Editorial Comment

This article presents a method of approaching certain psychoanalytic problems which is not on the beaten track, but has been used now and then before to the benefit of our science. It is not accessible for everyone, being based on the rare gift of quick and accurate self-observation. Some persons have learned, by cultivating this faculty, to perceive their mental processes in statu nascendi. The results of these “shortcuts” are distinguished by their immediate directness which makes them a valuable addition to the insight gained by means of the “orthodox” technique.

While this method is unable to open the gates of the Unconscious, k offers a great deal of new information about the processes in the Pre-Conscious, and especially about the mechanism by which the contents of the Pre-Conscious are brought under the influence and eventually under the domination of the Primary Process (Primaer. Vorgang). There is no better way to study what Freud called “Traum-Arbeit,” i. e. the manner in which important and unimportant day-residues are arranged, in order to mold them into the manifest dream-content. In this article we get, so to speak, a glimpse into the workshop with the help of the acute self-observation of the author and her free associations which explain the meaning of her “spectral” words. These words belong to the hypnagogic phenomena, but have the hallucinatory character of dreams.

It is of the highest interest to learn that all these associations lead towards the body and its momentary position. We know Schemer's old “Leibreiz” (body-stimulation) theory and the discussion of it in Freud's “Dream-Interpretation.” This article hints at something similar, but founded on actual observation and in full conformation with psychoanalytic experience. Moreover, it has much in common with the description given by a great psychologist—not a scientist, but a novelist: Marcel Proust who describes in several instances how the hypnagogic pictures and eventually the dreams are mode