4159

JOSEF POPPER-LYNKEUS AND THE THEORY OF DREAMS

There is much of interest to be said on the subject of apparent scientific originality. When some new idea comes up in science, which is hailed at first as a discovery and is also as a rule disputed as such, objective research soon afterwards reveals that after all it was in fact no novelty. Usually the discovery has already been made repeatedly and has afterwards been forgotten, often at very long intervals of time. Or at least it has had forerunners, had been obscurely surmised or incompletely enunciated. This is too well known to call for further discussion.

But the subjective side of originality also deserves consideration. A scientific worker may sometimes ask himself what was the source of the ideas peculiar to himself which he has applied to his material. As regards some of them he will discover without much reflection the hints from which they were derived, the statements made by other people which he has picked out and modified and whose implications he has elaborated. But as regards others of his ideas he can make no such acknowledgements; he can only suppose that these thoughts and lines of approach were generated - he cannot tell how - in his own mental activity, and it is on them that he bases his claim to originality.

Careful psychological investigation, however, diminishes this claim still further. It reveals hidden and long-forgotten sources which gave the stimulus to the apparently original ideas, and it replaces the ostensible new creation by a revival of something forgotten applied to fresh material. There is nothing to regret in this; we had no right to expect that what was ‘original’ could be untraceable and undetermined.

In my case, too, the originality of many of the new ideas employed by me in the interpretation of dreams and in psycho-analysis has evaporated in this way. I am ignorant of the source of only one of these ideas. It was no less than the key to my view of dreams and helped me to solve their riddles, so far as it has been possible to solve them hitherto. I started out from the strange, confused and senseless character of so many dreams, and hit upon the notion that dreams were bound to become like that because something was struggling for expression in them which was opposed by a resistance from other mental forces. In dreams hidden impulses were stirring which stood in contradiction to what might be called the dreamer’s official ethical and aesthetic creed; the dreamer was thus ashamed of these impulses, turned away from them and refused to acknowledge them in day-time, and if during the night he could not withhold expression of some kind from them, he submitted them to a ‘dream-distortion’ which made the content of the dream appear confused and senseless. To the mental force in human beings which keeps watch on this internal contradiction and distorts the dream’s primitive instinctual impulses in favour of conventional or of higher moral standards, I gave the name of ‘dream-censorship’.