Various

“ Do you not expect to become at once a slave instead of a freeman? To spend much money upon hurtful pleasures? To have too much occupation to attend to anything honourable and profitable? And to be compelled to pursue what not even a mad man would pursue?" "By Hercules," said Xenophon, "what extraordinary power you represent to be in a kiss!" "Do you wonder at this?" rejoined Socrates; "are you not aware that the Tarantula, an insect not as large as half an obolus, by just touching a part of the body with its mouth, wears men down with pain, and deprives them of their senses?" ”

“ To be accurate, one could not do justice to the symphony except by studying it as a whole, and similarly one should study the man as a whole, including his relations to the universe as a whole. It is as wholes that great poets conceived of their poems and great artists of their pictures, and it is as a whole that each and every human life, standing as it does as the representative of the body of the universe, and the spirit of the universe, on the other, should implicitly be viewed. ”

“ A young woman of irregular life appears in my dream as one with soiled skirts, and, very vaguely, some one's else skirts are soiled also. After seeing a print of Tompkins' painting, Hester Prynne, heroine of The Scarlet Letter, I dream that I go to a shop, where I have great difficulty because of darkness, to buy some dark green silk for embroidering a letter somewhere on my dress. Not to pander to the base in human nature are these details given but to make known life's realities to those who are blinded by theories. The frank and honest truth is never foul and monstrous. ”

“ His increased claim upon life and the joy of life, upon colored, brilliant reality, must endure the inevitable limitations, placed by reality, but not the arbitrary, wrong, indefensable limitations which put too many chains upon the creative spirit mounting from out the depths of animal darkness. The nervous sufferer possesses the soul of a child, that arbitrary limitation which represses and the reason for which is not understood. ”

“ Dream-self, subconscious ideas, visual images,—these are but terms which bridge the abyss of our ignorance. Further exploration of the mystery is of value not only from the standpoint of pure science, to whose domain there is no limit, but also in the interest of education, health, sanity and morality. It is neither necessary nor wise for all persons to study their dreams, but for those who shape the growing thought and conduct of the world a knowledge of even the remotest outposts of human mentality is supremely important. ”

“ For a musician to dream of playing, or of trying to play, upon an organ or piano is apparently the most natural thing in the world and an attempt at interpretation is, to uninstructed common sense, a journey far afield. ”

“ The patient in direct proportion to the degree of his dementia loses his capacity to recognize the reality of his environment or his relationship to it, and builds up more and more a world of his own in which he lives untroubled by the demands of adaptation. No one who has ever argued with a paranoic will forget how keen a sense of reality he may retain, how logical his arguments are, and how reasonable his delusions appear, if only some one point be granted. ”

“ After a walk in the spring when the ground was white with the cotton-tufted seeds of the poplar and I thought if all germinated how overwhelmed we should be with poplars, I dream that I am sweeping a floor upon which cotton is scattered, some of which flies and is caught in my hair. ”

“ The psychologist should sympathize deeply with the anatomist and the physiologist and the student of cerebral pathology, but equally deeply with the philosopher and the metaphysician who study the implications, present although hidden, that point to the bonds between the individual and the universe. To fail to recognize that these bonds exist,—as is done when the attempt is made to study human beings as if they were really and exclusively the product of their historic past conceived of in an organic sense,—would be to try to build one-half of an arch and expect it to endure. ”

“ The nature of any and every form of real underlying energy or essence must be defined in terms of our sense of our own will and freedom. And this means that we must conceive and describe ourselves, and expect to conceive and to describe the powers that animate us, no longer as a system of forces subject to the so-called laws of nature (which are, in reality, not immutable) but as relatively free, creative agents; no longer as the product of the interplay of instincts, but as individuals possessed of real reason, real power of love and real self-consistent will. ”

“ We are told that our visions of the unpicturable, the ideal world, which our imagination paints and which our logical reasoning calls for as the necessary cap or final corollary to any finite world which our intelligence can actually define,— that such visions are nothing but the pictures of infantile desires projected on to a great screen and made to mock us with the appearance of reality. ”

“ The study of human nature should, in short, begin at the top, rather than at the bottom; just as, if one had to choose what phase of a symphony one would choose in order to get an idea of its perfection, one would take some culminating moment rather than the first few notes simply because they were the first. ”

“ In such an analysis we would, of course, first take up, individually, every portion and every element of every portion of the dream, and by means of each such lesser or greater element of the dream, we could arrive at a mass of material, a wealth of information concerning the past experiential, emotional, mental and moral life of the individual whose dream we were at the moment analyzing. In fact, one could ferret out the full life history in great detail, thus obtaining a complete autobiography leading far down into the depths of the dreamer's mental life and into the inner world of his own. ”

“ In many cases in our returns repression is so potent from long practice, that the sweetest smile, the kindest remarks or even deeds are used either to veil it to others, or to evict it from our own consciousness, or else as a self-inflicted penance for feeling it, while in some tender consciences its checked but persistent vestiges may become centers of morbid complexes and in yet other cases it burrows and proliferates more or less unconsciously, and finds secret and circuitous ways of indulgence which only psychoanalysis or a moral or religious confessional could trace. ”

“ I had never before seen an animal look intelligently at itself. It was long before man distinguished his self from the world without, and longer still before he began to understand himself. Physical and mental phenomena, pain and pleasure, could not be tracked to their sources and so came to be expressed in terms of the world of nature, and for a reason precisely similar that portion of the self functioning in sleep makes use of symbolism. ”

“ Phantastic thinking begins when the subject fails to apply the test of reality to his mental image and exclude it if it be not adapted to realization. If environment or internal inhibitions prevent this realization, however, the craving: lying back of the fancy must be diverted to a more practical channel—the normal solution—or the fancy must persist in spite of its impracticability. This latter process is the germ of the psychosis. But not its development. A certain compromise may be reached—he who digs for gold in his back-yard is not so crazy as he who reaches out his hand for the moon. ”

“ Considering the instincts from the standpoint of evolution, one may assume that they first developed in extremely low forms of life in order to produce the few and simple reactions of which animals low in the scale are capable. One might almost say in regard to such primitive organisms, that for each situation an instinct is provided and the situation calls forth its appropriate reaction almost as automatically as the pressing of an electric button causes the ringing of a bell. But, as animals rise higher in the scale, the kinds of conduct required become more varied and complex. ”

“ Howard pleads for judicious scolding and flogging, to be, done in heat and not in cold blood, and says that there is enough anger in the world, were it only rightly directed, to sweep away all the evils in it. In all these phenomena there is no trace of sex or any of its symbols, and sadism can never explain but must be explained by it. My thesis is, then, that every Freudian mechanism applies to anger as truly as it does to sex. This by no means assumes the fundamental identity of every feeling-emotion in the sense of Weissfeld's very speculative theory. ”

“ Religion the author regards as an existence which is in harmony with that of the "universe-personality." If we have the attributes we give to the Deity as reason, love (disinterested) and will, we should seek this harmony. The "world of sense" is antagonistic to this conception, in that it leads us to reject all other than sense knowledge. Our notions of love, honor, power, justice cannot spring from the sense-world. We must look beyond the latter—a mere illusion—to find the true, immutable. Mind cannot be evolved from life but must pre-exist. ”

“ I may merely state that what is an absolute and fixed law for the tics, what is the fundamental and basic explanation or theory of the genesis and meaning of the tics must apply also to all habit movements wherever and whenever they occur, and, in like manner, to all habit formations of whatever nature. And since our habits are but the prolongations of our instincts, the latter also would be included within the purview of the same generalization. In other words, if all tics have a sexual meaning, then all instincts, which means the vital energy of man, has the same meaning. ”

“ Each member must be ever attentive to his social surroundings; he must model himself on his environment; in short, he must avoid shutting himself up in his own peculiar character as a philosopher in his ivory tower. Therefore society holds suspended over each individual member, if not the threat of correction, at all events the prospect of a snubbing, which, although it is slight, is none the less dreaded. Such must be the function of laughter. ”

“ But what does the normal man do? He diverts these thoughts into channels where fancy has a legitimate place—he writes romances; he imagines himself using an instrument to talk with his friend miles away and invents the telephone; he imagines a better society than the one which galls him, and writes a "Utopia"; above all he theorizes and speculates. According to his age or ability these speculations give us alchemy or chemistry, astrology or astronomy, magic or religion, spiritism or psychology, the were-wolf or psycho-analysis, phrenology or psychiatry, and so on. ”

“ In none of the examples is a complete analysis attempted. The mind of each reader may carry the solution of the problem as far as it will. I am content merely to furnish a clue. That each dream is of great significance must not be assumed. But that each one, even though it appear a mere fanciful reverie, means SOMETHING can hardly be doubted. At the outset it is acknowledged that the dreams recorded followed a period of intense emotion when, through the exigencies of life the strongest instinct of humanity required control and repression. ”

“ Men do not reach their best accomplishments, if indeed they reach any accomplishment, through the exclusive recognition, either unconscious or instinctive, of a utilitarian result, or a result which can be couched in terms of pleasure or personal satisfaction as the goal of effort. They may state the goal to themselves in these terms; but this is, then, the statement of what is really a fictitious principle, a principle in positing which the patient does but justify himself and does not define his real motive. ”

“ In our devolutionary tendency toward ancestral methods of reaction, the individual, resolved, so to speak, into his proximate elements, permits or is compelled by biological determinism to permit these split off tendencies to break forth once more, albeit in exaggerated fashion, as if let loose from the leash of control by the higher nervous centres, and reanimified, intensified, and magnified, our infantile, archaic, instinctive, inherited, hidden, phylogenetic tendencies or activities held sway. ”

“ Reverting for a moment to the sexual interpretations of the Scratch-Reflex dream that I manufactured by applying the Freudian ready-made symbolism, and, again, by imitating the constructive fancy of Jung; they must both be judged as having no merit beyond, perhaps, that of coinciding with inherent probabilities in the premises. That is, what they purport to reveal might be made out of whole cloth to fit almost any unmarried man, barring a few individual adaptations, to suit the known circumstances of the dreamer. As these interpretations stand, they do not fit the psychogenesis of the dream. ”

“ And if we can trust our intuitions so far, the perverted believing process is thus more a motor than a sensory process, more a disorder of expression than a disorder of impression, more a perversion of the WILL TO BELIEVE than a matter of the rationality of a particular credo.
Again we may appear to burst through from an undergrowth of statistics into the clear field of truism. False beliefs are more practical than theoretical, more a matter of practical conduct than of passive experience, more a change of reagent than a reaction to change. ”

“ I contend that the dream is neither an infantile nor a sexual wish-fulfilment, all plausible analogies to the contrary notwithstanding. Should anyone wish to urge the more remote interpretations which I first manufactured, then the burden of proof rests with him. And no proof is conclusive that rests on mere precedent or on mere reasoning by analogy. The only psychological proof of an interpretation is fundamentally the ability of the interpreter to reconstitute the dream beyond peradventure. ”

“ So weird and dramatic are these scenes often that to some minds we must call anger and hate the chief springs of the imagination. A pubescent girl who was deeply offended went off by herself and held an imaginary funeral of her enemy, hearing in fancy the disparaging remarks of the bystanders, and when it was all over and the reaction came, she made up with the object of her passion by being unusually sweet to her and even became solicitous about her health as fearing that her revery might come true. ”