed. It is easier to make over an unhealthy complex than to make over a weak heart, to straighten out a warped idea than to straighten a bent back. Remarkable indeed have been some of the transformations in people who are supposed to have passed the plastic period in life. While it is true that some persons become "set" in middle life, and almost impervious to new ideas, it is also true that a person at fifty has more richness of experience upon which to draw, more appreciation of the value of the good, than has a person at twenty. If he really wants to change himself, he can do wonderful things by re-education. The first step in this re-education is a grasp of the facts. If you want to pull yourself out of a nervous disorder, first of all learn as much as you can about the causes of "nerves," about the general laws of mind and body, and about your own mental quirks. If this is not sufficient, go to a specialist trained in psychotherapy and let him help you uncover those trouble-making parts of your personality which you cannot find for yourself. It is the purpose of this book to summarize the facts which most need to be known. Let us now consider those methods which the psychopathologist finds most useful in helping his patients to self-knowledge and readjustment. =Various Methods.= As there are a number of schools of medicine, so there are a number of distinct methods of psychotherapy, each with its own theories and methods of procedure, and each with its ardent supporters. These methods may be classified into two groups. The first group includes those methods, hypnosis and psycho-analysis, which make a thorough search through the subconscious mind for the buried complexes causing the trouble, and might, therefore, be called "re-education with subconscious exploration." The other group, includes so-called explanation and suggestion, or methods of "re-education without subconscious exploration," which content themselves with making a general survey and building up new complexes without going to the trouble of uncovering the buried past. Although the theory and the technique vary greatly, the aim of all these methods is the same,--the readjustment of the individual to life. RE-EDUCATION WITH SUBCONSCIOUS EXPLORATION =Hypnosis.= The method by which most of the important early discoveries were made is hypnosis, or artificial sleep, a method by which the conscious mind is dissociated and the subconscious brought to the fore. It was through hypnosis that Freud, Janet, Prince, and Sidis made their first investigations into the nature of nervousness and worked their first cures. With the conscious mind asleep and its inhibitions out of the way, a hypnotized patient is often able to remember and to disclose to the physician hidden complexes of which he is unaware when awake. Hypnosis may thus be a valuable aid to diagnosis, enabling the physician to determine the cause of troublesome symptoms. He may then begin to make suggestions calculated to break up the old complexes and to build new ones, made up of more healthful ideas, desirable emotions and happy feeling-tones. As we have seen, a hypnotized subject is highly suggestible. His counter-suggestions inactivated, he believes almost anything told him and is extremely susceptible to the doctor's influence. The dangers of hypnosis have been much exaggerated. Indeed, as an instrument in the hands of a competent physician, it is not to be feared at all. It has, however, its limitations. Many times the very memories which need to be unearthed refuse to come to the surface. Stubborn resistances are more likely to be subconscious than conscious, and may prove too strong to be overcome in this way. Moreover, the road to superficial success is very inviting. It is easy to cure the symptom, leaving the ultimate cause untouched and ready to break out in new manifestations. The drug and drink habits may be broken up without making any attempt to discover the unsatisfied longings which were responsible for the habit. A pain may be cured without finding the mental cause of the pain or initiating any measures to guard against its return, and without giving the patient any insight into the inner forces with which he still has to deal. Since nervousness is a state of exaggerated suggestibility and abnormal dissociation, many psychologists believe that it is unwise to employ a method which heightens the state of suggestibility and encourages the habit of dissociation. They feel that it is wiser to use less artificial methods which rest on the rational control of the conscious mind and make the patient better acquainted with his own inner forces and more permanently able to cope with new manifestations of those forces. They believe that the character of the patient is strengthened and his morale raised by methods which increase the sovereignty of reason and decrease the role of unreasoning suggestibility. =Psycho-Analysis.= Freud's contribution has been not only a discovery of the general causes of nervousness, but a special means of locating the cause in any particular case. Abandoning hypnosis, he developed another method which he called psycho-analysis. What chemical analysis is to chemistry, psycho-analysis is to the science of the mind. It splits up the mental content into its component parts, the better to be examined and modified by the conscious mind. Psycho-analysis is merely a technical process for discovering repressed complexes and bringing them into consciousness, where they may be recognized for what they are and altered to meet the demands of real life. It is a device for finding and removing the cause of nervousness,--for bringing to light hidden desires which may be honestly faced and efficiently directed instead of being left to seethe in dangerous insurrection. In order permanently to break up a real neurosis, a man must first know himself and then change himself. He must gain insight into his own mental processes and then systematically set to work to change those processes that unfit him for life. We shall later find that a detailed self-discovery through psycho-analysis is not always necessary, and that a more general understanding of oneself is sufficient for the milder kinds of nervousness. But because of the promise which psycho-analysis holds out to those stubborn cases before which other methods are powerless; because of the invaluable understanding of human nature which it places at the disposal of all nervous people, who may profit by its findings without undergoing an analysis; and because of the flood of light which it sheds on the motives, conduct, and character of every human being, no educated person can afford to be without a general knowledge of psycho-analysis.[41] [Footnote 41: It is unfortunate that the records of an analysis are too voluminous for use in so brief an account as this. Since the report of one case would fill a book, and a condensed summary would require a chapter, we must refer to some of the volumes which deal exclusively with the psychoanalytic principles. For a list of these books, see Bibliography.] =A Chain of Associations.= Psycho-analysis is not, like hypnosis, based on dissociation; it is based on the association of ideas. Its main feature is a process of uncritical thinking called "free association." To understand it, one must realize how intricately woven together are the thoughts of a human being and how trivial are the bonds of association between these ideas. One person reminds us of another because his hair is the same color or because he handles his fork in the same way. Two words are associated because they sound alike. Two ideas are connected because they once occurred to us at the same time. A subtle odor or a stray breeze serves to remind us of some old experience. Connections that seem far-fetched to other people may be quite strong enough to bind together in our minds ideas and emotions which have once been associated, even unconsciously, in past experience. In this way, thoughts in consciousness and in the upper layers of the subconscious are connected by a series of associations, forming links in invisible chains that lead to the deepest, most repressed ideas. Even a dissociated complex has some connection with the rest of the mind, if we only have the patience to discover it. Therefore, by adopting a passive attitude, by simply letting his thoughts wander, by talking out to the physician everything that comes to his mind without criticizing or calling any thought irrelevant or far-fetched, and without rejecting any thought because of its painful character, the patient is helped to trace down and unearth the troublesome complex which may have been absolutely forgotten for many years. He is helped to relive the childhood experiences back of the over-strong habits which lasted into maturity. =Resisting the Probe.= Naturally, it is not all fair sailing. The subconscious impulses which repressed the painful complex in the first place still shrink from uncovering it. In many cases the resistance is very strong. It, therefore, often happens that after a time the patient becomes restive; he begins to criticize the doctor and to ridicule the method. His mind goes blank and no thought will come; or he refuses to tell what does come. The nearer the probe comes to the sore spot, the greater the pain of the repressing impulses and the stronger the resistance. Usually a strange thing happens; the patient, instead of consciously remembering the forgotten experiences, begins to relive them with his original emotions transferred on to the doctor. Depending upon what person of his childhood he identifies with him, the patient develops either a strong affection or an intense antagonism to the physician, attitudes called in technical terms positive and negative transference. If the analyst is skilful, he is able to circumvent all the subterfuges of the resisting forces and to uncover and modify the troublesome complexes. Sometimes this can be accomplished at one sitting, but more often it requires long hours of conversation. Freud has spent three years on a single difficult case, and very frequently the analysis drags out through weeks or months. The amount of mental material is so great, especially in a person who is no longer young, that every analysis would probably be an interminable affair if it were not for three valuable ways of finding the clue and picking up the scent somewhere near the end of the trail. The first of these clues is nothing else than so despised a phenomenon as the patient's own night-dreams, which turn out to be not meaningless jargon, as we have supposed, but significant utterances of the inner man. =The Message of the Dream.= When Freud rescued dreams from the mental scrap-basket and learned how to piece them together so that their message to man about himself became for the first time intelligible, he furnished the human race with what will probably be considered its most valuable key to the hidden mysteries of the mind. Freeing the dream from the superstition of olden times and from the neglect of later days, Freud was the first to discover that it is part and parcel of man's mental life, that it has a purpose and a meaning and that the meaning may be scientifically deciphered. It then invariably reveals itself to be not a prophecy for the future but an interpretation of the present and of the past, an invaluable synopsis of the drama which is being staged within the personality of the dreamer. As modern man has swung away from the idea of the dream as a warning or a prophecy, he has accepted the even more untrue conception of dreaming as the mere sport of sleep,--the "babble of the mind," the fantastic and insignificant freak-play of undirected mental processes, or the result of physical sensations without relation to the rest of mental life. No wonder, then, that Freud's startling dictum, "A dream is a disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish," should be met with astonishment and incredulity. When a person is confronted for the first time with this statement, he invariably begins to cite dreams in which he is pursued by wild beasts, or in which his loved ones are seen lying dead. He then triumphantly asserts that no such dream could be the fulfilment of a wish. The trouble is that he has overlooked the word "disguised." Like wit and some figures of speech, a dream says something different from what it means. It deals in symbols. Its "manifest content" may be merely a fantastic and impossible scene without apparent rhyme or reason, but the "latent content," the hidden meaning, always expresses some urgent personal problem. Although the dream may seem to be impersonal and unemotional, it nevertheless deals in every case with some matter of vital concern to the dreamer himself. It is a condensed and composite picture of some present problem and of some related childish repressed wish which the experiences of the preceding day have aroused. As Frink says, a dream is like a cartoon with the labels omitted--absolutely unintelligible until its symbols are interpreted. Although some dreams whose symbolism is that which man has always used, can be easily understood by a person who knows, many dreams are meaningless, even to an experienced analyst, until the patient himself furnishes the labels by telling what each bit of the picture brings to his mind. The dream, as a rule, merely furnishes the starting-point for free association. Each symbol is an arrow pointing the way to forbidden impulses which are repressed in waking life but which find partial expression during sleep. The subconscious part of the conscience is still on the job, so the repressed desires can express themselves only in distorted ways which will not arouse the censor and disturb sleep. The purpose of the dream is thus two-fold,--to relieve the tensions of unsatisfied desire, and to do this in such a subtle way as to keep the dreamer asleep. Sometimes it fails of its purpose, but when there is danger of our discovering too much about ourselves, we immediately wake up, saying that we have had a bad dream. It is at first difficult to believe that we are capable of this elaborate mental work while we are fast asleep. However, a little investigation shows us to be more clever than we realize. The subconscious mind, in its effort to satisfy both the repressing and the repressed impulses, carries on very complicated processes, disguises material by allowing one person to stand for another, two persons to stand for one, or one person to stand for two; it shifts emotion from important to trivial matters, dramatizes, condenses, and elaborates, with a skill that is amazing. We are all of us very clever playwrights and makers of allegories--in our sleep. Also, we are all very clever at getting what we want, and the dream secures for us, in a way, something which we want very much indeed and which the world of social restraint or our own warped childish notion denies us. Not every one can become an interpreter of dreams. It takes a skilled and patient specialist thoroughly to understand the process. But it is fortunate indeed that we possess such a valuable means of diagnosis when extraordinary conditions make it necessary to explore the subconscious in the search for trouble-making complexes.[42] [Footnote 42: For further study of the dream, see Freud: _Interpretation of Dreams_; and _General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis_.] =The Word-Test.= Although dreams furnish the main clues to buried complexes, they are by no means the only instrument of the psycho-analyst. Another device, called the association word-test, has been developed by Dr. Carl Jung of Switzerland. The analyst prepares a list of perhaps one hundred words, which he reads one by one to the patient, hoping in this way to strike some of the emotional reactions of which the patient himself is unaware. The latter responds with the first word that comes into his mind, no matter how absurd it may seem. The responses themselves are often significant, but the time that elapses is even more so. It usually happens that it takes very much longer for some responses than for others. If a patient's average time is one or two seconds, some responses may take five or ten or twenty seconds. Sometimes no word comes at all and the patient says that his mind is a blank. He coughs or blushes, grows pale or trembles, showing all the signs of emotion even when he himself has no notion of the cause. The significant word has hit upon a subconscious association with some emotional complex. The blocking of the mind is an effort of the resistance to keep the painful ideas out of consciousness. The telltale word then furnishes a starting point for further associations. One of my patients blocked on the word "long." Instead of saying "short" or "pencil" or "road" or "day" or any other word which might naturally be associated with "long," she laughed and said that no word would come. Finally an emotional memory came to light. It seems that this woman had been courted by a man whom she unconsciously loved, but whom she had "turned down" because she was ambitious for a career. After the man had moved to another town, my patient heard that he was engaged to another girl. She then realized that she loved him and began to long for him with her whole heart. The meaningful word "long" thus led us to one of the emotional memories for which we were seeking. ="Chance" Signs.= There are other clues to hidden inner processes, other sign-posts pointing to the cause of a neurosis. Not only through dreams and through emotional reactions to certain words does the subconscious reveal its desires, but also through the little slips of the tongue and of the pen, the "chance" acts and unconscious mannerisms which are usually ignored as entirely insignificant. When we "make a break" and say what we secretly mean but wish to hide from ourselves or others; when we forget an appointment which part of us really wishes to avoid, or forget a name with which we are perfectly familiar; when we lose the pen so that we cannot write or the desk key so that we cannot work; when we blunder and drop things and do what we did not mean to do; then we may know--the normal as well as the nervous person--that our subconscious minds with their repressed desires are trying to get the reins and are partially succeeding. An example from my own life may illustrate the point. In building a number of houses, I had occasion often to use the word studding, but on every occasion, I forgot the word and always had to end lamely by saying "those pieces of timber that go up and down." Each time the builder supplied the word, but the next time it was no more accessible. Finally, the reason came to me. One day when I was a little child I looked out of the window and cried, "Oh, see that great big beautiful horse." My grandmother exclaimed, "Sh! sh! that is a stud horse." Over-reaction to that impression repressed the word stud so successfully that as a grown woman I could not recall another word which happened to contain the same syllable. During an analysis a patient of mine who had a mother-in-law situation on her hands told me a dream of the night before. "I dreamed that my mother-in-law, who has really been very ill, was taken with a sinking-spell. I rushed to the telephone to call the doctor, but found to my terror that I could not remember his number." "What is his number?" I asked, knowing that she ought to know it perfectly. "Two-eight-nine-six," she answered at once. The number really was 2876. Asleep and awake, her repressed desire for release from the mother-in-law's querulous presence was attempting to have its way. In the dream, she avoided calling the doctor by forgetting his number entirely. Awake, she evaded the issue by remembering a wrong number. In the dream she thinly disguised her desire by displacing the anxious emotion from the sense of her own guilty wishes to the idea of the mother-in-law's death. When confronted with this interpretation, the woman readily acknowledged its truth. Even stammering, which has always been considered a physical disorder, has been proved, by psycho-analysis, to be the sign of an emotional disturbance. H. Addington Bruce reports the case of one of Dr. Brill's patients, a young man who had been stammering for several years. Observation revealed the fact that his chief difficulty was with words beginning with K and although at first he firmly denied any significance to the letter, he later confessed that his sweetheart whose name began with K had eloped with his best friend and that he had vowed never to mention her name again. Upon Dr. Brill's suggestion he tried to think of the unfaithful lover as Miss W., but soon returned, saying that he was stammering worse than ever. Investigation showed that the additional unpronounceable words contained the letter W. When he was induced to renounce his oath never to call the girl's name again, he found that he had no more difficulty with his speech.[43] [Footnote 43: H. Addington Bruce; "Stammering and Its Cure," _McClure's_, February, 1913.] Thus we see that even the halting tongue of a stammerer may point the way to the buried complex for which search is being made. Since there is no accident in mental life, and since there is behind every action a force or group of forces, no smallest action is insignificant to the person trained to understand. If this at first seems disturbing, it is only because we do not realize that there is nothing within of which we need be ashamed. People are very much alike, especially in the deeper layers of their being. What belongs to the whole human race does not need to be hidden away in darkness. There is nothing to lose and everything to gain by an increasing understanding of the chance signals which reveal the forces at work within the depths of the mind. To the analyst every little unconscious act is a valuable clue pointing toward the end of his quest.[44] [Footnote 44: For further discussion of this subject, see Freud's _Psycho-pathology of Everyday Life_, translated by A.A. Brill.] =The Aim of Psycho-Analysis.= As we have seen, the object of all this technique is the discovery and the removal of the resistances which have been keeping the emotional conflicts in the dark. It is a long step just to learn that there are resistances; and by reliving, bit by bit, the earlier experiences responsible for unfortunate habits, we find that the habits themselves lose much of their old power. They can be seen for what they are, and changed to suit present conditions. A wish is incomparably stronger when unconscious than when conscious; and the old stereotyped, automatic reactions tend to cease when once they have been seen for what they are. They become assimilated with the rest of the personality and modified by the mature attitudes of the conscious mind. The person then re-educates himself by the very act of discovering himself. In other cases, the uncovering is merely the first step in the process of re-education. The analyst then assumes the rôle of educator, cutting away old shackles, breaking down false standards, building up new complexes, showing the patient the naturalness of his desires, inducing him to look at them as biologic facts, and showing him how to sublimate those which may not find direct expression; in fact, leading him out into the self-expression of a free, unhampered life.[45] [Footnote 45: "It will be readily understood that in the reconstruction of the shattered purposes, the frustrated hopes and the outraged instincts which are found to lie at the source of those human woes we call 'nervous disorders,' there takes place a gradual transposition of values, a total recasting of ideas, and that through the whole process, education in the deepest meaning of the word, enters at last into its full sovereign rights."--Trigant Burrow.] Among my patients at one time was a woman subject to terrible fits of despondency. She was happily married and enjoyed the marriage relationship, but could not free herself from a terrible sense of guilt and degradation, a sense which was so acute that she wanted to end her life. Although she was an active member of a church, she was starving for the real message of the church, continually bound by a feeling of aloofness which made her a stranger in the midst of friends. Psycho-analysis revealed an experience of her childhood which she had kept a secret all these years. It seems that when she was seven years of age an old minister had driven her into town and had made some sort of sex-approach on the way. Although ignorant of its significance, the child was badly frightened and overcome with a sense of guilt. She had already inferred that such subjects were not to be mentioned and she hesitated long before telling even her mother. Smoldering within her through the years had been this emotional complex about the sex-life and about people connected with a church, so that even as a grown woman the relationships of her mature years were completely ruined by her old childish reaction. With insight as to the cause of her trouble, she was able to modify her attitudes and to live a free and happy life. Several years ago there came to me a man of exceptional intellectual ability, who for years had been totally incapacitated because of blind resistances built up in childhood. Although married to a woman whom he thoroughly liked and admired, he was absolutely miserable in his married life. He had, in fact, a deep-rooted complex against marriage, and had only allowed himself to be captured because the woman, with whom he had been good friends, had cried when he refused to marry her. During analysis it transpired that as a little boy of four he had often seen his silly young mother cry because she could not have a new dress. He had taken her side and bitterly felt that she was abused by his father. Later, at six, he had heard some coarse stories about sex to which he had over-reacted. Still later he had heard the workmen on the farm say that they could not go to the gold-fields because they had wives and were held back by marriage. "There are no idle words where children are," and this little boy had built up such a strong complex against marriage that he could not possibly be happy as a grown man. He was as much crippled by the old scar as is an arm which is bent and stunted from a deep scar in the flesh. After the analysis had broken up the adhesions, he found himself free, able to give mature expression to his repressed and dissatisfied love-instincts. Psycho-analysis is not a process of addition, but one of subtraction. Like a surgical operation, it undoes the results of old injuries, removes foreign material, and gives nature a chance to develop freely in her own satisfactory way. RE-EDUCATION WITHOUT SUBCONSCIOUS EXPLORATION =Simple Explanation.= So far, "the way out" sounds rather involved. It seems to require a special kind of doctor and a complicated, lengthy process before the exact trouble can be determined. But, fortunately for the average nervous patient, this lengthy process of analysis is by no means always necessary. People with troublesome nervous symptoms, and even those who have had a serious breakdown, are constantly being cured by a kind of re-education which breaks up subconscious complexes without trying to bring them to the surface. If the dead past can be let alone, so much the better. Sometimes a bullet buried in the flesh sends up a constant stream of discomfort until it is dug out and removed; but if it has carried in no infection and the body can adjust itself, it is usually considered better to let it remain. The subconscious makes its own deductions. If resistances are not too strong it is often possible to introduce healthy ideas by way of the conscious reason, to break up old habits, and make over the mentality without going to the trouble of uncovering some of the reactions which are responsible for the difficulty. =Moral Hygiene.= Because this is true, there has grown up a kind of psychotherapy which is known as simple explanation, or persuasion. As usually practised, this kind of re-education pays very little attention to the ultimate cause of "nerves." It has little to say about repressed instincts or the real reasons for fearful emotions and physical symptoms. Instead, it attacks the symptom itself, contenting itself with teaching the patient that his trouble is psychic in origin; that it is based on exaggerated suggestibility and uncontrolled emotionalism; that it is made out of false ideas about the body, illogical conclusions, and unhealthy feeling-tones; and that it may be cured by a kind of moral hygiene, which breaks up these old habits and replaces them with new and better ones. It tries to inculcate the cheerful attitude of mind; to give the patient the conviction of power; to correct his false ideas about his stomach, his heart, or his head; to train him out of his emotionalism; to lead him into a state of mind more largely controlled by reason; and to make him find some useful and absorbing work. This kind of mental and moral treatment has been sufficient to cure many neuroses of long standing. In cases that are helped by this method, the patient's love-force, robbed of the material out of which it has woven its disguise, and trained out of its bad habits by re-education, automatically makes its own readjustments and forces new channels for itself out into more useful activities. Very many nervous persons seem to need nothing more than this simple kind of help. =When Simple Explanation Does not Explain.= For very many cases, however, this procedure, good as it is, does not go deep enough. Although it gives a sound objective education about the facts of one's body, it furnishes only the most superficial subjective knowledge of one's inner life. If the inner struggle be bitter, the competing forces will hold on to their poor refuge in the symptom, despite any number of explanations that the symptom can have no physical cause. Sometimes it is enough for a person to be shown that he is too suggestible, but often it is far more helpful for him to get an inkling as to why he likes unhealthy suggestions, and to understand something of his starved instincts which he may learn to satisfy in better ways. PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION Between the two extremes of the cases which need a real analysis and those which are cured by simple explanation, I have found the great bulk of nervous cases. To simple explanation with its highly useful information, I therefore add what might be called psychological explanation, a re-education which makes use of all that illuminating material unearthed by the explorations of hypnosis and especially of psycho-analysis. Along with correct ideas about such matters as digestion, sleep, and fatigue, I give, so far as the patient is able to understand, a comprehension of the rights of the denied instincts, the ways of the subconscious, the fettering hold of unfortunate childish habits, the various mental mechanisms by which we fool ourselves, and the ways by which we may make better adaptations. =According to the Patient.= The treatment varies according to the nature of the trouble, and is somewhat dependent on the mentality of the patient. There are many people who would only be confused by being forced into a study of mental phenomena. Not being students, they would be more bewildered than helped by the details of their inner mechanisms. Others, of studious habits and inquiring minds, are encouraged to browse at will in a library of psychotherapy and to learn all that they can from the best authorities. In any case, I give the patients as much as they are able to take of my own understanding of the subject. There are no secrets in this method. The patient is treated as a rational human being who has nothing to lose and everything to gain by the fullest knowledge that he is able to acquire. Without forcing him to plunge in over his depth, I encourage him to understand himself to the fullest possible extent. Besides individual private conferences, we have twice a day an informal gathering of all the patients in my household--"the family" as we like to call ourselves--for a reading or talk on the various ways of the body and the mind, which need to be understood for normal living and for the cure of nerves. Very often people of only average education, long without the opportunity of study, gain in a surprisingly short time enough insight to make new adaptations and cure themselves. For this, a college education is not nearly so important as an open mind. It is because of the success of this method that I have been encouraged to reach a larger number of people by means of a book, based on the same plan of re-education. =Explanation vs. Suggestion.= Re-education through this kind of explanation is simply a matter of learning the truth and acting upon it. It is a process of real enlightenment, and is very different from suggestion which trades upon the patient's credulity, increasing his already exaggerated suggestibility. Freud illustrates the difference between suggestion and psycho-analysis by saying that suggestion is like painting and psycho-analysis like sculpture. Painting adds something from the outside, plastering over the canvas with extraneous matter, while sculpture cuts away the unnecessary material and reveals the angel in the marble. So suggestion covers over the real trouble by crying, "Peace, peace, when there is no peace." Without attempting to remove the cause, it says to the patient: "You have no pain. You are not tired. You will sleep to-night. You will be cheerful." Sometimes the suggestion works and sometimes it does not, but at best the relief is likely to be a mere temporary makeshift. The symptom may be relieved, but the character is not changed and therefore no permanent relief is assured. It is far better for a nervous person to say to himself, "There is something wrong and I am going to find it," than to keep repeating over and over, "There is nothing wrong," and so on through a list of half-believed autosuggestions. On the other hand, psycho-analysis, and this kind of re-education based on psycho-analytic principles, do not pay a great deal of attention to the individual symptom. Instead of adding from without they try to take away whatever has proved a hindrance to normal growth and development, and to remove unnecessary resistances which are responsible for the symptom, and which have been holding the patient back from the fullest self-expression. =Incantation vs. Knowledge.= There came to me one day a well-known public woman who had suffered from nervous indigestion for many years. As she was able to be with me for only one night, we had time for just one conversation, but in that time she discovered what she was doing and lost her indigestion. In the course of the conversation she turned to me, saying: "Doctor, I know what a force suggestion is. I believe in its power. Will you tell me why I have not been able to cure myself of this trouble? Every night after I go to bed I repeat over and over these Bible verses," naming a number of passages relating to God's goodness and care for His children. My answer was something like this: "You are too intelligent a woman to be cured by an incantation. When you feel surging up within you the sense of God's goodness, or when you actually want to realize His loving kindness, then by all means repeat the verses. But don't prostitute those wonderful words by making them into a charm and then expect them to cure your indigestion. It is a desecration of the words and a denial of your own intelligence. Autosuggestion is a powerful force, but real psychotherapy is based not on the mechanical repetition of any set of words, but on a knowledge of the truth." =The "Bullying Method."= Sometimes, to be sure, explanation is not enough. The brain paths between the associated ideas are so deeply worn that no amount of persuasion avails. It is easy for the doubter to say: "Well, that sounds very well, but my case is different. I have tried over and over again and I know." With people of this sort, an ounce of demonstration is worth a pound of argument. By way of illustration we might mention the man who couldn't eat eggs. To be sure, he had tried many times but always had suffered the most intense cramps in his stomach, and no amount of talk could make him believe that an egg was not poison to him. I took the straight road of simply proving to him that he was mistaken, and had him eat an egg. After a time of apprehension and retching, he vomited the egg, thinking, of course, that he had proved his point. To his astonishment, I said, "Now, let's go and eat another." With great consternation, he finally complied, evidently expecting to die on the spot; but as I immediately prescribed a game of tennis, he scarcely had time to think of the pain, which in fact failed to appear. However, as he thereafter insisted on eating four eggs a day,--with eggs at top-notch price I decided that the joke was on the doctor! =Enjoying the Right Things.= In substituting healthful complexes for unhealthful ones, psychotherapy not only changes ideas and emotions, but alters the feelings of pleasure or pain that are bound up with the ideas. Dr. Tom A. Williams writes: "The essence of psychotherapy and education is to associate useful activities with agreeable feeling-tones and to dissociate from injurious acts the agreeable feeling-tones that may have been acquired." Right character consists not so much in enjoying things as in enjoying the right things. Some people enjoy being martyrs. They love to tell about the terrible strain they have been under, the amount of work they have done, or the number of times they have collapsed. One of my patients gave every evidence of satisfaction as he told about his various breakdowns. "The last time I was ill," or "That time when I was in the sanatorium," were frequent phrases on his lips. Finally, after I had asked him if he would boast about the number of times he had awkwardly fallen down in the street, and had shown him that a neurosis is not really a matter to be proud of, he saw the point and stopped taking pleasure in his mistakes. Such signs of pleasure in the wrong things are evidence of suppressed wishes which we do not acknowledge but try to gratify in indirect ways.[46] The pleasure which ought to be associated with the idea of good work well done has somehow been switched over to the idea of being an invalid. The satisfaction which ought to go with a sense of power and ability to do things has attached itself to the idea of weakness and inability. The pleasurable feeling-tone which normally belongs to ministering to others, regresses in the nervous invalid to the infantile satisfaction of being ministered unto. [Footnote 46: For a further elaboration of this theme, see Holt: _The Freudian Wish_.] But these things are only a habit. A good look in the mirror soon makes one right about face and start in the other direction. Once started, a good habit is built up with surprising ease. It is really much more satisfying to cook a good dinner for the family's comfort than to think about one's ills; much pleasanter to enjoy a good meal than to insist on hot water and toast. Once we have satisfied our suppressed longings in more desirable ways, or by a process of self-training have initiated a new set of habits, we feel again the old zest in normal affairs, the old interest and pleasure in activities which add to the joy of life. Thus does re-education fit a man to take his place in the world's work as a socially useful being, no longer a burden, but a contributor to the sum total of human happiness. SUMMARY =Knowing and Doing.= Having set out to learn how to outwit our nerves, we are now ready to sum up conclusions and in the following chapters to apply them to the more common nervous symptoms. It has been shown that a nervous person is in great need of change,--not, indeed, a change in climate or in scene, in work or in diet, but a change in the hidden recesses of his own being. Outwitting nerves means first and foremost changing one's mind, an inner and spiritual process very different from the kind of change which used to be prescribed for the nervous invalid. As Putnam says, the slogan of the suggestion-school of psychotherapy has always been, "You can do better if you try"; while that of the psycho-analytic school is, "You can do better when you know." Refuting the old adage, "Where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise," the best methods of psychotherapy insist that the first step in any thorough-going attempt to change oneself must be the great step of self-knowledge. As the conflicts which result in "nerves" are always far beyond those mental regions which are open to scrutiny, a real self-knowledge requires an examination of the half-conscious or wholly unconscious longings which are usually ignored. A real understanding of self comes only when one is willing, to analyze his motives until he sees the connection between them and his nervous symptoms, which are but the symbolic gratification of desires he dares not acknowledge. Although these deeply buried complexes are the real force behind a nervous illness, the material out of which the symptoms are manufactured is taken largely from superficial misconceptions concerning the bodily functions. It is therefore a great help, also, to possess a fund of information,--not technical nor detailed but accurate as far as it goes,--about the more important workings of the bodily machinery. A little knowledge about the actual chemistry of fatigue and the way it is automatically cared for by the body is likely to do away with the idea of nervous exhaustion as resulting from accumulation of fatigue. A simple understanding of the biological and physiological facts concerning the assimilation of food and the elimination of waste material leaves the intelligent person less ready to convert his psychic discomfort into indigestion and constipation. Chapters IX to XIII in this book, which at first glance may seem to belong to a work on physiology rather than on psychology are designed to give just such needed insight. But knowing the truth is only the first half of the way out. Every neurosis is a deliberate choice by a part of the personality. Self-discovery is helpful only when it leads to better ways of self-expression. The final aim of psychotherapy is the happy adjustment of the individual to the demands of society and the establishment of useful outlets for his energy. This phase of the subject will be discussed more fully in Chapter XVI. =The Future Hope.= Much has been said about the cure of a neurosis. There are enough people already in the maze of nervousness to warrant the setting up of numerous signs reading, "This way out." But after all, is not a blocking of the way in of vastly more importance? As it is always easier to prevent than to cure, so it is easier to train than to reform. If re-education is the cure, why is not education the ounce of prevention which shall settle the problem for all time? If the general public understood what "nerves" are, it is hardly conceivable that there could be so many breakdowns as there are at present. If a man's family and friends, to say nothing of himself, understood what he is doing when he suddenly collapses and has to quit work, it is not likely that he would choose that way out of his difficulties. Most important of all, when parents know that the foundation of nervousness is laid in childhood, they will see to it that their children are started right on the road to health. When fathers and mothers realize that an over-strong bond between parents and children is responsible for a large proportion of nervous troubles, most of them will make sure that such exaggeration is not allowed to develop. And, finally, when parents are freed from their "conspiracy of silence" by a reverent attitude toward the whole of life, their very saneness will impart to their children a wholesome respect for the reproductive instinct. There will then be found in the next generation fewer half-starved men and women carrying the burden of unnecessary repressions and the pain of unsatisfied yearnings. Not that such a day will usher in the millennium. We are not suggesting a panacea for all the social ills. There is an inevitable conflict between the instinctive urge of the life-force and the demands of society, a conflict which makes men and women either finer or baser, according to the way they handle it. What is claimed is that the right kind of education--using the word in its largest, deepest sense--will remove the most fruitful cause of nervousness by taking away the extra burden of misconception and making it easier for people to be "content with being moral."[47] [Footnote 47: Frink: _Morbid Fears and Compulsions._] CHAPTER IX _In which we discover new stores of energy and learn the truth about fatigue_ THAT TIRED FEELING UNFAILING RESOURCES "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint." It is safe to say that many a person loves this promise of the prophet Isaiah without taking it in anything like a literal sense. The words are considered to be so figurative and so highly spiritualized that they seem scarcely to relate at all to this earthly life, much less to the possibilities of these physical bodies. Besides the nervous folk who feel themselves so weary that they scarcely have strength to live, there are thousands upon thousands of men and women who are called normal but who have lost much of the joy of life because they feel their bodies inadequate to meet the demands of everyday living. To such men and women the Biblical promise, "As thy day, so shall thy strength be," comes now as the message of modern science. Nature is not stingy. She has not given the human race a meager inheritance. She did not blunder when she made the human body, nor did she allow the spirit of man to develop a civilization to whose demand his body is not equal. After its long process of development through the survival of the fittest, the human body, unless definitely diseased, is a perfectly adequate instrument, as abundantly able to cope with the complex demands of modern society as with the simpler but more strenuous life of the stone age. The body has stored within its cells enough energy in the shape of protein, carbohydrate and fat to meet and more than meet any drains that are likely to be made upon it, either through the monotony of the daily grind or the excitement of sudden emergency. Nature never runs on a narrow margin. Her motto seems everywhere to be, "Provide for the emergency, enough and to spare, good measure, pressed down, running over." She does not start her engines out with insufficient steam to complete the journey. On the contrary, she has in most instances reserve boilers which are almost never touched. As a rule the trouble is not so much a lack of steam as the ignorance of the engineer who is unacquainted with his engine and afraid to "let her out." ="The Energies of Men."= Perhaps nothing has done so much to reveal the hidden powers of mankind as that remarkable essay of Professor William James, "The Energies of Men."[48] Listen to his introductory paragraph as he opens up to us new "levels of energy" which are usually "untapped": [Footnote 48: James: _On Vital Reserves_.] Every one knows what it is to start a piece of work, either intellectual or muscular, feeling stale--or _cold_, as an Adirondack guide once put it to me. And everybody knows what it is to "warm up to his job." The process of warming up gets particularly striking in the phenomenon known as the "second wind." On usual occasions we make a practice of stopping an occupation as soon as we meet the first effective layer (so to call it) of fatigue. We have then walked, played or worked "enough," so we desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed. There may be layer after layer of this experience. A third and fourth "wind" may supervene. Mental activity shows the phenomenon as well as physical, and in exceptional cases we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points. Again Professor James says: Of course there are limits; the trees don't grow into the sky. But the plain fact remains that men the world over possess amounts of resource which only very exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use. But the very same individual, pushing his energies to their extreme, may in a vast number of cases keep the pace up day after day, and find no "reaction" of a bad sort, so long as decent hygienic conditions are preserved. His more active rate of energizing does not wreck him; for the organism adapts itself, and as the rate of waste augments, augments correspondingly the rate of repair.[49] [Footnote 49: Ibid., pp. 6-7.] Another psychologist, Boris Sidis, writes: "But a very small fraction of the total amount of energy possessed by the organism is used in its relation with the ordinary stimuli of its environment."[50] These men--Professor James and Dr. Sidis--represent not young enthusiasts who ignorantly fancy that every one shares their own abundant strength, but careful men of science who have repeatedly been able to unearth unsuspected supplies of energy in "worn out" men and women, supposed to be at the end of their resources. Every successful physician and every leader of men knows the truth of these statements. What would have happened in the great war if Marshal Foch had not known that his men possessed powers far beyond their ken, and had not had sublime faith in the "second wind"? [Footnote 50: Sidis: P. 112 of the composite volume _Pychotherapeutics_.] =What about Being Tired?= If all these things are true, why do people need to be told? If man's equipment is so adequate and his reserves are so ample, why after all these centuries of living does the human race need to learn from science the truth about its own powers? The average man is very likely to say that it is all very well for a scientist sitting in his laboratory to tell him about hidden resources, but that he knows what it is to be tired. Is not the crux of the whole question summed up in that word "tired"? If we do not need to rest, why should fatigue exist? If the purpose of fatigue seems to be to slow down our efforts, why should we disregard it or seek to evade its warnings? The whole question resolves itself into this: What is fatigue? In view of the hampering effect of misconception on this point, it is evident that the question is not academic, but intensely practical. We shall find that fatigue is of two kinds,--true and false, or physical and moral, or physiological and nervous,--and that while the two kinds feel very much alike, their origin and behavior are quite different. PHYSIOLOGICAL FATIGUE =Fatigue, not Exhaustion.= In the first place, then, fatigue very seldom means a lack of strength or an exhaustion of energy. The average man in the course of a lifetime probably never knows what it is to be truly exhausted. If he should become so tired that he could in no circumstances run for his life, no matter how many wild beasts were after him, then it might seem that he had drained himself of all his store of energy. But even in that case, a large part of his fatigue would be the result of another cause. =A Matter of Chemistry.= True fatigue is a chemical affair. It is the result of recent effort,--physical, mental, or emotional,--and is the sum of sensations arising from the presence of waste material in the muscles and the blood. The whole picture becomes clear if we think of the body as a factory whose fires continuously burn, yielding heat and energy, together with certain waste material,--carbon dioxide and ash. Within man's body the fuel, instead of being the carbon of coal is the carbon of glycogen or animal starch, taken in as food and stored away within the cells of the muscles and the liver. The oxygen for combustion is continuously supplied by the lungs. So far the factory is well equipped to maintain its fires. Nor does it fail when it comes to carrying away waste products. Like all factories, the body has its endless chain arrangement, the blood stream, which automatically picks up the debris in its tiny buckets--the blood-cells and serum--and carries it away to the several dumping-grounds in lungs, kidneys, intestines, and skin. Besides the products of combustion, there are always to be washed away some broken-down particles from the tissues themselves, which, like all machinery, are being continuously worn out and repaired. By chemical tests in the laboratory, the physiologist finds that a muscle which has recently been in violent exercise contains among other things carbon dioxid, urea, creatin, and sarco-lactic acid, none of which are found in a rested muscle. Since all this debris is acid in reaction and since we are "marine animals," at home only in salt water or alkaline solution, the cells must be quickly washed of the fatigue products, which, if allowed to accumulate, would very soon poison the body and put out the fires. =No Back Debts.= The human machine is regulated to carry away its fatigue products as fast as they are made, with but slight lagging behind that is made good in the hours of sleep, when bodily activities are lessened and time is allowed for repair. Unless the body is definitely diseased, it virtually never carries over its fatigue from one day to another. In the matter of fatigue, there are no old debts to pay. Nature renews herself in cycles, and her cycle is twenty-four hours,--not nine or ten months as many school-teachers seem to imagine, or eleven months as some business men suppose. In order to make assurance doubly sure, many set apart every seventh day for a rest day, for change of occupation and thought, and for catching up any slight arrears which might exist. But the point is that a healthy body never gets far behind. If through some flaw in the machine, waste products do pile up, they destroy the machine. If the heart leaks or the blood-cells fail in their carrying-power, or if lungs, kidneys or skin are out of repair, there is sometimes an accumulation of fatigue products which poisons the whole system and ends in death. But the person with tuberculosis or heart trouble does not usually allow this to happen. The body incapacitated by disease limits its activities as closely as possible within the range of its power to take care of waste matter. Even the sick body does not carry about its old toxins. The man who had not eliminated the poisons of a month-old effort would not be a tired man. He would be a dead man. =A Sliding Scale.= If all this be true, real fatigue can only be the result of recent effort. If one is still alive, the results of earlier effort must long since have disappeared. The tissue-cells retain not the slightest trace of its effects. Fatigue cannot possibly last, because it either kills us or cures itself. Up to a certain point, far beyond our usual high-water mark, the more a person does the more he can do. As Professor James has pointed out, the rate of repair increases with the rate of combustion. Under unusual stress, the rate of the whole machine is increased: the heart-pump speeds up, respirations deepen and quicken, the blood flows faster, the endless chain of filling and emptying buckets hurries the interchange of oxygen and carbon dioxid, until the extreme capacity is reached and the organism refuses to do more without a period of rest. The whole arrangement illustrates the wonderful provisions of Nature. Although each individual is continuously manufacturing enough carbonic-acid gas to kill himself in a very few minutes, he need not be alarmed for fear that he may forget to expel his own poisons. Nobody can hold his breath for more than a few minutes. The naughty baby sometimes tries, but when he begins to get black in the face, he takes a breath in spite of himself. The presence of carbonic-acid gas in the circulation automatically regulates breathing, and the greater the amount of gas the deeper the breath. The faster we burn the faster we blow. As with breathing, so with all the rest of elimination and repair. The body dares not get behind. ="Second Wind."= A city man frequently sets out on a mountain tramp without any muscular preparation for the trip. He walks ten or fifteen miles when his average is not over one or two. Sometimes after a few hours he feels himself exhausted, but a glorious view opens out before him and he goes on with new zest. He has merely increased his rate of repair and drawn on a new stock of energy. That night he is tired, and the next day he is likely to be stiff and sore. There is a little fatigue left in him, but it takes only a day or two for the body to be wholly refreshed, especially if he hastens the process by another good walk. Up to a certain point, far beyond our usual limit, the more we do, the more we can do. One day after a long walk my little daughter said that she could go no farther and waited to be carried. But she soon spied a dog on ahead and ran off after him with new zest. She followed the dog back and forth, running more than a mile before she reached home, and then in the exuberance of her spirits, ran around the house three times. =The Emotions Again.= What is the key that unlocks new stores of energy and drives away fatigue? What is it in the amateur mountain-climbers that helps the body maintain its new standard? What keeps indefatigable workers on the job long after the ordinary man has tired? Is it not always an invigorating emotion,--the zest of pursuit, the joy of battle, intense interest in work, or a new enthusiasm? All great military commanders know the importance of morale. They know that troops can stand more while they are going forward than while running away, that the more contented and hopeful they are, the better fighters they make; discouragement, lack of interest, the fighting of a losing game, dearth of appreciation, futility of effort, monotony of task, all conspire in soldier or civilian to use up and to lock up energy which might have been available for real work. Approaching the matter from a new angle, we find once more that the difference between strength and weakness is in many cases merely a difference in the emotions and feeling-tones which habitually control. Fatigue is a safety-device of nature to keep us within safe limits, but it is a device toward which we must not become too sensitive. As a rule it makes us stop long before the danger point is reached. If we fall into the habit of watching its first signals, they may easily become so insistent that they monopolize attention. Attention increases any sensation, especially if colored by fear. Fear adds to the waste matter of fatigue little driblets of adrenalin and other secretions which must somehow be eliminated before equilibrium is reestablished. This creates a vicious circle. We are tired, hence we are discouraged. We are discouraged, hence we are more tired. This kind of "tire" is a chemical condition, but it is produced not by work but by an emotion. He who learns to take his fatigue philosophically, as a natural and harmless phenomenon which will soon disappear if ignored, is likely to find himself possessed of exceptional strength. We can stand almost any amount of work, provided we do not multiply it by worry. We can even stand a good deal of real anxiety provided it is not turned in on ourselves and directed toward our own health. ="Decent Hygienic Conditions."= If fatigue products cannot pile up, why is extra rest ever needed? Because there is a limit to the supply of fuel. If the fat-supply stored away for such emergencies finally becomes low, we may need an extra dose of sleeping and eating in order to let the reservoirs fill again. But this never takes very long. The body soon fills in its reserves if it has anything like common-sense care. The doctrine of reserve energy does not warrant a careless burning of the candle at both ends. It presupposes "decent hygienic conditions,"--eight hours in bed, three square meals a day, and a fair amount of fresh air and exercise. ="Over There."= On the other hand, the stories that floated back to us from the war zone illustrate in the most powerful way what the human body can do when necessity forbids the slightest attention to its needs. One of the best of these stories is Dorothy Canfield's account of Dr. Girard-Mangin, "France's Fighting Woman Doctor." Better than any abstract discussion of human endurance is this vibrant narrative of that little woman, "not very strong, slightly built, with some serious constitutional weakness," who lived through hardships and accomplished feats of daring which would have been considered beyond the range of possibility--before the war. Think of her out there in her leaky makeshift hospital with her twenty crude helpers and her hundreds of mortally sick typhoid patients; four hundred and seventy days of continuous service with no place to sleep--when there was a chance--except a freezing, wind-swept attic in a deserted village. Think of her in the midst of that terrible Battle of Verdun, during four black nights without a light, among those delirious men, and then during the long, long ride with her dying patients over the shell-swept roads. Listen to her as she speaks of herself at the end of that ride, without a place to lay her head: "Oh, then I did feel tired! That morning for the first time I knew how tired I was, as I went dragging myself from door to door begging for a room and a bed. It was because I was no longer working, you see. As long as you have work to do you can go on." Then listen to her as she receives her orders to rush to a new post, before she has had time to lay herself on the bed she has finally found. "Then at once my tiredness went away. It only lasted while I thought of getting to bed. When I knew we were going into action once more, I was myself again." Watch her as she rides on through the afternoon and the long dangerous night; as she swallows her coffee and plum-cake, and operates for five hours without stopping; as she sleeps in the only place there is--a "quite comfortable chair" in a corner; and as she keeps up this life for twenty days before she is sent--not on a vacation, mind you, but to another strenuous post.[51] [Footnote 51: Dorothy Canfield: _The Day of Glory._] This brave little woman is not an isolated example of extraordinary powers. The human race in the great war tapped new reservoirs of power and discovered itself to be greater than it knew. Professor James's assertions are completely proved,--that "as a rule men habitually use only a small part of the powers which they actually possess," and that "most of us may learn to push the barrier (of fatigue) further off, and to live in perfect comfort on much higher levels of power." =How?= The practical question is: how may we--the men and women of ordinary powers, away from the extraordinary stimulus of a crisis like the great war--attain our maximum and drop off the dreary mantle of fatigue which so often holds us back from our best efforts? It may be that the first step is simply getting a true conception of physical fatigue as something which needs to be feared only in case of a diseased body, and which is quite likely to disappear under a little judicious neglect. In the second place, fatigue shows itself to be closely bound up with emotions and instincts. The great releasers of energy are the instincts. What but the mothering instinct and the love of country could uncover all those unsuspected reserves of Dr. Girard-Mangin and others of her kind? What is it but the enthusiasm for work which explains the indefatigable energy of Edison and Roosevelt? If the wrong kind of emotion locks up energy, the right kind just as surely unlocks great stores which have hitherto lain dormant. If most people live below their possibilities, it is either because they have not learned how to utilize the energy of their instinctive emotions in the work they find to do, or because some of their strongest instincts which are meant to supply motive power to the rest of life are locked away by false ideas and unnecessary repressions, and so fail to feed in the energy which they control. In such a case, the "spring tonic" that is needed is a self-knowledge which shall release us from hampering inhibitions and set us free for enthusiastic self-expression. NERVOUS FATIGUE _What of the Nervous Invalid?_ If the normal man lives constantly below his maximum, what shall we say of the nervous invalid? Fatigability is the very earmark of his condition. In many instances he seems scarcely able to raise his hand to his head. Sometimes he can scarcely speak for weariness. Frequently to walk a block sends him to bed for a week. I once had a patient who felt that she had to raise her eyelids very slowly for fear of over-exertion. She could speak only about two or three words a day, the rest of the time talking in whispers. She could not raise a glass to her lips if it were full of water, but could manage it if only half full. A person nearly dead with some fatal disease does not appear more powerless than a typical neurasthenic. If it he true that accumulation of fatigue is promptly fatal, what shall we say of the woman who says that she is still exhausted from the labor of a year ago,--or of ten years ago? What of the business man who travels from sanatorium to sanatorium because five years ago he went through a strenuous year? What of the college student who is broken down because he studied too hard, or the teacher who is worn out because of ten hard years of teaching? There can be but one answer. No matter what their feelings, they can be suffering from no true physiological fatigue. Something very real has happened to them, but only through ignorance and the power of suggestion can it be called fatigue and attributed to overwork. =Stories of Real People.= Perhaps if we look over the stories of a few people who have been members of my household, we may work our way to an understanding of the truth. We give only the barest outline of the facts, thinking that the cumulative effect of a number of cases will outweigh a more detailed description of one or two. The most casual survey shows that whatever it was that burdened these fine men and women, it was not lack of energy. No matter how extreme had been their exhaustion, they were able at once, without rest or any other physical treatment, to summon strength for exertions quite up to those of a normal person. The second point that stands out clearly to any one acquainted with these inner histories is the conviction that in each case the trouble was related in some way to the unsatisfied love-life, to the insistent and thwarted instinct of reproduction. In some cases no search was made for the cause. The simple explanation that there was no lack of power was sufficient to release inhibited energy. But in every case where the cause was sought, it was found to be some outer lack of satisfaction, or some inner repression of the love-force. =From Prostration to Tennis.= One young woman, Miss A., had suffered for ten years from the extremest kind of fatigue. She could not walk a block without support and without the feeling of great exhaustion. Before her illness she had had a sweetheart. Not understanding her normal physical sensations when he was near, she had felt them extremely wicked and had repressed them with all her strength. Later, she broke off the engagement, and a little while after developed the neurosis. Within a week after coming to my house, she was playing tennis, walking three miles to church, and generally living the life of a normal person. =Making Her Own Discoveries.= Then there was Miss B. who for four years had been "exhausted." She had such severe pains in her legs that she was almost helpless. If she sewed for half an hour on the sewing machine, she would be in bed for two weeks. Although she was engaged to be married, she could not possibly shop for her trousseau. Two years before, a very able surgeon had been of the opinion that the pain in the legs was caused by an ovarian tumor. He removed the tumor, assuring the patient that she would be cured. However, despite the operation and the force of the suggestion, the pains persisted. After she had been with me for a few days, she sewed for an hour on the machine. In a day or so she took a four-mile walk in a cañon near the house and, on returning in the afternoon, walked two and a half miles down town to do some shopping. I did not make an analysis in her case because she recovered so quickly,--going home well within two weeks. But she declared that she had found the cause while reading in one of the books on psychology. I had my suspicions that the long-drawn-out engagement had something to do with the trouble, but I did not confirm my opinion. A long engagement, by continually stimulating desire without satisfying it, only too often leads to nervous illness. =Afraid of Heat.= Professor X., of a large Eastern college, had been incapacitated for four years with a severe fatigue neurosis and an intense fear of heat. Constantly watching the weather reports, he was in the habit of fleeing to the Maine coast whenever the weather-prophet predicted warm weather. After a short reëducation, he discovered that his fatigue was symbolic of an inner feeling of inadequacy, and that it bore no relation to his body. Discarding his weariness and throwing all his energies into the Liberty Loan Campaign, he found himself speaking almost continuously throughout one of the hottest days in the history of California, with the thermometer standing at 107 degrees. After that he had no doubt as to his cure. =In Bed from Fear.= Miss C. was carried into my house rolled in a blanket. She had been confined to her bed except for fifteen minutes a day, during which time she was able to lie in a hammock! It seems that her illness was the result of fear, an over-reaction to early teaching about self-abuse. Her mother had frightened her terribly by giving her the false idea that this practice often leads to insanity. Having indulged in self-abuse, she believed herself going insane, and very naturally succumbed to the effects of such a fear. After a few days of re-education, she was as strong as any average person. Having no clothing but for a sick-room, she borrowed hat, skirt, and shoes, and walked to church, a three-mile walk. =Empty Hands.= Miss Y., a fine woman of middle age, suffering from extreme fatigue could neither sleep nor eat. She could only weep. She had spent her life taking care of an invalid girl who had recently died. Now her hands were empty. Like many a mother whose family has grown up, she had no outlet for her mothering instinct, and her sense of impotency expressed itself in the only way it knew how,--through her body. As there is never any lack of unselfish work to be done, or of people who need mothering, she soon found herself and learned how to sublimate her energy in useful activities. =Defying Nature.= One young man from Wyoming had felt himself obliged to give up his business because he could neither work nor eat. It soon cropped out that he and his wife had decided that they must not have any children. With a better understanding of the great forces which they were defying, his strength and his appetite came back and he went back to work, rejoicing. =Left-over Habits.= Often a state of fatigue is the result of a carried-over habit. One of my patients, a young girl, had several years before been operated on for exophthalmic goiter. This is a disease of the thyroid gland, and is characterized by rapid heart, extreme fatigue, and numerous other symptoms. Although this girl's goiter had been removed, the symptoms still persisted. She could not walk nor do even a little work, like wiping a few dishes. I took her down on the beach, let her feel her own pulse and mine and then ran with her on the sand. Again I let her feel our pulses and discover for herself that hers had quickened no more than was normal and had slowed down as soon as mine. After a few such lessons, she was convinced that her symptoms were reverberations for which there was no longer any physical cause. Another young girl, Miss L., had had a similar operation for goiter six years before. Since that time she had been virtually bedridden. During the first meal she had at my house her sister sat by her couch because she must not be left alone. By the second meal the sister had gone, and Miss L. ate at the table with the other guests. That night she managed to crawl upstairs, with a good deal of assistance and with great terror at the probable results of such an effort. After that, she walked up-stairs alone whenever she had occasion to go to her room. Her heart will always be a little rapid and her body will never be very strong, but she now lives a helpful happy life at home and among her friends. In cases like this the exaggeration proves the counterfeit. Nobody could have been so down and out _physically_ without dying. The exaggeration secures attention and gives the little satisfaction to the natural desires which are denied expression, and which gain an outlet through habit along the lines previously worn by the real disease. Many a person is still suffering from an old pain or an old disability whose cause has long since disappeared, but which is stamped on the mind and believed in as a present reality. Since the sensation is as real as ever, it is sometimes very hard to believe that it is not legitimate, but if the person is intelligent, a little explanation and re-education usually suffices. =Twenty Years an Invalid.= Mr. S., from Ohio, had spent much of his time for twenty years going from one sanatorium to another. There was scarcely a health resort in the country with which he was not familiar. The day he came to me he felt himself completely exhausted by the two-block walk from the car. He explained that he could scarcely listen to what I was saying because his brain was so fagged that concentration was impossible. When asked to read a book, he dramatically exclaimed, "Books and I have parted company!" I set him to work reading "Dear Enemy" but it was not a week before he was devouring the deeper books on psychology, in complete forgetfulness of the pains in his head. Playing golf and walking at least six miles every day, he rejoiced in a new sense of strength in his body, which for twenty years he had considered "used up." He is now doing a man-sized job in the business and philanthropic life of his home city. =Brain-fag.= This feeling of brain-fag is one of the commonest nervous symptoms; and almost always it is supposed to be the result of intellectual overwork. Some people who easily accept the idea that physical work cannot cause nervous breakdown can scarcely give up the deep-rooted notion that intense mental work is harmful. Intellectual effort does give rise to fatigue in exactly the same way as does physical exertion, but the body takes care of the waste products of the one just as it does those of the other. Du Bois says that out of all his nervous cases he has not found one which can be traced to intellectual overwork. I can say the same thing, and I know no case in all the literature of the subject whose symptoms I can believe to be the result of mental labor. The college students who break down are not wrecked by intellectual work. In some cases, one strong factor in their undoing is the strain and readjustment necessary because of the discrepancies between some of their deepest religious beliefs and the truth as they learn it in the class-room. The other factors are merely those which play their part in any neurosis. =Re-educating the Teacher.= School-teachers are prone to believe themselves worn out from the mental work and the strain of the strenuous life of teaching. Many a fine, conscientious teacher has come to me with this story of overwork. But the school-teacher is as easily re-educated as is any one else. I usually begin the process by stating that I taught school myself for ten years and can speak from experience. After I explain that there is no physical reason why the teachers of some cities are fagged out at the end of nine months while those in other cities whose session is longer can hold on for ten months, and stenographers who lead just as strenuous a life manage to exist with only a two-weeks' vacation, they begin to see that perhaps after all they have been fooling themselves by a suggestion, "setting" themselves for just so long and expecting to be done up at the end of the term. Many of these same teachers have gone back to their work with a new sense of "enough and to spare" and some of them have written back that they have passed triumphantly through especially trying years with no sense of depletion. In any work, it is the feeling of strain which tells, the emotionalism and feeling sorry for oneself because one has a hard job. It is wonderful what a sense of power comes from the simple idea that we are equal to our tasks. =Sudden Relief.= The story of Mr. V. illustrates Professor James's statement that often the fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, and then suddenly passes away. Mr. V. was another patient who was "physically exhausted." When the rest of "the family" went clamming on the beach, he felt himself too weak for such exertions, so I left him on the sand to hold the bag while the rest of us dug for clams. The minute I turned my back he disappeared. I found him lying flat on his back, resting, behind the bulk-head. I decided that he needed the two-mile walk home and we all set out to walk. "Doctor, this is cruel. It is dangerous. My knees can never stand this. I shall be ill!" ran the constant refrain for the first mile. Then things went a bit better. Toward the last he found, to his absolute astonishment, that the fatigue had entirely rolled away. The last half-mile he accomplished with perfect ease. Needless to say, he never again complained of physical exhaustion. =False Neuritis.= Miss T. was suffering from fatigue and very severe pains in her arms, pains which were supposed to be the result of real neuritis, but which did not correspond to the physiological picture of that disease. A consultation revealed the fact that her love-instinct had been repeatedly stimulated, and then at the last, when it had expected satisfaction, had been disappointed. A discussion of her life, its inner forces, and her future aims helped to pull her together again and give her instinct new outlets. The pains and the fatigue disappeared at once. =Something Wrong.= These cases are chosen at random and are typical of scores of others. In no single case was the trouble feigned or imaginary or unreal. But in every case it was a mistake. _The sense of loss of muscular power was really a sense of loss of power on the part of the soul._ Some inner force was reaching out, reaching out after something which it could never quite attain. As it happened, in every case that I analyzed, the force which felt itself defeated and inadequate was the thwarted instinct of reproduction. Like a man pinned to the ground by a stronger force, it felt itself most helpless while struggling the hardest. Just as we feel a thrill of fright when we step up in the dark and find no step there, so this instinct had gotten itself ready for a step which was not there. Inner repressions or outer circumstances had denied satisfaction and left only an undefined sense that something was wrong. The life-force, feeling itself helpless, limp, tired, had no way of expressing itself except in terms of the body. Since expression is itself a relief and an outlet for feeling, the denied desire had seized on suggestions of overwork to explain its sense of weariness, and had symbolized its soul-pain by converting it into a physical pain. The feeling of inadequacy was very real, but it was simply displaced from one part of the personality to another,--from an unknown, inarticulate part to one which was more familiar and which had its own means of expression. =Locked-up Energy.= We do not know just how the soul can make its pain so intensely real to the body, but we do know that any conviction on the part of the subconscious mind is quickly expressed in the physical machine. A conviction of pain or of powerlessness is very soon converted into a feeling which can scarcely be denied. The mere suggestion that the body is overworked is enough to make it tired. We know, too, that the instincts are the great releasers of energy. So it happens that when our most dynamic instinct--that for the reproduction of the race--is repressed, we lack one of the greatest sources of usable energy. The energy is there, but it is not accessible. Inhibited and locked away, it is not fed into the engine, and we feel exactly as though it were _nil_. Despite its name, the disease neurasthenia does not signify a real asthenia or weakness. Rather, it is a disorder in which there is plenty of energy that has somehow been temporarily misplaced. Then, too, we must remember that under the depressing influence of chronic fear, not quite so much energy is stored away as would otherwise be. All the bodily functions are slowed down; food is not so completely assimilated, the heart-beat is weakened, the breathing is more shallow, and fatigue products are more slowly eliminated. As Du Bois says, "An emotion tires the organism more than the most intense physical or intellectual work." =Avoid the Rest-Cure.= It is a healthful sign that the rest-cure is fast going out of style. Wherever it has helped a nervous patient, the real curative agent has been the personality of the doctor and the patient's faith in him. The whole theory was based on ignorance of the cause of nerves. People suffering from "nervous exhaustion" are likely to be just as "tired" after a month in bed as they were before. Why not? Physical fatigue is quickly remedied, and what can rest do after that? What possible effect can rest have on the fatigue of a discouraged instinct? Since the best releaser of energy is enthusiasm, don't try to get that by lying around in bed or playing checkers at a health resort. SUMMARY If you are chronically and perpetually fatigued, or if you tire more easily than the other people you know, consult a competent physician and let him look you over. If he tells you that you have neither tuberculosis, heart trouble, Bright's disease, nor any other demonstrable disease, that you are physically fit and "merely nervous," give yourself a good shake and commit the following paragraphs to memory. A CATECHISM FOR THE WEARY ONE WHAT? Q. What is fatigue? A. It is a chemical condition resulting from effort that is very recent. Q. What else creates fatigue? A. Worry, fear, resentment, discontent, and other depressing emotions. Q. What magnifies fatigue? A. Attention to the feeling. Q. What makes us weary long after the cause is removed? A. Habit. WHY? Q. Why do many people believe themselves over-worked? A. Because of the power of suggestion. Q. Why do they take the suggestion? A. Because it serves their need and expresses their inner feelings. Q. Why are they willing to choose such an uncomfortable mode of expression? A. Because they don't know what they are doing, and the subconscious is very insistent. WHO? Q. Who gets up tired every morning? A. The neurotic. Q. Who fancies his brain so exhausted that a little concentration is impossible? A. The neurotic. Q. Who still believes himself exhausted as the result of work that is now ancient history? A. The neurotic. Q. Who lays all his woes to overwork? A. The neurotic. Q. Who complains of fatigue before he has well begun? A. The neurotic. Q. Who may drop his fatigue as soon as he "gets the idea?" A. The neurotic. HOW? Q. How can he get the idea? A. By understanding himself. Q. How may he express his inner feelings? A. By choosing a better way. Q. How can he forget his fatigue? A. By ignoring it. Q. How can he ignore it? A. By finding a good stiff job. If he wants advice in a nutshell, here it is: Get understanding! Get courage! Get busy! CHAPTER X _In which the ban is lifted_ DIETARY TABOOS MISUNDERSTOOD STOMACHS =Modern Improvements.= Most people have heard the story of the little girl who wanted to know what made her hair snap. After she had been informed that there was probably electricity in her hair, she sat quiet for a few minutes and then exclaimed: "Our family has all the modern improvements! I have electricity in my hair and Grandma has gas on her stomach!" Judged by this standard many American families are well abreast of the times; and if we include among the modern improvements not only gas on the stomach but also nervous dyspepsia, acid stomach, indigestion, sick-headache, and biliousness, we must conclude that a good proportion of the population is both modern and improved. Despite all this the stomach is one of the best-equipped mechanisms in the world. It, at least, is not modern. After their age-long development the organs of the body are remarkably standardized and adapted to the work required of them. It is safe to say that ninety per cent. of all so-called "stomach trouble" is due not to any inherent weakness of the organ itself but to a misunderstanding between the stomach and its owner. =Organic Trouble.= Unfortunately, there are a few real organic causes for trouble. There are a few cancers of the stomach and a certain number of ulcers. But if the patients whom I have seen are in any way typical, the ulcers that really are cannot compare in number with the ulcers that are supposed to be. Patients go to physicians with so many tales of digestive distress that even the best doctors are fooled unless they are especially alert to the ways of "nerves." They must find some explanation for all the various functional disturbances which the patients report, and as they are in the habit of taking only the body into account, they find the diagnosis of stomach ulcer as satisfactory as any. There is, of course, such a thing as an enlarged or sagging stomach. But it is only in the rarest of cases that such a condition leads to any functional disturbances unless complicated by suggestion. In most cases a person can go about his business as happily as ever unless he gets the idea that ptosis must inevitably lead to pain and discomfort. Confusion sometimes arises when the stomach is blamed for disturbances which originate elsewhere. One day a very sick-looking girl came to me with eager expectation written all over her face. Her stomach was misbehaving and she had heard that I could cure nervous indigestion. It needed little more than a glance to know that she was suffering from organic heart trouble. A boy of sixteen had been taking a stomach-tonic for three months, but the thin, wiry pulse pointed to a different ailment. His digestive disturbances were merely the echo of an organic disease of the kidneys. When the body is burdened by disease, it may have little energy left for digesting food, but in that case the trouble must be sought in other quarters than the stomach. Aside from a few organic difficulties, there is almost no real disease of the stomach. Its misdoings are not matters of food and chemistry, muscle-power and nerve supply, but are the end results of slips in the mental and emotional life of its owner. =Fads Dynamogenic.= What is it that gives the impetus to fads about eating, or about religious belief? Are they advocated by the individual whose libido is finding abundant expression in the natural channels of business and family life, or by his less fortunate brother who can gain a sense of power only by means of some unaccustomed idea? William James says: This leads me to say a word about ideas considered as dynamogenic agents or stimuli for unlocking what would otherwise be unused reservoirs of individual power.... In general, whether a given idea shall be a live idea depends more on the person into whose mind it is injected than on the idea itself. Which is the suggestive idea for this person and which for that one? Mr. Fletcher's disciples regenerate themselves by the idea (and the fact) that they are chewing and re-chewing and super-chewing their food. Dr. Dewey's pupils regenerate themselves by going without their breakfast--a fact, but also an ascetic idea. Not every one can use these ideas with the same success. Because it is so adaptable and sturdy, the stomach lends itself readily to these devices for gaining self-expression; but the danger lies in bringing the process of digestion into conscious attention which interferes with automatic functioning. Still further, the disregard of physiological chemistry is likely to deprive the body of food-stuffs which it requires. The average person is too sensible to be carried off his feet by the enthusiasm of the health-crank, but as most of us are likely to pick up a few false notions, it may be well to be armed with the simple principles of food chemistry in order to combat the fads which so easily beset us and to know why we are right when we insist on eating three regular meals of the mixed and varied diet which has proved best for the race through so many years of trial and experience. WHAT WE NEED TO EAT =The Essence of Dietetics.= To the layman the average discussion of food principles is, to say the least, confusing. Dealing largely, as it does, with unfamiliar terms like carbohydrate and hydrocarbon and calories, it is hard to translate into the terms of the potatoes left over from dinner and the vegetables we can afford to buy. But the practical deductions are not at all difficult to understand. Boiled down to their simplest terms, the essential principles may be stated in a few sentences. The body must secure from the food that we eat, tissue for its cells, energy for immediate use or to be stored for emergency, mineral salts, vitamins, water and a certain bulk from fruits and vegetables,--this latter to aid in the elimination of waste matter. Food for repairing bodily tissue is called protein and is secured from meat, eggs, milk, and certain vegetables, notably peas. Fuel for heat and energy is in two forms--carbohydrate (starch and sugar) and fat. We get sugar from sugar-cane and beets, and from syrups, fruit, and honey. Starch is furnished from flour products--mainly bread--from rice, potatoes, macaroni, tapioca, and many vegetables. Fats come from milk and butter, from nuts, from meat-fat--bacon, lard and suet--and from vegetable oils. The mineral salts are obtained mainly from fruit and vegetables, which also provide certain mysterious vitamins necessary for health, but as yet not well understood. =What the Market Affords.= The moral from all this is plain. The human body needs all the foods which are ordinarily served on the table. Whenever, through fad or through fear, we leave out of our diet any standard food, we are running a risk of cutting the body down on some element which it needs. They say that variety is the spice of life. In the matter of food it is more than that, it is the essence of life. Eat everything that the market affords and you will be sure to be well nourished. If you leave out meat you will make your body work overtime to secure enough tissue material from other foods. If you leave out white bread, you will lose one of the greatest sources of energy. If you leave out tomatoes and cucumbers and strawberries, you deprive your body of the salts and vitamins which are essential. =A Simple Rule.= There is one point that is good to remember. The average person needs twice as much starch as he needs of protein and fat together. That is, if he needs four parts of protein and three of fat, he ought to eat about fourteen parts of starch. This does not mean that we need to bother ourselves with troublesome tables of what to eat, but only to keep in mind in a general way that we need more bread and potatoes than we do meat and eggs. The body does not have to rebuild itself every day. It is probable that a good many people eat too much protein food. If a man is doing hearty work he must have a good supply of meat, but the average person needs only a moderate amount. Here again, the habits of the more intelligent families are likely to come pretty near the dictates of science. =For the Children.= The mother of a family ought to know that the children need plenty of bread, butter, and milk. Despite all the notions to the contrary, good well-baked white bread is neither indigestible nor constipating. It is indeed the staff of life. Two large slices should form the background of every meal, unless there is an extraordinary amount of other starchy food or unless the person is too fat. Milk-fat (from whole milk, cream, and butter) is by far the best fat for children. Besides fat, it furnishes a certain growth-principle necessary for development. As the dairyman cannot raise good calves on skimmed milk, so we cannot raise robust children without plenty of butter and milk. The pity of it is that poor people are forced to try! Milk is also the best protein for children, whose kidneys may be overstrained by trying to care for the waste matter from an excessive quantity of eggs and meat. Bread and butter, milk, fruit, vegetables, and sugar in ample quantities and meat and eggs in moderate quantities are pretty sure to make the kind of children we want. Above all things, let us train them not to be afraid of normal amounts of any regular food or of any combination of foods. =The Fear of Mixtures.= There are many people who can without flinching face almost any single food, but who quail before mixtures. Perhaps there is no notion which is more firmly entrenched in the popular mind than this fear of certain food-combinations, acquired largely from the advertisements of certain so-called "food specialists." The most persistent idea is the fear of acid and milk. It is interesting to watch the new people when they first come to my table. Confronted with grape-fruit and cream at the same meal, or oranges and milk, or cucumbers and milk, they eat under protest, in consternation over the disastrous results that are sure to follow. Out of all these scores of people, many of whom are supposed to have weak stomachs, I have never had one case of indigestion from such a combination. When a person knows that the stomach juices themselves include hydrochloric acid which is far more acid than any orange or grapefruit, that the milk curdles as soon as it reaches the stomach, and that it must curdle if it is to be digested, he has to be very "set" indeed if he is to cling to any remnant of fear. Of course to say that the stomach is well prepared chemically, muscularly, and by its nerve supply to handle any combination of ordinary food in ordinary amounts is not the same thing as saying that we may devour with impunity any amount of anything. It is a good thing for every one to know when he has reached his limit, and a person with organic heart disease should avoid eating large quantities at one time, or when he is extraordinarily fatigued or emotionally disturbed, lest at such a time he may put a fatal strain on the pneumogastric nerve that controls both stomach and heart. THE FEAR OF CERTAIN FOODS =Physical Idiosyncrasies.= Most of our false fears on food subjects come from some tradition--either a social tradition or a little private, pet tradition of one's own. Some one once was ill after eating strawberries and cream. What more natural than to look back to those little curdles in the dish and to start the tradition that such mixtures are dangerous? The worst of it is that the taboo habit is very likely to grow. One after another, innocent foods are thrown out until one wonders what is left. A patient of mine, Mr. G., told me that he had a short time before gone to a physician with a tale of woe about his sour stomach. "What are you eating?" asked the doctor. "Bran crackers and prunes." "Then," said the learned doctor, "you will have to cut out the prunes!" Needless to say, this man ate everything at my table, and flourished accordingly. There may be such a thing as physical idiosyncrasies for certain foods. I have often heard of them, but I have never seen one. I have often challenged my patients to show me some of the "spells" which they say invariably follow the eating of certain foods, but I have almost never been given an exhibition. The man who couldn't eat eggs did throw up once, but he couldn't do it a second time. Many people have threatened to break out with hives after strawberries. One woman triumphantly brought me what looked like a nice eruption, but which proved to be the after-results of a hungry flea! After that she ate strawberries,--without the flea and without the hives. =Not Miracles but Ideas.= Conversions on food subjects are so common at my table that I should have difficulty in remembering the individual stories. Scores of them run together in my mind and make a sort of composite narrative something like this: "Oh, no, thank you, I don't eat this. You really must excuse me. I have tried many times and it is invariably disastrous." Then a reluctant yielding and a day or two later some talk about miracles. "It really is wonderful. I don't understand," etc. Experiences like these only go to show the power of the subconscious mind, both in building up wrong habit-reactions and in quickly substituting healthy ones, once the false idea is removed. Among my stomach-patients there were two men, brothers-in-law, immigrants from the Austrian Tyrol, and now resident in one of the cow-boy states. Leonardo spoke little English, and though Giovanni understood a very little, he spoke only Italian. Several years before I knew them, Giovanni had developed a severe case of stomach trouble and had finally gone to a medical center for operation. The disturbance, however, was not relieved by the operation and before long his brother-in-law fell into the same kind of trouble. For several years the two had spent much of their time dieting, vomiting, and worrying over their sour stomachs. Giovanni finally became so ill that his sick-benefit society had actually assessed its members to pay for his funeral expenses. About this time a business man of their town, impressed by the cure of a former patient who had made a quick recovery after seven years of invalidism, persuaded the two men to take their little savings and come to California to be under my care. The evening meal and breakfast went smoothly enough, although the menu included articles which they had been taught to avoid. However, as I left the house on a necessary absence soon after breakfast, I saw Leonardo weeping in the garden and Giovanni spitting up his breakfast, out at the entrance gate. On my return, I found one of "the family" literally sitting on the coat-tails of Leonardo, while Giovanni hovered at a distance, safe from capture. Leonardo upbraided me bitterly for having undone all the gain they had made in the long months of rigid dieting, for now the vomiting had returned, because they had eaten sugar on their oatmeal at breakfast! I made Leonardo drink an egg-nog, took him into the consultation-room and held my hand on his knee to keep him in his chair, while explaining to him as best I could the physiologic action of the hydrochloric acid on the digestive juice, which he feared as a sour stomach, the sign of indigestion. During the conversation I said, "I suppose Giovanni imitated you in this mistaken fear about your health." The reply was, "No, I got it off him!" Nearly two hours later he exclaimed in astonishment: "Why, that milk hasn't come up! Maybe I am cured!" "Of course you are cured," I answered; "there never was anything really the matter with your stomach, so you are cured as soon as you think you are." Later Giovanni was inveigled into the house by the promise that he would have to eat nothing more than milk soup. All was smooth sailing after this. For my own part I feared for the permanency of the cure, for they were returning to the old environment. But more than three years have passed, and grateful letters still come telling of their continued health. Another patient, a teacher of domestic science in a big Eastern university, had lived on skimmed milk and lime-water from Easter to Thanksgiving. Several attempts to enlarge the dietary by adding cream or white of egg had only served to increase the sense of discomfort. Finding nothing in the history of the case to warrant a diagnosis of organic disease of the stomach, I served her plate with the regular dinner, bidding her have no hesitancy even over the pork chops and potato chips. She gained nine pounds in weight the first week, and in two and a half months was forty pounds to the good. =When Re-education Failed.= But there is one patient who has had to have his lesson repeated at intervals. This man laughingly calls himself a disgrace to his doctor because he is a "repeater." His story illustrates the power of an autosuggestion and the disastrous effect of attention to a physiological function. When Mr. T. came first to me he weighed only 120 pounds, although he is over six feet tall and of large frame. From the age of sixteen he had followed fads in eating and thought he had a weak stomach. I treated his "weak stomach" to everything there was in the market, including mince-pies, cabbage, cheese, and all the other so-called indigestibles. He gained 16-1/2 pounds the first week and 31 pounds in five weeks. One would think that the idea about the weak stomach would have died a natural death, but it did not. Again and again he came back to me like a living skeleton, the last time weighing only 105 pounds, and again and again he has gone back to his home in the Middle West plump and well. Twice while he was at home he underwent unnecessary operations, once for an ulcer that was not there and once for supposed chronic spasm of the pylorus. Needless to say, the operations did not help. You cannot cut out an idea with a knife. Neither can you wash it out with a stomach-pump; else would Mr. T. long ago have been cured! This particular idea of his seems to be proof against all my best efforts at re-education. Psycho-analysis is impracticable, partly because of the duration of the habit of repression, but the history, and certain symbolic symptoms, indicate the Freudian mechanisms at work. All I can do is to feed him up, bully him along, and keep him from starving to death. Just now he is doing very well at home, although he has moved to California so as not to be too far away from "the miracle-worker." If Mr. T.'s case had been typical, I should long ago have lost my faith in psychotherapy. Keeping people from starving is worth while, but is less satisfactory than curing them of what ails them. The nervous patient who has a relapse is no credit to his doctor. It is only when the origin of his trouble is not removed that the bond of transference tends to become permanent. The neurotic who is well only while under the influence of his physician is still a neurotic. However, as most people's complexes are neither so deeply buried nor so obstinate as this, a simple explanation or a single demonstration is usually enough to loose the fettering hold of old misconceptions. COMMON AILMENTS ="Gas on the Stomach."= We all know people who suffer from "gas." Indeed, very few of us escape an occasional desire to belch after a hearty meal. But the person with nervous indigestion rolls out the "gas" with such force that the noise can sometimes be heard all over the house. He may keep this up for hours at a time, under the conviction that he is freeing himself from the products of fermenting food. He may exhibit a well-bloated stomach as proof of the disastrous effect of certain articles of diet. The gas and the bloating are supposed to be the sign and the seal of indigestion, a positive evidence that undigested food is fermenting in the stomach. But what is fermentation? It is, necessarily, a question of the growth of bacteria and is a process which we may easily watch in our own kitchens. Bread rises when the yeast-cells have multiplied and acted on the starch of the flour, producing enough gas to raise the whole mass. Potatoes ferment because bacteria have multiplied within them. Canned fruit blows up because enough bacteria have developed inside to produce sufficient gas to blow open the can. Every housewife knows that it takes time for each of these processes. Bread has to stand several hours before it will rise; potatoes do not ferment under twelve hours, and canned fruit is not considered safe from the fermenting process under three days. Evidently there is some mistake when a person begins to belch forth "gas" within an hour or two after a meal. As a matter of fact, it is not gas at all but merely air that is swallowed with the food or that was present in the empty stomach. When the food enters the stomach it necessarily displaces air, which normally comes out automatically and noiselessly. But if, through fear or attention, a certain set of muscles contract, the pent-up air may come forth awkwardly and noisily or it may stay imprisoned until we take measures to let it out. A hearty laugh is as good as anything, but if that cannot be managed, we may have to resort to a cup of hot water which gives the stomach a slap and makes it let go. Two belches are enough to relieve the pressure. After that we merely go on swallowing air and letting it out again, a habit both awkward and useless. If the emotion which ties the muscle-knot is very intense, and the stomach refuses to let go under ordinary measures, the pain may be severe. But a quantity of hot water or a dose of ipecac is sure to relieve the situation. If the person is able to give himself a good moral slap and relax his unruly muscles, he reaches the same end by a much pleasanter road. Some people are fond of the popular remedy of hot water and soda. Their faith in its efficacy is likely to be increased by the good display of gas which is sure to follow. As any cook knows, soda and acid always fizz. The soda is broken up by the hydrochloric acid of the stomach and forms salt and carbon dioxid, a gas. However, as the avowed aim of the remedy is the relief of gas rather than its manufacture, and as the soda uses up the hydrochloric acid needed in digestion, the practice cannot be recommended as reasonable. =Gastritis.= I once knew a woman who went to a big city to consult a fashionable doctor. When she returned she told with great satisfaction that the doctor had pronounced her case gastritis. "It must be true," she added, "because I have so much gas on my stomach!" The diagnosis of gastritis used to be very common. The ending _itis_ means inflammation,--gastritis, enteritis, colitis, each meaning inflammation of the corresponding organ. An inflammation implies an irritant. There can be no kind of _itis_ without the presence of something which irritates the membrane of the affected part. If we get unusual and irritating bacteria in some spoiled food, we are likely to have an acute inflammation until the offending bacteria are expelled. But an inflammation of this kind never lasts. People who have had ptomaine poisoning sometimes assert that they are afterwards susceptible to poisoning by the kind of food which first made them ill. Such a susceptibility is not so much a hold-over effect from the poison as a hold-over fear which tends to repeat the physical reaction whenever that food is eaten. I, myself, have had ptomaine poisoning from canned salmon, but I have never since had any trouble about eating salmon. =Sour Stomach.= Sometimes when a person lies down an hour or so after a meal, some of the contents of his stomach comes up in his throat. Then if he be ignorant of physiology, he may be very much alarmed because his stomach is "sour." Not knowing that he would have far greater cause for alarm if his stomach were _not_ sour, he may, if the idea is interesting to him, begin to restrict his diet, to take digestive tablets, and to develop a regular case of nervous dyspepsia. Sometimes when the specialists measure the amount of hydrochloric acid in the stomach, they do find too much or too little acid; but this merely means that an emotion has made the glands work overtime or has stopped their action for a little while. The functions of the body are so very, very old that there is little likelihood of permanent disturbance. =Biliousness.= The stomach is not the only part of the body concerning which we lack proper confidence. Next to it the liver is the most maligned organ in the whole body. Although the liver is about as likely to be upset in its process of secreting bile as the ocean is likely to be lacking in salt, many an intelligent person labels every little disturbance "biliousness" and lays it at the door of his faithful, dependable liver. As a matter of fact, the liver is liable to injury from virtually but three sources--alcohol, bacterial infection, and cancer--and even a liver hardened by alcohol goes on secreting bile as usual. The patient dies of dropsy but not of "liver complaint." Some people act as if they thought bile were a poison. On the contrary, it is a very useful digestant; it aids in keeping down the number of harmful bacteria and helps to carry the food from intestines to blood. Every day the liver manufactures at least a pint of this important fluid. The body uses what it needs and stores the surplus for reserve in the gall-bladder. The flow is continuous and, despite all appearances to the contrary, there is no such thing as a torpid or an over-active liver. It is true that after a "bilious" person has vomited for a few minutes he is likely to throw up a certain amount of bile, which is supposed to have been lying in his stomach and causing the nausea. In fact, however, this bile is merely a part of the usual supply stored away in the gall-bladder. By the very act of retching, the bile is forced out of the bile channels into the stomach and thence up into the mouth. Anybody can throw up bile at any time if he only tries hard enough. One of the favorite habits of certain people is the taking of calomel and salts. After such a dose they view with satisfaction the green character of the stools and conclude that they have rid themselves of a great amount of harmful matter. As a matter of fact, the greater part of the coloring in the stools is from the calomel itself, changed in the intestines from one salt of mercury to another. Any excess bile is the result of the irritating action of the calomel on the intestinal wall, an irritation which makes the bowel hurry to cast out this foreign substance without waiting for the bile to be absorbed as usual. A patient once told me that he had bought medicine from a street fakir and by his direction had followed it with a dose of salts. He saved the bowel movement, washed it in a sieve, and discovered a great number of "gall-stones," which the medicine had so effectively washed from his system. He was much astonished when I told him that his gall-stones were merely pieces of soap. He did not know that everybody manufactures soap in his body every day, and that by taking an extra quantity of oil in the shape of the fakir's medicine and an extra quantity of potash in the salts, he had merely augmented a normal physiological process. The supposed action of calomel belongs to the same class of phenomena, and has no slightest effect on the liver or on real gall-stones, which are the precipitate of bile-salts in the gall-bladder, and which cannot be reached by any medicine. If the popular notions about biliousness are ill founded, what then causes the disturbances which undoubtedly do occur and which show themselves in attacks of nausea or sick headache? The answer can be given in a word of four letters; a coated tongue, a bilious attack and a sick headache are all the outcome of a mood. Stocks have gone down or the wife is cranky or the neighbors are hateful. Adrenalin and thyroid secretions are poured out as the result of emotion; digestion is stopped, circulation disturbed, and the whole apparatus thrown out of gear. =Sick-Headache.= Sick-headache is primarily a circulatory disturbance; and although the disturbance may have been inaugurated by some chemical unbalance, the sum total of the force that makes a sick-headache is emotional. The emotion, of course, need not be conscious in order to be effective. If we picture the arteries all over the body as being supplied with, among other things, a wall of circular muscles, and then imagine messages of emotion being flashed to the nerves controlling this muscle wall, we may get an idea of what happens just before a sick-headache. Some parts of the arteries contract too much and other parts relax. The arteries to the head tighten up at the extremities and become loose lower down. The force of the blood-stream against the constricted portion can hardly fail to cause pain. The sick part of the headache is merely a sympathetic strike of the nerves which control circulation and stomach. The moral of all this is plain. If a sick-headache is the result of an emotional spasm of the blood-vessels, the obvious cure is a change of the emotion. Some people manage it by going to a party or a picnic, others by ignoring the symptoms and keeping on with their work. A woman physician whom I know was in the midst of a violent headache when called out on an obstetrical case. She felt sorry for herself, but went on the case. In the strenuous work which followed, she quite forgot the headache, which disappeared as if by magic. Sometimes it happens that a headache recurs periodically or at regular intervals. It is easy to see that in such cases the exciting cause is fear and expectation. At some time in the past, headaches have occurred at an interval of, say, fourteen days; as the next fourteenth day approaches the sufferer says to himself: "It is about time for another headache. I am afraid it will come to-morrow," and of course it comes. One man told me that if he ate Sunday-night supper he inevitably had a headache on Monday morning. We were about to sit down to a simple Sunday supper and he refused very positively to join us. I told him he could stay all night and that I would take care of him if the Monday sickness appeared. He accepted my challenge but was unable to produce a headache. In fact, he felt so unusually flourishing the next morning that he insisted on frying the bacon for my entire family. That was the end of the Monday headaches. =A Few Examples.= As sick-headache has always been considered a rather stubborn difficulty, not amenable to most forms of treatment, it may be well to cite a few cases which were helped by educational methods. A patient came home from a walk one day and announced that he was going to bed. When questioned, be said: "I am tired and I have a sick-headache. Isn't it logical to go to bed?" To which I answered that it would be far more logical to put some food into his stomach and change the circulation than to lie in bed and think about his pain. This man was completely cured. I have had patients throw up one meal, and very rarely two, but I have never had to supply more than three meals at a time. The waste of food I consider amply justified by the benefit to the patient. There once came to me an elderly woman, the wife of a poor minister. She was suffering from attacks of nausea, which recurred every five to ten days with intense pain through the eyes, and with photo-phobia or fear of light. I found that she had by dint of heroic efforts raised a large and promising family on the salary of an itinerant minister--from four hundred to six hundred a year! All the time she had been feeling sorry for herself because her husband did not appreciate her. One day, after reading one of his letters which seemed to show an utter lack of appreciation of all that she was doing, she fell down in the field beside her plow, paralyzed. From that time on she had been more or less of an invalid, continually nursing her grudge and complaining that she ought not to have been made to bear so many children. After I had heard this plaint over and over for about a week, I said: "Perhaps you ought not to have had that little daughter, the little ewe-lamb. Maybe she was one too many." "Oh, no," came the quick response. "I couldn't have spared _her_." Then I went down the line of the fine stalwart sons. Perhaps she could have spared John or Tom or Fred? Finally she saw the whole matter in a different light,--saw herself as a queen among women, the mother of such a family. As to the husband, I tried to show her that she was not very clever to live with a man all those years without discovering that he was not likely to change. "You can't change him but you can change your reaction to him. If something keeps hurting your hand, you don't keep on being sore. You grow callous. Isn't it about time you grew a moral callous, too?" I put her on the roof to sleep, on account of her fear of light. Only once did she start a headache, which I quickly nipped in the bud by making her get up and dress. She had come to stay "three months or four,--if I get along well." At the end of four weeks she left, an apparently well woman. The last I heard of her she was stumping the state for temperance, the oldest of an automobile party of speakers, and the sturdiest physically. With the emotional grievance, disappeared also the physical effects in stomach and head. Miss S., a very brilliant woman, ambitious to make the most of her life, had been shelved for twenty-five years because of violent sick-headaches which made it impossible for her to undertake any kind of work. She had not been able to read a half-hour a day without bringing on a terrible headache. I insisted on her reading, and very soon she was so deep in psychological literature that I had difficulty in making her go to bed at all. After learning the cause of her headaches and gaining greater emotional control, she succeeded so well in freeing herself from the old habit, that she now leads the busiest kind of useful life with only an occasional headache, perhaps once in six months. A certain minister suffered constantly from a dull pain in his head, besides having violent headaches every few days. He started in to have a bad spell the day after his arrival at my house. As I was going out of the door, he caught my sleeve. "Doctor," he said, "would it be bad manners to run away?" "Manners?" I answered. "They don't count, but morals, yes." He stayed--and that was his last bad headache. Both chronic and periodic pains disappeared for good. One woman who had suffered from bad headaches for eighteen years lost them completely under a process of re-education. On the other hand, I have had patients who were not helped at all. The principles held good in their cases, but they were simply not able to lose the old habit of tightening up the body under emotion. =Hysterical Nausea.= Sometimes nausea is merely the physical symbol of a subconscious moral disgust. We have already told the stories of "the woman with the nausea" (Chapter V) and of Mrs. Y. (Chapter VII). These cases are typical of many others. Their bodies were perfectly normal, and when, through psycho-analysis and re-education, they were helped to make over their childish attitudes toward the sex-life, the nausea disappeared. =Loss of Appetite.= A nervous patient with a good appetite is "the exception that proves the rule." The neurotic is usually under weight and often complains that he feels satiated almost as soon as he begins to eat. Loss of appetite may, of course, mean that the body is busy combating toxins in the blood, but in a nervous person it usually means a symbolic loss of appetite for something in life, a struggle of the personality against something for which he has "no stomach." Psycho-analysis often reveals the source of the trouble, and a little bullying helps along the good work. By simply taking away a harmful means of expression, we may often force the subconscious mind to find a better language. SUMMARY Since the stomach seems to be an organ which is much better fitted to care for food than to care for a depressing emotion or a false idea, it seems far more sensible to change our minds than to keep enlarging our list of eatables which are taboo. And since most indigestion is in very truth nothing more nor less than an emotional disturbance, worked up by fear, anger, discontent, worry, ignorance, suggestion, attention to bodily functions which are meant to be ignored, love of notice and the conversion of moral distress into physical distress, the best diet list which can be furnished to Mr. Everyman in search of health must read something like this: MENU Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday A Calm Spirit Plenty of Good Cheer A Varied Diet Commonsense Good Cooking Judicious Neglect of Symptoms Forgetfulness of the Digestive Process A Little Accurate Knowledge A Determination to BE LIKE FOLKS CHAPTER XI _In which we relearn an old trick_ THE BUGABOO OF CONSTIPATION POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS In line with the taboos connected with the taking of food are the ceremonials attendant upon its elimination. Taking anxious thought about functions well established by nature is a feature of conversion-hysteria, the displacement of emotional desire from its psychic realm into symbolic physical expression. Whatever other symptoms nervous people may manifest, they are almost sure to be troubled with chronic constipation. It is true that there are many constipated people who do not seem to be nervous and who resent being classed among the neurotics. Everybody knows that the occasional individual who has difficulty in swallowing his food is nervous and that the, trouble lies not in the muscles of his throat but in the ideas of his mind. But very few people seem to realize that the more common individual who makes hard work of that other simple process--elimination of his intestinal waste matter--is suffering from the same kind of disturbance and giving way to a nervous trick. When all the facts are in, the constipated person will have hard work to clear himself of at least one count on the charge of nerves. =An Oft-told Tale.= Sooner or later, then, the neurotic, whether he calls himself a neurotic or not, is very likely to begin worrying over his diet or his sedentary occupation. He imagines himself the victim of autointoxication, afflicted with paralysis of the colon or dearth of intestinal secretions. He leaves off eating white bread, berries, cheese, chocolate, and many another innocent food, and insists on a diet of bran-biscuit, flaxseed breakfast-foods, prunes, spinach, cream, and olive-oil with doses of mineral oil between meals. In all probability, he begins a course of massage or he starts to take extra long walks and to exercise night and morning, pulling his knees up to his chin and touching his fingers to his toes. When all these measures fail, he gives in to the morning enema or the nightly pill, in imminent danger of succumbing to a life-long habit. THE TRUTH ABOUT CONSTIPATION =What the Colon Is For.= It is well, then to have a fair understanding of the structure and purpose of our intestinal machinery. Contrary to general opinion, the intestines are not a dumping-ground but a digestive organ. After the food is partly digested in the stomach, it passes through a twenty-two foot tube (the small intestine) into a five-foot tube (the large intestine or colon) where digestion is completed, the nutriment is absorbed, and the waste matter is passed on and out through the rectum. As the food passes along the colon, pushed slowly ahead by the peristaltic wave, or rhythmic muscular contractions of the intestinal wall, it is seized upon by the four hundred varieties of friendly bacteria which inhabit the intestines of every healthy person, and is changed into a form which the body can assimilate. Digestion in the stomach and small intestine is carried on by means of certain digestive juices, but in the large intestine it is the bacteria which do the work. Without them we could not live. Around the colon is a thick network of little blood vessels, all of which lead straight to the liver, the storehouse of the body. After the food is fully digested, it is passed through the thin intestinal wall into these tiny vessels and carried away to liver and muscles for storage or for immediate use. This process of absorption is carried on throughout the whole length of the colon. Not until the very end of the intestine is reached is all the nutrition abstracted. The bowel-content can properly be called waste matter only after it has reached the rectum or pouch at the lower end of the colon. Even then, this waste matter is not poison, but merely indigestible material which the body cannot handle. =Food, not Poison.= The colon is not a cesspool but a digestive and assimilating organ. Its content is not poison but food. Active elimination is important not so much because delay causes autointoxication or poisoning as because too large a mass is hard to manage and irritates the intestinal wall. The problem is not so much one of toxicology as of simple mechanics. If Nature had put within the body five feet of tubing which could easily become a cesspool and a breeder of poison, it is not at all likely that she would have laid alongside an elaborate system of blood vessels leading not out to the kidneys but into the storehouse of the liver; and if civilized man's changed manner of living had so upset Nature's plans as easily to transform his internal machinery into a chronic source of danger, we may be sure that he would long ago have gone the way of the unfit and succumbed to his own poisons. =Possible Invasions.= It is true that the intestinal tract, like the rest of the body, is open to attack by harmful bacteria. But in a great majority of cases, these enemy bacteria are either quickly destroyed by the beneficent microbes within or are immediately cast out as unfit. Any germs irritating to the intestinal wall cause the mucous membrane to produce an unusual flow of mucus which washes away the offending bacteria in what we call a diarrhea.[52] [Footnote 52: If the invading army proves obstinate and the diarrhea continues a day or so, it is wise to assist Nature by a dose of castor-oil, which gives an additional insult to the intestinal wall, spurs it on to a desperate effort, and hastens the cleansing process. In severe cases the more promptly the castor-oil is administered the better. Such emergency measures are very different from the habitual use of insulting drugs.] Sometimes the wrong kind of bacteria do persist, causing anemia, rheumatism, sciatica, or neuritis. When these disorders are not the result of infection from teeth, tonsils, or other sources of poison, but are really caused by intestinal bacteria, I have found that a diet of buttermilk (lactic acid bacteria), with turnip-tops or spinach to supply the necessary mineral salts, often succeeds in planting the right bacteria and driving out the disturbing ones. These disorders are invasions from without, like tuberculosis or malaria, and are as likely to attack the person with easy bowel movements as the one with the most chronic constipation. =Autointoxication.= A good deal of the talk about autointoxication is just talk. It sounds well and affords an easy explanation for all sorts of ills, but in a large majority of cases the diagnosis can hardly be substantiated. Uninformed writers of newspaper articles on the care of the body, or purveyors of purgatives or apparatus for internal baths are fond of dilating on the "foulness of the colon" as a leading cause of disease. As a rule, they advise either a strict diet, some kind of cathartic, or an elaborate process of washing out the colon to clear the body of its terrible accumulation of poisons. =Cathartics and Enemas.= He who makes a practice of flushing out his intestinal tract with high enemas and internal baths is like a person who eats a good dinner and then proceeds to wash out his stomach. In the mistaken idea that he is making himself clean, he is washing what was never intended to be washed and robbing the body of the nutrition which it needs. And the man who persists in the pill habit is making a worse mistake, adding insult to injury and forcing the mucous membrane to toughen itself against such malicious attacks. =Cathartics and Operations.= Even in emergencies, the use of purgatives as a routine measure is happily decreasing year by year. For many years I have deplored the use of purgatives before and after operations. That other practitioners are coming to the same conclusion is witnessed by a number of papers recently read in medical societies condemning purgation at the time of operation. Among the most favorably received papers of the California Medical Societies have been one by Emmet L. Rixford, surgeon of the Stanford University Medical College, read before the Southern California Medical Society at Los Angeles December 8, 1916, and one by W.D. Alvarez at the California Medical Society, Del Monte, 1918,--both condemning the use of purgatives as a routine measure before operations. An article entitled the "Use and Abuse of Cathartics" in the "Journal of the American Medical Association" admirably summarizes the disadvantages of purgation at such a time.[53] [Footnote 53: "1 Danger of dissemination of infection throughout the peritoneal cavity, in case localized infection exists. "2 Increased absorption of toxins and greater bacterial activity by reason of the fact that undigested food has been carried down into the colon to serve as pabulum for bacteria, and that liquid feces form a better culture medium than solid feces. "3 Increased distention of the intestine with gas and fluid, when it should be empty.... "4 Psychic and physical weakness produced by dehydration of the body, disturbance in the salt balance of the system, and the loss of sleep occasioned by the frequent purging during the night preceding the operation. As Oliver Wendell Holmes says: 'If it were known that a prize fighter were to have a drastic purgative administered two or three days before a contest, no one will question that it would affect the betting on his side unfavorably. If this be true for a powerful man in perfect health, how much more true must it be of the sick man battling for life.' "5 Increase in postoperative distress and danger: thirst, gas pains, and even ileus...."--_Journal of American Medical Association_, Vol. 73, No. 17, p. 1285, Oct. 25. 1919.] Four years ago I was called to a near-by city to see a former patient who two days before had had a minor operation,--removal of a cyst of the breast. She was dazed, almost in a state of surgical shock and very near collapse. I found that she had been put through the usual course of purgation before operation and starvation afterward, and I diagnosed her condition as a state bordering on acidosis, or lowering of the alkaline salts of the body. I ordered food at once. She rallied and recovered. A few months later this same woman had to undergo a much more serious operation for multiple fibroids of the uterus and removal of the appendix. This time I advised the surgeon against the use of any purgative, and he took my remarks so seriously that he did not even allow an enema to be given. This time the patient showed no signs of exhaustion and had very few gas pains. I firmly believe that the day will soon come when a patient under operation, or a patient after childbirth, will no longer be depleted by a weakening and dehydrating cathartic and by a period of starvation, at a time when he needs all the energy he can summon. =Cathartics and Childbirth.= The article referred to in the "Journal of the American Medical Association" cites the experiences of Dr. R. McPherson of the Lying-in Hospital of New York, "who showed that the routine purgation after confinement is not only useless but harmful. Of 322 women who were not purged, only three had fever (and one of them a mammary abscess); most of them had normal bowel movements and those who did not were given an enema every third day. Of 322 women who were delivered by the same technique and the same operators but were purged in the usual routine manner, twenty-eight had some fever." This experience of one physician is corroborated by that of others who find that the more we tamper with the natural functions in time of stress the harder do we make the recuperative process. There are certainly times when catharsis is necessary but "one thing is certain, the day for routine purgation is past."[54] Even in emergencies we need to know why we administer cathartics and in chronic cases we may be sure that they are always a mistake. [Footnote 54: Ibid, p. 1286.] ="An Old Trick."= Before we make a practice of interfering with Nature's processes, it is well to remember how old and stable those processes are. As long as there has been the taking in of food, there has been also the casting out of waste matter. The sea-anemone closes in on the little mollusk that floats against its waving petals, assimilates what it can and rejects the rest. In the long line from sea-anemone to man, this automatic process of elimination has gone on without a hitch, adapting itself with perfect success to the changing habits of the varying types of life. So old a process is not easily upset. And, be it noted, in the human body this automatic, involuntary process still goes on with very little trouble until it reaches a point in the body where man, the thinking animal, tries to control it by conscious thought. =A Question of Evacuation.= Much of the misconception about constipation arises from the mistaken idea that this is a disorder of the whole intestine or at least of the whole colon. As a matter of fact, the trouble is almost wholly in the rectum. There is no trouble with the general traffic movement, but only with the unloading at the terminus. In my experience, the patient reports that he feels the fecal mass in the lower part of the rectum, but that he is unable to expel it. Examination by finger or by X-ray reveals a mass in the rectal pouch. If there is a piling up of freight further back on the line, it is only because the unloading process has been delayed at the terminus. So long as the bowel-content is in the region of automatic control, there is very little likelihood of trouble. An occasional case of organic trouble--appendicitis, lead-colic, mechanical obstruction, new growths or spinal-cord disease--may cause a real blockade, but in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred there is little trouble so long as the involuntary muscles, working automatically under the direction of the subconscious mind, are in control. By slow or rapid stages, on time or behind time, the bowel-content reaches the upper part of the rectum and passes through a little valve into the lower pouch. Here is where the trouble begins. =Meddlesome Interference.= In the natural state the little human, like the other animals, empties his bowel whenever the fecal mass enters the lower portion of the rectum. The presence of the mass in the rectum constitutes a call to stool which is responded to as unthinkingly as is the desire for air in the taking of a breath. But the tiny child soon has to learn to control some of his natural functions. At the lower end of the rectum there is a purse-string muscle called the _Sphincter-ani_, an involuntary muscle which may with training be brought partly under voluntary control. Under the demands of civilization, the baby learns to tighten up this muscle until the proper time for evacuation. Then, if he be normal, he lets go, the muscles higher up contract and the bowel empties itself automatically, as it always did before civilization began. There is, however, a possibility of trouble whenever the conscious mind tries to assume control of functions which are meant to be automatic. Under certain conditions necessary control becomes meddlesome interference. If the child for one reason or another takes too much interest in the function of elimination; if he likes too much the sense-gratification from stimulation of the rectal nerves and learns to increase this gratification by holding back the fecal mass; if he gets the idea that the function is "not nice" and takes the interest that one naturally feels in subjects that are taboo; or if he catches from his elders the suggestion that the bowel movement is a highly important process and that something disastrous is likely to happen unless it is successfully performed every day; then his very interest in the matter tends to interfere with automatic regulation, and to cause trouble. Just as people often find it hard to let go the bladder muscle and urinate when in a hurry or under observation, and just as an apprehensive woman in childbirth tightens up the purse-string muscle of the womb, so the little child, or the grown up who catches the suggestion of difficulty in the bowel movement, loses the trick of letting go. Instead of merely exercising control by temporarily inhibiting the function, he tries to carry through the process itself by voluntary control--and fails. Constipation is a perfect example of the power of suggestion, and of the troublesome effect of a fear-idea in the realm of automatic functions. FOOD AND CONSTIPATION Since the waste matter from all foods finally reaches the rectum, and since constipation is merely a difficulty in the forces of expulsion, it is hard to see how any normal food in the quantities usually eaten could have the slightest effect on the problem. When we remember that it takes food from twelve to twenty-four hours to reach the rectum, and that it has during all that time been subjected to the action of the powerful chemicals of the digestive tract, it is hard to imagine a piece of cheese, of whatever variety, strong enough to stop the contraction of the muscles of the upper rectum or to tie the sphincter-muscle into a knot. It would be difficult to find a food which could pass without effect through twenty-seven feet of intestinal tubing only to become suddenly effective on the wall of the rectum. If the wrong kind of food is the cause of constipation, why does the rectum prove to be the most refractory portion of the tube? On what principle could a piece of chocolate inhibit the call to stool or contract the sphincter muscle? On the other hand, even if it should be conceded that constipation were the result of lack of lubricating secretions in the colon, how could two tablespoonfuls of mineral oil be a sufficient lubricant after being mixed with liquid and solid food through many feet of the intestinal tract? =An Adaptable Apparatus.= The lining of the intestines has plenty of secretions to take care of its function. It is as well adapted to the vicissitudes of life as are the other parts of the body. The muscular coat is no more liable to paralysis or spasm than are the voluntary muscles. As the skin adapts itself to all waters and all weathers, and as the lungs adjust themselves to varying air-pressures, so the intestinal wall makes ready adaptation to any common-sense demands, adjusting itself with ease to an athletic or a sedentary life, and to the normal variations of diet. What man has eaten throughout the centuries man may eat to-day. If you will but believe it, your intestines will make no more objection to white bread, blackberries, and cheese, along with all other ordinary articles of food, than the skin makes to varying kinds of water. Naturally, the suggested idea that a food will constipate tends to carry itself out to fulfilment and to prevent the call to stool from rising to the level of consciousness; but the real force lies not in the food but in the suggestion. =The Bran Fad.= It is when we try to improve on the normal human diet that we really insult the body. He who leaves off eating nourishing white bread and takes to bran muffins is simply cheating his body. Bran has a small food value, but the human body is not made to extract it. Not only does bran fail to give us any nourishment itself, but it lessens the power of the intestines to care for other food.[55] The fad for bran is based on the well-known fact that we need a certain quantity of bulk in order to stimulate the intestinal wall to normal peristalsis. We do need bulk, but not more than we naturally get from a normal and varied diet including a reasonable amount of fruit and vegetables. [Footnote 55: See an article entitled "Bread and Bran," _Journal of American Medical Association_, July 5, 1919, p. 36.] It is true that the suggestion of the efficacy of bran, dates, spinach, or any other food is frequently quite sufficient to give relief, temporarily, just as massage, manipulation of the vertebrae, the surgeon's knife, or mineral oil may be enough to carry the conviction of power to a suggestible individual. But who wants to take his suggestions in such inconvenient forms as these? =Change of Water.= Another popular superstition centers around drinking-waters. There are people who cannot move from one town to another, much less take an extensive trip, without a fit of constipation--or a box of pills. If they only knew it, there is no water on earth which could make a person constipated. A new water, full of unusual minerals, might hasten the bowel movement, but on what possible principle could it retard it? Constipation has nothing to do with food or with water, but solicitous care about either can hardly fail to create the trouble which it tries to avoid. THE CURE =Taking off the Brakes.= Since constipation is wholly due to the acceptance of a false suggestion, the only logical cure must be release from the power of that suggestion. "He is able as soon as he thinks he is able"; not that thought gives the power, but that the right thought releases the inhibition of the mistaken thought. As soon as the brakes are taken off, the internal machinery is quite able to make the wheels go round. The bowel will empty itself if we let it. The function of elimination is not a new trick learned with difficulty by the aged, but a trick as old and as elemental as life itself. Like balancing on a bicycle, it may not be done by any voluntary muscular effort, but it just does itself when one learns how. Once the sense of power comes, once the mind forgets to be doubtful or afraid, then the old automatic habit invariably reasserts itself. Meddlesome interference may throw the mechanism out of gear, but fortunately it cannot strip the gears. Constipation is an inhibition or restraint of function, but is never a loss of function. No one is too old, no one is too fixed in the bad habit to relearn the old trick. I have had a good many patients with chronic constipation, but I have never had one who failed to learn. Real conviction speedily brings success, and in many cases success seems to outrun conviction. So efficient is Nature if she has only half a chance! =Some People Who Learned.= Unless you are over ninety-two, do not despair. One old lady of that age, a sort of patient by proxy, was able to cure herself without even one consultation. Her daughter had been a patient of mine and had been cured of the constipation with which she had been busy for many years. The mother, who believed her own bowel paralyzed, had been in the habit of lying on the bed and taking a copious enema every second day of her life. When, however, she heard of her daughter's cure, the bright old woman gave up her enemas and let her bowels do their own functioning. She stayed cured until her death at ninety-five. =A Fifty-year Habit.= Another old lady was not quite so easily convinced. She ridiculed the idea that her son of fifty, who had been "constipated in his cradle" could be cured of his lifelong habit, but he was cured. As long as there is life and the light of reason, so long may Nature's functions be reëstablished. =The Whole Family.= Nor is any one too young to learn. A tiny baby is easily taught. There came to me for two consultations a mother and her two babies, all three constipated. The four-year-old child, mentally deficient, had been fed on milk of magnesia from his infancy, and the four-months-old baby had been started on the same path. I explained to the mother the mechanism of elimination, told her to give up cathartics, and to set a regular time for herself and the baby, but was a little dubious about the mentally deficient four-year-old. However she soon reported that they had all three promptly acquired the new habit. Four years later she told me that they had never had any more trouble. =A Record History.= When Miss H. first came to my house, she told a story that was almost incredible. She said that for many months she had been taking eight tablespoonfuls of mineral oil three times a day besides a cathartic at night, and an enema in the morning. No wonder she was a little dubious over such mild treatment as mine seemed to be! Constipation was only one of this young woman's troubles. She could not sleep and was so fatigued that she believed herself at the end of her physical capital. When she first came to me she had tears in her eyes most of the time and used to confide to various people that she was sure she was a patient that I could not cure,--a very common belief among nervous invalids! She was sure that I did not understand her case, and that she could not get anything out of this kind of treatment. It was only a very short time, however, before her bowels were functioning like those of a normal person. She lost her insomnia and her fatigue and went away as well as ever. When she got back to her office, she found that her old position, which she had believed secure to her, had been given to another. She had to go out and hunt a new job and face conditions harder than she had had before, but she came through with flying colors. A short time ago Miss H. came back to see me,--a happy, robust young woman, very different from the person I had first known. She assured me that she had never had any return of her old symptoms and that she was as well as a person could be. =Living up to a Suggestion.= Mrs. T. had not had a natural movement of the bowels in twenty-five years. After the birth of a child, twenty-five years before, her physician had told her that her muscles had been so badly torn in labor that they could not carry through a natural movement. After that she had never gone a day without a pill or an enema. I explained to her that when any muscle of the rectum is injured in childbirth, it is the sphincter-ani, and that since this is the muscle whose contraction holds back the bowel content, its injury would tend to over-free evacuation rather than to constipation. She saw the point and within two or three days regained her old power of spontaneous evacuation. =Practical Steps.= The first step, then, in acquiring normal habits is the conviction of the integrity of our physical machines and a determination not to interfere by thought, or by physical meddling, with the elemental functions of our bodies. After this all-important step, there are a few practical suggestions which it is well to follow. Most of them are nothing more than the common-sense habits of personal hygiene which are so obvious as to be almost axiomatic, but which are nevertheless often neglected: 1 Eat three square meals a day. 2 Drink when thirsty, having conveniently at hand the facilities for drinking. 3 Heed the call to stool as you heed the call of hunger. When the stool passes the little valve between the upper and lower portions of the rectum, it gives the signal that the time for evacuation has come. If this signal is always heeded, it will automatically start the machinery that leads to evacuation. If it is persistently ignored because one is too busy, or because the mind is filled with the idea of disability, the call very soon fails to rise to the level of consciousness. The feces remain in the rectum, and the bad habit is begun. 4 Choose a regular time and keep that appointment with yourself as regularly as possible. In all the activities of Nature, there is a rhythm which it is well to observe. 5 Take time to acquire the habit. Do not be in a hurry. Do not strain. No amount of effort will start the movement. Just let it come of itself. 6 Finally, should the unconscious suggestion of lack of power stubbornly remain in force, take a small enema on the third day. If the waste matter accumulates for three or more days, the bulk becomes so great that the circular muscles of the rectum are unable to handle it, just as the fingers cannot squeeze down to expel water from too large a mass of wet blankets. Take only a small enema--never over a quart at a time--and expel the water immediately. One or two such measures will bring away the mass in the rectum. The material farther up still contains food elements and is not yet ready for expulsion. Lessen the amount of water each time until no outside help is needed. Once you get the right idea, all enemas will be superfluous. SUMMARY If you would have in a nutshell an epitome of the truth about constipation, indigestion, insomnia, and the other functional disturbances common to nervous folk, you can do, no better than to commit to memory and store away for future reference that choice limerick of the centipede, which so admirably sums up the whole matter of meddlesome interference: A centipede was happy quite Until a frog in fun Said, "Pray, which leg comes after which?" This raised her mind to such a pitch, She lay distracted in the ditch, Considering how to run. Whoever tries to consider "which leg comes after which" in any line of physiological activity, is pretty sure to find himself in the ditch considering how to run. Wherefore, remember the centipede! CHAPTER XII _In which handicaps are dropped_ A WOMAN'S ILLS "THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES" If ever there was a man who wished himself a woman, he has hidden away the desire within the recesses of his own heart. But one does not have to wait long to hear a member of the female sex exclaim with evident emotion, "Oh, dear, I wish I had been born a man!" It is probable that if these same women were given the chance to transform themselves overnight, they would hesitate long when it actually came to the point. The joys of being a woman are real joys. However, in too many cases these joys seem hardly to compensate for the discomforts of the feminine organism. It is the body that drags. Painful menstrual periods, the dreaded "change of life," various "female troubles" with a number of pregnancies scattered along between, make some of the daughters of Eve feel that they spend a good deal of their lives paying a penalty merely for being women. Brought up to believe themselves heirs to a curse laid on the first woman, they accept their discomforts with resignation and try to make the best of a bad business. ="Since the War."= Nothing is quite the same since the war. Among other things we have learned that many of our so-called handicaps were nothing but illusions,--base libels on the female body. Under the stern necessity of war the women of the world discovered that they could stand up under jobs which have until now been considered quite beyond their powers. Society girls, who were used to coddling themselves, found a new joy in hard and continuous work; middle-aged women, who were supposed to be at the time of life when little could be expected of them, quite forgot themselves in service. Ambulance drivers, nurses, welfare workers, farmerettes, Red-Cross workers, street-car conductors and "bell-boys," revealed to themselves and to the world unsuspected powers of endurance in a woman's body. Although some of the heavier occupations still seem to be "man's work," better fitted for a man's sturdier body, we know now that many of these disabilities were merely a matter of tradition and of faulty training. There still remains, however, a goodly number of women who are continuously or periodically below par because of some form of feminine disability. Some of these women are suffering from real physical handicaps, but many of them need to be told that they are disabled not by reason of being women but by reason of being nervous women. ="Nerves" Again.= Despite the organic disturbances which may beset the reproductive organs, and despite the havoc wrought by venereal diseases, it may be said with absolute assurance that the majority of feminine ills are the result neither of the natural frailty of the female body, nor even of man's infringement of the social law, but are the direct result of false suggestion and of false attitudes toward the facts of the reproductive life. The trouble is less a difficulty with the reproductive organs than a difficulty with the reproductive instinct. "Something wrong" with the instinct is translated by the subconscious mind into "something wrong" with the related generative organs, and converted into a physical pain. That this relation has always been dimly felt is shown by the fact that the early Greeks called nervous disorders _hysteria_, from the Greek word for womb. It is only lately, however, that the blame has been put in the right place and the trouble traced to the _instinct_ rather than to the _organs_ of reproduction. =Why Women Are Nervous.= Although women hold no monopoly, it must be conceded that they are particularly prone to "nerves." The reason is not hard to find. Since the leading factor in a neurosis is a disturbance of the insistent instinct of reproduction, a disturbance usually based on repression, then any class of persons in whom the instinct is particularly repressed would, in the very nature of the case, be particularly liable to nervousness. No one who thoroughly knows human nature would attempt to deny that woman is as strongly endowed as man with the great urge toward the perpetuation of the race, or that she has had to repress the instinct more severely than has man. The man insists on knowing that the children he provides for are his own children. Whatever the degree of his own fidelity, he must be sure that his wife is true to him. Thus has grown up the insistence that, no matter what man does, woman, if she is to be counted respectable, shall control the urge of the instinct and live up to the requirements of continence set for her by society. Unfortunately, however, there is more often blind repression than rational control. The measures taken to prevent a girl's becoming a tom-boy are measures of sex-repression quite as much as of sex-differentiation. Over-reaction of sensitive little souls to lessons in modesty often causes distortion of normal sex-development. Ignorance concerning the phenomena of life is commended as innocence, while it really implies a sex-curiosity which has been too severely repressed. The young woman blushes at thoughts of love, while the young man is filled with a sense of dignity. We smile at the picture of "Miss Philura's" confusion as she hesitatingly sends up to her Creator a petition for the much-desired boon of a husband. But really, why shouldn't she want one? Many a young woman, in order to deaden her senses to the unsuspected lure of the reproductive instinct by what is really an awkward attempt at _sublimation_, makes a fetish of dress and social position and considers only the marriage of convenience; or, on the other hand, she scorns men altogether and throws herself into a "career." Young men are not so often taught to repress, but neither are they taught to swing their vital energies into altruistic channels through sublimation. Since the woman of his class will not marry him until he has money, the young man too often satisfies his undirected instincts in a commercial way. The statistics of venereal diseases prove that here, as elsewhere, goods subject to barter are subject to contamination. In a late marriage, too often a contaminated body accompanies the material possessions which the standards of society have demanded of a husband. But the woman pays in still other coin for the repressions arising from faulty childhood training. Unable to find expression for herself either in marriage or in devotion to work, because some old childish repression is still denying all outlet to her legitimate desire, she frequently falls into a neurosis; or if she escapes a real breakdown, she gives expression to unsatisfied longings in some isolated nervous symptoms which in many cases center about the organs of generation. There then results any one of the various functional disturbances which are only too often mistaken for organic disease. What is needed in cases like this is not a gynecologist nor a surgeon, but a psycho-pathologist--or perhaps only a grasp of the facts. Let us look at the more common of these disturbances in order to gain an understanding of the situation. THE MENSTRUAL PERIOD =Potential Motherhood.= Among the normal phenomena of a woman's life is the recurring cycle of potential motherhood. Every three or four weeks a new ovum or egg matures in the ovary and undergoes certain chemical changes, which send into the blood a substance called a hormone. This hormone is a messenger, stimulating the mucous membrane of the womb into making its velvet pile longer and softer, and its nutrient juices more abundant in readiness for the ovum. The same stimulus causes the whole organism to make ready for a new life. As in hunger, the chemistry of the body produces the muscle-tension that is felt as a craving for food, so this recurring chemical stimulus produces a definite craving in body and mind. This craving brings about an increased irritability or sensitiveness to stimuli which may result either in a joyous or a fretful mood. During sleep the social inhibitions are felt less distinctly and the sleeper dreams love-dreams woven from messages coming up from all the minute nerve-endings in the expectant reproductive organs. But if no germ-cell travels up the womb-canal and tube to meet and impregnate the ovum, the womb-lining rejects the egg as chemically unfit. All the furbishings are loosened from the walls and slowly cast out, constituting the menstrual flow. The phenomenon as a whole is a physiological function and should be accompanied by a sense of well-being and comfort as is the exercise of any other function, such as digestion or muscular activity. Only too often, however, it is dreaded as an unmitigated disaster, a time for giving up work or fun and going to bed with a hot-water bottle until "the worst is over." Let us see how this perversion comes about. =Why Menstruation Is Painful.= What sort of atmosphere is created for the young girl as she attains puberty? Most girls get their first inkling of the menstrual period from the periodic "sick spells" of mother or sister. This knowledge comes without conscious thought and is a direct observation of the subconscious mind, which records impressions with the accuracy and completeness of a photographic plate. Hearing the talk about a "sick-time" and observing the signs of "cramps" among older friends, the young girl's subconscious mind plays up to the suggestion and recoils with fear from the newly experienced sensations in the maturing organs of reproduction. This recoil of fear interferes with the circulation in the functioning organs, just as fear blanches the face or hinders digestion. There is several times as much blood in the stomach when it is full of food as there is between meals, but we do not for this reason fancy that we have a pain after each meal. There is more blood in the generative organs during their functioning, but this means pain only when fear ties up the circulation and causes undue congestion. Fear acts further on the sturdy muscle of the womb, tying it up into just such knots as we feel in the esophagus when we say that we have a lump in the throat. It is safe to say that ninety-five cases of painful menstruation out of every hundred are caused by fear and by the expectation of pain. The cysts and tumors responsible for pain are so rare as to be fairly negligible, when compared with these other causes. Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher of Stanford University has for many years carried on careful investigations among the students of the university. After describing in detail certain physical exercises which she has found of value, she continues: But more important even than this is an alteration of the morbid attitude of women themselves toward this function; and almost equally essential is a fundamental change in the habit of mind on our part as physicians; for do we not tend to translate too much, the whole of a woman's life into terms of menstruation? If every young girl were taught that menstruation is not normally a "bad time" and that pain or incapacity at that period is as discreditable and unnecessary as bad breath due to decaying teeth, we might almost look for a revolution in the physical life of women.... In my experience the traditional treatment of rest in bed, directing the attention solely to the sex-zone of the body, and the accepted theory that it is an inevitable illness while at the same time the mind is without occupation, produces a morbid attitude and favors the development and exaggeration of whatever symptoms there may be.[56] [Footnote 56: Clelia Duel Mosher: _Health and the Woman Movement_, pp. 25, 26, 19.] =Pre-Menstrual Discomfort.= If it be objected that women often feel badly for a day or two before the period begins, before they know that it is due, and that this feeling of discomfort could not be caused by fear and expectation, it is easy to reply that the subconscious mind knows perfectly what is happening within the body. The emotion of fear, working within the subconscious, is able to translate all the varying bodily sensations into feelings of distress without any knowledge on the part of the conscious mind. Sometimes before the period begins, a girl feels blue and upset for a day or two, a sign that the instinct is getting discouraged. The whole body is saying, "Get ready, get ready," but it has gotten ready many times before, and to no purpose. Unsatisfied striving brings discouragement. What reaches consciousness is a feeling of pessimism and a general dissatisfaction with life as a whole. If, instead of giving in to the blues or going to bed and predicting a pain, the girl finds other outlets for her energy, she finds that after all, her instinct may be satisfied in indirect ways and that she has strangely come into a new supply of _vim_. =The Purpose of the Pain.= Although suggestion is behind all nervous symptoms, there is a deeper reason for the disturbance. When an unhealthy suggestion is seized and acted upon, it is because some unsatisfied part of the personality sees in it a chance for accomplishing its own ends. The pre-menstrual period is the blooming-time, the mating-time, the springtime of the organism. That means eminently a time for coming into notice, that one's charms may attract the desired complement. But if the rightfully insistent instinctive desires are held in check by unnatural repressions and misapplied social restrictions, the starved instinct can obtain expression only by a concealment of purpose. The disguise assumed is often one of indifference or positive distaste for the allurements of the other sex. But, as we know, an instinctive desire will not be denied. In this case, the misguided instinct which has been given the suggestion that menstruation means illness, fits this conception into the scheme of things and obtains notice in a roundabout way by the attention given to the invalid. =The Treatment.= To find that the symptom has a purpose rather than a cause gives the indication for the treatment. Judicious neglect causes the symptom to cease by defeating its very purpose,--that of drawing attention to itself. The person who never mentions her discomfort, thinks about it as little as possible, and goes about her business as usual, is likely to find her trouble gone before she realizes it.[57] [Footnote 57: Violent exercise at this time is unwise, but continuing one's usual activity helps the circulation and keeps the mind from centering on the affected part. The physiological congestion is unduly intensified by standing; therefore all employments should afford facilities for the woman to sit at least part of the time while continuing work.] A little explanation gives the patient insight into the workings of her own mind, and usually causes the pain to disappear in short order. Astonished, indeed, and filled with gratitude have been some of my young-women patients who had all their lives been unable to plan any work or social engagements for the time of this functioning. Many of them were the worst kind of doubters when they were told that to go to bed and center their attention on the generative organs only made the muscles tighten up and the circulation congest. They could not conceive themselves up and around, pursuing their normal life during such a time. However, as they have found by experience that this point of view is not an optimistic dream, they have broken up the confidence-game which their subconscious had been playing on them, and have gone on their way rejoicing. There was one young girl, a doctor's daughter, who suffered continuously from pain in the abdomen, and from back-pain which increased so greatly at the time of the menses that she was in the habit of going to bed for several days, to be waited on with solicitous care by her family. In an attempt to cure the trouble she had undergone an operation to suspend the uterus, but the pain had continued as before. When she came to me, I explained to her that there was no physical difficulty and that her trouble was wholly nervous. I made her play tennis every day and she had just finished a game when her period came on. She stayed up for luncheon, went for a walk in the afternoon, ate her dinner with the family, and behaved like other people. Her mother telephoned that evening and when I told her what her daughter had been doing, she gasped in astonishment. She had difficulty in believing that the new order was not miracle but simply the working out of natural law. Since that time her daughter has had no more trouble. =The Ounce of Prevention.= If young girls had wiser counselors in their mothers and physicians, the misconception would never occur, and such an indirect outlet would not be needed; the organic sensations incident to puberty and the recurring menstrual period would have something of the significance of the annunciation to Mary, bringing wonder and a sense of well-being. When your little daughter arrives at maturity, give her a joyous initiation into the noble order of women. She will welcome the new function as a badge of womanhood and as a harbinger of wonderful things to come. A girl of fifteen came under my care to be helped out of a mood of increasing depression and uneasiness. Her glance was furtive, yet anxiously expectant. Tears came unbidden as she sat alone or fingered the keys of the piano. Tactful questioning elicited no response as to reasons for her unhappiness. Opportunities for giving confidence were not accepted. At a chance moment our talk drifted to the subject of menstruation. "Your periods are regular and easy; and do you know what they are for?" Then I painted for her a picture of the preparations that are made throughout the whole organism, for the germ-cell that comes each month and has in it all the possibilities of a new little life. The result of this confidential talk may seem fanciful to any one but an eye-witness. We had only a week's association, but the depression ceased, the furtive look and deprecatory manner were replaced by a joyous buoyancy. In a few weeks the thin neck and awkward body rounded out into the symmetry which usually precedes the establishment of puberty, but which was delayed in this case until the unconscious conflict resolved itself. =In the Large.= Looked at from any angle, this subject is an important one. There are involved not only the physical comfort and convenience of the sufferers themselves, but also the economic prospects of women as a whole. If women are to demand equal opportunity and equal pay, they must be able to do equal work without periodic times of illness. When employers of women tell us that they regularly have to hire extra help because some of their workers lose time each month, we realize how great is the aggregate of economic waste, a waste which would assuredly be justified if the health of the country's womanhood were really involved, but which is inefficient and unnecessary when caused merely by ignorant tradition. "Up to standard every day of every week," is a slogan quite within the range of possibility for all but the seriously ill. When reduced to their lowest terms, the inconveniences of this function are not great and are not too dear a price to pay for the possibilities of motherhood. THE "CHANGE OF LIFE" =Another Phantom Peril.= As the young girl is taught to fear the menstrual period, so the older woman is taught to dread the time when the periods shall cease. Despite the general enlightenment of this day and age, the menopause or "change of life" is all too frequently feared as a "critical period" in a woman's life, a time of distressing physical sensations and even of danger to mental balance. As a matter of fact, the menopause is a physiological process which should be accomplished with as little mental and physical disturbance as accompanies the establishment of puberty. The same internal secretion is concerned in both. When the function of ovulation ceases the body has to find a new way to dispose of the internal secretion of the ovary. Its presence in the blood is the cause of the sudden dilatation of the blood-vessels that is known as the "hot flash." The matter is altogether a problem of chemistry, with the necessity for a new adjustment among the glands of internal secretion. The body easily manages this if left to itself, but is greatly interfered with by the wrong suggestion and emotion. We have already seen how quickly emotion affects all secretions and how easily the adrenal and thyroid glands are influenced by fear. This is the root of the trouble in many cases of difficult "change." If an occasional body is not quite able to regulate the chemical readjustment, we may have to administer the glands of some other animal, but in the majority of cases, the body, unhampered by an extra burden of fear, is quite able to make its own adjustments. The hot flash passes in a moment, if not prolonged by emotion or if not converted into a habit by attention. One source of trouble in the menopause is that it comes at a time in a woman's life when she is likely to have too much leisure. In no way can a woman so easily handicap her body at this time as by stopping work and being afraid. Those women who have to go on as usual find themselves past the change almost before they know it,--unless they consider themselves abused, and worry over the necessity for working through such a "critical time." =Three Rules.= Here are a few pointers which have have been of help to a number of women: 1 Remember that this is a physiological process and therefore abundantly safeguarded by Nature. If you don't expect trouble you will not be likely to find it. 2 Remember that the sweating and flushing are made worse by notice. 3 Do everything in your power to keep from the public the knowledge that you are no longer a potential mother. If you are past forty, do not mop your face or gasp for breath or carry a fan to the theater! Shun attention and fear, and you will be surprised at the ease with which the "change" is effected. =Nature's Last Chance.= While we are on the subject of the middle-aged woman, it may be well to mention a phenomenon sometimes noticed in the early forties. Often an "old maid" who has considered herself settled for life in her bachelor estate, suddenly takes to herself a husband. (I use the verb advisedly!) Mothers who have thought their child-bearing days long past sometimes find themselves pregnant. "The child of her old age" is not an uncommon occurrence. Unmarried women who have "kept straight" all their lives sometimes go down before temptation at this late time. There is a reason. It is as though Nature were making a last desperate attempt to produce another life before it is too late, speeding up all the internal secretions and flashing insistent messages throughout the whole organism. It may help some woman who feels herself inexplicably impelled toward the male sex to know that she is not being "tempted by the devil" but merely driven by the insistent chemicals within her body. She is likely to rationalize and tell herself that it is too bad for a worth-while person like herself to leave no progeny behind her; or she may say, as one of my patients did when contemplating running away with another woman's husband,--that she could make that man so much happier than his wife did, and that she really owed it to him as well as to herself. When a woman knows what is the matter with her, it makes it easier to bide her time and wait for the demands of Nature to subside. Chemicals may not be so romantic as love, but neither are they so melodramatic! OTHER TROUBLES ="Speaking of Operations."= Physicians are often called upon to diagnose some such vague symptom as pain in the abdomen, back and head; ache in the legs; constipation, or loss of appetite. Since the patient is very insistent that something shall be done, the physician may be driven to operate, even when he has an uneasy feeling that the trouble is "merely nervous." Sixty per cent. of the operations on women are necessitated by the results of gonorrheal infection. Next in frequency up to recent date, have been operations for nervous symptoms which could in no way be reached by the knife. Only too often a nerve-specialist hears the tale of an operation which was supposed to cure a certain pain but which left it worse rather than better. It is a pleasure to see some of these pains disappear under a little re-education, but one cannot help wishing that the re-education had come before the knife instead of after it. A skilled surgeon can cut almost anything out of a person's body, but he cannot cut out an instinct. It sometimes takes great skill to determine whether the trouble is an organic affection or a functional disturbance caused by the misdirected instinct of reproduction. Often, however, the clinical pictures are so different as to leave no room for doubt, provided the diagnostician has his eyes open and is not over-persuaded by the importunity of the poor neurotic, who insists that the surgeon shall remove her appendix, her gall-bladder, her genital organs, and her tonsils, and who finally comes back that he may have a whack at the operation scar. =The Bearing of Children.= A number of years ago I became acquainted with a charming young married woman who had all her life recoiled with fear from the phenomena of sex. She had been afraid of menstruation and of marriage, and had at this time almost a phobia for pregnancy and childbirth. Before long she came to me in terror, telling me that she had become pregnant. I explained to her that pregnancy is the time when most women are at their best, that the nausea which is often troublesome in the beginning is caused merely by a mixing of messages from the autonomic nerves, which refer new sensations in the womb to the more usual center of activity in the stomach; and that after the body has become accustomed to these sensations, most women experience a greater sense of well-being and peace than at any other time in life. We had a conversation or two on the subject and everything seemed to go well for a while. As it happened, this young woman and her husband came to call on me one afternoon just before the baby was expected. During the visit she began to show signs of being in labor. Again she was in terror. Again I explained the phenomena of labor, telling her that the womb-contractions are caused by the presence in the blood of a chemical secretion (hormone) which continues its good work as long as there is a state of confidence, but which sometimes stops under fear or apprehension. I explained that these womb-efforts are a peristaltic movement, a contraction of the upper muscles and a letting go of the purse-string muscle at the mouth of the womb, and that fear only tends to tie up this purse-string muscle, making a difficult process out of one which was intended by Nature to be much more simple. She seemed to understand and to lose a good deal of her fright. About six o'clock the couple went home on the street car from the upper end of Pasadena to the far end of Los Angeles. The next morning I had a jubilant telephone message from the happy father, announcing that the boy-baby had arrived at midnight and that, wonderful to relate, he had come without the mother's experiencing any pain whatever. I give this account for what it is worth, without of course contending that labor could always be as easy as this. It happened that this girl was a normal, healthy woman and that there were no complications of any kind in the process of childbirth. A right attitude of mind could not have corrected any physical difficulty, but it did seem to help her let go of her fear, which would of itself have caused long and painful labor. A patient once told me that when her first baby came, she happened to be out in the country where she had to call in a doctor whom she did not know. He was an uncouth sort of fellow who inspired fear rather than confidence. She soon found that labor stopped whenever he came into the room, and started again when he went out. She had the good sense to send him out and complete her labor with only the help of her mother. Unfortunate is the obstetrician who does not know how to inspire a feeling of confidence in his patients. Even childbirth may be mightily helped or hindered by the mother's state of mind. SUMMARY A woman's body has more stability than she knows. It is sometimes out of order, but it is more often misunderstood; usually it is an unobtrusive and satisfactory instrument, quite fit for its daily tasks. The average woman is really well put together. We hear about the ones who have difficulty, but not about the great majority who do not. We notice the few who are upset during the menopause, and forget all the others. To be comfortable and efficient most of the time is, after all, merely to be "like folks." The special functions which Nature has been perfecting in a woman's body are as a rule, easily carried through unless complicated by false ideas or by fear. If the woman who has no organic difficulty but who still finds herself handicapped by her body, will cease being either resigned to her languishing lot or envious of her stalwart brothers; if instead she will set out to learn how to be efficient as a woman, she will find that many of her ills are not the blunders of an inefficient Creator, but are home-made products, which quickly vanish in the light of understanding. CHAPTER XIII _In which we lose our dread of night._ THAT INTERESTING INSOMNIA THE FEAR OF STAYING AWAKE To sleep or not to sleep! That is the question. In all the world there is nothing to equal it in importance,--to the man with insomnia. His days are mere interludes between troubled nights spent in restless tossing to and fro and feverish worry over the weary day to come. His mind filled with ideas about the disastrous effects of insomnia, he imagines himself fast sliding down hill toward the grave or the insane-asylum. It is true that his conversation very often politely begins something like this: "Good morning. Did you sleep well last night?" but if we fail to respond by an equally polite "and I hope you had a good night?" he seems restless until he has somehow disillusioned us by stating the exact number of hours and minutes during which he was able to lose himself in slumber. We must not ridicule the man who doesn't sleep. We are all very much alike. If any one of us happens to lie awake for a night or two, he is likely to get into a panic, and if the spell should last a week, he begins looking up steamship agents and talking of voyages to Southern seas. The fact is that most people are dreadfully afraid of insomnia. Knowing the effects of a few nights of enforced wakefulness, and having had a little experience with the fagged feeling after a restless night, they believe themselves only logical when they fall into a panic over the prospect of persistent insomnia. =Two Kinds of Wakefulness.= As a matter of fact, insomnia is a phantom peril. There is not the slightest danger from lying awake nights, provided one is not kept awake by some irritating physical stimulus. All fear of insomnia is based on ignorance of the difference between enforced wakefulness and deliberate wakefulness, or insomnia. The man who has acquired the habit may stay awake almost indefinitely without appreciable harm, but the one who is kept awake for a week by a pain, by a chemical poison from infection, or by the necessity for staying up on his job, may easily be in a state of exhaustion. Even in cases of prolonged pain or over-exertion, the body tends to maintain its equilibrium by hastening its rate of repair and by falling asleep before the danger point is reached. It is almost impossible to impair permanently the tissue of the brain except in the presence of a chemical irritant. In case of infection we often have to give medicine to neutralize the effect of the poison or to resort to narcotics which make the brain cells less susceptible to irritation. But nervous insomnia is another story. A HARMLESS HABIT =Long-Lived Insomniacs.= A man of my acquaintance once said in all seriousness and with evident alarm: "I am following in the footsteps of my mother. She lived to be seventy years old and she had insomnia all her life." If this man had been preaching a sermon on the harmlessness of chronic insomnia, he could not have chosen a better text, but he seemed just as much concerned about himself as if his mother had died from the effects of three months' wakefulness. People can live healthy lives during twenty or thirty years of insomnia because chronic insomnia is nothing more or less than a habit, and "habit spells ease." The brain cells are not irritated by either internal or external stimuli; there is no effort to keep awake; virtually no energy is expended,--except in restless tossing and worry. If the body is kept still and emotion eliminated, fatigue products are washed away and the reserves are filled in with perfect ease. =Thinking in Circles.= Habit means automatic, subconscious activity, with the least expenditure of energy and the least amount of fatigue. We have already noted the ease with which heart and diaphragm muscles carry on their work from the beginning of life to its end. Anything relegated to the subconscious mind can be kept up almost indefinitely without tire, and to this subconscious type of activity belong the thoughts of a chronic insomniac. Despite all assertions to the contrary, his conscious mind is not really awake. If he is questioned about the happenings of the night, he is likely to have been unaware of the most audible noises. The thoughts that run through his brain are not new, constructive, energy-consuming thoughts, but the same old thoughts that have been going around in circles for days and weeks at a time. It is true that a person sometimes chooses to wake up and do his constructive planning in the night. This kind of thought does bring fatigue, up to a certain point. After that the body hastens its rate of repair or automatically goes to sleep. Activity of this kind is always a matter of choice. He who really prefers sleep will shut the drawers containing the day's business and leave them shut until morning. =Day-Dreaming at Night.= However, the man who makes a practice of staying awake rarely does much real thinking. He lets the thoughts run through his mind as they will, builds air-castles of things he would like to do and can't, or other kinds of air-castles about the disastrous effects of his insomnia on the day that is to come; he worries over his health, or his finances, and grieves over his sorrows. He is really indulging himself, thinking the thoughts he likes most to think, and these consume but little energy. Like a horse that knows the rounds, they can go jogging on indefinitely without guidance from the driver. WHAT CAUSES THE FATIGUE =Tossing and Fretting.= The thing that tires is not the insomnia but the emotion over the insomnia. If people who fail to sleep are perpetually fagged out, it is not from loss of sleep, but from worry and tossing. Often they spend a good deal of the night feeling sorry for themselves. They turn and toss, exclaiming with each turn: "Why don't I sleep? How badly I shall feel to-morrow! What a night! What a night!" Such a spree of emotionalism can hardly fail to tire, but it is not fair to blame the insomnia. He who makes up his mind to it can rest almost as well without sleep as with it, provided he keeps his mind calm and his body relaxed. "Decent hygienic conditions" demand not necessarily eight hours of sleep but eight hours of quiet rest in bed. Tossing about drives away sleep and uses up energy. I make it a rule that my patients shall not turn over more than four times during the night. This is more important than that they should sleep. To be sure, I do not stay awake to enforce the rule, but most people catch the idea very quickly and before they know it they are sleeping. HOW TO GO TO SLEEP =Ceasing to Care.= The best way to learn to sleep is not to care whether you do or not. Nothing could be better than DuBois's advice: "Don't look for sleep; it flies away like a pigeon when one pursues it."[58] Attention to anything keeps the mind awake, and most of all, attention to sleep. More than one person has waked up to see whether or not he was going to sleep. We cannot, however, fool ourselves by merely pretending indifference. The only sensible way is to get the facts firmly fixed in our minds so that we actually realize that we do not need more sleep than our bodies take. As soon as it is realized that insomnia is really of no importance, it tends to disappear. [Footnote 58: DuBois: _Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders_, p. 339.] =Catching the Idea.= There came one day for consultation a very healthy-looking woman, a deaconess of the Lutheran Church. "Doctor," she said, "I came to get relief from insomnia. For twenty years I have not slept more than one or two hours a night." "Why do you want more?" I asked. "Why, isn't it very unhealthy not to sleep?" she exclaimed in astonishment. "Evidently not," I answered. This woman had tried every doctor she could think of, including the splendid S. Weir Mitchell. Her insomnia had become a preoccupation with her, her chief thought in life. All I did was to explain to her that her body had been getting all the sleep it needed, and that neither body nor mind was in the least run down after twenty years of sleeplessness. "When you cease being interested in your insomnia, it will go away, although from a health standpoint it matters very little whether it does or not." We had two conversations on the subject, and a week later she came back to tell me that she was sleeping eight hours a night. One woman had had insomnia for thirty years. After I had explained to her that her body had adjusted itself to this way of living and that she need not try to get more sleep, she snored so loud all night and every night that the rest of the family began to complain! A certain banker proved very quick at catching the idea. He had been so troubled with insomnia and intense weakness that his doctors prescribed a six-months voyage in Southern waters. Knowing that my prescriptions involved a change in point of view rather than in scene, he came to me. Although he had been getting only about half an hour's sleep a night, he went to sleep in his chair the first evening, and then went upstairs and slept all night. He resumed his duties at the bank, walking a mile and a half the first day and three miles the second. During the months following, he reported, "No more insomnia." =Keeping Account.= A bright young college graduate came to me for a number of ailments, chief among them being sleeplessness. She was also overcome by fatigue, having spent four months in bed. A four-mile walk in the cañon and a few other such outings soon dispelled the fatigue, but the insomnia proved more obstinate. After she had been with me for a week or two, I took her aside one day for a little talk. "Well?" I said as we sat down. Then she began: "Sunday night I was awake from half-past one to four, Monday from twelve to one, Tuesday from one to three, Wednesday from two to four, Thursday--" By this time she became aware of the quizzical expression on my face and began to be embarrassed. Then she stopped and laughed. "Well," she said, "I did not know that I was paying so much attention to my sleep." She was bright enough to see the point at once, gave up her preoccupation in the all-absorbing topic and promptly forgot to have any trouble with so natural a function as sleep. =Making New Associations.= Examples like this show how natural is childlike slumber when once we take away the inhibitions of a hampering idea. Age-old habits like sleep are not lost, but they may easily be interfered with by a little too much attention. When a person who can scarcely keep his eyes open all the evening is instantly wide awake as soon as his head touches the pillow, we may be sure that a part of his trouble comes from the wrong associations which he has built up with the thought of night. When a dear little old lady told me of her constant state of apprehension about going to bed, I said to her: "When I go to my room, the darkness says sleep. When I take off my clothes, the very act says sleep. When I put my head on the pillow, the pillow says sleep." She liked that and found herself able to sleep all night. The next evening she wanted another "sleeping-potion" but as I did not want her to become dependent on anybody's suggestion, I put my mouth up close to her ear and whispered, "Abra ca dabra, dum, dum, dum." She laughed, but saw the point. After that she slept very well. She merely broke the habit by making a new kind of association with the thought of bed. Nature did the rest. It seems hardly necessary to remark that drug-taking is the most inefficient way of handling the situation. Everybody knows that narcotics are harmful to the delicate cells of the brain and that the dose has to be continuously increased in cases of chronic insomnia. If a person realizes that the drug is far more harmful than the insomnia itself, he is weak indeed to yield to temptation for the sake of a few nights of sleep. As the cause of insomnia is psychic, so the only logical cure is a new idea and a new attitude of mind. THE PURPOSE OF INSOMNIA Like all nervous symptoms, insomnia is not an affliction but an indulgence. Somehow, and in ways unknown to the conscious mind, it brings a certain amount of satisfaction to a part of the personality. No matter how unpleasant it may be, no matter how much we consciously fear it, something inside chooses to stay awake. Started, as a rule, through suggestion or imitation, insomnia is sometimes kept up as a means of making ourselves seem important,--to ourselves and to others. It at least provides an excuse for thinking and talking about ourselves, and furnishes a certain feeling of distinction. If something within us craves attention, even staying awake may not be too dear a price to pay for that attention. Strange to say, there are other times when the insomnia is chosen by the primitive subconscious mind with the idea of doing penance for supposed sins whose evil effects might possibly be avoided by this kind of expiation. Analysis shows that motives like this are not so uncommon as might be supposed. In other cases insomnia is chosen for the chance it gives for phantasy-building. A person denied the right kind of outlet for his instincts may so enjoy the day-dreaming habit that he prolongs it into the night, really preferring it to sleep. Such a state of affairs is not at all incompatible with an intense conscious desire to sleep and a real fear of insomnia. So strange may be the motives hidden away within the depths of the most prosaic individual! SUMMARY Nervous insomnia is something which a part of us makes use of and another part fears. It is a mistake on both sides. Although not in the least dangerous, the habit can hardly be considered a satisfactory form of amusement. Nature has provided a better way to spend the night, a way to which she speedily brings us when we choose to let her do it. We do not have to ask for sleep as for a special boon which may be denied. We simply have to lie down in trust, expecting to be carried away like a child. If our expectation is not at once realized we can still trust, as with relaxed mind and body we lie in calm content, knowing that Nature is, minute by minute, restoring us for another day. CHAPTER XIV _In which we raise our thresholds_ FEELING OUR FEELINGS FINELY STRUNG VIOLINS The young girl had been telling me about her symptoms. "You know, Doctor," she said. "I am a very sensitive person. In fact, I have always been told that I am like a finely strung violin." There was pride in every tone of her voice,--pride and satisfaction over possessing an organization so superior to the common clay of the average person. It was a typical remark, and showed clearly that this girl belonged among the nervous folk. For the nervous person is not only over-sensitive, but he accepts his condition with a secret and half-conscious pride as a token of superiority. It seems that there are a good many kinds of sensitiveness. Whether it is a good or bad possession depends entirely on what kind of things a person is sensitive to. If he is quick to take in a situation, easily impressed with the needs of others, open-doored to beauty and to the appeal of the spiritual, keenly alive to the humorous, even when the joke is on himself and the situation uncomfortable, then surely he has a right to be glad of his sensitiveness. But too often the word means something else. It means feeling, intensely, physical sensations of which most people are unaware, or reacting emotionally to situations which call for no such response. It means, in short, feeling our feelings and liking to feel them. There seems to be nothing particularly praiseworthy or desirable about this kind of sensitiveness. If this is what it means to be a "finely-wrought violin," it might even be better to be a bass drum which can stand a few poundings without ruin to its constitution. "But," says the sensitive person, "are we not born either violins or drums? Is not heredity rather than choice to blame? And what can a person do about it?" These questions are so closely bound up with the problems of nervous symptoms of indigestion, fatigue, a woman's ills, hysterical pains and sensations, and with all the problems of emotional control, that we shall do well to look more carefully into this question of sensibility, which is really the question of the relation of the individual to his environment. SELECTING OUR SENSATIONS =Reaction and Over-Reaction.= Every organism, if it is to live, must be normally sensitive to its environment. It must possess the power of response to stimuli. As the sea-anemone curls up at touch, and as the tiny baby blinks at the light, so must every living thing be able to sense and to react to the presence of a dangerous or a friendly force. Only by a certain degree of irritability can it survive in the struggle for existence. The five senses are simply different phases of the apparatus for receiving communications from the outside world. Other parts of the machinery catch the manifold messages continually pouring into the brain from within our bodies themselves. These communications cannot be stopped nor can we prevent their impress on the cells of the brain and spinal cord, but we do have a good deal to say as to which ones shall be brought into the focus of attention and receive enough notice to become real, conscious sensations. =Paying Attention.= If a human being had to give conscious attention to every stimulus from the outer world and from his own body, to every signal which flashes itself along his sensory nerves to his brain, he would need a different kind of mind from his present efficient but limited apparatus. As it is, there is an admirable provision for taking care of the messages without overburdening consciousness. The stream of messages never stops, not even in sleep. But the conscious mind has its private secretary, the subconscious, to receive the messages and to answer them. During any five minutes of a walk down a city street a man has hundreds of visual images flashed upon the retina of the eye. His eye sees every little line in the faces of the passers-by, every detail of their clothing, the decorations on the buildings, the street signs overhead, the articles in the shop-windows, the paving of the sidewalks, the curbings and tracks which he crosses, and scores of other objects to most of which the man himself is oblivious. His ear hears every sound within hearing distance,--the honk of every horn, the clang of every bell, the voices of the people and the shuffle of feet. Some part of his mind feels the press of his foot on the pavement, the rubbing of his heel on his stocking, the touch of his clothing all over his body, and all those so-called kinesthetic sensations,--sensations of motion and balance which keep him in equilibrium and on the move, to say nothing of the never-ending stream of messages from every cell of every muscle and tissue of his body. Out of this constant rush of stimuli our man gives attention to only the smallest fraction. Whatever is interesting to him, that he sees and hears and feels. All other sensations he passes by as indifferent. Unless they come with extraordinary intensity, they do not get over into his consciousness at all. ="Listening-in" on the Subconscious.= The subconscious mind knows and needs to know what is happening in the farthermost cell of the body. It needs to know at any moment where the knees are, and the feet; otherwise the individual would fall in a heap whenever he forgot to watch his step. It needs to know just how much light is entering the eye, and how much blood is in the stomach. To this end it has a system of communication from every point in the body and this system is in constant operation. Its messages never cease. But these messages were never meant to be in the focus of attention. They are meant only for the subconscious mind and are generally so low-toned as to be easily ignored unless one falls into the habit of listening for them. Unless they are invested with a significance which does not belong to them, they will not emerge into consciousness as real sensations. =Psychic Thresholds.= Boris Sidis has given us a word which has proved very useful in this connection. The limit of sensitivity of a cell--the degree of irritability--he calls the stimulus-threshold.[59] As the wind must come in gusts to drive the rain in over a high doorsill, so must any stimulus--an idea or a sensation--come with sufficient force to get over the obstructions at the doorway of consciousness. These psychic thresholds do not maintain a constant level. They are raised or lowered at will by a hidden and automatic machinery, which is dependent entirely on the ideas already in consciousness, by the interest bestowed upon the newcomer. The intensity of the stimuli cannot be controlled, but the interest we feel in them and the welcome given them are very largely a matter of choice. [Footnote 59: Sidis: _Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology_, Chap. XXX.] Each organism has a wide field of choice as to which ideas and which physical stimuli it shall welcome and which it shall shut out. We may raise our thresholds, build up a bulwark of indifference to a whole class of excitations, shut our mental doors, and pull down the shades; or we may lower the thresholds so that the slightest flicker of an idea or the smallest pin-prick of a sensation finds ready access to the center of attention. =Thresholds and Character.= There are certain thresholds made to shift frequently and easily. When one is hungry any food tastes good, for the threshold is low; but the food must be most tempting to be acceptable just after a hearty meal. On the other hand, a fairly constant threshold is maintained for many different kinds of stimuli. These stimuli are always bound together in groups, and make appeal depending upon the predominating interest. As anything pertaining to agriculture is noticed by a farmer, or any article of dress by a fashionable woman, so any stimulus coming from a "warm" group is welcomed, while any from a "cold" group is met by a high threshold. The kind of person one is depends on what kind of things are "warm" to him and what kind are "cold." The superman is one who has gained such conscious control of his psychic thresholds that he can raise and lower them at will in the interests of the social good. =Thresholds and Sensations.= The importance of these principles is obvious. The next chapter will show more of their influence on ideas and emotions; but for the present we will consider their lessons in the sphere of the physical. Psychology speaks here in no uncertain terms to physiology. Whoever becomes fascinated by the processes of his own body is bound to magnify the sensations from those processes, until the most insignificant message from the subconscious becomes a distressing and alarming symptom. The person whose mental ear is strained to catch every little creaking of his internal machinery can always hear some kind of rumble. If he deliberately lowers his thresholds to the whole class of stimuli pertaining to himself, there is small wonder that they sweep over the boundaries into consciousness with irresistible force. =The Motives for Sensitiveness.= Sensitiveness is largely a matter of choice, but what determines choice? Why is it that one person chooses altruism as the master threshold that determines the level of all the others, while another person who ought to be equally fine lowers his thresholds only to himself? What makes a person too interested in his own sensations and feelings? As usual there is a cause. The real cause back of most cases of chronic sensitiveness is an abnormal desire for attention. Sometimes this love of attention arises from an under-developed instinct of self-assertion, or "inferiority complex." If there is a sense of inadequacy, a feeling of not being so important as other people, a person is quite likely to over-compensate by making himself seem important to himself and to others in the only way he knows. All unconsciously he develops an extreme sensitiveness which somehow heightens his self-regard by making him believe himself finely and delicately organized, and by securing the notice of his associates. Or, again, the love of attention may be simply a sign of arrested development, a fixation of the Narcissistic period of childhood which loves to look at itself and make the world look. Or there may be lack of satisfaction of the normal adult love-life, a lack of the love and attention which the love-instinct naturally craves. If this instinct is not getting normal outlet, either directly through personal relationships or indirectly through a sublimated activity, what is more natural than that it should turn in on itself, dissociate its interest in other things and occupy itself with its own feelings, and at the same time secure the coveted attention through physical disability, with its necessity for special ministration? In any case there is likely to develop a general overreaction to all outside stimulation, a hypersensitiveness to some particular kind of stimulus, or a chronic hysterical pain which somehow serves the personality in ways unknown to itself. No one "feels his feelings" unless, despite all discomfort, he really enjoys them. A hard statement to accept perhaps, but one that is repeatedly proved by a specialist in "nerves"! DETERMINING CAUSES =Accidental Association.= In many cases, the form which the sensitiveness takes is merely a matter of accident. Often it is based on some small physical disability, as when a slight tendency to take cold is magnified into an intense fear of fresh air. Sometimes a past fleeting pain which has become associated with the stream of thought of an emotional moment--what Boris Sidis calls the moment-consciousness--is perpetuated in consciousness in place of the repressed emotion. "In the determination of the pathology of hysteria, the accidental moment plays a much greater part than is generally recognized; if a painful affect--emotion--originates while eating but is repressed, it may produce nausea and vomiting and continue for months as an hysterical symptom."[60] [Footnote 60: Freud: _Selected Papers_, p. 2.] One of Freud's patients, Miss Rosalie H----, found while taking singing-lessons that she often choked over notes of the middle register, although she took with ease notes higher and lower in the scale. It was revealed that this girl, who had a most unhappy home life, had, during a former period, often experienced this choking sensation from a painful emotion just before she went for her music lesson. Some of the left-over sensations had remained during the singing, and as the middle notes happen to involve the same muscles as does a lump in one's throat, she had often found herself choking over these notes. Later on, while living in a different city and in a wholly different environment, the physical sensations from her throat muscles, as they took these middle notes, brought back the associated sensations of choking,--without, however, uncovering the buried emotion.[61] Many a painful hysterical affliction is based on just such mechanisms as these. As Freud remarks, "The hysteric suffers mostly from reminiscences."[62] [Footnote 61: Ibid, p. 43.] [Footnote 62: Ibid, p. 5.] =Subconscious Symbolism.= Sometimes, as we have seen, the form which a hypersensitiveness assumes is not determined by any physical sensation, either past or symbolism which acts out in the body the drama of the soul. =Facing the Facts.= Whatever the motives and whatever the determining causes, hypersensibility is in any case a feeling of feelings which is not warranted by the present situation. Hypersensitiveness is never anything but a makeshift kind of satisfaction. Despite certain subconscious reasoning, it does not make one more important nor more beloved. Neither does it furnish a real expression for that great creative love-instinct whose outlet, if it is to bring satisfaction, must be a real outlet into the external world. An understanding of the motives is helpful only when it makes clear that they are short-sighted motives and that the real desires back of them may be satisfied in better ways. SOME LOWERED THRESHOLDS As the public appetite for specific cases appears to be insatiable, we will give from real life some examples of low thresholds which were raised through re-education. One hesitates to write down these examples because when they are on paper they sound like advertisements of patent medicines. However, there is no magic in any of these cures, but only the working out of definite laws which may be used by other sufferers, if they only know. Re-education through a knowledge of oneself and the laws at work really does remarkable things when it has a chance. ="Danger-Signals" without the Danger.= There was the man who had queer feelings all over his body, especially in his head and stomach, and who considered these sensations as danger-signals warning him to stop. This man had worked up from messenger boy to a position next to the president in one of the transcontinental railroad systems. On the appearance of these "danger-signals" he had tried to resign but had been given a year's leave of absence instead. Half the year had gone in rest-cure, but he was still afraid to eat or work, and believed himself "done for." After three weeks of re-education he saw that instead of having overdrawn his capital, he had in another sense overdrawn his sensations. He went away as fit as ever, finished his leave of absence doing hard labor on his farm, and then went back to even harder tasks, working for the Government in the administration of the railroads during the war. He is still at work. =Enjoying Poor Health.= There was the woman who had been an invalid for twenty years, doing little else during all that time than to feel her own feelings. Because of the distressing sensations in her stomach, she had for a year taken nothing but liquid nourishment. She had queer feelings in her solar-plexus and indeed a general luxury of over-feeling. She could not leave her room nor have any visitors. She was the star invalid of the family, waited on by her two hard-working sisters who earned the living for them all. Her sisters had inveigled her to my house under false pretenses, calling it a boarding-house and omitting to mention that I was a doctor, because "she guessed she knew more about her case than any doctor." For the first week I got in only one sentence a day,--just before I slipped out of the door after taking in her "liquid nourishment." But at the end of the week I announced that thereafter her meals would be served in the dining-room. When she found that there was to be no more liquid nourishment, she had to appear at the family table. After that it was only a short time before she was at home, cooking for her sisters. When she saw the role she had been unconsciously playing, she could hardly wish to go on with it. =Feeling His Legs.= Mr. R. suffered from such severe and distressing pains in his legs that he believed himself on the verge of paralysis. He was also bothered by a chronic emotional state which made him look like a "weepy" woman. His eyes were always full of tears and his chin a-quiver, and he had, as he said, a perpetual lump in his throat. Under re-education both lump and paralysis disappeared completely and Mr. R. took his wife across the continent, driving his machine with his own hands--and feet. =A Subconscious Association.= Mr. D.'s case admirably illustrates the return of symptoms through an unconscious association. He was a lawyer, prominent in public affairs of the Middle West, who had been my patient for several weeks and who had gone home cured of many striking disabilities. Before he came to me, he had given up his public work and was believed by all his associates to be afflicted with softening of the brain, and "out of the game" for good. From being one of the ablest men of his State, he had fallen into such a condition that he could neither read a letter nor write one. He could not stand the least sunshine on his head, and to walk half a mile was an impossibility. He was completely "down and out" and expected to be an invalid for the rest of his life. But these symptoms had one by one disappeared during his five-weeks stay with me. He had done good stiff work in the garden, carried a heavy sack of grapefruit a mile in the hot sun, and was generally his old self again. Now he was back in the harness, hard at work as of old. Suddenly, as he sat reading in his home one evening, all his old symptoms swept over him,--the pains in his head and legs, the pounding of the heart, the "all-gone" sensations as though he were going to die on the spot. He became almost completely dissociated, but through it all he clung to the idea which he had learned,--namely that this experience was not really physical as it seemed but was the result of some idea, and would pass. He did not tell any one of the attack, ignored it as much as possible, and waited. In a few minutes he was himself again. Then he looked for the cause and realized that the article he was reading was one he had read several months previous, when suffering most severely from the whole train of symptoms. When the familiar words had again gone into his mind, they had pressed the button for the whole physiological experience which had once before been associated with them. This is the same mechanism as that involved in Prince's case, Miss Beauchamp, who became completely dissociated at one time when a breeze swept across her face. When Dr. Prince looked for the cause, he found that once before she had experienced certain distressing emotions while a breeze was fanning her cheek. The recurrence of the physical stimulation had been sufficient to bring back in its entirety the former emotional complex. =Another Kind of Association.= One of my women patients illustrates another kind of association-mechanism, based not on proximity in time but proximity of position in the body. This woman had complained for years of "bladder trouble" although no physical examination had been able to reveal any organic difficulty. She referred to a constant distress in the region of the bladder and was never without a certain red blanket which she wrapped around her every time she sat down. During psycho-analysis she recounted an experience of years before which she had never mentioned to anybody. During a professional consultation her physician, a married man, had suddenly seized her and exclaimed, "I love you! I love you!" In spite of herself, the woman felt a certain appeal, followed by a great sense of guilt. In the conflict between the physiological reflex and her moral repugnance, she had shunted out of consciousness the real sex-sensation and had replaced it with a sensation which had become associated in her subconscious mind with the original temptation. Since the nerves from the genital region and from the bladder connect with the same segment of the spinal cord, she had unconsciously chosen to mix her messages, and to cling to the substitute sensation without being in the least Conscious of the cause. As soon as she had described the scene to me and had discerned its connection with her symptoms, the bladder trouble disappeared. =Afraid of the Cold.= Patients who are sensitive to cold are very numerous. Mr. G.--he of the prunes and bran biscuits--was so afraid of a draft that he could detect the air current if a window was opened a few inches anywhere in a two-story house. He always wore two suits of underwear, but despite his precautions he had a swollen red throat much of the time. His prescription was a cold bath every morning, a source of delight to the other men patients, who made him stay in the water while they counted five. He was required to dress and live like other folks and of course his sensitiveness and his sore throat disappeared. Dr. B----, when he came to me, was the most wrapped-up man I had ever met. He had on two suits of underwear, a sweater, a vest and suit coat, an overcoat, a bear-skin coat and a Jaeger scarf--all in Pasadena in May! Besides this fear of cold, he was suffering from a hypersensitiveness of several other varieties. So sensitive was his skin that he had his clothes all made several sizes too big for him so that they would not make pressure. He was so aware of the muscles of the neck that he believed himself unable to hold up his head, and either propped it with his hands or leaned it against the back of a chair. He had been working on the eighth edition of his book, a scientific treatise of nation-wide importance, but his eyes were so sensitive that he could not possibly use them and had to keep them shaded from the glare. He was so conscious of the messages of fatigue that he was unable to walk at all, and he suffered from the usual trouble with constipation. All these symptoms of course belonged together and were the direct result of a wrong state of mind. When he had changed his mind, he took off his extra clothes, walked a mile and a half at the first try, gave up his constipation, and went back to work. Later on I had a letter from him saying that his favorite seat was an overturned nail-keg in the garden and that he was thinking of sawing the backs off his chairs. Miss Y---- had worn cotton in her ears for a year or two because she had once had an inflammation of the middle ear, and believed the membrane still sensitive to cold. There was Miss E----, whose underwear always reached to her throat and wrists and who spent her time following the sun; and Dr. I----, who never forgot her heavy sweater or her shawl over her knees, even in front of the fire. The procession of "cold ones" is almost endless, but always they find that their sensitiveness is of their own making and that it disappears when they choose to ignore it. =Fear of Light.= Fear of cold is no more common than fear of light. Nervous folk with half-shut eyes are very frequent indeed. From one woman I took at least seven pairs of dark glasses before she learned that her eye was made for light. A good example is furnished by a woman who was not a patient of mine at all, but merely the sister of a patient. After my patient had been cured of a number of distressing symptoms--pain in the spine, sore heels, a severe nervous cough, indigestion and other typical complaints,--she began to scheme to get her sister to come to me. This sister, the wife of a minister in the Middle West, had a constant pain in her eyes, compelling her to hold them half-shut all the time. When she was approached about coming to me, she said indignantly, "If that doctor thinks that my trouble is nervous, she is much mistaken," and then proceeded to get well. Once the subconscious mind gets the idea that its game is recognized, it is very apt to give it up, and it can do this without loss of time if it really wants to. =Pain at the Base of the Brain.= Of all nervous pains, that in the back of the neck is by all odds the most common. It is rare indeed to find a nervous patient without this complaint, and among supposedly well folk it is only too frequent. Indeed, it almost seems that in some quarters such a pain stands as a badge of the fervor and zeal of one's work. But work is never responsible for this sense of discomfort. Only an over-sensitiveness to feelings or a false emotionalism can produce a pain of this kind, unless it should happen to be caused by some poison circulating in the blood. The trouble is not with the nerves or with the spine, despite the fad about misplaced vertebræ. When a doctor examines a sensitive spine, marking the sore spots with a blue pencil, and a few minutes later repeats the process, he finds almost invariably that the spots have shifted. They are not true physical pains and they rarely remain long in the same place. Pain in the spine and neck is an example of exaggerated sensibility or over-awareness. Since all messages from every part of trunk and limb must go through the spinal cord, and since very many of them enter the cord in the region of the neck and shoulder blades, it is only natural that an over-feeling of these messages should be especially noticed in this zone. Sometimes a false emotionalism adds to the discomfort by tensing the whole muscular system and making the messages more intense. When a social worker or a business man gets tense over his work or ties himself into knots over a committee meeting, he not only foolishly wastes his energy but makes his nerves carry messages that are more urgent than usual. Then if he is on the look-out for sensations, he all the more easily becomes aware of the central station in the spine where the messages are received. By centering his attention on this station and tightening up his back-muscles, he increases this over-awareness and easily gets himself into the clutch of a vicious habit. Sometimes a tenseness of the body is the result, not of a false attitude toward one's work, but of a lack of satisfaction in other directions. If the love-force is not getting what it wants, it may keep the body in a state of tension, with all the undesirable results of such tension. The person who keeps himself tense, whether because of his work or because of tension in other directions, has not really learned how to throw himself into his job and to forget himself, his emotions, and his body. =Various Pains.= Tender spots may appear in almost any part of the body. There was the girl with the sore scalp, who was frequently so sensitive that she could not bear to have a single hair touched at its farthermost end, and who could not think of brushing her hair at such a time. There was the man whose wrists and ankles were so painful that the slightest touch was excruciating; the woman with the false sciatica; the man with the so-called appendicitis pains; and the man with the false neuritis, who always wore jersey coats several sizes too large. Each one of these false pains was removed by the process of re-education. =Low Thresholds to Fatigue.= Mr. H. was habitually so overcome by fatigue that he could not make himself carry through the slightest piece of work, even when necessity demanded it. On Sunday night, when there was no one else to milk the cow, he had had to stop in the middle of the process and go into the house to lie down. To carry the milk was impossible, so low were his thresholds to the slightest message of fatigue. It turned out that things were not going right in the reproductive life. His threshold was low in this direction, and it carried down with it all other thresholds. After a general revaluation of values, he found himself able to keep his thresholds at the normal level. A fine, efficient missionary from the Orient had been so overcome with fatigue that he was forced to give up all work and return to this country. He had been with me for a while and was again ready to go to work. He came one day with a radiant face to bid me good-by. "Why are you so joyous?" I asked. "Because," he answered, "before I came home I was so fatigued that it used me up completely just to see the native servants pack our luggage. Now we are taking back twice as much, and I not only packed it all myself but made the boxes with my own hands. No more fatigue for me!" A charming young girl who in many ways was an inspiration to all her associates fell into the habit of over-feeling her fatigue. "You know, Doctor," she said, "that I give out too much of myself; everybody tells me so." That was just the trouble. Everybody had told her so, and the suggestion had worked. It did not take her long to learn that in scattering abroad she was enriching herself, and that her "giving out" was not exhausting to her but rather the truest kind of self-expression. It is only when a "giving out" is accompanied by a "looking in" that it can ever deplete. The "See how much I am giving," and "How tired I shall be," attitude could hardly fail to exhaust, but a real self-expression and the fulfilment of a real desire to give are never anything else than exhilarating. There is something wrong with the minister who is used up after his Sunday sermons. If his message and not himself is his real concern, he will have only a normal amount of fatigue, accompanied by a general sense of accomplishment and well-being, after he has fed his flock. To be sure, I have never been a minister, but I have had a goodly number among my patients and I speak from a fairly close acquaintance with their problems. =Stopping Our Ears.= Roosters seem to be a perpetual source of annoyance to the folk whose thresholds are not under proper control. But as roosters seem to be necessary to an egg-eating nation, it seems simpler to change the threshold than to abolish the roosters. There was one woman who complained especially about being disturbed by early-morning Chanticleers. I explained that the crowing called for no action on her part, and that therefore she should not allow it to come into consciousness. "Do you mean," she said, "that I could keep from hearing them?" As it happened, she was sitting under the clock, which had just struck seven. "Did you hear the clock strike?" I asked. "No," she said; "did it strike?" This poor little woman, who suffered from a very painful back and other distressing symptoms, had been married at sixteen to a roué of forty; and, without experiencing any of the psychic feelings of sex, had been immediately plunged into the physical sex-relations. Since sex is psycho-physical and since any attempt to separate the two elements is both desecrating and unsatisfactory; it is not surprising that misery, and finally divorce, had been her portion. Another equally unpleasant experience had followed, and the poor woman in the strain and disappointment of her love-life, and in the lowering of the thresholds pertaining to this thwarted instinct, had unconsciously lowered the thresholds to all physical stimuli, until she was no longer master of herself in any line. When she saw the reason for her exaggerated reactions, she was able to gain control of herself, and to find outlet in other ways. Too many persons fall into the way of being disturbed by noises which are no concern of theirs. As nurses learn to sleep through all sounds but the call of their own patients, so any one may learn to ignore all sounds but those which he needs to hear. Connection with the outside world can be severed by a mental attitude in much the same way as this is accomplished by the physical effect of an anaesthetic. Then the usual noises, those which the subconscious recognizes as without significance, will be without power to disturb. The well-known New York publisher who spent his last days on his private yacht, on which everything was rubber-heeled and velvet-cushioned, thought that he couldn't stand noises; but how much more fun he would have had, if some one had only told him about thresholds! SUMMARY There are two kinds of people in the world,--masters and puppets. There is the man in control of his thresholds, at leisure from himself and master of circumstance, free to use his energy in fruitful ways; and there is the over-sensitive soul, wondering where the barometer stands and whether people are going to be quiet, feeling his feelings and worrying because no one else feels them, forever wasting his energy in exaggerated reactions to normal situations. This "ticklish" person is not better equipped than his neighbor, but more poorly equipped. True adjustment to the environment requires the faculty of putting out from consciousness all stimuli that do not require conscious attention. The nervous person is lacking in this faculty, but he usually fails to realize that this lack places him in the class of defectives. A paralyzed man is a cripple because he cannot run with the crowd; a nervous individual is a cripple, but only because he thinks that to run with the crowd lacks distinction. Something depends on the accident of birth, but far more depends on his own choice. Understanding, judicious neglect of symptoms, whole-souled absorption in other interests, and a good look in the mirror, are sure to put him back in the running with a wholesome delight in being once more "like folks." CHAPTER XV _In which we learn discrimination_ CHOOSING OUR EMOTIONS LIKING THE TASTE It was a summer evening by the seaside, and a group of us were sitting on the porch, having a sort of heart-to-heart talk about psychology,--which means, of course, that we were talking about ourselves. One by one the different members of the family spoke out the questions that had been troubling them, or brought up their various problems of character or of health. At length a splendid Red Cross nurse who had won medals for distinguished service in the early days of the war, broke out with the question: "Doctor, how can I get rid of my terrible temper? Sometimes it is very bad, and always it has been one of the trials of my life." She spoke earnestly and sincerely, but this was my answer: "You like your temper. Something in you enjoys it, else you would give it up." Her face was a study in astonishment. "I don't like it," she stammered; "always after I have had an outburst of anger I am in the depths of remorse. Many a time I have cried my eyes out over this very thing." "And you like that, too," I answered. "You are having an emotional spree, indulging yourself first in one kind of emotion and then in another. If you really hated it as much as you say you do, you would never allow yourself the indulgence, much less speak of it afterward." Her astonishment was still further increased when several of the group said they, too, had sensed her satisfaction with her moods. Hard as it is to believe, we do choose our emotions. We like emotion as we do salt in our food, and too often we choose it because something in us likes the savor, and not because it leads to the character or the conduct that we know to be good. THE POWER OF CHOICE Whether we believe it or not, and whether we like it or not, the fact remains that we ourselves decide which of all the possible emotions we shall choose, or we decide not to press the button for any emotion at all. To a very large extent man, if he knows how and really wishes, may select the emotion which is suitable in that it leads to the right conduct, has a beneficial effect on the body, adapts him to his social environment, and makes him the kind of man he wants to be. =The Test of Feeling.= The psychologist to-day has a sure test of character. He says in substance: "Tell me what you feel and I will tell you what you are. Tell me what things you love, what things you fear, and what makes you angry and I will describe with a fair degree of accuracy your character, your conduct, and a good deal about the state of your physical health." Since this test of emotion is fundamentally sound, it is not surprising that the nervous man is in a state of distress. Indigestion, fatigue, over-sensibility, sound like problems in physiology, but we cannot go far in the discussion of any of them without coming face to face with the emotions as the real factors in the case. When we turn to the mental characteristics of nervous folk, we even more quickly find ourselves in the midst of an emotional disturbance. Worried, fearful, anxious, self-pitying, excitable, or melancholy, the nervous person proves that whatever else a neurosis may be, it is, in essence, a riot of the emotions. There is small wonder that a riot at the heart of the empire should lead to insurrection in every province of the personality. It is only for the purpose of discussion that we can separate feeling from thinking and doing. Every thought and every act has in it something of all three elements. An emotion is not an isolated phenomenon; it is bound up on the one hand with ideas and on the other with bodily states and conduct. Whoever runs amuck in his emotions runs amuck in his whole being. The nervous invalid with his exhausted and sensitive body, his upset mind and irrational conduct is a living illustration of the central place of the emotions in the realm of the personality. But it is not the nervous person only who needs a better understanding of his emotional life. The well man also gets angry for childish reasons; he is prejudiced and envious, unhappy and suspicious for the very same reason as is the nervous man. Since the working-capital of energy is limited to a definite amount, the control of the emotions becomes a central problem in any life,--a deciding factor in the output and the outcome, as well as in comfort and happiness by the way. Nothing is harder for the average man to believe than this fact that he really has the power to choose his emotions. He has been dissatisfied with himself in his past reactions, and yet he has not known how to change them. His anger or his depression has appeared so undesirable to his best judgment and to his conscious reason that it has seemed to be not a part of himself at all but an invasion from without which has swept over him without his consent and quite beyond control. A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF Most of the confusion comes from the fact that we know only a part of ourselves. What we do not consciously enjoy we believe we do not enjoy at all. What we do not consciously choose we believe to be beyond our power of choice,--the work of the evil one, or the natural depravity of human nature, perhaps; but certainly not anything of our choosing. The point is that a human being is so constituted that he can, without knowing it, entertain at the same time two diametrically opposite desires. The average person is not so unified as he believes, but is, in fact, "a house divided against itself." The words of the apostle Paul express for most of us the truth about ourselves: "For what I would, that I do not; but what I hate that I do." What Paul calls the law of his members warring against the law of his mind is simply what we call to-day the instinctive desires coming into conflict with our conscious ideal. =Hidden Desires.= Although we choose our emotions, we choose in many cases in response to a buried part of ourselves of which we are wholly unaware, or only half-aware. When we do not like what we have chosen, it is because the conscious part of us is out of harmony with another part and that part is doing the choosing. If the emotions which we choose are not those that the whole of us--or at least the conscious--would desire, it is because we are choosing in response to hidden desires, and giving satisfaction to cravings which we have not recognized. Repeated indulgence of such desires is responsible for the emotional habits which we are too likely to consider an inevitable part of our personality, inherited from ancestors who are not on hand to defend themselves. When we form the habit of being afraid of things that other people do not fear, or of being irritated or depressed, or of giving way to fits of temper, it is because these habit-reactions satisfy the inner cravings that in the circumstances can get satisfaction in no better way. These hidden desires are of several different kinds, when squarely looked at. Some of the cravings are found to be childish, and so out of keeping with our real characters that we could not possibly hold on to them as conscious desires. Others turn out to be so natural and so inevitable that we wonder how we could ever have imagined that they ought to be repressed. Still others, legitimate in themselves, but denied because of outer circumstances, are found to be easily satisfied in indirect ways which bear no resemblance to their old unfortunate forms of outlet. WHEN KNOWLEDGE HELPS The way to get rid of an undesirable emotion is not by working at the emotion itself, but by realizing that this is merely an offshoot of a deeper root, hidden below the surface. The great point is to recognize this deeper root. =Childish Anger.= It helps to know that uncalled-for anger is a defense reaction--a sort of camouflage or smoke cloud which we throw out to hide from ourselves and others the fact that we are being worsted in an argument, or being shown up in an undesirable light. Better than any amount of weeping over a hot temper is an understanding of the fact that when we fly into unseemly rage we are usually giving indulgence to a childhood desire to run away from unpleasant facts and to cover up our own faults. =Enjoying the Blues.= It helps to know that the easiest way to fight the blues is by realizing that they are a deliberate, if unconscious, attempt to gain the pity of ourselves and others. There seems to be in undeveloped human nature something that really enjoys being pitied, and if we cannot get the commiseration of other people, we can, without much trouble, work up a case of self-pity. Most of us would have to acknowledge that we seldom find tears in our eyes except when our own woes are under consideration. "Whatever else the blues accomplish, they certainly afford us a chance to submerge ourselves in a sea of self-engrossment."[63] [Footnote 63: Putnam: _Human Motives_.] =The Chip on the Shoulder.= It helps to know that irritability and over-sensitiveness are usually the result of tension from unsatisfied desires which must find some kind of outlet. If a person is secretly restive under the fact that he cannot have the kind of clothes he wants, cannot shine in society, or secure a college education or a large fortune,--all of which minister to our insistent and rarely satisfied instinct of self-assertion,--or if he is secretly yearning for the satisfaction of the marriage relation, or for the sense of completion in parenthood; then the tension from these unsatisfied desires shows itself in a hundred little everyday instances of lack of self-control. These mystify him and his friends, but they are understandable when the whole truth is known. =Anxiety and Fear.= Nowhere is understanding more valuable than when we approach the subject of anxiety and fear. Whenever a person falls into a state of abnormal fear, his friends and his physician spend a good deal of time in attempting to prove to him that there is no cause for apprehension, and in exhorting him to use his reason and give up his fear. But how can a person help himself when he is fighting in the dark? How can he free himself when the thing he thinks he fears is merely a symbol of what he really fears? The woman who was afraid she would choke her child had been several months in the hands of Christian Scientists, and had earnestly tried to replace fear with courage. But in the circumstances, and without further knowledge, this was as impossible as it is for a man to lift himself by his own boot-straps. She had no point of contact with her real fear, as the man has no leverage contact with the earth from which he wishes to lift himself. To be sure there are many cases in which an assumed cheerfulness and courage do have a mighty effect on the inner man. The forces of the personality are not set, but plastic, and are constantly acting and interacting upon one another. Surface habits do influence the forces below the surface. William James's advice, "Square your shoulders, speak in a major key, smile, and turn a compliment," is good for most occasions, but sometimes even a little understanding of the cause is far more effective. It helps to know that persistent anxiety, lacking obvious cause, is found to be the anxiety of the thwarted instinct of reproduction. When the sex-instinct is repeatedly stimulated and then checked it sets in motion some of the same glands that are activated in fear. What comes up into consciousness is therefore very naturally a fear or dread of impending disaster, very like the poignant anxiety that one feels when stepping up in the dark to a step that is not there. Simultaneous with the fear lest these repressed desires should not be satisfied, there is an intense fear lest they should. The more insistent the repressed desire, and the more it seems likely to break through into consciousness, the keener the anguish of the ethical impulses. Abnormal fear, however it may seem to be externalized, always implies at the bottom a fear of something within. There is no truth which is harder to believe on first hearing but which grows more compelling with further knowledge, than this truth that an exaggerated fear always implies a desire which somehow offends the total personality. When we observe the various distressing phobias, such as the common fear of contamination, a woman's fear to undress at night, a fear that the gas was not turned off, or that one's clothing is out of order; fear lest the exact truth has not been told, or that the uttermost farthing of one's obligations has not been met,--then we may know that there is something in the fear situation which either directly or symbolically refers to some hidden desire; a desire which the individual would not for the world acknowledge to himself, but which is too keen to be altogether repressed. The close connection between fear and desire is often shown in the unfounded fear of having committed a crime. Both doctors and lawyers in their professional work occasionally come upon individuals who believe that they have committed some heinous crime of which they are really innocent, and who insist upon their guilt despite all evidence to the contrary. A quiet, gentle youth who at the age of twenty was under my medical care, is still not sure in his own whether he, at twelve years of age, was the burglar who broke into the village store and killed the owner. It is difficult for the normally self-satisfied individual to understand the appeal of heroics to a person whose starved instinct of self-assertion makes him choose to be known as a villain rather than not to be known at all. =Breaking the Spell.= When once we bring up into consciousness these hidden desires that manifest themselves in such troublesome ways, we find that we have robbed them of much of their power over our lives. Sometimes, it is true, a detailed and thorough exploration by psycho-analysis is necessary, but in many cases it is sufficient just to know that there are underlying causes. To know these things is far from excusing ourselves because of them. Even though emotions are determined by forces that are deep in the subconscious, we may still choose in opposition to those forces, if we but know that we can do so. The fact that some of the roots of our bad habits reach down into the subconscious is no excuse for not digging them up. As Dr. Putnam says, "It is the whole of us that acts, and we are as responsible for the supervision of the unseen as for the obvious factors that are at work. The moon may be only half illumined and half visible, but the invisible half goes on, none the less, exerting its full share of influence on the motion of the tides and earth."[64] [Footnote 64: Putnam: _Freud's Psychoanalytic Method and Its Evolution_, p. 34.] THE HIGHEST KIND OF CHOICE There is no easier way to enliven any conversation than by dropping the remark that a human being always does what he wants to do. Simple as the statement seems, it is quite enough to quicken the dullest table-talk and loosen the most reticent tongue. "I don't do what I want to do," says the college student. "I want to play tennis every afternoon; but what I do is to sit in a stuffy room and study." "I don't do what I want to do," says the mother of a family. "At night I want to sit down and read the latest magazine, but what I do is to darn stockings by the hour." Nevertheless we shall see that, even in cases like these, each of us is acting in accordance with his strongest desire. There may be--there often is--a bitter conflict, but in the end the desire that is really stronger always conquers and works itself out into action. It is possible to imagine a situation in which a man would be physically unable to do what he wanted to do. Bound by physical cords, held by prison walls, or weakened by illness, he might be actually unable to carry out his desires. But apart from physical restraint, it is hard to imagine a situation in real life in which a person does not actually do what he wants to do; that is, what _in the circumstances he wants to do_. This is simply saying in another way that we act in accordance with the emotion which is at the moment strongest. =Will Is Choice.= Just here we can imagine an earnest protest: "But why do you ignore the human will? Why do you try to make man the creature of feeling? A high-grade man does--not what he wants to do but what he thinks he ought to do. In any person worthy of the adjective 'civilized' it is conscience, not desire, which is the motive power of his life." It is true: in the better kind of man the will is of central importance; but what is "will"? Let us imagine a raw soldier in the trenches just before a charge into No-Man's Land. He is afraid, but the word of command comes, and instantly he is a new creature. His fear drops away and, energized by the lust of battle, he rushes forward, obviously driven by the stronger emotion. He goes ahead because he really wants to, and we say that he does not have to use his will. Imagine another soldier in the same situation; with him fear seems uppermost. His knees shake and his legs want to carry him in the wrong direction, but he still goes forward. And he goes forward, not so much because there is no other possibility as because, in the circumstances, he really wants to. All his life, and especially during his military training, he has been filled with ideals of loyalty and courage. More than he fears the guns of the enemy or of his firing-squad does he fear the loss of his own self-respect and the respect of his comrades. Greater than his "will to live" is his desire to play the man. There is conflict, and the desire which seems at the moment weaker is given the victory because it is reinforced by that other permanent desire to be a worthy man, brave, and dependable in a crisis. He goes forward, because in the circumstances, he really wants to, but in this case we say that he had to use his will. Is it not apparent that will itself is choice,--the selection by the whole personality of the emotion and the action which best fit into its ideals? Will is choice by the part of us which has ideals. McDougall points out that will is the reinforcement of the weaker desire by the master desire to be a certain kind of a character.[65] [Footnote 65: "The essential mark of volition is that the personality as a whole, or the central feature or nucleus of the personality, the man himself, is thrown upon the side of the weaker motive."--McDougall: _Introduction to Social Psychology_, p. 240.] Each human being as he goes through life acquires a number of moral ideals and sentiments which he adopts as his own. They become linked with the instinct of self-assertion, which henceforth acts as the motive power behind them, and attempts to drive from the field any emotion which happens to conflict. Men, like the lower animals, are ruled by desire, but, as G.A. Coe says, "Men mold themselves. They form desires not merely to have this or that object, but to be this or that kind of a man."[66] [Footnote 66: Coe: _Psychology of Religion_.] If a man be worthy of the name, he is not swayed by the emotion which happens for the moment to be strongest. He has the power to reinforce and make dominant those impulses which fit into the ideal he has built for himself. In other words, he has the power to choose between his desires, and this power depends largely upon the ideals which he has incorporated into his life by the complexes and sentiments which compose his personality. _Ideas and Ideals_. If emotion is the heart of humanity, ideas are its head. In our emphasis on emotion, we must not forget that as emotion controls action, so ideas control emotion. But ideas, of themselves, are not enough. Everybody has seen weaklings who were full of pious platitudes. Ideas do control life, but only when linked up with some strong emotion. No moral sentiment is strong enough to withstand an intense instinctive desire. If ideas are to be dynamic factors in a life, they must become ideals and be really desired. They must be backed up by the impulse of self-assertion, incorporated with the sentiment of self-regard, and so made a permanent part of the central personality. Parents and teachers who try to "break a child's will" and to punish every evidence of independence and self-assertion little know that they are undermining the foundations of morality itself, and doing their utmost to leave the child at the mercy of his chance whims and emotions. There can be no strength of character without self-regard, and self-regard is built on the instinctive desire of self-assertion. =Education and Religion.= It is easy to see how important education is in this process of giving the right content to the self-regarding sentiment. The child trained to regard "temper" as a disgrace, self-pity as a vice, over-sensitiveness as a sign of selfishness, and all forms of exaggerated emotionalism as a token of weakness, has acquired a powerful weapon against temptation in later life. Indulgence in any of these forms of gratification he will regard as unworthy and out of keeping with his personality. It is easy, too, to see how central a place a vital religious faith has in enriching and ennobling the ego-ideal, and in giving it driving-power. A force which makes a high ideal seem both imperative and possible of achievement could hardly fail to be a deciding factor. Every student of human nature knows in how many countless lives the Christian religion has made all the difference between mere good intentions and the power to realize those intentions; how many times it has furnished the motive power which nothing else seemed able to supply. Moral sentiments which have been merely sentiments become, through the magic of a new faith, incorporated into conscience and endowed with new power. Just here lies the value of any great love, or any intense devotion to a cause. As Royce says: "To have a conscience, then, is to have a cause; to unify your life by means of an ideal determined by this cause, and to compare this ideal and the life."[67] [Footnote 67: Royce: _Philosophy of Loyalty_, p. 175.] =Avoiding the Strain.= It seems that a human being is to a large extent controlled by will, and that will is in itself the highest kind of choice. But too often will is crippled because it does not speak for the whole personality. Knowledge helps a person to relate conscience with hitherto hidden parts of himself, to assert his will, and to choose only those emotions and outlets which the connected-up, the unified personality wants. Sometimes, indeed, a little knowledge makes the exercise of the will power unnecessary. Using will power is, after all, likely to be a strenuous business. It implies the presence of conflict, and the strain of defeating the desire which has to be denied.[68] Why struggle to subdue emotional bad habits when a little insight dispels the desire back of them, and makes them melt away as if by magic? For example, why use our will to keep down fear or anger when a little understanding dissipates these emotions without effort? [Footnote 68: Freud: _Introduction to Psychoanalysis_, p. 42.] Whatever we do with difficulty we are not doing well. When it requires effort to do our duty this means that a great part of us does not want to do it. When we get rid of our hidden resistances we work with ease. As a strong wind, applied in the right way, drives the ship without effort, just so the forces in our lives, if they are adjusted to one another, will without strain or stress easily and naturally work together to carry us in the direction we have chosen. When we get rid of blind conflicts, even the business of ruling our spirits becomes feasible. SUMMARY =Various "Sprees."= The human animal has a constitutional dislike for dullness and will seize upon almost any device which promises to lift him out of what he considers the monotony of daily grind. An elaborate essay might be written on the means which human beings have taken to create the sense of _aliveness_ which they so much crave. Some of them--we call them savages--have found satisfactory certain wild orgies in primitive war-dances; others--we shall soon call them "out of date"--have found simpler a bottle of whisky or a glass of champagne; still others find a cold shower more invigorating, or a brisk walk or a good stiff job which sets them aglow with the sense of accomplishment. But there are always those who, for one reason or another, find most satisfactory of all a chronic emotional tippling, or a good old-fashioned emotional spree. Persons who would be shocked at the idea of whisky or champagne allow themselves this other kind of indulgence without in the least knowing why. Nor is the connection between alcoholism and emotionalism so far-fetched as it seems. Psycho-analytic investigations have repeatedly revealed the fact that both are indulged in because they remove inhibitions, give vent to repressed desires, and bring a sense of life and power which has somehow been lost in the normal living. Both kinds of spree are followed by the inevitable "morning after" with its proverbial headache, remorse, and vows of repentance but despite all this, both are clung to because the satisfaction they bring is too deep to be easily relinquished. Whenever an emotion quite out of keeping with conscious desire is allowed to become habitual, we may know that it is being chosen by a part of the personality which needs to be uncovered and squarely faced. Nervous symptoms and exaggerated emotionalism are alike evidence of the fact that the wrong part of us is doing the choosing and that the will needs to be enlightened on what is taking place in the outer edge of its domain. In the choice between emotionalism and equanimity, the selection of the former can only be in response to unrecognized desire. A nervous person is invariably an emotional person, and as a rule lays the blame for his condition upon past experiences. But experience is what happens to us _plus_ the way we take it. We cannot always ward off the blow, but we can decide upon our reaction. "Even if the conduct of others has been the cause of our emotion, it is really we ourselves who have created it by the way in which we have reacted."[69] [Footnote 69: DuBois: _Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders_, p. 155.] One ship drives east, another drives west, While the self-same breezes blow; 'Tis the set of the sail, and not the gale That bids them where to go. Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate, As we journey along through life; 'Tis the set of the soul that decides the goal, And not the calm or the strife. REBECCA R. WILLIAMS. CHAPTER XVI _In which we find new use for our steam_ FINDING VENT IN SUBLIMATION THE RE-DIRECTION OF ENERGY A child pent up on a rainy day is a troublesome child. His energy keeps piling up, but there is no opportunity for him to expend it. The nervous person is just such a pent-up child. A portion of his personality is developing steam which goes astray in its search for vent; this portion is found to be the psychic side of his sex-life. Something has blocked the satisfactory achievement of instinctive ends and turned his interest in on himself. Perhaps he does not come into complete psychic satisfaction of his love-life because his wife is out of sympathy or is held back by her own childish repressions. Perhaps his love-instinct is baffled by finding itself thwarted in its purpose of creating children, restrained by the social ban and the desire for a luxurious standard of living. Perhaps he is jealous of his chief, or of an older relative whose business stride he cannot equal. Jung has pointed out how frequently introversion or turning in of the life-force is brought about by the painfulness of present reality and by the lack of the power of adaptation to things as they are. But this lack always has its roots in childhood. The woman who is shocked at the thought of sex is the little girl who reacted too strongly to early impressions. The man of forty who is disgruntled because he is not made manager of a business created by others is the little boy who was jealous of his father and wanted to usurp his place of power. The man who suffers from a sense of inferiority because his friend has a handsomer or more intellectual wife is the same little boy who strove with his father for possession of the mother, the most desired object in his childish environment. The measure of escape from these childish attitudes means the measure of success in life. Fortunately for society, the average person achieves this success. The normal person in his childhood learned how to switch the energy of his primitive desires into channels approved by society. Stored away in his subconscious, this acquired faculty carries him without conscious effort through all the necessary adjustments in maturity. The nervous person, less well equipped in childhood, may fortunately acquire the faculty in all its completeness, although at the cost of genuine effort and patient self-study. =Sublimation the Key Word.= In the prevention and in the cure of nervous disorders there is one factor of central importance, and that factor is sublimation--or the freeing of sex-energy for socially useful, non-sexual ends. To sublimate is to find vent for oneself and to serve society as well; for sublimation opens up new channels for pent-up energy, utilizing all the surplus of the sex-instinct in substitute activities. When the dynamic of this impulse is turned outward, not inward, it proves to be one of man's greatest possessions, a valuable contribution of energy to creative activities and personal relationships of every kind. =The Failure to Sublimate.= A neurosis is nonconstructive use of one's surplus steam. The trouble with a nervous person is that his love-force is turned in on himself instead of out into the world of reality. This is what his friends mean when they say that he is self-absorbed; and this is what the psychologists mean when they say that a neurotic is introverted. A person, in so far as he is nervous, does not see other people at all--that is, he does not see them as real persons, but only as auditors who may be made to listen to the tale of his woes. His own problems loom so large that he becomes especially afflicted with what Cabot calls "the sin of impersonality"; or to use President King's words, he lacks that "reverence for personality" which enables one to see people vividly as real persons and not as street-car conductors or servants or merely as members of one's family. To be sure, many a so-called normal individual is afflicted with this same kind of blindness; here as elsewhere the neurotic simply exaggerates. Engrossed in his own mental conflicts and physical symptoms, he is likely to find his interest withdrawing more and more from other people and centering upon himself. =Sublimation and Religion.= We do not need psychology to tell us that engrossment in self is a disastrous condition. When the psycho-analyst says that the life-force must be turned out, not in, he is approaching from a new angle the truth as it is found in the gospel,--"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart," and "thy neighbor as thyself." Religion provides the love-object in the Creator; altruism provides it in the "neighbor." Christianity and psychology agree that as soon as love ceases to be an outgoing force, just so soon does the individual become an incomplete and disrupted personality.[70] [Footnote 70: For emphasis on religion as a means to sublimation, see Freud, Putnam, Pfister, James, and DuBois.] =Carlyle's Doctrine of Work.= "Produce! produce! produce!" Life for a social being involves not only rich personal relationships, but absorbing, creative work. No nervous person is cured until he is willing to take and to keep a "man-size job." A good piece of work is not only the sign of a cure; it is the final step without which no cure is complete. =Along Nature's Lines.= If the psychologist is asked what kind of task this is to be, he answers that each person must decide for himself his own life-work. An individual may not know why, but he does know that there are certain things which he most likes to do. Sublimation is more readily accomplished if his energy is directed toward self-chosen interests. Parents or teachers or physicians who try to force another person into any definite plan of action are making a grievous blunder. Help may be given toward self-knowledge and the understanding of general principles, but advice should never be specific. Taken in the large, it is found that men and women choose different ways of sublimation. Man and woman differ in the psychic components of the sex-life even as they differ in the physical. Sublimation to be successful must follow the lines laid down by nature. The urge of the average man is toward construction, domination, mastery. The urge of the average woman is toward mothering, protection, nurture. The masculine characteristics find ready sublimation in a career; the man builds bridges, digs canals, harnesses mountain streams, conquers pests, overcomes gravity, brings the ends of the earth together by "wireless" or by rail; he provides for the weak and the helpless--his own progeny--or, incarnated in the body of a Hoover, he gives life to the children of the world. In woman, the dominant force is the nurturing instinct. Child and man of her own come first, but when these are lacking, to paraphrase Kipling, in default of closer ties, she is wedded to convictions; Heaven help him who denies! Only as a career opens up full vent for this nurturing instinct, will it provide satisfactory substitute in sublimation. Its natural trend can be seen in the recent tidal wave of social legislation--for prohibition, child-labor laws, sanitation, recognition and control of venereal disease, acknowledgment of paternity to the illegitimate child. Since the women of the day, in numbers up to the million, have been compelled to sacrifice both man and unformed babe to the grim Juggernaut of war, this nurturing urge may press hard against many of the social and business barriers now impeding its flow. But if society understands and readjusts these barriers, making it possible for its citizens--women as well as men--to approximate the natural instinctive bent, it will not only save itself much unrest but will also go far toward preventing the spread of nervous invalidism. SUMMARY That which a nervous invalid most needs is a redirection of energy. Since, in spite of appearances, there is never any real lack of energy, no time is needed for the making of strength, and a cure can take place just as soon as the inner forces allow the energy to flow out in the right direction. Sometimes, indeed, an outer change may start the inner process. Often the "work cure" does cure; occasionally the sudden necessity to earn one's living or to mother a little child frees the life-force from its old preoccupation and forces it into other channels. In most cases, however, the nervous invalid is suffering not from lack of opportunities for outside interest but from an inner inability to meet the opportunities which present themselves. The great change that has to be made is not in external conditions and habits but in the hidden corners of the mind; a change that can be accomplished only by self-knowledge and re-education. But if self-knowledge is the first step in any cure, so self-giving must be the final step. Sooner or later in the life of every nervous invalid there comes a time when nothing will serve to unify his disorganized forces but steady and unswerving responsibility for a good stiff piece of work. Happy for him that this is so and that he is living in a day when science no longer tells him to fold his hands and wait. GLOSSARY _Autonomic nervous system:_ The vegetative nervous system which controls vital functions,--as digestion, respiration, circulation. _Censor:_ A hypothetical faculty of the fore-conscious mind which resists the emergence into consciousness of questionable desires. _Common path:_ In physiology, the final route over which response is made to physical stimulation; similarly in psychology, the one outlet for the finally dominant impulse. _Compensation:_ Exaggerated manifestation of one character-trend as a defense against its opposite which is painfully repressed; relief in substitute symptom formation. _Complex:_ A group of ideas held together by emotion (usually referring to a group which is wholly or in part unconscious). _Compulsion:_ A persistent compelling impulse to perform some seemingly unreasonable (but really substitute or symbolic) act, or to hold some irrational fear or idea; an emotional force which has been separated from the original idea. _Conflict:_ (Special) Struggle between instincts (unconscious). _Conversion:_ (Special) The process by which a repressed mental complex expresses itself through a physical symptom. _Displacement:_ 1. Transposition of an emotion from its original idea to one more acceptable to the personality. 2. The shifting of emphasis, in dreams, from essential to less significant elements. _Dissociation:_ 1. The state of being shut out from taking active part (applied to a group of ideas), as in normal forgetfulness. 2. (Abnormal) An exaggerated degree of separation of groups of ideas, with loss to the personality of the forces or memories which these groups contain, as in double personality. _Fixation:_ Establishment in childhood of over-strong habit-reactions. _Free Association:_ A device for uncovering buried complexes by letting the mind wander without conscious direction. _Homo-sexual:_ The quality of being more attracted by an individual of the same sex (abnormal) than by one of the opposite sex (hetero-sexual, normal). _Hysteria:_ That form of functional nervous disorder which manifests itself in physical symptoms; an attempt to dramatize unconscious repressed desires. _Inhibition:_ Restraint (Special) limitation of function, physical or ideational, due to unconscious emotional attitudes. _Libido:_ Life-force, élan vital, or (restricted) the energy of the sex-instinct. _Neurosis:_ Used loosely for psycho-neurosis or nervous disorder. _Obsession:_ A compulsive idea inaccessible to reason. _Oedipus Complex:_ Over-strong bond between mother and son, or (more loosely) between father and daughter. _Over-determined:_ Used of an impulse made over-strong by lack of discharge, with accumulation of emotional tension from added factors. _Phobia:_ A persistent, unreasoning fear of some object or situation. _Psycho-neurosis:_ "A perversion of normal (psychic) reactions," (Prince); a general term for functional dissociation of the personality, resulting in: psychasthenia--disturbed ideation; neurasthenia--disturbed emotions; hysteria--disturbed motor or sensory activity. _Psychotherapy:_ Treatment by psychic or mental measures. _Rationalization:_ The process of substituting a plausible, false explanation for a repressed, unconscious desire. _Repression:_ Expulsion from consciousness of a pain-provoking mental process. _Resistance:_ The force which impedes the return of a repressed complex to consciousness. _Subconscious:_ That part of the mind of which one is unaware; the storehouse of memories ancestral and personal. _Sublimation:_ The act of freeing sex-energy from definitely sexual aims; utilization of sex-energy for nonsexual ends. _Suggestion:_ The process by which any idea, true or false, takes hold of one; the idea may enter the mind consciously or unconsciously, through reason or through impulse. _Symbol:_ An object or an attitude which stands for an ides or a quality; (Special) that which stands for or represents some unconscious mental process. _Threshold_ (door-sill): A figure which represents the level of the barrier erected by the mind against the perception of an idea or sensation. _Transference:_ Unconscious identification of a present personal relationship with an earlier one, with conveyance of the earlier emotional attitudes (hostile or affectionate) to the present relationship. BIBLIOGRAPHY BOOKS ON THE GENERAL LAWS OF BODY AND MIND Cannon, Walter B: Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage. Crile, George W.: The Origin and Nature of the Emotions. Coe, George Albert: The Psychology of Religion. Hudson, Thomas Jay: The Law of Psychic Phenomena. Janet, Pierre: The Major Symptoms of Hysteria; The Mental State of Hystericals. James, William: Psychology; Talks to Teachers on Psychology; Varieties of Religious Experience. Jastrow, Joseph: The Subconscious. Kempf, Edward J.: The Tonus of Autonomic Segments in Psychopathology. Long, Constance: Psychology of Fantasy. McDougall, William: Social Psychology. Mosher, Clelia Duel: Health and the Woman Movement. Phillips, D. E.: Elementary Psychology. Prince, Morton: The Unconscious; The Dissociation of a Personality; My Life as a Dissociated Personality. Sherrington, Charles L.: The Integrative Action of the Nervous System. Sidis, Boris: The Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology; Psychopathological Researches. Tansley, A. G.: The New Psychology. Thomson, William Hanna: Brain and Personality. White, William A.: Principles of Mental Hygiene; The Mental Hygiene of Childhood. Proceedings of the International Conference of Women Physicians. (National Board, Y.W.C.A., 600 Lexington Avenue, New York City.) BOOKS ON MENTAL HYGIENE Brown, Charles R.: Faith and Health. Bruce, H. Addington: Scientific Mental Healing. Cabot, Richard: What Men Live By; Social Service and the Art of Healing. DuBois, Paul: The Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders. Huckel, Oliver: Mental Medicine. James, William: Vital Reserves. Prince, Morton, and others: Psychotherapeutics. Sadler, William S.: The Physiology of Faith and Fear. Worcester, Elwood } McComb, Samuel } Religion and Medicine. Coriat, Isador H. } BOOKS ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS Brill, A. A.: Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis. Emerson, L. E.: Nervousness. Freud, Sigmund: The Interpretation of Dreams; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; Wit and the Unconscious; Selected Papers and Sexual Theory; A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Frink, H. W.: Morbid Fears and Compulsions. Hitschmann, E.: Freud's Theories of the Neuroses. Holt, E. B.: The Freudian Wish. Jung, Carl G.: The Psychology of the Unconscious; Analytical Psychology. Jones, Ernest: Psycho-analysis; Treatment of the Neuroses, Including Psychoneuroses--in Modern Treatment of Nervous and Mental Diseases--White and Jelliffe. Pfister, Oskar: The Psychoanalytic Method. Putnam, James Jackson: Addresses on Psychoanalysis--Human Motives. Tridon, André: Psychoanalysis. White, William A.: The Mechanisms of Character Formation. JOURNALS DEVOTED TO THE SUBJECT OF NERVOUS DISORDERS Journal of Abnormal Psychology, published in Boston. Psychoanalytic Review, published in Washington, D.C. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, published in London. INDEX A Acid and Milk, 21, 257 Acidosis, 285 Adjustment a neurosis an effort at, 169 to new conditions causes consciousness, 82 of the race, in subconscious, 78 to the social whole, 164, 216, 380 Adolescence, 59 Adrenal Secretion, 42, 48, 133, 229, 270 Alcoholism, relation to unconscious desires, 377 Alvarez, W.D., 284 Ames, Thaddeus Hoyt, 170 Amnesia, 113 Anaemia, buttermilk in, 282 Anger, 47 ff. Anxiety and Fear, 366, 367, 368 Anxiety Neurosis, 7, 109 Anxious thought in conversion hysteria, 277 Appetite, symbolic loss of, 276 Association accidental, 341 a chain of, 191 free, 101, 191 making new, 329, 330 of ideas, 106 subconscious, 346 word test, 197, 198 Audience, secured in a neurosis, 169 Auto-eroticism, 57 Auto-intoxication, 279, 282 Automatic writing, 96, 97 Autonomic nervous system, 86, 126, 319 Auto-suggestion, 129, 210 B Bacteria, in anaemia, sciatica, rheumatism, 281 Bashfulness, 46 Bergson, 90 Biliousness, 268 Birth-Theories, 158, 160, 161 Blocking, in word association, 198 Bodily Response to Emotional States, 134 Brain, diseased in insanity, sound in neurosis, 13 fag, 125, 241 records, 89 Bran fad, 291 Breuer, Joseph, 142 Brill, A.A., 58, 69, 201, 202 Bruce, H. Addington, 200, 201 Burrow, Trigant, 173, 203 Buttermilk in anaemia, 282 C Cabot, Richard, 27, 381 Canfield, Dorothy, 231 Cannon, Walter B., 49, 134 Capitalizing an Illness, 170 Catechism, 247 Cathartics, 283 and acidosis, 286 and bacterial infection, 282 and child birth, 285, 286 and operations, 284 Causes of Nerves, 146, 164 Censor, psychic, 104, 195 Change of life, 314 Character and health, 24, 25, 362 Chemistry, 61, 190, 224, 225, 230, 247, 306, 315, 317, 324 Child, birth-theories of, 158 father to the man, 90 habit-fixation of, 150 love-life, four periods 54, 55 questions, 158 too much bossing of, 154 too much petting of, 57 training, 160 Childhood, bonds too strong, 72 determines future character, 91, 148 experiences, 149 reactions, 148 Choosing our Emotions, 360 a neurosis, 122, 169, 216 our Sensations, 339 Christian religion, 74, 374 Coe, George A., 71, 373 Colon, function of, 279, 280 Common Path, 52 Compensation, 168, 340 Complex, against marriage, 204 and conditioned reflex, 108 and personality, 105 breaking up of, 109, 186 buried, 187, 192, 197, 201, 202, 215 chance signs of, 198 definition, 107 dissociated, 111 emotional, 198, 345 father-mother, 152 feeling-tone of, 130 formation of, 129 forming a resistance, 159 making over, 187, 190 mother-son, 185 physiological, 108 repressed, 112, 157, 190 unconscious, 108 Compromise, 163, 164, 165 Compulsion neuroses, 7, 109, 156 Conditioned reflex, 108 Conduct, kind of, 168, 191, 360 Conflict, 59, 64, 112, 145, 154, 164, 178, 200, 218, 313, 372, 376 Conscience, 164, 173, 177, 196, 376 Consciousness, displaced threshold of, 91 relation to the subconscious, 82 rise of, 82 Constipation, 277 ff. and food, 289, 290 cure of, 294 due to suggestion, 294 purpose of, 288 Conversion-hysteria, 174, 236, 237, 238, 245, 277, 302 Crile, George W., 41, 44 Curiosity, child's concerning sex, 58 displacement over to scientific investigation, 45 D Day-dreaming, 162, 325, 326 Defence-reaction, 365 Desire energy of, 78 in dreams, 194 in emotional habits, 364 in nervous disorders, 167 instinctive, 38 instinctive and ideals, 363 tensions of, 196 Diarrhoea, bacterial, 281 Dietetics, essence of, 254 Digestion, 86, 133, 250, 251 Disease, of the ego, 15 physical, 12, 13, 28 psychic, 12, 13, 14, 28 Disorders, functional and organic, 13 Displacement, 109, 110, 165, 174 Dissociation, 111 abnormal, 189 an example of, 92, 347 in hypnosis, 123 in hysteria, 111, 123 in neurasthenia, 111 increases suggestibility, 122 normal, 111 of a "Personality," 113 of memory picture of walking, 125 of power of sight, 170 Dreams, 193 ff. Freud's dictum, 193 latent content, 195 manifest content, 195 purpose of, 195 work of, 196 DuBois, Paul, 4, 127, 246, 327, 382 E Education, 202, 218 in Emotional Control, 374 Emotion, 35, 360 ff. and complexes, 108 and fatigue, 229, 247 and instincts, 40 ff. and muscle tone, 137 blood-pressure in, 136 bodily response to, 133 feeling tones in, 130 precocious, 150 repressed (see repression) secretions in, 132 the strongest cement, 107 tonic and poisonous, 131 unrecognized desire in, 364 Energy, adaptable, 67 creative, 34, 69, 71 inhibited, 235 libido, 36, 252 misdirected, 28, 379 new level of, 221 physiological reserve, 117 redirection of, 385 releasers of, 245 three uses of, 23 utilization of, 68, 165 "Energies of Men", 221 Environment, 33, 96, 149, 334 Evolution, 73 Exhaustion, nervous, 216, 224, 243, 246 Explanation vs Suggestion, 206 ff. F Fads-dynamogenic, 252 Faith, 118 Family complex, 153 Fatigue, 219 ff. a Matter of Chemistry, 225 and insomnia, 326, 327 and moral tension, 166 and sex-repression, 235, 244 true and false, 223 Fear, 40 ff. exaggerated, 368 externalized, 368 of cold, 348 of fatigue, 219, 354 of food, 133, 251 of heat, 237 of noise, 355 physical effects of, 41 purpose of, 41 symbolic of desire, 368 Feeling our Feelings, 333 ff. Feeling-tones, 130, 206, 213, 229 Fermentation, 264 Finding New Vents, 379 Fixation of Habits, 150, 151, 162 Flat-foot, 138 Food, 254 ff. and constipation, 289, 290 for the children, 256 idiosyncrasies, 258 mixtures, 255 variety essential, 255 Foreconscious, 79 Free Association, 101, 191, 195 Freud, Sigmund, 69, 74, 83, 84, 104, 142, 149, 153, 163, 185, 188, 193, 210, 342, 376, 382 Freudian principles, 143, 144, 147 misconceptions concerning, 184, 185 Frink, H.W., 89, 107, 158, 162, 171, 195, 218 G Gall-stones, 269 Gas on the stomach, 264 Gastric juice, 86, 134 Gastritis, 266 Genius, 116 Girard-Mangin, Dr., 231 Goitre, 239 H Habit, defined, 150 dissociation, 189 dreaming, 162 fixation of, 150, 152 of insomnia, 322 of loving, 150, 164 of rebelling, 150, 164 of repressing normal instincts, 151 reactions, 364 Heredity, 148 Hidden desires, 363, 368 Hinkle, Bertha M., 154 Holt, E.B., 213 Homosexuality, 184 Hoover, Herbert A., 384 Hormone, 305, 319 Hudson, J.W., 91, 95 Hydrochloric Acid, 267 Hygiene, laws of, 127 moral, 206 Hygienic conditions, 222, 230 Hypersensitiveness, 342 Hypnosis, 84 ff. aid to diagnosis, 187 its drawbacks, 188 suggestibility in, 189 Hysteria, 7, 111 Hysterical pains, 353 Hysterical pregnancy, (case), 127 I Ideas, and emotions, 23 ascetic, 253 contagion of, 120 dynamogenic, 253 not surgical, 262 Idiosyncrasies, physical, 258 Identification, 110 Imagination, 162 Incantation, 211 Indigestion; 211, 250 Inferiority complex, 340, 380 Inhibition, 188, 245, 293, 306, 330, 377 Insomnia, 322 ff. Instincts and their Emotions, 33 ff., 51 ff. Instincts, beneficent, 85 energy releasers, 233 race-inheritance, 85 repressed, 28, 103, 147, 169, 172 sex (see under sex) thwarted, 235, 244, 340, 356, 367, 379 Internal Secretion, of ovary, 316, 317 (see Adrenal) (see Thyroid) Introspection, 26 Introversion, 380, 381 J James, William, 49, 221, 227, 243, 253, 347, 382 Janet, Pierre, 188 Jealousy, 154, 380 Jelliffe, Smith Ely, 98, 114, 153, 163 Jones, Ernest, 69 Judicious neglect, 127 Jung, C.G., 8, 64, 69, 163, 197, 380 K Kempf, Edward J., 86 Kinaesthetic sensations, 336 L Latency period, 60 Libido, 36, 147, 252 Liver trouble, 268 M Masturbation, 184 McDougall, Wm., 49, 122, 372 Memories, 84 ff. Menopause, 314 Menstruation, 306 Mind (see Consciousness and Subconscious) Misconceptions, about the body, 21, 22 about theory of sex, 184 Mixtures, fear of, 257 Monogamy, 63 Moral hygiene, 206 Mosher, Clelia Duel, 308 Muscle-tone, 137, 244 Myth, 146 N Narcissus, 55, 152, 340 Nausea, 101, 177, 275 of pregnancy, 319 Nerves, attitude toward, 3 causes of, 28, 148 drama of, 10, 29 medical schools and, 16 not physical, 14 prevention of, 385 Neurasthenia, 111, 246 Neuritis, 14, 244 Neurosis, a compromise, 167 a confidence game, 179 a failure of sublimation, 381 a flight from reality, 170 an ethical struggle, 177 an introversion, 381 and shell-shock, 147 and suggestion, 129 anxiety, 7, 109 awkwardness of, 213 compulsion, 109 caused by buried complexes, 108, 190 definition 112 origin in childhood, 149, 157, 217 purpose of, 167 root-complex of, 153 O Obsession, 7, 204 Oedipus Complex, 154 Organic trouble, 11, 12, 251 Ouija Board, 97 Over-awareness, 352 Over-compensation, 67 Over-determined, 148 P Pain, at base of the brain, 351 chronic hysterical, 341 menstrual, 306 Personality, alterations of, 7, 15, 20 and emotions, 362, 369 and will, 372 choice by, 216 complexes and, 107 disrupted, 382 multiple, 111, 131 nervousness a disorder of, 15 reverence for, 383 unified, 375 Persuasion, 206 Pfister, Oskar, 153, 166, 382 Phantasy, 153, 163 Phobia, 7, 368 Plagiarism, 98 Popular Misconceptions, 21 Prince, Morton, 79, 84, 89, 95, 97, 112, 132, 188, 347 Psycho-analysis, 189 ff. Psychological explanation, 208 Psychology, 25, 27, 94 Psycho-neurosis, 144, 147, 163, 169 (see also neurosis) Psycho-therapy, 74, 187, 216 Ptosis, 139, 251 Putnam, James J., 3, 34, 69, 215, 366, 370, 382 R Race-memories, 84 Rationalization, 90, 155, 168, 317 Reaction and over-reaction, 149, 198, 202, 238, 335 Reality, flight from, 164, 379 Re-education, 183 ff. Reflex, conditioned, 108 physiological, 349 Regression to infantile state, 163, 164 case of, 92 Religion, 74, 89, 374, 382 Reminiscences, hysteric suffers from, 7 Repression, 104, 156, 160, 162, 235, 245, 304 Resistance, 160, 188, 192, 202, 211 Rest-cure, 246 Rheumatism, buttermilk treatment of, 282 Rixford, Emmet L., 283 Royce, Josiah, 375 S Sadler, Wm., 126, 136 School, four grade, 54 Second wind, 221 Self-abuse, 184, 238 Self-pity, 365 Self-regard, 45, 103, 157, 374 Sensations, lowered threshold to, 333 ff. Sensitiveness, 333, 340 Sex, and artistic creation, 379 and "Nerves," 141 ff. glands, secretion of, 305, 314, 316 instinct organically aroused, 65 instinct thwarted, 161, 367, 379 instruction, 160 license, 184 life, 143, 146, 157 perversion, 152 phantasy, 163 psychic component of, 185, 356, 379, 383 repressed, 104 sublimation of, 233, 379 Shell-shock, (see foreword) also 145, 147 Sherrington, Chas., 39 Sick-headache, 270 Sidis, Boris, 24, 84, 188, 222, 337, 341 Slips of tongue, etc., 199 Slogan, of psychoanalytic school, 215 woman's, 314 Social code, 184 Soda, misuse of, 266 "Sour-stomach," 260, 266 Sprees, 376 Stammering, 200 Standard, double, 66 single, 62 Stomach, 133 and conversion hysteria, 250 ff. fads, 252 gas on, 252 Subconscious mind, 77 ff. amenable to control by suggestion, emotion, 119 functions of, 85, 335, 337 habits of, 105, 259 physical expression of, 245 playing confidence game, 311 store-house of memories, 84, 89 tireless, 325 Sublimation, 379 ff. a synthesis, 164 and religion, 74, 382 definition (Freud), 69, 70 failure of, 71, 147, 381 in a career, 385 in artistic creation, 68 natural trends of, 383 of energy, 178, 238, 309 Success, measure of, 380 Sugar in urine, 133 Suggestion, a method of psychotherapy, 208 constipation the result of, 289, 298 definition, 121 false, 302 in child training, 121 in hypnosis, 99, 188 in sleep, 99 inconvenient forms of, 296 power of, 45 unhealthy, 310 Suggestibility, 122, 189, 206 Superman, 339 Symbolism, 171, 176, 275, 342 Symptoms, purpose of, 168 T Taboos, dietary, 250 ff. interest in, 289 Tensions, psychic, 69, 85, 353, 366 Thresholds, psychic, 337 ff. Thyroid secretion, 42, 133, 185, 270 Transference, 109, 193, 264 Trotter, W., 46 U Unconscious, (see subconscious) V Venereal disease, 304, 317 Vitamins, 255 W White, Wm. A., 69, 82, 83, 98 Will, 371 Williams, Tom A., 21, 213 Wish fulfilment, 171, 194, 200, 214 Word-association test, 197 Work-cure, 385 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM CASES A Adolescence and depression, 312, 313 Anger and circulation, 136 Angina pectoris, false, 129 Anxiety-neurosis, 175 B Bearing children, 318 Brain fag, 241 Bran crackers and prunes, 258 C Cathartics, abuse of, 284 Childhood sex-reactions, 203 Constipation and lacerations in labor, 296 Constipation and Mineral Oil, 295 Constipation, recovery from, (some cases), 294 Contamination, fear of, 159 Conversion of moral distress to physical, 348 D Danger-signals and the railroad man, 344 Dissociated state, memories in, 92 E Emotion and sick-headache, 273 "Enjoying" poor health, 213, 345 "Exhaustion," 243 Eye-strain, twenty-five years, 274 F Fatigue, 228, 234, (two cases), 239 Fatigue and emotion, (three cases), 354 Fear, 237, of heat, 237 Fear of air, 348, 349 Fear of cold, (three cases), 348, 349 Fear of light, (two cases), 350 Fear complicating labor, 320 "Flat-foot," 137 Forgetting and repressed wish, 200 Free-love, chemical cause of, 317 G Gall-stones, 269 I Idiosyncrasy for eggs, 212 Insomnia and attention, 329 Insomnia and point of view, 328 Insomnia and wrong associations, 330 Insomnia, chronic, 328 L Library, child fear of, 100 Locomotor Ataxia, exaggeration of symptoms, 128 M Menstrual pain, unnecessary, 220 Muscle-tumors, phantom, 127, 128 N Nausea, in sex-repression, 101, 177 Nervous indigestion, 211 "Neuritis," 174, false, 244 Noise, fear of, 355 O Obsession against marriage, 204 P Paralysis, fear of, 345, 346 Physical illness mistaken for functional, 252 Plagiarism, 98 R Recovering lost word, 80 Repression and disgust, 199 S Sick-headache, 271, 274 Skim-milk diet, 262 "Sour stomach" and two Tyrolese, 260 T Temper, an indulgence, 359 The "Repeater" gains in weight, 263 Thyroid disturbance, fatigue in, 239, 240 U Unconscious Association and symptoms, 346 W Walking, lost power of, 124 Word Association test, 198 Transcriber's Notes The following typographical errors were noted and corrected: On page 146 of the book: Heading changed from "A Searching Queston" to "A Searching Question". On page 152, "Narcisstic" changed to "Narcissistic". On page 276, "..the nausea disappearaed." changed to "disappeared". On page 294, "...Nature's functions re reëstablished" changed to "be". On page 302, "...nor even of man's infringment..." changed to "infringement". On page 330, "I put my mouth up close to to her ear...", removed the duplicate "to". On page 346, for the paragraph starting "But these symptoms...", "disappeaared" changed to "disappeared". In the Index, page 401, "Thesholds" changed to "Thresholds". 
61124	----	book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.) Transcriber's Notes 1. Typographical errors were silently corrected. 2. The text version is coded for italics and other mark-ups i.e., (a) Italics are indicated thus _italic_; (b) Bold thus =bold=; and (c) Images are indicated as [Illustration]; (d) Footnotes are placed at the end. * * * * * PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LOVE PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LOVE BY ANDRE TRIDON Member of "The Medico-Legal Society of New York City," "The Society for Forensic Medicine of New York City," and "The International Association for Individual Psychology of Vienna, Austria." [Illustration] NEW YORK BRENTANO'S PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1922, by BRENTANO'S _All rights reserved_ PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I THE HEAD AND THE HEART 1 Love is independent from the will. Victims of Venus. Love and affection. Erotropism. What is the heart? A dead heart can be made to beat. The heart is a respectable organ. The antithesis head-heart. Nerve memory. II THE CHOICE OF A MATE 10 What we see in our mate. The meaning of choice. The donkey's dilemma. Chance in the discard. The dog's choice. The behavior of copepods. III THE QUEST OF THE FETISH 17 The hair fetishist. Everybody a fetishist. Most common fetishes. The breast and the bottle. Feminine fetishes. Physiological necessities. Foot and shoe fetishism. Non-physical fetishes. Symbolical fetishes. Antifetishes. Attraction or obsession? IV THE FAMILY ROMANCE AND THE FAMILY FEUD 29 The Oedipus complex. The Freudian view. Jung's interpretation. Adler. Pseudo-incest. The Neurotic life plan. Imitation. The glands. Identification mania. Early conflicts. Death wishes. Our preferences. Craig's birds. V INCEST 41 The incest fear. Incest in ancient times. Inbreeding. The primal horde. Repressed incestuous feelings. Blood relations. VI THE PHYSIOLOGY OF LOVE 49 The organism a unit. Love's stimulation. The successful lover. The unsuccessful lover. Calf love. VII THE SENSES IN LOVE 56 Sight. Auditory sensations. Smell. The sense of taste. Touch. Holding hands. The kiss. The birth of the kiss. Kisses and electricity. VIII EGO AND SEX 65 Neurotic complications. Self-love. Ego in sex guise. Fatherhood. War prisoners. Neurotic motherliness. When ego and sex do not conflict. IX HATRED AND LOVE 73 A worried wife. The test of love. Sour grapes. Brothers and sisters. A negro hater. Reformers. The syphilophobiac. Deluded martyrs. X PLURAL LOVE AND INFIDELITY 83 Polyandry. Infidelity. When love dies. Iwan Bloch's and Hirth's theories. Bored wives. Getting even. Varietists and Don Juans. The ultra-feminine. Messalina. XI IS FREE LOVE POSSIBLE? 95 Man, the dissatisfied. The next step. Blissful blindness. What of the child? Disharmony between the parents. The institution child. Free love plus birth control. XII PROSTITUTION 104 Economic factors. Lombrosos's theory. Sensuality. Father fixation. Prostitution a neurosis. The pimp. Prevention. Prostitution has no redeeming grace. XIII VIRGINITY 112 What men experienced in love want? Ethical prostitution. The fear of woman. The will-to-be-the-first. Telegony. Goldschmidt's explanations. XIV MODESTY, NORMAL AND ABNORMAL 122 In Turkey. On the modern stage. Normal modesty. Suggestive draperies. Excessive modesty. Immodest modesty. Fear of love. The masculine protest. Lack of modesty. XV JEALOUSY 133 Forel's rules for husbands. Very few men and women admit their jealousy. Jealousy and impotence. Childish behavior. The ego rampant. Sexless jealousy. Husbands and lovers. Cruelty. Making people jealous. XVI INSANE JEALOUSY 147 Delusional jealousy. Homosexualism and jealousy. A jealous wife. A case of projection. Masked sadism. XVII HOMOSEXUALISM. ITS GENESIS 155 Male lovers in Greece. Women were harem slaves. The tide turns. Theories. The third sex. Transvestites. Are transvestites homosexual? Metatropism. Steinach's experiments. Perverse birds. Freud denies the third sex. Active and passive types. The homosexual neurosis. A safety device. Above and below. A way out. The escape from biological duties. XVIII HOMOSEXUALISM A NEUROTIC SYMPTOM 174 A denial of life. Homosexualism is negative love. The love letters of famous homosexuals. Deeds of violence. A homosexual tragedy. Women more homosexual than men. Boastful homosexuals. The Nietzsche-Wagner feud. Shall perverse love be recognized? Man's emancipation from woman. Homosexualism and war. Is homosexualism necessary? XIX CRUELTY AND LOVE--SADISM 188 Algolagnists. The Marquis de Sade's biography. What Bonaparte thought of him. Glandular drunkenness. Atavism. Primitive religions. Primitive races and sex violence. Animal love fights. The sadistic mob. Is the male more cruel? XX LOVE THAT CRAVES SUFFERING--MASOCHISM 200 Sacher Masoch's biography. Love of the whip. The masochist is like a tired horse. Shoe fetishism. Craving for humiliation. Masochistic fancies. Are women masochistic? Women who enjoy a beating. A Freudian suggestion. XXI WHAT LOVE OWES TO SADISTS AND MASOCHISTS 212 Sadistic and masochistic lovers and their fascination. The vamp. Those who are too normal to be interesting or romantic. XXII LOVE AMONG THE ARTISTS 216 Dissatisfaction. The male artist. The female artist. The woman who accomplishes things. Flattery. XXIII THE PERSONALITY BEHIND THE FETISHES. GLANDS 223 The parent-child relationship. Modern endocrinologists ignorant of psychology. Reciprocal influence of glands and behavior. The pituitary gland. The thyroid. The adrenals. The gonads. XXIV GLANDULAR PERSONALITIES 233 The dark skinned type. The tall type. The lean type. The obese type. The slender type. Environment. Comfort and behavior. What teeth indicate. Matrimonial engineers. XXV LOVE AND MOTHER LOVE 241 Sex cravings and motherhood cravings. Pregnancy means health. Fear of pregnancy. When mother love is lacking. Frigid wives. Mother and father love. Mothers adore their sons. Fathers partial to daughters. The flapper and her mother. XXVI SHOULD WINTER MATE WITH SPRING? 251 Two disinterested brides. The case of Wagner. A parent fixation. Physical incompatibility. The plight of two neurotics. What will people say? Having her fixation-fling. Physical results. The fate of the younger mate. King David. XXVII NEGATIVE LOVE 263 A "clean" life. Utterances and conduct. Oracles and prophecies. Can we save our vital force. Sublimation. The sexless. Ideal love. Protective measures. Lovers of the absolute. A troublesome patient. Higher aspirations. XXVIII THE NEW WOMAN AND LOVE 275 George Bernard Shaw's view. The rebellion against nature. Woman in commercial life. Was it a sacrifice? The pursuit. The passing of respectable prostitution. The abettor of ethical sins. Health versus sickness. The passing of the flirt and of the doll. Modesty, old and new. The unadapted woman. The proud husband. XXIX BIRTH CONTROL 291 What we expect of the modern woman. The only solution. The human milch cow. The nightmare of abortion. The plight of the neurotic woman. The child of the neurotic woman. Birth control and indulgence. A great love is a holy thing. The passing of the double standard. XXX THE PASSING OF THE HUSBAND WORSHIP 303 Is man's vitality declining? Undue pessimism. The wise husband. Is the male indispensable? Loeb's experiments. Twins to order. The mother is the race. Matriarchal communities. Modern woman is conceited. The terrors of the climacteric. Masculine man is in no danger of passing away. XXXI PERFECT MATRIMONIAL ADJUSTMENTS 315 Marriage a compromise. Attractiveness an asset. Forty and hideous. Athletic movie idols. The foe of married happiness. Friendship may survive love. Separate vacations for the married. The play function of love. Psychoanalysis to the rescue. Wounded egotism. Democracy in the home. INTRODUCTION Life would be much simpler if love among human beings were similar to love among the animals. At mating time, any animal of any species feels automatically attracted to any animal of the opposite sex belonging to the same species. Age, appearance or relationship seem of no account in the animal world. The love activities begin at a definite time of the year, have as their obvious and exclusive purpose the reproduction of the species and, after attaining their goal, end very early in the summer of the same year. An exception may be made for a few wild and domesticated animals which have several mating seasons and for a few survivals of the prehistoric fauna, like the elephants, among which the family group seems more permanent than among more "recent" biological specimens. Nor do love activities among the animals result in lasting disturbances of their psychological life. In certain varieties of fish the male never even sees the female whose eggs he fecundates. While we observe at times duels to the death between two males for the possession of one female (elks or moose), animal life seems to suffer few lasting complications from the fact of such conflicts, which, like animal love, are purely seasonal. A greater regularity of the food supply which has intensified the sex urge among human beings and removed its seasonal character, and the progress of civilization which, for economic reasons, has placed upon the union of male and female a thousand restrictions, has complicated terribly what was merely among animals a periodic biological activity. Restrictions, however, never bring about the complete suppression of biological cravings and merely compel them to remain repressed for varying periods of time. Repressed cravings, denied a direct normal outlet, create for themselves indirect, morbid outlets. We are little more than civilized animals who have been trained not to reveal their primal cravings at certain forbidden times and places. The cravings are there, struggling for expression and denial of their reality does not suffice to make them unreal. It only invests them with morbidity and abnormality. Much of the fearsome mystery which surrounds sex is due to the fact that we have forgotten our origin. We have set up a goal which, like all goals worth striving for, is far ahead of the human procession and somewhere between the earth and the stars. But that goal should not cause us to forget our starting point. It happens too often that "what we should be" blinds us to "what we really are." Hence our surprise, our puzzled expression, our painful disappointment, when one of us reveals himself suddenly as he is instead of as he should be. Hence our absurd statutes which punish the laggards on the road of evolution instead of helping them along. Hence our fears in the presence of a mystery we have made mysterious, of a danger we have made dangerous and which we make more terrifying yet by burying our heads in the sand. To this day the study of love has been considered as the almost exclusive province of poets, playwrights, novelists, movie authors and philosophers. Those people have reveled in love's dramatic complications which they have, whenever possible, exaggerated, for "artistic" reasons. Instead of clarifying the problem, they have beclouded it. In anglo-saxon countries a class of neurotics countenanced by the police and the courts, the puritans, have further distorted the popular misconception of love by swathing it in the morbid veils woven by their unhealthy minds. It is high time, therefore, that the subject of love be reviewed from an impartial angle, from a purely scientific point of view. Only one science is qualified to undertake that review, psychoanalysis, for it has effected in the last twenty years a synthesis of all the data which biology, neurology, endocrinology and other sciences have contributed to the knowledge of human psychology and of the human personality. No scientist is satisfied with his findings unless they can be described in terms of accurate measurements, hence, repeated and checked up by any other scientist having acquired the requisite minimum of technical skill. The basis for such a study of love was established by the great pioneer in the science of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud of Vienna. By his masterly analysis of the sex life, to which, however, he has ascribed an undue importance, he has stripped love of many veils which made it look like a scarecrow. His successors, recognizing the importance of other factors in the love life, ego cravings, organic predispositions, etc., have in turn stripped love of other veils which made it look too romantically unreal. Thus we are gradually reaching the heart of the problem. Love to-day is no longer animal love, nor is it as yet angelic love. We are no longer beasts, altho the primal beast still disports itself in our unconscious. Nor are we angels, arduous as our striving toward the stars may be. To determine what love should be, could be or might be, seems to be an academic waste of time and little else. To determine, on the other hand, what love REALLY IS AT THE PRESENT DAY, what actual level it has reached, to explain some of the difficulties it encounters in trying to remain on that level, and finally to suggest to MEN AND WOMEN OF TO-DAY workable modes of adaption at that level, shall be the mission of this book. In the coming chapters, I will show that our choice of a mate is as completely "determined" as any other biological phenomenon; that the "reasons" for that choice are compelling "habits" acquired in our childhood and infancy within the family circle; that our "standards of beauty" are memories from childhood and infancy; that in our search for a mate we are influenced as powerfully by ego and safety cravings as by sex cravings that the so-called "perversions" are due, at times, to wrong training, at times, to organic disabilities and at times to unrecognized safety cravings; that jealousy is, in the majority of cases, due to ego cravings, not to sex cravings; finally that no perfect adjustment of the married relation can be brought about until democracy obtains in the home, replacing the various forms of autocracy against which bullied wives and henpecked husbands have directed many ineffective, neurotic revolts. New York City June 1, 1922 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LOVE CHAPTER I THE HEAD AND THE HEART Love, like hunger, fear or pain, is an absolutely involuntary craving. We may deny it expression and gratification, even as we may pretend that we are not hungry, afraid or in pain, and go without food, protection or relief from pain; but no exertion on our part will prevent us from experiencing love and craving its gratification. Nor can we experience it thru an act of will. This absolutely involuntary character of the love craving must be borne in mind whenever we discuss the complicated and at times puzzling relations which it brings about between human beings. The attitude of the average person to this question is extremely vague and illogical. The person obsessed by love cravings which are not meeting with the approval of his environment, justifies himself by stating loudly the overpowering character of his feelings: "I cannot help loving him or her," "It is a feeling stronger than myself," "It came over me suddenly," "It was a case of love at first sight." =Victims of Venus.= The ancients expressed their strong belief in man's helplessness against the allpowerful fascination of the love object by calling the lovelorn a victim of Cupid or of Venus, a puppet of the gods, of fate. And on the other hand, we behold modern and ancient lovers, whenever they feel that the love object is growing indifferent to them, reversing their attitude, denying their belief in love's involuntary character, and using words like fickle, changeling, to designate the love object they are losing. They speak of deception, of betrayal, of faithlessness. "You no longer love me," they state reproachfully. They may ask the stupid question: "Why have you ceased to care for me?" Worse yet, they may say to the love object; "You should be ashamed of your inconstancy." Such remarks are not infrequently coupled with another remark which goes more deeply to the root of the matter: "You should not show your indifference so plainly." In other words pretence is expected when actual love has died. And indeed nothing else could be expected logically by such illogical lovers, unless of course a deep affection, which may have grown between two human beings in the course of many years of life partnership, successfully masks the passing of the peculiar fascination which differentiates love proper from any other human feeling. =Love and Affection.= We may love a human being more than ourselves, enjoy infinitely his presence, delight in giving to him mental and physical happiness, lavish on him a thousand caresses and yet not experience the flash of desire which leads compulsively toward complete physical communion with that human being. A simile from the animal world will make my meaning clearer. A large number of animals "enjoy" light but only a small number of them are so "fascinated" by light that they cannot resist a "craving" to fly toward a light, contact with which may mean death to them. Only that small minority can be called in scientific jargon "positively phototropic," in sentimental parlance "hopelessly in love" with light. All animals are affected in some fashion by an electric current passing thru their bodies, but only a minority of them are so affected by it that they must, whether they wish it or not, face the positive electrode, as a lover fascinated by the face of his sweetheart. Only these can be characterised as "positively galvanotropic." =Erotropism.= Likewise a hundred men may be charmed by the sight of a woman. Only one or two from their number may feel compelled to seek complete union with her regardless of the obstacles to be surmounted, of the criticism their actions may arouse, of the expenditure of time, money and energy the adventure may entail. Only this minority may be considered as "positively erotropic." In other words it is the primal compulsion which nature uses to assure the continuance of the race and which I might designate as "erotropism" which must be considered the basis for a discussion of love. Love as commonly understood or misunderstood at the present day, is a series of variations on the theme of erotropism, variations due to the complication of modern civilisation and the restrictions placed upon all biological phenomena by the necessities of life in communities. =What is the Heart?= The reader will notice that I have thus far avoided any mention of the "heart" altho that organ is commonly identified with the various emotions of love. Physiologically speaking, the heart is no more vitally concerned with love than with any other disturbing feeling and emotion. Love may at times cause our heart to beat wildly, but so does strong coffee, so does acute indigestion, so does blood poisoning, so does any sort of violent fear. The heart, we must not forget, is a mere muscle, which is no more capable of being the seat of an emotion than our biceps or our calves. The heart is an elaborate centripetal and centrifugal pump which, in obedience to orders or impulses coming from elsewhere, draws the blood out of the veins and sends it into the arteries at a varying rate of speed. =A Dead Heart Can Be Made to Beat.= The heart, taken out of the body and attached to a well fitted system of pipes, thru which an appropriate fluid is circulating, will start beating anew and keep on beating until decay sets in, due to the fact that the proper nourishment is lacking. Talking of a sensitive heart, of a tender heart or of a heart of stone means merely juggling with pretty pictures which correspond to nothing physiologically. There may be sensitiveness, tenderness or stony harshness somewhere in the organism and the heart may give them expression by its fluctuating beats, but it acts on such occasions as a mere registering apparatus. Adrenin taken by the mouth or injected into the blood stream causes the heart pump of a perfect indifferent man to throb as wildly as the heart of a lovelorn swain. Strong doses of the nitrates may cause valvular insufficiency and "break" a heart more effectively than any catastrophe in one's sentimental life. =The Heart is a Respectable Organ.= The choice of the heart as the organ of the emotions, in particular of the love emotion, is certainly due to the fact that it is such a faithful registering apparatus and also to a "displacement upward" frequently observed in modern civilised thought. We do not willingly mention the abdomen and therefore have rechristened it the stomach. We have read many times the appalling statement that a woman carries her child "under her heart." The seat of the mind which materialist physicians of ancient Greece located in the intestines, rose later to the level of the solar plexus and with Descartes finally reached the pineal gland. Likewise the part of the body where love cravings receive their physical satisfaction having become taboo, the seat of love has been raised from the pelvis to the thorax, from the primary genital region to the breast, which bears secondary sexual characteristics. After which, the popular imagination has established an arbitrary contrast and antagonism between the mysterious clocklike organ in the chest and the mysterious soft mass in the skull. =The Antithesis Head-heart= is one which literature is not likely to abandon for years to come. We read that women "follow the dictates of their heart" while men are not so prone "to lose their head." The head is represented as the well-spring of reason while the heart is a fount of tenderness, if not of foolishness. Modern scientific research has demonstrated that the brain is nothing but an apparatus for burning sugar which is transformed into electric current which the nervous systems distribute throughout the body. Thought of the normal type is impossible unless the various parts of the brain are perfectly coordinated, just as the slightest accident to a telephone wire may leave a subscriber cut off from the rest of the world, but thoughts, feelings, emotions, cravings, originate elsewhere, in the autonomic nervous system. =Nerve Memory.= In our autonomic nervous system all our life impressions are indelibly recorded, probably thru infinitesimal chemical modifications of the nerves and the resultant tensions. Pleasant nerve impressions (pleasant memories) direct us toward certain objects which are the source of such impressions, unpleasant impressions drive us away from the outside stimuli which once produced them. The former cause our heart to beat slowly, peacefully, powerfully, the latter speed up the cardiac pump so as to send energy as fast as possible wherever it is needed for defence against harm. Pleasure, indifference and pain, built upon billions of nerve memories, make up the woof of our thinking. They ARE our mind, the mind that falls in love or falls out of love. The head supplies the energy and the heart registers the rate at which energy is sent thru the body, but the memories of which our thinking is made are stored up elsewhere. In a scientific study of love, therefore, I shall leave the head and the heart as individual organs out of consideration. CHAPTER II THE CHOICE OF A MATE =Love is a Compulsion.= The most striking characteristic in the love craving, one which differentiates it sharply from other cravings, is the compulsory exclusiveness of its choice. Hunger drives us to seek a large number of substances which, by filling the stomach, relieve what Cannon describes as a gastric itch. The person in love, on the other hand, seeks only one single object at a time, which alone seems capable of vouchsafing the desired gratification. A lovelorn man may be surrounded by many women, all extremely attractive and accessible, and yet pine away for some other woman who perhaps does not compare favorably with those he might conquer. He may, at times, yield to the temporary attraction of a new woman, but in the majority of cases, he will soon return to the woman he actually loves. Not infrequently his environment will wonder at his choice. "What can he see in her?" Physically or intellectually, anyone but himself would see very little to "admire" in her. =What We See in Our Mate.= The many handsome men whom we have met, and who are mated to homely wives, the many wives we have observed, mated to impossible husbands, and whose affection for their unprepossessing life partner is genuine and in no way dictated by sordid considerations, the many triangles we know of, in which a very inferior lover or mistress is preferred to an admittedly superior husband or wife, are evidence of the involuntary, nay compulsory, character of the love choice. A comparison imposes itself with certain obsessive fears or cravings bearing upon one object which, to any one but the person experiencing such fears or cravings, may appear anything but fearful or desirable. The psychoanalytic investigation of the origin of such obsessions always shows that they can be traced back to childhood impressions which have modified our nervous reactions to certain objects or ideas. =The Meaning of Choice.= Applied psychology and laboratory research have in recent years attached a more and more deterministic connotation to the term "choice." The word, which to academic psychologists, implied the exercise of free will and "judgment," will have some day to be accepted as synonymous with "compulsion." A few examples from animal behavior will illustrate my meaning. Philosophers have for years wasted breath and ink on the academic consideration of the following puzzle: A donkey is standing at equal distance from two bales of hay; the two masses of fodder are mathematically alike in size, shape, color, fragrance, quality, etc. Unless the animal, certain philosophers said, was able to "make a choice" of his own, he would remain motionless between the two bales whose attraction would be perfectly balanced. He would, like some celestial bodies, be held suspended by two forces which would not allow him to turn to the right nor to the left. He would rationally have to starve if attraction were a force exerting itself from the outside exclusively. Yet no donkey placed in such a situation will fail to make an immediate choice. He will turn to one of the bales and start eating it. Even if we imagine a philosophising donkey reasoning as follows: "The two bales are equally attractive. Hence it makes no difference which one I start with. Let us begin with either." Even then, he will have to "make a choice," altho his selection of one of the bales seems to be due entirely to "chance." =Chance in the Discard.= Psychological research has eliminated chance as a factor in human behavior, and whether our donkey starts with the right or with the left bale, an analyst will insist that there are reasons why he picks out that one bale to be eaten first. Laboratory dogs which have supplied solutions for so many psychological difficulties, have proved of service in this case too. If the slightest surgical operation has been performed on one side of a dog's brain, he becomes unable to move in a straight line. He deviates from the straight line toward the side on which his brain has been injured. If the lesion is on the right side he will be compelled to turn to the right and vice versa. This is due to the fact that the injury has weakened that side and the cerebral dynamo which supplies the body with power produces less current on the injured than on the uninjured side. When you row a boat and slack one oar the boat turns toward the side on which you are expending more effort. Of course the process is reversed in a dog because the nerves of the dog cross over, the right side of his brain supplying the left side of the body, the left side of the brain supplying the right side of the body with power. Let us repeat on two dogs, the experiment which academic psychologists imagined performed on a mythical jackass. =The Dog's Choice.= Offer two pieces of meat to a dog whose brain has been injured on the right side and he will invariably eat the piece of meat nearer that side. Repeat the test on a dog whose brain has suffered a lesion on the left side and you will see him gobble the piece of meat on the left side. Go even further and place both pieces of meat on the left side of the dog injured on the left side of his brain and he will "pick out" the one farther out. Not that he "prefers" that one. He will aim at the nearest but his injury will cause him to deviate too far to the left and he will be unable to reach the nearest one. Other experiments on dogs illustrate the purely organic "motives" back of certain lines of conduct. When both sides of a dog's brain have been injured in the frontal region, the dog refuses to go forward or downstairs but has a tendency to move backwards and to run upstairs. When the back of a dog's brain has been injured on both sides, the dog has a tendency to keep on running forward all the time and while he is unwilling to climb stairs he will willingly go downstairs. =The Behavior of Copepods.= When we pour carbonated water or beer or alcohol into an aquarium, certain crustaceans called copepods will at once swim toward the source of light, as tho they "loved" light, and appear so interested in light that they will "forget," to eat their food, if that food is placed away from the source of light. The same animals when placed in water containing strychnine or caffein, will shun the light as tho they "hated" it, and as tho they "loved" the darkness. We know that if a galvanic current is sent thru our head we will lean involuntarily against the positive pole. If the current is sent thru an aquarium, a number of the animals swimming in it will be compelled to seek the positive pole and to remain there, others to seek the negative pole. In the case of the laboratory dogs, a permanent modification of the nervous system caused a permanent modification of the animal's behavior, which could not be "cured," (for brain injuries do not "heal," the cells of the brain being unable to reproduce themselves), but which would probably be compensated for by gradual adaptation. In the case of the "phototropic" or "galvanotropic" animals, the modification of the nervous system was only temporary but might cause a more or less durable modification of the animals' behavior, if allowed to last a considerable length of time. The love attraction or "erotropism" is likewise due to certain more or less lasting modifications of man's nervous system caused by the fact that his nervous system was for variable periods of time exposed to the influence of certain outside stimuli. CHAPTER III THE QUEST OF THE FETISH The papers now and then tell the story of some man who was caught in the act of clipping a little girl's braid of hair. That man is what is called technically a hair fetishist. Hair is his fetish, that is the part of a woman's body which attracts him more powerfully than any other part. A search of the living quarters of that variety of "delinquents" generally reveals that they are in the habit of collecting women's tresses acquired in that fashion. The tresses are almost always of the same color. =The Hair Fetishist= whose unlawful activities bring him sooner or later into the clutches of the police is a neurotic who presents to an exaggerated, abnormal extent, a trait we find in all normal human beings. Every one of us is especially attracted by some part of the human body. The young man who raves over his sweetheart's hair, the young woman who blissfully runs her fingers thru her lover's hair are also hair fetishists. But their craving is not strong enough to lead them into committing unlawful, perverse, socially inacceptable acts. Another widely spread type of abnormal fetishist described by novelists and psychiatrists, but which very seldom gains newspaper notoriety, is the foot and shoe fetishist, who buys or steals all sorts of shoes. He too is merely the exaggeration of the man who is delighted by the sight of a Cinderella foot or a slim ankle. With hair and shoe fetishists, the fetish is more than a mere attraction; it is generally a powerful sexual stimulant. Such fetishists experience, while kissing or caressing their fetish, sexual gratification of the autoerotic or of the involuntary type. =Everybody a Fetishist.= There are hundreds of varieties of fetishism, normal or abnormal. There is no person living who is not more or less subject to the compulsive attraction of some fetish. There is in every man or every woman something which catches the onlooker's eye first and retains his attention longest. This varies with every human being. Ask ten men to describe one pretty woman. Every one of them will probably head the list of physical qualities he has observed in her with a different fetish. One will describe her as a blonde with a beautiful skin, rather tall and well shaped; another will state that she is a well-shaped woman, rather tall and with blonde hair; another will characterise her as a tall woman with an abundance of blonde hair, etc. I knew a man, in no way abnormal, who could not describe a pretty woman, regardless of whatever her build was, without making a gesture of the hand outlining ample breast curves. =Most Common Fetishes.= Women's hair, throat, neck, shoulders, arms and breasts seem to be the most frequently mentioned fetishes. Fashion and the law recognise that fact. Whenever women plan to make a physical appeal to men or women, they dress their hair with special care and they wear low neck gowns, thereby exhibiting those various fetishes. It will be noticed that the parts of the body constituting the most widely appreciated fetishes are those with which the nursing child comes in most intimate and continuous contact. To the child, they mean safety, comfort, caresses, food. The color of skin or hair, the shape of neck, head and shoulders on which his glances rest while nursing or while being carried about by the mother, are the only ones which will appear "natural" and safe, hence beautiful, to him in after life. The breasts from which he derives a perfect food, at the right temperature, which flows easily into his stomach and is assimilated without effort, the breasts, whose texture and elasticity make them pleasant to lean upon while nursing, may eventually become to his simple mind the most valuable part of the female's body. =The Breast and the Bottle.= My observations on several hundred men fed at the breast or on the bottle in infancy, have revealed to me that practically all the men nursed by a woman were greatly attracted to women with well developed breasts. The majority of men nursed on the bottle, on the other hand, preferred thin, boyish looking girls, some of them even expressing a distinct repugnance for rather buxom women. It may be stated that of the few who did not confirm that rule there were several more or less neurotic individuals, whom an unconscious fear of incest (see Chapter V) had conditioned to fear the very type of women by whom they had been nursed. Arms and hands, which to the nursling mean protection, service, caresses, transportation, etc., derive therefrom their great attraction as fetishes. =Feminine Fetishes.= I have thus far mentioned almost exclusively fetishes from the female body. There are several reasons why feminine fetishes are far more important to both men and women than masculine fetishes. Children of both sexes are exposed to the influence of the mother's fetishes more intimately, more constantly and more "profitably" (nursing), than they are to the influence of the father's fetishes. Hence masculine fetishes are fewer and less numerous. Woman is less of a fetishist than man. The most frequently mentioned masculine fetishes are the bodily attributes characteristic of strength, and which, hence, would afford most protection to the infant and the female. No perverse fetishism is observed in women, no abnormal craving driving women into securing unlawfully men's hair or clothing, etc. Some writers consider transvestite women, women who enjoy masquerading in men's clothes, as clothing fetishists, but such cases are extremely rare and can be accounted for in other ways. =Physiological Necessities.= There is another reason, a physiological reason, for the great importance which men and women attach to the feminine fetishes. More sexual excitement and a greater muscular tension are necessary in the male than in the female at the time of the sexual union. The female, being physiologically submissive, can wait for her desire to grow under the influence of the male's caresses. The male, on the contrary, has to be aggressive and cannot fulfill his biological part unless his desire has been aroused by other sensations than that of the sexual union. Hence the greater expenditure of time and effort on the part of the female to make herself attractive to the male. Hence also the long drawn courtship of flirtation thru which the female of every animal species endeavors to bring the male to the highest possible point of sexual excitement before surrendering herself to him. =Foot and Shoe Fetishism= is more complicated. The mother's feet are the part of her body which the infant, crawling on the floor or attempting to walk, beholds most frequently and at the closest range. That variety of fetish, however, should not be as strong as other fetishes more directly related to the child's nutrition, comfort and safety. When shoe fetishism become compulsive, it is a neurosis due to the repression of some erotic desire aroused in childhood by some striking incident. One case cited by Freud, illustrates that process. "A man to whom the various sex attractions of woman now mean nothing, who in fact, can only be aroused sexually by the sight of a shoe on a foot of a certain form, is able to recall an experience he had in his sixth year and which proved decisive for the fixation of his libido. One day he sat on a stool beside his governess. She was a shriveled old maid who, that day, on account of some accident, had put a velvet slipper on her foot and stretched it out on a foot stool. "After a diffident attempt at normal sexual activity, undertaken at the time of his puberty, a thin, sinewy foot like that of his governess, had become the sole object of his desires. The man was carried away irresistibly if other features, reminiscent of his governess, appeared in conjunction with the foot. Through this fixation, the man did not become neurotic but perverse, a foot fetishist, as we say." I wish to call the reader's attention to the expression "after a diffident attempt at normal sexual expression." It indicates a feeling of inferiority, likely to cause failure and also increased by failure which is always in evidence in every neurotic and which drives him toward easier goals, along the line of least effort. Some of the Freudians have suggested that foot fetishism is due to the repression of an early craving for the unpleasant odors emitted by perspiring feet. As against such a far-fetched explanation, I would offer the fact that foot and shoe are always associated in the unconscious of neurotic patients with the male and female genitals, respectively. We find the association of shoe and genitals clearly indicated in the old custom of throwing shoes and rice at departing newlyweds (rice symbolising the fertilising seed). Odors, sounds, tactile sensations, etc., may also be powerful fetishes or antifetishes, according to the impression they may have made on the nursling. This will be discussed in more detail in the Chapter entitled "The Senses in Love." =Fetishes may be of a non-Physical Kind.= A profession may be a fetish, and so can a mental attitude, in short, anything which in childhood may have been considered as a source of safety, comfort, egotistical gratification, etc. Age itself, is at times a fetish. Gerontophilia is a neurosis, the victims of which are only attracted to very old men or women, safety, comfort and food having been assured them probably by a grandfather or grandmother to whom they clung for neurotic reasons. =Many Fetishes are Purely Symbolical.= Some women fall in love with a uniform because that type of garment symbolises to them physical strength, virility, courage, etc. A uniform fetishist who consulted me during the war had given herself to half a dozen officers who appeared to her irresistible until they undressed or donned civilian clothes. After which she felt indifferent to them and suffered remorse. =Antifetishes=, parts of the body or their symbols which repel us in persons of the opposite sex, can be due either to unpleasant experiences of childhood connected with such parts of the body or to a neurotic fear of incest. A neurotic's resistance to a mother fixation may be so strong that in his (unconscious) fear of committing incest, he shuns everything which in any woman reminds him of his mother. A man whose violent mother and sister fixation had kept him till forty-five away from all women and made him homosexual, felt extremely uneasy and slightly ashamed in the presence of tall blonde women, the mother and sister type. While he never enjoyed greatly the company of any woman, he felt more at ease with small brunettes. In his case, blonde hair and a high stature had become strong antifetishes. =The Quest of the Fetish= means then, in last analysis, the quest of safety. If fetishes are so closely linked with sexuality, it is mainly because a feeling of safety is one of the necessary conditions for sexual potency in the male and the female alike. As soon as fear dominates, the pelvic regions are starved of blood, for the blood is then needed in other parts of the body, head and limbs, for fight or flight. Sexual impotence is the result. This is probably why in primitive races we often find the erect phallus used as a symbol of safety, as a primitive "fetish" vouchsafing imaginary safety and confidence. This throws an interesting sidelight upon the real meaning of morbid fetishism. As I said in one of the preceding paragraphs, every neurotic feels inferior and seeks safety. The hair fetishist, for instance, is inferior in some respect or considers himself inferior, which is about the same and has the same consequences, as far as ultimate mental or physical results are concerned. The normal hair fetishist seeks a woman whose hair will symbolise to him the safety he enjoyed close to his mother's hair. The abnormal fetishist will crave the possession of hair which alone will place him in turn in possession of safety, a condition in which his sexual cravings will be easily satisfied. Not feeling capable of conquering a woman, however, he will cut off some one's tresses, which will symbolise to him woman, and the safety enjoyed in woman's (his mother's) arms. In that fashion, he also gratifies his craving for the line of least effort. Unwilling to face the social, economic, biological responsibilities that go with the possession of a woman, he seeks in the fetish which he steals, an easy, selfish, unsocial form of gratification. That gratification is also a regression, for it leads him back to the autoerotic practices of childhood. =Attraction or Obsession.= In the normal man, then, the fetish is an attraction, influencing his choice of a mate. In the abnormal man it becomes an obsession, the fetish at times becoming infinitely more important than the part of the body it suggests, at times causing the elimination of the sexual mate which it replaces entirely. In the normal man, the fetish, being the bearer of pleasant memories from childhood days, facilitates one's adaption to a life partner. The abnormal individual, unwilling to part with his childhood ways, which were easier and safer, either demands that the life partner be the absolute image of the person from whom he acquired his fetishes or prefers one safe fetish to any life partner. In the next chapter we shall see how mental and physical, real and symbolic fetishes are forced upon us by the various developments of the family romance which is always accompanied by a more or less marked family feud. CHAPTER IV THE FAMILY ROMANCE AND THE FAMILY FEUD The craving for food and safety, gratified in our mother's arms, the craving for safety gratified by the strong father's presence, develop in our nerves automatic reactions of love or hatred (fear) toward other human beings endowed with or lacking our mother's and father's fetishes. Exposure to pleasurable or painful stimuli in infancy produces in our nerves a modification which could be roughly compared to the modification produced surgically in the brain of the dog mentioned in Chapter II. Even as a dog can be conditioned to "prefer" turning to the right and to "hate" (or fear) running down stairs, a human being can, thru continued exposure to the sight of red hair in infancy, become conditioned to "prefer" red hair. Many other factors, however, complicate the question of our likes and dislikes. A child's environment contains many sources of stimulation besides the mother's and the father's fetishes, all of them varying in intensity, duration and character (pleasant or unpleasant). Besides, the child is forced at some period of his life into a more or less sudden and more or less pleasant contact with the outside world. That contact, which at times is a conflict, often causes some of the early impressions made upon the infant's or child's nerves to be "repressed," thereby originating a conflict in the individual's nervous system. And thus we are brought to a consideration of the family romance which various conflicts within the family circle and with the outside world, not infrequently transform into a family feud. =The Oedipus Complex.= The complication designated by Freud as the Oedipus Complex is one of the most potent, altho at times one of the least obvious factors in family conflicts and in the mental disturbances which those conflicts occasion. The Oedipus Complex is named after the Greek legend according to which Oedipus killed his father and later married his mother without being aware of their identity. This is the form in which the Oedipus situation appears in real life: A male child may become overattached to his mother and develop a morbid, more or less concealed, hostility to his father. The female child may become overattached to her father and manifest a more or less overt hostility to her mother. There is no case of neurosis in which analysts do not discover a more or less marked maladjustment of that type. In fact Freud has gone as far as stating that the Oedipus Complex is the central complex of every neurotic disturbance. =The Freudian View.= Freudian analysts have somewhat dramatised the Oedipus complex which they consider as due to incestuous longings. Those incestuous longings, according to Freud, are in their last analysis, a yearning of the child to return to the mother's body where the child enjoyed, in its prenatal life, absolute peace and comfort. The average child manages to free himself gradually from the mother's body, first seeking pleasurable sensations in his own body, sucking his thumb, playing with his genitals, later becoming interested in other children like himself, finally, at puberty, seeking human beings of the opposite sex, etc. Some children, on the other hand, never seem to free themselves from the parent of the opposite sex. They are technically designated as the victims of a mother fixation in the case of boys, of a father fixation in the case of girls. =Jung's Interpretation.= Jung, head of the Swiss school of psychoanalysis, considers the Oedipus complication from a broader point of view. To him the father and mother are not real persons, but more or less symbolic and distorted figures created by the imagination of the child. The yearning of the child for its mother, its jealousy toward the father are simply due to its desire to monopolise a perfect provider and protector. =Pseudo-Incest.= To Adler of Vienna, the Oedipus complex is a fiction created unconsciously by the neurotic who is trying to fall back on the father or mother for support. The boy, afraid of life and of the responsibilities imposed upon a man by a normal sexual life, is naturally inclined to cling fondly to his mother, from whom he receives a love and adoration which need not be won or paid for or reciprocated and which in their demonstrativeness only stop short of sexual gratification. The neurotic girl dreams of monopolising the father's affection and financial support which are not to be repaid by sexual intercourse with its consequences, etc. Freud's interpretation explains certain details of behavior in boys with a mother fixation but the yearning to return to the mother's body does not explain a father fixation in a woman. On the other hand, Jung's explanation fails to account for some of the grossly sexual details in the behavior of the fixation child, such as great curiosity directed toward the parent of the opposite sex, at times, even, attempts on the part of a boy to possess the mother in her sleep, etc. =The Neurotic Life Plan.= Adler has clearly seen that the Oedipus situation is not the cause, but merely one of the details of the neurotic life plan. A human being adopts that plan because, owing to some inferiority, real or imaginary, (real to him), he feels unable to compete with other human beings on a footing of equality. The neurosis supplies him with a short cut to power along the line of least effort. That short cut is selfish, unsocial and, hence, productive of unpleasant results. The mother-fixation man, the father-fixation woman shirk their biological duties, thereby leading an easier, cheaper, self-centered life which, in the end, vouchsafes them no real positive gratification. What Adler has left unexplained is how the parent fixation establishes itself in the neurotic. =Imitation.= The Oedipus situation is simply one of the consequences of the imitation by the child of the parent of the opposite sex. Imitation plays a tremendous part in human life and, as far as behavior is concerned, is an infinitely more powerful factor than heredity. Heredity endows us with a certain set of physical organs, hence with a number of potentialities. But the utilisation of those potentialities is left to the individual's destiny determined by his environment. If the son of a splendidly developed prize fighter finds himself in an environment which countenances and lauds prize fighting, physical power will probably become his goal early in life. If his environment casts disobliging reflections on ring activities or if those activities have an unpleasant financial connotation for him, (father disabled and poor), the same boy will abstain from athletic training, remain physically undeveloped, perhaps even grow weak and stunted. =The Glands.= As we shall see in another chapter, the various glands of our body have a good deal to do with the shaping of our personality but the pressure of the social herd within which we live is also a tremendous factor for it compels us to adopt as models for imitation certain physical and intellectual types which are acceptable to the herd. The degree of the pressure exerted by the herd varies greatly with social conditions. The pressure is not the same in an Alaska camp and in a New England village. Unnoticeable in an artists' colony, it may become difficult to bear in a large family group including several members of the clergy. Children become grown ups by imitating grown ups. A boy acquires a man's behavior by imitating his father. A girl acquires womanly manners by imitating her mother. At the same time a boy with a strong organism and, consequently, a fair amount of self confidence, is not as slavish in his imitation of his father's ways as one who is cursed with a delicate constitution or who may have been made timid by fear-producing or humiliating experiences. The former is more adventurous in every way and will, not only roam farther away from his home, but let his eyes also roam on men outside of the family circle, whom he will pick out as secondary models. The weak boy, seeking safety and following the line of least effort, will cling to the closest model, his father, and in extreme cases, will identify himself with him. =The Identification Mania.= An exaggerated mania for identification is always a symptom of weakness and inferiority. The weak man joins numberless organisations and derives a great deal of pride from the mere fact of his membership in them. In general he will not allow anyone to discuss or criticise those organisations. The anonymous citizen of Chicago or Chillicothe is easily aroused by criticisms of his native city overheard elsewhere, for he identifies himself with his native city for lack of any distinction of his own. Members of so called "aristocratic" families, themselves incapable of any achievement, are most unbearable owing to their family pride. They obscurely feel that if their relationship to some more or less distinguished ancestor was taken away from them they would sink into complete obscurity. The stupid traveler who constantly flaunts the flag of his country wherever he happens to be, is also an inferior who is trying to claim all the virtues which the jingoes of his land consider as national characteristics. Close imitation and identification with the person we imitate cannot but lead to conflicts, for it sooner or later means that we encroach upon the rights of our model. =Early Conflicts.= The little boy who imitates his father, identifies himself with him and tries to "become" his father, may only provoke mirth when he dons his father's garments or carries his father's walking stick. When he carries his imitation to the point of handling his father's razors or sampling his cigars, he may court what, to him, is a very unintelligible, illogical and humiliating form of punishment. "If father is always right, why do I get spanked for doing what father does?" the child asks himself with a child's pitiless logic. A profound hostility to the oppressive father may then grow in the mind of the imitative child, in no wise due to sexual complications. This is also the way in which a rivalry may arise between son and father for the non-sexual possession of the mother, the freedom of her room and her bed, the sole enjoyment of her caresses, the sole disposal of her time, the sole domination over her. The father enjoys all those privileges, and in order to be exactly like him, the son must also enjoy them "exclusively" which is logically impossible and leads to unconscious death wishes. =Death Wishes.= The death wishes that lurk in the son's mind when his father and rival is concerned and reveal themselves thru dreams, are not simply murderous cravings. They are symbolical, like the death wishes which some fond mother may express thru her dreams when her beloved child has interfered too much with her activities in her waking hours. The imitative boy, beaten in the race for all of his father's possessions, of which the mother is the most valuable, wishes his father "out of the way." If there are female children, the imitative boy may, after giving up the mother as an unattainable goal, adopt toward one of his sisters the attitude of protection and ownership his father assumes toward his mother. In such cases, the feud is far from being as serious as it would be otherwise. A sister fixation, it goes without saying, is far less dangerous than a mother fixation. The sister is younger than the mother, the obsession of her image being unlikely to attract the brother later to women much older than himself. The love which a sister returns is also far from being as unselfish, intelligent and indulgent as that which a mother lavishes on her child. Almost everything which has been said about the mother fixation applies to the father fixation in girls. But we must bear in mind that owing to the tremendous biological importance of the mother, a mother fixation is likely to have a deeper influence on a boy than a father fixation on a girl. =Our Preferences.= Thus it is that the "preferences" we show when grown up, for a certain human type, are determined by the appearance and behavior of the males and females which were closest to us in the formative years of our life. In the majority of cases it is the mother type or the father type which proves most attractive to boys and girls respectively, the type being represented or symbolised by certain physical or mental fetishes. In many cases, the mother or father type have been modified or replaced by other masculine or feminine types which took the place of the mother or father during that important period of our life. The woman who suckled us or fed us and attended to our various physical needs, nurse or nurse maid, may become the bearer of our fetishes. In Europe where the wet nurse and the nurse girl are infinitely more common than in this country, the ancillary type of love, love for servants and menials, is observed with much greater frequency than here. The Southern man does not show the same repugnance as the Northern man to consort sexually with colored women of the servant class. The colored mammy's fetishes are found competing successfully in many cases with those of the white mother. =Craig's Birds.= Those who believe that heredity, instinct, the call of the blood, etc., have much to do with the choice of a mate, should read reports of experiments performed by William Craig on pigeons. Ring doves and passenger pigeons never mate. When the eggs of a passenger pigeon, however, have been hatched by a ring dove, the young male passenger pigeons will, at mating time, ignore entirely the females of their species, "their flesh and blood," and mate with female ring doves (the mother image) exclusively. The fetishes which to them meant food and safety in the nest mean to them beauty and eroticism when they reach adulthood. CHAPTER V INCEST The family romance has been presented by the Freudians as complicated by actual incestuous entanglements. Adler on the other hand has shown that the incestuous situation is rather an "as if" introduced by the neurotic as a part of his absurd life plan. Barring a few exceptions, the small boy does not desire his mother sexually nor does the small girl feel erotic at the thought of her father. That such incestuous desires arise at the time of puberty cannot be doubted. But they are observed mostly in neurotics to whom the incestuous situation suggests, as I pointed out in the previous chapter, to the boy, food, comfort, the mother's easily won love, to the girl, the protection and the attentions of the strong father. In many cases too, homosexual and incestuous practices among the children in one family mean nothing but the neurotic search for the line of least effort. Freud seeks at times very far fetched explanations for very simple phenomena in order to show the sexual motive at the bottom of them. He states in his _Introduction to Psychoanalysis_ that a girl may show great affection for a younger sister "as a substitute for the child she vainly wished from the father." The truth is that the older daughter, in her close imitation of her mother, also starts "mothering" a child. "A boy," Freud states in the same book, "may take his sister as the object of his love to replace his _faithless_ mother." He rather imitates his father and starts to protect and order about a little female of his age, which at times, when both have witnessed the parental embraces, may lead to actual incest. =The Incest Fear.= Incest is at the present day the form of sexual relation which provokes the most powerful expression of disapproval on the part of civilised and uncivilised races alike. In fact the primitive races seem obsessed by a panicky fear of incest. In many tribes, brothers and sisters are not allowed to meet or speak to each other and, in certain cases, they must even avoid the sight of each other and eschew every mention of each other's names. In the Fiji Islands, where the rules against incest are especially rigorous, there are, on the other hand, special holidays on which orgies are held in which incest becomes permissible. In other words, the natives of those islands, while recognising the irresistible nature of the incest temptation and taking all sorts of measures in order to prevent the commission of that sin, supply at stated intervals an outlet for incestuous cravings. Innumerable details of primitive legislation separate the son-in-law from the mother-in-law, the father-in-law from his son's bride. The Basogas of the Upper Nile loathe incest to such a degree that they punish it even in animals whenever it can be observed among them. =Incest in Ancient Times.= The horror of incest, however, is a relatively recent development in human psychology and ethics. The ancient dynasties of Egypt and Peru practiced incest. Incest was indulged in by all the archaic gods. The authors of the book of Genesis must have accepted the idea of incest as the sole means of explaining Adam's and Eve's descendants. The horror of incest which we all feel or pretend to feel, is indeed an acquired feeling. Since every race has adopted stern legal measures to prevent incest, it can only be because a desire for incest is one of the cravings which mankind is constantly struggling against. As Frazer says: "There is no law commanding men to eat and drink or forbidding them to put their hands in the fire. Men eat and drink and keep their hands out of the fire instinctively." If men and women avoided incest instinctively no legislation would be needed compelling them to avoid it. Indeed the confessions received by psychoanalysts reveal that the first sexual desires of the young are directed toward children of the opposite sex within the family circle. The many slight or serious indiscretions of an incestuous nature in which neurotic brothers and sisters indulge in infancy and childhood are generally "forgotten," that is, repressed, in later years, but analytic probing brings a great amount of such repressed material to the surface. Since neither animals nor human beings experience any natural fear of incest, why is it that all races are officially so afraid of it? =Inbreeding.= It cannot be due to the fear of race deterioration consequent upon inbreeding. Inbreeding is not necessarily a harmful process of reproduction as East and Jones have shown in their book on "Inbreeding and Outbreeding." It seems to have, at times, for instance in Athens during the classic age, led to the production of many very superior individuals. Furthermore the primitive savages who punish incest even among domestic animals have no conception of such eugenic theories. Some of them, incredible as it may sound, do not even realise the relation of cause to effect which exists between intercourse and pregnancy. Freud offers an explanation based upon the Darwinian hypothesis of the primal horde in which the old father kept all the females for himself and drove away the growing sons. This state of affairs has been observed among herds of wild cattle and horses. It generally leads to the killing of the oldest bull or stallion by the younger males. =The Primal Horde.= Freud assumes that this must have been the usual occurrence in the primal horde. One day the sons joined hands and killed the father. "Though the brothers had joined forces in order to overcome the father, each was the others' rival among the women. Each one wanted to have them all to himself like the father, and in the fight of each against the others the new organization would have perished. For there was no longer any one stronger than all the rest who could have successfully assumed the role of the father. Thus there was nothing left for the brothers to do, if they wished to live together, but to erect incest prohibitions, perhaps after many difficult experiments, in the course of which they may all have renounced the women whom they desired." In other words, the incest taboo was adopted to assure peace within the family circle, a convenience measure dictated by jealousy. =Repressed Incestuous Feelings= may at times drive one into a most objectional form of behavior. A brother who in childhood was too fond of his sister (or vice versa) may, from an unconscious desire for self-protection, adopt a hostile attitude to his sister. The more attracted he was to her the more sadistic he will appear in later years. He may even avoid all the women who would in any way suggest his sister and in that way never feel satisfied in love, for the women who cannot possibly suggest to him his sister, lack all the fetishes which would vouchsafe him safety and eroticism. Such a man should be analysed and made to realise the incestuous cravings which he has repressed into his unconscious. His hatred would then change into affection and in his search of a mate he would logically seek the sister image which alone would insure him sexual happiness. I have reconciled in that way several groups of brothers and sisters who had never been able to get along after puberty, altho most of them had developed a dangerous fondness for each other before puberty. Repressed sister fixation like repressed mother fixation has been found on several occasions as one of the components of homosexualism in the man, father or brother fixation as one of the causes of frigidity in the woman. =Blood Relations.= Mother or sister fixation is frequently the cause of marriage between blood relations. This sort of union has been unjustly suspected of breeding mental inferiors. We should rather say that it is the mental inferiors who seek their mate within the family circle. Unable to secure the mother or the sister as a mate, they select a woman who has as many of the family traits as possible, that they may feel more secure in her company. If a defective child is bred of such unions, it is not due to the close relationship of the parents but to the fact that too often one of the mates was deficient physically or mentally. In this respect as in many others, self-knowledge and acceptance of one's personality, coupled with a courageous understanding of unavoidable biological facts, are the necessary conditions for perfect mental health and freedom. The man with a mother or sister fixation, the woman with a father or brother fixation should be made aware of it, however slight or severe the fixation may be. They must be made to realise that incestuous cravings are biological phenomena which for reasons of convenience have been made unlawful but which do not brand the individual experiencing them as a degenerate or a vicious person. They must also be made to realise that their incestuous craving may be one of the symptoms of the neurotic search for the line of least effort, knowledge of which weakens the craving to the point of insignificance. The individual with a biologically real incestuous fixation should accept it and seek its substitute gratification thru association with a suitable mate presenting in his or her person the fetishes of the loved parent or brother or sister. The individual whose fixation is purely neurotic should be freed of it by analysis and allowed to seek a mate without being inhibited by ghosts. CHAPTER VI THE PHYSIOLOGY OF LOVE A human being has met another human being of the opposite sex and is attracted to him or her by the conscious or unconscious memories which his or her physical and mental make up brings back. An organic compulsion drives a man to seek a certain woman who is to be his sexual mate. We say then that the man is in love. What is the tangible, observable, measurable meaning of the condition of being in love? To understand this clearly we must bear in mind the principle which modern psychology is gradually adopting, that of the unity of the organism. =The Organism is a Unit= which cannot, except for reasons of pure convenience, be split into entities of a contrasted character, such as body and mind, matter and soul, etc. To every physical phenomenon corresponds a simultaneous mental manifestation and vice versa. The body is the tangible aspect, the mind, the intangible aspect of the organism. Nor can any scientific distinction be drawn between the so-called grossness of the body and the spiritual quality of the mind. Nor can we establish in the body absolute lines of cleavage between the various organs, heart, stomach, liver or sexual organs. They are all closely interrelated and there again we find a profound unity of action. When the nerves of the "life division" of the autonomic nervous system are set working, the pupil will be contracted, the saliva flow, the heart beat more slowly, the stomach secrete gastric juice and churn food, the intestines push digested food toward the rectum, and the sexual organs fill up with blood. When the "safety nerves" are in action the pupil is dilated, the saliva scarce, the heart beats faster, gastric activities cease or become reversed (vomiting), the intestines either stop their activity or are affected by diarrhea and the sexual organs are emptied of blood. Any stimulation applied to any of those organs will produce the specific stimulation indicated above in ALL THE OTHER ORGANS, tho in varying degrees. In other words perfect peace and safety promote all the activities of the "life nerves," danger and fear promote all the activities of the "safety nerves." Peace and safety build up the body and assure the continuance of the race. Danger and fear stop all the activities which are not directly concerned with fight or flight, hence weaken the organism and stop the sex life. Peace and safety represented by the mental and physical fetishes of the mate toward whom we are driven by an organic compulsion are bound to produce in us most gratifying results. The sight, smell and taste of good food, the sight of pleasant objects, the sound of good music, etc., produce a powerful stimulation. =Love's Stimulation=, reaching us, as we shall see in another chapter, thru all the senses and thru a thousand memories, is incomparably more powerful than that of any other craving. Nutritious food in sufficient quantities is generally synonymous with good health. Improper food in insufficient quantities is generally synonymous with bad health. The mental connotation of good and bad food, however, is far from being as important as the mental connotation of love or lack of love. There are besides the sexual factors, such tremendous egotistical factors in the love life (as will be shown in Chapter VIII,) that love is the most powerful stimulus known and the lack of love or the loss of love the most terrible depressant for the human organism. =The Successful Lover= has a good appetite, regular heart action, (hence a healthy complexion); he enjoys sleep undisturbed by nightmares, is capable of continued effort (good thyroid action), has firm muscles (regular adrenal section), is self-reliant, etc. In other words his organism is working on a hundred-per-cent basis and under the influence of that stimulation he can accomplish tasks which, under any other circumstances, would appear too difficult, and understand things which under the influence of a sluggish thyroid or bowels would have appeared very obscure. People indifferent to physiology might attribute some of love's magic results to "inspiration," to "spiritual uplift" and other vaguely conceived factors of a romantic and sentimental nature. I am always reminded when encountering such explanations in the literature of love, of the nuptial flight of the bee. When a male and female bee fall in love, they both fly to a dizzy height in the direction of the sun and there perform the sexual union. To an unscientific mind of the Maeterlinckian type, there might be in that picture a beautiful symbol of love's exaltation. The cold blooded scientist, on the other hand, will simply tell us that erotic excitement in the bee produces a large amount of irritating phototropic materials which compel the bees to fly toward the source of light. At the end of the sexual act, the production of phototropic materials ceases and the bees come back to earth .... like lovers tired of each other. In love the conqueror feels like a conqueror and is a hard adversary to defeat. Like the amorous bees which can reach, physically speaking, heights which they would never dream of exploring when out of love, the successful lover can rise to infinite heights physically and mentally. =The Unsuccessful Lover=, on the other hand, may be, in extreme cases, a pitiful individual to contemplate. The humiliation of defeat and the fear of other defeats, the starvation of all the senses which the love object would have gratified, produce a depression which stops temporarily all the life activities. Appetite is lacking and there may be nausea and vomiting; diarrhea or constipation replace the normal activities of the intestine, thereby inducing weakness or autointoxication which, through a vicious circle, still increase the depression. The heart action is disturbed, which increases the uneasiness of the sufferer, his breathing is difficult, causing much sighing, the surface capillaries are emptied of blood, producing a morbid pallor, etc. A person in that condition is incapable of continued effort in any direction. The stoppage of all the life functions induces a sense of worthlessness. The fear of defeat not infrequently drives the sufferer to suicide, which is a symbolic attempt at returning to the safest condition in which the organism ever found itself: death, the return to uterine life, to _mother_ earth, etc. It may, if the adrenal cortex, productive of anger and violence chemicals, has been sufficiently stimulated by suffering, provoke attempts at vengeance, cause hatred, murderous cravings, which, if indulged in, land the patient in jail, if repressed with difficulty, land him in a sanitarium. =Calf Love.= Those things should be borne in mind by parents attempting, for instance, to break up some absurd infatuation which is the more overwhelming as the unexperienced lover is not restrained by the many social or financial considerations which hover in the mind of a more sophisticated person in the throes of "erotropism." Those complications are to be borne in mind too by the psychoanalyst who must not mistake symptoms of physical deterioration due to unsatisfied love cravings with gastric or intestinal derangement due to toxic agents, and who must bend all his energies to separate what is "purely" sexual, from all the parasitic cravings of an egotistical nature which make the patient's sufferings more acute. CHAPTER VII THE SENSES IN LOVE Friedlander has wisely remarked that there is more sensuality than sexuality in love. Which after all means that sex is only a small part of love. It is only after the various senses have reported to the central nervous system the presence of numerous fetishes symbolising peace and safety, that the sex union is not only possible, but extremely attractive and creates a durable bond between two human beings. =Sight= is naturally the most important of the senses. Like hearing, it is a long distance sense, which does not require close proximity like smell, nor close contact like taste and touch. Thru association of memories, sight becomes the perfect, all embracing, descriptive sense, able to substitute for all the other senses. A glance reveals not only the color, size and shape of an object, but its consistency, firmness or softness, its state of preservation or deterioration, its probable odor and taste, etc. Sight perceives the exposed and obvious fetishes and, thru memory associations, imagines those which are neither exposed nor obvious. Visual sensations are the most powerful experienced by the organism; a slight injury to the optic nerve produces a greater shock than major injuries to any other nerve of the body. The popularity of the movies is based upon that characteristic. To the unimaginative, primitive people who relish that childish form of entertainment, visual sensations replace and suggest almost every other form of sensory gratification. I have shown in Chapter III that the large majority of fetishes are visual, being impressions of color and size, which were produced on the child's visual nerves thru close proximity with the mother's body. =Auditory Sensations= which enhance erotic states also hark back very obviously to infancy. The caressing tone of the lovers' voices, the well modulated words of praise which they speak to each other in a low monotonous sing-song during their embraces, the baby talk in which so many lovers indulge, remind one unavoidably of the crooned lullabies with which the loving mother created a state of peace and safety that would enable the nursling to doze off. =Smell.= In animals the sense of smell plays probably a more important part than the sense of sight. In man the olfactory sense has become more negative and protective than positive. It enables him to avoid rather than to locate certain objects. This partial atrophy of the positive olfactory capacities is undoubtedly due to the progress of hygiene and cleanliness in human life. The child whose mother is carefully shampooed and bathed will not consider strong odors emanating from hair or arm pits as a symbol of safety. On the contrary, they will be something foreign to him, hence suggestive of danger. In ancient times, bodily odors were frequently mentioned as love stimulants. The Homeric poems, the Song of Songs, the Kamasutra and other Hindoo erotic works, the Arabian Perfumed Garden and even in more recent times, poems like Herrick's "Julia's Sweat," extolled strong body odors which at the present day not only are deemed offensive but cannot be mentioned except in medical writings. The modern bathroom has exiled olfactory allusions from literature. Odors can be, not only fetishes but very often powerful antifetishes. This is partly due to a repression of the child's interest in his excretions which later burst forth in the use of perfume by women, smoking by men and women. Cigar smoking for instance supplies an outlet for a number of childish polymorphous perversions, to use Freud's expression. In this case as in many others, violent repugnance to odors good or bad in adulthood may be traced to a morbid craving for them in childhood. =The Sense of Taste= is not very important in love, altho some experienced lovers detect a distinct flavor in the skin of various parts of one woman's skin, cheeks, arms, etc. Taste observed in purely nutritional activities reveals constantly its unconscious infantile origin. However completely we may have been weaned, we constantly pay a tribute of appreciation to our first food. The exaggerated and unjustified importance we attribute to milk in the diet of adults, the way in which we designate a white complexion as "milky" or "creamy," and in which we praise many tender foods by stating that they are "like cream" or "melt in our mouth" illustrates, together with the popularity of breast fetishism, the influence which infantile gustatory impressions have made on all of us. =Touch= is probably as important as sight for physico-chemical reasons. All animals seem to enjoy the close contact of other animals of their own species. Even on very warm days, puppies, kittens and young birds derive a very great comfort from being huddled together in kennel, basket or nest. There are two reasons for that craving for contact. The safest period of our life which our automatic nerves remember is the fetal period during which the contact of the child with the womb is constant and in perfect relation to the fetus' growth. Also, contact facilitates the electrical exchanges between human beings, especially between male and female, exchanges which owing to the removal of organic inhibitions, must be singularly powerful between lovers. =Holding Hands.= Whenever conditions separate their bodies, lovers generally revert to the childish practice of holding hands, which to the child meant an assurance of safety when led by the strong parents and also facilitated electrical exchanges of distinct value to the young and old alike. =The Kiss.= This brings us to the consideration of a love manifestation in which sensations of a tactile, gustatory and olfactory character are combined: the kiss. The kiss, curiously enough, is found both in certain animal and human races but not in all human races. Many mammals, birds and insects exchange caresses which remind one of the human kiss. "Love birds" seem to spend much of their time kissing each other. On the other hand, Eastern races do not seem to relish the caress which Western peoples call a kiss. In China a form of affectionate greeting corresponding to our kiss consists in rubbing one's nose against the cheek of the other person after which a deep breath is taken thru the nose with the eyes half-shut. In some primitive races the equivalent for our "kiss me" is "smell me." In other races, the kiss is a manifestation of respect rather than a proof of love. Anglo Saxons on certain occasions kiss the Bible. In the early Christian and Arab civilisations, the kiss was a ritual gesture and has remained so in certain Catholic customs: kissing the pope's foot, relics, a bishop's ring, etc. In certain races, kissing is a proof of affection but not of love. Japanese mothers kiss their children but Japanese lovers do not exchange caresses of the lips, according to Lafcadio Hearn. The dark races of Africa are ignorant of that caress and so are the Malays, the aborigines of Australia and many other primitive tribes. =The Birth of the Kiss.= It appears that even among the kissing races, the kiss is a relatively recent development. It is rarely mentioned in Greek literature. In the Middle Ages it was a sign of refinement, being almost unknown among the lower classes. Some analysts have come to the conclusion that the kissing habit is derived from sucking the mother's nipple. If this was the proper explanation, all the races would naturally indulge in it. The kiss is infinitely more complicated than that. The Freudian explanation should not be discarded entirely but it does not explain everything. The kiss has grown in importance with the restrictions placed by civilisation on sexual activities. The more primitive the races, the more promiscuous they are and the less they kiss. The kiss seems to have become among the more repressed and advanced races a displacement upward of the act of possession, a sublimation of intercourse. It is, next to sexual union, the closest contact which the male and female may attain. =Kisses and Electricity.= If we adopt Crile's theory according to which the life stream is an electric current produced by the brain and constantly discharging itself, we may realise concretely the import of the kiss. The physical union is probably the neutralisation of two electric currents, positive and negative, altho we do not know as yet what correspondence there is between sexes and opposite electric currents. Anyone familiar, however, with experiences in galvanotropism, some of which I have mentioned in Chapter II, will when reflecting upon the way in which the spermatozoon directs itself infallibly toward the egg, conclude that it is headed toward a strong electric current issuing from the woman's womb and ovaries. The kiss is only a milder, less complete neutralisation of the currents issuing from two human beings. If the kiss on the lips is preferred by lovers, it is because the moist mucus of the lips is a better conductor of electrical current than the skin. In very passionate kisses, the lovers' tongues play a double part, a symbolic part, representing the mother's nipple, and a physico-chemical part, securing a closer connection, like plug and socket in electric appliances. In Anglo-Saxon fiction which does not countenance descriptions of lovers' embraces, a very passionate kiss is always symbolical of complete surrender. Physiologically this symbolism is quite accurate. The temporary exhaustion which follows a protracted kiss is often equal to that following a lovers' embrace and this can be easily understood when we remember the protracted electrical discharge which must follow the contact of the conductive surfaces of the mucus of the lips. CHAPTER VIII EGO AND SEX If the course of love was regulated solely by sexual factors its study would be a comparatively simple matter. Sexual cravings find themselves, however, in conflict with many other manifestations of the life force. For the _sexual libido_ is not the life force as certain psychoanalysts believe. It is only one of the manifestations of the electric stream produced in the brain and seeking an outlet. In fact, sex is only a _temporary_ manifestation of the life force, late to appear, early to disappear. Embryonic life begins several months before sex becomes observable in the fetus. Actual extrauterine life is in full swing before sex is ripe, that is, capable of fulfilling its biological destiny. Life continues sometimes many years after sex has ceased to serve its reproductive purpose. The most powerful urge to which sex has to adapt itself in the life of the human animal is the ego urge, the craving for food and power, the selfish urge par excellence. At times, sex and ego work in perfect accord as they should, considering the close relationship of the nervous divisions carrying power to them. =Neurotic Complications=, however, due to the necessary repressions of modern civilisation, throw them too often into conflict. We might say that there is a natural source of conflict between them, for the ego urge is selfish, aiming as it does at the conservation of the individual and its personal upbuilding, while the sex urge, whose aim is to assure the continuance of the species, is altruistic. By altruistic I mean that one human being must, before finding the complete gratification of his sex urge, join his body to that of another human being of the opposite sex, whose sex urge he helps gratify, the result of that cooperation being the creation of a third human being. From this we may see clearly how the neurotic temperament, unusually self-centered, is likely to exacerbate whatever conflicts may exist between ego and sex. Even in the so called normal human being, that is, the human being who in spite of life's repressions, manages to live at peace with his environment and himself, the will-to-power, the desire for possession and domination expresses itself constantly in what is generally considered as typically sexual manifestations of love. Do not lovers say that they "possess" each other. Was not the Biblical God power before he became creation? In the beginning there was the Word, that is the expression, the utterance of the divine ego. Does not the unmated God of the Western nations symbolise the absolute supremacy of power over sex? And when people pray to God, what do they ask for, in the majority of cases, if not power (help)? =Self-Love.= Yet we often consider the craving for power as a form of love, self-love. When Jesus said "Love thy neighbor as thyself" he testified to the fact that our self-love is the most powerful human feeling and he presented it as a goal which our love for others _might_ reach. He admitted that we all love ourselves first and he was too world-wise to advise men, as some of his followers have done, to repress their self-love. He only advised men to try and love others as much as they loved themselves. All the great conflicts between nations have been precipitated by ego rather than by love. Love and sex were responsible, we are told for the most famous war in history and legend, the Trojan war. I am quite sceptical about it in spite of the "evidence" presented by a poet who probably never existed as an individual, Homer. I know, however, that the most atrocious war ever fought, the world war, was unchained, not by sexual jealousy, but by the most sordid, the grossest form of predatory ego cravings, the will-to-commercial-power. In innumerable cases, ego overpowers sex and compels it to suit its purposes. It masquerades in the guise of sex and deceives many as to its true nature. Prostitution, in its last analysis, is the enslavement of sex by ego, sex working to feed the ego and supply it with necessities or luxuries. =Ego in Sex Guise.= Certain customs of ages past are sexual in appearance but the egotistical motive back of them is easily discovered. Take the right of the first night, which in several parts of the world survived until modern times. The tribal chief or the lord of the manor had the right to spend a night with every bride within his jurisdiction before the rightful husband was allowed to enjoy his marital privileges. That custom made the first born of every family the putative descendent of the chief and fostered a deeper loyalty to him among his followers. Even as economic exhibitionism prompts people to spend at show eating places sums in no way commensurate with their hunger, or to buy diamonds which are not in any way beautiful but only symbolical of the wearer's indifference to returns on his investments, egotism causes many men to pretend sexual cravings which they do not feel. Many stage women, actresses, singers, dancers, etc., are kept by men whose sex life is at low ebb but who parade their "conquest" before their associates or perfect strangers to demonstrate their sexual and financial powers. =Fatherhood.= A constant craving for fatherhood is not infrequently a neurotic symptom, an egotistical desire to compensate for low sexual potency. Physicians and druggists dispensing aphrodisiacs can testify to the prevalence of large families in the homes of almost impotent men. The man who can fulfill his sexual duties once a year for fifteen years and foils his mate's attempts at contraception, is quite able to raise a very large family and to pass among his associates for a very virile man. The sight of his numerous progeny silences any scepticism as to his sexual vitality. Some of the most astonishing vagaries in the choice of a mate are traceable to purely egotistical cravings. Neurotic women married to a superior man may refuse to express any sexual joy in his arms. They remain frigid in his company and then give themselves to some rather inferior individual to whom they feel superior and in whose arms they show the most complete abandon. The medical and lay press very often relates cases of fine looking and apparently normal women who marry idiots or morons. Their sense of inferiority and their fear of ego-defeat makes them seek inferior mates unlikely to dominate them in any respect. Some young women conceal their morbid desire to mate with a degenerate under a philanthropic mask. They pretend, when marrying a drunkard or a thief, that their aim is to regenerate him. And so do some young men with an inferiority complex explain to their family and friends that they have married a menial or a prostitute to reclaim her. =War Prisoners.= German newspapers mentioned several times during the war that war prisoners were treated too cordially by the women, many of whom had affairs with the defeated enemies. In several cities, it became necessary for the military authorities to issue proclamations on the subject, berating the offenders for their "shameless behavior." The same facts were observed in France and in Italy altho they were given less prominence in the American newspapers. Why was it that those women idolised men they were supposed to hate as enemies and accorded sexual favors to them? Why was it that they did not enjoy more completely the victory of the males of their race and jeer at the defeated foes? Those women were neurotics who, unable to enjoy the embraces of victorious, superior males, felt themselves superior in the arms of defeated and humiliated men. =Neurotic Motherliness.= A patient of mine who had always shown herself rebellious in her attitude to her sexually potent lover, became all tenderness and submissiveness one day when sickness almost cut off his potency. "I never loved him as much as I did yesterday," she told me, "for I felt then that I could really mother him." Which translated into honest parlance meant, to use Adler's vocabulary, that on that occasion he was "below" and she was "above." =When Ego and Sex do not Conflict=, a combination of the two gives results which stamp human love as distinctly superior to animal sexuality. Just as higher egotism has created cooperation, which eliminates individual fights and establishes in their place group fighting, healthy egotism added to sex has introduced cooperation and altruism into love. The egotistical desire to please and dominate the female thru vigorous caresses has thrown into the shade the primitive cavemanlike ways. Man no longer strikes the female unconscious in order to satisfy his sex cravings on her prostrate body. His aim is rather to satisfy his mate first. This of course carries sexuality far away from its primal aims. Love's byplays, in many cases, replace love's specific functions, the road from sensuality to sterility being a short one. When the goal of sterility is attained, we see sex willingly relinquishing its biological aims to egotism. In the plays of sex and ego as in the conflicts between the two urges, ego is more frequently victorious than sex. CHAPTER IX HATRED AND LOVE Hatred and love seem diametrically opposed feelings. Yet there are many cases when love masquerades as hatred and hatred as love. Altho such hatred and such love are not genuine they may drive us at times into acts of cruelty or self-sacrifice which to all appearances seem to emanate from perfect love or from savage hatred. Very exaggerated feelings should always be viewed suspiciously as blinds for the opposite feelings. An extravagant display of affection is generally a desperate attempt on the person indulging in that display at repressing loathing and hatred. On the other hand, morbid hostility toward one person is generally an attempt at repressing a love which would be unjustifiable or detrimental for the personality. A few illustrations from life will make my meaning clear. =A Worried Wife.= One woman I analysed was thrown into hysterical anxiety whenever her husband reached home a little late. She pictured him dead, dismembered by a train or knocked down by robbers. When she first called on me, she stressed the struggle going on in her heart. She loved two men and her nobility of soul, her delicacy of feelings, and many other qualities she bestowed on herself very liberally, were making that double life unbearable for her. "I have wronged my dear, dear, hubby," she kept repeating. "And he is so good, so kind, so considerate." The wife who never tires of singing her husband's praise is always somebody else's mistress. It is generally her way of settling accounts with her conscience. In this case, the anxiety she felt over her husband's whereabouts and health when he was late in reaching home, supplied the expiation which neurotics seem to crave for their misdeeds. But there was more in that anxiety than one of the manifestations of her sense of sin. I asked her whether she had ever experienced the same anxiety when her lover was late in coming to their trysting place. "No," she said, "and this is what leads me to think that I don't love him nearly as much as I do my husband." Her reaction to her lover's lateness was simply one of anger. She felt herself slighted and she suspected him of stopping somewhere to flirt with some woman. Even once, when a wreck on a suburban line leading to his home town, had prevented him from meeting her, she never imagined him the victim of any accident. Further questioning elicited the information that death wishes had crossed her mind on several occasions in relation to her husband. She finally came to see that those repressed wishes were simply finding an outlet in her wish fulfilment fears. She was constantly visualizing the tragedy which would have given her her freedom. =The Test of Love.= In other words, her unconscious wished her husband dead. The repression of that wish compelled it to masquerade as a hysterical concern for his health. The thought of her lover, however, never suggested to her any death scenes. During the war a woman patient who had two sons at the front, was tortured every night by a nightmare in which she saw her older son killed in action. She very naturally interpreted those dreams to herself as convincing evidence of her greater fondness for that boy than for his brother. In the course of our conversations, however, she gradually admitted that her elder son was a gambler and drunkard and had found himself in many an unpleasant complication. She had thought several times, altho she had at once repressed the thought, that death would be preferable to his life of embarrassment and degradation. Those repressed death wishes found an outlet in nightmares accompanied by a great display of emotion consciously felt as love and grief. Parents who continually warn their children against accidents "likely" to happen to them, who grow panicky when some street commotion takes place and imagine that their child has been hurt or killed, are not quite as loving as they imagine. In such unjustified fears, as in death dreams, there lurks an ill concealed desire to be freed from the thraldom of parenthood and to regain the selfish happiness of the childless state. A young woman fainted several times when she heard shouts on the street where her young child had been taken by the maid. She "knew" something must have happened to her boy. Her dreams would with alarming frequency picture accidents befalling the child. After I made her realise the way in which her child had interfered with her social activities, with her attending dances, theatrical performances, etc., a change became noticeable in her dreams. Instead of visualising her child dead she saw him in her day and night dreams as an adolescent, no longer in her way, no longer a handicap to her in her pursuit of pleasure. Her panics disappeared about the same time. More elusive at times are cases of hatred which analysis reduces to a struggle of the personality against an inacceptable love. =Sour Grapes.= A man, unduly attracted to a woman who socially, intellectually or financially, is or should remain outside of his reach, and would probably make an impossible mate, is likely to manifest violent hostility to her, to disparage her or even slander her. Every analyst has seen in his office the middle aged woman who "breaks down" soon after her daughter's marriage to a man whom she "despises." Either a family scene or a campaign of nagging and disparagement has caused a break between her and her daughter and son-in-law. Analysis reveals that she is love with her son-in-law, a situation more frequent than the layman imagines. This infatuation which she cannot accept as a fact is repressed savagely. To protect herself against overt acts which would make her sinful or ridiculous, she exaggerates every defect of the man she loves. She pursues him with a stubbornness which cannot deceive a psychologist. His name is constantly on her lips, coupled, of course, with abusive remarks, but the fact remains that she is constantly speaking, if not dreaming of him. Her peace of mind is only restored to her when she accepts as a fact a situation which need not be translated into a transgression of the ethical laws. For, in spite of what puritanical critics of psychoanalysis repeat, a conscious sex craving is more easily controlled and less likely to overthrow our willpower than an unconscious one. =Brothers and Sisters.= A similar complication is frequently found, as I stated in Chapter V, in the history of neurotic brothers and sisters. A brother and sister may to all appearance be irreconcilable enemies. Investigate their childhood and you will find memories of actual or attempted incestuous indiscretions which, after a while, were repressed either by punishment or voluntary restraint. In later years, fear of a possible recurrence of tabooed incidents may express itself in the shape of hatred leading at times to acute family conflicts, the brother or sister running away, the sister becoming a prostitute, etc. When hatred is unmasked and revealed as one of the avatars of inacceptable love, it dies off and is replaced by protective measures of a less objectionable nature, reserve or distance. =A Negro Hater.= A hysterical patient of mine who had always been a terrific negro hater and advocate of lynching, was disturbed at night by symbolic sexual dreams in which negroes took an active part. She could not help feeling uneasy in the presence of a colored man. "Those beasts" was her favorite designation for colored people. What drove her into my office was that on one occasion she had behaved in a, to her, inconceivable way to a colored janitor's helper who had come to her apartment to inspect the radiator. The presence of that man had aroused her so powerfully that for a few minutes she had been on the point of making advances to him. She fortunately came to her senses and fled from what had always been to her an unconscious temptation. Such incidents as that make one wonder how many lynchings have been precipitated by the hysterical actions of neurotic women. It may be stated broadly that every exaggerated attempt at protecting ourselves against a danger or a temptation is a confession on our part that the danger or the temptation is very fascinating to us. =Reformers.= Many "bold" reformers are merely very weak individuals struggling against sexual temptation and hating some vice which holds them in its power. The biography of Anthony Comstock which I have reviewed in detail in "Psychoanalysis and Behavior" proves that the obscenity he was so stubbornly ferreting held a strange fascination for him. I must not create the absurd impression, however, that all reformers are abnormal and moved by neurotic impulses. But between the scientist who warns people of venereal disease and combats it whenever possible and the so called "syphilophobiac" who sees everywhere chances for infection and would jail every prostitute, there is a great difference. =The Syphilophobiac= is always a weak, oversexed individual, whose only protection against his promiscuous cravings is the fear of disease and the absurd assumption that every woman is infected. The syphilophobiac hates prostitutes because he would love them too well but for the protection he erects between their body and his desire. The feverish energy displayed by many prohibition enthusiasts is at bottom the hurrying away from a temptation to which they know they would have to yield. The great prohibitionists crave alcohol and could not, without a terrible struggle, protect themselves against the lure of drunkenness if strong beverages were available. The stage has pictured many times the crusty old bachelor who is a ferocious woman hater. In the end he succumbs to the wiles of the ingénue, who is generally the first woman he ever associated with. The poor devil realised too well all his life the irresistible charm of women as well as his overwhelming craving for love and the joys of the flesh. Some neurotic incest fear, or craving for selfish pleasures, or money complex, however, caused him to avoid women and to protect himself against them by a display of hostility. The first time, however, when fate forces him into close contact with temptation he has to yield. =Deluded Martyrs.= In every social upheaval there are martyrs who sacrifice themselves for apparently very noble causes but whose unconscious reasons for their acts are much less sublime. Stupid bomb throwers who wreck a building or kill an individual, (acts most unlikely to change a social system to which they object), profess to be moved by their love for the people. Their actual motive is father hatred. Brutus and others who delivered the "people" from some "tyrant," in reality gratified an unconscious grudge and sought their own liberation from some form of authority made loathsome by infantile complexes. The most grotesque example of it was the destruction of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 by a French mob which imagined that it was thereby freeing crowds of innocent prisoners and abolishing arbitrary death sentences. There were less than a dozen people in the fortress at that time. The mob venting its wrath on a symbol of authority pretended to be animated by a love of freedom and a desire to benefit others. CHAPTER X PLURAL LOVE AND INFIDELITY Lecture audiences often ask me whether plural love is possible. This would indicate on the part of the questioner a more or less unconscious wish to justify polygamous cravings. Plural marriages exist but I doubt whether any such thing as plural love has even been observed at any period of mankind's history. For the most complicated examples of plural marriage, as for all the varieties of sexual complications, we must turn to Greece of the classical period. Demosthenes wrote somewhere: "We have prostitutes to give us pleasure, concubines to minister to our daily needs and wives to bear us children and to watch over our homes." When we remember that besides the three types of women with whom they had sexual relations, many and among them some of the greatest men of those times, indulged in homosexual unions with young men of feminine appearance, we must draw two conclusions: first, that those men must have been sexual supermen, as they were at times mental supermen, second, that love as we understand it at the present day, can only have had very little to do with their sexual life. Modern love as we shall see in Chapter XXXI means mutual love, the equal gratification of the mates thru the rites of sex communion. =Plural Love=, be it of the ancient Greek type, of the Oriental or mormon type, means varietism for the male, scanty gratification for the female. At best a mild form of sexual slavery, most humiliating to the woman and possible only under a social system debarring woman from financial independence. Only a man suffering from priapism could gratify the eroticism of a large number of wives and the latest or youngest wife would naturally receive a larger share of physical attention than the earlier and older mates. The jealousy and hatred thus engendered are in no way minimised by the fact that the custom of certain lands countenances such arrangements. =Polyandry= as it existed in ancient times and still exsists in Tibet, where a woman marries several men (generally brothers) may be more satisfactory for the primitive female. Owing to her physiological make up, and also to her passive rôle in love, woman can gratify several men and receive gratification from them. The neurotic disturbances which may arise as a result of a woman's lack of sexual gratification are avoided by the polyandric scheme of union. But this is the only superiority which polyandry has over polygamy. Both polygamous and polyandric nations and civilisations have gradually receded as far as numerical importance and world prestige go and both institutions are bound to disappear. The development of the human ego, both in men and women, will not permit much longer of the enslavement of one sex to gratify the pleasures of the other. Nor can any group, male or female, enforce its domination over individuals of the opposite sex and make them accept the dogma of an inferior sex by embodying that dogma in any religious creed of the mormon or mohammedan type. =Infidelity.= Plural love is passing but infidelity has taken its place in every possible respect as a sexual and an egotistical form of gratification. When dealing with infidelity we must establish a careful distinction between forms of infidelity due to "normal" causes and other forms due to unconscious complexes. On the other hand we should beware of admitting, as many unscientific writers do, that there is a distinct difference of attitude to infidelity in the two sexes. That shortsighted viewpoint has been unfortunately voiced in hundreds of popular sayings which represent man as the great examplary of infidelity and woman as faithfulness incarnate. Economic conditions, not sexual differences, are at the bottom of the levity with which men treat their heart affairs and of the gravity with which women, officially at least, consider the marriage relationship. Financial dependence and the fear of motherhood compel the domesticated, parasitic type of woman to secure the services of a breadwinner, and after achieving that object, to avoid hurting his susceptibilities. Independent and professional women, especially the sterile or sterilised ones, are frankly "masculine" in their love habits. But I insist on considering certain forms of infidelity as normal and others as abnormal, independently from the question as to whether they are socially desirable or undesirable. The human type which is so perfectly normal that it has no fixation and no definite fetishes, except species fetishes, and which weaklings and puritans designate as "animal," is not likely to be faithful to any mate. Like every strong and healthy animal at rutting time, he or she is sexually aroused by every individual of the opposite sex. No safety complex restrains him as far as sexuality is concerned. The only fears which restrain his search for gratification are fear of exposure and ostracism within his herd, fear of pregnancy or infection and fear of final complications, not to mention of course the fear of inflicting suffering upon a lifemate of whom he may be extremely fond. For we must never forget the fact, unpleasant as it may appear to unscientific hypocrites, that lasting love is a matter of fixation and fetishism, hence, always slightly tainted with neurosis. =When Love Dies.= "Normal" infidelity may also be merely the only hope of sexual gratification for the normal man or woman whose mate has ceased to present the fetishes needed to awaken his or her eroticism. Healthy individuals are neither willing nor capable to forego sexual gratification. Now and then complications arise, a man being very fond, for sexual reasons, of a woman who would prove undesirable as his mate and, for sentimental reasons, of a woman who is infinitely congenial but no longer arouses his desire. Likewise, a woman may be deeply attached to both her lover and her husband. Ivan Bloch writes: "It is quite possible to love more than one person at the same time with nearly equal tenderness and be honestly able to assure each of the passion felt for him or her. The vast psychic differentiation involved by modern civilization increases the possibility of this double love for it is difficult to find one's complement in a single person and this applies to women as well as to men." George Hirth, in his "Wege zur Heimat" also points out that women, as well as men, can love two persons at the same time. Men flatter themselves with the prejudice that the female heart, or rather brain, can only hold one man at a time and that if there is a second man, it is by a kind of prostitution. Nearly all the erotic writers, poets and novelists, even physicians and psychologists, belong to this class. They look upon a woman as property and of course two men cannot "possess" one woman. "Regarding novelists, however," remarks Havelock Ellis, "the remark may be interpolated that there are many exceptions. Thomas Hardy, for instance, frequently represents a woman as more or less in love with two men at the same time." Hirth maintains that a woman is not necessarily obliged to be untrue to one man because she has conceived a passion for another man. "Today," Hirth writes, "truly love and justice can count as honorable motives in marriage. The modern man accords to the beloved wife and life companion the same freedom he himself took before marriage, and perhaps still, takes in marriage. If she makes no use of it, as is to be hoped, so much the better. But let there be no lies, no deception, the indispensable foundation of modern marriage is boundless sincerity and friendship, the deepest trust, affectionate devotion and consideration. That is the best safeguard against adultery. Let him, however, who is, nevertheless, overtaken by the outbreak of it, console himself with the undoubted fact that of two real lovers, the most noble minded and deep seeing friend will always have the preference." Even under an economic system countenancing free love and birth control, such complications would surely arise and cause much suffering. =Bored Wives.= Infidelity is often also a refuge from boredom for the middle class woman who has no definite training or ability in any direction and is thereby condemned to idleness. Left alone all day and a few evenings every month by a busy husband, she yearns for companionship. Unless she is slightly homosexual, she soon tires of stupid teas, bridge and gossip parties and she accepts the attentions of some man who brings into her life a little romance and a different aspect of the world's activities. The French cynic Willy had that type in mind when he wrote: "adultery has become the key stone of society. By making married life tolerable it prevents the breaking up of the home." Besides normal sexual cravings, there are many unconscious or only partly conscious causes which drive human beings into being faithless to their life mates. Many women take lovers, many men take mistresses for purely egotistical reasons. Justly or unjustly they feel a certain lack of appreciation in their mates and make up their minds to get even with them. ="Getting Even"= is one of the great neurotic cravings, one which has led to numberless offences, including crime and suicide. To some neurotics with a sense of inferiority, an extramatrimonial affair seems to be the sole means of restoring one's self confidence. "I am of no account at home but to some one else I mean the world." Many neurotics use "romance" and "inspiration" as convenient scapegoats. "But for the inspiration I derive from my affair with So and So, I could not do my work properly," and this is true in a good many cases, but in many more cases, any one else would do just as well as a lover or mistress. Some neurotics, who remind one of Madame Bovary, the heroine of Flaubert's great novel, feel that accomplishment and the fullness of life are naturally associated with sexual irregularities. Too inferior to accomplish anything by dint of hard work, Emma Bovary childishly expected love to accomplish everything for her. Other neurotics, incapable of any creative work, consider romance as an achievement in itself and proceed to call every carnal dissipation romance. Just as inferior boys at the gang age steal or destroy in an absurd attempt at "doing something out of the ordinary." Some neurotics never feel safe very long with any sexual mate; they grow afraid or suspicious and seek safety in the arms of some other human being in whom they unconsciously hope to find the father or mother image to which they were over-attached. Their search for the safe mate, that is, for the parent image, is, of course, always unsuccessful. =Varietists.= I have observed a number of men and women who liked to designate themselves as varietists and who were simply unconscious or partly conscious homosexuals struggling against perverse tendencies to which they did not wish to yield. I have seen in my office several Don Juans who were unconsciously attracted to men and refused for a long while to admit that such a craving was a part of their personality. Every woman they met only meant one thing to them: "If I could capture her, I would feel sure that I was a real man." A few days after catching their prey they were once more obsessed by doubts and had to seek new evidence. Many partly conscious homosexuals seek women who in their appearance, manner of dress and behavior are the best substitutes for men, that is, mannish girls, flat chested, with narrow hips, bobbed hair, wearing tailor-made garments, engaged in masculine pursuits, etc. They often meet with disappointment for such women are frequently homosexual and hence unlikely to yield to a man. When the woman is sexually normal, however, the neurotic's happiness is far from assured. As soon as sentimentalism or tenderness allows the feminine component of those masculine women to break thru their masculinity, the unconscious homosexual loses his love for them. One patient of mine did his hunting among equestriennes in Central Park. On two occasions his attentions were accepted. His disappointment was terrible; calling upon the women who had attracted him when wearing a mannish derby and riding breeches, he was greeted by very womanly persons attired in the most feminine finery. Several times in his life my patient has been in love with rather masculine women. The first flash of femininity in them had always cured him entirely of his infatuation. =The Ultrafeminine.= Other homosexuals struggling savagely against the appeal of the masculine, seek safety in the arms of extremely feminine creatures who could not in any way awaken the slightest suggestion of a perversion. Their obsessive fear, however, does not allow them to enjoy the affair very long. Small physical details which a normal man would not notice suddenly fill them with fear or disgust. A masculine gesture, a raucous intonation, a slight growth of hair on the upper lip or the limbs may suggest unavoidably the sex from which they are fleeing in panic. Their love cools off and safety has to be sought, altho it is never found, in the arms of some other woman of very feminine appearance, who is in turn discarded for the same absurd reasons. As fixations and fetishism have infinitely more importance for men than for women (see Chapter III) the male neurotic is naturally more "promiscuous" and faithless than the female neurotic. =Messalina.= Every psychoanalyst, however, has met the Messalina type, who is constantly seeking the "love that will endure." Like her masculine counterpart, the Don Juan, she is in the majority of cases seeking safety and trying, by conquering many men, to reestablish her self-confidence which every little disappointment and humiliation destroys so easily. However loving and worshipful the neurotic's mate may be, he or she cannot hope to save the neurotic from further love entanglements. One of the most striking neurotic traits is a craving to disparage everything and everybody in his environment. The praise of the most affectionate husband or lover, wife or mistress, is insufficient to raise the neurotic's self-esteem. With all neurotics, familiarity breeds contempt and it must be from the lips of a new man or new woman that they must hear their praise sung before their feeling of inferiority is deadened and allows them to enjoy that praise. CHAPTER XI IS FREE LOVE POSSIBLE? "American Medicine" commenting upon the fact that divorces have increased twenty per cent in eight years and that, if the rate of increase continues, there will be as many divorces as marriages in thirty years from now, reaches the conclusion that "the individual has moved on far in the past two thousand years, while the institution of marriage has remained unaltered through the centuries.... The basis of marriage as it was originally conceived was entirely a racial one in which the individual counted for little; it was meant as a means of building a family and conserving it. Nothing else counted and the primitive individual exacted little else.... The modern man and woman demands in his mate more than that and it is here that the marriage institution is most defective in that it does not yield to these greater demands." Polygamy and polyandry have been found wanting and have been abandoned. Monogamy is, at the present day, tempered by frequent infidelity and numerous divorces. Which means that it does not satisfy the needs of the human race. Shall free love offer a solution? =Man the Dissatisfied.= I might as well voice here my pessimistic belief that there is no permanent solution for any human problems. The only tangible difference between man and the animals is that the animals are satisfied and man everlastingly dissatisfied. No cat was ever dissatisfied enough with the primitive feline way of catching mice to invent a mouse trap. The animals solved their problems thousands of years ago. Unless domesticated and exposed to the exclusive influence of men, they never vary from the form of behavior of their particular species. The only problem they have been unable to solve is how to get rid of man, the invader and parasite, and they will never cope with it. Man's satisfaction with every new improvement is only temporary. =The Next Step.= Free love may be the next step in the evolution of the sexual partnership but it certainly will not be _the_ solution of the marriage problem. As far as the mates themselves are concerned, free love will only be a success in the case of extremely normal individuals for whom the sexual relationship means solely physical gratification. As soon as affection intervenes in those unions, the thousand forms of jealousy we shall describe in another chapter will enter into play. Jealousy among free lovers cannot but rage more fiercely than among the legally married. A thousand details of married life are simply meant to establish the mates' ownership of each other in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world. The number of war marriages contracted hastily during the great European conflict by young men and women on the eve of the bridegroom's departure for Europe testifies to the powerful "safety" symbolism of the marriage ceremony. A gullible young man in love with a girl would not have trusted her alone during his absence from home. She might have experienced a change of heart. After going thru a wedding ceremony with him, however, he _knew_ that she could not change her mind and love another. As a matter of fact most of those unions were disastrous. A virgin might have waited. A young woman left alone after a few days of erotic enjoyment was naturally an easy prey for any clever tempter. The bridegroom, on the other hand, went away blissfully, secure in the thought that the marriage certificate, the ceremony, the wedding ring, the transformation of Mary Brown into Mrs. John Smith would protect his "honor" while he was away. =Blissful Blindness.= Some of the cleverest, most cynically suspicious husbands and wives go thru life blissfully blind to their mate's sidesteps. They see thru anyone else's husband or wife but they seldom suspect _their_ husband or _their_ wife. The stress which they place on the possessive works in their case as the fetish which a savage takes into battle. In hoc signo vinces. It is only in the so called smart set that men and women allude to their mates by their first names. The working classes, sexually the most conservative and puritanical, use the expressions "my man" or "the missus"; middle class men and women pompously refer to their mates as Mr. Smith or Mrs. Smith, always reminding their hearers of the legitimacy of their union. The celebration of wooden weddings, silver weddings, etc., is a means of reminding the community that Mr. and Mrs. John Smith _own_ each other, just as the engagement diamond is a scarecrow proportionate in visibility to the prospective bridegroom's fortune. Even if free love unions became the adopted standard of the land, those unions would be celebrated with appropriate ritual, the aim of which would be to tie the man to the woman and the woman to the man and to warn away sexual hunters of both sexes. Free love will not be possible until the absolute equality of men and women has been accepted, not only theoretically but practically. Before that equality is a fact, there must be written into the statute books some form of financial assistance to the woman disabled by pregnancy and lactation and which will enable her to retain her independence regardless of her physiological condition. Even this will not be enough. Birth control measures will have to become lawful and the subject of careful scientific teaching before woman can hope to lead her life unenslaved to her children's father. =What of the Child?= Besides, in free love arrangements, the mates are not the only parties to be considered. There is a party of the third part: the children, if any. If a perfectly independent male decides to cohabit for an indefinite period of time with a perfectly independent female, the community can hardly interpose any objection. For after all, most of our ethical indignation at the thought of temporary unions is due to the miserly fear of the community lest a pregnant woman and fatherless children be thrown upon it for support. No one's rights would be trespassed upon by such arrangements, ephemeral as they might be. As they would not cost anyone any money they would be considered acceptable. When a self supporting Sarah Bernhardt or Isadora Duncan bears children out of wedlock and we run no risk of being taxed for the support of her "illegitimate" progeny, we assume more liberal views than we would should a stenographer or a switchboard operator commit the same "errors." When children are the outcome of any form of union, however, the psychoanalyst, broad as he may be, is compelled to remember the pitiful stories he has heard in his office. No neurotic ever had a pleasant childhood. No neurotic was the child of a father and mother united by real love and manifesting within the family circle the mutual tenderness which is the poetry or the music of the home. =Disharmony Between the Parents=, culminating in divorce or desertion, has wrecked the future of thousands of children. Not every unhappy home has produced neurotics, but, every neurotic is the product of undesirable home conditions. Furthermore, it seems as tho a child in order to reach normal adulthood should be brought up by both a male and female. Many male homosexuals I have observed were brought up by a widowed mother or a woman abandoned by her husband or lover. In other cases, impotence or frigidity affected respectively boys and girls who had lost the parent of the same sex. Many other disturbances of the mental life, due to incompleteness of the parental environment or to its imperfection, could be mentioned if the limits of this book would permit. From the point of view of psychiatry, there is only one answer to be given to the question if free love is acceptable. Free love _must_ be supplemented by birth control. Those free lovers who decide to procreate children must also agree to live together until the youngest of their offspring has reached at least its fifteenth year. Creating children with the intention of turning them over to some charitable institution is also a proposition which to a student of mental disturbances appears just short of criminal. =The Institution Child.= Few children thrive well mentally or physically under institutional treatment. Children need love in order to grow strong mentally or physically. I read somewhere a story to the effect that a mediaeval ruler directed that some children be brought up by nurses who would never show them the slightest sign of affection or interest, his aim being, if my memory serves me well, to make extremely virile fighters out of those children, by protecting them against any weakening influence. As the story goes, all the children died. I do not vouch for the authenticity of the story but the vital statistics of orphan asylums affirm its plausibility. Children fare better in a poor, unsanitary home, at the hands of a stupid and ignorant but affectionate mother than in an up to date, well appointed, sanitary asylum. They need, in order to develop a strong, serviceable, well balanced autonomic nervous system, the safety which emanates from the breasts, the kisses, the hands, the admiring glances of their mother. If no doting mother has ever told a child that he is wonderful and the most precious thing on earth, he will never quite consider himself as of much avail and will probably never become wonderful in any respect. =Free Love Plus Birth Control= may reduce the actual population of the earth, but when only real lovers deeply attached to each other and only bound to each other by sexual desire and intellectual regard, will live together and decide to rear children as a monument to their love, free love and birth control will cause the population of insane asylums to dwindle to nothing and will save the world from the thousands of morons and neurotics who are the products of married disharmony and married slavery. CHAPTER XII PROSTITUTION Prostitution, as I stated in a previous chapter is one of the results of the overthrowing of sex by the ego. The craving for food and power triumphs over all the sexual cravings and compels one individual to pursue apparently sexual goals which are no longer sexual as far as that individual is concerned. The female prostitute lends her sexual organs to many men for money (food, power), not for her own gratification or to reproduce her species. That phenomenon is very complex and cannot be dealt with in detail within the limits of this book. I shall confine myself to pointing out some of the psychological problems which have to be elucidated before the causes, nature and results of prostitution can be clearly understood. =Economic Factors.= Certain radicals simplify a little too much the problem of prostitution by considering it solely as a by-product of the competitive system which would disappear as soon as a more equitable system of production and distribution was introduced into the modern world. No one can deny that under our social system, woman, burdened as she is, by many physical and social handicaps, is easily driven to the wall in times of stress and compelled to sell her body. Nor is there any doubt that under a system assuring every one a livelihood, regardless of business conditions, many women would be saved from adopting such a disgusting form of labor. At the same time, the radical interpretation fails to explain why, when submitted to a practically identical pressure, some women do not become prostitutes but either kill themselves or beg or steal. =Lombroso's Theory.= Very unsatisfactory also is Lombroso's attitude to prostitution. He finds a constant coincidence between prostitution and crime and states that the female offender _is_ a prostitute, one of the varieties of the "reo nato," of the born criminal. The female offender is not always a prostitute and modern research makes the theory of "congenital criminality" untenable. Kurt Schneider in his exhaustive study of seventy prostitutes brings out interesting details of their biography which throw a clearer light upon the psychology of prostitution. There were certain characteristics which all of those seventy women exhibited. They were all unwilling to work. They all were very grasping, altho, at the same time, very extravagant spenders when it came to personal adornment. Eroticism seemed to play a very insignificant part in their choice of a livelihood. Most of them were frigid, many homosexual, the majority of them sadistic. Fifteen of them had been punished for larceny (money and clothes). Many of them kept a pimp or cadet. Most of them were unhappy, dissatisfied types. All of them were greatly attached to children. Many of them were drunkards. One half of them were weak minded. Seven per cent of them had been brought up in institutions. We have there a striking picture of inferiority. An endocrinological examination of those unfortunates, similar to those which have been conducted recently at St. Elizabeth Hospital, Washington, D. C., would have probably revealed back of their unwillingness to work and of their thirst for money, weak thyroids and poor adrenals, not to mention unbalanced pituitary glands. The fires of the body burnt slow in them, producing and consuming little energy, a condition which, causing an obscure unconscious fear of the future, compelled those women to seek easy ways of gathering money, the only protection they could think of. Their inferiority complex revealed itself in their craving for personal adornment, to which they sacrificed their protective earnings. =Sensuality.= All the rant of the purity prophets to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not sensuality which "lures" women into a "life of shame." If the prostitute sought in her means of livelihood mere gratification of "vicious" instincts, why would she so often submit to the whims of a pimp who despoils her of her earnings. The prostitute hates the men who can compel her thru their financial superiority to submit to their sexual desires. The pimp, whom she keeps and who depends upon her bounty, is her inferior and the more she degrades him, the less she feels her own degradation. The prostitute, like all inferiors, is dissatisfied, but so are the man of genius, the inventor and the artist. The genius is the dissatisfied individual who organically is able to compensate for his feeling of inferiority by creating a more pleasant environment, physical or mental, and derives therefrom credit, praise, rewards, small as those rewards may be. The prostitute, too weak organically to find a suitable, socially valuable, form of compensation, flees from a reality which is unpleasant to her. Alcohol and drugs supply her with a convenient form of escape from reality, the more acceptable to her as her intelligence is the more limited. =Father Fixation.= Kurt Schneider found that fifty per cent of the prostitutes he examined were weak minded. The Chicago Vice report published a few years ago revealed the fact that fifty per cent of the prostitutes examined by the vice investigators were the victims of a violent father fixation. One half of them, when asked by whom they had been seduced, incriminated their fathers. To a psychoanalyst such an answer is an obvious morbid wish fulfilment. All of the women probably experienced unconscious incestuous cravings at some time or other, and in the minds of the weak minded, (fifty per cent of them according to Schneider), those cravings had produced an absolute delusion. Whether the incest was real or imaginary, the fact remains that those unfortunates either believed in it or considered it as a plausible explanation and scapegoat. A lie, when accepted as a part of our biography, often affects us as mightily as tho it were an actual fact. For, after all, every lie we tell is a fact unconsciously acceptable to us and which affords our ego a certain protection. The woman with a father fixation is usually frigid. She either never marries or is a prey to prostitution fancies, until analysis has freed her of her unconscious incest fear or has led her to accept her incestuous cravings as a part of her personality. =Prostitution is a neurosis=, affecting mostly the hypothyroid, hypoadrenal female of low culture and low intelligence. Psychoanalysis, which requires a certain grade of mental development on the part of the patient, is rather impotent in the majority of cases of prostitution when the woman has crossed the line which separates fancies from practice. There are male prostitutes also, of the normal sexual type. I do not allude here to the homosexual males whose mentality shall be considered in another chapter. By male prostitutes, I mean men who consort with women, in or out of wedlock, for purely sordid considerations. =The Pimp= who exploits some prostitute is a prostitute himself, but so is the man who marries for money or power a woman who does not attract him sexually. The male prostitute is, if anything, ethically inferior to the female prostitute. =Prevention=, rather than any form of cure, may some day solve the problem of prostitution. Repressive measures are, of course, a dishonest farce which deceives no one and benefits no one. The prostitute cannot be reeducated or adapted, for she is a weakling and the modern world offers to her no equivalent for what she would have to give up in order to reform. Female children, on the other hand, if trained properly and made independent, mentally and financially, could grow up free from the handicaps and the fears which, at the present day, drive too many girls into adopting the "easiest way." =Prostitution has no redeeming grace.= It may have saved many young men from impotence but it has made quite as many impotent thru venereal infection. Some claim that it has saved many pure wives and daughters from temptation but it has contributed also thru infection to making thousands of innocent women sexual invalids. Prostitution is a maladjustment whose worst sin is perhaps the maladjustment of married life which it occasions in thousands of cases. Too many young men, who acquired their sexual experience with prostitutes solely, imagine that they know and understand women, and they proceed to treat their life mates as tho the latter were only slightly different from the unfortunate neurotics they hired to relieve their sexual cravings. To that sort of experience we owe the horrible type of the "typical husband" who never misses an opportunity of reminding his wife of the fact that "she is only a woman." CHAPTER XIII VIRGINITY I am very sceptical when it comes to drawing a clear line of cleavage between what is typically masculine and what is typically feminine in behavior, and I believe that many of the so-called fundamental differences between the sexes are artificial and temporary ones due to the economic and social pressure which woman has to bear. Even in the valuation of virginity, it is difficult to say that there is a masculine attitude and a feminine attitude. Broadly speaking, we might state however that women, the world over, are more indifferent to the prematrimonial past of their future husbands than men are to the purity of their brides. =Men Experienced in Matters of Love= wield a definite attraction over all women, whether the latter are willing to admit it or not. This is not due to any especially feminine trait but rather to the difficulties which women encounter when they endeavor to secure positive information on tabooed sexual topics. They expect, therefore, their initiators to be conversant with the subject which is kept carefully shrouded in morbid mystery. The majority of men, on the other hand, when marrying a woman who is neither a widow nor a divorcée, expect her to be absolutely pure, that is, not to have had any sexual relations with any other man. =Ethical Prostitution.= In certain parts of the world, on the other hand, males appear rather indifferent to the female's past. In some parts of Japan and among certain Arab tribes, comely girls may go to larger centers of the population and devote themselves for a period of years to prostitution. After which, they return to their native place sometimes with a dowry they have accumulated thriftily, find a husband and settle down as wives and mothers, in no way disqualified by their promiscuous past. In certain parts of Central Europe, "window courting," as it is sometimes called, leads to unofficial trial marriages which do not arouse the jealousy of the final winner of a girl's favours. Among the Western nations, it is rather the very young, the stupidly conservative, the unsophisticated and the senile, who consider virginity as a great attraction and in some cases as a powerful sexual stimulant. The reasons for that are to be sought in the egotistical component of the masculine attitude. The strong and powerful male who has frequently proved his virility is not obsessed by the fear of defeat in love's intimacies. The innocent young man, on the other hand, who is full of misgivings and of diffidence, the elderly man whose sexual powers are on the wane and who is no longer sure of himself, prefer a woman who is totally ignorant of physical love. Their embarrassment or their shortcomings may escape a virgin but would not escape a woman of the world, a widow or a divorcée. There is, therefore, in the search for virginity, a slightly neurotic factor, the fear of defeat, the line of least effort, the search for ego safety. It must be noticed that it was during the great neurotic ages, the Middle Ages, which witnessed the bursting forth of so many hysterical epidemics, that both the cult of the Virgin and the belief in witches spread over Europe. =The Fear of Woman.= Man has always tried to protect himself against woman. In his fear of sex equality he has either made her an angel or a beast. The witch, perverse and filthy, was lowered to the level of hell. The virgin, on the other hand, unsexed and raised to heaven, was removed far enough from the world for perfect safety. =The Will-to-Be-the-First.= In the overemphasis placed by certain men upon virginity in the woman, and in the anxiety shown by certain husbands at the thought that their wife may have had sexual relations with another man previous to her marriage, we see the operation of the neurotic trait which Adler has called "the will-to-be-the-first" and which manifests itself, not only in the love life, but in all of life's situations. The neurotic of that type, obsessed with a feeling of inferiority is tortured by the thought that he may not have been the first to caress his wife. Analysis proves that in early childhood, he had a tendency (observable in certain breeds of dogs) to try to outrun every waggon, horse, train, etc.; that in later life he always tries to walk ahead when in company and hastens his steps whenever anyone threatens to pass him on the street. That type is given to hero worship, as he likes to identify himself with his favorite hero, Cæsar, Napoleon, etc. States of anxiety develop whenever his preeminence in society or business is threatened. =Telegony.= In the search for virginity there may also be in the male an unconscious "intuition" of some scientific facts. The phenomenon of telegony, explained by Dr. Jules Goldschmidt, of Paris, in the Medical Review of Reviews for April 1921, would, if confirmed by careful observations, throw a new light on the meaning of virginity. The first male, Goldsmith states, leaves an indelible impress on the female he possesses. Goldsmith believes that sperm plays a twofold part in the female organism that receives it. It not only fecundates the egg but modifies the blood of the female. He cannot believe that Nature would waste millions of spermatozoa in order that one of them should reach the egg. The millions of spermatozoa which are not needed for purposes of fecundation are absorbed, he thinks, by the mucous tissues of the woman's genitals and make her gradually more and more like her mate. To this factor Goldschmidt attributes the likeness of mates who have lived together many years. "When we reflect," he writes, "on the deep impress produced by the action of a single spermatic cell, we at once ask what will be the fate of the myriads of spermatozoids entering at the moment of fecundation, and later on into the female organism. Again we have to insist on the fact that nature works with excessive profusion, and that to secure success its means of action are multiple. Everywhere in the living world male generative cells are brought forth in an overwhelming abundance. "Their multiplicity guarantees at least the possibility of meeting the rather far-off ovulum, just as out of the multitude of male bees only one is chosen to impregnate the queen. "But it is inconceivable that the uncounted other male cells are condemned to useless death without any action on the entire female organism, into which, by reason of their mobility they can easily penetrate, either into the mucous membrance of the uterus or into the lymphatic and blood capillaries, and thru them into the whole circulation. "Kohlbrugge has demonstrated that in the case of a certain bat, the spermatozoids do enter in great numbers into the superficial stratum of the mucous membrance as well as into the glands and the adjacent tissues. Their fate is, of course, dissolution. We know that blood is the receptacle of all the products that are created by healthy life or disease. We know of no other liquid in the whole organic world so rich in the most heterogeneous chemical substances as blood. "Certain important substances circulate in it, which we only assume are there, not having been able to isolate them, but with which we work when we elaborate preventive or curative serums. All the antigens, antitoxins, antibodies, introduced into the blood by the living action of pathogenic bacilli, as those of diphtheria, typhoid, tetanus, after the happy termination of these diseases, present themselves in such infinitesimal quantities that we can only designate them by their most remarkable biological effects. They either confer for a lifetime an efficient immunity against renewal or, exceptionally, an increased susceptibility (anaphylaxis) for the bacilli which have created them. "If nature, in its morbific attacks on the organism, uses great quantities, extremely small ones answer its purpose for defense. Can we not by analogy conclude that the dissolved spermatozoids confer on the blood and thru it on the whole female organism, qualities which it had not possessed before their invasion? "From all of these facts we may return to our problem, and infer that not alone the solitary male cell which fecundates the ovulum is of importance to the economy of the female organism, but that we must not disregard the extremely numerous spermatic cells accompanying fecundation or the further introduction of these elements. "Just as the bacillary products during and after infectious diseases represent substances able to confer immunity from any renewed attack and therefore cause an important transformation of the human system, so the inference must be allowed that the spermatozoids, too, do exercise an ultimate lasting effect on the females organism, which will acquire a greater sensibility for the original and an insensibility for, or non-susceptibility towards extraneous generative cells, even those able to fecundate." This exclusive adaptation of the female organism to the male one is the phenomenon called telegony. "A curious example of telegony offers itself when a white woman, who has at first lived with a negro and afterwards with a man of her own race, presents her second husband or lover with a more or less intensely colored child. Such cases have given rise to dramatic and even tragic scenes when the innocent woman was simply modified (telegonized) by her first cohabitant. "All breeders are acquainted with the fact that the bull confers telegony on the cow. The dark colored bull having fecundated a light colored cow, the latter being subsequently covered by a red bull will put down dark and white streaked calves. "It is quite possible that the biological reaction of the blood in human and animal impregnation becomes identical in the mother with that of the first father, and that the influence of another male does not change sensibly the maternal blood." If demonstrated beyond the possibility of doubt, thru careful observation, telegony would be a tremendous fact which would, to all the egotists and neurotics, enhance tremendously the value of virginity in the woman. What a joy it would be for the self-centered, narcistic neurotic to know that he can gradually make his mate like unto himself! On the other hand, it might lead to most interesting experiments in eugenics and animal breeding. Thru deferred impregnation, brought about by special contraceptive measures, a better human type and better breeds of animals might be evolved. It might also sound the death knell of certain contraceptive methods which prevent the human mates from attaining the physical and mental oneness which, Goldschmidt says, is the result of life-long sexual association. Goldschmidt's thesis is worth investigating. Thus far the unverified observations and the sayings of more or less scientific breeders do not allow us to draw positive deductions. CHAPTER XIV. MODESTY, NORMAL AND ABNORMAL Modesty is not easy to define, for it varies with races, epochs and climes. As I said in the preceding chapter, in some parts of Japan and in one Arab tribe, it is almost shameful for a young woman to be married without having had sexual experience. A woman of the Western races on the other hand, regardless of her age and past, must in order to show a ladylike breeding, pretend a certain ignorance of things sexual when in the company of men, even in the company of her fifth or sixth husband. =In Turkey=, a woman may show her eyes but must veil her mouth; in the Southern Sahara, men of the Tuareg tribes go about veiled like Turkish ladies. Certain African tribes cover their backs carefully while exposing the rest of their bodies. In other tribes, men, instead of concealing their genitals, wear sheaths which exaggerate the size of their organs. In most parts of the earth, women keep the fact of their menstruation a secret. In others, they wear a cloth of a special color proclaiming that condition when present. =On the Modern Stage=, modesty seems satisfied if the nipples and the genitals are duly covered. In some parts of Europe entirely naked dancers have been seen in public. Until recently, an unwritten law made it more or less necessary for the male performers to wear more clothing than female ones did. The wave of homosexualism which has followed the war is probably responsible for the growing numbers of naked male actors and dancers who disport themselves nowadays on the French stage and elsewhere. There is a normal form of modesty, however, and there are many abnormal aspects of that elusive feeling. Many animals seek safety and seclusion when performing certain important functions of their life, nutrition, reproduction and defecation, which naturally place them at a disadvantage in emergencies requiring flight or fight. Even the boldest among the carnivorous animals, lions and tigers, drag their prey to a cave or into the depths of the bush before devouring it. Naked and otherwise shameless and "indelicate" savages will often walk a considerable distance from their village to satisfy their natural needs, and then hide behind bushes or trees. Many birds and animals pair off and isolate themselves at mating time. Races and nations differ greatly in their degree of modesty in relation to nutrition, reproduction and defecation. European races dine in the open, are more or less "shameless" in their love making, they talk freely on sexual topics and erect urinals and comfort stations, designated by their exact name, in many public places. Anglo-Saxons hide themselves while eating, are very silent about the processes of reproduction, seldom indulge in public kissing and designate urinals and toilets, which are very scarce in their lands, by cover names such as lavatories, smoking rooms, etc. =Normal Modesty= may then be a survival of the fear which the primitive men and women experienced of being surprised and overpowered by hostile animals or tribesmen during an embrace or when unprotected by garments or armor. In fact, modesty seems to disappear as soon as safety reigns or when no hostile element may be suspected of lurking in the environment. A woman strips without shame to undergo a medical examination, men and women appear naked in public baths where only one sex is admitted at a time, etc. Then also normal modesty must be considered as an offgrowth of the unavoidable repressions of modern, civilised life. Like the incest taboo, it has been cultivated for reasons of convenience. Modern community life having placed a thousand restrictions upon the age at which we can marry and the conditions under which we should marry, in other words, having delayed considerably our normal sexual gratification, an effort has been made to "repress" erotism by concealing "suggestive" parts of the human body. This is, of course, an abortive attempt, for habit is a more potent protector against temptation than veils. The races which live practically naked are not more erotic than the fully clothed, civilised races or the Arabs who not only cover their entire body and heads but conceal even the shape of their bodies in the loose folds of their ample garments. A husband, no longer erotically aroused by his wife's naked body, may be attracted violently by the partly draped body of another woman. =Suggestive Draperies.= One of the results of the policy of body-concealment has been to transform certain draperies into sexual symbols of great aphrodisiac power. Certain garments lend to the human body an appeal which it might not have if fully exposed. In other words, the obstacles which are meant to hold back erotism may be used neurotically as a morbid expression of erotism. At the present day, however, that form of protection against temptation serves its purpose to some extent and cannot be discarded until mankind has been reeducated. Custom and the law uphold official modesty. The mere fact, however, that modesty has to be enforced legally is one of the best arguments against the sentimental, unscientific view that modesty is an "innate," "natural" feeling of "delicacy" based upon some "higher," "spiritual" values, etc. Modern, official modesty is merely a compromise with sexual reality. It has been, like all inhibitory feelings, greatly overestimated and forced upon the weaker sex by egotistical men to prevent a display of their female's charms, likely to attract other women-hunters. Weak males with a sense of inferiority have called modesty the typically feminine virtue. =Excessive Modesty=, in men as well as in women, is an abnormal phenomenon, a mask for unconscious lewdness and obscenity. It is a neurotic means of protection against uncontrollable desires, or at times an expression of one's "sour grapes" attitude to others. It is always the shapeless and unattractive woman who is the most vociferous champion of highneck gowns and long skirts. A sense of bodily inferiority obsesses the woman who does not allow any caresses unless the room is darkened. Her modesty yields rapidly, however, to the praise of her attractions which she hears from the mouth of her lover. =Immodest Modesty.= A woman took her daughter to a specialist's office for an examination. The girl, asked to strip, complied at once with the doctor's request and stood naked before him without any display of shame. When they left, the mother made the very unwise remark that her daughter must have lacked modesty entirely to have stood the ordeal without any embarrassment. In this case, it was the mother who lacked "true modesty" and the daughter whose mind was "pure." The girl knew she was in the presence of a physician, but to the more highly sexed mother, the physician was above everything a "man." This sort of prurient modesty which, very often, exerts a baneful influence on the love-life of the individual, is usually due to repressed childhood memories and complexes. =Fear of Love.= Stekel, of Vienna, cites the case of a girl who evinced on every occasion a morbid fear of everything connected with love. She avoided men, she protected herself zealously against every "suggestive" influence, she decried love and marriage and was constantly trying to "spiritualise" the things of the flesh which she considered "bestial." Analysis showed that until the age of thirteen she had been perfectly normal in her behavior, considering love and marriage as natural human goals. One day, however, she chanced upon a collection of pornographic photographs belonging to her father. Instead of "corrupting" her mind, the incident disgusted her and caused her to renounce all the things of the flesh and to become unusually, negatively modest. A patient of mine declared on the occasion of her first call at my office that all men were "beasts." Whenever she associated with a man, at dinner, theater or dancing parties, she suffered from choking sensations, nausea, etc. Analysis revealed that at the age of six she had been subjected to an attempt at seduction. Another woman patient who went thru a mental crisis in the course of which she gave up all worldly pleasures and decided never to marry, merging into hysterical states very soon afterward, had bow legs and a tendency to skin eruptions which had, on many occasions, proved humiliating to her egotism. Her decision never to marry meant: "I shall not risk showing my deformed legs and my skin blemishes to a man." Also, at the age of ten, she had witnessed a scene of brutality in which a man had dragged his wife on the street by her hair. She was morbidly modest and wept bitterly once when a man whom she knew only slightly, pressed a kiss upon her lips. Withal her dreams revealed a violently erotic temperament. Like all exaggerated feelings morbid modesty is the mask for the opposite feelings, passionate sexual cravings. The woman who allows every one to kiss her is aroused but little by such caresses. The woman who never kisses any one and pretends she does not like being kissed, is usually the one who knows that a kiss might cause her to lose her self-control and to abandon all modesty. The puritanical male, paragon of modesty among his sex, is either an inflammable type who is afraid of his own sensuality or an impotent individual who protects himself against being put to any sexual test. That exaggerated modesty is only one of the components of the neurotic temperament has been well demonstrated by Adler: "The morbid modesty of neurotics," he writes, "who cannot visit a public toilet, who are unable to urinate in the presence of others, who avoid the society of women on account of blushing or anxiety or heart palpitations, reveals to us the strained manly ambition which supports itself against the original feeling of inferiority. "=The Masculine Protest= (craving for virility) of those patients, insecure to the core, forces them into this arrangement whose boundaries encroach upon those of bashfulness and awkwardness. Often, in neurotics of either sex, one observes an inability to go to a toilet in cases of great necessity if some one is looking at them. The greater modesty of women, especially of neurotic women, in all relations of life, originates from the fear which is implanted in them from the earliest childhood that attention might be directed to their sex. "I have often convinced myself that the behavior of girls and of women is considerably influenced by this more or less unconscious factor, indeed that the progress of their sexual development, like that of male patients who feel unmanly, the formation of social and professional relations and love relations, are immediately checked as soon as the patient is allowed to play a real 'feminine' or subordinate part or presupposes this expectation from others. "This fact is in no way affected when repressed sexual stimuli come to light as the present source of the checks of aggression. They are similarly arranged and have the purpose of enhancing the fear of the partner and of permitting the retreat decided upon in the plan of life, to be entered upon with certainty; they are therefore acts of foresight. The neurotic had already in childhood laid the foundation of this foresight and in it is reflected the feeling of shame as the guiding line of reassuring modesty and the prudery of civilisation. "The previous history of the patient reveals an exaggerated modesty and this is true at times of those who in other respects show a boyish nature; the anxiety of nervous children on being exposed may be observed in their conduct. They exclude every one from the room and lock the door when they are going to undress. This conduct is also observable in boys who have grown up among girls. In the prognosis of neurosis, this expedient of cowardice is a bad symptom. It is the equivalent of later castration thoughts and neurotic wishes, the wish to be a woman, for instance, which expresses itself as soon as the fear of the life mate becomes actual or a decision has to be avoided." =Lack of Modesty=, when it assumes a morbid form, has, according to Adler, the same meaning as prurient modesty. "The very shameless, obscene talker," Adler writes, "is trying to demonstrate to his listeners the fact of his great manliness of which he is not very sure himself, the very immodest woman merely demonstrates her inability to adapt herself to her feminine role.... In the analysis of such women, at times only in their dreams, is observed the childish expectation of a metamorphosis into a male, an attempted substitute for the will-to-power, the will-to-be-above." CHAPTER XV JEALOUSY Jealousy has been subjected to the distortion which every sexual manifestation suffers under the influence of our modern puritanical civilisation. It has to be concealed and lied about and derives from that fact an immense obsessional power. It becomes a mask for other feelings and, in its turn, may masquerade in the guise of other feelings. Both its presence and its absence may denote normality or abnormality. Intense jealousy may be the projection of our feelings into another individual and be a symptom of paranoia. On the other hand, the entire lack of jealousy of a husband who enjoys the sight of his wife caressed by another man, certainly reveals a most morbid masochism. Hunger, thirst, erotism always find their satisfaction at some time. Intense pain deadens itself thru its very intensity. Jealousy on the contrary feeds on itself. It can be aroused by the unseen as well as by the obvious. In fact, like many neurotic elements, it thrives best on the invisible and the unreal. Jealousy based upon unseen things, hunches, intuition, borders dangerously on hallucinatory states. The absolute blindness of some husbands, on the other hand, reveals a form of egotistical cocksureness closely allied to delusions of greatness. =Rules for Husbands.= Forel, in some ways very old fashioned and unimaginative, has summarised as follows the proper rules of conduct for "reasonable husbands" suffering from jealousy. "An intelligent husband," he writes, "should quietly find out thru the usual agencies whether his suspicions are justified or not. For what is the use of being jealous? If his suspicions are unfounded, he can only annoy his wife and make her unhappy thru his jealous behavior. If he was right in suspecting her, there is only one of two things to be done: either an otherwise excellent wife has yielded to the attraction of another man and may feel perfectly miserable over it. She should be forgiven and led back into the right path. Or a wife has no affection left for her husband or she is an unworthy, characterless deceiver, and in such cases, what is needed is not jealousy but a divorce." Instead of "reasonable" husbands, Forel should have written, husbands "free from complexes," for jealousy is little besides a neurotic mask for an unrecognized feeling of inferiority. There are thousands of husbands who would not dare to find out whether their wives are untrue or not. Some may be so enslaved to their wives' bodies that they cannot contemplate the possibility of losing them. Public opinion, if a scandal should break out, would compel them to seek a divorce and therefore they prefer to remain in ignorance of the real state of affairs and of their "defeat." Others are so egotistical that they refuse to suspect their wives of infidelity and are honestly trying to protect their wife's reputation when they make a jealous scene. This is frequently observed among the "after-me-who-has-a-chance?" type of husband. Other egotists fear the ridicule that might follow upon exposure and which might destroy some of their self confidence. They would be too weak to bear up well under their friends' open or concealed sarcasm. The jealous scenes they make to their suspected wives are in the nature of a punishment which they inflict on the faithless one. Other husbands, entangled in extramatrimonial affairs, are in no way desirous to create a scandal but work themselves into jealous moods to keep up a pretence of interest in their wives. Others, very old fashioned, believe in a double standard and, while condoning their own weaknesses, condemn every appearance of evil in "their" wives. =Very Few Men or Women Admit Their Jealousy.= Most of them cover it with ethical veils of the most transparent type: "You neglect your household," "you are a poor mother (or father) to your children," "you are making yourself (or me) ridiculous," etc. Some husbands deny they are jealous but declaim against low neck gowns, flesh-colored stockings, face powder, rouge, lip sticks to which they object on "moral grounds." The last two groups derive a great comfort from their assumed ethical and moral superiority which they use as a justification for their endless nagging. Some jealous husbands force motherhood upon their wives year after year as a protection against unfaithfulness. A woman disabled by pregnancy and lactation is, of necessity, more faithful. Attempts at freedom on the part of a woman burdened with a numerous progeny can easily be repressed by admonitions such as "Remember the children," etc. =Jealousy and Impotence.= Jealousy in a man is often caused by the fact that he has become impotent. Unable to gratify his wife physically, he imagines that she seeks consolation elsewhere and in that way he "gets even" with her: "I am impotent but she is promiscuous," so runs the neurotic's logic. Not infrequently a woman who has been brought up to consider physical relations as slightly shameful and something which a well brought up female submits to, but never "enjoys," may, if she is very erotic, develop terrible fits of jealousy. Frink, mentioning one of those rather frequent cases, dissects the psychology of that type of jealous women as follows: "If her husband's caresses leave her unsatisfied, she is caught between the two horns of a dilemma. If she grants that this is enough to satisfy her husband's 'animal instincts' she must then admit that she is more erotic than he is, hence, more 'animal' than he. And such an admission is impossible to a woman of puritanical upbringing. Hence 'logically' she concludes that he must be untrue to her." Frink adds: "Undue jealousy in a man usually means that he has, or thinks he has, some deficiency of sexual power. It means in a woman, not, as many seem to think, that she is unusually in love with her husband, but rather, that she is not perfectly satisfied with him, and often that she thinks that if he really knew her, he would not be satisfied with her. In most patients suffering from morbid jealousy there is an overaccentuation of the homosexual component of the libido." Very often some unattractive individual feels jealous because he or she has ceased to attract sexually his or her life mate. A neurotic, whose face had been made hideous by a discoloration due to illness, was sure his wife must have a lover, because she no longer seemed to feel erotic in his company. His way of reasoning was as follows: "I cannot disgust her, hence some one else must attract her." =Childish Behavior.= Some neurotics with a strong father or mother fixation become jealous of an otherwise perfectly faithful and devoted mate because they fail to receive from their husband or wife, the sort of attention and uncritical devotion they would expect from a parent. Those people are still children who never admit the possibility of adult equality between them and their mate. The mate must be the strong father or the self-sacrificing mother. They themselves remain babies, constantly to be petted, admired and consoled. If their husband or wife fails to shower on them the thousand little attentions which a nursling requires, they fly into a petty and unjustified rage, suspecting that some one else has robbed them of their privileges. The Don Juan and the Messalina are quite as jealous as faithful mates. Men leading a double life may watch wife and mistress with equal suspicion. This is probably due to the fact that they feel unable to satisfy both women sexually. Orientals with a harem are said to be infinitely more tigerish in their jealousy than Western men of the most monogamous type. I have known several married women who, altho they had deceived their husbands on several occasions, were terribly upset when their husbands showed too much interest in some other woman. =The Ego Rampant.= The proprietor of a hotel in a Western town, who lived a few blocks from his inn, was annoyed when his wife refused more and more frequently to come and keep him company at the hotel in the evenings. When a young lawyer took up his residence at the hotel, however, she never failed to put in an appearance, regardless of the weather or of her health, which she had used so often as excuses for staying at home. Later on, detectives supplied him with enough grounds to secure a divorce. Curiously enough, what brought forth the greatest display of anger on his part when he recalled the incident, was not the thought of the caresses which his wife and the other man may have exchanged. His humiliation was indescribable when he realised that the other man had wielded more influence upon his wife than he had himself. "One night," he said to me, "when she came down thru a heavy snowstorm, just to see him, I could have killed her." =Sexless Jealousy.= All the foregoing tends to show that jealousy has very little to do with sex. Many domestic animals evince violent jealousy when their masters show attentions to strange animals. A feud may be precipitated among the household pets when the dog beholds his mistress petting the cat and conversely. Fox terriers often attempt to bite people who shake hands with their master or, in friendly ways, lay hands on him. Likewise, it was jealousy which drove Cain to slay Abel and which caused Joseph to suffer many indignities at the hands of his brothers. A Freudian might say that Cain and Joseph's brothers were seeking the father's (God's) homosexual love and begrudged whatever of it was lavished on their victims. Adler would more plausibly suggest that the prestige and power wielded by Joseph and Abel were too much of an irritant for their inferior and greedy brothers. In other spheres than the sexual sphere, we notice that success won by undisputed superiors or absolute inferiors does not arouse our jealousy. A young pianist does not resent honors bestowed upon Paderewksy, nor does Paderewsky begrudge the stripling his early success. Jealousy, on the other hand, rages among great artists of about the same rank. In the first case, superiority or inferiority is taken for granted. In the case of equals competing for the same laurels inferiority is "feared." =Husbands and Lovers.= Many men feel no jealousy over the caresses their mistress may receive from her husband. The husband has been defeated by the lover, hence is "absolutely" inferior. The same, it goes without saying, applies to women in love with a married man. Many men, in fact, prefer to have extramatrimonial affairs with married women and many women with married men. They no longer fear the husband or wife whom they have defeated in the struggle for his or her mate's favor. They consider him or her as a watchful guardian of their mistress's or their lover's sexual life, less formidable than an unknown man or woman might be, who had not been defeated yet. The suttee custom in India, the various wills left by Western men or women, providing that the surviving spouse shall be disinherited if he or she marries again, shows that jealousy has little to do with love, sexual or affectionate. That posthumous jealousy is a distinct attempt at controlling one's "property" after one's death, whether the property be a woman or a certain sum of money. =Cruelty.= Adler has pointed out the cruel character of jealousy and the constant attempts made by jealous neurotics to disparage and belittle their love object. "The neurotic suffering from jealousy is insatiable in his search for ways to test his mate. This indicates his lack of self confidence, his lack of self esteem and his uncertainty. His jealous efforts are calculated to bring him more into notice, to attract more attention to himself and thus to increase his self-esteem. He revives upon every possible occasion the old feeling of being neglected and disregarded, and assumes anew the childish attitude of wishing to have everything, to obtain a proof of superiority upon his mate. "A glance, a word spoken in company, an acknowledgment of a favor, a show of interest for a painting, for an author, for a relative, even a protective attitude toward servants, may be taken as the cause of the operation. In certain cases the impression is distinctly given that the jealous individual cannot rest because he has no confidence in peaceful happiness or account of his misfortune. Then a neurosis develops in which an effort is made to subdue the life mate by a system of attacks, to arouse his or her sympathy; or perhaps the attack is intended as a punishment. Headaches, weeping fits, weakness, paralysis,[1] attacks of anxiety and depression, silence, etc., have the same value as alcoholism, perversion or lewdness. The line of distrust and doubt, often about the legitimacy of the children, becomes more pronounced, outbreaks of wrath and scolding, mistrust of the entire opposite sex, are regular phenomena and reveal the other side of jealousy as a preparation for the disparagement of the life mate. "Often pride prevents consciousness of jealousy but the behavior is the same. This situation is at times made worse by the fact that the suspected mate beholds the helplessness of the jealous one with unconscious satisfaction and fails to find the words or the tone that would hold jealousy within bounds." =Making People Jealous.= This is why the efforts made by certain men and women to arouse their sexual partner's jealousy are productive of rather baneful results. They do not bring out the love or affection of the person who is made jealous but his worst egotistical and sadistic traits. One of the strongest factors in love being the egotistical satisfaction we derive from the possession of the love object and the realisation of our influence over it, our love wanes rapidly when we see another person wielding much power over it. The stratagem has temporary effects which may deceive the person using them. The jealous lover, at first makes decided efforts to regain his position, but he soon feels swayed by egotistical considerations which lead him toward the line of least effort. Slighted by one woman, he turns to another for consolation, and usually finds it. The man or woman who considers it shrewd to let his mate suspect that "there are others," for one thing encourages faithlessness by creating a precedent. It is especially when the other (or others) are distinctly inferior in appearance or position that this sort of game ends disastrously. The woman who likes to mention the attentions bestowed upon her by some inferior man and seems to enjoy them accomplishes two things. She makes herself appear inferior and "easy" and makes her lover feel that any inferior man could compete with him for her love and that, hence, he himself must be inferior. He may run away from her to escape that feeling of inferiority. If he does not leave her, he no longer feels compelled to make any effort to please her, since worthless homage seems so valuable to her. =Jealousy is the Hell of Love= and no one should dare to open its gates lightheartedly. One should be the more careful in arousing jealousy as the "green eyed goddess" now and then is responsible for some killing. The sexually jealous husband may kill his wife's lover, the egotistically jealous husband may kill the unfaithful wife. The former removes temptation from her path, the latter avenges his wounded egotism. It is not always the sort of love that flares up frequently in jealous outburst, sexual or egotistical, which is the deepest. I know of a case in which a husband repressed entirely his anger and desire for vengeance when his wife left him to live with another man. A clever psychologist, he realized that lack of opposition to her plans would kill the romance of his wife's rash step. He also knew that any violence to which he might submit her lover would crown him with the halo of martyrdom. He wrote to her: "I shall not interfere with your adventure, for uninterrupted intimacy will soon cause you to tire of each other. Nor will I shoot him for I would thereby transform him in your mind into a hero." Eventually, the "erring" wife returned to her home. CHAPTER XVI INSANE JEALOUSY One form of jealousy which has absolutely nothing to do with love in the normal sense of the word, and one which not infrequently leads to acts of violence, to the "love tragedies" of newspaper headlines, is simply one of the first symptoms of paranoia. =In Delusional Jealousy=, the patient suffering repressed homosexual cravings, projects his own desires into the personality of his life mate. An unconsciously homosexual husband, attracted sexually by every man in his environment, assumes that his wife is also subject to the same attraction and suspects her of having sexual relations with every man who arouses him. An unconsciously homosexual wife imagines that her husband has a liaison with every woman who appeals to her perverse fancies. The paranoiac being at times very clever and convincing, that form of jealousy, insane as it may appear to the man or the woman who is the victim of it, may deceive the outsiders. In certain cases, the delusional character of it is obvious to everybody, including the jealous person. A paranoiac told me that every night he "saw" a man entering his wife's bedroom thru a window protected by solid iron bars so close to one another that a cat could have squeezed thru them only with difficulty. This was, of course, a case of hallucination, pure and simple. =Homosexualism.= Other cases are more complicated. Dr. S. Ferenczi, of Budapest, reports two of them which illustrate well the mechanism of insane jealousy due to unconscious homosexualism. He had a housekeeper whose husband, a man of thirty-eight, also busied himself about the house in his spare time. He was constantly cleaning Ferenczi's rooms, putting fresh polish on the doors and floors, pottering around, evidently anxious to show his good will and his devotion to his wife's employer. This man was very intemperate and beat his wife on several occasions. Altho she was most unattractive, he constantly accused her of infidelity with Ferenczi and every male patient treated by him. When the woman revealed those facts to Ferenczi, he gave the couple notice but decided to have a serious talk with her husband. The man denied having beaten his wife, altho this had been confirmed by witnesses. He maintained that his wife was a real vampire, whose lust was sapping his life strength. During this explanation, he impulsively took Ferenczi's hand and kissed it, saying that he had never met anyone dearer or kinder than the doctor. A talk with the woman revealed to Ferenczi that the man had always been very distant in his attitude to his wife. He would often push her away brutally, calling her all sorts of opprobrious names. When he learnt that Ferenczi had given her notice, the insane man abused and hit his wife, and threatened to throw her out on the street and to stab "her darling." Ferenczi at first paid no attention to those threats for the man remained very devoted, respectful and well behaved. When he learnt, however, that the man was sleeping with a sharp kitchen knife under his pillow and when he woke up one night to find him standing in his bedroom, he notified the authorities and the maniac was committed to an insane asylum. "There is no doubt," Ferenczi writes, "that this was a case of alcoholic delusion of jealousy. The conspicuous feature of his homosexual attachment to me, however, allows the interpretation that the jealousy he felt of every man, was only the projection of his own desires for the male sex. Also, his lack of desire for his wife was not simply impotence but was determined by his unconscious homosexuality. "To him alcohol played the part of an inhibition-poison and brought to the surface his crude homosexual erotism, which, as it was intolerable to his consciousness, he imputed to his wife. "It was only subsequently that I found a complete confirmation of this. He had been married before, years ago. He lived only a short time in peace with his first wife, began to drink soon after the wedding and abused his wife, tormenting her with scenes of jealousy until she left him and secured a divorce. "In the interval between his two marriages, he was said to have been a temperate, reliable and steady man and to have taken to drink only after his second marriage. Alcoholism was not the deeper cause of his paranoia; it was rather that, in the insoluble conflict between his conscious heterosexual and his unconscious homosexual desires, he took to alcohol, which brought the homosexual erotism to the surface, his consciousness getting rid of it by way of projection, of delusions of jealousy. He saddled his wife with his desires and by jealous scenes assured himself that he was in love with her." =A Jealous Wife.= The other case is that of a woman, still young, who after living in harmony with her husband for a number of years and bearing him daughters, began to suffer from violent fits of jealousy soon after the birth of another child, a boy. Alcoholism played no part in this case. She suspected every move her husband made. She dismissed maid after maid and finally had only male servants in the house. Curiously enough, her jealousy was directed against very young and very old, even very ugly women, while she was not jealous of her society friends or of the pretty women whom she and her husband occasionally met. Her conduct at home became so unbearable and her threats so dangerous that she was taken to a sanatorium upon Freud's advice. After which Ferenczi proceeded to analyse her. She harbored many delusions of greatness and ideas of reference. She thought she found in the local paper veiled allusions to her depravity and to her ridiculous position as a betrayed wife. The highest personalities in the land were banded against her, etc. She had married her husband against her wishes and when she bore the first daughter and he manifested his disappointment, she began to feel that she had indeed married the wrong man. She then made the first scene of jealousy in connection with a little girl of thirteen who came to help the servant girls. While still in bed after her confinement, she made the little girl kneel and swear by her father's life that she was still pure. This oath calmed her at the time. After the birth of her son, she felt she had fulfilled her duty to her husband and was free. She flirted with every man but would not tolerate the slightest liberty from them. At the same time, she made her husband violent scenes of jealousy and tried to incapacitate him, thru her constant passionate advances, for relations with any other women. When taken to a sanatorium, she gave evidence, thru her behavior toward the other women inmates of strong homosexual leanings. She confessed to Ferenczi that there had been homosexual experiences in her childhood. She then became more and more unmanageable and the analysis had to be abandoned. =A Case of Projection.= This is Ferenczi's comment upon this example of insane jealousy: "This case of delusional jealousy becomes clear when we assume that it was a question of projection upon the husband of her desire for her own sex. A girl who had grown up in an exclusively feminine environment is suddenly forced into a marriage of convenience with a man she dislikes. She reconciles herself to it, however, and only shows indignation when her husband proves cruelly unkind (disappointment over the birth of a girl) by letting her desire turn toward her childhood ideal, the little girl of thirteen. The attempt fails, she cannot endure homosexuality any longer and has to project it upon her husband. "Finally after the birth of her son, when her 'duty' is done, the homosexuality she had kept in bounds takes possession in a crude erotic way of all the objects that offer no possibility for sublimation (young girls, old women etc.), although all this erotism, (with the exception of cases when she can hide it under the mask of harmless flirtation), is imputed to the husband. In order to support herself in that lie, the patient is compelled to show increased coquetry toward the male sex, to whom she had become very indifferent and, indeed, to demean herself like a nymphomaniac." I have cited both cases at length for they confirm the statement I have made elsewhere in this book that very exaggerated feeling is usually a mask for the opposite feeling. Ferenczi's two patients, in love with persons of their own sex, "simulated" neurotically a passionate attachment for their heterosexual mates, who, naturally could not attract them. =Masked Sadism.= Their stormy jealousy was more akin to hatred than to love. There was no tenderness in it but a good deal of sadism, of cruelty, and they used it in order to torture their mates on whom, in the course of their jealous scenes, they could heap up abuse, which they would not, under any other circumstances, dare to voice as freely. Many a husband would like to insult a wife he detests. Neurotic jealousy supplies him with an excuse which he might not find elsewhere. After which, if the vocabulary he used on that occasion is especially vile, he has a good scapegoat at his disposal. "I was crazed by jealousy and did not realise what I was saying." CHAPTER XVII HOMOSEXUALISM; ITS GENESIS Love's normal goal is the union of the male and the female in a way which may insure the reproduction of the species. At times, however, we behold love deviating from the path that leads to that goal: a man may love another man as passionately as he would love a woman, a woman may be consumed with desire for another woman. Certain parts of the ancient world looked with indifference upon such deviations from the normal. The poems of Sappho, the dialogues of Plato, to only mention the best known sources of information on the subject, prove that in classic Greece homosexual unions were countenanced by public opinion. In the "Banquet" young Alkibiades describes, with a frankness reminiscent of eighteenth century novels, his attempts at "seducing" Socrates. In the holy island of Thera an inscription commemorates the "wedding" of two young men, Erastos and Klainos, which was celebrated with all sorts of ceremonies. A distinction was even drawn in those days between homosexual love which was purely sexual and the kind of love which was both sexual and intellectual. =Groups of Male Lovers=, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, Kratinos and Aristodemos, etc., became famous and legendary owing to their unusual faithfulness and constancy. Pederasty was countenanced by the very behavior of the Greek gods, of Zeus in particular. The various philosophers granted women the right to indulge in homosexual love if they wished, but, nevertheless, Lesbian love, as it was called after Sappho of Lesbos, was rather considered as a freak of nature, if not a vice. The low social condition of Hellenic women accounts for that illogical difference in treatment. =Women Were Harem Slaves= with little opportunity for intellectual development and their homosexualism could not drape itself in the mantle of intellectual pretence which it wore in the gymnasiums and schools frequented by men. Greek mythology offers no example of love between goddesses. Sappho and the Lesbian poetesses gave female passion an eminent place in Greek literature but the Aeolian women did not found a tradition corresponding to that of the Dorian men. We even find in Lucian's works a passage indicating that some of the Greeks felt at the thought of female homosexualism the repugnance which we feel at the thought of male homosexualism. =The Tide Turns.= About the third century and until the eighteenth, the tide turned, at least in the Western world, and homosexualism found itself confronted by a barrier of penalties which in certain lands included capital punishment. After the French revolution such extreme penalties were abandoned in several European countries. At present, death is no longer the wages of the homosexual sin, but jail sentences and ostracism of the most severe sort punish the sinner when detected. Legally, then, homosexualism is considered as a voluntary "perversion," to be punished, not as an abnormality, to be treated or accepted. This position is absolutely ridiculous and goes counter to every possible scientific view of homosexualism, its nature and its genesis. Whether psychiatrists consider sexualism from a "purely physical" point of view or from a "purely psychic" point of view, they all consider it, not as a matter of free choice, but as a compulsion, an organic compulsion according to the first view, an unconscious mental compulsion according to the latter. Opprobrium and punishment constitute no solution for any compulsion, be it physical or mental. =Many Theories= have been advanced as to the genesis of homosexualism and most of them are very unsatisfactory because every one of them generally excludes the others and because they attempt one thing which cannot be done: to found homosexualism either on a purely physical or on a purely mental basis. We can never understand homosexualism until we consider it from an organic point of view, according to which mental states are neither the cause nor the result of physical states, or vice versa, but mental and physical states are two aspects of the organism, of the personality. The first hypothesis I intend to review is that of the Berlin sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld which has had more influence on modern thought than any other theory of homosexualism and which unfortunately has been accepted as gospel truth by many homosexuals. =The Third Sex.= Hirschfeld reminds us in his book "Intermediate Sexual Stages" that during the first eight weeks of its existence, the fetus is neither male nor female. It is only about the eighth week that a differentiation takes place and that the sex of the unborn can be determined. A thousand physical influences may be at work in fetal life which may cause underdevelopment of the male fetus' organs, which then may resemble a female's in many particulars, or the overdevelopment of a female's clitoris which may make it slightly similar to a man's penis. Thousands of variations can be observed which, in certain cases, have caused the attending physician to declare the child's sex as "doubtful." According to the degree of development of their sexual organs, Hirschfeld suggests a classification of the intermediates into hermaphrodites, androgynes, transvestites, homosexuals and metatropists. I shall not touch upon the first two classes, hermaphrodites and androgynes, which are obvious, gross, physical malformations of a congenital character. Transvestism, homosexualism and metatropism, however, deserve careful consideration. =The Transvestites= are men who experience a craving to go about dressed as women, women who are anxious to dress themselves as men. Hirschfeld considers them as closely related to the male androgynes who crave to have breasts like women and are ashamed of facial or bodily hair, and to the female androgynes who are ashamed of their breasts and wish to have a beard and body hair. Transvestites generally explain that they do not feel free except in the garb of the opposite sex. "In men's clothes," a male transvestite said, "I have the feeling of wearing a uniform." "In feminine clothes," a female transvestite said, "I feel inhibited and hampered. It is only when wearing masculine garments that I feel energetic and efficient." The late Dr. Mary Walker, the French painter Rosa Bonheur, the French explorer Madame Dieulafoy, were characteristic examples of energetic women who felt compelled to abandon the garb of their sex and to dress themselves as men. =Are Transvestities Homosexual?= Dr. Wilhelm Stekel of Vienna objects to drawing a line between transvestites and homosexuals. But we must make a distinction. Hirschfeld is right in stating that there are no more homosexuals among transvestites than among normal individuals. He means, of course, _conscious_ homosexuals practicing their abnormal form of love. We know however, that there are thousands of men and women who, while _consciously_ experiencing the greatest disgust at the thought of homosexual practices are _unconscious_ homosexuals. Their dreams leave no doubt as to the nature of their cravings. We may reconcile the Stekel view with the Hirschfeld view by saying that transvestites are in the majority of cases unconscious homosexuals. They may _consciously_ lead a most normal life: Madame Dieulafoy was married and apparently very devoted to her husband whom she followed on all his voyages of exploration. _Unconsciously_, however, and for reasons which we shall examine later, transvestites crave a change of sex. =Metatropism= is masculine behavior in women, feminine behavior in men. Normal man is physiologically aggressive in love, normal woman is submissive. In cases of metatropism, those characteristics are reversed. =The Metatropic Man= prefers tall, strong, powerful women, often of a different nationality or race, at times, women with some physiological handicap, lameness or deformity (the French philosopher Descartes was attracted to women suffering from strabism). He generally selects a woman older than himself, either very intellectual or very low ethically. In one case he is dominated by her mental superiority, in the other he feels that he is sacrificing his principles or his social standing. Professional or business women appeal to him especially. He is often a shoe fetishist. Clothing which denotes power, authority, impresses him. =The Metatropic Woman= seeks feminine, beardless men, with perhaps a good head of long hair (poets, artists). Madame Dudevant, the French novelist, adopted the masculine name George Sand and had affairs with two sickly artists, Musset, the poet, and Chopin, the composer. The metatropic woman is often a professional or business woman who, in her love relation, assumes a very independent, dictatorial attitude to men. She favors young men whom she can dominate better. In what Hirschfeld calls metatropists, we recognise parent-fixation men and women, obsessed by a conscious or unconscious incest fear, a complication which has been discussed in another chapter. Krafft-Ebing and Albert Eulenburg classify metatropic men with masochists (see Chapter XX) and metatropic women with sadists (see Chapter XIX). =Dr. Steinach's Experiments= show the close relationship between homosexualism and the secretions of the interstitial cells of the genital glands. After castrating young rats which, after the operation, remained in an infantile stage of development, Steinach transplanted into their inguinal region male or female gonads. Males into which female gonads had been implanted, developed all the physical characteristics and all the mannerisms of the female, paid no attention to females at mating time and, on the contrary, attracted the rutting males and were attracted to them. Castrated females in whose body he implanted testicles, showed the hardier hair growth of males, tried to mate with females and remained indifferent to males. Prof. Brandes, director of the Zoological Garden in Darmstadt, has repeated those experiments on deer with identical results. The female in which testicles were implanted behaved like a male and grew antlers. The male's mammary glands grew very fast after the implantation of female gonads. It is said that Steinach has successfully transformed homosexuals into normal men but the last statement of his on the "Histology of the Gonads in homosexual Men," (Vol. 46, No. 1, Archiv für Entwickelungsmechanismus der Organismen) contains no mention of such results. =Perverse Birds.= If we now turn to experiments reported by William Craig in the _Journal of Animal Behavior_, we see an apparently different process at work. Young male birds kept for a year in a cage with females and away from all males, will at mating time ignore entirely the females, and offer themselves to males in the mating position of the female. The same process is observable in females brought up with males exclusively. Imitation in this case seems to give exactly the same results which Steinach obtained thru castration and transplantation of gonads. If we now leave the physiologists and consult the psychoanalysts, Freud, Ferenczi, Stekel and Adler will show us that homosexualism can be produced by "purely" psychic factors. =Freud Rejects the Hypothesis of a Third Sex=: "Homosexual men who have started in our times an energetic action against the legal limitations of the sexual activity," Freud writes, "are fond of representing themselves, thru theoretical spokesmen, as evincing a sexual variation, which may be distinguished from the very beginning, as an intermediate stage or sex, a third sex. In other words, they maintain that they are men who are forced by organic determinants originating in the germ to find in a man the pleasure which they cannot find in a woman. As much as one would wish to subscribe to their demands, out of humane considerations, one must nevertheless exercise reserve regarding their theories which were formulated without regard for the psychic genesis of homosexuality. Psychoanalysis offers the means to fill the gap and to put to test the assertions of the homosexuals. It is true that psychoanalysis has fulfilled that task in only a small number of people, but all the investigations thus far undertaken have brought the same surprising results. "In all our male homosexuals, there was a very intense erotic attachment to a feminine person, as a rule to the mother, which was manifested in the very first period of childhood and later entirely forgotten by the individual. This attachment was produced or favored by too much love from the mother herself, but was also furthered by the retirement or absence of the father during the childhood period. Sadger emphasises the fact that the mothers of his homosexual patients were often masculine women, or women with energetic traits of character who were able to crowd out the father from the place allotted to him in the family. I have sometimes observed the same thing, but I was more impressed by those cases in which the father was absent from the beginning or disappeared early so that the boy was altogether under feminine influence." "It almost seems that the presence of a strong father would assure for the son the proper decision in the selection of his love object from the opposite sex. "Following this primary stage, a transformation takes place whose mechanism we know but whose motive forces we have not yet grasped. The love of the mother cannot continue to develop consciously so that it merges into repression. The boy represses his love for the mother by putting himself into her place, by identifying himself with her, and by taking his own person as a model thru the similarity of which he is guided in the selection of his love object. He thus becomes homosexual; as a matter of fact, he returns to the stage of autoerotism, for the boys whom the growing adult now loves are only substitute persons or revivals of his own childish person, whom he loves in the same way as his mother loved him. We say that he finds his love object on the road to narcism, after the Greek legend of Narcissus to whom nothing was more pleasing than his own mirrored image. "Deeper psychological discussions justify the assertion that the person who becomes homosexual in this manner remains fixed in his unconscious on the memory of his mother. By repressing the love for his mother, he conserves the same in his consciousness and henceforth remains faithful to her. When as a lover he seems to pursue boys, he really thus runs away from women who could cause him to be faithless to his mother." =Active and Passive Types.= Ferenczi draws a distinction between the active and the passive types of homosexuals, that is, between the man who, in love acts like a woman, in a submissive way, and the man who loves men as he would women, in an agressive way. "A man who in his love relations with men feels himself to be a woman," he writes, "is inverted in respect to his own ego (homo-erotism thru subject inversion, or, more shortly, subject-homo-erotism). He feels himself to be a woman, and this not only in the love relationship but in all relations of life. "It is quite otherwise with the true active homosexual. He feels himself a man in every respect, is as a rule very energetic and active, and there in nothing effeminate to be discovered in his bodily or mental organisation. The object of his inclination alone is exchanged, so that one might call him homo-erotic thru exchange of the love object, or more shortly, object-homo-erotic. "A further and striking difference between the subjective and the objective homo-erotic consists in the fact that the former (the invert) feels himself attracted by more mature, powerful men, and is on friendly terms, as a colleague, one might say, with women; the second type, on the contrary, is almost exclusively interested in young, delicate boys with an effeminate appearance, but meets a woman with pronounced antipathy, and not rarely with hatred which is badly or not at all concealed. The true invert is hardly ever impelled to seek medical advice, he feels at complete ease in the passive rôle and has no other wish than that people should put up with his peculiarity and not interfere with the kind of satisfaction that suits him. He is not very passionate and chiefly demands from his lover the recognition of his bodily and other merits. "The object-homo-erotic, on the other hand, is uncommonly tormented by the consciousness of his own abnormality; sexual intercourse never completely satisfies him; he is tortured by qualms of conscience and overestimates his sexual object to the uttermost. "The subject-homo-erotic is a member of the intermediate sex, in the sense of Magnus Hirschfeld and his followers. The object-homo-erotic, is the victim of an obsessional neurosis." The distinction between active and passive homosexuals is convenient but slightly arbitrary. Certain homosexuals are at times passive and at times active. Both types become at times the victims of obsessions and seek the help of psychotherapists. Active as well as passive homosexuals may be married and heterosexually potent. =The Homosexual Neurosis.= Dr. Wilhelm Stekel of Vienna calls homosexualism the homosexual neurosis. He summarises the genesis of homosexualism as follows: "As a child the homosexual is very precocious sexually and can only repress his cravings by developing fear, hatred and disgust at the thought of heterosexual relations. The result of that repression is a flight from normal into abnormal forms of sexual gratification." =A Safety Device.= To Adler, homosexualism is a detail of the neurotic picture, a compromise and a safety device. "Every neurotic," he writes, "experiences at some time during his childhood doubts as to whether he will ever attain complete virility. Giving up the hope of being a real man, is, for a child, synonymous with being a woman. This carries in its wake a whole cycle of childish valuations: aggression, activity, power, freedom, wealth, sadism are male attributes; inhibitions, cowardice, obedience, poverty are female attributes. "The child plays for a while a dual part, being submissive to his parents and teachers but indulging in dreams which express his craving for independence, freedom and importance. "This duality in the child's psyche, the forerunner of a split in his consciousness, can have varying results in later years. The individual will oscillate between the male and the female poles with a constant striving toward the unification of those two tendencies. "The masculine component prevents a complete assumption of the feminine rôle, the feminine component is an obstacle to complete virility. Hence a compromise: feminine behavior thru masculine means: a timid submissive male, masculine masochism, homosexuality. Or masculine behavior thru feminine devices." =Above and Below.= A series of comparisons has established itself in the human mind, owing to the enslavement of the female by the male, starting with the antithesis: male-female: good and bad, right and left, HIGH, and LOW, ABOVE and BELOW. In every female neurotic, according to Adler, there is a refusal to be a female, that is, to be BELOW (socially as well as sexually). The female who is inferior in looks or intelligence or position and cannot either compensate for that inferiority by displaying superiority in some other way (artistic or scientific accomplishment), or reconcile herself to her inferior position, wishes consciously and unconsciously to be a man. Consciously she makes herself as masculine as possible. Unconsciously, she dreams herself into a male personality, physically, mentally, socially AND sexually. Her wish to be ABOVE makes her play a man's part in love as well as in the world's life. =A Way Out.= Homosexualism is, like every neurotic symptom, a way out of life's difficulties. A male homosexual I treated associated the idea of woman with "trouble, sickness, expense, lack of freedom." "Every" woman was to him a "leg puller," a "gold digger," a liar, insatiable in her demands, spying on her husband, constantly suffering from "female trouble." This man had never been married and his only sexual experiences, which were of the most ephemeral type, had been gained in the few hours of his life which he spent with a woman much older than himself, a cabaret singer and a prostitute. Yet, he was convinced that "women are too much trouble." An unconsciously homosexual male who is married, and quite potent and who consulted me after a serious "breakdown," had a dream in which he saw himself at the top of a mountain in Africa (flight from reality and his present environment). Six large negroes (powerful male sexuality) carried away his wife's coffin, (flight from the sexual partner). A long line of negroes then walked past him and he felt that as long as he would be on friendly terms with them, he would not want for anything (line of least effort). Female homosexuals who had never had any normal heterosexual experience ranted along the same line of thought: "A husband is too much trouble." "The idea of submitting to a brute of a man," "I don't wish to be a slave to a man," etc. All this voices what Adler terms the "masculine protest." =The Escape from Biological Duties.= Kempf also considers homosexualism as a compromise and a convenient escape from biological duties. "Heterosexual potency," he writes "judging from the behavior of many psychopaths and normals of both sexes, varies in its vigor and is never quite secure from the possibility of disintegration in the face of depressing influences, such as disease, a frigid, unkind, terrifying, neurotic or disgusting mate, hopeless economic burdens, fear of pregnancy, or venereal diseases, social scandals, an inaccessible or unresponsive love-object, death of the mate or a too fixed mother-attachment. The intrigues and usurpations of power by the family of the mate, suppressing the idealised wishes of the individual, often cause the regression to the lower level of homo-sexuality, where, at least, parental sacrifices need not be made." CHAPTER XVIII HOMOSEXUALISM, A NEUROTIC SYMPTOM The varying views as to the genesis of homosexualism, which I have attempted to summarise in the preceding chapter, can be easily reconciled. Doubts as to one's "completeness" and a craving for safety may, even at an early age, cause the gonads to remain undeveloped or to develop in the wrong direction. Craig's pigeons were as completely "perverted" by the wrong environment as Steinach's rats by surgical operations. Hirschfeld's intermediate sex, in its concealed forms, that is, when the individual, upon gross examination, appears normal, may well be produced by the environment. Freud's Oedipus situation is not incompatible with Adler's theory of the neurotic constitution. Gonads are not different from any other glands. Thyroid involvement may produce fear or, at least, a picture of fear (exophthalmic goitre), but fear also produces many forms of thyroid involvement (goitre and exophthalmic goitre were alarmingly frequent in French towns submitted to bombardment during the world war). A study of psychic impotence in men and frigidity in women has proved that impotence was mainly a refusal to be a potent man, frigidity a refusal to be woman in intercourse. In certain cases, exaggerated cravings for impotence or frigidity may modify the gonads so completely that they present the condition Hirschfeld has called typical of the intermediate sex. Homosexualism can be best understood when viewed as a neurotic phenomenon, not as a neurosis in itself, but as a detail of the neurotic attitude to life outlined by Adler. Homosexualism is, in its last analysis, an organic striving away from life's normal goals. =A Denial of Life.= Homosexualism cannot be understood unless we associate it with a denial of life and all its duties. Nor could love be understood if we tried to dissociate it from its primary sexual goal which is the acceptance of life with its duties, symbolised by the procreation of life and the creation of new duties by the individual, duties which he considers as a source of joy. =Homosexualism Is Love, Negative Love=, quite as involuntary and as obsessive as normal, heterosexual, positive love. A homosexual teacher wrote to Plazek: "A glance at the literature and art produced by homosexuals as well as insight into actual conditions, reveals that abnormal love can conjure up the same emotional display as normal love. Longing, faithfulness, devotion, self sacrifice, blossom forth in abnormal love as well as in normal love. "In both, complete communion may be the goal and climax of feelings which are perhaps among the deepest and finest which mankind can experience." =Their Love Letters.= The absolute similarity of heterosexual and homosexual love in their written expression can be judged by perusing the sonnets which Michael Angelo wrote to young Tommaso dei Cavalieri and which could very well have been addressed to a woman. A sober scientist like Winckelman was carried away by his homosexual love for Frederick von Berg to the point of writing the following epistle which might emanate from a lovelorn highschool boy: "All the names I might call you are not sweet enough and do not do justice to my love. All the things I might say to you sound too weak to give voice to my heart and my soul. I love you, my dearest, more than the whole world and neither time nor circumstances nor age could ever cause my love to diminish." =Deeds of Violence.= Homosexual love has led to as many deeds of violence on the part of disappointed lovers as heterosexual love. The papers frequently publish without comments stories of the shooting of a woman by another woman, caused by the fact that the victim was "too attentive to another woman." Psychiatrists who can read between the lines recognise in those murders the result of homosexual jealousy and infidelity. In that respect the behavior of the two sexes seems slightly different. "It is well known," remarks Havelock Ellis, "that the part taken by women generally in open criminality, and especially in crimes of violence, is small as compared with men. In the homosexual the conditions are to some extent reversed. Inverted men, in whom a more or less feminine temperament is so often found, are rarely impelled to acts of aggressive violence, though they frequently commit suicide. Inverted women, who may retain their feminine emotionality combined with some degree of infantile impulsiveness and masculine energy, present a favorable soil for the seeds of passional crime, under those conditions of jealousy and allied emotions which must so often enter the invert's life." =A Homosexual Tragedy.= In a recent case in Chicago a homosexual woman shot her former roommate and then seriously wounded herself. They had roomed together and last fall the victim broke off the life together because the invert "was too affectionate." The victim went to her parents' house in the South to get rid of the invert. On her return to Chicago two months later she was bothered by the invert who insisted that she room with her. On April 22d she received a letter from the invert containing a bullet and a threat. Alarmed, she had the invert arrested, but the invert was discharged on promise she would not annoy the girl. The invert had a number of swagger sticks, one of which she carried each day. There is no account of her masculinity of attire. She wrote poems to her victim and made her presents including a diamond ring and a diamond studded watch, all of which were returned. There had been several threats of killing the victim, before the letter came, if she ended the friendship. =Women More Homosexual than Men.= Remembering how the mother's fetishes affect us in the choice of a sexual mate we may expect to find more homosexualism in woman than in man. The facts bear up our theory. While the gross forms of homosexualism are less frequent among women, a thousand mild forms of it are observable in the behavior of even apparently very normal women. The sentimental attachments of school girls for certain teachers, the pleasure which they derive from spending nights with some friend on whom they have a "crush," the thousand and one bodily caresses female friends shower on each other, the curiosity they manifest about each other's physical condition, their frequent bed room or bathroom conferences, are manifestations of a mild homosexualism, which, however, do not always lead to overt acts. =Boastfulness.= Many homosexuals compensate for the scorn meted out to them by normal individuals with a certain proud boastfulness. "We are supermen," one hears them say when they find a sympathetic listener, "we have reached beyond the usual, boresome, bourgeois form of gratification. Our intellect is nauseated by woman's silliness." And the females say in their turn: "We are super-women, we have conquered the fear of man and we are tired of man's boorish ways." Some of the male homosexuals who are bisexual, that is, can also be attracted by women, pride themselves over the mentality of the women they love. "Men have accustomed us to a higher intellectual level and to a more intelligent form of conversation," a homosexual said to me. This is naturally a defence mechanism. By demanding extremely high qualification from the women, homosexuals have a ready excuse for consorting with men exclusively. =Famous Homosexuals.= Homosexuals are fond of mentioning all the men famous in art and letters whose sexual life was inverted: the Greek philosophers, poets and playwrights of the classic age, Julius Cæsar, Alexander the Great, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Frederick of Prussia, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche, etc. =The Nietzsche-Wagner Feud= should be rewritten from a psychiatrist's point of view. Wagner was to young Nietzsche an attractive, heroic, father-image. The philosopher never had any real affair of the heart with a woman. He only indulged in very ephemeral relationships which, by their disastrous results, drove him further away from women. (Dr. W. H. White of Washington received the assurance while in Europe that Nietzsche died of syphilis.) Nietzsche made himself obnoxious to Wagner by trying to be his press agent. As Wagner, however, a shrewd business man in his old days, objected to Nietzsche's agnosticism and to his friendship with certain Jews, Nietzsche, disappointed in his love, abandoned Wagner and hated him fiercely. He attacked him on every occasion, his hatred being made the fiercer by the fact that he himself considered himself as a greater composer, one line in Nietzsche's letters throws a strange light upon the poor paretic's feelings. Wagner's "feminine traits" he wrote, finally disgusted him. =Shall Perverse Love Be Recognized?= Efforts are being made in various directions at the present day to have homosexual love legally recognised and given perfect equality with heterosexual love. In Germany, a number of writers, Von Kupfer, Friedlander and others have boldly championed that futile attempt. A cinema film was produced last year (1921) in Berlin depicting the plight of the homosexual who is unable to control his cravings and falls a victim to the wiles of a blackmailer. Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld agreed to impersonate in that production the scientist who attempts to enlighten the public as to the nature of homosexualism, so as to bring about a modification of the statute punishing perverts. =Man's Emancipation.= In 1900, Elizar von Kupfer called upon the men to proclaim their "independence" from women. "The man who lives in bondage to women," he wrote, "and who humors her whims, has lost his manhood. Since woman is emancipating herself, why should not men follow the same road?" Illogically enough, Von Kupfer defends the mothers and wives, "flowers who should not be rooted out of the garden of love." In Schopenhauer's silly outbursts against woman, however, Von Kupfer sees "a test of manhood revolting against man's humiliation" and he adds that "it is only from the closest relation of man to man, adolescent to man, and adolescent to adolescent, that government and civilisation will derive real power." Blüher considers homosexualism as an "essential human trait which must be granted an outlet with certain restrictions (setting the age of consent at fourteen and forbidding the use of violence)." Benedikt Friedlander, in his "Renaissance des Eros Uranios" suggests "bringing ancient and modern culture into harmony with each other by reviving the Greek Eros and overthrowing the monopoly which woman has, of being loved and beautiful." Removing the legal penalties which punish overt homosexual acts is one thing. Recognising homosexualism is an entirely different proposition. Punishing a typhoid fever patient would be absurd, but typhoid fever sufferers should not be allowed to remain at large without treatment. Homosexualism is a neurotic trait which should be eradicated, if possible, by analytic treatment. Hopeless cases, on the other hand should be protected against their instincts by a form of confinement which would be neither punitive nor more humiliating than the confinement imposed upon sufferers from contagious diseases. =Homosexualism and the War.= Homosexualism has been on the increase since the war. Stekel reports many gruesome cases of husbands who, until they went to the barracks and the trenches, where their unconscious homosexualism found an unusual stimulation, were normal in their attitude to their wives, and who returned after the armistice absolutely inverted and unable to give or receive normal gratification. The bobbed hair craze has many good excuses. Bobbed hair is kept tidy more easily than long tresses and can be dried quicker after a shampoo. At the same time, when we consider that the boyish type of women became fashionable about the same time when short hair did, and that soon after the war, advertising boards were covered with the praise of devices enabling women to conceal their natural curves, we must consider both fashions as symptomatic of an increase in homosexualism. We might also mention another fashion detail: while dressmakers were trying their best to obliterate their customers breasts, they would bare entirely their backs. Anyone familiar with the symbolism and dreams of homosexuals will understand the import of that style of dresses. =Is Homosexualism Necessary?= Dr. Otto Gross, without openly countenancing homosexualism, holds that a certain proportion of it is necessary in man's makeup for a mutual understanding of both sexes. "We can only understand," he writes, "what we have experienced. Unless a man has a decided feminine trend, he is not likely to understand a woman, or to live with her harmoniously and vice versa." A consideration of the purely physical side of love lends a slight plausibility to that view. Unless a man can clearly imagine love's pleasure as experienced by a woman, he may not be able to vouchsafe her complete gratification. The progress of civilisation certainly demands that men become less masculine (translate: boorish) and women less feminine (meaning: silly). We could not tolerate, however, what Friedländer called a Renaissance of Eros Uranios, leading to the conditions which obtained in Greece where men, while consorting with other men, were also potent with women. No parallel can be drawn between Greek culture and modern culture. Hellenic culture was decidedly masculine, women being solely tools of lust, or beasts of burden, or means of proliferation. As I will show in another chapter, one really modern woman can give to the modern man what Demosthenes sought in three kinds of women, a prostitute, a concubine and a wife, not to count a male mistress. =What is Really Needed= is a better understanding of homosexualism by the public and by the homosexuals. After which, homosexuals, no longer despised and punished for their obsessive cravings, and no longer proud of their condition, will be given sympathy and treatment, voluntary or compulsory. Psychoanalysts will remove their complexes and lead them toward a positive goal; surgeons, performing on them some of Steinach's operations, may raise their heterosexual potency to the point at which no doubt will obsess them any longer. Those things will avail little, however, until parents watch their offspring carefully to discover in them the first symptoms of a homosexual trend and adopt ways and means to prevent the growth of the neurosis. We may for convenience quote Hirschfeld's description of the homosexual child, a very superficial one, indeed, sufficient, however, to cause the average parent to seek psychological and medical advice before it is too late and before mental and physical habits have compromised, perhaps hopelessly, the love life of their children. "The homosexual boy prefers girls' games, shuns boys' games, is girlish in disposition and behavior, if not in appearance. People often say that he is like a girl. He is happy in the company of girls. He has a psychic fixation on his mother. He is reserved and embarrassed before other boys. He often becomes unduly attached to a male teacher or a schoolmate. "The homosexual girl prefers boys' games, does not care for sewing or other feminine occupations, is boyish in her disposition, her motions, often in her appearance. People call her a tomboy. She likes to romp with boys. She is overattached to her father. She shows embarrassment in the presence of other girls. She often falls madly in love with a female teacher or some older woman." CHAPTER XIX CRUELTY AND LOVE. SADISM In normal individuals the idea of love is inseparably associated with tenderness, caressing gestures, words or glances, readiness on the part of either mate to go to extremes in order to enhance the loved one's enjoyment of the amorous relationship, or to protect him against all dangers or suffering. In normal individuals, love and suffering are antithetic terms, love meaning joy and pleasure, (sexual and egotistical), suffering being only conceivable when the craving for love is ungratified, when the lonely lovers are parted by life, when one of them has been robbed by death of his mate, etc. =Algolagnists.= There are abnormal human beings, however, known technically as algolagnists (from algos, pain, and lagneia, enjoyment), who cannot imagine or enjoy love when it is entirely dissociated from some form of suffering. The active algolagnists must inflict some pain, physical or mental, upon their mate in order to enjoy the pleasures of love to their full extent. The passive algolagnists only attain the highest degree of amorous satisfaction when they are submitted by their mate to painful or humiliating treatment. Active algolagnists are known more commonly as "sadists," an expression created by Moreau de Tours. Krafft-Ebing, the most famous writer on sexual perversions coined for passive algolagnists the expression "masochists." The word sadist is derived from the name of Marquis de Sade, a French pervert of the eighteenth century, whose life and writings well illustrate the form of love which is constantly associated with acts of cruelty. =Donatien Alphonse François de Sade= was born in Paris, June 2 1740, the offspring of an aristocratic family of Provence. Among his ancestors was the Laura of Petrarca's sonnets. At fourteen, he joined a cavalry regiment. He went thru the Seven Years War during which he witnessed the most ruthless atrocities. On his return, at the age of twenty-seven, he married, but soon after his marriage was arrested for some deed of cruelty committed in a house of prostitution. His father's death left him heir to an important government position but his life of excesses gave him little time to attend to his duties. At twenty-eight, he attracted much attention by a scandal in which he played a prominent part. He lured a shopkeeper's wife, Rose Keller to a house in the suburbs of the French capital where he used to hold revels. Threatening the woman with a pistol, he bound her hands and feet and whipped her to the blood. The next morning, Rose Keller managed to free herself, jumped out of the window and summoned help. De Sade was arrested but the affair was soon hushed up by powerful friends at the court of Louis the Fifteenth. That incident is characteristic of sadism in love's relations. His victim's sufferings supplied De Sade with the artificial stimulation which normal desire would produce in a normal man. Soon after this, De Sade eloped to Italy with his wife's sister. On his way to Italy, he stopped in Marseille and organized an orgy in the course of which he gorged his guests with candy containing some poisonous aphrodisiac drug. Two of them died. This time, a court rendered a death sentence against the murderous pervert, who eluded the police for a time and was finally confined in the fortress of Vincennes for thirteen years. It was said at the time that a woman had been found in a house where he indulged in all sorts of debauches, unconscious and bleeding from a hundred scalpel wounds which had severed many veins. De Sade devoted his enforced leisure to writing. His published works fill up ten volumes. They contain a description of the most atrocious sexual cruelties. The author makes a childish attempt at establishing a "satanic" morality based on the fact that "virtue is always punished by the world and vice always rewarded." His atheism is no more than a satanic ritual. De Sade's literary output, which is devoid of any artistic merit and is only of interest to the student of abnormal psychology, bears the stamp of hopeless intellectual inferiority trying to justify itself by representing the entire world as a combination of a brothel and a torture chamber and mankind as a herd of blood-thirsty and sex-crazed lunatics. A sinister autobiography and wish fulfilment. The revolutionists of 1789 who opened the doors of all jails and insane asylums gave De Sade his freedom on July 14. He sided politically with his deliverers but after a while, became suspicious to them and again spent one year in prison (1793-1794). =What Bonaparte Thought of Him.= De Sade, who had been very liberal in presenting free copies of his obscene novels to men prominent in the days of the Revolution and the Terror, made the mistake of sending a set of his works to Bonaparte. The Corsican caused the entire edition to be suppressed and diagnosed the author very accurately as a murderous pervert, unfit to be at large. De Sade was committed to an insane asylum where he remained until his death on December 2, 1814. Sadism is a morbid phenomenon which remained mysterious until recently, when the experimental work of physiologists like Cannon, Sherrington and others, revealed to us the close connection existing between mental states, muscular tensions and the secretions of ductless glands of the body. Adler's "individual psychology" also has thrown much light upon many morbid actions which are simply attempts at compensation for a feeling of inferiority. The neurotic, briefly speaking, feels inferior, that is, afraid of some imaginary danger. He casts about for something which can be done quickly, simply, with the least effort, and which will restore his peace and safety by filling him, were it only temporarily, with a sense of actual or imaginary superiority. =Glandular Drunkenness.= Wulffen suggests an interpretation of sadism which is ingenious but unconvincing. He considers every act of violence as provoked by the faulty functioning of some glands. He compares the effect of the gonadal hormones (one of the secretions of the sex glands issuing from the interstitial cells) with that of alcohol. Alcohol destroys the inhibitions and allows unconscious cravings of an inacceptable sort to express themselves thru overt acts. The drunken man loses all shame and all fear, becomes boisterous and, at times, murderous. Likewise, Wulffen says, oversecretion of the gonadal hormones creates a sort of sexual drunkenness in the course of which the individual is forced into violent or cruel behavior. This would be acceptable if all the sadists were strong healthy specimens of manhood and womanhood. Most of them, on the contrary, show plainly signs of glandular insufficiency. Wulffen's thesis is not confirmed as some writers assume by a study of the mating habits of many animals. Cocks during the act of mating peck cruelly the back of the hen's head. Tomcats bite the necks of their mates. Toads, at times, choke the female to death in their clinging embrace. In those acts of animal "cruelty" there is probably another element to be considered. The tomcat, digging his teeth into the female cat's neck, may not so much relieve his sadistic impulses as produce in his mate some welcome sensation of pleasurable pain. We know how willingly the most rebellious cats allow any one to grab them by the backs of their necks, making no effort at freeing themselves and apparently enjoying that partial strangulation. (Remember the aphrodisiac influence of hanging.) =Atavism.= Eulenburg considers that sadism is an atavistic trait. "Not only animals," he says, "but primitive races associate mating with violence." The caveman is supposed to have beaten the female he captured into insensibility before dragging her to his cave. We do not know, however, whether it was THE caveman or SOME cavemen who indulged in that practice, the existence of which may be merely a subject for speculation. It goes without saying that whenever females were carried off by victorious tribes after armed conflicts the "wooing" of the captives must have been synonymous with violence and rape. Old documents offer many examples of the combination of love and violence. There is the old legend of Griseldis in which a sadistic man tested in the cruellest way the woman who was to be his life mate. The epic poem Gudrun recites one of the prehistoric struggles between male and female. The unfortunate male in this case is overpowered by the Nordic Valkyrie who binds him with her girdle and keeps him lashed to the wall till morning. The modern honeymoon trip is undoubtedly a survival of the primeval habit of carrying off the bride. =Primitive Religions= constantly associate sadism with love. In fact the Goddess of Love, in the Greek mythology, owed her existence to an act of sadism. Kronos' male organ, cut off by his Zeus, fell into the sea, fertilized it, and Aphrodite was born. Many primitive gods demanded the sacrifice of virgins, primitive goddesses decapitated or castrated men with whom at times they consorted. The priests and priestesses of certain religions could only please their gods by submitting to sexual indignities, the priestesses of Cybelea prostituting themselves to every one, the priests castrating themselves. Some of those acts of violence, however, must be considered from an entirely different point of view. =In Primitive Races= real achievement was always associated with violence. The "real man" was the victorious fighter and killer. Even in Roman days, gladiator duels terminated with the death of the defeated man, unless he were a popular ring idol whom the mob saved for further encounters. The robber, designated by more flattering names, of course, gained more glory by stealing goods or gold than the merchant who, in ways more socially acceptable, accumulated goods and gold. Civilisation has changed those things. In neurotic states, however, we always observe a return to archaic modes of action which are more direct. We nowadays kill off a competitor thru advertising. Instead of levying tribute on the defeated rival, we compel him to sell out to us at our price, etc. The neurotic kills or steals, as archaic heroes did. =Animal Love Fights.= Also, as far as animals are concerned, the more or less playful fights with which they prelude their mating is not, as Wulffen suggests, due to gonadal drunkenness. On the contrary, it is meant to produce a stronger outpouring of gonadal secretions in both male and female, thereby increasing the energy of the male and assuring the pregnancy of the female. Fights preceding animal mating increase, among other things, the secretions of the adrenal cortex which impart to all the muscles (among them the sexual muscles) a considerable tension. Let us bear in mind that physiological detail while interpreting the fact that many neurotics are only potent sexually with women who resist them. We see how a certain amount of struggle, producing perhaps slight anger (and possibly leading to acts of violence), would strengthen the sexual faculties of the weak neurotic and enable him to possess his mate. From that type of neurotic, who requires glandular excitement of the adrenal type, to the sadist, typified by the famous Marquis, and up to the Ripper who disembowels his victims we see merely a series of gradations in glandular insufficiency, not as Wulffen said, in glandular hyper-secretion. =A Neurotic Trait.= Furthermore, sadism should not be considered as a phenomenon of purely sexual character. Sadism is merely a detail of the neurotic make up. It is one of the neurotic short cuts whereby an inferior individual acquires a temporary superiority. The section foreman who takes pleasure in driving his men at a killing pace, the detective engaged daily in the task of man hunting, the so-called "strict" parent who beats his children, the surgeon who never tires of performing operations, the futile reformer who is constantly trying to deprive some one of some form of enjoyment, the jealous husband who deprives his wife of many pleasures, the jealous wife who relishes the thought that her husband is giving up his club or his former associates for her sake, are sadists, some of them partly normal and useful, some of them morbid or ridiculous. =The Mob.= Sadism is one of the great "mob characteristics." Why do we run to fires and to the scene of an accident? To help? No. To enjoy the sight of some one's life or property being destroyed. If our impulses were humane or charitable we should be relieved, nay exultant, when we learn that the conflagration has only destroyed a curtain or a shade, when we see the man bowled over by a taxi getting up and walking away, little the worse for the experience. Notice on the contrary the indignation of the average man when the fire "does not amount to anything", when the "victim" of an accident escapes unharmed. =Is the Male More Cruel?= It has been said that sadism was a masculine trait, masochism a feminine characteristic. Like the majority of generalisations on the subject of sex differences, it is inaccurate. Man, the hunter, is more aggressive in love, but his aggressiveness need not include cruelty. His strength, in modern life, is put to quite a different use, to protect the weaker female, not to overwhelm her. Woman is supposed to be more submissive but mythology, legend and history present to us thousands of cases in which the female of the human species betrayed many sadistic instincts, not infrequently associated with her love activities. Even in the animal world, while we behold males apparently submitting the female to much suffering, we find not a few cases, for instance in the insect world, of females killing or even devouring their mate immediately after the love communion. CHAPTER XX LOVE THAT CRAVES SUFFERING. MASOCHISM The man whom Krafft-Ebing selected as the typical masochist, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, was born in Lemberg, January 27, 1836. He was extremely frail in infancy and childhood. He compensated for his physical inferiority thru unusual mental activity, for at the age of nineteen he won his degree of doctor of law. At twenty he was appointed instructor in German history at an university. At the age of twenty-five he was the author of several books of history. He then turned to fiction, first of the historical and then of the purely psychological type. A morbid tendency was observable in his very first books, a tendency which became more and more marked and which led him to write almost exclusively descriptions of perverse love entanglements. He showed a decided preference for delineating cruel, mannish types of women and incredibly weak types of men. As in the case of Marquis de Sade, we observe here a strange parallelism between the man's writings and his own biography. Sacher-Masoch's first love was a woman much older than himself, Anna von Kattowitz, who for four years humiliated, insulted and victimised him in every possible way, finally running away with a Russian adventurer. Then he met Princess Bogdanoff for whom he abandoned temporarily his professional and literary ambitions. She took him to Italy where he was compelled to serve her as a secretary and valet. He enjoyed the relationship, but the princess soon tired of him. His next liaison was with Baroness Fanny Pistor, with whom he had his picture taken once in the following position: she seated on a sofa and clad in furs, he kneeling at her feet on the floor. Then came Baroness Reizenstein, whom he could not love very long for she refused to satisfy his morbid craving for physical torture and humiliating treatment and, besides, was homosexual. Then he became engaged to a young artist, Miss Bauerfeld, of Graz. Soon after, however, he met an ugly, mannish hysterical person, Vanda Dunayef, who gratified better his perverse leanings and compelled him to break his engagement. A child was born of their union and in 1873 they were married. They traveled from town to town, apparently unable to find peace anywhere, and she finally left him to elope with a reporter from the Paris Figaro. Sacher-Masoch secured a divorce and married again, this time a motherly type of woman, Hulda Meister, retired with her to the small village of Lindheim and died there on March 9, 1895. A few incidents of his life describe well his perversion. =Love of the Whip.= Once, according to Havelock Ellis, in the course of an innocent romp in which the whole household took part, Sacher-Masoch asked his wife to whip him. She refused. Then he suggested the maid should do it. His wife did not take this seriously, but he had the servant whip him to his full enjoyment. When his wife urged that it would not be possible to keep the maid after this, Sacher-Masoch agreed and she was discharged. He constantly found pleasure in placing his wife in awkward or compromising circumstances, a pleasure she was too normal to share. This led to much domestic unhappiness. Against her wish he persuaded her to whip him with whips to which nails were attached. This he claimed was a literary stimulus. Dr. Eulenburg tells of a young woman with whom Sacher-Masoch corresponded for a while and to whom he wrote that "his greatest joy would be to be whipped by a woman." Later on, Sacher-Masoch met her in Vienna and asked her to don a fur coat and to whip him. She however, pretended to treat the matter as a joke, and dismissed him. His numerous books of fiction present over and over again the same theme: the domineering woman, "clad in furs," who tortures a weak helpless man. We behold in Sacher-Masoch a clear case of physical weakness and glandular insufficiency. His endocrines, in particular his adrenals and gonads, required the actual stimulation of pain (whipping) before they could react properly to a sexual stimulus. It is a curious coincidence that among all forms of stimulation used to accelerate the gait of beasts of burden or draft horses, the whip is the most commonly used the world over and that, on the other hand, perverts of the masochist type have, the world over and at every age of history, more frequently resorted to the whip to torture themselves than to any other means of physical punishment. =The Masochist is Like a Weak or Tired Horse.= Why does whipping make a horse go faster? Not merely on account of the fear or pain which the beast experiences, but because that fear and pain MAKE HIM STRONGER. The adrenalin liberated by the fear-and-pain-producting stimulus stiffens every muscle in his body and his strength is doubled. This is why frightened animals or insane people in a panic can perform feats of strength of which they would be absolutely incapable in a normal state. Masochism is much more, however, than an organic attempt at compensating for glandular inferiority and acquiring in a morbid way increased sexual potency. It is a neurotic expedient whereby an inferior man or woman compensates for his or her weakness thru more weakness. By belittling themselves, by disparaging their own ability, masochist lovers can take advantage of their mate, let him bear all responsibilities. =Shoe Fetishism.= We understand from that point of view the meaning of the shoe fetishism which Krafft-Ebing has noticed in male masochists. In fact Hirschfeld states that every male shoe fetish is a masochist. To the masochist, the shoe, especially the high buttoned shoe, is symbolical of woman's power, of her ruthless cruelty. He sees himself trod on by that shoe, he imagines that shoe pressing on his neck, pinning his head to the ground. Curiously enough, long gloves seem to arouse the same ideas in the mind of the male masochist. Both shoes and gloves are found in the dreams or visions of neurotics, symbolizing the female organs. A masochist wrote once: "The gloved hand of a woman, altho like her foot, smaller and prettier than a man's, can wield the whip powerfully over her slave whose greatest joy consists then in kissing his mistress's shoes while submitting to that punishment." =Craving for Humiliation.= The masochist welcomes every form of humiliation and not infrequently derives great pride from his "patience," "tolerance," "self-sacrifice," "martyrlike resignation" etc. Like Sacher-Masoch himself, some men, husbands or lovers, (pimps, cadets, etc.) have been known to enjoy the sight of their wife or mistress in another man's arms. Hirschfeld was consulted by a woman whose husband compelled her at frequent intervals to have relations with a man in his own house. He would invite a business associate for dinner and then leave his wife to explain that he had been suddenly called out of town. The guest and his wife would dine together. Wine would flow freely and she would coquettishly goad the man into making advances to her. Concealed in the next room, the husband would watch thru a peep hole the proceedings which ended with a passionate scene. It was only after beholding that humiliating sight that the masochistic husband could enjoy his wife's embraces. A man who consulted me confessed to me that he was absolutely impotent with his own wife or with any unmarried woman. It was only with married women that he felt perfectly virile. The thought of his mistress in her husband's arms was the only thing that could arouse him physically. Many neurotics of the masochistic type have dreams of being school children punished by a masculine female teacher. Those dreams, be they night or day dreams, are always associated with erotic thoughts. Remember Jean Jacques Rousseau enjoying viciously the spankings which mademoiselle Lambercier gave him when a child. Masochists, male or female, are often very anxious to perform menial or disgusting tasks for the person they love, thus placing themselves in a subordinate, protected, position and at the same time, claiming a great deal of credit for their devotion. =Masochistic Fancies.= The male masochist, eager to place himself in the position of safety toward his mate, not infrequently imagines himself to be an animal and asks to be treated as such. Greek antiquity has bequeathed to us the story of Aristotle the philosopher, allowing a prostitute to ride on his back, whipping him like a horse, while he would crawl about on all fours. Medical literature contains many descriptions of establishments where male masochists are submitted to voluntary torture thru various appliances. The ascetics who in the Middle Ages whipped themselves, wore hair cloth studded with sharp nails, etc., to manifest their love to God or the Virgin, the Russian Skooptsy who mutilate themselves to please God, are religious examplaries of masochistic love. The Christian ideal of suffering and renunciation as a means of conquering everlasting happiness is also purely masochistic. Suffering, be it physical or mental (remorse), assures to them in the end, well-being (glandular well-being) and enables them to reach Heaven (will-to-be-above). =Are Women Masochistic?= I denied in the preceding chapter the frequently heard assertion that sadism in a typically masculine trait. I would deny quite as emphatically that masochism is peculiarly feminine, a view held by many sadists, as an attempted justification of their cruel perversion. Oscar Wilde, a bisexual, stated once that of all the masculine traits it was cruelty which women appreciated most. To his morbid mind cruelty meant power. It is power of course which woman, disabled several times in her life by pregnancy and lactation, seeks in the man with whom she mates. He must be a good fighter and a good hunter, not, however, merely to capture her and brutalise her, but on the contrary, to protect her and feed her. The sadist Kurnberger in his novel, "The Castle of Horrors" also bids us believe that man's greatest victory, appreciated as such by woman, consists in making a woman suffer, in bringing tears to her eyes, in outtalking and outwitting her, "a victory compared to which," he says, "Marengo and Austerlitz look like thirty cents." And the sadistic Nietzsche puts in the mouth of an old woman in his "Zarathustra" the following statement: "when you go to women, don't forget to take your whip." Other sadists remind us of the Russian woman's wail that her husband's love must be cooling off, because he hasn't beaten her in an age. Barring a number of exceptions, the fact remains that masochism in women is as abnormal as masochism in men, or sadism in men or women. =Women Who Enjoy a Beating.= There are women who enjoy unconsciously being beaten by their husbands, much as they may resent the outrage consciously. They are in every case hypothyroid and hypoadrenal types in whom the distribution of energy and the emergency production of energy are very subnormal. Nothing but a violent stimulus, physical or mental, whipping or insult, can make them feel strong and active. The dreams of those women, like those of masochistic men, are often of the nightmarish type. They suffer in their night visions all sorts of torture. Analysis brings out the fact that every detail of those dreams is associated with energy, achievement, etc. De Sade's wife belonged evidently to the masochistic type. She remained faithful to him to the end in spite of his perverse life, his prison record and the fact that he deceived her with her own sister. Her life of sorrow must have vouchsafed her, after all, a good many masochistic compensations of the neurotic variety. =Famous Women Sadists.= As against the assumption that "all" women are masochists, we may mention many famous women sadists, several Byzantine and Roman Empresses, Frankish queens, two Russian empresses, the treatment meted out by women to Theroigne de Méricourt, tortured publicly by the Jacobine women in 1793, not to mention legendary characters like the Amazons and mythological goddesses who killed or tortured their lovers. Sadism and masochism in love are pathological disturbances due to a neurotic attempt on the part of an inferior individual to dominate the sexual partner thru violence or weakness, and to assure himself against defeat in the sexual relationship. =The Freudian Suggestion= that the sadist identifies himself with the powerful and apparently, brutal father, the masochist identifying himself with the weaker and submissive mother, applies to a too restricted number of cases to be of positive help in understanding the nature of those two perversions. Even when that explanation seems to fit the case, we must, nevertheless, fall back upon the Adlerian view of the neurotic temperament in order to understand why a child decides to identify himself with one parent instead of the other. CHAPTER XXI WHAT LOVE OWES TO SADISTS AND MASOCHISTS Love that inflicts suffering and love which craves suffering are travesties on love, for normal love gives joy and craves joy. Yet, it may be that a too perfect adaption, one vouchsafing constantly to the mates the security they seek in each other's arms would soon pall on them. They might not remain attached to each other any longer than the animals who, in the majority of species, part as soon as they have fulfilled their biological mission. A perfectly normal couple might die of boredom. What makes animals, when they have not been slightly perverted by contact with human beings, so uninteresting, is their absolute normality. A very slight touch of "perversion" in at least one of the mates, seems necessary if the novelty of the relationship is not to wear off too soon. Maybe I should not say perversion, but perverseness. The normal husband who would die rather than hurt his life mate cannot compete with the romantic, lover, a little mysterious, unreliable, suspected of flirting with other women, who "keeps a woman guessing," pretends at times to be indifferent and has to be won over and over again. The normal husband whose affection is taken for granted and who always says the proper thing at the proper time, remembers all anniversaries and celebrates them officially, pales in comparison with a tender, masochistic lover, whom every unkind gesture seems to wound deeply, whose affection is tinged with a melancholy longing, who treasures little sentimental memories which his earnestness makes at times rather poignant. =The Sadistic Lover= carries a woman off her feet by the daredevil things he may indulge in when away from her. The masochist touches deeply the motherly chord in her by the acts of kindness and devotion he may perform for others, by his charitable or professional activities. =The Vamp.= How much the world, especially the world of art, owes to the slightly sadistic, "vampish" woman, who, if she is endowed with much physical beauty sets, a little cruelly, all the males competing for her favors. How many flaming poems of passion, what priceless canvasses, statutes and monuments has she conjured up out of her admirers' minds. Even the perverse female beasts of the Italian Renaissance made love infinitely romantic. On the other hand, what worshipful tenderness meets even the memory of the patient Aude who silently closed her eyes and died when Roland was brought home dead, of Solvejg, waiting with saintly resignation for the return of the rover Peer Gynt. Of course the sadistic braggart earns much hatred and the whimpering masochistic male much scorn. The sadistic vamp gets shot by jealous lovers and the clinging masochistic vine is called a pest. To the lovers who are not unbearably normal and whose slight pituitary instability causes them to do and say the unexpected, love owes its poetry, the love life its charm and its inspirational power. All other things being equal, when a slightly sadistic male, seeking as his mate the image of a pliant mother, meets a slightly masochistic female who seeks the image of the powerful, domineering father, there are many chances that the match will, for a long period of time, retain its original qualities. The sadistic female, on the other hand soon emasculates the masochistic male. Sadistic mates and masochistic mates land in the divorce court, the former throwing at each other charges of cruelty, the latter, for unfaithfulness of one or both mates, who seek in adultery relief from the monotony of their too peaceful existence. CHAPTER XXII LOVE AMONG THE ARTISTS Frequent are the divorces in the artistic world. Platitudinous moralisers explain that fact with the stupid statement that the morals of the stage are "loose." Like the Freudians, they always seek in sex the origin of every disturbance in human life. Sex in the life of an artist, however, plays an infinitely less important part than egotism, the desire to be above. The so-called normal man, who works, eats, sleeps, reproduces himself, and, at his death leaves the world exactly as he found it is probably subnormal. He differs very little from the animals who do exactly the same things in the same way and seem perfectly pleased with the endless repetition of an immutable life ritual. =Dissatisfaction= is really the element which we must consider when we try to draw a line of cleavage between men and the animals. Dissatisfaction breeds either neurosis or creation. The dissatisfied person, devoid of intellectual resources, either commits a crime or kills himself or goes off into another world thru the door that leads into insanity. The dissatisfied person gifted with powers of self-expression, makes the world in which he lives better, more beautiful or more comfortable. That sort of achievement presupposes a certain amount of healthy sadism, the courage to criticise, to offer suggestions, to force the products of one's mind upon the community, to say "look at me, I am perfect or, at least, better than you." Every budding actor assumes unconsciously that he can delineate a rôle better than the other histrionic lights of his time; every new novelist must assume that he can tell a story more attractively than his readers could picture it to themselves, etc., etc. The artist who is willing to yield, soon relapses into the ranks of the business men. Whoever panders to the popular taste of his time may derive therefrom financial advantages but very little egotistical gratification. The real artist must know that he is right and must not be, therefore, soft clay to be moulded by any one else's desires. How then could the artist obtain lasting happiness from any form of love relationship? =The Male Artist=, if married to a submissive, masochistic wife, may live happily with her for a time. Egotists, male or female, however, need flattery. Familiarity breeds contempt. Flattery must come from a constantly changing source or lose its power, as drugs do when we grow accustomed to them. Flattery coming from a pretty woman whose attraction has not been weakened by daily contact will soon lead the artist husband into forbidden paths. Unless endowed with the wisdom of the musician's wife in "The Concert," his wife will soon be granted a divorce on the ground of his too obvious infidelity. Woe to the male artist who takes unto himself a female artist for his wife. As I said in the preceding chapter, sadist plus sadist equals divorce suit for cruelty alleged by both parties. In this type of matrimonial castastrophy, the fault lies more frequently with the wife than with the husband. =Female Artists= are more unbearable than male artists. They are more touchy, more easily offended and angered, more apt to suspect the people in their environment of harboring veiled hostility. The reason for that state of things is not far to seek. Women require infinitely more flattery than men do. Not that a craving for attention is by any means a typically feminine trait. That craving has been forced upon them by the masculine domination. We have made woman inferior to man politically, socially, economically, we have, as Adler would word it, put her "below." Until we allow her to rise to man's level, she will never feel safe and will constantly require assurances of her superiority, at least, from the men who fancy her looks and enjoy her company. =The Woman Who Accomplishes Things= in this world, who, in spite of woman's handicap in her dealings with the world, wins recognition as a painter, sculptor, writer, singer, etc., feels, and justly so, that she deserves more credit for her accomplishment than a man would. Winning power in a man's world is for the woman who reaches that aim ethically, that is, without bartering her sexual favors for success, as difficult as it would be for a Jew to arrive in a bigoted Christian community, for a negro to establish his prestige in a white anglo-saxon environment. Having reached the top after much fighting, she never feels as secure as a man would under similar circumstances. Her ego is steadily on the defensive and whatever interferes with her ego maximation appears to her dangerous and hateful. The female artist who marries a male artist will soon become jealous of him. Every bit of publicity he receives is something which he has stolen from her, which he should, she thinks, if he loved her enough, have renounced in her favor. The female artist who marries a man incapable of artistic achievement, may be violently attracted to him sexually. Her egotism, on the other hand, prompts her to disparage him and to scorn his judgment of her. However much he may admire her, his praise lacks weight in her estimation. He is not a member of the enchanted circle. A word from "one in the know", insignificant as he may be, will bring a smile to her lips, a flash of pleasure in her eyes, which will cut her mate to the quick. I have observed many a time an angry tension in the face of the business husband of some actress or singer when she would visibly gloat over the not too disinterested praise of some trashy professional. =Flattery.= The artist is at the mercy of the flattery lavished on him or her by a fellow artist and absolutely blind to the flatterer's ulterior motives. A great musician who died recently was an easy victim to every budding musician who would sycophantically sing his praises. The mere statement "if I could ever hope to sing a few notes like you" enabled any young exploiter who could approach him to negotiate a "loan." For the reasons I have mentioned in the preceding pages, the woman artist is even more easily victimised, financially or sentimentally than the male artist. Sexual jealousy wrecks the unions of artists with non-professional mates. Sexual jealousy and professional jealousy make the union of two artists a very problematical expedient for the attainment of happiness. Fortunately, very few heartbreaks result from the steady grinding of the divorce mills in concert land, opera land or stageland. The egotistical artist loves himself more than he could ever love any other human being. Separation from his life mate does not mean loneliness to him. He remains in his own company, to his mind, the best company on earth. And furthermore his egotism tells him, and rightly so in the majority of cases, that being as wonderful as he is, he cannot fail to meet soon "the great love" of his life. And he will probably embark upon another experiment with the same optimism and with the same results. CHAPTER XXIII THE PERSONALITY BEHIND THE FETISHES. GLANDS A man selects a mate because he finds in her fetishes the assurance of safety which those fetishes portended when observed in the appearance of his affectionate, devoted, self-sacrificing mother, whose intelligence and wisdom he never doubted when he was, let us say, ten or fifteen and she was thirty or thirty-five. And likewise, a woman expects, consciously or unconsciously, that certain physical characteristics which once indicated, when observed in her father's appearance, power, protection, a gainful occupation, sympathy and understanding, etc., will mean exactly the same thing when she finds them reproduced totally or in part in a male human being of the marriageable age. =The Parent-Child Relationship=, involving at first boundless devotion on the part of the strong parent to the helpless nursling, infant and child, and later, complete submission of the growing child and adolescent to the older and, supposedly world-wiser, parent, has very little, if anything, in common with the relationship of mate to mate. Sex plays no conscious part in the parent-child relationship. It does not tinge every action and every thought of the two parties concerned. The secret cravings or the secret repulsion it may awaken never distort consciously the judgments passed by parents on their children, children on their parents. Of neurotic unconscious distortions of judgment there is a plenty. Never, however, does the strife narrow down to this: "He or she does not satisfy me sexually," "he or she humiliates me sexually by being attracted to others," "he or she is an obstacle to my complete sexual gratification with another," etc., sources of open hostility of the most painfully conscious kind between mates. The mother who satisfied our egotism became to us beautiful and perfect. The female who employs the same means our mother did, to win us, but who cannot arouse us sexually, never appears to us very attractive physically or mentally. On the other hand we are apt to disregard, temporarily at least, the mental deficiencies of the man or woman who gives us the most complete sexual gratification. From this it will be easily understood that choosing a mate _solely_ on the strength of his or her fetishes, is likely, unless the union be of the most ephemeral kind, to lead to profound disappointment. It behooves us then to determine accurately what every fetish means and what sort of personality is actually to be found associated with a certain set of physical characteristics. For I repeat, a man's or woman's personality is to be studied, not in their attitude to their offspring, (for the most savage beast is transformed by the paternal or maternal instinct into a marvel of tenderness, kindness and patience), but in their relation to the social herd and to their sexual mate. Until the study of the ductless glands was given the importance we attach to it today, the word personality denoted a set of attitudes which many psychologists considered as mainly voluntary and amenable to "moral suasion" and other forms of pedagogical approach of the individual. When we read the works of Freud, Jung, Adler, Ferenczi and their disciples, we never receive an intimation of the rôle which the endocrines may play in moulding the human personality. =Modern Endocrinologists= on the other hand, seem as indifferent to psychology as the psychoanalysts of yesterday were to neurology and endocrinology. Some of them assume that the personality IS the glands and that our glands alone shape our thinking and our actions. Both views are narrow and unsatisfactory. The personality is made up primarily of an _organism_ which outward influences can or cannot influence easily. Pleasure and pain then shape that organism thru the memories which they leave in it in the form of infinitely small modifications of our autonomic nervous system. That system, in its turn, develops, thru constant stimulation, certain glands or allows them to remain undeveloped thru lack of stimulation or thru negative stimulation. Some of those glands may, thru mere accident of growth, have been already overdeveloped or stunted at birth. Individuals free from complexes, however, may easily reestablish the balance of cravings and social inhibitions which threatens at times to be upset by an overdeveloped or underdeveloped gland. Complex-ridden individuals on the other hand, use their glandular inferiority unconsciously as a scapegoat for absurd or morbid behavior. =Reciprocal Influence.= We cannot say, therefore, that our behavior is _dictated_ by our glands, but it is influenced by them and reciprocally, our behavior influences our glands. As I said in a previous chapter, hyperthyroidism creates fear, but fear may also create hyperthyroidism. Overdevelopment of the sexual apparatus creates a predisposition to sexual overactivity, but sexual thoughts also have a tendency to provoke unusual sexual activity. There is one thing, however, for which the secretions of our ductless glands are mainly responsible, and which is most important to consider in a study of fetishes. They determine the shape, color and consistency of many parts of our body, such as complexion, hair, teeth, skeletal frame and growth. A glance at a human body enables one to determine as accurately as an autopsy would, the size of a person's thyroid, adrenals, etc. As the development of those glands corresponds to the social and sexual behavior of the individual, a review of the various bodily fetishes from the endocrinological point of view will be helpful to the average reader. In order not to use too many technical terms we shall consider only four of the endocrine glands, the pituitary, the thyroid, the adrenals and the gonads. =The Pituitary Gland= is a small body, the size of a pea, located in the Turkish saddle (sella turcica), at the base of the brain and closely behind the root of the nose. Some have called it a brain within the brain with a miniature skull of its own within the skull. The pituitary regulates the rhythms of the body, from the bony growth of the skeleton to the rate of the heart and respiration, from the periods of sleep and waking time to the periods of menstruation. If a part of the pituitary of a dog is removed, the animal becomes sleepy, fat, perverse in its sex cravings; puppies cease to grow when submitted to such an operation; autopsy of many human dwarfs has shown that their pituitary was undeveloped. People whose pituitary is insufficient in its action have a tendency to lose their hair, have a very dry skin, a dull mentality, sometimes suffer from epilepsy and crave sugar in large quantities. They are generally obese, the fat accumulating on the lower abdomen and the feet and ankles. Louis Berman in his excellent book on the endocrines "Glands regulating the Personality," presents as a perfect likeness of the "hypopituitary type" the Fat Boy of the Pickwick Papers whose emloyment with Mr. Wardle consisted in alternate sleeping and eating. I will quote from Berman's book a description of the opposite type, the individual in whom the pituitary gland is too active. "If the overaction begins in childhood or adolescence, that is, before puberty, there results a great elongation of the bones, so that a giant is the consequence.... If the overaction happens after puberty, when the long bones have set and can not grow longer, a peculiar, diffuse enlargement of the individual occurs, especially of his hands and feet and head. The nose, ears, lips and eyes get larger and coarser. All those people are rather big and tall to begin with, heavy jawed, burly, with overhanging eyebrows and an aggressive manner. Rabelais' most famous character, Gargantua, belongs to the group. We recruit more drum majors than prime ministers from among those people." The pituitary has a strong influence on sexual activities. Young animals whose pituitary has been surgically damaged will not be able to reproduce themselves when reaching adulthood. Feeding pituitary glands to hens on the other hand, causes them to lay thirty per cent more eggs than they would naturally. =The Thyroid= is a transformer of energy. It is a large reddish mass located in front and on both sides of the trachea, consisting of two lobes connected by a bridge of the same tissue. The thyroid activates the fires of the body. An active thyroid means life at "concert pitch." A sluggish thyroid means a slow, negative existence. To a poor thyroid correspond a pasty complexion, watery eyes with heavy lids, a depressed pug nose, large ears, thin hair, scanty eyebrows and eyelashes, short, brittle nails, irregular, bad teeth, broad, pudgy hands and feet, generally cold. With an overactive thyroid we observe a high color, sleeplessness, restlessness, a tendency to lose weight, emotionalism, profuse perspiration, bright, large eyes, good white teeth. =The Adrenal Glands= are about the size of a bean and located on top of the kidneys. They secrete adrenin which, when poured into the blood, causes muscular tension, accelerates the heart beats and the breathing rate, dilates the pupil and produces fear or anger according to the relative size of the core (medulla) or envelop (cortex) of the adrenals. In timid animals (and women) the cortex is thin, in courageous animals (and men) the cortex is rather thick. According to the thickness of your cortex you shall, in an emergency, resort to either fight or flight. A man with a thin cortex looks feminine, a woman with a thick cortex looks mannish. The adrenals control the color of the skin, the growth of hair, the size of the canine teeth and the color of the teeth. To good adrenals correspond an olive complexion, much hair on the body, rather yellowish teeth and strong canines. The bearded lady of the circus is a woman with overdeveloped adrenals and a thick cortex. Weak adrenals go with cold extremities, a hairless body, poor canines, lack of ambition, discouragement, fatigability, etc. =The Gonads or Sex Glands=, testes in man, ovaries in woman, affect thru the secretions of their interstitial cells, the pitch of the voice, the growth of pubic hair, the size of the breasts, the distribution of fat. Good gonads mean masculine looking men and feminine looking women. Poor gonads mean feminine looking men, hairless and with overdeveloped breasts, talking in a high-pitched voice, with a tendency to obesity and laziness (eunuchs); scrawny looking women who may later in life grow abnormally fat, with, in their youth, flat chests, scanty menstruation, etc. Healthy gonads also retard senility. Gonads whose interstitial cells have been rehabilitated by the Steinach operation bring a new youth to the organism, mentally and physically. Other glands, the thymus, pancreas, parathyroid, pineal body also play an important part in shaping the human body and with it the personality. The limits of this book do not allow me, however, to discuss them even superficially. CHAPTER XXIV GLANDULAR PERSONALITIES I stated in the preceding chapter that to every degree of glandular development there corresponds a certain set of physical characteristics which, in the love life, may be transformed into fetishes, (beautiful features, laymen call them), which are necessary to arouse sexual desire in one's mate, but which are not necessarily attractive to any one else. Those physical characteristics are, in turn, the tangible evidence of the presence of certain mental attitudes and predispositions. Individuals seeking in the love union, not merely a passing gratification of their erotism, but a lifelong arrangement, gratifying both the physical and the mental aspects of the organism, should be trained to recognise the presence or absence of characteristics which would make such an arrangement a lasting pleasure or a lasting torture. For instance, the woman who falls in love with a man because her fetishism requires a short, round, plump, man, with a good head of hair but hairless limbs, must not expect him to ever grow into a fighter, a good provider or even a companion of placid moods. A man of that type is capricious, unstable, unresisting, and prefers the gentler arts to any form of competitive struggle. Likewise a man who picks out a woman for his mate because she has pretty, doll-like features, is "cute" and slight, has a soft skin, white and pink, must not expect to live peacefully with her on a farm, or even on Main Street or in a distant suburb. That type of woman grows easily emotional, is constantly in search of new excitement and new pleasures. It is only at forty that she will become more settled (and rotund), retaining, however, a certain jollity of disposition. =The Olive Skinned Dark Haired Type=, and the freckled, red haired are very much alike. Both have a low forehead, hair is plentiful all over the body, thick and coarse. Their canines are long and sharp. Men and women of that type are good fighters, more easily angered than scared; they are generally successful, with a tendency to slave-driving. In the face of great difficulties, of painful disappointment, however, they are prone to turn embittered and cranky. People of this type who show large birth marks are likely to be imbalanced and irritable. They may at times give the impression of being weak and lazy, altho their minds may be extremely active. =The Tall Type=, with strong frame, firm muscles, generous hands and feet, a thick skin, oval face, head flattened at the sides, thick eyebrows, prominent eyes, placed rather wide apart, large nose, square chin, large upper middle incisors, heavy joints, hairy legs and arms, is characterised by intelligence and self-control. At times that type has a tendency to be a little calculating if not sordid. =The Lean Type= with clean-cut features, thick hair, thick, long eyebrows, big, keen eyes, sometimes slightly protruding, well developed white teeth and a very masculine or very feminine mouth, according to sex, is active, restless, a live wire, emotional and likely to be easily prostrated by an unexpected defeat. Men and women of that type have a tendency to be sleepless and to do too much planning at night instead of resting peacefully. =The Short, Obese, Sallow Type=, with a high forehead, scanty eyebrows, deep set, narrow eyes, irregular teeth that decay early, with poor circulation, cold and blue hands and feet, is rather "animal" and lacks self-control. =The Slender Type=, with narrow waist line, rounded limbs, long chest, (which in women may carry poorly developed breasts), very white, hairless skin, delicate features, silky hair, childish teeth, flat feet, knock-knees, may be at times very brilliant, but is generally queer, eccentric, irresponsible, perverse, dishonest. That type is observed in many petty thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts, suicides. Those are the most striking physical types. They present hundreds of shadings and combinations. =Environment.= The last mentioned type, if reared and kept in a comfortable environment, among people of slightly lax behavior, of artistic inclinations, exposed to none of life's onslaughts, may do very well, and be considered by his associates as sensitive, gentle and likeable. It is the pressure of social and economic conditions which cause him to seek safety in theft (quick acquisition of wealth), drug stupor, (escape from reality, perversion, escape from biological duties connected with a normal sex life), or suicide, (return to the fetal stage and escape from life). Those people are children who can only thrive in the nursery. Even as infant mortality depends solely upon the family income, the death rate being five times as high in poor as in wealthy families, the stability and social charm of almost any glandular type depends upon the social pressure that type has to bear. Almost any type is bearable, if not lovable, in a comfortable environment requiring little planning and no fighting. One of the details of the social pressure is, of course, the attempts at repression or modification to which a personality may be subjected by the life mate. The fault lies in this case, not so much with the type in itself, however inferior it may be, as with the incurable optimist who attempts the impossible task of changing a human personality. In other words, it might be said, that in an environment which exerts no pressure on the individual, that is, where there is abundance of wealth and comfort, one can select a mate with bad fetishes, that is, indicative of weakness, while those less favored financially must lay greater stress on fetishes denoting strength and fighting ability. =What Teeth Indicate.= Fraenkel and Kaplan have pointed to the teeth as indicators of the general glandular condition of the individual and of his probable mental and physical powers. Good middle incisors indicate good thyroid and pituitary, hence strength and balance. Good lateral incisors indicate sexual power; good canines indicate strong adrenals, hence good fighting ability. Lack of any of those teeth, or their stunted growth, gives naturally, the contrary indication as to make up and character. One must not forget either that certain fetishes are superficial and likely to disappear early in life. Blondes may turn into brunettes; sveltness may yield to invading obesity, altho this last change is to be blamed more on the individual's stupidity than upon his glandular condition; a white skin may become yellow, etc. Preference should, therefore, be given, when in doubt, to more durable fetishes, stature, strength, general appearance, attitude, which are less likely to change with the years. =Matrimonial Engineers.= Here is a new field for educators; there may grow from this very new knowledge a new profession, that of the matrimonial engineer, who will diagnose the chances of happiness two human beings may have, if they decide to associate their destinies. Much has to be studied and experimented upon before any one can consider himself qualified to pass final judgments upon the decisions to which love leads couples. "However" as Berman writes, "the fact remains that, though we are only upon the first rungs of the ladder, we are on the ladder. We possess a new way of looking upon humanity, a fresh transforming light upon these strange phenomena, ourselves. Of the ugly achievements of that dreadful century, the nineteenth, the most illuminating was the discovery of itself as the ape-parvenu. Yes, we are all animals now, it said to itself, and set its teeth in the cut-throat game of survival. But there was no understanding in that evil motto of a disillusioned heart. The ape-parvenu, desperately lonely and secretive, has still to understand itself.... "Personality embraces much more than merely the psychic attributes. It is not the least important of the lessons of endocrine analysis that here is no soul, and no body either. Rather a soul-body or body-soul, or the patterns of the living flame. The closer tracking of the internal secretions leads us into the secrets of the living flame, why it lives and how it lives, the strange diversities of its coloring and music and the odd variations in its energy, vitality and longevity. Why it flickers, why it flares and glares, spurts, flutters, burns hard or soft, orange-blue or yellow." CHAPTER XXV LOVE AND MOTHER LOVE Is the perfect mother a perfect wife? Is the perfect mother, in every case, the result of mental perfection and ethical superiority? Or is there a hidden strife between love and motherhood? Is mother love always the enchanting image presented to us by poets and intimidated sons? Or is it an alloy of higher qualities, biological necessity and egotistical neurotic cravings? I do not intend to settle all those problems within the limits of a short chapter, but rather to point out some of the morbid components of mother love which a psychoanalyst detects in his women patients, and which, exaggerated in the neurotic, exist to a slight degree in every woman. =Sex Cravings and Motherhood Cravings= are so closely related that few psychologists have ever dreamt of dissociating them for the purpose of study. The average moralist, who prefers cheap popularity to scientific accuracy, excuses the existence of sex cravings only on one condition, that they become absolutely subservient to motherhood cravings. The birth control agitation which is making such rapid headway at the present day, on the other hand, means, in part, that while motherhood may be the consequence of unregulated sex activities, it is not, for all women, their conscious motive. Why is it that some women with an erotic disposition and a voluptuous physique, fear pregnancy while other women, apparently indifferent to men, crave motherhood? Physiology does not give us a very satisfactory answer to this question. Endocrinologists tell us that sex cravings are determined by the ovaries and motherhood cravings by the posterior part of the pituitary gland, but this leaves us exactly where we were when we started out. =Pregnancy and Health.= All physiologists will agree with the statement that in a normal, complex free woman, a type which unfortunately, the complexity of our civilization does not allow us to behold very frequently, pregnancy is accompanied by an unusual activity of all the organism, imparting to the female a sense of great power and, consequently, of well-being, mental and physical. The adrenals work at high pressure to produce the muscular tone necessary in gestation. The thyroid is called upon to transform more and more of the electric current produced by the brain cells. New glands of a temporary nature develop in the woman's body, regulating her life functions more accurately and imparting to her a feeling of dreamy happiness and relaxation. After delivery, another part of her body enters into activity, her mammary glands, so closely related to the genitals that any stimulation of either region finds a strong echo in the other. Many are the women in whom lactation produces intensely erotic feelings affording them at times full gratification. =Fear of Pregnancy.= Unfortunately, civilisation has surrounded motherhood with so many complications, social, ethical, financial, sentimental, etc., that in very few women, indeed, is that biological process an unmixed pleasure, dissociated from all pain and anxiety. Vomiting, which expresses the female's disgust for her condition, or her mate or the offspring; cramplike tensions, expressing her worries about her appearance, her anxious thought of financial or social consequences; anxiety states, affecting the adrenals, which discolor her face (pregnancy mask), make pregnancy hideous in many cases. Even the process of parturition seems to have become more painful and dangerous with advancing civilisation. Any one who has seen, for instance, Mexican women barely interrupting their labor in the fields to give birth to a child, and resuming their tasks an hour later, must realise that autosuggestion has much to do with the physical disability of the civilised woman in child bed. In spite of the complexities of modern life, the female organism which is not affected by fear complexes, must expect a pleasure premium from pregnancy, lactation and other duties of motherhood. This would supply us with an organic basis for the mother's attachment to her offspring which is observable almost in every animal species. That a number of women may be found who hate their children owing to the suffering to which unwelcome motherhood and difficult parturition have subjected them, is easily understandable. In fact we face a vicious circle. The unwelcome pregnancy will be an unpleasant one, followed almost unavoidably by painful delivery, etc. =When Mother Love is Lacking= or when a mother hates a very young child, the psychologist must look for morbid unconscious influences which analysis should remove as soon as possible. Stekel, the Viennese analyst, tells of a woman who was very fond of three of her daughters but, for some mysterious reason, detested the fourth one. Analysis revealed that she imagined she saw every one of her husband's faults reproduced and magnified in the unfortunate child. She also imagined that she loved her husband very deeply. The year when the unloved child was conceived, however, she had fallen in love with another man, a young poet. She remained "technically faithful" to her husband, altho, when in his arms, it was always the poet to whom she was giving herself. She hoped sentimentally that the forthcoming child would look like her platonic lover but the little girl reproduced with striking faithfulness her father's features. Unwilling to accept her dislike of her husband, the romantic mother had transferred it to the child who served as a scapegoat in various ways. =Frigid Wives.= We often observe a great craving for motherhood in frigid wives. Let us not rehash on this occasion the poetical and silly statement that the frigid woman is one whose love has been spiritualised and can only find an outlet thru her children. The frigid woman is a cripple or a neurotic. Either she was born with poorly developed genitals or she was made abnormal by the unconscious fear of yielding to man's domination, or by a morbid sense of sin due to asceticism, or by painful or humiliating sex experiences before or after marriage. Her craving for motherhood is not infrequently the hypocritical expression of her desire for intercourse, which her puritan training would otherwise make lewd and sinful. It is, at times, a desire for the superiority which age and bodily size will give her over infants, helpless and inarticulate. This is why, in a good many cases, a perfect mother makes a detestable wife. Unable to dominate her husband she craves children whom she can dominate with a minimum of bodily strength and mental effort, and she devotes all her time and care to them. When the children grow up and develop independent personalities, the neurotic mother often loses her interest in them. How many times have we heard women (and men) remark that children should remain "babies," that young children are far more lovable than adolescents, etc. =Mother and Father Love= differ in several respects. Fathers look upon their children, especially their sons, as a visible proof of their virile power. In their sons they see their own image, the more attractive to them as they are more egotistical. The weak, infirm or unsuccessful son, however, receives little love at the hands of his father. He is not a credit to his progenitor. No mother, on the other hand, seems to neglect a cripple or idiotic child. Be it male or female, it is a human being which she can dominate easily. The more neurotic she is, the more she will idolise the ill-favored child. =Mothers Always Adore Their Sons=, young and old, for they behold in them males whom they can easily dominate. And fathers love their daughters, young or old, for similar reasons. The relations of aging mothers and growing daughters, however, are almost invariably tinged with a certain hostility, overt or concealed, according to the women's habits, training, manners, etc. =Girls at the Flapper Stage= who resent the attraction which their mothers still wield over younger men, constantly remind them of their age and bid them to behave in a way more in keeping with their mature years. The flapper's mother on the other hand, who sees her daughter gradually monopolising the attention of men callers, reminds the girl with monotonous regularity that she is only a child and bids her to behave as befits her tender years. The mother resents her daughter's fresh beauty, the daughter, her mother's experience in dealing with males. Both watch each other closely, protecting each other's modesty and virtue and trying to make each other's life as uninteresting and uneventful as possible. The girl becomes an ethical critic on her mother's smoking or gowns. The mother blossoms into a puritan who allows her daughter no freedom and seems to have entirely forgotten her own girlhood years. The strife lasts until the daughter is old enough to have her own circle of friends and no longer needs a chaperone. After which mother and daughter, if matched intellectually, may once more become friends. =Repressed Hatred.= I have treated a number of neurotic mothers who seemed to be obsessed by their adoration of their children. That exaggerated tenderness was, as I mentioned in another chapter, a cover for death wishes directed toward those children. Some never allowed knives to be left in evidence in the house, some did not dare to carry their children in their arms on the stairs, while boarding trains, or while near open windows. One never dared to administer a medicine to her little girl "for fear of making a mistake and poisoning her." One did not dare to bathe her child for fear of drowning him "accidentally" in the tub. Neurotic women who do not wish to become mothers and rebel against motherhood, (which some of them consider as a symbol of woman's inferior role), often compensate for their lack of love by an almost criminal indulgence and weakness toward their children. Unable to give them genuine love, they pretend to idolise them and are apparently unable to deny any of their wishes. This, in last analysis, is simply a total indifference to the little ones' welfare. That type of mother spoils her children and makes them unfit to face life and its emergencies. Her extravagant adulation, her outbursts of artificial tenderness, however, do not always deceive the children themselves who feel automatically, thru nervous and muscular imitation, the tensions of their mother's body. The little son of the woman who was obsessed by the fear of drowning him (and who compensated for her murderous cravings by showering the wildest caresses upon him), could not be prevailed upon to ever go near the water until her obsessions, of which, he, of course, had no conscious knowledge, had been removed by psychoanalytic treatment. Neurotic mother love trains children for a neurotic life. CHAPTER XXVI SHOULD WINTER MATE WITH SPRING? This is the poetical way in which many newspaper editors have been introducing to their readers accounts of two recent incidents which, at the time of writing (this chapter), keep headline writers busy. One of the news items is the idyll of an heiress, still in her teens, who has made up her mind to marry a man of fifty or thereabout. The other is the heartbreak of a seventy year old husband, deserted by his twenty year old wife. The mating of winter and spring is a daily occurrence, both seasons being divided up about equally between the two sexes. The two unnatural matches which I mentioned above, however, stand in a class by themselves. Many a young idler, gifted with good looks, has managed to play on the erotic feelings of some woman in her dotage and to annex a goodly portion of her wealth. Many an attractive girl, seeking the line of least effort, has been known to prefer a union with a silly old man to the daily struggle for existence. =Disinterested Brides.= In the two cases under discussion, on the other hand, no suspicion of sordidness could be cast on the bride-that-was or on the bride-to-be. Both are wealthy, one of them immensely so. The bridegroom to be is, if not a poor man, at least in very modest circumstances. A genuine love match in both cases. But the genuineness of love did not prevent a catastrophe in one case and will probably bring about a catastrophe in the other case as well. In both cases, the men are probably normal and yielding to the very natural attraction of youth combined with beauty and refinement. Both women, however, are abnormal, altho one of them, the runaway wife, may have regained her normality and awakened from her absurd dream. Both are, or were, the victims of a fixation of the most acute type, on the father image indicating a morbid neurotic disposition. Such unions can hardly ever hold out any promise of lasting happiness. =The Case of Wagner.= There is, of course, the famous example of Wagner who, at fifty-seven carried off the beautiful wife of Hans von Bülow, almost thirty years his junior, and lived happily with her until his death. But Wagner was at the time a marvelous example of physical and mental activity, energy and creative power. In no way, barring his facial appearance, could he suggest age or decay to his young wife. He remained to the last a romantic figure. The glamor, however, which may surround a successful composer with a picturesque past, is not likely to dazzle in any way the bride of a riding master or of a New England manufacturer. =A Parent Fixation=, as I explained in the chapters on the Family Romance and on Incest, is the more acute as it drives its victim to seek a closer duplicate of the parent type. The man who seeks a woman for his mate because his mother was a woman is influenced by the most normal and biologically valuable of mother fixations. The race would come to an end but for that form of fixation. The son of a blonde mother who cannot love a woman unless she is also a blonde, is less normal and less free in his choice of a mate than the preceding type. He is inhibited by childhood memories, but then, education and civilisation are little more than inhibitions caused by childhood memories. That type simply marries in "his set" and can lead an otherwise very normal life. He, however, who is irresistibly attracted by a woman exactly like his mother, not only as far as appearance, but also as far as age goes, is a childish, regressive neurotic, seeking the safety of childhood conditions and obsessed at times by unconscious incestuous cravings. =The Rock of Physical Incompatibility= is often one on which such adventures are shipwrecked. A very young woman, ignorant of the sex life and its problems, unable to realise its meaning before marriage, may develop immediately after her union to an elderly man a very passionate temperament. Either she will repress her cravings for physical love, which her too mature mate is unable to gratify, and she will develop anxiety states or hysteria. Or she will be too healthy to repress her desires, and her disappointment may change her love into scorn, especially when conversation with other women or a clever suitor opens her eyes to what is lacking in her life. A separation, sometimes complicated by the usual triangle situation, may become unavoidable. There are cases in which both mates are frankly neurotic and were drawn together as invalids and weak-minded often are, by the similarity of their predicament. =The Plight of Two Neurotics.= Both of them may, as I observed it once, seek safety in a mock-incestuous relationship, the older mate, seeking safety in a union with an immature human being, the younger mate in a union with the parent image. In one case which I have in mind, the husband, fifty-five years old, had been several times on the verge of exposure for unlawful "liberties" he took with very young girls. The wife, a few days after her father's death, married the old man who had been her father's associate and who had tried to seduce her when she was barely ten. She visited me when a new scandal in which her husband became implicated caused her to leave him. She was considerably "mixed up" for, while young men had begun to attract her, she felt extremely self-conscious in their presence and could only enjoy herself in the company of elderly men who, in turn, reminded her too much of the nightmare thru which she had lived for two years. A pious Catholic, she solved the conflict prematurely, before I had time to bring insight into her mind, by fleeing from all sorts of men and into a convent. Other cases have a less tragic history: A young woman of twenty-eight who had never been happy with her husband, (thirty), took advantage of the numberless opportunities war work and war drives gave to women, to become faithless to her husband. She had four short-lived affairs with men twice her age, then "broke down" when her husband secured a divorce for adultery. Analysis gave her insight into her father fixation which was not very deep and might never have driven her into overt acts but for the unusual conditions in which she found herself. She is now happily remarried to a man of her age. =What the Community Says.= Mates whose ages are out of proportion, are often thrown into deep discord by the pressure of the community's criticism. They might thrive on a desert island or on a farm or, as in the case of an explorer I knew, when surrounded almost continuously by an "inferior" race whose opinion they can easily disregard. The community's smiles or open disapproval, on the other hand, are a heavy burden, especially for the more neurotic mate, who is likely to feel very self-conscious in everything he or she does. The too young wife and the too young husband may at first smile when hotel clerks, shopkeepers, chauffeurs, etc., allude to their aged mate as "your father" or "your mother." After a while, a feeling of embarrassment will get the best of their sense of humor. Shame and humiliation will soon set in when those mistakes are repeated frequently. When the ego is wounded by love complications, unless the individual is a pronounced masochist, love fares very badly. It turns into hatred for the mate causing the humiliating remarks, as unconscious incest ideas gradually break into consciousness and provoke protective measures, critical attitudes, disgust, etc. In one case which came under my observation, the community's criticisms worked as effectively as psychoanalytic treatment would have. =Having Her Fixation-Fling.= A young woman married to a man of her age, but discontented and frigid, had a passing liaison with an elderly man, which exposed her to many jeers on the part of her associates who suspected it. She was very intelligent and well acquainted with psychoanalytical literature and only consulted me to make sure of her correct diagnosis of her own case. She did the proper thing under the circumstances, confessed a part of the truth to her husband, went away with him for a while and has been happy with him ever since. She had had her "fixation fling" as she called it, had sown her neurotic wild oats and ridden herself of a morbid element which may never bother her again. This sort of solution, however, is one which is neither scientific nor safe, for the person affected by a fixation of that morbid sort is at the mercy of a recurrence of it, should life's problems compel him to seek once more the line of exaggerated safety and regression to the childish level of conduct. =Physical Results.= If matches between the young and old were successful physically and otherwise, they would be extremely beneficial to the older mate. Normal sexual stimulation, far from driving the aged to an early grave, as old time puritans have taught us, is probably the most potent factor of rejuvenation. The Steinach operation which enables the hormone-producing cells of the gonads to overdevelop at the expense of the seminiferous cells, seems, when successful, to confer new youth upon the entire organism. Lorand, Stekel, Hufeland and others hold that sexual activity in the old, when it is possible, is conducive to longevity. Lorand mentions many interesting cases in which remarriage at incredibly advanced ages seemed in no way to curtail one's life span. Thomas Parré, who died at 162, was arrested for assault at 102 and married again at 120. The Dane Drackenberg, who died at 150, married at 111 a woman of 60, became a widower at 130, and tried to woo a young peasant girl who, however, refused to accept him. Peter Albrecht, who died at 123, married again at 80 and had seven children. Gurgon Duglas, who died at 120, married at 85 and had 8 children, the youngest one being born when the father was 103. Baron Baravicion dès Capelles died at 104, having had four wives, the last one whom he married when 80. Lorand adds that, according to his observations, old people with an erotic temperament have a better chance of survival than "cold blooded" ones. Hufeland says that married people live much longer than the unmarried and that no bachelor was ever known to reach a ripe age. The sudden bloom and general appearance of rejuvenation of old maids finally finding a mate, of widows who remarry and of neglected wives who give themselves to a potent lover, is a good physiological argument why winter should try to seek the violent stimulation of a union with spring. =The Fate of the Younger Mate.= The younger mate, however, can hardly hope to escape unscathed when going thru such an experience. The old are benefited because their muscles, nerves, glands, etc., imitate the attitudes and behavior of the younger mate's organs and become accordingly younger. The same process of imitation is at work in the younger mate and the damage done to him or her is naturally great, altho not always obvious at first. His or her younger organism, less experience-laden, and hence more elastic and more responsive, adapts itself more quickly to the ways of old age than old age adapts itself to the ways of youth. Even in cases when the gratification seems to be mutual, the damage done to the younger mate reveals itself thru neurotic disturbances. A man of thirty-five consulted for anxiety states, nightmares, "nervous" gastric troubles, etc. He had been living since his twentieth year with a woman twenty years his senior, in fact, a friend and schoolmate of his mother's. He called her Mama and she called him Sonny. While, according to his statements, their sexual life was absolutely normal and satisfying, the repressed incest-fear lurking in his unconscious betrayed itself thru a nightmare which disturbed his sleep with alarming frequency: "I am at the foot of marble stairs. A female figure is standing at the top, a relative, perhaps my mother. She extends her hand to me to help me up the stairs, but that hand is so weak that it cannot hold me and then I am frightened by a powerful male figure, a man in authority, perhaps my father, coming toward me from the side." Altho the man was physically satisfied, the split in his unconscious made him very irritable, restless and an unpleasant companion for his "mama" to whom he made endless scenes for trifling reasons. =King David.= In Biblical days when King David grew old,[2] his ministers besought themselves of the following remedy: they found a young virgin and "let her lie in his bosom" in the hope that the dying man might be revived by her contact. Even that availed nothing. In our days, however, we have come to prize human life and happiness more highly and young virgins shall not be sacrificed, being the new generation and the future, to the welfare of some modern King David who is the past. The young women in our midst, virgins or others, whom a morbid obsession draws to the bosom of some King David must be saved from the winter chill that awaits them. Modern psychology holds the key opening for them the door to freedom and normal love. CHAPTER XXVII NEGATIVE LOVE The only form of love which is positive is complete love, which gratifies both the physical and the mental aspects of the organism and which, besides, is human and, hence, recognises and admits the relativity of all things human. Any form of love which excludes either the physical or the mental relationship of male and female, is incomplete and, therefore, abnormal. All the puritanical rant to the contrary notwithstanding, platonic love and prostitution are on the same biological level, as morbid and unnatural one as the other. Prostitution only gratifies the body more or less completely and starves the mind, causing the mental aspect of the love craving to become stunted or perverse. Platonic love gratifies the intellect more or less completely, rather less than more, for it offers few egotistical rewards, but it starves the body and leads it into adopting morbid forms of craving gratification. =A Clean Life.= Many a patient has declared proudly to me that he led a "clean life." A few days later, after losing his selfconsciousness in my presence, he would gradually confess to a terrible "struggle" against his "animal" instincts. Which meant, that at irregular intervals, self-gratification would give him, in a morbid day dream, the woman whose love he craved; or a pollution dream would allow him, in the unconsciousness and ethical irresponsibility of sleep, to make up for his privations by indulging in imaginary promiscuous cohabitation. This is in too many cases, the seamy side of a platonic love affair, when one or both of the mates is not naturally unsexed but unsexes himself thru what he or she calls will-power and which analysis reveals to be conscious or unconscious fear. This is the meaning of love plus continence. In the majority of cases its damage stops there. In a few cases, however, especially when the sex cravings of one of the mates have been so successfully repressed that they are no longer experienced consciously, symbolical nightmares of the most exhausting kind, hysterical disturbances during the waking hours, compulsions and obsessions of all sorts, reveal to the psychoanalyst that lava is boiling under the apparently extinct cone of a safe volcano. The platonic individual, like the puritan, is either oversexed or undersexed. The oversexed must surround themselves with protective measures lest their violent cravings may lead them into socially punishable acts. The simplest neurotic expedient is to utter a complete denial, whenever possible a public one, of the existence of sexual cravings, and then to be forced by one's statements into living up to an absurd self-imposed standard. =Utterances and Conduct.= This at times results in most grotesque conflicts between utterance and conduct. We see for instance the much married Mrs. Eddy who as the witty Theodore Schroeder remarked, had many more husbands than children, stating that the pleasures of the flesh "are always wrong unless the physiologic factor can be excluded from consciousness" (a rather cryptic sentence) and also that "generation rests on no sexual basis." Thy hysteric whose volcanic outbursts supply her with a morbid sexual relief for which she rejects all responsibility, for she is unconscious at the time is generally in her private and public life a woman of great repressions and perfect behavior, likely to sneer at every mention of a sex urge. In other cases, platonic love is an attempt at creating an artificial value thru destroying a natural, biological human function. =Oracles and Prophecies.= In ancient times it was observed that people deprived of any sexual gratification made at times mysterious utterances which were considered as an emanation of some divine intelligence. Those utterances were nothing but hysterical ravings, accepted as oracles, prophecies, etc. Our praise of continence, practiced even when it is unnecessary, (as in the case of lawfully married mates), is, after all, a survival of such superstitious beliefs based on misunderstood morbid phenomena. Modern science, especially the new science of endocrinology, has shown that to every display of sexual activity corresponds an outpouring of hormonic secretions which benefits the entire system. =Can We Save Our Vital Force?= Once upon a time it was assumed that continence enabled people to save their "vital force," to preserve the "resources of their body." We know now that the gonads produce two secretions, one which would pass out of the body in any event, and one which flows directly in the blood and is the only one which can benefit the organism. The various puritanical theories as to the great value of continence had been shaken many times by evidence from the biography of all the great writers, artists, philosophers, inventors and other men and women who have left the world much enriched by their creative labor and at the same time indulged freely in the pleasures of the flesh. =Sublimation.= Endocrinology strikes now the last blow at those theories, one of which by the way, was Freud's romantic hypothesis of the "sublimation." Freud believed that sexual energy could be diverted towards social ends of greater value and non-sexual in character. This is scientifically absurd, as it disregards the dualism of glandular secretions. The outward secretions cannot be "saved" and the inner secretions which are beyond our control flow directly into the blood stream. I have shown in another book, "Sex Happiness" that the platonic man is either the victim of his ignorance of sex matters and of ascetic superstitions which modern physiology can no longer countenance, or a physiologically deficient individual. The heroes of Beresford's "God's Counterpoint" and of May Sinclair's "The Romantic" whom I analised in "Sex Happiness" correspond to the first and the second of those types, respectively. =The Sexless.= There are men and women, of course, of the hypogonadal type, undersexed or sexless, who are capable of deep affection for a person of the opposite sex. That such an affection never culminates in complete physical communion is easily understood. Sexual failures discourage the weaker friend from risking any more experiments likely to result in humiliation. The sexless man is practically a woman, and like certain homosexuals, treats women as members of his own sex. He may make a pleasant, delicate, safe companion, but no woman should allow herself to care for him. =Frigid Women= who never experience any thrill in their husband's embrace and hence consider the physical communion as an indecent act forgivable in a husband only, as it is a part of the marriage arrangement, may love a man very deeply and yet never feel the urge to surrender their body to him. Here again we have to deal with ignorance or neurosis or both. The frigid woman, as I explained elsewhere is generally a neurotic, (perhaps made so by unpleasant first sexual experiences and her mate's failure to awaken her normal erotism), who is afraid of life, of its biological duties, of responsibility, of submission to a man's will, etc., and burdened with some unconscious incest fixation on her father, or homosexual fixation on her mother, etc. Her platonic attitude in love is due to numberless unconscious fears which are a strong bulwark against temptation. =Ideal Love.= Another form of negativism in love which receives no little amount of praise at the hands of the romantically silly and of the ill-informed, is the quest of the ideal love. We meet men and women, sometimes of mature years, who tell us with a great deal of pride that they never married because they could not find the "right mate." I will not deny that in rare cases this may be considered a perfectly valid reason, pointing to no morbid disposition on the part of the unwillingly single person. Marriage might have implied mating with a member of an erotically indifferent race, African or Asiatic; isolation in a remote farming community where a refined woman could only select a mate from among primitive laborers, or in mining regions like some Alaska camps, where the only women available at times are prostitutes. Barring such "legitimate" exceptions, which to my mind, imply however, a suspicious indifference to securing a mate, the seeker for an ideal mate is almost always neurotic. =Protective Measures.= By setting his goal very high, he is protected against the danger of finding a mate and assuming life's responsibilities, increased as they would be by normal sexual activities. This is done in various ways, thru exaggerated social expectations, or thru unreasonable economic demands, or through morbid criticism of the possible mate. A working girl may set her heart on marrying none but a Prince Charming who could by no chance whatsoever be attracted by her appearance or her manners, unless he himself were a neurotic seeking safety in a union with a socially inferior mate (students marrying waitresses, etc.). Newspapers publish enough news of such matches to supply the neurotic woman with a reasonable rationalisation of her fear of matrimony. Some poor, unattractive young man may likewise decide never to marry unless he may secure as his bride a woman whom her social position makes unattainable. Here again, unions of heiresses with menials supply the rationalisation. Some unattractive women may make such financial demands on the man seeking their affection that no one will have the courage to tempt them away from their single-blessedness. =Lovers of the Absolute.= There are individuals of a much more pathological type still, who refuse to recognise and accept the relativity of all things human, who seek absolute beauty, perfection, intelligence, understanding, sympathy in their future mate and who grow discouraged and depressed when they unavoidably discover flaws in every companion of the opposite sex. In certain cases that obsession of the perfect detail is a symptom of insanity. Cartoonists have often amused themselves and us by representing famous men and women with their features so distorted that their distant likeness to some animal is emphasized. I have observed the same distortion in neurotics to whom that delusion brought no humorous enjoyment but on the contrary deep suffering. =A Troublesome Patient.= One of my patients a handsome young man of twenty-six, had had very ephemeral affairs with several women and left them abruptly when he suddenly discovered in their features a likeness to certain animals, pigs, dogs, monkeys, etc. After which he could never be prevailed upon to see them again. One morning he called on me, announcing coolly that he had decided to shoot me. I invited him to sit down and discuss his plans more fully before carrying them out, and also to mention some of his reasons for that somewhat radical decision. He explained to me, with his right hand annoyingly buried in his coat pocket, that he had been in love for a few weeks, with a very attractive girl. Recently, he had noticed something in her profile which distantly resembled a pig's snout. The night before, while he was in her company, he suddenly saw her head transformed into a pig's head. He fled from her rooms in terror and disgust and, attributing his "clear insight into her true nature" to my psychoanalytic teachings, had decided to save others from my baneful influence by killing me. As is usually the case with maniacs, a quiet conversation cast doubts in his mind. I told him that I did not approve of his plans which might, however, be excellent, but that, as I was really a biased adviser in that matter, he should discuss them with an impartial third party. He then decided to call on Dr. Everett Dean Martin who advised him to take a rest cure and escorted him to Bellevue Hospital. The poor boy's transfer to the State Asylum has put an end to his search for the ideal love. That search was a disguised flight from women and love, his delusion was an effective measure of protection against temptation. Nothing but the absolute could satisfy him in a woman. Relativity was abhorrent to him. Every seeker for the ideal love has gone a few steps along the road which led my poor patient into the house of the living dead. =Higher Aspirations.= Neurotics of that type are plausible for they compensate for their fear and their inferiority with a pride based upon "higher aspirations," "greater delicacy of feelings," "an aristocratic nature" or the tell-tale statement that "their mother's beautiful character," "their father's noble nature" makes every man or woman appear very inferior in their eyes. Proud of certain characteristics of theirs which they cannot help having, they childishly display an egotism and selfishness which makes them at times very ridiculous, for it says indirectly: "Nobody is quite good enough for me." When the search for ideal love results in nervous states due to egotistical starvation, psychoanalysis can help greatly by giving the neurotic insight into the fear of life or the parent-fixation which is at the bottom of his romantic aspirations. CHAPTER XXVIII THE NEW WOMAN AND LOVE How will love fare at the hands of the new woman? The old forms of love will naturally be as unbearable to her as the steel corsets of a forgotten generation. Yet the problem is not so very pressing, for the truly new woman is still an almost insignificant factor, numerically speaking, in every community. Even in the professions and trades of a distinctly masculine character which woman has recently invaded, we meet constantly the mock-modern person, who under a veneer of modernity, still harbors all the superstitions, and exhibits all the mannerisms of the "old fashioned" woman. Being old-fashioned in love, as in every other activity of life, presents a great temptation to the lazy, the unintelligent, the neurotic. It is an excuse for all sorts of unethical forms of conduct, for failure or inactivity, and yet carries with itself a deceptive air of mock refinement and distinction. The woman who boasts of being old fashioned can misbehave and retain for years her husband's or her environment's confidence in her purity. Being old fashioned, she is assumed by all to be a little "simple" and "silly" at times, but unlikely to ever cross certain boundaries. At the same time, she can pass cruel judgments on all the trangressors who have not been as shrewd or lucky as she. As a basis for a discussion of the extent to which love will affect the modern woman and modern woman affect love, I shall select the picture drawn by George Bernard Shaw in McCall's Magazine for October 1920 of the woman of the new generation. "=What Women Had to Do Recently=," Shaw writes, "was not to repudiate their femininity but to assert its social value, not to ape masculinity but to demonstrate its insufficiency. This was the point of my play Candida in which it is made quite plain that the husband's masculine career would go to pieces without the wife's feminine activity. "As refinement was supposed to be proper to women and roughness proper to men fifty years ago, the great increase in companionship between men and women during that period was bound either to refine the men or roughen the women. It has done both. The feminine refinement which was only silliness disguised by affection has gone; and women are hardier and healthier, and the stock sizes of their clothes are larger in consequence. The masculine vigor that was only boorishness, slovenliness and neglect of person and clothes has fled before feminine criticism. "=But the Generalisation That Women are Refined and Men Rough by Nature= is a superficial one, holding good only when, as often happens, the man's occupation is rougher than the woman's. The natural woman cannot afford to be as fastidious as the natural man; if she shirked all the unpleasantness that he escapes, the race would perish. As a matter of fact, there are coarse women and coarse men, refined women and refined men; and there is no reason to suppose that the proportions differ in the two sexes. "=There is, However, a Rebellion against Nature= in the matter of the very unequal share of the burden of reproduction which falls to men and women in civilized communities. I say civilized communities advisedly, because the extremely artificial life of the modern lady has the effect of making her natural functions pathological. Whether the rebellion has been going on ever since ladies were invented I do not know, because history is silent on the subject, as it is on so many specifically feminine subjects. But I can testify that among women brought up amid the feminist movement of the second half of the nineteenth century there was a revolt against maternity which went deeper than that revolt against excessive maternity which has led to birth control. These more thoroughgoing rebels objected to the whole process, from the occasional event itself to the more permanent conditions it imposes. It is easy to dismiss this as monstrous and silly, but the modern conception of creative evolution forbids us to dismiss any development as impossible if it becomes the subject of an aspiration. "There is no limit to the truth of the old saying that where there is a will there is a way, and though for the moment a refusal to accept the existing conditions of reproduction would mean race suicide, the rebels against nature may be the pioneers of evolutionary changes which may finally dispose of the less pleasant incidents of nutrition, and make reproduction a process external to the parents in its more burdensome phases, as it now is in many existent species." =The Entrance of Woman into Commercial Life= has trained her no longer to expect something for nothing (exchangeable) and to realize that a bargain, to be satisfactory, an agreement, to be lasting, must be based on mutual advantages to both parties. Love, with the old fashioned, began with a struggle of wits between the sexes, the man trying to conquer without granting any advantages to the defeated, woman trying to wear out her opponent and make him yield more and more advantages before she finally "paid up." On one side, fear of financial burdens, at the other end, fear of desertion and pregnancy, suspicion and cruelty. The sex struggle with its disgusting features of hypocrisy, pretence, duplicity, misrepresentation, denial of biological facts, etc., has yielded to an agreement, much as the robber system of past ages has been replaced by commercial transactions which leave no hatred and no desire for vengeance in their wake. =Was It a Sacrifice?= The old-fashioned woman, wife or mistress, assuming the position of the conquered and defeated, claimed infinite privileges as an offset to what she has "given up," "sacrificed," "yielded." She humiliated her conqueror by pretending that his body or his caresses were not the equal of hers, and that she only submitted to his desire, without much pleasure, compelled by his "low instincts." The modern woman, conversant with the facts of sex, and no longer having to create an artificial value for her body based on disregard of biological facts, since her activities, mental and physical, now command a definite price on the market place, seeks a partner with whom she will exchange caresses leading, as she recognises without silly shame, to mutual gratification. =The Pursuit.= The old-fashioned woman, who always assumed the passive role in life and who, supposedly indifferent to the pleasures of the flesh, ran away, actually or figuratively, from the brutal pursuer, played a preposterous dual part in the pre-love skirmishes. Who has never encountered the woman who wears in a public place some dress which reveals a great deal of her bust, and yet who pretends to be offended if some man stares at what she has exposed in order to attract his stare? The modern woman whose worth is determined, not by the male's eroticism in her presence, but by her accomplishments, can afford to be frank, honest, if not, at times, aggressive, in the love search. =The Passing of Respectable Prostitution.= The old-fashioned woman, having created the artificial value of womanhood as such, indulged in a mild, genteel form of prostitution, which, having no consequences likely to impose a burden on the community, (pregnancy, childbirth) never was criticised very severely. She sold her company for meals, theatre tickets, comfortable transportation, flowers, trinkets. Now and then, developing a streak of fairness and honesty, she would grant the man she exploited small privileges of a superficial kind. But the real old-fashioned girl was of the absolutely sordid type, who could allow a more or less repellent suitor to spend considerable sums to amuse her but would express genuine indignation at the thought that the man could be as sordid as she was, and expect some caresses in return. The modern woman, made independent financially by her non-sexual activities, can remove from her love all taint of even mild commercialism, returning favors in kind, or accepting presents, no longer as a bribe, but as a token of affection on the part of a man she loves. =The Abettor of Ethical Sins.= The old fashioned wife was in many more cases than superficial thinking would cause us to imagine, a more dangerous corrupter of public and private morality than the prostitute. Numerically the wife predominates. The prostitute constitutes a very small minority of the population of large cities and does not thrive in small town, villages or farming communities. Louis Berman, who is generally very indifferent to psychology, makes a very valuable remark in his book on glands: "Consider," he writes, "the unimportance of a collective purpose to the woman whose career is the mate and then the mate's career." Which means that the woman who takes up wifehood as a profession has no social morality. Her husband is her oyster and the world must in turn be her husband's oyster. She knows only one thing: that she must support her mate in anything he does so long as his activities, be they even immoral or criminal, provide food and shelter for her and her children. She cares not what he does as long as he "succeeds." She founds her estimate of success upon visible accomplishment. Getting "theirs," to her is preferable to getting "there." She, in short, is a foe to the world, as the world is the foe her mate has set out to capture and rob. She willingly sells his ethics to buy success and, at the same time, is loud in her denunciation of public, self-confessed prostitutes. She would not prostitute herself but she lightheartedly prostitutes her mate. The modern woman can in an emergency help her husband financially and thus enable him to follow the dictates of social ethics. She will thereby earn deeper love and respect from him than by any willingness to stand by him in crooked deals. =Health Versus Sickness.= To the old fashioned wife, weakness and sickness were invaluable assets. Sickness excused laziness and capriciousness. Sickness was a bait for petting and at the same time, a protection against unwelcome physical intimacies. Her menstruation became a mysterious, offensive, painful process which debarred her from many careers she never thought of entering, saved her from duties she was only too glad to shirk. Undismayed by the sight of professional women, singers, actresses, dancers, divers, etc., who not only never seemed disabled by the "dreaded" period but also held a distinct fascination to males "in spite" of their lack of neurotic femininity, she prided herself in living up to Michelet's asinine description of woman, "an invalid twelve times unclean." The modern woman seeking accomplishment of the positive type, scorns the negative superiority which sickness and invalidism assure to neurotics. She has acquired a more scientific knowledge of sex matters and the superstitious fears surrounding menstruation no longer affect her. From my own clinical experience, I am compelled to agree heartily with Dr. Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury, who in their very fine and practical book "Outwitting our Nerves" state that "ninety-five out of a hundred cases of painful menstruation are caused by fear and expectation of pain." =The Passing of the Doll.= The modern woman, active, self reliant, honest and healthy, will force out of existence a type which has lent much picturesque charm to social gatherings and to pictorial art, the doll type of woman, prettiness incarnate, of rose leaf charm, unfit for any biological function except the mild lovemaking, not so much of a husband, as of a lover. Tuberculous poets and composers of the Musset and Chopin type, affected pictorial artists like Helleu, will deplore her disappearance. Man, put at his ease by the modern woman, who does not require constant protection, mental and physical, will find the doll "too much trouble." Only the very stupid and unmanly man will cultivate her for she will not throw his physical shortcomings into too striking relief and it will not require any mental exertion on his part to converse with her. =The Passing of the Flirt.= The flirt is doomed. The flirt is a rather unintelligent woman with a mild prostitution complex. She has been trained from infancy to consider a woman's career as successful when the woman fastens to herself a breadwinner whom she holds by his physical desire of her body. Having never acquired any market value outside of the sexual field, she must constantly test her powers and reassure herself by leading all sorts and conditions of men, for whom she may never experience even the slightest fancy, into consequential overt acts revealing that she has awakened their eroticism. Anyone will do, provided she reads in his eyes the verdict: I am still attractive. The terror of growing old is not so overwhelming to the modern woman who has acquired a non-sexual market value. She tests herself thru positive accomplishment, leadership, principally, and does not need to keep her eye constantly on the sex thermometer. =Modesty, Old and New.= Knowledge which dispels physical ghosts and a positive self-valuation based on accomplishment will cause the modern woman to discard the old fashioned modesty which was supposed to be her greatest attraction, and which husbands, while being obviously attracted by immodest women, encouraged in their wives as a bulwark against the advances of other men. Havelock Ellis in his "Impressions and Comments" contrasts cleverly thru two striking illustrations the old-fashioned type, worshipping at the altar of false modesty, and the modern type, who is no longer ashamed of her body or her sex: "In one of my books I had occasion to mention the case, communicated to me, of a woman in Italy who preferred to perish in the flames, when the house was on fire, rather than shock her modesty by coming out of it without her clothes. So far as it has been within my power I have always sought to place bombs beneath the world in which that woman lived, so that it might altogether go up in flames. I read of a troop ship torpedoed in the Mediterranean and almost immediately sunk within sight of land. A nurse was still on deck. She proceeded to strip, saying to the men about her: 'Excuse me, boys, I must save the Tommies.' She swam around and saved a dozen of them. That woman belongs to my world. Now and again I have come across the like, sweet and feminine and daring women who have done things as brave as that, and even much braver because more complexly difficult and always I feel my heart swinging like a censer before them, going up in a perpetual fragrance of love and adoration. "I dream of a world in which the spirits of women are flames stronger than fire, a world in which modesty has become courage and yet remains modesty, a world in which women are as unlike men as ever they were in the world I sought to destroy, a world in which women shine with a loveliness of self-revelation as enchanting as ever the old legends told, and yet a world which would immeasurably transcend the old world in the self sacrificing passion of human service." Thus far I have presented the silver lining of what some timid persons call the cloud of modernism in love. To be perfectly fair and honest, I must now mention the cloud itself, altho, like all clouds, it will soon blow away or resolve itself into a few drops of water, tears, perhaps, also of a temporary nature. =The Unadapted Woman.= The sudden rise of women in certain fields of activity has left quite a number of them unpleasantly unadapted. Certain positions, well filled by women, and which pay rather high salaries, demand but a modicum of intellectual development, little culture or manners. The women who fill them, and who generally come from the working class, financially well off, accustomed to expensive clothes and to respectful treatment on the part of their coworkers or employers, are loath to enter a married relationship or even a liaison, with men of their social set, that is, having the same culture or lack of culture, for those men are financially lower and lack certain manners which they expect to find in their environment. A husband of the working class type could not, in case of pregnancy, give such a woman the comfort which she now craves. Motherhood would deprive her, temporarily at least, from an income which nothing could replace. Nor could she become subservient to a husband after being very independent and having become slightly snobbish on account of the attentions she has received from men financially superior to her. Some of those women whom I have known, and whose profession I shall not mention to avoid references of an odious character, sought mates, legitimate or illegitimate, out of their class, taking for husbands or lovers unsuccessful professional men in need of help. The results of those matches were anything but encouraging. The male prostitutes who accepted such arrangements, either showed plainly their scorn of their unintellectual mate or left her as soon as success in their chosen field made them independent of their working class wife or mistress. =The Proud Husband.= Many men drawing even small salaries, are absolutely unwilling to marry a woman engaged in a gainful occupation. This is due either to hidden jealousy, some men imagining that daily contact with other men is bound to jeopardise a woman's morals, or to silly pride and panicky fear of "what THEY will say." I have heard many donkeys telling me that they do not wish "people" to think that they cannot support their wives. The cloud hovering over the modern woman and which may, at times, cast a shadow on her love life, will be blown away as soon as culture spreads to all social classes of the population owing to the increase and systematisation of leisure, and as soon as the old fashioned male has been consigned to his last resting place or analised out of his foolish neurotic notions. CHAPTER XXIX BIRTH CONTROL Modern love, as I have endeavored to show in the preceding chapters is infinitely more complex than love was in the past. When woman was meant to obey and serve, when feudalism or any other rigid caste system set clear-cut boundaries to each individual's range of development, there was less unrest among women just as there was less unrest among slaves. And both the mediaeval slave and the mediaeval women were probably absolute bores. Unrest is growth and complexity is the obvious evidence of growth. Love stirrings among the amoebae are probably similar to those experienced by human beings. Nature probably puts a premium of pleasure on the cleavage of the unicellular animal which reproduces itself by dividing itself in two, by issuing forth another cell, as it does on the human male when his gonads liberate spermatozoa. But the amoeba's love feelings are extremely simple and lead to no complication for they imply no enduring companionship, no responsibilities to a mate nor to the "offspring." =What We Expect of the Modern Woman.= The modern woman who is expected to be, not merely a sexual mate but a social and intellectual mate as well, a companion in our athletic diversions, a comrade-at-arms in the world's battles, and many other things, can no longer allow chance to interrupt her developmental strivings, to handicap her in the friendly race she is running with the mate of her choice for intellectual accomplishment by unexpected, unwelcome, inconvenient pregnancy and child bearing. Every child claims two years of its mother's life and it seems reasonable that the mother should have something to say as to what number that chapter will bear in her biography. As only the very weak-minded or very hypocritical offer as a remedy for frequent pregnancy male continence, we shall not even consider for one minute such an absurd, abnormal, biologically immoral solution. =The Only Solution.= The only other solution which has ever been proposed is a system of sexual enlightenment which will enable a woman to prevent pregnancy until such time when she feels that she can in justice to herself and to her offspring bear a child, and will, further, enable her to have an abortion performed when, in spite of all contraceptive measures, pregnancy has begun. This solution has been adopted by the entire civilised world, and in fact, I might say that the degree of civilisation of a race or nation can be accurately gauged by the number of individuals within that race or nation practicing birth control. With very few exceptions, a large family betokens stupidity, poverty and ignorance. It is the poor, the stupid and the ignorant who are burdened with children and, in turn, that burden keeps them stupid, poor and ignorant. A vicious circle which seems hard to break. =The Human Milch Cow.= Many a time when beholding some miserable female from the slums wrecked by repeated childbearing, dwarfed in mind, deformed in body, I have felt that sexual relations between her and her mate had probably reached the level at which they could only by an unusual stretch of one's imagination, be even distantly connected with love. To her and to her mate, every embrace, except after the onset of pregnancy, meant added suffering, added expense, further physical degradation and decay. Since the "nice" people, however, know the remedy and apply it, why bother any longer? Because, while normally intelligent men and women know how to avoid pregnancy and to whom to turn when an accident happens, the greatest uncertainty about contraception obsesses their minds and panicky fears bring about many catastrophes when the unwelcome fruit must be removed from the mother's body. Thousands of men and woman, enlightened in the mysteries of contraception by some one who is little less ignorant than themselves, are chilled in their enjoyment of lawful love by the thought of possible danger. Many women accept their husbands caresses in fear and trembling and many, imagining that there is a close connection between orgasm and pregnancy succeed in making themselves frigid, which leads to neurotic disturbances in the wife and unhappiness for both mates. Many husbands never dare to "let themselves go" unless it be in the arms of a prostitute who is "wise" and can "take care of herself." Many a woman has deceived her husband because a wise "man of the world" assured her that she ran no risk of pregnancy in his arms. =The Nightmare of Abortion.= And, if in spite of all, an "accident" happens, what is the mental state of the woman who calls at the "unethical" practitioner's office? While such an operation practiced with a modicum of skill may be harmless, the dread fear of possible consequences is quite able to kill the woman. Fear may bring forth any morbid symptom, from an embolus to violent suppuration. Fear, on the other hand, on which the advocates of suppressive measures rely, hardly ever leads anyone to continence or prevents any one from resorting to abortion. Legal obstacles to contraceptive education attain only one result. They make married love risky and unpleasant, kill many a young woman and, in the case of neurotic mothers, allow one morbid generation to bring into this world another morbid generation. =The Plight of the Neurotic Woman.= Many neurotic women imagine that they hate their husbands and rationalise that hatred by bringing up many absurd, imaginary charges against them. To them their husbands symbolise pregnancy. Many neurotic mothers, who did not wish to bear another child, often compensate for their lack of real love for the unwelcome child by an absurd, exaggerated tenderness which spoils the child or develops morbid fears (the fear they might hurt or kill the child, fear as to the child's health or welfare) which wreck the child's mental balance and not infrequently land the mother in a sanatarium. A neurotic woman I treated was obsessed by the fear that she might some day kill her husband and children. Several years ago she had had an abortion performed by a midwife whom she did not trust. Septic poisoning set in and she hovered between life and death for several months. A great fear of death drove her into reading many religious books. She came to the conclusion that she had committed a murder. But her husband, having impregnated her, was more guilty than she, for he was the cause of it all. Hence, her insane logic added, he and she would be better off dead than leading a sinful life. She should, therefore, kill him and kill herself. Furthermore, her children being the offspring of murderers, must be themselves tainted with criminal tendencies and should also be saved from a life of crime. When she was brought to me she had attempted to kill the entire family by turning on the gas faucets all over the house about two o'clock in the morning. The lawmakers who prevented that woman from having an operation performed legally, (which would remove the fear of crime) safely, by a reputable practitioner, (which would remove the fear of consequences), openly, (which would remove the fear of social ostracism), would have been responsible for the death of several people, had she not accidentally awakened her husband by upsetting a chair on her way back to her bed. There are thousands of neurotics, suffering from a feeling of inferiority, who are unfit to become mothers until their morbidity has been cured by psychotherapy, and who, if allowed to bear children, will train a new generation to behave in a negative, neurotic, socially baneful way. =The Children of Neurotic Mothers=, in whom the fear and hatred of sex and love is rampant, will some day become prostitutes or puritans, both of them degrading love equally. I cannot follow Freud when he states that every neurosis has its root in a failure of the love life, but some of the artificial obstacles created by a stupid puritanical civilisation between man and the full realisation of his sexual goal have not infrequently wrecked a life which, neurotically oriented as it was, might have gone on, in a socially tolerable way, for years and perhaps until the individual's death. Difficulties due to the use of improper or misunderstood contraceptive appliances, the terrors of pregnancy, actual or expected, the fear of abortion, the sufferings following abortion in a complex-ridden organism, have too often upset a balance which at best was precarious. =Birth Control and Indulgence.= Certain critics of birth control attack it on the ground that it would lead to "overindulgence" of the sex relationship. Those people are generally unprepossessing, worn, individuals who are trying to compensate for their sexual weakness by making a virtue out of an unavoidable inferiority. Their opposition to what they call "overindulgence" (one thing which nature hardly ever allows, barring rare morbid cases of priapism) is grotesque in the case of married couples. More unions are wrecked by underindulgence due to fear, ignorance of the mates or inhibitions on the part of one or both, than to indulgence of the normal kind. Anything which prevents or discourages the normal exchange of sexual caresses between those legally entitled to each others enjoyment is pernicious, antisocial and antibiological for, as Grace Potter writes: "Mating has to do with other creation than that of new human beings. It has to do with every kind of creation--a new state, a poem, a picture, a great bridge, a happier world. Mating is concerned with repeopling the world but also with regeneration of the individual, opening his capacities to growth. Who shall say that the one is not as important as the other? If the second were not as important as the first there would have been hardly any advance in human culture. Of all the errors incident to the development of human beings, in their struggle to attain a consciousness that makes them more than animals, none has had wider ill-effects than our misuse of love. "There are two equally unfortunate attitudes toward love which perhaps grow out of each other. The one is the puritan attitude and the other is the vulgar one. The puritan attitude is that sex impulses are somehow vile and so, altho they give pleasure, must be denied. The vulgar attitude takes it for granted that sex impulses are vile but as they are pleasant are to be accepted. The one tends to deny physical values to love. This is suppression. The other tends to deny tender values to love. That is suppression also. They have neither one known love. And finally the puritan becomes incapable of tenderness and the vulgar becomes equally incapable of physical expression. It is not a beautiful picture. "The healthy attitude is this: The sex impulse is not degrading any more than any other impulse is. It is a force as gravity is a force. Those human beings achieve beauty and harmony who correlate sexual impulses harmoniously with all their other impulses."[3] "In spite of the age-long teachings that sex life in itself is unclean," Margaret Sanger writes in "Woman and the New Race," the world has been moving to a realization that A GREAT LOVE BETWEEN A MAN AND A WOMAN IS A HOLY THING freighted with great responsibilities for spiritual growth. The fear of unwanted children removed, the assurance that she will have a sufficient amount of time in which to develop her love life to its greatest beauty, with its comradeship in many fields--these will lift woman by the very soaring quality of her innermost self to spiritual heights that few have attained. Then the coming of the eagerly desired children will but enrich life in all its avenues, rather than enslave and impoverish it as do unwanted ones to-day. "What healthier grounds for the growth of sound morals could possibly exist than the ample spiritual life of the woman just depicted? Free to follow the feminine spirit, which dwells in the sanctuary of her nature, she will, in her daily life, give expression to that high idealism which is the fruit of that spirit when it is unhampered and unviolated. "The love for her mate will flower in beauty of deeds that are pure because they are the natural expression of her physical, mental and spiritual being. The love for desired children will come to blossom in a spirituality that is high because it is free to reach the heights. "=The Moral Force of Woman's Nature Will be Unchained=, and of its own dynamic power will uplift her to a plane unimagined by those holding fast to the old standards of church morality. Love is the greatest force of the universe; freed of its bonds of submission and unwanted progeny, it will formulate and compel of its own nature observance to standards of purity far beyond the highest conception of the average moralist." =The Passing of the Double Standard.= "Birth Control in philosophy and practice," Margaret Sanger writes in "THE PIVOT OF CIVILIZATION," is the destroyer of the dualism in the old sex code. It denies that the only purpose of sexual activity is procreation; it also denies that sex should be reduced to the level of sensual lust or that woman should permit herself to be the instrument of its satisfaction. In increasing and differentiating her love demands, woman must elevate sex into another sphere, whereby it may subserve and enhance the possibility of individual and human expression. Man will gain in this no less than woman; for in the age-old enslavement of woman he has enslaved himself; and in the liberation of womankind, all of humanity will experience the joys of a newer and fuller freedom." CHAPTER XXX THE PASSING OF HUSBAND WORSHIP While thousands of healthy people, men and women, rejoice over the fact that woman of the modern type is coming to the fore, there are many "calamity howlers," male and female, who bid us pause and consider the direful consequences which they fear (that is, hope), this new stage in the development of mankind will bring to the world. Dr. Arabella Kenealy in "Feminism and Sex Extinction" forebodes the passing of whatever is masculine in the male. Her arguments are not very logical but they are interesting. She believes that "two fates await woman unless she rids herself of contempt for functions and duties purely hers, feminism and feministicism. She is handicapped every month for two or three days by weakness or pain. The craze to do men's work will result in man's emasculation. "The desire to figure in legislation far from stiffening the manly caliber of weak men will still further enervate them. Members of either sex are not capable of doing their best work while in association. Sex rivalries are excited. Sex ascendency is created. Man inherits from his mother some of woman's apprehension, foresight and altruism as required to present woman's bent and viewpoint. More of it would be superfluous. The numerical preponderance of women must ultimately swamp masculine initiative in state affairs unless the political functions of the sexes are separated." Why the process should be more baneful for men than it has been for women who, for countless generations have been decidedly "swamped in state affairs" is not very evident. =Is Man's Virility Declining?= An editorial writer in the New York Medical Journal also foresees degeneration ahead unless the male retains his mastery: "The yielding by man to the other sex of masculine essential rights and obligations is a symptom of declining virility, physical and mental." Another medical writer sounds a different alarm: "Overworked woman may impair the constitutional vigor of man, while she works with him. She is kept up by nervous excitement, by strong tea or drugs. In short, woman is fussy. In a stress of work she will work on with crimson cheeks and growing irritation, while man will put on his hat and calmly resort to the nearest lunch room. Women by their eternal high pressure as heads of departments are making nervous wrecks of themselves." Finally there comes Havelock Ellis, usually less panicky, who thinks he has noticed a distinct degeneration in the young man of today. "These weak-chinned, neurotic young men are no match at all for the heavy-jawed resolute young women feminist methods are creating. The yielding to women of masculine rights is a symptom of declining virility. Equality in all things yielded, pride in himself, in his work, gone, he will descend to the state of the decadent savage who keeps as many wives to work for him as their work for him enables him to keep." =There is Undue Pessimism in All Those Warnings.= Woman has not become brutish as some writers claim, nor has man become effeminate. Woman has simply gained a clearer knowledge of her latent powers and the war has provided her with a touchstone for her physical resistance and endurance. The work woman had to do during the war, which she had never suspected she could do, for until then it had been considered as man's work, has not "masculinised" her but it has rid many "delicate flowers" of their morbid belief in the fragile character of their constitution. Male man is not in danger of passing out of existence but one variety of man is doomed, the type which has always wished to mate with the two types of women which, in the preceding chapter, I declared doomed, the doll and the flirt. =The Wise Husband.= That almost extinct species is the type of husband who speakes of HIS wife, who knows "women" and what is "good" for them, the home Jehovah, all-knowing and all-powerful, who must be served and obeyed, who, on his return from work must find his wife ready to entertain him if so he wishes, or to plunge back into the depths of the kitchen if his mood so requires, the husband who knows that he is the aim and goal of his wife's existence. A ridiculous old man, abandoned by his too young wife, made to the reporters a statement betraying sadly the infinite conceit of that type: "She will return to me because I love her so." A most unprepossessing man was bewailing in my office the fact that his wife had grown sexually indifferent to him. I advised him not to compel her to have intercourse with him against her will, especially as he was diseased. He naïvely remarked: "But she is my wife." That type of husband, in other words, considers a wife as a chattel, to be submitted to any sort of legal indignity because she is "only a female." He may force motherhood upon her to demonstrate his doubtful virility or to protect his jealous egotism. He would accept with enthusiasm Goldschmidt's theories which I presented for what they were worth in the chapter on Virginity, and according to which, woman is soft wax and characterless, waiting to be shaped into a personality by her husband's caresses. Scientific investigators of a more reliable type than Goldschmidt and who avoid drawing "yellow" conclusions from their labors, have supplied the reading world with facts which should cause the Jehovah husband to fear for his lofty position. =Is the Male Indispensable?= Jacques Loeb and others have demonstrated that as far as the physical results of love, the continuance of the race, is concerned, the male may not be absolutely indispensable. Loeb had shown that almost anything which causes the protoplasm of the egg to separate itself from its membrane is sufficient to introduce "life" into that curious organism which until then only holds possibilities of life. Nature, in order to produce one individual demands two principles, one male and one female principle. She must have one egg which is modified by some product of the male organism, pollen or sperm. =Modern Scientists Have Beaten Nature at Her Own Game= of creation; they have taken one egg, the female principle and proceeded to fertilise that egg without any male product whatsoever. The experiment has only been made on low forms of animal life, sea urchins and the like, but the egg of the sea urchin is not different in any essential respect from the egg of the human species. By taking unfecundated eggs and placing them for two minutes in a mixture of sea water and acetic, or butyric, or valerianic acid, then placing them back in sea water and twenty minutes later, immersing them for about an hour in hypertonic sea water or sugar solution, and finally returning them to sea water, Loeb was able to bring to life young larvæ. A French scientist, Delage, repeating the same experiments managed to keep those larvæ alive until the time of their sexual maturity. Loeb also succeeded in fertilising eggs by placing them in the blood serum of cows, sheep, pigs or rabbits. Mathews has fertilised some by shaking them gently for a period of time. =Twins To Order.= Loeb and others have gone further even than that and produced not only single individuals but twins, triplets, etc. The secrets of nature's laboratory are being revealed more and more clearly from day to day. The conceited fathers who imagine that the bringing into life of twins is a symptom of their powerful virility must learn that a mere chemical phenomenon called _osmosis_ is responsible for the over-fertility of some wives. Remove from sea water sea urchin's eggs and place them for fifteen minutes or so in ordinary water. The density of water being lower than that of sea water, the eggs will absorb a great deal of water and burst open. A drop of protoplasm will come out at the break in the membrane. Replace the exploded egg into sea water and two larvæ will hatch out of it. Separate the two portions of the exploded egg and the twins will be as healthy as tho they had been allowed to grow for a while in Siamese style. By repeating the experiment, Loeb has produced not only twins but triplets and quadruplets, all normal and growing out of the same egg which was only meant originally to produce one urchin. One can understand how a variation in the pressure of the liquids surrounding the human egg may lead to the same result. While scientists have created living beings by using the female principles as a basis, they have not thus far attained any results by experimenting with the male principle alone. =The Mother is the Race= apparently and the stubbornness of man in claiming and fighting for the principle of masculine superiority is apparently due to his obscure feeling that after all he is not indispensable. The more vociferous the claim, the weaker generally the basis for that claim. In certain forms of insanity, the more the organism is destroyed by disease the more extravagant the statements are which the insane man makes about himself, claiming power, wealth, health, youth, beauty, etc. At least one animal species, the bees, have placed the male on that footing. The male bee represents a convenient and pleasant means of bringing about the fecundation of the eggs. After his chemical part has been played, however, no one takes him seriously and his official existence ends. Certain spiders and other insects consider the male in the same light, some of them killing and eating the male as soon as his fecundating activities have come to an end. The feminine domination, if it should ever implant itself into our world would undoubtedly lead to the absurdities, the exaggerations and the repressions which are the result of our man made civilisation. =Matriarchal Communities of the Past= in which the woman was the head of the family and probably of the state and matriarchial groups of Tibet have not left visible tokens of their worth as a family system. As they preceded the present family system however, it may be that all traces of their achievements have been obliterated by time. The Tibetan experiment may have been blighted by unfavorable geographical conditions and rendered as barren as the Mongolian patriarchal experiments in a neighboring part of the world. Man as a means of fecundation is not likely to be discarded by normal women but his prestige is likely to decrease as the secret of his mysterious power becomes better known. The passing of the smug, self satisfied Jehovah husband, a neurotic in every case, is in sight and his passing will facilitate the adaptation of some of the inadapted women I mentioned in the preceding chapter, some of whom fail to find love, and some of whom do not dare to seek it. =The Successful Modern Woman is Rather Conceited.= Some of the things I said about female artists applies in a great measure to the woman who in business or in a profession has managed to make her mark. After struggling years for a certain object which she has at last attained, she is naturally loath to surrender her personality to the average husband of the self-styled masculine type. She at times resorts to homosexualism in an effort to retain her independence and yet satisfy her love cravings without submitting to a domination which she feels to be unjustified. =The Terrors of The Climateric.= The passing of the Jehovah husband will also ease a process of woman's (and man's) life which has to this day held countless terrors to the uninitiated, the climacteric. To the old-fashioned and the gullible woman, the change of life meant the end of life as a female. The stupid man, who is constantly endeavoring to subdue his mate thru disparagement and kills speedily her youth, her enthusiasm and her hopes by repeating constantly the trashy "At your age, my dear," is in a great measure responsible for transforming that harmless phenomenon into a painful crisis, mental and physical. The crisis of the "Dangerous Age," to use Karin Michaelis's expression, is generally due to the clash of a weak masochistic female with a weak and sadistic male, a clash in which, owing to age and the staleness of the mates, affection has no redeeming, consoling physical features. =The Masculine Man is in No Danger of Passing Away= and he will for ever be as attractive to woman as the feminine woman is to him. As Shaw said, what has been killed in men by the growth of feminism is "not masculinity but boorishness," a characteristic, not of the strong but of the weak, who is trying to compensate for his weakness and to conceal it. What has been killed in woman is not feminine sweetness but overfeminine silliness which woman used as a deceptive weapon against the domineering male. In a world which grants equal opportunities to men and women, no husband will be able to justify or excuse his treatment of a woman by saying "She is my wife." He will have to remain her lover in order to hold her. No wife will be able to make the home hideous and, at the same time, brandish over her husband's head the certificate of enslavement called a marriage license. She will have, in order to compete with the free women whose personality will impose itself upon her environment, to remain his mistress. Every step ahead which the world takes fortunately proves a new step which love takes in the direction of completeness and freedom from sordidness and ugliness. CHAPTER XXXI PERFECT MATRIMONIAL ADJUSTMENTS While marriage, regardless of whatever form it may assume, has always been mentioned in this book as unavoidably related to love, we must not blink the fact that marriage and love are two absolutely different things forced into frequent association by social and economic necessity. Love is an involuntary and compulsory craving which draws a male and a female into the closest possible union for the purpose of mutual sexual gratification, generally followed by conception and reproduction. =Marriage a Compromise.= Marriage on the other hand is merely a compromise between the positive individual cravings which demand the most complete and frequent gratification of the love urge, regardless of its consequences, and the negative feeling which causes the community to shirk all possible responsibilities incurred by the individual, among others, the support of pregnant or lactating females and of helpless infants. Unless the community owns mother and child and can exploit their labor or receive their cash value (slavery system), it demands that their owner, the impregnator of the woman and procreator of the child, supply food and shelter for both. Marriage is also a compromise between two individual cravings which may not be synchronised, as the male's desire for the female may subside before her desire for him does, or reciprocally. Through the institution of marriage the community protects itself against new burdens directly by penalties (sentences against wife deserters or those who abandon children) and indirectly by protecting the mates against their own cravings for whose duration they are not responsible (laws against bigamy or adultery, etc.). =Considering the Artificial Character of the Marriage Union=, and at the same time the psychological importance of its durability as far as the mental health of the off-spring is concerned, one of the most pressing duties of the community (and one which it never performs), should be to devise all the possible ways and means whereby the sex cravings of both mates could be helped to retain their freshness and strength as long as possible. =Attractiveness an Asset.= The first thought which should be forced into the minds of modern men and women is that attractiveness is a positive asset not only to woman but to man. In classic Greece, a man could not be merely good, he had to be beautiful too. By "good" the Greek meant "fit" but in the compound word which implied both qualities, _kalos_, beauty came first. Cravings being awakened and kept alive by certain fetishes, the individual should be trained to recognize his and his mate's fetishism and to make all possible efforts to retain, if necessary by artificial means, the fetishes which lead to the awakening of erotism between him and his mate. =The Average Man or Woman of Forty is a Sorry Sight.= Yet a little intelligence would compel them to retain or regain the physical idiosyncrasies they exhibited at the time of their marriage. Too many women consider it sinful to devote much time to their physical appearance and the care of their body. In a man, any attempt to make himself attractive is considered in stupid middle-class circles as a stigma of effeminacy. The "pretty" man has always been despised by men and women, and endocrinology has confirmed their judgment by revealing to us that he is a glandular weakling. Between the pretty man and the attractive man, however, there is a far cry. While the American movies, generally speaking, are catering to the weak-minded and the unimaginative, they have, in their search for a bait where-with to catch audiences, rendered mankind a signal service by starring the kind of man which would have passed muster in ancient Greece, beautiful and fit. =Athletic, if not Acrobatic, Movie Idols= present to the female part of the audience a complex of physical qualities which women will gradually demand from their mates. It is regrettable that women should not attend prize fights in large numbers, for the sight of the godlike participants in those affrays would force them to institute enlightening comparisons between professional fighters and the average male. Besides retaining or regaining their fetishes, human beings should make a special effort not to let those fetishes lose their power. =The Worst Foe of Married Happiness.= Balzac in his "Physiology of Marriage" says that the married have to wage a constant fight with a monster which devours everything: Habit. Every stimulus, as we know, pleasant or unpleasant, loses its power when applied continuously or too frequently. It is only for the first minute or so that the ice cold shower causes our naked skin to tingle with excitement. As soon as the reaction sets in and the capillaries fill with red blood, the pleasant sensation of the water needles becomes dulled. After holding our hand for a minute in hot water, we no longer realise the high temperature of the liquid and in order to continue to experience the feeling of heat we must continually raise the temperature of the water. And likewise we may grow so accustomed to one source of erotic stimulation that we become indifferent to it. =Friendship May Survive the Death of Sexual Love=, provided the sex desire has died in both mates at the same time. When desire dies off in the wife first and is not replaced by aversion, the situation may be very simple for she can still satisfy her more ardent mate and derive some gratification therefrom. When the man's desire dies first, on the other hand, there may arise unpleasant complications. A man may be impotent with a woman whom he loves tenderly but no longer desires sexually and yet be potent with some other woman to whom he is not completely "accustomed." Jealousy on the part of the wife may then prevent the advent of the platonic friendship which is not uncommon between old married mates, altho Montaigne denies the possibility of its existence. Modern mates, conscious of that danger, have now and then devised ways and means to combat Balzac's monster. Not so long ago a well-known woman writer announced that she was planning to marry a certain man with whom, however, she did not intend to live day after day. The experiment has many chances of success if jealousy does not complicate the situation. I suggested to reporters last summer, when two famous artists parted company, that their union might have been of longer duration if one of them had lived at the Plaza while the other was stopping at the St. Regis. =Married People Should Separate for Periods of Variable Duration= in order that a fresh stimulation may emanate from their fetishes when they meet again. By leading more individual lives and having separate sets of friends, they would, besides, bring to each other a new sort of mental pabulum and stimulation day after day. Conversation becomes futile and unnecessary between a husband and wife who always pay and receive calls together, attend the same spectacles and hence always see the same side of life. Now and then we read of couples who separate and a few years later remarry. Those few years spent apart from each other mean for both new experiences which enrich their mind and their conversation and make them again interesting to each other. =The Play Function of Love.= Another factor which the monstrous hypocrisy of puritanism makes very difficult to discuss openly and honestly and which wrecks many promising unions is the ignorance, more common than we suspect among married couples, of what Maurice Parmelee in his "Personality and Behavior" has called the Play Function of Love, a term which has been given a broader meaning by Havelock Ellis in an article for the _Medical Review of Reviews_ for March 1921. The average man or woman is tragically ignorant of the mission of sex. The average man, as Ellis writes, has two aims: "to prove that he is a man and to relieve a sexual tension. "He too often considers himself, from traditional habits, as the active partner in love and his own pleasure as the prime motive of the sex communion. "His wife, naturally adopts the complementary attitude, regards herself as the passive partner and her pleasure as negligible. "She has not mastered the art of love, with the result that her whole nature remains ill-developed and unharmonized, and that she is incapable of bringing her personality (having indeed no achieved personality to bring) to bear effectively on the problems of society and the world around her." I have described in "Sex Happiness" the tragedies which result from that form of ignorance, especially the tragedy of the unsatisfied wife, her restlessness, her gradual dislike of her mate, her curiosity as to what feelings she might experience if married to another man, when some other man seems to awaken her erotism, and then the dilemma, repression leading to neurosis, or indulgence leading into the divorce court. =Psychoanalysis to the Rescue.= "In this matter," Ellis writes, "we may learn a lesson from the psychoanalysts of today without any implication that psychoanalysis is necessarily a desirable or even possible way of attaining the revelation of love. The wiser psychoanalysts insist that the process of liberating the individual from outer and inner influences that repress or deform his energies and impulses is effected by removing the inhibitions on the free play of his nature. "It is a process of education in the true sense, not of the suppression of natural impulses nor even of the instillation of sound rules and maxims for their control, not of the pressing in but of the leading out of the individual's special tendencies. "It removes inhibitions, even inhibitions that were placed upon the individual, or that he consciously or unconsciously placed upon himself, with the best moral intentions, and by so doing it allows a larger and freer and more natively spontaneous morality to come into play. "It has this influence above all in the sphere of sex, where such inhibitions have been most powerfully laid on the native impulses, where the natural tendencies have been most surrounded by taboos and terrors, most tinged with artificial stains of impurity and degradation derived from alien and antiquated traditions. "Thus the therapeutical experience of the psychoanalysts reinforce the lessons we learn from physiology and psychology and the intimate experiences of life." =Wounded Egotism.= Love in marriage is endangered from another quarter: The greatest foe of sexual desire, as I have stated several times in this book, is wounded egotism. A perfect matrimonial adjustment does not mean the modification of either mate's personality. We have seen in the chapters on glands that the normal personality is practically inadaptable, that is, nothing short of serious sickness or a surgical operation can transform an active person into a sluggish one and vice versa. It is only the neurotic personality which can be adapted by the removal of certain unconscious fears which prevent it from attaining social and biological balance and happiness. All psychoanalysis does in such cases is to teach the patient to accept everything which is biologically normal in his personality. We must then have an absolute respect for personality in ourselves and others. We must find a socially acceptable outlet for all our idiosyncrasies, a difficult, but never impossible task. Lack of an outlet means a neurotic disturbance. The so-called adaptable people are those who succeed in repressing temporarily their cravings and denying their existence, a result which they attain at the cost of much suffering to themselves and, indirectly, to their environment. =Democracy in the Home= is the prerequisite of every perfect matrimonial adjustment. The autocratic government of the home by a male bully of a female nag leads to either a revolution (divorce) or to the destruction of human material after a bitter strife, (neurotic ailments). The bullied wife and the henpecked husband fill the offices of neurologists, gynaecologists, psychoanalysts and sexologists. This is the way in which the wounded ego of the defeated mate avenges itself. The defeated mate becomes sexually disabled. The results of maladjustment of the mates are strikingly summed up by Kempf in his monumental work "Psychopathology": "Upon marriage a subtle if not overt struggle occurs between the mates for the dominant position in the contract. The big, aggressive wife and the timid, little husband attest to the importance of organic superiority in the adjustment, but the average marriage does not show such organic differences. The sadistic or masochistic husband and the masochistic or sadistic wife will certainly adjust to please their reciprocating cravings, no matter what influence this may have upon their children, and a sadistic wife and sadistic husband, although both are cruel in their pleasures, will divorce each other on the charge of the other being cruel; but it is the commonplace adjustment which interests us most, because it is most predominant. "Nature places an unerring punishment upon the woman, who, by incessantly using every whim, scheme or artifice, finally succeeds in dominating her husband. By forcing him to submit to her thousand and one demands and coercions, within a few years, he unconsciously becomes a submissive type and loses his sexual potency with her as the love-object. If he does not have secret love interests which stimulate him to strive for power, he finally loses his initiative and sexual potency completely and must live always at a commonplace level, the servant of more virile men: the counterpart of the subdued impotent males of the animal herd. "His more aggressive, selfish mate, if periodically heterosexually erotic, will become neurotic if her moral restraints are insurpassable, or seek a new mate whom she will again attempt to subdue. Never is she able to realise that her selfishness makes her sexually unattractive. The psychopathologist meets many such women whose husbands have evaded domination by secretly depending upon the affections of another more suitably adjusted woman." In "The New Horizon in Love and Life," Mrs. Havelock Ellis writes "It is more than probable that the evolved relationship of the future will be monogamy--but a monogamy wider and more beautiful than the present caricature of it, as the sea is wider and more delicious than a duck pond. "The lifelong, faithful love of one man for one woman is the exception and not the rule. The law of affinity being as subtle and as indefinable as the law of gravitation, we may, by and by, find it worth while to give it its complete opportunity in those realms where it can manifest itself most potently. We are on the wrong bridge if we imagine that laxity is the easiest way to freedom. The bridge which will bear us must be strong enough to support us while experiments are tried. "What is the gospel in this matter of sexual emancipation for men and women in the new world where love has actually come of age? It is surely the complete economic independence of women. While man is economically free and woman still a slave, either physically, financially or spiritually, mankind as a whole must act as if blindness, maimness and deafness constituted health. "The complete independence of husband and wife is the gospel of the new era of marriage. This is the actual matter which philosophers, parents, philanthropists and pioneers so often ignore when teaching the new ideals of morality. When a woman is kept by a man she is not a free individuality either as child, wife or mistress. Imagine for a moment a man kept by a woman as women are kept by men and a sense of humor illuminates the absurdity of the situation between any class of evolved human beings." As a clever patient of mine whom I regret I cannot mention by name said one day: "married happiness, to be lasting, requires more than sexual cooperation of both mates, it must resolve itself into cooperative egotism." [Footnote 1: See Mary Sinclair's "The Life and Death of Harriet Freau."] [Footnote 2: Kings. I, 1-2.] [Footnote 3: Birth Control Review, April 1922.] THE END INDEX Abortion, 295 Active homosexuals, 167 Adler, 32, 41, 71, 115, 130, 132, 141, 142, 170, 192, 211, 225 Adrenals, 230 Adrenin, 6 Algolagnists, 188 Androgynes, 160 Animal love fights, 196 "Animal" types, 87 Antifetishes, 24, 25 Aphrodite, 195 Aristotle, 207 Atavism, 194 Attractiveness, 317 Auditory sensations, 57 Baby talk, 57 Balzac, 318 Basogas, 43 Bees in love, 52, 53 Beresford, 267 Berman, Dr. Louis, 228 Bernhardt, Sarah, 100 Bloch, Iwan, 88 Blood relations, 47 Bonaparte, 192 Bored wives, 89 Boredom, 212 Bottle-fed men, 20 Bovary, Madame, 91 Brain, cells, 16 function of the, 7 operations on a dog's, 13 Breast-fed men, 20 Brothers and sisters, 78 Brutus, 82 Business women, 279 Cæsar, 180 Calf love, 54 Cannon, 10 Chicago Vice Report, 108 Childish behavior, 158 Choice, meaning of, 11, 12 Cigar smoking, 59 Clean lives, 264 Climacteric, 312 Community's criticism, 256 Contraception, 294 Conversation, 321 Cooperative egotism, 328 Copepods, behavior of, 15 Craig's Birds, 40 Crile, 63 Cybela, 196 Dark Types, 234 Darwin, 45 Death dreams, 75 Death wishes, 73, 74 Delage, 308 Deluded martyrs, 81 Delusional jealousy, 147 Democracy in the home, 325 Demosthenes, 83 Descartes, 162 Displacement upward, 6 Dissatisfied people, 216 Divorces in the art world, 221 Doll type, 284 Don Juan, 92, 94, 139 Double standard, 302 Ductless glands, 225 Duncan, Isadora, 100 Economic exhibitionism, 69 Eddy, Mary Baker, 265 Effeminacy, 317 Ego rampant, 139 Electrical exchanges, 60, 63 Ellis, Havelock, 88, 177, 286, 305, 321 Ellis, Mrs. Havelock, 327 Endocrinologists, 226 Environment, 236 Erotropism, 4 Ethical prostitution, 113 Eulenburg, Albert, 162, 194 Fatherhood cravings, 69 Fear of accidents, 76 Fear of woman, 114 Female artists, 218 Feminine refinement, 277 Ferenczi, 148 sqq. Fetishes, list of, 19, 20 feminine, 21 masculine, 21 non-physical, 24, 25 Fiji Islands, 42 First Night, the right of the, 68 Fixation, parent, 30, 31, sqq. Flappers, 247, 248 Flattery, 218, 219, 220 Flirt, the, 285 Foot Fetishism, 18, 22 symbolism, 24 Forel 134 Frazer, 44 Freud, 23, 24, 31, 42, 49, 62, 140, 164, 165, 211, 225, 267, 297 Friedlander, Benedikt, 183 Friendship, 319 Frigid wives, 245 Frink, 137 Galvanotropism, 4 Genesis, 43 Gerontophilia, 24 Getting even, 90 Glands, 34 Glandular drunkenness, 193 Glandular insufficiency, 203 Glove fetishism, 205 Goldschmidt, Jules, 116 Gonads, 231 Greek Gods, 156 Griseldis, 195 Gross, Dr. Otto, 184 Habit, 310 Hair Fetishism, 17, 26, 27 Heart, physiology of the, 5 Heredity, 34 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 158, 186 Hirth, George, 88, 89 Holding hands, 60 Homosexual tragedies, 179 Husbands and lovers, 141 Ideal Love, 269 Identification mania, 35, 36 Imitation, 33 Immodest modesty, 127 Impotence, 26 Inbreeding, 44 Incest fear, 42 Independent women, 281 Infidelity, 85 Institution children, 101 Jack the Ripper, 197 Jealousy and impotence, 137 Jesus, 67 Jung, 32, 33, 225 Kempf, 173, 325 Kenealy, Dr. Arabella, 303 King David, 261 Kiss, 60, 61 Krafft-Ebing, 162 Kronos, 195 Lean types, 235 Leonardo da Vinci, 180 Lesbian Love, 156 Loeb, Jacques, 307 sqq. Lombroso, 105 Lorand, 259 Love, a compulsion, 10 Lover, the successful, 52 the unsuccessful, 53 Lovers of the absolute, 271 Male artists, 218 Male lovers, 156 Male prostitutes, 109 Marriage, a compromise, 315 Masculine protest, 130 Masked Sadism, 154 Masoch, Leopold von Sacher, 200 sqq. Masochistic husbands, 206 Matriarchal communities, 311 Matrimonial Engineers, 238 Messalina, 94 Metatropism, 161 Michael Angelo, 176 Michaelis, Karin, 313 Michelet, 284 Milch cows, 293 Milk, 59 Mind, seat of the, 6, 7 Mobs, 198 Moreau de Tours, 189 Movie Idols, 318 Movies, 57 Naked male dancers, 123 Narcism, 167 Negative Love, 176 Negro Haters, 79 Nerve memory, 8 Nerves, 50 Neurotic frigidity, 70 Neurotic Life Plan, 33 Neurotic motherliness, 71 Neurotic mothers, 249, 296 Nietzsche, 180 Nurses, 39 Obscene talkers, 132 Obsessions, 27 Oedipus Complex, 30 Old fashioned women, 275 Oracles, 266 Organism, unity of, 49, 50, 51 Paranoiacs, 147 Parent-Child Relationship, 223 Parmelee, Maurice, 321 Passive homosexuals, 167 Perfect Mothers, 246 Personality, 239 Personality, respect for the, 324 Perverse birds, 164 Phototropism, 3 Physical incompatibility, 254 Pimps, 109 Pituitary, 228 Plato, 155 Platonic love, 63 Play function of love, 321 Plural love, 84 Polyandry, 84 Potter, Grace, 299 Preferences, 39 Pregnancy and Health, 242 Priapism, 84 Primal horde, 45 Primitive races, 42 Prize fights, 318 Prohibition, 81 Projection, 153 Proud husbands, 289 Psychoanalysis, 322 Puritanical males, 129 Rebellion against nature, 277 Reformers, 80 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 207 Rules for husbands, 134 Sade, Marquis de, 189 sqq. Sadistic lovers, 213 Sadistic mates, 215 Sadzer, 166 Safety devices, 170 Safety symbols, 97 Sallow Type, 235 Sanger, Margaret, 300 sqq. Sapho, 155 Savages, modesty among, 123 Schneider, Kurt, 105 Schopenhauer, 182 Schroeder, Theodore, 265 Sea urchins, 308 Self love, 67 Sensuality, 107 Sexless jealousy, 140 Sexless persons, 208 Sexual Libido, 65 Shaw, G. B., 276 sqq. Shoe fetishism, 18, 22, 205 symbolism, 24 Sight, 56 Sinclair, May, 268 Skooptsy, 208 Slender types, 236 Smell, 58 Social pressure, 237 Socrates, 155 Sour grapes, 77 Steinach, 163 sqq. Stekel, Wilhelm, 128, 160, 170, 183 Sublimation, 267 Suggestive draperies, 125 Suttee custom, 142 Syphilophobiacs, 80 Tall types, 235 Taste, 59 Teeth, 237 Telegony, 116 Test of love, 75 Third sex, 158 sqq. Thyroid, 230 Touch, 60 Transvestites, 159 Triplets, 310 Twins, 309 Type, parent, 39 Ultrafeminine, 93 Unadapted women, 288 Uniform fetishism, 25 Vamps, 213 Varietism, 84 Vital Force, 266 Vomiting, in pregnancy, 243 Von Kupfer, 181, 182 Wagner, 252 Walker, Dr. Mary, 160 War prisoners, 70 Whipping, 202 Wifehood, a profession, 282 Wilde, Oscar, 180 Will-to-be-the-first, 115 Winckelman, 176 Wise husbands, 306 Women Sadists, 210 Women who enjoy a beating, 209 Wounded egotism, 324 Wulffen, 193 
30556	----	[ Transcriber's Note: Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation; changes (corrections of spelling and punctuation) made to the original text are listed at the end of this file. ] Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series No. 31 SLEEP WALKING AND MOON WALKING A MEDICO-LITERARY STUDY BY DR. J. SADGER VIENNA TRANSLATED BY LOUISE BRINK NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON NERVOUS AND MENTAL DISEASE PUBLISHING COMPANY 1920 NERVOUS AND MENTAL DISEASE MONOGRAPH SERIES Edited by Drs. SMITH ELY JELLIFFE and WM. A. WHITE Numbers Issued 1. Outlines of Psychiatry. (7th Edition.) $3.00. By Dr. William A. White. 2. Studies in Paranoia. (Out of Print.) By Drs. N. Gierlich and M. Friedman. 3. The Psychology of Dementia Praecox. (Out of Print.) By Dr. C. G. Jung. 4. Selected Papers on Hysteria and other Psychoneuroses. (3d Edition.) $3.00. By Prof. Sigmund Freud. 5. 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CONTENTS Translator's Preface v Introduction vii PART I. Medical 1 PART II. Literary Section 45 Conclusion and Résumé 137 Index 139 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE Psychoanalysis holds a key to the problem of sleep walking, which alone has been able to unlock the mysteries of its causes and its significance. This key is the principle of wish fulfilment, an interpretative principle which explains the mechanisms of the psyche and illuminates the mental content which underlies these. Sleep walking as a method of wish fulfilment evidently lies close to the dream life, which has become known through psychoanalysis. Most of us when we dream, according to the words of Protagoras, "lie still, and do not stir." In some persons there is however a special tendency to motor activity, in itself a symptomatic manifestation, which necessitates the carrying out of the dream wish through walking in the sleep. The existence of this fact, together with the evidence of an influence of the shining of the moon upon this tendency to sleep walking, give rise to certain questions of importance to medical psychology. The author of this book has pursued these questions in relation to cases which have come to him for psychoanalysis, in the investigation of actual records of sleep walking given in literature and in the study of rare instances where it has been made the subject of a literary production or at least an episode in tale or drama. In each case the association with moonlight or some other light has been a distinct feature. The author's application of psychoanalysis to these problems has the directness and explicitness which we are accustomed to find in Freud's own writings. This is as true in the literary portion of the work as in the medical but it never intrudes to mar the intrinsic beauty of certain of the selections nor the force of the intuitive revelations which the writers of the preceding science have made in regard to sleep walking and walking in the moonlight. Sadger has skilfully utilized these revelations to convince us of the truth of the psychoanalytic discoveries and has used the latter only to make still more explicitly and scientifically clear the testimony of the poetic writers and to point out the applicability of their material to medical problems. The choice of this little understood and little studied subject and its skilful presentation on the part of the author, as well as the introduction to the reader of the literary productions of which use has been made, give the book a peculiar interest and value. It is also of especial service in its brief but profoundly suggestive study of the psychic background of Shakespeare's creative work as illustrated in the sleep walking of Lady Macbeth. The endeavor in the translation has been to make accessible to our English readers the clear and direct psychoanalysis of the author and the peculiar psychologic and literary value of the book. INTRODUCTION[1] [1] Über Nachtwandeln und Mondsucht. Eine medizinisch-literarische Studie, von Dr. J. Sadger, Nervenarzt in Wien; Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, Herausgegeben von Prof. Dr. Sigm. Freud, Sechzehntes Heft, Leipzig und Wien, Franz Deuticke, 1914. Sleep walking or night wandering, known also by its Latin name of noctambulism, is a well-known phenomenon. Somnambulism is not so good a term for it, since that signifies too many things. In sleep walking a person rises from his bed in the night, apparently asleep, walks around with closed or half opened eyes, but without perceiving anything, yet performs all sorts of apparently purposeful and often quite complicated actions and gives correct answers to questions, without afterward the least knowledge of what he has said or done. If this all happens at the very time and under the influence of the full moon, it is spoken of as moon walking or being moonstruck. Under the influence of this heavenly body the moonstruck individual is actually enticed from his bed, often gazes fixedly at the moon, stands at the window or climbs out of it, "with the surefootedness of the sleep walker," climbs up upon the roof and walks about there or, without stumbling, goes into the open. In short, he carries out all sorts of complex actions. Only it would be dangerous to call the wanderer by name, for then he would not only waken where he was, but he would collapse frequently and fall headlong with fright if he found himself on a height. Besides there is absolute amnesia succeeding this. Upon persistent questioning there is an attempt to fill in the gaps in memory by confabulation, like the effort to explain posthypnotic action. Furthermore, it is asserted that a specially deep sleep always ushers in night wandering, that indeed the latter in general is only possible in this condition. It is more frequent with children up to puberty and throughout that period than with adults. At the same time the first outbreak of sleep walking occurs often at the first appearance of sexual maturity. According to a widespread folk belief sleep walking will cease in a girl when she becomes pregnant with her first child. It seems to me that practically no scientific treatment of this problem exists. Modern psychiatry, so far as it takes a sort of general notice of it, contents itself, as Krafft-Ebing does, with calling night wandering "a nervous disease," "apparently a symptomatic manifestation of other neuroses, epilepsy, hysteria, status nervosus."[2] The older literature is more explicit. It produces not only a full casuistic but seeks to give some explanation aside from a reference to neurology.[3] So, for example, the safety in climbing upon dangerous places finds this explanation, that the sleep walker goes there with closed eyes and in this way does not see the danger, knows no giddiness and above all is in possession of a specially keen muscular sense. [2] Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Psychopathologie. [3] I introduce as the most important sources Peter Jessen: "Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Begründung der Psychologie," Berlin, 1855 (with many examples); Heinrich Spitta: "Die Schlaf- und Traumzustände der menschlichen Seele," 2d edition, 1882 (with abundant casuistic and literature); finally based upon these L. Löwenfeld: "Somnambulismus und Spiritismus," Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens, Vol. I, 1900. The phenomena of sleep walking and moon walking must be acknowledged, as far as I can see, almost entirely as pathological yet connected or identical with analogous manifestations of normal profound sleep. The dreams in such sleep, in contrast with those of light sleep, are characterized by movements. These often amount merely to speaking out, laughing, weeping, smacking, throwing oneself about and so on, or occasionally to complicated actions, which begin with leaving the bed. Further comparison shows the night wandering as symptomatically similar to hysterical and hypnotic somnambulism. This interpretation might be objected to upon the ground that unfortunately we know nothing of the origin of the motor phenomena of the dream and that understanding of the hysterical and hypnotic somnambulism is deplorably lacking. Still less has science to say about the influence of the moon upon night wandering. The authors extricate themselves from the difficulty by simply denying its influence. They bring forward as their chief argument for this that many sleep walkers are subject to their attacks as frequently in dark as in moonlight nights and when sleeping in rooms into which no beam of moonlight can penetrate. Spitta indeed explains it thus: "The much discussed and romantically treated 'moon walking' is a legend which stands in contradiction to hitherto observed facts. That the phantasy of the German folk mind drew to itself the pale ghostly light of the moon and could reckon from it all sorts of wonderful things, proves nothing to us." I can only say here that ten negative cases signify nothing in the face of a single positive one and a thousand-fold experience undoubtedly represents a certain connection between the light of the full moon and the most complicated forms of sleep walking. Not merely does science avoid these things on account of their strangeness, but also the poets best informed in the things of the soul, whom the problems of night wandering and moon walking should stimulate. From the entire province of artistic literature I can mention only Shakespeare's "Macbeth," Kleist's "Prinz von Homburg," the novel "Maria" by Otto Ludwig, "Das Sündkind" by Anzengruber, "Jörn Uhl" by Gustav Frenssen and "Aebelö" by Sophus Michaelis.[4] Finally Ludwig Ganghofer has briefly sketched his own sleep walking in his autobiographical "Lebenslauf eines Optimisten," and Ludwig Tieck has given unrestrained expression to his passionate love toward this heavenly body in different portions of his works. [4] The text of Bellini's "Nachtwandlerin" could hardly be called literature, nor Theodor Mundt's fabulous novel, "Lebensmagie, Wirklichkeit und Traum." The latter I will mention later in the text. Only in "Maria" and in "Aebelö" however do these themes play an important part, while in the other works mentioned they serve properly only as adornment and episodic ornament. I am not able to explain this unusual restraint, unless we accept the fact that our best poets shrink from touching upon questions which they themselves can so little understand. It has been expected that the psychoanalytic method, which casts such light upon the unconscious, might do much to advance the understanding of the problems of sleep walking and moon walking. But unfortunately no one undergoes such an expensive and time-consuming treatment as psychoanalysis for moon walking, so that the hoped for illumination can come at the best only as a by-product in the psychoanalysis of neurotics. That has in fact been my good fortune twice, where I have been able to lift the curtain, though only a little, in two cases among my patients and also in individuals who were otherwise healthy. What I discovered there, I will relate in detail in what follows. One point of view I will first set forth. Two questions appear to me to stand out among those closely bound with our theme. First on the motor side. Why does not the sleep walker, who is enjoying apparently a specially deep slumber, sleep on quietly and work out the complexes of his unconscious somehow in a dream, even though with speech or movement there? Why instead is he urged forth and driven to wander about and engage in all sorts of complicated acts? It is one of the most important functions of the dream to prolong sleep quietly. And then in the second place, What value and significance must be attributed to the moon and its light? These two chief questions must be answered by any theory that would do justice to the question of sleep walking and moon walking. PART I Medical CASE I. Some years ago I treated a hysterical patient, exceedingly erotic. She was at that time twenty-two years old, and on her father's as well as on the mother's side, from a very degenerate family. Alcoholism and epilepsy could be traced with certainty to the third ascendant on both sides. The father's sister is mentally diseased, the patient's mother was an enuretic in her earlier years and a sleep walker. This mother, like her father when he was drunk, was markedly cruel and given to blows, characteristics, which according to our patient, sometimes almost deprived her of her senses and in her anger bordered upon frenzy. The patient herself had been as the youngest child the spoiled darling of both parents and until her seventh year had been taken by them into their bed in the morning to play. In her first three years she always slept between the parents, preferably on the inner side of one of the two beds and with her legs spread, so that, in her mother's words: "One foot belongs to me and one to her father!" She was most strongly drawn, however, to the mother, toward whom at an early age she was sexually stimulated, already in her first year, if her statements can be relied upon, when she sat upon her mother's lap while nursing. The little one early learned also that, when one is sick, one receives new playthings and especially much petting and tenderness, on account of which she often pretended to be sick purposely or she phantasied about dark forms and ugly faces, which of course she never saw, except to compel the mother to stay with her and show her special love and tenderness. Already in her second year she would go to bed most dutifully, "right gladly" to please father and mother and gain sexual pleasure thereby. The father then let her ride on his knee, stroked her upon her buttocks and kissed her passionately upon the lips. The desire after the mother became the stronger. When the latter had lain down and the little one had been good, then the child would creep to the mother under the feather bed and snuggle close to her body ("wind herself fast like a serpent"). The mother's firm body gave her extraordinary pleasure, yes, not infrequently it led to the expulsion of a secretion from the cervix uteri. ("The good comes," as she expressed it.) I mention convulsive attacks and enuresis nocturna, as pathological affections of her childhood which belong to my theme. The patient had in fact suffered in her first year a concussion of the brain, through being thrown against a brick wall, with organic eclamptic attacks as a result. The great love which she had experienced because of this led her also later to imitate those attacks hysterically. In the fourth year, for example, when she had to sleep in a child's crib, no longer between the beloved parents, she immediately produced attacks of anxiety in which she saw ugly faces and witches as in the beginning of the eclamptic convulsions. Thereupon the frightened mother took her again into her own bed. Later also she often began to moan and fret until the mother would take her in her arms to ward off the threatened attacks, and thus she could stimulate herself to her heart's content. As she reports, at the height of the orgasm she expelled a secretion, her body began to writhe convulsively, her face became red as fire, her eyes rolled about and she almost lost herself in her great pleasure. Concerning her enuresis, in its relation to urethral eroticism, the patient relates the following: "When I pressed myself against my mother's or brother's thigh, not only 'the good' came, but frequently also urine with it. At about eight years old there was often a very strong compulsion to urinate, especially at night, which would cause me to wet my bed. This was however according to my wish to pass not urine but that same secretion which I had voided at two or three years old, when I became so wildly excited with my mother, that is when, lying in bed with her, I pressed her thigh between mine. I could not stop it in spite of all threats or punishments. Very curiously I usually awoke when I voided urine, but I could not retain it in the face of the great pleasure." I lay emphasis upon a specially strong homosexual tendency[5] among her various perversions, although she had the usual sex relations with a legion of men with complete satisfaction. Furthermore, as sadistic-masochistic traits, there was an abnormal pleasure in giving and receiving blows and a passionate desire for blood. It was a sexual excitement that occurred when she saw her own blood or that of others. I have elsewhere[6] described this blood sadism and I will refer here to only two features, which are of significance also in regard to her moon walking. The first is her greatly exaggerated vaginal eroticism, which at menstruation especially was abnormally pleasurably excited. The second, on the other hand, was that our patient already at the age of two years should have experienced sexual pleasure in the mother's hemoptysis. Sitting on the mother's lap she stimulated herself upon the latter's breast, when she began to scrape and then to cough up blood. She reached after her bloody lips in order afterward to lick off her own fingers. As a result of the sexual overexcitement which occurred then, blood has afforded her enormous pleasure ever since, when she has looked upon it. [5] This homosexual tendency was first directed toward her own mother in childhood and early puberty. [6] "Über den sado-masochistischen Komplex," Jahrb. f. psychoanal. Forsch., Vol. 5, pp. 224-230. As for the rest of her life, I will refer to two other points only, which are not without importance for our problem. First of all was the change of dwelling after the father's death in our patient's seventh year. The other is her burning desire, arising in her third or fourth year, to play mother and most eagerly with a real live child. A baby doll, of which she came into possession, was only a substitute, although for want of something better she carried this around passionately and did not once lay it out of her arms while asleep. At the age of eight it was her greatest delight to trudge around with a small two year old girl from the house and sing her to sleep as her mother had once done to her. "Carrying that child around was my greatest delight until I was fourteen years old." I mentioned above that her mother had been sadistic and at the same time a sleep walker. "Mother herself told me that she also rather frequently walked at night. As a child she would wander around in her room without being able to find her bed again. Over and over again she would pass it without finding her way into it. Then she would begin to cry loudly with fright for her bed until Grandmother awoke and lifted her into bed. In the morning she remembered nothing at all about it. "It was the same way with her desire to urinate. Every night she had a frightful need to urinate and hunted for the chamber, but, although it always stood in its accustomed place, she was not able to find it. Meanwhile the desire grew more severe, so that she began moaning fearfully in her sleep while hunting. She sought all over the room, even crept around under the bed without touching or noticing the chamber, which was there. Often she did not then return to her bed until Grandmother was awakened by her moans, brought her what she wanted and helped her to bed. It happened rather frequently that, because of the very great need, she wet the bed or the room while on her search, whereupon naturally a whipping followed. Sometimes she lay quite quiet later on in her sleep, but when she could not find her bed, was obliged to pass half the night in the cold room. Once when I myself wet my bed, she struck me with the words: 'Every time that this happens you will be whipped; my mother whipped me for this reason.' Although she knew from her own experience that it could not be helped, yet she struck me. "Besides the moon exercised a great power over my mother. Since the house in which she lived was low and stood out in the open country, and there were no window blinds, on bright moonlight nights the moon shone into the farthest corner. In the corner stood a box, on which were a number of flower pots, figures and glass covers. Upon this box she climbed, after she had first taken down one object after another and placed them on the floor without breaking anything. Then she began to dance upon the top of the box, but only on bright moonlight nights. Finally she put everything back in exactly the same place to a hair's breadth and climbed out of the window, but not before she had removed there a number of flower pots out of the way. From the window she reached the court where she rambled about, climbed over the garden fence and walked around at least an hour. Then she went back, arranged the flowers on the window in exact order and--could not find her way to bed. There was always a scene the next day if Grandmother had been wakened in the night." The most noteworthy feature in this statement, beside the phenomenon of sadism, later taken over by the daughter, the urethral eroticism and the susceptibility toward the moonlight, is the behavior of the mother while walking in her sleep. She plainly has an idea where the flower pots stand, which she removes from the box and the window, but on the other hand she comes in contact neither with the bed nor the chamber, which yet are in their usual places. We will also take note further on of the dancing upon the box in the bright moonlight as well as the climbing out of the window, climbing and walking about. Before I go on with my patient's story, something should be said concerning its origin. She had been undergoing psychoanalytic treatment with me for nine months on account of various severe hysterical symptoms, which I will not here touch upon further, when she one day came out with the proposal that she write for me her autobiography. I agreed to it and she brought me little by little about two hundred fifty pages of folio, which she had prepared without any influence on my part, except of course that she had, in those months of treatment, made the technique of the analysis very much her own as far as it touched upon her case. Practically nothing in our work together in solving her difficulties was said of her sleep walking. I have also in no way influenced or been able to influence her explanation. It originates solely from the patient's associations and the employment of her newly acquired knowledge of the unconscious in the interpretation of her symptoms. I find then in her account of her life some highly interesting points. "Even at two or three years old Mother at my entreaties must soothe me to sleep. As we lay together in bed I pretended often to be asleep and reached as if 'in my sleep' after my mother's breast in order to revel in sensation there. Also I often uncovered myself, again ostensibly in my sleep, and laid myself down quite contentedly. Then I awoke my mother by coughing, and when she awoke she stroked me and fondled me, and as was her custom kissed me also upon the genitals. Frequently I stood up in bed between my parents--a forerunner of my later sleep walking--and laid myself down at my mother's feet, asleep as she thought, but in reality awake only with eyes closed. Then I pulled the feather bed away from Mother and blinked at her in order to see her naked body, which I could do better from the foot than if I had lain near her. "If she awoke she took me up to my place, kissed me repeatedly over my whole body and covered me up. I opened my eyes then as if just awakening, she kissed me on the eyes and said I should go quietly to sleep again, which I then did. "Still earlier, at one or two years, I pretended to be asleep when my parents went to bed, that I might obtain caresses, because Father and Mother always said, 'See, how dear, what a little angel!' They kissed me then and I opened my eyes as if waking from deep sleep. This was the first time that I pretended to be asleep. I often lay thus for a long time apparently asleep but really awake. For when the parents saw that I was asleep, they told one another all sorts of things about us children. Especially Mother often spoke of my fine traits, or that people praised me and found me 'so dear' which she never said in my presence lest she should make me vain." Here is an early preceding period when the little one deliberately pretends to be asleep in order to hear loving things, receive caresses and experience sexual activity without having to be held accountable or to be afraid of receiving punishment, because everything happens in sleep. In the same way similar erotic motives and analogous behavior may be found in the account of her other actions while asleep. As she began to talk at two years old her parents begged her to tell everything that had happened to her, for example in the absence of either of them. She must tell to the minutest detail, when she awoke early lying between her parents, what had happened to her during the day before, what she had done with her brothers and sisters, what had taken place for her at school, and so on. She responded so much the more gladly, because in narrating all this she could excite herself more or less as well upon the father's as upon the mother's body. In fact, this was the very source of a direct compulsion to have to tell things, from which she often had to suffer frightfully. The very bigoted mother sent her regularly from her sixth year on with her sister to the preaching services with the express injunction to report the sermons at home. And although on account of her poor head she had to struggle grievously with every poem or bit of lesson which she had to learn for school, yet now at home she would seat herself upon a hassock, spread a handkerchief over her shoulders and begin to drone out the whole sermon as she had heard it in the church from the minister. And this all merely out of love for her mother! Furthermore she was, according to her own words, directly in love with her teacher in the school, who often struck her on account of her inattentiveness and certainly did not treat her otherwise with fondness. Here is a motive for the later learning, singing and reciting of poetry during the sleep walking, while the pleasure in being struck when at fault was increased by self reproach, that she in spite of all her pains was so bad at learning. "During my whole childhood," the patient states, "I talked a great deal in my sleep. When I had a task to learn by heart, I said over the given selection or the poem in my sleep. This happened the first time when I was eight years old, on a bright moonlight night. I was sleeping at the time in the bed with my sister and I arose in the night, recited a poem and sang songs. At about the same period, standing on a chair or on the bed, I repeated parts of sermons which I had heard the day before at church. Besides I prattled about everything which I had done the previous day or about my play. How often I was afraid that I would divulge something from my sexual play with my brother! That must never have happened, however, or mother would have mentioned it to me, for she always told me everything that I said during the night." I might perhaps sum up this activity in her sleep after this fashion: Day and night she is studying for the beloved but unresponsive teacher and strives to win and to keep her good will as well as that of the mother through the repeating of sermons and relating of all the events of the day. "As for the talking in my sleep, I began at the age of two or three, though awake, to pretend to be asleep and to speak out as if asleep. For example I acted as if I were tormented with frightful dreams and cried out with great terror, ostensibly in a dream: 'Mother, Mother, take me!' or 'Stay with me!' or something of the sort. Then Mother took me, as I had anticipated, under her feather bed and quieted me, but I naturally became excited while I pressed my legs about her body presumably from fear of witches and immediately there occurred a 'convulsive attack,' that is I now experienced such lustful pleasure that 'the good' came." Attention may further be called to the fact that she threw herself about violently in her sleep, which caused her, as the daughter of so brutal a mother, who was herself a sado-masochist, an excessive amount of pleasurable sensation. When only two or three years old, as she lay between the parents, she pushed them with hands and feet, of which she was quite conscious, while they thought it happened in sleep. This brought the advantage that she was not responsible for anything which happened in sleep, for it occurred when she was in an unconscious condition. The changing of the home in her seventh year, after the death of the father, led to her sharing the bed of her sister six years older than she. "My sister had the habit of throwing off the covers in her sleep or twisting her legs about mine. I, on the other hand, always hit her in my sleep with hands or feet. Naturally I could not help it since it actually happened while I was asleep, yet when my sister could stand it no longer I had to go and lie with Mother. I also struck her in my sleep. Besides I nestled up against her body, especially her buttocks, and experienced very pleasurable excitement. For it was simply impossible with her strong body and in the narrow bed to avoid touching my mother. Only I did it to her quite consciously, but she was of the impression that I pressed upon her in my sleep because I had no room in bed. The reason that I as a small child pushed against my parents in bed was simply the wish to be able to strike them once to my heart's desire, and since this was impossible during the day, I did it while asleep, when no one is responsible for what one does. Striking my sister then actually in my sleep, when I was seven years old, was again the wish to be able to excite myself pleasurably by the blows as when a smaller child." Here her sadism again breaks through in this desire to strike mother and sister according to her heart's desire and it especially excited her because of her constitutionally exaggerated muscle erotic. I have discussed this sadism at length elsewhere.[7] [7] Cf. note 6, p. 163. It can be affirmed, if we examine her behavior in sleep, that without exception sexual wishes lay at the bottom of it, just as the dream also, as is well known, always represents the fulfilment of infantile wishes. The plainly erotic character is never wanting in an apparently asexual action, if we penetrate it more deeply. So for example this patient repeated the sermon at her mother's bidding in order to receive her love and praise. Saying her lessons at night arose from her strong attachment to her teacher, which again in turn was a stage of her love for her mother. Naturally this was all concerned with wishes, which, strictly tabooed when awake, could only be gratified in unconsciousness, somehow carried out in sleep, or, as with the simulated convulsions, only in the mother's bed. The behavior during sleep served especially well to grant sexual pleasure but without guilt or liability to punishment. It was quite in order further that a conscious activity preceded the unconscious activity in sleep, that is, that for a time the patient while awake, but with closed eyes and therefore apparently asleep, did the very thing which later was done in actual unconsciousness. What then impressed itself as an unconscious performance during sleep, had been earlier done consciously, almost I might say as "a studied action." Only in special cases is there any need for playing such a comedy, for the direct demand of a beloved individual--"You must tell everything," "You must learn diligently," "Repeat the sermon accurately,"--when the eroticism is well concealed, permits of open action without more hindrance. It may be noted further that the patient never betrayed in the least in her sleep what she must have been at pains carefully to conceal, as, for example, the sexual play with her brother. Finally the striking participation of the muscle erotic at times in sleep must be emphasized. We have found already as roots and motives of her sleep activity sexual, strongly forbidden wishes, which particularly could often be gratified only in bed; the striving that she might commit misdemeanor without being held guilty or answerable; further the practicing of these things first while awake; and finally, as an organic root, at least the pleasure in blows in sleep, the undeniably exaggerated muscle erotic. Nearly everything takes place in bed, only occasionally outside it, and then always near it. Complicated actions are completely wanting. Likewise nothing was said of the influence of the light or of the moon. Only in passing was it mentioned that the patient arose in the moonlight for her first nightly recitation of lessons. The group of phenomena which we will now take up displays complicated performances and stands above all under the evident influence of the light of the moon. "In my fourth year," the patient relates, "I was put for the first time into a little bed of my own, so that my mother, who the day before had begun to cough up blood, should have more rest. She had closed the net of my crib and that I should not be frightened moved the crib up to her large bed. I pretended to be asleep and as soon as my parents had fallen asleep I climbed over the side but was so unfortunate as to fall into my mother's bed. I was quickly laid back in my own bed, without having seen the blood, which was my special longing. Often after this, almost every night, I tried again to climb into Mother's bed, so that finally she placed my bed by the wall in order to prevent my climbing over to her. For some months I slept alone in my little bed. She caught me one night, however, this time actually in my sleep, trying to climb over the side but entangled in the net. Fortunately I did not fall out but back into bed. At that time I produced also my pretended convulsive attacks that I might be taken by Mother into her bed and be able to excite myself upon her. "Mother began raising blood again when I was ten years old and we had already moved into the new home. That year she was seized twice with such severe hemorrhages that for weeks she hovered between life and death. Then in my eleventh year I began my sleep walking. What urged me to it was again Mother's coughing of blood as well as the desire to see her blood, both reasons why I had already at four years old pretended sleep so that I could climb into Mother's bed." The patient proved herself such an ideal nurse on the occasion of the mother's severe hemorrhage that the mother would have no one else. She watched tirelessly day and night together with her sisters, changing every few minutes the icebags which had been ordered. "Scarcely a moment did I tear myself away from my mother's bedside and, if one of my sisters relieved me, I often could hardly move, undress myself and lie down for an hour. If I did lie down, I threw myself about restlessly, torn with anxiety, and was only happy again when I sat by my mother's bed." This fearful anxiety was not however merely fear for the precious life of the mother, but still more, repressed libido. In spite of all her concern for the mother's suffering she could not prevent the strongest sexual pleasurable sensations at the sight of the mother's snow white breast in putting on the applications or when she raised blood. This intensive nursing lasted four weeks until finally a nursing Sister came to assist. "As I now for the first time could enjoy a full night's rest, I fell into a deep sleep, as from this time on I always did before every sleep walking. Near my bed stood the table with Mother's medicine and on the window ledge, behind the curtain, a lamp, which threw its light upon my bed. Suddenly I arose in my sleep, went to my mother's bed, bent over her. Mother opened her eyes but did not rouse herself. Then the Sister, who was dozing on the sofa near Mother's bed, awoke and rushed forward frightened as she saw me there in my nightgown. She thought something had happened to Mother, but the latter motioned with her hand to leave me alone and to keep still. I kissed Mother and changed the icebag, apparently in order to see her breast. I could see no blood this time, so without a sound I moved away and went to the table, where I put all the medicines carefully together to make a place and then went out into the pitch dark kitchen without stumbling against anything. There I took from the kitchen dresser a bowl with a saucer and a spoon and came back again to the room. Next I seized a glass of water which stood there and poured the water carefully into the bowl without spilling more than a drop. With this I spoke out half aloud to myself: 'Now Emil (my brother-in-law, who had for a long time taken his breakfast with us) can come to his breakfast without disturbing Mother, who had always prepared it for him.' Then I went to bed and slept soundly for some hours, as I sleep only at my periods of sleep walking, without crying out. All that I have described the Sister of Charity told me afterward. Naturally I did everything with closed eyes, without knowing it, and moved about as securely in the darkness as if it had been bright day. The next morning they told me about it and laughed over it." This is what she has to say of the influence of the light upon her sleep walking. "Here also Mother's coughing was the external cause as it had been when I was four years old. When Mother was ill, the lamp was left upon the window sill behind the curtain, burning brightly so that she would not be afraid. Now also, at the time of my first complicated sleep walking, such a light was burning behind the curtain throwing its light upon my bed and the wall. Mother had always left the light burning in order to see me at once, after I had sometimes climbed over the side of my crib at the age of four, when she was ill. The light however made me climb over to her, because in the dark no blood could be seen. Also when I began to moan, during my convulsive attacks, she made a light and came to my bed. Or she said, when my bed was pushed close to hers: 'Wait a moment; I will make a light and take you or you can climb over to me.' Next day I laughed with my parents over my visit at night, without suspecting that I would soon be repeating it actually in my sleep. And it was only for this, that I might, as at the very first time, enjoy the sight of Mother's blood. Now, when she had a light burning during her illness, this allured me in my sleep to climb out to her, as at that first time when she had made a light especially for me to climb over to her." The following memory leads still deeper into the etiology: "Mother always had the habit of going from bed to bed, when we children were asleep, and lighting us with her lamp to make sure that we were asleep. I perceived the light in my sleep, which called me to Mother. She had lighted me that first time so that I might climb into bed with her. Now I thought in my sleep, when I saw the light, that she was calling me again and she found me often at the very point of climbing over to her. I see myself yet today with one foot over the bars, almost in a riding position. Yet nothing ever happened to me. A complete change took place within me when the light of a candle or a lamp fell upon my face. I might almost say that I experienced a great feeling of pleasure. I seemed to myself in my sleep to be a supernatural being. I immediately perceived the light even when I lay in deepest sleep. There was however no sign of waking. This must represent a second form of consciousness, which possessed me at such times. I often asked my mother all sorts of things while wandering about, always knew to whom I spoke although I did not see the person and before I heard anyone speak I already mentioned the person's name. My orientation in sleep walking was so exact that I never once stubbed my toe against anything. It was just so with urination, which was probably connected with the moon or with a night light accidentally falling upon me. As soon as I pressed out secretion or the urine came, I found myself in a half sleep without being able to prevent an excessive feeling of pleasure. Then first I came to myself. This seems to me to go back to the fact that Mother often awoke me on special occasions in the night, holding a lamp or a candle in her hand to set me on the chamber, especially when she heard me moaning in my sleep and suspected a convulsive attack." In what follows a complete identification with the mother is reported in detail. That has come in part to our notice in the first sleep walking, when our patient prepares the breakfast for her brother-in-law. "After that first sleep walking when Mother was having hemorrhages, they took place now rather frequently, when the least glimmer of light fell upon me, when Mother, for instance, lighted a candle at night to take some drops for her cough. Thus it happened that almost every night, as long as our beds stood together, I acted this little part. Often my family did not awaken and yet we knew the next day, when something was missing, that I had been the culprit in my sleep, as the next little example will show. "My greatest wish at that time, at ten years old, was to be 'Mother' and have a child that I might bring up as I pleased. One morning when Mother got up and wished to dress herself she did not find her underclothing. We sisters were still fast asleep and Mother did not wish to waken us. She could remember exactly that she had laid her clothing as she always did on the chair near her bed. When she saw that search was in vain she put on fresh linen. Fully an hour later I awoke and was completely astonished to find myself dressed and in Mother's clothing. The puzzle was now solved. The putting on of Mother's clothing during the sleep walking had plainly been merely my wish to put myself into the mother's place and also to play mother, as I did with the children day after day. It was just at this time that I was always seeking to trail around all day with children, whom I tormented, treated cruelly, often even struck them for no cause whatever, always with a great feeling of pleasure, as I myself fared at my mother's hands. It was very frequently the case that I spread the table for a meal, in Mother's place, or put on her linen or outer clothing. This happened most often when she was ill again with her cough or the light shone upon me in my sleep. The light of the candle was sufficient for this." At thirteen years she began to be directly affected by the moonlight. "At that time I had to sleep in a small room which my brother had occupied before this. This room looked out upon the court and was, especially on the nights when the moon was full, as bright as if a lamp were burning in the room. I was very much afraid to sleep alone in a room. This was the first time in my life that it had happened. I feared that in every corner some one might be standing and suddenly step forth or might lie hidden behind the bed and although I first let the candle light shine over everything, I had no rest but was in continual fear. I slept here perhaps only fourteen days in all, but it was full moon just at this time and rather bright in the small room. "Before going to sleep I always barred the door of the room, which near the other door of our house opened upon a small passage. On account of the shop we lived on an upper floor. When I lay in bed I was always thinking that I had not bolted the door well and every night I arose three or four times before going to sleep in order to make sure whether I had actually bolted the door carefully. This I did while awake. Finally I fell asleep. I knew nothing in the morning of what happened in the night. Yet for several days, when I arose in the morning, I found the door which led out of my room upon the passage standing open. I must also have gone about the house during the night, at least have been in the passage. It alarmed Mother and, when early the next day the door was once more open, she said that I need never sleep alone again. I had not had the remotest thought that she would watch me the next night. As usual she could, when I talked in my sleep, ask me about everything and obtain correct answers without wakening me. If however she called my name in fright, when I was walking, as in the scene about to be described, then I awoke. Some nights apparently I roamed about in the house, God knows where, in the moonlight, without any one noticing it. Now it was the window in the passage, which looked into the court and was always closed at night, that was left open. What took place there I cannot say, since no one observed me. I can however describe clearly what my mother saw happen and which she told me afterward. "Before I lay down I tried the door several times to see if it were securely bolted, then slept until about twelve o'clock. Between twelve and one o'clock, when I as a child had always been most afraid because this was a ghostly hour, my mother, who compelled herself this night to remain awake, heard my door creak slightly. She watched and saw the following: I went out in my nightgown softly to the door and to the window on the passage, which I opened. I swung myself upon that rather high window and remained there a while without moving, sitting there while I gazed straight at the moon. Then--it seemed to my mother like an eternity--I climbed down softly and went quietly along the passage into the first story. Half way along however I considered, turned back and went into my room. Having reached the door I turned once again and went along the passage to the door of the court. This was fastened. Again I turned and now went to the house gate. There I remained standing. I even tried to open it, as if I heard my name called. Then I was frightened, looked about me and was awake. Shaking with cold, for I was there half naked, I could scarcely orient myself. Then I crept to my bed and slept without waking. "This happened in the second week. Every morning my door was open so that I had to sleep again in Mother's room. The moon never shone in there and the night light was covered. Nevertheless the sleep walking began also in this room in two weeks, if only the light of the candle fell upon me in my sleep. More often I lighted the candle myself in my sleep and went around in the room and the kitchen. Sometimes Mother found me standing by the door of the shop apparently about to open it and walk out. Now I have frequently, when I am lying in bed, the desire to spring out of the window, or to open both casements to get air for I am often afraid of choking. Mother had often felt this way in her illness. It also happened that Mother found me sitting by my chest, where I was looking for something which I had needed the day before and intended looking for the next day. I had laid out all my possessions about me. If Mother called me by name, I awoke; if she did not call me but only spoke in a certain way to me, I answered her everything without waking. I got up in my sleep, put on my mother's clothes, put on a cape and a nightcap, bade farewell to the children, to whom I wanted to be the mother, charged them to be brave and promised to bring them something. Then I took a piece of wood in my hand for an umbrella and walked about the room as if holding it opened out over my head because the sun shone. In reality it was the shining of the lamp. Mother's clothes were long and yet I wore the train beautifully and gracefully, without stepping on the skirt. My mother doubled herself with laughter when she saw such a caricature. Mostly I played the mother. Often I carried a small piece of wood wrapped in a cloth as a child in my arm and laid it on my breast. I sang songs, hushed at the same time other children--and knew nothing at all of it next day. Mother laughed most over this, that when I dressed myself, I first turned everything wrong side out. This goes back to the fact that Mother sometimes, when she had to get up in the night on my account and was half asleep, slipped her robe on twisted and wrong side out. These things lasted until my seventeenth year, when Mother was sick and I, as related above, made coffee in the presence of the Sister of Mercy.[8] [8] I have here given word for word what the patient wrote down. When I then pointed out to her the evident contradiction, that she had misplaced something into the seventeenth year, which according to an earlier statement must have happened in the eleventh year, she answered that here was in fact an earlier mistake, since her brother-in-law Emil had first taken breakfast with her mother in her seventeenth year. The facts were these: She had walked a great deal in her sleep from her eleventh to her seventeenth year, for her mother had always suffered from hemoptysis, with occasional intermissions, and on this account had a nurse at various times. She had in fact at eleven years done everything which she has described above, only the making of the coffee for the brother-in-law happened in the seventeenth year. Besides, all the other actions performed in sleep are correctly given. On being questioned, she stated that her menses occurred first between her thirteenth and fourteenth years and at the time of menstruation particularly she had walked a great deal. She was always very much excited sexually before her period, slept very restlessly and had always at that time arisen in her sleep. Blood always excited her excessively sexually, as has been already mentioned in the text. I will add just at this place that her exact dates, when an event appears in the very first years of her life, must be taken with a grain of salt, because falsification of memory is always to be found there. This, however, is not of great importance because the facts are authentically correct and at least agree approximately with the times specified, as I have convinced myself through questioning her relatives. "Mother was rather often ill, so that beside the care of her, in which later a nurse assisted us, the shop had also to be looked after, which always demanded one person during the day. If I lay down upon my bed after two or three weeks of nursing, I fell into a deep sleep. This never hindered me however from being in my place to the minute, when my mother's medicine was to be taken. My mother could have anything from me, although I lay in a deep sleep. She did not need to speak, and if she wanted anything, she spoke it half aloud. The Sister, over weary from night watching, slept lightly, but if Mother needed anything, it was sufficient for her to breathe my name and I was awake, although otherwise I did not hear well and must always be aroused for some time before I was fully awake. "In reality I merely imitated my mother in my sleep walking. In the first place it was my wish to hold some object in my arms during the night, or lay it near me, as if it were my child, to have one that I might play with it sexually. In the second place this went back to my early childhood when I lay near my mother and she played thus with me. In the third place it referred to a later time when I felt as a mother toward my doll, and never allowed it out of my lap by day nor out of my arms at night. When Mother wished to quiet me if I was suddenly afraid of ugly creatures at night, she had to make a light as quickly as possible. Then she took me upon her arm or laid me close to her. The light must however remain burning until I had fallen asleep so that the horrible faces could not torture me. As a child I often cried only for the light; it was the light that first completely quieted me. I longed indeed for the light that I might see the blood, and at the same time excite myself upon my mother." The patient proceeds in her story: "This continued until the seventeenth year. At eighteen I had to go into the country because of a nervous trouble. There I was quite alone and also had to sleep alone in a room. I always went to sleep very late and once--my small room was bright with moonlight--I arose, went into the small passageway, which opened into the court, and was going out of the courtyard gate. I was obliged to turn back, however, because this was fastened. Yet instead of going back to my room, I went into the sleeping room of my landlady, who was sleeping there with her daughter, a girl of about twenty-six years. The moon was also shining into this room and I slowly opened the door. Both of them then awoke and were, as they told me next day, frightened to death. It affected the daughter especially, so that she was terrified and at once sought refuge in her mother's bed. I went back. What happened further I cannot say, for the daughter had immediately bolted the door behind me. I had made it impossible for me to stay longer in the little country village, and although I had paid for my room for a month I preferred to go away two days later. All the people avoided me and looked at me askance. Most of all the people with whom I was stopping! I saw that a stone rolled from their hearts when I departed." At my question, whether she perhaps had been especially attracted by her landlady, she answered: "No, but in fact with another woman of the village. And it seems that I at that time wished to go to this woman in my sleep walking. At least the landlady's room, into which I went, after I found the gate of the courtyard fastened, lay in the direction of the house where she lived. "From this time nothing is known of my walking in my sleep even on moonlight nights. Only I have sometimes since that time put on my underclothes in the night, but always my own. That is I have often discovered in the morning, up till quite recently, that I had on my linen or my stockings. Besides I often dressed my hair during the night, and if I had had my hair, for example, braided or loose when I went to sleep, I would awaken in the morning with my hair put upon my head. This unconscious hair dressing happened most frequently before menstruation and was then an absolute sign that this would take place very soon. This has the following connection. Mother never went to sleep with her hair done up, but when in bed had it always hanging down in a braid. Only, when she was suffering from the hemorrhages--at the time of menstruation I also lost a good deal of blood--she did not have the braid hanging down but put up upon her head. Before the appearance of menstruation this braid hanging down annoyed me very much. Furthermore, the doing of my hair in my sleep, which occurred a few days before, is only the wish again to see blood, for which reason it appears only usually before menstruation." I will add to complete this that the ceasing of her sleep walking at her eighteenth year was contemporaneous with her taking up regular sexual relations with different men. The patient gives still other important illustrations of her awaking at the calling of her name by her mother, and of staring into the light, particularly the moon. "In school my thoughts were always on the sexual and therefore I heard nothing when an example was explained. I often resolved to listen attentively, but in a few minutes I was again occupied with sexual phantasies. Then if I heard my name called I woke up suddenly but had first to orient myself and think where I was. This awaking at the calling of my name at school was exactly like that when my mother called me by name during my sleep walking. Both times I was startled and awoke as if from a heavy dream. That excessive dreaming while awake goes back however to my earliest childhood, when I sat evenings on my mother's lap, while my parents were talking together, and excited myself with her. Oh, what wonderful things I dreamed! I always revelled then in sexual phantasies, and, completely lost in them, forgot entirely where I was until I suddenly heard my name called, when I started up frightened and had first to orient myself. Mother always called my name softly and usually added, when I began to yawn, 'the pillow is calling you,' and imitating a wee voice, 'You ought to come to it in bed.'" Once more: "When evenings I began to dream on mother's lap, I was compelled to look directly into the flame of the lamp. I looked straight into it and was as if hypnotized. I laid both hands upon my mother's breasts and traced their form. Besides I had my braid lying upon her left breast, which I liked very much, because it lay as softly as upon a pillow. I was also compelled to look into the light, gazed steadily at the flame until my eyes were closed. Then I lay in a half sleep, in which I heard the voices of the family without understanding what was said. Thus I could dream best, until my mother called my name and I awoke. "Every day I took delight in this sleep by the light of the lamp and the pleasure experienced upon my mother's lap. I lay quietly and with eyes closed so that they all thought I was fast asleep. Yet I knew indeed that it was no ordinary sleep, but merely a 'daydream,' from which I only awoke when Mother called me by name. When she did not do this, but quietly undressed me and put me into bed, I began to be restless. I stood up in bed, lay down at their feet and took care to cry out and throw myself about until Mother, quite alarmed, called me by name and quieted me. I believe that in these experiences lies another root for my staring at the moon when sleep walking, as well as for the dreamy state occasioned by the fixed gazing at the light." In conclusion there are still some less important psychic overdeterminations. "I often had the desire, when looking at the moon at the age of four or five, to climb over the houses into the moon. I knew nothing at that time of sleep walkers. About the same time my sisters often sang the well-known song: 'What sort of a wry face are you making, oh Moon?' I stared immovably also at the moon, when I had the opportunity to look at it once from my window, in order that I might discover its face and eyes. Then, too, my eyes grew weary and began to close. Later, when nine or ten years old, I heard other children say that people dwelt in the moon. I would have given anything to know how these people looked, and whenever it was full moon, I gazed fixedly at it. I had understood that another people dwelt there of a different race. I wished to have another race of men. Perhaps they had other customs, thought differently, ran about naked as in Paradise and there I wished to go, and lead a free life with boys as with girls. Even as a child I seemed to myself quite different from the rest of humankind on account of my sexual concerns and sexual phantasies in school. I always believed that I was something peculiar and for that reason belonged not on the earth but upon the moon. Once when I heard the word 'mooncalf' and asked what it meant, some one at home told me that mooncalves were deformed children. "I thought however that they did not understand; the children were quite differently formed, just as were all the people in the moon, so that their feelings were altogether different and they led a sexual life of a quite different kind. I thought they were kind to both sexes, because Mother always said, 'You must not be alone with boys!' and that in the moon this was permitted, for there no distinction was made between the sexes in play." I asked her more particularly in conclusion whether her explanation for staring at the moon, that she identified moon and lamplight, was all there was of it. She answered immediately that another explanation had pressed itself upon her earlier, which she had rejected as "too foolish." "The moon's shining disk reminded me in fact of a woman's smooth body, the abdomen and most of all the buttocks. It excited me very greatly if I saw a woman from behind. Whenever I am fondling any one erotically and have my hand on the buttocks--I always think then of a woman--the moon always occurs to me but in the thought of a woman's body." According to this explanation the sleep walker would have also stared at the planet, because the round sphere awoke sexual childhood memories of the woman's body, or, as I learned from another source, of the woman's breast, most frequently however of her buttocks. It is moreover noteworthy that it was always only the full moon that worked thus attractively, not by chance the half moon or the sickle. An everyday experience agrees very well with this. Children, when they see the full moon or their attention is called to it, begin to snigger. Every one familiar with the child psyche knows that such giggling is based on sexual meaning, because the little ones usually think of the nates. Not infrequently will children, when they are placed on the chamber, pull away their nightclothes with the words, "Now the full moon is up," likewise when a child accidentally or intentionally bares himself at that spot. We have now the explanation, if we put together that which has just been told us, why our sleep walker wakes up on the spot and comes to herself as soon as she is called by name. This corresponds to her starting awake when in school she was recalled from her sexual daydreams and the earlier being startled when the mother called her out of similar sexual phantasies to go to sleep. The inference may be drawn from this however that one is startled from sexual dreaming also when the name is called during sleep walking, or going a step further, that sexual phantasies are at the bottom of sleep walking in the moonlight and first find their fulfilment here. Could the interpretation of our patient be generalized, it might be said that the sleep walker climbs upon the roofs as a fulfilment of a childish wish to climb up into the very moon. It is of significance also how far we may consider universal her infantile belief that everything sexual is permitted upon the moon, that what was strongly forbidden her upon earth was there allowed to other children, and further the opinion that she was quite different because of her sexual phantasying and did not after all belong upon the earth but on the moon. At any rate the two motives introduced for staring at the moon's disk may be frequently met, are perhaps constantly present, that is the similarity of the moonlight and lamplight and the comparison of the moon's disk to the human body, especially the nates. Let us attempt to realize now what this case before us may have to teach, the first and so far the only one of its kind to be submitted to a careful analysis. It must naturally be candidly confessed from the start that from a single case history, be it ever so clearly and fully set forth, no general conclusions may be drawn. Moreover certain factors resist generalization because they are of a more specialized character and at most will only occasionally reappear, as for example, the strong sadistic note, the desire for blood, the hemoptysis of the beloved mother. More frequently, also with the female sex, there may be the wish to climb into bed with the parents or their substitutes, to play the rôle of mother or father, out of love for them, and finally in general homosexuality may be a driving factor. It is the sexual coloring and motivation of the sleep walking, especially by the light of the moon, which gives throughout the strongest tone to our case. This is something which the scientific authors have so far as good as completely overlooked, even where it has forced itself into view, as in a series of cases cited by Krafft-Ebing.[9] We shall hear, in discussing the works of the poets, that they and the folk place this very motive before all others, indeed often take it as the only one. We have here once more before us, if this opinion be correct, a scientific erotophobia, that is the dread--mostly among physicians and psychologists--of sexuality, although this is at least one of the chief driving instincts of human life. [9] _E. g._, "A monk of a melancholy disposition and known to be a sleep walker, betook himself one evening to the room of his prior, who, as it happened, had not yet gone to bed, but sat at his work table. The monk had a knife in his hand, his eyes were open and without swerving he made straight at the bed of the prior without looking at him or the light burning in the room. He felt in the bed for the body, stuck it three times with the knife and turned with a satisfied countenance back to his cell, the door of which he closed. In the morning he told the horrified prior that he had dreamed that the latter had murdered his mother, and that her bloody shadow had appeared to him to summon him to avenge her. He had hastened to arise and had stabbed the prior. Immediately he had awakened in his bed, bathed in perspiration, and had thanked God that it had been only a frightful dream. The monk was horrified when the prior told him what had taken place." The following cases besides: "A shoemaker's apprentice, tortured for a long time with jealousy, climbed in his sleep over the roof to his beloved, stabbed her and went back to bed." Another, "A sleep walker in Naples stabbed his wife because of an idea in a dream that she was untrue to him!" We may conclude, on the ground of our analytical experiences, that the untrue maiden always represents the mother of the sleep walker, who has been faithless to him with the father. The hatred thoughts toward this rival lead in the first dream to the reverse Hamlet motive, the mother has demanded that the son take revenge upon the father. Finally Krafft-Ebing gives still other cases: "A pastor, who would have been removed from his post on account of the pregnancy of a girl, was acquitted because he proved that he was a sleep walker and made it appear that in this condition (?) the forbidden relationship had taken place." Also, "The case of a girl who was sexually mishandled in the somnambulistic condition. Only in the attacks had she consciousness of having submitted to sexual relations, but not in the free intervals." There exists a better agreement of opinion over the relationship between sleep walking and the dream. Sleep walking, analogously to the latter, fulfills also wishes of the day, behind which stand always wishes from childhood. Only it must also be emphasized that the old, like the recent wishes, are exclusively or predominantly of a sexual nature. Because however that sexual desire is forbidden in the waking life, it must even as in the dream take refuge in the sleeping state, where it can be gratified unconsciously and therefore without guilt or punishment. Most of the sleep activities of our patient were performed originally in a state of apparent sleep, that is actually practiced in the conscious state until later they were carried out quite unconsciously. She would never then betray what when feigning sleep she had to conceal as causes. Finally the directly precipitating causes in her erotic nature for the sleep walking and moon walking seem especially to have been light and the shining of the moon, her puberty and her mother's sickness. All of our patient's sleep walking, in accordance with the etiology and interpretation, since it goes back to infantile sexuality, is half sexual, half outspokenly infantile. It reaches the greatest degree, indeed the moon walking sets in just at the time of sexual maturity and leads to the most complicated actions before the menses, that is at the time of the greatest sexual excitement. And this activity in sleep and the moon walking too almost cease when the patient enters upon regular sexual intercourse. The shining of every light stimulates her sexually, especially that of the moon. The wandering about in her nightgown or in the scantiest clothing is plainly erotically conditioned (exhibition), but also the going about in the ghostly hours (see later), finally the being wakened through the softest calling of her name by the mother, with whom alone she stands in a contact like that of hypnotic somnambulism. Purely childish moreover is the clever technique of disguise. First she simulates illness or fear in order to be taken into the mother's bed. Then she pretends to be asleep, talks in her sleep, throws herself about in her sleep, that she may be able to do everything without punishment and without being blamed, finally plays the mother in a manner which corresponds completely to child's play. Also later, before and after wandering in the bright moonlight, she produces specially deep sleep and first as if in an obsession tries the door repeatedly to see if it is closed. I see in this, naturally apart from possible organic causes of profound sleep, an unconscious purpose, which plainly insists: "Just see, how sound-asleep I am (we are reminded of the earlier pretending to be asleep) and how afraid I am that the door might be left open! Whoever has to walk about in spite of such sound sleep and such precaution, and even perhaps do certain things which might be sexually interpreted, he plainly is not to blame for it!" We might add from knowledge of the neuroses that the fear that some one might be hiding in the room signifies the wish that this might be so in order that the subject might be sexually gratified. There was one circumstance most convincing in regard to this, which I will now add. Even during the time of her psychoanalytic treatment, when she did not wander at night any more nor perform complicated acts in her sleep, she had a number of times in the country carefully locked the door of her room in the evening, only to find it open again in the morning. To be sure, her lover of that period slept under the same roof, though at some distance from her. Before I go more closely into the question as to what share the light had upon the sleep walking of our patient, I will recall once more that her actions during sleep were at first but few and had nothing to do with the light. As the years went by they became more complicated and finally took place only under the influence of the light, whether it was artificial or natural, that is of the moon. More extended walks were in general possible only in the light of the moon, which as a heavenly body shining everywhere threw its brightness over every thing, in the court, garden and over the street, while candles or lamps at the best lighted one or two rooms. The patient, given to sleep walking or moon walking, went after the light, which meanwhile represented to her from childhood on a symbol of the parents' love and gave hope of sexual enjoyment. It was also bound inseparably within with motor activities of an erotic nature. When her mother approached her bed with the light it was a reminder to the child, Now you must go upon the chamber and you can pass "the good," or, when she sat on the mother's lap and gazed into the lamplight, Now you may stimulate yourself according to your heart's desire. Then the lamp was shining when the little one wished to climb into bed with the mother in order that, while exhibiting herself, she might see her as scantily covered as possible. And finally the striking of the light announced, "the mother is sick, in nursing her you will have the opportunity to see her bared breasts and her blood." Evidently the light thus led, when she climbed after it, to the greatest experience of sexual pleasure of her earliest childhood. On account of this strong libido possession the memory of the light was kept alive in the unconscious and it needed only that the light of the lamp or the candle should fall upon the face of the wanderer to permit her to experience in the most profound sleep the same pleasure, the unconscious was set into activity and everything was accomplished most manifestly according to the purpose that served her strong libido. It is remarkable that our patient distinguished immediately a strong feeling of pleasure by the shining of every light, that moreover she seemed to herself as a supernatural being (glorification through the sexual feeling of pleasure[10]), that she herself imagined it must represent a second sort of consciousness, and finally that she stood in such contact with the beloved person as that of a hypnotized subject--somnambulist--with her hypnotist. For she perceived also the mother's lightest word when most soundly asleep, in spite of her difficulty in hearing at other times. [10] One thinks of the halo in religious pictures, which indeed is nothing else than the shining of the light about the head. What was the patient's intention in her longer walks under the moon's influence, that she, for instance, climbed to the first story, reflected for a moment and then started to go out at the gate? That becomes comprehensible when it is remembered that she once opened the door in her sleep for her lover in the country and furthermore in her first complicated sleep walking. The purpose of the latter has been stated, to climb into her mother's bed in order to obtain the greatest sexual pleasure. I do not believe I am far astray when I assume that this erotic desire of the child lies also essentially at the basis of her more extensive wandering in the moonlight. She simply wishes each time to go to the bed of some beloved one, which, as we shall hear later, is accepted by poets and the folk mind as a chief motive, and a fundamental one for many instances of sleep walking, especially with maidens. It becomes clear now, likewise, why the patient climbs into the first story, then recollects herself and seeks to go out at the gate. In her seventh year she and her family had changed their abode and this had been before in the first story but was now on an upper floor. She is trying yet to climb into the mother's bed, this still remaining as a fundamental motive. Only she is not seeking the bed where it stands at the present time but where it stood in childhood, in the first story and in another house. She goes, therefore, downstairs but remembers, unconsciously of course, that this is not the right floor and wants now to go out at the gate to find the home of her childhood. Later in the country when she so thoroughly frightens her landlady and her daughter, there she is also going to a woman she loves and she leaves the house for this purpose and goes at least into the room that lies in the direction of the house where the beloved lies. Later still she opens the door wide in her sleep so that her lover can have free entrance. We might also explain now in great part the sleep walking of the mother. As far as I can discover, the mother also as a very small child lived in another home than the one in which her sleep walking began. She ran about her room at night and could not find her bed and felt around in distress without coming upon the chamber, both of which stood in the usual places. This may be explained by the fact that in phantasy she was seeking the bed and chamber of her earliest childhood, which of course stood elsewhere. Moreover she attained by her moaning the fulfilment of her unconscious wish to be set by her mother upon the chamber and then lifted into bed. The wanderings in the moonlight, after which likewise she could not find her way back to bed, may be similarly explained, though I learned only this much about her dancing in the moonlight, that in her childhood she was very fond of dancing, which is also the case with our patient. Perhaps she wished also to play elves in the moonlight, according to poems or fairy tales or had, like her daughter, earned the special love of her parents through her skill in dancing. We are now at the chief problem. How is it then that the night's rest, the guarding of which is always the goal of the dream, is motorially broken through in sleep walking? There is first a special organic disposition, which is absent from no sleep walker, a heightened motor stimulability[11]. This appears clearly with children, and so for example with our patient as a tendency to convulsive attacks, pavor nocturnus and terrifying dreams, from which she starts up. [11] Cf. with this Krafft-Ebing, _l. c._ "Slight convulsions or cataleptic muscular rigidity sometimes precede the attacks." As far as my observations go, it seems to me that there is a special disposition to sleep walking in the descendants of alcoholics and epileptics, of individuals with a distinctively sadistic character, finally of hysterics, whose motor activity is strongly affected, who also suffer with convulsions, tremor, paralyses or contractures. It should be merely briefly mentioned that the heightened motor excitability also establishes a disposition to a special muscle erotic, which in fact was easily demonstrable in every one of the cases of sleep walking and moon walking which have become known to me. The disturbance of the night's rest was made desirable through the satisfaction of the muscle erotic to every one for whom the excessive muscular activity offered an entirely specialized pleasure, even sexual enjoyment. Moreover in our case a series of features besides those already mentioned bear undoubted testimony to the abnormally increased muscle erotic. I have already elsewhere discussed them in detail[12] and will here merely name briefly the chief factors. The patient had an epileptic alcoholic grandfather on the mother's side, who was notorious when under the influence of alcohol for his cruelty and pleasure in whipping. She had, besides a strongly sadistic mother, two older brothers, of whom the elder was frightfully violent and brutal, often choking his brothers and sisters, while the other found an actually diabolical pleasure in destroying and demolishing everything. Our patient exhibited already at two years old as well as through her whole life a pleasure in striking blows, and also conversely a special pleasure in receiving them, further at four years old an intensive delight in dancing, an enjoyment that was unmistakably sexual. We have learned above how she delighted to press herself upon her mother's body or twine herself about her legs. Moreover, finally, one of her very earliest hysterical symptoms was a paralysis of the arm. [12] Cf. note 6, p. 163. More difficult seems to me the answer to the second main question: What influence does the moon exercise upon the sleeper? It was earlier discussed, along with the various psychical overdeterminations, that the moonlight awoke first the infantile pleasure memories, among other things that that light shining everywhere lighted the way which led to the house and the dwelling of the earliest childhood. Mention was made of the infantile comparison of the moon's disk with the childish nates and perhaps the gazing upon the nightly orb, which seems besides most like a hypnotic fixation, may be also referred back to the same. Since we know today that the love transference constitutes the essential character of hypnotism, that symptom brings us once more to the eroticism. Beside there was not wanting with our patient a grossly sensual relationship. Finally there is also the infantile desire to climb over the houses into the moon, realizing itself in part at least in the moon-inspired climbing upon the roof. Yet the second leading problem appears to me, in spite of all this, not completely exhausted. It might not thus be absolutely ruled out that more than a mere superstition lurks behind the folk belief which conceives of a "magnetic" influence by which the moon attracts the sleeper. Such a relationship is indeed conceivable when we consider the motor overexcitability of all sleep walkers and the effecting of ebb and flow through the influence of the moon. Furthermore no one, in an epoch which brings fresh knowledge each year of known and unknown rays, can deny without question any influence to the rays of moonlight. Perhaps in time the physicist and the astronomer will clear up the matter for us. Meanwhile the question is raised and can be answered only with an hypothesis. In conclusion I have in mind a last final connection which the spell of the moon bears to belief in spirits and ghosts. It is established through many analyses that the visits of the mother by night form the basis of the latter, when she comes with the light in her hand and scantily clothed in white garments, nightgown, or chemise and petticoat, to see if the children are asleep or, if they are, to set a child upon the chamber. The so often mentioned "woman in white" may also be the maiden in her nightgown, who thus exhibits herself in her night garment to her parents as she climbs into their bed, later also eventually to her lover. The choice of the hour between twelve and one, which came to be called the ghostly hour, may perhaps be referred to the fact that at this time sleep was most profound and therefore there was least danger of discovery. CASE 2. I introduce here a second case, in which to be sure the influence of the moon represented only an episode and therefore received also but a brief analysis. It is that of a twenty-eight year old forester, who came under psychoanalytic treatment on account of severe hysterical cardiac distress. The cause of this was a damming up of his feelings toward his mother, for whom he longed in the unconscious. His condition of anxiety broke out when he went to live with his mother after the death of his father and slept in the next room. He admitted that his father drank. Every Sunday he was somewhat drunk. Likewise the mother, who kept a public house, was in no way disinclined toward alcohol. He himself had consumed more beer especially in his high school days than was good for him. I would emphasize in his sexual life, as belonging to our theme, his strong urethral erotic, which made him a bed wetter in childhood, led in later years to frequent micturition at night and caused a serious dysuria psychica. His muscle erotic finally drove him to the calling of a forester. Only the portions of his psychoanalysis, which lasted for eight weeks, which have to do with his sleep activities and his response to the moon will be brought forward. Thus he relates at one time: "At thirteen years old, when I was in a lodging house kept by a woman, I arose one morning with the dark suspicion that I had done something in the night. What I did not remember. I merely felt stupefied. Suddenly the boys who slept with me began to laugh, for from under my bed ran a stream of urine. In the night the full moon had shone upon my bed. We fellows had no vessel there but had to go outside, which with my frequent need for urination during the night was very unpleasant. Now there stood under my bed a square box for hats and neckties, which I, as I got up in the night half intoxicated with sleep, had taken for a chamber and I had urinated in it. This was repeated. Another time, also at full moon, I wet a colleague's shoe. They all said that I must be a little loony. When the full moon came, I was always afraid that I might do this again, an anxiety which remained long with me. I never dared sleep, for example, so that the full moon could shine directly upon me. Yes; still something else. Two or three years later the following happened, only I do not know whether there was moonlight. I was sleeping with several colleagues in a room adjoining that of the lodging house keepers, the man and his wife. I must have gone into them at night and done something sexual. Either I wished to climb into bed with the wife or I had masturbated, I do not know which. I had at any rate the next day the suspicion that something of the kind had happened. The landlord and landlady laughed so oddly, but they said nothing to me." "Did your mother perhaps in your childhood come to look after you with the light?"--"Yes; that is so. My mother always stayed up for a long time and came in regularly late at night with the light to go to bed. My father was obliged to go early to bed because of his work and had to get up at midnight, when he always made a light." Here he suddenly broke off: "Perhaps it is for this reason that I have an anxiety in an entirely dark room. If there is not at least a bit of light I can not perform coitus."--"How is that?"--"I have remonstrated rather seriously with myself that the sexual act could be performed only with a light."--Then at a later hour of analysis: "When my father went away at night, I came repeatedly into my mother's bed. I lay down in my father's bed, also in a certain measure put myself into his place."--"Did your mother call you, or did you come of yourself?"--"I believe that my mother invited me to her. Now something occurs to me: The moonlight awoke me as my father woke me when he struck a light as he was going out. Then it was time to go into bed with my mother, for the father was gone, which always gave me a feeling of reassurance."--"Yes, when he was gone he could do nothing more to the mother. And then you could take his place with her." Two months later came the following to supplement this: "Already in the grammar school I was always afraid someone might attack me in the night, because of which I always double locked the room and looked under the bed and in every chest. In childhood Mother came in fact to look after me and set me on the chamber."--"Then your neurotic anxiety presumably signifies the opposite, the wish that your mother shall come to you again."--"Or rather, I bolt the door so that my father cannot come to my mother. I followed in this also a command of my mother, 'Lock yourself in well!' She always had a fear of burglars. Now even since I have been living with my mother she has said to me more than once, that I should lock myself in well. But I thought to myself, 'What, bolt myself in!'"--"That would mean also that if the mother wants to come, only she should come."--"That is just what I thought to myself, when Mother woke me early, that she need not knock but come right in. In the daytime I lay in my mother's bed because her room was warmer than mine. I was feeling very wretchedly at that time and my mother said in the evening, 'Stay there where you are; I will sleep in the little room next. Leave the door open.' In the night I know I was very restless."--"Did you not perhaps have the wish that your mother should look at her sick child in the night, as she once did when you were younger?"--"Yes, to be sure. This wish pursued me and therefore I slept badly. I would have carried the thing out further if my dysuria had not hindered me. If I had arisen in the night or the morning, then Mother would at once have heard me in her light sleep and I would not have been able to urinate. One time I crept out of bed very quietly so that she did not hear me, and yet it held back a long time until I couldn't stand it any longer. It was just the same at the time when I was in the grammar and the high school, if Mother asked me to sleep near her and Father was not there. Then also I could urinate only with great difficulty. And now when I was living with my mother, I had the most severe excited attacks. There was no other reason for I was neither a loafer nor a drunkard. I have laid myself down in my mother's bed and been unwilling to get out. That is very significant. And if at any time I went away from home I at once felt so miserable that I must go back. I was immediately better when once there." This case, when we consider it, is plain in its relationships. The excessive love for the mother is a decisive factor as well as the desire to play the rôle of the father with her. Therefore the fear of burglars at night, behind which hides in part the anxiety that the father would have sexual relations with the mother and in part the wish that the latter might herself come to him. Joined to this is the desire for all sorts of infantile experiences, such as the mother's placing him every night upon the chamber because of his bed wetting. In the later repression the pleasure in the enuresis as well as in the being taken up by the mother becomes a dysuria psychica. Naturally to the urethral eroticist in childhood, and also later unconsciously, micturition is analogous to the sexual act. In puberty the moonlight awakens him as in childhood the mother's light or that of the father. So on the one hand the memory of the former is awakened, who with the light in her hand reminded him to go to the chamber,[13] and on the other hand the memory of the going out of the father, which was a signal to him to go to his mother. He arises and carries out with her symbolically the sexual act, for he urinates into a vaginal symbol (box or shoe-vagina). Also the fact that he got up once by the light of the full moon and wanted to climb into the bed of the landlady, likewise a mother substitute, is all of a piece. This case here before us, as may be seen, confirms what the first has already taught us. [13] In Rumania the folk belief prevails that children readily wet themselves in full moonlight. (Told by a patient.) CASES 3, 4, and 5.--I wish to give further a brief report of three cases of walking by moonlight, which I regret to say I could only briefly outline in passing, not being able to submit them to an exhaustive analysis. In everything they confirm every detail of our previous conclusions. The first case is that of an unmarried woman of twenty-eight, who walked in her sleep first in her sixth year and the second time when she was nine years old. "I got up when the full moon was shining, climbed over a chair upon the piano and intended to go to the window to unfasten it. Just then my father awoke and struck me hard on my buttocks, upon which I went back and again fell asleep. I often arose, went to each bed, that of the parents and those of the brothers and sisters, looked at them and went back again. Between sixteen and seventeen years old, when my periods first occurred, the sleep walking stopped." She adds later: "I frequently as a child spoke out in my sleep. My nose began to bleed when I was walking on the street and the sun shone upon me. After this the sleep walking improved. I always clung affectionately to my parents and brothers and sisters, and never received a blow except in that one instance by my father."--"Which you took rather as a caress, than as a blow for punishment." In this case also the sleep walker plays sometimes the rôle of the mother, who satisfies herself that her dear ones are asleep. Moreover a period of talking in the sleep precedes the wandering by moonlight. It is noteworthy that the sleep walking is intercepted by a caressing blow from the father and ceases altogether when menstruation sets in. Also earlier nosebleed had a beneficial effect. The second case is that of a forty-year-old hysteric, who in her marriage remained completely anesthetic sexually, although her husband was thoroughly sympathetic to her and very potent. Her father's favorite child, she strove in vain in early childhood for the affection of the mother, who on her part also suffered severely from hysteria, with screaming fits, incessant tremor of the head and hands and a host of nervous afflictions. This mother's daughters had all of them always an extraordinary passion for muscular activity with apparently great satisfaction in it. They were among other things distinguished swimmers and enthusiastic dancers. My patient besides could never tire of walking for hours at a time. In our discussion she related the following to me concerning her sleep walking: "I got up once in the night when I was about ten years old. I had dreamed that I was playing the piano. I found myself however not in bed but standing between a chest and a desk scratching upon the latter with my nails, as if playing the piano, which finally awoke me. There was also a paper basket there which either I had stepped over or there was a space through which I could slip, at any rate the way there was not quite free. I stood in this narrow space and dreamed I was playing the piano. Suddenly I heard my mother's voice, 'Mizzi, where are you?' She called me several times before I finally awoke. Without it was not yet growing daylight, but the moon shone brightly within. I recollected myself immediately, realizing where I was, and went back to bed. I told my mother, as an excuse, that I had to go to the chamber." "Had you at that time a great desire to play the piano?"--"Three years later it made me sick that I had not had to learn, but then I had as yet no desire for music. We had no piano at that time. Yet among my earliest memories is that of the way in which my mother played the piano. As a woman I wished that I could express my joy and sorrow in music. I would mention further that my brother and my uncle on the mother's side[14] are both sleep walkers. The former always wants to come into my bed in the night when he walks in his sleep. I must emphasize that he is especially fond of me. [14] They are both passionately devoted to sports, thus also endowed with a heightened muscle erotic. "The following often happened to me after I was married but never in my maidenhood. I awoke in the night, sat up in bed and did not know what was the matter with me. I could not think consciously, I was quite incapable of thought. I knew neither where I was nor what was happening to me; I could remember nothing. I did not know whether I was Jew or Christian, man or woman, a human being or a beast, only stared straight ahead into the next room, at a point of light. That was the only thing that appeared clear to me. I held myself to it to regain clearness. I always said to myself: 'What, what then? Where, how and why?' My powers of thought went no further. I was like a newborn child. I stared fixedly at this point of light because I unconsciously thought I would obtain clearness there for everywhere else it was dark. This lasted for a long time until through the light I could distinguish what it was that caused the light. It was from a street lamp, so apparently before midnight, and the lamp lighted a bit of the wall in the next room. After I had said to myself for a long time 'What, what?' and stared straight at that light, I learned gradually to distinguish what made the light, that is to recognize, That there above, is a bit of lamplight; again after some time; That is my lamp. Upon this I recollected my home and then for the first time everything else. When I had made out the outlines of things around me, then returned the consciousness that I was a human being and was married. Of all that I had not before been aware. I do not remember that I had dreamed anything before this came on, or that anything had excited me, nor that anything special had happened beforehand. Beside nothing like it has ever happened to me when I have been greatly excited. At the most, after my marriage I led a life of strain. I was tied to a shop which was damp, unwholesome and full of bad air, and I am a friend of fresh air. I suffered very much mentally under these conditions, because I love light and air."--"Did you think that you were indeed not a human being?"--"No; only that with God's help I would endure this life." I will add here that her second sister also manifested similar disturbances of consciousness. We find first in the foreground a family disposition to sleep walking and moon influence. The brother significantly always wants in his wanderings to get into the sister's bed, while our patient herself openly plays the part of mother, especially the mother of the earliest childhood. It is interesting also that when in her married life she had to give up her pleasure in light and air, the disturbances of consciousness set in, from which she could free herself only through fixing her attention upon a point of light. She had the distinct feeling that from this point of light things would become clear to her. One can easily think of occasions of being dazed by sleep when perhaps the mother came with the candle in her hand to see whether her child was asleep and the child awoke. The whole remarkable occurrence would then be simply a desire for the mother's love, which she all her life long so sorely missed. Now for the last case, a twenty-three year old married woman suffering from a severe hysteria, who clung with great tenderness to her parents, but received a reciprocal love only from her father, while the mother preferred her sister. The patient told me of her moon walking: "I always wanted to sleep by the open blinds so that the moon could shine upon me. My oldest brother walked about in the night, drank water, went to the window and looked out, all of course in his sleep, then he went back to bed and slept on. At the same time he spoke very loudly, but quite unintelligible things and one could actually observe that the moon exercised an attraction over him. My younger healthy brother said that it was frightful, the many things that he uttered in the night. I also climbed out of bed one night when sixteen or seventeen years old, because I could not find the moon, and sought it and met my moon haunted brother. I immediately disappeared again going back to my bed and he did not see me. "I was ill once, about the same time, with influenza, and continually repeated in my feverish phantasies that they should take down some one who was hanged and not punish him; he could not help it. There was moonlight at that time and moreover a light burned in the room. I took this for the moon, which I could not see but wanted to see. I strove only all the time to see the moon. The windows must be closed because I was afraid, but the blinds must remain open so that I could see the moon. Some one roused me then from my phantasies and there I saw that my cousin sat near me. He was not however the one hanged, it was some one who was first dragged out by another man, a warden in the prison. The face of the one who was hanging I did not see, only his body."--"Of whom did he remind you?"--"I do not know definitely and yet it was the cousin who sat near me. And as I awoke, apparently I called his name for he answered me, 'Yes, here I am!'"--"What about the warden of the prison?"--"A man is first locked up before he is hanged."--"Do you see also in phantasy something that hangs down?"--"Yes; when with my cousin I always had the desire to see his membrum stiff, as it could be felt and noticed outlined through his clothing." I will add likewise that behind the cousin and her sexual wishes toward him analogous phantasies toward the father were hidden. That which hangs down (pendens, penis) is also the phallus. Her adjuration that the hanged person should not be punished, he could not help it, is a demand for mercy for sexual sins (see also later). "Upon the wedding journey my husband did not want to sleep by the open blinds, and I wanted to sleep nowhere else so that the moon could shine upon me. I could never sleep otherwise, was very restless and it was always as if I wanted to creep into the moon. I wanted, so to speak, to creep into the moon out of sight.[15] Recently I was out in the country with my sister and slept by the open blinds. The light from the heavens, to be sure not the moonlight, forced its way in and I had the feeling as if something pierced me,[16] in fact it pierced me somehow in the small of my back, and I arose with my eyes closed and changed the position of the bed, upon which I slept well. I knew nothing of it that I had arisen, but something must have happened because I now could lie comfortably. [15] Phantasy of the mother's body? The moon's disk = the woman's body? [16] A clear coitus phantasy. "Something else still. About two years ago I observed the moon in the country, as it was reflected in the water, and I could not tear myself from this spectacle until I was suddenly awakened by my husband and cried out. Five or six years ago I went out in a boat upon the Wolfgang lake. The moon was reflected in the water and I sat there very still. Suddenly my brother, the one who is well, with whom I do not have much to do, asked, 'What are you thinking of?'--'Nothing at all.'--'It must be something.'--'No, nothing!' As we climbed out, I was still quite absent minded. Also at night I always had the moon before me and spoke with it."--"Consciously or in a dream?"--"I believe I was more asleep than awake. For if any one had come upon me then I should have felt it very painfully. I have incidentally noted the words: 'Oh moon with thy white face, thou knowest I am in love only with thee. Come down to me. I languish in torture, let me only comfort myself upon thy face. Thou enticing, beautiful, lovely spirit, thou torturest me to death, my suffering rends me, thou beautiful Moon, thou sweet one, mine, I implore thee, release me from this pain, I can bear it no longer. Ah, what avail my words and my complainings! Be thou my happiness, take me with thee, _only pleasure of the senses do I desire for myself_. Thou Moon, most beautiful and best, _save me, take my maidenhood, I am not evil to thee_. Draw me mightily to thyself, do not leave off, thy kisses have been so good to me.'" As may be seen, she loved the moon like a lover to whom she would yield herself entirely. The grossly sexual relationship is evident. It is after this fragment doubly regrettable that a penetrating psychoanalysis was not here possible. The early sexual content of the moon desire and its connection with the parent complex is shown by her further statement: "Last summer in the country I had only my mother-in-law with whom I could talk. It was the time of the new moon and I could not bear complete darkness in my room. It was frightfully lonely to me thus and I could not sleep. I had the idea that in the lonely darkness someone was coming to me and I was afraid." It soon came to light that she and her sister in their early childhood and again between the ages of eight and thirteen shared the parents' sleeping room and had repeatedly spied upon their sexual intercourse. Her present fear is also evidently the wish to put herself in the place of the mother, to whom the father comes. She recalls yet one more episode: "When I was nine or ten years old, the healthy brother was ill with typhoid and the parents were up nights on his account. We sisters were sent to stay elsewhere, where we had opportunity to play with a boy who carried on a number of sexual things with us. I then dreamed of him at night and phantasied the sexual things which I had done with him in the daytime. Apparently I had also at that time played underneath with my genitals. At the same time, while my brother had typhoid, I was unwilling to go to sleep and could not, because I could have no rest while my brother was ill." It is clear without further discussion to one who understands these things that it was not anxiety for the brother but secret, yet insistent sexual wishes which caused the sleeplessness. It is finally significant that, when later she dreamed of a burglar, he always came after her with a knife, or choked her, as her cousin and mother had often done to her. As we consider this third case of moon affectivity we find again familiar phenomena, connections with early sexual dreams and the parent complex. Especially noteworthy is further her direct falling in love with the moon, to which she addresses her adoration in verses and to which she even offers her virginity. It is as if she saw in it a man, who should free her from her sexual need. One is reminded how in the first case, the one cured by psychoanalysis, the four-year-old girl sought continually the moon's face on the ground of a students' song. It could not, we regret to say, be ascertained, in the absence of a psychoanalysis, whether in this case the heavenly body represented to the moon walker some definite person or not. CASE 6.--I add here three autobiographical reports, which I have gathered from literature. The first originates with the famous anatomist and physiologist Karl Friedrich Burdach, who from his tenth to his thirtieth year had occasional attacks of moon walking, although he apparently "enjoyed the most perfect health." "I have during these periods," he himself relates, "undertaken actions which I had to recognize as mine, merely because they could have been carried out by no one else. Thus one day it was incomprehensible to me why I had on no shirt when I awoke, and it remained so in spite of my utmost efforts to recollect myself, until the shirt was found in another room rolled together under a press. In my twenty-ninth year I was awakened from a night wandering by the question, What did I want? and then the consciousness of the somnambulistic state passed over in part to the awaking. First I found the question strange, but since I thought the reason for it would become plain, I need not betray it. Immediately, however, as I began to waken, I asked myself in what that consisted and, now that the somnambulistic state was over, the answer must be due me." One cannot help finding this self revelation exceedingly interesting. The hiding of the shirt, although the affair is so incompletely reported, especially in its motivation, points unmistakably at least to exhibitionism. The second sleep walking appears much more difficult of explanation. In this Burdach sought plainly a definite goal, which seemed so clear and transparent to him that he could not at all understand why anyone should question him about it. If we consider that his first thought on waking was that he need not betray this purpose, that moreover there enters at once a repression and causes him completely to forget it, there remains then no other possibility than that we have to do with a strongly forbidden wish, which the conscious censor will not allow to pass. It is easy to conceive a sexual motivation in this second instance if we remember that in the first sleep walking something sexual surely took place. Still more probable is the strongly forbidden sexual goal, if we take into consideration the circumstances of his life. In his autobiography "Rückblick auf mein Leben" Burdach tells us how extraordinarily his mother depended upon him. "Having already lost four children in their first year, she had longed to bear another child and especially since the setting in of the illness of my father had compelled her to think of losing him, she had wished for a son as a sure object for her love-thirsty heart. Her wish was fulfilled when she bore me." Eleven months later the father died, leaving his wife and his little son not yet a year old unprovided for. Nevertheless she, the widow, rejected the proposal to return to her parents' home and preferred rather "trouble, need and a thousand cares upon herself in order that I might be better educated; for I was the object of her deepest love. About nine o'clock in the evening she went with me to bed and twined her arm about me; in the morning she stole from my side and permitted me an hour or two more of rest (p. 14). "Women had a particular influence upon me; but it was also natural to me to attach myself to them. As my mother related, I never as a child went for a ride on my hobby horse without having at parting and on my return kissed my hand to my lady represented by a doll" (p. 24). It is superfluous to add that this lady was no other than his mother. Also the following passage I think is significant: "I was by nature endowed with as great a sensitiveness to womanly charm as to womanly dignity and this inclination toward the other sex grounded in my psychical constitution was nurtured by circumstances from my earliest youth on. I could but recognize very soon the high intellectual and moral quality of my good mother, who in her struggle with poverty kept herself fresh and free from vulgarity and shunned no sacrifice for me. Likewise the matrons to whose well wishing I owe my gratitude, inspired me with high respect for their character. In my former nurse there seemed to me a pattern of tireless and sagacious activity of a high order and breeding.... Thus a high respect for true womanhood was implanted in me. On the other hand I was as a boy made so accustomed to this rôle by several young women, who entertained themselves with me and considered me as their lover to while away their time, that I later retained the inclination to play this part and considered a friendly advance as an invitation which I in turn held as a sacred claim of honor and an agreeable duty" (pp. 69 ff.). When later the mother took a young widow into lodgings, the young man, then twenty-one years old, had "the exalted feeling of being her protector. Then it was all up with my heart" (p. 71). The death of the dearest one to him on earth, his mother, followed close upon this and brought an end to it. "I became convinced that happiness would be found for me only where I shared it with another being, and that I could be satisfied only by a relationship similar to that in which I had stood toward my mother; an inner bond where only a single mutual interest controlled, where one soul found its happiness only in the other. Without such an absolute love, penetrating the whole being, life seemed to me worthless and stale. My mother, whose unbounded love I had enjoyed, was torn from me; my excellent uncle, heartily devoted to me, I saw in the enjoyment of his own family happiness. And an unconquerable desire for the same happiness tortured me as I felt my utter loneliness" (p. 79). So he concluded to marry although he had only limited prospects for supporting a family. "The first intimation that my wife was pregnant filled me with delight. I took it for granted that Heaven would send me a daughter. With my idea of the value of woman all my wishes tended thither, to possess a daughter and to be able to watch over her while she unfolded to a noble womanhood. She should have my mother for her pattern and therefore also be named Caroline after her.[16a] I spoke so confidently, after I had left Vienna, of 'our daughter Caroline' in my letters to my wife that she was finally quite concerned and sought to prepare me for the birth of a son. I had not however made a mistake and my confidence was in the end justified" (pp. 83 ff.). His wife was confined at some distance from him and then as soon as possible journeyed to him with the little one. He relates as follows: "I went in Borsdorf with a beating heart to the carriage which brought her to me, kissed her hastily, took my child out of her arms and carried it hastily into the inn, laid it upon the table, loosed the bindings which bound it to its tiny bed and was lost in happy contemplation of the beautifully formed, lovely, vigorous and lively little girl and then first threw myself into the arms of my wife, who in her mother's pride and joy was feasting her eyes upon us, and then I had again to observe the lovely child. What cared I for mankind! What cared I for the whole world! I was more than happy" (pp. 85 ff.). [16a] Cf. Barrie: "Dear Brutus," Act. II. for the dream daughter, who bears the name of the author's mother. See also "Margaret Ogilvy." The dream daughter's apostrophe to the moon is also interesting in connection with the present study. Tr. The manner also in which he brought up his child is highly significant: "Our hearts clung mostly to our daughter.... I enjoyed the pleasure of possessing her with full consciousness of her worth, gazed upon her with rapture and was delighted when I observed in her a new trait of beautiful womanly character. She recognized by my serious treatment of her the entire depth of my love, repaid it with inner devotion and challenged it with merry playfulness. From her first year I delighted to lift her from her bed in the morning and even when she was eight years old she often got up of herself, knocked on the window of the alcove door leading into my work room and whisked back to her bed, so that when I came she could throw herself with hearty laughter into my arms and let me take her up. Or she slipped behind my chair and climbed up behind my back, while I was deep in my work, so that she could fall triumphantly upon my neck. "I must refrain from mentioning more of her winsome childhood. She was the most beautiful ornament of my life and in the possession of her I felt myself, in spite of all pecuniary need, immeasurably happy." It will not surprise any one with knowledge of these things that a child so insatiable for love should become hysterical. "Her sensitiveness was unnaturally exaggerated," also she was seized once with a hysterical convulsion, as Burdach relates. She died young and "the flower of my life was past. The fairest, purest joy was extinguished for me. I had wished her for myself and Heaven had heard me. Finding in her the fulfilment of my warmest wishes, I had never thought it would be possible that I should outlive this daughter. Nevertheless I bore the pain ... confident of being reunited with her.... For thirty years scarcely a day has passed on which I have not at least once thought in my inmost soul of my Caroline" (pp. 142-147). I will cite in conclusion still one more fragment of self characterization: "A chief trait in my character was the need for love, not that everyday love which limits itself to a personal pleasure and delight, but that unbounded, overflowing love which feels itself completely one with the beloved.... The ideal of marriage was before me in youth, for this need for love has been mine all my life.... I remember as a student having written in my diary that I would rather forego life itself than the happiness of family life" (pp. 53 ff.). The center of this interesting life is Burdach's deep oneness with his mother. She on her part took him from the beginning unconsciously as a sexual object, as a substitute for her husband, who was failing in health and soon after died. She lay in bed near her little one, her arm twined about his body and slept with him until morning. No wonder that the boy was so sensitive to womanly charm and likewise that later different women looked upon him as their lover. The thought early established itself with Burdach that only such a relationship could satisfy him as that in which he had stood toward his mother. And as he stood for the father it seemed to him a certain fact that now a little girl should come to be the surrogate for his mother. Noteworthy also is his attitude toward the mother who had just been confined and the child. The former is to him almost incidental, while in the contemplation of his child, in whom he secures his mother again, he can scarcely get his fill, and he overwhelms her later with such passionate love as he had once obtained from his mother. When the girl was torn from him, he was consoled only by the thought of being united again with her in heaven. We may see finally in the fond play in bed with his daughter a repetition of that which he carried on with his mother, and we may remember also that as a child he always slept with his mother. From all this it seems to me a light falls upon the unexplained purpose of Burdach's sleep walking. If this seems completely clear to him but so objectionable that he not only concludes to keep it secret, but, more than that, forgets it on the spot, then the probability is, that he desired that night to climb into bed with his beloved mother. CASE 7. A second autobiographical account of repeated sleep walking I find in the "Buch der Kindheit," the first volume of Ludwig Ganghofer's "Lebenslauf eines Optimisten." When the boy had to go away to school his mother gave him four balls of yarn to take with him, so that he might mend his own clothing and underwear. She had hidden a gulden deep within each ball, a proof of mother love, which he later discovered. In the course of time while at the school the impulses of puberty began to stir in him and pressed upon him so strongly at first that frequent pollutions occurred. He thought he must surely be ill, until finally a colleague explained to him that this was on the contrary a special sign of health. This calmed him and now he could sleep splendidly. "One night I awoke suddenly as if roused by a burning heat. I experienced a horrible suffering and believed I felt a hand on my body. I cried out and pushed with my feet, and as I lay there in a half consciousness it was as if many of my dormitory companions were awake and I heard them ask, 'What is it? Who has called out this way?' A voice, 'Some one has been dreaming!' And another voice, 'Silence in the dormitory!' And all was gone from me as if under a heavy veil. Once again quiet. Am I asleep or am I awake? A wild beating in the arteries of my neck, a roaring in my ears. Yet in the dormitory all is quiet. The lamp is burning, I see the white beds. I see the copper of the washstand glimmer like red gold. Must I have dreamed--an oppressive, frightful dream? Drops of sweat stood out on my forehead. Then came a heavy sleep. What was this? I rarely had days of depression or restless, disturbed nights. And yet in these weeks I entered upon this uncomfortable experience. "One night I awoke. Darkness was round about me. And I was cold. And I saw no lamp, no bed, no shining copper. Was this also a dream? Yet my hands felt plainly the hard wood in front of me. Slowly I recognized a number of vaguely outlined squares, the great windows. Clad only in my shirt, I sat in the study room before my desk. Such a horror fell upon me as I cannot describe. I ran wildly up the stairs, threw myself into my bed and shook. Another night I awoke. Darkness was about me. Again I was cold. And I believed that I was again sitting at my desk. No; I was standing. My hands however felt no wood, my eyes found not the gray windows. As I moved, my head struck against something hard. I became aware of a feeble light shining. As I went towards it, I came from some dark room upon the dimly lighted stair landing. "I awoke again in the night. I was cold. A semi-darkness was about me and over me many stars twinkled. I sat upon the shingle roof of the bowling alley. It was not a far leap to the ground below. But the pebble stones of the seminary garden pricked my bare feet. Moreover, when I wanted to get into the house, I found the gate closed. My God! how had I then come out? Somewhere I found an open window and climbed into the house and noiselessly up to the dormitory. The window near my bed stood open--and there outside, I believe, was a lightning rod. "All day I racked my brains to find a way to escape from the fear of this dreadful thing. I dared not confide in anyone, for fear of the ridicule of the others, for fear--I never knew just what I feared. In the evening I took one of Mother's balls of yarn to bed with me, bound two double strands about my wrists and tied the ends around the knobs of the bedstead. In the night, as I was about to wander again, I felt the pull of Mother's threads and awoke. It never came again. I was cured." This appears at the first glance a non-sexual sleep walking. This is only however in its first appearance, although it is to be regretted that the full explanation can scarcely be given in the absence of any analysis. It is first to be noted that sleep walking sets in at puberty and is ushered in by anxiety dreams, pollutions and various anxiety equivalents. The hammering in the arteries, the roaring in the ears, the restless, disturbed nights, as well as the unusually disturbed days, we know these all as manifestations of an unsatisfied libido. The first "frightful" anxiety dream seems to lead deeper, as well, as the "horrible suffering" started by a hand, which he felt upon his body. Must not this hand, which causes this "horrible suffering" to the youth who had never yet known trouble, have touched his genitals?[17] Behind this perhaps, moreover, are very early memories of the care bestowed upon the nursing infant and the child. [17] One may also think of the fear of castration, associated with the threats of parents so very frequently made when children practice masturbation. The terror which fell upon him every time that he walked in his sleep is worthy of note, for he was not otherwise easily frightened. "A terror which I could not describe," "fear of that dreadful thing" and fear not merely of the ridicule of his fellows but of something, what, he never knew, which is a far more violent reaction than we have been accustomed to find with sleep walkers. This excessive reaction may be very well understood, however, if behind it a particularly inacceptable sexual factor hides itself. Finally the cure by means of the mother's balls of yarn, homely proof of her love, doubtless has to do with the erotic. It must be admitted to be sure that we have to confine ourselves to mere conjectures. Only one may well maintain that even an apparently non-sexual case soon reveals its sexual grounding. Moreover, a strong muscle erotic is demonstrated further throughout Ganghofer's autobiography. CASE 8. I will now, especially upon the subject of moon walking, cite an author who shows a very unusual preference for this heavenly body. In many a description and in many of the speeches which he has put into the mouths of his heroes, has Ludwig Tieck, who also has sung of the "moon-lustered magic night," given artistic expression to this quite remarkable love mania--this is the correct designation for it. Ricarda Huch in her "Blütezeit der Romantik" makes the striking statement that from this poet's figures one must "tear away the labels stuck upon them and name them altogether Ludwig Tieck, for in truth they are only refractions of this one beam." One may hear for example how Sternbald felt: "The orb of the moon stood exactly opposite the window of his room." He watched it with longing eyes, he sought upon the shining disk and in the spots upon it mountains and forests, wonderful castles and enchanted flowers and fragrant trees. He believed that he saw lakes with shining swans which were drawing boats, a skiff which carried him and his beloved, while about them charming mermaids blew upon their twisted conchs and stretched their arms filled with water lilies over into the bark. "Ah, there, there!" he would call out, "is perchance the home of all desire, all wishes; therefore there falls upon us so sweet a melancholy, so soft a charm, when that still light, full and golden, floats upon the heavens and pours down its silver light upon us. Yes, it awaits us and prepares for us our happiness, and for this reason its sorrowful look toward us, that we must still remain in this earthly twilight." The similarity here with the phantasies of the psychoanalytic patient at the beginning is indeed unmistakable. Yet one or two extracts from the novel "Der Mondsüchtige,"[18] the title of which is misleading since it in no way treats of one afflicted with lunacy but of a veritable moon lover, presumably our poet himself. There the nephew, Ludwig Licht(!), writes to his uncle: "It is now three months since I had a very serious quarrel with my friend, a quarrel which almost separated us, for he mocked at an entire world which is to me so immeasurably precious. In a word, he railed at the moon and would not admit that the magic light with which it shines was anything beautiful or exalting. From Ossian to Siegwart he reviled a susceptibility toward the moon although the poets express it, and he almost had declared in plain words that if there were a hell, it certainly would be located in the moon. At any rate he thought that the entire sphere of the moon consists of burned out craters, water could not be found upon it, and hardly any plant life, and the wan, unwholesome reflection of a borrowed light would bring us sickness, madness, ruin of fruits and grains, and he who is already foolish will without doubt behave himself worst at the time of full moon.... What concern is it of mine what the astronomers have discovered in the moon or what they will yet discover?... It may be ludicrous and vexatious to devote oneself exclusively and unreservedly to this or that, any observation, any favorite object. Upon my earlier wanderings I met a rich Englishman who traveled only to waterfalls and battlefields. Ridiculously enough, though I have not journeyed only in the moonlight, yet I have from my earliest youth forever taken note of the influence of its light, have never in any region missed the light of the full moon and I dream of being, not quite an Endymion, but yet a favorite of the moon. When it returns, its orb little by little growing full, I cannot suppress a feeling of longing while I gaze upon it, whether in meadow and woodland, on the mountains or in the city itself and in my own room." [18] Literally, "Moonsick." [Tr.] And the uncle answers him: "It is true, you are moon sick, as we have always called you, and to such a one much must be forgiven which would have to be reckoned differently to a well man. I have myself however always inclined to this disease." In fact the entire action, loving and losing, the development and solution of the plot, takes place almost exclusively under the light of the moon. At the conclusion, when the hero finds the beloved given up for lost, he cannot refrain from the outcry: "Yes, the moonlight has given her and led her to me, he, the moon has so rewarded me, his true friend and inspired panegyrist!" I regret that I find nothing in the biographies which would explain Tieck's exquisite amorousness toward the moon. PART II Literary Section It is my purpose to bring also our beautiful literature to the solution of the exceedingly difficult and obscure problem of sleep walking and moon walking. Our poets, for all our psychiatrists and psychologists, possess the finest knowledge of the psyche and during the centuries before science was able to throw light upon the puzzles of the mind, they solved them prophetically with discerning spirit. Thus they knew how to bring to light various elements of our problem. Their creations directed to that end arose from their own inner nature, through analogy, or because sleep walking was not foreign to them themselves. And even if neither were the case, they still had the ability of those who have a real true knowledge of men, quite intuitively to see clearly into the unconscious of others. We will come to know what profound interest many of the great poets, like Otto Ludwig and Heinrich von Kleist took in night wandering and moon walking and how they have first introduced these dark problems into other traditional material. A striking similarity is revealed if one compares that which the poet has in mind with that which I have been able to report in the medical section. I shall be able satisfactorily to verify the statement that science and art have reached exactly the same result. First however I will present the examples from the poets according to their comprehensibility and their transparency. I begin with "AEBELÖ," by Sophus Michaelis. Twice had Soelver drawn near to the maiden Gro, daughter of his neighbor, Sten Basse. The first time was when in the spring he visited the island Aebeloe, which belonged to him but was quite uninhabited. So bright the day and so warm the kiss of the sun upon him, yet suddenly it was "as if his bare neck were flooded by a still warmer wave of light." A maiden stood before him, "who was like pure light. The eyes were as if without pupils, without a glance; as she looked it was as if white clouds floated forth out of a heavenly blue background. Soelver sprang up and stood face to face before her. Her cheeks grew red. Although unknown to each other, they smiled one at the other like two seraphim. Her hands opened toward his and before her, as out of her lap, fell the flowers which she had gathered. Soelver believed for a moment that it was all a dream. He swung his hands into the air and a hand waved toward him. He closed his eyes that he might enjoy to the full the soft, fleeting impression. It floated over his hand like an incorporeal breath. Was it then a ghostly vision, that wandered there at his side!" When however he knew that the maiden near him was a living being, then "his lips sank toward her trembling with desire, unintentionally and yet irrevocably." At this moment a "cloud passed over the sun and the light became at once dulled as if a mist had fallen upon all the flowers. Of all this he did not become so quickly aware, as that his own cheeks resounded from a whizzing blow." Her face glowed bright with anger and the delicate blue veins were swollen on her forehead, while with a scornful look she turned her back to him. His blood was however aflame with desire for revenge. A second time had the young nobleman Soelver sought to satisfy his masculine passion, when he surprised Gro bathing upon Aebeloe. She however had defended her maidenhood and struck him about the head with an old, rusty sword, which she found on the shore, so that he sank upon the grass covered with blood. "He felt the pain of his wounds with a strange glow of pleasure. The blow had fallen upon the hard flint stone within him so that the sparks of passion had sprung forth. He loved the maiden Gro. A consuming passion raged in his blood. In his thoughts he knelt always before that ineffaceable image, which struck him to the earth with a flame of divine wrath in her eyes." In revenge for the trespass committed Sten Basse fell upon Soelver's castle and took the young nobleman himself prisoner. Wild violence of this sort was indeed familiar to Sten Basse. He himself had once taken his wife thus by force. Just as he was flattering himself that he had broken her will once for all, she bit him in his chin so that the blood gushed forth and she spit his own blood into his eyes. He was struck with admiration at such strength. He had thought to desert her at once. Now he lifted her in his arms, carried her from her father's castle into the stable, bound her to his horse and rode forth--to his own home. Their marriage had been at first a long series of repetitions of the first encounter. In the end she loved him as the horse loves the iron bit between his teeth and the spur in his flank. She did not allow herself to be subdued by the blows which he gave her, but she was the weaker and she loved him because he was strong enough to be the stronger. An evil fate had taken his sons from him one after the other. Therefore he wished to call forth in his only daughter the traits of his own blood, his pride, disdainfulness and stiff-neckedness. "She must know neither fear nor weakness; her will must be hardened and her courage steeled like that of a man. When he heard that his daughter had been in danger but had saved herself, he swore revenge to the perpetrator of the outrage, yet at the same time his heart laughed with pride at Gro's fearlessness. He took the young nobleman prisoner and rewarded him with heavy and tedious torture as penance for his insolence. Yet at the same time he delighted himself with the thought of putting his daughter to a still more dangerous proof. He wished to see the young-blooded, inexperienced birds reach out swinging and scratching in attack and defense." As if in mockery he gave to the imprisoned youth the passionately desired Gro to be with him in the dungeon. "She stood there as if she had glided into his prison by the flood of light entering in and he trembled lest the light would again absorb her into itself." He knew not what power forced him to his knees and threw him at her feet with a prayer for forgiveness. She had however merely a scornful laugh for the man humbling himself in his love and the cruelly abusive word, "Creeping worm!" Then in his sense of affront there comes the thought that Gro was given into his power. While he tried the walls of his dungeon to ascertain if he was perhaps watched, Gro stood and stared out by the aperture through which the light entered, now paler than before. Soelver stepped near her, drew the single gold ring from his finger, which had come down to him through many generations of his forefathers, and extended it to her as a bridal gift. But she threw it unhesitatingly out through the peephole. Now bitterness raged in Soelver's blood. "He bowed himself before her face in order to intercept her gaze, but he did not meet it though her eyes were directed toward his. It was indeed no glance but a depth into which the whole light of day, which was blue now without overhead, was drawn down into a deep well. Soelver became intoxicated with this light, which, as it were, appeared to seek her alone and threw an aureole of intangible beauty about her form." He crept up and pushed forward the wooden shutter, then carried Gro to his cot. "She had let herself go without resistance and fell lifelessly with her arms hanging down. Soelver laid his face close to hers. His breath was eager, his blood was on fire and in his fierce wrath he intended to yield himself to the boiling heat of sensual passion. Her cheeks however, her skin, her lips were cold as those of death. He began nevertheless wildly to kiss her face, once and again, as if to waken warmth and life in the cold skin. Yet with every kiss it was as if she grew more fixed, as if the lips shriveled and grew cold and damp as ice over the teeth. The cold from this embrace crept over Soelver, and drew the heat and fervor from his nerves, until he shook suddenly with the cold and shuddered with the thought that he had a corpse under him. Yet in that selfsame moment he marked the rising of her breast as she drew in her breath, full of strength with all its coldness, so full of strength that it pushed Soelver away and he slipped down to the hard flags of the floor. "Soelver lay upon the floor, congealed with a coldness which was stronger than that of the hard tiles. It was as dark as in a walled-in grave. He dared not move however for fear that he would again feel that ice cold body. 'Hear me,' sounded suddenly a strangely shrill whisper, 'hear me, if you are a man, let me get out! Call my father! I want to get out--make light--give me air--I am almost choking--I want to get out!'" As Soelver opened the shutter again so that the dim shadowy glow of the night could enter, he saw Gro "tall and slender in the pale light." "Let me out, let me out!" she begged. "I am afraid here below--not of you--but of myself and of the dark--let me out!" "For the first time Soelver heard a soft rhythm in this voice smooth as steel. A soft breath breathed itself in her entreaty. He became a man, a protector and felt his power grow through her supplication." Yet though he exerted himself to the utmost to open the door of his dungeon, it was all in vain. It must have been fastened on the outside with massive oak or iron bars. "So finally he gave up entirely and turned back to the opening where the light came in. Gro had sunk down under the last bit of light, without complaint, without sound. Her eyes were closed, she leaned her head against the sharp edge of the aperture and her arms hung down lifelessly. Soelver bent over her; her breath was almost inaudible, but irregular and did not suggest sleep. Like a thirsty plant she stretched herself out of the single airhole of the dungeon that she might seize the last drop of light before the darkness extinguished everything. Soelver divined that she could not be brought away from this aperture for light." He brought all the skins from the couch, spread them over her, pushed them under her body and "solicitously, with infinite carefulness he protected her from the damp floor, while he shoved his arm under her for support without ever touching her with his hand. All his brutality was gone, all his burning passion. Here she lay before him like a delicate sick flower, which must be covered over from the cold of night." When Soelver awoke the next morning he noticed that one of his hands was seized by her, grasped in the unconsciousness of sleep and held fast by her long, slender fingers, which clasped themselves about his hand. It was as if her soul clung to him in sleep as helper and savior from him himself, from his own brutal savagery. When Gro however opened her eyes and stared into Soelver's face, lit up by the sun, she broke out into weeping which could not be stilled. "She was terrified at awaking in a cellar hole, into the close damp darkness of which she looked, while the face of her vanquisher blazed strong in the sunlight before her; she wept without understanding or comprehending anything of what had happened about her." Perplexed, Soelver bent over her hand and kissed it. Then came Sten Basse and saw how uncontrollably Gro sobbed. "If you have gone near my daughter," he hissed at the young nobleman, "there will be no punishment strong enough for you." At this there shot up in Soelver a wild lust for revenge and he answered his enemy with irritating coldness: "Yes, I took what you gave. You brought her yourself into my presence, you laid her yourself in my arms. Now you may take her back again. I spurn your daughter for I have not desired her for the honor and keeping of my house, but only for the entertainment of a night. Take her back now! Take her back!" Nevertheless better treatment was from this time on accorded Soelver, which he never for a moment doubted he owed to Gro. As he dwelt in his cell upon his phantasies, he suddenly heard her voice singing that melancholy song of Sir Tidemand, who tried to lure the maiden Blidelille into his boat by vigorous runes written upon roses. Blidelille awoke at midnight and knew not what it was that compelled her. "It drew me along to Sir Tidemand Whom never mine eyes had seen." In vain the foster mother bids them spread velvets and satins over her that she might sleep. Notwithstanding she arises suddenly, dresses herself and goes down to the strand to Sir Tidemand, who meets her scornfully. Then she goes into the lake, whither Tidemand follows her, seized with heartfelt remorse. "For evil the rune on the rose leaf traced And evil the work it had wrought, That two so noble, of royal grace, To ruin and death were brought." The woful song trailed itself through Soelver's mind like an indistinct dream. Then he believed that he distinguished Gro's step, until it was lost in her sleeping room. With his mental vision he saw the maiden, as she looked out upon the lake toward Aebeloe. She looked away from him, of whose fate she took no thought, but gazed fixedly over the sea, which bore upon its bosom a ship with silken sails, on whose deck Sir Tidemand stood. "Then Soelver was conscious of an infinite weakness in his love toward this pure maiden, whom his coarseness had taken into his arms, his desire had scorched with its hot breath but who had nevertheless left him benumbed in his baseness, cowardliness and weakness. Now he understood that love, in order to triumph, must first humble its own power, still its own movement and soften its brutal will. Now he comprehended that he must carve mystic runes of passion upon his own heart as upon a glowing rose and fling it into the mighty sea of feeling, praying it to bring the maiden Gro into his hands." Day and night Soelver's thoughts tarried only with Gro. In his phantasies "he forced himself through the bolted door, climbed sharp angled passage ways and winding staircases and lifted oaken beams from barred doors. Without once making a mistake, driven by a magic sense of direction, he finally reached Gro's couch, at which he saw himself staring with great white eyes, whose pupils in the darkness of sleep had as it were glided over to the side. And upon the cover of her couch lay her two gleaming arms and the fingers of the right hand trembled as if they grasped another invisible hand. In this room Soelver remained until her sleep drew him to itself, until the heaving of her breasts drew him down, until her fingers entwined themselves with his, until their breath mingled and his lids closed before her pure gaze." Another time he dreamed that he was upon a vessel, evidently in the rôle of Sir Tidemand. And Gro actually came over the water to him like the maiden Blidelille, "with roses like two blood spots upon her breast. She had crossed her hands beneath them and fastened her pure gaze upon Soelver, so that he was seized with terror and, without escaping her look, fled to the lee of the vessel to the edge of the ship. Yet Gro steadily drew nearer. Now she reached the ship's border and Soelver retreated. Step by step she followed him, the painful gaze of her deathly white face absorbed by his own. And he withdrew over to the other border, drew back until he felt the railing hard behind him. Gro stepped forward alone and it was not possible to stop her; he felt as if she wished to press within him like the sped arrow to its goal. Finally, in an instant, as her garment fluttered against him, he threw himself with a loud cry to one side and saw, with a great horror, that Gro went forward, through the railing as through air and disappeared on the other side in the sea, while Soelver lay moaning upon the deck and saw before him only the red roses, which fallen from her breast crept like living blood over the ship's planks." Was it dream or reality, which he saw when he opened his eyes? "The sun's rays burst forth through a crack in a long, radiant arrow, which bored itself into the floor and transfixed as it were something red that began to glow." And as Soelver crept nearer his astonishment grew deeper. "For hard by the vision of red were footprints breathed so to speak upon the floor, fine, slender prints, directed toward him, no more distinct than if a warm breeze had blown away the dampness from the surface of a stone, leaving the outline of a foot fixed there." As he now stooped down and with his hand felt for the blood red spot, his fingers actually touched "a heavy full-blown rose, whose sweet strong odor he drank as if in an intoxication of reality." No one had forced his way in through the hatchway, of this he soon convinced himself. Gro must have dropped it here while he was spinning dreams about her. In the nights which followed "he slept in a kind of hunger to feel her physically and tangibly in his arms." Then when it was again full moon, he found on awaking, in a spot upon which fell the rays of moonlight, a little gold cross, "whose six polished stones seemed to radiate moonlight from themselves. It was as if the moonlight lay within his hand. He watched the small cross sparkle--it was the same that he had seen in dreams upon her rose wreath. Gro had been also within his prison." He was led out soon after this to be shown to the monk, who had come to obtain news of his imprisonment. "In the doorway the young nobleman met Gro and drew back, so strong a power seemed to irradiate from her living form. She stood in the half twilight, with her white hands and her white neck and forehead, which shone as with their own light from out her coal black velvet robe. There was a blinding, marvelous reality about her, which drew him like a great fragrant flower." As the monk expressed his compassion for him, that imprisonment had befallen him, his pride of nobility awoke. "What do you say of imprisonment and ill foreboding? Know you not then that I am of my free will Sten Basse's guest?" This reply astonished even Sten Basse. "He admired the young, undaunted spirit, who found in himself no occasion for pity. Soelver stood before Gro, his arms firm at his sides, and breathed deep and strong. His eyes drank in the clear light from her hands and face." When however Sten Basse sought to approach him in a friendly manner, Soelver motioned him back: "As prisoner was I led forth, as prisoner I return of my free will. If you wish to make any apology to me, you know where my dungeon is to be found." Then he went quickly, without turning toward Gro, out of the hall and down into his prison. His senses nevertheless had seized that warm, radiant picture of the beautiful Gro and transplanted it to the midst of his cell. He saw it streaming before his eyes in the shimmering light of the cross of moonlight and longed for the clear light of the night, that he might go on and make the dream face live. When the darkness advanced "he stripped himself naked and allowed the air of the summer night to cool his limbs and purify them, before he betook himself to his cot. The small cross he laid upon his naked breast and watched the moonlight glimmer green and blue from every stone" and kissed it thinking of Gro. Then he fell asleep in blissful happiness. Suddenly however he awoke without any apparent reason, from no dream or thought. "He was awake, collected and yet at the same time strangely under the control of something that lay outside himself, a strange unknown power, which might be either mystical or natural. It appeared to him as if the moonlight had been loosed from the moon and now floated about in the room like a living being. So real seemed this fancy to him that he turned his head to one side and was not astonished actually to see a form standing in the center of the darkness. A feeling of reverence and awe swept over Soelver as little by little he distinguished in the floating folds of the moon white garment, the firm outlines of a woman's arms, which were crossed beneath a half bared breast, the line of the teeth in the open mouth, a flash of white light from Gro's eyes gazing with a certain fixed power. "Holy Mother of God--it was Gro herself! "Soelver started upright, frightened at his own movement, for he scarcely dared breathe, much less go towards her. He felt his nakedness as a crime, even his being awake as a transgression. The form glided forward out of the moonlight, the crossed hands separated themselves from the breast and Gro pursued her way with outstretched hands, feeling her way and yet mechanically sure like a sleep walker. "Yes, she was walking in her sleep. Soelver recognized it by the staring look in her eyes, which gazed through the night as through miles of space. Soelver slid noiselessly to the floor in front of her, afraid that he would be seen, in deadly terror lest she should awaken. For he knew how dreadful it might be to awaken a sleep walker and in his excited phantasy he heard already the cry of horror and madness which would issue from Gro's mouth if she awoke and saw herself in this dark, subterranean depth alone with a naked man as with a demon. It was as if everything in Soelver cried out in protective anxiety that Gro should not awaken. He crouched beseechingly upon the ground, his whole soul was a sobbing prayer for grace, for instant means of deliverance, now that Gro had come to him as if by fate. "There came a whispered sound from her open mouth, as her lips for a moment sought each other. It was as if she breathed out the one word 'Soelver.' This, however, to hear his name spoken, made Soelver strong at once. It compelled him to arise from the floor, it banished fear from his soul, it made him rejoice in every fiber of his being. The next moment her outstretched arm reached his hand--he felt the firm, cool skin under his trembling finger tips and his face felt the warm breathing of her voice, 'Soelver, Soelver!' And driven by some mystic power of will, he forced himself under the same hypnotic influence which surrounded her. He compelled himself to leave the clear broad way of reason and to enter the ecstatic, perilous, paths of the sleep walker. He was no longer awake. He sought, he touched, he stood before that after which he had groped. He was himself driven by a magic power, by a marvelous single purpose, which must be attained. This whole transformation took place in him merely because he felt that this was the only means of saving her from awaking to consciousness and madness. "'Soelver--Soelver!'--'Yes.'--'Soelver--are you--are you--there?'--'Yes--I--am--here.'--'Yes--that is you--that is you--I feel you.'--'And you see me?'--'Yes, I see you.'--'And you will stay with me?'--'Yes--I will--I will stay with you.' "Soelver answered her in the same whisperings in which she breathed out her words. His hands passed over hers with infinite carefulness. But finally his arms closed about her neck and he felt a marvelous tingling in his finger tips as he touched her soft silken hair. His mouth approached hers and mingled his warm breath with the breath which escaped cold from her lips. He drew in the air with her own rhythm, it was as if his naked heart bowed toward hers so that they all at once touched one another. Then the blood flamed out of her cheeks and streamed over into his, although they lay not upon each other. The blood burned in all her skin and Soelver trembled for a moment lest this transport was the beginning of the awakening. "His heart stood still with fear. However the blood continued to surge through Gro's body. She pressed Soelver close to herself and through her soft clothing he felt her breast swell and throb, as if she would bore herself into his flesh. 'Soelver--I love you.'--'Gro--I love you.' Then a strange giddiness seized him as if he were rushing into her arms on a tower miles high. He breathed upon her ethereal kisses, which closed her lips, moistened her forehead and descended thence like a refreshing spring rain so that her lids drooped. When her eyes were closed Soelver felt for the first time quite secure. He fastened them with a real kiss and now, since her sleep wandering had reached its goal in his arms and Soelver was sure that her love dream was too deep to be disturbed, he whispered louder than before, 'Gro--I love you!'--'Soelver--I love you!'--'How long have you loved me?'--'Longer than I have known you, Soelver.'--'Why have you not said so, Gro?'--'That, Soelver, I will never tell!' "So Soelver carried his wonderful burden to his couch and inhaled her youthful fragrance and lifted his mouth to hers and all his blood at once leaped forth. Every fiber of his being was stirred to kisses, every blood drop became a yearning mouth to meet the thousand mouths of her blood. And lost to sense--vehemently, seized by the divine power of nature, unafraid that she might awaken, without control over himself and yet proud as a master of worlds, he was impelled as the sunbeam to its goal, when it forces open the flower and buries itself in its fragrant depths. Soelver united himself with Gro. She on her part slumbered on, quiet as the sea which has closed over its sacrifice. "But Soelver felt his senses reawakening. What now? Should he let Gro sleep until day woke her and she saw herself in his arms? He bent over his beloved in deepest distress. She must not awaken in terror, not again weep as on that first morning when she was with him. The most delicate chords in her soul had trembled and sung to him in the night, to him whom she unconsciously loved with all the indefinable conviction of her heart. This love must not be rudely plucked and allowed to fade like a plant whose tender shoot is torn asunder. She must go back to her maiden's couch until the flower of the day had burst forth from its leafy covering. Then he discovered that the panel at the foot of his cot was opened, while some planking had been pushed back. Gro must have come this way and by this way he carried her back. Led by an unerring instinct, as if he knew from his nightly phantasied visits all the turnings of the way, he went without deliberation into the secret room behind the panel, found the passage to the main stairway, passed straight up, turned through corridors, passed under the heavy tapestry curtains, opened the last door and noticed first that he bore a burden when he laid it down. The moon threw its faint silver light round about in the little room. With a sweet wonder Soelver gazed upon the prayer stool and the brown rosary--without its cross." I may pass briefly over the remainder. In the first place Soelver was given his liberty and he went back to his castle. The death of Sten Basse occurred soon after. Soelver whispered to his daughter at his death bed, "Gro, whatever may happen, know now that we belong to one another." She "turned her head slowly toward him and looked at him with her large eyes swollen with tears. Her look was that of a stranger and quite uncomprehending, so that Soelver understood that she did not simply deny everything but she had no recollection at all." So Soelver turned and went. For the first time when bathing in the lake "he found again his youth and his freedom, his radiant hope and the jubilant certainty of his love. Gro loved him! Only the thought of love had not yet arisen from the depths of her soul like pearls to the light. Nevertheless the wonderful flower of her affection was growing in the golden light of dreams. He longed after Gro as after his bride, although he was only the bridegroom of her dreams, who dared to kiss her only when her eyes were closed. By day he was her foe, as the bear in the fairy tale, who by night alone is changed into a beautiful young man." They met therefore first again at Sten's bier, at the side of which they both kneeled. "Gro's eyes were directed upon him as upon a stranger, staring with wonder, burning with a mystic light. Why was this stranger here near her, the man whom her dead father had tortured and derided? And yet her eyes were wet with tears of pity and she felt that this man only desired to take her hand. Soelver observed her with his inmost soul. He pressed the small cross of moonshine between his hands, he bent over it and kissed it and a gleam from its blazing stones smote Gro's eyes. She stretched out her arms and took the cross from him and gazed into the stones as into well-known eyes. She knew not how this had come into Soelver's hands but she also bent over it and kissed it and her soul went out toward Soelver as toward a soul far, far away, whom she once had known, whom however she could scarcely remember." After this Soelver came and went at Egenaes, Sten Basse's castle, as if he were lord and heir of the estate. "It was rumored also among the tenants and the servants that he was betrothed to the maiden Gro. Yet no word of it was exchanged between them. Soelver stood by Gro in small things and great, and she allowed herself to be guided by his strength and cleverness. Since that night when he had kneeled with her at her father's lifeless body, she was bound to him by a nameless bond of gratitude, of mutual feeling, and by an inner apprehension that their fate was interwoven. Still no consciousness of love colored Gro's attitude. She longed for Soelver's strong handclasp because it made her will strong to withstand her sorrow. She could think of herself lying upon his broad, deep breast, only however because there slumber would come in sure forgetfulness. There was moreover a tenderness in her look, when in a fleeting moment she let her glance rest upon his, such as the realization of another's goodness awakens in us, especially when the goodness is undeserved and disinterested. Yet there was never any of love's surrender. Only she was glad to know herself observed by these quiet, steadfast, clear eyes, from which the red specter of passion, which had so frightened her that day upon Aebeloe, had long been banished. She believed that she had in Soelver a friend given her for life and death, a friend who could not desire her in love nor be desired, a brother whom one might trust with infinitely more serenity than any lover. "Soelver was ever watchful of Gro. His eyes were on the lookout whether he might not once surprise in hers the brightness of the dream, and make the hidden rose of love break through the green covering and bloom in reality. He longed thus within himself once to see the day and night aspects of her soul melt into a wonderful golden twilight. But Gro made no response to the gaze from his eyes. She turned her head aside so that her silken lashes concealed her glance. 'Gro, why do you never look at me?'--'I do look at you.'--'Do you see me with your cheek, Gro?'--'I see you, though, Soelver. I see you with the outermost corner of my eye.' Soelver bent his face beneath hers. 'Are you looking at me?' But Gro pressed her lids together as before a bright light and shook her head, 'No, Soelver, not so! You look too sharply, you look too deeply. You look so deeply that it hurts me very much. No, stand so Soelver, turn your eyes away!'--'Are you afraid of me?'--'No, no--why should I be afraid? But I do not feel comfortable to have you all the time wanting to read my heart, to have your eyes searching for some writing that does not stand written there. My friend and beloved brother, I fear what your look would draw from me--what would you drag out from my soul?'--'The spring day, Gro, when we first met.'--'Ah! Soelver, I scarcely remember it. It seems to me that I have always known you, that all your days you have been good and kind to me. Lately I have felt it in my heart and upon my cheek, as when my mother caressed me and that is long, long ago.'--'Gro, only say it, you are afraid of the word, but not truly--just say it--you love me.--You are silent because it is true.' 'No, Soelver, I have never felt that.'--'So you have dreamed it, Gro.'--'Dreamed!' Gro became fiery red. 'Dreamed--dreamed--oh Soelver, what have I dreamed? What do you know of my dreams? To have dreamed is to have dreamed, and my dreams belong to me, to me alone!' For a moment she turned to him a shy, quivering look, then tears trickled down from under her drooping lids. But Soelver observed that he had hit upon the truth. Immediately however he regretted that he had cast this look into the sanctuary of her soul. It was like the curious peeping of which the knight had been guilty, spying through the keyhole upon his wife, Undine. "A long time they sat silent. At last Gro was herself again, quiet and controlled. Then she spoke in a soft but firm voice, 'Soelver, if you remain with me to awaken me to love, then I beg of you, go and never return. I can never look upon you with the eyes of love. Passion seems to me like a glowing sword, which burns out one's eyes as it goes by. There was a day when you made the flaming sword of your desire pass by my face--since that time it is burned out. I have been blinded, Soelver, I am blind to the desire of your eyes, and all your fervent prayers. I have hated you, despised you, defied you, yet you have repaid evil with good and now I return good for good. Look not upon me with love's eyes, seek not to awaken the dead in me to life. You are to me more precious than if the proud brother of my childhood had returned in you, your spirit is his, I did not believe that in the will of a man so much kindness could dwell. Leave it so, stay with me as my brother, or leave me like my brother, but never speak to me of love, neither in words nor in looks for I know no reply.'" The young nobleman knew finally, for all his eager power, no other way of escape than to go with the king to the war. He saw quite clearly that "Gro struggled against the force deep in her heart. And yet the day's flaming sun could cause the weak chrysalis of the dream to shrivel so that no butterfly would break through the covering and rejoice in the strong light of midday. But with Soelver away, the longing for him would support the invisible growth of the dream and prepare the way for it into consciousness. Ah! it was worth his departure." Then he took leave of his beloved. "Goodbye; forget me not on our island. Bid me return when you will. The wind will find me, wherever I am. Tell the wild birds, when you want me and would call me home." Gro, remaining behind alone, first became aware what she had lost in him and in his "strong will, which was her source of light." She began to long more and more for him who was far away. "Ah, if he would only come again!" And when a bird flew by, she "flushed red at her own thought; was that a message sent forth by her desire? This took place contrary to her wish and will--she wished not to long for him, not to call him back, not to love him! Angrily she roused herself and sought to recall the burning gaze with which Soelver had wounded her modesty. So with a vexed and hard stroke of the oars she pushed the boat away from Aebeloe." When the war was ended, Soelver went to serve the king of France. For, as he wrote in a letter sent by carrier pigeon, "he who is not summoned, comes not." Meanwhile love towards the young nobleman had begun to grow in her bosom. "Night after night she dreamed of Soelver and at last one night she suddenly awoke and found herself cold and naked, wandering around in her room and heard the last note of her heart's unconscious avowal, 'Soelver, I love you.' There was a change within her. Hour after hour would she sit inactive and half asleep, listening to the irregular beating of her heart--something was drawing upon her very depths, sucking her strength from her, from her proud will, something that paralyzed her thought and bound her always to the same name, the same memory." As she listened to her own depths, "she caught a momentary something like a weak, quickly beating echo of her own slow heart, a busily living little heart, that ticked louder and louder until at last it deafened hers. A trembling joy seized her at that moment through all her senses as she knew that she bore a life within her life, that she enclosed in her body the germ of a new life that was not growing from her alone and of her life alone." Suddenly a crushing terror overcame her. Who was her child's father? "So abruptly came this question over her naïve soul that she fancied for a moment that this might be the punishment of fate for her longing for Soelver. This longing was desire, and desire was sin no less than the love itself. Her wish for him had grown to a fire in her blood and now she was stained by her own passion, pregnant from her own sin. God's punishment had visited her and soon would be visible to all the world. Gro saw however immediately the foolishness of her thought. For one moment she lingered at the thought of the one woman of all the earth, who had immaculately conceived. Then she uttered an inward prayer that the Mother of God would lighten her understanding and give her clearness of vision that she should not go astray in her brooding over this mystery." When she questioned her nurse and the latter finally put it to her, "Have you spent no night under the same roof with Soelver?" then there occurred to her the many nights "when she had dreamed of the lonely imprisoned man, who was being punished because of her. When she lay in her bed in the dark, a strange curiosity had overcome her to imagine his lot there below and, when sleep seized her and dreams chased away the bitter, hard thoughts, her heart had become softer and the sun had shone over the visions of her dreams as the spring day over the woods blossoming with the green May bells. Many a night and many a morning was she awakened by a strange burning desire in her thoughts, and her mouth was as though touched with fresh dream kisses, and she had entered into judgment with her own weak heart and had so inflamed herself to scorn and hatred that she had done nothing to soften the fate of the prisoner. But how could Soelver have been the guest of her dreams? And how had he been able to command the virgin love fed by her slumber? Then came the nurse to her aid and made it clear to her. She knew that the maiden Gro had walked in her sleep; the servants had told of a white ghost on the stairs and once she herself had seen it and recognized Gro, who had disappeared upon a secret stairway, which led down into the dungeon. She had kept still about it, for she thought it was a voluntary sleep walking to the young nobleman." Thus was Gro enlightened as to the source of her pregnancy. "She quivered with shame that the desire in her dreams had the power to drive her down to the lonely prisoner and she shook in her inmost soul at the memory of that happy dream, which she had had the night before her father's death. Now her love suddenly burst into the light like a wonderful flower, which suddenly springs up with a thousand fragrant buds. Now it was impossible to stem it or to conceal it. She had wanted to suppress every germ, with her father's coldness and the day's dispassionately proud haughtiness she had been willing to stifle every impulse toward love, every longing for self avowal. Now she found her pride was dead and buried and her being within and without was permeated by love. "For she had loved Soelver from the first springtime kiss, which he had imprinted upon her cheek as she wandered among the fresh May bells, loved him in the blow which she had inflicted upon his head when he had touched her chaste nakedness, loved him in those nights when he had slept uncomplaining in the cellar dungeon, loved him in those bitter moments of his humbling when he, in spite of scorn and insult, maintained his pride, loved him that evening when he kneeled at her father's bier and kissed the hand of his enemy now dead, loved him day by day all the time they were together, loved him in that hour when she saw his banner disappear among the hundred others, and today upon Aebeloe when she heard that new life singing within hers. And now she rejoiced; for she bore him always within her, she could never again lose her Soelver." As we glance over the material of this tale, we find as the nucleus of the night wandering and moon walking the strong repression of every conscious love impulse and the breaking through of the unconscious in sleep and dream wherever the censor's rule is relaxed. For the maiden Gro had loved Soelver from the first moment, yet this love was confessed only in moments of occasional self forgetfulness, as by the first meeting with the young nobleman, when her hand met his, yes, even pressed it for the moment. Only Gro should not have been frightened out of her half unconscious action by a kiss or a passionate desire, for at once there arose to life within her the coldness and haughtiness of her father and the highhanded reaction which her mother had manifested to her conqueror. The determining factor, to speak in psychoanalytic language, is the struggle between the strong sexual rejection and the equally compelling sexual desire. At first the former held the upper hand with our heroine in her waking and conscious action, the latter in the unconscious. Through the force of her will Gro seemed cold, even as she had learned of her father. She defended herself from her lover's craving by force and blow; even when conquered finally through the noble spirit of her enemy, she would see in him only the friend for life and death. She directly refused to think of love and displaced it to external things, she even bade the young man go rather than desire her as his wife. Soelver's devotion reminded her most significantly of her mother's tenderness, his pride, of the brother of her childhood. "It is as if in you the proud brother of my childhood had returned. Your spirit is his. Leave it so, stay with me as my brother or leave me like my brother, but never speak to me of love, neither in words nor in looks, for I know no reply!" Yet she avoided Soelver's searching eye and as he reminded her of her dreams, she was smitten in the depths of her soul. For her dreams, she well knew, chased away the bitter and hard thoughts, the repressed unconscious broke through and the true feeling of her loving heart. This already appeared clear to her when her beloved languished in captivity at her father's hands. The strange desire to work out the fate of the young nobleman, who suffered on her account, had overcome her lying there in her bed in the dark. And in the morning she awoke with a strange burning desire in her thoughts and her mouth was flecked with his fresh dream kisses. Still she consciously kept back every outer manifestation of love and met the young man while her father was alive with coldness and suspicion and later even merely as a brother. The great distance separating her beloved from her and above all the child which she bore from him under her heart for the first time conquer her haughty pride and her conscious aversion. And as she dreams one night again of the loved one far away she finds herself suddenly awake, going about cold and naked in her room and perceives as the lingering sound of her heart's unconscious avowal, "Soelver, I love you!" So severe is this struggle between conscious sexual denial and unconscious desire, that it even forces itself through in her sleep and her night wandering. Her dreams had indeed, as she later acknowledged with shame, the force and the power to compel her below into the young nobleman's dungeon. She had clasped Soelver's hand in her sleep, she had told him everything in the moonlight, with eyes closed, everything which she secretly felt, and had pressed him to herself. Yet when he asked her why she could never confess to him that she had always loved him so deeply, she repulsed him: "That I will never tell!" Even when he had united himself to his beloved, she had slumbered on as if nothing had happened and the next day knew nothing of it all. This leads now to that which, according to folk belief, constitutes the very core, the chief ground for sleep walking and moon walking in a maiden. It is easy to understand the wish, on the part of the female sex with their strongly demanded sexual repression, to come to the beloved one and taste all the delights of satisfaction but without guilt. This is possible only through wandering in unconscious sleep. For, as my first patient explained, one is not accountable for anything that happens in this state, and thus can enjoy without sin and without consciousness of what is not permitted. Convention demands that the maiden wait until the lover approaches her, but in that unconscious state she may surrender herself. The need for repression explains then the subsequent amnesia. Yet wandering by night is not concerned merely with sexual enjoyment, over and above that it fulfills a second desire that arises out of childhood, as we know from psychoanalysis. Every small maiden has, that is, the wish to have a child by her father, her first love, which is often in later years defined thus, one might have a child, but without a husband. The night wandering fulfills this desire to have a child yet without sin. Therefore has that motive of an unconscious, not to say immaculate, conception inspired not a few poets, as it has already, as is well known, been active in the creation of the drama. Less transparent than that chief motive is the action of the light, sunlight as well as moonlight. The heroine of the story stands toward both in a special relationship. Her body is almost illuminated by its own light, her hair sparkles electrically when it is touched, "warm waves of light" emanate from her, which Soelver noticed at their first meeting, the sun seems expressly to seek her, a halo of impalpable beauty surrounds her and above all glows from the depths of her eyes. Not only so, Gro seems to dwell chiefly in the light, whose last drops she greedily absorbs within herself. When the light fades, her body becomes cold as ice like a corpse. In similar manner the shining of the full moon affects her, the light of which the stones of her gold cross have absorbed. The first time that the slumbering youth saw Gro wandering, it seemed to him as if the moonlight had been loosed from the planet and floated only in his room like a living being. The poet, to be sure, has offered no explanation of this mystical effect of light and what the reader may think for himself would be merely drawn from other sources. For this reason I will not pursue this point further. The narrative affords somewhat further means for an understanding in another direction. It is not explained more fully just why Gro follows the sunlight and moonlight or why both exercise upon her a peculiar attraction, yet the tendency to a motor breaking through of the unconscious may be derived from an inherited disposition. The father is a rough, violent robber knight while the mother shows distinctly sadistic traits and a truly ready hand at fighting. That confirms what I explained in the first part, a heightened muscular excitability and muscle eroticism, which strives to break through again on the sexual side in sleep walking. Finally it may be affirmed without doubt that the ghostly white figure upon the stairs was no other than the maiden in her shift. "JÖRN UHL," by Gustav Frenssen. I can deal more briefly with "Jörn Uhl," the well-known rural romance of Frenssen, in which the sketch of a moon walker constitutes merely an episode. Joern Uhl, who, returned from the war, takes over the farm of his unfortunate father, discovers Lena Tarn as the head maid-servant. She pleased him at first sight. "She was large and strong and stately in her walk. Besides her face was fresh with color, white and red, her hair golden and slightly wavy. He thought he had never seen so fresh and at the same time so goodly appearing a girl. He was pleased also at the way she nodded to him and said 'good evening' and looked him over from head to foot with such open curiosity and sincere friendliness." She sings too much to please the old housekeeper! "She is so pert and too straightforward with her speech." It is noteworthy too that she talks to herself in unquiet sleep. Lena Tarn can soon make observations also upon her side. Joern was very short with the old graybeard, who advised him to an early marriage: "The housekeeper is with me, I do not need a wife." Lena, entering just then, heard what the unmannerly countryman said and assumed a proud look, thinking to herself, "What is the sly old man saying!" Since however the old man began to talk and compelled her and Joern Uhl to listen, she was concerned almost entirely for the latter, whose "long, quiet face with its deep discerning eyes she observed with a silent wonder, without shyness, but with confident curiosity." Not alone in the kitchen, which is under her control, can Lena show what is in her. When a young bull broke loose and came after the women, she met him with sparkling eyes, "Stop you wretch!" When he would not allow himself to be turned aside, she threw a swift look flashing with anger upon the men, who were idly looking on, then swung the three-legged milking stool which she had taken along and hit the bull so forcibly on the head with it that frightened, he lunged off sideways. "Lena Tarn had however all afternoon a red glow coming and going in her cheeks because the farmer had looked upon her with the eyes of a high and mighty young man. That caused her secretly both joy and concern." Immediately after this she experienced one satisfaction. Joern Uhl was dragged into the water by a mischievous calf and was much worse cut up by it than she, the weaker one, the woman had been. "Lena saw always before her the face which Joern Uhl had made when she had gone forward against the bull. She was otherwise in the best of humors, but when, as in the last few days, she was not quite well physically she was inclined to be angry. She preserved a gloomy countenance as well and as long as she could. Soon though, as she went here and there about her work and felt the new fresh health streaming through her limbs, she altered her looks.... Joern Uhl moreover could not be quiet that day. The sudden plunge in the water had brought his blood to boiling. The spring sunshine did its part. A holiday spirit came over him and he thought that he would go into the village and pay his taxes, which were due. On the way he thought of Lena Tarn. Her hair is coiled upon her head like a helmet of burnished brass, which slips into her neck. When she 'does things,' as she says, her eyes are stern and directed eagerly upon her work. When on the other hand she is spoken to and speaks with any one she is quick to laugh. Work seems to her the only field where quiet earnestness is in place. 'That must be so,' she says. Toward everything else she is angry or in a good humor, mostly the latter. Only toward me is she short and often spiteful. It has been a great joke for her that I had the ill luck to have to go into the water with that stupid beast. If she only dared she would spread it three times a day on my bread and butter and say 'There you have it.'" Now he meets old Dreier who gives him good advice: "How old are you? Twenty-four? Don't you marry, Joern. On no account. That would be the stupidest thing that you could do. I bet you $50.000 you don't dare do it. Time will tell, I say." "Take it for granted that I will wait yet ten years," he answered. And he went on thinking to himself, "It is pleasanter to go thus alone and let one's thoughts run on. Marry? Marry now? I will be on my guard. After I am thirty!" Then his thought came back to Lena. "She looked well as she flung the stool at the bull. Prancing like a three-year-old horse. Yesterday she did not look so well, her eyes were not so bright, she spoke harshly to Wieten (the old housekeeper) and said to her afterwards, 'Do not mind it, Wieten, I slept badly,' and laughed. Funny thing, slept badly? When one is on the go as she must be all day, one should sleep like a log. But that is all right in the May days. It is well that men understand this, otherwise every spring the world would go all to pieces." Then he rejoiced that he was so young and could point out on the farm what was his. "Later, when the years have gone by and I am well established I will take to myself a fine wife with money and golden hair. There are also rich girls who are as merry and fresh and as desirable and have as stately forms. It need not be just this one." Then he came to the parish clerk who had just been notified that day of six children to be baptized and who was complaining of the increase in births. Joern agreed with him: "What will we come to, if the folk increase like that? Marrying before twenty-five must simply be forbidden." "With these words he departed, filled with a proud consciousness that he was of the same opinion with so intelligent, experienced an old man as the parish clerk." At home he met Lena Tarn with an old farmer, who came to inquire after the fate of his son who had been with Joern in the war. Then for the first time the girl heard of the frightful misery and the suffering of the soldiers which cried to heaven, so that her face was drawn with pain. "Deep in her soul however thrilled and laughed a secret joy, that you have come back whole, Joern Uhl." Later, when she was making out the butter account with the farmer, "she had to bend her glowing head over the book, which he held in his hand. There came such a glistening in his eyes that he wrinkled his forehead and did not conceal his displeasure at such an unsteady flashing." In the evening she came to get back the book. Then Joern spoke to her, "You have not been in a good humor these last days. Is anything the matter?" She threw her head back and said shortly, "Something is the matter sometimes with one; but it soon passes over."--"As I came through the passage yesterday evening I heard you call out in your sleep in your room." "Oh, well!... I have not been well."--"What ... you not well? The moon has done that. It has been shining into your room."--"I say, though, there may be some other cause for that."--"I say that comes from the moon." She looked at him angrily, "As if you knew everything! I did not call out in my sleep at all but was wide awake. Three calves had broken out and were frisking around in the grass. I saw them clearly in the moonlight. I called them." He laughed mockingly, "Those certainly were moon calves." "So? I believe not. For I brought them in myself this morning and then I saw that the stable door stood open. I thought to myself, the boy has gone courting tonight. Your eyes always sweep over everything and light upon everything and you [du] worry so over everything out of order, I wonder that you [du] have not seen it."--"You say 'thou' [du] to me?"--"Yes, you say it to me. I am almost as great as you and you are not a count, and I am as intelligent as you." She carried her head pretty high and as she snatched the book from the window seat as if it lay there in the fire, he saw the splendid scorn in her eyes. "Take care of yourself when the moon is shining," he said, "otherwise again tonight you will have to guard the calves." "He had arisen, but dared not touch her. They looked at one another however and each knew how it stood with the other. He had again the look which he had revealed once in the morning, a presuming look, confident of victory, such a look as if he would say, 'I know well enough how such a maidenly scorn is to be interpreted.' But her eyes said, 'I am too proud to love you.' She went slowly into the darkness of her room as if she would give him time yet to say something or to long after her. He was however too slow for that and laughed in confusion." The night fell upon them, a wonderful still night. "I will take one more look at the moon," thought Joern Uhl and took his telescope. He went through the middle door with as little noise as possible, but the door of Lena's room stood open and she appeared upon the threshold and leaned against the side post. "Are you still awake?" he asked anxiously. "It is not yet late."--"The sky is so clear. I want to look at the stars once more. If you wish you may come with me." At first she remained standing, then he heard her coming after him. When he had directed his telescope to a nebulous star he invited her to look in. She placed herself so awkwardly that he laid his hand on her shoulder and asked her, "What do you see?"--"Oh!" she said, "I see--I see--a large farmhouse, which is burning. It has a thatched roof. Oh!--Everything is burning; the roof is all in flames. Sparks are flying about. It is really an old Ditmarsh farmhouse."--"No, my girl, you have too much imagination, which is bad for science.--What else do you see?"--"I see--I see--at one side of the farmhouse a plank which is dark; for the burning house is behind it. But I can look deep into the burning hall. Three, four sheaves have fallen from the loft and lie burning on the blazing floor. Oh, how frightful that is! Show me another house which is not burning.--Show me a house, you know, show me a farmyard just where they are who hunt up the calves." He laughed merrily. "You huzzy," said he, "you might well see your three-legged stool in the sky, not? So, high overhead!"--"You should have had the three-legged stool. I do not forget you that day, you ... and how you looked at me. That you may believe." He had never yet let anyone share in his observations. Now he marveled and was pleased at her astonishment and joy. And then he showed her the moon. He placed her and held her again by the arm as if she were an awkward child. She was astonished at the masses on it: "What are those? Boiling things, like in our copper kettles? Exactly. What if it hung brightly scoured over our fireplace and tomorrow morning the fire shone up upon it."--"The boiling things are mountains and valleys.--And now you have seen enough and spoken wisely enough. Go inside. You will be cold and then you will dream again and see in the dream I do not know what. Will you be able to sleep?"--"I will try." He wanted again to reach out his hand to her but his high respect for her held him back. He thought he should not grasp her thus, along the way as it were. "Make haste," he said, "to get away." She went and he remained to pursue his studies. So the time passed. He had grown eager and busied himself noiselessly with his telescope. "And he thrust aside once more that young life, which an hour ago had breathed so very near him and came again to the old beaten track of thought that the old Dreier was right. 'Don't do anything foolish, Joern.'--And yet, 'Fine she is and good. Happy the man about whose neck her arms lie.--What precious treasure must those eyes hold, when they can look with such frank confidence at a man.'" About him now were only the customary sounds of night. Suddenly it was as if near by over the house roof and then at the side at the wall of the house he heard the soft cry of a goose and the weak flapping of wings. And "as he looked, there stood under the house roof in the bright moonlight a white human form, with one hand over the eyes and with the other feeling along the wall, as if it would enter the house where there was however no door. It spoke in excited hurried words, 'The calves are in the garden; you must be more on the watch. Get up Joern and help me.' Joern Uhl came in three long strides over the turf and softly called her name: 'I am here.--Here I stand.--It is I.--So! so!--Now be still.--It is I.--No one else is here.' She was speechless and began to rub her eyes with the back of her hand, as a child rubs the sleep out of its eyes, and she fretted also in childish fashion. Then he embraced her and told her again where she was, and led her to the stable door seeking to comfort her. 'Look, here is the door of the stable. Here you have gone through, you dreamer; you have gone all through the stable in your sleep. Have you been seeking the moon calves? Ah you foolish child!--So, here you need not be anxious. You will straightway be back in your room.' When she finally clearly recognized her situation, she was frightened, flung her hands against her face and uttered mournful cries. 'Oh, oh, how frightful this is!' But he caressed her, took her hands from her face and said to her feelingly, 'Now stop that complaining. Let it be as it is.' So they came to the open door, which led to her room. It must have been a remarkable night, for not only had half the calves in the pasture broken out and in the morning were actually standing in the garden and the court, but the boy this night of all nights had not come home, but only returned in the early morning twilight." The next morning Joern Uhl went to the parish clerk that the banns might be published for him and the nineteen year old Lena Tarn. He was almost embarrassed when he came again before her, "I should merely like to know what you think of me." As she remained speechless, he came nearer. "You have always been a great heroine, especially to me. Hold your head high and make it known that I am right." She was still silent, merely pressed both hands to her temples and stared into the glowing hearth. Then he drew one of her hands down softly from her hair, seized it and went with her over the vestibule, through the door communicating with the front of the house. She followed him passively, her eyes upon the ground and the other hand still on her hair. In the living room he led her to the large chair which stood by the window and forced her into it. "So," said he softly, "here we are all alone, Lena. Here in this chair has Mother sat many a Sunday afternoon. You now belong in it." Still she said nothing. "I have been to the parish clerk and arranged everything and the wedding will be in June. Have you nothing to say yet?" Then she seized his hands and said softly, "As you think, it is all good so." And she covered her face with her hands and wept. Then he began to stroke her and kiss her. "Child, only cease your weeping. You are my fair little bride. Only be happy again." And in his distress he said, "I will never do it again. Only laugh again." At last when he could think of no more cajoling names, he called her "Redhead." Then she had to laugh, for that was the name of the best cow, which stood first in the stalls. Now she lifted her head and gazed long at him without moving. Thus Joern Uhl came rightly to that tenderness and comfort which he thought he deserved. I have only a little to add that is important for our theme. As a young wife also Lena Tarn was busy the whole day, working from early to late without rest. The work flew from her hand. And when her confinement was over, she got up the sixth day, against the earnest warning of the housekeeper, cared for her boy alone the whole day, went even to the kitchen and carried water for his bath. Joern Uhl allowed it. For he was proud to have such a strong wife, "not so affected as the others." It led however to her death. Somehow she must have become infected, for soon after a severe childbed fever broke out. Even as a young wife she, the poor humble cottager's daughter whose childhood was pinched by bitterest need, shed a wealth of love and joy upon all who dwelt about her. Yet now, "she, the friendly one, who had never caused suffering to any one, went in her fever delirium to every one in the house, even the smallest servant boy and to every neighbor and begged their forgiveness, 'if I have done anything to hurt you in any way.' Towards morning she became quieter but it was the exhaustion of death and she spoke with great difficulty. Her husband must 'tell Father that she had loved him.' Joern Uhl sobbed violently: 'Who has never spoken a kind word to you, poor child.' She tried to smile. 'You have had nothing but toil and work,' he said. Then she made him understand in labored speech that she had been very happy." The last fever phantasies finally put her back into her childhood. Her love went out to the old teacher Karstensen, then again to Joern Uhl, until she was finally led through angels to a further father-incarnation, to the dear God. "It came to her like peace and strength. Clasped by many hands and led forward, she came to an earnest, holy form who leaned forward and looked kindly upon her. Then she stretched her hand out and suddenly she had a great bunch of glowing red flowers in her hand. She gave them to him saying, 'That is all that I have. I pray you let me remain with you. I am fearfully weary. Afterwards I will work as hard as I can. If you would like to hear it, I will gladly sing at my work.'" Scarcely in any other tale is the fierce strife between the clearly active sexual longing, and the conscious sexual denial present at the same time, as well as the final victory which the unconscious attains, so plainly shown as in Gustav Frenssen's romance, where the moon walking, exhibitionistic woman completely overthrows the reasoning of the man. The poet expresses it clearly and decisively: They each knew the desire of the other. Joern Uhl saw through the meaning of a maiden's scorn and Lena's eyes said, I am too proud to love you, but I do love you. Yet opportunity must be given to the unconscious to break through victoriously so that the inhibiting reason shall be deprived of its power. Therefore the powerful increase of libido with the woman during the occurrence of menstruation and through the wooing of the boy, who lets the calves break out, in the man through the cold bath and furthermore in both through the seductive May air. Finally the moon acts directly with its light as a precipitating cause. The night before she had spoken out loud in her sleep just as Joern Uhl went by to his room. He had spoken of it directly as the action of the moonlight, which she of course contradicted; she had been lying awake and heard the calves break out.[19] Then she takes the following night, when the housekeeper, with whom she slept, was sitting up nursing an old farmer and the boy had gone courting again, to approach Joern Uhl on her part as a moon walker, who knew nothing of what she did and could not be held responsible. More than this her unconscious had a fitting speech ready, the calves had broken out again. [19] Has not the bringing in of these animals and of the word mooncalves a hidden closeness of meaning? The repetition twice of the same motive, the analogy with the case at the beginning which I analyzed, and at last the fact that Lena, when she looked at the stars, wanted to see a farmhouse where some one was just driving out the calves, all this gives food for thought. The breaking through of the motor impulse is also well grounded. Everything with Lena Tarn is joy in muscular activity, the restless, almost unappeasable desire for work and pleasurable "getting things done," "exerting herself," the constant singing, the easy giving way to anger. Work is the only thing which she can carry on earnestly because in that she lives out in part her sexuality, she meets every one else smilingly or angrily according to her mood. It is noteworthy too that her unquiet libido transforms itself toward Joern Uhl into anger and animosity and so much so that once in anger she addresses him as "thou" and acts as if she were his beloved. One thing is especially evident in this example of sleep walking and moon walking, the invariably infantile bearing of these phenomena. When Lena, walking in her sleep, was called by her lover, she rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand as a child rubs the sleep from its eyelids and fretted also in childish fashion. Then again there is her strange behavior when Joern announces that he has arranged for the publishing of the banns. The farmer had in a significant way put her literally into the mother's place and then in the same manner shown tenderness toward her, stroking and caressing her, as he himself had once been treated by his mother. Still Lena, who already in the night responded to the sudden realization of her position with the cry, "Oh, oh, how frightful this is!" cannot yet quiet herself. It is hardly to be believed that a farm maiden would so lose control of herself at the thought of an illegitimate relationship, which furthermore was to be immediately legalized by marriage. Many things however point to this--I mention only her later fever phantasies--that she always felt inwardly guilty because she had been untrue to some one else, the first beloved of her childhood, her own father. Only when Joern Uhl on his part becomes a child and in his way solemnly declares, "I will never do it again," and in the end names her "Redhead," apparently a pet name of her parent, then she has to laugh and looks long at him without moving, wondering perhaps if he is the real father. After this everything falls into proper place. I can now somewhat extend the statement at the beginning of this section. Night wandering and moon walking have not only inner connections with the infantile but more exactly with the infantile erotic. I will briefly mention still one circumstance in conclusion. The influence of the moonlight is but little touched upon in our tale. Joern Uhl speaks of it only once. There is on the contrary a connection with actual occurrences, a recent cause for Lena's moon walking. She has looked at the moon through the lover's telescope and received instruction in regard to it. That wakens the memory of the instruction of the old Karstensen, her teacher when she attended the folk school, from which we understand that he appears in the place of her father. "MARIA," by Otto Ludwig. Perhaps no poet has felt so deeply and expressed so clearly what constitutes the fundamental problem of sleep walking and moon walking as Otto Ludwig in his youthful novel "Maria." This novel has, according to a letter from the poet, "sprung from the anecdote of the rich young linen draper, who was passionately roused to commit an unnatural offence at sight of the landlord's daughter laid out apparently dead in the room through which he was conducted to his own. As a result of this, when he put up there years after, he found her, whom he supposed to have been buried, a mother, who had no knowledge as to who was her child's father." This anecdote, which he learned from a friend, took such a hold upon him that he immediately wrote down not only what he had heard but the first plan, although upon the insistent protestation of that friend he did not work out the story as it had been first conceived nor so glaringly. "I saw," writes our poet, "at first only the psychological interest in this material. The problem was to present the story as well as possible and this was indeed a significant one for the narrator. A distinctly esthetic interest would not be possible in conjunction with that." There is no doubt in the mind of the experienced psychoanalyst that, when a poet is laid hold of in this manner by an anecdote, this only happens because his own significant infantile complexes are roused out of the unconscious. Also the transformations, not unworthy of consideration, which the poet makes with the story are highly indicative. The seemingly dead maiden becomes a moon walker, the landlord's daughter is changed to the attractive daughter of a pastor. "Out of the linen draper there is finally made a cultivated, artistically sensitive youth, who has in him much of Ludwig's own personality" (Borcherdt). The finished romance the poet considered the best which he had so far created, it came nearest to his ideal of a story. Although his attempts always failed to find a publisher for the "Maria," the poet retained his love for this work all his life and it was one of the few productions of his youth which he occasionally still shared with his friends in his last years. The theme of "Maria" is, as indeed the significant title represents, the unconscious, not to say, the immaculate conception. It is unconscious because the heroine, drawn by the moon and walking in her sleep, comes to her beloved and becomes pregnant by him without a conscious memory of the experience. Furthermore the analogy with the Mother of God becomes emphasized by the fact that in a picture "Mary and Magdalene" described at the beginning, the Queen of Heaven bears quite unmistakably the features of the heroine of the title. The main event, with its results and discovery, is developed out of the character of both hero and heroine with extraordinary psychical keenness. Eisener like Maria is the only child of rich parents. For both love manifests itself for the most part rather unfortunately. Apparently neither gets on well with the father and both have early lost their mothers. Only Eisener even yet clings with deepest veneration to the mother who taught him to revere all women and, judging from his words, her influence upon her husband and the son's desire still appears. "Whatever of good there is in me, I owe to women. The thought of my excellent mother restrained me from many an indiscretion, as also the teaching and the example of the wisest and best of men (the father). This gentle power which is so sweet to obey and at the same time so full of reward! In loving surrender it obeys the man, while its divine power rules the man without his knowing it. The imperceptible but mighty influence of her gentle presence has determined his decision before he has comprehended it. It has fallen upon him in his anger like an angel before his own strength could arm itself, it has turned him to what is right and proper before he is conscious of the choice. Before her clear look confusion cannot exist, the coarse word of insolence sinks back unspoken into the shame filled breast. The brightness of a lost paradise shines from her eyes upon the fallen bringing pain and warning, the consolation of eternal pity smiles upon the penitent. These are the suns about which the planets of greatness, honor and beauty revolve, lighted and warmed by them." Maria's mother on the other hand is not praised by a single syllable. We do not discover when she died nor how old the little one was when she lost her natural protectress. Only indirectly can one make conjectures in regard to this peculiarly important point. Maria was from an early age a marvelous child. "She spoke a language of her own, which only the initiated or a very poetic person could understand. All lifeless things lived for her; she transferred to flowers, trees, buildings, yes, even furniture and clothing the feelings of a human soul. She mixed sense impressions in her speech in the strangest fashion, so that she asserted of tones that they looked red or blue, and inversely of the colors that they sounded cheerful or sad. A girl a few years older than she named her the blue song." Both phenomena, the attributing of life to inanimate things, to which one speaks as to beloved human beings, as well as the phenomenon of synesthesia, color audition and seeing of tone colors, are as we know positively today, to be referred back to erotic motives.[20] [20] According to my psychoanalytic experience children who cling so to inanimate things see in them either sexual symbols or those things were once objects of their secret sexual enjoyment. It may happen, for example, that such a child falls in love with the furniture, the walls of the room, yes, even a closet, stays there by the hour, kisses the walls, tells them its joys and sorrows and hangs them with all sorts of pictures. One very often sees children talking with inanimate things. They are embarrassed and break off at once if surprised by their elders. If there were not something forbidden behind this, there would be no ground for denying what they are doing, the more so since in fairy tales beasts, plants and also inanimate things speak with mankind and with one another without the child taking offense at it. The latter first becomes confused by the same action when he is pilfering from the tree of knowledge and has something sexual to hide. Hug-Hellmuth has convincingly demonstrated the erotic connection of the child's enthusiasm for plants as well as the different synesthesias. (See her study, "Über Farbenhören," Imago, Vol. I, pp. 218 ff. Abstracted in Psa. Rev., Vol. II, No. 1, January, 1915.) "With Maria's seventh year perhaps, the tendency to play and purposeless dreaming, which is always bound with such lively, mobile phantasy, gave place, to the astonishment of all, to an exactly opposite tendency. From this time she began to take root in life with all the intensity of her nature. Already in her twelfth or thirteenth year she looked after the father's household, to the admiration of all who beheld her. A divine blessing seemed to accompany everything which she undertook; everything increased under her hands. She could in passing enjoy herself well in the idealistic dreams of the poets and of her acquaintances, but her own peculiar element was reality." What had produced this sudden turn about? I cannot escape the conjecture that here the death of her mother had a decisive influence and with it the necessity to take the place with her father of his wife. Her housewifely activity is noted first to be sure from her twelfth or thirteenth year. Yet I am of the opinion that she had already in her seventh year begun to play this rôle--in which year the death of her mother would be placed--only because she was too small it had been under the eye of a maid or housekeeper. My analyses of hysterics has taught me that so profound and sudden a transformation of the whole character always takes place upon definite erotic grounds and for a quite definite erotic purpose. The earliest love of the tiny maiden belongs almost always to her own father, who is in truth her first beloved. One can often hear it from the child's lips, "You know, Papa, when Mama dies then I will marry you." That is in the childish sense meant quite properly and literally. The early, premature death of the mother gives reality to such infantile wishes, at least as far as concerns the care of the house. As soon then as Maria may begin to play this part, she fills it in a striking and inimitable fashion, although in years she is yet a mere child. She is altogether the mother in the care of a boy outside the family and this, as he quite rightly remarked, laughing boisterously and heartily, even where it is not necessary. Thus her first thought, when she spends her first night banished from home, is of "the poor father, who must go to bed without the little services to which he is so accustomed." She possesses a maturity in the management of the household which few elders have. Everything goes on and is done without any one noticing that it is being done. "Is there anything more charming than this sixteen year old little house mother in her housekeeping activities?" says one of her admirers. "Just look, let her do what she will, she accomplishes it in the best way and at the same time most beautifully." She is quite contented in the position which she has made. Her eroticism seems completely satisfied. "She is psychically yet so little a woman that there is not the least sexual inclination in the charm that infuses her and therefore her bodily development is overlooked. There is also no trace yet of that entrancing shyness which springs from the mere suspicion that there must be something else about the man." A friend of the family expresses it thus: "When one considers the repose, the self possession of her nature, the freedom from constraint and the spirituality of it, one might almost believe that _she was not originally of this earth but perhaps a native of the moon, which seems to exercise more influence upon her than the earth_." Every trace of dreamy maiden phantasies, which represent nothing but unconscious love desires, was wanting in her. What she formerly possessed of these was now completely bound with her care of the father. Her erotic nature is for the time satisfied and needs nothing more to veil it and has nothing to wish for. Therefore she has on the one hand kept childhood's clearness of vision, before which there can be no deceit, on the other hand unbroken contentment with herself and all the world as well as the capacity to forgive immediately every wrong suffered. According to the picture drawn by the poet of the passionate nature of the father, which is capable of hurrying him, the pastor, into reviling God, it seems to me plain why Maria, if she suffered wrong, "is distressed merely over the remorse which the other one, she knows, must feel, when he has finally come to an insight and to reflection." This is nothing else than the father's voice, who had once done wrong to his child and had in a later searching of heart repented of it. Maria, with such early satisfaction of her feelings of love begged "even as a child for nothing which the parents had to refuse her. If she had any need it was to be busy, to take care of the order and the nourishment of the house, the satisfaction and welfare of the inmates. Where she could love, she was happy and at home. Yet even the love for her father never proclaimed itself passionately but always rather in unwearied attention and concern for his smallest need, which only she might suspect as well as for that which manifested itself actively." For herself she scarcely had any wants. A piece of bread and two apples satisfied her as her day's nourishment, which is typical for the hysteric anorexia and perhaps merely signifies the unconscious wish to cost the father as little as possible. Just one single characteristic was wanting for her perfection, the soft, clinging, typically feminine characteristic. This also becomes understandable when one considers that all eroticism toward the father is inhibited in its sexual goal, and may manifest itself only intellectually on account of the incest barrier, at least as far as it comes into consciousness. The womanly within her shall nevertheless find release through the young Eisener. I have mentioned above how he hung upon his mother. As the early inclination of the small maiden is generally toward the father, so the first love of the boy is for the mother. It is she who teaches him to love and to seek the woman of his heart according to her own image. Later, just before puberty we might say, the boy becomes acquainted with the secrets of sexual life, then, clinging to certain impulses of his childhood, he begins to desire the mother also in the newly acquired sense, while he begins to hate the father as a favored rival, who stands in the way of this wish, and develops a conscious antagonism toward him. He falls, as we say, under the domination of the Oedipus complex. Yet the wishes toward the mother go as a rule no further, since meanwhile the incest barrier has already for a long time been erected. Through this the boy is compelled to submit the mother complex to a splitting. For a moment the phantasy may come to him that the mother shall conduct him into the sexual life--a feature not wanting in any youth--but it is now decidedly rejected or more typically displaced upon those women who make of love a profession and actually take care to initiate the youth into the sexual life. For this reason the remainder of the mother complex is idealized and the mother transformed to a pure virgin woman, toward whom no man dares direct his desire. Similarly is it with the loved one, whom one chooses after the pattern of the mother. So Eisener expresses himself warmly. "Maria is not made for love, only for reverence." Yet without the child's craving for the mother[21] he would not have become a compulsive neurotic,[22] with all the hypermorality of the latter, pride in his moral purity and extravagant self reproaches, even a lustful self laceration after he had at one single time been overpowered by sensuality. Furthermore his lack of resoluteness, decisiveness and courage is not, as he mentions, the result of his myopia but of his neurosis. He has developed himself, out of an unconscious rivalry, in direct contrast to his intensely narrow-minded father. The latter was only a tradesman, who set his comfort above everything, for whom art had value only in so far as it increased his own enjoyment of life. So painting becomes the son's chief delight in spite of his exaggerated myopia or perhaps just on account of it. He bore his father's tyranny with difficulty[23] and with inner protest. His tendency toward the free kingdom of art stood in contrast to him, and in the same way he sought on the other hand a substitute for the mother in every woman. He offered up for his sin the dreams of his youth when he first believed that his moral nature was stained and became as a result, as even the elder feels uneasily, an over obedient son. [21] One thinks of Eisener's panegyric: "Before her clear look confusion cannot exist, the coarse word of insolence sinks back unspoken into the shame filled breast. The brightness of a lost paradise shines from her eyes upon the fallen bringing pain and warning, the consolation of eternal pity smiles upon the penitent." [22] Like Otto Ludwig himself. [23] The well-known psychic overcompensation in congenital organic inferiority. How had this so easily befallen him with a mother so deeply honored! Around her spun all the boy's love desire and twined itself about her, and all that lava heated feeling belonging so peculiarly to the child alone. He had hung upon that idol the longing of his heart, the phantasies of a power of imagination lustfully excited, which is not indeed wanting in the best of children, although commonly these are inhibited, and later even completely forgotten because of restraining moral impulses. Therefore the memory of the highly honored mother is awakened not only through Maria, the pure one, but also through Julie, who comes into contact with his sensual desire and the unclean childish phantasies slumbering in the last analysis behind this. It is interesting how strikingly the poet is able to point out that double emotion in Eisener's soul. There the moral restraining impulses were first crowded back by the wine plentifully pressed upon him, which he, accustomed from his early years to moderation, could tolerate in only the smallest amount. Now "the sly Julie seemed to him ever more charming. A play of glances began between the two, which appeared to make the young hunter jealous. On the other hand Eisener himself felt something similar when his neighbor on the left addressed to the earnest Maria words which did not conceal the liking she had inspired. He listened to her replies almost with fear and was delighted that there was not audible in them the least response to this inclination, and then he wondered at himself over this same division in his nature. In Julie's dark eyes glowed a flame, of which he felt how it kindled him and that its fire must attract more and more to itself without his being able to defend himself from it, yes, without his wishing to be able to do it." To be sure when "the slender Maria stood like a holy picture behind Julie, the alluring child of the world with all her seductive graces sank low in value in contrast to the former. He felt the need to be open with himself." Transparency was a necessity to him from his youth, as an inheritance from his wise mother. "Then Breitung thrust with his glass against Eisener's refilled one. Laughing and drinking he found the motley interchange of the liveliest ideas outwardly, which already had taken the place of quiet thought, soon becoming less and less menacing and finally even agreeable and desirable." His sexual excitement, heightened besides through the plentiful indulgence in alcohol and the general boisterousness, was brought to a high pitch by an episode with the passionate Julie. Eisener had to leave the room with her during a social game. "A strange thing happened to him, for as he bent down in the adjoining room in the dark to the quick breathing Julie, instead of her ear her burning mouth met his mouth, and the soft pulsating form fell as if fainting into his arms. Wrestling with himself, striving to keep his senses, he seized her arm involuntarily and stood again with her in the assembly room before he was conscious what it was all about." Is not this behavior of the youth burning with desire peculiarly strange? What if behind it there is fixed a memory perhaps of a scene with the mother, who brought him to his senses by seizing his arm? Yet, it might always be so for him, he had found the power once more to withstand the hot temptation. Not to be sure without subsequent regret. For when he later sought his room he could not go to sleep and "his phantasy conjured up again, as often as he resisted it, that dark room about him and the bewitching Julie in his arms. He regretted a thousand times, so much did he distress himself, his joy at his instinctive flight, that he had not drunk that sweet poison to the full, whose mere touch had brought his whole being to this feverish pulsation." He sought now to find cooling for his heated blood in the garden, and in fact the fragrance of the flowers and the rustling of the leaves so soothed his excited mind that gradually the sense of a pleasant languor came over him. In a half unconsciousness he went upstairs again and back to bed. He was just falling asleep when he saw a white form enter, whose features he could not make out because of his shortsightedness. As it disrobed and came toward him, he first, as if seeking for help, reached with his hands toward the side where his friend should be sleeping. He did not however find him, he apparently had been put into another room. "The thought of being alone for the first time with a womanly being in the security of night crept over him at first like icecold drops, then like the glow of fire over all his nerves. His heart pounded audibly as the figure climbed into his bed. The strangeness and adventure of the situation was not fitted to work rationally upon the intoxicated man, whose excitement throbbed into his finger tips. The power of the warning inner voice disappeared with his reason and the strife was brief before nature came off conqueror." I have before this sketched Maria's character development up to the time when Eisener came into her life. Yet one point may be added. She had retained one single influence from her childhood in spite of all change in her seventh year, which "with the beginning of maturity appeared only occasionally and as it were in secret. The moon had been her dearly beloved and her desire; as a small child she had been able to look at the moon for hours without intermission. If she was sick her mother or nurse must carry her to the window through which she might look upon the friend of her small soul." About half a year before her acquaintance with Eisener "the moon had made its influence felt upon her sleep, as it had before affected her waking. At the time of the full moon she often left her couch, dressed herself and went up into the corner room in the pavilion. Here she stood for some time and turned her closed eyes toward the moon. Then she dropped the curtain, undressed and lay down in the bed, which stood in the spot where she had been used to sleep as a child. As soon as the moon had left the windows of this room or shone through the windows of her present sleeping room, she arose again, dressed herself and returned. She herself knew nothing of these wanderings, and whatever was done to awaken her during them was in vain. The physician thought that these attacks of moon walking would disappear finally when maturity was established, or at least at her first confinement." In this picture from a layman are some new and striking features. First is the love--one can call it nothing else--which the child bestows upon the planet. Why is the moon her beloved and her desire from childhood up, why can she stand by the hour looking at it, why does she long when sick to be laid so that she can look at it all the time? He who observes children knows that such extreme love, which endures for years without wearying of it, and finally that ability to stare steadily at the moon, must have a sexual content, although naturally no one will admit this. Only when the object, in our case the heavenly body, is sexually stimulating is the love for it enduring for all time, undergoing no change, no abatement of feeling for it. As Maria's erotism later found satisfaction in her father, her love toward the moon steadily receded. But at the entrance upon puberty her sexual impulse increased and she began to wander in the moonlight. The love finally which Eisener inspires in her, together with the strong sexual excitement, which the fête the day before had called forth in her, occasions again an attack, in which she surrenders herself willingly to the beloved. The folk, like the family physician, have not a doubt of the sexual basis of the moon mania with her as with individuals in general. When puberty is established or she has a child of her own the attacks will cease, is the opinion of the latter. The servant maid Grete also, a living book of fairy tales among her people, explains the moon wandering as nothing else than the result of an unsatisfied sense desire. There was a young knight who had wooed a rich woman of gentle birth. Shortly before midnight they were both led into the bridal chamber. "Yet hardly were they alone together when a strange voice outside before the castle called, 'Conrad, come down here! Conrad, come down here!' And again it called, 'Conrad, come down here!' The voice sounded so plaintive and at the same time so threatening. The bridegroom said, 'That is my best friend; he is in need and calls me.' The maiden said however, 'The voice belongs to my cousin, who was found dead two years ago.' Then she shuddered so that the gooseflesh stood up over her whole body," and she implored her bridegroom not to follow the evil spirit or at least to remain with her until the ghostly hour was past and the full moon was up. But he would not be restrained: "Be it an evil spirit or a good, no one shall call me in vain!" "And he went out. The lady went to the window but could see nothing for the darkness outside and for the tears in her eyes. Then the haunted hour was over and the full moon arose and she waited and waited, but the knight never returned. Thereupon she swore to take no rest on a night when the moon was full until she had gone to bed with her bridegroom. And as her first bridegroom never and nevermore came back, so she waited for another, but there was no one who knew her story who would woo her, because each one thought it would fare with him as it had fared with that other. Thus she died; her oath is however still unfulfilled. Whenever it is full moon, she is looking out to see if any bridegroom comes and she laments sorely, and holds her hands weeping toward the moon." In this folk tale the exclusively sexual foundation of the wandering is quite plainly expressed. The ghost makes use of a voice, complaining and threatening at the same time, which the bridegroom believes to be the call for help of his best friend, and the bride on the other hand imagines it the voice of her cousin, who had been found dead two years before, perhaps after she had taken her own life because unhappy in love. Both may be driven by sexual jealousy--I offer this as a hypothesis--which would not permit the other sexual gratification which is denied to himself or herself, the friend perhaps meaning jealousy from a homosexual tendency. The ghost having accomplished its purpose at the hour of midnight and in the light of the full moon, the lady swore "to take no rest on a night when the moon was full until she had gone to bed with her bridegroom." That is the kernel of the entire myth, the naïve and yet apparently conclusive folk interpretation of the riddle of moon walking, at least in its most frequent form. I have above taken it for granted that Maria's erotism was satisfied through her care for her father. That must of course be understood with some qualification. For she could play the rôle of mother only as housekeeper, not as wife. The former is satisfying therefore only so long, until stronger sexual impulses awaken through external stimuli or, according to rule, through the natural development of a maiden. When once that has come to pass, one so disposed to it as Maria was, begins to wander in the moonlight. Why then, it may further be asked, does Maria seek for her childhood bed, if the goal and the aim of the wandering is the sexual satisfaction of the maiden? In the case analyzed at the beginning the compelling motive was a sexual self stimulation upon the mother, in later years in the loved object whoever it was, male or female. In most cases, since normal sexual feeling predominates, the aim of the sleep walking is that of the folk tale, to go to bed with the lover. That would explain without difficulty the scene of the union in Maria's case, as soon as she had come to know Eisener. But what lay specially at the foundation of her earlier wandering, when no man had yet made an impression upon her? Or was there perhaps one, in relation to whom sexuality is most strongly forbidden, her own father? What if her erotic desire toward him was repressed and the indifference which she had attained was transferred over to all men? Much that is apparently harmless is permitted to a child, which would be regarded with horror in the adult. Many parents like to take their children into bed early in the morning and play with them without any consciously sexual thoughts and without suspecting how very often they in this way stimulate sexual desire in their children. Frequently also the mother or father visit the child before going to sleep, lean over the bed, allow themselves often to press the child passionately to themselves and count this asexual love toward the child. The case analyzed at the beginning teaches us how much of the grossly sexual erotic is concealed behind this, even if well hidden. Maria likewise sought presumably in her sleep walking for the bed of her childhood because her earliest erotism was bound with it. This had already happened under the instigation of puberty, before her heart had spoken. How is it now since she loves Eisener? We must keep in mind her unconscious wish, to climb into the bed of the man she loves, and on the other hand that Maria as housemother knew well that he was not sleeping alone, but with his friend, so only a compromise form of action would be possible. So she goes up again to her childhood room, which lies in the same direction as Eisener's sleeping room. There she first draws the curtain aside that she may gaze at the moon, which increases the sexual excitement with her, as I have earlier discussed. Then she undresses before the mirror as she probably had done as a child, and moves forward toward the beloved one, who after a brief struggle with himself embraces her passionately. She nevertheless submits to his caresses without response but also without resistance. For thus alone can the fiction be maintained that she has loved without consciousness of it and therefore also without culpability. It is not difficult, according to the analysis of the first case, to understand how she finally at the withdrawal of the moonlight gets up again, dresses herself before the mirror and leaves the room as noiselessly as she had entered it. The later portions of the narrative must confirm my assumptions if they are correct, that Eisener merely embraces the mother in Maria and that she on the other hand knows well enough in the unconscious both as child and as maiden that she wishes for that which is sexually forbidden and knows whom she desires. Let us see what the poet tells us. As Eisener awakes after the bridal night, he is not at all invigorated and uplifted as otherwise a man in like case, but psychically and physically cast down, as if he had to atone for some great wrong. "He strove to consider the strange adventure of this night as the delusion of a fevered dream. Yet that adventure painted itself before him, in spite of all his effort to forget it, in ever more vivid colors," because indeed a wish of his heart had been fulfilled through it. His inner unrest drove him forth and, as walking about he met his beloved, he marveled "that Maria seemed taller to him today than yesterday, or rather that he believed that he first noticed today that she was tall." What could this mean except that Maria now seemed big to him as once the mother had seemed to the small boy? Only he had first to embrace his beloved, before he could perceive such a thing and give heed to it. Maria herself, who apparently had enjoyed her pleasure only in her sleep and unconsciously, and therefore knew nothing of it all, had lost her frank manner with him, which she still possessed the day before. She grew red at his look and drew the hand which she gave him "quickly back again in confused fear," without consciously knowing why. "The flower of womanhood which had slumbered in her too serene, too cold image, appeared in this one night to have come with magic swiftness to bud and immediately to have unfolded in all its fragrance." Maria herself pictures her condition: "That morning I can never forget. Everything was so still, so solemn; the guests were all yet asleep. I had never been so strong of heart. I felt that morning as if all my life before had been only a dream and life was now just beginning. It seemed to me that I had suddenly become grown up and was now for the first time a child no more." Maria thus felt herself through the bridal night to have grown up from the child to the mother, only, now, it was for the lover who had taken the father's place. Both Eisener and Maria conducted themselves further entirely in accordance with their earlier unconscious wishes. The former for example "found a growing pleasure in representing his own action, when it was really the effect of many circumstances acting one upon the other, as the result of a cold, calm calculation on his part." And was it not at bottom actually something like a calculation, since he in his earliest childhood phantasies imagined something similar for himself from the mother? It is only natural that he now greatly exaggerated in consciousness the sin which he had desired. Never for a moment did it occur to him "to throw any part of the burden of guilt upon that being who so closely participated in it. His rightful feeling remained in regard to it that he had this night given to a woman a right to himself, which he, if she should demand it, could not dispute. It was a source of calmness to him to look upon himself as punished, as it were, in this manner." Only all too evident! This punishment was in reality a disguised reward, fulfilment of the infantile wish to win the mother.[24] For this reason he had not been able earlier to withstand Julie although Maria attracted him far more. For the former was the indulgent mother of his power of imagination, the latter on the contrary the proud, unapproachable mother of his real childhood. Moreover, though he did not conceal from himself that his heart belonged to the chaste Maria, yet he resolved, if Julie should convince him that she had been the ghostly visitor, to offer her his hand immediately. "The doubt, whether she deserved it, which was near enough at hand, he put from him as an excuse which he wished to make so that he could believe that he might release himself from that which he had to recognize as his duty." Maria however "he had in these days accustomed himself to think of as a being so high above him that his love must profane her." Again the well known splitting of the mother into the holy and the yielding one. [24] Cf. with this also the interesting passage ... "the passionate self accusations, in torturing himself with which he found comfort a short time before." How did it appear at this time to her, herself? The first weeks after that moonlight night the woman in her bloomed forth more and more, in spite of the fact that her lover tarried at a distance. Yet when in her body a new life began to develop and Eisener still did not appear, she was seized suddenly with a hysterical convulsion--she was wearing significantly the same rose-colored dress in which he had seen her that morning--which lasted twelve hours so that every one looked upon her as dead. The despairing father threw himself across her feet and lay there--a situation which will occupy us later--and Eisener, who was just now returning, was driven by the bitterest self reproaches across the ocean. After waking from her catalepsy Maria did not regain her former blooming health but grew more and more ill, which the family physician finally discovered as the result of her pregnancy. "The good girl herself believed at first that what she felt and what they told her was a vivid troubled dream." This idea will not appear strange to us who know so much about moon walking and that one does everything merely "in sleep" in order to remain blameless. "That she should become a mother seemed to her so strange and wonderful that she appeared to herself as some one else (this might well read, as her own mother dead at so early an age) or as suddenly transplanted into another world with strange people, animals and trees. The sound of her own voice, the tone of the bells seemed to her as other and strange sounds." We may bring forward in explanation in this place the case analyzed at the beginning, where a moon walker had abandoned herself to all sorts of dreams. In the moon must be living men of another sort with other feelings, customs and manners, and the sexual, strongly forbidden upon earth, must be freely permitted upon this planet. She seemed to herself on account of her sexual phantasies already as a child quite different from other people, as if she belonged not upon this earth but upon the moon. Could not a similar thought process have taken place with Maria? I said of her father, that he had been her first beloved. And it comes almost as an unconscious recognition of this when he, filled with anger, calls out to her mockingly, "Why do you not say that the whole affair has come to pass out of love to me, to prepare for me an unexpected joy?" Breitung also enjoyed since her earliest childhood her unlimited confidence only on this account because he loved her as his own child. Therefore she looks up with all her anxiety so trustfully and self confidently to this friend of her father. But when Breitung also no longer believed in her and her father turned from her with scorn it was "as if all her blood streamed into her eyes that, pressing out as tears, it might relieve her. Yet here it remained and pressed upon her brain as if threatening its fibers. With a strangely fearful haste she pressed her eyes with her fingers; they remained dry; a cry of pain would unburden her soul--no sound accompanied the trembling, convulsive breathing. The old servant, who entered after a while, found her lying with her breast upon the sofa pillow, her head thrown violently back," in hysterical opisthotonos. "The old man had loved Maria from her earliest childhood" and stood accordingly in the place of a father. "He clasped his hands together in distress. She recognized him and suffered him patiently to bring her head to a less forced position. She looked at him sharply as if she would convince herself that he was the one she took him to be. His Kalmuck features seemed to her as beautiful as the soul which they hid and seemed to want to disown. "The friendliness, the affectionate regard, which spoke so unmistakably out of the familiar old graybearded, sunburnt face, did her no end of good." Since she could not yet entirely believe she asked, "Is it indeed you, Justin? And you will still recognize me? And you do not flee from me?" At first the deplorable commission which the old man had to carry out threw her back again. When she had to understand that her father would not again set foot in the pastor's house until she had departed, her countenance became deathly pale and convulsive movements trembled in quick succession over her delicate body so that the old man wept aloud, for he believed that she had gone mad. His signs of distress, the faithfulness and love which spoke through them, touched her so effectually that at last the hysterical convulsion relaxed and she sank down. "The old man caught her up. He placed her on the sofa. She lay across his lap; her head lay upon his left hand, with the other he held her body fast that it should not slip to the floor. It seemed as if she would weep her whole weary self away. The old servant held her with trembling hand and heavy heart." Now the scene of childhood is complete, except that the old man plays the rôle of her father. So had Maria presumably done as a child when she felt too unhappy and so also the pastor's throwing himself down, as we saw above, over his daughter whom he believed dead, is not strange. When Maria had left the parsonage her first thought and silent concern was how her father must now live without her care, even that perhaps he would not be there any more, when everything had later turned out well. Then she thought again of the time when she would be a mother and "her life seemed to her as a tale that is told." On her journey to her new home there came over her ever more strongly "the feeling of her complete abandonment. All the dear childhood memories, into whose protection she would flee, turned in anger from her. With tears she cried to God for a heart that she might love, some one for whom she might really care. For it seemed as if a curse lay upon her, which estranged all hearts from her. She thought with fear at her heart that the being to whom she would give life might likewise turn from her, as everything had done that she loved." Then a good fate brings to her the unfortunate Johannes whom his crazy father wished to throw into the water in order to preserve him for eternal happiness. At once Maria assumes the rôle of mother toward the boy and now "that once more she had to care for some one, she was again the calm and serene being." What had so thrown her out of her course? It was not so much the banishment from the father's house, not the contempt of all the world, nor even of her very oldest and truest friend. She would have been able to look beyond both of these, because her consciousness felt itself entirely blameless. But she took so to herself the truth that she was no more the loving, caretaking house mother nor might play that part, that for a brief while she planned to take her life. She prayed to God with tears for one heart only that she might love, that she might actually care for. Since the care of her father is taken from her she feels herself at first truly and utterly forlorn, all the dear memories of childhood turn in anger from her and a curse seems to rest upon her soul. Why do all the memories of her childhood turn from her, if she actually knows herself guiltless? Is this merely because the father is indissolubly bound with them? If she still consciously feels entirely blameless toward him, and if he openly did her wrong from a false assumption, then should not the childhood memories return to her? I think the solution must be sought elsewhere, in this, that Maria knew nothing in clear consciousness of the happenings of that moonlight night and could honestly swear to that, but everything was known in the unconscious. Here is the sense of guilt engendered, of which consciousness may know nothing, here she knows well enough that the youthful Eisener has embraced her and she has together with him deceived the father whom she first loved. The goal of all moon walking is none other than to be able to enjoy and still be blameless, it is blamelessness because without accompanying consciousness. The poet's words must confirm this, if this assumption is correct. We will test them. The first night of her banishment Maria, while going to sleep, thought first of her father "who must go to bed without the little services which he was accustomed to receive from her." Then she thought of Breitung and the apothecary's daughter, who had turned from her full of scorn. "The young Eisener occurred to her in the midst of this, she knew not how, and a sort of curiosity whether Eisener also would have turned from her in so unfriendly a fashion as Breitung. She pictured to herself how he might have looked upon her now with contempt, now with friendliness, as on that morning which she so gladly remembered." Also an evident identification of the young Eisener with the father and the father's friend, and flight from the loved ones who had cast her off to him who had inclined to her as a friend. Yet more convincing is a passage which follows. Maria had born a son and "the more she looked with joy upon the small infant contemplating his sound and beautiful body, the more grew the need within her, only instinctively felt at first, to have some one who could rejoice in the child with her, not out of mere sympathy with her, but because he had the same right to it and so that she could rejoice again in his joy, as he might in hers. Without knowing how and why, she thought again of the friendly and true hearted Eisener. Her dreams brought his picture before her eyes in most vivid colors. It seemed as if it were Eisener who should enjoy the child with her. She hastened to him with tears of joy to lay the beautiful boy in his arms, and when she now stood by him, she had scarcely the heart to show him the boy. Then she cast down her eyes and said confusedly, 'See this beautiful child, Eisener, Sir!'" Maria knew quite well in the unconscious that she had conceived her child from Eisener and the sudden restraint when she laid the boy in his arms is only a compromise with consciousness, which must not know the facts, otherwise she could not be spared her feeling of guilt. Yes, when Julie then came with her love child, which she had conceived that same moonlight night from the hunter, although she really loved Eisener, then "Maria experienced, she knew not why, a gentle aversion toward her. She said quietly, 'That in which one has done no wrong and cannot change, one must bear patiently.'" Soon however there awoke a desire in her "for something new, still unknown to her, which she nevertheless felt must come now. It was the strange, fearfully sweet condition of the ripeness of love, which had not yet found the object on which she could open her heart. That night a need awakened, formerly repressed into the background by greater pain, but which threatened now to outgrow other desires and feelings in the undisputed possession of him." Often she sat knitting and dreaming at the boy's cradle. "There was a fair at Marklinde. She went early in her rose-colored dress into the garden and plucked wild hedge roses. She was startled for she heard a noise behind her and she knew that it was Eisener who was coming after her. She turned into another path; she was afraid to meet him, and yet she wished that he would follow her. As she bent low behind some flowers, she threw a hasty look behind her. She grew rosy because he might have noticed the look, and still it would have made her glad if he had noticed it. 'Yet if he knew everything,' she whispered to herself; 'but I could not tell him, nor could I let him perceive it. I would have to say No, although he understood it as Yes!' Suddenly he stood near her; he had seized her hand and was looking into her eyes. She bowed her head, he bent toward her. It seemed so strange to her--their lips touched--Maria frightened and blushing, sprang involuntarily from her chair, as if what she was dreaming were real. "A strangely mingled feeling drove her from her chair to the window and from the window back to the chair. She felt herself stirred in her very depths by something which wounded her sensibility as much as it excited her longing. She fled to her child. She strove to think of something else; in vain. That thought continually returned and gradually lost its frightful character. Soon she felt it only as a sweet dread and so the idea received a double stimulation while it woke the curious question, why and for what reason she must really be afraid. And as she looked now upon the child, it seemed to her so marvellous that she, mother and yet maiden, knew nothing of the happiness of which this little life must be the fruit. Julie's words were continually ringing in her ears, 'The happiness which is granted him, has to be reckoned too dear.' It gave her unending satisfaction, to think of herself actually in such a situation to the young Eisener that all her unhappiness was the result of a joy which she had granted him, without knowing what joy this must have been." I consider it superfluous to add a word to complete the interpretation of these phantasies, which speak for themselves. They confirm everything that I have said above, better than any labored explanation. Later Maria came to know that what had sustained her in the hours of her sorrow was nothing else than that mysterious but certain premonition of a happy life with Eisener and her George. And now back to the purpose of the analysis of all these tales. What does it teach us for the understanding of moon walking? First of all it confirms many of our earlier conclusions. The most important thing, in the first place, is that sexual impulses lie at the foundation, desire for sexual gratification, and that one apparently acts in sleep in order to escape all culpability, while the unconscious still knows all about it. The sleep walking begins, in accordance with the sexual basic motive, at the time of puberty and lasts until it is inhibited by the close of that period or in women with the birth of the first child. It is further established that at the beginning the bed of childhood is sought, the place of earlier sexual pleasures, later however the bed of the loved object, who appears in the place of the originally loved object, the parent. Finally, moreover, when the night wanderer fixes his closed eyes upon the moon before starting out on his wandering, erotic thoughts hide behind this, which in turn go back to earliest childhood. The heavenly body effects a sexual excitement not only through its light, but indeed also through sexual phantasies which are bound with it. Lastly folk myth knows likewise that the woman in white represents nothing else than the maiden in her night shift with all her sexual longings. One thing more this novel also confirms, which our earlier discoveries have already taught us, the abnormal muscle excitability and muscle erotic. For Maria was seized with a hysterical convulsion when her father's unkindness pressed itself upon her. It is interesting that this abnormal muscle excitability, which manifested itself in various muscular convulsions, was present with Otto Ludwig throughout his earthly career. Already as a boy he often suffered convulsive muscular twitchings, when he had exceptional tasks to perform or hard thinking was required of him, and "nervous twitchings of the head" are recorded of him when twenty-three years old, also presumably a tic had won for him the nickname of "the shaker." Later moreover our poet suffered chronically from convulsive manifestations of a lesser degree, repeatedly however in a stronger, special form although only in temporary attacks.[25] [25] Cf. with this especially Ernst Jentsch, "Das Pathologische bei Otto Ludwig," "Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens," published by L. Löwenfeld, No. 90. In other words, it may be said that Ludwig assigns to Maria and the young Eisener a series of his own personal characteristics. That is to say, not only was the tendency to convulsive attacks peculiar to him, but also to fainting, and a compulsive neurotic and hysterical tendency, the high grade myopia, a fondness for discussing painting, talking with inanimate things,[26] colored audition, as well as other synesthesias, and finally a special reverence for his mother. [26] Cf. here the poet's words: "It is strange that nature is personified for me, that I not only live in her, but as one human being with another, exchanging, not merely receiving, thoughts and feelings, and even so, that different places become as individual to me, distinct from others and, as it were, transformed in consciousness, so that I not only feel that they effect an influence upon me but it seems to me as if I work upon them, and the forms, as they appear to me, show the traces of this influence." Further: "I ... who stood even in a wonderful mutual understanding with mountain and flora, because the kingdom of love was not to be restrained...." "BUSCHNOVELLE," by Otto Ludwig. The moon plays an important part in the romance just discussed, even apart from Maria's night wandering, and a number of significant events take place under its very light. We find this relationship still stronger in Otto Ludwig's "Buschnovelle," briefly referred to earlier, which I add here, though it really does not directly treat of our problems. The heroine Pauline passed with many as moon struck and her blue eyes "have a strange expression of their own. They gaze as aliens upon this world, as angels, which, transplanted to our marvelous earth, belong to the heavenly home and cannot find themselves amid this confused and agitated humanity." Likewise his bride asserts of the count that he knows no other recreation "than to climb about in the night over the rocks and worship the moon." This perhaps gave occasion to the rumor of a ghost or at least breathed new life into an old tale. A prince was banished under an enchantment to the rocks of the gods. He had "a face as of a person twenty years old or so, but pale and quite transparent like moonlight, and he could be rescued only through a maiden eighteen years old and as innocent as when she came from the mother's womb." The count, whom his bride deceived, became very melancholy over it and trusted no woman after this. He learned to know and love Pauline upon the rocks of the gods, where he was accustomed to wander in the moonlight. When she believed she saw in him the enchanted prince and declared her intention of voluntarily rescuing him, he stipulated that she must climb down from off the rocks, down from the cross, without touching them with her hands but holding her arms toward the full moon. "And that must take place tomorrow night when the moon is sailing overhead, otherwise I must remain enchanted. When you shall have climbed down the rocks, I shall be saved and then I will make you my princess." One may read afterward from the poet how Pauline then carried out her resolve--her determination alone, sprung evidently from a great love, had already cured the count of his sadness--how the count saved her and later wooed her. Emphasis will be laid here merely upon two facts, first that not only all important events happen in the light of the full moon, but that also no other novel shows so many autobiographical features. The most recent publisher of this tale, Heinrich Borcherdt, gives this explanation: "One can recognize without much trouble in the portrait of the count with his well-trimmed beard the poet himself, who at that time tended to great seriousness and to melancholy. For this very reason the cheerfulness, gaiety and unrestrained naturalness of his bride Emilie worked most refreshingly upon him. Pauline in the tale exercised a similar influence upon the count. What we know of Emilie Ludwig from without agrees likewise with the picture of Pauline. Pauline's father suggests Emilie's father.... The greatest weight will be laid upon the fact that we possess in this work a poetic glorification of Otto Ludwig's love happiness in Triebischtal. The rural life is reproduced in every detail." Nothing unfortunately is reported in the different sketches of his life whether and how far the poet and his bride allowed themselves to be influenced by the light of the full moon. The striking fact remains at any rate that twice in the course of two years he spun out this theme and each time moreover with a strongly autobiographical note. That cannot be sufficiently explained merely through the influence of Tieck, whom he, to be sure, read diligently in his youth. "LEBENSMAGIE, WIRKLICHKEIT UND TRAUM," by Theodor Mundt ("Life's Magic, Reality and Dream"). In the seventh volume of the "Euphorion" Richard M. Meyer has exhumed a probable source of Ludwig's "Maria." It is a fictitious tale of the "young German" Theodor Mundt, which appeared in his collection "Charaktere und Situationen" in 1837, five years before the "Maria," and shows in fact some external similarities with this. Still Otto Ludwig expressly acknowledges a tale told by a friend as the source, but gives no syllable of mention to Mundt. I must say that it seems at least very questionable that the latter's story was the model, although the Berlin literary historian comes to the conclusion, "A direct utilization would be here difficult to dispute." I will reproduce the contents of this story, as far as it touches our problems, as closely as possible in the words of Mundt, although this story, which is contained in the collection mentioned under the separate title of "Lebensmagie, Wirklichkeit und Traum," hardly possesses an artistic value. The theological student Emil Hahn had, as one of his friends states, "lost life itself over his books and before his merry companions, who would have initiated him into the true enjoyment of existence, crowed many a moral cock-a-doodle-doo of virtue and self restraint." On the ride home to his father and foster sister Rosalinde he was urged by two student acquaintances to a little drinking bout, at which he partook of more wine than was good for him. The two comrades sang the praises of Rosalinde, whom Hahn had left as a fourteen year old girl and who in the two years of separation had blossomed out in full beauty. As Hahn returned to the father's house in a half intoxicated state and met Rosalinde in an adjacent room, he found at once, in contrast to his shyness of former times, the courage to approach her. "Ardently and daringly he embraced her and the passionate kiss which he impressed upon her maidenly lips was followed, as one lightning flash succeeds another, by a second more lingering one, which was reluctant to leave off." After he had for some time, again quite contrary to his custom, held his own place at the large party which his father was giving that very evening, "he felt himself gradually seized with weariness and the lively and excited mood, to which the wine he had enjoyed had awakened him, began little by little to disappear with the intoxication. He made his adieus in a dejected tone and betook himself with heavy, hanging head to his room, there to recover himself through sleep, which he could no longer withstand because of his painful state. "It was late in the night when Emil sprang from his bed. A vivid dream seemed to have confused and frightened him. He stood half clothed in the middle of his room and stared straight ahead as if trying to recollect himself. Above in the night sky glowed the full round moon with a sharp ray seldom seen and its white silver light pierced directly over the head of the youth walking in his sleep. The room gleamed brightly in the moonbeams trembling with mystery, which had spun themselves out in long, glimmering threads over floor and ceiling. Emil had fastened his eyes upon the great disk of the moon and staggered with uncertain steps to the window to open it." While he stood thus there came a small snow white cat--the cat is well known as a favorite animal of the romantic writers--and spoke to him: "I am come to congratulate you on your bridal night. Yes, yes, I know well that you are married. This is a beautiful night to be married. The moon shoots down right warmly, and its strong shining stings the blood and we cats also feel the impulses stirring in the whispering May night. Happy one, you who are married! Married to Rosalinde!" "Emil, distracted, clasped his forehead. Everything which he saw about him appeared to him changed and even the inanimate things in his vicinity seemed in this moment to have been drawn into a magic alliance. Everything, the very table, chair, press looked at him, rocking themselves saucily in the bright moonlight, personally and familiarly, and had to his eyes, arms and feet to move about, mouths to speak with, senses for communication. At the same time a fair picture rose before the youth deep out of the bottom of his heart, at which he smiled longingly. It was the recollection of Rosalinde and her matured beauty. She passed like a burning, ominous dream through his soul and he felt himself drunken, trembling, exultingly united with the proud but now subdued maiden in a love thrilled bridal night. While he was thus lost in thought his look was held chained by a painting, which hung on the wall opposite him. Strange, it was Rosa's portrait and he knew not whether this picture had just now arisen warm with life merely out of the force of the idea which was kindling him, or whether it had actually been formed over there in its golden frame by a painter's hand." Then the cat mewed again: "That is your young wife Rosalinde. The moonbeam chases her; see how its brightness kisses her temples unceasingly. The young woman is queen on her bridal night. We will crown her, all we who are here in this room and owe our life to the brightness of the moonlight night, we will crown her. I present her for her bridal crown burning, tender desires." Then the May blossoms in the room bestirred themselves and conferred upon her the bloom of fond innocence for her bridal crown. Also the bird in the cage made himself understood: "I give her for her bridal crown the score of my latest melody. Harmony and melody should be the dower of all young brides." Finally a cockchafer also which flew in offered her for her bridal crown "a pair of lovely crickets." "The dreaming Emil, surrounded by these fairy treasures of the May night, stood in sweet intoxication opposite the glowing picture, bathed in moonlight, of the maiden to whom all this homage belonged. The longer and the more vividly he pictured to himself and leaned toward all the maidenly charms, which had allowed the first passionate wish in the young man's phantasy to blaze up, the more an impatience, almost consuming, pounding, benumbing his heart, seized him, which he did not know how to explain and had never felt before in his life. Like a seductively sweet poison the delusion imparted itself secretly to him that Rosalinde was his bride, his wife, and that this wondrously beautiful spring night, bright with moonlight, was his wedding night. His heart swelled with mighty, growing desire, youthful passion breathed high in him. Trembling, fearful, wavering, longing, he still felt himself strangely happy. "Then it seemed to him that Rosalinde's picture began to move, as if the gleaming shoulders lifted themselves gradually and gently at first from it. Then the delicate outline of the bosom rose as the lovely form came forth, the face streaming with love bowed itself in modest shame before him. The form grew larger, rose to full beauty, stretched itself to life size. Smiling, beckoning, gazing at him full of mystery, promising favor and happiness, she took some steps toward him, then fled back again ashamed and as if frightened, floated away with sylphlike movements to the door and remained hidden behind it, yet peeping and looking out at the youth. "He did not know if he should, if he might follow her. He was drawn powerfully after her and yet he stood still and hesitated. The bright moonlight seemed, like a fairy toward one enchanted, to make merry at the loud anxious beating of his heart. He restrained himself no longer; with a passionate movement he hastened with open arms to the beloved apparition, desiring to embrace her, throw himself upon her bosom, breathe out upon her his burning desire. She fled, he followed her. She fled before him, but softly and alluringly and he, intoxicated, rushed after her from room to room unable to overtake the form flitting on with ghostly swiftness. Like a star drawing him onward she floated there before him, his footsteps were as if bewitched by her running, and thus she led him after her, on and on, through a succession of rooms, so that he marveled and thought himself wandering about in a great, unfamiliar enchanted palace. "At last he saw her no more, the lovely picture had suddenly disappeared from him. He must however still hasten and hasten, there was no rest for him. He no longer knew himself what he was seeking and what he hoped to find. But now he ran upon a door; it opened and he entered a small, cosy room in which stood a white bed. Seized with a strange apprehension the youth drew back the curtains with bold hand, and looked, astonished, smiling, burning with bliss. There lay a beautiful maiden asleep and dreaming--ah! it was Rosalinde herself. In the sweet forgetfulness of sleep, unveiling herself like the outblown petals of a rosebud, she revealed her most secret charms in lovely fulness to the eye of night. Emil stood before her in the dear delusion of aroused passion and bent over her. 'Is not tonight my bridal night?', thought he. He reflected and the hot tumult of exulting senses tore him irresistibly. Then he flung himself passionately into her arms, pressed his mouth to her mouth in yearning kisses and clung closer and closer to the warm, living delight of her charming form. He dared the boldest work of love. The sleeper did not oppose the daring beginning; in the power of a dream, like him, according to the myth, whom the chaste Luna had seized, she seemed at first to yield softly to the seductive moment. Only a glowing color suffused the tender cheek, a gentle halting exclamation breathed through the half open lips. The bright light of the full moon shone on high with its trembling beams directly over the couch of the maiden. "Now, now however she awakes from the strange troubled dream. She opens her eyes, she shakes her beautiful head as if she would free herself from the fetters of a dark enchantment. With a loud outcry she beholds herself actually in the young man's arms and sees alas! that she has not dreamed it. Wildly with all the strength of horror she pushes him from her, springs up and stands wringing her hands distracted before him, her fluttering hair only half disclosing her frightened countenance. Then she calls him by name in a tone indescribably piercing, painfully questioning, 'Emil!' He in turn, hearing himself called by name, falls at the same moment with a faint sigh swooning to the floor. After a pause he raises himself up, rubs his eyes and looks wonderingly about him. He cannot comprehend how he has come here. The influence of the moon has permitted the poor night wanderer to experience this adventure. When he was completely awake and had come to himself, he stood up and began to think over his situation. Then his eye fell astonished upon Rosalinde, who continued to stare at him speechless and immovable. Shame and anger adorned with a deep glowing color the injured maiden, whose virgin whiteness had been sullied by the strange events of this night. A dark, frightening recollection of what had taken place flashed now like a remote, faded dream into Emil's consciousness. The alluring spirits of the night, which had buzzed around him, now mockingly stripped from him the deceitful mask. "'Go, go, go!' called Rosalinde finally, who could no longer bear his look. 'Go!' she called and stretched out her hand with a passionate movement toward him, as if she would with it jerk a reeking dagger from her breast. 'Go, go!' she repeated, sobbing and beseeching. Then she hid her aching head with a loud outbreak of tears. Emil slipped away heartbroken and in despair. He was in such a state, when he reached his own room, that he would have put a ball through his head, had there been at that moment a pistol at hand." How Rosalinde then became pregnant and in spite of her resistance toward Emil, still married him to reëstablish her honor, how though after the wedding feast two acquaintances of the young husband, whom he had not invited, played him so mischievous a trick that he lost his reason in consequence, that deserves no further rendering. We find here also as the nucleus of moon walking, when we strip from the foregoing all its mystical setting, the longing to approach the love object and there to be able to indulge oneself without punishment because it is done unconsciously. The literary historian Richard M. Meyer regards it quite correctly: "Theodor Mundt believed that he had emphasized something new in his way of presenting it. 'The influence of the moon had caused the night wanderer to undergo this adventure.'" To be sure Mundt attributes all sorts of mystical-romantic rubbish to the action of the heavenly body. "DER PRINZ VON HOMBURG," by Heinrich von Kleist. Heinrich von Kleist also like Ludwig carried night wandering and moon walking into material at hand. We know that Kleist not long before the origin of the "Prinz von Homburg" under Schubert's influence occupied himself very much with the "night side of the natural sciences" and Wukadinovic has made it also apparent that the poet went still deeper, back to one of Schubert's sources, to Reil's "Rhapsodien über die Anwendung der psychischen Kurmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen."[27] There he found a number of features which he then interwove into his drama, although by no means all that he permitted his moonstruck hero to do. The matter of the drama is presumably so well known that I content myself here with giving the mystical setting and the beginning and end of the action. [27] "Rhapsodies over the Employment of the Psychical Method of Treatment for Mental Disturbances." See Critical Historical Review by W. A. White, Journ. Nerv. and Ment. Dis., Vol. 43, No. 1. [Tr.] Wearied with a long ride, the Prince von Homburg throws himself down to sleep that he may obtain a little rest before the great battle in which he is about to engage. In the morning when they seek the leader they find him sitting on a bench in the castle park of Fehrbellin, whither the moonlight had enticed the sleep walker. He sits absorbed with bared head and open breast, "Both for himself and his posterity, he dreams the splendid crown of fame to win." Still further, the laurel for this crown he himself must have obtained during the night from the electoral greenhouse. The electress thinks, "As true as I'm alive, this man is ill!" an opinion in which the princess Natalie concurs. "He needs the doctor." But Hohenzollern, his best friend, answers coolly, "He is perfectly well. It is nothing but a mere trick of his mind." Meanwhile the prince has finished winding the wreath and regards it idly. Then the elector is moved to see how far the former would carry the matter and he takes the laurel wreath out of his hand. "The prince grows red and looks at him. The elector throws his necklace about the wreath and gives it to the princess; the prince stands up roused. The elector withdraws with the princess, who holds up the wreath; the prince follows her with outstretched arms." And now he betrays his inmost wish, "Natalie! my girl, my bride!" In vain the astonished elector, "Go, away with you!" for the prince turns also to him, "Friedrich, my prince, my father!" And then to the electress, "O my mother!" She thinks wonderingly, "Whom is it he thus names?" Yet the prince reaches after the laurel wreath, saying, "Dearest Natalie! Why run away from me?" and really seizes her gloves rather than the wreath. The elector however disappearing with his retinue behind the gates calls to him: "Away, thou prince of Homburg, get thee back, Naught here for thee, away! The battle's field Will be our meeting place, when't pleases thee! No man obtains such favors in his dreams!" "The prince remains standing a moment with an expression of wonder before the door, then pondering descends from the terrace, laying his hand, in which he holds the glove, before his forehead, turns as soon as he is below and looks again toward the door." Out of this state the Hohenzollern returning awakens him. At the word "Arthur" the moonstruck prince collapses. "No better could a bullet have been aimed." Afterward of course he makes up some story in regard to his sleep walking, that he had slipped into the garden on account of the great heat. Only the princess's glove recalls to him what has happened in his sleep: "What is this dream so strange that I have dreamed? For all at once, with gold and silver gleaming, A royal castle flung its portals wide. While from the marble terraced heights above Thronged down to me the happy dancers all; Among them those my love has held most dear. Elector and electress, and--who is the third? --What name to call her?" For the name of the princess there is amnesia, as well as for the reason for his moon walking. Then he continues: "And he, the elector, with brow of mighty Zeus, A wreath of laurel holds within his hand. And pressing close before my very face Plucks from his neck the chain that's pendant there. His hand outstretched he sets it on my locks, My soul meanwhile enkindled high." Now again the complete forgetting of the loved one's name. He can only say: "High up, as though to deck the brow of fame, She lifts the wreath, on which the necklace swings, To crown a hero, so her purpose seems. With eager movement I my hands outstretch, No word, mere haste to seize it in my grasp. Down would I sink before her very feet. Yet, as the fragrance over valleys spread Is scattered by the wind's fresh blowing breath, Along the sloping terrace flees the throng. I tread the ramp--unending, far away It stretches up to heaven's very gate, I clutch to right, I clutch to left, and fear No one of all the treasures to secure, No one of all the dear ones to retain. In vain--the castle's door is rudely closed; A flash of brightness from within, then dark, The doors once more swing clatteringly together. And I awaking hold within my hand Naught but a glove, alas! as my reward, Torn from the arm of that sweet dream caught form A glove, ye Gods of power, only this!" It is evident that there is complete memory of the latter part of his night wandering up to the name of the beloved maiden, although he thinks, "One dumb from birth to name her would be able!" Only once, when he was dreaming by himself, he was on the way toward recollecting the repressed name. He turns even to the Hohenzollern: "I fain would ask you, my dear friend, The electress, her fair niece, are they still here The lovely princess of the House of Orange, Who lately had arrived at our encampment?" But he was cut off briefly by his friend, "Eh, what! this long while they've been gone." The same friend had however to explain in detail later, when he appeared before the elector in behalf of the prince condemned to death: "When I awoke him and his wits he gathered, A flood of joy the memory roused in him; In truth, no sight more touching could you find! At once the whole occurrence, like a dream He spread before me, drawn with finest touch. So vivid, thought he, have I never dreamed.-- And firmer still within him grew belief On him had Heaven a favoring sign bestowed; With all, yes all his inner eye had seen, The maiden, laurel crown and noble jewels, Would God reward him on the battle's day." We see here plainly that the kernel of the supposed dream belonging to the night wandering is wish fulfilment, desire for glory and the hand of the beloved. It agrees very well with this conception that the prince himself takes the laurel from the gardener's forcing house to wind a wreath of honor for himself. He looks at it with admiring eyes and puts it upon himself, playing the rôle of being beloved, only the elector and Natalie come in to interfere. The princess and the laurel, also love and fame really hypnotize him and draw him magnetically. The prince follows them both with outstretched arms until the elector and Natalie disappear behind the gates. It seems to me very significant that not long before the creation of this drama a crowning with laurel at the hands of a loved one had actually taken place in the life of the poet and that, as it is now generally admitted, Kleist himself stood as the model of the prince. "Two of the smallest, daintiest hands in Dresden," as Kleist relates, crowned him with laurel at a soirée in the house of the Austrian ambassador after the preliminary reading of the "Zerbrochenen Kruges." ("The Broken Pitcher.") These daintiest hands belonged to his beloved Julie Kunze, to whom Dame Rumor said he was engaged. Wukadinovic defines quite correctly the connection of the drama with its autobiographical meaning: "As the poet sees the ideal of love arising next to that of poetic fame, so he grants to the ambitious prince, who exhibits so many of his own traits, a loving woman standing at his side, who rewards him at the close with the wreath." The matter goes yet much deeper. The prince says of the elector: "Plucks from his neck the chain that's pendant there.... My soul meanwhile enkindled high." The laurel attains a further value for the prince, because the elector binds his own necklace about it. The latter is continually taken by Homburg as the father, to which a number of verses testify. Since the prince unmistakably stands for the poet, it cannot be denied that Kleist had desired the reward not only from the beloved one, but this still more with the express concurrence of the father. In the beginning to be sure he is repulsed by him, "Naught here for thee, away!" and later on account of his disobedience is even condemned to death.[28] He was not only pardoned, however, after he had acknowledged his wrong and recognized the father's judgment as correct, but when he believed his last hour had struck, he was bedecked with the wreath which he desired and on which moreover his elector's chain hangs. Still further, the latter, the father himself, extends the laurel to Natalie and leads the beloved to him. It is beyond question that love is the chief motive of the moon walking of the prince von Homburg, love to a woman as well as a homosexual tendency otherwise authenticated in the case of Kleist. Only it appears here closely amalgamated with desire for fame, something completely unerotic, and with the sexual, as we have found it so far regularly in night wandering and moon walking, quite excluded. [28] It is significant to compare here the Consul Brutus, who permitted the execution of his sons. We will attempt to get more light on the last two points. The striving after poetic fame does not remain with our poet within the usual, normal limits but becomes much more a peculiar neurotic characteristic. No less a hope for instance had Heinrich von Kleist than with an unheard of creation to strike at Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe and concerning the last named he uttered this audacious sentiment, "I will rend the crown from his brow!" Since he fails to attain this goal in spite of repeated most earnest onslaughts, he rushes away to die upon the battlefield. He writes to his sister, however, "Heaven denies me fame, the greatest of earthly possessions; I fling back to it all else like a self willed child!" What lay in truth behind that unattainable goal that Kleist tried again and again to carry by force? He himself confesses that it was not the highest poetic art or at least not exclusively so. Otherwise Kleist would have been able to content himself with his so commanding talent and with that which he was able to accomplish with it, like so many other great poets. Let us not forget that he sought to outdo especially the three greatest. Therefore I think, in accordance with all my psychoanalytic experience, that Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe are together only father incarnations, that Kleist thus wanted to remove the father from the field. One has a right to definite surmisings on the basis of various works of Kleist, although nothing is known to us of the poet's relations to his parents. The incest motive is one of the chief determining factors of artistic creation, as Rank has outlined in his beautiful book.[29] It is in the first place the desired and striven for incest with the mother herself, in the way of which the father naturally stands. The poet realizes in the freer land of poetry what is impossible in life, by displacing it over a discovered or given material. [29] Otto Rank, "Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage," 1912, Franz Deuticke. I discussed in a larger work,[30] previous to Rank's book, how Heinrich von Kleist made the incest phantasies of his childhood the foundation of many poems. So for instance the Marquise von O., assaulted in a fainting fit, is protected from the foe pressing upon her by some one who loves her and will subsequently surely marry her. I need hardly explain that the evil one who will positively force himself upon her is the father, from whom the son defends the mother, that he may subsequently woo her. It is again only the poet himself who sets himself as a youthful ideal god in place of the aging father, as Jupiter descended from his throne renewed in beauty and youth according to his divine power, to visit Alcmene in the form of her spouse Amphitryon. In the "Zerbrochenen Krug" (Broken Pitcher) the judge breaks violently into the room of the beloved one--a typical symbol for one's own father who is also in fact the child's first judge--and is driven out by the rightful lover. [30] "Heinrich von Kleist. Eine pathographisch-psychologische Studie," 1910, J. F. Bergmann. The objection need not be made that the poet has simply held to his pattern. The choice of material betrays the purpose, which frequently remains unconscious. What, we may say, impelled the poet although he wished to translate it wholly, to take up Molière's Amphitryon, one of his weakest productions too, and then change it in so striking a fashion? Quite unlike the French version, Jupiter becomes for Kleist the advocate with the wife-mother: "What I now feel for thee, Alcmene dearest, Ah, see! it soars far, far beyond the sun, Which even a husband owes thee. Depart, beloved, flee from this thy spouse, And choose between us, either him or me. I suffer with this shameful interchange, The thought to me is all unbearable, That this vain fellow's been received by thee, Whose cold heart thinks he holds a right o'er thee. Oh! might I now to thee, my sweetest light, A being of another sort appear, Thy conqueror since the art to conquer thee Was taught me by the mighty gods." In truth Kleist, like every other poet, chose the most of his material in accordance with unconscious wishes, where beyond all else the mother complex presses for poetic expression. Let us apply once more that which has been so far discovered to the "Prinz von Homburg." This is rendered yet more easy from the fact that the electress is repeatedly designated by the hero as "Mother." His real mother had indeed at her death delivered him over to the friend of her youth with the words: "Be a mother to him when I am no longer here." And the electress had answered in similar strain, "He shall be mine as if my own in birth!" But since on the other hand Natalie also addresses her repeatedly as Mother as she does the elector as Father, so Natalie is Kleist's beloved sister in disguise. The poet would desire the laurel wreath thus from his own sister. Why then the father's acquiescence? If we now appeal to our psychoanalytic experience, this teaches us that regularly the sister incest represents a later form of the older and more serious mother incest. The boy, who first desires the mother, satisfies himself later with the less forbidden and more easily accessible sister. All poets follow very significantly this psychoanalytically established relationship, as Rank[31] has recently convincingly shown. The poets often represent this, that the phantasies and wishes are displaced from the mother to the sister or they are split up between mother and sister, which then makes their origin especially clear. [31] _L. c._ The latter is also the case with Kleist in the "Prinz von Homburg." He takes for the mother he desires, at one time the electress, at another time Natalie, "his girl, his bride."[32] It agrees strikingly also that the prince in the fear of death expects to be saved only by the electress, that is the mother, from the punishment with which the elector father threatens him. So a child who knows no way out for himself, no help any more, flees to his mother. Such an unusual, shocking fear of death on the part of a field officer needs explanation. It is nothing else than the child's fear in face of the stern parent. It is further overdetermined in an infantile way. In the drama the prince for a long time does not believe in the grim seriousness of his position. The elector father will only put him to the test. The sudden transition to frantic fear follows first when the friend informs him that Natalie has sent back the addresses carried by the ambassador, because she is betrothed to the latter. This would have so roused the elector against him. From this time on the prince--and the poet--holds everything as possible and is ready to sacrifice even the hand of the beloved for his life. [32] It is now plainly understood that the prince can name among the dear ones who appear to him the elector and the electress, that is his mother, but not the third, who is merely a split-off from the latter, at bottom identical with her. A second determination likewise is not wanting, which is also infantile. Freud has shown in the "Interpretation of Dreams" that the child does not at all connect the ideas of older people with the words "death" and "to die." He knows neither the terror nor the shuddering fear of the eternal nothingness. To be dead means to him merely to be away, gone away, no longer to be disturbed in his wishes. For his slight experience has already taught him one thing, dead people, as perhaps the grandparents, do not come back. From this it is only a step that the child sometimes wishes death to his father, when the latter disturbs him. Psychoanalysis tells us that this is not perhaps a shocking exception but a matter of everyday occurrence. Such thoughts are touched upon in the "Prinz von Homburg." The false report has come that the elector father has been shot and Natalie laments, "Who will protect us from this world of foes?" Then is the prince ready on the spot to offer his hand to the orphaned girl, also apparently to her mother. A child wish comes to fulfilment, the setting aside of the father who interferes with his plans for the mother. When the man believed to be dead nevertheless returns, he pronounces, as we can understand, the sentence of death upon his treacherous son. Only when the latter had acknowledged the justice of the sentence--I might almost have said, after he had asked forgiveness, is he not only pardoned but more than that recompensed, while now the father voluntarily grants him his wish. It seems to me significant that Kleist freely introduced into his drama the complete condemnation to death as well as night wandering and moon walking. In the first point he had turned tradition quite to its opposite. In the original the great Friedrich relates that on the triumphant battle field the elector has already forgiven the prince that he had so lightly risked the welfare of the whole state: "If I had judged you according to the stern martial law, you would have forfeited your life. But God forbid that I should sully the brightness of this day by shedding the blood of a prince, who was once the foremost instrument of my victory." Personal reasons, and, as we know from psychoanalysis, these are always infantile reasons, must have been involved when Kleist incorporated this directly into his poetry and yet in so striking a fashion. Some of these reasons I have been able to set forth above. It is now clear that the apparently asexual desire for fame does not lack its erotic foundation. The desire for fame is so greatly exaggerated in Heinrich von Kleist that he will do no less than tear the laurel from Goethe's forehead, because in his infantile attitude he hopes through an unheard of poetic activity to supplant the father with the mother. After the shipwreck of his masterpiece, the Guiskard material, he longed for death because life had no more value for him, but he finds later in the "Prinz von Homburg" a happier solution. For not only does the mother herself now crown him but does it with the father's affectionate blessing. And the old theme of night wandering and moon walking, that is climbing into bed with the loved one, finds its place here although in an opposite form and under a certain sexual repression. The child does not come to the mother but she to him and places the longed for crown upon his head even with the concurrence of the father. Also the fact that the prince transgresses the elector's commands as the result of his moon walking, to which the prince is subject, must somehow, at least by analogy, have been created from the poet's own breast. Nothing is said about this in regard to Kleist, of whose inner life we know so little. Yet his very great interest in noctambulism and similar "night sides of the human soul," as well as his exceptional understanding of the same, show that he at least must have possessed a disposition toward it. It should be emphasized once more in conclusion that the moon walking in the "Prinz von Homburg" does not lack the infantile sexual root, nor is the corresponding erotic purpose wanting, which we have always found, heretofore, to come to the loved one without being held responsible. "DAS SÜNDKIND," by Ludwig Anzengruber. "Das Sündkind" ("The Sin Child") by Anzengruber (in the first volume of his "Dorfgänge") tells of an apparently non-sexually colored wandering by moonlight. There a 45-year-old pitch worker, the mother of twelve children, who had all died except the narrator, and for three years a widow, had become pregnant with a "sin child" whose father no one would acknowledge himself. She had always been a discreet woman, and was almost equal to her son in her work, although he at thirty years old was at the height of his manly strength. She had always been as exemplary in love as in her work, a combination, as we know, not rare to find. Having matured early she was with her first child at the age of fifteen and when she was a widow "the people could not wonder enough how long it would be before she showed her age." Not rarely "love" suddenly overcame her and even toward her grown son she could occasionally make quite "God forbidden" eyes. One might almost draw the conclusion from the following circumstance that he also was more deeply dependent on the mother than he might acknowledge to himself. Left alone with her during her confinement, he was not able to look at her but drummed on the window pane and became more and more confused although "God knows, there was no call for it." Then he turned around with his face burning red and said, "You ought to be ashamed, Mother, you ought to be ashamed!" Soon however not only remorse seized him but he began to curse at the folk, who see in the infant not his brother but only the "child of sin." "Do you think for a moment that I would bear a grudge against the little innocent worm? Curse you, anyone who would separate the children of one mother from each other!" After he had lost the love of his youth in earlier years, he had no more interest in women but dwelt with his mother alone on the land which belonged to the family. Later Martin toiled early and late for the illegitimate child Poldl, as if he were its true father, for whom moreover he never might make inquiry. When Poldl was perhaps sixteen years old, his mother's health began to fail and with her anxiety at approaching death she began to be concerned for her soul, which she, according to human custom, expressed as care for her illegitimate child. He should dedicate himself to the Lord, should become a clergyman, by which he would remain spotless. Martin, with keen insight, thought thus, "That is indeed the easiest way to get rid of one's own sin, to let some one else atone for it" and feared it might go hard with Poldl, hot blooded by inheritance, but he had no effect upon the mother, who was supported by the boy's guardian. Poldl also did not permit himself simply to be talked of by her, but applied himself ever more deeply to his future sacred calling, especially since all the people of the place already paid court to him as if he were even now an ordained clergyman. "Soon he had no other thought than of his future holy office and he might stay or go where he would, for nothing was for him too good or too bad to remind him of it." "He strolled about one entire summer," Martin tells us, "and did not condescend to the least bit of work but when I was out with the farm hands making hay in the meadows or reaping in the field, it very often happened that he rushed unexpectedly out of the bushes and began preaching to them. This seemed quite right to the lazy folk, they would let their work lie and would stand gathered about him and listen devoutly to him and I could not take ill their so excessive piety. The mother thought as they did and found that his absurd preaching there went straight to her heart." We will stop here a moment. What drove Poldl so to the priestly calling, what made him so intent upon it? We might mention in passing the vanity and the high sense of importance, which is created by the desire in the sixteen year old boy after the most reverend calling. Yet, though I would in no way undervalue his ambition or the satisfaction of a so pleasantly tickled vanity, yet decisive and determining these can scarcely be. Strong motives must govern in order to explain more completely such an impulsion. When Poldl strode over the fields and began to preach, "At that time the Lord Jesus spoke to the disciples ...," then he was indeed not far from conceiving himself as the Holy One and his mother as the Virgin Mary. Jesus had offered himself for the sins of man, as he now for the sin of his mother. According to this it is nothing else than his love to the mother which drives him to the sacred office, in which it is not to be forgotten that such a love, which leads to a thought obsession, is in the light of experience never without the erotic. This mingling of sensuality and love to the mother, and to an older woman who could be his mother, shows itself still more clearly two years later, when he has a holiday from the seminary for a few days. He finds at home a buxom picture of a woman, a relative on a visit, almost twice as old as he, the very essence of cheeriness and health. "The boy clung closest to her. In spite of his eighteen years he still seemed childish enough and this he turned to account, and 'played the calf with her,'" to use the excellent word of the writer. Six years later Poldl was appointed to assist an invalid vicar, in whose home a regular vicar's cook kept house with her sixteen year old girl, whom she had from the old vicar. In the same year Poldl's mother was laid to rest and her son appeared at her funeral, where the robust peasant girls and maidens pressed themselves upon him. But he "withdrew shyly from every one of them and gave his hand to no one, as he obligingly might have done. He has always before this appeared like milk and blood," thought Martin, the anxious one, "now he has an unhealthy look, no color, sunken cheeks, and his eyes are deep within, he stares at the ground and cannot bear to have a stranger look at him. It does not please me." All this is clear and transparent to the physician. In the young man now twenty-four years old the inherited blood began to make itself felt, and at the same time the cook and her daughter let no stimulus be wanting. He suffered under his self restraint, grew pale and hollow and because only his actions remained chaste but not his thought, he could no more look freely upon a woman. When he now preached in the pulpit, he spoke of the devil as the tempter and of all his evil suggestions. He could declare what evil thoughts come to a man and in closing he threatened his flock most earnestly that the devil would carry them all away together. We know well that no sins are more condemned than those which one holds himself capable of committing or which one would himself most gladly commit if only one dared. The young priest owed it to a great love which he felt for the miller's daughter that he kept himself pure at least in body. So much the more was the vicar's cook intent upon bringing about his downfall through her girl. Then they could again rule at the vicarage, since the old vicar's days were numbered, when Poldl came into the fat living left vacant. It was at the burial of the old priest that Poldl delivered at the grave the funeral oration for the dead, and endeavored to lay the good example which the old man had given upon the hearts of his flock. As he lifted his eyes once and caught those of the miller's Marie-Liese, who was listening so devoutly, not taking her eyes from him, he suddenly remained stuck in the midst of his speech and could find his place in the text again only with difficulty. Was he not able to maintain before her pure glance the fiction of a noble priest, did it come to his consciousness that he was wandering in the same paths on which the other had been most severely wounded? Something of this the miller's daughter seems to have had in mind, for as she later begged his pardon for having confused him by staring at him, at the same time she advised him not to have anything to do with those at the vicarage. The vicar's daughter, who had stolen up unobserved, shook her fist at them both, while her mother drew Poldl later into a corner to give vent to her feelings, "You cannot have the miller's daughter and do not for a moment believe that she would be willing to have you." On his death bed in the lesser parish, which he held later, he complained to Martin, "I should never have been a priest"--with his inherited passionate blood, in spite of his mother's urging and his love to her. "Martin, you have no idea how hard it is to run caught in a sack; it costs a deal of trouble to keep oneself upright. If one does not twist about one falls into it. The cowl was such a sack for me.... Brother, I have unwittingly fallen into disgrace as a wild beast into a trap, and I am more ashamed of it perhaps than the worst sinner of that which he has done deliberately and maliciously. I would not have stayed in the trap, could everything at first only have remained secret, so that no one would have been afraid to extend a clean hand to me, by which I might have found myself and might again belong to the world and everything. But that the others knew right well and they wanted me for themselves and therefore they have behaved without fear or shame so that soon everything was free and open to all Rodenstein from the forest house at one end to the mill at the other. From that time on I have seen no friendly eye, and the blue, yes, the blue eyes (of the miller's daughter) were always turned defiantly away from me. And because she was unkind to me she became all at once kind to some one whom she formerly could not bear. The folk shook their heads and prophesied little good for her. So the time came when I must come here to this parish. There lay upon me what can soon crush one to the ground, for peace and honor were squandered and those who had won them from me hung like chains upon me and the bit of sunshine that I had had in life I had to leave behind in Rodenstein. When however there was added to this concern for her to whom I owed the bit of happiness, I broke under it and then they took me and brought me here and I let myself be brought." So had he truly become a child of sin with the feeling of lost purity and a great consciousness of guilt upon his soul. And that he had not merely squandered his own honor and peace but had also dragged the beloved to harm, so that she must have doubts of her purity, this does the rest for him and makes him the willing play ball of the parish folk. From the first day when he took over his new charge, he began to wander in the full moonlight up to the ghostly hour of midnight. At the stroke of twelve he went to the pulpit, over which a bright moonbeam lay, which also lighted up his face as bright as day. With closed eyes he knelt in the pulpit, "his folded hands before him on the upholstered border, the head bowed upon it as if in quiet prayer to collect himself as usual before the sermon. All at once he raised himself, bent forward a little as if the pews were full of people and he wished first to look them over, then he threw his arms to either side and stood there like one who would say, 'Strike me dead, if I have offended you, but I cannot do otherwise!' He did not say this but in a voice as of one speaking in a dream he uttered the words, 'I know of nothing!' And then once more--his hands extended toward heaven and spread open, as if he would show everything to all within or about the church--'I know of nothing!' Afterward he turned and went." In this classic picture of the brother are some features of a new sort. Above all, sexuality appears only incidentally to play a part, in so far as it awakens the latent tendency to moon walking. Poldl begins to wander at midnight after the miller's daughter is lost to him and he is tortured by anxiety for her future. Otherwise he does what so frequently is done by the moon walker, he carries out the apparently harmless activity of the day as he prays in the church before an imaginary audience. At least he truly imitates the formalities with which prayer begins, though the conclusion does not accord with the beginning. It sounds like a justification before the folk of Rodenstein, who have taken offence at his action, that he stands there in Luther's place as one who cannot do otherwise though one strike him dead. At the same time the repeated outcry at the end, "I know of nothing, I know of nothing!" smacks not only of a denial that he did not know perhaps why Marie had fallen into distress, but suggests the directly infantile. Thus a child insists, when it is reproached, that it has done nothing. Let us take up again the threads of our narrative. Poldl faded day by day under the pressure of his heavy burden of soul. At last there remained nothing else for him but to let them write to his brother that he lay sick and wished to see him. As Martin entered the sickroom Poldl stretched his lean arms toward him, breathed a heartfelt cry and began to weep aloud like a child. "You are like a father to me, Martin, you are like a father to me!" And from time to time he added, "Forgive me!" Then he stroked Martin's rough hands, "the hands which had toiled for his daily bread when he was a boy." And now he poured forth his confession. He should not have become a priest, then the people of the parish would have remained strangers to him and he perhaps would have succeeded to the Rodenstein mill. His entire concern centered itself about this, that he had not only lost Marie-Liese but was also to blame for the overthrow of her happiness. He related to his brother how the parish folk had apprehended him, so that he was covered with shame, how they all hung about the great bell of Rodenstein until finally the miller's daughter turned from him and to another. After the confession was made Poldl fell asleep contentedly, yet only to wander that very midnight. The invalid was very ill, when Martin talked with him again the next day. And suddenly he began to speak of the days of his childhood and it was remarkable to the brother "how he had remembered the most trivial thing in regard to it and it seemed to me as if he himself often wondered at it in the midst of his speech. Bit by bit thus he took up his life and we talked together of the time when he ran about the sitting-room and the court in his little child's frock, until the time when he went to school, to the seminary, to Rodenstein.... The sun had set when with our prattle we had come to the place where we were, at Weissenhofen. 'That's the end,' I said, 'and there remains nothing else to tell.'--'Yes, yes,' said my brother reflectively, 'that's the end, and there remains nothing more to tell.'" Soon he noticed how truly Martin had spoken in every respect, for the end had come for him now physically. With a blessing on his lips for the newly won brother of his heart, he laid himself down to sleep. "It had become still as a mouse in the room. After perhaps a quarter of an hour I heard him say, 'Yes, yes, were we now together, only you must not hold me so tightly to your breast.' With this he threw himself suddenly over to the right, drew a deep breath, and it was over." Let us consider once more the circumstances of the moon walking which accompanied this. He begins with this after his removal from Rodenstein and from his heart's beloved. There had preceded the grief over his wasted honor and his forfeited peace, the pain at the loss of the miller's daughter and, which is rather conclusive, the torturing regard for her future, which completely paralyzed his will power. The latter point is somewhat remarkable. For at bottom it was never said that her marriage was unhappy. The people had shaken their heads before it, only, and prophesied nothing good. When Martin fourteen years after the death of his brother meets Marie-Liese at his grave, she has become a handsome woman and has been a widow for eight years but is well poised mentally and lives for her boy. In Poldl's concern the wish must indeed have been father of the thought. If he could not have his treasure, then she should not be happy at the side of another man. Yet apparently this does not refer alone to the miller's daughter. Psychoanalytic experience teaches that where the reaction manifests itself all too strongly this happens because it is not merely a reaction to a present, but above all to a long past experience, which stands behind the other and offers first the original actual tonal background. Only apparently is the effect too strong, if we measure it merely by the actual cause, in truth however the action corresponds to all the causes, that is the new added to the old. We can say further, if we apply this experience to the poet's narrative, Poldl had not merely lost the miller's daughter forever by entangling himself with the vicar's daughter, but far more another, the one for whom he had entered orders. The mother had said to Martin, "There is only one way, one single way by which my boy can be saved from ruin and I can obtain peace and forgiveness from my sin." This task, to atone for the mother by a holy life, had not prevented him from a passionate love for Marie-Liese or from an intrigue with the pastor's daughter, yet, since he had on the latter's account lost his purity, something else was also laid waste thereby, that which had given peace to him and a purpose to his muddled life, the love for his mother. As he tarried already half in the other world, his last words were, "Yes, yes, were we now together, only you must not hold me so tightly to your breast." This had the mother in her tenderness done to her little boy. We see here the regression to the infantile, to a primitive child libido. The matter can be followed still further. The walking by moonlight itself did not begin, in spite of every predisposing cause, until Poldl was connected with the new parish and no longer shared the same locality with his beloved. It is not revealed whether the pulpit of the Weissenhofen church looked perhaps in the direction of Rodenstein or not. It seems to me significant that the pastor's daughter crept after Poldl all night long, not perhaps merely the first time, as if she suspected his hidden erotic or feared even that he might go out toward Rodenstein. He must also every midnight establish the fact that, in spite of his sins of the flesh, he considered himself still worthy to be a priest. For the same reason he himself read the mass every day until near the end. Indeed he read this not merely in the daytime but also at midnight when other priests sought rest. And by his behavior in sleep walking it was as if he wished each time anew to justify himself before his Rodenstein parish, and especially before his beloved. The Luther attitude referred to the former, "Though you slay me, I cannot do otherwise!" the outspoken infantile expression, the only words which he actually speaks, "I know of nothing!" is for the latter. Thus a small boy protests his innocence when any one faces him with a misdeed. It was as if he wanted to go back to his beloved, to Marie-Liese, as if to his own mother. Again we find libidinous and infantile causes as the starting point of moonlight walking and sleep walking. Only the erotic no longer appears so openly as with the other poets but receives a certain disguise. Yet brother Martin, the philosopher of life, recognizes clearly the kernel of the matter: "So I had also to witness the end with him, as with so many of my brothers and sisters. But I still think today this need not have happened, if the mother had permitted him his life as it would have been lived out freely by himself. First she should not have counted it so great as sin, for otherwise there would have been no pitch worker Poldl in the world. Although she thought of it within herself that it was a sin, she should have so looked upon it that she could have settled it with the Lord God. Ah yes! he had to go about in the cowl, which had become a greater sack than a farmer's jumper and there all the sins of others enter, but if no one shall commit one in his own right, how would one find shelter for all these? If I had only at that time been obstinate about the planning of this thing, I would have foreseen the wrong of it and have known that the mother was an old woman, and with many conscience grows when reason is going to sleep. Faith, honor and peace he would never have squandered, for the farmer's position does not play with so high a stake. Still today the little fellow runs gaily about the yard under my eyes.... Ah, you poor sin child, how wantonly was the joy of living destroyed for you!" "MACBETH," by Shakespeare. As I now undertake the analysis of the case of Lady Macbeth, I stand not only before the last but the most difficult portion of my work. Here indeed everything sexual and the erotic itself seem to be quite excluded; and my attempt appears to fail in both directions, in the sexual as well as in the infantile, to apply to Shakespeare's heroine what my psychoanalytically treated cases, as well as all those others from literature have furnished. The poet has devoted no more than one single scene to this entire sleep walking including the grounds for it, and he has said as little of Lady Macbeth's childhood as of her sexual erotic life. Our knowledge of Shakespeare's life is above all so meager, if we turn from the case to the poet himself, that the difficulties tower in our way almost mountain high. The reader will in this case, which presents itself so unfavorably, have to expect neither that certainty nor even that high degree of probability of results, which the earlier examples gave us. Here through no fault of mine all aids to interpretation are wanting. I should consider it as something accomplished if the reader did not say at the close, "The case of Lady Macbeth contradicts all that has been heretofore discovered," as it will appear at first. We will begin with the literary source for Macbeth, Holinshed's "History of Scotland."[33] Shakespeare confined himself so closely to this that he took over accurately, even to the dialogue, whole scenes into his tragedy. The deviations are for this reason so much the more interesting. In the chronicle Macbeth is simply the tyrant. At the very beginning it is said of him, "he would certainly have been held as the most worthy of rulers, if his nature had not had so strong a tendency to cruelty." His cruelty is frequently emphasized, both at the bier of the dead Macdowald and toward the dwellers in the western isles, who "called him a bloodthirsty tyrant and the cruel murderer of those to whom the king's grace had granted their lives." Finally also in the camp of the Danes when they were overcome "he wrought such havoc upon all sides without the least resistance that it was terrible to look upon." A change seems however to have taken place in his character when, after the murder of Duncan, he had seized the kingdom for himself. "He began to reform the laws and to root out all the irregularities and abuses in the administration." He freed the land for many years from all robbers, guarded most carefully the church and clergy, and, to put it briefly, was looked upon as the defender and shield of everything blameless. He established also many good laws and ruled the kingdom for ten years with the greatest wisdom and justice. [33] I cite this according to "Die Quellen des Shakespeare," by Karl Simrock, 2d edition, 1870. "This apparent equity and zeal for all that is best was however merely hypocrisy; he wished only to win the favor of the people. Tyrants are always distrustful, they are always afraid that others will rob them of their power by the same unrighteous means by which they themselves have succeeded. As soon as Macbeth discovered any plans against himself, he no longer concealed his intentions but practised and permitted every kind of cruelty." At first the words of the three sisters of fate lay always in his thoughts. In order to attain to what they had prophesied he was willing to have Banquo and his son murdered. Yet the murderers hired for the purpose killed only the former while Fleance succeeded in escaping. "Luck seems to have deserted Macbeth after the murder of Banquo. None of his undertakings were successful, every one feared for his life and scarcely dared appear before the king. He feared every one and every one feared him, so that he was always seeking opportunity for the execution of suspected persons. His distrust and his cruelty increased day by day, his bloodthirstiness was not to be appeased.... He gave himself over recklessly to his natural ferocity, oppressed his subjects even to the poorest and permitted himself every shameful deed." Shakespeare has represented the rest fairly truly according to Holinshed, only that in actuality this lasted for seven years, until Macbeth fell at the hands of Macduff. It is also worthy of note what Holinshed has made the ground of the murder of Duncan. There preceded in the chronicle the promise of the three witches, further Malcolm's appointment as prince of Cumberland and, as a result of this, succession to the kingdom. Now Malcolm could "ascend the throne directly after his father's death, while in the old laws it was provided that the nearest relative would be placed upon the throne, if, at the death of his predecessor, the prince who was called to the succession was not yet capable of ruling." This latter had happened to Macbeth, Duncan's cousin. "Then began Macbeth, from whom by this arrangement of the king all hope of the throne was taken, to consider the means whereby he could seize the crown by force for himself. For he believed that Duncan had done him a great wrong, when he named his infant son as successor to his throne and had so annulled all other claims. Moreover the words of the witches encouraged him to his purpose. But foremost of all his wife, a proud and haughty woman, who longed with most burning desire after the name of queen, would not desist until she had strengthened him to the uttermost in his intention." This last sentence is the chronicler's only notice of Lady Macbeth. We can now measure what Shakespeare has contributed himself to her character as well as to that of her husband. At first the absolute cruelty, which with Holinshed was the chief trait of his character, is wanting in Macbeth, and therefore ambition is mentioned first. Macbeth becomes the tyrant wading in blood first after the murder of Duncan and then more from a necessity to defend himself. His own wife characterizes best the earlier hero: "Yet I do fear thy nature; It is too full o' the milk of human kindness, To catch the nearest way; Thou would'st be great; Art not without ambition; but without The illness should attend it. What thou would'st highly That would'st thou holily, would'st not play false, And yet would'st wrongly win: thou'd'st have, great Glamis, That which cries, _Thus thou must do, if thou have it_; And that which rather thou dost fear to do, Than wishest should be undone." Yet Macbeth at bottom dared not murder the king, he only toyed with the thought. He must be instigated from without, if the deed is not to be put off until the Greek calends. Lady Macbeth from the very beginning feels it her task to strengthen her laggard and doubting husband in his ambition. This Shakespeare had already found in Holinshed. As the chronicle has pictured it: "Still more did his wife urge him on to attack the king, for she was exorbitantly ambitious and burned with an inextinguishable desire to bear the name of queen."[34] While she thus incited her husband, she fulfilled yet more the longing of her own heart: "Hie thee hither, That I may pour my spirits in thine ear; And chastise with the valour of my tongue All that impedes thee from the golden round." [34] The words of Holinshed's chronicle. She summons herself also to the task, calls the evil spirits of the air to her aid and will become a man, since her husband is no man: "Come, come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here; And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood, Stop up the access and passage to remorse; That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers!" When Macbeth announces, "Duncan comes here to-night," she asks sinisterly, "And when goes hence?"--Macbeth: "To-morrow--as he purposes."--Lady Macbeth: "O, never Shall sun that morrow see! . . . . . . . . . . . . He that's coming Must be provided for; and you shall put This night's great business into my despatch; Which shall to all our nights and days to come Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom." It may be seen that the really cruel one is here first Lady Macbeth and not her husband. He on the contrary must always torture himself with scruples and doubts. He constantly holds before himself the outward results of his deed, brings everything together which should protect Duncan from his dagger and can only say in regard to the opposite course: "I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o'er-leaps itself, And falls on the other." And he explains to his wife, "We will proceed no further in this business." Then must Lady Macbeth rebuke him as a coward, no longer trust his love, if he, when time and place so wait upon him, retract from his purpose. She lays on the strongest accent, yes, uses the "word of fury": "I have given suck; and know How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me; I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums, And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn, as you Have done to this."-- and finally develops the entire plan and promises her assistance, before she can persuade her husband to the murder. She has stupefied the two chamberlains, upon whom the guilt shall be rolled, with spiced wine and drunk herself full of courage for the deed, as so many criminals. "That which hath made them drunk, hath made me bold; What hath quenched them, hath given me fire." Then she hears Macbeth within at his gruesome work uttering a terrified question, and continues: "Alack! I am afraid they have awaked, And 'tis not done:--the attempt, and not the deed, Confounds us;--Hark!--I laid their daggers ready, He could not miss them.--Had he not resembled My father as he slept, I had done't." Then her husband appears with the daggers. As he looks at his bloody hands a cry is wrung from him, "This is a sorry sight." Yet the Lady repulses him harshly, "A foolish thought, to say a sorry sight." Macbeth: "Methought, I heard a voice cry, _Sleep no more! Macbeth doth murder sleep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And therefore ... Macbeth shall sleep no more!_" Lady Macbeth quiets him but he weakens his high courage by brooding over the deed. "Go, get some water, And wash this filthy witness from your hand.-- Why did you bring these daggers from the place? They must lie there. Go, carry them; and smear The sleepy grooms with blood." Then however as her husband refuses to look again upon his deed Lady Macbeth herself seizes the daggers: "The sleeping and the dead Are but as pictures; 'tis the eye of childhood, That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed, I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal." Macbeth (alone): "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red." Lady Macbeth (returning): "My hands are of your colour; but I shame To wear a heart so white . . . . . . . . . . . . retire we to our chamber: A little water clears us of this deed; How easy is it then! Your constancy Hath left you unattended." But the horrid deed has not brought the expected good fortune. After Duncan's murder Macbeth finds no rest and no sleep: "To be thus, is nothing; But to be safely thus." So he first considers removing Banquo and his son. But Lady Macbeth is little content: "Nought's had, all's spent, Where our desire is got without content; 'Tis safer to be that which we destroy, Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy." Then comes her husband. All night he has been so shaken with terrible dreams that he would rather be in Duncan's place, "Than on the torture of the mind to lie, In restless ecstasy." Lady Macbeth tries here to comfort him with the only tender impulse in the drama: "Come on; Gentle my lord, sleek o'er your rugged looks; Be bright and jovial 'mong your guests to-night."[35] Macbeth promises to do as she asks and charges her to treat Banquo especially with distinction. Nor does he conceal from her what now tortures him most, "Dear wife, Thou knowest that Banquo, and his Fleance, lives." And immediately the Lady is her old self: "But in them nature's copy's not eterne." Though Lady Macbeth is represented as at once prepared for a second murder, Macbeth has now no more need of her: "Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, Till thou applaud the deed." [35] One notes the emptiness of this passage. She could scarcely have said much less, if she wished to comfort him. And yet this passage is always quoted by those authors who accept love on the part of Lady Macbeth for her husband as the driving motive for her action. Indeed, Friedrich Theodor Vischer himself does not shrink from an interpolation and translates the passage: Lady Macbeth ("caressingly")--"Come, come, my noble lord, remove thy wrinkles, smooth thy gloomy brow, be jovial this evening, well-disposed toward thy guests." And although the original English text contains no word for "caressingly," yet Vischer gives this commentary: "His wife's answer to him must be spoken on the stage with an altogether tender accent. She embraces him and strokes his forehead." (Shakespeare-Vorträge, Vol. 2, pp. 36, 102.) Yet, although he shrinks back no longer from any sort of evil deed, he does so before the horrible pictures of his phantasies, the hallucinations of his unconscious. Here is where Shakespeare's genius enters. The Macbeth of the Chronicle commits throughout all his acts of horror apparently in cold blood. At least nothing to the contrary is reported. With Shakespeare on the other hand Macbeth, who is represented in the beginning as more ambitious than cruel, is pathologically tainted. From his youth on he suffered from frequent visions, which, for example, caused him to see before Duncan's murder an imaginary dagger. This "strange infirmity, which is nothing To those that know me," comes to light most vividly on the appearance of Banquo's ghost at the banquet. Lady Macbeth must use all her presence of mind to save at least the outward appearance. With friendly exhortation, yet with grim reproof and scornful word, she attempts to bring her husband to himself. In this last scene, when she interposes in Macbeth's behavior, she stands completely at the height. Not until the guests have departed does she grow slack in her replies. In truth neither her husband's resolution to wade on in blood nor his word that strange things haunt his brain can draw from her more than the response, "You lack the season of all natures, sleep." It seems as if she had collapsed exhausted after her tremendous psychical effort. Shakespeare has in strange fashion told us nothing of what goes on further in her soul, though he overmotivates everything else, even devotes whole scenes to this one purpose. We first see her again in the last act in the famous sleep walking scene. She begins to walk in her sleep, falls ill with it one might well say, just on that day when Macbeth goes to war. Her lady in waiting saw her from this day on, at night, "rise from her bed, throw her nightgown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon it, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep."--"A great perturbation in nature! to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching," the evidently keen sighted physician thinks. He soon has the opportunity to observe the Lady's sleep walking for himself. She comes, in her hand a lighted candle, which at her express command must be always burning near her bed. Her eyes are open as she walks, but their sense is shut. Then she rubs her hands together as if to wash them, which she does according to the statement of the lady in waiting, often continuously for a quarter of an hour. Now they hear her speaking: "Yet here's a spot. Out damned spot! out, I say!--One, two, why, then 'tis time to do't.--Hell is murky!--Fie, my lord! a soldier, and afear'd? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?--Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?--The Thane of Fife had a wife; Where is she now?--What, will these hands ne'er be clean?--No more o' that, my lord, no more o' that; you mar all with this starting.--Here's the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh! oh! oh!--Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so pale;--I tell you yet again, Banquo's buried; he cannot come out of his grave.--To bed, to bed; there's knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed." After such appearances she always in fact goes promptly to bed. The physician who observes her pronounces his opinion: "This disease is beyond my practice. Yet have I known those which have walked in their sleep, who have died holily in their beds." Here however there seems to be something different: "Foul whisperings are abroad; unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles." And then as if he were a psychoanalyst: "Infected minds To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets. More needs she the divine, than the physician.-- God, God forgive us all! Look after her; Remove from her the means of all annoyance, And still keep eyes upon her." Also he answers Macbeth, who inquires after the condition of the patient. "Not so sick, my lord, As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies, That keep her from her rest.... . . . . . . Therein the patient Must minister to himself." Yet as the king's star declines neither the doctor's foresight nor his skill prevents Lady Macbeth, the "diabolical queen" from laying hands upon herself. This case of sleep walking, if we consider it, seems first to correspond entirely to the popular view, that the wanderer carries over to the nighttime the activities of the day, or to speak more correctly, of the most important day of the last month. We saw in the first act how she reproaches Macbeth for his cowardice, encourages him and controls his actions. Only in two points, very significant ones to be sure, does it appear that she has now taken over her husband's rôle upon herself; in the disturbance of her sleep and the concern for the blood upon her hands. How had she rebuffed Macbeth when he had called out in regard to his bloody hands, "This is a sorry sight!" It was only a foolish thought. "Go get some water, And wash this filthy witness from your hand." But Macbeth was not to be shaken, the entire ocean would not suffice. Rather would the king's blood, which he had shed, change its green to glowing red. Yet when Lady Macbeth completes his work for him, she remarks lightly, "My hands are of your color; but I shame To wear a heart so white.... A little water clears us of this deed." In her sleep walking itself she encourages her husband, "Wash your hands, put on your nightgown." She seeks however in vain in this very sleep walking to wipe the stains from her hands, they smell always of blood and not all the perfumes of Arabia will sweeten her hands. Must not the inner meaning of all her sleep walking lie exactly in these two points, in which she has so completely turned about? It must be observed that in the tragedy as in the previously related tale of the "Sin Child" the sleep walking does not begin in childhood nor in puberty, but in both instances in somewhat more mature years, and, what is significant, as an illness, more precisely a psychic illness. The sin child fell ill because he had lost his pure beloved one, who had taken the place of his mother, the original love object of his earliest childhood; and Lady Macbeth, who had herself become queen through a murder, falls ill just at that moment when her lord must go to the battlefield to defend his life and his crown. For not without reason the fate of Macduff's wife, who was slain when her husband had gone from her, occurs to her also when she, while wandering, speaks of the much blood which Duncan had. Therefore it seems likely, and is in fact generally believed, that Lady Macbeth becomes ill because of her anxiety for life and kingdom. Only the facts do not strictly agree with this. In the first place her husband's campaign is by no means unpromising. On the contrary he has heard from the witches that his end would be bound with apparently unfulfillable conditions, so unfulfillable that the prophecy at once frees him from all fear. Having hidden nothing from the "partner of his greatness" he would scarcely conceal the promise of the witches, which increased his confidence to the uttermost. Besides it cannot be fear and anxiety which brings on her night wandering. Another current explanation also seems to me to have little ground. As Brandes has recently interpreted it, "The sleep walking scene shows in the most remarkable fashion how the pricking of an evil conscience, when it is dulled by day, is more keen at night and robs the guilty one of sleep and health." Now severe pangs of conscience may well disturb sleep, but they would hardly create sleep walking. Criminals are hardly noctambulists. Macbeth himself is an example how far stings of conscience and remorse can lead a sensitive man. He has no more rest after he has murdered the king and Banquo, yet he does not become a sleep walker. There must be another cause here which precipitates Lady Macbeth's sleep walking. We will first examine the relation of husband and wife to one another in order to trace out this mystery. The character of Lady Macbeth has caused many a one in Germany to rack his brains since the time of Tieck. Up till that time she passed simply as Megaera, as an "arch witch," as Goethe calls her. This opinion prevailed not only in Germany but in the English motherland too. But this view went against the grain with the German spirit. Therefore Ludwig Tieck first looked upon Lady Macbeth as a tender, loving wife. From this time on there arose critics and even poets, who in the same way wished to wash her clean. I will cite the two most important, Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Rudolf Hans Bartsch. The former, of whom I explained earlier, that he did not hesitate to make an interpolation to prove his point, sums up his judgment in the following sentences: "It is not ambition alone that moves her, but love which would see her lord become great" (p. 78). And in a second place, "She loved her husband and had sacrificed her conscience more for him than for herself" (p. 124). R. H. Bartsch goes much further in his romance, "Elisabeth Kött." Wigram says to the heroine, "Do you not feel how she (Lady Macbeth) before everything that she says cannot hitch horses enough to carry her slow and immovable lord along?" In the sleep walking scene "the utter crushing of this poor, overburdened heart burst forth in the torture of the dream wandering." At the close he pronounces his opinion: "If there is a poor weak woman upon earth, so it is this arch enchantress, who loves her husband so much that she has in admirable fashion studied all his faults and weaknesses that she may cover over the deficiencies with her trembling body. Seek the wife in her rôle!" What truth is there in these viewpoints? The poet himself has been dead for three hundred years and has left behind him not a syllable concerning Lady Macbeth except in the text of the tragedy. Therefore according to my opinion nothing remains but to keep to this. At the most we can draw upon Holinshed's chronicle, which Shakespeare so frequently followed literally. According to this Lady Macbeth was extravagantly ambitious and when she continually urged Macbeth to murder Duncan, this was only because she "burned with an unquenchable desire to bear the name of queen." There is never a syllable of a feeling of love for her husband, or that she desired the crown only for his sake. This objection might be made here, that as Shakespeare has often gone beyond his source, as in creating the sleep walking scene without a model for it, so he might just as well have given characters to Lady Macbeth of which the source said nothing. Certainly that would be a priori conceivable. Only that must appear clearly from the text of the tragedy. Yet what does this say? Carefully as I have read its lines, I have not been able to find a single, actual uninterpolated word of love from Lady Macbeth. That is of double significance from the poet of "Romeo and Juliet." He who could give such language to love would not have completely denied it in "Macbeth," if Lady Macbeth was to have been a loving wife. One can find everything in her words, warning, entreaty and adjuration, upbraidings and threatenings, anger, yes, almost abuse, yet not one natural note of love. This has a so much harsher effect since her husband approaches her usually as an actual lover, or more accurately stated up to the murder of Banquo. She is warm only where it concerns the attainment of her goal; it is her ambition which demands satisfaction. She is always to her husband "my dearest partner of my greatness" as he once appropriately writes her. It is not to be considered that Shakespeare, who always overmotivates his situations, should have at the height of his power so obscured from recognition all the love impulses, which would have seemed to be decisive for her whole character. The truth is simply that Lady Macbeth is no loving wife, but merely greedy of fame, as already represented in the Chronicle. I suspect that the authors who all the way through see in her the loving spouse are expressing their own complexes, their own unconscious wishes. Such an one as Bartsch for example cannot think otherwise of a woman than as unfolding lovingly to the man. Lady Macbeth makes upon me, in her relation toward her frequently wooing husband as it were, the impression of a _natura frigida_, that is a sexually cold woman. If one takes her own frightful word for it, that she could tear the breast from her own sucking child and dash its brains out, then the mother love seems never to have been strong within her, but rather whatever feeling she has possessed has been changed to passionate ambition. Now psychoanalytic experience teaches that when a woman remains sexually cold toward a sympathetic and potent man, this goes back to an early sealing up of affect with a forbidden, because an incest object. Such women have almost always from their tenderest infancy on loved father or brother above all and never through all their lives freed themselves from this early loved object. Though at puberty compelled to cut them off as sexual objects, yet they have held fast to them in the unconscious and become incapable of transferring to another man. It is possible also in the case of Lady Macbeth to think of such an indissoluble bond. Moreover certain features in the sleep walking scene seem to speak directly of a repressed sexual life. Lady Macbeth wanders at night, since her husband has left her and marital intercourse has been broken off.[36] In her hand is a lighted candle, which according to her express command must burn near her bed, and only now for the first time, otherwise the lady in waiting would not have laid such stress upon the fact. The candle in her hand, that is a feature which up till now we have met in none of our cases, but which, as a glance into literature teaches me, is by no means infrequently found with sleep walkers. It can hardly be considered a mere accident that Shakespeare discovered just this characteristic, which is really atypical. One would be much more inclined to suspect in it a secret, hidden meaning. Then at once a connection forces itself. We know from the infantile history of so many people that a tenderly solicitous parent, the father or the mother, likes to convince himself or herself, with a candle in the hand, that the child is asleep.[37] Then we would have on one side a motive for sleep walking in general, that one is playing the part of the loving parent, as on the other hand a motive for the lighted candle. The latter has however a symbolic sexual sense which is quite typical and is repeatedly and regularly found. The burning candle always stands for one thing and signifies in dreams as in fairy tales, folklore, and sagas without exception the same thing, an erect phallus. Now it becomes clear why Lady Macbeth, after her husband had gone to the war, has a lighted candle always burning near her bed, and why then she wanders around like a ghost with it at night. [36] This is not without significance as a direct precipitating cause, although naturally not the true source of her night wandering. [37] A second still more important motivation for the nightly visit I will discuss later. The conclusion of the words she utters during her sleep walking contains a second unmistakably sexual relationship. Here she repeats not less than five times the demand upon her husband, "To bed," while in the corresponding murder scene (II, 2) it simply reads, "Retire we to our chamber; A little water clears us of this deed." The further repetition, "Come, come, come, come, give me your hand," sounds again infantile through and through. So one speaks to a child, scarcely to an adult. It seems as if she takes the father or the mother by the hand and bids them go to bed. One recognizes already in this passage that this atypical sleep walking of Lady Macbeth also leads naturally into the sexual and the infantile. It will not be difficult to determine now toward whom the repressed, because strongly forbidden, sexual wishes of Lady Macbeth are directed. Who else could it be but her own father, the original love object of every little girl; what other person of her childhood, who later becomes an unsuitable sexual object, but yet hinders for all the future the transference of love over to the husband? This is the one who summons her to walk in her sleep, the lighted candle in her hand. It is quite an everyday experience, which holds for everyone, for the well as for every one who later becomes ill, that in reality the first love, which bears quite clearly features of sense pleasure, belongs to the earliest years of childhood, and that its objects are none other than the child's own parents and in the second place the brothers and sisters. Here the polar attraction of the sexes holds in the relation of the elder to the younger and vice versa, that is the attraction of the man to the woman and the woman to the man. It is "a natural tendency," says Freud[38] in the "Interpretation of Dreams," "for the father to indulge the little daughter, and for the mother to take the part of the sons, while both work earnestly for the education of the little ones when the magic of sex does not prejudice their judgment. The child is very well aware of any partiality, and resists that member of the parental couple who discourages it.... Thus the child obeys its own sexual impulse, and at the same time reinforces the feeling which proceeds from the parents, if it makes a selection among the parents that corresponds to theirs." [38] Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by A. A. Brill. The Macmillan Company, London, New York, 4th edition, p. 218. We will stop here at two factors which will occupy us again later, the being in love with the parent of the opposite sex, and then the resistance against the one of the same sex. Corresponding to the love, every child in the period of innocence wants to "marry" the former. I recall what a colleague told me of a dialogue between him and his little five year old daughter. She began, "I want to get married."--"To whom?"--"To you, Papa."--"I already have a wife."--"Then you would have two wives."--"That won't do."--"Very well, then I will choose a man who is as nice as you." And Freud relates (p. 219), "An eight year old girl of my acquaintance, when her mother is called from the table, takes advantage of the opportunity to proclaim herself her successor. 'Now I shall be Mamma; Charles, do you want some more vegetables? Have some, I beg you,' and so on. A particularly gifted and vivacious girl, not yet four years old, ... says outright: 'Now mother can go away; then father must marry me and I shall be his wife.'" We will add just one more little experience to give us a broader point of view. The interpretation of dreams, fairy tales and myths teaches us regularly that the phantasies of the child, like those of all peoples in their period, identify father with king or emperor. Naturally then the father's wife becomes the queen. This fact of experience, which is always to be substantiated, can be applied to Lady Macbeth and makes her ambition at once transparent to us. I affirmed above that her lack of sexual feeling toward her husband had its origin in the fact that she had loved her father too much and could not therefore free herself from him. Her sexuality had transformed itself into ambition and that, the ambition to be queen,[39] in other words, the father's wife. So could she hold fast to the infantile ideal and realize the forbidden incest. The intensity with which she pursues the ambition of her life is explained then by the glowing intensity of her sexual wishes. [39] Holinshed's chronicle lays emphasis upon this: "She ... burned with an inextinguishable desire to bear the name of queen." With Shakespeare also king and father come together. A remark of Lady Macbeth shows that when she addresses herself to the murder of Duncan. "Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done't." This physical likeness signifies identity of individuals, as we know from many analogous examples. The king therefore resembles the father because he stands for her parent. Still one more point may be well explained from her father complex. The Chronicle speaks of the overweening ambition of Lady Macbeth. Now we know from neuropsychology that burning ambition in later years represents a reaction formation to infantile bed wetting. It is the rule with such children that they are placed upon the chamber at night by father or mother. Thus we comprehend from another side, with the so frequent identification with beloved persons, precisely why the lady wanders at night with a candle in her hand. Here again appears plainly the return to the infantile erotic. Now for the grounds of her collapse. As long as Lady Macbeth is fighting only for the childish goal, she is an unshakeable rock amid the storms of danger. She shrinks from no wrong and no crime that she may be queen at her husband's side. But she must gradually perceive that her husband will never win satisfaction, he will never recover from the king-father murder, her hopes will never be fulfilled and she will never live in quiet satisfaction at the side of her father. Then her power of endurance gives way until her very soul fails utterly. As she says on the occasion of the first disappointment after Duncan's death: "Nought's had, all's spent, Where our desire is got without content; 'Tis safer to be that which we destroy, Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy." Now the unconscious, hitherto successfully repressed, avenges itself, now conscience awakes and as the husband leaves her completely alone she begins to wander, that is to seek to return to the infantile ideal. In her wandering she herself plays the rôle of father, who once approached her with the lighted candle and then called to her, "Come, come, come, come, give me your hand!" and bade her go to bed. Why however does not the ruthless Macbeth live down the murder of the king as he does in the history? I believe that we must here go still further back than to the Chronicle, even to the creator of the tragedy himself. There is a certain important crisis in Shakespeare's life, where according to the biography by George Brandes "cheerfulness, the very joy of life, was extinguished in his soul. Heavy clouds gathered over his horizon, we now do not know just what their source. Gnawing griefs and disappointments gathered within him. We see his melancholy grow and extend itself; we can observe the changing effects of this melancholy without clearly recognizing its cause. Only we feel this, that the scene of action which he sees with the inner eye of the soul has now become as black as the external scene of which he makes use. A veil of phantasy has sunk down over both. He writes no more comedies but puts a succession of dark tragedies upon the stage, which lately reëchoed to the laughter of his Rosalinds and Beatrices." This crisis came in the year 1601, when the earl of Essex and Lord Southampton, Shakespeare's special patron, were condemned to death because of treason against the life of the king. According to Brandes the depression over their fate must have been one of the original causes for the poet's beginning melancholy. Perhaps the death of Shakespeare's father, which followed some months later, made a more lasting impression with all the memories which it recalled. The dramas which the poet published about that time, Julius Cæsar, Hamlet and Macbeth, have a common theme, they all revolve about a father murder. In "Julius Cæsar," Brutus murders his fatherly friend, his mother's beloved ("And thou too, my son Brutus?"). Hamlet comes to shipwreck in his undertaking to avenge upon his uncle the father's murder, because the uncle, as Freud explains in his "Interpretation of Dreams," had at bottom done nothing else than Hamlet had wished in his childhood but had not had the self confidence to carry out. And Macbeth in the last analysis is ruined by the king and father murder, the results of which he can never overcome. We may consider this theme of the father murder, always presented in some new form, in the light of its direct precipitating causes, the actual death of Shakespeare's father and Southampton's treason against the ruling power of the state. It is not difficult to accept that at that time the infantile death wishes against his father were newly awakened in our poet himself and were then projected externally in a series of powerful dramas. Perhaps the reader, who has followed me more or less up to this point, will stop here indignant: "How could any one maintain that a genius like Shakespeare could have wished to murder his father, even if only in the phantasies of childhood?" I can only reply to this apparently justified indignation that the assumption I here make concerning Shakespeare is fundamentally and universally human and is true with every male child. We go for proof to what we have earlier discovered, that the first inclination of every child, also already erotically colored, belongs to the parent of the opposite sex, the love of the girl to the father, the leaning of the boy to his mother, while the child sets himself against the parent of the same sex, who may be only justly concerned in his education without over indulging him. The child would be most delighted to "marry" the tender parent, as we heard above, and therefore feels that the other parent stands in the way as a disturbing rival. "If the little boy," says Freud in the "Interpretation of Dreams,"[40] "is allowed to sleep at his mother's side whenever his father goes on a journey, and if after his father's return he must go back to the nursery to a person whom he likes far less, the wish may be easily actuated that his father may always be absent, in order that he may keep his place next to his dear, beautiful mamma; and the father's death is obviously a means for the attainment of this wish; for the child's experience has taught him that 'dead' folks, like grandpa, for example, are always absent; they never return." [40] Freud, _l. c._, p. 219. Yet how does the child reach such a depth of depravity as to wish his parents dead? We may answer "that the childish idea of 'being dead' has little else but the words in common with our own. The child knows nothing of the horrors of decay, of shivering in the cold grave, of the terror of the infinite Nothing.... Fear of death is strange to the child, therefore it plays with the horrible word.... Being dead means for the child, which has been spared the scenes of suffering previous to dying, the same as 'being gone,' not disturbing the survivors any more. The child does not distinguish the manner and means by which this absence is brought about, whether by traveling, estrangement or death.... If, then, the child has motives for wishing the absence of another child, every restraint is lacking which would prevent it from clothing this wish in the form that the child may die."[41] It may be conjectured, if we apply this to Shakespeare, that also this greatest of all dramatists repeatedly during his childhood wished his father dead and that this appeared in consciousness agitating him afresh at the actual decease of the father and impelled him to those dramas which had the father murder as their theme. Moreover the father's calling, for he was not only a tanner but also a butcher, who stuck animals with a knife, may have influenced the form of his death wishes as well as of their later reappearances in the great dramas. [41] Freud, _l. c._, pp. 215, 216. The evil thoughts against the father in the child psyche by no means exclude the fact that at the same time there are present with them tender impulses, feelings of warmest love. This is indeed the rule according to all experience and can be proved also with Shakespeare. This other side of his childish impulse leads for example to the powerful ambition which we find as a chief characteristic of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, as in truth of the poet himself. We know that when the latter was a boy his father became bankrupt. He had not only lost everything which he himself possessed, his wife's dowry and his position as alderman, but was also so deeply in debt at this time that he had to guard himself against arrest. Once more I let Brandes express it: "The object of Shakespeare's desire was not in the first place either the calling of a poet or fame as an actor, but wealth and that chiefly as a means for social advance. He took very much to heart his father's decline in material fortune and official respect. He held passionately from his youth up to the purpose to reëstablish the name and the position of his family.... His father had not dared to go along the streets, fearing to be arrested for debt. He himself as a young man had been whipped at the command of the landowner and thrown into jail. The small town which had been the witness of these humiliations should be witness of the restoration of his honor. Where he had been spoken of as the actor and playwright of doubtful fame, there would he be seen again as the honored possessor of house and land. There and elsewhere should the people, who had counted him among the proletariat, learn to know him as a gentleman, that is as a member of the lesser nobility.... In the year 1596 his father, apparently at his instigation and with his support, entered a petition at Heralds College for the bestowal of a coat of arms. The granting of the coat of arms signified the ceremonial entry into the gentry." The ambition of the small child is to become as great as the father, and so later that of the man is to exalt the father himself, to make him king. One sees how close and how very personal the theme of ambition was to Shakespeare. Before I go on to analyze further what the poet has woven into his treatment of "Macbeth" from his own purely personal experience, we must first consider a technical factor which is common to all dramatists. It has been discovered that Shakespeare projected his own complexes into his tragedies, complexes which are in no way simple, but which show, for example, close to the hatred even as great a love as well as other contrary elements. He is fond of separating his dramatic projection into two personalities wherever his feeling is an ambivalent one, these two forms standing in contrast to one another. He splits his ego into two persons, each of which corresponds to only one single emotional impulse. That is a discovery which of course was not made for the first time by psychoanalysis. Minor, for instance, writes in his book on Schiller: "Only in conjunction with Carlos does Posa represent Schiller's whole nature, the wild passion of the one is the expression of the sensual side, the noble exaltation of the other the stoical side of his nature.... Schiller has not drawn this figure from external nature; it has not come to him from without but he has taken it deep from his inner being." Otto Ludwig expresses himself similarly: "Goethe often separates a man into two poetic forms, Faust-Mephisto, Clavigo-Carlos." It is plainly to be seen, if we apply our recognition of this fact to Shakespeare, that he has projected his ego affect into Macbeth as well as his wife, which gives numerous advantages. So far we have considered Lady Macbeth merely as a complete dramatic character, which she is first of all. Besides this nevertheless she surely corresponds to a splitting of Shakespeare's affect, for the poet incorporates in her his instincts for ruthless ambition. He has worked over the character already given her by the Chronicle for his own exculpation. It was stated previously that Macbeth in the first two acts is by no means the bloodthirsty tyrant of Holinshed and really stands far behind his wife in ambition. It is as if our poet, who plainly stands behind his hero, wished thereby to say, I am not capable of a father murder and would surely have put it off or not have accomplished it at all, if I had not been compelled by a woman's influence. Macbeth will go no further in the affair in spite of all favorable outward circumstances, but it is Lady Macbeth who forces the deed to completion. The final cause of every father hatred is rivalry in regard to the mother and so it was she, represented by Lady Macbeth, who in his phantasy would have urged the infantile Shakespeare to put his father out of the way. Here branches out another path for the sleep walking. We have so far spoken only of the father who comes at night to the child, but now Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep, seems also to represent Shakespeare's mother, who with the candle in her hand convinces herself that her darling child is sleeping soundly.[42] [42] Going back into Shakespeare's own life gives further illumination and foundation for Lady Macbeth's behavior in the sleep walking scene. The reader may already have secretly thought that those little tendernesses on the part of ordinary parents hardly enter into consideration in the case of a thane's daughter. It may be said in answer to this that Shakespeare often, as in the presentation of ancient scenes, put without scruple the environment of his own time in place of the historical setting. And according to the above he would be quite likely to utilize with Lady Macbeth recollections from the Stratford childhood. It need not seem strange that I give a number of interpretations apparently so fundamentally different for one and the same thing. There is nothing on earth more complicated than psychic things, among which poetic creation belongs. Psychic phenomena are according to all experience never simply built up nor simply grounded but always brought together in manifold form. Whoever presses deeply into them discovers behind every psychic manifestation without exception an abundance of relationships and overdeterminations. We are accustomed in the natural sciences to simple motivation, on the one side cause, on the other effect. In the psychic life it is quite otherwise. Only a superficial psychology is satisfied with single causes. So manifold a chain of circumstances, those that lie near at hand and those more remotely connected, come into play in most, yes, apparently in all cases, that one scarcely has the right to assert that a psychic phenomenon has been completely explained. Dream analysis at once proves this. One can almost always rightfully take it for granted that several, indeed manifold interpretations are correct. It is best to think of a stratified structure. In the most superficial layer lies the most obvious explanation, in the second a somewhat more hidden one, and in yet deeper strata broader and more remote relationships and all have their part more or less in the manifested phenomenon. This latter is more or less well motivated. We now turn back to Shakespeare and observe the great depression under which he labored just at the time when he created his greatest tragedies. Does it seem too presumptuous to conceive that one so shaken and dejected psychically should have slept badly and even possibly--we know so little of his life--walked in his sleep? The poet always hastened to repress[43] whatever personal revelations threatened to press through too plainly, as we know from many proofs. The poverty of motivation quite unusual with Shakespeare, just at the critical point of the sleep walking, seems to me to score for such a repression. We might perhaps say that the fact that the poet has introduced to such slight extent the wandering of Lady Macbeth, has given it so little connection with what went before, is due simply to this, that all sorts of most personal relationships were too much involved to allow him to be more explicit. See how Lady Macbeth comforted Macbeth directly after the frightful deed, the king and father murder: "Consider it not so deeply. . . . . . . . . . These deeds must not be thought After these ways; so, it will make us mad." [43] Otto Rank in his book, "Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage," furnishes a beautiful and convincing example of such repression: It comes from a second drama based on a king's murder, "Julius Cæsar." I quote from the author's words: "A heightened significance and at the same time an incontrovertible conclusiveness is given to our whole conception and interpretation of the son relationship of Brutus to Cæsar by the circumstance that in the historical source, which Shakespeare evidently used and which he followed almost word for word, namely in Plutarch, it is shown that Cæsar considered Brutus his illegitimate son. In this sense Cæsar's outcry, which has become a catch-word, may be understood, which he may have uttered again and again when he saw Brutus pressing upon his body with drawn sword, 'And you too my son Brutus?' With Shakespeare the wounded Cæsar merely calls out, 'Et tu Brute! Then fall, Cæsar!' Shakespeare has set aside this son relationship of Brutus to Cæsar, though doubtless known to the poet, in his working out of the traditional sources. Not only is there deep psychic ground for the modifications to which the poet subjects the historical and traditional circumstances and characters or the conceptions of his predecessor, but also for the omissions from the sources. These originate from the repressive tendency toward the exposure of impulses which work painfully and which are restrained as a result of the repression, and this was doubtless the case with Shakespeare in regard to his strongly affective father complex." Rank has in the same work demonstrated that this father complex runs through all of Shakespeare's dramatic work, from his first work, "Titus Andronicus," down to his very last tragedy. I cannot go into detail on this important point for my task here is merely to explain Lady Macbeth's sleep walking, but any one who is interested may find overwhelming abundance of evidence in Rank's book on incest (Chapter 6). It is not only that I have introduced Shakespeare's strong father complex here to make comprehensible Lady Macbeth's sleep walking, but his own chief complex stood affectively in the foreground, and was worked out, at the same time, as Macbeth. This must have referred to Shakespeare as much as to his hero. Moreover the writing and sealing of the letter at the beginning of the sleep walking described by the lady in waiting seems as if Lady Macbeth had a secret, a confession to make--in the name of the poet. I think also at the end, when the everlasting brooding over her deed drives her to suicide, she dies as a substitute for her intellectual creator, for his own self punishment.[44] [44] I also recall that it is in fact she who expresses Duncan's character as father, "Had he not so resembled my father...." There remain yet only one or two points to be touched upon and explained. No discussion is needed for the fact that an outspoken sadistic nature in Lady Macbeth leads her to walk in her sleep, indeed, disposes her to it. We can easily understand also that this breaks forth just at the moment when her husband sets out, that is, translated into the infantile, when Macbeth, or in the deeper layer her own father, dies. It is much more necessary to explain why immediately after the deed she has no scruples in staining the chamberlains with Duncan's blood and takes the affair so lightly, while later she is never rid of the fear of the blood and is always striving in vain to wash her hands clean. Here it must be again recalled that Lady Macbeth on the one hand represents the actual wife of Macbeth, on the other hand the poet himself and in two epochs of his life; Shakespeare first in his unrestrained striving and then when he is brought low, shaken in his very depths by the death of his father. Murder phantasies toward his father came to him as a boy and then as a youth at the beginning of puberty, and yet at neither time was he ill. The more mature man however, borne down more heavily by life, met by the actual death of his father, broke down under the weight of things. This explains in the last analysis the change in the attitude of Lady Macbeth. I do not know how far the reader is willing to follow me. Yet one thing I believe I have proved, that also in Lady Macbeth's sleep walking the erotic is not wanting nor the regression into the infantile. CONCLUSION AND RÉSUMÉ If now at the close of this book we bring together all our material, we may with certainty or with the highest probability speak of sleep walking and moon walking as follows: 1. Sleep walking under or without the influence of the moon represents a motor outbreak of the unconscious and serves, like the dream, the fulfilment of secret, forbidden wishes, first of the present, behind which however infantile wishes regularly hide. Both prove themselves in all the cases analyzed more or less completely as of a sexual erotic nature. 2. Those wishes also which present themselves without disguise are mostly of the same nature. The leading wish may be claimed to be that the sleep walker, male or female, would climb into bed with the loved object as in childhood, which both the folk and the poet well know. The love object need not belong necessarily to the present, it can much more likely be one of earliest childhood. 3. Not infrequently the sleep walker identifies himself with the beloved person, sometimes even puts on his clothes, linen or outer garments, or imitates his manner to the life. 4. Sleep walking can also have an infantile prototype, when the child pretends to be asleep in order that it may be able, without fear of punishment, to experience all sorts of forbidden things, that is of a sexual nature, because it cannot be held accountable for that which it does "unconsciously, in its sleep." The same motive of not being held accountable actuates the adult sleep walker, who will satisfy his sexual desires, yet without incurring guilt in so doing. The same cause works also psychically, when sleep walking occurs mostly in the very deepest sleep, even if organic causes are likewise responsible for it. 5. The motor outbreak during sleep, which drives one from rest in bed and results in sleep walking and wandering under the light of the moon, may be referred to this, that all sleep walkers exhibit a heightened muscular irritability and muscle erotic, the endogenous excitement of which can compensate for the giving up of the rest in bed. In accordance with this these phenomena are especially frequent in the offspring of alcoholics, epileptics, sadists and hysterics with preponderating involvement of the motor apparatus. 6. Sleep walking and moon walking are in themselves as little symptoms of hysteria as of epilepsy. Yet they are found frequently in conjunction with the former. 7. The influence of the moon in this moon affectivity is very little known, especially in its psychic overdetermination. Yet there is little doubt that the moon's light is reminiscent of the light in the hand of a beloved parent, who every night came in loving solicitude to assure himself or herself of the child's sleep. Nothing so promptly wakes the sleep walker as the calling of his name, which accords with his being spoken to as a child by the parent. Fixed gazing upon the planet also has probably an erotic coloring like the staring of the hypnotizer to secure hypnosis. Other psychic overdeterminations appear merely to fit individual cases. It is possible finally that there actually exists a special power of attraction in the moon, which may expressly force the moon walker out of his bed and entice him to longer walks, but on this point we have no scientific hypotheses. 8. Furthermore it seems possible that sleep walking and moon walking may be permanently cured through Freud's psychoanalytic method. I know very well that this explanation which I give here, offers only the first beginning of an understanding. It will be the task of a future, which we hope is not too far distant, to comprehend fully these puzzling phenomena. INDEX "Aebelö," ix, 45 Alcoholics, 137 descendants of, 25 Alcoholism, 1 Anorexia, hysteric, 76 Anxiety dreams, 41 Anzengruber, Ludwig, ix, 106 Audition, color, 91 Blood, 3, 15, 17, 20 Burdach, Karl Friedrich, 35 "Buschnovelle," 91 Buttocks, 7 moon as, 19 Cataleptic muscular rigidity, 25 Color audition, 74, 91 Compulsion, 6 Compulsive neurotic, 77, 91 Conception, Immaculate, 62, 73 unconscious, 62, 73 Concussion of the brain, 2 Consciousness, disturbances of, 32 Contractures, 25 Convulsion, hysterical, 85, 90 Convulsions, 25 muscular, 90 Convulsive attacks, 2, 7, 25 Cruelty, 25 Dream, Function of, x relationship between sleep-walking and, 21 Dreams, anxiety, 41 frightful, 7 of Gro, 61 terrifying, 25 Dysuria psychica, 27 Eclamptic attacks, 2 Enuresis nocturna, 2 pleasure in, 29 Enuretic, 1 Epilepsy, viii, 1, 138 Epileptics, 137 descendants of, 25 Eroticism, muscle, 63 urethral, 2 vaginal, 3 Erotic, muscle, 8, 25, 31, 42, 90, 137 nature, 23 urethral, 27 Exhibition, 22 Exhibitionism, 36 Exhibitionistic, 70 Folk belief, 62 interpretation, 82 mind, 24 tale, 81 Frenssen, Gustav, ix, 63 Freud, 104, 127, 130, 131 Freud's psychoanalytic method, 138 Ganghofer, Ludwig, ix, 40 Ghostly hour, 27, 81 Ghosts, belief in, 26 Hemoptysis, 3, 15, 20 Holinshed's "History of Scotland," 115 Homosexual, 2 Homosexuality, 20 Hypnosis, 138 Hypnotic fixation, 26 somnambulism, viii, 22 Hypnotism, love transference in, 26 Hypnotist, 23 Hypnotized subject, 23 Hysteria, viii, 33, 138 Hysteric, 30 Hysteric anorexia, 76 Hysterical cardiac distress, 27 convulsion, 85, 90 opisthotonos, 86 somnambulism, viii tendency, 91 Hysterics, 25, 75, 137 Immaculate conception, 62, 73 Infantile causes, 113 erotic, 71 regression, 136 sexuality, 21 "Interpretation of Dreams," 127, 130, 131 "Jörn Uhl," 63 Kleist, Heinrich von, ix, 46, 97 Krafft-Ebing, viii, 20, 25 "Lebensmagie, Wirklichkeit und Traum," 92 Libido, 23 repressed, 10 Ludwig, Otto, ix, 45, 72, 91 "Macbeth," 114 Macbeth, Lady, 114 "Maria," 72 Masochistic, sadistic, 7 Menstruation, 3, 15, 17, 30, 70 Michaelis, Sophus, ix, 45 Moonstruck, vii Motor activities, 23 impulse, 70 overexcitability, 26 phenomena of dreams, viii, ix stimulability, 25 Mundt, Theodor, 92 Muscular activity, 31, 70 convulsions, 90 excitability, 63, 90 irritability, heightened, 137 rigidity, cataleptic, 25 sense, viii Muscle erotic, 8, 25, 27, 31, 42, 90, 137 eroticism, 63 Myopia, 77, 91 Nates, 26 Neurotic, compulsive, 77 Neuroses, 22 Night wandering, vii Noctambulism, vii Nosebleed, 30 Organic disposition, 25 Orgasm, 2 Paralysis of arm, 26 Paralyses, 25 Pavor nocturnus, 25 Phantasies, sexual, 17, 19 Poets, 24, 45 "Prinz von Homburg, Der," 97 Psychoanalysis for moon walking, ix Puberty, 21, 41, 80, 82 Rank, Otto, 102, 134 Regression, 113, 136 Repressed libido, 10 Repression, 60 Sadistic, 20, 25 Sadistic-masochistic, 2, 7 Sadism, 8 blood, 2 Sadists, 137 Shakespeare, ix, 114 Sleep, normal, vii, viii Somnambulism, vii, 22 hysterical and hypnotic, viii Somnambulist, 23 Spirits, belief in, 26 Splitting of mother complex, 77 "Sündkind, Das," 106 Synesthesia, 74, 91 Talking in sleep, 7, 33 Tic, 90 Tieck, Ludwig, ix, 42, 124 Transference in hypnotism, 26 Unconscious conception, 62, 73 Urethral erotic, 27 eroticism, 2 Vaginal eroticism, 3 "Woman in white," 26 Publishers of The Psychoanalytic Review A Journal Devoted to the Understanding of Human Conduct Edited by WILLIAM A. WHITE, M.D., and SMITH ELY JELLIFFE, M.D. Leading Articles Which Have Appeared in Previous Volumes VOL. I. (Beginning November, 1913.) The Theory of Psychoanalysis. C. G. Jung. Psychoanalysis of Self-Mutilation. L. E. Emerson. Blindness as a Wish. T. H. Ames. The Technique of Psychoanalysis. S. E. Jelliffe. Wishfulfillment and Symbolism in Fairy Tales. Riklin. Character and the Neuroses. Trigant Burrow. The Wildisbush Crucified Saint. Theodore Schroeder. The Pragmatic Advantage of Freudo-Analysis. Knight Dunlap. Moon Myth in Medicine. William A. White. The Sadism of Oscar Wilde's "Salome." Isador H. Coriat. Psychoanalysis and Hospitals. L. E. Emerson. The Dream as a Simple Wishfulfillment in the Negro. John E. Lind. VOL. II. (Beginning January, 1915.) The Principles of Pain-Pleasure and Reality. Paul Federn. The Unconscious. William A. White. A Plea for a Broader Standpoint in Psychoanalysis. Meyer Solomon. Contributions to the Pathology of Everyday Life; Their Relation to Abnormal Mental Phenomena. Robert Stewart Miller. The Integrative Functions of the Nervous System Applied to Some Reactions in Human Behavior and their Attending Psychic Functions. Edward J. Kempf. A Manic-Depressive Upset Presenting Frank Wish-Realization Construction. Ralph Reed. Psychoanalytic Parallels. William A. White. Rôle of Sexual Complex in Dementia Præcox. James C. Hassall. Psycho-Genetics of Androcratic Evolution. Theodore Schroeder. Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental Sciences. Otto Rank and Hans Sachs. Some Studies in the Psychopathology of Acute Dissociation of the Personality. Edward J. Kempf. Psychoanalysis. Arthur H. Ring. A Philosophy for Psychoanalysis. L. E. Emerson. VOL. III. (Beginning January, 1916.) Symbolism. William A. White. The Work of Alfred Adler, Considered with Especial Reference to that of Freud. James J. Putnam. Art in the Insane. L. Grimberg. Retaliation Dreams. Hansell Crenshaw. History of the Psychoanalytic Movement. Sigmund Freud. Clinical Cases Exhibiting Unconscious Defence Reactions. Francis H. Shockley. Processes of Recovery in Schizophrenics. H. Bertschinger. Freud and Sociology. Ernest R. Groves. The Ontogenetic Against the Phylogenetic Elements in the Psychoses of the Colored Race. Arrah B. Evarts. Discomfiture and Evil Spirits. Elsie Clews Parsons. Two Very Definite Wish-Fulfillment Dreams. C. B. Burr. VOL. IV. (Beginning January, 1917.) Individuality and Introversion. William A. White. A Study of a Severe Case of Compulsion Neurosis. H. W. Frink. A Summary of Material on the Topical Community of Primitive and Pathological Symbols ("Archeopathic" Symbols). F. L. Wells. A Literary Forerunner of Freud. Helen Williston Brown. The Technique of Dream Interpretation. Wilhelm Steckel. The Social and Sexual Behavior of Infrahuman Primates with some Comparable Facts in Human Behavior. Edw. J. Kempf. Pain as a Reaction of Defence. H. B. Moyle. Some Statistical Results of the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychoneuroses. Isador H. Coriat. The Rôle of Animals in the Unconscious. S. E. Jelliffe and L. Brink. The Genesis and Meaning of Homosexuality. Trigant Burrow. Phylogenetic Elements in the Psychoses of the Negro. John E. Lind. Freudian Elements in the Animism of the Niger Delta. E. R. Groves. The Mechanism of Transference. William A. White. The Future of Psychoanalysis. Isador H. Coriat. Hermaphroditic Dreams. Isador H. Coriat. The Psychology of "The Yellow Jacket." E. J. Kempf. Heredity and Self-Conceit. Mabel Stevens. The Long Handicap. Helen R. Hull. VOL. V. (Beginning January, 1918.) Analysis of a Case of Manic-Depressive Psychosis Showing well-marked Regressive Stages. Lucile Dooley. Reactions to Personal Names. C. P. Oberndorf. A Study of the Mental Life of the Child. H. von Hug-Hellmuth. An Interpretation of Certain Symbolisms. J. J. Putnam. Charles Darwin--The Affective Source of His Inspiration and Anxiety Neurosis. Edw. J. Kempf. The Origin of the Incest-Awe. Trigant Burrow. Compulsion and Freedom: The Fantasy of the Willow Tree. S. E. Jelliffe and L. Brink. A Case of Childhood Conflicts with Prominent Reference to the Urinary System: with some General Considerations on Urinary Symptoms in the Psychoneuroses and Psychoses. C. Macfie Campbell. The Hound of Heaven. Thomas Vernon Moore. A Lace Creation Revealing an Incest Fantasy. Arrah B. Evarts. Nephew and Maternal Uncle: A Motive of Early Literature in the Light of Freudian Psychology. Albert K. Weinberg. All the leading foreign psychoanalytic journals are regularly abstracted, and all books dealing with psychoanalysis are reviewed. Issued Quarterly: $5.00 per Volume. Single Copies: $1.50 Foreign, $5.60. Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company 3617 Tenth Street, N. W. WASHINGTON, D. C. [ Transcriber's Note: The following is a list of corrections made to the original. The first line is the original line, the second the corrected one. 29. A Study of the Mental Life of the Child. $2.00. By Dr. H. Von 29. A Study of the Mental Life of the Child. $2.00. By Dr. H. von Conclusion and Resumé 137 Conclusion and Résumé 137 of importance to medical pschology. The author of this book has pursued of importance to medical psychology. The author of this book has pursued writers of these preceding science have made in regard to sleep walking writers of the preceding science have made in regard to sleep walking [1] Über Nachtwandeln und Mondsucht. Eine medizinish-literarische [1] Über Nachtwandeln und Mondsucht. Eine medizinisch-literarische Sechzentes Heft, Leipzig und Wien, Franz Deuticke, 1914. Sechzehntes Heft, Leipzig und Wien, Franz Deuticke, 1914. [6] "Über den sado-masochistichen Komplex," Jahr. f. psychoanal. [6] "Über den sado-masochistischen Komplex," Jahrb. f. psychoanal. sleep. In the same way similar erotic motives and analagous behavior may sleep. In the same way similar erotic motives and analogous behavior may it for him. Then I went to bed and slept soundly for some hours, as I it for him.' Then I went to bed and slept soundly for some hours, as I no sign of waking. This must represent a second form of consciounsess, no sign of waking. This must represent a second form of consciousness, "At that time I had to sleep in a small room which by brother had "At that time I had to sleep in a small room which my brother had Before going to sleep I always barred the door of the room, which near "Before going to sleep I always barred the door of the room, which near brothr-in-law Emil had first taken breakfast with her mother in her brother-in-law Emil had first taken breakfast with her mother in her maiden in her nightgown, who thus exhibits hereself in her night garment maiden in her nightgown, who thus exhibits herself in her night garment perform coitus."--How is that?"--"I have remonstrated rather seriously perform coitus."--"How is that?"--"I have remonstrated rather seriously mother call you, or did you come of yourself?"--I believe that my mother call you, or did you come of yourself?"--"I believe that my gone he could do nothing more to the mother. And they you could take his gone he could do nothing more to the mother. And then you could take his again"--"Or rather, I bolt the door so that my father cannot come to my again."--"Or rather, I bolt the door so that my father cannot come to my in!'--"That would mean also that if the mother wants to come, only she in!'"--"That would mean also that if the mother wants to come, only she he answered me, 'Yes, here I am!'--"What about the warden of the he answered me, 'Yes, here I am!'"--"What about the warden of the myself immediately, realizing where I was, and went beck to bed. I told myself immediately, realizing where I was, and went back to bed. I told episode: 'When I was nine or ten years old, the healthy brother was ill episode: "When I was nine or ten years old, the healthy brother was ill lunacy but of a vertable moon lover, presumably our poet himself. There lunacy but of a veritable moon lover, presumably our poet himself. There all this he did not become so quickly aware, as that his own checks all this he did not become so quickly aware, as that his own cheeks with massive oak or iron bars. So finally he gave up entirely and with massive oak or iron bars. "So finally he gave up entirely and surrounded her. He compelled himeslf to leave the clear broad way of surrounded her. He compelled himself to leave the clear broad way of look would draw from me--what would you drag out from my soul?--'The look would draw from me--what would you drag out from my soul?'--'The occurred to her the many nights when she had dreamed of the lonely occurred to her the many nights "when she had dreamed of the lonely his fresh dream kissees. Still she consciously kept back every outer his fresh dream kisses. Still she consciously kept back every outer I can deal more briefly with Jörn Uhl," the well-known rural romance of I can deal more briefly with "Jörn Uhl," the well-known rural romance of not yet late"--"The sky is so clear. I want to look at the stars once not yet late."--"The sky is so clear. I want to look at the stars once child and in his way solemnly declares "I will never do it again," and child and in his way solemnly declares, "I will never do it again," and for reverence.'" for reverence." is the love--one can call it nothing else--which the child betows upon is the love--one can call it nothing else--which the child bestows upon now for the first time a child no more. Maria thus felt herself through now for the first time a child no more." Maria thus felt herself through manner." Only all to evident! This punishment was in reality a manner." Only all too evident! This punishment was in reality a The friendliness, the affectionate regard, which spoke so unmistakably "The friendliness, the affectionate regard, which spoke so unmistakably good. Since she could not yet entirely believe she asked, "Is it indeed good." Since she could not yet entirely believe she asked, "Is it indeed and said confusedly, "See this beautiful child, Eisener, Sir!" Maria and said confusedly, 'See this beautiful child, Eisener, Sir!'" Maria premonition of a happy life with Eisener and her George." premonition of a happy life with Eisener and her George. [25] Cf. with this especially Ernest Jentsch, "Das Pathologische bei [25] Cf. with this especially Ernst Jentsch, "Das Pathologische bei [27] Rhapsodies over the Employment of the Psychical Method of [27] "Rhapsodies over the Employment of the Psychical Method of the laurel wreath, saying, "Dearest Natalie, Why run away from me?" and the laurel wreath, saying, "Dearest Natalie! Why run away from me?" and Who lately had arrived at our encampment?' Who lately had arrived at our encampment?" Kruges," ("The Broken Pitcher.") These daintiest hands belonged to his Kruges." ("The Broken Pitcher.") These daintiest hands belonged to his limits but becomes much more a peculiar neurotic charactertistic. No less limits but becomes much more a peculiar neurotic characteristic. No less in life, by displacing it over upon a discovered or given material. in life, by displacing it over a discovered or given material. everything as possible and is ready to sacrifiee even the hand of the everything as possible and is ready to sacrifice even the hand of the the justice of the sentence--I might almost has said, after he had asked the justice of the sentence--I might almost have said, after he had asked not only remorse seized him but be began to curse at the folk, who see not only remorse seized him but he began to curse at the folk, who see 'that's the end,' and there remains nothing more to tell." Soon he 'that's the end, and there remains nothing more to tell.'" Soon he The multitudinous seas incarnardine, The multitudinous seas incarnadine, his bloody hands, "This is a sorry sight"! It was only a foolish his bloody hands, "This is a sorry sight!" It was only a foolish come, give me your hand!' and bade her go to bed. come, give me your hand!" and bade her go to bed. phantasies of childhood? I can only reply to this apparently justified phantasies of childhood?" I can only reply to this apparently justified their later reappearancess in the great dramas. their later reappearances in the great dramas. apparently so fundamentally different for one and the same thing, There apparently so fundamentally different for one and the same thing. There calls out, "Et tu Brute! Then fall, Cæsar!" Shakespeare has set aside calls out, 'Et tu Brute! Then fall, Cæsar!' Shakespeare has set aside Conception, Immacuate, 62, 73 Conception, Immaculate, 62, 73 Epilepsy, iv, 1, 138 Epilepsy, viii, 1, 138 ]