“To him who is tortured by physical and mental sufferings the dream
accords what has been denied him by reality, to wit, physical well-being
and happiness; so the insane, too, see the bright pictures of happiness,
greatness, sublimity, and riches. The supposed possession of estates and
the imaginary fulfilment of wishes, the denial or destruction of which
have just served as a psychic cause of the insanity, often form the main
content of the delirium. The woman who has lost a dearly beloved child,
in her delirium experiences maternal joys; the man who has suffered
reverses of fortune deems himself immensely wealthy; and the jilted girl
pictures herself in the bliss of tender love.”
The above passage from Radestock, an abstract of a keen discussion of
Griesinger[31] (p. 111), reveals with the greatest clearness the wish
fulfilment as a characteristic of the imagination, common to the dream
and the psychosis. (My own investigations have taught me that here the
key to a psychological theory of the dream and of the psychosis is to be
found.)
“Absurd combinations of ideas and weakness of judgment are the main
characteristics of the dream and of insanity.” The over-estimation of
one’s own mental capacity, which appears absurd to sober judgment, is
found alike both in one and the other, and the rapid course of ideas in
the dream corresponds to the flight of ideas in the psychosis. Both are
devoid of any measure of time. The dissociation of personality in the
dream, which, for instance, distributes one’s own knowledge between two
persons, one of whom, the strange one, corrects in the dream one’s own
ego, fully corresponds to the well-known splitting of personality in
hallucinatory paranoia; the dreamer, too, hears his own thoughts
expressed by strange voices. Even the constant delusions find their
analogy in the stereotyped recurring pathological dreams (_rêve
obsédant_). After recovering from a delirium, patients not infrequently
declare that the disease appeared to them like an uncomfortable dream;
indeed, they inform us that occasionally, even during the course of
their sickness, they have felt that they were only dreaming, just as it
frequently happens in the sleeping dream.
Considering all this, it is not surprising that Radestock condenses his
own opinion and that of many others into the following: “Insanity, an
abnormal phenomenon of disease, is to be regarded as an enhancement of
the periodically recurring normal dream states” (p. 228).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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