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REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 

 BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 Religion and Medicine (co-author) 
 
 Abnormal Psychology 
 
 The Meaning of Dreams 
 
 What is Psychoanalysis? 
 
 The Hysteria of Lady Macbeth 
 
REPRESSED 
 EMOTIONS 
 
 BY 
 
 ISADOR H. CORIAT, M.D. 
 
 Author of "What is Psychoanalysis?" 
 "Abnormal Psychology," etc. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 BKENTANO'S 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
■ Li* 
 
 Copyright, 1920, by 
 BRENTANO'S 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 NOV -4 1920 
 "©CU 6 0138a 
 
TO MY WIFE 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 Introduction . 1 
 
 I The Meaning of Repressed Emotion . 7 
 
 II Repressed Emotions in Primitive Soci- 
 ety 58 
 
 III Repressed Emotions in Literature . . 88 
 
 IV The Sublimation of Repressed Emo- 
 
 tions 138 
 
 V The Development of Psychoanalysis . 164 
 
 VI The Depth of the Unconscious . .184 
 
 VII A Fairy Tale from the Unconscious . 194 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Psychology in both its academic and 
 practical aspects is now at the parting of the 
 ways and the immediate future will deter- 
 mine whether it shall remain unproductive 
 or become an instrument of practical impor- 
 tance in the guidance of human interests. 
 As Harvey, by training, a physician, dis- 
 covered the circulation of the blood and so 
 made modern physiology possible, so Freud, 
 also trained as a physician has devised new 
 avenues of approach to the understanding 
 of the human mind through the conceptions 
 of psychoanalysis. 
 
 There is a strange but perfectly natural 
 analogy between the utterances of a seven- 
 teenth century scientist and that of a twenti- 
 eth in the consciousness that each has per- 
 ceived the inner meaning of his great dis- 
 covery. Harvey states for instance, — "But 
 what remains to be said upon the quantity 
 
 [i] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 and source of the blood which thus passes, 
 is of so novel and unheard-of character, that 
 I not only fear injury to myself from the 
 envy of the few, but I tremble lest I have 
 mankind at large for my enemies, so much 
 doth want and custom, that become as an- 
 other nature, and doctrine once sown and 
 that hath struck deep root, and respect for 
 antiquity influence all men. Still the die is 
 cast, and my trust is in my love of truth, and 
 the candor that inheres in cultivated minds." 
 Three centuries later Freud was led to make 
 a similar statement, with a scientific candor 
 which showed his profundity of mind and 
 his sincerity of purpose. "In my continued 
 occupation with the problems considered 
 therein, for the study of which my practice 
 as a psychotherapeutist affords me much op- 
 portunity, I found nothing that would com- 
 pel me to change or improve my ideas. I 
 can therefore peacefully wait until the read- 
 er's comprehension has risen to my level, or 
 
 [2] 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 until an intelligent critic has pointed out to 
 me the basic faults in my conception." 
 
 Psychoanalysis has shown that what is 
 termed "abnormal" is merely an exaggera- 
 tion of certain traits as they manifest them- 
 selves in everyday life, for instance, the for- 
 getting of familiar words has the same mech- 
 anism as the repressions in the neuroses. The 
 psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious is 
 unique, since it demonstrates that all the 
 facts of consciousness cannot be gathered by 
 mere experimental introspection in the lab- 
 oratory and that the so-called free associa- 
 tions, on which experimental psychology has 
 laid so much stress, are not free at all, but 
 are definitely motivated by either antecedent 
 experiences or unconscious mechanisms. It 
 is this theory of psychical determinism which 
 explains not only the psychology of every- 
 day life, but also dreams and neurotic mani- 
 festations. Various mental concepts such 
 as determinism, the displacement of the emo- 
 
 [3] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 tions, the dynamic pature of the mental pro- 
 cesses, repression, the wish as the key to con- 
 scious and unconscious thinking, the various 
 levels of the unconscious, are thus clearly ex- 
 plained for the first time through psycho- 
 analytic investigation. Neurotic symptoms, 
 defects of the memory, slips of the tongue, 
 are not accidental trends but have a definite 
 psychological meaning and purpose — but 
 this meaning and purpose can be disclosed 
 only through the technical devices of psycho- 
 analysis. 
 
 The human mind is ever on the alert to 
 protect itself through repression into the un- 
 conscious from painful memories and anx- 
 ieties, but sometimes this repression over- 
 steps itself and leads to all sorts of neurotic 
 disturbances, through what is technically 
 termed, "a flight into disease." Psycho- 
 analysis is the method of probing into these 
 unconscious psychological settings. All 
 psychoanalysis leads to the realm of the un- 
 
 [4] 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 conscious, that strange mental world, bar- 
 baric, primitive, the repository of repressed 
 emotions, of a sort of elemental Titan, which 
 at times pushes the censorship aside and al- 
 lows these infantile emotions to invade con- 
 sciousness. There they are perceived like a 
 foreign body and manifest themselves in anx- 
 ieties, fears, depression, and compulsive 
 thinking. On the contrary, in the uncon- 
 scious are also precipitated those mental 
 traits which aid in the formation of charac- 
 ter and in the development of social con- 
 sciousness, both of which are so important 
 for adjustment to the realities and struggles 
 of everyday life. It is the task of the psy- 
 choanalysis to investigate the origin of these 
 hidden repressions through the technical 
 methods which have been devised in the de- 
 velopment of the science. 
 
 Whenever the principles of psychoanaly- 
 sis have been applied, particularly in the 
 unique concept of unconscious thinking, 
 
 [5] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 either to therapeutics or to cultural or social 
 problems, the various utilizations fit accu- 
 rately. Psychoanalysis has also shown that 
 human motives cannot be explained by or- 
 dinary superficial reactions, but behind these 
 reactions lie repressions and resistances of 
 which the individual is unaware and which 
 guide his thinking like an unknown force. 
 The unconscious, emotional settings of all 
 minds are alike, they differ only in their con- 
 scious rationalizations and methods of in- 
 tellectual approach. 
 
 The reader must bear in mind that the 
 subject matter of this volume deals more 
 with repressed feelings than with groups of 
 ideas technically known as complexes. 
 
 Parts of Chapter II, and of Chapters IV 
 and V, have been taken with certain modifi- 
 cations and additions from my papers in the 
 Psychoanalytic Review and the Journal of 
 Abnormal Psychology. 
 
 ISADOR H. CORIAT. 
 
 Boston, March 1920. 
 
 [6] 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE MEANING OF REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 Emotional repression is the defense of 
 conscious thinking from mental processes 
 which are painful. This provides not only 
 a method of mental protection, but if it 
 fails, it may lead to severe neurotic dis- 
 turbances. In the process of repression 
 there is a continual conflict between the 
 primitive emotions as they exist in the un- 
 conscious and the more highly evolved hu- 
 man impulses in consciousness. The me- 
 chanism of repression lies at the root of 
 Freud's entire conception of the human 
 mind and psychoanalysis cannot be under- 
 stood unless the theory of repression is 
 clearly comprehended. Repression accom- 
 panies the individual at every stage of men- 
 
 [7] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 tal development, from the primitive psyche 
 of the child to the highly complex integra- 
 tions of the adult mind. 
 
 In the course of development of the in- 
 dividual, certain powerful components of 
 the mental life, particularly referring to the 
 sexual impulse, may undergo a repression. 
 Before this repression became a social factor 
 it was first an individual phenomenon of 
 great importance. From the earliest dawn 
 of history, certain emotions were pushed 
 aside and psychological barriers erected to 
 prevent them entering into the field of con- 
 sciousness. Repression is not suspension of 
 the forbidden ideas or emotions. These 
 ideas or emotions, although thrust into the 
 unconscious, are as specifically active, as full 
 of energy, as though clearly recognized in 
 conscious thinking. These unconscious 
 forces are of great importance in the de- 
 velopment of the race or the individual. 
 For the former they may lead to all sorts of 
 
 [8] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 mental epidemics which from time to time 
 sweep over society, for the latter, they may 
 act as forms of defense from painful ideas 
 or as symptom creators of a future neurosis. 
 This concept of emotional repression is 
 very important for psychoanalysis. It leads 
 not only to an understanding of the various 
 types of neuroses, and those tricks of mind 
 which produce the forgetting of familiar 
 words, but at the same time its social im- 
 portance is such, that civilized society would 
 rapidly become a chaos if it were not for the 
 action of individual repression in protecting 
 the human personality and in erecting cer- 
 tain social barriers. Even among primitive 
 tribes there exist certain religious and moral 
 prohibitions, which are really forms of in- 
 dividual and social repression. The savage, 
 although he appears more at ease than civ- 
 ilized man and may experience no sense of 
 shame in his nakedness, is yet enmeshed by 
 certain tribal prohibitions termed taboos, 
 
 [9] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 which are the oldest unwritten code of human 
 laws. 
 
 Psychoanalysis has demonstrated, not 
 only in everyday life, but in the behavior 
 of subjects undergoing psychoanalytic treat- 
 ment of the neuroses, that all forgetting, 
 with the exception of forgetting produced 
 by actual organic disease of the brain, is due 
 to repression. The entire subject of forget- 
 ting and its motivation by emotional repres- 
 sion, can be best understood by giving the 
 details of a simple case in which this mechan- 
 ism was a predominating factor. 
 
 A young woman complained of difficulty in 
 remembering or recalling words with which 
 she was completely familiar. An examina- 
 tion showed no signs of organic disease of 
 the brain and further enquiry into the diffi- 
 culty disclosed the fact that there was no ac- 
 tual deterioration of memory, but that the 
 forgotten words related to specific anxieties 
 and situations in the patient's life. Neither 
 
 [10] 
 

 
 THE MEANING 
 
 did the forgetting of the word depend on in- 
 attention, because the more concentrated and 
 intense her attention for a given fact, the less 
 able was she to reproduce the word. In ad- 
 dition the forgetting referred only to fa- 
 miliar words. Sometimes the incorrect 
 word would enter her mind and remain there 
 in spite of efforts to dislodge it. An analy- 
 sis of the forgetting of these familiar words 
 demonstrated that it w r as motivated by an 
 unconscious emotional factor, the factor of 
 repression. Examples are the following: — 
 There was a complete inability to recall 
 the phrase "latent powers" but free associa- 
 tions 1 showed that this forgetfulness of 
 the phrase was closely linked up with pain- 
 ful and therefore repressed memories of her 
 brother's former alcoholic habits when she 
 
 i Freud attributes to psychical events a rigorous deter- 
 minism, — that is, even so-called free associations to a given 
 word are directly related in a causative manner to the 
 initial word. Of course this connection is not always 
 realized by the subject, as it is so often unconscious. 
 
 [ii] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 feared that the alcohol might ruin him men- 
 tally and thus he would fail to utilize what 
 was best in him (his latent powers) . 
 
 On another occasion she could not recall 
 the word "accommodator" (referring to 
 domestic servants) . An analysis of the for- 
 getting process involved, here disclosed the 
 fact that because of some financial reverses, 
 she really did not want an accommodator for 
 reasons of economy. It was her anxiety 
 over this latter which blocked the word and 
 prevented it from reaching consciousness. 
 
 A number of other instances of forgetting 
 were analyzed and as the cause for the for- 
 getting of each word was disclosed, this word 
 was no longer forgotten and could be recalled 
 at any time. The inability to recall familiar 
 words finally disappeared. In this case it 
 could be shown that the forgetting of famil- 
 iar words was due to emotional factors and 
 not to any actual deterioration of memory. 
 This emotional factor was repression, which 
 
 [12] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 sidetracked and blocked the word and pre- 
 vented it from entering consciousness, al- 
 though the word was fully conserved in the 
 unconscious. It was not the conservation 
 of the word that was at fault, since it was 
 completely stored up, but the reproduction 
 faculty was defective, and this defect of re- 
 production was produced by emotional re- 
 pression, — that is, the apparently forgotten 
 words were associated with a disagreeable 
 emotion. Consequently the inability of rec- 
 ollection was for the purpose of protecting 
 the mind from this disagreeable emotion, in 
 other words, the forgetting was a purposeful 
 act of defense, it was motivated by an un- 
 conscious wish to forget. 
 
 In this case for the purpose of cure, it was 
 not necessary to analyze all the forgotten 
 words, because the removal of a few repres- 
 sions, not only released other groups of re- 
 pressions, but actually prevented new words 
 from being forgotten. The forgotten words 
 
 [13] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 had not vanished, they were preserved in the 
 unconscious; they were merely sidetracked 
 and could not be recalled because of repres- 
 sion. The repression was purposeful, for 
 the words were associated with disagreeable 
 incidents. This is a simple instance of the 
 action of emotional repression. In the neu- 
 roses the mechanism is the same, but more 
 complicated, capable of extreme ramifica- 
 tions and can only be revealed by a long and 
 searching psychoanalysis. 
 
 Repression lies at the bottom of ordinary 
 forgetfulness, it is an inability to reproduce 
 memories and not an incapacity for storing 
 them up. Analysis of such conditions shows 
 how unscientific are the various methods de- 
 vised for improving the memory. They are 
 all based on the erroneous supposition that 
 a memory defect is due to an inability to 
 store up facts, the emotional factor of repro- 
 duction being entirely disregarded. 
 
 [14] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 Thus ordinary forgetfulness is not due to 
 chance, but follows definite laws. In the 
 case given, there was not only forgetfulness, 
 but actual false recollection, — the striving 
 for the escaped name brought substitutive 
 names into the mind, which were recognized 
 as false. The same process which produced 
 the forgetting (an unconscious wish to for- 
 get), led to the substitution (an unconscious 
 wish to keep the word hidden). 
 
 This forgetting is motivated by repression. 
 The repressed material which side-tracked 
 the word, prevented it from entering con- 
 sciousness, was emotional, as around the ap- 
 parently "forgotten" word were crystallized 
 painful and rebellious feelings. 
 
 When we come to study the mental de- 
 velopment of an individual, as revealed to us 
 by the psychoanalysis of adults and those of 
 children who develop abortive neuroses early 
 in life, we find that the first repressions do 
 not begin until about the third year, and re- 
 
 [15] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 fer principally to the primitive impulses of 
 hunger and love. Then they start with the 
 sense of shame, the sense of pleasure in a 
 body, certain perversions relating to the ex- 
 creta, the desire to run about naked and to 
 become destructive to property. In adults 
 the childhood repressions appear only in 
 dreams because of the strict censorship of 
 society. This explains the frequent non-em- 
 barrassment dream of being insufficiently 
 clothed in company. 
 
 The unconscious is made up of repressed 
 elements and the beginning of the uncon- 
 scious coincides with the beginning of repres- 
 sion. Therefore in very young children the 
 dreams, whose only source is the unconscious, 
 are literal wishes for food and play, without 
 any evidence of repression. 
 
 This brings us to the consideration of an 
 interesting question, academic, it is true, yet 
 fraught with the most practical applications, 
 namely, first, why is the "unconscious" un- 
 
 [16] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 conscious ? * and secondly, what is the rela- 
 tion of the collective unconscious of the race 
 to the important herd instinct ? 2 
 
 The best explanation of the psychology of 
 crowds can be found in the herd instinct, that 
 is that the collective unconscious is imper- 
 sonal. It is really nascent thought, which 
 has not become crystallized into conscious 
 action. The personal unconscious, that is, 
 the unconscious of the individual human be- 
 ings, is a part of this collective unconscious 
 and cannot be separated from it. This ex- 
 plains why no individual can be completely 
 emancipated from the crowd or from the 
 social structure of society in which he lives 
 and moves and has his being. This also ex- 
 plains the so-called "mental contagion" 
 which is so important for collective opinion. 
 
 Thus the herd instinct ensures that the be- 
 
 i See at this point the interesting symposium by Nicoll, 
 Rivers and Jones "Why is the 'Unconscious' Unconscious?" 
 British Jowrnal of Psychology — Vol. IX, 1918. 
 
 2 W. Trotter — '"Instincts of the Herd in Peace and 
 War"— 1918. 
 
 [IT] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 havior of the individual shall harmonize with 
 the community as a whole, and determines 
 the ethical code of man and his conduct and 
 opinions. The herd instinct is, therefore, 
 really the collective unconscious of society. 
 The unconscious mind has six chief charac- 
 teristics, namely: — 
 
 1. It is the result of repression and this 
 repression occurs because the unconscious 
 mental processes are of a character incom- 
 patible with the civilized conscious person- 
 ality. 
 
 2. It is dynamic in nature, for in the un- 
 conscious the most active mental processes 
 are active and elaborated. This active striv- 
 ing is of the nature of wishing and these 
 wish impulses form the external manifesta- 
 tions of the unconscious. 
 
 3. It is the repository of crude and primal 
 instincts. 
 
 4. It is infantile in character and this in- 
 
 [18] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 fantile characteristic persists throughout the 
 whole of life. 
 
 5. It is illogical and tends to ignore the 
 ordinary standards of life. 
 
 6. Its sexual characteristics (using "sex- 
 ual" in the broad, psychoanalytic sense) are 
 predominant and as a rule, these characteris- 
 tics manifest themselves in a symbolized 
 rather than in a literal form. 
 
 It is impossible to agree entirely with the 
 idea, that the unconscious embodies entirely 
 the lower and more brutal qualities of man, 
 that it is irrational, primitive, savage, cruel 
 and lacks individuality and self control. 
 Out of crowds, in war or in revolutions, there 
 have crystallized acts of sublime heroism, 
 sort of sublimations of the unconscious, and 
 this in itself invalidates the idea that the un- 
 conscious is the repository of primitive and 
 basal instincts alone. 
 
 Concerning the origin of the unconscious 
 
 [19] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 it is best to quote from Rank and Sachs, 
 with whom we are in complete agreement. 
 "Our first question will naturally concern the 
 origin of the unconscious. Since the uncon- 
 scious stands completely foreign and un- 
 known to the conscious personality, the first 
 impulse would be to deny connection with 
 consciousness in general. This is the man- 
 ner in which the folk-belief has ever treated 
 it. The bits of the unconscious which were 
 visible in abnormal mental states passed as 
 proof of "being possessed" that is, they were 
 conceived as expressions of a strange individ- 
 ual, of a demon, who had taken possession 
 of the patient. We, who can no longer rely 
 on such supernatural influences must seek 
 to explain the facts psychologically. The 
 hypothesis that a primary division of the 
 psychic life exists from birth, contradicts the 
 experience of the continual conflict between 
 the two groups of forces ; since if the separa- 
 tion were present from the beginning, the 
 
 [20] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 danger of shifting of boundaries would not 
 exist. The only possible assumption, which 
 is further confirmed by experience, is, the 
 separation does not exist a priori but origin- 
 ates only in the course of time. This de- 
 marcation of the boundary line must be a 
 level of culture; thus, we may say it begins 
 in earliest childhood and has found tempor- 
 ary termination about the time of puberty. 
 The unconscious originates in the childhood 
 of man, which circumstance affords the ex- 
 planation for most of its peculiarities." 1 
 
 Enmeshed as we all are in the complex 
 structure of modern civilization, a certain 
 amount of repression is often an instrument 
 of safety for the individual. It is true that 
 repression may reach a point of such inten- 
 sity that there may be an outbreak of the re- 
 pressed material after severe fatigue or emo- 
 tional strain, leading to the development of 
 neurotic disturbances or nervous "break- 
 
 i Otto Rank and Hans Sachs, "The Significance of Psycho- 
 analysis for the Mental Sciences"— 1915. 
 
 [21] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 downs" as they are popularly termed. A 
 nervous breakdown is not due to overwork 
 or over-worry, these merely act as pre- 
 cipitating factors in unlocking the material 
 which has been repressed in the unconscious. 
 
 This psychoanalytic conception is per- 
 fectly sound and is diametrically opposed to 
 the superficial view-point of the French 
 school, particularly Babinski, who states 
 dogmatically that "When the human soul is 
 shaken by a profound and sincere emotion, 
 there is no room left in it for hysteria." 
 Of course such a conception deals only with 
 recognized conscious processes. In order to 
 understand the relation of repressed emo- 
 tions to hysteria, it is necessary to approach 
 the problem, not from the descriptive aspect, 
 but from the interpretative, from the view- 
 point of unconscious mental conflicts. 
 
 The curse of modern civilization lies in ex- 
 cessive repression leading to codes of be- 
 havior and standards which are fraught with 
 
 [22] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 great danger. As repression begins in the 
 child, it is there that the difficulty arises. 
 The child should be given free play and ac- 
 tivity, adult codes should not be stamped on 
 it, it should be taught to sublimate and not 
 to set up an ideal so impossible of attain- 
 ment that repression of this ideal becomes 
 necessary, leading to all sorts of mental con- 
 flicts. 
 
 What is termed sadism is a form of re- 
 pressed hate. In the early education of the 
 child and in the suppressions of civilized so- 
 ciety, hate is strongly repressed in its out- 
 ward manifestations. The repressed ten- 
 dency to hate is one of the stages in the de- 
 velopment of normal children and shows it- 
 self in them in outbursts of irritability and 
 anger. Children, too, take a keen delight 
 in inflicting punishment on animals, or on 
 other children, on toys or dolls, the latter 
 for the child symbolizing the living object. 
 Certain adults seem to have never been able 
 
 [23] 
 
 I 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 to successfully sublimate this repressed 
 cruelty so as to transform it into more use- 
 ful social activity. They retain their child- 
 hood pleasure by procuring enjoyment out 
 of pain inflicted upon others. 
 
 These individuals are unaware of their re- 
 pressed cruelty and unconsciously seek posi- 
 tions where this repressed feeling can find 
 an outlet. Here also are grouped the neu- 
 rotic antivivisectionists whose unconscious 
 sadistic tendencies to inflict pain on others 
 are covered up or compensated by, an over- 
 tenderness for animals. 
 
 As an example of cruelty, which had be- 
 come strongly repressed into the unconscious, 
 the following case can be cited. In a young 
 woman who was undergoing a psychoanaly- 
 sis for a severe type of anxiety hysteria, the 
 two following dreams occurred in one night. 
 
 Dream 1. Her little dog seemed to have 
 been injured and was covered with blood 
 
 [24] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 and she carried him to a veterinary surgeon 
 on a mattress. 
 
 Dream 2, Her canary bird had been 
 killed by two cats and appeared covered 
 with blood. 
 
 It is well known in psychoanalysis that 
 where more than one dream occurs during 
 the night, or rather during the same period 
 of sleep, that it deals with the same repressed 
 material. It is doubtful in these cases 
 whether we are dealing with two dreams, or 
 two halves of the same dream. Dreams rep- 
 resent repressions into the unconscious, they 
 are fulfillments of current wishes reenforced 
 by infantile material. In the case referred 
 to, the young woman had always been over- 
 sympathetic towards animals, for years had 
 been a member of the Society for the Pre- 
 vention of Cruelty to Animals and was also 
 an ardent antivivisectionist. The mere idea 
 of inflicting pain on animals had always 
 
 [25] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 made her nauseated and she became hyster- 
 ical if she saw an animal suffer. So strong 
 was her attachment for animals that she had 
 birds, dogs, a monkey and even a dried alli- 
 gator in her home. Yet this young woman, 
 who by her outward reactions was so sensi- 
 tive to pain in animals, had in her uncon- 
 scious a repository of repressed cruelty as 
 shown by her dreams, since all dreams are the 
 product of the unconscious. This solicitude 
 for dumb animals was merely a conscious 
 defense for her unconsciously repressed 
 cruelty. 
 
 An excellent example of sadism in history 
 is Gilles de Retz of Brittany, the original 
 Blue Beard, who was executed for lust-mur- 
 der at Nantes in 1440. 1 
 
 The character of Iago, of all great crea- 
 tions in literature, stands predominant as a 
 type of repressed cruelty, of rinding pleasure 
 in the sufferings of others. Iago is cruel be- 
 
 i See Thomas Wilson's "Blue Beard, a Contribution to 
 History and Folk-lore"— 1899. 
 
 [26] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 cause he is pathological, pain is a source of 
 pleasure to him and behind it all, lies the 
 cynicism of his character and the almost com- 
 plete lack of erotic feeling. Iago is not, as 
 Coleridge states, "the motive-hunting of a 
 motiveless malignity," for admirable as this 
 characterization is, it does not express the 
 deeper motives of Iago's character. 
 
 Frequently in marital conflicts, which con- 
 stitute so large a portion of the defense-hys- 
 terias of adult life, there is a strong tendency 
 to outbursts of repressed cruelty in the 
 quarrels of husband and wife, what really 
 might be termed childhood reactions to adult 
 situations. 
 
 The history of civilization has proved be- 
 yond doubt that there exists a close relation- 
 ship between cruelty and the sexual impulse. 
 We can cite the examples of those subjects 
 whose cravings are satisfied by being 
 whipped themselves or whipping others and 
 finally those cases of lust murder which from 
 
 [27] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 time to time attract wide public attention. 
 It is really the gratification of the sexual 
 feeling by seeing or inflicting pain and as 
 such, all adults possess it to a certain degree, 
 but it is greatly repressed. Under certain 
 conditions the repression is broken down, the 
 adult regresses to the time of childhood when 
 little or no repression took place. In these 
 circumstances the repressed cruelty breaks 
 forth and projects itself into all forms of 
 abnormal symptoms. A case of automatic 
 laughter on analysis was found to be based 
 on sadistic fantasies and the laughter was 
 really the unconscious pleasure in the ideas 
 of pain. 
 
 Early in the development of psychoan- 
 alysis, the cause of every neurosis was sought 
 in so-called trauma or emotional injury, the 
 painful memory of the shock remaining 
 active in the unconscious, but hidden from 
 the thoughts of the subject and producing 
 its effect in the manner of a foreign body. 
 
 [28] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 At that time a complete talking out or abre- 
 action, which constituted the so-called 
 cathartic method, was thought to be suffi- 
 cient to produce a cure. It is this viewpoint 
 of psychoanalytic therapeutics which is still 
 held by those who have not followed its re- 
 cent developments and manifestations. 
 These developments have become elaborated 
 through the perfection of practical technique 
 and a deeper understanding of repressions 
 as they affect human emotions and conduct. 
 It is now known that the task of psy- 
 choanalysis consists primarily in overcom- 
 ing those inner resistances which prevent the 
 repressed emotions from finding complete 
 and more nearly normal expression. While 
 recent occurrences may act as precipitating 
 factors in the production of the neurosis, the 
 real basis of the neurosis is found in certain 
 emotions which have become strongly re- 
 pressed into the unconscious and are pre- 
 vented from finding a normal escape. It is 
 
 [29] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 not necessary that actual memories or emo- 
 tional scenes become repressed, for the re- 
 pression of fantasies or images, particularly 
 those produced in early childhood, can pro- 
 duce neurotic manifestations. For instance 
 a neurosis is often produced by carrying into 
 adult life from early childhood, an abnormal 
 fixation * on one of the parents, the father 
 for the girl and the mother for the boy. 
 These form the so-called Electra or CEdipus- 
 complexes respectively. It is not necessary 
 that the fixation be on the parents themselves 
 to produce the neurotic deviation, it is suf- 
 ficient if the emotion becomes attached to 
 the image of the father or mother, as this 
 
 i Fixation is a term utilized in psychoanalysis to indicate 
 that during the course of individual development in child- 
 hood, the emotional attachment to a member of the family 
 lingered too long at a certain age. There it became re- 
 pressed into the unconscious, but later in life, for some 
 special reason, the expression of this fixation became reani- 
 mated in the form of a neurosis, because the individual 
 was never quite able to free himself from his childhood 
 attachment during the course of development. The libera- 
 tion from this attachment is one of the problems of psycho- 
 analytic therapeutics. 
 
 [30] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 image when conserved in the unconscious, 
 may produce its pernicious effect as though 
 the attachment were to the actual person. 
 
 The neurotic may thus struggle with the 
 image of one long since dead. In fact the 
 image to which the patient is transfixed may 
 have died before the birth of the patient. 
 It is such observations as these which tend 
 to prove that the actual person is not neces- 
 sary for the conflict, but the image of the 
 person may produce a like effect. 
 
 The strength of the repression depends 
 upon the actual situation in which it origin- 
 ated, the exact type of experience, the gen- 
 eral social or ethical attitude towards the 
 painful idea and the frequent unconscious 
 wish to escape from the reality of the re- 
 pressed feeling. A repression may be so 
 severe, that the subject, in order to escape it, 
 may regress to infantile forms of mental and 
 physical activity, as is so often seen in cer- 
 tain cases of multiple personality. 
 
 [31] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 It is the inner resistance which prevents 
 the repressed emotions from emerging from 
 the unconscious to the conscious and this re- 
 sistance is a protective mechanism, an act of 
 defense. 
 
 While resistance may occur in every day 
 life and form the basis of our antagonisms 
 and dislikes and attacks of irritability to- 
 ward certain individuals, yet it is in the 
 course of the psychoanalytic treatment of 
 the neuroses that they are the most marked 
 and most clearly defined. Under these con- 
 ditions, resistances furnish the best material 
 for the study of the phenomenon. During 
 a psychoanalysis, the repressing force which 
 made the neurotic condition, by keeping vari- 
 ous repressed emotions in the unconscious, 
 is constantly exerting itself to prevent these 
 emotions from becoming conscious. The 
 conflict between the psychoanalysis and the 
 desire on the part of the emotion to remain 
 hidden, is the resistance to the treatment 
 
 [32] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 which must be overcome. Its object is to 
 keep the pathogenic material unconscious; 
 hence all psychoanalysis is directed toward 
 an overcoming of the resistances, for until 
 these are abolished, the neurosis persists. 
 
 These resistances during an analysis may 
 assume many different forms, such as ap- 
 parently motiveless hate, fear and apprehen- 
 sion towards the physician, the "forgetting" 
 of dreams and of appointments for the psy- 
 choanalysis, finally certain types of dreams 
 occur in which the unconscious resistance 
 is clearly defined. In these cases as a rule, 
 the analysis is dreamed of in a very uncom- 
 plementary manner, on other occasions, as in 
 the case of a young woman, there may be a 
 veritable bombardment of resistances during 
 the period of the analysis. In this case, in 
 the course of the one visit, six clearly de- 
 fined resistances were detected, such as a 
 symptomatic action, the forgetting of a 
 dream, coming late for an appointment, a 
 
 [33] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 curious error in spelling, etc. After these 
 resistances were overcome, the analysis pro- 
 gressed smoothly. 
 
 An example of this resistance as it occurs 
 in dreams, was furnished by the case of a 
 young woman who was undergoing a psycho- 
 analysis for anxiety hysteria. During the 
 course of the analysis she had the following 
 dream. 
 
 She seemed to be taking an examination 
 in Chinese history, but the questions were 
 written upside down on the blackboard. In 
 her hand she held a porcelain blue and white 
 bust of Buddha. She was unable to answer 
 the examination questions, in fact, she could 
 not read them and so handed in a blank ex- 
 amination paper. 
 
 To the psychoanalyst, the analysis of this 
 dream is clear. It represents a resistance 
 in the form of symbols, the process of sym- 
 bolization being carried out unconsciously, 
 
 [34] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 the subject being quite unaware of the sym- 
 bols employed. It really represented the 
 manner of unconscious thinking in a form 
 unrecognizable by consciousness, and like all 
 symbols, the choice was not arbitrary, but 
 had its sources in the unconscious. 1 In this 
 case, the subject of the examination 
 (Chinese history) , the distortion of the ques- 
 tions (upside down) and the statuette 
 (Buddha), all signified a resistance, namely, 
 that the psychoanalysis was a mystery to her, 
 she was unable to understand its meaning or 
 purpose. The teacher in the dream was the 
 psychoanalyst and the blank examination 
 paper, which she handed to him, symbolized 
 her ignorance of the examination (psycho- 
 analysis). 
 
 There are different degrees of intensity 
 of repression, but their mechanism and pur- 
 
 i See my "What is Psychoanalysis?" pp. 60-61 for a 
 more detailed explanation of symbolism in psychoanalysis. 
 
 [35] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 pose are identical, whether it produces the 
 absentmindedness and forgetting of every- 
 day life or whether it produces a severe hys- 
 teria. 
 
 In dreams the repressed emotion often 
 appears with startling clearness, either lit- 
 eral or symbolized, according to the degree 
 of resistance which produced the displace- 
 ment and symbolism. Sometimes the orig- 
 inal repressed feeling is so sidetracked dur- 
 ing sleep, that the dream assumes the form 
 of what is popularly known as a nightmare 
 and technically as a anxiety dream. 
 
 The power which produced the repression 
 is always active and with the lapse of time 
 the repression becomes more permanent and 
 sinks deeper into the unconscious. It is the 
 task of the psychoanalyst to dig out these 
 buried emotions and for this reason, the older 
 the person or the longer the duration of the 
 neurosis, the more difficult becomes the psy- 
 choanalytic therapy, as the cause of the neu- 
 
 [36] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 rosis in these cases may be deeply buried in 
 the lowest levels of the unconscious. 
 
 It is these various levels of the unconscious 
 which offer such perplexing problems for 
 psychoanalysis in the removal of repressions 
 and the neurotic conflicts. The descent into 
 the various levels of the unconscious may be 
 compared in its difficulties with Dante's own 
 neurotic conflict, while the guide, Virgil, may 
 be compared to the psychoanalyst. At the 
 lowest level of the unconscious are the ar- 
 chaic and primitive emotions such as nutri- 
 tion and sex, then at the next level, rage, 
 fear, and cruelty, a little higher up are lo- 
 cated the abnormal fixations on the family, 
 then occurs the level of the censor, finally 
 the foreconscious and the conscious level. 
 Of course this plan is purely schematic, but 
 it is useful for purposes of description. It 
 is at the level below the censor that all 
 dreams are made. 
 
 So the psychoanalyst becomes the paleo- 
 
 [37] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 psychologist and the uncovering of the vari- 
 ous levels of the unconscious, each level rep- 
 resenting a regression to the collective men- 
 tal life of our ancestors, may be termed 
 paleopsychology. 1 
 
 In the struggle between repressed emo- 
 tions and the social conscious life there are 
 produced irritations and antipathies, which 
 are synonymous with touching a sore spot 
 in the unconscious. All of us in life attempt 
 to avoid pain and seek pleasure, life is a con- 
 stant attempt to escape from reality, hence 
 the popularity of the stage, the dance, the 
 movies and the use of narcotic drugs. 
 
 We recall so little of the past, particularly 
 of our childhood life, not because it has faded 
 from memory or been destroyed, but because 
 it has been repressed. That the incidents of 
 childhood are merely repressed and not for- 
 gotten is shown by the fact that these appar- 
 ently forgotten memories often appear liter- 
 
 i This conception of the various levels of the unconscious 
 is more completely elaborated in a later chapter of the book. 
 
 [38] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 ally in dreams or in symptomatic actions. 
 
 Repressed emotions seek satisfaction in 
 the outlet of a more primitive manner in the 
 form of a neurosis, such as anxiety, fear, 
 depression, or compulsive thinking. This 
 repression is determined because it is intoler- 
 able and painful. Those who can work off 
 their repressed feelings in social reconstruc- 
 tion, mutual aid, intellectual work or aes- 
 thetic pursuits, are the happiest individuals. 
 This process of using a repressed emotion 
 for a more useful purpose is termed sublima- 
 tion. Those who bottle up their feelings, 
 who become victims of introversion and shut 
 up their personality by building a wall of 
 resistance about it, who are unable to find an 
 adequate escape from intolerable conflicts, 
 who show infantile reactions to adult situa- 
 tions, these are the unhappy neurotics. 
 
 The requirements of civilized society, of a 
 social and moral and ethical code, tend to 
 make us repress our frank feelings. Hence 
 
 [39] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 arise the neuroses in an abnormal sense, and 
 in everyday life, we have the conventional 
 lies of civilization. These repressed emo- 
 tions never emerge in their original shape, 
 but are converted either into dreams, hys- 
 terical symptoms, anxieties, fears, compul- 
 sive thinking, depression and insomnia. 
 
 The cohesion of modern society is based 
 upon repression, not so much in the sense of 
 legal formulations, but a repression arising 
 from within the individual. Psychoanalysis 
 understands the psychogenetic determinants 
 of these repressed impulses and although in- 
 wardly there may be mental conflicts, yet 
 the repression of these conflicts produces an 
 outward semblance of comfort. We all 
 have past or present mental conflicts which 
 we attempt to repress and this repression 
 may be successful or unsuccessful. Some- 
 times as a substitution for this repression an 
 individual may take a flight into a sort of 
 phantasmal comfort, that is, he may substi- 
 
 [40]- 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 tute or rationalize for his real conflicts, some- 
 thing which for the time being may be a 
 cover for this conflict, even though such a 
 process may be based on insincerity. 
 
 Mass repression is nothing but a collec- 
 tion of individual repressions cemented to- 
 gether by the herd instinct. Because of the 
 evolution of modesty the greatest repression 
 is in the sexual sphere. 
 
 The unconscious, being a common ethnic 
 possession is the same in both primitive and 
 civilized society, with the difference, that in 
 the latter, more repressed material is found. 
 Neurotic disorders arise from a blocking of 
 the sexual instinct, but the panacea is not 
 sexual indulgence, otherwise the Don Juans 
 of society would be free from neuroses. 
 
 The psychoanalyst, when he approaches 
 the problem of repression in the neuroses, 
 needs more than skill, more than a perfect 
 technique, more than a knowledge of the 
 psychology of the neuroses. His mind must 
 
 [41] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 be clean as a surgeon's hands before an op- 
 eration, his attitude towards the neurosis 
 should be that of the physician whose task 
 it is to help and not that of the moralist who 
 thinks it his duty to criticize. Any criti- 
 cism even inwardly, of the patient's life his- 
 tory, of his conflicts and repressions is apt 
 to set up within the analyst an inner resist- 
 ance, and this resistance in the analyst as 
 well as within the patient, may interfere with 
 the course of the psychoanalytic therapy. 
 Both patient and physician should clearly 
 recognize the problem with which they are 
 dealing, the truth must be thrashed out, no 
 matter how painful. Every psychoanalyst 
 should know his own resistances and com- 
 plexes as well as his various social, religious 
 and political prejudices. 
 
 Psychoanalysis is of great value in a com- 
 plex modern civilization, not only for the 
 treatment of the neuroses, but also for the in- 
 sight it furnishes into certain character de- 
 
 [42] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 i 
 
 fects. To make a person aware of his re- 
 pressions instead of closing his mind to them, 
 is to utilize the knowledge gained for the 
 development of his character. A psycho- 
 analysis is thus an education, it raises the un- 
 conscious to a higher cultural level. 
 
 As is well known, psychoanalysis, as elab- 
 orated by Freud, means an analysis of the 
 mind, a study of man's unconscious motives, 
 repressions and conflicts. Psychoanalysis 
 also demonstrates that the very foundations 
 of character spring from the unconscious of 
 the individual and shape his behavior. In 
 other words each individual determines his 
 own character and destiny. Character 
 traits are not inherited but acquired. 
 
 In 1907 one of the greatest thinkers of the 
 Freudian school, Alfred Adler, of Vienna, 
 began the publication of his remarkable 
 works on individualistic psychology. 1 He 
 
 i See Alfred Adler's two principal Contributions — "The 
 Neurotic Constitution" and "Organ Inferiority and its 
 Psychical Compensation." 
 
 [43] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 demonstrated that the predominant traits of 
 character are efforts on the part of the indi- 
 vidual to overcome a feeling of either mental 
 or physical inferiority. For instance, a man 
 who as a boy is a weakling will become an 
 advocate of the strenuous life, or one whose 
 thoughts are not what they should be may 
 become overzealous in the reform of so-called 
 vulgar literature and art. Demosthenes, 
 the stammerer, became the greatest orator of 
 Greece. 
 
 It is well known to physicians that a weak 
 or inferior organ tends to overcome its de- 
 fects : a weak heart compensates by growing 
 larger and stronger, if one of the kidneys is 
 removed, the remaining kidney enlarges and 
 performs the work of two. 
 
 This is exactly what happens in the men- 
 tal sphere. The feeling of inferiority forces 
 the individual to make supreme efforts to 
 overcome this particular defect. Feelings 
 
 [44] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 of inferiority are compensated for in various 
 ways by the person becoming egotistical, 
 boastful, envious, showing a tendency to un- 
 dervalue all men and things except them- 
 selves, developing ideas of greatness and om- 
 nipotence of thinking* Of course, from a 
 Freudian standpoint, this compensation is 
 really a repression of the inferior feeling. 
 
 This tendency to compensate is an uncon- 
 scious mental process, the only conscious 
 feeling being the over-compensation which 
 takes the form of day-dreams. Their origin 
 is unknown and never understood by the 
 sufferer. These day-dreams are so often re- 
 peated that they become part and parcel of 
 the personality, they cannot be distinguished 
 from reality. Thus, the individuals with 
 feelings of inferiority, whether real or fan- 
 cied, are individuals who possess inferior or- 
 gans which they attempt to compensate. 
 This is Adler's great contribution, the re- 
 
 [45] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 markable relationship between inferiority of 
 physical structure or feelings of inferiority 
 and mental compensation. 
 
 The collective unconscious of society is the 
 same as the unconscious of the single indi- 
 vidual, because however much individuals 
 may differ in their characterological traits, 
 it is in their merging, their cohesion by what 
 is termed the herd instinct, that unifies this 
 ^plastic human material. Therefore society 
 like an individual suffers from resistances, 
 from mass repression and from flights into 
 emotional upheavals. 
 
 Society consequently can be psychoana- 
 lyzed in much the same way as an individual. 
 Thus psychoanalysis can show the real char- 
 acter of society, can lay bare the hidden, 
 subterranean motives which lie behind its 
 various emotional manifestations. Society, 
 too, like the individual, has its dreams and 
 these dreams in a primitive community take 
 the form of symbolic creations, myths, folk 
 
 [46] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 lore, and in a more materialistic age, of ideal 
 commonwealths . 
 
 All these efforts of society to break away 
 from its present status are really the fulfill- 
 ment of the repressed wishes of the collective 
 unconscious, in the same manner that a 
 dream represents the repressed wish of the 
 individual unconscious. No social problem 
 can be solved or understood unless the mo- 
 tive force of this collective unconscious is 
 taken into consideration. The motive force, 
 the key to all human activity, is the repressed 
 wish. 
 
 The foundation of psychoanalysis rests 
 upon the theory of the unconscious. Psy- 
 choanalysis frees the repressed impulses 
 from the formation of neurotic symptoms 
 and the false attitude towards reality and 
 adapts these impulses to real possibilities in 
 social paths of gratification and develop- 
 ment. 
 
 It is the task of the psychoanalysis to warn 
 
 [47] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 against too strong repression in childhood 
 and thus turn the normal impulses of the 
 child into channels which are fraught with 
 neurotic pitfalls. Instincts should be con- 
 trolled and not repressed and this control 
 should show itself in varying adaptations to 
 reality. As stated by Rank and Sachs * — 
 "The child is only to be educated by love 
 and under this condition will feel sufficiently 
 punished by a withdrawal of this. Only for 
 a beloved person does he gladly give up the 
 undesirable attributes and aims, and as- 
 sumes an imitation, by way of identification 
 with adults, what culture, in the shape of this 
 beloved object of love demands of him." It 
 was stated in a previous contribution. 2 
 "The treatment of the psychoneuroses should 
 begin early, it should be prophylactic and 
 educate and correctly mold the psycho- 
 sexual trends of his child. The best method 
 
 i O. Rank and H. Sachs "The Significance of Psycho- 
 analysis for the Mental Sciences." 
 
 2 Isador H. Coriat — "Psychoanalysis and the Sexual Hy- 
 giene of Children"— The Child, Jan., 1912. 
 
 [48] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 of controlling these feelings is to teach the 
 child to change or sublimate these into 
 higher artistic or intellectual interests." 
 
 Dr. Oskar Pfister of Zurich, Switzerland, 1 
 has found a large number of neurotics among 
 school children, neuroses whose origin is 
 emotional, such as stammering, morbid fears, 
 blushing, shyness, petty stealing and lying, 
 all of which could be made to disappear 
 under psychoanalytic treatment. It is to 
 the lazy, uninterested, stupid, day-dreaming 
 pupils (provided of course that actual or- 
 ganic feeblemindedness can be eliminated) 
 that psychoanalysis can be applied and be of 
 material help. 
 
 As an example, a young man came for 
 personal advice because of inability to study 
 and to concentrate. This is a very frequent 
 complaint during the period of puberty and 
 adolescence. An analysis proved that the 
 
 l See Oskar Pfister— "The Psychoanalytic Method"— from 
 which the quotations are taken (translated by Dr. Charles 
 R. Payne). 
 
 [49] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 subject suffered from -a very severe form of 
 day dreaming, a sort of withdrawal from 
 reality, because he preferred his day-dreams 
 to more practical efforts of study. Such an 
 individual tendency is full of danger for the 
 development of a severe neurosis or even a 
 psychosis and should be treated by psycho- 
 analysis and not by the usual superficial ad- 
 vice to take "training in concentration." In 
 this case concentration was not at fault, the 
 difficulty was an abnormal slipping back into 
 a realm of day-dreaming because the realities 
 of life no longer interested him. 
 
 School teachers should be trained in cer- 
 tain psychoanalytic principles in order to 
 better appreciate the odd or unusual child 
 and to refer him to the proper source for 
 treatment. The attitude of such children 
 should not be dismissed with the mere label- 
 ing of "stubborn" or "inattentive," for the 
 motive for such a reaction usually lies deep 
 within the personality of the child. 
 
 [50] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 As an example of how much harm can be 
 done by the parent in not handling the child 
 properly, we refer to the case of a ten year 
 old boy whose mother kept his hair long, in 
 Dutch clip style, like a girl. The boy was 
 the youngest of four children, all boys, and 
 the mother's disappointment in not having 
 a girl found an outlet in having the youngest 
 child resemble a girl as much as possible. 
 Here is a problem fraught with the most 
 dangerous situations, in that this arouses in 
 the boy not only a feeling of inferiority, but 
 such a boy will be subject to ridicule from 
 his playmates and thus tend to become less 
 and less social. 
 
 The development of such a mental atti- 
 tude of sensitiveness and a shut-in personal- 
 ity with all that it implies, lays the founda- 
 tion for a severe neurosis during the adoles- 
 cent period, when the individual most feels 
 the need of becoming a social being. 
 
 Pflster well states as follows — "Parents 
 
 [51] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 must exercise particular care that no feeling 
 of inferiority be aroused. In order that the 
 child may have a normal relation to father 
 and mother, both parents must work to- 
 gether harmoniously. The more completely 
 we see through a pupil, so much the more 
 interesting does he become to us, and the 
 more profoundly he perceives himself under- 
 stood by us, just so much the more influence 
 do we gain over him. He will then no 
 longer attempt to escape a just and neces- 
 sary command by an unconsciously pro- 
 duced headache or to gain our sympathy by 
 unconsciously arranged sufferings and to 
 pose as a victim of overwork when he is lazy." 
 Finally to show how sensitive a child is 
 and how it may develop into a situation 
 which in an adult would be capable of easy 
 adjustment, the case may be cited of an 
 eleven year old girl who suddenly told the 
 neighbors that she was badly treated at home 
 and a few days later ran away, remaining 
 
 [52] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 away the greater part of the night. It was 
 shown on a short analysis, that her story of 
 being badly treated at home was a mere fab- 
 rication and that she told this tale and later 
 ran away, because recently a baby sister had 
 been given her room. This aroused such a 
 feeling of jealousy in the child, that her sen- 
 sations became those of a sudden impulse, 
 to which she added the fabrication of being 
 ill treated, in order to fortify her attitude. 
 
 Teachers should have a knowledge of the 
 child's unconscious mind for only by this 
 knowledge will they develop a greater toler- 
 ance for the various perplexities of child- 
 hood, the dislikes and distastes of children 
 and their often curious reactions to adult 
 situations. 
 
 Individual differences between children 
 are marked and infinite. For this reason, 
 the peculiar behavior of the child can never 
 be fathomed by any one of the many so- 
 called intelligence tests. The failure to per- 
 
 [53] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 form one of these tests may not mean any 
 intellectual deficiency in a given direction, 
 but may be due to an emotional blocking of 
 thought whose origin is in the unconscious. 
 The adolescent situation and the trans- 
 formation of puberty is thus expressed by 
 Freud. 1 "Simultaneously with the over- 
 coming and rejection of these . . . phan- 
 tasies, there occurs one of the most important 
 as well as one of the most painful psychic 
 accompaniments of puberty: it is the break- 
 ing away from parental authority. . . . 
 Many persons are detained at every station 
 in the course of development through which 
 the individual must pass; and accordingly 
 there are persons who never overcome the 
 parental authority and never or very imper- 
 fectly withdraw their affections from their 
 parents. They are mostly girls, who to the 
 delight of their parents retain their full in- 
 fantile love far beyond puberty." 
 
 i S. Freud — "Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory." 
 
 [54] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 In psychoanalytic terms the situation 
 named may be expressed as follows : — From 
 very early childhood, beginning at the period 
 between three and five years of age, children 
 manifest premature choice in relation to 
 adults, particularly the adults of the family 
 group, such as parents and nurses. This is 
 the so-called family romance and this devel- 
 opment in the family unit is of great impor- 
 tance for the impressions stamped upon the 
 plastic mind of the child. It is these impres- 
 sions which are gradually repressed and 
 forced from consciousness or the foreground 
 of the mind into the unconscious or the back- 
 ground of the mind. It is in the handling 
 of these impressions which are so important 
 for the later life of the individual, as to 
 whether they will be successfully directed 
 and the individual remain healthy, or the in- 
 dividual become, incapacitated by these im* 
 pressions and become the future neurotic. 
 
 L Thus there comes a time in the life of every 
 
 [55] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 one, in which the great decision must be 
 made, whether or not he will retain his emo- 
 tional fixation to the family or will break 
 away from his infantile moorings, grow in- 
 tellectually and emotionally, put aside his 
 childhood and go forth into the world of 
 reality. It is usually the only child who is 
 most liable to retain his infantile attachment 
 to the family group. When the critical 
 period of puberty and adolescence arrives, 
 such an "only child" becomes incapacitated 
 by the struggle to break away and manifests 
 symptoms of a so-called "nervous break- 
 down" so erroneously described to overwork, 
 when in reality it is due to an inner conflict 
 between the attempt to come into touch with 
 adult reality and the breaking away from 
 infantile moorings. It is this conflict, this 
 vicissitude of the emotional life, this swing- 
 ing of the pendulum between childhood and 
 adult development, with the new increase of 
 repression which it brings with it, that leads 
 
 [56] 
 
THE MEANING 
 
 so often in adolescent girls to the neurosis 
 known as hysteria. Boys too are liable to 
 hysterical disturbances at this critical period, 
 but to a far less degree than girls, since in 
 the latter there is more repression and 
 greater physiological and psychological 
 change in the life history of the individual. 
 In puberty and adolescence also the instinc- 
 tive sexual tendencies attempt to find an ob- 
 ject on which to fasten themselves outside 
 the family group. This explains the strong 
 craving for love and the adolescent crushes 
 which are so often seen. 
 
 These so-called "crushes" of adolescent 
 boys and girls are usually a temporary 
 phenomenon and are so frequently encoun- 
 tered, that they can be interrupted as merely 
 a phase of normal development. The im- 
 portance of this tendency in a sublimated 
 form in the life of adults, in the evolution of 
 friendship, social help and mutual aid, can- 
 not be overestimated. 
 
 [57] 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 REPRESSED EMOTIONS IN PRIMITIVE 
 SOCIETY 
 
 The complex construction of a psycho- 
 neurosis in an adult, due to the influence ex- 
 erted by the multiplicity of factors of civili- 
 zation and cultural advancement, is some- 
 * times so bewildering as to almost defy all 
 attempts at analysis. In children, the or- 
 ganization of a psychoneurosis is usually 
 very simple, almost monosymptomatic, and 
 in children, too, we often discover these neu- 
 roses in the actual processes of making. 
 When adult life is reached the individual 
 has left behind him all the factors of his 
 childhood life and all the repressed experi- 
 ences and desires which tend to produce his 
 adult characteristics. Among adults of 
 
 [58] 
 
IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 
 
 primitive races however, where the mental 
 organization is far less complex than that of 
 civilized man, certain psychoneurotic dis- 
 turbances are found, which if analyzed, 
 might disclose the mental mechanisms of 
 these disturbances reduced to their simplest 
 terms. 
 
 It has been my good fortune to be able 
 to secure data of this sort, pertaining to cer- 
 tain curious nervous attacks which occur 
 among the primitive races of the Fuegian 
 Archipelago. These facts were supplied 
 me, following along lines of a questionnaire, 
 by the well known explorer Charles Welling- 
 ton Furlong, F. R. G. S. who in 1907-1908, 
 was in charge of the first scientific expedition 
 to cross through the heart of Tierra del 
 Fuego. Mr. Furlong's keen powers of ob- 
 servation have made the data unusuallv 
 complete. While he had no theory to offer 
 in explanation of the attacks as seen among 
 these primitive tribes, it is interesting to note 
 
 [59] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 that certain of the facts corroborate the well- 
 known ideas of sexual repression as elabor- 
 ated by Freud. The mental organizations 
 of these people, likewise, seem to substan- 
 tiate certain psychoanalytic conceptions. 
 For a clear comprehension of these attacks, 
 certain preliminary anthropological and 
 geographical data are necessary. 
 
 The following data relates to running 
 amuck or "outbursts," among the Yahgan 
 and Ona tribes of the Fuegian Archipelago. 
 The data was obtained in 1907 and 1908 dur- 
 ing expeditions through the regions of the 
 Fuegian Archipelago. 
 
 The Yahgans, some forty years ago, num- 
 bered perhaps 2,500, but ill 1908 this number 
 had been reduced through contact with civili- 
 zation and principally through an epidemic 
 of measles to 173. These peoples are canoe 
 Indians and inhabit to-day the Island coasts 
 from Beale Island to the Wollastons inclu- 
 sive, in the neighborhood of Cape Horn, 
 
 [60] 
 
IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 
 
 from about 54 50' S. Lat. to about 55 56' S. 
 Lat., making them the southern-most inhab- 
 itants of the world. The Ona Indians, a 
 taller and finer race physically, who are foot 
 Indians, occupy the mountain and forest re- 
 gion of southern Tierra del Fuego from ap- 
 proximately 53 50' S. Lat. to 55 3' S. Lat. 
 The Onas formerly occupied the entire north- 
 ern half of Tierra del Fuego and possibly 
 numbered some 3,000, but through contact 
 and warfare with the whites, who drove 
 them south off the open lands of the north, 
 they have been reduced to about 300. These 
 people are of a light cinnamon colored skin, 
 black haired, and of a decided American In- 
 dian type. The Onas are above the average 
 stature, the Yahgans below it. 
 
 It is not an infrequent occurrence for in- 
 dividuals among both the Yahgans and Onas 
 to be subject to sudden outbursts of furore 
 and violence. At such times, however, it is 
 the custom of some of the men to follow 
 
 [61] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 closely behind to see that harm does not come 
 through injury against trees, stumbling, or 
 falling from the cliffs. They rarely touch 
 the afflicted one except to prevent harm, and 
 finally will lead him back to the camp, when 
 the attack is over or when he is exhausted. 
 
 While the attack occurs both among men 
 and women, it seems to be more prevalent 
 among men. The individuals in whom these 
 attacks predominate are men in the prime of 
 life, ranging from twenty-five to thirty-five 
 years of age. These people are polygamous, 
 as it is the custom for the old men to marry 
 young girls thus leaving the old women to 
 the younger men, which in many instances 
 causes a scarcity of women. 
 
 As a rule the character of the attack con- 
 fines itself to the mad rushing away, as above 
 described, at other times it consists of at- 
 tempts to injure or kill. For instance, a 
 rancher of Tierra del Fuego, was in the com- 
 pany of some Onas, when suddenly a hatchet 
 
 [62] 
 
IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 
 
 whizzed by him, barely missing his head, and 
 buried itself in a log of the Indian shelter. 
 This was the result of an attack which sud- 
 denly appeared in a native who was afflicted 
 thus from time to time. The actual outburst 
 in this case was sudden, although it is diffi- 
 cult to tell how long it might have been com- 
 ing on in the form of brooding, which seems 
 to be a premonitory phase of this condition. 
 Concerning a personal experience with one 
 of the early phases of the attack, Mr. Fur- 
 long states as follows: — "I am fully con- 
 vinced that one night while camping alone 
 with Onas in the heart of the Fuegian for- 
 ests, that my head man Aanakin, who had 
 a good many killings to his credit, was brood- 
 ing as he sat in his wigwam, which opened 
 towards the fire; he watched me for nearly 
 an hour with an attitude and expression 
 which reminded me of the look a dog takes 
 on sometimes before he snaps. Aanakin, I 
 knew to be of a very moody nature, but this 
 
 [63] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 particular mood was so marked and por- 
 tended evil so noticeably toward me without 
 any apparent cause, that I decided to do 
 something to break its mental trend. So 
 putting fresh wood on the fire, to make a 
 more brilliant blaze, I walked directly into 
 his wigwam and motioned to one of his two 
 wives who was lying beside him. There 
 was a passing look of half -anger, half-sur- 
 prise, but I gave no time for his mind to 
 dwell in the same mood, for simultaneously 
 I produced my notebook and pencil and be- 
 gan to make drawings of animals and other 
 things that were familiar to them. They 
 like to watch one draw and name the thing, 
 and so I kept them busy for perhaps an hour, 
 and finally had them in gales of laughter. 
 I am quite convinced that I forestalled an 
 attack or a condition akin to it." 
 
 It seems that an attack usually begins 
 suddenly. However, an instance is given 
 where an Ona becoming moody realized that 
 
 [64] 
 
IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 
 
 one of these attacks was incubating and put- 
 ting his hands together begged to have his 
 wrists and feet bound in order that he would 
 not do himself or others harm, or that it 
 would not be thought that he meant to kill 
 and consequently be shot in self-defense. 
 This would seem in a way to indicate that 
 there was no amnesia for the attack, as the 
 Indian undoubtedly realized what he had 
 done in previous attacks. 
 
 The moody state and the realization of 
 what might follow as the attack developed, 
 demonstrates a sense of uneasiness as the 
 premonitory symptom, which ends in a state 
 of utter exhaustion and sleep. The nor- 
 mal condition is resumed, practically on 
 awakening from sleep and recovery of 
 strength. 
 
 From a description of Donald McMillan, 
 the explorer, the Eskimo disease termed 
 Piblokto strongly resembles these attacks of 
 the Onas and Yahgan Indians with the ex- 
 
 [65] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 ception that Piblokto was particularly prev- 
 alent among women. 1 
 
 How an attack begins is shown by the case 
 of Aanakin, an Ona of Furlong's expedition. 
 A certain form of melancholia, brooding or 
 moodiness, seems to precede many of these 
 attacks, with a realization sometimes that an 
 attack is developing. The Onas not being 
 naturally a quarrelsome people, it may be 
 that this realization and foreboding of the 
 attack accounts for their tendency to run 
 away from their associates, when they have 
 endured the strain as long as they can, thus 
 placing themselves in a position to avoid a 
 deliberate assault or injury to those about 
 them. 
 
 It was further stated, in answer to the 
 questionnaire — "I cannot give you absolute 
 data regarding laughing or crying in this at- 
 tack, screaming, yells, foaming at the mouth, 
 biting the tongue, tearing the clothes, al- 
 
 i See A. Brill — "Piblokto or Hysteria Among Peary's 
 Eskimos" — Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease — 1913. 
 
 [66] 
 
IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 
 
 though I am of the opinion that any or all 
 of these things may and do occur. As to 
 violent resistance, the case, where the man 
 wished to be bound, would show there was 
 violent resistance, and it is probable that 
 partly for this reason the Onas and Yahgans 
 do not molest the afflicted except to prevent 
 them from harming themselves, preferring 
 
 to wait until the paroxysm exhausts them. 
 I cannot state positively as to whether the 
 attack is explained by the natives as being 
 due to an evil spirit. While the people are 
 polygamous, though having no form of re- 
 ligious worship, they usually believe when 
 any one has a disease that something has en- 
 tered them or some one who dislikes them has 
 surreptitiously sent some small animal or ar- 
 row into them. Among the Yahgans the 
 'Yuccamoosh' (doctors) or magicians pro- 
 ceed to pretend to extract these objects by 
 a form of squeezing and hugging the patient, 
 in the meantime blowing, hissing, etc., to 
 
 [67] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 force the object of evil out. I have never 
 known of their doing this, however, to a per- 
 son suffering from an attack. 
 
 "I am unable to supply any direct data as 
 to the relation of love, hunger, sexuality, 
 death of relatives or absent relatives to an 
 attack. On the death of a relative, the Yah- 
 gans go through incantations in the form of 
 a sort of weird death chant, which they often 
 sing in unison at certain times of the day 
 and night. They paint their faces to show 
 ' the death to strangers, but they rarely men- 
 tion the name of the dead, in fact by most it 
 is considered an offense to do so. They 
 simply say — 'He is gone.' 'He is no more.' 
 They feel the loss of relatives very keenly 
 and sorrow for them, and sometimes become 
 violent with grief and rage. 
 
 "Regarding the primitive type of mental 
 organization among these natives, — despite 
 Darwin's first opinion of them, which was 
 subsequently modified, — I consider these 
 
 [68] 
 
IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 
 
 people inherently intelligent, though of a 
 very primitive type as far as culture is con- 
 cerned, probably the most primitive in this 
 hemisphere, perhaps in the world, as the 
 Onas are to-day living in the Old Stone Age. 
 Dr. E. Von Hornbostel of Berlin Univer- 
 sity, who has collaborated with me in making 
 a special study of my phonographic records 
 of their songs, informs me that these songs 
 are the most primitive American Indian 
 songs of which they have any records." 
 
 Of importance for a clear understanding 
 of the mental traits of these Indian tribes, 
 as the source from which these attacks de- 
 velop, is the study of their dreams, their sys- 
 tem of taboos and their myths. So far as 
 could be determined from the data supplied, 
 the dreams of these primitive races strongly 
 resemble the dreams of children, as these 
 aboriginal tribes possess many childlike at- 
 tributes. In fact up to a certain age the 
 civilized child is really a little savage, with 
 
 [69] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 his strong egotism and feelings of rivalry, his 
 taboos, his jealousies and his few or no al- 
 truistic tendencies. In the child as in the 
 savage the wish and the thought are synony- 
 mous, both want their desires immediately 
 gratified, although such gratification may be 
 impossible in reality. 
 
 The dreams of the Yahgan Indians are 
 simple wish-fulfillments, without disguise or 
 elaboration, like the dreams of a civilized 
 child. 
 
 The Yahgan's attitude towards death is 
 the same as that of many primitive races 
 and their lack of understanding of the real 
 meaning of death, strongly resembles in its 
 attitude that of a civilized child. Any 
 reference to death is strongly tabooed 
 among them and to transgress this taboo, ex- 
 poses the individual to grave danger and 
 severe punishment, even the punishment of 
 the thing tabooed. Thus the person who 
 transgressed this taboo becomes himself 
 
 [70] 
 
IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 
 
 taboo by arousing the anger or the resent- 
 ment of other members of this tribe. How- 
 ever, a certain ambivalent * tendency seems 
 to be present, for while the word "death" and 
 the mention of the dead are prohibited, yet 
 they feel deep grief and sorrow for their 
 dead relatives. Transgression of the taboo 
 may arouse the other aspect of the ambiv- 
 alent attitude (for instance anger instead of 
 sorrow) and it thus becomes a source of dan- 
 ger to the guilty individual and so by con- 
 tagion and imitation to the community at 
 large. 
 
 This ambivalent tendency which leads to 
 taboos is prominent among primitive races 
 as well as in civilized children. For in- 
 stance, in the latter there may be cited the 
 taboo of pronouncing certain words which 
 leads to the anxiety neurosis of stammering 
 
 i Ambivalence is a term used in psychoanalysis, which, 
 according to Bleuler, "gives the same idea two contrary feel- 
 ing tones and invests the same thought simultaneously with 
 both a positive and a negative character." 
 
 [71] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 or the taboo of objects possessing a sexual 
 significance in producing the compulsion 
 neurosis of kleptomania. As civilization 
 and cultural advancement increase or as the 
 child becomes the adult, the taboo tendency 
 gradually declines, yet under certain condi- 
 tions it may manifest itself as a psychoneu- 
 rotic symptom. 
 
 When we approach this problem of the 
 taboo from the field of psychoanalysis, in 
 those who live, not in primitive surround- 
 ings, but in a highly civilized and complex 
 society, we find certain individuals who have 
 created artificial taboos for themselves: they 
 follow out these prohibitions as strictly as 
 the savage follows his taboos. This condi- 
 tion is found in the compulsion neurosis, and 
 as Freud very ingeniously suggests, the 
 term "taboo disease" might be an appro- 
 priate one for this malady. In the savage, 
 the taboo is a conscious act, bound up with 
 certain ceremonials of great religious and 
 
 [72] 
 
IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 
 
 social significance. In the compulsion neu- 
 rotic, the taboo has its origin in the uncon- 
 scious and the unconscious of the compulsion 
 neurotic as shown by the dreams predomin- 
 antly contains hostile and savage wishes and 
 thus is synonymous with the conscious be- 
 havior of primitive peoples themselves. 
 
 After this digression we are in a position 
 to understand the psychology of the taboo as 
 it is revealed in the compulsion neuroses. 
 For this purpose, it is best to relate briefly 
 the history of a patient with a compulsion 
 neurosis, who came under personal observa- 
 tion. 
 
 A young man for several years had had 
 the feeling that he became easily contam- 
 inated, either by touching objects which he 
 felt were contaminated or by merely passing 
 a location (such as a dug up street or sewer) , 
 which he felt might be the source of contam- 
 ination. As a result, he would set up all 
 sorts of defensive acts to oppose this con- 
 
 [73] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 tamination, either by having his clothes fre- 
 quently cleaned, or by habitually washing 
 his hands. In the analysis a large number 
 of peculiar dreams appeared which I have 
 termed "calamity dreams." In these 
 dreams, severe accidents or calamities would 
 happen to people who were total strangers 
 to the dreamer, such as little girls being run 
 over by motor trucks or young men being 
 severely cut by broken glass. This type of 
 dream is very primitive and savage and 
 clearly demonstrates an unconscious hostil- 
 ity to inflict pain or suffering, directed to- 
 wards any one. These feelings or wishes are 
 repressed in the unconscious, and the com- 
 pulsion neurosis, the feeling of contamina- 
 tion, arises as a defense (or punishment) 
 against these repressed, cruel and savage im- 
 pulses. 
 
 He worried about the future, because he 
 felt that certain objects in years to come 
 would remain contaminated from him. To 
 
 [74] 
 
IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 
 
 him the contamination is in the object, is part 
 of it, and not inherent in his ideas, although 
 it is the reality of his thoughts which forms 
 the basis of the compulsive thinking. He 
 hopes like primitive peoples, that the trans- 
 fer of contamination will relieve him by ac- 
 tually making the contamination cling to the 
 object, he acts as if inanimate things were 
 the carriers of contamination. This is the 
 typical taboo-transference of savages and 
 shows how primitive is the unconscious of a 
 compulsion neurotic. As Freud states : * 
 "Obsessive prohibitions possess as extraor- 
 dinary capacity for displacement ; they make 
 use of almost any form of connection to ex- 
 tend from one object to another. The com- 
 pulsion neurotics act as if the 'impossible' 
 person and things were carriers of a danger- 
 ous contagion, which is ready to displace it- 
 self through contact to all neighboring 
 things." 
 
 i S. Freud— -"Totem and Taboo"— p. 46. 
 
 [75] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 As these particular primitive races have 
 no conception of immortality, this taboo can- 
 not be a religious or moral obligation or 
 prohibition, but a social phenomenon for the 
 benefit of the tribe or for the physical welfare 
 of the individuals comprising the tribe. 
 Freud also has pointed out how the avoid- 
 ance of the names of the dead because of the 
 fear of offense to the living is found among 
 certain South American tribes. He states: 
 — "One of the most surprising but at the 
 same time one of the most interesting taboo 
 customs of mourning among primitive races, 
 is the prohibition against pronouncing the 
 name of the deceased. The avoidance of the 
 name of the deceased is, as a rule, kept up 
 with extraordinary severity. Thus among 
 many South American tribes it is considered 
 the gravest insult to the survivors to pro- 
 nounce the name of the deceased in their 
 presence, and the penalty set for it is no less 
 than that for the slaying itself. . . ." "The 
 
 [76] 
 
IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 
 
 strangeness of this taboo on names dimin- 
 ishes if we bear in mind that the savage looks 
 upon his name as an essential part and im- 
 portant possession of his personality." In 
 civilized society too the death of a dearly be- 
 loved one is often followed by a purposeful 
 forgetting (repression) of their physical ap- 
 pearance, a sort of defense of the mind to 
 minimize the loss. 
 
 A third factor of importance is a study of 
 their myths. These are the savage's day 
 dreams. The relation between myths and 
 dreams is well known, both having their 
 roots in the unconscious thinking of the race. 
 In the individual this unconscious mental 
 process produces dreams, in the race and 
 society, myths. Only one instance will be 
 cited, the legend of the Yahgan Indians 
 concerning the creation of the first man and 
 woman. When one of the tribe was asked 
 how the first human being came into the 
 world, he replied that a long time ago the 
 
 [77] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 first man came down from the sky on a rope, 
 and later, the woman followed. Here is a 
 striking instance of how an adult Indian had 
 applied his knowledge of individual births 
 literally to a cosmic process, a genuine crea- 
 tion myth as a form of symbolic thinking. 
 There seems little doubt in this case, that the 
 sky which to all savages appears like a bowl, 
 represented the uterus and the rope, the um- 
 bilical cord. The resemblance of this myth 
 to certain birth or parturition dreams, as en- 
 . countered in the psychoanalytic investiga- 
 tions of civilized adults, is certainly striking. 
 How is this mass of material to be inter- 
 preted? The mental traits of these people 
 as shown by an analysis of their taboos, 
 myths and dreams, are very primitive in or- 
 ganization, in fact according to Mr. Fur- 
 long, they represent the most primitive types 
 of culture in the world. Individuals of such 
 primitive mental traits have not yet learned 
 to .successfully repress their emotions and 
 
 [78] 
 
IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 
 
 hence are liable to sudden emotional out- 
 bursts. Substitution and repression in civ- 
 ilized races are utilized to cover complex 
 and multifarious ways of expressing social 
 wishes and wants. In the savage there is 
 little or no repression and substitution, be- 
 cause his desires are simple and easily satis- 
 fied. 
 
 These primitive people therefore resemble 
 children, without inhibitions or repressions. 
 Their attacks of violence and furore are sud- 
 den emotional reactions, perhaps hysterical, 
 but without any phenomena of what is 
 termed hysterical conversion, such as the 
 changing of ideas or emotions into physical 
 symptoms of paralysis or loss of sensation. 
 
 The relation of the attacks to an unsatis- 
 fied sexual craving is shown by the fact that 
 the attacks occur only in young men whose 
 libido remains unsatisfied, as according to 
 tribal custom they are compelled to marry 
 old women, or, in the words of the explorer 
 
 [79] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 who lived among the people, "old derelicts." 
 This factor, combined with the observation 
 that the victims of the attack are free from 
 the loss of consciousness and amnesia and the 
 absence of an absolute evidence pointing to 
 foaming of the mouth or biting of the tongue, 
 would seem to indicate that the outbursts 
 were hysterical rather than epileptic in 
 nature. 
 
 It seems that the attacks themselves are 
 
 motivated, not so much by the actual gross 
 sexual as by an ungratified or only partially 
 gratified love which would occur in a man 
 who is compelled by social and tribal custom 
 to marry an old woman. Among the Eski- 
 mos this factor is at work in the woman, 
 among the Fuegians in the men. Conver- 
 sion phenomena were absent, because their 
 mental organization is very simple, in the 
 same way that childhood hysteria is free from 
 conversion symptoms or at most is mono- 
 symptomatic. 
 
 [80] 
 
IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 
 
 That the unconscious thinking of man is 
 the same the world over and that similar 
 symbolic representations of repressed feel- 
 ings can be found in primitive tribes sep- 
 arated by time and space, is shown by the 
 identity of the myths of the Pueblo dwellers 
 of America and the Polynesian and Aus- 
 tralian myths, as compared with the myths 
 of the Fuegian. There is a strong identity 
 between dreams and myths, both are child- 
 hood phantasies which have been repressed 
 into the unconscious and both are symbolic. 
 In the case of a dream this repressed ma- 
 terial is projected into the partially sleeping 
 consciousness, in the case of a myth, it is 
 projected either as the birth of a hero or a 
 birth-process or as a phantasy of heroism 
 and salvation. A myth becomes then really 
 a waking dream. 1 Symbolism is the true 
 
 i See on this point Abraham's "Dreams and Myths" 
 Rank's — "Myth of the Birth of the Hero." Also my paper 
 "Dreams and the Samson Myth" (Int. Zeit. f. Artz Psycho 
 Analyse — Vol. II, No. 5) and "The Sexual Symbolism of 
 the Cretan Snake Goddess (Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. IV, 
 
 [81] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 language of the thinking and feelings of 
 primitive people and unconsciously of civil- 
 ized peoples. It has its roots in the uncon- 
 scious, since all symbols are identical be- 
 cause unconscious thinking is identical. 
 
 The unconscious not only originates in the 
 childhood of man, but it may also be said 
 to have its origin in the childhood of the 
 world. If it were possible to penetrate into 
 the mind and motives of prehistoric man, 
 such data might be able to throw light upon 
 unconscious symbolism in its most primitive 
 form and the earliest stages of its develop- 
 ment. While the skeletal remains of pre- 
 historic man have been subjected to a search- 
 ing anatomical investigation on account of 
 their comparative abundance, yet the data 
 upon the mental activities of the men of pre- 
 historic times, by the very reason of their 
 remoteness, must be very fragmentary. 1 
 
 No. 3). The best discussion of the entire question is found 
 in Freud's "Totem and Taboo." 
 
 i See on this Henry Fairfield Osborne's "Men of the Old 
 
 [82] 
 
IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 
 
 It can be shown on the basis of fairly 
 abundant material, particularly in the plas- 
 tic arts and paintings in the caverns, that the 
 various races of prehistoric times seemed to 
 possess, in much the same way that modern 
 man possesses, strong yearnings and mo- 
 tives, pleasure and pain. Men even in those 
 remote times tended to emphasize the sexual 
 element and their beautiful color paintings 
 in the caverns seemed to show, that even long 
 years ago, men attempted to repress reality, 
 to break away from it in the struggle for 
 existence and from the monotony of life in 
 the dark caverns. 
 
 Some of the phallic symbolism of their 
 every day utensils is interesting, a symbol- 
 ism so often found in dreams. Symbolism 
 and consequently even repression, although 
 to a less extent than in a more modern 
 civilization thus had its origin in the remotest 
 
 Stone Age" — 1915, and my critical review of the same, from 
 a psychoanalytic standpoint in the Journal of Abnormal 
 Psychology, Vol. II, No. 4. 
 
 [83] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 ages of the past. The symbolism of dreams 
 draws its material from this remote ancestry, 
 showing how primitive and archaic the un- 
 conscious of man is and how often the dream 
 is merely a fragment of the mental life of 
 our remote ancestors. 
 
 We are now prepared to briefly discuss a 
 few primitive myths as projections of mate- 
 rial which is repressed in the unconscious of 
 man and of the race. 1 
 
 In the myths of the Pueblo dwellers we are 
 told, that "According to their Genesis, the 
 ancestors of the Pueblo dwellers issued from 
 the fourfold underworld through a Sipapu, 
 which some regard as a lake, and thence 
 journeyed in search of the Middle Place of 
 the world, Earth's navel." Here the birth 
 symbolism is very evident as in all primitive 
 thinking, the application, as in the Fuegian 
 
 i The material utilized here is taken from the "Mythology 
 of all Races," Vol. 10, North American Indian, — Hartly 
 Burr Alexander, and Vol. II, "Oceanic," by Roland R. 
 Dixon. 
 
 [84] 
 
IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 
 
 myth, of an individual birth process to a 
 cosmic birth process. 
 
 In the Pueblo mythology, too, the 
 "Plumed Serpent" is connected both with 
 lightning and fertility and the same identity 
 can be detected in the analysis of the Pro- 
 metheus myth. In the "highly dramatic 
 snake dances of the Hopi Indians, there are 
 several acts which seem to represent the 
 fructification of the maize by the "Plumed 
 Snake." This latter quotation shows that 
 the phallic symbolism of the serpent is recog- 
 nized by the comparative mythologist as well 
 as by the psychoanalyst. 
 
 The natives of Australia are in their cul- 
 ture among the lowest people in the world, 
 but at the same time they possess extraor- 
 dinary complex social organizations and 
 elaborate religious ceremonials. They have 
 but little repression hence- their myths refer- 
 ring to the origin and birth of human beings 
 are very literal and not at all symbolized. 
 
 [85] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 "They had no distinct limbs or organs of 
 sight, hearing or smell, and did not eat food, 
 and presented an appearance of human be- 
 ings all doubled up into a rounded mass in 
 which just the outline of the different parts 
 of the body could be vaguely seen." In an- 
 other creation myth, there was absolutely no 
 repression, the ocean was derived directly 
 from the amniotic liquor. 
 
 In a Polynesian myth, showing the 
 CEdipus trend, we see the symbolization of 
 the repressed family conflict which so fre- 
 quently occurs in the childhood of man, lays 
 the foundation for a future neurosis and 
 often appears in the dreams of adults. In 
 these dreams the father is slain or does not 
 appear and the mother is triumphant. 
 These over-attachments to one of the family 
 group, usually the son to the mother, are 
 strongly repressed as the individual develops, 
 and forms what is known as the CEdipus 
 complex, from the well known Greek 
 
 [86] 
 
IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 
 
 legend. This legend, like the Polynesian 
 myth, merely represents the repressed feel- 
 ings of the race, the over-love for the mother 
 and hate for the father. This Polynesian 
 myth is very interesting because it occurs in 
 a very primitive race which had the same 
 CEdipus legend, as the more cultured 
 Greeks, although these two races were sepa- 
 rated by immense periods of time. In this 
 myth, the father is symbolized as the sky 
 and the mother as the earth. 1 
 
 i See on this point, "Mythology of all Races," Vol. 9, 
 "Oceanic Myths" in Chapter I, "Myths of Origins and the 
 Deluge." 
 
 [87] 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 REPRESSED EMOTIONS IN LITERATURE 
 
 It is generally admitted that Russian 
 literature abounds in abnormal characters 
 and in delineations of nervous and mental 
 diseases, and as such it offers interesting and 
 valuable material for the psychoanalyst. 
 The best examples of these psychopathic and 
 neuropathic personalities are found in the 
 Russian novel, but occasionally we find this 
 morbid tendency in Russian lyric poetry. 
 Readers of Lermontoff's "Tamara," which 
 is sort of a Russian Lorelei, will find a 
 striking resemblance to Heine's famous 
 poem in its association of pleasure with pain. 
 
 The best psychopathic examples are 
 found in Dostoevsky, who painted abnormal 
 men and women in novels of tremendous 
 power. Because he himself was an epileptic 
 and so understood the disease with all the up- 
 
 [88] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 setting factors producing the individual at- 
 tacks, Dostoevsky described epileptic con- 
 vulsions, the ecstatic aura or warning of the 
 attacks and the epileptic personality, with 
 an astonishing degree of accuracy. For this 
 reason, the works of Dostoevsky furnish a 
 valuable clinic for the psychoanalyst. 1 
 
 No one but a sufferer from epilepsy could 
 have written the astonishingly accurate and 
 terse account of an epileptic attack, as it 
 appears in "Crime and Punishment." A 
 less gifted author or one who did not under- 
 stand the disease, would have produced an 
 eye-witness's description of an epileptic 
 convulsion. Not so Dostoevsky. For him, 
 an epileptic attack, as to all epileptics, is not 
 objective, it consists merely of a queer and 
 sometimes indescribable bodily sensation 
 and then a break in consciousness. 
 
 For example, Raskolnikov, after the mur- 
 der, is about to make a voluntary declara- 
 
 lSee "A Study of the Epilepsy of Dostoevsky" by L. 
 Pierce Clark — Boston Medical and Surgical Journal — 1915. 
 
 [89] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 tion of his crime before the police. He com- 
 plains of being dizzy, and then Dostoevsky 
 goes on to say: * — "Raskolnikov picked up 
 his hat and walked toward the door, but he 
 did not reach it. . . . When he recovered 
 consciousness, he found himself sitting in a 
 chair, supported by some one on the right 
 side, while some one else was standing on the 
 left, holding a yellowish glass filled with 
 yellow water." This is a description of a 
 genuine epileptic seizure ; exactly the manner 
 in which sufferers from epilepsy character- 
 ize their attacks — a queer feeling and then 
 they find themselves lying on the ground or 
 in a hospital bed. 
 
 Other examples of the portrayal of the 
 abnormal mental states are seen in the curi- 
 ous religious symbolism of Korolenko's 
 "Makar's Dream," the sensual details in 
 Kuprin's stories of garrison life and also in 
 "The Little Demon" of Feodor Sologub. 
 
 i "Crime and Punishment" Part II. Chapter I — (Con- 
 stance Garnett's translation). 
 
 [90] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 Both as a novel and a psychiatrical docu- 
 ment, "The Little Demon" is a masterpiece. 
 Briefly, the story states that the schoolmaster 
 Peredonov has been promised an inspector- 
 ship of schools if he will marry his mistress 
 and around this slight nucleus there develops 
 the various ramifications of his mental dis- 
 ease. Out of this coveted inspectorship, the 
 various delusions arise, elaborate themselves 
 more and more and become more complex 
 as the different situations of the novel de- 
 velop. The thwarted desires of the school- 
 master finally crystallize into clearly formed 
 delusions of persecution; in other words, 
 Peredonov becomes the victim of a mental 
 disease known as paranoia. In the history 
 of psychiatry this term has had wide varia- 
 tions and been loosely used, but in individ- 
 uals of Peredonov's personality, it refers to 
 a type of mental reaction where the affected 
 subjects are inclined to see a sinister mean- 
 ing in things and to misinterpret actual 
 occurrences. 
 
 [91] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 In Peredonov's case, as in all paranoiacs, 
 the delusions are the logical outgrowth of 
 actual situations in the life of the individual. 
 These actual situations, however, are never 
 misinterpreted unless there occurs, as in the 
 case of Peredonov, what may be termed an 
 overloading of each situation with certain 
 emotions and unfulfilled desires. Thus the 
 delusion formation is not the disease, it is 
 merely the symptom, the outward expression 
 of the underlying pathological mental state. 
 'From this standpoint "The Little Demon" 
 is not only a masterly novel but also a psy- 
 chiatrical document of great value. 
 
 All who have carefully analyzed the gen- 
 esis and development of paranoiac delusions 
 have seen Peredonovs in realitv and have 
 noted their over-suspiciousness and misinter- 
 pretation of actual life situations. 
 
 With the exception of Maupassant's "Le 
 Horla" I know of no work in prose literature 
 in which the complicated skeins of a mental 
 
 [92] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 disorder are so cleverly unraveled as in this 
 novel by Feodor Sologub. There is an in- 
 teresting parallel, too, between the visual 
 hallucinations of the "Being" in "Le Horla" 
 and the hallucinations of the "Nedotikomka" 
 in the "Little Demon." 
 
 Another example of an accurate portrayal 
 of a pathological mental state, both in the 
 reactions of the individual involved and of 
 the means utilized to bring this individual 
 out of his abnormal mentality, is found in 
 Goncharoff s "Oblomoff." 
 
 Oblomoff is not only a product of supreme 
 merit, parallel to the best work of Tolstoy, 
 Dostoevsky and Turgenieff , but it possesses 
 a valuable psychoanalytic interest in that it 
 portrays a certain type of repressed or shut 
 in human character and shows the reactions 
 of that character to inner conflicts and upset- 
 ting emotional factors. The author pre- 
 sents a valuable portrayal of a shut-in or 
 introverted personality, and demonstrates 
 
 [93] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 how love acted on this introverted individual 
 in the same manner in which a psychoanaly- 
 sis works. 
 
 This book is therefore of great interest to 
 the psychoanalytic physician. Intuitively 
 the author portrayed a certain type of neu- 
 rosis, probably the outgrowth of his own ex- 
 periences. Olga is really the psychoanalyst 
 and Oblomoff the patient. The genius of 
 the author has unconsciously traced the de- 
 velopment of a neurosis and its conclusion 
 that is more slowly and painfully reached by 
 the psychoanalyst. We are in the presence 
 of a unique and at the same time a highly 
 scientific conception. 
 
 In order to understand the book and its 
 relation to the writer and his time, it be- 
 comes necessary to say a few words concern- 
 ing the author, Goncharoff. 1 Kropotkin 
 states that the most popular novel of Gon- 
 
 i Much of what follows concerning Goncharoff is taken 
 from the admirable account in Kropotkin'* "Ideal* and 
 Realities in Russian Literature." 
 
 [94] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 charoff is "Oblomoff," which like Turge- 
 nieff's "Fathers and Sons" and Tolstoy's 
 "War and Peace" and "Resurrection," is one 
 of the profoundest productions of the last 
 half century. "It is so thoroughly Russian, 
 so Russian indeed," he says, "that only a 
 Russian can fully appreciate it, but it is at 
 the same time universally human, as it intro- 
 duces a type which is almost as universal as 
 that of Hamlet or Don Quixote." It is 
 here that we see the real significance of the 
 novel, it is the "universally human," as 
 Oblomoff represents a type of character, or 
 even of disease, which is represented by 
 withdrawal from reality and living and lux- 
 uriating in day dreams. 
 
 It appears that the novel portrays the 
 close connection between its principal char- 
 acter and the author himself, in fact, it 
 seems, as in so many supreme works of art, 
 to be nothing more than Goncharoff 's pro- 
 jection of his own inner feelings in the form 
 
 [95] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 of a literary creation. In his short auto- 
 biography, Goncharoff states . . . "My 
 people did not let me have even a wish, all 
 had been foreseen and attended to long 
 since. The old servants, with my nurse at 
 their head, looked into my eyes to guess my 
 wishes, trying to remember what I liked best 
 when I was with him, where my writing table 
 ought to be put, which chair I preferred to 
 the others, how to make my bed. The cook 
 tried to remember which dishes I liked in 
 my childhood . . . and all could not admire 
 me enough." 
 
 When the novel was published in Russia 
 in 1859, it made an extraordinary impression. 
 "All educated Russia read Oblomoff and 
 discussed Oblomoffism. Every one recog- 
 nized something of himself in Oblomoff, felt 
 the disease of Oblomoff in his own veins . . . 
 and now forty years afterward, one can read 
 and re-read 'Oblomoff' with the same pleas- 
 ure of nearly half a century ago, and it has 
 
 [96] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 lost nothing of its meaning, while it has ac- 
 quired many new ones. There are always 
 living Oblomoffs." 
 
 There are always living Oblomoffs! 
 How true! We are attracted to Hamlet 
 and Faust again and again because they 
 represent universal types, every one has 
 something of Hamlet or Faust within him. 
 So is Oblomoff a universal type. The psy- 
 choanalyst meets with Oblomoffs continually 
 in his practice. Every neurotic, who lives in 
 his day dreams, who has withdrawn more or 
 less from reality, who as a consequence dis- 
 plays the inhibition and inertia of introver- 
 sion is an Oblomoff. The character of 
 Oblomoff presents such valuable material for 
 the psychoanalyst, because it portrays the 
 neurosis of a real human being. 
 
 Before proceeding to the analysis of the 
 novel, it might be well to give a short out- 
 line of the case of a neurotic patient, so that 
 it may be compared with the hero in Gon- 
 
 [97] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 charoff's production. It will be noticed, 
 that the artificial creation cannot be differ- 
 entiated from the real individual. 
 
 It refers to the case of a young man who 
 might be termed a modern Oblomoff thus 
 showing that the character of Oblomoff is 
 not limited to any particular time or race. 
 He was an extreme neurotic, who for years 
 had withdrawn more and more from reality, 
 had built a sort of mental Chinese wall 
 around his mind, and as in a forbidden city, 
 had preferred to luxuriate in his day dreams 
 rather than come into touch with reality. In 
 his case as in Oblomoff's there is no balanced 
 proportion of day-dreaming and realistic 
 functioning, the realistic does not control his 
 day-dreaming but rather the day-dreaming 
 controls the realistic. 
 
 From his early childhood, as in Oblomoff 
 and in Goncharoff's Autobiography, his rel- 
 atives absolutely directed his everyday life. 
 He did everything slowly and with a great 
 
 [98] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 deal of inhibition and when completely dom- 
 inated by his day-dreams, he would display 
 intense inertia and become completely in- 
 active. 
 
 This living in day-dreams and idly allow- 
 ing the day-dreams to represent wishes or 
 desires which are impossible of fulfillment in 
 reality, is termed "autistic thinking," a term 
 introduced by the Swiss physician Bleuler. 
 This autistic thinking is universal, from the 
 child to the adult. It exists in all grades of 
 intensity in human beings. In normal and 
 healthy individuals it is kept within certain 
 limits by logical thinking, the autistic think- 
 ing never gains the upper hand. When the 
 balance between the two is upset, a neurosis 
 develops. The neurotic withdraws from 
 reality and lives in the unreality of the day- 
 dream, but can always by an effort bring 
 himself back into touch with reality again. 
 To use a Miltonic phrase, the neurotic is 
 constantly "hatching vain empires." 
 
 [99] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 In extreme cases, the individual is com- 
 pletely dominated by his autistic thinking, 
 he loses all contact with reality, lives in his 
 day-dreams, his fairy tales; and this living 
 in the fairy tales may produce a delusional 
 state which the subject is unable to expel. 
 Such a person is insane, the victim of a 
 mental disease because he lives his fairy tale, 
 it is real to him, he believes in it and conse- 
 quently no amount of reasoning or logic can 
 shake his belief. Such a person, in technical 
 terms, lacks insight. It is thus that certain 
 individuals develop the belief that they are 
 great personages, a king or a queen, Napo- 
 leon, Jesus. On the surface, the thinking 
 or ideas of such persons appear sheer non- 
 sense, something absolutely impossible is 
 imagined and believed to be real. 
 
 A beautiful example in contemporary lit- 
 erature, of the manner in which autistic 
 thinking may completely dominate the per- 
 sonality and so lead to a complete with- 
 
 [100] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 drawal from reality, can be found in Lord 
 Dunsany's "The Coronation of Mr. Thomas 
 Shap." 1 Mr. Shap's occupation consisted 
 of the dull monotony of a prosaic clerk 
 until he began to first perceive "the very 
 beastliness of his occupation" and "from 
 that moment he withdrew his dreams 
 from it" and "took little flights with his 
 fancy at first; dwelt all day in his dreamy 
 way on fields and rivers lying in the sun- 
 light." Little by little he withdrew more 
 and more from reality, "his soul was no 
 longer in them." He began to lead another 
 life, neglected his business, in his own imagi- 
 nation he lived in scenes of oriental splendor 
 and finally dominated them as king "throned 
 on one amethyst." Here we have an exquis- 
 ite picture of the paranoiac domination of 
 the personality of an individual who has be- 
 come dissatisfied with reality, in which the 
 balance of his own thoughts and of coming 
 
 i Lord Dunsany— "The Book of Wonder." 
 
 [101] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 into touch with reality, was completely upset. 
 It will be seen that there is no hard and 
 fast line to be drawn between the autistic 
 thinking, the repressed ideas of normal indi- 
 viduals and of cases of nervous and mental 
 disease. In normal individuals, there is a 
 constant balancing: there always remain 
 many points of contact in reality; in the 
 abnormal cases, these points of contact grow 
 less and less, until they entirely disappear. 
 But autistic thinking, if well balanced, is 
 not absolutely dangerous. A neurotic dif- 
 fers from a normal individual in that he pos- 
 sesses only isolated points of contact with 
 reality. As Bleuler states it— "A humanity 
 without autistic thinking could not have de- 
 veloped . . . the autistic contains most of 
 our ideals. The autistic forms of thinking 
 have for thousands of years given form to 
 human ethics ; they have created ideals which 
 would be impossible to logical thinking, dim 
 ideals certainly, but guiding stars towards 
 
 [102] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 which mankind may direct his groping 
 way." l 
 
 The sleeping beauty motive, as it runs 
 through imaginative fairy literature, is also 
 a type of autistic thinking and may be di- 
 vided into different forms. In the first, as 
 exemplified by Catulle Mendes's exquisite 
 tale (The Sleeping Beauty), the Princess 
 had been dreaming beautiful dreams for a 
 hundred years and in her dreams she is 
 "adored by a lover more handsome than any 
 of the Princes of the earth; I do not gain 
 anything by coming out of my enchantment." 
 — Then the Princess goes on sleeping and 
 dreaming again. In the other form as in 
 Tennyson's "Day Dream," the Princess is 
 awakened from her sleep by the magic kiss 
 of the Prince and instead of returning to 
 sleep, she remains awake, — "And deep into 
 the dying day, The happy Princess followed 
 him." 
 
 i E. Bleuler — "Autistic Thinking" — American Journal of 
 Insanity (Special number). 
 
 [103] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 It can thus be clearly seen, how the wish 
 fulfillment and symbolism of fairy tales is 
 parallel with what occurs in neurotic sub- 
 jects. In the latter, autistic thinking or 
 day-dreaming may also take two forms, the 
 one in which the subject prefers to remain 
 shut in, as in the stupor of dementia precox, 
 and the second, in which there is a constant 
 struggle to break through the day-dreaming 
 shell, as in hysteria and various psychoneu- 
 roses. This final triumph can only be 
 brought about through a successful psycho- 
 analysis. The fact that the same mental 
 mechanism is found in fairy tales as in 
 neurotic subjects, is explained by the fact 
 that the makers of fairy tales struggled with 
 the same conflicts as the nervously ill and 
 projected their conflicts into imaginative lit- 
 erature. As stated by Riklin, 1 "Fairy 
 tales are inventions of the directly utilized, 
 immediately conceived experiences of the 
 
 i Franz Riklin — "Wish Fulfillment and Symbolism in 
 Fairy Tales." 
 
 [104] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 primitive human soul and general human 
 tendency to wish-fulfillment, which we find 
 again in modern fiction only somewhat more 
 complicated and garbed in different forms." 
 In fact, dreams often resemble fairy tales 
 and such types of dreams may be termed 
 fairy tales from the unconscious. The sym- 
 bolism is universal; it is constructed from 
 the unconscious and projected either in 
 primitive fairy tales and myths or in dreams 
 and the various neuroses. 
 
 The first example of the application of 
 psychoanalysis to a novel, is Freud's analy- 
 sis of Wilhelm Jensen's "Gradiva." In 
 Oblomoff, as in Gradiva, the author knew 
 nothing of the theoretical or technical as- 
 pects of psychoanalysis, but the novel in 
 each case not only accurately portrayed a 
 neurotic disease but showed how the spon- 
 taneous reactions to a love affair could re- 
 lieve a neurosis. The "Gradiva" idea was 
 not entirely the product of the author's fancy, 
 
 [105] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 but may occur in a genuine neurosis, as I 
 have the opportunity to observe. In this 
 case the dream of a neurotic young girl 
 strongly resembled in its details and sym- 
 bolism, the young archaeologist's dream in 
 "Gradiva." 
 
 In another case, a young neurotic dreamed 
 of his physician seated at a rough table carv- 
 ing a lotus flower on a little oval piece of 
 wood, with a small knife resembling a scal- 
 pel. The symbolism here is clear. The 
 •scalpel indicated that the psychoanalytic 
 physician worked with human material like 
 a surgeon, in fact it symbolized the psycho- 
 analysis as surgery of the mind, while 
 the act of carving symbolized the psycho- 
 analytic treatment. In both cases the 
 dreams represented the repressed emotions 
 of the individual, symbolized in the bas- 
 relief of the dream. 
 
 In both the novels, too, as will be subse- 
 quently described in detail, the girl acted as 
 
 [106] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 the psychoanalytic physician; in "Gradiva" 
 she cured the delusion, in "OblomofT" she 
 almost completely relieved the shut-in and 
 repressed personality. As Freud so well 
 states it — "The accomplishment of the task 
 is easier for 'Gradiva' than for the physi- 
 cian; she is in this connection in a posi- 
 tion which might be called ideal from many 
 points of view. The physician who does not 
 fathom his patient in advance, and does not 
 possess within himself, as conscious memory, 
 what is working in the patient's unconscious, 
 must call to his aid a complicated technique 
 in order to remove the disadvantage. The 
 disturbance disappears by being traced back 
 to its origin. Analysis brings cure at the 
 same time." 1 
 
 After these long but rather necessary in- 
 troductory remarks, we may now proceed to 
 the analysis of OblomofT. 2 
 
 OblomofT was a Russian gentleman of 
 
 i S. Freud— "Delusion and Dream"— 1918. 
 2 The translation used is by C. J. Hogarth. 
 
 [107] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 moderate means, living in Petrograd about 
 the middle of the nineteenth century. The 
 central theme of the book lies in the effort 
 of Oblomoff himself, of his friends and of 
 the girl, Olga, to lead Oblomoff out of his 
 shut-in or introverted life, into touch with 
 reality. In other words the book represents 
 a struggle between introversion or the tend- 
 ency to live within oneself and extroversion 
 or the effort to make interests flow outward, 
 to attach themselves to objects and to live 
 m events in the outer world of reality. It 
 is here that the profound psychoanalytic 
 significance and insight of the book lies. 
 The mental attitude towards his surround- 
 ings, the inertia, is well shown in the follow- 
 ing description : — 
 
 "On the walls and around the pictures 
 there hung cobwebs coated with dust; the 
 mirrors, instead of reflecting, would have 
 more usefully served as tablets for recording 
 memoranda; every mat was freely spotted 
 
 [108] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 with stains ; on the sofa there lay a forgotten 
 towel, and on the table (as on most morn- 
 ings) , a plate, a salt cellar, a half eaten crust 
 of bread, and some scattered crumbs — all of 
 which had failed to be cleared away after 
 last night's supper. Indeed, were it not for 
 the plate, for a recently smoked pipe that 
 was propped against the bed, and for the 
 recumbent form of OblomofT himself, one 
 might have imagined that the place con- 
 tained not a single living soul, so dusty and 
 discolored did everything look, and so lack- 
 ing were any active traces of the presence of 
 a human being. True, on the whatnots 
 there were two or three open books, while a 
 newspaper was tossing about, and the bureau 
 bore on its top an inkstand and a few pens ; 
 but the pages at which the books were open 
 were covered with dust and beginning to 
 turn yellow (thus proving that they had long 
 been tossed aside) , the date of the newspaper 
 belonged to the previous year, and from 
 
 [109] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 the ink-stand, whenever a pen happened to 
 be dipped therein, there arose with a fright- 
 ened buzz, only a derelict fly." 
 
 In spite of this mental inertia, his apathy, 
 these characteristics are superficial. He 
 gave himself up again to his day dreams, he 
 lives in them and these day dreams pass into 
 genuine dreams in the same imperceptible 
 manner unknown to the dreamer, as Raskol- 
 nikov passes into an epileptic attack. 
 
 The author goes on to state further de- 
 tails of Oblomoffs day-dreaming — "But in 
 Oblomoff s study, all remained silent as the 
 tomb. Zakhar peeped through the chink of 
 the door, and perceived that his master was 
 lying prone on the sofa, with his head rest- 
 ing on the palm of his hand. The valet en- 
 tered the room. 
 
 " 'Why have you lain down again?' he 
 asked. 
 
 " 'Do not disturb me : cannot you see that 
 I am reading?' was OblomofT's abrupt reply. 
 
 [110] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 " ' Nay, but you ought to wash, and then 
 to write that letter!' urged Zakhar, deter- 
 mined not to be shaken off. 
 
 'Yes, I suppose I ought. I will do so 
 presently. Just now I am engaged in 
 thought.' 
 
 "As a matter of fact, he did read a page 
 of the book which was lying open — a page 
 which had turned yellow with a month's ex- 
 posure. That done, he laid it down and 
 yawned. 
 
 " 'How it all wearies me!' he whispered, 
 stretching, and then drawing up his legs. 
 Glancing at the ceiling as once more he re- 
 lapsed into a voluptuous state of coma, he 
 said to himself with a momentary sternness : 
 'No — business first.' Then he rolled over, 
 and clasped his hands behind his head. 
 
 "As he lay there he thought of his plans 
 for improving his property. Swiftly he 
 passed in review certain grave and funda- 
 mental schemes affecting his plow land 
 
 [in] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 and its taxation: after which he elaborated 
 a new and stricter course to be taken against 
 laziness and vagrancy on the part of the 
 peasantry, and then passed to sundry ideas 
 for ordering his own life in the country. 
 "First of all, he became engrossed in a 
 design for a new house. Eagerly he 
 lingered over a probable disposition of the 
 rooms and fixed in his mind the dimensions 
 of the dining room and the billiard-room, 
 and determined which way the windows of 
 4iis study must face. Indeed, he even gave 
 a thought to the furniture and to the carpets. 
 Next, he designed a wing for the building, 
 calculating the number of guests whom the 
 wing would accommodate, and set aside 
 proper sites for the stables, the coach houses, 
 and the servants' quarters ; finally he turned 
 his attention to the garden. The old lime 
 and oak trees should all be left as they were, 
 but the apple trees and pear trees should 
 be done away with, and succeeded by acacias. 
 
 [112] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 Also, he gave a moment's consideration to 
 the idea of a park, but after calculating the 
 cost of its upkeep, came to the conclusion 
 that such a luxury would prove too expensive 
 — wherefore he passed to the designing of 
 orangeries and aviaries. 
 
 "So vividly did these attractive visions 
 of the future development of his estate flit 
 before his eyes that he came to fancy himself 
 already settled there, and engaged in wit- 
 nessing the result of several years' working 
 of his schemes. 
 
 "On a fair summer's evening he seemed to 
 be sitting at a tea-table on the terrace of 
 Oblomoffka — sitting under the canopy of 
 leafy shade which the sun was powerless to 
 penetrate. From a long pipe in his hand 
 he was lazily inhaling smoke, and reveling 
 both in the delightful view which stretched 
 beyond the circle of trees and in the coolness 
 and the quiet of his surroundings. In the 
 distance some fields were turning to gold, as 
 
 [113] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 the sun, setting behind a familiar birch- 
 grove, tinged to red the mirror-like surface 
 of the lake. From the fields a mist had 
 risen, for the chill of evening was falling, 
 and dusk approaching apace. To his ears, 
 at intervals, came the clatter of peasantry 
 as they returned homewards, and at the en- 
 trance gates the servants of the establish- 
 ment were sitting at ease, while from their 
 vicinity came the sound of echoing voices 
 and laughter, the playing of balalaiki, 1 and 
 "the chattering of girls as they pursued the 
 sport of gorielki. 2 Around him, also, his 
 little ones were frisking — at times climbing 
 on his knee and hanging about his neck; 
 while behind the samovar 3 was seated the 
 real ruler of all that his eyes were beholding 
 — his divinity, a woman, his wife! . . . And 
 in the dining-room, a room at once elegant 
 and simply appointed — a cheerful fire was 
 
 i Three stringed, lute-like instruments. 
 
 2 A sort of catch-as-catch-can. 
 
 3 Tea-urn. (Notes of the translator.) 
 
 [114] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 glowing and Zakhar now promoted to the 
 dignity of a major-domo, and adorned with 
 whiskers turned wholly gray, was laying a 
 large, round table to a pleasant accompany- 
 ing tinkle of crystal and silver as he ar- 
 ranged, here a decanter and there a fork. 
 "Presently the dreamer saw his wife and 
 himself sit down to a bountiful supper. 
 Yes, and with them was Schtoltz, the com- 
 rade of his youth, his unchanging friend, 
 with other well-known faces ; lastly, he could 
 see the inmates of the home retiring to 
 
 JL Co L» • • • 
 
 "Oblomoff's features blushed with delight 
 at the vision. So clear, so vivid, so poetical 
 was it all that for a moment he lay with his 
 face buried in the sofa cushions. Suddenly 
 there had come upon him a dim longing for 
 love and happiness ; suddenly he had become 
 athirst for the fields and hills of his native 
 place, for his home, for his wife, for chil- 
 dren — 
 
 [115] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 "After lying face down wards for a dick 
 ment or two, he turned upon his back. His 
 features were alight with generous emotion, 
 and for the time being, he was happy. 
 
 "Again the charming seductiveness of the 
 sleep-waking enfolded him in its embrace. 
 He pictured to himself a small colony of 
 friends who should come and settle in the 
 villages and farms within a radius of fifteen 
 or twenty versts of his country house. 
 Every day they should visit one another's 
 houses — whether to dine or to sup or to 
 dance; until everywhere around him he 
 would be able to see onlv bright faces 
 framed in sunny days — faces which should 
 be ever free of care and wrinkles, and round, 
 and merry, and ruddy, and double-chinned, 
 and of unfailing appetite. In all his neigh- 
 borhood there should be constant summer 
 tide, constant gayety, unfailing good fare, 
 the joys of perennial lassitude. 
 
 " 'My God. my God!' he cried in the full- 
 
 [116] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 ness of his delight: and with that he awoke. 
 Once more to his ears came the cries of the 
 hawkers in the courtyard as they vended 
 coal, sand, and potatoes : once more he could 
 hear some one begging for subscriptions to 
 build a church; once more from a neighbor- 
 ing building which was in the course of erec- 
 tion there streamed a babel of workmen's 
 shouts, mingled with the clatter of tools." 
 
 The reverie gradually faded into a real day 
 dream, which has all the characteristics of a 
 genuine dream — a wish fulfillment projected 
 into the future. 
 
 The medical advice for this neurosis is in- 
 teresting, but inaccurate, according to our 
 modern standards. 
 
 "You must avoid emotion of everv kind, 
 for that sort of thing is sure to militate 
 against a successful cure. Try, rather, to 
 divert yourself with riding, with dancing, 
 with moderate exercise in the open air, and 
 with pleasant conversation — more especially 
 
 [117] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 conversation with the opposite sex. These 
 things were designed to make your heart 
 beat more lightly, and to experience none 
 but agreeable emotions. Again, you must 
 lay aside all reading and writing. Rent a 
 villa which faces south and lies embowered 
 in flowers, and surround yourself also with 
 an atmosphere of music and women." The 
 doctor then goes on to give the advice of 
 traveling for curing the neurosis, not realiz- 
 ing that a neurotic carries his conflicts with 
 him wherever he goes. 
 
 In his dreams he regresses to his whole 
 past life, he reviews it from childhood up, 
 just as a neurotic individual always does. 
 This affords the author an opportunity to 
 make clear the background out of which the 
 shut-in personality developed and in one as- 
 tonishing passage, the whole of Oblomoff 's 
 emotional development is summarized and 
 described. 
 
 "Moreover, should the boy at any time 
 
 [118] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 want anything, he had three or four serv- 
 ants to do his bidding; and in this fashion 
 he never learnt what it was to do a single 
 thing for himself. 
 
 "Yet in the end his parents' fond solici- 
 tude wearied him, for at no time should he 
 even cross the courtyard, or descend the 
 staircase, without hearing himself followed 
 by shouts of ' Where are you going to, Illya?' 
 or 'How can you do that?' or 'You will fall 
 and hurt yourself !' Thus pampered like an 
 exotic plant in a greenhouse, he grew up 
 slowly and drowsily, and in a way which 
 turned his energies inward, and gradually 
 caused them to wither.' ' 
 
 Like Zoe in Jensen's novel u Gradiva," 
 Olga has upon Oblomoff the effect of a psy- 
 choanalysis. She acts upon his repressed 
 and introverted life in a way a chemical fer- 
 ment or catalyzer acts, she wishes to attract 
 to herself the repressed and shut-in emotions 
 of Oblomoff. But as we shall clearly see, 
 
 [119] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 she only partially succeeds, for Oblomoff is 
 only incompletely drawn out of the prison- 
 walls of his shut-in mind and then his neu- 
 rosis sinks again to a lower cultural level, he 
 reverts to the purely nutritional tendencies 
 of childhood. The love affair is thus de- 
 scribed. . . . 
 
 "From that time forth she lived in him 
 alone, while he, for his part, racked his brains 
 to avoid incurring the loss of her esteem. 
 Whenever she detected in his soul — and she 
 could probe that soul very deeply — the least 
 trace of its former characteristics, she would 
 work for him to heap reproaches for his leth- 
 argy and fear of life. Just as he was about 
 to yawn, as he was actually opening his 
 mouth for the purpose, her astonished glance 
 would transfix him, and cause his mouth to 
 snap with a click which jarred his teeth. 
 Still more did he hasten to resume his alac- 
 rity whenever he perceived that his lassitude 
 was communicating itself to her, and threat- 
 
 [120] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 ening to render her cold and contemptuous. 
 Instantly he would undergo a revival of 
 strenuous activity; and then the shadow be- 
 tween them would disappear, and mutual 
 sympathy once more beat in strong, clear 
 accord. Yet this solicitude on his part had 
 not, as yet, its origin in the magic ring of 
 love. Indeed the effect of his charmed toils 
 was a negative rather than a positive. True, 
 he no longer slept all day — on the contrary, 
 he rode, read, walked, and even thought of 
 resuming his writing and his agricultural 
 schemes; yet the ultimate direction, the in- 
 most significance, of his life still remained 
 confined to the sphere of good intentions. 
 Particularly disturbing did he find it when- 
 ever Olga plied him with some particular 
 question and demanded of him, as of a pro- 
 fessor, full satisfaction of her curiosity. 
 
 "This occurred frequently, and arose not 
 out of pedantry on her part, but a desire 
 to know the right and wrong of things. 
 
 [121] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 "At times a given question would absorb 
 her even to the point of forgetting her con- 
 sideration for Oblomoff. For instance, on 
 one occasion, when she had besought his opin- 
 ion concerning double stars, and he was in- 
 cautious enough to refer her to Herschel, he 
 was dispatched to purchase the great author- 
 ity's book, and commanded to read it 
 through, and to explain the same to her full 
 satisfaction. On another occasion he was 
 rash enough to let slip a word or two con- 
 cerning various schools of painting: where- 
 fore he had to undergo another week's read- 
 ing and explaining and also to pay sundry 
 visits to the Hermitage Museum. In the 
 end how he trembled whenever she asked 
 him a question!" 
 
 This is the defeated transference of 
 Oblomoff; here it is that love fails. This 
 emotional transference, which is really only 
 the acknowledged sympathy between two in- 
 dividuals, forms the basis of all love affairs, 
 
 [122] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 and love affairs often have an unhappy end- 
 ing because this transference fails. Why? 
 Because in every love affair it is necessary 
 for one of the parties involved to cut loose 
 from the moorings or attachments to the 
 members of their own family, to their blood 
 relations. Where this fails or only partially 
 succeeds, there arises both a conscious and 
 unconscious mental conflict during the 
 period of the love affair and in all these 
 cases it leads to a severe neurotic anxiety. 
 It is for this reason so many young people 
 have a so-called "nervous breakdown" dur- 
 ing a period of betrothal; the acknowledged 
 sympathy, the transference between the 
 two sexes remaining incomplete. In the 
 young man it is incomplete because of too 
 strong attachment to the mother, in the 
 young woman because of too strong attach- 
 ment to the father. While in these cases, 
 the neurotic anxiety is conscious, yet the 
 mental conflict, the over-attachment to the 
 
 [123] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 parent of the opposite sex, is very strong 
 and deeply imbedded in the unconscious 
 where it can only be detected through a psy- 
 choanalysis. As a rule this over-attachment 
 is very clearly seen in dreams, where the 
 parent appears in a more or less disguised 
 form or sometimes in a condensation, like a 
 composite photograph, of the parent and the 
 loved one. 
 
 This over-attachment to the family group 
 is very beautifully portrayed in OblomofFs 
 first dream. He dreamed that he was seven 
 years old and awoke in his little cot at home. 
 
 "OblomofFs nurse had long been waiting 
 for him to awake, and now she began to 
 draw on for him his stockings. This he re- 
 fused to allow her to do: which end he at- 
 tained by frisking and kicking, while she 
 tried to catch hold of his leg, and the pair 
 laughed joyously together. Finally, she 
 lifted him on her lap, and washed him and 
 combed his hair; after which she conducted 
 
 [124] 
 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 him to his mother. On seeing his long dead 
 parent, the sleeping Oblomoff' s form trem- 
 bled with delight and affection, and from 
 under his unconscious eyelids there stole and 
 remained two burning tears. . . . 
 
 "Upon him his mother showered affection- 
 ate kisses, and gazed at him with tender so- 
 licitude to see whether his eyes were clear 
 and healthy. Does he in any way ail? she 
 inquired. Had he (this to his nurse) slept 
 quietly, or had he lain awake all night? had 
 he had any dreams? Had he been at all 
 feverish ? Lastly, she took him by the hand, 
 and led him to the sacred ikon. Kneeling 
 with one arm around his form, she prompted 
 him in the words of the prayers, while the 
 boy repeated them with scanty attention, 
 since he preferred, rather, to turn his eyes to 
 the windows, whence the freshness and scent 
 of a lilac-tree was flooding the room. 
 
 " 'Shall we go for a walk, to-day, mama?' 
 suddenly he asked. 
 
 [125] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 " 'Yes, darling/ she replied hastily, but 
 kept her gaze fixed upon the ikon, and hur- 
 riedly concluded the sacred formula. Yet 
 into the words of that formula her very soul 
 was projected, whereas the little one re- 
 peated them only in nonchalant fashion." 
 
 Thus Oblomoff is merely autistic thinking 
 and his dreams are regressions to the earlier 
 and happier days of his childhood, when he 
 was moored to the various members of the 
 family, — that is the dreams were genuine 
 wish fulfillments. He is unhappy now, he 
 lives within himself because he is no longer 
 a child, his real childhood is slumbering in 
 his adult unconscious and only appears like 
 a living being in the form of a dream. The 
 disease "the apathetic malady of Oblo- 
 moffka" is what would be termed in psycho- 
 pathology an introversion neurosis, which 
 has all degrees of intensity and which is man- 
 ifested by the individual slowly shutting 
 himself off more and more from reality, 
 
 [126] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 finally sinking into and living completely in 
 day dreams. Under these conditions, real- 
 ity loses its hold and the inner world of un- 
 reality finally assumes a dominating power. 
 The result is inevitable, a mental inertia a 
 lack of will power, what the French term 
 aboulia. 
 
 As Jung expresses it — "Whoever intro- 
 verts, that is to say, who ever takes away 
 from a real object without putting in its 
 place a real compensation is overtaken by 
 the inevitable results of introversion." * 
 
 So it was with Oblomoff. The fatalistic 
 inevitable results of his introversion are ex- 
 pressed in the following passage. ... 
 
 "Such the philosophy which our Plato of 
 Oblomoffka elaborated for the purpose of 
 lulling himself to sleep amid the problems 
 and the stern demands of duty and of des- 
 tiny. He had been bred and nourished to 
 play the part, not of a gladiator in the arena 
 
 i C. G. Jung "Psychology of the Unconscious" — 1916. 
 
 [127] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 but of a peaceful onlooker at the struggle. 
 Never could his diffident, lethargic spirit 
 have faced either the raptures or the blows 
 of life. Hence he expressed only one of its 
 aspects, and had no mind either to succeed in 
 it, or to change anything in it, or to repent 
 of his decision. As the years flowed on, both 
 emotions and repining came to manifest 
 themselves at rarer and rarer intervals, until, 
 by quiet, imperceptible degrees he became 
 finally interned in the plain, otiose tomb of 
 retirement which he had fashioned with his 
 own hands, even as desert anchorites who 
 have turned from the world dig for them- 
 selves a material sepulcher. Of reorganiz- 
 ing his estate, and removing hither with his 
 household, he had given up all thought. 
 The steward whom Schtoltz had placed in 
 charge of Oblomoff ka, regularly sent him the 
 income therefrom, and the peasantry prof- 
 fered him flour and poultry at Christmas- 
 
 [128] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 tide, and everything on the estate was pros- 
 pering." 
 
 Thus his introversion has plunged him into 
 a lower cultural level where the sublimations 
 of civilized society, of intellect, of logical 
 thinking mean nothing to him. His life, his 
 reactions, his elan vitale, to use the Berg- 
 sonian phrase, became a mere nutritional 
 craving. . . . "He has succeeded in escap- 
 ing life, in driving a bargain with it, and en- 
 suring himself an inevitable seclusion." 
 How true this phrase is. . . . "He suc- 
 ceeded in escaping life." For psychoanaly- 
 sis shows that that is the purpose of intro- 
 version, to escape the conflicts of life, of 
 reality, by building a mental Chinese wall 
 around the mind. In fact, a neurotic is so 
 inaccessible because of this Chinese wall. 
 The neurotic turns away from reality, he 
 takes a flight in disease, runs under cover so 
 to speak and thus secures safety. Introver- 
 
 [129] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 sion is a method of escaping from reality. 
 
 Concerning Olga's failure to draw Oblo- 
 moff out of his introversion, Oblomoff him- 
 self gives the hint of the reason of his failure 
 in the following words — "Alas!" was Oblo- 
 moff's repetition, "Olga wishes forever to be 
 on the move. Apparently she cares nothing 
 about dreaming over the poetical phases of 
 life, or losing herself in reveries. She is 
 like Schtoltz. It would seem as though the 
 two had conspired to live life at top speed." 
 
 It seems, therefore, fair to assume, that if 
 the character of Olga had been a little more 
 ideal, a little more poetic in connection with 
 her practical ability, she would have suc- 
 ceeded. Therefore the love-transference 
 only partially appealed to Oblomoff; only 
 partially awakened his emotions. He could 
 not come into contact with the more sub- 
 limated aspects of love, he could not be re- 
 awakened from the slumber of his idle 
 
 [130] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 thinking and so regressed to that childhood 
 to which his day-dreams were totally at- 
 tached. He went the path of least resist- 
 ance and slipped back into his introversion; 
 in the words of the author, he was "deter- 
 mined to be powerless." A year and a half 
 later, Oblomoff was sitting in his dark, 
 murky rooms, in the same condition as when 
 he was first introduced to us. 
 
 So Oblomoff married his landlady because 
 his nutritional cravings and desires drew 
 him back to the childhood of his dreams. 
 Food alone, and not the higher sublimated 
 pleasures of love and intellectual interest, 
 were self sufficient for him. He does not 
 have to go beyond his own body for satis- 
 faction, his pleasures are found in the expec- 
 tation of eating and in the taste of food. 
 He thus becomes tremendously introverted, 
 shut-in, like those cases of dementia praecox 
 which in the terminal stages of their disease 
 
 [131] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 are interested only in the immediate pleas- 
 ures of the body. Oblomoff 's surroundings 
 are described as follows: 
 
 "Hams hung from the ceiling of the store- 
 room (to avoid damage by mice), and, with 
 them, cheeses, loaves of sugar, dried fish, and 
 bags of nuts and preserved mushrooms. On 
 a table stood tubs of butter, pots of sour 
 cream, baskets of apples, and God knows 
 what else besides, for it would require the 
 pen of a second Homer to describe in full, 
 and in detail, all that had become accumu- 
 lated in the various corners and on the vari- 
 ous floors of this little nest of domestic life. 
 
 "Nor was his coffee prepared for him with 
 less care, attention, and skill than had been 
 the case before he had changed his old quar- 
 ters for his present ones. Giblet soup, mac- 
 aroni with Parmesan cheese, soup concocted 
 of kvass and herbs, home-fed pullets . . . 
 all these dishes succeeded one another in reg- 
 ular rotation, and by so doing helped to make 
 
 [132] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 agreeable breaks in the otherwise monoto- 
 nous routine of the little establishment." . . . 
 His mental condition is portrayed in the 
 following passage — 
 
 "Thus Oblomoff lived in a sort of gilded 
 cage — a cage within which, as in a diorama, 
 the only changes included alternations of 
 night and day and of the seasons. Of 
 changes, the disturbing kind which stir up 
 the sediment from the bottom of life's bowl — 
 a sediment only too frequently both bitter 
 and obnoxious — there were none. Ever 
 since the day when Schtoltz had cleared him 
 of debt, and Tarentiev and Tarentiev's 
 friend had taken themselves off for good, 
 every adverse element had disappeared from 
 Oblomoff's existence, and there surrounded 
 him only good, kind, sensible folk who had 
 agreed to underpin his existence with theirs, 
 and to help him not to notice it, nor to feel 
 it, as it pursued its even course. Every- 
 thing was, as it were, at peace, and of that 
 
 [133] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 peace, that inertia, OblomofT represented 
 the complete, the natural, embodiment and 
 expression. After passing in review and 
 considering his mode of life, he had sunk 
 deeper and deeper therein, until finally he 
 had come to the conclusion that he had no 
 farther to go, and nothing farther to seek, 
 and that the ideal of his life would best be 
 preserved where he was — albeit without 
 poetry, without those finer shades where- 
 with his imagination had once painted for 
 •him a spacious, careless course of manorial 
 life on his own estate among his own peas- 
 antry and servants.'' 
 
 In his introversion, he retraces his mental 
 development, he regresses to his childhood 
 in his dreams because he loves his childhood, 
 because he was happy then, he wishes to be 
 there again and since he cannot have his 
 childhood in reality he has it in his dreams. 
 He does not identify himself with his en- 
 
 [134] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 vironment, his environment is undisturbed 
 and means nothing to him. 
 
 Oblomoff is merely an exaggerated form 
 of what often tempore rily occurs in normal 
 individuals, but here in the latter without 
 any final breaking away from reality because 
 of the perfect balancing between logical 
 thinking and autistic thinking. 
 
 This retreat or flight from reality has in 
 addition, a profound social significance. 
 All of us are more or less dominated by day 
 dreams and these day dreams technically ex- 
 pressed as autistic thinking, are really the 
 fulfillment of our innermost wishes, wishes 
 which are impossible of fulfillment in reality. 
 There is thus a withdrawal from reality but 
 with isolated points of contact in the nor- 
 mally balanced individual. Life is a conflict 
 between reality and retreat from it, particu- 
 larly if the reality becomes unbearable. 
 
 It would seem then, without stretching 
 
 [135] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 the comparison too far, as if the dreams were 
 the only realities, since in them are fulfilled 
 our innermost desires and ambitions, and all 
 our perplexities and conflicts are solved ac- 
 cording to our heart's desire. This is the 
 hypothesis of Freud . . . namely, that all 
 mental activities correspond to two funda- 
 mental principles . . . the "pleasure prin- 
 ciple" and the 'reality principle." The 
 "pleasure principle" is for the purpose cf 
 seeking pleasure and avoiding pain and it is 
 here that the concept of repression steps in. 
 The "reality principle" is the concept of ad- 
 justment to reality, either by contact with it 
 or by withdrawing from it, and by reality we 
 mean the mental as well as the physical 
 world. 
 
 All explorers, all those who with a scien- 
 tific impetus follow what is called the spirit 
 of adventure, are really those who retreat 
 from reality by seeking new worlds. There 
 is this exception however — they balance their 
 
 [136] 
 
IN LITERATURE 
 
 logical thinking with their autistic thinking, 
 they keep their points of contact thus saving 
 themselves from the fate of the neurotic or 
 the stuporous patient. 
 
 It is a question whether complete intro- 
 version can ever lead to a favorable issue and 
 liberate the enormous psychical energy which 
 seems to be latent in the unconscious. In- 
 troversion is always dangerous in the sense 
 that the inner cravings of man possess a 
 monstrous laziness and consequently any 
 tendency to lose oneself in introversion may 
 lead to indolence with its inability for the 
 production of creative work. 
 
 [137] 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE SUBLIMATION OF REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 We are now prepared to discuss how re- 
 pressions are removed, in other words, how 
 does a neurosis get well? 
 
 One of the greatest problems of psycho- 
 analysis may be stated in a few words — 
 namely, how does psychoanalysis work? It 
 is generally admitted that it is not due to 
 suggestion, since in all psychoanalytic treat- 
 ment, in which careful attention is paid to. 
 technique, the element of suggestion is care- 
 fully avoided. Xeither can it be said to be 
 due to explanation, for to explain the un- 
 conscious source of the nervous illness or to 
 enter into a discussion of the dreams, fre- 
 quently produces a feeling of antagonism 
 (resistance), which may well nigh prove in- 
 
 [133] 
 
SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 
 
 surmountable in the cure of a nervous ill- 
 ess. 
 
 It is easy to talk of the breaking down of 
 resistance, of transference, of sublimation, of 
 abreaction, 1 but these are the end-results of 
 psychoanalysis rather than its inner mechan- 
 ism and do not explain the real reason for the 
 working of the psychoanalytic procedure. 
 The test then of all psychoanalysis is the 
 pragmatic one. 
 
 It will be admitted by all psychoanalysts, 
 that psychoanalysis, used in the sense con- 
 ceived by Freud, is directed primarily to the 
 unconscious, for dreams, symptomatic ac- 
 tions, the wide range of the neuroses them- 
 selves, have their origin in the unconscious. 
 The so-called resistance is merely the force 
 which prevents a deep penetration into the 
 
 i By abreaction is meant the mental processes of work- 
 ing off a pent-up emotion by living through it again in 
 feeling and action. If completely abreacted, a repressed 
 emotion is diffused and works itself off harmlessly, if not 
 completely abreacted, it may lead to states of mental dis- 
 sociation. 
 
 [139] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 unconscious, which for certain purposes does 
 not wish to be revealed. It defends itself 
 against being brought into the light of con- 
 scious thinking. 
 
 Transference on the other hand represents 
 the opposite of resistance, the ability to 
 penetrate into the deeper strata of the un- 
 conscious. Psychoanalysis then is the tech- 
 nical instrument, if it may be so called, used 
 for the purpose of penetrating or digging 
 into the unconscious. If the term may be 
 permitted every psychoanalyst is a paleo- 
 psychologist, whose duty it is to penetrate 
 into the historic past of the individual psyche, 
 and to explore the primitive mentality. 
 
 It has been generally admitted through 
 study of dreams, and of the taboos and neu- 
 roses of primitive men, that the unconscious, 
 from which all neuroses take their origin, is 
 archaic and barbaric, in fact, all neuroses are 
 expressions of this barbaric unconscious. 
 The presence of the (Edipus motive as an 
 
 [140] 
 
SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 
 
 expression of this archaic and unethical un- 
 conscious is sufficient proof of the uncultural 
 nature of the unconscious. The unconscious 
 originated not only in the childhood of man, 
 but because it contains so many repressed 
 motives, may also be said to have originated 
 in the childhood of the world. These re- 
 pressed motives are revealed in dreams, as 
 during sleep the censorship of social inhibi- 
 tion is removed. There arise then dreams 
 of revenge, the symbolic dream of flying and 
 also the non-embarrassment dream of being 
 insufficiently clothed. 
 
 The dreams offer the best and it might be 
 said, the incontrovertible evidence of these 
 repressed feelings, which, since they cannot 
 be fulfilled in reality, are fulfilled either in 
 dreams or in neurotic disturbances. Thus 
 a dream in every case, is merely a fulfilled 
 repressed wish of the unconscious. As 
 stated by Rank and Sachs: 1 "A searching 
 
 i "The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental 
 Sciences." 
 
 [141] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 investigation revealed sufficient grounds to 
 justify the supposition that the collective 
 primitive forms of mental life, as they exist 
 in the child and remain preserved in the un- 
 conscious of adults, are identical within cer- 
 tain limits with the processes of the mental 
 life of the savage, so far as these may hold 
 as reflections of primitive humanity." 
 
 In the unconscious is condensed and capit- 
 ulated the cultural history of mankind. As 
 the different strata of the earth have revealed 
 to human paleontologists different cultural 
 levels, so to the psychoanalyst, the study of 
 dreams reveals the different cultural levels 
 in the unconscious. Any description of the 
 unconscious therefore must be expressed, 
 not in the horizontal terms, but as being 
 composed of different stratigraphic levels. 
 
 All who have worked in psychoanalysis 
 have been impressed with the fact that the 
 motives or wishes of the unconscious are 
 barbaric and unethical. The dream offers 
 
 [142] 
 
SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 
 
 us the best evidence of this barbarism, since 
 the dream-formation takes place exclusively 
 in the unconscious. The dream reveals verv 
 primitive mental states, which for years have 
 been more or less suppressed and dormant. 
 Thus the unconscious contains the same de- 
 sires which existed consciously in our very 
 remote ancestors. The dream reveals the 
 mind of prehistoric man, rather than the hu- 
 man mind as it has been rationalized and 
 changed through culture and education and 
 through the evidence offered by the dream 
 it is possible to reconstruct the entire human 
 mind. 
 
 If then the unconscious reveals very primi- 
 tive and barbaric ways of thinking and if the 
 only wishes at its disposal are more or less 
 unethical and anti-social, several questions 
 of great practical importance present them- 
 selves. Can these unconscious motives be 
 obliterated? Can they be raised to a higher 
 cultural level? If these questions can be 
 
 [143] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 answered in the affirmative, then we must 
 look for such evidence in the dream, which 
 is purely the product of the unconscious. 
 
 It is now a matter of common observation 
 that psychoanalysis can actually change the 
 nature and motives of a subject's dreams. 1 
 Psychoanalysis, therefore, does for the un- 
 conscious of the individual what education 
 does for the race. The best evidence of this 
 cultural advancement in the unconscious can 
 be demonstrated in dreams. 
 
 That psychoanalysis is certainly effective 
 in raising the primitive motives of the uncon- 
 scious, can be shown by the following facts, 
 taken from a psychoneurotic case which was 
 
 i Attention was first called to this phenomenon, so valu- 
 able for a clear understanding of the workings of psycho- 
 analysis and its prognostic value, in a paper published by 
 me in the New York Medical Journal for March 23, 1913. 
 It was later further elaborated in my statistical study of 
 psychoanalytic treatment and finally summarized in my 
 paper on "Hermaphroditic Dreams" (Psychoanalytic Re- 
 view — Oct. 1917), where it was stated that psychoanalysis 
 can actually change the unconscious bi-sexual tendency of 
 man, in the same way that it can raise our primitive un- 
 conscious traits to a higher cultural level. 
 
 [144] 
 
SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 
 
 carefully studied, over a long period of time. 
 
 A young man of high intelligence and with 
 a cultured social background, at the begin- 
 ning of the psychoanalysis, presented very 
 primitive types of dreams, showing that his 
 neurosis was the expression of barbaric re- 
 pressed wishes. After some months of 
 treatment, another dream of the same type 
 occurred, in which a marked censorship was 
 shown and an attempt to neutralize the fan- 
 tasy, although at the beginning of the psy- 
 choanalysis he knew intellectually about the 
 censorship, but was unable to utilize it. 
 This change as the result of psychoanalysis 
 is interesting, for it demonstrates that the 
 unconscious had been raised to a higher cul- 
 tural level, where censorship became active 
 and acted like a psychological taboo. 
 
 The original feeling in this case proved 
 that the patient's unconscious was the reposi- 
 tory of exceedingly primitive emotions and 
 wishes; emotions, antedating the taboo, be- 
 
 [145] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 cause no psychological barrier had been de- 
 veloped or erected. It is the unconscious 
 that has changed rather than the censor; it 
 has undergone a higher evolution as a result 
 of psychoanalysis. 
 
 This may be taken as the working of psy- 
 choanalysis. A neurosis is the expression, 
 usually symbolic, of the barbaric motives of 
 the unconscious. Psychoanalysis has an 
 educational influence in that the method 
 raises the unconscious to a higher cultural 
 level and sublimation. 
 
 In this modification of the unconscious by 
 psychoanalysis, the motives are so changed 
 that they become really civilized, in fact a 
 complete analysis is a complete regeneration. 
 
 When a neurosis gets well spontaneously, 
 without the aid of psychoanalysis, it is very 
 doubtful if there is a complete recovery in 
 the genuine psychological sense. By this 
 is meant, that after a patient plunges into 
 a neurosis, and the neurotic symptoms dis- 
 
 [146] 
 
SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 
 
 appear, either by the process of time or 
 through the ordinary methods of reeduca- 
 tion, the unconscious difficulties and conflicts 
 which produced the neurosis, still remain, 
 and are liable to reappear again through 
 future upsetting factors. In the spontan- 
 eous recovery of a neurosis (the term "re- 
 covery" being used for want of a better 
 word) , several processes may take place, viz. : 
 
 1. If the neurosis was an escape from an 
 unbearable situation, the symptoms gradu- 
 ally simmer down or a conscious process of 
 readjustment or compromise takes place. 
 
 2. The neurosis in itself or its nucleus re- 
 mains, but becomes "walled off" as it were, 
 ready to break out at any future time under 
 proper conditions of fatigue, worry, anxiety 
 or emotional upheaval. 
 
 3. There may develop a complete under- 
 standing of the neurotic symptoms without 
 the symptoms disappearing, in fact the neu- 
 rosis remains, but is borne with a more phil- 
 
 [147] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 osophical attitude. This is what usually 
 takes place after methods of ordinary reedu- 
 cation, the neurosis remains, but its symp- 
 toms (fear or compulsive ideas) are looked 
 upon from an entirely different angle. 
 
 4. A spontaneous readjustment of the un- 
 bearable situation which was responsible for 
 the neurosis, may take place in the uncon- 
 scious. In these cases there is either merely 
 a rearrangement of the pathogenic material 
 or it has been forced down to a lower level 
 of the unconscious. It is extremely doubt- 
 ful if this material has been completely ra- 
 tionalized by the personality. 
 
 As an example of this latter process, a 
 woman whose son had gone to war was ex- 
 tremely troubled by a recurrent dream in 
 which her son's military uniform disappeared 
 little by little. In this case, as the dream 
 demonstrates, in spite of her conscious patri- 
 otism there was an unconscious protest 
 against war, because, as she stated it, the 
 
 [148] 
 
SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 
 
 war situation had shifted from an impersonal 
 interest to a personal one "because it brings 
 my son into the vortex and may swallow 
 him up in it." The unconscious symbolized 
 this process in the dream by making the mili- 
 tary uniform gradually disappear. An in- 
 teresting case is reported by Rivers 1 which 
 shows in a very clear manner how spontan- 
 eous readjustments may take place in the 
 unconscious. An officer who had been par- 
 tially buried by an explosion and apparently 
 uninjured, immediately collapsed when he 
 saw the remains of a fellow officer who had 
 been blown to pieces. This vision haunted 
 him in dreams to the extent that he would 
 awaken in the utmost terror. Finally he 
 became afraid to go to sleep. Under the 
 effect of psychotherapeutic conversation, the 
 character of the dreams changed. At first 
 he saw the mangled body but without horror, 
 then in a dream he took some of his friend's 
 
 iW. H. R. Rivers — "The Repression of War Experi- 
 ence" — Lancet, 1918. 
 
 [149] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 personal belongings to send to his relatives 
 and finally he dreamed that he was talking 
 with his friend. Then the insomnia disap- 
 peared. In this case a spontaneous read- 
 justment of the nature of a wish fulfillment 
 took place in the unconscious. 
 
 In none of these methods of "spontaneous 
 recovery," is there a genuine recovery; the 
 conflict which lay at the root of the neurosis 
 has not been eliminated, only "walled off," 
 readjusted or resymbolized. Psychoanaly- 
 sis alone can cure a neurosis, for it actually 
 eliminates the unconscious conflicts which 
 lie at the basis of the neurosis, either by 
 raising the barbaric wishes to a higher cul- 
 tural level, by bringing the patient into 
 touch with reality again, from which reality 
 all neurotics withdraw, or by teaching the 
 patient to utilize the energy of the neurotic 
 conflict for more practical purposes. Psy- 
 choanalysis is like an archaeological excava- 
 tion, it digs out the buried complexes and 
 
 [150] 
 
SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 
 
 then they disintegrate. Through the draw- 
 ing-out of these repressed motives and im- 
 pulses into the full light of consciousness, 
 through facing and understanding the neu- 
 rotic difficulties, lies the ethical value of psy- 
 choanalysis. 
 
 It is an erroneous idea that psychoanalysis 
 consists entirely of sexuality in its narrower 
 sense or that it is the searching after porno- 
 graphic thoughts in the patient, as some of 
 its myopic critics would lead us to believe. 
 A properly conducted psychoanalysis refers 
 less to sex in its literal sense, than does the 
 details of a medical history in a physical dis- 
 order. On the contrary, it is the broad, sex- 
 ual conceptions of psychoanalysis, embrac- 
 ing all human emotions, conflicts and desires, 
 which gives psychoanalysis its high ethical 
 value. Psychoanalysis teaches how to meet 
 these problems, without flying from them on 
 one hand in repression, or by embracing and 
 treasuring them in unhealthy fantasies. A 
 
 [151] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 successful psychoanalysis should leave the 
 patient completely sublimated, that is, it 
 should enable him to utilize the unconscious 
 energy for the higher purposes of life, it 
 should teach not to waste this energy in 
 fighting the neurosis. 
 
 In order to demonstrate the beneficial re- 
 sults of psychoanalysis, I can cite the case of 
 a young man, who several years ago under- 
 went a psychoanalysis for a neurosis of ex- 
 treme severity. As a result of treatment 
 the neurotic symptoms entirely disappeared. 
 At the beginning of the Great War, he en- 
 listed, and at the time, I felt so sure of the 
 beneficial results of psychoanalysis, in pro- 
 viding a thorough reeducation and adjust- 
 ment of the patient's unconscious, that I was 
 able to predict that it was practically im- 
 possible for him to develop a war neurosis. 
 This for the reason that experience has 
 shown that this was one of the types of per- 
 sonality which was particularly prone to de- 
 
 [152] 
 
SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 
 
 velop the neurosis popularly known as 
 "shell shock." This prediction was subse- 
 quently verified, for he went through the 
 war and was engaged in some of the most 
 severe battles, exposed to the usual fatigue 
 and anxieties of military life, without the 
 slightest neurotic symptoms developing. 
 
 In the unconscious, however, one inter- 
 esting symptom developed and I feel sure 
 that it was the psychoanalysis alone which 
 prevented the symptom from projecting it- 
 self into the conscious mental life and thus 
 producing a war neurosis. It is well known 
 that a large majority of war neuroses, such 
 as the cases of functional tremor, paralysis 
 or blindness, are merely unconscious methods 
 of escape from an unbearable situation. 
 The patient had a dream that he was blind, 
 but in the dream there was a complete under- 
 standing and correction of what the blind- 
 ness meant, namely, — a relief from military 
 necessity. The fact that this remained a 
 
 [153] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 dream, that the unconscious wish was im- 
 mediately understood, prevented this uncon- 
 scious wish from converting itself into the 
 symptom of hysterical blindness, after the 
 manner of the mechanism of the conversion 
 hysterias. The unconscious had been so 
 well educated by the previous psychoanalysis, 
 that it no longer took the infantile satisfac- 
 tion of making the subject escape from 
 what he consciously felt was his patriotic 
 duty. 
 
 At the Fifth International Congress for 
 Psychoanalysis held in 1918, the main theme 
 for discussion was the treatment and psycho- 
 analysis of the War neuroses, popularly 
 known as "shell shock." It was generally 
 concurred that the war neuroses were merely 
 manifestations of the mechanisms of the re- 
 actions to fright, the same as the "fear neu- 
 roses" in the times of peace. The neuroses 
 were classified as anxiety hysteria and re- 
 pressed hysteria, and like all neuroses were 
 
 [154] 
 
 
SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 
 
 merely methods of escape from an unbear- 
 able situation, chosen unconsciously. As in 
 all neuroses, the repression had failed to 
 solve the unconscious conflict and conse- 
 quently the subject could escape his diffi- 
 culties only by a flight into disease. 
 
 The chief criticism which has been directed 
 towards the psychoanalytic treatment of the 
 neuroses has been that there are no statistics 
 available showing the results of the method, 
 the same as is the case in other departments 
 of clinical medicine. It appears that this 
 skeptical attitude was justified and it was 
 with the purpose of disarming or minimizing 
 such criticism, that a statistical study was 
 undertaken. 1 
 
 Some of the cases were severe, others mild, 
 but in a large majority of these, other 
 
 i See my paper "Some Statistical Results of the Psycho- 
 analytic Treatment of the Psychoneuroses" — Psychoanalytic 
 Review — April, 1917. Since this paper was published, the 
 psychoanalytic treatment has been carried into fields 
 hitherto thought inaccessible and has greatly widened the 
 therapeutic application of psychoanalysis. 
 
 [155] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 methods of treatment, such as drugs, rest, 
 electricity, explanation, reeducation, per- 
 suasion and the various ordinary methods of 
 psychotherapy, had been tried in vain. 
 These later methods deal only with conscious 
 processes and interests, whereas the success 
 of psychoanalysis is dependent on the fact 
 that it deals with unconscious mental factors, 
 which form the basis of every neurosis. In 
 certain of the cases treated by psychoanaly- 
 sis, it seems justifiable to state, considering 
 the inefficiency of other psychotherapeutic 
 methods, that the neurosis would have gone 
 on indefinitely, thus leaving the patient in a 
 condition of life-long misery and incapacity, 
 had not psychoanalysis been utilized. 
 
 In the sexual neuroses, such as homoero- 
 tism, psychoanalysis was the only method 
 which offered any hope of cure or even 
 amelioration of the condition. Before the 
 days of psychoanalysis, hypnosis was utilized 
 in an attempt to cure these conditions, but 
 
 [156] 
 
SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 
 
 the results were indifferent and any improve- 
 ment that was obtained was temporary. 
 Failures with hypnosis in the light of our 
 present knowledge of homoerotism, were to 
 be expected, since hypnotic suggestion, in- 
 stead of breaking down the resistances which 
 were responsible for the homoerotic attitude, 
 tended to increase them. 1 
 
 In a large number of cases, psychoanalysis 
 was used as a last resort. This statement is 
 made for the purpose of minimizing the 
 usual criticism that the case would have re- 
 covered without psychoanalysis, but the fact 
 that certain cases were absolutely unaffected 
 by other therapeutic procedures but recov- 
 ered under psychoanalysis, is sufficient to 
 invalidate any such attitude. Psychoanaly- 
 sis is a rational therapeutic procedure re- 
 quiring a specially elaborated technique and 
 
 i For a sound discussion of why hypnosis fails in these 
 cases, all the more interesting because it was written in pre- 
 psychoanalytic days and yet psychoanalytically sound, see 
 Chapter IV of Otto Weininger's "Sex and Character." 
 
 [157] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 is based upon sound modern psychodynamic 
 interpretations of the mental mechanism of 
 the neuroses. 
 
 The cases to which psychoanalysis is par- 
 ticularly applicable, consist principally of 
 the severe hysterias (such as anxiety hys- 
 teria, conversion hysteria and dissociation 
 hysteria) the compulsion neuroses, mental 
 torticollis, retarded depressions, the sexual 
 neuroses (various types of sexual inver- 
 sion) , stammering, the anxiety neuroses, and 
 finally certain psychoses such as paranoiac 
 states with limited delusion formation, mani- 
 ac-depressive insanity and dementia prsecox. 
 It appears that the early or mild cases of de- 
 mentia prsecox are distinctly amenable to 
 psychoanalysis, as at this stage the contents 
 of the psychosis are readily accessible and 
 furthermore in the early development of the 
 disease, the mental mechanism is strongly al- 
 lied to hysteria. 1 
 
 i Isadore H. Corlat — "The Treatment of Dementia Prae- 
 
 [158] 
 
SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 
 
 Of course, recovery from a neurosis de- 
 pends upon the transference and the ability 
 of the analysis to break down the uncon- 
 scious resistances which prolong the neu- 
 rosis. Those cases which do not progress 
 to recovery and in which only an ameliora- 
 tion can be obtained, the retardation is due 
 to the unconscious resistance, that is, a desire 
 on the part of the patient to retain the neu- 
 rosis, as the neurosis acts as a protector or 
 as a withdrawal or escape from an unbear- 
 able reality. The successful progress of a 
 case is best determined by the gradual dis- 
 appearance of the neurotic symptoms or a 
 change in the character of the dreams, as the 
 sources of both the dreams and the neurosis 
 is in the unconscious. The dreams, to the 
 trained psychoanalyst, offer the best objec- 
 tive evidence of either the progress or the 
 retardation of the case. From the dream 
 
 cox by Psychoanalysis — Journal Abnormal Psychology — 
 Dec:, 1917. 
 
 [159] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 can be determined the transferences and the 
 patient's attitude toward the neurosis. 
 
 Certain well selected cases of dementia 
 prsecox should be given the benefit of a 
 psychoanalysis and if the analysis is suc- 
 cessful, the social reaction of the patient 
 improves. When we consider the tendency 
 of dementia prsecox to deterioration, it is 
 worth while to attempt treatment at the 
 psychological level, even if this merely 
 ameliorates the condition. Of course, these 
 1 attempts are based upon the theory, which 
 is now gaining credence among all psychia- 
 trists, that dementia prsecox is a psycho- 
 genetic and not an organic disorder. In de- 
 mentia prsecox, psychoanalysis furnishes in- 
 formation which it is essential to have, in 
 order to deal with the patient intelligently 
 and advise accordingly. It illuminates the 
 factors which made or preceded the break- 
 ing down and penetrates into the nature of 
 the complexes, and thus, instead of approach- 
 
 [160] 
 
SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 
 
 ing the problem blindly, furnishes material 
 for the intelligent handling of the patient. 
 Psychoanalysis will orient the physician in 
 the handling of the patient's social relations, 
 which is of the highest importance in de- 
 mentia prsecox, as all of these patients tend 
 to be shut-in and anti-social. 
 
 The best results of psychoanalysis are ob- 
 tained in hysteria and the sexual neuroses. 
 In stammering, too, the results are gratify- 
 ing and permanent, as stammering is a form 
 of anxiety neurosis and is frequently as- 
 sociated with other neurotic symptoms. 
 Speech training in stammering is useless ; in 
 fact, it may make a stammerer worse. In 
 stammering, the speech defect breaks out 
 after the individual has learned to talk, 
 usually after an emotional episode or during 
 a critical period of development. The 
 speech defect in stammering is not the dis- 
 ease, but merely a symptom of the under- 
 lying neurotic anxiety. 
 
 [161] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 The periodic depressions should also be 
 psychoanalyzed, not during the period of 
 depression, but in the period of remission, 
 in an attempt to eliminate the factors which 
 might precipitate further attacks. Recur- 
 rences in after life can be avoided. In men- 
 tal torticollis the effects of psychoanalysis in 
 clearing up the muscular spasm have been 
 most gratifying, particularly in those c:. 
 where the usual orthopedic methods have 
 failed. These cases present tremendous 
 difficulties of treatment, because the roots 
 of the neurosis are so deeply seated. 
 
 In the paranoiac states, the analysis should 
 proceed along the line of both the conscious 
 and the unconscious settings of the delusion 
 formation, that is, an uncovering of the act- 
 ual circumstances in the patient's career 
 which lead to the delusional misinterpreta- 
 tions. This material should be used for re- 
 adjustment. In epilepsy, a study of the at- 
 tack, and its precipitating factors in connec- 
 
 [162] 
 
SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 
 
 tion with an analysis of the mental make-up 
 of the individual has furnished methods of 
 psychoanalytic approach which in the future 
 may be found very beneficial of results. 
 
 In psychoanalysis we have a procedure 
 which is based upon sound conceptions and 
 it consequently must remain as the most 
 effective psychotherapeutic method known 
 to medicine. The method is particularly ap- 
 plicable to those psychoneuroses which have 
 failed to improve under any other proce- 
 dure and it is the only method which pene- 
 trates to the fundamental disturbance and so 
 effects a radical cure. Other psychothera- 
 peutic methods merely teach or train the in- 
 dividual to evade his difficulty. Psychoan- 
 alysis penetrates to the basis of the disturb- 
 ance by uncovering the actual unconscious 
 source of the neurosis. 
 
 [163] 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 Without attempting a prophecy in the 
 literal sense, it seems worth while, in the 
 present stage of advancement of psychoan- 
 alysis, to briefly review its contemporary ac- 
 tivities and attempt to ascertain what the 
 future offers for its various medical and 
 'cultural aspects. As a therapeutic proce- 
 dure, psychoanalysis is not only compara- 
 tively new but really epoch making in the 
 help it furnishes to nervous sufferers. As 
 such, in certain well-selected cases of neu- 
 roses and psychoneuroses, it is immeasurably 
 superior to the so-called rest cure, a proce- 
 dure whose effects in neurological therapeu- 
 tics have been most pernicious. 
 
 Physicians are beginning to recognize the 
 
 [164] 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 efficacy of psychoanalysis and while only a 
 few have mastered the technique, yet increas- 
 ing numbers of cases are referred to those 
 who have specialized in the subject in order 
 that the nervous sufferer may be given the 
 benefit of a really fundamental type of treat- 
 ment. It seems to be becoming more and 
 more evident to the profession that the tech- 
 nique of psychoanalysis is something which 
 must be learned and mastered through ex- 
 perience, in the same way that the technique 
 of surgery must be learned. 
 
 The technical methods of psychoanalysis, 
 as in all fields of exact science, are under- 
 going modifications and improvements in 
 the hands of physicians working in this field. 
 
 A great deal of the future of psychoanaly- 
 sis depends upon improvement in its tech- 
 nique. The results of the method can best 
 be ascertained, not so much by study of in- 
 dividual cases, as by careful statistics of the 
 effect of the method by different workers. 
 
 [165] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 An attempt at a statistical study based upon 
 the results of nearly one hundred psycho- 
 analyses has already been made. 1 The re- 
 lation of psychoanalysis to ethics and the ef- 
 fect of psychoanalytic conceptions and the 
 theories of repression and the unconscious 
 can be easily seen in some recent philosoph- 
 ical publications. In fact, the idea that in- 
 trospection alone is able to reveal all the 
 facts of consciousness, as maintained by some 
 academic and experimental psychologists, is 
 being relegated to the limbo of outworn 
 ideas, in the light of our present knowledge 
 of unconscious thinking. We are learning, 
 too, that the spontaneous sublimation of a 
 patient should be encouraged and no effort 
 should be made to minimize and thwart it. 
 In fact, as a type of emotional sublimation, 
 religion, using the term in its broadest sense 
 without reference to any particular dogma, 
 
 i Isador H. Coriat, "Some Statistical Results of the 
 Psychoanalytic Treatment." — Psychoanalytic Review, April, 
 1917. 
 
 [166] 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 offers one of the most effective and satis- 
 factory routes for the sublimating process. 
 
 Pfister * makes the following statement 
 concerning the value of sublimation in re- 
 ligion. 
 
 "Psychoanalysis also teaches us to esti- 
 mate the value of religion anew. I confess 
 that the beauty and the blessing of a healthy, 
 ethically pure piety have only become over- 
 whelmingly clear to me from the investiga- 
 tions here described. Religion, in favorable 
 cases, guards the libido repelled by the rude, 
 avaricious reality, against conversion into 
 hysterical physical symptoms and against 
 introversion into anxiety, melancholia, ob- 
 sessional phenomena, etc. 
 
 "Freud speaks of the extraordinary in- 
 crease in neuroses since the decline of re- 
 ligion ! I would much rather have unfortu- 
 nate people whom I cannot really cure by 
 analysis, in an extreme sect or a cloister than 
 
 i Pfister, "The Psychoanalytic Method"— 1917. 
 
 [167] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 in a neurosis. Of course there is also much 
 neurotic misery in cloisters and religious 
 communities." 
 
 As as example of this sublimation in re- 
 ligion, the following case can be cited, partly 
 because of the patient's intelligent apprecia- 
 tion of the psychoanalytic process and partly 
 because it furnishes an insight into exactly 
 how psychoanalysis works. 
 
 The following was written by an intelli- 
 gent woman, a sufferer from a severe com- 
 pulsion neurosis of a year's duration. Al- 
 though her father was a clergyman and a 
 college professor and she was thus brought 
 up in her childhood in a religious atmo- 
 sphere, yet the severe compulsions which 
 concerned the excreta of the body and made 
 themselves manifest by obscene thoughts, 
 acted as a barrier to her religion, since she 
 felt that her neurosis was a moral fault or a 
 moral contamination. Her recent dreams 
 had shown an unconscious tendency to sub- 
 
 [168] 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 limate through religion and this form of 
 sublimation was encouraged. At the begin- 
 ning of the analysis, the resistances were 
 strong, but these resistances were gradually 
 overcome and transferences became marked. 
 
 In a recent dream she seemed to be going 
 through the aisles of a magnificent cathedral 
 to a door, when she found a clergyman of 
 her acquaintance (an old lover who married 
 some one else, much to her disappointment, 
 and consequently she never married) sitting 
 at his study table. In her dream, there was 
 an emotion of deep faith. This dream 
 demonstrated not only the wish to sublimate 
 in religion, but likewise a transference to her 
 physician (who was really the "clergyman 
 in his study"). 
 
 In this dream we see at work a prepara- 
 tory arranging function which belongs to the 
 work of adjustment in the unconscious, a 
 sort of an autosymbolic presentation of 
 the present psychological situation. The ac- 
 
 [169] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 count of the patient's sublimation in religion 
 follows in her own words. 
 
 'We can know God only in our fellows, 
 and we can know our fellows only in God.' 
 This was the teaching put into words by one 
 who knew him well of a Christian minister, 
 a man of insight. Now as I begin to ex- 
 perience the healing power of psychoanaly- 
 sis, their truth comes to me in full measure, 
 brought out and illuminated by the process. 
 For the relation between physician and pa- 
 tient seem to have much in common with 
 1 God's dealings with man. 
 
 "Thus if the doctor is to help his patient, 
 it is of the first importance that the latter 
 shall trust him and turn to him in entire 
 confidence. Accordingly from the begin- 
 ning of the analysis the physician strives to 
 inculcate this confidence, and to make the 
 patient feel that he is his friend. Little by 
 little the patient's resistance is broken down 
 by this attracting force until at length he 
 
 [170] 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 yields without reserve. Is not this human 
 power akin to the constraining power of the 
 divine love? 
 
 "Again, especially in the early stages of 
 the analysis, it almost seems as if the patient 
 were left to his own devices. The physician 
 apparently follows his lead. The patient 
 must think and speak what is in his own 
 mind until with some degree of definiteness 
 he realizes his own need. Not until then, 
 when the patient is ready to receive it, does 
 the doctor give the helpful suggestion the 
 consoling thought. Surely this is God's way 
 of dealing with the world. The great dis- 
 covery is made only when necessity has 
 driven men to search for it. 
 
 "Best of all is the way in which the experi- 
 ence of psychoanalysis contributes toward a 
 living faith. It brings home to us the deep 
 need of the human soul for a friendship out- 
 side itself. The nervous invalid turns to his 
 physician almost as a child turns to his 
 
 [171] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 mother, trusting that somehow he is going to 
 be helped. He learns that 'confession is 
 good for the soul.' that the burden is light- 
 ened bv sharing it with a friend. At first it 
 is hard to reveal his own weakness to another, 
 but as he goes on he finds that he is always 
 able to take the next step. He realizes that 
 the attitude of his hearer is not condemna- 
 tion, but sympathy, and that with the true 
 physician the depth of this sympathy is 
 measured only by his patient's needs. 
 
 "Presently, however, as the analysis pro- 
 ceeds, the patient is brought to realize that 
 this dependence on the doctor is a means, not 
 an end : also that the moral obligation to lay 
 bare his inmost soul to a fellowman exists 
 only in his own imagination. He knows 
 now that it is the part of the full grown 
 man or woman to bear his own burden, 
 that in relation to his fellows each hu- 
 man being stands alone. It is only God 
 
 [172] 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 who can meet man's deepest need, the expe- 
 rience of psychoanalysis has revitalized this 
 familiar thought. And this is the thought 
 that makes us free. 
 
 "The patient knows that he is free, and 
 he feels as if he had reached this conclusion 
 by himself. Yet when he reviews the prog- 
 ress of the analysis, and takes again in retro- 
 spect each successive step, he realizes that 
 the path has opened for him to walk in, that 
 his physician has led the way. He has been 
 thinking the doctor's thoughts after him. 
 Those words of the great poet come to his 
 mind — 'There is a power that shapes our 
 ends, rough-hew them though we may.' 
 He knows that in the psychoanalysis of life, 
 this experience is a stage through which he 
 has been led by the great analyzer of our 
 souls. 
 
 "Through his fellow men he has come to 
 know God. 
 
 [173] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 "Thus we learn that science is the comple- 
 ment of religion, that psychology no less 
 than theology leads us to God." 
 
 Psychoanalysis can do much too, in form- 
 ulating on the basis of its principles, rational 
 rules for nervous and mental hygiene, rather 
 than the usual loose conceptions of will 
 power, etc. In fact it points that the real 
 prevention and mastery of neuroses must 
 come from within, from the individual analy- 
 sis, rather than through any general propa- 
 ganda along the lines of mental hygiene, 
 since the latter at its best can only indicate 
 collective rules which cannot be adapted to 
 the complexities of individual minds. 
 
 As the psychoanalytic technique becomes 
 perfected, we may expect better and better 
 results through the treatment of such con- 
 ditions which were formerly looked upon as 
 hopeless, such as well selected cases of de- 
 mentia praecox or mild paranoiac states. 
 Certainly, the treatment of sexual inversion 
 
 [174] 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 is far more hopeful with psychoanalysis than 
 with the older methods of suggestion and 
 hypnosis. 
 
 When psychoanalytic principles become 
 known to educators they may do much to 
 prevent the development of a neurosis dur- 
 ing the critical formative period of a child's 
 life. That tendency to petty stealing or 
 even fantastic lying may often be the begin- 
 ning of an hysterical or a compulsion neu- 
 rosis ; it is very necessary for the educator to 
 know, in order to refer the child to the 
 proper source, where the faults may be sci- 
 entifically corrected rather than thought- 
 lessly punished. It is to be hoped that the 
 future studies of juvenile delinquency and 
 juvenile faults will be strongly influenced by 
 psychoanalytic conceptions, that is, one must 
 look for deeper motives than even the most 
 painstaking anamnesis affords. In cases 
 showing compulsive tendencies to stealing, 
 the so-called kleptomania, it is useless to ask 
 
 [175] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 a child why he takes certain things, since the 
 real motive is unknown to him, whereas a 
 short psychoanalysis may often clear up the 
 situation and furnish valuable therapeutic 
 hints. 
 
 For instance, in the psychoanalysis of the 
 case of a boy who was in the habit of pilfer- 
 ing money at home and spending it on nor- 
 mal childish desires, the manifestation re- 
 vealed a strong (Edipus complex and, in 
 addition, it demonstrated that the boy took 
 the money from his mother, never from his 
 father, as he knew that this act would remain 
 unpunished by his mother on account of the 
 strong attachment she had for him. The 
 obvious therapy was to break up the (Edi- 
 pus complex so that the boy would have as 
 much fear of stealing from his mother as 
 from his father. This was successfully ac- 
 complished. 
 
 Clergymen, too, have found a knowledge 
 of the principles of the psychoanalysis of 
 
 [176] 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 great value in their religious and moral ad- 
 vise to those who apply to them for consola- 
 tion in life's battles and struggles. 
 
 Adler's approach to psychoanalysis from 
 the organic side, interpreting organic inferi- 
 ority as the basic mechanism of what Freud 
 terms the conflict, is of great value for the 
 future development of psychoanalysis, par- 
 ticularly in harmonizing the viewpoints of 
 these who are either inclined to functional 
 or to physical interpretations of the develop- 
 ment of the neurosis. 
 
 As the unconscious is the historical past 
 of the individual and consists therefore 
 mainly of repressed material, so from the un- 
 conscious the springs of character take their 
 source. The character traits of the individ- 
 ual are not inherited, neither are they the 
 results of conscious effort. The charac- 
 ter of a person is made up of original re- 
 pressed childhood impulses or sublimations 
 of these. All character formation has an 
 
 [177] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 emotional rather than an intellectual basis. 
 
 To a certain extent one of the future tasks 
 of psychoanalysis, will not only be the treat- 
 ment of the abnormal manifestations of the 
 neuroses, but in addition, certain detrimental 
 character traits in normal individuals might 
 be immeasurably benefited. The object of 
 psychoanalysis in all these conditions is to 
 bring the unconscious repressions into con- 
 sciousness and by means of this, the conflict, 
 which produced the defect, may be brought 
 to a satisfactory conclusion. 
 
 As an example of what may be accom- 
 plished in the psychoanalysis of a character 
 trait, which was detrimental to the individ- 
 ual, the following case may be cited. A 
 young man complained of the habit of pro- 
 crastination which had been slowly develop- 
 ing for years and more recently had pro- 
 gressed to such an extent that it interfered 
 with his work. A short analysis of the situ-, 
 ation disclosed the fact that the roots of the 
 
 [178] 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 procrastination arose in his early childhood. 
 He was more attached to his father than his 
 mother and it was under the former's influ- 
 ence that the habit of procrastination arose. 
 The origin of this was unknown to him un- 
 til it was revealed by a psychoanalysis, but it 
 could be determined that it was produced as 
 conflict and was really a projection into his 
 adult life of his childhood as influenced by 
 the image of his father. Finally during the 
 course of the analysis he had a dream in 
 which it appeared that his father was dead 
 and the undertaker had been sent for. This 
 dream was interesting and important, as his 
 father was still alive. The dream symbol- 
 ized the death, not of his father, but what his 
 father stood for, namely, his procrastination. 
 In other words it symbolized the death or 
 disappearance of his procrastination in the 
 same childhood manner that the unconscious 
 always symbolizes the death of a member of 
 the family. After this dream had been an- 
 
 [179] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 alyzed and explained, the subject became en- 
 tirely well. 
 
 In the unconscious is concealed emotional 
 energy which is of great importance in the 
 sublimation of the complexities of life. 
 This is the sublimation which represents the 
 spiritual and ethical and artistic striving of 
 man towards greater inner perfection and to 
 a more perfect adjustment with the world of 
 reality. Psychoanalysis teaches the individ- 
 ual how to make use of this energy for a 
 social purpose and not waste it in mere de- 
 fense of repressions and in unhealthy erotic 
 fantasies. Thus the future of psychoanaly- 
 sis will be a highly moral task of great edu- 
 cational value, it will teach the individual 
 and through the individual the race, that the 
 Utopia comes from within and as this inner 
 adjustment to reality is perfected, mankind 
 will advance to higher ideas of social and 
 ethical justice. For then no longer will we 
 resist according to our narrow prejudices 
 
 [180] 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 and traditions or by flying into the realm of 
 phantasmal comfort, but will react as beings 
 who are freed from infantile limitations and 
 of childhood reactions to adult situations. 
 
 Thus Freud has given the w T orld a new in- 
 strument for explaining the unconscious 
 mental life in both the individual and in 
 society. The methods elaborated are of the 
 highest value, since the motives of all men 
 and women, the healthy as well as the nerv- 
 ously ill, are determined by unconscious 
 thoughts of which they are unaware. Men 
 do not act from conscious motives, but from 
 unconscious ideas, of which the conscious mo- 
 tives are mere rationalizations or excuses. 
 This is the fundamental principle of that 
 new psychology elaborated by Freud, which 
 to-day and in the future, will explain more 
 and more the real forces at the basis of hu- 
 man conduct and human motives. 
 
 Psychoanalysis is beginning to found a 
 new ethics as well as a new psychology, a new 
 
 [181] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 neurology and a new school of literary criti- 
 cism. It bears the same relation in all its 
 principles to the human mind, and to the 
 social consciousness as biology does to the 
 organic world. In other words, through 
 psychoanalysis, the mind is dissected and the 
 hidden motives and sources of human con- 
 duct laid bare. 
 
 For psychoanalysis has shown us our true 
 selves, how selfish and barbaric and revenge- 
 ful we all are, but repressing these primitive 
 instincts into our unconscious where they 
 only appear in dreams or in the form of a 
 nervous malady. Deeper than any philos- 
 ophy, for most philosophical systems repre- 
 sent merely individual attitudes toward the 
 universe, is the psychoanalytic conception of 
 the unconscious, because it deals with the 
 mind of all mankind and with all the aspects 
 of human life. However different men may 
 be in their religious or social or political be- 
 liefs, there is "one mind common to all indi- 
 
 [182] 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 vidual men" to use the phrase of Emerson, 
 and this universal mind is the unconscious. 
 At bottom, the psychology of all men re- 
 mains the same, however different their cul- 
 ture and social consciousness may be. This 
 fundamental identity of the human race is in 
 the unconscious. It is the field of the un- 
 conscious which Freud has made peculiarly 
 his own, in its analysis for the hidden mean- 
 ings of human life. 
 
 [188] 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE DEPTH OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 The practice of psychoanalysis has dem- 
 onstrated that after one mass of repressed 
 material has been brought to light, there are 
 frequently opened up new levels of this re- 
 pressed material, all of which demand an in- 
 vestigation. Therefore both from the prac- 
 tical and theoretical standpoint, at least for 
 the purpose of definite description, the un- 
 conscious must be conceived, not as a hori- 
 zontal plane, but possessing a stratigraphic 
 structure. 
 
 During a psychoanalysis, the conscious 
 material is first investigated, then one 
 reaches the level of the foreconscious, where 
 the minimum of resistance and repression 
 has taken place. As the analytic excavation 
 
 [184] 
 
DEPTH OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 proceeds, we reach the region of the uncon- 
 scious, where lower and lower levels are en- 
 countered until we come to the oldest por- 
 tions of the human psyche, most necessary 
 for the preservation of the race, that is, the 
 level of sexual and nutritional craving. 
 The greatest resistance is found at these low- 
 est levels, for the human mind is constantly 
 on the defensive lest it betray the indelible 
 stamp of its lowly origin. 
 
 Anthropological research offers the best 
 analogy and terminology for this concep- 
 tion. The unconscious is thus understood 
 as being composed of mental deposits from 
 the past, superimposed on each other and 
 showing the development of the psyche from 
 the very beginnings of the human race. 
 The study of these unconscious mental de- 
 posits has been aptly termed paleopsychol- 
 ogy by Jelliffe. This is a useful, and schem- 
 atic and at the same time a pragmatic con- 
 ception of the unconscious. 
 
 [185] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 This concept traces the development of 
 the individual psyche from the standpoint of 
 the part played by repression in the produc- 
 tion of the various levels of the unconscious. 
 It is the science dealing with the fossilized 
 thought forms in the unconscious of man 
 and is analogous to paleopathology, the sci- 
 ence of diseases which can be demonstrated 
 in human and animal remains of ancient 
 times, such as of the ancient Egyptians or of 
 prehistoric man and fossil animals. 1 
 
 According to Jelliffe — "The historical 
 past of the psyche is in the region of the un- 
 conscious, and this region can only be recon- 
 structed by an analysis, an uncovering of its 
 contents, much as the history of the earth's 
 crust can only be known through excavation 
 and discovery of fossil remains in the strata. 
 The uncovering of the contents of the past in 
 the unconscious, may by analogy be termed 
 
 i See "Studies in Paleopathology" by R. L. Moodie — 
 Annals of Medical History, Vol. I, Nov. 4, 1917. 
 
 [186] 
 
DEPTH OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 paleopsychology." Every psychoanalyst 
 therefore is a paleopsychologist, and the 
 dreams reveal the different cultural levels of 
 the unconscious. 
 
 These fossilized thought forms of man- 
 kind are preserved in the different levels of 
 the unconscious, in the same way that ana- 
 tomical fossil forms are preserved in the dif- 
 ferent strata of the earth. The unconscious 
 can, in the hands of a skilled psychoanalyst, 
 be reconstructed from a few dream frag- 
 ments, in somewhat the same way that a 
 skilled anthropologist can reconstruct a par- 
 ticular type of prehistoric man from a few 
 fragments of his skull. Like the anthro- 
 pologist, too, the psychoanalyst by means of 
 the dream material, and of dreams showing 
 particular symbolisms, can fairly accurately 
 orient the stratigraphic level of this dream 
 in the unconscious. For the unconscious is 
 composed, not of one mass of repressions, 
 but of superimposed repressions accumu- 
 
 [187] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 lated layer by layer, as mankind advanced 
 in his cultural development from prehistoric 
 times to the modern period. The uncon- 
 scious mental life was born when repression 
 began. Without repression there would be 
 no unconscious. 
 
 As anthropologists have gone backwards 
 in time to investigate the anatomical struc- 
 ture and culture of prehistoric man, as the 
 geological history of the earth has been ex- 
 amined layer by layer, so must the entire 
 mental history of man be pushed further and 
 further back into the remote past. The best 
 evidence of this successive growth of man's 
 mental history is found in the unconscious 
 and not the conscious, as the latter is only 
 the recent mental crust of the cultural his- 
 tory of mankind. 
 
 To understand the complete human mind 
 we must dig, by means of the technical meth- 
 ods of psychoanalysis, through the various 
 levels of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis 
 
 [188] 
 
DEPTH OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 is the instrument that delves into the hidden 
 depths of the individual psyche. It does 
 not interpret surface motives, because the 
 real motives are attached to the primitive 
 emotions of the unconscious mental life. As 
 we advance into adult life, the unconscious 
 becomes deeper and deeper, has more and 
 more levels, although in the child, where the 
 unconscious is quite shallow, it already con- 
 tains archaic and primitive wishes which are 
 fulfilled with very little resistance and prac- 
 tically no censorship. The infantile or child 
 mind does produce manifestations in adult 
 life, but it appears in a less primitive form. 
 The child is slumbering in the unconscious of 
 every adult, but is ready to awaken at any 
 time, ready to become restless and anxious 
 and when it does awaken, then dreams or 
 various neurotic manifestations develop. 
 In the adult the infantile mind is deeply 
 buried in the depth of the unconscious. 
 According to Freud, from the beginning 
 
 [189] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 of life there already exist two separate sys- 
 tems of mental activity which are precursors 
 or forerunners of what later becomes con- 
 scious and unconscious thinking. He states 
 "The wish manifested in the dream must be 
 an infantile one. In the adult, it originates 
 in the unconscious, while in the child, where 
 no separation or censor as yet exists be- 
 tween the foreconscious and unconscious, or 
 where these are only in process of formation, 
 it is our unfulfilled and unrepressed wish 
 from the waking state." For instance, the 
 neurotic fears of contamination or of pointed 
 objects, as they appear in the compulsion 
 neuroses, are really taboo commands from 
 the primitive layers of the unconscious. 
 The most primitive dreams are the fossilized 
 thoughts or structures of our unconscious, 
 deepest and farthest removed from modern 
 civilization. 
 
 The unconscious, therefore, is the key to 
 the human mind and in it can be found all 
 
 [190] 
 
DEPTH OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 the mental traits of prehistoric man. The 
 unconscious is primitive as it is composed en- 
 tirely of repressed material. These mental 
 traits have disappeared from consciousness 
 and have become precipitated into the un- 
 conscious, because of the ever-active power of 
 repression in the history of the development 
 of civilization. The conscious life of man 
 has taken centuries for culture, the uncon- 
 scious is still older and regresses to the times 
 of our remotest ancestors. In fact, the un- 
 conscious is the oldest portion of the human 
 mind. 
 
 In mental and nervous diseases one often 
 sees outcropping symptoms, symptomatic 
 behavior, dreams, bits of thinking which are 
 found only in very primitive human types 
 which come from the deepest strata of the 
 unconscious mental life. They regress to 
 this primitive behavior and mode of thinking 
 because they have the material for such 
 thought and behavior repressed into the low- 
 
 [191] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 est levels of the unconscious. This for the 
 reason, that so far as the unconscious is con- 
 cerned, time does not exist, because in an in- 
 stant a dream may go back to the social and 
 mental life of our prehistoric ancestors. 
 Therefore our social cravings often drag 
 phantastic symptoms or dream symbols from 
 the lowest depths of the unconscious. "The 
 man of prehistoric times lives on, unchanged, 
 in our unconscious" (Freud) . 
 
 Before the development of psychoanaly- 
 sis, Neitzsche recognized the primitive na- 
 ture of the unconscious as reflected in 
 dreams. He writes, "In sleep and in dreams 
 one passes through the entire curriculum of 
 primitive mankind. Even as to-day we 
 think in dreams, mankind thought in waking 
 life through many thousand years. In 
 dreams this piece of ancient humanity works 
 in us. The dream takes us back to remote 
 conditions of human culture and puts in our 
 hands the means of understanding it better." 
 
 [192] 
 
DEPTH OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 If the mind were not plastic, if it were 
 merely like the fossilized skeletal remains of 
 animals found imbedded in stone and gravel, 
 evolution would have been impossible. But 
 from age to age the plastic human mind has 
 been changing and in its integrations, it has 
 become possible for it to organize the highly 
 complicated modern civilization. As Berg- 
 son states: "Everywhere but in man, con- 
 sciousness has come to a stand ; in man alone 
 it has kept on its way." 
 
 This is because mind is plastic, because it 
 pushes its primal and archaic wishes to lower 
 and lower levels in the unconscious. Conse- 
 quently man can better utilize his conscious 
 energy to drive forward to more complex in- 
 tegrations and to those higher expressions of 
 the repressed, primitive energy which is 
 sublimated into social, ethical and spiritual 
 reconstruction. In the words of Tennyson: 
 
 "Men may rise on stepping stones 
 Of their dead selves to higher things." 
 
 [193] 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 A FAIRY TALE FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 It has been shown, that the psychology 
 of fairy tales, as interpreted by psycho- 
 analysis from the standpoint of origin and 
 symbolism, bears a close and intimate rela- 
 tionship to the world of dreams. Not only 
 are fairy tales highly symbolized products 
 and like dreams, do not say on the surface 
 what they really mean, but like dreams also, 
 their origin is in the very depths of the hu- 
 man psyche. In every fairy tale, to quote 
 from a previous contribution: 1 "We move 
 in a world of supernatural activities, witches 
 and ghosts, exaggerated and heroic deeds, 
 even at times emotionless murders, a 
 mechanism identical with dreaming." 
 
 ilsador H. Coriat— "The Hysteria of Lady Macbeth," 
 second edition, 1920. 
 
 [194] 
 
A FAIRY TALE 
 
 In fairy tales, as in the world of dreams, 
 there emerge in a symbolized form, for sym- 
 bolism is the real language of the uncon- 
 scious, the thoughts and actions which are 
 found only in the childhood of the individual 
 or in the infancy of the race. As stated by 
 Freud: "The research into these con- 
 cepts of folk psychology is at present not by 
 any means concluded, but it is apparent 
 everywhere, from myths, for instance, that 
 they correspond to the displaced residues of 
 wish phantasies of entire nations, the dreams 
 of ages of young humanity." 
 
 It is for this reason that children revel 
 in fairy tales, for they find there portrayed 
 the world of the emergence of their con- 
 scious thoughts and wishes. Adults likewise 
 delight in reading fairy tales, for in them 
 the adult regresses in his own unconscious 
 to the golden age of childhood. Because 
 a child's wishes are fulfilled almost immedi- 
 ately by parents, nurse or admiring rela- 
 
 [195] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 tions, as a result of his behavior, his mimic 
 expressions or gestures, the child lives in 
 that happy world of supreme omnipotence 
 which forms the basis and the wish-structure 
 of all fairy tales. Out of this omnipotence, 
 this thought that he is possessed of illimit- 
 able capacity for having every wish fulfilled, 
 the child actually thinks that he is possessed, 
 not only of magic thoughts and magic words, 
 but also of magic deeds. As the child 
 grows older and comes into more immediate 
 contact with adult reality and the world 
 about him, these omnipotent feelings are 
 repressed in the unconscious, to reappear 
 only in a symbolized form in dreams or in 
 the artistic structure of fairy tales. All 
 fairy tales portray the various efforts of the 
 adult mind to become reconciled to the irra- 
 tional and immediately fulfilled wishes of 
 childhood and consequently all fairy tales 
 have the childhood feelings of omnipotence 
 for their central theme. In every fairy tale 
 
 [196] 
 
A FAIRY TALE 
 
 the wish motive is not only very potent, but 
 also very omnipotent. The hero like the 
 imaginative mind of the child is endowed 
 with magical power; space and time no 
 longer exist for him ; the omnipotence of his 
 thoughts leads to the omnipotence of his 
 deeds. 
 
 Consequently in jvery fairy tale all im- 
 pediments of space, time, poverty, love, 
 social position, are swept aside in the multi- 
 tudinous adventures of the omnipotent hero. 
 Fairy tales are variants of the unconscious 
 conflicts concerning the so-called family ro- 
 mance which takes place in the psyche of 
 every developing child, such as emotionless 
 murders and the various symbolisms and 
 images of the sex motive. 
 
 I can refer particularly in this connection 
 to certain fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers, 
 such as "Frog King," or "Little Snow 
 White.'' In the latter tale in the birth of 
 the little daughter to Snow White after she 
 
 [197] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 had pricked her finger and drops of blood 
 fell from it, from which the daughter was 
 born, the sexual symbolism and wish fulfill- 
 ment are very clear, likewise the condensa- 
 tion of the name and physical appearance of 
 Snow White, a condensation so characteris- 
 tic of dreams. 
 
 The story goes on to relate: "While sew- 
 ing, and looking every moment at the fall- 
 ing snow, she (the Queen) pricked her fin- 
 gen and three drops of blood fell on it. She 
 thought the red color looked so pretty on the 
 white snow that she exclaimed — 'Ah! if only 
 I had a dear little child as white as snow, 
 as red as blood, and as black as ebony!' 
 Very soon after this she really had a little 
 daughter, who was as white as snow, for she 
 was fair ; as red as blood, for her cheeks were 
 rosy; and as black as ebony, for her hair and 
 eyes were black, and she was called Little 
 Snow White; but when the child was born 
 the Queen died." 
 
 [198] 
 
A FAIRY TALE 
 
 As stated by Riklin: 1 "It is surprising 
 how great a role the sexual plays in the 
 fairy tale and how great is the agreement 
 of the sexual symbolism with that of dreams 
 and psychopathology. When one realizes 
 and admits, however, that the sexuality, be- 
 sides hunger and the social factors, plays a 
 leading role in life and constantly influences 
 our thoughts and actions from youth up, then 
 it does not appear in any way surprising, 
 although the fairy tale appears to us in a 
 new, less child-like garb. They lose on that 
 account none of their charm and power of 
 attraction." 
 
 A fairy tale then is a day dream of child- 
 hood projected into a literary or artistic 
 form. The makers of fairy tales possessed 
 to a high degree that ability to carry on to 
 adult life, without any great amount of re- 
 pression into the unconscious, the day 
 dreams gathered from their own childhood. 
 
 i Franz Riklin — <r Wish Fulfillment and Symbolism in 
 Fairy Tales." 
 
 [199] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 The ordinary individual does not possess 
 this ability, or only to a limited extent and 
 then it appears only when the censorship 
 of repression is removed or is at its lowest 
 ebb, namely, in sleep and in the world of 
 dreams. 
 
 Very rarely, however, during the course of 
 a psychoanalysis, does one meet with a 
 dream which in every essential and detail is 
 a fairy tale. Such dreams can be termed 
 fairy tales from the unconscious. When 
 such a type of dream occurs, it represents a 
 bursting through into the dream life of all 
 the ideas of omnipotence which possessed 
 childhood. They are real fairy tales 
 elaborated in the form of night dreams di- 
 rectly from the unconscious of the dreamer, 
 instead of the childhood unconscious being 
 tapped by the creative artist in his day- 
 dreams. In addition even these day-dreams 
 may show the omnipotent ideas which are 
 so recurrent in fairy tales. Fairy tales rep- 
 
 [200] 
 
A FAIRY TALE 
 
 resent that period of childhood which has 
 been repressed, the period of magic thoughts 
 and deeds. 
 
 As Ferenczi so well states — * "The im- 
 petuous curiosity to know everything, that 
 has just seduced me into enchanted vistas of 
 the past, and led me to bridge over the yet 
 unknowable by the help of analysis, brings 
 me back to the starting point of these con- 
 siderations : to the theme of the acme and de- 
 cline of the feeling of impotence. Science 
 has to repudiate this illusion, or at least al- 
 ways to know when she is entering the field 
 of hypotheses and fancies. In fairy tales, 
 on the contrary, phantasies of omnipotence 
 are and remain the dominating ones. Just 
 when we have most humbly to bow before the 
 forces of nature, the fairy tale comes to our 
 aid with its typical motives. In reality we 
 are weak, hence the heroes of fairy tales are 
 
 i S. Ferenczi — "Contributions to Psychoanalysis" — Chap- 
 ter VIII (Stages in the Development of the Sens* of 
 Reality). 
 
 [201] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 strong and unconquerable: in our activities 
 and our knowledge we are cramped and 
 hindered by time and space, hence in fairy 
 tales one is immortal, is in a hundred places 
 at the same time, sees into the future and 
 knows the past. The ponderousness, the 
 solidity, and the impenetrability of matter, 
 obstruct our way every moment ; in the fairy 
 tale, however, man has wings, his eye pierces 
 the walls, his magic wand opens all doors. 
 Reality is a hard fight for existence; in the 
 fairy tale the words 'little table spread' are 
 sufficient. A man may live in perpetual 
 fear of attacks from dangerous beasts and 
 fierce foes : in the fairy tale a magic cap en- 
 ables every transformation and makes us in- 
 accessible. How hard it is in reality to at- 
 tain love that can fulfill all our wishes! In 
 the fairy tale the hero is irresistible or he 
 bewitches with a magic gesture. Thus the 
 fairy tale through which grown ups are so 
 fond of relating to their children their own 
 
 [202] 
 
A FAIRY TALE 
 
 unfulfilled and repressed wishes really 
 brings the perfected situation of omnipo- 
 tence to a last, artistic presentation." 
 
 The fairy tale is then really an imaginary 
 compensation for feelings of inferiority and 
 mental and physical limitations, it is an out- 
 ward projection in artistic garb of repressed 
 wishes carried over from childhood. These 
 wishes are repressed, because as adult de- 
 velopment proceeded, such wishes came into 
 conflict with the actual world of reality and 
 could only be imaginatively realized and ful- 
 filled in the form of an artistic creation. 
 That the fairy tale is like a dream is shown 
 by the various dream mechanisms which 
 enter into its construction, such as the oft 
 recurring motives of condensation and dis- 
 placement, of dramatization and secondary 
 elaboration, of reenforcement of the primary 
 wish by a series of heroic deeds and finally of 
 the struggle with obstacles, such as so often 
 occurs in anxiety dreams. 
 
 [203] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 It has been pointed out by both Freud and 
 Brill that fairy tales may act as determi- 
 nants or instigators not only of dreams and 
 of neurotic symptoms, but likewise play a 
 part in the symbolic manifestations of vari- 
 ous mental diseases, particularly dementia 
 preecox. 1 It is not, however, proposed to 
 discuss this aspect here beyond relating the 
 fragment of a dream occurring in a case of 
 anxiety hysteria, which portrayed in a 
 veiled symbolic manner the sadistic Blue 
 Beard motive, showing that the unconscious 
 of the ancient folk lore maker and of the 
 modern dreamer were identical. 
 
 In this dream she started to explore a 
 room which she had discovered at the fur- 
 ther end of a long gallery. The door was 
 marked "Holy of Holies" in small gilt let- 
 ters just under the key-hole and in spite of 
 a horrified protest from her mother she 
 
 i A. A. Brill — "Fairy Tales as Determinants of Dreams 
 and Neurotic Symptoms" — New York Medieal JowtmlI — 
 March 91, 1914. 
 
 [204] 
 
A FAIRY TALE 
 
 opened the door and found in the room only 
 a cedar chest containing ceremonial robes. 
 
 In this case there occurs the motive of the 
 locked and forbidden room which is so often 
 encountered in folk lore, as in the story of 
 Blue Beard with its sadistic episodes. It 
 symbolizes a forbidden erotic and uncon- 
 scious wish carried over from childhood and 
 reenforced in her adult life by the inscrip- 
 tion over the key hole in the manifest con- 
 tent of the dream. 
 
 Such an interesting and apparently 
 logical fairy tale dream is the following, 
 taken from the case of a young man who 
 suffered from an anxiety neurosis associated 
 with a conflict of strong feelings of mental 
 and physical inferiority. A searching 
 analysis failed to disclose, even in his early 
 childhood, that the patient had ever read or 
 heard of a similar fairy tale, although it 
 must be admitted, that there may have 
 been a childhood amnesia for this particular 
 
 [205] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 point which could not be overcome even by 
 the technical methods of the psychoanalysis. 
 In this case, there was no literal carrying 
 over into adult life of the omnipotence of 
 fairy tale heroes, it was rather an attempt at 
 compensation for the personal feelings of 
 inferiority, using the same unconscious 
 symbolic thinking out of which actual fairy 
 tales are created. Of course the dream as 
 related is only its manifest content. Its in- 
 terpretation and symbolism can be under- 
 stood only by analyzing the web of the 
 dream thoughts, the latent content of the 
 dream. 
 
 He seemed to be a frozen sea or large 
 lake and his country was at war with another 
 country. The enemy army was encamping 
 on the ice. He was lying wounded under 
 a bridge, dressed not in a soldier's uniform, 
 but in his ordinary civilian clothes. Some of 
 the enemy soldiers were at a distance watch- 
 ing him to see if he were dead or alive. 
 
 [206] 
 
A FAIRY TALE 
 
 First he made a slight movement, and as he 
 did so he felt a heavy blow on the head from 
 the butt of a rifle. In the dream he became 
 unconscious and when he regained conscious- 
 ness again, the enemy soldiers had disap- 
 peared from his immediate vicinity. Then 
 he crawled on his hands and knees to a small 
 cottage. In the cottage he found his 
 mother, who bandaged his head. Following 
 this, he dressed himself in a bullet-proof sol- 
 dier's uniform, which seemed inflated with 
 air and made him appear large and bulky. 
 
 He then crept slowly towards the enemy 
 lines and there found the King of his coun- 
 try. He said to the King without the slight- 
 est resistance or embarrassment — "On which 
 side are you?" and the King replied that he 
 was helping the enemy. Then he became 
 very angry with the King, but without re- 
 plying, he walked a little further on the ice 
 and pulled a large diamond cutter about 
 three feet long out of his pocket. Then with 
 
 [207] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 lightning like rapidity he walked across the 
 frozen sea, cutting the ice with the diamond 
 cutter. The enemy soldiers saw him and 
 shot at him and although he was struck a 
 number of times, he remained unwounded 
 on account of his bullet-proof suit. He con- 
 tinued cutting the ice, the enemy still pur- 
 sued him and continued to fire, but he man- 
 aged to out-distance them on account of his 
 extraordinary ability for rapid movements. 
 As the pursuing army approached they 
 stepped on the ice which he had cut, fell into 
 the sea and all were drowned. 
 
 The entire dream was very vivid and in his 
 capacity as hero who was possessed of the 
 ability for rapid movement and who was 
 invulnerable to wounds like Achilles, he 
 completely compensated for his feelings of 
 inferiority. He felt, too, on a social equal 
 with Kings in his attitude towards the King 
 of his country, although the King at the 
 same time, as so often occurs in psycho- 
 
 [208] 
 
A FAIRY TALE 
 
 analysis, probably represented his physician. 
 In this case the dream uncovered a trans- 
 ference, here symbolized as a sort of wish 
 or striving to be the equal of his physician. 
 In the dream, also, there occurred sort of a 
 rebirth symbolization : his mother bound up 
 his wounds : gave him life again, in the same 
 way she once gave him life at his birth. 
 This is really an CEdipus-saving fantasy — 
 a symbolic portrayal of birth by the deed of 
 saving life. The rebirth is also symbolized 
 by the crawling into the cottage, helpless, 
 like a child ; there finding his mother, nursed 
 by her and emerging strong, swift and in- 
 vulnerable. The symbolism here involved 
 may also be a form of introversion leading to 
 the mother imago, because in introversion he 
 retreats from reality and thus protects his 
 inferiority feelings. This rebirth symboli- 
 zation enters to a larger extent not only in 
 the tales of heroes, but also in religious cere- 
 monials and various religious cults, princi- 
 
 [209] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 pally to the pagan deities. The phallic mo- 
 tive and symbolism, represented by the ex- 
 aggeration and dream over-determination of 
 the diamond cutter is significant. It is 
 analogous to the mystic and symbolic phal- 
 lic worship of the ancients, where images of 
 a movable phallus of enormous magnitude 
 were carried in certain sacred processions. 1 
 It demonstrates how the unconscious dream- 
 work may utilize the same primitive 
 thought-symbolism as the unconscious of so- 
 ciety. Sexual symbolism is very complex 
 and varied and is expressed in the language 
 of the unconscious of mankind rather than 
 that of individual men. When it is further- 
 more stated that the diamond cutter also rep- 
 resented the powerful omnipotent wish-ful- 
 filling fairy wand, the importance of its sym- 
 bolism is very significant. 
 
 Thus the dream is a symbolized fragment 
 of his childhood unconscious, a sort of a 
 
 1 See Richard P. Knight — "The Symbolical Language of 
 Ancient Art and Mythology." 
 
 [210] 
 
A FAIRY TALE 
 
 break with reality and a regression to the 
 magic fairy land of his childhood. This re- 
 pressed feeling of omnipotence had long 
 lain dormant in the unconscious of the 
 dreamer and only emerged during the pro- 
 cess of psychoanalytic treatment. Its value 
 lay in the contrast shown him between his 
 conscious feelings of inferiority and in the 
 latent omnipotent powers which slumbered 
 in his unconscious. Consequently the analy- 
 sis released the repressed omnipotence, sym- 
 bolized it like a fairy tale and made it avail- 
 able for the first time to the dreamer as a 
 corrective to his character formation of in- 
 feriority. It neutralized and finally over- 
 came the inferiority feeling by a substitution 
 of his unconscious latent powers for his con- 
 scious inferiority complex. 
 
 The social and constructive value to the 
 dreamer of the analysis of such a dream is 
 therefore enormous, enabling him to utilize 
 for the first time in his life his dormant 
 
 [211] 
 
REPRESSED EMOTIONS 
 
 powers of overcoming the chief obstacle of 
 his life, the feeling of mental and physical in* 
 feriority. 
 
 Such dreams although absurd and fanciful 
 in the surface, are of great value in under- 
 standing the development of character. 
 When analyzed they are of great importance 
 in providing a release for dormant activi- 
 ties. Thus psychoanalysis in removing re- 
 pressions, in making them clear and mani- 
 fest to conscious thinking is an activator of 
 the repressed motives and wishes of human 
 life, and although human emotions cannot 
 be changed, those emotions which impede 
 one in the conflicts with the realities of life, 
 can be better understood, better combated 
 and consequently better utilized in the 
 struggle for existence, through psychoanaly- 
 sis. This dream represents, in its manifest 
 content at least, an effort to solve the prob- 
 lem of inferiority and for this purpose it 
 descends to a deeper layer of the uncon- 
 
 [212] 
 
A FAIRY TALE 
 
 scious, that portion made up of the repressed 
 omnipotent wishes of childhood, which in 
 adult existence, he was unable to fulfill in his 
 waking life. The childhood wishes really 
 form the motive force and symbolism of the 
 dream and it is in this deeper stratum tapped 
 by the psychoanalytic treatment, that the so- 
 lution of the dreamer's characterological de- 
 fects lay. When the dreamer awoke, the 
 world of reality again enveloped him and he 
 became the inferior human being once more. 
 The value of the analysis of this particular 
 dream lay in the fact that it gave the dreamer 
 an insight into his latent possibilities and 
 prepared him for readjustment in the 
 struggle for existence. The work of the 
 unconscious as revealed in the analysis of the 
 dream has released to consciousness, al- 
 though only in the form of dream wishes, the 
 energy and knowledge necessary to over- 
 come the feeling of inferiority. 
 
 [213] 
 
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