iRARY ffYPH , lSrarT f u 5t: I) i '?lX'-?r THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS BY THE SAME AUTHOR La Psychologie du T&inoi^nage. Hoste, Gand, 1914. Recherches sur les Soei^Us d' En f ants. Travaux de I'lnstitut Solvay de Sociologie, Notes et M^moires, No. 12. Misch et Thron, Bruxelles, 1914. Experimenteele Bydrage tot de psy- chologie van het getuigenis. De Vlaamsche Boekenhalle, Leuven, 1921. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS BY DR. J. VARENDONCK FORMERLY LECTURER IN THB PAIDOLOCICAL FACULTY OF BRUSSELS WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PROF. DR. S. FREUD LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. i NEW yORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY First published hi 1921 {All rights res$rved) ^ The part played by day-dreams in our psychic life has not yet been fully recognized and investi- gated by the psychiatrists. — S. Freud. 758118 PREFACE This essay has been written in English by a foreigner, who thus, from the start, forgoes any literary claims. If in doing so he has relinquished an important advantage, it was not without the hope that the novelty of what he wished to communicate — a contribution to the mechanism of thinking — would to a certain degree make up for his linguistic shortcomings and dispose the reader to regard with indul- gence the exotic form which he has given to his ideas. His only apology for addressing himself to English readers lies in the circumstance that he has been tempted to reach them directly, as being, at present, of all nations, those who show the greatest interest in psycho-analysis. His knowledge of the English soul will not leave him in the lurch when he foresees that the eccentricity of the thought-formations which he has been obliged to adduce as the foundation-stones of his theory will make an un- pleasant impression on some of his readers ; but from the nature of his work this is an unavoidable evil, as every- body's secret thoughts concern exclusively the self. There- fore he pleads indulgence on the reader's part, and this will be the more readily granted, he hopes, as in the theoretical part his personality disappears almost entirely into the background. Let the reader kindly bear this in mind, and he will not be unduly severe upon THE AUTHOR. INTEODUCTION By professor DR. SIGM. FREUD This present volume of Dr. Varendonck's contains a signifi- cant novelty, and will justly arouse the interest of all philosophers, psychologists and psycho-analysts. After an effort lasting fo/; some years the author has succeeded in getting hold of i the mode of thought -activity to which one abandons oneself during the state of distraction into which we readily pass before sleep or upon incomplete awakening. He has brought to the consciousness the chains of thought originating in these conditions without the interference of the will ; he has written them down, studied their peculiarities and differences with directed conscious thinking, and has made thereby a series of important discoveries which lead to still vaster problems and give rise to the formulation of still more far-reaching questions. Many a point in the psychology of the dream and the defective act finds, thanks to the observations of Dr. Varendonck, a trustworthy settlement. It is not my intention to give a review of the author's results. I will content myself with pointing to the signifi- cance of his work and will permit myself only a remark con- cerning the terminology which he has adopted. He includes the sort of thought-activity which he has observed in Bleuler's autistic thinking, but calls it, as a rule, fors- conscious thinkings according to the custom prevailing in psycho-analysis. However, the autistic thinking of Bleuler 10 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS does not by any means correspond with the extension and the contents of the fore-conscious, neither can I admit that the name used by Bleuler has been happily chosen. The designation " fore -conscious " thinking itself as a characteristic appears to me misleading and unsatisfactory. The point in question is that the sort of thought-activity of which the well-known day-dream is an example — complete by itself, developing a situation or an act that is being brought to a close — constitutes the best and imtil now the only studied example. This day-dreaming does not owe its peculiarities to the circumstance that it proceeds mostly fore-consciously, nor are the forms changed when it is accomplished consciously. From another point of view we know also that even strictly directed reflection may be achieved without the co-operation of consciousness, that is to say, fore-consciously. For that reason I think it is advisable, when establishing a distinction between the different modes of thought-activity, not to utilize the relation to consciousness in the first instance, and to designate the day-dream, as well as the chains of thought studied by Varendonck, as freely wandering or phantastic thinking, in opposition to intentionally directed reflection. At the same time it should be taken into consideration that even phantastic thinking is not invariably in want of an aim and end-representations. CONTENTS PREFACE . INTRODUCTION. By Professor Dr. S. Freud PRELIMINAKY CHAPTER THE TWO WAYS OF THINKING 13 I. ANALYTICAL PART CHAPTER I THE GENESIS OF THE CHAINS CHAPTER II THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS . 1. Visualization and Thinking in Words 2. Questions and Answers 3. Memory Drifting . . . 4. Errors and Absurdities (a) Unsteadiness . (b) The Absence of Regressive Survey (c) Forgetting .... CHAPTER III THE TERMINATION OF THE CHAINS 1. The Awakening .... 2. Censorship and Repression . 11 25 54 54 75 87 112 112 136 140 154 154 165 12 THE PSYCHOLOGY OP DAY-DREAMS n. SYNTHETICAL PART CHAPTEB I FAas MEMORY AND AFFECT 183 CHAPTER II APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT . . . .218 CHAPTER III IDEATION AND AFFECT . . . . .248 1. Conception and Affect .... 248 2. Conscious and Fore-conscious Attention . . 256 3. Wish and Will . . . . .260 CHAPTER IV THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING . . .278 1. Intuition ...... 278 2. Repression ...... 293 3. Intuition versus Repression .... 306 CHAPTER V VISUALIZATION AND AFFECT . . . .335 HI. CONCLUSION THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DAY-DREAMS . . .361 LITERARY- INDEX . . . . . .861 GENERAL INDEX . . .^ . . .168 PRELIMINARY CHAPTER THE TWO WAYS OF THINKING Psycho-analysis is responsible for having aroused, for the first time in the history of psychology, an extraordinary interest in the secondary mode of Chinking, differing entirely from logical ideation, which corresponds with reality, and is a reproduction in thought of the combinations which reality offers us. As a matter of fact, the main object of the study of normal psycho-analysis is this secondary mode*/ of thinking in all its manifestations. Bleuler calls it '' autis- tic " thinking. It is independent of the laws of logic and is directed instead by affective necessities. But whereas the great majority of the publications of the psycho-analysts aim at the understanding and explanation of some particular aspect of abnormal psycho-analysis, there are scarcely any studies in which the attempt is made to take advantage of all the partial findings of special investigations for the formulation of a systematic and general description of autistic, as differentiated from realistic, thinking. Exception should be made, however, in the case of two essays, Das autistische Denken, by E. Bleuler, ^ and the beautiful work of Jung, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido,^ trans- lated into English under the title Psychology of the Uncon- scious. From these two compositions we borrow the following details : Although on the whole there is but little difference between the conceptions and the principles that guide these two authors, their terminology is not identical. Bleuler was » Cf. Das autistische Denken, in the Jahrbuch Jiir psycho-analytiache und psycho -pathologische Forschungen, F. Deuttcke, Leipzig, IV/1, 1912, pp. 1-40. * Cf. Wandlungen u. Symbole der Libido, in the same Jahrbuch, III/I, pp. 120-228 and IV/1, pp. 162-465. The English translation has been published in the Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series, Washington. 13 1^ 14 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS the first to call autismus one of the most important symptoms of schizophrenia, viz. " a predominance of inner mental life with active estrangement from the outer world." This definition corresponds in the main with Jung's conception of - introversion^ a term which signifies the turning and directing inwards of the libido, which normally should seek Its object in reality. That which Bl^ulet calls logical or realistic Jthinking is for fesg ^iZ^S^^^ thinking, whilst the latter speaks of dreaming or " indulging in reveries " instead of " autistic ^thinking." " The former works for communication by means of speech ; it is laborious and exhausting ; the latter, on the contrary, advances without toil — i.e. spontaneously, by means of reminiscences. The former results in new acquisitions, in adaptations ; it imitates reality, and also tries to produce an impression upon it ; the latter, on the contrary, turns away from reality, releases subjective wishes, and is entirely unproductive as far as adaptation is concerned." It is more especially the autistic thinking of neurotics that has hitherto been the object of study. This, probably, is partly because in neurotic patients its presence is more obvious than in normal persons, but chiefly because in most cases it stands in a direct causative relation to their ail- ments. Hysteria might be called the invasion of the system of motility by the unconscious reveries ; to the paranoid sufferer his fancies have become reality, and we shall further have occasion to point out that the day-dream plays a part in the life of every neurotic. According to Bleuler and Jung, autistic thinking has a definite- tendency. It gives the illusion that wishes or aspirations have been fulfilled ; it thinks obstacles away ; it transforms impossibilities into possibilities and realities. It reaches its aims simply because it follows a stream of thought by means of associations corresponding to the aspiration, whilst it checks opposing ones by means of a mechanism which the study of the action of the affects has rendered familiar to the psycho-analyst. For the explanation of the autistic train of thought no new principle is required. We are simply dealing with a manifestation of affectivity ; for a tendency, a striving, is nothing other thajn the centri* THE TWO WAYS OF THINKING 15 fugal aspect of the phenomenon which we are wont to call affect when we consider it from the centripetal point • of view. When the inner mental life is predominant, all tendencies may achieve expression. But most often man turns his mental glance inwards, in order to avoid painful ideas ; consequently autistic thinking is practically a search for pleasurable representations and an avoidance of everything likely to cause pain ; we may therefore understand how it is that Freud has been able to describe as pleasure mechan* isms a very similar, but somewhat narrower, conception. When autistic thinking aims at bringing to the surface representations which correspond to a tendency of the inner self, to the mood of the moment, or to some craving or other, it does not need to take reality into consideration ; whether something be real, possible, or thinkable is a matter quite indifferent in these processes ; their only relation to reality is that it has provided them, and provides them still, with the representative material with which the autistic mechanism connects. -' But autistic thinking is not proper to neurotic individuals only, although it has been much better studied in their case. Normal humanity also knows autism and autistic thinking. 1^ It is most familiar with it in the shape of nocturnal dreams. ■ In the ideas formed during sleep one does not discover a connection with reality, nor an intellectual consideration of what is possible. Another manifestation of autism, namely the day-dream, brings us closer to realistic thinking, and is common to normal and abnormal individuals. From the fancy of the boy, who, riding his hobby-horse, plays the part of a general, or the poet who abreacts his unhappy passion in a work of art, or changes it into requited love, to the obscure hysterical sufferer or the schizophrenic, whose hallucination sees his most impossible wishes fulfilled, all transitions are to be found, through a scale which for the most part exhibits only quantitative differences. Autistic thinking in pathological cases gets its direction mostly from the unconscious tendencies ; but when the child has heard that the stomach is the kitchen of the body, and fa,ncies thereupon that his body cpntai;^3 9» kitchen. 16 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS similar to his doll's, it is not possible to attribute the phantasy to an affective direction. This is the purely intellectual side of autistic thinking. At the same time there is another distinction to be borne in mind when examining these two extreme cases. The neurotic is the victim of his unconsciousness, and he is unaware of it, while the normal day-dreamer never loses the notion of reality. His autistic activity does not dive as deep as the former's, and he can come back to realistic ^^ thinking whenever he chooses to do so. According to the ^ mental strata in which autistic thinking proceeds, it results (as far as the degree of deviation from reality is concerned) in one of two productions between which we cannot draw a sharp line, but which nevertheless offer in their typical formations quite definite distinctions : between the phantasies of a poetical mind and the hallucinations of the paranoid there is a similarity which is as obvious as tlieir difference. The true difference lies in the fact that in one case firmly established conceptions can be dissociated and reconstructed quite arbitrarily ; in the other they cannot. Moreover, in the pathological creations the number of autistic operations is much greater than in normality. The autism of the waking normal individual connects with reality and operates almost exclusively with normally formed and well-established ideas. ^^he similarity of these two phenomena can be explained more easily still : both are a consequence of repression. In realistic thinking, in the course of our everyday life, a great number of impulses and wishes are ignored or repressed to render the adaptation to actual circumstances possible ; and many of them scarcely ever reach our consciousness. But the repressed material takes as it were its revenge and comes to the surface. When a normal person is day- dreaming he may find that his mind is simply busy with matters which the cares of his daily hfe have obliged him to put momentarily aside. But neurotics brood over things which lie much deeper in their unconsciousness, often without becoming aware of the subject about which they are thinking, or even of the circumstance that their mind is wandering. There are cases, however, even with seemingly normal persons, in which autistic thinking goes on without apparent THE TWO WAYS OF THINKING 17 disturbance of the relations with the outer world, at least until a catastrophe occurs. And in the extreme cases realistic thinking has given way entirely, or almost entirely, so that the unreal world has become reality^ When autism directs our thoughts, anything may achieve expression, often against our wish. The most respectable man may become aware, in one way or another, of undesired and undesirable tendencies. At the sight of a heap of gold the idea may arise — even if it be only expressed in the form of a jocular remark — of appropriating it for oneself. Other criminal tendencies, e.g. the wish that the person w^ho somehow stands in one's way might be destroyed, whether he be otherwise beloved or not, have probably been fostered by everybody, even if impulses like these cause no awareness. It even looks as though it were especially the repressed impulses which force their way into the foreground of autism. And as, of all repressions which civilization has imposed on our primary instincts, the strongest has been placed upon the sexual impulse, it is not surprising, nor a token of bad morality, that in autism we constantly meet with the sexual and its perversions. As a matter of fact, in autism it is a rule that certain desires are directive and overgrow others and take them in tow. Quite often the ascendancy is gained by erotic complexes, and in the second order by others whose realization is impossible for reasons depending upon the inner self, or on outside conditions which cannot be abreacted in real life. But, whatever be the distinction to be made between autistic thinking in normality and in abnormality, its quali- tative similarity leaves no doubt ; there is only a question of estrangement from reality^ Most normal persons have, especially in their youth, been given to weaving fictions, but they always were able to distinguish them from reality, even though they entered so deeply into their fancied situations that they underwent the corresponding affects. This is normal autism. But these products of imagination always contain certain points corresponding with the real conditions of life. The more suppositions and associations a chain of thought contains which do not correspond with reality, the more autistic it 2 /^ 18 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS is. In autism there are consequently innumerable degrees. But what distinguishes normal from abnormal autism is the result to which it leads : as already suggested, it may result in simulated bodily affections in the motor system ^j^of the hysterical subject, or in the case of paranoids in the gradual obliteration of logical thinking ; but in the child it constitutes a training of the mental functions, and in the artist manifests itself in works of art. Autistic and realistic thinking often stand in an opposite relation to one another. The latter represents reality, the former imagines that which corresponds to an affect : con- P sequently, in most cases, that which is agreeable.' The realistic function aims at a correct knowledge of the environ- ment, at discovering the truth. The autistic function results J in the production of (usually) pleasurably accentuated repre- i sentations, and the repression of those due to an affect of r an opposite character. The realistic mechanisms regulate our relations with the outer world ; it is their function to maintain life, to feed, to attack and to defend the self. The autistic mechanisms create pleasure directly through the fact that they bring about representations of a gratifying nature and avert discomfort by barring such representations as are con- nected with pain. Accordingly, a distinction may be made between an autistic and a realistic gratification of one's wants. Night-dreaming is the normal process for obtaining the fulfilment of the wishes which practical life cannot satisfy. The opposite character of the two modes of thinking is particularly emphasized by the circumstance that they hinder one another to a certain extent. When the affects get the upper hand, either temporarily or through pre- disposition, logical thinking is restrained and adulterated to the advantage of autism. On the other hand, in the normal subject realistic reflection hinders the overgrowth of autism. Even when autistic ideation is given free rein the normal individual knows how to keep the two modes apart, and the influence on his reactions is limited or entirely repressed. » According to Brill and others, af!ect=8um of excitation or emotion ; it comprises also the notion of wish or desire, which may be considered m the active side of affect. THE TWO WAYS OF THINKING 19 Both functions, however, complete one another to a certain extent. When the circumstances do not fulfil our ^ desires, autism fancies them as realizable or realized. Even f when there is a question of the eternal " why " and " how,'* to which it is often impossible to obtain a reply by the realistic process of thought, humanity fills up the gaps with autistic ornamentation : thus the sun becomes a man riding through the sky in his chariot ; sickness is an independent entity reacting to certain spells, etc. In this summary I have tried to condense the general knowledge to be gathered from recent literature on the problem under consideration. But Bleuler observes that in Freud's opinion autistic thinking is so closely connected with the idea of the unconscious that the two conceptions may lead to confusion in the mind of persons who are not very familiar with psycho-analysis. " For anyone who, like myself, understands by the unconscious all those operations which are in evx^ry respect similar to the ordinary psychic ones, with the exception that they cannot become conscious, these two ideas must be kept perfectly apart. In principle | autistic thinking can be conscious as well as unconscious."! If we consider Freud's opinion of this question, as far v 'as day-dreams are concerned we remark that the creator of psycho-analysis himself distinguishes conscious from unconscious phantasies. In this essay, however, where we shall examine only the day-dreams of normal subjects— they are mostly my own — I hope that I shall give tKe impression that these reveries are almost exclusively pro- duced by the affects in the fore-conscious stratum. Accord- ingly, I abandon from the start the term " autism " and only use the words " affective " and " fore- conscious " thinking. It will further be shown that affective thinking may take place in the three levels of consciousness, but that uncon- scious and fore-conscious thinking are always affective. However, this question of terminology is only of secon- dary importance, as our chief aim is to detect the thought mechanism which is active in fore-conscious ideation. How far the attempt has been successful, it is for the reader to determine. When I started this investigation I was under the 20 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS impression that day-dreaming had not been studied before except by a Mr. Benedict, whom Freud cites in his Interpreta- Hon of Dreams. Subsequently I became aware that T. L. Smith had pubHshed what I gather to be a statistical study of day-dreams, but I have not had an opportunity of reading either of these studies. The present essay had already been completed when I obtained a copy of Abraham's Ueber hysterische Traumzustdndey^ which, however, I have been unable to utilize. It was, in fact, while I was at the front that I decided to undertake the work of which the reader will find the results in the following pages. My knowledge of day-dreams did not exceed that which may be gathered from Freud's above mentioned book on dreams, and is fairly well summed up in the following lines : " The elements of the dream-thoughts that I have in mind I am in the habit of designating as ' phantasy.' Perhaps I shall avoid misunderstanding if I at once adduce the day-dream of waking life as an analogy. The part played by this element in our psychic life has not yet been fully recognized and investigated by the psychiatrists ; in this branch of research Mr. Benedict has, it seems to me, made a highly promising beginning. The significance of the day- dream has not escaped the unerring insight of the poets ; the description of the day-dreams of one of his subordinate characters which A. Daudet gives us in Nabob is widely known. A study of the psycho-neuroses discloses the aston- ishing fact that these phantasies or day-dreams are the immediate predecessors of hysterical symptoms — or at least of a great many of them ; for hysterical symptoms are directly dependent not upon actual memories, but upon phantasies built upon the basis of memories. A The frequent occurrence of conscious day phantasies brings these formations within the scope of our knowledge ; but just as there are such conscious phantasies, so there are a great many unconscious ones, which must remain imconscious on account of their content and on account of their origin in repressed material? A^more thoro ugh examination into the character of these day phant asies » Cf. Veher hyalerieche Traumzustdnde, by Dr. K. Abeaham, in the Jahrbuch Jiir psychan.t etc., II/l, pp. 1-33, 1910. THE TWO WAYS OF THINKING 21 shows with what good reason the same name has been given to these formations as to the products of our nocturnal thought dreams. They possess an essential part of their properties in common with nocturnal dreams, and an ex- amination of them will really afford the shortest and best approach to an understanding of the latter^^_____ y/ il Like dreams, they are the fulfilment of wishes ; like dreams, a great many of them are based upon the impressions of childish experiences ; like dreams, their creations enjoy a certain amount of indulgence from the censor^^ If we trace their formation we see how the wish motive, which is active in their production, has taken the material of which they are built, mixed it t ogether, rearranged i^ ^ a.nd com- posed it into ajigw urjjtj/^hey bear the same relations to the childish memories, to which they go back, as some of the quaint places of Rome bear to the ancient ruins, whose freestones and pillars have furnished the material for structures built in modern form. . . ." ^ The reader who has followed thus far will now have obtained some idea of the point of departure of this study. ^""^ ' Cf. S. Fbeud, The Interpretation oj Dreams, p. 392, translated by Brill. Allen & Unwin, London, 1916. i 1 ANALYTICAL PART CHAPTER I THE GENESIS OF THE CHAINS I OWE the plan of investigating the fore-conscious mode of thinking to a spontaneous idea which came to me while I was reading the last chapter of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, the first book on psycho-analysis that I happened to come across. At that moment, however, it never entered my mind that I should have to bring under the reader's eye so many secret thoughts of my own. This necessity has been the only disagreeable aspect of my labour, and as I cannot escape this contrariety, I want to rid my mind of it as soon as possible. I will begin the sacrifice at once by making the avowal that it was due to the chances of war that Freud's masterpiece came into my hands one day at the front, at a moment when I had nothing else to read. Hitherto I had believed what I had been told by colleagues for whom I felt much respect, and had neglected to acquaint myself with the methods of psycho-analysis. I feel that I should also communicate at once a certain minimum of details concerning my life, an offer which so many psycho-analysts have to make."*" For as day-dreams are engaged with repressed thoughts, in their hidden meaning mostly disagreeable to the day-dreamer himself, they are ^ necessarily trains of thought not intended for communication. Fortunately, as the reader proceeds, my own person will soon fade into the background, owing to the interest which will be aroused by the phenomena that I have to expound. The majority of the following observations have been made during the war, in which I took part in the capacity of an interpreter attached to the British Army. And these were my private circumstances : I was pretty certain that 25 26 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS the new Faculty in which I had been appointed a lecturer some two years previously would not survive the general overthrow in Belgium ; consequently that I should have to look out for a new post, and this anxiety was con- stantly oppressing me. In the retreat from Antwerp I had lost the manuscript of a thesis which I had written in the hope of obtaining a scientific degree, which would at present greatly benefit me. The post for which I had volunteered in the army allowed me to remain most of the time at a distance of a few miles from the firing-line, so that I could devote all my leisure to writing another thesis. So one day I chose the present subject. In preparing my work I did not greatly feel the need of psycho-analytic literature — and that was a lucky circumstance in my special conditions — because I am of opinion that in the matter of research it is better to go one's own way (and at the worst be satisfied with having rediscovered old findings), rather than be hampered by knowledge which limits the number of one's mental associa- tions. For who can escape suggestion ? It happened that the first part of Freud's book had often reminded me of the fact that for years I used to wonder why I seemed to be cleverer in bed than out of it ; the few original ideas which I imagine myself to have conceived as my personal contribution to science having come to me just before sleep. That being the case, it is not surprising that I hit upon a new idea when reading the last part of the book, where it is proposed to regard the psychic apparatus as a compound instrument, the constituent parts of which Freud calls " systems." The idea which occurred to me was the following : Would not these systems provide the explana- tion of the abundant fore-conscious ideation in the waking state ? What a fine thesis might be developed out of this ! Scarcely had I become agreeably aware that Freud's conception might lead to an interesting explanation of day- dreaming, when a wealth of ideas seemed to invade my consciousness ; and when I decided to put them down on paper I had very soon devised a provisional method of investigation. I felt very well satisfied with these abundant suggestions. THE GENESIS OP THE CHAINS 27 although I wondered how it was that they came so readily and without effort, and where from ; and it was a long time that night before I could fall asleep. As it turned out, it was a wise precaution to write down my thoughts at once, for next morning, on awakening, I could scarcely recall any part of my plan. But I was rather fortunate in remembering anything at all of my fore-conscious chain of thought of the night before, for many people are unable to do so on awakening from mental wander- ings. To most people it often happens that when they become aware that they have been absent-minded they are unable to remember what their minds have been busy with during their distraction. As a rule, however, the last link of the chain of thoughts comes to the surface, or at least one can catch it without effort. In recalling the links of the train of phantasies which my mind had been forging while it was wandering, I made use of a special and, in fact, a very simple method, which is familiar to every psycho-analyst. Professor Freud, who has invented it, describes it in his Interpretation of Dreams as follows : " The next step was to treat the dream (of my patients) as a symptom, and to apply to it the method of interpretation which has been worked out for such symptoms (those of hysterical phobias, compulsive ideas, and the like). For this a certain preparation of the patient is necessary. The double effort is made with him to stimulate his attention to his psychic perceptions and to eliminate the critical attitude from which he is ordinarily in the habit of viewing the thoughts which come to the surface of his mind. For the purpose of self-observation with concentrated attention it is advantageous that the patient should occupy a restful position and close his eyes ; he must be explicitly commanded (to resign all criticism of the thought formations which he perceives. He must be told further that the success of the psycho-analysis depends upon his noticing and telling every- thing that passes through his mind, and that he must not allow himself to suppress a single idea because it seems to him unimportant or irrelevant to the subject, or because it seems nonsensical. He must maintain impartiality to- ward his ideas, for if he were unsuccessful in finding the 28 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS desired solution of the dream, the obsession, or the like, it would be precisely because of his criticism of his ideas. " I have noticed in the course of my psycho-analytic work that the state of mind of a man during contemplation is entirely different from that of a man who is observing his psychic processes. In contemplation there is a greater play of psychic action than in the most attentive self- observation ; this is also shown by the tense attitude and wrinkled brow of concentration in contrast with the restful features of self-observation. In both cases there must be concentration of attention, but, besides this, in contemplation the subject exercises his critical faculty, in consequence of which he rejects some of the ideas that he has perceived, and cuts others short, so that he does not follow the trains of thought which they would open up ; while toward still other thoughts he may act in such a manner that they do not become conscious at all — ^that is to say, they are suppressed before they are perceived. In self-observation, on the other hand, he has only the task of suppressing the operation of the critical faculty ; if he succeeds in this, an unlimited number of ideas, which otherwise it would have been impos- sible for him to grasp, will pass into his consciousness. With the aid of this material, newly secured for the purpose of self-observation, the interpretation of pathological ideas as well as of dream images can be accomplished. As may be seen, the point is to bring about a psychic state to some extent analogous, as regards the apportionment of psychic energy (transferable attention) to the state prior to falling asleep (and, indeed, also to the hypnotic state). In falling asleep the * undesired ideas ' come into prominence on account of the slackening of a certain arbitrary (and certainly also critical) action, which we allow to exert a degree of influence on the trend of our ideas. ... In the condition which is utilized in the analysis of dreams and pathological ideas, this activity is purposely and arbitrarily dispensed with, and the psychic energy thus saved, or a part of it, is used for the attentive following of the undesired thoughts now coming to the surface, which retain their identity as ideas (and herein the condition differs from the condition THE GENESIS OF THE CHAINS 29 of falling asleep). ' Undesired ideas ' are thus changed into ' desired ' ones. *' In the ease of these apparently ' freely rising ' ideas the suspense of the critical faculty which is usually exercised on them does not come easily to some persons. The 'un- desired ideas ' are in the habit of starting the most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent them from coming to the surface. And yet . . . such a shifting into the condition of uncritical self-observation is in no way difficult. " Most of my patients accomplish it after the first instructions ; I myself can do it very perfectly, if I assist the operation by writing down my notions. The amount, in terms of psychic energy, by which the critical activity is in this manner reduced, and by which the intensity of the self-observation may be increased, varies widely according to the subject-matter upon which the attention is to be fixed. " The first step in the application of this procedure now teaches us that not the dream as a whole, but only the parts of its contents separately, may be the object of our attention. If I ask a patient, who is as yet unpractised, ' What occurs to you in connection with this dream ? ' as a rule he is unable to fix upon anything in his psychic field of vision. I must present the dream to him piece by piece, then for every fragment he gives me a series of notions, which may be designated as the ' background thoughts ' of this part- of the dream." The only noticeable difference in my use of this analytic method is that I try to retrace, step by step, all the ideas which have succeeded one another on the screen of my fore-consciousness, but not at random. Usually I start from the last link (which I at once write down) and try to recapitu- late the last but one, and so on, with the least possible attention and the greatest possible abandonment, till at a certain moment all the previous links of the concatenation come together. The whole process requires some practice, of course, especially in recovering the first idea which caused the mind to wander. During the process of analysis the distribution of energy over the different mental functions is pretty well the same as when we are actually day-dreaming, as I shall prove later. 30 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS The slightest conscious reflection disturbs the process of remembering, and one writes almost automatically, without thinking. When I have to translate visualized ideas into words, I invariably use several languages, writing the words in the language in which they come to the fore, because any attempt at translation would break the spell and disturb the train of recollection. The idle drifting of reverie in bed, which begins immedi- ately with the abeyance of directed thinking, has long been known to me, as to all brain-workers, I fancy, as the cause of sleeplessness and the source of many an inspiration ; as far as I can remember, my night-table has always been pro- vided with a sheet of white paper and a pencil, with which I am wont to scribble down, even in the dark, the ideas which, having come to me in the night, I do not care to lose again. But in the beginning I wondered whether these products of the nightly " letting-go " period were the same as the idle romancing which accompanies the &tate of dis- traction in waking life. It did not take me long to find out that they are mani- festations of the same mental activity at different moments of the day. Indeed, a few days after I had decided to observe my own phantasies I wrote, early in the morning, the follow- ing notes in my diary : Preliminary Statement. — The Belgian Minister of Education had organized during the war an academic jury to examine those university students in the Army who were fortunate enough to he able to devote their leisure to preparing for their examinations. But as only those degrees which are conferred by our two State Universities were taken into account^ and not those of independent colleges, I intended to ask the Minister to constitute a special jury for my special case. A few minutes before this I had read, in a Belgian paper published in France, the results of the soldiers^ examinations before this central jury. Day-dream. — While I am reading the last chapter in The Interpretation of Dreams, obtrusive thoughts absolutely similar to those arising in the state just prior to sleep come to obliterate my understanding of the text, so I put my book down and retrace : I am busy again with my doctor'' s exam. : Will the Minister con- THE GENESIS OF THE CHAINS 81 sent to create a jury for me ? I wonder whom I shall ask to read my work, so that I may get some expert advice before I submit it to the critical judgme^it of the jury. My friend C. is not a specialist in this subject. Mr. P. I donH know well enough ; moreover {he is a neutral), he may be Germanophile, for he did not reply to the letter I sent him and seems to ignore me alto- gether. Mr. B. is too far off; how many months would it take before I got my manuscript back from America ? Will Professor R. do it ? He has not yet answered my last request ; perhaps his reply could not have reached me yet. Anyhow, I know too little about psycho-analysis and have too few biblio- graphic resources at my disposal to venture into what might be altogether a new theory without testing it somehow. So I shall ask Professor R. to do me this service. (I compose the letter I intend to write to him and urge him politely to be quick.) I hope he won't mind my hurrying him. I know no other Englishman who could do me this service. But then I shall have to translate my essay. Never mind, it was anyhow my intention to do that later. Will the translation be a difficult piece of work ? Shall I not lose too much time ? For I must be ready before the war ends, otherwise all opportunities (vacancies) will be gone. But it is no use worrying about that, for the Minister will not make his decision at a momenfs notice, and I cannot ask him to appoint a jury for a certain date before I am sure that I shall produce something worth the degree I am trying to obtain. Here I became aware that my mind was wandering and the phantasy was broken off. A few hours later, when I was in bed and nearly asleep, I became conscious again just as the clock struck 10.15. I found that my other self had for fifteen minutes (since I had blown out my candle) been spinning a fancy as follows : Preliminary Statement. — Scarcely had I closed my eyes to go to sleep, when I recalled the conversation we had just had in our messroom about the degree of education of the Belgian nation. Next the discussion had shifted to a more urgent problem : The landlady had warned us that we should have to look out for another messroom, as she wanted the one we occupied 32 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS presently for extending her business premises. Thereupon we had together considered which villagers might consent to let us a decent room and, if possible, to cook for us. Amongst these was a family of rather well-to-do refugees with a daughter of about twenty-five, the pride of the village. These recollections of our conversation formed the first link of the chain of thought here given. Another part of the phantasy recalls the circumstances which brought about my first contact with the justice of my country, and which made a deep impression upon me. In a notoriouiS case of the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl the solicitor asked me to assist the barrister in the capacity of a psychological expert, and bade me eooplain to the jury the irrelevancy and danger of the testimony of children, the accusation being based solely on the declarations of little witnesses from nine to twelve years of age. As this request was made only forty-eight hours before the trial, I had to work day and night, studying the case and writing my report, and an errand-boy had to carry my manuscript sheet by sheet to the typist, who was to make a copy of it for every individual member of the jury and court. And this period of excitement was followed by a noteworthy incident : the judge of the assizes wished to prevent my intervention and criticism of the proceedings before the coroner, who had admitted young children as serious witnesses. The recollection of these eventful days in my phantasy may be explained by the circumstance that a copy of my report in the form of a reprint from the Archives de Psychologic had come to my notice on the same day, for I had copied from it the address of the publisher Kundig in Geneva, to zvhom I had just sent an order for some books. Here now is the phantasy as I copy it from my notes : Day-dream. — . . . that Utile fatty. ... // / were still a bachelor I should not want to marry her ; she is coarse and vulgar and will soon be obese. Neither should I want to marry one of the cousins of my friend B., for, from what I hear him say about them, I infer that they are of the clitoric type, and accus- tomed to spend much money, like so many of the daughters of business people. Neither should I want to marry a rich woman, as, for instance, a rich French war-widow, who would be too THE GENESIS OF THE CHAINS 33 proud to appreciate me. The wife I should like best would le a woman like S., who is capable of estimating the value of a brain-worker and would be proud of me. (Here starts an association which I leave out ; then :) I have got a reputation^ though ; I have already published a lot. And what did not the papers write after my intervention in the case of V. P. ? (Here it is as if I went again actively through all the experiences of those days.) I am debating with the barrister in my study ; next I am in the typisVs room and see him busy ; soon after I myself am hurriedly writing the sheets of my report, with the barrister taking them away before I can re-read them, to hand them over to the boy who has to carry them to the typist. I see myself again in the court, sitting in the arm-chair before the judge, in presence of the jury. I quarrel with the former just as I actually quarrelled with him at the time ; I feel again all the emotions that overtook me then. (Here is a gap I have been unable to fill.) I will ask Mr. T. (an academic authority) to read this report and send him a reprint of it ; so he will see that I did not exaggerate when I had my interview with him ; and he may recommend me after all for the chair I should like so much. If only I had passed my doctor's exam. ! How nice that title would look on my visiting-card ! (I try different formulce for such a card, with my new title in spe.) But will the Minister constitute a jury for me ? (I am now composing in my mind a long request to the Minister to the effect that he should treat me as the undergraduates, whom the outbreak of the war has prevented from taking their degrees, have been treated.) But it would be much simpler if the Dean of our Faculty were in Paris, as I have been told she is. She could appoint a jury for me with the greatest ease, for there is no lack of competent authorities in Paris, and perhaps they would consent to act as members of a jury for the sake of the fee. Now I am thinking of the cost of the examination and of the reproduction of my manuscript, because Miss I. — the Dean — will want copies for each member of the jury, and perhaps also for the journalists that may attend the defence of my thesis, and that would cost a lot of money too. I am fully occupied with the question of the expenses of my examination, when I recover consciousness and decide to retrace the day-dream I have just had, 3 34 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS As I wrote the above, a comparison between the two fancies convinced me that the chains of thought which occupy our minds during our distractions in waking hfe are wholly- similar to the phantasies that arise in the somnolent state. The fact that in the last day-dream my musings seem to go so deep that I not only visualize, but even experience auditory and muscular sensations (i.e. my discussion with the judge and the writing of my report) does not constitute any real differentiation from the elaborate association of waking life, as I shall have occasion to show at the proper moment. The two fore-conscious streams of thought are accom- panied by an estrangement from reality which is charac- teristic of all the forms of mind action that do not take the outer circumstances into account. But it may be interesting to observe how this estrangement is brought about, and in what special circumstances it occurs. The case looks very simple when we go to bed and try to sleep. We relinquish our directed thinking, but at the same time we abandon ourselves to an apparently aimless course of fore -conscious thinking which ends by coming to the surface. However, the associative concatenation which is started at this moment is not as arbitrary as one would think. In the above example of a day-dream the chain starts wdth a recollection of the conversation which I had just had in my mess. Although only a short time elapsed between the moment of my leaving the common-room and the instant I closed my eyes, I think we should call the circumstance that the contents of this conversation came to J, the fore again a remembrance. A remembrance was accord- ingly the first link of that reverie. But one might wonder whether my mind had not been busy with this idea all the time, so that it did not need to be recalled. Therefore, after remembering that in the first day phantasy I have cited the genesis obviously corresponds with the recollection of the notice about the soldiers' examination which I had read in the paper a few minutes before, I shall communicate a few instances in which a simple reflection about an actual happening, when in bed, forms the first part of a connected series of ideas. THE GENESIS OF THE CHAINS 35 / was reading in bed Professor Ellwood*s Introduc- tion to Social Psychology, and when I dismissed all conscious activity I started automatically to compare certain definitions which I had just read with similar ones in Waxweiler's Esquisse d'une Sociologie. From this starting-point the chain went on : this volume is still at C. (the place where I lived before I came to the front). My only copy of my own book must still be there too. Had I been able to show it to Principal T. during my interview with him, etc. . . . until I find on awakening that I am thinking about the transport difficulties on the railroads in England. In this example the concatenation started with the recollection of a day remnant (Ellwood's definitions) associ- ated with older memories (Waxweiler's definitions). But a day remnant belongs to memory by the same title as a so-called remembrance ; the only difference between the two is a question of time, the latter having been stored longer in our inner self than the former. We notice also that the comparison is soon forgotten, and that the mind passes on to another subject : the books I left behind at C. I awake from a phantasy on marriage at the moment when I am recalling a past experience. In retracing it, I find that it started like this : As I am trying to fall asleep my landlady's silly laughter reaches my ear. Thereupon my mind associates such ideas as : I am glad I did not marry a woman who laughs so foolishly. Even a girl with a big fortune, but tactless, like this one, would not have tempted me, etc. In this instance the first link of the concatenation is constituted by the perception of an outer stimulus. The second is a conclusion based on a recollection : the complex of an unhappy marriage. There is again aj memory element present at the genesis of the chain. Moreover ,~ tTie subject under consideration is not lost sight of as quickly as in the above instance, but nevertheless we notice again that the object that caused the stimulus soon shifts from the centre of interest. 36 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS After having retraced and put down on a piece of paper the preceding reverie, I again try to fall asleep, but eight minutes later I awake from a new phantasy which starts thus : / was still smiling at the nonsense in the above reverie, when I thought I ought to relate it the next morning to my friends in the mess. Hereupon I associate : One of them, B,, has just asked me to-day whether I am getting on with my Spanish studies. We were just having our dessert, when my orderly gave me a card from Miss D. informing me that she had been unable to find the Spanish book I had asked her for, etc. . . . until on waking I am discussing within myself the capabilities of an unknown authoress, who had put an advertise- ment in The Times of that day. Can we call the first member of this thought-association a day remnant — that is to say, a concept that makes part of our memory ? Indeed, the phantasy about the landlady that is being thought of (remembered) has scarcely been formed, for only half an hour — ^the time required to trace it back and write it down — has passed between its formation and its recollection. However, if we undertook here a discussion of the question when an idea begins to belong to memory, it would lead us too far. Therefore I postpone it till later, when it may prove to be useless, and if anyone were to contest the right to attribute a memorial character to this first link — " I was still smiling at the nonsensical character of the above fancy " — I should be able to point out that after the thought " I shall tell it to my friends in the mess " comes another recollection : " One of them, Mr. B., asked me to-day whether I was getting on with my Spanish book,'* which is, at ^11 events, a remembrance of the same day. The day remnant is also very apparent in the following observation : When blowing out my candle I notice on the chair beside my bed a box of capsules to be taken the next morning as a medicine, a fact which I remember at the sight of the box. Thereupon my mind goes rambling : Could I not start taking my medicine at once, a capsule every ten minutes, instead of to-morrow morning ? Or from midnight on, if I cannot sleep ; THE GENESIS OF THE CHAINS S7 I can easily keep awake. But then I shall have to remain awake too long. And perhaps the remedy would not work properly, etc. When I " come to " five minutes later I am an actor in a scene that makes me smile. The perception of an outer stimulus is again the first Hnk of the chain. The second — " Could I not start taking my medicine at once ? " — hides the recollection of a purpose which actually drove me to take the trouble of walking a good distance to find a specialist for my case : the wish to be rid of my trouble as soon as possible. Nobody will deny that a pu rpose is a thing which may be remembered, so that here we again meet with a memorial element after the first perception. We shall see further that all the con- stitutive elements of memory may come to the surface at a given moment, provided the proper occasion offers itself. From a conscious point of view it would be exaggerated to say that the perception of the box of capsules is emotionally emphasized ; still, we shall learn later that from a fore-con- scious standpoint the affect is not absent. To our second self the sensations are never indifferent, and the lurking affects call the associative mechanism into activity — at the moment of relaxation of the will — whatever the nature of the outer stimuli that reach our sensory organs. Hereunder follow two instances in which violent excitations from the outer world are exploited to lead to such paths as the fore- conscious urges : It is eleven o'clock and I am trying hard to fall asleep. At a certain moment I become aware that the Germans are shelling the village. The explosion of a shell dropping a hit nearer than the others makes me think spontaneously of another shell, which six days ago dropped in the middle of our street and caused quite a number of casualties. Which way did it arrive and where did it come from ? Did it come over the row of houses ? Then it came from Mount Kemmel, etc. . . . until I am thinking of a schoolfellow of my youth who has become a specialist in ballistics, and of my days at the training college. At this moment the association is stopped and I become aware that " / am off again.*^- 38 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS In this instance the perception of the outer stimulus is indubitably followed by a recollection that entered my memory exactly six days before. An associative elaboration that has often recurred to me during the war, with slight variations, is much as follows : I am in bed, before falling asleep. Suddenly my not-at- homeness to a sensory appeal is suspended for a moment by the perception of the hummmg of bombing aeroplanes ; and thereupon my musing runs more or less thus : " They don't come for us. They are too high. They are going to Dunkirk or Calais. Anyhow, I am glad that I have not got to sleep in a camp under canvas, for the cloth walls do not offer any protection whatever. Here at least there is the thickness of the brick walls. If a bomb were to drop just in front of the house, even the portion of wall under- neath the window would save me. And I am better in this farthest corner than closer to the windows (n^y room was on the ground-floor), for the trajectory of the pieces goes above my head, etc. . . ." ^ Here the recollection following upon the perception is again implicit : " for they are too high," viz. " From their sound I infer that they are high, and I remember that when they are high they usually go far into the back area." In most of the aforementioned cases the stream of thought has originated in the perception of a stimulus from the outer w^orld, followed by a day remnant or a recent memory element with which the perception associates. Sometimes, however, it is an impression of the same day, recalled at the " letting-go " period, that is the genesis of my fore- conscious thought-associations. In one instance I have received during the day a letter which has provoked a slight emotion. In another I have been obliged to expostulate w^th a superior officer of mine ; in a third instance, a friend has warned me that he was going to come to see me at the front with the Belgian Minister Vandervelde. In each of these instances the event of the day has provoked feelings which, although being far from violent, are sufficiently pronounced in character to come to the surface, without my being surprised at their recollec- * This reconstruction is not a perfect one. THE GENESIS OF THE CHAINS 39 tion. But it is not even necessary that the occurrence of the day should have made a particular impression upon the mind to start the mind musing. " I have received to-day my weekly copy of The Times Educational Supplement, and I recall a reflection of this afternoon : I ought to ask the editor to send me a copy of the review of my last book (with the intention of utilizing it for a possible application), etc. . . .*' Other similar examples could easily be adduced, but such a genesis in the form of a recalling of details is quite common in everyday life : in the middle of our occupations it flashes through our minds that we have forgotten to post a letter, to pay a bill, to go to the dentist's, to keep a promise, etc. But our " bread-winning activities " soon put an end to any comment which we are inclined to attach to the recalled idea. In my ig-tiorance of the psychology of the fore-conscious I happened to make a mistake which later brought a smile to my lips, but which nevertheless gives us another small item of information : Whenever I am busy with creative work I am a bad sleeper, and I have tried all sorts of means to get rid of the thoughts that prevent me from abstracting myself from the outer world. When I was collecting the material for this study and had often to interrupt my attempts to fall asleep in order to make notes, I soon observed that some kinds of phantasies kept me longer awake than others. But I first imagined that if I could start my associations with ideas that were not likely to stir any emotions in my inner self, I should succeed in shortening my period of insomnia. Therefore I tried, and eventually succeeded in banishing from my mind any thought except the one I had voluntarily selected, and which I hoped might be the first link of a chain of ideas which would not banish sleep. The end-result was not what I expected it to be, of course, for it is not the idea conceived at the outset that exercises a preponderant influence on the trend of the associations. The experiment proved simply to be an illustration of the proverb " All roads lead to Rome." Here is part of a phantasy with a chosen genesis : One night I was trying to think exclusively about the 40 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS clever ways of a Brazilian thief operating in Paris, the account of which I had just read in the newspaper. When I returned to consciousness a short analysis brought to light the following chain : The Brazilian thief, . . . There is a branch of our International Society in San Paolo, too. The director once offered a brilliant post to my friend R. The branch in X, does splendid business {X. being in the country where I hoped at that time to get a chair), etc., all the rest centring round the same complex. When I wrote above that " I was trying to think ex- clusively about," etc., I did not give a very exact descrip- tion of my mental attitude : I certainly abandoned conscious thinking, for I did not concentrate, but as I knew that fore-conscious thoughts were bound to occupy the forum of my mind, I simply made an effort to avoid -ideas about any other subject than the one I had chosen ; I repressed part of my fore-conscious thoughts. (As we shall see later, I unknowingly tried to reproduce the conditions that prevail when the mechanisms of inspiration are active.) I cannot make out whether this mental attitude can be adopted without training, but I myself can assume it very readily. If we now summarize the different cases which we have examined, we may conclude that fore-conscious chains which are formed before sleep, when the conscious ego has been suspended, grow out of (a) The perception of an outer stimulus, of either a harmless or an exciting nature, which immediately associates with a recollection, and is soon lost to sight ; (b) The coming to the surface of a day remnant, which may be indifferent or emotionally accentuated ; (c) Ideas which are selected experimentajly and may immediately link up with memories. (d) We did not consider the case of violent emotions coming to the surface, such as that felt on the death of a dear relative, etc., for in these instances the mental functions are too deeply disturbed to THE GENESIS OF THE CHAINS 41 be included in a study of normal fore-conscious thinking. The category (b) might be said to be one in which the genesis is due to an inner perception, for we perceive or become aware of part of the content of memory. From this last we draw the following conclusions ; 1. A memorial element is present in all the concatenations at their genesis. This element forms the first link in the chains that start from an inner perception, and the second in others. 2. These different beginnings all present a common feature of actuality, for we know that thoughts which have come to consciousness during the day, and have been weighed down by a repression, have not therefore disappeared for good if they are sufficiently intense, but may be lying in wait until an opportunity arises which brings them to the surface again ; they are in the latent state only. Moreover, the circumstance that they come to the fore and are fore- consciously perceived makes them actual again, 3. The original perception, as a centre of interest, is forgotten after a certain number of associations, varying from one reverie to another. ** After having thus started the consideration of the path followed by the mind when it passes from consciousness to fore-conscious ideation at the moment when we dismiss our directed thoughts^ before going to sleep, we must next examine the associative process of our mind-wanderings in waking life." The conditions prevailing during our waking activity are not always the same, and may either favour the occurrence of fore-conscious thinking or may make it utterly impossible ; between these two extremes a whole scale of gradations is thinkable. We really reproduce the state of drowsiness occurring before sleep when, for instance, we are sitting in an arm-chair indulging in a brown study. But when we are reading, and notice that our attention wanders from the text, because our mind is busy with something else, we are in a different case. At all events, I cannot remember a single instance of deviation of attention having occurred while 42 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS I was reading a thrilling novel, or enthusiastically working at a literary composition that was the con- clusion and crowning of a patient and painstaking period of preparation,- or when I was having an interesting conversation. I shall now give a few examples of phantasies originating in these different conditions. I was one day in a frame of mind favouring absent-minded- ness. I was sitting in the train going from London to Folkestone. Unknowingly, I had taken a seat in the wrong half of the train, the half that was going to Sandgate, so that I had to change carriages at a junction. When I was once more comfortably seated and quite unoccupied, my mind strayed in this way : / narrowly escaped going to Sandgate instead of to Folkestone. I should have been surprised if I had discovered my mistake only when there. But I should not have missed my boat for all that. I should have taken the 'bus from Sandgate to Folkestone^ as I did so often in 1913. {Here a whole series of memories of my sojourn on the south-east coast in that year is revived and flows before my mind's eye.) We notice that this concatenation also grows out of an inner perception. Slightly more complicated conditions prevail in the observation which I cite next, for it concerns a visual im- pression, which originated at the same time two mental phenomena of a divergent nature. I was standing on the platform of a tramcar in my own town when I saw distractedly on a wall a big advertisement, the sense of which I faintly realized, but not sufficiently well to be able to reproduce its wording exactly. The advertisement (translated) ran thus : " Beers of the Brewery Belgica C.S." When the tram had gone five hundred yards further, I became aware that I was humming a song and that I was at the same time wool-gathering. My second self had picked up the words " Brewery " and C(o-operative) S(ociety), and by association obtained : "Oh yes, that is the new brewery company I read about in yesterday's paper. It stated that it has been formed by three brewers. I remember visiting THE GENESIS OF THE CHAINS 43 one of their breweries. It was there I first saw the process of making lager beer (by low fermentation), etc. It will suffice to call attention to the connection estab- lished between the outer perception and the memories by an outer association, so that we may now examine the meaning of the song I started humming at the same time. The words apply to the only Belgian training-ship, the Belgica^ which was inaugurated with great pomp after its predecessor had perished at sea under dramatic circumstances, when many young lives were lost. The translation of the Flemish text is as follows : The BelgicOt the Belgica, farewell I A thousand pious wishes follow her on her voyage, etc. A smile came to my lips as soon as I began the process of self- analysis and detected the thought that my unconscious self sought to express in this cryptic manner ; for it flashed through my mind that it was meant as a farewell to a person whom I badly wanted to be rid of. I remembered then and there that this song had often obsessed me during the last few weeks, and now, when I reflected upon its hidden meaning, I suddenly understood the significance of a number of other tunes that I used to hum with a feeling of annoy- ance at their frequent obsession. They were all connected with my personal troubles. The connection between my secret wish and the advertise- ment is also exemplified by an outer association : the word Belgica; but it should be said at once that in this instance we are dealing with a manifestation that is not entirely of the same nature as the phantasies which we have hitherto been considering. It is more akin to the unconscious. The genesis of the train of thought relating to the br^^wery, and the other, which occurred in the Folkestone train, as well as the forgetting of the original perception and the mental attitude at the moment of their origin, and also their general structure, recall the fancies of the dozing period in bed. Things, however, do not look so simple when we come to consider the trains of thought which cause distraction 44 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS while reading. Sometimes there is a Hnk between the text and the fore- conscious stream ; sometimes there is none, or none that is apparent. I was at first incHned to attribute it to want of practice that, in the earher days of my collecting such data, I was often unable to retrace the connection between the passage that I was reading and the first fore- conscious association, although I could invariably go back as far as a day remnant or an outward stimulus. But it soon became clear to me that in some cases the mind may divert from the outer world to the inner ego without any apparent bridge whatever. This may happen in two quite distinct conditions : directed attention may be so far weakened that it dwindles to nothing, even to the cessation of the mechanical process of reading ; but then the circumstances of the somnolent state are reproduced, and a repressed thought may arise without any association with the meaningless or abandoned text. But it may also happen that distraction sets in, not- withstanding the most energetic endeavours not to lose the thread of the story, in which case the fore-conscious chain does not connect with the text either. This we can observe in the following phantasy : One morning I was reading in bed, with concentrated attention and much interest, my son resting beside me. The night before, the boy complained of a slight indisposition, which made me a little anxious, for during the war he had been ill with pleurisy, and I could not banish the fear of pulmonary tuberculosis, notwithstanding the doctor's un- concern. At a certain moment I become aware that I cannot understand a passage of my book, although I have read it over several times. I have the intuition that here is some- thing worthy of observation ; so I drop my book and analyse myself. As I become aware that I am making special efforts to understand the text, I realize the subject of my phantasy (the disease), and I recollect that the boy coughed a few moments ago. (I did not become cognizant of this at the moment the coughing occurred.) I have no difficulty in retracing the concatenation : // there were any hcBmorrhage I should have to run to the nearest doctor, who, however, is not THE GENESIS OF THE CHAINS 45 a lung specialist. Neither has Dr, A'., who lives close by, any special knowledge of tuberculosis. To whom should I go during the night? Perhaps I should do better to wait till the morning. But in the meantime the boy might be dead, (Here the thinking ended.) I add that the ideas were represented visually, but obscurely, and accompanied by a certain amount of emotion. My next care was to see whether I could discover in the text anything that might have served as a link between the book and the phantasy. This search was quite fruitless, although it was only at this moment that I recollected the struggle that had been going on between the two streams of thought, which had ended with the victory of the fore- conscious one. It also became clear to me what an amount of mental energy had been wasted during this conflict, and I came to the conclusion that the phantasy had finally succeeded in overpowering the strongly directed train of thought because it was emphasized by an emotion. Later on I had more opportunities to observe similar cases of distraction, which persuaded me that when we find ourselves re-reading a passage without understanding, the forfiiconscious reverie which comes to the surface at the same time is without connection with the text or the conscious thought which it disturbs. It is then due to an unacknow- ledged outer perception. We should note, by the way, that we are dealing here with an occurrence that is the reverse of repression as it is usually understood : it is here the conscious element that is temporarily eliminated. Finally, I may lay stress upon the circumstance that it is an outer stimulus — the coughing— reinforced by an emotionally emphasized recollection — my fears for the boy's health — which is the occasion of the phantasy. In the following examples we shall come upon observa- tions in which two elements of our resolutions will be brought to the fore at the same time, corresponding with the questions : On what occasion did the fore-conscious chains start ? and : How do they connect with conscious thinking ? For we shall find that in reading the latter is often abandoned for the former by almost imperceptible transitions. 46 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS As long as our investigation was only concerned with the musings that begin when conscious thinking is dismissed, we were not so much struck by the circumstance that the two modes of ideation exclude one another. But if, as in the case of the last reverie, we turn our attention to the mechanism of fore-conscious ideation when it disturbs our conscious occupations, we have to solve a more complicated problem, and the question : How is our mental wandering caused ? is added to the first : What elements are concordant with the genesis of the associations ? In all the cases which we have considered thus far, excepting the last, the degree of consciousness was very faint, for we are on the verge of the fore-conscious state whenever we abandon any voluntary mental effort. When we are thinking in a directed manner ^ the conditions are not entirely the same. In the following instance my reading did not absorb me very deeply : In the course of the day I had sent an order for some books to a Swiss bookseller, and a few hours later I was perusing Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life (translated by Brill)y when on p. 49 my glance fell upon the footnote : " Zentralblatt fiir Psycho-analyse, I, 9, 1911." / soon found that my attention had wandered, and that I had been thinking fore-consciou^ly : " Is that the volume I ordered ? Then I shall meet with that example again. Anyhow, that shows that this edition is pretty well up to date,^^ etc., the last consideration being related to the xvork that I was preparing. It should be noted that here both the outward perception and the day remnant or recollection combine at the very beginning of the association, or, better still, the perception of the name of the publication recalls at once my ordering it. A connection of this sort belongs as much to conscious as to fore-conscious thought-mechanisms. W^hen I am speaking » My own realistic thinking is mostly applied to reading and writing. For that reason most of my mind-wanderings are related to these, my chief mental occupations. It is evident that with persons whose conscious thoughts are applied to the pursuit of other activities, their day-dreams will be connected — if there is any linking up — with the form of ideation that i0 consonant with their profession. THE GENESIS OF THE CHAINS 47 in the street with a friend, the sight of a common acquaintance may divert the conversation quite naturally to the latter. The manner of linking up shown in the next example offers a fairly close analogy with that preceding it : I was read- ing this sentence in La Psychanalyse : ^ " The production of morbid symptoms is explained by the fact that the repression, as a result of certain conditions, mainly of a subjective nature (which might be summarized by the very vague classical term of ' constitutional predisposition '), often succeeds only partially." (My italics.) My attention deviates, and when I become alert again I trace this association : " But I myself, in my notes, use the classical terms ' meditation ' and ' reflection,' and I even distinguish such fine shades of meaning that my readers may complain. Is it really worth while to give a long explanation of this ? " etc. The chain terminates with the obsessive anxiety about my future. Here again an expression (" classical terms ") brings back a recollection, but it is not recent, neither is it so direct as in the previous instance, although the phenomenon is still a very familiar one in daily life ; the sight of a letter-box in the street reminding me of a letter which I forgot and left on my desk, for example. A less common method of bridging the gap is active in the following case : I was reading an indifferent text when I found that I was distracted. I was thinking : " I don't want to be too late at F.'s. I hope the maid will be ready with tea at four o'clock, as I told her." When I tried to find out how my fore-consciousness had brought up this idea, I did not at once come upon the passage in the text which gave my mind the opportunity of wandering until I came upon the word nurse, which, indeed, by a sort of double meaning, led, by the synonymous association " maid," from the text to the thought beneath the surface. But this dissociative procedure at once calls to mind one of the many means at the disposal of the technique of wit-formation and nocturnal dreams, so that here again we arrive upon familiar ground. In yet other examples we come upon means of linking * E. Regis and A. Hesnard, La Psychanalyse, p. 60. F. Alcan, Paris, 1914. 48 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS up which recall at once the processes described in Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life. I had already pondered more than once over the great facility of fore-conscious association, and asked myself whether it may be due to the fact that any mean term can be chosen to connect two ideas, as Freud has suggested in his Interpretation of Dreams ; in other words, that the linking-up activity in fore-conscious- ness does not take fixed categories of associations into account. It was this idea that was present in my mind when the following occurred : / was deep in Jastrow's hook. The Subconscious, when the expression " fixed groups of associations " led me astray to this stream of thought : " Fixed groups of associations ! This is precisely the characteristic difference between conscious and fore-conscious attention. The latter takes each element at its own valu£, free of any associative relation to the category it usually forms part of or as belonging to the thought complex as a part of which it has come to our knowledge. It dissociates the apperceptions. But concentration, on the other hand, cannot free itself or the element from these relations. This explains why in some cases fore- conscious thinking is superior to voluntary thinking^ (This theory is not correct, as the reader will find later ; but I cannot communicate my musings if I omit to show my errors.^) The interesting fact is that the expression ""^ fixed groups of associations " has been freed from its relations with the context, isolated, as it were, by a sjeight of mind, so as to take waking consciousness at a disadvantage, and to transfer the attention to the fore-conscious level and there compare it with a stream of thought which was, as stated above, a sort of recollection of an idea previously entertained. But this is not the only feature that ought to interest us here, for a year later I discovered that I had read the text wrongly, and had moreover reproduced the mistake when copying it into my notebook. The text, as a matter of » This is a concrete example of the idea, which will be developed later, that when a general notion — a synthesis — the result of centuries of experi- ences, is rendered by a word which may at the same time have a special concrete meaning, which has faded away, the fore -consciousness may perceive this concrete meaning, which consciousness overlooks. This is also char- acteristic of the dream. THE GENESIS OF THE CHAINS 49 fact, runs : " Yet the suggestion is apposite that for intent reflection, particularly for the contemplation that fixes groups of ideas as yet vaguely held in the mind, thinkers have at all times resorted to the restful inspiration of a walk in the woods or a stroll over hill and dale." ^ The explanation of this mistake (fixed instead of fi^es) brings us back to Freud's theory of the errors common in daily life, and this is not the only case where we shall come across it ; but we reserve our comments until later. For the present we shall be content to note that we are trenching upon ground which has already been explored. However, there is no reason to hide the fact that in our last example we have for the first time struck upon one of the mechanisms active in invention, for the concatenation contains a new idea which will be examined more closely later. It is, as it were, a reconstruction of the elements adduced in Jastrow's text. We notice further that the mistake in the text is simultaneous with the commencement of the stream. Later on we shall have occasion to observe similar mistakes, corresponding with the conclusion of fore-conscious thought- structures. The following observation displays a connection similar to that in the phantasy originated by the apperception nurse-maid (p. 47), but it is slightly more complicated. In the first instance the musing was diverted directly from the text, while in the following case it runs parallel to it : as soon as the second sense of the word under consideration has been perceived the elements of the sentence are recon- structed with a new meaning : I was reading in the same hook of Jastrow's : ''Still more remarkable, as showing the extent to which such distribution of consciousness may be carried in regard to two complicated and wholly unrelated tasks, is the classic instance of Houdin, the French prestidigitateur. In order to quicken his senses and increase his manual skill, he practised juggling with balls ; and having, after a month'' s practice, become a thorough master of the art of keeping up four balls at once, he placed ^ Cf. J. Jastrow, The Subconscious, p. 94. London, Constable & Co., 1906. 50 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS a hook before him, and, while the halls were in the air, accustomed himself to read without hesitation. And as evidence of the tenacity of such acquisitions, he related that thirty years later, with practically no intervening practice, he found himself able, to read with three balls going. Returning to the more ordinary habit-acquisitions, we have further to note that when, after a variable period of training, they reach a subconscious {and subvoluntary) stage, they require only the initial start, or the familiar succession of slight stimuli, to run themselves off the reel " (pp. 45-46). The idea that came to the surface on this occasion — the intermediary associations will be examined later — was : '' I can understand how things that we have read often (in memorizing) sink into unconsciousness and may be recalled, but how is it that expressions which we have read only once come suddenly to our lips or our pen, unsought for or without our having made any effort to retain them ? " The common term between the two terms is obviously the word read, but whilst in Jastrow's passage it plays only an accessory role, it bears the entire emphasis in my musing, so that we may speak of two entirely different conceptions of reading, the last of which acts as a suggestion for a com- plicated fore-conscious concatenation. I must for the present content myself with pointing out the parallelism between the two ideas as provisional evi- dence that there is also a very close thought-connection, and ask the reader to give me credit for this until later. At any rate, the two first ideas of the chain are pure recollections. In the meantime I am able to show that such an inward association as that between read and read is not at all uncommon : / was deeply absorbed in my book — at least I thought I was — when my eye lit upon this passage : "... Suddenly arousing oneself from a state of distracted attention." Before the sentence of which it forms part was ended, I awoke from a fore-conscious chain of thought. (/ cannot call it any longer a day-dream, because it was so little dream-like.) At the same time I had this definition on the tip of my tongue : THE GENESIS OF THE CHAINS 51 " Distraction is precisely the opposite of inspiration, for in the loiter operation the two streams of thought {conscious and fore- conscious) flow toward the same goal, while in the former they diverged It is rather curious that I reacted to the true meaning of the phrase which I was reading, and that at the same time I had apperceived the word " distraction " in a particular way, and pursued the ideation under the threshold through a comparison with the mechanism of inspiration, so that the quoted definition rose to the surface as a kind of revela- tion. This double reaction recalls my behaviour in the musing over " the Belgica Brewing Society." On another occasion, also fore-consciously, I followed a suggestion derived from a book. I was deep in the chapter " Lapses in Writing " in Freud's Psychopathology. At p. 123 my conscious attention abated a little (whereof I was not aware at the time) and an idea came to me as I read : " But I had to reflect for quite a while in order to discover what influence diverted me from my first attention without making itself known to my consciousness." The spontaneous idea ran thus : " There is something going on in my fore-con- sciousness which must be in direct relation to my subject. I ought to stop reading for a little while and let it come to the surface." My second self interpreted this as a suggestion, and the thought that had weakened my conscious attention proved to be wholly related to the sentence reproduced. I must again repeat that I am obliged to postpone its consideration for a later occasion, but that need not prevent our noting that here again my fore-consciousness interpreted a text as an order, or took it as a hint to observe what was going on under the threshold. In waking life, too, we like to understand spoken words in a sense that is in conformity with our expectations. However, to prepare the way for generalization I may say that in the above instances I reacted to the texts in two different fashions : consciously, taking it in its obvious meaning ; and at the same time fore-consciously, interpreting it in a sense corresponding with the preoccupations of my second self. 52 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS This deserves some further consideration. We have seen that when our mind is not fully occupied, the occasion for the genesis of a fore-conscious chain of thought is the per- ception of an immediate outward stimulus which we associate with a recollection, or of a day remnant. When, on the contrary, our thinking is directed, we again find that the occasion, for the divergence from the voluntary occupation may be due to an outward stimulus (Belgica, pp. 42-43) accom- panied by a day remnant. It may also be due to a word or a phrase with a double meaning (see " Fixed groups,^ ^ pp. 48-49, and read, p. 50). At first sight it would appear as if the words Zentralblatt (p. 46) and classical terms (p. 47) could not be placed in this category. But after a closer examination we detect in both series a well known common feature : Zentralblatt fiir Psycho-analyse represents two different ideas : it represents (a) a quotation from Brill ;; and (b) the book I ordered from Geneva ; it is also their common mean. Classical term represents (a) Regis and Hesnard's idea that " constitutional predisposition " is a classical term ; and (b) that I myself use classical terms like " meditation " and " reflection." We have laid sufficient stress upon the double meaning of read and fixed groups, so that the four expressions have this in common, that each of them is a mean term for two entirely different conceptions which are present in our mind at the same time : (a) the text as it is understood by our conscious faculties ; (b) our recollections, kept ready in our fore-consciousness. But through the common link we identify them ; we are on the verge of a condensation. We are accordingly entitled to conclude that conscious and fore-conscious thinking connect superficially through a mean term, which is commonly a word or a phrase. How- ever, this mean term may also be provided by an idea, the elements of which are re-arranged in the fore-conscious concatenation and slightly altered. This happens in the case of the word read (p. 50), where both phenomena, inward and outward association, occur together. Speaking of these processes of connection, still another characteristic must be emphasized : immediately after an THE GENESIS OF THE CHAINS 53 outward association we find that the next link of the chain is constituted by a day remnant or a recollection. We notice also that as soon as we leave the phantasies connected with waking life by means of external associations we hit upon fore-conscious thinking related to invention and inspiration. When we review the various examples last analysed, we need not consider separately the trains of thought that start in waking life, when the mind does not pursue a definite aim, for we have seen that we then reproduce the conditions that prevail in our mental processes before sleep. On the contrary, special mention is due to the instances in which our voluntary ideation is inhibited in favour of our fore- conscious concatenations. ^ We have seen that the perception of an external stimulus (when reading) associates with a recollection or a day remnant that was waiting in the fore-consciousness, as it were, for the proper stimulus to form further associations and to progress. But the word or the idea which stimulates is interpreted in a sense imposed by the memorial elements ; it is given a second meaning. We shall further see that these elements are always emotionally emphasized. On the whole, the same memorial element is present at the genesis of all the fore-conscious chains. The full significance of this phenomenon can only become clear when we have submitted to analysis the other elements of day-dreams. This is what we shall undertake in the next chapter. CHAPTER II THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 1. Visualization and Thinking in Words. So far we have found that when the fore-conscious streams of thought originate while the mind is vacant, they grow out of a sensory or a psychic stimulus, and that when they deflect the mind from voluntary thinking along a fore- conscious path their genesis may be due to the same causes, in which case the passage from the first to the second mode of ideation coincides with an external association. Presently we shall analyse the whole contents of the fore-conscious concatenations, in an attempt to surprise the other secrets of this mysterious thought-process. The fact that I have cited thus far only the first parts of a certain number of day-dreams may have produced the impression that fore-conscious thinking is a concatenation of verbal expressions, that it thinks exclusively in words, like our conscious self. But I want the reader temporarily to suspend his judgment, for the case is not so simple as this. For just as Binet was the first to find that the visual type, for example, thinks chiefly in images, we may find that the different types which this author distinguishes, as far as directed thinking is concerned, may be retraced in fore- conscious ideation. Indeed, there are day-dreams which are visual almost from beginning to end, as instance that referred to on p. 42. I have now the opportunity of completing this short but remarkable fancy : I stated before that I had first taken a seat in the wrong half of the train. Strange to say, it was my second self that warned me of my error. I had been reading from London onwards, and as I felt a bit tired I had let my book drop for a moment and indulged in a brown study. At a certain moment I noticed vaguely 54 THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 55 that the train was delayed at a station, and that half the train was shunted to the opposite side of the platform, until I read, with a distracted eye, the word '' Folkestone " on a board attached to the luggage-van on the opposite track. This word caused my mind to drift back to the summer of 1913, when I was spending my holidays on the south-east coast of England, and in a vivid animated picture I once again went through some of my experiences of that season. All of a sudden it dawned upon me that the inscription on the luggage-van proved that that part of the train was going to Folkestone, but not the one I was in. I had just time to jump into a carriage that was already on the move, and when I was seated again I traced the happening back as stated above. I Soon afterwards another reverie took me back to the year 1913. I proceeded to muse as follows : Dear me ! I narrowly escaped going to Sandgate instead of Folkestone, I should have been surprised on finding out my mistake there. But I should not have missed my boat {for Calais) for all that. I should have taken the 'bus from Sandgate to Folkestone. Here I begin to recollect in pictures : I see myself sitting in one of the open ^buses that run along the seashore, as I so often did during my holidays. I think of the friends who were my companions, and pass through a great many incidents of those days : of our camping and its details, of a journey to London by a local train. {Here I make the mental reflection — not visualized but in words : What a silly idea of our London friends, to advise us to take that wearisome local train ! But I suppose they wanted to gain time for their preparations to receive us.) Visuxil again : But that made us leave Folkestone at su^h an early hour in the morning that we had no time to bid our friends good-bye ; and here again I pass through all the incidents of that hurried departure, upon which I awake from my reverie. ^ This occuFrence of being warned of a mistake by our fore-consciousness is quite frequent, as those who know how to observe themselves will realize. It may be opposed to the psycho -pathological events of everyday life, first described by Freud, and we shall have to point out its full significance in the next chapter. 56 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS This phantasy is of a characteristically visual nature and deserves to be examined in all its details. It may look a bit complicated, but it is nevertheless the least intricate of my collection, for, as we shall have plenty of occasion to observe, fore-conscious structures are scarcely ever simple. We shall note that as soon as my glance fell distractedly upon the word " Folkestone " on the luggage- van, I went at once, in an animated mental picture, through some of my former experiences. And after the interruption caused by the changing of trains I quickly lived again, in mental scenery, through some of the events that marked my holidays in 1913. I used the word " animated *' picture, and waited to develop the analogy and to pass on to the word " cinemato- graph," because of a striking difference between the two terms of this simile, which should be explained. For in my fore- conscious moving-picture associations my attitude is not always that of a passive onlooker, as though I were following a scene on the screen of a picture-hall which my phantasy localizes in my inner self, because here the analogy ceases : indeed, I am at the same time active, I am simultaneously an actor in the scene; on the screen and a spectator in the audience. In my fancy I am actually sitting in the 'bus going from Sandgate to Folkestone. I am performing succes- sively several duties in camp as in 1913 ; I see myself in the local train to London — I even follow, through the window of the compartment, a landscape which struck me particularly on that journey. I see myself going to the station with my friends before the town is awake ; every recollection is an accurate and living reproduction of my past experiences. I even feel the same emotions that I went through years ago, e.g. I very distinctly feel the annoyance I experienced at having to leave my Folkestone friends without shaking hands with them. Therefore, as I said before, I was at the same time actor and spectator. Anticipating a little my conclusions, I may now state that it would be scarcely possible to register a fore-conscious chain of thought in which the visual element should be totally absent ; on the contrary, visualization appears to be a constant element of fore-conscious thinking. And as THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 57 its second characteristic we note that the day-dreamer is at the same time the actor in and the spectator of the scenes that appear successively before his mind's eye. At this point I will deal with the objection that I myself must belong to the visual type. Such is not the case. Visualization is for me an impossibility in directed thinking. It always comes with verbal thoughts, and I attribute to this a positive mental disposition that I have never been an enthusiastic reader of poetry. I must even confess that this peculiar turn of mind of mine, which favours abstraction more than anything else, has often been a cause of secret regret to me, for I regard it as a kind of shortcoming, which is responsible for the fact that I am not as good an orator as I should like to be. I possess a certain facility for speaking in public, but flowery speech — except after elaborate preparation, which I disdain — and striking analogies are out of my reach. I am unable to make much out of little. I can only say outright what is in my mind. I attribute this defect — considered as such in Latin countries — ^to my inability to visualize my ideas. Only after I commenced the present study of fore-conscious thinking did I, to my great surprise, make the discovery that my second self operates distinctly by means of optical images, and I have reasons to think that most persons share this peculiarity with me. As a contrast to the foregoing visual phantasy I propose now to examine a concatenation of which the content is mostly thought in words and not changed into perceptible images. It demands, however, some preliminary statements : The day before it occurred I had come hack from leave. Before crossing to England I had sent in to my colonel an application for another post with the British Army, the second in a fortnight. Half an hour before this day-dream I had received a note through a dispatch-rider to the effect that I was to report to him next day. It had excited me a little, because both posts would bring me into close relations with people who dispose of professorships. , . , I was reading, and at that time I had not yet found out that it is interesting to observe the genesis of my musings, so that in this case the origin is missing. After 58 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS / had become aware of my mind-wanderirig, I put down my book and registered the following fancy : How shall I present my explanations so that they will serve my turn for the two applications ? Still, I would rather have the first post than the second. Should I have as much leisure as now ? Should I be able to get on with my work ? Should I have to live in Etaples, or stay part of the time in London and live with my family ? And what about my leaves ? Will they be granted by my new chief or by my (Belgian) colonel ? I may be able to get leave from the Belgian authorities and an extension from the British in London. I shall not mention my last urgent leave to my new British chief, in the hope of getting another within two months, — Broken off. One might imagine that in this chain, which seems to possess all the properties of the conscious processes that are known to us in waking life, the visual element is absent. But although we cannot indeed observe here any important regression toward revived memory-pictures, the power to concretize has nevertheless been active during the fore- conscious ideation, albeit in a more remote manner than in the preceding instance : while I was thinking of the argu- ments to offer to my colonel I was standing before him in imagination, although I lost sight of him as soon as I passed to the next association. At the mention of Etaples I see before me the immense camp which the British Army has established there, and at which I have looked with interest whenever I have passed it in the train. A moment later I even fancy myself in one of the wooden huts erected there. Immediately after this, at the idea of London, I have the vision of a definite part of that metropolis, in connection with my (possible) future work, and I even see myself walking to a certain place to get an extension of leave. We may conclude that the visual element is far from being absent from this day-dream ; still, the images do not remain in the foreground. My fore-conscious attention was much more busy with the verbal part of the ideas than with the visual element. I was not even aware of the latter until I had fully analysed the phantasy, which made all THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 59 the details discernible. Moreover, the visual representations did not melt into one another. They appeared, on the contrary, disconnectedly and independent of each other, as if there had been short intervals during which the stage was unoccupied, the screen a blank. The visions played the part of occasional illustrations only. In the previous phantasy precisely the reverse occurred at a certain moment. As soon as I saw myself in the 'bus from Sandgate to Folkestone, nearly all the thoughts were translated into moving scenes, the one developing into the other with invisible, gradual transitions, just as in a cinema. The screen was scarcely ever a blank ; there was practically no interruption as long as the film lasted. And where there was a verbal remark, such as " What a silly idea ! " etc., it seemed more like a comment upon the pictures, like the explanatory text on the screen of a picture-hall, with the difference that the comments did not precede the scene but followed it. We may conclude that between these two day-dreams, which were chosen as extreme cases from my collection, there exist some differences, which we sum up in the following manner : * 1. In the former the mind is chiefly occupied with the recollection of memories ; these are represented by vivid animated pictures, which unroll themselves automatically in the same order as they w^ere perceived, and evolve one from another without interruption, at least as long as the action continues in the same surroundings. The ideas which accompany these optic remembrances seem dependent upon the images, but are scarcely noticed. The same emo- tions that were experienced when actually living the scenes recalled come back again. 2. In the latter the mind is chiefly occupied with verbal thought construction ; the ideas are sometimes accompanied by visual images, like illustrations to the text of a book ; they are borrowed from the contents of memory and only dimly perceived.^ I do not become aware of my fore- conscious emotions. * I do not think the vulgar observe these optic illusions unless their attention has been directed to them. They appear before the mental eye 60 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS The visual element as it appears in fore-conscious ideation is far from being unknown in psychology. As I am not of the visual type myself, I should be very ill qualified, except through book-knowledge, to judge what is going on in the mind of persons who visualize even in waking life. But happening to be the father of two children who are accus- tomed spontaneously to transform all their readings into vivid mental scenes, I have plenty of opportunities of observing this phenomenon. Therefore I know that this peculiarity of their normal thinking is entirely similar to the visualizing process of my fore-consciousness as described in the last instance : their pictures also are the comments on their texts. My daughter, who is seventeen and a half, tells me, of course without knowing what use I intend to make of her confidences : " When I read the description of a place I see it all before me with all its details, and if later on I happen to come across the original which the author has tried to describe, I am always disappointed, for I have never seen it as it is in reality. The same thing occurs when persons are in question. I see them before me with the traits the writer gives them, but if on the next page there is an illustration representing the passage which I have visualized, I am again always disappointed, for it never corresponds with my own representation." The phenomenon is too well known for me to insist upon it any longer, and as a final comment upon this matter of similarity, I should like to call attention to the difference in the two series of images : the illustrations of my fore- consciousness are revived perceptions ; those of my daughter's are new compositions realized with elements of previous perceptions. Our fore-conscious self is quite capable of producing these too, as we shall soon have occasion to observe. But before I abandon this discussion I must lay still greater stress upon the difference between the two varieties in a manner strikingly analogous to the trick which the film-makers employ to show what the actors on the screen are recollecting : they project the picture of a person in a thinking attitude, and then, in a cloudy frame, the scene which he is supposed to be recalling. THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 61 of pictures observed in these two reveries. In the first, where the verbal thoughts remain in the background, the images acquire the character qt animated pictures, which seem to form a whole, or at least in which we are able to distinguish whole parts, one particular mental photograph seeming to develop from the preceding one, as in a cinema film, by a slight transition. In the latter day-dream, how- ever, where the skill of the psycho-analyst is required to detect the illustrations in the background, there seems to be only an occasional picture, as in books. Again, these two fancies represent, from this special point of view, extreme types of my own day-dreams : at one end of the series my fore-consciousness thinks in words with a few illustrations distributed at random ; at the other end this ideation seems to proceed by means of pictorial images with occasional verbal expressions. The former procedure recalls directed thinking, the latter the dream process. And between the two there is an infinity of degrees. We are now in a position to distinguish varieties in the lost-in- thought attitude as well. When the chain of associations proceeds by means of ideas expressed in words, the mind is not very far from the state of consciousness, as one may guess from the strict logic of the concatenated arguments, which give the whole the appearance of a structure elaborated under the direction of conscious volition. The mind does not insist upon one supposition to develop an absurd situation, but passes immediately to the next logical idea. Perhaps we shall better realize how near these streams of thought are to the surface if we contrast them with the visual reverie : as soon as I am re-enacting the recollections of my holidays, I stop even my fore-conscious reasoning. I do not create any more new associations. My mind is absent to such a degree that I proceed as if the present did not any longer exist ; I live in the past ; I am for a few moments living in the conditions of the pseudologia phantast. This is a feature which will furnish an argument for later discussions. There is still another difference between the two chains of thought under consideration which should be emphasized at this point. (Other distinctions will be examined further 62 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS on.) In the Folkestone phantasy, which does not awaken very strong affects, all the associations centre round a single series of recollections. It is what I call an indifferent day- dream, because it is not very obtrusive, nor of the kind that disturbs directed thinking. The second is of a more emotional character. Practically it owes its genesis to the slight emotion aroused by the dispatch from my colonel, one of a more or less anxious expectancy : " What will be his opinion of my application ? Will his attitude be favourable to me ? " (Everybody who has been in the army knows the importance of the colonel's opinions.) Next to this we find my anxiety to complete, as quickly as possible, the scientific studies which I am undertaking, for these, to me, mean obtaining my doctor's degree, which I justly regard as a matter of great importance. It further seems curious to my conscious ego that I should appear to attach so much importance in my fore-consciousness to the question of my next leave, for in reality I was not particularly anxious to obtain extra leave, as the Belgian regulations provided for ten days' leave every four months, and this was regularly granted ; moreover, I had other serious reasons for not caring about another early crossing to England. The fact that I had returned to the front the day before, leaving the sick-bed of my son, may be responsible for this. Anyhow, the concatenation makes a whole out of these different worries of varying intensity. However, it has also a deeper meaning which the attentive reader may guess : it deals in reality with my secret ambition for distinction, which was still further accentuated by my doubts as to the stability of the situation as I left it when the war broke out. For all these reasons this fancy is far from being an indifferent one. Accordingly, it is no wonder that it attracted my fore-conscious attention so strongly that I no longer understood what I was reading and had to put my book down for a moment. I complete this analysis by remarking — in opposition to the revived recollections of the Folkestone phantasy — how easily in fore-conscious thinking one subject is abandoned tor another : I jump from the argument with the colonel THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 63 to the anxiety about my work, and then from the front to my family in London, and the question of leave. In our voluntary ideation, on the contrary, when we have, for instance, to write an essay about a given subject — ^the daily task of a journalist — we keep that subject in the focus of our attention for a considerable time, even if it does not provoke the slightest emotion in our inner self; we turn it over again and again, so as to consider all sides of it, we examine it from all possible angles before we abandon it. Our fore-conscious thinking, on the contrary, seems ex- cessively capricious : the recent reception of the colonel's note — ^half an hour previously — has stirred me at least sufficiently to escape the repression that is trying to weigh it down (so as to keep my conscious field clear and allow me to read), and it forms the first links of a distracting series of associations. From what we know about conscious thought processes we might expect that all these successive ideas would have centred round this emotionally accentuated complex ; but no, it is immediately abandoned for another, with which it associates. This latter bears, it is true, a stronger emotional accent, but this in its turn is soon lost sight of for a new series of associations, behind which there is only a slightly emphasized affect ; and this offends our sense of logic more than the first abandonment. This capricious meandering, of whose reason we know nothing whatever, seems to me the most puzzling procedure that we have hitherto met with. A previous statement pointed out the fact that the two day-dreams which we have just analysed display the character of opposite extremes. We shall now devote our attention to a phantasy in which the visual and verbal elements are combined somewhat differently. It is also of the sort which I call indifferent, and does not diverge from a single central idea. Preliminary Statement. — At the beginning of the day- dream there is a question of a medical certificate. This hints at a complex of thoughts which may be summed up as follows : I had just returned to the front from an extra leave, which had been granted to allow me to see my son 64 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS on his sick-bed in hospital. As a proof of the sincerity of the telegram that had reached me I had had to produce a medical certificate, in which, however, something was not quite in order. But, as I hadhoped, my superiors had not been aware of this. The second part of the phantasy centres round an incident that had occurred the same day. An orderly from a Belgian Field Hospital had come into my office that day and pro- voked my anger. He came with a request from Lady V., the head nurse, but spoke and behaved so impolitely that I flatly refused to grant it. He left the room threatening me with Lady V.'s vengeance. I immediately wrote a report on his behaviour, demanding his punishment, and sent it to my commanding officer, Major H., as regulations pre- scribe. However, I had some doubts about the manner in which Lady V. would regard the incident, for she was extremely influential, and I knew that the chief medical officer was practically at her mercy. In a Belgian military hospital there are medical officers and also an administrative officer, known as the gestionnaire, who, amongst other functions, has authority over the sub- ordinate staff. Day-dream. — I have made an attempt to avoid obsessive thoughts with the purpose of falling quickly asleep. There- fore I have tried to think of nothing but the fact that I shall have an interview to-morrow with my commanding officer at Winnezeele. But I have soon forgotten my original purpose, and unawares I have associated with the chosen recollection the following ideas : My superior will not even mention the medical certificate I have sent him. Major H. also will have let it pass without looking at it. (Here I interrupt my concatenating with the reflection : / am thinking again ! But never mind, the chain is of the indifferent sort. Thereupon I resume unwittingly :) To whom will Major H. transmit my report F Either to the chief medical officer or to the gestionnaire ; not to Countess V. Stilly the latter will have her say in the matter. What if I warned her so as to dispose her in my favour and arouse her feelings against the culprit ? I begin to compose the letter which I intend to THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 65 write to her with this purpose, but am interrupted by tJie idea : What if I enclosed my visiting-card (with my academic title) ? What if I asked Captain Y. to send his corporal with the letter to the hospital ? And I might add a copy of my report to it. But wliat a loss of time to copy that long report ! Still, I might enclose my own copy and tear the sheet from my field notebook. However, I might still want that copy, I could ask her to return it to me after perusal. But what if I went to see her rnyself? I shall have to put on my best uniform, Fll send the orderly to ask her for an intewiew and tell him to give her my visiting- card. (Acting :) / am talking to Lady V., and relate the events. Perhaps she will offer to send the man back to his regiment, I shall simply require a slight disciplinary measure. But what if she sides with him ? One never knows. She might telephone to Major H, to thwart me. Therefore I had better postpone calling on her till I myself have talked to him, I see myself already on the way to see Major II. But all at once I become aware that I am forging a fore-consdous chain of thoughts again, instead of sleeping. My first idea is to retrace it and write it down. But immediately I say to myself : " No, it is not important enough. But what if it were a case contra- dicting my theory, viz. that the association should be provoked by my emotion and not by a wish ? But this supposition is wrong : in the present case the wish is a consequence of my emotion. The wish inspiring the concatenation is to the purport that the offender should not escape his punishment, and therefore I am trying to predispose Lady V, against him, thus depriving him of the assistance of the only person who is likely to take up his defence. Consequently the wish is a result of my emotion, and I am going to put the chain down in my diary, I open my eyes and start writing. The two previous analyses have made us already suffi- ciently familiar with the fore-conscious thought-processes, allowing us to perceive that my fore-conscious visualizing power is fully active where I am talking to Lady V. From this point onwards the chain is comparable to a film in which I was, as said before, actor and spectator at the same time. Making exception for a few reflections which we shall soon examine as a whole, every single sentence stands for a whole acted scene. Some of these scenes I will presently describe. As a matter of fact, the chain as it is written down here 5 66 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS is absolutely similar to the sketch of a film-play ; the words simply express the part which I am acting in fancy. Readers who share my fate in that they are not of the visual type would find it difficult to imagine what went on in my mind, if they had not the recollection of dream scenes at their disposal as a term of comparison. Indeed, at a certain moment all the images stood before me with the vividness of real dream pictures. I have here another parenthetical remark to offer, to the effect that I believe that my practice in analysing my phantasies has developed my faculty for observing these fore-conscious images, which may explain their vividness, and I cannot but think that persons predisposed as I am, but unprepared, will be unable to imagine the scenes described as vividly as they appeared to me during this musing. Moreover, we should not forget that ordinary persons do not, as a rule, take the slightest notice of their verbal and visual thoughts when they are wool-gathering, because repressing them is more natural to them than observing them — unless in some very special cases which we shall consider later. Mostly they simply awake from them or break them off with an effort, and their psychic attention follows other channels. Still, everybody may find in his memory the means to fancy to a certain extent what went on in my mind during this phantasy, and will thus be able to judge of the truth of my comments ; and it is even fortunate that circumstances favour this personal reconstitution, for to give a complete detailed description of a day-dream as I perceived it fore- consciously would be impossible to me. It would require the talents of a descriptive writer, which are denied to me. But the reader's fancy will supply my shortcomings. My superior will not even mention the medical certificate I have sent him : this sentence represents a visualized recollection. In my fancy I see in my mind's eye my commanding officer's office at the precise moment when my certificate is brought in by an orderly. He himself is absent and his chair vacant. I see his secretary, my colleague B., open the envelope, read my note, glance at the certificate and do the necessary writing for its transmission to the general headquarters without any suspicion that it is out of order. THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 67 Major H, also will have let it pass without looking at it. With this sentence the scene has changed. Instead of being in Winnezeele I am now in Cassel. As if no walls existed for me, I see the arrangement of my major's offices and I witness the filing of my certificate by a secretary without my little fraud being detected. It is while my mind is closely attentive to this well-known procedure in familiar surroundings that I " come to," and my visualization is interrupted for a little while by this return to consciousness. Afterwards it is resumed, and even very distinctly, whilst I am composing my letter. Indeed, I notice very distinctly the lines which I am supposed to be writing to Lady V., and see myself enclosing my visiting-card in the envelope. With the next sentence, " What if I asked Captain Y, to send his corporal with the letter to the hospital .^ " I am back in my own office again, which I share with that officer. As a matter of fact the sentence stands for a whole scene, during which I make my request to the captain. He objects because of the amount of work that still has to be done by his man. I suggest sending him after office -hours. The captain agrees. But these visualizations call for one significant comment : they are not the recollections of scenes that have been per- ceived before ; they are obviously composed by the admixture of images stored in memory : in the last instance the image of my own person moving in the memorial image of my office. This is what we call thinking in pictures, and it is obvious that its verbal rendering is only a very incomplete translation of the actual happenings. Therefore, as I said before, every sentence stands for a whole acted scene, the words being like the legends of a film-play. We notice also that my imagination suppresses the walls, or at least, like Asmodee in Lesage's Diable hoiteux, it sees through the walls, that is, suppresses natural hindrances. We shall come across more than one instance of this peculiarity. The sentences which we are commenting on at present afford me the opportunity to offer yet another remark as to the similarity of day- and night-dreams : I cannot doubt for a moment that I was really thinking fore-consciously at this point : " //I asked Captain Y.," etc., and yet the if is dropped at once, for I perform in fancy 68 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS the act which is only introduced hypothetically in the text. " The dream ignores the supposition." My fore-consciousness does not ignore it, but at the same time acts as if it did not exist. This coexistence of hypothesis and reaHty is remark- able, in my opinion, and \yil\ give us further the key to understanding the above statement of Freud's. Exactly the same thing happens in the next scene, introduced by : " But if I werit to see her myself^ " Scarcely has this suggestion come to the fore when I see myself making preparations for this call : I am in the act of dressing. Immediately thereafter I am transported two miles away and find myself in the orderly-room of the hospital, asking a private to take my visiting-card to Lady V. And the next moment I am talking with her in her own private room. Still I had only thought that / might call upon her, and put it down as a hypothesis in my notes. The if is forgotten as soon as thought, and swifter than the wind I fancy myself in different places without any consideration of time or distance. Here I recall a previous remark : just as I lost sight of my colonel as quickly as I had evoked his spectre before me, I here forget successively that I am in Winnezeele, then in Cassel, later in my own office, afterwards in my billet, to find myself finally back in Lady V.'s room. The whole conversation with this lady is summed up in a single sentence : "I am talking to Lady V. and relate what has occurred." I could easily fill a page with the description of the way in which she received me, of the satisfaction which I experienced at once again sitting comfortably in an easy- chair, conversing with a highly cultivated lady in the pleasant surroundings of her richly furnished boudoir. The reader's fancy will supplement the voluntary incompleteness of these comments, as they would lead us away from our main object. Indeed, what has been written so far has sufhciently illustrated our first thesis, that verbal thinking is much briefer than thinking in images. We provisionally close these comments with the remark that at the end of the day-dream the scenery has changed once more as I see myself en route to Major H. The above explanations have brought to the fore several problems which we shall deal with one after another so as to render possible, in a fmal synthetic review, a consideration THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 69 of eveiy single peculiarity of this complicated thought- structure. Therefore we again hark back to our analogy of a cinematographic film, and ask ourselves how many sections we can distinguish in it, as necessitated by the surroundings in which the action takes place. Before making this dissection we should observe that two entirely different preoccupations are discernible in the day- dream : the first part, going as far as the first interruption, is all about my medical certificate, which I hope will cause me no trouble ; the second part tends toward the realization of my desire to revenge myself for the offence of the soldier sent to me by Lady V. But if we do not take these two different purposes into account we can distinguish in the visualized phantasy, considered as a film, five different sections : the first represents the reception of my certificate in my commanding officer's office. The second, the repetition of this scene in my major's office. The third episode is a bit longer ; it takes place in my own office, but in the beginning only my writing-paper is fully visualized ; at the end, the whole room with its occupants is projected clearly on the screen whi^e I am deliberating with Captain Y. The fourth part is tlie longest of all : it represents my possible visit to Lady V. First I see myself in the act of dressing (in my billet), and the other different actions follow in a natural sequence : successively I find myself acting in the orderly-room of the hospital and in Lady V.'s boudoir. In the fifth and last part I am all of a sudden driving in a motor-car on the way to JVIajor H.'s headquarters. But the question arises : why is the film interrupted four times ? Fore-consciousness has realized in this phantasy two of the three great unities of the great French classical drama of the seventeenth century : unity of time and unity of action. But why not the third : unity of place ? Indeed, the scenery changes continually. In other worda^ why does not every single scene develop naturally with a slight transition out of the image immediately preceding it, exactly as in the verbal chain, where a link is observable between any pair of alternative ideas ? For, strictly speaking, the link is missing between every two consecutive sections of the visual phantasy, considered as a film. 70 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS I am perfectl}^ aware that somebody might argue that some of the gaps which I have noticed in my visual imagina- tions did not exist in reahty (an argument which I will meet at the appropriate moment), but are due to my want of skill in observing. Only these sudden passages from one scene to another are familiar to everybody from our nocturnal dreams. Moreover, it would be impossible to explain how I could have lost sight of the scenes which I passed through, as a transition between two successive parts, say, e.g., between Parts III and IV, from my office to my billet. Why should I have lost the remembrance of the visual repre- sentation, since I am able to fill up the gap each time with the proper verbal thought ? The further analysis will give us the reply to this objection. For reasons of method I ask permission to leave provisionally out of consideration in the following discussion the two first sections of the phantasy. ^ This procedure will allow us to discover that whenever a new part of the film is started we meet simultaneously with an if in the accompanying text. Part III, in which I request Captain Y. to send his corporal with my letter to the Belgian hospital, ends with the sentence : "I could ask Lady V. to return (my report after perusal)." And the next sentence is : " But if I went to see her myself ? " This shows that I have all at once abandoned the idea of sending the corporal with a letter for a new suggestion which has now arisen : that of calling myself upon Lady V. And immediately thereafter the scene has changed : I visualize my billet, in which I am dressing. Consequently it looks as if the change of scene, the breaking off of that part of the film, were due to a new idea arising in the forum of the mind. When presently we concentrate our attention upon the transition between Parts IV and V, we notice that something similar has happened : the film represents me in a boudoir talking to Lady V., when all at once I see myself driving in a car on the road to Cassel. If we look at the verbal render- ing of the phantasy we get again the explanation of this sudden change of scene : during my discussion with the head I Further analyses will prove that our theory is applicable to every day-dream. * THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 71 nurse the idea has arisen that she might side with her orderly and telephone to Major H. to thwart my purpose. Imme- diately thereupon I conceive the idea of seeing this officer before I call upon her. And as soon as I drop the idea of the interview with her the visualization is interrupted, and the hypothesis " // I went to talk to Major H. first " is at once represented. The above discussion shows also that at the end of each visual part the mind has made an objection. (Between Parts III and IV it is expressed explicitly, but runs thus : " She might not return my report, which I may still want." Between Parts IV and V it is worded : " She might side with her orderly," etc.) It is obvious that it is because of these objections that the pursuance of the idea, and con- sequently its visual representation, has been interrupted. This has necessitated on each occasion the search for another solution to the problem which occupies the fore-consciousness. The change of scene is consequently due to the objections that are successively raised, causing rejection and the introduction of a new hypothesis. The visual elements are dependent upon the thought-process ; they form only a constituent part of it. But in each case the rejection is based on the same reason : *' Thus I shall not get the fellow punished." This is the main motive that sets my brain working, the touchstone for all the suppositions that are successively formulated ; only the result of this act of discrimination is not rendered each time in the verbal repro- duction, although there is no doubt that the ultimate end was all the time present in the mind. When we now examine the different hypotheses a little more closely, we notice that they are all introduced b}^ the word "if." Our fore-consciousness visualizes the content of the supposition, but the hypothetic character of the phrase is not represented. Does that mean that our fore- consciousness ignores hypothesis ? If it did, it could not object to it nor reject it. There cannot be any doubt that it sees the supposition, or what is the same, its image, but it is not the dupe of this actuality. It does not ignore that two ways are open to it : it may reject it or adopt it and associate upon it as a new basis. The point is that the possibility of this choice is not expressed in so many words ; 72 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS we have no awareness of it ; still, it is present in the mind, and active at the required moment. We shall examine this mental procedure again when we have more arguments at our disposal. We gather from this discussion that when our thinking is preponderatingly visual, not all the elements of thought are represented by our mental images. Thus the latter are also in a certain manner the illustrations of our thoughts, just as when a certain number of isolated pictures accompany our ideation in words. There is only one manner of rendering more or less completely, of taking into account all the rela- tions between the elements of our intellections ; that is, with the aid of conscious speech. This does not alter the fact that our awareness is more impressed by the vivid pictures that accompany our mental processes than by the ideas that act in the background ; we retain the former more easily. But it is precisely the r61e of psycho-analysis to explain the respective importance and action of the different factors that intervene in the ideation that goes on without the knowledge of consciousness, and it is Freud's merit that he led the way to the discovery of mental processes of which nobody before him had the faintest notion. The reader may not yet be convinced of the plain truth of the assertion that even in fore-conscious visualized thinking the visions do not constitute the principal mechanism of the process. Therefore I will insist upon the point a moment longer, and we will now reconstruct the visual images into a concatenation. If the picturesque part has played the leading r61e, not a single link should be missing ; we shall have a perfect film. But if there is a link missing, we shall only find its verbal correspondent somewhere in the verbal association, which forms a more perfect whole, as it gives an account of processes and relations of which the fore- consciousness is not aware. Th« third part of the film represents my conversation with Captain Y. in our office. In the fourth part I am in the act of dressing in my own bedroom. All that has happened, or that in real life would have happened, in the interval between these two actions, namely, my walking from my office to my billet, is not THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 73 represented. If in a cinema they projected two successive scenes like these on the screen without interpolating a short explanatory text, the spectators would be unable to follow the action. But we find the explanation of this lack of transition if we turn to our text : "I could ask Lady V. to return my report. But if I went to see her myself ? " Here the absence of the missing thought (the objection, " She might not return it," which we mentioned before) does not strike us at all. In conscious life we are indeed used to omissions like the one in this sequence, and it has been very easy to complete the short-cut. Abbreviations of this kind are characteristic of realistic thinking. It may even be questioned whether our mind would have become the marvellous instrument that it is if we were not able to replace long-winded connections by short-cuts of this nature. Therefore, when I say : "I could ask Lady V. to return my report. What if I went to see her myself ? " the missing link seems so natural that in our waking life we do not even become aware of its absence. But the same cannot be said about a missing transition in a film : in the last image of the third part I am discussing the matter with Captain Y. in our office, and in the first image of the fourth part, following immediately upon it, I am in the act of dressing in my bedroom. As the two images succeed one another rapidly upon the screen, the mind does not seize this sudden change of conditions ; we do not see what has happened between the two images ; we are at a loss what to make of it. Moving pictures do not allow of any visual short-cuts. For that reason, whenever the playwright of a cinema sketch wants to bridge over two situations, he has recourse to a few sentences which he pro- jects on the screen. Our fore-conscious visualizing ideation proceeds in a similar manner, only the thoughts, expressed in words on the screen, need not be projected, because they are present in the mind without any awareness, and only when our analysis retraces our processes do we translate them into words. The gap in the pictorial part is filled up by mental conditions which do not achieve expression in the fore-conscious state. The same reasoning holds good for the transition between the other parts of the phantasy ; at the end of the fourth 74 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS episode I am talking to Lady V. in her boudoir, and at the beginning of the fifth I am driving in a car far away, etc. Consequently, we are entitled to draw the conclusion that the thought associations, which are rendered in words when w^e succeed in becoming conscious of our fancy, are the principal part of the phantasy, the visual images only the illustrations. The examination of the text, comparable to that followed by the modest performer of the Punch-and-Judy show, who remains almost unnoticed behind the background curtain of the stage, cannot be any longer delayed. And yet, to prevent our straying amid the perplexing tangle of the untrodden jungle we must first check our progress for a little while, in order to clear up the main obstacles which would delay us, when we will attempt to trace a highway through the new region which we wish to add to the common good. When in the first chapter we examined the genesis of fore-conscious thoughts, lengthy considerations relating to external and internal word and thought associations were imposed upon us. This time we must devote some attention to a new mode of association, brought about by the visual character of our fore-conscious thought-processes. Indeed, some of the concatenations of the present phantasy are due to the circumstance that certain plastic details presented themselves to my mind's eye and impressed me. In the first instance I am going to try to show that the idea " Lady V. might telephone to Major H." has been introduced into the chain as a consequence of my visionary state. As I have explained, I saw in a mental vision Lady V.'s boudoir before me in all its details, with its furniture, its easy-chairs with the soft cushions, etc., exactly as I had observed them during a previous visit. At a certain moment I must have noticed the telephone apparatus on her desk, and I cannot but admit that the introduction of the idea of her telephoning to Major H. for the purpose of thwarting me was due to circumstances inherent in my vision. This again, then, would be a mode of connection based upon an external association, but of a pictorial nature. ^ * I use the word "pictorial" int€»ntionally, for an external (word) asso- ciation may also be based upon a visual, not a pictorial phenomenon, e.g. when the decomposition of a word has been effected by the eye : My son sees the name Zwanepoel (Swanpool) on the window of a grocery and exclaims : "I say ! A swan in a pool ! " But in transforming Rousseau into un mux sot (a red-haired fool), it is the ear that has intervened. THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 75 However, I am quite aware that this instance of pictorial association is not very convincing, and I will immediately adduce another. In another phantasy I was at a certain moment stamping on the floor with the purpose of crushing a small insect, just as our small Flemish farmers stamp over their freshly sown land instead of rolling it, that is, treading sideways, when my mental eye noticed that my boots did not everywhere touch the floor — that is, they did not touch it where the sole curves up to meet the heel. This perception was the cause of my fore-conscious suggestion of the use of a roller such as the gardener uses for his lawns. But I soon noticed that even the contact of the roller was not perfect, for I saw the insect hiding in the interstices of the floor, and the latter in all their details. I think that after these instances the reality of the pictorial associations cannot be doubted any longer, for the vision alone can be responsible for the genesis of ideas so far-fetched. 2. Questions and Answers. The field is now clear for the discussion of the verbal thought process of this phantasy. We are now able to reproduce the text of the day-dream — at least of that part which we considered before — in the following way, which makes it look like a problem which the fore-consciousness tries to solve by successive attempts, the question being : How SHALL I GET THE SOLDIER PUNISHED ? ^Vhat if I warned her (so as to I start composing the letter. dispose her in my favour and arouse her feehngs against the culprit) ? If I enclosed my visiting-card ? No reply (suggestion accepted). If I asked Captain Y. to send his He is too busy. corporal with it ? And if he went after office-hours ? No reply (suggestion accepted). If I added a copy of my report ? A great waste of time to copy it. If I tore my own report out of my I might still want it. notebook ? If I asked her to return it ? (Understood : she might not do so.) 76 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS If I went to see her myself ? I shall put on my best miiform. If I handed my card to an orderly (Suggestion accepted and visu- and asked for an interview ? alized, as well as the inter- view itself.) If she offered to have the man sent I should only require a slight back to his regiment ? punishment. But if she sided with him, telephon- Better not call upon her until I ing to Major H. to thwart me ? have seen Major H. myself. We obtain thus a list of suppositions opposed to a corresponding list of objections. The analysis makes the whole dream appear as a concatenation of suppositions and objections, of questions and answers disposed in pairs, between which there do not seem to exist any very apparent transitions. And yet there is a tie between each pair of successive hypotheses, and it is even a common tie, although it remains in the background. This common bond is the ever-recurring problem, after the objection has done away with the proposed hypothesis : " Still, I want the soldier punished ! " This ever-recurring expression of anxiety might be inserted after each pair of questions and replies, as in the monotonous responses of a litany in the Roman Catholic Church. The suppositions and objections linked to a common cord suggest also the image of a string of beads, the latter being suspended from the string in pairs. This list of proposed solutions and refutations teaches us several things, among which one of the most apparent is that it brilliantl}^ illustrates the truth of the popular saying that the wish is father to the thought. It is evident that the wish not to allow the disrespectful private to escape his punishment provokes every other thought, continually proposing new means of reaching its end, and is the incentive for the invention of the different proceedings. Therefore we might add that it illustrates another proverb : Necessity is the mother of invention. We may conclude provisionally with the remark that this particular day-dream is a fore-conscious attempt at wish- fulfilment, and we shall make use of this knowledge when we come to examine fore-conscious thinking in relation with Freud's theory of night-dreams. THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 77 A second circumstance which the list exhibits even more clearly is that the different solutions proposed are all introduced in the dubitative mode, with an "if." But we see now why Freud has rightly concluded in his book on dreams that unconsciousness (here = the fore-consciousness) is incapable of representing the "if." As soon as an idea is suggested it becomes to the mind a plastic image, as were originally all the objects causing certain excitations. It is only through the later acquisition of speech that the verbal images may become in their turn the objects of perception as substitutes for their plastic correspondents. But not only thoughts introduced in a hypothetical way are immediately transformed into pictures ; the fore-con- sciousness visualizes everything that is capable of being transformed into mental images : even recollections are transformed into mental scenes ; for instance, my visit to the field- hospital. But it is not correct to say that these recollections are transformed into mental images ; these images were perceived when the events which they recall occurred ; they are memory pictures. Of all the events which we witness we possess memory pictures, but we are so accustomed to translate them into words that in our daily life we do not pay the slightest attention to these images, even when they are revived ; we concentrate our attention upon the words by which they are known to us. We are able to think in words ; but lower in the animal scale, where speech is absent, what else but images can exist as elements of thought ? We must not anticipate later discussions ; but we cannot, without comment, pass over the fact that in my day-dreams my fore-consciousness renders into pictures events which I have not witnessed, or things for the visual representation of which the elements, the notions, are absent. During one of my day-dreams I thought of the possible bi-sexuality of a flea ; I saw, in my phantasy, something which I recognize now as an illustration in a book on biology which I used when I was about twenty years of age ; it represented the respiratory and nervous systems of the cockchafer. I took the little tubes by which the air enters, and which are disposed along the edge of the body, for so many vaginas, and the pomt in 78 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS which the body ends for the male organ. Similarly, I fancied once I was on the torpedoed Sussex, and I witnessed the whole scene of the drowning of the passengers and the towing of the floating half of the ship into Calais harbour, although I have never seen a shipwi'eck nor the Sussex herself. We observe that not only the ideas introduced in the conditional mode are visualized as if they were actual, but even the past is represented in images that appear as present ; similarly the future is seen as actual (I see my colonel before me, although he is only going to arrive to-morrow). We now understand how it is that Freud has found that the unconsciousness cannot represent the *' if " ; it is because it knows only one mode of expression : the plastic present. I conclude that when the concatenation sinks deep enough the fore-consciousness visualizes all the thoughts — but not their relations — whatever their origin or their character. We may also conclude from our knowledge of waking life that all sentences introduced by " if " are preparatory to solutions of real or hypothetical problems, in other words, are tentative accommodations. When we abandon the consideration of the individual thoughts for the examination of the architecture of the structure as a whole, we become aware at once of a certain analogy with some products of primitive literature. But before developing this similarity we want to find out whether this form of construction is simply accidental, or whether it is constant and characteristic of fore-conscious thinking. Therefore we shall now examine a new phantasy from this special point of view. Preliminary Statement. — / am once more compelled on this occasion to unveil my innermost thoughts. I vanquish my fear of possible irony because I hope my endeavours will be appreciated by those who are qualified to judge them. For the understanding of this phantasy it is necessary for me to state that at the time when it occurred I was ruminating ideas of re-marriage, and I had talked the matter over with my children ; this explains the first part of the thought- structure. I had further in my mind some petty anxieties relating to a journey which I had to make, and to my time-table in school, THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 79 and also some minor worries which need no further comment, while the ever-present desire to add further contributions to my theory of fore-conscious thinking also makes its appearance in the chain. Deeper wishes still remain in the shadow. All these worries of different intensity are woven together in the chain f which I registered one morning at six o^ clock, when I was awake an hour earlier than usual. The phantasy started, when I had not yet opened my eyes, as follows : Day-dbeam. — Shall I get my book and read, or shall I con- tinue to think about Miss X. ? But what is the good of thinking about her ? And what should I say to my children to explain why I prefer her to Miss Y., to whom they seem to incline ? (Here my imagination reproduced before my mental eye an occurrence which took place the day before yesterday : Miss Y. is in my home with two members of her family ; we see them out, and at the front door we all repeat the same remarks. This recollection is interrupted by the thought :) Miss X. looks younger than Miss Y. But the latter seems so attached to her father that I should have to detach her from him before she could really become attached to me. I might let her read some works on psycho-analysis. That might help. But how could I make her realize that I am not any more the simple teacher of fifteen years ago? For I remember that she once said in my presence that she would never marry an insignificant man. I could let her read one of my publications. I might start by sending her an order written on one of my visiting-cards that bears my academic title. By the way, I must not forget to send a card of congratulation to my friend V. on the occasion of his election as a member of the Flemish Academy. God knows whether he may not one day propose my election in the scientific section. But for taking part in the discussions I ought to improve my accent, which is not as good as I could wish it. That again would help me to obtain my professorship. That reminds me of my friend S., who the other day seemed to regard me with an air of jealousy. Is it because he is afraid that I might obtain a chair sooner than he, although one of his certificates is of a higher degree than one of mine? Well, that small difference is rather in my favour, for I had to over- come greater difficulties in obtaining my doctorate than he had, (Here my son pushes his elbow into my back.) When I 80 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS am married again he will return to his own room. But will its furniture he good enough to move into Miss X.'s hou^e ? (Here is a part which I have been unable to retrace.) . . . But at what time shall I take the train to B. ? I shall not have finished my last lesson until 11.30 ; shall I have time to lunch before my departure? What if I were to take a sandwich or two in the train? Oh no, that is so vulgar. I shall get lunch in B. in my usual restaurant. No matter what it costs ; that will he defrayed. What commissions have I got to exeoute after the meeting ? Shall I go and look up V. ? Better wait until I want him, for he is always very husy. Shall I go and call on Mrs. R. ? No, I am no longer interested in the matter she wrote about. My colleague L. told me he had spoken to her a few days ago. He went to B. last Saturday, although he had promised to make up our time-table himself But the head master made it. He put me down for two hours of English only in the highest form, which is one hour too little. But I remember L. told me he was going to suppress one hour a week for all the languages, so as to find time to introduce the new Spanish course. Consequently my colleague R. teaches two hours a week less than I do. Consequently I was right and the head master wrong (in a discussion we had last week), and my colleague M.^s duties are all right. Still, I shall have to verify that. If I am right I shall pass a certain duty over to somebody else. But when is the new time-table going to he introduced? From the 6th onward. But there is still a member of the staff missing. Oh, I remember, the head said he was going to replace him temporarily if he had not yet arrived. But yesterday was the 5th : I wonder now whether my appoint- ment at B. is for the 7th or the 9th. If it were for the former date, this warning would be something like a case of tele- pathy (?). What if I could reduce telepathy to a special case of day-dreaming ? I am going to look up the exact date of the appointment immediately. I awake, jump out of bed and verify the date in my diary, I have copied this phantasy from my notebook just as it was recorded immediately after I had become conscious of it. But once I had started to analyse my observations and to make the discoveries which the reader will gradually THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 81 become acquainted with, it slowly dawned upon me that the record of my musings does not exactly render the streams of thought as they generated and proceeded in my mind. Thus, if I had previously had any notion that the quaint architectonic thought-structure which we discovered in the previous analysis was to be met with in my day-dreams, it is quite possible that I should involuntarily have been influenced by that knowledge, while I was recording, and I might unwittingly have transformed my text so as to fit my preconception. Therefore my ignorance is, as it were, a guarantee of the spontaneity of my reproductions, as it may be a revelation of their shortcomings. But anyhow my notes are very imperfect, for they are only the translation into words of phenomena which it is impossible to recapitulate by the means at the disposal of consciousness. If I had the use of a perfect cinematographic apparatus and a perfect gramophone I might attempt to reconstruct my phantasies by mechanical means. As the pictures would appear on the screen the gramophone would give an auditory per- ception of the verbal thoughts (or at least of the elements which are not represented by images), and one would have to be able to regulate both instruments in such a manner that at one moment the pictures would strike us more than the words which accompany them, whilst at another moment the main impression would reach the ear, the eye perceiving only faintly and vaguely. This would already be something of an approach toward a faithful reproduction of the fore- conscious thought processes, but it would still be very imperfect, for it would not give us the slightest idea of the numerous memory-complexes that are awakened and reviewed in a flash, nor of the manner in which the associations take place, nor of the emotions that manifest themselves, nor of other processes which we shall presently discuss. This well- justified remark is merely intended to demon- strate that it is absolutely impossible to register in words all that actually took place during the riiind-wandering ; it is impossible to translate fore-conscious chains of thought into conscious terms with any approach to completeness. I shall therefore reconstruct the phantasy in accordance with the plan exemplified in the soldier fancy. We shall discover 6 82 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS by this test whether it will show the concatenation of ideas. The gaps which occur will be the subject of further comment and possible explanations. We cannot, however, as in the first case, inscribe at the top of the list the statement of the problem, as in reality several propositions are successively reviewed in the course of the chain. For that reason we shall divide it into its apparent parts and examine the question which each part attempts to solve. I. How SHALL I UTILIZE THIS HoUR BEFORE RISING ? Questions. Answers. 1. Shall I read Freud's book ? 1. No ; it is too early. 2. Shall I continue to think about 2. No ; what is the use of that ? Miss X ? I. How SHALL I PERSUADE MY CHILDREN TO ACCEPT MY IdEAS ? 3. If she agrees with me, what 3. No reply {revived visual recol- shall I say to my children to lections of. Miss Y.^s call). make them share my prefer- ence and abandon their in- clination for Miss Y. ? III. How SHALL I WIN MiSS X. ? 4. How shall I detach her from 4. By psycho-analytical read- her father ? ings. 6. How shall I dispose her favour- 5. Show her my books {preceded ably toward me ? by a not distracting co- ordinated series of recollec- tions). 6. How shall I open the cam- 6. Leave her an order on one paign ? of my visiting-cards {fol- lowed by a memory associa- tion). IV. How SHALL I GET MY PROFESSORSHIP ? 7. Could I play an active role in 7. Yes, but improve my accent. the Academy ? 8. Would I not sooner obtain a 8, No reply {revived recollec- chair at the University ? tions). {After the outer sensory stimulus.) 9. Will the furniture of John's 9. {Gap.) bedroom be good enough to be removed to Miss X.'s house ? THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 83 V. How SHALL I ARRANGE MY TrIP TO B. ? Questions, Answers. 10. If I have no time to lunch 10. No ; too vulgar. before catching my train, shall I have a sandwich in it ? 11. Shall I have lunch in my 11. Yes: that does not matter usual restaurant and be late and the cost will be de- at the meeting ? frayed. 12. What if afterwards I were to 12. No ; better wait until it is look up V. ? necessary. 13. Shall I go to see Mrs. R. ? 13. No ; no longer interested in her case {revived remem- brances), VI. School Anxieties. 14. Suppose I were put down on 14. That was done intentionally the time-table with an hour {revived recollections). too little ? 15. Suppose I were put down with 15. Pass over part of my duty two hours too many ? to a colleague. 16. When will the new time-table 16. From Monday the 6th on- be introduced ? ward. 17. What if the missing colleague 17. The head master will replace has not arrived yet ? him {revived recollections). VII. Could this Idea be utilized for my Book ? 18. Suppose my appointment were 18. A case of telepathy {corn- on the 7th instead of the 9th ? plex of recollections), 19. What if I could reduce tele- 19. Awake to verify date {the pathy to a special case of reply is a motion). day-dreaming ? We have now succeeded in reducing the outHnes of this very complicated chain to a succession of questions and answers, of suppositions and rejoinders, just as in the previous phantasy. Therefore we are still more tempted to recognize in this procedure a process proper to fore- conscious thinking. If we put this hypothesis again to the test for the fancies which we have already analysed, which will not take long, we shall find that these also may be referred to the same type. Take the example on pp. 57-58 relating to my colonel : 1. If the colonel remarks that 1. I'll point out that they are this is the second application quite similar, in one fortnight ? 84 THE PSYCHOLOGY OP DAY-DREAMS 2. How shall I be able to con- 2. (Gap.) tinue my work if I get one of these posts ? 3. Shall I live in Etaples ? 3. There are instruction and rest camps everywhere. 4. Shall I stay part of the time 4. I could live there with my in London ? family. 5. By whom will my leaves be 6. I may take advantage of granted ? both my superiors. 6. Shall I get my next leave 6. I shall not mention my within two months ? urgent leave to my new chief. The musing on p. 42 relating to Folkestone contains only one question and one answer : " If I had arrived at Sandgate, how could I still have caught the boat at Folke- stone ? I should have taken the 'bus running along the sea-coast." All the rest of this phantasy is simply a drifting on the stream of revived recollection. We are now bound to admit that we have unawares hit upon an important discovery, which probably explains the method of fore-conscious thinking, the characteristic method of concatenated hypotheses and refutations, of questions and answers, which is still the most popular manner of bringing fresh knowledge to the simple-minded. Tradi- tional literature abounds in examples of this method, from the Roman Catholic catechism,^ and more from the old Jewish literature and perhaps even older written documents, down to the songs and rhymes of our nurseries. The dances in which one row of children advances while the opposite row retreats, stepping backwards, which have been sung all over Europe ever since the epoch of the great migrations — all these dances are danced to songs in which a question put by one row of children is answered by the » This mfinner of proceeding by questions and answers is still much in use in books for scarcely hterate people, and I fancy the predilec- tion of popular newspaper readers for dialogue is simply a primitive trait. It would be very easy to develop this idea, but as it is not relevant here I conclude by suggesting that an inquiry into the history of the dialogue in dramatic literature would be very interesting, for the dialogue may be imagined as a reproduction of the fore -conscious thought-process in which the interrogator and respondent are no longer the same person, Greek tragedy up to Sophocles seems at first sight an especially promising field of investigation from this point of view, for before his time the dialogue waa rendered by one person or actor, exactly as in our phantasies. THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 85 children confronting them. Sometimes the question may- be replaced by an offer (parallel to our suppositions) which all through the song expresses the same desire : for example, the wish to obtain possession of the bride. The French children still listen to-day to the randonnees or maroites ^ which their grandmothers tell them on winter evenings, seated beside the fire. In these stories the question is replaced by a sentence in the conditional mode. Amongst other remains of this structure in popular literature we may mention poems like The House that Jack built. Here the question is understood : What did the cat, the rat, the dog, etc., do ? We find some traces of it in some fairy- tales, as in Little Red Ridinghood : " Oh, Granny, how big your eyes are ! " " All the better to see you with, my dear ! " " Oh, Granny, how large your ears are ! " " All the better to hear you with, my dear ! " " Oh, Granny, how big your teeth are ! " " All the better to eat you with, my dear ! " I think I am right in saying that some books of the Bible still show traces of this original pattern ; also a Hebrew poem, mentioned by Tylor in Primitive Culture (a book which is at present out of my reach), entitled the Khad Gadia : "A kid, a kid, a kid, my father bought it for two coins (?), and then came a cat that ate the kid, and a dog that ate the cat," etc., suggests that the '^ Here follows the translation of one of these randonnees (randonnee — circuit made by an animal chased by a hionter ; it suggests also the meaning of mind -wandering) : " Marotte (= hobby-horse), pick up my ball of worsted." " I won't pick up your ball of worsted until you have given me some bread." I went to my mother : " Mother, give me some bread." " I won't give you any bread until you have given me the key." I went to my father : " Father, give me the key." " I won't give you the key until you have given me a pair of gloves." I went to the glove -maker : " Glove -maker, give me a pair of gloves." " I won't give you a pair of gloves until you have given me some leather." I went to the calf : " Calf, give me some leather." " I won't give you any leather until you have given me some milk." I went to the cow : *' Cow, give me some milk." " I won't give you any milk until you have given me some hay." I went to the mower : " Mower, give me some hay." " I won't give you any hay until you have given me some water." I went to the cloud : " Cloud, give me some water." " I won't give you any water until you have given me some wind."- I went to the sea : " Sea, give me some wind." The sea has given me wind ; I have given wind to the cloud ; the cloud has given me water ; I have given water to the mower, etc. . . . Marotte has picked up my ball of worsted. Cf. Rimea et Jeux de VEnfance, by F. Rolland, Paris, Maisonneuve et Cie, 1883. A variant version of this piece is to be foimd under the title of The Old Woman and her Pig, in More Nursery Rhymes, No. XIX of the Books for the Bairns, edited by W. T. »Stead, London. 86 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS many variants of The House that Jack built, which may- be found all over Europe, are its modern representatives.^ From modern literature I will cite a single instance — Lafontaine's fable of The Milkmaid and the Jar,^ However, this is merely a modernization of an ancient composition in which the antique form has been largely respected ; but by virtue of its content as well as its form it shares in the eternal charm of the masterpieces of literature from Homer down to Shakespeare. * Tylor adds that some Jews consider this poem to be a parable of the past and the future of the Holy Land. » La Laitiere et le Pot au Lait. Perrette sur sa tete ayant un pot au lait, Bien pose sur un covissinet, Pretendait arriver sans encombre a la ville. L^gere et court vetue elle allait a grand pas Ayant mis ce jour -la, pour etre plus habile. Cotillon simple et souliers plats. Notre laitiere ainsi troussee Comptait deja dans sa pensee Tout le prix de son lait ; en employait 1' argent ; Achetait xm cent d'ceufs ; faisait triple couvee : La chose allait k bien par son soin diligent. II m'est, disait-elle, facile D'elever des poulets autour de ma raaison ; Le renard sera bien habile S'il ne m'en laisse assez pour avoir un cochon. Le pore a s'engraisser coutera peu de son ; II etait, quand je I'eus, de grandeur raisonnable ; J'aurai, le revendant, de I'argent bel et bon. Et qui m'empechera de mettre en notre etable, Vu le prix dont il est, une vache et son veau, Que je verrai sauter au milieu du troupeau ? Perrette la-dessus saute aussi, transportee : Le lait tombe ; adieu veau, vache, cochon, couvee. La dame de ces biens quittant d'lm oeil marri Sa fortime ainsi repandue, Va s'excuser a son mari. En grand danger d'etre battue, Le r^cit en farce en fut fait: On I'appela le Pot au Lait. Quel esprit ne bat la campagne ? Qui ne fait chateaux en Espagne ? Picrochole, Pyrrhus, la laitiere, enfin tous, Autant les sages que les fous. Chacim songe en veillant ; il n'est rien de plus doux : Une fiatteuse erreur emporte alors nos S,mes ; Tout le bien du monde est a nous, Tous les honneurs, toutes les femmes. Quand je suis seul, je suis au plus brave un defi ; Je ra'ecarte, je vais d6tr6ner le vSophi ; On ra'^lit roi, mon peuple m'aime : Les diademes vont sur ma tete pleuvant : Quelqu'accident fait-il que je rentre en moi-mfime : Je suis Gros-Jean comme devant. THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 87 3. Memory Drifting. Having noted this curious finding, which has led us to make a brief digression, we will continue the analysis of my phantasy, for it may teach us something further. A glance over the list of replies will show the reader that in some cases they are negative and in others positive, while occasionally they are completely absent. We shall therefore examine the significance of each kind, and see what these differences mean. The first question is answered in the negative. That is why it recurs, If or our unconsciousness accepts no excuses. " I don't know " is non-existent, for nothing is impossible to it. It proceeds like the child, which returns to the same problem again and again until its curiosity is satisfied — unless we force it to be silent. But our fore-consciousness enjoys this privilege, that it cannot be compelled to keep silence, because our will has no power over it. It is its own master, or rather it is dominated by emotion and goes its own way until it somehow or other reaches its goal ; as long as the heart beats a fore-conscious problem is never abandoned until it is solved in a manner satisfactory to itself — ^which does not, however, mean that it must satisfy the conditions which consciousness would impose, or that we must become aware of the solution. Freud stated long ago that unconscious wishes are eternal, and we shall come upon still further illustrations of this truth. But if the same anxiety is manifested again in the second question, how is it that the same problem does not remain in the foreground in the third ques- tion ? — for the second reply is also negative. As a matter of fact, the third query belongs to another part of the chain. We observe that a simple thought-connection (Miss X. — my children — ^Miss Y.), such as we met with several times before in the previous chapter, has allowed the fore-conscious wish (of winning my children over to my views) to come to the fore, and furnished the bridge over which the mind glides gently from the conscious into the fore-conscious state. In reply No. 2 I decline to think about Miss X., but as I am in a state bordering on the 88 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS fore-conscious, my wish proves stronger than my will, and the predominance of my feelings coincides with my loss of consciousness. The same subject (Miss X.) is continued in the second part, only the point of view having again shifted slightly. The transition between the two parts seems normal, although the first problem has been lost sight of, as a consequence of the unexpected and involuntary connection. The third question is not answered at all. How is that silence to be explained ? It might indeed be taken as an exception to the above-mentioned law of the unconscious, that always strives for a reply to its queries, and therefore weaken the conception of its absolute applicability. A close examination, however, proves that at bottom this is not an exception to the rule of query and reply : it simply reveals another of the weaknesses of the fore- conscious thought-process. The new question results in a connection with a visual recollection which becomes so vivid that it is taken for a sensible perception, whereby the wish loses its intensity, so that it does not, during a certain space of time, press for an answer ; its action is momentarily suspended. This amnesia corresponds also to a thought-process of conscious- ness : when in the waking state an image strikes our retina, it often happens that we instantly drop the idea which we were entertaining and devote our attention to the new perception. A single example must suffice to illustrate this : I am occupied at my toilet and I open a drawer of my washing-stand with the intention of taking out a necktie, when my glance falls on a pile of handkerchiefs, con- sisting of white ones and others which were once khaki, but the colour of which has faded to a dirty white. Here my mind goes wandering : " O, I might as well take a fresh handkerchief, for the one I have in my pocket is not clean enough. But not a khaki one, for the person on whom I am going to call might think it dirty. So I had better take a white one." That is what I do, and I close the drawer, not thinking any more of my first purpose. But then I become aware that I have been distracted, that at first I did not intend to take a clean handkerchief; I have for- THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 89 gotten what I opened the drawer for, until I succeed in tracing my way back to the original object of my action. Between this dropping of a purpose and the case occurring in the above phantasy there is only a difference of degree. Here I pass from the conscious to the fore-conscious (or hypnoid state, as it was called before) ,* there I was already in the fore-conscious state. Here the shifting of attention results in an action (or a sokrCion) that was not intended ; there it terminates in a kind of brief hallucination during which I revive a past experience. These dissimilarities are not differences of kind, as we shall see later. But this analogy has shown us that the divergence of attention which has occurred, and has resulted in the absence of a reply to my third question, is not as novel a phenomenon as it seemed at first sight. Next we shall try to find out why, instead of suggesting an unintended action, the mind passes into a sort of hallucinatory state. Before going deeper into the matter I have, however, a preliminary remark to offer. In the fore -conscious state the mind may assume three different attitudes : it may give us the impression that our personality is thinking, or that it is mainly acting, or that it is simply a spectator. In the two first instances we have the feeling that our mind is active ; in the last we feel that it is passive. Thus when, as in the soldier phantasy, my wish to solve a problem (how to get him punished) causes a series of associations, which are visualized, I am mainly thinking. The imaginary actions which I perform thereby (calHng upon Lady V., driving in a car, etc.) do not bear the main emphasis ; and only when I have come back to the conscious state does my critical thought-activity tell me that I have been the spectator of my own performances. Thinking stands foremost in this case. When the optical recollection, as in the Folkestone fancy, is so vivid that it distracts the mind from its fore- conscious search, the intellect loses direction over the succession of animated pictures. These unroll themselves in an automatic, pre-established order, the order of per- ception ; the wish has no more influence upon the process of association ; the creative activity seems lamed ; the mind is no longer tliiuking progressively ; it is as if it were 90 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS fascinated by the pictures that succeed one another on the screen ; it is mainly a spectator. Certainly, in the Folkestone recollections I saw myself as an actor in the pictures, but this acting did not tend towards an end ; it was only a repetition of what I had done in the past. In the soldier fancy I saw myself acting, too : I repeated also movements which I had performed before, but I also performed in my imagination actions which I never before performed (for example, discussing with Lady V.) ; but in the last case I had the impression of being extremely active, so busy that I scarcely noticed the presence of my own image on the screen. In the visual recollections I was more of a spectator than anything else ; my mental attitude was a passive one. In the visualized conceptions I felt as ardent as when, sitting at my desk, I am working with enthusiasm at some essay or other ; in the former instance the only emotions that came to me were reproductions of the affects as I felt them when the events recollected actually occurred. These mental mechanisms, which I had never observed before I became a psycho-analyst, are at the basis of the explanation that I am now about to give of the absence of a reply to the third question discussed above. I think that, with a little practice, anyone will be able to recognize his actions in his own day-dreams. Moreover, this subject will be treated more exhaustively in the second part of this essay. The unanswered query was : "If Miss X. accepts me, what shall I say to my children to make them share my preference and abandon their inclination for Miss Y. ? " I resort to introspection, and attempt to reproduce before my mind's eye the recollected scene described on p. 79. This reproduction is not so difficult as it may seem, for the more fully I am occupied with the creations of my imagination, the better I can recall them,^ and careful observation may still surprise the mechanism that was at work at the moment of concatenation, although it escaped ' I have even noticed of late that when I happen to read poetry now I am able voluntarily to transform the poet's words into visual images, which adds a hitherto unknown charm to the reading. THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 91 my notice at first : at the idea of " their incHnation for Miss Y." my mind started to particularize, and recalled an instance in which this inclination had been strikingly manifested. During the recollected visit of Miss Y., I had observed further proofs of my children's preference for her, and, as before stated, all the incidents of that visit are faithfully reproduced, without an exception, in spite of myself, as it were, for the aroused affects are not, as they were then, of a pleasant nature. Again, my will is suppressed as well as all wishes ; the pictures on the screen direct my impressions, just as it happens to the spectator in a cinema theatre ; I follow a suggestion that is not desired, and the presence of my own image does not particularly attract my attention. The direction of the mental mechanism has reverted to the memory ; I do not think progressively. Does this protracted visual recollection replace the reply that should have been given to question 3 ? Before answering I will again call the reader's attention to the soldier phantasy on pp. 64-65, in which I am more of an actor than a spectator. Preliminary Statement. — In the course of the day a private of the R.A.M.C, comes into my office, and, as I cannot grant his request, he is impolite, which upsets me a bit. There- upon I write a report of his conduct and send it to my major. But the head nurse of the hospital to which he is attached is an influential and aristocratic lady, and as he said that he had been sent by this person, I am afraid I may come into conflict with her ; this weighs on my mind. The first part of the fancy contains also hints as to a medical certiflcate which I had to produce as a justiflcation for an urgent leave which I had obtained, and in which there was something not quite in order. Day-dream. — After having vainly tried for a long time to fall asleep, I try to provoke an indifferent chain of thought by thinking about Winnezeele, the village where the headquarters of our corps are established, and where I have got to call on the field cashier. Thereupon my mind associates : My CO. will not make any further mention of my medical certiflcate ; it will be passed unheeded. And Major H., our common 92 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS superior, tvill not even have looked at it. Here I interrupt the Unking-up voluntarily with the remark, " There I am thinking again ; hut it is quite all right, it is only an indifferent chain.^^ So I resume : to whom is the major going to send my report — to the medical director or to the administrative officer ? I Anyhow, I hope not to Countess V, But in any case she will have her say in the matter if she really sent that man to me. Shall I warn her of the incident so as to anticipate her siding with that fellow ? I compose a whole letter to her {which it is useless to reproduce here), and I think of adding my visiting-card with my academic title, hut here I continue : Perhaps I had better go and call on her. Fll dress up a hit and send an orderly with my card to ask for an interview. From this moment on I am an actor in the scene. I see myself sitting on a sofa in Lady V,^s room, where I have been before ; she is sitting in front of me and we are discussing the matter together. 1 explain that the man she sent to me behaved impolitely, and was tactless enough to use her name in an attempt to get by a threat what I could not grant after the insulting manner in which he had introduced his request ; that I came to tell her that I wished to be of service to her, but that the fellow had prevented me, etc. I hear and see the lady proposing to send him back to the infantry for his punish- ment. I declare myself satisfied with a more anodyne measure ; in short, we have a gratifying conversation together. Then all at once the idea arises : But perhaps she will side with him. The scene changes completely. We have a painful discussion, in a haughty tone, I see the lady pick up the receiver of her telephone and ring up my major, I hear her give, in my presence, a wrong version of the incident which I came to discuss with her. All at once I think : To prevent this from happening I shall postpone calling on her until I have had a talk with my major. I see myself already on the way to his headquarters, when all at once I awake and become conscious again. It seems obvious to me that although I saw all the details of the described performances vividly in images analogous to animated pictures, nevertheless notliing but the thoughts » In Belgian military hospitals the subordinate) staff is iinder the com- maiicl of (\n administrative officer who i« in charge of all extra-medical duties. THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 98 inspired the actions and provoked the images at the same time ; they played the leading part, and the succession of the scenes did not any longer depend upon a pre-existing order. They were the illustrations of the text, the action of the drama. They were still animated, but I did not stare at them with an impression of passivity ; I felt myself acting. In the Folkestone pictures I saw myself acting rather than anything else. The changes of scene are due to new conceptions of the brain, not because they pre-existed as associations in my memory. Moreover, instead of the vague feeling of lameness, of passivity, I have the impression of excited activity, accompanied by an intense attention, which I can only com- pare to an affect, familiar to all those who know what inspiration means. When I conceive new ideas (which are always due to the activity of my fore -consciousness), my fore-conscious attention anxiously follows the ideation, at a high tension, which makes the muscles of my forehead contract. (I only become aware of this keen attention when I analyse the process afterwards.) It ends with a feeling of jubilation as soon as the idea has finally been accepted as adequate. I want also to call the reader's attention to some other features of these two sorts of plastic representation : some are simple recollections ; others are of a creative nature (and we shall have the occasion to examine below what " creative thoughts " means). But in both cases, when they appear before our mental eye, we look most at the objects which are in the centre of our consideration (the optic field is sometimes astonishingly small) and not at the representa- tion of our own self. In animated pictures of a memorial nature we feel the same affects as in the past ; in those of a creative nature the affects that accompany them normally in waking life are absent in cases where they would be a result of con- ventionality and education : in the scene of the shelled village I feel no horror ; but those connected with inspiration — that is, with wish-fulfilment — are intense. Lastly, although in the latter the visual elements, taken individually, are reproductions of objects that have come under my per- 94 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS ception at one time or another, viz. are borrowed from memory and unaltered by my imagination, nevertheless, this time memory plays only the passive part ; it provides the solicited images or recollections, but its role seems insignifi- cant in comparison with its leading part in the former case. We are now prepared to answer the question on p. 91 : Does a protracted visual recollection replace the reply that should have been given to the third question ? The answer should be in the affirmative. The mind becomes so absorbed by the pictures on the mental screen that it seems paralysed. It does not reach an unintended solution, as when I become distracted at my washing-stand. It forgets its purpose, but at the same time it loses its power of thinking, of creating. It reminds one of the characteristic attitude of the gaper, who is so struck by what he witnesses that he forgets his conscious purpose and does not even perform the automatic movement of closing his mouth. We notice here for the first time that a fore-conscious purpose may be temporarily lost sight of, just as happened with my conscious purpose of choosing a tie. And as a fore-conscious purpose is the consequence of a wish, we may say that fore-conscious wishes as well as conscious ones may be temporarily silenced. But we notice at once that the suspense of the wish is simultaneous with our becoming the victim of our protracted recollection. This state ends only with the return to activity of the fore-conscious wish, when the concatenation is resumed. We shall further examine whether this simultaneity is merely accidental or points to a relation of cause and effect. In the meantime we are confronted by a new problem : How is fore-conscious thinking resumed ? How does the mind pass again from the passive to the active state ? I am so fortunate as to be able to state precisely the moment at which the impulse to associate reappeared. In my fancy I observed, as I had already done in the waking state, that Miss Y.'s face was beginning to show wrinkles — crow's-feet — at the corners of the eyes, and this detail led to the pictorial association : " Miss X. looks younger than Miss Y." Thus the concatenation continued without a THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 95 reply being given, for in the meantime the question had been forgotten, just as I had forgotten that I ought to take out my necktie, after I had gone astray over the handkerchiefs. But, nevertheless, in both cases I came to the conclusion : " Miss X. is more desirable than Miss Y.," and this inference was at least as unexpected as the choosing of a handkerchief. This is a fact that we should remember. In the present case the suspension of the fore-conscious wish and the accompanying passive attitude of my mental functions, with the exception of recollection, did not bring about any great change in the direction of the chain, for the next questions still concern Miss X., as before. But we may also meet with cases where this helpless floating away upon another current leads to a much remoter subject. I will con- tent myself for the present with remarking that the drifting has resulted only in a further shifting of the point of view : from the idea of how to win my children over to Miss X. to the problem of winning the latter for myself. The fourth inquiry : " How shall I detach her from her father ? " is answered positively, and we notice that the mind seems satisfied, for it does not return to the matter to propose other solutions introduced in a tentative manner. The fifth question therefore deals with another aspect of the same problem, and gives the impression of a thought transition such as we use in waking life: "How shall I now dispose her favourably toward myself ? " "By letting her read my books," is the reply ; it is positive again, and not repeated further in another form. This problem also is satisfactorily solved. However, the answer calls for another remark, for it offers an occasion for again examining the role of memory in fore-conscious thinking. Indeed, this answer is the consequence of a recollection, in this instance thought in words. Just as the idea of the way in which I might dispose the young lady to think favourably of me flashed through my mind, it brought with it to the surface the recollection of a long-forgotten conversation which I had with her fifteen years ago. On that occasion she said in my presence that she would never marry an insignificant man. (This infers that in the course of the years we had lost sight of one another.) We may deduce from this that 96 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS recollections do not always work disturbingly ; on the contrary. And as we know that in the fore-conscious state the observation and perception of the outer world is excluded, we might as well conclude at once that memory is the only source upon which this form of ideation can draw. " How shall I open the campaign ? " is a leitmotiv — w^hich leads to the positive and accepted suggestion to call upon her, give her an order, and arrange matters so that I can hand her my visiting-card, which bears the word " doctor," my newly acquired title, of which I suppose her still to be ignorant. Any further comment would be superfluous, except for a reason which becomes apparent when we reconsider the next question : " Could I play an active role in the Academy ? '* The mind here has leapt to an entirely new subject of investi- gation. A brief consideration shows, however, that this sudden change is due to a cause which has its correspondence in waking life. Through an external association the word " card " has recalled to me my negligence, that made me neglect again and again to send a card of congratulation to a friend of my youth, V., who has just been elected a member of the Flemish Academy, and from that thought I pass on to the conception — the more unexpected as it never entered my mind before — ^that some day he might propose my election as a member of this learned society. This is the method which secret ambition devises. This is the only comment that I shall make at present upon this involuntary manifestation of my infantile wish for greatness. This sudden divergence of the train of thought occurs in waking life whenever we use the formula " by the way," or a similar expression. We note in passing that in both instances the divergence is at bottom due to a recollection. As the idea of the possibility that one day I might myself become a member of the Flemish Academy dawns upon me, I at once see myself taking an active part in a discussion at a meeting of that erudite assembly : I am sitting and talking in the midst of the academicians, who are seated round a large table covered with a green cloth. But this delusive performance reminds me — for the fore-consciousness is as unbounded in its self-criticisms as in its ambition — THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 97 that my Flemish accent ought to be perfected if I want to meet my imagined colleagues on a footing of equality. Thus the conditional reply to the seventh question is satisfactory, and again the mind passes on to the next discussion, which is connected with the former in a manner which might be taken for a process of conscious thought : " Would not my academic title come in useful in obtain- ing a professorship all the sooner ? " The eighth reply is once more wanting, and, as in the first case, we are able to find the reason for this silence. The phenomenon which caused it presents a close analogy with the former one, which we examined exhaustively. This time it is not because of a pictorial association that the fore-conscious thought has gone astray, but because of an external associa- tion which connects directly with verbally recollected thoughts and logical inferences : the word " professor " has provoked the apparition of the visualized recollection of a friend who shares my secret ambition : I see him before me in the street as I met him a few days ago, and I notice again his strange way of glancing sideways at me, which in my inner self I voluntarily interpret as a sign of jealousy. The ponderings which were consecutive to this recollection were interrupted through my becoming aware of my son's movement ; this sufficiently explains the abrupt breaking-off of the con- catenation. It is remarkable that the former subject of my musings in the three first parts of the chain appears again after the perception of this sensory stimulus. It is just as though this temporary return to consciousness had brought the mind back to its former track, and as though only a slight shifting of the view-point had taken place, as during the two first transitions (between I-II and II-III), for the mind is still concerned about Miss X. We might well ask ourselves why the fore-conscious- ness reverts here to the same subject, although the preceding questions have been answered satisfactorily. This might indeed seem to be in contradiction to a previous state- ment, according to which fore-conscious ideation passes on to the next question as soon as it is satisfied. We should not forget, however, that these small problems are simply parts of a whole : I have not yet married Miss X., nor even 7 98 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS courted her, and as long as a decision, either positive or negative, is not reached in this direction this anxiety will remain in my mind and force itself upon my fore-conscious attention. In this respect the case is analogous to the anxiety in the soldier problem, except that it is conceived on a broader basis. Unfortunately, I have been unable to trace back the links of the chain leading from this part to the next, in which I consider petty anxieties in connection with my trip to B. Here we notice once more that when the tenth suggestion, as to eating a sandwich in the train, is rejected, the same problem of my lunch returns in the following reflection, so that the chain proceeds to the next point like a conscious meditation. The same thing happens with the two next propositions (12 and 13) : being satisfied with the suggestion of going to lunch in my usual restaurant, I consider now how I shall spend the time after my appointment. Although the replies to these two questions have a negative construction, they have yet a positive significance to the mind, and they satisfy it. The explanation of the reason of this satisfaction would lead us too far afield, especially as this analysis has already provoked the upheaval of so many data that it will tax our skill to bring some order into this tangle. Let us for the moment be content with the statement that the satisfactory reply allows the mind to tackle the subsequent connected problem. This is what happens after the twelfth reply. But when we arrive at the next, we see that our expectation has not after all been fulfilled, for another anxiety has been introduced with the fourteenth question, and another part of the chain commenced. The reason for this shifting need not be explained as laboriously as in the beginning of the present analysis, for we have already met similar cases : this time it is after the reply has been given that a series of memory-associations has led the mind astray, and not before the answer has appeared, as in the case of the two previous questions, to which no response whatever was offered. The mind-wander- ing is now consecutive to the reply instead of being con- secutive to the question. The recollections are to the effect that Mrs. R. had lately given a commission for me to my •THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 99 colleague L. ; a second link between these two concepts is that Mrs. L. lives in B. ; a third that Mr. L. was in B. last Saturday, the very day he was expected to make up our time-table. During the few moments which elapsed while my mind went over this recollection, it was again fascinated by memory ; it once again lost the leading part in favour of the concatenated recollections which are revived auto- matically and irresistibly in their natural sequence. The critical thought-activity and the impulse to concatenate have been vanquished, as has happened before. But I ought to point out some important differences : this time the recollections are expressed in words and accompanied only by very dim images. Moreover, the fore-conscious wish which has succumbed is not profound, the problem not thrilling. There seems to be a direct relation between these two facts : that vehement wishes can be superseded only by very vivid plastic memory images, and that when the wishes are feeble the passive attitude of the mind may be brought about by simple verbal recollections. However, this will be the subject of a further inquiry. We have seen that the link between Parts V and VI— that is, between questions 13 and 14 — is caused by recollections that came to the surface ; and we note that the reply now given is simply a reminiscence : I had been told that on the time-table an hour would be deducted from my work with the highest form, but I had paid no attention to the warning. Memory shows itself useful in that it spontaneously furnishes the reply to the query. As to questions and answers 15, 16 and 17, I shall simply repeat a former remark : they do not differ from conscious proceedings, and the rejoinders are remembered solutions which I had arrived at in former musings upon the subject. The last reply : " The head master will replace him," is also a memory remnant. The transition to the last part is due to an external association : the date, Monday the 6th, has associated with the 9th, a date which I bear in mind as the day on which I had to make a trip to B., and this again is a subject which has been treated before. But it is immediately pushed 100 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS aside by a more moving care : the ever-lurking desire to follow my fore-conscious thought processes and add new observations to my collection, the wish to which this book as it stands is almost entirely due. And as soon as a doubt seizes me that after all I might have to go to B. on the 7th and not on the 9th, my fore-consciousness makes a hasty and badly worded deduction, that this might be a case of telepathy. At this word all that I know about the Freudian theory of telepathy flashes through my mind. But in this instance the awakened wish is too intense to be overpowered by a verbal recollection, and the problem is further considered in the next and last question. The aroused interest is now so strong that I vanquish even the impulse to continue my musings (a renmant of the sleep- wish), as we shall see below. The interruption of the process of association is un- doubtedly due to the fact that my last idea awakened my observation- wish, for this never leaves me. We have now reached the end of this lengthy analysis, and before imdertaking any further meticulous investigations we shall occupy ourselves with a more restful review of the headway we have made through the jungle, and introduce some degree of order into the materials which we have been obliged to set aside as we proceeded in order not to hamper our progress. Our first care will be to collect the different memorial elements which we have met with during our progress, so as to determine the role which our memory plays in our fore-conscious thinking. Next, we shall try to discover the characteristic traits which differentiate the fore-conscious from the conscious thought-mechanisms, for we have now encountered all the elements required for such a comparison. We start with the proposition that all the replies are somehow connected with memorial elements. The latter may be so preponderant as even to absorb the reply and to represent it ; but at the other end of the scale they may be so weak as to be imperceptible, unless we analyse them ; and between these* two extremes stand the cases in which memory appears clearly as an inexhaustible store that never lets us down, whenever we want to dispose of its over* abundant acquisitions. THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 101 When we reply to a question, even in waking life, we can always prove that memorial elements are present in the answer. Therefore we need not insist on the replies 1, 2, 6 and 12, which we reproduce below, and which do not differ from conscious ones ; they are condensed reoolleotions of complex situations : 1. No ; it is too early. 2. No ; what is the use of it ? 6. I'll give her an order and hand her my visiting-card. 12. No ; I had better wait for a better opportunity. These are sagacious judgments, perfect in form and content, the product of recollected former experiences. I have put in a second category all the answers which are simple reminiscences. (The word " reminiscence " is used here as the term for unconscious remembrances, or at least remembrances to which we devote no attention, although we take advantage of them and use them as a current circulating medium. But I am quite aware that there is no sharp line to be drawn between the above automatically revived discriminations, between reminiscences and recollec- tions, which latter we shall consider next ; yet for the purpose of this review the above distinction may prove useful.) I have in each instance indicated as briefly as possible the connected reminiscences between brackets in the following list : 4. By psycho-analytical readings. (Electra-complex.^) 7. Yes ; but I must improve my {My Flemish accent is not pure accent. enough.) 10. No ; too vulgar. (In earlier days I often lunched in the train to B.) 11. Yes ; the cost does not matter. {My expenses will be defrayed.) 13. I shall hand over part of my {I had thought of this before.) duty to my colleague. ^ By Electra-complex the psycho-analysts understand a series of re- pressed feelings of excessive unconscious attachment of a daughter to her father, which occasions in neurotic subjects characteristical and well-known conflicts. The word QEdipus-complex has been coined to denominate the complex of male persons whose libido remains fixed on their mothers. 102 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS In the next category I have placed the rephes which seem less automatic than those in the previous series, and, on the contrary, seem to imply that a certain search has been necessary before selecting them among all the other contents x>f memory, so as to suit the special case raised by the question. In . the category of replies connected with recollections the verbal element is preponderant, but the visual elements can be traced in every one of them : 5. I shall let her read my books. 13. No ; I am no longer interested in her case. 14. Putting me down with an hour less in the highest form was done intentionally. 16. From Monday the 6th on- wards. 17. The head master will replace him temporarily. 18. This is a case of telepathy. {Recollection of a conversation of fifteen years ago, about her not marrying an insignificant man.) (Recollection : My colleague L., who brought me her commis- sion, had gone to B. on Satur- day, when he was to make up our time-table.) {Recollection : L. told me he had done it so as to find hours for the new Spanish course.) {Recollection : A conversation with my head master.) {Recollection : Ditto.) {Recollection : theory) The Freudian From this examination we may permissibly draw a first conclusion : Whenever our fore-consciousness is confronted by a problem, whenever a possible future situation is represented, whenever a prospective accommodation is considered, our mind obtains the means to help itself out of the difficulty from memory, either directly or indirectly — directly, when the reply to the query is furnished by a memorial element, that may be only a constituent part of a previous experience ; indirectly, when the reply stands for a memory complex from which it is an inference. But, in any case, the only source from which the mind draws the material to prepare for the future, to make ready for accommo- dation and adaptation, is memory. We come now to the questions to which the answers are wanting. We remember that in No. 3, p. 82, the THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 103 creative thought-activity was suspended as a consequence of a very vivid internal perception of animated memory images. As to the silence after question 8 : " Would I not quicker get my professorship ? " where we might argue that the absence of a reply might be due to the per- ception of the external stimulus, I want to suggest the following : If we consider what happened before the per- ception of the disturbing stimulus (No. 9), we see that the same conditions as those obtaining in No. 5 are reproduced. The reply was also preceded by a series of remembrances, half visual, half thought in words, which in all probability would in any case have caused a shifting of the centre of interest. At No. 19 I recall that instead of a reply there was an awakening, the meaning of which will be discussed in the next chapter. This helpless drifting on the stream of memory, accom- panied by the complete absence of mental reaction, of active interference on the part of our psychic personality, a drifting which in one instance replaces a response to a query and in others precedes or follows it, is unknown in voluntary thinking and deserves further attention. But this review is not yet complete, for we should not forget that memory also seems to be an occasionally active factor in determining the orientation of the concatenation. For that reason we should not fail to consider for a little the transitions between each pair of questions : they may be so many sources likely to throw some light on the role of recollection in fore-conscious thinking. For this purpose we assume the point of view of the conscious thinker. Questions. Transitions. 1st Part. 1. Shall I read Freud's book ? 1 t • i . 2. Suppose I continued to think I ^^S\^^^ transition as in con- about Miss X.? J scious thinking. 2. Ditto. 2nd Part. 3. If she favours me, what shall I say to my children to make }- Wanting (a). them share my preference and abandon the inclination for Miss Y. ? 104 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS Questions. Tbansitions. 8 Ditto. Srd Part. 4. How shall I detach her from her father ? 4. Ditto. 5. How shall I dispose her favour- ably toward me ? 5 Ditto. ^ 6. How shall I open the cam- 1 Ditto paign ? I 6. Ditto. Wanting (b). Logical transition as in con- scious thinking. 4th Part. 7. How could I play an active role in the Academy ? 7. Ditto. 8. Would I not quicker get my professorship ? 8. Ditto. 5th Part. 9. Will the furniture of John's bedroom be fine enough to be taken to Miss X.'s house ?^ 9. Ditto. Wanting (c). Logical transition as in con- scious thinking. Wanting (outer stimulus) (d). ' Wanting (c). 6th Part. 10. Shall I eat a sandwich in the train ? 10. Ditto. 1 11. Shall I lunch at my usual I Logical transition, etc restaurant ? J 11. Ditto. -1 12. Shall I afterwards call upon I Ditto. v.? J 12. Ditto. ^ 13. Shall I go and see Mrs. R. ? / ^^"*^* 13. Ditto. " Wanting (/). 7th Part. 14. An hour too little on the time- table ? 14. Ditto. ^ 15. Two hours too many ? / logical transition, etc. 15. Ditto. ^ 16. When will the new time-table l- Ditto, be introduced ? THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 105 Questions . Transitions . 16. Ditto. 1 17. And if the new colleague has > Logical transition, etc. not arrived ? J 17. Ditto. Wanting (g) Sth Part. 18. If my meeting were on the 7th instead of on the 9th ? 18. Ditto. ] 19. If this doubting were a warning > Logical transition, etc. from my fore-consciousness ?J The eleven transitions which recall the procedure of conscious thinking call for no special comment upon the mental process by which each question has adduced the next ; it is quite familiar to us. But the cases in which the waking mind does not at once see the connection between two successive questions are likely to add more to our knowledge. They strike us as being characteristically fore-conscious transitions, which we consider as thought-defects when they happen to occur during our waking life. Then we consider them nonsensical. It is significant that the seven transitions which are absent in the above list correspond precisely with the seven changes of direction occurring after the chain has been started. This concordance alone would arouse our attention, but for the fact that we already know from the foregoing discussion that the relation between the two series of circumstances is of a causative nature. The shifting is in every single case due to the nature of the transition : to every new direction corresponds a moment during which the purpose of the wish has been lost sight of, as a consequence of the domination of a series of recollections. The schematic representation on the next page is an attempt at a concrete rendering of these changes of direction. How are we to interpret this scheme ? For reasons which will become clear directly, I must postpone the dis- cussion of transition (a) for a moment. (b) We shall remember that questions 3 and 4 were respectively : " How shall I win my children over in favour of Miss X.," etc., and " How shall I detach Miss X. from her father ? " We have seen, in the narration of the day- 106 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS dream on pp. 78-80, that after the third question the mind strayed, and my imagination reproduced before my mind's eye an occurrence which took place the day before yesterday : Miss X. is in my home with two members of her family. We see them out, and at the front door we all take part in the conversation. We have further been able to trace the connection between Miss Y. and Miss X. back to the noticing of wrinkles (crows'-feet). The regressive revival of psychic memory pictures is, as we know, responsible for the dropping of our progressive fore-conscious thinking, (c) The third transition, which we characterize as proper to fore-conscious ideation, should be the link between the Qiiastxcms fir Answers 7^ Research. Work, School Worries toB nissX Pixjfessor- ship \ 2 3 SCHEME I 5 6 7 e 9 lO tt 12 13 14 15 16 17 l» V C- 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 U J 1 A— ct: / f m A) ^ ^)/™ I »° • • * ) ^^»^ ( \^ m id)/ \ y^^Z-cxtcrruil stimxdxis two questions : (6) " How shall I open the campaign ? " and (7) " Could I play an active role in the Academy ? " This time it is the analysis which tells us that after the reply : " Give her an order and leave her my visiting-card," a word-association with " card " brought about the revival of a series of recollections relating to the election of my friend V. as an academician, and absorbed all my mental energy. And when the progressive movement of the stream of thought was resumed again, I was sitting in the Academy as a member. {(l) How did the concatenation following the reflection concerning the Academy in the eighth question hit in the THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 107 ninth upon a supposition like this : " Will the furniture of John's bedroom be fine enough to be removed to Miss X.'s home ? " Because first of all I have been interrupted in my association by the disturbing perception of my son's elbow, which has caused me to " come to " ; and secondly, because I have passed again from the conscious to the fore- conscious state in a manner that reproduces the conditions prevailing in the first transition. For that reason we shall treat this point together with the former. In the meantime I may state that in both instances memory also is responsible for the shifting. (e) As stated before, I have been unable to retrace a cer- tain part of my day-dream, so that I cannot comment upon it. (/) The fifth transition has bridged over the gap between these two questions : (13) " Suppose I were to call on Mrs. R. ? " and (14) " If I were put down on the time-table," etc. This time we find again the traces of the recollections that have caused the deviation in the narrative (p. 80) : *' My colleague L. told me a few days ago that he had spoken to her. He went to B. last Saturday, although he had promised us he was going to make up the time-table himself." It should not be forgotten that all this fore-conscious remembering is accompanied by some degree of visualization. (g) The seventeenth question : '' What if the missing colleague has not arrived on Monday ? " is also connected with the next ; " Suppose my appointment in B. were for the 7th instead of the 9th ? " through memory-associa- tions chiefly thought in words, which were adduced by an external linking-up of " the 5th " and " the 9th," as we have seen in the analysis ; the recollection is to the effect that I should not forget to go to B. on the 9th, etc. We may now conclude that prolonged recollection is a most important factor in the process of deviation that constitutes one of the chief features of fore-conscious thinking. Only in the first transition and in the fourth have we so far been unable to trace whether a remembrance accom- panies the swerving of the association in these instances. But we should remember that in our first chapter we were also unable to say at which precise link of the concatenation 108 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS we were still in the conscious and at which already in the fore-conscious state. We meet with the same difficulty here. However, we observed there that the shifting of the mind from consciousness to fore-consciousness was invariably simultaneous with an abandonment or displacement of the centre of interest : as soon as the conscious purpose was indisputably lost, we knew for certain that we were dealing with fore-conscious concatenations. We see now that this dropping of the original purpose for a subsequent one, in which the centre of gravity has been slightly shifted, may occur several times in the same day- dream, and is invariably brought about by the intervention of memory, or, better still, by the fascination which the revived recollections exercise upon the mind. We pass for a shorter or longer period into a state of absorption, during which we lose all control over our mental activity, memory taking over the leading part ; but .the revived records apparently cannot impose a direction of their own, as does the fore-conscious wish. They do not create any- thing new. Memory seems capable only of an automatic reproduction of past events in their order of registration. So that in the end we find that the deviations of the fore- conscious associative chains of thought occur in a special state of the mind during which we are temporarily incapable of interrupting the recollection of past experiences^ which pass automatically before the mind's eye and absorb us completely. Our actual conclusion is, then, that the passage through this hallucinatory state is most apparent when our inner perception is most vivid, namely, when what I have called mental moving pictures unroll themselves before our inner eye, as in my Folkestone phantasy and the recalled visit of Miss Y. and her family. When the memories do not bear such an intensely visualized character and are partly remembered in words and partly seen in dim visions, the hallucination — ^that is, the suppression of the progressive movement of the chain, the loss of the direction by our fore-consciousness — ^is not so striking; but everyone has within himself the means of repeating my experiences, and in such self-observation the means of testing the reality of my findings. We may be carried away by the reeling off THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 109 of our revived verbal memories as well as by our visualized remembrances, provided the wish that directed the mental activity be emotionally weak enough. A certain amount of recollecting hallucination seems to be normal in the mental life of every individual ; of that there can be no doubt. There is, however, yet another means of putting this knowledge to the test, for if every divergence in a chain of thought is due to a temporary hallucination, provoked by remembering, we ought to find a brief recollection of past experiences at the starting-point of every fore-conscious chain as soon as we retrace the first deviation. Let us there- fore examine what result such a test will yield. We will apply our new theory first to transition IV, where I awake as a consequence of an external stimulus. What happened between this momentary awakening and the reappearance of the Miss X. complex ? In the course of analysis the following partly newly created, partly remem- bered ideas which I had associated during these few seconds came to the surface : " This awakening is the consequence of my boy sharing my big bed. I will not require him to sleep in his own room, for it is not so comfortably furnished as it was before the German soldiery stole part of my furniture and chopped up the rest for firewood. Miss X.'s house is still beautifully furnished." Here follows a mental picture of her house, in the contemplation of which I lose my fore-conscious direction. The hallucination has super- vened, and when I start thinking fore-consciously again I associate with the idea " furniture." In the fancy recorded on p. 32 the preliminary state- ment clearly shows the memories which I turned over in my mind as to the young country girl into whose house we hoped to move our mess, and I can still see her in my mind's eye, reproducing exactly in imagination the picture I had before me two years ago, and can exactly recall all the details of the series of thoughts. As to the soldier day-dream, I can remember even now that the recollections, when the chain started, related to the Corps canteen in Winnezeele where I used to buy my cigarettes, 110 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS In the day-dream related on pp. 30-31 the thoughts that constitute the recollection causing my straying and hallu- cination are written down in so many words : a request to the Belgian Minister of Education I had decided to make. A similar recollection is to be found in the phantasy on p. 35, where the recollections dealt with Professor Waxweiler's Esquisse (Tune Sodologie. A long list of examples like these might readily be given. We will, however, complete this enumeration with the genesis of the chains of the distracting kind. I open my collection at random, and happen upon the day-dream about my boy's coughing, reported on f)p. 44-45 : as I start reading the text it occurs to my mind that I have left out the first part of my musing : the flashing recollection of my son's and my own experiences during his stay at the hospital for chest diseases, the recommendations of the doctor on his discharge, etc. — in short, the whole complex. It need scarcely be said that when I started to collect observations for this study I knew practically nothing about fore-conscious thinking mechanisms, and therefore cannot have been affected by any unconscious suggestions that might result in my prearranging my notes to serve my purposes later. The new facts I have discovered have such absolute validity that they enable me to detect the gaps in the relations of my day-dreams and sometimes allow my fore-conscious memory to fill them up. Therefore I am sure that my observations are correct, and it is a great satisfaction to feel confident of this. We may safely conclude at present that the genesis of a fore-conscious chain is the consequence of a brief hallucination provoked by recollections, and that similar hallucinations are the cause of the unsteadiness of fore- conscious thinking. The objects of the hallucinatory perception may be plastic images or words. We have now attained the end at which we aimed when we commenced this section. At the same time we have caught a glimpse of the importance of memory in day- dreaming. We have seen that it not only causes one of its principal weaknesses, but at the same time it is responsible for the superiority of fore-conscious over conscious ideation. Indeed, the number and variety of recollections which it THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 111 puts at the disposal of fore-consciousness is astounding. No registered perception lies too deep to be beyond its reach. No detail, however insignificant to our conscious self, that cannot be utilized occasionally, as the scarcely visible wrinkles of the lady, noted in a vivid scene in which five persons were acting, in a house of which every peculiarity is recalled as soon as the need of it is felt. In a flea day-dream, which will be reproduced further (p. 250), my mind's eye even detects the fact that the flea is escaping under the roller between the interstices of the floor, although this is not a reproduced but a fancied scene. Memorial elements sometimes provoke answers and sometimes stand for answers themselves. They come to our fore-consciousness consecutive to replies, or they provoke fresh questions, furnish objections and explanations ; remin- iscences recur apparently uncalled for ; memories of whose existence we were ignorant flash through the mind : they help us or distract us, bring us a solution or make us swerve from it ; they give us at the time the impression of the sparks of a firework or a hail of brilliant stones which a volcano under pressure projects into the air ; or, again, memory fascinates our mind by its compulsive ideas or vivid moving pictures. But at all times it produces upon our inner self an impression differing from the waking state. When the fore-conscious ideation is in full sway the memory is no longer an inert mass, a subterranean stratum, a sub- marine region into which we send as it were a diver to search for recollections, to use an analogy borrowed from Jastrow. It appears, on the contrary, as a dynamic con- trivance possessing a pressure of its own, something like the internal fire of our planet ; it passes from latency to activity, making itself felt as soon as it becomes freed from the weight with which conscious repression keeps it down in waking life. If we could now detect the reason for the nonsense, the absurdities and the slighter mistakes which deform our day-dreams, we should have laid bare another of the threads which will enable us to unravel the close network which hides the fore-conscious thought processes from our under- standing. It is with this object in view that we shall presently undertake a new analysis. 112 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS 4. Errors and Absurdities (a) Unsteadiness. Preliminary Statement. — On the night when I recorded the following remarkable phantasy, I had already had two day-dreams, both of which I had recorded ; the first while I was reading in bed the Comte de Segur^s Memoirs of Napoleon in the volume called De Paris a Fontainebleau, the second while I was trying to get to sleep. Both were related to the applications referred to in the phantasy about my coloneVs visit on pp. 57-58 and my future career, the anxiety concerning ivhich is also responsible for the present fancy. The posts were newly created for the recreation of the Tommies in rest- camps. This repeated recording, however, had provoked a certain amount of psychic excitement which held sleep farther off from me than ever ; but these are sacrifices such as a student willingly consents to when his researches profit by it. When I " came to,^^ I took up my pencil and spontaneously gave this reproduction the name of "'phantasy-dream.'^ For upon awakening from it I felt as though I had been dreaming. I was, however, already aware at that precise moment that important dream features, such as distortion, for example, were absent in this thought-construction. Therefore I used the two words phantasy and dream, in order to render my first impression. In this relation all the parts which were vividly visualized are printed in ordinary characters. PiiANTASY. — At the start I was recollecting the wording of the request which I had sent to the Belgian Minister of Educa- tion, as stated in another day-dream, and I felt full of hope that he would concede my demand. Although my petition is very long he will read it himself, for there is a decision to be taken about a question of principle. (I fancy the Minister before me in the act of reading it.) One sentence which I employed will strike him : " As I am cool-blooded and ener- getic enough to perform research work in the midst of the thunder of exploding shells, you might ..." etc. That is not an exaggera- tion, either, for it is exact in the true sense of the word. The THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 113 civilian population have nearly all fled because of the continual bombardment. Now there passes before my mind, as though I were in a picture-hall, the exact reproduction of a scene which I • lived through three days ago : one of the shells which the Germans are sending us explodes in the middle of the street at the other end of the village while I am working in my billet. I lay my pen down for a moment and look through my open window, and notice a thick cloud of smoke ad- vancing in my direction. My colleague V. D. S. passes, and wonders why I do not go for a walk in the fields with him. I hear myself saying again : " The work I am busy with is too interesting for me to interrupt it ; nevertheless those shells are very annoying, for they interrupt my thinking every time.*' All at once I visualize a scene which I had not witnessed, but which was described in mess next day : the scene is a sequel to the one just recorded. I see in my fancy my other colleague F. picking up successively two children who have been severely wounded by the explosion. The blood spoils his uniform (about which he expressed regrets). The visualization is interrupted and I retrace this remark : ^^ If I had been there I might have lost both legs " ; and there is no doubt that this was thought in words, for at the subsequent analysis I remembered also that I had doubted for a moment whether it was one leg or both that I would allow myself to lose. Next moment I see myself lying on the cobbles in front of the butcher's shop with both legs off above the knee. I ask the butcher (the wounded children were his) for a knife to cut off the last filaments of muscle that attach the blown-off left leg to the thigh. I give orders and direct the attendance my state necessitates, for there are no R.A.M.C. men among the small terrified crowd. I ask the butcher's wife for a towel, tell a soldier how to twist it, and show him the place where he should bind my thigh so as to prevent further loss of blood. Then I send a soldier to the field-ambulance, which is close by. Next I am in the field- ambulance reception-room (/ do not know how I arrived there), and say to the doctor : "If my escape and recovery depend on the state of my spirits I am saved " (/ say this quite gaily). Next I think verbally : "7 hope they will not put 8 114 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS me in a ward with the rank and file. But no, for the British we are officers,''' Then I am in the officers' ward, givmg directions to the nurse that my books should be fetched so that I might be able to continue my work while obliged to lie in bed. / continue thinking in words : " / shall he able to pursue my career once I have recovered and shall go on teaching^ If my brother-in-law comes to see me I shall say to him ; " / sacrificed my legs for my country,'''' (I say this in Flemish.) But no, I shall say that in French, so that the nurse may under- stand it : ''J'ai donne mes jambes pour la patrie.^' He will bring me a stock of Turkish cigarettes (I see the box containing five hundred). / dictate a telegram for my wife : " / am wounded, but don't worry. I shall soon be discharged and get a decoration.''^ But perhaps they will refuse to discharge me, saying I have not far to walk from my billet to my office, and can still be useful to the army. But that is a foolish sup- position. I shall wire to Mr. X. to reserve my post {that which I have applied for) until I have recovered. Now I see myself sitting in a car with my artificial legs beside Mr. X. We are in France, driving from one rest-centre to another. Next I find myself in a London tube station. I take care, on entering a train, that my crutches do not slip into the slit between the carriage and the platform, and that I have a firm hold of a strap, so that I shall not lose my balance when the train starts. When it is on the move, I ask somebody to give me his seat, which he does at once, while the other passengers look at me with respect, because of my decoration and my two sticks. / am thinking in words again : ''In school I shall avoid mounting stairs. I shall smoke my cigarette in the classroom during the break.^' (Here I see myself smoking in a classroom in which I used to teach two years ago, and some visualized recollections connected with it pass before my mind's eye. / think after this I awoke more or less and turned round on my left instead of on my right side, my thoughts being : " Yes, I am busy with an indifferent chain ; I must not interrupt and register it any more, otherwise I shall not succeed in having any sleep at all to-night. Therefore I shall continue this phantasy.''' The idea I remember is ; " / shall ask the doctor THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 115 to tell me at once whether I shall recover or noty At this I see the doctor before me, and tell him : " Oh, I can stand the truth, and I want to take measures in case 1 die.'* Verbally thought : ''If I am doomed, Fll telegraph to my family.''^ I dictate the text {the first part of which I cannot remember) to an orderly, and add that they should go to a certain place in London to get free tickets to come and see me. This makes me reflect all at once that obtaining free tickets will cause a great loss of time. Now I reflect that the doctor will be surprised that I should let my family apply for free tickets, and I say to him : " Yes, you have no idea how hard we have been hit by the war ; we have temporarily become poor." Then I think again ; these free tickets will only take them as far as Calais. From there onwards they will have to pay their fares. All at once I am struck by my calmness in presence of the great calamity that has befallen me. Next comes a scene in which I am dying, but which I suppress. All I need say is that I am dictating my last will when I awake. Immediately I say to myself: " What a beautiful construction. I am going to write it down at once, for it contains a magnificent illustration of the suc- cessive risings to the surface and the sinkings into the unconscious. It entirely corroborates my theory as I have dimly constructed it.^^ The analysis to which this phantasy will now be sub- jected will be conducted from a new point of view. Now that we are acquainted to a certain extent with the role of memory in fore-conscious thinking, and are still more familiar with the visualization process, we shall be able to explain the mechanism of most of the errors, nonsensical elements and absurdities of this day-dream. It strikes us at once that the chain maintains almost exclusively a progressive movement with only a few swervings from the central subject under consideration. Notwith- standing an abundance of visualized recollections, some of which we came across before, we observe that the passive attitude of the mind, which was so obvious in other day- dreams, is scarcely perceptible. The inventive faculties are active from beginning to end, although some flagrant mistakes have been committed. 116 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS We may pass without comment the revived remembrance of my request to the Minister, which we now recognize to be the cause of the first important visual hallucination of the chain — the fascinating recollection of the scene of the desertion of the village during the bombardment — for we know its significance as regards the thought processes ; but we must linger a little longer over the part of the film that depicts the intervention of my colleague when he assists the two wounded children. I had only heard the description of his action in mess ; I had not actually seen it. Still, the visual representation of the event unrolls itself before my imagination as vividly as if I had witnessed it. This is not the first occasion of our being confronted by the translation of a verbal description of an occurrence into animated pictures, but now we are going to examine the phenomenon thoroughly. If we inspect the details of the tragedy more closely, we become aware that the whole of the scenery in which the action takes place is merely a reproduction of the village street and the houses as I know them by perception. I see clearly the image of my friend (also a recollection), but I do not see the faces of the children whom he carried ; and I have no remembrance of ever having noticed them. The difference between this visualization and the reproduc- tion in animated images of past experiences lies herein : that I have put the mental picture of my friend into the familiar surroundings. I let the action take place as he related it. The stage is the very street he talked about. My fancy puts wounded children without proper person- ality in his arms. He runs about with them and thereby stains his timic with blood. Thus the external proceedings, the action. Before we come to the next dramatic situation we notice that a supposition in words is inserted between the two visual- izations : " If I had been there I might have lost one leg or both legs." The latter part of the hypothesis gives the theme which the imagination is now about to develop in a succes- sion of tableaux vivants. Again all the stage accessories are placed at my disposal by memory : the butcher and his implements, the soldiers and the R.A.M.C. men whom I THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 117 see every day, the field-ambulance, the knowledge of how to act in urgent cases of severe wounds, etc. My creative power again has the mastery over the contents of the psyche. (We shall see later that a wish keeps hidden behind that power.) But this time it is no longer bound by a previously registered text. It goes on from supposition to supposi- tion, from one question to another, as in the phantasies which we analysed before (omitting the memory hallucina- tions). The spectator in me plays a very small part in these proceedings. He is not passive now; he pays scarcely any attention to the optic illusions ; my inner self is too busy with acting to heed the spectacle as an optic perception. The mind is not fascinated by the succeeding pictures, nor powerless, not psychically lame, nor deprived of energy, nor incapable of reacting. But still all emotion is absent excepting a certain excitement as regards the successive proceedings, an excitement that is a sort of anxiety that things should be done quickly : that the butcher should be quick in bringing his knife, that the towel should be bound round the thigh as a tourniquet, that the messenger should fly to the field-hospital, etc. It is the same feeling which I experience when I am writing with enthusiasm, when my thoughts run quicker than my pen : it is a form of interest. But there is no horror of the bloody scene, no trace of pain, nothing that may be called fear that the wounds may be dangerous and cause my death. During all these happenings an intuitive feeling never leaves me that this is only a fancy, that it is my own imagina- tion that is pulling the strings of the puppets on the stage and directing the show. Only at the end of this phantasy, when I was dictating my will, did this intuition leave me, and I really had the impression that I was dying. I cannot help thinking that it is due to this complete loss of fore- consciousness that on awakening I had the impression that I had " come to " after a night-dream instead of after a simple fancy. The impressions left by a day-dream and a night-dream respectively, although they defy description, are indeed very different to a careful observer. But the director of the Punch-and-Judy show has only 118 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS a part in the direction of the play that is being acted, although it looks as though he were the sole director. Both visualizing and acting, indeed, are dependent upon a text which we shall attempt to reconstitute, for it is not very apparent. Nothing, however, is easier than to trace it from the text already given. We select, therefore, the first visualized part of the phantasy, which is played out in the street in front of the butcher's shop. The reasoning goes as follows : What if one of my leg* is not quite Ask for the butcher's knife. detached ? What if there are no R.A.M.C. I myself must give directions. men to attend to me ? What if i were to lose too much Ask for a towel to bind up the blood ? thigh with. What if they are too long about Send a soldier to them. taking me to the field-hospital ? As this part of the argument obliges the reader, as a matter of fact, to make an appeal to the recollection of his own fancies, without which he would be unable to imagine in his mind's eye the scene as I described it, I will attempt another reconstitution in words, in which, as in the butchery described above, my visual concatenations seem to build a progressive structure in connected pictures as a solution of a fore -conscious problem. After the idea : "I shall wire to Mr. X. to reserve my post until I have recovered," the acting again replaces the text for a while with words : How shall I be able to get from Mr. X. has a car. one rest-camp to another ^vith- out legs ? And in London ? The tube will take me every- where. But is there no danger for an I shall take care on stepping in invalid in the underground not to let my crutches slip stations ? ^ between the platform and the train. And when the train starts sud- Keep hold of a strap or sit down, denly ? » At this point of the analysis I remember seeing myself pushed in a rolling chair into the lift and further rolled on to the platform in front of the open door of a carriage. THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 119 And if there are no seats free ? Ask somebody to give his up to me. Will everybody do that readily ? Yes ; I remember the readiness and respect which I have seen the Londoners display for war invalids, etc. All this, it should be remembered, was strongly visualized. I may again observe that all the stage details are furnished by the memory. Among these details my fancy shows my own person moving about. Again I am insensible to the pain, again the concatenation is progressing towards the solution of the problem necessarily aroused by thinking ; nothing is left over to chance. The associations follow one another in strict logical sequence ; the successive links are due to the thinking mind, which is active, not passive. The further rendering of the day-dream in queries and replies is given further on. We can, however, already define an important characteristic of fore-conscious ideation, for these reconstitutions afford a proof that the mode of thinking in fore-consciousness is the same whether the chain is preponderatingly visual or verbal. At present I wish to call the reader's attention to another consideration which is equally important. We will there- fore return for a moment to that part of the tragedy in which I am severely wounded. The most remarkable feature of all these dreadful scenes is that the victim of the explosion is unmoved and gives his orders with perfect calmness. What may be the reason for this absence of emotion, so strikingly different from the emotivity of which we found the same person capable when his fancy reproduced acted recollections, where the slightest shades of affects were reproduced almost exactly as he under- went them in waking life ? Is not the reply to this question to be found in the fact that, like the director of the theatre, who never loses sight of his business aims however divinely his company may play, fore-consciousness never loses sight of the wish that is hidden behind the play of the phan- tasy ? It is this desire that imposes the direction upon the 120 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS concatenation. Let me anticipate a little and state at once that I fore-consciously wished to be discharged from the army, even at the sacrifice of my legs. I had not been aware of that wish until the day after the date of this day-dream. But this wish hid still a deeper one : my ever active desire to become a professor, for I hoped that my services at the rest-camp might be rewarded with a chair. It would be very easy to show that a wish is active in every day-dream, whenever the fore-consciousness is not the victim of memory hallucinations. But this ques- tion must be further examined later on. However, we must take advantage of this discussion to review, in a brief summary, the role of memory and visualization in fore- conscious thinking, with the object of completing our former summing-up. ^ 1. We have come across a great abundance of cases in which memories recalled in words were accompanied by isolated visual illustrations (by the representation of the Minister reading my petition, for example, the image of my colonel, etc.). 2. We have also examined the instance in which new conceptions, verbally thought, were accompanied by similar visual elements, which is a phenomenon known in classical psychology. 3. We have considered and abundantly commented on (as in the case of the Folkestone day-dream) recollections which are not recalled verbally but pictorially. They are animated pictures, exactly reproducing recorded experiences. They gave us the first clue to the understanding of the temporary hallucination as the cause of the successive shif tings of the subjects of fore -conscious meditations. The emotions are reproduced very much in the same intensity as that which they exhibited during registration. 4. In the visualized scene of the verbal relation according to which my friend helped to attend to the wounded children we meet for the first time with a new distinction. The fancy is relatively free to dispose of the happenings on the stage as it pleases, but although the text on which it enlarges may be hidden it is nevertheless bound by it. THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 121 There is no perceptible trace of emotion, although the regression is still apparent. 5. In the last cases which we have examined the wording is again lost sight of, but nevertheless the imagination progresses as though it were composing a text. The develop- ment is no longer automatic ; we are no longer even in the slightest degree the victims of our recollections. The succeeding associations are directed by the fore-conscious wish, every new part of the film being comparable to a new proposition, to a new question or a new answer of the chain, thought in words. In this case one can speak of thinking in pictures, as painters naturally do, and the higher animals w^hich are deprived of speech. The memory still supplies the elements of the successive images. In general they leave us unaffected, except for the excite- ment of creation. After having thus diverged from our original pur- pose, but not without an approach toward our ultimate end, we return to our investigation in order to discover the reasons for the manifold blunders which our fore- consciousness makes in its thinking processes. All will agree that its most apparent defect is its unsteadiness of purpose, the capriciousness with which it leaps from one subject of consideration to another. Therefore, we shall first inquire whether the foregoing analysis taught us all that is worth knowing about the causes of the shifting of the fore-conscious stream of thought. First let us remember that the previous day-dream is concerned with several wishes linked together in one chain, and that the transition between each two parts corresponds to a short memory drifting. I have already hinted that, on the contrary, the single wish that directs this particular phantasy is an un- conscious desire to obtain my longed-for professorship. Is there then no shifting of the fore-conscious attention in this association ? To discover this we shall have to reduce the whole phan- tasy to its simplest verbal expression, and with this con- struct a schematic representation as before. This rendering in words will be much as follows ; 122 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS Chain of Thoughts. A protracted train of recollection during which the wording of the request to the Minister is recalled, with partial visualization. From this I am roused by the question : 1st Part. 1. Will not this sentence : " As I am cool-blooded and energetic enough to perform research- work in the midst of the thunder of exploding shells," etc., induce him to grant my request ? 1. Yes ; for it is true. Hereupon I am the victim of a second hallucination, which develops in my mind's eye the remembrance of the desertion of the village, under bombardment, by the civilian population. This scene is directly connected with a second hallucination, in which I transform the narrative of my col- league's intervention (in the case of the children who were wounded in the bombardment) into an animated tableau vivantf until the concatenation goes on, connecting with the last scene. 2nd Part, 2. What would have happened if I had been on the spot ? 3. What if one of my legs were not entirely detached ? 4. What if there are no R.A.M.C. men to attend to me ? 5. What if I were to lose too much blood ? 6. What if the people at the field- ambulance take too long about fetching me ? 2. I might have lost one leg or both. 3. Ask for the butcher's knife. 4. Tell them myself what to do. 6. Ask for a towel and make use of it as a tourniquet to compress the thigh. 6. Send a soldier from the crowd to hurry them up. Here the words " field-ambulance," as is the case with an external association when thinking in words — a pictorial association, as I called it before — must have provoked the image of the well-known hospital, for I now see myself THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 123 there on a stretcher, on the floor, in the reception-room, as I have seen so many poor fellows. And the suppositions and responses continue in this new milieu, but with the same fore-conscious intention of saving my life (for it is only because of the wish to be discharged, not because of the wish to die, that I have brought myself thither). Consequently this must not be considered as a new part of the film. It offers, moreover, a remarkable difference from analogous subdivisions in the previous phantasy : the subject is no longer changed, as it is when, after considering how I should arrange my trip to B., I pass on abruptly to school anxieties, and thence to suppositions relating to my research- work, etc. No ; the subject is adhered to, only amid fresh scenes. To the Doctor: 7. Shall I pull through, my 7. (I cannot remember the spirits being so good ? wording of the answer which I put into the doc- tor's — my friend's — mouth. That I considered two pos- sible repHes will appear at No. 25.) 8. Will you put me in the officer's 8. Affirmative reply understood, ward ? for next I fancy myself therein. 9. How shall I while the time 9. By working. away ? 10. What books shall I send for ? 10. I give directions about them. At this point my imagination follows the orderly who is going to my billet to fetch certain books, as I told him ; and thereupon I see my room and my small field library, etc. The directing part of the intellect has reverted to recollection. When I awake from this brief hallucination I find myself thinking that I have been creating new thoughts again. I shall explain further how the image of my books in my billet led me to think of my library at home, and so to the next question : 11. Shall I be able to continue to 11. I do not need my legs for teach after my recovery ? that. 124 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS I remember now while analysing that I had another brief hallucination in my dream, during which I saw myself sitting on a chair in front of a class, in one of the classrooms of my old school in Ghent. I am unable, however, to recall exactly what remembrances followed, but we know enough now about hallucinations to be sure that this recollection is responsible for the shifting which has taken place here, as we shall see in the next question. But, as happened twice in the last phantasy, the stream shifts merely to associate with a previous link of the chain. We return to the hospital ward at the ninth question : " How shall I while the time away ? '* with : 12. Will my brother-in-law come 12. Yes ; and provide me with to see me ? cigarettes as usual. 18. How shall I show him that I 13. " Ik heb myn beenen gegeven am not down-hearted ? voor 't vaderland." (Flem- ish for : I sacrificed my legs for our country.) Here an association of an auditive nature took place, for on giving this reply in my fancy I became aware of a ridicu- lous intention of producing a melodramatic impression. It struck me, when I imagined that I heard these words, that the nurse, who was turning her back upon us two, giving her attention to another patient, did not even turn her head nor look up at this sentence, from which I expected so much effect. Then I remembered that of course the English nurse did not understand Flemish. After this criticism I formulated my next sentence in words without any visualiza- tion whatever : " I ought to say that in French." So in my day-dream I faithfully repeated the sentence in French. We shall come across this peculiarity again later on. The sight of my brother-in-law makes me think of my wife : 14. What shall I telegraph to my 14. " Don't worry. I shall soon wife ? be discharged with a decora- tion.'* 15, But what if they did not dis- 15. No reply. charge me, on the pretext that^I had not far to go from my billet to my office ? THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 125 \ Instead of a reply, I see before me in a brkf hallucination the village street with my billet and my office, and I wander about considering the distance between the two, observing myself walking painfully as an invalid from the one to the other. But on this occasion the consequence of the hallucination is not a deviation from the subject under consideration. Upon its termination follows a reflection such as we make in waking life : " What a foolish supposition ! " The absurdity of the proposition has struck me this time. This is the second instance in which we come across a manifestation of our conscious critical activity. And w^e see, too, that notwith- standing the temporary drifting there is no displacement of the centre of gravity. A conclusion has been reached, an implicit reply given in the exclamation, and the con- catenation progresses : 16. How shall I reserve my post 16. Warn Mr. X. until I have recovered ? 17. How shall I be able to travel 17. Mr. X has a car. without legs from one rest- camp to another ? 18. And in London ? 18. There is the tube. 19. But is there no danger for an 19. I shall take precautions, etc. invalid in the underground stations ? 20. And when the train starts 20. I shall keep hold of a strap suddenly ? or sit down. 21. And if there are no seats free ? 21. I shall ask somebody to give his up to me. This is the moment when a new hallucination occurs, and first of all I take an active part in it : I see somebody, whom I have asked for his seat, rising willingly, and I notice the half pitying, half admiring looks of the passengers in the carriage as they stare either at my artificial legs, my two sticks J and my decoration. Insensibly I must have passed into the passive state, my mental gaze being attracted by the representation of a scene which I once witnessed in a » The contradiction between these two sticks and the crutches, men* tioned before, will be explained below. 126 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS tube train, and I emerge from it with a shifting to a subject with which I have akeady dealt in question 11. 22. Could I avoid climbing the 22. (I see myself mounting these stairs in school ? stairs.) 23. Shall I have to come down- 23. No ; I'll smoke it in the stairs during the break to classroom, smoke my usual cigarette ? With question 22 I saw myself being brought in a rolling chair to the foot of the staircase of my old school in Ghent. With the next question I was smoking in a classroom of the Cardiff High School, where I taught modern languages for a few months before I returned to the Army. This proves that thinking in pictures instead of in words does not prevent the mind from conceiving different hypotheses, otherwise the successive appearance of the two schools would seem an inexplicable absurdity. The sight of the Cardiff High School provoked a new memory hallucination, from which I partially awoke, to the extent that I remember that at that precise moment I turned over from my right to my left side and went on thinking : "I am busy with an indifferent chain ; I must not interrupt and register it any more, otherwise I shall not succeed in getting any sleep to-night." Thereupon the hallucination of the field-ambulance and the American doctor returned and shifted my association again to ques- tion 7 : " Shall I pull through ? " The next questions centre round the contrary supposi- tion, namely, that I might die of my wounds : 24. Shall I recover ? Tell me the 24. (The implicit reply is in the truth, for I can stand it, and I negative.) want to take certain measures before I die. 25. What shall I telegraph to my 25. (The JBrst part of the text is family to warn them ? unrecallable ; the second part contained directions about procuring free tickets.) 26. Will they be able to get these 26. It will take a lot of time. tickets quickly ? THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 127 Here we notice again a memorial association : my mind's eye has only now noticed the supposed surprise on my friend the doctor's face at the revelation of my poverty by the wording of the telegram. This takes me back to the recol- lection of my poverty, which often crops up in my musings, and of which my saying to the doctor : '* Yes ; you have no idea how we have been hit by the war," is the verbal expression. But this remembering makes me lose the object which I had in view, referring to the delay that may be . caused by the application for free tickets, and the stream of thought shifts back to the preceding answer, which relates to the expenses : 27. Will they be able to get here 27. They will have to pay from without expense ? Calais onwards. After this comes a reflection which I am unable to connect with the preceding answer, at least, not with the aid of my notes. I was then thinking in words : "I am impressed by my indifference in the presence of the greats calamity that has befallen me." I shall, however, give the explanation of this disconnectedness later. Next I am dying : 28. What if I die before their 28. Dictate my will. arrival ? And I awake from my phantasy while I am dictating it. We shall now be able to represent this thought-construc- tion schematically, but we have here to cope with a difficulty which we did not meet with in our former scheme. In the previous day-dream every protracted recollection was followed by a deviation, to such an extent that the subject under consideration was each time abandoned for a new connective one. Here, on the contrary, with one exception, the main anxiety remains in the foreground all the while. The memorial hallucinations are not so deeply disturbing. They cause each time a new direction in the search, and in one instance there is no deviation whatever (between 6 and 7). To meet this new difficulty in the concretization I have represented the two main parts of the chain as two series 128 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 129 of broken strata, broken off and connected by a hallucina- tion, the association moving about in each of these as the caprices of the linking-up direct it. In the scheme given opposite the connections due to drift- ings on the stream of memory are represented again by dotted lines and numbered in Roman figures. The first thing I want to draw the reader's attention to is, that of the nine interruptions of this progression, provoked by the passivity of my fore-consciousness during the process of recollecting, there is only one, the second, that has been the occasion of the introduction of an alto- gether new subject. We met with such instances several times in the previous analysis. Another special remark is due to the fifth deviation, at the end of which the association process did not undergo any change of direction. We infer from this that an abandon- ment to the stream of recollection does not always necessarily result in the swerving of the concatenation. With regard to the second interruption, after which an altogether new subject was introduced, and the fifth, where the memory hallucination did not cause a change of direc- tion in the associating process, we shall not make any further comments. In the seven other interruptions there is each time a slight shifting calling for some remark, as here we see for the first time a fore-conscious chain of thought reverting to a consideration that had been left behind — returning upon its steps, as it were. At question 9 I wonder how I shall while the time away during my stay in bed. Thereupon the association passes on to my books and my subsequent teaching after my recovery. But with question 12, after hallucination III, the train of thought reverts to the problem of the means of whiling away the time, and it now develops in a different direction : the visit of my brother-in-law, etc. The same phenomenon is observable when we compare questions 11 and 22 : in 11 I am concerned about pur- suing my career, and also at 22, after a deviation. We may detect this process even a third tim.e : at questions 7 and 24. At 7 I wonder whether I shall pull 9 130 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS through, and the implicit reply is in the affirmative. At 24, after the sixth swerving, I return to the same subject, but the implicit reply is now in the negative, and the develop- ment of the association follows a direction exactly opposite : it ends with a death-bed scene instead of one in which I have recovered and am teaching again. When we look at the shifting process from this angle it no longer seems so strange and perplexing as when it first came under our observation. This relatively greater familiarity is partly due to the fact that a similar process forms part of the thought-procedures of our waking life. To make this analogy clearer, I shall first give some examples which everyone may 'have observed in everyday life, and close the series with an analysed observation upon myself. At the annual meeting of a benevolent society of which I am an active member there was once a great discussion, almost an uproar, because a small but active minority was hostile in respect of a proposal which would profoundly modify the character of the society. The leader of that minority w^as a young politician, a commercial traveller by profession, who had the reputation of being a good orator, although he left school for business when in his early teens. He spoke very fluently and with an extraordinary abundance of words, his speech taking an hour and a half to deliver. But after the first half-hour had elapsed, he constantly and unknowingly, by means of external associations, reverted to points which he had already developed. Hot in the order in which they first occurred, but at random, and that to such a degree that even his own followers ended by becoming aware that he was " turning round the pot," as the French expression goes, and boring even the strongest partisans of the freedom of speech. The dullest of his hearers realized that he was repeating the arguments which he had developed several times already, and jumping from one point to another without any apparent transition. As I shall have occasion to show, this man, who could not stop himself, was simply rendering a fore-conscious concatenation in words, with all its defects and illogicalities, and he was not aware of it, for he could not hear himself speak, and was THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 131 unable to reflect while he was speaking. I have since noted that many orators of the popular classes present the same inconsistencies in their speeches, although not in such a high degree as this man. It is the incoherence of fore- conscious ideation that is reproduced in their speeches, for they think fore-consciously while speaking ; they simply render in words the process that goes on in their fore-con- sciousness and have not the skill of the more cultured speaker, who has the art of bringing order into his thoughts by suitable preparation, or is saved from useless swervings by purer inspiration. But as it stands the example shows that the incoherence and caprice of our day-dreams may be detected and observed by everybody who cares to listen to public speakers of limited education. The sudden changes of subject, the stray ings and repeti- tions of our phantasies, are also found in the letters of half-illiterate persons, and even educated persons allow themselves, in their conversation, to pass freely, without transition, from one topic to another, so that they have covered a wide field after they have been talking for a time. The French call this a conversation a batons rompus. They make use of external associations ("by the way," etc.) and all the means we have seen at the disposal of fore-conscious ideation, but at every change of subject something has happened which has recalled some remembrance or other, which they immediately develop. This bears a strong resemblance to the associations of fore-conscious thought. The main difference is that the recollections are not neces- sarily visualized, but more often than not are simply remembered in words ; but this is only a difference of degree, which I reserve for further discussion. If we tried to represent such a conversation schematically, we should elicit a progression precisely similar to those in our two representations. There is another similarity between my fore-conscious concatenations and the style of half-illiterate persons. We have all noted that they have an inclination for linking up all their sentences with the conjunction " and," as do the common folk as they stand talking together in a quiet street. The same particle can be added to every 132 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS question of my associations without producing an effect of strangeness. The last instance from everyday life to which I wish to draw the reader's attention is that of our children. We know that it is one of the first duties of a teacher to explain to his pupils that in writing an essay they should not abandon one subject for the next before they have said all that they have to say about that particular subject, and that they should use proper connections and transitions, so that their work forms a well-balanced whole. I will now introduce a brief observation with the purpose of determining the psycho-analytic explanation of a waking thought-association offering an unexpected shifting : / am in the train. My friend R, is sitting opposite me, and we are quietly discussing the subject of this book, I have just explained to him how it happened that, at the entrance of the station, he had put his ticket into the wrong pocket, so that he could not find it ; it was because his second ego xvanted him to go to Paris instead of accompanying me. At a certain moment I could no longer remember what I was going to say, and my friend, still half incredulous, asked me sneeringly : " How do you explain that forgetting of youjr purpose just now ? " The explanation flashed through my mind, although it had never occurred to me before : while I had been speaking, I had noted that our two neighbours, two celebrated painters, as I learned later, had been listening to my explanations about mislaying things and fore-conscious thinking; and this had been the cause of my straying. Indeed, during the short time necessary to pronounce the sentence that I was uttering when I became aware of their listening attitude, I had had this beginning of a fore-conscious association : " They are listening to me. This subject must be entirely new to them, and they must think it a fascinating one. What a success my book will have ! '* This I retraced in less time than I can write it. So my reply to my friend's question followed quick as lightning : " Because I have been distracted " ; and I frankly confided to him the THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 133 content of the involuntary intellection that had caused my distraction. Afterwards it needed a serious mental effort to get back to the point from which my mind had wandered, and I found it by asking aloud : " What did I say was my purpose when I started this argument ? " For now I was trying to trace back in my mind the things that I had said before, and by this regressive effort of memory I came back to my previous purpose and was able to get on with my explanation. Whenever it happens in waking life that we go astray in our conversation, it is possible to trace the deviation to the influence of another thought which absorbs our mental energy. For it is indeed the sudden appearance of a re- collection, at the conclusion of a fore-conscious concatena- tion, that has attracted my attention and absorbed my interest in my original purpose. This absorption makes me forget it. We know from our previous analyses that in our fore- conscious visual recollections we are passive spectators, fascinated by the animated pictures projected on our mental screen. We know also that the genesis of a fore-conscious chain of thought is the consequence of a brief hallucina- tion provoked by recollecting. The idea that caused my temporary distraction was also a recollection. I repeat that at the moment when, talking to my friend, I noted the two passengers in an involuntary listening attitude, my fore-conscious train of thought was : " They must think the subject fascinating. What a success my book will have ! " This is, however, not a new reflection. It has recurred to me whenever I have thought that I had found something that shed new light on the unravelling of the fore-conscious thought-mechanisms. And each time also it was accompanied by an affect, for I have always felt jubilant whenever new light has dawned upon me, a feeling to which I have alluded already. I am now fully aware of what I failed to notice at first sight, that the failure to remember what I was going to say next, in the conversation with my friend, is simply a ■' distraction," but so short-lived that we not only do not 134 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS call it by that name, but we do not even suspect, as a rule, that we have been distracted, so slight is the degree of absentmindedness. This imperfection of our conscious thought-processes, this deficiency of remembering what one was going to say, is well expressed by the French and English locutions : perdre le fil de ses idies, '' to lose the thread of one's argument." Summing up, we may now permissibly state that the present distraction and swerving partakes also of the nature of a memory hallucination, and we may conclude that the unsteadi7iess of fore-conscious concatenations is due to a hallucinatory phenomenon of memorial nature accompanied by corresponding revived emotions. The last term of this statement needs, however, to be more firmly established. We have noted before that in directed thinking we can, if we wish, go back upon our steps and recall the point at which we swerved. Not always, though, do we succeed in this attem2:>t to return to our starting-point. We succeed only if Our wish to discover it is strong enough, or if the starting-point is emotionally emphasized. If we do not succeed, we dismiss the problem altogether and simply admit our inability by saying : ''I have forgotten it, but it was probably a matter of no impor- tance, or I should not have forgotten it." So we pass on to the development of another idea, and we talk nineteen to the dozen. On the other hand, the three comparisons on p. 129 (between the ideas 9-12, 11-12 and 7-24 on the scheme on p. 128) demonstrate precisely that fore-consciousness also, after swerving from its original purpose, has returned after more or less delay to a thought from which it has previously strayed. But whereas we may succeed in so returning in waking life by the intervention of our will, provided the idea be emotionally emphasized, when the same phenomenon returns in our day-dreams it has been realized without the intervention of volition. Here the intensity of the wish suffices. And it needs no lengthy demonstration to persuade us that my unconscious desire for distinction, which is at the bottom of the whole chain, is stronger than the desire to solve the small worries that THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 185 are manifest in the preceding phantasy. This is in accord- ance with Freud's conception of the important role of the wish in unconscious thought-formations. Here I should like at once to meet an objection that might be made : Is it quite certain that it was the eternal infantile wish for distinction that directed this phantasy ? At the moment when I registered the day-dream under discussion my notions about fore-conscious thinking were very few indeed : I knew only what Freud says of it in his book on dreams. So I was still very unskilful, and the reader, who now already knows much more about the subject than I did at that time, could not possibly imagine the intense satisfaction which I felt a fortnight later, when I was able to write the following note in my diary (I copy it literally) : "I believe now that my phantasy about being wounded was due to the fore-conscious desire (of which I was not yet aware) to return to civil life, with the idea of being among the first, when peace is signed, to apply for any possible vacancies, so that I shall not fail to obtain the chair which I want to replace my lost post. For I can now remember the feelings that were aroused in me when I saw in The Times an advertisement for candidates for the chair of psychology at the Leeds University. But as the successful candidate had to enter upon his duties on January 1st, I have not even attempted to apply for the post. I remember now, too, with what feelings of regret I have perused The Times Educational Supplement every week, and I have more than once remarked to myself that all the best posts will be filled before I am demobilized. It is rather curious that it is only to-day that my fore- consciousness should give me the solution of the question which I asked myself when I registered this day-dream : ' Where is the wish in this fancy, and what is it ? ' " It will now be clear to the reader that the unconscious desire for distinction has been the chief stage-manager in my phantasy, so that we may sum up this part of the dis- cussion in this way : The phenomenon known as distraction in waking life has its correspondent in fore-conscious think- ing. But whereas in waking life we may succeed by the exertion of our will in retracing the idea which occupied 136 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS the mind at the moment of deviation, fore-consciousness is unable to do so. The latter may, however, recover an abandoned idea if the fore-conscious wish that caused the phantasy is strong enough, although the result is not a correction. Finally, in both cases the shifting is a consequence of a passive mental attitude in which the mind drifts on the stream of memory : it has passed from the latent to the active state. Before passing on to examine other defects of the fore- conscious thinking processes, I wish to make a simple remark which will be more fully considered later. The difficulty experienced in tracing the point where the thread of our conscious ideas was broken off is not the same in all individuals. Some always meet with success ; others try in vain. The latter are those who scarcely ever become aware of their day-dreams. The former can even register them, and I will hazard the guess that there is between the two the difference that distinguishes the visualizers from the non-visualizers. The former possess artistic dis- positions ; the latter do not. The former can without knowing it place themselves in a mental attitude very similar to the analysing attitude of Freud's patients as described on pp. 27-29. I will conclude these parenthetical remarks in order to proceed to considerations of another kind. {b) The Absence of Regressive Survey, It may have struck the reader that the reproductions of my day-dreams in the preceding pages do not bear any traces of correction by my second self, although I stated that I copied them faithfully as I put them down in my note- book. But it will certainly also have struck him that some of them give the impression of a kind of fairy-tales in which the errors have not been corrected. Like night -dreams, they contain gross mistakes which would not escape the dreamer's notice if he were awake. Day-dreamers and night-dreamers have, indeed, this in common, that they cannot correct their mistakes as long as they are not awake. This looks like a commonplace reflection, but it would be THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 137 interesting to find the reason for this shortcoming. Another analogy may set us on the way to the discovery of that reason. When I am writing a few pages of this book— my day's work — I proceed in the following manner : First of all I have, lying beside me, my diaries, with my notes of over three years. They replace my memory, upon which I cannot fully rely. When I start the analysis of a new day-dream I use a double sheet of foolscap paper, copying the phantasy sentence by sentence in a column on the extreme left, and afterwards assume the analysing attitude while I ponder over every sentence, the direction of my musing being given by my wish to allow everything to rise to the surface that may come in useful for the purpose of detecting the mechan- isms of fore-conscious thinking. These ideas coming to the surface, I scribble them down as quickly as possible, trying to write automatically, trying to ensure that my consciousness shall not cast any reflection between two consecutive ideas, for this would produce a disturbing effect and cause me to abandon my fore-conscious mental attitude. As a matter of fact, I reproduce as far as feasible the condi- tions of day-dreaming with a consciously chosen purpose. In this way the page gets filled up little by little. If in the end I were to read aloud all that is written from top to bottom, as though my thoughts had formed a sequence, I should find the composition nonsensical. It would be full of abrupt deviations, sudden jumps from one idea to another, something comparable to the unexpected and apparently unconnected changes which we know in our dreams. But I do not make the experiment. I simply put it aside, for it would take all my conscious skill to bring order into this tangle. In the next stage of my work I again rely mainly upon my fore-consciousness, but my aim has changed. I have gone over the jumble that I have written on my foolscap sheet, and have retained the points that will enable me to develop a certain line of argument, as, for instance, in the present case : that fore-consciousness cannot correct the mistakes which it makes in its progress, because the pheno- menon which we call reflection is denied to it, for it cannot 138 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS swim upstream again ; it knows only the forward movement of association. If the order in which I want to present the different points of my argumentation does not come forward at once fore-consciously, while I am reading them over, I leave my desk for a moment to look after the fire, or to play a tune on the piano, or something of the sort. And provided I have been all this time in a half-dreamy state, the order of presentation is usually ready in my mind's eye w^ithout any apparent effort. (On other occasions arrangements of this kind may occur to me wherever I am or whatever I am doing ; but I always note them carefully, as I do my day-dreams.) But if I allowed my book to be printed as my fore- consciousness conceived it, it would be incomprehensible ; it would be like the work of a scientist who had been unable to fix his mind upon the things which he wanted to expound. Therefore, my first work in the morning is to re-read what I wrote almost spontaneously the day before ; I complete, connect, re-arrange, reserve points for later consideration, etc., until the whole produces a logical impression. If the reader were to see my manuscript he would be surprised by the number of corrections which it exhibits. Yet I write so fluently that the present essay is from beginning to end the result of a sequence of day-dreams, called inspira- tions ; it has cost me very little conscious effort, and I owe it almost exclusively to my fore-conscious self. When I have come to the end of a section I cast a glance over my list of fore-conscious ideas, and I find that nearly all of them have automatically found their natural place in the text which my fore-consciousness has dictated. I give these details of the genesis of this book because I w^ant to show as explicitly as possible that a stoppage of the fore-conscious chain of thought cannot possibly occur without producing a disturbance, even when we check it for voluntary purposes. A return to an abandoned idea is still more impossible, unless an unexpected mean- dering of the association causes the mind to return to it quite involuntarily. Perhaps I might have spared myself this description, THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 139 for the reader might have inferred all this from the foregoing analyses. Indeed, we have seen that (protracted recollec- tions apart) the chain progresses continuously, and that the only way in which the fore -consciousness seems to be able to return to a certain point is by a memorial halluci- nation, after which the direction of the concatenation is imposed by the unconscious or fore-conscious wish. But even then the result is not the correction of a previous thought ; it is simply a new development in accordance with other associations ; it maj?- be the fore-conscious consideration of another alternative. We are forced to conclude from this that among the reasons of the inferiority of our fore-conscious ideation the impossibility of halting at, and, worse still, of returning to, any given part of the preceding associations holds an important place. (The more so, as we shall now see that the successive links are as readily forgotten as the elements stored in memory are recalled.) We know from our waking life how important it is to correct the verbal expression of our thoughts. Boileau's alexandrine, Vingt fois sur le metier remettez voire ouvrage (Return your work twenty times to the loom), in his Art poetique, is an advice that not only the poet but everybody should take ; but our inner self is incapable of following it. This activity is a privilege of consciousness. As a matter of fact it is very probable that in directed thinking we commit as many mistakes as in fore-conscious thinking, only we are not aware of them ; perhaps we commit even more. But in full awareness we can overlook the thoughts that have arisen in our minds with a critical intention. We condemn what is not to the point and retain what may come in useful. Let us suppose one has to write a letter in painful circumstances — for example, about a moral or material debt which one cannot pay. One thinks about the letter ; and in one's mind it has already been composed over and over again before one writes it down ; every argument that one can think of has been put forward and criticized, dropped or retained, until in the end the letter is present in the mind before it is confided to paper. But all the numerous attempts made before a definite 140 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS line is adopted are forgotten by the waking self. This does not alter the fact that they have been judged by the critical faculties as not being to the point, as being so many mistakes. But whereas I have here retraced all my day- dreams as they have been conceived and in their spontaneous sequence, consciousness forgets all the preparatory work, retains only the correct solution, and has rejected the numerous incorrect ones — those containing things which the conscious- ness regarded as errors. Better still, the critical faculty has picked out from the rejected solutions the service- able elements, and with these has composed the reply to the question. But the incorrect answers were nevertheless given, although they are not registered. If we could add up the total of all the suppositions offered before the con- scious adoption of a solution — and nothing more than great patience and much skill in self-observation would be needed — • we should in all probability find in that total as many errors as in our fore -conscious chains of thought. There might even be more, for our directed thinking does not dispose of the unlimited material stored in the memory as freely as our inner self, nor does it enjoy the freedom of associa- tion which we have noted as a privilege of fore-conscious intellection. The superiority of conscious thinking lies in the possi- bility of recalling at will all the links of the association and of criticizing and correcting them with a conscious aim in view. In conclusion, I may state that the errors proper to the fore-conscious thought-process, as a result of its incapacity to overlook its products regressively, have their correspon- dents in conscious intellection, but there, thanks to the possibility of regressive survey, they may subsequently be corrected. (c) Forgetting, After having devoted so much time to the role of recol- lection in our day-dreams, it will be worth our while to consider what is commonly admitted to be its reverse : the r61e of forgetting. For if the superiority of fore-conscious thinking is partly due to the hypertrophied power of recol- THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 141 lection and its extraordinary lucidity, just as its inferiority is to be ascribed to the invasion of hallucinatory recollections, we may ask ourselves whether the same quality and the same defect are not caused by the reverse faculty. Let us for a moment examine what seems to me the greatest absurdity in my day-dream about my hypotheti- cal wounds : namely, that the military authorities might refuse to discharge me from the army after my recovery, upon the pretext that, although I have now only two artificial legs and cannot walk without crutches, I am still able to perform my previous duties as an interpreter, because my billet is only a few yards from my office, a distance which I can easily cover even on crutches. This nonsense could only be conceived in the first place by a mind ignorant of the army regulations, and in the second place by one which cannot realize that in warfare there may suddenly arise circumstances in which even the non-combatant troops may want something better than artificial legs, if extensive operations are going to be carried out. This is exactly what my fore-consciousness has forgotten. This points to a mental oscillation of unsuspected width between an extreme acuity in recalling and an extreme efficacy in forgetting, of which the mind is capable in the fore-conscious state. On the one hand it has at its disposal the treasures stored in the memory, so much so that in the beginning of the day-dream it recollects the literal wording of my request to the Minister, of which my conscious self is incapable. But on the other hand it forgets for a moment the knowledge that is common even to the dullest individual, viz. that the loss of both legs is a reason for discharge from the army. Similarly I forget, in the flea phantasy, that a roller such as is used for rolling lawns could scarcely be moved to and fro in my tiny bedroom, and that insecticide powder ought not to be injected into my shirt with a horticulturist's bellows. In musing upon my boy's possible lung disease I forget that in a case of spitting blood one runs at once for a doctor and does not wait until the next morning. In the fancy about my colonel's visit I forget that my superior officer 142 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS is not an ass and will not allow me in one letter to apply for two posts which are given by two different authorities. Still, I was quite sincere ; not for a moment had I any notion of lying while I was in the fore-conscious state. In the fancy now under consideration I forget at a given moment that I have at a certain point begun to use a pair of crutches, for immediately afterwards I help myself forward with a couple of sticks. I forget just as quickly that I am in Ghent, for the next moment I see myself in Cardiff. The explanation of this succession of two different locali- ties is as simple as that accounting for the presence of sticks in contradiction to the crutches visualized in the early part of the day-dream. Just as I know that at a certain moment I wondered whether I should let myself lose one leg or both, so at a given association I was confronted by the alternative of choosing between crutches or sticks to help me to walk. (I was thinking of those hospital sticks with a support for the elbow and forearm, so that the cripple can more readily sustain the weight of his body, his fore- arms resting upon his sticks.) My preference was for crutches, but in the course of the day-dream I forgot this choice entirely, so that the sticks appear instead. It is very likely (although I cannot remember it definitely) that at another alternative solution (which staircase to avoid) the recollections of both the schools, that at Cardiff and that at Ghent, may have come to the fore, and having chosen the one, I may have forgotten this preference in the next associations, so that the other has been visualized. Such prompt amnesia should not surprise us, for it is apparent after almost every memory-hallucination. We have only met with one exception in which the contents of the associa- tion preceding a drifting were not lost sight of when the latter came to an end. These successive pictures, due to the untimely recalling or forgetting of alternatives, may be at the basis of the composite pictures which Freud has tried to decompose in his Traumdeutung. This sinking into oblivion is only to be compared in its swiftness and suddenness with the flash which all at once places forgotten and unthought-of recollections at our dis- THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 143 posal at the precise moment when we are in want of them. When I change from the Cardiff to the Ghent school, I even forget the resolution which I had taken long before : I had accepted the post of modern language teacher in the Cardiff High School as preferable to being maintained by public charity, like so many discharged soldiers and refugees in England. When later I was able to enlist again in the army, the town corporation had offered to keep the post at my disposal, but this I had politely declined ; neverthe- less, when I fancied myself recovered I saw myself back as a teacher in Cardiff : I was smoking a cigarette, during the break, in a classroom of the High School ; so I had forgotten my former decision as well. Although there is a superabundance of similar instances, in which two alternative or different suppositions are re- presented in quick succession — indeed, almost simultaneously — ^I shall call the reader's attention only to two more such ; I see myself driving in a car in France, and immediately afterwards, without apparent transition, I am in the London tube. One moment I am in the reception-room of the field-ambulance, and the next in bed in the officers' ward. These sudden changes do not surprise us any longer, for we know that they are merely due to the fact that we think in images instead of in words. Only when we render the thoughts verbally can the ideas and conditions that cause the successive pictures to appear come to expression. But here probably lies the key to the explanation of the genesis of the composite pictures seen in our night-dreams, as a result of condensation. The successive pictures of my two schools, as described above, contain the elements of a composite image in which they are blended. And probably visualizations similar to mine of driving in the car and in the underground train have led Fkeud, in his dream of Count Thun, to see himself driving in a carriage along the railway track. ^ But the instance of inattention which might most impress the man in the street, because it is one that he himself has observed in his own night- and day-dreams, is that all this while I am oblivious of the fact that in reality I am not ^ Cf. S. Fbeud, The Interpretation oj Dreams, p. 177. 144 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS wounded at all. For over a quarter of an hour I labour under the delusion that I have really lost my legs, that I am lying maimed in the hospital and sitting as an invalid in the ear, in the tube, etc. I believe temporarily in the lies of my own imagination. In other words, I have lost the notion of reality, and as long as it lasts I am in the same condition as the pseudologia phantast ; I forget that my visions are only the translation into images of suppositions ; I react to them as to existing realities. Cannot the material at our disposal furnish us with the key to the explanation of this delusive and seemingly in- comprehensible phenomenon ? If in the phantasy of my disablement I remain all the while in the false belief that I have really been wounded by the bursting of a shell, have we no examples of day-dreams at our disposal in which the deception has not lasted so long ? Such is the case in the soldier phantasy. If we look at its rendering in questions and answers (on p. 75), we note that although the visualiza- tion is abundant I do not halt for any length of time at any one delusion. At the same time we see that all the successive solutions or suppositions are rejected one after another, and that they seem to be forgotten as soon as they have been rejected. On the other hand, I am able to show that we retain and concatenate with a proposed solution only after it has been accepted by the mind as adequate and pleasing : (a) On pp. 82-83, in the day-dream relating to various anxieties, I examine in Part III how I shall win Miss X.'s favour. The means which my fore -consciousness proposes to this end are approved. But just as thinking and seeing are simultaneous in our imagination, so are thinking, trying and succeeding (for there are no impossibilities for the fancy) ; they are all one. And farther on (question 9), I associate as though Miss X. were already won. (b) The idea of the Academy is scarcely conceived and accepted when I concatenate upon it : I see myself an active Academician. I forget that a moment earlier the thought had been introduced hypothetically : it has now become a reality. (c) In my day-dream about the impertinent soldier, THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 145 I am so illuded by my suggestion of calling upon Countess V. that I immediately see and hear myself discussing the matter with her, forgetting that I had only considered the possibility of a visit. From these examples and the many others which the foregoing analysis affords, we may infer that the fore -con- sciousness accepts and retains as real only that which pleases it. That which does not suit it is at once rejected and sinks into oblivion. But when a possible solution has been accepted its hypothetical character is forgotten, and it is adhered to solely as a solution, as a reality, which is taken as a basis for further developments. I will try to indicate the reason of this ready acceptance, which seems a peculiarity of the imagination. In waking life, we know that what our day-dreams build are only castles in the air. The French locate them in Spain. However, when we are awake we know that these castles do not exist even in Spain. But when our powers of criticism are diminished in fore-consciousness we are unable to make this distinction, for then we really see these castles before our mind's eye. We believe because we see. And the fore-consciousness is not alone in believing what it sees or in wanting to see before believing. Even Thomas wanted to see before he would recognize Christ. He thereby proved himself to be merely human, a man of simple mind. Not only the simple in mind want to see before they believe. We may even say that simple-minded people believe because they have seen. This explains the power of printed matter over the mind of simple folks. "It is printed in the paper " differs only in degree from the Oriental fatalist's submission to fate expressed by the words " It is written." A certain development of the critical faculties is necessary to keep even the waking mind from believing what it sees. The mental eye treats the representations of the imagination as the wayfarers of the caravan interpret the mirage of the oasis where they hope to quench their thirst. But the self-deceptive power of the fore-consciousness is much greater than theirs, because the fore-consciousness has a tremendous capacity for forgetting. In this con- nection we should bear in mind that when our musings are 10 146 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS strongly visualized, the verbal expression of the successive ideas is not perceived ; it is only my analysis that makes me render my thoughts in words, so that the " ifs," the conditional presentations of the proposed solutions, are all the more easily lost. The text no longer serves as a guide to the illustrations. A certain amount of amnesia and visualization are thus so closely related that they react upon each other alternately as cause and effect. Our fore-consciousness, which at a certain stage seems to become ineffective as a critic, can see before it believes, for it can see everything, and it can believe before it sees, because it can forget everything (including the suppositional character of the presentations). But just as the visions become realities to the uncritical fore-consciousness, because the " if " is forgotten as soon as the idea is introduced, so the different modes of the verbs are reduced to the present as soon as the suppositions have become perceptions. Indeed, the fore-conscious capacity for forgetting is so great that the thoughts introduced need not necessarily be changed into images to be recognized as realities. The " w^hen ** which is thought is just as easily forgotten as the "if," and it would be difficult to determine when an illusion becomes a temporary reality by virtue of its visualization, or when by virtue of the capacity for forgetting the hypothetical conditions under which it was introduced. It is highly probable that both factors — visualization and forgetting — are never entirely absent, although the first may preponderate in one instance, and, conversely, the second in another. This brief review of the role of forgetting would not be complete if we did not in this connection emphasize a fact whose consideration had previously to be abandoned for reasons of method. We have seen that, among the reasons for the instability of fore-conscious trains of thought, the incapacity of the mind in this stage to make any effort to go backwards and examine any of the previous associations is an important factor. We might express this otherwise, and say that the fore-conscious intellect cannot retain any of the links which have passed across its focus, as the con- THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 147 scions intellect is able to do. They are forgotten and— for our second self — beyond recall as soon as they have been abandoned. One form of memory seems asleep : the memory for actual happenings. We are reminded of the memory of very old people, who cannot remember the events of the day, although they can readily recollect the events of their youth. And still, although we cannot anywhere observe an effort to recall our past concatenations, it looks as though this power of remembering, which belongs to volition in waking life, is not altogether absent, for we have often observed that after a memory-drifting a new connection is established, with a link that has previously been abandoned. We shall see below how this apparent exception is to be explained. We must now be content with observing that the complete forgetting of every last association occurs only after a memory hallucination as well as the starting of a new section or part of the chain. But that which in the last instance we have ascribed to forgetting might as well be attributed to distraction. For- getting and distraction are two notions which partially cover one another, and the latter term especially may lead to confusion. Let us therefore examine its exact meaning, as we shall have to use it in the discussion to follow. When we are speaking in terms of consciousness, distraction means " a state in which the attention is disturbed by variety or multiplicity of objects or motives." In these circumstances we should consider that although we are distracted the mind is still busy, but in a fore -conscious way. When we speak of distraction in fore-conscious terms, we must make a more subtle distinction : we are diverted from the consideration that was present in the mind only by a memory-hallucination of some length and duration. Then we pass truly into a passive state. In fore-conscious thinking a distraction is caused only by a recollection which is not limited to one element, but which automatically provokes the reappearance before the mind's eye of a certain portion of the series of which it is part. In terms of consciousness, as we have seen before, the cause of the distraction is also a memory element, but this 148 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS is either of short duration, provoking a reaction which results in a new creation, and constituting the origin of a fore- conscious chain, or it leads directly to the unrolling of a series of remembrances, as in the fore-conscious state. But from both points of view the distraction leads to a forgetting of the original purpose. We are now able to go still more deeply into the mechan- isms of our fore-conscious processes of ideation, for we can now proceed to a comparison between two phenomena proper to fore-conscious thinking. There seem to be two successive stages in our subjection to involuntary thought : (a) when we are conscious, and our mind goes wool-gathering, we forget our conscious purpose because of our untimely memories, upon which we associate ; and (b) when we are thinking fore-consciously we may again forget our fore-con- scious purpose, that is, the content of the last association that precedes a series of recollections. Let me particularize for the sake of clearness : On p. 113, No. 10, I give in my imagination directions to an orderly about the books which I want him to fetch from my billet. Thereupon I cease to associate, but I pass through a hallucination in which I recall in a vivid picture my room, my small field library, and the different books which it contains. This brings to my mind's eye my books at home ; and when the reaction which I call my creative power asserts itself again, I concatenate upon the complex " home " and think about my former teaching profession. The idea of the hospital is forgotten. The important feature which ought to be emphasized in both cases, because it is common to both — that is : (a) in passing from the conscious to the fore-conscious state ; (b) in passing from the creative stage to prolonged recollec- tion — ^is that each time the object that was foremost in the mind is forgotten for a memory element that acts like an external excitation. Recollections seem thus to produce a fascinating effect on the mind. The question arises, however, whether this fascination is due to the act of recollecting or to the fact that the memory elements present themselves as internal perceptions. The solution of this problem lies at hand. When we THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 149 ask ourselves where the suppositions and rejoinders come from, the answer is that both are parts of the contents of the memory. Let us take an example : Everybody has heard of accidents resulting in the loss of a leg and has been struck by the gruesome detail that sometimes the limb is not entirely detached from the body, etc. This detail is now recalled at the right moment in the form of a supposi' tion that suits the present situation. Immediately another remembrance comes to the fore. As I am lying in the street in front of a butcher's shop, one of the man's knives will come in useful, etc. Of course, the supposition is introduced by " if " or " when," but as soon as the memory-element loses its character of a recollection to become an internal perception (which for the fore-conscious has the same value as an external object) the conditional has become the present, the hypothesis is forgotten for reality : the perception is forgotten, just as the last link before a memory hallucination is forgotten, or as the subject of conscious thinking is lost sight of when we begin a process of mind-wandering. We have no difficulty in admitting this sort of fascination when the recollections become plastic, but the fascination is no less when the inner perception bears on a verbal expression, which is simply the present substitute for the primitive object. The spell of words is as great in man as the attrac- tion of plastic images in the highly organized animal world and in children. We may conclude that as soon as a memory-element becomes a perception we forget the conditions by which the presentation was first accompanied ; there is distraction in so far as the latter are concerned, because in the fore-conscious- ness there is no awareness of the past or the future. This is probably the phenomenon which Bergson had in mind when he wrote : " We should not forget that the image is a present state and can only belong to the past through memory, from which it has issued." ^ But although in fore-conscious thinking there seems to be no awareness for either the past or the future, the notion of the future is not altogether absent, for it is represented » Cf. Bergson, Matiere et Mimoire, p. 152, 13th edition. Alcan, Paris. 150 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS by the wish or successive wishes directing the associative process, and, as we shall argue later, all wishes point to the future. If we try finally to sum up this argument we find in the process of thought-formation the following stages : (1) a recollection is revived and introduced hypothetically ; (2) perception treats it as a reality ; (3) as such it is the object of a reaction, in the form of another recollection that is borrowed from the store of memory ; (4) this reaction indicates the adequacy or inadequacy of the supposition and is in each case followed by the hypothetical introduction of a new recollection, which is treated in the same fashion as the previous one. It looks as though fore-conscious thinking were a testing process, in which a particular memory -element is revived and confronted by a corresponding recollection, both recallings being directed towards an end of which we are unaware, but which becomes clear when we examine the whole association ; that is to say, the successive trials which flow one into another. It must be clearly understood that in conscious thinking the mind proceeds in a precisely similar fashion : a merchant who wants to obtain certain goods, a pupil who has an essay to write, a mathematician who has to solve a problem, all seek in their memory an element that may suit their purpose and immediately afterwards put their idea to the test with the aid of objections borrowed from the store of memory. But they are aware of the aim. They know that they are applying to memory for the solution of their difficulties, and they may remember the contents of their successive attempts. They are not fascinated by their recollections directly they perceive them, but accept them only in a pro- visional manner. These fresh acquisitions do not alter the close similarity between the two ways of thinking. If we now turn our attention once more to the paired queries and rejoinders that constitute the fore-conscious chains of thought, we are struck by the fact that what we call creative thinking is nothirig but recalling at the right moment with the right purpose. But the remembering at the right time is accompanied THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 151 in every single instance by a certain amount of forgetting : I forget the proper use of a butcher's knife, etc., a forgetting proper to fore-consciousness. Further, we must not fail to note that each individual question gives the impression that it must be due to a sort of apprehension or anxiety consecutive upon the preceding reply. We might easily express this feeling after each answer : Answers. Feeling. 8. Ask for the butcher's Would it be advisable knife . to sever the mangled limb ? VTould a R.A.M.C. man do the same ? 4. I can myself tell Might I not lose too someone what to much blood ? do. 5. Ask for a towel, etc. But would that make an efficient tourni- quet ? Questions. 4. What if there are no R.A.M.C. men to attend to me ? 5. What if I were to lose too much blood ? 6. What if the people at the field-am- bulance were to be too long about fetching me ? These feelings are all expressions of the instinct of self- preservation. If the reader will re-read the list of questions and answers on pp. 122 et seq., he will be able to supply and answer as I have done the feeling that stands behind every question. In other cases this may be less simple, but the rdle of the affects will be treated at length in my second part, and it is only with the purpose of marking out our ground for later consideration that this remark is offered in passim. I do not think I shall be anticipating further develop- ments if I call attention to the fact that we must also consider the influence of affects on remembering and forgetting in fore-conscious ideation : every reply arouses an affect that in its turn evokes a fresh supposition drawn from the stock of memory. Probably the question also arouses an affect which, as we shall see presently, provokes the reply, which is also drawn from memory, and thus feeling and thought exert a reciprocal influence upon each other as cause and effect. 152 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS As to the r61e of affects in forgetting, one analogy must suffice for the present. When I think fore- consciously : *' If I had been there I might have lost one leg or both," I immediately see myself lying wounded on the cobbles, and am so fascinated by the sight, so distracted, that I forget the hypothesis, the "if." I see myself wounded, conse- quently I am really wounded. This phenomenon has its parallel in waking life, and may lead to tragedies ; for instance, when an actor is so fascinated by his acting that he really stabs his colleague on the stage. In our fore-conscious life, however, no harm is done, and soon we pass over to the next progression : " What if one of my legs were not entirely detached ? " After this digression, little remains to be said about the role of forgetting in fore-conscious intellection, at least as far as analysis is concerned, for I have tried to render full justice to its most remarkable performance : the possi- bility of treating with inattention, as not existing, the pedestal on which it erects its statues, the frame that holds the pictures which the mind considers with such scrutinizing attention. I will close this discussion with two observations : Firstly, that memory and oblivion show themselves just as capricious under the scrutiny of the psycho-analyst as to the waking mind of the layman. Upon awakening from a phantasy nothing may be remembered about the castles in the air, or unimportant details may escape oblivion whilst important ones may be lost for ever. There is only one class of persons to whom this general rule is inapplicable ; namely, those who make an abundant use of fore-conscious processes for conscious aims, such as artists and scientists. But the majority of these use the organ of their imagination instinc- tively without expert training, much as Monsieur Jourdain in Moli^re's comedy Le bourgeois gentilhomme, who spoke in prose without knowing it. The highly affective life of the artist and the thinker is responsible for their capacity for profiting more than does the average individual by the mental procedures of their inner selves, as I hope to explain in another essay. The second and final observation is to the effect that THE CONTENTS OF THE CHAINS 153 when the layman remembers anything at all upon awakening from a day-dream, it is usually the case that he has had a vision of something or other related to his chief preoccupa- tion. However, when his fore-conscious concatenations have resulted in a conception that may prove useful in his waking life, he may remember this result in words (viz. he may retain the verbal remembrance of his vision), especially if it has caused him an emotion. Inspirations of this kind are usually accepted without the faintest notion of their origin. In the meantime we must bear in mind that in certain cases the fore-conscious images are more liable to be carried over into consciousness than their verbal expression. At the close of this long chapter we may look back with some satisfaction over the ground which we have covered, for we have discovered several data which will furnish the elements for an attempt to describe the mechanisms active in fore-conscious thinking. We have successively decided that our undirected trains of thought take the external form of a series of questions and answers, occa- sionally interrupted by memory-hallucinations, in which the recollections pass into the dynamic state : that internally the links are nothing but a continuous succession of remem^ brances ; that forgetting plays as active and extensive a role as remembering ; that the defects of this thought-process, as well as its superiorities, are mainly due to the capacity of the mind to forget as well as to remember, and to be dis» tracted (and in a less degree to the use of external associa* tions, although these are encountered more frequently than when we are conscious). One important problem, however, I have intentionally reserved for the next chapter, and this mainly for reasons of method, although I might have treated it here : the activity of the critical thought-process in fore-conscious thinking. CHAPTER III THE TERMINATION OF THE CHAINS 1. The Awakening. Our analysis of day-dreams will be completed when we have discovered how they terminate. In a few instances the conclusion seems obvious enough : (a) I was (in bed) thinking about the stationery for which we had indented last Saturday when the humming of aero- planes awoke me. (b) At 10.45 p.m. the buzz of the heavy motor of a car, which I had first taken for the sound of an aeroplane, awakes me from a reverie just as I am thinking of the torpedoed Sussex, in which my friend X. lost his life, {c) I return to consciousness just as the clock strikes a quarter past ten. This concordance makes me think that there is a relation of cause and effect between the awaking and the striking ; but this may be erroneous, for I often wake without any outer stimulus whatever. I was just musing about the means of passing my doctors examination when my reverie was broken off. This last observation, which I copy from my notes as I wrote it down in the early days of my investigation of this subject, is more profound than I thought at the time, as the sequel will prove. But it is nevertheless true that the perception of external stimuli coincides as often with the abrupt conclusion of day-dreams as with the genesis of others. At the same time, we note that the last link at which the association is broken off is in every instance a recollection, 154 THE TERMINATION OF THE CHAINS 155 In other cases the precise moment at which the Hnking up is interrupted at a recollection is very apparent in the text. (I insist upon the point that everything is repro- duced here as it was written down — that is to say, at a time when I had not the faintest idea whither my researches w^ould lead me.) The reproduction of the Folkestone day- dream leaves me in no doubt upon this point. But then the question arises : What can the cause of the awakening be in this case ? Before making an attempt to solve this riddle, we will first turn our attention to other endings, in which the reply to this query lies closer to hand. The first peculiarity that I want to emphasize is that in all the fore-conscious trains of thought which I have so far reproduced completely, the last link is always constituted by a remembrance : in the last association of the day-dream on pp. 30-31 I am turning over in my mind the few data which I have collected thus far for my thesis. In the other, on p. 83, I am turning over thoughts which I have often had before : the question of the expenses of my examina- tion. In a third (p. 35) I am recollecting the railway troubles in England. The end on p. 58 consists of a memory of my last leave, etc. The concluding sentences of the phantasy reproduced on pp. 112-115 attract our attention next : / was dictating my last will when I awoke (evidently a memory, for what reasonable man who went to the war did not make his last will before leaving the home to which he might never return ?). Immediately I say to myself : '' What a beautiful con- struction ! I am going to write it down at once, for it contains magnificent illustrations of successive risings to the surface and sinkings into the unconscious. It entirely corroborates my theory as I had dimly constructed it." Obviously, this final reflection does not belong to the day- dream. It is an opinion that has come to me after the awakening. A thing which it is difficult to translate into words is the feeling that accompanied this conscious reflec- tion. It was an agreeable emotion, a kind of jubilation that I have already tried to describe, which at different periods has come to me several times in the day since I started upon this work. It is, moreover, not my exclusive 156 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS privilege to feel this emotion ; it is shared by all creative minds at the moment of creation in a degree varying with the individual temperament ; it made Archimedes, as the legend goes, dance and shout " Eureka ! " through the streets of Syracuse. It was the satisfaction of the desire to observe my day- dreams and make new discoveries that caused this emotion in my case, and, as already stated, I am quite familiar with it. But this same excitement need not necessarily be a manifestation of the conscious mind. In the phantasy on pp. 78-80 it was fore-consciously that I erroneously thought that I might have hit upon a case of telepathy and con- catenated upon it. The same feeling as that experienced in the previous instance sharpened my wits and excited me so that I left my warm bed at once to look up the exaqt date in my diary. It is this fore-conscious satisfaction that ofj:en warns us intuitively that we are day-dreaming. I copy from my notes : / was perusing Freud^s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Chapter IV, " Lapses in Reading and Writing y^^ when on p, 123 an idea arose to consciousness as I was rather distractedly reading the following lines : " ... But I had to reflect for quite a while in order to discover what influence diverted me from my first attention without making itself known to my consciousness,"*^ The thought that came to the surface was : *' There is something going on in my fore-consciousness which is directly related to my subject. I ought to stop reading for a little while and let it rise to the surface." So I did indeed stop reading, and I was able to retrace a whole chain of ideation, which proved to be an inspiration and made me very happy. ^ I reproduce yet another day-dream which really does not belong here, and will be completely analysed in another book devoted to the mechanism of invention. But even without comment the sentiment that directed the asso- ' I cannot communicate the chain here, as it would lead us too far afield. It should, however, be stated that the last association contained a memory element. THE TERMINATION OF THE CHAINS 157 ciative process, and especially the one that caused the awakening, will, I hope, be clearly apparent. Preliminary Statement.— (1) It was at the time when I was reading for the first time Freud^s hook Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten. (2) The song I sung to myself dates hack from my adolescence and I have never sung it during the last twenty years. It is in- tended to he a comic song sung hy a Parisian imitating the Spanish language ; in reality it is in French, hut some words have been given Spanish endings, I reconstitute it from memory thus : Comica serenada cantada par un Espagnolos des Batignollos a una Andaluza du boulevard Rochechouardos, Pendant que ton vieux maritos En voyageos est partidos, Je veux te donner, senora, Una bella serenada, Mais je crains que ton maritos Ne vienne nous derangeros Et me flanquer son soulieros Au milieu de mon derriiros. Je n'aimos pas ces hlagoS'ld, etc. There is an error in the rhythm, hecause the musical accent ought to coincide with the accent of pronunciation on h\2i'gos-ld, instead of on hla-gos-ld. Day-dream. — / leave my house, and when I have walked a couple of hundred yards I stop, saying to myself: '^ Ah, I have got an example of shifting such as children often employ in their literary games ; better still, this is an instance of invention " ; and I remain standing in the middle of the bridge which I am crossing, in order to write down on the back of an envelope a summary of the following chain : When I closed my door my mind was a perfect blank {?). As soon as I had walked a few steps I started humming the above song. I remember that my friend E. used to enjoy this song very much, because he understood many of the endings as '* rosse " instead of " ros" ^ I had not thought of this until he suggested it, ^ Bos = roaae, pronounced as in "cross," is "old horse," or an invective for " woman." 158 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS He saw a double meaning where I saw none. He, too, is going to marry. His fiancSe lives close to the house which I should like to buy. He will have great difficulty in finding a house in F. (where he lives). (This town, as it has been partly destroyed during the war, passes across the screen of my imagination, and all the time I go on humming.) When I have come to the last line here reproduced I say to myself: " The composer has made a mistake in the rhythm (at blagos- Id), as my friend C. taught me one dayJ^^ (I see the composer C. at his piano.) Next I reflect that I read in last nighfs paper a notice of C.^s production. This is an over-deter- mination, as I read this morning in Der Witz, p. 138, " man verfolgt . . . die Assoziationsfaden, die von jedem der nun isolierten elementen ausgehen (Knoten). Die verflechten sich mit einander ..." etc. Consequently I make another dis- covery, a new analogy between day-dream and night-dream (Knoten-Kreuzpunkt), and I wonder now whether the ideas which I could not put into their proper place in my first recon- stitutions were also over-determinations. Anyhow^ I shall be able to observe my musings better in future, and my technique for observing myself improves every day. Here I divert again : " I wonder how my friend E. was able, simply by listening to me, to realize that ' blagos-ld ' meant ' blague ' = joke, for the accent in singing is on ' gos.' " (Here I see E. sitting beside me at the piano and leaning over my shoulder to follow the text, as he tcsed to do more than twenty years ago.^) " But this is again a shifting of accent, as children shift it in some of their ganus^' When I say this to myself my mind is not wandering any longer ; the day-dream stops at this recollection. The same triumphant feeling that accompanies any new light that dawns upon me invades my consciousness, and I con- tinue to reason, half consciously this time : " Children at play shift the accent in order to transform their mother-tongue into so-called ' child's Latin ' (an imitation of the Latin they hear at Mass),' just as adults use it imconsciously when * Here I forget that in the thought that has just been abandoned I admitted that he only heard the song, and / do not become aware, as the pictures unroll themselves before my mind's eye, that he follows the printed text with his eye. (Cf. my former remarks re forgetting.) » Here follows an instance of what the Flemish children call Latin in THE TERMINATION OF THE CHAINS 159 making jests and in various other circumstances. Is there any relation between these phenomena ? I shall make a note of this idea as soon as I reach home ; better still, I am going to write it down at once, for it is a fine example of an inventing chain." In the passage " But this again . . . children " we meet again with the observation- wish becoming apparent immediately after a memorial element. I regret once more that I cannot analyse this remark- able concatenation here, for I introduced it only for the purpose of giving an impression of the manner in which consciousness ends by reasserting itself. It introduces also a subject of consideration with which we shall presently deal. Indeed, it is evident that the same wish lurks in the background all the time, leading my fore-conscious stream of thought intermittently from one association to another. The time has come to emphasize the fact that the same wish is traceable at the same particular moment in some of the trains of thought already reproduced ; on p. 48 the expression " fixed groups of associations " linked up with the idea which I had already had : " Fore-consciousness takes each element of an association at its own value, apart from any relation to the category of which it usually forms part, and not as belonging to the complex thought as a part of which it has come to our knowledge. It dissociates the apperceptions." On the other hand, I understood the text I was reading as follows : Conscious contemplation sees only the groups of ideas as they are fixed in our minds. Thereupon, with the same feeling of jubilation, my fore-con- sciousness drew the conclusion : Here is the very cha- racteristic difference between fore-conscious and conscious their games : Hct lam graast (the lamb grazes) becomes Lama graza. and De puit zit op den dyk (the frog sits on the dike) is transformed into Puta dykOf etc. In the same way the Flemish rhymes : De hesp hangt er aan (The ham hangs on it) Kon er de kat aan . . . (Could the cat (reach) at it) are altered to Despanteran, conterdecaian, which is supposed to be French. The displacement of the accent in pronouncing will become clearer if we represent the syllables by feet : Original sentences : U - UU - Children's French : - UU - -UU-- -uuu- 160 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS attention. (Needless to say that I used the definite article erroneously ; it should be a difference.) In the example given on pp. 49-50 the case is slightly different. At the word " read " a former puzzling question is recollected fore-consciously : " How is it that the expres- sions which we have only read once rise suddenly to our lips, or come to our pen unsought, without our having made any effort to retain them when we actually came across them ? " My fore-conscious wish is evidently to obtain a reply. The second term of the comparison is given as imderstood from the text ; *' I can understand how things which we have read often (in memorizing) sink frequently into unconsciousness." But no reply is given here, and still I have the same imponderable feeling as in the above cases ; only there is no rejoicing, for the answer does not come. Still, the elements are there : a recollection and a fore-conscious wdsh. ^ In the next instance, given on p. 50, on the contrary, the feeling of triumph is again present : " Distraction is directly the opposite of inspiration, for in the latter opera- tion the streams of thought (conscious and fore-conscious) flow toward the same end, while in the former they diverge. '- In this conclusion the terms of the comparison are both recollections, but they are confronted here for the first time, and it is the text " state of distracted attention '* which has furnished the occasion of the comparison. From this long list of examples w^e conclude that, when- ever we awake fram a day-dream, we find that the last asso- ciation was a memorial element — that is, as we pointed out before, when our intellect is passive, when we are in a hallu- cinaiory state, due to recollecting. Dozens of observations have confirmed this fact since I have come to this conclusion, and everybody may observe it for himself. If we next inquire as to the cause of the awakening, we find external or internal stimuli. The internal stimuli are provoked most often in my own case by my wish for discovery ; only seldom have I observed an awakening, either in the daytime or at night, in which no particular affect whatever could be traced. Whosoever has once felt the joy that invades one when THE TERMINATION OF THE CHAINS 161 one has lit upon a new fact, unobserved before, will readily grant that it is really the emotion that is responsible for the interruption of our phantasies. Moreover, the role of affects and wishes is now well known from the study of existing psycho-analytic literature. But even practical life offers many examples wherein our ideation is interrupted owing to a wish : if I wish to remember to-morrow that I have got to go to my bank, I impress the idea strongly upon my mind, and I nearly always remember next day, at the right moment, that I must not forget the purpose which I formed the day before. My physician has advised me to perform a certain operation every day so as to avoid a small infirmity, and as I wish to reduce it to a minimum, I think of it every day, whether I have already complied with the advice or not. In each of these cases I have inter- rupted some train of thought or other, for the intellect is never at rest. I can even interrupt my sleep at any time of the night, provided I impress vigorously enough upon my mind, before I go to bed, that I wish to wake at any given time. And the more the wish is emphasized emotionally, the easier and the quicker the awakening. This interruption of sleep is possible to most persons, especially if the affects accompanying their wish to awaken are intense, as, for instance, in the case of catching an early train on the occasion of important business. Everyday life teaches us also that when our intellect is strongly concentrated upon a problem we are not easily distracted from it ; I mean when we are in the progressive state. (I hope to be able to demonstrate later that invention and inspiration are modes of thinking in which the hallu- cinatory driftings are suppressed, in which the states of distraction are reduced to a minimum, because a strong affect leads the fore-conscious concatenations by the shortest way to an intensely desired end.) When our minds are fore-consciously bent upon invention — that is, when the recollections which we use in our associations are emotionally emphasized — we are so abstracted from the outer world that a long address may reach our ear without being per- ceived ; all our senses may be in abeyance. From a con- scious point of view we are distracted in such a case, but 11 162 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS from the fore-conscious view-point we could not be more attentive. And if, notwithstanding the connivance of our senses, we are forced, by their refusal to work, to interrupt our thinking, we cannot help showing our displeasure. Judging externally, there is consequently a form of intellection in which an untimely awakening from the subject under consideration is reduced to a minimum. We are then in the progressing stage ; we are making deductions from the recollection or recollections that have just come to the fore ; our mind is active. This is another obser- vation which everybody can verify in his own person. Here is an observation bearing upon the point under discussion : My two children, since their early childhood, have been allowed to share my study and play there all their quieter games. After some experience, they never, if they saw me deep in my papers, interrupted me at my work, unless by a curious procedure which now I fully understand : when they wanted something of me they came and stood silently beside my desk until I noticed them and asked them what they wanted. I noticed them, or at any rate asked them what they wanted, only when my stream of thought could easily be resumed again, at the recollecting stage. They soon learned that I often became impatient when they interrupted me (at the creating stage), and that the only way to find me, as usual, anxious to satisfy their wishes was to wait silently until I could break off my ideation at the most favourable moment. This observation points again to moments of maximal and minimal attention during our mind-wanderings, or, better, during our fore-conscious thinking, as already ex- plained in the previous chapter. There, too, we considered the consequences of an idle drifting upon the stream of memory. When in the form of a panorama, either vivid or shrouded, the past glides before us in optical hallucina- tions, when the spectral element divests our intellect of all personality, suppressing volition and even desire, we note that at a given moment a mysterious energy is again infused into the sinking spirit, an unknown power stops the drifting, takes us upstream again, sets the faculties in motion anew, and we are able to retrace the effects of THE TERMINATION OF THE CHAINS 163 this marvellous mechanism if we glance over the series of concatenations that have thus been started afresh. It is in the state of remembering, in the state of fore-conscious distraction, that the unconscious or fore-conscious wish finds the opportunity of asserting itself when the mind is drifting. And as we have observed that at every awakening the fore- conscious association is brought to a close at a moment when memory has absorbed all available mental energy, we conclude that the stage of fore-conscious recollecting is the period of time wherein the mind is most receptive either to external or internal stimuli {to a noise, a sight, a scent) or to the impulsive power of an affect. It may even be supposed that affect and external stimuli collaborate in the awaken- ing, for then they tend towards the same end. The question here arises : What affects may play their part in the awakening ? We have met with several in the cases reproduced above : in the daytime, when we are wool-gathering, the affect may be the desire to continue our voluntary occupation ; my desire to make observations has often enough been apparent ; in my inventive associa- tions we have observed the action of my desire to make discoveries (jubilation) ; other wishes still are apparent in the case of wanting to wake in time for an early train, to remember certain duties, etc. But when my musings keep me from sleeping, it is usually my desire for sleep that puts an end to my fore-conscious ideation, although my wish to create is also responsible for some awakenings : spon- taneously I break off a concatenation that attracts my fore-conscious attention too forcibly and therefore drives sleep farther off than ever. But I have already emphasized the fact that the affect which provokes the awakening need not necessarily take the form of a wish : in the flea phantasy the last sentence is: "But might not the powder cause irritation of the skin ? " This is the translation into conscious terms of a fear that had arisen in me at that particular moment of the day-dream, and I remember perfectly that I saw my body covered with eruptions. This caused the start which has been mentioned. But if fear can cause the awakening from a day-dream. 164 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS how can we explain the fact that in the scene where I saw myself with both legs blown off the phantasy was not inter- rupted ? I think in this case the intense desire to obtain a professorship, which was lurking in the background, caused the forgetting of the pain complex, just as we are insensible to physical pain in waking life when we are passing through thrilling experiences. One affect seems to exclude the other. In some cases, however, no affect whatever is trace- able, as in the Folkestone fancy, when I had nothing to do and could let my mind wander as much as I liked. We should not forget, however, that all that exists in the fore-consciousness has a spontaneous tendency to rise to consciousness, and this alone is sufficient to explain an in- terruption of an indifferent chain. Just as the mother is able to lead the child's thoughts away from a desired object to another which it is made to perceive, just as the cat abandons a plaything to jump on the ball that comes rolling past it, so our mind may in the recollecting stage perceive an external stimulus and awake from its musing. (One perception is replaced by another spontaneously, as we shall presently see.) The important thing is that the transition takes place at a moment when the mind is in a state of passivity, at a moment of least resistance. But even when the fore-conscious wish is difficult to trace, this does not mean that a slight affective element is altogether absent, ^ for the perception of an external or internal stimulus is always connected with a wish, when volition does not interfere. This is most readily noted in psychopathological cases. In the instance of forgetting a purpose which I related on p. 132, we saw that just as I noticed that I could not remember what I was going to say — that is, when I perceived my inability — I became aware again of my conscious wish to explain some of my work ; moreover, I had gone astray because of an obtruding recol- lection. Here three elements meet ; the memory on one side, a perception and the wish on the other. The main difference is that in this case I knew of the wish that fur- nished the motive power, while I was not aware of it in ^ The affect responsible for my awakening from the Folkestone phantasy was the unconscious wish not to miss my boat. THE TERMINATION OF THE CHAINS 165 fore-conscious ideation. But we have learned from Freud's book, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, that wherever we meet with the formation of a compromise, this adjust- ment is due to a conflict of two opposite wishes, as we have witnessed above. It would be easy to show that in every- one of these cases the fore-conscious chain of thought which is responsible for the compromise, together with the con- scious occupation, is a consequence of a fore-conscious wish with a memory element at its genesis. In fine, we may permissibly conclude that the awakening from fore-conscious thought takes place at a moment of intel- lectual passivity under the impulse of an affect which may vary from a great intensity down to a degree in which it is only discernible through analysis ; in the latter case the external stimulus may divert the recollecting in favour of the apper- ceiving process, with the result of bringing us back to the conscious state. 2. Censorship and Repression. We have already come across several instances of criti- cism which cannot be distinguished from conscious mental activity, and we have each time delayed their consideration until a later occasion. That occasion has now arrived. In the previous section there were several cases in which the awakening from a musing was clearly due to a wish. When we examine the awakening from phantasies that have occurred in bed either before or after sleep, we note at once that the wish that causes a rising of the stream of thought to the surface may come into conflict with another wish that is more primary and therefore more difficult to vanquish, to repress : the wish to sleep. I possess in my collection a great number of instances in which I have observed this mental struggle exactly as Freud has done in his night-dreams. I copy from my notes the following examples : / awoke from a phantasy in the night, before sleep. My mind had been busy about the wording of a review of one of my books in the American Psychological Review, which might come in useful for a future application. As I became conscious 166 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS / thought : "I shall write this train of thought down. Bui it is not worth while, and I can retrace it to-morrow. Still, I cannot remember everything the next morning (I). / had better go on with this association, for it may lead me to a new dis- covery. But no, I shall put it down anyhow. Brief as it is, it has some value as an observation."^^ The pretext (I) was not again put forward later on, as I succeeded, when I was actually writing, in reconstituting the concatenation entirely, for the first time since I had started my observations. This discussion, which was provoked by two contra- dictory wishes — ^the sleep-wish and my observation-wish — reminds us of the resistance which Freud mentions in his Interpretation of Dreams : " It is pleasanter to go on sleep- ing (here : to try to sleep) and to tolerate the dream, because it is only a dream anyway (here : because it is not worth while to become conscious again). I imagine that the disparaging criticism ' it is only a dream ' enters into the dream at a moment when the censor that has never been quite asleep feels that it has been surprised by the already admitted dream." In another fancy just before sleep I was trying to make arrangements for the expected visit to the front of my friend R., accompanied by the Minister V. I awoke after a recollection relating to my landlady and thought imme- diately : " Here is a chain of thought again, but it is not worth while writing it down. Then, after a short pause : *' Oh ! it is certainly worth while, for it exhibits several risings to the surface." And for a little while I start re- tracing it (which is but another attempt of my sleep-wish to avoid a full awakening), until I succeed in overcoming my inertia and light my candle to write. This pretext — that the association was not important enough — has intervened again and again. Here are some more excuses which my fore-consciousness has found to keep me from interrupting my attempts to get off to sleep again. Just as I soon became aware of the fact whenever I sank into a reverie during my reading, so I gradually discovered that I was becoming capable of the same aware- THE TERMINATION OF THE CHAINS 167 ness in the mornings, when my sleep was over, but when I was still dozing. I thus found that sleep is followed by a hazy state of drowsiness, just as it is preceded by it, and that in both cases we are musing instead of dreaming. But I was not yet able to trace my day-dreams back in the morning, as I did those of the pre-somnial state. I even- tually succeeded, first, in observing the conflict between my sleep-wish and my observation-wish ; later I became able to register also the whole of my post-somnial chains. One of these conflicts was as follows : No ; I do not want to think yet, I would rather go on sleep- ing still. It is much too early. There is no light visible yet through the chinks of the Minds. If I start reading too early I shall tire my brain too much in the course of the day. I shall be obliged to stop my work and waste my time ; perhaps I may be compelled to stop my researches altogether for a whole week if I overtax myself My brain has not had a sufficient rest yet, for yesterday I was unable to do anything whatever. I have a slight headache already. But that is my own fault. I went to sleep in a cloud of tobacco-smoke and neglected to open my window as I usually do. That headache will pass off, however, as soon as I am in the fresh air. I light my candle and open my window. Here is another instance : / awake at 5.50 a.m. and am surprised to find that my sleep is interrupted so early to-day. There is no heavy traffic, however (numerous heavy guns had passed during the previous nights). Oh yes, I remember now : I have willed this early awakening so as to be able to read in bed before breakfast. {When this recollection flashed across my mind, I opened my eyes to see whether there was already some light visible through the slits of the blinds.) It is the 28th of September, and as the light is only faintly perceptible, I say to myself: " No ; it is too early yet.^^ And a moment later : " But this is the sleep-wish that is speaking J ^ I light my candle and look at my watch. It is 5.50 a.m. I am surprised by this fore- conscious discussion. 168 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS I conclude these citations with a last reconstitution, which I consider remarkable because it reveals my fore- conscious self as less honest than my conscious self: / awake from sleep, hut my eyes are still closed, I have just concluded a phantasy which was almost the exact repro- duction of a previous one, when all at once I say to myself: " I am on the point of waking and I am forming a fore-con- scious chain. This is the moment to observe myself as I have already so often decided to do^ And as I assume the peculiar mental attitude necessary to retrace the concatenation of which I have become aware, I continue : " No ; it is really not worth while to interrupt my sleep for that. I can observe such a chain at any time, and I shall note one down when I am really in want of it, for inclusion in my manuscript. '^^ This seems convincing to my other self and I make an effort to fall asleep again. I must have succeeded, for a few minutes later I awake from another phantasy, just as I am remembering an occurrence of the previous week. And the following soliloquy takes place : " Ah ! here is another day-dream. It is just the same as the day-dreams I have before I fall asleep. Bui it is not worth writing down. I may just as well choose from my collection a pre-somnial day-dream and let it pass as if I had registered it in the morning. Nobody will notice the difference. But how shall I arrange the details so as to surround it by the cir- cumstances of a morning day-dream ? There lies the difficulty. And the inadequacy of these details may lead to the detection of the fraud and cost me my scientific reputation. I had better wake.^^ Only at this moment does it daxvn upon me that this is another instance in which my fore-consciousness is dishonest. Before we can seek the interpretation of the data con- tained in these examples it is necessary that we should again remember our object, which is to understand the meaning of critical thought-activity in fore-conscious think- ing, for we are here confronted by another phenomenon as well, the examination of which we must for the moment postpone. But in the meantime nobody will deny that the above reproductions constitute so many manifestations THE TERMINATION OF THE CHAINS 169 of conscious criticism. We remember now that we have before this encountered other judgments applying to the associations themselves, such as " What a foolish sup- position ! " " What a silly idea ! " etc. The question is whether we have here two aspects of the same problem. Before replying, we first conclude from the examples just quoted that whenever fore- conscious wishes enter into a conflict we are on the verge of becoming conscious again. But how is it that many of the fancies that have been reproduced in the preceding chapters bear no trace of such a struggle ? The explanation lies mainly in the progress of my technique of observation. When first I started upon this work my skill in noting my fore-conscious processes was small, but after a year or so I had brought it almost to perfection. I had already made quite a number of observations before I was struck by the discussions that took place in my mind whenever I wanted to leave my comfortable position in bed to light my candle and pick up my sheet of paper and my pencil in order to record what I had been thinking unawares. But as my faculty of discernment was gradually sharpened, my mind became the seat of a curious phenomenon : first, I had the impression in my phantasies as though something were rising and falling in my brain, rather as a submarine navigates at varying depths. But as soon as I had detected and become capable of observing the action of repression as described above, I had no more peaceful awakenings from day-dreams once I had determined beforehand to register whatever might come to the fore. And so I found that what I had at one time imagined to be the rising and falling of the fore-conscious concatenations consisted really of parts of a chain interspersed with discussions as described above, which might perhaps be localized on the fringe of fore-consciousness and consciousness. I lost my capacity of observing my fancies before or after sleep without disturbing them. We know this as a form of self-consciousness. I reproduce, therefore, the description of a day-dream of the latter period, in which two wishes come repeatedly into conflict, or, to speak more precisely, in which the repression is frequently rendered in words. 170 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS As I am going to bed I reme^nher the letter which I received from my friend R. informing me that he will shortly he visiting the front accompanied by the Minister V., and that they will spend a few hours with me, I reflect that I cannot take them to a restaurant, as the nearest is miles away, so I decide that they had better lunch at our mess. Next I wonder how we shall be able to get all the plates, forks, knives, etc, required in order to do honour to guests of their importance. Then I wonder whether I shall bear all the expenses myself, or whether my messmates will share them. I determine to begin by announcing the visit of a Minister of the Crown without men- tioning his name, for that is the only way of obtaining their unbiased opinion ; for the political convictions of some of my comrades are quite contrary to those which Minister V. represents, and I do not want to impose on a friend an expense which he would not willingly defray. This causes me to recall several instances of narrow-mindedness on the part of one of my messmates. (At this point I have inserted the remark : *' I am off again, but never mind " (I).^ When the associ- ation continues I concatenate thus : Mr, X., to whom I applied for a post (of which there has often been mention before) does not give any token of life. If only I am not absent when his secretary from Cassel calls on me ! But I suppose some one on his staff will come and warn me of his visit. Moreover, I shall try to gain time before I accept, for I should like the other post better. It would lead me more directly to a pro- fessorship. And Mr. Z. (who is to give the latter) will shortly come to the front too, as well as his friend Mr. F. The latter is at present in London. (Here a new interruption takes place (II), to this effect : I say, " Here is another chain. I am going to register it. But no, it is not yet worth while ; it is still too short." After this reflection the concatenation continues :) / shall send him (that is, Mr. F.) an early copy of the essay I am now writing. But no, I had better send it when reprinted ; that will make a better impression than a manu' script. But has Mr. F. any more to say than Mr. Z. as to the making of the appointment? No; the latter signed himself " President.'' (Here I have again become half-conscious I The meaning is : " My mind is too busy again; I shall not b« able to fall asleep just yet." THE TERMINATION OF THE CHAINS 171 that I am day-dreaming (III), but no comment is made.) // 1 have to leave here I shall have a heavy kit to take with me. Shall I have to spend a few days at B. ? Shall I have to give hack the issues I received ? {Hereupon folloivs a long drifting during which a whole scene of the first days of my service in the army is recalled in vivid phantasmagoria.) I shall not be able to give my breeches back, for they are still at A. (With this recollection I become once more half-conscious, and I note this reflection (IV) : " I shall have to go and fetch them one of these days." And as I was in a state hovering between consciousness and fore-consciousness, I cannot quite make out which stage I was in when the first links of the sequel were associated.) Perhaps I can get a pair from the salvage dump and give them in. But what about my issue cap ? I left it at A. That tailor, a civilian, will have sold it. The greedy quartermaster at the base will want my best one. {Hence- forth I am an actor in a scene : I have a terrible quarrel with the quartermaster, and I have an impression as though I were really dreaming, not simply mind-wandering:) I offer to pay him for the lost cap, which he declines, demanding my best extra-regulation cap. As I will not give it up he refuses the rest of my issues altogether, thinking he will thus prevent me from leaving and force me to give in. But I set down my kit-bag at the door of his office (on the first fioor), with the idea at the back of my mind of explaining his trick in a letter to the Secretary for War. But the quartermaster angrily orders his corporal to throw the bag out of the window into the street. Thereupon I leave the fellow, telling him that I shall send in a complaint to the Secretary for War. This infuriates him still further. I go downstairs to the canteen, but I nevertheless see and hear (as if no walls existed) the quartermaster shout- ing through an open window to a clerk on the ground fioor, whose window is also open, telling him to pick up my bag lest a passer-by should make off with it. Upon hearing this I decide to go away as if everything were in order. When I get out into the street the bag has gone. But all at once I notice with surprise that my hands are empty : I have not even that part of my kit which I brought with me, nor any of my other belongings. (I become half-conscious again and wonder (V) :) Yes, what about my books? I shall take with me all those 172 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS of a scientific nature and leave the others with my landlady^ who will keep them in the chest in which they are at present. Thereupon I awake {my eyes are still closed), and as usual my first thought is : " Here is a chain again, hut it is not worth noting down.^^ But a moment later I say indignantly to my- self: ^^ Oh! but it is certainly worth while. It is one of the rising and sinking kind, and even a very remarkable one.^* So I light my candle and record it. A glance at my watch tells me that it has lasted fifty-five minutes. We note that on six different occasions the association has risen close to consciousness. In I, II, III and VI this is obvious and does not need any further comment. In instances IV and V the reader would have to take my word for it, if it were not that certain details throw full light upon the subject. Indeed, in those cases in which there cannot be any doubt we see that the awakening is immediately followed by a verbal reflection which cannot be distinguished from a conscious thought : After I : " Mr. X. does not give any token of life." After II : "I shall send him an early copy of the essay I am writing." After III : "I shall have a heavy kit to take with me." But after the awakening, about which there remains some doubt, we note : After IV : "I shall have to fetch them (my breeches) one of these days." After V : " Yes ; but what about my books ?" (cf. before : " My hands are empty.") In all these cases we are very far from any nonsense and absurdity, and from the similarity of the reflections in the five cases we may infer that I did not make a mistake in my observation, and that the approach to consciousness is evident in all cases. Analysis confirms my observation. We will now try to represent the phantasy schematically, as we have done before. But as we know at present that after certain hallucinations the stream of thought has risen THE TERMINATION OF THE CHAINS 173 to consciousness, we represent the drif tings by vertical dotted lines, the horizontal space above the diagram repre- senting consciousness. When two consecutive parts form a whole as far as their thought content is concerned — that is to say, when the second part associates exactly with the last link of the first — they are represented as progressing in the same direction ; they run parallel to one another. On SCHEMATIC • REPRESENTATION • OF • THE • PHANTASY ^.^X^^'^ ConteiousntSf ^•^^>^N^ \^ :\ '• \\i^ \\ i\ u ; j — \ 1— \ \ i \ : \ \L ) X \v xi the other hand, when the point of view has been altered the direction of the lines undergoes deviation. This representation offers a striking similarity to the previous diagram and makes us think that the similitude is not merely of a superficial kind. Indeed, we may now put to ourselves the question whether, as in the case of this phantasy, every prolonged drifting in the preceding phantasies does not result in bringing us closer to the conscious state again. To solve this question and to obtain proper terms of 174 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS comparison we shall analyse this phantasy briefly, as we did in the last chapter, thereby limiting our examination to the passages where I noticed an alteration in my mental state during my fore-conscious ideation. I. At (I) p. 170 I am remembering instances of the narrow-mindedness of my messmates, when I become aware that I am " off " again. When the concatenating is resumed I notice that the first link has not associated with my last remembrance (my colleague's narrow-minded- ness), but that another wish connected with my future career has taken over the direction of my train of thought. The result is, in other words, as though a marked deviation had taken place, such as we have noted so often in the middle of chains. This ought not to surprise us : as the fore-con- scious thought-process is a succession of alternate states of attention and distraction (the latter owing to the influence of the recollections), the distraction may be sq protracted that the original unconscious wish is forgotten and replaced by another, especially as the state of recollection is that in which the mind is most liable to receive fresh impressions. The only difference between this swerving and the deviations which we have already considered, when examin- ing the unsteadiness of our musings in the last chapter, lies in this : that my observation-wish had become aware of the activity of my mind, but without causing any dis- turbance. Normally this activity proceeds without the subject being aware of it. My sleep-wish has prompted the suggestion : " Never mind." Usually it remains silent, but it is no less active therefore in repressing the fore-conscious ideation process and trying to press it down into the deeper strata of unconsciousness. II. After the memory : " Mr. F. is in London," the chain has again risen to the surface, and this has been the occasion for a slightly stronger conflict between the two wishes. But this time, after its conclusion, there has been no deviation : the idea of Mr. F. remains in the foreground. Again this phenomenon presents only one point of difference, the same as before, from what we found in the last chapter. Its similarity is that after a recollection the ideation pro- gresses without swerving, as happens most frequently in THE TERMINATION OF THE CHAINS 175 this fancy. The difference is that between the states of distraction and attention there is again an awareness of the mental activity, with the accompanying struggle caused by the censor in the service of the sleep-wish. The same thing is true of the awakening at III and IV, which it will therefore be unnecessary to discuss any further. V. The fifth case, however, deserves some special com- ment, for it gives another proof, obtained in another way, that the awakening of the censor into activity is simul- taneous with the approach of the chain to consciousness : after having been an actor in a scene which is constituted partly of remembrances and of thoughts that remain in the background, I have all at once a feeling of surprise at noticing what I take for an absurdity : my hands are empty. What have I done with all my belongings, amongst which are my books ? And after this reflection I observe that I have become half conscious again. This is an instance of critical thought-activity as we have already encountered it in other phantasies. But it is apparent that this criticism does not belong to the fore- conscious processes. It is characteristic of conscious think- ing, for to the unconscious nothing is absurd. Moreover, here observation can guide us : the whole question will be solved if we can show that my becoming half conscious is previous to the reflection : '' What did I do with my belongings ? " And the proof that things happened really as I suppose lies in the text. It would have been easy, but not honest, to alter the sequence of the two sentences in the narrative, writing first " I become half conscious," and after that " All at once I notice with surprise that my hands are empty " ; for in that case no proof would be required as to the sequence of the phenomena. But a glance at the text itself shows that I became half conscious before I passed judgment on my action in the phantasy : indeed, I can only observe a state that has already arisen. I notice that I am half conscious again, because I have just made a half conscious remark to myself. Consequently, the critical thought- activity which we detect at this point belongs to con- sciousness and is due to the rising to the surface, to the 176 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS awakening. And as no discussion takes place I pursue my associations. When I started this argument I wanted to estabHsh beyond reasonable doubt that there occur in most of our day-dreams risings and fallings ; and that the upward move- ments have for consequence the introduction into the con- catenations of elements proper to conscious thought, namely elements of critical thought- activity, I have been able to reach these conclusions by three different procedures : (a) directly, by my own observation ; {h) by comparison ; (c) by analysis. I think I have carried my point, and from now on we shall be able, whenever we meet with sound verbal judgments in our associations, to infer that they have been subjected to conscious censorship, that at the moment when they were made we were close to the conscious state. We will turn our attention again for a pioment to the phantasy on pp. 112-113. We find therein six passages bear- ing clear traces of the intervention of the censor. We reproduce them here : (a) The visualization is interrupted, and I retrace this remark : " If I had been there I might have lost both legs." (h) I continue thinking in words : "I shall be able to pursue my career once I have recovered, and I shall go on teaching." (c) " But that is a foolish supposition." {d) I think after this I awoke more or less and turned over on my left instead of on my right side, my thought being : " Yes, I am busy with an indifferent chain. I must not interrupt and register it any more, otherwise I shall not succeed in getting any sleep at all this night." (e) Only now do I reflect that the doctor will be sur- prised that I let my family apply for free tickets. (/) " All at once I am struck by my coolness in presence of the great calamity that has befallen me." At the time when I registered this phantasy I was not sure whether my observation at (d) was quite correct, but after our analyses there does not remain the slightest doubt in my mind. As to the five other instances, one might THE TERMINATION OF THE CHAINS 177 ask by what test these reflections have been characterized as of a conscious nature. As a matter of fact, common sense only guided this selection ; but there is a test that proves that this procedure was not altogether arbitrary, for if we look up the localization of these extracts on the scheme on p. 173, we observe that each of them corresponds exactly with a drifting of the mind, or, as we have called it, with a displacement of the centre of gravity of the concatena- tion. Therefrom we infer that we were right in concluding that whenever we meet with sound verbal judgments in our recorded phantasies we may admit that they were inserted at a moment when the intellection was proceeding in close proximity to the conscious stage. The circumstance that only six of the eight deviations on the scheme are traceable in the description does not diminish the value of the argument, for this is due only to the imperfection of my technique of observation at the period when the phantasy was registered. The above conclusion suggests that absurdities and nonsensical ideas must be conceived in a state close to unconsciousness. A fresh examination of the analysed day-dreams would show that these defects in the thought- process are most common when we are mainly visualizing, when we get the impression that we are acting more than we are thinking. Must we conclude from this that the more we visualize the closer we are to the unconscious state ? (When I say " we," I mean the class of persons who are not of the visual type.) Such is my opinion indeed, although my observations offer too few data to furnish a proof of it. I I am reminded thereby of what we know about visualization in psycho-neuroses. In the meantime we should not forget that there is no strict separation between the three different states which we distinguish in consciousness. In extreme cases the differences are obvious ; in others the three states fade into one another, and the two ways of thinking may coincide, each borrowing some characteristics of the other.^ I Cf. in the Folkestone phantasy (cf. p. 55) the only purely verbal thought is : " Here I make the reflection, not visualized but in words j 'What a silly idea!' " etc. * Cf. my narrative on p. 171, where at a certain moment (IV) I had 12 178 THE PSYCH0L0GY OF DAY-DREAMS Before closing this chapter we must pick up a thread which we had to abandon previously because the state of our knowledge did not allow us at that time to bring the discussion to a conclusion. In the section about Forgetting we meet with the contradiction that although our fore-conscious memory is defective in that it cannot recall any of its past associations, yet some of these must be remembered after a hallucination, as we see that in the same day-dream the concatenating continues from a link that has previously been considered (cf. Scheme p. 128). This particular association must have been remem- bered somehow or other, otherwise the connection with it would be inexplicable. Now that we know that during the associative pro- cess the risings to the surface are frequent, the apparent contradiction is easily explained. We see, for example, in the day-dream on pp. 170-171, that after the second rising to consciousness there is a question in my train of thought of a Mr. F., as well as before it. The analysis shows that after the partial awakening / had more or less voluntarily recalled the last link of the association dealing with Mr. F. and had further associated with it, consciousness being lost again soon afterwards. I must insist that it is thanks to the analysis that I discovered this, for all that is going on in the fore-consciousness is so dimly lighted that only the analytical mental attitude and some skill in observation will enable one to surprise similar phenomena. In reality, it was only because of the preceding discussion between my two wishes, so that I was sufficiently awake to observe, that I made this half-voluntary effort at recollecting. I take it that this psychic act takes place at every rising to consciousness, but without our awareness ; in other words, we continually repress our fore-conscious ideation. In that condition which is intermediary between the conscious and fore-conscious states we are able to remember our musings, just as we are able to retrace them with some experience of the analytical attitude, which is a voluntary reproduction of the above state. But, as in the former to avow my inability to make out whether I was in the fore-conscious or in the conscious state when the next associations were made- THE TERMINATION OF THE CHAINS 179 instance our conscious will does not interfere, the recol- lecting may be very imperfect and not (consciously) to the point, for the affects have free play. We are very near the truth in saying that the whole direction of the associative process lies with the wish element. This abandonment of the will after rising to conscious- ness is clearly visible in the instance given on p. 170, after the first interruption : "I am off again, but never mind." The reader will remember yet other instances where this abandonment is rendered in the examples quoted. From this argument we make a double inference : (1) the only elements that recall conscious remembering are due to an intervention of consciousness, thanks to the successive risings of the chain to the surface ; and this confirms the inability of fore-consciousness to remember its own creations at will. And (2) after an interruption in the concatenation as a consequence of an approach to the conscious state the associative process is apparently pursued by virtue of the recollecting faculty, of which we dispose at will in waking life. In concluding this portion of our investigations we are able to describe our day-dreams as follows : 1. A fore-conscious chain of thoughts is a succession of hypotheses and rejoinders, of questions and answers, occa- sionally interrupted by memory hallucinations. *« ' * W4.v^ ^MinLi/-^ 2. These suppositions and criticisms look like a meritat^ ^ testing of memory elements adapted to meet a future situation, 3. The associative process is directed by one or several wishes, and is the more unsteady as the directive wishes are weaker, 4. Every chain originates with a remembrance that is, as a rule, emotionally accentuated and which is either brought forward on the occasion of an external stimulus or simply obtrudes itself upon our fore-conscious attention, 5. As the chains progress their depth varies continually ; visualization is predominant when they proceed closest to the unconscious level ; in the reverse case verbal thoughts prevail ; but when the ideation proceeds in images, the relations between 180 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS the visual representations are kept in mind without being represented, and only words can render them adequately when we decide to communicate these phantasies, which are not meant for communication. 6. They move only in a forward direction, which renders the later correction of their constitutive parts impossible except through the intervention of conscious functions. Another cause of errors is the mind's unlimited capacity for forgetting as well as for remembering. 7. These streams of thought are brought to an end (before or after their aim has been reached) at a moment of mental passivity under the influence of some affect which causes them to rise to the surface, or because memory is set in action in the service of apperception, following upon external stimuli. In both cases the result is a return to the conscious state. In short, day-dreams are thought -structures which have been elaborated without the intervention of the will, but under the direction of affective elements. Our next endeavour will be to examine more closely the correlation of feeling and thought in the different pro- cesses that constitute fore-conscious ideation. II SYNTHETICAL PART CHAPTER I MEMORY AND AFFECT In each chapter devoted to the analysis of day-dreams we have been led by the facts themselves to considerations of one or another aspect of memory. Thus we have been compelled to admit the presence of a day remnant in every genesis of a chain ; we have surprised the mind in a passive as well as in an active attitude : in the former we have y recognized an idle drifting on the stream of memory, an "^^ automatic rehearsal of the past ; in the active stage we \ have come to the conclusion that the content of every single created thought, in the form either of a question or an answer, is nothing else than an element borrowed from the store of memory and applied to the present need as created by an affect. Further, we have established the fact that it is in the recollecting stage that the concatenating is either brought to a close or resumed, most often in another direction under the influence of a new affect. We may close our summing up here with the remark that sometimes we have even come upon recalled emotions. All this points to the very important role of memory in fore-conscious thinking and invites us to bring some order into the mass of facts which our research has exposed to view, so that we may grasp their full significance. ^ Among the different facts with which we are here con- fronted we first select those which are likely to throw some light on the strange phenomenon which we have called memory hallucination :^^ in the course of every day-dream we have noted that during varying periods of time the creative activity of the mind was suspended, and revived recollections passed before the mind's eye instead, with an accompaniment of a more or less vivid reproduction of the emotions that we underwent at the time of the 183 184 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS original perception of the scene recalled. This running off the reel seems to go on automatically, and raises the question whether this mechanism is characteristic of the day-dream or whether it is also characteristic of memory when it manifests itself in other circumstances.'^ The following observations support the view that our memory possesses a peculiar tendency to reproduce from beginning to end a series of recollections in their order of registration, once the initial start has been given : (a) I am in bed trying to get to sleep. I hear the church bell strike the hour, and I decide to count the strokes, for I fear that my phantasies have kept me awake so long again that I shall feel tired to-morrow morning. Almost as I decide to count an idea flashes through my mind relating to an event that took place in 1914. A few seconds later I become aware that I am counting : " 1919, 1920, 1921," instead of 8, 9, 10, etc., which points to a compromise between the two thoughts, or rather between the automatism of memory and the recollected date. This automatism is still more apparent in the following observation : (b) In numbering the pages of my diary I always write the number twice : once on the right and once on the left hand of the top of every page. Before my attention had been aroused by the peculiarity which we are at present examining, it had often happened that, when I had put a number in the left top corner, I wrote the following number instead of the same one on the right hand. On a later occasion I was able to observe that this mistake occurred every time I was thinking of something other than the numbering. My hand wrote under the direction of auto- matic memory. (c) Something similar happened when on a certain day I found the clock on the mantelpiece of my study had stopped because I had forgotten to wind it up. The hands pointed to one o'clock, and I had to advance them to a quarter to nine ; but at every half hour I had to interrupt the turning movement to let the clock strike. At a certain moment my mind went wandering, and when I awoke the clock was just striking twelve. Automatic memory had again had free play and taken advantage of my dis- MEMORY AND AFFECT 185 traction : as I counted the strokes only in an absent way I had automatically continued counting, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, because when I had come to eight I was too much distracted to stop and I had been guided by my automatical memory. Once I had become attentive to this peculiarity, I made several experiments upon my children and my friends. I started humming a phrase of a piece of music at a pro- pitious moment — that is to say, when my humming did not seem out of place — and I invariably found that my hearers joined in at once or became obsessed by it after a short while. It cannot be denied that here imitation also plays a role, though not the principal one ; but if we were to attempt to observe a single " faculty " of the mind at work in a " pure " state — that is, free of the intervention of any other — we might as well give up observation and experimenta- tion altogether, for the amalgamation and interdependence of our mental " faculties " is so complete that only in philo- sophical treatises are we able to isolate a faculty in its pure state as an abstraction. Whatever be the manifestations that accompany the appearance of automatic recollection, the latter remains constant in its nature. Everybody will find that as a matter of fact this pecu- liarity of memory is well known, although its character has not yet, as far as I know, been emphasized ; we rely upon its action when in conversation we start a familiar quotation and stop it abruptly in the expectation that our interlocutor will pick it up and finish it. Or if one reads an abridged quotation one completes it unawares. It is the same propensity of memory that assists us in the reproduction of a poem or passage that we have learned by heart, and it is common knowledge also that rhythm facihtates the automatism in recitation. It is especially in the literature of the psychoses that one meets with abundant illustrations of this automatism. Breuer writes of Miss Anna O. that she fancied herself in the previous year, and related in her evening "talking cure " the phantasies which she had elaborated day after day at Christmas-time the winter before. " The retro- version to the past year was so intense that she hallucinated 186 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS her old room in her new home, and when she wanted to walk to the door she knocked against the stove, which was standing, in relation to the window, in the same situation as the door of the room in the old house." ^ P. Janet tells us how his patient Leonie * in her cata- leptic state reacted automatically when he put her in the attitude of prayer. She rose mechanically from her seat, bent her legs, kneeled down, bowed forward, inclined her head, and lifted her eyes toward the heavens. Then she rose and counterfeited the holy communion exactly as if she were really partaking of it. And still she was, as Charcot puts it, " in a state of complete moral inertia," Bergson also has been struck by this automatism, but he ascribes to the uninjured state of the language function what is obviously due to memory in general : " One has heard lunatics make intelligent answers to a series of ques- tions which they did not understand : language acted with them in the manner of a reflex. Aphasics unable to pro- nounce one word recall without mistake the words of a melody when they sing it, or they will recite fluently a prayer, or the series of the numbers, or the days of the week, or the months of the year. Thus mechanisms of extreme complication, subtle enough to imitate intelligence, may operate by themselves once they have been con- structed." 3 It is on this tendency toward automatic reproduction, as it manifests itself spontaneously whenever our conscious thinking is in abeyance, that the use of mnemonics is based. It is also the only aspect of memory which until lately edu- cation has recognized as worthy of development and train- ing. The memorization of words in a concatenated sequence is still in many countries the chief aim of teachers of all grades, although, as we shall soon have occasion to empha- size, our fore-conscious as well as our conscious thinking uses in most cases the recollection of facts, detached from the elements with which they have associated. But the analysis of day-dreams has taught us another » Cf. Studien iiber Hysterie, by Dr. J. Breuer and Prof. Dr. S. Freud (3© Auflage; Deuticke, Wien u. Leipzig, 1915), pp. 21 ff. » Cf. P. Janet, Lea N^vroses. 3 Cf. Mati^re et M^moire, by H. Beeoson, loc, cit. MEMORY AND AFFECT 187 property of memory ; namely, that when we stop our directed thinking the remembrances have free play in invading consciousness and provoking fore-conscious chains of associations. It was probably of this invasion that Freud was thinking when he stated that " all that is in the fore-conscious has a tendency to rise to the surface," for all repressed thoughts are at the same time recollections of a peculiar kind. We have even observed that their proneness to come to the fore may be so strong that they disturb voluntary thinking to the extent of rendering it impossible and re- placing it altogether. This is the moment to ask the question : " What can this coming to the fore, this dis- position of memory to become the object of perception, even at the cost of a disturbance of voluntary ideation, be due to ? " The reply lies close at hand, for even everyday life offers a multitude of instances in which our conscious think- ing is rendered impossible by the rising to the surface of the contents of the fore-consciousness, escaping from repres- sion. That is what happens, for example, with every violent emotion : when violent remorse refuses to leave us," when we feel the pangs of jealousy, when a bitter disappoint- ment has put an end to tenderly cherished hopes, etc., recollections of some sort or other, in connection with our emotion, invade the consciousness, and form the starting- point of fore-conscious thinking of a kind which is entirely similar to our day-dreams, and which we cannot stop or prevent. The same affective factor may be retraced in every or nearly every memory-element at the genesis of our day- dreams. The perusal of the following list will be convincing, but the reader should in this connection bear in mind a previous argument tending to explain that day remnants, although of a recent nature, partake nevertheless of the character of memory. And it is readily granted that the older the remembrance the more easily it is repressed, viz. prevented from coming to the surface, for we are all familiar with the action of time upon our affects and our memory. 188 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS Recollections at the Genesis of the Association. Affects, A. When the Mind is Vacant. The explosion of a shell . . . reminds me of another shell which caused many casualties . . Start. » I remembered the conversation I had just had in my mess . . . the pride of the village . . Eroticism. I am full of hope and feel almost sure that the Minister of Education will grant my request Hope. I narrowly escaped arriving in Sandgate instead of Folkestone . . . . . . . . . . Satisfaction. My son's coughing recalls my anxiety as to the state of his lungs . . . . . . . . Solicitude, I had been told this remedy (camomile) was efficacious, but . . . . . . . . . . Regret. B. asked me how I was getting on with my Spanish, etc. . . . . . . . . . . . . Disappointment.* Some definitions of EUwood's recall similar ones of Waxweiler's . . . . . . . . . . Scientific interest . The Belgica — that is the new brewery company I read about in the paper . . . . . . ? 3 (Chosen recollection) The Brazilian thief I read about to-day . . . . . . , . . . ? B. Disturbing a Voluntary Occupation. I hope the maid will be ready with tea at four o'clock, for I don't want to be late . . Apprehension. Will the Minister consent to appoint a jury for me ? Anxiety. *' Fixed groups of associations " — ^that is the characteristic difference between fore-con- scious and conscious attention .. .. Scientific interest. 4 " Read " — I can understand that we remember texts which we have often read, but what about recollecting passages which we have read only once ? . . . . . . . . Ditto. " Classical terms " — I myself use classical terms . . Ditto. Zentralblatt fUr Psychanalyse — is it the same volume as that I ordered ? . . . . . . Ditto. ** Suddenly arousing one's self from a state of distracted attention " — distraction is the reverse of inspiration . . . . , . . . Ditto. » The sequel of the concatenation proves that the affect was not fear in this case. > Because I did not get the Spanish book I had expected. 3 The affect behind the song I hummed at the same time was a feeling of hope to be soon rid of a certain person. * The affect which I call " scientific interest " was always strong when these observations were made. MEMORY AND AFFECT 189 *' Some influence diverted me from my first atten- tion " — ^there is something going on in my fore-consciousness ^ . . . . . . . . Ditto This list allows us to conclude indeed that every memory element that has forced itself upon my attention and has thus become the genesis of a day-dream is emotionally emphasized, just as violent agitation makes us unfit to per- form our daily duties in our usual manner. The reader will have noticed that I have arranged my citations so as to obtain in both cases a diminishing order in the list of affects. Thus the result is obtained that, while the feeling accompanying the recollection is obvious at the top, one hardly knows how to call it by its true name at the bottom. A doubt whether the recollection of the new brewery company goes with any affect at all would seem quite natural, and the same remark may be made with even more truth of the case of the Brazilian thief, which, as I explained before, is a selected remembrance. Of No. 6, in the second half of the list, one might wonder also what amount of scientific interest might be attached to the recollection of the order given to the bookseller. And yet I hope to demonstrate in a convincing manner that all these memories are emotionally accentuated — in fact, that all memories bear an affect. For the present I can only lay stress on the circumstance that the history of mankind, which has resulted in the acquisition of con- sciousness, through the repression and domination of our affects (a victory which is far from complete), and which has freed our thinking process to a certain degree from the influence of our feelings, has at the same time blunted our faculty for perceiving our affects. In my opinion thought has, in the conscious stage, developed so as to become inde- pendent of feeling, and that is the reason why we are such bad observers wherever fine affective shades should be distinguished. Moreover, our language bears traces of the neglect with which our affective life has been treated in the phylogenetic development, for our vocabulary is remark- ably poor as far as our sentiments are concerned. I In this casts I became aware of a feehng— I had an intuition, a pheno- menon which will be discussed further. 190 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS Another remark which must also stand for a provisional explanation concerns the two last examples in the above list. As already stated before, the two day-dreams they introduce will be treated fully in a later essay, but in the meantime we notice that the affects they evoked were per- ceived directly they originated. To grasp the difference between these two and all the other cases in the list, it should be said that the affects attributed to every recollection have been traced only through analysis : I was not aware of them in my fore-conscious state. In the two last instances, however, I perceived them dimly while I was distracted, and it is due to my becoming alert that I awoke ; indeed, in the last instance the rising to the surface of the affect occurred before I retraced the concatenation, and was even the incitement which induced me to retrace it. This remark seems important enough to justify the reproduction at this point of the whole observation. " I was absorbed in the chapter ' Lapses in Writing * of Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life. At p. 123 my conscious attention abated a little (of which I was not aware at the time) and an idea came to me as I read : * But I had to reflect for quite a while in order to discover what influence diverted me from my first attention without making itself known to my consciousness.' The idea that manifested itself spontaneously ran thus : ' There is some- thing going on in my fore-conscioicsness which must he in direct relation to my subject. I ought to stop reading for a little while and let it come to the surf ace. "* I followed the fore-conscious suggestion succeeding to the intuition, and recorded : * All the causes that produce the mistakes which Freud examines in his book are nothing but fore-conscious chains ; the errors are a consequence of their rising to the surface during the day. Consequently these mistakes are the result of day-dreams which have not become conscious, but which manifest themselves only through their dis- turbing results. We do not become aware at the moment that we have been day-dreaming, but we see the conse- quences, which the laity do not understand. Here the two ways of thinking meet, as also in inspiration, but instead of collaborating they disturb one another because they MEMORY AND AFFECT 191 are contradictory in their content.' " ' While I was record- ing this a profound feeling of satisfaction came over me. The first link of this association contains a memory- element, but for the present we deduce from it only the fact that in some cases the affect may become manifest before the content of the chain of thought. And we con- clude from this discussion that the memory element that rises to the surface and provokes a fore-conscious stream of thought is in every single instance emotionally emphasized. We have seen before that this memory element provokes a sort of brief hallucination, which allows the mind to glide from the conscious into the fore-conscious state. This leads us to the question whether there is any causal relation between memory and affect which may explain this hallu- cinatory phenomenon. The observation of everyday life taught us long ago that an affect is often responsible for conscious attention, and in the schoolroom the pupils follow the master's explana- tions with very little attention indeed, if he does not know the secret of interesting them. And what else is " interest " but a general and inadequate term for rendering many shades of affect ? — one may be interested for a hundred different reasons : pleasure, indiscretion, thirst of know- ledge, fear, curiosity, anxiety, etc. For this reason it is a truism to say that our affects influence at least one faculty of the mind : attention. We remember that another affect which we vaguely called " intuition " caused my attention to be turned, in the above day-dream, to my fore-conscious ideation. W^e are thus prepared to admit that our affects may play a role in recollection as well, for this is simply another aspect of our mental activity. The following observations, it is hoped, will bring conviction : (a) I have lent a book to my friend V. As I want it badly for a reference in connection with this work (which explains the strength of the affect which comes into play hereafter) I have written to him, asking him to send it back » The reasoning is reproduced textually as it came to the surface. Conse- quently no critical activity has been used to improve its form ; this the reader should bear in mind. Moreover, the statement is too absolute, although it stands good for most cases examined by Freud. 192 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS at once. A few days later the postman brings me a book for which there is extra postage to be paid. As the post- man comes in, I am surprised to hear myself saying to him : " It comes from Brussels probably " (I had distinctly in my mind : " from my friend V," who hves in Brussels). The book did not come from Brussels — the wish had been father to the thought ; the affect had directed the association between the book I saw and the one I expected, as will readily be granted. The reader may not be convinced in this instance, and may argue that, on the contrary, one might as well say that the association that took place between the object of the perception and the remembrance may be the cause of the reappearance of the affect. To this objection one might oppose the followii)g arguments : Firstly, we often recall affects independently.^ the memories that accom- panied them in the past. At the-mention of a book I may remember the impression, agreeable or disagreeable, which it produced on me, whereas not only the details, but even the general contents of the story may be completely for- gotten. From another point of view it has been observed that we are often unable to justify the special mood (depression, jocularity, etc.) affecting us, especially in the morning. We are still under the influence of the affect we remember as it resulted from our unconscious thinking in sleep, but the ideas that provoked it are forgotten. Consequently affects may arise independently of the thought memories. Secondly, there are cases in which an actual affect recalls a forgotten affect of the same nature, yet at the same time the facts which gave rise to it have passed into temporary or permanent oblivion. Whosoever has been the embarrassed witness of a domestic quarrel between husband and wife, or has felt the pangs of erotic jealousy or gone through any other strong emotion, will recall the chain of memories that has been formed in the mind under the im- pulse of the affect, and will be convinced that they have indeed the power to drive to the surface any sort of recol- lections, even those which are beyond recall in ordinary circumstances. But it is readily granted that it would be false to proclaim that it is impossible for recollections to MEMORY AND AFFECT 193 provoke the awakening of the affects with which they were registered. It is, indeed, often the case that sudden memories take us unexpectedly back to an emotive state which is only the reproduction of a former one. One may give orders that a certain name shall not be mentioned nor a certain fact recalled in one's presence, with the ojbect of preventing the recalling of a painful feeling, the name or fact mentioned associating irresistibly with the past. This proves simply that memory and affect are very closely connected, and this will be further emphasized later, but it does not alter the fact that psycho-analysis has been persuaded to recognize the truth found in an empirical way by the wisdom of the race and embodied in the saying : " The wish is father to the thought." But we will correct it slightly and say that affect may cause spontaneous recol- lection. And not only in the present instance will this prove to be true. At all events, I will cite some more observations, for the subject is not yet exhausted. {b) When my colleague De M. comes into the mess- room at dinner-time, I tell him : " Do you know that Thomas has come here for you ? " He replies : " Oh, have they come already ? " ''I did not say they — I said Ae." My friend had misunderstood me : he thought I said : " Tomatoes have come here for you." (In French tomates and Thomas have both the accent on the second syllable.) And he explained : " I understood you to say tomatoes, because a farmer has promised to send me a few pounds." The expectancy is rightly indicated by the speaker himself as the reason for the sudden remembrance, the cause of the misunderstanding. (c) The talk at table turns on Mata Hari, a well-known Parisian dancer, who has just been shot as a spy. " She was a fine woman of Dutch birth but of the brown type, the mistress of a Minister of the Republic." " Perhaps," replies a colleague, " she was a Dutch Pole — I mean a Dutch Jewess." Afterwards he told me that his mistake was the conse- quence of his thinking during his speech of a girl he had known in Holland ; she was a Jewess of Polish birth ; her 13 194 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS name was Polak, a very common name, and he added that he had retained an agreeable remembrance of her. In the three above observations the affect that caused the reviving of the memory is obvious. But the latter is no longer a day remnant, as in the case of my day-dreams, but dates much farther back ; in the last instance I under- stand that the Dutch girl had not been thought of for months. This points again to the power of the affect in recollecting. As a matter of fact, although we scarcely ever think of it, we often rely upon this power and make use of it when we are anxious to recall something that escapes our memory. During the war I wanted the name of a German paidological review, which I knew very well, for it had inserted an essay of mine. As one commonly does, I tried to create a mental atmosphere calculated to favour the coming to the surface of the stubborn title : I tried to call up a visual image of it ; in my mind I went over its dimensions, the colour of the cover, the special character of the print, the place of pub- lication, the room of the Sociological Institute where I used to read it, the table upon which it was laid, the persons w^ith whom I used to discuss it, etc., all without avail. Then I thought : If I could see one of the other German reviews I used to read before the war, I should remember it at once. Thereby I felt a certain impression which I will call intui- tion, but which is in fact indescribable, for the reason stated before ; it gave me the certainty that this would suffice to evoke the stubborn recollection. (I did not know yet, at that time, as I do now, the importance of the affects in recollection.) A few weeks later, when on leave in London, I went to the British Museum to look up the name I wanted, for I hoped I should recognize it in the catalogue of reviews. Scarcely had I opened the catalogue when the title I wanted so badly — Zeitschrift fur Kinderforschung — came to the fore spontaneously, before any search, to my great and agreeable surprise. I cannot help thinking that the entrance to the reading-room evoked the mood in which I used to enter the similar room of the Socio- logical Institute in Brussels that was so familiar to me, and that this affect was responsible for the reappearance MEMORY AND AFFECT 195 of the link that I wanted, and was missing when I had tried before to revive the associations connected with the place w^here I prepared most of my research work. This observation tends also to prove that our memory- is as good for affects as for intellectual elements, and perhaps better, only we are not conscious of it. That I am not the only person who instinctively relies upon his affects in the case of recollection is established by the numerous instances cited by the authors who have studied the psychology of inspiration. Therefore I .shall quote only one : While listening to the execution on the piano of a piece of Beethoven's, the German dramatist, Grillparzer, had a day-dream during which his conscious self conceived the scheme of a tragedy. Afterwards he was unable to retrace the scheme until he heard the same composition played again ; then the recollection returned.^ It is extremely probable that the explanation which I have given above of the circumstances in which my affective state was revived in the British Museum is applicable in this instance. It very often happens in daily life that when a word or a text is susceptible of more than one interpretation it is — most frequently — interpreted in a sense corresponding with the affect which it awakes in the reader's or hearer's memory, a sense quite foreign to its author. We call this " touching one's weak point " : a touchy person with a bodily defect will be prompt to perceive in every remark an allusion to his infirmity ; he who has something on his conscience continually hears allusions to the subject of his obsession, although there is not the slightest justification for such an interpretation. In such cases, it is not one affect that our innocent words revive, but a complex, as in some instances seems to be proved by the violent reaction of the subject, out of all proportion to the stimulus. In such an instance we provoke a phenomenon comparable to the trauma which causes the outburst of hysterical symptoms. The affects are thus efficient inciters of memory ; they I Reproduced from Hinrichsen, Zur Psychologie u. Psychopathologie dea Dichtera^ p, 48. 196 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS precede or accompany the recollections, and this fact will facilitate our understanding of their role in fore-conscious thinking. But before we turn our attention to this point we must examine the observations which we have adduced thus far a little more closely. For they tend to establish the theory that affects may be the cause of the transfor- mation of memory-elements into perceptions, and con- versely that recollections may arouse latent affects. But there is at least one aspect of experimental psychology which starts from the assumption that perception will arouse successively affective and intellectual memory, which points again to their close relation. Association experiments have demonstrated that it is possible artificially to arouse affects which direct the recollecting in the desired sense, thus reproducing the circumstances which we have observed in the psychopathological cases communicated above. This results from the researches of Jung, Webtheimer and Klein, of Lipmann, and Stern, etc., although their aim was the measurement of the reaction times. ^ Abnormal psychology also teaches us the influence of the affects on the memory. Freud has repeatedly insisted on the fact that during the treatment his patients revive their original affects while they are relating their past experi- ences, to which in reality their neuro-pathological state is partly due. He also repeatedly warns us that the psycho- analytic physician should carefully observe all the feelings which manifest themselves during the sitting, in reflexes and automatisms of the most various kinds, as so many » The method called Tathestandsdiagnostik (judicial diagnostic by the associ- ation method) was invented by Webthkimer and Klein and, if I remember rightly, C. G. Jung, the leader of the Swiss psycho-analytical school, was the first to put it into practice in the following way : A gentleman wanted his advice in the case of his adopted son, whom he suspected of larceny. He asked Dr. Jung to hypnotize the youth, so as to get at the truth. Juwg chose to apply the association method, and prepared a list of 100 inductive words, of which 63 were indifferent and 37 ^^ critical,'" viz. words relative to the circumstances of the theft. A small sima of money had been stolen from the drawer of a washing-stand from under a small board, covered with neckties, shirts, etc. When the list was ready, Jimg interrogated the suspected lad and took each reaction time with a chronometer. The replies to the critical and especially the post-critical words were so long in comparison to the others that Jung told his subject that he had stolen. The youth turned pale, burst out crying and confessed. Cf. also Jung, Ueber das Vtrhalten der Reaktionszeit itn Associationsexperimcnt (4er Beitrag d. diognost. Associationsstudien) and the complete series published under his direction. MEMORY AND AFFECT 197 hints concerning the thoughts and reminiscences of the patients. This recalhng of emotive states may go to great lengths. Breuer relates of Miss Anna O. : " In this instance also it happened, as was often observed while a symptom was being ' talked off,' that the symptom reappeared with greater intensity while she was describing it. Thus the patient was so deaf during the analysis of her incapacity of hearing that I had to communicate with her in writing." (We should here bear in mind that every hysterical symptom is in relation with an affect.) Finally, a careful observation of ourselves will teach us a good deal about the reawakened feelings which accompany our broodings over the past. Moreover, everybody knows how to interpret an involuntary sigh, etc., from a person who is remembering a sad experience. We conclude from this long exposition that the affects seem to constitute the active connection between memory and perception and conversely between perception and memory. They preside at the transformation in the mind of memory elements into perceptions, and at the awakening of recollections of a special kind which are related to the perceptions. It should once more be emphasized that the affects are active in this manner in our conscious as well as in our fore-conscious life. But we should not forget either that we are able to observe their influence only when we are in the conscious state. Only analysis has made clear that they regulate recollecting exclusively when we are day-dreaming. It will not seem out of place if we. here call attention to the fact that everybody relies continually, without know- ing it, upon the assistance of his affects in remembering, and expects help from them at the right moment, as I did in the case of the Zeiischrift fiir Kinderforschung, We use these mechanisms instinctively, without asking ourselves what we are doing or how they work. Such is unquestion- ably the case when we rely upon our unconscious self to wake us from sleep at a given moment of the night, or to remind us of a duty which we have undertaken to perform in the daytime. In most other cases we do not impress 198 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS our desires so strongly upon our mind ; we simply think we shall " pull through " somehow. During the war I noticed with surprise that the Flemish farmers of non-invaded Belgium and the North of France had not adopted the summer time and neglected to put their clocks and watches an hour forward. So I con- cluded that every time they had some business or other, either with their village council or with the army, they had to remember that their clocks were an hour late, and had to adjust their arrangements accordingly. I never heard of a mistake on their part that could be attributed to their conservatism ; their memory did not let them down. And I cannot help thinking that the automatic association between the glance at their clocks or watches and their memory was brought about by some desire, some affect that defies description. Perhaps a httle light may be thrown upon it by the following instance, which presents a certain similarity : The other day I wanted for quotation purposes a book which I had lent to my friend V., as stated above, and as it was not at my disposal there rose to the surface a recollection of Freud, who twice mentions in his works a similar case : once with reference to the Nabob by A. Daudet, in his Interpretation of Breams^ and once in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In my opinion the reason of the appearance of just these recollections is the common affect, in Freud's instances and in mine. And an affect of a similar nature directed the recalling activity in the case of the Flemish peasantry. Here is another instance in which I attribute a spon- taneous recollection to the reviving of an affect : When (as on p. 75) I had made the discovery that our fore- conscious streams of thought are constructed in dialogue form, I was conscious of an emotion, something like a mixture of joy and surprise. I remember having experi- enced a similar feeling years ago, while reading Tylor's Primitive Culture, when I spontaneously saw the relation between the Jewish poem called Khad Gadia and a Flemish nursery rhyme, a variety of the English piece The House that Jack built, I take it that the feeling in the present instance recalled the affect of years ago and thus brought MEMORY AND AFFECT 199 to my pen the reference to Tylor at the exact moment when I wanted it. Most intellectual workers will be able after some practice to analyse the sentiment that assists them in their composition and places the whole of their life's reading at their disposal provided they are in the proper mood. Only the intervention of affects can explain why we remember thus without memorization. As the mutual influence of memory and affect is so very important in the analysis of the elementary thinking process, I feel it necessary to adduce some further evidence of this interaction. Indeed I repeat that we constantly rely on our memory without asking ourselves what evokes it in the active state. We do not make a note of every duty or task which we have set ourselves for the next day or the near future. If I have to call upon a friend to-morrow and have an appointment with a superior on the day after, I trust that at the proper time I shall be reminded of the fact spontaneously. And still, as Freud writes, " our memories are unconscious in themselves ; those that are most deeply impressed form no exception. They can be made conscious, but there can be no doubt that they develop all their influences in the unconscious state. What we term our character is based, to be sure, on the memory traces of our impressions, and indeed on those impressions that have affected us most strongly,^ those of our early youth, those that scarcely ever become conscious." We must ask ourselves what power it is that revives the unconscious memories that play a role in our daily life. The only reply must be affect (or will).^ For the present we leave volition out of consideration and note that Freud also emphasizes the influence of our affects on our active memories. When we rely upon spon- taneous recollecting in the management of our waking life, we are actually doing the same thing as when we trust our unconscious self to wake us at a given moment in the night. There is only a difference of degree. The affective element is more apparent again in cases ^ The italics are mine. » I hope to show later that will is the conscious development of an affective factor. 200 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS like the following : I am talking to a colleague about my researches, which are only in the preliminary stage. In the course of the conversation I am obliged to make more and more violent efforts at remembering, and I succeed in relating observations w^hich I had thought unrecallable at the moment. But I know what made my reviving faculties so acute : it was the secret wish to astonish my friend. And under the influence of this affect recalhng and ideation were so easy that I even improvised on the spot schemes which I have since been able to utilize. Who has not experienced a higher intensity of his mental powers in similar situations (in the presence of his superiors, in case of great need or danger, etc.) ? Humanity has not failed to observe this fact, and the Flemish have embodied the experience in the saying : " When the need is sorest, salvation is nearest.'* This last observation calls, however, for another remark : in this instance the affect that acted as an incitement to recollecting was not the same as the affect w^hich accom- panied the original perception : there was scientific interest in the latter case, but in the former a feeling akin to pride. This is the first time that we have occasion to observe that memories may be recalled under the influence of different affects. Farther on we shall come across more instances of this kind. When recollections are revived by virtue of an external association, the feeling that reacts upon memory is scarcely ever the same as that which accompanied the original perception. Our conclusion is that in fore-conscious thinking the relation between memory and affect is causative : affects may stimulate recollection ; conversely, remembrances may provoke dormant affects.^ These considerations would not be complete if we did not offer some further remarks : 1. Whenever we rely unknowingly upon our affects for the purpose of recalling at the right moment, we perform I G, DwELSHAUVERS, in L'Inconacient (Paris, Flarnmarion, 1919), writes on p. 12 : " Memory does not seem to be dependent upon the application of attention, but upon the intensity of certain perfectly unconscious processes and the ensuing revivification of ideas." Our analysis has thrown some light on these " perfectly imconscious processes." MEMORY AND AFFECT 201 an operation that is exactly the reverse of the phenomenon of repression. Freud has laid so much stress on the impor- tance of repression in our mental life that any insistence on it in this place would be superfluous. But it is obvious that when we solicit the assistance of our emotions — and that is what everybody, and especially the brainworker, does unceasingly — we favour their development. And thus we are invited to consider these two phenomena : repression and solicitation of our affects, as a parallel to remembering and forgetting as far as our intelligence is concerned. 2. We have already been led to recognize that the wish imparts a given direction to' our fore-conscious associa- tions ; we cannot but admit here that the affects preside over fore-conscious (and to some extent over conscious) recollecting. If we succeed in establishing further that apperception is also dominated by our feelings, we shall be allowed to conclude that our affects govern the mind even more completely than they rule over the body. 3. The above facts enable us also to admit the existence of a memory for the affects, which are registered at the same time as the facts to which they relate. This coexist- ence has already been admitted by psycho-analysis. Brill defines a complex as " a series of emotionally accentuated ideas in a repressed stated ^ Ribot has already tried to establish the existence of affective memory,^ but I do not think that in his opinion an affect is attached to every remembrance. It is, however, in mine, and as the facts are eloquent in themselves, I hope, after this explanation, my opinion will be shared by the reader. There is, of course, a great difference between the intellectual and the affective sides of memory. In the former, every single element is differentiated from all others ; it has a proper personality, as it were ; it bears a name and a date ; it can he formulated in words, and is therefore easily recognizable as soon as it is revived. This differentiation or specialization has not taken place as regards our affects : we are able to distinguish pleasure ' Cf. A. Brill, Psycho-analysis, p. 380. W. B. Saunders & Co., Phila- delphia and London, 2nd edition, 1918. * Cf. Th. Ribot, Problemes de Psychologie affective (Alcan, Paris, 191G), especially the chapter on La Memoire affective. 202 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS from pain, or joy from grief, but we have scarcely any names to distinguish the Hghter shades. And yet they are recallable, as we have seen ; for if there were no affective memory, how could we explain the fact that the mention of a personal enemy provokes a feeling of anger, or that the allusion to a pleasant event of the past brings a smile to our lips ? I repeat here that I hope presently to show that every perception is associated with an affect. To my mind both are registered together by memory, as well as the reactions which occur simultaneously with the perception. It seems rather curious that so acute an analyst as Bergson failed to notice the affective side of memory, although he recog- nizes its motor side : " The past survives itself in two distinct forms : (1) in motor mechanisms, (2) in indepen- dent remembrances. But then the practical and conse- quently usual operations of memory, the utilization of the past experience for the present action, in short, recogni- tion, will be accomplished in two ways. Sometimes it will take place in the action itself, and through the automatic activity of the mechanism appropriate to the circumstances ; sometimes it will demand a mental effort to go back and seek in the past, with the intention of directing them to the present, the representations which are most capable of introduction into the present situation." ' He does not mention the intervention of our emotions. And still it seems as though memory registered the three elements at the same time, but separately, although each is readily accessible to the others. But as only the intellectual and emotional sides of the problem interest us here, we leave the aspect of motility out of the question ; and the better to express my ideas I will resort to an analogy : it seems as though memory decomposed the elements of per- ception as an electric current decomposes H2O, H and O being collected separately but with a high affinity for each other. This analogy has the advantage of permitting a visual representation of the mutual influence of the two elements of memory, as we have found them forever inter- reacting, and also of the phenomenon of repression, which « Cf. H. Behgson, Matiere et Memoire, p. 74. MEMORY AND AFFECT 203 bears chiefly on affects and causes indirectly intellectual amnesia, as Freud so clearly pointed out. It is readily granted that an analogy does not explain anything — comparaison rCest pas raison — but still it may permit of some reflections which it would otherwise be diffi- cult to introduce. In this connection we have in mind con- tradictory statements like those of such authors as Ribot and Carr, for example. According to the former " the unconscious is an accumu- lator of energy ; it collects for consciousness to spend." To this Carr opposes that " energy in physical science is a conception of something that is measurable, something that undergoes change of form, with quantitative identity. To apply such a conception to mental activity is plainly impossible, and to apply it metaphorically is only confusing. In what sense, for instance, is the memory that forms part of my subconscious psychical life a latent energy, and what is this energy converted into when some association brings it to consciousness ? " ^ But we reason thus : the affects are generally recognized as the innervators of our reflexes (for example, the muscular contractions at a pinprick) ; we retrace the presence of affects in fore-conscious thinking and remembering, in close connection with one another. Why deny the causal relation here which is admitted there ? Why refuse energy to the brain cells when its existence is not questioned in the case of the other cells of the body ? But this discussion can only have an accessory interest here, and in the meantime hypothesis comes in useful as a means of approach to the truth. Moreover, in establishing the fact that in fore- conscious thinking memory and affect are in causal relation we have achieved the confirmation of another finding of psycho-analysis : for this explains not only how memories come to the surface when the mind is not consciously occu- pied, but also how the activity of the unconscious, of which the fore- conscious is only a part, may disturb and interrupt our directed thinking ; consequently, when the affects of our inner self are awakened, the unconscious powers exclude » Mind, July 1914. Quoted by T. Shabper Knowlson in Originality^ p. 49. 204 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS our more recently acquired faculties. This is only another aspect of the problem which makes Pfister write : *' Repression never proceeds from purely external or in- ternal conditions, but always from a disproportion of both in which the inner forces must he acknowledged as by far the most important. In. the state of mental balance, when the tendencies and erotic claims of man are canalized to a use- ful purpose ... no outer shock, no misery in life's circum- stances, is able to produce a fatal repression. Conversely, an insignificant accident may be the cause of the deepest disturbance when the soul is pulverized by a bitter conflict. The external calamity is in this case the agent provocateur,^ the slight pressure on the electric button that causes the explosion of a gigantic rock." ^ Pfister is here evidently thinking of psychoses. But we are concerned only with normal psychology, and we may modify his statement, repeating it in less extreme terms, and state that when we are day-dreaming our phantasies owe their genesis to the influence of two inner factors : affect and memory, which often prove stronger than the power which consciousness has at its disposal. United they constitute the agent provo- cateur that is responsible for the phantasy that protracts the distraction. But this conclusion allows us to make a comparison between the remembering of memory-elements at the genesis of the chain and the revived memories in the course of the associating process. We have already seen that what we call creative activity is simply the upheaval of recollections by the wish to suit the present situation. Spontaneous recollecting, independent of a chain of thought, is also due to an affect, of which the wish is only a special aspect. We infer from this again that affects are the causative agents of remembering. We have thus laid bare the mechanism which tends to force memory elements upon our perception in a spontaneous manner. But there is one factor which we have thus far J Un agent provocateur is a man paid to incite the crowd to excessei in caae of disorder and strikes, etc., to give a pretext for the intervention of armed forces. » Cf . Dr. O. Pfister, Die Paychanalytiache Methode, pp. 96-97. J. Klink- bardt, Leipzig and Berlin, 1913. MEMORY AND AFFECT 205 left out of consideration, conscious attention namely, for we may well ask : What is the attitude of conscious attention when affectively accentuated recollections invade conscious- ness at a moment when our ideation is directed by will ? The reply to this question has been implicitly given in the first part of this study : the affect that accompanies every day remnant at the genesis of a phantasy causes the attention to be switched from the conscious occupation to the memory element brought close to the threshold. When we come to deal with intuition we shall have occasion to introduce several observations showing how we may become aware of our fore-conscious thinking. For the present one instance must suffice. But it should be noted that in this instance there is a question of a feeling that diverts attention but results from fore-conscious think- ing, and not simply from remembering. But this distinction does not constitute an objection. If we are able to estab- lish that an affect consecutive to a thought-process is capable of causing a shifting of attention, we may readily admit that an affect connected with a remembrance may have the same result ; indeed, there is no essential difference between these two emotive states, and there are no feelings resulting from thought formation which cannot be attached to a memory element, and conversely no emotions proper to memory which cannot be reproduced by thinking. If for the purpose of showing the influence of feeling upon attention we resort to an observation in which the affect is not a recalled one, we have a good excuse for doing so : most people are unable to observe their emotions in the recollecting stage of their phantasies because they are not conscious. W^e can only recall them through analysis, and so the proof of their action is not so convincing as I hope it will be in the following instance. Moreover, in this case the shifting of attention brings us from the fore- conscious to the conscious state, while at the genesis of a concatenation exactly the reverse takes place. The single observation which should establish pro- visionally that the shifting of attention is due to a feeling has already been communicated on p. 156 : "As I was reading I became aware of a special feeling, for the 20G THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS description of which I cannot find the proper words, but which was rendered verbally, without the intervention of my consciousness, in these terms : There is something going on in my fore-consciousness which must he in direct relation to my subject. I ought to stop reading for a little while and let it come to the surface.'^ These briefly are the facts : (1) I am mind-wandering (fore-conscious occupation) ; (2) I become aware of a certain feeling ; (3) which leads me to analyse my fore-conscious thoughts. The phantastic occupation is abandoned ; my attention is diverted to a scientific purpose. In this instance, which dates back to the earlier period of my researches, the affect has provoked a sort of reasoning that bears traces of its origin. We conclude provisionally that an emotion provoked by ideation is capable of divert- ing the attention with the result that we pass from the fore-conscious to the conscious state. The , same affect (recalled with a remembrance) may attract the attention with the result that we pass from the conscious to the fore- conscious state, as in every genesis of a phantasy. But here we must insert a special remark : The above observation is simply an illustration of the fact that all our thinking is accompanied by feelings of a widely varying nature and intensity. This peculiarity is well known. " I have often had the opportunity of ob- serving that the subjects of psychological experiments (I am speaking of educated and intelligent people) whom I aban- doned, apparently unintentionally and without warning them, to their musings, proved to develop manifestations of affects, which were experimentally registrable, of which, however, they could with all good will give me not the slightest account, or at least only a very unsatisfactory one. A similar experience becomes apparent in numerous instances in the association experiment as well as in psycho- analysis." I It is from this assumption as a starting-point that Benussi * undertook his association experiments, during * Cf. C. G. Jung, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, footnote on p. 134. » Cf. V. Benussi, Die Atmungsymptome der Luge, in Archiv fiir die gemmmte Psychologie, II, 5, 1914. Benussi's starting-point w»s : »,lthough MEMORY AND AFFECT 20T which he registered the variations of the affects through their influence on the respiration of his subjects. Thus the consideration of the mutual relations of memory and affect has brought us to recognize not only that the affects which come to the surface together with elements of our intellectual memory, as well as those aroused experimentally, show themselves stronger than our will in their power over our attention, but we must admit also that the same affects have the same power when they result from fore-conscious thought- formation. Feeling has a great affinity for attention, which it attracts, absorbs, monopolizes and directs. It will pre- sently be our endeavour to establish that attention cannot originally be distinguished from feeling ; the two are identical at bottom and have only become differentiated in the course of mental evolution. However this may be, in recognizing through analysis and observation that feeling is stronger than will, we simply reach a conclusion which observation had arrived at even before psychology had become a science. Ever since feel- ing has been opposed to will their antinomy has been admitted, and by many authors the domination of our ideation by the former has been stigmatized as a return to animality. Payot, for example, writes : " Passion is the victory of animality ; it is the blind urge of heredity that darkens intelligence, oppresses it, and, further still, subjects it to its service ; it means the suppression in us of humanity, the abasement of what is at the same time our happiness and the reason of our existence ; w^e take rank again, while it is growling, in the zoological series." ^ Now that we understand the reason of the distraction a physiognomist has a particular gift for observing and interpreting the slightest somatic expressions of our intellection, the registration by means of instruments of the slight changes which the affects cause in our motor system would be more reliable. Among the organs which imdergo involun- tary alterations under the influence of our affects, our respiratory system is most sensible. Our inner life manifests itself in the form of our breathing and betra3's itself even when one tries to hide it. Benussi posed the problem so : Do we breathe in a certain way when we are truthful and in another when we lie ? He solved this question in the affirmative by means of the pneumograph, in registering the respiration (with the aid of Marey's drum) of 3ubjects who are caused alternately to associate with a lie or with the truth. » Cf. J. Payot, U Education de la Volontd, pp. 191-192. 208 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS which results from the spontaneous appearance at the surface of uncalled-for recollections, we are able to find an explanation for a phenomenon which must have struck every author : the most disagreeable side of writing is re-reading one's own work (or correcting proofs). One experiences the greatest difficulty in fixing one's attention upon the text which one has written only a short time before ; one overlooks words because one sees the text with one's inner sight, in memory, and the latter works more quickly than one's voluntary glance ; the critical activity is hampered because the affects that presided at the creation are revived and lead the attention astray on the stream of memory ; and either we drift upon it, or we make fore- conscious associations which we cannot sufficiently repress. Most commonly the struggle — of which we remain unaware — between the two tendencies : the conscious one that is bent on re-reading and the fore-conscious one urged by our affects — in other words, the struggle between will and feeling — produces a disagreeable impression which increases the difficulty and augments the unpleasantness of correct- ing. (This disagreeable feeling is easily recalled at will, which is another proof of the existence of affective memory.) This is also the reason why the indexes at the end of scientific works are not, as a rule, made by the authors themselves. Another peculiarity which I have often observed can now be explained : When we are perusing a book of a scien- tific character it often happens that we experience some difficulty in fixing our attention upon our reading, especially at the start. I have noticed in my own case so many dis- tractions during the first few minutes after opening my book, that I end by wondering why my day-dreams are more frequent at the beginning of my reading than at the end. I now think that the explanation is as follows : Except in very special cases a scientific text does not awake an affect strong enough to fortify our attention to such an extent that it becomes insensible to the feelings that escape repression and come to the surface together with day remnants (memory elements). These, as we have seen before, monopolize and divert the attention, with what MEMORY AND AFFECT 209 result we know. On the contrary, when we read fiction, the affects which it awakens at once maintain the attention, so that affective recollections of the same intensity as before remain without any consequences. The predisposition of affective memory to influence our conscious thinking explains, besides many cases which Freud has examined under the common appellation of the *' psychopathology of everyday life," a great number of jests and humorous remarks. As regards the former, the three instances given on pp. 192-193 must suffice. As to the formation of wit and humour in relation to the affective memory, I make only one observation here, namely, that it is the lurking affect that interferes spontaneously to trans- form the conscious perception into a pleasantry. I repro- duce just as an illustration this one creation. Brill, in his Psychanalysis (p. 337), communicates the following example of wit : A physician, leaving the sick-bed of a wife, remarked to the husband, " I don't like her looks." " I have not liked her looks for some time," was the husband's rejoinder. The physician of course referred to the wife's condition — but he expressed his apprehension in words that afforded the husband an opportunity of utilizing them to assert his conjugal aversion. The complex that prompted this reply needs no further comment. When the affect which is awakened by the object of our perception — because it is foremost in our memory — is what we have sometimes called scientific interest and sometimes the observation-wish (two terms which display the poverty of our terminology for the emotional elements) — the result is a discovery, or an inspiration, as we have seen in the case of the day-dream on pp. 157-8, which showed me for the first time the analogy between the displace- ment of the accent on certain words in children's games and in fore-conscious thought-formations. We are further able to understand the full significance of the findings of psycho-analysis, which teaches us that an hysterical attack is invariably preceded by a period of frequent day-dreaming. For we now realize the impor- tance of affects as disturbers of our conscious ideation. This 14 210 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS gives us some insight into the intellection of persons with whom the affective life predominates ; and in this con- nection we think of all psychoses. As I began this chapter with certain considerations in respect of memory hallucinations, during which past experi- ences unroll themselves before the mind's eye in their natural sequence, and as we have since then devoted our attention chiefly to the examination of disaggregated memory-elements, we may ask ourselves w^iether there is any explanation of the fact that memory may thus mani- fest itself in two different manners. The question may be slightly premature, yet it deserves a provisional reply. The two phenomena occur when we are in the fore- conscious state, the use of our senses being temporarily suspended, as well as our conscious faculties, especially the will ; in other words, when only affects ' confront one another and are able to dispute with one another for the mastery over the association process. We have already met with instances of this antagonism in the reproduction of the fore-conscious reasoning as to whither the struggle between the sleep-wish and the observation-wish may lead. We remember also that w^e have admitted that the con- catenating takes place in a direction calculated to fulfil the wish that is foremost at the moment. We may imagine that in the fore-conscious state, at the time when a recollection occupies the forum, two affects of a different nature may be present : the wish tending toward its fulfil- ment and the affective accent of the recollection itself. If the former bears the greater intensity, the next link asso- ciating with the remembrance will constitute a progression toward the fore-conscious end. On the contrary, if the revived affect is more intense than the wish, the recollecting is not interrupted and the drifting on the stream of memory begins. When the rising to the surface of the recollection occurs during a conscious occupation, volition always succumbs to the recollection ; we are distracted, and the surrender of directed thinking is automatic and simultaneous with MEMORY AND AFFECT 211 the transference of attention to the memory- element. Thus the previous circumstances are reproduced and the two alternatives are possible. From these two possibilities we conclude that the fore- consciousness is capable of dissociating memory-elements just as the consciousness is : the wish can perform the role of the will. This finding is not new, for we knew it from experience, but it constitutes another element of a future comparison between the two ways of thinking. Freud has called our attention to this disaggregating function of the will in his Interpretation of Dreams. Un- fortunately, I do not see my way to use his terminology : " The intentional recollection and other processes of our normal thinking also require a retrogression in the psychic apparatus from any complex presentation-act to the raw material of the memory-traces lying at its basis " (p. 430). Both factors, volition and affect, result in the disaggre- gation of memory-elements for the actual needs of the thought-processes over which they preside, and the com- parison may be carried even farther, for when the will itself goes exploring the depths of memory, the act of decom- posing takes place without awareness, beyond the threshold of consciousness ; and the only occasion for observing such a dislocation in artificial circumstances arises when we use a nmemonic means of tracing back a remembrance. But this operation presents, as a conscious activity, a very close analogy to what takes place beyond the threshold, and gives us the key to the understanding of remembering and forgetting under the influence of affects : our feelings then replace our deliberate choice in recalling and reviving certain of the contents of memory and leaving others untouched. Before we close this parenthesis we should recall that in the affective state recollecting seems easier and more abundant, but we should not forget that what we lose in depth, when remembering consciously, we win back many times in area, because we are able to retain all the unearthed elements, to compare them, to draw conclusions from them — in short, to organize them, which we are usually prevented from doing in fore-conscious thinking through the 212 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS useless material which our affects unearth and the sudden shif tings of attention which we have already considered. After having thus sketched the relations between the two modes of fore-conscious recollecting, we wall briefly review some of its other characteristics as they result from our analyses. From the point of view of the consciousness we gain the impression that our memory contains many traces of the past which are beyond recall. It appears, however, that the fore-consciousness knows no limits to its possibilities of recollecting. But one point should be emphasized here : namely, that in our day-dreams the remembrances of our infancy do not intervene so frequently or so abundantly as in our nocturnal dreams. The number of recollections of my childhood that are woven into all the phantasies which I have registered is small. Still, they are recallable on occasion, so that we may really speak of the extraordinary power of recollecting in fore-conscious thinking. Nothing that has once been a perception is lost for later use, and the greater the store of memory, the greater the possibilities of thought-formation. But it is worthy of remark that whereas we are able in waking life to recollect, to retain in the focus of our atten- tion, to compare and combine several remembrances at the same time, this is denied to us in the fore-conscious state. Only one single memory-element can be considered at once, to the exclusion of all other intellectual elements, and it sinks into oblivion again as soon as the fore-conscious attention has passed to the next internal perception. There is only one exception to this rule : in the case of inspiration and invention the above conditions, described as a privilege of consciousness, may be reproduced in the fore-conscious stratum ; and on these occasions we note the presence of a wish of such intensity as I have been unable to observe in any other phantasy. We should, however, not forget that in the act of inten- tional recollecting also the remembrances come back one by one, and never two or more at a time, exactly as in the day-dream. But w^e retain them at will as long as we want them. Easy but fugitive — such is the characteristic of the fore-conscious recollection. MEMORY AND AFFECT 213 This may already have struck the reader, as also the circumstance that most remembrances, in our phantasies, bear upon past events and only very few relate to things that have been learned. This is a point which others have emphasized before me, but as educational psychology persists very largely in ignoring it, I may profitably, at this point, quote Bergson's statement : " When the psychologists speak of memory as a contracted fold, as an impression which engraves itself deeper and deeper as it is repeated, they forget that the majority of our memories bear upon events and details of our life whose essence it is to have a date and consequently never to allow of repetition. The voluntarily acquired memories are rare and exceptional. On the contrary, the registra- tion by the memory of facts and images unique of their kind goes on at all moments of duration." He adds that the learned remembrances are most useful, and that for that reason they are more noticed, but all depends upon the significance of the italicized word. If in his mind learned stood for memorized we should disagree, for we have laid stress upon the circumstance that the whole of our reading, all the perceptions that have interested us, may be recalled when we apply fore-conscious ideation toward a conscious end, provided the proper affect be present in th« mind. This confirms the empirical truth that reading develops, and that education should aim at utilizing the affects for its own purposes. In concluding this chapter I wish to make a few remarks as to the memory of our day-dreams themselves. They will lead us temporarily away from our main object, but they are too important to be omitted. As most people do not take the slightest pains to observe themselves when they wake from a mind -wandering, the question as to how far they retain their phantasies need not be put. Still, anyone may recognize a fancy which he reads in a novel as similar to one which he has had himself. And what most people take for sudden inspirations may be con- clusions reached by fore-conscious thought, but of which they have not become aware in so far as these so-called inspirations are not immediate products of their second 214 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS self, when they provoke intense feeling, thanks to which they are acknowledged. In the latter case we become aware only of the con- clusion of our day-dream, and remain completely ignor- ant of all the links of the association which have preceded it. This forgetting is the reason why we almost invariably underestimate the duration of our distractions. I have mentioned before that I have sometimes waked in bed from a phantasy that has lasted half an hour or more, and that I have been greatly surprised to find that it has occupied so much more time than I supposed on awaking. This is a circumstance which it is very easy to verify. Personally, I know that my memory is very deficient as regards my day-dreams, and for this reason I retrace and register them immediately if I think they may be useful. If I neglect to do so I have to rely upon chance to recollect them. Sometimes I succeed, especially if they happen to fill up a gap in my writings, which happens in cases like those relating to the passages read in Tylor, Freud, etc. There are even a certain number of daily duties for which I rely entirely upon my fore-conscious ideation, and on my certainty of recalling its products at the right moment ; thus, whenever I am not compelled to reply to a letter at once, or to prepare a speech or a lecture without delay, I trust my affects to do the business for me. And when the fancy takes me, that is, when I have the intuitive feel- ing (another form of affect) that the text of the letter or the scheme of the lecture is ready, I sit down at my desk and the paper is covered with writing without any serious effort on my part. Since I have accustomed myself to observe my unconscious life, I often become aware of the intellectual work which goes on piecemeal without the inter- ference of my conscious faculties. But unless it evokes an emotion resembling the joy of discovery, I do not interrupt it. Indeed, this emotion warns me unerringly that my mental occupation is of value in my. scientific pursuits. The fact that I write almost automatically as my fore- consciousness dictates is the best proof that I am recollecting the thoughts that have been elaborated under the direction of my affects. Not only poets and novelists and artists MEMORY AND AFFECT 215 work in a similar fashion : most people are thus helped by their second mode of thinking. But the products of their fore-consciousness are not distinguished from the results of their waking thoughts, and this want of dissimilarity, together with their ignorance of the unconscious, prevents them from recognizing the assistance which they obtain from their other self. The reader will have noted that I made what was appar- ently a most contradictory statement when I wrote above that as I know that my memory for my day-dreams is very deficient I often retrace and register them immediately ; for if I could not remember them, how should I be able to note them down in my diary ? This contradiction is due to the circumstance that I begin my sentence by using con- scious terms and end it by using fore-conscious ones. Indeed, while I am able to remember my fancies in waking life, I can retrace them most readily when I assume the analy- tical attitude. In analysis we are in a frame of mind which is to some extent the reverse of the state proper to our conscious life. Freud has insisted on the fact that in the waking state we repress everything that is liable to lead us astray from our voluntary aim. We repress especially fore-conscious thinking, which we know at present as an eternal menace of disturbance of our directed ideation with its spontaneous interference of affects and associations. On the other hand, as soon as we prepare ourselves to re- trace our fore-conscious thoughts we abandon repression by a process which defies description, we let our ideas come to the fore, we try to recollect (a voluntary function) and at the same time abandon the mind to its own impulses. This state, in which factors of consciousness and uncon- sciousness are present together, is not easy to assume, and it requires some practice before one is able to perform this remembering satisfactorily. The thing that one remembers first is the last link of the concatenation, or the conclusion ; and as this coincides with waking, we mostly recall it even before analysis, and it naturally constitutes our starting- point. But it is prudent to write it down at the outset, for fear it may be forgotten before the research is at an end. From the last link we try to recall the last but one. 216 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS then the one just before that, etc., until we reach the starts ing-point. This regressive recalling has especially struck me since I read the following remark of Freud's ^ : " Here I noticed for the first time (description of Mrs. Emmy V. N.*s case) what I have been able to observe later times without number, that at the hypnotic unravelling of a fresh hysteric delirium the patient's communication reverses the chronological order, relates first the impression and thought associations which occurred last and are least important, and arrives lastly at the primary, and, as a cause, probably the most important impression." This passage emphasizes the correctness of the supposition that a recollection is the reaction of memory upon the regressive current of feeling or will. In this ability to retrace the different stages of our fore-conscious associations by a voluntary renunciation of our conscious faculties we see simply another- instance of the employment toward a conscious end of a power proper to our unconscious mental life. We have already seen several instances of this. But what we perform deliberately in analysis is done spontaneously during our phantasies. As I showed in the section ** Unsteadiness," every time the affects, aroused together with recollections, cause the concatenations to rise near to the surface, the associative process is resumed by an unconscious effort to remember the preceding links, at a point which seems undetermined, unless the affects also play a role in this involuntary preference. And we know, too, from Freud's study of dreams, that the un- conscious scarcely ever fails to recall and utilize the creations of the fore-conscious in its dream formations. But what the psycho-analyst is able to do with an effort, artists in every medium — and to some extent scientists, whose work includes a certain amount of invention — are able to do spontaneously. A conscious part of their labour consists in registering the products of their fore-conscious thinking ; another in applying their critical activity to it in a manner similar to that which I have already more than once described. We know further that this thinking assumes » Cf. S. Fbeud und Breuer, Studien iiber Hyeterie, p. 63. MEMORY AND AFFECT 217 a peculiar form, proper to the means chosen for its com- munication. We have thus reached the end of this chapter, without, however, having exhausted the description of the mutual interaction of memory and affect. We shall now inquire into another aspect of their interaction, from a fresh point of view, described in other terms (apperception and affect), which is purely a submission to misoneism and at bottom an involuntary homage to the prestige of the old psychology and the '' faculties " which it has created. Notwithstanding this incompleteness, we have already found that the importance of affective and intellectual memory in fore-conscious thinking is so supreme that, at least as far as the upper half of the unconscious is concerned, we must admit that there is much truth in the prediction of Knowi.son, who foresees the day when " the subconscious mind of popular imagination is proved to be the organized but unconscious memory-system of the individual self." ^ » Cf. T. S. Knowlson, Originality, p. 45. T. Werner Laurie, 1919. CHAPTER II APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT In the present writer's opinion, it is not only in conscious and unconscious thinking that the influence of the affects upon the intervention of memory has not yet been justly appreciated. I shall now try to show that in the mental operation called apperception the importance of the affects in the orientation of our apperceptions has once again been insufficiently recognized. In other words, a given impression may automatically provoke the intervention of certain memory-elements, without awareness, and neglect others whose intervention would seem more logical. But how far this selection is determined by our feelings has not yet been sufficiently established. Apperception may not be as transcendental as Kant believed. The distinction made by Wundt between passive and active apperception facilitates our argument, for it allows us to set aside one half of the problem, which does not con- cern us here, for we are considering fore -conscious thinking only. His distinction is summarized by Dwelshauvers ' in the following terms : " Apperception ... is mental activity accompanied by the awareness of itself; it mani- fests itself through the attention wherewith certain psychic contents are chosen in our ideation and certain others rejected. From apperception depends mental synthesis, which extends from the fusion and assimilation of the elements composing a sensation as far as the logical unifi- cation of concepts in reasoning." " Apperception intervenes in the sensation which repre- > Cf. Dwelshauvers, U Inconacient, p. 90, and further pp. 176-177, 218 APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT 219 sents a less intellectualized synthesis, but there we may call it passive in this sense^ that the excitations themselves determine its entrance into action ; on the other hand, in the reasoning or dehberation of will with itself, apperception is active." As considerations of mental processes in w^hich will interferes are here excluded, we are confronted only by cases of so-called " passive " apperception. But the tech- nical terms of psychology are susceptible of so many shades of meaning that it may be advisable before beginning the discussion to state clearly the precise sense in whibh we shall use them : thus, we understand sensation to be the psychological phenomenon (of an affective or represen- tative nature) resulting immediately from an impression made upon the senses. The impression is then the modi- fication of the organs, especially of the nerves and the neural centres. Apperception is the operation (spontaneous or voluntary) which identifies sensations with similar previous ones, thanks to the acti^dty of memory. This activity results in perception. We should also bear in mind that the verbal dis- tinctions which we establish for purposes of study do not correspond with reality, where all these phenomena, and others which are not here under consideration, occur simul- taneously and are inseparable. Therefore our definitions are important only in so far as they assist us in formulating the facts which we are observing. But before we turn our attention to the latter as our analysis has brought them to light, we will first refresh our memory and briefly recapitulate where our predecessors who have studied the role of memory in apperception have left the solution of the problem. To this end we borrow from the excellent compilation of DwELSHAU^'^RS this statement : "In every sensible perception memory inter- venes unconsciously. When we perceive a sensation and devote our attention entirely to it, the synthesis becomes objective — that is to say, the performance which makes us perceive is, for our consciousness, the representation of an object. But it would be wrong to believe that this per- formance must consist exclusively in taking note of an 220 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS impression which we receive passively through an outer stimulus. " This would be quite erroneous. What we add in sensible perception is much more considerable than what the object gives to us by means of our senses. We will speak here only of the contents which memory adds to the actual perception ( = sensation). " A very simple experiment will give us a clear under- standing of the intervention of unconscious memory. On sixteen movable cubes mark sixteen letters of the alphabet. Dispose them in four groups of four letters. Expose the whole to someone for a very short space of time, just long enough to glance over it, without leaving him an oppor- tunity to go over it again, to learn the letters by heart and examine it in detail. See to it that the letters do not form words, and ask the subject to write down the letters which he remembers in the order of perception. " Repeat the experiment in the same manner, but now form four known words with your sixteen letters. Do not expose them to view longer than before, so that this time the impression on the retina is identical with that in the first experiment. The subject will not have seen any more letters, neither will he have seen them for a longer time. And yet he will remember many more. He will write the words as they have been presented to him. " Another easy experiment is as follows : Take a text of ten lines. Let somebody read them, and take note of the exact time it takes him to do so. Afterwards mix the same letters, exactly the same in number, and arrange them typographically in the same way, but this time so that they do not form intelligible words. They will take much longer to read. Yet from a material point of view the retina will have been impressed exactly in the same way, neither more nor less. " Why in the first experiment do we perceive more letters directly they form known words, and why in the second do we read more easily when the sentences convey a meaning ? It is not the actual impression, the present sensation which is responsible ; it is memory, the help which we obtain because in the case of known words and an intel- APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT 221 ligible text we add, we complete, we guess. Thus it is that on reading, with a distracted gaze, an advertisement, for instance, we make a mistake and replace what is really- printed by what we suppose ought to be there. "... The assistance afforded by the memory does not take place only when experiment allows us to observe it, but in all similar cases, and the experiment may be repeated for every sort of impression." We conclude from this passage that certain cases of the psychopathology of everyday life are due to wrong apperceptions, the deviation being due to our affects, as we have repeatedly pointed out before. But in what is to follow we shall try to find out the reasons for our mistakes when we interpret our sensations. Normally the spon- taneous contribution of memory in apperception is made in a sense whose conditions are imposed by the nature of the object from which the stimulus proceeds. When we see for the first time a new variety of tree, we begin by per- ceiving the object as a tree before thinking of anything else — for example, of its species, the animals that may live on it, its fruits, or any other train of thought connected with it. In other words, memory first of all enriches the sensation with such recollections as make us recognize the category in which we ought to place the object that causes the impression. But we have met with many instances, especially at the genesis of our day-dreams, where this apperception is erroneously performed, where the sensation is not exactly perceived. We will examine these cases afresh and begin with those wherein an external stimulus has led to a day-dream. No. 9 of the list on p. 188 reminds me that when my eye caught the advertisement beginning with " Belgica,^* I perceived its wording distractedly, and I reacted upon it in two different ways : I began humming a song ' which opens with the very same word, and at the same time my thoughts ran : " That is the new brewery venture which I read about in yesterday's paper," etc. As we have seen, this song constituted an unconscious ironical farewell to a person who stood foremost in my affective memory. The » Cf . with the song in FreudV Interpretation of Dreams, footnote at p. 329. 222 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS mechanism which caused it to be hummed may be explained as follows : The sensation caused by the impression of the object on the retina produced apperception spontaneously : in other words, it caused the automatical revival of a certain number of memory-elements. Thus a vague perception took place. Among these elements there were two which seem to bear a special emphasis : the first is the " Belgica " mentioned in the opening words of the song, which con- tinues : " The Belgica — ^A thousand pious wishes follow her on her voyage," etc. My unconscious self applied this fare- well to the lady to whom, in my thoughts, I had also said adieu ; and the affect attached to this complex will explain the facility of the connection. Thereupon I began to hum the revived song. The unconscious memory that was reanimated set my motor system in action, much as a person talks to himself without hearing his own words. Apper- ception, association, affect, humming and meaning, every- thing remains unconscious. The second element of the apperception which seemed emphasized was the Belgica as mentioned in the newspaper account of the brewery company bearing that name. This element is recognized by my fore-consciousness — ^normally the memory-elements that take part in the apperceiving process appear and disappear without any recognition whatever — and becomes the object of my fore-conscious perception ; my attention concentrates upon it, and at the same time I lose the notion of the outer world and concatenate with it as already shown. In both cases the genesis of the two unconscious mani- festations seems due to the intervention of an affect during the apperceiving process. The second example in the list on p. 188 sums up a day-dream reproduced on p. 44 : My boy had coughed while I was reading ; I had perceived it fore-consciously, without being aware of the perception, and it is likely that the spontaneous recollection of my constant anxiety about his health, of his pleurisy, of his sojourn at the hos- pital, of the serious warnings of the doctor against possible pulmonary tuberculosis, if the proper precautions were not taken, had all made part of the apperception, when my link- APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT 223 ing-up began : "If he were to spit blood," etc. Here again the genesis of the day-dream seems to coincide with apperception, or with certain elements of it, and to point to the affective complex that had been revived without my awareness, as this explains the shifting of my attention from my book to my emotionally emphasized recollections. In these instances it is difficult to establish a clear dis- tinction between the precise moment at which the apper- ception ceased and the moment when the phantasy started, for the recollections and apperceptions cannot be plainly separated from the recollection or group of recollections at the genesis of the fore-conscious association. In the next instance, however, these two moments appear more distinctly : one of the day-dreams originates at the very instant of the bursting of a shell in the neighbourhood. Directly the noise is perceived as being caused by a heavy projectile, this remembrance is added : " That was like the shell which caused so many casualties in the street the other day (cf. p. 37). Instead of ending with considera- tions about my old schoolfellow who specialized in ballistics, would it not seem more natural if my first thoughts had referred to care for mj^ own safety ? It is at least probable that with civilians their emotions would have led their thoughts in such a direction ; which is an argument in favour of our hypothesis that our apperceptions are influenced by our affective state. In the case of a soldier, used to bombardments, who knows by experience whether there is or is not any danger, and who is consequently not con- cerned about his safety at every burst of shrapnel, we may admit that the first recollection following upon the apper- ception betrays the affect that was first aroused in his mind. Another phantasy started after the perception of a bunch of camomile flowers, with the remembrance : " I have been told that this remedy against fleas is efficacious," etc. Again the two moments of perception and concatenation are clearly distinct and the feeling of disappointment that lurked in my unconscious mind has become apparent. We conclude from these instances and all the others which are presented for the reader's verifica- tion in the foregoing pages : (1) that an outer stimulus may 224 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS provoke apperception without leading to a conscious per- ception ; (2) that when there is a conscious perception the memory- elements that constitute the genesis of the day-dream are in some cases inseparable from the spontaneous recollections that play a part in apperception, while in other instances one may distinguish two different moments ; (3) that in our unconscious mind an association with memory-elements, which contri- bute to the apperception, may take place in such a way as to produce a manifestation whose meaning may escape our conscious self ; (4) that these instances confirm a former finding : namely, that the affects regulate recollecting. In this connection we should bear in mind that we con- sidered above only fancies which originated in a vacant state of mind. We shall now, therefore, examine whether this process is in any w^ay different when the phantasies cause a dis- traction from a voluntary occupation. In the list (p. 188) on No. 15 I remember that as I w^as reading the expression " classical terms " my attention deviated from the text, because I recalled unseasonably that I myself had made use of the classical terms " meditation " and " reflection." The apperception took me from the book to my own intended essay, thanks to a wish which never leaves me. I am always in an expectant frame of mind, perpetually on the look-out for the detection of new findings that will enrich my collection of data for the work which I have undertaken. In the present case this feeling proves stronger than the interest with which I am reading Regis and Hesnard's book, and causes association with memory-elements that were not absolutely necessary for the perception of the two words. We should be inclined to say that the apperception — that is, the act of spontaneously recalling those memory- elements that are necessary for leading to a perception — ^is protracted unduly, beyond what is strictly needful. We may suppose that when the impression caused by the phrase " classical terms," etc., on the retina of the reader is recognized, there spring up from his memory such words as " faculties, perception, attention, will," etc., and that the mind concludes therefrom, in a flash, that these are what we usually understand by " classical terms." It is APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT 225 also possible that in this Hst, which reappears perhaps in a synthetical manner which has not yet been analysed, the words " meditation " and " reflection " were comprised, and that they brought with them the remembrance that I myself had used these words, so that the affect, which is so helpful to me in my work, as I have just described, became animated and monopolized my mental energy for the thinking process that from this starting-point proceeded be3^ond the threshold. When this affect manifests itself in the form of a wish, such as we have already recognized as presiding over the fore-conscious stream of thought, it leads to its own fulfilment, if it is intense enough, or else, in the course of the association, is replaced by a stronger one, with the result which we have already seen. Summing up, we may say that it seems as though the apperceiving process goes beyond its original aim, owing to the affects which emphasize the superfluously added memory- elements ; it is further impossible to make out whether the wishes accentuate the latter or whether in their turn they revive dormant wishes and so give the impulse to further associations. We complete here the fancy referred to under No. 16 on the list on p. 188, the first part of which was com- municated on p. 46 : Preliminary Statement. — In the course of the day I had sent an order for some books to a Swiss bookseller, and a few hours later I was reading Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life (translated by Brill), when on p. 49 my glance fell upon the footnote '' Zentralblatt fiir Psych- analyse, I, 9, 1911." I soon found that my attention had wandered and that I had been thinking fore-con- sciously. " Is this the same volume as that I have ordered ? Then I shall meet with that example again. Anyhow, that proves that this edition is pretty well kept up to date. It has surely been revised since it was first published." (I turn back to the first page and see that it is the fourth English edition.) *' So they are much interested in psycho-analysis in England. Consequently my book has a good chance of 15 226 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS success. Will they put ' first edition ' under the title ? " I wake. (One link of the chain escaped me after it had been recalled, and I have been unable to retrace it again.) Here we observe once again that the perception has led directly to an emotionally emphasized day remnant : *' Is this the same volume as that I have ordered ? " The affect attached to it may be called expectation, anticipation of pleasure on reading, etc., but as I ordered the book for the purpose of acquiring useful knowledge for my work, it should not surprise us that it ended by so directing the association that the wish in connection with it became apparent. So far we have only come upon instances in which the apperception was perfectly performed, the genesis of the day-dream coinciding with the apperception itself, or following immediately upon it, so that we could speak of protracted continuation of the apperceiving process. Next we shall consider an example wherein the apperception is not correctly performed. I recorded on pp. 49-50 an association which originated through an erroneous interpretation of the word read. The word was used in the text in its ordinary meaning. But I had often previously been puzzled by the question how it is that we can recollect at the right moment a certain passage of a book which we have only read once, without having memorized it. There is no doubt that other elements of the text, which I cannot consider here, favoured this recollection, but it is nevertheless strange that in the apper- ception of the word read the above puzzling question was dragged along and revived, thanks to the expression " only read once " — and thanks also, apparently, to my lively curiosity. The intensity of the adduced remembrance, together with its accompanying affect, may explain why the word read is understood or perceived, not according to its use in the context, but in the sense of the added recol- lection, so that it becomes the genesis of a day-dream. The disturbing influence of the memory-elements spring- ing to the surface in the act of apperception, especially APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT 227 when dormant affects are aroused and collaborate in the revivification of remembrances, may go so far as to mislead our senses and provoke altogether erroneous perceptions. Such is the case in No. 18 of the list on p. 188. As related on p. 48, I was reading a sentence containing the words ^' fixes groups of ideas,^^ when I perceived it as ''fixed groups of associations.^* The explanation of the mistake is fairly simple after what has already been said : I had been ponder- ing repeatedly over the fact that our fore-consciousness seems to possess so much facility in disaggregating groups of associations or memories. Independently of these re- flections I had also found that in the conscious state, when we are trying to recollect, the elements for which we are searching are not easily dissociated from the whole of which they make a part. These two ideas are recalled here together in the act of apperceiving the words ''groups of ideas," and as they have come to the fore simultaneously for the first time, the fore-consciousness confronts them ; it recog- nizes their connection with exultation : in the conscious state the groups are better fixed, seem to keep firmer together ; in the fore-conscious state they seem less fixed, looser. I took the keenest pleasure in this unexpected conclusion, which at that moment I regarded as the solution of the problem which had absorbed me. Although the finding appears insignificant among the masses of facts recorded in these pages, I still remember the pleasure which I felt on this occasion. (One should not forget that a theory is not constructed all at once, and every little contribution that helps the thinker forward is welcomed by him with a certain amount of emotion.) I insist upon this affect because it explains the mistake made in reading : the apperception ceases in fore-conscious thinking before it results in a con- scious perception ; the voluntary process is interrupted. But there is a fore-conscious perception, and even an erroneous one. The act of recollecting that is provoked by the sensation extends to the two previously formed ideas : perhaps the impression serves as a link between them. The interest, for the latter, is more intense than for the sensation ; the psychic accent is displaced from one operation to another, and the result of the mental pro- 228 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS cess is an erroneous fore-conscious perception and a simul- taneous passage from the conscious to the fore-conscious state ; and as soon as the intellection is directed by the affects it proceeds beyond the threshold. The perception is a compromise between the sensation and the affectively emphasized memories. However, we can only call it wrong in so far as we do not take the second fore -conscious activity into account. From a fore-conscious point of view a so- called wrong perception is correct, for it takes place in the sense dictated by the affects ; from a conscious point of view it is erroneous because the result is not in conformity with the will. In the example where my friend (see p. 193) under- stood me to say tomates instead of Thomas^ wx have again a wrong perception. The mistake is caused by a simple recollection emotionally emphasized. A similar explanation represents the genesis of the phan- tasy communicated on p. 47 : the word nurse^ which I read, offered the occasion for a day-dream, because in the apperception of this word the recollection maid was added ; and the latter was affectively accentuated because I was afraid the woman would not serve my tea in time and would make me miss an appointment. We may thus conclude that, whether our mind is vacant or not, affects intervene in the genesis of our fancies and influ- ence it in each of the four cases which we have distinguished : (a) when the memory-element from which they start is indis- tinguishable from the other elements active in apper- ception, the porception being correct or incorrect ; (b) when the same memory-element appears as a protraction of the act of apperceiving, the perception being correct or incorrect In every one of the instances that have been examined so far the affects have been found to react simultaneously with the intellectual elements which they accompanied. Therefore it may be of interest to show that in a few cases the apperception may lead to the perception of the aroused affect before the perception of the outer stimulus is accomplished. Such is undoubtedly the case in the day-dream of which there is mention on p. 49 : I was reading in Jastrow*s APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT 229 book, The Subconscious, the following passage : "... The more ordinary habit- acquisitions . , . require merely the initial start ... to run themselves off the reel. The most convincing illustrations of such automatic execution are those in which the higher centres are thrown hors de combat and yet the actions continue as well as usual. The somnam- bulist directs his steps accurately ; the sonmiloquist utters words and sentences ; more rarely — because writing does not become as automatic as walking or talking — ^persons have been known to get up and write in their sleep. But everyone may observe the same type of automatism ; it occurs when we are engaged in protracted copying from a book, in the experience of a sudden arousing of one* self from a state of distracted attention (during which, how- ever, the writing has been going on as accurately as usual, yet without the appreciation of the senses or even the ^appearance of the text. Such is subconscious copying)." At the last italicized phrase I was actually aroused from a state of distracted attention to discover several things. First of all I had on my lips a definition which will be dis- cussed in one of the following chapters : *' Distraction is directly the opposite of inspiration, for in the latter opera- tion the two streams of thought (conscious and fore-con- scious) flow toward the same aim, while in the former they diverge." Next I observed that after the words " the actions continue as well as usual '* I had read the text auto- matically without grasping its meaning. And thirdly, I attributed my awakening to the last italicized phrase. By the reproduction of the fore-conscious stream of thought that went on during my distraction — but this would lead us too far from our present aim — I could prove that the expressions which I italicized in Jastrow's second sentence were apperceived and awoke in my brain memories which were partial conclusions of former reflec- tions, as in the day-dream on p. 225. This consti- tuted the beginning of a concatenation of a distinctly psychological nature, of which I have communicated only the result above. But it is here more interesting to note that the perception of the text was as good as absent during the perusal of the lines following upon the words that set 230 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS me thinking fore-consciously ; and what seems most curious of all is that I reacted without awareness to the sugges- tion comprised in the words : " sudden rousing of oneself from a state of distracted attention,'' It was only when I w^as awake that I noticed my emotive state, and it was still some time before I perceived the words to which I had reacted. We have seen on p. 190 that in another case I became aware of the affect created in my fore-conscious mind by the thoughts formed during my absentmindedness, before the ideas came to the fore. I can only suppose that the apperception went on during my thought-formation in a diminished degree, so that the text was perceived fore- consciously, associated with my observation-wish, as already described, and thus caused the awakening. (I shall presently try to establish the fact, giving some striking examples, that strong affects are able to cause our " coming to " from the state of distraction.) Before the reader will be ready to admit that the asso- ciation in apperception can take place between memory- elements and affects, instead of with other intellectual recol- lections as in the previous instances, the expression " fore- conscious perception " will require some explanation. So far, I think, the term " perception " has only been used in terms of consciousness ; that is to say, perception pre- supposes awareness. And yet we know of a multitude of instances in which a correct reaction to an external stimulus is induced without awareness on the part of the subject. Freud has been able to reduce several cases of so-called telepathy to the unconscious reactions to fore-conscious perceptions. In the example of the " Belgica " my hum- ming was similarly a symbolical response of my unconscious mind to an external stimulus. And whenever day-dreams start in the absence of an external stimulus, I have noted that the memory-element becomes the object of fore- conscious perception. The existence of such a thing as fore-conscious per- ception being admitted, it will no longer seem surprising that in the above case an affect was recognized. Moreover, this is not a new finding, as the reader will remember. Indeed, a similar case has already been related in so far APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT 231 as the perception of the affect was expressed in so many words. It may be worth while to reproduce it once more. I was absorbed in the chapter on " Lapses in Writing " of Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life. On p. 123 my attention abated a httle (of which I was not aware at the time) and an idea came to the fore as I read : " But I had to reflect for quite a while in order to discover what influence had diverted me from my first attention, without making itself known to my consciousness." The idea ran thus : " There is something going on in my fore-consciousness which must be directly related to my subject. I ought to stop reading for a little while and let it come to the surface." The observation has been reproduced on p. 190. As in the phantasy relating to the " fixed groups of asso- ciations," the text had already caused a fore-conscious association when I came to the passage " What influence diverted me from my first attention ? " which I read with a distracted eye. But it was still apperceived sufficiently to act as a suggestion and make me reflect upon the influence that diverted me from my flrst attention. The result was that / perceived my affective state at once, not my fore- conscious thoughts. This must suffice to establish that we may perceive affects consciously or fore-consciously before the thought- elements that accompany them ; and also that the affects not only favour the adduction of memory-elements in apper- ception, but preside over other fore-conscious operations which are not yet well known. This invites us to prospect this part of the unconscious sphere a little more closely, even if we have to postpone our advance for a little while. We have in the last discussion come across many in- stances which are so many illustrations of two of the con- clusions given on pp. 223-4 : namely (a) that an external stimulus may provoke apperception without leading to a conscious perception ; and (h) that in our unconsciousness an association with memory-elements that contribute to the apperception may take place in such a way as to produce a manifestation whose meaning may escape our conscious self. In the last chain of thought referred to above the texl 232 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS was perceived and understood fore-cmiscioicsly as a sugges- tion to direct the attention toward the mental process that was going on beyond the threshold. I suppose the affect that transformed the apperception into a suggestion was my observation-wish, and the result was a perception not of the text but of the affective state accompanying my fore- conscious thinking. In the other concatenation the process w^as similar : the words " suddenly arousing oneself from a state of dis' tr acted attention " were also perceived fore-consciously ; the same observation- wish again transformed the apperception into a suggestion, and the result w^as this time an awakening from the distracted state of attention, followed by the dim perception of my affective state only. The main fact to be recorded here is that our fore-con- sciousness is able to perceive on its own account, without the knowledge of our conscious self, and to react upon this fore-conscious perception. (Indeed, the circumstance that in the above cases I awoke with a certain awareness of my fore-conscious processes — as I always have done since I commenced this research work — has little general value, as only a psycho-analyst bent upon observing himself will be susceptible of becoming aware of what is going on within himself. We ought, however, to make a large exception in the case of artists and inventors.) In this way we obtain a key to the understanding of the genesis of a considerable number of manifestations of our unconscious mind. Among the latter we reckon most psychopathological cases, of which I shall only cite the following : At lunch-time I am making ready to leave my billet to go to my messroom, which is about sixty yards further down the street. At a certain moment I am sur- prised to find that instead of my gloves, which I always wear, I have in my hand my walking-stick, which I never take for such a short distance. A brief analysis shows me that I had said aloud to myself : "I am going to have lunch." I said this in Flemish : " Ik ga gaan eten," which would sound in English like " I am going to go and eat." I had perceived fore-consciously the word for "to go " as '' to walk," and associated upon this meaning by taking APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT 233 my walking-stick, for in Flemish as in English to go ^ gaan means both to go and to walk. Iii my distraction I reacted upon the fore-conscious perception and was surprised when the action was performed. If the example of this fore-conscious perception should not be convincing enough, here is another : I am strolling about in the country, my mind being occupied in thinking of an important appointment for the following day. At a certain moment I find that I have buttoned one of the side pockets of my trench-coat, which I have never done before. The pockets close well enough, and I do not use these buttons. As I am accustomed to analyse myself whenever there is an opportunity, I retrace what I have been thinking in my phantasy : " Quand je verrai Monsieur X. je ne vais pas me deboutonner tout de suite." The English equivalent expression is, "I shall not play my trumps at once," but literally translated it goes : " When I see Mr. X. I shall not unbutton myself immediately." My mind had perceived this " not unbutton = keep buttoned " fore-consciously, and as in the above case the corresponding movements had been performed without awareness. I have already spoken also of unconscious perceptions and associations. To illustrate what I mean by this, one example must suffice : I used to know a teacher who for years had been obsessed by a traditional song which is familiar to French children. The melody is in E fiat and imitates a funeral march, but the words are not sad. He often used to sing or hum it, let his own children sing it, and taught it to his pupils in the secondary school ; they also were very fond of it. But I could never understand this man's extraordinary predilection for this song, which, from a musical point of view, is not above the average. The text is as follows : Turlututu ! I Si ta femme ^tait morte, Turlututu, Te remarierais-tu ? I Turlututu is an ironical interjection used to rebuke or dismiss a child who is too inquisitive ; it is also used familiarly by men to mock the curiosity of the other sex. 234 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS Eh non, non, non ! Je prendrais men tambour Et mes petites baguettes, Je battrais la retraite, Ranplanplan-plan-plan, Pour tout le regiment. (Translation : Turlututu I If your wife were dead, Tur- lututu, would you marry again ? — Oh no, no, no ! I would take my drum and my little sticks, I would beat the retreat, Tow-row-row-row, for the whole regiment.) When I became acquainted with psycho-analysis I came to understand this obsession. The singer had lost his wife's love years before, and they were not happy. This song was an unconscious and symbolical death-wish. Every time he sang it his other self perceived it thus, which explains the pleasure that it gave him ; but his conscious ego remained absolutely ignorant of this significance. The unconsciousness found this symbolical way of giving vent to its feelings, which would have been vigorously repressed if they had manifested themselves without a disguise. Here we close this parenthesis and return to the con- sideration of the role of the affects in apperception. Thus far we have only examined the genesis of those fore-con- scious streams of thought that are consecutive to an external stimulus. But if we glance at them as a whole we may draw a general conclusion which is valid in every single instance. All these thought- associations owe their origin to abnormal apperceptions caused by the influence of affects. This abnormality may consist of : (1) the emotional emphasis borne by one of the memory-elements adduced in the act of apperceiving ; (2) the protraction of the apperception, an affectively accentuated recollection being borne along by the memory-elements — in both cases the mind associates with this conspicuous remembrance ; (3) the interruption of the apperceiving process before completeness, so that there is not a conscious, but a fore-conscious or unconscious perception upon w^hich the mind associates (symbolical actions) ; (4) an erroneous perception as a consequence of an emotionally accentuated memory-element which springs up and monopolizes the fore-conscious attention. It leaves APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT 235 the others in the background, so that the former is mistaken for the external stimulus and becomes itself the perception whereupon the mind associates ^ (psychopathological cases). This conclusion does not require lengthy comment ; we shall only remind here again that the more intent the waking mind, the stronger will be the affect that is needed if the apperception is to cause disturbance. On the contrary, when we are in a half-dreamy state, the affect that leads us astray is scarcely retraceable. Such was the case, for instance, in the observation recorded on the previous page, relating how in my absentmindedness I took up my walking-stick instead of my gloves. I must also call the reader's attention to the fact that when an external stimulus provokes a fore-conscious train of thought which is originated by an emotionally accentuated memory-element that is present in the apper- ceiving process, or continues it, this concatenation never follows the direction which we think normal from a conscious point of view. Invariably the external stimulus is linked up either after the object has been recognized or before we have become aware of the perception. It is often the case that the perception of the disturbing recollection re- places that of a real object. This observation may lead to the understanding of the intervention of external stimuli in night-dreams. Here again fore-conscious perception may occur and associate with the dream-thought (cf. the dream of the medical student cited by Maeder *) or with day remnants (cf. the dream of the burning child in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams). We will now examine more closely those day-dreams which start without an external stimulus, simply from a recollection that has become an internal perception. We may suppose a priori that there cannot be a great difference between the two series, for in the first it is not the external stimuli that are of importance in the genesis ^ The instance in which I reacted to a text which my fore-conscious- ness interpreted as a suggestion was evidently due to an apperceptive process, as we have seen. But as the consequence was an awakening from the day-dream, this point will be considered again in one of the succeeding chapters. » Cf. A. Maeder, Ueber die Funktion dea TraumeSf in Jahrbiich, etc., lV/1, 1912. 236 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS of the concatenations, but some memory-elements which they evoke, and which, being singled out because of their affects, become the objects of internal perceptions. We have seen already that the remembrance — always a day remnant — comes to the fore by itself as spontaneously as in the act of apperception ; but it is perceived fore- consciously and invariably leads to distraction as soon as it is reacted upon as an internal stimulus. We know also that these spontaneous recollections are always emotionally emphasized. These uncalled-for memories may consist of a single element or a series of elements, as in the phantasy on p. 81 : "I had scarcely closed my eyes to go to sleep when I started to think about (recall) the conversation which we had just had in our messroom about the degree of edu- cation of the Belgian nation." Next the discussion had shifted to a more urgent problem : Our landlady had warned us that we should have to look out for another messroom, as she wanted the one we then occupied for the extension of her business premises. Thereupon we had discussed which inhabitants of the village might consent to cook for us and rent us a decent dining-room. Among these was a family of fairly well-to-do refugees with a daughter of about twenty-five, who was the pride of the village. At this point the process of remembering was stopped and the idea was formed : " If I were a bachelor,'* etc. This long recollection is precisely similar to what I have already called a " memory hallucination " ; we drift on the stream of memory exactly as when the concatenating process is temporarily interrupted. But, as we have observed in apperception also an undue protraction of the act of recollecting under the influence of feeling, we find here the confirmation of a suggestion already put forward : that the memories seem to have a tendency to run automatically off the reel, to reproduce themselves spontaneously, espe- cially when they awake strong emotions, until the regression is interrupted by another affect which provokes a progressive movement, the thought-formation. I shall demonstrate further that this affect always takes the form of a wish, the fore-conscious representative of will. APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT 23T The above case of prolonged recalling at the genesis of a day-dream is not unique, as the reader will remember, but it will suffice to show that when an external stimulus is absent all our thought-formations owe their origin to the fore-conscious perception of affectively accentuated memory- elements upon which the mind associates. However, as in the case of an internal stimulus there is no new object to be recognized and classified in its proper category, and no synthesis to be made, the apperception is reduced to its simplest expression and does not evoke a multitude of memory-elements. It is sufficient that the isolated recol- lection should provoke a certain amount of interest for the fore-conscious perception to take place. And if we remember that the recollected element itself owes its re- appearance to an affect, we shall have completed the com- parison between the external and internal stimuli as the genesis of day-dreams. In both cases the shifting of the attention and the simultaneous passage from the conscious to the fore-conscious state is due to the interest wherewith we perceive a memory-element that bears a strong emotional accent. The foregoing discussion, however, has brought us face to face with a few other facts that demand some comment. Apperception appears as a spontaneous mental operation of the utmost importance in our psychic life. But in our examination of its mechanism we have been unable to surprise the mind in any passive attitude whatever. There- fore we feel that we must take exception to the terms *' passive " and " active " apperception used by Wundt (cf. p. 219). Apperception is always spontaneous and active. When Wundt and with him Dwelshauvers and others speak of a reasoning or a deliberation of will with itself as an active apperception, we cannot agree with the sense in which they use the terms active and passive. We have seen that apperception is an automatic reaction, a mental reflex out of reach of the will, a spontaneous com- parison between sensation and memory, the result of which may or may not attain the conscious level. For it may happen that this unconscious activity does not suffice to bring about a complete perception. Let us suppose that 238 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS we are on the seashore and an object on the horizon pro- duces an impression on our retina : apperception becomes active at once ; we perceive something. But the conscious mind is not satisfied ; we want to know whether it is a bird or a sail, etc. At this moment the direction of the apperceiving process is taken over by the will. We deliberate consciously what the object may be. Is it correct, however, to say in the first stage of the process that the mind has been passive ? When volition weakens and the affects rule, the result, in terms of consciousness, is not always such as we expect. Therefore it may favour our purpose, which is after all the study of our affective mental life, to view apperception comparatively from the conscious and fore-conscious point of view. In our normal waking life most external stimuli end in a perception. The apperceiving process is never inter- rupted. The perception may at will become the genesis of a thought, for example, the ship — the ship sails fast, etc. ; or the recollecting stage may be taken up again. Let us take the example of a schoolboy who has to write an essay, say, about his grandmother. He will con- centrate his attention upon his grandmother, actual or supposed, and if he is a good pupil he will ponder over the subject from time to time ; he will try to drag in as many memories as possible about his grandmother. Among these he may find ideas suitable for his composition, but he constantly keeps the idea " grandmother " in mind : he tries to protract his apperception. The untimely exten- sion of spontaneous recollecting in apperception which leads the mind astray when feeling prevails is a defect which consciousness has turned into a quality. But will has here replaced the affect that is active in fore-conscious thinking ; and the boy will succeed best if he feels something about his subject, because any affect favours recollection. But the consciousness has not freed itself from the influence of feeling to the point of being entirely immune to its power. Even when the perception is performed consciously with a strong application of will, some element that entered into the apperceiving process may force itself APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT 239 upon the attention in spite of all repression, because of the affect that accentuates it. When this happens we have an analogy with the abnormal apperceptions in thought asso- ciation so common in fore-conscious thinking, and much mental energy must be wasted to force the attention back to the original voluntary purpose. We have seen, on the other hand, that the apperceiving process may be interrupted in the fore-conscious state, so that the stimulus is not consciously perceived, but is nevertheless perceived sufficiently to produce beyond the threshold an association which must be attributed to feeling. This association may have an ordinary or a symbolic mean- ing. Finally, erroneous perceptions are characteristic of the fore-conscious state only. There is yet another fact which should be emphasized : In normal everyday life we continually profit by the natural tendency of our affects to give a special colour to apper- ception : many persons are in the habit of making a knot in their pocket-handkerchief when they are afraid of for- getting something ; some gum a small piece of paper on their watch (without a note on it), etc., thus relying on this mental peculiarity as a mnemonic. The sight of a letter-box reminds us of a message we forgot to post, that of a person whom we meet in the street of an appointment we had overlooked, etc. In these and similar cases we are thankful for the help we get from the unconscious mental process which we have just examined, and the popular wisdom of my nation has embodied this experience in the Flemish proverb " Zien doet gedenken " (to see causes to remember). It is only when our conscious purposes are not served, when our adaptation to reality is hampered, that we speak about psychopathological cases. For the same reason we cannot admit the distinction between association and apperception which is proposed by some authors, as by Schultze ^ : " Many psychologists give the name of association to every connection of con- scious elements or representations. They do not take into " Cf. R. Schultze, Aus der Werkstatt der experimentellen Psychologie und Pddogogik, p. 253. Voigtlander, Leipzig, 3e Auflage, 1913. 240 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS account the fact that some of these combinations, namely, the apperceptive connections, are really different from the others, especially in respect of the feeling of activity that accompanies their formation and which is absent in the former. '' When I abandon myself to my memories, the elements of my consciousness unite or dissolve without my inter- ference : the same associative process occurs when I assume a passive attitude toward impressions from the outer world. But I am in an entirely different position when, for instance, I compare two things ; when I am on the look-out for similarities and dissimilarities. During this apperceptive process I have a vivid feeling of being active which is characteristic of this procedure." The above discussion tends to prove that what Schultze calls association is involuntary or affective apperception. The difference lies simply in the application of feeling in one case and of will in the other. There is a question which has occurred to me, but which I have hitherto avoided writing down, because its discussion had to be postponed until a suitable opportunity occurred ; now it need not be delayed any longer. Hitherto there has so often been mention of the affects that accom- pany our memories — a simultaneity which the facts and the observation of our inner self have compelled us to admit — that it is time to inquire into the origin of these feelings. In this connection I shall not follow Bergs on, according to whom '' there is hardly any perception which cannot become ' affect,' and more especially pain, by an increased action of its object upon our body. Thus one passes in- sensibly from the contact of a pin to the prick. Inversely the decreasing pain gradually coincides with the perception of its cause and exteriorizes itself, so to speak, as a repre- sentation." ^ This gives the impression that pain ought to * In French the text goes : "II n'y a gu^re de perception qui ne puisse par un accroissement de Taction de son objet sur notre corps, devenir affection et plus particuli^rement douleur. Ainsi on passe insensiblement du cont8.ct de I'epingle 4 la piqiire. Inversement la douleur decroissante coincide peu k peu avec la perception de sa cause et s'ext^riorise, pour ainsi dire, en representation." Cf. H. Bekgson, Esaai aur les Donnets immddiates d€ la Conscience, p, 44, 18e Edition. Alcan, Paris. APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT 241 exclude perception, while my opinion is that the affect always accompanies perception. If for a moment we take the amoeba as the classical example of the simplest manifestation of life, we may ascend the scale of living creatures, and thus obtain some glimpses of the history of both phenomena. The reaction of the amoeba on a strange corpuscle which comes into contact with it may consist in surrounding it and leaving it behind, undigested or otherwise. Can there be any question here of a perception and an affect ? Can there be even any question of pain if the strange corpuscle brings about the violent destruction of the cell ? Only where a certain amount of differentiation in the nervous reactions has taken place can we justifiably presuppose a possibility of per- ception and affect. It does not matter here to which link of the animal series this supposition may first apply ; if we apply the pain and pleasure theory at all, we shall at a certain moment find nervous manifestations which can only be interpreted as adaptations for the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure. Indeed, in the organized world, as soon as multiplication in unlimited numbers diminishes, we observe a parallel improvement in the organism, part of which seems to tend to avoid destruction, to allow the individual to escape the dangers threatening it before they become realities. This adaptation is a conditio sine qua non not only of the perpetuation of the species, but of life in general. To see or to hear in time and to interpret correctly are still to-day in the animal world functions of the highest importance. The existence of organs of sense includes the possibility of perception in the individual equipped with them ; conse- quently, it infers a certain degree of development of the nervous system. Moreover, as perception is unthinkable with- out apperception, and consequently without memory, we must take the latter as the starting-point of the considerations which are to follow. We shall remember that we have already distinguished at least three aspects of memory : intellectual, affective and motor memory. Man is capable of isolating to a certain extent every single one of these parts : we are able to remember intellectual elements, thereby 16 242 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS preventing the interference of our affects through repres- sion, all the while remaining motionless ; we can recall more or less definite affects independently of the intellectual or motor recollections which accompanied them in the past (this is what artists do in the creation of their works) ; we can repeat connected movements which used to be accom- panied by thought and feeling, wdthout the intervention of the latter (as w^hen piano-playing, etc.). But this special- ization is not carried very far, for we cannot avoid being moved by certain intellectual recollections or by the repro- duction^ of certain movements (as when thinking of sexual matters) ; when violent emotions of bygone periods are awakened, voluntarily or not, the intellectual elements with which they are connected become conscious, even against our will, and we cannot prevent certain movements from being performed (for example, when one cuts open the leaves of a new book). Therefore it is not very hazardous to suppose that at the origin these three phenomena were registered at the same time by memory. Supposing an impression announcing danger to reach the sensory organs of a creature ranking near the bottom of the animal scale, how will it react ? If there is no memory whatever there will be no reaction (or at least no adequate reaction) and the individual will perish. But if there is any memory the impression may cause an apperception, resulting in a perception. But the process will not stop here : a motor reaction will follow, so that the danger will be avoided if possible. We need not here enter upon a discussion of the genesis of memory ; we shall simply try to obtain an idea of the interaction of the elements which we recognize in it all through the animal scale. We used the word may intentionally in the above sen- tence, for we can still observe to-day highly organized beings which are incapable of recognizing every peril that menaces their lives. Therefore we suppose that the most common, the most frequently repeated impressions, stood and still stand the best chances of being first perceived, because of the traces which the preceding impressions have left in the memory. As far as the present state of our knowledge allows us APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT 243 to move down the animal scale and imagine with some degree of probability the history of mental life, we can only picture a stage wherein perception is the result of a mental reflex without awareness, comparable, for example, to the phenomenon which leads to mimetism. In this stage the appearance of the affect and the rejoinder to the external excitation are alike reflex, but the internal image of the object of perception is registered by the memory simul- taneously with the affect that it provokes and the muscular contractions which have had the successful result. This still happens to-day in the case of man. But the three elements which we distinguish in the memory were perhaps not so widely differentiated in the beginning, so closely are they still connected in creatures of the highest mental development. They could not be evoked separately, for this is scarcely possible even in the highest expressions of evolution. However, if they were not differentiated in memory, this means that perception did not differentiate them either ; and the processes in our fore-conscious ideation will enable us to form a faint idea of a perception in the animal mind : (a) We have found that man also can react to a fore-conscious perception of a stimulus : that is, with- out awareness of it ; this represents the intellectual aspect of the perception, (b) We have also seen that we do not become conscious of the affects that lead the fore -conscious perception to thought-formation, (c) There is no awareness for the movements that follow upon the fore-conscious per- ception. And yet these reactions are, in variable degrees, ade- quate to the fore-conscious aim. With these data we may fancy that for a being without consciousness similar reactions may suffice for life that is to a vast extent purely vegetative. Of the three aspects of memory, it is indisputably the intellectual aspect which has been most highly developed, at the expense of the affects and the store of motor adapta- tions. The number of spontaneous muscular habits is much greater in the animal world than in man. (But this deficiency can be largely made good by conscious appli- cation.) We must suppose that the affects, in all their different aspects, play a greater role in animal life than in the existence of a civiUzed white man. 244 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS The history of mental evolution teaches us that con- sciousness is mainly the result of the successive repression of our affects. We are able to act and think voluntarily only in so far as we are capable of silencing our feelings. But we do not succeed in repressing them entirely, and it is the merit of psycho-analysis to have shown their impor- tance in the creation and perfection of modern civilization as well as in human behaviour. When, however, we endeavour, with the aid of the data of our own repressed affective life, to imagine what the reactions of the nervous centres must be and have been in more primitive organisms, we understand better the importance for these of feeling correctly at the right moment. We may, however, observe even to-day in man to what an extent certain stimuli may bring about emotive states which are out of all proportion to reality. This is why I have advanced the supposition that originally every perception was accompanied by an affect, perception being understood as defined above. We may consider this affect in its undif- ferentiated state as a reaction of the primitive brain, just as the reflex movement was the reaction of the body. In early life the affect permits of the distinction between dangerous and indifferent excitations, between useful and useless vicinity. Born at first of the tendency to survival, all perceptions must have been dimly felt to have a meaning from the point of view of nutrition or sexuality. But at the other end of the scale the human mind may neglect most of the affects that accompany its perceptions, because our conditions of life depend more upon the will than upon the feelings. The conscious human being has scarcely any ear for the primitive meaning of his perceptions, but his unconscious self understands it with animal intelligence. If the latter reacts upon this primitive meaning with words instead of images and motions, it is due to the fact that the conscious and the unconscious ego are inseparable and use the common store of memory. But if man has become a conscious organism, thanks to the relative mastery he has acquired over his feelings, he has not succeeded in vanquishing nature entirely — ^that is, he has not been able wholly to free his intellectual memory, APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT 245 the basis of his intellect, from the affective and motor memory. He still uses both the latter in combination with the former in order to advance his conscious aims, but he uses them in the primitive way, without awareness. Conversely, when the latter come into action without solicitation the result is a disturbance of the conscious mental life. I will sum up by saying that in my opinion fore-conscious perception coniprises two elements : an intellectual and an affective one, which were perhaps not differentiated at the beginning, nor did they become conscious, as at this stage of life there can be no question of consciousness. It is not until we ascend in the animal scale that we are able to observe how the affective element, produced by sensation, governs the mental or motor reactions dictated by the affect (for example, our cat interprets affectively the same attitude assumed by my daughter or by myself in a different way ; if I am in question, the animal leaves my arm-chair, where it was resting ; if my daughter, pussy only lifts her head). Originally we understand the affect as the nervous reaction which gives its special shade to the perception, to the intellectual element. It is the result of a nervous reaction accom'panying perception and constitutes a particular aspect of the general sensibility of living beings, enabling them to forebode pleasure or pain. It commands the motor as well as the intellectual system. As human evolution seems not to have favoured the becoming aware of affects, but on the contrary has led to their repression, freeing the intellect, we are only able to become conscious of some of our most violent affective complexes, those which are weaker or condemned remaining quite unconscious. The expression " affective complexes " reminds me that the original affect which I have just defined has developed in several directions, and I am quite aware that this same word " affect " has been used in my various arguments to denote very different notions, such as wishes, emotions, etc. But now that we have succeeded in isolating the notion of affect, let us examine the several aspects into which it has been differentiated as far as our analyses have revealed them. But before we tackle this new problem let us add some final remarks which in the preceding discussion I have been 246 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS compelled to postpone. We have seen already that when apperception is protracted under the influence of a strong affect the perception is abnormal and an association takes place which from a conscious point of view is unexpected. Indeed, the association is directed by a factor of which the consciousness is not aware : the fore-conscious or uncon- scious affect. In reality we have thus simply recognized analytically a presumption which Freud formulated long ago, and which is at the basis of his psychotherapeutic method : " When I request a patient to dismiss all reflection and to report to me whatever comes into his mind, I firmly cling to the presupposition that he will not be able to drop the end-idea of the treatment, and I feel justified in con- cluding that what he reports, even though seemingly most harmless and arbitrary, has connection with his morbid state." I In cases of apperception disturbed by affect.s the mental operation, however, does not result in a synthesis, but on the contrary in what we may call a dissociation. If on reading the word nurse my fore-consciousness perceives maid and associates upon it, or when the impression made by the word read leads me to a very special case of reading, we have here the reverse of synthesis. In such cases we are wont to speak of outer or superficial associations, which nevertheless take place in our un- conscious, our inner self, which are strongly determined and not superficial from an affective point of view. This confirms another former finding which Bleuler sums up in the following terms : " Jung and Freud have a ten- dency to explain dissociation in schizophrenia and in dreams by the action of affects. The bad thought-material would in that case already be present in the healthy mind in the waking state, and would only be preferred by the autistic mechanism, or it would be created by the needs of autismus themselves." » Not only in our day-dreams (including those prognosing psychopathological cases) are external associations due to affects which adduce additional memory -elements. We » Cf. S. Freud, The Interpretation oj Dreams, p. 421, op. cit. » Cf. E. Bletjleb, JCkifi autistiache Denken, footnote, p. 12, op. cit. APPERCEPTION AND AFFECT 247 have seen already that the same factors are observable in normal waking life when a haphazard word makes us change the direction of our conscious thought, which we indicate by such expressions as "by the way," etc. ; touchy and neurotic persons never resist the temptation to dissociate (that is, to give another meaning to a word or a phrase in which they see an allusion to their complex) and to conca- tenate upon this external association ; and in wit-formation the same operation is performed, the affect that is causative of the association being of a pleasurable nature. Dream analysis first pointed to the presence of affects as re- sponsible for the introduction of new dream-elements by means of outer associations, so that we may conclude that all superficial associations are due to the sudden appear- ance of emotionally accentuated memories^ because feeling becomes stronger than will in the direction of the thought- mechanisms. The faculty of fore-consciousness to react upon affective meaning as well as upon intellectual significance constitutes a new superiority of affective thinking which is at the same time a cause of inferiority. Of this superiority we become aware in inspiration, when an affect makes us discover in a sensation a meaning which our sober mind would never have hit upon ; but when the same affective interpretation sets the mind uselessly wool-gathering, it constitutes a disadvantage. Finally, I offer the remark that the so-called superficial associations giving rise to phantasies are no less than the faint echoes of the " traumas " which occasion the- breaking loose of hysterical symptoms. Both phenomena are to a large extent parallel, and both lead us to the better under- standing of either separately. The concretization which the latter involves will be examined more closely in the next chapter. CHAPTER III IDEATION AND AFFECT 1. Conception and Affect. In the previous pages we have examined the influence of affect as an inciter of memory and a disturbing stimulus in apperception ; beside its intervention in a regressive direction, it is also responsible for mental operations which result in a progression ; that is what we shall now seek to establish. We have already seen that the genesis of every fore- conscious train of thought is due to an abnormality in the act of apperception, one memory-element being singled out and attracting attention because of its emotional accent. On that occasion I omitted to emphasize the fact that the latter is, indeed, much stronger than appears at a first glance, and I did so intentionally, for it would have led us to con- siderations which I wished, for the time being, to avoid. Now, however, this objection has disappeared, and I may conveniently call the reader's attention to the affective complexes which every one of these obtrusive recollections represents. The gentleman's voluntary misunderstanding of the physician's reflection : " I don't like her looks," betrays his wish to be humorous (cf. p. 209) ; the forgetting of my purpose in the train (cf. p. 132) when I lost the thread of my thoughts was a consequence of my secret ambition ; and the recollections of the jury and my request to the Minister of Education (p. 30) are also the occasional representations of my infantile wish for greatness. Whether the affective complex that gives strength to the memory- element be apparent at once, or hidden to the layman, in every single instance it becomes manifest in the course of the concatenation as the wish directs the thinking process. £48 IDEATION AND AFFECT 249 This memory-element, which, as we have seen, constitutes the bridge over which the mind passes from the conscious to the fore-conscious state, offers another pecuHarity which we ought to appreciate ; it produces an affect which bears a definite character, as the following observations will establish. In the list given below I reproduce, on the left of the page, the series of recollections at the genesis of the fore-conscious thought-associations on p. 188 in a different order and complete it, so as to show that all the affects which accompany them are of an unpleasant nature : the opposite list contains the member of the association following upon the first one : 1. The explosion of a shell re- minds me of another shell. 2. My son's coughing recalls my anxiety about the state of his lungs. 3. I hope the maid will have the tea ready at four o'clock, for I don't want to be late at X.'s. 4. Will the Minister consent to appoint a jury for me ? 5. When I received the disap- pointing letter from Miss M., B. asked me how I was getting on with my Spanish. 6. I had been told this remedy (camomile) was efficacious, but it does not seem to help very much. 7. This volume is still at C. 1. From which direction did it arrive and where did it come from ? 2. If he were to spit blood I should give him a towel in order to save the blanket. 3. I shall benefit by this visit. 4. I wonder whom I shall ask to read my thesis. 5. I shall buy another book in Paris. 6. Still, it helps as a suggestion. 7. I received it from the London Sociological Society, where I may also find a copy of my book on children's societies. 8. Is it worth worrying about ? 8. (The vague classical term.) But I use some classical terms myself. In comparing the two lists number by number, we find that in every single instance there is a contrast, sometimes weak, more often strong, between the affects borne by the succeeding associations. It looks as though every thought 250 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS in the second list implies a soothing process, a consolation, a reparation for the unpleasant impression left on the mind by the recollections in the first list. It would be very easy to make another double list, in which one half should contain nothing but originations of an agreeable nature ; and we should still be able to trace a similar contrast of affects. Such is the case, for instance, in the phantasy communicated on p. 112 : the genesis is as follows : "I was recollecting the wording of a request which I had sent to the Minister of Education, and I was full of hope that he would accede to my demand." The contrasting feeling becomes apparent in the next member of the association : " Although my petition is very long." I cannot say that every chain of thought starting from a pleasant remembrance leads to an unpleasant affect in the second link (cf. in witty and humorous thought- concatenations). We consider similar constructions as less primitive than the former kind, as a later product of the general tendency to avoid pain and seek pleasure : this explains the reason of our above choice of examples. Let us continue our examination of the affects in fore-conscious ideation by reviewing all the successive links of an association, and let us take as an apposite case a phantasy which I only reproduce reluctantly.^ 1 What if it were a flea ? 1. The camomile would help ; the blisters would not be SO large, the swellings would be different in form. 2. What if it were a bug ? 2. It would not bite me in the daytime (recollections as- sociated with day : this has lasted now exactly a week ; my changing my linen last Monday may have been unsuccessful — it may have jimaped back upon me). 3. What if I undressed in another 3. The landlady might see me. room ? » For the sake of brevity I reproduce it directly as a succesaion of suppositions and objections. It started in bed, at the front, where I had always a bunch of camomile flowers beside me to keep the many fleas off. IDEATION AND AFFECT 251 4. What if I undressed here and 4. It might escape from under- tried to crush it ? neath my boots. 5. What if I used a roller ? 5. It might hide in the inter- stices of the floor. 6. What if it were going to lay 6. There is only one of them. eggs? 7. What if it were bisexual ? 7. It might lay eggs. 8. What if I had a white shirt ? 8. I might get one in the hospital. 9. What if I were to obtain 9. They might have some pow- another remedy there ? der. 10. What if I were to try insecti- 10. I might get a skin disease, cide powder ? There is not much imagination required to note an affective contrast between the two series of propositions in the above list. The contrast is mainly between hope and fear, with an exception in the case of No. 7, where the fear expressed by the supposition is strengthened, and in No. 8, where the expectation in the supposition is gratified by the rejoinder, which is, however, dropped for another suggestion. What seems rather curious is the continuous passage from one affect to another, the alterna- tion of hope and disappointment. Before we examine the mental processes that are active in the formation of the phantasy, let us remember that there cannot be any question of the intervention of the will in this thought-formation, as it occurred when all voluntary thinking had been dismissed. The musing is due to the fore-conscious wish to be rid of the troublesome insect, the wish being, according to Freud's definition, " a current (in the primitive psychic apparatus of his hypothesis) which emanates from pain and strives for pleasure " (p. 474). It is, however, not difficult to see that in the present case the wish corresponds to a conscious volition tending toward the same end : that is, the prolongation beyond the threshold of this volition, a circumstance which will facilitate further consideration. When we fix our minds on the list of suppositions that have been made, we are able to classify them under two different headings ; the first constituting a repetition of, 252 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS and an insistence upon, the vexation : " What if it were a flea or a bug ? what if it were going to lay eggs ? what if it were bisexual ? " etc. Their only result can be an increase of the disagreeable feeling and a correspondent strengthening of the wish for riddance. At any rate, the two first suppositions and objections seem preparatory to the manifestation of the striving that is expressed from No. 3 onwards, and the two others, Nos. 6 and 7, appear as a transition toward another method of getting over the difficulty. This transition is not arbitrary, for the con- siderations centre in the shirt, which elicits the suggestion of a white one. In the second series we find : " What if I undressed in another room ? or here ? or used a roller ? or a white shirt ? or insecticide powder ? " which are the true means prompted by the wish for the fulfilment of the end. But all the suppositions have in common the circumstance that they are intellectual elements, which come successively to occupy the forum of fore-conscious attention under the influence of the wish. This is another instance of the inter- action of affective and intellectual elements. The latter are borrowed from the store of memory exactly as in apper- ception, but the two processes are not entirely similar. In apperception the memory elements that group themselves spontaneously and simultaneously round the sensation are supposed to be awakened by virtue of the similarity of affect between them and the sensation : like affect, like recalling. The apperception is only abnormal when one of the adduced recollections bears emotionally a stronger accentuation than the others and leads the fore-conscious attention to the affective complex which it represents. Here, on the contrary, the coming to the fore of the successive memory-elements can only be ascribed to the wish — ^that is to say, to an affect, in most cases different from those which accompany the unconscious memories. This points to the affinity of affects for one another, of which we have seen many examples in the previous pages, and on which Freud lays so much stress when he treats of the displacement of the affects in dream-formations. This comparison leads to yet another remark : Just IDEATION AND AFFECT 253 as in abnormal apperception the affect emphasizes the intellectual element that corresponds to the emotional complex lurking in the background and sets it off among the others, the wish extracts from the store of memory and revives those remembrances that may be suitable for its purpose. From the point of view of consciousness, we may say that in the latter instance the choice was intended, in the former fortuitous ; but from the point of view of the unconscious things look otherwise. We know already that all the unconscious phenomena which we have reviewed here are wish-fulfilments, whether they occur when we dismiss directed thinking, as in the present case, or during our voluntary occupations. Therefore the affective emphas- izing of a memory-element in abnormal apperceptions is also the consequence of a wish, at least in psychopathological cases, and it looks as though the intellectual process which we are studying at present were only a systematization of the phenomenon which we examined at length in the « previous chapter. In the act of apperceiving it is the affect produced by the sensory stimulus that evokes memory- elements, and the repressed complex takes advantage of the occasion to connect with one of them ; here the same complex provokes the recollecting independently of any sensory stimulus. What is performed systematically in the latter instance may happen occasionally in the former. Another conclusion from this discussion is that both forms of affect — ^the centripetal in sensation, the centrifugal in the wish ^ — possess the same power of awakening unconscious memories, but with different results. The centripetal affect leads to perception, the centrifugal affect to conception. We should not forget that this power of the wish over our memory belongs to volition in conscious thinking, which has procured to consciousness the advantage, amongst others, of renewing at will the excitation of memory for a purpose, a quality which is denied to the wish. Moreover, in this function volition does not take advantage of the » Cf. Blehler, Das autistische Denken, p. 4. A tendency, a striving (a wish), is simply the centrifugal aspect of the phenomenon which we call affect from the centripetal point of view. 254 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS mutual affinity of the affects, as we pointed out before, but brings its action to bear directly upon the intellectual part of memory. If we remember that the wish in the present phantasy is simply a fore-conscious substitute for a voluntary aim, the analogy points to one of the main differences between fore-conscious and conscious ideation : the latter has resulted in intellection free of affects, or at least it tends toward such an end. But the examination of the relation of feeling and thinking is not yet complete, and w^e resume the thread of our dis- cussion at the point at which we found that under the influence of the wish recollecting is as spontaneous as in apperception, and in both cases occurs without awareness, as without apparent effort. Here the comparison between the two mental operations comes provisionally to an end, for as soon as the memory-element recalled by the wish has risen into the focus of fore-conscious attention, the mind changes its method of working. The supposition automatically provokes a rejoinder ; it is criticized fore-consciously ; a judgment follows upon the deliberation ; its weak points are laid bare, the other side of the medal is shown. All the memory-elements that are successively adduced are submitted to this criticism, whatever be their ultimate tendency. Thereby the elements which we have classified in our second category, the means of getting rid of the flea, especially attract our attention. The thought-process consists mainly in foreseeing their possible consequences, which is as much as to say that memory is again resorted to for testing the proposed method. And again this falling back upon memory is conditioned by the wish, or, to use Freud's expression, " the end-representation.'* The latter seems temporarily lost sight of in hypotheses 6 and 7 : " What if it were going to lay eggs ? what if it were bisexual ? " But in all cases the reply is provided by memory. I So much for the intellectual side of the operation. But we should not neglect the circumstance that it is » This criticizing process going on in the fore-consciousness is to be distinguished from the other process, which we examined before when Btudying the action of repression. IDEATION AND AFFECT 255 through an affect that memory is stimulated afresh to furnish a constituent part of its store, and especially such an element as is suitable to the case. How can we explain here the action of the affect ? We imagine that as soon as the recollection is perceived the perception is accompanied by an emotional element which is in the sense of pleasure or expected pleasure (hope) in every instance of our second category ; with reference to the wish it provokes the contrasting emotion (pain or fear — expected pain), and this it is which, like a diver under the water, searches, among the memories of previous experiences, for the recollection with which to test the adequacy of the advanced agency. The confrontation of the two memory-elements in the criticizing act may have a positive or a negative result. In the former case (cf. rejoinder No. 8) the concatenation advances toward its ultimate end ; in the latter the problem is taken up again at the point where it was left ; in both cases the affects resulting from the mental deliberation refer to the wish, which resumes its action. (In parenthesis I may remark that such is the normal occurrence ; the affect resulting from any of the processes which constitute fore- conscious thinking may lead also to an awakening from the mind-wandering or to a passive drifting on the stream of memory, as we have seen before.) Thus we have reached the conclusion that in the normal mind the fore-conscious critical thought-activity, the second condition of thought-formation, is conditioned by the pleasure- and-pain mechanism, the first recollection being directed also by an affect which tends to the avoidance of pain and the search for pleasure. Consequently, fore-conscious thinking is a mental process in which the ideation is directed by our affects according to the pleasure- and-pain principle, and the whole process is as spontaneous as our motor reflexes. Feeling is the incentive of the mental organ in the fore-conscious state, and a wish is feeling applied to an end. Finally, a fore- conscious thought is the result of a mental operation by which a memory-element recalled by a wish becomes a perception, preparatory to the wish-fulfilment, that is, to adaptation, or is the wish-fulfilment itself. The first part of this conclusion confirms a finding 256 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS which Freud has arrived at by way of the study of abnormahty.* We have already pointed out that our fore-conscious critic is not very competent in discerning the merits or demerits of the suggestions brought forward by our wishes : our conscious self smiles at the introduction of a garden roller into a bedroom for the purpose of killing a flea which may have jumped on to the floor ; our fore-conscious critic treats the proposition in solemn earnest. The former would hardly suggest, in another phantasy, the mutilation or loss of both legs for the purpose of obtaining an early discharge from the army, as was suggested. This is one of the weaknesses of fore-conscious or affective thinking, which popular wisdom has expressed in the saying, " La passion est mauvaise conseillere" — "Passion (= affect) is a bad adviser." 2. Conscious and Fore-conscious Attention. In our endeavour to arrive at the above conclusion we have been compelled to pass over unheeded a certain number of data which we will consider successively hereafter. The analysis of the thought-processes in fore-conscious ideation has shown us that the factors which have been described as " faculties " in classical psychology have their representa- tives in the subliminal. We have detected traces of attention, of deliberation, of perception, of awareness — in fine, of all the functions which we esteem in our conscious mental activities, distinguishing them as complicated operations of a high order. This proves at most, as Freud writes, " that the most complex mental operations are possible without the co-operation of consciousness." For our purpose, how- ever, it will prove worth while to examine closely what » Cf. S. Freud, Formulierungen iiber die zwei Prinzipien des psychischen Geachehens, in Jahrbuch f. Psych., etc., Ill, 1, 1911, p. 2: "We take these unconscious psychic procedures for the most ancient, the primary ; for remains of a stage of development in which they constituted the only sort of psychic manifestations. The supreme tendency which these procedures obey is easy to recognize ; it is known as the pleasure-pain principle (or more briefl5% the pleasure principle). These processes strive to attain pleasure ; psychic activity retires from acts which are liable to cause pain (repression). Our night-dreaming, our waking tendency to tear ourselves away from painful impressions, are tests of the mastery of this principle and proofs of its power." IDEATION AND AFFECT 257 we understand by the phenomena to which we have, in a provisional way, given names ; and as it may have seemed daring to speak of such a thing as fore-conscious attention, we shall take this first as the object of our inquiry. Conscious attention has been defined as "an operation which gives to one of our psychological phenomena a particular importance, which renders this phenomenon preponderant over all others, and which sometimes even suppresses all the other phenomena of consciousness, so that that which is the object of attention may develop in an exclusive manner." To the question : What is attention ? Bergson replies : " From one point of view, attention results essentially in rendering perception more intense and in extricating its details : its effects could be reduced to a certain magnifying of the intellectual act ; from another point of view ... it corresponds to a certain attitude adopted by intelligence." The second half of this definition corresponds to what we have called fore-conscious attention. When uncalled-for memory-elements come to the fringe of consciousness and divert the mind from a voluntary occupation — and these are the only ones which can be taken into account when we sever all relations with the outer world — or when they come to the 'Surface in idleness or in the course of fore-conscious ideation, they invariably attract some attention, and our second self becomes interested in them, otherwise they would not be perceived. Interest and perception coincide, so to speak ; in terms of fore-consciousness it is impossible to imagine a perception for which the interest that accom- panies it is not as spontaneous as the perception itself. But we know that the affective complexes called wishes are responsible for the consideration which these memory- elements obtain. In the case of invention (cf. pp. 50-51) the wish is active and apparent at the very genesis of the fore-conscious stream of thought ; in other instances the wish that lurks in the background only becomes obvious in the course of concatenation, but this form of feeling always benefits by the fore-conscious attention that has been bestowed upon the spontaneous recollection, so that we may point to the intimate connection between wish and 17 258 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS fore-conscious attention : the former ensures that our inner self does not remain indifferent, but reacts to the adduced remembrances in the manner which we have just described. We might even speak of a " certain attitude adopted by intelHgence," as Bergson does in the case of conscious attention. But, conversely, this attitude also results, exactly as in consciousness, in rendering the perception more intense, in magnifying the intellectual act — think, for example, of the imaginary perception of the flea between the inter- stices of the flagstones — so that one might speak of fore- conscious attention also as a function of the wish. Thus we come to the conclusion that fore-conscious attention has several simultaneous aspects : (a) it coincides with interest ; (b) it ensures that certain psychic elements come to the knowledge of our inner self ; (c) it intensifies perception ; (d) it acts as the advanced post of the wish. This shows that fore-conscious attention is as it were an undifferentiated function of which the different aspects have each a separate correspondent in consciousness : we dis- tinguish interest from attention, for we can pay attention to something without feeling much interest for it, especially when we are performing a duty ; " perception " is a faculty quite distinct from attention ; the latter is the result of an application of will, etc. The comparison between conscious and fore-conscious attention is not completed yet, and it will suit our purpose if we risk our own definition of conscious attention. In relation to voluntary thinking we see in conscious attention mental energy, freed of affect — that is, applied to a revived memory -element ^ or an object, or to an inner or an outer stimulus, or to both at the same time. If we say to a pupil in the schoolroom *' Pay attention,*' we invite him to make an effort to direct his mental faculties so that he may perform the duty which we have imposed. * By memory-elements we understand not only the initial elements at the genesis of the thinking process, but all the recollections that come fluccessively to the fore, either after rejection of the previous recollection or as a progression upon that which has just been acknowledged. Indeed, it has been shown already that every fresh idea is constituted simply of memory-elements arranged in a new order. It is this re -association which gives it the character of novelty that may be expressed conclusively in words. IDEATION AND AFFECT 259 We invite him at the same time to avoid distraction — that is» we request that he should not follow his affective thinking. Consequently, to pay attention has thus a positive and a negative meaning, each of which completes the other. Like an army commander who assumes a defensive attitude in one part of his front, while concentrating troops for an attack in another, one function of will is to keep the field clear of invasion by our feelings while it assembles the rest of our available mental energy, to focus it upon the object under consideration. The first aspect is sometimes called repression, sometimes the censor ; the second is the other form of will which we are now considering. We might continue this analogy and say that when conscious attention weakens and succumbs, it is because its headquarters have received the message that an assault has been made against that part of its position where it was on the defensive, so that it has been unable to sustain the effort upon the attacking front, whence it has drawn the reinforcements needed at the point threatened. This analogy should explain why (as we have already seen), whenever conscious attention decreases and is in abeyance, it is gradually replaced by a fore-conscious stream of thought, which originates because the mind becomes interested in an emotionally emphasized memory-element ; and as long as the fore-conscious thought-process lasts, the main, and often the exclusive, interest and energy are absorbed by it. This procedure points to the intimate relationship between the two forms of attention, a connection which will offer us a wished-for opportunity for some long-postponed reflections. We wish, however, first of all to complete the above comparison between conscious and fore-conscious attention by pointing out that in the fore-consciousness the problem of the deviation of the attention has been solved in another manner than by repression. I have already stated that the flea-phantasy and the musing about my marriage and other subjects (pp. 78 et seq.) represent two opposite extremes of my collection. In the former there are scarcely any strayings ; in the latter we note the succession of many wishes, which is rendered possible by numerous driftings 260 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS on the stream of memory. Whenever fore-conscious atten- tion is intense — or, as fore-conscious attention is only the expression of the wish, whenever a strong wish directs the chain, as in inspiration, invention and wit-formation—all swerving, all ideation that does not lead directly to the desired aim, is suppressed, and the result of the fore-conscious thinking comes to the surface in a concise form which the French call le style lapidaire, meaning that it strikes us by its brevity like an epitaph chiselled on a stone. In these circumstances, the straying of attention is avoided through its intensity ; this makes ideation immune to disturbing intervention ; there is no repression needed ; all available mental energy can be concentrated upon the desired end. This agency marks an advantage of fore- conscious over conscious ideation : during the latter, part of the mental energy is diverted for repressive or defensive purposes ; during the former, and in its highest form, all mental energy is focused upon the desired aim. We wrote above that this inquiry brings to light the intimate relationship between the two forms of attention. As a matter of fact, we have long ago arrived at the supposition that the deviation of a schoolboy's attention is provoked because in his imagination he is playing football or catching butterflies — adults refer in such cases to " castles in the air " — but to our knowledge the mental mechanism of this switching-off has not yet been laid bare. " We cannot concentrate " means that our feelings are stronger than our will and that the direction of our mental apparatus is taken over by the former, notwithstanding our mental exertions ; in such cases the past is predominant in that we fall back into a mode of ideation which has been abandoned by civilized man in his relations with reality : affective thinking is archaic, as Freud has shown. It would seem, however, that there is an exception to this rule, and that it is not always for affective reasons that we are unable to concentrate, for instance, when external stimuli come to disturb reflection or render it impossible, as when our neighbour's daughter bores us with the persistent repetition of her piano-exercises and distracts us from an important task. How are we to explain the deviation of IDEATION AND AFFECT 261 attention in similar cases ? Let us remember that whenever we try to think about a subject, even voluntarily, we direct our mental energy upon the memory to get help from that quarter ; thinking without recalling is impossible. While we are in the act of trying to recollect, external stimuli reach our ear. When we are engaged very deeply in our thinking these stimuli will be only fore-consciously or unconsciously perceived — as we have seen already in several instances — or will pass completely unheeded when there is no disturbance of the conscious procedure. In cases of complete absorption only certain peculiar stimuli have a chance of being perceived, as, for example, the calling of our own name. But at the commencement of a conscious occupation, when the associative mechanism is not yet working smoothly, an external stimulus may provoke apper- ception against our will ; in other words, the sensation sets the memory working ; recollections contribute to the perception of the stimulus, and we become aware of the latter. But as our consciousness is able to perform only one operation at a time, memory does not react upon the energy brought to bear upon it for our volun- tary purpose, which is rendered impossible in spite of ourselves, the spontaneous apperceiving process monopo- lizing memory. Thus the same result is attained as in the case of a distraction caused by an unconscious wish. We might even go further, and, having recollected that every sensation is an undifferentiated impression of affective, motor and intellectual elements, we might suppose that here again, as iti the above instances, which we have discussed at length, the affects establish the spontaneous connection between sensation and memory. It is in the regressive stage — recollecting — that attention passes automatically from the conscious aim to the unwilled sensation, that fore- conscious attention or spontaneous interest triumphs over directed attention. Thus there would be only a difference of degree between the two kinds of distractions which we have now learned to distinguish : outer stimuli that disturb our conscious thinking force the mind to an unintended operation as well as inner stimuli, unconscious wishes. Here we abandon the consideration of the two sorts of 262 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS attention in so far as they give rise to confusion, to turn our consideration to the opposite side of the problem : When do they collaborate, and what is the result of such collaboration ? Distraction is the result of a conflict between will and affect, and its genesis lies between conscious and fore-conscious attention, the spontaneity of the latter proving stronger than the will-power of which the former is the expression. But when we are reading a thrilling novel, when we are playing an interesting game or writing a chapter with abounding joy, the same spontaneous interest which analysis discovers in distraction is present in our conscious occupation and stiffens our voluntary attention. The previous chapter should already have convinced the reader. But a few apposite instances may be useful. When we are writing we say that we are inspired when we are able w^ith great ease to combine memory-elements into new units, so that we reach our conscious aim quickly and with pleasure. We say that in this case the two forms of attention collaborate, because the same result may be reached without the assistance of consciousness, notwithstanding repression even (which does not, however, mean that any chance distraction will result in invention). But when fore-conscious attention is active by itself, the result of thinking may be lost either because we do not become aware of its importance — which is the rarest case — or because we forget it again, as when the in- vention has been made in a drowsy state. On the contrary, when such findings occur this side of the threshold, when conscious attention assists in fixing them, they are never lost. So we are entitled to speak of a collaboration of the two. It should, however, again be remarked that the stronger the spontaneous interest that sustains the conscious attention, the less opportunity there is for distraction, and the more energy (usually set apart for repression) becomes available for the positive activity of the mind. At all events, whenever we observe the two forms of attention at work in unison, we observe at the same time that the thought -process approaches the threshold, the fringe at which the conscious and the fore-conscious meet, so that it is impossible to say which of the two states is prevalent. I will add here an observation as an illustration of this assertion. IDEATION AND AFFECT 263 I have already had occasion to mention my shortcomings as an orator : I can only say to my audience exactly what I should say in a private conversation : flowery locutions and striking analogies and symbols are not distinctive of my oratorical powers. The other day I had to deliver an official speech in my quality as chairman of a society of discharged soldiers. As I knew that our Premier and several other eminent persons would speak at the same meeting before me, I took the precaution to write my address down, for I wanted to be caustic without exaggeration, and my vanity would not allow me to show myself too inferior to the Parliamentary orators who were going to capture the first attention of the audience. However, I did not make any effort to memorize my notes, because I know that it is enough that I have written them down, that the requisite rhetorical niceties are at my disposal at the very moment when I want them. When half a dozen speeches had been delivered before a well-disposed audience, my turn came, and as I appeared on the stage I was greeted by an ovation. This agreeable surprise was due to the circumstance that I had put on my old uniform for the occasion : a patriotic manifestation in honour of a war hero. For me, personally, this ovation had an unexpected result : I never delivered a speech with greater ease. After almost every sentence an enthusiastic outburst of applause came to interrupt me, and during every interruption I visualized my written notes, so that I had the hallucination of the paper I had written them on ; I literally re-read them from memory. I repeated my speech faithfully as I had composed it. In the meantime I was absolutely not aware of my tremendous success, as my fore-conscious attention was directed exclu- sively to my visualized recollecting ; I felt very nervous, and could not stop my right leg from contracting and extending quickly, almost in a vibratory movement. I scarcely perceived the loudly expressed approbation, and whereas I usually distinguish every single face in the audience and easily recognize friends, this time I did not see any indi- vidual faces whatever, nor did I think of looking at them. I was absent-minded, if I may say so, for everything but the reproduction of the text which I hallucinated before my eyes. 264 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS This I consider as an extreme case, in which a conscious occupation is performed almost in a fore -conscious manner, where fore-conscious attention replaces, advantageously, so to speak, its conscious correspondent. But I have good reason to admit that public speakers who have a reputation for their successes on the platform possess the gift of con- catenating their thoughts in such a way that they perform in the presence of their audience what I am obliged to do by the concentration of my conscious attention while preparing for the speech which I have to deliver. They are so sure of themselves that they can rely upon their mind's eye following their fore-conscious ideation with as much ease as if their thoughts were written spontaneously upon a sheet of paper within reach of their glance. One of my friends, who is an excellent orator, tells me that when he begins speaking in public he visualizes and simply renders in words what we might call his hallucinations. I heard him in Liege begin a toast in the following manner i : " From the heights of X., where I went this morning to lay some flowers on a tomb that remains dear to me, I tried to discover this celebrated city that resisted with so much courage and success an invasion which we cannot forget. But, enveloped by a thick cloud of grey mist, your town seemed still to slumber on the banks of your silver river. And in my imagination I saw myself already in the train that advanced into the mysterious darkness, while I carried with me only a melancholy remembrance of the homage to our dead. " The grey sky had caused me too much to forget the living for those that are no more, and I did not think enough of this brilliant meeting, which was, however, the main object of my journey," etc. Later my friend satisfied my curiosity by telling me that he had visualized all that he had described, and that such was his accustomed procedure when he was called upon to deliver a speech. As soon as he rises, pictorial images appear before his mind's eye in connection with his subject and he proceeds to describe them aloud. There is no conclusion ' Li6ge is actually situated in a deep valley, surrounded by hills on aU sides. IDEATION AND AFFECT 265 to be drawn from this single observation, but the collaboration of the two forms of attention is again manifest. There is no doubt that, whenever they are active at the same time and collaborating, they result in a more than ordinary mental product. We should, however, remember that just as conscious attention is a manifestation of volition, so fore-conscious attention is a manifestation of a wish, so that we may say that when wish and will tend to the same end, they result in a higher form of intellection. We may now go one step further in this definition, and say that it may happen that conscious attention is voluntarily dropped so as to leave the intellectual field clear in favour of its affective correspondent. Such is the case in wit- formation, for instance. Freud communicates the following jeu d^ esprit in his work Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unhewussten (p. 27) : Louis XV had heard of the talent of one of his courtiers, who had the reputation of being very witty, and decided to put him to the test. At the first oppertunity he asked the cavalier to make a jest about his own royal person ; he himself was willing to be the sujet of the joke. The courtier replied with the hon mot, " Le roi rCest pas sujet, ''^ Obviously the speaker had stopped his conscious thinking for a little while to direct his fore- conscious attention upon his particular way of apperceiving the word sujet. This sort of suspension, which occurs in the case of the formation of hons mots or humorous sayings, is resorted to with awareness in the process of analysing, as will readily be admitted. The reverse situation is met with when we are obliged to concentrate our attention upon a subject which, instead of attracting, repels us. In this case the absence of affect must be made good by a redoubling of will — that is, the application of mental energy freed of affect. It is obvious that the utilization of feeling for the activity of the mind is in harmony with the law of the least effort, and this shows us, perhaps, how it can be explained that all artists adopt spontaneously this way of thinking in their work. These brain- workers seem, however, to possess an endowment which is denied to the common man : they seem to be 266 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS aware of their fore-conscious ideation at will, or spontaneously and intuitively rather, without the intervention of volition. Psychologists must first become familiar with the delicate mechanism of analysis before they are able to retrace their thoughts as they are linked up beyond the threshold. With artists these intellections obtrude themselves upon the consciousness, and we shall soon see that this procedure is probably due to a peculiarity of their manner of repressing. They are always accessible to intuition and have the gift of applying always the method which I used by chance and imperfectly in delivering the speech as described above. We cannot better imagine what goes on in their minds than by comparing it with what happens in vulgar minds when they are attempting puns, quibbles and witty absurdities. They bring to the surface a double meaning originating in an abnormal apperception. But before long, sometimes immediately, they continue the linking-up this side of the threshold, while in invention the concatenating proceeds all the time in the fore-consciousness. However, the methods of commencement are analogous, and we might even define a jest as an inspiration, provoked by the wish to be humorous or funny. At the conclusion of this section it will be permissible to describe fore-conscious attention as the manifestation of the wish when it bears upon a fore -conscious perception. When there is fore-conscious attention we observe that a connection has been established between affect and intellect, which leads to the fore-conscious awareness of the presence of a memory-element in the forum of the mind. This connection between the wish and the recollection, resulting in fore-conscious perception, is established by what we call mental energy ; consequently, we speak of fore-conscious attention when the wish brings mental energy to hear upon a revived memory- element. Similarly, we may say that there is conscious attention when volition brings mental energy to bear upon an inner or outer stimulus. But in both cases we apply the term *' attention " to the amount of energy that brings us awareness of the stimulating element. This is, however, only one side of the process of applying mental energy. Indeed, IDEATION AND AFFECT 267 if we make a fruitless effort to recollect, there can be no question of attention, as nothing is perceived ; nevertheless, a certain amount of mental energy has been wasted. We have also seen already that it is a wish which causes memories to be dragged up from the store of memory so as to suit its purpose ; here we have in mind the recognition of these memory-elements, either when they have been brought into the focus of fore-conscious attention by the wish in the act of ideation, or when the same elements force themselves upon our fore -conscious attention at the genesis of our mind- wanderings. We know at present that in the latter case this rising to the surface is due to a wish, just as during concatenation, so that w^e may conclude that the wish, as well as volition, is a stimulus for the revivification of memory. The stimuli from the outer world and the affects which they provoke have the same power, as we know from the apperception process. So has will. Therefore, we cannot help wondering whether there is not a relation between the affect in apperception, wish and will. It seems as though, in the course of evolution, the wish has taken over the power to excite the memory, which is active in apperception, with the result that the affect, undifferentiated in the sensation, and its reaction on memory, can be renewed in the absence of the outer stimulus ; and one is tempted to continue by saying that through the appearance of volition this excitation and recollection can be reproduced " at will," systematically and in perfected circumstances which cannot be described here. In the foregoing pages we had to recognize that the affect is centripetal in sensation and centrifugal in the wish. We now, however, find that the wish combines both the centripetal and centrifugal aspects of affect : it repeats the centripetal function in that it revives memories, and its centrifugal side becomes apparent in the critical thought- activity by which the recollections are weighed with a view to their adequacy to the desired purpose.^ Such are the ^ The reader will remember also that I have advanced the supposition that every apperception and perception comprises an affective and an in- tellectual component. As I put forward the hypothesis that in sensation also these components are present but imdifferentiated, we might continue the comparison between the action of wish and sensation upon intellectual 268 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS relations of fore-conscious attention and wish. We may add that we trace these relations when we refer conscious attention to will. We regard conscious attention as the representative, on the hither side of the threshold, as the development, of fore-conscious attention, to a certain degree independent of the affects, and capable to a certain extent of replacing it. Often these two forms are antinomic, but when will is repre- sented in fore-consciousness by a wish, when we are " inter- ested," viz. when will disposes of a certain amount of affect — in short, when they collaborate to the same end — we say that the range of consciousness is extended, and they result in the production of intellections bearing the mark of superiority. In this sense distraction — the divergence of the two forms of attention ending in the triumph of the affective — is the reverse of inspiration. From a fore-conscious point of view the, question of inattention does not exist ; the mind is perpetually attentive in some form or other, for attention is a component of our unconsciousness, just as are memory, feeling, perception, and several other aspects which w^e have considered or have still to consider. Therefore, as soon as conscious memory by regarding the wish as the m^emory of the sensation and of the motor reaction in which it has resulted. This would enable us to under- stand the transition from instinctive emotion to ideal emotion. It would allow us also to comprehend how the instinctive sensory-motor reaction has phylogenetically developed into an affective intellectual reaction after fore-conscious deliberation. Indeed, in the instinctive stage we observe the series : outer stimulus- — instinctive mental function — motor reaction. Bub if the excitation of the nervous centres can be renewed in the absence of the external object, because the central organ has acquired a new property (wish- formation), the motor reactions may become more mobile ; a first step in the direction of freeing the intellect from instinct has been taken. This may lead toward affective thinking as a stage preliminary to conscious thinking. We suppose that it is in this manner that we have to conceive the assertion that " instinct is modified by the growth of volition " (cf. J. M. Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and in the Race. 3rd edition. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1906, p. 6). The same hypothesis might be ex- pressed also as follows : In the instinctive stage the whole mental mechanism : outer stimulus — central process— mental reaction : is hereditary. Heredity of the central process would mean that the methods of reaction upon excita- tion are fixed and invariable. The affective stage wo\ild then constitute an advance in the central process : the wish, representing at the same time the old tendency to adaptation and the memory of excitation and reaction, would allow the trial of accommodations in the absence of outer stimuli and lead to heredity of the mental mechanism : stimulus — central process — re- action : in which the middle term would allow a greater nimiber of free combinations. IDEATION AND AFFECT 269 attention abates (as when going to bed), when we rest and our mind is vacant (as when we have a quiet smoke), fore-conscious attention automatically replaces it. In sleep the latter is replaced by unconscious attention. Finally, we are now able to explain why affective thinking tires us less than purely voluntary ideation : because, independ- ently of its spontaneity, in the former, all the available mental energy being focused on the ultimate end, repression becomes useless. 3. Wish and Will. We will pursue our review of the factors that intervene in fore-conscious thought-formation by the discussion of the significance of the wish, a discussion which we have already commenced, but had to drop for reasons of method. The momentousness of this active form of feeling in the sense of adaptation can only be fully estimated when it is examined with reference to its conscious representative ; will. If, therefore, we ask ourselves as a preliminary what is the relation between volition and the conscious thought- process, we find : (a) that the former becomes apparent under the form of attention ; (b) that it directs the recollecting process ; (c) that it presides over the adoption or rejection of the awakened remembrances in view of the end to be reached (the critical thought-activity resulting in concep- tion) ; (d) that it superintends repression ; and (e) that it disposes more or less freely of the motility end. All these operations are comprised in '' the conscious process which consists in directing one's actions according to a conceived aim," as Dwelshauvers defines will. But we have already seen that the wish performs exactly the same duties : we have called fore-conscious attention the outpost of the wish ; we have found that in fore -conscious thinking only those recollections are revived that are liable to be of service for the end-representation, and that they are weighed from the same point of view ; we have also recognized that the obtrusion of other wishes, which might cause a distraction, is avoided by a strengthening of the feeling that is active at the moment, and we shall presently exhibit the wish functioning as an active repressive agent 270 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS in the conscious sense ; finally, we have observed a good number of cases in which it regulates the motility end ; so that we may now subscribe to Grasset's statement in Le Psychisme inferieur: "The elementary forces of psychic activity have the same characteristics as consciousness." Among the most striking dissimilarities we may cite, however, the absence of awareness in affective thinking, its frequent inadequacy, the oft-recurring loss of the end- representation and its replacement by another, its useless meanderings, the weakness of the critical activity, leading to frequent absurdity, its occurring at haphazard, often out of place, its occasional unfitness for abstracted intellection, etc. — defects which conscious thinking is able to avoid. Still, these differences are not important enough to cause us to doubt the phylogenetic connection between these two ways of thinking, and if we are able to show that will must be the conscious correspondent of wish, we may have made a valuable contribution to psychology. Therefore let us consider some of the wishes which we have seen active in the phantasies reproduced in the foregoing chapters, so that we may be able to determine their relation to conscious life. Among these, the anxiety as to my future has inspired most of the day-dreams (obtaining either a scientific degree or a chair) ; nine are in connection with my research work, some relate to my matrimonial affairs, others to lighter anxieties : about my own or my boy's health, about an appointment, etc. Only in three cases out of thirty-five would it be hazardous to call the affect that directed the associating a wish. But at this point we should not forget that in the wishes there exist gradations, just as in the affects that accompany perception, and that it is difficult at a given moment to distinguish the wish from the automatic thinking impulse, which in its turn may make way for the revival of feelings during the drifting on the stream of memory. We have met with such an impulse in the case of my taking my walking-stick instead of my gloves (pp. 232-233).^ * Here is another instance of a fore -conscious association in which the wish does not become appai*ent at first sight : I am copying a passage from Blbulbr's essay, " Das autistische Denken " in Jahrhuch fiir peycho-analy- IDEATION AND AFFECT 271 Of all the above wishes inspiring day-dreams, there is not a single one which does not correspond with a conscious aim, with my will. I confess that before I learned to analyse myself I was ignorant of the extent of my ambition and the amount of fore-conscious thinking which I devoted to it, but I had the will to acquire the degree about which I schemed so much unawares, as a means of attaining the con- scious aim of my life. Similarly, I was ignorant that for years my fore -conscious self had been busy with my domestic unhappiness and had been musing upon the means of altering that situation, which my conscious ego would not have dared to dream of. It is also my conscious design presently to contract a new marriage, and my fancies about it correspond with my will as closely as in the instance of going to see the doctor. I also really wanted to get rid of the flea that bit me so long, etc. We see thus that the wishes which caused my fancies are indeed the prolongations of voluntary, acknowledged wants ; the wish tends to the same end as the will, the two continue one another. In fine, wishes may he called volitions in the affective stage. It is only when there is little interest in the voluntarily chosen aim that the fore -conscious fails to continue the conscious process of invention if the solution is not hit upon at once. Renouvier, the French disciple of Kant, seemed to understand this when he wrote in his Nouvelle Monadologie : " There is never pure volition ; but every volition is accom- panied by the vivid representation of the result which the agent is wont to expect from it, and also by some affect or other, of the category of the wishes, which makes him take an interest in the production of this result.^ ^ When I wrote above that wishes may be regarded as volitions in the affective stage, I perhaps reversed the relation ; it would be better to say that volition is originally tische und psychopaihologische Forschungen (IV, 1, 1912), when instead of the word Ziel 1 write ZeiL I analyse the cause of the mistake at once and find this : I am living by the river and an inland vessel is just passing as I am writing. The skipper ha« just blown his horn as a signal to have the bridge turned. This signal I must have fore-consciously perceived, for I retrace the ideas : " He has lowered his sail already, for there is no wind." But I thought this in Flemish, in which sail is called zeil, and as a compromise between my fore -conscious train of thought and the text I was copying I wrote Zeil instead of Ziel. 272 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS an acknowledged wish, which has become conscious. In will we recognize a form of mental energy which has taken over the role of feeling in the control of cerebration, so that ideation is to a variable degree freed from affective thought- impulses. If in the foregoing chapters I defined the wish as feeling applied to an end, I may now say that in the voluntary act mental energy freed of affect is applied to an end, and that will is the awareness we have of this power to use such mental energy for achieving a conscious purpose. This infers that feeling is mental energy, charged with affect, which I have expressed elsewhere in this wording : feeling is the incentive of the mental organ in the fore-conscious state. This relation between will and wish has several times been hinted at by Freud. After analysing several com- bined faulty acts, like that of the gentleman who " forgot " several times to return a borrowed watch, for several unconscious reasons, he writes : " I do not mean to assert that such cases of combined faulty actions can teach us anything new that we have not already seen in individual cases. But this change in the form of the faulty action, which nevertheless achieves the same result, gives the^plastic impression of a will working toward a definite end^ ^ The immersion of volition in the fore-consciousness, where we call it wish, gives us the key to the understanding of the collaboration which our directed thinking obtains from our feelings, as I have so often had occasion to point out. My conscious aim of gathering material for this essay is ever-present in my fore-conscious mind in the form of an observation-wish, and has often led to the discovery of new data when I least of all expected them (cf. my day-dreams as causes of distractions when reading and the phantasy on pp. 157-8, where it dawned upon me for the first time that children in some of their games make the same use of the shifting of syllabic accents as is characteristic of certain forms of humour). Similarly, when I am in bed and suffering from insomnia because my fore-conscious mind is too active and my conscious ego too self-conscious, it is my sleep-wish which warns me now and again that I ought to rest, and not think, which arouses my will to sleep and » Cf. S. Freud, Psychopathology, etc., p. 273. IDEATION AND AFFECT 273 encourages my attempts to repress my musings. It is my unconscious wish, as a prolongation of my will to rise at a given hour in the morning, which causes my timely awakening. Freud also cites an analogous process in his dreams : " In the dream of Irma's injection, the dream-wish does not separate itself from a continuation of the waking thoughts " (p. 423). In the same manner we should interpret his assertion : " For the more simple case of jests, we may imagine that an ever-lurking intention to obtain pleasure from the play of words takes advantage of the tendency of the unconscious (to distinguish unexpected meanings) to attract the thought-formation according to the known scheme in the unconscious " (p. 153). Not only in jokes but also in wit^formation this ever-lurking intention may correspond with a conscious aim. And when the same author, relating the case of a young girl who found a silver coin at the moment when she wanted it most badly, speaks of " a readiness to search," ^ we meet with another manifestation of the collaboration between will and wish. In this process we see simply an adaptation between the conscious and the fore-conscious which is comparatively new : we observe the latter in the service of the former. At the outset, however, we may imagine the reverse situation. All our present knowledge, scanty as it may be, points to evolution from affective to voluntary ideation, so that it looks as though consciousness must have been an assistance of, or improvement upon the fore-conscious stage. To-day, all our volitions may pass over into the fore-conscious under certain conditions, but all the strivings of the uncon- scious have not reached consciousness, nor do they actually reach it. Among the latter are all those that would oppose the tendency to adaptation to social life, with its intricate structure of conventions, as we shall see further on. Our present concern, however, is to lay stress upon the fact that, under the influence of unacknowledged and there- fore unconscious wishes, the psychic apparatus is often active, as it was in the dark past, when there was ks yet no question of man in the living world, although mental * Cf. S. Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewusaten, p. 176. 2e Auflage, Deuticke, Leipzig. 18 274 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS activity had long before made its appearance. We must attribute to this primitive unconscious thinking the same spontaneity which we have found to be characteristic of our fore-conscious ideation. Therefore it will seem natural that we should adopt a hypothesis which others have tried to establish before us, and relate it to our findings. I have often wondered whether this obscure thinking impulse might not be reduced to a psychic correlation of the motor impulse following upon excitation in the animal world. But how could the passage from the latter to the former be imagined ? A brief review of the different stages of intel- lection may be helpful as a means of making our idea clearer. Although we can point to no absolute period in the history of the mind during which a certain mental function takes its rise, we may distinguish the original automatic con- tractility from the instinctive stage, and the latter from the affective and conscious stages. Automatism , would repre- sent adaptation to the natural environment, as in escaping destruction by means of motor associations, which pre- supposes, besides a kind of memory for the sequence of the muscular contractions, a sort of retention for affects upon sensation and also upon reaction, a sort of biological memory, which T. Percy Nunn proposes to call mneme.^ Instinct, however, is a form of adaptation which includes the idea of the prevention of pain, a preventive accommodation. It supposes the existence of a memory which is to a certain extent independent of the sensation, and of a form of affect which is an incentive to a process corresponding to primitive thinking ; in other words, we cannot think of instinct without admitting the existence of something like a thought- impulse and of a discriminating power,^ the ultimate tendency of which is, according to the Spencer-Bain theory, the avoidance of pain as a means of self-preservation. The affect that provokes the mental activity is unthinkable save in the form of a striving of the same nature as the wish. We must admit also that, like motor automatism, all instincts manifest themselves through muscular contractions. I Cf. T. Percy Nunn, Education. E. Arnold, London, 1920. » In the work I am presently preparing, some important chapters will be devoted to the solution of the problem : What is the difference between instinct and intelligence ? IDEATION AND AFFECT . 275 in the affective stage the mental process seems to have reached a certain independence of the motor system — that is, the intellectual aspect is further developed, although the factors which we discerned in the previous stages are still active here. Moreover, the affects seem to have developed, and all the mental functions are no longer directed toward a purely vegetative life. The conscious stage, finally, is characterized by the voluntary use of intellectual memory for innumerable aspects of social life. Instinct seems thus to constitute the first attempt of nature to interpose intellection between stimulus and reaction, between sensation and motion. We repeat here that in our opinion the main difference between instinct and affective thinking lies in the central process. The successive operations which are characteristic of the latter, the selective activity of the memory repre- sentations, suitable to the ultimate end, cannot be denied to instinct either. But instinct shows little variety, although it is susceptible of transformations. This suggests the inference that instinct is hereditary as a whole, the same exeitation being responded to through a mental pathway fixed in the race. Still, this pathway does not exclude some sort of thinking, for when the conditions of the environment change, the inherited thought-process may find a solution to meet the new situation. If on the other hand we reflect upon the unlimited number of adaptations which affective thinking allows, we see in this multiplicity only a variety or a development of the above appropriateness ~of instinct in the presence of new conditions. The main difference between instinct and affective thinking thus comes to be only one of degree : in instinct a different reaction is simply a consequence of a real change in the environment ; in affective thinking there is a different^ reaction for any supposed changes in the environment ; in other words, in the instinctive stage the mind is incited to selective activity only when there is recollection of a fresh external stimulus, while in affective thinking the same selective process may be set at work by an infinity of inner stimuli. The latter process supposes 276 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS not only a more extensive memory, but also a higher develop- ment of all the constituent parts of mental activity. But all through the phylogenetic series ideas tend to realize themselves in actions. It will next be our endeavour to establish that affects (pleasure and pain) which seem to be at the origin of motor reaction are also at the origin of mental reaction, but the former is the older manner of response, and in the whole organic scale it is to motor reaction that the organism resorts, falling back upon it whenever the assailing feelings acquire a certain degree of intensity. In affective thinking the muscular reaction may be altogether absent for the first time in the evolution of the mind, and here we may witness the indefinite postponement of the intervention of the muscular system, when the psychic apparatus has been excited by an outer (and also an inner) stimulus : affective thinking appears as a substitute for an affective motor reaction, and to be as spontaneous as the latter, although here the outer stimulus is replaced by its recollection. But the pleasure-pain principle that is at the basis of muscular automatism has undergone a revolution that keeps pace with the development of intellection. Pain and pleasure form part of memory from the beginning, and it is this compound affect that acquires the nature of a wish as soon as it becomes a preventive factor of adaptation. It retains this character all through evolution and does so still to-day, in man. This is only another way of expressing what we found before, namely, that the wish combines the centripetal and centrifugal aspects of affect. However, this discussion has taught us something new, as we now know that what we call wish in fore-conscious thinking, and also in our conscious life, is ultimately an expression of the tendency toward adaptation which is characteristic of life in all its various manifestations. (When the wish no longer leads to adaptation, according to our ethical standard — for social conventions mean a selection between the impulses and a perfection of the latter — it is repressed into the unconscious sphere.) This definition is applicable to volition as well ; in the volitional stage, however, we dispose at discretion of the IDEATION AND AFFECr 277 power to repeat the outer excitation or its substitute, and to connect it with memory in an adequate manner, so as to suit the end-representation. We may permissibly infer also that every individual thought represents a certain number of attempts at adaptation, carried out mentally instead of by the motor system ; consequently, that finally a thought is the adaptation of revived memories to a present situation under the influence of affect or will. CHAPTER IV THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING ^ 1. Intuition. The correlation between affective thinking and muscular automatism raises a last question : What does this form of ideation lead to ? In waking life it brings disturbance of our conscious activity, as Freud has described at length and in a masterly manner in his oft-mentioned Psycho- pathology of Everyday Life, For this reason we shall not treat of this aspect of the question here. But in those instances in which it does not lead to any unexpected manifestations that may be regarded as faulty, but where we simply " come to " from wool-gathering, where we notice simply that we have been distracted, we shall have to examine the how and why of this awakening. When we try to rest after the fatigue of a laborious day, the same phantasies may keep sleep at bay, sometimes for a long while, and we shall hereafter regard the phenomenon of insomnia also as a consequence of fore-conscious thinking. Finally, we shall follow the example of several authors who have treated the problem before us, and endeavour to make some additions to their descriptions of the r61e of phantasies as preparations for waking life.* If we consider our fore-conscious thinking as the modern representative of a slowly acquired thought-impulse, we come to imderstand the different automatisms which we have successively analysed : the automatic recollecting in ' From here onward the appellation "fore-conscious thinking" will be abandoned, and I shall speak about " affective thinking " instead, for we have now found that what I thought at the start to be a mode of ideation proper to the fore-consciousness, is characterized by the fact that is the result of the action of feeling upon our psychic apparatus ; and it may operate in the conscious as well as in the fore-conscious state. » Fore-conscious thought preparatory to psychotic or neiu-otic manifesta- tions is beyond the scope of this study. 278 THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 279 apperception, the similar remembering and deliberating in the act of conception, the final spontaneous selection of a solution to the problem, and often an unforeseen motor reaction which works disturbingly or passes unheeded by the conscious ego. There is, however, one case in which the intellectual or affective result of our fore-conscious thinking strikes us most vividly ; and when it occurs we speak of " intuition." Intuition is a word which shares with most of the terms of our vocabulary which relate to our affects the peculiarity of being rather indefinite and liable to lead to confused discussions. In philosophy the word " intuition " is applied to all knowledge concerning objects as far as it is acquired without the help of the conscious self; that is, without deductive, inductive or analogical reasoning. Modern psycho- logy admits that we have immediate knowledge only about our conscious states : pleasure, pain, ideas. Our awareness of the modifications of our inner self is the very iypus of intuitive knowledge. Our present object will be to show that intuition is nothing other than the becoming aware of (a) the affects resulting from our fore-conscious thinking, without any knowledge of the ideas from which they result ; or (b) of the latter without paying attention to their affective accent ; or (c) of the thoughts formed in our fore-conscious mind and at the same time of the affects which they provoke. In each of these three cases the vulgar speak of intuition. From practical life we know that we instinctively feel liking or dislike for certain persons, although more often than otherwise we are not able to give the reasons for these impressions. If there should still be any doubt that these are the result of fore-conscious thinking, it will, I hope, be cleared up entirely before the close of this discussion. Similarly, we often judge persons at first sight, and some individuals may prove to possess an unerring fore-conscious judgment. In all the above cases we rely upon the feelings that arise from the depths of our fore-conscious self. In other circumstances we simply adopt the thoughts that arise in the same manner, without heeding much their accompanying affects, as when a business man accepts as 280 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS a suitable and immediate decision the measure which his second self prompts him to adopt when he is confronted by a new situation. An improvisor acts in the same manner, and poets, for example, although they are less insensible to the emotions that accompany their inspirations, are faithful recorders of the silent voice within them, although they have long believed that they received their communica- tions from a spiritual world outside themselves. The mental attitude which all artists spontaneously assume even when they are not expecting assistance from their second selves, we assume voluntarily in analysis. And as for the purpose of the present investigations I have been for about three years on the look-out for manifestations of my fore-conscious mind, my powers of observation have been notably sharpened, and I have been able to record certain facts which we shall presently discuss, as they are liable to throw some light on the mechanism of intuition. Here is an observation which I have already reproduced on p. 190, but which we shall now consider from another point of view : I was reading in bed Freud's Psycho- pathology of Everyday Life, chap, iv, " Lapses in Reading and Writing." I read with a distracted eye, and at a certain moment my attention was attracted from my book to my inner self, as I was saying to myself : " There is something going on in my fore-consciousness which must be directly related to my researches. I ought to stop reading for a little while and let these thoughts come to the surface.'* So I assumed the analysing attitude and the following sentence came to the fore : "All the causes which produce the mistakes that Freud examines here are nothing more than fore-conscious streams of thought which rise to the surface during the day. These manifestations betray day- dreams, of which we acquire knowledge only through their disturbing manifestations. We do not become aware that we are day-dreaming, but we notice the results and know how these should be interpreted. What a discovery I " When I had written this " inspiration " down I was incapable of remembering the text which I was reading at the very moment when I had become aware that there was something going on in my fore-consciousness worth THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 281 observing. So I looked it up and found : " But I had to reflect for quite a while in order to discover what influence diverted me from my first attention without making itself known to my consciousness. ^^ It is obvious that my fore-consciousness reacted upon the dim perception of this text, as in the instance " I am going to go and eat," which made me seize my walking- stick, or as in the other instance, " I am not going to * unbutton ' myself," which made me button my side-pocket, etc. But this is not what interests us here most : it is the fact that I became aware of the activity of my fore-conscious- ness before I knew what it was about, that should be emphasized. The sentence " There is something going on in my fore- consciousness which must be directly related to my investi- gations " shows not only a vague awareness of the inner activity but also an intuitive knowledge of the nature of the concatenations. That intuition — that is, my feelings — should inform me of the nature of my fore-conscious thinking is quite natural, if we bear in mind that every perception as well as every recollection is accompanied by an affect, and we have already studied the affinity of affects for one another. In practical life, in our sympathies and antipathies, our preferences and the judgments which we pass upon things and people, we constantly obey these affects, most often without being aware of it. But what is more remarkable is that our feelings, which originate in our fore-consciousness, seldom deceive us. They are, as we now know, the conse- quence of the discrimination of which our inner ego is capable, but as, in most cases, we are wont to adopt its judgments without discussion, and to base our convictions upon them, we must admit that our conscious assurance or certitude has a fore-conscious correspondent, the opinions of which have a great value in respect of our behaviour in life. We see here another illustration of the assertion that the primary functions of psychic activity have the same character as consciousness. Moreover, we enjoy a complete mastery of the inter- pretation of the emotions that accompany our affective thinking. Thanks to the delicacy of this function, som^J 282 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS have the advantage of being sensible of the sHghtest shades of affects of their inner selves, and of being able to express them. I think the practice of self-analysis develops the same tendency, because self-analysis is in a sense the education of the power of following our subliminal processes. Such is my explanation of my becoming aware of my fore-conscious ideation in the present instance, and in all the other observa- tions which I have collected : my alertness is a condition of general responsiveness to the solicitations of my fore- conscious mind. When I became aware that my mind was simmering over something, I had a dim feeling which is very difficult to describe ; it was like a vague impression of mental activity. But when the association had risen to the surface it expanded into an impression of joy, which I have already described, and is summed up in the final exclamation : " What a discovery ! " As further discussion will show, the latter feeling may invade us before we know the contents of the intellection that has provoked it. I will continue by reproducing from my collection an occurrence that bears a close analogy to the former : When I had finished registering the above observation, I resumed my perusal of the chapter " Lapses in Reading and Writing," which interested me extremely. A few seconds later I again became aware that something was brooding in my mind. I thought at once of observing what it might be that was tapping at the door of my consciousness, and another inspiration came to the fore. Again the affect, coming to the surface, betrayed its functional presence, although it first seemed to have no special psychic tint. It was as though my observation-wish had warned me of what was occurring across the threshold, before the thought- process had come to an end. I am the more inclined to think that this is so as I know from experience that almost all my reading gives me new ideas when I am in quest of the solution of a problem. However, when I am in an attitude of mind in which I do not, as it were, solicit assistance of my affective thinking, these feelings still force me to pay attention to my fore-conscious ideation, and then they are always of a pleasant nature ; that is, they proceed from the THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 283 successful termination of the concatenations, and this it is that makes them irresistible. Such may be the case when I am in bed struggling to go to sleep : I try to repress any thought whatever, but my conscious will usually succumbs, and I cannot help paying attention to the affects that intrude upon the field of my awareness, and the thoughts that have provoked them. In this circumstance, and similar ones of waking life, the fore-conscious process announces itself by exclamations that reach the consciousness, such as : " I say ! " " Ah I I have an idea," " Oh, I see I " "I have made a new discovery ! " etc. These and similar expres- sions are to be found in most of the day-dreams that have been cited. Experience has taught me how to interpret the affects that accompany my fore-conscious thoughts when they rise to the surface ; that is, when they come to my knowledge intuitively, and the above exclamations are an easy form adopted by my second self to force them upon my conscious attention and vanquish the censor. But although the interpretation of the affect, whose presence intuition announces, may be correct, we may still be unable to retrace the chain of thoughts that provoked it. I cite a few examples : For three days I had been unable to recall the name of a female colleague. Vera Kipiani, of the Paidological Faculty, notwithstanding the strongest efforts. I was at the time reading for the first time Freud's theory of the forgetting of names. At a certain moment I had the intuition of the presence in my fore-consciousness of a name of three syllables, ending in ka, which I was, however, unable to bring to consciousness afterwards. Although I had for a fraction of a second the impression that it was the correct name, I was unable to recall it, but nevertheless experienced an intense feeling of satisfaction, that even outlasted the unsuccessful attempt.^ Finally, I got at the forgotten name a few moments later through a new outer association connected with my reading. The important fact here is that the agreeable impression ' The case m related at length in the Psychanahjtical Review, January 1919. pp, 108-14. 284 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS that had aroused me from the text which I was following persisted for several minutes, although the thought or the fore-conscious conception of the thought that had created it, and which it announced, remained unknown to my conscious self. My interpretation of the obtruding affect was correct, my skill in retracing my fore-conscious con- catenations still insufficient ; but, as I stated, I caught the intellectual element at the next opportunity, a few minutes later. Here is an observation by Freud showing that the affect may be the only warning which our consciousness gets of the intellectual element to which it belongs : " When I have forgotten to pay a medical visit I feel a keen unrest. I know by experience what this impression means : a forgetting. I test my recollections, but in vain, until I become aware of it unexpectedly a few hours later. But all the time I have been uncomfortable." ' However, everybody is not such a fine observer of his emotional state, and most commonly we react in a sense indicated by the special mood resulting from our fore- conscious thoughts, without the slightest awareness either of the mood or of its cause. If we have had a bad night and in the morning are musing upon the waste of mental energy and its unfavourable consequences for the day's labour that is in front of us, we come to the breakfast-table in a disagreeable frame of mind, and find fault with the tea, which is not strong enough, or with the maid because she is not ready with the toast, or we vent our annoyance unawares in a dozen other ways. If we knew ourselves better we should soon find out why we are in a bad temper and avoid making others suffer for it. We should discover why we are in a dismal mood, rather than let a good business opportunity escape us, which we should not have missed in a brighter moment ; we should always know when we are about to be angry and avoid foolish actions or words, or when our erotic excitation is going to play us a trick ; we should always perceive the storm before it is close at hand, when only the echoes of the far-off thunder are faintly resounding. And we should be better men. » Cf. Breueb und Freud, Studhn iiber Hysteric, p. 195, THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 285 These parenthetical reflections, however, should not cause us to fail to conclude that we are able, in certain cir- cumstances, intuitively to perceive our fore-conscious feelings, independently of the recollections to which they belong. The converse happens oftener, however : we have a tendency to recognize and admit in our consciousness the solutions reached by our fore-conscious thinking without any conscious regard for their affective emphasis. In my Folkestone phantasy I " all of a sudden become aware that I am in the wrong half of the train " ; and, like most people when similar sudden suggestions arise from their inner selves, I do not observe my affective state at the moment. But just because our power of perceiving our affects is very small indeed, we have a tendency to underestimate their influence in our mental life and even to deny their activity. For that reason we shall next examine the activity of intuition when we do not become aware either of affective or of intellectual elements. When the intuitive knowledge which we derive from our affective thinking remains beyond the threshold of con- sciousness, we cannot recognize it directly as a sort of revelation ; only indirect inferences will reveal its presence in such cases. But sometimes even these inferences prove very convincing. When at the front the first news of the Allied successes reached us in July 1918, one day, after reading the evening wireless, which announced a French victory, I surprised myself humming a French popular song, " Le jpere La Victoire " (Father Victory), which is a very bright and enticing march. When first I had knowledge of the successful Belgian attack in Flanders, I noticed all at once that I was singing to myself " The dear little shamrock of Ireland," the tune and the feeling in the refrain corresponding entirely to my sentiment for Flanders. From these and similar unconscious manifestations we may infer that the ideas which the news had provoked were of a pleasant nature ; in other words, I knew intuitively, but not consciously, the trend of my fore-conscious thinking. Similarly, my children know intuitively of the character of my musings, as I play the piano every day, and the choice of my pieces — gay or melancholy — indicates their psychic 286 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS tint. (Need I say that I seldom think of such a selection, and only when the performance has begun or is over ?) These observations, which are preparatory to a further development of a new aspect of the problem of intuition, allow us to state, in the meantime, that fore-conscious intuition seems to be simply a continuation of the intuitive function which we know in our conscious life, and that the only difference between these two aspects of the same factor is a question of awareness. Awareness is, indeed, the distinctive point on which all previous authors have laid much emphasis, and we may infer from our observations that intuition is a process by which we become aware of the affective or intellectual results of our fore-conscious thinking, or of both at the same time. This becoming aware is facilitated when the fore-conscious intellection is concerned with a temporarily dismissed preoccupation. In everyday language we have different names for the two different elements that rise to the surface! and we never make any confusion between a " presenti- ment '* and a " revelation '* ; at present we can only see in these words an expression of the awareness of the two aspects of fore-conscious ideation. ^ Our definition differs somewhat from Bergson's, who estimates that by intuition is meant " the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places one's self within an object, in order to coincide with what is unique in it, and consequently inexpressible.'** The two italicized words show that he takes equally into account the intellectual and the affective elements. When in current literature intuition is synonymous for spontaneous thoughts that rise to consciousness, there can certainly be no question of " pure untaught knowledge," as the fore-consciousness uses in its associations only the I A striking example of the affective aspect of intuition is commvmicated by Brill : " Freud relates that one of his patients whose attention was called to these fancies later narrated the following occurrence : While in the street she found herself in tears, and reflextlng over the causes of her weeping, the fancy became clear to her. She fancied herself in delicate relationship with a musician famous in the city whom she did not know. In her fancy she bore him a child (she was childless) ; later he deserted her, leaving her in misery with the child. At this stage of the romance she burst into tears." Cf. R. A. Brill, Psychanalyais, 2nd ed., p. 244. W. B. Saunders, London, 1918. » Cf. H. Berqson, Metaphysics, p. 7, cited by Knowlson. THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 287 recollections of individual experiences. Our investigation has fully confirmed Knowlson's assertion that " memory, acting for the most part unconsciously, but with unusual efficiency, is the basis of our intuition." ^ The role played therein by our affects seems not to have been apparent enough to this author, who proves, however, to have a keen eye for the practical side of affective thinking. But we feel that we ought to linger a little while over the " efficiency " and the " rapidity " of the intuitive process, which he declares to be almost spontaneous. Indeed, we are of opinion that we only become aware of the argu- mentation that continually goes on beyond the threshold when intense intellectual pleasure or pain results therefrom. When we analyse all our observations we are struck by the circumstance that they either give solutions to problems that have worried us in waking life or else they arouse a fear that we cannot help acknowledging. Similarly, the business man has the intuition of a new combination only if he really wants it badly or strongly desires it ; or we awake from a nocturnal dream at the moment when we are afraid of falling into an abyss, or when other violent emotions are provoked. We have already pointed out in the flea phantasy, for instance, that the suggestion of a possible skin disease caused by the abundant use of insecticide powder, and in another case the fear that I was dying as I was really dictating my last will, caused the awakening. This is as much as to say that in order to reach our conscious knowledge certain conditions must be fulfilled, and we find these in the pleasure-pain principle ; our intuitive processes are set to work only when an acknowledged wish is present or a painful '4 emotion aroused ; in other words, when the fore-conscious '' ideation terminates with a strong affect that connects with one } dormant and admitted to our consciousness. Consequently all the intellections that do not fulfil these conditions pass un- heeded ; this includes also that we become aware only when the right solution is hit upon beyond the threshold, and thanks to our ignorance of all the previous attempts we obtain the idea of a rapidity which does not correspond with the reality. However, we must admit that in some cases of inspiration ' Cf. T. S. Kkowlson, Originality, p. 84, 288 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS the fore-conscious thought-processes, the concatenations, are reduced to the strictest minimum, and constitute the most concise associations for attaining their end that are known to us. In this special sense Knowlson is right. According to our definition, intuition bears a close analogy to the recollecting function which has already been described. The act of remembering also brings to our awareness either an intellectual or an affective element, or both at the same time, and there is good reason for wonder- ing how it is that the similarity between intuition and affective recollection has not been oftener emphasized before. The reason must probably be sought in the circumstance that in the former operation the novelty of the presentation that reaches the consciousness impresses our imagination very considerably ; in recollection the recognition occurs spon- taneously, but does not impress us. Therefore intuition may have been taken for a phenomenon without parallel in our mental life. Still, in the latter process the recognition is facilitated either by an acknowledged wish corresponding with a conscious aim or by comparison with a painful affect, the connection between either of these feelings and the arising presentation being established instantly and automatically, as is always the case in affective ideation. But we may imagine that it may happen that our fore- conscious thinking hits upon solutions of particular problems which do not correspond with any acknowledged wish. In such cases we do not become aware of these solutions. The conclusions of fore-conscious thinking cannot emerge in our consciousness. One example must sufBce as an illustration of this incomplete process. There has been mention before of a husband whom I know who unconsciously wished his wife dead in a whole series of songs, which have been recorded. The same man has for years had a strange obsession, without knowing it : every time he saw a woman at a moment when his mind was not particularly occupied with something else, the sight of her started phantasies as to whether she would have suited him as his wife. He only understood the meaning of the countless castles in the air which he used to build around the subject when he became acquainted with psycho-analysis. This leads me to THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 289 offer another remark : in many of my own musings, which I was only able to observe thanks to my new psycho- analytic knowledge, and which would not have reached the consciousness of a layman, I noticed that they were accom- panied by muscular contractions of some kind : humming, buttoning my coat-pocket, taking my walking-stick, errors in writing or in speech, talking aloud to myself, etc. So that I wonder whether there is any connection between the absence of adapted motor reaction in cases of intuition, and, conversely, between the presence of appropriate muscular contractions when there is no intuition. This is a question which will be examined further. If we were asked to put our definition of intuition in other words, we might call it an awakening from fore-consciou^s thinking with awareness. This awareness is a conditio sine qua non of intuition, for, as we shall show in the next section, we may awake from our phantasies without becoming conscious of their special meaning, even if they lead to inventions that might be of use in practical life. This is what happens when we " come to " from a mind- wandering during routine work or in bed, before or after sleep. There is no doubt whatever that intuition is a process that may be developed to a certain extent by appropriate training, and all psycho-analysts have the advantage of getting more intuitive information about, and contributions from, their second selves than ordinary mortals, because of their alertness in respect of their inner processes. The more one observes oneself, the more one strengthens the conviction that our fore-consciousness knows how to interpret our subliminal thoughts very precisely, and also that our intuition is an excellent interpreter of the feelings that accompany it : we accept its decisions with unfaltering confidence, although we are most commonly ignorant of the contents of the streams of thought that provoked the affect which intuition deciphers. The results of the present inquiry will do nothing to shake this confidence ; but we may remark that the importance as regards conscious life of some associa- tions sometimes escapes even our fore-conscious awareness, with the result that the accompanying affect is not above the average, so that the latter fails to result in intuition : thus 19 290 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS the custom of registering my fancies for the sake of gathering material for this investigation enabled me to discover that some chains contained ideas that were new and useful for my purpose, but which nevertheless had not been noted by my lurking observation- wish. In the process of intuition we have thus been able to distinguish several factors : (a) in fore-consciousness an affectively emphasized thought ; (6) in consciousness, or on its fringe, an affect that is as an outpost of a lurking feeling — wish or fear ; (c) when a current seems to be estab- lished between these two poles there arises an emotional state which leads to the intervention of consciousness, and so to the recognition either of the thought or its affective meaning, or both at the same time. If we continued the analogy we might compare the affect that arises through the meeting of the two currents to an electric spark, and apply it to all instances in which we have come across an affect that is not in the latent state. In this instance the spark sets our conscious discerning faculties to work, causing retrogression in the psychic apparatus, but in all the other instances which we have already examined the affects were the incentives of the fore-conscious thought- processes. We wish to remark also that the decomposition of the intuitive process into its elements brings us the confirmation of the previous inference that the wish is the affective prolongation of will. But there is one aspect of intuition which is commonly neglected, probably because it does not terminate in a striking manner. This appears when we give up the fore-conscious search for the solution of a difficulty which we have pursued without knowing it after we have ceased our voluntary endeavours. When our second self thus takes over without warning the duties of our conscious mind, we say that we are worrying, that we are haunted by an idea, etc., and if ever we become dimly aware of this harassing thinking process at all, it is at a moment when we recognize that it is fruitless and wearying : the affect that gives us the intuitive knowledge that our mind is busy with our foremost preoccupation (the same as that which we recognized before as created by the impossi- bility of completing the cycle of excitation — reflection — J THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 291 adapted reaction) is not of a pleasant nature, as in the case of invention : neither does it provoke serious apprehensions, but it is sufficiently intense to be noted, just as a regular intuition is noted, and the result is that we try to free our mind from this activity ; we try to repress it. This is a form of intuition which we shall see active again when next we come to describe the factors of insomnia. When we ask ourselves what is the significance of intuition, we cannot help remarking that intuition offers us our best opportunity of surprising affects when they are active within the range of normal awareness as intermediate agents between consciousness and fore-consciousness, for there can be no doubt that it is our emotional state that attracts our conscious attention to our inner proceedings ; the object of perception being either the affect itself or the emotionally accentuated idea. We get the impression that the intuitive process has brought us to the discovery of the natural power, the outlet leading across the threshold of consciousness, the safety valve through which takes place the discharge of mental energy which has accumulated and reached a certain intensity without our knowledge. Indeed, we can only speak of intuition from a conscious viewpoint. Intuition results in an emotional state which provokes the awareness. But in the fore-conscious state there is no awareness for affects or thoughts. In extreme cases of affective thinking on this side of the threshold of consciousness, the same awareness may be absent, too : when we are moved by strong emotions we may have reacted for quite a w^hile before we become conscious either that we are moved or that we have performed certain reactions. Accordingly, intuition is the forerunner of awareness. It provokes attention, but is not attention itself. Intuition seems to be the reverse of repression, for instead of trying to keep our fore -conscious ideas out of the range of consciousness, we welcome them in it. If in the phylo- genetic series the field of consciousness has developed at the expense of the fore-consciousness, in intuition, on the contrary, we allow the invasion of the former by the latter's characteristical mode of thinking. We may even say that this invasion takes place often against our will, the censor being 292 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS overpowered by the strength of our affects, for we know that the more intense our emotions the more easily repression is vanquished. Still, we continue to speak of intuition when such a violation brings us a contribution toward some con- scious end. But when there is a contrast between the two tendencies we use the word psychopathology and its synonyms. Still, this inquiry has taught us why Freud defines consciousness as "a sensory organ for the perception of psychic qualities," for indeed our fore-conscious is incapable of giving our conscious ego any account of our affects or of the intellectual elements that are associated with them. In this sense consciousness is the conditio sine qua non of the quality which the British world seems to admire most in man : presence of mind, coolness of head, phlegm, or whatever one may call it ; for repression and domination of the inner forces that surge to the surface is only thinkable when there is a possibility of perceiving them. If intuition be the normal track from fore-consciousness to consciousness, one may wonder whether we are not treading the ground over which the mind has passed to attain the conscious stage.^ If we now return to our analogy between spontaneous thinking and automatic bodily reactions, the affect that starts the intuitive process should correspond to the pleasure or pain which, according to Spencer's theory, results from the response to the outer stimulus. Intuition would be a superstructure built upon the primitive procedure for the dis- charge of energy that has not taken place through the motility end of the psychic apparatus. It might have been originally a process for preventing the affect from innervating the muscular system, which still happens so often as a result of our affective thinking, so that in the end awareness should be the ultimate outcome of the tendency to prospective adaptation to the environment. Intuition would thus be a remnant of a primitive mental process that represented normality at some step of the psychic ladder, and the essence of mental evolution should be constituted by the tendency to put I This is also the manner in which Freud understands intuition and conscience : " For us the state of becoming conscious is a particular psychic act, different from and dependent upon becoming fixed or being conceived, and consciousness appears to us as an organ of sense which perceives a content presented from another source." THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 293 mental energy and its methods of procedure at the disposal of our conscious self. The end-result would produce con- siderable superiority, but would not be reached without the loss of some advantages proper to affective thinking, which, however, remain at the disposal of some privileged individuals, who possess the gift of being able to use these advantages spontaneously for their conscious pursuits. 2. Repression. We continue our investigation by the examination of the mental reactions provoked by our affects, which remain foreign to our alertness, by the long delayed discussion of the problem of repression. We have seen above that only such terminations of fore-conscious streams of thought as are in relation with acknowledged desires or apprehensions of our conscious life can come to the surface, and that the others are not allowed to pass the threshold of consciousness because the censor does not let them through. But the thoughts and affects are nevertheless there, for at the proper moment we have noted that the persons living in our environment obtain a perfect intuitive knowledge of the hedonistic nature of our musings, although this is denied to ourselves. As a matter of fact, we have already seen repression active when in the first part of this essay we had to prove that our phantasies are often interrupted momentarily by risings to the surface. We observed on pp. 165 et seq. that the sleep-wish often tried to persuade me not to interrupt my rest by taking up paper and pencil to write my musings down. But we need to discuss these observations here from a different point of view. Indeed, they show us the methods of pro- cedure employed by our censor ; for that reason we again reproduce the following : (a) In the night, before falling asleep : I awoke from a phantasy. My mind had been busy with the wording of a review of one of my books in the American Psychological Review, As I became conscious I thought : "I shall write down this train of thought. But it is not worth while, and I can retrace it to-morrow morning. Still, I cannot remember everything the next morning. Nevertheless I 294 THE PSYCHOLOGY OP DAY-DREAMS had better go on with the association, for it may lead me to a new discovery. But no ; I shall put it down, anyhow." (b) I awake from sleep, but my eyes are still closed. I have just concluded a phantasy, when all at once the following in- tuition comes to me : " I believe I am close to awaking and I am forming a fore-conscious chain. This is the moment to observe myself, as I have so often decided to do." And as I assume the peculiar mental attitude for retracing the concatenation of which I have become aware, I continue to myself : " No ; it is really not worth while to interrupt my sleep for that. I can observe such a chain any morning, and I shall write such a chain down when I am really in want of it to insert it in my manuscript." This convinces my fore-consciousness, and I make an effort to get to sleep again. I must have succeeded in this, for a few minutes later I awake from another phantasy and the following soliloquy takes place : '' Ah ! here is another day-dream. It is exactly like the day-dreams I have before sleep. But it is not worth while to write it down. I can just as well choose from my collection a pre-sonmial day- dream and let it pass as if I had registered it in the morning. Nobody will notice the difference. But how shall I arrange the details so as to give it the circum- stances of a morning day-dream ? There lies the difficulty, and the inadequacy of these details may lead to the detec- tion of the fraud and cost me my scientific reputation. So I had better awake." The reader will understand that the motive of these repressions is to be sought in the conflict between my observation-wish and my sleep-wish, and it will be very easy for him to reproduce a similar struggle in his own mind if he simply decides to retrace and write down his own phantasies when he goes to bed. Repression, however, takes many forms, and I adduce now some more of its manifestations which will be recognized as common property. This is especially true where the checking of erotic phantasies is concerned, for I believe there is no mortal whose unconscious ego has not felt sexual desires of some sort, which our social conventions reprove, THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 295 and which are therefore rejected as soon as they tend to come to the surface. The same man whose case occupied us before told me of some of the reflections that came to him when at the sight of some woman he wondered whether she would have been the right wife for him : " But, you stupid ass, you are married already. What do you want another wife for ? If polygamy were the rule here, as in the East, what would you do with two wives ? " Or : " You need not dream about a second wife, for your first one will outlive you : she is of a long-lived stock and you are not." Or : " How can you compare every woman you see to your own wife ? She suits you much better than any of the vulgar females you sometimes compare her with." Or : " How can you be so ridiculous as to dream about every person of the other sex you meet with ? " etc. Most of us, and probably all of us, have had sexual fancies of some sort or other ending in similar repressions ; only, as these wishes are not acknowledged, we do not become aware of them, and they are forgotten as soon as they are rejected. At least they are forgotten by our conscious self. But when similar tendencies are not gross sexual cravings but the expression of secondary sexual feelings that remain unsatisfied for some length of time, they are not forgotten by our unconsciousness ; on the contrary, they become obsessions, which manifest themselves in a manner that is out of reach of the censorship, as in the instances of songs with a meaning that only our second ego understands, such as we have already analysed, or in other psycho- pathological ways, as in hysteria, or in dreams, etc. (cf. the dream of the butcher's wife in Freud's Traumdeutung '). » She wants to give a supper, but having nothing at hand except smoked salmon, she thinks of going marketing ; but she remembers it is Sunday afternoon, when all the shops are closed. She next tries to telephone to some caterers, but the telephone is out of order. Thus she must renounce her desire to give a supper. Analysis shows that this is only a manifestation of her fears that her friend, who is to be her guest, might become stout and please her husband, who likes well-rounded figures (pp. 123 et seq.). The fact that we do not become aware of our phantasies does not alter the fact that their influence on our psyche is manifest. Amongst others, Junq insists on this peculiarity : " As a theoretical advantage of a second order we should mention this dream (of the eleven years old girl who had dreamed she was as tall as a church tower) as a clear instance of the compensatory 296 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS We cannot insist enough upon the fact that in all the above observations it is simply owing to the extraordinary circumstances produced by the analysing attitude that the repressive process could be in any way followed and written down ; normally this process goes on without our awareness, which is a proof that repression is a function as spontaneous as fore-conscious thinking itself: the ignorance is the same for every single mental operation that goes on beyond the threshold. In the first examples repression aimed at allowing the mind to go to sleep ; in the last, at keeping it free from thoughts that our accepted conventions condemn ; but in all cases the result was the same : to keep the field of consciousness free of im wished -for ideas. In both cases also oblivion follows upon the subduing of the involuntary thoughts. This is another instance in which we arq bound to recognize that our consciousness obtains assistance from the unconscious part of our mind : the censor operates without the intervention of will, and resists the pene- tration to consciousness of fore-conscious thoughts, just as the dream-censor does for the contents of our dreams. But repression in waking life seems to be more complete than during sleep. Indeed, Freud asserts rightly that *' when we relinquish our reflection we can only . . . reject those end-representations that are familiar to us." But when we do not relinquish our reflection, when, on the contrary, obtrusive thoughts surge to the surface and try to interrupt and disturb our voluntary occupation, w^e repress these importunate presentations without becoming aware of them or without wondering what may be their meaning : for example, when one is reading a book it may happen, even to a psycho-analyst, that one will re-read a passage several times without understanding it, or before becoming significance and teleological function of dreams. Such a dream cannot but leave behind a certain feeling of increased self-consciousness, which is of great importance for the personal well-being. It is of little importance that the symbolism is not transparent to the child's consciousness, for no conscious recognition is necessary to obtain the corresponding emotional impression from symbols." (Cf. C. G. Jung, Verauch einer Daretdlujig der pftychoan. Theorie, p. 429, in Jahrbtwh, etc., V/1, 1913.) THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 297 aware that the termination of a phantasy is trying to invade one's consciousness. There is a struggle going on in one's mind between one's will to pursue the voluntarily chosen occupation and one's fore-conscious wish that seeks to achieve the reaction that it has started, a struggle comparable to those reproduced above. But the important difference is the following : the repression and the struggle in which it results take place before any attention has been paid to the nature of the fore-conscious association. The rejection is not based upon the contents of the chain, but is directed against the mental operation itself or against the fore- conscious activity. Here we have hit upon the ultimate development of the censor. We have first examined him in his role of the guardian of sleep ; we have then considered him as a judge condemning all thoughts that are not in conformity with our social conventions ; in the last instance his duty seems to be to keep the field of consciousness clear of any disturbance, no matter who is the trespasser. We must admit that this is the strongest expression of censorship one can imagine, for if the orders are to let absolutely nobody enter the field, the sentinel will never be tempted by any bribery whatever to let an intruder through. He can only succumb to a force more powerful than himself. It is this tendency of the censor that causes unawareness of all the phantasies that go on in the fore-consciousness during waking life, with only a few exceptions. At night, or when we dismiss voluntary thinking, the watcher at the gate of consciousness has not such strict orders : his duty is to send away in the first instance only such sleep-disturbing, and in the second only such anti-con- ventional callers as may present themselves. And as reliance is placed upon his discrimination and discretion, he may be tempted to grant admittance to his best friends ; he may even invite the latter. That is what I cause him to do when my observation-wish is lurking beside my censor. The same thing is done by everybody when intuitively a brilliant idea flashes upon the mind. In such a case the wish corresponds to a conscious aim. And at night sleep- lessness is caused — a point which will be discussed later — by our repression weakening in the presence of thoughts 298 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS that correspond to an interesting unsolved problem of which the solution is ardently desired. Consequently, the censor is first of all the guardian of the field of consciousness, and only in the second instance the representative of the conventions on which social life is based. In other words, the more our mental energy is concentrated in the forum of consciousness the more absolute the censoring function ; but when the thinking proceeds in the region intermediate between consciousness and fore- consciousness, repression has only an ethical meaning, which it loses in its turn when intellection recedes entirely behind the threshold. We infer also from this discussion that the activity of the censor requires part of the general attention of which the consciousness disposes, which is the confirmation of a conclusion that we reached previously. We understand now why Freud writes that the " criticizing instance is more closely related to consciousness than the criticized," for we have recognized in the former the expression of volition, while the latter is emitted by a subliminal wish. A well-balanced mind is conditioned in such a manner that the spontaneity of affective thinking is easily subdued by the spontaneous censorship in its highest expression. Where this superiority is not attained we meet with neuroses and psychoses in all their various forms. It is probably in this sense that we should understand Freud's assertion : " The theory of repression is the main pillar upon which rests the edifice of psycho-analysis." ^ But repression is not exclusively a function of conscious- ness. We have already seen it active fore-consciously, e.g. when we try to get to sleep. But it may be followed even further. Indeed, repression is based on a judgment ; its essence seems to be a rejection ; it is the refusal either to accept a presentation, and accordingly the affect or wish that is behind it, or more directly to admit the emotion.' The first alternative is realized when we repress erotic ideas ; I Cf. S. Freud, History oj the Paychanalytic Movement, p. 413, in the Prnjcho-analytic Review, No. 4, October 1916. » Emotion, in our opinion, is the expression to denominate the dim awareness of fore -conscious affects and their accompanying thought-complex. Emotion differs from intuition in that the end-result of the fore -conscious chain remains hidden from our consciousness. THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 299 the second, when we decide not to lose our presence of mind, to remain cool-blooded, another of the latest acquisitions of consciousness. However, we have been able to discover a similar judgment and rejection in the spontaneous process of conceiving. What we have called questions and answers, or suppositions and rejoinders, are manifestations of the empirical method of our fore-consciousness to find solutions of a problem by successive tests. We have seen that the discriminative faculty rejects what it considers unsuitable for the prospective accommodation that tends to be achieved, and that the end-result of the thinking process is a selection. We have also seen already, in several instances, that all the functions of consciousness have their fore-conscious and unconscious representatives. Therefore we are inclined to regard the judgment that is arrived at in the act of conceiving as the function corresponding behind the threshold to the censoring activity. If we compare this discriminative process with conscious repression, we notice that in both operations affectively emphasized presentations are submitted to a judgment, whereby the end-result is kept in view ; this end-result is always in the sense of an adaptation to a purpose ; there is a possibility of admittance or rejection in both cases. There are, however, also some important differences : in the automatic process only one presentation at a time can be taken note of ; conscious repression, on the contrary, can be brought to bear upon a whole complex of feelings and thoughts ; the conventions that rule our conscious life do not penetrate deep enough to have a great or even any influence whatever upon the unconscious judgments ; and here is a point that we shall have to examine further : in the latter instance our touchstone for ascertaining the adequacy of our presentations is a very imperfect instrument. But still, these dissimilarities, which are only differences of degree and not of kind, do not impair the value of our conclusion that the three forms of rejection which we should like to call proper to each of the three parts of the mind — consciousness, fore-consciousness and unconsciousness — ^form a single series, and represent three different stages of develop- ment of the same original function, of which the unconscious discriminative process is the most primitive. 300 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS Lest we should labour under a misunderstanding, we ought to declare here that the conceiving process as we have analysed it in previous chapters is not, in our opinion, the primitive thought-process, but only a modern repre- sentative of it. Man thinks in words even unconsciously, but in the latter case with a strong admixture of images, as we have seen already. We may imagine that before the appearance of speech only thinking in plastic images was possible, and we may complete this supposition by adding that this ideation aimed almost exclusively at the satis- faction of bodily needs. Our unconscious thinking in words would then be an adaptation of the later-acquired elements of speech to the primitive procedure, and would thus become available for pursuits of a more intellectual nature. Its antiquity would explain the inadequacy of the suggestions to which it leads, and which we have emphasized before (e.g. the suggestion to use a garden-roller for killing a flea in a bedroom). It would also tend to show that originally the mind is not very particular as to the means to be employed in reaching its ends ; it would simply constitute an illus- tration of nature's rule that " necessity knows no law." As long as the thought-mechanisms do not leave the fore-conscious region, repression knows no ethical standard, and this is a point which we ask permission to develop. A hasty glance at all the day-dreams communicated in the previous pages will remind us of the low moral value of many of them, and if I were to be judged by them I should run great risks of getting less than my deserts. For indeed my fore-conscious self tries sometimes to surprise my good faith by telling my conscious self that the phantasy from which I have just awaked is not worth registering, or is not long enough or important enough ; that it is too early or too dark to wake up already ; that I shall be too tired if I start working so early in the morning, etc. In one instance it suggests that I should deceive my colonel in a rather silly way ; in another instance, that I should cheat the Minister of Education ; and in yet another, that I should commit a scientific fraud. These observations prove that even when we are in a state of mind bordering on consciousness, but still beyond THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 301 the threshold, the prescriptions of the code of morahty are not remembered, and are not at the disposal of the censor. In our phantasies, moreover, we invariably think that we are cleverer than anybody else and scrupulosity is totally absent. However, we are liars and miscreants in our phan- tasies because we know no better, which proves that lying is at least as normal, and in some sense more natural, than telling the truth. Therefore everyone must admit that children and savages, who have only imperfectly assimilated our ethical conventions, may lie spontaneously without knowing that what they say is false, Normally it does not take a child long before it knows when it lies ; but in other cases, when repression does not develop regularly, lying remains a permanent feature, and we should not forget that there is such a psychosis as pseudologia phantastica. As a matter of fact, every human being bears in his fore- conscious ideation the traces of the lawlessness of primitive life, and, as Bleuler remarks, criminal thoughts, as soon repressed as they are born, may occur in the most upright man ; for example, death-wishes, which are expressed directly and not symbolically, as related before. The language of the vulgar bears some traces of this disposition, as witness the Flemish saying : "If my eyes were pistols, so-and-so would not live long " ; moreover, this has corre- pondents in every language, and sounds not unlike the English " to look daggers at somebody." In this and in similar expressions (as " his eyes flashed fire ") we observe the compromise between the spontaneity of our affective thinking and the censoring that civilization teaches us. What we call repression is accordingly an adaptation of the discriminative process that is a constituent of unconscious thinking, but the criterion is no longer the physical pain- pleasure principle, but conformity to social standards, obtained at the cost of sacrificing the most direct means that lead to our aim, and in its ultimate development the rejection is applied to our affective life as a whole. The question is no longer how to reach an end by any means, but firstly how to reach one's end without offending public opinion ; and later, how to reach one's end through free will only. This sort of repression includes the possibility of becoming 302 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS aware of our affects, or their intellectual representatives (for will can silence only its undisguised opponents), and of observing our social conventions. However, this aware- ness sometimes leaves us in the lurch, and similarly we have a propensity to forget the prescriptions of the decalogue when our affects are very intense. The mechanism of forgetting, which Freud ascribes to the tendency of avoid- ing pain, and which is nothing else but a special case of repression, is also active when our feelings are so strong that a painful conflict would arise from their confrontation with our voluntary mental acquisitions ; in these circumstances we throw these acquisitions to the winds, as the brute divests himself of the clothes that hinder his movements ; we become blind and deaf to the voice of civilization as soon as the primitive beast awakens in us and repression dwindles to what it was originally : a seeking for satisfaction without regard for ethical value. Wish and will come to grips, and most often it is the more ancient of the two antagonists that is victorious. Among the feelings that surprise volition most easily in their disguise, and therefore obliterate without difficulty our intuition for our affects, the sexual impulse, as psycho-analysis teaches, is the foremost. When this voice of nature speaks in man he relinquishes, he most promptly forgets, all conventions ; and we may fancy that here lies the reason why hysterics of both sexes are character- istic day-dreamers, their affective thinking being beyond their repression and ending by invading their motor system, where it manifests itself by muscular ailments that only psycho-analysis can bring into relation with their fore- conscious thoughts. The violation of the field of consciousness by our affects, with its correspondent obliteration of will and oblivion of the dictates of civilization, and, sometimes, loss of the instinct of self-preservation, reminds me of a game I witnessed one day at a swimming entertainment. A see-saw was fixed a few inches above the surface of the water, and two competitors at a time took their places on either end of the plank, where heavy weights had been attached to increase the swinging movements. The victory went to the lad who succeeded in making his opponent lose his foothold, which THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 303 happened easily when the seesaw dipped under the water. Similarly, when our affects force themselves above the level of consciousness, the later mental acquisitions at the other end disappear under the surface and leave the field clear to the re-awakened brute that is dormant in every one of us. Conscious repression is the name for the mental energy that is detached to keep the brute captive under the surface. Only when the struggle between will and wish is avoided — that is, when, as in the case of inspiration and invention, the wish coincides with volition — do the affective forces make no attempt to dethrone consciousness. In these cases the mental forces are not scattered and opposed to one another, but all available mental energy is focused on the common end-representation : our brute labours in the service of our better self. Thus it is that emotion intensifies attention and renders repression needless. That repression can be educated is proved by the phylogenetic history of the mind itself. But we must agree that the individual dispositions may differ widely. Just as a person with strong religious feelings or an unshakeable political conviction assumes unawares a friendly mental attitude toward everything that brings satisfaction to his tendency and a defensive attitude toward all that threatens to bring displeasure, similarly women of the clitoric type — and men no less — are inclined to excuse beforehand every- thing that agrees with their natural inclination for primary or secondary sexual satisfaction. They have a tendency to underestimate the dangers (or pain) they expose themselves to, to forget the rigidity of our moral prescriptions ; thus they find excuses beforehand and prepare for their possible fall. In this sense there can be no doubt that the abundant fictitious and dramatic literature, choosing for its heroes adulterers and advancing a veiled apology for their deeds, renders faithfulness more difficult without preparing the community for a purer sexual life. But the automatic obliviousness of social conventions and the latest acquisitions of civilization does not occur only when the sexual impulse triumphantly invades the field of consciousness. All other passions may produce the same result ; this is common knowledge. All those whose 804 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS repression is not up to the normal standard are in some sense primitives, and we are children in so far as our censor does not work well. Morality is therefore dependent upon our psychic activity, and no high ethical level can be attained where there is not perfect mastery over our affects. Freud was the first to emphasize the biological mean- ing of the censor : " The processes of repression are the psychic correlates of the flight reflex and pursue the end of preventing the genesis of pain from inner sources." » This assertion seems to contradict our previous conclusion that affective thinking appears as a substitute for an affective motor reaction, but in reality this is not so. Indeed, flight implies also an act of discrimination, like the thinking process at its different stages, but the degree of anticipation is not so pronounced in flight as in thinking. No doubt we cannot fancy the appearance of flight in the animal scale without granting a dim knowledge of the future, consequently of the past as well. But flight is a reaction in the presence of the excitation, while the thought mechanism requires only the representation of the excitation to become active. Another difference between the two reactions is that thinking results finally in rendering flight needless : the threatening object is not avoided, but overcome and vanquished. This lays bare the main difference between repression and thought : repression corresponds to the removal of the exciting object, which is an advance on the change of place of the excited organism itself ; thought tends toward the annihilation of the pain-giving excitations of the object. Therefore repression — and originally flight — is not so perfect a reaction as thinking : the former is a form of avoiding, the latter a form of meeting the external threat. In fore-conscious, thinking both phenomena coincide : repression is active in, is an operation constitutive of, the thought-process ; the former is a preparatory stage of the latter, for the rejection of unsuitable solutions leads to the final solution of the difficulty, and the repression ceases when an acknowledged proposition, a means of accommodation, has been adopted. I Cf. S. Freud, Der Witz, p. 204. THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 305 In waking life, however, repression can play a double role : in conscious ideation it acts exactly as it does behind the threshold, viz. when memory-elements are brought to the fore it discriminates ; but the censor also turns his power against the affects and the ideation they provoke, so as to keep the field clear for the mental operations that are directed by our will. The latter function refers to " the prevention of pain from inner sources." Therefore, if the processes of repression are the psychic correlates of the flight-reflex, the thought processes may be regarded as an advance upon repression, resulting in the overcoming of pain instead of avoidance through flight. If we fix our attention for a little while longer upon the comparison between repression in directed and affective thinking,'^ we find that in some instances repression is a functional expression of will, namely, when in energetic concentration upon a subject we strongly determine to banish any mental factor that is foreign to it. But in most cases the censor of our waking life is active without the conscious intervention of will — for example, when we reject erotic thoughts ; this pushing away proceeds spontaneously : the tendency for adaptation has taken over the duty which once was ascribed to volition when the young individual was learning to distinguish bad from good according to our moral law. The will to be good has become a wish, has sunk down toward the fringe of the fore-conscious, and operates almost without our conscious intervention. We repress in the same manner as we walk, unknowingly as it were. In the domain of the unconscious, on the contrary, repression is synonymous with automatic rejection, according to an amoral standard. If conscious repression be the outcome of evolution, what is the relation between will as a censor and the unconscious propensity for adaptation which rejects presentations of memorial origin ? There can be little doubt that there is a close connection » We repeat here that we distinguish affective from fore-conscious thinking because the former can go on above the level of consciousness when there is no volxmtary repression, as in the case of invention and inspiration, also in children and savages, in psychopathies, in dementia prsecox, etc. Fore- conscious thinking, on the contrary, is exclusively affective. 20 806 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS between the phenomenon of intuition and the social aspect of repression : through the former we admit the termination of fore-conscious thinking in consciousness ; through the latter this admittance is declined. But the voluntary dismissal of anything but the elements relating to the conscious end-representation stands by itself. All we can do for the present is to point out, as we have done, for the different factors which we have successively discussed in this essay, that repression is represented in the unconscious, just as we have found will correspond with wish, and volun- tary thinking, recollecting, attention, awareness, etc., corre- spond with representatives in the unconscious. Between the two aspects of all these processes there are only degrees of difference, not of kind. Repression, bearing primitively on representations revived through an affect, has finished by being able to subdue not only the intellectual elements sent to the surface, but even the active affects that give them their special meaning. 3. Intuition versus Repression. In the preceding sections we have studied two opposing tendencies : in intuition the conclusions reached by fore- conscious thought rise to the surface, and their acknowledg- ment by consciousness gives rise to a feeling pleasurable or painful. Repression, on the contrary, drives them back to the lower levels of the psyche, together with the affects that accompany them. In other instances, however, the thought- process does not come to a conclusion, through the inter- vention of the censor, that prematurely interrupts the affective combination ; the end-result may not be sufficiently accentuated emotionally to overpower the censor and awake a corresponding affect dormant in consciousness, in which circumstances the rising to the surface bears all the characters of intuition minus the conscious emotion ; or, again, between the two opposing tendencies — the thinking reflex and the repressing reflex — a conflict may arise which renders any voluntary occupation impossible. If fore-conscious ideation corresponds really to a thinking impulse, we must admit also that every perception originates THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 307" a stream of thoughts as soon as will ceases to dominate the mental apparatus ; for every perception is accompanied by an affect, and every affect has a tendency to awake a corre- spondent wish, or conversely, every wish may cause the per- ception process to result in such an affect as leads to its temporary possession of the psychical organ. As Bleuler states it, the affect on perception provokes its centrifugal correspondent, and we conceive this process as an hereditary acquisition, just as the feeding or the sexual impulse. But if every outer or inner perception automatically sets our brain in action in the sense of accommodation, the result will always progress toward a conception, which will tend to exteriorization for the completion of the cycle of reactions. This exteriorization — the rising to consciousness — will be the psychic correlate of the motor innervation on a lower psychic level. We have noted, however, previously, that whenever a phantasy ends unknowingly in a muscular innervation we do not become aware of it, unless the contractions bring about a disturbance of the conscious occupation, a circum- stance which confirms our hypothesis. It is this tendency of the conclusions of fore-conscious thinking to rise to the surface, and the opposite propensity of the censor to drive them spontaneously back, that we shall presently examine. But before developing this point I ask permission to insert here some reflections which may seem out of season, but will soon prove to be considered in their proper place. We will first mark out our ground, and repeat that in our opinion conscious thinking is the result of an evolution, thanks to which the inner process discernible all through the animal scale, in the cycle outer stimulus — inner process — motor reaction, has placed at the disposal of humanity the intellect that distinguishes man from all the rest of creation. We have attempted so far to show that voluntary thinking is the development of affective thinking, and the latter an advance upon the mental act proper to instinctive life, while this in its turn marks an advance upon an organization in which we qualify the reactions as purely automatic. We shall now try to show that the primitive cycle, outer stimulus — inner process — motor reaction, has preserved its 308 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS primitive character even in man, viz. that the three archaic operations are still strongly correlated in the highest form of evolution. We have already proved — it is hoped in r convincing manner — that as far as the first pair (outer stimulus — inner process) is concerned, the old interdependency is maintained unchanged in the main, progress in develop- ment having been conditioned by the replacing of the outer by inner stimuli. If we now show convincingly that the archaic tendency of the inner process to exteriorize itself through the motor system is still maintained in man, we shall have carried our point. To that purpose we com- municate here the following observations : (a) I am with my son at the doctor's, when at a given moment the following request reaches my ear : " Now breathe deeply." I soon find that I am myself carrying out the order more perfectly than my boy. (b) A lady makes her daughter recite a piece of poetry for me. I notice by the movements of her organs of speech that the mother recites also without making her vocal cords vibrate. (c) A singer in the theatre has become hoarse for a moment, and I hear several persons in the audience, including myself, audibly clear their throats. (d) Billiard-players usually bend the upper parts of their bodies in the direction they wish their ball to follow after they have struck it, at least when they follow its course with anxiety. (e) I am talking with a lady sitting on a sofa. At a given moment, after having looked me in the face while I was speaking, I notice her rubbing the corner of her eye with her forefinger. Unwittingly I imitate her movement, become aware of it immediately, however, and smile. She wonders, and asks me the reason for that out-of-season smile. So I cannot but tell her that I can guess what she has been thinking during my speech. As our acquaintance is quite recent — I had been introduced to her half-an-hour before only — she looks at me with an incredulous smile. Her features, however, soon express undisguised surprise when I explain to her that she has been rubbing the comer of her right eye, and that this movement is a consequence of her noticing THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 309 in the corner of mine some white mucosity, such as now and then gathers there, and which she wanted me to remove. She frankly admitted that I was quite correct in my supposition. (/) My daughter comes into my study and stands in front of my desk ; she asks me in pleading terms to do her a favour — to take her to a concert in the afternoon. While she is doing so she sketches unawares a characteristic move- ment of adduction and abduction with both arms, which makes me say to her : '* Are you thinking of swimming ? *' She stops her argument with some surprise, but as she knows the nature of my researches she explains at once that she was thinking in petto while she spoke to me : "If we go to the concert I shall not be able to go to the swimming-bath." It would be very easy to multiply such examples. These, however, will suffice to show how spontaneously the fore- conscious passes from the thought to the act ; in other wordsy it shows the interdependency of the mental process and the motor system. This correlation has been observed and utilized by all writers of any repute, and I shall content myself here with only one quotation : in the fable reproduced on p. 86, Lafontaine writes of the milk woman, " Perrette saute aussi transportee," after having told us how, in her fancy, she saw her calf jump about " au milieu du troupeau," a symptomatic action which causes her jug to fall and destroys at once all her air-castles. In everyday life some races, especially in the South of Europe, show a great propensity for accompanying their speech (spoken ideas) with expressive spontaneous gestures. But whereas in such instances the innervation of the motor system may be ascribed to the fact that the ideas to which expression is given concern the speaker's own person, on the contrary, the thoughts that invade the motor system in the above cases are not egocentric at all ; they are impersonal thoughts manifested by muscular contractions. On the other hand, this special feature of affective thinking explains the facility for producing errors in speech, writing, etc., which we have analysed before, and it makes us also better understand how correct Freud and his pupils are in their interpretations of such actions, performed unawares by 310 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS their patients as playing with their wedding-rings (which denote their domestic troubles) and the like. It further throws a light on the hysterical contractions so frequent in this disease,^ of w^hich the following extraordinary case deserves to be mentioned. I came across it as I was writing this very paragraph : *' Modern Sorcery, " Yesterday, before the tribimal, in the course of a divorce case, one of the barristers told a curious story of envoutement ^ that I ask permission to relate briefly here. " Being separated from his wife for over a year, and con- vinced that he owed all his troubles to his mother-in-law, Baron de J. yielded to the temptation of taking a plea- sant revenge. He imported from Tokio, at great expense, a magnificent gong of large dimensions, but before hanging it in the hall of his castle he invited a renowned engraver to fix on the sonorous disc the features of the Baroness R., a widow, the mother of his wife. The artist succeeded in producing a perfect likeness. The instrument was then hung up, and the baron finds real pleasure in hammering upon the bronze with all his might, fancying he is beating his mother-in-law's very face. His guests, his domestics, imitate him at all hours of the day. They bash his mother- in-law's nose under the pretext of announcing the meals or calling a servant. " The vengeance of the baron became complete when his mother-in-law heard of the facts. Soon it even went beyond his most cruel hopes. The first reaction of the old lady was all ire and indignation. She called upon an attorney, who could not intervene, and tried her best to engage a fresh action beside the divorce suit, which she supported to the best of her fury. One day she went rambling with her carriage ' The day-dreams leading to these contractions have been clearly ex- plained in an interesting essay by Dr. Odieb, A Propos cfun Gas de Contracture hy.tt4rique, in Archives de Psychologie, XIV, 1914, pp. 158-201. * EnvoHtement is the French name for a process of sorcery for which, I believe, English superstition has no corresponding word. Envouter is to wound an image (often in wax) symbolizing the person whom one wishes to injure, in the belief that the living person will siiffer all the pains inflicted on the image. THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 311 about the park of her son-in-law, lending an anxious ear to all the sounds proceeding from the castle, and the vibrations of the celebrated gong caused her such exaspera- tion that on coming home she had to go to bed. " The next day she reappeared with a swollen nose and black eyes. "A curious phenomenon of auto-suggestion had declared itself during the night. Since this terrible excursion, the Baroness R. believes that she is under the influence of the spell of a sorcerer in the service of her son-in-law. She is sensitive to the blows of the hammer which fall upon her distant image, and her visage bears the traces of the strokes as if she underwent the actual violence. Sometimes she fancies that she herself is a gong and tries to imitate with a cavernous voice the vibrations of the Japanese bronze. Purple protuberances disfigure her countenance and her jaws. Sometimes in the midst of a quiet conversation she suddenly emits a painful wail, and has to hold her handkerchief to her nose to stop the abundant bleeding : that means that they have announced breakfast in the house of her son-in-law. On certain days the poor widow's face has no longer a human aspect. " This story produced upon the court an impression the nature of which I hesitate to describe," etc. — Le Peuple, July 19, 1920. (The subject has been treated by the paper's humorist, but the facts are real.) From the above examples we conclude that the cycle outer (or inner) stimulus — inner process — motor reaction is still preserved in the fore-conscious state, and we come to the conclusion that only in voluntary thinking has intellection become separable at will from the motor system. In the con- scious state the mind disposes of two alternatives when the mental process has been brought to completion : we may adopt the ancient scheme and translate our thought in muscular reactions, or we may simply add the creation of the brain to the store of memory — that is, bear it in mind. The latter procedure looks to be an improvement and systematization of the intuitive acknowledgment which we have studied in the preceding section. Indeed, each time 812 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS that I have become aware " that something was going on " in my inner self that was worth observing, it was before the conception had manifested itself through motility. Therefore we are justified in supposing that the phenomenon which we have described as " a rising of the idea to the surface " is the second alternative, the first being the mus- cular reaction. The procedure kno^vn to us as intuition, and occurring only when the affective concatenation associates with a not-repressed conscious preoccupation, would have developed into an automatism, thanks to which volition disposes of the results of our thinking without our aware- ness of the process that had been active : we take it for granted that we have the free disposal, that we have the consciousness, of our conceptions. But this hypothesis involves this also : that when we decide not to let the thought innervate our muscles, the role of inhibiting this ancient reaction must be devolved upon some part of the mental system, which we suppose to be nothing else but another of the functions of repression or the censor. The conscious part of repression should then be the guardian that switches off the mental current either into memory or into the muscles. With the abeyance of wall, when the thought-process proceeds behind the threshold, the guardian vanishes, the switch makes contact only with the ancient passage to the motor system. We meet here for the first time with another function of consciousness, which has developed out of the process of intuition, but has become — and we insist upon this — as automatic as all the other processes active in thought- formation, as, for instance, the continual revivification of memory-elements. This automatism suffices by itself to explain why we have no awareness of our mental mechanisms. We conclude from this argument that the censor is the keeper of the gate of the motor system^ and switches off the thoughts at the command of volition either into the path of motility or into that of memory.^ But we have discovered also a new aspect of memory, * Some people believe that we are unable to recall the dreams during which we have been speaking aloud. K the fact were confirmed by observa- tion it would be pretty suggestive. THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 313 to which we have not yet had an opportunity of calHng the reader's attention : we have often mentioned the memory of perceptions ; here we meet for the first time with the memory for conceptions. It would, however, be an error to place this particular form of memory, in the history of mental development, on a level corresponding with the appearance of volition, for nobody will have the slightest doubt that in phylogeny the conceptional recollections are possible before the conscious stage is reached. We may even presuppose them in instinctive life. Only the progress from the stage of affective to that of volitional thinking is marked by the increasing independence in the latter of conceptional memories from motility, besides the previously emphasized distinction between the respective roles of affect and will in recalling the past. But with the evolution and development of this acquisition — the memory for conceptions — ^we observe a new period in the history of the mind ; for through it the psyche acquires the property of becoming independent of the muscular system, in the same measure as, at the other end, perceptional memory has rendered it independent of the outer excitations — that is, of the outer world. Indeed, as soon as a conception need no longer be transformed into a reaction against the outer world, but may be kept ready in the memory for future needs, or still better, may be used again for the formation of new conceptions, without any exteriorization, the instru- ment for abstraction, in the true sense of the word, is born. In this way the mind constitutes a unit complete in itself, or better, a compound instrument freed of reality, all its functions being performed without the intervention of any other factor but the central nervous system itself. It is even independent (at least immediately) for its motive power — mental energy — of reality, for, as far as our know- ledge goes, the same organ that is the seat of memory is also the depository of our affects and our will. Thus we have succeeded in sketching in rough lines the gradual but incomplete separation of body and mind. Here we close this parenthesis and return to the consideration of the tendency of the conclusions of fore- conscious thinking to rise to the surface when they do not 314 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS innervate the motor system, and the opposite propensity of the censor to drive them spontaneously back. The end-process of spontaneous thinking — the rising to the surface — can only be conceived as being just as automatic as its genesis. Indeed, we remember that the sliding from the conscious to the fore-conscious state is due to the mental glance being turned inward under the influence of a wish, to an inner perception bearing a strong affect. In the process of intuition an emotionally emphasized conception, or the feeling only, associates with a wish or an affect, which is the prolongation of the contents of consciousness, and through this channel causes the conscious perception of the inner state. In the act of becoming aware the process of losing awareness is reversed, but is equally spontaneous. Intuition, however, is but a particular case of awakening : when we " come to," as in inspiration, with a feeling of jubilation, the affect is very intense, because of the satis- faction which our conscious ego experiences in respect of the unexpected collaboration ; similarly, when we awake from a dream which has aroused our instinct of self-preser- vation, as, for example, when we dream that we are falling into an abyss, the emotion is quite strong and undoubtedly favours the tendency of the unconscious thought-elements to rise to the surface. But when I awoke from my flea phantasy just as my fore-conscious ego was afraid that I might catch a skin disease, the affect that favoured this bubbling up was much weaker, and it is probable that a layman in psycho-analysis would not have observed this fear. (Normally we become conscious again after the conclusion of a day-dream and resume our conscious occupation without noticing anything whatever.) But our censor may perfectly well interrupt our wool-gathering before any termination is reached, as when we become aware that we are absent- minded, and say to ourselves impatiently : " There I am off again ! " Repression proves thus to be a useful and vigilant assistant of consciousness. But all three of the above cases of awakening and the others which are to follow have a common trait : the tendency of the fore-conscious thoughts to rise to the surface obtains assistance from some content or other of consciousness. So it does when we are THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 315 warned by our second self that it is time to rise after we have determined before going to bed that we want to get up at such and such an hour, or that we are doing the wrong thing (cf. my becoming aware, in the Folkestone phantasy, that I was in the wrong half of the train), etc. In some cases this propensity to associate with elements of conscious origin is taken advantage of, more or less intentionally, in the production of jests, humorous sayings, puns, etc., and manifests itself quite unintentionally in the cases of mistakes in speech, in writing, in hearing, in erro- neously performed actions, etc. Normally, however, the natural tendency of the conclusions of fore-conscious thinking to rise to the surface does not require to be favoured by consciousness to become active ; only under these conditions we do not talk about " intuition," for the product of the fore-consciousness is scarcely heeded, or not at all. This is due to the censor, who acts with his usual spontaneity and annihilates the efforts of our fore-conscious ego as often as our consciousness does not see an advantage in opening the gate. This state of equilibrium is, however, very unstable, and very little is needed to make the scale incline in favour of the caller asking for entrance. But when this is granted only the final idea is allowed to pass. It is probably because we have no awareness of the largest part of our fore-conscious concatenations that in antiquity inspiration was taken to be vmtaught knowledge and of divine origin. Indeed, only psycho-analysis has been able to unravel the entanglement of the fore-conscious thought-process and to prove that it proceeds according to the simplest conscious pattern. Fore-conscious thinking comes to our knowledge in an abridged form only, and I am tempted to admit that it comes thus to our fore-conscious awareness also. For I often become aware of some striking idea that occurs in my phantasies without returning to the conscious state, but not of the intermediate links of the chain — ^this may happen during sleep — and I wonder whether this has some relation to the dream condensation observed b}'' all psycho-analytic writers on the subject. In other words, only certain emotionally accentuated parts of the stream of thought are taken note of by our conscious or fore-conscious awareness ; 816 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS the others may therefore represent the unheeded parts of the concatenation ; the former would then be used again in the second dream-elaboration. I communicate this idea as a suggestion and leave others to decide whether it has any value or not. The equilibrium referred to above may be that, not of two weak tendencies of equal strength, but of two intense forces opposing one another with equal intensity : these conditions are realized when the censor, assisted by the sleep-wish, defends the gate of consciousness against an emerging thought that corresponds to a preoccupation of waking life and derives strength therefrom. We mention this particular case at this point ^Decause we are reviewing the different possibilities that may arise at the termination of fore-conscious intellection, but its examination must be postponed for a while. Our fore-conscious thinking may be interrupted in another way than by the censor ; namely, through the perception of an outer stimulus, as we have already seen. This happens especially when the active thinking process is temporarily suspended and the mind is drifting on the stream of memory, as we have had occasion to observe. When it occurs we may truly speak of a fore-conscious distraction, for indeed we are led unexpectedly from one mental operation to another, exactly as when our conscious attention is disturbed and we are led astray. But in this process we see something more than a fore- conscious distraction : this shows once more that the per- ception process is as spontaneous as the thinking operations and that at a certain mental level curiosity is, so to speak, automatic : in certain circumstances we try to classify our sensations without our consciousness taking any directive part in the process, and one wonders whether there is any relation between this reflex and the instinctive curiosity of childhood ; to be sure, perception and conception are two different things, but we should not forget that perception is at the genesis of all conception. Of course, every conscious perception does not originate directed thinking, probably because we know all about the external object as soon as the act of perceiving is performed, partly, also, because the THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 317 adult may have other and more urgent interests at the moment. But in the fore-conscious sphere this is no longer so : every fore -conscious perception originates a fore-conscious concatenation, and as the child thinks chiefly in an affec- tive manner, we come to understand how the spontaneous curiosity, manifested in the automatic process of perception, may leave the child's mind unsatisfied, and thus provoke further activity of his brain, such as is manifested by the questions : who ? how ? why ? Moreover, what else is the thirst for knowledge but the intellectualized tendency to adaptation manifest all through the animal scale ? As soon as living beings have directed their mental energy or their nervous system toward the prevention of pain or the preparation of the future, we may say that curiosity as to outer stimuli has made its appearance. Therefore, as the infantile mind is not yet sufficiently stored to permit of the systematization of its perceptions, the outer stimuli bring into action the ancient process of affective thinking on this side of the threshold, as inner stimuli always, and outer stimuli sometimes, do in adults behind the threshold. The child's curiosity is a preparation for adult life, a variety of the eternal instinct for adaptation represented by the wish. Infantile curiosity ends in making perception and conception independent of one another, but this form of curiosity is represented in the adult mind under another aspect. Adult curiosity is nothing other than another variety of the same instinct, and we might say that in a certain sense all our phantasies tend to satisfy some aspect of our general inquisitiveness. Functionally, the main differences between infantile and adult curiosity are that the latter can better restrain its spontaneity, and tends toward exteriorization, while the former is more of an acquisitive nature and does not manifest itself so much outwardly. But the adult mind still shows a predilection for using the primitive power of affective thought when it seeks satisfaction for the problems that worry it. Although this argument may seem a little out of season, we cannot abandon it yet, for it will soon give us the explan- ation of another aspect of the thinking process which has no correlation in the muscular activity. If we regard as 318 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS curiosity the desire for intellectual knowledge corresponding to the tendency to adaptation by motor reactions, this inquisitiveness constitutes the intellectual aspect of the wish. Originally it causes a preparatory intellection in the service of motor adaptation, and its conclusions may be stored in the mind until the right moment arrives for expressing them in muscular contractions. These conclusions may become conscious or remain entirely outside of our awareness, but the purpose of the spontaneous mental activity will nevertheless be attained. In the last stage of development the motor reaction finally disappears altogether. How, then, is the final reaction that completes the cycle going to take place ? Through the organs of speech or their substitutes. As a matter of fact, the above statement is not quite correct, for the original scheme (outer stimulus — nervous reaction — motor activity) is still preserved when outer or inner excitations end in making us express our ideas, for in doing so we still make use of the motor system. But the main acquisition of the mind is that this final reaction can be postponed indefinitely and that the nervous process can go on with our awareness, provided certain conditions be fulfilled. Just as we have recognized the thirst for knowledge as a development of a spontaneous function of adaptation already present in very primitive life, so we are now led to see in the tendency to communicate our findings the correlate of the final process of the same instinct : the motor reaction following upon an outer stimulus. We may even suppose that the tendency to communicate manifests itself by contrac- tions of some kind as early as the dawn of social life in the organized world and has become sublimated in the same proportion as the process of conceiving itself. Waxweiler, in his Esquisse d'une Sociologie ^ (chapter on Les Phenomenes sociaux en Sociologie compareet pp. 67-72), establishes that in its developments it has kept pace with the increase of security of life. At all events, the propensity to impart new ideas is shared by the vulgar and the highest exponent of » Cf. E. Waxweiler, Esquiaae d'une Sociologie, Travaux de VInatitut Solvay de Sociologiey Notes et Mim(nrea, No. 2. Misch & Thron, Bruxelles, 1906. THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 319 humanity alike, and its irresistibility has struck the popular mind of old and has been embodied in tales, such as the legend of King Midas' barber ^ ; and the latter is even faintly echoed by the Flemish people in their saying, " I had to relieve my heart, even if I had to tell it to the trees." Nothing is truer than that talking relieves the mind. If we pursue the above discussion for a moment longer we shall not excite contradiction by supposing that originally, when the right response for meeting the painful stimulus in the future, when a possible expedient for escaping a threatening danger was not devised, this failure to complete the cycle of reactions caused in the primitive mind a feeling corresponding to anxiety in man. A business man worries about the situation of affairs for which he sees no outcome. A scientist worries about his problems, and our fore-conscious- ness seems to be the compartment of the psyche which we rely upon to resolve our cares and anxieties, to prepare our means of communication with the outer world. But after long brooding over things our fore-consciousness may still disappoint us. This feeling, representative of pain at inhibited reaction, and conversely the satisfaction which we experience at normal reaction, enable us the better to under- stand Freud's explanation of laughter on hearing a pleasant remark : " When a certain amount of psychic energy applied to the occupation of certain psychic paths has become unusable laughter arises, when it can be freely discharged.^^ ^ The same perspective enables us to understand why a thing known is often a thing cured : the absence of a solution may cause beyond the threshold a search which is accentuated in a more unpleasurable manner the longer the unconscious process lasts ; and this form of pain, which is not the less present although we are not aware of it, may be removed by the adduction of knowledge ; the cycle is completed, » King Midas had ass's ears, and he never failed to wear a special head gear except when he had to surrender himself to the care of his barber, who was the only other mortal who knew the secret and was pledged on pain of death not to betray it to man or animal. But it weighed so heavily on his mind that he went to the river and whispered to the reeds : " King Midas has ass's ears — King Midas has ass's ears." But when the wind blew through the reeds, they rustled more and more distinctly as their heads clashed together : " King Midas has ass's ears — King Midas has ass's ears," so that soon everybody knew the terrible secret. » Cf. S. Feeud, Der Witz, op. cit., p. 126. 320 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS and at the same time the cause of the painful affect removed. The modern mind has even found the means to prevent the eventual creation of this affect. When a politician in Parliament or a barrister in court indicates the possible arguments of his opponent and refutes them beforehand, he prepares in the mind of his auditors a psychic path which, in virtue of the law of least resistance, they are the more likely to adopt, the more satisfactory his refutation may seem, as soon as the adverse party deals with the same question : the mind's curiosity is satisfied beforehand, as it were ; the presentation of this question will no longer arouse the affect, which the retort will neutralize, because the cycle will be completed unwittingly along the path already created. We speak in such a case of a missed effect. An excellent example of this procedure, which thus possesses a deep psychological significance, is communicated below, and it shows that a clever journalist may prove to be at the same time an excellent practical psychologist. From a leading article in The Times, October 12, 1918 : No Shipping Misunderstandings. Germany in straits has not abandoned all her hopes, and one of the most alluring is to divide her enemies. How, her leaders may well be asking, can we hope to divide Great Britain and the United States ? With that question in their minds they are no doubt ponder- ing the account of the wonderful strides made by the United States in merchant ship-building. If Germany were in our place she would be green with envy of American prowess in ship-building. Here, then, to the German, is a fruitful field ready tilled for the sowing of the seeds of division between Great Britain and the United States. He is doing his best to get them sown — ^with poor success, for the manoeuvre is childish in its simplicity ; both the American people and ourselves have known that it would be tried, and it has only to be denounced in public to be stripped of all its petty ingenuity. Mr. Balfour laid a searching finger upon it yesterday. That is the way to treat these poisoned suggestions. They wither when they are dragged to the light [my italics] ; their spawn-beds are darkness, misrepre- sentation, misunderstanding. But that does not mean that we can afford to be careless or in- different about this question of ship-building, etc. It is due to the same painful affect corresponding to unsatisfied curiosity that the unconscious ideation is set to THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 321 work in dreams, and probably in all cases in which the uncon- scious foresees bodily ailments of a nervous nature, as we know from hysterical patients. We close this parenthesis with the remark that the twofold hypothesis of curiosity as an intellectualized wish and the tendency for communication as its counter-reaction gives us at the same time a better insight into the previously expressed opinion that feeling is the reason for knowing, and, we may add now, for imparting our knowledge. What we have discussed in the last few pages is, at bottom, nothing more than the phenomenon which psycho-analysis has called sublimation, the modern aspect of the ontogenetic recapitu- lation by man of the process, ancient as life itself, thanks to which the primitive reaction against environment has led to intellection. We mentioned previously that 'it may happen, when a fore-conscious stream of thought charged with an intense affect tends to rise to the surface and to provoke an intuition, that it is checked in its path by an equally strong repression, so that the mental equipoise is continually threatened and all voluntary aims unattainable. Such are the conditions in agitated sleep. But instead of at once examining this particular aspect of the mental conflict between intuition and repression, we prefer to proceed in chronological order and concentrate our attention first upon the mechanism of sleeplessness. Sleep lias been defined by Claparede from a biological point of view as ^' a phenomenon of disinterest as regards the outer world, or rather — for in the waking state one may be busy with one's own ideas only — of disinterest for the present situation. It constitutes, so to speak, a psychological suicide. The being that goes to sleep renounces ipso facto his perception of the outer world [my italics] ; he ceases to act, to adapt himself accordingly, to live, as it were. It is a momentary abdication." ^ And a little further on the same author explains that " the interest that disappears during sleep is interest in the present situation, viz. the mental ^ Cf. E. ClapakIide, Eaquisse dfun Theorie biologique du Sommeil, p. 307 and passim, in Archives de Psychologie, IV/15-16, 1905. 21 822 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS function thanks to which the animal adjusts its reactions to the outer circumstances." This definition corresponds with Bergson's, for whom " to sleep is to disinterest oneself ; one sleeps in exact proportion as one disinterests oneself." These definitions are confirmed by the present inquiry, inasmuch as the person who goes to sleep renounces perception, not only of the outer world but also of his inner world — ^that is, the internal representations of the outer world. We remember that even fore-conscious perceptions provoke thoughts which end by rising to the surface, where their acknowledgment terminates the sleeping process. In Freud's words, " the censor is the guardian of sleep." According to the definitions of Clapar^de and Bergson there can be no sleep once there is any interest whatever in the phantasies that progress beyond the threshold. When we refer to the observations in the last chapter of the first part of this essay we find, indeed : (a) that the censor may be frankly overpowered by the affects, so that the conscious interest is reawakened ; or (b) that at the gate of consciousness a conflict between the upward and downward tendencies may arise, so that we are not in a state of disinterest and cannot sleep, although we have no conscious knowledge, or only a dim awareness, of this collision ; or (c) that the censor may make an appeal to consciousness, so that will comes to his assistance to interrupt the fore-conscious concatenations ; in all these instances the result of the mental activity is sleeplessness. Finally, there is still a fourth case conceivable, namely, when the struggle of wishes does not reach the conscious level but goes on in the fore-conscious stratum, in which case we speak of agitated sleep. If we were to continue the enumeration we might even add, as a fifth case, the occasions when sleep is accompanied by dreams which do not disturb our rest. By an overpowering of the censor at night by the affects which are at work in fore-conscious thinking we mean those processes in which sudden thoughts rise to the surface, as in the phenomenon of intuition by day, when we cannot help paying attention to the ideas or feelings that are thus ** revealed," or, better, unveiled to us. We have examined at length also the observations in which the censor THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 323 was simply lying to our conscious self in his endeavour to ensure disinterest. We have seen there that my partial awareness was due to the watchfulness of my observation-wish, that prolonged its activity as far as the threshold, and that a layman would have been unable to follow his fore-conscious thoughts as I did on this occasion. Therefore an observation describing this struggle for sleep, dating back to the very first days of my investigations, when my skill at analysis was fairly poor and my inability to recognize the contents of my fore-conscious thoughts complete, may be suggestive. (The description was written on the morning following upon the event.) I had been reading Smoke, by Tourgenieff, and for a little while after I had closed my book and blown out my candle, a complete calm had come over me. But soon the usual wish for ideas that would be useful in my investigations unawares entered my mind. I hoped, however, that sleep would come very soon, for I felt vaguely that all my muscles were relaxed, especially those of the forehead, and a certain haziness had invaded my mind, which I knew to be a usual forerunner of sleep. But at a given moment ideas came to the fore, impetuous and numberless. For quite a while I tried to oppose them, repeating continually to myself : "I will not think — -I will not think," so that I should not lose conscious- ness of my will or give any heed to my obtrusive thoughts. But I soon forgot to repeat the above sentence, and I was again and again acknowledging surging ideas before I was aware of it. I then tried if my new system of defence would not have more success. (I am a bad sleeper whenever I am going through a creative period, and I have tried all sorts of tricks to suppress my fore-conscious ideation in bed. This was my latest invention in that direction : I imagined my brain as a kind of elevated lake, surrounded by a high wall which the ideas came to assail, and I threw them off again as the defenders of a strong castle in the Middle Ages repulsed besiegers.) But the image of the strong castle was lost, continually, as often as my (fore-conscious) attention became attracted by another presentation. However, I at last abandoned my resistance, for at a certain moment a particular idea filled me with enthusiasm. I remember, however, that 824 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS from that time onward my repression did not entirely cease, for more than once I said to myself : " You need not oppose your thinking any more, for you are not wasting your time. This will help to advance your project. As a matter of fact, you are already collecting material for your book." This last sentence confirms our hypothesis that repression is always at work, even automatically, when we wish to suppress it, just as the part of the psychic apparatus which builds the thoughts is permanently active as long as life lasts. However, the power of inhibiting repression increases with the practice of psycho-analysis. Here follows an extract of another observation taken five days later, also showing the mechanism of sleeplessness : " I have finished retracing a phantasy, an operation which has taken thirty minutes. I try hard to get to sleep, but I feel mental fatigue, and inwardly I am very excited, which I attribute to my late exertions. A quarter of an hour later I become conscious again, with the impression that I have been struggling hard to prevent my thoughts from invading the forum of my mind. " A chain of ideas staYts unawares ; I cut it off before it has been able to attain any length. But after a few moments of neutralization I become aware that I am thinking again. I stop it, but in vain ; the process recommences before I am aware of it. I even try to apply my ' wall system,' but inevitably my conscious attention weakens, and I forget to defend my ' elevated lake.' I cannot appease the disturbing ideas that keep sleep at bay. Will not an * indifferent ' chain lead me at last into the unconscious ? " That night the obsession (all about my research work) lasted throughout the night, although I actually fell asleep in the end. When next morning I tried to find out at what particular moment of my mental conflict sleep had over- taken me, I was unable to detect it, but an image came to me instead : I knew that sleep had surprised me while I was thinking entirely about my scientific work, and I had an impression as though a large flat stone had fallen over glowing ashes, which had nevertheless continued to glow all night. These observations^confirro my above remark, that if THE ISSUES OP AFFECTIVE THINKING 325 the mechanism of sleep consists in a reaction of disinterest for the present situation we ought to include in the latter term the present situation of fore-consciousness, where the volitions may be represented by wishes and the elements of consciousness by corresponding affects. They show also that going to sleep is an activity, and that Janet ^ is right in asserting that " looked at from a certain angle sleep is an act ; it requires a certain amount of energy to be decided upon at the opportune moment and to be accomplished correctly." But conversely, the awakening after sleep and the remaining conscious in the daytime are also acts. Repression is still turned against intuition, only it is no longer in the service of the sleep-wish : it assumes the character of a protector of the conscious state ; we expressed this before in other words when we wrote that part of the conscious attention is detached to defend the consciousness against the incursions of the fore-conscious. Therefore, we might define sleeplessness as a particular instance of distraction, and regard hysteria as parallel to both, for some forms of hysteria might be called a systematic distraction bearing upon certain subjects of a sexual character. The same observations establish that our censor possesses the privilege of interrupting our stream of thoughts before the wish-fulfilment is reached ; that is, the censoring bears upon the fore-conscious activity itself, instead of being directed against the affect or the affective idea that it results in, although we may imagine that the latter is the original procedure. We might have come to that conclusion pre- viously, for we exert the same power when the mind is consciously occupied in our waking life. But there the interruption does not take place with so much awareness as when we are striving to fall asleep. Neither was the repression so obvious in the day-dreams which I reproduced on pp. 170- 171, where I showed for the first time the successive awaken- ings from my phantasies, because there my attention was much more attracted by the contents of the thoughts than by the different factors that took part in the thinking process. I will conclude this argument with the inference that if » Cf. p. Janet, Lea Obseaaiona et la PaychastMnie, p. 480, cited by Clapar6de. 826 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS unconcern is the conditio sine qua non of sleep, sleeplessness, on the contrary, is the consequence of a conflict between the two opposing tendencies which we have called intuition and repression. Although both functions are of unconscious origin, as, moreover, are all the elements constitutive of consciousness, a distinction should none the less be made between them : at the frontier between consciousness and fore-consciousness repression has become an instinct for the defence of the territory of the latter against the invaders issuing from the former. Nature has ended by opposing instinct to instinct, wish to wdsh, in a manner imitated by those colonists who train part of the coloured inhabitants as soldiers to subdue the rest of the natives. If we entered still deeper into this discussion, its object would prove to be nothing other than an instance in which free will is opposed to determinism, a problem which can have no further discussion here. Previously we have hinted at a mental state called agitated sleep, which is characterized by a conflict of wishes proceeding beyond the threshold of consciousness. Although the subject is as familiar to all as sleeplessness itself, it may be worth while to give it a few^ moments' consideration. It can, of course, be treated here only parenthetically, but my observations in this connection raise a few questions which to my knowledge have not been hinted at before, and may therefore attract the attention of future investigators. In the description of my mental activity during a period of sleeplessness I omitted to state that it may happen that my stream of thought ceases any longer to progress, but there is no diminution of mental activity and no awakening. The same particular thought returns again and again until I become aware of this " marking time." I then have the impression of turning in a circulus vitiosus. It is as if the thought-processes came to a dead stop, thanks to a kind of equilibrium between the thinking impulse in its tendency to advance and repression in its striving to repulse, both being of equal strength. In these circumstances we awake with a painful impression which corresponds to the affect that caused the rising to the surface. On other occasions the sleeplessness may be due to a THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 327 thought-process which is a mixture of conscious and fore- conscious ideation ; for example, when I am composing letters I often afterwards write them almost exactly as I worded them in my phantasy. It happens very rarely that the fore -conscious composition is a whole sequel of sentences in ordinary epistolary style. Often there are some phrases following naturally upon each other, but then the deliberative procedure which I described in the first pages begins again, so that the two ways of thinking are represented in the result. It ought not to surprise us that we are able to carry on the process of directed thinking on the fore-conscious level, as we know from our dreams that even in unconsciousness we may do the same thing : we may write letters in dreams. In still other instances it has happened that after a long struggle I have succeeded in falling asleep, but that I have nevertheless waked an hour or two later, my mind being busy with the very same ideas that had kept me awake earlier in the night. (These preoccupations are always of a scientific character : I see myself working at my manuscript at the exact place where I left off that evening.) This carrying over of the occupation of waking life into sleep has been described at length by several authors, e.g. by Poincar6 in his Science et M6thode, in Jastrow's book. The Subconscious, etc., and need not be discussed here. Moreover, after the explanation in the foregoing pages one is able, I think, the better to understand this transposition, which may proceed provided it does not provoke too much interest. And after our examination of intuition and repression it will not surprise us either if the pleasure at reaching the longed-for solution rises to the surface and forces admittance into the consciousness. But if it were only to formulate this remark I should not have entered upon the present subject, for I trust the reader will have found the analogy for himself. My reason for recalling the instances of in- vention in dreams, or at least during sleep, is that I want to contrast this occurrence with the following. It frequently happens that in my sleep I compose, and read as though they were the work of another person, texts that are understood only by my second self. The following extracts from my observations will show what is meant : 328 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS " To-day I feel that my brain is tired on awakening. I went to bed last night at 8.30 and fell asleep some time later. At midnight I awoke from agitated sleep, and from that moment until the morning, except for one dream which I don't remember, my mind was busy with my work, and I was only drowsing. My mind's eye followed a written text, and although I understood it clearly to be the repro- duction of phantasies of a scientific nature, I could not make head or tail of it.^ I suppose the text was something like a wTitten fore -conscious concatenation which did not occasion a dream, and as my censor did not let it rise to the surface it went on beyond the threshold, with the result that the struggle between the up and downward tendencies has tired me. On the other hand, I think it did not descend into the deeper strata of the unconscious and become a regular dream because the affinity between the thought-process and the conscious preoccupation was too intense, the fore-conscious interest too vivid, so that it did not fulfil the condition of relative disinterest which renders dream-formation possible. " The feeling of brain fatigue is of the same sort as that which comes to me when I have sat too many hours over my manuscript, a weariness that seems localized in the cerebellum. " But why, then, did my phantasy not result in an invention, as it does so frequently ? Is it because of the strong opposition of the sleep-wish, of which I had been aware all the time ? But at intervals I was also aware that I was quite absorbed by what I was reading. And I am still quite incapable of retracing so much as one word of the text that appeared under my eyes. I remember only that at a given moment I made no further progress in my reading, the same phrase recurring again and again. This annoyed me so much that I finally awoke, and I understand now why this thinking did not lead to an invention : it was checked by the repression, " The thought-impulse and the sleep- wish ended in a dead stop, and the affect resulting from it forced the gate » This I found later to be a mistake in observation : my unconscious self understood the text perfectly, only to my conscious ego was it incom- prehensible. In the subsequent analysis I mixed up the two aspects of the case through my lack of experience of this new phenomenon. THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 329 of consciousness and caused me to awake at a certain moment, as it does in intuition." What I want to emphasize is not so much the mechanism of agitated sleep as the circumstances : first, that although at certain moments I followed the hallucinated text eagerly — • which implies understanding — I no longer understood its meaning when I had returned to the conscious state. The above text shows, firstly, that I remembered only faintly what was in question ; and secondly, that although at the period when I made this observation I was able to retrace any of my associations that occurred before sleep, I was incapable of doing so in the case of the one now under consideration. As soon as I had become aware of this new activity of my mind during sleep, the desire to observe it more closely came to me ; but I regret to say that in this direction I was not very successful, as the reader will judge by the following scanty gleanings. After some fruitless attempts I was able to write in my diary : " (Extract.) I awake at midnight, after having fallen asleep very easily soon after 9.30. This awakening is more or less voluntary, and I provoked it, so to speak, because I had become aware that in my slumber I was busy with my manuscript again. The imaginary work of the moment was concerned with the comparison which I was trying to draw between an ordinary phantasy and the inventive chain. But my comparison did not progress ; the same associating link came back again and again, with the result that I ended by becoming aware that I was again working unconsciously, and consequently that my brain was not resting and that I should be unfit for work in the morning. So I decided to awake, to let the stream of thought rise to the surface. . . . But when, after some ineffectual efforts, I succeeded in opening my eyes and making a light, I could no longer remember the wording of my unconscious comparison and the fore-conscious comments which I had made upon it during the interval between the moment of my becoming aware of my unconscious mental activity and my full awakening. . . . I recollected, however, that in my unconscious mental labour I was comparing, detail by detail, an indifferent 330 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS concatenation with an inventive one, for I know that at a certain moment I made the reflection : ' If I omit to do this my friend X. will criticize my negligence. But as I followed this associating process with pleasure, why did it not terminate in an inspiring thought ? ' I succeeded also in retracing the pre-hypnic phantasy, which may be regarded as the fore-runner of my unconscious elaboration.*' The above reproduction shows that I had, after all, made some progress with my powers of observation, which, however, led me no further than in the two following instances : One morning at four o'clock a woman shrieking in the street underneath my open window woke me suddenly from a quiet sleep. I tried at once to recollect what had been my unconscious thoughts at the moment of interruption, and found that I was just then busy with a nonsensical theory : I was observing how my head threw two shadows of different intensity on the page before me,^ so that the middle of the page was normally lit, but the left and right hand sides were unequally dark, as though two sources of light of different intensity had been standing behind me. Moreover, I brought the three different varieties of lighting thus produced on the page into connection with the conscious, fore-conscious and unconscious states, but in what manner I have quite forgotten. I am tempted to interpret the above-mentioned quietness of my sleep, notwithstanding the unconscious preoccupation about my work, by the circumstance that the latter was nonsensical, and therefore did not correspond or connect with a conscious problem, an affinity which I suppose to be the agency that favours restlessness and awakening from sleep or drowsing. Consequently the formation of non- sensical thoughts in the unconscious would be a means by which the thinking impulse would escape repression and lead to the fulfilment of the sleep-wish. In other words, it would be a compromise between the wish to invent and the sleep- wish, leading to a satisfaction of both at the same time. However, this argument should not be regarded as more than a suggestion. On another occasion I was able to recognize one word of a text which I was considering with satisfaction when THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 331 fully asleep ; and just as I succeeded in isolating this word — it was composed of two syllables — I thought : " Now I am in the fore-conscious state and I have at last succeeded in observing the nature of the texts which I create during my sleep." To my astonishment I found that the word was a good example of glossolaly, the first syllable, '' roit," having an erotic meaning. I found also the meaning of the second syllable and of the whole word. I did not take the precaution of writing the word down, because my fore-conscious censor persuaded me that I had repeated it often enough now to remember it easily when I rose in the morning. But on awakening a few hours later everything had gone except the above details. Although I have no other proof to adduce, I am still convinced that during my sleep I often use glossolalic constructions which my unconscious self under- stands perfectly and follows with pleasure. ^ The phenomenon of glossolaly is fairly well known in psycho-analysis,2 and I have come to wonder whether this form of soliloquy is not one of the latest adaptations of the unconscious, thanks to which it disposes of the elements of speech while evading repression. Indeed, we can only repress those thoughts that correspond to conscious elements ; and just as symbolically expressed ideas, incomprehensible to the censor of consciousness, may develop freely in our dreams and the mind-wanderings of our waking life, so glossolalic discourses may escape repression for the same reason, and thus fulfil the wish. Glossolaly would then mean the use of speech by the unconscious, thanks to a compromise between wish and censor, for the fulfilment of the wish. In this case this phenomenon would also be the converse of visualization in conscious life, which might be defined as the application of a primitive mental activity in the » C. Berguer, in a Note sur le Langage du Reve {Archives de PsychologiCf pp. 213-15, XIV, 1914), relates how in a dream he heard with inner audition the verse : " Un feu toit de petite claire " (a fire roof of small clear), which his fore-conscious mind understood, but which seemed nonsense to his waking self, and which he interpreted as a text devised to escape the censor. > Cf. O. Pfister, Die psych. Entrdtselung der religiosen Glossolalic und der aatomatischen Kryptographie, pp. 427-66, in Jahrbuch, etc., III/1/1911, and Kryptolalie, Kryptographie und unbew. VexierbiM bei Normalen, pp. 130 et seq. in Jahrbuch, etc., V, 1913. 332 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS highest form of consciousness, whilst the use of glossolaly would be the application of the most perfected of our mental instruments in the most primitive form of consciousness. When at the close of this chapter we pass rapidly in review the different points that have been successively discussed, we find that after all intuition is simply the final stage of instinctive thinking, which represents one of " the two great opposite ways in which all organisms behave toward stimuli : they approach them or recede from them. . . . We find these two well-marked differences in behaviour in every organism, whatever its type and place in the scale of animate nature." ^ But, as we have already defined thought — and intuition is only the process through which we become aware of it — as " an adaptation of revived memories to a present situation under the influence of affect or will," thinking is accordingly one of the means .of meeting a stimulus : the meeting is expected to be pleasurable. On the contrary, when we repress we act as though we recoiled from the stimulus as through an anticipation of pain. The seeking for pleasure and the avoidance of pain are both perfectly represented in the conceiving process, and we readily under- stand how Romanes defined mind as " the power of exercising choice." 2 Similarly, if instead of the conceiving process that bears a uniform character in all organisms we conceive the cycle of fore-conscious thinking as a whole, we find the primitive contractions for approach and recession respectively repre- sented by anticipatory wishes : some wishes start sponta- neously the mental activity known as thinking, as a means of meeting the stimulus ; others, as the sleep-wish, start just as spontaneously the opposite tendency, which is to avoid the painful stimulus, although this stimulus may proceed from a thought. The principle of pleasure and pain is here embodied in wishes of such an opposite character that they are irreducible, unless they are disguised. I Cf. J. M. Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the Race, p. 188. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1906, 3rd edition. » Cf. G. J. Romanes, UEvolution mentale chez les Animaux (Paris, Kein- wald, 1884), p. 7. THE ISSUES OF AFFECTIVE THINKING 833 In the highest mental stratum, in consciousness, both tendencies, expressed respectively in thinking and repression, have to a certain degree lost their spontaneity : our will disposes of the censor as it pleases ; in refusing admittance to consciousness to elements rising from the fore-conscious and in checking the invasion of the former, our will also chooses freely the subjects of our directed thinking. Will has thus merged the two great ways of behaviour of primitive life toward stimuli into one function, with the result that although their direction is different, they collaborate to the same end : in waking life repression no longer sketches a receding movement, or its mental simile : it simply keeps the conscious field clear of invaders ; and thinking is no longer directed towards meeting outer stimuli only, but towards the higher aims that proceed from the relative victory of man over nature. Thus the same pleasure-and-pain principle which in the lowest organisms explains adaptation from a biological point of view is recognizable in volition also, which, as already suggested, is the highest form of the primitive tendency to adaptation. Consequently we cannot accept Baldwin's definition of volition as the supreme form of attention. We have defined attention as mental energy that is applied to a memory- element of some sort or other. But when we stubbornly refuse to heed a memory-element that tries to attract our conscious attention, when we set our teeth to keep our affects or spon- taneous thoughts beyond the threshold, as in concentration, we are here again exerting our will, and our aim is now to avoid paying attention to the proscribed assailant. We speak of repression when we apply mental energy to prevent a memory- element or an affect from rising to the surface. Consequently volition is not solely the supreme form of attention ; it is at the same time the supreme form of repression. For that reason we have called will the awareness which we have of the power to use mental energy for a conscious purpose, a definition which includes both aspects of volition. Moreover, this definition offers another advantage : as will is a combination of two different tendencies, we get at the same time the explanation why our will may be ineffective when the weakening of one of its activities provokes the 834 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS loss of mental equilibrium, upon which we have already commented : if repression falters, conscious attention also succumbs. But conversely, if attention obtains assistance from our affects, repression becomes useless and all the mental energy becomes available for attaining the conscious purpose ; the mental performance is of a higher nature. In the latter case the loss of the ordinary equipoise is to the advantage, in the former to the disadvantage, of directed thinking. CHAPTER V VISUALIZATION AND AFFECT In the previous pages we have always been careful, as far as possible, to bring the functions which are active in the fore- consciousness into relation with the corresponding functions of our waking life. This method explains why we have had to postpone the discussion of visualization, for the latter scarcely seems to have any conscious correlate. At least, in the psychology of the present day this phenomenon seems to have provoked but little interest ; however, it may pay to devote some attention to it. There can be no doubt that everybody visualizes more or less in his directed thinking. Individually there are only differences of degree, as we have already argued. In our phantasies our thinking is also as a rule accompanied by images, but to a greater extent than in conscious life, the more so as the mind-wandering leads us closer to a state of affairs analogous to that prevailing in sleep. Such is the conclusion which we may safely draw from the previous pages. Therefore it is not without surprise that I have read Freud's assertion : " The second quality [in the mani- festations of the dream, viz. the transformation of the thought into visual images and into speech], however, is peculiar to the dream as distinguished from the day-dream, namely, the presentation content is not thought, but changed into perceptible images, to which we give credence and which we believe ourselves to experience." ^ Indubitably the pictures accompanying our musings do not strike us as vividly as do those that characterize our day-dreams, and that may be the reason why they are often unperceived by our conscious self. But after the » Cf. S. Fbeud, The Interpretation of Dreams, op. cit., p. 124. 335 336 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS previous analyses there can be no question of doubting the presence of plastic representations in most of our day- dreams. This point being established, we ask ourselves what may be the significance of the transformation of our thoughts into fanciful representations in the three stages of conscious- ness. And is this significance the same in the three different levels ? We must again solicit observation to solve the problem. We remember that in the first part we started by re- tracing visualization in the form of revived remembrances : in the Folkestone phantasy it seemed as though the pictures of the past allured my mind into the path of regression. But further, we have observed that our mental vision also represents in vivid scenes newly created thoughts and actions hypothetically introduced : the " suppose I did " becomes an optical delusion in which " I am doing." In the instance of revived memory-pictures we have more the impression of being merely spectators. In the latter case it is our own activity, as we gaze at it, which leaves the strongest im- pression on our mind. In visual recollections one might be tempted to see a simple regression to the primitive form of memory. For if we try to imagine what the contents of memory must have been before the appearance of speech, what else can have been retained but images — visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, etc. ? But if my definition of creative thinking be correct, as " recalling at the right moment to the right purpose," primitive thinking can only have been an asso- ciation of memorial images. Accordingly, when instead of recollecting we think in images — though with a verbal scheme in the background — we simply reproduce an ancient mode of conceiving which must still be the thought- mechanism at the disposal of all superior organisms deprived of speech. Visual recollecting is but one phase of this process, which we employ again almost wholly in our dreams, asleep or awake. Indeed, the use of this immemorial way of thinking is not limited to our dreams only. As already recalled, since Binet's study of the different intellectual types, the expressions " visual type," " auditory type," etc.. VISUALIZATION AND AFFECT 337 have become quite familiar, which implies that the archaic process of thinking still characterizes our conscious life. We constantly meet with people who visualize their reading, or are accustomed to represent to their mental vision, to translate into pictures, all the expressions that they hear ; and this procedure has often a comical effect. I have a friend whose memory is easily excited by his olfactory nerves : the smell of hay brings him the optic delusion of a farm t^-which he used to go in his youth : the odour of unpeeled potatoes recalls the summer holidays of his younger days, because at that time he used to help his uncle during the potato harvest. The sight of a lemon may make somebody's mouth water (gustatory recollection). In short, in everyday life the instances of recollecting without any verbal elements are numerous, and so are those in which fresh thoughts — one's own or somebody else's — are visualized. But a little reflection might have told us this without any further discussion : when any outer stimulus, other than a word, reaches our sensible organ, what else but appropriate images are always spontaneously revived to take part in the process of apperception ? Normally we are not aware of the inter- vention of perceptible images in our directed thoughts. There are, however, a few cases in which visual thinking in the conscious state causes great wonder and seems quite puzzling, as in the phenomenon known as crystal-gazing. The details that follow are borrowed from Jastrow ^ : " We describe this gift as a knack of developing the subconscious images by fixing the eyes upon a reflecting surface and noting the fleeting pictures that form thereon, apparently without conscious direction. Naturally, so subtle a process does not remain steadily at our command ; it is the occasional successful visions that illuminate the subconscious entrances of impressions that appear opportunely in this psycholo- gical mirror, " Miss X., one of whose observations will presently be cited, pertinently remarks (in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research^ vol. viii.) that ' it is just the things « Cf. J. Jastrow, Th* Subconscious^ pp. 102 et seq. London, Constable & Co.. 1906. 22 I 338 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS that we see without noticing at all which the crystal is calcu- lated to bring to our attention,' and she also notes, as a requisite for exercising this power, that ' every crystal-gazer I ever met with has been a good visualizer.^ ^ As an illustra- tion of her own powers she remarks : ' For example, I have forgotten the day of the month : I read The Times this morn- ing, and I chanced to remember that the first name in the Births was Robinson. My power of visualization enabled me to create in the crystal a picture of the top of the first column ; my memory, helped by this association, does the rest. I carry my eye along and see that the date is Sep- tember 6th.' " Here is another observation cited by Jastrow : " In the afternoon, in a conversation not addressed to the narrator, the name of Palissy^ was mentioned. A look into the reflecting surface showed a man hastily tearing up some wooden garden-palings ; and before I had time to wonder what this meant it was followed by another picture, all in red, of the corner of the library where as a child I kept my books, including one distinctly recognizable, which I have not seen these fifteen years, called The Trials of Madame Palissy, It w^as then recalled that one of the trials was that Pahssy fed the furnace for his pottery with the house- hold furniture rather than imperil the success of his labours." These cases, as the reader will have noted, concern merely visualized recollections which by a peculiar disposition seem to appear within the reflecting surface. I have no examples at my disposal in which newly created ideas have thus been followed in an optical illusion, but from what we know of the fantastic scenes of our day- and night-dreams we should not be surprised if similar scenes had been recorded. There are, however, some observations available describing the reproduction in the crystal of scenes that have only been unconsciously perceived. Crystal-gazing thus appears to be a special case of the faculty of visualization that is normal to a certain degree in every individual even in waking life, and constitutes for^plastic artists the first condition of their creative power. « The italics are mine. « The French re inventor of ceramic enamelling. VISUALIZATION AND AFFECT 33d How narrowly this natural disposition is related to the phenomenon of hallucination will be shown by the following observations : We were playing auction bridge, and in a certain game I had expected to win four tricks with my partner. When the game was over, one of my opponents said, " You have three tricks." I protested, and pointing to the cards, that were neatly arranged in packets of four in front of me on the table, I replied : "I beg your pardon, we have four and you have lost." I really perceived four, but after a short discussion I counted them four at a time and found that I was wrong : I had hallucinated four. For those who might doubt that it was really my strong desire, my preoccupation, that caused this optical delusion, I cite the following case, that differs from the above in one im- portant detail only : '' Dr. A. was walking along the streets of Paris, his thoughts intent upon an examination in botany which he was soon to face. Suddenly his eye was caught by an inscription on the glass door of a restaurant showing the words ' verhascum thapsus.^ This seemed rather an unusual legend, and now, with keener alertness as to his surroundings, he retraced his steps and discovered the real inscription to be ' Bouillon.' ^ It appears that the plant verhascum or mullein is popularly known as ' bouillon blanc' Thus the hastily and subconsciously observed ' bouillon * arouses an association with its popular synonym, and after the manner of a waking dream projects itself as an illusory visualization, taking definite form by virtue of the dominant botanical interest." The main difference between my observation and that of Jastrow lies in the circumstance that Dr. A. was more struck than I by his hallucination, because of its improb- ability. But my illusion was none the less provoked by a hallucination, for I perfectly distinguished four tricks, and it is probable that similar delusive visions occur to every- body, but are not noticed because they miss the charac- teristic of being extraordinary and therefore do not attract conscious attention. If we were called upon to point out a common character » Bouillon = soup, but used in Paris as the appellation for any popular restaurant. 840 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS in all the above data, we should have to admit that all the intellectual elements which we have successively considered seem to have taken an illusory concrete form ; they have all been transferred into some image ; they are inseparable from reality as our senses perceive it. Whenever a visualization appears in our directed think- ing we may say that our modem acquisition, thinking in words, is accompanied to a certain extent by the primitive process of thinking in sensory images. The importance of the latter increases in the same proportion as the mind tends to revert to affective thinking, either voluntarily, as when we make use of the mental dispositions of our second self (in wit-formation, invention and inspiration), or in- voluntarily, as in mind-wandering, in psychopathological cases, in night-dreams or in the psycho-neuroses. The gentleman who repHed to the lady that he could *' fan a flirt," in answer to her question whether he could flirt a fan, concretized " flirt " as a woman.^ The Jew in the following joke did something similar : " Two Jews meet near a bathing establishment. ' Have you taken a bath ? * asked one. ' Why,' replied the other, ' is one missing ? * " 2 Obviously, beside the technique of displacement, the man identifies taking with stealing, one of the concrete meanings of that verb. In many wit -formations the tendency to render words with an abstract meaning by something real may be observed. In the few instances of day-dreams that ended in motor innervations, we have seen the same tendency at work. When I thought in my musings " Je ne vais pas me d^bou- tonner trop vite," meaning " I shall not show my hand too soon," I found that I was really buttoning the side- pocket of my trench-coat. And in the sentence " I am going to go and eat," I unconsciously understood " to go " as " to walk," and took up my walking-stick in my distraction. Hysterical patients act in a similar fashion, as, for instance, the woman whom Pfister cured 3 of neuralgia in the face, from which she had suffered for years. The treatment was I Cf. A. Bhill, Psychanalysis, p. 336, 2nd ed. » Cf. S. FuEXTD, Der Witz, etc., op. cit., p. 37. 3 Cf. O. Pfister, Die Psychanalytische Methode, op. cit., p. 233. VISUALIZATION AND AFFECT 841 completed after he had discovered as trauma an insult from the husband. " During the narration of the scene she brings her hand to her cheek, cries out in pain and says, ' I felt it like a slap in the face.' She also had unconsciously inter- preted her thought in a concrete manner.'* With the last observation we have entered fully into the domain known in psycho-analysis as symbolization, of which there are innumerable examples in our night-dreams. The general conclusion which we have to draw from all these data is far from novel : abstraction is a mental process ignored by the unconscious, and the traces of this incapacity reappear every time the human mind concretizes abstractions. This leads us to another inference which is not new, namely, that every hallucination is the illustrative correlate of a normal verbal thought. But, as we have pointed out before, one should distinguish hallucination from visionary or auditory recollecting. We reserve the former name for the new mental combinations in which the images strike us more than the words they stand for. The hallucination may go so far that we even become the victims of our muscular sense. One night, after a long fruitless struggle to fall asleep, I suddenly felt terrified. My left arm was hanging out of bed, and all at once I fancied that I was grasping something fibrous, like a small truss or a cushion filled with hay. It was as though somebody tried to pull it down whilst I endeavoured to lift it into the bed, so that it remained suspended in the air. The more I pulled the more resistance I felt. My eyes were closed, still I saw the upper part of the object quite distinctly, and a feeling of terror invaded me, for I wondered all at once whether some- body might be hidden under my bed and also what was the reason of this pulling. The spell was soon broken, however, and I awoke. We have thus tried to establish a connection between the different instances of visualization which we have so far ex- amined : at one end of the scale are scarcely perceived illustra- tions accompanying directed verbal thinking ; at the other extreme, when our consciousness is dismissed, are hallucina- tions in which even the motor system may have its share. What is the common thread between these extreme 842 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS cases ? In our opinion it may be conceived as follows : Let us take the simplest operation of waking life — per- ception. If we hear somebody talking, we transform the sensation into a perception by a process of identification which spontaneously sets our memory to work. Some pre- disposed persons possess the faculty of reaching in the course of this regression not only the upper stratum of memory, where we suppose the w^ords to be kept in store, but the low^est level, the primitive chamber of mental images. We say of those people that they are of the visual (or olfactory, or auditory, etc.) type, because their conscious processes are characterized by a peculiarity which generally becomes apparent only in fore-conscious thinking. Most people do not of themselves know that they belong to such or such a psychological classification, because they have no awareness for their peculiar disposition unless their attention be specially drawn to it. Similarly, we are not aware that we use our memory in the process of appercep- tion, or that we make an effort at recollecting when we are thinking consciously. (We have the latter awareness only when we want to remember something purposely and unsuc- cessfully.) We might add also that we are but seldom cognizant of the fact that we are performing the act of thinking. But whereas only a few minds are so organized that the simple apperceiving process may bring to the surface the representation of the stimulating words only, this reviving of images is, for the thinking that goes on during sleep, characteristic of everybody. (We insist that thinking is a particular way of reviewing memories.) The day-dreams proceed under intermediate conditions : as the present in- vestigation has shown, they are a mixture of verbal and pictorial thoughts in ever- varying proportions. Some persons, however, as the above examples of crystal- gazing show, present the peculiarity of transforming their perceptions into images, which they project, as it were, on a crystal screen, although this is only an optical illusion ; nobody beside themselves is able to see these projections. They share this gift of imagination with most artists. Some of those people who are known as witty have a kindred gift. They, too, are able to transform their perceptions of verbal VISUALIZATION AND AFFECT 343 elements into images. But I do not mean to say that they go so far as to perceive these images consciously. I have already used the verb " to concretize " ; I mean thereby that they perhaps perceive them unconsciously, as when, lost in thought, we stop before a friend's door. I imagine that they visualize them without awareness, exactly as persons of the visual type, but react to their unconscious perceptions in the Way described by Freud in his famous book, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten. I lay stress upon the circumstance that this explanation does not hold good for all cases of wit-formation ; and also that a similar reasoning might be applied in other instances to auditory and other representations. We have seen above that the tendency of the unconscious to think in images instead of in words may lead to symboliza- tion. We fully agree, however, with Dr. Ferenczi, who states that " the symbols do not originate in language, but the figures of speech originate from symbols." ^ And further, there can be no doubt that in the instances which we have previously examined the symbols are due to the circumstance that our unconsciousness understands verbal ex- pressions in their concrete instead of in their abstract meaning. But we haste to add that the contradiction is only apparent. Jung has established in a masterly manner the eternal nature of a certain number of symbols, throughout the history of humanity, in his Psychology of the Unconscious^^ independently of the different languages of the earth. But when symbols proceed from a verbal expression we are in presence of a phenomenon which we have already observed in another of its aspects. We have already remarked that phylo- genetically affective thinking proceeded in images before the appearance of speech ; still, in our phantasies speech nowadays plays an important role. The explanation is that this process is a modern adaptation, a primitive pro- cedure applied with more recently acquired means. Simi- larly, symbols deriving from speech constitute a compromise I Cited by Otto Rank, Die SymboUchichtung im Wachtraum und ihre Wiederkehr im mythischen Denken, p. 100, Jahrbuch, etc., IV/1, 1912. » Cf. also the above study by O. Rank. 844 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS between a peculiarity of primitive thought and modern means of expression. But if the gradual diminution of the degree of conscious- ness seems to be correlated in an automatic manner with a corresponding increase of visualization, what may be the nature of the connection between these two phenomena ? A priori we are inclined to admit that this relation is con- stituted in some way or other by the affective elements, for in the previous chapters we have been obliged to recog- nize them as the originators of all the mental processes which we have successively examined. We follow up the hint, and have no difficulty in pointing to numerous instances in which visualization or hallucination is accompanied by strong feelings. It has been shown before that in cases of apparitions seen by nuns, for example, the exalted religious feelings of the subjects are obvious. Stekel relates in his book on dreams ^ the case of a general who for several days after the loss of his daughter, an event which put his nerves to a severe test, hallucinated his child in different surround- ings and performing several actions which he had seen her perform during her lifetime. During the war a libidi- nously disposed messmate once lent me a French novel which he described as " a book which one should read only in the conjugal bed.'* And he was quite right, for it provoked such erotic visions that I declined to complete the perusal. (Still, some consider it as a work of art, because it reconstitutes the life of a high-class Egyptian courtesan of the period of the Pharaohs, but it is extremely powerful in evoking Eros in the reader.) These remarks will suffice to show that at least during our waking life there may exist a connection between affect and visualization in its different degrees.* » Cf. W. Stekel, Die Sprache des Traumes, pp. 487-8. * J. KoLLABiTS, in the conclasions drawn in his essay, Observations de Psychologie quotidienne, Chapitre I, Stir les images visuelles qui accompagneni la representation des individus et des lieux inconnua, in Archives de Psychologie, XIV, 1914, writes (p. 240) : " Our thoughts are thus often accompanied by visual images, hallucinations or reveries. These pictures are memorial images. When one thinks of an individual whom one does not know or an unvisited spot, one often has visual images, especially when the individual or the place offers some interest to us. The agreeable or disagreeable im- pression attached to. these objects of thought tends in these circumstances to help us to determine these images'' (italics mine). VISUALIZATION AND AFFECT 345 Affective thinking in the fore-conscious state is always accompanied ,by optical delusions, in varying proportions, as we have seen. We have even found that primitively affective ideation disposed only of images. Accordingly, the wish must originally have been the reviving agent of plastic images dormant in the memory. Therefore we may safely conclude that there is indeed a close relation between visualization and affect. We infer from this that persons belonging to the visual type might prove in the end to be of a more affective disposition than others. We know already that this is true of hysterical patients, whose life often passes in the midst of the creations of their fancy. It remains to be proved for normal persons. Anyhow, we no longer wonder why Stekel has defined hallucination as " a day-dream that has become plastic , . . a dream controlled by consciousness." I cannot resist the temptation to propound at this point yet another problem which has puzzled me for years. As a teacher I have more than once observed how boys whose general results were very poor, especially in mathematics, were excellent draughtsmen, and in this subject at the top of their form. I often wondered whether there existed any correlation between the incapacity for abstraction, the propensity to visualize, and an affective disposition. This is a subject which in my opinion is worthy of investigation. There are certain examples contradicting my hypothesis; but one does not meet every day with a universal mind, like that of Leonardo da Vinci. Finally, I wish at this stage to insert another remark in connection with visualized thinking. In Chapter II I have written that " the visual elements depend upon the thought- process ; it seems as though the verbal thought- content of the chains gives the direction to the visual representation, not as though the latter prescribes the path which it has to follow. At present we are able to some extent to correct this statement. Freud is of opinion that the uncon- scious ignores the hypothesis ; the same cannot be said of the fore-conscious. Indeed, if we consider organized life at a stage before the appearance of any consciousness whatever, there is no doubt that beings of this type are capable 346 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS of a certain adaptation. Adaptation, however, presupposes the power of some form of recollection and of some com- parison between the old and the new conditions of the outer world : the old environment, adaptation to which exists, and the new, adaptation to which is to be attained. The alternative implies a certain form of hypothesis : if the stirmili are so-and-so, the reactions will be so-and-so ; if the stimuli are not so-and-so, the reactions will vary accord- ingly. We repeat that this choice need not imply conscious- ness. Nevertheless, the hypothesis is present in the primi- tive psyche, although there may be no awareness of it. Higher up the animal scale, man excluded, we have a still greater degree of assurance that hypotheses may be con- ceived, but in all the organisms under consideration the suppositions are not thought in words, as speech has not been acquired. What I wish to point out is that the power to conceive hypothetically is independent of speech. Conse- quently, it is quite possible that when we are thinking fore- consciously we do not necessarily think in words or introduce our suppositions with *' ifs " and similar particles. All that is required is that the mind should retain the idea that the representations — visual, auditory, etc. — ^which occupy it are only suppositions and not purely recollections. We see thus that fore-consciousness uses the same means — images — for recollecting and for constructive thinking ; all that is wanted to give their special character to the images is a certain mental function that distinguishes the repre- sentations used for creative purposes from simple remem- brances. We shall call this function fore-conscious presence of mind. It is when this factor is in abeyance that we say that memory unfolds its contents automatically, that the mind drifts on the stream of the past. But whereas all the beings considered thus far are, as far as our knowledge goes, devoid of any means of communi- cating their suppositions as such to their fellow-creatures, man has found in speech an adequate instrument for express- ing his hypotheses, and is also able to characterize them for the second person as suppositions, divorced from the reproduction of actual happenings. The words introducing hypothetical data are the translation of an individual im- pression intended for communication to others, and it is VISUALIZATION AND AFFECT 847 only thanks to this impression that we know whether we are thinking or recollecting merely. Consequently it is conceivable that the individual may resign these words when his ideas are not intended for communication, as when we are day-dreaming, when we occupy ourselves with our most secret repressed thoughts. In our phantasies we may perfectly well think in images, the hypothetical character of our representations being kept in mind ; we may renounce all verbal elements, so that we must modify our previous statement and say that it looks as though the verbal elements alone completely render the meaning of the visual representations that are entertained by the mind. Speech serves not only to describe our mental representations, but also to render the intention with which we revive them. The verbal element discloses the special character of the repre- sentations, or the end to which they are revived, that is to say, the nature of the mental operations. Consequently, when in my day-dreams I am thinking in images — or even in words — it may seem from a conscious point of view that I am fascinated by the representations that are spontaneously revived and attract and occupy my fore-conscious attention. My conscious self has lost the direction of the thought-process, but the association does not proceed at haphazard ; my fore-conscious self — except in cases of memory-drifting — is not fascinated by the images, but presides over the mental processes. It drops — that is, it forgets — the representations that do not suit it, directs them toward an affective aim, toward the solution of the wish that is active, and always tends toward the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure. The fore- consciousness does not lose sight of the hypothetical character of the representations, and exercises a choice between them. So that we come to the conclusion (1) that fore-consciousness does not ignore hypothesis ; (2) that visual thinking may proceed independently of speech ; (3) that directed thinking is a bad term, as is realistic think- ing also, because some of my day-dreams tend to help me in real life. Affective thinking is better, or voluntary thinking. At the conclusion of this chapter hallucination does not seem to us so pathological as some authors have conceived. A certain small proportion of it is as normal as day-dreaming 348 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS itself, and it is probably in this sense that one ought to interpret Aristotle's oft-quoted statement " that all vivid thinking must be in images.'* Another remark which I wish to offer is that pictography as man's first procedure for perpetuating his ideas, and the forerunner of all forms of writing, acquires a new meaning after this discussion of affective thinking in plastic pictures as the origin of our conscious verbal thought-processes. From quite another point of view this argument may to some extent help to explain the success of the cinemato- graph as a popular amusement and a means of education. It has been emphasized before that visualizing is an infantile process, and this is so in the sense that the child, with its strongly developed affective life, its plastic phan- tasies, its errors in interpreting the speech of adults, and all its peculiar methods tending to concretization, simply recapitulates the ways of thinking acquired by. the race. Artists have been defined as adults partly in the infantile stage. What has been called their infantilism would be more appropriately designated their primitiveness. For an artist without a delicate emotivity is unthinkable, and visualization plays an important role in all the expressions of art. It is not only in the plastic art that the practitioner has a special eye for colour or line, or both at the same time. Hebbel's statement that " the poet creates from contem- plation " is true of novelists and orators as well ; and com- posers, too, know how to utilize their auditory hallucinations. As to scientists, I have promised to myself to prove in a later essay that a certain amount of visualization and affect is not absent from their labours either. Bergson's assertion that " speech only marks out the several halting-places of thought " is true in more than one sense, and it has required all the foregoing pages of this book summarily to describe the different psychic mechanisms of which the human word does not give the slightest account. After having thus analysed the role of affects in the different processes which constitute the mechanism of day- dream formation, I shall consider my task fulfilled when I have briefly emphasized the significance of affective think- ing for our conscious life. Ill CONCLUSION THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DAY-DREAMS Many authors have quaHfied day-dreaming as an abnormal psychic process. Such is, of course, a consequence of the fact that psycho-analysis in its present stage is a young science, the first results of which have been acquired almost exclusively through the study of abnormality. Such is the history of the first developments of every branch of science. However, even for the psycho-analyst who limits his observa- tions to the ideative processes of normal persons only, day- dreaming is a kind of parasitic function, living on the mental energy reserved for our conscious life. But our musings lose this character altogether as soon as they are tolerated by our censor, or even resorted to as a means of solving problems which lie beyond the scope of voluntary thinking. We often seek inspiration in the smoke of a cigar, which means that we loosen the reins of repression and leave the field free to our affective thinking. We are also wont to defer a decision until the next day, because " la nuit porte conseiV^ When fresh conceptions come to us in such a way, who would think of calling the process abnormal ? L^ay- dreaming is a hindrance only when it disturbs our voluntary mental functions. If we consider the phenomenon from an exclusively fore-jconscious viewpoint, we may follow the example of Maeder ^ and regard day-dreaming as a process and dis- tinguish the phantasy as a product. When Freud conceives the nocturnal dream as the guardian of sleep, does he not mean hereby that the affective process, which is not allowed to rise to the surface and awake us, succumbs to the censor and is sent to the unconscious * Cf. A. Maeder, Ueber die Funktion des Traumes, op. cit. {Jahrbuch etc., IV, 1912, pp. 692^707). 351 352 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS stratum, where it takes on such a disguise that it is un- recognizable by our consciousness, so that no awakening is caused ? Indeed, it is only the violent emotions which it sometimes provokes that are recognized by our conscious ego and are followed by a momentary disturbance of sleep. Dream-formation realizes a double aim : the ever-present wishes must not cease their thought-inciting influence during the night ; their action continues without cessation. But the mental associations which they cause are rendered harmless to our rest by the mystery with which they are enveloped. We think and sleep at the same time. There is reaction, but scarcely any abreaction. - In day-dreams the conditions are somewhat different. We have distinguished between phantasies with a plain meaning and others of a symbolic nature. Both varieties tend toward abreaction — ^that is, toward an invasion of the motor system, or what stands for it — a breaking through to consciousness. The irruption into motility is carried out in a manner of which v/e may or may not become aware ; the first alternative is realized when the affective thoughts manifest themselves in the form of mistakes and erroneously performed actions, and in the formation of jests, puns, etc. Whenever the contents of the fore-conscious chains are condemned by our ethical censor their abreaction may take place through our motor system, but it always takes place without awareness, as in musical obsessions, for example, and in all the symptoms of hysterical and neurotic patients.* Many acknowledged mind-wanderings are admitted to the consciousness and there terminate, also being expressed either by a bodily contraction or by a motor reaction through the organs of oral or written speech. Acknowledged musings have much in common with conscious thoughts, to which we shall presently devote some attention. Un- acknowledged phantasies — which many authors call uncon- scious fancies — bear more resemblance to nocturnal dreams and are more closely related to the products of the unconscious » Cf. O. Pfister, Die Psyclumalytische Methode, op. cit., p. 263: " Jede neurotische Ersoheinung ist nur die automatische Verwirklichung einer autistische Phantasie." THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DAY-DREAMS 353 I sphere. But both acknowledged and unacknowledged day dreams appear as thought-processes originated by inner stimuH and tending toward exteriorization that may or may not be for some time delayed. We cannot help think ing affectively, as we cannot help feeling physical or sexual hunger, as the animals cannot help following their instincts or the amoeba reacting against its environment. Day-dreaming as a process is a manifestation of the! universal energy. » If we now examine the day-dream as a product of affec- tive thinking on the fore-conscious level we cannot deny it a teleological character. Like nocturnal dreams, day- dreams betray preoccupations with unsolved problems, harassing cares, or overwhelming impressions which require accommodation, only their language is not as sibylline as that of their unconscious correspondents. Moreover, their end -representation is oftener of a more immediate and topical character. But they all strive toward the future ; they all seem to prepare some accommodation, to obtain some prospective advantage for the ego ; in fine, they are attempt s . ^J'^,gjr>Qp tation : such is their biological meaning . They com- plete the functions of consciousness without our mental alertness. One ought, hov/ever, to make here a distinction between the fancies that are started in earnest (for example, the musings upon my future) and phantasies originating in play : in most countries of the Old Continent there is a familiar saying beginning with " my uncle in America " who will die some day and leave a big fortune. This points to " c astles in the air " which have been built by everybody, but no one becomes the victim of his imagination, for we all know from the outset that we have no " uncle in America." We merely ^experience pleas ure_i n the pha ntasy built byv th e play of our fancy , anTjn th is sense aa ydireuiElSe,! lik^- night -dreams^ compensator sT of our l3onsciou sness. | Maeder attaches to this particular aspect ot the activity of"^ our fore-consciousness the same importance as K. Groos t^play in general ^ For this author, as is well known, play in _tlie'"yoTihg ^n^ans preliminary exercise, a preparation *" for later adult life. Maeder sees in the nocturnal dream a 23 354 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS secondary function, having the same biological meaning as play. There can be no doubt that the play of our fancy in mythical phantasies about the " uncle in America " and the like has the same biological meaning, which is only less direct than in the musings in which we seek fore-conscious solutions for the troubles of our waking life. When affective thinking is caused by desires in connection with intellectual pursuits, the French speak of " imagination creatrice,''^ which is a modern adaptation of a primitive thought-process, and which we have regarded as nothing but a special instance of day-dreaming. More- over, our whole study is an argument against Jung's state- ment, who contrasts the two ways of thinking in the following terms : " Directed thinking is meant for communication, proceeds with verbal elements, is laborious and exhausting ; day-dreaming or phantasy, on the contrary, works without e ffort, spontaneously, so to speak, with the reminiscences. f^The former produces new acquisitions and adaptations, imitates / reality and tries to influence it. The latter, on the contrary, deviates from reality, frees subjective wishes, and is quite unproductive in respect of adaptation. " ' (the italics are mine). Obviously this assertion, which is a reproduction of W. James's opinion, dates back to a period when the inquiry had only taken into account the affective intellection of abnormal sub- jects, for in an essay published six years later we read : *' But imagination (because of the phantasies) has a bad reputa- tion amongst psychologists, and up to now the psycho- analytical theories have treated it accordingly. For Freud, as for Adlej, imagination is simply the veil called 'symbolic,' under which the tendencies and primitive wishes which these two investigators suppose dissimulate themselves. But one may object to this opinion — not on a theoretical principle but for essentiall}' practical reasons — that if it is possible to explain and to depreciate imagination in its causation, the former is nevertheless the creative source of everything that has ever meant for humanity a progress in life. Imagination has its own irreducible value as a psychic function, with roots plunging at the same time into the * Cf. C. G. Jung, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, op. cit., p. 136. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DAY-DREAMS 355 contents of consciousness and into those of unconscious- ness." ^ This statement agrees better with our findings. In the previous pages we have examined a good number of instances of assistance which our conscious self gets from our affective thinking : it prepares its plans for the future, composes the text of letters to be written, devises means and arguments for prospective discussions, warns me that I am in the wrong train, that I should not miss an appoint- ment, puts forgotten memories at my disposal at the very- moment when I want them most — facts which, with other similar ones, make Jastrow hint at our unconscious ego that watches over our safety when our waking thoughts are busy elsewhere. ^ Others before me have pointed out that day-dreamingl offers an escape from a censorship that is too stringent in its\ repression, and consequently constitutes a safety-valve for \ the abreaction of strong affects. This is the cathartic \ aspect of mind-wandering.j Maeder in this respect speaks i of the appeasing function of day- and night-dreaming. v From whatever side we approach the spontaneous opera- tions of the fore-conscious, we are bound to admit that they tend toward the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure, in which our phantastic thinking shows its common teleo- logical end with ail instincts discernible in nature. At the conclusion of this study a brief comparison between conscious and fore-conscious thinking, carried out only as far as our observations indicate, will recall, in a final summing up, the different data resulting from outl investigation. After all, voluntary thinking is superior to its affective correspondent in that in the former the mind maintains its mastery over our affects. In passing from affective to voluntary intellection, humanity has had to solve the problem of repression, and a simultaneous lifting above the threshold of consciousness of certain subliminal processes. When we direct our thinking we may follow a procedure quite analogous to fore-conscious ideation. Let us take the example of a journalist whose task it is to write a leader, » Cf. C. G. Jung, La Structure de VInconscient, p. 173, in ArchivcM dc Psychologie, XVI, 19. 7. S56 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS say, about the revolution in Germany. What else will he do but reflect ? That is to say, he will refer to his memory and try to revive all the remembrances about " Germany " and " revolution " that are stored in his mind, so that he may find the arguments that he requires. Instead of asking himself in so" many words " Shall I use this or that argu- ment ? " or " What if I made my article tragical ? " or '* Shall I anathematize the Kaiser and the Crown Prince once again ? " he nevertheless makes one supposition after another and accepts or rejects them. But his judgment is so sure that he does not consider any hypothesis for any length of time except voluntarily ; most of them are rejected as soon as they are revived : he uses short-cuts. Although he is not aware of it, he employs exactly the same method of hypothesis and retort, or queries and responses, which we have found characteristic of affective thinking, although with some improvements which we shall exangiine. W^hen it is an outer stimulus which is at the genesis of our voluntary thinking, the apperceiving process is never protracted ; we perceive logically as the nature of the stimulus indicates beforehand, and not as our affects impose. Neither is the perception imconscious, but always reaches our aware- ness. But in the conscious as well as in the fore-conscious state the apperceiving process is performed spontaneously without the intervention of our conscious self. When we choose to start our voluntary thought with a recollection — an inner stimulus — it is not a memory-element determined by our emotions that comes to the fore ; it is a voluntarily revived one. So that in both cases — outer and inner stimulus — the influence of our conscious self determines the nature of our perception, a consequence of which is that any drifting on the stream of memory is suppressed. In the act of recollecting itself our conscious ego declines to take any further notice of the condemned presentations either at the end or in the middle of the association ; con- scious attention is at the free disposal of the will. In other words, the will may last longer than the conscious attention which it may devote to a chosen subject. The fore-conscious attention of which the wish disposes lasts only as long as the wish itself ; the two are not independent of one another : THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DAY-DREAMS 357 they are both spontaneous and fugacious, fit is in the act of conceiving that the difference between^^oluntary and affective thinking is carried farthest ; the consciousness condemns proposed solutions which the fore-conscious would admit because its discriminating power is smaller ; it does not so easily lead to absurdity ; and besides this greater practical value of the conscious judgment, the latter is the depository of the ethical law, which on the fore -conscious level does not always penetrate even so far that human life is sacred to it. From another point of view, the spon- taneous recollecting in the act of conceiving may lead the fore-consciousness astray, but in conscious thinking the end- representation is never lost sight of, so that this unsteadiness is avoided. The fore-consciousness uses verbal elements only in their concrete meaning. Consciousness may employ both their concrete and their abstract senses. 1 All the memory-elements which in the course of the voluntary thinking process have been successively revived may be maintained above the level of consciousness, may be confronted with one another, and eliminated or retained for the ultimate purpose. The fore-consciousness is unable to do this. It can only consider one element at a time, and cannot critically review the preceding associations, for it has no awareness for either past or future. Conscious thinking appears thus as a mental process analogous to fore-conscious thinking, but in which the defects engendered by the emotions have been eliminated with the elimination of the affects themselves. It seems an adaptation, an overpowering of the affective thought- processes by will, with the result that the mind does not any longer react instinctively, automatically, but only at *J the command of our volition. I Conscious thinking is the / result of the domestication of our selves. But it is in affec- tive thinking that we observe for the first time in evolu- tion the development which the inner process has acquired in later stages, which has ended by rendering it independent / of the outer world as well as of the body. For memory! replaces the milieu as exciting agent, and replaces also the I muscular system as the agency for abreaction. It make^ the mental organ sufficient to itself.j 358 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS If we next inquire into the role of consciousness as current observation shows it, we soon remember that it is double : waking thought presides over our actions toward the outer world, which constitutes its most primitive aspect, and also enables us to pass on to speculative intellection. If^^^consciousness were only the name for the sense of reality— a quanly which Romanes recognizes as being as low down in the animal scale as the molluscs ^ — it would present no special interest for our present purpose. It fallows the organism to meet arid control the outer world j without strong emotion and with full alertness ; it gives us \the mastery over our motility and allows us to postpone jthe end-reaction indefinitely. Its role becomes clear if we think of the results which a continuous absentmindedness would have in our physical and social life. But if by con- sciousness we understand the power which we possess to think independently of any environmental conditions, we come back again to the object of our study. Thinking which aims at individual adaptation, at whatever level it takes place, is a process through which the ego comes into contact with the outer world ; it is therefore necessarily egocentric. >A11 authors agree that phantastic thinking also places the ego in the centre of the preoccupations ; still, we have come across a certain number of musings which did not exactly concern my own person, but the in- vestigations I was busy with, so that the rule is not absolute. But this speculative thinking differs from the corresponding conscious process in more than one aspect : it is well known that the advantages of voluntary thinking have to be paid for by the sacrifice of a certain portion of the power of regres- sion in the memory-system, which is a very serious sacrifice, as it constitutes the very basis of intellection. Another comparative inferiority of voluntary thinking is caused by the circumstance that the spontaneity of some of the pro- cesses constituting the operation of conceiving or creating is abandoned for a deliberate application of mental energy, which is less effective and more exhausting, as we have seen, because the available amount of energy has to be dis- » Cf. G. Romanes, UKvolution mentale chez lea Anitnattx, p. 63, op. cit. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DAY-DREAMS 359 tributed at the same time over protective functions and functions that are directly productive. However, these disadvantages may disappear when the two ways of thinking collaborate and unite, in a single mental operation, the superiorities proper to each form of ideation separately, while avoiding the defects of both. When in- vention and inspiration take place in the fore-conscious state, the advantages of both directed and affective thinking are united for the fulfilment of the wish. In the inventive chain the end-representation is well kept in view ; although the association progresses behind the threshold we think in words, which renders us, as in the conscious state, inde- pendent of facts and allows of abstraction. These are usually two great privileges of voluntary conscious think- ing. But as it is a wish that directs the concatenation, it disposes of the whole store of memory without apparent effort, and the strength of the affect not only detaches the mind from the outer world, but also preserves it from the disturbing perception of inner excitations, which are advantages proper to fore-consciousness. What we should mark here is that speculative thinking in which the ego is left out of consideration is not a privilege of consciousness only, but is occasionally observable in the fore -conscious state as well. Only in the waking state this tendency seems to have been developed systematically, so as to become independent of chance. However, abstract thinking is most successful when it reverts to the fore-con- scious level and borrows the primitive affective mechanism. In such a case the activity proceeds near the fringe of con- sciousness, for in the deeper strata only concrete representa- tions appear to be possible. Day-dreaming proves thus to be a mental phenomenon common to all human beings, and a modern adaptation of a primitive process that can be followed far down the psychological scale. In man this form of ideation is mani- fested not only through absentmindedness and distraction, but presides over verbal humour and analogous formations. It causes errors and mistakes in our daily life which psycho-analysis has divested of any mystery ; it is pre- dominant in hysteria and neuroses ; inspiration borrows its 860 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS mechanisms ; it explains our behaviour whenever our emo- tions prove stronger than our will. Our day-dreams may be so absurd that one is tempted to say that a certain amount of madness is normal to our phantasies, and that lying seems a .natural product of the conflict of wishes. Finally, this investigation tends to establish that the un- conscious, fore-conscious and conscious thought-processes are three manifestations, varying only in degree, of the same / \ function. This function, originally regulating the relations of the individual with the outer world, constitutes a mani- festation of universal energy, and is as eternal and unceasing as the other organic activities in the service of adaptation. /\ LITERARY INDEX Abraham, K. Ueber hysterische Traumzustdndey in Jahrbuch f. psychanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, II/l, 1911. Deuticke, Leipzig und Wien. Baldwin, J. M. Mental Development in the Child and the Race. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1906, 3rd edition. Benussi, V. Die Atmungssymptome der Liige, in Archiv fiir die gesammte Psychologie, II, 5, 1914. Bergson, H. Matidre et Memoire. 13® edition, Alcan, Paris. Essai sur les Donnees immHiates de la Conscience. 18® edition, Alcan, Paris. Berguer, C. Note sur le Langage du Reve^ in Archives de Psychologie, XIV, 1914. Bleuler, E. Das autistische Denken, in Jahrbuch f. psychan., etc., IV/1, 1912. Breuer und Freud. Studien iiber Hysterie. 3e Aufiage, Deuticke, Wien, 1915. Brill, A. A. Psychanalysis. 2nd edition, Saunders & Co., Phila- delphia and London, 1918. CLAPARfeDE, E. Esquisse d'une Theorie biologique du Sommeilf in Archives de Psychologie, IV/15-16, 1905. DwELSHAUVERS, G. L' Inconscient . Paris, Flammarion, 1919. Freud, S. The Interpretation of Dreams. Allen & Unwin, London, 1916. Psychopathology of Everyday Life. T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1917. Der WitZy und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten. 2e Aufiage, Deuticke, Leipzig, 1912. Formulierungen iiber die zwei Prinzipien des psychischen Gesche- hens, in Jahrbuch f. psychan., etc., II/l, 1911. History of the Psychanalytic Movement, in the Psycho-analytic Review, 1916. HiNRiCHSEN. Zur Psychologie und Psychopathologie des Dichters. Bergmann, Wiesbaden, 1911. Janet, P. Les N4vroses. Alcan, Paris. Jastrow, J. The Subconscious. London, Constable & Co., 1906. 361 362 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS Jung, C. G. Wandlungen u. Synibole der Libido, in Jahrbuch f. psychan., etc., III/l and IV/1. English translation, called Psychology of the Unconscious, in the Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series, Washington. La Structure de Vlnconscient, in Archives de Psychologic, Geneve, XVI, 1917. Ueber das Verhalten der Reaktionszeit im Associationsexperiment, 4er Beitrag der diagnost. Associationsstudien, Leipzig. Versuch einer Darsiellung der psychoanal. Theorie, in Jahrbuch f. psychan., etc., V/l, 1913. Knowlson, T. S. Originality. London, T. W. Laurie, 1919. KoLLARiTS, J. Observations de Psychologic quotidienne, in Archives de Psychologic, XIV, 1914. Maeder, a. Ueber die Funktion des Traumes, in Jahrbuch f. psychan., etc., IV/1, 1912. More Nursery Rhymes, No. XIX of the Books for the Bairns. W. Stead, London. NuNN, T. P. Education. Arnold, London, 1920. Odier, Cn. A Propos d'un Cas de Contracture hystMque, in Archives de Psj^chologie, pp. 158-202, XIV, 1914. Payot. ^Education de la Volonte. 10® edition, Alcan, Paris. Pfister, O. Die psychanalytische Methode. Klinkhardt, Leipzig, 1913. Die psych. Entrdtselung der religiosen Glossolalie u. der automatischen Kryptographie, in Jahrbuch f. psychan., etc., V, 1913. Kryptolalie, Kryptographie u. unbew. Vexierbild bei Normalen, in Jahrbuch f. psychan., etc., Ill, 1911. Rank, O. Die Symbolschichtung im Wecktraum u. ihre Wiederkehr im mythischen Denken, Jahrbuch f. psychan., etc., IV/1, 1912. Regis, E. et A. Hesnard. La Psychanalyse. Alcan, Paris, 1914. RiBOT, Th. Problimes de Psychologic affective. Alcan, Paris, 1910. RoLLAND, E. Rimes et Jeux de VEnfance. Paris, Maisonneuve & Cie, 1883. Romanes, G. VEvolution mentale chez les Animaux. Alcan, Paris, 1884. ScHULTZE, R. Aus der Werkstatt der experimentellen Psychologic u. Pddagogik. 3e Auflage, Voigtlander, Leipzig, 1913. Tylor. La Culture primitive. Paris, Reinwald, 1884. Stekel, W. Die Sprache des Traumes. Bergmann, Wiesbaden. Varendonck, J. About Forgetting of Names, in the Psycho-analytical Review, January, 1919. Waxweiler, E. Esquisse d'une Sociologie. Misch et Thron, Bruxelles, 1906. GENERAL INDEX Abnormality of apperception, 234 ; in fore-conscious chains, 235 Abraham, 20 Abstraction, 161, 313 Absurdities (112-53) ; 125, 126, 141, 175 Accommodation, tentative, 78 Actor and spectator, 56, 92-3 Actuality of first links, 41 Adaptation, in evolution, 241 ; 346 Affects, in autism, 18 ; 151 ; in for- getting, 152 ; in waking, 160 ; 163, 165, 1'80; and memory (183-217); and recollection, 188-9 ; and con- scious attention, 191 ; incite memory, 195—6 ; connect memory and per- ception, 197 ; mutual influence of, 199, 208, 217 ; and reflexes, 203 ; cause of remembrance, 204 ; stronger than will, 207 ; awake from distrac- tion, 230 ; in animal /life, 2i-S^ definition of, 245 ; command in- tellectual and nTOtor memorv, 245 ; and ideation (248-77) ; 262 ; re- action to, 293 ; and visualization, 335-49 Affective complexes, 245, 252 ; stimu- late recollection, 253 ; 257 Affective life, repressed, 244 Affective memory, 201-2, 241, 245 Affective thinking, 19, 275 ; a substitute for motor r»eaction, 276 ; issues of, 279-334 Alternatives, inclusion of, 143 Amoeba, reaction of, 241 Analysis of verbal thought -process 75-6; of phantasies, 82-4, 115-32 of fore -conscious chains, 122-30 method, 137-8 Analysis, self-, 27, 29-30 Animal mind, perception in the, 243, 244 Animality, 207 Animals, thoughts of, 77 Animated pictures, 56, 59-60, 61, 72-3 Aphasics, 186 Apperception, cause of waking, 186 ; and affect (218-47) ; correct and in- correct, 225-8; interception of, 234 ; abnormal, 234-5 ; mechanism of, 237 ; spontaneous, 237 ; interruption of, 239 ; protracted by affect, 246 ; memory elements in, 252 ; volition in, 333; in conscious and unconscious thinking, 356 Apprehension, 151 Artists, day-dreams of, 136 ; 152, 215^ 216 ; mental attitude of, 280 ; visualization by, 342 ; definition of, 348 'Association method, Jung's, 196 Associations, fore-conscious, 34, 37, 38 ; fixed groups of, 48-9, 107, 108 ; shifting of, 124; auditory, 124; external, in uneducated sj>eakers, . 131-2 ; waking, 132-3 ; directed by wish, 179 ; genesis of, 188 ; and apperception, 239-40 ; due to pro- tracted apperception, 246 ; super- ficial, 246-7 Attention, 41; shifting of, 89, 121, 205-6 ; memory elements in, 252 ; conscious and fore -conscious (256-69); straying of, 260 Auditory type, 336 Autism," 17-21 Autistic thinking, 13, 14, 15 ; in neuro- tics, 15-16 ; sexual, 17 ; mechanism of, 18 Automatism, of memory, 184-6 ; of motor -memory, 242 ; muscular, 276 ;. of recollection, 278 ; in animals, 307 Awakening from day-dreams (154-65);. 172—3 325 Awareness, 286, 287, 289, 292 ^.Baldwin, 268, 332-3 Beast, primitive, in man, 302 Belief, in simple persons, 145-6 Benedict, 20 Bergson, 186-202, 213, 240, 257, 268,., 286, 321-2 Berguer, 331 Bernussi, 206 . BiNET, 54, 336 Biological memorv, 274 ^JBleuler, 13, 14," 19, 246, 253, 301 Brain, primitive, 244 *Breuer, 186, 197 Bridge from conscious to fore -conscious^. 249 Brill, 18, 201, 209, 225, 286 " Brown study," 41 Carr, 203 " Castles in Spain " — "in the air," 145- Cat, intellect in, 245 364 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS "Censor," the, 166, 175, 176, 296, 297, 298, 304, 305, 307, 312, 314, 315 Censorship (165-80), 295 Centrifugal and centripetal aspects of affect, 267 Chains, fore-conscious, 27, 34, 35 ; genesis of, 40-1 ; contents of (54- 153); genesis of, 54; 81, 110; ter- mination of (154-80) ; definition and explanation, 179-80 " Children's French," 159 *' Child's Latin," 157-9 Cinema, phantasy compared to, 81, 91, 93, 113-16 Civilized instincts, obliteration of, 303-4 Clapar^jde, 321, 322 Comparison, impossible in fore-conscious- ness, 212 Complex, Brill's definition of, 201 Complexes, affective, see Affective Concatenations, see Chains Concentration, 101 Conception and affect, 248-56 •Conceptions, memory of, 313 Conflict of wishes, 65-7 ; cause of waking, 167 Conjunctions, use of by uneducated, 131 Conscious thinking, superiority of, 140 ; mechanism of, 150 ; attention, 191, 256-9, 307, 355-7 Consciousness, three levels of, 19 ; rising of day-dreams to, 172 ; 177, 179 ; invasion of by affective recol- lections, 205 ; by fore-conscious thought, 206 ; result of the repression of affects, 244 ; Freud's definition, 293 ; an act, 325 ; role of, 358 Contemplation, 28 Correction, possible to consciousness only, 180 Creative efforts of memory, 115, 123 ; thinking, 150, 336, 346 Criminal thoughts, 301 Critical faculty, suppression of, 28-9, 140, 145, 146, 153, 165, 168-9, 175, 208, 255 Curiosity, automatic, 317 ; infantile and adulib, 317 ; unsatisfied, 320 ; an intellectualized wish, 321 Danger, reaction to, 242 Daudet, a., 198 Day-dreams, 19; investigation of , 19-20; fulfilment of wish, 20-1 ; 23, 138 ; awaking from, 154—65 ; pre- and post-somnial, 167 ; risings and fall- ings in, 176 ; affects at genesis of, 189 ; 204, 205 ; and hysteria, 209 ; forgetting, 213-14; wishes in, 271; remembering, 275-7 ; amoral, 300-1 ; significance of (351-60) ; definition of, 353 ; pleasure-pain character of, 355 ; see Phantasies Day-remnants, 35, 36, 38, 40, 46, 52, 103, 236 Death-wish, obsession by, 233-4, 248, 288, 295 Directed thinking, 14, 34 ; dismissal of, 41 ; visualization in, 57 ; retracing, 134 ; mistakes in, 139 ; disturbed by fore -conscious thinking, 203 ; visualization in, 335, 355 Disaggregating force of will, 211 Dishonesty of fore-conscious thought, 168, 294 Disinterest, 321 Dissociation, 47, 346 Distinction -wish, 134, 248 Distraction, 43-4, 47, 51, 135, 147, 160, 229, 230, 236, 262 Disturbance due to check, 138 Divergence, of mind-associations, 96-8 ; 107, 109, 115, 129 ; of attention, 260 Dramatic visualizations, 116-17 Dream-formations, 352 Dreams, Freud's theory of, 76-7 Drifting, memory- (87-111). 162, 177 Dynamic quality of memory, 111 DwELSHAUVERS, 218, 219-20, 237, 269 Education and affects, 213 Egocentric thought -processes, 358 Eloquence of vmeducated, 130-1 Emotion, usual lack of in phantasies, 119, 125; a cause of waking, 161, 164 ; recalled, 183-4 ; 187 ; em- phasis of, 189 ;' recollection of, 197 Emotional accent, 248 End-process of spontaneous thinking, 314-15 End -representations, 254, 249 ; rejection of, 296 ; 359 End-results, 39, 299 Energv, mental, in attention, 266 Error '(112-53), 125, 126, 142-3, 190, 194-5 ; in perception and apper- ception, 225-9 ; in speech, 309 Evolution of conscious thinking, 307 Exteriorization of conceptions, 307, 308 External associations in uneducated. 131-2 External stimuli, cause of awakening, 154, 160, 164, 180, 230 ; and apper- ception, 231, 235 ; in dreams, 235 ; reflexes to, 243, 261 ; in conscious attention, 266, 316, 356 Fascination of recollections, 148 Fear, awakening due to, 163 Feeling and attention, 207 ; and will, 208 Ferenczt, 343 Fore-conscious aims, 243 ; attention, 256-69 Fore-conscious perception, 232-3 ; ele- ments of, 245 Fore-conscious, the, 19 ; not subject to will, 87 ; perception in the, 232, 243 ; reaction to affects, 247 ; presence of mind in the, 346 Fore-conscious thinking, 19, 34 ; re- sumption of, 94 ; deviation in, 94 ; 107 ; genesis of chains, 110 ; checks in, 138 ; impossibility of returning on, 139 ; acceptance and rejection in, 145; instability of, 146; dis- traction and forgetting in, 147 ; GENERAL INDEX 365 mechanism of, 148 ; last links of, 155 ; definition of, 179 ; rising to surface of contents, 187 ; caused by memory and affect, 200 ; afiects in, 203 ; comparison impossible in, 212 ; defi- nition of, 255 ; always attentive, 268 ; wish and will in, 269 ; issues of (279-334) ; conclusions of, 288 ; amorality of, 293-4 ; empirical methods of, 299 ; rising to surface, 307 ; hypothesis in, 347 Forgetting, 140, 146 ; and distraction, 147 ; 150-2, 302 " French, children's," 159 Freud, preface by, 9-10 ; 15, 19, 20-1, 25, 26, 27-9, 46, 48, 49, 77, 78, 87, 100, 135, 136, 143, 156, 157, 164, 166, 190, 196, 198, 199, 201, 203, 209, 211, 214, 215, 216, 225, 230, 231, 235, 246, 251, 254, 250, 260, 265, 272, 273, 278, 280, 283, 284, 292, 295, 296, 298, 302, 304, 309, 319, 335, 343, 344, 345, 351, 354 Future, the, in fore -conscious thinking, 150, 179 Gesticulation, 309 Glossolaly, 331 Grasset,' 270 Groos, 353 Habit-acquisitions, 50, 229 Hallucinations, memory-, 108-9 ; at genesis of fore-conscious chains, 110 ; in divergence, 125 ; invasion by, 141, 183-4 ; 236 ; visual, 339, 341 ; muscular, 341 ; normal, 348 Hebbel, 348 HouDiN, jucrgler, 49-50 House that Jack Built, The, 85-6, 198 Human mind, 244 Hypothesis, impossible to sub -conscious- ness, 77-8 ; 146, 150, 179 ; unknown to the unconscious, 345 ; without speech, 346 Hysteria, 209-10, 247, 310, 340-1 Ideation, logical, 13 ; visual and ver- bal, 179-80 ; and affect (248-77) ; pleasure-pain direction of, 255 ; sup- pression of useless, 260 ; forecon- scious, 306 ; mixed, 326-7 ; primi- tive, 345 " If," in fore-conscious thought, 78 Illustration of associations by visual elements, 72-4 Images, thinking in, 343, 345 Imagination, see Artists Impression, 219 Inattention of fore -consciousness, 152 Infancy, recollections of, 212 Infantile mind, 317 Inspiration, 153, 161, 212, 213, 229, 262, 315 Instinct, 274 ; modifies reaction, 275 ; conflicting, 326 Intellection and motor system, 311 Intellectual memory, 241, 243 ; en- j tangled with affective and motor memory, 245 ; voluntary use of, 275- Interest, shifting of centre of, 108 ; permanence of, 125 ; 177 ; banishes sleep, 322 Internal perceptions, 236-7 Internal stimuli, 160, 164 ; in fore- conscious attention, 266 Interpretation of Dreams, 20, 21, 25 Introversion, 14 Intuition, 205 (278-93); process of, 287; definition of, 289 ; factors of, 290 ; reverse of repression, 291 ; 306 ; versus repression (306-34) ; 312, 315 Invention, 49, 115, 151, 161, 212, 257 James, W., 354 Janet, 186, 325 Jastrow, 48, 49-50, 229, 337-8, 355 Jests, see Wit-formation Juno, 13, 14, 196, 206, 244, 295, 296, 343, 354, 355 Khad Gadia, 85, 198 Klein, 196 Knowledge, thirst for, 318 Knowlson, 21 kollarits, 344 Lafontaine, 38, 86, 87 *' Latin, child's," 157-9 LAUfiHTON, 319 "Libido," 14 Likes and dislikes, 279 LiPMANN, 196 Logical ideation, 13 Lying, 301 Maeder, 235, 351, 353 " Marottes," 85 Memories, uncalled for, 236 Memory-complex, due to reading, 109 Memory-drifting, 87, 183 Memory, dynamic powers of. Ill ; in fore-consciousness and the aged, 147 ; aspects of, 183 ; rule of, 183 ; and affect (183-217); automatism of, 184-5 ; unconscious in itself, 199 ; recalled under affects, 200-3 ; aspects of, 241, 243 ; of conceptions, 313 Memory - elements, in fore - conscious thinking, 34, 35, 41 ; compared to " living pictures," 59 ; a reply to queries, 100-1 ; material for prepara- tion for future, 102 ; orientation of, 103 ; automatic reproduction of part by, 108; as internal perceptions, 149; testing of, 150, 179 ; end of chains, 160 ; affective factors in, 187 ; emotional emphasis of, 191 ; and perception, 197, 219-20 ; spon- taneovis, 236 ; emotional accent of, 248 ; in fore-conscious attention, 266 Memory -hallucinations, 183-4, 236 Mental life, evolution of, 243, 244 Milkmaid, The, by Lafontaine, 86 Mimetism, 243 Mind-wandering in waking life, 41 :366 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DAY-DREAMS Mistakes, correction of, 136 '* Mneme," 274 Morality, 304 Motor aspects of memory, 202, 243, 245 Motor memory, 241 Motor reaction, replaced by affective thinking, 276 Motor system, mental process exterior- ized by, 308-9 ; guarded by censor, 312 ; action of replaced by speech, 317 JVIuscular automatism. 276, '279 Muscular hallucination, 341 Neurotics, autistic thinking of, 14-16 ^ight-dreams, 117 Nonsensical thoughts, 230 Observation, method of, 169, 215-16, 283 Observation-wish, 100, 155-6, 159, 167, 209, 210, 224, 232, 272, 282, 297 Obsession, by death -wish, 233-4, 248, 288, 295 Optical illusions, 69-60, 342-3, 345 Optical recollections, 89 ■Orientation of association, memorial elements in, 103, 105 Pain-pleasure mechanism, 16, 255; in sleep, 332 Pain-pleasure theory of wish, 251 ; selection of memories, 255 ; of in- stinct, 274 ; of muscular automatism, 276 Passion, 206 Payot, 206 Perception, at genesis of phantasies, 42 ; 45, 46 ; of recollections, 150 ; 196 ; and memory, 197, 219 ; erroneous, 221 ; fore-conscious, 230-3 ; uncon- scious, 233-4 ; various aspects of, 243 ; evolution of, 244 ; conscious and unconscious, 244 Pfistor, 204, 331 Phantasies, special : appointment of jury, 30-1 ; choice of wife, 31-3 ; Ellwood and Waxweiler, 35 ; mar- riage, 35 ; Spanish studies, 36 ; landlady, 35, 36 ; capsules, 36-7 ; German shells, 37-8 ; bombing aero- planes, 38 ; book review, 39, 165-6 ; Brazilian thief, 40 ; Folkestone- Margate, 42, 54-6, 59, 62, 84, 89, 90, 155, 164, 177, 285, 315, 336 ; " Bel- gica "Brewery, 42-3, 51, 189, 221-2 ; tuberculosis, 44-5 ; 141-2 ; 222-3, 570-1 ; Zentralbliitt filr P. -A., 46 ; nursemaid, 47, 49 ; associations, 48 ; Houdin, 49 ; distraction, 51 ; Etaples, leave, 57-8, 62-3 ; im- pertinent orderlv, 63-76 ; analysis of same, 75-8 ; 9l ; flea, 75, 87, 90, 120, 141, 163, 223, 248, 258, 259, .300, 314 ; s.s. Sussex, 77-8, 154, 155 ; Misses X. and Y., 78-80, 87-8, 90-1, .259, 270-1; bombardment, 112-15; : schematic representation of, 128, 144, 223-4 ; double entendre, 157-8 ; re- «ceiving Minister, 170 ; application for posts, 170 ; Service cap, 171-2 ; schematic representation, 173 ; 237 ; observation, 293-4 Phantasies, a preparation for waking Ufe, |78^ \ PhantasiesTwith selected genesis, 39-40 J Phobias, 27-9 Plastic present, the, 78 Pleasure, autistic thinking a search for, 14-15 Pleasure and pain, foreboding of, 245 Pleasure-pain, see Pain-pleasure Poets, 348 Presence of mind, 346 Primitive thinking, 307-8, 336, 341 Problem-solving in phantasies, 118 Professor-wish, the, 120-1 Pseudologia phantast, the, 144 Psycho-analysis, 13 ; technique of, 27-30 ; l32, 209-10, 351 Psychoses, 210 Question and answer method of analysing phantasies, 75-6, 84-6, 149, 151 Questions, memorial elements reply to, 100-1 " Randonn6es," 85 Rank, 343 Reaction, to recollections, 150 ; of amceba, 241 Reading, distraction during, 43-4 ; fore- conscious reaction to, 49-53 Realistic thinking, 16, 18 ReaUty, 14 Recollections, in foreconscious thinking, 34, 35, 53 ; visual, 89, 110, 336 ; as hypotheses, 150 ; perceived aa reality, 150 ; and affects, 188-9, 200 ; spon- taneous, 236 ; protracted by affects, 236 ; the genesis of fore-consciou» associations, 249 Recording fore -conscious chains, 27 Reflexes, innervation of, 203 ; to ex- ternal excitation, 243 Regressive survey, absence of, 136 Remembrance, last-link chain, 155 Reminiscences, 101 Renouvier, 271 Repression, 16, 23, 47 ; of fore -conscious ideation, 178, 201, 204 ; of conscious thought, 215; of affects, 244; reverse of intuition, 291 ; (293-306) ; spontaneity of, 296 ; education of, 303, 304 ; unconscious, 305 ; social aspect of, 306 ; 312, 324 ; conflict with intuition, 325 Retracing, 29, 136 ; author's method, 137-8 ; 165-6 Reveries, see Day-dreams, Phantasies Rhythm and automatism, 185 Riding -Hood, Little Red, 185 Romanes, 332, 358 Satisfaction, fore -conscious, 166 Schematic representation of phantasies, 128, 173, 237 GENERAL INDEX 867 ScHiJLZE, 239, 240 Scientists, 348 Secondary thinking, 13 Self -analysis, 282 Self-observation, 27-9 Self-preservation, instinct of, 151, 274 ; obliteration of, 302 Sensation, 219 ; affects in, 267 Sense, organs of, 241 Sexual fancies, 295 ; impulses, 303-4 Sexuality, in autism, 17 ; of perception, 244 Shifting of train of thought, or mind- wandering, 96-8, 103-5, 124 ; of attention, 205-6 Sleep, 321, 322 ; agitated, 322 ; an act, 325 ; 326 ; thought during, 342 Sleeplessness, 325-30 Sleep-wish, the, 165, 166, 167, 210, 293, 316, 324, 328 Solicitation of affects, 201 Somnambulism, 229 Songs, comic, 41, 157 Sorcery, example of, 310-11 Spanish song, 41 Speculative thinking, 358 Speech, 343-4 Spontaneous recollection, 193, 204 Stekel, 344 Stern 196 Stimuli, external, 35, 37, 38, 40, 49-63 ; internal, 41 SubUmation, 321 Summer time, 198 Suppositions, 149, 150, 179, 251-2 Symbolic meaning of associations, 239 Symbolization, 341, 343 Synthesis, 183 to end Telepathy, Freud on, 100, 230 Temper, bad, 284 Termination of chains, 154-65 Testing memory-elements, 150, 179 Thinker, affective life of the, 152 Thought associations and illustrations, 73-4 Thought, definition of, 277 ; 304 ; three manifestations of, 360 Thought-formation, process of analysing, 150 Transitions, examples of, 103-5 Traumas, 247 Tbibot, 201 Tylob, 198, 199, 214 Unconscious phenomena, solution of, 232-3 ; perceptions, 232-3 Unconscious, psychology of the, 13 ; 87 Unconscious thought, 19 ; primitive, 274 Undesired ideas, 28-9 Verbal elements of hypothesis, 347 Verbal thought-constructions (54-75) ; combined with visual, 65-6, 57-9, 63-4 ; analysis of, 75-6 ; 119, 179-80 Visual and non-visual day-dreams, 64—75, 136 Visual recollections, 354 Visual type, 54, 60, 177 Visualization (54-75) ; combined with verbal elements, 55-6, 57-9, 63-4, 81, 91, 93, 113-15, 179; in making speeches, 263-4 ; and affects, 335-49 Volition, and conscious thought, 269 ; never pure, 271 ; immersed in fore- consciousness, 272-3 ; definition of, 270 ; definition of, 333 ; indirected, 340 ; dependent on thought, 345 Voluntary occupation, distraction from, 224 Voluntary thinking, 355 Waxweiler, 110, 318 " Weak points," 195 Wertheimeb, 196 Will, and affects, conflicting, 208 ; dis- aggregating function of, 211 ; re- places affect, 238 ; in conscious and unconscious thinking, 253 ; in con- scious attention, 266 ; and in fore- conscious thinking, 269 ; relation of to wish, 272 ; 333-4 Wish, the, fulfilment of, 76-7 ; in unconscious thought, 135 ; 136, 139, 164 ; conflict of, 165-7 ; replace- nient of, 174 ; function of, 179 ; " father to the thought," 193 ; pain- pleasure theory of, 231 ; emotional emphasis of, 253 ; fulfilment of, 255 ; action of, 266-7 ; affects in, 267 ; and will (269-77) ; in fore -conscious thinking, 269 ; in phantasies re- corded, 270 ; as affective volition, 271 ; definition of, 271 ; relation of to will, 272 ; wish and will, 302 ; contest between, 303 Wit-formation, 247, 265-6, 273, 340, 343 Words, thinking in (54-75) ; mixed with visual elements, 59 ; 61, 300 Work, author's method of, 137-8 WUNDT, 218 Printed in Great Britain by- UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED WOSINQ AND LONDON RHURN EDUCATION-PSYCHOLOGY LIBRARY TO—*- 2600Tolman Hall 642-4209 LOAN PERIOD ^^HVVOMTH QiAnrrc tr ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS NO RENEWALS Return to desk from which borrowed DUE AS STAMPED BELOW «*»»- QUARTER I D AI [ D UE JAN 1 5 m2 SUBJECT 70 RX'ALL' ' ^t/6^far? >tm b4/n irtP^ , goN -KtiNtWA 2tE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY FORM NO. 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