The psycho-analytic study of the familyFlugel, J. C. (John Carl)
Science
The psycho-analytic study of the family
Flugel, J. C. (John Carl)
Families; Marriage; Parent and child; Psychoanalysis
[Footnote 6: The dreams falling within this class (together with some
others) appear to exhibit what is, at first sight at least, a puzzling
exception to the general rule governing the formation of dreams which
give expression to repressed tendencies, inasmuch as the obnoxious wish
is gratified openly and undisguisedly instead of appearing in an indirect
and symbolic form, as is usually the case. It would seem however, that
this departure from the rule may to a large extent be explained and
reconciled with the ordinary methods of repression by the following
considerations:--(1) although the content of the wish appears directly
in consciousness, it nevertheless fails (both during the dream and after
waking) to be appreciated in its full significance for the mental life
of the personality, _i. e._ there is no realisation of the fact that the
dream represents in any way the fulfilment of a wish; there is present
a sort of functional agnosia, in virtue of which the thought of the
death is dissociated from its actual psychical concomitants, which alone
can endow it with its full meaning; (2) in addition to this cognitive
dissociation there is an emotional substitution, the emotion actually
experienced being one of sorrow instead of one of joy, which the simple
gratification of a wish would by itself most naturally occasion. This
sorrow corresponds of course to the very genuine grief which would be
felt at the conscious level in case of any real mishap to the relatives
concerned and at the same time serves as an additional screen to hide
the underlying hostile wish in the Unconscious; (3) on rarer occasions
it would seem that the process of emotional substitution may be replaced
by one of deëmotionalisation which prevents the cognitive elements from
calling up any of the feelings which would normally accompany them; thus
the death of a near relative will appear not as a sorrowful (or as it
would be at certain levels of the Unconscious, a joyful) event, but as one
devoid of all affective significance or as one that is absurd, ridiculous
or unthinkable.]
[Footnote 7: Or sometimes, in the case of women, the Electra complex;
though the Electra myth gives a rather less complete expression of the
combined love and hate tendencies in the female than is found in the
Œdipus story for the corresponding tendencies of the male.
The whole subject of the manifestations of these complexes in legend and
literature and in the mind of the poet and the artist is treated at length
in Otto Rank's comprehensive and most valuable work "Das Inzestmotiv in
Dichtung und Sage".]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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