You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book, the twentieth of the International Psychoanalytical Library, renders a fund of applied psychoanalytical material–mythological, folkloristic, religious and semasiological–available to English-speaking readers. Its central theme is the import, in the broadest sense, of the nightmare. A wealth of related matter, culled in scholarly fashion from an imposing array of sources, published hitherto in two different technical papers, the one English, the other German, has been mustered in this volume under a single cover and subjected to revision, rearrangement and indexing that substantially enhances its value. However, over and above these considerations, the peculiar significance of the nightmare per se justifies the republishing of work done two decades ago, despite the rapid advances of psychoanalysis in the interim. Furthermore, one section of the book, containing a psychoanalytical contribution to semantics, is entirely new. The whole evinces the characteristics exhibited by all the contributions of this author–vast range of knowledge, arresting clarity of thought, delightful lucidness of presentation.
Part I, "The Pathology of the Nightmare", appeared originally in the American Journal of Insanity, January, 1910. It deals with the ætiology, pathogenesis and clinical aspects of that phenomenon and is primarily a medical paper, undoubtedly familiar to a number of neurologists and psychiatrists. Albeit clinical in flavor, it is intimately connected with the remainder of the volume. The exposition of the ultimate nature of the nightmare contained therein affords the necessary groundwork of the book. The author indicates that the pre-Freudian medical view of the origin of the nightmare, which, incidentally still commands credence in certain quarters, was a product of the resistances inherent in scientific materialism. Accordingly, ætiological potency was attributed exclusively to certain physical factors, diet, posture, toxins, etc., presumably affectin