Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/326

 1 8 Presidential Address.

part in the welfare of mankind in all places and at all times.

Strangely enough the special interest which modern psychology has come to take in symbolism is not due in the first place to the study of such cruder forms of human thought as are exemplified by the savage or the child, but has arisen out of the study of disease and of the dream. Students of those nervous and mental disorders which we call the psychoses and psycho-neuroses have come to see that many of the manifestations or symptoms of these disorders have a symbolic nature and are symbols of some underlying trouble which cannot come to consciousness in its true guise. The psycho-neurosis may be regarded as a symbolic expression of a deeply seated trouble providing a solution of some situation with which the sufferer is unable to cope in its naked reality.

Again, the fantastic and irrational structure of the dream is regarded as a symbolic expression of some deeply seated desire or anxiety which is not allowed to come to overt consciousness during the waking hours, and even when the control of the waking life has been removed in sleep finds expression only in symbolic form.

Those who have been led by their studies to the recogni- tion of the great importance of symbolism in disease and dream have not stopped at that point. There is now an extensive Hterature in which attempts are made to bring the symbolism of myth and ritual into relation with modern views concerning its role in the dream and in disease. One of the most striking conclusions to which this comparative study has led some writers is that there is a universal system of symbolisation among mankind ; that among all races of mankind and in the members of every race there is a tend- ency to symbolise certain thoughts by means of the same symbols, or at least by symbols having a close similarity to one another. This belief in a universal system of symbolisa- tion has been reached in the first place by the similarity which