Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis : $b a course of twenty-eight lectures delivered at the University of ViennaFreud, Sigmund
Science
Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis : $b a course of twenty-eight lectures delivered at the University of Vienna
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
Further, our parallels to dream-symbolism may assist you to appreciate
what it is in psycho-analysis which makes it a subject of general
interest, in a way that was not possible to either psychology or
psychiatry; psycho-analytic work is so closely intertwined with so many
other branches of science, the investigation of which gives promise of
the most valuable conclusions: with mythology, philology, folk-lore,
folk psychology and the study of religion. You will not be surprised to
hear that a publication has sprung from psycho-analytic soil, of which
the exclusive object is to foster these relations. I refer to _Imago_,
first published in 1912 and edited by Hanns Sachs and Otto Rank. In its
relation to all these other subjects, psycho-analysis has in the first
instance given rather than received. True, analysis reaps the advantage
of receiving confirmation of its own results, seemingly so strange,
again in other fields; but on the whole it is psycho-analysis which
supplies the technical methods and the points of view, the application
of which is to prove fruitful in these other provinces. The mental life
of the human individual yields, under psycho-analytic investigation,
explanations which solve many a riddle in the life of the masses of
mankind or at any rate can show these problems in their true light.
I have still given you no idea of the circumstances in which we may
arrive at the deepest insight into that hypothetical “primordial
language,” or of the province in which it is for the most part retained.
As long as you do not know this you cannot appreciate the true
significance of the whole subject. I refer to the province of neurosis;
the material is found in the symptoms and other modes of expression of
nervous patients, for the explanation and treatment of which
psycho-analysis was indeed devised.
My fourth point of view takes us back to the place from which we started
and leads into the track we have already marked out. We said that even
if there were no dream-censorship we should still find it difficult to
interpret dreams, for we should then be confronted with the task of
translating the symbolic language of dreams into the language of waking
life. SYMBOLISM, then, is a second and independent factor in
dream-distortion, existing side by side with the censorship. But the
conclusion is obvious that it suits the censorship to make use of
symbolism, in that both serve the same purpose: that of making the dream
strange and incomprehensible.
Whether a further study of the dream will not introduce us to yet
another contributing factor in the distortion, we shall soon see. But I
must not leave the subject of dream-symbolism without once more touching
on the puzzling fact that it has succeeded in rousing such strenuous
opposition amongst educated persons, although the prevalence of
symbolism in myth, religion, art and language is beyond all doubt. Is it
not probable that, here again, the reason is to be found in its relation
to sexuality?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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