Spiritualism and the New Psychology: An Explanation of Spiritualist Phenomena and Beliefs in Terms of Modern Knowledge — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Spiritualism and the New Psychology: An Explanation of Spiritualist Phenomena and Beliefs in Terms of Modern Knowledge
John Stuart Mill · en
The dissociated stream is hypersensitive and makes use of hints and
fears that have passed unperceived by the consciousness. This use
accounts for prophetic dreams, which are, like intuitions, the result of
unconscious processes. In my own experience I have known but two
circumstantial accounts of dream prophecies which were claimed to be
fulfilled: One concerned a railway accident, and the other the
destruction by fire of a distant house. Both the dreamers, who were of
the male sex, had suffered from gross hysterical manifestations, or, in
other words, had been woefully led astray by the unconscious concerning
something other than prophecy. Accounts of prophetic dreams must always
be suspect because of their origin in the unconscious and the inability
of the dreamer either to interpret them or trace their origin. It is to
be noted that psychologists who work at dream analysis make no mention
of dream prophecies, although the fact that 'the wish is father to the
thought' explains why a dream sometimes expresses an unconscious desire
that later attains fulfilment in reality.
The Biblical account of Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the idol with feet of
clay bears the stamp of genuine history. The king, like the neurotic
sufferer of to-day, 'dreamed dreams, wherewith his spirit was troubled,
and his sleep brake from him.' The magicians, called upon to interpret,
asked that the king should first tell his dream; but the king answered,
'The thing is gone from me; if ye will not make known unto me the dream,
with the interpretation thereof, ye shall be cut in pieces and your
houses shall be made a dunghill.' The magicians and astrologers, the
sorcerers and the Chaldeans, failed, but the prophet Daniel took up the
task and told the king his forgotten dream. We can only imagine his
method, but it is possible to revive a dream by using the emotion felt
on waking, and such a method, or even direct hypnosis, may have been
available to Daniel; and if we regard the interpretation, not as
prophetic, but as revealing to the king his forebodings of future
disaster, then the chapter accords with modern conceptions of dream
analysis. Nebuchadnezzar was already a psycho-neurotic on the borderline
of insanity, as his subsequent history shows, and would easily come to
rely upon and reward a psychologist like Daniel, who convincingly laid
bare to him the working of his unconscious. By tradition the old
civilisations of the East were the sources of occult knowledge, and this
view of a scrap of Old Testament history gives a hint how the tradition
arose. If there existed an esoteric knowledge of psychological technique
such as I ascribe to Daniel, then its possessors would easily obtain
reputations for more than worldly wisdom.
CHAPTER IX
HYSTERIA