the susceptible soul. Already the development and the associated changes of meaning make it impossible that any but the initiated should be able to understand the significance of the symbols.
Because the symbol is only a sign, only a part of the original significance, so it is, that in its further development, it gradually becomes the sign for different things: The post-horn has significance according to the place, the surroundings, in the psychological sense, according to the various associations bound up with it. Mail stage-coach connections, when it is by the name of a station on the time-table, letter mail connections when on a letter box. In out of the way mountain villages it signifies still much more, and on the sleeve of a uniform, again something different.
Through this summation of meanings it comes that the sign is a condensation and an accumulation of all of these single ideas concealed within it. The characteristic of, for example, the dream symbol, is the thousand threads of association that run together (the dream of the portal). It results, at the same time, in an ambiguity of symbols. The double meanings can come out in all possible ways. Whoever is not initiated and does not know all the directions of the symbol, interprets it falsely or only according to his own idea. The bible, for example, has both the advantage and the disadvantage of containing many symbols which may be interpreted in the most varied ways.
The interpretation of the dream symbol has to get its value on the same grounds as it has been given by Freud on scientific foundations, so that we recognize the structure of the symbol and everyone who cares to can learn this science.
The ambiguity of the symbols has the disadvantage that thinking in symbols, that is resorted to in dreams and in many psychoses, especially in dementia precox, here often to an unbelievable extent, is much less clear, defined and logical than is thought just in sharp, circumscribed ideas having to the greatest extent possible only one meaning. In this special sense one is quite right, with Bleuler,[1] Jung,[2] and Pelletier,[3] in designating
- ↑ Bleuler, "Freudsche Mechanismen in der Symptomatologie von Psychosen," Psych.-neurol. Wochenschrift, 1906, No. 35 and 36.
- ↑ Jung, "Ueber die Psychologie der Dementia praecox." Halle a. S., Marhold, 1907. See translation in Monograph Series, No. 3.
- ↑ Madeleine Pelletier, " L'association des idées dans la manie aigue et dans la débilité mentale." Thèse de Paris, 1903.
