Page:Jung - The psychology of dementia praecox.djvu/138

114 how the dream changed a metaphoric expression to a reality which it inserted into the personality of the dreamer, or, e. g., an unconscious complex immediately condensed a distant analogy with the personality and thus attained the necessary intensity to disturb the conscious process, as in "A fir tree stood alone, etc." If in a brief dreamy state the unconscious complex could have reached the speech innervation he would have said "I am the fir tree." As was pointed out in the preceding chapters, the necessary presupposition for this condensation is the indistinctness of ideas as they normally exist in the unconsciousness. From the above source we explain the condensation in our case. As soon as the patient thinks in the complex she no more thinks with the normal energy, i. e., distinctness, but her thought is indistinct and dreamy, as is normally the case in the unconscious or in the dream. As soon as the patient's associations reach the realms of the complex, the hierarchy of the chief ideas ceases and the stream of thought moves in dreamlike analogies, which, in the self-evidence of dreams, is put on an equal value with reality. The complex works here automatically following its laws of analogy. It is equally freed from the dominations of the ego-complex, and for that reason it is impossible for the ego-complex to properly direct the complex associations. On the contrary it is subjected to the complex and is constantly disturbed by defective reproductions ("thought-deprivation") and by obsessive associations (pathological fancies). The same process of obscuration, which takes place in the ideas, is also found in the speech of the complex. It gradually becomes indistinct, similar expressions readily substitute one another and there are also sound displacements and mediate (speech) associations. Thus it makes no difference to the patient whether she says "artist" or "fine artist world," "professorship" instead of "professor," "fine learned world" instead of "learned tailoress." These conceptions substitute each other with the same facility as the patient's personality with Socrates. The accent is characteristically not on the simple but on the unusual, because that corresponds to the tendency towards external distinction.

2. Double polytechnic (stereotype: "I am double polytechnic irretrievable"); that is, the highest of the highest, the highest of tailoring, the highest accomplishment—the highest