'Twas Brill-ig and the Slithy Freuds

The Truth, At Last, About the Greatest Dream in the World

LUCIEN BLUPHOCKS

CONCERNING psychoanalysis I am an intelligent neutral. I have a great respect for Dr. Sigmund Freud, and I should have to know as much as he does to quarrel decently with his conclusions. But for the analyst who retains his amateur standing I cannot say as much. When I say that I like to ride on the front seat on top of the bus and am told that that is a complex, I no longer pretend to be bored. I am bored. If I refuse to eat spinach, as I always do, it has ceased to make conversation for me to be told that I have an inhibition. I invariably reply that spinach is the broom of the stomach, and the subject is closed. And when fanatical amateurs ask me, "But why do we dream?" I am inclined to reply, "Why not?" and go on reading Alice in Wonderland.

As a result of this, I am in possession of an extremely interesting document. To make the allusions in my conversation intelligible, I gave a copy of that work to a young foreigner. He returned it with a report—the psychoanalytical showing up of Alice—

Child of the pure, unclouded brow And dreaming eyes of wonder as her creator called her. In regard to this report, I can only say what Swift said of Gulliver's Travels; that it is grossly exaggerated and for his part he didn't believe a word of it. Impressive as the document is, it has a weakness. It seems to me to be a showing up of the amateur analyst, a little less merciful than it is of Alice.

Alice's Dream Analyzed

"THE case of Alice—(surname not recorded)," says the report, "is of exceptional interest to the student of psychoanalysis as being the only instance in which the subject has retained and been able to record a dream, or as we more accurately say, a dream-content, of the highest order of complexity. It is quite characteristic of the Anglo-Saxons that a document of such supreme significance for students of the dreamlife of the child should have maintained its disguise as 'the love-gift of a fairy-tale'. But then the tragic-symbol-mechanism taboo is always very strong in semi-civilized communities."

(The writer's command of English is remarkable. Like Humpty Dumpty, when he uses a word, it means just what he chooses it to mean. "Tragic-symbol-mechanism-taboo" means that those who have it—and who has not?—are unwilling to give themselves unnecessary pain; that they believe there's so much tragedy in the world that one oughtn't to read it into fairy tales; and that primroses, even by the river's brim, are primroses.)

"Analysis of the dream content reveals the significant and hitherto unobserved fact that it is in reality two dreams; the first yields the symbolism of the playing-card, the other that of the chess-board. It being a first principle of analysis that 'it is wrong to attempt to interpret a dream with a knowledge of what the particular image represents in the particular person's mind'—as Dr. Brill so lucidly puts it—we must find the meaning of the cardsymbolism elsewhere. Remembering that the card is a playing-card, we are justified in provisionally assuming that it may be connected with games of chance, and that Alice in this dream betrays the normal criminal tendencies of all healthy children. Further proof of this can be seen in the fact that the card-symbol enters late into the dream; as the anti-gambling inhibition is strong and Alice is obviously trying to dream of everything else first.

"Alice was an unwelcome child, and as such was unhappy in her domestic relations. The whole dream is conditioned by these two factors and is, in effect, partly dream-escape and partly dream-revenge. The first we see in her evident desire to grow up; the moment she is alone she begins to nibble at whatever comes first to hand, and immediately grows, by distortion, smaller. This she soon remedies and she becomes so tall that she begins to dissociate her own personality and addresses letters to

"Alice's Right Foot, Esq. Hearthrug, near the Fender, (with Alice's love).

"In this address, the parenthesis will illuminate, to the strict professor of analysis, her first state of Narcissism, or self-worship. The second state—more acute than any other instance of Narcissism recorded—is where the self-infatuated Alice actually goes through the looking-glass!

"In interpretations of this sort it is advisable to consider nothing as unimportant. Look at the first line of this address, and ask why it is not to her hand, but to her foot, that Alice addresses the letter; note also that she addresses the foot as 'Esq.' The answer is obvious. The most familiar association with the word Foot is the name of Oedipus (Greek, swell-foot), and we therefore, establish the vital fact that Alice had an Oedipus complex. It being a principle of psychoanalysis, however, that each thing involves its contrary, we are safe in assuming that Alice did not have an Oedipus complex."

(This, I admit, came as a surprise to me. It had been my impression that all amateur analysts found that all human beings had all the complexes, and this one in particular. Not to have an Oedipus complex, I understood, was to be simply out of it. But that only shows my ignorance. The great rival of Oedipus in the complex-business is Electra, and the Electra complex is just the opposite of the Oedipus. In one case you hate your father — Oedipus quite unintentionally killed his—and love your mother; in the second—well, Electra's motives were her own and ought to be respected, but the fact is she jolly well knew what she was doing when she killed her mother. So if you have the Electra complex, as so many of the better classes do, it is your father whom you love. You see the beauty of the idea in any case; because each one implies the other and you may have one or both or neither without feeling any sense of personal disgrace.)

A Deplorably Missing Murder

"WE begin to understand Alice when we see the identification-parrallel of the Queen of Hearts—the mother of Alice. She is the Queen of Hearts—but this is only the psyche's indirect way of saying that she is not the queen of Alice's heart. Far from it! Analysing the phobias and anxieties of the patient, we discover that Alice lived in dread of being killed by her mother, and in the interest of science it is regrettable that this did not actually take place; the Alice-complex would have a notable place in our science if the dream were carried into action. 'Off with her head' sounds through the pages of this record, and Alice, a victim of Bezuhungswahn or delusion of reference, naturally assumes that this means herself. As, in fact, it does. It is also interesting to note in this connection, that the King of Hearts (a little adroitness in the handling of symbols will show that this is the dream-representation of Alice's father) is a gentle soul whose function seems to be to follow after the queen (matriarchy) and pardon all those whose heads have been ordered off (the pardon complex).

"There are two equally satisfactory explanations of what happens when the Queen of Hearts become the Red Queen (a symbol probably taken from the chess-board). One is that Alice made up with her mother. Rejecting this as unscientific we are compelled to believe that Alice was psychoanalysed between the time of the first and the time of the second dream. I shall come in a moment to the clearest proof of this. Here let us note that the Red Queen is full of kindness and good advice, such as 'Curtsey while you're thinking what to say. It saves time,' and that Alice is expressing her desire to be like her mother and equal to her in authority. In this the Red Queen aids her, assuring her that after she has passed through the seven squares (which are the Seven Stages of Karma) she will be herself a Queen.

(Continued on page 106)

(Continued from page 59)

"The one thing constant in these two dreams is the distortion of food. At the beginning Alice takes a jar of orange marmalade from a shelf (what we know of English home-life does not encourage an indulgent interpretation of this action) and thereafter the dream riots in food. There is a Mad Hatter's Tea Party (symbol of lunacy, explained by Fonck in his Occupational Analyses) stolen tarts, the 'soup of the evening, beautiful soup', the cunningly disguised, or as we should say, symbolically displaced stew made of 'shoes—and ships— and sealing-wax—and cabbage'; for the preparation of which the sea is said to be boiling hot. The food-libido, not at all uncommon among under-nourished children, is never so clearly stated elsewhere."

I here suggested that the reason for this is probably that Alice fell asleep just before tea-time; but this was also rejected as unscientific. "Particularly," said my friend, "as the dramatization of food in the dream-content eventually centres round an egg—and who ever heard of eggs at tea-time?" HumptyDumpty, in short, is the hero of the story. It is to him that Alice brings the Jabberwocky.

"No one can any longer be deceived by the explanation which the narrator herself gives of the amazing verses which she has called the Jabberwocky. That explanation is, to be sure, a normal protective disguise and it is quite common to find that those who are familiar with psychoanalysis dream their own interpretations in order to disguise the true meaning of their dreams. I am. for my own part, convinced that Alice actually dreamed in accordance with the laws of analysis. It was natural, therefore, for her to supply a meaning which her inhibited, conscious mind could afterward accept. However, as the words themselves may not be familiar, I will copy them here:

'Twas brillig and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves And the mome raths outgrabe.

"The concealed appearance of the name of a famous psychoanalyst in the second word of the stanza is the clue to the whole. The explanation which Alice gave herself, unconsciously preparing to delude her conscious mind is that 'brill-ig means four o'clock in the afternoon, when you begin broiling things for dinner.' It is, however, in truth four o'clock, the hour of her appointments with her analyst, and the word is a dream allusion to the happy hours spent there, responding to the common word-test. Like most female patients she has acquired a fixation; or more vulgarly said, fallen in love with her analyst. Unwilling to confess this, she substituted the name of another analyst, that of the great Dr. Brill. As for the Jabberwocky, the nature of the whole poem is purely erotic. Unless, of course, it is anti-erotic.

"Under-nourished, brutally treated, outcast, it is no wonder that the child, Alice, fails to display some of the more pleasing features of the adolescent dream-current. Except for the verse cited above, nothing sensual appears in her psyche, her arithmomania is slight, and she seems to suffer in equal measure from both agoraand claustro-phobia. A few obscurities remain, of course; such as the presentation of her father (named William) as (a) an albino or (b) a very old man, who incessantly stood on his head. There is also the continual irruption of the pun-formation, a phenomenon associated with acute anxieties, and the constant series of unanswered riddles—the Delphic complex. These smaller problems can be functionally resolved; the major truths about Alice are already revealed."

I do not know whether, in the interests of science, it was well for me to have told my friend that Alice is the imaginative work of a famous mathematician. However his reply reassured me. It was to the effect that psychoanalysis provided for everything and that the interpretation written above would serve equally well for Lewis Carroll.

The precision of that statement impresses me.