The Image of the Heart and the Synergic Principle in Psychoanalysis (Psychosynergy): II. Three Dreams of the Disguised Heart-Image: III. The Disguised Image of the Heart In a Case of Severe Sexual Impotence and Talent Inhibition; The Case of “The Clock Chimer” (Paroxysmal Auricular Tachycardia in Father and Son)

Perhaps the fundamental reason why the basic and synergic image of the heart in consciousness has been disguised in dreams is the fact that it is first and foremost a sonic image with certain vague, almost amorphous, but nevertheless tangible, even tactile components. A thing heard as the heart's beat is heard—felt as the heart's beat is felt in palpitation or in the pulse at the various peripheries and planes of the body and capable of creating a sense of pressure or heaviness in the entire chest because of its effect upon the lungs (the sense of “volumetric” expansiveness and lightness or constriction and heaviness)—such an image must of deep physiologic and psychic necessity be synergically compounded with the other more defined and definitive effort and emotional images of the Ego. Indeed, the principle of synergy, devoted to survival and longevity, demands such a compounding; otherwise “the bells would not toll”; the image of the heart as it spreads pulsewise through the Ego warns by tending to retract and to separate from1 the other images in the Ego; it refuses to concur—whether out of neurotic or real assessment of whatever danger—with the Ego in its impending course and direction. In such a situation one may express this feeling in its various gradations all the way from “not wholeheartedly in favor” to “downright anxious” or “abjectly terrified” depending upon the inner tempest and the tolling of alarm.

It is not necessary to recite the interminable list, in all languages spoken by man, of this compounding—as expressed by intuitive human speech—of the image of the individual heart with the other images of one's personal universe. What is necessary, however, is the recognition of the innumerable sonic branchings of this basic synergic compound in language and thought structures of all kinds. For example, there is little doubt that the sonic function of rhyme—which we see disturbed in the clang-association of mania2—carries this self-preserving sonic s