[571c]
while in others
the remnant is stronger and more numerous.” “What
desires do you mean?” he said. “Those,” said
I, “that are awakened in sleep1 when the rest of the soul, the
rational, gentle and dominant part, slumbers, but the beastly and savage
part, replete with food and wine, gambols and, repelling sleep, endeavors to
sally forth and satisfy its own instincts.2 You are
aware that in such case there is nothing it will not venture to undertake as
being released from all sense of shame and all reason. It does not shrink
from attempting to lie with a mother
1 Cf. Aristot.Eth. Nic. 102 b 5 ff.ὁ δ᾽ ἀγαθὸς καὶ κακὸς ἥκιστα διάδηλοι καθ᾽ ὕπνον, etc.; also his Problem. 957 a 21 ff. Cic.De divin. i. 29 translates this passage. Cf. further Herod. vi. 107, Soph.O.T. 981-982. Hazlitt writes “We are not hypocrites in our sleep,” a modern novelist, “In sleep all barriers are down.” The Freudians have at last discovered Plato's anticipation of their main thesis. Cf. Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. p. 74: “It has been perhaps Freud's most remarkable thesis that dreams are manifestations of this emergence of desires and memories from the unconscious into the conscious field.” “The barriers of the Freudian unconscious are less tightly closed during sleep” sententiously observes an eminent modern psychologist. Cf. Valentine, The New Psychology of the Unconscious, p. xiii. and ibid. p. 93: “Freud refers to Plato's view that the virtuous man does in actual life, but I believe he nowhere shows a knowledge of the following passage in the Republic. . . . ” Cf. ibid. p. 95: “The germ of several aspects of the Freudian view of dreams, including the characteristic doctrine of the censor, was to be found in Plato. The Freudian view becomes at once distinctly more respectable.” Many of the ancients, like some superstitious moderns, exalted the unconscious which reveals itself in dreams, and made it the source of prophecy. Cf. commentators on Aesch.Eumen. 104, Pindar, fr. 131 (96) Loeb, p. 589:εὕδει δὲ πρασσόντων μελέων, ἀτὰρ εὑδόντεσσιν ἐν πολλοῖς ὀνείροις|δείκνυσι τέρπνων ἐφέρποισαν χαλεπῶν τε κρίσιν, “but it sleepeth while the limbs are active; yet to them that sleep, in many a dream it giveth presage of a decision of things delightful or doleful. (Sandys, Loeb tr.) Cf. Pausan. ix. 23, Cic.De div. i. 30, Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, pp. 105-107 (ed. J. A. Symonds). Plato did not share these superstitions. Cf. the irony of Tim. 71 D-E, and my review of Stewart's “Myths of Plato,”Journal of Philos. Psychol. and Scientific Methods, vol. iii., 1906, pp. 495-498.
2 The Greeks had no good word for instinct, but there are passages in Plato where this translation is justified by the context for ἦθος, φύσις and such words.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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