and Naturalism to their age? What was the meaning of Romanticism or Hellenism? They were tendencies of art which brought to the surface that unconscious element of which the contemporary mental atmosphere had most need. The artist as educator of his time-that is a subject about which much might be said to-day.

People and times, like individual men, have their peculiar tendencies or attitudes. The very word "attitude" betrays the necessary one-sidedness which every definite tendency postulates. Where direction is, there must also be exclusion. But exclusion means, that such and such psychic elements which could participate in life are denied their right to live through incompatibility with the general attitude. The normal man can endure the general tendency without injury; hence, it is the man of the by-streets and alley-ways who, unlike the normal man, cannot travel the broad high-way, who will be the first to discover those elements which lie hidden from the main streets and which await participation in life.

The artist's relative lack of adaptation becomes his real advantage, for it enables him to keep aloof from the main streets the better to follow his own yearning and to find that thing which the others unwittingly passed by. Thus, as in the case of the single individual whose one-sided conscious attitude is corrected by unconscious reactions towards selfregulation, art also represents a process of mental self-regulation in the life of nations and epochs.

I am aware that I have only been able to give certain intuitive perceptions, and these only in the barest outlines. But I may perhaps hope, that what I have been obliged to omit, namely, the concrete application to poetic works, has been furnished by your own thoughts, thus giving flesh and blood to my abstract intellectual frame.

CRITICAL NOTICE

Beyond the Pleasure Principle. By SIGM. FREUD, M.D., LL.D. Authorized translation from the second German edition by C. J. M. HUBBACK. The International Psycho-Analytical Press. pp. 90. Price 68.

The theory of Psycho-analysis has been built up on the assumption that all mental process is dominated by the pleasure-principle. States of pain and of pleasure are correlated with states of tension and relaxation in the psychic life, and the psychic apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation as low as possible or at least constant. It is obvious, however, that the pleasureprinciple does not entirely dominate psychic processes for many of these are not accompanied by pleasure. All that can be maintained is that there is in the psyche a strong tendency towards pleasure which is, however, often frustrated by opposing forces or circumstances.

In examining the conditions which may lead to frustration of the pleasureprinciple Freud draws mainly on psycho-analytical experience and enumerates (1) the coming into action of the reality-principle, (2) the conflicts and dissociations during the development of the ego, and the pain caused by the return of the repressed material into consciousness, (3) pain of a perceptual order, perception of the urge of unsatisfied instincts or of something in the external world which may be painful in itself or may arouse painful anticipations. It is in the investigation of the psychic reaction to external danger that he finds the new material which leads him to infer the existence, in the psychic life, of a tendency more primitive and more fundamental than the pleasureprinciple.

The necessity for postulating something "beyond the pleasure-principle" would seem to have become urgent when psycho-analysts were confronted with the most striking peculiarity of the "battle-dreams" so common in the traumatic neuroses of war. In these dreams the patient goes through again the terrifying experience which led to his break-down; and analysis fails to reveal any kind of wish-fulfilment in the dreams or to provide any evidence that the pleasure-principle has been at work in their formation.

Freud has suggested that the absence of the wish-fulfilment tendency may perhaps be explained by supposing that the dream-function suffers dislocation and is diverted from its usual ends, or by relating the painful nature of these dreams to the masochistic tendencies of the ego. But such explanations are obviously unsatisfactory and Freud looks around for other examples of mental process with which to compare the repetition of painful experiences so characteristic of dreams in the war neuroses.

He finds a tendency to repetition exemplified sometimes in the play of young children. He tells of a game, invented by a boy of eighteen months old, which he had an opportunity of studying. This child was deeply attached to his mother, yet he never cried when she went out and left him for hours at a time. The game he played consisted in flinging into the corner of the room, or under the bed, his toys and other things that he could lay his hands on. This

frequently repeated action was accompanied by a long drawn out exclamation which was interpreted as meaning "go away." On one occasion he was observed to fling away a wooden reel, which had a string attached to it, and then pull it back by the string, greeting its reappearance with an exclamation of joy. This Freud regarded as the complete game: disappearance and return; and he thinks it was connected with "the child's remarkable cultural achievement -the forgoing of the satisfaction of an instinct- -as the result of which he could let his mother go away without making any fuss."

It does not seem as self-evident as Freud supposes that there was any connection between the game and the experience of the mother's departure and return; but, accepting this interpretation, he asks: "How does it accord with the pleasure-principle that the child repeats this painful experience as a game?" Not because of the pleasure of the return, because the first act, the going away, was played by itself as a game and far more frequently than the whole drama. Various conjectures are put forward in reply to the question, but a decisive answer is postponed until some further examples of the repetition of painful experiences are examined.

One of the best illustrations of such repetition is to be found in the course of psycho-analytical treatment. In the transference situation the patient repeats, as a current experience in relation to the analyst, those past experiences which are under repression and unable to get into consciousness as recollections. Although what is repressed has suffered that fate because of its painful nature, and its revival in the form of repetition in the transference brings pain to the conscious, it none the less, as a rule, brings pleasure to the unconscious system, and the pleasure-principle is not contravened. But it is a remarkable fact that the tendency to repetition brings up from the past, amongst other experiences, some which could not, at any time, have been satisfactions, even of impulses afterwards repressed.

The early blossoms of the infantile sex life "perished in most painful circumstances and with feelings of a deeply distressing nature." Frustration of impulses, disappointment, jealousy and failure in the sphere of the affections were the lot of childhood, but notwithstanding the pain which accompanied them, these experiences are repeated in the transference with the same unpleasant consequences. It is as if there were a compulsion to repetition which annuls or displaces the pleasure-principle, and necessitates a reproduction of the distressing situations of days long past. A similar compulsion to repetition may be observed in the lives of many normal persons. Psycho-analysis has long maintained that the "fate" which seems to dog the footsteps of some people throughout their lives is, for the most part, of their own making and is determined by influences in earliest childhood.

This, then, is what Freud finds "beyond the pleasure-principle": a repetition-compulsion, "more primitive, more elementary, more instinctive. than the pleasure-principle which is displaced by it" (p. 25). To this compelling force he relates the dreams of 'shock' patients, the play impulse in children, the transference phenomena of repetition and what may be called the "destiny-compulsion" of normal people; but he guards against ascribing too much to the operation of this repetition-compulsion and reminds us that only in rare cases can we recognize its workings in a pure form, without the co-operation of other motives.

It may be questioned whether the evidence adduced by Freud is sufficient to justify the conclusion that the compulsion to repetition is an essential

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characteristic of psychic life. The repetition tendency in the play of children may be of the same nature as that which lies behind habit formation. It may be merely an instance of the drainage of nervous energy into paths already open. In the other examples given the repetition tendency is related to the activity of repressed, dissociated, mental material, and it may be that the compulsion to repetition is a characteristic of dissociated states rather than a fundamental property of psychic life as a whole. Many "battle-dreams" appear to be little more than a hallucinatory reproduction of the traumatic experience and it may be even questioned whether they ought to be regarded as true dreams at all. As Freud himself says, in discussing "Dreams and Telepathy," a dream without condensation, distortion, dramatization, most of all without wish-fulfilment, surely hardly deserves the name1."

99 66

The 'shock' or 'battle' dream often reminds us of those hysterical attacks in which some dissociated experience is lived over again in a somnambulism, and the tendency of such dreams to repeat themselves night after night may be no more than the tendency of all repressed material to get back into consciousness as soon as the resistances are diminished or removed.

What many will regard as the most cogent evidence brought forward in support of the hypothesis of 'repetition-compulsion' is the 'repetition' observed in the transference situation of psycho-analytical practice; and it is interesting to notice that Freud describes this phenomenon in words that are very appropriate to the description of battle-dreams or of hysterical somnambulisms: in both of these conditions as well as in transference repetition, the patient seems "to repeat as a current experience what is repressed, instead of ...recollecting it as a fragment of the past" (p. 18).

We may thus be tempted to conjecture that in shock dreams, in the repetitions in the transference and in the "doggings of fate" in more or less normal people, it may be the ever-recurring "return of the repressed" that simulates a compulsion to repetition. But if this were so we could not ascribe 'repetition' to something "more primitive, more elementary, more instinctive than the pleasure-principle," nor could we say that the pleasure-principle was displaced by it; and it is just its relation to the pleasure-principle which is Freud's chief concern. In the consideration of this problem he allows himself to indulge in a series of brilliant speculations which form the greater part of this little book.

The speculative part of this work sets out with a metapsychological expression of the nature and characteristics of psychic processes. It was an early conclusion of psycho-analysis, derived from investigation of the unconscious, that consciousness cannot be the most general characteristic of psychic processes, but merely a function of "a particular system which may be called Bw." Since consciousness furnishes perceptions of excitations coming from without and feelings of pleasure and pain originating within the psychic apparatus, "we may allot the system W-Bw (= perceptual consciousness) a position in space."

This may seem a hard saying, for we are not accustomed to think of psychic processes in spatial terms. Moreover, we are not helped by Freud's declaration that "in this assumption we have ventured nothing new, but are in agreement with the localizing tendencies of cerebral anatomy, which places the 'seat' of consciousness in the cortical layer, the outermost enveloping layer of the central organ" (p. 27). We may remind ourselves that when he first described 1 International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. III. part 3, p. 294.

his conception of psychic systems which "maintain a constant spatial relationship to each other" he added that "strictly speaking, there is no need of assuming a real spatial arrangement of the psychic systems" (Int. of Dreams,

trans. P. 425).

At this point Freud again raises a question which he discussed in The Interpretation of Dreams: the question whether the W-Bw. system can retain any lasting trace of excitation, or if its sole function is to enable the excitation to become conscious. He has always held that if the excitations left behind any memory-trace in the conscious system, the latter would soon become unfitted for the registration of new impressions. His conclusion would seem to be that in the conscious system the process of excitation does not lead to any alteration which would leave a memory-trace but that its energy is dissipated in the phenomenon of becoming conscious. In the translation this conclusion is set forth in the somewhat ambiguous pronouncement that "consciousness arises in the place of the memory-trace."

The ambiguity of this phrase reminds us of a similar controversy which at one time occupied the attention of "physiological psychologists." The question of the relation of consciousness to excitation and memory-trace was then asked in reference to localisation in the brain rather than in psychic systems. It was assumed by Ziehen, for example, that sensation and idea depend upon different cortical elements. On the other hand modern psychology has hardly wavered from the belief that "the renewed feeling occupies the very parts and in the same manner as the original feeling."

same

It can hardly be gainsaid that Freud's use of spatial metaphors in his description of the functions of the psychic apparatus, while it leads to facilitation of the exposition of his views, is none the less a source of danger to those who are inclined to believe that we have any extensive knowledge of the correlation of mental and cerebral functioning. The tendency to make psychological process conform to what we know of cerebral anatomy is liable to be fostered by Freud's comparison of the Bw. system with the cortex of the brain, and in the further exposition of his views regarding the peculiar effects of stimuli on the conscious system as compared with the other psychic systems, the difference between mental process and its physical analogues or concomitants seems often to be forgotten or disregarded.

He imagines the living organism in the simplest possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of sensitive substance the surface of which serves as an organ for the reception of stimuli. Owing to the constant impact of stimuli on its surface a rind is formed as a result of a lasting alteration of its substance, and in time this rind becomes incapable of any further modification. Moreover, it has, in the course of this alteration, "been so burned through by the effects of stimulation that it presents the most favourable conditions for the reception of the stimuli." It is not very clear why this should be so.

Although the rind of the vesicle is said to become incapable of any further modification, Freud describes another, and a totally different, modification to which it, or part of it, must submit. For this living vesicle with its receptive outer layer floats about in an outer world which is charged with most powerful energies, and it would be destroyed by the stimuli from this world were it not provided with a shield against stimulus. Such a shield is acquired through outermost layer ceasing to retain the structure of living matter and becoming to some extent inorganic, so that it serves thereafter as a special integument or membrane capable of withstanding stimuli. That is to say, it

the