Human Psychology As Seen Through the Dream by Turner Julia

Author:Turner, Julia. [Julia Turner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136328763
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Chapter III

The Plot is Complicated by the Subject's Revolt

Men must work and women must weep.

(The Three Fishers, Charles Kingsley)

THE little child objects to the restriction of his activities, and equally he resents exclusion from favour. He brings no criterion of right and wrong along with him from his animal forbears. Life is life for him until the parents supply the criteria for the selection of preoccupations. To eat so long as a thing tastes good, to snatch a coveted object and appropriate it for his own satisfaction, to find interest in matters relating to his own body and its functions, these are as natural and desirable from the child's point of view as breathing. But precious energy required for the conceptual life must not be too recklessly wasted along these lines. If no solicitous parent be at hand to inculcate the rules of decency, the child's group, in its own interests, will not long tolerate asocial conduct; the subject will be ostracised. In these circumstances, habits which are undesirable, if persisted in, will have to be indulged surreptitiously. Here is one source of danger; another is, that the child may rebel vehemently. Unless he understands the reasons for coming into line with the social conscience, a child will become an outlaw or indulge in secret. In either case he becomes a law unto himself. The child may be full of subterfuges, for, though he bring no moral code with him, he is the embodiment of intelligence, that "filler in of gaps," as Professor Hob-house says, wherever the instinctive process is menaced with failure. If Mother has put the coveted foodstuff on a high shelf in the cupboard, there are, at any rate, chairs and tables which may lend themselves as a means of reaching it. The child, therefore, tends, in the first instance, to function as power subject, and it is as power subject that the dream supposedly first presents the subject. Nevertheless, the opposite "party" formed out of introjected material of the opposite quality, is somewhere in the immediate neighbourhood, and its relation to the power "party" supplies the anxiety drama with an infinite variety of situations. That the infantile mind is the scene of many a conflict, for which it probably gets no credit, is plainly seen both from dreams of the immediate period and from dreams of adulthood, which frequently contain infantile material. Possibly, if properly handled, dreams of the infantile period would be of great assistance in the child's training. The dreams of childhood show a great deal of mental tension. A small boy dreams that a giant comes with a sword and threatens to cut his head off. The violence of the crisis is evident.

The undisputed dominance of the power party does not, as a rule, last; the juvenile subject is warned early. This, it seems, is the intention of the above dream, as it evidently also is of a dream in which the devil is cutting the subject's nails. The devil is unmistakably regarded as an evil agent, the giant is just the power sense.

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