The medical profession is justly conservative. Human life should notbe considered as the proper material for wild experiments.
Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds,loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.
Remember the scornful reception which first was accorded to Freud'sdiscoveries in the domain of the unconscious.
When after years of patient observations, he finally decided toappear before medical bodies to tell them modestly of some facts whichalways recurred in his dream and his patients' dreams, he was firstlaughed at and then avoided as a crank.
The words "dream interpretation" were and still are indeed fraughtwith unpleasant, unscientific associations. They remind one of all sortsof childish, superstitious notions, which make up the thread and woof ofdream books, read by none but the ignorant and the primitive.
The wealth of detail, the infinite care never to let anything passunexplained, with which he presented to thepublic the result of his investigations, are impressing more and moreserious-minded scientists, but the examination of his evidential datademands arduous work and presupposes an absolutely open mind.
This is why we still encounter men, totally unfamiliar with Freud'swritings, men who were not even interested enough in the subject toattempt an interpretation of their dreams or their patients' dreams,deriding Freud's theories and combatting them with the help ofstatements which he never made.
Some of them, like Professor Boris Sidis, reach at times conclusionswhich are strangely similar to Freud's, but in their ignorance ofpsychoanalytic literature, they fail to credit Freud for observationsantedating theirs.
Besides those who sneer at dream study, because they have neverlooked into the subject, there are those who do not dare to face thefacts revealed by dream study. Dreams tell us many an unpleasantbiological truth about ourselves and only very free minds can thrive onsuch a diet. Self-deception is a plant which withers fast in thepellucid atmosphere of dream investigation.
The weakling and the neurotic attached to his neurosis are notanxious to turn such a powerful searchlight uponthe dark corners of their psychology.
Freud's theories are anything but theoretical.
He was moved by the fact that there always seemed to be a closeconnection between his patients' dreams and their mental abnormalities,to collect thousands of dreams and to compare them with the casehistories in his possession.
He did not start out with a preconceived bias, hoping to findevidence which might support his views. He looked at facts a thousandtimes "until they began to tell him something."
His attitude toward dream study was, in other words, that of astatistician who does not know, and has no means of foreseeing, whatconclusions will be forced on him by the information he is gathering,but who is fully prepared to accept those unavoidable conclusions.
This was indeed a novel way in