Now it is, of course, quite impossible for the monk to duplicate himself, and to be walking up the mountain and down the mountain at one and the same time. But in the visual image he does; and it is precisely this indifference to logical contradiction, the irrational, dream-like telescoping of the two images into one, which leads to the solution.
We could call the double image of the monk, or Einstein's traveller riding on any of light, a concretization of abstract problems as it sometimes occurs in dreams; and we could equally well call Kekulé's serpent which seizes its own tail 'to whirl mockingly before his eyes', the symbolization of a nascent, unformulated theory; these categories overlap. The following example illustrates both; it refers to an incident which has recently come to my knowledge:
Dr. X, a biologist, dreamed that as he was walking home from his laboratory he was joined by the wife and two children of his colleague Dr. Y --, one a boy, the other an enchanting little girl. The little girl seemed to take an immediate liking to X; she insisted on his picking her up, and gave him a kiss, or rather a peck, on the cheek. They all walked on with a feeling of friendly elation, but on arriving at the house where X lived -- it had, unaccountably, become a big railway-station hotel -- the girl declared peremptorily that she would be staying with him; and as he looked at her he discovered that she was no longer a child but an adolescent, 'almost fully developed', with a provocative glint in her eye. Dr. Y's wife gave him a glance which showed irony but no surprise; and the girl said to him mockingly: 'Don't worry, I am all brains.' He felt both tempted and terribly embarrassed; at which he woke up. The first thought that flashed through his mind was: 'She is Y's brain-child'; and immediately the message of the dream was clear to him. Some time earlier on Y had, in conversation, thrown out an idea, which had taken root in X's mind, and had eventually set him off on a line of research. The peck on his cheek had been 'the kiss of the muse'; but by now the idea was 'almost fully developed' -- in fact, the day before the dream, he had started drafting a paper on the preliminary results of his research. But he had postponed telling Y about it until he had something positive to show; and now he could neither face owning up to Y that he had taken up his brain-child, nor could he face stealing it (by omitting to give Y due credit in the paper). The conversion of X's house into a railway hotel indicated that this state of mind could not be a lasting one.
The dream solved his dilemma by producing a biological analogy for the growth of a 'brain-child' from infancy to 'full development'. The seminal idea had been Y's; but it was X who had done the work and brought it to maturation; every scientist knows that it is quite a different matter to throw out a casual suggestion which might or might not lead somewhere -- and to follow it up by months of hard work in the laboratory. The dream made him see the situation in its proper perspective; now all he had to do was to tell Y the simple facts of the matter, and to give due credit in his paper to Y's paternity.
On one level of his mind X had, of course, known all this; discovery in this case, as in many others, consisted in uncovering what had always been there. But his knowledge had been buried under the rigid crust of a conventional matrix, which made his conscious thoughts turn in a vicious circle.
Punning for Profit
Charles Lamb once remarked in a letter that he wished 'to draw his last breath through a pipe and exhale it in a pun'.
The benefits which the humorist and the poet derive from two meanings linked together by one sound are evident; in the natural sciences they are non-existent, for the simple reason that verbal formulation, the choice of the particular words in which a theory is expressed, is to a large extent irrelevant to its content. But in the sciences concerned with language and meaning, the relations between sense and sound play an important part. Homonyms and homophones, sound affinities and transformations, are essential pointers in etymology and comparative philology, in the study of the structure and development of language. I have mentioned the 'divine pun' by which adåm, man, was created out of adamåh, earth. Eve's Hebrew name is Havvåh, life; while ahavvah is love; esh, a synonym for man, has the same root as ish, fire; and milkhamåh, war, is derived from lekhêm, bread; so is the village of Beth-lehem: the House of Bread.
Afffinities of sound provide the threads which lead from contemporary words and concepts back to the Greek and Sanskrit womb. The deciphering of the scripts of ancient languages is often aided by clues such as the frequency with which a certain sign occurs, and other 'links' between sign, symbol, sound, and sense. Thus the links which, in 1821, enabled Champollion to break into the secret of hieroglyphics, were the proper names Ptolemy, Cleopatra, and Alexander, which appeared on the Rosetta Stone (and on various other documents) bearing parallel inscriptions in Greek and in two different Egyptian scripts. The three names, inscribed in conspicuous cartouches, provided Champollion with altogether fourteen alphabetic signs of ascertained value -- certainly the greatest service which any Cleopatra has rendered to history.
In the infantile and primitive imagination, the ties between sound and meaning are still very intimate; name and object form an almost indivisible unity, shown in the universal practices of word magic, incantations, and verbal spells. Related to this is the belief that the letters contained in a word form secret connections according to certain hermeneutical rules -- a belief, shared by Judaism, several other Oriental religions, and adopted by the Christian Fathers. It was thought, for instance, that to extract their hidden meaning, certain texts in Hebrew Scriptures should be arranged in vertical colunms and read downwards; or that the first and last letter in each word should be used to form new words; or that the letters should be reduced to their numerical value, and the sums so obtained should then be manipulated according to the rules of mystic numberlore. Here we have the archaic origins of the pun, the crossword puzzle, the acrostic, anagram, and cryptogram, which have always exerted such a curious fascination in the most varied cultures -- from Pythagoras and Lao-Tse to Champollion and Freud. The humorist's joke, the linguist's discovery, the poet's euphony, all derive from that source.
The Benefits of Impersonation
'As far as my observations go', wrote C. G. Jung, 'I have not discovered in the unconscious anything like a personality comparable to the conscious ego. But . . . there are at least traces of personalities in the manifestations of the unconscious. A simple example is the dream, in which a variety of real and imaginery people enact the dream thoughts. . . . The unconscious personates. [5]
The boundaries of the self are fluid or blurred in the dream. I may watch an execution, and the next moment become the penon to be executed. The actors on the stage are interchangeable; their cards of identity are often reshuffled.
To be oneself and somebody else at the same time is an experience shared by the dreamer, the Shaman impersonating the rain-god, the patient possessed by demons. The same projective faculty is made use of by the actor, to create the illusion in the audience that he is both himself and Prince Hamlet; by the priest offering the eucharist in Holy Communion; by the healer, who projects himself into the patient's place, and at the same time acts as a father-figure.
The fluid boundaries of the self as represented in the unconscious mind, confer on it the gift of empathy -- Einfuehlung --o f entering into a kind of mental symbiosis with other selves. Empathy is a nicely sober, noncommittal term for designating the rather mysterious processes which enable one to transcend his boundaries, to step our of his skin as it were, and put himself into the place of another. One reads the mood of the other from such scant and crude pointers as the lifting or lowering of the corners of the lips, or almost imperceptible changes in the muscles which control the eyes; but the interpretation of these signs is not a conscious act. It belongs to the repertory of underground games.
Empathy is at the source of our understanding how others think and feel; it is the starting point of the art of medical diagnosis and of the science of psychology. The medicine man, ancient and modern, has a twofold relationship with the patient
: he is trying to feel what the patient feels, and he is, at the same time, acting a part: the exorcizer of evil spirits himself endowed with divine powers; magician, witch, saint, sage, hypnotist, faith-healer, confessor, father. The roles have changed, but the principle has remained the same: to induce the patient to an act of faith, to submission, worship, transference, catharsis. Psychotherapy in its modern form expresses in explicit terms the principle of ab-reaction, of the mental purge, which has always been implied in the ancient cathartic techniques from the Dionysian and Orphic mystery-cults to the rites of baptism and the confessional. The psychoanalyst induces his patients to relive their conflicts in an illusionary drama, where he himself impersonates the central figure -- halfway between comedian and tragedian. The tragedian creates illusion, the comedian debunks illusion; the therapist does both. In the dreams of patients under Jungian therapy, supposed aspects of their underground-personality -- anima, animus and 'shadow' -- keep appearing under various disguises, like actors on a stage. Finally, the technique of impersonation is used deliberately and explicitly in the form of group-therapy known as 'psycho-drama'.
Some eminent psychiatrists -- among them Charcot, Freud, Jung, and Theodor Reik -- have expressed, or hinted at their belief that not only empathy, but something akin to telepathy operates between doctor and patient in the hothouse atmosphere of the analytical session. But there is no need to go that far in order to realize that some of the basic insights of medicine and psychology are derived from the underground games which permit us to transcend the limits of personal identity while we dream -- or stare into the footlights of the stage.
Displacement
We have seen that the sudden shift of attention to a seemingly irrelevant aspect of a phenomenon -- which was previously ignored or taken for granted -- plays a vital part in humour, art, and discovery. In the comic story, the abrupt displacement of emphasis ('What am I supposed to do at 4 a.m. in Grimsby?') has the same effect as the matador's nonchalant side-stepping while the bull charges at his muleta. In discovery, it makes a familiar thing or idea appear under a new angle, in an unexpected light. In the art of photography a shift in the direction and focus of the lens may turn a trivial object into a thing of wonder.
In the waking state, 'side-stepping', 'shift of emphasis', and related expressions signify a change-over from one frame of reference to another. But while we dream, the coherence of these frames is so much loosened that the change is not experienced as such, and side-stepping becomes almost the normal way of the dream's progress. It is by virtue of its freedom from restraint that the 'dreamy' way of thinking can benefit the creative person -- whether he is Archimedes relaxing in his bath, or the chimpanzee gazing absent-mindedly at a tree.
In one of his experiments, Carl Duncker -- the psychologist who fathered the Buddhist monk problem -- set his experimental subjects the task of making a pendulum. The subject was led to a table on which had been placed, among some miscellaneous objects, a cord with a pendulum-weight attached to its end, and a nail. All he had to do was to drive the nail into the wall and hang the cord with the pendulum-weight on the nail. But there was no hammer. Only fifty per cent of the experimental subjects (all students) found the solution: to use the pendulum-weight as a hammer.
Next, another series of students, of the same average age and intelligence, were given the same task under slightly altered conditions. In the first series the weight on the table was attached to the cord, and was expressly described to the students as a 'pendulum-weight'. In the second series, weight and cord were lying separately on the table, and the word 'pendulum-weight' was not used. Result: all students in the second group found the solution without difficulty. They took in the situation with an unprejudiced mind, saw a nail and a weight, and hammered the nail in, then tied the cord to the nail and the weight to the cord. But in the minds of the first group the weight was firmly 'embedded' into its role as a 'pendulum-weight' and nothing else, because it had been verbally described as such and because visually it formed a unit with the cord to which it was attached. Thus only half of the subjects were able to wrench it out of that context -- to perform the shift of emphasis which transformed a 'pendulum-weight' into a 'hammer' -- as Sultan transformed a 'branch' into a 'stick.'
I have quoted only one among many experiments on similar lines. The fact that fifty per cent of Duncker's presumably bright students failed at this simple task is an illustration of the stubborn coherence of the perceptual frames and matrices of thought in our minds. The visual gestalt of weight-attached-to-cord, plus the verbal suggestion of their venerated teacher, made that pendulum-weight stick to its matrix like an insect caught in amber.
To undo wrong connections, faulty integrations, is half the game. To acquire a new habit is easy, because one main function of the nervous system is to act as a habit-forming machine; to break out of a habit is an almost heroic feat of mind or character. The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know. Hence, once more, the importance of the Unconscious -- as an anaesthetist, who puts reason to sleep, and restores, for a transient moment, the innocence of vision. Without the art of forgetting, the mind remains cluttered up with ready-made answers, and never finds occasion to ask the proper questions.
If forgetting can be an art, ignorance can be bliss -- in the limited sense, of course, of procuring for a certain type of mind freedom from certain types of constraint. To Faraday, his ignorance of mathematics was an asset; Edison benefited from his shocking ignorance of science. As a child, 'his demands for explanations of what seemed obvious to his elders created the belief that he was less than normally intelligent. As his head was abnormally large, it was thought that he might have a brain disease'. [6] At a time when his inventions were transforming the pattern of our civilization, 'his ignorance of scientific theory raised criticism and opposition, especially among highly trained scientists and engineers without inventive talent'. [7] He was said to have carried the art of forgetting to such extremes, that on one occasion, when he had to queue at New York City Hall to pay his taxes, and an official suddenly asked him his name, Edison could not at the moment remember it, and lost his place in the queue.
Let me return from the laboratory of the Sorcerer at Menlo Park to that blacksmith's workshop in Samos which, according to tradition, was the birthplace of the first quantitative law in physics. One would expect that Pythagoras, as an acute and scientifically minded observer, would concentrate on the techniques the men employed in the exercise of their craft. Instead of this, his attention shifted to a phenomenon that was totally irrelevant and adventitious to that craft -- the fact that under the strokes of the hammer, iron bars of different size gave out different sounds. The ear-splitting crashes and bangs in the workshop, which, since the Bronze Age had yielded to the Iron Age, had been regarded by ordinary mortals as a mere nuisance, were suddenly lifted out of their habitual context: the 'bangs' became 'clangs' of music. In the technical language of the communication engineer, Pythagoras had turned 'noise' into 'information'.
'The great field for new discoveries', wrote William James, 'is always the unclassified residuum. Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever flows a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.' [8] The genius of Sherlock Holmes manifested itself in shifting his attention to minute clues which poor Watson found too obvious to be relevant, and so easy to ignore. The psychiatrist obtains his clues from the casual remark, the seemingly irrelevant drift of associations; and he has learned to shift the emphasis from the patient's meaningful statements to his meaningless slips of the tongue, from his rational experiences to his irrational dreams. The Lord Almighty seems to be fond of the trick which Poe's character employed when he let the secret document lie open on his desk -- where it was too obvious to be seen.
Standing on One's Head
A drastic form of dis
placement is the sudden shift of emphasis from one aspect of a situation to its opposite, accompanied by a kind of 'reversal of logic' (p. 65).
'The dream', wrote Freud, 'neglects in a most conspicuous manner the logical category of opposition and contradiction. The concept "No" does not seem to exist in the dream. It likes to compress opposites into a unity, or to represent them as one. It takes the further liberty of representing any given entity by its emotional opposite, so that a priori one never knows whether a reversible entity is thought of in the dream with a plus or a minus sign.' [9] When a patient says to the doctor: 'You think that I am now going to say something offensive, but I really have no intention of doing so,' then, says Freud, 'you can take it for granted that he did have that intention. Or, the patient will say: "You are asking me who that person in my dream could be. It is not my mother." We then correct him: "In other words, it's your mother." . . . At times one can obtain information about unconscious repressed processes by a very easy method. One asks: "What do you consider to be the most unlikely aspect of that situation? What was it that you least intended to do?" If the patient swallows the bait, and tells one what he can believe least, then he has almost invariably conceded the true answer.' [10]
The Act of Creation Page 21