Psychology by Robert S. Woodworth (intellectual books to read .TXT) 📖

his best friends, ill-treated by his family, jilted by his best girl, unsuccessful in his pet schemes? Why should any one make believe to be worse off than he is; what satisfaction can that {495} be to him? Certainly, one would say, the mastery motive could not be active here. And yet--do we not hear children boasting of their misfortunes? "Pooh! That's only a little scratch; I've got a real deep cut." My cut being more important than your scratch makes me, for the moment, more important than you, and gives me a chance to boast over you. Older people are known sometimes to magnify their own ailments, with the apparent aim of enhancing their own importance. Perhaps the same sort of motive underlies the suffering hero daydream.

I am smarting, let us suppose, from a slight administered by my friend; my wounded self-assertion demands satisfaction. It was a very little slight, and I should make myself ridiculous if I showed my resentment. But in imagination I magnify the injury done me, and go on to picture a dreadful state of affairs, in which my friend has treated me very badly indeed, and perhaps deserted me. Then I should not be ridiculous, but so deeply wronged as to be an important person, one to be talked about; and thus my demand for importance and recognition is gratified by my daydream.

Usually the suffering hero pictures himself as in the right, and animated by the noblest intentions, though misunderstood, and thus further enhances his self-esteem; but sometimes he takes the other tack and pictures himself as wicked--but as very, very wicked, a veritable desperado. It may be his self-esteem has been wounded by blame for some little meanness or disobedience, and he restores it by imagining himself a great, big, important sinner instead of a small and ridiculous one. In adolescence, the individual's growing demand for independence is often balked by the continued domination of his elders, and he rebelliously plans quite a career of crime for himself. He'll show them! They won't be so pig-headedly complacent when they know they have driven him to the bad. You can tell by the looks of {496} a person whose feelings are hurt that he is imagining something; usually he is imagining himself either a martyr or a desperado, or some other kind of suffering hero, often working up into a conquering hero in the end, when, his self-esteem restored, he is ready to be friends again. The suffering hero daydream is a "substitute reaction", taking the place of a fight or some other active self-assertion. The conquering hero daydream is often motivated in the same way; for example, our friend the milkmaid would not have been so ready to scorn the young men with a toss of the head if she had not been feeling her own actual inferiority and lack of fine clothes. The daydream makes good, in one way or another, for actual inability to get what we desire. The desire which is gratified in the play of imagination belongs very often indeed under the general head of self-assertion; but when one is in love it is apt to belong under that head. Love dreams of the agreeable sort need no further motivation; but the unpleasant, jealous type of love dream is at the same time a suffering hero dream, and certainly involves wounded self-assertion along with the sexual impulse. Probably the self-asserting daydream is the commonest variety, take mankind as a whole, with the love dream next in order of frequency. But there are many other sorts. There is the humor daydream, illustrated by the young person who suddenly breaks into a laugh and when you ask why replies that she was thinking how funny it would be if, etc., etc. She is very fond of a good laugh, and not having anything laughable actually at hand proceeds to imagine something. So, a music lover may mentally rehearse a piece when he has no actual music to enjoy; and if he has some power of musical invention, he may amuse himself, in idle moments, by making up music in his head; just as one who has some ability in decorative design may fill his idle moments by concocting new designs on paper. {497} When vacation time approaches, it is hard for any one, student or professor, to keep the thoughts from dwelling on the good times ahead, and getting some advance satisfaction. Thus all kinds of desires are gratified in imagination.

Worry

Do we have fear daydreams, as we have amusements utilizing the fear and escape motive? Yes, sometimes we imagine ourselves in danger and plan out an escape. One individual often amuses himself by imagining he is arrested and accused of some crime, and figuring out how he could establish an alibi or otherwise prove his innocence. But fear daydreams also include worry, which seems at first to be an altogether unpleasant state of mind, forced upon us and not indulged in as most daydreams are. Yet, as the worry is often entirely needless, it cannot be said to be forced upon a person, but must have some motive. There must be some satisfaction in it, in spite of all appearance.

Some abnormal cases of worry suggest the theory that the fear is but a cloak for unacknowledged desire. Take this extreme case. A young man, "tied to the apron-strings" of a too affectionate and too domineering mother, has a strong desire to break loose and be an independent unit in the world; but at the same time, being much attached to his mother, he is horrified by this desire. She goes on a railroad journey without him--just an ordinary journey with no special danger--but all the time she is away he is in an agony of suspense lest the train may be wrecked. Such an abnormal degree of worry calls for explanation. Well--did not the worry perhaps conceal a wish, a wish that the train might be wrecked? So he would be set free without any painful effort on his part; and he {498} was a young man who shrank from all effort. The psychopathologist who studied the case concluded that this was really the explanation of the worry.

If, however, we take such extreme cases as typical and cynically apply this conception to all worries, we shall make many mistakes. A student worries unnecessarily about an examination; therefore, he desires to fail. A mother worries because her child is late in getting home; therefore, she wants to be rid of that child. Thus, by being too psychopathological, we reach many absurd conclusions in everyday life; for it is the child that is loved that is worried over, and it is the examination that the student specially wishes to pass that he fears he has flunked.

Worry is a sort of substitute reaction, taking the place of real action when no real action is possible. The student has done all he can do; he has prepared for the examination, and he has taken the examination; now there is nothing to do except wait; so that the rational course would be to dismiss the matter from his mind; if he cannot accomplish that, but must do something, then the only thing he can do is to speculate and worry. So also the mother, in her uncertainty regarding her child, is impelled to action, and if she knew of any real thing to do she would do it and not worry; but there is nothing to do, except in imagination. Worry is fundamentally due to the necessity of doing something with any matter that occupies our mind; it is an imaginative substitute for real action.

But worry may be something of an indoor sport as well. Consider this--if the mother really believed her child had fallen into the pond, she would rush to pull him out; but while she is worrying for fear he may have fallen in, she remains at home. Really she expects to see him come home any minute, but by conjuring up imaginary dangers she is getting ready to make his home-coming a great relief instead {499} of a mere humdrum matter. She is "shooting the chutes", getting the thrill of danger with escape fully expected.

The normal time for a daydream is the time when there is no real act to be performed. A strong man uses it as the amusement of an idle moment and promptly forgets it. But one who is lacking in force, especially the personal force needed in dealing with other people, may take refuge in daydreams as a substitute for real doing. Instead of hustling for the money he needs he may, like Micawber, charm himself with imagining the good opportunities that may turn up. Instead of going and making love to the lady of his choice, he shyly keeps away from her and merely dreams of winning her. He substitutes imaginary situations for the real facts of his life, and gratifies his mastery motive by imaginary exploits. He invents imaginary ailments to excuse his lack of real deeds. He conjures up imaginary dangers to worry over. All this is abuse of imagination.

Dreams

Let us turn now from daydreams to dreams of the night. These also are play of imagination, even freer from control and criticism than the daydream. In sleep the cortical brain functions sink to a low level, and perhaps cease altogether in the deepest sleep. Most of the dreams that are coherent enough to be recalled probably occur just after we have gone to sleep or just before we wake up, or at other times when sleep is light. At such times the simpler and more practised functions, such as recall of images, can go on, though criticism, good judgment, reasoning, and all that sort of delicate and complex activity, do not occur. Daytime standards of probability, decorum, beauty, wit, and excellence of any sort are in abeyance; consistency is thrown to the winds, the scenes being shifted in the middle of a {500} speech, and a character who starts in as one person merging presently into somebody else. Dreams follow the definition of imagination or invention, in that materials recalled from different contexts are put together into combinations and rearrangements never before experienced. The combinations are often bizarre and incongruous.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of dreams is their seeming reality while they last. They seem real in spite of their incongruity, because of the absence of critical ability during sleep. In waking life, when the sight of one object reminds me of another and calls up an image of that other, I know that the image is an image, and I know I have thought of two different things. In sleep the same recall by association occurs, but the image is forthwith accepted as real; and thus things from different sources get together in the same dream scene, and a character who reminds us of another person forthwith becomes that other person. We are not mentally active enough in sleep to hold our images apart. Associative recall, with blending of the recalled material, and with entire absence of criticism, describes the process of dreaming.

What is the stimulus, to which the dream responds? Sometimes there is an actual sensory stimulus, like the alarm clock or a stomach ache; and in this case the dream comes under the definition of an illusion; it is a false perception, more grotesquely false than most illusions of the day. A boy wakes up one June morning from a dream of the Day of Judgement, with the last trump pealing forth and blinding radiance all about--only to find, when fully awake, that the sun is shining in his face and the brickyard whistle blowing the hour of four-thirty a.m. This was a false perception. More often, a dream resembles a daydream in being a train of thoughts and images without much relation to present sensory stimuli; and then the dream {501} would