Imago

Roeder, E. The Essence of a Thing.

Spielrein, S. Time and the Foreconscious Mind.

Fenichel, O. Psychoanalysis and Metaphysics.

Berger, G. A Contribution to the Theory of Human Hostility.

Hitschmann, E. Telepathy and Psychoanalysis.

Roeder, E. The Essence of a Thing.—An Aristotelian discussion too detailed for abstraction and of great interest to one up on his Greek and Aristotelian metaphysics.

Spielrein, S. Time and the Foreconscious Mind.—According to Freud, foreconscious thinking is governed by the same laws as the thinking of savages and children. Piaget, who is engaged in research on child thought, uses Bleuler's term “autistic thinking.” Consciously directed thought is circumscribed by three conditions: space, causality, and time. An idea of space is gained early in the development of thinking, then follows causality, and last of all, time. In the concept of time, duration may be distinguished from direction, with which we are here concerned. This direction aspect of time is a product of conscious thought, and research indicates that it does not exist in dreams and in autistic thinking. It is an abstract concept of the conscious mind, which separates out a stretch of time, calling it the present, and distinguishes it from a period directed to the past, and from another directed to the future. Distance in space is conceived by a small child when distance in time cannot be. The child knows only a present and an immediate future, separated from each other merely by duration, and they exist in a spatial sense. The past is a vanished present, a “no longer there” of an object or person, and death is conceived as a going away or journey.

The study of dreams and of the development of language helps us to understand how the child imagines the future and separates it from the present. In dreams the past is not a true past, but rather a “not present,” and is represented spatially. In his dream a man sees a painful situation as a landscape disappearing rapidly in