Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis : $b a course of twenty-eight lectures delivered at the University of ViennaFreud, Sigmund
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Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis : $b a course of twenty-eight lectures delivered at the University of Vienna
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
Once when such a sudden halt occurred on the line outside a station, a
young lady who was in the carriage said that perhaps there was going to
be a collision, and that the best thing to do was to raise the legs
high. This phrase “raise the legs” had associations with many walks and
excursions into the country, which he had shared with the girl mentioned
above in the happy early days of their love. Here was a new argument for
the contention that he would be mad to marry her now; nevertheless, my
knowledge of the situation led me to regard it as certain that there
existed in him all the same the desire to fall a victim to this form of
madness.
THIRTEENTH LECTURE
ARCHAIC AND INFANTILE FEATURES IN DREAMS
Let us start afresh from our conclusion that, under the influence of the
censorship, the dream-work translates the latent dream-thoughts into
another form. These thoughts are of the same nature as the familiar,
conscious thoughts of waking life; the new form in which they are
expressed is, owing to many peculiar characteristics, incomprehensible
to us. We have said that it goes back to phases in our intellectual
development which we have long outgrown—to hieroglyphic writing, to
symbolic-connections, possibly to conditions which existed before the
language of thought was evolved. On this account we called the form of
expression employed by the dream-work _archaic_ or _regressive_.
From this you may draw the inference that a more profound study of the
dream-work must lead to valuable conclusions about the initial stages of
our intellectual development, of which at present little is known. I
hope it will be so, but so far this task has not been attempted. The era
to which the dream-work takes us back is “primitive” in a twofold sense:
in the first place, it means the early days of the _individual_—his
childhood—and, secondly, in so far as each individual repeats in some
abbreviated fashion during childhood the whole course of the development
of the human race, the reference is _phylogenetic_. I believe it not
impossible that we may be able to discriminate between that part of the
latent mental processes which belongs to the early days of the
individual and that which has its roots in the infancy of the race. It
seems to me, for instance, that symbolism, a mode of expression which
has never been individually acquired, may claim to be regarded as a
racial heritage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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