tensity demanding his whole powers, may not be willing to undertake the long course of training required to unlimber mental processes bound into a scrupulousness which interferes with the acquisition of a spontaneous automatism required in the practice of any art. THE PSYCHOMOTOR DISCIPLINE ITS TECHNIQUE These difficulties having been faced, and treatment resolved upon, a psychomotor discipline is instituted. It begins with the movements of the larger joints, which are phylogenetically better established, and within their limits. easier to control. The end aimed at is largeness and smoothness of movement; all sudden jerking must be avoided; and the binding of muscles must be unlimbered. Gentle swinging movements, followed by Indian club exercises are a convenient introduction. Success is usually rapid, and then the second stage can be begun. This consists of directing the same principles to the use of the joints around which the cramp has occurred. Slow, smooth movements in different directions are at first practised, and at least until complete control is attained. Then some tool or instrument is grasped in the hand and wide sweeping movements made with this. Until this can be done with complete freedom, no use of the tool should be permitted; but when cramping ceases to occur the patient is directed to use his pencil or other instrument in a professional act. When this is begun, there is a great tendency for the patient's mind to concentrate upon the product of his act, viz., the writing or other work, and to wander from the act itself. This is the great difficulty at this stage of the treatment. To avoid it, the patient must be induced not to think of the form he is drawing, but to concentrate upon the movements he is making. To prevent cramping, all movements must at first be large, wide and sweeping. The lines made will therefore be round, and the forms large. The motion should be perfectly smooth, and not too slow, or binding is apt to occur. If it is made too rapidly, on the other hand, the muscles will contract too suddenly, and tend to jerk into cramp. The preliminary flourishes of an ornate writer furnish a good model of the speed and style of movement to be aimed at. Finally, the patient should not practise long at a time, or there will be a flagging of the attention needed to coordinate a vast number of muscular contraction and relaxations; and when attention relaxes, the old habit, which is that of the cramp, regains ascendancy and vitiates that attempt and makes the ensuing one still more difficult. But the sittings should be frequent, so that practice may be abundant; and each acquisition should be established before there is time for it to be forgotten. When large writing can be performed automatically without tendency to cramp, a gradual reduction of amplitude of movement is attempted; and when a reasonable size of writing is attained, the patient may be gradually permitted to resume writing in which the end is not the · manner but the matter. The cure is then only a matter of continued attention and further practice. Relapses, which are frequent, are due to the relaxation of earnest attention by the patient, and it is sometimes a hard task for the physician to prevent the natural tendency to a relapse into easy-going automatism before perfect freedom of movement has been attained. A full account of several cases upon which this treatment has been based is given in a current number of Brodwell's Jour. d. Neurologie u. Psychiatrie (Leipsig). POETRY AND DREAMS (Concluded) BY F. C. PRESCOTT Cornell University III Let us now again return to the subject of dreams. Dreams, as has been said, have their origin in the depths of the mind, in unconscious mental processes,- that is, in processes which do not come to our knowledge except indirectly, or under unusual or abnormal conditions,— the conditions supplied, for example, in dreams, in day dreams and hallucinations, and in certain neurotic activities. Under ordinary conditions there is a force operating to prevent these processes from rising to the surface of consciousness. If the reader has ever tried to recall any matter-for example, a proper name - which has fallen out of his recollection, and which he can almost but not quite recollect; if he has felt himself, so to speak, struggling to recover this matter and baffled in his efforts, he can form some idea of the repressive force in question.' This force is called in the dream theory the "psychic censor"; it "stands at the gateway of consciousness." In general, it prevents the deeper processes from becoming conscious. Under certain conditions, however, when this force is relaxed, as in sleep, it allows the repressed material to pass, or permits an evasion. That is, it permits such material to pass, but only in a disguised and distorted form, under which it escapes recognition. The so-called psychic censor, as its name implies, resembles a public censorial officer, say of the political press, who will not allow unpleasant truth to pass for publication, but may be evaded by a veiled or disguised representation. In dreams the latent content is under repression; it passes the 1 Freud explains this amnesia as caused by a connection between such a name and material which is under repression. See Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, p. 3. 104 censor only in a disguised and distorted form, in which it becomes unrecognizable - that is, in the form of the manifest content. The operations by which, under the direction of the censor, the underlying thoughts are transformed into the apparent dream are called the "dream work" (Traumarbeit).' They cannot be fully explained here, this being the most complex and difficult part of the dream theory. Through these operations, however described technically as "condensation," "displacement," "secondary elaboration," etc.the underlying thought is in appearance completely transformed; it is bodied forth in a strange guise which bears little or no resemblance to the original. This explains why dreams appear absurd and imcomprehensible; only when. these disguises have been stripped off, only when the work of the censor has been retraced and undone, do they disclose their underlying thought. An interpretation of dreams, then, requires a knowledge of the dream work. In this transformation, however, one element remains unchanged. A dream is always emotional, and the emotion which has properly belonged to the original dream-thoughts still clings to the final dream, where sometimes it seems strangely out of place. That is, intense feeling is sometimes. attached to apparently most trivial things, the explanation. for this being that feeling is transferred to these things from the more important ones in the original for which they stand. Whatever strange forms the dream may take this emotion is real and vital; "im Traume ist der Affect das einzig Wahre." Some features of this transformation, effected by the dream work, require for our purposes further explanation. The dream is fictional in two senses. In the first place it represents an ungratified desire as gratified, substituting for the utinam of the latent content a phantasm of gratification. In the second place it represents the abstract by a symbolical concrete. The underlying material, the elements from which the dream is formed, with the desires. as motive power, may be anything which finds place in the human mind persons and places, thoughts and opinions, 'Die Traumdeutung, VI. facts observed or inferences from facts, concretions or abstractions. In the dream these elements are reduced or transposed into one simple form. The dream, as a rule, represents not thoughts but actions. In a dream we take part in an action as one of the actors, or see a situation before our eyes. A dream is a kind of dramatic representation, a series of scenes in that theatre of the brain which Stevenson describes; and only such elements as are capable of being put upon the scene can pass into the dream. A thought cannot be directly represented; it must be enacted, and therefore the dream makes constant use of symbols. The symbolism of the wildest poet falls short of the symbolism constantly employed in dreams. Temporal relations cannot be represented; in a dream the time is always present. Logical relations cannot be represented; the dream cannot deal directly with an if or a because. Such temporal or logical relations must be expressed, if at all, somehow indirectly in accordance with the dramatic principle. Thus a dream is mainly visual in nature. It may include sounds and other sensations. It is, however, properly a vision. All underlying elements must either be suitable ingredients of a vision or be transformed into such ingredients, made visible, or at least sensible. The dreamer, then, sees a vision representing symbolically the gratification of his wish. - Dreams often take us back to the experiences of early childhood. The reader has, perhaps, like the writer, found this one interesting feature of his dreams, that they sometimes bring up long-forgotten incidents, faces, emotions, with surprising vividness. In dreams, as Dryden says, "Sometimes forgotten things long cast behind And the man dreams but what the boy believed." 1 Day dreams also often take us back to childhood. Drowning persons are said to see their whole lives, including events in early life long lost from conscious remembrance, in the twinkling of an eye; perhaps this vision is somehow related 1 The Cock and the Fox, 11. 333-336. |