Human Psychology As Seen Through The Dream

Julia Turner, Turner, Julia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136328763
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This is Volume XXXIV of thirty-eight in the General Psychology series. Originally published in 1924, the present book is an attempt to supplement the slight sketch of the Anxiety Hypothesis put forward in 'The Psychology of Self-Consciousness'. The former book aimed at explaining the difference between the difference between the perceptual and conceptual aspects of life, and at showing, by reference to general literature, the anxiety elements in human thought. In this book in Part I anxiety is described as arising through the reciprocal actions of introjection and projection to supply the warp and woof not only of individual character, but of an unseen spiritual self; in Part II is traced out the sinuous course of the dream life conceived as a dramatic cycle.

Part I
The Dream is the Psychological Apparatus Harmonising Experience

Chapter I
Introduction

What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?

(Hamlet)

HAMLET has been interviewing the Players. The sight of them had recalled the fact that when last entertained by this troupe the leader had declaimed a scene from the final act in a play on the siege of Troy. Hamlet asks to hear it again. The passage describes the slaying of Priam and the pitiful plight of his aged queen, bereaved of husband, sons and daughters, fleeing from her desolated home:—

"Barefoot up and down, threatening the flames
With bisson rheum; a clout upon that head
Where late the diadem stood; and, for a robe,
About her lank and all o'er teemèd loins,
A blanket, in the alarum of fear caught up."

The piece had never been acted; it was “caviare to the general," but in the recitation the Player had expressed signs of emotion, all his own.

Now Hamlet is alone. The Players have received the Prince's commands and for a moment the bitter frenzy of Hamlet's own anxiety is mingled with a fellow feeling for the man whose voice had trembled and eyes become suffused with tears, as he pronounced phrase by phrase the description of the sufferings of Hecuba.

What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?

Hecuba is for the moment everything to the player who enters sympathetically into the telling of her pathetic story. That is to say, for the purposes of his own anxiety life he "identifies himself with," or feels himself one with, Hecuba; her desolated condition is for him a picture or image of his own inner life. For Hamlet himself this is no less true. We remember that it is Hamlet who asks to have the poem recited. On the occasion when he originally heard it some inner impulse must have appropriated the mimic situation, some intuition in him having singled out the fate of Priam and Hecuba amid the ruins of Troy as prefigurative of his own destiny.

It is in virtue of our capacity for identifying ourselves with others that a theatrical representation affords us interest, and there is, moreover, a selective principle at work in the process which brings it about that the obvious parallel in the representation is not by any means necessarily the character which appeals most to any given spectator at any given time. What two beings could seem more remote than a man in his prime and the aged Hecuba in flight? Well might Hamlet ask, "What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?" And if Hamlet is surprised at the actor, the surprise applies in his case even more. One might have expected that the son and heir of a king, at the period of life that Hamlet was, having just completed his studies and returned to his father's state, would find his interest centre, not in the stricken consort of the unsuccessful defender of Troy, but in the triumphant besieger insinuating his troops into the city by the ruse of the Great Wooden Horse.

On the principle of identification, we find people in daily life expressing sympathy with children in distress or with animals in suffering; we might even go further and say that, at least in part, our regret over a broken ornament or defaced book is derived from the same source, namely, identification of the self with the object on which our feeling expends itself. Without a doubt, the other side of the picture holds equally. We are as capable of identifying ourselves with the successful hero. Which type of object shall claim the larger amount of interest will depend upon our mood, but the identification process is at work in both cases. Projection is a word highly applicable to this identification process, for it implies that there is an interior source furnishing the image of the self which corresponds with the external object capable of arresting the subject's attention. This interior source is the "Anxiety Drama" of the dream life.

In Part II of this book I shall attempt to describe and explain the Anxiety Drama in more detail. In the Psychology of Self-Consciousness I have shown that it originates in the sensory images derived, in the period of sensori-motor inco-ordination and language-inadequacy of babyhood, from emotional situations in which the child is directly or indirectly concerned. At this stage of his conceptual life the subject is alone, and the sensory images are confused with emotional states which the originals of the picture aroused in himself. In group-subjects, the same emotion is induced in the "patient" as the latter sees expressed by the "agent" in the situation; an image of the mother's angry or pleased face is the immediate reflection of his own emotion. Henceforward that image is capable of being revived together with the associated emotion. In the waking life, with the acquisition of language, the image habit tends to lapse for ordinary purposes, and energy escapes along speech and motor paths. In the waking mental process known as imagination, mental pictures continue to find a place, but they have less vividness and are subject to control; in the dream, the older habit persists in its original guise, the images, however, being constantly replenished from current experience. That this replenishing process goes on in us unobserved is shown by the fact that dreams reproduce elements of experience which, at the time the experience took place, did not, so far as we can see, particularly impress us. This process may be called Introjection.

The image or symbol habit is created and carried on for the purpose of an inner life which I have called the conceptual or self-conscious life. It is a life detached from the actual pleasures and pains of material existence. Over against this life lies the life of the flesh, the ordinary animal existence —the perceptual life, as I have called it in the Psychology of Self-Consciousness—the heritage of man as a species, the highest species which has appeared in the evolutionary series. Perceptual life is concerned with the interests of the organism. To bring the Conceptual and Perceptual into relationship is the function of the Anxiety phase of self-consciousness, revealing itself normally in the dream and in phantasy. Anxiety is wakened in infancy, probably with abruptness, and possibly in a situation which involves pain for the subject. I have called the process the "sparking," using the analogy of the starting of a petrol motor.

The above division of the mental life into conceptual, perceptual and anxiety experience includes every vital phenomenon known to the human subject. It excludes neither the lowest animal function, on the one hand, nor the most ideal aspiration on the other; it includes the normal and the so-called abnormal. The theory which regards the higher impulses of our nature as something extra, something imported from outside, is one which I fail to find confirmed in the dream. The de novo theory assumes that mankind has some private source of knowledge, an idea which seems strange when looked at more closely, for everything in the subjective world, the world of sensation, feeling and thought, must surely proceed from the one source, the Life-Principle itself. That pros and cons are bandied between opposite parties in the discussion of all the most important human concerns—especially in the discussion of the most arresting problem with which the human mind can deal, that of personal immortality—merely illustrates the fact that development of anxiety proceeds along two opposite lines, following conceptual and perceptual experience respectively. Every anxiety phenomenon illustrates this bifurcation of interest, one line following the course of experience which recedes into an inner source, the other the course of interest which flows out into the phenomenal environment.

The inner life unfolds for waking consciousness as the result of "Introjecting" the happenings encountered in the material world; on the other hand life lived among one's human fellows is regulated, if not enhanced, by the projection on to it of something supplied from within which gives form and continuity and purpose to the life of self-consciousness. To bring the two aspects of life into a single act of mental vision is the highest human accomplishment. To achieve this would be to turn all phenomenal functions into a sacrament —to spiritualise every experience of sense.

This is in effect the meaning of the saying of Jesus, "If thine eye be single thy whole body shall be full of light." The eye referred to is obviously not the physical eye, but the focus of the Life-Principle become self-conscious in the human being. To include in a single sweep of vision both the life of material things and the life of spiritual things is to have the body full of light; to see only the things of sense is to have the light that is within become darkness for waking experience.

The object of this treatise is to describe how human life develops conceptually. Part I deals with the reciprocal processes of Introjection and Projection; in Part II I endeavour to show how the study of the dream may be used to serve the purpose of unification of experience.

Through the study of the dream it becomes apparent by what mechanism it happens that the whole world enters the soul of man, there to create out of animal emotions a new and higher fact—a thought life. The infant is a creature of massive feeling, in quality negative and positive, feeling associated, at this stage, as in his immediate animal ancestors, with the instincts. After the sparking the child associates his feelings mainly with the personalities, human and animal, in his environment; a slow laborious process at first, it grows with exercise. The first situations arouse pleasure and displeasure in gross; habituation induces more measured reaction. Feelings have become the personalities among which they (the feelings) are distributed. As experience enlarges, the "dream population" grows and develops and the scope of their activities enlarges, with the result that the child's feelings, erstwhile massive and simply negative or positive, become widely distributed, what they stand for more widely discriminated and their content less feeling than thought. At first just "good" or "bad," (i.e., fearful or pleasurable in relation to sensory criteria), the dream personalities become good or bad in varying degrees in relation to other experience which gives knowledge to the child of the laws of his own being. Through a special class of dream, of which the "falling" dream is typical, the child learns subconsciously that the law of his life is that the vital energy should rise in his nervous apparatus. The "fall" dream is not the fall of the subject but of the vital energy in the nervous system.¹

The dream warns the child what he should really fear because it breaks the law of his own being. As he learns to choose good and avoid evil, or vice versa, character develops. The images importing that which is most feared, whether good or evil—for both are or may be feared—are banished and become forgotten, "dissociated," a very apt technical word. The dreams of infantile origin show fear of that which will break the law and precipitate consequences foreboding danger, and on the other hand they make into a thing of beauty, or at least a thing to be desired, that which is in accordance with the laws of vital energy. All is at first referred only within and all hangs together, producing the effect of a dramatic representation. This is a process which forges thought out of feeling and is perpetually tempering the instrument and sharpening its edge. Finer and finer differences between these feeling-saturated thoughts are perpetually coming to light in the child's experience, the relations of each to the other and each to the whole becoming clearer. These are the thought relations as ordinarily understood (the logical relations). Projection is the process by which the correspondences between the interior and exterior worlds are re-established or sought to be re-established. It is a process which is subject to many difficulties.

The dream, we may assume, is only part of the whole mechanism of mind organisation, a process which will be going on in ordinary circumstances as steadily as the metabolism of the physical body, with which, indeed, the dream compares it. In the dream normally the subject's immediate experiences are staged in order that he may see whither his line of present-day experience is leading and how it is related to the whole. The "fearful" in the dream, far from attaching to physical and external values, is really directed to keeping intact a higher self and providing for the expansion of spiritual energies. By projection, the subject re-discovers in the external universe the creations of his interior life and applies them to it. Hence the rational mind as we contact it embodies the thought relations which have developed between the various parts of the dream life. Because the invariable nucleus of the dream symbolism brings into relation the body and the "unseen self," the bulk of the thought life of mankind is essentially the same. Again, because all other symbolism is highly flexible, involving as it does individual and racial differences, the thought of every human soul shows marked variations.

¹These psycho-physical problems cannot be adequately dealt with at this stage. See Appendix I, No. 1.

Chapter II
The Inauguration of Introjection and Projection

A spark disturbs our clod.

(Rabbi ben Ezra, R. Browning)

THE medium of exchange between experience of the inner life and experience as we understand it in a phenomenal environment is in the first instance symbolism. A symbol is something concrete, something familiar to sense, which is adopted to represent experience of the inner life. Practically everything which the human mind can take cognisance of, is capable, by furnishing symbolism, of assisting towards the harmonisation of experience.

I will attempt to trace what appears to me to be the probable course of the rise of the symbol habit in the individual.

The baby, at first merely an animal subject, has self-consciousness "sparked" in him in some situation involving intense emotion. The situation is in all likelihood one in which the child's guardian counters his will in a quite unmistakable fashion. The change of countenance, the signs of displeasure, in a face which has hitherto looked into his with nothing but gentleness and love, provide a momentous experience; the significance is heightened if infliction of pain accompanies the essential signs of displeasure. It arouses a mixed feeling of fear and hate.

As the perceptual subject quickens in the mother's womb, so the conceptual subject is quickened when the baby subject first reads displeasure in her face.

Because in the helpless subject fear cannot, activate the flight-impulse—i.e., the subject cannot run away—his reactions mark a new departure in the mental life. ¹ We may assume that the sensory image becomes endowed with superior vividness and with permanence. The angry face, the raised voice, any significant movement made by the object he confronts and all somatic accompaniments of his own, will henceforward tend to associate themselves with any future situation in which the subject cannot so react as to secure immediate safety, i.e., with every anxiety situation. Henceforth the image embodies the particular emotion. It exists for the sake of the emotion, and whenever the emotion recurs, the image, we may suppose, will at the same time be revived in memory. Again, the smiling face, which succeeds the angry one, expressing forgiveness and a renewal of the love relation, is on the same principle assimilated for pleasurable experience. There follow before long images of other angry and pleased faces; for the same emotions as expressed by every individual must present differences, since no two persons are affected in quite the same fashion, and their capacity for instilling fear or suggesting well-being will likewise vary. The father's mode of expressing anger and pleasure will be different from the mother's, and these will both differ from the expression of the same emotions as seen in the face of each one of all the members of the baby's little group; yet the facial image of anger in all will bear a certain resemblance and so also will the facial image of happy pleasedness. Consequently, whenever the infant suffers because he desires to alleviate his condition and cannot—if only because he cannot reach an object or effect any other change in his circumstances which would remove an inconvenience or produce positive satisfaction—the symbolic face will present itself on the field of memory as it does in the dreams of the adult. The same thing will happen in respect to auditory images. In both cases, it will be the prepotent stimulus which will survive, i.e., the face of the person who instils most fear, or the voice expressing for the little subject the most alluring sense of pleasure, will secure priority, a quality in a stimulus which in psychology is expressed by the word prepotency.

As the self-conscious habit becomes fixed, images corresponding to emotions slightly different in quality from the above will add themselves to the picture gallery. Situations in which the child sees anger directed against another child will impress on the awakening self-consciousness an image of fear as expressed by the threatened child. It is not necessarily the face which provides the image, it may be the part threatened, e.g., a subject remembers seeing the button of a sister's frock flicked from the back with a stick by the father. The visual image chronicles just the objects involved, back, button and stick. This is an entirely different experience from that provided by a situ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PART I THE DREAM IS THE PSYCHOLOGICAL APPARATUS FOR HARMONISING EXPERIENCE
• PART II THE ANXIETY DRAMA
• PART III THE SELF THROUGH THE DREAM
• CONSULUSION
• APPENDIX I
• APPENDIX II