Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Allow me first of all to thank you for the honour you have done me in asking me to read the opening paper at this Annual Meeting of your learned Society. I take it as an honour done not so much to myself as to psycho-analysis. Seventeen years ago I had the privilege of visiting this country with Professor Freud, and so I am able to compare the position of psycho-analysis in 1909 with its position to-day both in America and in Europe. At that time, apart from the friendly interest shown by two great American scholars, Dr. Stanley Hall and Dr. J. J. Putnam, Freud’s method was championed by only one single person in the United States—Dr. A. A, Brill. And in Europe things were certainly not much better. We were only a handful of pioneers scattered about the world—generals without an army; yet we were full of hope and optimism about our work. Our abounding hopefulness in those days reminds me of the old anecdote of the beggar who was dividing his property amongst his sons. To the first he said, ‘You may beg in Germany’; to the second: ‘You shall have Hungary’, while to the third he apportioned Switzerland, and to the fourth, America. Since the time of my visit we have indeed advanced enormously in public recognition, and can boast of a whole host of adherents of psycho-analysis both in your country and in Europe; at any rate, I find a more widespread interest in psycho-analysis in America among people who have not had a proper training in analysis. If I had to account for this fact I should be tempted to say that the spirit of liberty characteristic of the American genius makes it impossible for a young science to be rejected, as has been attempted in certain European universities, for reasons of mere conservatism, without its having first been examined. On the other hand you will, I am sure, allow me to remark that this spirit of liberty is not without its dangers. Once, when I was talking to several eminent Americans, they said that the spirit of liberty in them resented Freud’s specially important precept that anyone who wanted to become an analyst must first be analysed himself. I fear that this attitude may rob you of all the advantages which you derive from your love of liberty and may make it impossible for you correctly to evaluate Freud’s methods. The larger number and greater importance of scientific contributions to psycho-analysis in Europe are probably accounted for by the fact that there is a larger body of well-trained analysts there, and the possibility of acquiring an analytic training at several psycho-analytic institutes, which in America are non-existent.
In concluding this comparison, I will mention only the following points: In Europe it has become customary for people to appropriate a large part of Freud’s life-work, to dish it up in a new form and with a new terminology, and publish it as their own original work. I have come across nothing of this sort in American literature. On the other hand, it seems as though in America (possibly owing to the pressure of public opinion) people are much readier than we are in Europe to accept the watered-down and attenuated views of certain of Freud’s former disciples. I have noticed too, over here, something of an exaggerated anxiety about the question of lay-analysis, probably because there are many more dangerous quacks in America than with us. With this danger strongly impressed on your minds, you seem to me to undervalue the advantage we derive from the co-operation of thoroughly well-trained lay-analystis, both in medical practice and in social and educational work. There are not enough members of the medical profession to undertake every case of neurosis and to deal with all ‘difficult’ children and all adult criminals. Besides, we are obliged to co-operate with non-medical research-workers, analytically trained, in the fields of ethnology, pedagogy, history, and biology. I hope that this difference of opinion between Freud and his American followers will soon be satisfactorily settled.
My original intention in speaking to you to-day was to give a general account of the relation between psychiatry and psychoanalysis. But to have done so would have been merely to add one more to the numerous essays on psycho-analysis which already exist and which you have doubtless read. So I have chosen rather to demonstrate by means of a concrete example how psycho-analysis deals with a special psychiatric problem. I am quite aware of the dangers of this experiment. By leading you to dip into the seething cauldron of psycho-analytic work I shall assuredly rouse the resistance of all those who are not accustomed to contemplate mental symptoms in the light of our analytical understanding of symbols. I hope that the resistance so evoked will be only transitory, and that subsequent experience will convince you that our science is neither as hysterical nor as speculative as it may appear at first glance.
With your permission I will now enter upon the subject of today’s lecture. In your observation of patients you have all come across psychotics who had hallucinations about giants and dwarfs, such hallucinations being accompanied by feelings of anxiety and fear. Frequently dwarfs and small creatures appear to such persons in terrifying hordes. Microptic and macroptic illusory distortions of the surrounding world are, indeed, rather more rare, but with alcoholics and hysterics they are by no means uncommon. In general, the old text-books of psychiatry made scarcely any attempt to explain this kind of symptom, and, if they did set out to do so, it was upon a purely physiological basis. For example, they explained an entoptic sensation by cramps in the focusing muscles of the eye or by circulatory disturbances in the retina or the optic brain centres.
Probably under the influence of Freud’s teaching psychiatrists are now beginning to interest themselves in these symptoms from a more strictly psychological standpoint. Some psychiatrists have given them the name of Lilliputian hallucinations.
The deeper psycho-analytical explanation of this symptomatology is, however, still to come. With two decades of psychoanalytical work behind me, I believe that I can throw a little light on this question. Most of my experience in this connexion is derived from the dreams of neurotics, particularly of patients suffering from anxiety neurosis. The dreams in which giants and dwarfs make their appearance are generally, though not invariably, characterized by marked anxiety. Sometimes they have the effect of a nightmare; in other cases, on the contrary, the magnifying or minimizing of a person, an animal, or an inanimate object is accompanied not by anxiety but by a certain pleasurable feeling. In Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, which is the principal source of our knowledge about the nature of dreams, we find an explanation of this type of dream: a visual disproportion is always somehow connected with the earliest period of childhood. My experiences entirely confirm this view. The sudden appearance of giants or magnified objects is always the residue of a childhood recollection dating from a time when, because we ourselves were so small, ail other objects seemed gigantic. An unusual reduction in the size of objects and persons, on the other hand, is to be attributed to the compensatory, wish-fulfilling fantasies of the child who wants to reduce the proportions of the terrifying objects in his environment to the smallest possible size. In many dreams the tendency to minimize or magnify is not so plain, because the persons minimized or magnified appear not as living beings but in some symbolical disguise. Dreams of landscapes with mountains and valleys, for instance, which represent male or female bodies, or parts of bodies, might be termed, from the psycho-analytical point of view, Lilliputian dreams, if we compare the size of the dreamer with that of the persons or bodily organs symbolically represented by the landscape. The symbolism of staircases, houses, and deep hollows, representing the mother, and the appearance of the father or his genital organ in the form of a gigantic tower or tree, bear a certain analogy to Gulliver fantasies. One of the most frequently occurring dream-pictures is that of rescuing someone from water—the sea or a deep well, symbolizing the mother’s womb. These rescue dreams are interpreted by Freud as symbolic birth-dreams. In other instances, where the dream represents penetrating into a cellar or some other subterranean place, climbing, going up or down in lifts, and so forth, Freud explains it as a distorted coitus-fantasy, generally of coitus with a woman for whom the dreamer has a special respect. In my experiences the fantasies of birth represented by rescue from water or by climbing out of, or sinking down into, holes generally admit of a twofold interpretation. The more superficial one, which the patient readily accepts and sometimes even spontaneously proffers, is the birth-fantasy. The more hidden and not so easily accepted over-determination is the fantasy of sexual intercourse with some woman who is held in special esteem, and whose claims to reverence and whose dangerousness are represented by the large size of the symbol. The disguise of fantasies of sexual intercourse as a symbolic birth comes about through the dreamer’s substituting his whole body for his sexual organs. In my opinion this is the principal motive of Lilliputian dreams.
You probably know that Freud himself was the first to recognize the significance for the unconscious of fantasies of the mother’s womb. Subsequently I worked out the meaning of these fantasies into a genital theory by showing that the sexual act represents symbolically the desire to return to the mother’s womb.1 Next Rank came to regard these fantasies of return to the mother’s womb and of being born as the central problem of the whole psychology of the neuroses. He holds that ‘the trauma of birth’ determines not only the symptomatology of the neurotic but the psychological development of healthy persons. Freud rejects this one-sided and exaggerated view, and I agree with him. We are also unable to adopt the new therapeutic technique which Rank works out on the basis of his theory of the birth-dream.2 In this he seems to have forgotten many of his own valuable contributions to dream-psychology, especially in connexion with the over-determination of both dream-content and neurotic symptoms. Even when he bears in mind the complicated structure of the dream-fabric he undervalues the true significance of the sexual element and the castration-complex and is too much inclined to take literally every association and every fantasy of the patients which sounds like a reference to the trauma of birth.
My experience in the matter of Gulliver fantasies and symbols in neurotics has proved to me beyond any possibility of doubt that fantasies of birth or of return to the mother’s womb generally indicate a flight from the sexual trauma to the less terrible idea of being born. For example, one of the most recent of my patients constantly dreamt that she was buried alive in a cave, or else that she was a tiny little person who was obliged to hop rhythmically over the spokes of a wheel which was going round quite fast, so that she was in perpetual danger of being crushed by it. Sometimes, too, she was suddenly tempted to jump out of the window. AU these dream-fantasies and impulses are explained by the patient herself as representations of birth, but a more thorough analysis has shown that the whole complex of fantasies of birth and the mother’s womb was simply the Lilliputian disguise of sexual temptations. The same patient often dreamt of tiny little black men, and in one of her fantasies during free associations she felt impelled to eat them all up. A quite spontaneous association to these thoughts was that of eating dark-coloured faeces and then of biting and devouring a penis. By eating these up she felt that her whole body was in some way transformed into a male genital; in this guise she could in her unconscious fantasies have sexual intercourse with women. These associations reveal the masculine trend in the patient’s disposition as well as the fact that the tiny creatures in her dreams represent not only birth but, in a deeper mental stratum, her sexual tendencies and her penis-envy.
One of my male patients recollects that in the masturbation fantasies of his youth there was a little, imaginary, female figure which he always carried in his pocket and from time to time took out and played with. This patient had had a number of dreams all his life, which recurred also during his analysis, in which he found himself placed in an enormous room. You will already have guessed that this man’s sexual potency was very inconsiderable. He came into the category of those men who with women whom they respect and love suffer either from ejaculatio precox or complete inability to achieve erection and are potent only with prostitutes. These are only some of the many instances which have proved to me that Lilliputian fantasies of the uterus are characteristic of persons whose sexual development has not been sufficiently normal for them to make the penis in coitus a completely valid equivalent for the whole body. Freud also came to the conclusion that (as I suggest in my genital theory) persons who cannot attain to this level of sexual reality show a preference for fantasies in which they substitute the whole body for the sexual organ.
A patient who suffers from a severe obsessional neurosis said that in his masturbation fantasies he always imagined himself a big man, surrounded by a whole harem of tiny women, who served, washed, and caressed him, combed his pubic hair, and then played with his genital until ejaculation ensued. In both these last two patients the real anxiety is the fear of castration associated with the idea of sexual intercourse, and both the Gulliver fantasies and those of the mothers womb are simply substitutes, by a process of displacement, for the painful idea of being castrated on account of incestuous desires.
Fantasies connected with the birth-trauma may well be compared with examination-dreams which often occur in impotent neurotics during the night before they attempt some sexual activity to which they feel themselves unequal. Generally they dream, with an accompaniment of great anxiety, that they are being examined in some subject in which they are in reality thoroughly versed or even have already successfully passed an examination. Now, the experience of birth is for all of us a test which we have successfully passed, and it can therefore serve as a less terrible substitute for a real, actual sexual task which is dreaded and for the menace of castration with which this is associated. The comparison of Lilliputian and birth fantasies with examination-dreams holds good, I think, in yet another respect, namely the fact that there is no other trauma for which we are so well prepared as for that of birth. Birth itself is, as Freud himself was the first to emphasize, certainly a shock, but the preparation for the difficulties of extra-uterine life and the great care which the maternal instinct lavishes on the child immediately after birth make the trauma as light as possible.
When it comes to the child’s sexual development, on the other hand, there appears to be no inherited instinct in either father or mother which can assist it. On the contrary, parents often intimidate their children by threats of castration, and this is the greatest and most important ‘trauma’ which leads to neurosis. Passing or ‘transitory’ symptoms1 which I have observed in my patients during their analyses have sometimes revealed a sudden displacement of genital sensations or sexual excitations to the whole surface of the body. For instance, by a process of hysterical conversion, erection has been represented by a rush of blood to the head. In a whole series of cases of repressed male homosexuality I found that in moments of sexual excitement the whole surface of the skin became burning hot. It is not unlikely that the German slang expression used of homosexuals, ‘hot brothers’, has its origin in this symptom. In some other cases patients have told me that, instead of an erection, they experience a sudden rigidity of all their muscles. I have found that many cases of neurotic spinal rigidity or passing cramps of the leg-muscles could be similarly explained. Possibly this sort of conversion-symptom forms the physiological substructure upon which is erected the psychic superstructure of the Gulliver fantasies.
As I have already said, it is almost as common to meet with a tendency to magnify or minimize the male body as the female. The material derived from the associations of patients with this kind of fantasy is in the case of male children clearly connected with the boy’s dread of a gigantic father—a dread proceeding from the comparison of his own genital organs with those of his father.
The fear of castration and mutilation, or the dread of being eaten up or swallowed, is apparently even greater in the unconscious than the dread of death. So long as we are not mutilated, the unconscious regards being buried, drowned, or swallowed up as a kind of continued existence in toto. Apparently it cannot grasp the idea that death betokens a complete cessation of existence, whilst even a slight symbolic suggestion of mutilation, such as cutting the hair or nails, or a threat with a sword, knife, or scissors, or even with the index finger, may produce an intense reaction in the form of an outbreak of castration anxiety. A little boy in his dreams and fantasies prefers to picture himself as a dwarf who is devoured by the terrible father, but whose genital is thereby secure from castration, rather than to imagine that he is natural life-size but that his genitals are exposed to the danger of mutilation. Similarly, a little girl prefers the oral fantasy of being eaten up but preserving her genital organs intact to the idea of being injured in these organs by the penis of the male. (This last would mean accepting without reservation her lack of the penis.)
I must confess that I should not have had the courage to tell you about all these unconscious fantasies, which are only reconstructed from dreams and based on what patients have said, if I were not certain that in your capacity of psychiatrists you must have often had occasion to convince yourselves of the existence of active and passive castration tendencies which frequently manifest themselves quite clearly in psychosis. In my monograph entitled Versuch einer Genitaltheorie I tried to account theoretically for this high estimation of the penis by showing that the sexual organs, in particular the penis and the clitoris, are the pleasure-reservoir of the whole individual and are prized by the ego as a kind of second personality which I have termed the libidinal ego. You know how often children and the common people call the genital by pet names as though it were an independent being.
I will now try to enliven the monotony of this dry and somewhat theoretical argument by reading some passages from the two first journeys of our friend and colleague, Gulliver, in the hope that perhaps they will make my constructions seem somewhat more probable.
Let us take the description of Gulliver’s awaking in the land of Lilliput: ‘When I awaked it was just daylight. I attempted to rise, but was not able to stir: for, as I happened to lie on my back, I found my arms and legs were strongly fastened on each side to the ground; and my hair, which was long and thick, tied down in the same manner. I likewise felt several slender ligatures across my body, from my armpits to my thighs. I could only look upwards; the sun began to grow hot, and the light offended my eyes. I heard a confused noise about me, but in the posture I lay, could see nothing except the sky. In a little time I felt something alive moving on my left leg, which advancing gently forward over my breast came almost up to my chin; when bending my eyes downwards as much as I could, I perceived it to be a human creature, not six inches high, with a bow and arrow in his hands, and a quiver at his back. In the meantime, I felt at least forty more of the same kind (as I conjectured) following the first. I was in the utmost astonishment, and roared so loud, that they all ran back in a fright; and some of them, as I was afterwards told, were hurt with the falls they got by leaping from my sides upon the ground.’
This description has a great similarity to the apparitions seen by our neurotic patients who so often tell us how they are frightened by little animals and manikins sitting on their breasts.
Anyone who wishes to explain everything by the trauma of birth will probably lay stress on another detail, a suspicious number which appears on page 89 of this edition.1 Here Gulliver states that he lived for nine months and thirteen days in the land of the Lilliputians—a period which exactly corresponds to the duration of pregnancy. On the other hand we may cite the fact that the little Lilliputians were just six inches long and that this number is suspicious from another point of view, especially since Gulliver happens to say that the Lilliputians were ‘rather longer than my middle finger’ and further, that he could not be mistaken in this estimate ‘for I have often held them in my hand’. (He is referring to the Lilliputians!)
A little further on he says: ‘Two hundred sempstresses were employed to make me shirts and linen. … [They] took my measure as I lay on the ground, one standing at my neck, and another at my mid-leg.… Then they measured my right thumb and desired no more; for, by a mathematical computation, that twice round the thumb is once round the wrist, and so on to the neck and waist. …’ It is significant that it is just the finger, the typical genital symbol, which is taken as the standard measure for the whole body. It will have struck you, as it did me at the time, how similar this fantasy of being served by so many tiny women is to the masturbation-fantasies of one of my patients.
The strong exhibitionistic tendencies of Gulliver and his great desire that the Lilliputians should admire him for the size of his genital are very clearly revealed in the following description of a parade held by the Lilliputian army in his honour: ‘[The Emperor] desired I would stand like a Colossus, with my legs as far asunder as I conveniently could; he then commanded his general … to draw up the troops in close order, and march them under me … with drums beating, colours flying and pikes advanced. … His Majesty gave orders upon pain of death that every soldier in his march should observe the strictest decency with regard to my person, which, however, could not prevent some of the younger officers from turning up their eyes as they passed under me. And to confess the truth, my breeches were at that time in so ill a condition that they afforded some opportunities for laughter and admiration.’
Does not this sound exactly like the reassurance-fantasy or dream of an impotent man who in waking life suffers from the idea that his penis is too small and in consequence of his sense of inferiority is shy of showing his organ and in dreams basks in the admiration of those whose penises are even smaller than his own?
A still worse offence brings Gulliver into the extreme peril of his life. I refer to the incident of his urinating before the Empress. As you perhaps know, the queen or empress is one of the typical symbols of the mother. A fire breaks out in the Empress’s apartments and the Lilliputians are unable to extinguish it.
Fortunately our hero Gulliver is at hand and performs this heroic task as follows: ‘I had, the evening before.’ he says, ‘drank plentifully of a most delicious wine … which is very diuretic. By the luckiest chance in the world I had not discharged myself of any part of it. The heat I had contracted by coming very near the flames, and by my labouring to quench them, made the wine begin to operate by urine, which I voided in such a quantity, and applied so well to the proper places, that in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished. …’
Everyone who is acquainted with the mode of expression used by the unconscious will know that the extinguishing of a conflagration in a woman’s house, especially when this is done by urinating into it, represents the child’s idea of sexual intercourse, the woman being symbolized by the house. The heat mentioned by Gulliver is the symbol of the male’s passionate desire (and at the same time fire stands for the dangers to which the genital is exposed). And, in point of fact, with Gulliver the threat of punishment follows hard upon the misdeed and characteristically proceeds from the Emperor, the typical father-substitute: ‘I could not tell how His Majesty might resent the manner by which I had performed it. For by the fundamental laws of the realm it is capital in any person of what quality soever to make water within the precincts of the palace. …’ ‘I was privately assured that the Empress, conceiving the greatest abhorrence of what I had done, removed to the most distant side of the Court… and … could not forbear vowing revenge.’ The death penalty is revoked by the mercy of the Emperor, but Gulliver cannot escape punishment in another form. The sentence ran as follows: ‘The said Quinbus Flestrin’—(the Man Mountain, the Lilliputians’ name for Gulliver)—‘in open breach of the said law, under colour of extinguishing the fire kindled in the apartment of His Majesty’s most dear imperial consort, did maliciously, traitorously, and devilishly, by discharge of his urine, put out the said fire kindled in the said apartment, lying and being within the precincts of the said royal palace.’ But, of his clemency, the Emperor condemned him merely to the loss of his eyes, which would not impair his bodily power and would enable him still to be useful to His Majesty! The punishment, you see, is the same as that which King Oedipus inflicted on himself for his sexual intercourse with his mother. And countless times our analytical experience shows us beyond a shadow of doubt that putting out the eyes may be a symbolic distortion of the punishment of castration.
But even in peril of death and mutilation our hero Gulliver cannot deny himself the satisfaction of suggesting a reason for this sentence, namely, that he was not only able ‘to extinguish the fire by discharge of urine in Her Majesty’s apartment,’ [but he might] ‘at another time raise an inundation by the same means to drown the whole palace.’
As you know, Gulliver succeeded in escaping from the Lilliputians, who had by now become so hostile to him, but fate still dogged his footsteps, and on his next journey he fell into the hands of the giants of Brobdingnag. His very first experience with one of the natives of this land is a symbolic representation of the danger of castration. ‘[The man] appeared as tall as an ordinary spire-steeple,’ and had a reaping-hook in his hand ‘about the largeness of six scythes’. Gulliver was very nearly cut in two with the reaping-hook, but he ‘screamed as loud as fear could make’ him, whereupon the huge creature seized him between his forefinger and thumb, regarded him as a curiosity, and then gave him as a plaything to his wife and children. He called his wife and showed him to her; ‘but she screamed and ran back as women in England do at the sight of a toad or a spider.’
Women’s abhorrence of spiders, toads, and other little creeping things is well known as an hysterical symptom. A disciple of the theory of the trauma of birth would say that this anxiety was simply conditioned by the fact that little reptiles are the symbol for little children who might creep in and out of the genital. My analytical experiences, however, all go to confirm Freud’s idea that the deeper meaning of such little creatures, especially of those which move rhythmically, is really that they represent symbolically the genital organ and function, and that the sight or touch of them therefore produces the kind of disgust which is often the woman’s primary reaction to her first contact with the genitals. I should not hesitate to interpret a dream in which such creatures appeared as the identification of a whole (here, of an animal’s) body with the male sexual organ and to class it with those cases in which women in their dreams or fantasies are made uneasy by little creatures or manikins.
As he became a plaything, Gulliver had the opportunity to observe the most intimate functions of the gigantic women and girls from quite near by, and he is untiring in describing the frightful impressions produced in him by their monstrous dimensions: ‘I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with so as to give the curious reader an idea of its bulk, shape and colour. It stood prominent six foot, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference. The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and the hue both of that and the dug so varified with spots, pimples, and freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous: for I had a near sight of her, she sitting down the more conveniently to give suck, and I standing on the table. This made me reflect upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen but through a magnifying glass; where we find by experiment that the smoothest and whitest skins look rough and coarse and ill-coloured.’
In my opinion it would be far-fetched to explain the dread of the large holes in the women’s skin as a recollection of the trauma of birth. It is much more probable that Gulliver is the embodiment of a type of male whose sexual courage vanishes in the presence of a young English lady with her delicate skin and who prefers to complain of the difficulty of the task before him and the lack of charm of the object of his love rather than admit his own inadequacy. An interesting contrast to the extinguishing of the fire is given in a later chapter in a scene where Gulliver is obliged to urinate in the presence of one of the giant women. He signed to her not to look or to follow him, and then he hid himself between two sorrel-leaves and there satisfied the needs of nature. Further he tells us that the young maids of honour often examined him and touched him for the mere pleasure they took in it. ‘They would often strip me naked from top to toe, and lay me at full length in their bosoms; wherewith I was much disgusted, because to say the truth a very offensive smell came from their skins, which I do not mention or intend to the disadvantage of these excellent ladies, for whom I have all manner of respect. … That, which gave me most uneasiness among these maids of honour … was to see them use me without any manner of ceremony like a creature who had no sort of consequence. For they would strip themselves to the skin, and put on their smocks in my presence, while I was placed on their toilet directly before their naked bodies; which, I am sure, to me was very far from being a tempting sight, or from giving me any other motions than those of horror and disgust. Their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously coloured when I saw them near, with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than pack threads, to say nothing further concerning the rest of their persons. Neither did they at all scruple, while I was by, to discharge what they had drunk, to the quantity of at least two hogshead, in a vessel that held above three tuns. The handsomest among these maids of honour, a pleasant frolicsome girl of sixteen, would sometimes set me astride upon one of her nipples, with many other tricks, wherein the reader will excuse me for not being over particular. But I was so much displeased, that I entreated Glumdaiclitch to contrive some excuse for not seeing that young lady any more.’
I am sure that you know that according to the findings of psycho-analysis two dreams dreamt in the same night often throw light on one another. The same could be maintained of the first two sections of Gulliver’s Travels. The adventure in Lilliput represents the wish-fulfilling part of the dream—it is a description of large size and male potency in his own person. The terrible experiences in Brobdingnag reveal to us the motives of the tendency to self-magnification; his dread lest he should fail in rivalry and in strife with other men and his impotence with women.
Of course, in the story of the second journey there are suggestions of the situations of birth and intra-uterine existence. During the whole period of his sojourn in the land of the giants Gulliver was carried about by a young girl in a travelling box, in which at the four corners of the top a hammock was fixed by silken ropes to break the jolts, and the manner in which he finally escaped from the dangerous land of the giants is still more significant. He woke up and felt his box raised very high in the air and then borne forward with prodigious speed. ‘The first jolt had like to have shaken me out of my hammock, but afterwards the motion was easy enough. … [I] then began to perceive the woeful condition I was in, that some eagle had got the ring of my box in its beak, with an intent to let it fall on a rock, like a tortoise in a shell, and then pick out my body and devour it. …
‘I heard several bangs or buffets, as I thought, given to the eagle … and then, all on a sudden, felt myself falling perpendicularly down for above a minute, but with such incredible swiftness that I almost lost my breath. My fall was stopped by a terrible squash, that sounded louder to my ears than the cataract of Niagara, after which I was quite in the dark for another minute, and then my box began to rise so high that I could see light from the tops of the windows. I now perceived that I was fallen into the sea. … I got with much difficulty out of my hammock … to let in air, for want of which I found myself almost stifled. How often did I then wish myself with my dear Glumdalclitch, from whom one single hour had so far divided me!’ (Glumdalclitch was the name of the girl who carried him about and whose plaything he was.)
No analyst would take exception to an attempt to interpret this escape as a birth-fantasy—the natural end of pregnancy, which is represented by being carried about in a box. On the other hand, dreams of a similar sort give us no reason to suppose that this scene represents details of the individual birth, as Rank assumes. It is much more probable that Gulliver and other people into whose dreams birth-fantasies enter transform and diminish quite real sexual dangers to which they feel unequal into injuries dating from childhood or even from foetal life. Almost as though the author wished to make clear beyond any doubt that in Gulliver’s journey the whole body really represents the male organ and coitus, he adds to the description of the escape that one of the few tokens of remembrance which he had saved from the giant mother was ‘a gold ring which one day she made me a present of in a most obliging manner, taking it from her little finger, and throwing it over my head like a collar.’ Students of folklore and psycho-analysts agree in the belief that putting on a wedding ring is a symbolic representation of coitus, the ring standing for the female and the finger for the male sexual organ. Thus when the giantess takes her ring from her little finger and throws it round Gulliver’s neck she simply expresses by this gesture the idea that only his head would be big enough to fulfil the sexual task for which normally an organ of the size of a finger suffices.
The fact that all creations of genius are characterized by the remarkable number of interpretations which may be put upon them has made it possible for Gulliver’s Travels to be interpreted in the most varied ways. Despite their superficiality, these interpretations have a certain basis in fact. In his short biography of Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, Walter Scott, tells us how the different classes of society reacted to the book. Readers in higher social circles saw in it a personal and political satire; the common people looked upon it as a story of exciting adventures; romantic persons admired the element of the supernatural which it contained; the young loved its cleverness and wit; thoughtful people read into it moral and political teaching. But neglected old age and disappointed ambition found in it only the maxims of a sad and embittered misanthropy.
These may be called the preconscious interpretations, whereas psycho-analysis would aim at explaining also the unconscious meaning of the Travels. Perhaps if we study the life-history of Jonathan Swift it will help us to decide on the value or otherwise of our interpretation. A large number of authors have devoted whole volumes to this extraordinary personality, but, so far as I know, Hans Sachs is the only psycho-analyst who has made Swift the subject of a psycho-analytical study. Even the very fleeting glances which I myself have been able to take at Swift’s life-history throw light upon certain data which support my notion about the fantasies of magnifying and minimizing in Gulliver’s Travels. I will quote briefly some of the most important facts of Swift’s life.
Jonathan Swift was born on 30 November 1667. Towards the end of his life he kept his birthday always as a day of fasting and mourning, and never omitted to read the third chapter of the book of Job. Richard Brennan, the servant in whose arms he died, tells us that in the infrequent lucid intervals of Swift’s fatal illness he seemed to be conscious of this date, as was seen from the fact that he constantly repeated the words: ‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the light in which it was said there is a man-child conceived.’ Swift was a posthumous child. A remarkable occurrence removed him for a time from the care of his uncle and his mother. The nurse who had charge of the child was so devoted to him that she stole him from his mother and took him across the Channel. His delicate health and the difficulty in those days of finding an opportunity to cross prevented his being sent back for three years.
It is probably not too rash to assume that these abnormal situations and events of his youth made an ineffaceable impression on Swift and exercised a great influence on his subsequent development, possibly also increasing his interest in adventurous travels. It seems to me unnecessary to seek for abnormal physiological difficulties in the child’s birth when the pathogenic factors during his childhood are so patent.
Our psycho-analytical experience teaches us that sons who grow up without a father are seldom normal in their sexual life; most of them become neurotic or homosexual. The fixation to the mother is in these cases by no means the result of any birth-trauma, but must be attributed to the lack of a father, with whom a boy has to fight out the Oedipus conflict and whose presence helps to resolve the castration anxiety through the process of identification. Naturally, the excessive spoiling which the boy is likely to receive from mother and nurse makes him less liable to compete with other boys, and this disability is often one of the principal causes of disturbances of sexual potency. Moreover, when there is no father, the mother is the only person in whom resides the power of discipline or—in sexual matters—of castration, and this often leads to an exaggeration of the boy’s normal reserve and timidity in his relations with women whom he reveres, or indeed with women altogether. Swift’s later behaviour, especially in the sphere of sex, does actually show that he was a neurotic Thus for example he began a flirtation with a Miss Waring, whom he affectionately called Varina, as his biography tells us: ‘The courtship so far as it can be traced is supremely ridiculous. While the lady was coy and cold, nothing could equal the impetuosity of the lover, but when after a long resistance she unexpectedly surrendered at discretion, the lover suddenly disappeared, the warm epistles to “Varina” were changed into a cold formal “Miss Jane Waring”… in which it was hinted in unequivocal terms that the impatient suitor would be a reluctant bridegroom. The lady with proper spirit broke off all intercourse and Swift was free to try his arts on a more unfortunate victim.’ It is interesting that in contrast to this exaggerated scrupulousness rumour in that part of England has it that Swift committed an indecent assault on the daughter of a farmer and that criminal charges were laid against him on oath before Mr. Dobbs, the mayor of the neighbouring town.
The accounts of his subsequent famous marriage with Mrs. Esther Johnson—better known by her poetic name of Stella—on the other hand show marked dependence and passionateness from the beginning of their acquaintance. Walter Scott, it is true, quotes a remark of Swift’s about his love story which seems to contradict this: ‘It is a habit which I could easily renounce and which I could leave without regret at the gate of the sanctuary.’ And so it actually came about. Swift married Stella only on condition that their marriage should remain secret and that they should continue to live apart. Thus, these details of his private life do really reveal the far-reaching consequences of the disturbances in his development as a child. From the psycho-analytical standpoint one would describe his neurotic behaviour as an inhibition of normal potency, with a lack of courage in relation to women of good character and perhaps with a lasting aggressive tendency towards women of a lower type. This insight into Swift’s life surely justifies us who come after him in treating the fantasies in Gulliver’s Travels exactly as we do the free associations of neurotic patients in analysis, especially when interpreting their dreams. The disadvantage of such an analysis in absentia is that the patient cannot confirm our conclusions; the scientific advantage of a posthumous analysis, on the other hand, is that the analyst cannot in this case be accused of having suggested to the patient the statements made by the latter. I think that the biographical argument confirms our supposition that Gulliver fantasies in which persons and objects are magnified or minimized express the sense of genital inadequacy of a person whose sexual activities have been inhibited by intimidation and fixations in early childhood.
My analysis of Swift and his masterpiece has perhaps been too long, but I think it bears out my suggested interpretation of the Lilliputian and Brobdingnagian fantasies and symptoms met with in psychotic and neurotic patients and in dreams.
I cannot do better than conclude with a slightly altered quotation from Gulliver himself: ‘I hope my readers will excuse me for dwelling on these and similar particulars; however insignificant they may appear, yet they may perhaps help a philosopher to enlarge his thoughts and imagination so that he may apply them to the benefit of public as well as of private life.’
I thank you once more for your invitation and for the patience with which you have listened to me.
1 Read at the Annual Meeting of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry, 9 December, 1926.
First published in German: Int. Z. f. Psa. 0927), 13, 379. English translation in Int. J. of PsA. (1928), 9, 383.
1 Versuch einer Genitaltheorie, Wien, 1924. Hungarian translation: Budapest, 1929. In English: Thalassa, (2nd imp.). New York, 1938.
2 Cf. ‘Zur Kritik der Rankschen “Technik der Psychoanalyse”.’ Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse, Bd. XIII, 1926. In English, Int. J. of Ps.A. (1927) 8.
1 cf. First Contr., p. 193.
1 (The author is quoting from the Tauchnitz Edition.—Trans.)