Krauss[39] attempted to base the relationship between the dream and
insanity upon the etiology (or rather upon the exciting sources),
perhaps making the relationship even more intimate than was possible
through the analogy of the phenomena they manifest. According to him,
the fundamental element common to both is, as we have learned, the
organically determined sensation, the sensation of physical stimuli, the
general feeling produced by contributions from all the organs. _Cf._
Peise, cited by Maury[48] (p. 60).
The incontestable agreement between the dream and mental disturbance,
extending into characteristic details, constitutes one of the strongest
supports of the medical theory of dream life, according to which the
dream is represented as a useless and disturbing process and as the
expression of a reduced psychic activity. One cannot expect, however, to
derive the final explanation of the dream from the mental disturbances,
as it is generally known in what unsatisfactory state our understanding
of the origin of the latter remains. It is very probably, however, that
a modified conception of the dream must also influence our views in
regard to the inner mechanism of mental disturbances, and hence we may
say that we are engaged in the elucidation of the psychosis when we
endeavour to clear up the mystery of the dream.
I shall have to justify myself for not extending my summary of the
literature of the dream problems over the period between the first
appearance of this book and its second edition. If this justification
may not seem very satisfactory to the reader, I was nevertheless
influenced by it. The motives which mainly induced me to summarise the
treatment of the dream in the literature have been exhausted with the
foregoing introduction; to have continued with this work would have cost
me extraordinary effort and would have afforded little advantage or
knowledge. For the period of nine years referred to has yielded nothing
new or valuable either for the conception of the dream in actual
material or in points of view. In most of the publications that have
since appeared my work has remained unmentioned and unregarded;
naturally least attention has been bestowed upon it by the so-called
“investigators of dreams,” who have thus afforded a splendid example of
the aversion characteristic of scientific men to learning something new.
“Les savants ne sont pas curieux,” said the scoffer Anatole France. If
there were such a thing in science as right to revenge, I in turn should
be justified in ignoring the literature since the appearance of this
book. The few accounts that have appeared in scientific journals are so
full of folly and misconception that my only possible answer to my
critics would be to request them to read this book over again. Perhaps
also the request should be that they read it as a whole.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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