Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/162

 154 REPORTS

some ideas more or less closely related to it. She was not attempt- ing to form any scientific conclusions. Visual images, or patterns of spatial outline and color, are woven into every function of human life. In considering any function of the mind, we come into relationship with every other process and product, and one some- times seems to wander from the announced subject.

Taking visual images, first presentative and then representative in the order of their relationship to external reality in varying degrees down into the depths of unconscious life, we have direct visual perception of an external object, after-images, conscious memory images, revery, fantasy, hypnagogic images, dream pictures, hallucinations, imagery of the clairvoyant trance.

In order to gain a clear idea of the relation of visual imagery to libido, the writer called attention to zonal components and various other topographical areas of interest. By means of the zonal components and organs of special sensation, as well as of those muscular, articular, and visceral, the partial instincts work out their urges. The partial instinct with which we are concerned in the formation of imagery is that of looking in its extreme receptive and passive functioning. If this sort of functioning becomes blocked by a heaping up of libido toward the sensory end, the sensory stimulus is not transmitted into motor activity, but is projected from within into an artificial objectiflcation. But a temporary blocking is not unwholesome, provided it continues only long enough to act as a signal for further and more effective activity. It can not be considered abnormal, unless it persists long enough to cause annoyance and inconvenience.

Some of the causes for the heaping-up of libido in vision were discussed. In regard to wrong methods of training, the case of a child who developed habits of repression, from being under the supervision of two austere, silent and repressed parents, was de- scribed. Such a child is denied most of its motor outlets, and has little chance to express itself even in words of which it hears very few in the solemn, vacuous, and sordid atmosphere of the home. It is on the way to become idealistic beyond its capacity for sublimation, introverted, and hyperaesthesic. Under these conditions, it resorts to the most accessible, but chiefly passive occupation of looking at things, although its interest in everything is very active. But the passive attitude of receiving impressions gets an active motor outlet, when the child hunts through books^