[154] I hope that all colleagues and fellow workers who, following in Freud’s footsteps, have investigated the problem of dreams, and have been able to confirm the basic principles of dream-interpretation, will forgive me if I pass over their corroborative work and speak instead of another investigation which, though it has led to less positive results, is for that reason the more suited to public discussion. A fact especially worth noting is that Morton Prince, thanks to his previous work and his deep insight into psychopathological problems, is singularly well equipped to understand the psychology inaugurated by Freud. I do not know whether Morton Prince has sufficient command of German to read Freud in the original, though this is almost a sine qua non for understanding him. But if he must rely only on writings in English, the very clear presentation of dream-analysis by Ernest Jones, in “Freud’s Theory of Dreams,”2 would have given him all the necessary knowledge. Apart from that, there are already a large number of articles and reports by Brill and Jones, and recently also by Putnam,3 Meyer, Hoch, Scripture, and others, which shed light on the various aspects of psychoanalysis (or “depth psychology,” as Bleuler calls it). And, for full measure, there have been available for some time not only Freud’s and my lectures at Clark University,4 but several translations of our works as well, so that even those who have no knowledge of German would have had ample opportunity to familiarize themselves with the subject.
[155] It was not through personal contact, of whose suggestive influence Professor Hoche5 has an almost superstitious fear very flattering to us, but presumably through reading that Morton Prince acquired the necessary knowledge of analysis. As the German-speaking reader may be aware, Morton Prince is the author of a valuable book, The Dissociation of a Personality, which takes a worthy place beside the similar studies of Binet, Janet, and Flournoy.6 Prince is also, of course, the editor of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, in almost every issue of which questions of psychoanalysis are discussed without bias.
[156] From this introduction the reader will see that I am not saying too much when I represent Morton Prince as an unprejudiced investigator with a firmly established scientific reputation and undisputed competence in judging psychopathological problems. Whereas Putnam is chiefly concerned with the therapeutic aspect of psychoanalysis and has discussed it with admirable frankness, Morton Prince is interested in a particularly controversial subject, namely, dream-analysis. It is here that every follower of Freud has lost his honourable name as a man of science in the eyes of German scientists. Freud’s fundamental contribution, The Interpretation of Dreams, has been treated, with irresponsible levity by the German critics. As usual, they were ready to hand with glib phrases like “brilliant mistake,” “ingenious aberration,” etc. But that any of the psychologists, neurologists, and psychiatrists should really get down to it and try out his wit on Freud’s dream-interpretation was too much to expect.7 Perhaps they did not dare to. I almost believe they did not dare, because the subject is indeed very difficult–less, I think, for intellectual reasons than on account of personal, subjective resistances. For it is just here that psychoanalysis demands a sacrifice which no other science demands of its adherents: ruthless self-knowledge. It needs to be repeated again and again that practical and theoretical understanding of psychoanalysis is a function of analytical self-knowledge. Where self-knowledge fails, psychoanalysis cannot flourish. This is a paradox only so long as people think that they know themselves. And who does not think that? In ringing tones of deepest conviction everyone assures us that he does. And yet it is simply not true, a childish illusion which is indispensable to one’s self-esteem. There can be no doubt whatever that a doctor who covers up his lack of knowledge and ability with increased self-confidence will never be able to analyse, for otherwise he would have to admit the truth to himself and would become impossible in his own eyes.
[157] We must rate it all the higher, then, when a scientist of repute, like Morton Prince, courageously tackles the problem and seeks to master it in his own way. We are ready to meet at any time the objections that spring from honest work of this kind. We have no answer only for those who are afraid of real work and are satisfied with making cheap academic speeches. But before taking up Prince’s objections, we shall have a look at his field of inquiry and at his—in our sense—positive results. Prince worked through six dreams of a woman patient who was capable of different states of consciousness and could be examined in several of these states. He used interrogation under hypnosis as well as “free association.” We learn that he had already analysed several dozen dreams.8 Prince found that the method of free association “enables us by the examination of a large number of dreams in the same person to search the whole field of the unconscious, and by comparison of all the dreams to discover certain persistent, conserved ideas which run through and influence the psychical life of the individual.”9 Using the “insane” psychoanalytic method, therefore, the American investigator was able to discover, in the realm of the unconscious, something that perceptibly influences psychic life. For him the “method” is a method after all, he is convinced that there is an unconscious and all the rest of it, without being in any way hypnotized by Freud personally.
It was a brilliant stroke of genius that led Freud to the discovery that dreams are not the meaningless vagaries that they were previously supposed to be, but when interpreted through the method of psychoanalysis may be found to have a logical and intelligible meaning. This meaning, however, is generally hidden in a mass of symbolism which can only be unraveled by a searching investigation into the previous mental experiences of the dreamer. Such an investigation requires, as I have already pointed out, the resurrection of all the associated memories pertaining to the elements of the dream. When this is done the conclusion is forced upon us, I believe, that even the most fantastic dream may express some intelligent idea, though that idea may be hidden in symbolism. My own observations confirm those of Freud, so far as to show that running through each dream there is an intelligent motive; so that the dream can be interpreted as expressing some idea or ideas which the dreamer previously has entertained. At least all the dreams I have subjected to analysis justify this interpretation.
[159] Prince is thus in a position to admit that dreams have a meaning, that the meaning is hidden in symbols, and that in order to find the meaning one needs the memory-material. All this confirms essential portions of Freud’s dream interpretation, far more than the a priori critics have ever admitted. As a result of certain experiences Prince has also come to conceive hysterical symptoms “as possible symbolisms of hidden processes of thought.” In spite of the views expressed in Binswanger’s Die Hysterie, which might have prepared the ground, this has still not penetrated the heads of German psychiatrists.
[160] I have, as I said, begun with Prince’s affirmative statements. We now come to the deviations and objections (p. 151):
I am unable to confirm [Freud’s view] that every dream can be interpreted as “the imaginary fulfillment of a wish,” which is the motive of the dream. That sometimes a dream can be recognized as the fulfillment of a wish there can be no question, but that every dream, or that the majority of dreams are such, I have been unable to verify, even after subjecting the individual to the most exhaustive analysis. On the contrary I find, if my interpretations are correct, that some dreams are rather the expression of the non-fulfillment of a wish; some seem to be that of the fulfillment of a fear or anxiety.
[161] In this passage we have everything that Prince cannot accept. It should be added that the wish itself often seems to him not to be “repressed” and not to be so unconscious or important as Freud would lead us to expect. Hence Freud’s theory that a repressed wish is the real source of the dream, and that it fulfils itself in the dream, is not accepted by Prince, because he was unable to see these things in his material. But at least he tried to see them, and the theory seemed to him worth a careful check, which is definitely not the case with many of our critics. (I should have thought that this procedure would be an unwritten law of academic decency.) Fortunately, Prince has also presented us with the material from which he drew his conclusions. We are thus in a position to measure our experience against his and at the same time to find the reasons for any misunderstanding. He has had great courage in exposing himself in this commendable way, for we now have an opportunity to compare our divergencies openly with his material, a procedure which will be instructive in every respect.
[162] In order to show how it is that Prince was able to see only the formal and not the dynamic element of the dreams, we must examine his material in more detail. One gathers, from various indications in the material, that the dreamer was a lady in late middle age, with a grown-up son who was studying, and apparently that she was unhappily married (or perhaps divorced or separated). For some years she had suffered from an hysterical dissociation of personality, and, we infer, had regressive fantasies about two earlier love-affairs, which the author, perhaps owing to the prudery of the public, is obliged to hint at rather too delicately. He succeeded in curing the patient of her dissociation for eighteen months, but now things seem to be going badly again, for she remained anxiously dependent on the analyst, and he found this so tiresome that he twice wanted to send her to a colleague.
[163] Here we have the well-known picture of an unanalysed and unadmitted transference, which, as we know, consists in the anchoring of the patient’s erotic fantasies to the analyst. The six dreams are an illustrative excerpt from the analyst’s struggle against the clinging transference of the patient.
[164] Dream I: C [the patient’s dream-ego] was somewhere and saw an old woman who appeared to be a Jewess. She was holding a bottle and a glass and seemed to be drinking whiskey; then this woman changed into her own mother, who had the bottle and glass, and appeared likewise to be drinking whiskey; then the door opened and her father appeared. He had on her husband’s dressing-gown, and he was holding two sticks of wood in his hand. [Pp. 147ff.]
[165] Prince found, on the basis of copious and altogether convincing material,10 that the patient regarded the temptation to drink, and also the temptations of “poor people” in general, as something very understandable. She herself sometimes took a little whiskey in the evening, and so did her mother. But there might be something wrong in it. “The dream scene is therefore the symbolical representation and justification of her own belief and answers the doubts and scruples that beset her mind” (p. 154). The second part of the dream, about the sticks, is certainly, according to Prince, a kind of wish-fulfilment, but he says it tells us nothing, since the patient had ordered firewood the evening before. Despite the trouble expended on it (eight pages of print) the dream has not been analysed thoroughly enough, for the two most important items–the whiskey-drinking and the sticks–remain unanalysed. If the author would follow up those “temptations,” he would soon discover that the patient’s scruples are at bottom of a far more serious nature than a spoonful of whiskey and two bundles of wood. Why is the father who comes in, condensed with the husband? How is the Jewess determined other than by a memory of the previous day? Why are the two sticks significant and why are they in the hand of the father? And so on. The dream has not been analysed. Unfortunately its meaning is only too clear to the psychoanalyst. It says very plainly: “If I were this poor Jewess, whom I saw on the previous day, I would not resist temptation (just as mother and father don’t—a typical infantile comparison!), and then a man would come into my room with firewood—naturally to warm me up.” This, briefly, would be the meaning. The dream contains all that, only the author’s analysis has discreetly stopped too soon. I trust he will forgive me for indiscreetly breaking open the tactfully closed door, so that it may clearly be seen what kind of wish-fulfilments, which “one cannot see,” hide behind conventional discretion and medical blindness to sex.
[166] Dream 2: A hill—she was toiling up the hill; one could hardly get up; had the sensation of some one, or thing, following her. She said, “I must not show that I am frightened, or this thing will catch me.” Then she came where it was lighter, and she could see two clouds or shadows, one black and one red, and she said, “My God, it is A and B! If I don’t have help I am lost.” (She meant that she would change again—i.e., relapse into dissociated personalities.) She began to call “Dr. Prince! Dr. Prince!” and you were there and laughed, and said, “Well, you will have to fight the damned thing yourself.” Then she woke up paralysed with fright. [P. 156.]
[167] As the dream is very simple, we can dispense with any further knowledge of the analytical material. But Prince cannot see the wish-fulfilment in this dream, on the contrary he sees in it the “fulfilment of a fear.” He commits the fundamental mistake of once again confusing the manifest dream-content with the unconscious dream-thought. In fairness to the author it should be remarked that in this case the repetition of the mistake was the more excusable since the crucial sentence (“Well, you will have to fight the damned thing yourself”) is really very ambiguous and misleading. Equally ambiguous is the sentence “I must not show that I am frightened,” etc., which, as Prince shows from the material, refers to the thought of a relapse into the illness, since the patient was frightened of a relapse.
[168] But what does “frightened” mean? We know that it is far more convenient for the patient to be ill, because recovery brings with it a great disadvantage: she would lose her analyst. The illness reserves him, as it were, for her needs. With her interesting illness, she has obviously offered the analyst a great deal, and has received from him a good deal of interest and patience in return. She certainly does not want to give up this stimulating relationship, and for this reason she is afraid of remaining well and secretly hopes that something weird and wonderful will befall her so as to rekindle the analyst’s interest. Naturally she would do anything rather than admit that she really had such wishes. But we must accustom ourselves to the thought that in psychology there are things which the patient simultaneously knows and does not know. Things which are apparently quite unconscious can often be shown to be conscious in another connection, and actually to have been known. Only, they were not known in their true meaning. Thus, the true meaning of the wish which the patient could not admit was not directly accessible to her consciousness, which is why we call this true meaning not conscious, or “repressed.” Put in the brutal form “I will have symptoms in order to re-arouse the interest of the analyst,” it cannot be accepted, true though it is, for it is too hurtful; but she could well allow a few little associations and half-smothered wishes to be discerned in the background, such as reminiscences of the time when the analysis was so interesting, etc.
[169] The sentence “I must not show that I am frightened” therefore means in reality “I must not show that I would really like a relapse because keeping well is too much trouble.” “If I don’t have help, I am lost” means “I hope I won’t be cured too quickly or I cannot have a relapse.” Then, at the end, comes the wish-fulfilment: “Well, you will have to fight the damned thing yourself.” The patient keeps well only out of love for the analyst. If he leaves her in the lurch she will have a relapse, and it will be his fault for not helping her. But if she has a relapse she will have a renewed and more intense claim on his attention, and this is the point of the whole manœuvre. It is altogether typical of dreams that the wish-fulfilment is always found where it seems most impossible to the conscious mind. The fear of a relapse is a symbol that needs analysing, and this the author has forgotten, because he took the fear, like the whiskey-drinking and the sticks, at its face value, instead of examining it sceptically for its genuineness. His colleague Ernest Jones’s excellent work On the Nightmare11 would have informed him of the wishful character of these fears. But, as I know from my own experience, it is difficult for a beginner to remain conscious of all the psychoanalytic rules all the time.
[170] Dream 3: She was in the rocky path of Watts’s,12 barefooted, stones hurt her feet, few clothes, cold, could hardly climb that path; she saw you there, and she called on you to help her, and you said, “I cannot help you, you must help yourself.” She said, “I can’t, I can’t.” “Well, you have got to. Let me see if I cannot hammer it into your head.” You picked up a stone and hammered her head, and with every blow you said, “I can’t be bothered, I can’t be bothered.” And every blow sent a weight down into her heart so she felt heavy-hearted. She woke and I saw you pounding with a stone; you looked cross. [Pp. 159f.]
[172] The dream is built up on the following experience. On the previous morning the patient had begged the author for medical help and had received the answer by telephone: “I cannot possibly come to see you today. I have engagements all the day and into the evening. I will send Dr. W, you must not depend on me” (p. 160). An unmistakable hint, therefore, that the analyst’s time belonged also to others. The patient remarked: “I didn’t say anything about it, but it played ducks and drakes with me the other night.” She therefore had a bitter morsel to swallow. The analyst had done something really painful, which she, as a reasonable woman, understood well enough—but not with her heart. Before going to sleep she had thought: “I must not bother him; I should think I would get that into my head after a while” (p. 161). (In the dream it is actually hammered into her head.) “If my heart was not like a stone, I should weep.” (She was hammered with a stone.)
[173] As in the previous dream, it is stated that the analyst will not help her any more, and he hammers this decision of his into her head so that at every blow her heart became heavier. The situation that evening, therefore, is taken up too clearly in the manifest dream-content. In such cases we must always try to find where a new element has been added to the situation of the previous day; at this point we may penetrate into the real meaning of the dream. The painful thing is that the analyst will not treat the patient any more, but in the dream she is treated, though in a new and remarkable way. When the analyst hammers it into her head that he cannot let himself be tormented by her chatter, he does it so emphatically that his psychotherapy turns into an extremely intense form of physical treatment or torture. This fulfils a wish which is far too shocking to be recognized in the decent light of day, although it is a very natural and simple thought. Popular humour and all the evil tongues that have dissected the secrets of the confessional and the consulting-room know it.13 Mephistopheles, in his famous speech about Medicine,14 guessed it too. It is one of those imperishable thoughts which nobody knows and everybody has.
[174] When the patient awoke she saw the analyst still carrying out that movement: pounding15 with a stone. To name an action for a second time is to give it special prominence.16 As in the previous dream, the wish-fulfilment lies in the greatest disappointment.
[176] It would really be incumbent on the author to present all the interim material which would finally establish the erotic meaning of the dream. Though he has not done it for this dream, everything necessary is said indirectly in the following dreams, so that my above-mentioned conclusion emerges from its isolation and will prove to be a link in a consistent chain.
[177] Dream 4: [Shortly before the last dream the subject] dreamt that she was in a great ballroom, where everything was very beautiful. She was walking about, and a man came up to her and asked, “Where is your escort?” She replied, “I am alone.” He then said, “You cannot stay here, we do not want any lone women.” In the next scene she was in a theater and was going to sit down, when someone came and said the same thing to her: “You can’t stay here, we do not want any lone women here.” Then she was in ever so many different places, but wherever she went she had to leave because she was alone; they would not let her stay. Then she was in the street; there was a great crowd, and she saw her husband a little way ahead, and struggled to get to him through the crowd. When she got quite near she saw … [what we may interpret as a symbolical representation of happiness, says Prince.] Then sickness and nausea came over her and she thought there was no place for her there either. [P. 162.]
[178] The gap in the dream is a praiseworthy piece of discretion and will certainly please the prudish reader, but it is not science. Science admits no such considerations of decency. Here it is simply a question of whether Freud’s maligned theory of dreams is right or not, and not whether dream-texts sound nice to immature ears. Would a gynaecologist suppress the illustration of the female genitalia in a textbook of midwifery on grounds of decency? On p. 164 of this analysis we read: “The analysis of this scene would carry us too far into the intimacy of her life to justify our entering upon it.” Does the author really believe that in these circumstances he has any scientific right to speak about the psychoanalytic dream-theory, when he withholds essential material from the reader for reasons of discretion? By the very fact of reporting his patient’s dream to the world he has violated discretion as thoroughly as possible, for every analyst will see its meaning at once: what the dreamer instinctively hides most deeply cries out loudest from the unconscious. For anyone who knows how to read dream-symbols all precautions are in vain, the truth will out. We would therefore request the author, if he doesn’t want to strip his patient bare the next time, to choose a case about which he can say everything.
[179] Despite his medical discretion this dream too, which Prince denies is a wish-fulfilment, is accessible to understanding. The end of the dream betrays, despite the disguise, the patient’s violent resistance to sexual relations with her husband. The rest is all wish-fulfilment: she becomes a “lone woman” who is socially somewhat beyond the pale. The feeling of loneliness (“she feels that she cannot be alone any more, that she must have company”) is fittingly resolved by this ambiguous situation: there are “lone women” who are not so alone as all that, though certainly they are not tolerated everywhere. This wish-fulfilment naturally meets with the utmost resistance, until it is made clear that in case of necessity the devil, as the proverb says, eats even flies—and this is in the highest degree true of the libido. This solution, so objectionable to the conscious mind, seems thoroughly acceptable to the unconscious. One has to know what the psychology of a neurosis is in a patient of this age; psychoanalysis requires us to take people as they really are and not as they pretend to be. Since the great majority of people want to be what they are not, and therefore believe themselves identical with the conscious or unconscious ideal that floats before them, the individual is blinded by mass suggestion from the start, quite apart from the fact that he himself feels different from what he really is. This rule has the peculiarity of being true of everybody else, but never of the person to whom it is being applied.
[180] I have set forth the historical and general significance of this fact in a previous work,17 so I can spare myself the trouble of discussing it here. I would only remark that, to practise psychoanalysis, one must subject one’s ethical concepts to a total revision. It is a requirement which explains why psychoanalysis becomes intelligible to a really serious person only gradually and with great difficulty. It needs not only intellectual but, to an even greater extent, moral effort to understand the meaning of the method, for it is not just a medical method like vibro-massage or hypnosis, but something of much wider scope, that modestly calls itself “psychoanalysis.”
[181] Dream 5. She dreamt that she was in a dark, gloomy, rocky place, and she was walking with difficulty, as she always does in her dreams, over this rocky path, and all at once the place was filled with cats. She turned in terror to go back, and there in her path was a frightful creature like a wild man of the woods. His hair was hanging down his face and neck; he had a sort of skin over him for covering; his legs and arms were bare and he had a club. A wild figure. Behind him were hundreds of men like him—the whole place was filled with them, so that in front were cats and behind were wild men. The man said to her that she would have to go forward through those cats, and that if she made a sound they would all come down on her and smother her, but if she went through them without making a sound she would never again feel any regret about the past … [mentioning certain specific matters which included two particular systems of ideas known as the Z and Y complexes, all of which had troubled her, adds the author]. She realized that she must choose between death from the wild men and the journey over the cats, so she started forward. Now, in her dream of course she had to step on the cats [the subject here shivers and shudders], and the horror of knowing that they would come on her if she screamed caused her to make such an effort to keep still that the muscles of her throat contracted in her dream [they actually did contract, I could feel them, says Prince]. She waded through the cats without making a sound, and then she saw her mother and tried to speak to her. She reached out her hands and tried to say “O mamma!” but she could not speak, and then she woke up feeling nauseated, frightened, and fatigued, and wet with perspiration. Later, after waking, when she tried to speak, she could only whisper. [Pp. 164f. A footnote adds: “She awoke with complete aphonia, which persisted until relieved by appropriate suggestion.”]
[182] Prince sees this dream partly as a wish-fulfilment, because the dreamer did after all walk over the cats. But he thinks: “The dream would rather seem to be principally a symbolical representation of her idea of life in general, and of the moral precepts with which she has endeavoured to inspire herself, and which she has endeavoured to live up to in order to obtain happiness” (p. 168).
[183] That is not the meaning of the dream, as anyone can see who knows anything of dreams. The dream has not been analysed at all. We are merely told that the patient had a phobia about cats. What that means is not analysed. The treading on the cats is not analysed. The wild man wearing the skin is not analysed, and there is no analysis of the skin and the club. The erotic reminiscences Z and Y are not described. The significance of the aphonia is not analysed. Only the rocky path at the beginning is analysed a little: It comes from a painting by Watts, “Love and Life.” A female figure (Life) drags herself wearily along the rocky path, accompanied by the figure of Love. The initial image in the dream corresponds exactly to this picture, “minus the figure of Love,” as Prince remarks. Instead there are the cats, as the dream shows and as we remark. This means that the cats symbolize love. Prince has not seen this; had he studied the literature he would have discovered from one of my earlier publications that I have dealt in detail with the question of cat phobia.18 There he would have been informed of this conclusion and could have understood the dream and the cat phobia as well.
[185] Dream 6: This dream occurred twice on succeeding nights. She dreamed she was in the same rocky, dark path she is always in—Watts’s path—but with trees besides (there are always trees, or a hillside, or a canyon). The wind was blowing very hard, and she could hardly walk on account of something, as is always the case. Someone, a figure, came rushing past her with his hand over his (or her) eyes. This figure said, “Don’t look, you will be blinded.” She was at the entrance of a great cave; suddenly it flashed light in the cave like a flashlight picture, and there, down on the ground you were lying, and you were bound round and round with bonds of some kind, and your clothes were torn and dirty, and your face was covered with blood, and you looked terribly anguished; and all over you there were just hundreds of little gnomes or pigmies or brownies, and they were torturing you. Some of them had axes, and were chopping on your legs and arms, and some were sawing you. Hundreds of them had little things like joss-sticks, but shorter, which were red hot at the ends, and they were jabbing them into you. It was something like Gulliver and the little creatures running over him. You saw C, and you said, “O Mrs. C, for heaven’s sake get me out of this damned hole.” (You always swear in C’s dreams.) She was horrified, and said, “O Dr. Prince, I am coming,” but she could not move, she was rooted to the spot; and then it all went away, everything became black, as if she were blinded, and then it would flash again and illuminate the cave, and she would see again. This happened three or four times in the dream. She kept saying, “I am coming,” and struggled to move, and she woke up saying it. In the same way she could not move when she woke up, and she could not see. [Pp. 170f.]
[186] The author does not report the details of the analysis of this dream, “in order not to weary the reader.” He gives only the following résumé:
The dream proved to be a symbolic representation of the subject’s conception of life (the rocky path), of her dread of the future, which for years she has said she dared not face; of her feeling that the future was “blind,” in that she could not “see anything ahead”; of the thought that she would be overwhelmed, “lost,” “swept away” if she looked into and realized this future, and she must not look. And yet there are moments in life when she realizes vividly the future; and so in the dream one of these moments is when she looks into the cave (the future), and in the flash of light the realization comes–she sees her son (metamorphosed through substitution of another person) tortured, as she has thought of him tortured, and handicapped (bound) by the moral “pin pricks” of life. Then follows the symbolic representation (paralysis) of her utter “helplessness” to aid either him or anyone else or alter the conditions of her own life. Finally follow the prophesied consequences of this realization. She is overcome by blindness and to this extent the dream is a fulfillment of a fear. [P. 171.]
[187] The author says in conclusion: “In this dream, as in the others, we find no ‘unacceptable’ and ‘repressed wish,’ no ‘conflict’ with ‘censoring thoughts,’ no ‘compromise,’ no ‘resistance’ and no ‘disguise’ in the dream-content to deceive the dreamer—elements and processes fundamental in the Freud school of psychology” (p. 173).
[188] From this devastating judgment we shall delete the words “as in the others,” for the other dreams are analysed so inadequately that the author has no right to pronounce such a judgment on the basis of the preceding “analyses.” Only the last dream remains to substantiate this judgment, and we shall therefore look at it rather more closely.
[189] We shall not linger over the constantly recurring symbol of the painting by Watts, in which the figure of Love is missing and was replaced by the cats in dream 5. Here it is replaced by a figure who warns the patient not to look or she will be “blinded.” Now comes another very remarkable image: the analyst bound round and round with bonds, his clothes torn and dirty, his face covered with blood—the Gulliver situation. Prince remarks that it is the patient’s son who is in this agonizing situation, but withholds further details. Where the bonds, the bloody face, the torn clothes come from, what the Gulliver situation means—of all this we learn nothing. Because the patient “must not look into the future,” the cave signifies the future, remarks Prince. But why is the future symbolized by a cave? The author is silent. How comes it that the analyst is substituted for the son? Prince mentions the patient’s helplessness with regard to the situation of the son, and observes that she is just as helpless with regard to the analyst, for she does not know how to show her gratitude. But these are, if I may say so, two quite different kinds of helplessness, which do not sufficiently explain the condensation of the two persons. An essential and unequivocal tertium comparationis is lacking. All the details of the Gulliver situation, especially the red-hot joss-sticks, are left unanalysed. The highly significant fact that the analyst himself suffers hellish tortures is passed over in complete silence.
[190] In Dream 3 the analyst pounded the patient on the head with a stone, and this torture seems to be answered here, but swelled out into a hellish fantasy of revenge. Without doubt these tortures were thought up by the patient and intended for her analyst (and perhaps also for her son); that is what the dream says. This fact needs analysing. If the son is really “tortured by the moral pin pricks of life,” we definitely require to know why in the dream the patient multiplies this torture a hundred-fold, brings the son (or the analyst) into the Gulliver situation and then puts Gulliver in the “damned hole.” Why must the analyst swear in the dreams? Why does the patient step into the analyst’s shoes and say she is unable to bring help, when really the situation is the other way round?
[191] Here the way leads down into the wish-fulfilling situation. But the author has not trodden this path; he has either omitted to ask himself any of these questions or answered them much too superficially, so that this analysis too must be disqualified as “unsatisfactory.”19
*
[193] Only after the conclusion of this review did I see the criticism which Ernest Jones20 lavished on Morton Prince’s article. We learn from Prince’s reply that he does not claim to have used the psychoanalytic method. In that case he might fairly have refrained from criticizing the findings of psychoanalysis, it seems to me. His analytical methods, as the above examples show, are so lacking in scientific thoroughness that the conclusions he reaches offer no basis for a serious criticism of Freud’s dream-theory. The rest of his remarks, culminating in the admission that he will never be able to see eye to eye with the psychoanalytic school, do not encourage me to make further efforts to explain the problems of dream-psychology to him or to discuss his reply. I confine myself to expressing my regret that he has even gone to the length of denying the scientific training and scientific thinking of his opponents.