The symbolism of dreams / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
[1910]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The symbolism of dreams / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    is association, indeed, but it is association not along the matter-of-fact lines of our ordinary waking civilized life but along much more funda- mental and primitive channels, which in waking life we have now aban- doned or never knew. There is another consideration which may be put forward to account for one group of dream-symbolisms. It has been found that certain hysterical subjects of old standing when in the hypnotic state are able to receive mental pictures of their own viscera, even though they may be quite ignorant of any knowledge of the shape of these viscera. This autoscopy, as it has been called, has been specially studied by Fere, Comar and Sollier.^* Hysteria is a condition which is in many respects closely allied to sleep, and if it is to be accepted as a real fact that autoscopy occasionally occurs in the abnormal psychic state of hypnotic sleep in hysterical persons, it is possible to ask whether it may not some- times occur normally in the allied state of sleep. In the hypnotic state it is known that parts of the organism normally involuntary may be- come subject to the will; it is not incredible that similarly parts nor- mally insensitive may become sufficiently sensitive to reveal their own shape or condition. We may thus indeed the more easily understand those premonitory dreams in which the dreamer becomes conscious of morbid conditions which are not perceptible to awaking consciousness until they have attained a greater degree of intensity. The recognition of the transformation in dream life of internal sensations into symbolic motor imagery is ancient. Hippocrates said that to dream, for instance, of springs and wells denoted some disturb- ance of the bladder. Sometimes the symbolism aroused by visceral processes remains physiological; thus indigestion frequently leads to dreams of eating, as of chewing all sorts of inedible and repulsive sub- stances, and occasionally—it would seem more abnormally—to agree- able dreams of food. It is due to the genius of Professor Sigmund Freud, of Vienna— to-day the most daring and original psychologist in the field of morbid psychic phenomena—that we owe the long-neglected recognition of the large place of symbolism in dreaming. Schemer had argued in favor of this aspect of dreams, but he was an undistinguished and unreliable psychologist and his arguments failed to be influential. Freud avows himself a partisan of Schemer's theory of dreaming and opponent of all other theories,^ but his treatment of the matter is incomparably Sollier, L'Autoscopie Interne, Revue Philosophique, January, 1903. Sollier deals with the objections made to the reality of the phenomenon. Freud, Die Traumdentung, p. 66. This work, published in 1900, is the chief and most extensive statement of Freud's views. A shorter statement is embodied in a little volume of the Grenzfriigen Series, Ueber den Traum, 1901. A brief exposition of i reud's position is given by Dr. A. Maeder of Zurich in Essai d'Interpretation de Quelques Rfives, Archives de Psychologic,