PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

Wanganui Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 160735, 23 August 1920, Page 10

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

DREAMS IN NORMAL LIFE, We have learned to recognise the dream as one of the chief functions by which repressed desires for tendencies find imaginary fulfilment. Under sue. cessful analysis the purport of the dream is made clear to the dreamer, who can thus bring conscious valuation and criticism to bear upon his previously concealed trends. The usefulness of the dream is clear enough, with an analysis! at hand to help in its interpretation; but what has been ,tha normal function ox dream-life during the ages before the discovery of dream analysis?

Thp noimal dream may be regarded as a kind of automatic safety-valve for repressed feelings and the ideas surrounding them; a means for the expression, in a sphere of wild symbolism and fantasy, of any fore is within ourselves that we cannot or will not express in reabby But there is a further view, that the dream is purposive, not merely automath. Even i.n tho rarrow giouud that til dreams are wish fultenents, we have to remenaer than tie. wish :s a dynamic dang. Every wish impbes at least <* latent pi,rrose. An example may make clear the purposive character of dreaming. The dreamer in question was not undergoing analysis at the fimo when he experienced the following dreams; he did not realise their purport, nor their practical influence upon hjs affairs, and only mad© note of them because it seemed! to him remarkable that he should dream three times in succession of tho same type of experience. On looking up tho dates of these dreams and comparing them with his financial records, lie realised that they had occurred! just before ho had taken a very necessary but difficult step to put his finances in order. If he liad’ neglected this necessary and painful measure he would in all probability Lave been landed in the Bankruptcy Court.

The first of his three dreams was of an infantile character. He was tobogganing down a bank on a tea-tray, a proceeding which took him back to his childhood. (Wo may observe the unconscious presentation: "I am behaving childishly ’) Looking at it more closely, he realised (hat it was a model of Ids own house. Ho was letting himself glide, childishly, in some way that imperilled his house. ’The next night he was in an aeroplane, banking steeply (a characteristic dream metaphor for the state of his banking account, and of his finances generally; the dream-mind is remorseless in its use of pipis). The recurrence of "bank” in all three dreams is noteworthy. He made a precarious landing on a steep, grassy slope, and found that the aeroplane had turned into a car, in which he was driving his wife and children down a more and more precipitous declivity. Ills brakes refused to act—and he woke in a state ok panic. His next dream experience was a nightmare; the familiar "falling dream ” He tumbled headlong out of Hie skies, on to a steep bank of stones and scree, and forthwith Hie whole mass slid down with him in an avalanche. Below was a house which he knew was his own, with hia wife and children in it; and "his” avalanche—for it all seemed part of himself, in the dream—' was inevitably rolling down to tha destruction of his house and family. As the crash, came he knew that they were all killed, together—and awoke, in a state of perturbation that may be imagined. lie drew no conscious analogy between the catastrophes of his dreams and his unrealised financial peril; but in point of fact two days after his last dream he realised with a shock tho danger that lie was in, and took the drastic and difficult step that was necessary to put things right. Reviewing Hie incident some years later, in tho light of his experience of ‘psychoanalysis, lie had no doubt that tho dream catastrophes stood for his repressed knowledge of the imminence of a real catastrophe, arid that the last dream had succeeded in stirring hia apprehension to the pitch of breaking his resistance against the effort that the situation required of him. But this stirring up of a right impulse towards self-preservation took place quite outside his conscious range of thought. It should be added that analysis of these dreams showed other factors besides that of the subject’s inhibition about money; and it will be a point, •of interest for the student that the subject was not in fact a married man at live time of Hie experience. Tho dream -presentation of wife and children represented his normal ambition to become a husband ana father, an ambition which financial breakdown would have prevented him from realising. This example may appear remote from educational psychology; it has been chosen only for the comparative obviousness with which it shows the unconscious judgment of a situation forcing its way through the inhibitions of tho conscious life, by way of the wild and apparently irrational symbolism of the dream. It also points to a conclusion of analytical experience, that dreams present not only the fulfilment of wishes, but also—the converse of thoproposition—the idealisation of fears. It might be laid down that, as our wish-dreams are concerned with the principle of desire, so our fear dreams are failures of response to the principle of reality. The moral, for tho educator, is that which analytical phychology perpetu ally draws—that the operations of tho unconscious are of very much greater significance than. w« are usually disposed to think. ■ It is important to realise the great extent to which Hie child, like the adult, has to rely upon the unconscious processes for his right adaptation to reality; so that we cease to overload his conscious self with responsibilities that it cannot undertake. A child’s "conscience,” like a man’s- is not only that which wc can tell him to understand and reason out; it is also a mysterious function of tho pysche, a flower of the soul which, as good gardeners, wo can only leave to blossom in its own appropriate season, while wo learn all we can of the natural laws that govern its blossoming.—The Times Educational Supplement.