Page:Jung - The psychology of dementia praecox.djvu/171

Rh nearest analogy to her method of thinking is that of normal dreams which make use of the same or at least similar psychological mechanisms, and which no one can understand without paying homage to Freud's analytic method. The poet creates by means of rich expressions and mostly consciously, his thought follows a definite trend, whereas this uneducated and scantily-endowed patient thinks without any directing idea, in obscure dreamlike pictures and amid indistinct expressions. All this contributes to making the stream of thought as incomprehensible as possible. That every person is unconsciously a poet—especially in dreams—is a banal expression. In dreams he coins his complexes into symbolic forms, to be sure, but it is only in an aphoristic manner, and it only seldom reaches a more extensive or a more connected formation, as this requires complexes of poetic—or hysteric force. In our patient, however, we have long and extensively elaborated fancies which on the one hand are comparable to a great poem and on the other to the romances and fantastic pictures of somnambulists. The waking state of our patient just like that of the poet, is filled with fanciful formations, while in somnambulists the extension and the elaboration of the system mostly results in the dissociated "other" state of consciousness. But just as somnambulists prefer to translate into exquisite fantastic and many mystic forms, and often allow their pictures to fade into dreamlike imperfections, so does our patient preferably express herself in monstrous and grotesquely distorted metaphors, which resemble much more the normal dream with its characteristic absurdities. What our patient has therefore in common with the "conscious" poet and the "unconscious" poet, the somnambulist, is only the extension and constant elaboration of the phantasms, while the absurd, the grotesque, in brief the lack of all that is beautiful, appears to be taken from the dream of the average normal person. The psyche of the patient stands therefore psychologically about midway between the psychic state of a normal dreamer and a somnambulist, but with the exception that through serious injury of the "fonction du réel" and adaptation to the surroundings, the dream persistently replaces the waking state. How dream formations may grow out of complexes I showed for the first time in the little book, "Zur Psychologie und Pathologie sogenannter