The unconscious : $b The fundamentals of human personality, normal and abnormalPrince, Morton
Science
The unconscious : $b The fundamentals of human personality, normal and abnormal
Prince, Morton
Psychology, Pathological; Subconsciousness
This experimental dream confirms therefore the general principle
formulated by Freud from the analysis of dreams in which the causal
factor is an inferred wish. It is likewise on the assumption of my
having correctly inferred this factor that I have insisted that a dream
may be a fabricated expression of thoughts other than wishes or may be
the solution of an unsolved problem. In this last case _the dream
phenomena and mechanism seem to be analogous in every way to the
subconscious solution of mathematical problems_ which I have already
described. In such and other cases the subconscious process would seem
to be a continuation and elaboration of the antecedent suggested
problem.
In dreams, then, or, as we should strictly limit ourselves for the
present to saying, _in certain dreams_, there are, as Freud first
showed, two processes; one is the conscious dream, the other is a
subconscious process which is the actuated residuum of a previous
experience and determines the dream.[104] It would be going beyond the
scope of our subject to enter into a full exposition of this
interpretation at this time and I must refer you for a discussion of the
dream problem to works devoted to the subject.
We have not, of course, touched the further problem of the _How_: how a
subconscious intelligence induces a conscious dream which is not an
emergence of the elements of that intelligence into self-consciousness,
but a symbolization of them. This is a problem which still awaits
solution. From certain data at hand it seems likely that so far as
concerns the hallucinatory perceptual elements of a dream they can be
accounted for as the _emergence of the secondary images_ pertaining to
the subconscious “ideas.”
The following observation is an _example of subconscious versification
and_ also of _constructive imagination_. It also, I think, gives an
insight into the character and content of the underlying process which
constructs a dream. I give the observation in the subject’s own words:
"I woke suddenly some time between three and four in the morning. I
was perfectly wide awake and conscious of my surroundings but for a
short time—perhaps two or three minutes—I could not move, and I saw
this vision which I recognized as such.
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