A man who merely rides in other people's automobiles may not rise to
finer discrimination than between a Ford, a taxicab, and an
automobile. But let that same man own a car and drive it, let him, as
the psychoanalysts would say, project his libido upon automobiles, and
he will describe a difference in carburetors by looking at the rear
end of a car a city block away. That is why it is often such a relief
when the talk turns from "general topics" to a man's own hobby. It is
like turning from the landscape in the parlor to the ploughed field
outdoors. It is a return to the three dimensional world, after a
sojourn in the painter's portrayal of his own emotional response to
his own inattentive memory of what he imagines he ought to have seen.
We easily identify, says Ferenczi, two only partially similar things:
[Footnote: Internat. Zeitschr, f. Arztl. Psychoanalyse, 1913.
Translated and republished by Dr. Ernest Jones in S. Ferenczi,
_Contributions to Psychoanalysis_, Ch. VIII, _Stages in the
Development of the Sense of Reality_.] the child more easily than
the adult, the primitive or arrested mind more readily than the
mature. As it first appears in the child, consciousness seems to be an
unmanageable mixture of sensations. The child has no sense of time,
and almost none of space, it reaches for the chandelier with the same
confidence that it reaches for its mother's breast, and at first with
almost the same expectation.
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