A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
I trust you are taken by surprise by the establishment of this fact, and
that you will ask me why I did not refer to this proof before in the
case of the slips, where we credited the man who made a mistake in
speech with intentions he knew nothing about and which he denied. "If a
person believes he knows nothing concerning experiences, the memory of
which, however, he retains," you might say, "it is no longer so
improbable that there are also other psychic experiences within him of
whose existence he is ignorant. This argument would have impressed us
and advanced us in the understanding of errors." To be sure, I might
then have referred to this but I reserved it for another place, where it
was more necessary. Errors have in a measure explained themselves, have,
in part, furnished us with the warning that we must assume the existence
of psychic processes of which we know nothing, for the sake of the
connection of the phenomena. In dreams we are compelled to look to other
sources for explanations; and besides, I count on the fact that you will
permit the inference I draw from hypnotism more readily in this
instance. The condition in which we make mistakes most seem to you to
be the normal one. It has no similarity to the hypnotic. On the other
hand, there is a clear relationship between the hypnotic state and
sleep, which is the essential condition of dreams. Hypnotism is known as
artificial sleep; we say to the person whom we hypnotize, "Sleep," and
the suggestions which we throw out are comparable to the dreams of
natural sleep. The psychical conditions are in both cases really
analogous. In natural sleep we withdraw our attention from the entire
outside world; in the hypnotic, on the other hand, from the whole world
with the exception of the one person who has hypnotized us, with whom we
remain in touch. Furthermore, the so-called nurse's sleep in which the
nurse remains in touch with the child, and can be waked only by him, is
a normal counterpart of hypnotism. The transference of one of the
conditions of hypnotism to natural sleep does not appear to be such a
daring proceeding. The inferential assumption that there is also present
in the case of the dreamer a knowledge of his dream, a knowledge which
is so inaccessible that he does not believe it himself, does not seem to
be made out of whole cloth. Let us note that at this point there appears
a third approach to the study of the dream; from the sleep-disturbing
stimuli, from the day-dreams, and now in addition, from the suggested
dreams of the hypnotic state.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account