W.H.R.Rivers

“ On admission into hospital he suffered from fearful headaches and had hardly any sleep, and when he slept he had terrifying dreams of warfare. When he came under my care two months later his chief complaint was that, whereas ordinarily he felt cheerful and keen on life, there would come upon him at times, with absolute suddenness, the most terrible depression, a state of a kind absolutely different from an ordinary fit of the blues, having a quality which he could only describe as "something quite on its own."
For some time he had no attack and seemed as if he had not a care in the world. ”

“ There are two chief reasons which induce a sorcerer to work his magic on another. One is when a request by the sorcerer for assistance has been met by deception. If the sorcerer asks a rich man for a buffalo, or for money, and the rich man refuses point-blank, it does not appear that the sorcerer proceeds farther; but if the rich man promises a gift and does not give it, or if he delays giving a positive answer and puts off a decision from day to day, it is a clear case for the application of occult measures. ”

“ An animal or child exposed to danger, which is so recognised as danger that it produces a reaction, tends to give itself to the reaction fully. If it runs away, it tends to run with every particle of the energy which it is capable of putting forth; if it cries, screams, or utters other sound, it tends to do so with all the vigour at its command. In these cases there is no discrimination of the degree of danger. The reaction by flight or cry is the same whether the danger be great or small. ”

“ I can in imagination go downstairs into a kitchen in a basement and I can go upstairs towards the upper door, but when I reach the top of the stairs I come to the absolutely unknown, an unknown far more complete than is the case with any house occupied more recently, where I have some idea of the topography, though this is inexact and vague. For more than two years I have been attempting, by means which have succeeded in evoking other early experience, to penetrate into the mysterious unknown of the upper storey. ”

“ According to my scheme, not only has the general character of systems of relationship been strictly determined by social conditions, but every detail of these systems has also been so determined. Even so small and apparently insignificant a feature as the classing of the sister-in-law with the sister has been found to lead back to a definite social condition arising out of the regulation of marriage and of sexual relations. If sociology is to become a science fit to rank with other sciences, it must, like them, be rigorously deterministic. Social phenomena do not come into being of themselves. ”

“ It seems as if the thoughts repressed by day assume a painful quality when they come to the surface at night, far more intense than is ever attained if they are allowed to occupy the attention during the day. It is as if the process of repression keeps the painful memories or thoughts under a kind of pressure during the day, accumulating such energy by night that they race through the mind with abnormal speed and violence when the patient is wakeful, or take the most vivid and painful forms when expressed by the imagery of dreams. ”

“ The system of kinship is of the kind known as ‘classificatory,’ and the customs to be described apply not only to the brothers of the mother, in the strict sense, but to all those males of the clan of the same generation as the mother whom the latter would call brother.
A man will cease fighting at once when told to do so by his maternal uncle. The power of the uncle is so great that a fight between the natives two hostile islands (Mobuiag and Moa) might be stopped if a man on one side saw his sister’s son among his enemies. ”

“ In large islands, such as the Marquesas and Tahiti, the stone-workers would find many outlets for their energy and for the satisfaction of their religious and artistic impulses. There would be no reason why any one element of their culture should undergo hypertrophy; why their energies should take the direction of magnifying the images which, as I suggest, they may have trusted their souls would occupy when they were no longer living.
A little place like Easter Island, on the contrary, would give no outlet for the energies of the immigrants in an economic or social direction. ”

“ Whether it be the censorship of the Press of highly civilised societies, or the disguise of the truth found in the ritual of a Melanesian secret fraternity, the processes of suppression and distortion point to some fault in the social order, to some interference with the harmony and unity which should characterise the acts of a perfectly organised society. ”

“ O woman of wonderful birth, renowned were you born, O flower, lime, O flower, tree. Having found a proper husband you married; having found a proper wife I married. I gave my best buffalo to Piedr for you. I took you as a beauty to Kuudr. A house we built, bracelets and buffalo horns we made in sport. I thought we should have had many children and many buffaloes should we have enjoyed. Liberal you were and refreshing like the shade of the umbrella tree. We thought that we should live long. We went together as we willed. We bought strong buffaloes and we prevailed over injustice. ”

“ The records of others can never, however, carry the conviction which comes from one's own experience, even though such experience can rarely have the dramatic and conclusive character of my case of claustrophobia. One who wishes to satisfy himself whether or no unconscious experience exists should subject his own life-history to the severest scrutiny, either aided by another in a course of psycho-analysis or, though less satisfactory and less likely to convince, by a process of self-analysis. ”

“ When we find a feature such as that of the Florida system among a people none of whose allies in culture practise the cross-cousin marriage, the matter must be far more doubtful. In the present state of our knowledge we are only justified in making such a feature the basis of a working hypothesis to stimulate research and encourage us to look for other evidence in the neighbourhood of the place where the feature has been found. Our knowledge of the social institutions of the world is not yet so complete that we can afford to neglect any clue which may guide our steps. ”

“ Moreover, we must not be content merely to advise our patients to give up repression; we must help them by every means in our power to give up repression; we must help them by every means in our power to put this advice into practice. We must show them how to overcome the difficulties which are put in their way by enfeebled volition and by the distortion of experience when it has long been seen exclusively from some one point of view. It is often only by a process of prolonged re-education that it becomes possible for the patient to give up the practice of repressing war experience. ”

“ It often happens that we only become aware that we have dreamed owing to some event of the day which recalls an image or incident of a dream which has occurred during the preceding night, or even on some more remote occasion. This has often raised the question whether sleep is not habitually accompanied by dreams, only a small proportion of which are remembered. Whether this be so or not, we can be confident that dream-experience bulks largely in the content of the unconscious. We all know that dreams differ greatly in the ease and completeness with which they are forgotten. ”

“ Of course, in so large a mass of material there are mistakes.2 In one family no doubt a child has been omitted, especially when it died young and had no posterity to make its name important; in another case perhaps a child has been added to a family who was really the offspring of another mother. That there are such mistakes is certain, but they are probably few in number, and I have no doubt that, with one exception to be presently considered, such mistakes as have crept in do not appreciably impair the value of the genealogies as a record of the working of social regulations. ”

“ It is evident that, whenever we find such a feature as common nomenclature for a grandmother and a sister or for a cross-cousin and a parent, it should suggest to us the possibility of such marriage regulations as those of Pentecost and the Banks Islands. But such common designations might have arisen in some other way, and in order to establish the existence of such forms of marriage in the past history of the people, we must have criteria to guide us when we are considering whether a given feature of the terminology of relationship is or is not a survival of a marriage institution. ”

“ When a group of animals react to danger by means of flight it is certainly for the welfare of each individual that it shall act with the rest, but it is not so clear that complete uniformity is necessary in this mode of reaction. It may even be that in some cases individual safety, as well as the safety of the greatest number, would be promoted by flight in different directions rather than by the absolute uniformity which would result from a perfect process of suggestion. In the reaction by aggression again, absolute uniformity is not imperative. ”

“ The case I have just narrated is a straightforward example of anxiety neurosis, which made no real progress as long as the patient tried to keep out of his mind the painful memories and anxieties which had been aroused in his mind by reflection on his past experience, his present state, and the chance of his fitness for duty in the future. When in place of running away from these unpleasant thoughts he faced them boldly and allowed his mind to dwell on them in the day they no longer raced through his thoughts at night and disturbed his sleep by terrifying dreams of warfare. ”

“ It is an almost universal feature of the classificatory system that the children of brothers are classed with the children of sisters. A man applies the same term to his mother's sister's children which he uses for his father's brother's children, and the use of this term, being the same as that used for a brother or sister, carries with it the most rigorous prohibition of marriage. ”

“ The memory of the special variety, which is known as the nightmare, may be as vivid and persistent as that of the most poignant and striking events of the waking life, and all degrees occur between this realistic persistence and the complete forgetting of a dream which is present only for a few moments after awaking. ”

“ Assuming that animals whose common action is thus determined possess something we call mind, the effect of suggestion is to produce in all the members of the group a mental content so similar that all act with complete harmony towards some common end. There is reason to believe that the harmony so produced is more complete than is ever produced by the common possession of an idea or other form of intellectual motive. It is no great assumption that the more gregarious is a species of animal, the more perfect is its gregarious instinct. ”

“ Those who escape from danger by the performance of some complex activity bear almost unanimous witness that, while so engaged they were wholly free from the fear which the danger might have been expected to arouse. Highly complex acts designed to allow escape from, or to overcome, the danger are carried out as coolly as, or even more coolly than, is customary in the ordinary behaviour of daily life. There seems to be in action a process of suppression of the fear or other affective state. ”

“ Freud's theory of the unconscious should appeal to the physician in that it provides him with a definite working scheme of influences, which he has long known to be active in the causation of mental disorders and of the bodily disorders which are traceable to mental factors. The modern conception of such disorders is that they are not merely the result of some shock or strain, but are the outcome of the whole life-history of those who suffer, that they are the result of the totality of the individual experience of the patient as well as of that ancestral experience which we call heredity. ”

“ I have taken the frog as an instance of an amphibian because it is one with which we are especially familiar, but the process of dissociation and the property of alternate consciousness would be still more necessary to such an amphibian as the newt, which is for long spaces of time the subject of purely aquatic experience and then for long periods leads a life upon the ground. In such an animal, the process of dissociation might be expected to be even more complete than in an animal, such as the frog, which passes habitually and quickly from one mode of existence to the other. ”