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PLATO
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feeling and character, but also because it preserves and restores health. There are some diseases which can be treated only through the mind (Charmides, 157): so the Corybantic priest treated hysterical women with wild pipe music, which excited them to dance and dance till they fell to the ground exhausted, and went to sleep; when they awoke they were cured. The unconscious sources of human thought are touched and soothed by such methods; and it is in these substrata of behavior and feeling that genius sinks its roots.

"No man when conscious attains to true or inspired intuition, but rather when the power of intellect is fettered in sleep or by disease or dementia"; the prophet (mantike) or genius is akin to the madman (manike) (Phædrus, 244).

Plato passes on to a remarkable anticipation of "psychoanalysis." Our political psychology is perplexed, he argues, because we have not adequately studied the various appetites or instincts of man. Dreams may give us a clue to some of the subtle and more elusive of these dispositions.

Certain of the unnecessary pleasures and instincts are deemed to be unlawful; every man appears to have them, but in some persons they are subjected to the control of law and reason ["sublimated"], and the better desires prevailing over them, they are either wholly suppressed, or reduced in strength and number; while in other persons these desires are stronger and more abundant. I mean particularly those desires which are awake when the reasoning and taming and ruling power ["censor"] of the personality is asleep; the wild beast in our nature, gorged with meat and drink, starts up and walks about naked, and surfeits at his will; and there is no conceivable folly or crime, however shameless or unnatural not excepting incest or parricide ["Œdipus complex"]—of which such a nature may not be guilty.… But when a man's pulse is healthy and temperate, and he goes to sleep cool and rational,…having indulged his appetites neither too much nor too little, but just enough to lay them to sleep,…he is then least likely to be the sport of fanciful and lawless visions.… In all of us, even in
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