Part 2

Nor is this all. Where there is a marked repression of a large part of oneself, the repressed material may become what is called a secondary personality, and every so often preempt the conscious mind, so that at one time the personality may be timid, pious, good, and at another bold, wicked and evil. It is, in a way, the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Finally, the unconscious appears in consciousness in the form of dreams. It is really this great discovery which led to the development of the technic of psycho-analysis, and opened up the path which has led to all the other discoveries.

A dream takes place when we are asleep; that is to say, when the conscious mind is completely relaxed, when all the bars are let down. What more natural than that the repressed portion of the mind may now flare up, just as the stars become visible when the sun is withdrawn from the sky? But dreams usually have something absurd about them. We walk in seven league boots, we cut off a hand and sew it on again, animals talk; we are in the land of make-believe and of the fairies and the bad spirits.

Why does the unconscious speak such a fantastic language? Why doesn’t it express itself in simple English? According to Freud, this is because the conscious mind has refused to face the evil which it has repressed, and the unconscious therefore ever seeks a masked or camouflaged expression, whether in the form of a physical symptom, a fixed idea, a phobia, or a dream.

Dreams, in short, are symbolic. Everything in a dream stands for something else. But these symbols are not haphazard; what they stand for are definitely expressed by the symbol. It is not haphazard for instance that a dove has always symbolized the holy spirit, or that a spear has stood for the masculine organ, or that a vessel has stood for the womb. There is a certain likeness between symbol and fact.

It is nothing new to invest dreams with meaning. The human race has always done so. Man has always intuitively known that these strange manifestations of the night held a hidden meaning for him, a meaning that must be searched out by interpretation and analysis. So we read in the Bible of Joseph interpreting the dreams of Pharaoh; in Euripides’ play, Iphigenia, the action begins with a dream of the heroine, which she herself interprets, though somewhat mistakenly. So too we have the well-authenticated dream of Lincoln (ten days before he was assassinated) that he heard a noise of lamentation and sobbing downstairs in the White House and took a candle and went down. Around a catafalque moved a crowd of weeping people. He asked who was dead, and was informed that it was the President, who had been killed.

Such dreams are of the prophetic order, and will be dealt with later on. The last dream, also, was straightforward. It was not symbolic. But such dreams are outside the usual run; they are the exceptions to the rule.

The way then to find out the meaning of a dream is to treat the images in it as symbols and try to discover what the symbols stand for. And the quickest way to do this is to ask the dreamer himself.

You dream, for instance, to use a simple illustration, that you are involved in a fight between a cat and a dog. Well, what do you think of cats and dogs? What are your associations?

You begin to tell all the thoughts that come into your mind when you think of these two animals. You may drag in personal stories of a pet cat you once had, of a dog it fought with, etc. When all you have said is boiled down it may amount to this: that cats and dogs appear to be opposites, that cats are aloof, “selfish,” withdrawn, asking much and giving little, whereas dogs are loving, affectionate, very sociable, and may even give their lives for their masters. Symbolically then, the cat stands for the ego-impulses, the dog for the social impulses. It is natural that they should fight each other every so often; there are times when we are in great conflict between our wish to serve others and our desire to gratify or satisfy ourselves.

What Freud discovered was that the repression came to light through the dream; that the dream material, if analyzed, showed exactly why the patient was ill, why he had his phobia or his physical symptom. For instance, the man might have a strain of sexual perversion in him. He himself is not aware of it. But the dream immediately brings it to light and he is forced to recognize it.

Naturally it is difficult to get a patient to accept the repressed material. If he repressed it because of a great moral revulsion, he can only be led by a process of re-education to accept it. When he first comes for treatment, therefore, he merely tells the analyst all that he remembers about his past, his family and personal history, etc. Gradually he acquires confidence in the analyst. This unburdening is like a confession. The analyst hears things that the patient has never before mentioned to anyone else. The analyst, because of his knowledge of psychology, also shows an understanding of the patient that quite startles the latter. The analyst, in short, becomes more than a father to him, more than a mother. There is a feeling of gratitude, of trust, which approaches the border of love. This feeling, this attitude, is called the transference. The patient has transferred himself, his burden, to the analyst. And no cure can take place until this is achieved.

For when the transference is made, the patient is now ready to go along with the analyst in his re-education. He gains a new standpoint. He discovers that the ugly and evil things which he suppressed are not his personal property, his private depravity, but are public property, that every one who is a human being has the same impulses, the same shameful lusts, the same wicked wishes; and that there can be no genuine health until one allows these impulses in consciousness and accepts them in their nakedest aspect.

The patient then is ready to face squarely and truthfully the divulgences of his dreams.

And what is the cure? Sometimes, happily, it is a simple matter. The man who has suppressed his sexuality altogether, for instance, may now marry and gain a good direct expression for his need. But what of those who find strong perverted wishes, what shall we do with them?

At this point Freud erects the theory of sublimation. It is not a new theory. The youth in college is admonished to go into athletics that he may channel off and use up the energy which otherwise would provide him with a sexual problem. It is the substitution of a “higher” thing for a “lower.” Only, of course, the higher thing must stand in some natural relation to the lower, that the instinctive craving may have some genuine satisfaction.

The classic example is that of surgery. A man is sadistic. That is, he desires to practice cruelty on the object of his love. Turn this upside-down from something destructive to something creative, and you let him dig his knife into the human body, but now it is to help and heal another, not to hurt him. Hence, the surgeon is sublimating his sadistic tendencies.

Another example, according to Freud, is the artist. His wicked and criminal impulses, we will say, would indicate a long list of murders if he lived them out. He does not live them out, he writes them out. He becomes known as a writer of crime and detective stories, and in this form he releases his evil energy and spends it utterly.

Or take the actor. As a child he wanted constantly to exhibit himself, to go naked before others. This strong strain of exhibitionism can be satisfied finally by acting, by showing himself off before audiences.

Hence, the Freudian cure for those impulses we cannot live, is, first, to recognize and accept them, and secondly, to sublimate them.

The Freudian psychology, however, does not rest at this point. It has a theory which underlies all the others; it is the theory connected with the Oedipus complex.

Oedipus was the man, celebrated in Greek drama, who, by a fluke of fate, married his own mother, had children by her, and later had to expiate his crime by blinding himself and wandering poor and helpless about the world. For his crime is the one crime which mankind has usually found absolutely taboo. In practically all the savage tribes, and in every civilized code, incest, or intermarriage between child and parent, brother and sister, has been strictly forbidden.

Why is this so? Freud believes that there is a natural sexual attraction within the family group itself, that the child begins its sexual life very early, that the boy gains satisfactions through his mother’s caresses; and that hence the whole beginnings of sexuality are wrapped up in the incestuous wish. Naturally, however, for the son there is a great rival. It is his father. His father would fight him off just as he would any other male rival. This is one of the reasons for the universal taboo.

But if the origins and beginnings of sexuality are entwined in the incestuous wish, and incest is taboo, we have an immediate cause of trouble in human nature. We are all bound to repress. And indeed if we look upon man, we see that he is afflicted with much sickness, that he is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.

If, however, this is the nuclear complex, this Oedipus complex, how can we account for the other sexual difficulties, the perversions? They originate, according to Freud, in the Oedipus complex itself. The child’s first act is suckling, this involves the mouth; he then learns to suck his finger when he cannot get at the nipple, this involves mouth and hand; he then begins to use his hand rubbing himself and this leads to rubbing the sexual organ (auto-erotism); he now takes pleasure in his own body and in bodies like his own (homosexual interest), and finally he becomes interested in bodies unlike his own (normal sexual wish). He may find, however, that he cannot cross the last bridge and get to normal sexuality. The repressed incest wish stands in the way and makes him fear the woman who would, unconsciously, be used as a substitute for the mother. Hence, he remains fixed at some infantile stage; mouth-erotism, auto-erotism, homosexuality, etc. Often in analysis, when he discovers this, according to Freud, he can learn to renounce the infantile fixation, or perversion, and learn to take pleasure in normal sexuality.

Such, in brief, and with, alas, much omitted, is an outline of the Freudian theory. It is a sexual theory. The psychological troubles of mankind, with all their symptoms, either physical or mental, are traced back to a disturbance in sexuality, to taboos which bring the individual into conflict with society and so cause these unnatural repressions. Freud, however, does not use the word sexuality in a narrow sense; he makes it synonymous with love-life, though the purely sexual element is, on close examination, always present.

However, recently, Freud, now an old man, has advanced a new theory to supplement the sexual theory. He believes, though he is very cautious in his statement, that beside the sexual impulse, the will-to-live, to create and procreate, there is an opposite impulse, a will-to-death, a wish to have done. In this, he pays an unconscious tribute to some of the theories of Jung, which will be discussed later on.

III.