The patient, accustomed to deadly peril on his long expedition, could not
explain to himself the anxiety caused by this dream. I called Mr. X's
attention to the fact that in my opinion an erotic conflict was concealed in
the dream, and asked him point blank whether he had taken part in a love
story. At this the patient grew deadly pale, struck the table with his fist
and said "That you should have guessed it!" Now the confession followed, how
he had had a love affair in which he had not cut a good figure and which
ruined a woman's life, and that afterwards he had been violently remorseful
and had lived with the idea of suicide. Then he had seized upon the
opportunity offered him to lead a dangerous expedition. He wanted to die and
here he would not find death ingloriously.
It is clear that the two people upon the rocks above symbolized the two, who
went to meet destruction.
Soon afterwards the travelers parted. A year later the newspapers contained
the report of the marriage of the famous explorer. The surmise is allowable
that the analysis of this dream was the cause of this fortunate solution.
As I have already pointed out, the original cathartic method of Breuer and
Freud, explained to some extent, is still followed by some investigators, by
Muthman, Bezzola, Frank and many others. I had the opportunity in June and
July, 1912, of observing for some time the treatment of patients by Dr.
Frank in Zurich at his private clinic, and of gaining for myself a
satisfactory idea of his technique. Frank by no means rejects the Freudian
psychoanalysis with all its helps, but uses it only when he does not succeed
in hypnotizing his patient. Preferably, and in a great number of cases, he
uses, in a state of hypnotism, a cathartic method he originated.
Where Breuer and Freud profited from the spontaneous or the provoked
somnabulistic state of the patient, and by questioning dug up the hidden
depths, Frank decided to be satisfied with a light hypnose, a state of
hypotaxie, which might be termed analogous to the half-conscious state of
the person who after taking a mid-day nap frequently denies having been
asleep. In this condition we can give an account on waking of what happened
around us. One sleeps and one does not sleep; the upper-consciousness then
can control what the sub-consciousness brings up.
Frank says that, except in the peculiarity that he is satisfied with a
lighter degree of hypnose, his method differs from that of Breuer and Freud
in that generally he does not question the patient when under hypnotism,
neither suggests. Experience has taught him, he says, that the ideas loaded
with affect, spontaneously discharge. They are the very ones which would do
so in a dream, but are differentiated from the occurrences in the dream in
the sense that these last enter phantastically dressed, while the first
express themselves with the mental affects belonging to them, precisely as
they were lived through.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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