Morton Prince
Time after time, I dream I am in the England of entre deux guerres. One life I seem to enter in this series is very familiar. However, I find myself in many different stories.
Once again, my dreams set me a research assignment.
April 26, 2025
Dream
Remember Morton Prince
I am leading a conference at a country house in England after the Great War. We have leading psychologists, doctors, scholars. We are studying the psychosomatic effects of the war, which killed so many and left so many bereaved or "shell-shocked". We play games and drink and flirt pretty freely to keep our spirits up. More young women are present than you might expect in this era, because so many young men are missing.
Pictures of luminaries in relevant fields are on display. Among them is a portrait of Morton Prince. He can't be with us, we have been told, because he has fallen ill. Before leaving the dream, I make a mental note to look him up.
Seeking Dr Prince
Waking, I knew the name vaguely. A rapid search tells me that Prince was a neurologist who became a specialist in abnormal psychology. He came from a wealthy Bostonian family with Sephardic Jewish ancestry. He became famous and controversial for his studies of multiple personality disorder, today called dissociative identity disorder. His key work on this subject, The Dissociation of a Personality, was published in 1906.
He favored a "medicalist" rather than a metaphysical approach, arguing that dissociation disorder was the effect of split-off fragments of the self asserting their own identity rather than spirit possession or 'walk-ins". He told the Society for Psychical Research in a lecture "that which has been called spirit possession may, when carefully studied, often reveal itself as a phase of the human mind, divided against itself."
In 1910 Prince published an article, "The Mechanism and Interpretation of Dreams" that drew a rebuttal from Jung, who accused him of the "reductive fallacy" of shrinking dreams to broken fragments of day residue, ignoring their deeper sources and possible central role in healing and individuation.
Jung wrote in 1911 in a critical review that "Dr. Prince approaches the dream as if it were the senseless by-product of a mind disintegrated by sleep. But the dream is not an accidental conglomeration; it is a natural phenomenon, and like every natural phenomenon it has meaning. To dismiss it as meaningless is not a scientific explanation but a confession of incomprehension."
I'm not sure why my dream tagged Morton Prince, but as I look at the field of psychology today, from the sidelines, I see that the debate between Prince and Jung still goes on, in the contention of cognitive analysts and behaviorists with depth psychologists.
Perhaps I will look deeper into Prince’s personal story. Did he have personal experience of “dissociation disorder”? Did he treat the symptoms of his wife Fannie and her mother, who both suffered extreme depression?
I found a photograph of Prince with Massachusetts soldiers on the balcony of the Hotel Lotti in Paris on June 24, 1918. What else was he doing in Europe towards the end of the Great War and after?
Somewhere in Time, after Time
Time after time, I dream I am in the England between the two world wars. One life I seem to enter in this series, thayt of an RAF pilot who belonged to a magical order, is very familiar. However, I find myself in different life stories. I think that in last night's dream excursion to a scene at the end of the Great War I am operating a different body than that of the pilot, who was probably born around 1918.. As so often, the dream gives me a new research assignment. Pursuing these assignments is one of my favorite pastimes.
Potrait of Morton Prince c.1895 by John Singer Sargent
Like
Comment
Share