Relationship to the Unconscious Personality.
As we have seen, the numerous personalities become grouped round two types, the grandfather and Ulrich von Gerbenstein. The first produces exclusively sanctimonious religiosity and gives edifying moral precepts. The latter is, in one word, a “flapper” in whom there is nothing male except the name. We must here add from the anamnesis that at fifteen the patient was confirmed by a very bigoted clergyman, and at home she is occasionally the recipient of sanctimonious moral talks. The grandfather represents this side of her past, Gerbenstein the other half; hence the curious contrast. Here we have personified the chief characters of her past. On the one hand the sanctimonious person with a narrow education, on the other the boisterousness of a lively girl of fifteen who often overshot the mark.[1] We find both traits mixed in the patient in sharp contrast. At times she is anxious, shy, and extremely reserved; at others boisterous to a degree. She herself perceives these contradictions often most painfully. This circumstance gives us the key to the source of the two unconscious personalities. The patient is obviously seeking a middle path between the two extremes; she endeavours to repress them and strains after some ideal condition. These strainings bring her to the puberty dream of the ideal Ivenes, beside whose figure the unacknowledged trends of her character recede into the background. They are not lost, however, but as repressed ideas, analogous to the Ivenes idea, begin an independent existence as automatic personalities.
S. W.’s behaviour recalls vividly Freud’s[2] investigations into dreams which disclose the independent growth of repressed thoughts. We can now comprehend why the hallucinatory persons are separated from those who write and speak
- ↑ Carl Hauptmann, in his drama “Die Bergschmiede,” has made use of the objectivation of certain linked association-complexes. In this play the treasure-seeker is met on a gloomy night by a hallucination of his entire better self.
- ↑ Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams.” See also Breuer and Freud’s “Studies on Hysteria,” 1895.
